March 30, 2000
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
For Museums, Internet Art Is a Tricky Fit
What's that wonderful sound?" the woman exclaimed as she rushed toward the Whitney Biennial's Internet Gallery.
Alas, she discovered that the art in the room was silent for the moment. The noise she had heard was just the gallery's computer being restarted -- again. When it came back up, at least one problem persisted: every time a new Web page appeared on the screen, the PC emitted a loud "ding."
The Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial Exhibition, which opened
last week in New York, is the first major survey of contemporary art in this country to present Internet-based works side by side with works done in more traditional media, a significant validation for the emerging form.
But as a two-hour visit on Sunday to the Whitney's Internet Gallery showed, displaying Internet art in a museum space can be a far greater challenge than just plopping a PC in a room and letting it run. Even after the technical troubles that seem to be endemic to all new-media art have been solved, a thorny issue remains: how to exhibit interactive works designed for a single user to a large, and largely passive, audience.
At the Whitney, a lone computer has been set up in a 14-by-25-foot room where one person can surf the nine Internet sites in the biennial, while others watch a wall projection of what is on the computer screen. Six computers are also being installed this week on the museum's lower level.
Whitney officials say the gallery is now operating smoothly after some early kinks were ironed out. A few of Sunday's software glitches were probably due to a filtering program that was added to prevent gallery-goers from checking their e-mail (which one visitor was spotted doing on Friday), and a little tweaking was clearly needed.
Yet in an exhibition that accommodates 200 different works, including several large-scale video installations, it is a shame that the nine Internet works had to share screen space with one another.
In contrast, the National Design Triennial currently at the Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian Institution's design museum in New York, has individual LCD panels sprinkled throughout the show for each of the computer-based entries.
Stephen Soba, a Whitney spokesman, said it would have been impossible to give each Internet work its own projection room. "We simply do not have the physical space to do this," he said.
One digital artist in the biennial, when asked about the Whitney's decision to display all the Internet works on one screen, said, "If the museum is trying to make the point that this is special, they're blowing it. It's nice that we're in there, but it feels like we're not really invited guests at the party."
Soba responded: "It's not unusual for artists to question how their work is being shown once it's up -- especially in a Biennial."
Some small-screen artists object to wall projections like the one at the Whitney. Auriea Harvey, a New York artist now living in Belgium, said she turned down the Whitney's invitation to be part of the biennial after learning that the museum planned to project her intimate digital work "Skinonskinonskin," a collaboration with the Belgian artist Michael Samyn. At the time, Harvey said, "I wanted to be part of the show, but not at the expense of having our work misrepresented."
Multiple monitors are not necessarily the solution, either. Peter Weibel, director of the Center for Art and Media Technology (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, or ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, said that "Net art is more than a two-dimensional activity on a screen," and that its presence in a museum gallery should serve to replicate the social connections enabled by the Internet. Last fall, ZKM mounted "Net_Condition," an exhibition that experimented with ways to show virtual art in a non-virtual space, ranging from individual computers to large, elaborate installations.
Technology is still the first hurdle for showing Internet art, though.
In his review of the biennial, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times that the Internet sites "didn't amount to much more than scrolling texts, fuzzy pictures, video cameras and interactive gimmicks" that "were slow to download and visually inert." But many of those problems might be attributed to the Whitney's projection system, Internet-connection speed or computing equipment, rather than the works themselves. The works' impact was also dampened by a murky sound system.
And at least one Internet work in the biennial was presented incorrectly for a time when, its creators claimed, a link to the work was changed on the Whitney site. Last week, the online-activist group RTMark reprogrammed its site so visitors accessing it from the Whitney, or via a link on the Whitney site, would be redirected to a new exhibit area, where anyone could submit a Web page that would then appear in the biennial for a few minutes at a time.
But an RTMark member said the address was changed on the Whitney site, from rtmark.com to www.rtmark.com, so that the reprogramming was defeated and the group's standard site was displayed instead.
The Whitney's Soba said any alterations to the biennial site were made to improve the graphic design and that, in terms of the Web addresses, "nobody [at the Whitney] seems to think anything was changed." After being apprised of the problem by a reporter, RTMark made adjustments so that its exhibit page appeared again.
Although the computers in the Cooper-Hewitt's galleries were working well on Saturday, the museum has grappled with digital dilemmas. A note on the museum's home page states, "We apologize for any technical difficulties you might experience with the Triennial web site," and some pages were not loading properly on Wednesday.
As the Whitney show demonstrates, even the layout of a gallery can have an impact on how the art is viewed. Because the computer is tucked in the room's back corner, people waiting for a chance to surf block the entrance and stop others from sitting on the benches inside.
"The room is a bad interface," one digital artist said. Another added: "The clumsiness of the exhibit is only going to make people say, 'Oh, I'll check that out at home,' which is what we want anyway."
That might happen, although the prosaic character of both the Whitney Biennial and National Design Triennial sites does not provide much incentive for exploration. It is also somewhat surprising, given that both museums have built progressive online exhibitions in the past, the Whitney for the recent American Century retrospective and the Cooper-Hewitt for the Mixing Messages exhibit in 1996. An artist-designed site, like the one commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the Art Entertainment Network, its current online exhibition, might have been more enticing.
A docent on duty at the Whitney on Sunday did encourage people to visit the biennial site at home, especially during periods when the computer was not running correctly. Several artists suggested that the docents also be trained to cycle through the nine sites, as if leading a guided tour, when visitors were not engaged in active surfing.
Whitney officials say they are tentatively considering an Internet-art exhibit for the fall. If plans proceed, the museum will have another chance to wrestle with these complex issues -- and to show that Internet art can make sounds just as wonderful as a computer.
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