Digital Asylum, "Violencia," details from the multi-media installation, 1996.
by Beate Bermann-Enn
(Gallerie Spagnolo, San Diego) One of the most riveting concerns of the
1980s and '90s is the violence in our society. This multi-media, multi-artist
installation and exhibition will address some of the aspects of this topic.
Not just what is violence--what shapes and forms it takes--in nature, in
sublimated forms, in the past, in overt and aggressive shapes; but also
its seductive shapes made acceptable and fascinating by a kind of beauty
that can envelop it.
The four artists of Digit Asylum who created the interactive multimedia
Violence and Beauty in America are Patrick Howell, Laura Malone,
Gordon Van Huizen and Sean van Tyne. Timed to happen simultaneously in the
gallery and on the Internet, this piece gives the user the responsibility
of what happens on the screen, and makes the viewers in the gallery and
on the Internet witnesses to the users' relationship to the violent options
on the computer.
The friendly and familiar guidance of the mouse component of this installation
seduces the viewer to activate violent sequences on a computer screen. Music
interweaves with the images, sometimes contrasting with soft romantic tunes
the stabbing and pain on the screen, sometimes underscoring the action the
user always has the option to stop, not be violent, or to go to a different
sequence The inescapable question is posed about the frightening willingness
of the viewer/users to engage in acts of violence if they are clothed in
contemporary media aesthetics.
Jeff Laudenslager contributes an installation which that includes several
multimedia components ranging from etched glass to evocative shadows on
the wall. They deal with the diverse nature of violence. One, the demolition
of a Soviet guard tower in East Berlin, refers to a heroics of violence
that we can cheer. Another is a newspaper story, etched on glass, of three
white Africaaners, two dead and one to be executed by a black militiaman.
The visible hatred in the eyes of the white man about to be executed plays
off against the black oppressed man about to execute his oppressor, confronting
the viewer with the question of the justification of violence. The third
component of this installa- tion uses the image of the swastika, a clear
and emblematic sign of violence. It appears here once as a reflected shadow
on the wall, and again as a very real swastika blade in a skillsaw.
Shauna Peck will present a purposefully unromantic installation that leads
the viewer back to the "commonness" of death, using a body bag.
This item is common in war, present at accidents, used by every medical
examiner, never recycled, and is used all over the world. They are manufactured
in Southeast San Diego, by rows of women sowing zippers into the body bags,
which comes in different colors, but only one size. It does not vary and
production has gone up. Peck creates a surrounding that evokes a very normal
day in a very normal life, very simple, very generic, not even female/male
oriented--but containing the unplanned-for presence of the bag. Death as
the out-of-place intruder in a normal life.
Raoul Guerero will be represented with three lithographs of "wanted"
posters. They are made up of people and characters that might have been
real. Reflecting upon the mythology of the West, violence as an inheritance,
Guerero uses his experience and impressions from a sojourn in the Black
Hills of South Dakota. He infers with the types of his characters a deeper
connection to German, Dutch and Scottish forebears whose daring and hardiness
might have laid the foundation for the types that ended up on wanted posters
in the past.
Ronin Mintz has a different take on violence, a counterpoint to the interactive
media piece in the gallery. He examines the depersonalization of violence--really
of life in our time--and confronts the computer. In this view technology
has made us insensitive to violence by distancing us from the act. Film,
television and now Virtual Reality has taken the place of reality, causing
people to lose the skills to interact as people. Mintz presents a conveyor
belt with computer parts sitting on it, some of them "alive:"
computer disks spinning, LED lights flashing, memory boards etc. The belt
moves every once in a while, passing under suspended old hand tools like
mallets, sickles and hammers that pound them. The tools destroy the new
vehicle for violence.
Joyce Cutler Shaw presents a Message Monument featuring the words
"We the People" in melting ice. Water for the ice has been
collected from all 50 states. The original work had been conceived for the
west front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. for the Bicentennial
in 1976. Shaw incorporated the legislative process into the piece: an act
of Congress was needed for permission to set up the piece in that location.
Having been endorsed by the bicentennial commission and approved by the
chairman of the House, the art project together with other issues were swallowed
up and wiped away by the Hayes-Elizabeth Ray scandal, and so never came
to actual realization at the capitol. With this installation and readings,
Shaw reflects on the intervening 20 years-- on what violence is, not just
physical but also the effects of neglect, the encroachments into freedom
of speech and other issues.
