LifeLike
New Langton Arts
June 27 through July 28, 2001
The idea for reviewing a review came out of a discussion I was having
with Josh Greene (an artist) over a shared bowl of ice cream. Josh mentioned
a review he had read in Artweek magazine that he was particularly
fond of. I urged him to elaborate and we discussed what makes one review
more engaging than another. I then voiced my principal frustration as
an art critic – the lack of feedback (criticism) a writer receives
on her work. Between us, we came up with the idea of reviewing reviews,
offering the art critic a similar service to that which is provided the
artist- a formal analysis of their creative endeavor. Josh expressed the
belief that writers and artists best attain critical feedback on their
work in the more informal process of face to face interaction and other
forms of one-on-one communication (e.mail, u.s. mail, etc.) Since art
reviews are generally targeted towards a wider community of readers however,
it only made sense that a review of a review be presented in a similar
context and made available to a wide readership. It was decided that Josh
would review my review for Stretcher.
– Berin Golonu
One might expect an exhibition titled LifeLike
to spur an existential debate about the hierarchy between the natural
and the artificial, one that is posed in films such as A.I. (and
Blade Runner before it,) where robots are rendered so eerily similar
to human beings in appearance, intelligence, and personality that it becomes
difficult to determine how to assign a value to the mechanical in relation
to the organic. That is, if the work in LifeLike was, well, a little
more lifelike. As it stands, most of the work makes such a tongue-in-cheek
comment about the confluence of the natural and the artificial, like the
campy special effects of a B-rated sci-fi movie, that the nature vs. culture
debate acquires a disconcerting absurdity.
Marcia Tanner noted in her curatorial statement that artists, primarily
during the 18th and 19th centuries, were taught
to model their work after nature, that the more representational or "lifelike"
their work appeared, the more successful it was deemed to be. Nowadays,
artists, scientists, plastic surgeons and biotechnology engineers alike
have gotten past such romantic notions. Nature is too unpredictable, too
wild, too difficult to control. Now the challenge is not to represent
nature, but to recreate it in an abbreviated, more efficient manner: genetically
engineered seeds that are more resilient to disease, bald pets for those
allergic to cat or dog hair. Never mind that nature "enhanced" by man
often falls short of the real thing—a simple taste test proves that
produce pumped full of hormones never tastes as good as organic, and who
would want to pet a hairless cat anyway? If someone can make a profit
out of it, we can rest assured that there will be a demand.
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The decidedly low-tech works in LifeLike
make painfully obvious humans’ inadequacy at playing God, calling
attention to how our legerdemain falls pathetically short of recreating
the complexity of nature. It’s no shock, therefore, that Reuben Lorch-Miller’s
glorified beer sign (Or is it a screen saver?) sporting the picture of
an animated waterfall doesn’t approximate the monumentality of Niagara
Falls, even if he did choose the right sound track to accompany it. In
the same vein, the sight of Elliott Anderson’s mechanical, toy-like
tortoise lying on its back under a heat lamp couldn’t possibly inspire
empathy from the human observer, even if it does have a red blinking light
bulb for a heart. And the notion that Stephanie Syjuco’s computer
components rendered like 19th century scientific illustrations documenting
various species of flora could closely approximate the beauty of our natural
world, even if the artist has digitally grafted natural textures on top
of their plastic surfaces, comes across as being slightly farfetched.
The most successful pieces in LifeLike examine the results of our
botched attempts at reconfiguring nature. Philip Ross spent six months
growing fungus—Ganoderma lucidum to be exact — into shapes
that resemble architectural structures, or in one case, the composition
of a well known photograph by Harold Edgerton. Of course, the growth paths
of the moulds haven’t exactly followed their molds. Various sections
of the fungi have sprouted antennae that loom disproportionately out of
control, threatening to take over their glass vitrines. These living beings
might have been nurtured by mankind, but they clearly have their own agenda.
And it’s no surprise that Ross’s fabrications, the only "living"
beings in the show, are also the most interesting objects on display.
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John Slepian’s fleshy mutations offer an even
more biting critique of man’s interventions in the universal order.
Two monitors facing one another display images of tumor-shaped biomorphs
digitally rendered from scans of the artist’s own skin. These knuckle-like
blobs apparently have vocal chords, as they coo at one another through
what look to be rectal orifices adorned with lipstick. Is this what the
human genome project has yielded? Do these mutants breed? If so, is it
any surprise that the first beings artificially created from our own DNA
are more likely to resemble Slepian’s gurgling sphincters rather
than mimicking the physical perfection of, say, a virtual human such as
Lara Croft or a mechanized being such as Gigolo Joe? Slepian succeeds
in leaving us with a very unpromising vision of our biotechnological evolution,
and that’s his point.
For the most part, works in LifeLike take a humorous approach to
the marriage of biology and technology, deriding the sensation and hype
revolving around hot topics such as genetic engineering, robotics, and
the virtual vs. the real. Granted, the humor employed in such an approach
may come as a comic relief to the customary gloom and doom surrounding
discussion of the nature vs. culture debate. The artists might have invited
a more thorough contemplation of their work, however, had they taken the
topic a little more seriously, by either introducing factual evidence
into their examinations or referencing social controversies relevant to
our day.
Lifelike was on view June 27 - July 28, 2001 at New Langton Arts,
1246 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-3817. For more information
contact (415) 626-5416 or www.newlangtonarts.org.
