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Eyes On The E-prize Online Art Gets its Due Glen Helfand, Special to SF Gate |
Wednesday, May 31, 2000
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In award-obsessed American culture, visual art, much less digital art, is one of the few arenas that doesn't have a glamorous system of recognition. Sure, there are stately grants, those lucrative MacArthur genius awards, and the Whitney Biennial (and its newly-created prize), that pulse-taking exhibition of American art that most contemporary artists long to be included in but invariably feel slighted by. But they are not accompanied by the type of glitzy awards ceremonies you'd see on TV, with Joan Rivers dishing all those dour black outfits. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the recent Webby Awards ceremony, which imagines itself the celebrity-spiced Internet equivalent of the Oscars, should be a place where art would assume a surprisingly strong profile. But there it was, the shining star amidst the dazzle of heavy corporate sponsorship and self-congratulatory awards for best commerce site and 26 other Web categories. Thanks to a 'Net art-loving anonymous donor who bankrolled a $50K SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art, the event became a forum for the advancement of artistic expression in digital space. Before getting to the prize, however, those at the event had to endure dozens of category awards, an endless procedure that left plenty of time to ponder how the Webbys, at its core, is riddled with inconsistencies. In an arena where there are gazillions of sites addressing as many subjects and tightly focused worldviews, how can a single best of breed be selected, even if a panel of celebrity experts -- Tina Brown, Liz Smith, Deepak Chopra among them -- are the judges? What's their criterion in deciding between Martha Stewart.com and Swoon? Box office-driven Hollywood seems to be the model, yet in the film industry, corporate involvement is limited to behind-the-scenes lobbying. At the Webbys, the red carpet entrance was lined with colorful characters hawking start-ups, and the sponsors were acknowledged on stage. What, ultimately, is the goal here? The SFMOMA prize, since it had the weight of a respected cultural institution and a wad of cash behind it, was the only award of the evening that had any meaning. It has clearer goals than the wiggly Webbys themselves; that is, the prize is intended to foster the development of art and to discover talent in the undernourished electronic arena. While there are other prizes, like the prestigious and older (though less lucrative) European Prix Ars Electronica, the Webby prize functions in a more populist realm. Winners are chosen from an open call -- a wise move in a field where artists work very independently and it resulted in hundreds of submissions -- and judged by a group of curators and artists. The prize honors a body of work that pushes online art practice in promising directions. It acknowledges this as a medium in transition. Even with such unglamorous philanthropic impulses, the Prize managed to be put on the schedule at the end of the stultifying Webby ceremonies, in the Best Picture position, with new media artist superstar Bill Viola as presenter. (Interestingly enough, a site that SFMOMA developed to accompany Viola's major travelling exhibition was a nominee for the regular Webby art award. It was not an artist's site, but one created by a presenting institution with corporate help from Intel. Yet it was up against privately created art projects with much smaller budgets. The Viola site ended up receiving the people's choice award, while Web Stalker, an inventive rethinking of the browser model, received the art prize.) Viola annonced that the inaugural $50K SFMOMA Prize (to be awarded annually) would be split four ways -- between a $30,000 grand prize winner and honorable mentions who would get $6,500 each. (The figures don't sound like much in high tech business terms, but for artists who have little possibility of selling their work, it can be a blessing.) None of the winners, ironically enough, work in Silicon Valley. Honorable mentions went to Ichiro Aikawa, a young Japanese man who lives and works in Seattle, South Korean artist Young-hae Chang, and Mexican-born Canadian Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. The grand prize went to a pair of artists. Michael Samyn, a handsome Belgian designer with prominent sideburns, and dreadlocked artist Auriea Harvey, originally from New York, are a romantically entwined couple who collaborate on entropy8zuper.org. The self-described exhibitionists stood on the circular stage and silently, passionately kissed for a good long time, an undeniably attractive vision that was projected on the large screen behind them. (Harvey, it so happens, was the first recipient of a standard art Webby in 1997, when she was producing Entropy 8 on her own.) Their make-out artistry was as much eye candy as their site itself, to which they gave an extensive guided demo at a day-long, issues of Web art-probing symposium SFMOMA held the weekend following the Webbys. Their site offers a prime example of one direction Web art can take -- a lushly visual, intuitively interactive one. Samyn and Harvey, who question the need to show their work in a museum, lead an audience through their site, which is a rich tangle of technology that forms a sensual tapestry of sound and moving image. The presentation felt a lot like watching a film, an experience that raised pertinent questions about how to present Web work in a public setting. The runners up, as well as a few finalists, also presented their work, each operating in very different veins. Aikawa's site, @2000 dips into the visual pleasure realm, albeit with rave-like graphics which foreground the computer context in breathtaking ways. The technology is also an awe-inspiring aspect of Lozano-Hemmer's work, specifically a piece that involved an extremely complex, Web-controlled light show in Mexico City's Zocalo Anybody who logged on to his Web site, could create light patterns that were realized in that mega-metropolis for a few days at the turn of the millennium, extending cyberspace interaction into the real world. Korean artist Young-Hae Chang prefaced her work with a succinct statement: "My Web art tries to express the essence of the Internet: information and disinformation. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colors, the fonts and the rest, and what's left? The text." She showed a jazzy, quasi political, non-interactive diatribe on sex and revolution which provided the symposium's comic, conceptualist relief. Now an afternoon of discussion, some of it heated, with artists and curators is not analogous to an awards presentation, and the SFMOMA prize isn't exactly analogous to a Webby award, but the symposium pointed out just what was missing from the breathless ceremony that came before it -- context. It will be a lot more exciting for the Webbys to generate glamour and the thrill of a winner once they've settled on some conceptual foundations and standards of quality.
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