THE BOOLEAN OR[B]: We Juxtapose, Therefore We Are!
© Adrianne Wortzel, Respondent

OK, I give up. No more Donna Quixote. I throw in my trowel.

I've tried, not single-handedly, and not, I admit, in this forum, to wield a sword against the habitual bi-polarization of everything that leads to assigning opposing qualities and meanings to things in order to bring them into focus.

This methodology has its model in stereoscopic vision, admittedly an attribute I am devoid of since I cannot fuse my opthamological muscles (handy for shooting through the camera with one eye while using the other to watch where I am going -- but making it difficult to see the whole picture).

Its an idealized and static world where everything is filtered through bi-polarized lenses. But I can see how oxymoron forms a lintel for the posts of "creative people" trying to bridge the gap towards "civilians" for support and appreciation. That condition rears the necessity for using juxtaposition; which in turn pits the Hope that the Sisyphean boulder will always roll back to a new and higher plateau against the Hopelessness that our efforts may prove to be a prime argument for Xeno's Paradox.

But then, it's all ones or zeros now: on or off; true or false. This is true.

Hybrid vs. Holistic:

>From the 3rd through the 13th century, Western European cartographers created hybrid "monstrous races" to populate the unexplored territories of their world on their maps. In doing so, they marginalized human beings occupying more than 2/3 of the world while simultaneously creating a 4th-dimensional cartography of the imagination that reflected their theology and had nothing to do with empirical facts. They made maps that told us here in their future more about them than they may have wanted us to know. Their maps were imaged narratives telling us stories about what they thought was a righteous world. My hope for all of us is that we can be supported to create evocative and resonating "cartographies" without territorizing our work to forced conclusions, juxtaposed or otherwise. We all know that the standards now should be addressed to process, not to product, and that is the spirit in which I am writing.

Analog vs. Digital; Then vs. Now; Before vs. After:

Bruce Connor's is the designated analog/then/before work and perhaps its materials have acquired a certain patina of nostalgia for us. But its layerings add up to much more than the sum of its parts. The television set was originally introduced to our culture in a state of atrophy -- mostly sitting with just a signal on its happy face. In Connor's work the signals have become symbolic live metaphors projected on its face, which actually reminds me of the digital seemingly evocative qualities of software -- as in FLASH where you can upgrade your vector images to "symbol" status and truly do a lot more resonant things with them.

And, except for the very analog hum of the film projector, prevalent in the Mezzanine at BAM, which accompanied Philip's Glass excellent music like an additional instrument, I know that "Monsters of Grace" is the designated digital work.

It did not seem disruptive to think about how Bruce Conner made his work, in fact it seemed part and parcel of his content, but somehow I found myself watching Robert Wilson's images with an uncomfortable recognition of where he used particular software, Bryce, Poser, or their equivalents. The sound designer I was with was having the same experience with the score, albeit he is a strong fan of Glass's.

If knowledge of the underpinnings is a dilemma for digital artists in viewing digital work, then what opposing dilemma occurs for civilians watching it where they haven't a clue? The attribution of magical powers to a work made with new technology is old hat; perceptive at every threshold of new technology. Does it count more NOW? Is this leap the largest span ever?

TwoD vs. ThreeD:

Although Wilson's use of ThreeD (3D glasses supplied, and yes, somehow, I could see it in spite of my stereoscopic handicap!!!), was fabulous and incredibly enjoyable, it was always present wholly as 3D phenomena, it never seemed captured by the content enough to transcend that. I kept hoping for something to happen, but it never happened. Although maybe this is the point; that there is no transcendence.

Nostalgia vs. Awe: Could I fault my own sense of and desire for nostalgia for this? I could apply nostalgia to TV Assassination's technology; but not to Monster's.

Representation vs. Abstraction: The Robert Wilson images are readymade, artist-made symbols; their content evolution is not transparent except that they evoke former works of Robert Wilson and of Magritte. In general in our culture there has been a rush towards high resolution as progressive, high res good, low res- bad, forgetting that it is all relative anyway and progression may just be a construct we began when we suddenly got upright and assumed that meant we were going uphill.

"Monsters" does allow the viewer a cocoon for complete subjectivity in both senses of the word: it couches the viewer in a private world where one can be totally subjective and it subjects the viewer to an almost tyrannical high art appreciation sense, even though it remains in the realm of modernism. In attendance at "Monsters" we are definitively viewers and even if we are truly lucky to enjoy that position, something about its tenor keeps reminding us how lucky we are. Shall I just say that Connor's imagery is proletariat and Wilson's is elite and that that corresponds to analog and digital?

If analog work now evokes a kind of nostalgia, is that fair? Is it appropriate that shared scenes of a specific date become dated; and gather value through our own sepia filters as we, from a very narrow-ledged vantage point, experience and critique works over time?

I know that the desire to experience awe and nostalgia is both seductive and germane to underestimating and misunderstanding almost everything. But it is what we often expect of the "general public".

"Monster's" imagery was charmingly analog while Connor's uses so many of the attributes we associate with digital work: politicization, appropriation, veiling, layering. And it is montaged rather than episodical. I liked that Connor used montage (in the sense of creating a palimpsest) for an analogic work; while Wilson and Glass used lateral episodes (a string of cultured pearls?) with digital work.

On the other hand, maybe this is what makes "Monsters" so pleasurable. But let's consider it a work of the present and not of the future. To say that someone's work is work of the future is like saying your blind date was very nice; it bypasses dealing with issues of quality and significance.

Genre vs. Elite In the 1980s there was this metaphorical division in my mind between 8mm and 70mm art = between private studio art and colossal endeavors of tremendous expense. Costs and backing in performative work tend to command that the work be a theatrical production. It would be interesting to find ways around that - such as the work that occurs in several locations simultaneously and/or productions that have online components occurring spontaneously in real time. It's worrisome to think that this type of work may never be "touched' by the traditional Broadway "Angel" . * * * The only distinguishing mark I can see that may be viable in the leap in performance work from analog to digital is that there may be a prevalent operatic basis to digital performance because, in a world where technology is making our locations transparent, the world is indeed becoming a stage, a theater in which we are all surveillable and visible, all actors. Our Training Method is our habit of equating ourselves with characters we see in films and TV. We are no longer viewers, even if we are watching, we are being watched by the performers we are watching. In Bruce Connor's work we can be either Kennedy, Oswald, or Ruby in the trilogy Connor enlarges on. At the foot of "Monsters of Grace" there is no one to be. We are locked out in the audience; not even allowed backstage. Put in our place, we are depended upon to sit back and enjoy it.

I wish I could have seen the performance Randall Packer describes: with the integration of " live performance and computer-generated imagery" - wow, that must've transcended juxtaposition.