The juxtaposition of works so as to have one provide commentary on the other, and, indeed, on the cultural apparatus that would pair them, is fraught with difficulty, especially when the issue is precisely the examination of new practices in comparison to established ones. The established side has the upper hand but runs the risk of appearing to be a token of the old order, somehow behind the times. The new side enjoys the urgency of novelty but runs the risk of appearing to be lacking in depth or sophistication. Both suffer being placed on opposite banks of an obviously arbitrary divide, and the orchestrator, by initiating this act of comparative attention, is inevitably subject to similar scrutiny. In this artificial antagonism, every question reflects upon every involved party. Like a broken mirror, "The Shock of The View" enters this multifold mirror-symmetry knowingly, hoping to survive the reflection by enabling a much needed dialogue.

The two works exhibited here both embody and defy the easy expectations associated with the false dichotomy between "real" and "virtual." While they are initially easily typecast, subsequent examination confounds any simple answers and demonstrates that they are less dissimilar than they at first appear, and are perhaps united in being artifacts of a larger formation of cultural forces, a formation that motivates both the works and the exhibition itself. The following comments are not judgments of the works but descriptions of some of the more evident similarities and differences that emerge in this juxtaposition, leading to some comments about this larger cultural formation.

Presumably, "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" represents the kind of work that is more familiar to the conventional art world, while "Mitologies" is the newcomer, representing a form of expression that has not yet been assimilated into established critical and museological practices. At first sight, Atelier van Lieshout's work operates in physical space and employs an elliptical conceptual language that valorizes a screaming silence of defamiliarized familiarity and the thinly veiled self-referentiality of the art world commenting upon the art world. In other words, although it employs numerous strategies which challenge or claim to challenge conventions -- the strategies vary in their effectiveness -- it is still very much a self-conscious work of the system it criticizes.

Bizri and Roussou's "Mitologies," on the other hand, appears to be the evident outsider, presenting a virtual space, a space that is still considered new to galleries and museums. But although this work is the token of the problematic new, its language is almost totally historical and symbolic, employing numerous references to mythological, artistic, and Western religious imagery: boats and churches, Cabalistic books and electric chairs, Satan and the number of the Beast. Where "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" offers no direct explanation of itself, "Mitologies" is literally constituted as a navigable database of citations and interpretations. For a work that ostensibly represents that which is hard to contain, it is surprisingly respectful of an anachronistic sense of what an artwork is and how it becomes eloquent. Yet, though it appears more innocent, its engagement with technology leads it to uncover new expressive ground, especially as it unexpectedly implicates the immersant as unwitting actor and accomplice.

Indeed, both works attempt to escape the confines of the museum as prison, morgue, or graveyard by opening themselves to the contingencies of interaction with the viewer. "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" heads for the neighborhoods in a vehicle of its own making, ironically offering to escape the museum by engaging the ordinariness of tax-preparation, for instance, as vanguard art. "Mitologies" tries to escape the museum by turning inward, into its own internal caverns and labyrinths. Both works abduct the viewer into distinct roles and , hence, definite narrative arcs with clear beginnings, middles, and ends, but one cannot really get lost in these labyrinths. At the close, "Mitologies" is as circumscribed by its own thematic thread as "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" is by the scenarios of banality it activates.

Thus, while "Mitologies" initially appears to be the more literal work, "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" reveals itself to be just as literal, in its own way. Heading for the hills is itself a literal gesture of escape, as is the straight-faced appeal to a self-sufficient utopia. Indeed, the title "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" is as direct a reference to the American Western and to mainstream cowboy culture as Ariadne's thread is to the labyrinth of virtual space within Western Judeo-Christian tradition. Once culture becomes a commodity, playing to pop culture differs little from playing to any other culture, high, middle, or low, past or present, since all cultures are appropriated into the same stew. Whether the references are to vans or to Wagner, the mechanisms are the same.

"Mitologies" weaves its own critique through the history of visions, constructing a paradoxical non-teleological teleology within its allotted span. In escaping inward it becomes its own fluctuating wunderkammer, its own liquid museum. If, by its own admission, "Mitologies" attempts to instill wonder by extracting it from a historical record of unrealizable visions connected by the threads of myths, "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" attempts to distill it from the ordinary by applying torque to our expectations. When all the words, both spoken and silent, have quieted down, what remains? In my eyes, the remnant of "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" is a curious, almost old-fashioned sense of formal beauty coupled with a strange but romantic sense of mystery. The artifacts created by Atelier van Lieshout seem to be excavated from another civilization, brought back from the "City of Lost Children" or some other such fantastic place. However humble and innocuous they may appear to be, they offer the critique of a possible civilization upon the present one, and accomplish a fragile sense of distancing that would self-destruct if the possible world from which they originate were ever adopted here. The remnant of "Mitologies" might be a phenomenology of the momentary sense of being lost in a space known to have no extent, and the concomitant suggestion that an infinite number of threads of meaning may be running through that non-space.

Perhaps what is happening here is that the central issue that "The Shock of the View" raises is neither about museology nor about the nature of the net-work, not about digital vs. non-digital art, nor virtual/real space, nor open and closed works, nor any of the other dichotomies that suggest themselves but fail to hold, but rather about our arrival at a new cultural and intellectual outlook that is informed by all these issues and by the technologies of globalization and virtuality but that operates on an entirely larger plane. In my estimation, this new outlook characterizes us and is centered on the phenomenon of persistent deep change, change so transformative as to produce what might be called "the alien-other." If, after the Nietzschean death of God, the project of modernity up to a certain point can be characterized as the effort to construct the Overman, we have come to a time when our efforts seem aimed not at self-overcoming but at constructing the alien -- neither the geopolitical alien nor the extraterrestrial, but the transhuman "alien-within." I use the word "within" to describe any circumscription of context. Hence "The Shock of The View" seeks to assist in the creation of that which is alien to the museum within the museum itself, just as the works we are discussing are doing within their own orbits. This phenomenon of ubiquitous self-transmutation is our form of hypercharged modernity, what I have come to term "transmodernity." The entirely non-utopian asymptote of transmodernity is the condition of total liquid mutability we call "virtuality." Technology, digital, networked, or other, enters the discussion in distinguishing "virtuality" from "ideality." While some sense of the virtual has always existed, it has until now been affiliated with the ideal. Unlike the ideal, transmodern virtuality is technologically operationalized, instrumentalized, and made available for global distribution and sharing. As nanotechnology and biotechnology aptly demonstrate, our alchemy is not metaphysical but transphysical, literally transforming the matrix of the real by the growing hyperspecificity of our knowledge. Thus, the dilemma of transmodernity, which both these works aptly demonstrate, is the question of how to contend with the obstinate fact of accelerating deep change while at the same time not falling prey to modernist utopianism and the myth of Progress.

Thus, the most intriguing aspect of "The Shock Of The View" is the opportunity it affords to the construction of a dialogue that is enabled by the museum without being confined by it. The web presence of the exhibition folds works and words upon themselves, and thus grows autocatalytically through the accretion of acts of interest. The museum as repository becomes the museum as generator. Perhaps the best critique of a space is another space. Inthis spirit, I end my response to "The Shock of the View" with a comment in the form of a small but growing alien space, residing someplace outside the museum's event horizon.