Stan VanDerBeek, Movie Drome, 1963-66
Photograph courtesy of the New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Paille

Ghosts in the Machine opened at the New Museum in New York on July 18th, 2012. The exhibition is the brain-child of Associate Director Massimiliano Gioni and Director of Exhibitions Gary Carrion-Murayari, Curator. It focuses on and highlights the relationship between man and machine in art throughout the years. Spanning over fifty years, most of the work in Ghosts in the Machine is from the 1960’s and 1970’s, offering a glimpse into early projections, simple, abstract, motorized works not competitive beyond their own specific artistic purpose. Time is evident in many pieces since technological advances have been so rampant in the last ten or more years. However, entering into the  environmental container Movie-Drome, 1963-66 by Stan VanDerBeek, viewers are invited to lay down on provided black pillows and take in the visuals. The imagery varied from egyptian sculpture stills, black and white film with people doing things, landscape and protest narrative. An abstract political thread seemed to be a consistent in all of the projections. Shapes overlapped, colors overlapped,  periods of time overlapped, although the technology used to create the entire installation was a reminder of and reflective of the time when it was made. I stayed in the installation for about 20 minutes, listening to the clicks and hums of the machinery and watching the images and the interaction of shadows as people entered and left the space. In his catalog essay about the exhibition, Gioni suggests:

“…VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome plunges its viewer-patients into a river of images that seems to portend the extreme voyeurism of the Internet. Might the global onanism of our social media be the latest incarnation–a transnational, corporate one, as befits this era–of the bachelor machine?”

Technology has given way to overstimulating and over abundance of visual information now readily available at our fingertips. At the time this work was made, the political and economic realm was intersecting with art and expanded upon by way of technology. Artists and theorists alike were exploring possibilities dealing with the machine in direct relationship with human feeling. Ghosts in the Machine is an exhibition dealing with an archive of visual occurrence documented and salvaged. IN answer to what is a bachelor machine, the exhibit references Harald Szeemann, “The Bachelor Machine”, 1975 along with literary critic Michel Carrouges’ interpretation that “a bachelor machine is a fantastic image that transforms love into a technique of death. (said regarding the exhibition and in reference to a work by Marcel Duchamp).” If as a whole, humanity is about love and machines are man made, the machine should equal love but what if love just equals death? It is here we find the conundrum of the what machine culture and it’s assistance and corruption have resulted in. An international group of artists started forming in the early 1960’s catapulting several movements and experiments falling under the titles “kinetic art”, Concrete art”, “Zero” and “GRAV”.  A few artists included in this particular exhibition, part of the collective “Arte Programmata”, started showing work in Italy in 1962. Again according to Gioni,

“The artists of Arte Programmata imagined art as a training ground of the senses, “a perceptual gymnastics” a necessary preparation for survival in a world overstimulated by ever-more-invasive advertising and technology.”

Stan VanDerBeek, Movie Drome, 1963-66
Photograph courtesy of the New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Paille
Ghosts in the Machine, uses machines both literal, metaphorical and in a direct representation manner in each of the artworks present in the exhibit. Born 1973 in East Jerusalem and currently based in New York, artist Seth Price is the most contemporarily relevant or at least youngest artist in the show. His piece “Film/Right”, 2006 is a 16mm film in color, silently back projected onto a hanging screen. The work features a landscape and an ever changing sky, eerie and consistent. His inclusion in the show is a bit of a mystery however, as his is the only work, that is in direct communication with the present, even if obviously influenced by many of the other artists, now deceased, whose ghosts invisibly hover around every corner.  Followed by the second youngest artist Henrik Olesen, born 1967 in Esbjerg, Denmark and currently based in Berlin, Germany. Olesen contributes a series of computer made collages from 2009, along with two of my favorite works in the show, Apple (Ghost) (1), 2008 and Imitation/Enigma (2), 2008 the first being a computer from the 1980’s wrapped in plastic and the latter a box (which could also be construed as a computer tower), with a crudely tied, heavy wool blanket covering the object. Both these works are sculpturally undemanding yet effective in their relationship to contemporary installation, the speed of technology and the concept of monumentalizing an object via the declaration of art.
Thomas Bayrle, German artist born in 1937, caught my attention with his piece Madonna Mercedes, 1989 on the 3nd floor. The work is a black and white photocopy collage of the Madonna and Child, mounted on wood. Upon close inspection, it is possible to see that, as assumed by the title, the work consists of a myriad of the Mercedes Benz. As a whole, the recognizable image of the Madonna and Child communicates in an art historical stance, delving from the Renaissance and in turn being fast forwarded to a particular time, while not today, also not such a distant past. Bayrle also has work in DOCUMENTA (13) and has heavily relied on machines and the concept of human interaction along with repetition of images within his work. In this piece there is a two-dimensional interaction, a flattening of space within a flattening and compression of time. The work comments on status, the power of labels, the commercial identity of representation along with religion and class.
Thomas Bayrle, Mercedes Madonna, 1989 (Left) & Claes Oldenburg, Profile Airflow, 1969 (Right)
Photograph courtesy of the New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Paille

It is on the 2nd floor where the viewer will come across some of the works from the “Arte Programmata” artists.  Spazio Elastico [Elastic Space], 1967-68 by Gianni Colombo is an installation in a square room. The piece consists of elastic cord, black light and an electric motor. Entering the space, one is challenged to pause and look at the elastic string. Very subtly it moves, stretching in a gridded format, dizzying inside the black cubed room. I leaned against the wall, and felt a bit off center but deliciously. Functioning as a record of time yet completely fresh and relevant in the moment, Colombo’s piece offers a pure, crystallized interpretation of the umbrella concept of Ghosts in the Machine. The elastic and it’s eerie movement performs as a ghost, it is a specific haunting within the context of a specific interior realm. Similarly to VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome, Spazio Elastico is an artificial environment ahead of it’s time, a foreshadowed look into a society now completely driven by computer networks and circuits.

Gianni Colombo, Spazio Elastico [Elastic Space], 1967-68
Photograph courtesy of the New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Pailley
Otto Piene, Hängende Lichtkugel, 1972 1967-68
Photograph courtesy of the New Museum, New York
Photo: Benoit Paille

What Gioni and Carrion-Murayari have done is composed and revealed an archive of sorts, raising the dead and reminding us that everything comes from something else.

Ghosts in the Machine, a major survey exhibition exploring the relationship between art and machines, opened on July 18th and will be on view until September 30th, 2012.

More soon xo