Art: No Brush Required

Ok, this may not be the best moment for cyberspace. Napster is stumbling. NASDAQ is a bust. Whole sectors of the virtual economy are wrapping up their stories at Chapter 11. But who cares if investors lose faith in the digital world? The artists are sticking with it--at least the ones who lately have been making some galleries look like Circuit City, full of dot-matrix screens and wall-mounted monitors. Remember when videotape was the hot new medium? Compared with CD-ROM art and screen-saver art, with website artworks or virtual-reality goggles, videotape is starting to look quaint, even primordial. Like charcoal.

You know these developments must be reaching critical mass when two museums decide simultaneously to look into them. "BitStreams" at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City and "010101: Art in Technological Times" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are Zeitgeist shows, attempts to collect a few specimens of this emerging practice and let them vibrate in proximity to one another. There is not much effort in either exhibit to draw broad conclusions, no gathering of everybody into schools or "isms." The spirit behind both is to let a thousand digits bloom.

In some ways, this is a moment like the first decades of the 20th century, when biplanes, automobiles and skyscrapers looked like portents of a magnificent new world in the making. The essential task for many artists then was to align themselves with the dynamic forces of that world, to heap up raptures to horsepower and the Brooklyn Bridge. Cyberspace and digital technology have some of the same glamour and promise, but the romance of technology has long since wilted. After two world wars and Three Mile Island, who can take seriously the militant modernity of the Italian Futurists or the Russian Constructivists? What artists want now is to use new technologies without falling for them.

So when Inez van Lamsweerde (at the Whitney) digitally erases her boyfriend Vinoodh from Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately), she is not worshipping digital photo retouching. She's just taking advantage of it to examine herself contorted by a passion without its object. And when Jochem Hendricks (at SFMOMA) uses a specially constructed helmet to read the smallest movements of his eyes and translate those into a scribbled line drawing like Reading, he is not paying homage to the electrocardiogram. He's using a similar technology to achieve a strangely more intimate end.