The Whitney Should Punch the Keys!

The phrase “video art” conjures images of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Laurie Anderson for most of the artistic community. The term is seemingly forever linked with pretty young men staring endlessly into the lens of a bulky videotape camera, jerky edited images of the New York landscape, or possibly even intentional video noise thrown over the visage of a naked middle-aged woman. These ideas haven’t changed since the first Sony television made its way into MoMA as part of a larger installation which attempts to show the suffering and degradation of the human soul as it existed in the larger metropolises of the 20th century.

That’s exactly why the Whitney Biennial sucked.

Art as it exists in motion-picture media is tired and stale. When Nam June Paik taped a piece in which he dipped his head in ink and ran it across a gigantic piece of paper, very few people, if anyone, owned camcorders. Novelty is what carried the piece more than anything else, especially since the stunt itself is not interesting enough to merit an installation. The videotaped image can be cut, chopped, looped, and distorted, bringing another layer of meaning and depth into the mix. It had never existed in the art world before, so naturally crowds gathered to take a look at this newly emerging form. Now a sizable portion of the art-faring world owns at least one kind of video-recording device, so the value of the video format itself has diminished somewhat. Another step must be taken to keep the audience staring at a sixteen-hour unbroken shot of the Empire State Building.

The problem with the form is that it hasn’t developed anything new. The subjects will still address the camera like an interviewer, a few seconds of footage will loop over and over, and the same tricks will be used to throw the image off-kilter. While I know other innovations in the art world would sometimes take hundreds of years, I’m also aware that the current scene has sped to an insane rate, plunging us from Damien Hirst to Andres Serrano in no time flat; with that sort of turnover, one could have expected a major advancement in this field between 1963 and now. Instead one finds the same tricks employed over and over, much to the audiences chagrin. “Down by Law,” instead of eliciting the outrage from the crowd that I’m sure the curators were expecting, simply drew a large amount of befuddlement and lachrymose stares. Aficionados aren’t impressed anymore. There needs to be a new breed of concepts in moving image art, or we need to chuck the entire field altogether.

Ladies and gentlemen: the time is right for You’re the Man Now Dog to invade the Biennial.

While the site, at first glance, reveals little other than a demented sense of humor and a hypnotizing need to watch the repeating gifs over and over again, there is also more artistic merit in the site then you would often give it credit for. First of all, the manipulation of the images is beyond anything Warhol could have dreamed when he first silk-screened a picture of Marilyn Monroe onto canvas. Celebrity and non-celebrity alike, from Patrick Stewart to Brian Peppers, receives a royal full-motion treatment complete with personalized soundtrack. On YTMND, everyone is famous for their allotted fifteen minutes, or however long it takes you to navigate away from the page. The media manipulation also hovers in the realm of the absurd, but is unlike any sort we’ve yet seen displayed in museums of contemporary art. The “art” of YTMND relieves almost solely on prefabricated material, and yet the resulting creations often seem more fresh and alive than the pieces from which they are assembled. I can tell you that I’d much rather watch any of the “Conan Summons” pages than the interview segments of your typical Late Night, and the line from Finding Forrester which gives the website its name has spawned a hundred better works than the middling Gus Van Sant entry. Each one of the links to a new YTMND creation holds the promise of something truly new and exciting, such as this or this or this, and even those which are shoddily made or disappointing still hold more sway over the audience than any given Warhol regurgitation or artist who simply must show us all of the work he did in pee.

So when the next Biennial rolls around in 2008, I hope the Whitney has the guts to say no to the endless cycle of boring artists. If I step into an installation then and see a man urging me to go back in time, or a reworked version of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! designed to be intentionally racist, I’ll be a happy man. Art exhibitions will be on their way towards a bright future.