PARIS LETTAU
REVIEW
TECHNOLOGISM MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART 3 OCTOBER–12 DECEMBER 2015
ebrated this ‘technologically’ transformed paradigm. Under these new conditions, according to Technologism, art has been licensed to upturn old hierarchies and disrupt the centralised control of media by corporate and government interests—whether this means that art wilfully exits the art institution, or re-materialises within it. Another important theme is the shift from technology as an external, objectified tool at the beck and call of the human subject, to it being an integral part of this subject. Marshall McLuhan discussed this issue in the 1960s, but a turning-point in our contemporary consciousness was also Donna Harraway’s 1983 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, in which she proclaims ‘the cyborg is our ontology.’2 Australia’s living artist-cyborg, Stelarc, was notably absent at Technologism, but Hershman Leeson’s Cyberoberta (1996), Ricky Swallow’s iMan prototypes (2001) and Mark Leckey’s GreenScreenRefrigerator (2010) entered the cyborg’s territory.
T
echnologism was the final instalment of MuMA’s trilogy of historical exhibitions exploring landmark moments in twentieth century art—following Reinventing the Wheel: the readymade century in 2013, and Art as a Verb in 2014. Curated by Charlotte Day and featuring 43 historical and contemporary works, Technologism surveyed the artistic engagement and critique of electronic systems (radio, TV, the Internet, social media, smartphones, surveillance etc) since the 1960s.
If Technologism has a central theme, it is technology’s dematerialisation and re-materialisation of art. In Sean Dockray’s catalogue essay, he refers to Jack Burnham’s famous 1968 essay, Systems Esthetics, to describe the ‘paradigm’ shift from the artistic production of art objects to the production of ‘unobjects’, such as systems and environments.1 The exhibition celAbove: Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer, Simon McGlinn (Greatest Hits) - all 1985, Once mysterious became secret then became private, 2015 (detail), Ceiling mounted wifi access points, smartphone location analytics software, mini computer, dimensions: 588 square metres. Courtesy of the artists, Commissioned by MUMA (Monash Univeristy Museum of Art) for Technologism. Photograph Christo Crocker.
48
BROADSHEET JOURNAL 45.1
Technologism, however, did not simply celebrate ‘techy’ electronic and new media art (decried by Philip Brophy in his polemical catalogue essay). The ‘retro’ aesthetic of some work actually had an element of nostalgia, no matter the apparent irony of its intention. For example, Matt Hinkley’s Untitled (MH10-9) (2010) and Untitled (MH10-31) (2009), a found TV remote and old-school cordless phone encased by the artist in Perspex, looks like an aestheticisation of ‘80s and ‘90s tech. The irony is the labour intensive extension of Hinkley’s drawing practice. With Dremel and scalpel he intricately traces new textures and naturalistic aging effects into the plastics. This reification of waste affirms Arte Povera as it now exists in the art museum as the ‘perverse’ inversion of its original Dadaist intentions, except Hinkley shows that today’s impoverished objects are discarded, obsolete electronics. Hinkley’s work also demonstrates that Technologism avoids a cheap shot at traditional mediums and skills, as if wanting to claim continuity with the institutional project of art, rather than, like Arte Povera, declaim against it. Ulla Wiggen’s intricate acrylics of electronic circuitry from 1963-1969 sit comfortably with John F. Simon, Jnr’s transformation of drawing into writing. In Colour Panel v1.0 (1999), for instance, software produces shifting colour-contrasting grids on a disembodied Apple PowerBook LCD screen, running iterations of colour possibilities taken from Bauhaus colour theory. Simon writes the software himself, in what he has called ‘cod-