Driven to distraction.

Leaving the industrial age in the dust, telecommunication giants and cyberspace czars are making their mark. The Guggenheim Soho's recent exhibition "Mediascape" is one of those marks. The show, a collaboration with ZKM/Center for Art and Media(1) in Karlsruhe, Germany was made possible largely by the support of the Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telecommunication company.

Covering low- to high-tech video art, "Mediascape" reveals a shifting patronage, while proposing a bizarre pedigree for new multimedia art. The curious aspect of the exhibition is its uncomfortable relationship to history. The overall agenda of a media show typically suggests a break from tradition. Yet, based on the pieces selected for this exhibition, there is a curatorial if not institutional desire for the sanction of history. At the same time, the historical video work provided comes out of a conceptual and anti-commodification sensibility at odds with the newer commodity-oriented work. Exhibited together, the new work has the potential to undermine, invalidate or even erase that which it is called upon to validate.

Although not reflected in the catalog, the work in the show was divided between the first and the second floors. Generally, the technically complex and ultimately less engaging work was on the first floor. The glitzy attraction wore off during subsequent visits, while on the second floor the quieter work, demanding some reflection on the part of the viewer, held ground. ZKM appears to have many toys, and at this point random distraction is the greater part of the game.

At the entrance to the exhibition Nam June Paik's Megatron (1995), a wall of video monitors with constantly changing images, engaged most visitors before they entered the galleries. Intermittently, all screens would momentarily lock together, generating a cartoon, a flying bird or a national flag, for example. The fast-paced video loops were punctuated by a series of repeating erotic clips depicting a voluptuous woman, whose bare breasts and other body parts are fondled by the camera. I was amazed at first and kept trying to find repeating patterns, but my intense looking just gave me a headache. Megatron actively resisted close scrutiny.

In a dark first floor gallery, Toshio Iwai's interactive Piano-As Image Media (1995) allowed visitors to click a mouse, creating random patterns or notes on a moving gossamer-like scrim that rolled up to a grand player piano, which actually appeared to "play" the notes. Then the scrim, all the while moving away from the viewer, establishes an upward trajectory where upon the notes are transformed into light patterns. Bill Seaman's Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1994-95) also invited viewers to queue up to move a mouse and apparently effect a random connection of words and images. For Jeffrey Shaw's The Legible City (1991), the museum visitor mounted a stationary exercise bike and, by pedaling, simulated movement through a virtual metropolis made of giant, illegible letters. I was amused, but also concerned about the line of people behind me waiting to try the bike.

Ingo Gunther's Im Berich der West-Wind-Welt (1991) involved two waving flags that served as a screen for a projection of U.S. and Russian political moments. This piece demanded the viewers' knowledge of recent history, and without that knowledge, the work would have had little meaning. Upstairs, earlier work suggested - but did not confirm - an historical context for video and interactive multi-media art. The pieces were largely free of a fun-and-games, commercial attitude, though Marie-Jo Lafontaine's Les Larmes D'Acier (1987), a mural of monitors showing brawny biceps pumping iron, brought to mind a giant Calvin Klein advertisement. Jenny Holzer's Untitled (1990) was a room filled floor-to-ceiling, band upon band, with neon signs spewing aphorisms in different languages. Using language, Holzer created a system in which text as form and form as text diverge and coalesce.

A schizy feeling resulted from experiencing Bruce Nauman's low-tech, conceptual video Surveillance Piece (Public Room, Private Room) (1969-70), a vastly different one than Iwai's high-tech, high entertainment value Piano-As Image Media, produced at ZKM. In the Nauman piece viewers stand in one room watching a single monitor repeatedly pan another room they cannot enter. A Nauman work from 20 years later, Raw Material: Brrr (1990), made using two-channel video and two-channel sound installation, is given a ZKM/Center for Art and Media designation, but maintains a conceptual focus on repetitious body movement that is divorced from the random-quality work downstairs constructed by younger artists while in residence at the Center in Karlsruhe.

Steina and Woody Vasulka's Matrix I (1970-72) and Borealis (1993) both seemed closer to Nauman's aesthetic and not really related to the "downstairs" work. Although the two works are separated by over two decades, a mantra-like redundancy defined both. The earlier piece showed the same moving metallic shapes on 20 black and white monitors, while the more recent project involved a two-channel color video and a four-channel soundtrack projected on mural-sized screens.

Bill Viola's video installation Threshold (1992) was a compelling exploration of the public and private, exterior and interior, even media and mediums, of those who travel from one state of consciousness to another. One band of ticker tape news bulletins crossed a blank white wall interrupted by a vertical black passage, literally a threshold into another space. The passage was so dark that one might not recognize it as a point of entry. Taking a chance, walking into complete darkness, viewers were enveloped by an intensely intimate space mediated by the mural-sized, tightly cropped faces of three sleeping people, whose faces moved ever so slightly. Deep, regular, sonorous breathing filled the room. The City of Man (1989), also by Viola, was less convincing. Heavy velvet curtains covered the doorway to a discreet gallery. The room contained a large, projected anti-narrative video triptych. The reason for the use of video was ambiguous. Why not just use still photographs?

All the pieces except Paik's, Holzer's, Nauman's of 1969-70 and the Vasulkas' of 1970 came from the ZKM collection. According to a Guggenheim statement, ZKM claims a collection of over 1000 works of multi-media art. Except for Holzer, every artist in the exhibition is represented in the ZKM collection. Is this another instance of canon construction where the history of video art is being prescribed and given rubber stamp approval? But what exactly is being approved?

There was a peculiar - even suspicious - dynamic between the more conceptual pieces and the fun-house, interactive work. The earlier work tended to demand more from the viewer, while the later work expected a certain quick glance and contested the mental state of musing. Those "multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law," to quote Walter Benjamin, have multiplied. In Nauman's Surveillance piece made in 1969-70, two monitors are used. Megatron, by Paik includes 150.

Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, compares this moment in museum history to the italian Renaissance. Although he emphasizes the "commingling of science, art and the humanities," equally important is the demand for Medici-quality patrons and robber baron resources, particularly when dealing with high-tech installation projects.

The Museum seems to be following suit with the large publishing houses where literature is replaced by pulp fiction, or with certain academic institutions where classes are first and foremost "edutainment." One is left with the feeling that business concerns - how to market and support a museum - are taking over to the detriment of considered reflection on the contemporary world. On the other hand, the contemporary world aggressively resists qualified reflection. If we expect the museum to engage this world, then "Mediascape" speaks volumes.

NOTES

1. ZKM is an umbrella foundation, still in formation, bringing together artists, technicians and scientists with a common goal: to combine traditional art forms with the new digital technologies and to make the products useful to the public. As an institution, ZKM strikes me as a cross between New York's International Center of Photography and Germany's Bauhaus in a twenty-first century multi-media setting. In the U.S., MassMoCA in North Hampton, Massachusetts might be the closest comparison.

LUCY BOWDITCH is Assistant Professor of Art History at the College of St. Rose, Albany, New York.