Waffling Over the Media’s Influence : Artists in Whitney exhibition imitate the techniques they criticize

Ever since television entered our lives in a big way, pundit and parent alike have worried about its supposedly sinister influence. It all seemed a bit silly at first. How could Howdy Doody be anything but nice? Yet the rumblings went on until--among other things--they jelled into an entire school of artists who seem to spend their lives staring at the telly and making artworks that either criticize The Media, satirize The Media or imitate The Media.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon is the Whitney Museum’s big fall-season effort “Image World: Art and Media Culture” (through Feb. 19). It includes some 100 works by 65 artists and takes up the museum’s entire fourth floor. Actually, it’s not all that large.

Circumstances conspired to make it appear that the significance of the show spills beyond the borders of the art world, as if preoccupation with The Media has reached some sort of general critical mass. The Whitney show arrives more or less on the heels of last summer’s “A Forest of Signs” at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, an exhibition that dealt with similar issues and many of the same artists.

On the day of the press preview of “Image World,” public television launched a four-part series by Bill Moyers called “The Public Mind.” It presented such information as the fact that the average American sees 32,000 TV commercials a year. It speculated that The Media create a climate where appearances are prefered to reality and that it manipulates powerful symbols in such fashion as to render them meaningless except as merchandise. A powerful religious symbol in a science-fiction film is transformed into, say, a box of kitchen cleanser. The thesis of the show seems to be that The Media makes everything into a commercial product including itself and us. That is a cliche of long standing but in these days of hectic consumerism and marketed media it may have greater pertinence.

From an art-world perspective it appears to be true, witness the careerism rampant among contemporary artists and the repellent feeding frenzy on the auction market. Increasingly these days, an artist is not significant because he is talented but because he is an interesting personality capable of generating publicity. An artwork is not valued because it is great, but great because it is valuable.

One exits the elevator at the Whitney confronted by a spectacular work by Nam June Paik. A grid of 300 small TVs evidently programmed by computer flashes a myriad of images. Dancing girls strut, at first like electronic Rockettes in lines contained within the sets, then enlarged to billboard size close-ups of a single figure--a mosaic of electronic tesserae. The piece fawns on famous personalities from Joseph Beuys to David Bowie.

It is unquestionably great fun but it is the fun of an elaborate disco light show. It has nothing to do with art. It abandons history and leaves the viewer no room for contemplation. It assaults and dazzles the senses enfolding us and causing us to disappear like a member of the audience at a vast rock concert. It’s not art.

But wait. One school of thought has it that The Media are in fact the art of our times, the guardian of the beatific vision, influencing the aspirations of millions, while the art of galleries and museums represent only an impotent and outdated subculture. Paik can be rationalized as a kind of Electronic Baroque phenomenon.

Nam June Paik is not a critic of The Media. His work says he wants to be part of it. It delights in television’s cheerful, crystalline artificiality in a society that prefers fake to fact. Bogus art is more interesting to The Media than real art.

Did you see “Doonesbury” the other day? An older Roland J. Hedley had become news anchor and was preparing the nightly news, asking his staff about the actors who would play the parts of victims and pundits. At its best, The Media already includes internal critics that make most of the gang at the Whitney look like sophomoric amateurs. Moyers’ show was flatly more interesting and informative than “Image World.”

Gang surveys like this one tend to blur important distinctions between included artists, but with the exception of a few truly hard-nosed people like Hans Haacke and Jack Goldstein, the attitude toward The Media here waffles embarrassingly. Worse than Paik’s frank celebration, many here equivocate so badly they make neither telling social criticism nor decent art.

Things begin innocently enough in a gallery devoted to background in ‘60s Pop. There is ironic self-effacement in Ed Ruscha’s “Large Trademark With Eight Spots,” real affection in Tom Wesselman’s kitchen still life that includes a portrait of Lincoln and a TV set, authentic anger in Wallace Berman’s Verifax collage. One notes numerous L.A. artists among the Warhols and Lichtensteins and it may be significant that this art has grown from the nation’s two media capitals.

If Pop prepared the ground for this mess, the work of John Baldessari got us into it. He is on board with a grainy screened photograph of a parking lot and the lettered statement, “An artist is not merely the slavish announcer of facts which in this case the camera has had to accept and mechanically record.”

It ties the mind in a knot.

Intellectually, these artists want to be French thinkers who analyze language to discover hidden forces of social coercion behind every ad. They don’t make it because they deal in cliches just like their love-hate foe The Media.

Robert Heinecken takes a fashion ad and superimposes a photo of a female guerrilla smiling and holding two severed heads. Right, got it. No need to look at that twice. It has all the depth of a childish vandalization of Mom’s Good Housekeeping.

Gee, there is a work by Alexis Smith right across the way. What did she do to deserve such company? Robert Cumming too. His intelligent, witty photos that probe the grammar of vision and the borders of reality seem out of place in a show where most attempts at subtlety are just sheer faintheartedness.

One thing these artists are not shy about is themselves. One of the most telling displays among the aggressive large installations is a small case of magazine ads and posters in which the artists display their own persons. The most notorious is Linda Benglis’ 1974 Artform page where she posed nude excepting sunglasses and a very large dildo. It was, I think, a protest against the excesses of the feminist movement of the time, as was a clearer example by Hannah Wilke, where her nudity is cloaked only in the slogan, “Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism.”

What may have begun in these works as a brave and unpopular stand too easily backfires into the appearance of rampant weirdness and exhibitionism. What are we to make of Robert Morris, his nude torso wrapped in chains and head capped with a German helmet?

Repellent as these works are, they represent a somewhat earlier period when artists had guts. But they do share a kind of general Midas delusion epidemic here. It tells these folks that everything they touch turns to art.

Wrong.

Today’s version is Jeff Koons’ cuddly series of ads where he promotes himself with all the cosmetic harmlessness of a fashion model. His work--represented by a kitsch-style sculpture of Michael Jackson--is at very best a mailed fist in a velvet glove so thick you never feel the blow. Just cute.

On evidence these artists long to see themselves as German Dadaists like George Grosz or John Heartfield, laying into a decadent society by attacking its media--always an easy target. In fact, they are willing to do little more than gum the hand that feeds them. Dara Birnbaum can go no further than to use German-language slogans over her video clips of a happy technocracy.

Moyers’ program may be right about big media having a bad effect on the culture, it definitely had a lousy one on the art world. The artists have abandoned aesthetic concerns to become social commentators and they are just not good at it--both because they aren’t and because they aren’t really angry. They are fascinated and not a little jealous.

Downstairs there is an installation by Bill Viola. A TV set stands on a tacky chest in a bare room. It shows a picture of a sleeping man. Periodically huge projected video images flash on the wall. It is the picture of a world where illusion has replaced reality even in our dreams. It is the picture of the collective artist haunted by the power of media.

The show reveals a kind of self-loathing these artists have attached to their calling. “Image World” ends with a painting--an actual painting--by Mark Tansey. It shows a group of Sunday artists on a bluff placidly recording the launch of a space shuttle. It says the activity of the real artist is useless and outmoded.

Wrong again.