DOMENICO QUARANTA

First published on Spawn of the Surreal, May 22, 2008.

Yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours in Second Life to visit Kiss the Sky, an huge exhibition curated by artist DC Spensley (DanCoyote Antonelli in SL) for the New Media Consortium in collaboration with the Museum of Hyperformalism, directed by DanCoyote himself. Kiss the Sky pretends to be the “definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism”, with 37 installations by over a dozen artists: Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The notecard of the exhibition includes the following definition of Hyperformalism:

“Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.”
The press release goes on saying that Hyperformalism removes “the comfortable cliché of anthropocentrism”, talking about immersion and abstraction, and concluding that Hyperformalism exceeds our traditional concept of art, because it is “native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.”

This last point is very important, because I think that the very concept of “nativity” is in the same time the strength point and the deafness point of the hyperformalist strategy (and of all the “not possible in real life” approach). Visiting the exhibition, I was quite surprised to notice that I enjoyed it a lot. In the end of the long tour I was quite bored indeed, but nothing different from any big exhibition of abstract art – or from an exhausting visit to the Venice Biennale. Some works, in particular, gave me a great aesthetic and immersive experience. If you are planning to go and see the show, I suggest you to have a look to Pulse Points, by Nebulosus Severine – an enormous ice block that can be visited like a room, with some strange sculptures frozen in it like a Siberian mammoth; to the ambitious Fractus V, a colossal kinetic sculpture which made me think to Boccioni and Pomodoro for its bronze-like textures; to Juria Yoshikawa‘s works, in particular Spiny Bumblebee Abstract; to the ambiguous, surreal sculptures by Chance Abattoir; and, finally, to a classic by Adam Ramona, the wonderful A Rose Heard at Dusk previously installed on Odyssey.

1. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Is everything art?

I enjoyed these works, really. Or, better said, my avatar enjoyed them; he had some interesting experiences, like every time he discovers something new in SL, being it art or not. This is one of the first problems coming to my mind, and one of the things that prevents me to fully enjoy Hyperformalism. Everything, in SL, is constructed. Everything can be art. Do we have to rely on what people say about their work, or on what the New Media Consortium suggests to call art? Yes and no. The answer is related to what we think SL is.

2. Is SL an art world?

So, what is SL? A software or a world? If it is a world, probably there is an “art world” in it. That is, in Howard S. Becker‘s words (1982), a group of people “whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” Artists, critics, collectors, galleries, institutions and so on. You don’t need a great experience of SL to know that you can find in it all the key figures who build up an art world. So, SL has an art world and Hyperformalism is its avantgarde. Since it can be understood only by people living in that world, and belonging to that art world, no surprise if it is not recognized by any RL community. Better, there’s no need for that: art, to exist, needs to be recognized as such only by its own art world.
Simple, don’t you think? Yes and no. The problems come when you don’t think, like me, that SL is a world.

3. SL as theatre

SL is a platform. When you enter it, everything you do is to set up your own performance. Choose an avatar. Edit it. Find a name, a costume, a position on the platform. Write down your script and act it. Add some furniture to the stage: everything you do is just a step forward in the development of your story. And of the collective history of SL. Your story can be similar to your (real) life, or radically different. Can be work, play or art. So, the SL “art world” is not real, it is just a collective myth, a narration, and in this sense it is very interesting. Most of the stories are boring, because most of the people are bad players. But some stories are very interesting. Think, for example, to Anshe Chung. Aimee Weber. James Wagner Au. Sugar Seville. China Tracy. Molotov Alva. Or Gazira Babeli. All beautiful stories. Not all of them are art, because not all of them want to be recognized as such. But if Anshe Chung will say. “my story of the first SL billionaire is art”, she will be a better artist then DanCoyote Antonelli.
Like Anshe Chung, DanCoyote is adding furniture to the stage. But while Anshe Chung describes the Anshe Chung Studios as an entrepreneurial venture, Dancoyote describes his installations as art.
Indeed, Dancoyote seems to have understood it, maybe in a vague and faded way. His story is great. His young avatar; the myth of the sixth finger; Hyperformalism as the SL avantgarde: all these things are good entries in a good story. Probably what he does is not art, but Dancoyote Antonelli is, without doubt, the best artwork by DC Spensley. Also other artists, such as Adam Ramona and Juria Yoshikawa, wrote an interesting script for their avatars. Adam Ramona’s avatar is wonderful. But all of them are confusing what their avatars are doing in SL with what their humans did in real life: they call it interactive installations, sound installations, optical art. And they neglect their script, which is exactly what gives sense to what they are doing, and what – I’d dare to say – can make their work interesting even for a real life audience which never experienced SL.
But most of the self-pretending SL artists make their own work without caring at all about their story. SL art is a midsummer night dream, that in a few years will turn into a nightmare, with people realizing that they wasted their time without creating anything valuable. Wake up, artists! Without narration there is no art in SL!

4. Performance, but not only

After what I wrote, probably you can understand why I think performance is the most interesting way to deal with SL. Gazira Babeli, Second Front, Man Michinaga, Eva and Franco Mattes are all feeding, with their works and acts, the mythologies of that cluster of stories that is called SL. They perform everywhere. They don’t need technical settings to be experienced, because my imagination does not need technical settings. They play with the vernacular background of SL, and with their culture and tradition, not just with codes, prims and scripts. They don’t add furniture to the stage, but stories to the script.

And, last but not least, they don’t distinguish between “native art” and “RL art”, because there is no such distinction: there’s only art. That’s why I count among the best examples of art related to virtual worlds such works as Cao Fei‘s RMB City and Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott‘s No Matter: they are not – not only – native, but they say something interesting on both the worlds their authors deal with – and they contribute to both the narratives.