October 2009

1969, by dint of its aforementioned, almost emotional, coherence, does provide for the most successful aspect of all the fall programming taken together, namely the contrast with Between Spaces, the first floor presentation of emerging contemporary sculpture. Professional to the point of self-consciousness, Between Spaces is an almost surgical presentation of eleven sculptors working across a variety of media. Deploying a highly polished conceptual dexterity with a subtlety that borders on self-effacement, the show couldn’t be more different from the messy, arrogant and, it must said, decidedly endearing ruckus perpetrated by the aging hippies on the second floor.

So it came to pass that Andy Bichlbaum, performing under some deliciously ridiculous name, alerted the world that Dow Chemical was taking full responsibility for the tragic legacy of its recently purchased subsidiary, Union Carbide, by liquidating it and paying full restitution to its victims. This news, and it was actual news for about an hour, caused the citizens of Bhopal to rejoice and Dow to lose a breathtaking two billion dollars off its stock price. If you can imagine a more spectacular demonstration of moral bankruptcy, I would love to hear it.

Two large, black-on-white tracings of multiple figures further rehearse this feeling of isolation. Each character seems almost to be floating in space, unrelated and unaware of the others, except when their action seems directed towards one of them as if by chance, as when a miner seems about to bring down his axe on a fallen cowboy. The works themselves seem formal echoes of an adolescent’s sketchbook or a sheet of stickers, with figures finding themselves in proximity to one another by dint of a haphazard necessity.

There was a tension between these two dimensions of Internet identity. The more freedom remained to the individual to alter his own self-presentations, the more potential there was for (occasionally extreme) abuses of trust and the more difficult it was to create cohesive community ties. Most online communities developed social, rather than programmatic, solutions—formal and informal codes of behavior that limited the degree of experimentation open to their members. But a broader cultural phenomenon also emerged: a pervasive cult of unfiltered emotional rawness and sincerity coupled with an equally pervasive anxiety about insincerity and deception.