Editor's note: You can call me uncultured, and you can call me uncouth, but visual art has never made any sense to me. After an initial assessment of whether or not a piece is aesthetically pleasing to me, I never really know what to do with it. Dennis seems to have a similar ambivalence toward art, but he struggled through it during a recent showing at his local art museum. -James
Corey Arcangel is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist who has made a name for himself by incorporating digital technology into his work. I attended his show The Sharper Image back in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.
I'm not one for contemporary art. It often seems too haphazard and easy. I had to walk through another exhibit to get to Cory Arcangel's, and I actually saw the following "pieces" on display: a row of four dots on a wall, a slide projector on a table projecting nothing, and two copies of the Life Magazine Picture Puzzle on a shelf
When crap like this constitutes "art," I don't feel uncultured when I tell my wife that I don't get it. Her usual response is that contemporary art requires context in order to understand it, and that if you already have that context, it makes sense to you.
If that's what an artist requires, wouldn't contemporary artwork that incorporates modded Atari 2600 and NES cartridges and PlayStation controllers make some sense to me? I've been a video gamer for 32 years.
Anyway, the first exhibit I saw was Space Invader. Arcangel describes the work on his website:
"Space Invader is a mod of the Atari game Space Invaders which has been turned into Space Invader (note: it's no longer plural…thus the white out over the last "s" on the cartridge) –> all the invaders have been erased except one."
The exhibit is interactive. I asked the nearby security guard whether I could actually pick up the Atari 2600 controller, and when she answered in the affirmative, I snatched up the joystick with a huge, little-kid grin, and promptly found myself holding only the Atari controller's rubber joystick guard while the rest of the device fell loudly onto the white bench that the Atari console rested on.
No one can say the exhibit wasn't authentic.
I thought the game was stuck at first, but resetting it didn't replace the lonely Space Invader with the horde I was looking forwarding to shooting in a fit of nostalgia. Then I read the placard identifying the piece and thought "I get it. Clever." I always feel as though the creator intends for me to have some sort of deeper reaction to his piece of "art" than thinking the title is clever, but Space Invader left me feeling that same kind of empty.
I did some reading about this exhibit online (I've cleaned up the text; the website I took it from looks like a product of Babelfish or some other translation program):
"Arcangel's work also distinguishes itself by demanding audience interaction. This usually ends in total frustration and thus delivers a critical commentary about the participatory strategies so very popular in the 1990s." I looked up "participatory strategies" and found this:
"Participatory Learning & Action (PLA) is a practical approach to development which evolved and spread in the 1990’s. PLA enables people to learn, work, and act together in a co-operative and democratic manner to achieve agreed goals."
I have trouble getting from "A" to "B," here. The audience member plays the game alone, and this has something to do with criticizing people working together? It sounds more like Arcangel is just having a laugh at us.
I Shot Andy Warhol was much more amusing than Space Invader. Again, from Arcangel's website:
"I Shot Andy Warhol is a modification of the NES game Hogan's Alley, where the gangsters have been replaced by Warhol, and the "innocents" have been replaced by the Pope, Flavor Flav (pre MTV show!!!!), and Col Sanders…" I got the high score in all three game modes, and I walked away amused and completely unaware of what the piece's significance is.
Once again, I looked up some criticism. People have read I Shot Andy Warhol as a tribute to Warhol, and since Warhol was about being strange and walking down the road less traveled, this is acceptable to me.
Super Mario Clouds is an old Super Mario Bros. cartridge modified to erase everything but the clouds. "The work's minimalist aesthetic reveals clear references to abstract monochrome painting." Courtesy of an undergraduate art history course, that actually made some sense to me.
Various Self Playing Sony PlayStation Bowling Games consists of three PlayStation consoles displayed on three side-by-side monitors with controllers modded to play games by themselves. I found an interview with the artist, and apparently, he meant this work to be funny.
I've heard Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade speak a few times about his belief that gamers have a set of shared, digital experiences which help define us as gamers. I think Holkins would enjoy Totally Fucked. It's another hacked NES cartridge:
I burst out laughing in the middle of the dead-silent exhibit hall when I saw this. I can't find a video of this piece, but it's actually animated. Mario looks left and right over and over again while the "?" block flashes.
I define art as something that inspires an intellectual or emotional reaction that is substantive and has resonance. I may not understand most of these pieces on an emotional level, but they did get me curious about what they meant. By my definition, I have to call every one of these exhibits art, even if they are of the contemporary variety that I normally have such distaste for. I am, after all, still thinking about these pieces two months after I viewed the exhibition.
Do these exhibits prove Roger Ebert wrong? I Shot Andy Warhol is essentialy Hogan's Alley with altered graphics. People aren't controlling Various Self Playing Sony PlayStation Bowling Games, but the game are certainly being played. Arcangel has hacked Space Invaders to be a terrible game, but it still has all the basic functionality and victory conditions the creator intended. It's possible that someone could actually fail to kill the lone Space Invader before he marches to the bottom of the screen.
It's ironic that the one piece from Cory's exhibit that drew the most immediate and powerful reaction from me was the one that isn't a game anymore — but that's the point of Totally Fucked.
I've argued that video games are not art, but when I think about these exhibits, I'm not so sure anymore. The debate brings to mind my favorite Penn Jillette quotation: "The definition of an intellectual is someone who can change their mind given facts." Cory Arcangel's works are factual, real entities that exist. You can look at, interact with, and contemplate them.
Many of them are video games, and they are all art.