“Dystopia and Identity
in the Age of Global Communications”
Curated By Cristine Wang

December 2, 2000- January 13, 2001
@ Tribes Gallery
285 E. Third St. NYC 10009

    Tribes Gallery is notorious for its bacchanalian wistfulness.  It is as much a literary establishment as a visual one, that so honors the vestiges of its incumbent community’s bohemian roots.  Since the early days things have changed, only ever so slightly.  There is always art to be found on its walls, reverberating the truths striven for during its incipiency.  Intellectual rigor, political acumen, and strident humor abound.  “Dystopia and Identity in the Age of Global Communications” curated by Cristine Wang, underscores the above attributes with a post-modern edge.
     There are nearly sixty artists involved in the project. Contributing work done in a multitude of media- oil paint, video projection, rubber, algae, photographic materials, cement, music, and more- the oblation to politically laden art in the global techno-mechanical age is an ambitious ode to conceptual art.  What better place to extend, celebrate even, that discourse than a multi-culti poets’ house on New York’s Lower East Side?  With a conspiratorial nod from the gallery’s director Steve Cannon, Wang manages to bring together a wealth of talent and diverse cultural representatives into relatively tight quarters.
     The installation filled with sculptures, paintings, monitors, digital prints, furniture even, suggests manifestly an essay on the machination of the human (terrestrial) spirit.  The din of several monitors palavering at once, revel in counterpoint with silent cynicism articulated in drawings, sculptures, photos and paintings. The offered point of view is a heterogeneous collection of intellectual, post-mod artisans, rhetorically passionate, yet pretentiously aloof producing objects that embrace and eschew the ensuing obliteration of the human touch.  A feat presumably accomplished by the human hand, as the mind attached asks- Why? How? What would be the point of that, exactly?
     The show perhaps inappropriately titled “Dystopia” meaning “anti-utopia,” doesn’t come off so wretched and sad, as much as it does analytical, cynical and playful.  The most overtly depressing work in the space is a video by artist Christopher Draeger called “Oil”.  Found footage of documented oil spills where oceanic wildlife is shown writhing and dying in the gunk is still, today, abominable. Inter-cut with the oil spill footage are movie scenes of exploding vessels, and drilling rigs.  Another impactful metaphor via video is Draeger’s “Apocalypse Now”.  The series of clips features scenes from the Japanimation “Akira”, the film classics “Ten Commandments”, “Towering Inferno”, and “The Shining” in addition to several others.  Doll houses burn, people run, panic, and battle. The piece seduces while it bombards the viewer with a series of pyrotechnic climaxes.  Draeger evokes the voyeuristic tendencies of the Hollywood moviegoer, simultaneously revealing the discursive projection of violent entertainment in the media.
     A peaceful approach is taken by artist Gu Wenda, whose work exhibited in the same room as a Draeger’s oil, shows a large work on paper.  Wenda, the “hair calligraphist”, references Chinese calligraphic character writing, creating a vague dadaistic version of the formal lettering.  His large sheet covered with ink is the most beautiful, nearly conventional object in the show.  Its aspiration toward undermining the authority of the written and the spoken word is reminiscent of the ink and paper drawings of French writer/artist Henri Michaux.
     Other autonomously strong efforts were: a plastic sculpture called “Scumak” by Roxy Paine, a video of breeding flies and moss shown on a monitor mounted in a cement pedestal “Lacustrine Landscape #2” by Mariah Corrigan and Jonathan Herder, and a scroll length photo by Wang Qingsong.  Notables Mike Bidlo and Jonas Mekas also made contributions.
     However difficult it may have been to do, Wang pulled off something rather marvelous.  Her curatorial acumen here revealed posits her a bit of an artist herself.  Whether or not she would agree, I don’t know.  Last we spoke, I hadn’t directly asked her.  “Post-modern”, “Conceptual” whatever those terms mean (they seem to have so much and yet so little meaning); whatever our little world wants to call creative acts that make you think about more than just aesthetic relationships, many of those would-be-theoretical gestures were made in “Dystopia”, and some right adroitly.

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