| (1) WHEN NOTHING IS SOMETHING by Peter Lunenfeld (2) JUST IN TIME : NOTA SULLA PUNTUALITA by Stefano Chiodi (3) THE U-HAULS ARE IN YOUR MIND by Benjamin Bratton (4) THE MAN FROM NEEN by John Glassie (5) CONFESSIONS OF A WHITNEYBIENNIAL CURATOR by Patrick Lichty.
THE MAN FROM NEEN By John Glassie, for SALON.COM
March 21, 2002 | During the last month or so, artist Miltos Manetas publicized his big plans for the Whitney Biennial exhibition, which opened March 7 -- plans that included Flash animation and 23 U-Haul trucks. This was really going to be something, observers of art said, especially considering that Manetas wasn't actually selected for inclusion in the show and that his idea was lightheartedly subversive of the contemporary art exhibition. At the Biennial's opening gala on March 5, however, Manetas' desire for attention was revealed to be far greater than most people had ever imagined. The Greek-born Manetas and his cohorts had claimed to be getting 23 U-Hauls ready to display Flash animation pieces by 200 young designers, programmers and assorted digital artists. On the night of the Whitney's party, the trucks were to drive around and around the museum (which takes up a block on the Upper East Side of Manhattan), diverting the attention of the invitation-only guests. As it turned out, it was all a hoax. Or rather, "It went great!" as Manetas says. "The trucks were not there, of course. The U-Haul idea was only an advertisement" for what he calls a para-site exhibition of Flash works at www.whitneybiennial.com (not .org), a domain he registered for the purpose. "They were invisible trucks," he says. "We would have never made them in real life even with the most great sponsoring." The Great Whitney U-Haul Scam is only part of what Manetas calls a "worldwide artistic movement" that has been a few years in the making. In 1999 Manetas was one of an increasing number of artists who used software, the Internet and other digital media to make and display -- or who used those media as the subject of -- their work. Manetas himself had produced traditional oil paintings of wires, cables and computer hardware, created short looped fragments of video games such as "Tomb Raider," and exhibited computer-generated "screen grabs," among other things. But he was impatient with critics and curators who had yet to come up with a really good "-ism" for this new generation of creativity. After securing financial assistance from a nonprofit called the Art Production Fund, Manetas went out and hired Lexicon Branding, a California firm responsible for creating such product names as Powerbook, Pentium, Zima, Swiffer and Dasani. Lexicon's assignment was to create a name for this new movement. The word Manetas wanted was "not exclusively about technology in art, but more about the style, about the psychological landscape," he has explained. "We have two kind of lives now -- a real life and a simulated one. I wanted to give a name to this psychology." In May 2000, during a packed press conference at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan -- and a panel of people like Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker ready to provide (tongue-in-cheek) analysis of the term -- Manetas unveiled the new word. Actually, it was the squeaky, synthetic voice of a Sony Vaio that made the announcement. The word was "Neen." In his subsequent Neen Manifesto, Manetas declared that the term represented "a still undefined generation of visual artists. Some of them may belong to the contemporary art world; others are software creators, web designers and video game directors or animators." He later added: "The identity of a NEENSTER is his state of mind. Because he will publish everything on the web, his state of mind reflects on the public taste. NEENSTERS are public personas." Since then, the public persona that is Miltos Manetas has been busy, both holding up and working under the Neen umbrella. In the midst of the Napster debate, for instance, he established www.iamgonnacopy.com, described as "a Neen place against intellectual property and copyright." And last year, in a storefront space in the Los Angeles gallery district on Chung King Road, he set up the so-called Electronic Orphanage, which he says is "a black cube where a large screen is left white for projections." When galleries on the street have openings, he says, "EO [shows] a piece commissioned for the occasion .... The rest of [the] time, it's a studio where people (the Orphans) are 'working' on Neen and other screen ideas." He is also planning Electronic Orphanages in Shanghai, China, and in Goa, India. Full disclosure: This interview was conducted via e-mail over the past couple of weeks, the bulk of it between "work" on the fictional U-Haul trucks before the hoax was revealed. This part of the interview, the vast majority of it, stands as it did before March 5 -- the day of the Whitney's opening gala. Manetas had no scruples about letting the New York Times run with the fake story on March 4, but Salon had a chance to ask some follow-up questions after the opening-night festivities -- or lack thereof.
|
Next
page |
 |
 |
 |