Leonardo Digital Reviews

238 Leonardo Reviews dominate the cityscape but rather emerge at the ends of the roads that lead to the museum plaza. The building is generously surrounded by water, plazas and a park and is intriguing in the complexity, variety and novelty of its architectural flourishes. The inside and outside of the building merge seamlessly, feeding the visitors into the tall light atrium that looks onto the river. One gigantic gallery, shaped like the inside hull of a ship, housed Rauschenberg’s 1 /4-mile-long Two Furlong Piece and Richard Serra’s Snake. Both pieces of art work exceptionally well in the room, as testified by the many Spaniards parading up and down the gallery as if it were an extension of the city avenues along which they stroll every night. This exhibition reveals another basic conundrum faced by modern art museums as they seek to incorporate the work of artists such as those involved with science and technology into the twentieth-century canon: the basic curatorial structure of these museums is largely incompatible with art-making that has as its heart experimentation with new media or formats, interactivity, performance, accident and emergence. The large exhibit of Fluxus work that is touring internationally, the exhibit of Group Zero work shown in Nice last year, or indeed many of the recent museum shows of Web art all fail to find a way to display the work in any way that makes much artistic sense. Reduced to desiccated vestiges that can be displayed under glass cases as “objects” (surely, displaying PC computers is the ultimate absurdity for Internet-based work), the works lose almost all their individual interest , and the method of display creates a false mystery around the nature of the artistic meaning. Perhaps, ironically , the gallery that displays the work of your favorite postmodernists is a culde -sac on the top floor. One might get the impression that one had entered a “museum of useless things” or, perhaps more likely, leave with the impression that “it is all shopping, after all.” And yet, it must be admitted that Rauschenberg succeeds in this show in doing much more than just decorating the insides of Gehry’s building; or perhaps it is a tribute to the success of Gehry’s design that the artist gets to have his say in the architect’s gorgeous mausoleum. When this retrospective reaches your area, it is worth the visit even without the context of the Gehry building. MATERIALS RECEIVED Multimedia Products Borderland Produced by Plokker. Plokker, France, 1999. CD-ROM. Computer Music Journal “Dancing the Music.” Vol. 22, No. 4. Journal plus audio CD. Conversations with Angels Produced by Andy Best and Merja Puustinen. VRML CD-ROM plus picture book. MEET Factory, Helsinki, Finland, 1999. 25 Euros. DOC(K)S “La Trilogie des Medias”: Tome 2: Chantier “Son.” Journal (in French) plus two audio CDs, 1998. 300 FF. Audio Compact Disc Portals of Distortion: Music for Saxophones , Computers, and Stones Matthew Burtner. Innova, St. Paul, MN, U.S.A., 1999. $14.97. Books Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science David Bohm and Charles Biederman. Paavo Pylkkanen, ed. Routledge, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1999. 252 pp., illus. Trade. $40.00. ISBN: 0-415-16225-4. The Computer in the Visual Arts Anne Morgan Spalter. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, U.S.A., 1998. 500 pp., illus. Trade. $39.95. ISBN: 0-670-87883-9. Media & Performance: Along the Border Johannes Birringer. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, MD, U.S.A., 1998. 381 pp., illus. Paper. $48.00. ISBN: 0-8018-5852-6. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink Mark Dery. Grove Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1999. 295 pp., illus. Trade. $25.00. ISBN: 0-8021-1640-X. Shiny Shapes: Arms and Armor from the Zeughaus Graz Landesmuseum Johanneum, eds. Springer, Vienna, Austria, 1999. 220 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 3-211-83098-7. Stairways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures Anthony Aveni. Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, U.S.A, 1999. 220 pp., illus. Paper. $15.95. ISBN: 0-471-32976-2. The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture John Beckman, ed. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY...