To: Media and Public Affairs <publicinfo@lacma.org> From: Media and Public Affairs <publicinfo@lacma.org> Subject: The Electronic Body: Surveying Net Culture. Cc: amelia jones <jonessher@aol.com>, andrea rosen gallery <rosengal@internetmci.com>, andrew ross <rossa@is.nyu.edu>, art in america <remote-printer.art_in_america/editor@12129412885.iddd.tpc.int>, art+text <artex@unsw.edu.au>, artforum@aol.com, artnow@gallery-guide.com, artweek@artweek.com, frazer@gramercy.ios.com, freize <remote-printer.freize_us/editor@17185994395.iddd.tpc.int>, jmalloy@artswire.org, la times <remote-printer.la_times_daily_calander@12132374712.iddd.tpc.int>, la times <remote-printer.la_times_life_and_style@12132374712.iddd.tpc.int>, la times <remote-printer.la_times_sunday_calander@17149667790.iddd.tpc.int>, la times <remote-printer.la_times_the_cutting_edge@12132377837.iddd.tpc.int>, new art examiner <examiner@cnaa.tezcat.com>, susan kandel <skandel@artcenter.edu>, vivian@adaweb.com, webmaster@laweekly.com, webmaster@nypost.com, zing magazine <dantigone@aol.com>, agent@blast.org Bcc: X-Attachments: Contact: Ann Nixon, Media and Public Affairs Immediate Release March 9, 1998 Los Angeles, California. LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART TO PRESENT - THE ELECTRONIC BODY: SURVEYING NET CULTURE. On View at LACMA April 6 to May 1, 1998. The new LACMA exhibition series showcases contemporary digital installations and Internet works by reknowned artists including Jin Sup Kim, Jenny Holtzer, Alexei Shulgin, Antonio Muntadas and Lawrence Weiner. On April 6, 1998 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present the inaugural exhibition in its NetArtlife series, focusing on contemporary Internet culture. These focused exhibitions, occurring biannually, will present recent electronic art from around the world as well as Los Angeles. The first in the series is The Electronic Body: Surveying Net Culture, presenting site-specific installations as well as net-specific projects by 8 renowned artists from across North America, Latin America, and Western and Eastern Europe: Jenny Holtzer, Jin Sup Kim, Louise Lawler, Antonio Muntadas, Victor Nagy, Julia Scher, Alexei Shulgin and Lawrence Weiner. The unifying theme of the artwork in this exhibition is the investigation of a new electronic body: a virtual and fluid body of borders, communities and identities. The exhibition will be on view in the museum's Anderson building, plaza level, through May 1, 1998 and will premiere on-line through on LACMA's Web site, http://lacma.org, on opening night. The exhibition is the first in a series of co-curated shows featuring LACMA's senior curator Maurice Tuckman and Andrea Rosen of the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. Says Maurice Tuckman, "In the last few years, a new assortment of concerns, manifesting themselves in a variety of ways, have developed among artists spending most of their days and nights on-line. This work transcends national and regional borders, and out of it we see the growth of a large virtual body. In this first in a series of east coast/west coast curatorial collaborations, we have probed the body for work that displays an acute involvement with a net culture without geographical borders. Andrea Rosen adds, "we believe it is a crucial moment to begin to define art in more global terms, as the Internet has dissolved regionalism not only in relation to artistic concerns, but also vis-a-vis many artists' net-worth. Just as last season there was a merging of art and fashion, this season we see a collapsing of the ability to define artistic practice in terms of physical location. Jenny Holtzer's new project, net-truisms, continues her work in a virtual environment, investigating constructions of on-line mythology. In the project to be premiered on opening night, Holtzer has scavenged the web in search of "web wives' tales", particular those that address women and their relationship to motherhood, widowhood and new technology. The work will also take form as a series of banners to be displayed around East LA. Holtzer lives and works in New York. Los Angeles based artist Jin Sup Kim's work consists of an intervention into net communication systems. Working out of a hacker tradition, she adds audio and visual noise to binary and audio transmission across the net. Reflecting on the sterile quality of Internet communication, Kim's mediation adds a degree of human frailty and fragility to a cold and bodiless media. Louise Lawler lightheartedly confronts the male dominated art and computer world in a recreation of a sound work first produced in the early 1980s, now transformed into an audio based web-specific work entitled "Birdcalls." Lawler lives and works in New York City. Spanish artist Antonio Muntadas, based in Barcelona and Manhattan, examines the massive history of censorship in "The File Room." The project's interactive component consists of one hundred and eighty large color computer monitors installed in file cabinets around a large room. With a click of a mouse at any one of these terminals, viewers can access case histories of censorship by geographical location, date, grounds for censorship or medium. At the center of the room is a desk with another computer and monitor in which visitors can enter their own examples. In Victor Nagy's interactive installation, See-You Hear-Me (1997) a user is strapped into a chair by Nagy who performs as a lab monitor throughout the duration of the exhibition. Additional viewers stand in an adjacent room with one way mirror looking in on the user while their voices are broadcast in to the room in which the user sits. The user hears but can not respond, and is seen, but can not see back. The installation examines surveillance and control mechanisms associated with Internet technology. Nagy lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. New York based artist Julia Scher dismantles surveillance systems by introducing a high tech-system that tracks viewers of the exhibition from the time they enter the exhibition to the time they enter the gift shop. A digital print out of their movements through the space is available in the gift shop in poster form or stenciled onto a tee-shirt. In his provocative on-line project, http://www.easylife.org/xxx, Alexei Shulgin, an artist from Moscow, has collapsed distinctions between high art and low art, creating a site in which art and pornography are presented and treated as absolutely equal. As a Post-Soviet artist who grew up in a regime where pornography was illegal and almost impossible to obtain, this Eastern European artist addresses a newly popularized Post-Soviet commodity as well as a fact of life on the Internet. The work registers the shock of the transformation from a totalitarian society to a capitalistic one, and bitterly reflects Shulgin's split and fractured Eastern European identity, formed in a regime that no longer exists. Co-curator Rosen adds, "Shulgin is a great example of the globalizing of artistic concerns. I have long been interested in artists who dealt with taboo issues such as pornography and female fetishization. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to bring this important artist, widely known and respected in Europe, to the west coast for the first time. Lawrence Weiner reconstructs a singles' chat room, playfully intermixing a functioning on-line singles' scene with preprogrammed robots simulating singles. The robots are modeled after well known and fictitious European art collectors. Weiner lives and works in New York, Amsterdam and Cologne. The Contemporary NetArtlife Series is a series of small exhibitions focusing on state-of-the-art and cutting-edge art. International in scope and informal in nature, this exciting series will act as a laboratory for the museum to test their ideas about trends in the international contemporary digital culture. It will serve the Los Angeles, New York as well as the International art communities by presenting the most advanced art from the two coasts in a shared context with new work not only from across the United States, but also from select parts of Latin America, advanced nations in Africa, recognized regions of Eastern Europe and many other locations. In addition to the exhibit, there will be a panel discussion on net culture, pornography and border control entitled "High Art/Low Art, File Not Found" on April 7th, 5-7 PM. Participants include Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Benjamin Buchloh, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Barnard College,New York, Connie Butler, Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Alexei Shulgin, Eastern European artist and participant in The Electronic Body exhibition. Credit Line: This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was made possible by the Contemporary Projects Endowment Fund. Contributors include Mr. and Mrs. Peter Loder, Mark F. Sultan, Florian Smith Collect, Inc., The Ali Croad Family Foundation, Sam Sonner, Ted and Sue Putz, Ardsley I. Sun Trust, Bobbie and Mary Flex, and Sandy and Jerome Y. Yernin.