My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

I DON'T TAKE VOICE MAIL 79
screen of film. Moreover, the scale, conditions of viewing, and typifying
formats make video, film, and TV three different media, just as animation,
photography, and computer graphics may be said to be distinct media
within film. (Hybridization and cross-viewing remain an active and welcome
possibility.) Computer-generated graphics, then, may be classified
as presentation computer art modelled on small screens for big screen projection.
Note, also, that I have not included in my sketch nonscreen art that uses
computers for their operation (for example, robotic installations and environments}-a
category that is likely to far surpass the screen arts in the
course of time.
But I don't want to talk about computers but objects, objects obduring in
the face of automation: I picture here a sculpture from Petah Coyne's April
1994 show at the Jack Shainman Gallery, which featured candelabra-like
works, hung from the ceiling, and dripping with layers of white wax. For
it has never been the object of art to capture the thing itself, but rather
the conditions of thingness: its thickness, its intractability, its untranslatability
or unreproducibility, its linguistic or semiotic density, opacity,
particularity and peculiarity, its complexity.
For this reason, I was delighted to see a show of new sculpture at Exit
Art, also in April, that seemed to respond to my increasing desire for sculpture
and painting thick with its material obsessiveness, work whose
response to the cyberworld is not to hop on board for the ride or play the
angles between parasite and symbiosis-but to insist ever more on the
intractability of its own radical faith, to cite the title of this work by Karen
Dolmanish, consisting of a floor display of obsessively arranged piles of
broken things-nails and glass and metal.
Object: to call into question, to disagree, to wonder at, to puzzle over,
to stare at ... Object: something made inanimate, lifeless, a thing debased
or devalued ... Whatever darker Freudian dreams of objects and their relations
I may have had while writing this essay, nothing could come close
to Byron Clercx's witty sculpture, Big Stick, in which he has compressed and
laminated 20 volumes of the complete works of the father of psychoanalysis
into one beautifully crafted Vienna Slugger, evoking both the
uncanny and the sublime-finally, an American Freud. Here is the return
of the book with a vengeance, proof positive that books are not the same
as texts. Go try doing that to a batch of floppy disks or CD-ROMs.
In Jess's 1991 paste-up Dyslecstasy, we get some glimpse of what hypertext
might one day be able to achieve. Collaged from thousands of tiny
scraps collected over many years, Jess creates an environment of multiple
levels and dizzyingly shifting contexts; and yet in this world made of tiny