Pleonastic Ephemera

5.17.2004 posted by William 00:20 link

I've thought a little more about the Whitney Biennial website political declaration. It's not the politics I object to, certainly -- I'm all for people coming together and defeating Bush. And on further reflection, I can't fault a private institution (which I still haven't verified the Whitney is; well, I know it's not run by the government, but I don't know how much if any funding it receives from the government, and even if that amount is greater than zero, I'm not saying it's automatically a public institution) for taking sides such an important matter as a national election. One oddity about the message is that it's contextless: just three pages of simple text (on closer inspection, it's not a Flash movie), not even a hyperlink: a curiously straightforward statement that comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere. Who would write a message like this? Another oddity is the way it (the political declaration) is somewhat hidden away. On neither of my visits to the museum in the past week did I see any political message like it; commentary of that nature was part of some of the works in the Biennial, of course, but not in any of the Museum's literature. Nor could I find any other references to the presidential race elsewhere on whitney.org. It seems to exist by itself, apart from and inaccessible from the rest of the website. So what are we to make of the fact that it's hidden? They're afraid for it to get out that the museum supports Bush, possibly alienating benefactors (um, nevermind) or drawing unwanted press attention? But then why put it up at all? It seems unlikely but possible that whomever designed the website put it in as an Easter egg of sorts. Or perhaps it's someone's idea of a piece of net art. I'm curious. OK, addendum, I wrote all that before I realized that one of the pages that flashes up *is* a hyperlink: clicking on "TOGETHER WE CAN DEFEAT" takes you to the Anti-Capitalist Operating System, a work by an art collective called Together We Can Defeat Capitalism. Well, it's an art collective that speaks in both the first person singular and plural in its biography, so maybe, you know, take that term loosely. So I did some more searching on this this group, and now the political declaration and its odd link can be explained, mostly. TWCDC member Andy Cox's resume (isn't it called a C.V. when you're an artist?) includes the following: 2000 Whitney Biennial Exhibition Purchased the domain name WhitneyBiennial.org, and created an alternative Whitney web site by copying portions of the official Whitney Biennial web site (at whitney.org), and reposting the altered portions on my WhitneyBiennial.org web site. A Together We Can Defeat Capitalism Project. Total cost $500. So what we're seeing could actually be a remnant from this piece from 2000, just an oversight that someone forgot to clean up after its time was over. I mean, people believed that together they could stop Bush back in 2000, remember? However, you only get the Bush message if you go to www.whitneybiennial2004.org, so that leads me to believe that they've done a new version of it for this year. If you go to the URL listed above, whiteneybiennial.org, you get a page that looks very realistic but includes the text site altered by Together We Can Defeat Capitalism at the bottom in place of site design by Domani Studios on the genuine page. A regular Encyclopedia Brown, I am.