Jennifer Steinkamp
When Jennifer Steinkamp began exhibiting computer-generated video projections several years ago, they were small things (or, more accurately, small, virtual things), puddles of rippling, coloured light appearing mysteriously on a gallery floor or ceiling. As her career has expanded, so has her artwork - though perhaps metastasised is a better term, as Steinkamp's latest project, Swell (1995), swallows the gallery whole.
A sign on the outside of the building asks visitors to enter and close the door behind them; if they don't, all they see is a stark white room. But once darkness falls, they are plunged into a disorienting environment of colour, light and sound.
One expansive wall of the darkened room is employed as a substrate for an organically pulsing pattern in a sparkly purplish hue, its regular, jerky contractions reminiscent of the feed from a fibre optic medical scope. The far right section of the wall doesn't seem quite right; this is because it's really a scrim of translucent, hard plastic. The equally trippy, rotating pattern on this segment is projected from an ante-room behind the wall, a facet of the installation apparent only when someone enters that back room and their crisp silhouette is thrown onto the translucent divider.
Accompanying the mesmerising light show is a soundtrack (composed by Bryan Brown) aurally located somewhere between ambient dance music and New Age whale songs - a burbling, clacking underwater sound that adds to the Fantastic Voyage feeling of Steinkamp's visuals. If one spends enough time in the room, the overall pattern of the piece is discernible; the glottal whooshing of the soundtrack and the in-and-out rhythm of the video - in which viewers get closer and then farther away from a twinkling, blobby field - become predictable and soothing in a way, despite their disconcertingly aortic stutter.
Steinkamp's art requires us to use a whole new set of terms for discussing abstraction: instead of vibrant colours, we are faced with literally pulsating hues. Focus becomes an issue, as do time and sound. But while Steinkamp may crank up the experiential volume, at its core her art's closest analogue is still abstract painting. Instead of making bigger canvases to accommodate viewers' expanding sense of scale (as painters from the Hudson River to AbEx to Neo-Expressionism have done), Steinkamp expands into an enhanced third dimension and sensory realm - perhaps to make up for her audience's new-found tolerance for multimedia pyrotechnics. In one sense, Steinkamp's projections serve as a litmus test for art world ennui, by measuring our inurement to the effects of her approximation of the all-encompassing abstraction once theorised by Jackson Pollock. Some who enter Swell's environment get dizzy, even nauseous - so much so that they have to leave the room, yet others are able to take it all in (these stalwarts aren't necessarily of the Nintendo Generation either).
Beyond the requisite comparisons to Pollock, Steinkamp more accurately references a relatively contemporary type of abstraction: the art of Light and Space, specifically the 60s incandescent-light-based installations of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and James Turrell. While they may have aspired to a more mellow abstract experience, the Light-and-Spacers' methods were strikingly similar to Steinkamp's - especially in Turrell's work, in which intense beams of projected light created seemingly tangible objects. On occasion, Steinkamp flirts with Turrell's monastic quietude with pieces like Stripey (1995), a small video projection in which TV test-pattern bands of colour bend and curve when projected into a corner of the room.
Bur despite their pretences at introspection, Steinkamp's divertissements still exude too much fun to be taken as serious inheritors of sombre abstraction's legacy. Like much public (and computer) entertainment, Swell promises to remove us from our humdrum surroundings by submerging us in something transformative - an exciting, mysterious, all-over experience. Yet after we spend some time with it, Swell invariably reveals to us its underlying structure - which is to say, technically at least, it becomes boring. Turrell laid his boredom out front, offering us one very cool thing that we could take or leave. But crucially, we first had to decide to contribute to the event - to actively give ourselves over to his glowing illusions and therefore ensure their mutability - whereas Steinkamp provides no similar invitation, or choice.
When Steinkamp's work was first shown locally, group-exhibition curators had a field day, making her pieces fit whatever agenda they happened to espouse. The external definitions applied to her art have therefore followed the curatorial trends of the first half of the 90s - from feminist politics to photographic critique to post-abstract painting. But now that Steinkamp has achieved some measure of art-world independence, she's no longer the universal group-show donor. Her work shows up, solo, primarily in small museums and non-profit art spaces, projected in an entryway or project room. Thus, when left to their own devices, Steinkamp's creations become architectural and atmospheric - i.e., decorative. Such a definition may indeed be fine with Steinkamp, who makes these works with labour-intensive computer programmes (hence the eventual predictability of their patterns), their real 'beauty' hidden in the gorgeous perfection of their code. In the end, her pieces function less as independent works of art than as environments in which art can take place, warm-up acts for the dawn of a new dimension.
