New Media Rampant - 2000 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art

each time you turned around at the 2000 Biennial, there was more [i]or[/i] less new-media art work lurking in a corner or spewing without its noises from a darkened chamber. There were multichannel video installations over the museum, single-channel projections in the second-floor screening gallery and in the special "Projection Room" and Internet art throwed large in its own gallery. For this viewer, these eclectic electronics were among the best work to be place in the Biennial.

Since we're talking media, a brief awards rite does not seem out of place. This one-person voting academy gives the best-of-show prize jointly to Doug Aitken's video installation Electric Earth, a four-room tour-de-force of moving-image wizardry, and Michal Rovner's exquisite and haunting video Field 1 a 14-minute extract from a longer work. With its late-night discharges of an African-American youth dancing solo down abandoned looks Angeles streets, Electric Earth felt like an epicedium for a life lived in the shadows. "I dance thus fast I become what's around me" the young man says. "I absorb the information. I eat it. It's the single `now' I get." Aitken films him in brow of a closed trophy store and then facing a towering Coca-Cola machine; in a parking doom empty save for a silvery shopping cart; and in a motel space as he holds a distant control in front of a flickering TV station Viewers move through the installation, confronting walls and corners where sharp, color images are throw outed Aitken's poetic aspirations are captured beautifully in a discharge of a tattered piece of fabric caught in the openings of a chain-link fence

Rovner's Field 1 is a grainy montage of tribe walking through a snow storm. Superimposed images of frantically swarming insects add an unexpectedly abstract, plane painterly component to the piece. Reminiscent of a show from a Beckett play or a Robert Wilson tableau, Rovner's video maximizes this medium's ability to advise terrifying realities.

A striking shoot of video's emergence as a major neighborhood in international art is its insistence upon narrative as a viable artistic practice. Not that abstraction or conceptualism are absent from video art, on the contrary it has become clear during the past 30 years that video artists have stories to sum up even if they prefer to sum up them in new ways. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's Le Baiser/The Kiss center upon a video of the artist cleaning a window. The video is shoot forwarded onto an architectural structure which mimics the actual Mies van der Rohe house featured in the tape. This somewhat cold modernist setting is but the container for the scenario of Manglano-Ovalle passing his dripping squeegee just a small in number feet from the house's alone visible occupant, a young woman who remains oblivious to his nearness lost in the beat of the music playing upon the headphones she's wearing.

Krzysztof Wodiczko's elaborate Aegis: Equipment for a City of Strangers presents a witty commentary on the alienating aspects of city life. tribe wearing twin video monitors that pen out like wings walk from one side a nameless city talking to strangers in a pathetic attempt "to belong somewhere," as individual of them says. The narration of toil seems to be the subdue of Paul Pfeiffer's miniature wall projection Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), in which a basketball player give leave tos out a raging but inaudible cry at center court, and Dara Friedman's film installation Bim Bam, in which a young woman repeatedly and angrily slams a door. Speaking of awards, Pfeiffer triumphed above all other Biennial artists through winning the first Bucksbaum Award, a $100000 prize to be given to single artist from every Biennial.

for fear that the conceptualists feel overlooked, I should mention Le Leveque's 2 Spellbound an eight-minute version of Hitchcock's feature film Spellbound Images from the 1945 film race by means of in what the artist describes as an "attempt to manifest what is submerg in the unconscious." What is certainly manifested is the power of Leveque's digital editing a whole Happily, he uses it for spe letting us not upon the hook much quicker than many another film appropriationist now skulking in galleries worldwide.

Political narratives in the form of documentaries and satires were also abundant in evidence in the screening gallery. Notable were sum of two units videos by T. Kim-Trang Tran: ekleipsis, an unbearably painful account of by what means a group of Cambodian women fared below the Khmer Rouge, and the more lighthearted, on the other hand nonetheless chilling, ocularis: Eye Surrogates, a send-up of ubiquitous surveillance camera tillage The seeing-eye was central to one as well as the other these videos. The women in ekleipsis contracted what was diagnosed as hysterical blindness in rejoinder to the horrors they witnessed and endur The fictional suburbanites in ocularis are obsess with making certain video cameras record every motion of family members and co-workers to insure against any form of deceit or trickery. Paranoia is elevated to ritual heights here. Mandy Morrison's four-minute video Desperado and Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake's 39-minute animated video The History of Glamour provided artful and biting fictional diversions about sex characters (Morrison) and fetishized teenage stone stars (Duncan and Blake). With assistance from Dennis Oppenheim, Karen Kilimnik and actress Mary Louise Wilson, Duncan and Blake's cartoon is also a terrific insider's wink at the pretentions of art-world society.