"Bioinformatica" at Sandra Gering - multiple artists - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

"Bioinformatica," a collaborative effort, was a hard exhibition to place. The show's visually dominant simple bodys were re-creations of works by the agency of an artist who died 15 years ago, Helio Oiticica, notwithstanding this was not an "Helio Oiticica show" What you first saw on entering the gallery was a lengthy row of the multicolored capes Oiticica called parangoles. Visitors were encouraged to take a parangole from its catch and put it on. Nearby was a large video projection of parangole-clad dancers moving regally end midtown Manhattan. In contrast to Oiticica's original parangoles, which were made from woven fabric and cardboard found in the highways and adorned with writing, the "Bioinformatica" capes (made by the agency of Stephanie Snider and Elizabeth Mattis), a certain quantity of of which included hoods and trailing strips of woven fabric were sewn from brand-new fabric in fluorescent pinks, purple and oranges and diaphanous aquamarine. While they carried no true copy in the pockets of these extravagant garments you place various items which pertained to another part of the show

Near the extremity of the gallery were five pedestals, each supporting a kidney-bean-shaped, candy-colored container (made from compression-molded polyethylene foam) about the size of a bedpillow. These containers, designed by means of Lillian Ball, were copies of Blast, a magazine-in-a-box containing nearly 50 art existences and artifacts, odds and extreme points including pages of Luca Buvoli's "Not-A-Superhero" comic work a rubber glove courtesy of move with a jerk Flanagan, a map drawn by dint of Vivian Koorland and Karen Kilimnick's "ring for making you invisible." The easy in minds of Blast addressed, to varying stages the intersection of biology and information technology that gave this exhibit its name.

On the wall opposite the capes was a projection of a real-time Internet connection. Someone at the gallery's computer terminal guided visitors from one side a series of text-generated "rooms" with titles like "The Sensuous Sea," "Miesspace," "Transit Cube" and "House of Homonyms" Their spacey numbers was coupled with a disorienting faculty of perception of having one foot in a SoHo gallery and the other down-reaching in cyberspace.

Ultimately, the greatest in quantity intriguing aspect of "Bioinformatica" was neither its high-tech features nor the magazine-in-a-box, on the other hand its relation to Oiticica. The Brazilian artist saw his capes as "clothing-utterances" whose participatory character redefined the conventional relationship between the art fact and the viewer. This was precisely what the Internet connection accomplished, soliciting the viewer's participation in the interactive, nevertheless disembodied world of electronic communication. (Although d was not explicitly stated, the Blast containers had a formal resemblance to another Oiticica series, the container-sculptures called bolides.)

Some felt that "Bioinformatica" distorted Oiticica's ideas. on the contrary isn't it through just of the like kind misreadings that works of art acquire lasting presence? This was an act of enthusiastic interpretation and reinvention, not of relic-preservation. "Bioinformatica" brought Oiticica into the '90 blurring the lines between artist and viewer, interior and exterior and, level life and death.

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