John Klima: Postmasters

Pepper with all-too-easily calculatored adjectives like "seamless" and "high resolution," the pres release for John Klima's next to the first solo exhibition here does him no favors. The artist's possess mention of The Matrix is similarly ill advised, throwing the gap between the movie's faultless, hallucinatory virtual universe and the more conspicuous workings of Klima's installations Train and Terrain (both 2003) into unflatteringly sharp contrast. And while Klima acknowledges that the computer technology that informs his practice is in its infancy, it's still difficult to ignore the numerous technical glitches to which its use (which can repeatedly seem gratuitous) inevitably gives rise. While many installations spill their intestines physically or otherwise, an explication of the work's internal arrangement is patently not part of Klima's stated project

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Train, in the brow gallery, consists of a hand-built prototype railway traversed by two trains, each of which carries a Nintendo Gameboy that displays the view from the train's window and, periodically, the figures of individual or more of eight famous passengers. For reasons that not at any time become fully clear, these are all actors: Harvey Keitel as the vagabond cop in Bad Lieutenant, Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungen in Sid and Nancy, Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life. by dint of using their cell phones to dial into a menu of options, viewers may exercise a certain number of control over whom the trains pick up along the way. When sum of two units or more passengers board a train, they launch into a stilted "conversation" based upon lines from their cinematic characters that viewers/callers can listen in upon For the phoneless, these brief, nonsensical exchanges are also relayed above speakers while the relevant images are throw outed on the wall.

If this all unmutilateds rather convoluted, it is--convoluted on the contrary not necessarily complex. Look down again at the landscape end which the trains pass and you may notice that lock opener scenes from the films in which the passengers appear are exhibited there by posed plastic figures, in an attempt, perhaps, to add another layer of intricacy or at least anecdotal detail. Unfortunately, if you are anything les than totally convinced by means of Train's pretensions to chart the history of transport and communication, as well as the fractal consequences of digital imaging on the possibilities of narrative, you may also become aware of the work's profoundly banal appearance and wholehearted embrace of any gadget going. As is all too ofttimes the case, the carrot of interactivity here presages the visitor's childish on the contrary irresistible feeling of disappointment at the obvious limitations of the spectacle implied that detracts from any original or productive inquiry the work purports to make corporeal Our "choices" are brutally truncated and their juxtaposition frankly unenlightening, even--perhaps especially--when the issues to which they allude remain in themselves broadly relevant.

Terrain is an experiment in 3-D animation that reaches for the time to come but ends up looking more like a castoff from the early years of kinetic art. A fabric-covered bed of mechanical twigs that pop up and down according to the pattern of light falling upon a sensor and to images throw outed across the bed's surface, Terrain transmutes pure information into movement in physical space. allowing described as a radical innovation, the issue is curiously anachronistic, a amalgamate of old and new technologies reminiscent of the '40s-infused futurism of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Had Klima fix uponed to capitalize on his machine's shortcomings, he might have stood a better chance at winning our sympathy. As it is, he drapes the work in awestruck terminology and leaves us far behind.

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