Smile Machines
Anna Altman
Tucked away in the upper level of the Akademie der Künste on the tree-lined Hanseatenweg in Berlin, "Smile Machines" does not at first glance appear equipped to grapple with the questions it purports to answer. A visitor to the exhibit enters a dimly-lit room illuminated by the glow of various screens. A spotlight illuminates Nam June Paik’s The Thinker–TV Rodin (1976-1978): a miniature of Rodin’s most famous sculpture faces a television screen, on which an image of itself is projected in a close-circuit recording. This first piece strikes the viewer, who has knowingly come to a media arts festival, as neither elaborate nor technologically complex despite Paik’s renown. To the left, Les Levine’s video of himself walking on New York City’s Bowery, entitled I am an artist (1975) is projected on a large screen just inside the entrance. The video’s dialogue assaults the viewer with artistic disengagement and arrogance, as Levine repeats incessantly: "I’m an artist; I don’t want to be involved… I’m above this, I make art."
The subject of the exhibition–"cunning mechanisms for distancing ourselves" from what is fast becoming "a world of total entertainment"–also elicits a bit of skepticism. How can an exhibit place itself at the nexus of such difficult and tangled discourses as technology, media influence on modern life and the broad category of humor, and expect to provide answers? A coherent or succinct position on how humor is used in art to expose tensions of engagement and distancing is indeed hard to come by.
But despite the cards stacked against it, "Smile Machines" creates a thoughtful and, indeed, humorous environment.
In fact, the strength of "Smile Machines" lies in its diverse pieces, carefully selected by Anne-Marie Duguet, a professor at the Art Faculty of Université Paris 1. The breadth of material on display steers clear of spreading itself too thin, and instead lays a thoughtful groundwork that builds as you move through the exhibit. Pieces like Paik’s The Thinker–TV Rodin raises questions of what happens when TV becomes interactive and reflective: when the viewer becomes the subject. And what of the exhibit’s visitor, one degree removed, who through the frame that captures the Thinker project himself onto the screen as well? Paik creates a visual example of mediated introspection, in which a statue, the identity of which rests on its thoughtful posture, must contemplate itself through a television screen. Instead, Paik’s piece suggests, the thinker ends up scrutinizing the television and, by extension, technology itself. Even such a technologically simple piece of media art manages to accomplish the feat of elevating the viewer and the viewed and to relativize the feats and functions of technology.
Other foundational pieces by Fluxus artists like Paik both solidify and expand on this groundwork: George Maciunas’s Flux Smile Machine (1977) makes humor suspect with his suggestion that humor is so compulsory, that one needs a machine to manage a smile (or a grimace). Robert Filliou, another Fluxus artist, is represented by his video And So on End So On, Done Three Times (1977), which explores his "Principle of Equivalence": whether a work is equal when badly made, well made, or not made. The 30-minute black and white video exemplifies the artist’s self-conscious and powerful position as entertainer, as director and finally as a judge of art.
At the other end of the spectrum from these technologically simple but layered works is Simon Penny’s Petit Mal (1989-1993), a robot constructed primarily from two bicycle wheels that serves no robotic purpose. Instead, Petit Mal is splendidly useless. Entirely unreliable as a computer or piece of machinery, Petit Mal wanders aimlessly through a square pen into which any viewer can enter, its pendular body swinging back and forth as its wheels change directions without provocation.
The other works on display at "Smile Machines" exhibit different levels of technical complexity, and deal with issues such as violence, feminism and corporate wrong-doing. Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman (1978-1979) turns its attention toward figures of the public imagination, the ubiquity and representation of which have the power to change our perceptions of reality. Birnbaum’s splicing of old Wonder Woman episodes to reiterate the female hero’s moment of transformation. In doing so, Birnbaum exposes the way that television alters our concept of time: with the possibility of re-runs, commercial and playback time has changed from a linear to a malleable and even reversible entity.
Two of the most disturbing works in the show utilize the proximity of laughter, death, and violence. Maja Bajevic’s Black in Black (2000), for example, is a diptych video that shows residents of Sarajevo telling jokes about the violent experiences of Suljo and Mujo, two imaginary friends, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The fact that these same characters were once used throughout Yugoslavia to make light of discomfort under Communism makes the humor even darker. A laugh track, accompanied by no organic laughter from the audience, highlights the fact that the jokes being told are neither clever nor amusing. In another, less political work, Death is Certain (2004) by Eva Meyer-Keller, the artist uses the strict focus of the camera as she ruthlessly enacts a catalogue of deaths on ripe red cherries to confront one of the most difficult and riveting preoccupations of the human condition.
There is no cumulative impression after a visit to see this collection of complex, clever and diverse works. But this breadth ends up being the exhibition’s strength: a visit to "Smile Machines" certainly requires the viewer to consider carefully the result of living among an assault of media images without offering any pat answers. Engaging in this kind of inquiry, as well as confronting the subjects of certain works, can be somewhat troubling. But "Smile Machines" is, in equal measure, also a pleasure: works like like Petit Mal, a search for hidden icebergs under Germany’s ice rinks in Agnes Meyer’s Brandis, SGM-Iceberg Probe, and selected works from William Wegman will certainly make you smile.
