High-tech conceptual art dares viewers to get with the program
Friday January 09, 2004
By Doug MacCash
Art critic
Last Saturday's opening reception for Patrick Lichty's "Wunderkammer" exhibition at Barrister's Gallery was a conclave of Crescent City conceptual artists. Dawn DeDeaux, Stephen Paul Day, Sibylle Peretti, Mary Jane Parker, Gary Oaks, Courtney Egan, David Sullivan and Blake Boyd all appeared at the out-of-the-way showplace to pay their respects to Lichty, a Baton Rouge-based high-tech artist well known in underground conceptual circles.
Lining the gallery walls was an eclectic hodgepodge of tongue-in-cheek artworks in soup-to-nuts styles. Among the offerings were a suite of low-resolution digital photo images interpreted as bathroom tile mosaics; a time bomb with wax hot dogs where the dynamite should be; a parsnip nailed to the wall above a row of similarly impaled carrots; a talking Teddy Bear that lamented being an out-of-work children's entertainer; and a jittery black-and-white video taken from a lawn mower as it rattled across a patch of suburban grass, grinding up stuffed dogs and cereal boxes in its path. And, on a movie screen suspended in the center of everything, a psychedelic video image was being created by a computer program that spliced and diced Lichty's digital photographs to the rhythm of a Mozart symphony that echoed through the gallery -- too bad Jerry Garcia didn't live to see that.
The bewildering effect of the exhibit, which looks more like a group show than a solo, was by design. Lichty prides himself on his mercurial art-making. "You can kind of see that my art goes all over the place," he said. "I'll get into a project, I'll do whatever I need to do to accomplish it, then I go on to the next project. I don't need to work in one way."
Lichty chose the title of the exhibit because it reflects the diversity of his artistic outpouring (Wunderkammers were small Renaissance-era museums in which all the wonders of the world, from whale bones to Roman coins to Tibetan fur hats to ostrich eggs, were illogically displayed side by side).
Lichty, 41, was born into an artistic family in Akron, Ohio. His mother and brother were painters, his grandmother a concert pianist. Despite his natural artistic inclination, his family pushed him toward the burgeoning world of electronics. At the tender age of 8 he cut his teeth on a RadioShack 50-in-1 electronics kit. As a teenager he and his computer-obsessed circle of friends spent their spare time trying to invent electronic games. Eventually he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Akron and found a job in computer engineering. "I was beyond an Ubergeek," he said. "To me technology was like breathing. It was no longer a means to an end, it was the end."
But when a career downturn landed him behind the counter of a RadioShack selling electronic kits to a new generation of techy kids, he feared the world was passing him by, so he enrolled in art school. "My first love was calling me back," he said.
While most of his classmates worked in oil paint or welded iron, Lichty explored new art media such as web site design, videography and computer hacking. In the following years, he combined his electronic expertise with a youthful sense of subversiveness, helping create several high-profile spoofs. He collaborated with a guerrilla art group called RTMark to secretly switch the voice chips in talking Barbie dolls with talking G.I. Joes, creating gender-bent toys for unsuspecting girls and boys. With a similar group called the Yes Men, he helped create a web site that could be easily mistaken for that of the World Trade Organization, proffering mischievous yet believable misinformation.
His brand of digital dada created a sensation, earning Lichty (though his contributions were often anonymous) and his collaborators national media coverage and a place in the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art -- the biggest of the big-time contemporary art shows. A selection of Lichty's videos and documentaries dedicated to his art pranks will be shown tonight and Saturday at the gallery.
Lichty met his wife, a Kent State theater history major, at a Star Trek fan club meeting -- they shared an interest in the Shakespearean career of Patrick Stewart. When she was offered a teaching position at LSU, Lichty found himself in Dixie. He showed a series of digital photos, taken with a Dick Tracy-like wrist camera at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans in 2001, and was welcomed into the extended family of New Orleans high-tech artists and conceptualists.
When Lichty next felt the itch to present one of his computer concepts to the local audience, he turned to Barrister's Gallery -- the Big Easy's anything-goes showplace. Gallery director Andy Antippas agreed to put a Lichty exhibit on the schedule, but stipulated that the artist had to create something tangible -- in other words, something that could be sold. Thus the concept of "Wunderkammer" was born -- an exhibit of random subversive thoughts made into objects that could hang on the wall or rest on a pedestal. It would be the first time in five years that Lichty produced actual art objects.
Does "Wunderkammer" succeed? Yes and no. The buzz among gallery-goers on opening night was a blend of admiration and consternation. For every idea that works there's another that doesn't. The digital photo of a black cat rendered in Lego-like plastic blocks: yes. The line of naughty wax penises: no. The charcoal portraits of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and an anonymous sweat-shop worker (which Lichty commissioned from a Jackson Square artist): yes. The brushy oil paintings of Pacman: no. The antique fallout shelter sign lit with uranium-bearing neon lights: yes. The rainbow-colored abstract doodle-like drawings: no. Panoramic digital landscape photos: yes. Digitally-produced pictorialist nudes: no. The concept of having a digital drawing rendered as an oil painting by a Chinese art factory: yes. The spooky sci-fi crucifixion image given to the Chinese factory for reproduction: no.
Lichty has plenty of ideas -- way more than he needs. What he lacks is patience. Several of these small pieces could become suites of very satisfying artworks. Imagine, for instance, large-scale versions of his digital photos rendered in bathroom tile. Or imagine if he'd had the Chinese art factory render his pixelated portraits of Boticcelli's Venus, DaVinci's Mona Lisa and Hitomi (a character from a violent volleyball computer game) as large-scale oil paintings. Or imagine if his panoramic landscapes stretched around the whole room.
The ideas in "Wunderkammer" are like Jack's magic beans. Lichty shouldn't just throw them away. He should plant them, let them grow and see where they take him.
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WUNDERKAMMER
By Patrick Lichty
What: An ambitious exhibit of technology-oriented conceptual art.
Prices: From $10 for a pair of printed bikini bottoms to $4,000 for a large Chinese factory-made painting.
Video screenings: "The CEO's New Clothes: An Evening with RTMark and the Yes Men," presented by Zeitgeist Multi-disciplinary Arts Center (which shares the space with Barrister's Gallery), will be shown at 8 tonight, and "Experiments and Bizarre Behavior," a selection of Lichty's videos, will be shown at 8 p.m. Saturday. General admission is $6, students and seniors $5.
As an anachronistic visual joke, digital artist Patrick Lichty rendered several vintage computer-game images, such as 'Orange Alert,' as traditional oil paintings.
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