MCA’s I Was Raised On the Internet a Provocative Beauty

Although the title of one of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s more fascinating current exhibits may enjoy a light-hearted ring, I Was Raised on the Internet proved deeply provocative, startlingly imaginative and characteristically beautiful.  Rather than an examination of how the internet has shaped our lives, the artists participating in the show express the myriad ways the internet has “changed the way we experience the world” and how we may experience it in the future.

With works going back as far as 1998; one of the earliest, Blackness for Sale overlays the nuances of language and race onto the online bidding platform Ebay.  Its creators, Wendi + Keith Obadike, completed the work in 2001 as an online performance piece commenting on the language of colonialism and how it can still be found throughout the web as it relates to black people.

Broken up into five sections, the Obadike piece resides in the Look at Me portion of the show that delves into the malleability of identity in the age of social media. The Obadike’s insert irony into the description of selfhood and use it to ignite controversy and conversation.

The jolt of the piece is all subliminal and causes a small riot of the mind.  What I Was Raised on the Internet does so beautifully is to keep that stimulating cerebral insurgence percolating throughout the nearly 100 works in the exhibit.  Extending over a huge sweep of media including painting, photography, sculpture, film and video; it also embraces virtual reality and other new and developing technologies.  With the occasional employment of 3D googles, it’s the immersive capabilities of some the latter formats that give viewers the change to engage directly with the art.

Amalia Ulman’s 2016 Excellences & Perfections series take a more classical approach but with a destabilizing intent.  Her Instagram based projects intensifies those idealized images we take of ourselves and extends them out to fantasy. Analyzing “the influence of social media on attitudes toward the female body”, her works are ethereal, beautiful and ultimately impossible. In the end, they seem to be asking why is it so difficult to simply be who we are.

At times, roving through the exhibit also feels like journey through the future.  And the further you climb into it; you begin to realize there are stakes involved. In a number cases, the tone and feel of the installations’ messages were ominous and foreboding; evoking definite unease.  Sublime beauty would exist side by side with the luridly fantastical as seen in Jacolby Satterwhite’s engrossing En Plein Air Music of Objective Romance, Track #1 Healing In My House.  Using HD digital video for both color and sound with 3D animation, a sexualized otherworldly alternate reality exists in 9 minute loops.  You’ll need the time to visually dissect and digest the torrent of messages these images generate.

But even the hyperstimulation created by Satterwhite’s work won’t prepare you for Jon Rathman’s Transdimensional Serpent.  Taking up the equivalent of a small room, the serpent is oversized to allow seating, completely white and displayed in a circle.  And, because of its almost playful construction, it looks completely benign.  Almost like something you’d see in a playlot if snakes didn’t translate to fear.   Everything changes when you put on the goggles.  You’re immediately removed from the world that you know to one that is alien to the extreme and filled with two-legged human-like creatures you’ve never seen before.  And that benign cartoonish snake you sat down on appears to be writhing beneath you as you sit and takes on a much more sinister mien.  It’s a four-minute ride and the last two seem like an eternity.  Before donning the googles, the museum staff lets you know you have full movement of your head.  You can turn left to right, up or down.  When you engage accordingly, suddenly that world you’re immersed in has lost its gravity and everything goes into uncontrolled flight.  The skies darken and the wind whips as you sit in helpless observation.  Disconcerting and discomfiting?  Yes.  Exhilarating and brilliant?  Absolutely.

Placing Takeshi Murata’s Daliesque still life Golden Banana so close to the serpent was like giving viewers a soothing pool to lie in after an unexpected trauma.  With its tranquil mashup of the natural and the futuristic, the ancient and the contemporary, the mind can rest but still wonder at the time suspending beauty of Murata’s creation.

Like a river that’s both wide and deep, I Was Raised on the Internet covers a lot of ground.  Similar to the Look at Me segment of the show that peers into the shifting nature of identity, other areas show how artists process and create when they delve into the culture of surveillance or consider how corporate culture and consumerism are adapting and impacting our web centric existence.  One visit is not enough to absorb all that this majestic exhibit has on offer.

I Was Raised on the Internet

Runs through October 14^th, 2018

Museum of Contemporary Art

220 E. Chicago Avenue

Chicago, IL   60611

mcachicago.org