High Anxiety Over High-Tech Humanity

Hands nesting PalmPilots, ears adhered to cell phones, eyes locked on computer screens--these are common enough sights in Southern California. From looking around this privileged corner of the universe, you might conclude that our relationship to technology has already been consummated. It’s intimate, passionate, committed and seemingly long-term. Already we regard our high-tech tools and toys as extensions of ourselves, but what would we really look like, and how would we really view the world, if the boundaries between body and machine were dissolved?

In 1960, the term “cyborg”--short for cybernetic organism--was coined to describe such a hybrid, a technologically enhanced human being capable of surviving on the new frontiers about to be explored in space. Theorist Donna Haraway revived the term recently in her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which assumes high technology not as a new frontier but the dominant reality.

To thrive under the new conditions it presents, she proposes that we merge with the tools of our making, at least metaphorically, and become what, by nature, we are not, to expand our identities as human beings. We must embrace our roles as cyborgs by thinking outside traditional definitions of ourselves and our bodies and remaining open to radically new possibilities.

Some of those possibilities are visualized in the Laguna Art Museum exhibition “Cyborg Manifesto, or the Joy of Artifice”--and they’re not a pretty sight. Desperation, violence and confusion between fact and fiction dominate the investigations by the 24 artists included in the show. Technology functions here as a flash point. It does spur the unraveling of conventional definitions of the body and self, but as a consequence, it undermines the sense of security that came as a fringe benefit of those familiar definitions.

The show, curated by the museum’s Tyler Stallings, is largely unsettling as a result, its prognosis less liberating than stultifying. The erosion of established boundaries doesn’t lead to a new and improved variety of human in these artists’ eyes, but rather a compromised human, whose fragmentation and multiplicity comes at the expense of a grounded, integrated soul.

Frankenstein’s monster, the Ur-cyborg, serves as the model for two works here: Mike Kelley’s body-sized pillar of patched-together stuffed animals; and S.E. Barnet’s video installation, in which body parts appear on eight monitors, and viewers can build their own version of the figure by changing the cassettes. Barnet’s gesture feels facile, and only Kelley’s monster elicits any empathy.

Photographs by Naida Osline and Clare Cornell make literal the cyborgian notion of the extended body. Osline grafts body parts onto incongruous places (eyeballs where testicles would be, breasts in place of calves), an exercise in special effects that owes equally to Hollywood and bad-boy artist Matthew Barney. Cornell takes pedestrian shots of men at the beach and subjects them to a distorted-mirror doubling. Body parts get stretched and bent into Rorschach-like abstractions, but the visual gimmickry hardly elucidates a state of extended consciousness.

Photographer Ken Gonzales-Day, too, abstracts the body, rendering extreme close-ups of skin and body parts into marvelous patterns assembled like a mosaic. His prints are conspicuously beautiful here and add a refreshing note of reverential fascination with the body.

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The elasticity of psychic identity plays into Tony Oursler’s installation “Come to Me,” among the most haunting pieces the show. Oursler projects an image of his own talking head onto a lumpen fiberglass skull that distorts his features into a freakish mask. “Come closer,” he whispers, then grimaces in pain, laughs uneasily, pleads for attention, begs for mercy. It’s a compelling psychodrama, compact, visceral and demonstrative of the double-edged power of high-tech media. Its veracity is persuasive, even mesmerizing, and yet we remain at a safe distance. We are implicated in this perverse monologue but removed from its source.

In another disturbing video installation, Carlee Fernandez has us adopt the perspective of a rabbit in the moments before, during and just after it is bludgeoned. The narrative plays itself out in a short video viewable through a peephole between the eyes of a taxidermied rabbit.

Technology admittedly expands our individual means of perception and expression, but it doesn’t necessarily spell progress in terms of interpersonal relationships or societal self-understanding. The man and woman in Alan Rath’s “Couple” chatter away at each other from two small, facing screens, each clamped in place by a vise. The talking heads, their sound turned off, are stunning emblems of a failure to connect. Technology, because it can mediate and depersonalize experience, might take a share of the blame, but also a slice of the credit for articulating a fundamentally human problem in a most canny form.

Although the conceptual origin of the cyborg has a utopian spin to it, and Haraway’s manifesto is a proclamation of possibility, the artists Stallings has assembled dwell mostly on the darker consequences of the techno-human merger. The work reminds us that the marriage is of unequals--one partner with consciousness (and a conscience) and one without. That the products of such a marriage might be of dubious morality is a likelihood brought home by Jon Haddock’s digital drawings of the Unabomber’s cabin, the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the SWAT-team style retrieval of Elian Gonzalez, and other tragically violent milestones in recent history--all filtered through the trivializing aesthetics of the video game. No “joy in artifice” here, just a bleak, dystopian view in the mirror.

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* “Cyborg Manifesto, or the Joy of Artifice,” Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8971, through July 8. Closed Wednesdays. An online catalog of the exhibition is available at www.cyborg-manifesto.com.