9.28.11 — Social Work
Have social media taken over everything? Consider Pace, whose other branches are hosting the uncanny silence of Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin. Right next door, through October 1, David Byrne squeezes an inflatable globe under the High Line, as old-fashioned as grade school. Now, though, the kids may have to turn off their phones before class.
“Social Media,” at through October 15, starts with brightly colored text right on the entrance wall. The night of the opening, the tweets took on Michele Bachmann’s link between the HPV vaccine and mental retardation. 
Well, that explains her, right? But wait a minute: that was my joke—and the display, created by Michelle Leftheris, repeated the line twice. People make compromises when they go online, only starting with their privacy.
Critics debunked the “originality of the avant-garde” long ago, not to mention mine, but for once that poses a problem. Six months from now, will anyone get the joke—or the work? Can art about the latest thing keep up, and need it bother? Can Chelsea turn social media into art, just when alternative spaces elsewhere are styling themselves as “do it yourself”? So many artists have moved to new media for its promise to transform art. This time the medium truly is the message, as simultaneously device and subject matter, only it threatens to leave the work behind.
Christopher Baker recognizes the problem. He searches Twitter for such eloquence as aargh and hmphh, sending the live stream to thermal printing that spews onto the gallery floor. Others seem torn between stating the obvious and lending it refinement. On the obvious side, Penelope Umbrico culls from ten million Flickr sunset pictures on a single day, plus interiors reflected off TV sets advertised on craigslist. As for refinement, Emilio Chapele converts the numbers of Web searches for the two major parties (plus the Tea Party) into the volumes of brightly colored cubes. You probably knew that people reveal far too much online, including their own banality, and bar charts work just fine apart from Minimalism.
The show takes its inspiration from Robert Heineckin, who invaded people’s privacy long before the Web. Heineckin, who died in 2006, altered mass-circulation magazines to protest war and commercialism, returning the “compromised” magazines to unwitting newsstands for sale. With Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, even participatory democracy becomes something of a lecture to its participants, much as Heineckin’s guerrilla tactics lectured buyers. They invite people to “act out” moments in lives in the news, as seen on democracynow.org. Jonathan Harris’s two-channel video “diary” follows nine women filming a lesbian porn site. It recovers them, but it also reduces nine lives to ten-second clips.
The transformative power of new media and political art always come with question marks, and so does the social in social media. The Web allows egotism and individualism in the guise of openness—just as with my self-published art criticism. It also allows chaos in the guise of community. Ironically enough, Postmodernism brought exactly those charges against much of modernists like Jackson Pollock, with his male posturing and drip paintings. Harris and Sep Komvar raise the very same charges when they “harvest” the cuddly “I feel” from blog posts. And a big-name gallery intensifies the conundrum, game as it is in trying to take the lead.
“Social Media” runs to inside jokes, like Aram Bartholl’s QR code portraits of such arty celebrities as Ai Weiwei. Byrne, better known for his public installations (not to mention music), downright relishes one-liners. His paintings advertise imaginary apps, while Democracy in Action displays parliaments in session as an image shuffle. The jokes gain nothing from old-fashioned paint on new-fangled Plexiglas, but he makes one wonder at political debate going nowhere fast. Still, sometimes it helps to turn off the computer or iPhone and head outside. Byrne’s inflatable globe is lightweight, but it hints at all sorts of communities.