The knitters, crocheters, needlepointers, and stitchers hold their soft hobbies right in their padded fingers, while residents of a virtual world point, click, and simulate. But the stereotypes end there. The handcrafters make art that is confrontational, impolite, and cerebralânot folksy and nostalgic. And the online world that provides a medium for the digital artists is only shocking in that it is so routineâit is a fake real world, where âresidentsâ have âreal estateâ (the term finally comes to life!) and create lives mind-numbingly similar to the ones they live offline.
The pair of art exhibitions showing these artists at Bumbershoot are called Softly Threatening: Artwork of the Modern Domestic and Pixel Dolls, MeatSpace, and Everything All at Once. The curators, Yoko Ott and Michael Van Horn, have dubbed the collective theme âHigh Tech vs. Home Ec.â This seeming clash between the visceral and the virtual is actually not a duel but a Dumpster dive into two mediums the mainstream art world has been slow to acknowledge despite their broad appeal: DIY craft and online gaming.
Ottâwho has been responsible for most of the good ideas in visual art at Bumbershoot for the past several years, but never put her name on a show beforeâselected 14 artists for Softly Threatening. The locals are Mandy Greer, Jodi Rockwell, Elizabeth Jameson, Toi Sennhauser, Charles Krafft, Natalie Schmidt Dotzauer, and Donna Stack. Krafftâs contribution is a Juvenile Delinquent Bridal Registry flatware set, in which every piece of the silverware is a sharp blade waiting to cut. An actual wedding cake is frosted with Third Reich symbols.
Piles of crocheted, sewn, beaded, pom-pommed, and knitted blood spilling from the wound of a seven-foot-tall white stag and trickling up to become a bloody chandelier are Greerâs room-sized tribute to the formation of her family: her husband nearly hemorrhaged to death in an accident before they were married, and two years ago she gave birth to their son. Joining the personal and the universal, Anna Von Mertens designs quilts based on the patterns of natural phenomena, then lays them on low plinths to form bed sculptures.
Each artist exploits differently the history of womenâs work that the materials imply, from Knittaâs fuzzy graffiti and Orly Coganâs raunchy, endearing embroideries on vintage textiles to Craig Fisherâs silk bombs and Brett Alexanderâs gray-flannel private-school uniforms embroidered with homophobic slurs in script.
That would be enough show to chew on for a museum visit, and thereâs still Van Hornâs Pixel Dolls to contemplate. Computers will feed artworks existing in the online world Second Life, and in the gallery, artworks will respond to the three-year-old online program. Less than a year ago, Second Life had only 60,000 users, now it has half a million. Anyone can log into Second Life and wander around homeless (beginning on âOrientation Islandâ), but those who are serious pay real money to buy land in thereâVan Horn pays $195 a month for the contemporary-art island for this show.
The real lifers also pay programmers and designers to âbuildâ them houses, which they then outfit with art and furnishings purchased in-world. (Doing this DIY is possible, but it takes time and learning.) They spend real dough at American Apparelâs in-world store to dress their âavatars,â or online twins. Avatars host parties in-world, where they dance, chat in real time, and retreat to virtual waterfront properties for sex. Sound mundane and familiar? In one episode, an avatar named Lazarus Divine began buying up the small slivers of undeveloped land near other avatarsâ properties and putting up scores of giant anti-Bush signs. The signs were so big that even political sympathizers balkedâhe was blocking their residential water views. Lazarus Divine raised the prices on his odd-shaped holdings, made a pretty penny, and the signs came down.
Van Horn invited participation from artists already working in Second Life. Those who werenât submitted proposals, and Van Horn hired builders to install the projects in-world. The roster spans the globe, locally including Susan Robb, Chad Wentzel, Anne Mathern, and Todd Simeone. Mathern and Wentzel are surviving in a remote refuge, an island within the island. To visit, you have to take the shape of one of the animal avatars already in Second Life, to assume the forms of the virtual wilderness. Whatâs funny about that, Van Horn says, is that in Second Life, âyou can hardly tell a blue jay from a deer.â
Simeone wanted to build a cave, where representations of whatâs going on in Second Life today would be stored for future generations. But you canât go sideways into a hillside in Second Life, so it was impossible. Simeone, a playful conceptual artist to begin with, was enchanted to discover that in the middle of all this technology, you canât do what the cavemen did.