Text for the postcard invitation:
Opening reception:July 29, Saturday July 29 4 - 6 pm
Phoebe and Belmont Towbin Wing
Woodstock Artists Association
28 Tinker Street
Woodstock, NY 12498
(845) 679-2940email: website: WoodstockArt.org
Gallery Hours: Thursday, Friday and Monday 12-5; Saturday and Sunday 12-6
This exhibition was funded in part by Robert and Barbara L.Bachner
Text for catalog brochure:
Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?)
In her new project, Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?), Kathleen Ruiz—an artist with longstanding interest in investigating the line between the virtual and the real—
targets one of the more controversial issues of our digital landscape: the representation of violence in computer games. Ruiz, whose previous work mapped the
unseen spaces of cognition and offered interactive meditations on the biological and the technological in works such as “The Body 21 Series”, “The Enumerated Repositories” and “Dwelling” is now
experiencing a kind of phase shift as she directs her sights on game culture and decision theory. Exploiting her technical facility in both traditional and digital media, she has constructed a provocative interactive installation that reconfigures the dynamics of game culture.
Consisting of 8 by 20 foot digital prints, an interactive projection, a mix of audio sources, and a modified gaming console, Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) catches the viewer in an imaginary
crossfire of gaming and the disturbing questions it often raises. In this installation, Ruiz offers the viewer wall-to-wall images of young people caught in the
act of operating—“playing”—violent, multiple-user games. The gamers in the images are aimed to shoot into space, at one another, or, perhaps, at the viewer, suggesting that the entire installation is criss-crossed with implied gunfire. Instead of a digital game, the console presents on its screen video footage of frenzied gamers blasting virtual targets. Ruiz has created
a visual displacement that functions to critically rearrange the conventions of gaming: there is a wall-sized projection
of a digital game at one end of the
installation onto which viewers’ shadows intermittently become “targets” for the gun-wielding gamers.
Ruiz created Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) in response to her visits to gaming arcades. During the past decade, questions have been raised about links between
particular types of shooting found in
the virtual games and kinds of violence occurring in recent multiple shootings. But Ruiz’s Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) is not a simplistic anti-gun or anti-gaming project. Rather she has stated, “I am
continuing my exploration of the interrelationships between reality and fantasy by staging the question, ‘does our recreation re-create us?’”
In the violent game, and in Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?), point of view is all. The weapon directed by the player, always in the foreground and around which
all action is organized, is characteristic
of what is called “first person shooter.” This domination of the subject is also a reminder of cinema’s complicity in the drive to frame and contain subjective experience. The structure of the game
suggests that the user’s freedom to
understand space—to define space—by
shooting at it is simultaneously total and meaningless. Images of users enmeshed, Laocoön-like, by the hardware of immersive technologies underscore the extreme vulnerability of the gamer, a vulnerability
inextricably related to the fantasies of violence and invisibility of the medium catered to
by the dominant conventions of immersive environments. Viewers moving freely through the installation interfere with the freedom of other viewers to see, and to shoot at, objects and images. Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) compels the subject to come on out (“hands up!”) from behind the instrument of subjectivity—be it camera, gun, or Cartesian point of view—to be recognized.
Of all the suspensions of belief necessary to the operation of cinema and its progeny, the consensual removal of the subject (the viewer) is the most fundamental. It is a predicate to any understanding of mise-en-scene and
narrative. But, as Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) reminds us, in the immersive environment of the interactive game, the subject doesn’t leave; instead, he or she is incorporated into the panorama of the work. This incorporation is a mark of the assiduously cultivated, monolithically marketed brand of “violent game.” Stripped of agency but hooked on action, the game player is constantly compelled to register himself or herself through the only channel available: shooting up the virtual scenery.
Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?), suffused with the legacy of cinema and shaped by the artist’s own past work, mixes the signifiers of aesthetic discourse with those of everyday experience. In so doing, it extends the artist’s deep interest in quotidian pleasures: the stranger observed; the sense-memory noted, the operation of the mind acknowledged.
And yet, the work also questions the radical dissolution of boundaries between observer and the observed, between viewing and
participating, and between subject and
environment. Bang, Bang (you’re not dead?) provokes important questions regarding the complicity of gamers in the eradication of
distinctions between reality and fantasy—and between responsibility and irresponsibility.
The conceit—the unexamined assumption—“game equals life” runs through
contemporary systems-oriented culture:
decision theory, game theory, and their
progeny buttress dominant models of finance, information, education, scientific inquiry, and creativity. Game theory assumes rational decision-making and propounds a system in which randomness is, within the limits of
the game, predictable. Embodying a cathartic culmination that can blur the lines between artwork and viewer, Bang Bang (you’re not dead?) reminds us that, even in a virtual
culture, the bloodlessness of fantasy and the blood-rush of reality overlap.
Brian Wallace is Curatorial Director at the Bellevue Museum, Bellevue, Washington and is a graduate of The Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.
Phoebe and Belmont Towbin Wing
Woodstock artists association
July 29–October 16, 2000
Kathleen RuÍz
Lives and works in Olivebridge, NY
Born 1952, New York, NY
Selected Individual Exhibitions
1998Sequence, Percent for Art Program, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs,
New York, NY
Millennium Capsule, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, NY
1996 Mental Picture, The Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, NY
1995The Lost Dimension, The Art Gallery of Ramapo College, Mahwah, NJ
1994InsideOut, deCompression Gallery, Phoenix, AZ
Selected Group Exhibitions
2000Public Art 1996–2000 in The City of New York, DDC Atrium, Long Island City, NY
1999Cut & Paste The International Festival for Film, Video & New Media, Lucerne, Switzerland
Toys’n’Noise, The Center for Contemporary Art, Linz , Austria
1998TechnoPassion, iEAR Exhibition & Performance, The Kitchen, New York, NY
1997Beyond Shelter: The New Public Domain, School of the Art Institute, Chicago IL
Technoseduction, School of Art, The Cooper Union, New York, NY
1996VIDEO: Sans Titre, Galerie Froment & Putnam, Paris, France
The Machine Stops, The Brush Art Gallery, Lowell, MA
1995Art as Signal: Inside the Loop, @art/ Leonardo web gallery University of Illinois,
Champagne Urbana, IL
Re-inventing the Emblem, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
The Enumerated Repositories, Parco Gallery, Kichijoji, Tokyo, Japan
1994Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age, Aperture
The Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY,
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA,
The Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL,
The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA,
The artist wishes to thank: Frances Gray, Herminio Rivera, David Cabrera, Alex Gray, Robert & Barbara Bachner, Linda Freany, John Hanhardt, Oxclove Studios, iEAR Studios at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute,
Mary Anne Staniszewski, Kathy Rae Huffman, Neil Rolnick, Laurie Brown, Chris Pascucci, Brian Kenyon, Rich Czyzewski, Chris Frolich, James Baungartner
Woodstock Artists Association, 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock, NY 12498Tel: (845) 679-2940
This exhibition was funded in part by Robert and Barbara L.Bachner
Captions
Cover: The Shooting Gallery #1, 2000, ditial print, 48" x 72", detail
Inside Spread: Bang, Bang (you're not dead?), 2000, multimedia game, 96" x 120" x 120"
Inside Left: The Shooting Gallery #3, 2000, digital print, 120" x 93", detail
Inside Right: The Shooting Gallery #4, 2000, digital print, 120" x 93", detail
All images © 2000 Kathleen Ruíz
Design: David Cabrera, San Antonio, TXColor Separations: The LTC Group, San Antonio, TX
Printing: Clarke Printing Co., San Antonio, TX