When the Revolution Comes, It Will Be a 3D AnimationEntertainment With Art Merchandizing | G. Roger Denson

This is the second in a series on visual artists who have embraced, redefined and subverted thecomputer-generated imaging (CGI) and 3D-simulation modeling originally developed to composespecial effects graphics and animation in mainstream film, video, gaming, and high end advertising.See Part 1 of this series, Projecting the Future of Painting in Claudia Hart's 3D Utopian eScapes;Part 3, And Some See God: Getting to the CORE in the 3D and Immersive Art of Kurt Hentschlaeger.and Part 4, PostPictures: A New Generation of Pictorial Structuralists is Introduced by New York'sbitforms Gallery.

On February 16, 2013, The Sonnabend Gallery in New York presented The Celestial Sea, a newseries of sculpture, painting and 3D animation video by Matthew Weinstein. For further information,consult The Sonnabend Gallery website or matthewweinstein.com..

Matthew Weinstein isn't the first artist to take on the 1950s Situationist guru, Guy Debord, and hiswarnings against the decadence of spectacle. He isn't even the first to hold out the vision (or is it thewarning?), that when the revolution comes it will entertain us with such splendidly animatedspectacles, we will want to retreat with them into our own hedonistic and solipsistic worlds, the kindwe might describe as Disney fantasias on meth. Or, if you prefer a more de-accelerating bliss, onheroin. We were served notice of such a future in the cyberpunk novels of Philip K. Dick, WilliamGibson, Pat Cadigan, and Bruce Sterling as early as the late 1960s--and then the barrage ofcyberpunk films to follow.

But until the Matthew Weinstein Studio phased into being, we didn't see the narration of spectacleplayed out in the art world with the combined mise-en-scène of Wagnerian opera, the technical

illusionism of Pixar and Dreamworks, and the media eclecticism of a Venice Biennale, all in onespace. Incorporating sculpture, painting, video, narrative, poetics, and animation in a single spatialproduction, Weinstein oversees a kaleidoscopic array of recombinant materiality and imagery. In sodoing, he manages to simultaneously embody and orchestrate the elliptical narratives and detailedvisions of a novelist, while reflecting the silver fluidity of the mystic to illuminate the deepestrecesses of the poetic mind. He finishes his productions off with the kind of social scrutiny andepistemological mirroring one expects of a philosopher. And that's only after Weinstein the artist hasmediated his private battle between aesthetic principles and indulgent spectacles. In staginginstallations and videos as entertainments, Weinstein is both artist and impresario, adapting equallywell to gallery settings and performance settings. His biggest commission so far has been with TheCharlotte Symphony, where on May 4, 2012, Weinstein premiered a 16-minute original animatedvideo on a screen suspended above the orchestra in sync with its performance of Ravel's Bolero.

Matthew Weinstein, The Childhood Of Bertolt Brecht, 2012.

In mixing 3D animation videos with a full array of mixed media to physically embody a stream-o--consciousness imaginarium, Weinstein plays a kind of tantalizing antichrist to Situationist christfigure, Guy Debord. The French artist, who played a key role in the development of political artactivism in Europe and America in the 1950s and 1960s, felt passionately that vital art could onlyexist "beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle," with the spectacle defined as the array of capitalistentertainments and promotions keeping people alienated from the natural world. Debord islegendary for his predictions for culture in tandem with political consciousness, particularly whereentertainment is concerned. At the very beginning of the television age, Debord predicted the"abundance of televised imbecilities" would account for "the American working class's inability todevelop any political consciousness." Like Bertolt Brecht, Debord's Situationist morality still has aprofound hold over the art world ascetics who, despite (or because of) the orgy of ostentatiousconsumption of art on display at auction houses around the world, persevere in their assumedproject of breaking the spell of the spectators' psychological identification with spectacle. It allcomes back to Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playright who Debord drew heavily from, andwho professed that imposing a distance between the audience and the art drew the audience outfrom their own narcissistic indulgences, so to realize their full capacity to effect revolution in thereal world.

It's Debord's and Brecht's aversion to immersive entertainments to which Weinstein responds inparodying the so-called "ruins of the modern spectacle" we today live in when he revives andcontemporizes the medieval danse macabre. I mean both his 3D animated video, Skeleton Dance,2010 (see the 2nd video below), and the bronze skeletons flying through galleries to catch a goldenfrisbee. What can they signify but the remains of a once-golden utopia of Modernist art, with flesheaten away by the decadence of capitalist excesses and a plethora of artistic visions colliding in acompetition for art world celebrity. Or so the more puritanical advocates of an art devoid ofentertainment would have us believe about the excesses in the art world that we've witnessed atleast since the 1980s, and growing more ostentatious with each decade.

Weinstein seems to have the critics of the new art largesse (and one might suspect a disillusionmentwith his own youthful idealism) in mind as he crafts his video, The Childhood of Bertolt Brecht. It'shere that wee, young Bertolt, Weinstein's age-regressed version of the renowned bronze portraitsculpture of Brecht on the Bertolt Brecht Platz in Berlin, introduces himself and his vision.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, when the revolution comes ... people will call each other sweetie-pie andkitten and poopsie. They will blow kisses at each other and hug without touching. And we willforgive them because we will know that this behavior is a part of something bigger, much bigger,something so big that space people will crane their necks out of their spaceships to see it, but wewill cover the earth with a gigantic piece of red velvet, and we will say, 'no, NO! You can't see it yet.It isn't finished."

Whatever his motives or fixations, Weinstein is ventriloquizing through young Bertolt what I andothers have been proclaiming for years to be the beginning of a movement underway within the artworld--a revolution that, though slow to be embraced, is accumulating an audience from around theworld. It's a movement intent on implementing a future in which pictures on walls will one day nolonger predominantly be painting, prints and still photography, but motion pictures. Within thismovement will be the sub-class of artists who ensure the revolution will not be merely filmed, butvirtualized by computer-generated imaging software (cgi). This group will further consist of thoseartists eager to digitally extend the same primitive sensory-motor capacity from which arose thosefirst drawings and paintings of Paleolithic cave and rock art; pueblo ceramic decoration; SungDynasty ink washes; Renaissance sfumato and Baroque chiaroscuro; ukiyo-e wood prints; the myriadtechniques of etching, engraving, and lithography; all the impressionisms and expressionisms; and,yes, the pixel-perfect Disney and Pixar fantasias. I'm referring, of course, to the 3D animators whodespite their Macs and Maya software, employ the same eye-hand coordination from which arose theinvention and evolution of drawing and painting--though now it is applied in the name of the world'senhancement via 3D entertainments.

Entertainment is the art world's last frontier. Along with the art cognoscenti's larger resistance tomass-producing affordable art multiples and DVDs geared to an expanding art-educated public, theobstacle slowing the 3D revolution down is a resistance by many to an art of entertainment for whatis perceived as its indulgence in gratuitous pleasure. Pleasure: the most ancient anathema toascetics and aesthetes alike. And yet, the pleasure principle has washed in increasingly larger wavesover the shore of artistic production with eash successive generation since the beginning of theIndustrial Revolution. In response, we who count ourselves as culturophiles, and believing weprotect ourselves with a distinction between art and entertainment, have clung to a perceived higherground. But that ground has been chipped away to the point that it is about to cave in with theavalanche of cgi. If we seem desperate to hold onto the perilous cliff overhanging the vast canyon ofglobal markets, it's because in an increasingly secular world, the only spiritual sustenance bothdefensible and competitive comes with an increasingly materialist world view. And amid thematerialism, art is the fetish still able to instill and facilitate a complex of psychologicalrequirements: catharsis, self-atonement, elevated consciousness, identity transference, the creativedrive--all while art is posed as our bid for the respectability and esteem accorded our counterparts inthe sciences.

We are ever ready to admit that the issue, like many issues that artists are passionate about, iscomparatively unimportant on the list of existential necessities. And yet, when our beloved, "serious"arts are invaded by the aesthetics of entertainment, even when only in the name of parody, webecome alarmed that the sacrilege of shallow pleasures might truly corrupt the temples of ourartistic worship. Entertainment may always be the snob's bane, the aesthete's thorn, the princess's

pea beneath the pile of mattresses. But entertainment has no less become the economic forcethreatening to reflect the art world as we know it to be today: a throwback to the 17th-century,dependent not on the democratic tastes of the masses, as is the entertainment industry, but on thepatronage, the noblesse oblige, of aristocracy, or what today translates as oligarchy with all itswhims distended by oppulance every bit the equal, if not surpassing, Versailles.

To indicate just how seriously invested Weinstein is in the revolution that will bring entertainment tothe art world, I'm citing largely verbatim the promotional copy from Weinstein's website to conveythe full commitment of his creative ethos, facilities and production process.

Weinstein assembled a small animation production community that assists in the production of his ...fully realized 3D characters, beginning with drawings and pre-visualization, all the way through totexturing, animation, dynamics, hair and cloth. He then works with actors and musicians (BalkanBeat Box, Natasha Richardson, Hope Davis, Adultnapper) to bring his characters to life. Thecharacters then perform narratives and songs that Weinstein writes for them. Along the way,Weinstein has built up an index of characters, sets, environments and plant forms which constitute avirtual architecture surrounded by a virtual nature that is populated with virtual beings. These 3Delements, like stage sets, costumes, locations and actors, can be recombined and re-contextualizedin different pieces. Weinstein has assembled a production facility in his studio in Bushwick,Brooklyn, where 3D animation, sculpture, writing, research, painting, rehearsal, choreography andlive motion capture of actors and dancers all occur simultaneously. His studio mimics, in miniature,the 'Dream Factories,' of classic American film.

Weinstein ... begins with the writing of a script and song lyrics. This leads to the creation of virtualcharacters, which arise out of creative and technical discussions with the animators in Weinstein'sstudio. Then the actors and musicians work on the dialogue and the music, which is edited into thesound layer of the film. They also explore how the characters move in space by working within amotion capture grid and stage that has been assembled in Weinstein's studio. As soon as thecharacters are capable of posing in their custom environments, Weinstein can begin to prepare

paintings of them. These paintings are created with airbrush, precision stenciling, and handpainting. Sculptures also come out of the virtual wire frames for the characters that, through rapidprototyping processes, eventually jump straight out of the computer.

Matthew Weinstein, Skeleton Dance, 2010.

Clearly, Weinstein's cottage industry is as state of the art as a solo production can get on acomparatively modest, independent budget. It certainly helps that Weinstein has had amplebackground in theater, acting, film, screen writing, commercial art, product design and 3Danimation.

But is entertainment really the thief in the citadel that Weinstein believes it to be? However muchthe myth of art as exalted masterpiece still grips the hearts and minds of artists, critics, curators andcollectors, the threads of entertainment that have expanded within the art world since the 1980s iswrongly perceived as a collective effort to "bring art down to the level of popular culture"--whichmight mean making art less structurally, thematically, conceptually complex. The error in thisthinking lies within the single-minded direction presumed necessary to bringing parity to art andentertainment. Why is a cumulative effort for parity by visual artists conceived of metaphorically asa downward spiral? Why can't visual and conceptual artists raise entertainment to the levelprejudicially ascribed to art? After all, the more high-minded popular artists within the fields ofentertainment have long sought, and with numerous succeeding (we all have our lists), to raiseentertainment to the level of art.

The source for the myth, the superstition really, however distasteful it seems to a secular enclave ofartists, is religion. Hedonistic pleasures, which is the basis of popular entertainments, wasproscribed for millennia. From shamans to mystics to stoic philosophers to political activists toscientists: all regarded pleasure to be antithetical to knowledge, enlightenment, salvation, and theattainment of paradise (where only then can pleasures be trusted). But we, in the art world, reallyhave no right to be so disturbed and disgruntled by the inspired and received promise of a futureholding out art in parity with entertainment. It's been nearly two centuries that the age-oldconviction that art is more noble and ennobling than entertainment had first shown itself to bevulnerable to the erosions of an increasingly relativistic civilization. Among the first significantresponses to photography and the advances in printing that came with the Industrial Revolution isthe prescient remark in 1835 by the German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, that civilization hadcome to prefer the copy of life to the original.

Depictions of entertainments, meanwhile, slipped into the canvases of the avant-garde paintersManet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and ultimately yielded the vulgar night life of Toulouse-Lautrec andthe young Picasso. A full century ago, the Dada artists brought popular objects and theiriconography into the field of art making as political protest against the masterpieces that failed totame the barbarisms of the monarchies who unleashed the First World War. Visionaries such asHannah Höch, Raoul Haussman, John Heartfield, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Marcel Duchampscandalized aesthetes by making art that provoked laughter as their response to a world taking itselfso seriously that war and destruction was its natural response to adversity.

The Surrealists were natural entertainers in taking up Freud's cue that puns, and the seeminglyinanity of dreams, were a path to healthy behaviors. Humorous plays on language run throughoutthe paintings of Salvador Dali and the films of Luis Buñuel, as they do in the work of Merit

Oppenheim, Max Ernst, and later Yves Klein. Giorgio De Chirico also entertains, though he opts forthe trope (or is it the parody?) of suspense over humor. It can even be said that the Surrealists gavefuture generations of artists permission to entertain. Certainly Robert Rauchenberg, Jasper Johns,Andy Warhol, Marisol Escobar, Claes Oldenberg, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, and most everypurveyor of Pop Art thought so. So did Nam June Paik as he brought a punning video art to thedreaded TV, and in architecture, Robert Venturi taught that we should learn from the vernacularsignage of the Las Vegas strip and its casinos instead of from the colonnades, palladiums, palacesand cupolas of Athens, Rome, Paris, Isfahan, or even New York and Chicago.

But whether as a reaction or as an independent assertion of aesthetic puritanism, the increasedpoliticization of culture in the 1960s and 1970s led to severe, even ascetic proscriptions. This isnowhere better conveyed than in Minimalist art, Conceptualism and the spread of Situationist anti-aesthetics that pared down expression and content to barest structure and sparest concept. Theminimalist puritanism holding artists back from employing entertainments is nowhere betterexpressed than in the famous 1965 "No Manifesto" issued by the dancer and choreographer, YvonneRainer. Rainer's spare approach to dance grew as much out of Bertolt Brecht's distancing effect intheater as from the reductionist dictates of minimalist sculpture. Her intent: to eliminate any and allelements in her staged performances (and later her films) that might lead to entertainments. Hermethod of negation says:

"No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to theglamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trashimagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction ofspectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved."

As Rainer's Brechtian-inspired manifesto indicates, Weinstein has good reason to settle on Brecht asthe catalyst and pillar of the anti-entertainment sentiment in art making. Before Brecht, thebourgeois Left in the 19th century may have been wary of enjoying the same arts accorded privilegeby the aristocracies of Europe, while the aristocrats were indifferent to the entertainment of themasses. It is ironic that Marx and Engles, neither of whom wrote any major directives on art, arewell known for having followed the aristocracy and academics in their prejudice for the classics ofVirgil, Plautus, and Persius; the medieval German poets Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram vonEschenbach, and the modern literature of Balzac, Dickens, Schiller and Heine. The irony is, besidesbeing writers who possess a social consciousness and a basis in history--which inform the 19th-century narrative of all the machinations of personal drives and passions that act as cause and effectfor poverty, war and division of humanity by class--most of these writers, as well as a great portionof the classics written before and since, have shaped the entertainments of the masses in both

theater and film.

Among art-political dissidents, it isn't until after the October Revolution in Russia that a number ofartist-workers drew up the manifestos of the art of agitprop, which severely demarcated thedifference between the art of the bourgeoise and the proletariat. But agitprop quickly becamediscredited with the tragic assumption by Stalin over the guardianship of culture and the greatCommunist persecution of artists. We know too well of how Socialist Realism was made the onlyacceptable and official art of the Soviets and later of the Chinese and Communist Southeast Asiannations.

Seen against the backdrop of the purges of the Red East, Brecht was the West's more moderaterepresentative of what became exaggeratedly called Marxist aesthetics. Rather than coerceaudiences into becoming revolutionaries, he appealed to playrights, stage directors, and theiraudiences to choose to be liberated from bourgeois entertainments. Brecht's principle of theatre,and by implication all art, is an outgrowth of Marx's description of Dialectical Materialism at work inthe progressive evolution of civilization. In short, Brecht urged that viewers should be afforded thenarratives that provide insight on the world, but artists and spectators alike should strive to keepfrom identifying emotionally with the characters or action unfolding before them, while in place ofbeing entertained, we should critically reflect on what the action on the stage means in terms of thewell being of society. Brecht's "distancing effect" as it became known, and his opposition to Hitler'sNational Socialist movement, together endeared him to the Left, to the extent that the love affairwith his method is still championed by not just political advocates around the world, but byintellectuals and avant-gardes of all stripes working today.

Matthew Weinstein, Chariots of the Gods, 2009; Natassha Richardson, voiceover.

Brecht's distancing effect can even be seen used by Weinstein himself as he seeks to elevateentertainment by infusing it with ironic structures and motifs that scrutinize and satirize slackpopulist productions, while aspiring to raising the I.Q. of the entertainment enthusiast. But in this he

differs little from the performance artist Laurie Anderson, the rock musician David Byrne, or the filmdirector Kathryn Bigelow, in that Weinstein is bringing the concept of high artistry to a popular formof entertainment--primarily 3D animation and motion capture video. But he is doing it by holisticallyincorporating theater, music, painting, sculpture, narrative and poetry that entertains as much as itprovokes thought.

Weinstein is in some ways indebted to the Pictures Artists--particularly Jack Goldstein and to a lesserextent Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. He is as well informed by the same film directors whoinfluenced them--Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alain Resnais--for the variety andrange of pictorial and thematic strategies with which they opened up the art world to entertainmentsafter Guy Debord and Yvonne Rainer closed it down with their interpretations of Brechtianinterventionism and reductionist aesthetics. Cindy Sherman above all opened the door for depictionsthat simultaneously doubled as semiotics and entertainment. In performance art, Laurie Andersonsoon after incorporated humor that was as much entertaining as it was reflexive of the underlyingstructures of her work's medium and message.

Weinstein references this long legacy with his video, Childhood of Bertolt Brecht, a parody of Brechtas barely more than a baby, yet already endowed with a Dialectical Materialist consciousness. But asa baby, he is still overcome by infantile fantasies of animals who can talk and space-travelingspectators--an ingenious ploy for Weinstein to inject his own brand of populist dialectics which hesees invading the art world on numerous fronts. The revolution being called for, specifically by who,against whom, and for what aim, Baby Brecht never informs us. That wouldn't be entertaining. Moreimportantly, and ironically, Weinstein puts Brecht's own distancing effect to work to remind us of

what an irrational and coercive imperative the Marxist fantasy of regulated art is, and which we cansee for ourselves as Marxism unspools from the main agenda the world over. Weinstein doesn'tdismiss Brecht as much as he pokes fun at the image Brecht carried with him of an audience thatcan not only be politically aroused by a theater denied catharsis (which Brecht believed made peoplecomplacent), but a production that would sustain that political consciousness long after the audienceleaves the theater and thereby (wishfully) effects revolutionary change in the world. In illuminatingthe naiveté of such thinking, Baby Brecht, as Weinstein models him, might have been tortured andexecuted in any number of the Marxist regimes of the 20th century for the flamboyantly bourgeoiscounterrevolutionary rhetoric that Weinstein has him mouthing.

When I write that Weinstein employs his own distancing effect on his audience, I mean that hesupplies imagery or objects that disorient us in the Surrealist or the Skeptical tradition of pittingreality and subjectivity off one another. Whether that disorientation is effected with a 3D animationvideo or through contact with his painting, writing, or sculptural installations, Weinstein's art maynot make us more politically aware of oppression, but it makes us feel uncomfortable with both thethought that there is a presumed, ideologically correct way of thinking, at the same time that we aremade to regret the cynicism that emotionally arrests our idealism. Weinstein seems to be feeling hisway to a position in between cynicism and idealism, much as does today's Left-liberal, upper-middleclass intellectual in America and Europe has come to tentively endorse, however wearily, acapitalism conditioned by taxation proportionate to an individual's wealth. It is the Left's seeminglylast recourse amid the spoils of failed socialisms. And it comes with an equally resigned attitudetoward the mass production that we associate with the flush economics that make entertainment sopragmatic, if not appealing.

Playing to that Left-liberal audience, Weinstein's animations, sculpture and painting together markout the conceptual, material, economic and social terrain that this class paternally defines asdesirable for all. We might add the adjective "effete" to the list--the effete Left intellectual--ascharacterized in the The Childhood of Bertolt Brecht by the jazzy koi fish who sings lilting yetdownbeat lyrics that seem to come as much from existentialist poems of the 1940s and 1950s as theydo the chanteuses of the postwar American songbook. As we are entertained by the fantasy of asultry singing fish, we also may find the music evokes an ambiance given over to the addictions oflove and drugs even as the lyrics sing to us of contingencies and ambiguities of a vaguermetaphysical stream-of-consciousness. But because the ambiguities win out lyrically andcontextually, we are more entertained to the point of being charmed than prompted to work out thecomplexities of real-world implications being skirted over. In this respect, Weinstein is the anti-Brechtian music video director who uses Brechtian methods to foil Brechtian (Marxist) politics. Orperhaps more to the point, he poses a foil to those pseudo-Brechtians who sound out Marxist speakwhile enjoying all the bourgeois privileges of capitalists.

Yet Weinstein also poses a counterpoint to Jeff Koons. Whereas Koons has become known forseducing collectors into outlaying enormous sums for objects that appear to be oversized,sentimental kitsch they would never be caught dead in possession of without the high-artprovenance, Weinstein is the collector's friend looking out for his buyer's interests and vanities--which may be to the Left or to the Right, but is above all too complex and varied to stereotype. Forone thing, Weinstein has a seemingly innate sense of restraint that may or may not do him good,depending on whom one asks. But that restraint is the outcome of the logic that Weinstein applies tohis installations, each of which is loosely composed of stream-of-consciousness narratives or poemscentered around a video and/or a sculpture or painting. In the past, Weinstein's installations havebeen relatively contained, making it easy to read their meanings as a whole. Of late, they havebecome more oblique, a challenge to decipher--if deciphering matters. Either way, were Weinstein toindulge Koons' ostentatious kitsch, we would lose sight of his logic and his proclivity for phasing inand out of streams of consciousness, a loss Weinstein will likely never allow.

Weinstein's most recent installation, The Celestial Sea, is an example in which spectacle is ample butno less sparsely parsed out for the sake of whatever lucidity can be seized on to carry us away onsome spontaneous current of consciousness. Weinstein assembles an exhibition of diverse media thatby their appearances alone have little in common but are, in keeping with his metaphorical theme ofthe celestial sea, akin to life preservers that keep us afloat in an ocean of metaphysical uncertaintythreatening to swallow us. The nexus of the exhibition is a bronze anchor that sits in the center ofthe floor, and which according to Weinstein's narrative has fallen from the sea of the sky. Around thewalls of the two galleries hang a series of paintings composed of interlacing circles forming a kind ofgradient mesh painted by Weinstein with stencils. For this non-technical viewer, they summon tomind the circular reflections that manifest when aiming a camera at the sun, or more thematically,when squinting at the sun while awakening or coming to consciousness. Weinstein claims that thepaintings depict "the paths of virtual lights within a 3D computer program as they sweep acrossvirtual space, creating patterns that evoke Kandinsky, Kupka, Emma Kunz and Delaunay."

Only one of the four paintings has its abstract surface overlain with a text. Although written byWeinstein, it unreels its stream-of-consciousness scenarios in styles evocative variously of theauthors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Anna Kavan, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. In a related phasingout and in of contents, a 3D animation video of two souvenir-like toy ships passing each other on a

reflective sea has appropriated the title and date of the movie, Cruisining, 1980 as its title. The filmreferenced, a psychological thriller directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino as anundercover cop investigating the serial killings of gay men, upon its release garnered considerablenoteriety for casting Pacino in a role in which he must cruise a sea of gay men out for sex--any ofwhom could become the killer's next victim. In utter disjunction with the rest of the show, the finalcomponent is a painting reprising the face of the boy Bertolt Brecht, an image that is a holdoverfrom Weinstein's 2012 video and installation, Childhood of Bertolt Brecht. No doubt, Brecht is hereintervening on our reverie in the Celestial Sea to remind us that we are not really in the CelestialSea, but in a Chelsea gallery. And upon noting this we also note the somewhat skewed, yetrecombinant sound pun: 'Celestial sea,' 'Chel sea.'

Apart from appreciating Weinstein's stream-of-consciousness on display, it seems likely that fewviewers will take the time or the trouble to fathom what invisible unity connects the disparate workson view, and this is what is both problematic and attractive about the show. Solipsism is hardly aninsult to today's artists, especially those equipped with the software enabling them to imagine aphenomenologically subjective multiverse at their disposal. But unity still matters collectively,especially in an art form challenging the proscription of entertainment. Entertainment, after all,must entertain people, and unless one is an archeologist or a criminal detective, loose-fittingfragments by themselves don't entertain.

It is only after we read the gallery press release that we learn The Celestial Sea "refers to a storyfrom the 13th century about a sailor who climbs down from his ship floating in another world abovethe clouds--by the time he reaches the surface of the earth, he has drowned." But while this helps usunderstand why a simulated ship anchor stands in the middle of the gallery, even with thisinformation we're left bereft of the thread connecting the other images to the anchor. If we try hardenough, the threads gradually entwine. But what effort it takes!

The animated video of the toy souvenir ships passing as they reflect the setting sun summon to mindthe ship from which the dead sailor must have tumbled as he fell into the sky. That the sailor is from

another world is no doubt analogous to the dead gay men killed by a homophobic serial killer. It's astretch, but on reflection, in 1980, gay men in a heterosexual world lived too much like sailors awayfrom sea--out of their element.

The paintings, meanwhile, simulate the blinding glare as one gazes into the sun, perhaps whenfloating on the sea, or falling through the sky to one's death, or when waking up after being washedashore. And the young Bertolt Brecht: Is he really only here to interrupt our immersion in theinstallation? Or is he here to draw us further in to the virtual world, which would make him a badBertolt for failing to remind us that we are only experiencing a work of art alluding to our ownconsciousness as viewers of the "constantly shifting boundaries between physical reality and virtualreality."

As with any puzzle, piecing together the disparate meanings gleaned from Weinstein's exhibition isenthralling. What is not enthralling is having to refer to Weinstein's press release for our start. Atleast it's not as enthralling as it might have been had there been a work, perhaps a video, to help usbegin piecing the totality of the show together, as there have been in previous Weinsteininstallations.

I'm going to now state an argument that I will later seeimngly refute just so that both trains ofthought are aired dialectically, as Brecht would have had it. My first train of thought is thatWeinstein is perhaps in this installation too influenced by high-modernist stream-of-consciousnessnovels and films, whereby such disparate parts can be experienced in succession without apparentconnection by the artist, yet still be connected by the audience. But such narrative works arebounded by a single medium--the book or the film--within which can be found the unity that impartsmeaning upon repeated returns and reconsiderations. When the boundary of an artwork is brokendown and its metaphorical referents are scattered among diverse media across a space to which wehave limited access, as are Weinstein's gallery installations, the demands of the detective work andthe presence of mind required to piece together the meanings precludes participation for mostgallery goers. We are all too busy piecing together the meanings encountered in the diverse events

of our lives to be able to do the same for a tentative narrative in a gallery space.

On the other hand--and this leap to my other, perhaps opposite, train of thought is the dialecticalmethod at work--each of the individual works in The Celestial Sea, and the grouping of the virtual,reflectiive light paintings, entertain us by virtue of their unities regardless of their unresolvedmeanings when judged together as an installation. And if two centuries of modern art have taught usanything, it's that we don't require to know the meanings of works of art, or their relations to otherworks, to find them pleasing individually.

In the end, it's our inability to identify any one overarching meaning unifying the full repertoire ofnarratives, imagery, and forms operative in Weinstein's installation as a whole that identifies thework to be more of the realm of mind than of materiality. In this regard. Weinstein is displaying akind of dialectical thinking liberated from materialism, as materiality has limited, if any, sovereigntyin the realm of the ideas of the mind. For that matter, the dialectical materialism of Debord, Brecht,and ultimately of Marx, is a misnomer, a fiction, in that materials are not comprised of pairs ofopposites (what dialectics join together). For that matter, opposition is not a material relationship.The confusion comes when, in our material existence, we confuse difference with opposition, whichit is not. Difference is merely perceived, and mistakenly, as opposition.

Only meanings (that is, ideas) are oppositional, and hence are also dialectical, which means that thevery mental nature of meanings suggest that they have opposites that we can attempt to reconcile.This is why Weinstein, along with the cyberpunks, and before them, the stream-of-consciousnesswriters, and like most of today's cgi artists as well, are all more assuredly artists of the mind than ofmateriality. Weinstein's meanings are fleeting, hard to grasp and hold onto. And they are that waybecause he doesn't attempt to resolve opposites. For when we realize that differences in the worldare not oppositions, and from this we infer that opposites are only figments of the mind, not ofmateriality or reality, we no longer feel a need to resolve what we perceive as oppositions. Werealize differences--say, different ideas--can co-exist in the mind without conciliation. Thecoexistence of their unresolved, unreconciled differences are, in a rather old-fashioned expression, a

matter of mind over matter. Stream of consciousness. Virtual reality. An imaginarium. The Matrix.The phenomenalogical. Dreamtime. Trance. The referents for the medium are legion, cross-cultural,and as ancient-yet-ageless as human, perhaps even animal, consciousness.

What's important is that streams of consciousness, virtual reality, the mind, the Matrix--whatever wechoose to call it--is Weinstein's ultimate medium--albeit, a medium imposed with obvious unresolvedtensions when joined to his material media. But we must learn to recalibrate our criteria to thismedium of unrestrained subjectivity. Weinstein enjoys the greater nuances of dialectical pairings--pairings of ideas and pairings of media. But in the mindspace that we have come to call virtualworlds, worlds where we only temporarily mediate a shared collectivity defined by the boundaries ofcomputers and software, Weinsten shows himself to feel most assured. The signs of Weinstein'sconfidence of mind are the same signs conveyed by the cyberpunks, the stream-of-consciousnesswriters, the cgi artists designing virtual realities, even the mystics and shamans in their states oftrance. Their common sentiment is that they feel free to operate in this mindscape as if there is norequirement for fixed meanings or fixed durations for entertaining meanings. Any desire toprolonging or unifying ideas is merely an effect of one's psychological dependency on materialreality being dragged into the virtual, trance world. It is those of us who feel Weinstein's art ofvirtual worlds of the mind is unresolved who are at fault. For we have not yet learned to keep ourmaterial expectations behind in the material world where they belong.

In this, we who are too attached to the material world, even if it be the world of high art--and artistsand their admirers are the easiest to fall prey to the trappings of the material world--are inferior tothe fans of such entertainments as sci-fi and super hero comic books and movies. Anyone who hasseen the Matrix Trilogy knows that to flourish in the virtual world, one has to stop conforming toearthly gravity to fly; has to not die when a mountain falls on top of her; has to stop treating the

Matrix as a dream to become omnipotent. In the same way, critics of art made with the virtual worldin mind have to stop applying the criteria of material art to virtual art. The Surrealists taught us thatmuch about their liberation from logic, but we've forgotten it because theirs was an avant-garderevolution that had no where near the accessibility to the masses that our cgi artists have.

In short, there is no need for continuity or resolution of ideas in the recesses of the mind that haveno relevance to our material survival. By descending into the solipsistic depths of Weinstein's TheCelestial Sea, we come closer to realizing the revolution of 3D entertainments. Our choice is toevolve into the virtual worlds that Weinstein and other cgi artists like him provide, or remain contentin being bound to the material art and reality of the past.

Vive la révolution of the mind! Vive le spectacle of entertainments!

Matthew Weinstein, Cruising 1980, 2010

On 3/16/13 the author added the last two images seen in this post and expanded on the finalcommentary. They were not included in the original post.

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