Sudden Death in the Multi-User Dungeon
Sudden Death in the Multi-User Dungeon
Reviewed: "Multi-User Dungeon" at Petzel Gallery, curated by Simon Denny
Games, virtual space, multiplayer politics: see Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), an exhibition curated by artist Simon Denny at Petzel. His own solo shows at Petzel and Dunkunsthalle seem to have eclipsed this significant group show that closes March 30th. Denny brings together artists old and young in a mini-survey of art and games’ intersection over the years. The show throws back to a pre-Internetmaxxed era and demonstrates how the once wild and free virtual world became the warlike, divided network machine we have now.
In the back office, Suzanne Treister’s early computer landscapes in Virtual Wilderness (1991-92/2020) tempts us with now historical images of a still-unsettled digital West, beckoning us in with a system prompt to “NOW ENTER A VIRTUAL WILDERNESS”. This is the starting gun for the clamorous homesteading of virtual space by kids, gamers, artists, nerds, and capitalists, and which in hindsight foreshadows the enclosure of the Internet into strict platform boundaries and permission systems (listen to Denny’s interview with Joshua Citarella on “enclosure”).
Brown Benton (2004) by Seth Price is another sort of conceptual landscape, one which appropriates Thomas Hart Benton’s Prodigal Son (1939-41) in a calendar format along with its gallery label at the Dallas Museum of Art. Prodigal Son itself is a parody of a New Testament parable; in Price’s calendar, there is an ironic recursion at play, each successive reentrant to the fable trying to return home, but finding it ever desolated and empty. Twenty years on, we return to Brown Benton, but this time there is not even a territory to return to, but rather time itself. The calendar year, 2004, offers nothing more than a coy shrug.
Then there’s Matthias Groebel’s machine-painted, low-res TV grabs, one of them being Untitled (156) (1995), an agonized man banging his head against the wall of a brightly lit room. It’s a proto-meme, a single-panel rage comic. “Bird Man” adds some comedic relief to a show that’s about games but is actually rather self-serious. This is how we feel losing a game; or perhaps when we witness another mind-boggling funding package pass through congress to fund not one but two foreign wars.
Öyvind Fohlström, a Swede born in Brazil in 1928, is cool, and it’s too bad he died young in 1976. He was hot. He lived in the same building as Jasper Johns and was friends with Rauschenberg. “Study for Phase 3 of ‘The Cold War’” (1964/68) sees the combatants of the Cold War take their sides. A nice neighborhood kid on the grass and a spring loaded boxing glove are imaged by a spy satellite as tiny mice scamper in an infinite loop. War is all just a game for its belligerents (in this case, a game of chicken), but from the planetary view, we’re just rats running in circles.
Tishan Hsu and Yngve Holen are a conspiratorial duo in the corner of the front gallery. Holen’s 5G Airscale Black (2023), quite literally a blacked-out 5G radio sold by Nokia, feels spiritually more like a downed plane’s “black box” that’s designed to emit distress signals. It’s out of sorts and ominous, but it comes to make sense next to Tishan Hsu’s gorgeously textured Gray-Zone 8 (2023), a wireless communication in two dimensions. In the mixed-media drawing, Hsu renders the spiritual phenomenon of the smartphone: a smirking portrait is seen through computer vision through a black rectangle. One bright iPhone-style slim rectangle glowers above, constantly scanning for the strongest network to latch onto. The glitched figure is ambivalent to the 5G radio waves passing through his eyes and ears. He goes cross-eyed. The radio waves swirl around the canvas into vortexes and whirlpools. This is the view from inside the network.
An unconscious undercurrent in the show reveals itself. Isabelle Francis McGuire’s neo-medieval, motion-detecting Bust2 (2023) hides the U.S. flag underneath its layers of chainmail. It relays the immanent nationalism underlying a gaming industry that produces such titles as Assassin’s Creed and other death-mongering Triple-A games like Call of Duty: WWII (soundbites of which play when you move in front of the bust1). Bust2 is both an inconsequential in-game NPC and a real-world wartime grunt. This grunt plays war games in the evening and wakes up the next morning to spend the day drone-striking civilians. The lines ever blur between fiction and reality, and it’s in the Western war machine’s best interest to make it that way.
Kline, coming off an enormous survey at the Whitney last year, has a thing for on-the-nose all-American critical art. As for Reality Television (2023), I can’t see any reason to cover a TV in the U.S. flag and title it “Reality Television” in 2023, and so I have to believe that it represents something greater than itself within the context of Denny’s show, hung so proudly at the entrance to the gallery. At its core, the beflagged screen symbolizes the U.S.’s manifest destiny over digital images and digital space. It welcomes a progressively violent realism in games that come to resemble life, just as life now has come to resemble games. The two converge at a point in this show, which may well be a celebration of games2, but can’t help but shine light on the fact that within the American digital empire, every “game” — from gamified social platforms like TikTok to “innocent” first-person shooters — ultimately become weapons.
This feature was broken when I visited MUD at Petzel, but I also saw this piece at McGuire’s solo show at King’s Leap last year.
Denny proclaimed in a post on X that “my Dungeon exhibition is meant to celebrate not denigrate virtual worlds and game testing”, but rather “highlights that important role they play in the world”.