| Artist: | Doug Buis |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Untitled Landscape | |
| Date: | 1999 | |
| Medium: | mixed media | |
| Dimensions: | 7"x6"x9" | |
| File Size: | 47813 | |
| File Width: | 450 | |
| Dominic Szeto Art History 611 Nov. 18, 1999 Dr. Kleinfelder We are lured, as it were, inside Doug Buis's plywood, virtual reality of stereoscopic puffy clouds and miniature figurines by Leonora Carrington's surrealist poetics: "To possess a telescope without its essential half--the microscope--seems to [be] a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope." Using "low tech" optics and "outside-camera" effects, Buis projects a tele-micro-vision that simultaneously constructs a childishly endearing world of three dimensional desert space and a fiendishly cryptic world of postmodern self-suspicion. This stereoscopic, hyperrealistic landscape, or what he labels as "virtual reality still," navigates and collapses the coded spaces between miniature/giant, low technology/high technology, make-believe/disbelief, imaginary/symbolic, art(ifice)/criticism by becoming too realistic to be real, too hyper to be hype. That is, the pulsating three dimensional effects of the stereoscope--the spectacle--becomes so heightened that it reveals itself to be the mere affect that it always was. The conflation and hyphenation of simulation and reality is thus short-circuited by overloading the very code of optics and perspective that produced the virtual reality in the first place. Buis moves beyond, however, by retreating from, mere theoretical critique, for his work operates on the premise that one must be willing to suspend all disbelief, like a child, in order to engage in the critical discourse of disbelief. Buis playfully navigates. So, although his work is informed by a political, ecological, and social urgency, the critical theory of Jean Baudrillard, and an actual surrealist travel story (that begins mid-sentence and ends with the travel brochure-like claim: "Egypt was exciting."), Buis' stereoscope first and foremost revels in the pure joy and seduction of simulation, for only then, ironically, can it act out--as mischief and simulation--our (in?)ability to distinguish simulacrum from reality. Hence: critique as play, play as critique. As a further retreat from critical theory, Buis believes in the possibility of a "non-verbal state of consciousness." If his stereoscopic views does traverse the realms of belief and disbelief, art and criticism, imaginary and symbolic, then Buis might have chanced upon Jacques Lacan' notion of the Real: the place where theory ends. This whimsical fall of high technology is therefore a comical yet disturbing allegory of theory's self appointed righteousness and mastery--a self appointment which returns full circle to Carrington's warning of a "dark incomprehension." | ||
