Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through Sept. 11

The funny thing about any new technology is that, before you know it, it becomes obsolete, said Miranda Siegel in New York. Digital artist Cory Arcangel seeks out bygone cutting-edge devices—a computer printer that uses miniature pencils, ’80s arcade games, “a monstrously heavy portable video recorder from 1974 that accepts only one impossible-to-find tape format”—then uses them to create compelling installations. His one-man Whitney show is a veritable “celebration of this kind of forlorn, funny-sad cultural detritus.” The exhibit’s centerpiece projects onto a wall various video bowling games from the past. “Starting with a crude Atari version and ending several product cycles later with the hyperreal GameCube, the technology evolves,” but Arcangel has re-engineered each game so that it allows gutter balls only. The piece playfully critiques the absurd ways we use technology: “The graphics and sound get better and better, but the player keeps losing—in part because he’s sitting in his living room, fake-bowling.”

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The most powerful aspect of the work is in the games’ “ever-sharper depiction of human emotion,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The piece seems to trace “a kind of dawning of existential despair” in the way it charts the player’s evolution from “pre–Pac-Man grunt to a relatively realistic tantrum thrower” collapsing and pounding the floor. Unfortunately, such moments of brilliance are rare. Given Arcangel’s promising early output, what’s here feels a bit austere, especially when the humanism vanishes and the artist seems merely to be providing wry commentary on minimalism or other art-world-only concerns. Maybe the power of some of his digital work was inadvertent and the human element only slipped in by chance. His passions seem to lead mostly to “low-affect art-about-art.”