American Visions
Written for the Utne Reader, December, 1995
Reviewed by Scot Hacker
AMERICAN VISIONS (Creative Labs, 1901 McCarthy Boulevard; Milpitas, CA, 95035. Windows and Mac. $49.95)
Roy Neuberger has collected Great American Artwork for over 60 years. His New York gallery features original pieces from artists as diverse as Milton Avery and Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and Max Weber. He is an honest, intelligent, and articulate man who has never sold a painting for profit. He's also on CD-ROM.
Rather than attempting to provide an encyclopedic overview of national art movements, American Visions walks us through the 185 original works that comprise Neuberger's gallery, augmenting gorgeous visuals with background information, context, and links to related artists and movements. One can view movies which capture the artist creating or discussing the pieces, listen to Neuberger recall his first encounters with the artists, or watch kinetic sculptures spinning in the wind. Still shots of the artists and their friends are populous, as is commentary by poets, essayists, and critics.
Much to its credit, AV attaches a lot of gravity to the historical context of the art it hosts. Not only is "View by year" one of the main display options, but year-by-year datelines outline salient events from 1906-1988. Works thus come to be seen as necessary results of the historical current, rather than as free-floating entities. Being able to connect the Watts riots of 1965 to Robert Rauschenberg's "Untitled," from the same year encourages digestion of both the piece and the time.
Oddly enough, although AV succeeds so well on this count, it surprisingly fails on a similar one. "View by school" is another main display option, and although you can, with the click of a button, view all of the Biomorphic Abstractionists represented in the gallery, you won't get more than a single cryptic sentence to explain what the movement was, how it came to be, or what its repercussions were. With so much attention to detail and background information elsewhere on the disk, this seems an unaccountable oversight on the part of the designers.
AV's interface features an attractive (and original) layer of wood-trimmed burlap, overlayed with dozens of thumbnail versions of the pieces, people, and movements the tour represents. Neuberger's commentary is relaxed, thorough, and useful; the tour feels personal, not at all cold. And although no art thrown onto your computer screen is ever going to appear as rich and fulfilling as it would in person, this disk adds enough value to the gallery experience to obviate questions like "Why not just go there?"
[Writers] [Birdhouse]