5.4.1 innocence exposed:

With no context to guide us, we could fairly readily identify the type of image at the left and its probable purpose. Even though the woman wears no ring, and perhaps because of that, the picture asserts the happy couple-hood of the two individuals. It is the sort of picture people in their later twenties might send out at Christmas. What could be more wholesome than the shine on her cheek? The Onion reveals a double complexity beneath the surface: "S&M Couple Won't Stop Droning On About Their Fetishes." They tell all their friends of fondness for SM role playing and practices, which supposedly shows them to be adventurous and open-minded, but, The Onion reports, their friends find their constant return to this topic makes them just as boring and uptight as the "normals." Their real fetish, the woman's former roommate concludes, is talking about fetishes; that discourse (fetish talk?) is the target of the satire.

5.4.2 the intensification of the banal

Here we have a rather amateurishly composed snapshot of a woman who has received the "employee of the month" award from the local Target store in Franklin, Tennessee (one of about 1000 Target stores). The picture may be the Polaroid photo which, the article reports, was slipped into the Employee of the Month plaque. Such a picture documenting the award may have value to the recipient, but on the face of it the event would ordinarily receive no wider notice than the store newsletter. The text, (Headline: "Employee of the Month Sad It's Already the 19th") rather than revealing some unsuspected wider significance, dwells precisely on the completely routine nature of the award, the fleetingness of its fame, and its success in motivating the employee to "raise the level of her performance" by straightening out laundry baskets and refolding every towel. The target of the satire is the discourse of Human Resources Management ("Catbert") in the dead end world of minimum wage, minimum skill world of discount marketing.

5.4.3 brochure art exposed

The picture of three elderly persons enjoying a glass of wine on a lawn, presumably, of their "retirement community" opens a site at chickenhead.com called "Treasury of Geriatric Erotica." This is an advert for a library of six classic titillating tales of erotic dalliance among the very aged. Each title has its own image and jacket blurb and each asserts that lust can still burn brightly, triumphing over walkers and pacemakers and colostomy bags and bladder control devices. The images are vignettes from the life of the elderly (socializing, receiving medical care, taking exercise, gathering around the piano, and touring in a Winnebago)—the sort of thing you might find in a brochure for a retirement community. The text, however, purports to reveal a secret vitality behind this bland and wholesome surface, though in fact it also repeatedly alludes to various debilities. Neither the erotic nor the frightening and humiliating parts are depicted. The titillating parts seem largely fantasy and incipient senile dementia, but the loss of basic bodily functions is a sure fact. In a sense, the blurb texts and the images share a similar tone in that they both affirm the possibilities of life for the aged, but the text lets much more of the disturbing and disgusting parts of that life leak through. Text is able to call these parts to mind while saying something quite different, thus exposing the images as nothing more than a facade.

5.4.4 50s' cheerful smiles exposed

The "happy people in a happy world" look of 1950's illustrations and advertisements has become a favorite object of satire, associated as it is with the formation of suburban consumer society and the return of women to the role of homemaker. The images of this era are something of a specialty for chickenhead.com, from which all three of these example are taken. The first at the left is actually one of a sizable set of animated banners that they have used, usually as anchors to a page developing the notion epitomized in the banner. Virtually all of these banners match a 50s retro image with some text that represents a messy or unpleasant reality glossed over by the image. Here the animation flips through from top to bottom at 1.75 second intervals with words that belie the ever-pleasant permed and pearly-toothed visage of the "ideal woman."

"Chesterfields" is one from another chickenhead site, a rather large display of cigarette adverts from the 1940s and 50s called Truth in Advertising: A Collection of Vintage Cigarette Advertisements from the Age of Innocence. It is introduced by a page contrasting that pleasant illusory world of innocence with the grim health consequences as we now know them. "Gosh Darn, Wally!" it exclaims at the disparity, and then provides 52 reproductions of period cigarette ads with some of the "Fun small print" highlighted for each ad (without comment). In these pages, the text and the image are completely congruent; the effect of 52 pages of image and "fun small print" is to dramatize the wide gulf that separates us from that "innocence." This dramatizing may in turn lead to a certain nostalgia, even though (or because?) the introduction concludes "This site is powered by the white-hot bitterness of long-term Nicotine withdrawal." We at this point are very close to Richard Prince's Marlboro Man images and the question of whether "noticing" can be a critical act. The ironic title of the site does reflect some of the bitterness and leaves us in little doubt that we are about to enter an exhibit of prime examples of the Big Lie (in one of its forms) but, as Plato feared, the images were and are appealing and would perhaps retain that appeal even if each one had a little skull in the corner, or a Surgeon General's warning. The contemporary viewer knows their promises are snares and delusions but still can wish they were true and that we could inhabit the world they project, a world with no unpleasant long term consequences.

On this account of the five types, I have argued that the target of each of these satires is a discursive practice: fetish talk, educational funding policy, human resources management, news-interviewing, promotional brochures, 1950's advertising, fundamentalism, and NRA's version of kid-talk. All call attention to, and some clearly critique discursive practices that are alive socially and would not make their point if we were unfamiliar with these practices. I do not mean to suggest that these discourses are purely text, for they do make use of "visuals" as well, and in the case of the 50s adverts, may be predominantly visual. It is not the visual modes of signification that are the main target, however, but the discursive practices of which they are a part.

Conclusion

It will not have escaped the reader/viewer that these Web satires are, as we say, fairly broad, unsubtle, and simple in their implied repudiation of a discursive practice. Aligning oneself in relation to a discursive practice is clearly not the same as aligning oneself to a particular work that is familiar and much thought upon. At times, the motive for either sort of alignment can be desecration, as when one Web satirist exposed Santa Claus as a voyeur and pederast, which is a bit like drawing a mustache on La Giaconda and captioning it "L.H.O.O.Q." But the sort of rich relation of past and present image that Witkin, for example, creates—homage across great cultural distances—is hard to imagine at the present state of development of net.art, when perhaps the most widely known image is that of Mouchette's attacking cat, and that is still known only to fans of net.art. The most direct and extensive connection of net.art to the History of Art is Dean Brown's An Incomplete History of Art, where Barbies and Kens are posed in many classical settings, and that, alas, has been taken off line without explanation or farewell. (It is still linked by over 300 sites, several months after going down.) Barbie has become quite the Web celeb, despite Mattel, Inc.'s vigorous opposition, but I do not wish to offer her as the epitome of how a Web image can acquire meaning. Nor, for that matter, do I wish to include Morimura's recent version of La Giaconda naked and quite pregnant as anything other than the spelling out of what some have long suspected. It is not even clear to me that Web images can or should establish complex relations to images from the History of Art, even though those images are available as never before just a few clicks away as one surfs or works on line. But it is clear that net.art needs to summon and marshall its contexts, as Jon Ippolito said, or it will be severely limited in how much it can mean. Looked at from a different angle, viewers may need to be prepared to do some of the contextualizing and sorting work of galleries and museums, some of the work that Ippolito was asked to do. This also means that a standard semiotics that sets out to read the code from the work is likely to be unproductive.

Harlan Wallach, Chicago Murder Sites (c. 1992).
Currently 14 image/text pairs can be viewed at http://smith.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~harlan/arthole/cms/ index.html.

An example will illustrate these points. Chicago Murder Sites is a minor Web classic, having been on line since 1996. As it appears on the Web at the Northwestern site, it has little or no explanatory material, no artist's or curator's statement, no interviews, nothing but high modernist "the work itself." The work consists of fourteen pairs of texts and images describing and depicting sites of murders in Chicago. The texts are excerpts of newspaper accounts of the murders and the images are presumably of the sites where the described murders occurred. Nothing is said about the pictures, which are dark, restricted in tonal range, oddly tilted, many shot from ground level. There are no bodies—in fact no human figures of any kind—just pictures of alleys and dumpsters, houses, apartment buildings, and rundown shops. These 14 sites can be reached from a single index page which has the sites plotted with red pins on a map of Chicago. (Each pin is a hot link to an image/text pair.)

Without very much more to go on, Sean Williams analyzed the images in this site using the Kress and van Leeuwen semiotic framework, picking up on such things as the apparent positioning of the camera, and hence the viewer, on the ground and the numerous strong oblique angles, concluding that there are "dissonances" in the camera's views: at times they are "objective" and "uninvolved" but at others they are subjective, subjugated, and powerless and in that sense very much in the scene. He also notes that the images sometimes do not seem to him to illustrate exactly what the text describes.

Google returns 106 sites to the query "Chicago murder sites", and we can use them to break down the isolation of the Chicago Murder Sites and perhaps give explanations for some of Williams' "dissonances." Wallach did not simply put this project up at his own site. He contributed four text/image pairs to the on-line gallery SITO along with some information about the project. He lists the exhibition and publication history of the project and mentions that it is pinhole photography. SITO reports an exhibit at S. F. Cameraworks, and we find a notice of a "Murder as Phenomenon" exhibit in 1992 in S.F. where Wallach's Chicago Murder Sites is described as part of a project to photograph the 922 murders that had been reported in Chicago in 1992. The date 1992 directly conflicts with another one that appears on a couple of linking sites, namely 1951, when Wallach is said to have taken the pictures. This I think is an urban myth: you can't find out much about Wallach on the Web, but you can find an MFA showing in May 2000, suggesting that there was no Harlan Wallach in 1951 to take pictures, and the self-portrait drawing at SITO also argues for a later date of birth. So we may conclude that Chicago Murder Sites was a work for gallery exhibition and print publication that was adapted for the Web. The originals are 11x14" prints, which means that the text on them would be legible: the text-image pairing is a result of adaptation to the very lean graphic capacities of current desktop computers.

Both S.F. Cameraworks and SITO note that these prints are instances of pinhole photography. The pinhole camera explains a number of the formal features Williams noted: pinholes have high depth of field and wide angle of vision, but require long exposure times (2 seconds to 2 minutes) and are frequently set on the ground, or set with a wedge under the taking end of the camera. Depending on the film and developers used, the result is often high in contrast and weak in the midtones. Because of the long exposure times, objects that move through the scene do not register, hence streets appear empty. If something or person enters or leaves the scene part way through the exposure, they may appear as semi-transparent, giving the ghostly effect valued by Clarence Laughlin and other photomontageurs. Pinhole photography stretches out the moment of exposure; hence the process sees stasis. This, along with its wide angle of view, make it suited for landscapes and especially abandoned, ruined landscapes. (And see Lisa Johnston's "Urban Anthropology" collection of pinhole images.) Pinhole cameras have become quite popular on and through the Web; they have several fine exhibition sites and Webrings.

A second clue can be found in Black and White World's listing for Chicago Murder Sites in its March 1999 Top Ten Photo Websites. There they say the pinhole camera was placed at the exact spots where the victims were found. This addresses another of Williams' "dissonances," since he assumed the camera would be pointed at the scene or the body (as is the strong convention of scene-of-crime photography, complete with chalked body outline) not placed at the scene or the body. So in one case he discusses, the body is said to be found under a porch, but the camera points to a building with no porch. Ah yes, but the camera might well be under the porch pointing across the street. Black and White World do not tell us how they came by this useful piece of information. It does square the texts with the images insofar as the images can be made out. Finally, if we could add to the context this study we would quickly draw the parallel with Rosler's Bowery set of image/text pairings depicting urban physical and moral decrepitude which are in addition devoid of human subjects!

None of this addresses "why?" of course, but it does help keep us from being caught up in a semiotic updraft toward a flight of fancy. It gives us a tradition and context for Wallach's use of the pinhole and it restrains us from reading significance into certain features that are part of the material reality of pinhole photography. The camera is on the ground because it stablizes it and because the body was on the ground. The body was on the ground because it was dead and that the dead are powerless is not news. These images are as it were what the dead people see, urban landscapes utterly without life. The modernist "My images say best what I have to say" presentation of Chicago Murder Sites invites a structural-semiotic approach: deprived or lacking much context, we try to apply the code and come up with a partial approximation and some loose ends.