The telephone landed its own gallery show first, way back in 1968. People on one end of the curly-corded land line carried out instructions in art-making issued by folks at the other end. Later - much later - came a retrospective devoted to the graph- ics and snapshots created by the gadget's annoying, chirpy little cousin, the cell phone.
Both types of talking machine are still, God help us, very much in use in modern society. But a national traveling show opening this weekend at the Contemporary Museum celebrates another communication device that is on its way out: the fax machine.
"Faxes are one of those generational divides," says Irene Hofmann, the museum's executive director. "They were ubiquitous in the 1980s, but they are fast being rendered obsolete by e-mail. One generation has to teach the next generation how to use it."
The idea, Hofmann says, is to use the fax machine as just one more thinking and drawing tool, like a paintbrush or camera lens. Throughout the show, the Contemporary's fax machine will continually receive and print incoming faxes from 120 artists from Baltimore, elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad. As the faxes are received, the museum's staff will use thumbtacks to attach them to the wall.
Some artists may fax in a completed artwork before the show opens. Others, such as Molly Springfield, a recent finalist for the Sondheim Award, might send a random page for the opening, wait a few weeks, follow up with a few more pages, wait several days more, fax over another installment, and so on.
Pages could get lost, or come over in the wrong order. The printer could jam. Chances are, legitimate artworks will be interspersed with "junk" faxes sent in by non-artists, such as advertisements for body-building machines and cut-rate mortgages.
So be it. The exhibit embraces spontaneity, so nothing that occurs will be considered a mistake.
"One thing I like about this exhibit is that it evolves," says Springfield, whose own contribution will explore an 1888 precursor of the facsimile machine called a "telautograph."
"You can come to the museum and see the exhibit on one day, and come back a week later, and everything will have changed."
Some artists, such as Tauba Auerbach, are interested in the machine itself. Her piece, "What a fax says" consists of six pieces of paper that seem to contain nonsense words. Vocalize them, though, and it all becomes clear. Who hasn't heard that high-pitched "eeeeeeeeeee" that signals that a fax is being electronically transmitted?
