Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Claude Closky, Do you want love or lust?, 1997
Claude Closky, Do you want love or lust? (detail), 1997– . Collection of the artist, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Claude Closky
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of this kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here.
“Does your skin look like silk or like a war zone? Have you been there or done that? When you arrive, are people indifferent? Or, do they start laughing, which then transforms into a weird hilarity when you start speaking?”
Created for Dia’s Artist Web Projects in 1997, Claude Closky’s Do you want love or lust? poses an endless sequence of questions written by the artist in the genre of popular magazine quizzes, a pop-psychological poetics of absurdity. The work is an early example of an artist’s foray into hypertext—a word or words that contain a link to a website—a format that sparked a flurry of theories in the 1990s about its potential to create open-ended, user-activated narratives. Yet here, hypertext is short-circuited. It is unclear whether or not the user’s choices determine the course of the quiz, and the click-through fails to deliver test results, yielding no climax, no final assessment of character. Instead, the user navigates endlessly through false binaries, responding with a choice—perhaps arbitrary, perhaps sincere—to each unanswerable, contradictory, or absurd prompt. You can’t move forward without choosing.
An emissary from the heyday of cyber-utopianism, Do you want love or lust? establishes a false sense of liberation. The work reimagines freedom within the context of the internet as the repetitive act of choosing within a controlled set, reducing desire to pop dating conventions and deceptive consumer options. Silk or war zone, been there or done that—where does the self fit in? Through the user’s selections, the limitations of these binaries and false choices emerge.
