For younger Americans, Facebook is a fully integrated aspect of normal social life. Yet for many others, the viral logic that makes social media so pervasive is precisely the thing that makes it seem so alien.

As I grew up, there were three television stations – the three networks – and Americans mostly watched the same programs, heard Casey Kasem count down the same songs, went to the same movies and read the same books, magazines and newspapers.

While this may sound to some like a recipe for glacial-paced cultural change, in many ways it was the opposite. With such a comprehensive armature in place, a single person, idea or artist could have a massive (and sudden) impact.

Then along came the Internet. Soon thereafter came social media with its ability to change and grow in real time following the indications of immediate feedback mechanisms. Data was no longer just a road map, but cultural fuel itself.

Facebook is the Google of social media. Launched in 2004, about one in 10 humans on Earth now uses it. Currently, it has more than 845 million users – almost three times as many people as there are American citizens.

Facebook is such an obvious subject for contemporary art that it was just a matter of time until Maine would see its first major exhibition dedicated to it. However, the likelihood of an artist rising to the overdetermined subject without getting buried by it seemed to me extraordinarily unlikely.

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Tanja Alexia Hollander’s “Are You Really My Friend?” at the Portland Museum of Art is a very successful exhibition because it asks relevant questions rather than staking out preachy positions.

Hollander’s take on Facebook is actually an ongoing, process-oriented project rather than a polemic. She decided to take her Hasselblad camera (ironically old-school) around the country to photograph all 626 Facebook “friends” she had at the time she undertook the project. A year after she began, Hollander had photographed 200 of them; it is these photos that comprise the images of “AYRMF.”

In the museum, the show basically has five components: A 70-foot continuous print with 61 of the images; about 80 prints mounted on magnets that can be moved around by the visitors on a pair of walls (very fun; my son, for example, grouped images of people and their dogs); a pair of framed prints; removable laminated object lists hung on the wall with image information (including how, how well and how long the artist has known the subjects); and, finally, a wall on which visitors can post sticky notes to respond to Hollander’s questions. (These change: On my first visit, the question was “How important is face time?” and during my last visit, it was “How has social media made you more social?”) A mounted pair of iPads allows visitors to type comments.

The wall, of course, is a Facebook joke, because the main activity in Facebook is posting on virtual “walls.”

“AYRMF” is a good show because it respects the basics. It is a well-labeled, interactive, accessible and handsome installation of technically strong and well-printed photography. And it was created as part of a serious process-oriented project by an accomplished professional artist with a recognizably personal aesthetic.

In this sense, it’s hardly a radical art exhibition. In fact, Hollander deserves great credit for her self-restraint regarding the show’s conceptual scope.

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That we can sense her personal artistry within the framework of a show about something as massive and unwieldy as Facebook both reflects very well on her as an artist, and allows the installation at the museum to work as an exhibition rather than merely as the documentation of some external conceptual project. It’s a subtle point, but I cannot overstate how impressive this achievement is.

Hollander’s Facebook page, in light of this show, becomes something other than documentation. It pulls an ironically Zen inversion and becomes itself a wellspring of meaning by being a document that illuminates itself (think grammatology). I was surprised by Hollander’s actual Facebook page: It’s strangely integrated with the PMA show, a result of the real-time dynamism of social media.

“AYRMF” features images of Hollander’s Facebook “friends” and their families with deadpan expressions in high focus. To viewers accustomed to the world of iPhone snapshots, this approach might look strangely affected, but it’s simply old-school photographic portraiture (long exposure, wide depth of field, high focus, etc.). I find the seriousness of the sitters appealing; they aren’t faking affect or wrapped up in the giddy emotion of some ephemeral moment.

Of course, the exhibit leaks into the virtual world. It would be wrong if it didn’t. It is, after all, a show about a website that in turn is about the show. (Eat your heart out, Andre Gide.) It is topographically poignant, yet stands with an artistic maturity that makes it a great credit to Hollander, the PMA and the phenomenal “Circa” series showcasing living, contemporary artists.

Don’t just check out “AYRMF” online – go see it in the flesh.

Freelance writer Daniel Kany is an art historian who lives in Cumberland. He can be contacted at:

dankany@gmail.com 


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