Archive for the ‘marisaolson’ Category

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Marisa Olson: Recent Work

1.

The Internet enables anyone with a connection to publish and share their artwork on a global scale. In many ways, this is a triumph of democratic thought as the barriers to creative expression are open much wider than they were twenty years ago. This pleasant vision becomes complicated, though, when one considers that because of this very democratization of cultural production, the landscape of cultural reception transforms, as well.

The viewer or receiver of cultural data is now presented with a seemingly infinite amount of novelty and amateur cultural ephemera to sift through. Because of this, the viewer’s relationship to media becomes one not of audience member to media work, but rather of “prosumer” to media unit.

In the ocean of infinite media novelty, the media viewer is nudged towards, on the one hand, consuming media the way a cable television ”zapper” surfs through television, and, on the other hand, producing media in the hopes of providing another surfer with good, quick zappable content. This surfing/consuming/producing model is, in general, not conducive to deeper modes of reflection or engagement with media. On the contrary, it is conducive to shallow skimming, scraping the surface of works. The pleasure of consumption in an ocean of media is the leap from one drop of media to another to another as opposed to a deeper engagement with a single drop. The media which are most attractive are fast, funny, and immediately clear. They need to be, otherwise the prosumer will grow bored and surf to the next article or the next image or the next whatever of media. The result is that media requiring a relatively greater degree of depth of thought are lost in the shuffle.

Now, with all of this in mind, an artist might grow anxious.

What is the point of making anything and casting it out to this ocean of media if it’s just going to be at best buzzed through or at worst completely ignored? It’s great that the Web allows anyone to put their own production into the sphere of public consumption, but at what cost? For the contemporary artist especially, whose motivation is ostensibly to create culture with a greater depth and preciousness than a “Fat Kid on Roller Coaster” video, it would seem absurd to even participate in this dog-eat-dog system.

Still, though… would anyone earnestly desire for everything to return to the pre-Internet model in which only a handful of individuals are able to put their ideas out there into the world? No, probably not. Fifteen minutes of fame are better than none.

What to do then?

How can an artist participate in this system which is in many ways preferable to the prior model without feeling as though their individual works of art are on some level meaningless?

2.

The artist Marisa Olson’s recent work is not illuminating in the sense that it has any concrete answers to this question, but is rather therapeutic in the sense that it seeks to quell the desire for answers to this and similar sorts of questions by focusing instead on what is creating the anxiety in the first place.

For example, Whew! Age (2010), a performance at PS122 in New York, dramatizes a hallucinatory therapy session in which the patient oscillates between a search for meaning and a cynicism regarding the very idea of search for meaning.

In a set composed of cardboard crystal shards outlined in dayglo duct tape and cheap-o Persian rugs sparkling with glitter and tinsel, Olson’s character interacts with the video projection of a customer-service rep-slash-self-help guru (played by Olson, as well). On the one hand, the guru character leads Olson inside herself on a mission to “chill out” and stop worrying about all the things she thinks she needs. To some extent, it works. Olson comes to the stage in a translucent mask and the guru is able to get her to take the mask off (there’s a gag where after Olson takes the mask off, it reveals another mask, but the guru is sharp enough to have her remove that mask, too). On the other hand, the guru is a sleazy con-man, convincing Olson to put on blinders – avoiding hope in more rigorously intellectual traditions such as empirical science or psychoanalysis. And, in a musical montage in the middle of the show, the new age approach of the guru is marketed as a cheesy, 100% guaranteed enlightenment or your money back-style video series.

This tension between sleaze and truism is explored in a moment in which the guru demands of Olson to put her finger in her mouth and imagine that her finger is a glacier. Olson does so and the guru says to be as chilled as the glacier. This starts to work, but then one remembers that the glaciers are melting. And this melting – ostensibly due to climate change – is what created anxiety for Olson in the first place.

Between wisdom and mass-produced wisdom, chilling and heating, going into one’s self and back out to the world, is the space Whew! Age inhabits. In the process, it produces a therapeutic effect by nudging its audience towards neither one pole nor the other but rather towards an acknowledgment of the inevitable contradiction between the two.

Another example of Olson’s recent work is Double Bind (2010), a two-channel video first exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. The work is composed of two YouTube videos – one a “response video” to the other. In the first video, one views Olson dressed professionally in a black suit with make-up and styled hair as she wraps her head in hot pink vinyl bondage tape until it’s completely covered. In the response video, one views Olson unwrap the pink tape from her head.

So, in one video, the artist is tying herself up in bondage tape; in the other, she’s releasing herself from this bondage. As they play in a loop side by side – not in perfect sync as the runtime of one video is roughly twice as long as the other – the viewer is presented with two contradictory messages – liberation and submission – each competing with the other and in neither case allowing the two messages to coalesce into a synthesis.

The title of the work, Double Bind, refers to the artist’s binding of herself and unbinding of herself with the bondage tape, and it also refers to a term developed by, among others, the anthropologist/psychologist/cybernetician Gregory Bateson, referring to a condition in which two contradictory pieces of information negate one another. This negation creates an anxiety in a patient in which he or she cannot settle on one piece of information or the other. For Bateson (following, to some extent, ideas explored in Zen Buddhism), the discussion of the double bind underlying these sorts of contradictions possesses a therapeutic value for the patient by demonstrating that the desire for solution or synthesis is not a pressing human concern due to its logical impossibility.

In Double Bind, the phenomenon of “double bind” is demonstrated, thus creating a way to confront the anxiety by pointing out the incommensurability of the information in conflict with one another. Through this demonstration, the subject struggling with the choice of either/or is released from the need to even make such distinctions.

Furthermore, as curator Richard Rinehart points out in his statement regarding the work, an underlying theme of Double Bind is Olson’s own oscillation between digital culture and the world of contemporary art. By presenting her work as a YouTube response video replete with the design elements and user comment structure familiar to users of YouTube and placing that in the context of the white cube art space, Olson engages in another double bind – the push and pull between the democratic culture of the Web and the elitist culture of contemporary art. Without definitively aligning herself in either realm, Olson presents this very conflict between democratic culture and art culture as a subject of the work.

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Whew! Age, a performance by Marisa Olson at PS122 in New York, is about the twin concerns of chilling out and heating up and chilling out and heating up.

In a set composed of cardboard crystal shards outlined in dayglo duct tape and cheap-o Persian rugs sparkling with glitter and tinsel, Olson interacts with the video projection of a customer-service rep-slash-self-help guru (played by Olson, herself).

On the one hand, the guru character leads Olson inside herself on a mission to “chill out” and stop worrying about all the things she thinks she needs.

It’s a sort of pop-Zen-New Age stand-by: eliminate your desires to see yourself as a being blinded by desire.

To some extent, it works.

Olson comes to the stage in a translucent mask and the guru is able to get her to take the mask off (there’s a gag where after Olson takes the mask off, it reveals another mask, but the guru is sharp enough to have her remove that mask, too).

On the other hand, the guru is a sleazy con-man, convincing Olson to put on blinders – avoiding hope in more rigorously intellectual traditions such as empirical science, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis.

And, in a musical montage in the middle of the show, the new age approach of the guru is marketed as a cheesy, 100% guaranteed enlightenment or your money back-style video series.

This tension between sleaze and truism is explored in a moment when the guru demands of Olson to put her finger in her mouth and imagine that her finger is a glacier.

Olson does so and the guru says to be as chilled as the glacier.

This starts to work, but then one remembers that the glaciers are melting.

And this melting – ostensibly due to climate change – is what created anxiety for Olson in the first place.

Between wisdom and bullshit, chilling and heating, going in to one’s self and back out to the world, is the space Whew! Age inhabits.

It is, the performance tells us, after the New Age of crystals and Enya.

The Whew Age doesn’t profess to offer peace of mind through true enlightenment, but a piece of mind through its demonstrating the impossibility of true enlightenment.

In and back out, truth and illusion, in a pattern.

A spiral.

Friday, January 1st, 2010

The main idea of “Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture,” an essay written by Marisa Olson for LACMA’s Words Without Pictures essay series, is this:

1

After Web 2.0, the materials that form the foundation of the Internet – what Olson calls the “vertebrae” of the Internet – are all of the circulating found photographs and amateur videos contained in searchable databases and meme blogs. These vertebrae tend to be overlooked, though.

She writes:

Those split-second bloopers, acts of conspicuous consumption, and diaristic elevations of otherwise banal moments found on sites with names like FAIL (http://failblog.org/) and Ffffound (http://ffffound.com) comprise the backbone of contemporary digital visual culture. They are the vertebrae of a body that we otherwise seek to theorize as amorphous. We tend to overlook this proliferation of images, considering it as somehow anomalous and not yet part of the master narrative of network conditions.

*****

2

Because these anonymous images and video clips are not visible as the vertebra of the network, certain artists – she calls them “Pro Surfers” – working on Internet Surfing Clubs such as nastynets.com are taking these materials “out of circulation,” and re-contextualizing them so that might be seen as more than disposable net ephemera. By doing so, they create “portraits of the Web.”

She writes:

(Pro Surfers) are engaged in an enterprise distinct from the mere appropriation of found photography. They present us with constellations of uncannily decisive moments, images made perfect by their imperfections, images that add up to portraits of the Web, diaristic photo essays on the part of the surfer, and images that certainly add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Taken out of circulation and repurposed, they are ascribed with new value, like the shiny bars locked up in Fort Knox.

*****

These artists, then, are not merely playing art world games, but helping people see what the Internet looks like right now.

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Space Junk by Marisa Olson is a black, monochrome square painting like Malevich or Ad Reinhardt or Wade Guyton, but when you look closer, you can see that it’s not black – but a pattern of flickering stars whose aesthetic is appropriated from a web-native starfield wallpaper .gif (a now defunct trope of Web 1.0). The surface itself is wallpaper that Olson wallpapered onto a stretcher to make the monochrome painting.

So, there is a reference to an obsolete avant-garde painting style, as well as a reference to an obsolete Internet aesthetic.

When they combine, they each highlight each other’s obsolescence. Or, perhaps they highlight the fact of obsolescence.

Part of what Post Internet art had to do was get into contemporary art, which – on paper – seems do-able, but in practice is incredibly difficult. Contemporary art people look at contemporary art. They have a sense for work that is adding something they appreciate to their world and they have an even stronger sense for work that is not doing anything but wasting their time.

This painting is “art” because it tells me something about art, about obsolescence in art. It is art (without quotes) because it tells me something deeper, too. Memento Mori.

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

David Horvitz interviews Marisa Olson for a show I curated at CCS Bard.

This is just one piece…

DH: […] Do you believe it is possible to be responsible while still invested in upgrade culture?

MO: I think that’s the question I’m trying to answer for myself. I don’t know. My thought right now is that the upgrade cycle is one we all get locked into. No one’s making me buy a new ipod, but then again, the US government’s legally forcing producers and consumers of TV to upgrade, and they are competing with other countries to do so in a way that I think very interestingly mirrors the space race. I mean, the even bigger question is why we always feel so compelled to invent, buy, reinvent, and toss old models out. Why are so many of our fantasies and fears about the future invested in technology? If I can’t save the world from ewaste and solve the problem of upgrade garbage, I at least hope to initiate these conversations in my work.

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Here is one more excerpt from a Marisa Olson interview. This is one from July, 2008 with a Philadelphia blogger named Annette Monnier.

Olson is an interesting thinker as she brings acute knowledge from many fields including the cultural history of technology and art history, in order to show that, as fields, their boundaries are growing blurrier and blurrier everyday.

My favorite passage is when she brings in Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm in relation to technological paradigm shifts:

Marisa: Speaking of degrees, I don’t really have a degree in computer science but in the course of working on my PHD one of my official field titles was “The Cultural History of Technology” so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of batteries, televisions, telephones, and video games…

Annette: Is that like studying “the history and philosophy of science” or something?

Marisa: Yeah. Exactly, it’s very closely related.

Annette: I always liked those kind of courses. That sounds pretty cool.

Marisa: Yeah, me too. Thomas Kuhn is one of my favorite writers,“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Annette: Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in a class called something like “history and science of philosophy 101” or something.

Marisa: I re-read it every single year. Twenty-four is my favorite page.

Annette: I have no idea what that refers to but i’ll look it up.

Marisa: It’s just this line about how science is trying to force nature into a conformed thought. It’s all about how science as a field is trying to confirm existing ways of thinking, existing paradigms, and you have to wait until enough things don’t fit into the box until you change the box. I dunno. I like stuff like that.

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

In a 2006 Time Out magazine group interview conducted by Lauren Cornell, another crucial figure in the development of Post Internet art, Marisa Olson speaks about her work not being “on the Internet,” but, rather, “after the Internet… the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading.” Here are some key exchanges between Cornell and Olson from the interview:

LC: When artists started working online, the internet wasn’t nearly as assimilated into everyday life as it is now. Popular culture is clearly influenced by e-mail, blogs, ebay and social software like myspace. Do you use these platforms in your work?

MO: In between my jobs, art and personal life, I’m online nearly 24/7. I think my recent work and that of many of my peers puts this consumption on display. I frequently work in blog format. In American Idol Audition Training Blog, I documented my attempt to become a contestant on the TV show. I was simultaneously indulging in and critiquing media culture.

LC: Does internet art need to take place online?

MO: No. What I make is less art “on” the Internet than it is art “after” the Internet. It’s the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading. I create performances, songs, photos, texts, or installations directly derived from materials on the Internet or my activity there.

*****

Olson delineates Internet art from Post Internet art. Internet art is on the Internet; post Internet art is after the Internet.

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

In a March 2008 interview with Régine Debatty on the We Make Money Not Art blog, Marisa Olson suggests that, on the one hand, Internet art is going mainstream, but, on the other hand, contemporary art is going Internet.

RD: You are also a curator, both independently and as part of your activities at Rhizome. Your curating often deals with new media art pieces. What are the challenges of curating and exhibiting works of new media art today?

MO: I think that there is presently a very exciting turn happening in new media, with respect to both the art world and the context of “traditional media.” It used to be very important to carve out a separate space in which to show, discuss, and teach new media. Nowadays these spaces are sometimes seen as ghettos, but at the time, they were safe havens championing under-recognized forms. Things are more co-mingled now. Not everyone will agree with me about this, but I think it’s great that some people no longer even know new media when they see it. I know curators who turn their nose up at that phrase, but they love Cory Arcangel or Paul Pfeiffer. There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work – afterall, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I’ve called “Post-Internet” art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called “Internet Aware Art.” I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline. Of course, it’s an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art… If that really matters…