Painting

1.

Painting is a meme.

What is a meme?

Meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to refer to units of cultural data which act like genes–replicating, spreading, and mutating in response to the selective demands of the culture in which they develop.  Many things count as memes–political slogans, film dialogue, emergent philosophical perspectives, technological breakthroughs, advertising brands, economic principals, fashion trends, viral YouTube videos, the very idea of a meme itself,  the list could go on.  What matters is that it is an idea which has the power to replicate itself from one mind to another to another and sustain itself through a stretch of cultural time.

So, if one is to take the history of painting as a meme spreading from mind to mind through its history—from cave paintings to Piero della Francesca to Thomas Gainsborough to Nancy Spero and beyond—each iteration in the history of the meme mutating itself in response to its own context—then what would it mean to extend the painting meme into the context of digital computer networks?  That is, assuming that painting did not, in fact, die sometime in the early 1980s, what would it mean to respond to the continually evolving painting meme in the context of ubiquitous computing in 2010?  How would the painting meme be translated when a painting is still an object, but an object dispersed through the network as a mutable digital photograph, as well?  This is not to say that all relevant painting must take this question of the network into consideration, but that it could be a pressing and fruitful intellectual question for at least some painters.

One way to think through an answer to this question is provided in the art historian David Joselit’s recent October essay “Painting Beside Itself.”  In this essay, Joselit suggests that recent painters such as Julia Koether, Stephen Prina, and Wade Guyton have developed practices which allegorize their objects’ own “transitivity” or continuous in-between-ness as they shuttle from one node of the network to another—from object, to photograph of object, to source material for another artist’s appropriation and re-circulation, and back again, in an ongoing circulation.  Works of art—here—are never situated in a static context; rather they are situated in continuous state of passage between contexts in a broader network of multiple contexts.

An alternative response to the question of the painting meme’s life in the network is being developed by young artists working on or around the Internet.  For these artists:

1. The computer screen is the primary surface on which painting will be viewed and, because of this, a new suite of phenomenological effects occuring between painting and viewer are opened for exploration.

2.  The rate of speed at which paintings travel is atrophied when uploaded directly to computer networks and this increase in speed allows one to, then, view the flow of painting in time.

In what follows, I’ll say a few more words about the relationship between painting and the computer, describe a recent trajectory of the painting meme amongst a group of Internet artists, and, then, focus, in particular, on the work of the PAINT FX collective.

2.

It’s possible that an “actual” Abstract Expressionist painting produced in the 1940s and a “fake” Abstract Expressionist painting created through the application of digital effects in a piece of software could be effectively indistinguishable when viewed through the light of the computer screen.  With this in mind, some painters have shifted their concerns from those native to the paradigm of the white cube to, instead, those native to the paradigm of the computer screen.  This shift has repercussions, though.  For example, the phenomenological effects of painting shift from the materiality of paint on canvas to the light spilling from a computer screen.  This bias towards the surface of the screen, then, nudges artists towards exploring different types of bodily shock effects.  The relationship of the body to the computer screen after all is different than that of the body to the physical painting in space–computers are open circuits in which cybernetic feedback relationships between computer databases and users allow users to actively shape the mediascape they inhabit.  These cybernetic relationships create a desire for clicking, scrolling, and following—dynamic motion premised on sifting through an accumulation of data rather than gazing for very long at a single pattern of light.  The Internet painter, then, begins to think in terms of multiplicity, the aesthetics of the surfeit, and, crucially, a strong temporal element which transforms painting into a variation on performance art.  Furthermore, jpegs, as digital files, are mutable, meaning that they can be radically transformed instantaneously at the level of code.  If one wants to merely touch up a single brush stroke or slap a picture of a sea shell on the top layer of the painting, the technology is agnostic in regard to the amount of variation each of these types of alterations suggests.  This mutability means that once it is part of the network, other artists and non-artists, as well, are given free reign to appropriate the image and alter it themselves, re-disseminating the mutated image through alleyways of the network which the painting’s original creator could not anticipate.  In other words, paintings here are a network of versions; a stream of evolving memes.

3.

The meeting of painting and the computer is not new.  MS Paint, for example, has long been mined for painting effects.  In the context of the Internet, the artist Tom Moody (a former “actual” painter) has built an important practice at the interface of painting and the computer screen which has evolved into making animated gifs and placing them on his own blog and sites like dump.fm.  This is not meant to be an authoritative history, though, so I’ll focus on the life of one strain of the painting meme as I’ve witnessed it over the past two or three years.

I first began to notice artists working on painting at the tail end of the surf club phenomenon.  Artists like Will Simpson, Thomas Galloway, and Travess Smalley on the surf club Loshadka, for example, were moving away from appropriated content derived from Internet surfing and towards original content created in painting software programs.

Around this time, the artist Charles Broskoski began increasingly focusing his work away from conceptual art pieces to a painting practice premised on volume, performativity, and innovations in presentation which were native to the computer screen.  The artist Harm van den Dorpel was working on a similar project, in which he straddled the borders between a computer model of a work and a work in physical space and allowed that very tension to become illuminated as the work.  Along the way, he raised an interesting set of questions regarding artistic deskilling and the borders between hand-made effects and automated effects.  In short, the “hand of the artist” was, on the Internet of all places, becoming an interesting area to explore.  Soon enough, there seemed to be an internal logic and momentum to this digital painting meme and the Supercentral II surf club and  Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff, pushed it further, actualizing what was in the air.  A slightly younger generation of artists working on the tumblr platform and the emergence of a body of critical reflection by artists such as Ry David Bradley on his PAINTED, ETC blog continued to sustain the evolution of the meme, polishing certain presentational elements and building a community of people interested in these ideas.  Painting in the network was about fast-paced collective dialogue and mind-bending abstractions.  It was also about painting.  The imagery of these works are often collisions between digital gestures and painterly gestures, but, generally speaking, the concern is with the tradition of painting–pre-Internet–as opposed to the animated gif scene whose roughly concurrent rise (in the net art context) posed as a nice counterpoint to the painting meme.

If one was watching, one could view the evolution of the meme as it started in a sort of experimental phase, gained some steam, developed a community, and achieved some sort of level of self-consciousness about itself.  The meme here takes on its own form of life which one can watch live on the Internet.

4.

Recently, the PAINT FX collective composed of Parker Ito, Jon Rafman, Micah Schippa, Tabor Robak, and John Transue, have developed a new mutation of the painting meme.  Looking closely at what had been accomplished in the work mentioned above and also ideas at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and performance which the Jogging collective (Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen) was working on, PAINT FX designed an environment to both experiment with performative voices as painters and develop micro-versions of the painting meme in one ongoing stream of paintings.

Although the paintings are not explicitly associated with particular artists (there’s no supplementary text on the site, at all), one can view unique voices develop as each painter builds a vocabulary of specific paint effects he’s working with.  One views both the development of these effects and the exploration of their usage through these unique voices.  Additionally, one views both the artists engaged dialogue with the other members of Paint FX collective and the flows of specific memes threading in and out of the broader image stream.

There are, to date, just under three hundred paintings posted on the collective’s very lengthy single web page–paintfx.biz.  One can experience this body of work in multiple ways.  There is this performative element—a fast paced call and response game in which the members of PAINT FX evolve memes.  There is also the trace of this performance which exists as a totally different type of effect.  The artists chose to not divide their archive up into multiple pages which one would have to click through, but instead as one very long scroll.  What this choice nudges the viewer to do is consider the flow of images as an ongoing development—a long poem, say.  This effect, though, is open to further versioning in relation to the type of device one uses.  So, for instance, scrolling through Paint FX on an iPhone is going to be a different type of effect than scrolling through it on a flat screen computer monitor in the comfort of one’s living room.  PAINT FX, though, has created a platform robust enough to be dynamically experienced in a multitude of viewing contexts.

There are also other variations in how the work will be experienced which are dependent on the user’s context.  Let’s say that one chooses to let the entire page download and start at the earliest painting, scrolling up to the most recent.  One could, on the one hand, just hold the scroll button down and watch the paintings zoom by like objects outside the windows of a moving car.  The style of the paintings and their sequencing on the page are instantaneously visible enough to provide an ongoing series of shock effects which increase as one continues to ride out the scroll (which lasts for several minutes bottom to top).  By rapidly scrolling through this way, one gets a broad overview of the way the voices of the artists, the various vocabularies of painting effects, and various bursts of smaller memes each develop.  On the other hand, though, one could also go through and carefully consider each painting.  This, too, can be effective as the paintings are not merely eye candy.  They are generally each labored over and carefully considered from multiple points of view before they are uploaded.  Also, oftentimes, the phenomenological effect of looking at a static image on the site for a more extended point of time can be powerful.  Through the practical experience of simply looking carefully and observing their own reaction to consuming images on computers, these artists have become discriminating in relation to the types of effects possible through the light of the screen.  In turn, they have developed unique skills for crafting particularly optically-charged images.

Finally, the project is also a robust space  for painting memes to accelerate and disseminate in the most efficient possible modes.  On PAINT FX, the viewer watches the lifeform of memes develop in a sort of real time.  On the one hand, this is frustrating because one can’t hold out much hope for an individual painting to maintain a level of qualitative power after a few days and weeks as it becomes swallowed up in the flow of the entire project.  On the other hand, if one refocuses the way they view the project in terms of following this flow, new categories of aesthetic experience are opened up.

5.

On the Internet, the meme of painting has developed ways in which to increase the efficiency and acceleration of the dispersal of its own versions.  Keywords here are “speed” and “immediacy.”  A question which the Internet hasn’t effectively explored as of yet, though, is related to the ethics of this acceleration.  Now that one can view painting in motion, a question and a way to perhaps further evolve the meme may revolve around where this acceleration is headed and why.

Performance 3

1.

Brad Troemel, an artist perhaps best known for his work with the Jogging collective, claimed in a 2009 interview with the Counterfeit-Mess Blog that:

A couple years ago when I became a Photographer-hater, I realized that you can’t possibly explain the world through a single tool. I feel that way now in regard to The Art Project, that 10 projects can’t explain everything or anything either. All you can do is have a constant engagement with art, trying to find meaning. On Jogging, we, the creators, are the art and artists… Creating this way makes assessing/accessing our work on the whole difficult. There’s no fitting “grading rubric” for everything at once because the intent of the art is multiple. So, you can either assess every single work individually, or, you can assess us, ourselves, as the work.

*****

The artist Duncan Alexander recently wrote a blog post which made a similar point regarding certain artists working on the Internet. Before making that point, though, he divides current net art practices into two (admittedly) very broadly sketched camps – on the one hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with art history and, on the other hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with the cultural history of the Internet itself. He, then, claims that for the “net historical” camp:

What matters… is not so much the individual artwork as the artist’s oeuvre and net presence. This is one reason why these artists don’t receive as much coverage – you can’t pin a work down as easily. Where most camp one works are one-way in terms of links (and this appears to be a strategic move), camp two relishes hypertext and cross-platform performance. Their work spills across the social networks that the artists inhabit.

Alexander’s division of the current net art paradigm into two broadly sketched camps is perceptive and works well as a shorthand. To my mind, though, the work of both camps is most potently experienced in terms of what he calls ongoing “net presence” as opposed to through an individual work. For example, Ryder Ripps, who (if we are going to follow Alexander’s “two camps” framework) is a member of the “net historical” camp, has created important work which explicitly embraces a plurality of production occurring in time; but the work of Jon Rafman, who is a member of the “art historical” camp, is also, for me, anyway, more meaningfully experienced when considered in terms of ongoing presence – even if this presence is less pronounced. Google Street Views and Brand New Paint Job, for example, are memes he’s actively improvising with in time; they are knowingly performed and are responsive to the demands placed on them by both general Internet culture and the history of art.

In the two previous posts on this blog, I’ve tried to work through a similar idea; namely, that the “aura” of an individual work of art in the age of the digital media network is, for better or for worse, not eliminated, but rather relocated. Instead of associating cult value with an artifact, one associates it with the live performance of the artist as he or she creates individual works of art and uploads them to the data cloud in sequential order. Following this publicly viewable sequence as it happens live is where meaningful artistic experiences are happening on the Internet. There are, of course, interesting individual works of art on the Internet, but that’s all they can be – “interesting.” Each individual work of art in the context of the incomprehensible amounts of artistic media on the Internet is leveled out in value to right around zero. For example, both the avant-garde music of Arnold Schoenberg and humorous videos of cats playing the piano are equally “interesting” – one no more qualitatively valuable than the other when viewed through a computer in the context of all of the other media one is able to consume on the Internet. The result of this is that those invested in reflecting on works of art in the context of the Internet are nudged towards following the artist’s live “presence” as he or she disseminates work in time. These live performances are where one is able to draw qualitative distinctions.

That said, there are a number of clear objections to this idea. One of those objections is that the use of the terms “performance” and, especially, “live performance” are problematic.

For example, for the performance theorist Peggy Phelan, the ontology of live performance is divorced from image reproductions and involves the co-presence of a limited number of bodies in the same space. Likewise, in the performance historian Chris Salter’s book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, Salter refuses to include a discussion of performance on the Internet even though he does so for many other “entanglements” of performativity and technology. For Salter, performance is necessarily “situated” meaning that, even if the stage is filled with technological gadgetry and television monitors intermingling with live bodies, the audience and performers need both be situated in the same physical space for the same amount of shared co-present time. The disembodied quality of Internet experience is beyond the pale of what one could call “performance.”

Before going any further, I should say that this aggressive line-drawing between what is real performance and what is not real performance makes a great deal of sense to me. There’s always going to be something more visceral about the sharing of physical space that needs to be preserved and honored. For example, jumping up and down and slamming into other sweaty bodies for an hour and a half while listening to loud, deliriously pounding rock music would be more exhilarating than the experience of watching the same music through a live stream on the Web. Similarly, physical contact during sex is not something that you could hope to reproduce on the Internet. I’m not interested in arguing against these obvious facts or diminishing the value of these experiences.

What I am interested in thinking through, though, is that there may be multiple ways to talk about a body which include both the experience of the body in a dance club in “natural time” as well as the body online, surfing through the Internet in “Internet time.” Again, I am not in favor of one conception of the body in time over the other; I do think, however, that it’s possible for one to seriously conceive of their bodies as being in two (or more) places at once.

In what follows, I’ll discuss several theories of performance working around these issues.

2.

What is liveness? One way to approach that question is to ask, first, “what is not liveness?” For example, if one views video documentation of a live performance, is what one views really “live”? I personally don’t think that it is. Here’s an example:

Joy Division, the British post-punk band best known for its sparse sound and vocalist Ian Curtis’s baritone renderings of his own moody lyrics, was, for me, a band whose sound I liked, but had to be in a very particular head space if I was to be infected by it. That changed, though, after I viewed live concert footage of the band performing and, in particular, after I saw Ian Curtis performing.

As individual records, the songs are so dark and hermetic that they could easily lull one to sleep late at night; however, as live performances, they take on an opposed set of attributes – they’re charged and vital. For example, in a performance of “Transmission” broadcast from a BBC television studio, one views Curtis begin the song in a deep focus – he stands awkwardly, his eyes are almost closed, and he grips the microphone, holding it next to his mouth – as the tempo escalates and Curtis’s vocals follow suit, though, he moves the mic stand out of the way and begins making spastic movements – choppy running in place, circular motions with the index finger he’s pointing to his head, pushing the finger away as if pushing something out of his mind, and swinging his forearms in semi-circles. He goes deeper and deeper, doing what he can to get the words out the way he means them to sound, ending up in positions resembling Christian revivalists or the seizures of an epileptic (as a matter of fact, Curtis would occasionally go into epileptic seizures while performing).

There’s something unsettling about watching these performances as they go beyond irony – it’s not as if he’s joking. In a 1979 interview with the Northern Lights Cassette Magazine, Curtis spoke about this seriousness of intention in his performances, claiming, “Instead of just singing about something you could show it as well, put it over in the way that it is, if you were totally involved in what you were doing.”

If one is to view the depictions of Curtis by actors in the films 24 Hour Party People and Closer, and, then, compare those depictions to the mania in Curtis’ eyes when he’s in the grips of his performance, there’s really no comparison; it only makes sense if the artist is present, totally involved in what he’s doing.

But, all that said, is the video footage I viewed of Curtis on the Internet really what one would call a “live” performance? Despite all my enthusiasm for the liveness of the band, did I even witness anything “live”?

The OED defines “live” as, “Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc.” Similarly, Peggy Phelan claims that the ontological character of live performance demands that it disappears as it is enacted, that it only exists in the “now” of its performance. She writes:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.

*****

Phelan’s argument around this ontology of liveness is complex and astutely weaves through dense theoretical terrain involving Lacanian psychoanalysis, speech act theory, and feminist critiques of representation. She takes a polemical stance not as an angry conservative reactionary to the forces of technological reproduction, but as a believer in the possibility of cultural experiences which resist commodification, simulation and the male gaze. For Phelan, live performance’s “promise” is its automatic tragedy, the fact that as one views the work, the work slips from one’s grasp, resisting representation and unable to be accurately reproduced, commodified, or otherwise “marked.” The video of the live Joy Division performance, then, would be missing the point of the performance as it tries to preserve what, by definition, cannot be preserved.

Perhaps what the video affords is the idea of the performance – the idea that the band was doing something other than playing music on well-produced albums; the idea that the band only makes sense when viewed “live.” With this idea in mind, I was able to appreciate Joy Division – an intellectual response rather than a bodily one. To actually be in a pub in the north of England in the late 1970s watching Ian Curtis perform would be powerful for precisely the reasons which Phelan suggests – it would be un-reproducible, demanding my bodily engagement in the moment. I’ll never be able to watch Joy Division perform live which is precisely what makes the live performance valuable for those who did view it – its mortality, its preciousness not as an object but as a stretch of unique time. Nothing like that occurs when I view the video – again, it’s the intellectual idea that Curtis did perform this way which I respond to in the video, not the performance itself.

3.

This ontologically “pure” understanding of liveness has been criticized, though. For example, the performance theorist Philip Auslander has critiqued Phelan’s understanding of liveness, suggesting that there’s really no such thing as what Phelan describes as “live performance” because almost any performance in “mediatized cultures” is a jumble of liveness and media effects. Think of the fans at a baseball game watching the Jumbotron television screen rather than the actual players on the field or even something as simple as a microphone and amplifier which create a layer of technological interpretation of a live performance. Furthermore, think of the “live” television broadcast of the six o’clock news or the multimedia performance art of Laurie Anderson or Ann Liv Young. Don’t these performances involve both “live” and re-producible elements?

It’s not that Auslander is saying that there can be nothing like what Phelan describes, but that the actual condition of live performance as it is practiced in the contemporary moment is endlessly hovering between both pure liveness and a technological mediation of this liveness and, therefore, the idea of defining a fixed definition based on its separation from technological reproducibility is admirable, but ultimately futile. He writes, “Much as I admire Phelan’s commitment to a rigorous conception of an ontology of liveness, I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a mediatized culture or should be expected to do so, even to assume an oppositional stance.”

I agree with Auslander that the “friend or foe” lines drawn by Phelan in regard to technological reproduction sets up unrealistically high standards given the massive amount of cross-pollination there actually is between live and reproducible elements in a given work of performance. However, I believe that liveness as a disappearance, as Phelan defines it, is, nevertheless, still possible, still, for better or for worse, uncommodifiable, and, in fact, (and probably to the horror of Phelan) occurring on the Internet. What is my experience of, for example, a surf club or a Tumblr blog or dump.fm if it’s not the unfolding of a live performance, un-reproducible as itself – a sense of presence to a unique stretch of time?

4.

A point of contention here revolves around the word “body.”

For Phelan, this would be the biological body co-present to its audience in situated space. She writes, “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.” There is something crucial to performance in that one must go there and be co-present to it in the same “specific time/space frame.”

Similarly, in his book On the Internet, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus discusses the phenomenological differences between live performances and live reproductions of live performances. He contends that live actors “are, at every moment, subtly and largely unconsciously adjusting to the responses of the audience and thereby controlling and intensifying the mood in the theater.” Dreyfus’s dedication to embodied co-presence is not based on a whimsical prejudice against computers, but rather a deeply held belief, following Merleau-Ponty, that the risk and continuous re-adjustment process in which one seeks to get a “grip” on the reality in front of one’s eyeballs, is what gives this reality a sense of meaning. He writes:

Not only is each of us an active body coping with things, but, as embodied, we each experience a constant readiness to cope with things in general that goes beyond our readiness to cope with any specific thing. Merleau-Ponty calls this embodied readiness our Urdoxa or ‘primordial belief’ in the reality of the world. It is what gives us our sense of the direct presence of things. So, for there to be a sense of presence in telepresence, one would not only have to be able to get a grip on things at a distance; one would need to have a sense of the context as soliciting a constant readiness to get a grip on whatever comes along.

*****

Dreyfus is skeptical about the possibilities of ever getting a “grip” on a world in which one is only present to via telepresence. His practical concern actually has less to do with performance than with “distance learning” – say, a simple lecture conducted via videoconferencing or a doctor teaching medical students how to perform surgery via a camera mount attached to his head.

I agree with this. I agree that Shakespeare performed on an empty stage to an audience of computer users is an embarrassing idea. I also agree that doctors cannot responsibly teach surgery to medical students remotely. These are human practices that need to occur in space and need to be preserved and honored.

My interest, rather, is in thinking through the possibility that as people begin to, for better or for worse, spend more and more of their lives on the computer and as certain specific relationships between these computer users and the ocean of cultural media which they consume becomes more and more a part of banal daily life, is there a way to have a new type of live performance, a live performance which creates new types of risks, new types of grips on the world? Is there a type of live performance whose actions are not imitations of those in physical space, but rather live performances of actions which could only be conducted through computing?

Could one perform Internet surfing through Internet surfing?

Or is that just nonsense?

5.

1.

In “The Present Age,” an 1846 essay by Søren Kierkegaard, the author lambasts his own age for its passionless stance towards the world in which everything is sort of interesting and sort of boring at the same time and, as such, nothing is worth loving or dying for. Kierkegaard felt that the massive quantitative increases in information which emerged in relation to the rise of the “public sphere” of the nineteenth century were a disaster because they leveled out the sorts of experiences one could have. When everyone is encouraged to be opinionated about everything, no one knows anything with any depth and, in turn, no one really cares about anything with what could be called love or the sense that one would sacrifice themselves for that one particular thing. According to Kierkegaard, a reliance on consensus, daily newspapers, and scientific expertise to define the course of human life is a sure way to create a world in which sacrifice is unnecessary and love is almost impossible. When nothing stands out as any more qualitatively interesting than anything else, it becomes difficult to say that one “loves” anything and really mean that word. In other words, it was a prototype of the age of “whatever.”

About a decade ago, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus compared Kierkegaard’s vision of the “present age” to the rise of the Internet in his own contemporary moment. According to Dreyfus, the qualitative leveling-out of all experience at zero which Kierkegaard describes in relation to the public sphere is “perfected” on the World Wide Web and, furthermore, that Kierkegaard’s proposal for a risky, unconditional commitment or “leap of faith” in the face of this leveling out is made almost impossible. This impossibility is due to the technology’s simulated and anonymous experiential reality which, according to Dreyfus, demands no commitment to any particular decision.

For a contemporary artist who believes or at least wants to believe that what they are doing is more than a vague combination of “interesting” and “cool,” the prospect of making work in the type of world described by Kierkegaard and Dreyfus is a daunting prospect. Why sacrifice one’s time to making art if no one cares, including oneself?

One response is that one could simply not participate in the online arena, at all. That certainly seems plausible – the artist Tino Seghal, for example, goes to all sorts of great lengths to avoid new technologies. But, even by not participating, one is still highly engaged with this media environment by going out of one’s way to avoid it. That is, it’s still, at the very least, a source of anxiety. So, if one is going to directly participate, how would one do that and maintain any belief that their works of art are meaningful?

For the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg, that question is based on a faulty premise which will always inevitably bog one down. For Steinberg, an individual work should not be thought of as a “good investment” in meaningfulness. One work will always be a hive of contradictions and limitations. And, furthermore, anytime an artist becomes anxious about the meaning or lack thereof in regard to a given one of their works, that anxiety won’t be resolved by reasoning one’s way to its meaningfulness. What’s meaningful – or at the very least a way to cope in the face of all that novelty – is to, following Kierkegaard, make a “risky investment” – a “leap of faith” – going into each and every new day with an openness to experience and to the shifting of criteria in one’s world, and, then, making meaning out of that.

In what follows, I’ll discuss in greater depth the relationship of the Internet and making artwork on the Internet in relation to Steinberg’s ideas regarding the potential for meaningfulness in art.

2.

The pop star Prince, has, since 2007, been at war with the Internet in regard to, amongst other claims, its users’ ability to distribute his music for free. A recent highlight of Prince’s feud with the Net came several weeks ago when Prince declared that “the Internet is over.” According to the artist, “The Internet’s like MTV… At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

Contrary to Prince’s analysis, though, while it’s debatable whether or not the Internet is hip anymore, it’s not necessarily “over.” In fact, the amount of time people spend consuming media online is only increasing. And, according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Foundation which was reported in The New York Times, young people in the United States are consuming an eye-popping seven and a half hours of electronic media a day – basically every waking minute outside of school – which actually increases when one considers the layers of media involved in multitasking (for example, surfing the Web while listening to music), pushing the figure up to eleven hours of media consumption a day. According to Donald F. Roberts, one of the study’s authors who was quoted in the Times, “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

One reason why it’s possible to spend that much time consuming media, is that there is now an effectively unlimited amount of instantaneously available, free media through which one may consume twenty-four hours a day as well as the devices through which one can execute this consumption. It becomes plausible to just sit and consume all day, popping from one interesting thing to another interesting thing to another – all of them different and equally interesting. For instance, while I don’t remember the actual circumstances in which I read the article about Prince, I’m picturing a typical scenario in which it would have been crammed-in amongst thirty other news items and a half-dozen advertisements on a Web page, which is itself nestled-in amongst four other tabs on my browser – all of which contain other interesting media. No matter what the actual circumstances, though, I almost instantaneously forgot about it in my rush to continue consuming other interesting media.

I bring all this up, though, to actually sympathize with Prince and with every other person creating all of these hours of free media which are consumed at these astounding rates. How, after all, is one supposed to make a living as an artist in this scenario? And, perhaps more importantly, how is one supposed to find any meaning in participating in this scenario? That is, how is one supposed to find any meaning in one’s work when it’s competing to make a little noise in an endlessly noisy room? Even if one’s work is fortunate enough to receive fifteen minutes of fame, will that fifteen minutes be enough to provide one with a sense of meaning in regard to what one is producing? I recently read something the filmmaker Harmony Korine said about his own frustrations with producing anything in the cultural context of the media explosion engendered by the Web. He said:

[…] at a certain point everything becomes noise. I find it increasingly difficult for movies to have a lasting emotional resonance, the way they did when I first started watching. You would see something and it would live with you forever and could change the way you thought about things. There seems to be this shift where now it is just about consuming them. Even the movies that people say they love for the most part they forget the next day.

There’s a paradox to democratic culture in which all media is accessible, but, because all media is accessible, it all becomes equal in value to zero – like fifty almost identical brands of shampoo in a super market.

3.

This concern is related to the “plight” of contemporary art which the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg describes in his 1962 essay “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public.” In this essay, Steinberg describes a contradiction in the very idea of Modernism in which the Modernist imperative to continually overturn the hard fought insights of the generation of artists just historically prior to one’s own, compounded by the ever-narrowing cycles of these generations, results in the absurd situation in which no one – no matter who they are – feels secure in the knowledge that any individual work of art they produce or any artistic breakthrough they accomplish will retain any meaning for anyone in more than a year or two, most likely in less time than that. When faced with this reality, how can an artist believe that what they’re fighting for or fighting against has any meaning? This contradiction creates, for Steinberg, an anxiety. He writes:

I know that there are people enough who are quite genuinely troubled by those shifts that seem to change the worth of art. And this should give to what I call “The Plight of the Public” a certain dignity. There is a sense of loss, of sudden exile, of something willfully denied – sometimes a feeling that one’s accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution. And this experience can hit an artist even harder than an amateur.

*****

For Steinberg, this anxiety is bound up with both the quantity of new art pumped out every month in the contemporary art system as well as the speed in which this system seems to be moving since it became aware of the demands placed on it by both the art market and the art magazines hungry for “the next big thing.” That is, all contemporary art comes with what, in a related essay, Steinberg terms “built-in obsolescence.”

Thinking of these anxieties in the context of the Internet, then, this situation is further compounded as the surfeit of art through which to sift through is by now greater and the cycles of built-in obsolescence are by now narrower. This is especially true in relation to the history of artists working directly on the Internet. The “net.art” generation of artists in the 1990s and early 2000’s, for example, seem, for better or for worse, like distant art history and even Internet Surfing Clubs which created buzz in the net.art community for a couple of key years seem like a hazy memory which is too difficult or embarrassing to remember in the face of keeping up with RIGHT NOW. Furthermore, if the words you’re reading right now are at all “interesting,” that interest will be long gone within a month – you won’t even remember reading this.

Perhaps this was always the case, though. Perhaps artists have always dealt with this and it’s besides the point to even bring it up because it’s so obvious. But the particularly disarming element of the contemporary moment which Steinberg presciently noticed in his own time is that the rate of turnover at present is so accelerated that it rubs this built-in obsolescence in one’s face and doesn’t allow one a decade or two of breathing room in which to pat one’s self on the back. No one can even pretend to love an individual work of art anymore (another’s work or one’s one) because one knows that that love will be obsolete almost as soon as it’s proclaimed.

So, why even do it? Why even participate in this system if one’s work is going to be chewed up and spit out without much serious reflection?

The way Steinberg addresses this anxiety in the essay is to quell the need one has for each individual work to be thought of as anything like a “good investment” in terms of either financial or art historical capital. As long as one focuses their desires on the worth of an individual instance of one’s ongoing art practice instead of on the ongoing evolution of the art practice itself, one will always inevitably run into these anxieties. Steinberg’s goal here is not to reverse the situation or to reason himself away from it, but rather to come to grips with this loss of one’s ability to love a work of art, identify it as an anxiety and propose a way forward. What he comes to is that for the contemporary artists or the contemporary art lover, a shift in focus is needed in which one focuses their attention away from investments in individual works and towards an ongoing, daily practice.

What’s potentially horrifying in regard to this, though, is that it requires, for Steinberg, following Kierkegaard, a “leap of faith” with zero logical certainty in regard to the value of this potential evolution in daily practice. At least with the individual work of art, it’s there, you know it’s done, it’s something concrete which you can evaluate. What comes next in one’s ongoing practice or “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, is completely anybody’s guess. If one is to follow his argument, though, it’s the only way forward for both artist and art lover if they are to overcome the anxieties of “the present age.”

In response to Hubert Dreyfus, then, who was concerned with the impossibility of a meaningful sacrifice or “leap of faith” in the solipsistic worlds of the Internet, we can offer Steinberg’s interpretation of the “leap of faith” in relation to problems inherent in late Modernist art. The sacrifice here comes not from one single decision or “leap,” but rather from a deep engagement with time – the development of an ongoing practice, in which the only hope for meaning emerges through a daily-ness and openness to receive what comes along that day and every day until the end.

4.

Although perhaps lacking the existentialist angst which Steinberg describes, many artists working on the Web right now, particularly younger artists working on Tumblr blogs and sites like dump.fm, have come to a similar conclusion: no single instance of a work which is thrown up onto the Web is going to be very meaningful. What could be meaningful, though, is a discernible shift in the object of inquiry from the individual work to the ongoing performed practice of creating work.

I, personally, became interested in this idea through my experience of watching “Internet Surfing Clubs” around 2007 and 2008. Internet Surfing Clubs are blogs authored by multiple users in which short, visually immediate posts – each of which often involves re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet – are shared in ongoing conversation. The Surfing Club I was aware of first and to this day have the most affection for is Nasty Nets.

Before I became acquainted with Surfing Clubs, I wasn’t particularly interested in art and only moderately interested in Internet culture. I came from a background in film production and, while I was still watching certain filmmakers, generally speaking, I had hit a brick wall with film on a creative level. This led me YouTube where my interests were rekindled.

On YouTube, the attraction, at first, was to surf through the archive, finding weird stuff that I watched as a child in the 1980s, television news bloopers, “mashups,” etc. Eventually, though, I became particularly interested in following regular YouTube users who talk into their webcams everyday – sometimes to large audiences of people. Many of these personalities were genuinely intriguing and I began to pick up on the fact that it didn’t matter if what they were saying was logically incoherent or creatively limited, I loved the fact that they kept going, they kept performing everyday and, in the best cases, they kept transforming themselves. And you could watch this transformation happen in real time. For me, this was revelatory: the individual movie was sacrificed for the performance of daily moviemaking over time. What becomes valuable is the performance of it – the fact that the person will be there, improvising, talking, interacting with the network of other users and they’ll do it (almost) every day. To my mind, this is where the energy of cinema was going – focusing on the improvisatory authorship of cinematic objects, as opposed to the cinematic objects, themselves.

Shortly after this, I became aware of Surfing Clubs and, in particular, Nasty Nets through “The Year in The Internet 2006” which was a series of “best of” lists by people interested in Internet culture and Internet memes. It was edited by the artists Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel, who also made a similar list the year before.

On Nasty Nets, the same principles applied except, in this case, there was a level of meta-criticality in regard to what was being shared. It was Internet culture about Internet culture, and, in some cases, it was about the history of conceptual art, as well. Once again, though, the point, for me, was not to spend too much time asking whether or not the individual posts were good or bad, but to simply follow the stream, day after day, every day. And, just as in my experience on YouTube, in the process of following these streams, the posts began to differentiate themselves and different performative voices began to emerge. I didn’t know anybody that was on a Surf Club or have any idea what their backgrounds were, but, all of the sudden, certain surfers on Nasty Nets became, to me anyway, the most relevant, significant artists that I knew of – period. If one watches this type of work, one quickly realizes that the meaningful art on the Internet is accrued through “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, following the performing of the making of art on the Web.

5.

When faced with a leveling-out of all individual units of culture to right around zero, both the artist and the art-follower are presented with a choice: either drown or surf. The work which one views on the Internet which retains a sense of meaning and the possibility of inspiring further work by artists and further following by art followers is, more often than not, produced by those who surf.

Performance

The democratic culture of the Internet (blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) is increasingly a part of daily life. If somebody wants their voice heard, they can do it with a couple of clicks. However, as this democratic culture creates more instantaneously available media on a daily basis than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime, a tension emerges in which each of these individual units of media is transformed into noise. In this scenario, both Proust and pornography flatten out in value to right around zero – each just a drop of water in a continuously expanding ocean.

Information theorists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner discussed this problem in the early days of cybernetics research. Information is a ratio of signal to noise. The more noise – or entropy – in a system, the less clear the information. On the Internet, there is so much culture that it becomes like what Weiner, in a different context, called a “Niagara of entropy.” There are so many people shouting in the room that one voice cannot be heard clearly.

For a contemporary artist, this scenario poses an interesting problem. In prior models of media dissemination it was difficult for an artist’s work to reach large public audiences, critics, or curators without the artist being based in one of a handful of cities or receiving support from a commercial art space or a not-for-profit art institution. The democratic culture enabled by the Internet, though, allows for anyone and everyone with a connection to have their work viewed by both casual audiences and international arts professionals. This means that an aspiring young artist is now able to radically disseminate her work. The flip side of this situation, though, is that the meaningful value of this work becomes relatively minuscule because it’s now just one drop in an ocean of other works. As an artist uploads a work to the Internet, the chance that it will be viewed by more than a handful of people or reflected upon for more than a couple of minutes is minuscule due to the massive amount of other media through which it’s competing against. The artist, then, is left in a tangle: what’s the point of making anything if, at best, the work becomes a viral meme for a couple of hours and, at worst, is completely ignored by anyone other than the person that uploaded it? For some, I guess, this is the dream of the Internet in which the postmodern death of the author is made official and all culture just swirls around as anonymous memes. For others, though, it may be frustrating.

One artistic stance in response to this question takes an ongoing, constructive approach to creating meaning on the Web. This stance sees that, if there is meaning in this context, then it is accrued through the ongoing performance of an artist making individual works through time – less the individual work and more the ongoing exhibition of multiple instances of work.

Before continuing, a step back in time:

Pablo Picasso began to consider the location of his art as residing in his entire ongoing practice – one action after another after another. Picasso wrote, “Paintings are nothing but research and experiment. I never paint a picture as a work of art. Everything is research. I keep researching, and in this constant enquiry there is a logical development. That is why I number and date all my paintings. Maybe one day someone will be thankful for it.” For Picasso, who pictured himself as a blind minotaur crashing his way through a labyrinth in many of his paintings, the work occurs in the cumulative effect of his ongoing search for meaning; each individual painting functioning as a piece of “research” conducted in the name of this search.

As Leo Steinberg demonstrates in his long essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Picasso’s medium is not even painting at the point in his career in which he made the “Algerian Women” paintings, but, rather, “the artist” – in this case, the artist performing an allegorical quest for a “realistic” two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional perceptual space. It is, for Steinberg, only through the catharsis of following this performed myth wherein the most powerful meaning of Picasso’s work is realized for his audience. As such, Steinberg takes it upon himself to critique the performance as a whole, subjecting Picasso himself to the lens of “the work of art.”

In re-constructing the historical drama of a myth surrounding Picasso, Steinberg painstakingly re-constructs the order of historical events, giving the viewer a sense of Picasso’s evolution. One can surmise that the essay was something of a labor of love for the author to construct due to, if nothing else, the raw amount of time consumed in traveling to see these dozens of works in dozens of museums and other collections all over the world.

And that’s the wager of Steinberg’s analysis – it operates on a highly privileged scale and, as such, describes things that are effectively impossible to view for anyone but an academic art historian with an expertise in that particular field. For almost anyone else, be they casual art fans or enthusiastic ones, access to Picasso’s work is limited to the handful of art museums one has the ability to visit firsthand in the course of one’s lifetime. Because of this limit, Picasso’s audience cannot easily appreciate the work as an ongoing performance.

Viewed through the lens of the Web, though, this distance between dramatic stage and audience is dramatically squashed. When an artist uploads a work, anyone with an Internet connection can view it. Furthermore, the vast majority of work – from artists working both on the Web and outside of it (such as painters [even dead painters like Picasso]) – is now viewed in the context of the artist’s chronological development as it is displayed on a Web page. That is to say, the idea which Steinberg is at pains to describe in regards to Picasso – the artist’s self-authoring performance of the role of “the artist” in time – becomes, on the Internet, automatic.

The artist’s website, as a publicly accessible database, may be followed by a public interested in the artist’s work. As an artist continues to create work, this creation is knowingly performed – one views the drama of an unfolding practice in which each “move” is in dynamic dialogue with past practice as well as a navigation into future practice. If I encounter the work of the contemporary artist through their managed presence on the Internet and I do it again and again and again and again, then this managed presence itself becomes a performative work.

There are many examples of this type of approach to making work in the context of the Web. One of those examples is Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff.

Poster Company is a Flickr page consisting of over two hundred paintings produced between July 2009 and May 2010. In this project, the artists, first, focus on collisions between automatic effects which read as either “painterly” or “digital,” and, second, shift the focus of their labor in the work from the production of the individual painting to the performance of producing many paintings over the course of months. As such, their work is in dialogue with the painter On Kawara’s Today series and Josh Smith’s influential painting project – each of which are meaningful when considered as reactions to the automatic reproducibility of images as well as an ongoing, long-form performance.

The question “what is a digital painting?” (a noun) is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?” (a verb). The significance of Poster Company’s work lies not in the individual compositions, nor in the volume of output (although these elements are undeniably crucial for the full execution of the work to occur), but rather in the performance of the work.

In many ways, digital technologies and the Web make life easier for those who use them. This ease, though, frustrates the sense of accomplishment and meaning involved in laboring over something. When everyone can easily broadcast themselves on the Web or create a modern art masterpiece with a few clicks of a mouse, these actions become meaningless. In the face of this quandary, some artists have conceived of art production less in terms of the creation of a single work and more in terms of the performance involved in creating multiple works over time which an audience may follow live.

Tom Moody

1.

Tom Moody is best known today as commentator on the net art scene and a member of the animated GIF and meme sharing community on dump.fm.  However, he is also an accomplished painter and a pioneer in employing consumer-quality paint software applications in a fine art context.  Throughout his career, his works have provided mesmerizing DIY optical effects balanced with thoughtful considerations of the impact of technology on image production, particularly in regard to the tradition of painting.  This text is an overview of some of his work.

2.

Tom Moody was born in Texas and attended high school in Northern Virginia.  He received a BA in English Literature and Studio Art in 1977 from the University of Virginia, did a year in the BFA program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC from 1977 to 1978, and, following his year at the Corcoran, a summer semester at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City.  Following his education, Moody returned to Dallas, Texas as a painter.

A successful early body of work from 1979-1980 is a series of black and white photorealistic portraits of his male high school friends.  Photorealism was an established movement by the time Moody made these paintings, but his facility with the technique (they could be installed comfortably with Chuck Close’s Phil from 1977) and his embrace of the banal photographic portrait as his subject matter point to his interest in the movement’s conceptual underpinnings.  By laboring to create hyperrealistic photographic effects and employing banal subject matter, the work opens the door to a deeper subject—photography itself; or the use of paint to demonstrate for the viewer what photography, divorced from the photographic print, looks like.  This interest in exploring the formal aesthetic of an imaging technology is a strategy that Moody continues in his embrace of the lo-fi digital affects embedded in the Microsoft Paintbrush, Microsoft Paint, and Adobe Photoshop tools.

Another key work from this period is Wired Self Portrait (1978), a black and white photorealistic self-portrait depicting the artist wearing bug-eyed novelty sunglasses and standing in front of a bank of electrical meters.  The painting is connected to a piece of “hardware” (a white machine about the size of a home printer or fax machine with rows of black knobs whose function is unclear) via two telephone cords inserted into Moody’s neck. This imagery recalls Frankenstein and A Clockwork Orange and anticipates the cyberpunk movement in literature.  Additionally, the depiction of the painter as a cyborg can be thought of as a harbinger of sorts for the direction Moody’s involvement with painting will take.

3.

By the early 1990s, Moody had developed a brand of optically-charged abstract painting, developing his own style and visual vocabulary.  Many of the motifs present in his computer-based painting such as concentric circles, serialized rows and columns of illusionistically-rendered spheres he calls “atoms,” and graphic depictions of molecules as networks of nodes and edges are present in his painting from this period.

As Moody developed this brand of abstract painting, he began meeting other painters from Dallas and Houston who were also exploring abstract effects. These painters, including David Szafranski and Jeff Elrod, became grouped into a movement that Art in America covered in a 1995 article by the art historian Frances Colpitt.

What set Moody’s work apart from the other painters in this scene, though, was his approach to the ground of the paintings.  Instead of painting on canvas, Moody painted directly on, on the one hand, the packaging of consumer goods such as cereal boxes and promotional-size Advil boxes, and, on the other hand, computer print-outs of his own art criticism, re-arranged to disrupt the narrative or argument of each piece, that he would then tape together into grids.  These gestures add an explicit layer of conceptual meaning to Moody’s work.  In regard to the works painted onto his own art criticism, the abstract imagery does work on a purely formal level, but this formal level is complicated by the layer of jumbled art criticism upon which it rests.  The paintings are, in part, about the making of abstract paintings, including the complicated legacy of Modern art discourse.

It should also be noted that the application of paint in these works is often crude, the method of taping-together the computer print-outs of the writing lacks polish, and the consumer-quality of the paper itself is not sensuous in the way that canvas is, giving the paintings an over-all lo-fi, rough-around-the-edges quality.  However, at the same time, the paintings’ embrace of this rawness is both intentional and self-aware.  Part of the aesthetic becomes about a sort of garage rock DIY-ness.

4.

Just as the Art in America article was released and the painting scene Moody was involved in began to receive national attention, though, many of its members, including Moody himself, had left or moved elsewhere.  In Moody’s case, he moved to New York City, taking a clerical temp job with plenty of downtime.

With all of the downtime he had at this job and his interest in situating himself somewhere in the New York art world, Moody began to think of this office as an art studio.  The computer consoles at the office employed out-of-date versions of Microsoft Windows and the paint software application, Microsoft Paintbrush, which, even by the late 1990s, was itself out-of-date.  Moody embraced the banality and technological obsolescence that these tools offered, creating pixelated iconography that he would then print-out onto shades of yellow, pink, blue, and white copy paper.  He would also, in some pieces, create signal distortions from his console to the office printer, resulting in jagged, pixelated lines along the paper that add a further level of formal pattern.  Moody then cut these print-outs up into asymmetrical shapes and re-combined them into a painting using linen tape on the back surface of the paper.

When displayed at a large-scale (as they were in Moody’s solo show at the Derek Eller Gallery in 1998 and the “Post-Hypnotic” exhibition that traveled from the University Galleries at Illinois State University to multiple venues between 1999 and 2001) the patterns of the cut-up paper, punctuated by the simple black icons printed on their surface, resist the humbleness of their materials and give off a mesmerizing optical pop.

Additionally, the slight crinkle of the manipulated copy paper and the patchwork re-assembly of the cut-up pieces create a “quilted” effect on the surface.   The reference to a quilt has a particular resonance for Moody.  As a metaphor for the way the Internet works, the quilt takes on a different set of characteristics than would the “web,” “network,” “cloud,” or “information superhighway.”  For example, the quilt is highly tactile and often associated with femininity.  In a 2005 interview with the artist Cory Arcangel on Rhizome, he comments on this, stating:

In the late ’90s I was impressed by the writing of cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who opened up for me a whole organic, non-analytical way of looking at computation. She traces digital equipment back to one of its earliest uses, as punchcards for looms, and talks of the internet as a distributed collaborative artwork akin to traditionally feminine craft projects.  At the time I was drawing and printing hundreds of spheres at work and bringing them home, cutting polygons around them, and then taping the polygons back together in enormous paper quilts.

There is also an embrace of lo-fi digital imaging in these works in which the rasterized pixel is not cleaned-up as one would find in contemporary imaging software, but rather visible as an indexical account of digital processes.  The sight of these digital traces in the imagery demands the viewer to consider the fact of the computer in the process of image-creation.  What appeals to Moody about this is an embedded acknowledgment that new media technologies are limited; always already on their way out the door.  This doesn’t make them useless as a tool for art creation, though.  On the contrary, the aesthetic or medium of an obsolete technology can be beautiful precisely because it understands its own inevitable obsolescence.  As he writes in his artist statement, technology is “a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication.”

What is also interesting to consider about the way Moody made these works is his clandestine re-purposing of the technologies around him at his bland office job.  He was making objects, yes, but also re-thinking the place of the traditional painting studio and perhaps even creating a portrait of the Gen X-era, mind-numbing corporate milieu in which he was situated.  The curator Richard Klein picked up on these aspects of the work, curating him into the “Ink Jet” exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2000.  As did the painter Michelle Grabner, who showed this work in the “Picturing the Studio” exhibition she co-curated with Annika Marie at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

5.

During this period of Moody’s career, he also created a controversial series of portraits on the Microsoft Paintbrush application depicting physically attractive women whose images he found in print magazines.  In each of these images, Moody would “perfect” the features of the already idealized women using the digital tools at his disposal, bringing the eyes closer together or further apart, making the nose smaller or bigger, etc.  There is something uncomfortable about these images as they were carefully studied, drawn in a piece of software, and digitally “perfected” by a male artist without the female model’s knowledge.  One is provided a sort of unfiltered access to the male gaze.  Furthermore, the black and white, pixelated images provide an un-realistic, clearly computer-created look to each of the subjects, which makes them not erotic, but unsettling.  The women’s bodies are even further abstracted, even more on view as commodity objects than they are in the print magazine.  Like the artist Richard Prince before him, though, Moody walks a fine line in these works between purely fetishizing a woman’s body and providing a self-critical portrait of this very act.  Perhaps their success as artworks is the inability of the viewer to reach a synthesis or conclusion in regard to which side of that line they exist on.

6.

Through the early 2000s, Moody would continue to work in many different veins, both on and off the computer, in most cases combining processes occurring in both locations.  One of his most familiar icons, the molecular model, is an apt metaphor for this approach to artistic process between virtual and physical space.  The molecular model is a unified structure composed of at least two discrete parts that is itself part of a larger structure.  One work, style, or location of work can be thought of as one node or one atom in a larger network or molecular structure.  Taking a cue from the artist Gerhard Richter, the heterogeneity of this larger network is, in part, where the art in Moody’s project occurs.  His serial patterns of spheres or atoms, in which the focus is on a multiplicity of atoms in a larger pattern as opposed to a single atom, can be thought of in a similar way.

Within this rhizomatic structure, though, one of the modes of production Moody returned to quite often is the one he developed in his temp office job—creating imagery in a piece of software, printing (and often re-printing…and further re-printing) the image out onto relatively inexpensive consumer-quality printer paper, cutting it up into asymmetrical shapes, and finally re-combining these shapes using linen tape on the back surface into large, optically-charged rectangular paintings.

As this body of work developed, the patterns became more varied and visually maximized, developing into intense compositions with echoes of Russian Constructivism and late Kandinsky.  Additionally, the paper he worked with became increasingly white in color—a reference to his own vocational shift from the corporate office to the home office.

7.

At around the time that these works achieved a level of self-consciousness within Moody’s project, though, he began to focus elsewhere, exploring the animated GIF file as a robust Internet-native art media.  Moody had long posted digital drawings and paintings onto his blog, but with the GIF he found a more immediately powerful tool to make paintings expressly for the screen.

GIFs are short, looping animations, composed of a relatively small amount of frames and file size.  They have been a part of the vernacular visual lexicon of the Internet since the earliest days of the World Wide Web and have recently seen a surge of interest amongst digital natives on platforms like Tumblr and the website dump.fm.  Part of the appeal (or, for some, lack thereof) of GIFs is the sense that they are aggressively, endlessly instantaneous and, hence, work well for communicating lowest common denominator images and ideas.  However, this very crudeness also makes them particularly robust files to distribute socially, giving them a potential political efficacy that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of photography and cinema in the early 20^th century.

Moody’s embrace of the GIF came through the use of his pioneering art blog (that itself was the subject of a 2007 exhibition, “Blog,” at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn).  He found that, as an Internet native media, GIFs, in a way, effectively cut out the middle man to showing paintings online.  A photograph of a painting is often a poor substitute for the phenomenological impact of a “real” painting.  If one’s painting is going to be viewed far more often in the context of a website or blog (as Moody’s work was) than why not make digital paintings?  Furthermore, why not make those digital paintings move, catching the hyper-wandering Internet surfer’s eye?  And, finally, why not use a file type associated with viral Internet meme culture, providing the paintings with a dynamic life outside of the artist’s website?  With these points in mind, Moody began to experiment with GIFs.

Like his ink jet painting works, the GIFs embrace visual immediacy, pixelation hearkening to a form of technological obsolescence, and a rigorous economy of materials that result in a certain roughness in appearance.  One of his most widely-viewed GIFs (and, if not the first, among the first GIFs to be purchased explicitly as a work of art), is OptiDisc (2007).  This is an eighteen-frame animation depicting concentric circles that alternate at uneven intervals in color from black to red to blue to white, creating a crude, but hypnotic effect.  The work resembles a target, a Modern art favorite famously used by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland.  However, while Moody’s target possesses the same sort of visual punch that these others painters generated, there is also an embedded commentary about progress, be it technological or artistic, occurring here.  Through the use of pixelated imagery, a pointedly small file size, and the uneven temporal intervals of the circles’ alterations in color, OptiDisc is at once both dynamic and pathetic, visceral and antiquated. This tension is what makes it interesting to think of as a work of contemporary art.  The critic/curator Paddy Johnson, in her commentary on the work in the “Graphic Interchange File” exhibition text, writes that the GIF’s “emotive qualities last only as long as Moody allows a reverence for technology – in Moody’s world modernism  is only an afterimage, its spirit eventually replaced by mechanical functionality.”

8.

Recently, Moody has continued to work with GIFs and also created a series of large glossy prints made with Paintbrush, Paint, and Photoshop.  These prints feature complex layers of abstract iconography, much of which is created with a “spray paint” tool, as well as the representation of a crudely-drawn brick wall that functions as both a reference to the Modernist grid and to a wall tagged with graffiti.

This blurring of the polish of Modern art and the rough, democratic aesthetic of street art is a fitting description of Moody’s artistic project in general.  One of the acknowledged inspirations for his painting process comes from cyberpunk literature.  As Moody describes it, cyberpunk inherited the British New Wave’s dystopian, yet hauntingly beautiful, near-future science-fiction vision, mixed it with a dose of cutting-edge computer science, and threw in the science-fiction novelist Samuel R. Delaney’s “street kid” protagonist, resulting in a scrappy form of visionary pop.   One can see Moody, then, as a breed of cyberpunk artist–critically exploring the new, avoiding pretension, and approaching authenticity.

In each case, the disappearing effect is meant to mimic a similar effect produced by the Nightcrawler character in the X-Men comic book and film series.

“BAMF’S,” as these mimicries are often called, take their name from the distinctive sound made by Nightcrawler every time he disappears in the X-Men films – something in-between slamming and suction.

Taken individually, these videos, which generally run from a couple of seconds to between ten and twenty seconds, to, in some cases, over a minute, are moderately interesting – some videos are more dynamic than others; some videos are funnier than others; generally, though, it’s difficult to read anything into them as they’re fairly self-explanatory.

When re-contextualized in a sequence of videos though, a different picture emerges. Again and again one views teenage boys amidst the trappings of a moderately comfortable suburban life – nice lawns, athletic clothing, family pictures, sofas, outdoor decks, etc.

And again and again, one views these teenage boys in the act of escaping this milieu.

The escapes occur in the form of, on the one hand, the demonstration of the teenager’s supernatural control over his own body in space, and, on the other hand, the execution of an action on a computer.

There’s something pathetic about these forms of escape, but, when viewed as a genre with its own conventions, one might pick up on something more to these videos, as well. In Coy’s words:

[…] an understanding of the vastness of the need to broadcast a coping mechanism to others; like a shared frame in a comic book…

(Street View is a massive venture sponsored by Google in which vehicles armed with multi-lensed cameras drive all over the world, taking automatic and indiscriminate street photographs which are themselves, then, composed into 360 degree panoramas which can be virtually navigated through on the computer.)

In each case, one views a landscape (any landscape, rural, urban, suburban, whatever, just so long as it’s a view from a street) depicting either a figure or a group of figures, architectural details, empty vistas, or camera glitches.

It should be said, though, that the bread-and-butter of the project is the series of images depicting a figure or group of figures in isolated settings, suggesting a sense of loneliness or alienation.

For example, in Rafman’s Sixteen Google Street Views book, one views hikers dwarfed by a sublime, snow-covered landscape, a man taking a secret photograph of a group of teenagers in a public square, a small girl sitting by herself to the side of a street, an arm sticking out of the window of a white building, a naked woman staring into the ocean, a man staring into an empty landscape of the American west, and so on and so forth.

In each case, Rafman isolates a view on human action in which that human and their actions are viewed as insignificant or lonely.

When these images are taken by themselves, they often border on the sentimental, but when they are paired with the iconography of the Google copyright and directional compass arrows familiar to users of Google Maps, they take on a new significance.

The Google-ized images, after all, are produced without any moral, humanistic point of view.

In regard to this point, Rafman writes:

Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.

*****

The driver of the Google vehicle pauses every ten to twenty meters so that the automated cameras can take a picture – the objective is to map out geography photographically (à la Borges’ map of the world at a 1:1 scale), not intentionally suggest anything in particular about that geography.

As such, these images are all but devoid of the human hand in their production, going beyond even Ed Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip in which Ruscha turned on the street photography tradition of, say, Cartier-Bresson by cataloguing “every building on the Sunset Strip” in Los Angeles with an identically wide, frontal framing in every shot, that, then, compounds the endless, lonely sameness of the L.A. landscape.

There are no “decisive moments” in Ruscha’s project as every image is meant to be banal and stricken of any point of view.

In the case of the Google street view camera, this connection between the human hand and the representational image is even further separated, underlining the increasing disconnect between human beings and lived experience – even taking a photograph is more efficiently executed by a machine than a person.

However, whereas Ruscha’s project is anti-aesthetic and largely conceptual, demonstrating a certain deskilling of the artist’s hand, Rafman’s project comes full circle in a way, re-introducing a mode of skilled artistic craftsmanship not, in this case, in taking the photographs, but in searching through Street View and choosing unique images to isolate and re-contextualize.

Rafman writes:

Despite the often-impersonal nature of these settings, the subjects in these images resist becoming purely objects of the robotic gaze of an automated camera. For in the act of framing, the artist reasserts the importance of the individual. This altering of our vision challenges the loss of autonomy and in the transformation of our perceptions, a new possibility for freedom is created.

*****

Without ever intending to do so, the totally automated, impersonal Google Street View camera often picks up stray moments, off-hand glimpses of human personality.

Rafman’s vision of street photography hearkens back to Cartier-Bresson by tracing the (virtual) landscape, seeking out these rare gems – the “decisive moments” accidentally caught by Google – which tell the viewer something particular about where it is they exist.

Of the eleven paintings exhibited, one of them was The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet (which is discussed in the previous post) and the remaining ten comprise a series of digital prints on canvas which (1.) each depict a wide range of subject matter and (2.) over all of which the artist applies an acrylic texturing gel in order to give the surface a more tactile, painterly feeling.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the varying images in the series converse with one another.

One views, for example, the stock image of a bowl-of-fruit still life, a photorealistic portrait of a woman photoshopped to blur at the lower edge like a tableau vivant, broad squiggly lines which read as “digital” over a background of paint blobs which themselves read as “painterly,” a cliché image of messy abstract brushwork, a wheel of gradiating digital color, an “animal portrait” foregrounded by LOLCATS – style text graphics, a collage of varying pictorial strategies from the history of art placed in a grid, nude models covered in paint, a digitally drawn rendering of a Hudson River school style landscape, and, finally, a rigid formal pattern composed of a tactile material (in fact, it’s a close angle on the texture of the same canvas material Ito used to print the images in the series on).

So, as mentioned, there is a heterogeneity in subject matter here which is initially disorienting.

However, as one continues to view through this wide variety of imagery, taking the show in as a whole, one theme begins to emerge as a constant variable:

A collision between the physical act of painting and the simulation of the physical act of painting.

In each instance, a pictorial strategy or “effect” drawn from the history of painting is input into a computer, simulated through digital tools (where it gains its own currency as part of digital culture) and, then, re-output as paintings which were automatically “painted” by a digital printer.

On Ry David Bradley’s Painted, Etc. blog, Ito is quoted as calling the works in this series not paintings, but “painting objects.”

He writes:

[…] these “painting objects” were simulating hand made things, but also referencing modes which have been typically associated with the reproductions of paintings. The whole premise of the body of work was approaching painting as “found”, so I selected jpegs that referenced genres/history of painting (sorta based on wikipedia). The work is very involved in painting history and an awareness of that history, but I also believe the jpegs I selected reflect on other issues that are not so specific to this history, and are more specific to Internet culture.

*****

With that mind, the kick of the paintings is similar whether one views them in person or on the Web.

In both cases, what one views is a painting straddling each of those two worlds.

Furthermore, it is thought that the art world – even if it did acknowledge this work – would not know what to do with it as this online economy is alien to its own – premised as it is on the exchange of materially sensual objects for amounts of (financial) capital unavailable to all but the most wealthy members of society.

Jogging writes:

In the lives of contemporary artists, Free Art is a place to find one’s self through the existence of others – to individually reclaim the ability to self-mythologize and empathetically pick from your peers for influence. Thus, Free Art is marked by the compulsive urge of searching (or, surfing) to connect with others in a way that is not dictated by profitability, but found and shared charitably among individuals based on personal interests.

*****

A couple of thoughts:

I’m not sure that the Web is any less tainted by economics than the art market. The re-blogging format preferred by Jogging did not appear out of nowhere; power relations are alive and well (t)here as one might say that all of this activity is ultimately in the service of market research for corporations.

Meanwhile, the world of contemporary art is obviously not perfect, but it’s not entirely dominated by auctions and abusive gatekeeping, either.

And if one is interested in placing their creative endeavors on the Web in both the most critically sympathetic as well as the most critically astute environment possible (the environment in which it will be judged as more than style alone), one can’t so easily dismiss the art world as it has been thinking about these questions very seriously for a very long time.

Furthermore, the work will (if it is as good as it thinks it is) end up back in the art system as salable objects; the question here, then, is how much control does the artist exert over this entry into the system.

This is just to say that the conversation occurring inside the art world is worth taking a second look at before one abandons it outright.

Also, Jogging’s reference to the immaterial or de-materialized quality of the work is problematic.

For the sake of argument (and it is debatable), let’s say that – yes – a virtual .jpeg of a sculpture is immaterial – free of the problems of aura and material commodification which the sculpture depicted in the .jpeg itself affords.

But, what about the hardware displaying this content?

The notion that the Web has accomplished some sort of Hegelian transcendence is precisely what, say, Steve Jobs wants consumers to believe:

Go on, keep chatting with your friends, watching videos, listening to music – it’s all fluid and immaterial now and that’s great – just so long as you do so through the iPad.

These devices which display the work which Jogging thinks of as lacking aura, are, in fact, highly susceptible to aura or, from a slightly different angle, fetishism.

One can’t wait to get home and log-on to their machine, touch it, ride the time of computing cycles; anytime the threat of boredom creeps in, one can immediately start fingering their iPhone, dexterously running their hands all over it in the hopes of generating more immaterial content.

Indeed, perhaps one could think of the endless stream of a blog as lubricant – sweet nothings in one’s ear, easing one’s entry into a more rhythmically sustained fingering of their device.

This is just to say that the materiality of digital culture is worth taking a second look at before one denies its presence outright.

Now all that said (and on the other hand), there’s another consideration which comes into play here:

“Free Art” was posted on the Jogging Tumblr on May 12^th, 2010.

In the five days which have passed since the 12^th, Jogging has posted six additional unique works – each possessing their own unique power and each propelling my own following of their posting (as in an on-going performance).

As a matter of fact, this immediacy and performative enthusiasm is relatively more exciting (to me, anyway) than most things happening in most of the shows advertised via, say, e-flux.

Which is precisely the effect which Jogging describes in their text.

An anxiety arises:

I have some issues with the idea, but I’m compelled to follow it nonetheless.

That is to say, it can’t be dismissed outright as the artists demonstrate it for me, placing it directly in front of me, demanding my acknowledgment.

And through this acknowledgment, I may never quite decide for certain if the idea of Free Art is naïve or pioneering (or both), but I may be infected by it, nonetheless.

One views, in the image to the left of the diptych, a vertical composition composed of an open door that itself frames an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and the obstructed view of a window.

These figurative elements are each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, a painting style – say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s paintings lack that sort of “shock effect.”

They are not wild, but tame.

The fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects that, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodified signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych – as it is displayed on his website, anyway – is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and “new.”

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might be taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image.

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine – perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing – were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an ongoing stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy – a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.