The age of digital information networks, according to the Jogging collective’s text “Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age,” has so radically mutated the way information is distributed, that a revolution in the way artists exhibit their work is called for.
Jogging writes:
The internet offers a chance for art’s users to experience organizational models of viewership in ways that are non-dependent and non-hierarchical. Allowing institutions to dictate the function of the Internet, be it through copyright, privatization, and/or the commoditization of information, simply digitizes pre-existing modes of viewership built upon problematic power relations.
To that end, Jogging has mounted two non-hierarchical exhibitions – READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 and AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS – in the past two weeks.
READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 is an art action involving a word-of-mouth exhibition on the Facebook Wall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in which hundreds of artists posted their work.
AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS is a Tumblr of installation shots from the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in which the works depicted were digitally inserted into empty shots of the galleries to look as if they were installed in the physical space.
However, what one views when one views the exhibitions is not non-hierarchical resistance, but rather a hierarchical structure in which Jogging is the sun around which the other artworks orbit like planets.
The kick of An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers is not that it is a great way to exhibit the artists in the show (it’s not), but that it is a work of art itself – by the Jogging.
What is interesting here is Troemel and Christiansen’s gesture – that’s where the aesthetic kick occurs.
This is just to say that Jogging is creating art, but not political art.
Tags: brad troemel, digital, exhibition, hierarchy, horizontality, immaterial survey of our peers, information, information age, jogging, politics, ready or not it's 2010, vertical