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Friday, June 18th, 2010

Still Available by Oliver Laric is an ongoing list of Web domain names which are still available to be taken.

Laric’s work Taken is an ongoing list of all of those domain names listed in the Still Available series which have, in fact, subsequently been taken (at present, almost seventy domains are now taken from the over three hundred listed over the course of the series’ five installments).

In the earliest iteration of Still Available – Still Available 17.10.08 – approximately one hundred thirty-five potential domain names are listed, each of which refers to keywords rich in value relevant to that particular historical time period regarding, for example, politicians, political theorists, luxury commodities, pornography, artists, art theorists, art world events, physics, pop culture, or cities.

These domain names are often funny and perceptive in the way in which they pinpoint strategies employed by “parked domain” companies who buy up domains in bulk using keyword strategies not unlike those employed by Laric himself.

So, for example, he lists domains which have no value other than a speculative one regarding the future of value-rich keywords such as elections2032.com, documenta13.com, and beverlyhillsninja3.com; or domains which combine vaguely-related value rich keywords at that particular moment in historical time such as putinpalin.com, gucciprada.com, and platinumclit.com; or else domains which just sound as thought they could be actual domains such as botoxbros.com, divorcebattle.com, or thenewsocialism.com.

Likewise, in the following four iterations of Still Available, a similar method is employed.

In this way, Laric creates a portrait of the practice of domain naming as an increasingly complicated and speculative enterprise which, in turn, results in a Web consisting of as many empty, “parked” domains awaiting potential owners as it does active ones – a portrait of the Web as a space undergoing not exploration, but relentless colonization into the predicted value-rich keywords of the future.

The Taken list of domain names underlines this understanding.

On the one hand, it’s true that some of the domain names from the list are taken by “normal” people or small not-for-profits such as the artist Billy Rennekamp taking billyrennekamp.com, a modest Amon Düül fan site taking amonduul.com, the “Frankly My Darling…” blog run by a middle-aged woman taking 13dimensions.com, or the breast milk donation info hub taking breastmilkdonation.com.

However, most of the domains were taken by Web-based companies in the business of parking on domains in order to cybersquat or provide advertising space (my favorite example is steaksonaplane.com which was taken by the Godaddy.com company to advertise its own services).

With all of this in mind, what one views here, then, is the way in which this increasingly colonized landscape is different from the geographical landscape of Earth in the sense that its potential space for expansion is itself continuously expanding as world events, and memes both high and low open it up to the contingency of the moment.

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Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Sand Saga by Shana Moulton, a ten-and-a-half minute video with a family resemblance to Moulton’s own Whispering Pines video series, is the story of a vision quest through a landscape involving not the traditional natural environment of the Native American vision quest, but rather a mishmash of the natural environment, new age kitsch, mirrors, vaginal Georgia O’Keefe iconography, archetypal myth, psychoactive skin creams, digital effects, time travel portals, and an extended hallucinatory state.

The narrative opens with two views of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia, viewing her own represented reflection in, first, a large bathroom mirror, and, second, a small personal mirror which (due to its ability to magnify facial details) morphs her face, stretching it and compressing it into bizarre forms.

Cynthia, then, returns to her reflection in the larger mirror as she applies a brown-green facial mask while, in the meantime, various objects in the bathroom – a Georgia O’Keefe “cow skull” poster as well as masks and sculptural busts depicting mythological figures – look on.

After putting on the finishing touches, she turns over an hourglass and, as the sands of time drip away, Cynthia – continuing to stare into her own reflection – watches the facial mask transform into a portal which itself leads to a lush landscape in which a shamanic figure drips sand onto a Native American sand painting (perhaps there is a Jackson Pollock reference here).

The shaman, represented to Cynthia as herself wearing an O’Keefe cow skull mask and a red jump suit, directs her to lie down on the painting as she applies consumer-quality massage gadgetry and polished black stones to Cynthia’s back.

Through the stages of this ritual, the shaman is able to extract both symbolic representations of blockages to Cynthia’s chakras as well as a contact lens from her eye – actions which, then, set off a cathartic, carnivalesque montage composed of dancing figures wearing mythological masks in the midst of a blissful void space composed of imagery from O’Keefe’s flower paintings.

This montage, accompanied by rhythmic new age music, continues for roughly three of the video’s ten-and-a-half minutes and, then, in a final scenario, Cynthia returns to her bathroom as “a new woman” and proceeds to eat her facial mask, taking what was initially a synthetic cover to her face and ingesting it, symbolically destroying it by absorbing it into herself.

Now, on the one hand, Sand Saga is a bildungsroman in which a young, seemingly dissatisfied character gains confidence through a mystical journey into the archetypal depths of herself.

On the other hand, though, the constant, knowingly jokey references to borderline quackery, “cheesy” special effects, and sham new age commodity culture casts the sincerity of this vision quest thesis into doubt – like, oh, it’s all a joke.

So which is it?

Well, at a recent artist’s talk at E.A.I., Moulton made several references to the television series Twin Peaks, citing it as an inspiration and ironically claiming that her own best video was a remake of the “Black Lodge” scenes from the final Twin Peaks episode which she made as an adolescent (unfortunately, that tape is now lost).

The appeal of Twin Peaks at the height of its meteoric rise in the 1990s was its tone of, on the one hand, absolute vulnerability and sincerity, and, on the other hand, absolute detached coolness and irony.

The viewer of Twin Peaks is invested in following the case of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” not because they intrinsically care about Laura Palmer nor because they care about the show’s detached hipster humor, but rather because of the satisfactory collision between these two elements in which it’s impossible to tell which one is the true Twin Peaks.

Similarly, Moulton’s videos are perhaps best considered as operating in the cracks of a collision between sincerity and irony and a lot of that has to do with Moulton’s skills as a performer.

Like Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Special Agent Dale Cooper before her, if one views Moulton’s character enough, it doesn’t matter if she’s serious or goofing or if the truth will ever be revealed; the pleasure is in following her figure it all out for herself.

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Monday, June 14th, 2010

Plato with biometric overlay by Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas of Aids-3D is a work of inkjet print and acrylic on canvas depicting two elements:

1. The photo of a Greek sculptural bust.

2. A formal pattern of intersecting pink lines and “stars” at each of the intersection points that together map out the facial features of the figure depicted in the Greek sculptural bust.

At first glance, one views the contrast of the relatively smooth lines and monochromatic color palette depicted in the photo of the sculpture (which read as “ancient” – the photo comes across as signifying the era of Ancient Greece more than a particular artist or subject), with the rigidness and dayglo color-scheme of the lines and stars (which themselves each read as “artificial” – they create a pattern reminiscent of graphic iconography from the Transformers cartoon show and film series).

So, there’s an immediate collision between two starkly differentiated iconographic elements – each of which pull one in an opposed direction.

The title – Plato with biometric overlay – points out for the viewer where to go from there.

In the context of the philosophy of art, Plato is perhaps best known for his “mimetic theory” of art in which art is an imitation of an imitation of a real thing; there is – here – a higher level of idealized, capital-F “Form” (an abstracted, immaterial idea of a bed), an imitation of this ideal (an actual material bed based on the idea of a bed) and an imitation of an imitation (a drawing of an actual bed based on the idea of a bed).

Biometric overlay, on the other hand, is a surveillance strategy employed by security professionals in order to create an abstracted, immaterial representation of a person’s facial features which can be digitally stored and cross-referenced in a computer network in order to, for example, quickly see if the subject’s facial features match those of anyone on a terrorist watchlist.

When the biometric overlay is placed over the face of Plato, a collision occurs in the work between one vision of idealized Form and another – one vision of Form as the transcendental space outside of the “cave” of “normal” consciousness and another vision of Form as the nightmarish acceleration of Biopower in the wake of the military industrial complex (or some such).

In their own commentary on this work, the artists lay out a similar reading.

They write:

The form has become the Form – There is no longer a need for a distinction between the particular and the universal. Plato’s ‘faceness’ has been quantified and digitized and his biography, stress levels, horoscope, download queue, credit history and criminal record have all been cross-checked for potential threat-patternage. Are the laser lines a symbol of magic and wonder or of cold totalitarianism?

*****

With this in mind and as one continues to view through the work, the biometrics overlay, with its diamond-like rigidity, becomes aggressive, confronting Plato’s face like a muzzle or the “facehugger” alien from the Alien films.

However, against this pressure, the eyes of the philosopher – emptied out of content in the classical style – are able to momentarily resist, extending beyond the biometrics, pointing towards (without naming) something seemingly outside of any representation.

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Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, national defense, law, cognitive science, and myriad other fields are increasingly focusing their investigative energies onto the ramifications of the ever updating financial flows, communication paradigms, sub-cultures, social norms, personal security concerns, and general experiential phenomena emerging in relation to the growing public usage of the Internet.

That said, it would really be something for the rarified air of the contemporary art world to not follow suit.

But, nevertheless, that is largely the case.

Contemporary art, for a variety of reasons, chooses to bypass or ignore the opportunity to reflect on these technologies.

Stroll through the kunsthalles of Europe or the galleries of Chelsea (to name two prominent examples), and one would be hard-pressed to find any indication (outside of certain for better or for worse ghettoized new media spaces) that the constellation of technologies surrounding digital networked computing have any influence over one’s relationship to space and time.

It’s like it doesn’t exist.

Which seems like a problem (if, that is, one believes that art, as a “humanity,” is pressed to reflect on the condition of being a human).

Perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, though.

After all, I spend a lot of time on my computer and while it seems to me like my own life is radically different than it was before I started logging onto my friend’s Prodigy Internet provider when I was a kid, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other people are quite as hooked.

In fact, most people don’t spend nearly as much time on-line as I do.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the opposite is actually the reality – most people are luddites who are actively not engaging with these technologies – they write letters not e-mail; they read books not blogs; they read The New York Times not nytimes.com; they have big family dinners not social network updates.

Even in this case, though, the actions just mentioned are conducted in explicit reaction to the phenomenon of the Internet.

A world of “not Internet” still presupposes the existence of Internet – be it an existence worth celebrating or problematizing.

To go out of one’s way to not use the technology, the technology still impacts one’s actions.

But still, it might be argued, that’s obscuring the problem here.

It’s not that there is a world of Internet and not-Internet, but that most people in the world have never even thought to think about these technologies because they’re too busy breaking their backs in manual labor and, as such, it’s imperialistic (not to mention petty) to suggest that anything so wild as the Internet is worth taking seriously.

Fair enough, but even if, for the sake of argument, most people in the world will never interact with these technologies (or choose not to do so), their lives may very well be effected, nonetheless.

With the proliferation of n.g.o.’s and transnational corporate interests into parts of the world where Internet access is limited, the livelihood of all but the hardiest human beings is in one way or another dependent upon capital which is now streaming through and enabled by digital computer networks.

But, perhaps, that, too, is missing the point.

Perhaps it’s not that the art world doesn’t think these technologies are on some level “worthy” of inclusion into the contemporary art discussion, but that it’s never really been the job of contemporary art to automatically start wringing its hands over new technologies.

In this reading, it’s not that the art world doesn’t understand the Web, but that the Web doesn’t understand the art world.

Neither Internet art nor art about the Internet actually partakes in what’s interesting about the contemporary art discussion and, as such, makes it difficult for themselves to be included.

For better or for worse, contemporary art is a world and (as worlds tend to do) it spends a lot of time reflecting on its self.

If the artists can’t figure out a way to connect the development of the steam engine or the television to contemporary art, then why would contemporary art have to automatically reflect on the steam engine or the television?

They might be important technologies (no one is arguing that they aren’t), but it’s simply not the job of contemporary art to account for them just because somebody outside of contemporary art demands that it be so.

Besides, that’s what new media art spaces or art & technology journals like Leonardo are for.

Related to this argument is the question of quality.

Again, it’s not that contemporary art is automatically predisposed to reject the inclusion of art made about these technologies or with these technologies, but that, entre nous, there just hasn’t been any good examples of this type of art.

The proof is in the pudding and one can’t expect artwork that’s at best working at an undergrad level of sophistication to just waltz right in and take over the conversation.

This might be the most powerful argument against the notion of contemporary art’s embrace of work explicitly made on or about digital computer networks.

However, I believe it’s an argument which is ignorant regarding the work that is actually out there – the proof in the pudding so to speak.

From one view, the artists I’ve written about on this blog, for example, are working very creatively in the wake of (again, from one view) early video art, “the Pictures generation,” painters like Christopher Wool, and on through the Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker crowd.

From other views, other genealogies could be posited and, if one is willing to put aside their own embarrassments concerning the computer, then one might see how these connections aren’t forced, but are rather logical and even obvious.

That’s not to say that this is the most astounding work ever made, but that at the very least it’s positioning itself in ways that seem like they should be intriguing for a contemporary art audience to reflect on.

Now, in contemporary art’s defense, it’s not so easy to just up and change its whole game plan.

First of all, there’s the problem about how to create financial value around this type of work and, thus, circulate it through its own well-oiled economy.

But outside of that, there’s another anxiety.

Contemporary art, to my mind, is in the business of asking “what is contemporary art?”

If contemporary art were pressed to say “contemporary art exists in the digital network as much as it does outside of the digital network,” then contemporary art would all of the sudden be operating from radically different premises.

The “white cube” paradigm (as the site where contemporary art occurs) would be threatened from within.

The “where” of “where the art occurs” would be altered as the simulation of the physical work through (primarily) the Web archive would be understood to be art’s arena.

To my mind, work which successfully bridges the worlds of the digital computer network and contemporary art is work which, on some level, implicates contemporary art into this very network.

It’s not work about the digital computer network, it’s work about contemporary art’s own entanglement in the digital computer network.

And for contemporary art to acknowledge this, it would demand that contemporary art changes the way it sees itself.

As such, contemporary art wouldn’t be taking in an orphan, but a virus.

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Thursday, May 20th, 2010

In You As In User, an academic text on Web 2.0 economics, Dennis Knopf (aka Tracky Birthday) explains the way in which large social networks such as Facebook thrive on the sale, not of network space, but rather of information culled from network users.

Facebook, without this data, is worthless.

Value here is traded through its users’ voluntarily offered likes, dislikes, pictures, keywords, ratings, and other personal information which advertisers can, in turn, use to micro-target clusters of audiences, maximizing the ratio of advertisement signal to advertisement noise in each user’s daily media diet.

For some, this is seen to be progress – a “win-win” situation in which the consumer is afforded the freedom to seek out their most intricately individualized desires and the corporation offering this service is afforded the freedom to transform all of the data traces left by users into streams of financial capital.

But think of what this does to the potential for shared experience.

As one’s consumption becomes more and more individualized, does it perhaps decrease one’s ability to personally connect with other people consuming other sets of media?

And, furthermore, think of the existential dilemma posed by the ostensibly infinite choice of networked consumption.

As one’s initial mania for endless novelty wanes, is there a point in which this enthusiasm transforms into a dread regarding the possibility of endless fun consumption, endless deference of “true” satisfaction?

What exactly is the consumer getting out of this deal?

Knopf (following a thoughtful, not to mention substantial, presentation of research) writes in his conclusion:

The myth of complete consumer freedom and the seeming focus on giving users the chance to express their individuality is to be questioned. Web2.0 has opened up a world of opportunities and introduced technologies that have changed our relation to media. But as long as strategies like the walled gardens and the segmentation of media are just to construct differentiated, homogeneous audiences then the world of Web2.0 is not much of a democracy.

*****

That said, though, what is the user supposed to do here?

Perhaps one severs their relationship to digital media in disgust and starts reading Hegel all day.

Perhaps one says, “the Hell with it,” leaping head first into the void of novelty, hoping to burst through to some other realm.

Knopf’s own suggestion takes a different path.

Effective counter-culture – here – aims to inform users of their exploitation in the system; he points to the practice of “culture jamming” in which the content of, say, an advertisement is designed to alienate the viewer of the ad from the ad’s message, thus catalyzing the viewer’s criticality towards not just this ad, but (ideally) all ads.

What would it mean to confront these conditions in contemporary art?

How does the contemporary art audience become conscious of contemporary art’s own involvement with these very economic models in which information is more valuable than material?

One place to look for an answer to both of these questions is the artist Ben Schumacher’s Immaterial Labour works.

In Immaterial Labour 4, for example, one views three beach towels inverted to hang on a wall.

Printed on each of the towels is a black and white photographic image of, respectively, a young woman, a man reading art books in a room filled with other art books, and another young woman.

It turns out that these images were not created by Schumacher, but rather were appropriated by him from the Facebook pages of users who identified that they were going to attend that show in which the towels were first exhibited.

Schumacher selects the image he wants to display, prints it onto a towel at Walmart, and, then, when the user attends the event, he or she sees themselves transformed into a work of art.

In each work, what one is viewing, if one is to follow the title’s lead, is not necessarily a person, but a concept – immaterial labour – the post-industrial labor of, for example, data sharing, the service industry, intellectual consulting, etc.

For an artist, particularly a young artist working in a networked culture, the capital they manage, before it’s financial capital, is social capital which can be quantified in terms of, for example, how many other Facebook users (and which Facebook users) acknowledge that they are going to attend your show.

If a ton of people indicate that they’re coming and a ton of people the artist desires, in particular, to indicate that they’re coming, then his show is, all of the sudden, worth something which might result in financial capital down the road.

Schumacher – in these Immaterial Labour works – transports this very process of others conducting free, immaterial labour for him into the eye of the art space.

What one views here, then, is, on the one hand, a towel whose face value (like Facebook’s face value) is negligible; and, on the other hand, a towel containing information (like Facebook’s user information) which is worth something.

It’s culture jamming. The product is a self-reflexive critique of its underlying economic function.

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Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org) is an approximately sixteen minute video depicting a diptych of video images.

In the video to the right of the diptych, one views a young man who has (it appears) hung himself to death.

In the video to the left of the diptych, one views a continually changing series of random computer users who are responding to the sight of this hanging man.

More specifically, the video is a documentation of the Chatroulette interface in which one of the artists (Franco Mattes) performs the role of the hanging man and leaves it up to the algorithms of Chatroulette (and the pool of Chatroulette users online at the time) to generate the bulk of the video’s subsequent content.

The first thing to note is that one’s focus through the duration of the video is nudged further away from the video of the hanging man and closer towards the video of users’ varied reactions to the sight of the hanging man.

What one takes away is the picture of a virtual public responding to the possibility of a real suicide.

In most cases, a legible pattern forms in which, first of all, a shock occurs where the user confronts the image of the suicide and exhibits a strong reaction.

The sight of a suicide online or off is obviously going to be unsettling, but, there’s something about placing a suicide in this context which is unsettling in a very particular way.

For example, the hanging man here is “live” in the sense that their virtual persona is functioning, but the user (the actual hanging man, himself) is “dead” in the sense that his biological body is no longer functioning.

So, can one really say that he’s definitely not there?

(Like a ghost, his presence in the bedroom is palpable.)

But, can one really say that he is there?

(Of course not, he’s dead.)

So, one asks one’s self:

Is a dead body the same thing as the real person?

And, then:

Is the online persona of a person representing themselves as their own dead body the same thing as the person?

Furthermore, the body here is suspended in the air – both floating, free from the laws of gravity and falling, on the precipice of physical collapse, which only adds to this confusion regarding its location.

After this initial shock effect, then, a range of reactions occur from apathy, to pondering, to sexual excitement, to denial, to the need to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, to amusement, to vicious insulting, to hilarity, to confusion, and, in one case, to calling the police.

Some people assume it’s a joke, some people think it might be real, and most people aren’t quite sure.

Within this range of reactions, though, there is one underlying theme which remains as constant as the presence of the hanging man himself:

The question:

Is this real?

That is to say, first of all, is this really a dead body or is it rather a clever fakery perpetrated by, say, a performance artist?

And, second of all, is this real, as in is this the sort of real human situation wherein I – as a real human being – am ethically called upon to really act (whether it’s real or whether it’s fake)?

That question is by far and away the most common theme brought up by the users throughout the video’s runtime.

Is this real?

NOTE: This post might be read in conjunction with the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” by Julian Dibbel (1993)

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Monday, May 17th, 2010

In “Free Art,” a text by the Jogging, it is suggested that the Web’s economy of re-blogging and fast-paced communal interaction creates its own economic model and, thus, its own best practices for understanding how value around work is accrued.

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 12th, 2010.

In the five days which have passed since the 12th, 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.

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Thursday, May 13th, 2010

“Nothing To Blame But Gemini” is an installation of fourteen works by Whitney Claflin now on view at Real Fine Arts in Williamsburg.

The installation is composed of one-half modestly-sized abstract paintings produced by the artist and one-half similarly-sized glossy posters printed-out by the artist which themselves each depict an abstracted detail of one of her own abstract paintings (not – it should be noted – the paintings in this particular installation, though).

The first thing to say about the installation is that one isn’t immediately sure which of the works here are the paintings and which of the works here are the posters as they’re each roughly the same size and they each depict iconography which one reads as “painterly” – drips, slashes, goopy brush strokes, etc.

(If one were to view the works through a computer screen [or a printed-out checklist], it would be effectively impossible to differentiate them via their media [rather, the “take away” message – in that case – becomes the sign of “painting,” or, alternatively, of “art.”])

However, as one spends time with “Nothing To Blame But Gemini” (as in the case [if one goes for this sort of thing, anyway] of spending time with a person born under the sign of Gemini), what at first glance appears to be singular, gradually reveals a strong duality.

The key variable of difference between these works is their materiality as objects – the paintings are sculptural, tactile; the posters are flat, glossy.

In the paintings, one views onto a surface molded by the artist – that is to say, a phenomenological space – the action occurred “here”; in the posters, one views into a surface automatically printed-out by a machine – that is to say a conceptual space – the action occurred “out there.”

Going one step deeper, the surface of the paintings calls to mind production as the location of the work (present tense), while the surface of the posters calls to mind both pre-production as well as post-production as the location of the work (past and future tenses).

And, at this point, if one is willing to go this far with the work, another layer emerges wherein each individual image harnesses these very tensions between “the hand of the artist” and “automatic effects.”

For example, in the painting works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the application of objects (broken ceramic, pieces of canvas, newspaper, string, glitter, etc.) which automatically produce iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s application of paint which manually produces iconographic elements.

And in the poster works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the data of the photograph which automatically produces iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s digital manipulation (using “painterly” effects in an image editing software) of the photograph which manually produces iconographic elements.

Finally, the painterly gestures in the works themselves (be they conducted with paint or pixels) point one in the direction of these dialectical tensions as they reveal an indeterminacy – a hesitation to settle anywhere for certain.

One views wiggling lines and almost haphazard juxtapositions of iconography and media; things never quite coalesce.

However, if one is willing to think of the work occurring here as located less in the individual objects, and more in the dialectical tension pictured by the installation as a whole, then suddenly a strong, singular point of view reveals itself.

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Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Battleship Potemkin Dance Edit (120 BPM) by Michael Bell-Smith is a twelve-and-a-half minute video in which the artist condenses the shots of Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, to one half of one second each (one hundred twenty cuts per minute).

He, then, underlays this “sped up” footage with a stripped-down 120 BPM dance music beat which matches the cuts of the image in perfect synchronization.

At first glance, it creates a strobe effect.

However, after a few moments, the flow of the narrative becomes followable due to both the original film’s heavy-handed graphic symbolism (silent films, of course, relied largely on pointed imagery to advance narrative) and the contemporary mind’s training for such rapid-fire editing techniques at the hands of MTV, Web surfing and whatnot.

One views, then, in a Cliffs Notes version, the famous montage elements and the revolutionary propaganda techniques for which the original film, Battleship Potemkin, is deservedly famous.

On the one hand, that’s great – the viewer gets to check out a film with aesthetic, intellectual and historical importance and is able to do so without the “boringness” of sitting there “forever” watching a really old movie.

(“History written with lightning” as Woodrow Wilson put in regard to another landmark silent film – Birth of a Nation.)

But, on the other hand, can one say that they have actually viewed Battleship Potemkin?

That is to say, even though the narrative sequence of the film is more or less legible, is there some missing “purity” to the film which is lost in the sped-up translation?

The goal of the film was to awaken in the viewer a sense of class consciousness through montage editing (shot A + shot B = Synthesis C; the aesthetic answer to the dialectical method of history explored in Marxist theory).

Is this effect, or the ability to even appreciate this effect, lost?

Perhaps what one can say they see in Bell-Smith’s version of the film is this, a new type of synthesis:

The mesmerizing, almost sinister mechanical regularity of one image colliding into another image resulting in an intellectual synthesis of images again and again and again and again without ever achieving “pure” synthesis (like an endless, un-changing dance beat).

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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The subject matter of “Liquid Door,” an exhibition of work by Isola & Norzi on-view at Art in General in New York, is the screen (and the desire to transcend the screen) between the human mind and the natural world.

One views:

1. { salt water [ fresh water ( distilled water ) fresh water ] salt water }, an aquarium tank filtering between salt water, fresh water, and distilled water.

2. Platonic Aquarium, the schematic model of an idealized Buckminster Fuller-esque underwater domicile.

3. Bated Breath, a series of matted photographs depicting the artists’ attempts to re-create the “liquid door” of Jacques Cousteau’s “Starfish House” (a “door” which emerges due to the air pressure of the water colliding with the air pressure at the threshold of the House)

4. And Large Glass, a video documenting the pas de deux performance conducted between a scuba diver and the large transparent glass screening him from the public space of the Coney Island Aquarium.

Throughout the viewing of these works, one’s attention is nudged further and further away from the form of life occurring in the water and closer and closer towards the screens which separate one from this very form.

Indeed, there’s something anti-aquatic about it – not beautiful, not flowing, not majestic; claustrophobic, mirrored, alienating.

This is not necessarily a problem, though; in fact, if one spends enough time in the show an intriguing (if not bitter) quasi-philosophical thought might enter one’s mind:

In one’s search for a “closeness” to nature, perhaps these efforts have only increased one’s dependence-on and desire-for the screens which separate.

This thematic crystallizes as one views Anemonia Mirabilis, a projected video loop (one screen from nature) depicting vintage film footage (another screen from nature) of Cousteau and his colleagues smoking cigarettes in their underwater home (a third screen from nature) which the artists have re-filmed through the “transparent” water (a fourth “natural” screen from nature) of a “transparent” aquarium tank (a fifth screen from nature) and contextualized in a space marked for “art” (a final screen from nature).

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