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Friday, August 20th, 2010

The cultural theorist Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known for his observation that the mechanical reproduction of unique works of art eliminates the “aura” or ritualistic cult value around these works. He writes: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” A mass-produced photograph of the Mona Lisa, for example, is not going to call for a ritualized pilgrimage to see it “in-person” and take-in its aura in the same way that the original is able to accomplish every single day at the Louvre. Instead of bemoaning this withering-away of aura due to mechanical reproduction, though, Benjamin turns on the point, suggesting that both the religious undertones and the focus on the individual which are suggested by aura are, in fact, a tool of fascist politics and that reproducible media, especially film – with its radically more dispersed and instantaneous modes of reception – open the door to an art conducted in the name of communism.

In this widespread reading of Benjamin’s theory of media, though, there is no clear-cut understanding of what it is exactly that Benjamin means by “aura.” As commentators such as Miriam Hansen have pointed out, Benjamin’s writings seem, at times, to celebrate the demise of aura, and, at other times, to demonstrate a certain nostalgia for it, if not suggesting that aura still, in fact, exists – albeit through very different means – in reproducible media such as photographs of people who are now dead. Likewise, there is a certain murkiness surrounding the ways in which Benjamin defines aura, both in the “Work of Art” essay and beyond it.

One way to understand his use of the term is that it denotes a quality which does not emerge from within the work and emanate out, but is rather accrued in time through both the work’s testimony to history and the trajectory of its social transactions through this history. That is, the aura around a work is not beauty or a magic which originates from the inside of the object, but a conceptual field around the work accrued through time as it reflects back upon its own history as a material object. In what follows, I’ll discuss Benjamin’s use of the term aura in these terms and, then, briefly consider its relevance to digital media reproduction.

Benjamin’s earliest usage of the term “aura” occurred during one of his writing experiments while under the influence of hashish. He describes it here as an “ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case.” What one can gather from this description is that it is something external – “ornamental” – to the object; there is nothing magical inside the case of aura; the aura is generated by the case itself.

Later, in his essay “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin considers the influence of time on this “ornamental halo.” He describes aura here as “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” There is a suggestion in this description that aura involves not just the space of the physical object, but an invocation of linear time. This interest in the effect of time in the experience of a work puts Benjamin outside of many other theorists of the phenomenology of the art experience. For example, it contrasts with what Michael Fried, in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” terms “presentness” or a sort of atemporality in the work of art. Whereas, for Fried, the most powerful art objects exist outside of time (and, thus, outside of theater) – continuously re-creating themselves anew every moment – the auratic work of art, for Benjamin, creates a sense of distance around itself by actively invoking a continuum of time (a continuum which would be eliminated by mechanical reproduction).

In one line of thought in Benjamin’s writing on the subject, he discusses the experience of time in the aura of a work of art in relation to the materialist history through which the object has existed.

He points to this in “The Work of Art” essay, writing:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

*****

The auratic authority around an object, then, is – again – not generated by something inside the object as if it were magic, but rather through an “ornamental halo” accrued through the object’s testimony to a period of history. The fact that the object was there in a certain corner of historical time is what affords it any more authority than an identical object which did not experience that history, much less a reproducible photograph of the object.

Related to this is the idea of provenance or the history of ownership of a work of art. If a particular painting has been passed through the hands of famous collectors for centuries, what one would find auratic about the painting is not the alchemical effect of the artist’s application of paint to canvas, but rather the series of transactions from one historical figure or collecting institution to another over time. For example, if one can say that the Mona Lisa possesses any sort of aura for its viewers at the Louvre, it is not necessarily because they find it to be a particularly beautiful painting, but rather because of its history and prominence in the museum’s collection. Art historians and aficionados may be entranced by its formal qualities, but the aura of the work for the public is, in Benjamin’s terms, accrued through the painting’s testimony to its history.

Benjamin also relates this to collections of objects other than works of art. For example, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin discusses the value of the books in his collection in relation to their historical testimony and provenance. He writes, “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to the magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” This relates to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of commodities as having a “social life” in which value around the object is accrued and lost depending on how it is socially transacted. For example, one of my favorite t-shirts belonged to my father when he was roughly the age I am now. When I see that t-shirt, it possesses, for me, a ritualistic value – an “ornamental halo” related to the transaction which led from my father’s wardrobe to my own. If I had purchased an identical t-shirt at a retail store or even a thrift shop, my entire relationship to it would be different; it’s provenance would be a mystery to me and, thus, diminish the t-shirt’s aura.

In the 20th century modernity which Benjamin experienced, he saw this sort of aura to be withering away as the mechanical reproduction of images diminishes the relationship of the mass public to unique works of art bearing traces of historical time. On the one hand, there is something bittersweet about this rupture, but, on the other hand, it presents a window – not on an artistic level per se, but on political one. All authority in the object which could be potentially utilized by the forces of fascist politics is challenged, opening the door to a new relationship of art and politics, one based on dispersion and the communication of communist political ideas.

In the age of digital reproduction, which would seem to even more radically destroy the possibility of aura, though, there is, paradoxically, a form of aura which persists not in relation to objects, but to information.

On social bookmarking sites like delicious.com, for example, works of net art become valuable based on the way in which the link to the work is transacted. If an artist produces a work and shares it through the Internet, the work can either stop there and be ostensibly forgotten or it can be bookmarked by another user, re-blogged elsewhere on the Web, or generally digitally dispersed. Additionally, the work can be re-versioned – meaning that it is appropriated, changed, and further re-circulated through the Internet as a mutation of the original. As all of this dispersion occurs, the “original” information on the Internet gains a certain aura – an “ornamental halo” or “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” Additionally, this aura is enhanced by the particular provenance of its trajectory through the Internet. If the information is collected and re-circulated by Internet users who have been bookmarking and re-blogging for long enough to have developed a proven “track record” as opposed to a user lacking a proven track record, then the aura of the information is further increased.

I recently viewed the original YouTube video which inspired the widespread “Double Rainbow!!” meme. In the video, an apparently stoned man – YouTube user Hungrybear9562 – is looking out onto a beautiful mountain landscape in which two rainbows are in the sky. He’s so profoundly moved by the site of the “double rainbow” that he begins an emotionally overwhelmed ramble in which he shouts “Double Rainbow!! Oh my God!!” and generally expresses his stoned enthusiasm for the vividness of the rainbows. Prior to my viewing of the original video, I had only come across versions of the video created by other YouTube users. When I did view this original video, the information it contained possessed an aura based on how widely the meme it inspired had been virally spread through the Internet. If the video had not been so widely dispersed, then it would have lacked that “ornamental halo” around the information it contained. For works of net art, this principal applies, as well, but with a slightly different emphasis. The aura of a work of net art is not necessarily based on its dispersion through mass culture, but through the a combination of both mass dispersion and dispersion through the smaller community of net artists and fans of net art.

*****

For Benjamin, aura is a complicated term. One way to understand it is that it is, first, not synonymous with beauty. Aura is something placed onto the object by history as it is travels through social transactions. He believed, or at least advocated for, the idea that when objects with this aura around them are photographed and re-distributed, the aura is necessarily lost and that, furthermore, this loss of aura around the way works of art are received in culture creates an opportunity for an art based not on ritual, but rather politics. However, in the contemporary moment in which culture is radically more technologically reproduced than it was even in Benjamin’s time, a sense of aura in terms of the social transactions around the work persists, for better or for worse, in the form of memes.

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Friday, July 30th, 2010

Performance 2

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.

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Monday, July 12th, 2010

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 20th 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.

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Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Watching Martin Kohout, a work by Martin Kohout recently exhibited on jstchillin.org’s year-long “Serial Chillers in Paradise” online exhibition space, is a YouTube channel consisting of (as of the current date) four hundred and thirty uploaded videos.

Kohout began uploading videos to this channel in April 2010 and is still actively doing so.

The content of each of the videos on the channel consists of (in all but a few cases) a webcam capture of Kohout as he himself views another video on YouTube (some of which are his own earlier videos from this very series).

Each video acts as a sort of loop from YouTube to Kohout back into YouTube (and sometimes looping back out to Kohout again if, as just mentioned, he chooses to watch one of the videos of himself watching another video).

In a gallery setting, the playlist would presumably be run through chronologically (although not necessarily); however, for the viewer of the work on a personal computer, there are any number of ways to engage with it.

I, personally, began by viewing the most recent video – Watching Liam Crockard – Hugh Scott-Douglas – ABSOLUTELY @ CLINT ROENISCH.

In this particular video, one views Kohout – whose distinctive physiognomy is anchored by a pair of glasses with large, rounded frames – looking down towards the webcam and the computer screen which displays the video he’s watching.

Because he’s looking down to the webcam, a source of tension in each of these videos is the way in which Kohout’s gaze almost meets the viewer’s own.

It’s sort of like being on the side of a one-way mirror which allows one person the ability to look directly at the other without the other’s ability to look directly back.

As the video goes on, Kohout’s eyes scan over different parts of the screen with a dead-pan expression; at one point, he fidgets and, then, smirks; a bit later, something catches his eye out the window; and near the end, he gives a little smile before again returning to his default dead-pan.

Generally, though, there is only very little variation in Kohout’s performance (he’s just watching the videos) and this minimal, vaguely uncanny fascination persists through the playlist (or at least through the eight videos I personally viewed in full and the four videos I viewed in part).

As one views through multiple videos, the lack of variation in action nudges one towards elements outside of the central action documented in the videos including a heightened awareness of the shifting architectural scenarios, slight changes in Kohout’s hair style and clothing, and, finally, reflective thought regarding the conceptual apparatus of the work.

His seemingly unaffected performance brings up a source of tension in the work regarding the degree to which what one views here is, in fact, an unfiltered view on Kohout as he naturally watches the video or else if it’s a performance of someone as if he was naturally watching the videos.

Kohout knows that his watching is being recorded and is destined to be uploaded to YouTube as part of an art project – does this fact preclude one from saying for sure that he’s naturally watching the videos, and, furthermore, is there a normalizing process in which Kohout’s awareness of the recording process diminishes as the actual naturalness of the performance increases?

Additionally, as one views Kohout responding to the videos, to what degree does the viewer participate in the viewing of the videos he watches (particularly if the viewer is familiar with the content of the video)?

Is one just watching Kohout or is one to some extent watching a version of the video viewed, as well?

To the work’s credit, there aren’t any concrete answers to any of these questions.

What one views here, then, is perhaps a self-portrait demonstrating the ways in which the lines between being and being watched are increasingly blurred.

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Monday, July 5th, 2010

AfterSherrieLevine.com is a website by Michael Mandiberg.

It consists of scanned versions of Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans photographs (which themselves were appropriated versions of “original” Walker Evans’ photographs) as well as a section of texts, including a statement by Mandiberg, and a series of appropriated texts written by or involving Levine.

The titles of the individual photographs refer to their url (e.g., AfterSherrieLevine.com/1.jpg).

In each one of these photographs, one views, at first glance, a black & white, Great Depression-era documentation of either a figure, a group of figures, an architectural detail, or a barren landscape in a rural, economically-distressed area.

These images were initially created by Walker Evans and received attention for providing documentary evidence of the way in which the Great Depression impacts “the common man” as well as creating a myth around the figure of Evans as a roving, Whitman-esque bard of the photographic medium.

However, in the context of Mandiberg’s website – aftersherrielevine.com – one views another layer to these photographs, consisting of Levine’s intervention into them.

As photographs of photographs taken by Levine, their value resides less as the documentation of poverty or as a sign of the mythology surrounding Evans and more as empty simulations of these qualities.

In the perceived wake of Modernism, the heroic potential of autonomous artists or autonomous works of art was challenged as artists such as Levine sought to demonstrate the impotence of these ideas in the wake of the massive increase in social image consumption due to technological reproduction.

She writes:

The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, bend and clash.

*****

Photographs which are framed as “of photographs,” it is thought, demonstrate this very condition of an “image world” and, as such, contain no illusionary cult value in and of themselves; on the contrary, they demonstrate the negation of this value.

Now, of course, Levine’s re-photographs are not purely theoretical objects; they exist in major museum collections and are widely exhibited, thus, complicating any claim to Levine’s negation of the idea of the “artist as genius” or of the original work of art.

And this is where Mandiberg’s intervention into Levine’s work comes in.

By scanning the photographs from the same Walker Evans book which Levine herself used, uploading them to the Internet and marking them as “After Sherrie Levine,” Mandiberg demonstrates that the very self-mythologizing and cult-value which Levine ostensibly critiques is, in fact, highly present in her own work.

Though her work was a critique of the authority of the hero-artist as produced by art history, this critique is arguably as well known in contemporary art discourse as Evans’ original work.

As art discourse paralleled the accomplishments of postmodern artists, these artists and their works paradoxically become art historical landmarks

It should be said, though, that Mandiberg’s insight here was not lost on Levine herself.

Several years after the production and exhibition of her After Walker Evans series, Levine suggests in an interview with Jeanne Siegel (which Mandiberg turns into a one-act play available to read on aftersherrie-levine.com) that her own thinking about the work is transformed.

She claims:

In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about the denial in the work and I certainly corroborated in that reading, but now it’s more interesting for me to think about it as an exploration of the notion of authorship. We do believe that there are such things as authorship and ownership. But I think at different times we interpret these words differently. It’s the dialectical nature of these terms that now interests me.

*****

This dialectic of critique and confirmation is further developed in Mandiberg’s project as he includes with each of the high resolution images in the project a printable “certificate of authenticity” which is to be signed by the person who printed it out.

This gesture allows Mandiberg to acknowledge his own images’ potential for cult-value while also distancing this value from economics as the person viewing the work is free to print out and “officially” certify it by their own hand.

By versioning Levine’s work on the Internet and self-reflexively accounting for the fact that his own critique is itself subject to objectification and fetishization, Mandiberg’s project expands the picture drawn by Levine – one not of a struggling farmer, but rather of the process of image dissemination.

One views here a version of a version of a work of photography which is itself a version of another work (say, of portraiture or landscape in 19th century painting) and one views this version not as an endgame, but rather as one more notch in a chain of versions extending into the past and the future.

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Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Google Street Views, a body of work by Jon Rafman consisting of an ongoing Tumblr blog, a book published in conjunction with Golden Age in Chicago, a photo essay on the Art Fag City blog, and a series of glossy c-prints, is – in each of these versions – a collection of images found by Rafman while surfing through the “Street View” feature of the Google Maps application.

(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.

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Friday, June 25th, 2010

Brandnewpaintjob.com, an ongoing blog by Jon Rafman, is composed of (as of today, anyway) almost forty posts.

Each of the posts is itself composed of either (1.) a digital image depicting a 3D model, or (2.) a digital image depicting a 3D model as well as a short video clip in which a “camera” moves around the 3D model as if it were filmed in physical space.

The models Rafman uses are appropriated from Google 3D Warehouse and altered by him so that the “texture” or outer surface of the model reflects the style of (in most cases) a canonical Modern or contemporary artist.

So, for example, in the first post of the blog, Motherwell Elephant, one views an elephant whose surface reflects the rough confrontations between the colors black and white in paintings by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell; and, in the most recent post, David Hockney Studio Apartment, one views a modern studio apartment with natural light, expensive furniture and a flatscreen television in the color palette and iconography of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash.

In-between these examples is a series of similar collisions between a particular painting style and a particular 3D model such as Warhol Commodore (a Warhol self-portrait over the 3D model of a Commodore 64 computer) or Parker Ito Condo (Parker Ito’s The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet over the 3D model of an expensive looking condo apartment).

At first glance, these collisions may strike one as somewhat arbitrary postmodern one-liners; however, if one continues to view through the blog or follow its development as it happens live, then one begins to appreciate the way the posts function in greater depth.

Take, for example, Pollock Tank.

Pollock’s infamous dripping style serves here as a formal equivalent to the camouflage designs normally associated with the surfaces of a tank.

However, there are other things happening.

The aggressively armored shell of the tank nudges one towards viewing Pollock’s persona and his paintings as “tank-like” – excessively private and explosive – while this very explosiveness of Pollock’s canvases nudges one towards viewing the tank as itself wildly explosive (as opposed to defensive or keeping the peace).

In each of the cases presented through the blog, a similar collision between the 3D model and the painting style creates a two-way street of meaning in which the painting style says something about the model and the model says something about the painting style.

In regard to this point, Rafman writes:

A conversation is going on between the surface and the underlying structure. In this way, the clash of the cultural weight of a high modernist paintings and a mass produced vehicle is not simply another example of the blurring of the distinction between high and low culture.

*****

It’s often not immediately clear what the connections are leading towards, but this very wiggle-room in interpretation benefits the project as a whole by maintaining a certain ambiguity to each post.

For example, I’m not sure exactly what Lewitt Blue Whale or Morris Louis Penguin have to say about each of their respective collisions off of the top of my head, but in seeing the actual models, each case does make some sort of sense and part of the pleasure in the work is in thinking through why that sense may or may not exist (why is Sol LeWitt like a blue whale; why is a penguin like Morris Louis?)

Finally, when the blog is viewed as a whole, an interesting theme is demonstrated:

When viewed as digital images, canonical works from the history of 20th century painting are inevitably going to lose whatever phenomenological power they possess in the physical space of the museum.

A .jpeg of a De Kooning is not going to afford one the phenomenological “De Kooning effect” which one would experience in a traditional art space.

However, what does afford one a certain phenomenological effect on the Web is the way that, over time, it’s not the style of the famous paintings that serve as art, but Rafman’s performed exploration of them.

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Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Acapella, one of two videos by Guthrie Lonergan with that title (the other was discussed in the previous post), opens on a stock video clip depicting a direct point-of-view shot in which the camera smoothly banks through white clouds in an otherwise sublimely blue sky.

Almost immediately after this imagery appears onscreen, an a cappella version of the Oasis song “Wonderwall” emerges on the soundtrack and, then, almost immediately after that, an identical “Wonderwall” vocal track appears, creating a harmony.

The lead vocalist of Oasis, Liam Gallagher, in harmony with himself, sings:

Today is gonna be the day
(Today is gonna be the day)
That they’re gonna throw it back to you
(That they’re gonna throw it back to you)
By now you should’ve somehow
(By now you should’ve somehow)
Realized what you gotta do
(Realized what you gotta do)

*****

At about nine seconds into the video, a ray of sun peeks through the clouds and the video clip suddenly loops back to the beginning while the song continues normally.

The video clip then continues looping while the song continues playing.

There’s something blissful about it.

The shot is generic, but somehow beautiful in its simplicity and the harmony created from the a capella versions of “Wonderwall” only adds to the sense of this.

However, as one watches, one may wonder if it’s too blissful – after all, artists who work in a conceptual vein (as Lonergan does) often use aesthetic beauty ironically or to make a broader point about art.

So, one scans through the image, on the hunt for clues or a punchline.

But, there doesn’t seem to be any goofing going on here – it’s not like it’s all a big joke.

Eventually, though, the song ends and the viewer is left only with the endless silent looping of the video clip.

There’s an unsettling quality to just seeing the video clip without the song; it’s not “silent” as in a silent film, but rather “quiet” as in a person who could speak, but chooses not to.

At this point, one can either leave the work or follow it through this new phase.

Now, all that said, a strange sort of question pops up:

Is Acapella a narrative video with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or is it an infinite loop?

Is the piece done when the song finishes or does it just go on endlessly?

To put the question in practical terms, how would one show this in a gallery?

At the opening do you play it through with the song once and, then, for the duration of the exhibition just let the loop cycle through itself in silence or does the curator or gallery assistant just occasionally go over and start it up again based on either whims or an arbitrarily regulated schedule?

Perhaps that’s missing the point, though.

Maybe it only works as Web art in which the user is free to control their own personal experience of the work, viewing for as long as they choose, reloading as frequently as they choose.

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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Guthrie Lonergan created two videos composed solely of the a cappella vocal tracks of famous pop songs mashed-up with appropriated stock footage clips.

Both of these videos are titled Acapella.

In the first video, one views, to start, stock footage with burnt-in time code depicting an hourglass spinning on a pedestal in front of a blue background, which is itself probably designed to be used as a generic “bluescreen” in video postproduction.

The blue background in the clip, though, is creased and wrinkly which would make it difficult to use for a seamless bluescreen effect.

Also, the lighting is generally harsh, casting an entire half of the blue background in darkness, again defeating the point of bluescreen as an even, unchanging field of blue which can be easily keyed out in a single gesture in post-production.

Each of these qualities give one the impression that this is an amateur production, perhaps a single person hoping to sell cut-rate stock footage from their bedroom.

Following this introductory shot, the soundtrack opens with an a cappella rendering of the Police song “Message in a Bottle” as the view on the hourglass itself zooms in, focusing closer and closer on the sand dripping from the top of the hourglass to the bottom.

The viewer watches these sands of time drip away as Sting sings:

Just a castaway, an island at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

*****

It should be noted that as an a cappella version of “Message in a Bottle,” these lyrics become simultaneously more isolated and more rawly emotional than they would come across in the original song; and, furthermore, despite the seeming incongruity of the hourglass imagery and this raw vocal track, they begin to quickly make some sort of emotional sense together as they’re each sparsely produced and they each reference a certain threat of being alone in the world.

As the song continues, this hourglass imagery dissolves to a shot depicting a man (whose slicked back hairdo is visible in the bottom of the shot, incidentally) holding his hands above his head, demonstrating the idea of “growth” by placing his palms close together and, then, spreading them far apart over and over again.

At this point, the chorus of the song kicks in:

I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle, yeah…

*****

When the man’s hand motions are juxtaposed with these lyrics, the viewer can, then, almost read them as themselves an “S.O.S.” – a ritualistic signal to a distant viewer, asking to be saved (or at least acknowledged).

This becomes poignant when one considers that – again – this particular stock footage is amateurish and naïve – one more drop of water in the ocean of non-professional or semi-professional user content on the Web, one more person expressing themselves in an environment of endless amounts of other personal expressions.

This is the problem of trying to express oneself in what Lonergan has termed “The Big Database” in which even what would otherwise be “amazing” content is flattened out; expressions (any expression – the videographer’s, Lonergan’s, my own) are consumed and, then, almost instantaneously forgotten.

As such, anyone trying to get their ideas heard in Internet-land is a sort of castaway.

Related to this point, Sting sings:

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone in being alone

*****

What work like this video by Lonergan does, though, is start from the idea that everyone working on the Web is sending out their own S.O.S. and, by self-reflexively picturing that, a different lens and set of criteria for thinking about work in The Big Database might open up.

In Lonergan’s words:

[…] Something very real struggling beneath a heavy and ancient structure of corporate software defaults and cultural banality…

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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Chris Coy’s contribution to Contemporary Semantics Beta, an art show curated by Constant Dullaart at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, consists of two elements:

1. A pair of large, printed images hanging beside one another on the wall.

The first of these images depicts a straight-faced young man in a red t-shirt holding a completely blank, white rectangle vertically (as if it were a painting). The second depicts a group of enthusiastically smiling young people in business attire holding a similarly blank, white rectangle horizontally (as if it were a novelty-size check).

In both of these images, it seems as though the white rectangle should contain some sort of signage which would relate it to the rest of the given scenario, but it doesn’t.

As it turns out, these are appropriated stock photographs whose original intention is to provide either (1.) a clean, broadly cliché “stock” image of a person or group of people holding a generic sign which, for example, a corporate client could easily digitally insert their own chosen signage into the white space; or (2.) a visual equivalent of the phrase “blank slate” which could be used in the off-chance that a magazine or advertising campaign need communicate the idea of “blank slate” in a single potent image.

It’s not the artist who subtracts from the original image here, but the original image created by a stock image company which subtracts from itself; the artist merely points this phenomenon out.

2. The second element in the work is a large, completely blank, white rectangle which is placed on the gallery floor, leaning against the wall below the prints mentioned above.

This white rectangle functions the same way that the white rectangles in the stock photos do:

It is meant to be an open space for something that another person could insert; in this case an artwork.

Coy knows that the installation will survive as a digital photograph. The white rectangle completes a loop – from the mutable digital image on the computer, to the art space, and back again.

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