Posts Tagged ‘art history’

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Performance

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

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

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

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

Before continuing, a step back in time:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Friday, June 11th, 2010

Parker Ito’s recent solo show at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in San Francisco, entitled “RGB Forever,” featured eleven unframed paintings and one video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He writes:

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

*****

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

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

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Friday, May 21st, 2010

Pre-Sensation by Hayley Silverman is an approximately four minute video in which one views a laser pointer track over the projected image of another video which itself depicts rhythmic hand-held camera movements over sculptures representing “natural” forms and abstracted nude bodies.

The motion of the laser pointer here is composed of improvised, arcing motions which reflect the improvised, arcing motions of the camera over the sculptures depicted in the projected video.

Additionally, the video is paired with an improvised jazz score by a band named “Willendorf” and is also intercut at one point with several shots of a male sculptor as he washes the dirt from one of his sculptural tools and, then, from his hands.

Silverman’s movements with the laser pointer are legible as a sort of pre-intellectual, pre-sensational sensuality harmonizing with the shapes of the sculptural forms.

The fact that she is pointing her laser beam and her camera lens all over these sculptures, though, is not a neutral gesture.

Rather, the aggressive scopophilia on view here in which the laser and camera ogle over representations of breasts, thighs, penises, and asses is an act of primitivist othering which mirrors and, thus, brings to the forefront, these sculptures’ own participation in this process.

That is to say, as one views the laser pointer and camera scope-out these sculptures as if they were sexual conquests, one feels, perhaps, empathy with them as in – hey, you’re basically raping it with your eyes instead of considering the object as an equal being.

In turn, the sculpture’s own problematic relationship to idealizations of otherness is, then, almost unavoidably brought to the forefront of one’s view on the work.

The history of primitivism in 20th century art, after all, (of which the sculptures depicted in this video are in sincere dialogue) is (it is widely thought) premised on an illusion in which non-Western cultures are presumed to be closer to nature and, thus, more pure than self-loathing technologically-tainted Western cultures.

What was intended as praise for these cultures, is received – in reality – as the worst kind of imperialism in which anyone outside of Western culture is reduced to a myth or a symbol of purity – that is, non-existent (or if existent, then existent only in order to serve as a reflection for Western culture).

Now, it’s important to emphasize the fact that the performance here is intercut with images of a white, male sculptor (ostensibly the sculptor of these sculptures) as he washes the dirt of the sculptural process off of his tools and hands.

By including this particular footage, Silverman both upsets the rhythmic flow of the performance, as well as nudges one’s view on the work towards the fact that the sculptures here were created by a white male artist as an instance of primitivist art.

Additionally, the fact that the name of the band who scored the video’s improvisatory jazz score – “Willendorf” – is presumably taken from the twenty-four thousand year old nude sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, also nudges one in this direction.

As such, the performance’s physicality and sensuality activate one part of one’s mind, while the artist’s careful critical framing of this very physicality and sensuality, activates another part, a counterpoint, calling into question its own premises.

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