Posts Tagged ‘exhibition’

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

“Hydrate and Perform,” one part of a two-part solo exhibition of the work of Tobias Madison at the Swiss Institute, features sculptures and prints which function as synthetic visions of the natural world.

The sculptures in the exhibition are divided into a pair of categories:

1. Translucent horizontal cubes which are filled with a variety of colors of Vitamin Water.

In approximately half of these tanks the artist has placed artificial bamboo shoots which poke out of the tops of the tanks.

The effect of these bamboo shoots is to both frustrate the strict cubic linearity of the sculpture and compound the sense of artificiality introduced into the work through the use of the Vitamin Water.

2. Translucent vertical cubes which are filled top-to-bottom with claustrophobically-confined, paint-splattered artificial plant arrangements.

These cubes are supported upon minimal vertical bases – the surfaces of which are combinations of various faux wood patterns.

The prints in the exhibition, likewise, are divided into a pair of categories:

1. A series of large, framed scans of compact discs which have been digitally-manipulated to appear as though they have melted and spilled down the page like paint spilling down a canvas.

2. Several un-framed prints of similarly digitally-manipulated imagery which is no longer legible as the representation of any particular object – it reads not as a melting CD, but rather as the melting effect itself.

In combination, these sculptures and prints frame not just the artificiality of natural elements and phenomena, but – through their aestheticized / fetishized presentation – frame the desire for artificiality itself wherein artificial water is more desirable than actual water and the effect of “liquification” overruns the effect’s functional representational application.

However, there is another (perhaps unanticipated) formal element occurring here which is worth mentioning.

In the tanks of Vitamin Water, one views blocks of colorful, über-artificial water – yes; however, one also views the accumulation of dust and debris which has gathered in the corners and walls of the tank, disrupting the vision of total, almost evil, artificial cleanliness.

This trace of naturally-occurring entropic process is, like the dust “breeding” on Duchamp’s Large Glass as photographed by Man Ray or Smithson’s vision of crumbling cinematic apparatus, a death mask – a reminder that even the hyper-virtualized quality of contemporary experience is always already a ruin.

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

The age of digital information networks, according to the Jogging collective’s text “Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age,” has so radically mutated the way information is distributed, that a revolution in the way artists exhibit their work is called for.

Jogging writes:

The internet offers a chance for art’s users to experience organizational models of viewership in ways that are non-dependent and non-hierarchical. Allowing institutions to dictate the function of the Internet, be it through copyright, privatization, and/or the commoditization of information, simply digitizes pre-existing modes of viewership built upon problematic power relations.

To that end, Jogging has mounted two non-hierarchical exhibitions – READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 and AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS – in the past two weeks.

READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 is an art action involving a word-of-mouth exhibition on the Facebook Wall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in which hundreds of artists posted their work.

AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS is a Tumblr of installation shots from the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in which the works depicted were digitally inserted into empty shots of the galleries to look as if they were installed in the physical space.

However, what one views when one views the exhibitions is not non-hierarchical resistance, but rather a hierarchical structure in which Jogging is the sun around which the other artworks orbit like planets.

The kick of An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers is not that it is a great way to exhibit the artists in the show (it’s not), but that it is a work of art itself – by the Jogging.

What is interesting here is Troemel and Christiansen’s gesture – that’s where the aesthetic kick occurs.

This is just to say that Jogging is creating art, but not political art.