Posts Tagged ‘object’

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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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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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Apples and Enamel by Lance Wakeling is a series of fifty-five process sculptures – each of which consist of a rotting apple covered in gesso and, then, glossy white (and in two instances, glossy yellow) lead-based enamel paint.

They are process sculptures in the sense that one views each of the apples as an individual art object – yes – but one also views the processes of gravity, entropy, and decay.

These processes are pictured through the artist’s use of the gesso and enamel over the apple’s surface which allows it to flexibly compress without cracking as the apple itself rots away from the inside (one might think of the look of certain Claes Oldenburg “soft” sculptures from the mid-1960s – Soft Toilet, for example).

Thus, the form of the sculpture is in a continual state of transformation.

Eventually, the surface of the apple will compress to the point that it has nowhere else to go, but, at that point, the form of the apple reads as a sign of decay as much as it does a solid form and, as such, one is nudged towards continuing to think of the sculpture in terms of the time of its decay which continues unabated from the inside.

What significance, though, does the apple as the locus of this decay afford the work?

What does an apple do here that, say, a peach or roast beef wouldn’t do?

Well, one could think of the apple as bound up with the Apple corporation – a sort of The Picture of Dorian Gray meets the iPad.

That’s one possibility. Another would be that on art historical / iconographic level, the apple is perhaps best known to be “forbidden fruit” – desire incarnate as described in the story of Adam and Eve.

And if one is to view the works in the context of the white cube art space on either a pedestal or in a vitrine (which would each mark the work as capital-A-Art), then this reading makes a certain amount of sense.

One could say, then, that the work pictures the glossy white sheen of desire incarnate as much as it pictures this desire’s ongoing decay.

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Thursday, May 13th, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Friday, April 30th, 2010

Ancient Artifacts by Brad Tinmouth consists of a series of four product-shot style photographs depicting down-market kitsch sculptures of, respectively, a “Pharaoh,” a “Buddha,” a “Cat Goddess,” and a “Krishna” over each of which the artist has applied a layer of clear resin.

In each case, this layer of clear resin “spills out” beyond the bottom edges of the object, thus creating, not just a synthetic “sheen” to the object’s surface, but an expanded surface area to the object’s base composed of the dried resin, as well.

Due to this ejaculatory marking of his own objects, one views both:

1. Mass-produced objects which are the synthetic versions of once-unique objects (appropriated kitsch gods).

2. As well as a series of unique objects in their own right (the serial mutations of appropriated kitsch gods).

Each work’s totemic power resides here, then, not in either (1.) nor in (2.), but rather in the oscillation between (1.) and (2.) from original to version to original to version and back again.

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Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Dialectics in February by Martijn Hendriks consists of two elements:

1. An inverted royal blue flag with a circular hole cut-out of the middle.

2. A piece of the flag placed on the ground directly below the hole.

As one digs deeper into the work, one understands that the flag from which the hole has been cut is, in fact, the European Union flag.

The power of the work, then, is the erasure of the flag’s power: a European Union whose only rallying cry is that the entire notion of the “European Union” is literally empty – nothing.

Self-annihilating ideas such as this have been explored by artists before, but the use of the flag is particularly effective as the flag – as a symbol of symbolism – short-circuits all meaning directly back onto itself; its impotency becomes – as a flag – to literally wave for itself.

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Friday, April 16th, 2010

Avatar in 3D by Artie Vierkant is a slowly-spinning animated 3D sphere.

On the surface of the sphere, the entire one hundred sixty-two-minute runtime of the film Avatar has been warped and stretched-out in order to cover the total surface area of the sphere.

By turning Avatar into an image object – a “thing” – the work illuminates how Avatar itself is not just a movie, but a gigantic meme, an entire world, extending well beyond the runtime of the film.

One of the most significant developments in film history is George Lucas’s recognition that Star Wars is not just a movie, but a franchise that fans can wander around in via all of the extra media and merchandise that surround it.

In a hyperreal world of endless media unreality, consumers have the desire and now the ability to amble through metaverses, consuming media franchises in ways that diverge from simply sitting in a theater and watching projected light for two hours.

The slow, painful death of movies is a testament to this as consumers now prefer the scope of entire television series or massively multiplayer game universes like Halo or World of Warcraft.

In the event that someone wants to go to the movies, it’s to see a new installment of a franchise that expands the world of the characters; in the event that someone wants to read a book, it’s to read an installment of a series like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books.

Films are still on some level stretches of time told through cinematic language, but they are now also, perhaps primarily, things, objects expanding through the Internet and culture at large.

This is what Vierkant’s work shows me.

An avatar for Avatar.

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Thursday, April 8th, 2010

The Continuous Line Drawings series by Damon Zucconi consists of (what is displayed to date, anyway) fifty-four short loops (at the most a couple of seconds per loop) – each of which consists of a single action – a jagged line being drawn.

These line drawings, though, are not representations of the artist’s hand painting in a studio or over a pane of glass (as in the films on Picasso and Pollock).

Rather, they are representations solely of the line itself being drawn over a field of black as if they were a screen-capture from a digital painting program (which they’re not – on the contrary, they were created with a tablet and a piece of custom software which captures, plots, and plays-back the drawing gesture).

The lines in each loop begin to fade away as soon as they are drawn, resulting in a “ghosting” effect (in this sense, they look like hyper-complicated representations of the heart beating as it rises and falls in a classic EKG monitor).

However, the rigorous looping combined with the very short run-times of each loop results in the continuous retracing of each line’s path so that just as a point in the trajectory of a given line drawing is about to completely fade away, the drawing of the line from the following loop picks up the slack, breathing new life into the line and sustaining an afterimage of a full shape drawn by the line.

When one views these elements as a whole, then, one views both:

1. An un-changing object (one does see a static shape outlined through the looping drawing of the line).

2. As well as flux (the continuously executed temporal event of the line being drawn).

Each work in the series thus plays with this tension between the work as a spatial object and the work as a temporal object (or alternatively, an understanding of an artwork as a creation and an understanding of an artwork as creating).

To that end, Zucconi alters the frame-rate at which he records the drawing of each of his lines.

So, in drawings with relatively high frame-rate recordings (say, sixty frames-per-second), the action appears “fast” and, thus, the “object-ness” of the shape drawn by the drawing-action is rendered more legible and vice-versa.

When one views through each work of the series, then, one begins to picture the differences between each drawing and between each drawing-time.

Additionally, when the artist projects these works in physical space, his objective as an artist, then, becomes to create a harmony (or dis-harmony as the case may be) between the physical architecture and the frame-rate of the drawing.

The work becomes site-specific.

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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Same Shit Different Island, a sculpture by Joel Holmberg, is a thin, haphazardly bent-up metal beam supporting a rough chunk of concrete in the shape of, say, a long piece of petrified grey shit, which itself is held to the beam by a thin piece of fishing wire.

Also attached to this bent-up metal beam-armature are a small piece of wood and a second, relatively smaller metal beam element, which, in turn, each support a vertical leg of the larger metal beam-armature.

Before the sculpture is an object, it is – for the artist – a process which is designed to be replicated and reproduced through a broad spectrum of scales.

The work consists of the following 5 process-steps:

1. A beam is bent in three points, forming an armature.

2. Two wires span the uprights of this armature and a third, longer (and, thus, more deeply hanging) wire is suspended down the middle of the first two wires.

3. A tarp is stretched over the three wires, resulting in a hanging “hammock” form.

4. A cement mixture is poured into this hammock form.

5. After the cement dries, both the tarp and the outer two wires of the armature-form are removed so that a curved concrete shape (the piece of shit) is left suspended in air by the “third wire” which still spans the upright points of the beam.

One is, thus, provided with a blueprint for the creation of the “same shit” on “different island(s).”

As one evaluates the sculpture in terms of form, one evaluates it as a set of instructions as well.

It’s virtual art.

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Monday, March 15th, 2010

Harm van den Dorpel’s Texture Mapping works are minimal, starkly-outlined cube sculptures whose high-gloss surfaces each depict abstract images reading to the viewer as “painterly.”

The “painterly-ness” of each image, though, is mutated by the de-texturing (or mapping of texture) accompanying one’s view of their subject matter through the glossy “screen” of transparent acrylic which functions as the surface of each cube.

The result is less the experience of viewing a painting first-hand (as in, say, a museum) and more the experience of viewing a painting remotely (as through, say, the screen of a computer).

In the process of describing the experience of textural remoteness, however, van den Dorpel creates a short-circuit to a whole new type of texture:

That of virtual space.

He does so in at least two ways:

1. Van den Dorpel’s technique in these works is to paint on the surface of the acrylic which – in the final product – will be viewed as the inside (as opposed to the, more traditional, outside) of the cube sculpture.

One’s view of the painting process is, thus, reversed.

The first layers of paint applied to the surface are the most visible and everything else is masked through, not overpainting, but underpainting.

The virtual presence of this painting’s absence is, thus, activated.

2. Similarly, the mobility of the relatively very light cubes and their subsequent malleability into almost instantaneous re-arrangement nudge the viewer’s understanding of the work’s physical “presence” away from, say, the mass and volume of Minimalist cubes and closer to the virtual 3D space of Second Life.

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