Posts Tagged ‘purekev’

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf was doing okay for himself.

1. He was a co-founder of the Internet surf club Spirit Surfers.

2. He was developing a prolific and popular collection of photography, texts, performance pieces, and music on his website maximumsorrow.com.

3. He had (amongst other exhibitions of his physical work) a solo show at the V&A Gallery in New York, and a two-person show with Guthrie Lonergan at the well-known And/Or Gallery in Dallas.

In short, Bewersdorf was building an impressively dense archive of work with a strongly growing reputation both on and off the Internet.

(He had good “stats.”)

What, then, to make of his decision in early 2009 to take this archive of work off of the Internet, destroying it as well as whatever traces he could find of it left, and replacing it with a single work – an in-progress performance piece he calls PUREKev?

PUREKev is a highly-focused, three-year long performance in which Bewersdorf very gradually diminishes the size of his artistic avatar – a looping clip of over-exposed home video footage depicting a firecracker flickering – against an (International Klein?) blue field over which it flickers.

There’s something poetic about this idea which draws one to its premises and, then, carries one beyond the auto-destructive act which preceded it.

Still, though, what justifies the relatively extreme length of three years?

Would one, after a year, of watching Bewersdorf’s little light growing smaller and smaller, still care?

And, indeed, that’s the gambit of the work:

Bewersdorf made a wager that there is something to his gesture which – despite its simplicity – is intriguing enough for one to follow and keep following, each return a new wave of illumination into the work’s significance.

In my own experience of the work, this is – so far – true.

I can’t say that I look at purekev.com everyday or even every month, but I do return to it every now and again on a somewhat regular basis (as in a pilgrimage) and, when I do so, I never leave satisfied or dis-satisfied, but, rather, pleasantly held in suspension – not sure where to put my finger, but interested in fingering it nonetheless.

When I go to the site today (April 6th, 2010), I – at first – don’t view the flickering light at all.

Rather, I view a blue void through which I scroll to – then – find the little, flickering light at the bottom of the page, surrounded by blue.

As I’ve followed Bewersdorf’s performance, its value to me has begun to reside less in the tracking of his flickering light and more in its tracking of the field upon which it flickers.

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf intentionally reduced his presence on the Web to a single image – a flickering flame sourced from a .gif of fireworks set off in front of a suburban garage. Over the course of three years, this flickering flame will grow smaller and smaller into a field of Yves Klein Blue.

It’s called PUREKev.

As one returns to the work again and again and again – not daily (although, perhaps daily) – one views a mutation in time as the flicker goes deeper and deeper and deeper into the void.

The website goes in the exact opposite direction of most Internet production, focusing on slow, imperceptible change over the course of years. By doing so, it allows one to see (as if for the first time) what it opposes. The extremity of Bewersdorf’s slowing-down nudges the viewer to project their own image of what “normal” time on the Internet feels like. It’s the creation of the image in the viewer’s mind that allows her to see what this time looks like.

There’s something unsettling about viewing PUREKev and returning to it every now and again. It’s always there – always going a little bit deeper, but never quite finishing. As the rest of the Internet is in a race to produce more and more, Bewersdorf’s resolute focus on one thing – watching a flame die out in a blue void over several years – is sublime.