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Friday, August 6th, 2010

Performance 3

1.

Brad Troemel, an artist perhaps best known for his work with the Jogging collective, claimed in a 2009 interview with the Counterfeit-Mess Blog that:

A couple years ago when I became a Photographer-hater, I realized that you can’t possibly explain the world through a single tool. I feel that way now in regard to The Art Project, that 10 projects can’t explain everything or anything either. All you can do is have a constant engagement with art, trying to find meaning. On Jogging, we, the creators, are the art and artists… Creating this way makes assessing/accessing our work on the whole difficult. There’s no fitting “grading rubric” for everything at once because the intent of the art is multiple. So, you can either assess every single work individually, or, you can assess us, ourselves, as the work.

*****

The artist Duncan Alexander recently wrote a blog post which made a similar point regarding certain artists working on the Internet. Before making that point, though, he divides current net art practices into two (admittedly) very broadly sketched camps – on the one hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with art history and, on the other hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with the cultural history of the Internet itself. He, then, claims that for the “net historical” camp:

What matters… is not so much the individual artwork as the artist’s oeuvre and net presence. This is one reason why these artists don’t receive as much coverage – you can’t pin a work down as easily. Where most camp one works are one-way in terms of links (and this appears to be a strategic move), camp two relishes hypertext and cross-platform performance. Their work spills across the social networks that the artists inhabit.

Alexander’s division of the current net art paradigm into two broadly sketched camps is perceptive and works well as a shorthand. To my mind, though, the work of both camps is most potently experienced in terms of what he calls ongoing “net presence” as opposed to through an individual work. For example, Ryder Ripps, who (if we are going to follow Alexander’s “two camps” framework) is a member of the “net historical” camp, has created important work which explicitly embraces a plurality of production occurring in time; but the work of Jon Rafman, who is a member of the “art historical” camp, is also, for me, anyway, more meaningfully experienced when considered in terms of ongoing presence – even if this presence is less pronounced. Google Street Views and Brand New Paint Job, for example, are memes he’s actively improvising with in time; they are knowingly performed and are responsive to the demands placed on them by both general Internet culture and the history of art.

In the two previous posts on this blog, I’ve tried to work through a similar idea; namely, that the “aura” of an individual work of art in the age of the digital media network is, for better or for worse, not eliminated, but rather relocated. Instead of associating cult value with an artifact, one associates it with the live performance of the artist as he or she creates individual works of art and uploads them to the data cloud in sequential order. Following this publicly viewable sequence as it happens live is where meaningful artistic experiences are happening on the Internet. There are, of course, interesting individual works of art on the Internet, but that’s all they can be – “interesting.” Each individual work of art in the context of the incomprehensible amounts of artistic media on the Internet is leveled out in value to right around zero. For example, both the avant-garde music of Arnold Schoenberg and humorous videos of cats playing the piano are equally “interesting” – one no more qualitatively valuable than the other when viewed through a computer in the context of all of the other media one is able to consume on the Internet. The result of this is that those invested in reflecting on works of art in the context of the Internet are nudged towards following the artist’s live “presence” as he or she disseminates work in time. These live performances are where one is able to draw qualitative distinctions.

That said, there are a number of clear objections to this idea. One of those objections is that the use of the terms “performance” and, especially, “live performance” are problematic.

For example, for the performance theorist Peggy Phelan, the ontology of live performance is divorced from image reproductions and involves the co-presence of a limited number of bodies in the same space. Likewise, in the performance historian Chris Salter’s book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, Salter refuses to include a discussion of performance on the Internet even though he does so for many other “entanglements” of performativity and technology. For Salter, performance is necessarily “situated” meaning that, even if the stage is filled with technological gadgetry and television monitors intermingling with live bodies, the audience and performers need both be situated in the same physical space for the same amount of shared co-present time. The disembodied quality of Internet experience is beyond the pale of what one could call “performance.”

Before going any further, I should say that this aggressive line-drawing between what is real performance and what is not real performance makes a great deal of sense to me. There’s always going to be something more visceral about the sharing of physical space that needs to be preserved and honored. For example, jumping up and down and slamming into other sweaty bodies for an hour and a half while listening to loud, deliriously pounding rock music would be more exhilarating than the experience of watching the same music through a live stream on the Web. Similarly, physical contact during sex is not something that you could hope to reproduce on the Internet. I’m not interested in arguing against these obvious facts or diminishing the value of these experiences.

What I am interested in thinking through, though, is that there may be multiple ways to talk about a body which include both the experience of the body in a dance club in “natural time” as well as the body online, surfing through the Internet in “Internet time.” Again, I am not in favor of one conception of the body in time over the other; I do think, however, that it’s possible for one to seriously conceive of their bodies as being in two (or more) places at once.

In what follows, I’ll discuss several theories of performance working around these issues.

2.

What is liveness? One way to approach that question is to ask, first, “what is not liveness?” For example, if one views video documentation of a live performance, is what one views really “live”? I personally don’t think that it is. Here’s an example:

Joy Division, the British post-punk band best known for its sparse sound and vocalist Ian Curtis’s baritone renderings of his own moody lyrics, was, for me, a band whose sound I liked, but had to be in a very particular head space if I was to be infected by it. That changed, though, after I viewed live concert footage of the band performing and, in particular, after I saw Ian Curtis performing.

As individual records, the songs are so dark and hermetic that they could easily lull one to sleep late at night; however, as live performances, they take on an opposed set of attributes – they’re charged and vital. For example, in a performance of “Transmission” broadcast from a BBC television studio, one views Curtis begin the song in a deep focus – he stands awkwardly, his eyes are almost closed, and he grips the microphone, holding it next to his mouth – as the tempo escalates and Curtis’s vocals follow suit, though, he moves the mic stand out of the way and begins making spastic movements – choppy running in place, circular motions with the index finger he’s pointing to his head, pushing the finger away as if pushing something out of his mind, and swinging his forearms in semi-circles. He goes deeper and deeper, doing what he can to get the words out the way he means them to sound, ending up in positions resembling Christian revivalists or the seizures of an epileptic (as a matter of fact, Curtis would occasionally go into epileptic seizures while performing).

There’s something unsettling about watching these performances as they go beyond irony – it’s not as if he’s joking. In a 1979 interview with the Northern Lights Cassette Magazine, Curtis spoke about this seriousness of intention in his performances, claiming, “Instead of just singing about something you could show it as well, put it over in the way that it is, if you were totally involved in what you were doing.”

If one is to view the depictions of Curtis by actors in the films 24 Hour Party People and Closer, and, then, compare those depictions to the mania in Curtis’ eyes when he’s in the grips of his performance, there’s really no comparison; it only makes sense if the artist is present, totally involved in what he’s doing.

But, all that said, is the video footage I viewed of Curtis on the Internet really what one would call a “live” performance? Despite all my enthusiasm for the liveness of the band, did I even witness anything “live”?

The OED defines “live” as, “Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc.” Similarly, Peggy Phelan claims that the ontological character of live performance demands that it disappears as it is enacted, that it only exists in the “now” of its performance. She writes:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.

*****

Phelan’s argument around this ontology of liveness is complex and astutely weaves through dense theoretical terrain involving Lacanian psychoanalysis, speech act theory, and feminist critiques of representation. She takes a polemical stance not as an angry conservative reactionary to the forces of technological reproduction, but as a believer in the possibility of cultural experiences which resist commodification, simulation and the male gaze. For Phelan, live performance’s “promise” is its automatic tragedy, the fact that as one views the work, the work slips from one’s grasp, resisting representation and unable to be accurately reproduced, commodified, or otherwise “marked.” The video of the live Joy Division performance, then, would be missing the point of the performance as it tries to preserve what, by definition, cannot be preserved.

Perhaps what the video affords is the idea of the performance – the idea that the band was doing something other than playing music on well-produced albums; the idea that the band only makes sense when viewed “live.” With this idea in mind, I was able to appreciate Joy Division – an intellectual response rather than a bodily one. To actually be in a pub in the north of England in the late 1970s watching Ian Curtis perform would be powerful for precisely the reasons which Phelan suggests – it would be un-reproducible, demanding my bodily engagement in the moment. I’ll never be able to watch Joy Division perform live which is precisely what makes the live performance valuable for those who did view it – its mortality, its preciousness not as an object but as a stretch of unique time. Nothing like that occurs when I view the video – again, it’s the intellectual idea that Curtis did perform this way which I respond to in the video, not the performance itself.

3.

This ontologically “pure” understanding of liveness has been criticized, though. For example, the performance theorist Philip Auslander has critiqued Phelan’s understanding of liveness, suggesting that there’s really no such thing as what Phelan describes as “live performance” because almost any performance in “mediatized cultures” is a jumble of liveness and media effects. Think of the fans at a baseball game watching the Jumbotron television screen rather than the actual players on the field or even something as simple as a microphone and amplifier which create a layer of technological interpretation of a live performance. Furthermore, think of the “live” television broadcast of the six o’clock news or the multimedia performance art of Laurie Anderson or Ann Liv Young. Don’t these performances involve both “live” and re-producible elements?

It’s not that Auslander is saying that there can be nothing like what Phelan describes, but that the actual condition of live performance as it is practiced in the contemporary moment is endlessly hovering between both pure liveness and a technological mediation of this liveness and, therefore, the idea of defining a fixed definition based on its separation from technological reproducibility is admirable, but ultimately futile. He writes, “Much as I admire Phelan’s commitment to a rigorous conception of an ontology of liveness, I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a mediatized culture or should be expected to do so, even to assume an oppositional stance.”

I agree with Auslander that the “friend or foe” lines drawn by Phelan in regard to technological reproduction sets up unrealistically high standards given the massive amount of cross-pollination there actually is between live and reproducible elements in a given work of performance. However, I believe that liveness as a disappearance, as Phelan defines it, is, nevertheless, still possible, still, for better or for worse, uncommodifiable, and, in fact, (and probably to the horror of Phelan) occurring on the Internet. What is my experience of, for example, a surf club or a Tumblr blog or dump.fm if it’s not the unfolding of a live performance, un-reproducible as itself – a sense of presence to a unique stretch of time?

4.

A point of contention here revolves around the word “body.”

For Phelan, this would be the biological body co-present to its audience in situated space. She writes, “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.” There is something crucial to performance in that one must go there and be co-present to it in the same “specific time/space frame.”

Similarly, in his book On the Internet, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus discusses the phenomenological differences between live performances and live reproductions of live performances. He contends that live actors “are, at every moment, subtly and largely unconsciously adjusting to the responses of the audience and thereby controlling and intensifying the mood in the theater.” Dreyfus’s dedication to embodied co-presence is not based on a whimsical prejudice against computers, but rather a deeply held belief, following Merleau-Ponty, that the risk and continuous re-adjustment process in which one seeks to get a “grip” on the reality in front of one’s eyeballs, is what gives this reality a sense of meaning. He writes:

Not only is each of us an active body coping with things, but, as embodied, we each experience a constant readiness to cope with things in general that goes beyond our readiness to cope with any specific thing. Merleau-Ponty calls this embodied readiness our Urdoxa or ‘primordial belief’ in the reality of the world. It is what gives us our sense of the direct presence of things. So, for there to be a sense of presence in telepresence, one would not only have to be able to get a grip on things at a distance; one would need to have a sense of the context as soliciting a constant readiness to get a grip on whatever comes along.

*****

Dreyfus is skeptical about the possibilities of ever getting a “grip” on a world in which one is only present to via telepresence. His practical concern actually has less to do with performance than with “distance learning” – say, a simple lecture conducted via videoconferencing or a doctor teaching medical students how to perform surgery via a camera mount attached to his head.

I agree with this. I agree that Shakespeare performed on an empty stage to an audience of computer users is an embarrassing idea. I also agree that doctors cannot responsibly teach surgery to medical students remotely. These are human practices that need to occur in space and need to be preserved and honored.

My interest, rather, is in thinking through the possibility that as people begin to, for better or for worse, spend more and more of their lives on the computer and as certain specific relationships between these computer users and the ocean of cultural media which they consume becomes more and more a part of banal daily life, is there a way to have a new type of live performance, a live performance which creates new types of risks, new types of grips on the world? Is there a type of live performance whose actions are not imitations of those in physical space, but rather live performances of actions which could only be conducted through computing?

Could one perform Internet surfing through Internet surfing?

Or is that just nonsense?

5.

One way to think about this perplexing question is this:

Through the course of one’s day, one moves through all sorts of different moods which define one’s relationship to reality. Sometimes one is anxious, optimistic, sexually aroused, quietly reflective, whatever it may be. None of those moods are absolute, but they each have a devilish power over one which creates the illusion that that one particular mood is, in fact, what is true. So with that in mind, on the one hand, if I’m in a mood in which I picture my body’s boundaries ending where the skin meets the air, then these performances on the Internet are not anything that I would ever be present to; on the other hand, though, if I’m in a mood in which I picture my body’s boundaries extending outside of my skin (say through various online representations), then these performances on the Internet are something that I may be present to.

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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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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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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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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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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 18th, 2010

Still Available by Oliver Laric is an ongoing list of Web domain names which are still available to be taken.

Laric’s work Taken is an ongoing list of all of those domain names listed in the Still Available series which have, in fact, subsequently been taken (at present, almost seventy domains are now taken from the over three hundred listed over the course of the series’ five installments).

In the earliest iteration of Still Available – Still Available 17.10.08 – approximately one hundred thirty-five potential domain names are listed, each of which refers to keywords rich in value relevant to that particular historical time period regarding, for example, politicians, political theorists, luxury commodities, pornography, artists, art theorists, art world events, physics, pop culture, or cities.

These domain names are often funny and perceptive in the way in which they pinpoint strategies employed by “parked domain” companies who buy up domains in bulk using keyword strategies not unlike those employed by Laric himself.

So, for example, he lists domains which have no value other than a speculative one regarding the future of value-rich keywords such as elections2032.com, documenta13.com, and beverlyhillsninja3.com; or domains which combine vaguely-related value rich keywords at that particular moment in historical time such as putinpalin.com, gucciprada.com, and platinumclit.com; or else domains which just sound as thought they could be actual domains such as botoxbros.com, divorcebattle.com, or thenewsocialism.com.

Likewise, in the following four iterations of Still Available, a similar method is employed.

In this way, Laric creates a portrait of the practice of domain naming as an increasingly complicated and speculative enterprise which, in turn, results in a Web consisting of as many empty, “parked” domains awaiting potential owners as it does active ones – a portrait of the Web as a space undergoing not exploration, but relentless colonization into the predicted value-rich keywords of the future.

The Taken list of domain names underlines this understanding.

On the one hand, it’s true that some of the domain names from the list are taken by “normal” people or small not-for-profits such as the artist Billy Rennekamp taking billyrennekamp.com, a modest Amon Düül fan site taking amonduul.com, the “Frankly My Darling…” blog run by a middle-aged woman taking 13dimensions.com, or the breast milk donation info hub taking breastmilkdonation.com.

However, most of the domains were taken by Web-based companies in the business of parking on domains in order to cybersquat or provide advertising space (my favorite example is steaksonaplane.com which was taken by the Godaddy.com company to advertise its own services).

With all of this in mind, what one views here, then, is the way in which this increasingly colonized landscape is different from the geographical landscape of Earth in the sense that its potential space for expansion is itself continuously expanding as world events, and memes both high and low open it up to the contingency of the moment.

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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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