Posts Tagged ‘website’

Friday, May 14th, 2010

“3 weeks ago” Charles Broskoski uploaded a diptych of images, each of which depicts a still-life composed in a painterly style.

One views, in the image to the left of the diptych, a vertical composition composed of an open door that itself frames an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and the obstructed view of a window.

These figurative elements are each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, a painting style – say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s paintings lack that sort of “shock effect.”

They are not wild, but tame.

The fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects that, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodified signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych – as it is displayed on his website, anyway – is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and “new.”

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might be taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image.

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine – perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing – were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an ongoing stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy – a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.

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.

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Some of the key differences between magnetized (that is, pre-digital) videotape and celluloid film are the quantitative shifts in the following three categories:

1. Memory storage capacity.

Videotape, as a media storage device, holds more temporal information and affords un-interrupted recording.

2. Affordability.

Videotape is less expensive then celluloid film.

3. And mobility.

Video cameras are lighter than film cameras and videotape is more robust in more light conditions then celluloid film.

That is to say, automatic moving image reproductions were – with the onset of magnetized videotape in the 1960s – no longer quite as precious.

Just shoot – shoot a lot; shoot at your house; shoot at the park; shoot down time, not just up time – just shoot.

This change in the relationship of moving image technology to the representation of time became a point of interest to many artists.

Bruce Nauman, for example – in a particular series of videos from the late 1960s – pictures the artist not as one who represents an act of creation, but rather as one who (through the technology’s ability to depict greatly extended units of un-interrupted time) represents creating.

One views Nauman stomp on the ground of his bare artist studio in a rigorous rhythm for approximately 60 minutes.

Or one views him adjust a piece of wood, never quite getting it right, for the same amount of time.

These projects can be read as allegories about creation.

The artist never gets it quite right; every stomp or every movement of the wood is a failure.

What is more important is the evolving process of creation.

In the wake of videotape technology, though, a further series of media storage mutations have come and gone.

The result is the end of material storage devices such as videos or hard drives and the birth of the virtual data cloud – the immaterial field of code transformed into information signage – both private as well as public – hovering in, out, and around one’s physical locations in space.

Each one of these generational mutations, then, has necessitated subsequent mutations in the pictures artists draw of their own body performing actions through time.

Kari Altmann, for example, considers her work to be located not in individual works (as meaningful as they may be), but rather in her avatar inside the data cloud wherein one views her perform the excavation and molding of her own artistic archive in mutable cloud-space, cloud-time.

Sometimes she’ll just add an image for research or edit an older project; sometimes she’ll list, but not show new projects she’s working on; sometimes she’ll add a new video; sometimes she’ll take a video away; and so on and so on and so on and so on in a plethora of permutations one follows the artist play with her own cloud data:

Change, evolve – not to “better” data, just different data – data occurring in an ecological network of additional data networks which are – as a whole – growing and becoming self-reflexive, becoming visible to themselves.

The performative focus here, then, is not on the physical body repeating an action, but rather on the virtual body mutating its own archival network.

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Right now, on the main page of Charles Broskoski’s personal website, one views paintings created with digital tools as well as clocks which read-out the amount of time passed since each artwork was initially uploaded to the site (in this case, for the more recently uploaded painting “2 days ago…” and, for the less recently uploaded painting “3 weeks ago…”).

One, thus, views both the paintings and the paintings’ built-in obsolescence.

The most recently uploaded painting, Avocado, is a token of a traditional painting genre – the still life with fruit; on the other hand – with its ghostly, blurred brush work which fights to keep from dripping down (to the past of the artist’s painting) and up (to the future of the artist’s painting) – the work is an allegory of painting on the computer:

Not present in space, but streaming through time, fighting for its life to be there in the room (on the screen) despite the inevitability of its passing.

That is to say:

1. A picture of avocados (they are there).

2. A picture of avocados blurring through time from future (an ideal) to past (a memory) (they’re gone – ghosts).

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

If I encounter the work of a contemporary artist through their website or some other form of managed presence on the Internet and I do it again and again and again and again, then the evolution of their website or managed presence itself becomes a work.

That is to say, the more I view the artist’s work as an ongoing chronological development accounted for in a database accessible on the Web (as opposed to, say, seeing an object first-hand and, then, relying on memories or reference books to account for the artist’s previous body of work), the more I view a whole new type of first-hand:

A performance of the artist as an artist, moving in and out of positions and tempos, and, in some cases, picturing their own inhabitation of time.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Between the work 10 Seconds to Each Point and the work Lateral Crossings Damon Zucconi leapt between one form and then another.

In 10 Seconds to Each Point he describes a unit of time – 10 seconds.

In the course of viewing the work, one begins to view less the motion through space of a small orb and more the time of the orb’s cycles between contact with one line intersection and then another – 10 seconds.

In Lateral Crossings, on the other hand, he describes a unit of time occurring within a broader spectrum of 16 concurrent units of time – each unit placed according to its location within the represented scale of chronologically-ordered time units in the spectrum.

In the course of viewing the work, one begins to view less the temporal rhythm of a single orb and more the simultaneity of multiple temporal rhythms framing the spatial motion of multiple orbs.

It’s a more structurally complicated picture of time.

Now that said, I don’t know if Lateral Crossing is “better” than 10 Seconds to Each Point because both works are limited in describing temporal objects – they’re just pictures.

Rather, if one was tasked to name the art of Zucconi’s work here, one might say that it occurs neither in Lateral Crossings nor in 10 Seconds to Each Point, but rather out (t)here on his personal website where one follows his leap from one form of life to another.

The leap – the artist’s performed mutation – is the only thing that I know I viewed.

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Charles Broskoski paints on a computer.

However, he understands that by employing digitally automated “painterly” tools on a computer, he re-orients the launching-off point for a consideration of these works.

In the current design of Broskoski’s personal website, the artist displays his most recent painting – in this case, a layering of long, wide, generally vertical “brushstrokes” in the airy style of the late de Kooning into the form of a primordial “ball” – a locus of energy, both budding and dying, aggressive and nervous, which calls to mind Philip Guston’s early abstractions (as well as a muddied take on the reds, greens, blues and blacks from Guston’s palette in these abstractions).

The bottom edges of this “ball” seem to “put the brakes on” in an act of inertia, curling in against a threat of pure formlessness.

And, at the top, the brushstrokes seem to be shooting upward (as in transcendence), but – in a reversal of the physics occurring at the bottom – suffer a smooshing down (as in gravity).

The result is a stormy mass of energy simultaneously expanding away from its self and contracting into its self.

It has a kick.

But – as a painting – it also lacks a kick.

The painting is created on a computer with a mouse and a suite of digital “effects” rather than paint and canvas.

Also, it looks really nice, but it’s just one of the thousands of images that hit my eye through the light of a computer screen while I’m online.

So, where does this leave one?

A clue may be found in the caption to the work (the title to the work?) – a sort of clock reading “7 days ago…”

“7 days ago…” refers to the amount of time past since Broskoski uploaded the painting to his site.

Yesterday it read “6 days ago…”

The day before “5 days ago…”

Tomorrow it will read “8 days ago…” or perhaps “1 week ago…”

And so on until Broskoski uploads another work, thus resetting the clock.

What this counter adds to the work is a whole new type of meaning.

Like Josh Smith, Broskoski and artists such as Harm van den Dorpel are re-examining the possibility of a certain sincerity in painterly expression, but doing so not in the individual painting (well, not primarily in the individual painting), but as a performance – in time.

Broskoski is struggling with how to reconcile the tradition of painting with the computer.

As one returns to the site again and again and again and again, watching him upload new work, trying things out, performing his creation, one begins to see it.

It turns out that what the computer shows me is not space, but time; not the digital painting, but digital painting.