Archive for April, 2010

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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.

Tags: ancient artifacts, , brad tinmouth, , gods, kitsch, object, reproduction, resin, simulacra, simulacrum, simulations, totems, unique, versions
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010

The world of Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World is literally moving forward.

Indeed, the world is, one learns, a large mechanical sphere moving on continuously built-out tracks which are plotted by people such as the novel’s protagonist, Helward Mann.

Mann’s only job, as a “Future,” is to survey ahead of the track-work, making sure that the world’s journey towards what is referred to as “optimum” is as smooth as is reasonably possible.

The reason the world engages in this peculiar activity is the oft-mentioned fear of a centrifugal force in the natural world which, as Mann can attest to, would suck the mechanical world into a Hellish entropic spiral—a void.

(Mann saw this).

Now, this would be fine were it not for the fact that this world—in its endless march towards “optimum”—is overrun with mountains of its own feces.

One can hardly look around the world without viewing its own crumbling mechanical apparatus, its own genetic aberrations, and its own unapologetic human exploitation and warmongering—all conditions contingent upon the world’s progress in one way or another.

But, surely—as Mann would argue–there is simply no other option—one must keep going.

Indeed, Mann, as a professional surveyor into the future, would know–he has, after all, seen it:

If Man(n) stops working, Man(n) goes to(ward)s Hel(l).

(This is what Helward Mann saw.)

For Mann, one must choose the lesser of two evils and march on into the future.

The problem with all this, though–as the novel’s foil to Mann, Elizabeth Khan, demonstrates–is not that Mann is wrong per se, but rather that his question is badly stated.

It’s not that there is a binary between going forward towards the Truth and backwards towards Hell (as if time were a piece of string); but rather that there are a plethora of radically incomplete goings–never forward (as if towards “optimum”), but simply “on.”

All one can do here, then, is be reasonable and present to what is in front of one; that is to say, see things.

In the case of the world of Inverted World, the paradigm of seeing must shift or the world will drown in the endlessness of the ocean (in a sort of reversal of Mann’s own understanding of the void).

Again—it’s not that Mann is “right” or “wrong” here but that his vision is for better or for worse in ruins.

Tags: christopher priest, death, entropy, forward, future, inverted world, novel, , progress, science fiction, scifi, sf, , utopia
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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

The subject matter of “Liquid Door,” an exhibition of work by Isola & Norzi on-view at Art in General in New York, is the screen (and the desire to transcend the screen) between the human mind and the natural world.

One views:

1. { salt water [ fresh water ( distilled water ) fresh water ] salt water }, an aquarium tank filtering between salt water, fresh water, and distilled water.

2. Platonic Aquarium, the schematic model of an idealized Buckminster Fuller-esque underwater domicile.

3. Bated Breath, a series of matted photographs depicting the artists’ attempts to re-create the “liquid door” of Jacques Cousteau’s “Starfish House” (a “door” which emerges due to the air pressure of the water colliding with the air pressure at the threshold of the House)

4. And Large Glass, a video documenting the pas de deux performance conducted between a scuba diver and the large transparent glass screening him from the public space of the Coney Island Aquarium.

Throughout the viewing of these works, one’s attention is nudged further and further away from the form of life occurring in the water and closer and closer towards the screens which separate one from this very form.

Indeed, there’s something anti-aquatic about it—not beautiful, not flowing, not majestic; claustrophobic, mirrored, alienating.

This is not necessarily a problem, though; in fact, if one spends enough time in the show an intriguing (if not bitter) quasi-philosophical thought might enter one’s mind:

In one’s search for a “closeness” to nature, perhaps these efforts have only increased one’s dependence-on and desire-for the screens which separate.

This thematic crystallizes as one views Anemonia Mirabilis, a projected video loop (one screen from nature) depicting vintage film footage (another screen from nature) of Cousteau and his colleagues smoking cigarettes in their underwater home (a third screen from nature) which the artists have re-filmed through the “transparent” water (a fourth “natural” screen from nature) of a “transparent” aquarium tank (a fifth screen from nature) and contexualized in a space marked for “art” (a final screen from nature).

Tags: aquarium, , art in general, closeness, cousteau, distance, film, isola, isola & norzi, large glass, liquid door, nature, norzi, ocean, screen, separation, transparency
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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.

Tags: , dialectics, dialectics in february, emptiness, erasure, eu, europe, european union, flag, martijn hendriks, nothing, object, subtraction, symbol,
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Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Archaeologies of the Future by Charles LaBelle is a series of two-hundred and sixty-eight drawings of architecture drawn on the front and occasionally on the [un-seen] back of two-hundred and fifteen scanned (or photocopied) pages culled from the Fredric Jameson book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

It was produced over the course of a twenty-three day road-trip through the American Southwest (from Las Vegas to Las Vegas) as the artist executed a watercolor-and-graphite drawing of every individual building he “entered” during the course of his trip directly onto the copied pages of Jameson’s book.

These copied pages have also been obscured with white-out except for occasional phrases referencing the potential for utopian thought in the face of postmodern relativism which have been underlined in red pen by the artist.

The broad thematic approach of Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future is itself an “archaeological” investigation into the history of utopian thought (as expressed primarily through science-fiction) in which each vision of utopia is undoubtedly always already a ruin, but which nevertheless must thrive as a tradition if, for Jameson, the material dialectic is to march on.

With this in mind, then, one can view LaBelle’s obscuring and highlighting of the text as itself an archaeological approach in which he digs out whatever hints and clues he can find regarding Jameson’s vision of utopia.

And, in turn, these twin “archaeologies of the future” are both further compounded the building drawings mentioned above–all of the casinos, shopping plazas, budget chain hotels, suburban ranch houses, municipal centers, and other once shiny-and-futuristic, now shabby-and-outdated architectural styles which themselves are each drawn onto the pages of the book by the artist in order to mark that he had “entered” the given building.

Now, on the one hand, this work has its own dismal vision of the future—a piling-up of false futures which never seem to learn that they’re always already limited and pathetic.

On the other hand, though, there’s another way to think about what’s occurring here.

Each drawing and each page, after all, is just one of a couple of hundred similar drawings hung along the walls of the Anna Kustera gallery in New York; that is to say, each one gets lost in the flow of the whole project.

What one views here, then, is perhaps less the artist’s entering of space (a drawing) and more his entering of time (drawing).

Tags: anna kustera, archaeologies of the future, , building, charles labelle, diary, drawing, fredric jameson, pages, road trip, , utopia
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Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Glass House, a photo series by James Welling on-view at the David Zwirner gallery in New York, consists of sixteen large-scale framed prints and six smaller framed prints.

Each of the prints depict either the Modernist “Glass House” residence designed by Philip Johnson in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut or further architectural and sculptural elements located on the forty-seven acres of the House’s grounds.

In each digitally-captured image on view through the gallery’s white-walled rooms, the artist experiments with a wide range of lens filtration techniques, resulting in lushly-saturated colors grading over the figure of a giant glass cube (or similarly Modernist iconography) in the midst of the pastoral Connecticut landscape.

Despite the presence of varying seasons and light conditions portrayed throughout the photographs, though, the project as a whole projects a feeling of day-dreamy late-afternoon melancholy and reads in dialog with certain late 1960s psychedelic album covers or the lens flare effects favored by certain European cinematographers of the same era.

Digging a bit deeper into the work, though, one begins to view the significance of these images beyond their somewhat nostalgic sensual power.

First of all, the key technical variable is the variation of filters between the artist’s camera lens and his subject matter.

As one views through the twenty-two photographs on-display here, one begins to view their filters and their filtering (as they are the primary agent of change between the individual photographs in the series) as much as one views their subject matter (the Glass House).

The decision to photograph this particular building is decisive as it illuminates a framework around which to view the process of filtering.

In a project picturing various filtrations on the landscape, the “transparent” glass of the Glass House becomes visible as just one more of these filters—one more obstruction between one’s self and “reality.”

This becomes more intriguing when one considers that the Glass House, in particular–as an idealized model of Modernist ideology–sought to provide a neutral, objective, totally transparent space through which one could look out onto the world.

However, as history has demonstrated, the Modernist vision of objective transparency is hardly without a point of view; it is, indeed, a wildly distinct lens through which to filter one’s view on reality—no better nor worse than any of the varieties of filters employed by Welling through the series (which is fine [it’s not as though there’s something that would be more objective]).

Finally, with all of this in mind, the work offers one more (unintended) kick.

Moving through the gallery space, one views the photographs—yes; but one also views the glare of the glass filter between themselves—as viewers–and the photographic print:

A “neutral, objective, totally transparent” window reflecting back one’s own contextualization in the “neutral, objective, totally transparent” space of the white cube in which all of this occurring.

Tags: architecture, david zwirner, filter, filtering, glass, glass house, james welling, lens, modernism, neutral, philip johnson, photography, reality
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: artificial, cd, dust, entropy, exhibition, hydrate and perform, melting, minimalism, , simulacrum, swiss institute, synthetic, tobias madison, virtual, vitamin water
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Monday, April 19th, 2010

From Return from the Stars (1961) by Stanislaw Lem:

The Coronation was quite a simple matter.  They put a man in a suit, took him up into orbit, and at an altitude of some hundred thousand kilometers, where the Earth shines like the Moon enlarged fivefold, simply tossed him out of the rocket into space, and then flew away.  Hanging there like that, moving his arms and legs, he had to wait for their return, wait to be rescued; the spacesuit was reliable and comfortable, it had oxygen, air conditioning, a heater, and it even fed the man, with a paste squeezed out every two hours from a special mouthpiece.  So nothing could happen, unless maybe there was a malfunction in the small radio attached to the outside of the wearer.  There was only one thing missing in the suit, a receiver, which meant that the man could hear no voice but his own.  With the void and the stars around him, suspended, weightless, he had to wait.  True, the wait was fairly long, but not that long.  And that was all.

Yes, but people went insane from this; they would be dragged in writhing in epileptic convulsions.  This was the test that went most against what lay in a man–an utter annihilation, a doom, a death with full and continuing consciousness.  It was a taste of eternity, which got inside a man and let him know its horror.  The knowledge, always held to be impossible and impalpable, of the cosmic abyss extending in all directions, became ours; the never-ending fall, the stars between the useless, dangling legs, the futility, the pointlessness of arms, mouth, gestures, of movement and no movement, in the suit an earsplitting scream, the wretches howled, enough.

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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 mulitplayer 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.

Tags: 3d, , artie vierkant, , avatar in 3d, , object, representaton, sphere, temporal object, , video, vimeo
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Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

At Light Industry in Brooklyn, the artist Paul Slocum recently exhibited a re-constructed 1966 Dr. Who episode which long-time fans of the series feared was “lost in time” following a spat of sweeping reductions from the BBC’s entire television archive during the 1960s and 70s.

The BBC’s discarding of this particular Dr. Who episode was not personal, but economic—they were looking for a way to save money on media storage.

In the current epoch of media storage technology, though, the data cloud affords ample room to archive and database this or any other Dr. Who episode.

And, indeed, in response to this hunger, fans of the show and, eventually, the BBC itself have subsequently played the role of the “time-lord,” travelling back in time and re-constructing several of these lost episodes.

As one views-through this particular episode re-construction, which was conducted by the BBC, one listens to an original audio track and views two key visual elements:

1.  The first is the rough-hewn re-construction of the episode itself which consists of explanatory text as well as black-and-white production stills and video footage scraps depicting low-budget sci-fi sets and costumes intermingling with actors frozen in time.

There’s a surrealistic, dreamy quality to the visual rhythm here and the lack of clear connection between the images on the screen to the soundtrack reminds one of, say, the Chris Marker film La Jetée which is, likewise, a time-travel story told through an audio track and a series of black-and-white still frames.

2. The second key visual element in the re-construction, though, is the shifting background of solid colors intermingling with random number and letter strings under which this episode re-construction plays-through.

This shifting background imagery reads as “tech” or “sci-fi future” or “futurity”; however, it does so in a notably different way than those same words would find their meaning in the imagery of the episode re-construction—(they read here—not as better or worse—but simply as if from a different era—perhaps the mid-1990s [there’s something Gattaca about the background’s look]–in any event, equally historically dated–dead).

At the end of the episode’s narrative, the Doctor (one vision of the future)  “dies” and is—then—re-generated into an entirely new Doctor (another vision of the future) with an entirely new take on the role of the “time lord” who will, nevertheless—play-out an old story:

Like the Doctor before him—this new Doctor will die and be re-generated and, then, that Doctor will die and be re-generated and so on and so on and so on and so on.

Slocum’s further re-contextualization of the episode re-construction itself provides an even deeper layer of re-generation:

One views here neither the obsolete imagery of the episode re-construction nor the obsolete imagery of the background of the re-construction nor the collision of the re-construction and its background, but rather an endless chain of dead re-generations of the future extending forever.

Tags: , death, dr. who, dr. who and cops with house music, endlessness, event, lecture, light industry, paul slocum, re-generation, , time lord, time travel
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