Archive for July, 2010

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.

2.

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.”

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 involve re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet–are shared in on-going 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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Friday, July 16th, 2010

Marisa Olson: Recent Work

1.

The Internet enables anyone with a connection to publish and share their artwork on a global scale.  In many ways, this is a triumph of democratic thought as the barriers to creative expression are open much wider than they were twenty years ago.  This pleasant vision becomes complicated, though, when one considers that because of this very democratization of cultural production, the landscape of cultural reception transforms, as well.

The viewer or receiver of cultural data is now presented with a seemingly infinite amount of novelty and amateur cultural ephemera to sift through. Because of this, the viewer’s relationship to media becomes one not of audience member to media work, but rather of “prosumer” to media unit.

In the ocean of infinite media novelty, the media viewer is nudged towards, on the one hand, consuming media the way a cable television ”zapper” surfs through television, and, on the other hand, producing media in the hopes of providing another surfer with good, quick zappable content.  This surfing/consuming/producing model is, in general, not conducive to deeper modes of reflection or engagement with media.  On the contrary, it is conducive to shallow skimming, scraping the surface of works.  The pleasure of consumption in an ocean of media is the leap from one drop of media to another to another as opposed to a deeper engagement with a single drop.  The media which are most attractive are fast, funny, and immediately clear.  They need to be, otherwise the prosumer will grow bored and surf to the next article or the next image or the next whatever of media.  The result is that media requiring a relatively greater degree of depth of thought are lost in the shuffle.

Now, with all of this in mind, an artist might grow anxious.

What is the point of making anything and casting it out to this ocean of media if it’s just going to be at best buzzed through or at worst completely ignored?  It’s great that the Web allows anyone to put their own production into the sphere of public consumption, but at what cost?  For the contemporary artist especially, whose motivation is ostensibly to create culture with a greater depth and preciousness than a “Fat Kid on Roller Coaster” video, it would seem absurd to even participate in this dog-eat-dog system.

Still, though…would anyone earnestly desire for everything to return to the pre-Internet model in which only a handful of individuals are able to put their ideas out there into the world? No, probably not.  Fifteen minutes of fame are better than none.

What to do then?

How can an artist participate in this system which is in many ways preferable to the prior model without feeling as though their individual works of art are on some level meaningless?

2.

The artist Marisa Olson’s recent work is not illuminating in the sense that it has any concrete answers to this question, but is rather therapeutic in the sense that it seeks to quell the desire for answers to this and similar sorts of questions by focusing instead on what is creating the anxiety in the first place.

For example, Whew! Age (2010), a performance at PS122 in New York, dramatizes a hallucinatory therapy session in which the patient oscillates between a search for meaning and a cynicism regarding the very idea of search for meaning.

In a set composed of cardboard crystal shards outlined in dayglo duct tape and cheap-o Persian rugs sparkling with glitter and tinsel, Olson’s character interacts with the video projection of a customer-service rep-slash-self-help guru (played by Olson, as well).  On the one hand, the guru character leads Olson inside herself on a mission to “chill out” and stop worrying about all the things she thinks she needs.  To some extent, it works.  Olson comes to the stage in a translucent mask and the guru is able to get her to take the mask off (there’s a gag where after Olson takes the mask off, it reveals another mask, but the guru is sharp enough to have her remove that mask, too).  On the other hand, the guru is a sleazy con-man, convincing Olson to put on blinders—avoiding hope in more rigorously intellectual traditions such as empirical science or psychoanalysis.  And, in a musical montage in the middle of the show, the new age approach of the guru is marketed as a cheesy, 100% guaranteed enlightenment or your money back-style video series.

This tension between sleaze and truism is explored in a moment in which the guru demands of Olson to put her finger in her mouth and imagine that her finger is a glacier.  Olson does so and the guru says to be as chilled as the glacier.  This starts to work, but then one remembers that the glaciers are melting. And this melting—ostensibly due to climate change—is what created anxiety for Olson in the first place.

Between wisdom and mass-produced wisdom, chilling and heating, going into one’s self and back out to the world, is the space Whew! Age inhabits.  In the process, it produces a therapeutic effect by nudging its audience towards neither one pole nor the other but rather towards an acknowledgment of the inevitable contradiction between the two.

Another example of Olson’s recent work is Double Bind (2010), a two-channel video first exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California.  The work is composed of two YouTube videos—one a “response video” to the other.  In the first video, one views Olson dressed professionally in a black suit with make-up and styled hair as she wraps her head in hot pink vinyl bondage tape until it’s completely covered.  In the response video, one views Olson unwrap the pink tape from her head.

So, in one video, the artist is tying herself up in bondage tape; in the other, she’s releasing herself from this bondage.  As they play in a loop side by side—not in perfect sync as the runtime of one video is roughly twice as long as the other—the viewer is presented with two contradictory messages—liberation and submission—each competing with the other and in neither case allowing the two messages to coalesce into a synthesis.

The title of the work, Double Bind, refers to the artist’s binding of herself and unbinding of herself with the bondage tape, and it also refers to a term developed by, among others, the anthropologist/psychologist/cybernetician Gregory Bateson, referring to a condition in which two contradictory pieces of information negate one another.  This negation creates an anxiety in a patient in which he or she cannot settle on one piece of information or the other.  For Bateson (following, to some extent, ideas explored in Zen Buddhism), the discussion of the double bind underlying these sorts of contradictions possesses a therapeutic value for the patient by demonstrating that the desire for solution or synthesis is not a pressing human concern due to its logical impossibility.

In Double Bind, the phenomenon of “double bind” is demonstrated, thus creating a way to confront the anxiety by pointing out the incommensurability of the information in conflict with one another.  Through this demonstration, the subject struggling with the choice of either/or is released from the need to even make such distinctions.

Furthermore, as curator Richard Rinehart points out in his statement regarding the work, an underlying theme of Double Bind is Olson’s own oscillation between digital culture and the world of contemporary art.  By presenting her work as a YouTube response video replete with the design elements and user comment structure familiar to users of YouTube and placing that in the context of the white cube art space, Olson engages in another double bind—the push and pull between the democratic culture of the Web and the elitist culture of contemporary art.  Without definitively aligning herself in either realm, Olson presents this very conflict between democratic culture and art culture as a subject of the work.

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Monday, July 12th, 2010

Tom Moody

1.

Tom Moody is best known today as commentator on the net art scene and a member of the animated GIF and meme sharing community on dump.fm.  However, he is also an accomplished painter and a pioneer in employing consumer-quality paint software applications in a fine art context.  Throughout his career, his works have provided mesmerizing DIY optical effects balanced with thoughtful considerations of the impact of technology on image production, particularly in regard to the tradition of painting.  This text is an overview of some of his work.

2.

Tom Moody was born in Texas and attended high school in Northern Virginia.  He received a BA in English Literature and Studio Art in 1977 from the University of Virginia, did a year in the BFA program at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC from 1977 to 1978, and, following his year at the Corcoran, a summer semester at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City.  Following his education, Moody returned to Dallas, Texas as a painter.

A successful early body of work from 1979-1980 is a series of black and white photorealistic portraits of his male high school friends.  Photorealism was an established movement by the time Moody made these paintings, but his facility with the technique (they could be installed comfortably with Chuck Close’s Phil from 1977) and his embrace of the banal photographic portrait as his subject matter point to his interest in the movement’s conceptual underpinnings.  By laboring to create hyperrealistic photographic effects and employing banal subject matter, the work opens the door to a deeper subject—photography itself; or the use of paint to demonstrate for the viewer what photography, divorced from the photographic print, looks like.  This interest in exploring the formal aesthetic of an imaging technology is a strategy that Moody continues in his embrace of the lo-fi digital affects embedded in the Microsoft Paintbrush, Microsoft Paint, and Adobe Photoshop tools.

Another key work from this period is Wired Self Portrait (1978), a black and white photorealistic self-portrait depicting the artist wearing bug-eyed novelty sunglasses and standing in front of a bank of electrical meters.  The painting is connected to a piece of “hardware” (a white machine about the size of a home printer or fax machine with rows of black knobs whose function is unclear) via two telephone cords inserted into Moody’s neck. This imagery recalls Frankenstein and A Clockwork Orange and anticipates the cyberpunk movement in literature.  Additionally, the depiction of the painter as a cyborg can be thought of as a harbinger of sorts for the direction Moody’s involvement with painting will take.

3.

By the early 1990s, Moody had developed a brand of optically-charged abstract painting, developing his own style and visual vocabulary.  Many of the motifs present in his computer-based painting such as concentric circles, serialized rows and columns of illusionistically-rendered spheres he calls “atoms,” and graphic depictions of molecules as networks of nodes and edges are present in his painting from this period.

As Moody developed this brand of abstract painting, he began meeting other painters from Dallas and Houston who were also exploring abstract effects. These painters, including David Szafranski and Jeff Elrod, became grouped into a movement that Art in America covered in a 1995 article by the art historian Frances Colpitt.

What set Moody’s work apart from the other painters in this scene, though, was his approach to the ground of the paintings.  Instead of painting on canvas, Moody painted directly on, on the one hand, the packaging of consumer goods such as cereal boxes and promotional-size Advil boxes, and, on the other hand, computer print-outs of his own art criticism, re-arranged to disrupt the narrative or argument of each piece, that he would then tape together into grids.  These gestures add an explicit layer of conceptual meaning to Moody’s work.  In regard to the works painted onto his own art criticism, the abstract imagery does work on a purely formal level, but this formal level is complicated by the layer of jumbled art criticism upon which it rests.  The paintings are, in part, about the making of abstract paintings, including the complicated legacy of Modern art discourse.

It should also be noted that the application of paint in these works is often crude, the method of taping-together the computer print-outs of the writing lacks polish, and the consumer-quality of the paper itself is not sensuous in the way that canvas is, giving the paintings an over-all lo-fi, rough-around-the-edges quality.  However, at the same time, the paintings’ embrace of this rawness is both intentional and self-aware.  Part of the aesthetic becomes about a sort of garage rock DIY-ness.

4.

Just as the Art in America article was released and the painting scene Moody was involved in began to receive national attention, though, many of its members, including Moody himself, had left or moved elsewhere.  In Moody’s case, he moved to New York City, taking a clerical temp job with plenty of downtime.

With all of the downtime he had at this job and his interest in situating himself somewhere in the New York art world, Moody began to think of this office as an art studio.  The computer consoles at the office employed out-of-date versions of Microsoft Windows and the paint software application, Microsoft Paintbrush, which, even by the late 1990s, was itself out-of-date.  Moody embraced the banality and technological obsolescence that these tools offered, creating pixelated iconography that he would then print-out onto shades of yellow, pink, blue, and white copy paper.  He would also, in some pieces, create signal distortions from his console to the office printer, resulting in jagged, pixelated lines along the paper that add a further level of formal pattern.  Moody then cut these print-outs up into asymmetrical shapes and re-combined them into a painting using linen tape on the back surface of the paper.

When displayed at a large-scale (as they were in Moody’s solo show at the Derek Eller Gallery in 1998 and the “Post-Hypnotic” exhibition that traveled from the University Galleries at Illinois State University to multiple venues between 1999 and 2001) the patterns of the cut-up paper, punctuated by the simple black icons printed on their surface, resist the humbleness of their materials and give off a mesmerizing optical pop.

Additionally, the slight crinkle of the manipulated copy paper and the patchwork re-assembly of the cut-up pieces create a “quilted” effect on the surface.   The reference to a quilt has a particular resonance for Moody.  As a metaphor for the way the Internet works, the quilt takes on a different set of characteristics than would the “web,” “network,” “cloud,” or “information superhighway.”  For example, the quilt is highly tactile and often associated with femininity.  In a 2005 interview with the artist Cory Arcangel on Rhizome, he comments on this, stating:

In the late ’90s I was impressed by the writing of cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who opened up for me a whole organic, non-analytical way of looking at computation. She traces digital equipment back to one of its earliest uses, as punchcards for looms, and talks of the internet as a distributed collaborative artwork akin to traditionally feminine craft projects.  At the time I was drawing and printing hundreds of spheres at work and bringing them home, cutting polygons around them, and then taping the polygons back together in enormous paper quilts.

There is also an embrace of lo-fi digital imaging in these works in which the rasterized pixel is not cleaned-up as one would find in contemporary imaging software, but rather visible as an indexical account of digital processes.  The sight of these digital traces in the imagery demands the viewer to consider the fact of the computer in the process of image-creation.  What appeals to Moody about this is an embedded acknowledgment that new media technologies are limited; always already on their way out the door.  This doesn’t make them useless as a tool for art creation, though.  On the contrary, the aesthetic or medium of an obsolete technology can be beautiful precisely because it understands its own inevitable obsolescence.  As he writes in his artist statement, technology is “a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication.”

What is also interesting to consider about the way Moody made these works is his clandestine re-purposing of the technologies around him at his bland office job.  He was making objects, yes, but also re-thinking the place of the traditional painting studio and perhaps even creating a portrait of the Gen X-era, mind-numbing corporate milieu in which he was situated.  The curator Richard Klein picked up on these aspects of the work, curating him into the “Ink Jet” exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2000.  As did the painter Michelle Grabner, who showed this work in the “Picturing the Studio” exhibition she co-curated with Annika Marie at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

5.

During this period of Moody’s career, he also created a controversial series of portraits on the Microsoft Paintbrush application depicting physically attractive women whose images he found in print magazines.  In each of these images, Moody would “perfect” the features of the already idealized women using the digital tools at his disposal, bringing the eyes closer together or further apart, making the nose smaller or bigger, etc.  There is something uncomfortable about these images as they were carefully studied, drawn in a piece of software, and digitally “perfected” by a male artist without the female model’s knowledge.  One is provided a sort of unfiltered access to the male gaze.  Furthermore, the black and white, pixelated images provide an un-realistic, clearly computer-created look to each of the subjects, which makes them not erotic, but unsettling.  The women’s bodies are even further abstracted, even more on view as commodity objects than they are in the print magazine.  Like the artist Richard Prince before him, though, Moody walks a fine line in these works between purely fetishizing a woman’s body and providing a self-critical portrait of this very act.  Perhaps their success as artworks is the inability of the viewer to reach a synthesis or conclusion in regard to which side of that line they exist on.

6.

Through the early 2000s, Moody would continue to work in many different veins, both on and off the computer, in most cases combining processes occurring in both locations.  One of his most familiar icons, the molecular model, is an apt metaphor for this approach to artistic process between virtual and physical space.  The molecular model is a unified structure composed of at least two discrete parts that is itself part of a larger structure.  One work, style, or location of work can be thought of as one node or one atom in a larger network or molecular structure.  Taking a cue from the artist Gerhard Richter, the heterogeneity of this larger network is, in part, where the art in Moody’s project occurs.  His serial patterns of spheres or atoms, in which the focus is on a multiplicity of atoms in a larger pattern as opposed to a single atom, can be thought of in a similar way.

Within this rhizomatic structure, though, one of the modes of production Moody returned to quite often is the one he developed in his temp office job—creating imagery in a piece of software, printing (and often re-printing…and further re-printing) the image out onto relatively inexpensive consumer-quality printer paper, cutting it up into asymmetrical shapes, and finally re-combining these shapes using linen tape on the back surface into large, optically-charged rectangular paintings.

As this body of work developed, the patterns became more varied and visually maximized, developing into intense compositions with echoes of Russian Constructivism and late Kandinsky.  Additionally, the paper he worked with became increasingly white in color—a reference to his own vocational shift from the corporate office to the home office.

7.

At around the time that these works achieved a level of self-consciousness within Moody’s project, though, he began to focus elsewhere, exploring the animated GIF file as a robust Internet-native art media.  Moody had long posted digital drawings and paintings onto his blog, but with the GIF he found a more immediately powerful tool to make paintings expressly for the screen.

GIFs are short, looping animations, composed of a relatively small amount of frames and file size.  They have been a part of the vernacular visual lexicon of the Internet since the earliest days of the World Wide Web and have recently seen a surge of interest amongst digital natives on platforms like Tumblr and the website dump.fm.  Part of the appeal (or, for some, lack thereof) of GIFs is the sense that they are aggressively, endlessly instantaneous and, hence, work well for communicating lowest common denominator images and ideas.  However, this very crudeness also makes them particularly robust files to distribute socially, giving them a potential political efficacy that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s understanding of photography and cinema in the early 20th century.

Moody’s embrace of the GIF came through the use of his pioneering art blog (that itself was the subject of a 2007 exhibition, “Blog,” at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn).  He found that, as an Internet native media, GIFs, in a way, effectively cut out the middle man to showing paintings online.  A photograph of a painting is often a poor substitute for the phenomenological impact of a “real” painting.  If one’s painting is going to be viewed far more often in the context of a website or blog (as Moody’s work was) than why not make digital paintings?  Furthermore, why not make those digital paintings move, catching the hyper-wandering Internet surfer’s eye?  And, finally, why not use a file type associated with viral Internet meme culture, providing the paintings with a dynamic life outside of the artist’s website?  With these points in mind, Moody began to experiment with GIFs.

Like his ink jet painting works, the GIFs embrace visual immediacy, pixelation hearkening to a form of technological obsolescence, and a rigorous economy of materials that result in a certain roughness in appearance.  One of his most widely-viewed GIFs (and, if not the first, among the first GIFs to be purchased explicitly as a work of art), is OptiDisc (2007).  This is an eighteen-frame animation depicting concentric circles that alternate at uneven intervals in color from black to red to blue to white, creating a crude, but hypnotic effect.  The work resembles a target, a Modern art favorite famously used by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland.  However, while Moody’s target possesses the same sort of visual punch that these others painters generated, there is also an embedded commentary about progress, be it technological or artistic, occurring here.  Through the use of pixelated imagery, a pointedly small file size, and the uneven temporal intervals of the circles’ alterations in color, OptiDisc is at once both dynamic and pathetic, visceral and antiquated. This tension is what makes it interesting to think of as a work of contemporary art.  The critic/curator Paddy Johnson, in her commentary on the work in the “Graphic Interchange File” exhibition text, writes that the GIF’s “emotive qualities last only as long as Moody allows a reverence for technology – in Moody’s world modernism  is only an afterimage, its spirit eventually replaced by mechanical functionality.”

8.

Recently, Moody has continued to work with GIFs and also created a series of large glossy prints made with Paintbrush, Paint, and Photoshop.  These prints feature complex layers of abstract iconography, much of which is created with a “spray paint” tool, as well as the representation of a crudely-drawn brick wall that functions as both a reference to the Modernist grid and to a wall tagged with graffiti.

This blurring of the polish of Modern art and the rough, democratic aesthetic of street art is a fitting description of Moody’s artistic project in general.  One of the acknowledged inspirations for his painting process comes from cyberpunk literature.  As Moody describes it, cyberpunk inherited the British New Wave’s dystopian, yet hauntingly beautiful, near-future science-fiction vision, mixed it with a dose of cutting-edge computer science, and threw in the science-fiction novelist Samuel R. Delaney’s “street kid” protagonist, resulting in a scrappy form of visionary pop.   One can see Moody, then, as a breed of cyberpunk artist–critically exploring the new, avoiding pretension, and approaching authenticity.

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Friday, July 9th, 2010

From Diaspora (1997) by Greg Egan

…He turned to Paolo, his expression suddenly, painfully naked.  ”I know I’m not flesh and blood.  I know I’m software like everyone else.  But I still half believe that if anything happened to the polis, I’d be able to walk out of the wreckage into the real world.  Because I’ve kept faith with it.  Because I still live by its rules.”  He glanced down and examined an upturned palm.  ”In the macrosphere, that will all be gone.  Outside will be a world beyond understanding.  And inside, I’ll just be one more solipsist, cocooned in delusions.”  He looked up and said plainly, “I’m afraid.”  He searched Paolo’s face defiantly, as if daring him to claim that a journey through the macrosphere would be no different from a walk through an exotic scape.  ”But I can’t stay behind.  I have to be a part of this.”

 

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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.

Tags: action, , body, , jstchillin, martin kohout, , playlist, self portrait, , video, watching martin kohout, , youtube
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Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Ray Gun by Mike Beradino is a 1960s plastic “ray gun” toy in which the artist installed components of a 48X speed DVD burner.

The DVD burner projects a red laser point from the barrel of the ray gun with a non-negligible impact.

In video documentation of the gun’s use which is viewable on Beradino’s personal website, the artist points the gun at a black balloon, initiates the DVD laser, focusing the laser’s point on the surface of the balloon, until—POP—the balloon explodes due to the degree of concentrated heat generated by the laser point.

Now, on the one hand, this work is funny in a one-liner way in that it turns a child’s toy into a working weapon.

On the other hand, though, there’s another level of meaning to the work as, according to Beradino, before the DVD burner was installed into the ray gun toy, it was “broken.”

The broken DVD burner, unable to fulfill its intended function as a reliable inscriber of digital code on the surface of a DVD, is obsolete trash—a bunch of useless plastic and screws.

By re-purposing this broken technology, Beradino breathes new life into it.

In this way, it is in dialogue with the 1960s ray gun—itself a technology, or an idea of a technology, which once heralded a new vision of the future, but is now obsolete.

Furthermore, one could say the same thing regarding fully-functional DVD technology which was also once futuristic and cutting edge but is now in the process of being replaced by digital streaming and download.

It’s all the same process—a technology emerges, promising to bring one closer to one’s desires; it’s consumed; and is, then, replaced by the next technology and the next round of promises.

In no case does the technology definitively answer any of one’s questions or bring one definitively closer to one’s desires.

On the contrary, it always raises more new questions and more new desires.

The collision between the ray gun toy from the 1960s and the broken DVD player creates an impact, then, in the sense that it can pop a balloon, yes, but it can also crystallize one’s awareness of this process.

Two visions of the future—each pointing out the other’s obsolescence.

By doing so, the work creates a portrait of the fact of obsolescence.

Tags: future, laser, mike beradino, obsolete, ray gun,
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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 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 aftersherrielevine.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.

Tags: after sherrie levine, after walker evans, , image, michael mandiberg, process, sherrie levine, simulation, version, walker evans,
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Friday, July 2nd, 2010

The BAMF! Studies by Chris Coy is a YouTube playlist consisting of fifty-three videos created by other YouTube users (almost all of which are teenage males) in which a character or a group of characters disappear in an inky vapor cloud, only to, finally, reappear in a similar vapor cloud a moment or two later elsewhere in the same physical space.

In each case, the disappearing effect is meant to mimic a similar effect produced by the Nightcrawler character in the X-Men comic book and film series.

“BAMF’S,” as these mimicries are often called, take their name from the distinctive sound made by Nightcrawler every time he disappears in the X-Men films—something in-between slamming and suction.

Taken individually, these videos, which generally run from a couple of seconds to between ten and twenty seconds, to, in some cases, over a minute, are moderately interesting—some videos are more dynamic than others; some videos are funnier than others; generally, though, it’s difficult to read anything into them as they’re fairly self-explanatory.

When re-contextualized in a sequence of videos though, a different picture emerges.

Again and again one views teenage boys amidst the trappings of a moderately comfortable suburban life—nice lawns, athletic clothing, family pictures, sofas, outdoor decks, etc.

And again and again, one views these teenage boys in the act of escaping this milieu.

The escapes occur in the form of, on the one hand, the demonstration of the teenager’s supernatural control over his own body in space, and, on the other hand, the execution of an action on a computer.

There’s something pathetic about these forms of escape, but, when viewed as a genre with its own conventions, one might pick up on something more to these videos, as well.

In Coy’s words:

…an understanding of the vastness of the need to broadcast a coping mechanism to others; like a shared frame in a comic book…

Tags: bamf, bamf studies, chris coy, conventions, , effect, genre, nightcrawler, playlist, seecoy, teenagers, youtube
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Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Google Street Views, a body of work by Jon Rafman consisting of an on-going 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.

Tags: 9 eyes, , decisive moment, , google, google maps, google street view, isolation, jon rafman, loneliness, map, photography, street photography,
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