Katharina Grosse

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Katharina Grosse

Work from I Think This Is a Pine Tree at KHB.

“In a large room, three tree trunks lie haphazardly in a pile at a slight angle to the wall. They have been stripped of their branches and bark but their roots remain intact, awkwardly protruding into a closed doorway. The trees along with the floor and wall of the museum have been doused with an energetic — if not defiant — series of gestures of brightly colored spray paint. The piece, “I Think This Is a Pine Tree” (2013), by Katharina Grosse at the Hamburger Banhof Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin was a jolt to my system. Like any discovery of an uprooted tree, Grosse’s piece is familiar, while taking on its own immediate dramatic presence. It contains recognizable elements — gestures evocative of Abstract Expressionism, an application reminiscent of graffiti — but the work is not merely a mix and match of previously explored territory.

“I Think This Is a Pine Tree” delivered a sensation often sought by any visitor to a contemporary art museum. Goosebumps formed on my neck and blood pumped to my limbs causing the urge to run, skip, and jump around in a fight or flight response of viewership. My ego was having none of it. “Come on you’re in a museum. Yeah, you came here searching for this very feeling but play it cool. You are an educated adult for god’s sake! Go read the description, look ponderously at the piece, and start figuring out why it made you feel this way. Spread your response out over time; mix some delayed gratification in with work. Maybe write something about it. Just do not hurdle those tree trunks!”

Traditional Abstract Expressionism is often applied (and I say this as someone who painted in an Abstract Expressionist style for some years) through pushing paint, building on blank canvas and other paint. The physical structure and texture of an Ab-Ex piece is often redefined by the medium itself. Ab-Ex artists have broken the picture plane, cut through the canvas, exposed the stretcher bars, even hacked them up but the plane almost always remains in a back and forth relationship with the medium, even if only referentially or antagonistically. Grosse is not painting outside the picture plane, because there is none. She is using spray paint exactly how it was designed to be used, to paint over something, to move without touching what is painted, free of friction. Spray paint evokes graffiti, but there is nothing approaching image or text in Grosse’s marks, nor is the piece framed by or directly responding to the architecture like graffiti often does. Rather, the floor, the wall, the trees are all fair game in coloring movements. The distinction between these structures is not necessarily ignored nor accentuated by the application of the paint. As a result, “I Think This Is a Pine Tree” manages to be a series of actions, despite its form as an installation, sculpture, and painting…” – Hyperallergic

Katja Strunz

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Katja Strunz

Work from Berlinische Gallery.

“…Four pieces, 3 sculptural works and one work on paper, whilst the curation of the show seems balanced, the necessity of having four pieces seems perhaps doubtful. The space is rightfully dominated by two large-scale sculptural works titled ‘ Tellurische Kontraktion’ and ‘Tellurischer Riemen’.

Tellurischer Kontraktion greets you on entrance into the space resembling a scrunched up piece of paper, its close resemblance to the everyday object allows us to imagine an aspect of movement and a closeness that is quite unexpected from blackened steel and aluminum. The piece, when unfolded holds the capacity of the exhibition space questioning notions of space and perception. The scale of the work allows the steel to, in itself achieve a successful execution of its own materiality whilst at the same time embodying the materiality and structure of paper.

Behind Tellurischer Kontraktion, commanding attention from the get-go is Teller Riemen, again, blackened steel, but this time the piece stands at a height of 8 meters, supported by a steel rope and an internal frame which gives the piece its form. Again this piece references the everyday object allowing us to imagine how the work would materially function yet in reality removing that function and creating a space in which to look at the formal in another context.” – La Scatola Gallery

Wade Guyton

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Wade Guyton

Work from his current exhibition at Petzel.

“In 2007 Guyton showed a series of black paintings made with his Epson 9600 printer and covered the gallery’s concrete floor with a facsimile of his studio’s plywood floor. This time he has made five new works on linen specifically for the gallery’s walls. Using the same digital file from 2007, but enlarged to accommodate a new printer’s increased width, they are printed with an Epson 11880. The ink is UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta. The works are turned on their sides, hung horizontally and stretched to fit the gallery walls. Two of them are jammed in a corner…” – Petzel

Edgar Martins

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Edgar Martins

Work form The Rehearsal of Space & the Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite

“In 2012 I approached the European Space Agency with a very ambitious proposal: to produce the most comprehensive survey ever assembled about a leading scientific and space exploration organization. I have contacted ESA at an interesting time in their history when they are looking to establish a more coherent dialogue with the wider public and the arts. Unlike NASA or CERN, ESA do not have an artist residency program. So I was delighted when they agreed to support my endeavor. It is the first time in their history that they have granted an artist exclusive access to all of their facilities, staff, programs, technology, partners, etc. The access I have been granted is unparalleled, even within the framework of the residency programs specified above. This project had an 18-month gestation period and will be launched in early 2014. It documents over 15 separate facilities, located across the world, namely in the UK, Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, Kazakhstan, French Guiana, etc. These locations range from test centers, robotics departments, jet propulsion laboratories, space simulators, launch sites and launch platforms, astronaut training centers and training modules, satellites and technological components, payload/launcher assembly and integration rooms, etc. I feel fortunate that ESA has recognized, through my proposal, that artists should be entitled to access and engage with space. I was also heartened that ESA welcomed the idea that I may bring with me a critical and artistic perspective. This projects looks, therefore, to engage with ESA and its partners’ programs –the microgravity, telecommunication, navigation, lunar and Mars exploration programs, among others–, whilst also reflecting on the new politics of space exploration as well as the impact of this kind of technological application on our social consciousness. As someone who has always worked in hard-to-access environments, I am interested in the dialogue that these environments can provoke. There are multi-layered challenges for artists working within any established structure – cultural, ethical, legal. In the case of space exploration organizations this can be further exacerbated given the increasing privatization and militarization of space and the constraints that these engagements can activate. My main challenge was, therefore, to develop an approach that was simultaneously descriptive and speculative, and which enabled me to engage with all those I entered in contact with – from scientists to the public. Like a topographer or visual archaeologist I set out to discover and reveal the spectrum of possibilities awakened by the objects and places I visited, consequently, inviting a broader and more intricate experience of its hidden meanings. This project explores the theme of space exploration with a strong sense of perspective, an understanding of the other sector’s operating culture and an unequivocal ability to articulate, critique and engage. The work has a cross-sectoral approach and so it will incorporate a variety of audience driven events such as seminars, exhibitions and discussion forums, scheduled to take place between 2014 and 2018.”

Halina Kliem

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Halina Kliem

Work from her oeuvre.

“We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside
out” (‡ l’envers), of the “turnabout,”, of a continual shifting from top to
bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties,
humili- actions, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. Mikhail Bakhtin

I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer.
It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way.
Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful.
But nevertheless it is inevitable. Martha Graham

Can you meet me halfway, right at the borderline?
That’s where I am gonne wait for you
I’ll be lookin’ out night and day
Took my heart to the limit, and this is where I stay. Black Eyed Peas, Meet me Halfway

Meudon, 1912: Serge Diaghilev, impresario of Ballets Russes, in a rage enters the splendid villa on the outskirts of Paris, with one intention: to disturb and forever end the events unfolding in the villa’s surrounding garden. Here, he knew he would find his lover, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, almost naked, dancing in the dubious private audience of Auguste Rodin. Diaghilev’s infamous jealousy, history books inform us today, is the reason that only one 19 cm large draft of the bronze sculpture was delivered to posterity. A second, more apocryphal version of the affair, emerged 76 years later in the publication of Jean Cocteau’s diaries. “The statues ended”, the diary states, when Nijinsky in his second meeting with the artist, “turns around and Rodin, fly open, is masturbating.”

The Rodin-Nijinsky connection offers yet a third narrative regarding the relation of desire and art: This time evolving around the sculptor’s relentless, aesthetic quest for sculptural movement and the dancer’s goal to make movement sculptural. This is another story of desire, straining and bending boundaries along the lines of their reciprocal becoming, desiring to possess each other, be like one another, and exploring of the body as tool to unravel the energy, passion and ecstasy common to human experience.

No stranger to this quest, Halina Kliem, in her second solo exhibition at DUVE Berlin, investigates what it means to set oneself up in the midst of the phenomenological divide that is at stake in desire: the obsession with an object or the desire to become that object.” – DUVE, Berlin

via Dust Magazine

Collin Snapp

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Collin Snapp

Work from his oeuvre

“In a world where technology relegates us to the status of objects observers observed where ordinary experience is so infiltrated with media isolating organic life moments becomes on one hand a keepsake and on the other hand the spectacle of visibility of growth something utterly distanced from tory involment It has been said that one of the functions of art is to critically disrupt the seeming transparency between viewers and objects viewed and Colin Snapp with his series called tc Studies wants to question whether images can preserve the vital presence of what they necessarily represent
These images are derived from video footage of various plant species The artist produced these works by photographing the lcd screen (view finder) of his video camera and printing the image of the 3inch screen at a significantly magnified proportion This process came about as a by product from the Panorama project in which Colin Snapp spent a month filming within national parks Much of the footage ended up being of ors experiencing these national parks through their cameras In a sense the view finder has become a sort of third eye and within these natural landscapes becomes very apparent What might otherwise be doentary realism plain and simple translates into commentary on the contemporary technologies by which we take in the world thus labeling it and reducing it to the status of a commodity”

Diane Simpson

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Diane Simpson

Work from her oeuvre.

“The six pieces in the show all appear to be based on wearable items that have had three-dimensionality steam-pressed out, but that still retain a sense of volume and, additionally, assume new functional identities. A brand new work, “Collar (Pagoda),” appears to be the enlarged version of a clerical collar spread open horizontally atop a slender stand. Constructed from painted aluminum, linoleum and rivets, it suggests a roof, a set of shoulder pads and an open book. A wall sculpture, “Bib”(Quilted),” which dates from 2006 and is made from vinyl, felt and thread, could be a) an umpire’s padding; b) a cathedral floor plan; c) an X-ray shield; d) a priest’s chasuble; or e) other. So it goes: an Amish bonnet is a Brünnhilde helmet upside-down; a black formal coat, a carapace.” – NY Times

Surface Poetry

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Surface Poetry at Boetzelaer|Nispen.

“Today, the digital screen has become the predominant surface for engaging with visual content. The texture of the digital screen, characterized by its flat surface, artificial smoothness, juxtaposition of different windows, and chromatic backlit glow, constitutes the aesthetic framework in which we perceive and act upon a large part of the images we digest daily. Getting accustomed to its visual and haptic settings, we expect other surfaces and visual stimuli to appear and respond in a similar fashion. We have never been able to demand as much from a surface as we do in the age of digital screens. Having turned into intimate objects, screens have never been more responsive, more aligned with our needs, more flexible and addicting. Yet, at the same time, these beautiful things remain strangely alien, remote and detached in their closed-off technological perfection.

If digital surfaces are so ubiquitous, if we embrace them in such a powerful way, we need to question how they actually influence our visual culture. What are the aesthetic norms and affordances of the screens that we look at and touch continuously? How do they shape our perceptual and tactile conventions – also in situations that are not directly related to digital devices? This exhibition traces the impact of digital surfaces in the selected works of 3 artists – Katharina Fengler (1980, Germany), Ida Lehtonen (1986, Finland) and Rachel de Joode (1979, The Netherlands).

In Katharina Fengler’s paintings flatness dominates. On her large airbrushed works on paper fore- and background merge, while high and low contrast meet. Her paintings have an absolute presence, no before and after. The eye doesn’t know where to focus, how to zoom in or out, where to look first. Her paintings conjure the atemporality of the screen, the juxtaposition of disparate entities on one equalizing plane. This obstruction of perspective, in combination with a mesmerizing presence, also translates to her sculptural work. As if they fell from the paintings, these objects occupy space like alien things. Upon closer inspection, they reveal distinctly human marks, such as handprints, which complicate their smooth, Photoshop-like appeal.

Ida Lehtonen’s canvases display digital prints. In her collages, images are layered, merged and folded into each other, displaying frictions and traces that are entirely software-generated. Abstract landscapes with an almost painterly quality emerge. As if the screen had collapsed, these landscapes present us with a mush of patterns and glitches, laying bare textures that otherwise remain hidden by the smooth functionality of our interfaces. Placed in the exhibition space, it looks as if the contents of our computer screens, tablets and smartphones have spilled out and morphed onto hanging structures and objects.

Rachel de Joode’s sculptures often play with expectations connected to specific materials and surfaces. In her work, digital images are given a material presence in the physical space of the gallery, which they nevertheless have to share with other objects. In the case of “Reclining Wet Clay On Greek Marble,” a high-definition photograph of wet clay is mounted on top of a marble stone as a sculptural element, generating a sense of dissonance that addresses our habituated perception of each medium. For “Folded Skins,” De Joode pasted together images of her skin to create a group of photographic sculptures. These sculptures are informed by the smooth and homogenizing effects of digital image-processing software, while simultaneously highlighting the uneven and porous textures of the human skin. The photo collage is printed on round, bean-shaped cut-outs, which are somewhat oddly grouped together. This further complicates their presence as objects constituted on the bleeding edges of the slick and the granular, the artificial and the organic, surface and depth, the screen and the gallery space.” – Boetzelaer|Nispen

Jeff Thompson

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Jeff Thompson

Work from Computers on Law & Order

“In the fall of 1990, a television program about crime, police investigation, and criminal trials named Law & Order aired for the first time. The show eventually ended in 2010, tied with Gunsmoke for the longest-running live-action television show at 20 seasons and 456 episodes.[1] With its unique (and consistent) style and trademark “dun-dun!” sound, Law & Order has generated several spin-offs and can likely be found playing at any hour of the day somewhere on cable.

Much has been written recently about how “binge-watching” an entire season or even an entire show is changing our interaction with—and in some cases the making of—television. This new TV-watching paradigm is due in large part to Netflix’s streaming service; around the same time it was launched, I started watching a lot of Law & Order. With so many episodes available in an easy-to-digest procedural format, I could just turn to the next episode in line and hit “play.”

I began to take screenshots of oddities: moments where the show broke from its usual format into first-person or split-screen views, or frames of unexpected abstraction as the camera panned across a scene. But somewhere in all those procedurally-formatted murders, quips, investigations, interrogations, and trials I began noticing computers. At first they were oddities too (characters using computers in funny ways, interesting-looking fake applications or websites), but as many obsessive projects start, the more screenshots I took, the more I noticed computers.

In the summer of 2012, I received a Rhizome commission to more systematically document computers across the entire original Law & Order series. I purchased the 120-disc box set and began to record (almost) every computer from all 456 episodes. Now, a little more than a year later, nearly 11,000 screenshots have been gathered along with some related (and some not-so-related) data about the show. The project is presented in the form of a blog (computersonlawandorder.tumblr.com) and in the more curated form of a book.

After watching all 319 hours of the show (or the equivalent of about two straight months watching 40-hours a week, though that is not how I consumed it), I think Law & Order is an even more interesting cultural artifact than I could have ever expected. The show forms a unique database of images and speech, and one that reflects the fascinations, fears, and biases of its time. Law & Order’s long run and its “ripped from the headlines” content makes it a useful lens through which to look at a period of great political and economic change in the United States. In particular, the show coincides with a major cultural shift: the rise and eventual ubiquity of computers and networked technologies over a crucial 20-year period in technological history.

Law & Order spans the emergence of the ever-present personal computer, the trajectory from specialized to mainstream internet use, the introduction of laptops and flatscreen monitors, and finally the mass adoption of internet-enabled smartphones. Alongside the actual technology appearing onscreen, the show’s content, ranging from casual conversations to crimes and crime-solving, reflects our fascination with and sometimes fears about technologies like BBS systems, email, online dating and social networking, webcams, privacy and hacking, facial recognition, and search engines.

While an investigation of the show could have taken many forms, as an artist interested in how technology shapes culture it made perfect sense to use Law & Order as a means to talk about how our relationship with computers has formed and changed over the last 20 years. The screenshots resulting from this project (along with other data, including web addresses used on the show, quotes about computers, and a list of “first appearances”—all included in this book) provide a rich data set through which there are many possible lines of investigation. One of the trajectories we can trace through the show is the transition of the computer from turned-off background prop, lending realism to scenes in the workplace, to its current position as a necessary, always-networked, and constantly used tool.

The first computer on Law & Order appears nine minutes into the first episode of the show. A rather small, dull-gray monitor sits on the also-dull-gray box of a computer. The keyboard rests on the desk in front and some kind of peripheral sits to the left. Exact details are difficult to identify. We see the computer as the camera quickly pans the room, obscured by motion blur and the graininess of the film stock. Alone, unused and tucked into the corner of the room, this is the state of computers for most of the first ten seasons of the show: a shared resource used only occasionally as needed, turned off more often than not, and dotted with Post-It notes left for other users. Often, these computers are shown on dedicated computer desks or tucked away in corners, below counters, or in other out-of-the-way places.

This reflection of banal details is something Law & Order excels at (whether intentionally or not) and stands in contrast with one of the show’s spinoffs, Law & Order: SVU, which often depicts police station computers in a manner bordering on the sci-fi. Unlike the smart-boards and touch-based interaction of SVU (which is intended to suggest high-tech interactivity while being decidedly not, sporting instead clunky and simplified user interfaces with the veneer of corporate design), the original series accepts the realistic limitations of blue screens and keyboard-only input, and as a result is a much better representation of the average computer user in the early 1990s.

In fact, it isn’t until nine episodes and 39 computers later that a machine is even turned on, and it isn’t until season five that a computer appears on the front of someone’s desk. Over the course of the show as we might expect, computers become more and more common, shifting from bulky desktops to laptops and flatscreen monitors. City employees look up records for detectives and DAs, forensics and computer experts are seen using high-end software and even engaging in hacking, and computers dot the background with random programs open as if some important work had been interrupted. By the last two seasons, both detectives are regularly seen working on laptops across from each other and smartphones begin to make appearances.

This shift can be measured by counting the number of computers captured per season. The below chart shows the computer counts across all 20 seasons along with a line tracking the average trend: a steady incline in the number of computers onscreen that bumps up briefly in the middle and skyrockets towards the end of the show’s run.

An overall rise in the count is to be expected as computers become more common throughout 1990s and early 2000s (the spike in the first season is likely the result of my overzealous capturing of images at the start of the project). Computer use transitioned in the late 1990s from a shared office tool to one of near constant use at work, and often at home as well. By 2002, more than half of Americans were online.[10]Computers, the internet, and computer-related stories and crimes were on everyone’s mind; this was reflected in the show’s stories and as a bump in in the computer count.

The subsequent dip in the early-to-mid 2000s is perhaps the most interesting, and is likely the result of several factors. The first may be ubiquity: we all got used to having and using computers. Computers mediated many daily tasks and the internet matured, giving us a feeling of comfort with technologies like email and instant messaging. Another possible reason is a feeling of doubt about the role computers would play as the result of the dot-com bubble, when online retailers went under and technology stocks dropped. While not seen as clearly in the screenshots themselves, these sentiments are reflected in the show’s storylines. In episode 253 (2001), one character sums up this feeling: “Then her cousin Jeff convinced her to jump on the internet bandwagon. It was a disaster.”

But new technologies breed new fascinations and anxieties, and this is a likely cause for the sharp increase in the number of computers in the final seasons. With the rise of mobile computing, characters start using smartphones and laptops on a regular basis, and engage more with social networking sites (Law & Order’s fake Facebook is called Faceplace, one of few domains used on the show that NBC isn’t just sitting on).

There is a second possible reason for this spike: Apple became a sponsor of many NBC shows. No longer did we see nameless beige computers recycled from previous episodes or devices with their brand names covered. Instead, fancy new computers proliferated, clearly identifiable as Apple products. This consistent shift to a high-end brand is out of character for a gritty crime drama, but in the end perhaps says more about how television is made than it does about computers.

Now 18 months and hundreds of episodes later, I realize this isn’t a project about Law & Order at all—the show is one of many possible vehicles for exploring our culture’s relationship to technology. Detailed accounts have been written of mainframes and cloud computing, social media and online commerce, but there are few books about the more humble aspects of technological culture. Consider the computer desk: formerly ubiquitous, fake-wood melamine furniture with a keyboard tray and, depending on the vintage, a box of disks or a built-in CD rack, the computer desk is one of many objects mostly lost to the past that get a rich historical document through Law & Order. If we want to dig for this sort of anthropological detail, we are unlikely to find it anywhere but in the media of the period. It is difficult to pin down exactly what these and all the other images in this archive might mean, and that’s something I find satisfying. Embedded in the background of scenes, snippets of dialog, or fleetingly glimpsed fashion, I look forward to seeing more projects that use media to nibble at the profound or kitschy that lies waiting to be unearthed.”

text via Rhizome

Scott Lyall

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Scott Lyall

Work from Indiscretion at Miguel Abreu Gallery.

“Lyall’s paintings, which are in fact digital prints on stretched canvas, are mounted on monochrome backings that frame them, double them, and space them in relation to their environments. As color field images – or the lack of such images – the paintings are generated using an iteratively mechanical strategy that resolves a triple demand for negation, schema, and repetition. The viewer is confronted with a continuous and joyfully predictable pictorial surface of totally rendered difference. Lyall begins a work by selecting a single pixel, an invisible quantified ‘color’ within a digital color model. From this initial decision and definition of primary color emerges a self-generating, potentially infinite sequence of transformations: the color is wound around the virtual curvature of a void. This vertiginously repeatable formula results in iridescent and impersonal visual atmospheres, where no two points are quantitatively equal, but where the magnitude of their relationships remains constantly equivalent. At face value, the paintings appear like sheer almost-monochromes made from digital dust, while being predicated exactly in the opposite reality of the polychrome. By contrast, the glass works, although made by an identical print technique, commit the layers of ink to the opacity of a glaze – the absorptive, 80% black sheet backing. These differential treatments of identical file material, which immerse the expressive artist in the technical support or apparatus, imagine a common interface of remarkably lucid lack.

‘The first paintings that cannot be misunderstood’, wrote Ad Reinhardt about his late work. But as it turned out, Reinhardt’s insistence on negation, schematization, and repetition has never ceased to augur misunderstandings. Like his predecessor, Lyall accepts and even proposes that his work be conventionally recognized as abstract painting, that is that it exists as a signifying and signified part of a specific culture at a particular historical moment – ours. However, his infinitesimal and quasi-random choices of generative color pixels might point to a limit reached in the digital age. It is as if Lyall’s paintings depict a lack in their environments, a pure particle that, to echo the famous words of Mallarmé, is missing from every volume, every empty sample of air. At the same time, his monochrome backings – made of cemented wooden powder, or MDF – are reminders that the tasks of separation and negation also signal an inevitable differential affirmation. Reinhardt was either too early or too late for most historians. Lyall, in repeating him, is always- already there and done. The artist’s iterative painting resembles neither a critique of authorship (as was implicit in Conceptual art’s ‘instructional’ production, or in the image appropriations of the Pictures generation), nor a romanticism of the ‘ghost-in-the-machine’ sensibility that has been heralded as the Pop intersection of painting and printers. His stance implies, rather, a program of refusal against the torrent of digital images that flood the world today. This subject would not be offered as the significance of anything, but it is opened to a poetics of its decision-based refusal. The object here, further, is pure discretion itself, the form in which compression can allow for absolute mobility.” –