tom moody

Let's keep talking about the phrase "internet aware art."
Two senses of the term are in use:

1) Offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind. (A behavioral quirk observed by the artist* who originally coined the phrase).

2) Offline art that is influenced by online conventions, trends, and jargon. (This is mostly a theory in search of artists, where curators look for examples of non-tech art informed by tech concerns. "We know the internet must be changing art, so let's go find examples. Look, here's a sculpture that uses the letters 'OMG'--it's perfect. I'm sure the artists weren't aware that this is what we were looking for.")

Both senses of "internet aware art" are present on the Vvork website, and suspect:

An example of the first type: this installation called Turbo by Baptiste Debombourg. The sheetrock of a gallery wall bulges surrealistically like a hand or head emerging from a TV in David Cronenberg's movie Videodrome, almost to the point of touching a conveniently placed viewer. The drywall is cracking but miraculously retains its convex shape during this real space morph. Neat idea but it doesn't need to exist as a piece--you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the "product" being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic's visit who noticed the piece only "read" from a couple of angles and didn't hold up to more than a few seconds' study? Vvork means never having to explain--success is presumed.

An example that combines both types of Internet Aware Art: Also very jpeg-friendly, this installation by Martin Pfeifle, titled about:blank, consisting of stressed-past-the-point-of-cracking wood (reminiscent of Kai Vierstra's work) that appears to be circulating around the walls of a gallery space. "about:blank" is Internet jargon, a command to load a blank page into a browser, to use as an "inline" frame (an HTML page within an HTML page), which can then be modified by scripts. By calling his installation "about:blank" Pfeifle wants you to think about internet browsing and how it relates to his hand-made, three dimensional work: the gallery wall is the page; the wood is the inline frame; the cracking is--the script? A virus? Time to go read the press release.

(*Have not consulted with Guthrie Lonergan on any of this--he may hate it.)

from Brenna on Nasty Nets: Futuristic Control Panels

A selection of wooden cabinets for the den or family room, each of which features an enormous flatscreen TV surrounded by domestic books and knickknacks.

Compare to Barbara Gallucci's photo project, where she photographed the "TV nook" under the stairs in a typical Levittown home and what owners are doing with the nook 40 years later. In case the meme has faded, Levittown is "the first and one of the largest mass-produced suburbs... a symbol of postwar suburbia," per Wikipedia.

The TV was smaller then but no less a spaceship artifact in the suburban little house on the prairie. Most of the people in Levittown filled in their nooks with something else, as shown in Gallucci's photos. Mainly because of the awkwardness of the stairwell placement--presumably their big flatscreens are elsewhere in the room now.

The flatscreen/widescreen phenomenon spreads like a disease, not just in homes. Every bar has one. Even office computers, which presumably aren't being used to watch Lawrence of Arabia or play videogames, are now coming equipped with font-stretching widescreens. The screens get bigger but '50s-style conformity never goes away.

Have been enjoying the writing on the blog Post Internet.

A dissenting remark: the author misinterprets Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" based on a interview Lonergan gave (where he didn't define the term) as opposed to a more recent public talk (where he did give a definition). See discussion on Rhizome. Post Internet subscribes to Marisa Olson's idea in her piece Netacronyms and this interview of an art based on internet jargon and conventions, whereas Lonergan was talking about art made offline with an eye to how it would look on the internet (for example on the website Vvork, where art is represented by a single installation shot and compelling tag line). The latter is a more subtle and caustic notion.

A quibble: Post Internet's recent analysis of Travis Hallenbeck's Tinypic Video Thumbnails, an 85 page artist’s book and .pdf, is excellent but mistakes the source of the thumbnails collected in the book. It is not YouTube, which PI gives considerable space to describing, but a less-well-known image and video hosting service called Tinypic. Tinypic is very popular with children, which explains the prevalence of "youthful goofing around and skateboarding." Unlike YouTube it doesn't use the middle frame of the video for a screen shot. The screen shots that Hallenbeck chose for his book are generated by some automatic, server-side process (the selected thumbnail frame seems to be occurring about two seconds into the video) but this makes PI's discussion of the folklore of the middle frame mostly superfluous.

Update: Deleted some portions of this post. Still thinking about some of the issues of post-internet art.

"Hoarding" is definitely a topic in the air--why are we suddenly obsessed with obsession?
There's the TV show Hoarders (Bill Schwarz says they need to meet the Pickers--ha ha).
Wikipedia has an entry on digital hoarding.
Seth Price in his entertaining but incoherent Teen Image essay also talked about hoarding in the digital context.
OK, that's all, gotta get back to my stuff.

Show me a corporate executive who says he has stopped printing manuals for his products or who wants you to do online billing to "save the trees" and I'll show you a liar.
It's about cost savings, which will not be passed on to you.
So sick of these lies--they are everywhere.
Greenwashing BS. Make it stop.

Update: If banks and credit card issuers are so concerned with trees they could stop stuffing promotional materials into their billing envelopes...

Let's try it with, oh, say, Jenny Holzer:

Holzer acted in a film by Beth B and Scott B, The Trap Door (1980)

Beth B later directed Two Small Bodies, which starred Suzy Amis and Fred Ward.

Suzy Amis is the current wife of director James Cameron.

James Cameron was married to Kathryn Bigelow from 1989-1991.

Bigelow is a past member of Art & Language.

Art & Language is in the Tate collection with Francis Bacon.

[OK it's a lousy game, because no one current is really connected to Bacon except through the Tate. The Trap Door is chock-a-block with art stars; have never seen it. Here's co-director Scott B's description, from IMDb: "A Nietzschian parable on the fate of innocence, THE TRAP DOOR follows the mishaps of Jeremy (John Ahearn) as he is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer), gets laughed out of court by Judge Gary Indiana, loses his girlfriend to sleazy Richard Prince, is hustled by prospective employer (Bill Rice) and mauled by predatory bird-women. Finally, he seeks the help of a shrink (the legendary Jack Smith) who turns out to be the most demented of all."]

In yesterday's Salon Martha P. Nochimson takes Kathryn Bigelow to task for not being femme enough: "It's that I'm still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America."

Some good responses on the first (earliest) page of letters. Anna68:

Uh, because she is an artist and artists are keen observers of human nature? Just a shot in the dark.

(With feminists like this, who needs mysogyny!)

MHC adds:

...Bigelow is a visual artist, not simply a "female director" (whatever that may mean.)

And her film centers on a character who is addicted to a nearly wordless, intense, visual pursuit -- as is any visual artist worth their salt, no matter their gender. Bigelow chose the palette of war, and did show something about the addiction our culture has to war making, but what I found compelling was watching the main character work, watching him engaged in a life and death situation that depended for a positive outcome on his visual acuity, totally mesmerizing. The life and death part of his job seemed secondary to him; the time-stopping focus he was capable of achieving when looking at a bomb and figuring out how to defuse it was what seemed to bring him intense pleasure and release. Anyone who thinks images can relate to that. And anyone who makes war knows that James' character was doing, on a micro-scale, what war-makers do, too; they focus exclusively on the necessary. And women are obviously as capable of engaging in that kind of focus. Just ask Bigelow.

In the film, the main character keeps a box of defused bomb parts as souvenirs. A fellow soldier says "it's just junk from Radio Shack." Reading MHC's letter made me think about the artist connection: the box suggests an after-the-fact version of the found object/collage materials artists collect, which have no value until they are assembled.

...from Holland Cotter in his New York Times review of the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Some of these remarks are taken out of context (what sounds like a cut might be ameliorated with praise elsewhere) but the overall tone of snippy boredom is fairly accurate. Given Robert Williams' extreme, er, sensitivity to his pop culture roots, being called "the cartoon artist Robert Williams" for his big moment in the sun has gotta hurt.

"[t]he museum...can claim credit for a solid and considered product"

"Two mural-size photographs by James Casebere...have the trippy glow of Claritin ads"

"Small gouaches by the cartoon artist Robert Williams"

"Pictures by Sarah Crowner are basically Op Art folded and stitched"

"Scott Short elaborates on a production process Franz Kline used 60 years ago"

"[a]bstraction’s old content — utopian ideals, personal expression — is squeezed out... What’s left? Décor? Expensive busywork?"

"Lorraine O’Grady...rais[es] issues of race, class and the highly ambivalent nature of beauty that the new abstraction ignores"

"Exactly what the Bruce High Quality artists had in mind I don’t know, but maybe it doesn’t matter. In any case, they’re already on to something else"

"In the end it was video along with photography...that made the show tick for me"

"And there’s one example of Conceptual Art still to come. It’s by Michael Asher, and it consists of keeping the Whitney open around the clock just before the Biennial ends in late May. Mr. Asher was originally told his piece would last a week, but the museum, for budgetary reasons, has cut it back to three days"

Good call from John Michael Boling on spotting this '70s Levis commercial--all analog, anticipating the look of CGI. Some real chicken/egg stuff here: Is CGI a style or did it follow the look of what had been predicted for it? As for the Friskies commercial posted by Paddy Johnson that Boling was responding to, I laughed at what was probably the unintended irony of the cat re-emerging from this sublime, tripped-out landscape to greet a lousy can of commercial cat food. Talk about a letdown. Or perhaps the cat's "trip" is what an ordinary can inspires--that's how uncritical felines are when it comes to a meal.

...as in, it's worse than AOL.

Had heard about "the poke" but couldn't believe it. (Obviously we aren't Facebook users here.)