by Hypothete
art - others
Dry Cell
Gagosian has a Robert Rauschenberg mini-retrospective at its Chelsea satellite gallery. Lots of so-so work mixed with good pieces, an ahistorical mingling of early and late. Was glad to spend some time with Dry Cell, 1963, reproduced above.
Jim Long, writing in the Brooklyn Rail, described the piece as follows:
In [this] assemblage a military helicopter is screened on a piece of Plexiglas attached to the frame of a folding camp stool mounted on the wall. A sound sensor activates a small motor that spins a shrapnel-like fragment of metal; it’s terrifying.
The motor wasn't operating at Gagosian--possibly it might have frightened the venerable and well heeled patrons milling about last Saturday and made one or more of them think about exerting some social pressure on that nice military contractor in their co-op, you know, the one that keeps pushing these silly foreign wars for profit. Vietnam flashbacks aside, what I find interesting in Dry Cell is its complex spatial layering of angled lines, a formal puzzle to rival the social vectors of mass destruction: the camp stool is one set of such lines; another is screened onto the pane of glass attached to the stool, and a third resides in the outlines of a swaybacked '60s Army helicopter (just visible in the above photo). An incongruous coat hanger complicates matters even further. The assemblage has a rough, dirty quality, like a prototype robot that has just come back from the field with holographic combat images, mounted for its final debriefing.
dump.fm partial group portrait
Thanks to whoever took this photo of my installation in the "Dump.fm IRL" show, which opened last night. The grid is from a collection of "eyeflip" photos posted to dump.fm from dumpers' webcams. Had been saving them as jpegs for a while and when I was asked by the curator, Lindsay Howard, to submit something to the show I thought of making a physical artwork out of them. Below is how the piece looked in the studio:
For more detailed views here is the web version of the piece, just assembled this morning. (Some tweaks may be done.) In the photo above, the "key" is:
Top row: ryder, mirrrroring, girlafraid, hypothete, JSLASHER
Row two: xsaidanddone, lobstersoap, FRWLx, stewfoo, noisia
Row three: lucy, zoeee, frederick, mallxgoth, stage
Row four: ary, CHCSD, kellymaxine, mirrrroring, poopdeck
No criteria were considered other than what to save (mostly on the fly, from images appearing on dump.fm over a few weeks' time) and whether the image worked in a group of twenty. [Update: should probably mention for anyone unfamiliar with the software that these flips were done by the webcammers themselves and involved no manipulation by me other than brightening them somewhat for printing.]
More about the exhibition. Thanks to friends for coming to the opening and also "Sanity Disobedience for a New Frontier," which also launched in Brooklyn last night. And many thanks to "Sanity Disobedience" curator Rod Malin for replacing a TV one of my GIFs was showing on, when it broke the day of the opening (ouch). Was great to meet many of the artists in both shows for the first time "irl."