general

Virgil Thomson: for Four Saints in Three Acts came up with motifs corresponding to Gertrude Stein's words without writing them down. Eventually when the same motifs had recurred from memory enough times he decided those were the ones worth keeping and they became the opera. He worked the same way with his portraits--musical interpretations of people that resulted from sitting in the same room with them.

Eric Satie: "furniture music" consisting of more or less interchangeable parts that filled space and time but did not dramatically engage the listener

George Antheil: a piece for player piano no longer governed by time as music had always been. it can be compressed and uncompressed more or less instantly like a piece of visual art.

--notes from memory on Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent. Not quotes and the ideas may be slightly altered from Albright's meaning.

Had to back off my devil's advocate support of Dan Proops on this Rhizome thread. Rob Myers convinced me that Art & Language-style conceptualism was the best frame for the work and I can't defend it on that basis even jokingly. My apologies to some excellent painters that got dragged into this.

Update: Rhizome keeps changing its links. This should work --the above one is broken.

Over at Rhizome we are discussing the artist Dan Proops, who, among other things*, repaints old master paintings in the manner of a "Girls Gone Wild" video (i.e., with the naughty bits pixelated out). Yrs truly said:

It's hard to argue about paintings without the paintings present. It's quite possible that if Proops could paint as well as Caravaggio (or even John Currin, who's worked hard to get the old master depth and sensitivity in his rendering, making collectors go gaga), the viewer would have to deal with the fact of those painted pixels in a way that you might not seeing them at 72 dpi on a browser.

As in, "my God look at the amount of time and finesse that went into this art just to make this point about censorship or whatever." Your rational mind would be pulling you in one direction ("this is a bad idea") while your senses were pulling you in another.

It seems unlikely that the work has its ducks in a row to that degree but we could at least entertain the possibility.

*Based on these jpegs [or here] it looks like another case of "computer envy" where a contemporary artist working in the tried-and-true medium of paint on canvas adopts digital imagery as subject matter (a trend that arguably began with Lowell Nesbitt painting photoreal pictures of IBM mainframes and was more recently seen in Miltos Manetas's still lifes of Playstation equipment or Wayne Gonzales's acrylic renderings of basic Photoshop effects).

The intended tension here is between a slow, contemplative medium and a fast, disposable medium. For example, painting the browser window and scroll bars as well as the porno imagery inside that frame. Or rendering every facet of a wireframe Nefertiti model. As Ed Halter says in the Rhizome post, this appears, from the jpegs at least, to be "quick-glance commentary on medias new and old through easy-to-get juxtapositions." That is likely the case but you can never say for sure until you see the work--there is always the possibility of a formal wow factor or something surprisingly wonderfully trashy happening in a person-to-painting encounter.

Update: I had to back off my devil's advocate support of Proops on the Rhizome thread. Rob Myers convinced me that Art & Language-style conceptualism was the best frame for the work and I can't defend it on that basis even jokingly. My apologies to some excellent painters that got dragged into this.

Blog post from MTAA:

On Friday April 11, 2008 as part of its monthly curatorial project, art collective MTAA premiered "The Surrogates," a performance art piece exploring the nature of perceived identity and representation, credited to European-based art collective 0100101110101101.ORG (in absentia).

Presented at MTAA's OTO art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the two-hour piece began at 7 p.m. with an open bar and velvet rope welcoming attendees in the hallway.

Inside the OTO space proper, two rows of two chairs (numbered 1-4) faced a low stage featuring a 4'x6' projection screen (center) and a small television monitor (stage right). Attendees entered the darkened room four at a time, their assigned seats facing a slightly delayed projection of themselves. The monitor revealed hallway activity in real time.

The attendees (now participants) were given no explanation of the piece, though they were invited do as they pleased within the space and to leave at their leisure. Re-entry was not permitted however, and those exiting the piece were immediately replaced by those next behind the velvet rope.

"The Surrogates" reaches its 180-degree apex via this text. Please note that while the Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG.) are credited as the authors of this seminal performance, MTAA designed, built and executed this work in its entirety.

Similar idea done in Dallas, early 90s:

Young artists fresh from school, let's call them the XYZ Collective, invite all their classmates and a large swath of the general public to a new, then-hot art space called the Hickory Street Annex. They show a room full of paintings, hung salon style. At the suggestion of area dealer Chris Byrne, they have "mediated" the show by installing spy cameras in some of the paintings.

After looking at the paintings and attending what seems to be a normal opening, viewers enter a second room of the exhibit through a black velvet curtain. In that room is a video projection of the people in the first room, viewing the paintings and chitchatting. The viewpoint rotates from one spycam to another, like a convenience store security camera.

Viewers were allowed to go back and forth between the rooms, so the dynamic was this:

Someone would enter the second room, see what was going on, and go back into the first room to tell other people. People in the second room could watch people in the first room being "wised up" to the trick, then peering *much* more closely at the paintings. Because the show drew a large crowd and there was a constant influx of new people through the door, at a given time only about half the people in the room knew they were participating in a social experiment.

To make it work, the artists had to be willing to use their own paintings as fodder, or props, since the real subject matter of the show was people gazing at other people on TV (half of whom were gazing back without seeing their observers).

An internet abstract painting:

Landscape, by Borna Sammak

A field of animated "paint strokes" that appear to be digital samples from landscape images--sprays of foliage, reflections on water, hunks of sky. They bear the traces of removal from whatever photo source they came from--specifically a jagged white pixelated outline surrounding each form. The "painting" consists of one all-over rectangular field of these patchy shapes, moving down and to the right. While this is happening, horizontal and vertical bands consisting of daisy chains of individual, like patches sweep down and across the rectangular field in a slow, jerky videogame-like crawl. Several of these bands are moving simultaneously and independently of each other like marchers in a halftime game. This is an atomized, media-derived experience of nature, formally complex and Pollock-like but unromanticized. It is on a large scale so as to fill a web browser. Every viewer's experience will be different depending how their computer handles the data in random access memory. This is an elite, highbrow style of art made accessible and entertaining with animation bells and whistles, widely distributable so everyone can enjoy it on their laptops.