May 2008

That is, 4chan, 7chan, etc.--collective sites of posts by mostly anonymous users that serve as breeding grounds for animated GIFs and other "meme" art. Vijay Pattisapu has an informative rundown on them in the Rhizome.org discussion forum. Some have furrowed their brows wondering how that kind of anarchic creative energy, native to the world wide web, can be translated into capital A art. But they have not furrowed their brows enough for some other people, as can be seen on the same Rhizome thread.

Two reviews of Ross Knight's recent Team Gallery show noted the connection of his work to the ephemeral sculptures in the New Museum's "Unmonumental" survey. He certainly deserved to be in the exhibit but perhaps wouldn't have benefited being crammed into a room with other appropriators.

8 years ago yrs truly wrote an article for Sculpture that compared Knight, Rachel Harrison, and the recently Vvorked Michael Phelan and related their work to Minimalist art since the '60s. Just noticed that Team has a decent pdf of the essay online. [pdf] Of the three only Harrison had any juice with the NewMu curators, but compared to those administrators' sprawling kitchen sink show of kitchen sink artists the Sculpture article "Secondary Structures" is hellishly focused and argued with the passion of a religious recruiter, if I do say so.

One afterthought about the article. I described "institutional critique" as a period style ranging from the '80s to the mid '90s and in my lead said that that generation of artists "revealed" the white cube environment to be "riddled with patriarchal assumptions." The rest of the article lays out more clearly what was meant with that academyspeak, but the lead seems un-nuanced and perhaps should have read "proposed" or "posited" rather than "revealed."

In a recent post Paddy Johnson considered the merits and demerits of two websites, the Frieze site and the Eyebeam reBlog. I just added a comment re: the latter:

Four years ago when I reBlogged for eyebeam Michael Frumin and Jonah Peretti were still there. They invented the reBlog concept and were actively recruiting a wide range of people to use it, including non-tech people. After they left, responsibility for the reBlog changed hands a couple (?) of times but staffing it with a diverse group and maintaining a certain rhythm remained a priority. Apparently the current group no longer has that interest. When you last mentioned the pruned feed list Amanda McDonald Crowley of Eyebeam said she’d “look into it”–she couldn’t commit to fixing it–and she said that potential reBloggers were welcome to contact Eyebeam, which suggests they are passively but not actively involved in recruiting new reBloggers. I hope I’m wrong about that.

It was an interesting experiment but they never added comments to the blog and as you say reBloggers rarely added their own thoughts to the feeds. You can’t chide an overworked, underpaid nonprofit with volunteer reBloggers too much for not having the “right” priorities but you would think an “art and tech” website would want a feisty, dynamic web presence. Their current feed list is mostly the other “art and tech” sites so you’re getting unironic items about rocket powered personal helicopters again.