January 2009

Regarding Jeff Sisson's online project "Bodega List," the following exchange took place at Rhizome.org:

Comment by Tom Moody
January 21, 2009 1:08 am
I think this is a good idea... My fear with a project like this is that its "success" is defined as getting reblogged by Rhizome and We Make Money Not Art and then it gradually falls apart. Remember Street Meme? An Eyebeam-launched crowdsourcing project where people identified graffiti tags out on the street and there was some kind of ranking system. The system was never completely functional and the creators lost interest in I think less than a year. But it didn't matter because the main tech art portal/aggregator sites all gave it the big thumbs up. I'd like to see the Bodega project become a popular NYC institution, loved outside the tech art ghetto and enduring for many years, a real urban resource celebrating these non-chain store, practically invisible but vital institutions, so prove my gloomy prognosis wrong.

Comment by Brian Droitcour
January 22, 2009 2:30 pm
A bodega is something you search for with your feet, not the internet. If you need a bodega you just walk down the street until you find one. What makes this idea interesting to the "tech art ghetto" is its absurd nonfunctionality, its joke about the internet as an out-of-control database that catalogs things that don't need to be cataloged. The project starts to look misguided and silly if you inject it with a social conscience by saying it celebrates "practically invisible but vital institutions." They're only invisible if you never leave your computer to go outside.

Comment by Tom Moody
January 28, 2009 11:00 am
It's refreshing to be criticized for having a social conscience, since I'm usually "insulting artists" by being apolitical. My point is once you have your little moment of absurd non-functionality it's on to the next project. I was imagining absurd non-functionality on a rather grander scale, with lots of New Yorkers actually participating in this thing. I believe something could be an urban resource and still kind of a joke. We-love-bodegas-but-not-really.

A review I did of a Feigen show curated by Tim Griffin in 2000. Shortly after this was published Griffin moved to Artforum, and quickly became the editor. Sadly, two of the artists are now deceased, Susan Goldman and Jeremy Blake. In a nutshell, Griffin's show attempted to spice up some standard gallery fare with digital concepts and jargon but some of the work actually crossed the new media vs artists-with-computers divide in interesting ways.

"Compression," Feigen Contemporary, New York, NY, December 2, 2000 - January 12, 2001
(originally published in Art Papers, May/June 2001, p. 44)

This exhibition, curated by Tim Griffin, a founding editor of artbyte magazine (and currently art editor for Time Out New York), attempts to link the art and cyber-discourses by asking: "What kinds of depicted space do we encounter when digital materials enter the picture?" Even with the collapse of the dot-com economy, this is a timely inquiry, since our living environments, work habits, and media views of reality continue to be shaped by software engineers, and artists are well-equipped by training and temperament to look over their shoulders and ask--from a conceptual and design standpoint--exactly what the hell they're doing. Although Griffin included a range of high-, low-, and no-tech work that purportedly addressed the question, unfortunately too many of the pieces required theoretical uploads from his exhibition essay to be relevant.

Only two of the artists make direct, hands-on use of the computer. Conjuring post-human exercise videos, Asymptote Architecture's looping, slowly morphing pod-shapes on small display screens combine machine curves, body contours, and textures scanned from athletic apparel. In Jeremy Blake's DVD light-show-in-a-box, pulsating color field patterns alternate with views of a synthetic Mediterranean villa, as if to say that inside the computer, it's all just planes and colors. Both artists favor the sleek airbrushed look typical of commercial digital work and display their pieces on pricy appliances such as wall-mounted plasma screens and Apple G-4 hard-drives; this is fine, but the danger of embracing the dominant economy's techno-fetish is that (as Joseph Kosuth once said of painting) one also embraces "the tradition that comes with it": consumption, fascination, waste.

Stephen Hendee bridges virtual space and gallery space without succumbing to cliches about the state of the art. His work might be called "proactively dated": using Foamcor, electrician's tape, and colored lights he creates walk-in environments recalling the faceted, wireframe landscapes in Steven Lisberger's retro-futurist (and still seductive) movie Tron (1982). Hendee's installation in "Compression" resembled a digital Fort Knox, with stacks of cartoon SIMMs (Single In-line Memory Modules) in place of gold bars--a fitting symbol for the (old) New Economy. Alternatively, the room full of boxes could be a kind of architectural history simulation, futuristically representing the not-so-futuristic storage warehouses that dominated West Chelsea before galleries and dot-commers came along.

Susan Goldman also practices reverse engineering, making handmade models--in her case 2-D--based on digital originals. Although her quirky arrangements of typography, pictograms, and clip-art look very "cyber," she draws and paints them entirely by hand on canvases or sheets of vellum. Her decentralized compositions and scatterings of fonts recall CD covers and club flyers from the rave underground, where graphic artists like Designers Republic and Switzerland's Buro Destruct challenge the fetishistic clarity of conventional illustration with semi-private, "wild style" languages. Unfortunately Goldman adds little to this oeuvre by hand-rendering it--the thin, spidery line she uses to enclose and define every form quickly becomes monotonous.

Which leaves three artists whose work, however compelling, had nothing inherently to do with digital space. Michelle Grabner coated two adjacent walls with white flocking and sprayed it with an infinitely subtle rainbow of pastel colors. This shimmering dematerialization of a gallery corner could be called "de-rezzed" if one wanted to give it a cyber-spin but could just as easily be about subverting the white cube with happy, fuzzy crafts. Dike Blair's elegant Zen gardens of display paraphernalia and slick home furnishings from outlets like IKEA and Home Depot could relate to "flagship stores" and other (digitally?) designed environments, as Griffin suggests, except that, by arranging these materials incongruously and applying photos to their smooth surfaces, Blair seems more interested in de-contextualization than "branding." Last, Diti Almog's paintings of nested, Albersian rectangles are all about the grid and "windows," and so is the computer, but so what?

Jack McHugh from the Big Picture blog:

[Jeremy] Grantham reminds us that there are really only three ways to deal with a broken credit bubble [such as the dot com era's]: 1) liquidate (the deflationary route the U.S. took after 1929), 2) stimulate enough to allow for a long sideways period of repair (a la Japan after 1989), and 3) inflate enough to reduce the real value of the debt burden. He mentions a fourth way out — blow an even larger bubble in another asset class (e.g. housing). Unfortunately for all of us, this was the path chosen by Alan Greenspan when faced with the broken equity bubble of 2000-2002. Instead of allowing our economy to face the music back then, he set in motion (and even cheered) the events that have led us into our current predicament before retiring to the lucrative lecture circuit. Perhaps we should all take the time to pen a note to the Maestro and offer him what golfer Nick Faldo once said to the irritating British press: "Thanks from the heart of my bottom."