The art world (academically vetted system of gallery and museum spaces) will be said to have evolved only when it stops looking back to 1968 and Paris kids running wild in the streets for its touchstones and models. Here it is 2012 and the Vvork website is displaying a "society of the spectacle brickbat" with the bookcover of Debord's classic wrapped around a brick.
There was briefly a possibility of revolution! Art seemed about to change to something de-materialized and free of rotten capitalism!
We know all this, already, but can't escape the moment.
September 2012
Sarah Oppenheimer
Opening tonight at P·P·O·W Gallery in Chelsea.
Saw this work earlier today - hard to decipher from the photo but Oppenheimer cuts into the physical walls of the gallery to create these portals of glass and aluminum. One of them you can walk through and one is sealed by angular glass panes seated in deftly mitred trim. These relatively slight Matta-Clarke-esque interventions create funhouse spaces that are austere and elegant -- three-dimensional abstract compositions of available light, depending on where you're standing.
One also thinks of Dan Graham's rooms where you view other people viewing from behind transparent barricades. Yet design-wise the closest comparison I can think of is Australian artist Stephen Bram's gallery revamps, which I saw in Munich years ago. He is much more aggressive about building out additional walls to create his angled spaces. Oppenheimer only makes you think she is doing that much labor-intensive work. Her labor is thinking and observation to find the slightest pressure points in existing architecture to turn rooms inside out.
sketch_i9
Did this with the Computers Club Drawing Society software but took it down because it's so much like other things I've posted on the site recently. Was suddenly noticing quite a bit of latency in drawing lines onscreen there. In addition to the lag the curves kept trying to straighten out as I drew them. In this drawing I tried to "roll with it" and let the bush be spiky and geometric. I hope this delay/glitch is a slow network and not some new issue with Windows 7, my tablet, or some other aspect of my personal decaying computational environment.
Update: The latency issue was caused by a pen/tablet feature I thought I turned off, called "Flicks" -- you are supposed to be able to control navigation using flicks of the pen -- whatever.
unresolved
Duncan Alexander has an informative post on screen and print resolution and the uncertainties of scale for art and/or images in the digital arena.
One wonders who his intended audience is for this, since only five of us really care and we already know. Dragan Espenschied has covered it, I've covered it, Nullsleep has covered it, Jon Williams has covered it, and now Duncan. The computer-literate world just follows where Apple and Google lead and the art world is like "resolution? isn't that something a corporate board passes?" No one ultimately gives a shit about how art looks on a computer screen, is my cynical conclusion after preaching about it for several years.
The issue just reared its head in the real world. Recall that Nullsleep posted some CSS a few months back that you could put in your web pages to defeat the ubiquitous involuntary pixel-smoothing of modern browsers. Well, Google recently changed its Chrome specs in such a way as to override anti-anti-aliasing.
Resistance is futile: your experience of the web WILL be like smooth jazz even if they have to beat you to death with Kenny G's sax.