March 2013

and/or on YTMND

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More reminiscing about And/Or Gallery:

They also did a show putting YTMND (what we would now call a meme site) into a gallery setting. There has been writing praising sites like YTMND and 4Chan for their participatory democracy art model, which is kind of BS because there is no reversibility: to these sites the art world is just a bunch of [insert gay slur]. The YTMND forum thread about the And/Or show pretty much proved this. (Hat tip to RA.)

The best reason for people with MFAs to appreciate sites like YTMND is the same reason everyone else appreciates them: because they're funny. Also there is art in the way pages are put together and a kind of shared meta-critical attitude about the Web and the world. But you can keep your Nicolas Bourriaud references: it's so colonial and Margaret Mead to talk about sites that way, and the natives ain't having it. Guthrie Lonergan's text on the And/Or page makes the case well (also published as text-to-speech on YTMND - am sure they hated it).

and/or gallery, 2006

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And/Or Gallery, currently on hiatus, put some images up of the show I did with them in January 2006, a two-person exhibit with Saskia Jorda.
This was an early-ish net-in-the-gallery experiment in the sense that co-gallerist Paul Slocum took screenshots of GIFs off my blog, burned them to DVD as video files, and showed them on old TVs/monitors.
Another piece consisted of GIF frames printed out.
I didn't see the show but I like the remote collaboration aspect (based on trusting what Paul was going to do) and the DVD/CRT method of showing GIFs was something I continued to work with after the show.
Other work wasn't net-based but all of it involved some lo-tech use of the computer: MSPaint drawings, collages of printed-out molecule designs (taped together or glued onto product packaging). Also a music video.

"Drippy Smooth"

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"Drippy Smooth" [mp3 removed -- a remixed version of this track is on Bandcamp]

Modular synth triggered by six channels of MIDI-to-cv signals, with some added drums. Approximately one minute. Hat tip to ben_dover for the title.

real and virtual paint metastasization

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tabor_robak_paint-fx-3

roxy_paine_Paint_dipper500

Top: Tabor Robak, paint-fx-3 (found filename), jpeg
Bottom: Roxy Paine, canvas dipped multiple times in automated paint dipping machine built by the artist

The now defunct paintFX dot biz collective that Robak was part of was problematic (and not in a good way) because it remained stubbornly rooted in 2D traditions of "abstract art" that were already exhausted beyond critique, without finding a way to get on top of the subject matter, other than adding a tech gloss. But the example of his work above (hat tip Jeffrey Henderson) makes sense as a virtual meta-painting based on a sculptural or Supports/Surfaces-like high tech reimagining of paint conventions. Below is Roxy Paine's real-life counterpart, made with elaborate electromechanical hardware that for what it's worth also had a computer monitor attached to it.
Both of these images compel because their notion of the monochrome is hyperbolic to the point of grotesqueness. It's painting recast as some kind of stem cell experiment gone badly wrong -- painting as disease.
Robak's work is a thought experiment about painting, a model that will never be built, which seems superior to Paine's overdetermined, resource-intensive, probably-always-breaking-down-in-the-gallery method of making a similar point about the pathologies of the material painting tradition: fetishization of the object and "touch" to the point that the skin needs artificial growth hormones, with their attendant dangers.