art - others

from the vault: The Art Guys, Jets

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A review I wrote for Art Papers when I lived in Texas, never submitted, then reworked for my blog in 2007. When I blogged I thought I didn't have a photo but belatedly realized it was in their 1995 catalog from the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, The Art Guys Think Twice. So here is the review again, with the photo I never had from the Dallas Museum, where I viewed the installation in '91 (the inset photo is as it appears in the book, to show what's otherwise difficult to see on the video monitors).

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Jets, by The Art Guys
Dallas Museum of Art, November-December 1991

The main concourse of the Dallas Museum of Art ascends in a series of broad, gently sloping ramps, creating spaces reminiscent of airport architecture. Appropriately, that's where the Art Guys placed their installation Jets during the 1991 Dallas Video Festival.

Sixteen TV monitors fanned across the ceiling over the ramps, linked by black cables to a neat bank of VCRs on the wall. Each monitor faced down with its back securely bolted to the ceiling--or so we hoped. The screens glowed pale blue, green, or violet, the ambient colors of footage taped from the sky at different times and places, and intermittently roared to life as an airplane passed across the screen.

The artists phased the tapes so at a given time some screens showed empty sky and others tracked commercial aircraft landing or taking off in wobbly, hand held fields of view. The random distribution of the zooming images along the corridor kept the viewer off guard: as you followed the progress of one jet, another would loom unexpectedly behind you.

The network of cables crawling across the ceiling and down the wall to a controlling ganglion could emblematize the global transportation and communication systems on which we are so dependent, while the fragility of the systems could be felt in the nervous-making Damoclean placement of the monitors. That's one level of interpretation.

Yet sitting beneath them for a few minutes revealed something a hurried passerby might have missed: their curious kinship to natural phenomena. The random lightening and darkening of screens and the antiphonal whining of the jets became paradoxically calming, like stars blinking or insects chittering in the breeze. Thus do our daily threats become reassuring background texture.

Have written about the Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) a number of times (recently here).

stormlogo

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carjackcker posted a GIF of Storm, from the X-Men, looking strangely bulbous and flying around in a circle in the sky. The frame below grabbed my eye, for the way its extreme foreshortening turned the character into an almost-abstract blob. Originally I had her centered against a blank sky background but then decided to overlay her over something. Fishing around my hard drive I found a frame from a topologically distorted version of my blog logo (blogo?) that someone (apologies for the dropped attribution) made a while back. Many of the colors were the same, and the distortions of the figure and background seemed to resonate. The jagged pixel edges, a byproduct of transparentizing the original background, "expose the seams" for an added touch of self-referential authenticity. [/gratuitous exegesis]

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cell phone photo benefit

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b_wurtz_mikekelleycontinues

Social Photography III: An Exhibition of Cell Phone Photographs benefits the Tribeca non-profit gallery carriage trade. The press release explains:

Emphasizing no particular theme beyond how the cell phone camera is most often used, both artists and non-artists were invited to submit images from their phones and email them to carriage trade.The images will be produced as 5" x 7" prints, installed in a grid in the gallery exhibition, and offered for sale to help support upcoming programming at carriage trade.

Images are viewable on flickr. It's amusing that after flickr's recent white-space-eliminating redesign, users such as carriage trade are adding white mattes to the photos in order to separate them visually on the page and give them breathing room. See example above, a photo by B. Wurtz, downloaded from flickr as a 800 x 570 pixel jpeg, more than half of which is white space. We're assuming the prints on view and for sale don't include this surplus acreage. But that's a minor issue. I like what the gallery says about cell phone photos:

As cell phone cameras become more ubiquitous, their function continues to evolve. Encompassing the varied roles of snapshots, visual notes, discrete picture taking, or the immediacy of citizen journalism, the cell phone camera lacks the intentionality of a point-and-shoot, resulting in a more direct recording of the “everyday.” Because of the proximity of cell phone images to the spoken word and text-based communication, the pictures are often a kind of visual shorthand to fill the gaps in between.

In this third installment of Social Photography, the increasing sophistication of cell phone camera technology has led to an interest in it as a medium in its own right, raising questions about whether it will become indistinguishable from a camera or maintain some level of informality and idiosyncrasy by virtue of its hybrid nature and function as a tool for communication.

The question of whether the phone is "indistinguishable from a camera" gets at the more vexing question of how, and at what level, to evaluate its output. Photography had an uphill battle for acceptance as a museum-collectible art, and now the ease and ubiquity of phone-imaging challenges the preciousness of photography. carriage trade kicks cell phonery up a notch by "reifying" it, that is, making it physical, handsome, and collectible. So in a sense the exhibition isn't so much raising a question as answering it. The next step toward museum validation is critical discourse, of which this blog post constitutes a tiny part. A further question is whether a star system can ever emerge in such a diffuse field. Who will give us the Mike Kelley stairwell sign for this practice, if it is a practice?

Addendum: Continuity-wise, see earlier post on carriage trade's 2011 benefit. The issue then was removal of a page of exhibition photos by Facebook. Back then Zuck wasn't the well-known unhip evil he is now widely understood to be, among teens and other discriminating internet users.

Addendum 2: I saw the show as installed in the gallery. The white space is indeed part of each print but it works as a kind of matte to isolate the image. So it's not Flickr-specific (was being sort of cheeky-rude with that implication). According to the gallery, the format has been in place for the last three years' benefits. Amusingly, when it started, many printed-out cell phone photos didn't occupy much more than 3 x 4 inches, and the paper prints are 5 x 7. Now with the advent of megapixel-everything, the gallery is having actually to shrink many of the photos to keep the format consistent.