art - others

"Stop Posting Stupid Shit!" AN ART SHOW
by lolumad

Excerpt:

hat tip hypothete

By Thomas Galloway, posted on the Loshadka blog. This jpeg is 113 KB and the original is 347 KB but the dimensions are the same.

This image has a Katamari Damacy feel (the Japanese game where everything gets rolled up together in a magnetized snowball) combined with the Memphis furniture aesthetic of Neapolitan ice cream on hard, polished surfaces. Every element has (simulated) three dimensionality yet hangs weightless in a shallow 2-D space. The loose, irrational weave suggests an 8-level chess version of gestural abstraction, yet somehow without the painful, implied "critique of painting" that usually accompanies references to mid 20th Century modernist art.

Some of the quasi airbrush and painted formica patterns are pure kitsch but every facet of the work seems so careful and considered we embrace these FX-slash-faux-finish indulgences as natural elements of the scheme. This is where an artist's eye and control can begin to tame the lamer aspects of "anything is possible" digital culture.

Afterthought: Perhaps the drawing's most salient property is its paradoxical calm in spite of all its zigzagging motion. The weightless elements don't bob or rock but sit as obdurately as a building. This is how Frank Gehry probably thinks his architecture is--arrested movement on a monumental scale; unfortunately he is a hamfisted sculptor and forgets the poetry.

top: Alexander Ross, jpeg of painting found on Google Images
bottom: Tom Beddard vimeo (via Data Is Nature), screen capture converted to jpeg

Obviously there are some things people do better than machines (be unpredictable, funny, perverse, and sensitive) and some things machines do better than people (create patterns very quickly requiring mammoth amounts of calculation). It would be nice to think that these two skill sets will merge but that isn't what will happen. Rather, "human" skills will atrophy as cost models demand increasingly gaudy digital bells and whistles. (See: movies. music, etc.)

Afterthought: Apropos of this earlier post, turning off the sub-Ligeti soundtrack on the Beddard video and just watching it in silence is recommended. It's pretty visually rich and really, truly doesn't need to be accompanied by prosthetic heavenly choir sounds.

It's actually an artwork, One of Each, 1993, by Karsten Bott, as seen on Vvork. This work came to NY (PS1) in the '90s in a show called "Deep Storage." At the time of the exhibit the concept of "hoarders" wasn't in common parlance but the show featured pieces such as Warhol's time capsules (unsealed somewhat prematurely), racks of library catalog file cards, On Kawara date records in ledgers, and other obsession-compulsion-as-art projects.

I couldn't name anything in Bott's collection of crap today but I remember a lot of it was old, faded and depressing. "Deep Storage" was fairly convincing about the tragedy of making, preserving, and warehousing "stuff" as an inherent flaw in gallery-style art since Duchamp. How long are you going to pay for your storage unit of found objects? There is an invisible economy in the art world based on delusion and hope, where everything eventually ends up either in permanent storage in a museum or back in the landfill.