Why does the Internet respond as it does to the work of Jeff Koons? I believe that Koons’s work provokes a particularly vehement response in the digital world, and I want to find out why.
Update: To clarify, following a few exchanges on Twitter over the past hour: I am most interested in how the social digital space—Tumblr, Twitter, the like—are enabling a specific kind of reaction to Jeff Koons’s work. What is it about the GIFS, derivative works, and other Internet-specific reactions that feels different? It’s not simply a question of form, I believe.
Jeff Koons Koonses Koons, 2013
Sculpture
Join Triple Canopy at MoMA PS1 this Thursday, May 16 at 2pm and 4pm for a discussion and lecture with Dan Phiffer as part of Speculations (“The future is ______”), fifty days of lectures, discussions and debates about the future as part of EXPO 1: New York.
See full school schedule here.
Phiffer is an artist, programmer and creator of Occupy. here, a peer-to-peer network of virtual spaces (autonomous from the Internet) for open political discussions. Phiffer’s Occupy.here will be accessible via wifi in PS1’s gallery, through which visitors can access a digital Speculations Library.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Long Island City
2pm seminar, 4pm lecture
FREE with museum admission
João Enxuto and Erica Love are artists (and current participants in the Whitney Independent Study Program) whose work I’ve become more acutely interested in recently. The video above documents a 2011 intervention at MoMA in the form of a live, guerilla screening produced by Enxuto and Love using two pocket projectors. Here’s an excerpt from the description of their project, Out of Frame. :
“At a recent exhibition, Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures, The Modern Museum of Art presented a version of Blow Job (1964). It is a 16mm film that the museum converted to a digital file for large-scale projection. We found an MPEG-4 version of Blow Job on YouTube and projected the file on March 6, 2011 as two overlapping beams, just out of frame and to the left of MoMA’s Blow Job file.”
As perhaps the last generation—nay, one of the last undergraduate classes, even—to have studied Art History before Kodak stopped producing slide carousels, I still associate the side-by-side comparison as the field’s reigning visual strategy. Is the infographic the future of art historical visualization? Big Data—and the forms of visualization it engenders—is already beginning to enforce a different, more expansive and less binary view of ever-linear, ever-canonical Big Art History. The face of art history is changing—that much is clear.
A few questions come to mind, however, as we think about how more colloquial forms of data visualization could impact our understanding of an academic discipline such as art history (in any form).:
Who’s historical facts are cited? (Here’s a critical exercise: imagine the notoriously problematic survey classic, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, visualized as an infographic. Ouch.) What information is included (or excluded) in that person or entity’s chosen narrative, and why? What social, political, or economic purposes are represented or served? Do sophisticated graphic interfaces reify those positions any more or less than simple side-by-side image comparisons have for ages?
The infographic above details the working life of Jean-Michel Basquiat; it was produced by Christie’s auction house.
(via blackcontemporaryart)
Barbara Kruger on the appropriation of her ubiquitous graphic aesthetic by New York-based lifestyle brand Supreme for Complex :
“… But in the past, Kruger—who now teaches at UCLA—has been pretty quiet on the connections, deferring questions about the commercial entrepreneurs who’ve culled from and profited off of the template she inarguably set. But we thought we’d give it a shot, and Complex reached out to Kruger anyway, asking her what she made of the lawsuit, as well as both McSweeney and Jebbia’s positions, and the appropriation of her ideas and work at-large.
This afternoon, Kruger responded to us in the form of a blank email, with an attachment. We opened it, and this is what we found: “
Crowds lined up to visit Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), Schulausstellungsgebaude, Hamburg, November-December 1938
(Via interweber)
Just Launched: “Hyper-Current Living is a performance by Ryder Ripps in which he “lives” and “works” at Red Bull Music Academy between April 28th and May 5th 2013 – he’ll be drinking Red Bull and creating digital stuff at hyper speed. In the stream, our output is valued by its proliferation and its likes and favs – what incentive is there to spend 4 years writing a novel if it will just be a link in a stream lasting a few hours? The piece brings this trait into light by designating a time and space to the creation of such fragmented, short interactions native to social media. Site development by Jules LaPlace and Ryder Ripps – OKFocus.”
“Step Inside the Mechanized Fun-House Wasteland of Artist Jon Kessler,” implores tech gadget blog Gizmodo in a gushing review that performs precisely what Kessler seeks to critique in his recent installation at the Swiss Institute, The Web, a commission by the Métamatic Research Initiative, Amsterdam. Tonight’s closing performance, a press conference-cum-product launch for Kessler’s new business enterprise, GlblVlgIdiot, promises to exhume the coffin of 90s-era irony as Soho meets Silicon Valley on its own terms.
Paper Monument editors Dushko Petrovich and Roger White are clearly struggling with the balance between work-life bureaucracy in Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom, a photo essay published in issue XVII of The Highlights.
Institutional Strategy Digest is a tongue-in-cheek, yet deadly serious print and digital ‘zine produced on the occasion of “Professional Forum: Institutional Strategy from Europe to the U.S.” a session presented at the Museums and the Web conference in Portland, Oregon on April 19, 2013.
It was conceived and edited by Sarah Hromack, Head of Digital Media, Whitney Museum of American Art (that’s me) and John Stack, Head of Digital Transformation, Tate. An edition of 100 print copies were distributed to a frenzied mass of conference attendees following our session; the ‘zine is distributed in perpetuity as a digital embed on Issuu.
Smoke and Mirrors
When the museum I work at—the great concrete behemoth on Madison Avenue designed by Marcel Breuer—opened in 1966, Jacqueline Kennedy attended the private ribbon-cutting ceremony held in the museum’s lobby. This, at the time, was news.
Fifty-odd years later, thousands gathered in Amsterdam to witness yesterday’s opening of the Rijksmuseum, a spectacle presided over by Queen Beatrix and marked with a multi-hued fireworks display. (Which I found myself speculatively attributing to Cai Guo-Qiang for a moment, incidentally.) This image, featured here on the Rijksmuseum’s website, is now circulating widely in the international press as a 10-year, 375 Euro ($480 million) renovation is indeed news.
Seeking redress of historical claims that cast museums as temples for the wealthy and the privileged, modern institutions work hard to demonstrate inclusiveness toward their audiences—the ‘general pubic.’ The Rijksmuseum’s new website, for instance, was designed to be accessed on a tablet device, a decision that gestures as much toward people—what they do, what they like—as it does technical prowess. It is incredibly easy and pleasant to use.
Power reveals itself everywhere: Invisibly, in the case of the private ceremonies held to mark institutional milestones, attended by a scant invited few. Swathed in smoke for all to see—or digitized, for all to swipe. Monuments take many forms.
If you are an artist—or anyone, for that matter—who desires a flexible CMS that foregrounds content above all, try Indexhibit. Oakland-based digital makers The Present Group have launched an (incredibly useful) online tutorial to help users build their own portfolio sites. Give it a go—and consider hosting your domain with TPG, while you’re at it. Proceeds benefit artists directly!
Manfred Mohr’s Youtube Channel
A collection of videos featuring works by pioneering computer artist Manfred Mohr, many dating back to the early 70’s. Also includes interviews and lectures:
Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960’s, Mohr’s artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969.
You can go to the Youtube channel here
(via areashape)
