ARMORY WEEK: A CHANGE IS GONNA COME

RaebervonStenglin had a neatly tucked away booth with work by Jill Magid that only consisted of a ring with empty setting and contracts concerning this ring.

A few of the best pieces at this fair were the works by Slavs and Tatars at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. The other one was the Artcash booth at Broadway 1602, originally created in 1971 by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT).

Perhaps a reason why I like works that originated in the 1970’s is that I have simply gotten tired with seeing similar works of art since the 1980’s. I sometimes wonder if the movements of the 1970’s went too fast, too hard and weren’t sustainable at that moment in time, or if it was crushed by a hyper capitalistic 1980’s. However, I wonder, may it now be the right time to reinvestigate where the movements left off using different mediums and languages?

At the New Museum: Julia Scher

ARMORY WEEK: AT THE NEW MUSEUM

An example. The show at New Museum called NYC 1993, Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star, taught me one thing in particular. And that is how badly that era sucked. The show was a mishmash of ideas, materials, concepts and outcome and very few of them were truly strong. Those that were strong were the works that dealt with issues of AIDS, queerness and gender, perhaps because the people dealing with that were seriously, and rightly so, pissed off. Almost all the other stuff looked poppy and frivolous but pretending to be serious. Sarah Lucas being one, Patricia Cronin another. All very confusing except, perhaps, the room with Rudolph Stingel’s orange carpet and Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘ dangling lights which was quite mesmerizing though suspiciously photogenic. Same with the installation by Pepón Osorio. Big stories to tell but it just doesn’t come across in all its prettiness.

The one truly amazing piece in the New Museum was the installation that showed the remnants of Superdream Mutation by Peter Halley commissioned by Wolfgang Staehle. On view was the login screen for The Thing BBS, a floppy disk, some prints and a screen. The GIF for Superdream Mutation could be bought and downloaded with a password and then printed. This work predated the World Wide Web. And to think that twenty years later there are people actually outraged that someone would buy a six-second Vine video at an art fair. But more on that later.

However, it does bring me to Jon Kessler’s show at the Swiss Institute, called The Web. It was all about…the web. I had a ton of fun here, I downloaded an app for the show which could feed the pictures I took right onto the surrounding monitors.

Though this show was memorable, and of course Kessler is an amazing artist, it was also very bombastic. New media has far more interesting avenues to be explored than mega sized iPads and iPhone apps.

Time to go to 319 Scholes where I attended Art Hack Day and a Tumblr Art Symposium.

ARMORY WEEK: ART HACK DAY

Art Hack Day, a recurring event that can take place in any city in the world, was described as part happening, part hackathon. The NY event was themed God Mode. God Mode has been a gaming feature since the early 80’s which offers players unlimited strength or invulnerability. But by now God Mode is everywhere, it is the backdoor in all our electronics, it is the jailbreak but also how your phone company knows where you are.

Amazingly clever, rebellious, interactive and visually stunning art happenings ensue.

Playing God(dess) in real time by awarding or punishing people not even touching a mouse or keyboard, or witnessing random hacks in surveillance cameras around the world, spying on offices. Or being photographed by a 3D camera as you walk past a screen to subsequently see yourself falling onto said screen on a pile of people who where photographed before you. Or walking past a stand and receiving a text from God from a phone number with two digits realizing they just hacked into your phone! Just fantastic. Where is this stuff in the galleries? Since this is all about sharing there is no money to be made perhaps? And it shouldn’t but it must still be seen in art galleries and institutions. As The Thing at New Museum showed, it is way past time it did.

TUMBLR ART SYMPOSIUM

Tumblr Art Symposium was the other event at 319 Scholes I attended which was about art derived from and using Tumblr as a medium. Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian was the moderator and among his guests were curators Christiane Paul and Lindsay Howard and artists GH Hovagimyan, Jennifer Chan, Brad Troemel and Eco Art Tech. This guaranteed lively debates on art on and off the net using and abusing corporate owned platforms as mediums.

The exhibition was titled Walking Into The Dashboard, co-curated by Vartanian and Ben Valentine. A constant stream of images taken from and manipulated by the web by, among many others, Blake Brown, BlinkingGirls (tumblr) and FriendsterFriday (dot com). Think M.I.A. And you know what I mean. Again, isn’t it way past time this should be seen in art institutions and galleries?

 Angela Conant on Spring / Break