FEBRUARY 19 - MARCH 19, 2005
CARNEGIE ART CENTER
CURATED BY JULIA DZWONKOSKI AND KYE POTTER
TONY CONRAD
ERNEST GUSELLA
CHRISTIAN JANKOWSKI
NATALIE JEREMIJENKO
BARBARA LATTANZI
JOHN OLSON
PAPER RAD
WILLIAM POPE.L
DYLAN REIFF AND JOE KORSMO
AÏDA RUILOVA
BRIAN SPRINGER
HAIM STEINBACH
To dismantle the whole in order to understand
its parts; to use existing objects and technologies in a manner unforeseen
or unintended by their manufacturers; to invent new forms by breaking
down the codes that underlie old forms; to provoke systems into revealing
what they’re made of. These are some of the tactics associated
with reverse engineering as practiced in a variety of fields and contexts:
from industrial design and software development to anthropology and
medicine. As a practice that emphasizes “know-how” over
material advantage, it is no coincidence that reverse engineering has
emerged as a strategy in wars that are increasingly asymmetrical and
in a world where power and resources are increasingly concentrated and
unequally distributed. The artists featured in this exhibition variously
embrace reverse engineering as a means of critically understanding,
intervening in and reinventing this world.
|
|
Tony Conrad is a video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer,
teacher and writer. He was involved in the early development of minimalist
music and was a founding member of the Theater of Eternal Music with
John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela. His stroboscopic
film, The Flicker (1966) and experiments in film processing
and projection are among the key works in the history of avant garde
cinema.
Conrad’s subsequent works in video explore structures of authority,
power and desire as they play out within the audio-visual domain. In
his 1985 tape, In Line, Conrad addresses the viewer with a
series of commands, conflating actual control with its on-screen performance.
Other works explore hypnotism, language acquisition and the “haptic”
space that exists between a work of art and its spectator. In recent
years, Conrad has produced a series of performance-based videos that
have been characterized as “fragmentary burlesques.” They
include Tony’s Oscular Pets (2002), in which Conrad demonstrates
how to care for the pets that live inside his mouth, Hart (2001),
a modern-day rendering of the story of Gradiva, and Hello Happiness (2000), in which Conrad finds himself, via chroma key, on the set of
an S/M film shoot.
Tony Conrad lives in Buffalo, NY where he teaches at the State University
and releases music recordings through an imprint of the label Table
of the Elements.
|
|
Ernest Gusella’s videotapes combine experimental engineering,
avant garde music, psychedelia and Dadaist theater. As he once put it,
“my art is 1/4 fornicalia funk, 1/4 New York punk, 1/4 European
bunk, and 1/4 Canadian skunk.”
With a background in classical music, Gusella immigrated from Canada
to the United States where he studied with composers John Cage, Steve
Reich and Constantine Xenakis, and became involved with the emerging
video art scene through friendships with Nam June Paik and Kitchen founders
Steina and Woody Vasulka. Many of Gusella’s tapes make use of
sound and image processing tools designed by himself, other artists
and sympathetic engineers. These include the VideoLab, a voltage controllable,
multi-channel switcher, keyer, and colorizer designed by Bill Hearn
that was used in Gusella’s 1978 work, Exquisite Corpse.
Here, a composite image of the artist is created through live switching
between shots of different parts of his body. Other works explore the
relationship between video and audio signals, often using one to generate
or transform the other. In Audio-Video Rituals, jerky boxing
movements trigger a range of electronic sounds while in Violin D’Ingres,
drawing a self portrait with a marker attached to the bow of a violin
produces an indexical sound track. In Gusella’s words, “all
of my work is about things which turn me on – either visually,
mentally or through sound, and are rites of passage to that ultimate
future in which all the best aspects coalesce.”
Ernest Gusella lives in Cumberland, MD with his wife and collaborator,
Tomiyo Sasaki.
|
|
Described as an “infiltrator” and “deceptive appropriator,”
Berlin-based artist Christian Jankowski’s videos and installations
break down perceived boundaries between reality and fiction, art and
life, the scripted and the spontaneous. As an artist, he has inserted
himself into a variety of social and occupational contexts, often involving
professionals in fields other than art as collaborators.
For the project, My Life as a Dove (1996), Jankowski invited
a professional magician to transform him into a dove for the duration
of an art exhibition. A similar scenario unfolded in Flock (2002), where 12 gallery visitors were turned into sheep and remained
in this state while they viewed the other artworks on display. Create
Problems (1999) records a series of couples who were invited to
act out scenes from their personal lives against the backdrop of an
adult movie set. Telemistica (1999) documents a phone conversation
between Jankowski and a television psychic in which the artist asks
whether the artwork he is currently working on will be a success. The
live discussion, broadcast on Italian TV and recorded by Jankowski,
serves as the completed work.
For The Holy Artwork (2001), Jankowski arranged to appear as
a guest artist on a Texas-based evangelical TV program. Approaching
the pulpit with his video camera, Jankowski suddenly collapses, leading
the pastor to deliver an improvisational sermon on art (defined as “that
which has never been seen before”). Through the entire sermon
and several choir songs, Jankowski remains frozen at the pastor’s
feet in a pose that recalls the scene (in Spanish Baroque painter Juan
Bautista Maino’s Saint Domini and in other works from this period)
where an artist, working in his studio, is struck down in a state of
rapture and unable to complete a painting without divine intervention.
The pastor in Jankowski’s tape provides just such a rescue, while
capitalizing on the artist’s spontaneous collapse as a sign of
the “bridge between religion, art and television.” |
|
“Ask yourself if there is anything currently in your view that
you know anything about how it was made: the computer you are using,
the pen on the desk, the desk, the chair, the shoes, etc. We are largely
blind and blinded to people, places and processes involved in making
things, and yet, there could be little else of more political import.
These obscured processes are the base of the global consumption of market-based
democracies and the trade, political and institutional relationships
that support them. It is these that make the material conditions of
life that most effects the air we breathe, the water we drink, our personal
and environmental health, and the very activities we conceive of doing.”
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist, engineer and inventor who puts emerging
technologies to work for social change. Working collaboratively with
other artists, students, scientists and research groups, including the
Bureau of Inverse Technology, she has created public artworks and staged
media spectacles designed to “place evidence in the public sphere
that would otherwise only be available to particular experts.”
Recent projects of Jeremijenko’s have involved: suspending six
live trees upside down to study their “contrived growth responses
over time” (Tree Logic, 1999); planting pairs of genetically
identical trees throughout the city of San Francisco to “render
the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed”
(OneTrees, 2003); modifying consumer-grade robotic toys to
sniff out toxic waste (Feral Robotic Dogs, 2003); and working
with activists at the 2004 Republican National Convention to develop
counter surveillance and other devices for assisting and protecting
demonstrators.
Jeremijenko’s commitment to decentralized and socially responsible
forms of information design is evident in the ongoing project HowStuffisMade (http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/howstuffismade)
an on-line encyclopedia of labor conditions and manufacturing processes
involved in the production of contemporary products. HowStuffisMade serves both as a consumer guide to everyday commodities (blue jeans,
plastic bags, fortune cookies, and disposable razors to name just a
few) and as a prototype curriculum for training future engineers and
designers.
The project began as a course taught by Jeremijenko in which students
at Yale University researched and published encyclopedia entries on
consumer products of their choice. Students were required to initiate
contact with a manufacturing corporation, secure entry to its production
facilities and visually document the process and conditions of production.
The research results are presented in the form of ‘photo essays’
on the HowStuffisMade website, which is designed (along the same lines
as the popular wikipedia website) as an open-content, editable system
that allows visitors to modify, correct and/or contribute new content.
As Jeremijenko writes, in addition to educating consumers about how
stuff is made, “this system has the potential to change design
practices, and industry practices… Because future generations
of designers and future managers will be introduced to manufacturing
and labor issues much earlier and much more vividly in their career
(most engineers and almost all management students graduate without
a single visit to a manufacturing facility), they may be better equipped
to explore and develop designs to address these issues.”
|
|
Barbara Lattanzi is a digital artist who creates interactive software
for live video improvisation. Drawing connections between old and new
forms of time-based media, her work includes software modeled on karaoke,
early vampire movies and 60s avant garde cinema.
For The Interrupting Annotator (2004) and C-SPAN Karaoke (2005), Lattanzi wrote software that allows users to manipulate, add
text comments and sing along with internet streams from C-SPAN and other
news services. Muscle and Blood Piano (2000), is a video editing environment
programmed specifically for use with F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu.
In performances using a laptop and projector, “the film characters
are re-animated through improvised montage of shattered, low-resolution
image fragments.”
Positioning 60s structuralist film as a precursor to today’s VJ
culture, Lattanzi has created software that translates the temporal
structure of selected films (by Ernie Gehr and Hollis Frampton among
others) into programming scripts that can be applied to any movie clip
on a user’s hard drive. Frampton’s 1971 film Critical
Mass (in which a lovers argument is continuously looped back on
itself), was chosen by Lattanzi because of the way the film’s
structure “marks the passage of time of the viewer in counterpoint
with the time-frame of the film’s subjects - somewhere between
now and not-now, 24 frames per second.”
In addition to exploring parallels between past and present articulations
of the moving image, Lattanzi’s work aims to bring these (rarely
screened) films back into circulation. As she writes, “simulating
these films in regard to their structure enables the viewer to experience
the films by remaking them.”
Lattanzi uses her software in live performances and installations with
footage culled from a variety of sources, including, in this exhibition,
recordings of the Apollo moon landings. Produced in the same period
of time as Critical Mass, these films were chosen because of their “renewed
relevance in relation to current U.S. ambitions in outer space”
and “in connection to alternative readings of NASA documentation.
An example of such an alternative reading is the persistent luddite
skepticism that Apollo missions ever happened at all.”
Barbara Lattanzi lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Smith College.
Her software is available at: www.wildernesspuppets.net
|
|
Since age 15, John Olson has been making art, playing in bands, inventing
electronic instruments, booking shows and putting out records and tapes.
He started the label American Tapes in the summer of 1992, releasing
limited-edition recordings of his own and others’ music from around
the world. Now approaching its 400th release, American Tapes continues
to feature improvised music made with handmade and prepared instruments,
low-fi tape recordings of shows and rehearsals, and densely layered
electronic experimentation.
Olson’s vinyl, cassette and cd-r editions, often released in small
quantities of ten or less, reflect an aesthetic that is decidedly handmade
and raw. Incorporating an array of materials and processes (spray paint,
collage, found objects, photocopies, and screen printing), his releases
often take on the status of sculptural objects. The American Tapes release,
D.L Savings T.X’s Midwife (Am-26, 1996), is made from
four different vinyl records, quartered and reassembled into a one sided
picture disc. The cassette of E Ka (s) Boa’s May You Be Joined
By... (Am-43, 1997) combines silicone, train tracks, metal tags,
screws, brass lines, silver paint, and lacquer. Olson writes, “you
have to learn how to use your own style. Chinese artists would spend
their whole lives on one style, so they would know every idiosyncratic
aspect to it. If you just stay focused, and try to learn as much about
subtlety and nuance, you can put a lot of depth and character into what
you do.”
A large part of Olson’s musical interests involve the act of recording.
“Recording stops time. Anyone that has recorded can listen back
and know how they were feeling at the time. It’s better than a
diary.” Part of Olson’s installation at the Carnegie allows
visitors to record and take home their own American Tapes release on
a configuration of Olson’s machines made for the exhibition.
Olson lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan where he plays magnetic tapes, electronics
and horns in Wolf Eyes and performs with his wife Tovah in Dead Machines.
Though equally prolific as a visual artist, Olson reflects, “more
and more I think that sound is a stronger personal art form than visuals.
Because with visuals, you can just turn your head and it’s not
there. But sound is on you like a blanket.” |
|
Structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths are
best interpreted and understood through other myths. The artist collective
Paper Rad adopts a similar approach to pop culture, synthesizing material
from television, video games and advertising, and letting these fragments
contextualize and cross-reference each other. Day-glow colors, bit-mapped
graphics, puffy cartoons and psychedelic patterns combine to create
an optical and information overload, exemplified by the group’s
website: www.paperrad.org.
Here, a pulsating interface offers a selection of scrolling comics,
flash animations, and “illustrated songs.”
Paper Rad’s installations scale walls and fill rooms with an iconography
that brings together fluorescent pigs, dancing mummies, eastern gurus,
alien ravers, Masonic pyramids, neon athletic wear, bright-haired trolls,
Gumby slippers, Atari graphics, inter-species totems, sheets of LSD
inspired by country décor and the fort you always wanted to build
in your bedroom.
As member Jacob Ciocci writes, “In the 70s and 80s cartoons and
consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked
kids out... Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody
else out by using this same throw-away trash.” Paper Rad members
Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci, have been producing
visual art, music, videos, photography, comics, clothes and writing
since 2000.
|
|
William Pope.L, aka The Friendliest Black Artist in America©,
has been using art to question culturally ingrained categories (of race,
food, sex, poverty and work) since the mid 1970s. Combining conceptual
rigor, visceral impact and humor, his works expose layers of social
absurdity and confound expectations about what “black art”
should be.
Over the years, Pope.L’s work has involved crawling through
the streets of major cities, eating and regurgitating the Wall Street
Journal, mapping the United States in hot dogs, and exploring the legacy
of Martin Luther King Jr. via writing, rumor and bioengineering. Most
recently, Pope.L has been touring the country with The Black Factory,
a mobile exhibition/work space that collects and processes objects of
“blackness.”
Many of Pope.L’s pieces take place on the street and use his own
body as a figure of menace, abjection and physical vulnerability. In ATM Piece, he chained himself (with sausage links) to the entrance
of a bank in Manhattan wearing only a skirt made of $1 bills, which
he handed out to passersby. In Member (aka Schlong Journey) Pope.L walked along 125th street in Harlem with a 6-foot white cardboard
penis in an effort to “own whiteness, male whiteness through the
phallus,” and to do so “in a black environment, where I
became a spectacle and the site of questions.”
As part of his larger eRacism project, Pope.L has performed more than
forty “Crawl” pieces where, giving up his ‘verticality,’
he has crawled for miles on his hands and knees along public sidewalks
until the point of exhaustion. In 2001, Pope.L began The Great White
Way, a five-year, 22 mile crawl. Wearing a store-bought superman
costume and with a skateboard strapped to his back, he will travel from
the Statue of Liberty to his mother’s home in the Bronx.
About his work, Pope.L writes, “you can hold contraries, bound
together, without blurring them together… The fact is I am black
and I am influenced by historically European-based art. I am interested
in formal issues and I am interested in social issues. Think of it as
a bunch of flowers—daisies, lilies, daffodils. I want you to hold
them all in a bundle, but see them each distinctly.” |
|
In 2002, Dylan Reiff and Joe Korsmo began tracking the internet activities
of Kolin, aka V. Gnome, an 18-year old computer gamer. They monitored
and recorded Kolin’s AOL instant messages and gathered information
about his friends and family from other sources on the net. Blending
this data with scenarios from videogames and sci-fi films, they developed
a mythology in which Kolin is “singled out as the savior of the
human race.” The story is told in Gem Missile: A Tribute to V.
Gnome, a 40-page book that incorporates photographs of Kolin and excerpts
from his personal correspondence. In August 2003, Reiff and Korsmo showed
up on Kolin’s parent’s doorstep in Chicago. Reiff introduced
himself as “Z. Figiam,” Kolin’s “mentor from
the future,” presented him with the book, and left without further
explanation.
The plot thickened several days later with Kolin posted a detailed description
of the encounter to an on-line gaming forum, along with digital photos
of every page in the book. Members of the forum quickly added their
own theories and responses, which ranged from close readings of the
text and speculations about the gender of its authors, to admissions
of jealousy and accusations that Kolin had invented the story in order
to get a high rating for his thread (which in a few weeks had received
over 40,000 hits).
A year passed after this initial contact. In August 2004, Reiff and
Korsmo mailed Kolin a package containing a photograph of their meeting
a year earlier, along with a note, a certificate, and a plane ticket
to Minneapolis. Kolin was met at the airport by a man in a beat up Lincoln
Town Car who identified himself as “The Gatekeeper.” For
two days, Kolin was lead around the city in search of robots, buried
treasure and information needed to save the future. Reiff and Korsmo
involved numerous actors and another online gamer who, equally baffled,
was driven with Kolin to a forest in search of buried treasure. After
unearthing a mysterious black box, Kolin noticed that his new friend
had disappeared. “I stood there alone in the woods, in Minnesota,
with a shovel and a large black locked box, more confused then I have
ever been in my life.” After returning safely home to Chicago,
Kolin posted a detailed account of his adventure, concluding, “it
was a great experience, and I would not hesitate to save the future
again, if the chance ever arose.”
Dylan Reiff is an actor and playwright who studies theater at Antioch
College. Joe Korsmo studies business and marketing at the University
of Pennsylvania. Both are avid gamers and have been playing them together
for 15 years. Their installation is titled after Kolin’s mother’s
announcement: There’s Someone at the Door, He Says He’s
From the Future.
|
|
A classically trained pianist who plays with the band Alva, Aïda
Ruilova approaches the video medium with an emphasis on sound, rhythm
and timing… and a love of 70s horror films. Her short-format videos
unfold around psychologically charged situations, pushing the aesthetics
of horror and techniques of filmic suspense to unsettling and often
absurd extremes.
Among Ruilova’s influences are Russian avant garde and cult cinema,
death metal and French horror director Jean Rollin, who appears beside
the artist in her 2001 work Tuning. Here, a hypnotic soundtrack drives
the image as the seated couple slowly comes into focus. Other works
experiment with the extension and compression of time to evoke fractured
narratives. UH OH (2004) sustains a moment of paralyzed dread
as the camera tilts almost 90 degrees in contrast to its inert subject,
a woman murmuring “uh, oh” again and again. In No, no (2004) a rapid-fire sequence of shots (a body agonizing on the floor,
a face peering in the window, a pair of flailing arms) creates a escalating
sense of disorientation and mayhem. Frantic montage and slow motion
sequences play off one another in The Stun (2000), where an
unseen person wearing fur attempts to pry open a man’s mouth.
Ruilova’s works are often spatially choreographed across multiple
monitors which abruptly turn on and off, providing an intense if fleeting
glimpse into a postindustrial (and preternatural) world. Though centered
around “feelings of tension, unresolve, and depravity,”
Ruilova insists her works are optimistic: “I’m into horror
film, but I’m also into comedy that’s extreme.”
Aïda Ruilova lives and works in New York.
|
|
Brian Springer is a media artist whose work explores ways in which
new communications technologies redefine notions of public space and
private enterprise. He has exploited social and technological loopholes,
extracting images, sounds and data from within traditionally closed
systems of power. His 1995 documentary Spin uses unpackaged
and uncensored satellite news feeds to offer a behind-the-scenes look
at the American political process. In his recent work, Springer has
strategized methods for recovering hidden information from digital text
files.
I Trust You is a candid portrait of a high-risk work environment
reflected through workplace media materials appropriated by an oil company
employee. The project is an investigation of risk capital, oil exploration,
and the role of audience as investor.
|
|
“Everyday objects produced by our society may be turned into
objects of desire more than one time. I am trying to show that an object
may be consumed more than one time and desired in more than one way.”
Lava lamps, driftwood, boxes of cereal and laundry detergent, pre-Christian
pottery, digital clocks, Yoda masks, snowmen made of yarn, a Mies Van
der Rohe day bed. These are some of the objects assembled and displayed,
often on custom-built shelves, in the work of Haim Steinbach. We’ve
seen these things before: advertised in store windows, laid out on flea
market tables, lining the aisles of supermarkets, exhibited in museums,
decorating friends’ apartments and arranged on shelves in our
own homes.
Steinbach’s work since the late 1970s has explored our society’s
evolving relationship to material culture. His use of familiar objects
and forms of presentation show us what, in an era of globalization and
commodity abundance, we wind up doing all the time: identifying ourselves,
communicating with each other and structuring our relationships through
objects. Extending the questions of authorship and originality raised
by the Duchampian readymade, Steinbach’s work elaborates (through
its own example) how context and timing determine the way that objects,
including works of art, are desired, valued and exchanged.
While some have called what he does “commodity art,” Steinbach
prefers to think of his work in terms of collecting. “My work
is a reflection on collections because any specific thing we possess
is part of a collection or a collectivity.” Since the early 1990s,
Steinbach has been collecting vernacular statements (slogans, catchphrases
and other idiomatic expressions) from newspapers and magazines. Some
of these expressions become titles for his three-dimensional works.
Others are reproduced as large-scale wall paintings where the typography
and layout of the original text are preserved and presented against
a solid background. Through their altered context and cinematic proportions,
works like yo. (1991), aha! (1997), and you don’t
see it, do you? (1994), catch us in the act of receiving a private
message (the one we read to ourselves in a magazine) while encountering
a public announcement (the one we read collectively).
Haim Steinbach lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the Visual
Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. |
Still
from Hello Happiness, 2000, video, 1 min.
