contemporary monkey

like Amiga, but with paint

In October of 2009, the internet turned 40 years old.  Not the web, or as some would call it, the Google machine; I mean the internet, developed by ARPANET for the US military to withstand a Soviet nuclear missile attack.  Images on the internet arrived later, around 1990, when the CERN Institute developed the world wide web. I bring these dates up because they seem so long ago; the wow factor hasn’t been palpable since the late 20th century.  Or so I thought.

Digital art, while not widely accepted by the art buying public (i.e., merchant bankers), is widely followed by a global audience.  Its gallery, however, is mostly online so you’d have to know where to look to find it.  Even with limited appeal, however, there it is; raging wildly and completely toward the Next Big Thing.  Digital styles vary from futuristic, technology-pushing 3D imagery coded to audio, fireworks, and probably even orgasm, to something completely not that – sentimental remembrances of 8 bit digital: the old space invader imaging.  If you missed the digital art revolution, you were probably buried under a rock, or possibly banished to whatever the equivalent of the art gulag would be.  Crawford, Texas maybe.

Semyon Faibisovich isn’t from anywhere near Texas, at least not topographically.  He’s from Moscow.  But the digital distance between he and Crawford’s most popular citizen isn’t that far.  Faibisovich at one time painted in the realism style, but traded canvas for film in the past two decades.  During this time, the former Soviet Union was crumbling beneath the merciless weight of its arch enemy: Conceptual Art.  While Faibisovich was off conceptualizing, digital photography was busy happening.

Faibisovich is being shown at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, where he’s uploaded (OK, hung) large format images on the IKON’s walls (or as I call them, old-style screens).  He’s back painting large formats using very small source material, and he’s done most of it within the past few years.  Walking around the Moscow district of Razgulyai, he’s captured what passes for life by way of a mobile phone camera.  As most of us know, camera phones today are terrible at reproduction, but handy when you need it.  Like when your friends are throwing shots of high octane alcohol down their necks at a Spanish bar and the moment Must Be Recorded.  Nobody pretends the quality is going to be any good, with the results eventually getting sucked down the drain of the digital dark underworld of forgotten photos.  Or maybe that’s just me hopin’ and wishin’.

Faibisovich seems to have just now discovered the technological fault of the ubiquitous comrade of the proletariat.  Starting with highly-pixellated mobile photographs, he then distorts the image further through either Photoshop filters, or his own paintbrush.  The result is the digital equivalent of Monet or Renoir.

just prior to the introduction of digital photography

Pixellation isn’t new to art. Digital artists have used old fashioned computer images to achieve a kind of distressed or atavistic effect.  Faibisovich is simply doing what the impressionists and post impressionists did, but with some help from a mobile camera phone.  It’s like he’s just discovered the 20th century world of pixels through photography and manipulation.  This doesn’t seem contemporary to me.  Faibisovich is just someone who’s playing catch-up with the rest of the world, and thinks he’s on to something. He’s like the Brendan Fraser Neanderthal character in Encino Man (California Man to British People).  The content is only interesting from one point of view, and it isn’t ours.

What I found more curious was the amount of manipulation that varied among the works.  Some sections of the pieces Faibisovich has left alone, where the final enlargement is magnified relentlessly from the original source.  Other bits were recorded over with oil, which to me would suggest that he must have had a reason for supplementing some bits and not others.  What were those reasons?  As I’ve said before, knowing why an artist does something can be more interesting than the way he does it.

In fact, let’s make a rule: art can only be called contemporary if it feeds the creative spirit of our time…events within the last 10 years.  If it’s just catch-up art, then maybe the work is best suited for the museums.  Or the nostalgia bin.