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.

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.

Penone: "Breath of Leaves"

It’s only a pile of dried, grey brown leaves, swept into a mound, placed in the middle of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.  They’re not particularly impressive looking leaves either; small and perfect shape, lacking in personality.  They’re from the box tree, offers the Ikon employee sitting near the sculpture.  He goes on to say that the artist wanted to use box leaves for their size and light weight, and allegedly, wherever the sculpture goes, so go the same leaves.  That day it occurred to me the gallery employees might be a worthwhile source of un-tapped knowledge of contemporary art.

The Ikon Gallery was showing an exhibition of sculptures by Giuseppe Penone in June.  Left on my own, which is what many galleries do to wanderers from the outside, I would not have been able to even make a guess why the artist did what he did.  At the pile of leaves, however, I made the decision that it was the gallery’s job to help me understand why last Autumn’s tree trimmings are called art.  Turning around, I glanced by a few of the other equally baffling sculptures, and returned downstairs to the manned front desk. The willing person there pointed me in the direction of the show’s programme, in addition to retrieving a more specific Penone exhibition guide.   He also provided me a brief one or two lines to think about while traveling through the show.  After sifting through the Hammurabi-like code of marketing copy for the gallery,  Penone’s point became more straight-forward.  In it’s most basic form, Penone’s discovered that the boundaries between people and nature are a fluid border, sometimes not obviously visible.  I returned to my first position: the dead pile of leaves, which was adjacent to two, similarly looking boulders.  (I learned later that one of the rocks is a man-made replica of a river boulder, which, itself was carved by nature over thousands of years.  The replica was made in a few months, but Penone’s point was, even if you could do it, why would you?  My question exactly.  I like Penone.)

I enlist my new-found friend, still perched on the chair near the heap of leaves, for more banter about leaves, rocks, branches, anything that seems to make sense at the moment.  To my surprise, the guy is happy to thrash out some meaning with me.  Together we sort through theories, insights, even wild guesses, for about five of the pieces that are within eyesight.  He seems to have been well-prepared for the artist (”he” doesn’t have a name tag by the way, so I have no idea what to call him).

Together, we reckon that the leaf mound is Penone’s canvas, and his body, the brush.  His is the form imprinted onto the pile of leaves, just as a kid would do after a father has raked a large pile from under an Autumn tree.  It looks more like good fun than serious art, but Penone adds to the shape by blowing sideways while he lies chest-down in the stack.  A half-conical valley is the only imprint left from his effort, and indeed the work is called, “Breath of Leaves”.  Nearby are photographs of Penone’s warm breath in an Italian winter forest.  Each breath develops its own shape, and the still photographs capture only one instant of each puff of warm wind.

Birmingham's Ikon Gallery

My guide and I went on for twenty minutes more, and during our discussion, I realized that he must have been waiting in a sort of limbo for a curious person like me who isn’t intimidated to ask questions.  Later he tells me that the learning centre upstairs is showing a video that Penone himself made where he explains why he does what he does.  Interviews by the artist aren’t common enough in my opinion, so after having left my guide to chat with another curious mind, I dashed up to the video room.

Penone describes using his breath as an invisible sculpture. By capturing his warm  exhalation in a chilly forest, he suggests that plant life is not much different: branches and roots instead of arms and legs, expiring oxygen through leaves rather than carbon dioxide via the mouth.

I was inside the Ikon gallery for nearly two hours - about four times the length that most shows can be consumed inside this smallish gallery.  Enabling all the resources of the Ikon, however, I was able to enjoy myself much more, and learn a great deal about the exhibit than I would had I only read the exhibition guide.  I don’t know why galleries or museum don’t encourage their people to come forward to discuss the current programmes.  If the folks are there only for security, the gallery should employ people to circulate while engaging the public.  The repeat business would certainly increase.

Something that Jeffrey Deitch said in the book, Collecting Contemporary (by Adam Lindemann) I thought was a very useful idea for understanding contemporary art.  Deitch is one of New York’s art dealers, with a background in finance as well as art.  Although he doesn’t come out and say it, his perspective is one where art is collectible for financial gain.  Still, what do you do with a Harvard degree, and Citibank Art Advisory on your CV?  I’m guessing the phrase “capital gain” comes up in his conversations with clients.

But everyone has their reasons for existing in the art world, and for a moment, let’s give Deitch credit for creative thinking.  He looks for an artist who “creates his or her own aesthetic world, as opposed to an artist who’s just making a nice object.  There are a lot of artists who make very nice objects, but you can’t really say that there is a whole vision of the world that you can grasp in their work.”

Creating worlds is a place where traditional story tellers excel, and artists should be held to the same level of expectation.  For example, in film, the Coen Brothers create their own worlds, and whatever the outcome to the protagonist, we’re always someplace we’ve never been.

Fargo: Joel and Ethan Coen

There was an online video once about a London artist by the name of Richard Galpin (Hales Gallery) where we followed along with him as he created his own invention using existing photographs.  Working with an enlarged C-Print of an existing city centre, he slowly peels away slices and sections of the original photograph, revealing his version of a futurist’s cityscape. The result shares very little with the original photo, but is useful as a “blank” screen for ground breaking results after a few hours.  It’s a revolutionary approach in that the world he’s given is not the world he’s taking.

Richard Galpin: Distructure 1

Can a photograph be art?  Images constructed inside the camera, or via Photoshop can be art-like, so it’s possible that photography can mimic art.  But if the image is everyday content, and it’s, well, big, does that make it more art-like?

Art World (April/May 2009) makes a “rare” interview with Andreas Gursky about his photographs (after reading the article, it’s understandable why he would be less inclined to speak to any art media).  Most of Gursky’s photographs are large, about 2 meters by 3 meters.  Most are either photographs of landscapes, or appear landscape-like due largely because of their size.  In one piece, a C-Print of a particle accelerator called “Kamiokande”, 2.2m x 3.7m, Gursky shoots a patterned wall of shiny solid globes. I suppose if I walked into someone’s house, and was faced with this image, I would call it impressive.  Mostly because of its size, not because of content.

In another of Gursky’s image, “Gas Cooker” (1980), it’s exactly that: his old gas cooker, white against a white wall.  He declares that one day it turned from a gas cooker to an image of a gas cooker, so he took the shot and reproduced it.  I’m pretty sure if I re-arranged the furniture in my sitting room one weekend, that would be more artistic than a picture of an unremarkable gas cooker.

On one occasion, Gursky claims to have had a “discussion” with his girlfriend outside, at night, when he finds himself focusing on the ground.  I guess that discussion was really only Gursky’s girlfriend having a monologue.  While looking down, he suddenly realized he was staring at a structure of a photograph.  The final result is a 1.5m x 2m picture of the ground, called “Untitled III”.  It’s the ground! How is that art??  You know those T-shirts that busty girls wear that say, “my eyes are up here (arrow pointing up)”?  Gursky’s girlfriend should get shoes with type that say, “my tits are up here”.  Oh that poor girlfriend…

This is an example of an “artist” navel gazing into their everyday surroundings in order to discover more about themselves.  A better description on this is called Art for Me, and doesn’t really need to be anywhere near public space, let alone be produced with public money.  To call photography of everyday images, regardless of their boldness, poignancy, social import, or even largesse, is not art.  It’s called photography, and any of us can, and do, do it.