29-08-2009

The cool thing about being a friend of Cory Arcangel on Facebook is that you get access to the short films and website links that he collects on his Delicious page. Delicious is presently the most popular place for putting up your personal internet bookmarks. You can then share these through a social network site like Facebook. Arcangel also has his own YouTube channel on which he puts links to videos by others. The artist places his own internet video works and recordings of his performances on it too. What’s neat is that the differences between his own videos and those of others are sometimes not so great. The fascinating thing about the materials he distributes is that they reveal a lot about his own interests and way of working, and display the qualities of his art. Characteristic and recurrent elements of Arcangel’s work, like pop music, new or old technologies and humor – especially in combinations with one another – can be discovered in the found videos too. In addition, the mixture of his work with that of other artists (and non-artists) on a place like YouTube can be said to be typical of our times. Internet artists use the net more and more as a platform for showing their work, as a medium for responding, and therefore release their codes, rather than stub-bornly keeping information to themselves. Arcangel’s work is characterized by diverse but also overlapping aspects. These vary from lo-fi to more complex technological works, from home-made videos to references to pop art or other avant-garde currents such as minimalism, conceptualism and experimental film, games, hacking, old or outdated and recent technologies, music (from pop to classic and avant-garde) and more generally digital techniques and our love for them and relation with them. In addition to being a digital artist Arcangel is also a performer, musician, programmer, and sometimes even a stand-up comedian. His work often touches on a combination of these differ-ent fields, depending on the platform to which Arcangel brings the videos, performances or website hacks for our attention. He seeks to employ, test and take down similar aesthetic systems within these different fields. He does this in ways which vary from a vernacular or non-expert approach by software, to the conscious and in-formed disruption of digital techniques. To keep it short: with his work Arcangel comments on digital media technologies and handles these in a play-ful and humorous way. It is typical of the way Cory Arcangel works that he isolates and repeats certain iconic images or historic information, such as an intro by Guns N’ Roses, the clouds from the Super Mario Brothers game, or cats walking on piano keys in YouTube videos. The artist modifies the chosen elements with the aid of software (and often considerable patience and time) to produce a non-functional game, a Flickr-like YouTube video or an abstract film of scratches. These at first sight so simple-looking and humorous works refer to historical-technical-cultural phenomena lying behind them such as pieces of avant-garde music and art-works in relation to old or outdated techniques, digital and otherwise. For instance, in the work ‘Untitled Translation Exercise’ the voice-over of the film ‘Dazed and Confused’ is spoken by the staff at an Indian company, linking techno logy and pop culture with a current business and economic phenomenon like outsourcing.

Another of Arcangel’s methods is the use of certain new (or on the contrary, outdated) technologies. By using the ‘slit scan’ tool he formally deconstructs the film ‘Colors’, as if it was filmed through a crack. In another work Arcangel uses the Photoshop image manipulation program to produce RGB Gradient prints in a vernacular way. For this the artist opened Photoshop, left the pro-gram on the factory settings, pressed a couple of buttons, and printed the resulting ‘ready-mades’ as real Cory Arcangels. In this way the artist made a factory setting into the aesthetic of his work. Much of his work indicates the degree to which the creative process today is dependent on, and is indeed dictated by computer programs and the parameters on which they are based. Traditionally artists like Arcangel have critiqued culture by applying mechanisms like amateurism, appropriation, humor, or the isolation and manipulation of popular images. This was the manner in which the avant-garde, the vanguard of artists, worked in the 20th century, but today it is applied – often unwittingly – by many who place their own self-made videos on YouTube. Production on internet has become consumption in the Web 2.0 era, in which anyone can react and offer their commentary. The big question is what position visual art takes in this development. Arcangel’s work responds to this question by, for instance, using home videos of cats walking on piano keys to play an avant-garde and atonal piece by Schönberg. In ‘Drei Klavier-stücke, op. 11’ the artist employs each video fragment separately for a music note. In doing so, Arcangel pushes editing techniques to their utmost, and carries the MTV style of rapidly changing images and agitated camera hand-ling to the max. In brief, by combining You-Tube shorts with an atonal piece by Schönberg and transferring found film material from the internet back over to film again so that it reminds one of an avant-garde film, or by coupling an intro by Guns N’ Roses to a minimalist composition by Steve Reich, Arcangel links hi-art with lo-art in an intelligent way. In summary: Arcangel looks to remarkable, new or old digital techniques, or uses digital methods in order to imitate analogue tech-nologies, in order to generate surprising new insights or images with interesting, familiar and popular (or, as the case may be, uninteresting, unfamiliar or unseen) elements that are (or recently were) ubiquitous. By modifying, appropriating and isolating existing material with the aid of old and new digital technologies, the artist reduces our media culture to its essence. —

Cory Arcangel Works

Permanent Vacation, 2007
It is not an unthinkable scenario: two silver Imacs whose users are absent, sending endless e-mails to each other with the message ‘out of office’ until their hard disks fill up and crash. But that filling up and crashing apparently will not hap-pen for another 24 years, and before that time the mail server will long since have become obsolete, and certainly the computers will no longer function. With this Arcangel raises for our attention the timely, but also transient nature of phenomenon like e-mail, mail servers and the hardware associated with them. In addition the work also refers to the reactionary character of digital systems, the logic of the loop, and the infinite. The computers need each other to reveal that no one is present to answer the mails. There is also some-thing irritating about this installation, like a satiric joke, a comedian who never knows when to stop, a snake that swallows its own digital tail as if it is a technological vicious circle from which we will never escape. Riveted to our e-mail boxes, we are seized by electronic tedium.

Self–playing Sony playStation 1 Bowling, 2008
In this work Arcangel has modified a Playstation controller. The result is an endless bowling game throwing gutter balls time after time. Here the sometimes totally senseless aspect of technology is made inescapably clear. The artist fusses around for months programming something like this game, which ultimately can no longer do any-thing meaningful. In this and other game modifications Arcangel twists the narrative structure and changes the game into bizarre cinema. At the same time he displays an absurd situation; there is no longer a sense of any actual replay, but a software program that determines that a gutter ball will be bowled, anew, and endlessly.

I don’t want to spoIl the party, 2007
It is February, 1964. The Beatles have just landed in America. The mass hysteria around the band is at its height. The video shows the legendary press conference that is now regarded as a cultural-historic landmark. In Arcangel’s version an irritating, active red dot floats between Paul McCartney’s eyes. Is it the laser pen of a professor of media/ television studies, or is it something stranger? In any case, according to Arcangel it is nothing personal... The title ‘I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party’ is a number by the Beatles, written by John Lennon. In the text somebody goes to a party and waits there for his girlfriend. When it becomes clear that she has stood him up, he leaves the party rather than spoil things for the others.

UntItled translatIon exercIse, 2006
In ‘Untitled Translation Exercise’ the artist dubbed the popular high school film ‘Dazed and Confused’ by the artist Richard Linklater, hiring a company in India to perform the labor-intensive process. He asked the staff at the Indian firm to read the original scenario. Each ‘actor’ had to record his sentences independently of the others, so that the post-synchronized dialogues fail to connect with one another, often quite comically. The work can be read as an allegory for the manner in which American’s dependence on out-sourcing is destroying its social cohesion. Arcangel downloaded the script from internet, and sent it to India together with six empty tapes and a cassette recorder. After receiving the tapes back it cost Arcangel lots of time to overlay the words on the original voice track. Thus the work not only deals with outsourcing, but also authentic authorship and the phenomenon of copying and downloading films, music and programs from the internet.

Sweet 16, 2006
In this work two introductions from the video clip ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses play together, sometimes synchronously, sometimes totally out of sync. The intro is comprised of a guitar loop by the guitarist Slash. The installation plays the two video images alongside each other, starting in perfect sync, but becoming more and more removed from each other in terms of image and sound, slowly creating fascinating visual and auditory contrasts. After seventeen minutes the image and sound come back around to running in sync again, and the process starts all over anew. As a viewer, you keep hoping that the video will get further than the intro, where the needle appears to have gotten stuck.‘Sweet 16’ was inspired by the minimalist composition ‘Clapping Music’ (1972) by Steve Reich. The work is an homage both to clapping music and the history of phasing, a fairly common technique within minimalist composition which was inspired by the sound of machines running out of sync. ‘Clapping Music’ was written for two persons and is performed only by clapping hands. One performer always claps at the same rhythm; the other begins clapping the same pattern offset by one beat: they start in sync, go out of sync, and after some time, come out alike again. In the installation this phasing algorithm is applied to the introduction of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses. Arcangel translated an avant-garde minimalist composition, performed by the human body emulating the sound of machine, into a video recording of a popular electric guitar solo. In a digital rather than ‘manual’ way, ‘Sweet 16’ follows in a comparable compositional (a)synchronicity.

Personal Film, 2008, & structural Film, 2007
In ‘Structural Film’ Arcangel employs the filter from iMovie called ‘Aged Film’, which imitates the dust and scratches on a worn film, to an empty image. The artist then transferred the resulting QuickTime film to 16 mm stock, so that the work becomes a contemporary pastiche on Nam June Paik’s ‘Zen for Film’. Paik’s original consisted of an endless loop of undeveloped film stock running through a projector. The projected image consisted of a lighted area with, now and then, visible dust and scratches from the damaged film stock. In his art Paik used the empty image and the qualities of the stock as an anti-film, the cinematic equivalent of John Cage using silence as music in ‘4’33”’. Arcangel’s original intention was to make a piece which showed only digital scratches and digital dust, but during the transfer process the print was damaged somehow, and colored dots appeared on the image. The artist found this accidental result a beautiful formal and substantive addition: the constructed concept and the accidental became mixed. Arcangel here plays with the idea of old (and old-fashioned) media, and how new media seeks to copy old media, as well as tapping into our continuing fascination with and reassessment of abstract and experimental film. In ‘Personal Film’ Arcangel transfers degraded / hand drawn film material found online to 16mm stock so that it appears to be ‘avant-garde’. As in several other works, here Arcangel makes use of existing material, a method that has been familiar and much used since Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. In an absurdist manner the art-ist combines the use of existing material with the labor-intensive, expensive and complicated process of transferring from video to 16 mm film. Here, in an artificial manner, using existing rather than original material, Arcangel is able to evoke the avant-garde currents of experimental abstract cinema – and ironically, to do so with the aid of new technologies. Both these film installations play with the technology and history of the avant-garde film.

I Shot andy Warhol, 2002
Arcangel added famous figures from the mass media into this handmade hack of the air pistol arcade game ‘Hogan’s Alley’ (1984). The artist replaced the targets of the original game with the iconic characters Andy Warhol, Pope John Paul II, Flava Flav and Colonel Sanders. You only score points by gunning down Warhol, thus assuming the role Valerie Solanas, who did shoot him. In another part of the game you shoot at falling Campbell soup cans, with which Warhol is identified. In this work Arcangel connects the popularity of games with pop art works by Warhol, who became famous for something as banal and popular as Campbell’s soup cans.
With it, he creates an ode to the king of pop art.

Space Invader, 2004
‘Space Invader’ is a hack of the classic 2004 Atari game ‘Space Invaders’. This game can normally be played by everyone, but Arcangel reduced the game in such a way that playing it becomes uninteresting. All the invaders have been rubbed out, except for one, although this invader inherits the missiles from the others making the game im-possible to play. What’s left of the game is boring and difficult, and the frustrated gamer drops it for other things. In this and other games made un playable by game modifications, Arcangel responds critically to the interactive strategies that have been popular in media art since the 1990s.

Colors, 2006
Here Arcangel formally deconstructs the classic Dennis Hopper film about gangs entitled ‘Colors’. Arcangel often makes his working process publicly known via the internet, as he did with this specific work. He revealed the video technique as ‘Colors PE’ or ‘Personal Edition’. For this application Arcangel used ‘slit scan’, which is a very common and relatively simple technique in which something appears to have been photographed through a crack. The software application that Arcangel has written for video can play any QuickTime film with this technique. A horizontal line of the video is systematically selected and then stretched to a full image, so that colored vertical strips move over the wall. The original sound plays at normal speed. The software requires that the video has to be played hundreds of times before it will have been seen in its entirety. The cinematic quality of ‘Colors’ is here expressed in a totally different, abstract way, so that the film is quite literally to be evaluated in terms of its colors – just as the title of the work would lead one to expect.

Super Mario cloudS V2K3, 2002—...
Arcangel modified a version of the Nintendo game ‘Super Mario’ by hand, in such a way that only the iconic, bright blue sky with its clouds slowly drifting by remained. Like ‘Japanese Driving Game’, this work refers to landscape art and minimalism. At the same time it is humorous, and totally unplayable. With its simplified, pixelated cloud forms and garish color the iconic blue sky refers to pop art. Arcangel uses the aesthetic of games in order to create a contemporary variant of pop art.

Japanese Driving game, 2004
In the adapted ‘Japanese Driving Game’ a road runs down the middle, with landscapes rushing by to the right and left, as if you were in a race car. It is a horizontal rendering of space, unique to the video games of the 1980s. But conceptually this work also refers to other landscape art, or conceptual art. In this setting the clouds of the Mario game function as the sky that be-longs with the road and horizon of ‘Japanese Driving Game’, as if it is a landscape painting comprised of several screens.

Drei KlavierstücKe, op. 11, 2009
Arcangel’s love of music emerges in his latest work, ‘Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11’. In this work the artist brings together short YouTube fragments of cats walking on piano keys. In the work each video fragment is equivalent to one music note. The artist edited the images so that together the cats collectively play Schönberg’s ‘op. 11’. ‘Op. 11’ is an avant-garde atonal piece for three pianos. With this work Arcangel pushes editing techniques to the limit, and takes the MTV style of a rapid succession of images and restless camera handling to an extreme. Here the artist seeks to make an important piece of music, unknown to the vast majority of his audience, visible with the aid of the omnipresent, banal, almost slapstick YouTube fragments of cats-on-the-keyboard.

The exhibition is curated by Petra Heck
Text Petra Heck
Translation Don Mader

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Courtesy Team Gallery