In 1967, Robert Smithson took a bus from New York City to Passaic, New Jersey, to investigate the definition of the word “monument.” Instead of any grand structures meant to mark history and stand the test of time, Smithson found significance in the mundane: a bridge, a parking lot, a sandbox. Nearly 50 years later, curator Joseph del Pesco from The Kadist Foundation in San Francisco asked photographer Jason Fulford to read Smithson’s essay, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” and visit Passaic to make photographs, using the essay as a point of departure. Fulford invited writer Hernán Díaz to join him and to create Monument (2015), an online, multi-media photo essay presented on The Kadist’s website.

Fulford’s photographs demonstrate a masterful ability to illuminate uncanny correlations and bizarre banalities of vernacular culture through sequences of otherwise unrelated images. In Monument, the combination of Fulford’s imagery with Díaz’s words exists in a translational loop, where information transitions back and forth between visual, textual, and abstract forms. Whatever manifestation the information takes, it remains anchored to the concepts of codes and ruins. The final sequence in Monument begins with an image of a pharmacy’s façade where an awning and a wall sign both read “Lucy’s Pharmacy.” While one sign is clearly worn and the other is newer, they create an almost perfect redundancy — a visual stutter. Beneath the image, Díaz’s words appear onscreen, typed letter by letter, as a female voice reads a Spanish translation of the text. A few slides later, a question in Spanish types onto a black screen as the same female voice recites the English translation. On the next slide Morse code beeps as it types below an image of a two-dimensional black dog on a stake casting its two-dimensional black shadow on the lawn it ornaments — another visual stutter. The Morse code answers the previous slide’s question:

Q: ¿QUÉ ES LO QUE QUEDA CUANDO NO HAY RUINAS? [trans: “WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THERE ARE NO RUINS?”]

A: … ___ __ . _ …. .. _. __. .._ _. _ ._. ._ _. … ._.. ._ _ ._ _… ._.. .

[“SOMETHINGUNTRANSLATABLE”]

The next and last slide is black and silent, then the whole sequence starts again in an infinite loop of its own.

Monument functions much like a book, albeit a digital one, though without the tacky skeuomorphic designs like animated “page” turning. Instead, Monument translates the qualities of a book into the digital, multi-media platform. In general, reading a book and using a computer are solitary, private pastimes. They can occur in public, but the reader/user focuses on the book or computer, and not her surroundings. Books and the Internet can connect us with billions of other people, and they can freeze time, existing in a temporal limbo when they are closed.

With the seemingly endless torrent of artist websites, blogs, and online magazines, it is easy to ignore — or at least be ambivalent about — the majority of art displayed on the Internet. In almost every case, viewers experience the work through some kind of standardized manner, such as an image carousel, slideshow, or grid. When we click, scroll, and swipe through countless images, how many truly affect us? On its most basic level, Monument is a digital slideshow of images, text, and sound. In this iteration, however, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco elevate the format’s stale viewing experience to a method that is both novel and nostalgic. As an alternative to the monotonous click- or scroll-through presentation pervading the web-based photo world, Fulford, Díaz, and Pesco developed a dynamic and interactive method that necessitates greater participation and offers a greater reward.

Monument requires decoding, both literally and figuratively, and in this way the project takes full advantage of its digital existence. Fulford and Díaz insisted that the Morse code be copy-pastable so that viewers could translate the anachronistic cipher. Reading Smithson’s essay alongside Monument amplifies the project’s process of re-contextualizing the past within the present, making the essay’s online presence in PDF form a valuable asset (unless you have a copy of the 1967 Artforum lying around). In his essay, Smithson writes about a landscape by Samuel F.B. Morse, and remarks on its lack of finitude: “A little statue with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). ‘Gothic’ buildings in the allegory had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up on the left side of the landscape.” Fulford and Díaz continue Smithson’s line of questioning comparison of fabricated binaries: pond/sea, tree/smoke, dots/dashes, zeroes/ones, monument/parking lot. And they propose “Samuel Morse put an end to vastness. With the telegraph, immensity became a ruin.” The telegraph imploded our notions of size and speed in the 19^th century. Today, we can carry infinity in our pockets and the instantaneous speed of digital technology erases the present: the future is immediately translated into the past, a ruin. Monument asks, “What is left when there are no ruins?” A more appropriate question may be “what is left when there is nothing but ruins?”

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You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Imagination imagined by Kafka before the Internet.

I wonder about the Internet. Does it in fact exist? Or does it prove an alternate universe? If you sit there surfing long enough it starts to pour right into your head. I’m in the middle of writing or editing something, and for some inexplicable or at least forgettable reason, I’m lead elsewhere and halfway down a rabbit hole to read a joke about some cartoon bears. So, like anyone, I bookmark it as distraction for later. I bring a plum out of my bag, but Allison Cobb won’t let me eat it:

“I know, like Subway low, like bread puffed up

with yoga mat chemicals. Yes I did

steal everyone’s detournement”

Am I now looking at a desert mountain range, a gorge, a rattler’s skin, sand designs left by a Mojave sidewinder, a natural Mandala, the mouth of a deep sea creature, or a series of close-ups of a person’s eye? I can rarely stay on one of these pages long enough to reach its end. All the subsequent descriptions and associations lead in 100,000 directions; exploring the Internet is more divergent than a Raymond Roussel stanza, more plentiful than The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Appealing to my at best curious intentions, as much as distraction and forgetfulness, artcritical’s Bookmarked feature seems a fun idea for anyone willing to share their abandoned to-dos and tabs for inspiration, or for any readily charmable reader. (I’m pressed in this moment to express just why this is. Voyeurism, compulsion, affinity, or just plain curiosity?) Sometimes I fear I won’t find my way back to the new thing I’ve discovered, as if associations won’t work without some kind of guide. Years ago, taking notes while receiving instructions from someone of my grandparents’ generation, I was admonished that excessive notation beguiles memory, which in turn can cause its loss. I think this is true.

My fits and starts on the Internet are, like anyone, a daily occurrence. Everything’s in here, and its access is seemingly ubiquitous. It’s no surprise that the saved tabs the folder of URL shortcuts are ones that I can scarcely remember any reason for having saved. As I continuing to flip through read-later tabs, I’m at a sudden rapt to the ticking of a bedside clock, followed by a soothing French voice that nevertheless sounds as if it’s awoken from a long night beside an ashtray. A sideburned fop pours hot water into a bowl in black and white. It’s Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs! What is it? Why is it there? I have no recollection, but I love it.

It’s a dream. Wonderful, terrifying, stupid, very ordinary. Researching wildlife online (again, why? because we can), I half-expect a gazelle to leap out of the liquid crystal screen, still baffled by the endless deluge that is the Internet — in the way an early motion-picture crowd feared the train arriving at its station in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) might burst right through the screen and into the cinema to overtake them. They ran to the back of the room, then returned to their seats for more.

Here I’m totally distracted by a singularly interesting, eccentric guy. I was a bellhop and John was in town from NYC, needing respite from some unpleasant associations, situations he’d describe to me at the front door on successive nights and mornings. He was cool and a great conversationalist. Told me his brain is swelling and that I ought to get the rich guests to buy all his paintings. He also once commanded, upon my delivery of the Wall Street Journal, that I return to the front desk to have it burned at once. In his underwear, no less. More on this in another essay, but I will add that John is generous, no-bullshit, very funny, and every bit of the creative spirit evinced by his many musical, on-screen, and visual-art works. In his After Dark Episode 1, you’ll catch the above-mentioned attributes straightaway.

Now I remember what I was supposed to do: read an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.

Have you heard of Sue Tompkins? This remains in my read-later tab, and though I’ve heard it many times I don’t think I ever reached the end. Being “heat-faint,” in ecstasy, longing for islands or “24 hours on my favorite planet alone” (my favorite of her hypnotic refrains here), irritation for standing by, wondering “if you feel like I feel.” How about Carla Harryman’s Memory Play? Mile’s Champion’s How to Laugh? Every different emotional state represented outside avatars to distract you. Avert your eyes awhile, you’ll come back soon. Fog everywhere. Sun whenever. Festooned in little pics of food, or all the cute pets your landlord won’t let you house. Years ago, they even foreshortened your audible laughing. What a rotten, wondrous place.

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Considering the clamorous and literally unbelievable results of the life-editing that has corrupted our presentations of who we are — replacing them on social media with desperate assertions of who we would like to be seen as — rather than contrive a list of what I would prefer my topmost visited sites to be, thereby concocting some intellectual fantasy about myself, I remonstrate here against digital self-denial and provide the list of my actual recent most visited sites, and what impact they have on my life as an artist. They are in no particular order.

www.pornmd.com

This site is the Kayak of porn, alleviating of hours whirring about the web in frustration, by efficiently finding the pornographic clips that a person most responds to. Type in the word or phrase that you are looking for, and it searches all the top porn sites in an instant. It even makes suggestions. PornMD frees up oceans of time for considering my next exhibition, while simultaneously offering up the male physique as artistic inspiration. And anyway, it’s on doctor’s orders.

Kate Bush Youtube/Google searches

She is only considered bizarre or banshee-like by incompetent journalists without the capacity to consider a songwriter/singer existing beyond the narrowly defined societal prescriptions of what a female artist ought to be.

The worlds, sentiments and experiences that she has conjured through her intellectual, sonic and visual individualism have been a constant source of reference to me since youth, outstripping that of any visual artist. The two minutes and seven seconds of “Under the Ivy” (1985) are among her most excruciatingly beautiful retreats. Bush is one of three principal figures who anchor my artistic sensibilities by forming a trajectory of sweeping gothicism across art, music and literature; the others are Emily Bronte and Casper David Friedrich.

Wikipedia entry on Scottish castles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_castles

Having left Scotland at age 19 to live among the tumult of London and New York, I often long for the solitude, brooding history, and enchantment of my ancient home. When the rigors of urban life mount, I’m afforded distance from the present by an Internet journey back in time through the presence of spellbinding buildings that embody the gruesome, captivating march of humanity.

Castles have lent me an artistic dowry since I was young and spent time investigating ruins, searching for secret tunnels and seeking the supernatural. The experience of such places endows the mind with boundless imaginative force, lowering the divisions between reality and the mythological. Related artworks include Portrait as a Gargoyle (2013), photographed at the Tolkien-esque Castle Glume, situated above the Burns (rivers) of Sorrow and Care in the Ochil Hills; and Portrait as the Devil (2014), taken at Glamis Castle, and referencing the Devil’s visit there one stormy night to play cards on the Sabbath with the fiery Earl of Crawford.

www.wordsmith.org

Words are to me what clay is to a sculptor. As a text-oriented artist, words are the pleasure and pain of my existence. The limitless potential that text contains for communication, connection and harm, positions words as the most powerful tools for construction, and weapons of destruction, that humans possess. This website remains a source of delight, humor and alternate truths in relation to my ongoing series of anagrammatized vinyls.

www.darrenjonesart.com

Physical exhibitions of contemporary art in galleries have been around for perhaps 200 years. They ideally present much art, which is often created with consideration as to how it will appear in the gallery. It’s hard to imagine now, but they may not always exist. The computer disseminates work far more efficiently and to a larger audience than a traditional gallery, while the computer screen need no longer be considered a virtual gallery but an effective and autonomous exhibition space. If the requirement to experience the work in person is reduced or eliminated, and if the sentiment or intention of the work can be liberated from the physical and adequately conveyed across the internet, then the need for an actual site is lessened. I visit my website a lot, to regard and refine the work, and what I say about it. It is a working platform not dissimilar to an artist taking up residence in a gallery space. It functions as a studio, and a place to present work, ideas and observations that are sometimes fabricated and pictured in situation as completed pieces, but increasingly that exist entirely in sketch, or conceptual format on the screen.

www.maploco.com

Maploco enables viewers to create personalized maps of the states, countries or continents that they have visited by clicking to highlight each territory. The thrill (or disappointment) lasts about 10 seconds. By inserting various maps into photoshop, cutting, resizing, flipping and rearranging various regions I have formed a series of geographic motifs that include responses to empire, gay marriage and the recent tragic events in France.

www.thesaurus.com

Another marvelous tool for an artist enamored with vocabulary and words, who also writes about art. Clichéd phrases and art-world gibberish so quickly become bankrupt husks exhausted of impact and meaning, and deft new ways of saying something are refreshing. However, there are artists whose descriptions of their work are so stuffed with superlatives and overwrought language that they are downright fuliginous… I mean opaque.. I mean, well, confusing.

www.logolalia.com

Concrete poetry is the use of visual or typographical arrangements or patterns of words to convey the meaning of a poem or text. It wasn’t an art form I was familiar with until discovering this site, which is a portal to some brilliant, simple combinations of word, image and meaning.

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“In the beginning everything was dead,” chanted a voice from Camille Henrot’s mesmerizing video Grosse Fatigue (2013) as it leaps off to 13 minutes of throbbing inquiry. There is something slightly contradictory about this statement: death is the cessation of life, so how could death precede the existence of living things? An attempt to trace the history of the Universe usually leads to a brutal confrontation with the limits of one’s perception and ability to comprehend infinity, and describing the endpoints of a creation story seems essential and grounding. Or perhaps this doesn’t matter so much.

Henrot’s exhibition at the New Museum, “Restless Earth,” is one of the most energetic and rejuvenating installations to visit New York this season. It expands upon her explorations of culture, history and informational systems in her earlier works, deliberately toying with the artificially established boundaries between disciplines of study, research and perception as Henrot masquerades as anthropologist, scientist, librarian, sociologist and artist. She explores how the material world and culture is formulated, acknowledged, recorded, organized and standardized, but more prominently, it demonstrates all the chaos and energy these processes exhale.

A large section of the exhibition is filled with sculptures inspired by various works of literature, guided by Ikebana, the Japanese practice of flower arrangement. In these engrossing displays, Henrot attempts to visualize literature through slightly absurd compositions of flowers, grocery vegetables, other seemingly arbitrary ingredients, such as USB cables, Japanese newspapers, sheet moss — all exposing their physical and socio-economic connotations, their roles as food, decoration or mechanical devices, the stories of their discovery or their taxonomy. Each work is labeled with a quote from a work of literature, as well as detailed, hilariously scientific lists of its components — this interest in cataloguing and factual archiving is noticeable throughout her exhibition. These terse, contemplative canopies sprout from countertops, drape from the ceiling and crawl past the walls (Melville’s epic Moby Dick, 1851, is reduced to a few scattered crescent-shaped palm leaves), to form a little jungle ecosystem of their own, a buzzing room of dialogue. There is something strange and attractive about nature jolted into unnatural juxtapositions, considering these fragrant, vivacious arrangements are of amputated flowers and leaves nearing the end of their lives — “at death’s door” would be melodramatic, but their drying edges and fading color carry a hint of ephemerality and urgency.

Her fascination with appropriation and biological material is extended to another room of the show, containing a long table of neatly arranged pages from a 1995 Christie’s catalogue, Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan. Henrot illustrates the descriptions on each page with dried bookmark-like flowers and leaves stolen from residences on the Upper East Side. The magnificent gems and luxury uptown urban herbarium are both deliberate demonstrations of excess, but also, to their owners, decidedly necessary measures that define their social status. The catalogue pages only note estimated prices, rendering the values of the jewelry — and whatever they signify — speculative until juried by the auction attendees. This small sense of instability is perhaps furthered by spare, conspicuous slices of opaque tape affixing immobile and dried leaves to the pages, as if to restrain their plot to escape.

Then there are Henrot’s videos. The exhibition features several earlier videos that study the role of various symbols, practices and material objects across different cultures: Coupé/Décalé (2011) documents the origin of bungee jumping; Le Songe de Poliphile (2011), of the semiotics of the snake; and Million Dollars Point (2011), on World War II materials abandoned in Polynesia and the “cargo cults” that subsequently formed. Grosse Fatigue is the most conceptually ambitious (and probably low-budget) of them all, a series of desktop windows appearing on a computer screen, propelled by a groovy rap song that stitches together various origin myths, scientific presentations and annals of anthropology with the coherence of a surging music video. The deluge of imagery in today’s Internet age is a popular topic for artists, but few successfully conjure much beyond some purposefully collaged frenzy. Henrot’s selection of images (animals of from various phyla, different cultural practices, shots of mundane activity such as a manicured hand rubbing an orange) is not unpredictable, but they provide more than a simple sensation of distress and visual saturation. She consciously demonstrates the gaps and limits that still (and might forever) exist in our already overwhelming knowledge of history, a vault of information that could be more reasonably experienced through the momentum and innate disorder that weaves it all together.

Grosse Fatigue was made at Henrot’s 2013 Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian, during which she collected footage of animal and plant specimens, obscure digital archives, blank hallways and anonymous office workers. She paired that imagery with the unending reach of the digital realm, which, in many ways, is an archive and simulation of the immense universe beyond the monitor, but also feels oddly tangible as it is fully manmade and portable (one shot features an iPhone with a green croaking frog parked on top, held by a hand). This strategy allows her narrative to swell with felt urgency and inscrutable complexity, and also the leisurely nimbleness of aimless web surfing. Queues of browser windows at times pile up like flashing torrents of spam advertisements, but they can be readily clicked shut like full drawers of ghastly, vibrantly preserved tropical bird specimen. In the beginning and end there were both uncluttered Mac desktops.

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