April 9 to 12, 2016
Pyongyang, NK, +850 2 381 2134

In April of 2016, there was a sudden flurry of banal images across my Instagram — a fluorescent train interior, a bleached highway, a public monument — that would not have garnered further attention were it not for the accompanying hashtags: #northkorea, #pyongyang, #exhibition. These may well have been tagged #mars, but such is the reveled territory of Zurich’s Random Institute, an enigmatic art project by Sandino Scheidegger and Luca Müller. The Institute often holds exhibitions within such inaccessible areas of no-place (the transliteration of utopia): places of the virtual, the impermanent. Using the artist and the exhibition as medium, each project imagines new borders to trace the untraceable elements of our world through art, and even exhibition, as idea, challenging the viewer’s belief that the show happened at all. Pairing with curator Anna Hugo, Random Institute’s most recent project, “All the Lights We Cannot See,” is perhaps their most pioneering trek into such intangible terrain.

“All the Lights We Cannot See” exhibited the work of nine international artists in Pyongyang, North Korea from April 9 to 12, on the 23rd floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel. The show was not discussed in North Korean news, or anywhere at all. According to the omnipotence of Google, this exhibition is virtually nonexistent and yet, virtually, it is: a slick photo stream on Random Institute’s website reveals the chalk pinks and cheap lacquer of a vaguely Asian, two-bed hotel room. The photos seems a bit like an Airbnb ad, yet within the normality, punctuations: Ragnheidur Karadottir’s bubblegum-pink ball sporting cheerful streamers, Birdie (2016), balances on the edge of the nightstand; a jacket called Naked Bombers (2016), by Simon Mullan, hangs from the wall like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement (1536–41), turned inside-out and molting its flocked flesh. There is an iPhone or two pictured that are deceptively mundane, but then a levitating fork pricks the wall, Juan Betancurth’s Movement No.6 (2016); an ominous chocolate bar rests on the velour settee in Alison Kuo’s Personal Chocolate (2016); and a row of paradisiacal beach towels, Sulking Souvenir,(2013) by Clifford E. Bruckmann, bear the names of imaginary getaways as seemingly inaccessible as this clandestine art project.

Bruckmann’s sculptures are a poignant centerpiece to the exhibit as utopia. The no-place seems to be the non-existent ideal that Random Istitute is frequently tracing: just as Bruckmann creates a souvenir from the paradise he never saw, RI has created an exhibition that, according to them, “went virtually unnoticed.” “All the Lights We Cannot See” directly injected the intangible ideals of utopia into the dystopic reality of North Korea, and most covertly: even the black sheets of the poorly made hotel beds are the work of French artist Achraf Touloub, highlighting the demand for secrecy on the part of both the art and its environment. Indeed, these objects are as careful as they should be, all falling within the limits of allowance when traveling to North Korea (e.g. visitors are advised that chocolates make a lovely gift for North Korean women). Thankfully, definitions of contemporary art are more generous than state security.

The artists of the North Korean exhibit are contractually obligated to silence by the Institute, their only legal response to questions about it being: “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” Outside of Random Institute’s website, searching online for “All the Lights We Cannot See” will only direct you to a New York Times best-selling novel of the same name (the proverbial red herring), or a few of the participating artists’ CVs. So we are presented with the shell of an exhibition, the lamination of an event, but also the muffled experience of non-experience; only Scheidegger and Hugo, and perhaps a North Korean maid or minder, bore witness to this show. Random Institute has archived “All the Lights We Cannot See” and moved on (though they recently released their exhibition catalog: a limited edition of the Pyongyang Times that has been implanted with a mocked-up review of the show).

Other Random Institute projects have occurred within similarly remote contexts of the no-place: furniture catalogs, a transatlantic Filipino boat, in a book buried underground, or traced — by rock, dream or GIF — within a barren patch of Iceland the RI has named Kunsthalle Tropical. A “non-profit exhibition field that does not belong to anyone,” Kunsthalle Tropical examines the immaterial and the ephemeral or, as filmmaker Chris Marker describes such phenomena, “the impermanence of things”: museums that will melt under the rare rains of the Icelandic desert, remains of hovering helium from a 1969 exhibition by Robert Barry, and verbal artworks to be shouted, via megaphone, from the sky (attempted and failed five times). The insistence is a detachment of the art from its physical audience, isolating — or even disappearing — the art(ist) to the essential element of idea.

This is a far cry from the heavy-handed, wine-fueled mobs of the typical gallery scene: these exhibitions ask for silence and faith over networks and market values. Being of absence and no-place, this is a new approach to the art space that materializes that virtual space we are all too familiar with. They redefine the gallery, the museum and the library as physical spaces newly transformed (updated) by their virtual counterparts. It is a grand and impressive effort to materialize nascent philosophies of the virtual world physically, to weigh that which is hanging in the air.

There is little difference between “All the Lights We Cannot See” and a missed exhibition caught up with online. Having stared across so many white walls, the audience may be just as keen to stare into the MacBook’s own rare rectangle. Perhaps what Random Institute understands so well in its utopic tracing, better than many post-Internet artists, is the definition of virtual: not physically existing but made to appear.

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Andrew Lampert: Don’t Lose the Manual at the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin
September 19 to December 6, 2014
2300 Trinity Street (at San Jacinto Street)
Austin, 512 471 1108

The meatiest portion of Andrew Lampert’s “Don’t Lose the Manual,” at the University of Texas’s Visual Arts Center through December 6, commences with a blunt shot of a middle-aged man in a crumpled red shirt. He waxes lyrical on the technology of potato chips. This is Charlie, a recurring character in the stream of short documentary videos (all from 2014), who recalls the odd pleasure of chancing on charred potato crisps as a kid (back when fallible humans sorted through the starchy masses whizzing by on conveyor belts). Adult Charlie laments the “bank of cameras” looming over the process now, which feed images to insatiable computers sending 0s and 1s to air pistols that gun down unsuitable snacks into a gulf of oleaginous waste.

Next, the two sexagenarian stars of Cave of Wonders bow over in quarters so cramped and overflowing with books that before the first Ludditism can emerge from their mouths, I’m overtaken with longing for an erstwhile, rent-stabilized Manhattan. Lampert’s voice inquires over his whirly hand-held camera, “Will you always adapt to technology, or will you stop?” A brittle, scarlet copy of Sun Ra’s This Planet is Doomed (2011) beams down over the couple and their bookshelf garret as they reply that they were “isolated… pushed into email… forced to continue” updating and upgrading, until both eventually succumbed to a pricey laptop, which they admit to fussing over like toy-greedy children.

Newish technology is conversely embraced in Citizens of the Wider World, the next video fragment, which follows a group of seniors studying digital photography and the World Wide Web at “@ Senior Planet,” where the mission is “aging with attitude.” Lampert’s lens spends about a minute with each unnamed student as their reasons for attending are reported: “feeling less scary about [the Internet],” traditional photographs’ susceptibility to moisture and age, whereas “in the computer they can last maybe forever.” A lattice of platitudinous images — lopsided sidewalk trees, shadowy mannequins in hazy windows, grinning friends mid-gait — project onto the classroom wall and frame the students’ monologues. In the final scene of this six-minute video, the seniors smile quietly over their crisp A-4 paper diplomas, glad, I think, to have something tangible in hand.

The nostalgia that accompanies the hand-wrought continues in the next video segment, Typewriter Tony. Here we meet a purveyor of the “abandoned technology,” who notes how the pre-online and post-world are differentiated by the ability to be alone: the Internet “infringed on our lives so much… [the typewriter] puts you in a different state.” Could the distinction here be between the art of being alone and just plain, albeit distracted, loneliness?

And what does “losing the manual” signify anyway? A beclouded experience of technology? A technically astute, but ethically unsound use and disuse of gleaming machines? The whole of Lampert’s exhibition doesn’t quite make a call but rather functions much like the gadgets and contraptions it puts on display — as a list, or a grid, or the coolly scanning gaze of a security camera.

Our first character pops in again in Charlie’s Future Technology quoting the futurist Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As Charlie speaks, I notice I’ve gone beyond recording snippets in lieu of scrawling notes, and am now plainly watching the monumental projection through my iPhone. The camera app is insisting I don’t have sufficient storage to record. The gallery is closing soon and I worry that I’ll forget the details of the video on the way from doing something I love to doing something that earns a wage.

The subsequent video, Actual Real Cameras tracks a lovely girl fumbling with an old 35mm Minolta SLR in a singular, aesthetically engaging portion of the exhibition. That SLR is the same model that was passed down to me for my first photography class. The taut click of the open shutter startling the onscreen digital-native was just one enchantment in a sensual process of image-making that was already in its death-throes when I got my hands on my first Minolta. I shot exclusively on Kodachrome and by chance managed to get through most of my college courses before the remaining three labs in the world still processing the film were shut down. Like Charlie, I had a weird childhood fascination that remains, but mine was with brightly colored images, and I imagined the world had once been Kodachrome-bright and had subsequently faded like a husk from the flush of its Technicolor glory.

It’s banal to discuss nostalgia and dead technology, and somehow it’s become trite to talk about degrees that become obsolete sooner than they’re earned. A heavy wordlessness looms around the issue.

On the other side of the gallery, past Lampert’s photographic grids of everyday people who tread Manhattan gaze-down, iPhone aloft, there is a little dirge that takes place at Jonas Mekas’ New York institution, Anthology Film Archives — where the artist is also Curator of Collections. The video DCP/Steenbeck documents in a plain, split-screen composition the removal of a 16mm Steenbeck editing bay from Lampert’s residence on the right, while in the left frame the Anthology staff hoists, by yellow cord and lever, a new DCP (Digital Cinema Package) projector into place. The pale-blue, formica Steenbeck is carried out to the trunk of car and covered with a black blanket. Charlie’s potato chip insights and skepticism still linger at the end of Lampert’s exhibition: “Somehow this is more economical.”

The post “Antiquated Piece of Shit”: Andrew Lampert at UTVAC appeared first on artcritical.

“Rabbit season! No — duck season! No — rabbit season!” Michael Bell-Smith’s solo exhibition at Foxy Production, borrows its title from a scene in a 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon, in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck try to evade hunter Elmer Fudd’s murderous intent by changing a placard to indicate that it’s the other critter that should be hunted. Modifying the existing sign is a surprisingly fast and easy game-changer, but also a necessary one: for Bugs and Daffy, their life depends upon it.

Bell-Smith is interested in the malleability and instability of images. Like other Post-Internet artists, he delights in the tsunami of stock digital imagery that engulfs us, presenting itself so promiscuously, as if dying to be interfered with and repurposed. Computer desktop wallpaper, libraries of textures, browser views, 3D software demo scenes are the readymade raw materials that Bell-Smith melds into questions about the nature of our universe of images.

Six vinyl on aluminum prints, each 31 x 23 inches, riff on the familiar statement “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member,” setting that text in what appears to be an uncompleted layout for a magazine ad. The quote (actually uttered by Groucho Marx) is misattributed to various celebrities and historical figures. It’s amusing to observe the quote’s meaning slide politically left or right as it is passed from mouth to mouth: when Ayn Rand says it, it’s a conservative’s kiss to the unregulated market; from Thomas Jefferson, a vision of liberty; from the different-thinking Steve Jobs, a call to individuation via shopping.

The series “Standard and Life” (2014), comprised of three 47-by-35-inch vinyl-on-aluminum prints, appears as tasteful AbEx allovers. But they’re clever simulations: each mark is a vector-graphics representation of a hand-made gesture, like Roy Lichtenstein’s Benday dot images of brushstrokes. There’s a digital prank here. The same marks re-appear identically in each image, that is, every image is only a rearrangement of one set of messy components. Bell-Smith mocks the modernist sincerity of a gesture, like Jackson Pollock’s shamanesque paint-flinging, by re-imagining it as an algorithm running an equation with arbitrary variables. It’s a re-evaluation of expressive art-making as little more than what Vilem Flusser termed a “combination game.”

The exhibition’s richest work is the five-minute video Rabbit Season, Duck Season (2014). Like Oliver Laric’s Versions (2012), it’s a theoretical inquiry in Internet-friendly form. The rigor of an essay film is mated with the easy WTF-ness of an animated GIF. Bell-Smith montages hyperreal but unnatural 3D renders, Shutterstock images, and close-ups of fabrics, while subtitles ruminate on questions like, “This / that? Norm / alt? Cool / uncool? Visible / invisible?”

The question “rabbit season or duck season?” might be best interpreted as, Do you side with Adorno or Benjamin? Do we swing high or low? Do we locate ourselves outside, in reasoned critical distance, or inside the contradictions of lived experience?

In his video, Bell-Smith stakes out a uncommitted, centrist position: ”The conversation is cyclical. It could last forever, ping-ponging back and forth across time. …I’m tired. I don’t want to make any more decisions today.” If all is arbitrary, then little is demanded of us. While it’s true that there is energy in the pendulum swing to the opposite pole, and that to be human is to move between contradictory positions, the easy relativist stance misses out on what any fully-inhabited position provides access to: a type of ethics and/or belief. Disappointingly, Bell-Smith refuses to join any club that would have him as a member.

Has any Post-Internet artist made his or her work with Bugs and Daffy’s attitude of absolute conviction, not merely playing a low-stakes game, but struggling desperately for survival? The genre has not yet identified its Elmer Fudd.

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