H

E-State Realisms — exhibition text and catalogue

ArtCenter/South Florida (now Oolite Arts), 924 Lincoln Road, 2nd floor, Miami Beach. 25 July – 30 September 2018. Curated by Emer Grant. Text as published on the Oolite Arts exhibition page (source); harm.work reproduces it on E-State Realisms. Catalogue: the "E-State Realisms e-publication", 64 pages, PDF of September 2018 (copy on narrativeprojects.com; the Google Drive link on the Oolite page no longer works). Wiki reading: E-State Realisms (ArtCenter/South Florida, 2018). Nora Khan's catalogue essay: Associative Systems.

Exhibition text

Artists: GALA Committee, Felice Grodin, Nicolas Lobo, Jillian Mayer, Harm van den Dorpel, and more. Curated by: Emer Grant.

As our digital and analog worlds continue to merge, we are only beginning to understand the profound effects this change is having on our society. How then, might we use art to understand how the internet is shaping our lives? How does art move through that digital space – and what does that mean for an artwork's value?

Oolite Arts's new exhibition, E-State Realisms explores these and other issues emerging in the digital age. It's departure point is a pre-Internet phenomenon that set the stage for these challenges. The exhibition starts with rarely-exhibited works by the GALA Committee, the artist collective created by conceptual artist Mel Chin in the 1990s. The collective flooded the popular soap opera Melrose Place with artworks as props in disguise. These works were later traded at auction with this broadcast value factored in. In doing so, the collective demonstrated how narrative and value had foreclosed on one another. The popularity of this soap opera not only proved how value was transferred on to an artwork, it perpetuated the postmodern logic that the meaning of art is constructed by viewing.

The internet has since amplified the reach of media beyond broadcast radio and TV into a global marketing megastructure — a new architecture of information. Artworks are now made to exist in two realms: the physical one from which they originate, and the digital one in which they continue to circulate globally. This digital manifestation of the object becomes a negation of the artwork, precisely because it creates a system of value based on circulation, not proximity or ownership. This paradigm suggests a shift toward a new art ecology, one where art depends on the reproduction and distribution in the marketplace for its sustenance. Complicity is inevitable for all involved: the artist, curator, institution and spectator alike.

The pieces in this exhibition, which begins with a GALA Committee work, tackle a range of topics from blockchain, to luxury real estate and e-commerce. Some are documents of pieces that exist purely online. Together, they seek to peel back a layer of our world, and use artistic interventions to demonstrate how digital landscapes shape our everyday reality.

Opening

The opening on Wednesday 25 July 2018 began at 6 pm with a panel "between Critic and ArtCenter Fellow Nora Khan and Chief Curator Red Bull Art-New York Max Wolf on the legacy of the GALA Committee and the widespread influence of digital technology in the contemporary cultural landscape. Moderated by Emer Grant", followed by a reception from 7 to 9 pm (Oolite Arts event page). The event page calls Grant an "ArtCenter Fellow".

Van den Dorpel's works in the catalogue

The catalogue's list of plates gives, for van den Dorpel (pp. 22–42):

The prints are credited "Courtesy the artist and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam". harm.work catalogues four of them under shortened titles: Peached Renitencies Mercer (2018), Sensualist (slug w-d-sensualist, dated 2019), R. Electrotype (2018, UltraChrome on Hahnemühle paper, 100 × 100 cm) and C. C. Rashes (dated 2019), with the software Nested Exchange. The artist's are.na block of 28 June 2018 titles the explainer "Wildcard Token Explainer", "As part of" the exhibition (block 2368362).

From Emer Grant's catalogue essay

Grant's essay, "E-State Realisms" (pp. 4–7), opens with a conversation with van den Dorpel:

An early conversation between myself and Harm van den Dorpel has stayed with me throughout curating this exhibition. We were talking about decentralised networks as inspiration, and he described the moment when you are in a deep sleep and you start to wake up and "look" around the room, and what was once familiar has become something else; furniture is recast as looming figures, lighting becomes texture. Then, the familiar reemerges and at this point consciousness becomes the computation that sorts the visual environment into a reality that permits bodily response. This alien dimension of haze, randomness, and anarchy before the reassertion of cognition, is the space in which the artworks in E-State Realisms coalesce.

She proposes that Miami "must be understood as hyperreal, a composite of the unreal, the digital, and the fake", reads private infrastructure through Keller Easterling's term "extrastatecraft", and treats the GALA Committee's Melrose Place project, including Total Proof, banned from the broadcast after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, as the moment TV "had become the public sphere". She then turns to Felice Grodin's 3D Assets, sculptures and text on architecture as a reification of investment, and to van den Dorpel:

Dutch artist Harm van den Dorpel uses genetic algorithms to produce his work. Van den Dorpel comes from a generation of artists who are suspicious of capital's role in the global connectivity of the internet. As an early practitioner of "Internet Art" he was a skeptic who recognized the Silicon Valley revolution for what it was— capitalism re-branded. Using web-based content as both source and material, the artist looked to the changing organizational structures of the creative process that have emerged as a result of new technologies of connection. In Nested Exchange: " the artwork begins its life as a digital specimen that lives in the cloud. It is ascribed pseudo-biological properties such as a chromosome to breed and birth children across generations and form part of a population." The population produces the condition where they can couple off, and breeding occurs through exchanging genetic information, reframed as "gossiping," a nod to informal networks and their continued influence across power. The "fittest" then make it through to become frozen as an immutable data set, appearing in E-State Realisms as prints. These works exist on the ethereum blockchain, where each artwork is assigned a speculative value mediated through the various iterations of presence and movement throughout culture. Three images show how the act of looking co-authors the work, its essence scattered and its aura seemingly impossible to pin down.

The quotation inside the passage is footnoted to "Harm van den Dorpel 'Nested Exchange' presentation notes 2018". The essay continues with Nicolas Lobo's 3D-printed figure of his friend Jon, whose head wound from a fall while painting a mural on a condo was detailed by an international pool of digital labourers, and Jillian Mayer's pitch to become Brand Representative for Estonia's E-Residency programme. It ends:

By inserting the work of contemporary artists into global channels, E-State Realisms identifies the absence of critical contemporary art in the viral domain. Here artists are dealing critically with and not about the digital/IRL landscape. They are active players in the systems they critique.

and closes with the claim that the exhibition "attempts to reclaim art as critique by rethinking the terms of complicity and the spatial configurations of content." A footnote names the exhibition's precursor: the 12-week fellowship "The Re-calibrated Institution", organised by Natalia Zuluaga, Victoria Ivanova and Armen Avanessian at ArtCenter/South Florida, whose participants included Grodin and Nora Khan.