Free — exhibition texts

New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Second Floor Gallery, 20 October 2010 – 23 January 2011. Curated by Lauren Cornell. The texts below are reproduced from the New Museum Digital Archive (exhibition record), the museum's 2010 press release (copy on artmap) and the exhibition's catalogue website, newmuseum.org/free (Internet Archive copy of 29 May 2012; the museum notes that Rhizome also archived it at archive.rhizome.org/free).

Exhibition text (New Museum Digital Archive)

"Free" explores how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space. Our shared space has expanded beyond streets and schools to more distributed forms of collectivity. What constitutes this expanded public is not only greater social connectedness but a highly visual, hybrid commons of information. As the artist Seth Price wrote in his essay "Dispersion," which serves as a touchstone for this exhibition and is featured here within a large-scale sculptural Essay with Knots: "Collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza."

"Free" takes its name from free culture, a social movement that acknowledges the revolution the internet has caused in industries like music and print publishing, and argues that it be dealt with as an opportunity for greater sharing and distribution of knowledge, rather than a threat. "Free" is based in this commitment to openness — but not directly about the movement itself. Rather, it explores how artists are engaging with the complex freedoms of a newly expanded public space; how they are examining the possibilities and dilemmas enabled by broader availability and circulation of digital material, rooting out information that is missing or hidden in an ostensibly more transparent society, and locating new contexts for art to take place.

Instead of exploring the internet's formal properties — code and connectivity among them — "Free" explores its broader influence as a territory populated and fought over by individuals, government, and corporations, as a tool and as a cultural catalyst. The artists included here span various disciplines: photography, sculpture, video, and installation, among others. They emerge from different modes of artistic practice, and are connected through an expansive conversation around the show's themes. The exhibition catalogue will take the form of an active website — newmuseum.org/free — including descriptions of each artwork in the exhibition, biographical details on the artists, as well as essays and a blog.

"Free" is curated by Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator of the New Museum

Artists: Liz Deschenes, Aleksandra Domanović, Lizzie Fitch, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg, David Horvitz, David Karp, Lars Laumann, Andrea Longacre-White, Kristin Lucas, Jill Magid, Hanne Mugaas, Takeshi Murata, Rashaad Newsome, Lisa Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Clunie Reid, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alexandre Singh, Ryan Trecartin, Harm van den Dorpel.

Press release (2010)

FREE
20 October 2010 - 23 January 2011

Today, culture is more dispersed than ever before. The web has broadened both the quantity and kind of information freely available. It has distributed our collective experience across geographic locations; opened up a new set of creative possibilities; and, coextensively, produced a set of challenges. This fall, the New Museum will present "Free," an exhibition including twenty-three artists working across mediums—including video, installation, sculpture, photography, the internet, and sound —that reflects artistic strategies that have emerged in a radically democratized landscape redefined by the impact of the web. The exhibition makes a case for a newly formed public art that responds to a vastly more connected society whose true openness is still being negotiated. The philosophy of free culture, and its advocacy for open sharing, informs the exhibition, but is not its subject. Instead, the title and featured works present a complex picture of the new freedoms and constraints that underlie our expanded public space. "Free" is curated by Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome and New Museum Adjunct Curator.

"Free" is inspired in part by "Dispersion" (2001–), an essay by the artist Seth Price that is available as a free online booklet and will be featured within the exhibition as a large-scale sculptural installation composed of nine panels each imprinted with a page from the original booklet. The essay traces the increased dispersion of culture, by examining how its circulation and reception has changed across mediums from print, to video, and to the web. In light of the way we now experience political events and pop culture, Price questions the viability of public art as we understand it. Price writes: "We should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza." The works in "Free" alight from Price's statements to demonstrate and explore the multiple ways artists utilize, appropriate, and reenact material sourced from a distributed public space.

For Lisa Oppenheim's 35mm slideshow projection The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006), the artist sourced from Flickr snapshots of sunsets taken by US soldiers based in Iraq, and re-photographed the soldiers' photos against her own horizon in America, framing a common tendency to connect to a universal experience from a foreign vantage point. Artist Aleksandra Domanovic instigates a process of cultural transubstantiation in her work 19:30 (2010)—for which she traveled around the former Yugoslavia collecting visual introductions of nightly news shows from national television stations. She then uploaded these clips online and encouraged DJs to use them as the basis for new techno tracks—a genre of music chosen because it is based on the creation of infinite variations of original productions. Exhibited within the gallery as a two-screen video installation, 19:30 creates an unusual national archive while demonstrating how flexible the meaning of media can be, by revealing how easily obsolete culture from this former country (the nightly news sequences) can be rejuvenated into something vital with a shift in context.

Other works in the exhibition explore strategies around the appropriation of digital imagery. Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples (2009) by Clunie Reid is comprised of a series of found images the artist layers with hand-drawn anarchic expressions. Dark Current (2010), a series of photographs by Andrea Longacre-White, explores the aesthetics of photographic degradation, through images that the artist re-photographed countless times. Takeshi Murata, in a premiere single-screen video, explores the way public images are interpreted, transformed, and personalized as they cycle through different contexts and hands. For this new video, Murata used the 3d modeling program Cinema 4D to investigate the notion of knockoffs through Popeye, a popular character that has been endlessly remixed online and whose copyright in Europe recently expired. Artist Trevor Paglen investigates information—be it personal, scientific, or governmental data—that is masked from public view. In his new series of large-scale landscape photographs, Paglen reveals classified information: federally sanctioned eavesdropping facilities deep in West Virginia and the orbits of dead spy satellites around the moon—all secret activity made visible with extensive research and a long-range lens. Martijn Hendriks considers common forms of mass communication in his Untitled (Black Video) (2009). Hendriks sourced anonymous comments from an online video forum who participants were responding to the leaked video of the execution of Saddam Hussein: some crude, some unsettled, some laissez-faire, all demonstrating the kind of freedom associated with being unidentifiable. Artist Joel Holmberg asked searching, existential questions in the user-generated forum Yahoo Answers, like 'How does it feel to be in love?' or 'How do I best convince someone I am an artist,' in substitution of the mundane questions usually asked about pets or parking needs. Holmberg's performance Legendary Account (2007-10) turns Yahoo Answers against itself by asking profound questions, instead of easily answerable ones.

Artists featured in "Free" include Liz Deschenes, Aleksandra Domanovic, Lizzie Fitch, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg, David Horvitz, Lars Laumann, Andrea Longacre-White, Kristin Lucas, Jill Magid, Hanne Mugaas, Takeshi Murata, Rashaad Newsome, Lisa Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Clunie Reid, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alexandre Singh, Ryan Trecartin & David Karp, and Harm Van Den Dorpel.

The exhibition catalogue will take the form of a frequently updated web site edited by Ceci Moss, Rhizome Senior Editor, with contributions by Lauren Cornell and guest essayists including author and critic Ed Halter; blogger Joanne McNeil; critic Brian Droitcour; and entrepreneur Caterina Fake, as well as related videos, articles, and artworks.

Catalogue entry: "Redux" series (newmuseum.org/free)

The catalogue website notes: "Artist texts were written by Brian Droitcour, Jacob Gaboury, Ceci Moss and Lauren Cornell. Writers are noted on individual texts." This entry is signed J.G./L.C.

"Redux" series
Harm van den Dorpel
2010 – Plastic, acrylic, glass, and spray paint

Critic and novelist Bruce Sterling has said, "The idea that the virtual is somehow philosophically separate from the actual is a period notion. It's done." Encompassing websites, video, collage and sculpture, Harm van den Dorpel melds physical and virtual realms, exploring how their overlap affects aesthetics and objecthood. He often utilizes sophisticated design and programming to create works that return materiality to digital form.

For the series "Redux," van den Dorpel appropriated movie posters from popular Hollywood films, including Cloverfield, The Lost World, and King Kong, which rely on costly technologies to create spectacular digital effects. These are the same technologies that are later used (by non-industry professionals) to capture and distribute the films for free via peer-to-peer networks and on CDs and DVDs. The collages in "Redux" are inspired by this radical shift in form. They draw on the commercial branding of the DVD-R & CD-Rs to examine the way content is carried in a post-cinematic, sometimes illegal state, where packaging and presence has been completely stripped down. By removing all figurative elements from the original posters and adding other material such as plastics, acrylic, glass, and spray paint, the collages lose their primary narrative and commercial context. What remains is a vastly different object, abstracted from its original, relying almost entirely on pattern and texture to convey a complex media transition, that is totally unlike, but haunted by its original content.
-J.G./L.C.

Education
Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, Fine Arts, 2006
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Artificial Intelligence, 2001

Selected Exhibitions
2010 – Multiplex, Peer to Space, Munich, DE
2010 – Enchanted, School of Development, Berlin, DE
2010 – Fotografia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome, IT
2010 – Sousveillance, The Young Artists' Biennial, Romania
2009 – Homebrew Readymades, Senko Gallery, Denmark
2009 – Prints, etc., Fabio Paris, Brescia, IT
2009 – Contemporary Semantics Beta, Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam
2009 – OAOA Annual Show, Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam
2009 – Are you sure you are you?, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, NY
2009 – The New Easy, Art News Projects, Berlin, DE
2009 – New Wave, Internet Pavillion, Biennale di Venezia, Venice, IT
2009 – Away from Keyboard Sculpture Garden, Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin, DE
2009 – Argot, Plan B, Amsterdam
2009 – Objects, Furniture, and Patterns, Art Since The Summer Of '69, New York, NY
2009 – Versions, Dutch Institute For Media Arts, Amsterdam

From Brian Droitcour, "All Together Now" (catalogue essay)

Droitcour's essay for the catalogue opens on Microsoft's 2009 Bing commercial and its "search overload", sets Google against it, and borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin the town and the road as figures of cyclical and forward-moving time, asking how the internet mixes the temporalities of conversation and archive. One paragraph discusses van den Dorpel's websites; it is quoted here with the image caption that precedes it. The rest of the essay is not reproduced.

Harm van den Dorpel, Ethereal Others and Ethereal Self, 2008-2010

"We should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion," Seth Price writes in his essay "Dispersion." "Publicness today has as much do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza." Ethereal Self is a website by Harm van den Dorpel, with enough hits to be considered public art by Price's criteria. When viewers allow it to access their webcams, it shows their reflections refracted in a silvery gemstone. Ethereal Others, the site's double, tiles snapshots of the viewers at the moment their webcams connect. Between these two sites, van den Dorpel visualizes the principle of Google Autocomplete or Amazon's shopping suggestions, which make individual interests and queries available for common use. Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others — the object of public viewing and the record of its viewers — inverts domestic interiors into the internet's open space.

Free Artists in Conversation (21 October 2010)

From the New Museum Digital Archive (sound record); the recording itself is held there.

Artists in "Free," including Aleksandra Domanovic, Martijn Hendriks, Alexandre Singh, and Harm Van Den Dorpel, discuss their work and the show's themes: What constitutes an expanded public space? How does a greater access to images, and a more democratically produced culture, affect their work? Participating artists present and discuss projects. Moderated by Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, New Museum Adjunct Curator, and curator of "Free."