Loomer (2015) — First Solo Show in Los Angeles

Young Projects, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, opening 23 January 2015. Source: the artist's press release, 3003, also at Loomer — Press Release.

The show

The press release opens: "Press release for 'Loomer', my first solo show in Los Angeles, 2015, I will be presenting an array of formerly unmaterialized poster collages, presented in space with sculptures and animations, many of which span the past five years." A listing of the time gives the venue as Young Projects in West Hollywood and the run as from 23 January, "a month at least". harm.work has no page for the exhibition.

Assemblage (shell) hanging on four cables above a concrete floor marked with looping lines — *Assemblage (shell)* (2011) in *Loomer*, Young Projects, 2015 — are.na, 13 August 2019

The photograph, filed in his are.na channel sculpture (block), shows Assemblage (shell): an open sphere of riveted transparent strips, one ending in a disc printed with an ammonite, hung on four cables above a concrete floor marked with looping lines. The same work hung in About (2012) and was on the checklist for Release Early, Release Often (2013), one of the works "that span the past five years" (→ Sculpture and the Object).

The third person dropped

"When writing texts for my own exhibitions, I used to pretend and write them in the third person: 'the artist', 'Van den Dorpel', 'he'. An outsider perspective suggests neutrality, and protects me from explaining my own work."

He calls the convention a pretence and writes this text in the first person. The same year's Just-in-Time press release went further, printing his chat with the writer (→ Just-in-Time). The argument about the third person as concealment is made on Process Legibility.

Artist or programmer

"After studying artificial intelligence, I graduated art school in 2006. I still hesitate to call myself an artist. At obligatory gatherings I prefer to say I'm a computer programmer, which is more tangible."

"Post internet"

"Often people approach explanations in terms of 'found imagery', which is 'culled' from the internet. I never minded the label 'post internet' but know it is not sustainable. The fact that the internet is my material doesn't mean much anymore. It's 2015 and modes of appropriation are default."

He accepts the label and says it will not last, because working with internet material is no longer distinctive. Seven years later he put the sequence of labels more bluntly in an interview with Tina Rivers Ryan: "I used to be called a net artist, then I was a Post-Internet artist, now I'm a crypto artist. I don't care." (Spike #70, 2021/22).

The work runs ahead

"Shared blobs, organised algorithmically. I can't be productive without programming a system. What the work is about, runs ahead of myself, and I will never quite fully catch up with it (even though I suspect it's always about the same)."

The parenthesis qualifies the claim: the work keeps getting ahead of him, but it may always be about one thing. 793, which adapts a passage from Bernard Williams's Morality (1972) quoting D. H. Lawrence ("find your deepest impulse, and follow that … a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision"), states as a principle what the press release reports as experience (→ Impulse, Risk, and Method).

The new and the known

"I'm leaning over, approaching too close, breathing over the edge of my own screen. Small drops of spit land on it. There is still a potentiality in the 'new', regardless how quickly it condensates into a 'known', which then slips through my fingers again."

The text ends at the screen, close enough to spit on it. The new keeps a potential even though it quickly becomes known, and the known does not stay either. 952 makes a similar observation: "upon arrival its novelty fades immediately". The wiki maps this onto the New/Not-New axis on Semiotic Square.