Interdisciplinary and Time based Media Art research and exchange space.
A blog for Master of Fine Art MCMA Graduate students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale
What I find of most interest in these two pieces lies only marginal to the idea of a new media practice or the practice of using modern communicative devices as tools of visual art making. I say this because I read these pieces in a way that I feel to be almost inconsequential to their context of media technology or as acts of transgression toward previously established forms of visual representation. I also find the pieces – agreeably – to form something of an antithetical response to the prevailing ideals of the technological fetish. While Nick makes full use of the instagram as a technology tool, he also makes use of the instagram technology in a more subtle, provocative, quiet, and humane fashion that works to defuse its materialist ideology of endless nostalgic repetition, as well to undercut its built-in capitalist intuition for non-reflective obsessive consumption. What these two pieces seem to imply, as much as an introspective curiosity regarding the position of self in an age of technology and the meaning and use of new visual technologies, is an embodied response to, or continuation of, previously established modes of expression. It is in this sense of continuum, but a continuum not in a sense of the repetition of other historic movements, that the pieces take on an oblique and timeless quality that sidesteps the gloss and imminence of postmodern surfaces and dips inward toward an essentialist layer of personal and cultural contemplationist caution. It seems that the mediatory technology becomes more of an incidental symbol of our current period while allowing the pieces themselves to move into a koan like world where they purposefully allude any predetermined guidelines of easy definition. While sidestepping any presumptions of gloss and mere surface, the pieces seemingly collude in an understated provocation of anti-materialism. In their small and transparent forms, they strip away the sheen of advanced mathematical consumerism and dare exist as sublimely fragile and ideally non-reproducible idiosyncrasies that hint at a new contemplation hidden beneath the electrically charged canopy of our One and Zero based conveniences. On one hand I am reminded of pieces as constructively simple as Duchamp’s snow shovel, “In Advance Of The Broken Arm” and on the other hand, the meditative engagement of a Barnett Newman zip painting, but in a way in which all the parts are brought up to date for the twenty first century. The pieces propose a distinctly contradictory attitude. Maybe a dialectic that confronts the conundrum of the contemporary complexity of a secularized and overly intellectualized world on one side, and an innate simplicity that underlies our most basic ontological presence on the other. But the pleasure of the contradiction lies exactly where the most advanced of our everyday technologies are stripped of their fetishized subjects, the photograph of anyone or anything, and are crossed with the most simplistic craftsmanship. The presentation of sheets of glass and tape. What exactly is there in these pieces to label as subject mater? Perhaps many things, but not the pseudo-subjectifying photographic image. The images between the pains of glass are functionally fetishistic vessels that have been emptied of their primary content and intentionality. Again, the pieces seem to work well in relation to Duchamp’s ready-mades as well as with his notions of creating an Anti-Retinal art. And given that the pieces began as investigations into the innately retinal and intentionally fetishistic medium of the instagram, they seem to succeed not only as a furthering of techno-cultural critique and understanding, but as a subtle rebukes to the dictum of more is better. The image and the technology are forced to step back and momentarily pause. There is a place of thought where there is normally only engrossement. And there is at least a moment for the transitive and to slip quickly and quietly through the door.
NICK’S INSTAGRAMS
ReplyDeleteWhat I find of most interest in these two pieces lies only marginal to the idea of a new media practice or the practice of using modern communicative devices as tools of visual art making. I say this because I read these pieces in a way that I feel to be almost inconsequential to their context of media technology or as acts of transgression toward previously established forms of visual representation. I also find the pieces – agreeably – to form something of an antithetical response to the prevailing ideals of the technological fetish. While Nick makes full use of the instagram as a technology tool, he also makes use of the instagram technology in a more subtle, provocative, quiet, and humane fashion that works to defuse its materialist ideology of endless nostalgic repetition, as well to undercut its built-in capitalist intuition for non-reflective obsessive consumption. What these two pieces seem to imply, as much as an introspective curiosity regarding the position of self in an age of technology and the meaning and use of new visual technologies, is an embodied response to, or continuation of, previously established modes of expression. It is in this sense of continuum, but a continuum not in a sense of the repetition of other historic movements, that the pieces take on an oblique and timeless quality that sidesteps the gloss and imminence of postmodern surfaces and dips inward toward an essentialist layer of personal and cultural contemplationist caution. It seems that the mediatory technology becomes more of an incidental symbol of our current period while allowing the pieces themselves to move into a koan like world where they purposefully allude any predetermined guidelines of easy definition. While sidestepping any presumptions of gloss and mere surface, the pieces seemingly collude in an understated provocation of anti-materialism. In their small and transparent forms, they strip away the sheen of advanced mathematical consumerism and dare exist as sublimely fragile and ideally non-reproducible idiosyncrasies that hint at a new contemplation hidden beneath the electrically charged canopy of our One and Zero based conveniences. On one hand I am reminded of pieces as constructively simple as Duchamp’s snow shovel, “In Advance Of The Broken Arm” and on the other hand, the meditative engagement of a Barnett Newman zip painting, but in a way in which all the parts are brought up to date for the twenty first century.
The pieces propose a distinctly contradictory attitude. Maybe a dialectic that confronts the conundrum of the contemporary complexity of a secularized and overly intellectualized world on one side, and an innate simplicity that underlies our most basic ontological presence on the other. But the pleasure of the contradiction lies exactly where the most advanced of our everyday technologies are stripped of their fetishized subjects, the photograph of anyone or anything, and are crossed with the most simplistic craftsmanship. The presentation of sheets of glass and tape. What exactly is there in these pieces to label as subject mater? Perhaps many things, but not the pseudo-subjectifying photographic image. The images between the pains of glass are functionally fetishistic vessels that have been emptied of their primary content and intentionality. Again, the pieces seem to work well in relation to Duchamp’s ready-mades as well as with his notions of creating an Anti-Retinal art. And given that the pieces began as investigations into the innately retinal and intentionally fetishistic medium of the instagram, they seem to succeed not only as a furthering of techno-cultural critique and understanding, but as a subtle rebukes to the dictum of more is better. The image and the technology are forced to step back and momentarily pause. There is a place of thought where there is normally only engrossement. And there is at least a moment for the transitive and to slip quickly and quietly through the door.