I briefly made my way by On and Off over at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery tonight (would be better if the url for this exhibition were not the homepage of the gallery as we’ll lose the link to the show’s content in the future).

Actually, I liked the show and wanted to stay longer but was not feeling well.

The online newspaper series by Olia Lialina and Dragan Esperschied was an interesting idea – take real newspapers, digitize them and run animated characters ontop of the digital newspaper.   The works are satisfying to look at if you don’t ask anything more than what you see.

My problem with Online Newspapers are not how it’s done but the lack of a clear relationship between the animated figures and the theme of the  newspaper behind it.   Sure, the newspaper above is in Chinese (I think – or is it Japanese – I can’t tell since the lettering is horizontal and vertical).  At best, the animated oriental fighting figures are boxing with the appliances and lettering of the newspaper – so what? 

Here is a good idea that does not go anywhere.   In fact, my idea of painting my life as a homepage would be perfect for an approach like the Online Newspaper – this pair of artists had good ideas but don’t know where to go with it.

Lisa Jevbratt’s Informe Imager is an interesting idea too …. though the abstraction might dilute the idea.  I think Lisa’s idea is to deplict a telnet session or web traffic that happens at a specific moment in time as a printout.  

 

The work itself is much better in person than online (strange that I say it since the painting deplicts an online experience – like the handshaking telnet / tcpip protocol) as the color printout has textures missing from the online picture.

Same problem – this printout is a good idea, but stop and think about it for a second.  Take any digital image and blow it up – limit the color and you get a image much like what’s above.  So what’s the relationship between the squares and what she’s deplicting …nothing – except in her title of the work.

I’d be the first one to say this work is great if the artist did their homework a little better and made the pictorial elements do something more than just sit there.  For example, if your going to paint TCPIP telnet session happening on a website – do something to show “handshaking” and make the colors connect somehow with something meaningful on the site – use the composition and structure of the 2D printout to reinforce a real computer experience that happened in a moment of time.  The artist did not do that – both did not do that – this one just illustrated a telnet session and the other one just put a newspaper on a flat panal screen and ran some figures over it – both totally missed the greater opportunities their work afford them.

My point – if your going to use the computer and internet – don’t just reference the internet, as the other artist who listed all their MySpace “Friends” on a projected movie on one of the walls, do the internet in your work – be the internet.

My overall impression -good ideas that were wasted.  There are so many things you could do with the Online Newspaper idea – way beyond what was done – same with the rest of the work – they actually played it safe – this show could have been a 100% better if the artists just went a bit futher – used more imagination, more daring. 

What would have been more daring …… create your own network in the gallery where the show is taking place (no big deal) and make the online newspapers take snapshots of the visitors and have them overlayed over the digitized newspapers….how’s that for something more interesting?   Or how about taking the printout of a telnet session (or whatever it was) and create some subtle overlays that connect the website with the printout…again…be the Internet.

These artists played it safe, like I said, settling for pretty pictures when they could have actually done something meaningful.  Let’s hope they improve the ideas as there’s a lot of unrealized potential here.

I may go to this opening if I feel up to it – it’s called On and Off and here’s the Press Release.

 

The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present On and Off a new show featuring an international group of contemporary artists.

Ten years since it emerged as a medium for contemporary art, the Internet, and the work it inspires, is no longer confined by the browser window. The Web influences culture at large: it adapts to new technology, cultivates demographics, and evolves our cultural needs and norms. The works of Vuk Cosic, Lisa Jevbratt, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Thomson & Craighead, and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are testament to its expanding role in contemporary life.

In ASCII History of Moving Images Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic re-presents key moments in classic films as monochromatic waves of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) characters. Cosic’s use of this universal code to depict Psycho or Battleship Potemkin draws our attention to how culturally specific artifacts are translated and viewed across cultures, both on and off the Web.

The German based artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenscheid also examine issues of cultural translation in their work Online Newspapers. They re-imagine how our world’s newspaper sites would appear if they had been developed not by professional web and graphic designers, but by the lay journalists whose homegrown aesthetics defined the era before the dot-com boom.

Through their work Beacon, the British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead provide a real-time glimpse of the obsessions of our time by showing us, in a rhythmic, relentless stream, what people are “Googling.” The fragmented phrasing used in search queries is made public and becomes a poetic narrative—sometime shocking, other times mundane—of our culture’s almost tragic longing.

For YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ Travels in Utopia: A Brief History of the Internet, network technology is not only the subject, but also the means of distribution for their text-based narratives. With basic Flash animation, a limited palette of colors and fonts, and a soundtrack of 1960s style bebop, their stories reside somewhere between the novella and cinema and encourage a new type of reading.

Rather than focusing on the output and use of the Internet, Swedish/American artist Lisa Jevbratt looks at its base structure and organization. The Infome Imager works mine the vast database of existing Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Using predetermined guidelines (the date, URL, length of site, or network location for instance) she assigns particular colors and patterns to IPs in a specified range. The results are part portrait, part landscape painting and wholly beautiful and abstract visions of information itself.

Long working at the forefront of the medium, these artists explore the particularities of Web technology and its aesthetics and utility in projects that clearly transcend the specificity of “Internet art.” Internationally renowned and widely exhibited both on line and off these artists offer us compelling insights into our simple, everyday desire to be connected.

Vuk Cosic was the Slovenian representative to the Venice Biennale in 2001 and is the co-founder of Ljudmila — a digital media lab for artists in Slovenia. A pioneer in the medium Cosic has been widely exhibited internationally. He has recently been included in shows at the, Chelsea Art Museum in New York, the ICA in London, Villette Numerique in Paris and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

Lisa Jevbratt is a Swedish/American artist and an Assistant Professor in the Media Arts and Technology Program and the Art Department at University of California Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, and Transmediale in Berlin.

Olia Lialina was born in Russia and now lives and teaches at the Merz Academie in Stuttgart, Germany. Originally a film critic, Lialina is known as the creator of some of the most powerful and influential works of network based art and art criticism. German born Dragan Espenschied is also a lecturer at Merz Academie in Stuttgart. His online work Gravity won the People’s Choice Webby Award in 2004 and he is a core member of the rock band Bodenstandig 2000. Together and separately their work has been shown in numerous online and off line venues including Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, Deitch Projects in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

Thomson and Craighead are London based artists who work primarily with video, sound and network technologies. Their online, site specific and installation works have been exhibited widely in venues including the Barbican Center and the Tate Modern in London, FACT in Liverpool, the New Museum in New York, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Villette Numerique in Paris.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ two chief officers are Korean born Young-hae Chang (C.E.O) and American born Marc Voge (C.I.O). The primarily Web based artists who live and work in Seoul, South Korea have been included in numerous publications on new media art and have been shown at the New Museum in New York, the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

The Gallery is located at 601 W 26th Street, Suite 1240, New York, NY. The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6.
 

Been having a lot of problems with my back – I may have done something to it and as I did this nude study of a woman athlete, who was our model today, my back pain really picked up…but it maybe it was worth it for Art (I’ll be easier on my back for now on, I need it).

I tried to find out something about the model – she’s in her off season but trains 10 hours a day and now has her own business setting up sports competitions – did not do justice to her face – it was an oil pastel and I did my best – was more captivated by her skin smooth, perfect body – I tried to convey that — or maybe it just comes out of the paint.

And here’s my experiment – below – painting my life as if it’s a homepage.

In case you don’t know what this – my life as a Web Analyst where I analyze the success of  websites has been transformed (in this sense) into a page of my own life – a real synthesis.

From an execution point – I learnt something from this experiment.  I need more detail (better mediums as well – perhaps working with Oil again – acrylic is harder to manipulate) and I need, for me, larger canvas and more drawing beforehand.  I did a little.

For a quick check to see how my idea would look, I’m satisfied that I got what I need out of this exercise.   I will do a couple of there before trying to do what I’m seeing in my mind – something much more ambitious.

I don’t mind sharing this as it’s what the internet is all about and as I give more – I receive more.  I will mention that I felt encourged to try this first experiment in painting my life as a homepage after seeing the paintings of Alfred Jensen as the approach (painting texture, design, overall feel) is much closer to my own way of expressing myself and organizing sensation.  I don’t want formulas, and Jensen does that – I don’t need the formulas to understand his paintings on an intuitive level – it’s the paint texture that I want to adapt to the “homepage” life painting.

Like I said -this was just an experiment …hell, it’s all an experiment – the last thing I want to do is an illustration of the homepage of anything…  That’s an idea, again, a synthesis, my path.

Ok, I admit I was not expecting much when I want to the Art(212) fair last night at the 68th Regiment Armory on 26th Street and Lexington Ave, NYC.

I can’t even identify half the artists that I saw whom I liked – the show was not organized in a way that makes it easy for Art Writers, like me, to write about it (maybe next time, they can printup cards for each artist in the show with a picture or two and the contact information – that’s my suggestion).

I’m going to just mention what I liked – even if I don’t have the name of the artist – readers, try to figure it out if your interested by going to the Art 212 listing.

The most impressive art in the show was Devorah Sperber’s After van Eyke, and the artist will be having a show next month at the Brooklyn Musuem of Art which ArtNewYorkCity.com will cover as I live in Brooklyn, NY and do go the Brooklyn Museum from time to time.

 

I did collect a packet with Devorah Sperber’s informaiton – the work is 5024 spools of thread arranged to appear like a painting from Van Eyck when you appear in front of it with the crystal ball.  Amazing!

I also talked a woman from the Art Gallery website creator called THEO – Theo Digital Gallery System at www.theodigitalgallery.com ; it’s a web content management system just for galleries.  I asked if it was profitable enough to run something like this and the lady said ….”yes” but she does travel a lot (I guess there are galleries all over).  Anyway, I like the idea of a CMS system for galleries as most Art Gallery sites are awful from the point of view of Search Engines – and I question if any of them do well, in many cases, even on the Artist’s name.  Yes, I’m sure they will work OK for the Gallery name…but few people search that way.  Anyway, if THEO solves an Art Galleries Search needs, all power to them.

I also liked the works of David Kramer who was being shown with the Birch Libralato Gallery located in Toronto (but I think he lives here).

And here’s a couple of extra shots of the show and work (don’t have names, sorry).

An Andy Warhol photo by some famous photographer – I liked it.

I liked the artist – who lives in the midwest, but where it’s warm – it’s a made up scene – but I liked it so that’s why it’s here in ArtNewYorkCity.com.

And here’s the Art(212) show itself. It’s on though the weekend in case anyone lives in NYC and reads this blog.

And now I’m off to paint today. Chow.