Katrina Sluis’ work Server Room in the Central Saint Martins MA Fine Art show was on first sight merely a literal imposition of contemporary computing into the gallery space, but set amongst video works, paintings and sculpture, the work brought to light the complex, contradictory and ritualized relations that define our experience of the image / object in the digital age. On the final day of the show we discussed the work and its conceptual context.
Tom Clark. It felt like a bit of a rupture looking at the server room to start with, having seen it against all the projections. There’s a lot of conventional appropriation of representation. Is this work a deliberate gesture against that kind of thing?
Katrina Sluis. That’s a good question, I mean I guess a lot of the things that I think about, certainly in terms of my own writing and so on is how one might think about photography and representation in an environment where the flow of images is increasingly mediated by non-humans.
Oliver Laric: Productively destructive on Flux Magazine
Screenshot from Versions 2010, single channel video, work in progress. (all images are
Courtesy of Seventeen Gallery)
Whilst most people may not have heard about Oliver Laric's work, they will at least know or participate in the subject. Based in Berlin, his ongoing projects have investigated how images are used, appropriated and modified in contemporary digital experience.
Using historical events such as the Iconoclastic damage of religious icons during the Protestant Reformation as a starting point to make sense of a constantly updating and proliferating visual landscape, he produces videos, digital images and objects that document and explore the replication of culturally significant images.
This October at the Frieze Art Fair he will be showing his video work Versions 2010 along side a suite of polyurethane sculptures based on the iconoclastically defaced reliefs from Utrecht Cathedral in the Netherlands and bootlegged copies of the rare 1977 publication by Margarette Bieber Ancient Copies.
Nature – Technology project, Tom Clark, 2010
Nature, Landscape and Technology
Experience and Origin
Our view of nature is irrevocably bound to a romantic idea of Landscape: something to be looked upon, and increasingly through and mediated by digital technology.
Today, we are more likely to experience the digital or cultural sublime rather than any original and vital experience of the natural world. As technology (particularly visually mediating) becomes further integrated into contemporary experience, the divide between actual and representational becomes increasingly blurred.
What then is an origin? Can there be a truly (Kantian) sublime experience, particularly given the popularity of adventure-leisure: especially as these activities are commercialized, spectactularized and competitive, whilst claiming to offer an ever realer experience.
As the ‘experience’ of nature becomes increasingly mediated, digital technology is used to create ever more ‘real’/believable virtual versions of nature in computer games, big-budget CGI in Hollywood movies and increasingly exciting representations in documentaries.
This engenders a double looping of abstraction and confusion as potentially nostalgic and already ideologically predetermined ideas of nature are re-mediated through exponentially effective and invasive technological mimesis.
The question of origin also applies to the understanding of digital technology itself: the belief in the truth and reproducibility of a digital file which, with no tangible existence, has no apparent origin (in an analogue sense) making it mutable, corruptible and available for appropriation.
Where, when the visual experience is only a visualization of data that has no physical providence, does the origin, or ‘real experience’ of digital visual forms exist?
The works in this project seek to make clear these concerns in the forms they exist in culturally through appropriation and re-positioning; using the means by which they were created in the first place.
Photo by: Gigi KaliskyPublished here on the CSM Website (link)
The Sandra Blow Lecture: Vanessa Jackson Stolen & Contaminated – the form, the function and the ornament.
Review by Tom Clark.
Providing context and theoretical ‘justification’ for her practice, Vanessa Jackson’s lecture was a wide reaching journey through art history and the continued influence of geometry and system in visual and physical experience.
I approached this lecture somewhat wary of her particular use of phenomenology and abstraction but it was interesting to see how these questions intersected with her continued, and unchanged practice in our over-developed and culturally available contemporary context.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the talk arose out of her ritualistic use of abstraction and geometric form. She noted how, at the beginning of her practice, abstraction seemed to provide a transcendental democracy, balancing the velocity of modernity[1] and ideas in the highly politicised art school of the early 1970s. Now, this seems outmoded and by her own admission ‘somewhat unable’ to fully deal with the current context.
Despite her own attempts, using phenomenology and “democratic’” (in what she describes as a “trans-cultural” sense) abstract geometric aesthetics to decontextualize and therefore democratize the content of the paintings, abstraction now has an established art history. It is recognisable and culturally referential, its loss of radical potential is explored by Peter Halley in his 1984 article for Arts Magazine ‘The Crisis in Geometry.’[2] In a particularly ironic example; the same systems of geometry artists used to legitimize their practice were also those cited by Michel Foucault[3] as the organizational system for surveillance and social confinement.
Moreover, though this is testament to the lecture’s depth and negotiation of information, Jackson’s ability to link sources and ‘culturally sample’ (as was seen here) is now more symptomatic of a system that properly developed after the first wave of avant garde: that is, the world wide web. The Internet is designed to be flexible, rhizomatic and chaotic; something which, it appears, sits uneasily with Jackson’s continued exploration of experience using a rigidly specified two-dimensional painting praxis.
In a way this perhaps stems from her early experience of conceptualism. Her research and the systems of its access and organisation outstrip the ritualized and distinct ‘rules’ of her practice. The geometric forms in the work lend themselves to the more traditional examples of illusion and ornament in the lecture’s accompanying slide show, which, only occasionally matched up with what was said. Seemingly, like her paintings, they attempting to float above theory and cultural context.
In spite of my initial reservations I enjoyed the lecture, not least for its demonstration of the continued instability of the authorial image when sourced from and placed amongst the networks and systems of contemporary information and cultural exchange. In its continuity the work allows this morphing of context to become evermore apparent, and articulates the increasing difficulty of providing an abstract, geometric resolution to the plurality of visual experience.
