#contemporaryart
Urban Outfitters, Apple, MacDonalds and lists of other companies look to the young creative class (YCC) to help identify their idealized audience. The YCC leads culture into the future by imposing new visual cues, ideologies, and politics. At different points in contemporary western history we can look to the Beatnicks, Hippies, Punks,Grunge, and most recently Hipsters to dictate the visual language of the commodified corporate standard. I understand, accept and expect large companies to appropriate counter culture aesthetics to promote their product and ideas but in a post internet society the commercial engine works as quickly as the culture engine. Today art, music, and fashion get posted, resposted, liked, tumbld, tweeted, and pinned constantly circulating and recirculating images until they’ve gone viral or become a new branding technique for the next microsoft campaign. With the success of internet image proliferation major companies have capitalized on what is intended as counter culture and spits it back out just as quickly as the authentic original image/idea reaches the cultural surface.
Because of this, artists like Alex Da Corte and Timur Si-Qin (internet artists) use image commodification proliferation as a medium. Their work critiques the devalued image and heightened value of ‘product as lifestyle’. But the dilemma with this mode of critique is the “any press is good press” mentality. Where companies like Apple, Monster Energy, and Axe are thrilled at the publicity they are receiving in a high concept culture market. It is one thing to have Axe body wash on a billboard at a busy highway interchange, but the reception of Axe body wash in a Brooklyn Art Gallery only gives the brand more power. Artists working in all forms of photography are quickly appropriated to sell product. Whether it is Cindy Sherman for Marc Jacobs or Terry Richardson for UNIQLO any potential contemporary art aesthetic is used to sell mass produced culture back to itself.
THE AXE EFFECT
So how do we as artists critique the commercialization of art/culture if we keep feeding images and culture back to it through the all you can eat internet buffet? If we take the initial translation of the avant garde as THE FRONT LINE it is our duty to perform that role. By providing the advertising/marketing mechanism content to sell to corporations we, through the food chain, provide the top 1% the visual structures they need to continue collecting the money that holds them at the top. If my hypothesis is correct we must figure out new modes to make art that denies ad agencies, bloggers, facebook the jpegs it so desperately needs to continue controlling our image dependent culture. If we don’t give them anything to see then no one will look. As an artist I believe it is our responsibility to take back control over visual culture. We should (in theory) have the most control considering our culture’s dependence on images.
It is easy to look to the past at the Earthworks artists, specifically Michael Heizer, for his negative sculptures and Hans Haacke for using the politics of an environment to dictate a works reception but who today is making work that denies an easily consumable image structure? Tino Sehgal is the easiest artist to reference as he refuses to document his work and instead sets up a series of actions or ephemeral sculptures that are only diseminated via audience photo/video uploaded from smart phones. Then there is Roman Ondak’s Loop created for Venice Biennale. For the Biennale Ondak replicated the garden that lies just outside of the pavillion inside of the pavillion. Critical engagement aside, this piece is relatively undocumentable. When looking at an image online the viewer is denied any sort of formal read that would provide a synopsis of the work. To sincerely “get” the art the viewer must experience the work. She must walk through the garden, enter the pavillion only to find herself back in the garden. This deja vu, while visual, is purely experiential.
Ondak’s use of visual information to change the way time and space is perceived critically engages the viewers intuition and under minds the image saturated machine that dictates how critical visual culture is commodified. While probably not Ondak’s intention, he is either working in a post-visual format or making experiential visual work.
And in that, experiential is specifically chosen not to be confused with interactive- as interactive art suggests an engagement along relational art or technology based gamer art (second life). Experiential art intends to engage it’s viewer through visual/aural cues to experience the work in non visual ways, maybe a destabalization in weight with a slanted floor, or change in temperature, or Ondak’s case; a spatial repition, forcing the work to exist as short term memory. The visual/physical manipulation acts as the painters brushstrokes to get to the concept of the work. The experience is not the product but the medium used to get the viewer to the subject.
The work of Tino Sehgal and Roman Ondak are both making groundbreaking strong work while also denying the internet content to serve up to advertising agencies. My hope is to look to other artists who are working in a post-visual/ experiential format that denies the internet and social media it’s jpegs, gifs, and pngs and in turn denying advertisers and corporate giants the power to control the state of contemporary art.
