SELECTED WORKS BY James Howard
Click on the images to enlarge
James Howard
Untitled
2007
46 digital prints
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James Howard
Untitled (details)
2007
46 digital prints
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
James Howard's Digital Artistry
TOKION Magazine, NY, 2008
Text: Maxwell Williams
"There are all sorts of these services," says the young British artist, "but also a Western fear of these services, or a kind of suspicion. I'm interested in the hopes and fears of everyday life, I suppose." James Howard is, of course, talking about sex change operations and penis enlargement pills.
He is talking about the dark and seedy underbelly of the Internet, the scams and services that most people reading this magazine may never try to experience. What we forget is that we can really get Enzyte if we just click on the spam. Happiness is there, on the other end of the Internet, just a click away.
On the subject of unlikely happiness, Howard's rise to prominence is a well documented tale. The story goes, James Howard awoke one day to find Charles Saatchi had bought his entire senior art project. Before your inner cynic pipes up, Howard didn't just appear out of nowhere, he'd been cultivating his techniques at London's Royal Academy of Art, and prior to that his formalism was solidified at Reading University. "At the time I was making these abstract paintings," Howard says of his early work. "They were supposed to represent social networks. There were lots of lines going all over the place. I think that's why I left painting, because I wasn't really able to explore those ideas in a very direct way. That's how I ended up going into the digital field I'm in now."
Howard's works now are an amalgamation of digitally stitched together bus stop posters, mixed with the poetry of Internet spam, filtered through his brazen mind. In one poster, Howard imagines an artificial womb for transsexual men who dream of giving birth. "mirracle [sic] is part of the everyday life," reads the poster in the strange English of spam. It brings to mind several questions about the white noise we deal with every day: Who would this service cater to? And, who is behind these emails we receive so many of every day? "You're always wondering who has done it, or what is going on in the back ground," says Howard. "If they're sitting in some steamy Internet café in the middle of god knows where making scam after scam after scam. It's kind of like what I'm doing in my smoky bedroom most of the time, spending hours of the evening whacking these things together."
But Howard is no scam artist. His artworks are thought provoking, aesthetically inventive and more than a little funny. "I've made a new video about global sourcing and how viruses travel from family pets into pregnant ladies," Howard explains. "It's sponsored by a company called Happy Dog Bakery. It's an infomercial for these snack foods for dogs, but in it there's health warnings about the virus that travels from mosquitoes to pregnant ladies, and dogs to all around. And everyone gets brain damage at the end of it. I'm glad you're laughing. That's a good reaction."
As for his encounter with Saatchi, Howard is frank. To him, he's so young it doesn't matter yet that the man behind some very questionable art practices owns a considerable portion of his art-being so young and unproven, Howard feels in control of the development of his career. Or maybe it's that by the time you read this, the deal that created some pretty substantial ripples in the art world is still less than a year in the past, and Howard hasn't had time to process the effect Saatchi's purchase may have had on his career in the long-term. In Howard's eyes, the whole thing isn't really worth much except a boost in recognition (Howard recently showed alongside Martin Parr, Tracey Emin, Wolfgang Tillmans and Sam Taylor-Wood for the AIDS charity Terrence Higgins Trust at the London Art Fair).
No matter what the case is, Howard is working hard these days. He's putting the finishing touches on a curatorial proposal for a show about reproduction, as well as collaborating with like-minded Chinese artist Mai Lin Tan for an exhibition at the Peles Empire gallery in London later this year. Contrary to the prototype of a young star, James Howard is unfazed by his success-he is young, funny and in control.
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