Team Gallery, having just made its surprising move from Chelsea to Soho, the neighborhood colonized by the art world more than 20 years ago, now boasts an impressive stable of artists. To inaugurate the new larger digs, media artist and rising art star Cory Arcangel has created a layered sound-and-videoscape that manages to bombard our senses and lull us into contemplation at the same time. The five recent creations in the show continue the artist's quest for that fertile place where a compressed pixel or a Google search can be art.
The dominant work in the front gallery is the floor-to-ceiling projection of a loop of a riff by Guns and Roses's guitarist Slash (Sweet 16, 2006). The two side-by-side video images are on the surface reminiscent of Warhol's Chelsea Girls. They start off perfectly in synch, but Arcangel has taken a small piece from the loop on the right side so that the clips become slowly offset and visual and aural contrasts emerge. "The best part is that after 17 minutes, they synch up again and it starts over," says the artist.
Untitled Translation Exercise (projection from a digital source, 2006) is the artist's side-splitting take on outsourcing and authorship. Arcangel downloaded the script for the Hollywood slacker film Dazed and Confused, then Fedexed it along with six blank cassette tapes and an antiquated but user-friendly audiocassette recorder to India. The commissioned nonactors dutifully recorded themselves reading the lines, and Arcangel painstakingly resynched the tape and dubbed their words over the original voices. Postmodern piracy has seldom been such a treat.
In the smaller back gallery, Colors, the Sean Penn cops-against-the-gangs film, has been formally deconstructed by Arcangel. Software he wrote systematically selects a horizontal sliver of the video, but stretches the segments of that slice to full screen size so that vertical bands of colors move across the wall. The original audio plays in real time. The program requires that the video be played through hundreds of times before the entirety of movie is "seen."
Perhaps the most thought provoking work is Untitled (After Lucier), 2006, a unique digital work on Mini-Mac support. A loop of the Beatles' famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan show is projected low on the wall. Each time it plays, the video is compressed. The pixels get larger and larger as the video loses information. Eventually the image will be hard to recognize, and perhaps become just a gray screen. The video takes on sculptural traits. It's strangely satisfying to entertain thoughts of the ubiquitousness and longevity of a decades-old image/historical marker as it deteriorates before our eyes. Arcangel is curious about the outcome, but it's the idea of the program that excites him. "I make them run it all night long," he says.
Once known for his work with obsolete technologies such as the Super Mario clouds piece created from a discarded Nintendo cartridge, Archangel branched out to try performance with his lecture presentation Sans Simon, 2005. There Arcangel would discuss footage of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel while intermittently covering Simon's face with his hands. With each of the works in this exhibition he shows his inquisitiveness about new media exploration and a passion for getting there.
Doug McClemont
DOUG McCLEMONT: So much of your work has come from discovery and process, but with the Dazed and Confused piece (Untitled Translation Exercise) you obviously had the definite end product in mind before you began the piece.
CORY ARCANGEL: With most of the work I have a result in mind. The Colors piece I knew exactly what it would look like. Of course I had never seen it, but I knew it would work. Dazed and Confused I knew exactly what it was gonna be.
DM: You must have notebooks filled with stuff to be realized.
CA: I never write these things down. Because I think if you forget about an idea it wasn't worth remembering anyway. Like self-filtering. I work things out in discussions with other people. Dazed was actually a collaboration with my friend Ben Jones. But yes, I have tons of ideas.
DM: So as far as what's in your head: you've said that you don't necessarily have a close relationship to your source material before you begin a piece. But, for instance, the Sans Simon (2005) piece. You must have some interest in Simon and Garfunkel... no?
CA: I can explain it in reference to that piece, because it's one of my favorites. I really nailed that one. My relationship to the source material is once removed. I was never personally invested in Simon and Garfunkel in any way. But I understand what they represent. To me, out of the million things you can say about them, the most prominent is the fact that they represent the classic notion of a relationship: the break-up, the drama, who's the talent? Who's the good-looking one? It's the archetypal human relationship. In that sense, they represent something bigger than just being Simon and Garfunkel.
DM: Like they're The Couple.
CA: Yes, The Couple... exactly. Also, in their case, the fame and what that does to people.
DM: Why did you cover Paul Simon's face with your hands?
CA: I thought about what would be the biggest impact I could have with the smallest gesture. It's just a tiny bit of interference, really. I did only that one tiny thing. But there's so much in that little gesture.
DM: How do their fans react?
CA: To S + G fans, it is personal. They go crazy one way or the other: they either love it or hate it. More than most pieces I've done, it really sets people apart.
DM: I like that the piece is kind of inscrutable at first.
CA: Yes, I like to make work that is mysterious in some way. A lot of people ask me why I covered the face. You can see what I did and how I did it, but you don't know why.
DM: To draw a sort of crazy distinction: with the work of Jackson Pollock, we see in the paintings the way he made them. It's like a map of itself. But with most of your work unless the viewer is a techie, you can only see the final outcome.
CA: Right, most people have no idea really how the pieces were made.
DM: But we clearly sense that a lot happened offstage, before we got here, standing in front of the work. Time, technical skill.
CA: The computer is my studio, of course. I came out of the "media" art scene. And my big beef with it was that you always had to understand how a piece was made in order to comprehend it. It was integral to enjoyment of the work. So I made a decision around 5 or six years ago that I have to cover my bases. In case someone wants to understand my work on a technical level, it had to be really interesting. I wanted all the techies to think it's cool. But I made the conscious decision that the viewer shouldn't have to understand it; it should stand on its own and be beautiful. Anyone can have an art moment with my work, regardless of their technical knowledge.
DM: It's the why not the how.
CA: Ideally, yes.
DM: Is it usually a line of music that grabs you first or an image? Or are they inseparable?
CA: It's interesting. I studied music and I'm coming back to it now. The Dazed and Confused piece is essentially an audio composition. That's all I've done. I haven't made the video. Yet it is exhibited as a "video" piece. I want to explore that contradiction more and challenge expectations.
DM: You are known for your work with obsolete technologies, but to me a lot of the work in the current show seems cutting edge.
CA: Yeah. I like that with the obsolete technologies I could actually get in there and do all of the [programming] myself. I wanted the same thing from a new computer. So my first concern was: how does a movie play on a computer? You know, you put a DVD into a computer and what the hell happens? So Colors is running on my own software. I've written my own movie player. I know it's not apparent, but that piece is kind of the equivalent of the earlier work like the Super Mario pies. I've coded my own mechanism for displaying things on the screen. The Beatles piece is all about compression. Because even a DVD that you buy is already compressed... although nobody knows it. So I'm starting to tiptoe into trying to figure out how things are working now as opposed to back then. I just want to know how everything works... so I can take them apart. Like Colors, I figured out how movies play on a computer and that allowed me to take it apart.
DM: Any artists whose work you respond to and would like to work with?
CA: Hmm... I would love to work with Gary Larson.
DM: The cartoonist?
CA: The Far Side. Now that was the best. I still worship that.
DM: What music do you listen to?
CA: People give me music... I have an iPod that I don't use.
DM: And your relationship to the Internet?
CA: I'm on it absolutely all the time. With dazed I was thinking I could just put the mp3 on the net. And people could buy the DVD of the real Dazed and Confused and play it on their iPod.
DM: Don't you do that already? You put the source codes or whatever on the Net?
CA: Yes, I have. And when things hit the Internet, they lose their context, which is really interesting to me. That translation, so to speak. It is where it's all going. On the Internet, everything is just a piece of information.
Cory Arcangel
Until 4 November
Team Gallery
83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene
New York
Tel: +1 212 279 9219
Cory Arcangel listenting to Untitled Translation Exercise
Cory Arcangel, Colours, 2006
Cory Arcangel, Untitled (After Lucier), 2006
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