More than the sum of its parts
Snapshots of strangers holding hands, MoMA's Artists' Cookbook, a wall teeming with anonymous message scraps, that frighteningly evolving 'live' screen sketch.. What all the projects on display at 'Phantom Captain' - the current group show at Apexart in New York - have in common is their origin in a collaborative ethos, known as 'crowdsourcing', and the show itself is a reflection and exploration of the process as a current trend in art. It was one of the artists participating in this show, Jeff Howe, who introduced the term in his June 2006 Wired Magazine article, 'The Rise of Crowdsourcing', to describe a new form of corporate outsourcing of labor to armies of amateurs. As the methodology behind websites like Wikipedia, Ebay, Flickr, Youtube, etc, crowdsourcing is becoming common practice in business, but its potential is also being harnessed by artists to create communal artworks.
Curated by artist/writer/curator Andrea Grover, the show includes work organised by Howe, Peter Edmunds, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Aaron Koblin, Davy Rothbart and Allison Wiese. Through assignments, collections, solicited submissions (as in Fletcher & July's hand-holding photo project), and even the farming out of creative tasks like drawing and decision making, the artists in the exhibition create works of 'distributed creativity', employing anything from 10 to 10,000 geographically dispersed voluntary collaborators who contribute to create 'discrete, multiple, and ongoing art works'. As within any genre, old or new, some of the projects are more compelling than others; Found magazine's wall of lost missives (shopping lists, love notes, phone memos) are wry and melancholy, somehow completed by the viewer's absorption, and Wiese's artists' cookbook and the accompanying display of older takes on the same subject may or may not be transcendental art, but they make irresistible browsing material. The show attempts to illustrate how crowdsourced art renders something akin to a portrait of a contemporary collective unconscious. Non-finite, multi-perspectival, and subject to the rules of inertia, led by a sort of invisible phantom .. much more about quantity and randomness as sources of meaning than, if not quality, at least specificity and focus. It's hard to take in all at once, needless to say to even begin to contemplate the conceptual instinct behind these urges to see the biggest possible picture (let's not even think of how buying and selling these works would complicate things further). For better or worse, the whole here is more than the sum of its parts, that's for sure.
'PHANTOM CAPTAIN'
To 25 Nov 2006
Apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
T: +1 212 431 5270
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