[Add-Art's] Double Act
The Hustler and The Carer
w/ Extensions
For the sake of clarity, this project focuses on two modes of presentation of art online, which we're calling The Hustler and The Carer. The Hustler refers to the form of reciprocity in which a product or service is being presented (for sale) to a potential user (based upon analytics culled from taste-expressing consumers). A great example of this kind of reciprocity is the virtual context - the ad spaces - in which Add-Art operates (i.e. The Banner Ad Surrogate). In contrast, The Carer refers to a form of reciprocity in which personal requests for intimate communication are offered as a form of support. These requests are typically not associated with economic transactions but rather a reciprocity of attention.
Through the Internet, non-spatial attributes of virtual communication create a conceptual double of artists' work, work which would otherwise be primarily interpreted via object-ness and/or through an intimacy of spatial relations. We know about objectless art from conceptual art that came to light in the 60's. Perhaps conceptual art prepared us for the presence of art online. Yet, the current conceptual doubles of artworks on the Internet transgress this historical notion of conceptual art by coming into being unintentionally or automatically. These conceptual doubles tend to do two things: hustle and/or care.
Some of the artists in Double Act have been included because of the ways they can be positioned within the dynamism between the virtual and the physical. Others have been included for their ambiguous identification with The Hustler and The Carer modes of communication. While the range of each artist's practice varies substantially, each of the artists explicitly employs conceptual tools in their art making practice, tools that continue to work online. It's also important to note that the artists were given no directions or guidelines for adapting their work to the add-art format. Thus, methods vary from creating site-specific drawings to cropping previous work to presenting previous work alongside the images that informed it.
However you decide to locate these artists within this project, please reconsider the way in which you reciprocate their presentation. Instead of discarding their work as an additional attempt to call upon your monetary support, act out your ability to extend your attention and contribute to their request for conversation. This form of support is vital to the current development of our language of seeing and our vocabulary for caring.
Now is undeniably a good moment to consider the behaviors we adopt from the Internet, to think about the seeming discordance of visual art and the Internet (in opposition to the Internet's assimilation of music or film), and to question the function of art's conceptual doubles, it's Double Act.
Credits
Add-Art
This exhibition project was made possible by the genii behind Add-Art.org. Add-Art is a Firefox plug-in that replaces website advertising. The following is from the site of one of Add-Art's founding developers, Steve Lambert: "Created with support from Eyebeam and Rhizome, Add-Art releases new art shows every two weeks and strives to feature contemporary artists and curators. AddArt can bring contemporary art to the desktops of all types of people at home and in their workplace - all over the world."
A very special thank you to Hana Newman whom politely handled the requests for post-deadline edits, all while effectively running Add-Art on a day to day basis.
The Artists
Each of the artists in this exhibiton have an art practice which involves the ability to respond to calls above and beyond their duty. I am deeply grateful to each for their openness to accept the invitation to work outside the commonplace gallery scenario.
The Inspiring
Part of the exhibition's title (the "Double Act" part) was derived from the casual input of Heather Rasely. Additionally, Heather was responsible for suggesting Tobey Albright as a curatorial contributor to Add-Art.
Web Production
This site was created collaboratively by Daniel Miller and Tobey Albright. Additional thanks go out to Nathan White for all the knowledge, support and patience he's offered in helping us understand how creating on the internet is supposed to work.
A History
I had the privilege of working with several of these artists prior, thanks to my professional collaboration with mack b projects, and Margaret Barnes.
And thanks to you for your attention,
Tobey
Graham Matthew Coreil-Allen
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spring 2010
To playfully explore a thrilling urban sublime through drifting symbols of invisible sites; this is why I make art. As an interventionist public artist, I am interested in the constructs, semiotics and contradictions of our everyday environment. Through urban analysis and research, I develop projects that test the boundaries of pedestrian agency, interpret the overlooked and banal, and investigate the negotiable nature of public space. Situated within disparate urban zones of overlap, rupture, ambiguity and interstice, my ongoing New Public Sites project addresses how lost spaces and overlooked features of the city are experienced at a pedestrian level. The project starts with a radically expanded understanding of civic space and proposes alternatives for representing and activating the potential for such under-recognized sites. Primary components of my work include subtle, outdoor architectural installations, observational videos on public space, interactive walking tours, and various fantastical and discursive maps. Whether marking paths for pedestrian trespassing, framing provocative city vistas, or encouraging participants to find poetic meaning in discrete urban moments, I always bring a sense of play and critical engagement to public space.
Sybille Hotz
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spring 2010
The artist's interest in medical and technical manuals is repeated in the motifs of her work. The "Handgriffe", "To Hide and Vanish", "Vanishing" or "Körperobjekte" series of works are primarily composed of images of the human body in a state of illness or injury. Initially seen as technical views of organs, they then emerge as interior views of the human form. Abstract patterns, recognisable as cellular structures, are brought to the body's surface and allow a view of the innermost.
That which keeps a human together or threatens it is thus turned outwards. In Sybille Hotz's "Cut Outs", the textile's surface appears as a pattern of our existence equal to votive-like building plans of viruses, bacteria, muscle fibres and cells on the 16 and 30 page cloths. Sybille Hotz examines the human and it's being in a purely formal manner and with an aesthetic eye. The loose woollen fibres that hang from the image's surface strengthen the character of an embroidery pattern on the one hand side and suggests the unperfected and incomplete potential which forms the basis of the figures on the other.
Biography
Sybille Hotz lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Arnheim Atelier. She is a founding member of the artist's group "adapter" in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally. In November 2007, her work was shown in the "Extreme Embroidery" exhibition at the New York Museum of Art and Design. The latest publication featuring works by Sybille Hotz is: "Contemporary Textiles | The Fabric of Fine Art", Black Dog Publishing, London, UK 2008.
Thomas Martin
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spring 2010
Using the size, scale and the fragmented, digital nature of the project as an impetus for discovery and an opportunity to play, this collection of digitally manipulated drawings, "AA M," functions as a digression from my current thread of work devoted to the structure of the Durer Solid, a geometric form found in Durer's "Melancholia I."
Biography
Thomas Martin lives and works in Bronx, NY. He received his MFA from Montclair State University in 2006 and his BFA from the Ringling College of Art in Sarasota in 2003. In the summer 2002, he attended the Yale Summer School of Art & Music in Norfolk, CT. In 2009 he was a resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Cynthia Mason
ARTIST STATEMENT
Fall 2008
Art making, when reduced to its basic function, is building. This 'art' building happens not only as an artist creates, but also as the viewer moves their experience over the surface of the object created by the artist. In both our current and historical world, there is rarely anything we build without purpose or utility.
The built works I draft through free association rely on creative structures that record relationships between conversation and form. Within this record, the imagined and the actual, the conceptual and the formal, as well as the internal and the external, all inhabit the same grid of physicality.
Some built works, like buildings, are used as places of worship, entertainment, education or even dwelling, and are often engaged solely on the terms of such predestined uses. My interest, as a builder and an inhabitant, is to engage and incite others to experience built objects creatively - to experience the values a "built work" can have in addition to the function(s) for which it was built. When I experiment with use, by feeling for and experiencing different ways of inhabiting a place, I manifest a spiritual essence.
Biography
Cindy Mason is an emerging visual artist who explores and diagrams both the external and internal environments, inspired by the natural, built and verbal structures created around her.
Mason's paintings and drawings have appeared in many group and two person shows including the James Cohen Gallery in New York City, Rhonda Schaller Studio Online Gallery in New York City, Canvas Cafe in Sarasota, Fl., Mack B Gallery in Sarasota Fl., the Selby and Crossley Gallery at Ringling College of Art and Design, ExhibitSwitch, and XYZ Gallery in Blacksburg Va. She received her BFA in Graphic and Interactive Communication in 2003 from Ringling College of Art and Design. Past studies have included architecture and painting at Va Tech. She owns White Dog Design, a graphic and webdesign firm in Sarasota, Florida and teaches as an adjunct graphic design professor at Ringling College of Art and Design.
Cindy is the recipient of a 2008 Jentel Artists Residency in Banner Wyoming and a 2006 Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. She lives in South West Florida with her 7-year-old daughter Chloe.
Michael Ruglio-Misurell
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spring 2010
The Pavilion Project is a series of architectural renderings that depict proposals and conceptual studies. By combing computer graphics with heterogeneous, excessive and vulnerable architectural forms, I reference both the process of constructing spaces and the use, reuse and abuse of neglected urban spaces. For Pavilion#4, I display an underpass with glassed-in columns. Beginning with a marginal urban site, I transform the idea of how an underpass is used, while maintaining the less desirable qualities of the site. Within the pavilion, floating and exploding building materials, typically purged from decaying architecture, are composed to create fleeting architectural forms that refer to the failure and malfunction of the built environment.
Biography
Michael Ruglio-Misurell is an installation artist who has created and shown works in Berlin, Chicago, Boston and New Jersey. He is a recipient of a 2009-10 J William Fulbright award to create a series of sculptural projects that explore monuments and ruins through the architecture of Berlin. He received an MFA in 2008 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in 2004 from the Art Institute of Boston.
Bradley Wester
ARTIST STATEMENT
2009
My work has evolved into a hybrid-practice combining painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and digital imaging into larger installations, with particular and unique reference to color and light and to physical space. I am interested in traversing the boundaries of three specific content areas.
Transparent-Mystery: Transforming unlikely, everyday materials into art with limited alteration so as to remain recognizable as they inexplicably begin to appear mysterious and opaque.
Fragment-Whole: Making distinguishable and separate parts into a single work of art, which then becomes a single unit or component of a larger installation whole.
Time-Continuum: Making simultaneous historic and contemporary references; Altering older work and combining it with new; And, as in a recent solo in New York, visually and conceptually linking that current exhibition with one from my past, then linking my exhibition with those of the gallery that came immediately before and after mine.
New to my recent work is a return to the painterly gesture describing an illusionistic image on canvas. These new paintings however are meant to be quotations of familiar images, in this case, Japanese motifs and decoration. The motif-paintings are treated simply as another recognizable everyday object or material that I combine with others to make art. They are inserted and arranged as one component of many, inside what I call a cluster. I see each cluster as an individual and complete work of art that relates to other clusters nearby, and so on, until the entire single installation is achieved. The intention is to equalize the value of the familiar Japanese image with the common, everyday objects used. These cluster-pieces, or pods of visual narrative that radiate out to other pod-narratives, can be seen to mirror our hyper-linked, web-based information age, with no start or finish, no linear historic narrative.
For at least a decade, my manipulations of commonplace packaging materials and various kinds of ephemera have made multiple iconographic references, from the modernist grid to computer circuitry, from the Italian Baroque to Japanese art and Anime. When my early drawing/collages, using paper labels and stickers, began to impersonate the look and geometry of computer circuit boards (2000-1), I was inspired to enlist real computer circuitry to 're-draw' the label designs as digital files in graphics software. The result closed the circle: Paper labels mimicking circuitry that in turn mimics paper labels. I want to have it both ways: exploit the glamour and scope of technology while retaining the political agency of art made with my hands out of mundane materials.
WITH (withyou.co.uk)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spring 2010
The art collective WITH pose publicly as a life improvement company. From within this quasi-fictional framework they have created a number of products and services that are described as 'Life Enhancement Solutions' at the company website withyou.co.uk. On commissioning a Life Enhancement Solution, a client has an experience lived out on their behalf by an employee of the organisation (an agent).The agents documented proof of the experience is then presented to the commissioner thus becoming the 'product' or 'artwork' of the exchange.
There are over 50 solutions available, which cover most facets of human experience from the everyday to the extreme. For example an agent can be commissioned to fabricate a trauma or alternatively to sit and do nothing on your behalf. The project examines the nature of vicarious experience, belief, the role of the artist and the limits of human labour from within a darkly funny, evocative and accessible platform. WITH succinctly challenge the parameters and orthodoxy of contemporary art making by purposefully asking what art could look like in a rapidly changing and blurred cultural landscape - one that has entered an experiential, user generated, virtual and mediated age. For the exhibition DoubleAct The Hustler and The Carer WITH have created withstore.com - a pop up store designed to sell 'off the shelf' Life Enhancement Solutions. In withstore_001 the public are invited to commission a WITH agent to accidently break a glass on their behalf.
Within the selling of this concept WITH maintain throughout, that the commissioner of the act will actually believe that they will never break a glass again as a result of the delegated incident. It therefore positions itself as a type of antidote for an entirely speculative event. Glass itself has a double life. It's functional qualities are diverse and yet one false move and the object transforms into something potentially dangerous and injurious. It's passivity beyond it's function is confounded on breakage and is replaced by an anxiety about 'what could happen' if not handled carefully. We all own a glass and chances we have and will break one in the future and the work proposes that this everyday chance event can be nullified by a type of cathartic parallel rehearsal, performed on a commissioners behalf by a WITH agent. The subtle extravagance and humour of such a gesture is however countered by a convincingly branded aesthetic - How much do we believe in the WITH organisation? If their capable of diluting a micro quantum event then what else could they do? Is this actually taking place? If I order one will I feel any better once I own the objectified memory of the act?
WITH were created by artist Alasdair Hopwood in 2001 and he is currently represented by Rokeby Gallery (www.rokebygallery.com).