Ofer Wolberger

10.03.2011 | Ryan Barone

Held together by nothing more than a modest fold and measuring a bit taller than a standard sheet of letter paper, Ofer Wolberger’s Visitor shifts clumsily in the hands of the beholder. Deceptively simple, Visitor joins together several portraits, exclusively female, in a dense field of halftone. Flirting with abstraction, figures emerge as partial renderings; Seurat with a printer.

There is no pagination. Excluding the timestamps which complement each photograph, text is seldom found. Over the course of 48 pages viewers are asked to consider several ambiguous portraits prefaced only by the book’s title, hastily written and underlined across an otherwise barren white cover.

Despite no explicit instructions to do so, Wolberger’s book practically demands to be rearranged. Quietly recalling the cut up methods of Brion Gysin, Visitor merges portraits almost seamlessly; cursory glances would doubtful trigger any suspicion to the incongruities that exist just below the surface. Yet it is the inclusion of a blurred red line – a zip as Barnett Newman preferred saying – as if born from the soft flow of a spray can, that draws attention towards the book’s unbound gutter, at once uniting and dividing each portrait.

Parallels, tenuous as they are, may be found between Visitor and Life with Maggie, Wolberger’s extended photographic project which began in 2007. Like Life with Maggie, a series at once recalling Cindy Sherman and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Visitor addresses the complexities of identity with elegance. Both works, separated stylistically, address identity is a construction existing in flux, a pastiche adaptive to the environment it occupies. A set of masks.

The 2008 recipient of the Humble Arts Foundation New Photography Grant, Wolberger has, since 2010, gradually chipped away at his unfortunately titled Photographic Book Project with Visitor marking the eighth release in a series of twelve self-published books. The plan for the Photographic Book Project was ambitious: one book for each month of the year. Wolberger has fallen behind schedule but few appear to be complaining. Like the Photographic Book Project as a whole, Visitor is an exercise in dexterity. Created under severe time constraints with little preconception, Wolberger’s vast and varied output alone, a seemingly fearless display of raw ideas is worth noting. A welcome departure from the artist’s more long-term endeavors, Visitor provides viewers a glimpse into the mind of the artist at work; unbound, open to change.

Visitor
8.5 x 12.5 in.
Unbound
Soft Cover
48 pages
Edition of 100
Horses Think Press
Publication Date: April 2011

ofer wolberger

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Artie Vierkant Interview

09.29.2011 | Courtney Asztalos
Image from the Image Objects series; Monday, April 25, 2011, 5:01PM, 2011, UV print on sintra, image alteration

Image from the Image Objects series; Monday, April 25, 2011, 5:01PM, 2011, UV print on sintra, image alteration

Artie Vierkant (b. 1986) is an artist whose work addresses the role of image reproduction and dissemination in contemporary networked society. His massive body of work includes sculpture, digital works, photography, print, drawing, collage and painting. In his own words, his work “concerns the degree to which digital media constitute fully tangible objects, actors which are both pliable and physical, structures to be broken into pieces and reconceived.” Pouring over his extensive catalog, one cannot help but see that he is a true pioneer in mapping the terra incognita of the Internet. He has a BA in Photography from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from UC San Diego. His work has exhibited at Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö Sweden; Reference Gallery, Richmond VA; PRETEEN Gallery, Hermosillo Mexico; Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam Netherlands; Exile, Berlin Germany; Bitforms, New York NY; and more. His work appeared in Rethinking Photography (Routledge), Post Internet by Gene McHugh, ARTINFO, PWR Paper, and countless blogs. He also contributes to Hyperallergic, including a column he entitled Hypermedia: Critical Issues in Contemporary Media Art where each article ‘discusses an existing or emerging theme in practices at the intersection of electronic media and the arts, drawing from the contemporary and the historic, the pervasive and the obscure’. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Courtney Asztalos: I enjoyed reading your statement for STATE, and I would like to start with something you said “The content of the image is now meaningless. Instead the meaning and our own understanding of it is distilled from how we organize, quantify, relate it to other images, and ultimately display it.” Is this essentially what drives your work?

Artie Vierkant: This definitely drives a lot of my thinking. The platforms on which we create images, the framework [within which] we conceive them, and the avenues of dissemination say much more, I think, than any individual image. One of my favorite (intentionally brazen) quotes to reference is from a 2003 essay by Lev Manovich, in which he says “The greatest avant-garde film is software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects, which contain the possibilities to combine thousands of separate tracks into a single movie, as well as setting various relationships between all these different tracks – and thus develops the avant-garde idea of film as an abstract visual score to its logical end – and beyond.” This idea always causes much debate. But considering that the recent history of contemporary art practice has been dominated by discussion of artist-created participatory and relational systems, it can’t be far off to suggest that the platforms most commonly used today to create cultural materials are in fact great artworks in themselves.

CA: Is Image Objects a structural alteration of an image, a proposal for the image’s environment, or a concept rendering?

AV: Image Objects, at least the series as it stands now, is a series of semi-sculptural prints that exist somewhere between how they are manifested as physical objects and how the images are treated in documentation and dissemination. At this point the majority of art viewing (and in general, cultural experience) happens through images or other reproductions, and I wanted to work within that to make the documentation of my work into pieces in their own right. So while Image Objects, are physically produced pieces that inhabit gallery space, I also go back into the documentation and change things, add layers of collage, distort the image, add watermarks, and in general use any photo retouching techniques I can pick up. Just usually not for their intended purposes.

A lot of the thinking behind them comes from what I find interesting (and contradictory) about working digitally. When a work starts its life as a digital object, the process of deciding both when the file is “ready” to be made physically and which of many versions to print seems arbitrary. So in a way these pieces can also be altered into any of the other myriad versions that could have been made, or serve as concept renderings for future works.

Similar Objects (similarobjects.com), 2011, Website

Similar Objects (similarobjects.com), 2011, Website

CA: Could you talk about Fingerprints?

AV: Fingerprints started as a series of videos, but it’s since evolved also into prints, one-off jpegs, and the “fingerprints” themselves have started seeping into a lot of my other pieces—including my website.

The series is inspired by techniques of digital fingerprinting and watermarking, different ways culture industries try to mark content with authorship, authenticity, or more commonly to make the source of specific files traceable. For instance, when a film distributor sends out advance copies of their films, each copy will have a watermark or fingerprint with a unique placement. That way if the film leaks to file sharing networks ahead of release, they can pinpoint the exact reviewer or organization the copy was sent to, and bar them from receiving future releases. A wonderful threat, really, and an interesting way of making something, which is otherwise infinitely reproducible, at least moderately unique.

I’ve taken this idea to work with as an aesthetic, so instead of overt text watermarks (though I use those, too) I use different color flares superimposed over my images. When I get a Google Alert or see someone’s shared an image of mine somewhere on the Internet, the placement and tone of the flares let me trace back to where I originally posted those images, or who I emailed them to, and tells me something about the reblogger.

The Fingerprints pieces themselves are pure white videos or prints which have these same fingerprints and watermarks over them, and usually (almost imperceptibly) some text that includes information like what show the pieces are being shown in, or who the piece was made for. Every time I display one of the videos somewhere it’s a different pattern and hue of color flares, so even if they look similar you’ll never see the same work exhibited twice. The embedded Fingerprints video on my website is maybe the sole exception, because it’s sort of the “example” web version. It’s embedded through Vimeo, so if I saw it posted around I wouldn’t be able to tell if it was found on my website or on my Vimeo account.

Untitled Photographs--Untitled 40 x 80 in. Blue Photograph (Trapezoid) and Untitled 38 x 20 in. Red Photograph (Rectangle), 2010, HD Video Loops

Untitled Photographs–Untitled 40 x 80 in. Blue Photograph (Trapezoid) and Untitled 38 x 20 in. Red Photograph (Rectangle), 2010, HD Video Loops

CA: When do you think that the barriers of digital media are necessary?

AV: I think there are profoundly less barriers to working with digital media than there are with traditional mediums. There are so few, in fact, that thinking of digital works in terms of falling under a specific medium—image, video, audio, separated—is an entirely self-imposed restriction. Of course, with traditional mediums and the massive variety of objects in the world there’s little restriction there as well, but since it costs a lot more to buy a vitrine filled with formaldehyde than it does to Photoshop one there’s a massive difference in accessibility there.

That said, I do think it’s possibly problematic that fervent computer use trains us to think in very flat terms. Even my Image Objects are pieces with size and depth that are built to be flattened into a photograph. This condition will probably change. There’s also always the danger of losing the big picture and becoming so heavily focused on what software is already built to do that you lose sight of the fact that anything is possible, or get mired in very specific platforms.

CA: Untitled Photographs are HD video loops transformed by space to become photographs?

AV: That piece plays directly to this same idea of mediums as self-imposed restrictions. It’s quite simple, but it’s essentially a proposition piece for talking about still video projections as photographs. The listed dimensions for display are important facets as well, because conceiving an image as specifically “20 in. x 24 in.” instead of a “6 min. loop” is really the main distinction separating photography and video.

I made a companion piece to this, Untitled Videos, which is essentially the inverse but works on the same principle. That piece is a series of c-prints made by projecting full YouTube clips onto photosensitive paper. The image gets completely blacked out and eradicated, but it’s still a way of displaying those videos.

An image object jpeg Artie made especially for this interview, it's an altered version of images from the * new jpegs * show at Johan Berggren

An image object jpeg Artie made especially for this interview, it's an altered version of images from the * new jpegs * show at Johan Berggren

CA: Could you talk about your solo show Real Proper at the Preteen Gallery?

AV: I took the term “Real Proper” from common terms in the file sharing community (warez scene). Within this specific non-monetary-based black market, these words denote particular things.

If a group uploads the first rip of some film or TV show, but doesn’t compress or label their file properly, someone else will re-encode the file or make a different rip and tag it as “PROPER” to signal that their version ascribes to the warez scene’s formatting standards. “REAL,” as far as I can tell, isn’t used so much at this early stage (among the people first uploading), but instead gets added as a tag to convince the downloader that the file isn’t a fake. It’s really interesting because these are both terms that, in colloquial English, ascribe something to be genuine or authentic, but [in this particular context], they have very different meanings and uses.

The pieces in the show—a Solvent Study, a Styrofoam sculpture, and a video—all play off this notion of authentication or derivation in some way. The Solvent Studies series was something of a transitional moment, where I was printing huge Photoshop files and splashing them with chemical solvents to play with the digital photograph’s materiality—and in some ways make a dark joke about creating “unique” digital files. The sculpture falls neatly with the Untitled Photographs you mentioned before—there I was taking a short video clip and rendering the brightness levels of each frame of video into pieces of Styrofoam.

The video, also called Real Proper, is made up of four copies of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine workprint, each of which runs for the whole duration. This version of the film was leaked to the Internet a month before it was even released in theaters, was missing a lot of finalized digital effects, and didn’t even have a watermark. When I downloaded these four versions, a full year had passed and there were still 38 differently formatted versions of the workprint available on bittorrent, despite the film having been released on DVD. When you line them all up together like this, you really see the variation—some are stretched out, the timing gets out of sync, some people have added subtitles directly into the file.

artievierkant.com

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This Week in Stock Photography

09.28.2011 | Jon Feinstein

Photo Copyright: Bigstock

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Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich Interview

09.23.2011 | Legacy Russell

Time: 7 o’clock sharp
Location: Mini Bar, East Village

Over Butter Lane cupcakes, a glass of summer bubbly, and candlelight, East Village bred artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich shines. By the end of the night I’ve got the hiccups, a reading list, and a listening session in store. Here’s why for the rising Hunt-Ehrlich “mixed media” takes place both inside the exhibition space and in the bodegas beyond.

Legacy Russell: What would you say your focus is as a photographer? Wait…would you even self-define as a “photographer,” or is that just the easy way out when describing yourself to someone else? Better question: What’s your take on the work you do?

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich: My work is different from many photographers in that the medium is secondary to what I am trying to put out in the world, which is a complex understanding of black urban culture and public spaces. Maybe one day it will take the form of a feature-length film. At times the work takes the form of an essay on Little Haiti in Miami in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Port Au Prince, which was published by Studio Museum in Harlem; or a combination of both words and images such as the presentation I gave at the Caribbean Epistemologies Symposium at the CUNY Graduate Center this past April. Most frequently my work is mediated through photographs or video.

LR: How does video/how do motion pictures integrate themselves into your approach to taking pictures?

MHE: Right now I’m working on a video piece in collaboration with playwright Diane Exavier. The piece, which is being filmed on Gunhill Road in the Bronx and is called “Stay Close”, looks at the style of wearing rosaries, crosses and crucifixes on the street. It’s a style with Catholic roots but its significance mutates in the context of “the block.” It becomes about gold, diamonds and showing off how well you are doing to your community. At the same time it is also a token of luck and can stand for the wearer’s fears and sense of mortality, functioning as a symbolic or spiritual armor. It is an umbilical chord to family, mothers and grandmothers and children whom frequently give crosses as gifts. Certain gangs and “fresh crews” have adopted it as a way to identify fellow members. In many urban neighborhoods street corners are claimed by men, they are a stage for learning, enacting and perfecting masculinity. I once asked a kid why he was wearing four gold crosses around his neck at the same time; he said, “because I need that much luck.”

Stay Close Film Stills, 2011

Stay Close Film Stills, 2011

LR: What difference is there between having a woman like yourself behind the lens, controlling the image, versus, say, an Alex Prager? Or maybe like an…Elad Lassry? Or a Roe Ethridge?

MHE: Identity plays huge roles in photographers’ access and practice. The street, public spaces at night for instance are typically considered unsafe for women. I always refused to let the expectations of being a woman get in the way of photographs I want to make. While studying in Kingston, Jamaica I often would throw on a baseball cap and some baggy clothes and play myself off as male or at least androgynous to get images without having to deal with the harassment and intimidation one often experiences as a female on the street. I had a few scares while working on a project in Miami but instead of giving up I learned how to box and to protect myself. I think about what is expected of me as a woman and just have come to accept that an image is more important to me than fulfilling those expectations. There’s a lot of genius that comes from studio practice but right now I am too in love with the element of surprise encountered in public space. The street is my studio, that’s where I get ideas and then they take on a different life in the editing and sequencing process.

LR: What would you say your primary influences are? Walk us through them, and tell us why, in the larger scheme of things, we should care.

MHE: I’m interested in what happens when cultures come together; you can stop-motion view the way that culture’s change, rub-off on one another, assimilate — it can be as simple as the assemblage of images and objects on the dashboard of a car, or the combinations of sounds and languages on a street on any given evening. The hyphen or the hybrid state is essentially American — one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world – and yet still Americana is associated with an outdated aesthetic of suburban sameness. There was a point when I took pictures as a way of rebutting Stephen Shore’s entire catalog of images — his [version of] “pop culture” is not my pop culture which is fine but I wanted to see the things I saw as being tenants of American culture given the status of being iconic.

Dominoes, 2010

Dominoes, 2010

Urban public space can be a wonderland, it can be a war-zone; a space of invention and resilience urban neighborhoods are the physical junction of pragmatism and desire. When Cuban theorist Antonio Benitez-Rojo wrote in his book The Repeating Island “Processes, dynamics and rhythms show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous, or, if you like the unpredictable that coexists with us in our everyday world,” he was talking about Caribbean space, but also describing a way of conceiving public space.

Steelpan USA, 2010

Steelpan USA, 2010

The stack of crates behind the bodega may not seem noteworthy but is actually latent with untapped potential to become a dominoes table, an old mans chair, a roadside produce store. A multi-speaker sound system can stir more deep down feeling than witnessing a shiny new skyscraper. It’s my works mission to make you feel that kind of veneration for something you might have written off. Pepon Osorio does that with his installations. I think photographer Anthony Hernandez does that with his series Landscapes for the Homeless. Simone Leigh’s use of everyday objects in her sculptures convey that. Your public installation of small shrines in the East Village consider this as well. Charles Burnett’s films Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding casts a lover’s gaze on Watts in Los Angeles. My favorite kinds of art point to something overlooked and make you see the beauty and power that is in fact there.

Portrait of a Young Girl, 2010

Portrait of a Young Girl, 2010

To Live and Die Caribbean, 2010

To Live and Die Caribbean, 2010

LR: “Édouard Glissant”…does that name ring a bell? What role does his writing play in the work you choose to produce?

I was really honored to have the chance to co-curate an event in memoriam of the late writer and theorist Edouard Glissant, whom is a great inspiration to me, at the art space Recess Activities this summer. The event was an installment of Simone Leigh’s serial programming Be Black Baby. Artists such as Jayson Keeling and Devin KKenny presented works and scholars Kelly Josephs, Alessandra Benedicity and Kaiama L. Glover gave a fabulous tribute to Glissant’s text The Poetics of Relation.

It was instructive while putting together the event to try to take a step back and explain Creolization to an audience primarily composed of the larger arts community. The word “creole” is commonly used to describe “pidgin” languages such as Jamaican Patois or Haitian Kreyol. It’s also a word that’s historically been used to describe West Indian people of mixed race. The concept of “Creolization” emerged from the potential Caribbean writers and theorists had begun to unpack from the definition of Creole; by applying the word to culture rather than solely to language or identity Creolization can describe hybridity in all its forms, giving us new language for social structures and rhythms.

While Creolization is a concept of the Caribbean it can be used to describe larger social currents. Edouard Glissant’s writings on the topic are expansive and prolific. Glissant uses Creoliztion to critique “globalization” which infers a shrinking center, or a growing homogeneity due to convergences of cultures. Creolization as supposed to globalization preserves locality and thus is an important dialogue for cultural producers to actively engage with. Dr. Kaiama Glover drew these two circles at Be Black Baby that illustrates this perfectly:

LR: What music are you listening to these days?

MHE: Analyzing music is an important component of my practice. Urban neighborhoods are a living mixtape. Sit on a corner you will hear the songs that are important to people through windows and from passing cars overlapping like a real time remix. It is a widely held belief that hip-hop arose from the selector and soundsystem traditions of Dancehall, including the production model of songs starting with the base of a “riddim” or musical loop over which multiple artists and selectors/DJs add additional sounds, voices and lyrics. This act of layering seemingly disparate sounds could be viewed as a mimicking or mirroring of the sonic experience of one’s neighborhood.

The exchanges between and within hip-hop and dancehall are not talked about enough. Both are inflected with South Asian, South American, African, African American and Spanish and Afro-Caribbean cultural elements. Take for instance Dancehall star Mavado whose voice is styled after the Islamic call to prayer. The diversity in the sounds of the music reflects the cultural complexities of the identities of the neighborhoods the music comes from. Dancehall used to originate primarily in Jamaica but now artists like Ricky Blaze from Flatbush in Brooklyn produce hits for Dancehall stars in Kingston.

I think Dancehall specifically is a visual music; the culture of the Dance Hall is just as much a part of the music as the track or the riddim. If you watch footage of the late Bogle, whom is considered the founding father of contemporary dance styles in the Dance hall, one can see the synthesis of culture, capitalism and history in his impressive and visionary movements — simultaneously African, Caribbean and reminiscent of Michael Jackson all at once.

LR: What are you reading these days? Be honest.

MHE: Right now I’m working my way through Sonjah Stanley Niah’s fabulous dissertation on Dancehall in Jamaica From Slave Ship to Ghetto and also Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I read very slowly though — I carry a book around with me for months and read a bit at a time on the train. Staying in motion is a big part of my practice and livelihood being an artist; [this]…often requires working several jobs and putting in work on several creative projects at a time.

Legacy Russell is a writer, artist, and cultural producer. She is the Art Editor for BOMB magazine’s BOMBlog and the co-founder of CONTACTProject.net.

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Some critique with your tea, Vicar?

09.22.2011 | Nathalie Levi

Christoph Büchel
Piccadilly Community Centre
Hauser & Wirth
13 May – 30 July 2011

I’m feeling pretty inadequate.

I’m at a dance with a friend, she has been solicited three times already.

I stand alone.

My friend is 79.

Like I said, I’m feeling pretty inadequate.

I’m at Piccadilly Community Centre, an initiative set up by Hauser and Wirth, London who invited the eminence grise behind the Piccadilly Community; Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. You may never have heard of him so allow me to introduce Büchel the King of immersionist installations, the mid-career artist who doesn’t like to be mentioned. He’s the higher brow version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you chase this artist through different scenarios that vanish as quickly as they appear. Part satirist, part sociologist, part commentator, part paranoid schizophrenic… the list continues, his constructed realities ask us to question our own.

Büchel was previously behind the conversion of an old Coppermill off Brick Lane into a flophouse in Simply Botiful, 2007, the transformation of galleries into tanning salons, gaming arcades, fitness studios and morgues. Other activities include auctioning off his invitation to Manifesta 4 on eBay and hiding a cheque for an exhibition’s entire budget within the empty space awaiting its discovery by one lucky visitor.

One thing that won’t be found at Piccadilly Community centre however, is the artist’s name. Not that anyone there really cares.

For the Piccadilly Community Centre is fully functional, (almost) convincing and rendered down to exquisitely tacky detail; stuffy lino clad rooms, an accurately crap website, haphazard notice-boards and wonderfully badly hung watercolours abound. Elderly regulars stalk the corridors sipping lukewarm tea whilst a charity shop on the top floor plies its trade…

But, hang on, why is there an enormous Tory party display amongst the bric-a-brac? Come to think of it, why, upon entering the centre is one met with an abandoned Pay Day Advance counter? Why, pray tell, does a sign hang above the door proclaiming ‘WE CASH GOLD’??

…. No, no it couldn’t be….could it? Could The Piccadilly Community Centre really….. be about Broken Britain?! About the skewed idea of a Big Society? About the alarming adoption of leftist rhetoric by the Conservatives? Could the squalid recreation of a squat up in the Centre’s rafters, replete with filthy mattresses, decaying takeaway boxes and porn magazines, be something to do with this?

The locals running their Algerian cake baking, Indian aromatherapy head massage and laptop workshops downstairs couldn’t care less about this either. Not about the message, nor about the centre’s status as ‘art’ project. They are simply there to do their thing, overlooking the hoards, on possibly one of the most expensive addresses in central London.

Despite its appearances, this project was not cheap. The deceptively authentic naffness has been reconstructed to enormous expense. The space was previously your typical whitewashed gallery hall. False floors have been cleverly constructed, each item carefully sourced, a cheesy dancefloor and full bar erected in the basement together with several meeting rooms, counselling office and gym studio.

Superficially, Piccadilly Community Centre works wonders, but underneath the meticulous veneer the message is confused. It’s a recreation of a council run centre but the Big Society promotes independently run undertakings, is it critiquing one or the other or both? Or, neither? There’s a Nativity scene locked in a safe on the basement dance floor; is this a reference to the marginalisation of religion in pursuit of less salubrious entertainment and a culture of cheap thrills and bleak consequences? Oh who cares, I’m going hula-hooping….

piccadillycommunitycentre.org
hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/963/piccadilly-community-centre/view/

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