Is digitization the end of the world or the beginning? - Martí Cormand, Untitled
Vanishing Points marks the launch of LewAllen Projects with a curated group exhibition in the gallery’s Railyard location. The man behind the curtain is Alex Ross, an employee of LewAllen and a sometime art critic.
I have known of Ross since I first moved to New Mexico. As a writer, he stands out for his verbose and dense prose on matters of aesthetics. I don’t know what grade level he is reading at, but suffice it to say I’m not in that grade yet. I need a dictionary to machete my way through a typical Ross piece and this merely translates the language into digestible words; it does little to provide lucidity for Ross’ claims.
His curator’s statement is no exception—I just finished reading it now, though I saw the show more than a week ago. I commend Ross for striving to do more than provide a sappy introduction of facile works, but the couch in which his ideas rest is a heavy floral thing indeed, and it threatens to overpower the art that hangs above it.
According to Ross, the show examines the ever-evolving ways we receive and interpret information, specifically by re-evaluating the practice of landscape painting. Incorporating various strategies of mark making, the artists’ work is a far cry from idyllic depictions of a peaceful countryside. Theirs is a world being scrambled apart; digital artifacts are likened to decay.
Saul Becker eyes the waterways surrounding Brooklyn like someone awaiting a lover’s return. From land he looks outward toward an empty horizon. In many cases, the view looks to have once been obstructed, but erosion and time have worn through the concrete barriers and rotted piers. His bleak palettes and titles—with ironic names like “Cornucopia”—indicate a possible future wiped of mankind. Becker is a precise draftsman and his surfaces are smooth and seductive, but the paint is laid down in parts, giving the images a pixilated quality. It’s an interesting effect, but ultimately the works remind me of dystopian screen savers.
Steve Robinson’s images of Ryo-an-ji utilize a computer to create elaborate stencils. The shapes at first look like specks and pebbles, but a moment to read just one of the work’s visions—squinting helps—reveals the intricate surfaces and patterns of the famed garden. Especially lovely is a black-and-white pen drawing. The lack of color allows the viewer to oscillate between the surface and the marks’ illusory perspectives. By enlarging and simplifying the shapes to this extent, Robinson questions the completeness of the nature of representation.
Martí Cormand’s realist renderings are immaculately detailed. The problem is he repeatedly disrupts the imagery with a goofy one-liner meant to invoke tensions between interiors and exteriors. He does this by cutting across the pictures with colored lines and widgets that recall the early days of CGI. I believe Cormand means to reference the amassing of bits of information that fabricate a seamless and untruthful whole, but the effect is neither poignant nor sensible. His concept is clear enough in the clever and masterful “Bite,” in which a hillside road has been destroyed and has collapsed into a gaping hole littered with human detritus. At the bottom of the composition, spilling out farthest, is a painter’s easel. In this single image, Cormand captures the theme of his other works, if not the entire show.
The works of Vanishing Points are beautifully crafted, but the tone of the show seems unnecessarily negative. Whereas the artists and curator alike see something tragic in the potential for misinformation, I would counter that digital media has helped aid our awareness of the world well beyond any harm it has done. As more of our experiences become virtual, something may be lost, but what exactly? It may not be perfect, but wider dissemination of information and greater interconnectivity are rather worthy goals.
I have known of Ross since I first moved to New Mexico. As a writer, he stands out for his verbose and dense prose on matters of aesthetics. I don’t know what grade level he is reading at, but suffice it to say I’m not in that grade yet. I need a dictionary to machete my way through a typical Ross piece and this merely translates the language into digestible words; it does little to provide lucidity for Ross’ claims.
His curator’s statement is no exception—I just finished reading it now, though I saw the show more than a week ago. I commend Ross for striving to do more than provide a sappy introduction of facile works, but the couch in which his ideas rest is a heavy floral thing indeed, and it threatens to overpower the art that hangs above it.
According to Ross, the show examines the ever-evolving ways we receive and interpret information, specifically by re-evaluating the practice of landscape painting. Incorporating various strategies of mark making, the artists’ work is a far cry from idyllic depictions of a peaceful countryside. Theirs is a world being scrambled apart; digital artifacts are likened to decay.
Saul Becker eyes the waterways surrounding Brooklyn like someone awaiting a lover’s return. From land he looks outward toward an empty horizon. In many cases, the view looks to have once been obstructed, but erosion and time have worn through the concrete barriers and rotted piers. His bleak palettes and titles—with ironic names like “Cornucopia”—indicate a possible future wiped of mankind. Becker is a precise draftsman and his surfaces are smooth and seductive, but the paint is laid down in parts, giving the images a pixilated quality. It’s an interesting effect, but ultimately the works remind me of dystopian screen savers.
Steve Robinson’s images of Ryo-an-ji utilize a computer to create elaborate stencils. The shapes at first look like specks and pebbles, but a moment to read just one of the work’s visions—squinting helps—reveals the intricate surfaces and patterns of the famed garden. Especially lovely is a black-and-white pen drawing. The lack of color allows the viewer to oscillate between the surface and the marks’ illusory perspectives. By enlarging and simplifying the shapes to this extent, Robinson questions the completeness of the nature of representation.
Martí Cormand’s realist renderings are immaculately detailed. The problem is he repeatedly disrupts the imagery with a goofy one-liner meant to invoke tensions between interiors and exteriors. He does this by cutting across the pictures with colored lines and widgets that recall the early days of CGI. I believe Cormand means to reference the amassing of bits of information that fabricate a seamless and untruthful whole, but the effect is neither poignant nor sensible. His concept is clear enough in the clever and masterful “Bite,” in which a hillside road has been destroyed and has collapsed into a gaping hole littered with human detritus. At the bottom of the composition, spilling out farthest, is a painter’s easel. In this single image, Cormand captures the theme of his other works, if not the entire show.
The works of Vanishing Points are beautifully crafted, but the tone of the show seems unnecessarily negative. Whereas the artists and curator alike see something tragic in the potential for misinformation, I would counter that digital media has helped aid our awareness of the world well beyond any harm it has done. As more of our experiences become virtual, something may be lost, but what exactly? It may not be perfect, but wider dissemination of information and greater interconnectivity are rather worthy goals.
Parry:
I think there's actually a pencil near the bottom of the Cormand painting. It has a shadow. It's just there: falling. I am mostly positive that this is a pencil, not a brush. Are words, perhaps, in greater danger? Unless we drop them carefully...
The claim that "the artists and curator alike see something tragic in the potential for misinformation" is one I do not find immediately able to substantiate. Though I read the curatorial statement before walking into the show, I did not get the sense that there was anything extensively "negative", nor did that feeling appear as I looked at the images. In fact, my reaction was quite opposite. The softness of Cormand and Becker's styles, the soothingly muted color palette shared by all three painters (punctuated by moments in Cormand's images), the desire to play with photographic and digital media as part of the painting process: it would be hard to acknowledge all of these and simultaneously feel any sort of heavy-handedness, which I think is what is being suggested. Ross makes a somewhat startling but intrinsically valuable observation about digital information: like natural objects, it can accumulate, go to waste, and undergo decay. ["We must consider the life of digital archives and their place in the technology, for although completely modern, they are as fragile as ancient books" - Jean-Noël Jeanneney.] I think one should be cautious to describe something like Ross's observations as "negative", since that word has both a generic and a particular usage. We could half-attentively assume from the text that the exhibit was curated negatively by observing that words like "destructive", "regime", "excess", and "decay" have unfriendly connotations. But that would only be an assumption; moreover, it would be an assumption that ignores context. Though the curator asks the viewer to consider concepts, it is up to each individual viewer to determine whether or not those items might be difficult and possible unpleasant. Calling the show negative is like claiming that the man in the grocery store was trying to clip your heels with his cart. The malice is assumed. The overarching goal of the project, to seek "more adequate understandings of a changing world," sounds pretty positive (if these words are to be used in a generic way). One may not agree with the ideas that Ross posits regarding each artist, or may simply see additional possibilities for the work, but it would inattentiveness alone that could generate the sense that the show simply bore some facile, superficial statement about the tragedy of modern technology.
As someone who deals with photography and Photoshop on a daily basis, I find it increasingly enticing that these artists have absorbed the vocabularies of digital photography and graphic design and then re-processed those languages to varying extents. The feeling of the pieces, especially Becker and Robinson's, is as anachronistic as it is contemporary: translating 21st-century digital into early 20th-century pictorial. Like the photographs from Hiroshi Sugimoto's 'Architecture' series, Robinson's images of Ryoan-Ji invoke a place which we are unable to recognize while standing just before its representations, yet becomes more comprehensible to us while standing away from it. By sourcing multiple images from multiple photographers and then relinquishing further control of the painting to digital processes, Robinson encourages the viewer to consider more general questions about what it means to make a photograph or painting or who owns images of cultural site. This subject matter in particular also provokes meditation on the relationship between a space and the method one may choose in reproducing it. One feels encouraged to ask why this process was used to portray this place. There are similar moments in Becker's work, though the intensity of process (even neurosis) apparent in the other artists' paintings possibly overshadows his works' otherwise delicately engaging moments. Cormand's work seems to be as much about perfection and interruption in the practice of painting as it is in inverting the traditional roles of landscape--take for example "Deposit", wherein the simple but well-executed geometric jetsam washes up out of a picturesque shore, as if all the efforts of a beginning art student had pooled together and been swept together into the final waves of the painting. In "Bite", the trash filling a gouge in the landscape is engrossing, even beautiful. The playfulness of Cormand's images defies negativity. Cynicism perhaps, but too much dreaminess otherwise.
Ross' show is, then, a well-pieced exhibit which encourages viewers to consider both contemporary society and contemporary practice in painting and image-making. The density of the curatorial statement, if intimidating in its verbosity, still says no more than is necessary, and does indeed offer up interesting points for debate and contemplation. One thinks of Wittgenstein's introduction to the Investigations, wherein he warns the reader that he does not intend to do his thinking for anyone else, but instead wishes to bring others to their own thoughts. Ross and Lew Allen Projects have created an exhibit which accomplishes this very goal, and hopefully they will continue to provide this vital service to the art community of Santa Fe. All dictionary machetes and potential negativity aside, we cannot afford to skip reading such work.