Entering Japanese artist/composer Ryoji Ikeda’s new installation “the transfinite,” which is currently showing at the Park Avenue Armory, feels like sitting inside of a computer.
video art
Posted inOpinion
Ryan Trecartin Makes a Movie Trailer
In advance of Ryan Trecartin’s upcoming exhibition at PS1, the artist has released a trailer teaser to get us all excited for a new batch of video works.
Posted inOpinion
General Idea Tells You to Shut the Fuck Up
There’s something about General Idea that always felt ahead of its time. Videos like “Shut the Fuck Up” (1984) foreshadows the mashup culture of today but with a decidedly anti-establishment feel, even though they were obviously designed for the capitalist art market.
Posted inOpinion
Cory Arcangel’s Surrealist Super Mario
New media and internet artist Cory Arcangel often appropriates artifacts from earlier digital times for his artwork. In a series of videos, Arcangel hacks cartridges of the original Nintendo game Super Mario Bros., twisting the game’s graphics into surreal reinterpretations.
Posted inOpinion
Nam June Paik’s “Electronic Space Opera #1”
It seems fitting to kick off our Videodrome day of art videos with one from Nam June Paik, an early video artist from Korea whose multimedia sculptures and installations challenged the boundaries of art making in the 60s and 70s. Here, check out Paik’s “Electronic Opera #1”.
Posted inOpinion
Why Are So Many Museums Buying Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”?
The Boston MFA is purchasing Christian Marclay’s epic movie mash-up “The Clock” (2010) (recently on view in NYC) for $250,000. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought the piece in April, and there are rumors that MoMA plans to do the same. What’s up with this collecting fad?
Posted inArt
Video Art as a Multivalent Medium
Video art is still in the process of establishing itself. Despite the fact that art has been created through the medium over the course of the past century, it’s still hard to pin down what forms video art can take, and what vocabulary we use to talk about it. At New York University’s 80WSE gallery, a current exhibition entitled By Chance, a Video Show, marshals together video art in its multivalent states, from video-as-installation to video-as-flat surface to video-as-collage. Artists including Alejandro Cesarco, Jason Varone and Nayda Collazo-Llorens explore the different possibilities of video art.
Posted inArt
Paying Attention at Moving Image 2011
The first thing that I noticed about Moving Image, an art fair based entirely around video works, was the relative calm. Gone were the crowds, gone were the collectors running rabidly from booth to booth, gone were the chatty gallerists and curators. Moving Image is a place to look at art and experience it one on one. It takes some time, but walking through the videos I definitely caught a few stand out pieces that would have been overwhelmed in an regular art fair display.
Posted inArt
Does Cao Fei’s “Rabid Dogs” (2002) Age Well?
Everything that matters happens in an office these days. To survive in today’s world, one can’t help but burn with curiosity about why some rise to the top while others gets stuck at the bottom box of the organizational chart. The Office, Mad Men or The Devil Wears Prada all hit this nerve with verve. But what’s been missing for me is that spunkier imagery and wilder narrative that video art can get away with. Cao Fei fills this void in spades with her 2002 video “Rabid Dogs” on view till Sunday at the Asia Society.
Posted inArt
Exploring Early Computer Art, 1950-1980
Personal computing may have begun in the 1980s but the history of computer art started much earlier during a period when only a few visionaries sensed the impact computers were going to have on our lives. The Slovakia-based Translab has posted a good online archive of early computer art from names that aren’t widely known but were important for their early work with computers.