CORY ARCANGEL – TL;DR
2014-09-15Arcangel has produced a body of work expanding upon his use of cultural and technological obsolescence as the source of an artistic vocabulary. In the gallery, he will be showing a series of works called Lakes. These sculptures consist of flat-screen televisions turned on their sides, displaying images taken from pop culture to which the artist has applied the Java applet “lake,” which creates a shimmering, seemingly liquid reflection along a horizontal axis. The effect is familiar but dated: something seen regularly on personal websites of the late 90’s but rarely since. These works explore a tension in societal attitudes towards the preservation of culture: the obsessiveness with which we conserve and narrativize visual art and popular culture, yet dismiss technology as somehow adversarial to art and art-making.
We may immediately place the autonomous elements of the artworks – the semi-iconic imagery, the televisions, the “lake” applet – but, through their relationships to one another and to their presentation, Arcangel renders them foreign. The flat-screen television, a contemporary symbol of American consumerism and capitalist aspiration, is literally turned on its side, simply and comically subverted to accommodate the vertically formatted pictures of the Lakes. On the televisions, where we expect either static or dynamic images, we get instead these strange hybrids, previously the exclusive domain of the Internet. The familiar net-material and its newfound highbrow context subvert one another, and as a result become wholly new. Arcangel’s decision to carpet the gallery further confounds expectations by emphasizing the “showroom” quality of the space and subverting its white-cube pretentions.
Exhibition runs through to October 26th, 2014
Team (gallery, inc.)
83 Grand Street
New York
NY 10013