Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is the first major thematic group exhibition in the United States to examine the radical impact of internet culture on visual art.
Featuring 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, the exhibition is comprised of over 70 works across a variety of mediums, including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, web-based projects, and virtual reality. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; the possibilities for exploring identity and community afforded by virtual domains; and new economies of visibility accelerated by social media. Throughout, the work in the exhibition addresses the internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Associate.
“Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today shows the extraordinary changes in contemporary art that have developed alongside the rise of the internet. Our exhibition looks at the implications of these changes—and our understanding of self, privacy, community, and virtual and physical space—and the ways that artists convey, explore, and challenge them,” said Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director.
“Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today explores how all art—whether painting or moving images, sculpture or photography, websites or performance—has been radically transformed by the cultural impact of the internet,” said Respini.
“The exhibition also establishes important historical links between ideas pioneered by artists before the internet age and artists working today.”
The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory outside of Geneva, Switzerland. This development, and others that followed in quick succession, modernized the internet, and in the process radically changed our way of life―from how we shop, make friends, and share experiences, to how we imagine our future bodies and how nations police national security. The development of the internet after 1989 engendered the introduction of new digital technologies, allowing for the now ubiquitous platforms for social media and communication, and the massive proliferation of images of all kinds, drastically altering the ways in which we access and generate information. 1989 also marked a watershed moment across the globe, with significant shifts in politics, geographies, and economies. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and protests in Tiananmen Square signaled the beginning of our current globalized age, which cannot be imagined without the internet.
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is divided into five thematic sections: “Networks and Circulation,” “Hybrid Bodies,” “Virtual Worlds,” “States of Surveillance,” and “Performing the Self.”
In “Networks of Circulation” artists working with objects, images, and materials aggregated from the endless stream of information proliferating online and off explore the widespread social and political impact of our previously unimaginable level of interconnectivity, often pointing to how an accelerated image economy increasingly structures our everyday experience.
The age-old question “what does it mean to be human?” remains critically important, and takes on new urgency in today’s technologically mediated societies. Artists in “Hybrid Bodies” explore various related subjects, as well as how the body remains a site for politics, history, and contestation amidst the increasing complexity of science, politics, and international relations.
In “Virtual Worlds,” artists explore the aesthetic possibilities of computer-generated spaces as sites of production and inquiry, even as they mark the increasing elision between the virtual and the real in everyday life.
In “States of Surveillance,” artists employ a variety of strategies to examine the wide-reaching effects of surveillance technologies while pointing to paths of resistance.
The artworks in “Performing the Self” explore the extraordinary visibility afforded to individuals and groups moving within digital networks as well as their far-reaching effects offline.
The exhibition will feature a newly commissioned site-specific virtual reality installation by artist Jon Rafman. The ICA’s architecture and location on Boston Harbor feature prominently in the work, collapsing real and virtual space in a dreamscape that unfolds over eight minutes.
CREDITS
Photos by Caitlin Cunningham and Maxime Dufour
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today
Curated by Eva Respini
February 7 – May 20, 2018
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Shot entirely at night over the course of two years, this three-dimensional film connects a series of divergent natural and cultural phenomena throughout Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin. Organized into distinct chapters, Nightlife optically, audibly and conceptually brings together an obscure yet significant mix of historical monuments and occurrences, forming a hyper psychedelic experience. This ambitious production ties together several key themes that recur throughout the artist’s oeuvre, such as cultural relics, preservation and entropy, and speaks to the multidisciplinary nature of his practice.
Nightlife chronicles four interconnected subjects: Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker installed at the Cleveland Museum of Art; non-indigenous plants scattered throughout the Los Angeles basin; the annual Pyronale firework event at the Olympiastadion in Berlin; and the Jesse Owens Olympic oak tree at the James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland. The film begins with the camera panning over an unidentifiable undulating green form that resembles an indiscernible tropical leaf. As the camera continues rightward, showing the viewer a scaly, dense metal object, Rodin’s The Thinker is unveiled in its full form. One of the last casts overseen directly by Rodin, this work is shown in its current state outside the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1970, the work was partially destroyed by a bombing attributed to a cell of the anti-imperialist group ‘Weather Underground.’ Through the lens of stereoscopic vision, Rodin’s damaged thinker permeates the exhibition space, establishing both the spectral and sculptural nature of this film.
The viewer is then transported to Los Angeles, where different species of street vegetation appear to dance throughout the city. Yearning and swaying against artificial barriers and anonymous buildings adorned with pulsating bursts of technicolored lights, Gaillard records and highlights the various florae’s humanistic qualities. Each plant seems to respond to the light and music in a choreographed and humanistic way, creating a trance-like spectacle of movement. Primarily focusing on the Hollywood Juniper, an East Asian species of trees that Gaillard has returned to throughout his practice, these plants directly engage and struggle with the imposing architectural forms they are situated alongside, providing a deeper narrative about cross-cultural cohabitation.
In the third act of Nightlife, the setting shifts to the Olympiastadion, the site of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin for the annual Pyronale fireworks event, a two-day international pyrotechnical competition. Built from 1934 – 36 during the Nazi regime, this Stadium was once a monument to the Third Reich and a symbol of Germany’s connections to World War II, but is now used for a multitude of contemporary events. The viewer enters the scene at ground level, but is stealthily levitated into a field of fireworks, entering an abstracted landscape of lights and motion. Gaillard captures the action of this event in one long take from a unique aerial perspective, moving through blasts of light and plumes of smoke, forms that resemble ghostly depictions of trees or gun smoke from a violent battlefield. The event looks like a cosmic blast, blurring the line between reality and a hallucinogenic trip. The film concludes in Cleveland at the site of Jesse Owens’ Olympic oak planted at the Ford Rhodes High School. Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games, was awarded four oak saplings by Hitler, one of which still lives on today outside the stadium where he trained. The sapling turned full-grown tree is illuminated from multiple perspectives by a circling helicopter, creating a cascade of shadows that dance throughout the trees sturdy branches.
Mirroring the three-dimensionality of the film’s visual narrative is the dub soundtrack to Nightlife, a space-filling and deliberately low-tech soundscape made by the artist using a variety of analog filters and basic sound effects, such as reverb and delay, creating a disorienting illusion of expanded space. The soundtrack features a sample from the chorus of rocksteady singer’s Alton Ellis’ song, Blackman’s Word, played on a loop throughout the film’s first three acts. Originally released in 1969 on the Treasure Isle label, the lyrics sang, “I was born a loser.” The song was later re-recorded on a rival label, Coxsone, in 1971, and the song’s title was changed and the chorus sang, “I was born a winner,” a subtle yet powerful audible transformation that is reflected in the film as Gaillard turns his attention to Jesse Owens’ Olympic oak.
CREDITS:
Photos by David Regen
Courtesy the artists, Sprüth Magers and Gladstone Gallery New York and Brussels
CYPRIEN GAILLARD
Nightlife
Through April 14, 2018
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