Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age 9781684484171

Table of contents :
Contents
Collectors’ Statement
Curating Screen Time
Flipping the Script
Artworks
Further Reading
About the Curators

Citation preview

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO ART IN THE INTERNET AGE E D I T E D BY R I C H A R D R I N E H A RT W I T H P H I L L I P P RO D G E R

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age, presented at the Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, January 18–March 27, 2022. The exhibition is cocurated by Richard Rinehart, director of the Samek Art Museum, and Phillip Prodger, executive director of Curatorial Exhibitions. All works generously loaned by THE EKARD COLLECTION. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949128 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Bucknell University Press Individual essays copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.bucknelluniversitypress.org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Collectors’ Statement

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Curating Screen Time Richard Rinehart

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Flipping the Script Phillip Prodger

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Artworks

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Further Reading

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About the Curators

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Collectors’ statement Sharing works of art with a broader public is an honor for us; indeed, we believe it is the responsibility of art collectors to do so. Together with Samek Art Museum director Richard Rinehart and Curatorial Exhibitions executive director Phillip Prodger, we chose sixteen artists from our collection to create this exhibition, called Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age. Each work has a unique story, message, or concept, and each is challenging and engaging in its own way. Through these works, the artists convey messages intrinsic to our times. We hope you will enjoy them as much as we have enjoyed collaborating on this project. —The Ekard Collection

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Curating Screen Time R I C HAR D R I N E H A RT

The artworks in this catalog were first presented together in the exhibition Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age. It is my pleasure as cocurator of this exhibition to share here some of the questions and ideas that sparked its formation. It may clarify to mention first what the following collection of artworks is not intended to be: it is not a measure of the state of contemporary art or the international art scene, though the artists included here originate from and practice in several nations. The following works do not represent an art movement and, in fact, many of these artists have never before been exhibited together. Each of these artists speaks in their own voice and each artwork in its own style toward various ends, some of which may not be highlighted here. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to speak about what binds together groups of artists and artworks. Our current political environment, shaped by polarizing and siloed social media, indicates a much-diminished sense of shared social reality (a phenomenon that has been documented particularly well in many of the nations represented in this exhibition). Gone is the centralized national narrative fueled by monolithic broadcast networks and gone is the modernist universalizing myth of the “Family of

Man”1— and perhaps this is not all bad. Recent contemporary art, network cultures, and social activism have driven home the message that there never was one shared social experience and that perhaps it’s more accurate to speak of dominant rather than shared realities. Social knowledge and perspectives have always been diverse, and minoritized peoples negotiate dominant culture by code-switching, but this is becoming more challenging as the set of dominant cultural references (from movies to news stories to memes) further fractures. I am not arguing that we are in any kind of post-dominant-culture moment. After all, America is still a cultural empire, corporations dictate cultural property law, and white supremacy deforms our notions of beauty globally. The base apparatus of power remains but the cultural super-structure has shifted in relation. It is apparent that dominant culture is increasingly characterized by the media fractures that would appear to break it. And, insofar as dominant culture has long served as a foil for artists, code-switchers and artists alike scramble to find new footing. This exhibition is, in part, about that scramble. These artworks are also joined by other, more concrete, connections. They are not unmoored

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artifacts of media at large but rather positioned within the art world. They can be discussed within the genres of photography and video and, as Phillip Prodger suggests in this volume, they may be linked to earlier art histories of Dada and conceptual art. They are linked by their temporal proximity within the last couple of decades and the world history that entails. These artworks are also related by affective tactics used in both contemporary art and broader media cultures—such as nostalgia and humor—as well as others that I will introduce below and cite further in the image plates. The broadest framework that I can offer is that this exhibition features a sampling of international contemporary artists who use photography and video to critique and reflect on contemporary cultures. These artists ask what it means to be a photographer when everyone is an Instagram influencer; what it means to make video art when everyone is a TikTok star; and how to deliver social commentary in the age of the meme.

The Post-Internet Thing “Post-internet art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson that describes art that may or may not have been made for the internet but that acknowledges the internet as an omnipresent influence and contemporary social condition. The term has been interpreted in diverse ways and has ignited debates as

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dynamic as the art it describes. The “post-” originally referenced an era following the art historical bloom of net art that took the form of websites, software code, and digital games at the close of the twentieth century. Post-internet art described the next generation of hybrid artistic practices that may have begun online but that had since moved offline or vice versa. For example, there were artists who practiced “traditional” performance art using the body, time, and real space as their media. These artists might then video stream their performances online, not merely as an expedient way to expand their audience but with full awareness of how using the network changed the inherent nature of the performance. Other artists used the tactics of net art but moved them offline. A video game artist might take their gaming tactics offline into live action role playing, flash mobs, geocaching, and other real-world formats. At this point, post-internet described the consciousness of the network as it pervaded other art forms. Following roughly chronologically, the phrase “the new aesthetic,” coined by artist James Bridle, similarly describes the blurring of virtual and real worlds but initially focused more narrowly on visual artifacts of digital media moving into an offline environment. Examples include everything from three-dimensional sculptures that appeared to be pixelated to the buildings of architect Frank Gehry that could be designed only with new digital tools that

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could calculate the weight and distribution of unusual architectural forms. New aesthetic was an attempt to describe the ways in which technologies have so deeply changed how we see that they have reshaped human vision beyond the limits of the network. Post-internet art has since come to refer not only to art that has a direct relationship to digital information technologies (in the form of cross-over artists or digital effects) but also to art that bears a meaningful relationship to broader social conditions occasioned by the internet. I propose that this is where Screen Time fits in—as an updated social art history practice in which artworks may be read through the “screen” of social behaviors of the net (memes, for instance) or in relation to social conditions driven by the net (political polarization). Post-internet is helpful in framing the social conditions of these artworks’ creation and/or their reception, sometimes beyond the artist’s intent. At this point, the whole world is pixelated. It’s worth noting here that the title of this exhibition, Screen Time, refers not only to the fields in which the artworks are being read but also to the conditions of this exhibition’s development. This exhibition was curated entirely online across two continents; as of this writing, I have not seen any of these photographs and I have never met Phillip Prodger in person. This is not unusual in the art world but, coming on the heels of a worldwide pandemic

that fused with the internet to create new social norms and practices, it may signal a further shift. Curators prefer, when possible, to see physical artworks such as photographs in person before selecting them for an exhibition. There are many reasons for this custom, such as the fact that the real artifact may yield details and insights that do not appear in reproductions. It bears mentioning that there are less laudable functions of this custom; for instance, the ability to travel for research also signals membership in a privileged class and constitutes a marker of insider status. In any case, access and proximity to the original are the same reasons that scholars from other disciplines prefer to visit primary source material in person as well. But maybe that kind of indexically conferred authority is like an artwork’s aura; maybe it’s not so important now. Maybe that’s post-internet too.

Media-ness: Images and Objects This exhibition may document yet another chapter in the evolving role of the object in the art world, but the object has not quite disappeared. While this exhibition may screen contemporary social behaviors and register affective artistic strategies, it also speaks the formal language of media; it is a conversation conducted among images and objects. Photography and video art have been alternately cast as embodied art mediums or as dematerialized images, freed through

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reproduction from the ties of materiality. They can be both. If a traditional singular artwork embodies the “hand” or even the soul of the artist, then media artworks, through iteration and reproduction, offer a transmigration of the soul. Photographic prints, such as those presented in this exhibition, have been physically processed since the medium was invented and each print is a unique object. Video, though it may seem more ephemeral, is equally material; inextricable from the physical equipment needed to render it in real time. Even born-digital images— the ultimate dematerialized media—are carried by physical substrata, a continuous flow of electrical impulses through chips, wires, and LEDs. The early debates around digital NFT artworks and their environmental impact underscore the fact that considerations of aura and physicality are still very much relevant to media art though they are inflected differently. The objects in this exhibition operate within the parameters of their mediums—photography or video. In this context, a medium is a bit more than a technology. More precisely, a medium can be understood as an interface between technology and society (reflecting the etymology of the word “medium” as something in the middle.) For instance, the medium of film or, better yet, the more abstract “cinema,” refers not just to the celluloid strip but also to the conventions of filmmaking, the industries surrounding the

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production and presentation of film, the professions and discourses surrounding those, and so on. Internet art and post-internet art can be similarly understood to refer to clusters of interrelating technologies as well as communities of practice. Photography and video constitute artistic traditions and historic discourses as well as specialized technologies and industries. The mediums of these artworks do more than complete the wall label, they reveal a host of technological, intellectual, and social connections to the broader world and suggest expanded avenues of inquiry. Taking one of these avenues, I see nostalgia as one of the affective strategies deployed in contemporary media culture and taken up by some of the artists in this exhibition. In a VICE magazine article, Gita Jackson claims, “If you look at the culture that Millennials have produced and consumed, we are preoccupied with nostalgia.”2 The article goes on to detail this generation’s fondness for Disneyland, the TV show Friends, and for acid-washed jeans, and it’s not a long walk from pop culture to the art world. Earlier generations of video and internet artists would often dismantle their chosen medium like a child taking apart a clock to see how it works. These artists introduced glitches to their work or removed all content from their media, both of which have the impact of foregrounding the medium itself as the primary object of examination. Several of the younger artists in this exhibition seem less interested

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in “breaking” the medium than in referencing and collaging the historic encyclopedia of tropes and motifs associated with it as an alternate means of creating meaning. This approach does not result in a stripped-down formal presentation of a medium but instead an object thickly layered with history and history’s nostalgic strata. These artists’ choices to use relatively traditional media like photography and video art in the internet age is itself a comment on this era. The vast majority of photographic images and video today circulate in digital formats. Photographic prints, like vinyl records, are an artistic form of resistance that feels, perhaps necessarily, nostalgic. The Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century similarly resisted our mechanized divorce from nature and resulting social conditions by purposely employing pre-industrial materials and practices. Arts and Crafts is sometimes characterized as being retrograde but it was achingly modernist because, before industrialization separated society from nature, nostalgia for nature would have been impossible to conceive. The question remains: What is the object of today’s longing? Jackson never answers that question but the artists included here might provide clues. To conclude these ruminations on curating Screen Time, I hope that screening these artworks through a contemporary social lens can help acclimate our eyes to the larger reshaping of vision

that is taking place. The inter-social connections that appear in these artworks seem to run orthogonal to the fractures in our social reality. I see artworks here that are intensely personal and public in ways that belie the self-indulgence we see exhibited on social media. Looking further, these artworks allow me to see through my world-bubble into neighboring ones and to do that now seems surprisingly ambitious. ________________________________________________ Notes 1. Edward Steichen, curator. “The Family of Man.” Art exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, January 24-May 8, 1955. 2. Gita Jackson. “Gen Z Is Coming for Millennials and We Deserve It,” VICE, June 16, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/ 4ayx9p/gen-z-is-coming-for-millennials-and-we-deserve-it.

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FLIPPING THE SCRIPT P HI L L I P P RO DG E R

Like most complex inventions, the internet has no single birthday, and no one inventor. In fact, it is not even one thing. Evolving out of Department of Defense initiatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for nearly two decades it existed mainly as a series of linked computer pathways, connecting university campuses and independent labs for the purposes of academic research. It was not until 1989 that commercial internet service providers—companies like America Online and the long defunct but once omnipresent Prodigy and Compuserve—began offering internet services to the public. Although widespread adoption took time, such services enabled ordinary people to join the cybersphere, ultimately transforming it almost beyond recognition. The influx of paying customers, advertising money, and investment accelerated growth and expansion, while the internet’s “killer app,” the World Wide Web, released to the public in 1991 (though not fully embraced until some years later), enabled new ways of sharing and transmitting information. The rise of the 24-hour news cycle, sparked by the founding of CNN in 1980, and later, its partner website CNN.com, further accelerated the near-instantaneous spread of information. The result has been a seismic shift—the Gutenberg press of the information age—an international,

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democratizing force, driving advancements in science, medicine, and the humanities while transmitting news as it happens and breaking down geographic, ethnic, and socioeconomic barriers. At the same time, it has become a clearinghouse for all that is venal in our collective nature—deceit, predation, corruption, abuse, bullying, and hyper-consumerism. In other words, the internet has come to embody humanity’s very best and worst qualities. As cultural commentators, and indeed, as citizens of this still new internet-inflected reality, artists have had a critical role in navigating the good, bad, and indifferent of this new set of circumstances. As the works in this catalog and accompanying exhibition show, the results are seldom predictable and the effects are not always obvious. They may take the form of interpretation and performance—Vik Muniz’s magnificent rendering of the figure of abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, first photographed in the act of painting by Hans Namuth in 1950, then rendered, Pollock-like, in chocolate by Muniz, and finally rephotographed for display. Alternatively, responses may involve appropriation and creating new context, as with Christian Marclay’s playful telephone narrative, cut and spliced, like

Frankenstein’s monster, from cinema and television. Or they may confront the role and significance of medium itself, as in Cyrus Kabiru’s elaborate sculptural eyewear, which the artist uses to produce self-portraits obscuring his facial features, or Mary Sue’s Universal Art Translator, where the would-be translator becomes the work of art, rather than the work it is supposed to explain. Such directions are not entirely new in the internet age. Notions of appropriation, manipulation, and chance have existed in Western art since at least the rise of Dada in the mid-1910s, especially in the conceptualist teachings of Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Dzama mischievously alludes to the master’s example in his Game of Chess, which may be interpreted in part as a riff on Duchamp’s advocacy of chess as game, performance, and alternative to (or extension of ) visual art in the 1920s and ’30s. Ironic appropriation and challenging of pre-existing styles and philosophies of art is also a hallmark of postmodernism, the widespread if loosely defined midto late-twentieth-century artistic, architectural, literary, and historical movement in which artists turned to historical precedents in art and literature, incorporating, questioning, and combining elements of earlier practice in provocative ways. The term “post-internet art” was coined in 2006 by the artist Marisa Olson to describe art made in the “wake” of spending time surfing the internet. As curator Eva Respini explains, the term is not entirely satisfactory, since many of the attributes ascribed to

post-internet art, including immersive space, multiple visualities and perspectives, and the use of digital markers in real space, are not new.1 Building on the legacy of Duchamp and other early-twentieth-century artists, conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s turned their attention to questions of consumerism and mass media, engaging with issues of sexuality and gender bias, social and political authority, and racial inequality. These artists also began to look closely at artistic practice itself, challenging the materiality of photography and other modes of representation, while critiquing the art marketplace. Central to this activity was a search for identity and self in the face of what even then seemed to be an onslaught of mass communication. This same artistic inheritance informs artists of the internet age; however, what once seemed a homogenous and monolithic media culture has now become increasingly granular and fragmented. To understand the significance of this change, it may be helpful to consider how scholarly opinion has changed in the intervening years. In 1972, scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw laid out their landmark agenda-setting hypothesis, which shaped communication theory for the decades that followed.2 According to this idea, the primary influence of newspapers, magazines, and television is not to sway public opinion (although they can and do so), but to set the agenda for the key issues of the day, serving as

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gatekeepers for the public consciousness by deciding which stories are newsworthy, and prioritizing among them. By choosing headlines, lead stories, and opinion pieces, the authors argued that the media have the ability to raise attention on any given issue, setting the playing field for debate and discussion. Using television as an example, it stands to reason that when only three major channels offered national news—CBS, NBC, and ABC (and to a lesser degree, a fourth, PBS)—there was little opportunity for stories that were not featured by these broadcasters to enter civic discourse. The downside of this situation was that time limitations and errors of judgment could be amplified. If Walter Cronkite, or one of his competitors, failed to cover a story, then it might not be heard or considered at all. On the other hand, Cronkite’s judgment carried significant weight, and the limited number of stories had a stabilizing effect, ensuring that most Americans were engaged with the same political issues at more or less the same time. In the age of the internet, the agenda-setting idea has been turned on its head. The proliferation of media and entertainment sources, legitimate and otherwise, means that users can choose from a wide variety of voices with differing priorities. The individual now sets the agenda. And while certain subjects are of such widespread concern that they inevitably rise to the top, there can be enormous deviations among outlets not just in terms of priori-

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ty, but whether certain subjects are covered at all. The World Wide Web in particular enables individuals to form communities of any size, bound by any issue, from an issue-driven national rights organization to a local club. Within these silos of association, like-minded persons exchange information and may pursue overlapping agendas, but have little in common with others who identify differently. This is the fundamental paradox of the internet age—while the internet may bring us closer to those with whom we may wish to affiliate, it separates us from those with whom we do not. This is a conundrum one of the founders of sociology, the French philosopher Émile Durkheim, foresaw more than a century ago. Although he could not have conceived of such a far-reaching platform as the internet, in The Division of Labor in Society, he argued that increasing specialization meant that people had less in common with their neighbors than ever before. For example, in agrarian societies where there were farmers, millers, and haulers, even if jobs differed, the individuals involved could relate to each other since they knew and understood each other’s jobs. In post-industrial society, by contrast, specializations could be extreme even within fields of study. The skills required to be an optician are distinct from those needed to be an ophthalmologist, let alone a glass or frame maker. Under such circumstances, commonalities of experience and understanding break down. As people come to know more and more about ever-narrower fields of

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endeavor, their shared social understanding is diluted. As Durkheim put it, “society does not find the bases on which it rests fully laid out in consciences; it puts them there itself.”3 Ironically, Durkheim believed that one of the ways society could be made more cohesive was through communication. And while he could not have foreseen the explosion of ideas and viewpoints that the internet embodies, he did understand the constructive power of art and literature. If artists of the ’60s and ’70s sought to challenge the authority of over-reaching media, artists of the internet age frequently seek the opposite: to restore shared understanding in the face of disunited and divided communities. They may be just as cynical and provocative as their predecessors, but their goal is not to undermine but to strengthen—to highlight, acknowledge, and navigate uncharted, and sometimes unchartable, waters. In a 2015 interview, the media artist Natalie Bookchin put this succinctly:

misinformation and propaganda continue to thrive in the internet age. Rather, it is a matter of connection, of belonging, of developing a genuine sense of self when confronted with a mega-faceted culture. The internet offers an infinitude of possible paths. Artists are our arbiters and guides, ready to lead the way. ________________________________________________ Notes 1. Eva Respini, ed., Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today (New Haven: Yale University Press and Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2018), 15. 2. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, “The AgendaSetting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 176-87. 3. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 350. 4. Natalie Bookchin, “Out in Public,” in No Internet, No Art: A Lunch Bytes Anthology, ed. Melanie Bühler (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2015), 159.

…as we rant, confess, describe and confess to our screens, I search for common ground, collective desires, common sense, and shared insight into the present, [revealing] collective longings to be connected—to define ourselves as part of a larger social body, and to be seen and heard in public—even as we isolate ourselves in front of our screens.4 The contemporary dilemma is not just the casting off of programmatic thinking, although

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ARTWORKS

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N. Dash (USA, b. 1980) Untitled, 2012 gelatin silver print 15.5 x 19.5 in. Dash, who often works with tactile adobe mud, raw pigment, and wool, harkens back to the sense of touch as foundational for art making. It is perhaps no coincidence that the recent rise of touchless ethereal media has been inverted by new interest in maker spaces, knitting circles, and handicraft techniques.

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Nathalie Djurberg (Sweden, b. 1978) Deceiving Looks, 2011 clay animation, digital video 5:58 min. Music by Hans Berg Djurberg’s nostalgic use of claymation puts this video in the realm of children’s TV. Like that historic media, the work contrasts visual playfulness with ethical subtexts. The surreal violence here seems an absurd but apt reflection of an era characterized by real social unrest contrasted with memes and deepfake videos.

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Marcel Dzama (Canada, b. 1974) A Game of Chess, 2011 single-channel video 14:02 min. © Marcel Dzama Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner A Game of Chess references the history of surreal film from Fellini’s mad parades to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which the protagonist plays a game of chess against death. Today, chess remains a metaphor for the game of life, pitting free will against determinism, human against artificial intelligence.

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Peter Funch (Denmark, b. 1974) Smoking Smokers, from the series Babel Tales, 2006 digital color coupler print 23 x 50.75 in. Each individual image may appear real, but repeating the same point of view and placement of figures while transforming individuals into homogeneous members of social tribes (smokers, lovers, children) reveals the illusion of the series. The cruxes of historical photography—framing and indexicality—are both twisted into a purely contemporary vision.

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Peter Funch (Denmark, b. 1974) Loving Lovers, from the series Babel Tales, 2006 digital color coupler print 23 x 50.75 in.

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Peter Funch (Denmark, b. 1974) Juvenile Bliss, from the series Babel Tales, 2007 digital color coupler print 23 x 50.75 in.

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Huang Yan (China, b. 1966) Face Painting: Plum, Orchid, Bamboo, and Chrysanthemum chromogenic prints, in four parts 58.1 x 47.5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Red Gate Gallery, Beijing Huang’s work combines the mediums of body art, painting, and photography to mash up the art genres of figure and landscape. His works honor and update Chinese art traditions while depicting them precariously, as fleeting as the model’s next bath.

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Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya, b. 1984) Macho Nne (Confusion) photograph: pigment print 59 x 47.25 in. sculpture: copper wire, aluminum, and steel 9.5 W x 5 H x 1 D in. Kabiru’s photographs depict his meticulously crafted sculptural eyewear series, C-Stunners, made from found materials and presented as the focus of his self-portraits. Instead of using the camera to capture sumptuous images for our eyes, Kabiru transforms his own eyes to become a fantastic Afrofuturistic sentinel capturing us in his gaze.

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Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya, b. 1984) Macho Nne (Roman Attire) photograph: pigment print 59 x 47.25 in. sculpture: copper, steel, and wire mesh with beads 9.5 W x 5 H x 1 D in.

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William Kentridge (South Africa, b. 1955) Anti-Mercator, 2010-11 high-definition film transferred to video 9:45 min. Courtesy of the artist Kentridge’s use of playful visual techniques belies his serious subject (a strategy echoed in other video artworks presented here). In Anti-Mercator (named for the European cartographer, Mercator, who imposed the now-ubiquitous grid onto the world map), Kentridge critiques the use of technologies that measure—but also prescribe and control—our sense of time and space.

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Christian Marclay (USA, b. 1955) Telephones, 1995 single-channel video  7:30 min. The ruins of the nineteenth century were abandoned castles; the ruins of the modern era are obsolete technologies. The nostalgia for classic Hollywood originally evoked in Telephones in 1995 has since become layered with nostalgia for its now-obsolete subject. Depicting a vast social network of phones through cinematic narrative, Telephones also seems oddly prophetic.

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Marilyn Minter (USA, b.1948) Yellow Sparkle, 2007 color coupler print 39.75 x 60 in. © Marilyn Minter, courtesy of Regen Projects Makeup tutorials created the first YouTube stars and glamor is the affective currency of Instagram influencers. Using historic and contemporary visual languages of fashion and beauty, Minter’s images offer critical glamor-memes that are, by contrast, over the top, dirty and messy, and flashy and trashy.

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Vik Muniz (Brazil, b. 1961) Action Painter, from the series Pictures of Chocolate, 1999 color coupler print 48.5 x 48 in. © 2022 Vik Muniz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Muniz’s photographs re-create iconic art images using unexpected materials like peanut butter, diamonds, dice, or chocolate. Action Painter reproduces Hans Namuth’s famous photograph of Jackson Pollock, whose own paintings inspired these splatters of chocolate. Muniz adds a new layer to the history of these images, playfully inserting himself as a self-described “illusionist.”

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Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, b. 1959) Paradise Portraits, Matt, 2002                                                                     digital color coupler print 29.5 x 22.25 in. Far from the comedic jokers or black velvet clown paintings that served as kitsch for a previous generation, Matt is a glamorous, Instagrammable clown. Olaf uses crisp lines, saturated colors, and uncomfortably close focus to create an uncanny emotional dissonance between realism and surrealism.

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Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria, b. 1974) Alterscape Stories: Spilling Waste, 2006-11 diptych of pigment prints 44.5 x 89 in. total Produced by the 1st Bienal de Arquitectura, Arte y Paisaje de Canarias. The Alterscape series is comprised of dioramas depicting the Nigerian landscape in which the artist performs symbolic actions documented with photographs. Towering over the landscape like a titan, the artist represents a generation that commands omniscient Google Earth views but sees a landscape scarred by postcolonial legacies and threatened by environmental collapse.

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Robin Rhode (South Africa, b. 1976) Scales, 2015                                                                                       color coupler prints; 28 parts 14 x 20.5 in. each Scales might appear to be an objective scientific study of color theory (often represented by three-point triangular spaces). However, Rhode’s ongoing interest in the social echoes of apartheid in his native South Africa suggests a social allegory behind the work and prompts us to wonder whether color is ever truly neutral.

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Vee Speers (Australia, b. 1962) Untitled No. 3, from the series The Birthday Party, 2007 dye destruction print 47.25 x 37.75 in. Speers’ series The Birthday Party is shot at the eye level of the subject, drawing the viewer into the children’s world and the seemingly happy nostalgia of a birthday celebration. However, Speers removes the narrative and visual context that might explain the children’s odd expressions and costumes.

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Vee Speers (Australia, b. 1962) Untitled No. 19, from the series The Birthday Party, 2007 dye destruction print 47.25 x 37.75 in.

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Vee Speers (Australia, b. 1962) Untitled No. 38, from the series The Birthday Party, 2007 dye destruction print 47.25 x 37.75 in.

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Mary Sue (France, b. 1979) Universal Art Translator, 2017 single-channel video variable duration Secret information has long been used to differentiate group insiders from outsiders. This work translates rarified art concepts and terms into common language for the exhausted gallery visitor. Once everyone can translate artspeak, how will the art world define itself?

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Puck Verkade (Netherlands, b. 1987) Plague, 2019 single-channel video 4:50 min. Courtesy of the artist and Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague Plague employs cinematic techniques, including stop motion, green screen, live action, and montage, to create an environmental allegory told by a fly. Evoking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, this tragically absurd story follows a protagonist who, like poor old Gregor, is mentally unraveling in ways that provoke equal parts pity, mirth, and horror.

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Further Reading Bookchin, Natalie. “Out in Public.” In No Internet, No Art: A Lunch Bytes Anthology, edited by Melanie Bühler. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2015. Centola, Damon. “Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It.” Scientific American, October 15, 2020. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-social-media-makes-us-more-polarized-and-how-to-fix-it/. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2009): 7–35. Cornell, Lauren, and Ed Halter. Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Dixon, Tom, and Míriam Juan-Torres. “Is the Internet Eroding Europe’s Middle Ground?: Public Opinion, Polarisation and New Technologies.” ESPAS Foresight Reflection Paper Series, March 2018. https://espas.secure.europarl.europa.eu/ orbis/sites/default/files/generated/document/en/Foresight%20Reflection%20Polarisation%20paperV04.pdf. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. New York: Macmillan, 1933. Fletcher, Richard, and Joy Jenkins. Polarisation and the news media in Europe. Panel for the Future of Science and Technology. 2019. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/polarisation-and-news-media-europe. Jackson, Gita. “Gen Z Is Coming for Millennials and We Deserve It.” VICE, June 16, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ayx9p/gen-z-is-coming-for-millennials-and-we-deserve-it. LeFrance, Adrienne. “Facebook is a time bomb.” The Atlantic, December 15, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/. Leeker, Martina. “Performing (the) Digital Positions of Critique in Digital Cultures.” In Performing the Digital: Performance Studies and Performances in Digital Cultures, edited by Timon Beyes, Martina Leeker, and Imanuel Schipper, 21-60. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017. McCombs, Maxwell E. and Donald L. Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 176-87. Morris, William. News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance. Edited by David Leopold. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Respini, Eva, ed. Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today. New Haven: Yale University Press and Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2018. Steichen, Edward, curator. “The Family of Man.” Art Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, January 24-May 8, 1955. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.

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ABOUT THE CURATORS Richard Rinehart is the director of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He has curated, taught, lectured, and published extensively on contemporary new media art. He previously served as digital media director for the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and is the author, with Jon Ippolito, of Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory. Phillip Prodger is the executive director of Curatorial Exhibitions in Pasadena, California, and former head of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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