The following is a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with Marisa Olson.Feel free to download the podcast if you prefer to listen, but I must warn you that the quality of the audio is appallingly bad.

The first question I asked was supposed to be “What is New Media Art?”, a question Marisa, classified as a new media artist herself and also curator-at-large and staff writer for the new museum’s new media component; rhizome.org, is in a better position then most to attempt to answer. However, I forgot to turn on the recorder for most of that answer.

Marisa, who lives in New York and has recently taken her oeuvre on tour to Paris, Berlin, and Cincinnati, Ohio, is in no fewer then two exhibitions in Philadelphia at the minute. A solo exhibition of her work, “Background Information”, opens at the Esther M. Klein Gallery TONIGHT! (she is also in Bitmap at Drexel):

New Media can be old

Annette: You mentioned earlier that New Media art doesn’t necessarily have to deal with new technologies because a lot of the [technology] used in [what's classified as] New Media art is now old. I noticed in your personal artwork there’s a lot of nostalgia, maybe, for artwork gone by. Could you address that issue?

Marisa: You mean for media that’s gone by?

Annette: Yes [sorry]. For instance on your blog you have an image of a [cassette] tape with your name on it which looks sort of “bubblegum pop”, and I noticed you’ve done a lot of drawings based off images you found on the internet that were of older headphones and recording devices. . .

Marisa: Yeah. That work that I’ve done with mixed-tapes and headphones and that sort of thing, it definitely initially came out of a space of nostalgia, but as I worked more and more with it I’ve asked myself why I’m so interested and I’ve realized that I’m more into media change then anything. I’m more interested in what are the cultural or political forces that compel people to keep upgrading and keep making the new ipod or the new device that makes the old one obsolete. More so, what happens to those old things? Do they just end up in landfills?

These drawing’s that I’ve been making, these monitor tracings–sorry it’s really loud outside–

Annette: s’ok

Marisa: In a way they are about the google image search and the way the internet is becoming this depository for our memories of these things, these things that are sort of “out of sight, out of mind”. The other thing about these drawings is thinking about the monitor as the newest technology in the lineage of technologies that have assisted artists, like the camera obscura, the overhead projector, that kind of thing. It’s all kind of about the evolution of technology.

I’m really nerdy

Marisa: I’m really nerdy.

Annette: Actually, I was wondering how nerdy you are? Do have, like a degree? How much technology do you actually understand? I realize that you have to be able to manipulate it. . .

Marisa: When I was a little kid I was a total computer-programmer nerd on my Commodore 64 and now I write a lot of html, everyday, by hand, but I’m not like a hard-core programmer by any means.

Annette: Well html is kind of old isn’t it, if you were [hard-core] you’d be writing in something crazy, like not even Java Script anymore I don’t think. . .

Marisa: Yeah. I can’t really do any of that stuff. But I can understand what it can do and have conversations with people about it, which I like. I like learning more, it’s kind of mystifying and really interesting.

Speaking of degrees, I don’t really have a degree in computer science but in the course of working on my PHD one of my official field titles was “The Cultural History of Technology” so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of batteries, televisions, telephones, and video games. . .

Marisa Olson, Free Gift Economy, 2007, screengrab AFC, stolen from artfagcity.

24

Annette: Is that like studying “The History and Philosophy of Science” or something?

Marisa: Yeah. Exactly, it’s very closely related.

Annette: I always liked those kind of courses. That sounds pretty cool.

Marisa: Yeah, me too. Thomas Khun is one of my favorite writers, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.

Annette: Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in a class called something like “History and Science of Philosophy 101″ or something.

Marisa: I re-read it every single year. Twenty-four is my favorite page.

Annette: I have no idea what that refers to but I’ll look it up.

Marisa: It’s just this line about how science is trying to force nature into a conformed thought. It’s all about how science as a field is trying to confirm existing ways of thinking, existing paradigms, and you have to wait until enough things don’t fit into the box until you change the box. I dunno. I like stuff like that.

————————————————————————————————

[Cut out in acknowledgment of all of our sort attention spans

And, just a recap of all the myriad of things Marisa has been up to this summer.]

————————————————————————————————-

Conclusion

Annette: I just want to end with a little bit more about your show at Esther Klein Gallery that is coming up on Friday. It’s called Background Information, what sort of spurred the ideas of the work in the show?

Marisa: All the work in the show revolves around images pulled from the internet that are not really meant to be looked at directly. I’m going to do a wallpaper installation of the background image on my myspace page, which a lot of these animated .gifs are referred to as wallpaper files. I’m actually making wallpaper out of it.

Then there are are other things like a flickr space search bale, it’s an image that flickr uses to cover up “inappropriate images”, or a comparison of the background images that really hide in the background of the web-pages for McCain and Obama, just showing only the background and you can kind of think about whose is whose, and other kinds of images that are meant to be peripheral rather then foreground images but have a kind of duty and cultural relevance of their own.

There’s also going to be a video animation that uses only icons from my facebook page.

It’s kind of a double entendre, background information in terms of background images, but also background information about myself and the kinds of web pages I’ve been looking at. It’s kind of a self-portrait in a way, the type of material that I tend to surf.

Annette: Yeah. Especially coming from your myspace page, that seems pretty auto-biographical.

Marisa: Yeah, even though looking at this wallpaper of glittery stars isn’t going to tell you that much about me, but that’s kind of funny too because I think that the whole discourse of auto-biographical art could use some critique.

END

Michael Grothusen‘s welded metal structures Life’s Joys and Life’s Disappointments are as far from today’s anti-matter assemblage art as Gustave Eiffel‘s Tower was foreign to the streets around it when it debuted in 1889. Eiffel’s Tower , which took 2 years, 2 months and 5 days to complete and is composed of 18,038 pieces fastened with 2,500,000 rivets is of course a completely different animal from Grothusen’s metal sculptures. But in their monumentality and lacey industrial machismo — as well as in their ability to make you think — these pieces are kindred spirits.

Base of Life’s Joys.

Grothusen’s twin vessels (at Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery to Dec. 12) have a look of delicacy that suggests yarn, woven threads and hair. The pieces look a little like an egg seated in an egg cup on an almost preposterously heavy base. They are neither male nor female and yet as a pair they suggest a couple. They also could be bookends or even trophies of a wry sort.

Because they look so much alike (and I’m sorry I couldn’t capture the two large objects together in one shot but it was more than my camera could do), you might think they’re identical. But, since they’re hand-made, they have individual lilts and tilts that give them subtle distinctions. They may look like twins but, like twins, they are slightly different physically and have different personalities.
They could also be one person seen at two points in life, or two people who have different orientations (glass half full, glass half empty).

Check out the welds! each stick, all the sides of the base, everything was welded.

The works have a kinetic element caused by a motor and a small chain that stretches from top to base of the open vessel form. The chain moves slowly up and down and the thrum of the two motors and the clicking of the two chains on the two metal bases evoke a quiet factory of some sort where work never ceases. There’s something reassuring about the perpetual motion and sounds, something akin to the sound of steam radiators which produce their warmth with a friendly audio accompaniment of tick, clack and tock. Although depending on your tolerance for noise, the piece might get on your nerves. I liked it.

The chain drags along the base, scraping it and sounding like a set of keys being fumbled with on a metal desk.

Grothusen, Tyler grad (1991), UArts faculty and Pew fellow, had a solo exhibit in 2001 at Gallery Joe that involved maps and geographical references. But the artist has always been all about humans and their needs and wants. He’s also always been about measurements of unmeasurable things like love, time and levels of satisfaction.

Humble and without posturing, Grothusen’s beautifully-crafted works with their dense conceptual underpinnings deal with what it means to be human.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote for the Weekly in 2001 for the artist’s Gallery Joe solo.

“I love to make things,” says Michael Grothusen, whose solo show of new work, “(Un)explained Phenomenon,” opens at Gallery Joe Oct. 20 (2001). “Sculptors should know how to make things,” he adds.

Grothusen, Tyler MFA (1991), PEW fellow (1999) and University of the Arts faculty member, is debuting several mechanized pieces–new for him–that use motors, fans and steam. The artist, who changes materials to suit his ideas and who has previously worked with wood, concrete, plaster and Home Depot materials (like pink Fiberglas insulation), sometimes worries about not having a “signature” look.

“What is a signature?” he asks rhetorically. “I guess if you wanted to say something about my work–all my work is about fragility, but it all looks solid.”

Grothusen used motors and movement for this new work, partly to address issues of time (revolutions being good visual metaphors for the passage of time) and change (water becoming steam, hinting at the instability and changeability of materials–and life). But he’s not committed to motors. Though they solved problems this time, he may be on to something else next.

A soft-spoken, intense man, Grothusen’s sentences pour out like Zen aphorisms. He’s a big thinker and speaks about concepts like “measuring the unmeasurable.”

Almost all the new pieces, flat plates made of cut steel, have the look of maps. Everything dangles at around knee level or sits low on the floor so that you feel like a giant walking among them. One piece spins clockwise and counter-clockwise, blown by a small fan. Other pieces hiss and tick as water in copper boilers heats up and steams pours out tiny holes. The visuals are a mix of the austere, the elegiac and the Franklin Institute.

But the aural experience–hissing, whirring, ticking, clacking–conveys a kind of machine-musical domestic charm, like that found in old houses with aging appliances.

Looking through Life’s Joys at Life’s Disappointments.

This show comes with a great brochure with beautiful images by John Carlano and an essay by Leah Douglas, Director of the Philly Airport’s art program. This hand-made, conceptually-loaded work should be must viewing for anyone interested in sculpture. Without being messy or loaded with pop culture references this work gets to the core of how people feel. We worry about fleeting joy, we worry about being disappointed, and depending on who we are, we’re either bitter and mad or shrug-shouldered and accepting. For truly, life comes with both joy and disappointments and it’s what you make of it all that makes you you.

More photos at flickr.