Ed Ruscha at the Fabric Workshop last Friday night

Ed Ruscha was looking like a little leprachaun in front of a packed audience at the Fabric Workshop’s new space last Friday.  The 2nd floor gallery space — which makes a great lecture hall — was certified for only 200 people with a live feed downstairs for the big spillover crowd.  

Ruscha and his slide of the Barnyard Rembrandt

According to Ruscha, who was showing slides of his influences and a few of his own work, Barnyard Rembrandt Chuck Byers (sic–it’s really Clark Byers, see obit) said, “‘I never passed up a good roof.’”

Ruscha went on to say of Byers’ work, “It reminds me of those wraparound videos on buildings today”  (referring to moving billboards and the moving news ticker around Times Square).

We had a great time laughing at Ruscha’s wry humor.  He was full of notable quips including:

Jasper John‘s Flag was my atomic bomb.

Muhammed Ali. My hero, he was outrageous in almost every way.  He’s worth getting choked up about.

Harold Edgerton‘s photos are frozen still lives.

Renato Bertelli‘s endless [Head of] Mussolini.  That’s my Mona Lisa.  It says everything about our time.

I like the ambiguity of monosyllabic words.

Maybe I’ll live in a Standard [gas] station.  Park the car and just go in.

Accidental Ed Ruscha. Outside the FWM on Arch Street.

This light box on Arch St. caught our friend Susan‘s eye.  She immediately dubbed it an “Ed Ruscha.”

Jamie Dillon’s Monomelon at Copy

We heard it moaning like a beached whale before we saw it–Jamie Dillon‘s Monomelon at Copy Gallery.  It’s a sound installation following up his sound installation last month at Vox.   People loved this melon.  They were hanging out trying to hear what the oracle had to say next.

Trevor Reese, installation at Space 1026, has audio and video and plants!

Space 1026 has a terrific show by two artists, Trevor Reese of Brooklyn and Sighn (aka Matthew) of Chicago.  Words, wood, plants and video.  It’s one of the best shows we’ve seen there in a while — unexpected and provocative.  Fun, too.

Sighn at Space 1026. 

Sighn’s “ITSOK” wall.  Hand-cut bass wood.  1,000 pieces, cut with a jigsaw, which explains Sighn’s aching back.  Individual units of ITSOK in bamboo or bass wood available for $20!

Marisa Olson’s video at Vox Populi

We made a video of Marisa Olson’s video at Vox to try to give you a sense of the action in the subtle piece.  Well, YouTube rejected our video as “content inappropriate.”  So here’s a photo. The action is:  this woman is tied with pink strings.  She’s wiggling to get out of her predicament.  Over time you see she’s got a razor in her hands.

Xiang Yang’s installation at Vox Populi.

Xiang Yang was at the opening, showing a new body of work — deconstructed chairs.  He scavenged the chairs from the streets of New York where he lives and lovingly sanded them to new abstract beauty.  Zhang also has an installation opening Oct. 17 at the Liao Collection piece –a room filled with Chinese furniture.  It reminds us of Mari Shaw‘s encounter with some Chinese art in Germany.  

Gossip

William Pym, former gallery director at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery,  is now living at Jersey City with his girlfriend and writing for Village Voice and Artforum. We got this from John Ollman, who told us while juggling a glass of wine and a copy of the PMA’s hot-off-the-presses James Castle catalog. Fleisher-Ollman’s upcoming Castle show is running in conjunction with the upcoming PMA exhibit. Ollman, by the way, is featured in the Castle documentary movie that’s part of the PMA’s exhibit.

Anthony Campuzano is having a solo show at ICA’s project space, opening Jan. 16. We heard this from Ollman and then ran into Anthony at Vox and he confirmed. He seemed calmer than us. We’re very excited about this. He’s working with ICA’s new curatorial assistant Kate Kraczon. Anthony told us another Philly art star, video and clay animation virtuoso Josh Mosley, will be in the large upstairs gallery at the same time.

Pepon Osorio told us he’s in a great-sounding group show opening October 19 at PS I in New York. NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is co-organized by The Menil Collection Many of the artists in the show we’ve followed for years and love — including Philadelphia artist Terry Adkins. Here’s who else is in the exhibit:

Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, William Cordova, Jimmie Durham, Regina José Galindo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, Brian Jungen, Kcho, Marepe, Ana Mendieta, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Adrian Piper, Ernesto Pujol, Dario Robleto, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, George Smith, Michael Tracy, Nari Ward

Artist Marisa Olson takes on one of the building blocks of the Internet and the computer–background imagery–with wit and verve, stealing the familiar wallpapers and animated gifs, reimagining them in gigantic proportions–from bits to bytes to pure gluttony.

Marisa Olson, The New Transparency (diptych), detail, Iris Prints, each 32 x 26.5 inches

Her exhibit Background Information at Esther Klein Gallery includes new work. It’s a load of fun, a small exhibit that takes on the graphics used to express sound files, the “transparent” grid from Photoshop, even the Flickr Safe Search Veil.

Marisa Olson, Flicker Safe Search Veil, Digital Pigment Print on Canvas, 33 x 46 inches

This last one was personal for me–I still haven’t forgiven or forgotten when Flickr veiled my images for a brief period after someone tagged as offensive a Marilyn Minter image of a woman giving a microphone a blow job. It’s a microphone for god’s sake!!! Have we lost all perspective here or what! And then I had to grovel for the anonymous Flickr police bureaucracy to prove my worthiness! It took a moment to veil me. It took a month to strip my photos bare. [This story is completely wrong; the truth is, Minter's blow job to a microphone was in fact a penis being held like a microphone. I rewrote the past in my mind to justify my outrage, I suppose.]

Marisa Olson, detail, Flicker Safe Search Veil

In this non-world that is the Internet, it turns out what is not real is all too real, an elusive recreation of real institutions of human society reduced to their most inhuman. It is here in that confusion between reality and unreality that Olson positions her work.

It’s the vaguely disquieting lack of genuineness that makes Olson’s work pack a punch. The Flickr veil is a fall-apart vision of black and gray-scale pixels that dissolve into meaninglessness at the same time that they have the power to censor. They are nothing. They are something.

Marisa Olson, Unlocking my Sandbox, html and javascript-based video animation

The cgi sand of a screensaver wallpaper of sand drifts are pixillated silliness on which Olson tosses her play things–gifs of bouncing products and toys–in a video called Unlocking my Sandbox. The html and javascript-based video animation pretends to be all these things and the computer has certainly become the national sandbox for us all.

Marisa Olson, Some Nice Looking Sound Files, I think this is #3, Iris Print, 32 x 36 inches

As for the sound files, they are luscious, and the pixel leakage around the edges are a form of deconstruction of the visuals in motion. Are they there, those ghostly edges? Can you hear them? Or are they visual residue of the previous sound? Beats me. But the more I thought about those seeping edges, the more I read into them. My ideas about them are at least as real as those stray pixels.

Olson is in another exhibit in town, about to close Friday. Here’s the info.

A writer as well as an artist, Olson has a hefty resume, which ranges from the Whitney to the Centre Pompidou to the New York Underground Film Festival. If you missed Annette’s terrific interview–a little edgy, a little hilarious–check it out. It’s the best way to find out just how nerdy Olson is.

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