Versus
2011
Ongoing collection to chart the passage for painting in the continuous current, with writing for work informed by or informing painted practice. Images, modelled and actual paint all twisted like a vine, etc.
PAINTED,ETC. is a broad research initiative currently produced by artist Ry David Bradley to document the practice, understanding and lineage of painting and its descendants in the internet age...PAINTED,ETC. accepts contributions, brief reviews, short artist essays, statements and images.......
To send work click here • PAINTED, ETC.
(Image by Travess Smalley)
Two recent projects hosted on PWRSHARE in the last few months both expand on, or depart from the idea of getting up close and personal to the image online. How close can you get to an image online anyway? Isn’t the distance of your head from the screen always the same regardless of what you look at - and nothing changes on the screen no matter how much you move around. Getting up close isn’t really getting up any closer - but by turning up the specs for an illusion of closeness, we enter into a deal that seeks to side-up with the physical. Google’s recent Art Project brought the idea of proximity into play with its gigapixel lenses picking up all the cracks in all the classic old museum paintings - aside from preservation and democratic access, the ability to zoom in so close on each piece seemed to be the kicker of the project. It’s still not the same as being there, but it was you know like, closer. Detail was at least there in some way that it wasn’t before on Google image searches, which leads to some kind of extra connection to what is being seen. And yet with screen viewing, the more detail you see, the less of the overall painting you see (due to a fixed screen size, the further you zoom in the less you see overall). As poetic as that might be, getting up close in the physical museum itself doesn’t mean you can’t see the rest of the piece at the same time, which is great for providing context. This has always been the problem with screens, they get you so close but also always keep you at bay. You book early and queue up, but really you can’t be there. It’s great for building a kind of weird semi-detached aura though that’s for sure, if only Walter Benjamin could have known. Scalable screens or AR vision might solve the problem one fine day, but until then, the idea of only being able to see small details without being able to see the the image overall is a real loss of perspective - at least in comparison to real life, and in many ways is symptomatic to much screen based discourse and production. Of course sometimes loss can be enabling, but anyhow now that real life is a landscape interjected with screens from the pocket to the desk and beyond - the yearning to merge the higher realness toward screen based experience is tantamount, and can be charted as regular as clockwork throughout recent history. Now that it feels so familiar to view through the screen, it should be synonymous with it’s twin right? But it isn’t. Taking this kind of element as a cue, Travess Smalley presented a series of high-res, large scale (at least for a screen) images of paintings titled Capture Physical Presence, letting the viewer up a little closer than usual, while in the following and current project Matt Goerzen presents a piece that allows for a commercial product style mouse-over zoom, not to reveal the details of an Air Jordan, but to display unseen textures of the painting/jpeg - a nice touch. Especially considering none of these texture elements are visible in it’s thumbnail state, which might inadvertently highlight the real lack of distance online image viewing brings. Both artists and half the world for that matter, should be seeking a range of terms for bridging gaps between the disparity of worlds. Those fixed edges at the edge of your laptop or desktop screen really do create an unholistic split between this odd sense of here and there - which might be the point at which attempting to bring these works out into full scale achieves a significant importance. At least for now, compression is still king.
- Ry David Bradley
Let’s pretend we live in a historical or hierarchical vacuum where a cell phone has the same amount of creative potential as a paintbrush—now open your eyes!!! this is REALITY!!!! - Jacob Ciocci excerpt from Rhizome Interview
Untitled
2011
“All reproductions more or less distort,” says art critic John Berger. Ours sure as hell do. We took ten famous paintings, shrunk them down to six or twelve pixels wide, then blew them back up to 600 pixels. You can play a guessing game, or just appreciate some highly optimized art.
via Jennifer Chan
