–Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”

In a video commissioned for French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification.  The exhibition that joins works by Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over the past few decades.  The artworks here provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate every aspect of our lives.

Fluidity, flexibility: oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience through digital information technology.  The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on the flow of symbolic capital itself.  Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.

Placing high stakes, making hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls

–Sade, “Smooth Operator”

Linda Francis’s recent work is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the computer.  Her pieces present technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed, unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.  The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media that produce them, such as pixelation.

Linda Francis, We Can Build You, 2013 Oil on wooden panel, 38 x 95 in.

In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image suggest patterned organization while eluding it.  Yet across the multiple silkscreened prints assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference is both fugitive and precise.  Indeed a strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that leans on the floor against the wall.  Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.

Also patternlike but dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater magnification.  It resembles representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K. Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the way technological capitalism works on us.  Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication, as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.

John O’Connor also indexes research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of psychological experience with an information economy.  As the Surrealists channeled the illogical logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of information processing.  He produces drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers, reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems, running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.

Turing (named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data.  The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding, bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling.  O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality).  Characteristic of the artist’s work, the drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.

In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges.  The piece invites us to comprehend the design of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are opaque.  Similarly, the thin, almost weightless sculptures Future Rods are covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering.  Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life.

O’Connor’s artistic practice mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal life.  His work does not so much assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity, discordance, uncanny disconcertment.

John O’Conner, SUSEJ, 2011. Colored pencil on graph paper, 43 x 25 in.

Ken Weathersby, 197 (dcch),
 2012. 
Acrylic & graphite, linen, wood
. 25 x 15 in.

In 198 (dc), paint is applied to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the picture plane.  Meanwhile the painted image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.  The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between structure and surface.

In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting.  In this piece, the wood strips enclose the painting, holding it within.  The structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars.  Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about what is supportive structure and what is visual display.

Weathersby’s work foregrounds how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each other.  It is as though painting is posing questions about its constituent terms.  In 197 (dcch), what looks like a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other gridded paintings and wooden grids.  The piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.

Interestingly, the container is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as possible.  Indeed, as the forces of transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below the threshold of perceptibility.  The artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication, of congruence and incongruity.  It resonates keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.

by Michele Alpern

The post Linda Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby at Suite 217 appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Being an artist has always been so much about one’s handle on previous visual history. Our access to information is now blown wide-open thanks to the Internet. It’s a resource quite available to all of us, but as with most things, it means a different thing to grow up with a technological innovation than it does to realize that the same innovation is causing rampant change within the world you are accustomed to. It must be similar to the ripple of disruption that happened the first time the camera was being fully utilized as an artistic tool. The reality of it all is, thanks to this proliferation of information, now all artists have to be aware not only of the generations before them, but also of contemporaries by their side, not to mention the young up-and-comers who are greedily sucking up information in their wake. An artist has to have his or her head on a swivel, constantly keeping an eye on all other creatives around them, knowing that with the vast sea of information available, any artist could be the next daunting aesthetic pirate. As we all know, art has always been very much about stealing.

Some young artists are making work that takes on a refined look in order to bump their name into the ring of commerce, while some older artists are making work that appears fresh and young, hoping to stay in the conversation by taking on the look of those breaking onto the scene. Meanwhile the Internet has its eyes on all of it, doing what the Internet does best, widening the spotlight and democratizing information. The funny thing is, regardless of their technological prowess, this actually means the young people have to be watching their back just as closely as the old.

There’s something great about it all.

In 2009 the New Museum ran a blockbuster of a show called Younger than Jesus, showcasing a promising group of artists who at the time were younger than the age that arguably the most documented historical figure was when he died. As far as we can tell, maybe Alan Kaprow would consider Jesus an artist, but for us it’s a bit of a stretch. This got us thinking, “Who the fuck cares? What does it mean to be young as an artist anyway? Isn’t the point that you are engaging in a lifelong pursuit? Why should your age matter at all?”

We know, it’s a lot of pointed questions.

Once we cooled off from our little fit, what this really got us thinking was, “How long does a typical artist live, maybe 80 years?” A quick check into the standard life expectancy revealed an actual statistic of closer to 78.6 years. We decided to draw a line in the sands of time at the age of 40, conceivably half way between an artist’s birth and death. Instead of taking it upon ourselves, we asked a group of artists younger than forty years old to pick a group of twenty artists they admired older than forty, and we asked a group of artists older than forty to select a promising group of twenty artists under the age of forty.

Artists have a very discerning eye, keeping their mind tuned by viewing a multitude of work, often what they really like can be quite different than the work they make themselves. Always being on the scene, on cannot follow all the trends but instead must pick and choose patterns they see as relevant and built to last. The people we selected to choose their favorite artists from across the age divide are people we knew were always out surveying the openings, meeting new people, shaking hands and forging new connections and professional relationships. In asking them to select the artists that had caught their eye, we knew they would filter out the bullshit.
Although it was a pretty specific idea, requiring a good amount of explaining on our end, we ended up with a solid group of artists doing their thing with aplomb. Age be damned, really. The more interesting thing that came out of this little experiment was the reality of how little age mattered to an invested artist these days. It seems a talented artist will always be making engaging work.

The artist’s age comes into play more readily in the way others approach the work. Gallerists and collectors will project value on the art based on the stage of development they connect to whatever age the artist seems to be. There is a perceived gamble involved with collecting young artists work in that it may be strong now, but later may unravel as studio process proves not to be sustainable. These selections represent a group of individuals who have been chosen by attentive contemporaries as artists engaged in sustainable, serious work that is built to be part of a life-long pursuit.

It proves that age matters less than ever. With the expanded field of accessible knowledge open to all and growing wider by the second, information is sometimes able to bypass actual experience when in the right young hands, paired with hard work, and a sprinkle of luck. It also doesn’t hurt to have someone else pat you on the back once in a while.

This piece began as a bit of an experiment, evolving as we began to feel out its strengths and weaknesses along the way. In the end we are pretty excited by the result. The forty artists we ended up with are making work that is only showy when appropriate, poetic but not inaccessible, and ranges many media. In the end, we feel like it’s an eclectic mix of pertinent work that may only share one thing in common: collective admiration.

40+

Linda Francis, Wendy White, Stanislav Kolíbal, Abel Barroso, Xenobia Bailey, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Tom Butter, Roberto Molla, Jim Lee, Bram Bogart, Johnny Mullen, Armen Eloyan, Annie Albers, Christian Bonnefoi, Imi Knoebel, Kes Zapkus, Peggy Ahwesh, Nancy Shaver, Taylor Davis, Rose Wylie

40-

Aaron Stephan, Abigail DeVille, Esperanza Mayobre, Fawn Krieger, Helen Benigson, Ilona Szalay, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jacqueline Cedar, Lauren Seiden, Mala Iqbal, Mark Sengbusch, Matt Mignanelli, Nichole Van Beek, Osamu Kobayashi, Rudolf Reiber, Sarah Maple, Shinsuke Aso, Tameka Norris, Laura Bottin, Nate Ethier

The post Art and Ageism: The Decisive Eye of Fellow Artists appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.