This Exhibition Claims That “All Art Is Virtual” - Hyperallergic

SANTA FE, N. Mex — All Art is Virtual is the benignant of catch-all rubric that made maine wary adjacent earlier I stepped into the acheronian and buzzing interior of Thoma Foundation’s caller media abstraction Art Vault. The nonprofit gallery’s website states that the accumulation “proposes that each creation tin supply a virtual world acquisition — nary peculiar goggles required.” 

I, too, dislike VR headsets (bad ergonomics aside, their aesthetic is iconically mortifying), but this taxable sounds similar an excuse to showcase beauteous overmuch thing successful a caller media collection. In that respect Thoma holds the goods, successful immense archives that agelong backmost to immoderate of the earliest examples of integer art. All Art Is Virtual features 2 twelve works spanning 7 decades (its earliest introduction is from 1962), but what’s the curatorial glue?

Mercifully, a series of narrative-driven works lends signifier to an accumulation that has the imaginable to transcend its branding. A downtempo Nina Simone sets the tone, playing soft and crooning crossed 29 tv screens successful a pyramidal installation by Atlanta-based creator Paul Stephen Benjamin. The enactment is titled “Black is the Color” (2015) which is the lyric that echoes done it arsenic 3 clips of Simone endlessly cycle. The singer’s drawn-out vocal steeps similar tea, dilatory resolving to the ear.

Nam June Paik’s 1989 enactment “Portable God,” a two-channel video installation enshrined successful a 1950s tv cabinet, is simply a psychedelic, calligraphy-covered altar to Allen Ginsburg, Elaine de Kooning, Confucius, and different taste figures. Offerings specified arsenic atom and candles are poignantly perched connected the piece. 

An ornately framed flatscreen seamlessly loops Kent Monkman’s 2015 “video painting” “The Human Zoo,” which casts the Cree artist’s resistance change ego arsenic a sideshow performer connected the streets of 1850s Berlin. At the extremity of her frenetic creation to a drumbeat struck by a White antheral companion, she’s denied a stock of the tips.

Paul Stephen Benjamin, “Black is the Color” (2015), three-channel integer video (color, sound) connected 30 CRT monitors (© Paul Stephen Benjamin; photograph by Jason Wyche)

These works consciousness astir cinematic, masterfully harnessing caller media’s temporal nature; arsenic they bloom, our knowing of them evolves and deepens successful spine-tingling ways. In this vein, the exhibition’s pièce de résistance is “Inverso Mundus” (2015), a deliciously bonkers video opera by the Moscow-based corporate AES+F. Come for the lavish tableaus of radical enacting societal powerfulness reversals (women locking men into stylized stocks, children wrestling elders to the ground) and enactment for the angelic accomplishment of the mutant menagerie.

There are galore different beardown artworks successful All Art is Virtual — Sandra Perry’s interactive rowing instrumentality that drops you onto the platform of a enslaved ship, Michael Bell-Smith’s vertical scroll of video crippled skylines that rival the splendor of Roku City, a cardinal country filled with unusual puzzle boxes by artist-scientists — but the full expanse is ruled by a perplexing eclecticism. With truthful galore treasures to take from, wherefore not zero successful connected a circumstantial taxable and edit from there?

This tin beryllium harder than it looks successful our existent taste landscape. As David Salle wrote successful a section of his 2016 publication How To See, we’ve landed successful an epoch of sensory overload successful which “images person nary fungible consciousness of authorship; pictures of each imaginable thing, person, event, are conscionable truthful overmuch ocular weather.” But, arsenic Salle contends, that’s wherefore it’s peculiarly important for creation to “function differently” from the remainder of the imagery flashing past us.

Universal Everything, “Communion” (2010/2020), single-channel integer video (color, sound) connected projector (© Universal Everything)

The occupation with curating successful the tone of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (“the centre volition not hold” and each that) is the hazard of simply mirroring the moment, with its ocular avalanche, channeled but not rather controlled by algorithms. No 1 needs much of that — we request to boldly carve thing from the mass.

Nam June Paik, “Portable God” (1989), single-channel video (color, silent) connected 2 CRT monitors successful artist-modified wood furniture with altar offerings

Michael Bell-Smith, “Up and Away” (2006), single-channel integer video (color, sound) connected show (© Michael Bell-Smith)

Josh Tonsfeldt, Untitled (2017), single-channel integer video (color, silent) connected artist-modified LCD monitor, fiberglass cloth, urethane resin, pigments, and recovered materials (© Josh Tonsfeldt; photograph by Charles Benton)

All Art Is Virtual continues astatine Art Vault (540 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico) done April 15. The accumulation was curated by Jason Foumberg.

Jordan Eddy is simply a Santa Fe-based writer, curator, and gallerist. He is the manager of signifier & conception and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and helium is cofounder of the task abstraction No Land. He has contributed... More by Jordan Eddy