Blastomere at Young Projects

• published: 14 Oct 2014
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Blastomere /blas·to·mere/ (blas´to-mēr) a separate cell produced by cleavage of a zygote. The subtitle for this show is Beyond Planet Claire, given that the exhibition was inspired in part by the controversy surrounding critic Claire Bishop’s essay in Artforum entitled “Digital Divide.” That essay, which Bishop claims was designed to “examine the mainstream art world’s disavowal of digital media”, did little to explore the difficulty that moving image artworks have in the marketplace, nor the psychological, financial and/or practical basis for that issue. Instead the article explored the aesthetics of the digital and suggested that, because of the formal qualities of the medium—precisely because it wont sit still--it will always remain on one side of the “digital divide” while traditional arts will remain on the other. The fault, she suggested was partly due to a kind of chauvinism on the part of art world professionals. “The inability to speak meaningfully about our contemporary experience of the digital,” she writes, “seems to be a structural blind spot produced by the mainstream art world’s insistence on individual authorship and auratic materials and by new media’s niche advocacy that misses the point, fixating on the centrality of digital technology rather than confronting it as a repertoire of practices and effects that increasingly lodges capitalism with in the body.” While experimental film and its art-world spawn, video art, have technically remained in their own niche as Bishop suggests—and often proudly so—the article has since become a kind of symbol for digital, video and new media artists. For them the digital (and the fact that things don't sit still) is the very definition of life in the 21st century; and the idea that the world’s leading art magazine might suggest that there is a ‘divide’ at all—especially one that will never be breached—seemed antagonistic. Lauren Cornell, curator of the 2015 Triennial at the New Museum, spoke for many when she called Bishop’s stance “out of date” and “badly timed.” The works in Blastomere, by contrast, not only live in Bishop’s ‘digital divide’ but represent an ever-growing area of artistic production that deliberately combine traditional mediums (painting, sculpture, photography or classic experimental film) with digital content. Like earlier forms of mixed media collage (ie Art Povera) the meaning of the work lies in that combination, not in any specific material or medium. In many (but not all) of the works in Blastomere, the digital elements are not always the content content itself, but another surface plane, or technique, not unlike what silk-screening was to the artists of the early 1960s—a mechanical process that can be layered over various surfaces. In the “Digital Divide” Bishop claimed that the rising interest in ‘bricolage’ is a clear example of the internet’s impact on artists, and thus a significant form of contemporary art, and yet she seemed to have her own “blind spot’ for the vast array of artworks being made today that employ both—traditional techniques and moving image artforms. All of the artists in Blastomere are exploring different ideas and themes—from consumerism (David Raymond Conroy) to Esotericism (Joe Merrell), and yet they all share a formal interest in the rich dialectic that occurs between the traditional and the digital. Some use street art and punk to paint canvases with Day-Glo colors and combine them with video projections (Ben Jones, Jimmy Joe Roche). Others use TV monitors to create neo-assemblage sculptures that use the most prevalent visual language of our day: the internet (David Raymond Conroy, Frank Zadlo, Dina Kelberman). Others still use video to create ‘events’ that occupy space in the same way that a piece of sculpture does (Peter Coffin, Laure Provoust, Cal Crawford and Tommy Hartung). Space is also central to the installation work of Benedict Drew and Joe Merrell, both of whom have created highly immersive environments that pull from traditional mediums to create a physical experience and/or object. Drew’ Gliss has an almost absurd relationship to (ceramic) sculpture, while Merrell’s Suspension of Disbelief riffs on vintage experimental film, in particular Kenneth Anger.