art,lately

Cory Arcangel, Various Self-Playing Bowling (2011)

Some Thoughts on the Pro Tools Exhibition at the Whitney Museum

“Do Facebook statuses take out the drive beneath wanting to tell the world something with other methods?”

The question posed by a friend in her status update seems strangely relevant to a discussion of Cory Arcangel’s show. Works like Various Self-Playing Bowling Games and Masters seem to invite us to reflect on the way we use technology and realize that there’s a danger in environments created with the use of technology of becoming stand-ins for real life experiences. In the bowling game work, he facilitates this moment of reflection, by taking away the interactivity of the video game. Seeing the players evolve from blobs to well-rendered albeit overly emotional humans is rewarding in itself. But regardless of how “realistic” the players and their environment looks, the task is made absurd and pointless by Arcangel’s hacking of the game.

Hacking games requires a high level of skill and Arcangel is well know for it. The compilation of bits of youtube instructional videos in Paganini’s Caprices allows for a similar display of technical virtuosity (and brings to mind Christian Marclay’s The Clock) . At the other extreme, the Photoshop gradients, the pen plotter drawings, the Hello World sculptures are more art history-driven conceptual works and require little skill.

Overall, I thought there were some good works in the show but I found the placement of some of the works ( especially the kinetic sculpture in the first gallery) and some of the wall text ( too concerned with establishing art historical lineages) a bit problematic.