Finding the new canvas

“Probably the biggest thing that changed the art world, ever, was the camera,” the young artist says.  Her name is Lisa N. Jones, she’s a Durham based waitress and mixed-media artist, and we’re sitting in the living room of her rented house near downtown.  The house has the same sort of emptiness of a typical dorm or apartment – there’s very little furniture and the walls are all the same bland white – except for her paintings.  “Once you could take a perfect image, of like a photorealistic image with a camera, people didn’t want to paint that way so much anymore.”

She’s correct.  When photography first came about in the mid 1800s, there was much debate over whether or not the new medium even counted as an art form.  The Imperial Court of France put this question to the test and held a trial to see if photography would have the same legal distinction as art.  The question was raised: do photographers count as actual artists, or is it the workings of a machine?  Is taking a photograph, as realist painter Jean Auguste Domique Ingres wrote, “a series of manual operations… [that] does not require the intelligence or study of art”?[1] Eventually, the Imperial Court ruled that “Truth and beauty were the same for the photographer as they are for the painter or sculptor.”[2]

Painters, especially the realists, were outraged.  Some, such as François Bonvin, refused to have their photograph taken for the rest of their lives.[3] The rise of photography as an art form in 19^th century France shadows the rise of mediums that came both before and after it.  For most of the medieval period, churches served as the primary canvases of art – their walls were frescoes, their windows stained glass, their tapestries ornate… even the architecture itself was designed to tell a story.  Architects thought that the churches “would inspire parishioners to meditation and belief.”[4] Before that, it was the very concept of paint itself.  Before that, it was pottery and sculpture.

"Circles House" by Lisa N. Jones. This is indicative of her style - multiple mediums brought together on the canvas to form one image.

“Do you think the internet is doing that to art now?” I ask.  A cat rubs against a canvas that Jones had been mounting fabric on for later.  The room itself is littered with leftovers, art supplied and bits of canvas and Elmer’s Glue.  Most of the paintings around us emerged from the mess the same way that dust clouds form stars.  They’re fabric, paint, canvas, all pulled out of chaos and molded into art.  “Yeah,” she says, grabbing the cat into her lap, “probably.”[5]

Lisa’s been an artist for several years.  Her career began in high school and continued with a BFA from Eastern Carolina University.  She’s had several shows, at least twenty-five, in cafes or schools or spaces around the state.  There’s also an online gallery that is made up of photographs of her work.  The pictures don’t do much justice – her work is in the third dimension, and you’re meant to see the different fabrics and textures.  Online, they’re flattened.  All the texture is gone.

There are those like Lisa who only post their artwork on the internet, or try to sell it.  There are, however, also the people out there who are using the internet itself as a unique form of expression.  The internet brings some very different things to the table as a medium; the most important, in my opinion, is interactivity with a wide audience.  How well they integrate this varies from artist to artist.

On the more traditional end of the scale is 99Rooms.  At its most basic level, 99Rooms is a gallery of Berlin artist Kim Köster’s work in industrial ruins.  With the help of Richard Schumann and Stephan Schulz, the artwork actually responds to the actions of the viewer, making it into a game.  Your task is to get through to the next room by finding the trigger that allows you to move on.  It’s the same central structure of several flash-based games on the internet, but the quality of the work makes it stand out.  Instead of the typical midi-based soundtrack, we have a creepy industrial ambience (courtesy of Johannes Buenemann).  Instead of the typical cartoony or blocky art, we have high quality photographs.[6] When it first came out in 2004, it rose as something special, something different.  It combined the best of flash games with high art.  It allowed the four million people who visited the site[7] to actually interact with Köter’s work.

Room 2 of the 99 Rooms. Photography and Flash mix into a haunting game.

99Rooms is more of the older approach to the internet, very Web 1.0.  The game only has one very linear track.  Playing it, it’s very obvious that the game is meant to show off the work of the artist.  In other words, it’s a very top down approach, reminiscent to many early internet sites.  99Rooms came out the end of an era, right before the dawn of YouTube and Facebook.  As we try to find more interactive work, we come to newer projects that both play out to and attempt to interact with a wide audience.

In B Flat 2.0, the brainchild of musician Darren Solomon, is a musical experiment using YouTube’s embedded video option.  Solomon made six videos of himself playing B flat on a variety of different instruments – piano, guitar, mallets – alongside a clip of an old British documentary.  He then posted them side by side in a post on his blog and invited readers to start playing the videos whenever they pleased.[8] The result is a very strange, calming, ethereal experience.  The videos all fit together without clashing. The music itself was a soothing abstract.

It became popular enough that other artists wanted to participate.  Soon, musicians submitted themselves playing their own instruments which Solomon happily added.  What was once a very basic collection became larger and more complex: a violin, a banjo, a clarinet, a muted trumpet, three more guitars, a quartet of electronic gadgets (including a Nintendo DS).  Solomon expanded the project out to its own domain at inbflat.net with 20 different sounds ready to be mixed at leisure. [9] [10]

The homepage of InBFlat. Browsers are invited to mix their own songs using a series of YouTube videos.

In the same vein is ThruYOU, another musical mash up.  Afro-Funk artist Kutiman (alias of Israeli Ophir Kutiel)[11] went in the opposite direction.  Instead of allowing people to interact with his works, he took various videos from YouTube and mixed them into a cacophony of funky sound.  The videos weren’t commissioned.  If anything, the whole musical experience is similar to found art.  “What I did here is I collected all kind of different unrelated YouTube movies,” he says in his “About” film in the same style.  “It was really amazing to see how movies matched together without me even touching it.”[12]

Solomon and Kutiman have similar projects, but represent opposite approaches to interactivity.  Both are musical endeavors; both are pseudo-mash ups that take advantage of YouTube.  This is where the similarities end.  Each takes their own approach to the inevitable crowd that is lurking out there on the internet.  Darren Solomon plays to the crowd, allowing them to become the artist themselves.  Kutiman, on the other hand, remains as the artist – like the 99Rooms, YouTHRU is all about his creativity and product – but instead pulls his material out from the greater population and uses it to form his own work.

In a way, Kutiman and Solomon both share something in common with Lisa N Jones.  All three use a potpourri of fabrics to form their canvases.  For Jones, of course, this is literal.  But for Kutiman and Solomon, their fabric is the part of the social fabric of the internet itself.  By using YouTube, they connect themselves to the greater worldwide social network.  More importantly, by getting their audience involved, they are expanding their expression to the wider world.

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[1] (Scharf, 1963, p. 217)

 

[2] (Scharf, 1963, p. 217)

[3] (Scharf, 1963, p. 218)

[4] (Boswell & Strickland, 1992, p. 29)

[5] (Jones, 2009)

[6] (Rostlaub Collective)

[7] (Rostlaub Collective)

[8] (Solomon)

[9] (Solomon)

[10] (Donahoo)

[11] (Abend, et al., 2009)

[12] (Kutiel, 2009)

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~ by bechter on November 29, 2009.