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Written by Joe DiRosa
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The Last Generation
curated by Max Henry
Examines mechanical reproduction and seemingly
“analog” approaches to art-making in our contemporary "digital" world.
November 30* - January 7, 2006
*Opening reception: WED DEC 7, 6-8 pm
Artists: Kota Ezawa, Malachi Farrell, Wayne Gonzales, Emilie Halpern,
Jan Mancuska, Laurent Montaron, Scott Myles, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
The Last Generation
Culturally altered for better or worse, every day we are steps closer
to the cyber-fictional world of man/machine. From 20th century analog
bulk-mass and "slowness" to early 21st century speed and compactness,
this transition hurtles us forward. At some point in the near future
the analog world of the 20th century will be a distant memory....
Many of you remember:
There was a day when the phone rang, and was left unanswered if nobody
was home. Then came answering machines, which brought the first wave of
automation into the home. The LP record and 8-track tape were gradually
replaced by smaller cassettes. One day after MTV hit, I walked into a
major record store, and seemingly overnight everything in the racks was
a sleek (wow!) compact disc, with the old technology overstock in
leftover bins... As the years flew by we witnessed a technological
boom...ATM machines cropping up everywhere, satellite television
installations in almost every home, and the pc revolution…
A phrase that most often refers to recently outmoded technology,
a quick internet search on "The Last Generation" reveals thousands of
references to video gaming, holocaust and A-bomb survivors, tomes
written on the political history of the last generation of the Roman
Republic, and end-time Christian ideology on "the rapture.” Such a term
then indicates an irrepressible change from past knowledge towards an
encounter or collision with new ideas and altered forms.
In contemporary art, the juxtaposition of the analog and digital has
led to an ambiguous back and forth between the two. The virtual has
seeped into our consciousness like a stimulant drug, and we find
ourselves in an ambiguous artistic terrain that is grounded in the
intangibility of matter. As physical objects become more condensed we
find their origins in virtual forms, as seen in the unusual shapes of
the architecture and design of Gehry and Hadid.
The group of artists hereby assembled represents a generation that
experienced the last decades of an analog dominated world. While fully
immersed in the digital ether of now, they maintain a strong link to
analog processes and esthetics--in music often described as warm, as
opposed to the coldness of digital.1
Emerging from this hyperspace of 21st century altermodernity and its
numbing visual and informational matrix, many artists have found ways
to process and edit the flux of our post-industrial information age.2
Such is the case in this show where the appropriation strategies of the
1980's are utilized in addition to some of the post-production
techniques of post-90's art. Late postmodern irony has led us into the
first decade of a new century full of paradox, marked by an exchange
between naturally occurring phenomena (as in the physical world I
associate with analog and the body) and the simulated supra-plasticity
of the digital with its implied modifications of the real.
Immanuel Kant set up a distinction between phenomena and
noumena—”phenomena” being that which can be experienced, and “noumena”
being things that are beyond the possibility of experience and
transcend the vehicles of representation. In the phenomenal world we
experience something that reaches the senses and clues us in to an
added dimension that leads to heightened perception. Videos,
sculptures, and television monitors initially offer the viewer an
analog (phenomenal) experience by virtue of their physical presence.
Then digital compression takes over the information and a moment of
conflation occurs, a seamless balance in the space/time continuum.
Situated on the axis of the phenomena/noumena, these works occupy the
space where the raw materials of the analog world and the subtleties of
the virtual interact, expand, and contract. The body is represented as
a robotic tool that receives commands from an unknown source, coldly
executing movements that (strangely) emote human neuroses (Farrell) /
Text references hypertext, physical aberrations of mass produced
signage, and the structure of words as thought in constructed form and
connotation (Mancuska, Myles) / The propagandistic visual sound-bytes
of the media are enlarged to a colossal scale, compounding their power
to induce fear and awe (Gonzales) / The retrieval of dreams from the
database of the unconscious underscores the encoded narrative of sleep
cycles and the search for their meanings (Montaron) / Simply animated
characters move with analog-like slowness like our lowest common
denominator, the consuming television viewer (Ezawa) / A vortex of
complexly layered pop imagery references western philosophers,
numerology, cognitive association, and spatial perception, mirroring
the brain’s synaptic response to a flood information and our ability to
process it (Kerckhoven) / Eastern mysticism and metaphysical
transcendence are evident in the landscape where a person
dematerializes. Is this a romantic gesture or a hallucinatory moment in
the virtual? (Halpern)
In the above-mentioned works there is a moment of cognition that takes
the viewer from the alien to the familiar, a cause and effect within
their mechanistic analog/digital sleight of hand. As such, "The Last
Generation” is for me the equivalent of a transformer of the
perceptual. The rich tonality associated with the analog is present, as
are the cold, unquantifiable depths of the virtual. A visual blueprint
for the exhibition might look like an analog/digital converter where
one form transmutes into another and a double take reveals more.
Distancing itself from nostalgia and aware of Modernity's failed
utopia, “The Last Generation” contains nonetheless a sense of the
sublime. Not in the 19th-century Romantic sense, but by virtue of an
intangible network of associations that push art further into the
terrain of physics. As though gazing at a scaffold surrounding an
invisible edifice, we experience the duality of nothing and something
at the same time.
Max Henry
2005
1. In layman's terms: analog is defined as a signal that has a
continuously and smoothly varying amplitude or frequency. Digital is
signal composed of electrical pulses representing either zero or one.
Because digital signals are made up only of binary streams, less
information is needed to transmit a message.
2. Nicolas Bourriaud has coined the term “altermodernity” which I
interpret as a characterization of 21st century modernity: a modernity
which is no longer a linear march forward but rather a revolving door
that allows movement in either direction.Max Henry is an independent
curator and critic based in New York.
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