REVERSE ENGINEERS
Curated by Julia Dzwonkoski and Kye Potter
MARCH 19 - APRIL 13
Herndon Gallery, Antioch College
To dismantle the whole in order to understand its parts; to use existing objects and technologies in a manner unforeseen or unintended by their manufacturers; to invent new forms by cracking the codes that underlie old forms. These are some of the tactics associated with reverse engineering as practiced in a variety of fields and contexts: from industrial design and software development to anthropology and medicine. As a practice that emphasizes “know-how” over material advantage, it is no coincidence that reverse engineering has emerged as a strategy in wars that are increasingly asymmetrical and in a world where power and resources are increasingly concentrated and unequally distributed. The artists featured in this exhibition variously embrace reverse engineering as a means of critically understanding, intervening in and reinventing this world.
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ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION:
DANIEL BOZHKOV
Daniel Bozhkov is a Bulgarian-born conceptual artist whose work has involved assuming a variety of roles and engaging professionals in diverse fields. Positioning himself as an intruder/visitor/amateur, he seeks to introduce new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems. In Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea with Brita Filter (2000), Bozhkov posed as the Star Wars anti-hero in a noble but impractical ecological intervention. In Training in Assertive Hospitality (2001), Bozhkov took a training course and worked as a People Greeter at a Wal-Mart in Skowhegan, Maine. In between shifts, he painted a fresco in the layaway department of the store. Later on, the fresco was half-obscured with Wal-Mart merchandise: artificial trees, reclining chairs and Duracell battery packs. The artist continued working as a People Greeter and painting the places he could reach between the merchandise. In 2002, Bozhkov created a 300ft x 250ft crop circle portrait of CNN host Larry King in a farm field, and took flying lessons in order to photograph his work from the air. He timed the piece, Learn to Fly Over a Very Large Larry, to coincide with the release of the Hollywood film “Signs.” Most recently, Bozkov has organized walking tours of cities that are unfamiliar to him. Posing as a local expert, but with the curiosity of a foreigner, he invites tour-takers to take a fresh look at their surroundings.
In conjunction with this exhibition, Bozhkov led The Fastest Guided Tour of Yellow Springs, Ohio (March 13-14, 2004). Highlights of the “accelerated viewing” included: a secret compartment in the floor of the local flower shop that allegedly served as a stop on the underground railroad; a penguin mural created by a Yellow Springs high school student in the 1970s; a defunct amphitheater hidden in the Glen; the grave of Benjamin Rexford Hudson (Devoted Husband and Father, Magician, Hydro-Geologist, World Traveler, Builder of Homes); the kitchen at the Sunrise Cafe (where owner, cook and artist Jonathan Brown’s tile paintings of bears were on display); and the future site of the Shirley-Jones Gallery, a contemporary art gallery set to open later this spring.
The Fastest Guided Tour of Yellow Springs, Ohio, 2004
MIGUEL CALDERÓN
Working in a variety of media, from photography and sculpture to video and music, Miguel Calderón has a knack for pushing crass stereotypes and clichés to absurd and provocative extremes.
The photographs that make up Calderón’s Serie Historia Artificial (Artificial History Series) (1995) were taken in a natural history museum where the artist, armed with a handgun, assaults the taxidermy animals on display. In other series, Calderón has photographed groups of people “playing dead” at picnic tables in a polluted area, hotel/service industry workers posing as upper class socialites, and his own testicles camouflaged to appear as part of the landscape in a series of scenic postcards. His paintings of mask-clad bikers that appeared in the film, The Royal Tannenbaums, were based on staged photographs shot by Calderón and reproduced by an amateur painter hired by the artist.
Like his photographs, Calderón’s low-tech videos and installations are often tied to staged events and situations. In his 1996 installation, A propositio... (with Yoshua Okon), 120 car stereos were stacked in the center of a room while video footage of the two artists breaking into cars was projected on the wall. For the videotape Inverted Star (2003) Calderón put an ad in the newspaper inviting people who thought they were possessed by the devil to appear before his camera. In Middle Age Rampage (2003), two men take turns climbing onto the roof of a car as it speeds along a desert highway. Repeated at length and accompanied by suspenseful music, the macho stunt is recontextualized in an uncanny and mesmerizing cycle.
Still from Middle
Age Rampage, 2003, video, 5 min.
Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery
TONY CONRAD
Tony Conrad is a video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, teacher and writer. He was involved in the early development of minimalist music and was a founding member of the Theater of Eternal Music with John Cale, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela. His stroboscopic film, The Flicker (1966) and experiments in film processing and projection are among the key works in the history of avant garde cinema.
Conrad’s subsequent works in video explore structures of authority, power and desire as they play out within the audio-visual domain. In his 1985 tape, In Line, Conrad addresses the viewer with a series of commands, conflating actual control with its on-screen performance. Other works explore hypnotism, language aquisition and the “haptic” space that exists between a work of art and its spectator. Over the last few years, Conrad has produced a series of performance-based videos that have been characterized as “fragmentary burlesques.” They include Tony’s Oscular Pets (2002), in which Conrad demonstrates how to care for the pets that live inside his mouth, Hart (2001), a modern-day rendering of the Freudian Gradiva myth, and Hello Happiness (2000), in which Conrad finds himself, via chroma key, on the set of an S/M film shoot.
Tony Conrad lives in Buffalo, NY where he teaches at the State University, releases music recordings through an imprint of the label “Table of the Elements,” and contributes as a long-standing member of the city’s public access television and independent media communities.
Still from Hello Happiness, 2000, video, 1 min.
GREENE COUNTY LEARNING CENTER ART THERAPY GROUP
Greene County Educational Service Center provides school-based behavioral health services that are comprehensive, preventative, family-focused, integrated and flexible. The Greene County Learning Center is a highly specialized program with a model that supports school-aged youth whose emotional needs manifest in behaviors that significantly effect academic achievement. Teachers and therapists work together to accomplish the mission of school success for students.
Greene County Learning Center Art Therapist Eliza Woodburn encourages students to explore art making as a positive emotional outlet as well as means of self-discovery and expression. In one class project, students used collage to enhance their anger management skills, experimenting with different ways of representing how they experience and cope with difficult emotions.
Invited to develop an installation for this exhibition,
students in the art therapy group considered how reverse engineering is
practiced everyday by people living on the streets. While middle class
Americans turn to the real estate section of the paper in their search
for the perfect home, homeless people make use of newspapers and other
discarded materials in an attempt to meet basic human needs. Students
took images of homes for sale and collaged them together to form a makeshift
bed, with additional newspapers used to stuff the mattress. The bed rests
inside a cardboard box, suggesting the precarious nature of shelter, privacy
and security on the street. Images of flowers, also cut from magazines,
line the outside edges of the bed, resembling a fancy dust ruffle. As
the title suggests this is “Not a Bed of Roses”, but rather
a sign of the extreme economic disparity that characterizes America today,
and a dream of something better.
Not a Bed of Roses: A Homeless Person's Dreamquilt, 2004
CHRISTIAN JANKOWKSI
Berlin-based artist Christian Jankowski’s videos and installations break down perceived boundaries between reality and fiction, art and life. As an artist, he has inserted himself into a variety of social and occupational contexts, often involving professionals in fields other than art as collaborators.
For the project, My Life as a Dove (1996), Jankowski invited a professional magician to transform him into a dove for the duration of an art exhibition. A similar scenario unfolded in Flock (2002), where 12 gallery visitors were turned into sheep and remained in this state while they viewed the other artworks on display. Telemistica (1999) documents a phone conversation between Jankowski and a television psychic in which the artist asks whether the artwork he is currently working on will be a success. The live discussion, broadcast on Italian TV and recorded by Jankowski, serves as the completed work. For The Holy Artwork (2001), Jankowski arranged to appear on a Texas-based evangelical TV program. Approaching the pulpit with his video camera, the artist suddenly collapsed, leading the pastor to deliver an improvisational sermon praising Jankowski’s gesture as a “bridge between religion, art and television.” The Hunt (1992) is an early work documenting a week-long performance in which Jankowski visited a series of supermarkets armed with a bow and arrow. After hunting down his groceries, he proceeds to the check out line and pays the cashier. This unexpected turn of events suggests an affinity between modern consumer capitalism and the “manly technique of ‘natural’ self-supply.”
Still from The
Hunt, 1996, video, 1 min.
Courtesy of Michelle Maccarone Gallery
BARBARA LATTANZI
Barbara Lattanzi is a media artist and software designer who experiments with intersections of symbolic code, cinematic representation and interactive projection. Her recent work includes the construction of “idiomorphic” software for video improvisation and draws from her background as a film and videomaker and from the work of structuralist filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Anne McGuire and Ernie Gehr, among others. In another recent project, Strains of 2003, Lattanzi wrote software that enables users to manipulate and add text comments in real time to internet video streams of C-SPAN and other news material. Lattanzi is currently based in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is a Visiting Artist in Digital Media at Smith College. Her website, www.wildernesspuppets.net, includes downloadable open source software and interactive applets.
Artist Statement
HF Critical Mass applied to cinematography by NASA
The Quicktime videos used in this project are based on NASA footage from the 1968-72 U.S. Apollo missions to the moon. The software HF Critical Mass is based upon the structuralist film Critical Mass (1971), by the late Hollis Frampton. The software borrows the structure of that film, its way of marking the passage of time of the viewer (distinct from the time-frame of the film’s subjects). An important figure in the history of experimental filmmaking, Frampton worked during a period that reached a point of particular intensity in the 1960s and early 1970s.
There were two crewed landings on the moon during 1971, the same year that Critical Mass was produced. Apollo 14 launched January 31 and landed on the moon February 5 on the site named Fra Mauro. It returned to Earth on February 9. The next Apollo mission, Apollo 15, launched on July 26 and landed on the moon July 30. The landing site was Hadley Rille /Apennines. Apollo 15 returned to Earth on August 7, 1971.
I wish to thank the curators for suggesting the
use of the Apollo moon mission footage and for noting not only its renewed
relevance in relation to current U.S. ambitions in outer space, but also
its connection to alternative readings of NASA documentation. An example
of such an alternative reading is the persistent luddite skepticism that
Apollo missions ever happened at all.
Barbara Lattanzi
Barbara Lattanzi
Still from HF Critical Mass software
JOHN OLSON
Since age 15, John Olson has been making art, playing in bands, inventing electronic instruments, booking shows and putting out records and tapes. He started the label American Tapes in the summer of 1992, releasing limited-edition recordings of his own and others’ music from around the world. Now well past its 300th release, American Tapes continues to feature improvised music made with handmade and prepared instruments, low-fi tape recordings of shows and rehearsals, and densely layered electronic experimentation.
Olson’s vinyl, cassette and CDR editions, often released in small quantities of ten or less, reflect an aesthetic that is decidedly handmade and raw. Incorporating an array of materials and processes (spray paint, collage, found objects, photocopies, and screen printing), his releases often take on the status of sculptural objects. The American Tapes release of Chris Freeman’s “The Story of Yes” (Am-39, 1997) combines tackboard, tissue paper, ink, branches, red paint, staples and lacquer, while the cassette recording of D.L Savings T.X’s “Thank You Urine Doll” (Am-28, 1997), is packaged using a 7” record, grime, paint, ink, dirt, windex, oil, paint remover, lacquer and cloth. Olson writes, “you have to learn how to use your own style. Chinese artists would spend their whole lives on one style, so they would know every idiosyncratic aspect to it. If you just stay focused, and try to learn as much about subtlety and nuance, you can put a lot of depth and character into what you do.”
Most recently, Olson has been putting out hand-cut records that he distributes while on tour and through a growing international mail order operation run out of his Ypsilanti, Michigan apartment.
Olson plays magnetic tape and electronics in Wolf Eyes and performs with his partner Tova O’Rourke in Dead Machines. Though equally visionary as a visual artist, Olson reflects, “more and more I think that sound is a stronger personal art form than visuals. Because with visuals, you can just turn your head and it’s not there. But sound is on you like a blanket.”
Thirdorgan
“Poptones” C60
Paint & Brown paper lacquer Cover
(Am-48)
MIGIWA ORIMO
Born in Tokyo, Japan, Migiwa Orimo studied literature and graphic design before moving to the United States in 1981. Her large multi-panel paintings from this period reflect her experience of existing between two cultures and ways of life. They adopt a grid structure as a means of organizing otherwise incongruous visual fragments, drawing attention to the edges that both connect and divide the individual image panels as “points of negotiation, conflict and compromise.”
Orimo’s work shifted focus when her mother suffered a stroke and came to live with her in the United States, or as Orimo explains, “when my Japan came to my house.” From an emphasis upon edges, Orimo became interested in layers and how different images, cultures and systems of thought overlap and become visible through one another. Her 2003 series, Interior of a Shadow, includes paintings based on MRI scans of her mother’s brain superimposed with silhouettes of Japanese chrysanthemums and other organic forms, as well as translucent sculptural forms that reference both the human brain and the templates her mother used during her career as a hat designer in Japan.
The Gariban Project # 1: A Device for Two
extends Orimo’s investigation of layered forms of cultural communication
and messaging. The installation incorporates multiple sheets of traditional
Japanese “gariban” copy paper. Introduced in Japan at the
turn of the century, gariban is a direct process stencil duplicating method,
a precursor to today’s photocopy machines. Originally developed
for government and business use, the technology was embraced by political
activists and literary groups in the 1920s, enabling dissemination of
their materials to a mass audience. Orimo was interested in incorporating
this early form of mass communication in a sculptural context that invites
intimate communication between two people. Onto the individual sheets
of paper, the artist has inscribed images culled from medical science,
geographic maps, Japanese textiles and native flowering plants. The sheets
are suspended on a copper scaffolding, creating a luminous corridor. Standing
at opposite ends, viewers’ eyes meet through a series of holes cut
in the center of the individual hanging sheets. The pages are covered
with images, yet remain un-inked, suggesting the tension between personal
communication and mechanical reproduction.
The Gariban Project #1: A Device
for Two, 2004, installation view
PAPER RAD
Structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths are best interpreted and understood through other myths. The artist collective Paper Rad adopts a similar approach to pop culture, synthesizing material from television, video games and advertising, and allowing these fragments to contextualize and cross-reference each other. Day-glow colors, bit-mapped graphics, puffy cartoons and psychedelic patterns combine to create an optical and information overload, exemplified in the group’s website (www.paperrad.org). As member Jacob Ciocci writes, “In the ‘70s and ‘80s cartoons and consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked kids out... Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody else out by using this same throw-away trash.” Raper Rad members Benjamin Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci, have been producing visual art, music, videos, photography, comics, clothes and writing since 2000.
Rave culture and psychedelic experience are among
the subjects explored in Paper Rad’s installation at the Herndon
Gallery. It includes a painting documenting a girl’s vision in which
she discovers (while tripping) that she no longer needs acid to get high,
a video that offers views into some of the 100 rooms at a rave at the
Sphinx, a design for a sheet of LSD based on country kitchen aesthetics,
and hand-made stencil prints and cartoons featuring multiple fluorescent
creatures.
Still from installation video,
2004
WILLIAM POPE.L
William Pope.L, a.k.a. The Friendliest Black Artist in America©, has been using art to question culturally engrained categories (of race, food, sex, poverty and work) since the mid 1970s. Combining conceptual rigor, visceral impact and humor, his works expose layers of social absurdity and confound expectations about what “black art” should be.
Many of Pope.L’s pieces take place on the street. As part of his larger eRacism project, Pope.L has performed more than forty “Crawl” pieces in which he has crawled for miles on his hands and knees along public sidewalks until the point of exhaustion. In ATM Piece, he chained himself (with sausage links) to the entrance of a bank in Manhattan wearing only a skirt made of $1 bills, which he handed out to passersby. In Member (a.k.a. Schlong Journey) Pope.L walked along 125th street in Harlem with a 14-foot white cardboard penis in an effort to “own whiteness, male whiteness through the phallus,” and to do so “in a black environment, where I became a spectacle and the site of questions.”(1)
In other works, Pope.L has confronted the legacy of
Martin Luther King Jr. “King is important as material to me for
a number of reasons. It is not only his status as mythic that interests
me, it is his reality as a person, a black man, a father, a creature of
desire constructed not by his own making. It is his lack, also, his power
as symbol, as representations are most interestingly a bundle of contraries
that are not congruent [...] The great legacy of MLK is his absence. His
body is only as interesting as our drive to continually consume it and
regurgitate it.”(2)
Pope.L’s ongoing project, Redistributing Martin (www.redistributingmartin.com)
aims to “share MLK’s physical, spiritual, and metaphoric body
via dispersion through a variety of strategies: from site specific projects
to novels, to rumor, to bioengineering. The sculptural notion here is
to take what is vertical and re-render it as horizontal, i.e. to take
the monument off its pedestal and bring it down to the ground where the
rest of us live.”(3)
1 Barbara Pollack, “Superman Enters the Culture
Wars,” The Village Voice, 14 January 2002, 47
2 Chris Thompson, “Q &.L,” The Portland Phoenix, 8 February
2002
3 Ibid
Martin Luther King’s Cock
Connecting Selma, Alabama(The Artist’s
Birthplace) with Lewiston,Maine (The Artist’s
Home) Note:
Traditional Landscape and..., 2004,
drawing on plywood, 69” x 25”
LEIF RITCHEY
Leif Ritchey is an artist and fashion designer who builds his visual
language from the ground up. His recent work is constructed out of scraps
of paper, thread and fabric collected off the streets and from the floor
of his job at a New York fashion house. He transforms these found materials
into vibrant, shrine-like compositions, held together with yarn and clear
packing tape. Ritchie compares the process of gathering materials from
his immediate environment (and putting them to use) with the ecological
aim of “using the entire animal.” New York is Ritchie’s
“animal” at the moment, an endless source of potentially useable
objects and fragments.
Ritchey began altering, adding to and “collaging” clothes
in high school as a way of “customizing himself.” In addition
to clothes, books, mix tapes and visual art, Ritchey creates one-of-a-kind
shoes, usually with specific individuals in mind. “I try to embody
a person or a vibe by designing shoes to fit it.”
Most recently, Ritchey has been designing clothes with his partner and
long-time collaborator Tooya Deas. He collaborated with Tom Hohmann and
Zach Miner on a recent installation built by simulating the temporary
nesting patterns of apes. Constraining themselves to a two-mile radius
surrounding the gallery space, the artists gathered indigenous materials
and sculpted them into five sofa size nests where visitors were invited
to relax. In this project, as in much of Ritchey’s work, organic
forms and inorganic materials manage to coexist. The two go together for
Ritchey as “both plastic things and natural things are extreme at
this point.”
Customized Shoes, 2002
BRIAN SPRINGER
Brian Springer is a media artist whose work explores ways in which new communications technologies redefine notions of public space and private enterprise. He has exploited social and technological loopholes, extracting images, sounds and data from within traditionally closed systems of power. His well-known documentary, Spin (1995), uses unpackaged and uncensored satellite news feeds to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the American political process. In his recent work, Springer has strategized methods for recovering hidden information from digital text files.
I Trust You is a candid portrait of a high-risk work environment reflected through workplace media materials appropriated by an oil company employee. The project is an investigation of risk capital, oil exploration, and the role of audience as investor.
Still from I
Trust You, n.d., 5 min.
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