Difference Engine (Installation View), via Jodie Berman for Art Observed

Meandering into spaces of contradiction and surrealist juxtaposition, artist Cory Arcangel has put on his curator cap for a show organized in collaboration with Art21’s Tina Kukielski, organizing an exhibition of works centered around modernity and technology, and framed equally by ideas of potential and hazard. (more…)

Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina, Asymmetrical Response (Installation View), via Art Observed

Since 2003, artists Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina have held an ongoing dialogue on contemporary practice, politics and the web, exploring their shared experiences in the early years of broadly accessible internet culture, and the often obscured histories that the era’s technologies and sites (GeoCities, early Javascript, etc.) held.  Working together for the first time, the artist’s have embarked on Asymmetrical Response, an exhibition at The Kitchen that feels like equally like historical research and contemporary study, engaging with a distinct era of internet culture while serving as an elaboration and examination on the conditions that have ultimately played out on the stage of American politics this year. (more…)

Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited Publishing House has released a series of artist-made digital files, including works from Cory Arcangel, Martine Syms and others, and featuring a variety of incomplete, unrealized or proposed projects.  “A file is the work before the work. It is the “score” that directs the printer, video projector, or speaker to create the expression that is experienced,” a press release reads.  “And as such, artist files hold considerable value and potential in contemporary culture.” (more…)

Tom Sachs, Crawler (2003), all photos via Andrea Nguyen for Art Observed

The group exhibition Space Age, which closed yesterday at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris-Pantin, took up all four of the gallery’s spacious halls to examine historical and commissioned works by twenty contemporary artists, drawing on the astrological, the exploratory, and the untapped potential of outer space.  The artworks on view explored one of humanity’s most archaic collective dreams: the conquest of the skies and the immersion in the cosmos.

James Rosenquist, An Intrinsic Existence (2015), via Art Observed (more…)

Cory Arcangel, AUDMCRS (Installation View) all images courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin

On view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is a solo exhibition by American artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer for a generation of artists devoted to the archaeology, reuse and re-appreication of computer technologies.  Arcangel has built an international reputation for his performances, videos, installations, and computer-generated works, but here turns his attention to more antiquated modes of digital music, tracing the use and dissemination of certain pieces of gear, musical genres and gestures in modern pop and dance music.

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Team Gallery is planning to open a space in Los Angeles on September 14th, 2014. The new space, called Team Bungalow, will be the third iteration of the Team Gallery and the first outside of New York City. The gallery will be based in a small bungalow and garage on Windward Avenue in the Venice neighborhood and will be open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Team Bungalow’s inaugural show will be called “tl;dr” and feature work by Cory Arcangel.  (more…)

Recognized contemporary artists Ryan Gander and Cory Arcangel have both announced the launch of their own lines of clothing.  Gander’s line is a collaboration with Japanese clothing line A.Four Labs, while Arcangel’s, titled “Arcangel Surfwear” is “all designed for comfortably surfing…. the web of course,” says a project manager. (more…)

‪‬Tom Sachs, Cory Arcangel, and Mike Mills among the 17 artists included in Transmission LA: AV Club at MOCA in Los Angeles, a ‘multi-sensory experience’ festival curated by Mike D of the Beastie Boys, also featuring a pop-up restaurant by Roy Choi

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Cory Arcangel, Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture 6) (2011).
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Following up on his solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum, media artist Cory Arcangel is currently showing at the Lisson Gallery in London. Titled Speakers Going Hammer, the show features a number of pieces previously unseen in the UK, as well as several new works. The New York-based artist first rose to prominence in 2002, with his piece Super Mario Clouds, featuring a hacked Super Nintendo System that had removed all of the graphics from a Super Mario Cartridge save for the blocky, pixilated clouds. Continuing along these lines, Speakers Going Hammer features a hacked basketball game program, titled Self Playing N64 NBA Courtside 2, in which an outdated, video game version of Shaquille O’Neal continually takes and misses free-throws.

Installation view.

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Cory Arcangel, Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ) (2011), all images via The Whitney
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Currently showing at The Whitney is “Pro Tools,” the first major retrospective of Brooklyn-based Cory Arcangel. The show surveys a diverse set of works that display a focused obsession with both outdated technology and pop culture.  The exhibition’s title refers to a software that is used in sound mixing, and becomes a synecdoche for the way in which tools and trends allow culture to move forward, but in doing so render themselves obsolete.

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Cory Arcangel, Various Self Playing Bowling Games (aka Beat the Champ) (2011) (detail)

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Jeff Koons Must Die!!! The Video Game by Hunter Jonakin

“What if you were locked in an art museum overnight, with a rocket launcher, during a Jeff Koons retrospective.”  So begins the video preview for the videogame Jeff Koons Must Die!!!  MFA candidate Hunter Jonakin‘s 2011 sculpture, is a stand-up arcade cabinet where the viewer can play a video game in which the protagonist walk around an art museum during a Jeff Koons retrospective and is given the choice to destroy the work with a rocket launcher.  In choosing the virtuous path by not doing so, they merely wander the museum, see the work, and then the game ends. However, if they do destroy more than one work (and there’s the choice of puppies, basketballs, La Cicciolina paintings, etc.), Koons will appear and the game takes on the more familiar violent nature of popular first-person shooters, with enemy combatants being replaced with museum guards, curators, lawyers and studio assistants. The important action of the game is not the destruction itself, but which decision the player makes regarding whether to destroy Koons’ work. “Jeff Koons Must Die” clearly pays homage to one of the art world’s entrenched stars while also allowing its player to enact a virtual catharsis if they so choose.

Hunter Jonakin, Jeff Koons Must Die (2011), via Hunter Jonakin.com

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Installation view of Cory Arcangel, ‘Beat the Champ’ via Artdaily

Currently on view at London’s Barbican Gallery is “Beat the Champ” by Brooklyn-based Cory Arcangel, known for diverse and innovative work using DIY low-fi tech materials. Cory’s recent project for The Curve, a co-commission with the Whitney Museum of Art is an installation featuring 14 bowling video games from the 1970s to the 2000s. The artist has used custom-made electronics in order to hack each unit to play a loop game whereby the bowler fails to score.

Beat the Champ (2011) by Cory Arcangel, via Barbican Gallery

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Another view of the main lobby, A Scott Campbell “tropical fantasy” (represented by the Miami based OHWOW Gallery) is the top center work

Art Observed was on site at the Soho Beach House Miami during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach for a tour of the 150 work art collection assembled for the private club and hotel.    Keeping a close connection with the artistic community has been an important part of the strategy for the Soho house brand, which has multiple locations in England as well as in New York and newly in Los Angeles, Berlin and Miami Beach.   This week marked the first Art Basel Miami Beach for the location and it hit the ground running,  hosting some important events such as dinners for White Cube and Victoria Miro galleries and a W Magazine event.

A John Baldessari on the left and a Friends With You on the right, in a hallway on the main floor

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Tacita Dean’s Christmas tree, ‘Weihnachtsbaum‘ at Tate Britain via Zimbio

The Tate has been embracing the Christmas spirit this week with a series of headlining seasonal happenings.  The Tate Christmas Tree 2009, “Weihnachtsbaum” designed by Tacita Dean, shocked critics by actually appearing “Christmassy”[Bloomberg]  This weekend, Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall was taken over by Rob Pruitt‘s festive ‘Flea Market’ – originally held at Gavin Brown’s Passerby gallery in New York in the late 1990s, this event was programmed to coincide with the Tate Modern exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, in which Pruitt also appears [POP Magazine]

Italian police have seized works of art belonging to Carlisto Tanzi – founder of the Italian firm Parmalat who collapsed in a massive fraud scandal in 2003. The 19 paintings and drawings, included works by Picasso, Monet and Van Gogh, and is estimated to be worth more than 100million euros [BBC News]

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Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon that will appear in New York’s Madison Square Park in March 2010 via ArtInfo

Antony Gormley has announced plans to install 31 nude sculptures cast from his own body in and around Madison Square Park in Manhattan’s Flatiron District beginning March 26 [NY Times]

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Kathy Grayson, center, at the opening of ‘New York Minute’ via Depart Foundation

New York City has been the center of the contemporary art world for over half a century, and while contemporary art production and dissemination has been influenced by globalization, with new centers of of activity gaining recognition around the world in cities such as Berlin, Moscow, or Shanghai, there’s still something about New York that attracts new and established artists alike. ‘New York Minute’ is an exhibition produced by the young Italian philanthropist Pierpaolo Barzan’s DEPART Foundation to bring the energy and sense of community found in New York’s downtown art scene to Rome, hosted by Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO).

‘New York Minute’ brings together sixty artists who live and work in New York, or are involved in its extended network, and showcases new tendencies in art that have developed out of that community. Curated by Kathy Grayson, director of New York’s Deitch Projects, the exhibition groups those new tendencies under three headings: the brash and gritty street punk aesthetic of artists such as Dash Snow, Terence Koh, Aurel Schmidt, the rainbow inflected wild figuration of Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Paper Rad, or Jules de Balincourt, and the new abstractions of artists including Tauba Auerbach, Xylor Jane, and Dan Colen.

The opening night brought thousands of young Romans looking to vibe on the energy brought to the city by the New York contingent. Kathy Grayson answered ArtObserved’s questions about what makes the New York scene so special, how ‘New York Minute’ is spreading its infectious communal energy, and what the plans are for the future.

DEPART FOUNDATION BOWS WITH “NEW YORK MINUTE” [Artnet]
New York Minute [Art in America]
Minute Made [Artforum]
Sixty New York-Based Artists Featured in Exhibition at Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Roma [ArtDaily]
The Heart of the New York Art World Beats in Italy at the “New York Minute” Show [Paper Magazine]
It’s a New York Art ‘Renaissance,’ Argues Upcoming Show [NYMagazine]
Wine-Maker Uncorks New York in Rome [Bloomberg]
New York Minute with Dash Snow, Aurel Schmidt, Barry McGee and Others [The Fader]
“New York Minute” exhibition [SLAMXHYPE]

The logo of ‘New York Minute’ by Chris Johanson via Depart Foundation

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Still from Cory Arcangel’s ‘Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11’ via Team Gallery

Team Gallery’s current exhibition is a group show of three video artists from the gallery’s roster: Cory Arcangel, Guillaume Pinard, and Jon Routson. It follows a similar three-person show of abstract work by its artists in January. The exhibition includes a number of video pieces, in both large and small formats, as well as a sound piece by Routson and two prints by Arcangel in his Photoshop series – a similar print was in the New Museum’s triennial, Younger Than Jesus.

Arcangel, Pinard, Routson [Team Gallery]
Arcangel, Pinard, Routson @ Team [This Heart’s On Fire]

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