Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with Melbourne Festival
TECHNOLOGISM: MEDIA KIT
Technologism
Test Pattern 2013, humble VHS tapes are copied and recopied, in a
process of metaphysical reduction; while in Joshua Petherick’s new work,
one technology is employed to record another soon to be superseded,
revealing new visual dimensions and the ‘ghosts in the machine’.
EXHIBITION DATES 3 October - 12 December 2015
Opening function: Saturday 10 October 2015, 3-5pm
ARTISTS Cory Arcangel (US), Dara Birnbaum (US), Chris Burden (US),
Ian Burns (AU), Antoinette J. Citizen (AU), Simon Denny (NZ), Jan Dibbets
(NL), Aleksandra Domanović (SI/DE), Harun Farocki (DE), Benjamin Forster
(AU), Isa Genzken (DE), Greatest Hits (AU), Martijn Hendriks (NL),
Lynn Hershman Leeson (US), Matt Hinkley (AU), Jenny Holzer (US),
Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz (US), Oliver Laric (AT),
Mark Leckey (UK), Scott Mitchell (AU), Rabih Mroué (LB), Henrik Olesen
(DK), Nam June Paik (KR/US), Nam June Paik & John Godfrey (US),
Joshua Petherick (AU), Matte Rochford (AU), Jill Scott (AU), Richard Serra
(US), John F. Simon Jr. (US), Brian Springer (US), Hito Steyerl (DE),
Ricky Swallow (AU), Jeff Thompson (US), Pia van Gelder (AU), Ulla Wiggen
(US) and Dennis Wilcox (AU). Curated by Charlotte Day.
INTRoduction MUMA concludes our three-part series on
watershed moments in art history — Reinventing the Wheel: the
readymade century and Art as a Verb — with Technologism, a major
group exhibition bringing together forty-three historical and contemporary
artworks, including several new commissions from Australian
practitioners. Technologism wrestles with the profound cultural, social
and political impact technology has made on art since the 1960s.
Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA says, “Across this series we move
from the artists working with found objects, to dematerialisation of the
object and emphasis on performance and action, to thinking about the
intersections of art and technology ­– the transition from hand-made to
the machine, analogue to digital, and physical to virtual worlds.”
Conservative cul-de-sac’s of the community are often sceptical of
technology and its ever increasing presence in our lives. However many
artists — with a natural propensity for constant upheaval — have wholeheartedly embraced radical changes in technology over the last sixty
years. Featuring artworks that engage both physically and conceptually
with electronic systems — television, computers, the internet,
smartphones — Technologism focuses on the ways artists critique and
disrupt official uses of the media, or construct their own machines and
data systems.
Riffing off both the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of
technology, artists in Technologism document technology’s advancement
in a plethora of ways: Ulla Wiggen’s intricate paintings of circuit boards
from the mid 1960s, see the development of an aesthetic inspired by the
complex intersection of electrical wires, connectors and components,
working to manipulate and rewire the physicality of technology; some
thirty years later, John F. Simon's Art Appliances series of the 1990s
uses the circuitry of small LCD screens to disrupt pictures and patterns,
recreating them over; in Matte Rochford’s video Progressively Degrading
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
A story of advancement inevitably turns into obsolescence, and
Technologism seeks to document the early use of broadcast technology
as a way of bridging the gap (and finding a space) between the image
on the screen, the physical presence of the viewer, and the broader
community. Jan Dibbet's TV as a Fireplace 1968, documents television
as a collective experience — even if viewers were separated physically,
they were united through time and space like pre-historic cave-dwellers
by a communal broadcast. However with the advent of the internet,
personal computer devices and streaming services, technology has again
changed the relationship we have with the world around us to a more
singular yet proliferating existence.
A history of DIY jamming and hacking presents the way artists have
continued to subvert conventional uses of technology and challenge
the status-quo, from the internet as militarily-designed, to corporatelyexploited, civilian-employed, artistically-manipulated, and back again. For
instance, Lynn Hershman Leeson's work investigates how media is used
as a tool for censorship and political repression, while Simon Denny's
work co-opts the aesthetic and rhetoric of language of multinational
corporations in order to question their power. In presenting these works
and others, Technologism seeks to consider what is the value of such
subversion, or is it merely a perpetuation of the problem?
Artist Hito Steyerl asks, ‘is the internet dead?’ Although, hyperbolic in its
prognosis, Technologism recognises that sceptical questions such as this
are an important part of how artistic practice negotiates technological
advancement. Technologism proceeds from the idea that technology in
all its forms, physical and immaterial, needs to be interrogated in order to
be perpetually remade.
Technologism considers changes in infrastructure, such as
telecommunication networks and the internet, and the cultural
implications of technological innovation and considers from the position
of the developers of these technologies as well as from the end user.
Technologism asks ‘how does technology effect artistic practice?’ As well
as, ‘how can artistic practice effect technology?’
CATALOGUE The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated
catalogue with commissioned texts by Philip Brophy, Bridget Crone and
Sean Dockray.
Sound Spaces A program of innovative experimental and improvised
music, mining the rich territory of sonic experimentation with recent
technologies.
Saturday 17 October 3pm / FREE
Liquid Architecture: workshop and performance by 'Critical Engineer' and
artist Julian Oliver
Saturday 24 October 3pm / FREE
Australian Art Orchestra: musicians Austin Buckett and Martin Ng will
present RELAY, a new collaborative work for multiple turntables, graphic EQ
and four speakers
MEDIA For all media enquiries please contact Kelly Fliedner
kelly.fliedner@monash.edu | +61 418 308 059
Technologism is presented as part of the 2015 Melbourne Festival and is supported
by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm
Aleksandra Domanović
From yu to me 2013
HD video, colour, sound, 35 minutes
courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with Melbourne Festival
TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES
Aleksandra Domanovic´
Aleksandra Domanović’s work is concerned with the circulation and
reception of images and information, particularly as they shift meaning and
change register, traversing different contexts and historical circumstances.
Her works create strange taxonomies and manic associative chains that
poke and prod at copyright laws, unpack the geopolitical implications of
web domains or explore the model of exhibitions. Most recently, Domanović
has turned her attention to the complex ways in which image culture
and information flows have formed the postwar environment of former
Yugoslavia.
From yu to me tracks the history of the Internet in the former Yugoslavia and
specifically the involvement of female internet pioneers Borka Jerman Blažić
and Mirjana Tasić. Blažić, the President of the Internet Society in Slovenia,
is the founder and first general secretary of the Yugoslavian Network for the
Academic and Education Community, which introduced the first internet
services in the former Yugoslavia in 1991. The video comprises both archival
and interview footage with Tasić, Blažić, and Belgrade-based art historian
and curator Ivan Manojlović, and resulted in Domanović’s accidental
discovery of an unusual Yugoslavian contribution to science: the Belgrade
Hand (pictured).
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a pioneer of video installation in the 1960s, and was
associated with the international conceptual movement Fluxus. Paik
regularly collaborated with other Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and
George Maciunas.
In 1976 John Kaldor invited Paik and his collaborator, the cellist Charlotte
Moorman, to create a Kaldor Public Art Project in Australia. As part of
the project Moorman played the TV cello. Paik’s first TV cello, which was
created in 1971, was made by attaching a bridge, tailpiece and strings
to three TV monitors housed in clear boxes so their inner workings were
revealed. As part of the Australian project, Moorman played TV Cello at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales, while the screens showed closed-circuit
footage of the gallery and the performance as it happened.
Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl is a documentary filmmaker and writer whose practice
encompasses film, essays, and installations. Her work, which examines
issues such as globalisation, feminism, and postcolonial critique, also
focuses on mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge
brought on by digital technologies.
Steyerl’s work takes the digital image as a point of departure for entering
a bizarre world where politics, war, genocide, capital flows, digital detritus,
and class warfare always take place within images and their online digital
manifestation. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV
File 2013 is a sly parody of an instructional film based on the idea of
becoming invisible in the digital world (the first part of the title is borrowed
from a Monty Python sketch). Each of the work’s four sections outlines
some tongue-in-cheek strategies to avoid being seen—from hiding in plain
sight, to shrinking down to a unit smaller than a pixel, to living in a gated
community, to being female and over 50 years old. A seemingly automated
male voice reads out the instructions in a droll English accent and Steyerl
herself, along with several faceless figures, demonstrates the proposed
methods. Many of them, such as to shrink, to swipe, and to take a picture,
are accompanied by gestures familiar from use of mobile phones—
point to the fact that the bodies in question here exist in (and take their
choreographic cues from) a world that is at once virtual and material.
(from top)
Aleksandra Domanović
From yu to me 2013
HD video, colour, sound, 35 minutes
courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
Nam June Paik
TV Cello 1976
Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of
the John Kaldor Family Collection 2011
Hito Steyerl
How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic
Educational .MOV File 2013
courtesy of the artist
Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with Melbourne Festival
TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES
Jan Dibbets
Jan Dibbets is a Dutch artist who works predominantly with video and
photography. After teaching abstract painting during the 1950s and early
'60s, Dibbets visited London on a British Council scholarship and met
Richard Long and other artists involved with the land art movement.
In 1968, Gerry Schum, a German filmmaker, was interested in transmitting
artworks to West Berlin, then behind the Iron Curtain. Television, he realised,
could allow artworks and viewers to be connected across the closed
borders. Fernseh-Galerie (Television Gallery), a pioneering series of video
art, was commissioned by Schum, including two broadcast exhibitions
in 1969 and 1970. The first exhibition, Land Art, was broadcast on the
public station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) on 15 April 1969. Many notable
artists contributed films that were then transferred to videotape, including
Jan Dibbets (with TV as Fireplace), Richard Long, Walter de Maria, Dennis
Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. Between 25 and 31 December 1969,
public television station WDR III in Cologne rebroadcast Dibbets’ video of
a burning fire every night for three minutes. The logs were lit on the first
night, and the fire grew in intensity before slowly dying on the last. Dibbets’
piece turned the home’s living/sitting room into a flickering fire for just a few
moments at an historical moment when the TV set had gone a long way
toward replacing the hearth as the focal point of domestic space.
Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz
Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz were American installation and
assemblage artists whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life.
Edward's skills in carpentry, metalwork and auto repair, as well as their close
relationship with artists from the Beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg,
William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, shaped their unique artistic vision of
large-scale tableaux from assembled and constructed objects that sharply
criticised contemporary politics and cultural discourses concerned with
progress, technology and innovation. The Kienholz's destroyed monitors,
tubes, screens, circuitry, cabling, shells and frames to create sculptures
that poked fun and undermined the technology they deconstructed. Philip
Brophy comments, 'These operations sought to retool the televisual medium
by blocking its reception and emission. In a sense, this amounts to a "demediatising" of the television by instituting a perceptual focus onto the object
in an act of retrograde radicalism.'
Pia van Gelder
Pia van Gelder is an electronic artist, curator and teacher. She develops
performances and installations by working with media machines, both
custom-built heirloom technologies like the audio-video modular synthesizer,
and common electronic devices which are hacked and opened up to
perform in ways that negate their use or assumed design. In her recent
work, she has been interested in presenting opportunities to experience AV
mysticism and what she calls ‘machinic affinity', feelings of closeness to a
machine. Involving methodologies of hacking within her practice at large, van
Gelder also explores interdisciplinary research into theosophy, technology,
science, counter-culture histories and DIY pedagogy. Apparition Apparatus
2012, is an autonomous audio-visual setup presented on a table-top
installation. This work presents the no-input vision mixer’s audio and visual
performance through a speaker and CRT field monitor. The title indicates the
mystical nature of the audio-visual outputs from the media-machine, in this
case a Panasonic WJ MX 12 (c.1989), an early digital video mixer whose
own video output is plugged into its input, and so too for the audio, resulting
in a continuous stream of abstract electronic feedback phenomena.
(from top)
Jan Dibbets
TV as a Fireplace 1969
video on television set
distributed by LIMA, Amsterdam
Edward Kienholz & Nancy Reddin Kienholz
The Block Head 1979
various materials with transistor radio
courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney
Pia van Gelder
Apparition Apparatus 2012
panasomic W3 MX12, video mixer
courtesy of the artist
Presented by MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
in association with Melbourne Festival
TECHNOLOGISM: SELECTED ARTIST PROFILES
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been probing the idea of what it means to be
a cybernetic organism since the 1960s. Long before the digital revolution
and the virtualisation of everyday life, Hershman Leeson created surrogate
personas to investigate relationships between humans and technology, and
the media’s potential as a tool to counter censorship and political repression.
Her practice traces these prophetic concerns through photography, collage,
sculpture, and interactive installations. CyberRoberta displays Hershman
Leeson's ongoing interest in notions of the split self and the double-bind of
voyeurism and surveillance, and is the reincarnation of an ongoing alter-ego
'Ruby', a cyborg character initially created and controlled by the artist but
gradually altered through her experience of the world. CyberRoberta, is a
custom-made doll with blond hair and webcam eyes, programmed through
the internet, and ruminates on our obsession with, and the relationship
between, private surveillance and the online world.
Isa Genzken
Isa Genzken’s began exhibiting in the mid-1970s. Working with a language
of found objects and collage that ranges from smaller sculptures, dioramalike works to room-filling installations, Genzken has created an idiosyncratic
aesethetic that has helped to redefine assemblage practice in contemporary
art.
World Receiver, a concrete reproduction of a portable radio receiver mocks
the readymade—a term describing prefabricated, often mass-produced
objects elevated to the status of art by the mere act of an artist’s selection
and designation. Genzken once declared, “A sculpture must be at least
as modern as the most modern hi-fi systems.” When first exhibited, World
Receiver was shown with a group of Ellipsoid and Hyperbolo sculptures
(computer-designed sculptures installed on the floor that resemble garish,
gigantic needles) as well as a series of Ear photographs (small artworks
worn as earrings) and one true readymade of an unaltered multiband radio
receiver—a contextualization that attemps to describe and critique the
intersection of aural and visual perception.
SIMON DENNY
Simon Denny’s work has challenged numerous themes entrenched
in modern society’s globalised culture: the internet, technological
obsolescence, corporate culture, television broadcasting, and national
identity. He is interested in technology’s role in shaping global culture and
in the ways information is controlled and shared. The rapid technological
growth and innovation seen by large corporations and start-ups alike since
the dot com boom is a phenomenon which motivates Denny’s practice.
He creates a dialogue with these ideas through installations that combine
sculpture, graphics, and moving images.
Simon Denny's New Management is part of a series of works that function
as a documentary of the South Korean technology giant Samsung and
its global success story. The title, refers to the legendary management
philosophy that Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of the Samsung Group, infamously
introduced in the early 1990s. “The New Management” principle. While
the market success of Samsung that Denny retells is well-known,
recontextualising it in this way highlights its currency and raises questions
about globalisation, economic dominance, nationalistic aspiration,
and expansion. In this, as with his broader practice, Denny attemps
to monumentalise Samsung and other corporations' powerful cultural
messages to interogate the global material language of corporate pride and
presentation.
(from top) Lynn Hershman Leeson
CybeRoberta 1996
Telerobotic made-to-order doll with web-cam
eyes, computer, software, monitor
Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC
Isa Genzken
World Receiver 2014
concrete, metal, aerial
Collection Daniel Buchholz and Christopher
Müller, Cologne
Simon Denny
New Management 2014
Anodised aluminium, digital print on perspex,
screws, Samsung TV, remote control
collection of Elevation Capital Limited, Auckland
New Zealand