Heavy hitters at the MIA - "The Sports Show"

I made it across the street this afternoon to "The Sports Show," the current special exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show's premise is an investigation into the depiction of various facets of sports. Each of the nine rooms dedicated to the show divide the work into categories such as "spectacle," "race," and "politics." Since I'm not much of a sports fan, I had very little interest in attending, but as I explored more, I found myself enjoying the exhibition.

Hardware from Cory Arcangel's Masters, 2011

The categories offered on the walls did little to inform the work; most of the exhibition seemed to be chronological in content. The first few rooms contained mostly old sports photographs from notable locations and times, and the end of the show consisted of video works and contemporary photos leading up to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. One exception to this trend was Cory Arcangel's Masters in the front room, which is is a golf video game hacked to always screw up your putt. Everyone took a turn at the game, only to fail. It was especially disappointing to watch small children attempt the putt over and over again. You could tell they were thinking, "I know video games, I can do this."

Jaques Henri Lartigue, Grand Prix of the Automobile Club of France, 1912

To be honest, quite a bit of the material in the show - particularly the historical photos - felt like padding for the more clearly intentional artworks. One example of this is Ezra Shaw's photos of divers mid-leap - maybe I've seen too many Internet memes, but I wasn't sold as easily on the message of this work as, say, Andreas Gursky's heavily photoshopped Bahrain I.

That's not to say that humor doesn't have its place in art. Though it was clear that the Zidane screening was intended as the big draw for the museum, the hands-down most popular artwork in the show was Upstate Olympics by video artist Tim Davis. In Davis' videos, the artist invents sports such as Lawn Jockey Leapfrog, and proceeds to "compete" by, say, jumping over all of the lawn jockeys he can find in his town. Davis' 54 "competitions" were displayed on three parallel monitors, running out of sync so that  a new sport was constantly visible on each.The room got crowded quickly, and no one wanted to leave.

Davis doing his stuff in Drive-in Movie Tennis

About 5 events in, I realized that the Upstate Olympics were more devious than the surface implied. Davis draws you in first with his ridiculous competitions, but once you have watched him perform for a few minutes, you begin to imagine what it would feel like to do what he is doing, and you are hooked. Everyone in the room felt for Davis, and we all found ourselves wincing and cheering out loud as the competitions progressed. We weren't just happy that he stuffed a bunch of acorns in his mouth (presumably to beat a record); when he spit them all out with a strand of drool, everyone chuckled because they had done something like that before.

Furthermore, when Davis steamrolled across a long line of political and commercial yard signs, we the audience were not just satisfied that he destroyed the signs in a fun way, but we endorsed his competition as a political statement, too. By using mundane materials and old public spaces for the competitions, Davis seems to be making a point about how hyper-real the actual Olympics tend to be - how can international friendships be made in an event that does its best to avoid reality? At the end of the video, we see Davis saluting "Olympic flags" flying at a location we cannot initially determine - an American flag, the New York flag, and a McDonalds flag. I'm not sure if the curator of "The Sports Show" had planned for the audience to walk away with a smile on our faces and unease in our hearts, but success is what you can get.

Cinemagraphs, deposed

I haven't talked much about "cinemagraphs" on the blog. They're GIFs similar to what most people think of when they think of GIFs: appearing to stem from a film or TV show. The "high art" cinemagraph, however, does one other thing specifically (for some reason) that most GIFs do not: the cinemagraph reduces movement in a scene down to a few localized areas, such as a person's eyes, hair, or a scarf blowing in the breeze. It thinks very much of itself.

Stage (we are familiar) has produced, in retaliation, a series of faux-cinemagraphs that reverse the localized movement: twitchy, wobbly eyes and uncanny jaw movements turn what appear to be normal humans into uncanny-valley monsters. Watch and enjoy.

In which I am a grouch about panels on net art

LINK to AFC comment thread where I lose my shit - who is behind this? Why? What do collectors in Dubai want with net art? Why is Constant Dullaart the representative of the community? How did the audience respond? Why does everyone think that archiving a website or web content is akin to videotaping or photographing a performance? Isn't it the perception that matters over the material? If you can replicate the perception exactly, why worry?

In the debate, Marius Watz hedges with the common complaint about net art/artists being undefinable. I can't speak for Watz, but generally the complaints I see like his are all on Mr. Moody's 14 definitions of WTF a net artist is. (here's #14) I disagree with Tom and Marius because I think that by proposing a definition you can establish methods of evaluation. Here's my stab at a broad definition of the genre:

Net art is either artwork produced for web-based consumption with an implicit awareness of the culture and power structures that govern its dissemination, or physical artwork produced with a more explicit awareness of the same in mind, or a combination thereof.

It seems to me that intentionality is key here - self-awareness, awareness of the qualities of the Internet. Anything implying a lack of understanding while billing itself as art is untrustworthy and patronizing. If it's not intended to be net art, it's outsider art or just a really funny website. If you feel otherwise, comment here and I'll duke it out with you, but be prepared to provide examples.

One last link before I go to keep this on-task: The Idiocrats by Alexander Provan, a gentleman mentioned in the panel as arguing against non-Internet-aware net art.  I'm not familiar with Triple Canopy yet, so if you know more please chime in.