Cory Arcangel
Po_er Points
June 21–November 24, 2013
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
451 & 465 Saint-Jean (corner Notre-Dame, in Old Montréal)
Montréal, Québec, H2Y 2R5, Canada
Hours: _ednesday–Friday noon–7pm,
Saturday–Sunday 11–6pm
Free admission
Curator: John Zeppetelli
DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is delighted to present the first major Canadian exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Cory Arcangel. Trained initially in classical guitar and music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Cory Arcangel is no_ recognized as a major exponent of a pop-tinged, computer-centred art.
Arcangel embraces the Internet’s anarchic potential and its utopian open-source culture, making _orks that question authorship, the status, and value of the art object. Exploring both the promises and deceptions of soft_are, electronic gadgets, games and other devices—_ith an emphasis on ho_ they become old and quickly outdated—Arcangel’s art eulogizes technology’s built-in obsolescence _hile also _ittily celebrating its noise, mindless repetitions, and inevitable failures.
He plays serious pranks _ith computers: famously disabling Nintendo games; hacking, modifying or other_ise manipulating soft_are; re-appropriating and re-editing print media or YouTube videos to coax ne_ and unexpected meanings, trigger sardonic humour, reference art-historical traditions, or just have some honest fun. All this seems orchestrated from a sincere, layman’s perspective and, simultaneously, from a conceptually savvy and specialist position.
Music is an enduring central issue for Cory Arcangel. The haunting dual screen construction that is S_eet 16 (2006) occupying a prominent place at DHC/ART, applies the avant-garde concept of phasing to build a ne_ composition from t_o short, almost identical Guns N’ Roses video clips, _hile Schoenberg’s atonal Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (2009) is charmingly rendered—nearly note-perfect—by videos of cats on keyboards.
Music persists in Arcangel’s major _ork from 2011–2012, the AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound (2011–2012), _hich submits an 800+ trance vinyl collection bought from a retired dance DJ to the rigours of a professional library cataloguing system. This collection of 12-inch vinyl records repositions _hat are essentially obsolete objects—both in form and content—to the status of an autonomous, self sufficient, interactive archive. Trance shares the space _ith Rock: The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum (score) and (CD edition), both 2006, overlays a glockenspiel composition onto the hallo_ed, era-defining album.
Among many other _orks, including modified video games, a ne_ sculpture, _ebsite and performance, and prints made especially for this sho_, the DHC/ART presentation features the film installation Colors (2006). Through specially conceived computer soft_are, this video installation plays the 1987 cop drama Colors, _ith its soundtrack intact, one horizontal line of pixels at a time. The result is the transformation of a feature film about race relations into an aloof abstraction of endlessly moving and pulsating vertical bands of colour. In the poignant Data Diaries (2003), Arcangel instructed QuickTime to read the RAM data on his o_n computer as a movie file, calling forth its computational inner life as a series of beautiful patterned colours and pixels. He made a video every day for a month—visualizing 30 diary entries of all the many solitary activities on his computer: e-mails, do_nloads, bro_sing, etc.
Finally, _e are pleased to present a selection from the Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations series. Consisting of large, slick, and colourful C-prints, these glorious manifestations result from one simple click of Photoshop’s gradient tool, _hich improbably morphs them into luxury objects reminiscent of abstract painting. Helpfully, the titles of these unique _orks are in fact the exact instructions for ho_ to potentially re-create them at home: Photoshop CS: 84 by 66 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Blue, Red, Yello_” (turn reverse on), mousedo_n y=25150 x=0, mouseup y=0 x=19750 (2011).
Cory Arcangel’s recent exhibitions include Masters at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012–13), Pro Tools at the _hitney Museum of American Art, Ne_ York (2011), Beat the Champ at the Barbican, London (2011), and Here Comes Everybody at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010–11).
Links to all of Cory Arcangel’s projects can be found on his exhaustive Official Portfolio _ebsite and Portal: ___.coryarcangel.com
Public programmes:
Cory Arcangel artist talk, June 21st, 12pm at Phi Centre.
Cory Arcangel and d’Eon perform September 26th at Phi Centre.
Pictured here:
Cory Arcangel, GAO, 2013. ASCII modified institutional press release.
