PREDRIVE: After Technology
The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, USA
Gretchen Skogerson, Switch (2008)
It is a fine moment to mount a show like ‘PREDRIVE: After Technology’. While our culture fully expects screens and clicks and immediate information, the economic engine behind all that newness has slowed, stuttered, or maybe even stopped - at least for a while. Global markets are frantic and our once-great growth rates are nil or negative. So what comes next? What do we do when the ‘wow’ is gone?
This is the central question of ‘PREDRIVE’, a group show at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, guest-curated by Melissa Ragona, a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. Works by Takeshi Murata, Brody Condon, Gretchen Skogerson, Antoine Catala and the collective Paper Rad seek out juxtapositions, loops and forms that are unwavering, if varyingly successful, in their quest to ferret out a place for new media in an age in which technology’s magical newness has been lost.
Paper Rad’s The Dark Side of Light (2008) quite fittingly functions as the show’s foyer. Brightly patterned knitted blankets hang like primordial pixels in the space’s windows and announce that what lies behind them is a techno clubhouse that pits the matte form and function of some not-too-distant ‘then’ against the high gloss of now. Past the giant DayGlo hand, the compulsive doodles, the clear plastic sacks of stuffed animals and the flat-panel video screens vibrating with what feels like every awful gif animation, collaged with what one might find by searching YouTube for ‘lonely’, then set to yappy dance music, there is a pile of decidedly out-dated technological apparatus: Wood-paneled speakers; 1980s-grey plastic amplifiers; cassette tapes; a Walkman; a video rhythmically plodding through its cuts; and a soft synthesizer groove.
Takeshi Murata, Homestead Grays (2008)
In the next room, Takeshi Murata’s hand-drawn animation Homestead Grays (2008) follows circles as they bumble their way into ‘U’ shapes, then squares, then folding boxes, balloons, fireworks, Alice in Wonderland-puffs of hookah smoke and more token psychedelia. As the animation builds in busyness, it starts to zoom in on itself, adding a sudden sense of perspective to the work. What was once an animated Rube Goldberg machine, busy changing lines to whirls and wonders through simple gestures strung together in convoluted ways, becomes a documentary on the lever, the cog, the pulley, or some other essential parts of the process. Taken together, these two pieces make a strong argument about the weird relationship that new media has to itself: no matter the current shines and flashes, the obsolescence built into a technology will, over time, wash and dye the work a drastically different shade.
Gretchen Skogerson takes up the same theme in her marvelously literal Switch (2008). Hung above a curved wall are a variety of ultraviolet bulbs that cycle through a series of combinations, casting the viewer, the wall, and the delicate lines that run down it in different spectrums of blacklight. The transitions between the hues are loaded with possibility, awkwardness and a fluorescent flicker that reminds one of just how tenuous the magic of technology can be: that ‘wow’ won’t always be enchanting, which is something worth remembering these days.
Graham T. Beck
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
