421 abstract paintings on matchbox.
Publications
©2008 by 48073. All rights reserved.
Posted by artreview.com on 11 April 2008 at 5:00pm
By James Westcott
Something an online gallery lends itself to – as well as the pure visual pleasure of tenaciously retinal art – is archiving. We're approaching 30,000 images now in the gallery, and there's no real limit to the number we can accommodate (just so long as the images don't come all at once and crash our server!). This isn't a call to upload every image you've ever made just for the sake of it (a few artists haven't been shy in exploiting the new easy mass-uploading function), but where archiving and documentation is intrinsic to the work itself, artreview.com is a perfect filing cabinet: easy to open, infinitely expandable, and, best of all, always on show. On Kawara's date paintings would sit well here; but what would be there contemporary equivalent? I knew an artist in New York who painted an apple every morning before going to work, a method of maintaining sanity (and constructively expressing insanity).
One artist deserves a mention here for the sheer obsessive repetition in their art and in their archiving here on artreview.com: 48073. "The number was born online, december 2002", says the artist on their profile. "It is the number I find hardest to remember." Kudos. One of his/her projects was making 100 paintings consisting of looped circles – mostly black and white, but some in colour. Isn't painting circles an classic sign of painterly madness? The circles aren't particularly nice to look at, but something about the sheer force of repetition and commitment in making 100 canvases like this raises the stakes beyond simple aesthetic contemplation into the realm of (dumb?) endurance art, or even art therapy:
48073, twirl, 1995
Another of 48073's projects was to make 421 abstract paintings on matchboxes:
48073, absract paintings on matchbox, 1994-1998
The audio on his/her/its profile page offers a clue to this multiplicity: it's George Steiner talking on Heidegger, who – Steiner says – warned as early as the 1920s that 'as this soap powder [ie. conveyor belt consumerism] spreads over the planet, over the universe, it will be almost impossible for you to be you and not just one'.
Speaking of overwhelming consumerism, here's Sabina Jacobsson's (John Stezaker-esque) postcard diptych of 'Dubailand' and Dubai (which blows up nice and big here). It's hard to tell whether the illustration on the left is a utopian fantasy or a faithful architectural rendering of actual plans for Dubailand – a theme park/mini-city being built in the desert:
Sabina Jacobsson, Indoor happiness
And here's a still from 10:50-11:15, a video made in Oslo's central station in 2005. See more of the tai chi style dancing in a clip on Jacobsson's website, which reveals a wide-ranging practice in drawing and performance too.
Sabina Jacobsson, 10:50-11:15
Iranian artist Mehraneh Atashi unfortunately doesn't say much on her profile page, though her website reveals that she was born a year too late, 1980, to be among the many exiled children of the revolution in the US. "I was destined to be born in this spiritless, timeless era" she says. "[I]t is like i am the lost spirit that hegel heard during his last breathes!" Atashi studied photography at Tehran University, and her practice is sensual, archival and classical. On artreview.com Atashi shows a series of lonesome, longing images, where a plate of glass offers imaginative interaction with the world and also a constricting screen in front of it, forbidding full immersion:
Mehraneh Atashi, fear and loathing
There's a trend in photography at the moment to helicopter views of cities and crowds with a massively exaggerated depth of field so that few figures in focus look like little toys and streets and cars look like the scenery of a model railway. Scott Carruthers offers a kind of painterly equivalent of this, but he strips out the entire scenery to leave a field of choreographed figures in an empty stage set, all facing the same direction, looking like they're all waiting for something. Funnily enough, the expectant figures, though pudgy and cute, somehow don't end up looking forlorn and helpless:
Scott Carruthers, happy cycling
Steve Armstrong signed up to artreview.com this week and has immediately posted some delightful pencil drawings that would be almost photo-realistic if it wasn't for their warmth-n-fuzziness:
Steve Armstrong, Untitled (light bulb)
In his newspaper works, Armstrong pulls off the very tricky feat of drawing text -- freeing it up from its status as language and bringing out formal qualities:
Steve Armstrong, The Globe and Mail, 27 April 2007
Finally this week, the young artist Matt Larson graduated from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and is now based in New York. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a thorough admiration of Martin Creed, whose fingerprints can be found all over the irresistibly cute, object-based conceptualism of Orange Balloon:
Matt Larson, Orange Balloon
Even the description of this work is bright and breezy: "Balloon, nail, ribbon". Doesn't tell you how the balloon doesn't burst though! Another of Larson's projects is to try to get into the Guinness Book of Records. Like Darren Bader, he shows his befuddled rejection letters as the artistic documentation; unlike Bader, and very unfortunately for us, he doesn't publish the original proposal letter. We can only imagine how he planned to set the world record for 'biggest waste of batteries':
Biggest Waste of Batteries
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For more artworks picked out for the Roundup, see the slideshow.
