Individual Curatorial Photography Project

Between Module 4 and 5 of this course, you will be individually assigned a contemporary artist working with photography to engage with in a curatorial project developed in close consultation with the me and the class over the remaining semester. You will receive an instruction sheet that provides more detailed guidance of what I will be looking for, and I will assign your artist based on a balance of your own interests in the themes and ideas raised in the course.

Please find below the name of your artist, along with one artwork that will serve as your entry point into this artist’s work with photography. I have also attached a jpg of the work for you to begin with.

ARTIST: Artie Vierkant, Image Objects (2011-ongoing)

Between now and next week’s class, please do the following:

Research your artist(s) and find out something about their biography, training, and background. If you can, read a few interviews or writings about the artist(s). I have chosen artists who are emerging and/or beginning to establish themselves in the contemporary art world, so be sure to visit their websites, social media profiles, and bookmark and begin building a set of resources so you can understand who your artist is.
Artie Vierkant (b 1986 as Arthur Benjamin Vierkant) is from Brainerd, Minnesota.
Vierkant completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, and his MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 2011. His CV is posted on his website, and its information can be summarized as follows:
- Between 2010 and 2018, Vierkant exhibited his work in:
  - 17 solo exhibitions; and
  - 55 group exhibitions.
- Vierkant has been featured in 11 interviews and articles in such publications as Artforum and The New Yorker.
- In addition to his artworks, Vierkant has worked as an art theorist, writing 9 different articles including THE IMAGE OBJECT POST-INTERNET (2010).
- Vierkant has given 9 different artist talks.
- And from 2013-14 he was an adjunct professor at New York University, Steinhardt; as well as a visiting faculty member at the Virginia Commonwealth University in the Department of Sculpture in 2012.
From a Wikipedia article about Vierkant, it’s noted that Vierkant is “…an American digital artist based in Brooklyn, New York.” The short article also quotes author Paddy Johnson, who notes how Vierkant’s “…work is the classic conceptualist, fixated on the distinction between the object and its documentation, and theorizing - in classic Baudrillardian fashion - that representation can exist without reference to an original.” The article led me to want to define several terms floated about Vierkant’s practice:
- DIGITAL ART: Adobe explains how that digital art is “Any artwork that draws upon digital technology as an important part of its creative process. It encompasses a wide range of techniques from digital drawings, paintings, and illustration, to photos, videos, and even sculpture / installation (my note: graphic design, animation, game design). All can be classed as digital art, so long as they’re created, enhanced, or exhibited digitally. Some artists may also produce prints and exhibit in-person, while others might go straight to a virtual or online environment. In an increasingly online world where children might access a tablet as easily as a colouring book, it’s a gateway for many aspiring creatives. And as you’re not confined by physical materials or media, the possibilities can be seemingly endless.”
  - DIGITAL MEDIA ART combines art and technology in creative ways.
- CONCEPTUAL ART / CONCEPTUAL ARTIST / CONCEPTUALISM: The Tate Museum defines conceptual art as being “…art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished artwork / art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.” A 2013 Quora post explained how: “Most art has a concept. It is the driving force behind it that provides content or meaning. Conceptual work is work that is for the most part about the concept.” And Wikipedia describes how conceptual art is: “…art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than the traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.”

ARTIFACT > The Art Assignment. “The Case for Conceptual Art.” YouTube, 26 Jul 2018.

With the artwork I have chosen for you, please complete a full inventory of the FORM and CONTENT of the work. This can and should be done with little need for research (beyond maybe determining scale/materials for form). Once you complete this, work on the CONTEXT of the image as best as you can. I have put resources on Moodle so you can better understand FORM, CONTENT, and CONTEXT if this is new to you, or you need a refresher. Be sure to have this on hand for next class.

ARTIFACT 02 > Artie Vierkant, *Image Objects* (2011- ). Prints on aluminum composite panel, altered documentation images.

FORM: Vierkant works with several mediums including DIGITAL NEW MEDIA, INSTALLATION, PHOTOGRAPHY, and SCULPTURE, all of which serve as part of the artwork’s form as it exists in the image presented above.

First, in terms of a SCULPTURE, Vierkant works with several found objects that sit as installed sculptural elements on a white rectangular plinth inside the white cube of an art gallery space. A wall runs parallel behind the long back side of the plinth, and another shorter wall appears to run parallel to the left of the plinth. While the left side is seemingly closed off by the shorter wall, the room appears to continue off to the right of the picture frame. On the right front corner of the plinth sits a small, heavy looking, dullish grey block pipe that appears slightly rusted on the left hand side as well as on top of the block itself. Near the back of the plinth, to the left of the small block pipe stands a long, clean looking, glossy black rectangular block with a cylindrical top. Directly in front of this skinny monolith sits a stout, marble green block, possibly a cylindrical shape (but it’s hard to tell). On the opposite side of the plinth, in the back left hand corner sits a much larger shiny, clean looking, greenish-blue block pipe. Next to this, near the very front of the plinth, is the start of a fifth object, which appears as though it might be a long, black object laying flat on the surface of the plinth. But the object is cut off and obscured by Vierkant’s digital elements. Finally, a sixth object sits at the very front of the image, occupying a slice of the lower right hand side of the image. It appears as though it is another heavy, dull grey block pipe, possibly one whose right hand side protrudes upward, possibly turning the block pipe into a corner connector.

Secondly, in terms of PHOTOGRAPHY, Vierkant is known to digitally photograph his sculptural installations, which serve as a foundation for his use of DIGITAL NEW MEDIA manipulations of the image in programs such as Photoshop. Here, Vierkant appears to have added two digital compositions to the far wall of the gallery space. The compositions mimic paintings, albeit digital paintings. The composition on the left is the most visible, a square field of orangey colour upon which a gradient swirl of blue swishes its way upwards like a digital cloud, and a small bit of it even breaks the frame of the canvas, by floating out beyond it on the lower left hand side.

Very bright neon spring colours

CONTENT:

CONTEXT: As a Post-Internet CONCEPTUAL ARTIST, Vierkant is interested in exploring the meaning behind what constitutes a photo-based art object and how that object lives on once it leaves the creative hands of the artist. As a conceptual artist, Vierkant’s work references and is influenced by several art movements of the past, including:

THE READYMADE: Vierkant’s use of heavy, industrial like objects calls back to the very roots of modern conceptual artworks as represented by the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp. Wikipedia notes how:

“The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art.” By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.
Duchamp was not interested in what he called "retinal art"—art that was only visual—and sought other methods of expression. As an antidote to retinal art he began creating readymades in 1914, when the term was commonly used in the United States to describe manufactured items to distinguish them from handmade goods.
He selected the pieces on the basis of "visual indifference,” and the selections reflect his sense of irony, humor and ambiguity: he said "it was always the idea that came first, not the visual example ... a form of denying the possibility of defining art."”

In Vierkant’s Image Objects, it is safe to assume that Vierkant choose the objects that appear on the plinths with the same kind of “visual indifference,” as Duchamp described as harbouring “…no aesthetic emotion.” By there mere placement in an art gallery, these industrial objects have become art, and carry the added burden of existing to be replicated and altered through the creative possibilities inherent with digital photography and software programs such as Adobe Photoshop (ultimately, film photographs could also be taken of these objects, and they could be further manipulated by the possibilities that exist with the tools in a photography darkroom).

COLOUR-FIELD PAINTING: Vierkant’s use of brightly coloured, computer generated geometric shapes in many ways feels as though they are a throw-back to the ideas and style embedded in colour-field painting, which the Tate notes how:

“From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliamand others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it.”

Wikipedia also describes how colour-field painting:

”…is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

The bright, colourful shapes Vierkant creates and places within the photographically represented space of the gallery, although gestural, feels largely impersonal, and even flat. There are no references to any objective content, leaving room for whatever subjective interpretation the viewer brings to the work.

The gradient colours of the computer generated geometric shapes appear to pay homage to Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, a series of artworks created between 2007-15 (a sample of the gradients Arcangel created can be seen in Artifact 02 below). These works by Arcangel are evocatively bright gradients of computer generated colour, where the name of each piece contains the information that anyone can use to recreate the artworks in their own copy of the Adobe Photoshop software program. This sharing of information by Arcangel surrounding the process of creation blurs the line between how the art object exists in terms of how it can be viewed, shared, and recreated. Arcangel is freeing the work from the confines of the four walls of the white cube known as the art gallery, democratizing the image by allowing it to live a life beyond those walls and in the hands of anyone who knows how to use Photoshop. Technically, I could print these art pieces and have them framed, and have an Arcangel hanging in my own home. I could also alter them by changing their size, and superimposing them as an added layer on top of my own photographs, or onto photographs I appropriate on the internet, to give them new life and new meaning. I could even layer them onto an image created by Vierkant and post the result onto my Instagram feed.

ARTIFACT 03 > Arcangel, Cory. “*Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Yellow, Violet, Red, Teal", mousedown y=16450 x=10750, mouse up y=18850 x=20600*.” Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009.

Usually, Vierkant formally starts by creating various geometrical and curvilinear shapes in a software program such as Photoshop, which often act as frames - highlighted by colourful gradients that in some ways evoke a callback to colour field painting and even the Fauvist works that were interested in exploring bright, wild colours and flat forms. Vierkant then prints these shapes onto a kind of hard plastic surface that is cut to fit the shapes he created. These would then be installed in a gallery, where the installation would be photographed again, and further altered in Photoshop. Here though, it appears that Vierkant has placed various found objects (heavy, dull looking, industrial like objects) on a white plinth inside of a gallery. This installation was then digitally photographed so that it could be brought into a computer, where Vierkant then placed his colourful forms behind and on top of the assorted objects. Some of these electronic forms look to also be superimposed onto the far back wall of the gallery, mimicking the style of his earlier images in this series, with the layered objects on top of the entire image marking a new placement for Vierkant. Finally, the black imagery feels sculptural, with a weight to it, even as it appears to float in the spaces the pieces occupy. The largest piece feels almost figurative, as if it was operating like the profile of a female figure (a nun?) perhaps (another possibility the three black shapes might represent is that of a mermaid). It all serves to transmute the idea of what is real and what is digitally created, superimposed, and altered. The finished piece is an experience through step by step processes, forming an exploration of what an art object is, how it is created, and how it ultimately ends up living in the world.

Identify THREE ideas we have covered in the first classes so far that you can see are somehow related to your assigned artwork. For now, this can be quite broad and may be related to the artists we have looked at to date (past and present) or the readings we have covered. I am looking here to see how you are thinking about your assigned artists in connection to course ideas. Be sure as well to have these ideas sketched out and with you for next class.
- In the first seminar of this course, we looked at several artists working with the medium of photography (Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Richard Mosse), and considered the question, What interests them about the medium of photography? For Jeff Wall, he spoke about the relationships and collaborations he has with performers, and in class we spoke to how Wall is interested in getting people to spend more time with an art object. By comparison, Vierkant is interested in developing conversations and collaborations with viewers of his artwork by encouraging them to continue the process of creation by photographing and distributing the artworks through their own online networks. Through his augmented reality smartphone app, he also encourages viewers to spend more time with art objects by photographing it and further altering it before redistributing it online.
- In our second seminar of this course, we examined the concept of how artists and viewers talk about ideas by understanding what is constructed (Sherman / Wall). We also noted how it was important to understand What was happening socially and culturally as the medium developed. This is of interest to Vierkant, who through Image Objects he is exploring how an art object exists and moves between the artist and viewer to create a dialogue. For Vierkant, the meaning behind his Image Objects is contingent on what a viewer brings to the conversation, and how they choose to share that dialogue through their interaction and further distribution of the artwork, in ways which blur the distinctions between what exists on and offline. In many respects, Vierkant seems curious about exploring how the medium is the message (a concept developed by Marshall McLuhan) in a Post-Internet world.
- In seminar five, our focus moved into exploring the documentary power of photography, and what photography reveals. The question of what defines photography and art, as well as where it is viewed was considered. There was an exploration of how art and photography can be examined for links to the past. Eugene Atget produced photographs for sale as artists studies used by painters, architects, and stage designers. Although Atget was best known for his photographs, he had also worked as a painter and an actor which isn’t that different from how Vierkant works across the disciplines of digital new media, installation, photography, and sculpture. It highlights the idea explored in class about how there can be no neat divisions between the types of photography an artist uses.