Cory Arcangel: Creative Pursuits
January 16–April 11, 2010
As technology takes on an increasingly central role in cultural production, contemporary artists are faced with a rapidly evolving palette of tools to use for creative work. Each new medium demands new forms of expertise to exploit its possibilities. Each presents a moment of great potential, but as the pace of development increases, new media are born already haunted by the specter of obsolescence. Since the early 2000s, Cory Arcangel has pursued an artistic practice that explores these conditions, probing the relationship between technology and culture.
In Creative Pursuits, Arcangel continues to explore the possibilities that exist at the intersection of art, humor, and technology. The selection of works in the exhibition reflects his growing interest in the tension between skilled and unskilled uses of technology. Some works rely heavily on Arcangel’s programming skills and sophisticated understanding of musical composition, while others are the result of a more intuitive, “non-expert” use of technology.
Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11 (2009) consists of short YouTube fragments of cats walking on pianos, painstakingly edited so that the cats collectively play Arnold Schoenberg’s eponymous 1909 composition, widely considered the first piece of “atonal” music, or music to completely break from traditional western harmony. In a nod to classical music’s long engagement with technology, Arcangel identified the appropriate fragments by matching them to a 1958 recording of Opus 11 played by legendary pianist Glenn Gould, who pioneered the use of electronic recording and editing technologies for classical music.
For his first foray into the medium of sculpture, Kinetic Sculpture #1 (2009), Arcangel has modified two motorized retail display stands to perform a composition based on the technique known as phasing. Each of the two stands performs the same repetitive movement, in steady but not quite identical tempo. As one gradually gets ahead of the other, the two stands shift out of sync. What begins as a slight visual echo becomes increasingly complex as the temporal gap widens, then lessens as they eventually come back into unison and the process begins again.
Also included in the exhibition is Arcangel’s take on the popular video game Guitar Hero, in which players use a guitar-shaped controller to play along with the notes on the screen. Here, Arcangel has modified the
open-source Guitar Hero clone Frets on Fire, replacing the game’s usual rock soundtrack with La Monte Young’s seminal minimalist work Composition 1960 #7 (July 1960), which consists of the sustained interval of a perfect fifth, B and F#, with the instruction “to be held for a long time.” In this deadpan mash-up of high and popular culture, Arcangel has created a version of the game that anyone can master while at the same time confounding the game’s complex scoring system. The combination of expertise and defeat is also at work in Self-Playing Sony PlayStation1 Bowling, a hacked version of the once-ubiquitous game system reprogrammed to throw nothing but gutter balls. (This work is being projected in the gallery after hours every evening and is visible from outside the Museum.)
Arcangel’s series of Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations utilize the gradient tool of the image-editing program Adobe Photoshop as a readymade device to create works of classic modernist abstraction. Although Arcangel himself approaches the program intuitively, precisely without reading the instructions, the exact commands and mouse movements needed to reproduce the images are contained in the works’ titles. If the Photoshop gradients result from untrained use of software, another set of four c-prints speaks to a similarly non-expert use of hardware. Faced with an image (the back cover of a late-1970s “Rock Sampler” compilation LP) whose dimensions were incompatible with those of the bed of his desktop scanner, Arcangel opted to scan the image four times, each time rotating it ninety degrees. Collectively, the four prints map the entire surface of the record sleeve. There is something cheerfully perverse about this intergenerational meeting of media, but questions of technical incompatibility, data migration, and obsolescence are inherent in the thirty-year-old source image itself—a sleeve for a vinyl LP record advertising the then new medium of the cassette tape.
Jacob Proctor
Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
This project is made possible in part by the University of Michigan Office of the President and UMMA’s New Visions Venture Fund including the Susan and Richard Gutow Fund.
Works on View
Maxell
2007
four c-prints
Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11
2009
single-channel video
dimensions variable
Composition #7
2009
“Frets on Fire” video game and mod file, personal computer,
Guitar Hero controller
dimensions variable
Untitled Kinetic Sculpture #1
2009
2 modified silver Z01S dancing stands
Photoshop CS: 40 by 30 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=9040 x=2460, mouse up y=10040 x=1040
2009
unique c-print
Photoshop CS: 40 by 30 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=560 x=2160, mouse up y=2300 x=3160
2009
unique c-print
Photoshop CS: 40 by 30 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=2520 x=1540, mouse up y=2520 x=3540
2009
unique c-print
Photoshop CS: 40 by 30 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=9400 x=7200, mouse up y=1640 x=1640
2009
unique c-print
Photoshop CS: 40 by 30 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=1960 x=2020, mouse up y=4400 x=5640
2009
unique c-print
on view overnight/after-hours:
Self-Playing Sony Playstation 1 Bowling
2008
Handmade hacked Sony Playstation 1 controller, Sony Playstation 1,
and Sony “Bowling” video game
dimensions variable