Two online exhibitions from ongoing curatorial initiatives Why + Wherefore and Club Internet opened within the last week. See below for a quick summary of each, plus a few highlights.

"Sound" Curated by Bozidar Brazda (part of the 7 x 7 series) for Why + Wherefore

For the first installment of 7 x 7, Why + Wherefore (Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist) invited 7 organizations to produce an exhibition composed of 7 items around a theme. Rhizome was one contributor, and staff writer Brian Droitcour put together an exhibition of 7 vertical works that exceeded the browser frame. (Other guests included Sundays, iheartphotograph, Triple Canopy, The Highlights, VVORK, and Humble Arts Foundation.) Continuing with the 7 guests, 7 items format is the second round of 7 x 7, where individual curators were asked to contribute an exhibition. So far, João Ribas, Kate McNamara, Josh Kline and Mark Beasley have chimed in with exhibitions ranging from items made in Photoshop to men modeling the durability of their outerwear in advertisements from 1969. The second (the first was VVORK's) sound-specific theme in the 7 x 7 series went live this week, curated by artist Bozidar Brazda. Simply titled "Sound," the show's logo (above) resembles a CAPTCHA, and the works operate in a similar fashion, being both comprehensible and somewhat obscured. Ryan Foerster's Untitled (2009) assembles roughly 15 separate clips of (what I presume) is the Ramones counting off, "1,2,3,4" before launching into a song. The song is omitted, thus the listener is simply left with the lead up. Rich Alrdich's (The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts (2009) is an acapella version of the Bee Gees' 1967 song and on first listen, it sounds like a late night, drunken recording of a group of ...

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Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE

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ASDF, the joint collaboration between Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz, announced a new project yesterday, S.A.S.E.. Adopting the format of the self-addressed stamped envelope, where the receiving party sends an empty envelope to the sender in order to obtain a reply, potential viewers of the ten email-based exhibitions must send an email request to ASDF to receive the show in their inbox. Each exhibition contains a statement, a works list, and a selection of images. Many of the exhibitions read much like art projects, such as Michael Mandiberg's "FDIC Insured" in which the artist assembles the corporate logos for banks recently closed by the recession, found from images searches and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Image searches figure into Jess Wilcox's "Discovery of Orange" as well, a show that loosely collects images referring to the color in an effort to illustrate its artificial manufacturing. The results fluctuate from Vincent Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night to a photograph of construction cones to the Nickelodeon logo. ASDF are offering 11" x 17" prints of the email exhibitions as well, but only through - you guessed it - a self-addressed stamped envelope.

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In New York City, time and space (and, of course, the ever-present dollar bill) have long operated as limiting factors in the exhibition of art. In response, curators and artists alike have had to eek out unique and innovative approaches to show work. Galleries such as Fake Estate have set up shop in former utility closets while curatorial initiatives like Apartment Show have taken up impromptu, one-night only residencies in homes across the city. Art Since the Summer of ’69, run by Hanne Mugaas, Fabienne Stephan and Paul-Aymar Mourgue d’Algue, is another such enterprising venture to carve out space, often in uncommon settings, to show work by emerging artists.

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Rhizome is pleased to announce the launch of “Splashback: Rhizome’s Splash Pages, 1998-2002,” an online exhibition featuring the 39 splash pages commissioned over a four-year period. “Splashback” offers a brief overview of online art and design practices from ten years ago through a nearly obsolete medium, the splash page.

Artists include: Annie Abrahams, Daniel Garcia Andujar, Ben Benjamin, heath bunting, Gregory Chatonsky, Shu Lea Cheang, Andrew Childs, Curt Cloninger, David Crawford, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, entropy8zuper, Andrew Forbes, Valery Grancher, Matthew Hoessli, Olia Lialina, David Lindeman, jimpunk, JODI, Yael Kanarek, Lucas Kuzma, Antonio Mendoza, Mouchette, MTAA, Robbin Murphy, Nettmedia, Scott Paterson, Pavu, Waldemar Pranckiewicz, Reinis, Satellite01, Sigma6, Starry Night, Eugene Thacker, Jake Tilson, Maciej Wisniewski, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

“Splashback” is organized by Brian Droitcour, Rhizome Curatorial Fellow.
Site built by Elise Roedenbeck, Technology Assistant.

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Curator Hanne Mugaas launched a new pdf exhibition in collaboration with Private Circulation this week, "The "Painting" Show." Much like ASDF's For a Brief Time Only, the curator sends the exhibition personally to the viewer, who then has complete control over its display. While For a Brief Time Only delivered the show's 24 photos off to a local lab for print and pick up, thus examining the ease and accessibility of photography's circulation in the age of Walgreens, "The "Painting" Show" looks at the distribution of painting, or rather, "painting". By inserting the quotation marks around "painting", Mugaas signals that this isn't the real thing, but perhaps a new sort of something, stating,"the results are not paintings, not pictures of paintings, but 'paintings'." The show's 10 "paintings" by artists AIDS 3-D, Kerstin Bratsch, Charles Broskoski, Marcel Dionne, Aleksandra Domanovic, Anders Nordby, Guillaume Pilet, Hayley Silverman, Anne de Vries, and Ulrich Wulff are a painterly spin-off of the standard brush, paint and canvas combo, coming from sources such as computer programs, video, and scanned versions of paintings on paper, and the show's only instructions are that these images be printed on 32lb paper. Although much more expensive to produce, I would've liked to see these "paintings" actually repainted again, perhaps by oil painting "manufacturers" such as Canvaz, thus pushing painting or "painting"'s claim to originality even further.

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Every weekend in the month of March, "In Real Life" took over Capricious Space in Brooklyn, NY with four-hour residencies by various art-related web sites. We felt the project stirred up some compelling ideas surrounding the presentation of online artistic activities within a gallery setting, and we attended as many residencies as we could. Finding a format to review everything that went on last month wasn’t easy. We eventually decided to crib the form of curator Laurel Ptak's statement, a conversation between herself and art historian Leigh Claire LaBerge over Skype, and exchanged our impressions of "IRL" over email.

Ceci: The first "IRL" residency I attended was the performance for Club Internet. Some have grumbled that this "performance" was boring -- just a bunch of people around laptops. But I stayed at the gallery for almost two hours, talking to Laurel about the use of (and resistance to) digital manipulation in commercial photography during the 1980s, the subject of her academic research that preceded her blog iheartphotogaph. I also had an interesting talk with Club Internet founder Harm van den Dorpel. I don't know if we really needed the gallery setting or even the production of Club Internet in the background to have that kind of dialogue.

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Addressing the American Association of Museums in 1941, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, then curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, put forth a fundamental question: "What is an Art Museum for?" He proposes that the answer is contained in the term "curator," which implies that "the first and most essential function of such a Museum is to take care of ancient or unique works of art which are no longer in their original places or no longer used as originally intended, and are therefore in danger of destruction by neglect or otherwise." Significantly, Coomaraswamy's concept downplays one curatorial activity otherwise taken for granted today: "This care of works of art," he writes, "does not necessarily involve their exhibition" but if an institution does choose to exhibit works, "this is to be done with an educational purpose." Moreover, he adds, "it is unnecessary for Museums to exhibit the works of living artists, which are not in immanent danger of destruction."

Coomaraswamy's antediluvian pronouncements, predating both the development of the modern computer and the institutional embrace of contemporary art, nonetheless provide a way to think about the assumptions underlying the twelve essays in Christiane Paul's collection New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art, recently published by UC Press. For even if Coomaraswamy's skepticism about the value of exhibiting living artists now strikes us as thoroughly outdated, his general concerns continue to inform the questions posed by Paul and her contributors. For new media, the problem of how to deal with artworks "no longer in their original places or no longer used as originally intended" remains salient -- albeit for technological rather than antiquarian reasons -- and all of Paul's essayists propose some version of what necessary "educational purpose" curators of new media must embrace.

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