Marisa actively contributes to the field, writing for many major art publications, ranging from magazines & exhibition catalogs to academic journals and chapters in books on the history and theory of media art. She has served as Editor & Curator at Rhizome, the inaugural curator at Zero1, and Associate Director at SF Camerawork, whose Journal she edited. In 2013 LINK Editions will publish a retrospective anthology of over a decade of her writings on contemporary art which have helped establish a vocabulary for the criticism of new media. Meanwhile, Marisa has also curated programs at the Guggenheim, New Museum, SFMOMA, White Columns, and Artists Space. She has served on Advisory Boards for Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, Creative Capital, EYEBEAM, the Getty Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the Tribeca Film Festival.
Marisa studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric & Film Studies at UC Berkeley. She has recently been a visiting artist at Yale, Oberlin, VCU, UC-Boulder's Brakhage Symposium, Penn State, Visiting Faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and Visiting Faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Ox-Bow program. She previously taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' new media graduate program and was Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase's School of Film & Media Studies. She is currently Visiting Critic at Brown University.
Green is the New Black?
As our cities get bigger, our buildings grow taller, but our farms and gardens shrink. Trendy clothing stores and greenwashed corporate slogans are working double time to convince us that green is the new black, but what are our real strategies for building and staying green? A group exhibition at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, entitled "The Gatherers" addresses this question by presenting projects that merge art and activism to address urban environments. This includes work by Fallen Fruit, Amy Franceschini with Wilson Diaz, The National Bitter Melon Council, Oda Projesi, Marjetica Potrc, Public Matters, Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Rebar, roomservices, and Åsa Sonjasdotter--some of whom use parody to point out the absurdity of existing (non)strategies, while others take a more proactive approach. On a micro-level, LA-based collective Fallen Fruit maps the free fruit in their city's neighborhoods and encourages public consumption and awareness at "Public Jams" in which jam is made of these freebies. On a larger scale, Swedish artist Åsa Sonjasdotter created The Potato Perspective in order to use this root vegetable as a touchstone for tracking food trade, genetic modification, the political barriers to growing and eating healthy foods, and the future of sustenance in increasingly-colder climates. YBCA will also be hosting a series of public talks and workshops that address the themes of the show while inviting the audience to participate in the solutions presented. - Marisa Olson
Fallen Fruit, American Family, 2008, (Credit: Fallen Fruit)
Putting the You in Tube
For his solo show at London's Seventeen Gallery, Berlin-based Austrian artist Oliver Laric is showing three video projects that put a recursive spin on his previous work. The artist's 50 50 project, in which he seamlessly strung together fifty YouTube clips of strangers singing three songs by hip hop artist 50 Cent, has received praise around the internet and the art world for its remix of both 50's music and vernacular video culture. But now he's showing a recomprised version of the piece (50 50 2008, a remix of his own remix) by using all new clips. The mass availability of videos of people singing these three songs speaks both to the popular appeal of the music and of the act of performing for the home movie camera--thus deepening the initial resonance of Laric's project. For Touch My Body (Green Screen Version), the artist took the nerd-loving video for Mariah Carey's hit single and made a template for chroma-keyed remixes by YouTube users by digitally replacing the background images surrounding the starlet's body with a flat green backdrop. At Seventeen, Laric is showing not only his template video, but also the remixes that internet users (other net artists and general surfers alike) uploaded to the web. This decision emphasizes the project's dependence on the notion of fandom, which is both participatory and collaborative by nature. Laric's inviting template also susses out the often creative and productive nature of fan culture, particularly with regard to the internet, where appropriation and distribution tend to be fast and easy. Finally, his multi-channel work,
Video Disharmonies
On October 29th, the new Temporäre Kunsthalle will open in Berlin, making the city even more of an international art mecca. Their inaugural exhibition features four ambitious multi-channel video installations by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz. The show will open in two waves, beginning with her installations Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna). In each of these pieces, fans of the musicians have been invited to sing entire albums by Madonna, Michael Jackson, and John Lennon. With each performance shot in precisely the same way, the resulting headshots are presented in the round, a circle of voices aimed at each other, almost duking it out for the title of ultimate spectator, in front of a perpetual blue screen that marks the whole thing as a production. While Breitz is often celebrated for her witty and clever embrace of pop culture, there is a deeper current to her work which revolves around close scrutiny of the relationship between the formation of celebrity at the hands of mass media and the role of these machinations in the culture industry. In these ways, her often autobiographical parodies of pop figures are not so different from the real thing--afterall, it's the idea of Madonna that we see in the media, more than Madonna herself. If a circle of people singing Madge's hits can constitute a "portrait" of her, it's because her image is best reflected in the way that consumers drink-up her message. Then again, this creates a nice tension in the new work Breitz will premiere in the second half of the show. Him + Her is a two channel project employing several decades' worth of found footage from the films of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep ...
Changing the (Art?) World
While both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are running for office on the platform of change, the question that seems to be on many peoples' minds is the kind of change that will in fact be effected--no matter whom is elected. Mobilization around the leading candidate, in many ways, resembles a swelling social movement, but the extent to which the mainstream media is implicated in this movement begs the question of the shifting relationship between politics and those other visual spectacles we call Art. The current exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, entitled "After October," asks precisely this question of what's changing (or what needs to change) in art's ability to operate politically, while pivoting on a double entendre that speculates on what will happen after election day and ruminating on what happened to art following the October Revolution. Curator Tim Saltarelli's curatorial statement poses the question of whether a new approach might be taken, given the recent misfires in protest art wherein an effort to negate a political system or scenario instead resulted in entrenching it. The work of Andreas Bunte, Duncan Campbell, Thea Djordjadze, Matias Faldbakken, Claire Fontaine, Luca Frei, Cyprien Gaillard and Pia Rönicke is presented in remembrance of these historical moments and their resultant iconography. After all, the recognizability of, say, "May 1968 Art," which has effectively become a brand, is part of the problem. Saltarelli's invitation is for the art world to begin allowing "for works of art to resonate in different ways than being literal, that are not, always, immediately, accessible." Perhaps in our efforts to break these codes we will decipher new ways of thinking about how to change the world. - Marisa Olson
Image credit: Claire Fontaine, First Flight (2001), 2005. (Two twenty-five cent coins, steel box-cutter blades ...
Keeping Hope Alive
"Optimism,", the newest exhibition organized by independent curator Michael Connor takes on the not-so-small task of exploring "the dreams and realities of making progress and changing the world." As everything seems to be crashing all around us, it can be hard--and even risky--to maintain a glass-half-full attitude toward things. Even more challenging is the prospect of making political art that doesn't simply aestheticize politics or that actually makes an impact, rather than simply preaching to the choir of those who already share the artist's beliefs. The work of Becca Albee, Ghana Thinktank Collaborative (John Ewing, Matey Odonkor & Christopher Robbins), Matt Keegan, Zoe Leonard, Tara Mateik, Walid Raad, and Paul Shambroom fleshes-out this tricky conundrum while offering productive and hopeful gestures. The common factor in their work is a frank assessment of a situation and an informed, if humble move to take matters into their own hands--an act which implies a belief in the possibility of change. At times these efforts manifest in almost humorous explorations of failure and impossibility, while at other times they are more explicitly activist and/or hopeful. The exhibit is on view at the Westport Arts Center through November 30th, effectively meaning that it will continue even after the current presidential campaigns hinging on the prospect of change have ceased. While the notion of optimism is often dismissed as Pollyanna, Connor says the show offers an alternate take on the concept, laying out strategies for proactive political engagement and means of future-improving. He suggests, "The glass is not yet half-full, but it will be, once the wine is poured." - Marisa Olson
Image: Matt Keegan, Without touch, we can't connect. Without skin, we can't touch, 2008
Breaking the Ice
Like most of the folks above, I too am a "forever member," from the days of the Rhizome Communications ascii RAW listserv and, later, fancy Dreamweaver/Flash "Splash Pages," to the present. Reena Jana and I were the first two paid writers (poached from Wired!), when Alex Galloway was running "content," which at that time meant programming and editorial--though Rhizome was declaratively non-editorial, so they just commissioned book & exhibition reviews, and some interviews from us that were fed into the RAW stream and included in the Digest as Features. Oy vey, I can still remember the cross-eyed weekly ritual of trying to untangle parallel conversations to reassemble them into a coherent thread for the Digest, when I was editing it--and the race to get it out by noon one day each week!!
I've seen Rhizome go through so many changes, and I've been a part of the back channel conversations on years of them, including huge ones that we decided not to go through with. I have to say that it's always hard to serve a membership-based organization, which is what Rhizome has always thought of itself as. But I can say that every change in content or form has been discussed critically, at length, and typically not without a degree of passion.
I am also biting my tongue because I *really* do not want to put words in any staff member's mouth (past or present), but I can say that I believe everyone who's ever worked there has taken their position as a labor of love, with users/reader/members/community (everyone has their favorite self-identification; semantics trolls please don't hate today!) in mind, and everyone has collaborated with the staff to bring a unique take on how best to serve you in the current creative and technological climate. For instance, I remember that my big objective coming in the door was wanting to change the mission statement to reflect not only net art and not only highly technological art, but also art that "reflects" on technology in a meaningful way. In fact, I think contemplating this change was very much a part of my conceptualizing Postinternet.
There is so much to say here, but I think I'd best sign off. This is not my soap box, and in some way, it feels weird to comment so much. I used to be a Superusing Megaposter, but as soon as I became Editor & Curator, I stepped back to focus on trying to facilitate and amplify other voices, which I do believe every Rhizome Editor has done in their own way.
I'll end with this, then. I'd be surprised if every reader, writer, or editor loved everything that ever appeared (structurally or content-wise) in their newspaper of choice. I'd be surprised if every curator or museumgoer loved every artwork shown (or every exhibition design decision) in their favorite museum. But it's the day we stop reading, stop going to look at art that disappoints me. It's the day Rhizome stops experimenting that scares me. And I wish them well on this new experiment.
Conference Report: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH)
Thank you for these points of clarification. I actually tried to convey (and forgive me if I failed) that your presentation was unique in identifying multiple generations of networked artists, and I particularly liked the way you talked about artists working before the internet in ways that anticipated network culture.
You also made that great point (via Hal Foster) about the ways in which critics' work is influenced by what is/ was happening at the moment they entered the art world. I admire how you helped pioneer new media criticism and yet have continued to stay on the pulse of new work. This is what I had in mind when recalling your point about your relationship to a previous generation of net-dot-artists, versus the artists of the era Inclusiva was calling the "second epoch." I just really liked the way you fleshed out more than two epochs and I wanted to highlight your catalyzing role in the net-dot-art scene, in particular.
In my own presentation, my intent absolutely was not to dismiss any previous artists, movements, practices, etc. It was simply to flesh-out one niche of new media art practice. In fact, I really liked the pointed questions that the audience asked afterwards, because it helped us have a really meaningful discussion about the problematic relationship of pro surfer work to art historical discourse, and my calls to action revolved around getting those artists to participate in learning about their own pre-histories and writing historiographies that situate their own trajectories on their own terms.
So I don't think we're in disagreement. But I appreciate your call to fine-tune my articulation of these scenarios.
Go Ahead, Touch Her
Go Ahead, Touch Her
I'm sorry that you found my article objectionable. I didn't intend to make the implications you suggest, but I believe your response cuts to the most interesting aspect of Laric's piece, which is the effect of remixing.
For those who care to review the lyrics to this song, they are here:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mariahcarey/touchmybody.html
They include the refrain:
Touch my body
Put me on the floor
Wrestle me around
Play with me some more
Touch my body
Throw me on the bed
So, in fact, I do think that Carey's lyrics (and video) invite sexual fantasy, but my article doesn't say that she is asking to be violated, it says that she's asking to be remixed. Of course, the slippage between the two that you identify is what's so interesting.
In an interview with Laric, he told me that he noticed that the video takes-on an increased sexual tone when all but Carey is masked out. He was interested in how this first-person invitation to "touch my body" could be construed as an invitation to remix the visage of her body (and/or the voice emitted from it), particularly given (a) the implicit link to digital culture embodied by both the lyrics and video, and (b) the fact that the remix is now such an important part of the media ecology of pop culture.
In the last 25+ years of pop music, lining-up celebrity remixes and making singles remix-ready has been an important part of the production cycle, often preceding the release of the original recording. Almost all historical accounts of Madonna's rise to fame cite her relationship with DJs and openness to remixing as a key factor in her success. So while you may see the remix as a violent act, clearly those participating in this industry see it as an imperative.
Discussions of why a remix is or isn't violent are interesting, as they get to questions of the status of the digital reproduction. Are we remixing a person or "just" her image, and what's the difference when thinking about how a person's identity--particularly a famous person's identity--hinges upon their image? Carey's image was already manipulated before it came to us. In the interview with Laric, he pointed to a segment in the original video in which the shape of a cup becomes distorted as a result of distorting the footage to make the singer standing behind the cup appear slimmer. So this is already not her. If you listen closely, I believe there is also a question as to whether all of the voiced parts of the song are her, so the audio issue adds another layer to the phenomenological question of the brute force of the remix.
These issues of the import of the remix, the relationship to broader pop culture (rather than an insular art world), collective authorship, and the nature of Carey's invitation are what I hoped to address in this article.
Thank you, Patrick May
You've been an awesome colleague, Patrick! Thanks for everything!
