COPYPASTEINTERNET
Excerpt from 100% by John Kelsey100% How much of the painting is already in the TIFF? And in the end, after the file has been selected and commanded to print, how much actually comes out of the Epson? Where does painting go when it's sent and received like this - as a code? The work of art seems to go outside of itself when it decides to picture the weightless, groundless, dimensionless, and genderless qualities of information, in the cybernetic sense; or when the image itself assumes such qualities in order to experience how abstraction happens today. The first thing the work abandons is the act of painting, and with it, manual space. Replacing the "diagram" with the program or code, painting suddenly leaves the ground and approaches something like a post-Fordist condition of abstraction. Now the space of the work is no longer either optical or manual, but communicational, extending itself along a network that links one apparatus to another. The object in the gallery is now like a hard copy or alias of the source file on the drive, and what we are looking at is perhaps less a painting than a "rendering." What this work displays is the difference between sending information and receiving aesthetic objects in the gallery, or what happens when "black" moves from the desktop to printer to museum, and whatever is lost along the way. The monochrome is a record of a circulation. As it is copied and communicated, discrepancies are produced. And these are what now stand in for painting. LINK Posted by JOSHUA ABELOW at 12:19 PMLabels: 100%, John Kelsey, Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art
