Grey Areas, Interview b:w Michael Bell Smith and Lauren Cornell

7/29/2019 Grey Areas, Interview b:w Michael Bell Smith and Lauren Cornell

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ICA @ MECA

LC: This exhibition was a partial survey

of work you’ve created since 2005. Can

you describe the selection? Was the

intent to show a breadth of work or to

narrow in on several themes or formal

strategies?MBS: I’ve rarely gotten the opportunity

to show dierent bodies o work in the

same space over the last ten years. Iwanted to have a variety o pieces talkingto each other, creating new associationsand meanings. In that respect, I saw theshow working as a typical survey might: away to present a more multiaceted ideao what I do. Another aspect o the show

was thinking about the duality o videoas both digital les and as things. Onone hand, video is portable and ephem-eral, while on the other, your experienceas a viewer is entirely dependent on itsphysical maniestation. This might seemlike a no-brainer or someone workingwith video, especially in art spaces, but as

video bleeds into more and more o ourlie through our various screens and envi-ronmental advertising, the “thingness” o video becomes a more complicated andimportant issue.

LC: Your work has always engaged

so incisively with how moving image

creation, exhibition and distribution

have changed in light of digital media.

“Thingness” addresses key challenges

of how digital video exists in physi-

cal space. And yet, I wonder how you

make the idea visible within an in-

stallation when we are all already soaccustomed to seeing video through

a device? Did you conceive the instal-

lation so that it would exaggerate a

feeling of “thingness”?

MBS: I wanted to show work that couldtouch upon that idea in dierent ways—pieces with dierent relationships toduration, to other media (sculpture, paint-ing, etc.), to scale, to display technologies

(CRT monitors vs. video projection vs.

fat screens). I wanted some videos to eelmore like objects, others like pictures,and still others like more traditionalvideo screenings.

For instance, three videos—Glitter

Grade , Return to Forever , and On The

Grid—were projected on the wall at a

scale comparable to paintings or largephotographs. These three works are quiteminimal; very little “happens” in them.They work more with the language o pic-tures than the ideas o montage we mighttraditionally associate with video or lm.So the display echoes the work. Battle-

ship Potemkin Dance Edit (120 BPM),

which is very much about montage, wasshown with a selection o other works ona large fat screen TV opposite a couch.The viewer was given a remote to selectwhich video to watch: it was set up like aliving room. So while these videos are allbasically QuickTime les, their physicalmaniestations, and how the viewer en-gages with them, was completely dierent.

The promotional video or my DVDmultiple, Digital Fireplace Upside-Down ,was broadcast on public access televisionin Portland in conjunction with the exhi-bition, bringing in a whole other idea o

video “thingness” and its transmission.So, I didn’t work to exaggerate it exactly,but hoped that through this variety, the

Gray AreasAn Interview between Michael Bell-Smith and Lauren Cornell



Michael Bell-Smith ICA @ MECA

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“thingness” would become more pro-nounced. The aim, I suppose, was thatthis marriage o (as you put it) device andvideo, would carry more intentionality,

echoing this shiting role o video and itsdelivery in our culture.

LC: Let’s move away rom a strict ocus

on video. Your work is also animatedby conceptual strategies that draw on,and I would say oer, an update to thehistory o appropriation in art. Thisis seen quite clearly through Creative Elements, the book published in conjunction with the show, and the relatedprints. Can you discuss these projects?MBS: The inspiration or Creative Ele-

ments was the black and white clip artbooks used by graphic designers beorethe advent o desktop publishing. Thedesigner would cut the images, standard

clip art type things, out o the book touse in ads, magazines, brochures, etc.

The books are still being made (now theycome with a CD o digital les) but withthe Internet, they’re relics o a dierenttime. Why deal with a physical thingwhen you can download whatever imageyou want online? While those books

might not be so useul anymore, you canstill consider them in other ways: aes-thetically, as classications o objects, ascatalogs o the language o design andadvertising. With Creative Elements , Iwanted to ape the orm o these bookswhile playing up the qualities that reso-nate or me.

So I made my own, working withimages rom a collection o digital clipart I’ve been amassing over the last ew

years. I stripped them o all color andarranged them to ll t he page. Each pagehas a singular category o image—Tape,Trees, Frames, Splatters, etc. I like the

suggestion o unctionality, o a system,albeit in ways that might be a little cryp-tic or misguided.

The prints are straight out o the

book: pages blown up, pigment printedon canvas, and stretched. The composi-tions are very basic, just lling up thepage. It’s like a manual recreation o computer logic. They’re noncomposi-

tions, yet there are still decisions beingmade in their arrangement and I thinkthere’s something compelling in how thatlooks. By having them pose as paintings,I wanted to amp up the proposition o the pages as aesthetic objects. They werehung in a grid to play up the sameness. Ilike the idea that at a remove, the individ-

ual elements become lost, highlightingthe ormal arrangement. It’s a take on the

way we read images online, like the wayGoogle Image Search categorizes similarimages based solely on orms and colors,ignoring content or meaning.

LC: This ascination with “creative”deaults recurs in your work: in “De-Employed” or instance, a video (noteatured within the show) in whichdigital special eects are displayedcentrally so that they become thecontent, not just the elements that cre-ate the visual orm or narrative. Thisconsideration and deconstruction o

visual vocabularies plays out through-out dierent systems o classifcation.Moving away rom deault design and

special eects, this also seems to beat play with your work N.E.W. Y.O.R.K. / M.I.A.M.I. / L.A.S. V.E.G.A.S . (2010)which eatures establishing shots o the eponymous cities. It seems thathere, similar strategies to those usedin Creative Elements are at play in theappropriation o this TV show. Can you

describe how you conceived this piece?MBS: The point o departure or N.E.W.

Y.O.R.K. / M.I.A.M.I. / L.A.S. V.E.G.A.S .was Internet culture, specically a typeo an edit called a supercut. It’s a videowhere all instances o a particular TV orlm trope are isolated rom their context,

things like cutting together every timethe word “dude” is uttered in The Big

Lebowski . I see it as a sort o low-browconceptual art. I remember seeing workswith similar strategies by Jennier andKevin McCoy years ago, and how excit-ing they elt. Now they’re something thatteenagers are posting online or YouTube

views; it’s a radical shit. With that disper-sion there’s something lost; the gestureloses much o its efcacy, but there’s alsosomething gained: all these “non-artists”working in this quasiconceptual zone.

The contradiction o this loss /gainwas exciting to me; I wanted to work withthe orm, but move it somewhere else. Iisolated the establishing shots— shots

that “establish” a scene by showing itslocation—rom the entirety o the 2004season o the three dierent TV shows inthe CSI ranchise. The result was a TV-l-tered portrait o the three cities in which

the shows takes place: New York, Miamiand Las Vegas. I liked the idea that theseclips purport to tell t he viewer something,

but when edited together reveal their rolesimply as placeholders. In some respectit was an anti-supercut.

LC: Right. Establishing shots wouldbe an unlikely material or a an-madesupercut as they’re such a non-eventcompared to the larger dramas at play.

I elt like you were kind o turning theestablishing shots into stock images—showing how they were staging orraming the city, instead o being it.MBS: Yes, it ended up being a reverseengineering o a stock ootage collection.There’s a stock ootage company called

Art Beats that sells collections o aerialviews o cities, including the three that Iworked with—they look almost identicalto the shots in my videos. The piece thentakes on this roll o reraming the unc-tional as aesthetic, similar to the Creative

Elements works. I think there’s a produc-tive awkwardness in that process.

LC: Along the same lines, the overlaidsketches seemed like a playul kind o watermarking—perhaps like a slightalteration to say you’d been there?These markings also appear in Art Tape; can you explain them a bit more?Are you playing o the idea o owner-ship/copyright o images?MBS: With the sketching, there are a loto ideas at play or me. One is that ideao ownership and copyright: the water-marking o digital images, the signatureor remarque o the artist, grafti. I like

that the squiggles sit on the “surace,”my mark on top o my environment.



Michael Bell-Smith ICA @ MECA

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Another is this idea o the gesture (theline, the paint stroke, etc.) as an icon orpersonal expression: a modernist idealo the mark o the artist. I like how thisis used in commercial design to conveyreedom, or chance, or artsiness. One o my avorites is the little brushstroke in the

header o the Arts Beat (not to be con-

used with Art Beats) section o The NewYork Times website. It’s unny, this little180 pixel wide paint stroke: Arts Beat!

There’s also a perormance element,something that piggybacks on that ideao expression. There are those lms o Picasso painting on glass, or the Hans

Namuth lms o Pollock; they play aunny cultural role, validating certainmyths about the role o the artist. I seeit as emulating the aect o that kind o move, but through the control o digitaltechnology.

LC: Several o the earlier works in this

exhibition, like Glitter Grade (2007),On the Grid (2007) and Return to

Forever (2009) are rich in mood andeeling. At rst glance, they seem tograsp at a kind o sublime emotionalstate that some o the artists you just mentioned were either workingthrough or, perhaps, trying to evoke.And yet, they are also perormative:they transpose analogue genres, likelandscape painting or sci- lms, intopixelated, looping animations, wherephysical sites and psychological statescan be more limber. For instance, inGlitter Grade

, a night view is renderedin only two planes, sky and ground,

divided by a hard horizontal division.The solid ground (not the sky) glitterswith stars, seeming to refect what’snot visibly there. Can you describehow you conceived and createdthese works?MBS: Each o those three pieces was

made quite manually. Not as physical

things, obviously, but as pixel-by-pixel,rame-by-rame constructions. In that re-spect, the process behind them has a lotmore in common with cell animation, thetechnique used in the “traditional” ani-mation o Disney and Warner Brothers,than the CGI modeling o contemporary

video games or Hollywood movies.I say this not just as a peek behind-

the-scenes. My aim is that aspects o thisconstruction are visible in the work as itis experienced. In those three videos it’simportant to me that apart rom their par-ticular aect, there’s a legible structure.I want the viewer to be able to break

down the illusionistic eects into a seto discrete elements or movements. Inthe case o On the Grid , or instance,the viewer might suss out that the ap-pearance o depth is constructed bytwo-dimensional images moving later-ally at dierent speeds. The viewer mayhave no idea how I “made” the work,but maybe they can see how the little

space I’ve constructed operates. I wanta seduction and an undermining o thatseduction at the same time. It’s about let-ting the viewer in on the magic trick, andultimately, an attempt to refect on the

anxiety around the role o technology incultural production.

LC: With Glitter Grade, you’ve saidthis work was inspired by the “glitter”graphics ound on online social net-works in the early 2000s. Here theseearly antasies o “cyberspace” areenmeshed with landscape painting, andhow that genre eigns discovery andexploration. Can you talk about why

you brought these two discreet visualantasies together, and your largerinterest in translating or intertwiningdierent genres?MBS: Much o my work comes out o wrestling with some ambivalence orcontradiction I eel around technology

and media-making. Over the last twentyyears, everything’s changed, yet we’restill sorting through ideas rom 75 yearsago. With these three works, there’s adegree to which I’m testing some o these contradictions out, questioningdierent values we hold on to in light o this new technology. Do certain ideas

around romanticism, around modernism,even around virtual space, hold up whentranslated into these orms? With thattranslation, I’m interested in both whatworks and what alls apart.

LC: This interest seems to cohere yourwide-ranging practice, rom workingappropriated TV clips to supercuts tothe translation o avant-garde paintinginto digital tools (Photoshop or variousprograms).MBS: Yes: or me there’s that commonthread, how contemporary visual culture

can be reconciled with our history o cultural production.

So, I don’t see these dierent ways o working as distinct, more like dierentapproaches to the same issues: dierentpoints on the continuum o “workingwith digital inormation.” Contemporarydigital tools are designed to blur theline between the real and the digital, t he

hand-made and the automated, the ound

and the created. I see what I’m doingas playing around in these gray areas.Photoshop is in many respects as “ound”as a piece o video ootage ripped roma DVD.

LC: What do you think draws you tothese gray areas?MBS: I think that’s where the meat is,where these tools have the power torefect something about our culture. It’sthe larger conceptual project, not push-ing the limits o new technologies (todaythat’s the job o movies, advertising andvideo games), but talking about the

technologies that are all around us, theircontradictions, slippages, humor. Wherethose disjunctions can be brought intoocus or play, there’s something interest-ing to talk about.

___

Lauren Cornell is a Curator at the

New Museum in New York City.

Documents

Grey Areas, Interview b:w Michael Bell Smith and Lauren Cornell