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Tina Rivers Ryan

Guestbook: Tina Rivers Ryan on Molnar’s corrupted squares and challenging the modernist cult of rationality with its own tools
I’ve always loved squares and cubes, with their symmetry and stability and perfect rationality. The history of early 20th century modern art is filled with them, from Malevich’s Black Squares to Mondrian’s grids of primary colors and Albers’ colour studies. Although every artist might decide to use these shapes for different reasons, ultimately, they became a symbol of the almost scientific pursuit of “progress’ in art—as if art itself could be made as perfectly rational as geometry or industrial mass-manufacturing. But the square and cube are always haunted by their negation—by the threat of entropic dissolution or the specter of the chaos that lies beyond their borders. In the 1960s and 1970s, postminimalist artists made squares that literally seemed on the verge of collapse (signaling a preference for the messiness of reality over the perfection of abstract ideals), such as Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) or Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting. I love these works, but I’m especially drawn to artists like Julio Le Parc and Vera Molnar, who embraced industrial and technological materials and processes to produce their own corrupted squares, essentially challenging the modernist cult of rationality with its own tools. When I look at Molnar’s many ‘transformations’ of the square, I see not only the automation of composition through algorithms, but also a celebration of the everyday beauty of the vitally imperfect, and even a kind of political statement about the values we encode in our technologies.

Tina Rivers Ryan is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the uses of new media technologies since the 1960s. An Assistant Curator at Buffalo AKG Art Museum since 2017, her recent exhibition “Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art“ was awarded the 2022 Award of Excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators. Ryan’s writing has been commissioned by museums including the Walker Art Center, the Dia, and HangarBicocca; and she regularly writes about exhibitions and (more recently) the rise of NFTs for magazines such as ArtforumArt in America, and ArtReview. 

Mohsen Hazrati’s “PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES“ Fuses Virtuality and Persian Lore

Fusing virtuality and Persian Lore, the online exhibition “PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES“ opens at Cologne’s Priska Pasquer Gallery. For it, Iranian artist Mohsen Hazrati has created an allegorical space for reflection, over which its titular winged creature hovers; the phoenix also evokes the mythical Simurgh, a virtuous Persian “symbol for self-knowledge.“ Curated by Tina Sauerländer, the show is accompanied by an NFT edition that captures its avian protagonist in flight (image).

James Webb Space Telescope Images Tap into American Self-Mythologizing, Trevor Paglen Says

“The color pallet and compositions make an implicit argument we understand subconsciously: that looking at the depths of the cosmos is akin to looking into the 19th Century American frontier. Aesthetically, they tap into some intense American self-mythologizing.”
– American artist Trevor Paglen, invoking art historian Elizabeth Kessler’s Picturing the Cosmos (2012) as the world marvels at the first (heavily edited) images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

Hardware Engineer Jason Keats: ‘Making a Mobile Phone from Scratch in North America Is Impossible’

“Your integrated circuit is going to come from Taiwan Semiconductor, your memory will come from Korea, and your display will be produced in Indonesia or China—there is no manufacturer for those components anywhere in the Western world.”
– Hardware engineer and OSOM Founder Jason Keats, when asked if it would be possible to make a smartphone from scratch in North America [quote edited]

“Martine Syms: Neural Swamp” Publication Offers In-Depth Analysis of the Artist’s Provocative Video Installation

OUT NOW:
Calderoni & Sroka (eds)
Martine Syms: Neural Swamp
Expanding on Syms’ 2021 immersive video installation, curators Irene Calderoni, Amanda Sroka, and scholar Christina Sharpe provide deep insight into the American artist’s research on “machine systems that erase Black bodies, voices, and narratives.”

First James Webb Space Telescope Image Captures Glimpses of the Early Universe

“It’s astounding. It’s the oldest documented light in the history of the universe, from over 13 billion—let me say it again—over 13 billion years ago.”
– U.S. President Joe Biden, unveiling the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope during a White House ceremony. A “deep field” observation, the image shows galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 and offers a rare infrared glimpse of the early universe. “And we’re going back further,” notes NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We’re going back almost to the beginning.”

Clash of Berlin- and LA-Based Net Artists Evokes Utopias from Media’s Past and Present

A collaboration between Berlin’s panke.gallery and LA’s JAUS, “Post Cinema” opens at Open Mind Art Space in Los Angeles. Exploring common themes across recent media history—from TV to VR—works by Berlin-based (Nadja Buttendorf, Esben Holk, Cornelia Sollfrank) and LA-based artists (Petra Cortright, Julie Orser, Peter Wu+) echo “dreams of global utopia,” whether broadcast over airwaves, electronic superhighways, or streamed directly from the cloud.

Four Women-Identifying Artists Ask Perennial Question of (Feminized) Robots: “Can You Fuck It?”

Showcasing four women-identifying artists whose practices address feminized robots, “Can You Fuck It?” opens at Tokyo’s Ningen Gallery. Curator Elena Knox, Allison de Fren, Mika Kan (image: The Silent Woman, 2017), and Lin Xin’s contributed works—spanning documentary to digital illustration—demonstrate that “women’s ideas must begin to be acknowledged alongside those that present objectified feminine embodiment as a fait accompli,” writes Knox in her curatorial essay.

Prescient Works by Generative Art Pioneer Georg Nees Featured in DAM Projects Solo Show

“Ornamental Spaces,” a show featuring vintage works by late computer art pioneer Georg Nees, opens in Berlin. The exhibition showcases Nees’ prescience on two fronts: first, with works from “Bilder Images Digital” (a 1986 exhibition at Munich’s Galerie der Künstler) generated by a Lisp program in response to user questions; secondly, for context, screenprints related to his PhD research on Generative Computergraphik (shown at “Computer Graphics” in Stuttgart, 1965).

Martin Bricelj Baraga’s Geneva Monolith Measures the Blueness of the Sky

Martin Bricelj Baraga’s latest Cyanometer (2016–) is unveiled in front of Geneva’s Museum of History of Science, the very institution that keeps Horace Bénédict de Saussure’s original instrument from 1789. Fourth in a growing network of distributed public sculptures, Baraga’s reflective monolith measures (and archives) the blueness of the sky as well as air pollution, allowing for comparative analysis between the cities of Ljubljana, Wrocław, Dresden, and now Geneva.

Web3 Enthusiast Goes on Vacation, Realizes Crypto’s Irrelevance in the Real World

“After 5 weeks of vacationing and disconnecting myself from crypto, it is truly amazing how utterly irrelevant crypto is in every day life and how little it matters to most people. Yes we’re early, but also we are clearly caught up in a tiny niche bubble that no one cares about.”
– Web3 enthusiast Foobazzler, providing a much-needed reality check

Hiromasa Fukaji and Junichiro Horikawa Express Nature’s Complexity Through Code and Drawing

“Nature/Code/Drawing,” an exhibition of plotter drawings by Hiromasa Fukaji and Junichiro Horikawa, opens at CUBE 1,2,3 in Tokyo, showing exceedingly natural, but algorithmically generated forms. In joining forces—Horikawa on programming, Fukaji on plotting—the two designers attempt to express nature’s complexity by simulating the delicate interplay of logic and chaos that governs the world. They reveal process too, drawing new forms during the exhibition.

Post-Apocalyptic Videogame Version of Lake Mead Healthier Than Real Deal

Reddit user Monsur_Ausuhnom points out that Lake Mead in the dystopian videogame Fallout New Vegas (2010) has more water than its IRL counterpart. The drought-stricken reservoir in the Southwestern U.S. has seen unprecedented water loss in recent months, setting new record lows by the day. Monsur and fellow Redditers speculate how in the game, set in the year 2281, the lake was able to recover: “In this world, it appears that nuclear apocalypse has allowed Lake Mead to stay healthier.”

Ana Prvački Engineers Site-Specific Species of Bee for Berlin’s Gropius Bau

Ana Prvački’s Apis Gropius, a new site-specific species of bee, takes over the atrium of Berlin’s Gropius Bau. An AR experience hatched in collaboration with NEEEU during the museum’s residency program, the project draws on Prvački’s long-standing interest in bees, our dependence on them, and the venue’s history in taxonomical research. The goal: playfully explore “the manifold ways in which institutions and nature intersect and co-evolve.”

Stéphane Thidet Sculpts Sand Flows and “Bruit rose” at Le Grand Café Satellite Subterranean Venue LiFE

Presenting a new large-scale eponymous work by installation and media artist Stéphane Thidet, “Bruit rose” (2022, image) opens at LiFE in Saint-Nazaire, France. Extending the elemental engagement with materials from his iconic waterfall façade Rideau (2020), here the French artist sculpts with streams of sand not water, accelerating geological flows and presenting “paradoxical images, from respiration to collapse, savage force to fragility” for viewers to contemplate.

Letta Shtohryn Depicts How Life Is a Beach for (Presumed) Dead Ponzi Cryptocurrency Exchange QuadrigaCX CEO Gerald Cotton

Cryptoheaven3 (2022), a CGI short imagining the “digital afterlife” of disgraced ponzi crypto exchange CEO Gerald Cotton, premieres at Milan Machinima Festival. After defrauding traders for $180 million the QuadrigaCX CEO died in 2018—Ukrainian artist Letta Shtohryn began making shorts about his idyllic posthumous adventures with The Sims 4, and this third iteration depicts Cotton’s arduous daily regime of “sunbathing, daily massages, and exotic cocktails.”

$40 USD