Brian Belott, new doo dolls, collage

Last Friday marked the closing of IMG MGMT, an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the artistic practice. As the host of these posts I’m going to refrain from reflecting on the work, as the practice feels a little too self indulgent for my tastes. I will note however, that I found the number of essays dealing with spirituality an interesting outcome, if only because there was no direct curatorial effort on my part to bring together artists I thought would be inclined to investigate the subject matter.

In an effort to provide a basic summation of the material, I’ve included a picture and titled for each guest post in the order they appeared. Due to the success of the series, I have decided to run IMG MGMT semi annually. Look forward to more IMG MGMT this winter!

Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20

Saul Chernick, The Undead. Saul Chernick discusses art historical depictions of the Undead.

Image via: 123RF

Kevin Bewersdorf, Stock Photography Watermarks as the Presence of God. Bewersdorf’s title and image pretty much says it all.

The Stanford Bunny. Three-dimensionally scanned from this terra cotta garden decoration in 1994, the Bunny model has since become one of the most commonly used tests for a wide variety of 3D research projects.

Kevin Zucker, 20 Archetypes. Kevin Zucker reflects on the documentation of objects and images used in the development and testing of digital imaging and 3D modeling technologies.

Image: Stephanie Diamond

Stephanie Diamond, Do Attempt This At Home. Diamond invites readers to put together an exhibition from cell phone pictures we take of ourselves. Don’t forget to read the submission guidelines!

Screengrab: Kari Altmann

Kari Altmann, Fossils and Minerals Teleportation A youtube collection of home made teleportations. Artist rationale posted in the comment section.

Screengrab AFC

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Public Art and Collaboration. “The term fascismo was termed by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and the Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It is derived from the Italian word “fascio” which means bundle or union and from and from the Latin word Fasces. The Fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods tied around an axe, were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrates, and the symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity”

Tom Moody, Psychotronic Gifs. A type of animated Gif that can be described as mini-cinema concerning teenagers, rock and roll, juvenile delinquents, monsters, aliens, killers, spies, detectives, bikers, communists, drugs, natural catastrophes, atomic bombs, the prehistoric past, the projected future and more. Psychotronic is in the eye of the beholder, and can be used to describe a quality of weirdness.

Image via: Wayne Hodge

Wayne Hodge, Race Card. A historically based image rebuttal to McCain’s Obama attack ads Celeb and The One, and the subsequent media coverage.

Screengrab AFC

Wendy White, Facebook. A video collection set to music of faces found in everyday things.

Found image via: Brian Belott

Brian Belott, The Joy of Collecting…Found Photographs. Brian Belott examines a few of the many genres within found photographs.

Erwin Blumenfeld, ca. 1948

Miranda Lichtenstein, Untitled. Although no text accompanies this essay, the images depict document and suggest half-conscious states, transcendence, and the desire (or) delusion of eternal life.

Image via: Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico, Our New Library. Umbrico explores the use of books in post 9/11 consumer home-improvement websites.

Guest post by: PENELOPE UMBRICO

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist, Penelope Umbrico, works with LMAK Projects and maintains the website penelopeumbrico.net.]

Wandering through images of rooms on consumer home-improvement websites it’s impossible to not to notice fresh signs of someone’s presence. Since there are rarely any people in any of the rooms, the viewer (consumer) becomes the subject, invited to move through the space and vicariously try on the idealized life-styles of the virtual home’s absent occupants.

My interest in these spaces began after 9/11 in response to news that, along with art-and-crafts, the retail market for home-improvement had sharply risen (while all other markets had fallen). I wanted to understand what the impulse was to “cocoon” (as it was called) and see how this was played out in visual consumer media. My initial thought was that it had to do with an implied control of the mess of personal space though organization and self-reliance, but I found details in these images that pointed elsewhere.

The most common visual tropes I found there depicted books, which on first glance seemed to act as a symbol for knowledge, history, meaning, all things deep and thoughtful. But on closer study the use of books on these sites seems perversely inverted; they are used solely as props, retaining only a vestige of their former life as objects containing content.

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Guest post by: MIRANDA LICHTENSTEIN

Peruvian Shamans surround a photo of JFK Jr. and Caroline Bessette Kennedy

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist, Miranda Lichtenstein, shows at Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Her exhibition at Gallery Min Min, Tokyo will open January 13th, 2009.]

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Guest post by: BRIAN BELOTT

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Brian Belott has a found audio radio show on WPS1 called “Lost and Found Sound”. He contributes to the fantastic found audio blog The Audio Kitchen, produced by The Professor, and is represented by Canada New York.]

ZANY CARNIVAL OF CHARACTERS FOUND IN JUNK STORES AND FLEA MARKETS

I was bit by the collector’s bug years ago, collecting the alpha to omega of ephemera but no collection has been as exciting or as rewarding as found photos. Somewhere between a flying carpet ride and a magic Eight Ball the found photos appear out of the ether void of uprooted lives.

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Guest post by: WENDY WHITE

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist, Wendy White, shows at Leo Koenig Inc. Her solo show at Koenig closed August 1st but you can still see her work in “Accident Blackspot” at Freight + Volume thru August 15th.]

Since the late 90s I’ve been obsessed with finding faces in everyday things. For a while, I was making a lot work about it, and since I still think it’s kinda cool to find the familiar within semi-abstract situations, I made this movie from images I’ve collected on the internet.

Guest post by: WAYNE HODGE

[Editor’s note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Wayne Hodge is an artist who combines elements of performance, video, photography, and film production. Wayne is the recipient of a grant from The Art Matters Foundation and recently received a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. He is currently a studio artist at Smack Mellon in DUMBO.]

Race Card
The rhyming of Barack Obama’s name with Osama Bin Laden, the Baby’s Mama tactic, as well as the emphasis on his middle name, while completely racist, are also sophomoric, and ultimately, will not resonate with American voters as much conservative media outlets would like them to. However, as the first so-called “serious” black presidential candidate (a label that denies the agency of Black political movements of the past); Obama’s bid invokes a level of anxiety amongst his opposition that touches a deep hysteria about race, politics, and the history of media images, particularly those involving African-American men. Two recent ads by the McCain camp, “The One” and “Celeb” question Obama’s readiness as a possible president. The subsequent reaction by the Obama camp, as well as the McCain response, illustrate an example of media double- standards.

With all of the attacks between the two camps, no one would ever accuse John McCain for being “not ready” to be a president, as these ads have done. Barack Obama responded to the attacks by accusing the Republicans of trying to make voters afraid of him, one of the most potent analogies he used referring to his difference from the presidents on the dollar bills. Consequently, a McCain aide accused Obama of “….dealing the race card…from the bottom of the deck.” Every time I pick up a newspaper, or watch the news, I am confronted with a story or poll claiming to gage Barack Obama on the issue of race in America. Despite, his well-scripted temper-tantrum on the Sunday news shows, John McCain is simply not expected to carry the same burden of the so-called race “problem” in America. McCain’s indignant attitude, and the presumption that he was the “victim” in a one-way race- baiting game precipitated entirely by a vindictive candidate of color is the type of hysterical rhetoric that harkens back to media images from the post-reconstruction era. The images I am presenting are by no means comprehensive, but do offer a historically based rebuttal to bad media coverage that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

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Guest post by: TOM MOODY

IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Tom Moody shows at artMovingProjects in New York, maintains the blog tommoody.us, and recently exhibited videos in the Dallas Video Festival.

Animated GIFs have evolved over the last several years into a kind of ubiquitous “mini-cinema,” entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. (From Wikipedia: “the Graphics Interchange Format is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.”)

In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs (free if you search for open source). GIFs are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language.

As an artist I am attracted to this medium and have been making and posting GIFs for several years. This mini-cinema can be “scaled up” for galleries and film festivals but it’s equally fun to surrender it to the big pool of home-made creations that circulates on the Web. It’s gratifying to find GIFs you made yourself circulating on the pages of strangers months or years later. I don’t consider this “mail art”–it is too chaotic and lacks that practice’s genre rules. At the same time I do consider it a legit and underexamined form of post-studio art. My main point of comparison is Jim Shaw’s “Thrift Store Paintings” show at Metro Pictures gallery (also the book), for the questions that show raised regarding authorship and taste in the art world.

“Psychotronic” is a term coined by writer and low-budget film buff Michael Weldon to describe a certain type of movie:

Psychotronic films range from sincere social commentary to degrading trash. They concern teenagers, rock and roll, juvenile delinquents, monsters, aliens, killers, spies, detectives, bikers, communists, drugs, natural catastrophes, atomic bombs, the prehistoric past, and the projected future. They star ex-models, would be Marilyns, future Presidents (and First Ladies), dead rock stars, and has-beens of all types.

…according to the intro to the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, 1983. The great thing about “psychotronic” is it is in the eye of the beholder–it could be a quality of weirdness in an otherwise “normal” film. (Although there is some dispute about this among Weldon and subsequent users of the term–it doesn’t appear to have been trademarked by Weldon and is also used by a film society of that name. The term originally came from a film called The Psychotronic Man.)

For this IMG MGMT essay I present a smaller pool of mostly psychotronic GIFs. About half are ones I made (or remixed) and half are ones I found on the Internet and saved. My site tells which is which but here I have numbered them a1, a2, etc as a gesture to the “authorless” quality of their web milieu. All of them are subject to whatever copyright claims adhere to their original publication source, so I will remove them or attribute them if you so request in the comments, and I ask that you not use any of them for commercial purposes (as if!).

GIF fans know that there is a lot sicker material out there. Gruesome actual deaths, bestiality, coprophagy (yum), etc. Psychotronic films, while not exactly family fare, generally avoid the hardcore and the abyss. Exploitation, fine, but there is nothing easier than a “money shot.”

13 GIFS AFTER THE BREAK!

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Guest post by: THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION

B.H.Q.F.U. is an ongoing educational series provided relatively free to the public and concerned with the cross-articulation of mountains and mole hills.

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. The Bruce High Quality Foundation is a radical art collective from Brooklyn whose most recent projects include “The Retrospective” at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC, “Brucennial 08″ at The Bruce High Quality Foundation, BKLYN, and “The Great Wall” at DUVE Berlin. Their website can be found at www.thebrucehighqualityfoundation.com]

Link

Link

Guest Post by: KARI ALTMANN

[Editors Note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Kari Altmann has an upcoming show at netmaresnetdreams.net and is participating in the Deitch Parade with friends in September. She maintains the websites karialtmann.com & blackmoth.org. You can also see more of her collections at blackmoth.info ]

A two-part excerpt from one of my largest collections of found youtubes.

(Alternately available as playlists: 1 | 2 ) MORE »

Image: Brian Belott

IMG MGMT (as in image management)…involves artists curating images off the Net, either because they routinely do that in their work or simply because more artists are exposed to or otherwise glom onto this material with the effect that it slowly seeps into their work (or doesn’t). In a sense We Are All Surf Clubs now…

Tom Moody’s above summation is a response to the first two essays in the series by Saul Chernick and Kevin Bewersdorf, both of whom curated images off the web, though to clarify, IMG MGMT begins at this point, and expands. The rationale for this is primarily based on my interest in both the ease of download and upload of images to the web. In as often as I see Oliver Laric’s sentiment “I don’t see any necessity in producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about finding it”, quoted amongst net artists, many of these same people are creating web cam videos and using cell phone pictures in their art, which suggests a greater interest in the idea than building a rigid practice around it (though I’m pretty sure no one was suggesting that in the first place). Representing artists like Stephanie Diamond, a photographer who explores virtually any method shooting a picture can occur, is an important aspect of the series, because it not only speaks to the ease in which images are created and distributed but the way it effects the culture.

Not that such grand themes were necessarily the impetus for the series. On a pretty basic level IMG MGMT is about giving artists a venue to show and discuss images they happen to have interest in. Moody draws out a few similarities between the Saul Chernick and Kevin Bewersdorf essays, which is useful for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it adds a bit of shape to the series; both are collections, both follow a top to bottom list, both are not the artists “normal” work. Notably, only the first observation can be applied unilaterally to the project, though it’s reasonable to assume the participating artists will largely share the second and third commonalities (Diamond an exception to the third). Moody also observes a commonality explanatory text (Kevin Zucker’s post also shares this), and interest in the other worldly, providing great counterpoints like Damon Zucconi and Jim Punk to the IMG MGMT series.

Guest post by: STEPHANIE DIAMOND


Image Stephanie Diamond

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Stephanie Diamond, today’s invited artist exhibits her work internationally and nationally and maintains the website stephaniediamond.com]

DO ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME

Congratulations! You have been selected to be part of the exhibition, Do Attempt This at Home. Please follow the simple instructions below for the exhibition. Thank you and good luck!

1. How do you feel?

2. Pull out your cell phone.

3. Set it to camera mode.

4. Take a picture.

5. Do you look like how you feel?

6. Do you look like a different feeling?

7. If satisfied, save picture.

8. If not satisfied, erase and re-shoot your photo until it reflects the feeling you want to evoke.

9. Refer to these photos in the future to remember how you felt and feel.

10. Repeat these steps, as needed.

11. Take some pretty pictures sometimes too, i.e.: clouds, totem poles, pools, beaches, and trees.

12. Take some shots of people you like as well.

13. Save these people pictures as photo ID’s, and when these people call you their photos will come up.

RULES
You cannot erase any photos of children.

All of the photos you take can only exist on your cell phone; they cannot be downloaded onto your computer.

You can text message these photos; I encourage this to be done with the majority of your texts.

If someone sends you a text message; you can upload it to your phone, but her/his name must be mentioned when exhibiting the image.

OPTIONAL

Share your exhibition with others.

Keep your exhibition for private viewing only.

See below for examples of Do Attempt This at Home. These 33 images were selected out of 108 photos taken over the course of three years on one cell phone.

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Guest post by: KEVIN ZUCKER

The Stanford Bunny. Three-dimensionally scanned from this terra cotta garden decoration in 1994, the Bunny model has since become one of the most commonly used tests for a wide variety of 3D research projects

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Kevin Zucker, today’s invited artist is represented by Greenberg Van Doren in New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, most recently Standards and Anomalies at Arario Beijing, where he showed work that incorporated imagery discussed in this post. His next project will be a two-person show with Hilary Berseth at Eleven Rivington (NY) in October.]

“These are the archetypes of a new world. They don’t need you or me. They’re representation for machines.”¹

I’ve been collecting documentation of objects and images used in the development and testing of digital imaging and 3D modeling technologies for a few years, and have thousands of them stashed on a hard drive and a list of links to databases with literally hundreds of thousands more. The twenty presented here are representative highlights that I think epitomize the inscrutability, banality, anachronism, and the straightforwardly artless presentation that characterize most of the collection. Those qualities, contrasted with the weird aura possessed by these analog “originals” of digital representation, make for the unsteady balance of gravity and absurdity that first got me interested in collecting them.

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1. Hilary Berseth, email [↩]

Guest post by: KEVIN BEWERSDORF

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Kevin Bewersdorf will show at V&A this fall in New York, and maintains the website maximumsorrow.com].

Disagreements on the ownership of intellectual property are issues of personal belief, and are therefore spiritual issues. Stock photography corporations have their own rigid dogma on the ownership of information, and they hold their beliefs to be truth. Like shepherds guarding a flock, these corporations brand their property in order to protect themselves and their patrons (the photographers) from unlicensed misuse or “evil” on the lawless web. In this collection of photos I have limited myself to an investigation of the protective watermarks of one such stock photography website, 123RF.com, and the search term “prayer.” MORE »

Guest post by: SAUL CHERNICK

Daniel Hopfer, Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women, circa 1500-10 (Click on all images to see larger version)

[Editors note: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Saul Chernick shows at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, and maintains the website saulchernick.com].

By way of curating this post I’ve decided to focus on the Undead, images of beings that hover between the realms of life and death. You know us artists, we can’t get enough of stuff that “defies boundaries” and “resists classification”. What could be more nebulous than that space between life and death? Let’s take a journey beyond the grave and see how artists of the past conceived the not quite dead… MORE »

Brian Belott, new doo dolls, collage,

This Monday marks the beginning of IMG MGMT, an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Originally inspired by studio visits in which I was frequently presented with folders of found images, the initial intention was to simply represent this material as posts. However, some artists wanted to make images based on their interest in pre-existing material, the artistic process alone of others seemed to involve curating which required a different kind of essay, while others still, found they wanted to use the form to discuss topics inspired by their online surfing. As a result, the essay form is open and the various methods of artist curation situated within a larger practice, a focus. Look forward to viewing the work of participating artists, Kari Altmann, Brian Belott, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kevin Bewersdorf, Saul Chernick, Stephanie Diamond, Wayne Hodge, Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenschied, Miranda Lichtenstein, Tom Moody, Penelope Umbrico Wendy White, Kevin Zucker, and others.