Storage Facility

Today and tomorrow are the last two days of art collective The Cave's week-long residency at La Mama gallery space in the East Village. The group has been running an series titled "SCULPTURE STORAGE" in which a small stage hosts a series of performances, screenings, workshops and lectures. Not only do the lectures themselves deal with the issue of storage and the archive, the series itself functions as a performance of the act of storage:
"The platform will start out empty, but will accumulate debris from each event as it takes place. The physical wear on the structure and the rubble left from the nine days will act as a living timeline of the events that took place there. Posters surrounding the stage will both advertise and memorialize the events as they unfold during the exhibition."
Events this evening include a lecture on "The Personal Website" by Travess Smalley of Poster Company and a tour of Kool-Aid Man in Second Life given by artist Jon Rafman. The full schedule can be found online at The Cave.
A Queer History of Computing
I am very concerned with problematizing the class and gender dynamics of this history in particular, especially since I am using the term "queer" here in a slippery way, applying it to a group of men who may better fit its historically pejorative definition more than its contemporary transgressive one. I'd love to chat more online and in person. I'll contact you through twitter and perhaps we can get a coffee.
A Queer History of Computing
Tool Time: Cory Arcangel at The Whitney
Honestly I just found it more interesting to talk about what the show might mean instead of whether or not it was good. People are going to see the show regardless, and I'd rather they read a piece that puts the show in a context they hadn't thought of then go in with the idea that the show is good or bad because they read it on a website. Is it the responsibility of a site like Rhizome to publish reviews that take a clear stance on the quality or validity of shows such as this? Maybe. But honestly I find that kind of work dull, particularly when it devolves into snark and shade that does more to boost the ego of the reviewer than it does to inform its readers. In fact I would argue that it is precisely those kinds of reviews that are uncritical, or at least, critically shallow.
Tool Time: Cory Arcangel at The Whitney
Part of the reason I reviewed the show as I did is that I was not particularly interested in the pieces as artworks - and how they might fit into a longer art historical tradition - but more what they might be saying about art, technology, and culture. Whether or not the pieces are good is entirely beside the point for me. And, not to contradict Brian, but what the artist's intentions were when creating that piece, or whether or not he did it for the reasons I gave in my review, is also not personally of interest. And while I said in the first paragraph of my review that even though the show was "about" failure the show itself was not a failure, that does not mean that many of the pieces were not critical or intellectual failures, particularly in their failure to provoke any consideration from the viewer beyond "I see what you did there."
But when I went to the show having to actually consider the pieces beyond their immediate punchline and forced myself away from the kind of knee-jerk eat-our-own criticism that is so easy with so much of this kind of work - and so prevalent in this community - I found something that I thought was worth writing about, and that (hopefully) wasn't the same kind of critique that everyone has given Cory for years. For me the review wasn't about if the show was good or bad, it was about what it meant both for the new media art community and within the broader context of art, technology, and culture.
It’s Only Humanist
So while this may be a question of defaults it doesn't seem to be reflecting on technologically specific defaults, just culturally specific defaults and readily available forms.