clairemazur:

Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002-2005

I try not to be too negative on this blog, because ideally I’d like to use it as a vehicle to promote things I think are worth promoting.  On the other hand, I think it’s pretty important to think critically and therefore be critical at times. With that in mind, I bring you digital artist Cory Arcangel.  Over the past year Cory’s star has risen swiftly, landing his work in MoMA exhibits and granting him extensive coverage on blogs like Rhizome. My impression of him is somewhat biased by my encounter with him at an art event where he chose to comport himself in the manner of a vainglorious and disobedient rock star. That said, I recognize this as not uncommon behavior among successful (and/or deluded) artists, and I try to separate my personal impression of him from my attitudes regarding his artwork. 

Cory is best known for his projects which involve hacking into old video game cartridges and altering their function or appearance in some way.  The work I’ve posted here is a hack of Nintento Super Mario Brothers in which everything except the clouds has been removed.  While Cory is, at times, clever, (Permanent Vacation, for example, has some merits) I think he is over-hyped.  Much of his work is not so much clever as it is ironic, which is more or less my pet theory as to why he is so popular at the moment: irony, a la hipster culture, is popular at the moment.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with irony, but if it is masquerading as art then I think it ought to be a means of conveying some sort of a statement or message.  I am actually a very big fan of the topic central to most of Cory’s work: the intersection of technology and culture; unfortunately I think he, and his work, fail to communicate anything particularly constructive on the topic.  Consider his explanation of a piece that plainly asks the viewer to consider the role of outsourcing and globalization (via Rhizome):

“Like, globalization, which I really don’t have a political stance on, but I know I don’t think it’s ‘funny.’ That’s why I felt I had to do the whole thing. I had to put in an enormous amount of work to at least hint at the fact that this wasn’t actually funny.”

Well, Cory, if all you know about globalization is that you don’t think it’s funny, I’m not really sure that’s enough of a reason to construct an elaborate and costly work of art on the topic.  Furthermore, if you can’t take a stance on globalization, I think it’s unfair to ask your audience to do so in response to your work.  While there is something to be said for art’s redemptive qualities standing separate from the artist’s intent, that aspect is lost if the artist chooses to speak publicly about his work at great length, as Cory often does.  I believe this lecture that Cory gave at Columbia University does a pretty solid job of illustrating the artist’s lack of conceptual* understanding of his own work.  In regards to the work shown above, Super Mario Clouds, Cory says: “It’s supposed to be, like, a place where you’d like to picnic”.

My biggest gripe about contemporary art is that it’s not political enough.  And I don’t mean political in the sense of electoral college, government, and so on, I mean it in a more abstract sense—I think art should say or mean something significant, I think it should stake claims.  Decorative art has it’s place, but I think the best art changes the way people consider the world around them.  If one is producing artwork that claims to explore certain topics, I think it’s fair to expect a “stance” on those topics. Sometimes it can be hard to decide how you “feel” or what you “think” about something, and even harder to work up the courage to express those feelings and thoughts to others, but that’s part of the challenge of being an artist—or rather, a good artist (not to mention a responsible citizen).

Obviously a lot of curators and art world influencers see or appreciate something in Cory’s work that I simply don’t or can’t…I’m more than open to the possibility that my mind could be changed if presented with a strong argument in support of his work.

*his technological understanding of his work is quite sound, and seems to have contributed greatly to his superstar status

I had to reblog completely, because she raises valid and important points.

But I like Corys work; maybe because I never heard or read him about his own work. I’ve just seen the work itself, which is bright, colorful, recognizable, yes, ironic piece; yet then starts to resonate, with me, as a very profound metaphor for art in this age of technology. I might be lucky never to have seen any of his own words on his work, or to have encountered them in any environment that suggested ‘high culture’ either. The night I first saw it it must have been on one of my random browsing sessions on a night like this, and I liked it. The technological prowess is of no significance really; it’s not central to the work, how it was technologically achieved, not even in the explanation given by Cory himself.

He shouldn’t have stated his (lack of) intents if he intended the work to work.

There is an entertaining post to be written about how artists deal with having to talk about their work to be successful in todays art- and media markets. From Warhol, to Richter, and where I could switch between Jeff Koons ramblings and Corys nerdy nonchalance. Some other time.

One year in art school, for art history, our teacher asked every one of us to choose an artist from a list to give a lecture on. I was thrilled I was able to get Jeff Koons. (This was 1993, I think). At the end of the lecture, in which I had declared in all earnestness how important and relevant Koons is as an artist (This was in 1993, I think), the teacher forced me to choose; was Koons making an ironic statement on the art and art world, or was he being serious? I was not ready then to state “He is being very serious about being ironic”. I conceded it was, at its heart, ironic. But I believed that he was not being ironic, rather very serious, through and through.

This might not apply to Cory. But he might just be very serious about being so very non-committal.