Cory Arcangel @ Lisson Gallery, Shanghai – "Errors and Omissions" Exhibition

Cory Arcangel

Errors and Omissions

Lisson Gallery, Shanghai

3 November 2023 – 31 January 2024

Lisson Gallery presents Errors and Omissions, Cory Arcangel’s second show in Shanghai, following his 2019 solo presentation, Topline, at CC Foundation. Constructed as a focused take on a survey show, this exhibition features an array of the artist’s multimedia projects, including video games, single-channel video, inkjets and industrially-coated aluminum ‘paintings’, utilizing techniques such as AI, machine learning and machine code. The show is anchored by two video game works created nearly 20 years apart — Super Slow Tetris (2004), and /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021). Super Slow Tetris, an original copy of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Tetris has been hacked and slowed radically so that it now takes almost a whole day for a group of blocks to fall to the bottom of the screen (while crucially still playable). /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ (pronounced ‘Rodeo’) is another approach to extended game play, but here a bespoke Deep-Q machine-learning super computing system plays a casual, free-to-play Android game called ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,’ where players aim to increase their reputation by gaining fans and A-List celebrity stardom. /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2021) presented in the Lisson's Shanghai gallery is a 3 hour long single-channel screen capture video of /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ playing ‘Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,’ recorded on 14 December 2021.

Connecting these works are not only /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/’s ambient system sounds by musician Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), but a new series, entitled Things I Made, in which various webpages from coryarcangel.com become prints on paper ripped from a HP Deskjet 2710e manual. The prints track the progress of Cory Arcangel’s work over the last two decades and include Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstration (2007) and his Self-Playing Nintendo 64 NBA Courtside 2 (2011).

The show concludes with a ready-made floor installation and a new series of Alus, aluminum paintings featuring abstract shapes and signatures cut by a robotic CNC fibre laser cutting machine with finishes that are reminiscent of Apple’s product lines for both casual and professional users. The lines, curves, and letters have been rendered from vectorized photographs of tracksuits, motifs which have been a long-standing interest of Cory Arcangel’s. Industrially painted in hot pink, each work and its markings are unique. Diamond Plate (2023) utilizes a non-skid, safety surface used for stairs, catwalks, work platforms, walkways and ramps as the backdrop for the exhibition. Notably, the diamond plate pattern was a popular website background in the early days of the internet, and was the background for the artist’s first website (circa 1996). From the ’90s until 2023, Cory Arcangel has weaved and swerved through a career centering contemporary art around ideas of power, digital technology and humor. Errors and Omissions serves as a teaser to Cory Arcangel’s continuing journey. 

CORY ARCANGEL (born 1978, Buffalo, NY), is an artist, composer, curator, and entrepreneur living and working in Stavanger, Norway. Cory Arcangel explores the potential and failures of old and new digital technologies, highlighting their obsolescence, humor, aesthetic attributes and, at times, eerie influence in contemporary life. Applying a semi-archaeological methodology, his practice explores, encodes, and hacks the structural language of video games, software, social media and machine learning — treating them as subject matter and medium. Notable works include Totally Fucked (2003), a hacked Mario Bros game cartridge where Mario is stuck on a cube forever; Permanent Vacation (2008), where two computers are locked in an out of office email loop; Drei Klavierstücke op.11 (2009), in which Arnold Schoenberg’s homonymous 1909 score is plated by editing together YouTube clips of cats playing pianos; Working on my Novel (2009), a compendium of Twitter search results for ‘working on my novel’; Various Self Playing Bowling Games (2011), video games modified to throw gutter balls; Flatware (2018-), a series of abstract ‘paintings’ mounted on Ikea tabletops sourced from a diverse range of leisurewear and, /roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD (2017-2021), a custom built high performance machine learning computer which plays, as it learns, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free-to-play role-playing Android game. Recent and ongoing projects include ‘Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age’ at Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany and Centre Pompidou Metz, France; ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen’, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, US; ‘Rainbow’ at MUDEC, Milan, Italy and ‘Game Society’ at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.

Cory Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have been given a full floor solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011). Other exhibitions comprise: ‘Midnight Moment – Another Romp Through the IP’, Times Square, New York, USA (2022), ‘Flying Foxes’, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2022), ‘Topline’, CC Foundation, Shanghai, China (2019), ‘BACK OFF’, Firstsite, Colchester, Essex, UK (2019), ‘Be the first of your friends’, Espace Louis Vuitton München, Munich, Germany (2015), ‘This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous’, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2015), ‘All The Small Things’, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (2015), ‘Masters’, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA (2012–13), ‘Beat the Champ’, Barbican, London, UK (2011), ‘Here Comes Everybody’, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010–11) and Nerdzone Version 1, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland (2005). Cory Arcangel received the Kino der Kunst Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Nam June Paik Award in 2014. His work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial (both 2004). In 2014, he launched Arcangel Surfware, a merchandise and publishing imprint. Its flagship store opened in Stavanger, Norway in 2018.

LISSON GALLERY

2/F, 27 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

www.lissongallery.com

Cory Arcangel @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg - Verticals

Cory Arcangel: Verticals
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
27 January - 16 March 2019

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents Verticals, an exhibition of works by American artist Cory Arcangel with a focus on his new series of 14 Scanner Paintings. These new works are shown together with a number of drawings, a laser animation, two video sculptures referring to Nam June Paik's TV Buddha and a new minimalist sound installation. 

A pioneer of technology-based art, Cory Arcangel works in a wide variety of media, including music composition, video, modified video games, performance and the Internet. The ease with which he recognises how to use software, hardware and Internet resources as raw artistic material, placing them in new contexts, reveals a new kind of style. The ageing process of technologies is always a central question in his oeuvre.

The Scanner Paintings, a series conceived since 2010, are based on commercially available textiles, which are scanned, inscribed with the artist's signature and printed with UV ink on IKEA LINNMON table-tops. They show various types of leggings – sweatpants, track pants, Daisy Dukes and ripped denims. In each work, details such as waistband, pockets, zips and logos are combined, usually collage-like, on two boards hanging one above the other. Overlapping letters create word-plays and new meanings, or the logo is legible only by force of the branding typography. Independently of changing fashions, the sports labels are part of a contemporary pop culture and a collective memory to which the artist refers.

Cory Arcangel's almost abstract laser animation Dunk takes the form of a stylised basketball player from an NBA video game throwing a ball into the basket. The artist drew the animation by hand into a computer using a Wacom tablet. It is projected onto the wall using a Kvant Laser Clubmax 800. Cory Arcangel sees the Slam Dunk as a typically American phenomenon that illustrates America's current role in the world – requiring only brute height and strength, rather than ball-handling skills or finesse.

The Original and Season 6 are videos made in real-time with the aid of baby monitors. In the first of the two video sculptures, the digital video baby monitor is directed at a plastic mannequin's head wearing a structured man's hat from Ping Men's Tour and Oakley Men's OO9154 Half Jacket XL 2.0 golf sunglasses. The other baby monitor is directed at a Yeezy Season 6 crepe slide slipper on an acrylic display stand. The displays echo Nam June Paik's legendary TV Buddha (1974), in reverse: the object is being observed, and baby monitors are surveillance devices.

"I studied music, and discovered John Cage, Nam June Paik and Karlheinz Stockhausen. My works often refer to art history, particularly to Paik. A few years ago, I saw his closed-circuit video installation TV Buddha in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. At the time, I'd already had the idea for an installation with two computers continuously sending each other mails with an automatic out-of-office message." (Cory Arcangel)

Sonic Attack consists of a speaker and a data visual system directed at the doorway, to register people entering the gallery, emitting the typical ping sound as though it came from their pocket, causing them to think they have received a message on their iPhone.

The exhibition also presents a series of seven works on paper. The abstract drawings were made by dripping triple-concentrate espresso onto the paper and tilted to produce modernist patterns.

Verticals is Cory Arcangel's sixth solo exhibition in the Salzburg and Paris galleries since the start of our collaboration in 2004. In addition, musical performances were initiated, such as in 2015 with the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Pantin, and in the Eglise Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement during the FIAC 2018.

  

Cory Arcangel was born in Buffalo (NY) in 1978. After living in New York for 15 years, he moved to Stavanger, Norway, in 2018, but he still has a studio in Brooklyn. His unique artistic approach is based on his training in classical guitar and his studies in music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio in the late 1990s, which coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution and inspired him to become an artist, composer, programmer and entrepreneur. In 2014, he founded a software and merchandise company under the imprint Arcangel Surfware, stocking T-shirts, sweatpants, bed-sheets and iPhone cases – things needed for surfing the Internet. His first flagship store opened in Stavanger in September 2018. 

Cory Arcangel is the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to hold a solo exhibition (2011) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition Asymmetrical Response, in collaboration with Olia Lialina, toured in 2016/2017 through the art spaces Western Front, Vancouver, to The Kitchen, New York, and Art Projects, Ibiza. Solo exhibitions have been held in distinguished international museums and institutions, including the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2015), Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland (2015), Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2014), Fondation DHC/ART Montreal, Canada (2013), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA (2012), Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (2011), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA (2010).

GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG
Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg
www.ropac.net