07/02/2022
Opens at Open Mind Art Space in WLA, Sunday, July 10. Open Mind Art Space x JAUS x panke.gallery.
Post Cinema | Los Angeles – Berlin
July 10–20, 2022
group show
Location: Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles, CA
11631 Santa Monica Blvd, LA, CA
https://panke.gallery/exhibition/post-cinema
Panke.gallery (Berlin) and JAUS (Los Angeles) present Post Cinema, a group show at Open Mind Art Space in Los Angeles with Nadia Buttendorf, Esben Holk, and Cornelia Sollfrank from Berlin, and Petra Cortright, Julie Orser and Peter Wu from Los Angeles.
•
This catchy title echos post internet as much as postmodern or post digital, but it is not about "post," or is it? Wasn't TV already post cinema? For decades, dreams of global utopia have been rushing over the airwaves and electronic superhighways into the clouds of the internet, flowing further into the (inter)streaming networks of today.
The exhibition takes an early TV performance from Cornelia Sollfrank as a starting point. As member of the artist group "Frauen und Technik" ["Women and Technology"], Cornelia filmed herself meditating within the "Piazza virtuale" a project by Van Gough TV [https://vangoghtv.hs-mainz.de/?portfolio=hamburg-2&lang=en] that somehow - very precisely and as early as 1992 - predicted twitch.tv.
Sollfrank's performance anticipated the next step in the development from Post Cinema to Post TV, finally executed/accomplished by platforms such as Youtube, whose slogan appropriately commanded: "broadcast yourself". With their simple tools, defaults, templates and their UIs programming user behavior, those platforms strongly shaped our perception and expectations of film and TV.
Petra Cortright's web video "VVEBCAM" [https://anthology.rhizome.org/vvebcam] from 2007 highlights this moment. While there had already been experiments in the early 90's (one of them being the web videos Gil Kuno did on his page unsound.com, for example), Cortright's early work marks the time of so called Web 2.0, when platforms began to rule the appearance, framework and sometimes the content of the videos, too. In the case of "VVEBCAM," the artist’s practice of playing with the standard TAG function of the platform got the video suspended. Not only is the platform an integral part of Cortright's artwork, its functions, such as comments and standard we**am video filters, are also the subject of the video, while the human and meditative presence in the video are reminiscent of Cornelia's piece 15 years earlier. Furthermore, the platforms now seem to move away from desperate self-broadcasting to brand and popular content creator channels, in a wicked twist backwards towards the idea of classical network TV.
Similarly, Nadja Buttendorf is broadcasting herself in the format of a TV show, using the notion of "seasons" and even publishing "making-of" episodes. In a very personal way, she is telling the story of Robotron [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Robotron] - the East German IBM - inspired by the biography of her parents who had met and worked there. Nadja uses the narrative as a framework to reflect on the topic of woman and technology, from the socialistic times of the GDR to today's hyper capitalistic society. EPOCH (organized by Peter Wu+) and Esben Holk develop 3D worlds in which the spectator becomes the actor. With their works, the artists play/act on the intersection/line where games, movies and TV intertwine. In Esben's work the narration is unfolded by the audience, its subject is the actor Jennifer Aniston and the world of the sit-com, Friends. The Jennifer Aniston Superfriends Tarot is exhibited in a Web 3D world through which the user has to navigate and by that create their own, intimate Tarot session. EPOCH [https://epoch.gallery/] presents "Cryosphere" a collaborative online universe that presents work addressing the climate crises and the melting of the Arctic, and more speecifically Alaskan, glaciers, a process that has been accelerated in the last century which has been roughly parallel to the existence of cinema and television.
Finally, Julie Orser presents "NotAMuse (Unknown Artist, vol. 2)" a video-art piece culled from hours of material from movies and television shows created between 1914 and 2022 depicting the male artist and his female muse. In the piece, the model's image is not only “captured” on canvas and in stone, but she is the “object” of his obsession that she must ultimately destroy. The work is at once a reflection of recurring tropes within the cinematic medium but also serves as a powerful critique of the entertainment industry's perpetuation and self-mimicry of the gendered relationship between artist and subject.
