The Flog

Skafte Aymo-Boot, Mark Bain, Daniel Bejar, Petra Cortright, Brock Davis, Edith Dekyndt, Mikolaj Dlugosz, Harm vd Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Sergey Golnikov, Jeffrey Heart, Oliver Laric, Pop Levi, Vadik Marmeladov, Philipp Otto, Rafael Rozendaal, Anne de Vries, Robert Wodzinski: The New Easy – curated by Lars Eijssen @Artnews Projects (June 11 – July 18, 2009)

From the press release:

The New Easy is marked by works that were primarily – but not all – conceived for the web or to be found there easily. Most of the works look like straight copying of whatever is surfacing reality, or rather digital reality, and as mediated as a piece of art or plain creativity back through the web. Simplicity on first sight however reveals a certain brilliance, and what looks like pure and easy conceals what is not just an idea but rather an exercise in contemporary visual culture. According to the Dutch performance artist Lars Eijssen, who curated the New Easy, the artists use these looks to prove the superiority of their mastery of the visual in comparison to many of their high art colleagues. They need just little for a powerful work. Indeed, instead of being streetwise or art minded, one better calls them webwise, countering the usual prejudice of the internet as merely producing ephemeral and unsorted stuff only. In addition their internet orientation also groups them in the area of commodity-suspiciousness and makes them heirs to the first, second and third generations of conceptualists before and partly right next to them. The offline version of the show emphasizes that for a more regular and perhaps more conservative contemporary art audience.

–

–

Brock Davis.

Watch Living photograph, Chris with Tea cup, 2007, here.

–

Edith Dekyndt.

Watch an extract of Provisory03, République Démocratique du Congo, 2004, here.

–

Oliver Laric.

–

–

Constant Dullaart.

Watch Posing, Group picture projects, 2007, here.

–

Anne de Vries.

–

Sergey Golnikov. Update, this piece is by Harm van den Dorpel, Ethereal Self .com, 2008.

–

Mark Bain.

–

I was really looking forward to seeing this show as it was gathering quite a number of artists I know and like to follow. This particular show, inside Artnews Projects which I hadn’t visited yet but was eager to, sounded like the best combination, and clearly, this was the best (mostly) video based exhibition I have seen in a very long time. The pieces were clever, intriguing without falling in the crowd-pleaser-pit, and were completely relevant to the ideas behind the show. It was refreshing to see that each work had been given its own space to evolve while subtly resonating within the next. The show is up until July 18th, so really, go see it.

–