Issue 26: Are You Experienced?
Soft Labor, is an occasional newsletter about trends in visual culture written by Sarah Hromack. Related/Unrelated is a highly heterogeneous, link-heavy feature whose style hearkens back to my earliest days as a digital editor. Soft Labor is a reader-supported publication and I invite you to share this newsletter and subscribe at either the free or paid level. I appreciate you.
Hyperallergic just published my review of Harold Cohen: AARON, an exhibition of the late painter-cum-programmer’s work on view through mid-May at the Whitney. Thanks for giving it a read.
While walking through the show with its curator, my longtime colleague Christiane Paul, I was particularly struck by how the exhibition’s display conventions demonstrated Cohen’s multivalent artistic process — one that bridged a wide divide between forms, from painting to code. I didn’t say much about this in my review, but Paul’s interpretation of Cohen’s work coupled with the show’s design — plotters designed and programmed by Cohen produce drawings live in the galleries — points to a larger museological (and sociological) trend that favors visitor experience as a means of parsing narrative as much as it does art history or theory.
This isn’t a new convention, even if it has taken on so many dizzying forms over the past several decades. (Not to digress here, but for the academics in the house, chapter six of Stanford comms professor Fred Turner’s excellent book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, is a favorite of mine for thinking about exhibition design in a larger cultural-historical context, as it takes a critical look at The Family of Man, MoMA’s 1955 photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and memorably designed by architect Paul Rudolph, who took his cues from the Bauhaus and the Dadaists alike.)
For art folks of a given age, blaming Matthew Barney (for just about anything) is perhaps too convenient a trick at this historical juncture. I do believe, however, that his Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) and its spectacular takeover of the Guggenheim in 2003 — Remember that one? I sure do. — might be viewed as one if not the exhibition that toed the line between more traditional museological conventions and the physical, experience-driven display that has become a given kind of expectation.
Incidentally, the Cremaster Cycle coincided perfectly with the publication, in 1998, of “Welcome to the Experience Economy,” the Harvard Business Review article (and later, book) written by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore that made waves for its clear articulation of a then still-emerging economic trend — one all too familiar in a moment when exhibitions are praised for their immersive qualities. (A Metta Prayer, Jacolby Satterwhite’s recent takeover of the Met’s Grand Hall, is a stark recent example of this phenomenon as is Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: The Sphere in Las Vegas. I also want to give a hat tip to the New Museum, which was on a real tear for a while in the 2010s. Recall Carsten Höller’s exhibition replete with floor-through sliding board, the aptly-titled Experience?)
Will the “experience” bubble ever burst? It may very well have several weeks ago in Glasgow, Scotland, where Willy’s Chocolate Experience, an utterly farcical children’s attraction produced by (the presumably also-fake) House of Illuminati demanded world-class attention in the press, ripping across the Internet from the New York Times to a seemingly endless series of gleeful memes parodying the disastrous event. Would-be visitors were incensed upon arrival at a mostly empty industrial building, which was absent the VR-enabled wonderland promised by its bogus website. They had been deceived.
The leap between Barney’s Guggenheim extravaganza and, say, The Museum of Ice Cream, seems like a long one that crosses many invisible social (not to mention, art-historical) boundaries along the way. But is it? If there’s anything the experience economy has taught us over the past several decades it is that, whether played out in a museum in New York City or an industrial warehouse in Glasgow, people’s expectations for what an experience might be — and for what it might be worth — have only grown as time and technology have progressed. So, don’t blame VR, people. Blame Barney!
(Sorry, Matthew.)
Related/Unrelated:
Listen:
Debuts: Kingdom is the debut single of Clothing, the result of a musical collaboration between Ben Sterling (Cookies, Mobius Band) and Aakaash Istrani (Dawn of Midi) that has lasted over a decade. Kingdom features the unmistakable vocals of Amber Coffman (Dirty Projectors). It is, in a word, sublime — and it takes me back, musically and socially speaking, to earlier days in NYC when I saw the infinitely talented Cookies and Dawn of Midi play live on the regular with a crew of folks who have mostly moved away and that I won’t soon forget. (I still remember this little piece by Sasha Frere Jones, writing for the New Yorker, as it perfectly encapsulates that flash of time.) I could go on here, but why don’t you simply head over to Bandcamp or Apple Music or Spotify and do a quick download for old-time's sake?
Scroll:
Tweencore: Casey Lewis, of After School, is a “youth consumer analyst” (a.k.a. trend watcher) whose newsletter I read almost daily. Her recent piece for The Cut, “Tweencore: What the 13-and-under set is shopping for” absolutely fascinated me (and also embarrassed me, frankly, as in reading it I realized that I am usually dressed either like a sixty-year-old woman or a thirteen-year-old girl, neither of whom I am). Indeed, I’ve noticed a recent media obsession with the spending habits of Gen Alpha — defined as children born between roughly 2010 and 202— as most perfectly encapsulated by Kate Lindsey in this recent piece for the BBC. Notably, both Lewis and Lindsey identify how inextricably linked the consumer desires of children are with their parents’ tastes. My son hoards money in a toy ATM (no joke) but he also begs to visit Dover Street Market. Guilty as charged.
Am I a thirteen-year-old girl? Hard to tell. Photograph by Sara Messinger. Picturing AI: Following his recent (and comparatively pithy) take on the Apple Vision Pro for the New Yorker, the magazine’s editors clearly handed AI pioneer Jaron Lanier the reins for this epic essay on how we might envision AI as an entity. “It might not even be proper to call a technology a technology absent the elements needed to bring it usefully into the human world; if we can’t understand how a technology works, we risk succumbing to magical thinking. Another way of saying this is that we need cartoons in our heads about how technologies work.” I’ve suggested as much before, but Lanier is at his best, as a thinker, when most unhinged as a writer. This is one for the books, best read digitally as the illustrations by Arif Qazi are a very intentional part of the experience. (Incidentally, I recently paid cash money, in Euros no less, to download last autumn’s issue of Spike magazine, Field Guide to AI, which features a slew of art world-y essays by Lev Manovich, Mike Pepi, Tao Lin, Martine Syms, and many others.)
Castouts and Comebacks: What would you do if your child were, seemingly out of nowhere, absolutely enthralled at once by Ye and Michael Jackson? (Asking for a friend.) Both are mentioned prominently in Jon Caramanica’s latest Times piece on the sense of mainstream cultural amnesia that has seemingly culminated in pop pariahs — West, Jackson, Chappelle, Galliano, the (mostly male) list goes on — being effectively let off the hook for a wide range of serious social sins. “Cancellation was always an incomplete concept, more a way of talking about artists with contentious and offensive personal histories than a fact of the marketplace. Except in the most extreme cases, moral failure has never been an automatic disqualifier when it comes to artistic work.” writes Caramanica in a Times-grade (which is to say, kinda soft, but infinitely readable) critical take that high school ethics teachers the country over are likely already assigning to their students.
Read:
New Theories: I’m about to start reading — and may well write more about — The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, a book “about how to survive on the Internet,” based on the original “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” essay, which was published by (Kickstarter founder) Yancey Strickler in a private newsletter sent to 500 readers back in 2019, striking a chord between and amongst those who shared his sense of danger online. The book is about to be released by Stricker’s new platform, Metalabel, a space for releasing, selling, and exhibiting creative work, and essayists include Strickler (Kickstarter/Metalabel); Venkatesh Rao (Ribbonfarm); Maggie Appleton; Peter Limberg and Rebecca Fox (The Stoa); Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research); Arthur Röing Baer and GVN908 (Moving Castles); Leith Benkhedda (DNR, Trust, and New Models); and Caroline Busta and Lil Internet (New Models).
Shop:
Art Market: I plan to hit the NADA Flea, a community art market, sometime before it closes on March 24th. It’s located at NADA East Broadway located on the 2nd floor at 311 East Broadway in the Lower East Side and open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12pm–6pm, March 9–24, 2024. Free!
Balletcore: So-called “balletcore” is an ongoing trend that I simply cannot cope with, a fact that will come as no surprise to those who see me (still) stomping around in my Docs in my tender mid-40s. However, the infinitely weird, Copenhagen-based brand GANNI, which has gained a toehold in the U.S., released a response that I am indeed obsessed with — so much so that I bought these shoes in both black and red.
GANNI's take on balletcore Collabs: I'm looking forward to Thursday night's opening of Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning at MoMA. (I'll be wearing the aforementioned GANNI flats and insane Miyake one-shouldered dress, for the record.) Rachel Comey just released a collection in collaboration with Joan, and I want not all, but some of it — mainly the dress pictured here, which is based on Choreomania, a work from 1971.
Performance Views of Choreomania, 1971 c/o Joan Jonas
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.