art review of hike, hack, hic et nunc

8/10/2019 Art Review of Hike, Hack, Hic Et Nunc

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HIKE, HACK / HIC et NUNC

XPO Gallery

On the web at http://www.xpogallery.com/HH/HN/

and physically at 17, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth 75003 Paris (appointment only)

Closed November 26th, 2014

Published at

http://artillerymag.com/hike-hack-hic-et-nunc/

I was generally sympathetic to the examination of remote machinic vision on display at XPO

Gallery, with their presentation of a Brooklyn heavy group show that is weirdly shut to the

public: HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNC. Interestingly, it coincided with the punch of learning that a

Russia-based website now offers the world peeks into private homes and businesses around the

world via live feeds from web-cam baby monitors and security cameras.

Curated by Alexis Jakubowicz and Jean-Brice Moutout, it is a show intended to be seen virtually

on a screen by the world online, and/or in actuality when accessed privately by appointment only.

This mixing of the two experiences is what gives the show its merit and viractualimpact, saving

it from mere camp theatrics. It draws us into the question of how technical apparatus shapes what

can be perceived and conceived by constructing an intertwining pretend (fairy-like) space, ideal

for floating between modes of knowing.


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HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNCinstallation view with nonfunctioning web-cams

It would be unproblematic to criticize the exhibitions technological incompetence when

compared to earlier telematic masters like Wolfgang Staehle, Paul Sermon and Ken Goldberg (or

the recent political exactitude of !Mediengruppe Bitnik, artists who use distant hacking as an

artistic strategy) - as the web-cameras used in the show (that make for the broad intellectual point

of remote perspective) amusingly do not work. In that way it is an elaborate mannerist farce.

The on-line component that feigns live web-cam feeds is actually a combination of non-streaming

gif animations and vimeo-hosted videos. I encountered in the show a rather tawdry (simulations

of simulations of simulations) techno Arte Povera post-internet version of the high-tech aesthetics

of technoromanticism. Regardless of said tawdriness, the encounter still managed to shift my

attention from the realism of the object to the realism of the means of production of perception.

Thus, though somewhat lost in transmition, it still participates in the examination of the net as the

major ideology of our age, whether one approves of its diffusion or condemns and struggles

against it.

It is a fun collection of art that configures a pluralist understanding of our networked world by

refusing to treat machinic vision as an ontology. Rather, it insists on machinic visions


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constructivist and provisional make-up, thus serving again the poetic function for art that began

with the displacement techniques of the early Surrealists.

A fairyland feeling is established throughout the gallery by Madrid artist Manuel Fernandezs

short video soundtrack of Provisional Landscape (2013), generated from audiovisual stock

material. It provides a pixie-like audio reverberation that embraces the space.

Partial installation view, Manuel Fernandez & Hunter Jonakin (right)


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Guillaume Collignon, From Earth to Mars: 9 layers of space exploration (2014)

Guillaume Collignons work provides a key to the telematic-landscape theme, while also hinting

at the meaty world of now (nunc in French). Nowhere is this more apparent (even as it too was


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not working) than in Jill Magids alluring Legoland (2000) video, as it was cheekily hidden

behind a black velvet curtain. As seen on the online show, it is a rather sexy video the artist made

with an infrared security camera mounted on her shoe, shooting between her apparently pantiless

legs at night amongst tall buildings, that include, I think, the World Trade Towers. At 28 seconds

in, there is a pivotal moment where a sliver of gleaming moisture between her legs glints.

Obviously the play of hiding/revealing in and of this work behind the black curtain suggests a

parallel with the painting L'Origine du monde (1866) by Gustave Courbet when it was in the

collection of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as it, for a time, was hidden behind a black curtain

in his bureau, only viewable by request or private invitation.

But a post-internet landscape motif dominated the show, with attention-grabbing works that used

gorgeous digital prints (Penelope Umbrico), floppy digital painting based on google maps

(Clement Valla) or a combination of digital imaging technology and traditional painting

technique as with Kevin Zuckers stunning and visually noisy Claustra (blue) (2014).


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Kevin Zucker, Claustra (blue) (2014)

Kevin Zucker, Claustra (blue) (2014) installation view with nonfunctioning web-cams


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Clement Valla, The Universal Texture Recreated (4642'3.50"N 12026'28.59"W) (2014)

installation view with nonfunctioning web-cams


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Penelope Umbrico, Mountains, Moving (2012)

Penelope Umbrico, Mountains, Moving (2012) installation view

There were three robust sculptural combines as well, the hysterically funny vibrating Terrain

Vague (2014) by Paul Souviron, the elegant screen-meets-fishing-pole combine of Pierre

Clment and the slow-time ice-melt composition Mran: Modular Moraine Maker - Conceptual

Art for the Masses (2014) by Hunter Jonakin.


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Paul Souviron, Terrain Vague (2014)


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Pierre Clment, Off the hook (2014) installation shot


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Hunter Jonakin, Mran: Modular Moraine Maker - Conceptual Art for the Masses (2014)


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Hunter Jonakin, Mran: Modular Moraine Maker - Conceptual Art for the Masses (2014) detail

As noted above, I utterly took pleasure in the fairy camp send-up of high-tech surveillance in our

post-Snowden era here. Its ominous mannerist aesthetic, perhaps oddly, reminded me of the

school of British fairy painting that stemmed from the late-18th century works of Henry Fuseli,

the artist that, by using William Shakespeares fairy play Midsummer Night's Dreamas subject,

established the basic vocabulary of the dainty fairy/nymph genre in painting. During the epoch of

Romanticism the artists Henry Singleton, Henry Howard, Frank Howard, and Joshua Cristall all

carried on the tradition in small-scaled fairy works. This pixie approach to the land is most

enticing for the shows portentous concerns with ephemeral perception and I was reminded of

Daniel Maclises dark nymph painting The Disenchantment of Bottom (1832) with its depiction

of an ominous but frisky fairy ring of sprites, circuitously and torturously opening the eyes and

ears of the central figure.

But, and even given the limitations of the gallery, the curators could have thought about modes of

net art inquiry a bit more historically, rather than simply tongue-in-cheek sociologically. Perhaps


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they could have put a bit more stress on artistic responses to the ominous anthropocene context of

our network of perceptual apparatus (and its social organization of modes of knowledge) even as

Claire Colebrook has suggested that we have always been post-anthropocene.

Joseph Nechvatal

art review of hike, hack, hic et nunc

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