The New Easy

Berlin 11 June - 25 July 2009 Artnews Projects

Reviewed by Karen Archey          

How easy can you get? Curated by Dutch performance artist Lars Eijssen, The New Easy combines a zeitgeist-appropriate curatorial statement with a solid line-up of emerging artists. Claiming that all work in the exhibition appears to be ‘conceived of in one second and created in three’ The New Easy’s structure proves too limiting to accommodate all the work on show, and regardless, a little flat. What’s the significance of ‘easy’ art, anyway? 

Eijssen attempts to define a new artistic movement by opening up the exhibition’s thesis to a larger, cultural realm. The interpretation states, ‘This apparent simplicity reveals a certain brilliance, and what looks pure and easy conceals something that is not just an idea but rather an exercise in contemporary visual culture.’ Thus a ‘New Easy’ artwork mimics the cultural phenomena of Twitter, bumper stickers, text messaging: the gamut. Not that I want to be simply one of many journalists writing about Twitter and the effect of new technology on our cultural attention span, but now we have a breed of art mimicking the ADD production style of micro-blogging. Great, but again, what’s the point?

Originally created on the internet via Google Lively – the search engine’s version of Second Life – this exhibition showcases mainly web-based work. Theses of immediacy and netart undeniably marry well together, yet, The New Easy has the ability to reach a new complexity in its IRL version. For example, and not without humour, Mark Bain’s ‘Endless Beer Column’ provides a party favour and Brancusi reference simultaneously.

Petra Cortright’s video ‘VVebcam’ (2007), meanwhile, illustrates Eijssen’s curatorial thesis most clearly. In her piece, the artist wears a dress shirt buttoned all the way to its top. She appears absorbed in her computer screen as preset YouTube gifs giddily dance by. The piece seems pretty straightforward but Cortright’s video, at just under two minutes long, can be more rewardingly deconstructed art historically. Politics of the gaze and vulnerability are evident here, which the artist negates by refusing to longingly glower into her webcam as per YouTube custom. The result is a work that appears simplistic, simultaneously catering to several broader cultural trends. Cortright clearly understands the internet, and helps us to do so by delicately repackaging it for us. 

Among welcome plastic additions to the 18-artist line up include work by Daniel Bejar, Rafael Rozendaal, and Edith Dekynt. Daniel Bejar’s ‘The Visual Topography of a Generation Gap’ (2006) consists of a set of keys representing the artist’s process of copying the original key to his apartment successively until all the object’s information was lost. Rafael Rozendaal’s ultimately easy installation, three television and DVD units displaying the system’s bouncy default symbol, uncover the system’s ‘true’ form while conjuring a Nam June Paik zen-for-film reference. Edith Dekyndt’s spacey video ‘Provisory Object 03’ (2004) captures a hand with an undulating bubble between thumb and forefinger, meditating on the phenomenology of perception. 

Although Cortright’s video and Bain’s keg tower fit this exhibition’s system of classification perfectly, others do not. The production of Harm van den Dorpel’s ‘Ethereal Self’ (2008) – a website that allows viewers to see themselves in a spliced gem formation via webcam – can hardly be considered quick or easy. In fact, van den Dorpel was among the first to code websites that prompt the activity of a computer’s webcam. Unbeknownst to its visitors, the website creates an archive of users, subversively documenting a seemingly private experience, making it public.

Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of The New Easy is its lack of props for their art historical predecessors beyond the ‘commodity suspicious’ conceptualists mentioned in Eijssen’s interpretation. Although the curator makes a worthwhile observation that ‘easy’ art often isn’t plastic, and thus not easy to commodify, the idea is left undeveloped. How does the presence of craft and labour in contemporary art dictate its cultural worth? Does the discipline’s previous pre-Modernist, anti-conceptualist role as documentarian have anything to do with a 'new easy' work’s inherent lack of value? What relation does 'new easy' have to the readymade? Such questions could be beneficially meditated upon within the context of the exhibition. But despite its deceptively impressive roster, this is exactly where the exhibition falls short. Not everything should be perfunctory, and some things should be left to stew: especially curatorial statements.
 
Karen Archey is Associate Editor of Art Fag City and is based in New York