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My article "Palo Alto Dreamin': Towards a New Digital Expression(ism)" appears in this month's Art Papers magazine--the Nov/Dec 2001 issue, celebrating the Atlanta-based art journal's 25th anniversary. To visit the AP website (which doesn't include the text of the article), click here; for the full text of the article (with additional images), click here. Three of the artists discussed favorably in the essay--Matt Chansky, Claire Corey, and Marsha Cottrell--have been previously featured on this weblog: to view a slightly expanded slide show of their work, click here. With respect to the three artists discussed not-so-favorably, it should be mentioned that Jeremy Blake has a show up right now at Feigen Contemporary in Manhattan. Is the work an improvement? In some ways. The video-abstractions aren't as yoked to the Mondrian/Ellsworth Kelly grid--now they're more organic, resolving into occasionally striking, mandala-like images. Yet while freely riffing on the comparatively looser, bouncier oeuvres of Morris Louis and Paul Feeley, they still have that cut-and-dried, predictable feel of a software demo, and the ominous, David Lynchian pink noise is getting very tiresome. Some videotaped photographic images spliced into the abstractions (a burning castle, a girl spinning in a room full of snowflakes or feathers) make the work a bit more eclectic and varied, but also break the psycho-hypnotic mood.
For an earlier-published discussion of Blake, and some of the issues in the "Palo Alto" essay, please see my May 2001 review of the "Compression" exhibit at Feigen.