Material Matters
GIVEN PRESIDENT TRUMP’S recent attempts to undermine the work of archives and libraries, never in my lifetime has the work of archivists, librarians, library scientists, and “data hoarders” seemed more urgent. The same might be said of the work of those conservators who have much to teach us about preparing the present for the future. Of particular relevance are the practices associated with “variable media,” or artworks that vary from one installation to the next—a broad category comprising installation art, performance art, and file-based art, the last including digital photography, digitized video art, and most digital art. (In museum circles, the phrase “variable media” has largely been replaced by the not-quite-synonymous term “time-based media,” denoting works that change over time and are exhibited via media technologies ranging from speakers and televisions to slide, film, and digital projectors.)
As a co-chair of the Time-Based Media Working Group at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and then a curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, an institution that played an iconic role in the emergence of time-based media in the 1970s), I had the great privilege of learning from many conservators about the various challenges of working within the framework of variability while imagining a future universe of the widest (and wildest) statistical improbabilities. These experts routinely contend with both practical and philosophical questions that shape the preservation of cultural heritage: How do we define the boundaries between asset, technical support, and documentation, or between the crucial and the incidental (in other words, what is worth saving and what cannot, or can, be modified)? How do we calculate the right amount of redundancy, given the associated expenses and risks? How do we balance the desire for something to be accessible with the need for someone to be responsible for its care?
Notably, Artforum has its own history of looking closely at the materiality of art and at questions of obsolescence. Our October 2007 issue focused on the evolution of fabrication and the turning of artists toward tools and techniques beyond their own mastery; in October 2015, the magazine focused on both the decline and the persistence of celluloid film in the digital age. For this issue, international editor Pablo Larios has coordinated a cluster of features—including a roundtable discussion, a series of artists’ portfolios, and an essay by conservators at the Met—that similarly assess the materiality of photography, which is now being put under pressure by the disappearance of photographic papers and printing machines, the attrition of specialized printing knowledge, and the rise of digital photography as a conceptual framework that emphasizes the replication and mutability of the image.
In dialogue with these reflections on photography, this issue features several other texts that similarly focus on the intersections of art and technology. Some of these look back to the history of modernism: Noam M. Elcott’s Close-Up essay on Franz Wilhelm Seiwert’s 1925 mural for August Sander explores the stakes of one encounter between painting and photography, while an interview with Thelma Golden and Connie H. Choi highlights the 1960s kinetic light sculptor Tom Lloyd, whose long-overdue retrospective reopens New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem this month. Others explicitly link the past to the present: Caroline A. Jones’s feature essay on the concept of “immersive” art reviews its history from the perspective of the most recent Tribeca Festival, while Paula Burleigh’s Focus review of the exhibition “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio explains how the show’s transhistorical definition of the “algorithmic” opens up the emergent category of “generative art.” Finally, we feature the cutting edge of contemporary practices in Kevin Buist’s Technology column on the latest video games from artist Mitchell F. Chan, who is known for his conceptual projects about cryptocurrencies, art history, and other systems of value, as well as in Andy St. Louis’s Spotlight feature on Ayoung Kim, whose work is being presented this month at both MoMA PS1 and Performa in New York, and whose sculpture Ghost Dancers B, 2022, appears on this issue’s cover.
Ghost Dancers B depicts two characters who appear in Kim’s recent works: Ernst Mo, a motorcycle courier who makes quantum leaps for the fictional “Delivery Dancers” service in Seoul, and En Storm, a version of Mo from another dimension with whom she becomes entangled. In these works, the slick aesthetics of techno-fetishism and Asian futurism are gateways to a narrative and visual universe that layers the discourses of technology, physics, gender, and labor (a topic that also appears in Gazelle Mba’s Spotlight on Karimah Ashadu), proving that world-building can be designed just as much for provocation as for spectacular entertainment—and providing a model as we rethink the role that the visual arts can play in popular culture more broadly.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
