Jogging: Soon

“While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?”
Claire Bishop

“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
George W. Bush

The internet has been thought of as a place for sometime now. Chat "rooms", "home" pages, email "addresses", and a collection of online archives, libraries and even museums, have conceptualized a digital "space" behind the screen. The emergence of the "cloud" still cannot escape the analogy of data as physical matter. These online "places", by cataloguing and preserving information, serve in many ways similarly as their traditional, physical counterparts. However, the experience of the digital landscape is not perfectly analogous to the real world. It is this theoretical terrain, the specificity of online experience and how it is changing the way we relate to art and ultimately each other, that positions Jogging at the front of the internet(-)art(-)world.

Without falling into tautological gimmick, Jogging seriously reconsiders Tumblr as a "site". The team produces images from outrageous combinations of everyday objects, including batteries, Powerade, Ugg boots, Whole foods bath salts, fish, and a host of other common objects. At first glance, the project looks like a Dada-esque assemblage of random things, presented simply for absurdist shock value. In some ways, it is possible to read it this way, and it stands alone as hilarious pastiche of the range of contemporary culture. However, it is the site-specific nature of the artworks which gives it its most power as an experiment. Tumblr, with a blank white background, becomes an online gallery, and its specific means of presentation and reception animate the art as social-media commentary.

The striking images of odd everyday situations which are obviously staged, are presented as serious artworks, with proper art gallery titles such as "Found Photograph", "Still Life", and "Installation Image". On the website, this posits the images as art, but as users reblog the pictures on their own blogs, they become completely de-contextualised, existing alongside other images, and without artistic treatment.

Rather than acting as an internet version of an existing power structure (i.e. a gallery), Jogging lets the Tumblr network act as a fluid, decentralised gallery, run by thousands of people, which proliferates its images inside of this unique digital landscape, sending the images through the tubes of the internet, and positioning them in many different contexts. The random ways in which the works end up de-contextualized and re-contextualized (for example, next to a picture of a half-naked girl with a gun, or a .gif of Will Smith), is precisely Bishop's call for an art which "[reflects] deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence".

Turning the hive-mind of Tumblr into a place for what could be thought of as a site-specific installation makes the de-contextualized randomness and apparent authorlessness of the objects seem even more familiar yet unfamiliar. What happens when Jogging decides to move to the context of another site?

At the Stillhouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Jogging presented its second public show, with a series of the object-based sculptures presented in 3D, in a classic, white-walled gallery space. Here, the context is much different: Red Hook, ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, is situated in a post-industrial landscape across a river from the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. Waves from the Atlantic ocean and its massive blue expanse crash against rusty fences just feet from the Stillhouse. This context serves as the departure point for a new "site" where the Jogging has produced a set of artworks that, through the narrative qualities of specific, detourned objects, tells a story about Red Hook. The real-life exhibition tells a story about impermanence, fragility, impending collapse, and uncertainty of contemporary culture and existence in Red Hook.

The works are concertized under this theme. In Hot Topic Hair Extensions Discovered In Polar Ice Cap, an ice column embedded with Hot Topic hair extensions melts quietly as exhibition-goers search out and contemplate the pervasive stench of P.H.I.S.H: Pink Hydrographic Integrated Fish Swims Horizontally, where decaying piranhas which have been printed upon with pink camouflage and screwed to the gallery wall. Both appropriate objects in an absurdist assemblage highlighting the subjective, creative potential of a quasi-anonymous author. (This is a sort of group show with no wall placards) These odd objects seem weirdly out of place, manipulated in relationship to one another and the viewer, but also ironically in place, as someone has placed them there for a reason. This dissonance furthers the unpredictability and uneasy feeling of impermanence that the show aims for.

The narrative potential of these objects allows the artists to make art for any situation. The literalness of the works makes them readable on several levels. The absence created by a series of plaster inversions reads as a weird combination of cantaloupe and Croc, or as a "permanent" indent of impermanent objects. Here, and in Ceramic Pitcher Pours Water Onto Extremely Rare Genetically Modified Triplet Watermelon, the story is told through the combination of objects, such as watermelons and a water pitcher, which have associations beyond the work itself. These objects are animated through a simulation of poured water, allowing it to act as very slow performance art. The narrative literalness does not, however, preclude beauty. In Rationed Water, gatorade is bound to a piece of tempered glass by a border of hydrophobic coating. This causes the sports drink to function as a graphic element, while the glass plane is held up by four large bottles of water. The result is a sublime blue, green, and yellow field which seems strangely un-identifiable as Gatorade. All the works tell a story about things that are just on the verge of collapse, like Red Hook.

While the relationship of site-specificity of Tumblr and Red Hook makes sense, conceptually, there is something latent in the experiment of taking this work off out of the 2D digital environment of social networks, and into the real, 3D context of a gallery. There will arise questions about the dissemination of these images from 3D in to 2D through more traditional media. Perhaps this review can become a part of the process of the reception and after-life of these works. What this exhibition does, more than its online counterpart, is to highlight art's narrative potential and the importance to contemporary artists of radically appropriated parts, new combinations of old things, and the specificity of reference. The image-making process and its hyper-consumption has placed an importance on the ability of an image to quickly resonate with a broad audience as it flies by in a newsfeed. With their graphically-charged, object-based narratives, Jogging is leading the way down this increasingly crowded road.

Jogging: Soon

The 'real' exhibition in 3D of the images posted and shared in Tumblr by Jogging poses questions about the decontextualization of images, and consequently art.

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