Cory Arcangel

The Sala dei Giuristi of the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo is the exceptional venue for a major exhibition promoted by GAMeC and strongly driven by its curator Stefano Raimondi, who led us on tiptoe through Cory Arcangel’s electrifying chrome world.

“You’ll never find rainbows, if you’re looking down”, Charlie Chaplin used to say, almost as if he meant: raise your head and sprout wings. Without wishing to contradict him, however, sometimes you really do find a rainbow beneath your feet, fallen to the ground along with all its colours through who knows what hole in the sky.

A good place to find one right now, and until well into June, is the Sala dei Giuristi of the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo. It is the exceptional venue for a major exhibition promoted by GAMeC and strongly driven by its curator Stefano Raimondi, who led us on tiptoe through Cory Arcangel’s electrifying chrome world.

The Buffalo artist travelled up to the highest point of the provincial Lombard capital, in the heart of Upper Bergamo, to pour his trademark rainbow – made to be walked on you might say – onto the terracotta floor of Italy’s oldest town hall, surrounded by thick walls lined with mediaeval frescoes and epigraphs. A carpet, in short, except that carpet is far too modest a word for such a grand work: 200 m² of synthetic fabric, fantastically striped with all the colours of the rainbow and maybe more.

All the other works gravitate around this one, as if driven by a centrifugal force that thrust them against the walls, in an exhibition that grabs hold of the building’s architecture and seems to make it levitate, together with everyone inside it. The lengthy title of the work (Photoshop CS: 1060 by 2744 centimeters, 10 DPC, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1800 x=6800, mouseup y=8800 x=20180) is a string of Photoshop source codes ready to be “liquidated” in cyberspace.

There is no doubt that Cory Arcangel’s art stems from constant looks and peeks at the “liquid” digitalised pop society around us. This is demonstrated by his passionately committed and demanding relationship with media (old and new) and his infatuation with garish, big-mouthed and grossly fake figures, from videogame superheroes to fickle jet-set starlets and the grand vizier of politics. Last but not least, he is a brilliant rabble-rouser, running as wild as a spring colt, especially on social networks.

As an artist, he gives the impression of still working as his young self and seems to home in on everything that is trendy or colourful before then regurgitating it in the form of eye-catching installations. Teenagers, in particular, ceaselessly connected and with their styled personalities, send him into raptures, as Holden Caulfield might say. So much so that they have featured in recent works as exemplified in this exhibition and in Screen-Agers, Tall Boys, and Whales (2011-2015), in which upper-class New York youths are concisely portrayed as autistic pool noodles adorned with smartphones, earphones and bracelets, dressed in clothing of the moment: leggings, torn jeans, towelling wristbands, wool berets and jogging socks – all strictly designer gear (one of the brands is Arcangel Surfware). The catalogue has the look of a tedious teenage magazine in which everyone is trying to look “awesome”.

Similarly, fame and its frivolous power seem to play a large part in this exhibition. Its title “This Is All So Crazy, Everybody Seems So Famous” (words from the Miley Cyrus hit Party in the U.S.A.) places two clearly recognisable icons of yesteryear in the right setting. Reflected like Narcissus on the wavy surface of two flat-screen monitors in the Lakes series (named after the Java filter “lago”, 2011-2015), the photogenic, efficient and antiseptic Britney and Hillary (no need for surnames) swim undisturbed in their “15 minutes of fame”, grinning triumphantly as if saying “I will smile forever”, while an IPod blasts out Shania Twain’s country-pop. “Fame is the name of the game”.

That said, beneath all the rouge, the works spruced up by Cory Arcangel also hint at a colour spectrum, a reminder of how much of the vacuous and the vulnerable exists in the hugely uninhibited and sensationalist society – to which the promotion of technological titles has accustomed us – with all now seemingly static unless it doubles in 18 months. The sacred torch passes down from generation to generation at the speed of light today – the artist seems to be telling us – and nothing becomes totally obsolete and depleted faster than cutting-edge technology or the latest fad or media phenomenon.

So, the latest hits pumped into the headphones of the “noodle-teenager” fashion slaves scattered around the Sala dei Giuristi will not last long. Their time is nearly up. It is also amusing to read in today’s paper about the candidate at the next US presidential elections, “Hillary Clinton has lunch in a fast food and no one recognises her”. Technology, the artist’s favourite means of expression, is perhaps the most obvious symbol of this premature erosion process. Technology, as Bruce Sterling writes, “doesn’t glide into the streamlined world of tomorrow. It jolts and limps, all crutches and stilts, just like its ancient patron, the god Hephaestos,” making it easy to trip up (Arcangel made his artistic debut as a hacker).

Even the recently come of age World Wide Web is starting to rot, tainted by derelict and abandoned files and the empty websites of extinct dot.com companies (“Sorry I Haven't Posted“, filled with excuses made by bloggers unable to keep up with their stagnant sites, remains one of the artist’s most inspired works in this sense). Yes, Cory Arcangel does wallow in the effluent of cybernetics and our false, unbridled consumer society but, like daddy Warhol (cited frequently although his work seems closer to a certain British Pop, more critical and cynical), he does not fall under his spell but is perhaps only fascinated by it. On the contrary, he becomes a champion of the wet and the organic (a white sock coupled with an elegant Gucci shoe in Asshole, 2013, on display in Bergamo, is a good example). It is as if he were saying, the connection nodes are more interesting, more the staying afloat than the “surfing”.

This is particularly evident in some of the artist’s early works, which this exhibition has the merit of showing in Italy for the first time – the famously hacked Super Mario Bros. cartridges – in which he applied a removal strategy to the famous Nintendo videogame, now buried in the graveyard of videogame elephants. Placed beneath a fresco of St George without his dragon, the video Totally Fucked (2003) shows a more modest 1990s’ hero, the moustached plumber Super Mario, similarly lacking in any purchase or ramp that might ferry him from level to level to reach Princess Peach’s hiding place. Suspended in limbo above a large question mark, the helpless Super Mario symbolises an identity crisis, destined to wait, uncertainty and impasse, unable to do anything but turn constantly left and right like a hitchhiker looking for a lift that never comes.

The Super Mario Clouds video (2002) arouses the same, duly unfulfilled, expectations after the artist applied surgical precision to the removal of all the game’s features one bit after another – from the brick platforms to the gold coins and mushrooms – save for the familiar and much pixelated “clouds”. Observers find themselves looking at an antediluvian monitor, with their heads in the clouds and slightly bemused. They contemplate a sky anchored to a metaphysical fixedness in the secret hope that at any minute they will glimpse some movement, a sign – or perhaps even a rainbow.

until 28 June 2015
CORY ARCANGEL
This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous
GAmeC

Cory Arcangel

The Sala dei Giuristi of the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo is the exceptional venue for a major exhibition promoted by GAMeC and strongly driven by its curator Stefano Raimondi, who led us on tiptoe through Cory Arcangel’s electrifying chrome world.

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