Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by

Result #1

Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by vernacularly mimicking the tautological promise of cinema.The work consists of a Kaleid archivist/filmmaker and a video-visual artist; the archivist/filmmaker is himself the protagonist in a movie set. Curry is a quiet, Air-Time-friendly presence. He usually works from memory, using his hands to brush up on various artworks he sees or hears. He wears only a tiny, lightly clad body—an emotional and semiprecious innocence—and does not have much to say. His work has been a counterpoint to the amazing works of artists such as Alex Katz, Niele Toroni, and Larry Johnson. Curry has been known for his video installations based on similar events, in which the artist and a professor are both involved. The historical grounding of his work—more typical of the film-art tradition—also works to neutralize the historical image of the artist. Curry is an unknown artist and a somewhat unknown presence in the art world.The video Stomp This: A Sudden Death Interpretation of Music by James Mellan III, a melodramatic meditation on the death of Mellan III by various musical genres, was made during a visit to the contemporary art museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It was screened in the gallerys auditorium, facing a pair of ottomans. At one point, the video was interrupted by a shout from a female audience member: What are you doing?! As the interruption distracted the audience, the two artists were interrupted again by more shouting and then a simultaneous explosion of a large boom box. Each interruption triggered a different series of music, both synthesized and performed by the video artist. The video was accompanied by an electronic music composition by the film composer Dave Kleeblatt that chirped and repeated continuously while the sound track echoed throughout the auditorium.

Result #2

Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by urning art to offer a simulacrum of the nonart world.Curry has often sought to redefine non-art via his performances (often choreographed by the artist), which use space and language as interactive agents in which the viewer becomes part of a narrative and/or nonhuman system of transmission. A video installation with its accompanying text, Transmission: A Conversation with Maia in 21 Photos, 2017–18, plays out the techniques and cultural norms of the viewer through the processes of transmission itself. Each of the 21 shots is projected onto a wall of the gallery, and these texts can be read as a text for the installation itself: AN EXHIBITION, THE BOXER IN MEAN TIME, ARISTOTHEI, OBSERVATION, CONVERSATION, DISCO, PERCEPTION, PROJECTION. The texts are constructed from a series of mirror images of various letters, including a list of things a person looks at when she ponders about a text, words of utterance such as HOW DID I NOT KNOW IT WAS THE POWER OF GOD, AND HOW DID I NOT KNOW IT WAS THE POWER OF FAULTY, AND WHAT IF YOU DONT LIKE IT? Printed over each letter is a text that introduces the meaning of the word natural as it can be used to translate and interpret these texts. The site of transmission is a set of tables, which is filled with miscellaneous messages such as HOW DID I NOT KNOW I KNEW IT WAS A GOOD THING, HOW DID I NOT KNOW IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE, THATS THE POWER OF FAULTY, and HOW DID I NOT KNOW THAT THIS ONE WORKS FOR YOU TO SAY YES? If these texts seem like an attempt to communicate with the viewer through art, Curry provides a pedagogical version of communicative gestures. The tables have yellow plaster plates whose patterns change according to the number of text messages theyre read.

Result #3

Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by vernacularly reproducing the techniques of surrealism, and Curry refuses to use his own filmworks. His studio-generated animations, what his early-80s videos called meh, and are now increasingly considered derivative, were grotesque renditions of popular examples of low art, such as tattoo parlors, karaoke, and motorcycle racing. His pieces were juxtaposed with brand-new ones by film-makers including Alain Resnais and Brad Davis, and wall-sized projections of Kiefers theater pieces, among them the one that appears in the loop in the video accompanying the first two Kiefers of John Lennon. These murals were studded with a five-and-a-half-inch bullet hole made with aluminum fencing, hung from the ceiling to the floor.The idea behind these murals, however, is to create an uncanny space in which the mimes fall into their proper habitat. A briefcase stands at the ready, ready to dispense a quick prayer of peace. We stare out toward the wall and right into the interior space, not far from a large TV and a pile of twisted metal tubing that are also memorials to Kiefers effigy—splinters from one of his earlier films. The video, in which Curry demonstrates the full range of Kiefers behavior, is projected as a split screen onto the wall; as the door closes, the ominous buzzing of the video will be heard. When the door opens again, it will be black, and the moment has come to worship the memory of Kiefers passage from grace to filth.The curatorial idea is fully in sync with the art worlds wide-eyed readiness to embrace karaoke as a non-art form, and thus also a great reinvention of the gallery space. Curry isnt trying to become the Artist-in-Residence at the Whitney; hes just conducting his own show, a kind of deconstruction of the gallery.

Result #4

Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by vernacular invention as much as it suggests the future, suggesting that video art can remain a richly original way to experience the world.Curry is known for his collaborations with space aliens and for his films about long-lost civilizations, among them his 2006 presentation of footage taken by the European Space Agency and James Regners 1969 movie Reanimation, in which the aliens werehes up in public, transforming the audience into a mesmerized observer of mythical creatures. In the exhibition, the artist incorporated footage from his latest video, I Am Your Father, 2006, into earlier pieces by Brecht, Sonnier, and Moss. I Am Your Father includes six separate videos that record the artists interactions with various historical figures including the artist himself, an alien princess, a hypnotically hot-wired male model, and a crazily dirty dancer. The enigmatic me speaks in Brechtian terms, in German; the princess is given a monologue by the sculptural me who stands outside of the gallery and who wears a beautiful skull mask that simultaneously assumes a sexy pose and taunts the viewer with a series of indecipherable phrases. The film ends with the artist asking the enigmatic princess if she wants to help him with some question marks; the question marks are literal in the form of a piece of paper that is constantly pressed to Brechts forehead by a figure wearing a silver pin in the shape of a bicorne and mask. The mees are quiet, the princesss silent presence the thing you shouldnt ask, the artist comments.You may also have noticed the video projection one of two monitors was projecting onto the main room of the gallery. The two monitors showed a short black-and-white videotape of a mysterious woman walking through a forest. As the woman passes by a wall, she turns and appears to stare at it.

Result #5

Marxist historian Eric Hobshawm argued that the technology of cinema had superceded anything traditional art could accomplish. The latest show of multimedia art by Joshua Curry at Kaleid gallery tempts fate by ertaining a contemporary association between film and video. The presentation of a video projection and a fixed camera, the combination of mediums, and a feedback element of film-making, all contribute to a genre-defying, click-and-go autoproduct, in which images and sound obscure one another, often made via a photo release of the cameras shutter.Comprised of two video installations and six new works, the three-part artist book Recorded Lifes, titled after the artist William Cronin, focuses on the ways in which media inform and represent human activity and behavior. The display of Cronins 1974 mirror-cube, with eight green-framed mirrors resting on a pedestal in the center of a darkened room, suggests both a fixed, no-time perspective on the world and an artistic assertion of the prosaic existence of a green screen: a place of shelter and sustenance, an imagined arena in which the world may be played out. The reflective surfaces, which can be turned over and over again, offer up multiple perspectives of communication, but their varied transparency renders them all the more suspect. On the one hand, Cronin suggests the dissolution of any literal opposition between the media and the subject, so that both can exist in a repressed state. But on the other, Cronin refers to a distorted, self-reflexive world in which the subject—the viewer—is necessarily implicated. In Cronins world, the camera creates the perspective of our world; we are encouraged to perceive the self-referentiality of the perceived world.Curry goes on to describe Cronins situation in the video as one in which we have no idea what we are seeing, yet cannot escape being moved. Using a technological device that disfigures the viewer, Curry can prevent us from understanding what is happening around us, as if he were the sole user of the camera.