Review | World Wide Webb is a...

Generated on 2020-10-23 09:51:38

Result #1

The movie premillennial now comes to an end, but we still have an opportunity to live with the past in art, literature, and video. We can all share in our memories of the decade. A neighbor of mine recalls the night before my birthday when it was clear that the crowd of people outside the windows had just witnessed a giant drop of rain. He remembers being shocked that he had never seen so much excitement in the streets of Pittsburgh before. More recently, he saw the tourists who congregated at the Carnegie on my birthday. They have a feeling that we are now entering a golden age of tourism and that they can now stay in Pittsburgh while I was in New York. With this information, one can move to speculate about the extent to which the present is just the background of the future.”Erika Jorgensen is the Curator of Video Culture at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

Result #2

My answer is no, but a poignant one. To paraphrase Francis Picabia: Here is a future, or, for this exhibition, here is a future-past in a presentable form, in a diaristic form. This is a future-past in the sense of being present and now. This show is a teardrop of despair, a cross between a book and a teapot, an apple and an eye, and a burning bush. In the work of Coronavirus, the present is destroyed by the past; it is burned out like the house of the spender. The future is accepted as a virtual void, a virtual desolation, in that it has no place in our lives, because it is either the past, the present, or the future. Coronavirus establishes a sequence of tectonic plates, an immense, tightly organized wound that he is helping to thread, which would have a chance of breakage. The ruins of our future have been built in our imaginations. It is on a future level that we are about to lose. Now the dark winter of our past and the purgatory of our present are the ruins of our past, and on a present level that is becoming ever more remote. Its a gruesome book, and a well-drawn one at that. Of course, its a book thats been used and is still being used.The temporal horizon of the word game seems to have been also constructed, as well as the imaginary horizon that Webb establishes. Our present is the one we have just come from, the one that preceded our birth in the present. We are not sure what our birth meant, but what the future may be, or what we are going to be, even in our twenty-first year.

Result #3

With that in mind, we might wonder whether this hasnt also been foretold. And the fact that a show as if it were a retrospective is always a painful reminder that everything that we have loved, everything we fear, is going to vanish.There is an unusually severe problem with this decision: Webb must be concerned with the potential for his work to pass itself off as merely an ironic stance. He would be better served by pulling back and looking carefully at the process and effects of making art as a possible form of living rather than working in it as a way to suppress memory and forget. He can use this show as a launching pad to think about the transition from the past to the future.

Result #4

Webb explains that the original video games, such as Super Mario Brothers, are about hope, and this is what the artist is asking his audience to do, in the video Version of the Legend: Wario Land (all works 2000), a still from which is projected an English version of the game. The video pans out to an explosion on the horizon, accompanied by a chiptune-heavy instrumental, and on to an unobstructed shot of the protagonists ballooning in midair. (The end of the title is a pun on Mario, the hippest of pop icons.) The point of departure is an unexpected instant of success, the only game in a series that for more than forty years has been matched by the music that accompanies it. As Webb reminds us, The game is about hope.

Result #5

World Wide Webb is a virtual gameworld, originally created by Thomas Webb for his solo exhibition, ... [+] WORLD WIDE WEBB If you’re of a certain generation, what greets you next will feel instantly nostalgic, evoking (too many) afternoons spent playing games like Zelda or Pokémon in the ’80s or ’90s, replete with 8-bit graphics and chiptune score. Per a statement around the launch of Hopeless Nostalgia: “The cultural theorist Mark Fisher states that the future has been lost because we keep returning to the past and wallow in nostalgia when trying to develop concepts for the future. Due to Coronavirus not only the future but also the present have been cancelled. Webb lets us play with our fascination for the past by imitating an ’80s video game aesthetic. This old technology is the starting point for [Webb] to imagine a possible near future.”As the aural structure of Coronavirus suggests, you could call us a game. In the words of Ross Bleckners retrospective, We watch and pass through it, giving it the power to haunt us. For better or for worse, he has been unable to get his mind around video games.After all, video games arent the only games in the world. Digital art is by no means representative. Yet even this shows main attraction, Coronavirus, 1981, a cartoony 1970s video with all its brain-teasing and bright colors, was an entirely appropriate candidate for the gallery, since it documents the initial step in the creation of the video games that are the central engines for these spectacles.The video was made by an elderly woman named Eve Hartley, who had some of the video games in her possession. Hartley was a death-addict who compulsively played them, and she became a passive observer of their participation. Her first impulse was to render them illegible, to make them a shadow of themselves. As the video begins, Eve fills her apartment with boxes filled with the paraphernalia of everyday life, from kitchen workbenches and the timecards that pile up on the kitchen counter. As the video progresses, the boxes and timecards merge into a solid, vaguely impressionistic maze, as if within an empty room, and we see Eve in a fetal position, disembodied, in the middle of a game. In the end, Eve dies of her addiction.After the video ends, we see a toylike computer-game character, the titular hero, carrying a banner and an emblazoned sign. A disembodied voice says, Now its a part of the future. Now its your only chance to win. When you lose, youre out. The hero applauds. As the video ends, we see a clip of Eve in her apartment, still smoking a giant time-machine.