Avery Singer at Stedelijk Museum

(link)

Remember that scene in the Matrix when, readying for climax, they enter the blank void of the virtual and conjure a Babelinian library of weapons? Whatever the power of its virtual blank slate - despite its seeming infinince - it couldn't conjure a rifle outside of what any American police force would already own, revealing severe limitations of its virtuality to the pre-existing commodities already found in its prison-like realm. Whether this digital limitation was an artifact of its virtual script, or the inability of the actor/agents to themselves think outside their commodic prison* it showcases an inherent issue with the power of the virtual as still limited to human ability to think outside itself.

The virtual "White Room" is obviously a metaphor for a blank canvas.
This impotence in manifestability still inherent to primitive modes as it irrupts again in new technologies.

Like Guyton, the digital expression comes with the promise of fuller possibility that anything thought can be rendered, that the blank white space can be filled with anything you can dream, printed direct from our subconcious but reveals our dreams to be mostly the same but with some effects added.

*and thus tragically reveal themselves to be stuck in their own learned form of The Matrix's prison, i.e. never truly free having already internalized the dominant order.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Avery Singer at Hammer Museum

(link)

Money and value are often conflated, as institutional credence incommensurate with aesthetic interest, on which Singer's meteoric rise could be conspiratorially stated, that sometimes automations in markets encounter feedback loops of marked signals and values exponentiate. This is to say let's not yet make much of the rise. Singer's paintings are fine, just fine, their biggest asset, perfect productions - obvious in hindsight and brilliantly able to recoup near any critique as symptoms of the increasingly digital world they represent safely - expressions of 2012's much talked about "New Aesthetic" documenting "the increasing appearances of latent digital mechanisms within the real world" which is here the google freeware (created to model and represent 3-D space) painted as representations (become representations of our digital representations then) and which Singer's painting do represent well, that particular weight digital objects hold entirely in their surface and the weight of rendered light they are, after all, realist. Again it's that reptilian pleasure of seeing something painted, rendered, we get representation back but now with the value added of a moral (which the institutional artworld secretly loves, gives reason to text), cautionary tales of spooky new digital take over as dutch still lifes, vanities, memento moris of everything beautiful mechanized and produced, even the artists and art, which we know but now they get to tell us.


See too: Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium