Petra Cortright at Team Gallery, Inc

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The art dads who thought artists interacting with youtube was revolutionary are back and they're interested in printing the computer in physical space. "Post-internet art" as become the Kinko's avant garde, all the substrates and inks you can print. The issues for Cortright, and the virtual progeny as whole, seem at odds with the demands of art which - despite all the Lippardian lip service otherwise - requires physical coins to be traded, the friction of so much "post-internet" art struggling to erupt the virtual as unique meat. The PR says as much: "Cortright’s challenge [...] is conveying the distinctly digital navigation of an endlessly evolving visual terrain resistant to a singular final state or form." Everything that makes virtual space unique is lost in order to give you, prospector, something to bite. The "diaphanous textiles" function only a primitive allusion to the high clouds of photoshop, like deploying a cardboard cut out replacing someone famous. Cortright's just straight digitally printed "unique" "paintings" are perhaps a more interesting tensioning of the digi-physical divide in that they don't metaphorize the digital, they just press print and call it painting, asking collectors to believe it.


See too: Petra Cortright at Société

Petra Cortright at Société



Like many today, Cortright deals with a subject whose new identity is expressed through the grate of the digital realm’s corporate packaging, pressed through ready-found effects and constructs for personalization.
Whereas others construct a stand-in (avatars) for the self - Atkin’s mask, Wolfson’s “Shylock” or punk, Stark’s ready-made avatars, or Trecartin's identity ad nauseum; Cortright's rejection of the third person instead uses the ubiqutious pseudo-self that most conform online, creating a sort of Sherman like paradox of inseparable artist/performer.
And while most of the digital-existentialists stand to thematize and problematize the new identities, those operating from internet modes seem not only indifferent to the skepticism of its promise, but also content with the play in the sandbox and to occasionally bring some of the found network detritus back into the gallery. It becomes a sort of Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art; updated as whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction. Taking pieces and artifacts of the internet into the gallery for its scrutinizing pleasure seems to miss the vast sea operating right now. At worst used by theorists to form a rational order, or theories of internet based upon these examples.
The allure of internet-platformed art comes again implicitly with the ideal of a merging of art and virtual-life. It is a throwback in the form of neo-60’s-happenings, performed on the new-found democratic platform of the a global everything-available network where finally everyone can see. But as Youtube’s “censorship” of Cortright’s early video shows, most of the internet cares nothing for art's particular interests and detournments. At a certain point the artworld has to acknowledge that merging of art and life can't be premised on the insertion of what it owns as art into life, but respecting what is outside of it, that as Youtube made clear, making no distinction between spam and art spam.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery , Rachel Rose at High Art