Saturday, April 25, 2020

Petra Cortright at Team Gallery, Inc


(link)

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