You had mentioned a sort of saturation of images — the insane amount of images we see or scroll through each day — and how you thought of these images as an intentional slowing of that consumption, at least for you to spend more time with them, and how the work also engaged a lot of the materials of advertising, prop styling, and
commercial image production.
In 2005, the artist opened lesser new york in her Williamsburg loft, which was a response to Greater New York (2005) but it was lesser; it was a greater response to the lesser limits of the art world that she saw reflected in PS1's concurrent survey; this lesser exhibit / installation was organized under the auspices of a «fia backström
production,» a lesser
production of curated ephemera such as press releases, invites, posters, and so on culled from found materials and the work of a greater local network of friends and peers; the lesser aesthetics of dejecta, pasted directly onto the walls, reflects a greater decorative pattern, not unlike Rorschach
images of a lesser art industry itself within a critique of a greater institutional relationship to art
production; as such, the lesser display of curated ephemera (from nonartists and artists alike) not only comments on the greater vortex of art and capital, but also serves as a lesser gesture toward something like a memorial wall, not unlike a collection of posters on the greater Berlin Wall, or a lesser improvisational 9 - 11 wall, or, more recently, a greater Facebook wall, or the lesser construction wall surrounding the Second Avenue gas explosion in the East Village, all pointing to a lesser memorial for the greater commodified institution of art consumption; whereas in Backström's lesser new york each move repels consumption by both the lesser value of the pasted paper and its repetition, which dispels the greater value of precious originals; so the act of reinstalling lesser new yorkten years later at Greater New York — the very institution that rejected her a decade earlier — speaks to the nefarious long arm of Capitalism that can morph into an owner of its own critique; so that lesser new york is greater than its initial critique, greater than a work of institutional critique: it is a continuous institutional relationship, a lesser critique that keeps on giving in its new contexts; the collective spirit of artists working together playfully is lesser, whereas the critique of how artists can imagine working alongside the institution is greater, or vice versa; the lesser gesture of a curated mixed - media installation in one's home with no clear identification and no
commercial validity becomes untethered when it is greater, and this particular lesser becomes greater in the Greater New York (2015) context; still, the instabilities of the organizing systems by Backström continue to put pressure on both the defining features of art
production in both the lesser context and the decade - later greater one; further, the greater question of what constitutes an art as a lesser art becomes a dizzying conundrum when the greater art institution frames the lesser to be greater, when the lesser is invested in its lesser relationship to the greater.
One of the most influential artists working with photography and the
production and display of
images, Christopher Williams» recent photographs reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of
commercial, industrial and instructional photography
Exploring the position of the female body in the history of digital
image technology and the labour and politics inherent within
commercial production, Cooper is interested in what new propositions of refusal, sabotage or autonomy this form of working might propose.
Here we return to Warhol's enduring aesthetic — the artist's concerns with death are again suppressed by that of celebrity, as we leave behind Warhol's obsessive electric chairs, or car crashes, and swiftly return to the artist's fascination with the mass
production of the
image, repetition, and
commercial cultural value.