A Macrocosmic Zero is the title of Tivon Rice’s second solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project in Seattle, on view through March 27.  Rice is a new media artist whose tactile approach seeks to present video as an object of use, and to integrate the observer as participant.  The current exhibition fills the front room of the gallery, a windowless space with concrete floors.  It is lit by two bright plasma screens and fluorescent bulbs suspended vertically from  wooden scaffolding. The bulbs sweep on and off in patterned surges of blue-white with a series of clicks and gentle hums.  A motor turns on and a central camera pans the room.  As the camera goes over a screen and films an image produced a few moments ago, a slow feedback happens, layering and obscuring the present space where the viewer stands, and also the viewer if he has caught a glance at the camera lens.  Rice’s video system is performing it’s routine.

The whole set is programmed for a unique experience for each viewer—a lighting display that doesn’t repeat for 18 days, a delay between the live feed and playback, a robotic camera that responds to motion, and sound feedback that swells, but never explodes.  A “finished” or composite image runs at the back of the exhibition.  This view allows spectators to see who enters the gallery and how others interact with the work.

The use of lights is at least a pragmatic choice, a basic component in office buildings and modern living.  Their stark whiteness casts no “cinematic” shadow on its subjects, and in video perfection, imperfections of the subject are clearly and initially displayed.  Through layering “real” images, subjects become formal elements of flat light. The macroscopic view of this work is what is observable to the human eye, and as the title suggests, this view is fleeting. As the art progresses, it periodically interrupts what has been displayed to return to “zero.”  The art is the mechanical and sensory performance, rather than what is recorded.

Rice also presents four video portraits that act as sketches or versions of the installation.  A face is seen in each one that the viewer continues to look for and find through swirling frames of mutation.  A final piece, the smallest in the exhibit, is a CRT monitor taken out of television presenting a static image of the artist.  For the amount of time in its title Self Portrait (3 days, 2 months, 10 days), an image of the artist’s face was lit on a small monitor.  The result is a “pixel burn,” an image made by exploiting the weakness of the display.  As it stays lit all over to show its ghost, it is undergoing its own decay as long as it is displayed.

Exerpt from 3 Studies for a Portrait of Bronwyn Lewis, 2010

Tivon Rice lives and works in Seattle, WA where is pursuing a doctoral degree at University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS).  He obtained his master’s degree from UW in 2006 and has been a Graduate Instructor there since 2007.  For his bachelor’s studies, he attended University of Colorado, graduating in 2000 with two degrees in Electronic Media and Sculpture.  He has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries in the Pacific Northwest. His work is in private collections and his collaborative video of abstracted shaving cream with Jeffry Mitchell entitled Panda was acquired by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.  He has been in group exhibitions across the nation including the CUE Art Foundation in New York, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.  His work was included in 1000 Days at the Scion Installation Space in Los Angeles, curated by DailyServing.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

Josh Harris welcomed the new millennium from the basement of a New York bunker. He was surrounded by a posse of jumpsuit-clad creatives, and, at one point, all of them watched as a naked man whipped a barely dressed woman around underneath a running shower head. The scene made about as much physical sense as Bernini’s The Rape of Prosperina—the bodies twisted perpetually but never quite met in the way you’d expect them to. Harris and his companions watched the crude assault as though it were on television.

One of the first entrepreneurs to channel the potential of internet TV, Harris used a significant portion of his dot-com  fortune to build the bunker, which he called Capsule Hotel and filled with over 100 mini living pods, a shooting gallery, interrogation room, banquet hall, bar, and obscene number of cameras and video monitors. By the time New Years’ Eve arrived, 150 people had lived in the Hotel for nearly a month.

Residents (including Alanna Heiss, P.S.1’s haughtily fearless matron) submitted to constant surveillance and interrogation in exchange for admittance. Not only were members of the panoptical community watched, but they could watch one another by tuning in to any channel on any of the readily-available monitors.

"We Live in Public," Film Still, 2008.

“Everything is free except the video we capture of you. That, we own,” says Harris in We Live in Public, an unpretentiously efficient documentary released on DVD this week. It’s a telling quote because it suggests that the opposite of free is not costliness but being owned, and it pushes Harris’ experiment out of the realm of asset-swapping and into soul-selling.

Directed by Ondi Timoner, We Live in Public follows Harris through the birth of his dot-com fortune and his subsequent series of ahead-of-their-time media experiments. Harris plays villain and hero, acting as a self-appointed artist-prophet who exploits people’s penchant for attention and thus exposes a future in which “we’re going to increasingly have our lives exposed in very personal and intimate ways and we’ll want it to happen.” Chuck Klosterman would almost certainly call Harris “advanced.”

Not long after Quiet, the 24/7 bunker surveillance venture, was shut down by the NYPD  in early January, 2000, Harris invited his girlfriend Tanya to move in with him. Together, they went public. They installed nearly thirty web cameras in their home, including one in the toilet, and streamed their whole life onto the web. When they fought, they would run immediately to their computers, to see which of them had the allegiance of chat room regulars.

It ended badly, of course. After the dot-com crash, in which Harris’ fortune all but disappeared, Harris ended his relationship with Tanya (later he would call her a “pseudo-girlfriend,” though she claims they loved each other) and pulled the plug on public living.

As the rest of the world caught on to online chatting and video streams, Harris pulled away, initially living on a rural apple farm and later disappearing to Ethiopia to evade creditors.

Gustavo Artigas, "Vote for Demolition," 2009. Courtesy LAX Art.

Exposure doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Now the well-trafficked terrain of mainstream websites and reality TV, it often seems contrived and redundant when it appears in art. Many of the best artist-driven social experiments I’ve encountered this year refuse to invaded peoples’ privacy and, as a result, they seem perfunctory, even impersonal.

In Vote for Demolition, artist Gustavo Artigas invited people to vote for which over-priced, over-sized Los Angeles’ building most deserved the wrecking ball. The voting booths at LAX Art were perfectly spaced, giving voters plenty of room to deliberate, and Artigas asked for no personal information. The “surveillance” in John Baldessari’s recent exhibition is carefully unobtrusive–a camera watches you watching art, and, while art-viewing may be a genuinely intimate experience, it’s one that tends to play out in public anyway. Baldessari’s experiment feels more like documentation than invasion. Its aloofness makes the loneliness of experience painfully evident; no live streams or chat rooms can combat the fact that, most of the time, we navigate the world alone with our bodies. But maybe that’s okay.

When Harris moved to his apple farm, an interviewer asked him, “Are you a lonely man?”

He responded, “The implication when you say ‘am I a lonely man,’ is that it’s worse than being together. It’s just a different state of being, and one I’m quite comfortable with.”

Marilyn Minter, Crystal Swallow (2006), Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein to The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin

Now showing through April 25^th at The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is the group exhibition Desire. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, Desire features fifty works from an international grouping of contemporary artists working in a variety of media. The concept of the exhibition is to present the many ways artists have explored the notion of desire and its many facets within their work. The thought of this concept being visually displayed is tantalizing, yet, it is only with the multiple video works that the exhibition’s guard comes down. Isaac Julien’s Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), a video collaboration with the choreographer Javier de Frutos, is a stunning visualization of the yearning of two cowboys “dancing” around their mutual attraction and the stigma that often comes along with it.  Cauleen Smith’s Elsewhere, is a sensual film of a woman standing absolutely still while another person slowly unravels her sweater by a single thread.

Amy Globus, Electric Sheep (2001 - 2002), Blanton Museum of Art, Purchase through the generosity of the 2004 Blanton Contemporary Circle

However, it is Amy Globus’s video installation Electric Sheep (2001-2002) that will make the viewer blush. Set to Emmy Lou Harris’ rendition of Neil Young’s, Wrecking Ball, a large octopus is filmed in slow motion as it makes its way from one confined space to another. While watching the piece the viewer is likely to feel all the accoutrements of desire simultaneously: longing, lust, sensuality, fantasy, rejection, sexual identity, passion, intimacy etc. Also not to be missed is Mads Lynnerup’s Untying a Shoe with an Erection (2003), a tongue-in-cheek performance of presumably a man untying his shoe with his penis. The exhibition is able to transcend being merely an exercise of artists implementing the theme of desire, perhaps a bit unwittingly, with the dominance of these video works. The question that lingers long after leaving the museum is exactly how much of a continued role visual media plays in defining our collective idea of desire.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, housed in a recently completed two building complex, is one of the foremost university art museums in the country. The museum’s collection is the largest and most comprehensive in Central Texas and comprises more than 18,000 works. It is recognized for its European paintings, modern and contemporary American and Latin American art, and an encyclopedic collection of prints and drawings.

Still image from Erik Levine's Grip, 2005

As we witnessed over the past two weeks at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, athletes are under perpetually extreme pressure. During practice and performance—be it game, match, run or race—athletes in all sports carry the weight of victory on their shoulders, which of course is why the best of them are so uniquely admired.

Currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is a presentation of Erik Levine’s 2005 large-scale video projection, Grip, which the museum has recently acquired. Grip, a two-channel DVD in an edition of six, deals with the complexities of athleticism, as it features teenage boys playing tennis. The kaleidoscopic images in the two-channel video bend inward and out in a hypnotizing way as well as showing silent side by side shots of the young players in various states of sportsmanship on and off the court.

At first the quick-cuts of boys at play make up a montage that looks almost like a Gatorade commercial, but the clips quickly segue from displays of athleticism to the torture of self-punishment as boys slap their foreheads, kick their rackets, and fall to the green court on their knees in defeat. One boy shouts, “I quit tennis, man,” as he throws the racket to the ground, with not so much rage as a sense of what seems to be complete despair.

Many of us would argue that, within reason, the pressures of competition help to build character in adolescents, even if the athletes never go on to compete professionally, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking to watch a teenager bury his face in a towel to hide his tears after losing a match. However, too much of this mounted pressure can be dangerous for athletes of this age. As Erik Levine asserts in his discussion of the piece, “This despair can lead to extreme expressions of anger and frustration at a time in their lives when perspective can often be elusive, and alludes to the startling and revealing analogous microcosm for life outside the demarcations and boundaries of the playing field.”

Grip will be on view at MCASD’s La Jolla location through March 21, 2010. If you can’t make it to San Diego by then, you can view the video online here.

Erik Levine was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in both New York and Boston. He is an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a recipient of multiple Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant awards, National Endowment for the Arts grant awards, New York Foundation for the Arts awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

Whitechapel Gallery in London is currently showing Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street).   This project addresses concepts of individual and community identity by revisiting the tradition of public street parties and festivals popular in 20th century London.  Drawing inspiration from these past events captured in newsreels and photographs, Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party.

Manchot realized Celebration by working closely with Cyprus Street inhabitants and organizing a party in this Bethnal Green, East London neighborhood.  The artist captured gathered residents as they posed for a group portrait using 35mm film – a medium with historic connection to old newsreels.  Blending photography and film, Manchot used a single tracking shot that pivoted to create a comprehensive, durational group portrait.

Melanie Manchot:  Celebration (Cyprus Street) also includes  photographic portraits of individual Cyprus Street residents.  Manchot’s new film and photographic work is juxtaposed with archival footage selected by the artist of historic street celebrations such as peace parties that took place in 1919 and 1945.  This arrangement allows the gallery visitor to view the changing faces of communities that have coalesced around London’s streets over time.  Most importantly, Manchot’s work reveals the diversifying effects of global migrations on a particular contemporary community.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is exhibited as a part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Education Programme.  It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and was funded by Film London (Digital Archive Film Fund) and Arts Council, England.

Melanie Manchot lives and works in London.  She is represented by Goff + Rosenthal in New York.  Manchot earned an MFA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and works in photography, film and video.

Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street) will remain at Whitechapel through 14 March 2010.

Western Exhibitions in Chicago is currently presenting The Power of Selection (Part I), the first in a series of three exhibitions organized by Chicago-based artist and independent curator Ryan Travis Christian. The exhibition, which features works by Alika Cooper, Mike Rea, Allison Schulnik, Marissa Textor, and Eric Yahnker, loosely explores the idea of contemporary figuration. Works in the exhibition range from a massive anthropomorphic wooden sculpture by Mike Rea, who also exhibited in DailyServing.com’s 1000 DAYS exhibition in Los Angeles last May, to new video work by recent DailyServing.com interviewee, Allison Schulnik.

The exhibition series is designed to bring new creative talent to the Chicago area by artist who rarely exhibit in that region. Curator Ryan Travis Christian works diligently, as he has noted, “to increase the circulation of contemporary artwork”, not only in Chicago, but also as a correspondent for Fecalface.com and through his daily artist selection through Facebook and Beautiful/Decay.com. The young artist and curator has organized recent exhibition including West, Wester, Westest at FFDG, San Francisco, SPORTS at Synchronicity, Los Angeles, and Control C, Control V at EbersMoore Gallery in Chicago.

Marc Horowitz, a self-described “maximalist,” has permeated American culture with his socially-oriented projects and playful enterprises. His work includes video, drawing, cultural experiments, and the dynamic use of networks like twitter and youtube. In 2004, while working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326″ on a dry erase board that was included in their fall catalog. He received over 30,000 requests for dinner dates, and began driving around the country to dine with people. The National Dinner Tour garnered attention from numerous press outlets; Horowitz appeared on The Today Show and was named one of People Magazine’s 50 Hottest Bachelors in June 2005.

In 2009, Horowitz embarked on The Marc Horowitz Signature Series, for which he signed his name on a map of the United States and drove that route, stopping at 19 towns along the way. He documented these adventures in short webisodes. In Nampa, Idaho, Horowitz established the first Anonymous Semi-Nudist Colony (complete with complimentary jean shorts and ski masks). In Battle Mountain, Nevada, he pitched an idea to local politicians that involved changing the name of the town to something less pugnacious, suggesting the gentler alternative “Tender Pie Hill.” Other notable projects include Google Maps Road Trip and Talkshow 247.

In December 2009, Horowitz participated in a panel discussion as part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Video Art Program, “Video Art and Mainstream Distribution,” curated by New York’s Creative Time. Short films from The Marc Horowitz Signature Series were shown prior to the discussion. DailyServing’s Rebekah Drysdale was able to ask him a few questions about his past projects and future pursuits during an interview conducted over Skype in December.

Rebekah Drysdale:  At your discussion in Miami, you mentioned you studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute after leaving the business world. Do you think the tools you are using now, such as YouTube and Google maps, are the new media for this generation of artists?

Marc Horowitz: I think so. Painting and drawing will never die, obviously, but with the advent of the internet and the accessibility of video and broadcasting, I think that there is going to be such an insurgence of artists using these media.

RD: Your work engages the public, but seems very personal as well. What is the most influential encounter you have had in the making of your films?

MH: Omigod, there are so many of them!

RD: Can you pick one or two?

MH: The most memorable project is probably one you have never seen before. It was one I did while at the Art Institute, called Free Ideas. I went down to the corner of Market and Powell streets in San Francisco, where they turn the cable car. There are all kinds of tourists and homeless people there, the Seven Galaxies guy, preaching about the end of the world, religious people, preaching about God, and then there was me. I had two blank white sandwich boards that I made. I was handing out blank sheets of paper saying “free ideas.” People were confused. Most of the business people didn’t want to deal with me. One guy came up to me and said I was doing God’s work, for whatever reason. Several tourists thought that I was always there and wanted to have their pictures taken with me. Homeless people wanted me to write letters to their family members, so we would, and when we were done, they wouldn’t have their address. Kids wanted to have paper airplane throwing contests. I honestly think that project was what got me started in most everything I’m doing now.

RD: How did Free Ideas influence your later works?

MH: It was just taking such a simple idea as a blank sheet of paper and putting yourself out there in the world with that one element and then seeing what happens. I think that notion informed a lot of my projects after that. The Dinner Tour is the simple idea of dinner, at its least common denominator. Driving your signature across the United States is just a signature, something we use everyday. The Google Maps Road Trip was me and my friend wanting to take a simple road trip together, but not having the time or money, so we had to do it virtually.

RD: Tell me more about the experience and execution of the Google Maps Road Trip.

MH: The Google Maps Road Trip was a fascinating way of seeing America. It was also a really great way to get to know Peter (Baldes). In 2003, he e-mailed me saying I should have a blog. I had no idea who he was and why he was contacting me. Nevertheless, I immediately called him up because he put his phone number in the e-mail. We talked for a bit and he seemed nice enough, so we loosely kept in touch. I didn’t actually meet Peter in person until last year at a friend’s wedding. So all in all, we had only spent about twelve hours together in-real-life before we executed GMRT, and then we shared 40+ hours together “driving” across the country virtually. For me, it was like the Dinner Tour, except I got to know a single person, Peter, much more in depth.

The technical aspects of the project get a little complicated, but basically we left my house in LA and began driving together to Pete’s place in Richmond exclusively on Google Maps. For nine straight days, we “virtually drove” across the country by zooming in all the way on Google Maps and continuously pressing the Google Maps arrow keys eastward. We broadcast the entire experience live on googlemapsroadtrip.com. This meant that folks were able to not only see and hear us as we traveled, but also join us in a real-time chat room. Just think of it as an invitation for someone to hop in the backseat and ride along with us for part of the adventure.

RD: It sounds like your interaction with Peter during the Google Maps Road Trip was similar to what travel buddies may experience on a real cross country road trip. Do you think virtual travel will become more popular?

MH: Google Maps Road Trip is very lo-fi and basic. I would love to see it be implemented in schools. You could have an American fourth grade class travel around Europe, and (time zones permitting) they could travel with European students. They could go back and forth and talk about the things that are local to them. With the accessibility of Flickr photos, YouTube, and Panoramio (Google’s photo program), you can see all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise see. You can even bring up peoples’ live broadcasts while you are traveling. So, yeah I definitely think it is the start of something.

RD: In terms of your creative process, it seems that projects like The National Dinner Tour or the Marc Horowitz Signature Series would require much more planning than something live like the virtual road trip. Do you prefer to work with a plan or broadcast live?

MH: The Dinner Tour involved a serious amount of logistical planning more than anything else. Getting places on time, setting up dinner dates, etc. And I had no help. It was just a one man army. But that was a not-for-broadcast type of project. It was more experiential. Then I did the Signature Series, which was highly planned. A lot of it was written. We had to have all of the props, the locations secured, etc. It was a different way of working for me, but I really enjoyed it. Through all of the planning, there was still a lot of room for chance because we were doing the project in public, and in that way it felt very improvisational, like my previous works.

After that, I did Talkshow 247, where I broadcast myself live for three months, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on talkshow247.com. This project about destroyed me. There was always a live audience chatting away, commenting on my every action. It made me feel like I constantly had to be entertaining an audience that wasn’t even physically there. I really just wanted to live my life, but it became addictive to look at the chat and see what the audience was saying, and then do things to make my life more exciting. I didn’t really like that. So, to answer the question, I would much rather do some more planned out projects in the future, like the Signature Series. That is the direction I want to head with these projects.

RD: What type of work do you show in galleries?

MH:  I had some shows in Europe that were mostly drawings and sculptures because it is really hard to sell video art. It’s almost impossible. At some point, you have to make a product if you want to make a living as an artist, which is weird, you know? I did a show in Italy, called More Better. In it, I had made a drawing on how to make a helicopter out of a disassembled brick house and GMC truck. Really futile stuff, like a remote control bearskin rug. I made a suit of armor out of kids’ shin guards that is designed for people with a fear of sharp objects who are on a budget. Also included was The Tragedy Car Series, drawings of cars dedicated to terrible moments in history. For example, The Titanic Car.  The drawings are interesting to me because I can really go way far out there, without actually having to execute these proposals. For a show I had at Nuke Gallery in Paris, I did a series called At Least You Don’t Have it This Bad. One of the drawings is a guy with circular saws for hands, and he’s trying to eat chicken McNuggets. That stuff is more fantasy-based. It’s really one big joke, they’re one liners. I like that.

RD: What are you working on now?

MH: I’m about to launch a new project called The Advice of Strangers. I’ve been working on it for about a year, but haven’t told anyone about it yet. Basically folks will be able to vote online on all my life decisions, small to large. Should I comfort the girl across from me who is crying? Do I tell my mom she should work out? Should I eat the noodle that fell on the floor that my roommate jokingly offered me? Should I start looking for a new place to live cause my landlord is an asshole? Do I move in with my girlfriend? Each decision will have a time constraint depending on the magnitude of the choice. And when the poll closes, I’ll post photo and/or video documentation of what happened as a result of the poll so people can see how their vote has effected my life.

The website for the project is www.theadviceofstrangers.com. If you are interested in participating, please check the site for the launch date.

RD: Your work certainly has a refreshingly witty appeal. Is there one last thing you would like DailyServing readers to know about you or your practice?

MH: A big component of my work is my blog, www.ineedtostopsoon.com. I am always posting fresh stuff there. Another thing that I am really into is Twitter. I’m so addicted to it. I’m using it as sort of a diary! You can follow me at www.twitter.com/marchorowitz.