The only joy I distinctly remember from 2006 is the joy of beating a timed test in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing not by holding 8 fingers over asdf jkl; in the home row as she told me to, but by speeding over the keys with thumbs and pointer fingers like I continue to do still. Having gone to middle school when computers still had floppy drives but we did not use floppy disks anymore, our computer class PCs were populated with those vaguely educational games for children: All the Right Type, Reader Rabbit, Math Blasters; software developed in the 80s and 90s and only marginally updated for an audience of ten-year-olds. There was a Barnyard themed one that I haven’t been able to track down despite hours of googling. While we remember the joy of computer classes, few of these computer games have held their place in our hearts like Kid Pix.
The success of the 1990s bitmap drawing program Kid Pix is predicated on two ideas: the program is easy for children to use, and the program is easy for the computer to execute. “Computers are designed to perform the same calculation over and over accurately. People who write programs to control these machines utilize this inherent talent,” write Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams, in their book Form + Code. Kid Pix manages to make the value of repetition in code valuable in the context of play as well. Reuse of the same line of code over and over again allows users an economical way to produce as many possible variations on an image in as little time as possible. A kid can stamp a strawberry 10,000 times in 10,000 different ways and arrive in so many different places.
A successful program uses this natural ability to the benefit of itself. It is in that same mode that Laura Owen’s eponymous mid-career presentation at the Whitney can often feel iterative. Owen’s economic use of repetition and reconfiguration is creatively useful and fruitful; this is obvious from the sheer amount of work on view.
Owens, who saw success on the west coast with poppy and pellucid paintings, a graduate of RISD and CalArts, here presents multiple bodies of work; paintings (ostensibly), featuring silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing, material exploration, replication, and redux. Owens is gluttonous in her use of source material; illustrations by and for children, greeting cards, clocks, bicycle wheels, fibrecraft paintings of the alphabet reminiscent of children's pseudo-educational room decor. Her 2014 painting, made for a past biennial and featuring the words “When you come to the end of the rope, make a knot, and hang on,” reads like an elementary school inspirational poster. She acts in the mode of pop-art, albeit a take on pop from the perspective of an early childhood educator: the physical and digital detritus of young life replacing images of celebrities and overt consumerism.
The Whitney, for its part, has installed much of Owens’ work so as to suggest the playfulness you might look for in the work; a series of 24 by 24-inch paintings hang at the very upper edges of walls, others are tucked into corners as if they’re playing hide and seek. But from an institution of their disposition, it feels condescending. An attempt at activating the gallery as space has, unfortunately, deactivated Owen's work, and, in fact, makes it actively challenging to take a good look at it. The paintings are hidden in plain sight, even when there is nothing else to look at. It reminds me of how art is hung at my house, and the houses of my friends and parents; haphazardly, in the odd small spreads of usable wall between the other inconvenient and nonsensical architectural features of the space. But attempts to bring these domestic stylings into the museum push it into the direction of an ersatz furniture showroom (replete with a few pieces of bedroom furniture, a collaboration with Jorge Pardo), a sterile space standing in for another actual, living space.
Rocketing upwards with a winter coat buffering human touch in an at-capacity elevator to the fifth floor takes you a break from this overstyled section of the exhibition. With a single full-room installation of 5 free-standing double-sided paintings, the work is front and centre. I wandered through these panels, trying to puzzle out some ideas about process and reproduction, to think through and trying to not think about why on earth everyone had immediately walked to the far end of the room and pulled out their cell phone. I finished weaving my way around like a peewee hockey player carefully navigating pylons and turned around to see, written across the 5 panels, visible only at that perspective in a child-friendly font: “There was a cat and an alien. They went to Antarctica. Then they teleported to the center of the earth. There they got 11,0000000 bombs and blew them up and turned earth.” The jokes on me.
The position of mimetic practice, of multi-faceted reference material, of overlapping reinterpretations of work, can, for the briefest moment, feel nearly genius. But it’s a very clever knock-knock joke. With each retelling, the joke is less and less funny. To a certain degree, the lack of editing in this show often leaves many of these repetitious paintings feeling algorithmic, rather than cohesive. Rather than a meditation on the productivity of rearrangement, they become exhaustively equivalent. Rather than paintings, they become stand-ins for painting. “A landscape,” writes Henri Berson in his book Laughter, “may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.” Owen’s show is suggestive of the presence of jokes, the presence of people, the presence of humanness, but, at the end of the day, feels like a collection of attempts at a joke, at humanity, by a very well designed program.
Work Smarter Not Harder: Laura Owens at The Whitney
March 2018
The only joy I distinctly remember from 2006 is the joy of beating a timed test in Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing not by holding 8 fingers over asdf jkl; in the home row as she told me to, but by speeding over the keys with thumbs and pointer fingers like I continue to do still. Having gone to middle school when computers still had floppy drives but we did not use floppy disks anymore, our computer class PCs were populated with those vaguely educational games for children: All the Right Type, Reader Rabbit, Math Blasters; software developed in the 80s and 90s and only marginally updated for an audience of ten-year-olds. There was a Barnyard themed one that I haven’t been able to track down despite hours of googling. While we remember the joy of computer classes, few of these computer games have held their place in our hearts like Kid Pix.
The success of the 1990s bitmap drawing program Kid Pix is predicated on two ideas: the program is easy for children to use, and the program is easy for the computer to execute. “Computers are designed to perform the same calculation over and over accurately. People who write programs to control these machines utilize this inherent talent,” write Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams, in their book Form + Code. Kid Pix manages to make the value of repetition in code valuable in the context of play as well. Reuse of the same line of code over and over again allows users an economical way to produce as many possible variations on an image in as little time as possible. A kid can stamp a strawberry 10,000 times in 10,000 different ways and arrive in so many different places.
A successful program uses this natural ability to the benefit of itself. It is in that same mode that Laura Owen’s eponymous mid-career presentation at the Whitney can often feel iterative. Owen’s economic use of repetition and reconfiguration is creatively useful and fruitful; this is obvious from the sheer amount of work on view.
Owens, who saw success on the west coast with poppy and pellucid paintings, a graduate of RISD and CalArts, here presents multiple bodies of work; paintings (ostensibly), featuring silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing, material exploration, replication, and redux. Owens is gluttonous in her use of source material; illustrations by and for children, greeting cards, clocks, bicycle wheels, fibrecraft paintings of the alphabet reminiscent of children's pseudo-educational room decor. Her 2014 painting, made for a past biennial and featuring the words “When you come to the end of the rope, make a knot, and hang on,” reads like an elementary school inspirational poster. She acts in the mode of pop-art, albeit a take on pop from the perspective of an early childhood educator: the physical and digital detritus of young life replacing images of celebrities and overt consumerism.
The Whitney, for its part, has installed much of Owens’ work so as to suggest the playfulness you might look for in the work; a series of 24 by 24-inch paintings hang at the very upper edges of walls, others are tucked into corners as if they’re playing hide and seek. But from an institution of their disposition, it feels condescending. An attempt at activating the gallery as space has, unfortunately, deactivated Owen's work, and, in fact, makes it actively challenging to take a good look at it. The paintings are hidden in plain sight, even when there is nothing else to look at. It reminds me of how art is hung at my house, and the houses of my friends and parents; haphazardly, in the odd small spreads of usable wall between the other inconvenient and nonsensical architectural features of the space. But attempts to bring these domestic stylings into the museum push it into the direction of an ersatz furniture showroom (replete with a few pieces of bedroom furniture, a collaboration with Jorge Pardo), a sterile space standing in for another actual, living space.
Rocketing upwards with a winter coat buffering human touch in an at-capacity elevator to the fifth floor takes you a break from this overstyled section of the exhibition. With a single full-room installation of 5 free-standing double-sided paintings, the work is front and centre. I wandered through these panels, trying to puzzle out some ideas about process and reproduction, to think through and trying to not think about why on earth everyone had immediately walked to the far end of the room and pulled out their cell phone. I finished weaving my way around like a peewee hockey player carefully navigating pylons and turned around to see, written across the 5 panels, visible only at that perspective in a child-friendly font: “There was a cat and an alien. They went to Antarctica. Then they teleported to the center of the earth. There they got 11,0000000 bombs and blew them up and turned earth.” The jokes on me.
The position of mimetic practice, of multi-faceted reference material, of overlapping reinterpretations of work, can, for the briefest moment, feel nearly genius. But it’s a very clever knock-knock joke. With each retelling, the joke is less and less funny. To a certain degree, the lack of editing in this show often leaves many of these repetitious paintings feeling algorithmic, rather than cohesive. Rather than a meditation on the productivity of rearrangement, they become exhaustively equivalent. Rather than paintings, they become stand-ins for painting. “A landscape,” writes Henri Berson in his book Laughter, “may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.” Owen’s show is suggestive of the presence of jokes, the presence of people, the presence of humanness, but, at the end of the day, feels like a collection of attempts at a joke, at humanity, by a very well designed program.
Work Smarter Not Harder: Laura Owens at The Whitney
March 2018