JON KESSLER
乔恩·凯斯勒
존 케슬 러
ジョン·ケスラー
Джон Кесслер
The Web
source: blogart21org
Jon Kessler has built a remarkable career out of rather clunky mechanized sculptures. A 1996 Guggenheim Fellow and a professor in Columbia University’s School of the Arts since 1994, Mr. Kessler has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1986), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1991), and P.S. 1 in New York (2005), to name but a few. Kessler’s art often balances dark themes and political subject matter with a wry humor and mesmerizing modes of presentation. In 2009, for example, he debuted Kessler’s Circus, a video sculpture that the Deitch Projects press release noted at the time “depicts the American military-industrial complex as macabre circus.”
In The Web, Mr. Kessler’s latest work currently on view at the Swiss Institute in New York City, the mediated scenes of modern warfare of Kessler’s Circus have been exchanged for the sublime spectacle of consumer culture. Kessler turns to contemporary visual culture, and specifically Apple Inc., to examine the impact of popular and commercial imagery and products on society’s desires and collective psyche.
The Web is a colorful, kinetic installation filled with whirling objects and brightly lit computer screens housed within a sprawling wooden construction. Kessler has mounted iPads, iPhones, and other Apple hardware throughout the installation, while surveillance cameras rotate back and forth on mechanized mounts. The quiet hum of the machinery is occasionally punctuated by the iconic sound of an Apple computer’s startup chime played over loudspeakers.
A variety of security cameras positioned throughout the installation—including tiny spy-cams held by lifelike disembodied hands—stream real-time footage across the network of monitors and screens situated throughout the installation, where they mix with prerecorded imagery of earlier visitors and footage culled from commercial advertising. Visitors can also download an iPhone app while in the exhibition space that will upload the images from their phone onto surrounding monitors. The brightly lit screens and banks of stacked television monitors create a kaleidoscope of video imagery, and visitors could certainly be forgiven if they at first mistake The Web for a fun, interactive tribute to Apple.
Before long, however, Kessler’s mechanized sculptural environment devolves into a technological hall of mirrors, as the montage of live and taped video produces a confusing loop of people observing themselves and others while they too are watched. As images of people no longer physically present in the exhibition space appear on the screens alongside those who still are, one struggles to keep track of what is and is not happening in real time. It can be a somewhat bewildering and even a bit disorienting experience as the installation presents and re-presents live and recorded video feeds, with little differentiation between the two (fittingly, one section of the sculptural installation is titled “Infinite Regress”). What is more, commercials for iPads and iPhones play on monitors wherein you see a live shot of yourself on the screens of the Apple products in the advertisement.
Adding to The Web’s hall-of-mirrors effect, visitors peer into different sections of the installation through cutouts of computer and iPad screens that Kessler has presumably culled from Apple advertisements and product packaging. In other words, objects of cultural consumption—commodities—often literally frame the visitor’s visual consumption.
Within The Web’s restless visual field visitors encounter on three different occasions a man lounging in a hammock. Dubbed the “Global Village Idiot,” this animatronic figure, whose features are based on Kessler’s own, relaxes as the security cameras spin to and fro and computer monitors flicker with endless streams of images around him. He has a long beard and is dressed in what might be called typical “hipster” attire: a brown zip-up hoodie with “BROOKLYN” written across the front, olive-drab cargo pants and a tattered pair of converse all-star sneakers without laces. One “Global Village Idiot” swipes through images from the surveillance cameras on his iPad while another FaceTimes on his MacBook with any visitors peering into an iPhone located in a far corner of the gallery. The third figure, tucked away in the back of the installation, holds his iPhone to his ear with one hand while masturbating with the other.
The “Global Village Idiot” has been a recurring figure in Kessler’s work for some years now. The moniker combines “village idiot” with Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “Global Village,” which McLuhan coined in the early 1960s to describe the integrated, global audience resulting from the instantaneous worldwide reach of new electronic technologies. In conjoining “village idiot” and “global village,” Kessler apparently does not share McLuhan’s optimism about technology’s capacity to produce a globally unified community.
By mobilizing the conventional signs of what is popularly known as a “hipster”—a term generally used to identify a subcultural group that fetishizes seemingly authentic modes of being and living—Kessler’s “Global Village Idiot” figure suggests a more insidious relationship between technology, commercial advertising and self-expression than McLuhan envisioned. In fact, the “Global Village Idiot” and the experience of The Web as a whole seems closer to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ideas concerning the mass production of culture, which they called the “Culture Industry.”
In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer warn that seemingly authentic expressions of individual, even counter-cultural identity are increasingly filtered through a formulaic visual vocabulary of stylistic artifice carefully crafted by corporate marketing. Unlike McLuhan, Adorno and Horkheimer saw an increasingly homogenized culture as a threat to individuality and critical thought. They believed that the capitalist ethos of corporate and media culture manipulated and prescribed consumer desires in order to then satisfy them with their products. Adorno and Horkheimer proposed that those areas in life where people believed themselves to be genuinely free has in fact been compromised by the streamlined system of capitalism in which corporations supply a demand that they themselves helped to shape.
Kessler’s hipster figure of the “Global Village Idiot” might be considered the embodiment of the Culture Industry’s effects, where individual style is expressed and a seemingly authentic sense of self is validated through an increasingly homogenized menu of options. Kessler’s interest in the insidious relationship between mass production and mass consumption is suggested by the title of another of the artist’s works, Desert of the Real, from 2009. “Desert of the Real” is a phrase used by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard to describe the proliferation of images in late capitalism and, perhaps more famously, a phrase uttered by the character Morpheus in the Baudrillard-inspired The Matrix, a film in which reality is revealed to be nothing more than a simulation designed by machines to keep people enslaved.
Kessler’s use of iPhones, iPads and Macbooks in The Web seems particularly fitting to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ideas, as Apple is one of the largest companies in the world in terms of market capitalization thanks in part to its selling itself as the cool, independent “outsider” option to the big bad corporate behemoths. Indeed, Apple has consistently and successfully branded itself and its products as signifying some sort of authentic and individual form of expression, from the famous “1984” commercial in the early 1980s—in which Apple Macintosh is positioned as the counter-cultural rebel to IBM’s monolithic, even fascist corporate ethos—to their more recent ad campaigns in which a balding, suit-wearing corporate dolt represents the PC while the Mac is personified by a young, smart and composed guy in a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers.
With its surveillance cameras, “Global Village Idiot” and readymade commercial imagery of happy, beautiful people holding iPhones and iPads, The Web is not a celebration of technology in general and Apple in particular but a sober and sobering assessment of the technology and corporate aims behind our smartphone and social media culture. But perhaps The Web’s greatest feat is that its mesmerizing display of technology seduces as much as critiques. Rarely has a work of art attended so carefully to the beguiling seduction of visual culture, to which I willingly and enthusiastically succumbed by taking photos of The Web with my beloved iPhone 5. And as Adorno and Horkhemier (and Baudrillard) would probably tell you, that seduction is part of the allure of the Culture Industry.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: elaogloboglobo
Mergulhar fisicamente na rede mundial de computadores é impossível. Ou era. Essa é a sensação ao visitar a instalação “The Web” (A Rede), de Jon Kessler. Os visitantes entram na Rede, deitam na rede, e refletem sobre o espaço cada vez maior que computadores, tablets e celulares ocupam nas suas vidas.
A ideia surgiu quando Kessler estava em um metrô, em Nova York, e percebeu que mais da metade das pessoas estava falando no telefone, mandando mensagens ou jogando videogames.
Quando chegam à exposição, os visitantes podem baixar um app que manda imagens em tempo real para os monitores da instalação. Eles também são filmados e aparecem nas telas. A sensação é de estar imerso em uma rede infinita de informações, onde você também é uma atração. Bem semelhante a navegar na internet.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: akcjadobrapolskaszkola
W Szwajcarskim Instytucie Sztuki Współczesnej w Nowym Jorku będziemy mogli oglądać nową, bardzo ciekawą instalację – “The Web” Jona Kesslera. Zbudowana z różnego rodzaju urządzeń Apple, telewizorów, kamer, The Web pokazuje ogromne znaczenie Internetu i urządzeń przenośnych w naszym życiu. Na pomysł tego typu instalacji Kessler wpadł podczas jazdy nowojorskim metrem, w którym praktycznie połowa podróżujących używała telefonu, wysyłała teksty, słuchała muzyki, czytała, oglądała filmy lub gry video.
Każdy odwiedzający wystawę może jednocześnie stać się jej częścią, poprzez pobranie wcześniej specjalnej aplikacji na iPhone. Aplikacja pozwala robić zdjęcia, które następnie wyświetlane na monitorach wokół wystawy.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: nomadaqblogspot
The Web es la instalación del artista Jon Kessler es un experimento en el que el elemento principal es la tecnología, y con el que el autor quiere mostrar hasta que punto influye en nuestros habitos y nuestras relaciones sociales. Compuesta por elementos digitales, cinéticos y brillantes pantallas de ordenador alojadas dentro de una estructura de madera en expansión.
Kessler ha montado iPads, iPhones y otros equipos de Apple, mientras que las cámaras de vigilancia giran hacia atrás y adelante sobre soportes mecanizados, creando un perímetro supuestamente seguro. El zumbido silencioso de la maquinaria se ve interrumpida por el sonido emblemático de inicio un ordenador de Apple que alerta al visitante de que esta inmerso en la nueva epifanía del siglo XXI.
Los visitantes también pueden descargar una aplicación para el iPhone, para poder exhibir las imágenes de su teléfono en los monitores. Los monitores de televisión apilados crean un caleidoscopio de imágenes de que los visitantes sin en los que se pueden reconocer, pasando a formar parte de la misma.
Convirtiendo la sala en un salón tecnológico de los espejos, el montaje de vídeo en directo y grabado produce un bucle confuso de personas que se observan a sí mismos y de paso a los demás, mientras que ellos también son vigilados por esas mismas cámaras.
Jon Kessler empezó su trayectoria como becario en el Guggenheim, en 1996 ocupo plaza como profesor en la Escuela de la Universidad de Columbia de las Artes. Esta actividad docente la ha compaginado con su carrera como artista exponiendo en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chicago (1986), el Museo de Arte Carnegie en Pittsburgh (1991), y el PS 1 en Nueva York (2005), entre otras.
En las obras de Kessler a menudo se trata las relaciones sociales en un contexto contemporáneo y la influencia de las decisiones políticas desde un punto irónico a través modos de presentación donde utiliza materiales de deshecho.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: artwakr
기계의 모든 메커니즘을 적나라하게 노출시킨 작업으로 유명한 미국의 키네틱아트 작가 존 케슬러의 개인전이 열린다. 30여 년 가까이 기계 조각에 집중한 존 케슬러는 아날로그와 디지털 기술을 조합한 작품으로 ‘후기 유토피아’ 시대에 일어나는 소비지상주의의 쇠락을 폭로해 왔다. 또한 1990년대 이후 동양과 서양의 상호 관계에서 빚어지는 긴장감에 주목하여 미국의 9.11 사태를 계기로 전쟁 감시 고립 등을 테마로 한 작품을 선보인 바 있다.
이번 전시에서 존 케슬러는 주로 미술관에서 전시됐던 기존의 작품들과 차별성을 주기 위해 키네틱 조각과 비디오를 결합한 새로운 방식의 작품을 선보인다. 키네틱 조각의 움직이는 모습은 설치된 카메라를 통해 모니터로 실시간 출력된다. 작가는 비디오에 투영된 기계 장치의 구조적 움직임에서 인간과 기술 사이에 작동하는 현대 문화의 메커니즘을 ‘날 것’ 그대로 드러내려 한다. 이번에 선보이는
존 케슬러(Jon Kessler) 1957년 뉴욕 출생. 뉴욕주립대 졸업. 다이치프로젝트갤러리(2009, 뉴욕), 루이지애나현대미술관(2008, 코펜하겐), 드로잉센터(2007, 뉴욕), 팔켄베르크콜렉션(2006, 함부르크), 뉴욕현대미술관(2005), 도쿄에르메스(2005) 등에서 개인전 개최. 장팅글리박물관(2010, 바젤), 쉬른미술관(2007, 프랑크푸르트), ICA(2007, 필라델피아), 휘트니미술관(2005, 뉴욕) 등에서 열린 다수의 단체전 참여.
