MONTREAL ? The technologies that provide our digital world are subverted and redirected into mind games played out in surprising and humorous ways by Cory Arcangel in his exhibition at DHC/ART.
Arcangel, who grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., studied music at Oberlin in Ohio and is based in Brooklyn, drew the attention of the art world in 2004 with a Super Mario game without characters or action. In removing them from the game, Arcangel had uncovered an entrancing serenity in the game?s background ? white clouds moving slowly across a blue sky. Super Mario Clouds is one of 26 works in Cory Arcangel: Power Points at the art foundation gallery in Old Montreal.
Several more altered video games are in the exhibition. One is I Shot Andy Warhol, in which Arcangel substitutes the cast of Hogan?s Alley, a Nintendo shooting gallery game. Warhol is the bad guy/target; Colonel Sanders is one of the good guys with a gun.
Arcangel is a most genial and generous artist. Besides sharing his sources and inventions on his website, he twice mentioned during a media tour of his exhibition that he and Montreal electronic musician d?Eon will perform together on Sept. 26 during POP Montreal.
Music pervades Arcangel?s work. Drei Klavierst?cke op. 11 is a rendition by cats of Arnold Schoenberg?s pioneering atonal composition. Arcangel cut snippets from 170 videos of cats on pianos that he found on YouTube, creating what is described as a nearly note-perfect performance.
It?s high art feeding on pop culture. John Zeppetelli, the curator, noted how Arcangel created difficult, elitist, twelve-tone music from videos uploaded by cat lovers.
Another music intervention is an archive of trance music on vinyl, a 1990s style that is obsolete but will outlast most music recorded since then because of its recording technology.
Vinyl, the most archivally secure source material, is preserving one of the last genres of music with a chance to make it to the future, Arcangel said, noting the irony that trance is preoccupied with the future. Vinyl will last 100 years; tape 50 and a hard drive as little as five years, he said.
Arcangel bought a retired DJ?s entire collection of 12-inch trance records ? 839 of them, and created an archive for them.
?Each record was given a bar code and a five-star rating,? Arcangel said. A visitor can play the records and cross-reference them with a binder full of information, including Arcangel?s rating.
Arcangel subverts movies as well. He reduces the visual dimension of Colors, a Dennis Hopper cop drama about race relations, to one line of pixels at a time. The audio track, full of violent talk and action, plays as a background to what looks like an ever-changing stripe painting. The colour of the stripes does seem to reflect the atmosphere of the movie scene.
Another is Untitled Translation Exercise, in which Arcangel replaces the dialogue of Richard Linklater?s high school film classic Dazed and Confused with a script reading outsourced to non-actors in Bangalore, India.
The comedy, its dialogue now in a monotone South Asian English, becomes absurd. It is ?a dubious globalized version of a movie about a specific culture, suburban America,? Zeppetelli said.
Personal computers and software also come under Arcangel?s scrutiny. The exhibition begins with five high-quality framed prints in a colourful abstract style, hanging in a gallery with a floor covered by a purple wall-to-wall carpet. It?s another nod to popular culture as food for high art: abstract expressionism produced by geeks in a basement.
The images are Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations that Arcangel captured with one click of a gradient tool. They are unique images, but can be reproduced by following the directions in their titles.
The exhibition ends with Data Diaries, which visualizes Arcangel?s daily activities on the computer ? emails, Internet searches and downloads ? as colour patterns and pixels. The information comes from his computer?s random access memory, which empties when the computer is turned off at the end of the day.
?I tricked QuickTime into reading RAM data as a movie file,? Arcangel said.
There are also workshops in conjunction with the exhibition.
Cory Arcangel: Power Points continues to Nov. 24 at DHC/ART, 461 and 465 St. Jean St. Information: dhc-art.org. Links to Arcangel?s projects can be found at coryarcangel.com.
john.o.pohl@gmail.com
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