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ELEKTRA Gallery
“Know Brow” Technoshamanism
‘Know Brow’ art is the product of new media - ars electronica -- that transcends the dichotomies of high and low brow. More than “consumable” commercial media, it is digital art that stands the test of time.
Know Brow implies the knowledge, attitudes and skill sets necessary to produce art with highly technical processes, but also the visionary capacity to see multiple layers of meaning through direct experience. This knowing uses “knoware” for its discovery process, a seeking, a gnosis that cuts a path through the mindscape of the ‘now’ toward the future that remains perpetually undefined. The future “pulls” these artists forward.
We commune with the past to inform our present, not just as a homage, but to gain initiation to that transtemporal way of knowing and honoring our cultural roots. For example, in his latest series (2004), “Slashers: A Cultural Commentary on Today's Political and Economic Climate”, , Gartel created a suite of techno-portraits (with complementary audio voices), which in retrospect reminded him of the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana. They let us see the chaos that lies below the surface of the persona. But this work is not about the past. The content is strongly reflective of the present, the NOW:
Defining the ‘hidden curriculum’ in media schools makes a strong statement about the missing element of art history in technical art education, and the silent blocks in the system to its fulfillment. More traditional institutions have been remiss in honoring the rightful place of digital fine art as the wave of the future.
‘Know brow’ art, as a movement, encourages the active, constructivist acquisition of artistic knowledge and openness to new forms and media, as well as technical capacities. We want to inspire more than digital “factory workers” or proficient craftspeople.
We want to enable the student to make, shape or organize with a telos, a meaningful purpose that has deep psychic rootedness: one who invents, not adopts; who shapes not copys; who builds not assembles; who is capable not merely competent; who is efficacious not just efficient; who experiments not just conceptualizes. There is a bliss that comes from within one that energizes the human desire to enact, to enable, to engage, to outwork it, i.e. to transform oneself and the world (bizarre and grandiose as this may sound).
Art is a discipline of consciousness, whose ecology is to recycle itself.
The Postmodern era ushered in a hodge-podge of styles harking back to bygone eras. Postmodernism began in the 1970's, when the dominant styles of art - Minimalism and Conceptualism - seemed to no longer fit in a world struggling with a myriad of social problems. As a result, a plurality of styles developed. Some Post-modernists forcefully expressed a desire to do away with art that seemed to have no meaningful content, and began to turn back to figurative art and the establishment of meaning.
Other Post-modernists attempted to extend modern art in new ways by appropriating earlier styles, which they modified. Due to the sheer variety of sources and styles it is difficult to categorize Post-modern artists with the same ease of earlier styles or movements. The post Postmodern era saw the development of new media, such as digital fine art, digitally modified photography, digital animation, multimedia, holography, computer generated imagery (CGI), interactive gaming, even virtual reality, etc., with styles all their own.
Computer enhanced images are produced with a stage of manipulation in digital language using computer software. It can be applied to other media, such as photographs or scans of traditional media, or 3-D objects. This awesome technology is used by photographers, filmmakers, the advertising industry, web designers, graphic designers and increasingly available to fine artists.
Museum quality prints can be made by the enhanced giclee or other processes. (Giclee [zhe-clay]; literally means little squirt in French. It is the latest digital printing technique enabling "print on demand". Originally it was a term used by Iris printers but rapidly became the generic term for top quality digital prints using archival quality inks on heavy weight paper or canvas.)
Suddenly, the entire history of art became fodder for a raw-image-hungry medium that gobbled up, digested, and spat out a pot pourri of historical, fantastic, and futuristic iconography in the digital vernacular. Rapid cut clips are the visual equivalent of ‘sound bites.’ We see the familiar old images – here a Michelangelo reference, a Van Gogh homage, or a Duchamp pun -- but they have become virtually meaningless in the new context…a fractal blur.
There is nothing new under the sun, the saying goes. In art, it means there is rarely anything truly innovative, and that most imagery is a rehash of previous work, in which the statement was perhaps more succinctly embodied. Virtually any work can be considered derivative or deconstructed by its critics. The exceptions are works of genius, milestones in the history of art. They foresee the future, hunting it down in the forest of kaleidoscopic potential creations.
Gauguin said, “There are only two kinds of artists -- revolutionaries and plagiarists.”
Revolutionary work marks a transition in a civilization’s worldview. The CybeRevolution marked such a transition. Arguably, today’s marriage of art and science is embodied in new media: digital and electronic arts. Highly technical media have made new images possible through programs that render images virtually as fast as we can think them up. But it requires a lifelong learning curve that is daunting and unrelenting. It requires we continuously update our skill and knowledge base to realize our creative dreams.
Experimentation with new compositional programs can yield surprising results moving artists into heretofore-unexplored territories in their work. Still, even new media’s novel appearance can echo the iconography, moods and textures of past eras and their styles. It is the same in fashion where looks and eras are recycled deliberately but interpreted in today’s fabrics and cuts. It all depends on how you accessorize it.
Innovation requires more than sampling and restyling. It requires a personal archaeology that means digging up that unique portion of our human depths that wants to come to birth through you - that which comes to be through a conspiracy of necessity and coalescence.
One must commit to the image and let it speak for itself in the now, with little or no thought to the past or future. When one opens to the moment, to the process, a flow emerges. Serendipity and synchronicities require fluidity of imagination, an inner eye for what could be important to incorporate, as well as fluency in technical procedures.
Style emerges as the result of habitually reiterating creative choices and recycling favored elements. The same ideas roll around over and over, evolving into variations on a theme. Some artists stake their career on this rather uncourageous course instead of evolving further. It may be less a desire to maintain commerciality or please their public than simply lack of fresh inspiration. That inspiration can be rekindled by immersion in new exciting fields of imagery, new mindscapes, new places, new media, great art.
Just as our prehistoric ancestors painted their own reflections on the walls of Lascaux, history comes full circle, or as T.S. Elliott wrote in the Four Quartets, "my end is my beginning."
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(c)2006 Iona Miller
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