50-50

by Jack Kelley

The style of our moment is a self-conscious absence of style, or at the very least the downplaying of styledness. Anna Kornbluh stresses this point in her blockbuster–as much as theory monographs published by Verso can be blockbusters–from last year, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Our current unifying logic of aesthetics, she argues, is art’s ability to be at hand, on call. In being constantly available, art obscures its distinct quality of being made (or styled) and instead foregrounds its ability to be circulated. Think of the flurry of interactive video exhibitions for canonized painters that engage the senses at the expense of fidelity to the original medium (Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, Chagall: Paris-New York, etc.). Think of autofiction’s promise of delivering its reader pure interiority, like a diary, without the decoration of fiction or the flourish of overwrought prose. Think of just-in-time shipping solutions, ensuring Amazon packages of goods are delivered overnight, the intense speed of which helps one forget their production under inhumane working conditions. Content must reach the consumer instantaneously in order to be valued, at the expense of all else.

As a result, everything is quite quick nowadays. With incredible ease, I am able to open my internet browser of choice, type in “flatratecontemporary.com” and click enter. Images populate the screen in a familiar grid arrangement. This imminently available, immediately digestible format seems to sit well within Kornbluh’s diagnosis of our milieu. At first glance, the images appear as posts, not as distinct works of art; one mistakes art for content. Furthermore, even the gallery’s name, “Flat Rate Contemporary”, references its ability to circulate efficiently and honestly, at a low cost for all parties.

Flat Rate Contemporary finds its genealogy in the white cube gallery, but a more recent ancestor is Web 2.0-born Contemporary Art Daily. Michael Sanchez’s 2011 essay, “Contemporary Art, Daily,” describes the site’s “competitive image ecology” that mirrors economic competition and observes the site’s resemblance to a social network.[1] Value, here, is accrued through an artwork’s ability to circulate as a digital image file. Contemporary Art Daily is neither a gallery nor a journal but is able to perform the circulatory function of both. Like social media, it serves as a sort of para-reality, a machine that takes raw goods and produces engagement.

Returning back to its familial roots, Flat Rate Contemporary is a gallery. While it takes cues from social media, it takes in equal amounts from (e-)commerce. A grid of items with product descriptions and click-to-purchase buttons. One of the most charming elements of the site is a shopping cart always present in the top right corner of the page, reminding you how many “items” are in your cart.

The digital gallery’s group show is not curated by a gallerist/moderator (such as in the model of the white cube gallery or Contemporary Art Daily) or by an algorithm (the social media model), but rather through a democratic vote by all artists who submitted to the exhibition. The top 12 pieces are shown. This innovative practice is what changes the nature of FRC’s circulation. Explicit is the gallery’s desire to “give artists a voice in their means of distribution,” changing the relation of the artist to the tools of circulation. In this new orientation, one reads what Kornbluh pejoratively dubs “immediacy” not as the hollowing out of art on behalf of the multinational corporation, but rather as the attempt by artists to use the corruptive, lucrative techniques of digital image economies for their own ends.[2]

In this fresh orientation of artists and circulation, the logics of “too late capitalism” are tweaked. Just-in-time shipping standards are practiced to save artists the time and money of only packing and shipping a work if it sells. A jury of one’s peers decides what is placed in front of a scrolling audience. The bluntness of e-commerce aesthetics becomes pedagogical–the art gallery is just another store, as we all know, but seeing the mechanisms of the online store and social media feed work in real time is illuminating and nearly novel. FRC uses the term “demystifying,” and I am inclined to agree.

Of course, this discussion of the digital gallery is only relevant in so far as it mediates the works presented. It structures how we experience FRC19, how we approach the pieces.

Take, for instance, Yevgenia Davidoff’s playful floral field, “Wildflower Void V.” The acetate sheet at the center of the work is encased in a cement frame that feels like an extension of the website’s architecture, providing a small peephole through the white background. The nimble drawing at the center is minimal in its construction but overflowing in the image it conjures. The black lines at once provide a loose, Spaghetti-like definition to the wildflowers, while at the same time suggesting movement lines of wind. These lines do not settle down as one or the other, and as a result the breeze rolling across the scene becomes a part of the definition of the flowers, the two concepts completely intertwined, just for the moment. 

The feeling that we are getting a snapshot in time–the immediate impression–is reinforced by the pin-hole construction of the frame. One almost feels compelled to move their head around, like a child looking through a cracked open door, to try to get a better view of the sunny day that must lay just on the other side of the glass. 

The eponymous dog in “Contrast Dog” by Brendan Shea also seems to live on the other side of the glass. The barrier here is not a frame, but the painting itself. The fantastical, pastel plant life in the foreground serves as a sort of interstitial space that separates the dog and the viewer, giving the two interlocutors equal but opposite spaces to admire the pastels. The in-between takes up most of the work’s real estate, creating a detailed, subtly spacious landscape that verges on abstraction. Unlike “Wildflower Void V,” this mediating layer is bright and eye-catching. The canine, painted with a hangdog expression in tame colors, seems to share our more drab world as we both look on at the bright spectacle.

Tala Asmar’s contribution to the show, “Uncle Abu Ahmed’s Vegetables,” is a monoprint on paper. Through this medium she plays with ideas of absence and presence. The single chance for the transfer of ink onto the paper, forming a sole print, imitates the formation of memory–a one-time impression liable to miss out on things, to not get the whole picture. 

The subject of Asmar’s piece inverts the typical negative construction of ink not transferring, of an experience not transforming into memory the way one desires. The shelves and baskets of vegetables appear on the page as negative space, while the spatial contours of the seller’s wares are filled in with ink. Thus, when the ink does not transfer, as it does in specks here and there, this absence only puts more produce on the page. Absence manifests as abundance, as sustenance.

Hazel Elsbach’s eerie still life, “Shadow Figures,” appears simple on its face. Objects line up, roll-call style, with their shadows beneath them. But what are all the objects? Sure, there is a pop tab and perhaps tweezers, but under closer scrutiny these originally plausible items become surreal, resisting definition. Their loose imitation of everyday objects land them halfway in between Man Ray’s The Gift (and its Freudian play with castration and eye-gouging) and the classic “Name One Thing in This Photo” meme. Either way you cut it, the figures invoke in me a deep anxiety around vision and its impairment, and we haven’t even mentioned the fact that over the figures lies a constellation of eye floater-like interactions between graphite and ink…

Now back to my ever-lengthening list of questions–how are all these objects standing en pointe? Where is the light source? Where even are we? The more you look at the work the more the questions mount, leaving you with an unresolved tension that keeps the figures in your mind long after you look away.

Matthew Mahler’s “Double Tap” pairs inflexible angularity with soft gradients, creating a work that moves in ebbs and flows, propelled on by the wave-like texture of the tissue paper. The rectangular composition feels like a Josef Albers piece after you have shaken it like an Etch A Sketch. Depending on your current level of optimism, the rigid geometries become either problematized or playful. Tech pessimists see the screen at the collage’s center as mind-numbingly blank, pitched at a Dutch angle to invoke maximum feelings of chaos. Tech optimists, on the other hand, are reminded of the small, animated dance that icons do, momentarily shimmying outside of their place in the grid when you hit the like button. To my eye, it’s about 50-50.

This conflict in Mahler’s work brings forth the larger conversation the works of FRC19 are having from their respective places on the grid. Each piece is navigating its status as a digital representation of a physical object, as a circulatable instance of the work of art it represents. How each piece unfolds to the online viewer–whether as a sudden cascade or as a slow drip–gives us an insight into the manifold ways in which we can aesthetically approach our current culture of immediacy. Kornbluh comes down hard on the vulgarities of our cultural moment, and she is right to do so. But perhaps there is something we can do with these tools, a way to repurpose them into a cudgel for use against our rather bleak times. FRC19 is a proposal that this is possible.

[1] “Paintings and sculptures are social networking devices, programmed to connect with the right actors,” Sanchez writes.

[2] Sarah Brouillette speaks of a similar move in fiction–“immediacy may also be the aesthetic manifestation of a situation in which people are trying… to break through the barriers that control who has access to cultural careers.”