Actual Size
2006
Solo Show at C.Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore
C. Grimaldis Gallery
523 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
(P)410.539.1080
(F)410.539.2229
www.cgrimaldisgallery.com
February 2nd-26th 2006
Opening Thursday February 2nd 6pm
C.Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present new work by the New York based artist Graham Parker.
Actual Size quotes the languages coined by late 19th century con artists, the media and visual tactics of mid-20th century conceptual artists and the source code of early 21st century spam e-mails, to slow and abstract the apparently overwhelming and unique speed of data flow of the current historical moment - revealing historical analogues, instances of recognizable human agency, possibility and playful resistance within the totalizing tendency of modern electronic networks and the archival forms they generate.
Furthering Graham Parker's recent work in print (from the fully archival to the ephemeral quality of newsprint), neon and digital photography, Actual Size deepens and develops the artist's use of text found on electronic networks – a core tactic of Parker's work in recent years.
The text in question is always unreliable – spellcheck errors, aggregate website versions of popular anecdote, fragments of novels or apparent doggerel found hidden in the code of spam e-mails (in crude attempts to bypass the mail program's spam filters). Parker détourns this virtual data into physical forms: neon signs bearing the misspelt titles (another filter-defeating tactic) of spam e-mails such as "The Stokc to watch" and "Phanrmaceuticaal"; newspapers printed the night before the show, carrying spam fragments from the artist's inbox (interwoven with other found texts on the last words of Dutch Schultz or the spread of a parasitic seaweed named Undaria); austere framed prints carrying tiny small print text on an expanse of white – the font size hovering at the edge of both legality and legibility.
Two of these prints allude to heavily mythologized moments in the development of the computer: the apparent origin of the term "computer bug" in the discovery of a crushed moth in an early supercomputer and the apparent origin of the Apple Mac logo in the suicide of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing. Other fictions are at play too – such as "The Master Key", a 1901 children's story by L. Frank Baum, fragments of which began appearing in certain spam e-mails in 2004 and represented in the show by a diptych marking that century long journey. Another print shows a timeline constructed from fragments of 'historical' dates from the last 200 years - generated by a crude algorithm used in spam advertising fake Rolexes and fake college degrees. Also, a smaller series of photographic works are digitally watermarked by fragments of spam mails sent at the same time as the photos were taken, highlighting both the mix of temporal precision and specious content that is often the hallmark of burgeoning online archives and the spectral quality of the networks which service them.
Actual Size thus plays with a number of scales and temporal modes: the declamatory neons work in contrast to, or comment on, the intimately subjective viewing demanded by the print works; the allusions to genuine historical events mix with the apocryphal and the nonsensical; references to popular confidence tricks of the early 21st century, such as so-called Nigerian 419 spam, find counterparts in references to the confidence tricks that flourished along 19th century railroads (e.g. the neon sign "cacklebladder" refers to the device used by conmen to fake a shooting and disappear from the scene). The viewer's attention and subjective knowledge is invited and often thwarted by each individual work, yet the landscape as a whole offers a certain affective coherence.
The media chosen are also evocative of earlier moments in conceptual and certain post-minimal art practices. The show's title and its final print, Actual Size, refer to Ed Ruscha's eponymous painting (that first of the many subsequent loosenings of Spam's humble signification), whilst Parker's strategies towards text, surface and the material object deliberately point to earlier moments where structural theory was beginning to make its mark on certain key art practices – theories finding unexpected echoes in the code of the lowest common denominators of today's internet traffic. The work is thus often uncanny – quoting a relentlessly contemporary argot, whilst using recent-historical forms to present abstracts of today's 'chatter on the wires', to speak of both this moment and the moments and forces which shaped and preceded it and which live on in our time.