Griska’s title, Nowhere Fast, sets a tone just this side of mid-20th century existential angst. His choice to render it in neon tubing, as a discrete piece, tips it over the edge.

Putting a contradictory declaration in neon is a number from the post-modern bag of tricks that has gone from a radically distanced yet familiar way of making a statement to a common choice at risk of triteness.

Griska’s largest piece, Icarus, spreads itself over much of the main gallery. It is a mostly steel apparatus that is equal parts exercise bike, Mark di Suvero, and space shuttle landing. In addition to the apparatus itself, there are three large photographs entitled Sisyphus, documenting a performance that used the machine.

The photograph Sisyphus

The Sisyphus photographs are striking. The performer, clad in a bodysuit and helmet, assumes a sporting stance, seemingly at the ready, and prepared to go for the win! However, the clear immobility of the machine and the overwhelming presence of the outspread silver parachute make the ambition suggested by the figure’s stance and costume seem deflated by comparison. In the pictures, the simultaneous arrest of ambition and movement is echoed by the stillness of the photographs. The dramatic lighting and centralized compositions provide this further level of precarious stillness: if the lights were just slightly different, or the camera pointed just a little to the left, the picture might feel like a snapshot instead of staged photography.

However, Griska’s excellent photographs are dominated by the Icarus apparatus and the other sculptures in the show. These physically large pieces lack the metaphorical weight of Griska’s more successful performance documentation.

Icarus, in particular, is more a collection of props than a coherent work. The parachute-machine’s propeller cage, hung and lit on its own wall, feels especially flat. The cage’s separation from the standing machine and outspread parachute on the floor makes Icarus barely readable as one piece.

A part of Icarus, hung on the wall

A generous reader might try interpreting the cage, bike-pedestal, and parachute in the terms of the Icarus myth—a kind of warning about ambition overstepped—yet it’s clearly also linked to the nearby Sisyphus piece, which has a less moralizing and more ambivalent relationship to ambition. Should I just read it, then, materially? It is, on that level, a number of deft, deliberate steel constructions, vaguely reminiscent of some minimal artwork.

The rest of Icharus, spread out across the floor

Yet, it is hard to consider it’s physical properties alone, as Griska has worked his sculpture into a messy symbolic tangle with both his Sisyphus piece and the Icarus myth. Unfortunately, by linking this confused sculpture to the tenser symbolism in his photos, Griska also threatens to loosen that carefully strung set of associations.

In fact, each additional piece I saw in the show further explained away the exciting and controlled tension of Sisyphus. A pattern emerged: a device designed to create a determined interaction with a body—the parachute, exercise bike, etc.—would be re-presented in the artwork, essentially unmodified, but now made decorative or functionless.

The denial of function and play with bodily regulation are, indeed, powerful artistic tools. As I’ve said before, such challenges to the conventions of rationalized life make the for best works of art.

But precisely because these methods are now so well understood as signs for “art,” in order to continue their fight, artists must be careful not to merely cite them, but actually create new, hard to describe, modes of challenge.

Griska’s most puzzling—and by my rubric, then, most successful—piece, had little to do with function or the body at all. His piece Ad Infinitum, a loop of McDonald’s PlayPlace-like tubes—if read along with others as an absurdist take on the control of bodies—is a bit of a one liner. However, it was originally made not as a part of this show, but for his 2008 senior project, in quite a different context.

Looking closely at the details of its material existence, Ad Infinitum offers much more than the sum of its parts.

Ad Infinitum

The surfaces of the slide-tubes now have lights clinging to them instead of sweaty kindergarten palms. The constellation of lights, mirrored in the veined marble floor, truly becomes a phantasmagoric image, all the more arresting because it is both easy to see how it produced and impossible to predict its complexity. Further, the geometric lines connecting the lights on the piece are painted in conductive silver ink, giving them a strangely hand-drawn feel where I was expecting mechanical precision.

Imagining Griska scrawling those lines on that plastic for hours provides is a truly odd image. Perhaps in the future, Griska will be able to capitalize on his clear material sensitivity to generate more novel approaches to his critiques. Nowhere Fast is on view at the University Science Center until June 25th.

Steve Brower behind his custom fabricated 'control center' which started as a sculpture and has taken on evolving functionalities as his projects develop over time. He know considers it as his "platform" from which ideas are developed and launched.

The first Breadboard project, which opens tomorrow at EKG, is Steve Brower’s Brower Propulsion Laboratory: BPL-003 Moranic Mission to Montana.

Steve Brower's custom fabricated stereoscope suitable for use with iPhone screens. using iPhone you can link to his website and view ready-made stereograms based on live-feed imagery from the "lander". The lander will be producing imagery from the Klein Gallery and is gearing up for a mission to Montana.

According to Dan, Breadboard will give artists and community groups the opportunity to learn how to work with high-tech tools. EKG will be a project space for installation and exhibition of the resulting tech/art work. The tools include laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC milling machines, and all kinds of digital software, all belonging to NextFab Studio.

• Breadboard also has a 700-square-foot community space on the ground floor of 3711 Market Street, adjacent to NextFab Studio. Breadboard user groups and our extended community can schedule use of this space for staging activities relevant to Breadboard initiatives
• The aim is to develop cross-disciplinary projects with both arts and non-arts organizations and communities.
• Breadboard allows us to invite artists to create new work on site, at NextFab and exhibit it at EKG.

Steve Brower's custom fabricated 'Lander' based on the Viking Space Lander launched in the '70's. The lander is rigged with multiple digitally manipulated functions to explore terrestrial environs remotely (see youtube video below)

From David, NextFab Studio and Breadboard interact this way:

• NextFab Studio will develop and run the prototyping workshop. We created Breadboard as a non-profit partner to develop educational outreach programming and write grants with NextFab.

Breadboard_1: vertical triptych; laser cutter/process/product; laser cut image of deer with design motif, cut from 1/8" luan panel, approx. 2x3 inches

NextFab will be holding open studio tours during the opening reception. Read more at Technically Philly about what NextFab offers.

See it in the real world:

Esther Klein Gallery and NextFab Studio
Friday, Jan. 22, from 5-9pm.
EKG:  3600 Market Street
NextFab Studio: 3711 Market Street

Artist Marisa Olson takes on one of the building blocks of the Internet and the computer–background imagery–with wit and verve, stealing the familiar wallpapers and animated gifs, reimagining them in gigantic proportions–from bits to bytes to pure gluttony.

Marisa Olson, The New Transparency (diptych), detail, Iris Prints, each 32 x 26.5 inches

Her exhibit Background Information at Esther Klein Gallery includes new work. It’s a load of fun, a small exhibit that takes on the graphics used to express sound files, the “transparent” grid from Photoshop, even the Flickr Safe Search Veil.

Marisa Olson, Flicker Safe Search Veil, Digital Pigment Print on Canvas, 33 x 46 inches

This last one was personal for me–I still haven’t forgiven or forgotten when Flickr veiled my images for a brief period after someone tagged as offensive a Marilyn Minter image of a woman giving a microphone a blow job. It’s a microphone for god’s sake!!! Have we lost all perspective here or what! And then I had to grovel for the anonymous Flickr police bureaucracy to prove my worthiness! It took a moment to veil me. It took a month to strip my photos bare. [This story is completely wrong; the truth is, Minter's blow job to a microphone was in fact a penis being held like a microphone. I rewrote the past in my mind to justify my outrage, I suppose.]

Marisa Olson, detail, Flicker Safe Search Veil

In this non-world that is the Internet, it turns out what is not real is all too real, an elusive recreation of real institutions of human society reduced to their most inhuman. It is here in that confusion between reality and unreality that Olson positions her work.

It’s the vaguely disquieting lack of genuineness that makes Olson’s work pack a punch. The Flickr veil is a fall-apart vision of black and gray-scale pixels that dissolve into meaninglessness at the same time that they have the power to censor. They are nothing. They are something.

Marisa Olson, Unlocking my Sandbox, html and javascript-based video animation

The cgi sand of a screensaver wallpaper of sand drifts are pixillated silliness on which Olson tosses her play things–gifs of bouncing products and toys–in a video called Unlocking my Sandbox. The html and javascript-based video animation pretends to be all these things and the computer has certainly become the national sandbox for us all.

Marisa Olson, Some Nice Looking Sound Files, I think this is #3, Iris Print, 32 x 36 inches

As for the sound files, they are luscious, and the pixel leakage around the edges are a form of deconstruction of the visuals in motion. Are they there, those ghostly edges? Can you hear them? Or are they visual residue of the previous sound? Beats me. But the more I thought about those seeping edges, the more I read into them. My ideas about them are at least as real as those stray pixels.

Olson is in another exhibit in town, about to close Friday. Here’s the info.

A writer as well as an artist, Olson has a hefty resume, which ranges from the Whitney to the Centre Pompidou to the New York Underground Film Festival. If you missed Annette’s terrific interview–a little edgy, a little hilarious–check it out. It’s the best way to find out just how nerdy Olson is.

The exhibit opens tonight at the Esther Klein Gallery, 5-8.

The big pre-opening news is this from Annette: “We just got some press from Rhizome, the New Museum’s New Media web-site: http://rhizome.org/.”

So maybe we’ll see you there tonight!!

Given Enough Eyeballs
March 14th-April 26th
The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery
The Science Center: 3600 Market Street

Newsreader in the faux news program in Joulia Strauss’s video in the Great Society.

“The Great Society” at Klein Art Gallery is a dirge in eight-part harmony about our not-so-great society. Even if you don’t know the show’s historical reference (Lyndon Johnson’s optimistic social program of the 1960s), you’ll grasp its irony.

Guest curator Daniel Fuller’s group exhibit of six artists and two artist collectives presents our times as if reflected in a funhouse mirror. Like the satirical artists George Grosz and Otto Dix in Weimar, Germany, the artists in this show create views of life that are familiar but exaggerated to the point of parody.

Joulia Strauss’ five-minute DVD The Earth Is Flat—Bob Ross Is Not Dead is one of the strongest in a show of strong works. Strauss, a Berlin-based artist, skewers the media with a faux European-style nightly news program that’s a mix of YouTube and MTV. It’s raw, sexy and funny. In one segment, an Einstein-lookalike scientist and an interviewer dressed in a USPS mail carrier shirt talk about scientific fact and theory. The scientist says the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth and science can’t prove otherwise. It’s a 2007 update on the hippie slogan, “Question authority.”

Claire Fontaine’s slow burn video. Fontaine is an art collaborative based in Paris.

A video projection by the Paris collective Claire Fontaine plays a continuous loop of a fire. The urban backyard conflagration is a slow and silent burn and could be breaking news from a local TV station anywhere in the world. The beautiful piece seduces like a stained glass window of a medieval torture scene—you don’t want to look but can’t tear your eyes away.

Huang, Shih Chieh’s tiny robot on a turntable. It flashes and tweets and is friendly as a video arcade game. Materials include a toy gun and what look like Tupperware containers, in addition to plastic handcuffs, lights and circuitry.

J. Shih Chieh Huang’s RTI 9—a robot on a caffeine high—twirls, taps, beeps and sings like R2-D2. It’s made of electronic parts and video arcade junk like a plastic toy gun and colored plastic handcuffs. The piece is so charming it disarms without having to use the firearm. The subversion of cheap electronics to the needs of art is a reminder of the interweaving of art and life, and also of engineering, war and commerce. Huang’s appropriation of gun, handcuffs and gadgetry isn’t far removed from corporate appropriation of products like Teflon, acrylic polymers and the Internet. Only unlike the corporations, Huang’s profits won’t be millions of dollars.

Isaac Resnikoff’s We’ve Run Out of Continent

Others in this not-to-be-missed show are local artist Isaac Resnikoff, Amy Yao, David Clayton and Huong Ngo.

Great Society installation. Foreground, David Clayton, All Systems are Go, 2006. mixed media installation that was DIY NASA-gotta love it. Background, Huong Ngo, Hazmat Suit.

Our time is full of visual imagery, most of it controlled by corporations. Art is a small voice in this vast image-rich chaos. Shows like this—full of visual pleasures and loaded with critiques of media and culture—are the canary in the mineshaft urging a retreat from what’s quick, easy and accessible at the push of a button.

“The Great Society”
Opening reception Fri., Aug 24, 5:30-8pm. Free. Through Sept. 29. Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, 3600 Market St. 215.966.6188.

The seating is glorious–three sweet little high-tech stools in front of each of the longer videos at Esther Klein Gallery. Each of those two videos is in its own little cubicle, one nearly a black box, the other more open, but both doing the job of giving a viewer a way to savor the videos.

The four small dvd players, mounted on the wall, each had a couple of earphones, and each held ultrashort videos–short enough to make me not mind standing through the experience.

Another highlight–the high-tech, ultra-designed portable dvd players mounted on the wall, two trimmed in orange, two in green–yummy jewels for the tech conscious. The earphones cut off any noise bleed from the viewing rooms.

I’m writing here about the video show Panoramas and Other Circular Stories–Art & Science XXIII, featuring six video works in all by Roderick Coover with word (and sometimes music) soundtracks contributed by several others.

People on a Mexican plaza are dwarfed by a giant face looming in an archway, adding a surreal touch and raising issues of authenticity.

I truly enjoyed looking at the two longer videos. The images are beautiful, rich with color, and evocative of times and places, including a beautiful plaza in Mexico that has a clear colonial Latin American history. I especially enjoyed some of the strange juxtapositions, like the giant face looming behind an archway, that put reality or scale into question–as well as the authenticity of the video image as a true record of reality.

Although the subject matter is quite different, Coover’s eye reminds me a little of Doug Aitken’s Interiors installation at the Fabric Workshop, with its broken panoramic narratives and sense of lives in motion, and a little of the elegance of Bill Viola’s The Greeting, with its sense of time relived.

When I listened to the soundtrack as I watched the Coover videos, however, I was utterly puzzled and distracted. When I ignored the voices, I enjoyed the videos more. And when I shut my eyes just to listen, I enjoyed the sound tracks more, although I must say they were a little too arty and precious for my taste. I enjoyed the imagery in the slide-show-like smaller videos, and their shortness protected me from missing a narrative.

One of Coover’s manipulated images on the small dvd players. These were stills shown like a series of slides. This one also reminded me of foreign climes. I was thinking of tropical sun and sky. Even the truck inserted in the image seemed to evoke transportation of goods on the twisting roads of some fabulous island.

And to raise a quibble about the exhibit, the press release stated:

“Playing with text/image relationships, these works create strange stories that loop upon themselves and examine the ideas of travel and time in order to evoke ways that technology permeates the modern imagination.”

The whole science connection seemed convoluted. That evocation of how technology permeates the modern imagination eluded me. Better to focus on the content than the process, I think.

However, I did notice how the techology doesn’t always work. Fortunately for me, someone came along and changed the disks in a couple of the small DVD players.

Traffic and people on the move dominated the architecture of a London scene.

What the work does evoke are foreign lands and travel. The looping of the imagery creates a surreal sense of time and experience, kind of like Groundhog Day.

Coover’s colors and compositions–and loose narratives that impel the viewer forward — are terrific.

And again, thumbs up on the video installation, which offers some nice lessons in the right way to do it.