Sight Scene: Alberto Gaitán
Map It:
Dupont Circle
DO POST-MEDIA ARTISTS fret about the move from one medium to another — the way that a newspaper columnist might sweat writing a poem? Is there an interstitial palate cleanser? Or palette cleanser?
Post-media artist Alberto Gaitán's Remembrancer, seen here, a robotic painting installation at Curator's Office, is not exactly a transition between media. His piece — a machine that slowly drips paint on three gridded supports, in patterns determined by a variety of data inputs — also includes sound, the work for which Gaitán is best known. And the painting itself is incidental, anyway; the real work happens in the design and implementation of the data collection process.
In the 1990s, Gaitán might have been called an interstitial artist, someone who works in a field that falls somewhere between genres. The terminology has been updated, loosely, to postmedia, a category that enfolds increasingly larger groups of artists (in particular, sculptors, who just refuse to be chained to any single media). Gaitán's overriding interests in data, robotics and information technology unify his work.
But the same interests also date his pieces — situating them squarely within the late '90s. Roxy Paine manufactured art using a variety of industrial automatic painting devices, such as Painting Manufacture Unit and SCUMAK (Automatic Sculpture Maker) — pieces that fully disguised the artist's hand while cranking out artworks like so many widgets.
Gaitán's Remembrancer is less efficient than those by design: Three machines will drip red, green, and blue paint onto grids for weeks before the piece is finished. His update on the work that's come before him? For one, they're digital. The machines collect data on the gallery environment via Internet-enabled sensors arranged throughout the space. This isn't exactly new territory, either, but it does make for data-driven art, a gallery show determined by the gallery itself. The end results may appear as arbitrary as any of Paine's Ford-factory pieces. But Gaitán's outputs are about their own inputs: a form of commentary on the forces that drive the art world.
» Curator's Office, through May 26, 1515 14th St. NW, 202-387-1008 (Dupont Circle)
Photo courtesy Curator's Office
Print
Addison Road
Thanks for the review, but this work had nothing to do with the forces that drive the art world. The work picks up data from key words that the artist has programmed in local (500 mile radius), national, and global sources. The red piece, for example, recorded the data hits on the Virginia Tech murders almost as they were happening. A very chilling and incredibly contemporary recording of data that was then altered (like inaccurate media reporting, our understanding of the reporting and the final distorted abstract messy message that becomes collective memory. I know my space is presenting the work, but it's far more complex than the review here let's the reader believe. It is actual current data being collected and delivered via internet, robotics, and sound to create abstract fields of accreted media on time logs. Yes, we all know Roxy Paine has machine-generated artwork. Not new. Many artists before Paine have worked within that interesting process, but Gaitan takes it to a new ground-breaking level. Old media. Old data. Old-fashioned presentation (Frankenstein lab meets Walter Reed hospital room). That's precisely the point of the installation. Memory is a fragile thing.
Andrea Pollan
By Andrea , Posted May 1, 2007 8:02 PM