Obsolete technology given new life by variety of artists
Celebration of smudgy relics
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/12/2009 (6123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Back in the 1980s, faxing was cool and cutting-edge. Now, of course, the fax has been routed by email and text messaging, and the fax machine seems as creaky as the wind-up phonograph or the vacuum-tube television.
Obsolete as a practical technology, the fax takes on strange new life as a creative tool in this unfolding exhibition at Plug In ICA. In April, 2009 curator Joao Ribas asked almost 100 people, including artists, designers, engineers and filmmakers, to send faxes to The Drawing Center in New York. These works were received, exhibited and archived while the FAX show was running. Plug In presents this core exhibition, as well as inviting local artists to contribute, via the HP fax machine that currently waits in the gallery space.
These fax-based works draw on the traditions of Mail Art, a cheap and cheerful movement in which artists send notes, jottings, rubber-stamped postcards, sketches, cartoons and other ephemera around the globe via through the postal system.
Along with examining issues of information and communication, fax art — being an odd and evocative combination of the machine and the human hand – also looks at technology. Bearing physical traces of the sender’s handwriting and drawing, the fax can seem endearingly expressive and emotional, especially in light of what’s come along since.
Take a funny back-and-forth series of faxes from Bank, an irreverent British artists’ group that in the 1990s started offering unsolicited corrections to art world press releases. In these "fax bak" works, Bank circles phrases on faxed gallery announcement, adds cheeky comments in the margins, and then returns them. The faxed response from one gallery — PLEASE STOP WASTING OUR TIME WITH YOUR ADOLESCENT INANE COMMENTARY. GO AWAY!! — is scrawled in big, dark, angry letters. No emoticons needed.
Some of the FAX artists have sent drawings, sketches or cartoons. Since a fax is a reproduction — and a fragile, frequently screwed-up reproduction, at that — these images are smudged, hazy and flat. Most of these artists aren’t mourning what is lost in the process of duplication and dissemination, though. They’re celebrating the obscure, ghostly beauty of the copies.
Some artists are deliberately testing the limits of legibility. Barbara Bloom uses the triangular organization of eye charts in her faxes, replacing the standard letters with text-message abbreviations (OMG, WTF) or bird silhouettes. Other artists cherry-pick images that have become immediately recognizable for political or cultural reasons, like I ‘* NY or that grainy picture of Osama bin Laden.
Some works are text-based. Eric Mitchell picks up on the way replication affects the spread of information — and disinformation — with faxes that highlight spurious conspiratorial phrases plucked off the Internet ("The Illuminati," "The New World Order," "Miraculous Cancer Cure!").
Taken as a whole, FAX calls up Proustian memories of the medium’s glory days — that juddering sound when a transmission came through; the metallic smell and slippery feel of a fax fresh off the roll; the adorably limited palette of white, black, near-black and off-black. Although the show’s curatorial guidelines sternly warn artists against "fetishistic nostalgia," viewers can do as they please.
alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca
FAX
Plug In ICA, 286 McDermot Ave.
Until Feb. 21
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
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Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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