| If you’re making contemporary music, it doesn’t matter how big you are, you can’t not have a Myspace page. That the internet has profoundly changed the way music is made today is so evident that it’s almost embarrassing to state it. The availability of a huge archive of content online and cheap editing software, along with the ability to collaborate with—and borrow from—artists everywhere, and at any time, as well as the advent of communities like Myspace, which facilitate quick feedback from listeners, haven’t just changed the way that musicians get the final product, they’ve also changed the standards in contemporary music, created new techniques, working relationships and even genres. |  |
Natalie Czech – Alix Rule
If you’re making contemporary music, it doesn’t matter how big you are, you can’t not have a Myspace page. That the internet has profoundly changed the way music is made today is so evident that it’s almost embarrassing to state it. The availability of a huge archive of content online and cheap editing software, along with the ability to collaborate with—and borrow from—artists everywhere, and at any time, as well as the advent of communities like Myspace, which facilitate quick feedback from listeners, haven’t just changed the way that musicians get the final product, they’ve also changed the standards in contemporary music, created new techniques, working relationships and even genres. But, all this is old news.
What then has made the art world so slow to acknowledge the potential impact of the internet upon visual work? Maybe it’s the thought that art, whose production is centered around the internet, brings up hard questions about authorship—questions that pace a century of art movements concerned with raising them—still always make this world a bit squeamish. Maybe it’s the fact that much of internet art isn’t made for the gallery.
But, as in the past, it seems that the commercial art world is gradually waking up and getting ready to appropriate—that is, embrace—art whose production has been based on, or influenced by, the internet. Natalie Czech, a young German artist who has recently had her first major solo shows in Berlin and Cologne this spring, seems an early example, and quite a fine one. Her latest work, the “Daily Mirror” series, was created by culling motifs from the backgrounds of internet news photos. She arranges her digital clippings in Photoshop with the differences in the original images’ resolution maintained and with the resulting effect being often almost holographic. The worlds of repeated form that Czech creates are hence surprisingly deep.
The way Czech treats her found images offers obvious parallels to the way that people began treating pop music in the early 2000s. The mashup revolution happened when it suddenly became possible to decompose the enormous volume of songs online using cheap software—when people started collaging the bits together in more interesting ways. As with music, efforts by distributors to keep electronic images commercial have been largely frustrated. The pictures in AP and Reuters’ online archives all have watermarks to guard against “unauthorized use.” Czech simply removes them, or uses parts of the image where they don’t show.
Natalie Czech’s work speaks clearly and accessibly of the general desensitization to the kinds of images out of which they’re composed. The plethora of shots out of which each of her works is composed in fact represent only a small and highly curated sample of the images that are shot according to the news industry’s standard templates—and a new batch of which is available everyday. Confetti. Rubble. Flowers. Protest banners. Yanked from their context, the motifs that Czech samples lose their meanings and become like any graphic; the “Daily Mirror” reflects the violence done to the particular events’ significance as they get served to us through the commercial media.
But, if the abstraction of conflicts around the world into symbols that we can digest without chewing is the starting point for Czech’s work, it’s only a starting point. Like the best mashups of mass-produced pop, the use of the original mediocre source material isn’t just a smarmy expression of consumer dissatisfaction as much as the basis for work that rocks to its own drumbeat. One thinks of auteurs like DJ Danger Mouse or Go Home Productions, whose "Stroke of Genius"—in which Christina Aiguilera’s lyrics are put to the Strokes’ "Hard to Explain." While both sources are still identifiable, together they yield a desperate sexuality more genuine and interesting than anything in either of the originals.
Czech’s work too fully discloses its sources (although the artist composes her works stunningly, she is as careful to leave some of the seams of the collage evident). But, despite flaunting its origins, this work isn’t too preoccupied with them. “The Daily Mirror” isn’t about our addiction to these familiar images as such—the artist’s interest is clearly in marshalling them to create something that’s not only better, but different. Czech’s “Across the Universe” series, for instance, stops short of delivering an indictment of the uniform media coverage of mass demonstrations. Czech organizes the protest banners by year and arranges them in undulating patterns—evoking patterns of waves or tides, or some other natural cycle. Some will no doubt reproach the work for failing to deliver a clearer critical perspective.
The realms created are indeed far removed from the places where the source photos were originally shot (Jette Rudolph, the Berlin gallerist representing Czech made an apt choice in first showing her work in a exhibit of a group of young artists titled ‘Surreal’). They are also—despite uniform technique and source material—extremely varied. The enormous Sea of Flowers composed out of 300-plus images from state funerals hits you with a sensual and emotional overload in the style of Gericault’s Medusa. On the other end of the spectrum is the black and white series "Holes," four table mat-sized prints each composed of a handful of images shot through bombed walls, in which conceptual and visual wit compete for the floor.
In some cases, Czech describes her works as “tributes” to the images themselves, which are manipulated delicately—almost lovingly—to create these worlds. The artist’s attitude towards her source material, in brief, is more ambiguous than it appears on the conceptual level. There’s something very exciting about Czech’s work, which is manifest in the anti-theoretical way in which she tends to describe it: it feels very young. Czech is clearly still experimenting.
It’s this complex attitude—a jaded acceptance of the degradation of the material she’s working with, entertained alongside a playful optimism about what can emerge from it—that gives the work Czech’s work its very contemporary tone. This is a tone also characterizes the mash up experiments the past decade; one that’s familiar to a generation who have grown up getting served more mediocre content than we can possibly consume. The possibilities that emerge out of the out of the internet’s detritus is where the work’s radicalism kicks in, and where the enchantment happens.
