This past spring, Israeli artist Michal Rovner exhibited a series entitled Michal Rovner: In Stone at Pace Wildenstein’s Chelsea location.
Rovner Digital Projections Prove Reflective of Old and New Technologies
By Erin Scime
This past spring, Israeli artist Michal Rovner exhibited a series entitled Michal Rovner: In Stone at Pace Wildenstein’s Chelsea location. Operating as a sequence of digital video projections on stone slabs, In Stone employs and plays with modes of museology and media including film, photography, inscription and sculpture.
Enclosed in minimal white cases, each work in the series features slowly migrating forms that if passed by too quickly, appear as ancient written texts. Countlesstwo-dimensional characters are projected from a concealed source: appearing as ancient linguistic signifiers, an endless (and timeless) chain of faceless characters. Rovner has an appetite for duplicating and repeating forms. The abstracted chromosome-like figures featured here are also found in earlier video works such as Notes (2001) and Time Left (2002). The political and existential tone that weighs on much of her earlier work is absent here. With In Stone, Rovner’s layered interface of digital images (arguably the most contemporary art medium) is an homage to conventional modes of visual communication.
As In Stoneis a series of projections, it is necessary to question and explorethe installation as film. In 2001-02, the Whitney Museum presented an exhibition which investigated the merging environments of the projected image and Conceptual sculpture in analog formats. In Rovner’s series, the potential and power of projected digital images moves beyond the cinematic and technical apparatuses of mechanical reproduction highlighted by the aforementioned effort. If cinema and photography have been historically connected with the trace, or ghost, of the corporeal body, then how does digital imaging alter our relationship to and our understanding of matter, the physical, the body?
As part of her labor-intensive process, Rovner carefully blurs, crops, amplifies, diffuses and manipulates the color of the figures originally captured by video and translates them into a cyclic pattern that is ultimately projected in a traditionally filmic format onto slabs of organic material. This procedure leads to a composite of media that ultimately breaks down the subject into an abstracted, mathematically coded form that is far past the possible result of analog data.
Rovner obscures the traces and enhances the anonymous characteristics of the subject. It is no surprise that Rovner’s abstracted figures have been compared to the portraits of Gerhard Richter. Although Rovner’s editing plays on the tenets of painterly abstraction, her method is distinct from analog photography or film. In Rovner’s work, the insistence on play (or manipulation of information) leads to a game theory based on decision–of input and output–and thus offers a digital outlook that positions computed output at the expense of ‘natural’ input. In terms of art historical rhetoric, this leads to the question of whether the pictorial quality of the image is the referent (as in analog) or the managing mechanism (i.e. computer processing) is the actual referent.
In the seminal work Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan reminds us that in an age of information and electronic dominance, the medium, or "content," is inextricably linked to the old mechanized environment of the industrial age. In other words, as layers of media are applied and understood, the product (or artwork) exists as a layering of densities. Therefore, new media changes the environment of perception and the architecture of meaning. Taking this theory into consideration, In Stone operates as a literal example of new media layered onto old. Specifically because it is a digital projection onto a stable, almost iconic stone base (recall pre-Minimalist sculpture); it translates McLuhan’s theory on the layering effect of mediums into kinetic work of art. Rosalind Krauss has rightly suggested the expansion of sculpture into a field that is closer to architecture, but are these pieces returning sculpture to its natal form? In Stone recalls the pedestal, the artifact case and the illusory lighting scheme of museum presentation. Interestingly enough, what breaks the cycle of reverting to the past is the nostalgic effort of layering and balancing old and new that confirms the work as something that moves on by looking back.
Using traditions of museology, archeology and formal artistic properties as a conceptual base for the digital media overlay, Rovner provides the necessary harmony, the necessary link, and the necessary grounding between the present media frenzy of the ‘information age’ and ‘global era’ and the long history of visual communication. If nothing else, In Stone reminds us that the so-called ‘chaos’ of the information age may be closer to our recent mechanical past than we like to believe.
