CONTENT-AWARE
NEW WORK BY AIDAN FITZGERALD
MOUNT ANALOGUE
SEPTEMBER 6TH - SEPTEMBER 30TH
WORK DAY
LIVE-STREAMING TODAY 9AM-5PM
Work Day is uninterrupted 8 hour video of the Artist scrolling through content on his phone.
ABOUT THE SHOW
Content – Aware is a collection of work by Aidan Fitzgerald, working through his ideas of Art and Content creation.
The show contains installation work, video, prints, books, drawings, and sculpture – it’s sort of like a group show, except it’s all made by one guy. The work is about art creation and the idea of putting on an art show in Mount Analogue – each piece references itself as an element of a body of work, and questions the intent of its generation and author. The show is an investigation of the separation of Art and Content, and the impossibility of the artist to fully realize their endeavors.
The majority of us interact with art and ideas through Instagram and social media – so we never actually see the work, only tiny representations of it in our hands. The internet has leveled the playing field that separated “images” from “Art”: Art on Instagram, facebook, tumblr, the New York Times, The Stranger – these are only secondary representations of the work itself. While this is no different from images in books or newspapers of the 20th century, the perpetual scroll of our content consumption has rendered the drawing, the soliloquy, the cast bronze sculpture equivalent to the dog doing a cartwheel, the weight loss before/after, the mirror selfie, the hot boy #mcm.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Art deserves to be taken down a peg – and it deserves to be accessible. If you have a smartphone, you get to look at art.
The internet has become not only a new venue for work – whether it be the collection of images that constitute your feed or an all-digital museum on second life, or simply the collection of images the All-Powerful Algorithm chooses for your google results – but also a medium for new work – memes, oblique alt poetry, webcomics, online publishing, or Newhive, to name a few. But what happens to actual, hold-it-in-your-hands, physical work? Painting, poetry, and the novel have been “dying” for hundreds of years now, not to mention the death knells for photography sounded by Teju Cole, and previously, Susan Sontag. And yet all this physical stuff is still out here. What does this work look like in a gallery, when it knows it’s on the way out? What does art look like when it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and knows that at the end of the day it’s just content to be tapped and scrolled past? What is the work made by an artist who has no idea how to make work anymore?