COPIA: Collection of Post-Industrial Arts
Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna
Before Georg Kargl Fine Arts exhibited art it was a printers, the Druckerei Guberner & Hierhammer to be exact, the repetitive rhythm of the presses echoing in the gallery’s large central space. Today, this kind of printing is fading from sight, replaced by the digital files pulsing across our screens, while the old Druckerei now contains the singular beauties of art. Mladen Bizumic’s exhibition COPIA: Collection of Post-Industrial Arts (2023) examines and contests the inevitability of this shift, weaving history and its temporal textures into hybrid images, mixtures of new and old, analog and digital, information and experience.
The shift from analog to digital is fundamentally photographic, because today photography is coextensive with the world, inseparable from its perception and analysis. Digital photomediation is ubiquitous and constant, the permanent production of images by human and nonhuman agents that don’t simply represent the world but shapes it. Today, the amount of images that can actually be perceived by humans is only a small part of those produced. The photograph is no longer simply something seen, but an infinitely reproducible file, dematerialized and distributed. It is everywhere and nowhere, always waiting to be realized but real nonetheless. This essentially dispersed ontology of the virtual is the diagram of contemporary life, generating new social forms and the new forms of capitalism that exploit them, channeling feeds of images that accumulate value through their continual manipulation of clicks, taps and swipes. This permanent state of consumption–production rolls time and space into the constant flow of information and images that constitutes our instant. An instant to which the image is no longer fixed, its constant reproduction forming a ramifying series of repetitive differences, an unstable surface of time and (dis)appearance. Bizumic offers an alternative to this incredible inflation of photo-images, a kind of de-growth or slowing down of production, a return of the hand in images that do not flash, crash and re-form, but instead mold time into new shapes, mixing present, future and past in ways that do not reduce them to a meme or an ironic reference.
The passage from the hands-on process of commercial printing to the virtual flows and feeds of today’s ‘new’ media is mapped in iCloud (Extraction Contract #1), where the 19 page iCloud contract is laid out (its clear: they own everything), and silver-gelatin photos of clouds are placed upon it. The materiality of these prints is indexed by the silver smudges appearing all over the contract pages. Against the invisible and immaterial exploitations of the digital world appear marks caused by handling. The presence of this hand (its digits rather than the digital) registers the artist’s body, and reminds us of our own, overlaying the analog on the digital in order to recalibrate their relationship. Bizumic is suggesting that materiality and feeling not only persist, but also evade our virtual regulation, leaving messy remainders from real life. Every cloud, we remember, has a silver lining. Similarly, those parts of the gallery flushed with red, blue and green light refer to the RBG colour system now used by digital media, but here these are liberated from any ‘content’ to appear here and now, insisting on our physical presence and experience (Who’s Afraid of the Red?, Who’s Afraid of the Blue?, Who’s Afraid of the Green?). This recalling of the body is not nostalgic, it neither mourns what’s lost nor tries to recapture it. Bizumic instead confronts the digital world with analog technologies and techniques, and the values that go with them, rebooting them as part of our present. This is a utopian, Modernist strategy using art and technology to orient bodies and forces towards the future, by inventing new experiences that escape our current conditions. Perhaps such futures are vaporized in today’s ominous feelings of apocalypse, but Bizumic nevertheless challanges our constantly flickering instant to form a question about itself, and so produce a new future, a new narrative. The exhibition COPIA: Collection of Post-Industrial Arts is just such a question.
Stephen Zepke
