Cory Arcangel

Team Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, 2011, p. 9, illustrated in colour

Colour:The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is more saturated in the original.Condition:This work is in very good condition.
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Using both existing and obsolete technology as the central element in his artistic production, Cory Arcangel has created a body of work that perfectly encapsulates the vernacular of the 21^st Century. Video games, easily-relatable imagery and music, and recurrent phrases that circulate the Internet all populate the artist’s work, which encompasses digital media, but also painting, sculpture and performance. Carefully documented in his website, Arcangel’s works are analogous to an archive that showcases the ascent in popularity of varied forms of software, as well as their inevitable obsoleteness, thus offering an acute observation of the fast-paced culture we live in.

Executed in 2010, Photoshop CS: 84 by 66 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Blue, Red, Yellow," mousedown y=18200 x=1350, mouseup y=23400 x=18250 is part of the artist’s celebrated Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations series, which – according to his online portfolio – were started in 2007. Visually reminiscent of the all-over compositions of the colour field abstraction typical of the American Abstract Expressionists, the Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations incorporate creative aspects that can be traced back to the artistic movements of Fluxus and even Dada. Reminiscent of Rudolf Stingel's notorious Instructions from 1989, the title of the present work provides the exact coordinates and tools one should use in order to reproduce an identical image on Photoshop. However, the DIY, readily available/reproducible nature of this work is undermined by the fact that it is not only unique, but has also been painstakingly printed using high end technology and high quality photographic paper. Arcangel has explained how “I advertise them as being really easy to make. I make hundreds and hundreds of them and then I edit down to the four that seem to work well together. But, of course, I like to play it up. Like, ‘Oh, they’re so easy. It’s nothing’” (Cory Arcangel in conversation with Maru Heilmann in, Interview, 4 March 2011, online).

In 2011, a year after it was executed, the present work was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools at the Whitney Museum in New York. The show included works from the Photoshop Gradient Demonstration series, whose high end, polished finish contrasted starkly with the seemingly rudimentary appearance of the artist’s notorious series of hacked videogames. This contrast between high and low aspects of popular culture lies at the heart of Arcangel’s practice who, as curator Christine Paul explained, is interested in “’the human factor’ – the way we express ourselves through technological tools and platforms (from Photoshop to Youtube) in funny, original, creative, awkward, pathetic, and embarrassing ways. He manages to connect these forms of expression to the history of art, showing how the pop-cultural vernacular unintentionally and unknowingly emulates artistic practices and approaches in the fine-arts world. Arcangel’s product demonstrations ultimately do not evaluate technology itself but the human perspective on it – the ways which we play with tools to engage the world” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, 2011, p. 1).