Try to Hold Your Gaze Steady 
—exhibition 2/19 - 5/2, 2019

Curated by Viola Lukács
Radiator Gallery, New York

Persistence of Vision at Radiator Arts: Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga, Harm van den Dorpel, Lan Xu and Thomas Dexter. February 19-May 2, 2019, curated by Viola Lukács - essay by Eszter Polonyi

The show at Radiator Arts is dedicated to digital cameras and the extent to which the vision of the world they offer continues to be optical or even recognizably human. At hand are digital cameras that snag, twitch, lurch and swerve. Instead of rendering the world in a likeness, they capture it in shreds and tatters, leaving evidence of their fractal computations in the form of ridges, seams or fractures interrupting our visible world. As a display of the quirks and glitches that riddle digital media, the show offers valuable insight into the specificities of our digital technologies, on the one hand, but it also demonstrates their inevitable departure from the logics of visual perception. Each of the four interconnected rooms that make up the space of the Radiator Arts gallery moves the viewer through a different problematics or obstacle course of digital image generation. Somewhat remarkably, most of these works address the eye only to dismiss it in favor of the soft viscera in which might be located the visitor's orientation, proprioception and sense of bodily wholeness and integrity.

Appropriately entitled Try to Hold Your Gaze Steady by the curator Viola Lukács, the ostensible purpose of the show is an open challenge. We imagine to be in control of the cameras on our phones, computers, etc. But in fact the times have long past since we were consulted in the adjustment of focal and aperture settings or indeed in the event of photographic capture. The obsolescence of the human as a source of feedback necessary for the camera's calibration is perhaps the reason behind the recent deluge in the gallery of the full range of analog industrial test imagery, in the form of the delectably material projection countdowns, timing tape and color swatches. Since the unboxing of the digital apparatus, it turns out that the access to an apparatus's inner workings that was the project of the twentieth-century avant-garde was not only unsustainable, a blip along the expanding vistas of machine vision, it was also profoundly inhospitable to either the human eye, human sensorium or human intelligence. Up for question in the show might be the validity of much of the teachings of our twentieth-century predecessors and intellectual parents. If image-making with cameras can happen without our control, consent or even awareness, why continue to make images? Why not instead make machines that may or may not make images?

One such machine might be the gallery. The formal logics of the white cube appear to be the concern of the work in the show by Zsuzsanna Szegedi-Varga. Gallery walls have been understood to determine historical conventions of form, such as modernist flatness in the early twentieth century. In this instance, Szegedi-Varga has captured and isolated a digital short-circuit in a wall sculpture (No Time for Sublime, 2019). Encased in a laser-cut frame, this jagged line of cold cathode tubes stretches at least five feet high and articulates the phenomenon of fracture in monumental terms. Elevating digital reproducibility to a paradigm, it constitutes one of the centerpieces of the show. For Szegedi, the machine of the gallery is not spared the eventuality of a systems failure. She sees in the gallery a realm in which walls will reconsider their weight-bearing function and, against all odds, sprout outwards (Plexi Wall, 2019). Such algorithmic contingencies work against the art establishment's purposes of cult value, as a masterpiece remains identical to itself regardless of the number of times it has been compressed and copied (Rembrandt on Repeat, 2017). But if this fracture is the stuff of computational modeling, its visibility is an anomaly.

The gallery goes curiously dark once it is made subject to the logics of the digital. Two spaces at Radiator Arts have been dimmed for purposes of this show. The first contains a mixed media installation by artist and DJ Lan Xu (Beasts in the Playground, 2019). Combining a percussive soundtrack with a video of dancing feet, a women's jacket hanging off a pink metal grid and multiple sources of colored light, Xu invites the viewer into a space of sensory immersiveness. While her use of multi-directional lighting and sound evoke the throb of a night club, the space seems to be at a one-step remove from the dance floor. Instead of graffitied walls, we find a poem in mandarin characters. The beats are muffled, like distant fireworks. A neon sign that spells out R-E-L-A-X reads like a surreal injunction for inwardness. Basking in the pink glow of neon that is modulated in subtle touches of yellow and blue, the space feels cocooned by something like a physiological membrane, as though we were in a simulated sensorium being asked to expand.

Another machine would be the cinema. Cinema has a curiously fraught history with vision. While analog media were still in force, only half the time spent watching film involved the observation of images. The other half was spent staring into darkness. What forms of apperception rose to the surface in these moments of optical suspension are a source of film theoretical legend. But they still strain against the backs of your eyeballs today, when your frame buffer lets out and the show you are watching freezes on your screen. The prioprioception of the sightless body seems to be Harm van den Dorpel's preoccupation in their three-part animation (Three Sleepwalkers, 2006), exhibited alongside Szegedi's work in the lit, middle-section of the show. Three consecutive photographic images of sleeping bodies slowly reanimate after they splinter along fracture lines and begin to shift their loose tectonic plates into an upright position that enables them to sleepwalk off the screen.

Ironically, the clearest argument for the persistence of human-centered visuality comes from a corner of the show ostensibly designed in homage to machine vision. Two films by Thomas Dexter appear in the second darkened space of the gallery. Projected onto the front and back of a massive vertical screen suspended from the ceiling, his films move through an alternation of light and darkness whose accelerated interchange over the period of three-four minutes eventually results in intermittent flashes (Spincycle II, 2012, Spincycle IV, 2012). Located at the furthermost point from the gallery's entranceway, Dexter's work has the effect of opening the back wall of the white cube onto a bottomless vortex. Lost seem to be the points of reference permitting the eye to situate the body within space. But as the visitor nears his screen and seems to teeter on the verge of an epileptic sightlessness, there is a simultaneous realization that Dexter's image is that of a landscape. A landscape so familiar, in fact, as to be banal. This is New York; this is here and now. The effect of disorientation is due to the fact that the eye has managed to locate itself with reference to a real horizon line, that of the city's rooftops and its maritime coastline. In the context of this show, Dexter use of photography in the employ of representation turns a technofuturist apparatus—a GoPro action camera attached to the head of an electric drill—into an opening onto anthropomorphic rootedness. Although ostensibly the apex of a show that aims to disarm the visitor of their capacities of orientation, in fact Dexter's films reclaim the phenomenon of the line from its existence as digital fracture. Although from a seemingly impossible distance, we rediscover the expanding limits of the sight of the human.

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