Overview
With this work, Arcangel took into account the explosively developing parallel society of artists operating in the virtual world
Last year, New York artist Cory Arcangel (born in 1978) was given an extensive solo exhibition in the main rooms of the Gallery. The key work in the Salzburg exhibition was A Couple of Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (2007). This was a dual-channel projection in which Arcangel spent months painstakingly putting together selected samples from Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1741 Goldberg Variations. Arcangel took these samples from the many amateur videos of hobby musicians found on the YouTube Internet platform. With this work, Arcangel took into account the explosively developing parallel society of artists operating in the virtual world, while at the same time referencing Glenn Gould’s revolutionary style of recording: already in the 1950s Gould was putting the highly successfully parts of a piano piece into a whole. The Berlin National Gallery purchased A Couple of Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (2007) among other things.
We are now pleased to present a new installation by Arcangel that is directly related to A Couple of Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (2007) and that expands on this idea. In the work Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11 (2009) on which the artist worked for a half year, Cory Arcangel painstakingly pieces together YouTube samples of piano-playing cats performing Arnold Schönberg’s Drei Klavierstücken, a groundbreaking piece of atonal music. In this way, Arcangel fuses the demands of a complicated piece difficult for the public to receive with the performance of cute cats. The Avant Garde is made more accessible with this approach. We will display this single-channel projection, which had its premiere in June of this year in Diedrich Diederichsen’s group exhibition Schere – Stein – Papier, Pop-Musik als Gegenstand Bildender Kunst (Rock – Paper – Scissors, Pop Music as an Object of Fine Art) in the Kunsthaus Graz, in the Annex of the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac until January 16, 2010.
If the radical form of Appropriation Art in contemporary art has been established since Richard Prince at the latest, impartiality is revealed here in which American artist Cory Arcangel uses software, hardware and Internet resources as raw artistic material and presents it in new relationships and in an innovative style. In recent years, Arcangel has become especially well known with his applied archeology to the historical computer technology of the 1970s and 80s, while over time his arsenal of artistic material and digital sources has expanded slowly but surely.It is seldom that an artist of the younger generation receives such great attention from renowned cultural institutions. Thus in 2004 works by Arcangel were shown in the Museum of Modern Art New York, in the London Royal Academy of Art, at the Liverpool Biennial, in the Whitney Museum of Art New York and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2005 the Migros Museum in Zurich devoted a solo exhibition to him. In February 2008 Arcangel participated in the exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to today in the New York Museum of Modern Art.
