Hudson of Feature, Inc.
with detail from Fall '91 by Charles Ray

 

I wish I could see a hard-edged abstract painting look that fantatic. Not very often.

(art)n was previously represented as an emerging art collective working in digital media by Feature Inc. in Chicago and New York, 1987-1992:

 

(art)n at Fermilab
Hudson
Feature Inc., New York

October 1987

Since '77, many of the significant developments in art have been actively concerned with photography. That technology's 148-year tradition has continuously stressed its inherent connection to objectivity and truth, but in the early eighties this no longer appeared correct. Especially evidenced in the electronic media was the revelation that the truth-or what had been parading as truth-had been manipulated, even blatantly fabricated. The need to be vigilant followed that revelation. Scrutinize everything for the hidden agenda. History has come to be fiction. The prescient function of art was rejected. Even the authority of one's own perceptions have been reduced. Suspicion and question rule.

A look at art's recent buzzwords identifies our reorientation: simulation, appropriation, deconstruction, reification, contextualization, suspension, confalte, signify, collapse, rupture. And the overview of this decade's most critically regarded art-works by Prince, Sherman, Levine, Charlesworth, Lawler, Kruger, Welling, Brauntuch and Koons-reveals this common ground-the examination of text/subject, believability/fakery, and authority/multiplicity.

(art)n's PHSColograms participate in this dialogue regarding the new reality. They present images which are not only more real and believable than those found in traditional photography, but also even more fabricated and fake. As with the works by the seminal artists already mentioned, the life of art is dependent upon the willingness of the viewer to suspend his/her orientation and play both in the believability of lies and the falsehoods appearing true-to-life. When the subject of the PHSCologram is no longer an image of something in our tangible world, but rather a computer generated deformation of a four-dimensional mathematical equation, the empirical indexing of the abstract image/object becomes further obfuscated by the clarity of its representation. How is it that a 4D math equation is simulated as a 2D image by a computer and then made to appear to be a 3D form floating in the flat space of a photograph?

Familiarity and seductive appearance keep the viewer returning to this art which poses doubt and reflection at its core. Artists exploring this new photography achieve this by utilizing carefully selected formats, techniques, and images which were generated by advertising and entertainment agencies for their efficaciousness. With the use of this material, the art and the artist participate in this system of manipulation. And the moment the viewers experience attraction to the art, they, too, are implicated. But, where the original purpose of the mass media images was to sentimentalize, capture, and thereby, close-off the experience from question, this new photography represents this information so as to reveal the fake and redirect the examination onto the artist's agenda and the viewer.