"The Manic American Humanist Show" at PWA
Filip Kostic
Holly Oliver
Tomi Faison
Emma Murray
curated by Abbey Pusz
March 10th - March 26th, 2023 at Public Works Administration
THE MANIC AMERICAN HUMANIST SHOW honors work from four core contributors to Do Not Research.
This group exhibition falls just after a decade of experiments in political possibility via the internet. From the first call-to-action for an online counter-hegemony during Occupy in 2011, to the meme magic that oversaw the election of Donald Trump in 2016, to the overton window shifting projects of a “dirtbag left” that corresponded with each Bernie Sanders campaign. A new kind of politicized American citizen emerges; one of increasingly niche-ified politics. The long-tail of the internet finds an analog in the production of idiosyncratic flags, t-shirts, bumper stickers... If nothing is working, I guess I’ll take matters into my own hands.
This is parodied and contemplated in the later period of Post-Internet art. From its culture-jamming roots, it comes to shine a light on contemporary alienation as manifested in the fringe political corners of the internet. It is from this that Do Not Research as a publishing platform and community developed.
Pop is taken as a material in itself. Bundled in this impulse, and calling to mind its aesthetic sibling PC Music, is the emergent redemptive quality of popular culture. Taking first the work of Flip Kostic, Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel, the artist leans on the conventions of blockbuster film narratives to deliver us through the otherwise schizophrenic landscape of Fortnite. Part autobiography, it is also the telling of the real-life NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, specifically Belgrade.
In one sense, the direction these artists took their interests after a relative high point in the culture-war-to-date can be read as symptomatic of a familiar cycle of optimism-turn-burn-out in left American politics. Without a window toward political possibility, the movement inward, to spiritual liberation and self-reflection, is present in the early examples of American subculture as well as the millennial politics of today. In another sense, this direction may serve as a reinvestment in art as the “daughter of freedom;” a claim to ambivalence that is enabling to the artist.
What can be said most concretely, however, is the concern of these artists to break ways with the nihilism underpinning millennial politics, which shares an impact on the art-pessimistic attitude of the contemporary fine art world. Do Not Research, when acting as institutional critique, identifies the trends in which art and curation seems to have been sold out from under itself in favor of a display of its own self-suspicion.
Where I am most inspired by these artists, as my peers, is the depth of their sympathy and emphasis on a human agency. The potential to mystify and spectacularize the postmodern moment is hemmed and reigned in by a simple truth, that the internet is all the same to where I grew up.
1 Overton window describes the spectrum of acceptable politics.
2 This is a quote from the poet, composer, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller. :P
3 See Ben Davis, Here Is What the Riddle at the Heart of the 2022 Whitney Biennial Actually Means, published 2022.
Tomi Faison:
“It's a modular video installation series of 16x9 individual videos strung together. It resembles a series of gifs on filmstrip or a side-scroll video game, or even a banner ad.
Simultaneously, it displays specific micro-unconscious psychoanalytic observations of desire and drive. The work takes on broad political ideas and trends and traces this connection.
I see a lot of political ideology, particularly an older school of understanding ideology, as fully top down, where the capitalist are generating a brainwashing apparatus that controls us through schools and so on.
From that I find a politics that seems to swing super hyperly back and forth between these very individualist poles. I have a very personal ripened frustration with teeth, as a seemingly fundamental human necessity, that should be a human right, and for me seems to stand in for these broader trend, such as the sovereign citizen / happy pod-liver bug-eater dichotomy.
The other layer is one I don’t really know how to talk about yet, but there’s something about working on this piece and shooting sections months apart within my first two years on E. A lot of the work is about gender, but like using teeth instead to talk abt the body.”
Filip Kostic:
“Fortnite: 007 Merciful Angel is a remake of Fortnite set in a 1999 faulty reconstruction from memory of Belgrade, Serbia during the NATO bombing. The game is both a retelling of the war in '99 as well as a smashing together of cultural references in the game space of Fortnite. You play as Serbian double-agent Dusko Popov (who 007 was based off of) and are joined by the Scarlet Witch of the Avengers as you uncover disparate retellings of events from the time period surrounding the war. The work focuses on the infrastructural basis of Fortnite in which all of context can collapse within the game, using it as a spring board to bring in its own contexts into the fold of the game's logic, further complicating the collapsing as a sort of mirror of the collapsed nature of a recalling of a traumatic event.”
Emma Murray:
“Some of my thoughts on this are… obelisks as a funny symbol of a successful empire. From the Romans stealing them and putting them in their own cities into today, where we keep making them for our own monuments and trying to replicate the power of the original ones.
And I was like, yo if I were making an obelisk for America it would have to be covered in bumper stickers because that's like the purest distillation of political opinions and the culture…and aren’t bumper stickers so great, as both early advertisements and early memes. That seems so American.”
Holly Oliver:
“Field Notes reflects an intuitive archival approach to digital subjectivity, repurposing material sourced from years of phone/laptop notes and other ephemera. The resulting ‘scrapbook page’ traces a wide range of digitally-mediated affects; Deeply personal reflections share the page with free association, brainstorming, experimentation, ideation, and intention. At the same time, the work attempts to capture the experiential ‘materiality’ that forms the substrate for these extended-mind processes. Composed almost entirely in Google Docs, *Field Notes * treats the graphical elements afforded by spreadsheets and rich text editors as found materials for formal exploration. Unicode characters, elemental building blocks of digital graphic space, become flora and fauna of the interface. These sources of natural fascination accrue in a way resembling a collection of shells on a mantle, rocks on the windowsill, or wildflowers pressed in the pages of an old book.”
Sam Black & Alison Sirico:
co-directors of the project space Public Works Administration
“My partner, Sam, and I opened up a project space for digital artists in NYC seven months ago. We've always been passionate about nightlife and community art spaces, and after the pandemic, we noticed a surge in digital art but a lack of physical spaces to showcase it. We felt like we had to do something about it, so we created a local platform for artists to connect and share their work.
One of the most exciting parts of our programming is our collaboration with online communities like Do Not Research, FELT Zine, and RefractionDAO. These virtual networks bring with them relevant conversations about topics such as American politics online, the intersection of graffiti culture and web3, and the playful possibilities of art on the blockchain. By working with these communities, we've been able to broaden our perspective on the relationships between digital and physical art, culture, and society, and explore new creative possibilities.
For us, our project space is more than just a physical space – it's a community incubator... an IRL forum. By creating a physical platform for digital artists, we're able to provide a space where people can come together and share their work, collaborate, and form meaningful connections.
As our project space continues to grow and evolve, we are excited to collaborate with more artists, curators, and creative degens. Everyone we work with is future-thinking and innovative, so we can't wait to see what's going to happen here!”
Read more in Dazed: The Manic American Humanist Show explores life on the US political fringes by Gunseli Yalcinkaya