For the last half-dozen years I’ve been watching the development of a “school” of art work so new and innovative that I don’t know what to call it. Video art, electronic abstract expressionism, cross-media youth? Some of it is painting, some is mixed-media, sometimes painted photos, superimposed images, fragmented bricolage, layered exposures. Most of it could never be done in a darkroom or, for that matter, on a canvas. In some ways a throwback to the Seventies and in other ways so far in the future that it might be from another planet, not usually a utopian one. The images are autobiographical, but you might not recognize them if you haven’t been there.
Beginning as something like music videos and drawing on the photography skills developed in the streets of San Francisco during the great blossoming of gay culture just before AIDS hit, the computer programs draw on a massive accumulation of years of images not available through public social media. Both still and moving recurring images which they mix and match, edit and reverse, overlay and punch full of holes, all in an abstract expressionist mode but without settling into a particular style.
The context is powered by the emotions and survival struggles of young men, some kicked out of upscale homes, maybe for being gay, and others accidentally growing up like weeds in the interstices of drug culture. In fact, the premise is that this art can pull them towards new skills and resolutions and that -- hopefully -- they can convey to others the desperate passion of their lives. I believe it. Occasionally, there are images of great tenderness, mixed with a hunger for movement, esp. on wheels but often in dance. Often there are beds -- not portraits of sex but of fever and pain. Then again, joyous friendship. Against the public obsession with the female body is the male body.
The original Paris boys, working in an old dubious hotel on desktop paraphernalia they pieced together, are men now and international. Some are professional. The newer, younger, American groups are working on tablets and smartphones, which influences their work. The trend includes color-patch abstract expressionism that overlays faces or figures in way that direct the eye, tease the understanding, spotlight the unexpected. The boys work in the context of group and discussion, but in the end do individual and unique work, more clearly in the still images than in the video.
The ways of using print are unique to the medium. Sometimes they are the whole image: a statement, a philosophy, a poem, a banner. Found poetry. Sometimes they are ticker-tape-style crawls along the bottom of a video, maybe the same words that are accompanying as voice-overs. They might be signs, t-shirt statements, or written right on the boys -- possibly permanently as tattoos. Some websites (Tumblr) allow along with an image, text a little more than a caption, which is likely to be a poem.
I had intended to insert a sample still image here but had no permission to use it. I’ve gotten high-handed about using images from the Internet, but these boys are trying to earn money to help with their upkeep, so in the end I thought it was not proper. The image was summertime, one of the simpler and happier images. Boys in groups, never far from water and wheels. Their fav subjects are themselves. Sometimes little more than home movies, they are far more rooted in their actual lives than any art vids from professionals, so often promotional. Once in a while -- more often as time goes on -- they create something of o’erleaping mythic meaning or of heartstruck truth. For those of us who have been watching for years, every composite of the image archives holds echoes of past images. Often now I can see a foot or the crook of an elbow and remember an entire figure that was powerful in itself but in quite different circumstances.
Bricolage is when an image is assembled of bits that may have been part of something else, but most of these vids are not that kind of mosaic. Rather they overlay, changing color, changing dimensions. Even in the still pictures, if you sit for a while looking at them, you can see deeper and new bits emerge, almost as if the picture were moving after all. Something may arise from inside you, the viewer, surprising you. There’s a kind of photo sequence that goes in a loop, round and round, faster and faster, until you see things visionary, get meanings never intended. Or there might be the most casual snap of a friend, easy, making you laugh. Or a formal black-and-white portrait, gazing out so level, so intelligent.
The settings are not always so idyllic since these are boys from the street, the squats, the abandoned urban railyards and warehouses left behind when economies collapsed. Those rusted, broken, contaminated and dangerous places that no one cares about. No one knows what to do with them. They aren’t worth investment. The kind of places boys have always explored, looking for something unexpected, meeting people also broken, contaminated and dangerous. Rain and leaks make oily pools. Shadows through dark knives across the walkways. A red smear -- is that blood? Quite possibly. Anyone we know? Could be.
For a while the boys had a gallery outlet in Tribeca called “Tristan’s Moon.” It was ended by Hurricane Sandy when it flooded a whole gallery district of Manhattan. Much earlier, when I was more closely connected, we were going to write a book, a kind of dialogue alternating raw life with high-flown musing. Then we thought, “Oh, VOOKS!” but Madison Avenue grabbed that. The whole merry-go-round went a little crazy, ending with a crackup on Facebook that lost the videos the website was supposed to be hosting. Then the iPad tablets appeared. A revelation. And smart phones. Suddenly there were kids sending vids to Show Me Your Life from Africa and SE Asia and Buenos Aires. Then apps. How can apps BE art, not just access? Every new technology starts a whole new game. No one needs classes -- one figures it out, shows the next, each-one-teach-one.
Perhaps American art collectors don’t quite know how to think about a group effort like this one, made necessary by the danger of revealing individuals with underground pasts. We’re used to group efforts in the theatre and in film, but not so much in the context of art even if it’s presented on a screen. We’re accustomed to the cult of the individual, something one can collect by following a name -- not a “school” of art that is interactive both at the point of creation and then again in the dynamics of its viewing.
Is it therapy? Social comment? Some kind of vision? Or a rifle shot across the bow of stigma and class? Probably all of those and more. Many claim they are trying to “reach” these boys, but they always try to go through a middle man who filters what they get in order to deduct a “finder’s fee”. This group bypasses that. What you see on the screen is before your own eyes. What you see is not the boys -- it’s what the boys see.
If you’re curious, you can use Twitter to get access. @timbarrus
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