Kathryn Andrews, Brendan Anton Jaks, Eva Berendes, Simon Denny, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Patrick Hill, Tilman Hornig, Dan Rees, Philipp Timischl, Anne de Vries
From the 14th – 17th May my Instagram feed was awash with photographs of two art fairs: Frieze New York and NADA. I enjoyed it; I could see the highlights of the fairs without the expense of going to New York, seeing only the favourite works of those whose taste I generally trust. Eventually I felt the urge to broaden my scope so I browsed the hashtags (#friezeny and #nadany), thus quenching my increasing fomo. As the fairs went on I quickly got bored of seeing the same pictures over and over. These most popular works - the most retinal, the most accessible, the most shared, the most liked, in all their quirky retro filters - had propagated through Instagram with the aid of a simple hashtag.
Around the same time as #friezeny and #nadany, a group of photographs on my Tumblr feed caught my attention. These were the documentation photographs of an exhibition, Screen Play, at SWG3 in Glasgow, curated by It’s Our Playground (Joey Villemont and Camille le Houezec). The photographs showed an exhibition of photographs that were hung on Chroma green walls and freestanding aluminium mesh frames, I recognised many of these photographs from previous online browsing of exhibitions, similar browsing to that which led me to view the photographs of Screen Play. Their bright colours and abundance on my Tumblr feed (having been reblogged by several tumblr users that I follow) led me to investigate. The photographs exhibited in Screen Play were not artworks themselves but the documentation of artworks, so I was viewing the documentation photographs of an exhibition of documentation photographs of artworks.
In the press release the curators admit to crude image-selection criteria: “online virility”, “visual impact”, and “quality”. Whilst the latter criteria of “quality”, assuming this meant ‘resolution’, seemed to be a reasonable practical requirement for the enlargement of a photograph; the two former got me thinking. The phrase “online virility” stood out to me: virility being an intriguing word to use in relation to art. I supposed that its use here, rather than referring to masculinity, was intended to be synonymous with “reproducibility”, or perhaps it was a typo and was meant to say “virality”. Either way I understood it as an image’s ability to proliferate online. The second criteria “visual impact” struck me as being incredibly blunt and subjective. But both made sense to me. The reason I was even reading about this exhibition at all was that the documentation of it was so vibrant and bountiful on my Tumblr feed and that I had recognised the photographs of artworks that were displayed in the exhibition: the curators had been successful in fulfilling their selection criteria. These aforementioned qualities were not only possessed by the artworks whose images appeared in the exhibition, but also by the documentation photographs of the exhibition itself. I then had the realisation that I would not have had these realisations had I actually, physically, in person (AFK) visited the exhibition, in the gallery, in Glasgow.
I couldn’t to say for sure, but presumably for those who saw Screen Play AFK it was an exhibition about screens and their capacity for representation: all of the depicted works reference screens in some form, for example Eva Berendes’ GRID (2014) series which are steel mesh screens with objects attached to them, and Philipp Timischl’s recent series of works that consist of floor-based LCD screens with painted canvases attached to them such as Untitled (Two Parks) (2014). For me, Screen Play is about the flip-flopping of an image between its physical existence and digital existence until it becomes difficult or perhaps futile to distinguish its origin and endpoint. By seeing it online, on Tumblr, I experienced Screen Play at the most developed point of its concept, a level further than those who actually visited the physical space of SWG3 and saw the exhibition AFK: the point at which the images that had been made physical for display in this exhibition had become images once more.
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