ART FROM THE TUBE
Zane Hettinga
According to Andre Malraux though new artistic means art in will be less restricted to the usual confines of the museum. With the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s this gained new meaning for the art world, a new more free way of viewing art work and spreading the concepts attached to them. Giving the new means for the art world to propagate in the realm of fine arts there have been more democratizing effects that have lent the ability of anyone to produce and to show works of art. There are very successful examples for this for the purposes of this exhibition I will concentrate on the open call video site that is Youtube. This website is a museum to exhibit user-generated content including movie clips, TV clips, music videos, along with original videos. The democratizing effects have been well recognized and Youtube was given the George Foster Peabody Award Citing Youtube as “… a "Speakers' Corner," where Internet users can upload, view and share clips, is an ever-expanding archive-cum-bulletin board that both embodies and promotes democracy.” The effects of this democratized environment can be seen in the number of views which, in effect, is placing the viewer in the position of critic allowing for not only rating of the work but in posting written comments often critiquing the work. Malraux may not have foreseen the development of digital technology and the democratizing platforms to display new media work. What he did understand is greater accessibility to fields like photography were opening new avenues for the artist to engender empathy from their viewers.
An artist utilizing this new domain for is Jason Baalman, who posts under the name Electric
Asylum Art when submitting has work on Youtube. The work that is shown by Baalman very process based, representational drawings using alternative materials to draw with or on. In the piece video Elvis Presley Painting with Cheese Puffs on Velvet, Baalman begins with the camera from above the velvet canvas. First all that is visible is the torn open bag of Cheetos in the top left corner of the screen when almost instantly, a hand moving at a greatly accelerated pace wielding a single Cheeto begins to lightly smudge the surface of the black velvet. From the beginning there is a early rock and roll track with vocals in the style of Elvis Presley coming in with minimal hesitation. Having a first fine layer of the wispy cheese dust down he begins to crumble the brittle orange puffed corn into masses around what is slowly becoming the face. Baalman begins to start smudging the medium tones of the face in between the fervor or the sped up hand precisely applying the crumbled cheese dust. Interspersed between the calculated drops of heavy pigment are brief and almost unnoticeable subtle smoothing with the flat foil interior of the Cheetos bag or the quick fine definition of the teeth with the point of his pencil. All the while the Elvis impersonator, with this slightly off tune backup team, wail on about how he’s “The King”. With his hand popping in and out of frame using differing hand gestures to further model this cheesy portrait, Baalman almost seems to be using sign language. After the portrait has been roughed in he spends the rest of his efforts smoothing and defining the surface to represent this seemingly iconic image of the late pop star. In the end before the viewer can see the finished painting, the artist informs the viewer that there are prints available for sale through his Ebay store. Here the artist has made available for the cost of only twenty dollars, here also is an embedded version of the video displaying the artist’s talent. This style of painting is one of the latest permutations of the American Velvet-Painting genre, a genre started and popularized by Edgar Leeteg, a billboard who lost his job due to the depression. Taking only a small inheritance and stolen painting supplies and moved to Tahiti where he painted erotic paintings of the local women and selling them to the passing sailors. Eventually Bernard Davis, a gallery owner in Honolulu, found Leeteg introducing him and his new take on velvet paintings to the gallery market. Although this style of painting can be seen as kitsch what Leeteg did was to recontextualise the work of early 
14th Russian orthodox priests from Kashmir who used the velvet to produce religious icon paintings. Since Leeteg took this the icons from his Tahitian island culture to represent on the velvet, so have many of his predecessors, taken icons such as Elvis, Jesus, dogs gambling, Presidents, racecar drivers and among many others religious icons. Jason Baalman is an example of a contemporary artist pushing his genre and medium further by combining it with non-traditional materials, something stressed within the scholastic realm of art. Baalman has naturally found the media of video and printmaking a remarkable fit for this ephemeral style of painting much in the same way Earthworks artist have chosen to engender an empathetic responses from their viewers by showing video of the process and selling prints. Andy Goldsworthy the artist who first comes to mind as a prime example of utilizing this similar marketing technique. Goldsworthy creates site and time specific work using raw natural resources such as rocks, leaves, sticks, water, and earth to create his highly engineered sculptures. His work is made using only the objects that he finds in the landscape around him, embracing the impermanence of the work, realizing that there is no true 
permanence to any artwork.“ when I make a work I often take it to the very edge of its collapse and that’s a very beautiful balance.” In his video Grizedale 1987 Goldsworthy is show creating and talking about his site-specific sculptures. He starts off behind a wall of shale that is holding up a very precarious shale arch. In the back ground you hear a mixture of percussive music and the falling of stone from the shale structure, as Goldsworthy removes the interior of the arch he talks about his connections to stone and stone walls including his experience as a stone wall builder. As the voice over continues he battles the will of this structure, poised for collapse, until finally he has removed the supports leaving only this beautifully and precariously balanced arch. Next Goldsworthy moves to what he says is the tallest piece in Grizedale being fifteen yards tall yet one could easily walk past the work without even noticing that it is there. This piece along with the next are made up whole tree trunks arranged according to weather they were straight or bent respectively, with the straight trunks bundled together standing on end while the bent snake horizontally across the landscape. Talking about how the straight piece lead to the bendy piece he said he found himself “looking for straight trees and only seeing bent trees so I decided to make something out of the bent trees...”. Moving on to the next piece Andy talks about how small pieces that are low to he ground, much like the one he is shown working on, can act as sketches to inform the larger scale work. His final piece that he talks about in this video is a very large stacked shale egg, in which he talks about the intensity and excitement that come when he realizes that he is working so close to the object’s collapse also about how working outside all year long is necessary to understanding a place. Through all of his work that he is displaying in this video Goldsworthy’s work seems to speak of process as product as well as using process to help his understanding of both space and place.
Brandon McConnell doesn’t seem to have all together too much in common with Andy Goldsworthy, but using different mediums and filling differing reams in the art world does not mean that they are that different when it comes down to it.
McConnell, according to his website, grew up as an artist working with stereotypical two dimensional material such as drawing on his school desk, and winning high school competitions for his ink and airbrush works. While on a day trip he came upon a man painting with spray paint on the streets of Tijuana, this encounter spurred him toward a new vein of work. He much like Goldsworthy has found a personally interesting set of materials to dialog with that are culturally relative. While McConnell uses his interests in production, painting, masking, and modes of alternative mark making; Goldsworthy’s interests lie in natural materials, impermanence, and balances. Yet the culmination of both of their work is most visibly in still images (paintings for McConnell and photographs for Goldsworthy) and video detailing the performative nature of the processes used to create their art.
In 39 Second Painting McConnell demonstrate the skill and ease with which he can create an image. The video is shot so that only things centered in the frame are the canvas, his hands and a clock to corroborate McConnell’s claim. With a skillful flip of the paint cans he syncs his start with the alignment of the clocks second hand at 12 thus exploding into a fury off motion and the ensuing mist of paint precisely landing in its place on the paper. Within the first seconds he has confidently established the colors that will soon become the planet mixing through spraying then blotting with a page from a magazine. Using a lid from a kitchen pan to mask the outline of the planet the background is applied while using paper to mask the lower portion of the canvas. A few flick of the fingers births the stars, again he smudges with the paper 
this time creating mountains. In a blur of black paint the masked region is defined to a pyramid and with a few final wipes, swipes, and sprays you are looking over a lake nestled in the mountains of some strange moon of a distant galaxy.
So what is really separating these two artists? Like Baalman, many do not respect McConnell’s work as art even though he claims it to be so, while Goldsworthy’s work is seen as art without question. It seems to partially be due to a cultural need to equate time spent working on something with worth of the object then categorizing things accordingly. Could it be due to the mediums used or the context in which the work is made and sold? What ever it may be the fact you can view either on a level playingfield is enough for me to question the space in-between the two.
Bjorn Melhus is a Norwegian artist working primarily in new media who seems to have a gras on what the potential for marketing is through sites such as Youtube. Melhus has created his own site on Youtube where he displays a great deal of his work from the past 10 years in clips from the video or installation. In his piece “Primetime” Melhus has created a three channel video installation with 19 televisions, 5 video cubes and one large projection spanning beween two rooms. The clip start out with the bank of nineteen televisions screening a wipe of white diagonally across the screen to what seems to be a commercial jingle. Stacked five high the video cubes blink white with the rhythm of a voice clip whose source seems distinctly that of a talk show guest with intermittent suspenseful music clips. This is abruptly cut with the cubes blinking red with a corresponding alarm tone and the wall mounted nineteen follow suit. Again there is a quick transition to a thin shirtless male in a grass skirt projected onto the wall opposing the nineteen. The man has a super imposed overly smiling face and is dancing while the opposing televisions scroll along to the words “Im having sex with my father” repeated along with the talk show voice and a 
drum backbeat. This develops almost into a pop music track with the two channels of sound and video dialoging back and fourth. Silence comes back as the projection turns to that of another of Melhus’s characters dressed as a televangelist in a red spot coat holding a large microphone. Again the two walls begin a different song like dialog evolving from some of the talk show elements similar to those before, escalating and building into a fervent array of over stimulating elements. Stopping back on the projection of two mirror images of girls dressed and speaking televangelist jargon with the wall of televisions starting a targeting sequence ending in the words target executed.
Melhus’s work directly stems from the way that we interact with the media by taking both visual and sonic elements and recontextualizing them to point out the way that we are affected by them mentally and emotionally. Through these spastic and hyper emotionalized means Melhus recreates a hyper-real version of our national media. In installations such as Primetime that carry such culturally relevant concepts it is only natural for Melhus to utilize such a far reaching means of communicating his concerns.
These artists all using differing media addressing varying concerns may all seem to be far from relatable yet no matter what their media is addressing they have all found viewers in the same gallery. YouTube has become a place that is best suited for this specific goal to allow anyone to share content pertaining to their individual concerns therefore democratizing the ability for artists to share their work.
YouTube links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7dnyedABYE
http://www.youtube.com/user/spacepainter#p/search/0/mnmOKjSV-50
http://www.youtube.com/user/bjornmelhus#p/u/0/CRszAGAXDY8
http://www.youtube.com/user/EclecticAsylumArt#p/u/5/SXigfZGqsLM
Exterior links
http://www.barracudamagazine.com/leeteg.htm
http://www.spacepaintings.com/spraypaintart.html
http://stores.ebay.com/Eclectic-Asylum-Gallery
