Jack Strange: Exercises In Virtually Nothing

Jack Strange’s work is really about nothing. Drawing from a toolbox of quintessential Conceptual art strategies from the 60s and 70s, British artist Jack Strange reframes the “dematerialized” in our increasingly virtual, laptop-dependent lives. As Lucy Lippard recalls in her catalog essay for the Centre Pompidou’s 2009 exhibition, Voids: A Retrospective:

With art history backing them up, Conceptual artists broke the rules of conventional art by emphasizing emptiness, cancellation, the vacuum, the void, the invisible. They made blank films and empty squares; they locked the galleries and practiced doing nothing…The bedrock of the notion of “nothing” in art was often a fusion of art and life, or at least a narrowing of the distance between the two. 1

Figuratively and at times more literally, Strange’s work hearkens back to the notion of “nothing” in art, which surfaces in his work through the banal and mundane, but more poignantly when the artist draws parallels between the void of the virtual realm and the physical realm of objects. His humorous, nearly satirical approach to highlighting removal and emptiness culminates in Into a Puff of Virtual Smoke (2008). The three-minute, looped video depicts a completely black background, periodically interrupted by a digitally animated puff of smoke. The sound and image represent the animated icon produced on Macintosh computers when one deletes a file. It is a symbol of erasure, the removal and absence of information. One could perceive it as the death of information, but it amusingly recalls an anti-climatic version of the big bang. Strange’s void here is a play on presence and absence, something which can be seen through out his practice. He recontextualizes a quotidian symbol within the frame of a blank screen, provoking the viewer to ask: what is being erased? Although the answer is null and void, what we do know is that it’s a small, futile gesture thrown into the ether.

Our repertoire of everyday objects has rapidly changed over the past few decades due largely to advances in technology. Today an iPhone is indicative of a quotidian object than a Campbell’s Soup can. As we can see in Into a Puff of Virtual Smoke, the artist explores the expanded possibilities of appropriation in our digital age. Strange takes this one step further when he presents a laptop computer as a ready-made of sorts.

In g (2008), Strange presents a Macintosh laptop with a small ball of lead placed carefully on the keyboard’s letter ‘g’. The Word application that appears on the screen displays the unrelenting and seemingly infinite stream of ‘g’s, which consumes the space of the white page and eventually leads to the computer’s crash. The work culls from the linguistic games and serial production strategies of 60s and 70s Conceptual artists. In physics, ‘g’ denotes the standard value of gravitational acceleration. It is the invisible force of gravity that allows Strange’s piece to function, which is simultaneously represented by the letter ‘g’ that speeds along, line after line on the Word document. It distantly recalls Joseph Kosuth’s seminal 1965 One and Three Chairs in which the artist presents a chair, a photograph of the chair and a written definition of the word from the dictionary. However, Strange is less interested in semantics and rather draws our attention to the action, an artistic gesture on autopilot. With cunning wit, he’s removed his hand while making his physical gesture all the more apparent to highlight absence and presence. Though playful, on some level, it suggests the type of futility noted in Into a Puff of Virtual Smoke.

The same can be said of Strange’s Spinning Beach Ball of Death (2007), which becomes a quirky celebration of postponement and delay. For this work, the artist produced a modest drawing on paper of the spinning “wait” cursor in Apple’s Mac OS X program. He then motorized the drawing to slowly spin when installed directly on the wall, materializing the computer animation in the physical space of the gallery. Again, we see here clever references to art history including, Op art, Kinetic art, and even Pop art. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death emphasizes the tension between the seemingly ceaseless action and it’s referral to pause. When we see the hypnotic rainbow cursor appear on our computer everything becomes frozen. Although there are a number of invisible operations at work, nothing appears to be happening. What is left is an irreverent symbol of our short attention spans. All three of these works are united by his interest in duration, repetition, materializing the “dematerialized” and the conceptual connotations of emptying and filling virtual and three-dimensional space.

Strange’s approach emphasizes nothing(ness) in that it aims to narrow the distance between art and life. Within these works, the artist questions the strangeness and ambiguity of the symbolic value of objects in our increasingly virtual lives. If as Robert Irwin once said: “The act of art has turned to a direct examination of our perceptual processes,” then Strange’s work suggests our perception of the world is continuing to be radically transformed by technology, which is ultimately a process of uncertainty.2

1. Lucy Lippard, “Making Nothing out of Something,” published in Voids: A Retrospective (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2009). p. 228.
2. Robert Irwin, “Reshaping the Shape of Things, Part 2,” Arts 47, no.1 (September-October 1972), p.30.

Kristin Korolowicz is currently the first appointed Knight Curatorial Fellow at the Bass Museum of Art. She received her Master’s of Art in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. Korolowicz has curated projects featuring emerging and well-established artists while in the Bay Area, including at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Before relocating to the West Coast, she was the Programs Assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Her recent projects include leading a new collaboration between the Bass Museum of Art and Art Basel Miami Beach’s Art Public 2011 to inaugurate the fair’s 10th anniversary. Additionally, Korolowicz will curate an upcoming exhibition at the Bass Museum, which will be on view in March 2012.