Gartel Reviews
Gartel on Culture Talk
Italian Master Artist Mimmo Rotella: Essay on GARTEL
Mimmo Rotella, October 1998
It was in occasion of my numerous trips around the world that I have had the opportunity to visit some Digital Art exhibitions
I've had the possibility myself, to operate with virtual signs, through a graphics tablet on the image of one of my works projected on a monitor. This being my intervention happened during the creation of a video, "The Virtual Tear", realized by Studio Metamorfosi and directed by Marco Porna. It was dedicated to me within an exhibition, which took place in Milan.
It would be interesting to imagine what influence on my artistic life, the presence of these innovative virtual instruments could be in the remote years of my "explorations".
Certainly, fundamental Larry Gartel in Rome, in the occasion of "Digipainting '97", the show organized by our mutual friend Maurizio Monticelli.
I appreciated his works and I observed that with his new and actual research of daily life, the cinema and the advertising world, he wants to express even if with a different medium, my same concepts and my same consideration of life and contemporary society.
I consider Larry Gartel the "creator and evangelist" of this new current, based on the new technologies and on a new way of thinking philosophy. Larry demonstrates a sensibility and sense of humor. His attention for form and content, along with his ability in "taming" a technical medium, makes him the "digital artist" of this time, ever eager for discovery of new forms and artistic expressions.
His works, utilizing these new virtual techniques, are sending messages created in the "now", but will be handed up to the third millennium.
Art Historian Restany on GARTEL
Pierre Restany Milan, Italy July 9th, 1998
Laurence Gartel is surfing on the wave of electronic communication through the poetic impulse of his multimedia-language.
Photography, graffiti, digital paint blend on his computer as in the weaving loom of an everlasting tapestry: a texture of fragmented visual elements in continuous progress whose varied serial lines form the consecutive photograms of a mental film in full virtual surfacing. Those series may as well feature images created for advertising projects like Coca-Cola or Absolut Vodka, images which appear on the back covers of national magazines or on posters announcing cultural events (concert, film festival ... ). The varying versions of the original model fit in the thick weave of the artist's sensitivity towards the emotional magma of everyday life. Those electronic collages that Gartel creates using the capabilities of the most recent sophisticated software, express the impredictable impulses of his expressive conscience.
Such a visual language does not address any more the rational reality from which it originates, but reaches indeed the infinite lavishness of desires already collected among the masses by the industry of culture.
As a true "fabulist" of our present time, Gartel uses Internet for its fabulous capacities of amalgaming the illimited variety of differences included in each existential microcosms of the human being. The formal profile of the communication vector resulting from such process follows the seductive throbs of daily life, being captivated meanwhile. Here we are, right in the basic grounds of Gartel's expressiveness: the author assumes his self-awareness throught the full description of his journey on Earth, piece by piece, instant after instant. Gartel's fictional story carries its specific weight through its continuity, its inner dynamics grafted on every emotional fragment of the objective reality of the world.
Unfortunately the story of the "electronic photographer", as Gartel describes himself, appears to us always as a fragment or a suspended moment. Pointing out in a single book the full stream of the artist's vision in its unbroken line seems to be a gigantic task: goodness knows how long we will have to wait for it!
A thing remains sure: Gartel is designing, image by image, the encyclopaedia of his entire life. with smooth gracefulness and self-assurance, this man of his time acts beyond other people's time. The river stream of Gartel's visual fiction has no spring and no mouth: it gives free play to his imagination through the dizzy spells of our modern chaos. And this shivering sensation of free-thinking upsets all the formal taboos nourished by the retinal persistence of our visual prejudices. Wow! What a debunking eye cast by a man of to-day at the sham glamour of our time!
Norton Museum Director Christina Orr-Cahall Essay on GARTEL A Cybernetic Romance
Christina Orr-Cahall, Executive Director, Norton Museum of Art
Laurence Gartel is an artist who leads his field. In fact, Gartel is defining his field. Computer Art is the new medium of this century.
Photography was the new art form of the nineteenth century, oil paints the invention of the twelfth. In each of these instances the introduction of a new technology changed the way art was created. They also ushered in an entirely new group of artists who were willing to be experimental and work to establish the credibility of an innovative art form. Each of these centuries is remembered for the art produced by its artists using specific technological contributions.
Ironically, often the names of the artists are forgotten. So many unknown photographers capture the startling images of the nineteenth centuries; so many stained glass windows are attributed to workshops or unknown craftsmen. It is not possible to know the full impact that the computer will have on art, but it seems certain that it will grow in force. It is important to look at the beginnings of the art form and to acknowledge those artists who are breaking the new ground. It is also important to distinguish between the artist, the craftsman and the dilettante. The difference is a significant and verifiable one. To be a photographer who steps into the museum world, one must be able to do more than adjust the lens and click the shutter.
To frame up colored glass is not to create the passion of St. Agatha or the caring of St. Francis. There are many people who enjoy the challenge and fun of working with art computer programs but these people are not artists. To take the computer, to manipulate it to your own use, to take it beyond what others have thought or done, to create work which inspires the viewer to enjoy and to think, this is the work of the artist.
The test of time will define the impact of the medium and each individual artists but it is essential that we acknowledge this new work and these new artists.
Christina Orr-Cahall, Executive Director, Norton Museum of Art
Laurence Gartel is an artist who leads his field. In fact, Gartel is defining his field. Computer Art is the new medium of this century.
Photography was the new art form of the nineteenth century, oil paints the invention of the twelfth. In each of these instances the introduction of a new technology changed the way art was created. They also ushered in an entirely new group of artists who were willing to be experimental and work to establish the credibility of an innovative art form. Each of these centuries is remembered for the art produced by its artists using specific technological contributions.
Ironically, often the names of the artists are forgotten. So many unknown photographers capture the startling images of the nineteenth centuries; so many stained glass windows are attributed to workshops or unknown craftsmen. It is not possible to know the full impact that the computer will have on art, but it seems certain that it will grow in force. It is important to look at the beginnings of the art form and to acknowledge those artists who are breaking the new ground. It is also important to distinguish between the artist, the craftsman and the dilettante. The difference is a significant and verifiable one. To be a photographer who steps into the museum world, one must be able to do more than adjust the lens and click the shutter.
To frame up colored glass is not to create the passion of St. Agatha or the caring of St. Francis. There are many people who enjoy the challenge and fun of working with art computer programs but these people are not artists. To take the computer, to manipulate it to your own use, to take it beyond what others have thought or done, to create work which inspires the viewer to enjoy and to think, this is the work of the artist.
The test of time will define the impact of the medium and each individual artists but it is essential that we acknowledge this new work and these new artists.
History of Digital Art Paper
MIKE KING excerpt:
The last of our very small (and not particularly representative) selection of computer artists is Laurence Gartel, who started working with video synthesizers in 1976. This is some 10 years before the watershed of 1986 (marking as we saw earlier the introduction of the Paintbox to painters, the use of the Amiga by Warhol, and the creation of Photoshop), and was at a time when the video image could only be crudely manipulated and then photographed off the video monitor. While the 'algorists' and artists working in similar ways with plotters could manage with relatively cheap computer equipment, the video and pixel-based image required expensive equipment far beyond the budget of individuals. In Ruth Leavitt's 'Artist and Computer' we learn that the necessary equipment in 1975 would comprise a computer ($50,000) a frame-buffer ($80,000) a tablet ($5,000) and a colour TV monitor ($5,000) . In the year 2002 all this hardware is subsumed within a cheap personal computer, totalling around $1,000, apart from the tablet which would be a small additional cost. The frame-buffer, essentially fast video RAM with a controller chip and digital-to-analogue converters, has experienced the most astonishing drop in price, from $80,000 to $80. Gartel is unusual for having entered the paint-box style of work so early, and having persisted through the evolution of this technology to the present day. ~Candy, Linda and Edmonds, Ernest (Eds.), Creativity and Cognition 2002, Proceedings of the 4th Creativity and Cognition Conference, Loughborough University, New York: ACM Press 2002.
http://digitalarthistory. iwarp. com/
Art of Fetish
Independent Curator Clayton Spada: Essay on GARTEL
Going for Some Double Fantasy
Clayton Spada, October, 2001
Sub-cultures exert an odd sort of push-pull attraction that is nearly impossible to resist and which leaves no quarter for amorphous responses. One is either fascinated or repulsed. There is no middle ground. Perhaps this is because, relative to "mainstream" society, sub-cultures are somewhat akin to the unconscious components of a personality. According to Jungian psychology, the subconscious is keyed to primal symbologies, or archetypes. One of the most powerful archetypes is maternal connection, or more essentially, fecundity. No matter how we try to define and justify our existence, we are left with the fundamental fact that every one of us arose from the synergy of sexual activity. Humanity's vaunted cerebral and spiritual nobility...all stoked by the flames of basic wet biology. It's difficult to imagine how anyone who realizes this can fail to be somewhat amused, or at least bemused.
Laurence Gartel effectively places this issue in perspective with his stunning Fetish series. Why is an attempt to achieve a more complete understanding of one's erotic nature any less compelling as a serious pursuit than, say, scientific scrutiny or philosophical inquiry? A detailed reading of the writings of the Marquis de Sade reveals that the physical ambivalence of sado-masochism plumbs the most essential psychic and intellectual aspects of what it is to be human. But Gartel also shows us that the profound isn't equivalent to the joyless. His images attend to deeply abstruse thought processes while concurrently projecting an untrammeled sense of play, reflecting the complex psychoneurotic internalization which spawns the wildly colorful fashion show that is an integral optical sensibility of fetish.
The contemporary sex fetish world seems at first glance to be more of a cultic social aberration that serves as a haven for bizarre misfits, thus warranting marginalization. However, unlike the exclusivity engendered by a great many sub-cultural phenomena, the salient trans-personal fabric of fetish is non-judgmental and inclusive. All proclivities are welcome. This is as it should be, for fetish is fantasy, a space for distancing oneself from a stressful or uneventful life through active role-playing. One may choose to be a super-hero or a villain, dominant or submissive, participant or voyeur. Corporeal aspects of sexual experience are subordinate to the psychology of erotic catharsis. Such libertine explorations are deemed shocking in doctrinal society and quickly swept under the rug, not so much because they are perceived as amoral, but more likely because they are so intoxicating. After all, life is supposed to be profound, serious. Right?
Despite the increasingly iron grip of the Cartesian paradigm on our collective psyche, sex still manages to captivate us as a mysterious power that is beyond our rational control, whether it is elevated to metaphysical levels of cosmic proportions or leveraged for more earthy purposes. We expend an extravagant amount of near-superstitious devotion over matters sexual, in reverence or in fear. Just as our forebears referenced their sexuality through the crafting of fetishistic objects that they believed to have magical properties to protect or aid their owners, so too has post-industrial humankind accessorized its quest for erotic gratification.
Using the virtual domain to make art can facilitate a degree of creative freedom that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with traditional processes. Iterations and reiterations can be explored at a breakneck pace, thereby permitting the artist to concurrently optimize previsualizations in a systematic fashion and engage in free-wheeling experimentation which more deliberative workflows might very well attenuate or suppress. Changes are easy to implement, and if things don't work out, the original electronic file stands ready as the ground-state from which to begin anew. Of course, if practiced merely as a button-pushing exercise, this same uncomplicated mutability can also inhibit creativity. Just because digital technology affords the ability to do something doesn't necessarily mean that it should be done. Knowing when to leave well enough alone is of paramount importance for making good art, and this sense of discipline is what elevates each Fetish image to an iconic status.
Those familiar with Gartel's signature style of extensive image manipulation accompanied by chromatic punch and rich textural effects will immediately appreciate that the core imagery in his Fetish works is represented as largely straightforward. This creative decision is significant at both conceptual and process-oriented levels. Fetish as idea and as conduct works because it is overtly artificial and a bit over the top; constructing a special effect from something that is in essence already a special effect would serve only to countermand the immediacy of the artist's direct experience with the source "material". With great insight, Gartel has resisted the urge to over-decorate compositions already bursting with vitality, choosing instead to let his subjects transcend the visual plane of the paper substrate as true encounters. Real experience is polymerized with the factitious to generate a supersensory reflex that Gartel has aptly dubbed as "novo-surrealist".
The Gartel Fetish works provide the viewer ample space to accommodate the fantastic, as engendered in the accentuated graphic qualities of the compositions, without discouraging untroubled acceptance of the veracity of the core images. What is depicted was...is...actual, but also interiorized to the point of seeming as if it is de novo fabrication, an imaginary figment. Shock value is subsumed by the playful presentation of the subject matter. We are given the opportunity to unwind and take a wild no-obligation, risk-free test drive through experiential territory that fetish practitioners regularly visit during their libertine forays away from the mundane. It's all great fun, but it's also great art. Gartel makes it okay to indulge in what he calls the "double fantasy" of Fetish.
GARTEL THE ART OF FETISH
Published by Schiffer Books, 2007
Going for Some Double Fantasy
Clayton Spada, October, 2001
Sub-cultures exert an odd sort of push-pull attraction that is nearly impossible to resist and which leaves no quarter for amorphous responses. One is either fascinated or repulsed. There is no middle ground. Perhaps this is because, relative to "mainstream" society, sub-cultures are somewhat akin to the unconscious components of a personality. According to Jungian psychology, the subconscious is keyed to primal symbologies, or archetypes. One of the most powerful archetypes is maternal connection, or more essentially, fecundity. No matter how we try to define and justify our existence, we are left with the fundamental fact that every one of us arose from the synergy of sexual activity. Humanity's vaunted cerebral and spiritual nobility...all stoked by the flames of basic wet biology. It's difficult to imagine how anyone who realizes this can fail to be somewhat amused, or at least bemused.
Laurence Gartel effectively places this issue in perspective with his stunning Fetish series. Why is an attempt to achieve a more complete understanding of one's erotic nature any less compelling as a serious pursuit than, say, scientific scrutiny or philosophical inquiry? A detailed reading of the writings of the Marquis de Sade reveals that the physical ambivalence of sado-masochism plumbs the most essential psychic and intellectual aspects of what it is to be human. But Gartel also shows us that the profound isn't equivalent to the joyless. His images attend to deeply abstruse thought processes while concurrently projecting an untrammeled sense of play, reflecting the complex psychoneurotic internalization which spawns the wildly colorful fashion show that is an integral optical sensibility of fetish.
The contemporary sex fetish world seems at first glance to be more of a cultic social aberration that serves as a haven for bizarre misfits, thus warranting marginalization. However, unlike the exclusivity engendered by a great many sub-cultural phenomena, the salient trans-personal fabric of fetish is non-judgmental and inclusive. All proclivities are welcome. This is as it should be, for fetish is fantasy, a space for distancing oneself from a stressful or uneventful life through active role-playing. One may choose to be a super-hero or a villain, dominant or submissive, participant or voyeur. Corporeal aspects of sexual experience are subordinate to the psychology of erotic catharsis. Such libertine explorations are deemed shocking in doctrinal society and quickly swept under the rug, not so much because they are perceived as amoral, but more likely because they are so intoxicating. After all, life is supposed to be profound, serious. Right?
Despite the increasingly iron grip of the Cartesian paradigm on our collective psyche, sex still manages to captivate us as a mysterious power that is beyond our rational control, whether it is elevated to metaphysical levels of cosmic proportions or leveraged for more earthy purposes. We expend an extravagant amount of near-superstitious devotion over matters sexual, in reverence or in fear. Just as our forebears referenced their sexuality through the crafting of fetishistic objects that they believed to have magical properties to protect or aid their owners, so too has post-industrial humankind accessorized its quest for erotic gratification.
Using the virtual domain to make art can facilitate a degree of creative freedom that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with traditional processes. Iterations and reiterations can be explored at a breakneck pace, thereby permitting the artist to concurrently optimize previsualizations in a systematic fashion and engage in free-wheeling experimentation which more deliberative workflows might very well attenuate or suppress. Changes are easy to implement, and if things don't work out, the original electronic file stands ready as the ground-state from which to begin anew. Of course, if practiced merely as a button-pushing exercise, this same uncomplicated mutability can also inhibit creativity. Just because digital technology affords the ability to do something doesn't necessarily mean that it should be done. Knowing when to leave well enough alone is of paramount importance for making good art, and this sense of discipline is what elevates each Fetish image to an iconic status.
Those familiar with Gartel's signature style of extensive image manipulation accompanied by chromatic punch and rich textural effects will immediately appreciate that the core imagery in his Fetish works is represented as largely straightforward. This creative decision is significant at both conceptual and process-oriented levels. Fetish as idea and as conduct works because it is overtly artificial and a bit over the top; constructing a special effect from something that is in essence already a special effect would serve only to countermand the immediacy of the artist's direct experience with the source "material". With great insight, Gartel has resisted the urge to over-decorate compositions already bursting with vitality, choosing instead to let his subjects transcend the visual plane of the paper substrate as true encounters. Real experience is polymerized with the factitious to generate a supersensory reflex that Gartel has aptly dubbed as "novo-surrealist".
The Gartel Fetish works provide the viewer ample space to accommodate the fantastic, as engendered in the accentuated graphic qualities of the compositions, without discouraging untroubled acceptance of the veracity of the core images. What is depicted was...is...actual, but also interiorized to the point of seeming as if it is de novo fabrication, an imaginary figment. Shock value is subsumed by the playful presentation of the subject matter. We are given the opportunity to unwind and take a wild no-obligation, risk-free test drive through experiential territory that fetish practitioners regularly visit during their libertine forays away from the mundane. It's all great fun, but it's also great art. Gartel makes it okay to indulge in what he calls the "double fantasy" of Fetish.
GARTEL THE ART OF FETISH
Published by Schiffer Books, 2007
Austrian Review
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All Rights Reserved for Graphic & Written Content
Use by Explicit Written Permission Only
[email protected]