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Graham Parker
18.06.04 – 31.07.04
Comme Ca NYC is delighted to present Lost in the Telling
- the first New York solo show by Graham Parker.
Lost in the Telling sets written versions of two maritime
incidents against glimpses of the electronic networks which
carry them. The show mixes print, photography and video to
produce an elegiac account of 2 moments of failure –
represented within the flat equivalence of 14400 baud rate
downloads, anecdote, legal small print and photographic evocations
of the sublime.
Two ‘last sightings’ are evoked in the show –
conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader disappearing in the Atlantic
whilst in search of the miraculous in 1975 and ‘Titanic’
designer Thomas Andrews, staring at a painting in the first
class smoking lounge, as the ship sinks beneath him in 1912.
The events are further drawn alongside the stubborn literary
enigma of Herman Melville's Bartleby (as 'told' to a Microsoft
sub routine).
In the eponymous centerpiece of the show, two large digital
prints bookend the central axis of the gallery – each
carrying several small print versions of the respective stories
(as found and isolated from searches on the web). The stories
retain the same narrative ‘shape’ each time –
but in each case the details shift slightly. Ader sets sail
in a 12 ft or a 13ft boat, which disappears, or is found off
the coast of Ireland; Andrews meets his fate whilst staring
at a painting entitled “Approach to the new world”
or “Entrance to the New World”. Each of these subtle
alterations to the basic meme is set down in tiny 4 point
text on an expanse of brilliant white - barely legible (they
are printed at the minimum text size for contractual legality)
and demanding an intimate choreography of the viewer. From
a distance they might read as opposing coastal shelves, close
up they are intimate storytelling forays.
Further allusive details emerge in the show. In ‘Ping’
two photographs shot in consecutive seconds from the prow
of the QM2 on her maiden voyage out of New York play off each
other (the title is an allusion to the testing of remote computer
servers by sending a ‘ping’ signal to them,
analogous to sonar - such a transatlantic process, using the
ships wireless network, provides the time cue for the photographs).
The video ‘Baud’ shows a series of heavily
pixelated close ups of the web pages which contain the Ader
and Andrews stories loading – the former loading at painfully
slow pace and low baud rate on an old 386 PC, and the latter
on a virtually instantaneous WiFi connection. ‘Crag
and Tail (Bartleby)’ is another print diptych combining
descriptions of a slow forming geological formation with words
highlighted by Microsoft spellchecks from ‘Bartleby the
Scrivener’.
In all the works, the ‘telling’ is forever thwarted
by limits - physical and technological (human eyesight, occlusion,
digital resolution and memory). Time and relative speeds are
key to the show also – from the relative rate of knots
of a small boat and an ocean liner, to retreating ice flows,
to the disappearing phenomenon of perceptible ‘download’
time of digital information in the privileged data capitals
of the world and glitches of detail in retelling and representation,
as events are pressed into service as romantic myth. Taking
its title from the vernacular Irish allegation of narrative
exaggeration (“Knowing him, that story lost nothing in
the telling…”), Lost in the Telling considers the
seductiveness of ideas of romantic death and satisfying narrative
alongside the implicitly seductive rhetoric of electronic
networks and their promise of ‘connectivity.’
Graham Parker's work often focuses on the idea of the "end
user" - the inheritor and sometime interpreter of proscribed
conditions and environments (from provincial cities to computer
interfaces). Crossing a range of media and tones, his work
looks at how those on the receiving ends of codes of political
power, cultural myth and programmed environments might recognize,
reconfigure and record themselves within these contexts, by
using and misusing the given tools and approaches available
for navigating them – be they official histories, software,
language, choreography, costume etc.
Currently attending the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program
in New York, Graham Parker also lives and works in Manchester,
UK, where he has been at the forefront of artist-led activity
within the city (coordinating the Manchester Pavilion at the
2001 and 2003 Venice Biennales and now as Director of floating
ip project space). Over the past decade he has had major work
commissioned by Henry Moore Institute and Tate Gallery, Liverpool
(Artranspennine), Manchester City Art Gallery, Compton Verney,
Foundation for Art and Creative Technology and Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council amongst others and he has shown at the ICA
London; Lux Centre, London; Cornerhouse, Manchester; A22,
London; Albrecht Dürer Kunstverein, Nurnburg, as well
as in group shows in numerous cities including Berlin, Amsterdam,
London, Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco. His work
is in several public and private collections, including the
British Government art collection.
For further information or images by the exhibitors contact
Comme Ca Art on: Tel: 0161 839 7187
Email: info@commecaart.com
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