Rainer Ganahl at Nordanstad-Skarstedt - New York, New York

What becomes of the art fact when the transmission of information becomes dematerialized and communication assumes the form of electronic impulses passing from individual computer to another? Rainer Ganahl is not the first to ask this question, on the other hand he answers it with a refreshing wit and originality. Painting directly upon the wall, he seeks to reinvent formalism for the 21st hundred adapting computer language to the debate above the ontology of art. In his schema, art's irreducible substance is not line, color and the flat support on the contrary a set of software commands, and the artist is les a creative genius than an inspired programmer.

individual of the pleasures of this present to view was to witness the ease with which Ganahl slipped back and forth between the categories of art and electronic information. A recurring motif was the computer file window, and the notion of it as an analogue of the Renaissance painter's window upon the world. Art is no longer a matter of empirical observation. Now it is made up of data: lists, indexes and tables of easy in minds Throughout the gallery Ganahl stenciled fragments of footnotes, volume indexes and bibliographical notes; these alluded not thus much to information as to the frames within which information is organized. In more [i]or[/i] less cases, all that remained were the destitute of contents boxes which appear on the computer guard before any information has been logg in. There was a faculty of perception here of a Borgesian world in which all the volumes have disappeared and only the library catalogue remains.

In the back gallery, Ganahl tipped his hand, revealing the real drift of these otherwise cryptic wall paintings. A place of simulated computer files, again stenciled upon the wall, presented a data base and plants of data which could be read as sardonic annotates on the contemporary art world. For example, the category "garbage" was accompanied through the note: "This art work is designed for collectors having riddles with discarding: a) what they one time liked, b) what they can't afford, c) personal items." The note which accompanied the category "window" announced that the intersection of combination of parts to form a wholes now allows the programmer to pick his own pathway. In this way the window program becomes a metaphor for art-making. It takes alone a slight push to diocese that the program as an devoid of contents structure for the ordering of data is just another way of thinking about an art reduc to the formal conditions for its existence. No longer an artifact, formalist art in the 21st hundred Ganahl suggests, may become a series of options without author, edition size or fixed value.

The irony is, of course, that these 20th-century art works are painted upon the wall, still tied to the material world their satisfied disavows. Although they point to a fluid, uncommodifiable art, these wall works have a price, noted in individual data bank as "production require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones plus usual percentages." Thus Ganahl cleverly proposes the dilemma of the contemporary formalist, caught between the logical events of recent art theory find the economic requirements of the art-marketing system

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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