Brimming with vibrant hues of blue, red and yellow, Photoshop CS: 72 by 110 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Blue, Red, Yellow" mousedown y=11050 x=3350, mouseup y=16300 x=19900, 2009, is a quintessential example of Cory Arcangel’s salient Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations. With each title disclosing the specific x and y coordinates of pre-set colours in the graphics-editing programme Adobe Photoshop, Arcangel’s series of glossy c-prints examines the relationship between art history and modern technology. Utilising digitally concocted pigments and technical printing, the present work becomes an algebraic readymade that pays irreverent homage to Marcel Duchamp and the American Colour Field painters.
Discovering high-speed internet connection whilst studying at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1996, Arcangel became fascinated with the myriad possibilities surrounding the realm of contemporary technology. Pairing his classical guitar studies with courses in music technology and coding, the artist developed an exceptional practice spanning internet-based interventions that saw him repurpose digital tools such as Youtube, Garageband and Photoshop. He remarked, ‘I wait for culture to swim by me, and then I snap it up’ (Cory Arcangel, quoted in Miranda Siegel, ‘The Joys of Obsolescence’, New York Magazine, 15 May 2011, online).
First garnering critical acclaim in the early 2000s with tongue-in-cheek works that reworked the mechanisms of old computer games, Arcangel became one of the leading contemporary artists to explore the intersection between artistic creation and the digital. As noted by Christiane Paul on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Arcangel’s works ‘ultimately do not evaluate technology itself but the human perspective on it—the ways in which we play with tools to engage the world’ (Christiane Paul, Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, exh. brochure, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, p. 28). Layering primary colours in a way that is redolent of a colour temperature chart, the present work touches precisely upon this notion of phenomenological human perspective.
