Cory Arcangel: Brooklyn’s preeminent pop art prankster hijacks DHC/ART

Cory Arcangel may well have one of the catchiest names on the contemporary art circuit today, but thankfully, this 35-year-old’s playful and subversive body of work merits even more attention. For over a decade, the multidisciplinary Arcangel has been fascinated by technological obsolescence and the ephemeral nature of cultural objects. Montreal’s DHC/ART recently unveiled Power Points, his first major Canadian exhibition, and it’s an eminently entertaining survey of open-source computer culture, assorted pop culture detritus and the twisted ways in which we interact with and relate to technology.

Among the highlights are an I Shot Andy Warhol arcade-style shooting game with Warhol as the baddie and Colonel Sanders and Flavor Flav as the good guys; a painstakingly catalogued, 839-strong trance vinyl collection entitled AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound, which visitors are invited to tamper with, and Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, a series of brightly coloured, abstracted prints produced with a mere click of Photoshop’s gradient tool, and on view in a room covered in stomach-churning purple carpet. NIGHTLIFE.CA recently spoke with Arcangel about the MoMA's embrace of video games, the "Decline of Western Civilization" and hacking as art.

I Shot Andy Warhol, Cory Arcangel

1. I like how you describe yourself as a “hacker” according to the original definition of the term, which was more about pranksterism than breaking into computer networks. The old definition as I understood it, and I think it’s still one of the definitions, is somebody who infiltrates systems and tampers with them in order to do something clever or play pranks. It didn’t necessarily need to be computers. I think that describes my work well. Screwing with a system, switching things around, in order to play a prank. I think that describes a lot of my work, actually.

2. In Untitled Translation Exercise, you subsitute the original recording of Dazed and Confused with an absurd, re-dubbed version of the script read in a "globalized" South Asian English by non-actors. What was it about Richard Linklater’s defining stoner film that made it suitable for monotone butchering in an outsourcing centre in Bangalore, India? Well, it’s the classic American coming of age story. It’s about the last days of high school, it’s a great movie, and it’s very much about the American experience, so that’s what made me think it could work. I had to watch it 60 or 70 times as I did the work, and it actually got better each time. The newly dubbed version wasn’t done in sync with the voices so I had to go in and synch each work to the actual mouth movement. It took 6 months, for about 10 hours per day!

Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations, Cory Arcangel (Photo: Vincent Toi)

3. You often appropriate elements of the video game aesthetic (Commodores, Nintendos, Ataris) in a playful way. More and more, we’re seeing the contemporary art world embrace that aesthetic, when for a long time they were reluctant to even acknowledge it. Why do you think we’re suddenly witnessing such an institutional change of heart? The MoMA in New York recently started collecting video games, and I think that is to be applauded. These are really important parts of our culture, as much as cinema, or just any kind of poetic, creative expression. Just like anything else, it needs to be preserved, studied and examined. In the same way that people would look at a classic piece of cinema or culture… because it’s important! This stuff has really become part of mainstream culture, and art just follows culture. The video game industry is, from what I hear, bigger than Hollywood, so eventually, it gets so large, and that’s why I started tinkering with [the games], because they’re everywhere!

4. Your work generally refrains from making any overt statements, but one of your most famed pieces, an installation featuring 14 abstracted bowling video games from the 1970s to the 2000s, was initially titled “The Decline of Western Civilization.” Should I be reading into that any further? (laughs) It’s funny you bring that up; I had completely forgotten that. It’s not just games, but computers in general are such a part of our culture, as they define every aspect of our daily lives. Your car now is controlled by a little computer, and obviously we’re talking into a little computer, most buildings are controlled by computers. All components of our daily existence are interfaced with these machines.

There’s a work in the DHC/ART show called Permanent Vacation, and it’s two computers that are stuck in an automated out-of-office e-mail loop. One will e-mail the other, and then it will apply the out-of-office and reply back and it just sends this e-mail back and forth…for ever. So, as more and more of our daily lives actively involve computers, there are all these weird situations arising where the machines break down, where somebody punches in the wrong number, and that’s the kind of thing I tend to fixate on.

Permanent Vacation, Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel: Power Points
Until November 24
DHC/ART | 461 and 465 St. Jean
dhc-art.org | coryarcangel.com