Brandon Bandy

Contemporary Art, Daily, 2024-2025

Solo exhibition at The Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles, Organized by Josh Schaedel

Exhibition View, 2024, Transmedium (Exhibition promotional image)

Exhibition View, 2024, Transmedium

Exhibition View (detail), 2024, Transmedium

Exhibition View (rear), 2024, Transmedium

Title, Date, Medium (detail), 2024, Exhibition checklist, vinyl, custom baseboard

Screw hole from works staged for Exhibition View photograph

Original Movie Poster - Large Bus Stop Size 48" X 70” - “GOOD BOYS” Teaser Version, 2024,

View from gallery

Art Post-Prefix v2.0

by Brandon Bandy

Within visual art, photography is the great equalizer, all other works become photographs anyways. Nothing is free from this compression, even works of time-based media are typically flattened into documentation, stills, the installation view. Further, the documentation of the work of art now seems to define artists’ scope of possibility, designating what art is made, its subject, its materiality, its mode of display, and its reception. Long ago, when Los Angeles was entirely on the outskirts of the Contemporary Art System, works were almost entirely experienced as their reproduction, plates, slides, etc. Often, the early generations of “contemporary” artists working within the region will point to this fact as a providing a kind of freedom that comes with operating on the periphery, liberated from the crushing weight of art history. Perhaps this is what has given Los Angeles a relationship to conceptualism and photography that is distinct and invigorating. This domination of images has heightened and morphed, putting art today in a bit of a double bind. Artists by and large seem to reject dealing with the present in favor of retreating into the past, insisting on a “return to tradition,” that involves conservative modes of making, traditional approaches to materiality and a narrow historical scope of subject matter. Simultaneously these artists unconsciously privilege the freedom of the reproduction, allowing the work to uncritically flow into a wide variety of decontextualized spaces under the guise of visibility and professional development. While artists seem to freely disperse works within these networks, it seems they have very little awareness of what this actually means, and appear to put very little thought regarding the dispersion of their work at all. There seems to be a fair-weather criticality towards the networks in which these images travel—often individuals recite platitudes about the ills of online platforms, extremism, and the edges of society, all the while falling prey to the algorithmic cultural homogenization which these platforms enable, the very thing it seems artists should be acutely aware of.

You know it when you see it, and sure, maybe it changes occasionally, with slight variation due to the seasonal tastes, but it’s non-style style, with an air of cool removal, a quirky imitation of weirdness, a glib performance of counterculture within the preordained scope of possibility, kitsch with the pretense of transgression, and most importantly, clear boundaries of artistic authorship. It would be hard to say that there is not a general feeling in the air that art is in crisis. There has been much discussion of the “avant garde” the past few years (let alone the past month), how culture feels stuck and radical breaks in art seem hard to come by. Artists are not risk adverse solely because of finance or gallery representation, or any of the usual scapegoats, instead artists have embodied the mannerisms of contemporary art as a result of the image. This is the gravitational pull of business as usual.

In 2013 Michael Sanchez wrote one of the few analyses addressing art’s continued relationship to its reproduction. Titled “2011: Art and Transmission” and published in Artforum, the article points towards everyday, now banal, modes of networked technologies as an accelerant for the consensus-building on which the Contemporary Art System is predicated. What was once a process of legitimization though the ‘proper’ channels of this system is now legitimization through collective attention. This was the abolition of the gatekeepers of old promised by network technologies.

Sanchez notes the market implications of this new ease of transmission and perhaps the point which has entered discourse the most: a show can be photographed quickly and easily, allowing collectors to buy works before it even opens, then the work can go off to the Freeport, never to be physically encountered by its owner. The market effects on art are nothing to shrug off, but I would insist there is something more interesting to consider, how the image has shifted the physical reality of the gallery— bright, diffuse fluorescent or LED fixtures replacing the antiquated spotlights of old, “making their walls pulsate like a white IPS screen.”

Sanchez does not discuss the history of art documentation or the installation view, one which remains mostly unwritten. There’s something humorous about looking back at the archives of institutions, even well after the invention or color photographic film and finding that the records of an exhibition exist purely in monochrome. Now we have the “full Gagosian,” (I do not know where this term originated.) This is the phenomena of the documentation of art superseding the actual experience of visiting the gallery. The outlets are removed, the uneven paint retouched, the floor free of dust and debris, the walls a little too perfectly desaturated. Each work painstakingly masked so it can be adjusted independently of the space it resides within. Perhaps this is the reason many galleries have opted for the shadow reveal, that 1/2” gap between the stark white wall and the floor which eliminates the maximalism of a baseboard or the messy endeavor of a flush seam. Sanchez points to Contemporary Art Daily as a primary driver in the contemporary art system’s digitally driven image fetish.

Forrest Nash, the founder of Contemporary Art Daily, would begin the early stages of his project on the eve of the 2008 election. The largest curatorial project of the early 21st century was started while Forrest was an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In a 2015 lecture at Williams College, Nash refers to the burgeoning fully networked world, McLuhan’s Global Village realized, the undoing of the curse of the tower of Babel. “It’s not like putting all this material on the internet is going to magically make people in New York care about galleries in Angola. My hope is that by making this system as transparent as possible and by making it as inclusive as possible, we can remove what to me seems like a huge barrier to participation.” Around the time of CAD’s inception, “Post-Internet” was first conceptualized, a mode of working, a style, a way of being that embodied (or at least considered) the idealism surrounding newly networked technologies. In fact many of the artists who are considered “Post-Internet” mainstays attended SAIC at the same time as Nash: Brad Troemel, Daniel Keller, Jon Rafman, Andrew Norman Wilson, to name a few. Projects such as The Jogging considered art’s new relationship to its shifting context through engagement with art as a type of content, works made only to circulate online, primarily though Tumblr, pointing towards a new horizon of art’s preexisting memetic tendencies. Likewise, artist Ian Rosen began using Contemporary Art Daily as a site for a work's singular existence.

Another future seemed possible. Platforms could replace galleries and the audience for one’s work could be wider than ever before. Seth Price’s Dispersion embodies the early days of this quest for a new means of distribution and a redefining of public art. Dispersion calls into question the importance of Steiglisz’s photograph of Fountain and how perhaps in that moment a work of art not only redefined what art was, but the container or context it could travel in. The documentation of a work was of equal weight as the object. Likewise Duchamp’s Box in a Valise continues this questioning of the boundaries, singularity, and static nature of the work of art. Very few works today seem to truly acknowledge the reality of their existence, failing to embody the complexity and self awareness of Duchamp’s, meanwhile being fully embodied in the conditions he was reacting to.

It seems strange that the foremost mode of artistic distribution is sparsely discussed within contemporary artistic practice or art history. Post-Internet’s strength was in its active engagement with the reality and possibility within the conditions of the present, much like Conceptualism. While its idealism regarding information technology may have been undue, it seemed to ask the question “What territory is left to operate within, and what forms and tactics provide a meaningful container for radical propositions of art’s nature?”

Perhaps art seems to be in crisis because much of it amounts to no more than a desperate attempt at romantic escapism and a lack of self awareness or recognition of the reality of the present. When the image dominates our psyche art can only be pastiche. The homogenizing force of familiarity pushes artistic production deep within a feedback loop, rote anachronisms which only serve to be legible as “art” and function as pure content.

There is another way forward, but it is not nearly as romantic. If art is already beholden to the image, why not go all the way, removing any pretense of romance or sentimentality, making art a procedural operation, finding transcendence in desaturated walls, layer masks, and the cold, distanced gaze of the apparatus.

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There are two layers within the mode of working I have decided to pursue, first being works which are derived from metadata and contemporary folklore and provide the content within the second layer of the work. The second layer of the work consists of gestures such as “Exhibition View” and “Title, Date Medium,” which deal with similar subjects such an images and communications technologies but are specific to the visual and textual conventions of the contemporary art system.

Within this particular exhibition the first layer is based upon the 2019 story of Ghislaine Maxwell’s “photoshoot” at a Universal City In-N-Out burger and subsequent New York Post article. I have long been interested in the 2010’s phenomena of In-N-Out as a site for making photographs, mostly by teenagers, not a place to be see, but a place to have-been seen. The story behind Ghislaine’s image is complicated and uncertain. First published 5 days after Epstein’s death, the photograph seems to be constructed as some kind of red-herring, pointing those searching for her in the wrong direction. The origin of the image unclear, it seems to originated from Meadowgate Media Investments, a corporate filing operated by Maxwell’s former lawyer, Leah Saffian. This corporate entity has 3 addresses, all of which are photographed and displayed within the first layer of the exhibition. The only online records regarding the activities of the corporation indicate they imported two containers from China, one of gaming chairs, the other two pound dumbbells. The importer’s location has been photographed and displayed all well. Within the image Ghislaine is reading “The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives, with a poster for the 2019 film “Good Boys” located on a bus stop just visible over her shoulder. Allegedly there was never a poster for “Good Boys” at that bus stop, but coincidently the film is reviewed within the issue of New York Post which first published this story.