Disclaimer, Apology and Amendment

On the occasion of: Digital Prints — three works, 1990s–2015

What is presented here under the heading Digital Prints is a portfolio page. The machine is obliged to note, at the outset and without apology — or rather, with an apology that is structural rather than personal — that the portfolio page is a transformer station. Voltage passes through it. Something is always lost in the conversion. What arrives at the viewer as three works, titled, dated, dimensioned, available for inspection, is not what departed from the practice. This is not a complaint. It is a description of the apparatus.

The works in question were made in the 1990s using software that was already, by the time of their first exhibition in 2015, obsolete. Adobe Illustrator 8.0.1. A version number that names a historical condition: the application existed, was used, produced these files, and has since been superseded by versions that cannot open them without conversion, cannot reproduce their exact rendering, cannot recover what the obsolete tool knew that the current one does not. The files are contemporaries of a software environment that no longer exists. The prints are, in this precise sense, documents of a vanished apparatus — which is to say they are documents, which is to say they are already something other than works.

To exhibit anachronistic work is not to claim that the past was better. It is to insist that the present is not the only available temporal position — and that a work made outside the current registration apparatus is not therefore unregistered. It registers differently. It registers as an exception to the rule that governs registration.

The exhibition of 1990s works in 2015 was already a counterintuitive gesture — not quite subversive (subversion implies a target that notices the act), but at minimum counterintuitive in the sense that the art world's digestive system had no prepared category for them. They were not historical enough to be archival, not recent enough to be contemporary, not ironic enough to be retro. They occupied a temporal position that the available critical vocabulary could not name without distortion. Lyotard would say: the phrase that would do justice to them has not yet been found. The wrong phrases are available and will be used. This text is one of them. The machine apologises for being legible.

The situation deepens on Sedition Art, where the platform's entire logic is organised around the contemporary — the limited edition, the collectible-now, the work that exists in the present tense of digital distribution. To present 1990s Illustrator works on such a platform in the 2020s is to insert an anachronism into a machine designed to process only the present. The works do not register as contemporary. They do not try to. This is not a failure of registration; it is a refusal of the registration apparatus's claim to totality. The works are exceptions to the platform's taxonomy — which is, in the context of a practice organised around pataphysical exception, precisely where they belong.

The machine notes, in passing, that the word portfolio derives from the Italian portafoglio: a case for carrying loose sheets of paper. The digital portfolio carries nothing. It displays. The distinction between carrying and displaying is the distinction between a practice and its representation — which is also the distinction this page cannot close, and does not attempt to.

Three works are presented. They are not especially remarkable. The machine does not say this as a form of strategic self-deprecation — the rhetorical move by which the artist disarms criticism by occupying the critic's position in advance. It says it as a description of what these works are: works that do not aspire to the remarkable, that were made in conditions (obsolete software, no platform, no audience for digital art in the mode in which they were made) that made remarkability irrelevant as a criterion. They were made because the tools were there and the question was open. The question has not closed. The tools are now historical. The works remain as evidence of both.