Ken Okiishi
In the eleven paintings that were in this show, all equal in size and in identical thin black frames, densely expressionist or allusively calligraphic brushstrokes bunch or stutter across shimmering color fields. You had to dip your head ninety degrees toward your left shoulder to read the name of the Old Master, stamped in silver and running up each frame’s right-hand edge: SAMSUNG.
For his first solo show at Reena Spaulings, Ken Okiishi executed a series of oil paintings on the surfaces of upturned flat-screen televisions. (A group of related works hung concurrently in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.) The idea is so perfectly simple and so monumentally appealing, there ought to be an app for it. And indeed, there is. There are a number of them—from Meritum Paint Pro and Adobe Ideas to Fifty-Three’s Paper—all of which allow the movement of your fingertip across your mobile device’s touch screen to mimic the brushing of oil paint on canvas: swiping as painting. Designed to enhance your creative productivity, these apps allow you to capture the inspiration of the moment, on the go, in real time, immediately exportable to Facebook or Instagram.
The works in “gesture/data” dismantle that seamless prosumer immediacy by overlaying strata of disjunctive temporalities in obsolete formats. The portrait-oriented flat-screens play looped footage recorded on VHS by the artist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, transferred to digital video, and converted to .MP4, the preferred encoding standard for Net-streamed mobile video, a lossy codec that bakes in nostalgia by further degrading the originals.
They were painted as they hung, with the video running. The strokes become, like oily fingerprints, the traces of an otherwise fleeting user-screen interaction: from swiping as painting to painting as swiping. One can speculate about the point in the loop a given stroke was made, as when a Dodge minivan materializes directly under a zone of red brushwork keyed to its silhouette, or when a shift in the looped clip to a red wash makes patterns of red strokes disappear while greens darken to near black and a constellation of short white strokes aggressively glow. At some point the activity of painting had to end, though the loops inexorably continue. Okiishi’s show wittily includes airtime missed via oversaturation or disconnection. On one screen, TV Guide’s scrolling index registers all of the programming left unpainted while you watch. On others, allover and violently gestural paintings cover the blue screens of death that once told you your cable was out or that your OS met an unhandleable exception.
Floating over all of these differently mediated temporalities is that of your own vision, split between the perception of a stilled vertical painting with active video collé and that of a horizontal playback interrupted by oil static, or resting uneasily somewhere between the two. When conditions are right and a moment of darkness on the flat-screen’s reflective surface aligns with the gaps between brushstrokes, a painting can return your own furtive gaze, inserting the time of your looking between painted surface and looped background.
The painting bends to its video substrate; the screened images themselves are not so accommodating. A visitor born under the sign of the iPhone’s internal accelerometer might find herself fighting off a manic urge to pull the screens off the wall and shake them until the snippet of a Food Network cooking show or an ad for a decade-old Honda or a few seconds of 60 Minutes automatically rights itself. Despite the paintings’ portrait-oriented similarity to comically outsize smartphones, the archive they screen stays landscape. They refuse to respond in the ways we now expect from our media technologies, not only to our desires but even to our sheer physical orientation in the world. In their literal détournement of the screens that facilitate our conspicuous consumption of “the present,” Okiishi’s paintings create a tension played out in the viewer as the wagged dog of an immediately graspable conceptual gesture—a tension that is genuinely moving and feels perversely like relief.