There’s always a learning curve for a brand new art fair, and perhaps even more so for one in Silicon Valley, a corner of the United States known more for birthing iPhone apps than art careers. This week, we’ll find out what sort of market actually exists in the region, as Silicon Valley Contemporary comes to San Jose from April 10 through 13. Fair organizers are consciously banking on attracting a crowd that appreciates both circuitry and artistry — they cite the popularity of the likeminded Zero1 Biennial, which kicked off in 2006 — although event programming seems to be pulled in several contrary directions.
Certain forward-thinking gallerists, like Kathy Grayson of the Hole, have found a way to simultaneously appeal to the tech-geek and the art purist: Paintings, made by drones, which are then couched in the language of Abstract Expressionism. Those works are the brainchild of Katsu, an artist perhaps best known for converting fire extinguishers into massive paint-delivery systems that can then be used to tag walls (like the one that he illegally augmented at MOCA in 2011). They’re made by outfitting a DJI Phantom 2 consumer-grade drone — retail price of around $700 — with a spray-paint can and hardware from Home Depot and Lowe’s. “It’s this bizarre collaboration, with me assisting the technology as much as it is assisting me,” said Katsu, who is prone to vaguely anthropomorphizing the drone, almost suggesting that it approaches a sort of low-level quasi-sentience while making the paintings. Canvases are suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire, and Katsu determines — or tries to determine — both the drone’s movement and the paint application via remote control. He compares the experience to becoming so immersed in a video game that “you enter a zone where it’s almost out-of-body, where your connection with the remote becomes so fluid it’s like you’re moving your limbs.” The end results are airy, abstract pieces in which lines of pigment dissolve into vaporous contrails. It’s difficult, as a viewer, to step back and appreciate them simply as paintings, rather than as paintings-made-using-drones; for that reason the Hole is showing a short, abstract film that captures the process (the actual drone, however, won’t be on display). Even so, Katsu wonders how the Silicon Valley crowd will react, and what they’ll actually respond to. “I think people will probably be eager to point out all the things that were wrong with it, technologically,” he said. “How it could have been simply programmed to perfectly execute a Jackson Pollack.” For Katsu, the experience itself was infinitely more humanistic than that. “I don’t think the drone has the capacity to learn,” he said, “but we did improve our relationship over time.”
Other elements of Silicon Valley Contemporary straddle a similar line between the domain of the art lover and the gadget fetishist. A crew from the Marina Abramovic Institute is bringing the “Mutual Wave Machine” to the fair, an “interactive neurofeedback installation, that embodies the elusive notion of ‘being on the same wavelength’ with another person through brainwave synchronization,” according to press materials. (The work’s “concept trailer” is similarly oblique, and makes the whole project look a bit like a sci-fi horror nightmare). Untitled is bringing a slice of Lower East Side chic, with work from web-obsessed Brad Troemel, as well as Jon Rafman, whose practice often touches on what would seem to be Silicon Valley-friendly tropes (video games, interactive worlds like Second Life, Google Street View photography). Yet some gallerists are keeping it simpler, hanging the Richters and Basquiats that by now are the wallpaper of international art fair monoculture. Pace Gallery adds a measure of instant blue-chip cred to the fair; while they don’t have a booth per se, they’ll be exhibiting a 2011 “pin drawing” by Tara Donovan, measuring 10’ x 10’, in the VIP Lounge. (Pace is also initiating a pop-up space in nearby Menlo Park, California, where an Alexander Calder show opens April 16, followed by a Donovan exhibition opening May 22.)
As to who will actually be attending the fair, looking at — and hopefully buying — this eclectic range of work, that’s an open question. “Obviously, we have invited VCs and bankers and doctors and lawyers and the average public” in addition to tech-industry workers, said Rick Friedman, executive director and founder of the Hamptons Expo Group, which is behind Silicon Valley Contemporary. Collectors, he ventures, might be a bit younger than at other fairs: “In Silicon Valley, people have become financially successful at a relatively early age, so it’s not unusual for guys in their 30s or 40s to have cashed out and be thinking about their next venture.”
Stereotypes that linger in the air over the typical Silicon Valley collector — highbrow nerds in Google Glass! Anime freaks with a jones for post-post-Internet art! — may be rendered moot by the ever-present bottom line. “We sell art to people in the tech industry,” Grayson said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve sold art to the head of Rockstar Games, the head of WireImage. When people have a lot of money, they usually buy art — whether they are excited about it, or always wanted to and couldn’t afford it. It’s just something that people above a certain income level like to do, and are able to do.”
Click on the slideshow to see images from Silicon Valley Contemporary.
