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Kind of like an Accident: Interview with Cory Arcangel

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Cory Arcangel, Power Points, exhibition view. Courtesy the artist and DHC/ART, Montréal. Photo by Vincent Toi

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn based artist working in diverse media, including video, music, modified videogames, performances and the Internet. Arcangel often makes use of appropriation as a strategy to draw attention to source materials ranging from best-selling albums, Photoshop gradients and UGG boots. While bridging the gap between the highbrow and lowbrow culture, his work explores the nature of cultural production and consumption in a media and technology saturated world. On the occasion of his solo exhibition at the DHC/ART in Montréal, Arcangel talked to M-KOS about his art, his diverse influences and the role of artists as archivists.

MKOS: You started out as a musician, right? How did you make the transition to visual art?

Cory Arcangel [CA]: Its hard for me to explain, it just happened backwards, when I was in high school I was always making videos and you couldn’t go to art school to make video in 1996, so I went to music school. But I also feel in love with the history of music, so when I got out of school I was composing and I was making videos and I just put my work wherever I thought it would be cool and it’s just the gallery people who kept asking for it. So it happened kind of like an accident.
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Cory Arcangel “Power Points” at DHC/ART, Montréal

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Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture #6), 2011. (Installation view, Pro Tools, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011; Photo: Sheldan Collins). Modified silver dancing stands. © Cory Arcangel, Courtesy of Cory Arcangel.

Cory Arcangel
Power Points
21 June – 24 November 2013
at DHC/ART, Montréal

DHC/ART presents the first major Canadian exhibition of Brooklyn based artist Cory Arcangel. Trained initially in classical guitar and music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Cory Arcangel is now recognized as a major exponent of a pop-tinged, computer-centred art.

Arcangel embraces the Internet’s anarchic potential and its Utopian open source culture, making works that question authorship, the status, and value of the art object. Exploring both the promises and deceptions of software, electronic gadgets, games and other devices—with an emphasis on how they become old and quickly out-dated—Arcangel’s art eulogizes technology’s built-in obsolescence while also wittily celebrating its noise, mindless repetitions, and inevitable failures.
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Cory Arcangel “Masters” at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh


Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (still), 2002. Handmade hacked Super Mario Brothers cartridge and Nintendo NES video game system © Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel
Masters
3 November 2012 – 27 January 2013
at Forum Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA

Employing readymade digital technology as his primary medium, New York–based artist Cory Arcangel applies a hacker’s sensibility to a wide range of work that incorporates web, video, sound, performance, and photography. Arcangel’s appropriated source materials—ranging from obsolete video games to YouTube clips, and from Hollywood films to underground music—all become fodder for his visual and sensorial modifications. His artistic pursuits live as witty and informative interventions into contemporary culture at a time when we witness its rapid and frequent obsolescence before our eyes. [read the full text here]
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