Android Plaza - Shards of a Sotheby's Auctioneer
Quote from CohentheWriter on 27. April 2022, 6:21Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/permanent-collection?collection=0xb932a70a57673d89f4acffbe830e8ed7f75fb9e0&token=7699&page=2
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/android-plaza---shards-of-a-sotheby%27s-auctioneer-7699
Date Minted: February 4, 2020
Artist Description: Sotheby's auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself. Harman's Android Plaza is a collection of digital artworks using a specially formulated algorithm. Within the corruption of the digital image, there is a breaking up of the information, which leaves the viewer to interpret the space between abstraction and figuration. He then Digitally paints elements of the composition referencing Richter whilst the mangled figuration echoes Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Rarely do we get to examine a piece of Crypto Art through the exacting lens of known intention, known influence, and known effect. But artist Norman Harman is extremely deliberate in his offering of information to the observer. In the Artist Description for Android Plaza- Shards of a Sotheby’s Auctioneer, one of 31 “Android Plaza'' pieces in the artist’s oeuvre, Harman writes, “Sotheby's auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself. Harman's Android Plaza is a collection of digital artworks using a specially formulated algorithm. Within the corruption of the digital image, there is a breaking up of the information, which leaves the viewer to interpret the space between abstraction and figuration. He then digitally paints elements of the composition referencing Richter whilst the mangled figuration echoes Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.” I reference the entire description only because of its specificity. Harman, despite, in his own words “mangling” the image beyond recognition, nevertheless provides us a pathway to understanding it.
Shards is meta in initial construction. “Sotheby’s auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself.” Nominally, what this scene is depicting is a glitched auction, one where the auctioneer is broken into pieces, literally, and appears to be without any seeming understanding of the piece he’s brainlessly auctioning off. Seems fair to just let that understanding sit by itself for a while, giving it a chance to sink in. That auctioneer is one of three characters in the piece, the other two in the bottom left corner, both white men in blue suits, though just random pieces of their faces have been left for us to see; the algorithm has absorbed the rest.
It’s hard to gauge exactly what that algorithm is doing to the rest of the piece, at least cohesively. In places, like atop faces, it disrupts whole objects and obliterates their underlying completion. When applied to people, we get foreheads shifted left or vanished altogether. We get solemn mouths without eyes, without head, without hair, and sitting atop a suit and tie that is, itself, placed next to another suit and tie, this one fainter and devoid of color, as if a phantom of the first. Some images, like the outstretched fingers of the auctioneer, repeat one two three times in rapid succession, though none of the fingers are connected to the arm which assumedly produced them. We can’t really wade through this piece purposefully, that is to say, based on logic. The algorithm is adept at breaking apart whole, rational images, and in their place producing a sequence of lines, glitches, color, or shards that provide only a general impression of the thing we’re seeing here. Emotion —read: effect— , and experience of that emotion, are how we need to guide ourselves through this piece and ground ourselves in it.
Which brings us to Harman’s aforementioned influences, the German artists Gerhardt Richter and Frank Auerbach, and the Irish artist Francis Bacon, all masters of abstraction. Bacon, perhaps the most famous of the three, if not only the most prolific, was well-known for his ravaged images of individuals. He was constantly fragmenting faces, and indeed, throughout his works, you’ll find example after example of portraiture that, while containing that which resembles a face, people appear to have had their disparate parts put through a meat grinder. Auerbach, meanwhile, was famed for a painting technique —layer after layer after layer of dense, thick, goopy paint that dried 3-dimensionally— that many people treated more like sculpture than painting. Both artists focused primarily on the human form, and both used different avenues to make us aware of human form via its deformation. Auerbach, in his repetitious layering, sought to mimic the experience of his models, who sat for hours upon hours in a cramped studio. Bacon used his fragmentation to gauge his own opinion of something; see his Pope Pius, “Screaming Pope,” series for a prominent example. And here, in Shards, Harman uses that fragmentation to, in his own words again, call attention to “ the space between abstraction and figuration.” We look at Shards, and vague impressions start to form out of the deformation. We pull from the messy ether all the pieces of the image which we can ascribe meaning to: a face, a tie, a picture frame, even though they exist garbled and jumbled up, no more connected to the meaning we impart on it than the blotchy spots of color do to the wall or background they likely once were. But this is the human mind, desperate to find patterns, desperate to find things to latch onto. Shards asks us to live within this half-world, destroyed by the artists but built up again by the natural mechanics of our psyche. True abstraction does not leave room for this kind of interpretation. It forces us away from connection with real imagery, shoving us into a world of shapes and colors and spaces, experiences. Shards is less interested in that effect as a whole and more interested in finding exactly where that effect starts. And what exact point do images start to fall apart? How much must they be stretched and ripped up before they begin to mimic the abstractionists, before they cease to appear as what they were before?
Source Link: https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/android-plaza---shards-of-a-sotheby%27s-auctioneer-7699
Date Minted: February 4, 2020
Artist Description: Sotheby's auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself. Harman's Android Plaza is a collection of digital artworks using a specially formulated algorithm. Within the corruption of the digital image, there is a breaking up of the information, which leaves the viewer to interpret the space between abstraction and figuration. He then Digitally paints elements of the composition referencing Richter whilst the mangled figuration echoes Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
Rarely do we get to examine a piece of Crypto Art through the exacting lens of known intention, known influence, and known effect. But artist Norman Harman is extremely deliberate in his offering of information to the observer. In the Artist Description for Android Plaza- Shards of a Sotheby’s Auctioneer, one of 31 “Android Plaza'' pieces in the artist’s oeuvre, Harman writes, “Sotheby's auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself. Harman's Android Plaza is a collection of digital artworks using a specially formulated algorithm. Within the corruption of the digital image, there is a breaking up of the information, which leaves the viewer to interpret the space between abstraction and figuration. He then digitally paints elements of the composition referencing Richter whilst the mangled figuration echoes Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach.” I reference the entire description only because of its specificity. Harman, despite, in his own words “mangling” the image beyond recognition, nevertheless provides us a pathway to understanding it.
Shards is meta in initial construction. “Sotheby’s auctioneer auctioning a fragmented picture of himself auctioning a fragmented picture of himself.” Nominally, what this scene is depicting is a glitched auction, one where the auctioneer is broken into pieces, literally, and appears to be without any seeming understanding of the piece he’s brainlessly auctioning off. Seems fair to just let that understanding sit by itself for a while, giving it a chance to sink in. That auctioneer is one of three characters in the piece, the other two in the bottom left corner, both white men in blue suits, though just random pieces of their faces have been left for us to see; the algorithm has absorbed the rest.
It’s hard to gauge exactly what that algorithm is doing to the rest of the piece, at least cohesively. In places, like atop faces, it disrupts whole objects and obliterates their underlying completion. When applied to people, we get foreheads shifted left or vanished altogether. We get solemn mouths without eyes, without head, without hair, and sitting atop a suit and tie that is, itself, placed next to another suit and tie, this one fainter and devoid of color, as if a phantom of the first. Some images, like the outstretched fingers of the auctioneer, repeat one two three times in rapid succession, though none of the fingers are connected to the arm which assumedly produced them. We can’t really wade through this piece purposefully, that is to say, based on logic. The algorithm is adept at breaking apart whole, rational images, and in their place producing a sequence of lines, glitches, color, or shards that provide only a general impression of the thing we’re seeing here. Emotion —read: effect— , and experience of that emotion, are how we need to guide ourselves through this piece and ground ourselves in it.
Which brings us to Harman’s aforementioned influences, the German artists Gerhardt Richter and Frank Auerbach, and the Irish artist Francis Bacon, all masters of abstraction. Bacon, perhaps the most famous of the three, if not only the most prolific, was well-known for his ravaged images of individuals. He was constantly fragmenting faces, and indeed, throughout his works, you’ll find example after example of portraiture that, while containing that which resembles a face, people appear to have had their disparate parts put through a meat grinder. Auerbach, meanwhile, was famed for a painting technique —layer after layer after layer of dense, thick, goopy paint that dried 3-dimensionally— that many people treated more like sculpture than painting. Both artists focused primarily on the human form, and both used different avenues to make us aware of human form via its deformation. Auerbach, in his repetitious layering, sought to mimic the experience of his models, who sat for hours upon hours in a cramped studio. Bacon used his fragmentation to gauge his own opinion of something; see his Pope Pius, “Screaming Pope,” series for a prominent example. And here, in Shards, Harman uses that fragmentation to, in his own words again, call attention to “ the space between abstraction and figuration.” We look at Shards, and vague impressions start to form out of the deformation. We pull from the messy ether all the pieces of the image which we can ascribe meaning to: a face, a tie, a picture frame, even though they exist garbled and jumbled up, no more connected to the meaning we impart on it than the blotchy spots of color do to the wall or background they likely once were. But this is the human mind, desperate to find patterns, desperate to find things to latch onto. Shards asks us to live within this half-world, destroyed by the artists but built up again by the natural mechanics of our psyche. True abstraction does not leave room for this kind of interpretation. It forces us away from connection with real imagery, shoving us into a world of shapes and colors and spaces, experiences. Shards is less interested in that effect as a whole and more interested in finding exactly where that effect starts. And what exact point do images start to fall apart? How much must they be stretched and ripped up before they begin to mimic the abstractionists, before they cease to appear as what they were before?