Masters

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.

Masters presents works that reflect Arcangel’s prolific career from roughly 2002 to the present, including five time-based videos, one modified video game, one modified flatscreen television, a wallpaper installation, and archival materials that touch upon an artistic practice that exists as much on the web and in popular culture as it does in the museum or gallery.  The museum will debut a new work featuring Arcangel’s recently released collection of catalogued trance and techno LPs; sited in the Carnegie Library adjacent to the Museum of Art, the installation will feature a listening station and library-standard database. The exhibition opening on November 2, 2012, will feature Arcangel’s Selected Single Channel Videos performance.

Arcangel has shown work on several occasions in Pittsburgh, and has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Barbican Art Gallery, London, among others.

Cory Arcangel: Masters is the 70th installment of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series. The exhibition is organized by Tina Kukielski, associate curator of the 2013 Carnegie International.