Photos by Kristy Leibowitz/elkstudios
This past weekend, MoMA presented a collaboration between
electronic musician Daniel Lopatin—who records under the moniker Oneohtrix
Point Never—and video artist Nate Boyce, as part of its PopRally series of art
parties. While not an overly
serious gathering, Boyce and Lopatin delivered an hour of strobing,
structuralist-minded imagery over relentless digital throbbing. Each of the work’s sections was based
upon a specific object in the MoMA’s sculpture collection and the overarching
title, Reliquary House, suggested a
congratulatory pat on the back for the museum. PopRally events are more often than not thematically
connected to what’s concurrently on MoMA’s walls, while in this case the
institution’s history was the tie-in.
The video screen displayed 3-D renderings of modernist forms
by Isamo Noguchi, David Smith, Jacob Epstein, and Anthony Caro, which gyrated
in “impossible” landscapes evoking the Panopticon look of the music video to
Nine Inch Nail’s “Down In It.” To
clarify their intention, Lopatin began each movement with details of the image
being projected—dates, dimensions, curatorial texts—dictated by robotic voices
a la Siri and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Within the foreboding visual environment, these came off as
provocations of a sort, which gave way to beds of digital glitches and
rollicking bass oscillations, positing a bleak underbelly to the neutrality of
the subject material. Boyce and
Lopatin, who often communicate a sense of humor about the austerity of
contemporary tools and approaches in their work, perplexed the droll audience,
who perhaps expected Lopatin to perform the angelic synthesizer music
indicative of his latest record, Replica. Boyce and Lopatin stood ground
side-by-side, facing their laptops, but more often were caught gazing up at the
video screen.
Lopatin’s other recent art project, a zine ...
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Yamil Orlando