ONE BY GON

ONE BY GON is a series of curated encounters with one outstanding work of art at Vienna’s GON shop on Marc Aurel Straße. Designer Christina Steiner invites a group of international curators, artists, designers and thinkers from a wide range of fields to work with the unique concept of GON’s store.

The store moves beyond being a retail space or a concept store, presenting itself as a space of possibilities between a cabinet of curiosities, a museum, a lab, an atelier and transdisciplinary space of encounter. Seven artists from the inner circle of GON have co-created the space.

Within the stripped back, concrete interior, the artists‘ works not only function as decorative exhibits but seem almost like poetic organs of an industrial baroque world.

In regular intervals, selected people will work together with GON’s creative team to pick an international artist and create a singular form of presentation within the artistic echo chamber that is the shop. Combined with an opening day and subsequently displayed for one month, ONE BY GON creates assemblies on various levels: An assembly of art forms, media, materials, and people. A space for co-creation.

Selected artists will create one-off editions for ONE BY GON, ranging from custom printed textiles for GON clothing to a variety of other manifestations such as T-shirts, posters, pins or whatever else the curators, artists and GON create together. During opening days, the artists are present and customize, personalize and sign their works.

CORY ARCANGEL
Title: F1 Racer Mod (aka Japanese Driving Game)
Year: 2004
Medium: Modded FamiCom game cartridge.
Elevator pitch: Just the road from a racing game.

While computers usually accomplish what never gets seen, art makes stories visible by peeling away layers. Cory Arcangel can do both. He virtuously strips technology of its teleology when, in “F1 Racer Mod,” he programs the supposedly essential elements – the car and its driver or player – away from the road in a classic driver game and thus no longer brings the goal, win or progress into view, but rather the empty path toward the future: “The only winning move is not to play,” as they say in WarGames, that early film about the consequences of computer games and simulation from 1983.

But Cory Arcangel is also going back to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), a key novel of the Beat Generation, in which the westward movement of settlers and the constant pursuit of the frontier are questioned in favor of being on the road. It’s no coincidence that the very place where both settlers and beatniks pushed both their frontiers and those of Pacific Beach soon gave rise to Silicon Valley, nor is it a coincidence that driving became one of the first casualties of computer simulation and (data) highways became the first bad metaphor for the Internet.

We know where Cory Arcangel’s roads lead. But where do they come from in their straightforward endlessness? Media and art have always told their own stories, whether we like it or not. Arcangel’s view of the street, his first-person perspective, comes from the historical depths of the early Renaissance. In the 15th century, Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti first developed technical construction methods of central perspective. While Brunelleschi used tools such as a “camera obscura” to produce perspectively correct pictorial spaces, Alberti went the decisive step further and published in Della pittura (1435-36) an idea, inspired by Euclid’s ancient geometry, that every perception is reducible to constructible geometric elements. From Brunelleschi to Arcangel, the painter and constructor, artist and programmer are one and the same. Without this merging of mathematics and art in the Renaissance, there would be neither computers nor computer games today, as both the technical basis and the imagination for a three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional image would be missing. The illusion of depth of space is the vanishing point of the media and art history of “F1 Racer Mod”. All this in the simplicity of the omission of a car.

As the first time-based work, “F1 Racer Mod” is now being shown in the special space that GON runs in Vienna and is entirely designed by artists*. Arcangel’s “mod” meets GON’s fashion, which encodes equally endless layers of history in its patterns. The pantsuits designed for the occasion are certainly the racing jerseys we wear as pilots of aimless races in post-digital spaces. They are anything but streamlined and fall out of Renaissance escape lines into baroque folds and monochrome geometry.

The neon signs of Joep van Liefland’s „Logos of the Present” are resurrections of slowly disappearing business signs – and the businesses that they represented. Decrepit nostalgia oozes from the lights and words and radiates a sense of doom and hope alike.

VALIE EXPORT, SYNTAGMA (1983)

For its first installment, ONE BY GON has selected a spectacular early film by legendary Austrian media artist VALIE EXPORT. SYNTAGMA sets in motion a series of earlier photographic works in which the artist traces architectural elements in concrete and marble, which syntagmatically assemble the grimy early 80s post-war darkness of Vienna. Exploring both different media such as film, early computers and the juxtaposition of still and moving images, EXPORT rearranges topologies and geometries of urban history. Opening a chasm between strips of film material, fingers with red-lacquered nails crawl out of the analog like insects and become digits in a doubled sense, signing out letters, spelling out what technologies are made of: syntax, SYNTAGMA.

A young person walks the city in nylons and heels, time gets reversed, they encounter media doppelgängers made from shadow and film, and mimic the stone and concrete shapes of a bygone empire. The screen splits, timelines break apart, the protagonist’s identity shows its true, fragmented, divided self. Green phosphor letters spell out R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self while „shrapnels of female imagination“ travel between the historic layers of Vienna: palace steps lead to subway escalators, 8mm video projections fall on surveillance camera screens, the underground cinema of the Künstlerhaus Kino and Filmcasino connect to Vienna’s newly opened subway system. The protagonist descends into these undergrounds barefoot and again in nylons and heels as if on a catwalk, ushering in a new era of aesthetics and style reflected in the work of Helmut Lang, Elfie Semotan and the eponymous underground club U4, which had just opened its doors in 1980. Once arrived and seated in an abstract room, the protagonist enters into a dialogue of soliloquies with themself and their media doubles. Their nude, female-presenting body multiplies and is disassembled into its syntagmatic elements. In another split screen setting, leaf doors swing open and they enter – or leave – the domestic world and with it their assigned gender roles in a fashion that could very well be a fashion show, each cut of the film also a switch in outfits. Once escaped, the protagonist arrives at a desk with a typewriter in a study room, filled with books, art and musical instruments. In contrast to the history of women working as secretaries and typists in the offices and bureaucracies of Capitalism, the protagonist’s dress code is gender neutral, as they become their own author and write and study their own stories. Multiple layers of the female voice of the speaking clock form the syntagmatic soundscape of technological time.

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ONE BY GON

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ONE BY GON