Kaphar

The first step I took in the investigation for this activity was to open the studio websites of each of the three artists. Immediately a problem with the digital medium of an artist website hit me in the face. Carrie Mae Weems's website had lost its formatting, appearing like a plaintext document with images placed inline with the text. Sanford Biggers's website, even more detrimentally, could not load any pictures unless I viewed an archive of the site on another site. Titus Kaphar's website looked alright, but the minutiae of digital design were still incomplete, such as page titles and transparent icons. The effort and meaning that had gone into the design of the websites had been rendered invisible, not through vandalism or lack of artistry, but through the structure of the medium and its opacity to the viewer. Technical problems exemplify the limitations of the digital medium, especially the online medium where often an exhibit such as these sites depends on many other services to function. Even a temporary outage detracts from viewership of the page and discourages viewers at first glance from pursuing the actual art that the website is trying to display.

More broadly, the medium of the computer presents a built inaccessibility to both viewers, such as in these cases, and presenters. Trying to interact with computers is often needlessly complex, and trying to create something such as a website even more so. Indeed, there are entire industries dedicated to making computers easier to use. The consequence is that even beginning to present online raises tremendous hurdles. A person who wants to present must overcome the opportunity cost associated with the learning curve before they can make even a simple functioning website, or they must hire someone else to do it for them. Clearly the world of digital production is primarily reserved for those with the necessary resources to access it.

Even when the program works and displays what one has told it to display, translating many common artistic techniques into digital strokes is challenging. The computer presents perfect lines, constrained further into rectangles and text. Presenting an exhibit beyond those shapes means a journey into one of many graphics libraries. Even if one is willing to approximate such curves with their cursor in a drawing app, they still need to figure out how to position the finished pieces on the site. Then, necessarily, they must address aspect ratios across the various devices that may view their site, most frustrating of all the mobile phone on which the majority of their viewers will probably view it, where I found that Weems's site did not conform to any aspect ratio other than desktop.

Computers do offer dynamic and interactive features that may be more difficult or functionally impossible to implement in a hard medium. Obviously these still come with the associated cost online, but with it probably relatively lower. Animation, responsive animation, even platforms for community-sourced art, and the simple experience of being able to click or swipe through hundreds of pieces rather than walk through tens of galleries with high travel costs. Kaphar's gallery takes advantage of the last point by definition, while mostly leaving the others alone. Still, there is some responsiveness, as the site header sticks to the top of the screen when I move away, and when I hover over an exhibition or work cover, it shows me relevant paratext.

I believe I am drawn to many of Kaphar's pieces because they are striking. Originally I was somewhat dismayed to find that many of the works could only be accessed picture by picture in each category, and that there was no grand gallery on the website. However, I now think that a gallery would have taken away from the experience of viewing the paintings. The digital space may in fact be better for viewing than a physical installation in this sense. Listing the works in order of category might make them homogeneous within their categories, and in a random order might make the whole mix so. Currently, the website preserves an order through the categories but does not make it so all are shown at once, overloading instead of stimulating the viewer. This choice of display method echoes Kaphar's sentiment in his 2017 TED Talk "Can art amend history?" in which he whites out the faces of the White people in a photo so that the viewer can temporarily consider the Black person without noise. Each piece on the website is effectively isolated for consideration.

I have tried to produce somewhat of the same effect here, with the images in their own sections at the bottom, intended to be viewed after the reading and each separately, with captions to remind the reader of where they are referenced in the text. While viewing the Gagosian's website for Kaphar's From a Tropical Space exhibit, I noticed that the pictures were placed first, but I think an analysis preceding the material can be more beneficial, as in Professor Cooks's essay "Intricate Illusion" which shows the referenced works by Kaphar after Professor Cooks's analysis. While I didn't find an elegant way to make the text itself show by paragraph, as I would have liked, I think the way I have positioned to pictures makes the page calmer and leaves the text some space to be considered for itself.

Some of the most viscerally material works are in the Shredded collection. These pieces especially are severely limited in their reach by the digital medium, but this is actually more an aspect of the way art is presented in general—they would still be limited as physical works on a gallery wall. For a complete experience, one would need to be able to touch them, sift through each shredded strip and understand not only the meanings given to each but the effort that went into creating the piece. In the piece pictured here, words are written on each strip; it is natural that I want to read every one, since the way the document was divided by Kaphar is probably intentional. In others, there are no words, but the pieces are cut at different angles and some are of the original painting. Then these pieces must show on their viewer-averted sides the original aspects from the painting, and I would like to see what pieces Kaphar wanted to rip out. In the current medium I must compare with the actual original painting. This poses two difficulties: first, Kaphar does not cite the originals on the website; second, there are many things I could miss when comparing the two works side by side that I would not if I had the opportunity to actually move the strands of Kaphar's piece. At a whopping 60 by 48 inches, the piece shown would give ample room to play around with the strands, and I wouldn't feel frustrated like I were picking through a haystack, nor encumbered by massive, immovable recreations of paper.