The Greater Cloud

There is a great value in art that can only exist in the now, or in very recent history, art that evolves together with that moment and is somewhat aware of its own existence as a flow of matter and energy. Often it is a kind of work that owes the very possibility of its existence to a certain technology or idea that is at the frontier of what is out there. This quality of a 'contemporary' actuality is not connected to a specific medium or aesthetic. Further, it is only partially connected to new-ness, just like we ourselves as species only partially rely on the latest technologies, as most of our lives and values have emerged from millennia of experience. Art is one of those things that humans have been doing for a very long time. What kind of art has the potential to define the second decade of the 21st century and how is it positioned within the realities of the present time? We are currently faced with too much of a lot of things: overproduction, panicking markets, climate change, overpopulation, overconsumption, viral revolutions, global cloud technologies and attention deficit ideologies. How does art fit into this?

Harm van den Dorpel strikes me as an artist with a heightened sensitivity to what is 'actually contemporary'. He uses the Amazon Kindle text highlighting service to make textual assemblages from the books that he reads. The resulting essays and text-objects are further advanced to become part of a video or press release and often refer to the history of their synthesis. For example, the assembled Manuel De Landa text found on Van den Dorpel's website talks about the process of assemblage and emergence itself. Similar thinking is helpful to understand the more visual and material work of the artist - his digital, material or mixed collages and sculptures, curatorial work, videos and online presence. The artist scans his environment and actively, mainly in subjective and intuitive ways, translates them into works of art that are shown in a gallery as objects, are to be photographed and distributed online as images or act an online content management system. With his work it is unclear if it actually exists as an object, if it is just a render, a digital collage or a found item but often it is a combination of all of the above. Van den Dorpel takes this method to the extreme by turning his website into an extensive catalogue and associative archive of his work.

Many art works by the artist have an autonomous aesthetic merit and relevance that reaches beyond common points of reference. And they gracefully echo and engage in dialogues with artworks by modern and contemporary artists, from Mark Rothko to Seth Price to even JODI. Influenced by abstract expressionism on one hand and programming languages on the other, Van den Dorpel's practice adds up to something as complex as it is poetic and one of a kind. This multidimensionality is what ultimately makes his work rich, allowing it to transcend the limitations of a single particular genre or market niche. His work is truly a product of today's world, of the Greater Cloud we all find ourselves in.