Jon Rafman Is the Tarkovsky of Google Street View Art
March 27, 2014 | Marina Galperina
Decisive moments by Michael Wolf are very punchy. Doug Rickard’s captures are sprawl like landscape paintings. There are dozens of other artists who sensitively scour the infinite passages of Google Street View for good screengrabs, but Rhizome has just reminded us of Jon Rafman and he is the best at this.
Everyone does car accidents. Rafman’s car accident is a pathetically baby-blue car that’s tucked itself face-down into the trees between the spreading paths of a highway, a mystical absurdity. Masked vandals throwing grenades at the Google truck. Hustlers thrusting their asses at the road. Violence and sadness. Alien hues, melted in the camera lens. It almost seems posed and contrived — although there is nothing more desensitized than the corporate cameras on top of corporate trucks rolling through the lives of others. These aren’t just good images; they’re revealing of forced interaction and voyeurism. They’re implicating the viewer in a scene, Haneke style, in all this that has been robotically farmed in compounding slices.
The 9-eyes project has been previously exhibited, and is ongoing.
As internet-based art proliferates, it's fascinating to watch work that is rooted in the digital as it migrate into the world of physical art spaces. The success of these transitions is varied, but Jon Rafman's practice is endlessly fascinating. His exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis opening tomorrow feels likely to…
Earlier this morning, Oneohtrix Point Never released a new music video directed by Jon Rafman, a contemporary artist currently exhibiting at Zach Feuer gallery. It was pulled from YouTube within minutes for what we can only assume was the brief inclusion of creepy anime porn. Unfortunately the new video for @0pn…
Jon Rafman's 9-Eyes Of Google Street View project showed us just how unsettling and surreal images captured around the world by Google's surveillance van can be. Rafman travels the streets of the world from the comfort of his home, snapping screenshots of the most striking vignettes. Sometimes he finds surprising violence in…
