Art today can hardly compete with the spectacle offered by the artfulness of technology, unless it appropriates technology as a medium, which is what Julius Popp does. But the gimmick of artificiality is for him only a tactic to attract the viewer into a short-time capsule given by aesthetic contemplation. Like a modern memento mori the work gives way to a quest for meaning, objectified not in the human skull or fading beauty of a still life, but in the oddity against nature of liquid shaped into words and images taken at random from news webs and existing for the span of an eye blink. Information is quantifiable in “bits,” yet how does it qualify in terms of meaning?
bit.fall
Courtesy of Galleries Jocelyn Wolff & Nächst St. Stephan; photo: François Doury
