“Over the course of the past thirty years, mainstream contemporary art’s attention has shifted between the picture and the page. That is, the aesthetic discourse of artists, art writers, and other market actors has privileged images and
structures in turn (e.g. the 1980s passage from Neo-Expressionism to Neo-Geo or, recently, a shift of emphasis from Gothic figuration to forms of conceptual montage).

Now, some artists are attempting syntheses of these terms, talking about artworks in ways that fuse investments in pictorial effects with deep attention to the structures of art objects and the systems through which those objects are distributed. Small printed pages (photocopies, laser prints, cheap color photos, and altered advertisements) are a primary medium of this new work.

This art discourse arises from, and documents, the effects of increasing virtualization on daily life in the industrialized world. As the Cubists and Futurists imbricated the stuff of industrial society into representations of their changing worlds (with Dada, the aims of collage were different), so young artists today incorporate the materials and techniques of the internet age. Their work expresses a wish and striving to represent, through images being and touching bodies, a culture in thrall to sinister myths of immateriality.”

Printed Space, collated by Scott Speh and featuring an essay by John Neff (draft excerpted above), will be on view in Western Exhibitions’ Plus Gallery from July 14 through August 18. At the close of the show the gallery will publish a small Xerox catalog containing reproductions of exhibited works and a version of Neff’s essay.