Cory Arcangel
Here Comes Everybody

30.11.2010 to 28.08.2011

Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

The New York-based artist Cory Arcangel (* 1978) uses his work to explore the practices and myths that have built up around Internet culture, pop music and experimental music. In processing visual and audio material for his works, he not only uses and adapts available computer programmes but also develops his own programming to do so.

Far from being merely interested in current trends in the entertainment industry and in our everyday use of the Internet, the artist also highlights the rapid obsolescence of technologies and codes. Cory Archangel mixes and matches his works, each time presenting them in a new constellation to each other and applying them in different settings. Depending on the situation, for instance, he combines older and more recent video works with sculptural works, while the material for a music performance may also reappear in a video installation or in an Internet project.

At the heart of this exhibition is the two-screen video installation entitled 'a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould' from 2007. Compiled from over 1100 individual snippets that the artist downloaded off the Internet and edited using software that he himself devised, we are treated to a video version of the 1st variation from Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. At a bewildering speed, the images alternate from person to person as each individual plays a completely different instrument, each time performing a single note from Bach's composition. The pianist Glenn Gould used the technique of piecing together various recordings to produce his commercial records, something which Archangel takes here to its humorous extreme.

Series "Works of Music by Visual Artists"

So far the series has presented concert performances of musical works and installations by Hanne Darboven, Yves Klein, Hermann Nitsch, Rodney Graham, Stephen Prina, Lawrence Weiner / Peter Gordon, Käthe Kruse, Carsten Nicolai, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Cory Arcangel, Egill Sæbjörnsson & Marcia Moraes, Ryoji Ikeda, Susan Philipsz, Saâdane Afif, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Christian Marclay, Jorinde Voigt and Cevdet Erek at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.