NYAB Event - James Howard “Energy Fluid Enemania System”

James Howard “Energy Fluid Enemania System”

Envoy Enterprises (87 Rivington St.)

This event has ended.

In the fourth and final iteration of the Great Debate About Art exhibition series, artist James Howard examines the decline of the arts and its surrender to commodity fetishism.

The arts are a part of humanities, which is something that commodity fetishism and its increasingly corporatized environment is an adversary. “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive,” as explained by the late art critic Robert Hughes, is a direct relation to this new post-post modern development in the arts.

For his first U.S. solo exhibition, Tokyo-based artist James Howard creates an immersive large-scale installation for which the contents of scams, spam, unregulated websites, stock images, and poorly software-translated texts are obsessively cut out and recombined into digital “base material”. Howard’s work encompasses the whole gallery space from floor to ceiling, in banners and pulsating GIF animations, including a projection of a live feed from the artist’s website.

James Howard (1981, Canterbury, UK; lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) is a hacker-turned-artist who probes the schizophrenic unconscious power of Internet junk. Howard studied Fine Art at the University of Reading, and subsequently at the Royal Academy, London - graduating in 2007.
In the late 90’s, he was a notorious teenage hacker - gaining access to highly secure foreign government networks via a dial-up Internet connection. He uncovered terrifying documents “that rewrote the origin and development of human life” - something which kick-started his fascination with re-assembling reality via concepts of becoming, fluidity, and art.

His room-filling installations have been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, including Barbican Center, London, UK; The Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, envoy enterprises, New York City, USA; and Duve Gallery, Berlin, Germany. His work has been featured on BBC, Rhizome.com, The Guardian, Artinfo, The Independent, and The Times amongst many other outlets. This exhibition is James Howard’s first solo project in the United States. James Howard is represented by envoy enterprises.