Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Russell's Rainbow" (turn transparency off), mousedown y=9300 x=14550, mouseup y=9300 x=19000, 2010

‘Arcangel invites us to reconsider how the qualities of established artistic practices have been profoundly affected by tools that allow for the instant creation of Abstract Expressionist imagery [...]’
(C. Paul, quoted in Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011, p.11).


Immaculately fabricated using the highest quality printing techniques, Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=9300 x=14550, mouseup y=9300 x=19000, 2010 belongs to Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop Gradient Demonstrations Series that was the subject of his major solo exhibition, The Sharper Image at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. The exceptionally long title of the present work is in fact the list of instructions through which Arcangel created his colour gradient image in Photoshop. The gesture of naming an artwork after the method of its construction has its roots in the conceptual legacy of artists such as Sol LeWitt, who provided museums with instructions for making his drawings rather than producing the works himself, and Lawrence Weiner, who equated linguistic facts with manifested art works. Arcangel’s confusion of ‘instruction’ and ‘object’ is compounded by his use of code, which often involves following the instructions of a prior programmer or software designer, if only to be at cross-purposes with a software’s intended application. Rather than keeping the image in digital format, Arcangel prints Photoshop CS as a unique C-print, pointing out the wide accessibility of consumer technologies versus the often inaccessibility of contemporary art.

With the advent of the digital revolution and the ready availability of such programs since the early-2000s, Photoshop has come to occupy the domain of both amateur and professional alike. For Arcangel, this software perfectly encapsulates the do-it-yourself attitude that advancements in information technology has inspired. With a practice that adopts these technological tools or products, Arcangel explores the juncture between high-tech and DIY and in so doing blurs the realms of fine art and pop culture. Arcangel is interested in our dependence on and the ubiquity of certain image software; Photoshop, the trade name of the most popular consumer image manipulation software, has become a verb, much like the trade name ‘Google’ has become a verb that stands in for ‘search on the internet’. Photoshop software has standardized effects that can be used to adjust an image in a way that is usually recognizable as having been created using the program. With so many people ‘Photo-shopping’ images, the results begin to carry the stamps of the program. Arcangel makes these traces the solo image content of Photoshop CS.