Joshua Selman, "In Memorium of
Wendy Geller",
performance detail

I had the opportunity to see Josh do in memoriam wendy geller as an isolated performance and tribute to his friend in '96 at Anthology Film Archives. The evening included Alison Knowles, Jessica Higgins, Larry Miller, Yoshi Wada and others. At the time I was unaware the Canadian video artist had passed away a few days before. Josh placed the work first on the program secretly framing the evening as a memorial by a local arts community. Seeing it again conceived within off the grid, the action echoes the hard core of early performances by Nam June Paik or Yasunao Tone. Perhaps it transforms into an homage to the Fluxus subsoil of the gallery's historic space itself.

Behind the performance there was a large photograph mounted to a white window shade, the image of a hill of old cobblestones. They are visibly dumped along the West Side Highway of Manhattan during its renovation. "I like the image because the cobblestones seem like the smallest addressable unit of grided architecture. They're like random pixels." Josh tells me. The pile confirms the forest's rural decay. I wonder what will happen to those cobblestones; a desiccated stack of urban history. Are they to be recycled or hauled away in dump trucks and deposited at some other site to sit and rot? Perhaps they could be sent out to Smithson's Spiral Jetty. As the room unfolds a collapsed urban grid next to the orderly display of nature's becoming, the obsolescence of heroic industrial New York is un-earthed.

Turning to a third pole I encountered three ancient Mac IIci computers as a table top installation. By first impression they were on the internet, rhythmically searching through sites and loading in images. Interesting how these old computers are serving as a sculpture positioned between video-art and interactive computer driven art. They are automated, obviously second hand low-tech and possibly scavenged from the corporate environment of the late '80s. Looking closer I see browsers loading pages from off the grid life style websites. There are also grayscale images of the loft space Josh shared with Jessica Higgins and Philip Corner. It is totally empty, "broom clean." Obviously the last moment in the space before he was forced by his landlord to leave forever. I myself had spent many happy occasions in that space. Additionally, I saw many pages of the cobblestone hill, alternative shots filling in the details of origin for the large photo image on the window shade. Three image sources bouncing between three ancient computers created a fractured rhythmic in the Netscape browser windows programmed to load these cheap, full screen animated gif files. The effect was truly a future-past of the urban grid in the age of digital flow.

In Selman's press release it says, "'Off the grid' is a term used today by a growing segment of the population attempting to sever its dependence on the support grid behind industrial civilization. The cult lifestyle has even made its own industry of products for living off the grid. Whether or not this is possible, a growing human desire to go beyond the reduction of all phenomena to elements within a material grid seems to be timely. Mr. Selman admits he feels centering in the urban grid is obsolete and, in the exhibit, draws from his own desire to expand beyond its domain."

The Amish communities in Northeast and Midwestern America have been living this way for generations. They are mostly indifferent to the fantastic predictions for the horrors of the Y2K bug. By contrast Selman uses early Mac IIci computers, which may not be Y2K compliant, to distribute information to his audience about the off-grid lifestyle. As he tells us, "These days they're re-cabling the entire planet. You feel a destabilizing effect. But, this anticipates our journey. WeÕre roaming within structures more flexible than the prefabricated urban container." That the entire urban idea can now be replaced with more flexible structures strikes me as his focus in the exhibit. Whether or not the view is activated by his personal experiences, the question is timely for all of us. The exhibition read as a trialogue between the artist's rural coordinates, his urban coordinates, and the electronic coordinates which triangulate them.

Erika Knerr

Brooklyn, New York 1999