On Monaghan’s “Opulence” and the World of Digital Art:
A Baroque Allegory of Neoliberalism
İpek Yeğinsü
23.08.2022
(on the occasion of Jonathan Monaghan's solo exhibition)
The Experience
I dedicated two consecutive afternoons to experiencing Jonathan Monaghan’s solo exhibition “Opulence” taking place at Kalyon Kultur, one of Istanbul’s youngest corporate arts and culture institutions. Inhabiting a 19th-century Baroque and Neo-Gothic stone building (Tas Konak) at the heart of the fancy neighborhood of Nisantasi, the center’s exhibition program focuses on digital culture with the ambitious work of its artistic directors, the curatorial duo Irmak and Ceren Arkman.
The venue’s architectural style is in shocking harmony with Monaghan’s comprehensive selection of works from the last seven years, almost as if the exhibition was commissioned as a site-specific project reflecting on the building’s historical references. Tas Konak’s construction took place during the reign of Abdulhamid II, an Ottoman sultan well known for his politico-religious conservatism in public matters and his appreciation for Western lifestyle in his private quarters, a celebrated figure in Turkey’s current cultural environment taken over by Neo-Ottomanism. Apparently, the center continues to carry those references into the present, combining an admiration for tradition with a futuristic vision capitalizing on the East-West synthesis. Its location and list of past inhabitants, on the other hand, symbolize a history marked by political, social and economic privilege, the same concepts that, ironically, Monaghan subtly but persistently criticizes in his recent oeuvre.
Just as contemporary forms of entertainment are superficially pleasant and ‘opulent’ but often conceal, perpetuate and maintain the existing power relations, the works in the exhibition appear cheerful at first; familiar forms and textures borrowed from the history of art, sci-fi and animation rendered in lively colors are meticulously combined into highly seductive collages. Yet, the allegory begins to unfold as the viewer hops from one piece to another and notices the subtle details and the visual connections between the works that, ultimately, become the reiterations of the same mythical universe. Every inch of the exhibition carries Monaghan’s passion for mythology, and just as myths operate with a well-defined set of archetypes and repeat the variations of the same narrative, Monaghan’s mythical universe takes its persuasiveness from its repetitive and pervasive character. Ancient emperor busts, baroque ceiling ornaments, mesmerizing shades of velvet, majestic spaceship designs and tech-giant logos, all coming from the same lineage of exuberant symbols of power and wealth merge into each other, giving birth to a strange family of hybrid species representing the 21st-century neoliberal cultural atmosphere marked by consumer hysteria. Combined with the decorative elements dominating Tas Konak’s interiors, the exhibition turns into an immersive installation, a seamless whole bombarding the audience with a rich pool of references that stimulate their memory, imagination and ultimately self-doubt, and ask them to question the ‘system’ that family, school, workplace and mass media have been teaching them to comply with and that they have obviously taken for granted.
The Conversation
On the second day of my visit, I had the opportunity to converse with Monaghan not only on his artistic philosophy but also on his experience of being a professional artist in today’s art world:
IY: It is interesting to observe how digital artists position themselves in terms of professional identity. Some of them also have design studios where they do commercial work to sustain themselves, whereas their artistic practice remains as a space of freedom and autonomy. How do you experience that in your own career?
JM: This is a big issue; the technology and the tools we use are very much the same with those that are used in commercial media, and there are a lot of crossovers. When I was young, I decided to switch my career path and step away from the commercial areas of computer graphics and to use my skills to create meaningful, experimental and challenging works. There are also incredible things being done in the commercial sphere, but I preferred to operate as an individual artist just expressing myself, and that is what I have been doing ever since.
IY: How do you sustain yourself financially? What are the funding possibilities like for the digital artists in the USA?
JM: I sometimes will teach and do other things to help support myself. But it is very difficult to be an artist anywhere, and then you have these different art worlds. You have the high-end, blue chip art world, the world of big museums, auction houses and artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, which tends to gravitate towards traditional painting and sculpture. They have been slow to accept digital art for a long time, but it is getting there thanks to a long lineage of people, especially curators that have been trying to elevate digital art to a high cultural status. Plus, I work with bitforms gallery and they occasionally sell work and I sell prints and other more traditional forms of media. The gallery’s founder, Steven Sacks, has done great work in this sense. Yet, it does not pay all the bills, you know.
IY: How about the NFTs? Were they a game-changer?
JM: Especially in the past two years, artists like me have been able to find new audiences and support, and the NFT phenomenon has been a big part of it. But there also seems to be a growing public interest in digital art experiences in general.
IY: I think the audiences are getting younger, and the digital natives have now become the main consumers of digital culture. This helps dissolve the tension between the two art worlds, I suppose.
JM: Yes, and I think people seek new experiences and digital work is uniquely capable of providing that. These are less about the intellectual concepts we find in the high-end art world; some are just about fun visuals and popular forms of culture.
IY: Another thing that amazes me is that you show off a lot of texture, a bit like the Dutch painters used to do; your digital works have a very tactile feel, and this brings me to the debate on the traditional versus digital media. You seem to navigate the grey zone between the analog and the digital, something already evident in your media palette ranging from marble to animation. How is your position received in the traditional and digital art worlds? Do you ever feel like you do not belong in either gang?
JM: Yes, I do feel that way. My dad was a carpenter and my mom worked at the florist, and I came from a working-class neighborhood in New York. I have always felt like a bit of an outsider as many people do, since the art world is all about gatekeeping. Yet I do not think about it too much; I know what I want to express, and I try and find venues and audiences that are receptive to it anywhere I can, whether in the contemporary art world or in more popular channels of culture.
IY: Your images are highly seductive… But they have intellectual depth as well.
JM: That is intentional. I try to create works that are both accessible and critical. The more closely you look at them, the more you realize that there is a lot going on.
IY: I think that is a good strategy; when you confront the audience with open criticism, they sometimes tend to resist it. But when you ask them to explore and give those messages more subtly…
JM: That is my exact strategy; I bring people in via flashy textures and recognizable imagery, and after they stay with it for a while, I hope they gain some critical insights and have some perspective changed about the world around them.
IY: In addition to an attachment to art history, your works also hint at a fascination with vintage sci-fi and digital arts, such as the Star Wars aesthetics or Miyazaki…
JM: I think sci-fi, video games and other elements of modern culture give people a point of entry into what you want to talk about.
IY: Do you ever get criticized for perpetuating or even exploiting the commercial aesthetics in your work?
JM: I try to take ownership of it for it offers me an important way to think about it. The corporations and their logos are too pervasive everywhere in the world, so for me as an artist it is really an issue I have to address.
IY: And how about the criticisms targeting the use of digital technology in artistic creation? Especially conceptual artists can be extremely critical of the digital artists for becoming dependent on the software imposed on them by the tech industry and losing their creative autonomy.
JM: To the contrary, digital art it surprisingly democratic. Anybody with a computer can download the software and start learning to use it. Some software companies like Blender are open source and community driven anyway. Plus, 3D models and assets can be shared as open source and it is a very fluid way to work; if you play a video game, you can extract content from it. You can take different assets from several different places and recycle them, so it is similar to doing a pop art collage.
IY: Where do you go from here? What is your next move?
JM: I have recently done a project in Milan using digital fabrication and marble. It explores materiality and sculpture a little bit more which I enjoy, and I hope to continue being able to do more of that. I am also working on a project with the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. It is the USA’s first modern art museum, so the works are quite old, impressionist, surrealist, etc. What they do is they invite contemporary artists in to respond to historical art works from their collection; this is right up my alley, and so I reinterpreted a painting by Giorgio de Chirico for them.
A Baroque Allegory of Neoliberalism
İpek Yeğinsü
23.08.2022
(on the occasion of Jonathan Monaghan's solo exhibition)
The Experience
I dedicated two consecutive afternoons to experiencing Jonathan Monaghan’s solo exhibition “Opulence” taking place at Kalyon Kultur, one of Istanbul’s youngest corporate arts and culture institutions. Inhabiting a 19th-century Baroque and Neo-Gothic stone building (Tas Konak) at the heart of the fancy neighborhood of Nisantasi, the center’s exhibition program focuses on digital culture with the ambitious work of its artistic directors, the curatorial duo Irmak and Ceren Arkman.
The venue’s architectural style is in shocking harmony with Monaghan’s comprehensive selection of works from the last seven years, almost as if the exhibition was commissioned as a site-specific project reflecting on the building’s historical references. Tas Konak’s construction took place during the reign of Abdulhamid II, an Ottoman sultan well known for his politico-religious conservatism in public matters and his appreciation for Western lifestyle in his private quarters, a celebrated figure in Turkey’s current cultural environment taken over by Neo-Ottomanism. Apparently, the center continues to carry those references into the present, combining an admiration for tradition with a futuristic vision capitalizing on the East-West synthesis. Its location and list of past inhabitants, on the other hand, symbolize a history marked by political, social and economic privilege, the same concepts that, ironically, Monaghan subtly but persistently criticizes in his recent oeuvre.
Just as contemporary forms of entertainment are superficially pleasant and ‘opulent’ but often conceal, perpetuate and maintain the existing power relations, the works in the exhibition appear cheerful at first; familiar forms and textures borrowed from the history of art, sci-fi and animation rendered in lively colors are meticulously combined into highly seductive collages. Yet, the allegory begins to unfold as the viewer hops from one piece to another and notices the subtle details and the visual connections between the works that, ultimately, become the reiterations of the same mythical universe. Every inch of the exhibition carries Monaghan’s passion for mythology, and just as myths operate with a well-defined set of archetypes and repeat the variations of the same narrative, Monaghan’s mythical universe takes its persuasiveness from its repetitive and pervasive character. Ancient emperor busts, baroque ceiling ornaments, mesmerizing shades of velvet, majestic spaceship designs and tech-giant logos, all coming from the same lineage of exuberant symbols of power and wealth merge into each other, giving birth to a strange family of hybrid species representing the 21st-century neoliberal cultural atmosphere marked by consumer hysteria. Combined with the decorative elements dominating Tas Konak’s interiors, the exhibition turns into an immersive installation, a seamless whole bombarding the audience with a rich pool of references that stimulate their memory, imagination and ultimately self-doubt, and ask them to question the ‘system’ that family, school, workplace and mass media have been teaching them to comply with and that they have obviously taken for granted.
The Conversation
On the second day of my visit, I had the opportunity to converse with Monaghan not only on his artistic philosophy but also on his experience of being a professional artist in today’s art world:
IY: It is interesting to observe how digital artists position themselves in terms of professional identity. Some of them also have design studios where they do commercial work to sustain themselves, whereas their artistic practice remains as a space of freedom and autonomy. How do you experience that in your own career?
JM: This is a big issue; the technology and the tools we use are very much the same with those that are used in commercial media, and there are a lot of crossovers. When I was young, I decided to switch my career path and step away from the commercial areas of computer graphics and to use my skills to create meaningful, experimental and challenging works. There are also incredible things being done in the commercial sphere, but I preferred to operate as an individual artist just expressing myself, and that is what I have been doing ever since.
IY: How do you sustain yourself financially? What are the funding possibilities like for the digital artists in the USA?
JM: I sometimes will teach and do other things to help support myself. But it is very difficult to be an artist anywhere, and then you have these different art worlds. You have the high-end, blue chip art world, the world of big museums, auction houses and artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, which tends to gravitate towards traditional painting and sculpture. They have been slow to accept digital art for a long time, but it is getting there thanks to a long lineage of people, especially curators that have been trying to elevate digital art to a high cultural status. Plus, I work with bitforms gallery and they occasionally sell work and I sell prints and other more traditional forms of media. The gallery’s founder, Steven Sacks, has done great work in this sense. Yet, it does not pay all the bills, you know.
IY: How about the NFTs? Were they a game-changer?
JM: Especially in the past two years, artists like me have been able to find new audiences and support, and the NFT phenomenon has been a big part of it. But there also seems to be a growing public interest in digital art experiences in general.
IY: I think the audiences are getting younger, and the digital natives have now become the main consumers of digital culture. This helps dissolve the tension between the two art worlds, I suppose.
JM: Yes, and I think people seek new experiences and digital work is uniquely capable of providing that. These are less about the intellectual concepts we find in the high-end art world; some are just about fun visuals and popular forms of culture.
IY: Another thing that amazes me is that you show off a lot of texture, a bit like the Dutch painters used to do; your digital works have a very tactile feel, and this brings me to the debate on the traditional versus digital media. You seem to navigate the grey zone between the analog and the digital, something already evident in your media palette ranging from marble to animation. How is your position received in the traditional and digital art worlds? Do you ever feel like you do not belong in either gang?
JM: Yes, I do feel that way. My dad was a carpenter and my mom worked at the florist, and I came from a working-class neighborhood in New York. I have always felt like a bit of an outsider as many people do, since the art world is all about gatekeeping. Yet I do not think about it too much; I know what I want to express, and I try and find venues and audiences that are receptive to it anywhere I can, whether in the contemporary art world or in more popular channels of culture.
IY: Your images are highly seductive… But they have intellectual depth as well.
JM: That is intentional. I try to create works that are both accessible and critical. The more closely you look at them, the more you realize that there is a lot going on.
IY: I think that is a good strategy; when you confront the audience with open criticism, they sometimes tend to resist it. But when you ask them to explore and give those messages more subtly…
JM: That is my exact strategy; I bring people in via flashy textures and recognizable imagery, and after they stay with it for a while, I hope they gain some critical insights and have some perspective changed about the world around them.
IY: In addition to an attachment to art history, your works also hint at a fascination with vintage sci-fi and digital arts, such as the Star Wars aesthetics or Miyazaki…
JM: I think sci-fi, video games and other elements of modern culture give people a point of entry into what you want to talk about.
IY: Do you ever get criticized for perpetuating or even exploiting the commercial aesthetics in your work?
JM: I try to take ownership of it for it offers me an important way to think about it. The corporations and their logos are too pervasive everywhere in the world, so for me as an artist it is really an issue I have to address.
IY: And how about the criticisms targeting the use of digital technology in artistic creation? Especially conceptual artists can be extremely critical of the digital artists for becoming dependent on the software imposed on them by the tech industry and losing their creative autonomy.
JM: To the contrary, digital art it surprisingly democratic. Anybody with a computer can download the software and start learning to use it. Some software companies like Blender are open source and community driven anyway. Plus, 3D models and assets can be shared as open source and it is a very fluid way to work; if you play a video game, you can extract content from it. You can take different assets from several different places and recycle them, so it is similar to doing a pop art collage.
IY: Where do you go from here? What is your next move?
JM: I have recently done a project in Milan using digital fabrication and marble. It explores materiality and sculpture a little bit more which I enjoy, and I hope to continue being able to do more of that. I am also working on a project with the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. It is the USA’s first modern art museum, so the works are quite old, impressionist, surrealist, etc. What they do is they invite contemporary artists in to respond to historical art works from their collection; this is right up my alley, and so I reinterpreted a painting by Giorgio de Chirico for them.