Ah Hole Ah Hole, “Can I Get a Witness”; installation at Art Blog Art Blog
‘What, exactly, is a blog?’ This question is our contemporary moment’s shibboleth. If you ask it, it’s likely that you’re receiving social security checks, or get into the movies at a reduced rate. Nevertheless, it’s a valid existential question too, because a blog is the quickest and most ubiquitous way to gain an independent ‘presence’ online (i.e. one not tethered to Facebook or Google). And though blogs have been around since the early days of the web browser, their ubiquity belongs to the last decade, long enough, that is, to begin to feedback into the way we look at, and think about, and do things, offline.
Can I Get a Witness, curated, or ‘posted’, we might say, by Tisch Abelow, Jashin Friedrich, and Dakotah Savage, is the first exhibition I have seen that manages to translate, or perhaps ‘remediate’, the form and sensibility of the blog. I say “the blog,” even though there is ‘a’ blog in particular—Art Blog Art Blog, the blog of Joshua Abelow, one of the artists in the show and older brother to Tisch—that has temporarily lent its name to the space (Ross Bleckner’s studio, in fact) in which Can I Get A Witness was ‘posted’. There is another blog too, Ah Hole Ah Hole, which is Tisch Abelow and Dakotah Savage’s, and which does much of what the elder Abelow’s does, and that is to array—this is what blogs do, array things, consecutively, most often vertically, but sometimes horizontally too; it is the blog’s form—images and videos and short tweet-worthy statements and questions and announcements, and, of course, links, all of which have been put there by the blogger(s).
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