JAMES HOWARD
AUTHORISED
27 April – 06 MAY 2011
Within the last one hundred years, the notion of the innovative has
mutated from the industrial and mechanical advances that preoccupied
Walter Benjamin, to the unprecedented impact of today’s communication
technologies.
Eight decades have passed since Valéry published his
philosophical prophecy, and indeed, the advent of the Internet has transformed the contemporary definition of what might constitute a work of art.
The ‘digital aesthetic’, which James Howard employs, is, at once, all his own, yet strangely familiar – reminiscent of the international call shops on many suburban high streets, their shabby wooden booths cluttered with homespun poster graphics offering cheap rates on communication with family and friends in faraway locations, as well as other services, such as,
to ‘unlock’ a problematic mobile. Other influences might also include the illuminated signage in a fastfood kebab house, visual clashes of design between genre shifts in DVD packaging, provinciallooking websites for craft fairs and garden centers, the subprime iconography of cheap puzzle monthlies, and not forgetting celebrity endorsements of anything from life
insurance to the ultimate in home Pilates sessions.
Howard’s most recent works, digital prints executed on industrially produced vinyl tarpaulins, indicate a shift in the artist’s practice towards a darker, more incisive flipside to the empty promises of validation and acceptance that the Internet proffers to the most vulnerable and gullible.
James Howard was born in 1981 in Canterbury University of Reading and The Royal Academy Schools, London UK
Murakami.
“We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our
very notion of art.” Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
www.aubingallery.com
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