Eduardo Navas: The Allegorical Impulse Part I

June 2002

Screenshot of a pattern of a colorful gird of squares and rectangles, some of which are solid green, blue, and red, and others are photographs or other images.

Eduardo Navas’s Gate Page reinterprets Craig Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980) through two key quotes from the essay. The two sentences are presented on separate pages, with every word in the respective quote arranged as a pull-down menu that enables a remix of the words. The first sentence positions allegory as a supplement to artworks, while the second discusses unity of form and content in Western art. As users remix the sentences by selecting terms from the pull-down menus, they trigger a pop-up window with an image grid that recomposes with each new choice. Navas scanned and sliced images of all the artworks Owens cited in his essay and randomized their appearance to create the shifting compositions. The Allegorical Impulse Part I thereby creates an evolving visual allegory that reframes the themes of Owens’s essay through users’ choices.

Enter project View original Gate Page

Eduardo Navas (b. 1969; Armenia, El Salvador) is the author of books including Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (2012) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2025, 2^nd ed.). Navas’s production includes media art projects, critical texts, and occasional curatorial projects. He has collaborated with or served as a consultant for organizations such as Turbulence.org (1996–2016), Rhizome, and Creative Capital. He is the founder of Net Art Review (2003–5) and cofounder of newmediaFIX (2005–11) and, in 2008, was gallery coordinator for gallery@calit2 (now GalleryQI) at the University of California, San Diego. Navas has taught art and media history, and production at institutions including Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; the New School, New York; and Pennsylvania State University, State College.

Gate Pages

Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.

Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.

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View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.