Michael Mandiberg: Live Study
2019–2024
Michael Mandiberg: Live Study
Michael Mandiberg, screenshot of Live Study, 2019
From 2019 to 2024, a live video stream (now accessible as an archive), showed Michael Mandiberg painting portraits of the people who worked for the artist over the years. Each canvas is sized according to the total hours worked by the person at one square inch representing one hour, making visible the usually hidden labor of studio assistants and interns. The canvases range from a 4 × 5 inch miniature of a technical consultant to a 4 × 5 foot portrait of a long-term assistant. The background of most of the paintings is a 1 × 1 inch grid of semitransparent glazes of every color used in the respective painting. The grid highlights the extent of the labor but also references digital pixelation, the Photoshop transparency grid, and the conventions of Minimalist painting. Many of the portraits were painted twice: one of a pair entered the art market, priced at the total wages paid to the subject by Mandiberg, and the other was given to the subject as a gift if requested. In total, Mandiberg created 100 paintings: 22 pairs of portraits, 8 individual ones, and 48 color and value studies. As a durational performance, Live Study memorializes the time and energy given to Mandiberg by the subjects.
Michael Mandiberg (b. 1977; Detroit, Michigan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from large-scale installations and software-driven durational performances to socially engaged pedagogy. Mandiberg’s projects have been written about widely, including in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.
Their works have been exhibited at venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Arizona State University Museum and Library, Tempe; New Museum, Denny Gallery, and Eyebeam, New York; and Transmediale, Berlin; and are in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the 21c Museum Hotels. They are the recipient of a LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, three Eyebeam fellowships, and a Mellon fellowship at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Mandiberg is a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.