Margot Lovejoy: Turns
May 2001
Margot Lovejoy: Turns
Margot Lovejoy’s 2001 Gate Page served as an entry portal to her artwork Turns, a website that collected stories of the turning points in people’s lives and thematically organized them in a navigable interface. The Gate Page references elements of the larger Turns site, with connecting paths that resemble roads, blood vessels, or neurons. Clicking on the paths generates additional routes, which intersect and overlap with existing ones, gradually filling the empty space and saturating the screen. As the network expands, dots in various shapes and colors, described by the artist as “kernels,” move along the paths with increasing speed and frequency. Occasionally, emotionally charged words indicating themes for turning points—such as “SURVIVAL,” “SHOCK,” “ALONE,” and “ENEMIES”—appear along the paths. The work is set against a background of industrial, percussive sounds that create a sensory environment. The Turns website was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
This project was reconstructed using the Internet Archive.
Margot Lovejoy (1930–2019) used new technologies in her installations, artist’s books, and websites to open a discourse on the ways the internet was changing notions of the individual in a social context. Her first website parthenia.com (1995), a monument to victims of domestic violence, was archived by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as part of the pioneering site äda ’web. A professor of visual arts at the State University of New York at Purchase, she was the author of Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (first published 1989); and the recipient of a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1994 Arts International Grant in India. She exhibited internationally, including many solo presentations in and around New York at MoMA PS1; the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island; the Alternative Museum (1975–2000); the Queens Museum; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; and the Islip Art Museum (1985–2020).
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.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.