Zhang Ga: étant donnés: to be looked at with two eyes, about 2 feet away (from the screen), for precisely one minute; clicked, even; red, yellow, blue
January 2002
Zhang Ga: étant donnés: to be looked at with two eyes, about 2 feet away (from the screen), for precisely one minute; clicked, even; red, yellow, blue
Zhang Ga’s Gate Page reimagined iconic artworks by Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman. Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1966) assemblage features a nude woman—lying in front of a landscape and holding a gas lamp—viewable only through peepholes in a wooden door. Zhang Ga xeroxed a reproduction of the tableau, animated it with flickering light shone through the woman’s handheld lamp, and streamed it live with a webcam. The title of the Gate Page also references Duchamp’s To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918), a painting between two glass panes, and updates it: not with one eye but two, not close to but two feet from the screen, and not for an hour but one minute. An interactive script interrupted the stream of the photocopied image with areas of red, yellow, and blue, alluding to Newman’s series Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966–70). While Newman’s canvases demand sustained contemplation, the color fields of the Gate Page appear only momentarily, echoing the short attention spans of screen culture. The work, now shown as a simulation of the original live stream, staged a dialogue between Duchamp’s optical provocations and Newman’s chromatic sublime, reframed as the flicker, click, and refresh of the internet.
This project was meant to run in RealPlayer 8, using a .smil file retrieved from the Internet Archive.
Zhang Ga (b. 1963; Hangzhou, China) is an artist, curator, writer, and educator working at the intersection of culture and technology. Formerly the director of the New York–based Netart Initiative, Zhang Ga has exhibited and lectured on media art worldwide and has published in October, Flash Art International, and with the MIT Press. He is the founding artistic director of Chronus Art Center, Shanghai and the former consulting curator of media art at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, where he curated three editions of its international media art triennial. Other curatorial work includes ZHANG Peili (Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, 2024–25), Topologies of the Real (Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, China, 2023), and Motion Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou, China, 2023). Zhang Ga is distinguished professor and vice dean at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
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.
