Sarah Zucker’s works are emblematic of the enduring interest in analog electronic technologies within the digital art community. She produces her raw materials using VHS videotapes, analog editing equipment, and vintage CRTs; she then uses digital cameras and editing techniques to create the final artworks, which she shares as GIFs and digital videos. The results are prismatic images in which bands of color actively wiggle, exaggerating the visual artefacts of the meeting of digital cameras and the refresh rate of the scanlines on old electron screens. Like a spiritual medium, Zucker uses her outmoded technologies to induce altered states of consciousness and summon those forces that are ostracized from polite society, such as humor and the grotesque, which she taps into with cartoonishly-drawn figures. She is particularly interested in ancient mythology and religion and our enduring fascination with archetypes; characters such as Prometheus and Cassandra populate her works. She refers to many of her projects as “Video Alchemies,” which is an apt term, as they result from the transformation of analog objects into digital signals; traffic in stories of metamorphosis; and turn materials that normally are perceived to have little cultural value, like the silliness of camp aesthetics, into fine art. In the four videos that comprise the series Four Caryatids, Zucker imagines herself as a modern-day version of the Eight Caryatid Figures, 1906–07, that were made by the renowned American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the Buffalo AKG’s east portico, and which still face out from the museum to this day. Four of these eight caryatids—or columns designed to look like women, which were common in ancient Greece—are allegories of the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music; the other four are allegories of victory that flank the other figures. Each is identifiable by the symbolic attributes that she holds or wears: for example, “Painting” holds a palette and brushes, while “Sculpture” holds a small replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an iconic Greek sculpture now at the Louvre. Zucker refers to her versions as Vision, Thought, Wink, and Recursion, representing the four pillars of her own practice. Each features Zucker herself in costume; her bright pink shawl looks vaguely like an ancient garment, as well as the folds of a woman’s labia. The square capitals on the heads of the Eight Caryatids have been replaced by large blue boxes that bear the Wi-Fi logo, and she holds in her hands the modern tools that represent her art: a camcorder and a computer keyboard. While the sculptural caryatids are forever motionless, each video caryatid makes a different gestural movement (such as side-to-side or up-and-down), which is then repeated through video feedback, forming rippling patterns. Together, these colorful, dynamic, brazenly silly caryatids upgrade our categories of art for the digital age, while also queering the idealized female body and the “heroic” values of Western art.

Caryatid: Recursion #1

Caryatid: Recursion