Art: The Perfect Glitch

Originally published in Canadian Art. Read the full text here.

Lorna Mills and Her Subversive GIF Art

In the fall of 2014, Lorna Mills, the Toronto-based net artist, was exhibiting at Dubai’s Zayed University and struggling to appease the censors. She couldn’t show work with images of masturbation, women humping blowup dolphins or men sticking their dicks into trumpet bells—hefty restrictions for an artist like Mills. One of her pieces featured an image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 bed-in. The official at Zayed hemmed and hawed—“They’re fully dressed, but they are in bed”—and eventually accepted the work on the grounds that the characters are married.

Mills’s art is exuberantly raunchy, but so is much of the Internet. Her medium—the graphic interchange format, or GIF, a lightweight digital motion-picture technology—is about as old as the World Wide Web itself. She sources the footage for her hyperactive collages from user-moderated forums like Reddit, troll caves like 4chan, humour sites featuring bloopers from porn films (called pornfails) and oddball Russian domains that are teeming with nasty Internet detritus. “Russian sites are really bad, by which I mean really good,” says Mills. Her collages feature grainy images of humans and animals, all of them moving (read: breathing, gesticulating, fucking) in jerky, repetitive motions. She disseminates her work mostly through electronic platforms, including Google Plus, social-networking application Ello and Digital Media Tree, an eclectic blog operated by New York programmer Jim Bassett.

Today, net art is an established phenomenon, attracting growing interest from critics and collectors, but some traditional museums aren’t sure how to handle it. How do you capture the Internet’s vulgar, democratic spirit while adhering to the principles of decorum that remain important to many art institutions?

Mills’s work suggests that in a world of seemingly limitless porn, the notion of public decency is anachronistic. The Internet has made all of us into perverts and voyeurs—or probably, by giving us a forum to indulge our perversions and voyeurism, it’s shown that we had them in us all along. That’s why, for Mills, it’s silly to exhibit digital art and censor it at the same time. “There’s a lot of interest from galleries and museums for ‘that net art thing,’” says Mills, “but what they sometimes want is a gentrified version of the Internet.”

Mills was recently invited to exhibit at “X+1,” a one-night showcase in February of this year at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The piece she submitted, from her Ungentrified(2014) series, included embedded GIFs of a boy humping a dog, a child smoking, a house cat with a bouncy pair of human breasts superimposed onto its torso, two athletes having stand-up sex at the Trojan Games, a tiger heaving like it’s about to puke and a hilarious orgy scene—all of them presented in cloying, heart-shaped frames. The piece had already exhibited at OCAD University for Nuit Blanche Toronto, and the “X+1” organizers loved it, but then one of the MAC’s higher ups pulled it, forcing Mills to submit a milder, last-minute replacement. “Boring, conceptual, grey Toronto had no problem with my GIF,” says Mills, laughing, “but apparently it was too much for swinging Montreal.”

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.