DIS’ practice can be considered exemplary in defining the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life”.1The New York based collective of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro have over the past ten years produced images and collaborated on projects described as “rendering the present”2 : making, remaking and representing the now in all its historical, current and potential complexities. Their photographs and videos appear at first glance neutral and functional but linger in the eye and the memory, sustaining a seductive ambiguity.
DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Unbound by the traditional white cube, a DIS image can be seen:
+ as an art work exhibited in a traditional exhibition or art fair presentation
+ as an exhibition marketing campaign
+ as a corporate advertising campaign
+ as “documentation” of a graduating student exhibition or Frieze Art Fair booth
+ as a readymade stock image.
The collective’s genre-shifting has continued into the new decade. Since 2018, they have launched a new online video platform dis.art, a subscriber-based online video channel popularizing in edutainment, the gamut of programs merging education and entertainment, from documentaries to reality television. DIS has continued to track the rise and fall of the economic and the political with a dead-pan, non-ironic perspective. If current history is a kind of template which is copied again and again, then DIS provides an aesthetic mirroring of it, a constant feed of images and texts which underline the present’s dissonance.
DIS’ practice can be considered exemplary in defining the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life”.1The New York based collective of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro have over the past ten years produced images and collaborated on projects described as “rendering the present”2 : making, remaking and representing the now in all its historical, current and potential complexities. Their photographs and videos appear at first glance neutral and functional but linger in the eye and the memory, sustaining a seductive ambiguity.
DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Unbound by the traditional white cube, a DIS image can be seen:
+ as an art work exhibited in a traditional exhibition or art fair presentation
+ as an exhibition marketing campaign
+ as a corporate advertising campaign
+ as “documentation” of a graduating student exhibition or Frieze Art Fair booth
+ as a readymade stock image.
The collective’s genre-shifting has continued into the new decade. Since 2018, they have launched a new online video platform dis.art, a subscriber-based online video channel popularizing in edutainment, the gamut of programs merging education and entertainment, from documentaries to reality television. DIS has continued to track the rise and fall of the economic and the political with a dead-pan, non-ironic perspective. If current history is a kind of template which is copied again and again, then DIS provides an aesthetic mirroring of it, a constant feed of images and texts which underline the present’s dissonance.
(1) Hannah Black on the 9th Berlin Biennial, Artforum (September 2016)
(2) Roundtable: History in the Time of Hypercirculation with Hito Steyerl, DIS and Susanne von Falkenhausen” edited by Kolja Reichert Spike (Aut/Win 2016)