Petzel presents Downloadable, an online exhibition that offers works available for free and unlimited download, contributed by Petzel artists. The show explores ideas of looking, ownership, and originality as art experiences have been forced into the digital realm. We now find ourselves drowning in emails touting various iterations of virtual exhibitions, walk throughs, viewing rooms, and art fairs. With our pleasure of seeing works in person disrupted, the notion of looking at art has radically shifted. While the digital files may be the same for all visitors, the experience and context surrounding each download is different, and as a result a new unique work is created for the viewer every time. Petzel is grateful for our artists’ contributions with offerings from GIFs, to collages, to poetry, photographs, audio files, screenplays and beyond.

Stephen Prina presents Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe, a video animation of a rhythmic light sequence, looping in perpetuity. Once imagined as a public artwork, it incorporates lampposts that shine in two different ways. The title is a reference to Schönberg's symphonic poem Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, first realized as a film score by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in the 1972 film Introduction to Arnold Schönberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene."  Flattened through their digitization, the sculptural qualities and textures of Rezi van Lankveld’s collage and drawing transform into something new. Thomas Eggerer’s original Drawing for Yellow Harvest #4 was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy leaving behind only a digital trace – here, as part of the exhibition, its jpeg finds a poetic afterlife. Several artists request collaboration on the downloader’s part: Jorge Pardo has begun the process of adding color to a painting, and invites the downloader to complete the composition; Christian Jankowski calls for participation in his new work Jankowski 4.0, by requesting that viewers create a Dada Poem via an online Poetry Generator and film themselves reading it. The video is then to be posted on Instagram using the hashtag #Jankowski4.0; Allan McCollum offers ever-evolving insight into his practice and requires viewers to take their own screenshots from his new website as a form of downloading. Through an array of experiences, Downloadable bends the definition of collecting an artist’s work and experiencing an exhibition today.

Downloadable includes work by Yael Bartana, Walead Beshty, Ross Bleckner, Simon Denny, Keith Edmier, Thomas Eggerer, Robert Heinecken, Dana Hoey, Christian Jankowski, Sean Landers, Rezi van Lankveld, Allan McCollum, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, Jon Pylypchuk, Willem de Rooij, Pieter Schoowerth, John Stezaker, and Hiroki Tsukuda.

Keith Edmier
Virtual Reality
1998–1990
Originally recorded on VHS tape then digitized as a MOV file
7:41 min
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Stephen Prina
Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe
2020
GIF
Animation: Devon McDonald-Hyman
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Stephen Prina presents Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe, a video animation of a rhythmic light sequence, looping in perpetuity. Once imagined as a public artwork, it incorporates lampposts that shine in two different ways. The title is a reference to Schönberg's symphonic poem Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, first realized as a film score by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub in the 1972 film Introduction to Arnold Schönberg's "Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene."

Hiroki Tsukuda
Digital Graphic
2009
JPEG
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Tsukuda created these three graphics from 2008-2013 during his development as a graphic artist. The original renderings served as source images for his signature black & white works on paper and sculpture.

Hiroki Tsukuda
Digital Graphic
2013
JPEG
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Hiroki Tsukuda
Digital Graphic
2008
JPEG
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Ross Bleckner
Untitled
ca. 1994
C-Print
4 x 6 inches
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These photographs were selected from Bleckner's notebooks dating from the early 90s. Both photos were taken by Bleckner and have been used as inspiration and source material for a variety of different paintings in the years since.

Ross Bleckner
Untitled
ca. 1991
C-Print
4 x 6 inches
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Keith Edmier
Digital Self Portrait, February 1988
1988
TIFF
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Made on a Commodore Amiga 2000 computer in February 1988 using a New Tek Digi-View video digitizer and New Tek Digi-Paint software. Originally saved as an Amiga IFF file and output to Kodak Ektachrome 100 35mm film with Polaroid’s FreezeFrame Video Recorder. Drum scanned in 2020 and saved as a TIFF file.

Rezi van Lankveld
Wheel
2020
Collage, acrylic, and ink on paper
11.8 x 8.3 inches
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Rezi van Lankveld
Speech Bubble
2019
Ink on paper
11.8 x 8.3 inches
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Thomas Eggerer
Drawing for Yellow Harvest #4
2012
Acrylic, pencil and carbon on paper
79 x 90 inches
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Thomas Eggerer’s original Drawing for Yellow Harvest #4 was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy leaving behind only a digital trace.

Sean Landers
What Do Paintings Say?
2017
Oil on linen
72 x 61.5 inches
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Each of Sean Landers’s Aspen tree paintings presents a complete poem when read from the upper left corner to the bottom right. Download the corresponding poem for three paintings here.

Sean Landers
This Thing
2017
Oil on linen
72 x 61.5 inches
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Sean Landers
In the Wind
2018
Oil on linen
77.25 x 59.5 inches
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Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #6 (Tropical Romance Island Community Event)
2020
GIF
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Schoolwerth's paintings utilize a unique 3D relief "infrastructure" – he first photographs 3D models (composed off of a Sims 4 screenshot), embeds the matching fragments of the screenshot back into the model in photoshop, prints the file out on canvas, and applies paint on top. These gifs illuminate Schoolwerth’s process and connect the model to the finished painting, allowing viewers to better understand his technique.

Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #17 (Wicked WooHoo Sex Mod)
2020
GIF
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Pieter Schoolwerth
Shifted Sims #17 (Influencer Career)
2020
GIF
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Pieter Schoolwerth
Waiting Room
2020
GIF
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Seth Price
White Shift
2018
Audio file
16:07 min
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A mix of ten tracks off the LP White Moods (a continuous composition of various white noise segments) that Seth Price Studio created in 2016 to play in galleries where Price’s light boxes were installed. Listen and try to catch where each different mood of white noise transitions into the next.

Robert Heinecken
Revised Magazine Portfolio: American The Violent
1993
Re-collated Magazine Pages
GIF
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A series of diptychs from Robert Heinecken presented here as a unique GIF. The work opens with a Time Magazine cover image that Heinecken coupled with a passage from French writer, André Breton. The cover perfectly captures early 90's distress about crime in America and the re-collated pages that follow in the inserted folio come from editorial features gathered from a variety of magazines of that time period. Some of the images are quite benign on their own but come across as menacing subsequent to the title page.

Walead Beshty
Unmaskings [1925-2012: Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Face of Another (1966), Mission: Impossible (1966), Mission: Impossible (1970), Mission: Impossible (1971), unknown (1971), Lupin III (1972), Smokey the Bear (1973), Fantastic Journey (1977), Dominique is Dead (1980), V (1983), Miller Lite: The Case of the Missing Case (1986), If Tomorrow Comes (1986), Hell Squad (1986), Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (1987), Beetlejuice (1988), Naked Gun (1988), American Ninja 3 (1989), Cheers (1989), Darkman (1990), Ferris Bueller (1990), RoboCop 2 (1990), Total Recall (1990), Popcorn (1991), Steel and Lace (1991), Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), Droopy: Master Detective (1993), Droopy: Master Detective (1993), Darkman II: The Return of Durant (1995), Megaman (1995), Snackwell’s (1996), Waffle Crisp (1996), FX (1996), Fired Up (1997), Outlaw Star (1997), Michael Jackson’s Ghosts (1997), Men in Black (1997), Sony MiniDisc (1998), Omnitel (1998), Subaru (1998), Charlie’s Angels (2000), Diabolik (2000), La Femme Nikita (2000), Road to Ruin (2000), Passions (2001), BBC (2001), Monkeybone (2001), Alias (2001), Mutant X (2001), Master of Disguise (2002), Pepsi Twist (2002), Kekkaishi (2003), Average Joe (2003), Britney Spears’s Toxic (2003), Cariot (2004), Bleach (2004), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Red Remo (2006), Pushing Daisies (2007), Carlsberg (2007), Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (2008), Old Spice (2009), Camaleones (2009), Salt (2010), Days of Our Lives (2011), Toyota Corolla (2011), Players (2012)]
2020
Digital video file
Color, sound, 41:06 min
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Walead Beshty contributes a compilation of YouTube clips of people taking masks off.

Walead Beshty
Unmaskings [16:9 Desktop Wallpaper Gender Reveal Party (1962–2001: Jimmy Olsen 59; Super Girl and Wonder Woman 63; Jimmy Olsen 79; Detective Comics 335; Bob Hope 93; BlackHawk 210B; Action Comics 349; Jimmy Olsen 111; Green Lantern 69; Action Comics 379; Detective Comics 407; Adventure Comics 428; Adventure Comics 429; Black Magic 1A; Black Magic 1B; House of Mystery 237; Teen Titans Annual; Batman Family Giant 9; Iron Man 103; Batman 321; Brave and the Bold 176; Detective Comics 507A; Detective Comics 507B; Hawkeye 1; AlphaFlight 12B; Batman 318; Captain America 311; Captain America 320; Boris the Bear 11; Excalibur 1; Excalibur 2; Batman 458; The Mask 1; Human Target 1; Captain Planet 8; Batman 484; Blood and Shadows; DareDevil 358; Gen13 53; DareDevil 241; Betty and Veronica 117)]
2020
Digital image file
Dimensions variable
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John Stezaker
After Death Judgement (From the "Underworld" Series)
2020
PDF
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“After Death Judgment” series is a continuation of a long-standing collection of the bottom parts of film stills titled “Underworld”. In the absence of the heads of actors (generally occupying the top one-third of the 10x8 film stills) the underworld is a space of props, children, animals, and unseen gestures normally overlooked. The title derives its name from a placard in the first of the series. The “After Death Judgment” series alludes to an underworld of unnoticed events. – John Stezaker

John Stezaker
Still Life
2020
PDF
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The “Still Life” series are postcard-sized fragments, usually corners, of film stills in which incidental still lives are found. It is a collection of these spaces of stillness on the periphery of the action. “Still Life” is, therefore, more of a collection of peripheral objects. – John Stezaker

Willem de Rooij
Manual
2020
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For Downloadable, Willem de Rooij sourced a stockimage to reflect on the interplay between the body and the tools that it produces. De Rooij: “I like this image because the hand is not in an expressive pose. At the same time, the lines in the palm are visible – looking like a roadmap or manual of sorts. It also reminds me of the importance of the hand in times of isolation.”

Stock Photo: Niteen R Kasl.

Dana Hoey
Untitled
2020
Digital photograph
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In her latest work, Hoey collects patriotic gear and interacts with the people who sell it. She then puts it on and takes a picture using herself as a model, though they are not thought of as self-portraits.

Yael Bartana
Abrakadabra
2020
A1 Poster
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Yael Bartana’s new work series, Abracadabra, reintroduces an ancient spell as a means to fight the current global pandemic. Used throughout history as part of magical gestures and performances, the mysterious term “Abracadabra” first appears in the writings of Serenus Sammonicus, a medical savant who served as the physician to several Roman Emperors. In his book Liber Medicinalis, Sammonicus suggests a literary amulet against fever and malaria, the word Abracadabra written in the form of a triangle. Though the etymological origin of the word is unclear, it is suggested that it derives from the Hebrew “Evra KeDavra”, literally meaning “I shall create with the use of speech”, a reference to the creation of the world, accomplished – as described in the Hebrew Bible – merely with words. Anticipating the second wave of the Covid-19 catastrophe, and as a reaction to the desperate attempts of governments around the world to deal properly with the social, political and economic consequences of the pandemic, Bartana’s work turns to the realm of the mystical, suggesting unconventional ways to approach the collective crisis while evoking historical practices that have been discarded in order to make space for modern science. Mixing in her work Latin and Hebrew letters, Bartana adjusts the spell as presented by Sammonicus, thus bringing forward the Hebrew origin of the magic word, as well as her own cultural history and heritage.

Seth Price
Stay at Home / Go Home
2003
PDF
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In 2003, Seth Price produced the book Stay at Home / Go Home, which he circulated online as a PDF. An early example of what would come to be known as Conceptual Writing — he looked up the countries that were then on the State Department’s “Travel Warning” list and compiled a book made of amateur reviews and descriptions of those countries, sourced from various travel websites — which was then one of the most burgeoning and lucrative sectors of the young internet.

Jon Pylypchuk
Three Little Birds
2012
Written by Jon Pylypchuk and Greg Tonner
Screenplay
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Jon Pylypchuk's screenplay "Three Little Birds" is a memoir of his mother.

Jorge Pardo
Collaborative Work with Jorge Pardo
2020
Coloring Book Page
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Simon Denny
Amazon Worker Cage patent (US 9,280,157 B2)
2019
Amazon.com patent PDF
23 US letter sheets
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Amazon worker cage patent is a 23-page PDF which helps contextualize many of Simon's recent works. It is the document which inspired Denny’s Amazon cage sculpture and is also used in some of his Document Relief pieces.

Christian Jankowski
Jankowski 4.0
2020
Video and poem
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In his new work Jankowski 4.0, Christian Jankowski invites the viewers to use the text from the Petzel invitation E-Mail for the Downloadable exhibition as a basis to create a Dada Poem via an online Poetry Generator. Viewers are then requested to film themselves reading their poem and post it on Instagram using the hashtag #Jankowski4.0.

Allan McCollum
Artist Statement Website
2020
VIEW HERE

Allan McCollum offers ever-evolving insight into his practice with his Artist Statement Website, which creates, at random, over 146,849,472 possible artist statements, appearing with no predictability. He invites viewers to take their own screenshots from the site as a form of downloading. The above video is merely a brief sample of these many combinations, please click "View Here" to see the full website.

Allan McCollum
Natural Copies & Visible Markers
April 18 – May 16, 1998
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 26 Wooster Street
Press Release
Download Handouts

In 1998, McCollum's project “Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah” was developed from dinosaur tracks that were discovered by local coal miners in the 1920s. They were carefully excavated and later given to a prehistoric museum in a small town called Price. McCollum made rubber molds from the “original” tracks (or better “natural casts”), recast them in polymer-reinforced hydrocal, and painted them in different colors. In conjunction with the exhibition, McCollum offered articles about these coal mines and dinosaur tracks – you can download those articles above.

Allan McCollum
THE EVENT: Petrified Lightning from Central Florida (With Supplemental Didactics)
October 20 – November 24, 2000
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 W 22nd Street
Press Release
Download Handouts

For an exhibition in 2000, McCollum spent the summer of 1997 triggering lightning strikes by launching small rockets with hair-thin copper wires trailing behind them directly into storm clouds as they passed overhead. The triggered lightning bolts were directed down the wires into various containers prepared by the artist that were filled with Central Florida minerals donated by a local sand mining operation. The bolts instantly liquefied a column of sand with temperatures up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This immediately re-congealed into a column of naturally created glass that exactly duplicated the path of the lightning bolt. These were then dug out by the artist in a manner similar to the way a paleontologist might remove a fragile fossil from its matrix. The result is the fulgurite, or what is sometimes referred to as petrified lightning. Using a mixture of epoxy and zircon, 10,000 fulgurites were cast from a single mold. Through this process, McCollum specifically explored the creation of objects by lightning. In this way he also deconstructed commonly held ideas of instant production of objects, and popular metaphors that are often used to describe the processes of creativity, as with our fantasies of receiving "illumination" from above, being "struck" with an idea like a "bolt from the blue." As another element of the installation, he produced a series of over 13,000 small booklets on over sixty subjects related to fulgurites and lightning. This arrangement provided the equal balance between the visual and scientific content that was integral to the exhibition – you can download those booklets above.