He took no pictures. He collected other people’s pictures. He told a story with the fragmentary narrative of a magpie consciousness. Distributed network profundity. Turn on the hose and leave the hose. It is in a glass room with a child in the center, and as it fills up one wonders if he shall die – he is a fish wearing an image. The dream falls apart when you tug at it with logic not born inside it.
Peter Dentride became an artist working in collage, and he attracted a girl named Magda who weirdly worked with magnitzidat copies of ancient recordings. Some people said that you couldn’t find either of them really present in their work, and some people argued that that was exactly the point. The age of digital curation and link-blogging was commented on by a medium that turned the transient into something more permanent. Art in an age of ephemerality was an interesting notion.
Of course there were those who made their commentary in art so that it would decay at a rate commensurate with the thing that they were commenting on, but Peter and Magda said that they loved the irony of the notion that the art they created would be like worm casts surviving long past the passage of the worms.
Decay Rate, by one of their contemporaries, John Weekly, was a sound installation that was designed to deteriorate in quality to the point where it became little more than white noise. Lossy System, by Katrina Blank, was a perpetual loop of transfer where an image disintegrated once it was fed into the looping protocol of the program she had written.
Peter and Magda, when they hit their sixties, were something to behold, because Peter was suffering from a degenerative muscle wasting disease, and Magda began to show signs of early onset Alzheimer’s. Their amaneunsis, Josh Pfeizer, began to detail their days in scrapbooks, and that final exhibition over which they had any say, was like an exploded diagram of their artistic lives; a huge gallery-sized scrapbook. It was beautiful, and it was remembered much more than their sad ends might have been.