If you were wondering whether galleries will ever embrace the animated GIF, then the answer is now yes.
Takeshi Murata’s latest short video “OM Rider” at fancy gallery Salon 94 is advertised with this GIF of a werewolf riding a moped. To be fair, Salon 94 typically presents cooler artists than the average gallery (read: Jayson Musson and Marilyn Minter), but the GIF rides forth through the night. You can see “OM Rider” at Salon 94 through December 21st.
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A gallery using a GIF to advertise isn’t exactly “embracing the animated GIF.” Salon 94 seems quite taken with Murata as a full-spectrum digital animation artist with
“innovative and evolving processes rang[ing] from intricate hand-drawn
animations to installations accenting the defects and broken codes of
film, advertising and pop culture.” (Always with the codes — surely that stuff’s been thoroughly decoded by now.) GIFs aren’t mentioned in the press materials. The GIF you chose here falls more in the category of “clip from longer video” than anything inherently GIF-like. Murata got known in the new media world for his “datamoshing” style glitch art but by the time he appeared in the New Museum’s “Free” show, he was doing bulbous Pixar style animation, which, it must me said, was awkwardly paced and kind of terrible. A rubbery-looking werewolf riding a motorcycle through a wind farm isn’t something we especially need to see in the gallery environment — Disney and Dreamworks have this kind of material covered.
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