One Fine Show: ‘Jon Rafman’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
The genius composer Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, is known for his collaborations with visual artists. The first time I saw him play live was at the Museum of Modern Art in a multimedia performance that paired him with frequent collaborator Nate Boyce. I’ve seen him several times since then, memorably at Greenpoint’s Warsaw in 2016, where Jon Rafman (b. 1981) did the visuals. The music was fantastic, and my appreciation of its glitch qualities was deepened by the giant image of a Reddit-style man that kept appearing onstage, his face masked by panties as he points two guns at his own head.
Rafman drinks deep from internet culture in ways that are not always mainstream-friendly. I saw a piece of social sculpture he staged at Zach Feuer Gallery that was indistinguishable from an actual Street Fighter IV tournament. Now, the forward-thinking Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has just opened “Jon Rafman: Report a Concern – The Nine Eyes Archives,” which collects works related to The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a project he began in 2008.
The project sounds simple, for it consists of Rafman combing and cataloging moments captured on Google Street View, but the artist has managed to find astounding moments of irony, violence and beauty—qualities all deepened by their fleeting nature as they were captured by chance on an orb-shaped camera not at all designed to record humanity.
The core of the exhibition is these images, presented in a 60-meter installation of thousands of small prints or displayed in a supercut video. Rafman’s curation is astounding. It’s as if he is one of the angels in Wings of Desire (1988), silently watching the various follies of man. There are furries, car accidents and people passed out drunk. There is tragic brand-new architecture that was supposed to look futuristic. There is much prostitution. There is mooning.
It is all so brilliant that it almost stands as a riposte to other contemporary art. Is anyone going to make a sculpture as good as the inflatable taters outside Austin’s Couch Potatoes Furniture & Mattress, Home of the World’s Largest Sofa?
Rafman unpacks many of his ideas, too, as in You, the World and I (2010), which tells the story of a man who never had any photographs of an ex-girlfriend and now stalks her addresses on Street View to find images of her. Even the name of the project offers commentary. “Nine Eyes” refers not only to the number of cameras on the cars that collect such photographs, but a SIGINT sharing arrangement—the Nine Eyes alliance—between certain countries. In the catalogue, Rafman reminds us that back when this project started, Google’s motto was “Don’t be Evil.” They’ve since changed it.
“Jon Rafman: Report a Concern – The Nine Eyes Archives” is on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art through January 11, 2026.
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