Still from Cory Arcangel's video Schoenberg’s Cats
Last year we criticized Cory Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas’ Art Since 1950 performance pretty heavily on this blog. And there's been some convincing criticism of his video Schoenberg’s Cats at ArtFagCity. So when I went down to Power Plant to see the group show Adaptation I was fully prepared not to like the piece. But it turned out I liked it a lot, for several reasons.
First of all, youtube looks fantastic in a gallery. The video was displayed on a not-too-fancy monitor (no high-def plasma screen, just a biggish, oldish monitor on a video cart...very simple) but still much larger than the youtube window online. The pixelated low rez look of youtube, thus translated, is really dramatic. In the context of a high-end gallery where all the other video works had high-end production values, the explosion of blurry pixels and inconsistent quality reads like an intentional aesthetic decision. And it's a good one, very pretty and engaging if you happen to have a taste for the various ways that video can look on screens.
There is a lot of ongoing discussion about the failure of curators to deploy social media in the gallery or museum. And I agree that the two contexts don't mash well at all. This was my problem with Art Since 1950... there is nothing more irritating than watching someone else click links. If Arcangel's cat video was not a discrete, edited piece but a curated collection of found cat & piano footage from youtube it would be a real drag. Youtube as-a-resource is better online. The joy of youtube is that there is very little imposed structure and its a participatory community where viewers are creators...etc, etc. Those kinds of modes of engagement just don't translate into a gallery. Sure you could set up a monitor connected to the internet and people could sit and surf through collections online, but why would you? It's much, much more sensible to look at art that way at home.
But the Schoenberg cat video, as displayed in the exhibition, is not an example of online art. It's an example of gallery art in the age of youtube, and the aesthetic is instantly recognizeable. Power Plant in summer gets a lot of tourist traffic. It's down by the lake at Harbourfront where people go to eat ice cream, watch buskers, listen to music, take boat tours and buy souvenirs. Many of them wander into the gallery because its free and well marked - big signs and arrows outside the building that say ART, FREE, ENTRANCE, and such like. When I first walked into the space there were two little girls running up to Arcangel's video with their arms outstretched, chirping "Kitties! Kitties!" and then tickling and scrunching their fingers at the screen while various cats flopped around on various pianos. These kids weren't thinking, "My what terrible video quality" they were responding to a medium they recognized with a sense that it belonged to them and they were welcome to interact.
I'm a fan of cat and piano videos. I often plop in those search terms to see if there's anything new I've missed. Arcangel's edit is very sweet, and the musical structure is perfect for an installation. It's atonal enough to be believable, cats padding on keyboards creating those very chords, and yet it's melodic enough to give a shape to the piece. The Schoenberg number imposes a narrative structure: beginning, middle and end. And that's necessary when the audience is not online, and free to click away. But at the same time the youtube aesthetic is clear, and curated in together with full-on wall-sized projected video and wall-mounted plasma screens it reads like the people's medium.
There are some purists who think that when artists who work online show pieces in a gallery they are selling out the participatory ethics of online interaction. But at the same time, there is grumbling that curators and gallery audiences need to figure out how to address the internet. There are plenty of artists who work in both contexts, and showing sensitivity to the differing audience needs between online and gallery interaction is a genuine skill. I don't like Schoenberg’s Cats online. I'd rather just watch youtube cats that I select myself. But in the Power Plant's white cube, a surprisingly social space on a sunny August afternoon, I enjoyed it very much indeed.
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Sally, this is an effing fantastic essay and meditation on why that work 'works' so well in a gallery space, and in that specific context. Thanks for writing.
golly! thanks Jennyhead.
Sounds like this piece succeeded in its use of the YouTube frame where others have failed (I gather you were reading the latest Rhizome melee?). Good point about the structure unifying/justifying the YouTube quotations. I still have a problem with the "I studied music at conservatory and respect Schoenberg enough to use his music note for note but am gonna pretend that I'm this goofy kid making fun of 'dad' culture" aspect of it.
I have a t-shirt that reads: I used YouTube framing in an art gallery and all I got was a WTF.
(I just wrote that to make Sally sputter, she was the only person who said WTF.)
Yeah Rhizome. sigh.
I think the goofy kid pretense only really comes across in full if you are following Arcangel's whole career. As a stand-alone piece the balance between goofy and classical is pretty suave. A good development for him, I think.
That je t'aime installation was WACKY. (I liked it too...WTF)
I didn't see this installation and already beat the issue to death at Paddy's but I assume a wall label gave you the details about the digital schoehorning (ha ha) of cat notes into classical notes. That is supposed to make you go "ooh" about the process and at that point I would be asking (absent career knowledge) --"what is the point of this piece exactly?"
Sorry, still in the post-beating-to-death mode but I just had a brainstorm of how this piece could be improved.
The "takeaway" for me was Arcangel's use of a "found technology" that identifies clusters of notes in the manner of character recognition software. It's a "default" not a "hack" as some misidentified it.
A possible better use of that tech would be to search out cat notes that could be used to recreate a classical warhorse like Beethoven's 9th.
Then you would get a piece that:
--puts the uselessness of certain tech "advancements" front and center
--is fun to listen to
--doesn't sneer at 20th C music you actually like but others don't
--has a built in kitsch factor (using kitsch to make kitsch) that makes it impervious to criticism ("it's supposed to be dumb - cats who play Beethoven, c'mon")
I think I will hire myself out to contemporary artists to be the art equivalent of a script doctor.
Well, you know, as I suggested above, the Schoenberg is kind of a perfect choice. It sounds just right.
That's cool. I did want to inject that YouTube issues aside, this piece is supposed to be about "technology and art."
Sorry Tom, we must've posted at exactly the same time. I missed your list before I made my latest comment. A few things...
Cats playing Beethoven's 9th would be silly. Too silly to hold my interest, I think. Also I doubt if it would work. While there are a lot of cat/piano videos, they aren't infinite and cats are pretty atonal. I doubt if you'd be able to find the notes and phrases necessary to pull off a convincing Beethoven. The program Arcangel used isn't like Autotune. If I understand his notes correctly, it was really just a time-saving device. He could have gone through and done his own comparisons to select the best bits by ear; the software just made that part of the process faster.
So the Schoenberg choice is not about sneering at high-brow music, nor is it just about processing random data through software to give it a shape. The piece is more aesthetically driven than that. Schoenberg makes sense precisely because it is atonal (like cats). If there is a conceptual/historical element regarding the choice of music, I think it has to do with abstraction and the avant-garde: the way that audiences adjust to new aesthetic forms and begin to accept them over time. The irony is that cats playing piano, a relatively new development in the cultural sphere, are already a popular form (pixelation, atonality and all), while Schoenberg, who's been around for a century, can still (apparently) ruffle feathers. So I don't read the piece as poking fun at Schoenberg at all, it's more of a reprise, or testament. And if you like atonality (which I do, in small doses) it sounds really good.
The piece is totally poking fun at Schoenberg ("my cat could do that").
You have to get into the personal history of the artist to determine if, as Beau Sievers said on the AFC thread, the piece "might... be a weird kind of high-level 3D-chess style backhanded homage" or if it's a status quo piece. You are saying Arcangel used to be sweet and then got snotty and now he is sweet again. I say the piece is conservative and safe and "stealth snotty" in (i) playing to the rube notion that there is nothing to Schoenberg while (ii) stroking curators' vanity that the artist is "hep" to the modernist canon. Very tired of these parasitic artworks riding on past masters. The cats on YouTube are plenty interesting: you don't need this academic layer to make them OK, just some thought in how to organize and present the material.
Note: although most people would describe Schoenberg's later music as "atonal", Arnold himself would call it serial dodecaphony.
But when most people or cats listen to it, it usually sounds kinda random.
Trivia: Arnold Schoenberg was regarded as a talented painter, a friend of George Gershwin, and according to Wikipedia, a fan of Hopalong Cassidy.
Grand Funk Railroad paved the way for Jefferson airplane, which cleared the way for Jefferson starship. The stage was now set for the Alan Parsons project, which I believe was some sort of hovercraft.
For the link-averse, my first sentence on the AFC comment thread is "Schoenberg’s 12 tone system (where all semitones in a 12 note scale are given equal weight, regardless of combinations that are discordant to Western ears) was the academic norm for decades." My job in these conversations is to play the part of "the purist," so future art historians can say, "while this artist's work had purists up in arms..."
That's funny, Tom!
I tend to focus on interpretation rather than intent. My allegiance is usually with the audience and I'm always more interested in the potential for real-time reception of specific work in context than I am in positioning the artist in an historical narrative. So I wonder who exactly is supposed to be proposing that an academic* layer is required to make the piano cats OK. I'm not saying it, Tom's not, and Arcangel himself is totally Mister I-love-youtube. If we all think the piano cat videos are so great, and audiences also love them, then hey...maybe the comparison is just not denigrating to Schoenberg.
Tom's phrase "my cat could do that"... reminds me of my favourite Boris Groys quote. He's talking about people looking at Malevich and complaining "my kid could do that."
One thinks that this comparison discredits Malevich, whereas the
comparison could instead be used as a means of admiring one's child.
If we are supposed to hate Schoenberg, then maybe these fabulous cats will make us think again. That's how my experience of the work at the Power Plant and Arcangel's career history lead me to read this piece. He surely can be snotty, but even at his most annoying I've never had any reason to doubt his genuine enthusiasm for his material.
*I see the piece as aesthetically driven, rather than academic...but that's another quibble.
In the modern world (especially in the US) every work swims in the waters of total anti-intellectualism. The "academic layer" is a curator or editor who perceives himself or herself as a bulwark against that tide and is persuaded that this work is OK because by referencing Schoenberg the artist shows his "been to college" bona fides. However, if the piece was called "Schoenberg--My Cat Could Do That" and was made by one of those bloggers who rails about the degradation of art it would not be shown. Arcangel has to know this and to have considered all the implications, good and bad. I'm glad if the piece actually kindles someone's interest in music theory and I'm glad you enjoyed it but this is simply not "I love me some serialism and I want others to love it too."
op. 11 has won its place. its locked in. it is in no danger of losing its established position as a music theory landmark. archangle plays with a timeworn notion of yesterdays avant garde being todays institutional standard. a victory lap for challenging art which has proved its detractors wrong. if Schoenberg’s Cats has a weakness its not that it reiterating the bad old days when most people sided with the (anti-intellectual or just from a different aesthetic place?) detractors, but that its too easy to use hind sight to embarrass conservatives for being wrong minded about good difficult new work.
The "academic layer" is a curator or editor who perceives himself or herself as a bulwark against that tide and is persuaded that this work is OK because by referencing Schoenberg the artist shows his "been to college" bona fides.
Ouch — that's a nasty catch 22. The artist who makes an intellectual reference is accused of pretending to be an anti-anti-intellectual for base careerist reasons. What about skipping the convolutions and taking the work at face value as simply being somewhat intellectual? Galleries can be pretty good places for processing intellectual ideas (audiences being always part of the equation). And maybe not all curators are insecure about their roles and scared to take risks. Maybe some of them are actually intellectually engaged in the culture. Would that be such a bad thing?
Hi Sally,
I think you've presented a compelling argument for the piece, but I still have problems with the work. For one thing, as I recall there's a giant floating wall at the front of the gallery, and Arcangel's piece is behind that. The first way the viewer experiences the piece is not visually but through its sound. Since it's not the only work in the gallery without structured sound, it's not pleasant.
Also, I'm not convinced that youtube presentation looked great. The low tech look of those cats on a CRT screen is fine I guess, but it's an easy presentation that doesn't add too much more than what's already there. I'm mean it's on a tall pedestal designed to heighten the importance of the object, and the display device mimics the low image quality. These seem like fairly standard exhibition design decisions to me, all of which translated to meh for me.
By contrast, I recently saw Laurie Anderson's O Superman at MoMA on the same screen, but placed on the floor. I really liked that decision because the low placement combated the nostalgia the piece now evokes -- it was a hit in 1982, so that charm of the old can take away from the seriousness of the song's message.
Arcangel's message isn't nearly as sophisticated though, so the gallery presentation would need to augment the work more spectacularly than I think it did. I think there's an argument to be made for art that works better in a gallery than it does online but it seems like in at least some of these cases, that debate occurs because there is a flaw in the work itself (Rashaad Newsome is another example that comes to mind).
I hate to say this, but I do think having a love for cats adds to the viewing experience. I am a dog person through and through.
I liked the YouTube presentation with the crt on a rack in the corner, it cut a lot of the monotony and haphazardness of the Power Plant's placement of video for this show. (I would have hated it on a wall mounted flat screen, which seems to be the current convention for video in galleries.)
Maybe I don't remember it so well any more -- I thought it was on a pedestal -- one that was higher than normal.
I agree with the point of monotony relative to the other video and also don't think it needed to be on a plasma screen. Still there's typically not tons of variation within video presentation. standard choices are:
CRT screen, flat screen, or projection + floor, eye level, up high.
Mix and match as you choose.
On the subject of the "new, sweet Cory" please consider his blog post yesterday. He "sifts through about 50 posts a day on his reader" to find posts where people are apologizing for not posting on their blogs. That's a lot of work to prove that bloggers are pathetic idiots. Pardon my sarcasm, but maybe he really wants people to discover all the positive benefits of blogging--a whole new generation is waiting to be turned on!
Hey Paddy,
Competing audio! Indeed. augh. And it's not the first time the Power Plant has done that in an installation. I came in the south entrance, however, so my view wasn't blocked by that wall at least and I could see the video before I got close enough to filter out the noise from other works. In general I think that south entrance makes for a better experience of the space...too bad it's only open in the summer.
I also thought it was just a standard AV rack. Maybe even a wheelie, though I'm not sure about that...maybe it was on a pedestal when you saw it in NY? I agree that would be a bad decision.
I do love cats. granted. And probably more to the point I also love cats on youtube. So yeah, there's maybe a bit of fetish appreciation at play. But I also really love the aesthetics of video as a medium. And I love the way its look and feel changes through history. I think your list of how video art can be displayed is too limited. There are lots of ways for video to become a material presence in an installation (Tony Oursler being one obvious example...I don't love Oursler, actually, but at least he gets the plasticity of the medium).
Maybe the coolest thing about youtube is that in the same era when HDTVs and blue ray and 3D movies are hot commodities, masses of people are also perfectly happy watching tiny pixelated blurry images. There's something so wonderfully populist about that perversion of the notion of technological progress that it warms my little heart. But I also just really dig the look of video distortions. Youtube produces scads of fantastic artifacts along with big pixels, bizarre lighting hotspots, and mushy out-of-focus-edges. mmmmm. There is something very sexy when signal with content unravels around the edges into raw eye candy. It's a visceral kind of thing.
As for "stroking curators' vanity" I guess that sounds like I was attributing careerist motives to the artist but it's really more a comment on curators. Arguably Arcangel is already "there" and these are just the prevailing assumptions artists must work with today to get anything done. Beethoven cats - thumbs down (too fun); Schoenberg cats (thumbs up - modernist hair shirt).
Not a catch-22, a 3d chess backhanded homage wrapped in a diss wrapped in an homage. "Highly intelligent" but sort of a waste of brain power considering other things you could make art about.
Hey Tom,
What's this "new sweet Cory" in quotes business. I never said he was sweet, I said he made some sweet edits. I never thought he was "sweet" in the first place, that's your construction. Here's my very abbreviated Cory history in a nutshell: dirt-style web stuff digging the medium of DIY html with a politics of noticing that technological environments can be manipulated into myriad forms besides top-down corporate models. Performance lecture about guitars, also emphasising connections between aesthetic appreciation and technological empowerment. Not very interesting installation at the Whitney with video game rendered abstract and unplayable. Collaborative work with Beige and Paper Rad helping promote awesome gawky live audio/video acts like Dr. Doo. Lots of stuff I didn't pay attention to. Very snotty lecture performance in which he seemed to think it was his job to inform the artworld about the wonders of youtube, as if we were all luddites or something. Aesthetic video installation made for gallery context in which the formal qualities of youtube are understood to be generally shared and appreciated by broad audiences.
"modernist hair shirt"...only if you think that experimental audio is an elitist project. Put a kid in a basement with a synthesizer and you will get some weird noise. Point out that weird noise is something the culture's been chewing on for hundreds of years and you are relegated to some kind of imaginary ivory tower.
Beethoven cats technically un-doable. Also too much like dogs barking x-mas carols. been there, done that.
Note: a dear friend just pointed out to me on email that I can like the video without believing it to be the greatest work ever about youtube. This is very true. I'm not a great big huge Cory fan, or anything like that. I just thought this piece worked well in context and I'm willing to defend my judgement.
I want to see the dogs barking xmas carols. Got a link?
no...man...that was some pre-internet radio thing. Should be something online somewhere though.
bark bark bark... /
"Jingle Bells," The Singing Dogs (RCA) 1955
thanks bill!
re: Cory's blog post about "sorry I haven't posted lately" posts...Tom, do you have a reason to think that this is intended to show that bloggers are pathetic? Does Cory hate blogs or something? I'm curious.
Forgive the intellectual reference (snark) but the post makes me think about Geert Lovink and Anna Munster's essay on network aesthetics where they point out that nodes are not fixed forever but often die off, which is just fine, but masked by formalist obsessions with mapping the network. The stumblings, lapses and endings of blogs are an integral part of the picture, especially if we are going to think of online media as a temporal human endeavor. Not sure if there needs to be any particular value judgement attached.
Sally - I didn't know there was another way to enter the Power Plant and you're right, my list of display options was too limited. I almost didn't post it for that reason, but I think it's reasonable to say those are the defaults.
I think there's some truth to the allure of video distortions and blurry pixelated images, but you could say that about a lot of youtube videos that could placed in the gallery. I don't think Arcangel's piece is that remarkable on craft alone.
Tom: That new Arcangel piece leaves the impression he rarely uses the internet.
"you could say that about a lot of youtube videos that could be placed in the gallery" ...absolutely.
Arcangel-history-wise, there was the hacked Nintendo game "I Shot Andy Warhol," which I'm liking less in retrospect since it was clearly the beginning of a career of killing modernist father-figures.
I have no anecdotes on why he's making fun of bloggers not posting. Now that you've raised the Lovink/Munster thesis, I'm sure others will say it is a humorous treatment of that. (counter-snark)
To come back to the original reason for your post, Sally, I don't think anyone on the Rhizome thread took such an extreme position that the Net, or YouTube, couldn't be done in a gallery. I was talking about a piece that didn't work and gave specific reasons. Now you have given some reasons why another piece worked. I happen to think it's wrong on a lot of other levels but I have no opinion on whether the installation helped, undermined, or had no effect on the "social media" aspects of the piece. Your hypothetical of a collection of clickable cat videos is as speculative as my Beethoven cats hypothetical. (I did mention the barking dogs singing Christmas carols in the AFC thread.)
One of my old friends actually had a vinyl LP copy of that old 1955 dogs barking version of jingle bells. It had amusing liner notes where they described the technique, involving field recording different dogs separately, and then fine-tuning the barking with tape speed adjustment. This process was very much influenced by Stockhausen (not making this up).
Of course, when the Jingle Cats sessions came out much later, that was just a digital sampler. Much less effort.
Oop, I got my threads mixed up. I thought Tom had mentioned the dogs above here. Sorry for the uncredited reference!
VB, that's hilarious. Dogs get Stockhausen, cats get Shoenberg.
I had read the Rhizome thread, but wasn't trying to take it up specifically. However, Tom does point out a bit of straw man in my argument, which I have to confess to. Part of my intent was to talk about the systemic differences between the gallery and the online environment. I'm suggesting that the gallery is a good space for processing cultural phenomena in an aesthetic way. I would agree that this piece doesn't at all challenge gallery viewers to think about art the way we think about art in social media (for lack of a better term). All I was really hoping for in my top post was to side-step the implicit dichotomy of gallery/curator= bad, youtube/self-organising=good. And yes, there are many people* engaged in both forms of practice who are aware that it isn't so black and white.
*artists for sure...and, I'd argue, some curators.
So, then today's query: Stockhausen or Schoenberg?
Stockhausen. I mean...helicopters! That's hard to beat.
Stockhausen is more appealing for 20th/21st century tech kids, he was instrumental in inventing a new discourse about music technology.
Schoenberg was more of a tragic figure. His ambition in life was to single-handedly force forward the evolution of the rules of Western Classical Music harmony, and he succeeded, but he won a pyrrhic victory as much of the audience for music were not very interested in his results.
If anyone feels for the music of Schoenberg, it is probably the earlier Mahler-influenced Verklärte Nacht.
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Still from Cory Arcangel's video Schoenberg’s Cats
Last year we criticized Cory Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas’ Art Since 1950 performance pretty heavily on this blog. And there's been some convincing criticism of his video Schoenberg’s Cats at ArtFagCity. So when I went down to Power Plant to see the group show Adaptation I was fully prepared not to like the piece. But it turned out I liked it a lot, for several reasons.
First of all, youtube looks fantastic in a gallery. The video was displayed on a not-too-fancy monitor (no high-def plasma screen, just a biggish, oldish monitor on a video cart...very simple) but still much larger than the youtube window online. The pixelated low rez look of youtube, thus translated, is really dramatic. In the context of a high-end gallery where all the other video works had high-end production values, the explosion of blurry pixels and inconsistent quality reads like an intentional aesthetic decision. And it's a good one, very pretty and engaging if you happen to have a taste for the various ways that video can look on screens.
There is a lot of ongoing discussion about the failure of curators to deploy social media in the gallery or museum. And I agree that the two contexts don't mash well at all. This was my problem with Art Since 1950... there is nothing more irritating than watching someone else click links. If Arcangel's cat video was not a discrete, edited piece but a curated collection of found cat & piano footage from youtube it would be a real drag. Youtube as-a-resource is better online. The joy of youtube is that there is very little imposed structure and its a participatory community where viewers are creators...etc, etc. Those kinds of modes of engagement just don't translate into a gallery. Sure you could set up a monitor connected to the internet and people could sit and surf through collections online, but why would you? It's much, much more sensible to look at art that way at home.
But the Schoenberg cat video, as displayed in the exhibition, is not an example of online art. It's an example of gallery art in the age of youtube, and the aesthetic is instantly recognizeable. Power Plant in summer gets a lot of tourist traffic. It's down by the lake at Harbourfront where people go to eat ice cream, watch buskers, listen to music, take boat tours and buy souvenirs. Many of them wander into the gallery because its free and well marked - big signs and arrows outside the building that say ART, FREE, ENTRANCE, and such like. When I first walked into the space there were two little girls running up to Arcangel's video with their arms outstretched, chirping "Kitties! Kitties!" and then tickling and scrunching their fingers at the screen while various cats flopped around on various pianos. These kids weren't thinking, "My what terrible video quality" they were responding to a medium they recognized with a sense that it belonged to them and they were welcome to interact.
I'm a fan of cat and piano videos. I often plop in those search terms to see if there's anything new I've missed. Arcangel's edit is very sweet, and the musical structure is perfect for an installation. It's atonal enough to be believable, cats padding on keyboards creating those very chords, and yet it's melodic enough to give a shape to the piece. The Schoenberg number imposes a narrative structure: beginning, middle and end. And that's necessary when the audience is not online, and free to click away. But at the same time the youtube aesthetic is clear, and curated in together with full-on wall-sized projected video and wall-mounted plasma screens it reads like the people's medium.
There are some purists who think that when artists who work online show pieces in a gallery they are selling out the participatory ethics of online interaction. But at the same time, there is grumbling that curators and gallery audiences need to figure out how to address the internet. There are plenty of artists who work in both contexts, and showing sensitivity to the differing audience needs between online and gallery interaction is a genuine skill. I don't like Schoenberg’s Cats online. I'd rather just watch youtube cats that I select myself. But in the Power Plant's white cube, a surprisingly social space on a sunny August afternoon, I enjoyed it very much indeed.
- sally mckay 8-30-2010 1:21 pm
Sally, this is an effing fantastic essay and meditation on why that work 'works' so well in a gallery space, and in that specific context. Thanks for writing.
- jennyhead (guest) 8-30-2010 1:49 pm
golly! thanks Jennyhead.
- sally mckay 8-30-2010 2:23 pm
Sounds like this piece succeeded in its use of the YouTube frame where others have failed (I gather you were reading the latest Rhizome melee?). Good point about the structure unifying/justifying the YouTube quotations. I still have a problem with the "I studied music at conservatory and respect Schoenberg enough to use his music note for note but am gonna pretend that I'm this goofy kid making fun of 'dad' culture" aspect of it.
- tom moody 8-30-2010 3:43 pm
I have a t-shirt that reads: I used YouTube framing in an art gallery and all I got was a WTF.
- L.M. 8-30-2010 3:53 pm
(I just wrote that to make Sally sputter, she was the only person who said WTF.)
- L.M. 8-30-2010 4:13 pm
Yeah Rhizome. sigh.
I think the goofy kid pretense only really comes across in full if you are following Arcangel's whole career. As a stand-alone piece the balance between goofy and classical is pretty suave. A good development for him, I think.
That je t'aime installation was WACKY. (I liked it too...WTF)
- sally mckay 8-30-2010 4:56 pm
I didn't see this installation and already beat the issue to death at Paddy's but I assume a wall label gave you the details about the digital schoehorning (ha ha) of cat notes into classical notes. That is supposed to make you go "ooh" about the process and at that point I would be asking (absent career knowledge) --"what is the point of this piece exactly?"
- tom moody 8-30-2010 5:06 pm
Sorry, still in the post-beating-to-death mode but I just had a brainstorm of how this piece could be improved.
The "takeaway" for me was Arcangel's use of a "found technology" that identifies clusters of notes in the manner of character recognition software. It's a "default" not a "hack" as some misidentified it.
A possible better use of that tech would be to search out cat notes that could be used to recreate a classical warhorse like Beethoven's 9th.
Then you would get a piece that:
--puts the uselessness of certain tech "advancements" front and center
--is fun to listen to
--doesn't sneer at 20th C music you actually like but others don't
--has a built in kitsch factor (using kitsch to make kitsch) that makes it impervious to criticism ("it's supposed to be dumb - cats who play Beethoven, c'mon")
I think I will hire myself out to contemporary artists to be the art equivalent of a script doctor.
- tom moody 8-30-2010 5:42 pm
Well, you know, as I suggested above, the Schoenberg is kind of a perfect choice. It sounds just right.
- sally mckay 8-30-2010 5:45 pm
That's cool. I did want to inject that YouTube issues aside, this piece is supposed to be about "technology and art."
- tom moody 8-30-2010 6:14 pm
Sorry Tom, we must've posted at exactly the same time. I missed your list before I made my latest comment. A few things...
Cats playing Beethoven's 9th would be silly. Too silly to hold my interest, I think. Also I doubt if it would work. While there are a lot of cat/piano videos, they aren't infinite and cats are pretty atonal. I doubt if you'd be able to find the notes and phrases necessary to pull off a convincing Beethoven. The program Arcangel used isn't like Autotune. If I understand his notes correctly, it was really just a time-saving device. He could have gone through and done his own comparisons to select the best bits by ear; the software just made that part of the process faster.
So the Schoenberg choice is not about sneering at high-brow music, nor is it just about processing random data through software to give it a shape. The piece is more aesthetically driven than that. Schoenberg makes sense precisely because it is atonal (like cats). If there is a conceptual/historical element regarding the choice of music, I think it has to do with abstraction and the avant-garde: the way that audiences adjust to new aesthetic forms and begin to accept them over time. The irony is that cats playing piano, a relatively new development in the cultural sphere, are already a popular form (pixelation, atonality and all), while Schoenberg, who's been around for a century, can still (apparently) ruffle feathers. So I don't read the piece as poking fun at Schoenberg at all, it's more of a reprise, or testament. And if you like atonality (which I do, in small doses) it sounds really good.
- sally mckay 8-30-2010 7:41 pm
The piece is totally poking fun at Schoenberg ("my cat could do that"). You have to get into the personal history of the artist to determine if, as Beau Sievers said on the AFC thread, the piece "might... be a weird kind of high-level 3D-chess style backhanded homage" or if it's a status quo piece. You are saying Arcangel used to be sweet and then got snotty and now he is sweet again. I say the piece is conservative and safe and "stealth snotty" in (i) playing to the rube notion that there is nothing to Schoenberg while (ii) stroking curators' vanity that the artist is "hep" to the modernist canon. Very tired of these parasitic artworks riding on past masters. The cats on YouTube are plenty interesting: you don't need this academic layer to make them OK, just some thought in how to organize and present the material.
- tom moody 8-31-2010 1:16 am
Note: although most people would describe Schoenberg's later music as "atonal", Arnold himself would call it serial dodecaphony.
But when most people or cats listen to it, it usually sounds kinda random.
Trivia: Arnold Schoenberg was regarded as a talented painter, a friend of George Gershwin, and according to Wikipedia, a fan of Hopalong Cassidy.
- VB 8-31-2010 2:40 am
Grand Funk Railroad paved the way for Jefferson airplane, which cleared the way for Jefferson starship. The stage was now set for the Alan Parsons project, which I believe was some sort of hovercraft.
- H. Simpson (guest) 8-31-2010 5:27 am
For the link-averse, my first sentence on the AFC comment thread is "Schoenberg’s 12 tone system (where all semitones in a 12 note scale are given equal weight, regardless of combinations that are discordant to Western ears) was the academic norm for decades." My job in these conversations is to play the part of "the purist," so future art historians can say, "while this artist's work had purists up in arms..."
- tom moody 8-31-2010 8:51 am
That's funny, Tom!
If we are supposed to hate Schoenberg, then maybe these fabulous cats will make us think again. That's how my experience of the work at the Power Plant and Arcangel's career history lead me to read this piece. He surely can be snotty, but even at his most annoying I've never had any reason to doubt his genuine enthusiasm for his material.I tend to focus on interpretation rather than intent. My allegiance is usually with the audience and I'm always more interested in the potential for real-time reception of specific work in context than I am in positioning the artist in an historical narrative. So I wonder who exactly is supposed to be proposing that an academic* layer is required to make the piano cats OK. I'm not saying it, Tom's not, and Arcangel himself is totally Mister I-love-youtube. If we all think the piano cat videos are so great, and audiences also love them, then hey...maybe the comparison is just not denigrating to Schoenberg.
Tom's phrase "my cat could do that"... reminds me of my favourite Boris Groys quote. He's talking about people looking at Malevich and complaining "my kid could do that."
*I see the piece as aesthetically driven, rather than academic...but that's another quibble.
- sally mckay 8-31-2010 3:55 pm
In the modern world (especially in the US) every work swims in the waters of total anti-intellectualism. The "academic layer" is a curator or editor who perceives himself or herself as a bulwark against that tide and is persuaded that this work is OK because by referencing Schoenberg the artist shows his "been to college" bona fides. However, if the piece was called "Schoenberg--My Cat Could Do That" and was made by one of those bloggers who rails about the degradation of art it would not be shown. Arcangel has to know this and to have considered all the implications, good and bad. I'm glad if the piece actually kindles someone's interest in music theory and I'm glad you enjoyed it but this is simply not "I love me some serialism and I want others to love it too."
- tom moody 8-31-2010 4:26 pm
op. 11 has won its place. its locked in. it is in no danger of losing its established position as a music theory landmark. archangle plays with a timeworn notion of yesterdays avant garde being todays institutional standard. a victory lap for challenging art which has proved its detractors wrong. if Schoenberg’s Cats has a weakness its not that it reiterating the bad old days when most people sided with the (anti-intellectual or just from a different aesthetic place?) detractors, but that its too easy to use hind sight to embarrass conservatives for being wrong minded about good difficult new work.
- bill 8-31-2010 4:59 pm
The "academic layer" is a curator or editor who perceives himself or herself as a bulwark against that tide and is persuaded that this work is OK because by referencing Schoenberg the artist shows his "been to college" bona fides.
Ouch — that's a nasty catch 22. The artist who makes an intellectual reference is accused of pretending to be an anti-anti-intellectual for base careerist reasons. What about skipping the convolutions and taking the work at face value as simply being somewhat intellectual? Galleries can be pretty good places for processing intellectual ideas (audiences being always part of the equation). And maybe not all curators are insecure about their roles and scared to take risks. Maybe some of them are actually intellectually engaged in the culture. Would that be such a bad thing?
- sally mckay 8-31-2010 7:22 pm
Hi Sally,
I think you've presented a compelling argument for the piece, but I still have problems with the work. For one thing, as I recall there's a giant floating wall at the front of the gallery, and Arcangel's piece is behind that. The first way the viewer experiences the piece is not visually but through its sound. Since it's not the only work in the gallery without structured sound, it's not pleasant.
Also, I'm not convinced that youtube presentation looked great. The low tech look of those cats on a CRT screen is fine I guess, but it's an easy presentation that doesn't add too much more than what's already there. I'm mean it's on a tall pedestal designed to heighten the importance of the object, and the display device mimics the low image quality. These seem like fairly standard exhibition design decisions to me, all of which translated to meh for me.
By contrast, I recently saw Laurie Anderson's O Superman at MoMA on the same screen, but placed on the floor. I really liked that decision because the low placement combated the nostalgia the piece now evokes -- it was a hit in 1982, so that charm of the old can take away from the seriousness of the song's message.
Arcangel's message isn't nearly as sophisticated though, so the gallery presentation would need to augment the work more spectacularly than I think it did. I think there's an argument to be made for art that works better in a gallery than it does online but it seems like in at least some of these cases, that debate occurs because there is a flaw in the work itself (Rashaad Newsome is another example that comes to mind).
I hate to say this, but I do think having a love for cats adds to the viewing experience. I am a dog person through and through.
- Paddy Johnson (guest) 9-01-2010 2:45 am
I liked the YouTube presentation with the crt on a rack in the corner, it cut a lot of the monotony and haphazardness of the Power Plant's placement of video for this show. (I would have hated it on a wall mounted flat screen, which seems to be the current convention for video in galleries.)
- L.M. 9-01-2010 4:14 am
Maybe I don't remember it so well any more -- I thought it was on a pedestal -- one that was higher than normal.
I agree with the point of monotony relative to the other video and also don't think it needed to be on a plasma screen. Still there's typically not tons of variation within video presentation. standard choices are:
CRT screen, flat screen, or projection + floor, eye level, up high.
Mix and match as you choose.
- Paddy Johnson (guest) 9-01-2010 5:23 am
On the subject of the "new, sweet Cory" please consider his blog post yesterday. He "sifts through about 50 posts a day on his reader" to find posts where people are apologizing for not posting on their blogs. That's a lot of work to prove that bloggers are pathetic idiots. Pardon my sarcasm, but maybe he really wants people to discover all the positive benefits of blogging--a whole new generation is waiting to be turned on!
- tom moody 9-01-2010 2:12 pm
Hey Paddy, Competing audio! Indeed. augh. And it's not the first time the Power Plant has done that in an installation. I came in the south entrance, however, so my view wasn't blocked by that wall at least and I could see the video before I got close enough to filter out the noise from other works. In general I think that south entrance makes for a better experience of the space...too bad it's only open in the summer.
I also thought it was just a standard AV rack. Maybe even a wheelie, though I'm not sure about that...maybe it was on a pedestal when you saw it in NY? I agree that would be a bad decision.
I do love cats. granted. And probably more to the point I also love cats on youtube. So yeah, there's maybe a bit of fetish appreciation at play. But I also really love the aesthetics of video as a medium. And I love the way its look and feel changes through history. I think your list of how video art can be displayed is too limited. There are lots of ways for video to become a material presence in an installation (Tony Oursler being one obvious example...I don't love Oursler, actually, but at least he gets the plasticity of the medium).
Maybe the coolest thing about youtube is that in the same era when HDTVs and blue ray and 3D movies are hot commodities, masses of people are also perfectly happy watching tiny pixelated blurry images. There's something so wonderfully populist about that perversion of the notion of technological progress that it warms my little heart. But I also just really dig the look of video distortions. Youtube produces scads of fantastic artifacts along with big pixels, bizarre lighting hotspots, and mushy out-of-focus-edges. mmmmm. There is something very sexy when signal with content unravels around the edges into raw eye candy. It's a visceral kind of thing.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 2:25 pm
As for "stroking curators' vanity" I guess that sounds like I was attributing careerist motives to the artist but it's really more a comment on curators. Arguably Arcangel is already "there" and these are just the prevailing assumptions artists must work with today to get anything done. Beethoven cats - thumbs down (too fun); Schoenberg cats (thumbs up - modernist hair shirt).
- tom moody 9-01-2010 2:26 pm
Not a catch-22, a 3d chess backhanded homage wrapped in a diss wrapped in an homage. "Highly intelligent" but sort of a waste of brain power considering other things you could make art about.
- tom moody 9-01-2010 2:31 pm
Hey Tom, What's this "new sweet Cory" in quotes business. I never said he was sweet, I said he made some sweet edits. I never thought he was "sweet" in the first place, that's your construction. Here's my very abbreviated Cory history in a nutshell: dirt-style web stuff digging the medium of DIY html with a politics of noticing that technological environments can be manipulated into myriad forms besides top-down corporate models. Performance lecture about guitars, also emphasising connections between aesthetic appreciation and technological empowerment. Not very interesting installation at the Whitney with video game rendered abstract and unplayable. Collaborative work with Beige and Paper Rad helping promote awesome gawky live audio/video acts like Dr. Doo. Lots of stuff I didn't pay attention to. Very snotty lecture performance in which he seemed to think it was his job to inform the artworld about the wonders of youtube, as if we were all luddites or something. Aesthetic video installation made for gallery context in which the formal qualities of youtube are understood to be generally shared and appreciated by broad audiences.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 2:41 pm
"modernist hair shirt"...only if you think that experimental audio is an elitist project. Put a kid in a basement with a synthesizer and you will get some weird noise. Point out that weird noise is something the culture's been chewing on for hundreds of years and you are relegated to some kind of imaginary ivory tower.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 2:55 pm
Beethoven cats technically un-doable. Also too much like dogs barking x-mas carols. been there, done that.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 3:04 pm
Note: a dear friend just pointed out to me on email that I can like the video without believing it to be the greatest work ever about youtube. This is very true. I'm not a great big huge Cory fan, or anything like that. I just thought this piece worked well in context and I'm willing to defend my judgement.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 3:19 pm
I want to see the dogs barking xmas carols. Got a link?
- L.M. 9-01-2010 3:48 pm
no...man...that was some pre-internet radio thing. Should be something online somewhere though.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 3:54 pm
bark bark bark... / "Jingle Bells," The Singing Dogs (RCA) 1955
- bill 9-01-2010 4:48 pm
thanks bill!
re: Cory's blog post about "sorry I haven't posted lately" posts...Tom, do you have a reason to think that this is intended to show that bloggers are pathetic? Does Cory hate blogs or something? I'm curious.
Forgive the intellectual reference (snark) but the post makes me think about Geert Lovink and Anna Munster's essay on network aesthetics where they point out that nodes are not fixed forever but often die off, which is just fine, but masked by formalist obsessions with mapping the network. The stumblings, lapses and endings of blogs are an integral part of the picture, especially if we are going to think of online media as a temporal human endeavor. Not sure if there needs to be any particular value judgement attached.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 5:48 pm
Sally - I didn't know there was another way to enter the Power Plant and you're right, my list of display options was too limited. I almost didn't post it for that reason, but I think it's reasonable to say those are the defaults.
I think there's some truth to the allure of video distortions and blurry pixelated images, but you could say that about a lot of youtube videos that could placed in the gallery. I don't think Arcangel's piece is that remarkable on craft alone.
Tom: That new Arcangel piece leaves the impression he rarely uses the internet.
- Paddy Johnson (guest) 9-01-2010 6:28 pm
"you could say that about a lot of youtube videos that could be placed in the gallery" ...absolutely.
- sally mckay 9-01-2010 8:56 pm
Arcangel-history-wise, there was the hacked Nintendo game "I Shot Andy Warhol," which I'm liking less in retrospect since it was clearly the beginning of a career of killing modernist father-figures.
I have no anecdotes on why he's making fun of bloggers not posting. Now that you've raised the Lovink/Munster thesis, I'm sure others will say it is a humorous treatment of that. (counter-snark)
To come back to the original reason for your post, Sally, I don't think anyone on the Rhizome thread took such an extreme position that the Net, or YouTube, couldn't be done in a gallery. I was talking about a piece that didn't work and gave specific reasons. Now you have given some reasons why another piece worked. I happen to think it's wrong on a lot of other levels but I have no opinion on whether the installation helped, undermined, or had no effect on the "social media" aspects of the piece. Your hypothetical of a collection of clickable cat videos is as speculative as my Beethoven cats hypothetical. (I did mention the barking dogs singing Christmas carols in the AFC thread.)
- tom moody 9-02-2010 1:05 pm
One of my old friends actually had a vinyl LP copy of that old 1955 dogs barking version of jingle bells. It had amusing liner notes where they described the technique, involving field recording different dogs separately, and then fine-tuning the barking with tape speed adjustment. This process was very much influenced by Stockhausen (not making this up).
Of course, when the Jingle Cats sessions came out much later, that was just a digital sampler. Much less effort.
- VB 9-02-2010 1:12 pm
Oop, I got my threads mixed up. I thought Tom had mentioned the dogs above here. Sorry for the uncredited reference!
- sally mckay 9-02-2010 3:09 pm
VB, that's hilarious. Dogs get Stockhausen, cats get Shoenberg.
I had read the Rhizome thread, but wasn't trying to take it up specifically. However, Tom does point out a bit of straw man in my argument, which I have to confess to. Part of my intent was to talk about the systemic differences between the gallery and the online environment. I'm suggesting that the gallery is a good space for processing cultural phenomena in an aesthetic way. I would agree that this piece doesn't at all challenge gallery viewers to think about art the way we think about art in social media (for lack of a better term). All I was really hoping for in my top post was to side-step the implicit dichotomy of gallery/curator= bad, youtube/self-organising=good. And yes, there are many people* engaged in both forms of practice who are aware that it isn't so black and white.
*artists for sure...and, I'd argue, some curators.
- sally mckay 9-02-2010 3:33 pm
So, then today's query: Stockhausen or Schoenberg?
- L.M. 9-02-2010 6:50 pm
Stockhausen. I mean...helicopters! That's hard to beat.
- sally mckay 9-02-2010 8:17 pm
Stockhausen is more appealing for 20th/21st century tech kids, he was instrumental in inventing a new discourse about music technology.
Schoenberg was more of a tragic figure. His ambition in life was to single-handedly force forward the evolution of the rules of Western Classical Music harmony, and he succeeded, but he won a pyrrhic victory as much of the audience for music were not very interested in his results.
If anyone feels for the music of Schoenberg, it is probably the earlier Mahler-influenced Verklärte Nacht.
- VB 9-04-2010 10:26 pm