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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Ico playing with my new Progress Bar sculpture. I've included the cat to prove that it really moves.
Thanks Sally. Fans of Prereview know that I tend to rant so, in the spirit of "dance with the one that brought you" here's my first post.
I'm a video game junkie, but I do have to confess that I'm getting a bit burned out. Here's a short list of things I'm getting sick of.
- Strafing. Every shooter/platform game can be won by understanding how to move and shoot at the same time. Make it harder or different. If I see an enemy moving I shoot slightly ahead of them or I shoot with a larger weapon, but the AI never does that to me. In general, as long as you shoot and move you live.
- Hello my name is Snake and I'm the CIA's best agent with super duper abilities, yet I cannot step over this knee high log. If you want to make the game realistic, then let grown men and women step over logs. Climbing ladders should not be rocket science either. I've died way too often at the foot of a ladder for want of the ability to climb it without pressing some fucking action button. AND I shouldn't have to have been a trucker for five years to be able to back up while crawling. Video games that pride themselves in realism need their own Dogma movement.
- Let me accurately throw or drop my grenade, you bastards.
- God I hate performing combo "tricks". As soon as I have to memorize combos I feel like my life is ebbing away in a sad unending succession of video games, instead of the happy unending succession of video games I intend it to end in. A Teken fan I am not, (although I like talking to Teken fans because y'all are freaks.) Tony Hawk underground actually makes me want to buy a skateboard and sell my PS2, not because it's inspiring but because anything (including broken limbs) must be better than memorizing "X-Y-Square" every time I want to perform a "goofy-foot oly to flipside 360".
- Boss fights are always the same. "Oh, it's really big, but that means its slow so I should get in close!" No fucking shit, just like every other boss fight ever. And if you've figured out how to move and shoot on top of that you'll never die, I promise.
- I don't give a shit about your stupid fucking story. Tell the story in the game not in cut scenes, or not at all. Here's the back-story to my favorite commodore 64 game "KILL HIM, MY ROBOTS". What more do you need? All Your Base Are Belong To Us, indeed.
- I wish Katamari Damacy would make the local news for every 100 million times someone takes offence to GTA. And I also wish that North Americans could get the money to make cool innovative games. Here's a brilliant idea What if Japan was a market for video games?! If a game won't sell really well here but will in Japan, then make it here and market it in Japan! OMG! I know, I'm a fucking genius.
- I guess that's all for now. There's plenty more I've yet to play Grand Tourismo 4 but I hear that you can still gain advantage by driving into people in the corners with no repercussions or damage to your car, a problem which has plagued the franchise since its inception. Anyways, feel free to comment with your video game pet peeves.
I like blogging but boy am I getting sick of the sound of my own voice. To alleviate the pressure, I'm introducing a "guest poster feature," new brains who will enliven this page with occasional variety and alternate viewpoints that are, well...not mine...exactly. To start us off right, the apple is gonna fall straight down out of the tree. Please allow me to introduce my first guest poster...sibling, artist, bad speller and brainiac...Joester! Joester posts coming soon.
I just found out about Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' Rock 'n' Raven Haida Manga via Geist magazine. Thanks Geist, this guy is great.
Tom Sherman has a great rant about video in the current issue of Canadian Art. "Fuck film," he says, "The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video. Cinematic history is like a ball and chain." This evangelical stance is pretty entertaining. I can't tell for sure how tongue-in-cheek he means to be, but I'm guessing this posture is somewhat self-conscious. Sherman is sophisticated, and he knows video. He has been insightfully pushing the medium for nearly its entire 40 year history. He also says:
Art is a perceptual and intellectual activity conducted by people who question and often despise the status quo. In the 21st century reality is defined by layer upon layer of media, often by media stacked high upon one another, unattached to any absolute truth (no matter how momentary and fleeting any sense of truth may be). Video is not only the best medium for critiquing television and cinema, its media next of kin, it is also a perceptual, philosophical instrument for questioning reality in broader terms, for finding problems with the way we connect with the world, and doing something about it.
Goodreads has posted a C Magazine article by Emily Vey Duke titled "Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good." I love Vey Duke's writing for it's open-heartedness and genuine striving. I like that she is casting around for ways to better connect art with a non-art-educated public. I disagree, however, that there is something inherently wrong with teaching Duchampian nominalism. Also, I believe a healthy suspicion of art tropes about beauty and truth is not only a beneficial trait, but imperative to a genuine and communicative expression of either beauty or truth. In my student days it was an over-reliance on emotion, direct expression, machismo, and navel-gazing therapeutic personal brain barfs that seemed to be dragging art into a murky and inaccessible quagmire. Now I see Vey Duke calling for us to value the "explicitly emotional in art as highly as we value the ambiguously clever" and my instincts are to cry out No! Gawd, spare us the myopic whinging and purging of a bunch of young artists' personal angst.
At the same time I recognise what seems to be a systemic lack of rigour and ambition (and I would not exclude my own practice, especially considering a recent rash of afternoon napping). I chalk this up to the legacy of post-modern slacker-type despair ... in which making anything at all was seen as somehow heroic in the face of the perceived (I've always believed incorrectly) abject meaninglessness of all symbols. Furthermore, a crappy-looking aesthetic was required as a sort of apology, an acknowledgement that the artist was aware of the sheer audacity of saying anything at all. After the cold brash onslaught of deconstruction, an intimate personal approach was necessary..."please don't take my little art offering too seriously, it's just my two-cents worth of pain and insight."
Fortunately artists like Vey Duke and others have taken up symbols afresh as considered and effective tools for art communication. Hearts are back on sleeves and this is probably a very good thing. I am just wary of current trends of creeping anti-intellectualism. Expertise has become a bad word in the art world, and this is a problem. If you believe in your work, then there is nothing wrong with working really hard to achieve excellence in your field.
For the most part, I agree with Vey Duke. My plea to artists (and I plead with myself here as well) would be: don't be ashamed to work hard for your art. Don't sell yourself short by presenting self-effacing shoddy work if you have in you an idea that is excellent. Don't hold your own intelligence in check, and be brutally honest with yourself and apply your own criteria to determine what is good enough.