Compare and contrast:
Kristin Lucas, Host, 1997 (Quicktime excerpt clickable here [not anymore--thanks EAI!!!], or rather, here)
and
Paul Slocum, Hats, 2007 (YouTube)
Update: 12 hours later, and none of you have turned in your essays. I think these pieces are very similar and say much about the media (and assumptions about media) prevalent at the time they were made.
1. Both take place within a screen space, with inset headshot windows, and involve two characters talking (or not) at cross purposes to each other.
2. The Lucas is a quasi-science fiction scenario playing on the Logan's Run/THX1138 trope of the "video confessional." Lucas tells her troubles to an ATM camera, but instead of Big Brother or Sister, an overworked, headset-wearing operator (also Lucas) mostly ignores her while putting out fires on other networks. POVs are looking out from the ATM at the patient/confessor on the street, the operator/shrink on an inset screen, and an awkward exchange where the shrink tries to tell the patient where to touch the screen to get a response.
3. In Slocum's piece the action takes place on a present-day, cluttered computer desktop. Two video inset windows frame Slocum and another character, who might be videoconferencing. The headset-wearing Slocum is mostly just listening and lurking, opening and closing desktop windows as the page strains from the taxing of memory. He recalls the "operator" in the Lucas video, managing chaos and not accomplishing much. The other character is not a penitent from the street but a guy on YouTube confessing his girlfriend problems, and not to Slocum but the world. His voice cuts in and out and repeats.
4. 1997: closed network, centrally controlled, falling apart from an absence of qualified human "controllers," yet there is still faith in the system by the users.
5. 2007: open network, peer to peer, but communication no better--YouTube is a one way confession, screen is clogged with noise of too many cyberentertainment distractions. Users still think confessing (to a social networking site) will solve their problems.
6. Both pieces are complex and layered and make adroit use their respective media to evoke maximum cognitive dissonance.
7. Both works introduce subject matter extraneous to a simple two character narrative. Lucas' operator appears to be splitting her time between her "confessional" clients and managing some sort of group videogame environment (this may not be apparent on the excerpted clip). The contours of her activities are porous and uncertain. Half of Slocum's screen space is taken up with a banal jpeg of baseball hats on an armchair, along with a confused multiplicity of windows opening and closing as well as overlapping and interrupting the YouTube boob.
8. In both works the artists use their own image as a character or characters.
9. Lucas's screen environment is wholly fictional, but Slocum's might actually just be his desktop on a given day, heaven help him.
10. Both pieces are further nested within screen environments reflective of their eras. Lucas is Amiga computer- and analog-mixed video for TV display (converted to Quicktime for the Web by the non-profit Electronic Arts Intermix, which distributes the work). The Slocum piece is all-PC, using capture programs and other software, self-distributed via the YouTube (centrally, corporately controlled) video networking site.
11. Both pieces are linked to from the artist's personal websites. Lucas's has an archive linking to excerpted versions of the work (update: a longer one is here); Slocum's is in blog form and puts an embedded YouTube of the video in a post.
Wow, great post. Prototypically related:
youtube(dot)com(slash)watch?v=__8OV0PAKzU
An analog, perhaps to the visual disarray of slocum's desktop is the sort of cheesy (but over time really disturbing) use of foley in the Lucas video. This is, as you state (and to use a potentially modernist idea that still has overwhelming currency) working within the specificities of the mediums: television as singular image densely layered with sound, versus abstracted digital workspace cluttered with clearly demarcated images. The difference being that sounds mix while images remain opaque or, to be functional in the artist's workspace, distinct from one another.
An afterthought on my comment would be that the singular video images or channels have become more commonly fragmented to simulate the that digital space Slocum references. Steady, simultaneous, streams of information projected at once (contemporary broadcast design, national american newscasting, taint(dot)org/xfer/2004/CNN-sums-it-up(dot)jpg, etc.) can only ever mimic the digital.
My link turned your URL into a hotlink warning. Here's the image:
A couple of thoughts:
Agreed the Lucas sound track is fragmented but her multilayered use of video was prescient of where everything was going. The clip may not do justice to how much layering is also going on in the video.
Lucas and Slocum are Gen X and Gen Y and grew up with video and shortening audience attention spans so unlike the Holt/Serra, they forgot to make it boring.
Maybe there's also something about boredom and length that is determined by accessibility of production methods; if you're paying some tech a lot of money an hour to make your video in a commercial studio, you're likely to want to compose something more substantial than sketchy or insignificant. Not to detriment either of the latter pieces, of course. Serra's work is also coming out of a distinctly 70s video-body-performance kind of work, and I think that, among peer works executed in similar modes, the video fits rather nicely in that temporal vernacular and is not very boring at all.
Now, boredom, says Patricia Meyer Spacks, "defies narration," it is the way in which we stop believing in the future, stop desiring. Paul Chan tells Martha Rosler in conversation that, while her early videos are very important to him, they nontheless, like much great art he claims, are very boring at first. Chris Marker is boring, says Paul Chan (!). Martha Rosler reminds Paul Chan that boredom is a much more contemporary concept than he imagines; as a word we can trace the etymology only as far back as the 18th century. I find it hard to believe that contemporary artists have any sort of advanced agency in the word's application; it seems much more the realm of commercial culture to use or even desire such designations.
Well, there is boredom and there is boredom. You're talking to a guy whose one YouTube is a drawing demo of a two-headed deer. It is not even real time but 7 minutes can stretch to eternity. I like to watch it as is, but others have told me half apologetically that they use the fast forward scroller and wiggle the control around.
Now, if they did that to Richard Serra, he would seethe, I suspect. He is the god-like artist and his work is all about intimidating the viewer. I like some of Serra's and Holt's work but maybe it's because I did radio for a while and know that "echo-chamber-defeats-speech" effect only too well I really don't like that piece, I think it's self-indulgent and unforgiving to the audience and not in a good, transgressive '70s way.
(previous comment edited to remove imaginary Richard Serra rant--I mostly really hate his work and artistic personality and get carried away--it's off topic anyway)
bored
"Can you answer these questions properly?"
You know Serra was a darling of the the galleries for a long time, and while i won't dispute the macho abstract fuck-all -ness of his sculptures, some of his politics show in his video works and are pretty radical. Either way, you're probably right about Serra, even in your derisive rant. The way you feel about him is the way I mostly feel about Matthew Barney (and they're friends, imagine that).
I wanted to post you a video of Serra having a famous fight with one of his 70s dealers.... is it Leo Castelli? I can't remember it for the life of me. He sort of rants about the art market and collectors being forever ideologically set against the artists they collect. It's a great video clip, but it's not on the internet, sadly. If I find it on one of my vhs tapes in the next few days I'll be sure to post.
Just to backtrack and explain my own joke a bit ("they forgot to make it boring")
I think both artists were aware of that '70s video tradition of using boredom and long takes to "problematize" mass media uses of TV.
I think the artists' strategy of having lots of things happening on the screen is a reaction to or an avoidance of that ultra-serious Serra type video that happens in a walled-off art realm.
Their work participates in mass culture to some extent so it revels in all those commercial considerations like audience attention span. But the end effect is showing that culture as a kind of paralysis.
Ultimately they have very different fish to microwave than Serra, whose piece, while unusually playful and psychedelic for him, is still one person, more or less static, against a blue screen for 10 minutes.
So your example pushed my buttons because I don't personally like it, but also because I think it's the opposite of Lucas/Slocum. Sorry to sound harsh, just trying to plant some poles here.
I'm still not sure I understand why you feel the Slocum and Lucas work is so opposed to that of Serra. I suggested you consider that work because I feel it's a lot about some of the same stuff: mediated realities, communication practices, the narcissism of the performer/artist, and high-tech (and high-touch) self-representation.
I don't think that Serra was necessarily trying to make a "dry" or ultra-serious video. I think we was working with the production tools he had available at the time (ie no broadcast design software). I see a little cheekiness in some of his video work (see, for example, television delivers people, where the text alone would be didactic, yet the way it is visually and aurally delivered makes it really funny).
It is didactic. For me it's an issue of economy. The point is made in a couple of Jenny Holzer-like messages (not even, they're preachier) but it just goes on and on, pummeling you into brain-fog. The cheesy music and glitches don't make it any less an ordeal. Similarly Holt is just repeating variations of "I'm find-d-d-d-ding it very hard-d-d-d-d to form sentences-s-s-s." OK, already.
I think eventually artists figured out how to use the tools--later work is an improvement over these early, clunky experiments. Eventually artists didn't have to apologize by saying "the boredom is part of the work!"
This is my problem with showing canonical avant garde work on YouTube. At the end of the day that video I posted of the hissing, shrieking cat is more profound and startling to me than this old work. When I was talking about the need for cats and sloths on VVork it was a joke, but also feeling a bit that that someone's amateur tracking shot of a baby sloth is more compelling and even important than a student's Carl Andre speaker stack.
On TV Delivers: it's didactic, just like a PSA is didactic, just like commercial television is didactic, just like a news program is didactic. The elevator music in the video signals that the work is operating in "tv mode": by miming the delivery methods of commercial television it delivers its poorly written harangue, becoming an ill-informed and poorly executed public announcement. Hence it's a little funny to me, but I understand why you hate it.
Re: "the boredom is part of the work!"
Endurance work still exists. Not that I like it or anything.
Re: "When I was talking about the need for cats and sloths on VVork it was a joke, but also feeling a bit that that someone's amateur tracking shot of a baby sloth is more compelling and even important than a student's Carl Andre speaker stack."
More compelling, perhaps. More contemporary, certainly.
Great points, and you will find lots of support with those that disparage more sanctioned high-brow cultural practices---this is all part of the contemporary moment. Personally, I'm often very suspicious of populist culture; I'm suspicious of it passing unexamined, of it breeding a type of non-critical, all-ingestive type of pedestrian spectatorship. Not that I would wish it all away, but I hope you get what I'm saying. My own background, practice, and training has been to always approach all culture critically and engage rather than just consume.
A suggestion: If the 70s art we're discussing was about looking critically at society, the 21st century is just about looking, looking, and more looking.
Sorry to keep putting myself back in the equation but I do post cats and sloths, very critically, comparing them to Richard Serra and such.
Also Host and Hats are a critical look at society, they're not just about looking. Where we disagree is I think they're more effectively critical than the Serra, because they're out there mixing it up with the culture and they're fun to watch--the viewer stays engaged. I understand that Serra was trying to be "ironic didactic" but I think the didacticism overwhelmed the ironicism. The guy just likes to pummel.
I've thought about this for the past few hours, while out and looking at art. When I raised issues about the sloths I wasn't at all thinking critically about the Slowcum and Lucas videos; and when I brought Serra into the equation I only was trying to trace a historical lineage to a sort of performance video to which your two great contemporary examples (especially the Slocum) seem at least somewhat indebted. Isn't YouTube video blogging about performance video?
I like what you do with when you do post things like cats and sloths and such, and it's important to look at that sort of thing critically. Also, I like your last sentence.
Sorry, I don't mean to pummel. Yes, I think Slocum's is about found performance--like a found Serra/Holt monologue where Slocum added the echoes through digital errors and so forth. Or for that matter, a found Lucas monologue, since her piece is 10 years closer in time to the Serra era and she is acting out/channeling a character as opposed to just finding/appropriating someone else's pathos.
The character Slocum "plays"--a guy clicking windows on his desktop while recording himself as a webcam image--has a closer analog. The Petra Cortright webcam video Paddy and I talked about a while back.
His performance is showing himself apparently doing nothing but actually controlling the screen mayhem. Meanwhile, all this slightly pathetic angst is pouring out of Joe Everyman YouTube user.
I'm less respectful of the lineage of the Serra than I should be. At this point, after a generation of videos that imitated "the single video'ed talking head doing something weird/banal for 10 minutes" I see it as a trope that current artists can pluck out of the air and use, no more or less important than the Kubrick steadycam shot of the kid on the Big Wheel or someone singing "Come to the Honeycomb Hideout." It's just another link in the chain of reference and I'm thinking of it as kitsch now even though it had its moment of breaking down boundaries.
I don't mean to slight the Lucas piece in any of this--it sounds like I prefer non-performers but I really believe "those who can perform should" and she can--she's very funny and dry in her vids.
Hats reminds me of another piece of Kristin's from 2000, Involuntary Reception.
|
Compare and contrast:
Kristin Lucas, Host, 1997 (Quicktime excerpt clickable here [not anymore--thanks EAI!!!], or rather, here)
and
Paul Slocum, Hats, 2007 (YouTube)
Update: 12 hours later, and none of you have turned in your essays. I think these pieces are very similar and say much about the media (and assumptions about media) prevalent at the time they were made.
1. Both take place within a screen space, with inset headshot windows, and involve two characters talking (or not) at cross purposes to each other.
2. The Lucas is a quasi-science fiction scenario playing on the Logan's Run/THX1138 trope of the "video confessional." Lucas tells her troubles to an ATM camera, but instead of Big Brother or Sister, an overworked, headset-wearing operator (also Lucas) mostly ignores her while putting out fires on other networks. POVs are looking out from the ATM at the patient/confessor on the street, the operator/shrink on an inset screen, and an awkward exchange where the shrink tries to tell the patient where to touch the screen to get a response.
3. In Slocum's piece the action takes place on a present-day, cluttered computer desktop. Two video inset windows frame Slocum and another character, who might be videoconferencing. The headset-wearing Slocum is mostly just listening and lurking, opening and closing desktop windows as the page strains from the taxing of memory. He recalls the "operator" in the Lucas video, managing chaos and not accomplishing much. The other character is not a penitent from the street but a guy on YouTube confessing his girlfriend problems, and not to Slocum but the world. His voice cuts in and out and repeats.
4. 1997: closed network, centrally controlled, falling apart from an absence of qualified human "controllers," yet there is still faith in the system by the users.
5. 2007: open network, peer to peer, but communication no better--YouTube is a one way confession, screen is clogged with noise of too many cyberentertainment distractions. Users still think confessing (to a social networking site) will solve their problems.
6. Both pieces are complex and layered and make adroit use their respective media to evoke maximum cognitive dissonance.
7. Both works introduce subject matter extraneous to a simple two character narrative. Lucas' operator appears to be splitting her time between her "confessional" clients and managing some sort of group videogame environment (this may not be apparent on the excerpted clip). The contours of her activities are porous and uncertain. Half of Slocum's screen space is taken up with a banal jpeg of baseball hats on an armchair, along with a confused multiplicity of windows opening and closing as well as overlapping and interrupting the YouTube boob.
8. In both works the artists use their own image as a character or characters.
9. Lucas's screen environment is wholly fictional, but Slocum's might actually just be his desktop on a given day, heaven help him.
10. Both pieces are further nested within screen environments reflective of their eras. Lucas is Amiga computer- and analog-mixed video for TV display (converted to Quicktime for the Web by the non-profit Electronic Arts Intermix, which distributes the work). The Slocum piece is all-PC, using capture programs and other software, self-distributed via the YouTube (centrally, corporately controlled) video networking site.
11. Both pieces are linked to from the artist's personal websites. Lucas's has an archive linking to excerpted versions of the work (update: a longer one is here); Slocum's is in blog form and puts an embedded YouTube of the video in a post.
- tom moody 6-22-2007 8:26 pm
Wow, great post. Prototypically related:
youtube(dot)com(slash)watch?v=__8OV0PAKzU
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 6:07 pm
An analog, perhaps to the visual disarray of slocum's desktop is the sort of cheesy (but over time really disturbing) use of foley in the Lucas video. This is, as you state (and to use a potentially modernist idea that still has overwhelming currency) working within the specificities of the mediums: television as singular image densely layered with sound, versus abstracted digital workspace cluttered with clearly demarcated images. The difference being that sounds mix while images remain opaque or, to be functional in the artist's workspace, distinct from one another.
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 6:26 pm
An afterthought on my comment would be that the singular video images or channels have become more commonly fragmented to simulate the that digital space Slocum references. Steady, simultaneous, streams of information projected at once (contemporary broadcast design, national american newscasting, taint(dot)org/xfer/2004/CNN-sums-it-up(dot)jpg, etc.) can only ever mimic the digital.
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 6:32 pm
My link turned your URL into a hotlink warning. Here's the image:
- tom moody 6-23-2007 6:40 pm
A couple of thoughts:
Agreed the Lucas sound track is fragmented but her multilayered use of video was prescient of where everything was going. The clip may not do justice to how much layering is also going on in the video.
Lucas and Slocum are Gen X and Gen Y and grew up with video and shortening audience attention spans so unlike the Holt/Serra, they forgot to make it boring.
- tom moody 6-23-2007 6:48 pm
Maybe there's also something about boredom and length that is determined by accessibility of production methods; if you're paying some tech a lot of money an hour to make your video in a commercial studio, you're likely to want to compose something more substantial than sketchy or insignificant. Not to detriment either of the latter pieces, of course. Serra's work is also coming out of a distinctly 70s video-body-performance kind of work, and I think that, among peer works executed in similar modes, the video fits rather nicely in that temporal vernacular and is not very boring at all.
Now, boredom, says Patricia Meyer Spacks, "defies narration," it is the way in which we stop believing in the future, stop desiring. Paul Chan tells Martha Rosler in conversation that, while her early videos are very important to him, they nontheless, like much great art he claims, are very boring at first. Chris Marker is boring, says Paul Chan (!). Martha Rosler reminds Paul Chan that boredom is a much more contemporary concept than he imagines; as a word we can trace the etymology only as far back as the 18th century. I find it hard to believe that contemporary artists have any sort of advanced agency in the word's application; it seems much more the realm of commercial culture to use or even desire such designations.
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 7:25 pm
Well, there is boredom and there is boredom. You're talking to a guy whose one YouTube is a drawing demo of a two-headed deer. It is not even real time but 7 minutes can stretch to eternity. I like to watch it as is, but others have told me half apologetically that they use the fast forward scroller and wiggle the control around.
Now, if they did that to Richard Serra, he would seethe, I suspect. He is the god-like artist and his work is all about intimidating the viewer. I like some of Serra's and Holt's work but maybe it's because I did radio for a while and know that "echo-chamber-defeats-speech" effect only too well I really don't like that piece, I think it's self-indulgent and unforgiving to the audience and not in a good, transgressive '70s way.
- tom moody 6-23-2007 7:50 pm
(previous comment edited to remove imaginary Richard Serra rant--I mostly really hate his work and artistic personality and get carried away--it's off topic anyway)
- tom moody 6-23-2007 8:54 pm
bored
- bill 6-23-2007 8:59 pm
"Can you answer these questions properly?"
- tom moody 6-23-2007 9:07 pm
You know Serra was a darling of the the galleries for a long time, and while i won't dispute the macho abstract fuck-all -ness of his sculptures, some of his politics show in his video works and are pretty radical. Either way, you're probably right about Serra, even in your derisive rant. The way you feel about him is the way I mostly feel about Matthew Barney (and they're friends, imagine that).
I wanted to post you a video of Serra having a famous fight with one of his 70s dealers.... is it Leo Castelli? I can't remember it for the life of me. He sort of rants about the art market and collectors being forever ideologically set against the artists they collect. It's a great video clip, but it's not on the internet, sadly. If I find it on one of my vhs tapes in the next few days I'll be sure to post.
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 11:00 pm
Just to backtrack and explain my own joke a bit ("they forgot to make it boring")
I think both artists were aware of that '70s video tradition of using boredom and long takes to "problematize" mass media uses of TV.
I think the artists' strategy of having lots of things happening on the screen is a reaction to or an avoidance of that ultra-serious Serra type video that happens in a walled-off art realm.
Their work participates in mass culture to some extent so it revels in all those commercial considerations like audience attention span. But the end effect is showing that culture as a kind of paralysis.
Ultimately they have very different fish to microwave than Serra, whose piece, while unusually playful and psychedelic for him, is still one person, more or less static, against a blue screen for 10 minutes.
So your example pushed my buttons because I don't personally like it, but also because I think it's the opposite of Lucas/Slocum. Sorry to sound harsh, just trying to plant some poles here.
- tom moody 6-23-2007 11:04 pm
I'm still not sure I understand why you feel the Slocum and Lucas work is so opposed to that of Serra. I suggested you consider that work because I feel it's a lot about some of the same stuff: mediated realities, communication practices, the narcissism of the performer/artist, and high-tech (and high-touch) self-representation.
I don't think that Serra was necessarily trying to make a "dry" or ultra-serious video. I think we was working with the production tools he had available at the time (ie no broadcast design software). I see a little cheekiness in some of his video work (see, for example, television delivers people, where the text alone would be didactic, yet the way it is visually and aurally delivered makes it really funny).
- bxk (guest) 6-23-2007 11:27 pm
It is didactic. For me it's an issue of economy. The point is made in a couple of Jenny Holzer-like messages (not even, they're preachier) but it just goes on and on, pummeling you into brain-fog. The cheesy music and glitches don't make it any less an ordeal. Similarly Holt is just repeating variations of "I'm find-d-d-d-ding it very hard-d-d-d-d to form sentences-s-s-s." OK, already.
I think eventually artists figured out how to use the tools--later work is an improvement over these early, clunky experiments. Eventually artists didn't have to apologize by saying "the boredom is part of the work!"
This is my problem with showing canonical avant garde work on YouTube. At the end of the day that video I posted of the hissing, shrieking cat is more profound and startling to me than this old work. When I was talking about the need for cats and sloths on VVork it was a joke, but also feeling a bit that that someone's amateur tracking shot of a baby sloth is more compelling and even important than a student's Carl Andre speaker stack.
- tom moody 6-24-2007 12:01 am
On TV Delivers: it's didactic, just like a PSA is didactic, just like commercial television is didactic, just like a news program is didactic. The elevator music in the video signals that the work is operating in "tv mode": by miming the delivery methods of commercial television it delivers its poorly written harangue, becoming an ill-informed and poorly executed public announcement. Hence it's a little funny to me, but I understand why you hate it.
Re: "the boredom is part of the work!"
Endurance work still exists. Not that I like it or anything.
Re: "When I was talking about the need for cats and sloths on VVork it was a joke, but also feeling a bit that that someone's amateur tracking shot of a baby sloth is more compelling and even important than a student's Carl Andre speaker stack."
More compelling, perhaps. More contemporary, certainly.
Great points, and you will find lots of support with those that disparage more sanctioned high-brow cultural practices---this is all part of the contemporary moment. Personally, I'm often very suspicious of populist culture; I'm suspicious of it passing unexamined, of it breeding a type of non-critical, all-ingestive type of pedestrian spectatorship. Not that I would wish it all away, but I hope you get what I'm saying. My own background, practice, and training has been to always approach all culture critically and engage rather than just consume.
A suggestion: If the 70s art we're discussing was about looking critically at society, the 21st century is just about looking, looking, and more looking.
- bxk (guest) 6-24-2007 12:13 am
Sorry to keep putting myself back in the equation but I do post cats and sloths, very critically, comparing them to Richard Serra and such.
Also Host and Hats are a critical look at society, they're not just about looking. Where we disagree is I think they're more effectively critical than the Serra, because they're out there mixing it up with the culture and they're fun to watch--the viewer stays engaged. I understand that Serra was trying to be "ironic didactic" but I think the didacticism overwhelmed the ironicism. The guy just likes to pummel.
- tom moody 6-24-2007 12:25 am
I've thought about this for the past few hours, while out and looking at art. When I raised issues about the sloths I wasn't at all thinking critically about the Slowcum and Lucas videos; and when I brought Serra into the equation I only was trying to trace a historical lineage to a sort of performance video to which your two great contemporary examples (especially the Slocum) seem at least somewhat indebted. Isn't YouTube video blogging about performance video?
I like what you do with when you do post things like cats and sloths and such, and it's important to look at that sort of thing critically. Also, I like your last sentence.
- bxk (guest) 6-24-2007 5:39 am
Sorry, I don't mean to pummel. Yes, I think Slocum's is about found performance--like a found Serra/Holt monologue where Slocum added the echoes through digital errors and so forth. Or for that matter, a found Lucas monologue, since her piece is 10 years closer in time to the Serra era and she is acting out/channeling a character as opposed to just finding/appropriating someone else's pathos.
The character Slocum "plays"--a guy clicking windows on his desktop while recording himself as a webcam image--has a closer analog. The Petra Cortright webcam video Paddy and I talked about a while back. His performance is showing himself apparently doing nothing but actually controlling the screen mayhem. Meanwhile, all this slightly pathetic angst is pouring out of Joe Everyman YouTube user.
I'm less respectful of the lineage of the Serra than I should be. At this point, after a generation of videos that imitated "the single video'ed talking head doing something weird/banal for 10 minutes" I see it as a trope that current artists can pluck out of the air and use, no more or less important than the Kubrick steadycam shot of the kid on the Big Wheel or someone singing "Come to the Honeycomb Hideout." It's just another link in the chain of reference and I'm thinking of it as kitsch now even though it had its moment of breaking down boundaries.
I don't mean to slight the Lucas piece in any of this--it sounds like I prefer non-performers but I really believe "those who can perform should" and she can--she's very funny and dry in her vids.
- tom moody 6-24-2007 6:11 am
Hats reminds me of another piece of Kristin's from 2000, Involuntary Reception.
- sally mckay 6-25-2007 1:10 am