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Carl Scholz at Momenta Art through June 2. I haven't seen the show but this is a great picture. Or maybe just a great car. From the press release: "Titled Cherry, the vehicle has been rendered inaccessible through a flawless body job that replaces and covers all windows, exterior decoration, or any reference to the interior. Scholz is interested in symbols of power, class, masculinity, recognition, and safety." Yes, it's pushing all those buttons for former teen muscle car model-kit builders such as myself.
The artist here is Ina Ettlinger, from Munich. Her pieces start as actual clothing which is dismantled into the weird tendrils you see. She often picks out a section or color of the fabric pattern to 'work out.' Sometimes the extracted bits crawl up the wall, other times travel out onto the floor. No wires involved, just stuffed fabric. The work is by turns whimsical and feminine, creepy and hysterical. (Paraphrased from an email from Courtenay Smith, director of Lothringer13/Halle in Munich.)
Some of the records mentioned in my post about Stefan Schwander (aka Antonelli Electr. and other aliases) were on order and just arrived. The Repeat Orchestra disc, released in 2001, is dynamite; it out-Antonellis recent Antonelli for tuneful danceability, or danceable tunefulness (it's also a bit reminiscent of the Darshan Jesrani/Morgan Geist gem-and-a-half Metro Area). The Pop Up discs are OK; probably not floor-fillers but might work well as transitions. The Swimmingpool CD is slower and dubbier but quite good. The definitive Schwander isn't any one specific disc but would have to be taken from a combination of CDs and EPs under various names (I'm working on a list). And speaking of filler, that's what this post is; it's mainly here to put a text buffer between different types of artwork, for page design reasons, blah blah.
Wild Berry Crisp and Filter(less) House
Below is a discography of Dusseldorf musician Stefan Schwander, who records primarily as Antonelli Electr. (as in "electric" or "electronic"? I used to say the former but after hearing it the other way a couple of times I'm starting to just say "electer"). Schwander also plays keyboards with the Elektrotiki combo The Bad Examples, but is best known for his dance work, consisting of very minimal, catchy compositions performed mainly with sequencers and drum machines. Antonelli's club hit, the super elegant track "I Don't Want Nobody Else But You," combines a house four-on-the-floor thump with shimmering electro chirps and a plaintive vocoder, but in the years since that release, Schwander's output has become more abstract and stripped-down: the recent Antonelli disc Love and Other Solutions is very much of a piece with cuts under his supposedly more ambient Rhythm_maker alias. No matter how pre-planned and systematic the work is, Schwander has a gift for melody, exquisite production skills, and a knack for conjuring a soulful vibe--the tracks may be even more powerful for being chopped down to a few interlocking tunes. The man is the funky Dan Flavin of the music world.
ANTONELLI ELECTR. RELEASES - LONG PLAYING
Peng Peng Baby, CD (Stewardess)
Me, The Disco Machine, CD and 2x12" (Italic)
Click, CD and 2x12"' (Italic)
Love And Other Solutions, CD and 2X12" (Italic)
ANTONELLI ELECTR. RELEASES - SINGLES, EPS
Handclaps EP, 12" (Stewardess)
Bohannon, 12" (Italic)
Composure EP, 12" (Italic)
Automatic Music, 12" (Italic)
I Don´t Want Nobody Else But You, 12" (Italic)
Dubby Disco, 12" (Italic)
The Source Of Design, 12" (Italic)
Chrome Vanadium EP, 12" (Italic)
The Vogue, 12" (with Miss Kittin) (Italic)
Pictures, 12" (Italic)
JODI's current installation % MY DESKTOP at Eyebeam Atelier raises everyday machine disfunction to the level of the sublime. Occupying one long wall in Eyebeam's cavernous raw space, four standard computer screen desktops are projected side by side: two Windows on the left and two Apples on the right. The screens tower over the viewer at about ten feet in height. Invisible users appear to click the menus and desktop icons in real time, but what you see are actually recordings of these activities, presumably on DVD. To stand before the screens is to be immersed in an elegant chaos.
On the far left, a user attempts to move groups of icons to other positions on the same desktop. The new positions don't "take," but instead leave grey silhouettes, which gradually become cumulative, tangled masses of icon-shadows. In the middle left, the user methodically clicks unintelligible lists of wingdings, opening dialogue boxes full of more wingdings, and so on. In the middle right, sound files are randomly triggered, filling the space with a cacophony of clicks, martial arts grunts, and punching noises. And way over on the right, the letters underneath icons become long, conjoined strings of verbal gobbledegook, which are superimposed again and again.
There's nary a pigment stroke in sight, but the scale and handling of these pieces is very painterly, specifically Abstract Expressionist. JODI's process of cyber-vandalism--tinkering with browser software and then further abusing it through excessive, mindless icon-clicking--recalls strategies of "creative destruction" familiar from the work of the de Kooning generation (build up, wipe away, leave a residue, build up again...) It's also a cyber-critique, specifically playing on our legitimate fears that information-processing technology will break down when we're using it the hardest.
The messy visual record of "incorrect," panic-stricken choices is the kind of disobedient, Dionysian use of the computer sadly lacking in "BitStreams," the Whitney Museum's 2001 survey of computer art. If % My DESKTOP could have somehow been included in that exhibit, the focus and tone would have dramatically shifted from the utopian magic of thinking machines to their ad hoc, poorly-understood nature. With its size, ambition, and (refreshing) lack of reverence, it would have been a much stronger centerpiece than, say, ecosystm, John Klima's gee-whiz videogame salute to the raptor-eat-raptor world of global capital.
Check out Paper Rad's music video Bubble Puppy (Flash animation, takes a few secs to load--but worth it!). The tune is actually "Hot Smoke and Sassafras" (1968), by the Texas psychedelic band and one-hit-wonder the Bubble Puppy (more info on them below). Mixing '60s hippie mysticism with '70s bad taste, Paper Rad envisions the band riding (and playing) on top of painted vans with names like "Green Shock" and "Midnight at the Oasis" while the Egyptian desert scrolls in the background. The eponymous dog suffers from some sort of magical mystery hydrophobia that causes blue bubbles to hover in front of its mouth and ass. The animation has a nice dirt-style feel with lots of gratuitous gradating and sunburst effects--like van painting come to life. Of course, it's also completely self-aware, recycling all the MTV moves in a hilarious, inept-but-not-really parody style.
Back to the Bubble Puppy itself, here's a cached text from an apparently defunct web page (really takes you back to the days before corporate control clamped down on the music biz, when you could still have spontaneous regional hits):
Memories of Bubble Puppy
by Roy Cox
BUBBLE PUPPY
THE "HOT SMOKE AND SASSAFRAS" BOYS
I instigated the formation of the "Bubble Puppy" in 1968. We were four of the best available musicians the State of Texas had to offer. I had worked with Rod Prince in the Bad Seeds.
From a Metropolis magazine review, discussing the "French theoretical architecture show" at the Guggenheim Soho a few years back:
The fascination of French artists and architects with surrealism may explain why they're so often charmed by postmodernity in its more kitsch incarnations. Take, for example, one of the artists featured in "Premises," Bertrand Lavier, who contributes a suite of work called "Walt Disney Productions," life-size replicas of the phony abstract paintings and sculptures in a 1947 comic strip in which Mickey Mouse visits a modern art museum. The catalogue is worth quoting for its summary of the show's own delirious critical stance:
"Rather than making a painting that was a copy of a cartoon (as a number of his contemporaries did), and rather than reclaiming some tired abstract painting under the pretext of simulation, Lavier took directly from the cartoon itself. [Meaning he hired a fabricator to turn the drawings into objects. Not that there's anything wrong with that.] Since the cartoon precisely simulated a body of images prevalent in Modernist art, he simultaneously succeeded in resuscitating abstract painting. Although he did so without theoretical effort and--since his short circuit was photographic--without an excessive quantity of turpentine."
It's hard to know which failure of nerve is greater, that of the artist toying with the simulacra of the simulacra to "resuscitate" abstraction by yoking it to an Arp-like lexicon of cartoon shapes, or the too-clever-for-words tone of the catalogue and its dumb disdain for turpentine and technique. Not only is the art dopey--and this is a show about dopey art if ever there was one--the feeble character of its critique is revealed in its slavish replication of the original image. Disney is simply too much loved by all concerned for this kind of work to pose a threat to the battalions of imagineers who blanket the world with what can only be described as the real thing.
Oh, lighten up. Catalog writer, reviewer, you're both wrong. Lavier's installation isn't meant to "resuscitate abstract painting"--who really believes that?--nor to threaten Disney's "battalions of imagineers." It's a meditation on historicization, to use a rather ugly word: refracting capital-A art through the lens of a pop culture artifact to show how taste and vision change from era to era. The images in the comic strip (and by sly implication, the art referenced) are clearly from the '40s, but it takes a few decades to see that conclusively. What things from our own time that we take to be immutable will seem this "period" in 20X3? (Candidate: Matrix "bullet time" effect.) Lavier tackles the subject with wit and polish, and it's depressing to read such a grave debate surrounding this work.
Cats vs Dogs: left, Carl D'Alvia, Ratdog, 1996, carved plaster and rope, 40" X 25" X 23"; right, Sigurd Engerström, The Nightmare Cheetah, 2003, pencil drawing.
A list of permanent links has been added to my faq page (scroll down past the personal bombast). Included are four weblogs that were kind enough to link to me recently, and that I've been enjoying: Hullabaloo (Digby); artnotes (Ariana French); Three River Tech Review (Philip Shropshire); and ukor.org (not really a weblog, an eclectic portal page from Japan). All are recommended. Shropshire has an interesting piece here comparing Ted Kaczynski to Hannibal Lecter (the definitive one, played by Brian Cox, not the other guy), and then likening Kaczynski/Lecter to Francis Fukayama and Leon Kass: the Luddite posse. Good quote: "If I want artificial blood, augmented antioxidants, a Rhino Horn, creepy blood-red infrared eyes and a bio-networked version of a Spidey sense, then that should be my choice, my call. Will I still be human? I don't know. But I should have the right to find out, good or ill. And I shouldn't have to fear the actions of Kass, Fukuyama and especially Kaczynski." To which I would add, provided all that stuff isn't being pushed by corporate body-molders as the Next Big Thing, in a milieu of bought-off regulators, a la Big Pharm and Big Agriculture. Not sure how we're going to get to the post-human phase without some awfully unhappy guinea pigs.
Wireframe Aesthetics (Part 2). Above is a screen grab from the 20th Anniversary Tron DVD, specifically a "making of"
feature. This was probably an early test for the MCP (Master Control Program): it looks better exploded like that than it did in the finished movie, where it seemed pretty stiff. I learned a lot from the DVD, specifically how Moebius's production sketches dramatically spiced up the film's look, and how Sid Mead, the futurist designer who also consulted on Blade Runner, contributed cogent machine design (e.g., the light cycles and tanks). The computer graphics were divided among four different companies. In order to communicate the movements the filmmakers wanted (say, in the sequence where a Recognizer chases a tank), the animators hand-wrote numerical coordinates for the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes of each object, as well as variable factors such as pitch and yaw, on a sheet of paper, and the graphics shop keypunched the numbers in: 600 numbers translated into four seconds of film. The movie had approximately 20 minutes of computer-generated footage (including the "descent into the computer," the yes/no-speaking "bit," and other vignettes), all of which had to be painstakingly integrated with the backlit kodalith of the rotoscoped sequences. The "making of" featurette is tres corporate; the Disney execs interviewed basically fib and say the movie succeeded from the get-go, when in actuality the game outsold the film in '82. Absent is any mention of Wendy Carlos' lush electronic score, snippets of which are playing constantly in the background.
The Artforum Top Ten wasn't great when Greil Marcus did it: too cutesy-cryptic, with endless attention paid to blues and folk-based music only a few ex-hippies care about. Since he left, artists have been doing Top Tens and now it's even worse. Instead of talking about stuff they know and like (like, say, the work of fellow artists), most feel, because it's Artforum, they have to drop references to obscure theorists, difficult bands, and hard-to-navigate websites (and don't get me started on the "Hot List"). Thus it was a pleasant surprise to see Guy Richards Smit mentioning homestarrunner.com in this month's issue--something even kids like! The link to Smit's Top Ten is here (at least while the mag is on the stands); the link to Homestar is here (but not in the online version of the Top Ten--go figure). Speaking of Homsar, I mean Homestar (cryptic, Marcusian in-joke), I recommend the Strong Bad email called "techno," in which the masked one improvises a spot-on, old school techno track with mouth noises until suddenly interrupted by The Cheat doing a "lightswitch rave." Even Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel would have to agree this is superb. "The system is down... The system is down..."
LoVid at Southfirst, May 10, 2003 (photo by yours truly)
If you're looking for uninformed opinions on upcoming movies, I can recommend no better source than PreReview. The blurbs there (including a few of mine) are based on fleeting glimpses of trailers and TV ads, memories of films that look superficially similar, and half-baked speculation. In other words, the movies are getting exactly the kind of ink they deserve. Check it out, it's fun!
The images above are pixelist drawings from the deviantART website. (The name "deviantART" rankles, by the way; it's not like there's much sexual or transgressive content on the site. In fact, it's fairly tyPICal in its table-jammed, info-overloaded layout. A lot of the work is great, though.) Although deviantART makes images freely available for the clicking, the administrators guilt-trip you about asking each artist's permission to reproduce them. I mean no discourtesy or larceny towards the artists; my weblog is a labor of love and I just don't have the time or energy to obtain scrupulous copyright permission for everything I put up on it. Hopefully you will cut me some slack and take each reproduction as the compliment it was intended to be. It's not like I'm passing it off as my own work, or selling T-shirts, or anything. (This is my standard, bitchy "fair use" disclaimer and will be linked to in future posts.) Left to right, top to bottom: banxter, wenstrom; wenstrom, beef; astropioneer, robotriot. Each image is linked to its source page.
Last night I caught a couple of musical performances at Siberia, a scummy, graffiti-scrawled punkoid club across from the Port Authority at 9th Ave. The Experimental Makeup has been described as "roots electronica"; they use a combination of hotwired analog equipment and heavily filtered digital sequencer loops. The result was a long, continuous (I would say) ambient piece that occasionally segued into dub. The dub parts were the best, with one of the players crooning dumb stuff like "let's go to the beach" in a Gary Wilson-meets-Damo Suzuki voice. The burps and sniggles emanating from the analog equipment were frequently ear-tickling (if that's the right word at these decibel-levels). Next was Makita, as in the drill, "from Berlin," which was much more rockin'. The singer and guitarist were respectively Wolfgang Mayer and Tom Früchtl, who I had just heard a couple weeks back as 2/5 of Discoteca Flaming Star. Also playing was laptop-and-keyboard percussionist Michael Schultze supplying a fast-thumping rhythm. Described by Früchtl as "powerbook deathmetal," the music consisted of revved-up metal tropes played very rapidly and proficiently, while Wolfgang shimmied his exposed midriff and sang lyrics like "This is the end of the society of fun" and "my blood is boiling" (I occasionally thought of Nitzer Ebb, plus a guitar). One song lyric consisted solely of numbers: "666-767, 666-767, 666-767..."
More on the William Gibson/contemporary art connection mentioned in my last post. Below is a list that could probably be added to:
1. In Count Zero, an A.I. assembles objets d'art resembling Joseph Cornell boxes. Cornell's sculptures are overrated IMHO, too much antiques roadshow and not enough zap. (Sorry, I know that's simplistic, but I don't feel up to a full-bore critique.) Cornell's proto-remix of the film East of Borneo, in which he strips out the narrative elements and reduces the movie to a series of evocative fragments, is great, though.
2. Mona Lisa Overdrive has a character making battlebots similar to Survival Research Laboratories'.
3. The book All Tomorrow's Parties depicts but doesn't name Noritoshi Hirakawa's photos, exhibited at Deitch Projects in NY in September 1998. Here's how Dominique Nahas (a male writer, in case you're wondering) described the work in artnet:
The works in this series, titled "The Reason of Life," are diptych cibachromes. In one half, a black-and-white documentary pic gives us the dead-pan set up: an attractive young woman wearing a skirt stands in a public space, staring defiantly out at the viewer, while passersby continue on their way in a blur, oblivious to what's going on. The woman holds a shutter-release bulb in her hand, the cord lasciviously snaking down to the ground at her feet. It's connected to a camera placed on its back between her legs. The Peeping Tom lens is obviously aimed directly up at her crotch.The Gibson book imagines the diptychs split in two. The girl-clicking-shutter photos are exhibited in a crowded bar; patrons admitted to a more exclusive area of the bar get to view the cr0tch shots. I'm sure Gibson is fascinated by the Japanese-ness (queasy sex department) of the photos, but in the art world context they come off as gimmicky--a smutty one-off footnoting earlier, more daring work in which Hirakawa documented Tokyo girls flashing their bare pubes on the street. Gibson's idea of bifurcating the viewing context is actually more dramatic than the rather pat diptych mode Hirakawa chose.The diptych's color half delivers the undercover goods: white calves, flanks and a delicious sliver of white pantie [Oh, please!] framed by swirls of miniskirt. Hirakawa creates a male fantasy come true: willing women documenting their private parts for us, as a tacit acknowledgment if not a celebration of the intersection of secret male and female desires.
4. Pattern Recognition has the creator of "the footage." I don't wanna spoil this with the book fresh out but I found the conceit contrived and poorly explained, from an artmaking standpoint.
I've recently read William Gibson's new novel Pattern Recognition, reread his "Virtual Light trilogy" (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties), and have been following his weblog, and am now jotting down a few thoughts. First, Gibson has really mellowed over the years. As he himself says, he no longer does "deep fried anomie" or even cyberpunk. Pattern Recognition is his first attempt at a mainstream novel with tech (as opposed to sci fi) elements. I have to say it's less satisfying because it limits his imagination. His gift for extrapolating/exaggerating current trends into pungent satire hasn't disappeared but it's severely circumscribed. Also, it's a weird book because the writing of it clearly straddled 9/11. The "hunt for the perfect pair of sneakers" he started at the go-go turn of the millennium acquired a melancholy 9/11 subplot which skews (and actually comes to dominate) the tone. I realize that many of us went through a similar thought process but Gibson's unabashed consumerism (reverent descriptions of clothes and gear) makes the transition to a meaner, leaner consciousness even bumpier.
One thing PR shares with all the books that preceded it is a weak plot. The Virtual Light novels each relied on what Alfred Hitchcock calls a "McGuffin"--some object that drives the story but turns out not to be terribly important (respectively virtual sunglasses, a nanotech generator, and a kind of fax teleporter, the last being the most significant of the three). I won't spoil PR but the thing the main characters are focused on feels like another McGuffin. And once again an artist is a supernatural hero figure--I sometimes think WG was born to be an art critic [update: more on this here], even though I don't entirely trust his eye (Cornell? Noritoshi Hirakawa?). What Gibson does best is make cutting social observations in gemlike prose, e.g., his travelogue through a one-step-removed Japan in Idoru, his thoughts on reality TV (Slitscan, Cops in Trouble), and in the new book, bleeding-edge trendspotting or "cool hunting." Which brings me to my main point: why do these things have to be in a novel?
I was somewhat let down when I found out his weblog was a kind of promotional stunt, timed to coincide with the PR book tour and then to end. I actually thought for a moment that he might be an old media guy that wrote about new media and one day started living it. At this stage of his career a weblog seemed like a better vehicle for his dry observations than his novels, which are becoming lackluster, as novels. It seems silly to be killing a bunch of trees and providing grist for the book-publishing hype cycle when he could be communicating directly, and semi-interactively, with his core readership. I briefly, naively imagined him living on the royalties from his rather lucrative back-catalogue and just blogging. Oh well, not everyone is made for the potlatch economy. I'm not sure I am either, so I'm sorry for projecting. To be honest, I worry about being sucked wholly into the blogosphere, like Colin Laney disappearing through a "nodal point" into pure data, and was hoping for a prominent guinea pig. *pities self*
Postscript: After I wrote this I visited Gibson's blog to get its hyperlink and found this stuffy piece on "writing vs blogging." I guess as he prepares to start work on that next book after being a pretend-blogger for a few months (he says the two activities are mutually exclusive), he's decided to go out with a bitchslap, by declaring bookwriting more important than blogwriting. As for the supposed ease of weblog writing, I can only say speak for yourself.
[Update, July 2005: Gosh, this post is harsh. Gibson did restart his blog a year after the "stunt" and kept it going for a few months, but it has trailed off again. With two years hindsight I have only to add, not everyone has the need or personality for regular blogging. I'm not sure I always will. Blogging is right for me because I like to post sound and pictures (as opposed to say, a novel, where I would constantly be having to suppress and channel other senses through a linear stream of words), but that's me. Different strokes and all that...]
Slate has a rather tedious essay up at the moment explaining The Matrix's appeal to geeks. (Nerd becomes hero; it's like a computer game; other obvious points.) A more pertinent question is why it did so well with non-geeks. I saw the movie in a packed Times Square theatre and can attest that the kung fu-cheering audience came from all walks of life--not just Silicon Alley. Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir had an observation three years ago that now seems almost nostalgic:
The Matrix was the first movie of '99 to tap into the deepening unease surrounding the info-consumption economy. Its vision of the human race as isolated prisoners being forcefed an electronic false reality is, after all, pretty much true.I say almost nostalgic because while the context has changed from Clinton bubble to Bush endless-terror-war, the "electronic false reality" still remains in place. Even though I saw the World Trade Center fall with my own eyes, the image became intermixed almost immediately with the mediated version on TV, which had camera angles and freeze frame capability and running commentary unavailable to my bare senses. As Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek points out (thanks, Bruno), the twin towers' destruction was exactly the type of Hollywood blockbuster explosion America had been feeding itself as entertainment in the years preceding 9/11 (think Independence Day). In his essay written a few days after the WTC-toppling, Zizek somewhat touchingly wondered if the event would open our country's eyes to its own filtered, Truman Show reality. As if! From the slime tanks where we serve as human batteries, we've now seen two Matrix-like wars won with sheer technology. I didn't witness it, but read many media accounts of Pres. Bush's photo-op jet landing on an aircraft carrier after he "whipped Saddam's ass." The newscasters were gushing about how good he looked in a flight jacket. Maybe for the next war he can wear a long black coat.