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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.