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| "Post-painterly abstraction" was Clement Greenberg's term for a kind of self-referential art that, by the 1960s, was becoming increasingly less rooted in the physical world of art-making materials. The then-new polymer paints made possible a kind of uninflected visual experience: color experienced as pure presence. The minimalists took this logic further than Greenberg was willing to go with an emphasis on found materials and processes: e.g., Dan Flavin's colored light bulbs. Extend the logic even more and art would be a series of Sol Lewitt-like commands to a piece of hardware such as a computer monitor, telling it to beam certain colors in certain configurations directly to a remote viewer's eyes.
And that's what Christopher (or Chris) Ashley is doing with his "html drawings," it seems to me: these aren't jpegs that can be right-clicked and saved but a series of instructions to your browser, telling it to draw tables in particular shapes and fill them in with hexadecimal colors (#0088bb, #00bbbb, #0077cc, #00CCCC, #0099cc, and #00dddddd in the piece above, for example). As you can see from Ashley's archive, some of the configurations get quite elaborate. I like the simplicity of Santa Cruz, Monterrey, Pacific Grove (reproduced here without permission by saving the html in "View/Source" on my toolbar, hope it's OK), but also the complexity of The Asian Influence in Drawing, I - XV and the super-baroque Hippie Dreams, I - XII, the latter of which also incorporates .gif files. One quibble: an aspect of a project like this ought to be that each viewer experiences the work as his/her browser interprets it, just as painters ultimately must lose control of the lighting conditions and surroundings in which their art is viewed. Ashley has said that certain pieces are best viewed on IE, which favors a proprietary format and kind of stunts the magic of a million possible readings (including "incorrect" readings) of the work. Ashley also has a nice weblog here. This is my off-the-cuff take on his work, BTW, and may not jibe at all with his own theory; looking forward to exploring the site(s) and learning more. |
American Splendor, the new movie about underground comix writer Harvey Pekar, is Crumb Lite. It's funny (funnier than the one Pekar comic I've read--#15), but the filmmakers have succeeded mainly in domesticating a talented crank. The actor who plays Harvey is smoother, dopier, more like a sitcom actor; the actress who plays his wife is fetching even with ironed hair and nerdygirl glasses. Think back to Crumb for a sec: the unstinting, voyeuristic interviews with the artist's damaged brothers, the excruciating footage of Crumb talking to an ex-girlfriend, the whole porn magazine/acid casualty vibe of a failed counterculture. That film took you to the edge. By contrast, the edgiest moment in Splendor is footage of the real Pekar appearing on Letterman. He's unkempt, he's unpredictable, he fights back.
The most compromised moment in the film is the restaging of Pekar's final appearance on Late Night, where he told off Dave and launched into a jeremiad against NBC's military-contractor owner, GE. As the movie sets it up, it's all explained as a byproduct of Harvey's personal problems. The scene is filmed with the camera behind his chair, looking out at the shocked reactions of the audience. His actual rant is sliced into bits and pieces, to "denote the passage of time" but also making it less intelligible. Worse, the scene is intercut with shots of Harvey's friends and co-workers watching their TVs at home in dismay. You can't help thinking this is how the infotainment world (indie film division) processes someone just a little too individualistic. They give him the world (this'll do more business than Crumb, I expect) but none-too-subtly muffle his voice.