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The pale surrogate humans of Michelle Handelman's performance work Passerby infiltrated Bryant Park today, mingling with the late lunch crowd. Resembling a cross between "living statue" mimes, Duane Hanson sculptures, and nerds who got lost on the way to a DEVO reunion, the actors mostly sat frozen, or changed position artistically, as if voguing. Prerecorded conversations came from iPods concealed in their bags or clothing. Did I say actors? They're actually reenactors: what most parkgoers didn't know was that real people had sat in these same positions a few days before, eaten the same takeout food, and spoken the same words. Handelman photographed them and recorded their chitchat and then turned her pod-folk loose to simulate them. (Her notes and photos are here).
Some of the privacy issues raised by this work were discussed earlier, and many of the conversations were frank and revealing despite their everyday banality. If you eavesdropped on the tapes (and you had to stand pretty close in the noisy park) you found out who was having parent problems, who was worried about blowing an audition, and who were ex-lovers. (My favorite line was one guy to another: "You were the daugher-in-law my mother never had.") But who would connect these intimate conversations to their source? Only someone in on the joke, or who stumbled randomly on the truth. If any of the tapees were mad or determined enough they could sue, I suppose, but surveillance in public places is pervasive, and of course we have to "watch what we say, watch what we do" in a time of total terror, as Ari Fleischer reminds us.More info here.
Günther Selichar's Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green annoys because it's a rather stale parody of a well known brand name of modernist abstraction and promotes bogus creativity under the guise of communal participation. What Selichar did was create a "make your own Barnett Newman" program and invite artists to fiddle around with it. You are limited to vertical stripes, the three aforementioned colors, a fixed size limit and whatever you can do to animate these elements. Thus Newman, whose work was "about" Kabbalistic meditation on a fixed object, or, alternatively, the phenomenology of moving back in forth in front of the canvas in real space and being subjectively affected by it, and whose paintings differed enormously depending on the scale and materials he used (this was abundantly clear from his recent Philadelphia retrospective) becomes fodder for disposable blinking graphic eye candy. (No, this isn't a Newman-protecting Hilton Kramer rant; I mean, the actual theories associated with his work could always use a plug, as opposed to "Newman=Evil White Man," but I'm more appalled that someone still thinks a riff on Newman is fresh--please read on.) Dozens of artists created virtually identical animations--it's painful to click through them and see how much alike they are--and the three most "original" were chosen by an expert panel including professional Newman hyperrealizer Peter Halley. The winners are currently having their animations shown hourly on a big video screen in Times Square.
In all fairness the three winners' pieces are pretty good given the limitations they had to work with--they're dynamic, hypnotic Op abstractions and almost make you forget you're looking at Newman's quasi-proprietary, well-known-from-art-school format. Selichar's project would be vastly improved if we found out it was a goof on corporate "customize your experience" faux-creativity and made light of the cult of artistic competitions and expert panels, by asking panelists to furrow their brows over hundreds of similar pieces created within ridiculously narrowly-defined parameters. Somehow I don't think we're going to find that out, though. (Apologies to selma and others who liked the piece; you do the hard work of linking and I'll carp.)
Below are photographs of the current World Trade Center site, taken from inside a moving PATH train as it enters the temporary station. The PATH is the main commuter subway from New Jersey: one branch goes under the Hudson and terminates at the WTC; another one enters Manhattan in the West Village. Explanatory captions are located under each picture.
1. Looking east. The large, evenly-dotted concrete wall is the so-called "bathtub," an enormous retaining wall that keeps water out from the surrounding landfill (and survived the catastrophe). Note huge truncated tunnel (water main?) in the center, and directly above it, the sign for Century 21, a thriving designer outlet store located across Church Street. 2. Looking northeast. The temporary PATH station is in the center of the photo, butting up against the bathtub. Trains enter the station several floors below street level. 3. Looking north. In the center is the rapidly-rebuilding WTC 7, former home of Mayor Giuliani's "command bunker in the sky." There are conflicting explanations for why the original building (which housed many federal government records and offices in addition to the bunker) was destroyed. (See 9/11 timeline, March 2, 2002) The three theories are: fires burning out of control (official explanation), an explosion of the fuel tanks for the Mayor's bunker (the New York Times' theory), or, according to a 2002 PBS interview statement by WTC owner Larry Silverstein, a deliberate, controlled demolition late in the afternoon on September 11, 2001 (what he called "pulling" the building). The rubble was cleared out quickly and its whereabouts are unknown. Of course, I don't believe anything conspiratorial happened regarding Tower 7.
I grew up in the same town as George Bush (Midland, Texas) and like him, was educated on the East Coast. He's older than me, but we went to the same junior high school (San Jacinto--Go Mustangs!). So I often wonder, what went wrong? With him, I mean. How is that I became an artist and a writer and a productive, creative member of society while he became a party animal, failed businessman, and later, election-stealer and killer of hundreds of soldiers? I ponder this a lot. (Excellent graphic from Bartcop.com.)
What Is An Art Blog? (2)
The "what is an art blog?" discussion continues in the comments to the previous post, and Cinque Hicks also has some thoughts on the subject. While some webjournals focus on work exhibited in museums and galleries (news and criticism) he kindly cites my page as a counter-example--in that it strays, and then strays from the straying, and maybe that's not so terrible. He has some good observations about art changing (horrors) into something more collective, fluid, and hybrid, and suggests that maybe blogs have a role to play in this. And he considers whether blogging can be an art, as opposed to just documentation.
Maybe, as with previous emerging media, we're still in the stage of figuring out what a so-called art blog is going to be best and worst at. Photography started out copying the formal strategies of painting until practitioners got a grip on its own unique properties; ditto film with stage plays. Blogs aren't art magazines; they have their own life and logic. For one thing, they don't have the same high production costs; you can post more text and pictures. If you can put up a music file, why shouldn't you? As for journalistic objectivity--maintaining a firewall between your creative and critical thoughts (this is assuming you're an artist)--forget about it! The print magazines are stifled by fake objectivity (like we don't know who pays the bills); people look to bloggers mainly for honesty. Also, thanks to Google, people do non-categorical searches, why should any blogger care about maintaining "evenness" or predictability? If anything the personal, diaristic nature of blogs makes random eclecticism the norm and tight, self-imposed parameters, well, not the norm.
This sounds like an argument for the (pretentious reference alert!) fox who knows many things over the hedgehog who knows one big thing, but reading a blog over time can also bring a "big thing" into clearer relief. I do believe, with the evil Greenberg, that visual art ought to remain entrenched in its area of greatest competence (as he once said about painting), that is, that there's something about the purely visual worth preserving and doing well, but to deny technology and where it might take the visual experience (via imaging software, Internet exchange, cross-pollination with other media) by replicating print magazine approaches to reviewing art-gallery art is pretty hard to defend at this point.
A woman in Europe named M_____ 0______ (name permission pending) is researching "artblogs" and sent these questions to artist & blogger T.Whid. He forwarded the list and my slightly edited response is below. All this stuff vomited out, probably, because it was so shocking to see this level of interest about something American galleries usually say "huh?" about:
• After having done research on the artblog phenomena for a couple of months now, I’m surprised to find that not many artists use this media. Personally I would find it an ideal space for artistic exhibition, exploration and exchange. Do you have an explanation to this?
• What made you start blogging?
• What keeps you blogging?
• Do you perceive your blog primarily as a personal or as a professional project?
• Does your blog affect your work process as an artist?
• Do you know of other artists blogging (besides M.River)?
• Do you know of artists reading your blog?
• Do you feel part of the blogosphere? I mean do you feel part of a community of (art)bloggers?
• Have you met any problems being a blogger?
Dear M_____ O______,
The non-responsiveness of the art world to blogging is a recurring theme with me. I write from New York but the syndrome is widespread. I attribute it to several factors:
(a) somewhat rapid change in tech--just as the galleries are getting all their fancy dot-com era Flash sites up and running, this thing called blogging comes along. Worse, some bloggers make fun of the Flash sites! Galleries and artists tend to rely more on tech experts to do their updating and even if they know about blogs, not everyone has (or should have) the personality for daily ranting.
(b) art galleries (and artists who produce for them) are still stuck in the era of steam trains and butter churns. In this world, it's all about print--hard copy reviews from recognized institutional authorities that can be sent to collectors and curators. Ethereal pixeled criticism is regarded as too impermanent and likely the work of lone cranks.
(c) institutions like the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council perpetuate the divisions between gallery art and new media art by requiring painters to send in slides for fellowships, residencies, etc., whereas a new media artist can just send a URL. This idea that a photo emulsion glimpsed through a Magic Lantern contraption on a metallic screen in a dark room is the "best" or "most accurate" way to judge physical work is très 19th Century. Once the medium of information exchange changes (to URLs, etc) then metacriticism linked or patched into those resources will seem more natural.
(d) the economic (collector/donor) base of the art world includes many tech-savvy people, who stare at computer screens all day for a living and by damn, when they want to relax they don't want more screen stuff, they want to immerse themselves in the healing balm of the "old ways"--viewing pigment-impregnated vegetable oil smeared on coarse cloth; standing in a clean quiet room having elevated discourse about exquisite, handmade objects; reading elegantly typeset reviews on solid paper stock with good offset printing (see (b) above). Dealers and artists tend to follow the collectors' preferences.
(e) as T.Whid mentioned [in his response to you], many artists are quite simply tech-phobic and/or uninclined to check in on a blog. Some are excited by the idea of jpegs of their work being viewable all over the world and the subject of ad hoc critical dialogue while their shows are still up; others don't give a hoot and would rather avoid the computer and wait 9 months for an Artforum review (possibly) to come out.
Tom Moody
PS There is an emerging community of art blogs out there that tends to draw its lines of
subject matter narrowly, chewing over news of museums, auction sales,
gallery gossip, old school art
appreciation... I'm more interested in the crossover of visual art, tech,
electronic music, film, science fiction, and politics than just replicating
the art world online. I sometimes get linkage from the pure art sites when I
do something "out there" like
criticize the Whitney, or one of the major magazines, but rarely when I just
talk about a show (in Williamsburg or wherever), and never when I stray
outside their specialized field of interest. I'm happy for the traffic, of
course, those are just some patterns I've noticed. I do read and link to some of
those blogs. As for blogs causing me "problems," I
was a print critic for years so I'm already screwed. Actually the blog has
been quite helpful in clarifying that my art practice and thoughts about
other artists are intertwined--it was a way voluntarily to take the
institutional edge off my writing.
I just contributed my first photo to the Street Meme database: a stencil of a smiling Gary Coleman captioned "Gary vs Giant," spotted on a Jersey City lamppost. Enlarged versions of the image are here. I guess a review is pending whether mine is a true first sighting of this meme, or whether it should properly be categorized as a related meme, submeme, or subsequent sighting of an original meme. There are only 100 pics in the database and I saw no other Garys. There may be legitimate doctrinal disputes as to whether (a) all stencils of Gary are considered one meme, (b) "Gary vs Giant" is the meme, or (c) (highly unlikely) that the style and caption of this image are close enough to the powerhouse Andre the Giant meme to subsume it within that meme. Of course my vote would be for (a), making my sighting very weighty and prestigious indeed.
The image in the previous post is a "virtual" version of a series I did in the early to mid-'90s, of acrylic and gouache molecules painted on giant, taped together sheets of doodled-on, throwaway paper. I did quite a few of these pieces (detail of one above--full sized one in progress below) before moving to New York and getting minimalist religion.
I mean, I like the ability of avowedly maximalist work to upset people. Collectors prefer elegant black and white abstractions that fade into the background, and the bad kid in me wants to make something they'll totally hate. And these are bad--there are a lot of degraded, half-finished pin-up girl drawings you can't see in the scanned polaroid, and bug-eyed caricatures, just the worst stuff. I'm compelled to do this kind of work (still) but once it's finished and I step back and look at it, I sometimes wish I hadn't.
My Loop Collection. The following are looped fragments of pop and electronic music I've been collecting. They could be karaoke or mashup fodder, or minimal art pieces suitable for playing in a gallery on a jukebox knocked off from Sol LeWitt. More will be added as I come across suitable material. Credits are withheld to discourage art-hating lawyerbots. Any or all will be removed at the least hint of trouble.
The Techno Loop [mp3 removed]
The Proto-Trance Loop [mp3 removed]
The Psychedelic Rock Loop [mp3 removed]
The decapitation of Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia brings together two recent themes of this weblog: beheading by Islamic militants and mowing down Arabs from the sky in Apache helicopters. According to this ABC news story, Johnson "worked on Apache attack helicopter systems for Lockheed Martin." While his death is horrible and deplorable, so are the sophisticated weapons the United States uses to turn Arabs into bloody piles of hamburger, in the course of our unprovoked war. Graphic photos purportedly documenting the Johnson killing are here: the big sword in one image looks more plausible than the knife used in Berg video. These thoughts and links are offered not to be flip or titillating but because we really need to be thinking about this stuff instead of Laci and Kobe. Interesting that this Talking Points Memo discussion of al-Qaeda violence in Saudi Arabia never mentions Johnson's occupation.
This pic just popped up on a new site called Street Memes, which tracks graffiti and other street art. "Toynbee Idea in Movie '2001': Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter" is an oldie but goody; I've seen it in black in white and color. This one's from Chicago but there are/were several in midtown New York. According to this page (one of many if you google the phrase) they've been spotted in a host of North and South American cities. There seems to be some debate whether the "Toynbee" is the historian Arnold Toynbee, who wrote of bodily resurrection as one of the ways a civilization deals with the fact of death, or a reference to Ray Bradbury's science fiction tale "The Toynbee Convector," about a time traveler who comes back with a wondrous vision of the future. More likely it's the former, a simple statement of the religious underpinnings of the Kubrick/Clarke film. The slogan always makes me think, though, of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels, where everyone who ever lived on earth is resurrected somewhere along the banks of enormously long, planet-girdling river. I don't know who's behind the slogan but I smile whenever I see it.
Adrien75's Chickadoo Chronicles: A Listener's Diary
[This post was extensively rewritten; the new version is here.]
Sidney Blumenthal in Salon: "As we made our way in the receiving line from the East Room, I noticed that the Georgia O'Keeffe painting that Hillary had hung, the first and only 20th century work of modern art in the White House, was gone. In its place was a nostalgic scene of the Old West."
Mark Dagley is one of my favorite painters but kind of a hard sell unless both humor and minimalism are your thing. He emerged in New York at the same time as Steve Di Benedetto, Steven Parrino, and Michael Scott, all of whom were doing post-Peter Halley masking tape paintings in the '80s. After a solo at Tony Shafrazi in '87 he showed quite a bit in Europe, and his work appears sporadically in the states. Of his peer group, I think he's the best, if not the best known. He has a genuinely quirky approach to Mondrian-ish "universal absolutes"--primary colors and basic structures that he keeps running catchy variations on. We worked together on a couple of exhibits, including "Op at UP" and "post-hypnotic," and he currently has a tight, exquisite little show up at Abaton Garage in Jersey City. The piece depicted above, Untitled Construction 5-30-04, consists of cylinders of Play-dohTM he allowed to dry in the tub and coated with acrylic resin. These "found color" objects are lined up inside a white-painted wood enclosure that hangs on the wall. Simple, elegant, stupid--what's not to like?
Camgirl (recently retired).
Artnet has a great interview up with artist Sue de Beer. Part of it is excerpted below. I've written about her work here and here and am impressed by her smarts, as well as her courage in injecting schlocko, gross-out horror conventions into the by-now familiar vocabulary of art world transgressions. It's not the shock value that makes her work special (we had Chris Burden and Karen Finley for that), or the "low culture into high," but rather some combination of the two: a willingness to be scary and as declasse as a Wes Craven movie at the mall. After the excerpt, I have a few thoughts on the relationship of her work to recent, real life (mediated) horror.
Ana Finel Honigman: Do you think deconstructing horror, like explaining a joke, kills its impact?All this talk of stabbing and guts hanging out and our relationship to it isn't just relevant to the art world. I'm curious to know what de Beer thinks of the Nick Berg "beheading" video, which is riddled with discrepancies and seems to be some hillbilly's idea of a slasher movie. Art trumping life trumping art. (I mean, check out the plastic prison chairs in the photos below.) Even though it's in a macho, war context, it made me think of Heidi 2's "operating scene," here Heidi's mom teaches Heidi how to "self operate" and Heidi removes her own stomach. This collaborative project with Laura Parnes is the exception to de Beer's credo of "either you have victims with no killer, or a killer with no victims." Unless you read the stomach operation as a self-inflicted wound (i.e., the Heidis are one person) and not as one generation literally damaging the next. At any rate, there's theatrical slashing with no spraying blood, just like the Berg video; a body part is removed and shot close-up; no dubbed-in scream, though. Anyway, apologies to Sue and Laura for comparing their work to real life melodrama; current events are forcing us to think this way.Sue de Beer: For me, if you stab something really hard with a knife, and make it bleed, you know, for art or for whatever, that should have enough impact on whoever is watching in whatever context. If it doesn’t have an impact, then it is probably just crappy.
AFH: How aggressive should art be in order to have an impact?
SdB: For me, sometimes stabbing something can have more impact if you ease up. Take for example, the photo I made of Sasha La Rosa. I photographed her bored and smoking with her intestines hanging out. It is a really soft romantic image, and you know she is alive, so you can take the time to check out her intestines without being too scared. But while you are doing that and enjoying how beautiful she looks, the impact hits. Your pleasure is in examining her guts. Maybe the scary part is in knowing that you want to see her cut open. Discovering the depth of your curiosity produces the impact.
AFH: Is it curiosity or schadenfreude? Isn't the pleasure a mixture of sympathy for the victim and empathy for the killer?
SdB: Yes. I was just reading a Slavoj Zizek essay on Lolita because I am making this new piece about desire, the act of desiring someone or something. In the essay, Zizek describes the moment when Humbert realizes Lo's mother is dead and Lo is his, as the pivotal scene in which Nabokov implicates the reader in Humbert's pedophilia. Because we want to know what will happen, we have to develop an empathetic relationship with Humbert and Zizek argues that part of the book’s power is in welcoming the reader to join in the crime. Nabokov allows everyone to be the pervert. We want him to succeed.
AFH: So in making your work, you are working for us?
SdB: Well, I guess the difference is that in my work, no one ever gets anywhere. It is all fait accompli, to be a little bit French about it. If the event was going to work out in my work, you would kind of know it beforehand. If it wasn’t, you kind of know that too.
AFH: But isn’t chilly suspense the most important part of horror?
SdB: Perhaps, but my work is a portrait of a moment in time with no beginning and no end. It is of a situation that just exists. You can't really have empathy for the killer because there is no killer. There is only death and a body. Or sometimes the opposite is true, like in Hans und Grete. There, there is a boy with black hair who wants to be strong. He wants to be a tough violent kid. He wants to be a killer but he doesn’t really have any victims. So either you have victims with no killer, or a killer with no victims.
Now that the Gipper's in the grave and we're all sick of the subject: he was a mediocre-to-bad1 President who did not end the cold war or break the back of inflation but did cause a lot of suffering in the world, particularly in Central America. Some pretty good negative obits are Ted Rall's, Greg Palast's (scroll down to June 6), and Alexander Cockburn's. American politics became surreal in 1980 once people decided to hire a movie actor as President. Wasn't that when the Athenian democracy went into decline, when they started electing actors? The folks writing his scripts weren't surrealists, though: they had a very straightforward agenda of turning the clock back to some perceived Eisenhower '50s while plunging their hands deeply into the till. David Lynch nailed the era in Blue Velvet--behind the facade of old Gus waving from his red fire truck lurked the sexually depraved, oxygen-huffing criminal. Reagan's men had to wait 12 years before they found another wax dummy Average Americans could fall for--they almost succeeded in recreating what they had in the '80s, except Frank Booth keeps popping up on people's television screens. Reagan was a much better animatronic doll than George Junior.
1. Mediocre in that we're all still alive.
I made a few tweaks to my main site page. Since I've been doing more animation than installation lately I put the animation log higher up the list. Also I made a page for my music .mp3s. The artist's statement remains intact because it's what I still believe--I just added a little update about my growing interest in "time- and internet-based work."
I originally created that family of pages to apply for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Trade Center studio program. They said you could submit a URL instead of slides, so even though I was basically painting and drawing (with the computer & printer) I was happy to dispense with the whole slide ritual. I've since found out the LMCC only wants URLs for new media or net-based projects--painters still have to submit slides. How techno-provincial is that? I guess the LMCC new media judge opened my URL that year and went, "hey where are all the moving parts and sounds making a profound comment on databases as art, the economic biases of the web, etc? These are just abstractions and drawings of pretty girls!"--if it even got that far.
There has been some discussion of late (here, and scroll down) of moving some "major cultural institutions" to the World Trade Center site. Names being tossed around include the New York City Opera and the Drawing Center. I offer the following modest proposal, which is that no cultural organization move to the site for the following reasons: (a) too much suspicion and lingering questions about the destruction of the first buildings to just "move on," (b) fear of a second attack in a Bush-increased terror atmosphere, (c) commercial motivations and personal greed of the present property owner, (d) distrust of any environmental bill of health given the site by the owner, the City, or the Feds, and (e) not enough attention to calls to keep the land empty as a memorial to the dead.
UPDATE: Item (d) was added in response to a comment by selma on the other thread.
UPDATE 2: Per this Newsday article, it's just been announced that the Drawing Center and some other institutions that don't share the above concerns will be moving to "ground zero," as the article refers to the site.
Making art in the age of abusive copyright enforcement.
Negativland and Public Enemy are two '80s groups who became experts on copyright whether they wanted to be or not. U2's overbearing record label forced Negativland to defend appropriation theory in court (and radicalized them to a point of complete obsession on this issue, as trauma has a way of doing); Public Enemy quickly learned what they could and couldn't create after sampling suits brought hiphop's most innovative phase to a halt. Negativland now maintains an online database relating to "fair use" and other copyright issues (be sure to check out their interview with U2's The Edge if you haven't), and Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee recently gave an industry-savvy interview on "how copyright changed hiphop." Along with law professor Lawrence Lessig (and many others) these groups are urging fundamental changes to American copyright laws. This is important but don't expect it to happen anytime soon, given the strength of the music and film industry lobbies. For those planning to make art in the meantime, these are your sole options:
1. Stay poor. The humorless twit who sued Jeff Koons over that "string of puppies" photo would never have done it if Koons hadn't been an "art star." Very few people sue to make a point (except RIAA); it's too expensive.2. Record live versions of other people's songs, or song fragments, for the sole purpose of sampling them--you avoid the "master recording" fee for the sample and only have to pay the "publication" fee. Just kidding: this is actually done by the big-bucks hiphop performers, as described in the Chuck D/Hank Shocklee interview, but it sounds fake as hell--essentially having a lawyer as a creative partner.
3. Stay several steps ahead of the shysters by mutating the sounds so they're virtually untraceable. A lot of drum and bass producers do this. You don't get that bang of recognition ("Oh that's Richard Dawson in Running Man!") but the texture of the sound is yours to play with.
4. Make completely original art. No more samples, no more collage, it's back to the Modernist dictate "make it new." It's always possible you heard or saw something subconsciously that crept into your work and could get you sued, but creativity isn't just about mixing up other people's stuff. (Dumb, I know; I just put it in in case Jed Perl stumbled across the page).
This Financial Times essay by Michael Lind argues that the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have damaged not just the neoconservative cause of establishing
jimpunk at 544x378 WebTV remixed my atom .gif, so I re-remixed it.
UPDATE: A couple more iterations are in the comments.
Via thickeye we learn about an upcoming Michele Handelman performance where she surreptitiously photographs and audiotapes people in a public park and then, on another day and in the same places in the park, stages reenactments of what they were doing and saying. Live performers--surrogate humans with white hair, white skin, white clothes, and orange-lensed goggles--will sit in the same positions as the tapees and the audio of their conversations will be transmitted through loudspeakers. Fine, so far, but the press release description just gives me hives:
Michelle Handelman will spend one day in Bryant Park clandestinely documenting visitors to the park, recording their conversations, photographing them, and taking note of their location/time in the park. During a single performance, entitled Passerby, she will work with performers to recreate five of the situations she observed in the exact locations at the same time they originally occurred. Handelman's project addresses the possibility for or lack of privacy in public space as well as the prevalence of and high tolerance for surveillance and will take place on Tuesday, June 29th, from 1-4PM in Bryant Park, 6th Avenue between 40th/42nd Streets. Rain date is Thursday, July 1st.The phrase in bold is the type of earnest curatorial recap they use in Whitney wall labels, taking the edge out of the art and making it "socially responsible" for skittish newbies. Plus, it's not accurate. To say the work addresses our "high tolerance for surveillance" is just wrong if these people don't know they're being taped. What if a kid is agonizing out loud about whether to come out, or a couple is trying to decide whether to have an abortion, or, if this seems too farfetched, what if a guy is just obsessing to his girlfriend about his BO? Will Handelman edit conversations down to material she feels is "not too invasive"? Is she going to get releases, now that likenesses and voices are increasingly treated as intellectual property? Or is she just going to throw caution to the winds and see what happens?
Many of the same issues were raised by Sophie Calle 25 years ago in her "Venetian Suite" pictures, where she followed a man around and photographed him without his knowledge. Is the artist critiquing surveillance or just being a voyeur? Also, films such as The Conversation and Blow-up taught us that these little slices of life can be utterly unlike what they appear to be and have only as much meaning as one reads into them. Maybe that's where our tolerance of surveillance, if it's true we tolerate it, comes from? At any rate, those are the kinds of issues that ought to be raised in the press release. I look forward to checking out the performance.
More things will be said about the upcoming show in which Handelman's work appears, "public.exe: Public Execution," organized for Exit Art by Michele Thursz and Anne Ellegood with participating curator Defne Ayas. Stay tuned.
Update: review of the Handelman performance here.
I hereby humbly present my Justin Berkovi Mix [.mp3 removed], featuring several of this UK producer's innovative techno tracks from the late '90s/early '00s. I thought the Village Voice was being perverse comparing techno to bluegrass a few years back (actually it was the other way around, and it was disparaging) but the second track "Gaddster" makes the connection explicit--much more convincingly than the The Grid's early '90s one-off "Swamp Thing." Berkovi doesn't just superimpose a banjo over a dancefloor beat, he actually uses electronic instrumentation and studio wizardry to mimic the rhythm and feel of a thumping hoedown, or maybe "holedown" since the track keeps plunging into the sonic equivalent of the Ketamine hole. Here's a track listing, all mixed live from vinyl EPs:
"Dark Clouds" from "The Storm" (Predicaments 11)
"Gaddster" from the "01273 Predicaments" (Force Inc.)
"Thass Raaht Baaahbee" from "Tanned Lumps With Lipstick" (Predicaments 9)
Track 2, text side, from Nightrax "London" EP (with Ibrahim Alfa)
"Dark Clouds" reprise
The plan was not to post anything too serious today, but here are some rhetorical questions addressed to future Memorial Days:
Did the cold war end because of Reagan's budget-busting military buildup or because the Soviet Union rotted from within?
With America's superpower rival gone, are "rogue states" and Islamic terrorists enough justification to maintain 700-plus military bases all over the world, and thousands of nukes?
Is the Dick Cheney goal of "imposing a fearful peace"1 on the world the right course for Americans?
Is "Islamic terrorism" about taking over America or getting America to leave Islamic countries?
1. Cheney didn't actually phrase it this way--it's what John Perry Barlow thinks his fellow libertarian Wyoming mountain man is trying to accomplish in Washington. Cheney a libertarian--what a joke: he's a creature of corporate and government bureaucracy.
It's a holiday (or post-holiday) so I'm posting stupid stuff today (or more stupid than usual). Like the homestar-ish End of the World (link may be dead because site exceeded bandwidth). This may be old news but I just discovered it. No disrespect meant to the war dead, but if we don't [fill in cautionary statement here].