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Ryan Compton, Mathematics of Composition (Brains and Grid), silkscreen, 2004, 17.5 X 22.5 inches, from "The Infinite Fill Show." "Compton invests what Leo Steinberg called the 'flatbed picture plane' of Rauschenberg and Warhol with the almost perceptible audial tint of a feeding-back electric guitar dropped from a considerable height." --October magazine (just kidding, I made that up). I believe that's Britney Spears posed like the Virgin Mary over the soccer ball and the brains.
Simon Reynolds on Beats as Fonts
The analogy that struck me was fonts. If your classic rock drum sound is something like Baskerville or Times New Roman, then the drums in the Belgian stuff or early Eurohouse or The KLF is perhaps equivalent to Arial or Lucida Console or something of that ilk: streamlined, almost-naturalistic, with a hint of futurity and this-is-the-modern-world. But like your classic rock drum sound, the beat/font doesn’t really draw attention to itself, it’s functional--rhythm as division of time. Pure information. Of course rock drum sound hasn’t always been like that--think of psychedelia’s effects-laden beats: the billowing, phased drum-rolls on The Small Faces’ "Itchycoo Park" being equivalent perhaps to the trippy typography on all those Fillmore Ballroom posters for bands like Sopwith Camel and Jefferson Airplane, woogly and pendulous to the point of illegibility.
Looksmart's FindArticles is putting old art magazine articles online; from the blowing my own horn department, I offer the following links:
Frances Colpitt's Art in America piece on abstract painting in Texas, which discusses an interesting scene we had going there in '94-'95 (continuing to this day even though several painters moved to NY). Also discussed besides yours truly are John Pomara, Aaron Parazette, David Szafranski, Jeff Elrod, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, and others. It's amusing to read her description of Elrod's (then) slacker paintings of Atari game imagery, since he eventually became a somewhat stylish reifier of vector flotsam. (Boy, there's an article; I wonder who will write it?)
My Artforum review of the French (Corsican) artist Ange Leccia's solo at the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston. I described this big-scale Fluxo-conceptualist's entire show based on how it compared to various strains of abstract painting, using commodity art as a straw man. The show was good, but in retrospect I'd say it was a meditative climb-down from the work that got him known--the curious conceit of doing ephemeral Yoko Ono gestures with massive heavy-industry-produced technology.
From my first year of New York Artforum reviews, a piece on Barbara Gallucci: a 1996 show that Roberta Refused to Touch. Well, I remember she did a big roundup of hot new Soho galleries that month and managed not to mention Lauren Wittels' space, which was definitely hot at the time. There was some personal back story associated with the exhibit that I was definitely aware of, but I chose to review it with a "cold" interpretation.