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Couple smooching on xerox machine glass - drawn freehand in my cubicle today - the original image I eyeballed was a takeaway xerox print from Erika Somogyi & Evan Greenfield's cube (next to mine in the ART^!*@#WORK show).
More "live drawing" done in my cubicle earlier today.
I haven't seen these photos by Grace Graupe Pillard in person, or projected, which is how they're being shown at The Proposition, 559 West 22nd Street, New York, through June 25. The thumbnails certainly get across the sickening disconnect between us Americans going about our business in our lovely cities while another country is ripped apart by an unprovoked war we started. Yes, we did experience some of this in two American cities 3 years ago, 9/11 was horrible and tragic, but what did attacking Iraq have to do with that? (Don't answer that, Jim Bob.)
Not drawn in my cubicle. I did this at home (reposted earlier today with changes). Update: revised yet again and reposted.
"Aye-aye-aye" [mp3 removed] My first real house track (I originally said "techno house" but don't want to put off anyone who envisions "pounding" and "Berlin" when they see the t-word--the little electro touches don't make this piece any less friendly). I have some other plans for this tune, but this is the basic concept.
An addendum to two recent posts, the one on hippies and the one on Gary Wilson's Mary Had Brown Hair. Bill's comment reminded me that the Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For the Money, which Wilson's record was compared to here, also contains "Flower Punk," a song ridiculing donning beads and moving to Haight (written in 1967!). That has nothing to do with Wilson--I was thinking in my comparison more of the mood of "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" and "Idiot Bastard Son" from the same LP* which are kind of wistful and hook-y in addition to having a sonic sculpture aspect (and being weird). "Flower Punk" offers solid proof, though, along with the more-sardonic-than-you-remember commune scene in Easy Rider, that not every baby-boomer bought (or buys) into the generational mythology--that the seeds of the present day critique of "codes of representation" vis a vis hippies, to the extent that's going on, were already well sprouted back in the day. Zappa preferred "freak"--sort of the wised-up, media-savvy, L.A. version of long haired non-conformism. Nevertheless, it's the earth mama and Neal Cassady dropping the hammer that we fondly eulogize, or recycle in the art world every ten years.
*The LP as opposed to Zappa's disastrous 80s CD remix. --music nerd
Modern Art Notes spotted a funny headline over a recent NY Observer review by neocon grump Hilton Kramer: "Realist Richard Baker Confers His Anxiety On Tulips, Lemons." It's the bored headline writer's revenge for having to read a by-the-numbers, ridiculously hedged review. Kramer's main point (I think) isn't that Baker makes still life subjects anxious, but that the artist dissipates his talent in not-so-clever pictorial tricks calling attention to the paint medium. A more accurate (and Kramer-like) tag would be "Self-Reflexive Shenanigans Drain Needed Anxiety from Tulips, Lemons."
Been thinking about hippies lately. Not just me, the art world is going through (yet another interminable) hippie phase, inspired by "the rise of the new art collectives" and/or the salesmanship of gallerists Daniel Reich and John Connelly--some cynics say they're one and the same phenomenon. (Not saying I'm saying that, but have had a couple of impassioned discussions with people in the last week who think the 2003 Holland Cotter article identifying art collectives as a national trend was either part of an elaborate marketing scheme or a lazy writer being handed a package by a dealer--"collectives" being a more or less constant, short-lived byproduct of kids meeting up in art school.)
Christopher Hitchens, in a recent diatribe about how much the left sucks, sought to condense the whole 60s counterculture down to one image of lame misguidedness: the commune 20-somethings in Easy Rider scattering seed in the dusty furrows of the land where they have to come to "make their stand." That socks it home all right--but doesn't give the film credit for being a smart and subtle critique of the very phenomenon it was selling: right after the shot of the barefoot seed-sowers, the camera pulls back and lingers over a western landscape that is mountainous and dry, dry, dry. Just as you're thinking that, Peter Fonda says, "Do you get much rain out here?" (And then later, incongruously, opines "They're gonna make it.")
The photo above is a work from Justin Samson's current show at John Connelly Presents. I assume this is a sculpture Samson made and am guessing it was for a residency at Andrea Zittel's Joshua Tree, CA, studio/project space High Desert Test Sites, so no actual hippies were involved. Below is the Mondo Mondo Trading Post, which Matt Savitsky and Kevin McGarry erect outside strip mall coffee shops, bookstores and the like to trade Perler bead souvenirs. Again, no bonafide tuning in, turning on, or dropping out is occurring--day jobs are preserved while we are reminded of our buckskin past, just as in Little House on the Prairie reruns. I actually like McGarry's and Savitsky's project, and I like the Samson photo, but am just wondering--what is it with artists and hippies these days? Is it yet another media critique? (They loved the 60s back in the 80s too--loved to make fun of them--as in Kenny Scharf's sardonic black light rooms and Halley's Day Glo paints.) Is it some unironic yearning for "the real" amongst all the Starbucks simu-culture? A little of both? Can those be mixed?
The Rude Pundit imagines what Hogan's Heroes would be like in the current world of Bush-encouraged torture:
Every other time Hogan had invoked the Geneva Convention (for instance, "Colonel Klink, I must protest as a violation of the Geneva Convention the private interrogation of my men by a Gestapo officer"), Klink had crumbled like a house of cards. But when he tried this time, he was slammed face down on the Klink's desk as the Commandant exhaled a frustrated, "Hooogannnn. I'll show you what we think of the Geneva Convention." And then Hogan heard a thick sheaf of papers being rolled tightly. Well, this is poetic, Hogan thought, just before he felt the searing pain of the Geneva Conventions being shoved into his ass. Schultz protested briefly, but Klink asked the bumbling Sergeant what he would say to any investigators.
"I see noth-ink," he exclaimed. "I see noth-ink."
More wormy art drawn in my cubicle (today).
"Happy E-tune" (Dance Party Remix). [mp3 removed] In which four melodic parts that bring new meaning to the word jaunty get the full remix treatment, with a phased drum break. The overlapping synth voices are like a conversation where people keep interrupting each other.
Drawn at "work" in my cubicle Tuesday and today. I didn't feel like doing portraits, I felt like doing wormy, noodly things.
Quick take: Listened to Gary Wilson's Mary Had Brown Hair again last night, and am in awe of his music and art. I mean to do a proper review eventually, and posted some other people's thoughts here. I don't think he is "just a weirdo," I think his "loser mooning over old girlfriends" is a carefully thought out persona and his music as tight and smart as any I've heard. I would compare MHBH to the Mothers' We're Only In It for the Money, partly, obviously, because Wilson disguises his vocals by speeding them up the way Zappa did, but also for its intriguing combination of humor, poignancy, and Cagean noise aesthetics. Sped up or not, I love what the Dusted reviewer calls Wilson's "white soul bro" voice--the way he lapses from singing into just talking,or rambling, about those (fantasy?) femmes who won't stop circling around inside his brain.
Jack Masters: "Yes, with only MS paint, a lousy gif animator, and something to generate random numbers, you too can make this seething mass of pixelated fractally horror."
Rotating smile emoticon html-enlarged by cosmic_disciple (Travis Hallenbeck).
Donald Rumsfeld: Loser
From Reuters (this is already a month old but still relevant):
Asked during the briefing "are we winning" the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not directly respond.Rumsfeld knows how to start a fight but not how to finish it.
"The United States and the coalition forces, in my personal view, will not be the thing that will defeat the insurgency," Rumsfeld said.
"So, therefore, winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional, conventional context of using the word 'winning' and 'losing' in a war. The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis."
[...]
After Rumsfeld finished, [Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Richard] Myers interjected, "I'm going to say this: I think we are winning, OK? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."
Before The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou*, before Sealab 2021 (or even Sealab 2020), there was:
From the Onion's Films That Time Forgot: "Is it really better down where it's wetter, as animated crabs suggest? That's what Tony Randall intends to find out when he signs his family up to live in his experimental underwater house, in an attempt to convince his skeptical boss Jim Backus that the model is feasible. Randall's wife Janet Leigh is terrified of water (which, after Psycho, is understandable), but concedes anyway. So do the shaggy ruffians in Harold And The Hang-Ups, an anonymous, faintly hippie-ish pop-rock outfit that includes Randall and Leigh's fresh-faced progeny, plus a young Richard Dreyfuss. The gang soon learns that the life aquatic can also be la vida loca, thanks to sharks, technical malfunctions, professional competition, dancing sea creatures, cheap animated sequences, and a wacky comic-relief seal. Even worse, a hurricane threatens to end Randall's experiment prematurely. But everything works out in time for the band's big closing underwater performance on The Merv Griffin Show." More from the Onion review of this terrible Ivan Tors film from 1969:
Can easily be distinguished by:
It's virtually alone in the underwater-house rock 'n' roll family-comedy subgenre.
Timeless message:
Placing one's family in mortal danger is a great way to cultivate teamwork and togetherness.
Memorable quotes:
Griffin introduces Harold And The Hang-Ups by assuring the audience that the band's manager is "stoned on these shouters," finding them to be "mellow yellow, turned-on, and groovy!"
*Zissou: tied for best film of 2004 with I Heart Huckabees, Oscars notwithstanding. From imdb's memorable quotes: Steve Zissou: "Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?" Anne-Marie Sakowitz: "No, they have to share one."
"Reggae Scratchin'" (Swedish Deathmetal Version) [mp3 removed]. As threatened, an (incredibly distorted) "lead" has been added and the scratching pared back to accommodate the new chops. Somewhat inspired by Faust, my musical gods from the '70s, except scratching wasn't invented then.
Some good photos from the ART@><*WORK show* taken by Chris Ashley, who was in town from the West Coast to be on the Blogging & the Arts Panel at the New Museum. Top to bottom: (1) dude working hard in foreground cubicle with details from Erika Somogyi/Evan Greenfield cube behind, (2) Elana Langer's work area, (3) Douglas Repetto/LoVid's cube, (4) Langer deals with falling Irene Moons, (5) Brian Alfred--the whole array including the tools is made out of Color Aid paper, (6) Cat Mazza's cube. I like the way Ashley just plunged in there with his digital camera, nailed the spirit of the show, and had it all up on his weblog the next day (with accompanying text). This should be the model for art writing/reportage: artist with camera and clue documents on the fly as opposed to waiting around for some old-media wizard to dignify your show in print months after the fact. (A concomitant aspect being that you would then link to said reportage on your "hompy"--what they call homepages in Korea--as opposed to whining that you never get ink, which would have the side benefit of increasing the standing of the artist/documenter and eventuallly breaking the deadly cult of stultified expertise that ruled art in the last century.)
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Rhizome.org's Net Art News has a nice writeup on the ART@><*WORK show. Lauren Cornell begins her piece with the following hackle-raising anecdote:
A New York gallerist once took the wind out of my sails by telling me "If you're not trying to make it to the top in this town, then GET OUT OF THE WAY!" Umm, what top? What way?Let's briefly answer those questions. The top: Gagosian, Matthew Marks, PaceWildenstein. The way: art school with influential 70s/80s figure on faculty, show with Connelly or Reich, inclusion in the Whitney, move to the Boesky/Rosen stratum and if you survive midcareer hell thence to canonization and high-level commerce at the aforementioned "top" galleries. That's it, folks!
Speaking of alternatives, Joy Garnett has a report on the second Blogging & the Arts panel here. Fun event but too sparsely attended! I guess everyone was busy making it to the top. Thanks to Francis Hwang for organizing these events (there'll be more), also under the auspices of Rhizome.org at the New Museum.
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/
Lucas Samaras' Hands, animated GIF, 2005. I posted this animated .GIF a couple of weeks ago and am reposting it with the explanation that it's not a piece by Lucas Samaras, it's a piece by me--a "remix" of one of his quicktime movies. I had shot a bunch of stills in the gallery trying to get "the single shot where his hands looked the strangest" for the blog, then realized the "proof shots" could be cropped, animated, and scrunched down to 16 colors to make this animation. It's meant a bit as a criticism--it is more dynamic than his current work and the pallette is in the spirit of his *very* dynamic early work. A friend thought this GIF was his piece and others may have thought that too, hence the repost and gaseous explanation.
Portrait of the late Steven Parrino, based on an artnet photo by Nancy Smith. Drawn in my cubicle Sunday and Tuesday.
The audio of the speech by George Galloway, British member of Parliament, dressing down the shysters in the US Senate who enabled Bush's Iraq invasion (i.e., almost all of them, but his words are aimed at Norm Coleman), has to be heard. (1 MB .mp3.) His voice never wavers, his grammar and diction are a perfect sledgehammer beating those fools. Apparently the solons were squirming in their chairs "unused to such stark language in their polite chambers" or however the papers phrased it. The salient part of his speech is below:
"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
"If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.
"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
"Reggae Scratchin'" [6.6 MB .mp3 removed--see update below]
Bonus b-side: "Slowsteppin'" [mp3 removed]
(genius "scratch school" photo by anthony pidgeon, east bay express, via google images; bob marley graphic from fill in the blank fan site)
I will probably do a more complex version of "Reggae Scratchin'"; this is the bare bones "street" version, ha ha. Obviously the scratching could be varied more throughout the piece, some more instrumental voices could be added, blah blah good songwriting values blah blah.
Update, March 19, 2008: "Reggaedrome II" [4.3 MB .mp3] replaces the "street" version, which I took down.
Chris Ashley, The Infinite Line: List, 2005, HTML, 620 x 500 pixels
Blogging and the Arts Panel 2
Rhizome.org at the New Museum is having its second Blogging and the Arts Panel tomorrow night, Tuesday, May 17. You may recall the first panel, which yours truly was on and which got written up ad infinitum...on this page. Here's the prospectus for tomorrow's:
Rhizome.org Director of Technology Francis Hwang will lead a panel discussion on Blogging and the Arts. This panel, the second in a series hosted by Rhizome.org, includes painter and web-artist Chris Ashley, painter Joy Garnett, artist and programmer Patrick May, and writer Liza Sabater. The discussion will address issues such as ways that artists are using blogs to distribute their own work, and the influence of blogging culture on political issues of interest to those in the arts.Chris Ashley's work has been talked about on this weblog quite a bit; it's nice to see him getting over here to the east coast for some meat space confabbing. His work was described by some internet soundbite-meister as "Mondrian for your browser," and that's perfectly good but omits a few art historical steps and much of the innovation, as described here and here.
About Rhizome.org
Founded in 1996, Rhizome.org is an internet-based platform for the global new media arts community. Through programs such as publications, online discussion, art commissions, and archiving, it supports the creation, presentation, discussion, and preservation of contemporary art using new technologies. Since 2003, Rhizome.org has been affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Clocked in a solid six hours working in my cubicle today. Did this drawing, Chloe Stage Two (previously described here and slightly reduced in size for the blog), and another one I hope to wrap up on Tuesday.
UPDATE: I knew I was going to do this. I got up this morning and started tweaking this drawing. Above is the current state.
[via Travis Hallenbeck, who finds great stuff on the net.]
"Alpha Romeo" [mp3 removed].
"Alpha Romeo" is not actually made with a Vermona drum machine. It's all soft-synths, but the "kicks" are analog-modeling. I just posted this picture because I think it's beautiful, and kind of fits the vibe of the piece.
"There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. “ - George W. Bush, July 2, 2003.
War News for Thursday, May 12, 2005 (from Today in Iraq)
Bring 'em on: Twelve killed in car bomb attack in central Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Seventeen killed in car bomb attack in Shia market area in Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Two marines killed and 14 injured in bomb attack near the Syrian border.
Bring 'em on: Iraqi army general assassinated in Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Iraqi police colonel assassinated in Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Car bomb kills two in Kirkuk.
Bring 'em on: Two Iraqi civilians injured in car bomb attack on US convoy in Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Oil infrastructure attacked in Kirkuk.
Bring 'em on: Families flee as attacks on Al Qaim continue.
Bring 'em on: Large explosions heard near Japanese base in Samara.
Bring 'em on: Two Iraqi soldiers killed in attack in Baghdad.
Bring 'em on: Dutch troops involved in firefight in Basra.
Bring 'em on: Two killed and twenty injured in explosion in Umm Qasr.
We marched to prevent this thing, but the "majority" of Americans thought George Bush knew what he was doing (line from Animal House: "You fucked up! You trusted us!"). Another 80 billion dollars of our money was just appropriated by the U.S. Senate by a 100-0 vote (that means including John Kerry), to perpetuate this mess, bringing the total to 300 billion dollars wasted. And over 1600 American lives. Unbelievable. Apparently the news media don't think this is good TV anymore, so we little people are going to have to keep posting reminders, even if it's "boring." Just added Today in Iraq, where the above synopsis was taken, to the links over on the left. Impeach Bush!
Assuming this isn't a hoax about Susan Sontag writing lyrics for Fischerspooner, it should be noted that the words were a rather pale retread of Fear's "Let's Have a War" ("let's have a war/jack up the Dow Jones...let's have a war/so you can go and die, etc") from 1982 or so. May she rest in peace but this had to be said.
Another more or less verbatim art world (Williamsburg) conversation, from last weekend.
[Artist A is having an opening. Moody and Artist A discuss Artist A's work at some length, then the subject of "digital art" generally, then the recent Lucas Samaras show, which Artist A didn't see and asks Moody to describe. It is a pleasant enough conversation until Barger walks up.]
Barger: I hope you don't mind if I barge in on your discussion here.
Artist A: Not at all.
Moody: Not at all.
Artist A: He was just telling me about the Lucas Samaras show.
[Moody recaps briefly and finishes the point he was making. Barger stares at Moody with what can only be described as defiant blankness, then turns to Artist A.]
Barger: So, Artist A, I really like the [describes technique] in your prints! It's just great!
[Moody realizes it is, after all, Artist A's opening, and it's never exactly rude to derail a discussion to give the honoree a compliment, so he waits a moment or two until a third person joins the conversation, then exits the group, mainly to get away from Barger.]
SCREENFULL is lending a thoughtful hand helping me to put up new drawings in my cube and/or has hijacked my current exhibition space. Thanks, guys.
UPDATE: That's some pretty seamless photoshoppery they're doing. If they decide to turn to the dark side (corporate media) they could be rich and live in that cube thing they're building down on the Lower East side! My own skills don't include being able to turn imagery on a plane so that it's seen at various perspective angles. It's the reverse process of the technology used to "rectify" the Pollock photos so that Pepe Karmel could divine their ultimate secret: that underneath all that messy abstraction lay the all important HUMAN FIGURE!
(Edited slightly). Thanks to everyone who came to the opening of ART)@*!(WORK. The group show takes place in an office cube farm on the 16th floor of a building at 520 8th Avenue (between 36th and 37th). I carried out my plan which was to sit in a cubicle drawing pictures on the computer and shooting the shit with people. Neither the cube ambience nor the business casual attire was particularly ironic in my case--it's pretty much how I dress and live, now, but especially in 1995-2000, the time period in my working life I was "channeling" in the performance by using an old computer, Windows 98, and MSPaintbrush as my main drawing tool. I did a rendering of Chloe Sevigny based on an artnet photo by Nancy Smith I downloaded earlier in the day (at home), got panicky that the drawing looked like garbage, saved it and started making spheres. About a half hour later I booted it back up and found it was a passable likeness! so I kept it on the screen. The picture still needs work but I have 42 more hours to sit in the space, so this shouldn't be a problem. Expect also some photos and commentary on some other artists' work in the coming weeks. (Another slight update: I'm the only artist in the show treating this like a residency and working in the space full time after the opening. A few others are popping in for a bit of a temp work.)
Around 8:00 pm Irene Moon did a live performance on the theme of social and antisocial insects (more specifically the scientific paper "Building Web-Based Interactive Keys to the Hymenopteran Families and Superfamilies" from Moon's work life as an entomology grad student) with electronic music, video, shoutouts to E.O. Wilson, and one major costume change from weird Bee-Woman zombie tourguide to southern-accented "Pleasant Planarian." "Fly Me to the Moon" was rendered in a well, drone, interlaced with factoids about insect eating and mating habits. At the end of the gig, everyone in the hive rubbed their forelimbs together and buzzed appreciatively. (Photo of Irene Moon from the Carbon Records website.)
Be there (tonight). "Oh, sorry, man, I didn't see your blog. You should have emailed me."
Good post on why a National ID card is a horrible, scary idea. The US Senate votes today: call your Senator (if it's not too late--Christ, who can keep up with all the bad legislation coming down the pike?).
The REAL ID Act requires driver's licenses to include a "common machine-readable technology." This will, of course, make identity theft easier. Assume that this information will be collected by bars and other businesses, and that it will be resold to companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It actually doesn't matter how well the states and federal government protect the data on driver's licenses, as there will be parallel commercial databases with the same information.(hat tip to dratfink)
Even worse, the same specification for RFID chips embedded in passports includes details about embedding RFID chips in driver's licenses. I expect the federal government will require states to do this, with all of the associated security problems (e.g., surreptitious access).
REAL ID requires that driver's licenses contain actual addresses, and no post office boxes. There are no exceptions made for judges or police -- even undercover police officers. This seems like a major unnecessary security risk.
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security. (This is an interesting insecurity, and is a direct result of trying to take a document that is a specific permission to drive an automobile, and turning it into a general identification device.)
REAL ID is expensive. It's an unfunded mandate: the federal government is forcing the states to spend their own money to comply with the act. I've seen estimates that the cost to the states of complying with REAL ID will be $120 million. That's $120 million that can't be spent on actual security.
And the wackiest thing is that none of this is required. In October 2004, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 was signed into law. That law included stronger security measures for driver's licenses, the security measures recommended by the 9/11 Commission Report. That's already done. It's already law.
REAL ID goes way beyond that. It's a huge power-grab by the federal government over the states' systems for issuing driver's licenses.
REAL ID doesn't go into effect until three years after it becomes law, but I expect things to be much worse by then. One of my fears is that this new uniform driver's license will bring a new level of "show me your papers" checks by the government. Already you can't fly without an ID, even though no one has ever explained how that ID check makes airplane terrorism any harder. I have previously written about Secure Flight, another lousy security system that tries to match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists. I've already heard rumblings about requiring states to check identities against "government databases" before issuing driver's licenses. I'm sure Secure Flight will be used for cruise ships, trains, and possibly even subways. Combine REAL ID with Secure Flight and you have an unprecedented system for broad surveillance of the population.
Is there anyone who would feel safer under this kind of police state?
Film critic tedg on Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, starring Legolas (scroll down). Practically no "mainstream" critic talks about film in terms of image/editing/camera movement like this.
I've commented before about Scott's ability to have each camera shot mature at some point (about two seconds before it ends) in such a way that it anticipates the next image. No one else seems to have this ability. The famous George Stevens method was to shoot every scene from every angle and create a rhythmic dance of the eye afterward. Most filmmakers follow something like this today, which means that the registration of every shot happens after it appears, not before as with Scott.I'm getting more interested in Stevens (Shane, Penny Serenade, Giant, etc) these days and would like to follow up, through observation and the occasional comment, on this thesis of pre- and post-registration of visual information that tedg contrasts between his work and Ridley Scott's. Fascinating stuff!
Most of this, I think, is in how the camera moves. Early on, he establishes certain rules of vision that tell us when he does this, this something will follow, all done by how the camera moves. Because this visual logic is so rigidly followed, we cannot see the usual seams between real and computer generated images. He must have these rules written down for the hundreds who must be involved to understand and follow.
The story itself is mundane as with all such which have to have mass appeal. The acting is less aggressive than in his last two projects, and for my tastes that's good because it allows us more space for the cinematic experience.
Some images remain in my mind after a few days. when Saladin begins his attack on Jerusalem at night and the fireballs start coming at us over the horizon. This is truly impressive and serves as the template for the entire battle.
In that same timeframe, we have a shot of our hero anticipating. It is a three-part shot. First we see a smoky moon, then the camera moves down and to the right and we see a fluttering canvas. Each of these are amazingly rich, with the smoke anticipating the waves of the canvas. It is as if all the sea and the rolling hills and the desert were compressed into those two images. Then we move on down to our hero's face. In this ten seconds, Scott makes up for all [Orlando] Bloom's weaknesses. [...]
"Go East (Additive)" [mp3 removed]
"Go East (Subtractive)" [mp3 removed]
Both tunes are the same rhythm pattern, played with different "lead" instruments. I'm pretty amazed how much the pattern changes from tune to tune, and how much variety there is within each rendering. Except for some slight virtual knob turning, I mostly just set this up, got out of the way and let the machines do their thing. The subtractive version has some "skips" that I may or may not fix.
From UnFair Witness: "The Pentagon blacked out the faces and identifying information in some photos showing honor guards for coffins lining the interiors of C-17 transports [for returning Iraq War dead]. Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive called the edited images 'an outrage and an insult.' (Photo Credit: Defense Department Photos Via Nsarchive.org)"
Mithras, on the above photo: "Nothing more evocative of this war for me than the officially-anonymous living honoring the anonymous dead. "
j asked if I was going to do sound-related work in connection with my upcoming performance piece of sitting in an office cubicle making art for
Yesterday one of the organizers politely but nervously asked me if I still have an, um, job these days. The answer is yes! Where I work now isn't so physically different from this "art project" and my past jobs; it is more demanding, though. We could talk about it, but let's just say blogging about my perma (as opposed to permatemp) gigs is not part of my long-term survival plan as an artist. (But
My cubicle for the ART*%@((WORK show described below. The moire pattern on the chair isn't me being deliberately psychedelic--it's a "digital camera error."
Opening in a few days is a show I'm in called "ART)@*!WORK" (the characters vary each time it's typed), taking place in a 16th floor office suite at 8th Ave and 36th Street. Artists in this group exhibition will do installations, etc., in the cubicles of this formica-heavy unrented space. The last tenant sold mobile phones or something (still checking on that--it wasn't what I originally posted). Here's how I'm describing my piece:
Tom Moody, "Office Reality: Channeling My Art Life from 1995-2000," performance work, 2005. Moody will keep "office hours" while the exhibition is open (Tues 9-5; Sun. 12-6 from May 10 to 31), and will sit and draw on an old computer. Portraits, abstract art, and tasteless cartoon imagery will be pinned up in his cubicle as he works. All will be drawn using MSPaintbrush (precursor to Microsoft Paint); Moody's attire will be "business casual."I should have photos of my "work space" up soon. Here's a summary of the press release:
ART*!(%WORK, 520 Eighth Avenue Between 36th and 37th Street. Suite 1602; opening reception with live performance by Irene Moon May 10 2005 7-9 p.m; regular "office" hours: Tuesdays 9-5 and Sundays 12-6
May 2005, New York City—Ignivomous, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to nurturing and developing new genres, art forms and mediums presents ART!@*<>WORK, an art exhibition exploring the tension between the art of doing work and the work of doing art.
This show will take place in the cubicles of a midtown Manhattan office space. Fifteen artists will transform and exhibit projects inspired by the act of doing work and the spaces created for working. Visitors will be invited to explore and interact with the space during "office hours."
ARTISTS' WORK INCLUDES: Cat Mazza (microRevolt) recreating corporate logos with knitting, machines, and needlepoint; Sabrina Gschwandtner sewing thread and paper drawings on the machine installed in her cubicle; LoVid and Douglas Repetto producing patchwork of videos generated by an installation of work clothes and electronic office supplies; Evan Greenfield and Erika Somogyi creating a shrine to lost free time out of Sculpey clay and wax; Tony Luib transforming his cubicle into an abstract environment using office supplies; Michelle Rosenberg’s installation will create a space for daydreaming; Yoav Bergner replacing the office’s furniture with his own artisan and conceptual furniture; Elana Langer installing an audio piece compiled of field recordings taken from local office spaces; N.I.N.E launching a new addition to their urban exploration game HERE "I Hate My Work"--visitors will be invited to take part in the game throughout the show; Irene Moon presenting a 4’ tall microscope as well as photographs and a video animation from her MS thesis in entomology; Brian Alfred will show a collage entitled Cubicles with a replication of all the tools used to make the work out of paper; Tom Moody installing an old computer and drawing during visiting hours portraits using the outdated software Paintbrush; Bengala will include their personal experiences from their jobs in a mixed media installation.
Hunter at DailyKos:
There are plenty of individuals in the world -- people of deep faith, regular churchgoers, etc. -- who see no conflict between faith and science. It requires significantly less imagination, if you are of both a scientific and a religious bent, to imagine the universe being set into motion through a single, unimaginably powerful spark of existence -- a singularity of time and space that gave birth to all that followed -- than it is to imagine the earth, heavens, animals, plants, elements, galaxies, fossil records, tectonic processes, quantum effects, etc., etc., etc., each being laid out one-by-one like props on a television set, all waiting to be set into motion at once when an unseen director cries action on the two poor unknowing saps gorging themselves at the buffet table. Science, as it turns out, requires that you believe in a much more powerful and ingenious God than the God of fundamentalist Topeka, Kansas.As the aliens say in Dark City: "Let the tuning commence!"
"Nice Curves" [mp3 removed]
I kind of hate to debate Damien Hirst here, because there are better artists who never get attention, but the current paintings at Gagosian do look more interesting in photographs than live so I'm quoting the following exchange from the comments as a public service. It's also "my position on Hirst," for what that's worth. Sally McKay said:
[T]here was another drug painted in the show [besides the Paracetamol reproduced here]--- I can't remember now, an antidepressent ...xanax? with yellow on the label. Anyhow, I saw slides of the show at a symposium and the woman next to me pulled my sleeve excitedly and said "I take that one!" We both gave a little "whoo-hoo" cheer from the cheap seats which mystified the rest of the audience a bit. Anyhow, I started seeing this show as a kind of greatest hits of contemporary apathy. I've been instructed already here and elsewhere as to how bad the paintings were. But Damien Hirst is such a cypher, I'm not satisfied just ascribing this crappy output to one guy having a bad idea. He's an institution, and if his art is coming out as lame crap then there's a cultural balloon floating lame crap that is worth trying to look at.And my reply:
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes tossed-off paintings of "anomic" subjects are...
This is the third Gagosian show I've seen of Hirst's, plus the pieces in "Sensation" and a dramatic but poorly conceived museum show in Dallas, when he still just a lad. He is only a passable fabricator, with a knack for making work that almost always looks better in photos than in person. It was disappointing after experiencing the work of our own very thorough and meticulous bad boy Jeff Koons to see that Hirst's shark was held up inside the tank with cheap fishing line that sort of bites into the sagging creature, and that the sections of cut up cow were affixed to the insides of their vitrines with plastic safety ties. We Koons fans take it on faith that our guy would have figured out a way to make the former seem weightless and latter sandwiched tightly between glass surfaces, or he wouldn't have done the show (after all, he spent years working on a Guggenheim exhibit that never happened, legend has it, because he couldn't resolve certain fabrication issues). I gave Hirst a pass for ambition--we all do. But these paintings weren't ambitious, they were a retrenchment, a mere sellout disguised (in plain sight) as a fuck you, with what I would describe as textbook negative content (blood, check; gross organs, got em; media photos of woman on crack, oh yeah...).
Your "greatest hits of contemporary apathy" is a great line--hopefully someone will do that show someday.
This bit of unabashed, 40 years after the fact Pop Art is the best piece in Damien Hirst's painting show at Gagosian. The quality level/vibe of the rest of it is much like the canvases Ludwig Schwarz (and also an artist in Germany who's name I'm blanking on) did where they hired a company in China that will render any photo as a photorealistic oil. Hirst's contracted-out art is actually slightly more inept, hand-wise, than those guys'. The photos chosen were his typical death from life, life from death themes. He's having us on as usual, but also heading down the painting-on-canvas trail that many conceptualists follow to stay market-viable. Usually that's when they--sorry for the pun in Hirst's case--"jump the shark." (But of course Hirst has been producing paintings all along, clever bastard: the dots, which are kind of good, and the Walter Robinson-derivative spin paintings.) As joester points out on Sally McKay's page, the Gagosian set
...weren't painterly paintings. They had wiener symptoms (where every brush stroke looks like a wiener) and were really ugly to look at up close. Not ugly in a good way, ugly in a rushed "oh my god I have to paint 12 of these by wednesday" way.That's really all you need to know about the show. The work is too lame to merit any discussion of crack addicts, bloodied football hooligans, dissected brains, appropriation theory, and whatever else they they've raised. The forced "downer" themes also recall Cindy Sherman's vomit photos, an extended lament over the curse of success without end that attaches itself to "canonical" visual artists, more than any other type of creator (because we still have this medieval idea that art is iconic and forever, reinforced by a market that needs a canon). "I know--I'll make something they'll really hate." Except they don't hate it.
Karen Kilimnik: So much better than Elizabeth Peyton it's not even funny
Here are some quotes from a silly New York Times article today about the disparity in auction prices between male and female artists (thanks again, Bill):
One more example. Since three emerging figurative painters - Luc Tuymans of Belgium and the Americans John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton - were exhibited together at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, they, too, have come to seem almost like classmates, all heralded as leading figures in painting's contemporary resurgence. [What resurgence? Painting left the art market for about two years in the mid-70s, it hasn't gone away since.] The two men's canvases have sold for more than $1 million. Meanwhile, Ms. Peyton's 1996 oil portrait of a languorous John Lennon is estimated by Christie's at $200,000 to $300,000. And even that is a lot more than the current record price for her work: $136,000, set in June 2002.This is great news. Perhaps there is a (benign, de-gendered) God, after all. Peyton's work is tepid and blandly illustrational: rather than languorous the paintings would be better described as fey, or wan, and that's all she does, fey and wan, over and over and over. Stupid looking people all with the same cherry red lips--how about some other colors for those? Karen Kilimnik's good bad paintings ca. 1997 would have been a better choice for that particular (overrated) MOMA show.
Art defies head-on comparison. Forget apples and oranges; how does one judge the value of [Rachel] Whiteread's cast fiberglass and rubber mattress relative to Mr. Hirst's deteriorating shark? Or of Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture of a taxidermied ostrich compared with [Agnes] Martin's canvas with the faintest of graphite grids on it? The contemporary art market has at least one frustratingly simple answer: price. And from that perspective, the comparison is unmistakable: art made by women is regarded less highly than art made by men.This argument is tautological: the art world chooses men over women in the competition for higher prices; choices can't be easily made; the only criteria for choosing is price. Art doesn't actually "defy comparison," people do it all the time, and usually not as ludicrously as above. You compare artist to artist, rather than arbitrarily chosen artwork to arbitrarily chosen artwork.
In all of the following comparisons (originally posed in the article), the former artist is protean, energetic, and innovative and the latter is refined, narrow-ranged, building on and deepening existing ideas, and sorry, we tend to value one more than the other: Philip Guston vs Joan Mitchell, Damien Hirst vs Rachel Whiteread, and (if you must compare these two) Mauricio Catellan vs Agnes Martin. Guerrilla Girl repellent: "Women can make art as well as men can. Many of the artists mentioned in the article are undervalued and the market will eventually correct for that, but on the basis of scholarship and consensus, not nitwitty New York Times articles that refuse to make meaningful comparisons."
Lucas Samaras' Hands, animated GIF, 2005
Made it to the last night of Bent 2005, the circuit bending festival, at the Tank, located on a "soon-to-be-bulldozed part of far West 42nd Street," as the Washington Post describes it. Downstairs people were sitting at benches with soldering guns disassembling toys and appliances, rewiring them to make interesting electro-gnarly sounds; upstairs people were performing using such instruments. The Post article about the festival is here; an excerpt discussing a previous night's performances gives you the flavor:
None of these people is playing songs, in the sense that a song has a chorus and lyrics, a beginning, middle and end. For the most part, the performers just make noise for about 10 minutes, then the noise subsides and when they say "thank you," you know the song is over. The pleasure for performer and fan alike comes from the textures of the noise, the idea of it as a landscape that has never been experienced before. It's all about sonic novelty. You get the sense, too, that these circuit benders just like to freak people out. T-Bone, for example, wears braids, which give her the look of a schoolgirl, until you notice the top of her head, which is shaved and vividly tattooed, like a Technicolor yarmulke. One can only think of her parents.Note to the WaPo writer: Dude, you're obviously interested in this subject or you wouldn't have spent the time writing and researching it to the degree you did; you definitely took it beyond a "mere assignment." So why the condescending tone throughout your article? Is it to satisy your editors? Are you reaching out to some perceived middlebrow reading audience that you feel wouldn't like this music and that you have to apologize in advance to? Get a blog, you can be more honest. (And I can't believe you called Texas Instruments to ask the PR person if the company knew Speak and Spells were being bent. What a journo-nerd. And the performers don't generally say "Thank you," they just stop. )
Back to the festival. At 5:00 pm Paul B. Davis of BEIGE/8-Bit Construction Set gave a Nintendo-hacking workshop. In contrast to fellow BEIGE-r Cory Arcangel's lectures on this subject, which are generally laff riots, Davis's was calm and droll, but similarly informative and persuasive on the hacking principals underlying the dismantling of silly games from people's youths. He makes a distinction between general purpose computers (like the one you're reading this on) and special purpose ones (like a pocket calculator) and points out that the old game cartridges are the former, and thus can do the same kinds, or categories, of things a sleek laptop can do--it's just a matter of accessing and reprogramming them. Opening up a Nintendo cartridge and burning new data to it is a way to gain access to a device brimming with art and music making potential, albeit on the low res end of the spectrum. The age or nostalgic appeal of the machinery is interesting but largely irrelevant.
Davis came back around midnight and did a DJ set interspersed with surprisingly substantial ringtones played on his Ericsson phone through the Tank PA. Cellular audio has noticeably improved from the early bleepy stage--if improved is really the right word considering most of the material is still cheesy pop songs. The vinyl set featured electro, Grime (a successor to 2-step garage in the London club scene), and Funk Carioca, which is new to me but quite amazing. Here's a description I found googling:
Funk Carioca (Rio funk) is the product of Brazil's favelas parties and fuels the night-long bailes that form the nocturnal soundtrack of Rio's hills. Funk Carioca combines street smarts with popping dirty electro beats and the intensity of DIY techno topped with some crude lyrical rhymes resulting in an irresistible cocktail that grabs you by the hips and never lets go.More on the Bent Festival, including photos, possibly, soon.
Edited slightly for coherency, accuracy, tact, etc.