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I'm taking a vacation from blogging for a few days. Posting will be light to nonexistent from now to August 2. In the meantime, as the Daily Howler says, "please visit our incomparable archives."
Five by Kara Hammond, an artist who showed and worked in New York for many years and recently relocated to South Carolina, where she is teaching. I'm writing an essay about her work and am using the blog as my notepad. Top to bottom (these are her descriptions accompanying the photos she sent--actual titles, dimensions, etc. pending): Airport Roundabout, Boat for Sale, Bozeman Storage Units, Jetpack (In Progress), Tybee Island Toilets. Some earlier writing on the artist is here.
"1987" [4.7 MB .mp3].
The rhythms in this song consist of sampled (then altered and resequenced) beats from the above drum machine, which was originally manufactured in the titular year. (Just as an aside, as mentioned earlier, this blog has adopted 1987 as its foster year. See past references here, although one unrelated one came up because 1987 was in the URL for a link.)
Other songs written and posted in July, but not related to 1987:
"Drum Reverie" [mp3 removed]
"Mouse Party" [mp3 removed]
"Audrey Zapp" (lean version) [mp3 removed]
"Nine Inch Bells" [mp3 removed]
"Cryptkicker" [mp3 removed]
My photo of LoVid is used in a brochure for upcoming events at the Kitchen; below is a scanned detail. [Update: the curator, Nick Hallett, says it's a draft and will change considerably.] The image originally appeared here on this blog as part of its ongoing experiment in citizen journalism and public multitasking.
Steven Spielberg's AI and Minority Report were dreadful but War of the Worlds ain't half bad. It's terse, moves like the wind, and tells its tale almost entirely in pictures, like an old silent film--you could watch it on a plane with no headphones and know exactly what is going on every minute, even if you'd never somehow encountered the Wells story. Critics mostly like this update, but a quick glance through the reviews at rottentomatoes.com pulled up a couple of debatable points:
Spielberg gives his pulp material grandeur because he is an A-list director. No, he is a pulp director with pretensions to A material, adding films such as Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, and Amistad to his shark and dinosaur canon. WotW works because it's pure sensationalism. And like the best B-movies, it has that undertow of other stories being told. Like, who is scarier to the children in the movie, the bloodsucking aliens or the angry, controlling absentee dad fate sticks them with after the apocalypse? Or, how close are we to the kind of savagery depicted in the film, where a mob attacks an SUV that is the only set of working wheels on the road?
You won't remember anything in WotW the next day. Beg to differ--that klaxon horn that heralds the arrival of the alien tripods still has me shivering. Because the movie is a silent film (with explosions) I can replay almost all of it in my mind as a series of images: Cruise struggling to keep his son from chasing the monsters while twenty feet away a well-intentioned couple tries to whisk his daughter away, thinking she's an abandoned child; the guy tearing through the SUV's window glass with his bare hands (but why is he black--pandering to suburban racial angst? Spielberg, meet George Romero); Cruise and Tim Robbins silently fighting over a shotgun while an alien roto-rooter probes the basement where they are hiding; Cruise yelling at his kids again and again.
Michael Atkinson of the Voice is right that the 9/11 references (e.g., walls dense with flyers describing the missing) are a bit much. And it wouldn't be a Spielberg movie without stuff thrown in for no reason other than to be "cinematic." [Spoilers] For example, people are kept in cages riding under the heads of the towering alien "walkers"; periodically a snake-thing comes out of a rubber anus and grabs a human, presumably for a snack. Yet when it comes time to use human blood as fertilizer for the monsters' crops, the victims are dropped ten stories to the ground, a snake thing comes down and stabs them and sucks their blood ten stories back up into the tripod, where it is then sprayed in a thin mist across the landscape. But why all this dropping and long-distance sucking when the humans are already in cages next to the sprayers? Because a body falling towards the camera from a great height is "visually exciting." In the director's defense, stuff like this also makes the movie more irrationally dreamlike and disturbing.
I wish the New York Times would interview me about the new policy of random bag frisks by cops in the subway. Most interviewees are saying tired stuff like "I don't like it but I want to feel safe." I'd say "Oh yeah, really fair to give up my civil liberties because Goober and Gomer out there in bumf*ck thought it'd be a good idea to invade Iraq!"
Sorry to my red state friends for these continuing cracks, but I hate your neighbors, the pinhead war supporters.
"Audrey Zapp" [since removed]. Originally posted under the title "Back to Fairfax Circle." That was kind of boring; the new title is still a geographic place name, believe it or not.
I'm also adding the following, which was the original take before I started adding little touches:
"Audrey Zapp (original take)" [since removed]
I may ultimately go with the earlier version [I didn't]--it's more minimal, and I like the cymbal that got buried in all subsequent mixes for some reason. I'm really fighting the battle over whether adding drum rolls, filter sweeps, and a punchier bass line improves the piece or if those are just canned values.
Update, 2009: "Audrey Zapp (Light Industrial Remix)" [4.5 MB .mp3]
I love the temporary PATH and subway station in the World Trade Center crater; it's a very open, airy, unpretentious concrete and steel structure--just a functional placeholder till they put in something fancy.
I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I think of another oversized tower on that location, which is the current plan, to help the greedhead owner recoup his losses, I mean, to show America doesn't learn from its construction mistakes, I mean, to show that America stands tall and doesn't cave to terrorists.
New at the temporary transit hub: a glassed-in booth near the entrance to the E train where survivors go into a soundproof chamber and tell their stories into a digital recorder. I kid you not! It's run by some nonprofit called StoryCorps dot whatever and while it is attended by humans, it looks like a glass robo-confessional out of Logan's Run or Sleeper. On the exterior, near the entrance to the booth, are all the logos of donors, corporate and governmental, that are backing StoryCorps.
Your leaders don't want you suing Saudi Arabia when its boys run wild with planes in this country, but they'll give you a little glass box where you can talk about your troubles.
"Back to Fairfax Circle" [reposted above under a new name]. This song is on the perky, upbeat tip, as opposed to the grungy, mock-doom-laden end of my musical production. I gave it a geographical place name in homage to Gary Wilson.
Above is the final version of the piece I'm donating to the Dieu Donne Papermill, titled Zipatone Omniverse. (I posted earlier stages and talked about this project here, but have since taken down the previous draft versions.) Below is a detail showing some of the fill patterns and the layering of the paper:
More on the Rove nonsense and left's sudden touching concern for the agency that brought you assassination plots and poisoned cigars. If every employee of that outfit was fired tomorrow and had to work at Burger King, would the country be better off? Worse off? I'd say better. Either they're sitting around Langley writing memos to the file or they're helping to spread corporate misery abroad--deposing democratically elected governments to put in someone more to the liking of...your boss. The cold war is over, and Islamofascism is a defense contractor-friendly canard. Where was the C1A on 9/11? Leaving it to you and me to deal with it. We all want Bush gone, but getting involved in the daily minutiae of the Washington pencil-pusher class is just nauseating--and pretty much a parlor game unless you have subpoena power and suspects in the dock. A majority of Americans have come to understand that Bush is a creep because of the Iraq dead, Schiavo, Social Security, and people like Michael Moore getting the truth out to a mass audience--no one cares about the he said she said of the Plame case. One day we bloggers are all chewing like rodents on the Downing Street memos, then--whoops, they weren't the answer, Bush didn't resign, so now we're chewing on the meaning of "covert." If you want to do something, show Fahrenheit 9/11 to some middle class Republicans--make'em watch that footage of Bush zoning out in the school and Bush calling the new robber barons his "base."
Update: Let's end this post on a less angry and class-baiting note--and I decided "our new robber barons" was a more subtle turn of phrase than, um, what was there originally--by noting that it was written before Bush inevitably changed the subject from RovePlame to the new Supreme Court nominee. If past practice is a guide, this should give us all a break from the center-left's unpacking of State Dept. memos, which has been going on for the last week in a manner recalling the 101st Fighting Keyboarders' intrepid "kerning analysis," which as we all know, blew the lid off Rathergate.
Lord God, it would be great if the lefty bloggers would shut up about Rove and Plame, Rove and Plame. Either the prosecutor has something or he doesn't. All this Hardy Boys parsing of the evidence by people who don't know squat is reminiscent of the amateur sleuthing the right wing idiots did over the Rathergate memos. "Keeping up the blog heat" could also be "burning everyone out" on the topic when the prosecutor finally does show his cards, assuming he has anything. Also, Alexander Cockburn is right--this sudden lefty concern for the covert status of a C1A agent is ridiculous. When did that agency, toppler of world governments for oil and banana companies, become the good guys? The real issue should be, when is anyone going to talk seriously about impeaching Bush for lying us into an increasingly bloody war?
Followed by a "restitution tax" on corporations and upper-income earners who got breaks in the last four years to pay reparations to the destroyed countries.
Belaboring this, but what the hell. The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo just opened a big show called "Extreme Abstraction," which is short for "Extreme(ly Large) Abstraction (Show)," since the work isn't really extreme but consists mostly of blue chip practitioners both living and dead. What would a real "extreme abstraction" show consist of?
--Work in a visual language that is neither Renaissance perspective nor Modernist allover flatness nor Kraussian "expanded field" conceptualism but something wholly new and unrecognized. Which by definition means it would not be in the show.
--Abstract art outside the range of human perception, requiring special equipment to view or hear it.
--Art that is so volatile or fugitive that it decays by the show's end.
--Abstraction that results from extremes of human behavior, as in paintings made of blood during actual cult rituals, under the influence of hallucinogens, etc. See also John Nash's "paranoia rooms" in A Beautiful Mind.
--Conceptual art practices that recontectualize abstract things from the culture, such as mathematical formulae, circuit diagrams, or botanical microphotography, all of which are completely incomprehensible to the layman.
Any others?
Update, from the comments:
--Abstract art created while doing a righteous goofy-foot 360 counter-rotation backside double-fakey. (mark)
--Thousands and thousands of yards of saffron fabric hanging from orange goal posts... (bill)
"Nine Inch Bells" [mp3 removed]
Quoting myself from an earlier thread: "Chris, thanks for the comment on the recent visual work, and no, my musicmaking is still going strong. I just picked up a slew of new programs and am slowly learning them. If anything has to give here it's going to be the damn writing."
The Albright-Knox Gallery's website really blows chunks. I've been bitching (good naturedly) about their "Extreme Abstraction" show, thinking it was just the four fairly un-extreme artists I mentioned, but it turns out those were just the four participating in the extreme symposium. The website doesn't list the artists in the exhibition! Or if it does I missed it. Does anyone know who is in the exhibit, and if there is anyone more extreme in it than Liz Larner, David Reed, Linda Besemer, Katharina Grosse, and Ingrid Calame? Also, why are Cory Arcangel, Paper Rad, and Tree Wave performing in connection with the exhibit? Are they extreme abstract artists?
Further digging on the Albright site pulled up this para: "'Extreme Abstraction' is a major installation that will open to the public in the summer of 2005. Commissions by leading, (sic) abstract artists, recent acquisitions of contemporary art, and masterworks from the Gallery’s collection will be highlighted together and throughout the entire Gallery to provide visitors with a visual representation of the history and future of abstract art. Artists such as Polly Apfelbaum, Lynda Benglis, Arthuro Herrera, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, and Pae White are only a few of the many artists who will be represented, several of whom will be working at the Gallery on site-specific installations for this exhibition." OK, this gets more blue chip by the minute.
The above piece, Fuzzyball, has been shipped over to Manchester, UK, for the Futuresonic festival. It's in an exhibit called "Fuzzy Logic," which is a subset of another exhibition called "Low Grade" that is part of the larger festival. The curators are Jackie Passmore and Michael Connor. By the way, the molecule above really is called a "fuzzyball" (a buckyball variant); I didn't title it just for the show. Here's the rundown on "Fuzzy Logic":
"Low Grade" argues that the roots of computing technology are linked to Britain's 19th Century cotton trade, with weaving looms providing inspiration for the design of the first computer. In a city famous for both its textile history - Manchester was once known as "Cottonopolis" - and as the birthplace of the modern computer, "Fuzzy Logic" demonstrates how new media artists are turning back to the loom, combining technology with the knitting needle to create a new wave of fabric-based media arts, mathematical knitting and textile activism.My piece doesn't involve knitting but I have always described this type of work as a paper quilt or mosaic. When I started doing these pieces in the mid-90s I was very interested in cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who is speaking at the festival, and I was somewhat chagrined to discover no one in the NY art world was following this dialogue, or giving any particular thought to bridging the computational and the crafted. Things have gotten better in the last few years with the arrival on the scene of many of the above artists, so I'm not feeling quite as lonely as I did in 1997, when the gallery I was showing with mostly just apologized for the work, as in "Sorry it's not made with a brush or pencil and fabricated of fine, durable art materials, we know how important that is to you, Mrs. Drysdale." As late as 2001, a dealer I was working with was still asking me questions like "Do you ever think of painting these?"
Artists and works include:
Claire Irving (UK): Mathematical Knitting
Woolly Thoughts (UK): Mathematical Afghans
Cat Mazza (US): KnitPro Software, the LogoKnit knitting machine and examples of knitted work
Mandy McIntosh (UK): Knitting patterns for Atlanta and other cities, plus Radiant Circle
LoVid (US): Soft sound sculpture, sculpting psychedelic soundsssssssssssz
Peter Coffin (US): Wall-based prints bridging ASCII art and knitting patterns
Cory Arcangel (US): Security blanket based on the "infinite fill" patterns used in place of colour on early drawing software Mac Paint
Rebecca Vaughan (US): Conceptual knitted cosies for uncosy environments
Tom Moody (US): Psychedelic and abject works riding the guardrails between the handmade and the digital
"Cryptkicker" [mp3 removed]
I may do some more variations on this (minimal techno) piece. For the non-drum parts, I picked three (licensed!) samples that I thought were just exquisite and gave each its own track in the sequencer and its own octave for keymapping. The bass seems to go slightly out of phase because I left in all the trial balloons that eventually led to the main groove, sprinkling them in more or less randomly into the main sequence. The piano chords are appallingly simple and eventually I'd like to add some juicier melodies. The synth stab I left as is, because it sounds so seductively weird and funny.
Zipatone Omniverse, 2005--this piece will be donated to the Dieu Donne Papermill (accent agu over the e in Donne screws up my RSS) for its annual benefit. Quite a challenge to figure out a way to incorporate their fine handmade artist's paper into my usual slacker vibe. I settled for practically destroying a couple of sheets in the printer and then trying to salvage them with tape and glue stick. This piece really looks handmade (and kind of "1930s surrealism") to me--even though all the drawing/markmaking was done in MSPaintbrush.
More on "extreme abstraction": Adolescent ranting aside, there is always the inherent contradiction of packaging work as extreme or "out there" when it's acceptable enough to curatorial and collector sensibilities to be in a major museum. I don't know David Batchelor's work but the rest of the choices in the Albright-Knox's "Extreme Abstraction" show are bread-and-butter practitioners. Each got noticed for bringing a little added oomph to the art world's workaday business of moving paintings. Besemer is "excessive" in the sense of "look at all those damn tiny stripes, can you believe someone sat there and painted those by hand with a brush?" but her paintings are perfectly crafted modular artifacts that are ultimately quite soothing to collector sensibilities. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be extreme about David Reed, unless it's the polish and seamlessness he brings to his surfaces. Katharina Grosse's best wall paintings do have a bit of that messy graffitti edge but compared to say, Jonathan Borofsky's rambunctious wall fillers of yore she seems positively sedate. In a sense all abstraction is extreme because no one gets it except a handful of aging art world initiates and it still has the capacity to inspire hostility after all these years. (I realize "extreme abstraction" as an exhibition title is sort of a joke and don't want to belabor this.)
Posting has been lighter than usual because I've had some time-consuming things going on in the studio and frankly I need a break. For the next little while it's just going to be nerdy introspective private jokes and willfully obscure art around here.
I'm reposting this 'cause I'm afraid the joke wasn't clear. Barbara Kruger... Freddy Krueger... The '80s... Oh well... |
Extreme Abstraction. (See previous post.) Actually Linda Besemer, one of the artists in the Albright-Knox's show of that name, isn't extreme. Why is she extreme--because she's anal-retentive and makes hundreds of super thin stripes? Why does the art world insist on obsessive repetitive complexity as a rite of passage? And Katharina Grosse--she's extreme because she paints on the walls? Why is covering a lot of wall surface area a rite of passage? And David Reed--why is he extreme? Because he's so polished and professional? My favorite piece of his is probably the video where he (poorly) digitally inserted one of his paintings into the background of the Michael Mann-produced '80s TV series Crime Story. Dennis Farina and some other guy are arguing and the whole time there's this jerking, shimmering abstract painting on the wall behind them. It wasn't extreme, but it was a good piece.
Albright Knocks
Chris Ashley describes a frustrating visit to the Albright-Knox museum in Buffalo here. Seems the museum is, um, fudging on the terms of its gift of Clyfford Still paintings:
When I was ready to see the Stills I asked someone at the desk where his paintings are.Also amusing is the press release for an upcoming show there called "Extreme Abstraction," featuring Linda Besemer, David Reed, David Batchelor, and Katharina Grosse, which also consists of "Extreme Fundraising Events," an "Extreme Dinner," and an "Extreme After Party." There is an extreme space commitment, as well--Chris says large parts of the collection were unviewable while the museum prepared for it."Oh, yeah, we showed him a few months ago."
"You mean there are none on display right now?"
"No, we just showed them."
"Doesn't that violate the conditions of his gift, that a portion be displayed in a dedicated room at all times?"
(Shrug) "I don't know anything about that."
Huh? On the web page regarding the Albright's Stills it says, "According to the terms of the gift, the paintings must be shown in their own room, all of the time, and never loaned to other museums." OK!
Afterthought on Clyfford Still: I kind of like those craggy, ultraserious paintings, which I saw at the A-K in '94, and the "stoner concentration" Still paid to his edges, as one painter I know put it. Hey, someone has to defend that holy-terror-even-in-death.
Finished the piece started over the July 4 weekend, finally. That's it above, posing with a chair. Below is the back, showing the strips of canvas-colored, gummed cloth tape that hold all the paper pieces together. The buckyball is an Epson print of a scan of a transparency of a handpainted buckyball I made years ago. The background xerox sheets are an Op art-like pattern I drew in MSPaintbrush--they would make a continuous wavy field if trimmed and arranged in a grid.
Bombings in London
My condolences to all impacted by this tragic event. Billmon has some fond things to say about London, but fearing the inevitable making-it-worse by the media, advises his American readers:
The next few days would probably be a good time to stay away from the TV. On top of the televised gore and the stunned faces of the survivors, we'll have to endure the canned Churchillian rhetoric of Messrs. Blair and Bush. Blitzes will be remembered; blood, sweat and tears promised, ultimate victory predicted. The babbling heads of cable news will babble even louder. Conservative con artists will figure the angles and work out the attack lines to use against the liberals -- whatever it takes to drown out the fact that, nearly four years after 9/11, Bin Ladin still lives and Al Qaeda is back in business. Mission unaccomplished.That's a good statement but puts too much emphasis on the al Qaeda threat. (The implacable Islamofascist enemy.) The problem is the cycle of violence we're in because many in the developing world believe we're trying to extract their natural resources by force, stomping all over local traditions to do so. The Iraq war as a response to "terrorism" does nothing to assuage this, especially with the stories about Iraqi oil field maps spread out on the table during Cheney's energy task force meetings. The conversation we should be having is "Are we taking their resources by force and crapping all over their local traditions, so we can lead our wonderful lives?" and if so, "Isn't terrorism in our cities an expected consequence of that?" And if this sounds like America-hating to you, sorry.
Of course, this is all just speculation.
Just found this article by Morgan Reynolds, a Texas A&M professor and economist in the first Bush administration, arguing that the World Trade Center towers collapsed from a controlled demolition (i.e., explosives planted in the building) rather than jet fuel melting the steel beams. This isn't new, but it puts the arguments together nicely.
First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not. These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.Reynolds wants to know why the steel was so rapidly shipped to China and melted before engineers had a chance to do "forensics" on it. This January 2002 article from Fire Engineering magazine suggests it was because the Port Authority didn't want lingering evidence of shoddy construction or fireproofing. Another possibility is, maybe the PA just wanted Silverstein, the building's owner, to get some cash.
Reynolds also wonders why all the concrete in the buildings was pulverized into fine dust by the force of the collapse. He says that only happens when explosive charges are used. And he wonders, can jet fuel really melt steel? A German engineer says burning kerosene isn't hot enough. And another issue:
Progressive pancaking [of falling floors] cannot happen at free-fall speed ("g" or 9.8 m/s2). Free-fall would require "pulling" or removing obstacles below before they could impede (slow) the acceleration of falling objects from above. Sequenced explosions, on the other hand, explain why the lower floors did not interfere with the progress of the falling objects above. The pancake theory fails this test.But then, that seems to be contradicted by the next paragraph:
If we put the murder of 2,749 innocent victims momentarily aside, the only unusual technical feature of the collapses of the twin towers was that the explosions began at the top, immediately followed by explosions from below. WTC-7, by contrast, was entirely conventional, imploding from bottom up.Also suspect are Reynolds' apparent assertions that planes did not hit the towers. Were all the videos and eyewitness accounts supposed to be faked? He doesn't say. It is weird that more attention wasn't paid to recovering the plane wreckage. The TWA plane that crashed in '96 was recovered from the ocean floor and reassembled piece by piece in an aircraft hangar; the WTC plane wreckage was apparently just hauled away with the rest of "ground zero" debris (and whose idea was it to call iit "ground zero"--where a nuke hits?)
Reynolds links to many books and web resources on the controlled demolition topic. Obviously 9/11 was a boon to Bush's childish "payback to Saddam" agenda; the case against a government conspiracy mainly comes down to: if they were that smart, why didn't they plant WMDs in Iraq? Why are they bungling Iraq so badly? Because of the quick destruction of so much evidence, conspiracy theory becomes hard to separate from simple facts of engineering. My own minor contribution to the evidence: I've watched two big buildings fall in my life, the Cotton Exchange in Dallas in the early 90s, a controlled demolition, and the North Tower of the WTC, which I saw from a sixth floor apartment window in Jersey. They sure looked the same to me.
Currently up on NY Arts magazine's website is an interview with yours truly titled "Not Just Flying Toasters." I'm told the piece will be running in the September/October print edition, as well. I'm happy with how it came out. Thanks to Aaron Yassin, who did the interview, James Westcott for the excellent editing, and everyone else at the magazine.
rem:x by jimpunk (I added the green)
One of the things the Rovunists do to discredit certain liberals is say "They opposed Afghanistan!"
"Afghanistan was good" is supposed to be the conventional wisdom but not everyone thinks invading that sovereign albeit crappily-run nation and destabilizing it further was any better of a response to 9/11 than "doing" Iraq. When the attacker is a shadowy group as opposed to a nation the only (still) relevant question was whether the severity of 9/11 justified the use of (internationally) extrajudicial means such as commando raids, or whether there were other ways to bag terrorists and pressure countries "harboring" them. Invading meant precisely this: Osama got away, and we now have troops permanently stationed in yet another damn country. Why is this good exactly?
Mine isn't really a "liberal" position, but rather a libertarian or paleoconservative one based on the idea that the US doesn't need military bases all over the world. For the cost of dropping daisy cutters on Afghanistan we could have increased vigilance at home--say, by actually reading airport passenger manifests--and been a lot safer. And perhaps it wasn't such a hot idea to let the incompetents who allowed 9/11 to happen be the ones to "go hunt down the terrorists." Instead of rallying around Bush and comparing him to Prince Hal, the wastrel who became a military leader, as the NY Daily News did, we should have impeached him immediately for 9/11, then thrown out the remaining bums in '04, and let the next administration "go get the terrorists." Again, obviously, law enforcement would have to be extra-vigilant to prevent another domestic attack in the interim, but my sense in '01 was that Osama & Co. had given it their all and nothing else that horrendous was in offing. BushCo hasn't foiled any terrorist plots against the US on the scale of 9/11 because there haven't been any.
I miss the '80s...
"Drum Reverie" [mp3 removed].
My Winamp playlist editor currently has 60 of my own tunes in it, most made in the last six months. There's some duplication, with multiple versions of a few tracks, but still, that's
Update: the amount of music was revised after I downloaded iTunes while updating Quicktime. Unlike Winamp, iTunes tallies the total time of the music in the playlist editor.
My somewhat overoptimistic July 4 post from two years ago:
Wrong.
I enjoyed seeing the fireworks over the East River last night and...whoops, wrong picture, this is us blowing up Baghdad. But seriously, talk about a disconnect between American ritual festivities and the chaos in Iraq right now. We're fast approaching the point where the number of our soldiers killed after George Bush's victory declaration tops the number that preceded it. After a few exciting days of monkey-screeching and hard-on flashing, Bush, Rumsfeld & Co. have moved on to other things (campaigning, plotting global domination, plundering public funds) and left others to clean up the mess. American troops are getting shot up, the Treasury's overdrawn, people are losing jobs, and the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.
Fortunately we can all go the polls next year and get rid of these clowns, right? Right?
More work in progress. One thing not clear from the photo is the black and white sheets no longer overlap: they've been cut into jigsaw pieces that mimic the initial one-shot, casual distribution of pages on the floor. You can see where the fragment to the right would fit into the "puzzle": every page is now similarly irregularly shaped. All of this keeps the piece from getting too thick and "multi-ply" when it's eventually taped together into a mosaic. Right now the white pages are held together with low-tack housepainter's tape, barely visible in the photo. The buckyball will be moved to the center for more tracing and trimming of the black and white paper.
Addendum to an earlier post: SCREENFULL had David Lynch's "Daily Report" covered a week before it appeared on boingboing. Just being catty--I hardly ever look at boingboing. I really kind of hate those tech-oriented, gee whiz isn't science weird and wonderful sites. Boingboing describes the Lynch thing as a "weather report," which is a bit like saying Marcel Duchamp was a urinal-maker. It's true Lynch tells you the weather, but I swear I saw one where there was just this waxy, meat-like lump sitting on a tabletop. Also, maybe it should be called the weekday (except holidays) report, since he hasn't updated since Friday. If he doesn't keep it reasonably current there's no point and I'll delink it (woo).
Follow-up: today (Tuesday July 5) it's just a desktop still life and a Lynch voice over. He does recite the weather, but I still wouldn't call these things weather reports--all he does is give the temperature and what the sky looks like outside.
Today I cannibalized an older piece that wasn't working, going after it with scissors and an X-acto knife (woo).
Approximately 5 CDs later (actually LPs, mostly prog rock), the shearing was done and a new background was in place. Now the real work starts--the whole thing has to be cut into pieces and taped back together in a mosaic/quilt that looks exactly like this. (Strips of cloth framers' tape will be applied on the back, along the seams.) Those bar code things are xeroxes of an op art pattern I made in MSPaintbrush and only used once, for a small piece.
Added a left side link for David Lynch's Daily Report. In most of the short Quicktime movies I've seen at this URL, he's sitting in the same spot behind his work table wearing a white shirt. He looks at the sky outside his window (off camera), gives a short synopsis of the weather "here in LA," and looks calmly back at the viewer. The only thing that changes are slight variations in the direction of his towering white wave of a hairdo. It's awesome hair. I like the story James Wolcott told recently about the special critics' screening for Blue Velvet Pauline Kael gave back in the 80s. (Speaking of media objectivity.) She called Lynch to tell him everyone loved his sicko masterpiece and he earnestly replied in his typical schoolboy manner, "Oh, God bless." Dune, the movie he made for Dino de Laurentiis to bankroll Velvet, gets better and more disturbing every year. I had horrible bloody nightmares after watching it recently.
"Mouse Party" [mp3 removed]. Down and dirty, as they say.
One of the umpteen million lies told by the current lyin'-its-head-off US Administration was calling 9/11 a failure of imagination. Man, didn't these people ever watch movies? Executive Decision, a pretty excellent if technically overambitious actioner from 1996, features a band of Muslim hijackers (with submachine guns!) who take over a crowded jet ostensibly to free their jailed Osama-like leader. A bomb is on board containing "enough nerve agent to wipe out half the Eastern seaboard," and the real mission of the cell's Mohammed Atta-like second in command is to crash the plane into the heart of Washington DC and bring the "vengeance of Allah" down on the American people. The part where life-imitating-art completely breaks down, tragically, is that the US government not only scrambles fighters to escort the plane, but literally injects a team of commandoes by means of a flying leech that attaches to the outer hull, giving Kurt Russell and the other good guys access to all the non-passenger parts of the plane. The bomb is defused, the fanatics are all killed, no passengers are hurt (except a smarmy Senator trying to use the event for a photo op), and Kurt Russell lands the plane after the main insane jihadist kills both pilots. Again, what really stretches credulity is Condoleeza Rice never seeing this movie (or a half-dozen like it) flipping around a hotel cable dial late at night.
Good piece by Joe McKay:Press Enter to ExitMcKay's work often features klutzy robotic simulations of the sleek cool computer trappings that enhance our lives, for example, his mechanical progress bar, or a recording light that "blinks" by slowly spinning on a wall-mounted rotor. Maybe in the future he can tackle the "Start" button the majority of the world's computer-users still have to press to shut down their machines. On second thought, Windows is beyond satire at this point.
There are two mesh screens inside the box, one that's shaking and one that's not. This shaking makes the letters shimmer with a moire brilliance that mimics a computer screen.
The text comes from my local deli's ATM machine. I love how messed up life is that pressing "enter" to exit makes perfect sense.
Click here for a link to a small video clip of the sculpture in action.
UPDATE: For those in the greater New York area, Progress Bar will be on display through Sunday, July 3 at vertexList, in Williamsburg. Hours are 2-6 pm today, tomorrow and Sunday. By the way, I disagree with the statement in Marcin Ramocki's exhibition thesis that "Content itself has faded to the background [in the present era] the way an adjective still describes a noun without holding much importance." It's possible to like Joe McKay's work and still enjoy something like George Romero's Land of the Dead on the level of pure story. Content is even triumphing over empty signifiers in the political realm, if Bush's poll numbers on Iraq are any indication. Go see LotD, by the way, it's a hoot. Visualize the destruction of resource-hogging yuppies by the underclass, achieve the destruction of resource-hogging yuppies by the underclass.
