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"Mutator OD Bass (Long Version)" [4.8 MB .mp3]
I came back to this piece from a few months ago, adding some more arpeggios using a different Mutated (filtered) synth and a jaunty "surprise" theme at the end to lighten up the doom and gloom.
From Justin Strawhand's series Desktop Portraits. Screenshots of his desktop showing Tiananmen Square tanks made entirely of "shrink and enlarge" icons. (Other drawings include a self portrait, Popeye, and Bush Junior, made with other types of icons and desktop objects.) Sort of a new Internet-era cargo cult art. One thinks of the Afghan rugs depicting helicopters and Kalashnikov rifles.
A different view of the infamous World Cup "head butt." (To paraphrase Alicia Silverstone, "I may not know my soccer but I know my LiveJournal.")
In the comments we've been discussing the issue of presenting Paper Rad artists as individuals as opposed to promoting them as a collective. Someone asked whether the decision to do the former originated with the gallery or the artists. My reply:
I don't think it matters so much how the decision got made. Every step in the art world ends up being so strategic and fraught with importance. When I said the power of the status quo is huge, well, I'm up against it, too. All our brains are colonized by these social Darwinian ideas of individuals struggling against individuals. I think here the issue is one of mystique-building. Everyone assumes the weight of commerce and habit will eventually turn the collective into a "bunch of talented, readily identifiable individuals" so it would be cool to hold out as long as possible resisting that "inevitability." A good role model would be the musical group The Residents, who perform in masks and reveal little of their back story--I still have no idea who those people are. Who sings? Who does the writing? Are the southern accents real? Are they really from Louisiana? Are they men? WASPs? I'm sure I could figure some of that out googling but they never really made me *want* to know. We should just be listening, not nosing after "stories." And they're in music where a certain amount of ego-submersion is expected. In art you would drive the whole art-historical trainspotter structure insane if you continued year after year to thwart the all-important Alfred Barr chart of which rugged individualistic genius influenced which. This would never happen but it's nice to dream.