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Giant Reptile News. My brother Brad forwarded this photo of a massive alligator found in Missouri City, TX, a Houston suburb. A construction worker discovered the creature lying in one of the concrete pipes shown in the photo. According to animal control officers, it weighs just under 2100 lbs and is 18 1/2 feet long. It was taken to Brazos Bend State Park (28 miles south of Houston), where it was released.
On my "miscellaneous page" I've critiqued some anime-style drawings by Krystal Ishida, an artist based in the UK who I discovered surfing around the net. Her work has enthusiasm and punch, and I don't care if she's still in the learning stages: she works harder than a lot of mature artists I know. Also, I'm interested in what makes a good web drawing, and in the post I discuss some of the aesthetics of using low-fi vs. "upgraded" software.
Also, on my technodiary page I discuss a recent release by Beige Records artist Paul B. Davis.
Two years ago this fall, video artist Caspar Stracke did a performance at PS1 with an obsolete consumer video player called a CED: basically he just let the glitch-ridden machine run for six hours. The CED player (exhaustively documented on this website) was the biggest loser at a time (the early '80s) when VHS, Beta, and laser discs were all competing for market share. It works like a vinyl record player: you slide a twelve-inch-square cassette into a long slot, the disc drops down into the machine, and a tone-arm reads the capacitance (analog information) stored on grooves on the disc. Stracke has several malfunctioning machines, and each reads the discs in its own uniquely screwed-up way. Unfortunately I missed the performance, but the amazing press release caught my attention, so I looked up Stracke and visited his studio. He showed me a couple of CEDs, projected large on the wall, and the "errors" do make for fascinating viewing. As he explains in the press release: "the machine, 17 years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record but chops a scene into fragments less than 1/4 second long and reassembles them by chance operation. The needle gets physically irritated by several factors besides the scratches that let it skip the grooves, resulting in an infinite number of similar but not identical collage variations of the same scene. The performed 'cuts' are almost seamless."
Thus, in the CED of The Shining, you see Danny playing darts by himself in the kitchen of the Overlook hotel; he stands up on a chair to retrieve a dart, turns around, and sees the spooky twin girls. Then he's instantly back on the floor, on the chair again, on the floor, on the chair, and sees the girls again. Then he's on the chair, grabbing a dart, and suddenly he's teleported ahead to a completely different scene in the movie, then he's back on the chair, but always, in the about eight different loops I saw, the "scene" ends with him seeing the girls. It's like a bad dream that keeps repeating itself, or the chapter in Philip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip where the same events are refracted through Manfred's autistic consciousness over and over, each time slightly different but all ending dismally. The looped events don't have to be negative, of course: in a busted CED of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983), Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken have a screen kiss that keeps getting interrupted by the skipping player, so that an erotic moment is deliriously sustained. That's especially ironic, since the subject of Brainstorm is a new virtual reality technology (also analog) that allows people to record, playback, and loop experiences and share them electronically with others: happy memories, orgasms, after-death experiences, stuff like that.
As an artist, MC Escher is pretty corny but some of the visual paradoxes in his work are hard to resist. A recent New York Times article describes the efforts of a Dutch mathematician to fill in a mysterious "hole" in Escher's image The Print Gallery. In this picture a man in an art gallery is staring at a picture of a city, which spills out of the frame--in a weird anamorphic swirl--to become the city in which the man is standing. In a center of the image is a blank space, with the artist's signature. Was this a failure of imagination? Biting off more than the artist could chew mathematically? Well, thanks to the miracle of the computer (and retouch artists) we now know what should, logically, have gone in the hole: it's a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man, etc., spiraling down to infinity. Below is Escher's original grid for the drawing (kind of nice, isn't it?), which was the starting point for a process of restoration/completion/meddling described in detail on this website.
I took out a personal ad at nerve.com in connection with the exhibition "Are 'Friends' Electric? - The Art of the Online Personals Ad." My nickname is afe_supertoy (my page is a concept piece, "exploring contemporary mating rituals in the posthuman context"). Here's the blurb from the New Times LA calendar, July 26, 2002: "Is there any single person left in America who hasn’t posted their puss in pixels? The concept of cyberdating is ripe for artistic interpretation, say L.A. musician Jody Hughes and New York painter Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, who persuaded 50 artists, writers, musicians and curators to post ads in the nerve.com personals -- which The New York Observer referred to as ostensibly hip but really creepy and soulless -- and explore the commodification of personal relationships and projections of the self in online ads. Copies of the ads and responses received go up tonight at 7 p.m. at arefriendselectric.com."
More press accounts, and comments regarding nerve.com's semi-hostile interview in response to the exhibit, can be found in the comments to this post.
A couple of new pages have been added to my artwork archive: a selection of drawings made with MSPaintbrush, and "Volume Two" of my work from 77-96, concentrating mostly on abstraction. Also, I've added a page for posts on electronic dance music called technodiary. The picture essay I began several months back on "Video Games and Contemporary Sculpture" has been expanded and added to my writing archive.
Here, Let Me Give Your Career a Try.
New York residents may remember an ostentatious and obnoxious ad campaign around 1997 for an artist calling himself Amano. In a move normally used by fashion retailers, entire subway cars were plastered with ads for his first solo show in New York. Over amorphous backgrounds hovered pretentious and faux-mystical slogans: "paint your lunch/THINK LIKE AMANO," "mistrust certain flowers/THINK LIKE AMANO," "refuse to wear your glasses/THINK LIKE AMANO," and so forth. I'm not sure where the show was, but the campaign had "West Broadway" written all over it. I don't know anyone who saw the exhibit. [Update: a friend saw it and said it was in the Puck Building.]
Well, Amano's back, and now he's at Leo Koenig, which shows a number of good artists (Jeff Elrod, Lisa Ruyter, Michael Phelan, etc). Turns out he's a Japanese animation guy making a career change, or trying to, anyway. The work is fine--a kind of Asian Pop version of the flat affectless modernist-style painting that is becoming Koenig's specialty--but the claims the press release makes for his career are a bit of a stretch: that he is "a creator" of Speed Racer and Final Fantasy, and that he "creat[ed] such characters as Hutch the Honeybee, Tekkaman, and G-Force."
Most of that isn't true, but the New York Times bought the hype and stretched it even further. Here's today's listing:
"YOSHITAKA AMANO, Leo Koenig, 249 Centre Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 334-9255 (through Aug. 3). A superstar of Japanese anime, Mr. Amano is the creator of "Speed Racer," "G-Force" and "Final Fantasy." This show features glossy, cartoon portraits of androgynous young action heroes and a near mural-size painting crammed with every "Final Fantasy" character. Best is a series of brush and ink paintings on paper, each representing a different emotionally excited human eye (Johnson)." [And suggesting an un-arty Raymond Pettibon, I might add.]
Here are the slightly less inflated facts of Amano's career. According to Clements & McCarthy's Anime Encyclopedia, he was a teenage prodigy who lent his design talents to many major anime productions (both film and TV), beginning in the late '60s/early'70s. His first job was with Tatsunoko Productions, at age fifteen. He may very well have worked on Speed Racer, but is not listed in the encyclopedia as one of the series' creators. G-Force first aired in 1972, but according to Clements and McCarthy, only the 1979 Japanese sequel Gatchaman II featured Amano's design work. Hutch the Honeybee premiered in 1970, but Amano did design work solely on the 1974 followup series, called New Hutch. The encyclopedia's entry for Final Fantasy discusses an anime based loosely on the popular game, and the barely-related 2001 film, but Amano isn't mentioned in connection with either (in all likelihood he only worked on the game). Tekkaman, 1975, is actually the only anime cited by the gallery for which Amano was the primary designer, according to this fairly exhaustive reference work.
None of this should matter: Amano's work will stand or fall based on what he's doing now, in the West, and not on his previous career in another artistic ecosystem. Pumping up the resume is an attempt to create mystique for the work--the myth of the genius, from the mysterious East, and all that (not to mention tapping into boomer/Gen X kid's-show nostalgia). We'd be a lot better served by understanding, first, what makes good anime (what role does the designer play, exactly, as distinguished from the director, the writer, or the animator?), and second, how does work produced in that genre transcend its context to speak to the Western gallery world? There's a lot of confusion out there right now: Takashi Murakami, for example, has endeared himself to American curators by appropriating anime and other Japanese design conventions; his is a highly commercial enterprise sold as "Japanese contemporary art," even though Japan itself has no real tradition of the solitary, metacritical, artist. At least Amano has roots in a legitimate cultural sweatshop. Just a little of that is necessary to give his work street cred, though--he doesn't have to be the Japanese Walt Disney.
Update: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.
Those drawings I did of the Shell girls now appear on the inside of the CD booklet for their new maxi-single, available through mp3.com. More pictures of the duo are here. Sorry about the f**ing popups.