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October Exhibition Diary 7. I spent a few more hours in the freight elevator at 50 Washington installing my wall-piece yesterday (see details and map below). The elevator never sat still for more than five minutes. The building has 10 floors, fully leased, mostly with commercial tenants (artists are the exception; they're all corralled on 5). Deliverymen bring boxes in; workers bring boxes out; and all day long it's garbage, garbage, garbage. The 8th Floor is the powerhouse tenant: a company that makes low-cost plastic items such as carry-all bags, videocassette cases, and so forth. The owner appears to be Indian and his employees African; the latter were constantly getting on the elevator with dollies hideously overloaded with boxed merchandise, grunting back and forth as they try to maneuver motorized and non-motorized handcarts through the door. One of them looked to be about a hundred years old--I thought maybe he was the other guy's Dad. He got the job done, but just barely. (The UPS guy, who knew everyone in the building, made fun of them to me: "Those guys moan and groan at each other and you don't know what the fuck they're saying.") Another place makes IKEA-type furniture; I saw a number of disassembled bedframes go through the elevator. As for the trash, after doing this project I feel like a pop-abstractionist version of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. (At one time the Official Artist of the NY Sanitation Department, this eco-conceptualist is famous for her piece Touch Sanitation, where she shook the hand of every garbage truck driver in NY.) I asked about the trash at 50 Washington: it supposedly goes out three times a day, but a couple of maintenance guys never stopped getting on the elevator with garbage. Even after 6, when the DUMBO art tour had officially begun and visitors were sprinkling through, one of these guys was still wheeling his plastic tub on and off the elevator. By 3:00 pm, I had reached the stage of making my piece where I needed to get back from it, so I could see the whole and add or subtract struts. Instead of the sculptures that Barnett Newman complained about bumping into when backing up to look at paintings, I kept putting my feet down on bulging, refuse-filled plastic bags.
I did get a non-stop stream of commentary from elevator users yesterday. The knuckleheads who gave me a hard time a few weeks ago came back through ("Look, it's the tape-test guy!") but were actually complimentary (for guys) when they saw the piece. One of the 9th Floor employees gave me a full blown interpretation: "It's an elevator molecule... See, you got metal, plastic, electricity, oil (?), the whole elevator is here in this molecule." In fact, I got a mostly enthusiastic reception until the NY art-erati started coming through (and I'm one of them so I can say this): maybe the poker-faces expected more bells and whistles? Another elevator in the building is draped in sepulchral black cloth, backlit in red light, and pulsates like an enormous beating heart. I can't really compete with that.
October Exhibition Diary 6. Worked from 6:00 pm to 1:00 am yesterday installing phase one of the elevator installation. That freight elevator is truly the alimentary canal of 50 Washington. Boxes come in on dollies and bags of garbage go out, all fricking night long. The custodial staff, both Albanian, were split on the merits of the piece. One thought it was nice and the other was completely baffled. "What is it?" "Atoms. Molecules. What everything's made of." "You ask office?"
October Exhibition Diary 5. As I've been mentioning, I'm doing an installation in a freight elevator in D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn, as part of The Freight Elevator Project 2, curated by Ombretta Agrò. The elevator project is under the auspices of the D.U.M.B.O. "Art Under the Bridge" festival, a three-day event of gallery openings, open studios, and performances. Here's how the curator describes my piece: "In Molecular Dispersion (Elevator Kit), Tom Moody has assembled a 70-foot-square lattice of molecular spheres and struts drawn and printed on his home PC. This 'kit' consists of several hundred individual pieces, put together improvisationally within the elevator site."
See http://www.dumboartscenter.org/festival/ for more information and a DUMBO map. The Elevator Project is described under "open studios." The Festival's (and elevator's) hours are: October 18-20, 2002, Fri 6-9 pm and Sat/Sun 12-6 pm. Below is a map showing how to get to my elevator. I hope you can stop by over the weekend.
Just jotting down some things I've been looking at and listening to lately:
MUSIC. Swayzak's newest, Dirty Dancing, is, I'm sorry to say as a fan, the pits. Awful cover--what were they thinking?; too many tracks with guest vocalists; too many self-conscious attempts to capitalize on the '80s revival. The only track I really like is the last one, "Ping Pong." Adrien Capozzi aka Adrien75 has a new one on Worm Interface under a new alias, 757. The CD title is also 757. Really interesting musician. Fans of To Rococo Rot, Richard D. James, Kit Watkins/Coco Roussel, Alan Gowen/Hugh Hopper take note! (Listen to the track "Two Cats" here; also good is "Dusseldorf," which is like Kraftwerk's "Neon Lights" set to a raga beat.) Two old-school tracks from Clay's Pounding System show on WFMU caught my ear (check out the stream for 9/25/02 on his archive): Eazy E's "Nobody Move" and Coldcut's "That Greedy Beat." The late 80s/early 90s were truly a golden age.
ANIME. Two '80s classics set in WWII have recently come out on DVD: Barefoot Gen and Grave of the Fireflies. The former depicts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a boy who survived, and has much nightmarish imagery. The latter may be the saddest movie ever made. It's the story of a kid trying to keep himself and his 5-year sister alive after their parents die in the war. Despite his determination and resourcefulness--living on dried frogs and stolen vegetables in an abandoned air raid shelter, after their cold-blooded aunt makes it clear they're not welcome--over the course of 2 hours we gradually watch them starve to death. Both films are beautifully drawn and animated, and are routinely shown to elementary school kids in Japan. Maybe if we did that here people might not be so ready to jump on the war train.
BOOKS. I'm re-reading a lot of stuff at the moment. Laughing my way through VS Naipaul's Mystic Masseur, which I made a note to reread after seeing Ismail Merchant's pretty good film adaptation. Like Woody Allen, Naipaul's earlier, funnier material is his best. I'm also revisiting some science fiction I hadn't looked at in a while, such as Frederick Pohl's intense absolute power fantasy Demon in the Skull (1965-1984), A. A. Attanasio's completely overlooked In Other Worlds (1985), and William Gibson's very amusing Virtual Light, which no one knew in '93 would be the first of a trilogy. "Rydell drove past an In-and-Out Burger place and [Chevette] remembered how this boy she knew called Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun over to an In-and-Out and shot out the B and the R, so it just said IN-AND-OUT URGE." Now that's funny!
October Exhibition Diary 4. The Jersey City studio tour came and went and now I'm gearing up for the elevator installation in D.U.M.B.O. this weekend. I'll post a building map and directions tomorrow. I was a bit disappointed in the turnout from the five boroughs for the JC tour, but it was fun. I probably had a couple hundred visitors through my studio in two days, and got some interesting responses. Casual viewers don't seem as put off by the use of the computer as typical "sophisticated" collectors who shop in Chelsea; most seemed comfortable with my hybrid of the machine and the hand. A lot of viewers thought the new molecular wall-pieces were painted frescos, to which I can only say: yay! Someone commented that they resemble the interconnected spheres and struts of the Atomium in Belgium. Big difference between my work and '50s atomic art: with mine the pseudoscience is right up front.
Thanks to everyone who came or emailed. I greatly appreciate your support!
People sitting in a darkened theater stare at a large reflective surface, while cell phones ring randomly throughout the room. The typical moviegoing experience at Times Square? No, it's a musical piece called Dialtones, which I recently learned about on dratfink's page. This "telesymphony," performed in connection with the Ars Electronica festival and funded by Swisscom Mobile, etc, is a half-good idea that just doesn't know when to quit. Check out the exhausting spec sheet: the piece is a social sculpture, it uses corporate switching systems as a found medium, it employs a lot of clever programming and hardware, it's electronic music, it's live performance, it's an audience participation piece, it has flashing lights, it has graphics, it has Mylar!
This kind of MIT Media Lab product (at least one of the performers went there) just pounds you with technology. It's essentially a loss leader for the tech industry, crafted by geeks whose art sense derives from rock concert multimedia shows. Audience members are asked to register their phone numbers when they arrive for the concert, special ringtones are downloaded to their cells, and then a musical ensemble "plays" the phones in an auditorium by punching buttons on a graphic display. So far, so good, I guess, but do we really need spotlights hitting the audience members when their cells ring? Keychain lights distributed to everyone that glow red two seconds before the tones go off? To see all this activity in a reflective mirror? The visual element is as gimcrack-filled as a Spielberg movie.
The piece assumes an audience with near-infinite time, patience, and trust. You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded "custom ringtone," all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own). Thirty minutes of antiphonal chirps, climaxing in the inevitable "crescendo of sound," might be pretty interesting to sit and listen to in the dark, if you weren't also being forced to "participate." The authors dispense grant-panel-friendly nonsense when they say this participation is "active," though. Your creative input consists solely of choosing a ringtone (doesn't the phone company also call this "creativity"?) and deciding what exotic handwaving motion to make when the spotlight hits you. The spec sheet doesn't mention another option you have that would definitely affect the "texture" of the piece: turning off your phone.
Congratulations to my friend, artist John Pomara, for receiving a thumbs-up in Wired for a show he curated called "jet_seT." The exhibition, at the University of Texas at Dallas, deals with artists using new printing media, but contrary to the "art of the future" spin Wired typically puts on things, most of the folks he picked disrespect the technology quite a bit. This applies to content as well as form.
I telephoned the Washington offices of my senators and congressman this morning about Iraq. The polite but bored phone-answerers got the following earful: "Hi, I'm a constituent, and I'm just calling to say that I'd like [the elected rep] to vote against any resolution giving the President broad, open-ended powers to start a war against Iraq. Declaring war is Congress's job under the Constitution, not the President's. Fighting Iraq is a personal obsession of George Bush's, and Senators and Congressmen, particularly Democrats, should stop looking over their shoulders to see how everyone else is voting, listen to their constituents (most of whom oppose the war), and stand up to the President. It's time to focus on more important matters, like the economy. I'm calling on my own behalf and not as part of some orchestrated campaign: I think Congress is out of touch and needs to listen to voters." Universal response from operators: "Thank you, Mr. Moody, I'll pass your message along to [the elected representative]."