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Here's a bit of casual racism from the New York Times' lead editorial today: "Poor neighborhoods are the killing box, and if a drive-by shooting occurs there it may touch the middle-class heart, but it does not chill the soul. When a criminal like the sniper demonstrates that he can strike anywhere — in a mall, by a school, at a bus — we tend to endow him with unique personal qualities."
Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine, in theatres now and worth a look, shows how the media demonizes the black male "other" as the main source of crime in America. After seeing that film's endless montage of blowdried talking heads saying "The suspect is a black male...", you couldn't help but wince when news outlets blitzed the world with John Muhammad's headshot, before he was officially accused of anything. Here we go again. Of course the rightwing nutball commentators seized on the accused's last name, trying to add fuel to Bush's Anti-Islamic Crusade, but surely the most salient fact is not Muhammad's race or religion but that he's ex-Army, and an angry Gulf War veteran to boot. Chalk 10 dead as more blowback from bad government policy in '91, add them to the five spouses brutally murdered by Delta Force guys returning from Afghanistan, and think about all the future mayhem GWB is about to unleash. As one of those kids whose deaths don't chill our middle-class souls might say, "Actions have consequences, yo."
Addenda: In an essay that appeared a few days after this post, Alexander Cockburn made a more fleshed-out argument for the sniper-as-blowback, including a recitation of all the domestic killings by US military personnel, post-Afghanistan. Also, a friend read the Times quote above and didn't believe me that that paper could be that callous. Surely I had misread a comment that was intended to be an ironic take on the average blockhead view. No, unfortunately it was that view straight up. In the comments to this post, I've included a longer excerpt from the editorial to put the remarks in context. I assume these lines were written by Gail Collins, the Times' editorial page editor.
One last post on the Elevator Project before I return to ranting about the government and media (like the interview I caught on CNN's "all sniper all the time" coverage today featuring some idiot hawking bulletproof vests). I've documented the elevator piece (some might say overdocumented) here, with installation shots, curatorial notes, my diary in chronological order, and a new series-in-progress inspired by Jim Bassett's molecular closeup shots. I know, I know, there's too much material and it's way self-indulgent, but I'm really happy with the way the project turned out.
October Exhibition Diary 8. I installed my piece Molecular Dispersion (Elevator Kit) in the freight elevator at 50 Washington in DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) NY on Thursday and Friday. The piece was open to public viewing in connection with the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival on Saturday and Sunday (Oct 19 and 20). Lots of people came by both days, as they wandered around the fifth floor touring the open studios. In my previous post I described installing amidst the chaos of a normal busy day in the elevator; the contrast between that experience and my weekend experience was marked.
On Saturday and Sunday, the building's management decided for crowd control reasons to keep my elevator frozen on the fifth floor with the doors open, while allowing other elevators to service the floor. This was nice because it kept the work on "permanent" view. But it was also not so nice, because the art was no longer in a functioning, workaday environment. People either entered, pushed buttons trying to get to other floors, and left in frustration; or saw the explanatory text on wall outside, realized it was an art show, then gave it a quick look from the doorway. If they'd been using the elevator, they'd be immersed in the environment for however long it took to get to their floors, and they'd see the art full-on, with the depth-effect (such as it was) of the simulated 3-D molecule floating on shiny metal. From the doorway, seen at an angle, glare and wall-smudges are more pronounced and the depth was lost.
Nevertheless, some people were curious enough to enter the space for a better view, from what I could observe standing in the hallway talking to friends, which kept me in a good mood. If I happened to be in the elevator talking to someone, however, it created an interesting social dynamic. Seeing us in the lift, people would assume it was working, and walk in and push the buttons. When one of us inevitably piped up to say "It's not working," about 6 out of 10 visitors got huffy. At least four type-A personalities actually said, with sneering sarcasm, "So what are you doing in here, just hanging out?" When I said "It's an art exhibit" I either got the hand-over-the-mouth "I'm so sorry" reaction or the eye-rolling "Well la-di-fucking-da."
There's an awful lot of free-floating hostility out there; two of the friends I was talking to (one of whom had recently exhibited in a public space) discussed with me how art becomes a lightning rod for all that anger. Of course, anything that smacks of conceptualism (or presumed superior posture on the part of the artist) just generally pisses people off. Not guessing I was the artist, a couple of guys read the text aloud in pretentious voices and then loudly dissed the work, while their girlfriends giggled appreciatively. But that kind of reaction was the exception--when all was said and done, the piece was too brightly colored and "fun" to really hate. (Some people expected more of an elevator-filling spectacle, to which I can only say, I'm sorry, I think this particular type of structure would have diminished the more it surrounded you--one wall was enough!)
In any case, the project was an adventure. Thanks to curator Ombretta Agrò for including me in the exhibition and bringing tours through each day. Also, big shoutouts to James, Gregory, Claire, Ross, Deb, Matt, Jim, Sarah, Alex, Linda, Dave, Mike, Janet, Brian, Cory, and anyone else I might have missed that came by. Jim took some nice pictures with his Danger hiptop and posted them while he was in the elevator; the sheer immediacy of that publication I find mind-blowing. I also like the way he shot them, in a kind of "descent into the Microverse" montage. I'll have some more pictures up soon.
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!