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In November I visited Robert Boyd at Schroeder Romero gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to talk about his exhibition "The Virgin Collection" (as in "Like a..."), a high-concept conflation of Madonna, Gap kids, Spanish penitents, leftist agitprop, and fine crystal. The centerpiece of the show was a tall, freestanding effigy in bridal attire, holding a bouquet, with what looked like a KKK hood covering the head. The headgear is actually the official garb of the Nazarenos (the aforementioned penitents), originally meant to debase the wearer, like a dunce cap. During the opening, Boyd stood immobile inside this getup while people boozed & schmoozed (but still gave him a lot of space). In a true test of self-discipline, he held his pose even when a random drunk knocked over a delicate sculpture right in front of him. Sprinkled on plinths or hanging throughout the gallery were wedding trappings straight out of Modern Bride--stemware, cake-cutting knife, bridal portraits--emblazoned with Virgin Collection logos or otherwise tweaked, but all very elegantly presented. Boyd is taking a subtly askance, queer-theory look at both wedding mores and what Walter Benjamin calls the "aestheticization of power" with the show, but he also had some anecdotes suggesting an emotional undercurrent. We talked about the experience of certain gay couples being politely but perceptibly shunned at straight weddings, as if the whole rutting hetero thing caused even BoBos (bourgeois bohemians) to close ranks at Ritual Time. And if you think the Klan hood has lost any transgressive potential through pop culture repetition (in Cohn Brothers movies and the like), he related how the first lab he took the "bridal photos" to refused to print the pictures. Such symbols do still have power, as attested to by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's recent outburst during oral arguments in the cross burning case. (I had a couple of sentences here where I mimicked an offended Klansman threatening Boyd for his various transgressions against Southern honor and matrimonial rites, but I deleted them because people didn't know I was joking.)
This is an odds and ends post, where I talk about all the half-finished projects I'm working on. First, I direct your attention to my slightly juvenile defense of Jason Little, an amazing graphic novelist who got semi-slammed by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) in the New York Times. In his stuffy discourse on the immaturity of the graphic novel as an art form, Hornby sounds nervous, perhaps looking at the rise of a post-literate generation that doesn't have the time or patience to read his comedies of manners but has turned graphic novels into a burgeoning medium. Plus, it's possible he doesn't get Little's work, fretting that the cartoonist's material is potentially alienating when to many of us a "Nancy Drew mystery told in the style of Brian De Palma" is, um, good. Dissing Little's genre-bending suggests Hornby's own bias for the linear--or the old, like Louis Armstrong calling bebop "Chinese music."
I did a round of gallery & studio visits this past fall and wish I could write them up faster. An interesting range of work: Robert Boyd, Eric Heist, Carl d'Alvia, and Cory Arcangel. I've got notes and am hoping to get something readable posted soon.
I also have a review in progress of one of my current favorite musicians, Adrien Capozzi (aka Adrien75), whose work emerges from the late '90s ambient drum and bass scene but incorporates aspects of much earlier styles--'70s "jazz fission," RIO (rock in opposition), and Canterbury stylings. He released two superb, and very different discs this fall: 757, on Worm Interface, and Coastal Acces (sic), on Source. The first is kind of bouncy and melodic with warm analog synth melodies and nods to the early '80s, and the latter is a slow, tripped out series of impressions of the California coastline, with understated but intricately programmed rhythms and washes of industrial sounds. I first discovered Capozzi's work hearing "Smack Rabbit" on a NY radio show, a gorgeous instrumental that could have been a combination of the early Mothers, Milton Babbitt, and Bill Evans (if that makes any sense); subsequently I tracked down his amazing work with Doron Gura, under the names Unagi Patrol and Microstudio, among other aliases. He's an American Original who deserves a lot more attention.
I have a series of photographs I'm calling the New Jersey Wasteland Tour, in the tradition of Robert Smithson and Michael Ashkin but with no pretensions to being art. I took the pics with my digicam in a panic that the little "zone of rot" I frequently walk through was about to be beautified by the city or state. They include shots of the Morris Canal at its toxic/fecal best, the Statue of Liberty with a "No Trespassing Hazardous Materials Area" sign in the foreground, and some documentation of the parking lot that was hastily put in and removed by the Junior Soprano Paving Company in the patronage free-for-all that followed 9/11 (as described here). Eventually I'll have a slide show up. [Update: it's here.]
The Xtreme Houses book mentioned earlier was reviewed in the New York Times on December 19, 2002, in the house & home section. It's selling well, and has recently acquired a stroke-and-slap review from a reader on amazon.com. Slap because the writer feels the book needs to separate its artists-engaging-in-Marxist-agitprop from its shelter mag "livestyles of the cooler than you" spreads. I see the book's political and artistic non-hierarchical-ness as a strength. Also, the book is not "typographically cute" or Webby. It has text on the left, pictures on the right, and clear captions; Wired circa 1994 it's definitely not. The amazon writer's credibility is dicey, too, because in another review he says he has "nothing but respect" for MIT designer/programmer John Maeda, whose work, in the art field at least, still has a ways to go.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to all.
Quick addendum: Someone told me they saw my byline in the current issue of Flash Art. This is strange because I've never written for Flash Art. They do, however publish a lot of press releases that look like they might be articles, so maybe someone ripped some copy from a review, or this log, and stuck my name on it? I don't guess I care much. If anyone runs across the mag and can enlighten me further about this I'd greatly appreciate it.
A friend of mine was kidding me for saying I liked Dragonball Z, a much serialized, much butchered anime series that runs infinitely on the Cartoon Network on cable. I was trying to think what possible justification I had. Then I remembered King Kai. He's a sort of Yoda character that teaches battle tactics. He lives on a tiny planet in another dimension, which you get to by traversing Snake Way, which looks like the Great Wall of China on the back of a snake hundreds of miles long, twisting through the clouds. See the three people standing on the grass in the center of the planet? Each weighs 700 pounds in its enormous gravity. That's why it's such a good training place: if you can move at all you get stronger. Kai himself has blue skin, catfish whiskers, cockroach antennae, and dresses in priestly garb--with little hipster shades. He talks like a cross between Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd, and constantly tells terrible jokes, like "You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish." He's just the greatest!--and reason enough in my book to tune into the series. He's the type of "what the hell were they thinking?" character that pops up only in anime.
The apparent lethargy of the New York art world has less to do with 9/11, or even the Bush economy, than the shift of galleries from Soho to Chelsea, which, as I wrote in the New Art Examiner in 1997, was a calculated move to create an artist-free Brasilia for collectors (among other things, of course). The dealers are now reaping what they sowed in the form of an overall diminished sense of energy. Chelsea is a giant outlet mall, with huge spaces all apparently designed by the same person, providing festival-circuit artists with a place to strut their stuff in NY before moving to the next Biennale.
Increasingly I'm convinced that the action--yes, it's come down to this--is in artists' studios. You get to see a lot of work and hear the best explanation of it, before the ideas get turned to hash by a condescending or airheaded Manhattan gallerist. True, you don't get always get the nice white box, but c'mon, we're pros here! These, then, are notes from a few recent visits I did. Coming soon: the rest of this post, where I discuss recent visits to four NY studios. I'm still working on it, and I confess, the only reason I'm putting in this teaser is because I wanted some text between the images in the preceding and following posts, for layout reasons. That's the freedom I have, here in the blogosphere.
Check out these designs showing you how to make the entire Pokémon menagerie out of beads. The artist is Jason. (Above: Magneton.) The drawings are great, lo-fi patternmaking, and the site is a fine example of Dirt Style design. While the above image's suggestion of computer pixelation is largely unintentional, artist/musician/programmer Joe Beuckman pushes the connection explicitly in his beadworks. The image below, captioned "Karate Kicking Ensues," is from a series based on scenes from Datasoft Presents Bruce Lee, programmed by Ron J Fortier, 1983 (graphic design by Kelly Day).
As we near the end of the Web's First Decade of Widespread Use, it was only a matter of time before connoisseurship of bad web pages really got off the ground. Herewith I recommend Dirt Style 101, a vicious, take no prisoners critique hilariously masquerading as a home design course. Sample hint: "Dirt style projects must be nasty. Think 4th generation VHS dubs, Xerox copies made with a cartridge low on toner, post rap Vanilla Ice, or any car made in the '80s that ran on diesel. Now translate that into Web Design." I said the critique is vicious, but Professor C. Dirt also obviously has affection for the maimed, moronic, or just slightly off web pages he links to. If you've ever designed a web page, look at your peril! You'll probably find an example that looks like something you've done.
Reviews of the film One Hour Photo (no longer in theatres but due out on DVD soon) concentrated on its stalker theme and its critique-of-suburbia theme but pretty much left its art theme the hell alone. (Caution: this discussion reveals plot points.) Charles Taylor, in an incredibly obtuse write-up in Salon.com, called the movie “art house horror” but only used the word “art” as a tossed-off insult in the course of demolishing it on more typical (dramatic, cinematographic) grounds. He never considered whether the filmmakers might be interested not just in the “art house,” but art itself, and overlooked another fair reading of the movie: that it’s a parable of creative regeneration told under the guise of a psycho-slasher film (a parable only half-interesting, but more on that below).
Thoughts on the Hydrogen Economy. In his new book Jeremy Rifkin makes the case for hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels, imagining a World Wide Energy Web where nations, municipalities, and individuals have the ability to upload and download electricity (from fuel cells, solar, wind, biomass) whenever and wherever needed. His proposals make absolute sense as a set of goals. It'd be good to get some more opinions about whether they're all technically feasible--that is, based on technology we have now, as opposed to something we hope to discover--and of course they're almost impossible to sell politically, what with all the vested interests at stake. Still, this is a real, optimistic vision for the future, as opposed to the Dick Cheney "let's just steal it and burn it" approach to energy.