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Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for mentioning this page as an example of online art-writing. I've been enjoying his, too. In another recent post he mentions his dislike of John Currin and mocks the inevitable hagiographic Kimmelman review in the Times. Kimmelman invokes Paul Cadmus and I think that's exactly right: both artists are acerbically witty, with old master polish, but "minor" or "genre" figures. The difference is Currin's canvases are sold as the current high-priced ($400,000) "cutting edge": that's disturbing because it shows how retrograde the collector sensibility has become. Currin's work is mildly transgressive, eminently collectible, and assures the continuity of a certain line of American painting in museum collections: Sargent, Hopper, Cadmus, Tooker, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, John Currin. Avant gardes come and go, modernist and postmodernist trends seem faddish, but the Painterly Tradition is preserved. John C, I hope you're very proud.
Dallas, 1982 (They Live), scan of a black and white photo. I stood at one end of a University Park strip center and took a roll of pictures with a telephoto lens. One thing that strikes me about this image now is how huge the cars are. Also, remember antennas? Geez. I thought they were streaks on the scan at first. This looks like a documentary photo from the '60s to me. Very strange time warp.
My Dream (I promise this won't be a habit.)
Last night I dreamed I was a Japanese salaryman, living by myself in a large two story house, and all the light bulbs kept failing. As soon as I screwed one in it would short out, and I was starting to get scared. I went upstairs to see if I could find some part of the house with light, and found a duplicate of myself lying face down on some nail-studded boards, awkwardly trying to wield a hammer. I've never dreamed of myself as Japanese before; the vibe here was distinctly Tetsuo the Iron Man meets Waiting for Godot. Weird. After I woke up, I got online and ordered a VHS copy of Tetsuo, but mostly because I want to own Greg Nickson's incomparable "Drum Struck" video, which is on the Fox/Lorber tape (the dream reminded me I've been meaning to do this).
I have been thinking a lot about going to Japan, though. One thing I want to do is visit the west coast (Akita or Yamagata) so I can eat hatahata. I found out about this from an episode of Patlabor: Mobile Police, where Captain Gotoh dispatches Izumi and Shinohara to Sakata (in Yamagata) for a mission and asks them to bring back a package of these fish as a souvenir, or "miyage." (see Anime Companion Supplement). "Where's my hatahata?" becomes a running joke in the show. At the end the crew has boiled his hatahata in a soup-pot and appears to be eating without him. I do not get the ending of that episode.
Update, 2013: Drumstruck is on Greg Nickson's vimeo.
Oswald Rising, 1988, oil on canvas, 66" X 47". When I lived in Dallas, "the city that killed Kennedy" AKA "the city of hate," I participated in a university gallery show coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the assassination. I made this painting for the show, whoops, sorry, to express my deep feelings about an event that changed America. It was reproduced in the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram and Art Papers. On the 40th anniversary I find it amazing that webloggers like Steve Gilliard still buy the "lone nut" theory (scroll down to "Conspiracy Theories" on 11/21/03). Even if you don't believe all the evidence pointing towards a second shooter on the Grassy Knoll, the idea that a sleazy mob wannabe like Jack Ruby would suddenly get an attack of morality and kill Oswald out of "revenge" just stretches credulity. I'm with Gore Vidal that the shooting of the President with his wife in the car, in full view of everyone, was "classic Palermo style"--that is, a mob hit. Help from crazy anti-Castro Cubans and rogue CIA agents shouldn't be ruled out either. Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK is valuable not for its theory--that the military industrial complex whacked Kennedy because he was going to end the Vietnam War--but rather for its careful laying out of the many reasons the lone gunman hypothesis makes no sense.
Update to my previous post on the "A.B.C." video night at Deitch: It seemed strangely contradictory that Carly Ptak contributed the evening's most holistic performance (as a camcorder pans across images of the Great Outdoors, her voice hypnotically intones such Baba Ram Dassian commands as "look at the water, it's flowing neither forward nor backward, be a leaf in the water, just be here...") while at the same time, as a Duchampian found video finder, she offered the most out-of-synch-with-nature entry in the video program: a tape called Memorial Day 2000, which originally turned up in a West Michigan yard sale. The latter piece, shot by an anonymous camera holder, records a weekend of drinking, dancing, barbecuing, and bonfire-burning at a campground near the Michigan sandhills, attended solely by 20 and 30-something Midwesterners (no kids or anyone over 40) with the world's largest collection of RVs, ATVs, dirt bikes, and beer bongs. Kind of like an outdoor rave without a DJ, the event features vehicles chewing up the countryside, men wrestling in mud, a guy vomiting, and at the climax, a couch hurled onto the bonfire. To sensitive East Coast intellectual types, many of whom fled this kind of milieu, I'm guessing, the tape was a glimpse into the 9th circle of hell.
But maybe Ptak's two contributions aren't so far apart, on second thought. The TM piece isn't "nature" but electronically mediated nature, somewhat reminiscent of a soothing self help tape you could order online to get your fried head together. The electronic drones underlying the words were vaguely sinister and hardly "natural," in the sense of wind and babbling brooks (Ptak is one-half of the demonic noise act Nautical Almanac, after all). And as barbaric and eco-unfriendly as the Memorial Day revellers were, "at least they weren't at home clicking through the channels all weekend," as Ptak pointed out to me later. Their activities were a frenetic but ultimately non-violent coming together in search of...some kind of meaning? An attempt to reclaim lost communal rituals? And who's really in a position to judge them? When all was said and done, both performances reduced nature, or "natural experience," to phosphor dots on a screen, watched passively by a room full of people in their own search for collective meaning/entertainment/enlightenment.
Pictures from "A.B.C.", a.k.a. Another Bad Creation, a group night of video and performance curated by Cory Arcangel, at Deitch Projects, NY (last night, November 19, 2003). Featuring works created and/or found by Cory and Jamie Arcangel, BEIGE, Paper Rad, Seth Price, CELLmedia, Carly Ptak, LoVid and the shinths tour.
From the press release: "Taking its title from the early 90's teen pop band produced by Michael Bivins (of Biv10 entertainment), this night explores a style of video and performance best described as 'post cable access.' [V]ideo and live performance mash together in an almost imperceptible mix of quick cuts and poorly tracked VHS footage. Think accidental high-school videos, Salvation Army found tapes, awesome karaoke, anything originally recorded on a BETA tape, broken Nintendo games, blue screen ring tone hip-hop videos, and dance videos made with tin foil and spray paint. Th[e] night explores the side of homemade single channel video which is cheap, quick, and often embarrassing. Colliding to provide us with a clear picture of the ill fated 'home video revolution,' the foundations of A.B.C. are the celebration of the camcorder, the banality of everyday life, and a complete disregard for the medium."
Top to bottom: Carly Ptak, live video/sound/performance (a kind of transcendental meditation incantation with a spooky electro-bass pulse and the artist's face superimposed over leaves, rocks, river, and sky--rather disconcerting after a night of High Irony); LoVid, live video/sound/performance (playing their new video synth--sorry I didn't get more imagery in the shot); "Shinth," DIY performance with handmade electronic instrument built by Peter B. The Shinth tour was in the basement of Deitch's Wooster Street space; the video program ran upstairs for a continuous 90 minutes of big-screen projection. The flow of recorded videos and "pay no attention to those performers behind the curtain" live video was fairly seamless: I didn't realize till afterward that the Paper Rad performance (psychedelic nonZense literally phoned in through a stuffed talking bear telephone) was done live.
A couple more pics are here (click on thumbnails for enlarged view). More on Carly Ptak here.
An earlier thread on Christopher Ashley's html drawings got sidetracked into other issues, such as browser and display technology and whether web designers are artists (I'd say they're designers, but that's not to say design can't be artistic). Ashley's abstractions are consistently inspiring and imaginative, accomplished with the most minimal and available of means. New patterns, color relationships, and strategic approaches to that Modernist mainstay, the grid, just seem to pour out of him.
A painter friend of mine was over recently and really responded to Ashley's works onscreen. We agreed they (html drawings) were the type of thing Peter Halley would be doing if his work wasn't "stuck." Halley talks a good cyber-game but he's never made the leap to actually composing with or for the computer. Usually he uses it to illustrate or document ideas in his paintings, or as digital window dressing to make his art seem more "now," while he continues producing traditionally-fabricated canvases.* His biggest problem, though, is being a prisoner of his own cells and conduits. Ashley, on the other hand, working only with the computer, shows a wide range of places the "Halley-type painting" could go: intriguing figure-ground play, simulated transparency, flirtation with applied design (logos, pictograms, game boards).
I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form.
*See for example, this jacket illustration for a recent Halley book. Behind the all the naked models you can see a Halley painting fuzzed out with some kind Gaussian filter. The inside of the book features More Wacky Photoshop Fun With Halley Paintings. Oh, and I guess I should say I generally like Halley's work but find his recent forays into installation and trying to position himself as a Warholian media maven unconvincing.
