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Above: Ross Knight at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves St., Long Island City (Queens), NY. On one level, Knight's work takes us back to a moment of not-so-ancient art history when the aesthetic purity of say, Anthony Caro smacked up against the obdurate factualness of Minimalist slabs and cubes. What makes it "now," as opposed to some '60s throwback, is the rickety, slightly forlorn look of the sculptures (yes, that's intentional, and very wry), masking a kind of stealth investigation not just of found materials but found design--in 80s-speak, a "play of real world signifiers" that would have been anathema to all those '60s guys. To plagiarize myself from an earlier article:
Using a limited but highly versatile repertoire of materials—aluminum pipes, corrugated vinyl sheeting, Velcro, paint—Knight erects flimsy, portable structures that are essentially abstract (like classic Minimalist works, they unfold and change as the viewer moves in and around them) but invoke influences ranging across the socio-economic spectrum, from high-tech trade show architecture to point-of-sale advertising displays to the jury-rigged shelters of the homeless. Highly sensitive to context, these constructions change with their placement and angle of view.Several things have happened with the work since that was written. Knight no longer paints the structures but relies instead on the straight-from-the-factory pigmentation of the cut plastic sheets (and it's tinted Plex now, in lieu of the lighter weight corrugated signboard). Also, he's making forays into outdoor sculpture, so the pieces now tread a delicate line between the light, provisional look that's essential on a content level and the practical realities of withstanding the elements. Thus, he buries concrete to anchor the aluminum tubes, uses bolts rather than velcro, and adds tightly stretched guy wires, incorporating these as new elements to his vocabulary, while still keeping that carefully controlled slapped-together feel. One imagines an enthusiastic (or deranged) carnival barker standing within the black & chartreuse enclosure above, exhorting the viewer to enter the gateway and experience more of that particular exquisite blue. Unlike the egomaniacal Richard Serra, Knight doesn't rudely block ingress and egress to a public building, though. You just walk right on through.
I've revised an earlier post about the recently-deceased writer John Gregory Dunne and his hilarious book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. I'm re-reading the book now and decided to flesh out the information a bit. One anecdote I'll repeat here, for those that don't feel like backtracking. During the on and off writing of the Up Close and Personal screenplay, Dunne and his wife & writing partner Joan Didion tackled a science fiction script, for a Simpson/Bruckheimer blockbuster (never filmed) called Dharma Blue. The plot concerned UFO-related goings-on at a mysterious research facility called Rhyolite. Written into a corner, they decided they need a lesson in current physics to move the story forward. Science go-to guy Michael Crichton's suggested dialogue about string theory cracks me up:
[Doctor, novelist, filmmaker] Michael Crichton has for years been our authority about matters medical and scientific. [I called him and said] Michael, tell me about string theory. "For a piece, book, or movie?" Michael asked. "Movie," we said. "You want to know what it is," he asked, "or do you need dialogue?" "Dialogue," we said, "and we need to keep it simple." "John," he said patiently, "It's a movie." We explained the circumstances. "I'll check some people and get back to you," Michael said.A few days before our meeting with Simpson and Bruckheimer, Michael called back with the requisite information, and helped us put it in dialogue form:
A. Most people think of the universe as having four dimensions. Height, length, depth, and time. String theorists have constructed a theoretical model of the universe with 26 orthogonal dimensions.B. Orthogonal?
A. At right angles...
B. But what does it mean that they're doing string theory at Rhyolite?
A. I think it means they're not doing theory any more.
(a beat) It means that...whatever they're out there to study...may appear to exist in more than four dimensions.
(another beat) It means they could be out there to see what 26 orthogonal dimensions looks like when it hits the real world.
Joe McKay, "Audio Pong" game. The volume level, not the degree of dopiness of the noises coming out of players' mouths, determines the height of the paddles. Some people don't realize this, believing instead that an algorithmic spazz-out evaluator controls the ascent and descent of the rectangles (and whether the ball stays on the court). The players above were real pros, however. Five rounds determines a winner. At Vertexlist in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Below: another McKay piece. The recording light rotates, simulating blinking in real space.
A non-clinical definition of paranoia: you go right past the simplest explanation and look for one that's the most dangerous. In the case of John Woo's film Paycheck, the simple reason why 89 out of 115 critics hated it could be that it's bad. But let's explore the paranoid one. (Spoilers, but this is the type of movie where they don't matter, right?) Paycheck has a point, and the point is this: Pre-emptive war leads to more war, the nasty kinds where A-bombs explode in US cities. This goes squarely against the party line espoused by our chowderhead-in-chief and his gang. And since the majority of the 89 naysaying critics are media whores, they protect and promote the conventional wisdom, aka the party line (such as "everything changed after 9/11/01"). So they want to make sure you don't see Woo's film, that it dies ignobly at the box office, and only a handful rent it on DVD. Whatever their motives, they're wrong: the movie is much tighter than the chase-padded Face/Off (and the pretentious, incoherent Minority Report). Affleck and Thurman are good, the movie keeps you constantly thinking and guessing. And it's fun. Another reason for the critical slam, I think, is that mainstream critics hate "sci fi," as they call it. Until it succeeds at the box office: then they start analyzing it for political portents. I say, both paranoically and simplistically, see the movie, embrace its wisdom, stop Bush.
Afterthought: the film also shows a couple of "good feds" hiding evidence to prevent the Guantanamo-like incarceration of a man they know is innocent. Deep-six that movie!
My recent post on Artforum's bestowing of "new artist" status twice to the same person (in 1992 and again 12 years later) led to some unfortunate bashing of the magazine out in bloggerland. One writer told me in an email that he hadn't read anything good in AF since its September 2002 piece on Robert Ryman. This challenged me to look through a stack of 'forums since that date and find good, or at least provocative, articles. What follows is the first in an on-again off-again series discussing what I found. The posts won't always be "positive" (the one below isn't) but the idea is to have a discussion as opposed to just popping off.
January 2003 issue. (Yes, I know this was a year ago.) Philip Nobel's cover story on a Pierre Huyghe-curated exhibition gives the reader much to react to, even though the piece isn't critical enough by half. Huyghe and collaborator Phillipe Parreno purchased the rights to the Japanimation character Annlee (below, left) from "Kworks, a Japanese clearinghouse" for such things, and then a group of artist friends riffed on this piece of readily-available intellectual property. Nobel accurately describes the little girl Annlee as "sad," but then takes a critical kamikaze dive and declares her a metaphor for the Japanese themselves, citing Takashi Murakami's morose thesis: "Behind the flashy titillation of anime lies the shadow of Japan's defeat in the Pacific war. The world of anime is the world of impotence." Right, as we see in the enterprising Japanese space program in Wings of Honneamise, the bickering-but-always-successful robot-pilot cops in Patlabor, the ebullient gender comedy in Ranma 1/2... Anime isn't just Grave of the Fireflies but tell that to an American critic looking for a hook. (For the record, Huyghe thinks Nobel's interpretation of the project overromanticizes it. "We bought a virgin," Huyghe says, sounding like one of those cold, cold Euro-operators in Olivier Assayas' Demonlover.)
According to Nobel, Huyghe "slightly redrew" the character (see two computer images above right), which is true if "slightly redrawing" means removing her pupils, tilting her eyes the opposite way, giving her a perm, stripping off her clothes, and turning her into a robot ET. Huyghe then asked 14 artists to interpret this "open source Annlee" for a group show that traveled to major museums. Once he created the "freeware" prototype, the artists were stuck drawing her that way, that is, like his digital puppet and not the Kworks original (Nobel refers to the show's "many identical video avatars"). So what's the purpose of buying the brand, bringing the "empty sign" to life through multiple interpretations, and then transferring the copyright back to the character, as Huyghe supposedly did, if you're going to make the brand unrecognizable before the interpretation process even starts? The work has a superficial frisson of commodity art but fails as a meme-propagating business model, parodistic or otherwise. It's the sort of high-concept exercise that gives museum curators goosebumps, but based on the reproductions and Nobel's description I'd say it flopped. And now Huyghe "owns" the idea in the copyright office of artist opinion so no one else can ever do it again, not that they should.
This abstract "Annlee" wallpaper by M/M Paris, sorry for the grainy scan, is great, though:
Rover Anthony Feyer, whose work I only know from the card below, which I received in the mail, is showing at Suite 106 gallery in Soho. I'm guessing this is a digitally manipulated photo. Dear God, I hope it is. It's not entirely clear in the scan, but that's a person in an animal suit in the uppermost vehicle, holding a sign that says Jesus Loves You. I assume it's the eponymous "furry."
Moody Wins Coveted "PreVie" Award
Is runner-up in second category
(AP, January 13, 2004) Artist and weblogger Tom Moody has won a coveted PreVie award, given out annually for the best "prereviews" of Hollywood films.
"It was a three-way tie for 'Best Rant,'" says an ecstatic Moody. "The award committee really liked my review of the movie, The Order. No, not the one with Jean-Claude Van Damme, the one about the rogue priests."
"Prereviews" are an Internet phenomenon, where reviewers describe and opine about films they don't see.
"In an information-blitz society, there is so much data out there about films that one can formulate a reasonably good opinion about them," observes Charles Sheckley, a media studies professor at Virginia Polytechnic University. "Also, frankly, Hollywood films are so cookie-cutter and filled with platitudinous 'conventional wisdom,' who actually needs to go?"
Inspiring many other prereview websites, Joe McKay's "PreReview" was the first, and "still absolutely the best," according to TinselTalk, a Hollywood-watching site. McKay raised a few eyebrows by judging this year's competition, especially since he gave himself one of the awards.
"That was a bit tacky, but hey, it's his site," said TinselTalk's Sherry Flanagan.
Moody was also runner-up for his "Classic PreReview" of the movie Top Gun. Classic PreReviews apply to older films and must also not have been seen by the reviewer.
"Yeah, I'm probably the only person in America that hasn't seen Top Gun. But I wasn't confused when everyone was comparing it to Bush's flight deck stunt. I certainly knew it well enough to review it," Moody said.
New Strong Bad email features different generations of cheesy video games. A Pong-level charmer called "Secret Collect," ye texte-bafed gamme called "Dungeonmaster," the ultra-sophisticated "Rhinofeeder," and best of all, a 3-D vector game called "Strongbadzone." In the last, you use your cybershield to block Strongbad's "perplexing 3-D geometric attacks" and whenever you lose a point, a message appears on the screen saying "YOUR HEAD A SPLODE." Wait a few beats after the end of the email and playable versions of the games will appear. Back off, baby!