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Thickeye has piqued my interest to go see William Pope.L's show at Artists Space. The video work looks particularly interesting. Actually that's not a very good word: try wrenching, heartbreaking, black-humorous (in a dual sense)... I say that based not on seeing the work but checking out this web page discussing Pope.L's "crawl pieces" such as The Great White Way: 22 miles, 5 years, 1 street, 2002, then reading Thickeye's description:
I really liked his old school performance stuff [...] which includes portions of his Great White Way wherein he crawls around portions of Manhattan wearing a suit and tie. While I had read about this before and seen still images they do not convey the degree to which this performance is about time, tedium and the agony of the slow. It's really painful to watch the pace as he crawls, flowers in hand, his glasses falling partially off, and hanging from his sweaty face. While the piece is about race and the "other" in many obvious ways, for me, the portion that most interestingly touched on the layers of otherness was when two other black men, seeing him crawling (and presumably the camera man) attempt to get him to stand up. While I could not hear what they were saying (though there is sound included) as a silent act to me they did not want him exhibiting his otherness, brandishing it with such bravado, bringing attention to their own (from both inside themselves and outside). I will probably write a more formal review of the show after I go for a visit during a more mellow time. The best part was probably getting one of his business cards that has his name and "friendliest black artist in America."The "formal review" did get written and appears on The Blowup Review site. It's well worth reading, but good luck finding it in that unlinkable frame-o-rama (hint: look over on the right and use that scroller).
UPDATE: D'oh, I assumed because the Pope.L exhibit was on the front page of the Artists Space website, that it was still up. It closed Feb. 21.
UPDATE 2: The Pope.L "crawling" performances have a lot in common with Momoyo Torimitsu's robotic dummies of bellycrawling salarymen (currently at Deitch Projects--see photo in the comments to this post). Momoyo used to walk one around the city streets wearing a nurse's uniform, which was a nice macabre touch. I first saw her work around '96 or '97. When did Pope.L start crawling? Did he know Momoyo's work or vice versa? Is anyone else asking these questions?
"Show Us Your Gnomes."
I know a woman who works at an uptown, blue-chip-type gallery in NYC. She tells the story of a major Abstract Expressionist artist--she won't say who--that for decades had been selling nonrepresentational paintings for the big bucks. One day he invited her to his studio and said, "You know, I have this body of work I rarely show anyone that I've been doing for a few years now. It's really different from my abstract work but I'd like for you to look at it and tell me if you think it has any potential." So the woman looks at it and at this point in the telling of her story she literally screams and says "Oh, my god, it was these GNOMES! These horrid cutesy drawings of little men! Etc Etc sarcasm abuse..."
I find this story really poignant and compelling. The gnomes are probably the guy's real art, what he actually feels and cares about. But his market is this fake art that may very well have emerged from a place of sincerity 40 years ago but now is just a simulacrum he's doomed to repeat because it's his "job." So he's stuck. By not revealing the gnomes sooner, and attempting to gather support among critics and fellow artists (say, by covertly sponsoring shows with portentous titles like "Unpacking Little Men: The Content Paradox"), they're forever his dirty secret, bringing him only ridicule from the guardians of uptown taste. As the dealer's scream implies, to loose them on the world now would be a devastating career ender.
This gave me the idea for a curated exhibition called "Show Us Your Gnomes." It would consist of work artists are hiding from the public because they find themselves locked into a "signature" style or sensibility. It would essentially be a free pass for them to exhibit their gnomes, or gnome-equivalents, before it's too late. Work they care about but find embarrassing that might actually turn out to be more important than their accepted work. Talk about a minefield. (Pictures accompanying this post found by searching "gnomes" under Google/Images. For illustrative purposes only. That top one's pretty good.)
UPDATE: Edited slightly to reorder sentences and remove a gratuitous classist swipe.
UPDATE 2: This is not an actual call for work, just an idea.
We're discussing nuclear explosions in Japanese animation here and Richard Box's latter day "lightning field" of bulbs fluorescing around a giant electric pylon here. Regarding American consumption of the former, in videos with apocalyptic themes and spectacular battles, Sally says "culturally it's a disturbing kind of acquisitiveness--buying products of catharsis from the culture that we inflicted with the suffering that we feared." Regarding Box's work, where the array of light bulbs on the ground mysteriously glows in response to powerline flux, I suggest the artist is hitching a p.r. ride on electricity-related health fears just as others say his piece hitches a free ride on the power lines: "The piece looks lovely but it owes a big debt to someone else's work [Walter De Maria's], and the science around it appears to be more unsettled than unsettling."
"Daddy, tell me about Powell's meltdown again."
This story has been much repeated, but I just love rereading it, so here it is again. The subject is a recent public flip-out by soon-to-be-ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who as you recall went before the UN last year and lied and lied and lied about the pressing need to go to war. This is from James Ridgeway in the Village Voice:
Last week, Powell tried hard to regain the righteous high road with testimony in Congress, but when Ohio congressman Sherrod Brown mentioned Bush's AWOL problems as an aside in one question, Powell sprang into a generalissimo pose, ordering Brown, "Don't go there," as if the congressman were some dumb enlisted peon.
Then, as Powell was ruminating about how hard he tried to understand the pre-war intelligence—"I went to live at the CIA for four days"—he broke off and stared at a committee staff person sitting behind the congresspeople. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?" Powell intoned. "Are you part of these proceedings?"
Sherrod Brown, who has been in Congress 12 years, jumped to the staffer's defense: "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."
Powell snapped, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you giving editorial comment by head shakes."
Powell just doesn't seem to get it. He's not in some army camp. This is the people's house, and any member of Congress can ask whatever he or she pleases.
Who does Powell think he is? Douglas MacArthur?
A new, old review--written in 1982--has been added to the Doris Piserchia Website:
Mister Justice, 1973.My exhaustive, spoiler-ridden explication of the novel is here. Thanks to Joanna for finding the Trombetta review.Crammed into half an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, sci-fi style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930s, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables - they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders.
He then returns to the present, where he arranges an "eye for an eye" treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and "empty the world." With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchmen and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva - she of the constrictor thighs - Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp.
Jim Trombetta, "The Coolest Sci-Fi," from The Catalog of Cool (1982), edited by Gene Sculatti, p. 87.
"If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse." Who said that--John Kerry? Tom Daschle? Don't make me laugh. No, it was Ralph Nader, the man conservative Democrats love to hate (on Meet the Press). Look, you don't have to vote for him, but shouldn't we all be happy if his candidacy gives him a platform to say what mainstream pols are too gutless to say?
One of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated themes is the idea that global capitalism will lift all boats. As he puts it, "No country with a McDonalds has ever fought a war with another country with a McDonalds." Forget that the work is demeaning and the food is crappy. Since 9/11/01 he's been embarrassing himself in print with great regularity, trying to reconcile his "we are the world" thesis with the need to show Muslims who's boss. He's also been weighing in on the exporting of American jobs, which of course he thinks is great, and today he's come up with a clever name for the "new class" of Indians who are getting an increasing chunk of American white-collar work. The hokey neologism shall not be repeated here lest it add to his meme-pool cred, but here's a modest prediction: that it will end up being used, not like he hopes--as a cutesy way of understanding and relating to the people taking our jobs, sorry, our fellow laborers, across the Pacific--but as a term of derision by the so-called "protectionists" he hates. God, if only.