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Blogger Billmon (of the "Whiskey Bar" site) disappeared about a month ago and recently resurfaced on the op-ed page of the LA Times, griping that bloggers are being co-opted through advertising and gradually absorbed into the major media. It's definitely happened here; I'm constantly being offered plum sponsorship if I would just stick to one subject. (Kidding.) Billmon makes one good point: "The political blogosphere already has a bad habit of chasing the scandal du jour. This election season, that's meant a laser-like focus on such profound matters as the mysteries of Bush's National Guard service or whether John Kerry deserved his Vietnam War medals. Meanwhile, more unsettling (and important) stories — like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or the great Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction snipe hunt — quietly disappear down the media memory hole. And bloggers either can't, or won't, dig them back out again."
But he's just as guilty of focusing on A-list bloggers as he says the media is. Instead of using his moment in the sun to steer readers to less-appreciated venues, he kvetches about a handful of peers he perceives as "making it." Like we give a flip. James Poniewozik used to be a regular, hilarious read for me in Salon, but since he became Time's TV critic I haven't read a single word he's written. (I just never read Time.) The same will happen when Atrios or Kos cross over to the dark side. Or Billmon, if he becomes a "pundit" and doesn't restart his blog.
(thanks to drat fink for the LA Times link--registration probably required)
Via bloggy, Christie's, and Sir Reggie Dwight's collection comes this Harry Callahan image, titled Collage, Chicago, 1957, a small gelatin silver print. An uneducated guess is these are superimposed negatives of an array of photos spread out on Callahan's wall or floor (which may or may not actually have been glued together in real space). Interesting the way the photo picks up the rhythms of the Abstract Expressionist painting of the time--e.g. Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin. Back then this was was just considered "art" but now we see it as all of a piece with 50s textile design and magazine illustration. What will the "art of today" be all of a piece with, I wonder?
In the comments to an earlier post, Aaron Yassin says: "Although I don't mind a few New Dumb Little Paintings here and there (some of them can be pretty cute) I'm not as sympathetic as you or Jerry Saltz are to the genre. I'm actually more mystified by the continued proliferation of the form and view it as one more sign that we are really in the midst of a mannerist period." He asks what I think is important about the genre.
First, don't give too much weight to Saltz's opinion since he has what art historiographer James Elkins calls a "positionless position" on art. The brief for bad painting, however, has remained fairly strong since it was first identified by Marcia Tucker and others in the late 70s. Here's the gist of an argument: Technological developments in "imaging" (first photography, now digital tools) are in the process of making painting as historic as hot lead typesetting, whether we like it or not, and there are only two ways it can go now. It can merge into technological practice and/or it can be the most idiosyncratic, unco-optable form of personal expression. "Mannerist" implies decadence but idiosyncratic personal expression is absolutely vital and essential in a world dominated by mass-(re)produced media. Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" show at Metro Pictures was a landmark because it harnessed the power of many individuals' "one good painting" (good meaning punchy or hard-to-forget) and also presaged the role of the artist as curator of such phenomena, an increasingly common practice on the Web. I could go on but that's it in a nutshell. To me, "mannerism" is the postmodern AbEx painting at Von Lintel gallery in Chelsea.
In this post Adam Greenfield points out a recent bit of Eyebeam reBlogging to illustrate the damage that resyndication feeds could do to Google ranking and giving-credit-where-credit-is-due. Specifically, when Eyebeam reBlogged an item about Jim Davies' Pac-Man Paintings Page, it did not assign the primary, "top of the post" link to the original source but rather to a downstream reblogger. Thus, instead of clicking surfers through to Davies' page, the top link takes them to a secondary source. Greenfield believes such practices muddy the web waters and fears that ultimately a reBlogger could beat out Davies, the content originator, for top Google ranking.
I was the reBlogger at the time so here's an explanation. First, in defense of the Eyebeam reBlog software, it does give the reBlogger a choice which link to use for "top of the post" status, so it's not purely robotic. I chose the link I chose (we-make-money-not-art's reblogging of the item) because w-m-m-n-a had picked and (as best I can recall) resized the photo accompanying the Davies plug and added (admittedly very slight) editorial commentary. I figured that since Davies was being reBlogged so many times he'd ultimately get his due (which at the moment appears to be slashdotting), and I'd give credit to the reblogger who packaged the item in a way most to my taste. And, to be perfectly honest, I thought Davies' art was topical and only mildly amusing so this was my way of hedging a critical endorsement.
As far as Google getting skewed by my capriciousness, jeez, who cares? It's an erratic search measure at best and plain screwy as a measure of intellectual worth. Thanks to Google, my current largest hit-getter is a drawing of gay furry porn I linked to over two years ago, to make a minor point about, ironically, the vernacular side of the Web mooting earnest new media initiatives. As far as I know, I'm the only person who ever linked to it, and it gets disproportionate attention because Google Images pulls it up as an example of the hugely popular "yaoi" (male-male manga) search term. That comes from the URL, not me--I didn't even know the term in June 2002 (in fact, I thought the furries in question were a male and a female). I guess my point is that sometimes it only takes one link to make something "a hit," and getting credit as a "discoverer" of an artwork can result in a tidal wave of unwanted traffic. Not quite the same, honor-wise, as publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal, for either the critic or the critiqued. To conclude, as David Byrne once said of the government, "Don't worry about Google."
From Daniel Albright's Quantum Poetics (Cambridge University Press 1997), p. 191:
For several years before writing Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Ezra Pound had earned money by writing criticism, with varying degrees of good humor and bitterness. Much of this criticism was published pseudonymously:I am writing regularly for [Orage, editor of The New Age] as B. H. Dias and Wm. Atheling. The former on art, where E. P. would be hopelessly suspect of Vorticist Propaganda, and the elderly Atheling on music because no one writer should publicly appear to know about everything. These wind shields are to be kept secret. Dias only puts over as much as the N[ew].A[ge]. reader is supposed to be able to stand. (Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, p. xxii [1918])Clearly these personae are conventional critics generated by a general subtraction of talent, vigor, and idiosyncrasy. (Though of course they still managed to give a good deal of offense--particularly because of Atheling's invectives against the piano.) Atheling is elderly, while Dias is--at least on a few occasions--a fuddy-duddy horrified by certain advanced Modernist ideas, such as those of Ezra Pound. As Dias wrote to The New Age:There is no use arguing with these people. There is no use trying to make them understand [that]...sculpture...is an art of form, whose language is form... Mr. Ezra Pound attempted some such explanation in your paper years ago; it only produced a riot. But, then, he expressed himself very badly and in the jargon of his horrible vortex. (Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, p. 36 [1918])
I first heard the music of jenghizhan (aka John Parker) at the Brooklyn space vertexList, and described it enthusiastically here as "mysterious, sexily-filtered ambient industrial keyboards." He has since posted those performances on this page of his website, as "live improvisation with the Elektron Monomachine." Track 4 is one of my favorites, and I did a "remix," consisting solely of lopping off the intro and cutting straight to the monster, four-note hook that first grabbed my attention: [4.7 MB .mp3].
Later I heard him perform with Man from Planet Risk, his duo with Cave Precise (Ron Ramey), both in a live club setting and on CD. In a post on the band I commented on the differences between their live and studio sounds:
For all its echo-y horror soundtrack atmospherics and Black Sab-like bass riffs, the CD is much lighter [than the live playing]: the beats are spryer, with turntable twists & jazzy piano riffs livening up the doom and gloom. "Triphop" comes to mind because the sound is truly trippy: jenghizkhan approaches music like a painter (and is in fact a visual artist, exhibiting under his non-nom de plume), taking advantage of all the filtering and timestretching capabilities of modern keyboard tech to make layers of artfully mangled sound. Imagine Ennio Morricone eclectism shot through with the kind of dreamy, smeared psychedelia of San Francisco post-punkers Chrome, or the European hardcore tech of The Mover set to a hiphop beat.Since then, I've listened to jenghizhan's solo CDs Hooden Knooks and Brooklyn Sucks. It's great stuff, what the late lamented Throb records would file under "braindance" and what I would call "art electro." By way of comparison, I went back and listened to the Ischemic Folks compilation, which many considered a watershed for this kind of intensely digital electronic music, and found I like jenghizkhan better. Except for a couple of lush Richard Devine compositions, the IF CD is brittle and analytical, with too much of the Miami Bass parent DNA decanted out in the name of art.
Mixed in with jenghizkhan's trademark doomcore riffs one hears a lot of humor, and a strong melodic sense even when he's furthest out there in the drill-and-bass, sound-bending zone. As audio abstraction it's more frenetic de Kooning than faux-febrile Richter, and for all jk's insistence on "modern digital synthesis" over retro styles and sampling (more on this soon), his compositions have the verve and warm texture of early analog and tape recorder music (e.g., Mario Davidovsky, Otto Luening, Richard Maxfield), as opposed to the rather cool "glitch" sound of Oval, Phoenicia, et al. Check out these tracks from the CDs: "Sidewinder Circus" [1.4 MB (excerpt) .mp3], where the digitally scrambled phrase "sidewinder heat-seeking missile" sniggles in and out of overdriven-soundcard-like raunch, and "Outlet Nightjar" [ 3.56 MB .mp3], in which a synthetic bowed string keeps sounding the same ridiculous note in counterpoint to a heavily reverbed pseudo-guitar.
[coming soon: Part Two--how Man from Planet Risk differs from jenghizkhan solo work, and a discussion of gear]
If I'm sympathetic to the New Dumb Little Painting genre it's because I've done my share of them over the years. Here's one from '91: Rot Gut, acrylic on canvas, 10 X 8 inches, currently hanging in the Louvre in Paris, France.
Today is my last day reBlogging for the Eyebeam reBlog. Tomorrow the Eyebeamers will introduce my successor, Tim Shey, who will take it from here. After three weeks monitoring about 100 blog feeds and reposting 15-20 items per day (often with added pictures, text, or gratuitous comments), I would now like to articulate my personal reBlogging philosophy--hopefully you're sitting down. Here are my thoughts, for future reBloggers (and reBlog readers) to take or leave:
1. reBlogging is definitely an art, somewhere between curating and editing. I believe the Eyebeam reBlog can be as important and genre-defining as any of the major umbrella tech sites, umbrella art sites (if those existed) or heaven forbid, regular news sources, as long as original material from a pool of steady dedicated bloggers is given equal weight to clips. The purely anecdotal has value, as does free lance reporting. Accordingly, I tried to emphasize unique, personal blog writing and research over news items recycled from big media sources. By and large I did not reBlog slashdot, boingboing or kottke, assuming that most people were looking at them anyway. I also avoided the major media feeds, such as NY Times, Yahoo, Wired, for the same reason.Because of the rotation system, personal guidelines such as these won't harden into rules, resulting in the "soft bigotry of voluntarism." I look forward to following the reBlog after I Ieave, and invite everyone to visit my personal blog, where posting is about to increase markedly. I'll probably reBlog a few more items today, but wanted to get this up.
2. I favored items with text or pictures over blind links with pithy 3-word captions.
3. I tried to keep a balance of tech and art writing.
4. I included a heftier dose of politics because the major media are failing us in that regard and we have to do what we can.
5. I added a few feeds where people are posting original art to the Web: Look, See; SCREENFULL; Wooster Art Collective.
6. I was disappointed in the music coverage out there. A lot of electronic dance bloggers, for example, don't have RSS feeds or seem to be in a post-coital slump after they all found and linked to each other about two years ago.
[Obviously this was written with self-reBlogging in mind.]