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New track: "Taser Squad" [mp3 removed].
Dark, gloomy, bare-bones techno where the bolts pop off the synthesizer and the circuits audibly fail.
My complete musical works in .mp3 form are here (19 tracks since 1998!)
Housekeeping: my review of Susan Canning's "Paradise/Paradox" exhibit published in Sculpture last spring is posted in full text here. Also, the "selected critical writing" page has been revamped slightly, putting print publication, web-only writing, and interviews under separate headings. The criteria for "selection" were very exacting: basically anything I had in soft-copy form that didn't have to be retyped.
More on the circuit bending genre. The painterly and/or sculptural aspirations of benders can be problematic, especially if the result is sci fi cliche, but the physical aspect can be engaging, too. So we're looking for good examples of circuit bent pieces that are visually, musically, performatively tight. I've posted work by Peter Blasser (aka Peter B) before; above is another piece of his (I think it's his) that I photographed at the Shinth Tour at Deitch last year. It reminds me of Eva Hesse's Metronomic Irregularity II (below) only with a sound component: actually it's as if her work looked forward to a time when sound would complete the idea.
My memories of the Blasser piece are sketchy. I don't know what the circuit board/sound-producing module thingies are. The cloth is a paint-spattered rectangle of canvas that's like a parody of a bad Pollock, but the expressionism component is relevant, particularly in light of the Hesse, which has been described as an attempt to reconstitute Pollock in the vocabulary of '60s minimalism. The sound you hear through the headphones is the sublime product of random crisscrossing connections in the circuit field: chirping robotic crickets, but with pauses and subtleties making them slightly haunted and Eno-esque. The blinking lights were their ephemeral, firefly-droid cousins. I don't know if there was any programming involved in the routing of the signals, or if it was solely a product of hardwiring parts. I guess I don't really care. More detail about the piece would be appreciated.
UPDATE: via cory, a momus-sponsored page devoted to Peter Blasser's old band the Gongs. the mp3 doesn't work but great photo. also link to CD (don't know about availability).
The Democratic Leadership Council--the pro-corporate, pro-war wing of the Democrats that helped bring us Bill Clinton, has been busy lately trying to disassociate itself from Michael Moore and the rest of us who oppose Bush's wars. Of course the antiwar position is the sane position and the idea of US Empire Forever basically nuts, but for the sake of argument let's say we and Moore are extremists. The Republicans won in 2004 by embracing their extremist elements (and cheating): the corporate hotel porno-pushers cynically worked hand in hand with religious fundamentalists. The Democratic corporatists repeatedly fail because they can't do that. This is probably because the Moore wing's critique of the overall corporate program is more devastatingly effective than the fundies', who don't have such a critique because they haven't figured out who their real enemies are--they think gays and abortion are the problem.
And for trolls who think we're endorsing Stalin here, "corporate" or "corporatists" refers to crony capitalists, missile mongers, and sundry multinationals gaming the system against the greater interests of the larger number of US citizens, as well as exploiting labor at home and abroad. And not everything about the DLC is bad--check out this anti-Bush statement by its policy director Ed Kilgore.
Pixar's latest The Incredibles is incredibly derivative but exhilirating. Here's just a few borrowings: society outlaws and shuns masked adventurers (Alan Moore's Watchmen); second-rate series sidekick grows up to be demonic villain (Alan Moore's Miracleman); villain has private tropical island fortress (Bond films); high speed chase through the trees (Return of the Jedi)--etc. etc. I thought I'd given up on rubbery skinned Pixar universe after Nemo but the helming of Iron Giant director Brad Bird brought me back; he's a terrific visual storyteller even when you know every...single...thing...that's...going...to...happen. And I realize the filmgoing demographic demands "family values" but the working Dad, childraising Mom, 2.5 kids in a 50s suburban tract home is an impossible (or undesirable) ideal for so many people today it's irritating that Disney keeps pounding it in as a "norm." Where's grandma, or stepdad? Not to be too much of a grouch, though, because it's genuinely uplifting watching the beat-down kids getting to finally use their "powers," no matter how well adjusted and normal (i.e. privileged) they are.
Banks Violette at Team, 2004
Michael Phelan at Andrew Kreps, 1997
The point here being not that there's plagiarism but two emotional workings of a very similar Minimalist theme. Both artists use polyurethane-coated planks of foam, skeletal piping and fluorescents--Phelan to evoke a Valley-boy world of swimming pools and tanning booths and Violette the drums, Stygian caverns, and concert stages of black metal (or black metal by way of Berlin?). Institutions have no memory so I appointed myself.
UPDATE: I need a new screen and/or computer. Just noticed on someone else's machine that the Phelan detail had spots all over it. (Mostly) fixed now.
I Can Crawl Again (in Chelsea)
Jacco Olivier, MARIANNE BOESKY, 535 West 22nd Street, 2nd Floor, November 13–December 11. William Kentridge meets LeRoy Neiman meets the Discovery Channel. Small animated paintings projected from thigh-high plinths directly onto the wall. This is what Donald Moffett tried and failed to do--make lush, moving, painterly paintings. Will someone buy one of these and burn a DVD for me?
Daniel Lefcourt, TAXTER & SPENGEMANN, 504 W. 22nd Street, November 19–December 18. Paintings of lumps of coal on pristine, high-commodity linen. Jet black juicy paint crosshatched with strokes as if from the Zen master's rake. Unrelenting Germanic rigor. Ponderous titles based on books of philosophy.
Martha Rosler, GORNEY BRAVIN + LEE, 534 West 26th Street, November 01–January 30. Extending Richard Hamilton's "What makes today's homes..." collage to feminism and antiwar themes. Lots of hot babes posing nude, working in the kitchen, mowing lawns in stretch pants. Biting wit occasionally goes overboard and gets too obvious with war dead juxtaposed over suburban interiors. The best are the Austin Powers era ones.
Art Battle: Richard Kern vs. Lily van der Stokker, FEATURE INC., 530 West 25th Street, October 23–December 11. Kern's photobooks of hot downtown babes are possibly the most thumbed, greasiest items at the midtown Virgin Megastore. Here he's not as skanky, perhaps reflecting the modifying influence of van der Stokker's gaily colored wall-hugging daybed sculptures, which hold the line for permanent presexuality.
I enjoyed blogger Michael J. Totten's photo tour of Libya (hat tip to Dennis). Totten captures the bleak Soviet-style architecture in Tripoli, vanishing Berber dwellings in the Saharan outback, and some beautifully-preserved Roman buildings, all framed against the empty desert landscape--in fact, there are hardly any people in the photos so the country looks weirdly depopulated. Of course, Ghaddafy has his heroic picture everywhere, which Totten mercilessly ridicules. But wait, isn't Moammar a good guy now that Bush's aggressive warmaking convinced him to "turn in his nukes"? Thankfully we don't have a Libya-esque, state-sponsored cult of personality in this country.
Whoops, well, I'm sure this billboard in Florida paid for by the Bush-backing Clear Channel radio chain is a fluke.