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Detail from a work on paper by Erika Somogyi at Monya Rowe Gallery in New York. Somogyi's drawings depict people in ambiguous rural or exurban spaces having Carlos Castaneda-like transcendent moments, merging into the landscape and etherscape, as denoted by vivid whorls and slashes of DayGlo paint. I'm sure they are not using drugs. I've mused before on the perennial return of a hippie aesthetic and the differences between the ultra-ironic use of DayGlo by Peter Halley and Kenny Scharf in the '80s and its rather more committed use by Somogyi and others. Her work is driven, without the complete obliviousness to history usually marked by this kind of project. Further pondering will have to be done on how it escapes self-consciousness but also avoids the better-known outsider cliches.
Went to see
, aka the O Show, curated by MatCh-Art, during the last week of the show's run at SICA, Long Branch, NJ. More on the exhibit here. The top photo is my DVD of OptiDisc, pulsing away to the amusement of a room of empty seats. The bottom one is Nami Yamamoto's installation of foam, vinyl and pins, bubbling up through the solid matter of the gallery's concrete floor.
Above is a proposal page for a project I did around 1990 for Dallas Public Access Cable. Messages 2-6 above were translated into "teletext" (block capitals on blue screens) and aired individually at random times of the day. I made this crude prototype using MacPaint. Clearly, as text-based art the piece owes more to Harvey Kurtzman of Mad than Lawrence Weiner of Dia. Never saw these live because I didn't have cable but remember one anecdote from their run: Due to a technical glitch the "WE COMMAND. YOU OBEY..." screen accidentally ran on an African American affairs channel and the station got a lot of angry complaints. What, black people don't want authoritarian messages coming from their TVs? Seriously, sorry that happened but it was kind of an anti-authoritarian (or a-authoritarian) message.
I was reminded of this because Emma Davidson (Lektrolab) and Paul B. Davis (Lektrolab/BEIGE) are doing a Teletext project that will run on Dutch TV later this month as part of ambientTV.net. Their Teletext TV station is called Microtel, and they are calling for submissions to create simple text and graphics messages. If you saw the Bodenstandig 2000 show at Deitch you saw some of drx's girlie/sex ads done in this format and they looked great--very low res and cheesy. You have to download a program (Windows only) to create the Teletext files and then email the files to Paul and Emma for reformatting.
Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel present The Year in the Internet '05. More linkz than U can shake a joystiq at. My selection has a blog focus. Eventually I'll repost it here, but for the time being go to their page [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
"ChamberVirus" [mp3 removed]. Tech house Morton Subotnick* using 2 softsamplers and some Access Virus effects sounds and drum hits from the Drat Fink Archive. A musician I know unloaded his Virus synth because he couldn't make interesting enough sounds with it. I dunno, these sound seriously deep to me. (I've been fantasizing about the TI Desktop.)
*changed to be less falsely modest.
Also via NEWSgrist, I was reminded that John Kelsey of the conceptualist art outfit Bernadette Corporation picked for his December 2005 Artforum top ten list...Hurricane Katrina! Please feel free to lambast me in the comments if I ever write anything this insensitive and pretentious:
HURRICANE KATRINA Ask Stockhausen. As if timed for the opening of the Whitney's Robert Smithson retrospective, this was arguably less a natural disaster than a case of Land art gone horribly wrong. An environmental and political tragedy of Spielbergian proportions, Katrina produced images of the sort of "naked life" we'd previously only identified with non-sites like Iraq. The drowned ghetto, the shooting of homeless looters, the police suicides, the forced evacuations, the superdomes filled with refugees—these are visions we can only try to erase. For some reason it was impossible not to imagine the hurricane as a terrorist act. And I guess it was—Made in USA.Yes, Artforum's an art magazine, but that doesn't make every damn thing you mention in it art. Curator Thelma Golden went down the same road a while back, discussing the 2003 blackout as some kind of art event. Oh, and by the way, bloggers, it's Artforum, not ArtForum. Sick of seeing that mistake.
Getting ready to ship work to Dallas for the 2-person show I'm in with Saskia Jorda at and/or gallery. All the above are now wrapped and boxed and ready to go out tomorrow. The exhibit opens January 28. Besides these objects, I'll be showing a couple of videos ("Guitar Solo" and "OptiDisc") and animated GIFs. The GIFs will be looping on small (?) TVs and are being captured from my animation log and burned to DVD by Paul Slocum (thanks, Paul), who is running the space with Lauren Gray. The two are also in the band Tree Wave, featured in the movie 8-Bit, which I've been talking about. I like this kind of long distance gallery interaction. I've done a few shows where I emailed BMP files and they were printed on the exhibiting end. People do this kind of thing every day in their jobs, but it might not be "special" enough or have sufficient "aura" for many conservatarians in the art world. Well, too bad.
Liebovitz Casts Art Stars in Fashion Wizard of Oz
Very, very lame. (via NEWSgrist)