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Vice President Cheney during Chinese President Hu's press conference. The Veep's staff says he was "studying his notes," but it's pretty clear he's sawing logs. Oh, well, at least he's not shooting anyone.
This is what he's going to look like in a few years, retired to his 3 million dollar residence on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Just an amiable old duffer, nodding off on his front porch, remembering all the good times from his years of invading countries, ordering "swirlies" for prisoners in Gitmo, and enhancing the Halliburton bottom line. Unless he gets some Pinochet action late in life, heh heh.
YouTube: Frank Zappa, "Pound for a Brown," orchestral version. This is one of the prettiest tunes FZ wrote--originally from Uncle Meat ("A Pound for a Brown on the Bus"). It's nice to see it getting this treatment, even though Zappa thought the classical music consumption/production system was basically ludicrous.
Via MTAA comes the news that Harlem gallery Triple Candie is doing a Cady Noland survey show, consisting of re-creations of her past artworks based on the Internet and other documentary sources. The re-creations are not approved by Noland, who "dropped out" of the art world in the mid '90s but "tightly controls" her work; this is not to say she disapproves--according to the press release she simply "was not consulted or notified."
Noland is a proto-slacker, neo-scatter artist whose themes are consumerism, nihilism, and politics as refracted through tabloid media; she achieved instant notoriety in the late '80s/early '90s with installations of beer cans, machine parts, and other urban or post-industrial detritus. Triple Candie sees her as an influence on a large range of current artists, including Wade Guyton, Sarah Lucas, and Banks Violette.
I'm curious what Noland's reaction to this will be. The press release says she "haunts the art world like a ghost" while scrupulously limiting the exhibition and publication of her work. This project is kind of fascinating coming so soon after Jack Pierson pitched a fit over the sign letter sculptures at Barneys that resemble his conceptualist/assemblage works. Pierson followed Noland in the art world's every-couple-of-years "new car rollout" hype cycle (both showed at the influential American Fine Arts gallery), but he stayed in the game and became a successful market entity. Does she care that Triple Candie is doing this? Would she have the clout or stamina to stop faithful re-creations of her work (as opposed to a mere window-dresser's homage)?
And finally, doesn't Elaine Sturtevant's inclusion in the current Whitney Biennial, showing exacting Duchamp knockoffs, legitimize this project (and delegitimize Pierson's huffing and puffing)? Some interesting questions here.
GIF Shows
The solo show I'm doing next month is titled "Room Sized Animated GIFs." The ArtCal listing is here (thanks to ArtCal--the listing is in RSS now will go "live" a week before the opening). The choice to use, in the title, a banal everyday computer "file extension" (.GIF) that hasn't quite risen to the level of a household word was deliberate. The point is not to be tech-elitist but rather that there is nothing more un-elite than an animated GIF, your grandmother has several of them on her homepage, but the word "GIF" is nevertheless seldom bandied about in the medieval, still-painting-centric artworld. Another show I'm in taking the humble GIF as its theme is described on Marisa Olson's blog:
Hi, there. I've unashamedly followed the masses to Myspace, and there I've erected a page for an upcoming exhibit I'm curating. Please check it out and become our friend:Why GIFs? They're a relatively "open source" way to get ideas, in the form of moving images, out to broad audience. They are low or no cost to make, consume very little bandwidth, no one has to buy or download a proprietary player to play them. They have their own special charm, minimal in the way garage rock is minimal. Scaling them up to room size, showing them on TV screens as opposed to computer monitors, exhibiting individual frames in a grid, are ways to inject this aesthetic into physical space, which has its own demands, limitations, and pleasures.
http://www.myspace.com/gifshow
The show is called The Gif Show (I briefly considered Meet the Giffords, Meet the Giffordz, Gif Starz, and Choosy Moms Choose GIF). It opens May 3, at San Francisco's beloved RX Gallery, and is co-presented by Rhizome. The artists are Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). Everyone's showing GIFs, and some are also showing videos, works on paper, sound, and other cool related stuff. Together, their work shows the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.
Hence the Myspace page... GIFs grow, breed, and comingle sparklingly on Myspace. Please come be our neighbor, there, and help us spread the word about the show. (More curatorial & opening party details to come, here, in a bit.)
posted by Marisa S. Olson at 12:01
More YouTubin'--it's weird, I hate TV but I can watch these little blurry things all day.
Can "Paperhouse" live 1970 - awesome - Czukay and Suzuki: "no shirt no service" (also here--louder sound, worse video, loads slower).
"Mushroom"--probably my favorite Can song--suspect the video was made later than 1970.
Boards of Canada "Gyroscope" (for the video) - lots of geometric patterns and mismatched letters - watch out, Jack Pierson's gallery will write you an angry note.
Boards of Canada "In a Beautiful Place" (for the music).
Atari Teenage Riot - "Revolution Action" - ahh, the dotcom era.
Clipse "Grindin" --that '80s beatbox sound will never die. [link replaced Aug 2010]
808 State "Pacific" (1989) - the sublime.
Aphex Twin "Come to Daddy" - the ridiculous. I remember James saying in an interview he woke up and his girlfriend was in the bed next to him wearing one of those masks and he freaked out.
Roxy Music "Do the Strand" (The '80s were invented in 1973--and see Eno in "outre" drag).
Roxy Music "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Eno wearing that feathery thing--with VCS3 and tapes on stage).
King Crimson "Lark's Tongues in Aspic" 1972 (feat. Jamie Muir, who was in the Music Improvisation Company with the late Derek Bailey. Troll repellent: yes, it's "pretentious").
Update, Aug. 2010: All these links are dead except Mushroom, Boards of Canada, and Clipse. Viacom - what a joke.
"Sensor Readings" [27 MB .mp4]
Tuvok reprograms the Lateral Sensor Array to play drum & bass from his homeworld. Or whatever. I'm actually not that big a Trek nerd (just the Borg episodes and, um, TOS), so, what does that make this, an ironic fan mashup? When it's all said and done this works better on a TV monitor than as a Quicktime. Kind of restoring it to its original home, several steps displaced.
Digby theorizes that Bush can't fire Rumsfeld because they're deep in planning the next war (Iran), which they decided to launch right after a bunch of idiots re-elected Bush, making him think he had a mandate.
Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ's. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.Impeach.
These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his "advisor" Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn't require an actual army.
I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it's fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn't know what in the hell he's doing. The military is finally saying "enough." We are witnessing a coup by media.
The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.