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The Sunday NY Times had a report about a musician who quit his job and posted a song a day on his blog. One minute journalists are hissing and spitting about "people in their bathrobes" presuming to usurp them and the next they're glorifying the new lifestyle mythos. Didn't read past the first page but it sounded like it was about an individual trying to cope not just with creativity but the stresses of fan adoration, frequent commenters, people music-animating and -remixing his work--in other words, being a one man band of self promotion. Yawn. Not too interested in the problems of someone replicating how the record industry promotes an artist: that is, via behind the scenes stories and a cult of personality. Every musician his own Tigerbeat. As artists using blogs we want transparency but on some level our projects should still be difficult for journalists, not spoonfeeding them stories in terms they already understand. To adapt a favorite quote about art from AbEx painter Adolf Gottlieb: "I'd like more status than I have now, but not at the cost of closing the gap between blogging and the public. I'd like to widen it!"
An earlier post incorrectly stated that Minus Space ("Reductive Art") had added a blog to its website; in fact it has a page of texts in reverse chronological order that it's calling a "log". The page has no permalinks, no comments, no RSS feed, no content management system that I can see (a la Word Press or Blogger). It appears to just be a list.
Yet Minus Space was included by ArtKrush in a recent article on "Art Blogs" and appears on the ArtKrush link list as an "art blog." Maybe ArtKrush can correct that Minus Space is not a "blog" but a "site" a la the dot com era.
Update: The more closely one looks at Minus Space, the more unclear what it is. Not only is it not a "blog," it appears to be a gallery that is repping "reductive artists." Or was, because now the site says "MINUS SPACE IS NOT ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS AT THIS TIME." Submissions for what? They appear to have a physical "project space" that is intermittently open, which may or may not be the same as the online project space. In the past they sent out email notices of online exhibitions but those are not maintained in any kind of archive. They have a page of "Minus Space Artists" consisting mostly of links to the artists' personal websites (some don't link to anything). If it's a real space gallery it's not much of one and if it's a virtual gallery it's not much of one either. And it's not a blog. So, what is Minus Space?
Update 2: Also this bit of dubious puffery from the site. The end of the ArtKrush article reads: "Check out the complete list of our favorite art, architecture, design, photography, and new media blogs" with a link to over a 100 blogs. The Minus Space press page presents this citation as a quote: "'Favorite Art Blog' --artkrush.com." Bit of a stretch, that.
Josh Marshall on the Fort Dix Six, the US government's latest attempt to say "Look! Over there!":
The Fort Dix Six?
Well, seems they made a jihad training film featuring themselves. But they couldn't figure out how to burn it to a DVD. So they went to a Circuit City and asked the clerk on duty if he could do it for them.
D'oh!
I guess that means these guys probably needed remedial terrorist training.
There also seems to be more than a hint of entrapment in the role the government informant played in helping arrange the planned attack. Back in November one of the plotters called a Philly police officer and told him that he'd been approached by someone [i.e., the government informant] "who was pressuring him to obtain a map of Fort Dix, and that he feared the incident was terrorist-related."
Televised Abstraction, 1988-2007
Lorna Mills, L to R: Bletchingly, Infomint, Lucky Hubble 2007, MFD, latex, video (at akau inc., Toronto)
Mills' piece (see this Digital Media Tree page, where we are fortunate to have her posting as L.M.) differs from the Staehle in the choice of "formalist forms" used, a sense of heightened artificiality, the oval masking on the screen, and most significantly the real world content: names of racehorses scrolling across the bottoms of her screens, defamiliarized and exoticized in this context. Also, not sure why Staehle was "broadcasting" to his TV--maybe VCRs on the floor were not the norm in 1988.
More cassette madness: Tone Set, where have you been all my life? Found out about this Tempe Arizona duo from Mutant Sounds. John Carpenter-esque minimal moog meets Negativland sound collage, only it was '81-'82 so the sampling is all done with tape. "Synthpunk" probably is the best term, as it's in the DEVO/Wall of Voodoo camp melodically. The title "Cal's Ranch" refers to Cal Farley's Boys Ranch outside Amarillo TX, and some of the samples have ironically appropriated fundamentalist Christian themes. Also bad movies from late night TV, call-in shows, snippets from Rocky and Bullwinkle, all that stuff you get sued for now. My favorite tracks so far are "The Devil Makes the Loudest Noise" [mp3 removed] and "Out! Out!" but it's all pretty amazing.
Thanks to Rhizome for reblogging* this recent sketch. I like what happened when the image resized--the center got white hot and edges became black holes. It's more of a graphic this way, but a mysterious one, I think.
Someone asked if the recent uptick here in drawings and animations was because I was showing the blog in the gallery. That hasn't started yet--end of next week. This blog is a place for my artwork and if I had more discipline I would just draw and post sound files. I post text because (a) some images don't look good adjacent to each other and it helps to have a buffer of some kind, but the buffer can't just be filler so I have to write something cogent, and (b) I'm verbose and have to talk about things (even though it means sometimes people get "insulted.") The writing helps me think through what I'm doing and ties it into a larger context of stuff I like and don't like. [/pure egotism]
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/may/9/sketch-monochrome-gradient/.