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Samurai Quotes from Ghost Dog.
From the Vault: Ghost Dog review(s) and license plate screen shots. (Some serious link rot rectified!)
Completely off topic, but essential: the last 10 or so seconds of every episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, assembled by Paul Slocum (Caution: Wesley Crusher in oversized natural fabric (?) top)
A couple of threads on art and religion over at Sally McKay's and L.M.'s blog: here and here. Seems it started with a panel with some art critics saying really stupid stuff like
"A -"We [secularist intellectuals] are very much the white settlers in the fort, completely surrounded ...by the raging hordes of the spiritual outside."...followed by some of McKay's/LM's commenters decrying the art world's hypocritical bias against current religious art when it is only too happy to talk about past religious motivation (Kandinsky, etc.) To David Morgan's question "why do art historians studying art before the modern era give attention to religion, but those writing on fine art since the 19th century often very confidently consider religion irrelevant, even improper to examine?" I responded (cramming together several answers):
B- "That's precisely the point. Well put. That is exactly what's behind the anxiety...about all this religion stuff and what does it have to do with the avant-garde, with contemporary art, real important art. There is an anxiety that we are indeed outnumbered. Jesse Helms attacked the NEA and had great success. We're under siege."
A-"But luckily we're the ones that write the textbooks."
How about: Because art before the modern era is safely in the past, its practitioners long dead, and religion's contribution can be approached analytically without getting some living religious person's knickers in a twist. It's not that religion is irrelevant but let's just say certain zealots have made the topic literally lethal.(image above--possibly the greatest painting ever made--by jonathan borofsky)
As an artist I'm fascinated by fringe religions because the idea of the deity seems to come from the same place as art ideas--as in, some murky, ecstatic place. I like to read and think about those religions but I don't necessarily want to meet these people. As for religions with more established dogma many of those practitioners are reading from a script. Either way, I hate it when someone tries to convert me because a lot of sleazy mind control tricks are used. The practitioner is looking for people who seem depressed and unhappy* because they're more subject to "love bombing" and all that other shite. Ugh. I'm proud to be from a country where the founders steered clear of the various mystery cults in creating our civic charter.
The art world's "bias" against religion isn't just reflex avant gardism. Empirical, Enlightenment principles of rational argument are also at stake. (One who questions whether the Earth really started 6000 years ago is in actual, physical danger today.) But I don't think contemporary art has any duty to defend such principles against the fanatic hordes--just to be aware that talking about current religion (critically or not) involves real risks so it's better to be guarded, or coded, or steer the f*ck clear of it.
*Or in my case because they mistake irony for misery. Thinking of one specific instance where I was sitting drawing a skeleton playing bongos and a woman saw it and tried to get me come to come to her megachurch on the freeway.
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.