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On this inspiring web page, New York artist James Hyde documents a visit he made to London studios a couple of years ago. Few people I know were terribly moved by the YBA (young British artist) work forcefed to the U.S. in the mid- to-late 90s. It was just so art-smart, riffing on famous pieces the recent grad students had seen in slide lectures at Goldsmiths, or wherever. Hyde has tapped a vein of real eccentric creativity, however. He writes:
"[In] March of 2000, I was in London to install my exhibition at Hales Gallery in Deptford. I managed to clear a week to steep myself in the new local culture. Much of this involved beer, crisps, curries and negotiating a maddeningly managed public transit system.
"I visited a number of studios. The locations ranged from rooms in a very domestic house to a council flat to various industrial spaces. There is an architecture to how an artist's workplace is organized. I photographed these studios to attempt to draw out the intimate and sometimes subliminal dialogue between art objects and their [original] scene."
The photos, taken with a digital camera (I assume), are gorgeous, cryptic, semi-abstractions, very much reflecting the style and sensibility of Hyde's own art (according to his website he has a show up at Brent Sikkema right now, but I haven't seen it yet). It's fascinating to see his eye at work, cropping and zooming in on studio details: materials strewn casually around, half-finished pieces, product packages, photos pinned to walls, puddles of brightly colored goo. Pieces by Daniel Coombs, Kathrin Boehm, Keith Wilson, and others show me a side of the London scene I wasn't so familiar with (Deitch artist Richard Woods had a nice, underappreciated show at Cristinerose a few years back, but I'm seeing some of the other artists here for the first time). Kudos to Hyde for his curiosity and enthusiasm.
In this thread on Jim's log, we've been discussing energy, which is, let's face it, one of the main reasons our one-track-minded President is trying so hard to get us into a war right now. One issue that came up is the popular myth that back in 1979, Jimmy Carter urged Americans to wear sweaters and turn down the thermostat to 68 degrees, an image trotted out by right-wing commentators to show the impotence and nerdiness of energy conservation (as opposed to the Cheney approach, which is to secure foreign oil supplies by force). The only problem with the Carter story is it isn't exactly true. In the "crisis of confidence speech," given at a time of gas lines and rationing, Carter urged Americans to turn down thermostats--perfectly sensible advice--but didn't bore us with a precise setting. He also didn't say anything about sweaters. Yes, he was wearing a sweater, as he had been doing since his Inauguration in '77. Admittedly dorky, the cardigan was meant to be a symbol of his laid-back Populism, after the Imperial excesses of the Nixon years. It had nothing to do with energy--that's pure Republican disinfo. Unfortunately it's become tenacious urban folklore, as a Google search of "carter sweater thermostat" shows.
I've been looking at Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo a fair amount lately. While he's good on his facts and scholarly in his argumentative approach, he still comes off as another Washington wannabe hanging out with the same tired government types, chasing the same types of leads, and reaching the same namby-pamby "consensus" as everyone else. He favors invading Iraq to install leadership more to the US's liking, for example, only disagreeing with Bush et al over the timing and the methodology--a viewpoint not likely to get doors slammed in anyone's face. (Karl Rove wants the media talking about Iraq to get their minds off Bush ties to corporate mal-fee-ance: who is Josh to buck the trend?) Folks constantly change hats in DC, from government to lobbying to media to think tanks, in an endless (lucrative) circulating flow, and if you're a pundit you inevitably pull your punches, since the person you're criticizing today might be working in the same office with you tomorrow. That's the suckup trail Marshall appears to be on. By contrast, a lot of what the west coast pundits (Counterpunch.org, Antiwar.com) print is paranoid speculation, but at least they call'em like they see'em and don't have to worry about "offending a potential source." The granddaddy of unimpeachable commentators, of course, was I. F. Stone, who worked solo, burrowing through government records, drawing intelligent conclusions, and printing the documented dirt. That's what Talking Points Memo should be like--instead of "I called Jane So-and-so in Senator Such-and-Such's office and I'm still waiting for her to get back to me..." or "I'm appearing on MSNBC tomorrow so be sure to tune in..."
Update, January '06: Marshall was wrong to support the war--got sucked in like a lot of other centrists by the disgraced Kenneth Pollack's BS--but most of the rest of this post was unfounded fretting. Marshall has done terrific work tracking government shenanigans--particularly during the Bush push to destroy Social Security. And he recently moved to New York.
I started an archive of the molecular wall-drawings I've been doing recently. I spent several years in the mid-'90s using this type of stick-and-ball model in paintings, drawing the struts and spheres in pencil and laboriously hand-rendering them with acrylic paint. (Now I hand-paint them in the computer, and frankly, the only thing missing is the repetitive stress injury in my wrist.) The constructions started out based on actual complex molecules, but then I started looking elsewhere for patterns: For example, in this piece from 1994, I snapped a photo of Curly Howard of the Three Stooges off the TV (from the short where he's a plumber and ineptly builds a cage of leaky pipes around himself) and used the cage as a model for a "molecule."
It just dawned on me recently that in all that work, I was somewhat pathetically regressing to the level of playing with tinkertoys, a product I had a love/hate relationship with as a child. I liked the look of them but they never really worked after you used them a few times, because the split ends of the wood sticks wore out and lost their spring. They fell right of the wooden "wheels" and nothing complicated could be built. In contrast, my molecules can be any shape because there are no guide-holes and gravity is not a factor.
At any rate, thinking about that product led me to the Hasbro website, where I was amused and depressed to see that tinkertoys are still being made, for "pre-schoolers." My theory is that boomer parents only remember the good and not the bad aspects of the classic (read archaic) toy and want their kids to "experience the magic." One design caught my eye in a page of overly-complicated, somewhat loaded examples of tinkertoy constructions for tots to build: a stealth fighter, so the little Rummy or Condoleezza in your household can play Kill the Bad Taliban Man.
This led to my own molecular stealth fighter:
Giant Reptile News. My brother Brad forwarded this photo of a massive alligator found in Missouri City, TX, a Houston suburb. A construction worker discovered the creature lying in one of the concrete pipes shown in the photo. According to animal control officers, it weighs just under 2100 lbs and is 18 1/2 feet long. It was taken to Brazos Bend State Park (28 miles south of Houston), where it was released.
On my "miscellaneous page" I've critiqued some anime-style drawings by Krystal Ishida, an artist based in the UK who I discovered surfing around the net. Her work has enthusiasm and punch, and I don't care if she's still in the learning stages: she works harder than a lot of mature artists I know. Also, I'm interested in what makes a good web drawing, and in the post I discuss some of the aesthetics of using low-fi vs. "upgraded" software.
Also, on my technodiary page I discuss a recent release by Beige Records artist Paul B. Davis.
Two years ago this fall, video artist Caspar Stracke did a performance at PS1 with an obsolete consumer video player called a CED: basically he just let the glitch-ridden machine run for six hours. The CED player (exhaustively documented on this website) was the biggest loser at a time (the early '80s) when VHS, Beta, and laser discs were all competing for market share. It works like a vinyl record player: you slide a twelve-inch-square cassette into a long slot, the disc drops down into the machine, and a tone-arm reads the capacitance (analog information) stored on grooves on the disc. Stracke has several malfunctioning machines, and each reads the discs in its own uniquely screwed-up way. Unfortunately I missed the performance, but the amazing press release caught my attention, so I looked up Stracke and visited his studio. He showed me a couple of CEDs, projected large on the wall, and the "errors" do make for fascinating viewing. As he explains in the press release: "the machine, 17 years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record but chops a scene into fragments less than 1/4 second long and reassembles them by chance operation. The needle gets physically irritated by several factors besides the scratches that let it skip the grooves, resulting in an infinite number of similar but not identical collage variations of the same scene. The performed 'cuts' are almost seamless."
Thus, in the CED of The Shining, you see Danny playing darts by himself in the kitchen of the Overlook hotel; he stands up on a chair to retrieve a dart, turns around, and sees the spooky twin girls. Then he's instantly back on the floor, on the chair again, on the floor, on the chair, and sees the girls again. Then he's on the chair, grabbing a dart, and suddenly he's teleported ahead to a completely different scene in the movie, then he's back on the chair, but always, in the about eight different loops I saw, the "scene" ends with him seeing the girls. It's like a bad dream that keeps repeating itself, or the chapter in Philip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip where the same events are refracted through Manfred's autistic consciousness over and over, each time slightly different but all ending dismally. The looped events don't have to be negative, of course: in a busted CED of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983), Natalie Wood and Christopher Walken have a screen kiss that keeps getting interrupted by the skipping player, so that an erotic moment is deliriously sustained. That's especially ironic, since the subject of Brainstorm is a new virtual reality technology (also analog) that allows people to record, playback, and loop experiences and share them electronically with others: happy memories, orgasms, after-death experiences, stuff like that.
As an artist, MC Escher is pretty corny but some of the visual paradoxes in his work are hard to resist. A recent New York Times article describes the efforts of a Dutch mathematician to fill in a mysterious "hole" in Escher's image The Print Gallery. In this picture a man in an art gallery is staring at a picture of a city, which spills out of the frame--in a weird anamorphic swirl--to become the city in which the man is standing. In a center of the image is a blank space, with the artist's signature. Was this a failure of imagination? Biting off more than the artist could chew mathematically? Well, thanks to the miracle of the computer (and retouch artists) we now know what should, logically, have gone in the hole: it's a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man staring at a picture of a man, etc., spiraling down to infinity. Below is Escher's original grid for the drawing (kind of nice, isn't it?), which was the starting point for a process of restoration/completion/meddling described in detail on this website.