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A friend of mine was kidding me for saying I liked Dragonball Z, a much serialized, much butchered anime series that runs infinitely on the Cartoon Network on cable. I was trying to think what possible justification I had. Then I remembered King Kai. He's a sort of Yoda character that teaches battle tactics. He lives on a tiny planet in another dimension, which you get to by traversing Snake Way, which looks like the Great Wall of China on the back of a snake hundreds of miles long, twisting through the clouds. See the three people standing on the grass in the center of the planet? Each weighs 700 pounds in its enormous gravity. That's why it's such a good training place: if you can move at all you get stronger. Kai himself has blue skin, catfish whiskers, cockroach antennae, and dresses in priestly garb--with little hipster shades. He talks like a cross between Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd, and constantly tells terrible jokes, like "You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish." He's just the greatest!--and reason enough in my book to tune into the series. He's the type of "what the hell were they thinking?" character that pops up only in anime.
The apparent lethargy of the New York art world has less to do with 9/11, or even the Bush economy, than the shift of galleries from Soho to Chelsea, which, as I wrote in the New Art Examiner in 1997, was a calculated move to create an artist-free Brasilia for collectors (among other things, of course). The dealers are now reaping what they sowed in the form of an overall diminished sense of energy. Chelsea is a giant outlet mall, with huge spaces all apparently designed by the same person, providing festival-circuit artists with a place to strut their stuff in NY before moving to the next Biennale.
Increasingly I'm convinced that the action--yes, it's come down to this--is in artists' studios. You get to see a lot of work and hear the best explanation of it, before the ideas get turned to hash by a condescending or airheaded Manhattan gallerist. True, you don't get always get the nice white box, but c'mon, we're pros here! These, then, are notes from a few recent visits I did. Coming soon: the rest of this post, where I discuss recent visits to four NY studios. I'm still working on it, and I confess, the only reason I'm putting in this teaser is because I wanted some text between the images in the preceding and following posts, for layout reasons. That's the freedom I have, here in the blogosphere.
Check out these designs showing you how to make the entire Pokémon menagerie out of beads. The artist is Jason. (Above: Magneton.) The drawings are great, lo-fi patternmaking, and the site is a fine example of Dirt Style design. While the above image's suggestion of computer pixelation is largely unintentional, artist/musician/programmer Joe Beuckman pushes the connection explicitly in his beadworks. The image below, captioned "Karate Kicking Ensues," is from a series based on scenes from Datasoft Presents Bruce Lee, programmed by Ron J Fortier, 1983 (graphic design by Kelly Day).
As we near the end of the Web's First Decade of Widespread Use, it was only a matter of time before connoisseurship of bad web pages really got off the ground. Herewith I recommend Dirt Style 101, a vicious, take no prisoners critique hilariously masquerading as a home design course. Sample hint: "Dirt style projects must be nasty. Think 4th generation VHS dubs, Xerox copies made with a cartridge low on toner, post rap Vanilla Ice, or any car made in the '80s that ran on diesel. Now translate that into Web Design." I said the critique is vicious, but Professor C. Dirt also obviously has affection for the maimed, moronic, or just slightly off web pages he links to. If you've ever designed a web page, look at your peril! You'll probably find an example that looks like something you've done.
Reviews of the film One Hour Photo (no longer in theatres but due out on DVD soon) concentrated on its stalker theme and its critique-of-suburbia theme but pretty much left its art theme the hell alone. (Caution: this discussion reveals plot points.) Charles Taylor, in an incredibly obtuse write-up in Salon.com, called the movie “art house horror” but only used the word “art” as a tossed-off insult in the course of demolishing it on more typical (dramatic, cinematographic) grounds. He never considered whether the filmmakers might be interested not just in the “art house,” but art itself, and overlooked another fair reading of the movie: that it’s a parable of creative regeneration told under the guise of a psycho-slasher film (a parable only half-interesting, but more on that below).
Thoughts on the Hydrogen Economy. In his new book Jeremy Rifkin makes the case for hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels, imagining a World Wide Energy Web where nations, municipalities, and individuals have the ability to upload and download electricity (from fuel cells, solar, wind, biomass) whenever and wherever needed. His proposals make absolute sense as a set of goals. It'd be good to get some more opinions about whether they're all technically feasible--that is, based on technology we have now, as opposed to something we hope to discover--and of course they're almost impossible to sell politically, what with all the vested interests at stake. Still, this is a real, optimistic vision for the future, as opposed to the Dick Cheney "let's just steal it and burn it" approach to energy.
Bedroom Buckyball, ink on cut paper, map pins, 80" X 75"
On Wednesday, Nov 20, I attended a panel discussion on "Painting in the Age of Digital Manipulation" at Artists' Space in NYC. Mark Tribe, director of the new media website rhizome.org, moderated, and each of the four panelists, Claire Corey (image below), Millree Hughes, Sherry Mayo, and Fabian Marcaccio, showed slides and fielded questions. The panel was a clash of cultures, to some extent, since rhizome.org exists within an infrastructure of funding and exhibition spaces largely distinct from the "gallery world" that the four panelists inhabit. Tribe's opening remarks contained an intriguing word choice. He described the panelists as painters using digital tools, as opposed to technologists making paintings. This immediately made me wonder "Who would be in the latter category?"
I'll go ahead and answer my own question and say that John Maeda and Golan Levin, programmer/artists from the MIT Media Lab environment, immediately spring to mind as "technologists making paintings." Their inclusion might have made the panel more meaningful, but it was frankly more enjoyable looking at work by technological autodidacts who really know how to push (virtual) paint around. Interestingly, although all four panelists are concerned with output, printing their work on canvas or other materials for ultimate display in galleries and museums, they all used multimedia tools--CD, DVD, digital animation--to show it to the audience. During these presentations, their work was indistinguishable from much new media art. One's respect for Corey's and Hughes' work really deepened when you saw animations of their work-in-process. Corey's DVD took viewers through 25 stages in the development of one of her paintings, and it was amazing how radically the piece changed from one stage to the next. Hughes, who uses Flash as his primary paint program, showed an interactive game where an unseen button pusher makes random combinations of colors, sizes, and spatial orientations; Hughes works the "byproducts" of the game into his creative process.
Hughes also read an eloquent prepared statement, in which he discussed the activities of the digital painter in the context of the "contingent reality" of the Internet, where every opinion is given weight and facts are hard to separate from hearsay. He distinguished the digital painter's choices in making art from the consumer's choices online (the former being infinite and problematized; the latter being determined largely by checking boxes in multiple choice forms). Sherry Mayo made a similar point later when she analogized computer art to early video art, which subverted the conventions of commercial TV by making the tapes longer than most people's attention spans, through odd cropping strategies, and so forth.
After the four articulate presentations, I felt like groaning when someone in the audience asked the (predominantly abstract) artists on the panel, "Can each of you say how you're addressing the issue of content of your work?" Beneath this question lies a very tired, conservative accusation: that pictures of people, places and things have content and abstract art does not. All the artists patiently
(re-)answered the question, even though they'd been discussing content for the previous hour. Tribe also raised a rather old-fashioned issue, half-apologetically (considering his stake in new media), when he asked (of all but Marcaccio): "Do any of you miss pushing actual paint around?" The consensus was that the artists didn't. Tribe also asked if the four artists felt they were the vanguard--if they felt more historically important--being the first to use a new medium. No one was trapped in that kind of pomposity, but of course they are more courageous and enterprising to move into an area that has minimal collector support.