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Very brief update on my Nancy post, after having read most of Brian Walker's The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. Zen, schmen, the strips are all about the gag, and many of them are funny. Clearly artists are drawn to Bushmiller's visual wit: until I saw a large collection I had no idea how devoted he was to puns and sight gags; they're almost half of his output. Here's my theory on the Nancy revival (with help from Mr. Wilson), adapting Kubler-Ross's "stages of grief" for comedy:
Denial. Boomers in the '60s see Nancy as a legacy of the "square" '40s and '50s--no way it could be funny.
Anger. Hipsters start looking at Nancy in a new way, saying it's "zen" or "so stupid it's good." This is still a putdown.
Bargaining. The generic, "anyone can make Nancy" gags start to appear.
Depression. Artists begin appreciating the strip for its craft, and for Bushmiller's "visual intelligence." (OK, my analogy doesn't work so well here.)
Acceptance. Boomers (and younger) read Nancy and laugh their asses off. Yes, I know, it's not that funny.
I reviewed the film One Hour Photo after seeing it once in the theatre; I recently rented the DVD and made a slight correction to my text. (Caution, semi-spoilers.) The film tells you, but not in a way that clearly sinks in, that Sy (Robin Williams in a great performance) took two rolls of film in the hotel, near the end of the story. One roll captured exactly what smutty-minded idiots are currently searching the internet for, the photos of which we don't get to see: "These are not pretty pictures," the cop says. Here's how I (now) describe the other roll:
The audience assumes that the photos he keeps asking for in the interrogation room are his [STARK RAVING NUDE!!!!!!!!] shots of the husband and girlfriend. Turns out they're photos he took in a nearby hotel room, before the police found him, on a separate roll of film. When a sympathetic cop finally hands them over, Sy patiently lays them out on the table and we can see they're images of the sofa, clothes hangers, bathroom fixtures, and the like, shot at odd angles and strangely cropped. He seems quite content looking at them. (sarcastic bracketed language added for this post only)In the original writeup I described the second film roll as being taken only in the bathroom. Aside from this goof my interpretation stands. Oh, and one other bit of trivia, which also hasn't escaped internet comment. A couple of scenes involve a Neon Genesis Evangelion action figure that Sy purchases for the little boy, Jake. The kid describes the figure as "a good guy that can fly, and he has a silver sword that can kill bad guys, and he's sixty feet tall." Evangelion nuts recognize the figure as a Mass Production Series 5-13 Eva, from the End of Evangelion movie, and that it's not a "good guy" but a monster (actually one of a group of monsters) that slays the flawed heroine Asuka and helps usher in the Apocalypse. The commentators I read thought that One Hour Photo erred to include this, because the toy likely wouldn't be sold in US stores (extensive Japanese writing on the box tends to support this) and it's a villain. I'd call it poetic license: yes, if the kid was an Evangelion fan he'd know it wasn't a "good guy," but since the director's obviously a fan, he knows that nothing in that Japanese TV/movie series is black and white--even the "bad" Evas have a role to play in human evolution--and his inclusion of the figure in his own shaded scenario makes sense.
The scenes raise another flaw, I suppose. In real life, if a near-stranger showed up unannounced to watch a young boy's soccer practice and attempted to give him a gift without parents present, it would undoubtedly be found out, and in our current hysterical climate about molestation (see Capturing the Friedmans) that would be it for Sy. Yet the movie keeps moving forward with its own relentless, dreamlike logic. The film is quite amazing in its ability to provoke a squirming sense of discomfort almost from the first frame. Beautifully shot, too.
Stephen O'Malley, a designer and musician in experimental outfits such as Khanate and Sunn O))), recently posted the above piece by Seldon Hunt, an Australian artist and graphic designer (a few more images are here--click on the link to "words" and scroll down; still more pics are in the news archives). Hunt has created record sleeves for the German label Drone records, among other projects. I'm pretty sure this work, which has a nice sci-fi lyricism to it, is done in Adobe Illustrator; it's definitely vector-based (drawn by means of defined curves) rather than pixel-based. This piece in particular is reminiscent of the work of New York artist Marsha Cottrell, who recently showed at Henry Urbach Architecture. Cottrell's work is much denser, limning an endless futuristic space in the vein of Rem Koolhaas's "delirious" urban spectacles. (The image below, completely packed with linear bizness, is a detail of a much larger piece.) While Cottrell's work is oddly controlled for something so "out there"; Hunt's evokes the spirit of Abstract Expressionism (or at least Rauschenberg) in its energy and formal variation. It may ultimately have more to do with the eye-grabbing immediacy of album graphics than Cottrell's ultra-refined, analytical architecture critique, but one can see an interesting dialogue between the two bodies of work. (Thanks to Brian Turner for the O'Malley link(s).)
references, easter eggs, and trivia about Homestar & Co. I wonder, though: was it shut down through threat of litigation? The fine print at the bottom (still cached) says, in so many words, "greasy lawyers, go away; this is just a fan site." I hope it's not the case that they
were officially warned off, since the Chapman brothers seem very generous in their approach to internet marketing.
One bit of trivia is how to find the Nintendo game endings, which I mentioned to someone recently. These are small screen shots of the last panels of various games, including Mario lying in bed dreaming of the Princess at the end of Super Mario Bros 2.
1. Click (and watch) the Strong Bad email "Japanese Cartoon."
2. At the end of the short, click the words "Japanese cartoon" on Strong Bad's computer screen and watch a short title sequence for "Stinko Man 20X6."
3. When you are returned to the Strong Bad email, click the words "Japanese cartoon" again to see Homestar watching the show on TV and mumbling along with the theme song.
4. While Homestar is watching his TV, click on the videotape on his shelf that says "NES endings".
5. When the first NES screen shot pops up, click it repeatedly to see more NES endings.
"I'm a blade man, man!"
The photo at the top is a detail from Dearraindrop's installation at John Connelly Presents, 526 W. 26th Street, NYC. The full-color psychedelia never lets up--the walls are covered floor to ceiling with crude, slightly brain damaged painting, collaging, knickknacks, and inflatables--but I prefer the dense sticker/product collage such as the area depicted here to the painting, which is mostly sub-high school in execution. Ironically, the most sophisticated work is the video by the youngest member, Billy Grant, who did just graduate from high school. Maybe video is a better medium than painting for this kind of A.D.D., media-overloaded consciousness? I recognized some of the footage from Psych-Out 2K3: scenes of Ronald McDonald leading a pair of ecstatic youngsters through a solarized psilocybin world. Two floors down in the same building, at Greene Naftali, Jim Drain & Ara Peterson present a more minimal, scientific version of the psych experience: the video kaleidoscope shown in a cropped view below. The viewer looks through a triangular window into a mirrored tunnel, the cross reflections of which create an astounding illusion of a large, hovering geodesic sphere, covered with ever-changing patterns. This is completely cool.
Last night was the opening of "Outpost," an exhibition curated by Ada Chisholm at Smack Mellon (50 Water St, Dumbo, Brooklyn). Highlights were Joe McKay's big screen video game (pics here) where players achieve heights of competitive blood lust in order to...match colors, and Cory Arcangel's power-point-presentation-with-Van-Halen-guitar-solo. In the McKay piece, players sit at a console and work simple RGB sliders (levers raising and lowering the amount of red, green, and blue light). Each player is arbitrarily given a "starting color" and must shift the levers until a "target color"--say, a large dot moving around the screen--is duplicated. When one player hits the exact hue (and it takes some concentration), he or she is declared the winner of that round and the game resets. Each new game has a different "op art" pattern--circles, stripes, spirals--and the color-combinations are often quite dazzling. The installation does something often claimed for color field painting that invariably never happens when you look at it: that is, it teaches you about the physical properties, relativity, and context-specificity of color. A few rounds of the game are equivalent to a short Bauhaus course with Albers and Itten, and I love that the competition is centered around Kandinskyesque harmonics rather than blowing apart zombies or whatever.
Cory Arcangel was also in the education mode last night, giving one of his trademark nerdy laptop slide lectures, but instead of explaining some obscure point of 8-bit computing, he delved into a pop-cultural moment of the type geeks enshrine on the internet in mind-boggling detail: specifically Eddie Van Halen's Paganini-like 1978 guitar solo "Eruption." With amusingly clunky graphics Arcangel explained to a somewhat skeptical, slow-to-warm audience how Van Halen put the pickups from a Les Paul into a Stratocaster body so he could play "up high and nerdy," wired his amps to think they were playing at a lower volume than they were, and got Floyd Rose whammy bar effects with a stock, Strat-style whammy bar. (Simulating the sound on his own guitar, Arcangel momentarily got the wrong vibrato and said "Whoops, that sounds more like Steve Vai.") As the minute fanboy details kept coming and coming, the crowd finally started getting the joke, and then was roused to cheering applause when Arcangel ended his lecture with a blistering note-for-note recreation of the solo. Trips to art galleries should always be this fun.
A quick round of the Chelsea Dead Zone, I mean art district, today. Some people didn't like Liz Larner's show at 303, but I kind of enjoyed it. Ribbons, fake hair braids, surgical tubing, TV antenna cable, canvas strips, and other filaments converge from the walls and ceiling of the back gallery into a "vanishing point," consisting of a big suspended gordian knot of all that stuff. In the front room interlocking colored cubes perched cockeyed on plinths--more of her trademark wacky (but quiet) modernism. I'm glad to see she's sticking to her guns after Ronald Jones attacked her in a recent Artforum for going soft conceptually. I really don't need to see any more petri dishes in the gallery, thanks.
Speaking of modernism, Carol Bove presents another ambiguous tribute to the halcyon days of the late '60s/early '70s, when talk of utopia (social, sexual, artistic) suffused the air. Stacks and shelf-arrangements of period books (Black Rage, I Seem to Be a Verb, People's Park, Solaris, anything by John Lilly) mingle with geometric sculptures and wall drawings of tightly-stretched thread, while wispy inkwash renderings of Twiggy and other bygone beauties stare balefully from white sheets of paper pinned to the wall. The connecting glue is idealism, as reflected in the show's title: "Experiment in Total Freedom." But it's a kind of frozen, museological idealism, in which the Minimalist design trends of the '60s eclipse the wild-in-the-streets, getting naked side of the decade. That's a very fitting metaphor for the way things are right now, with "doin' your own thing" boxed up and, er, shelved by both the p.c. left and the Ashcroft right. (At Team through June 21.)
Larry Clark's show, over at Luhring Augustine, dealt with some of the same themes but might have benefited from Bove's light touch. This is the Shrine-to-River-Phoenix, 45-collecting, total-memorabilia-dump side of the Clark experience, which isn't as strong as his films and photographs. (Bully rules!) Speaking of Total Freedom: the art world allows Larry to do it all, that is, hang out with attractive young people, photograph them, & sleep with them, while oodles of creative people with similar behavioral quirks and yearnings are just going to get crucified in the current climate. I'm not sure where that thought is going so let's just leave it for now.
Lisa Yuskavage tackles polymorphous sexuality from the female perspective in a lovely, rather somber show at Marianne Boesky. What strikes me here is the strange, postmodern dialogue with painting's past--ways of representing women (straight portraiture, in repose, having their hair combed) redolent of Velazquez, Mary Cassatt, Manet, Degas, all mixed up with the Hugh Hefner cartoon, Sex-to-Sexty kitsch sensibility of big-boobed sex kittens. No single painting is either one way or the other. Both in this refusal to pick a period or a tone, and more blatantly, in the women's facial expressions, there's something kind of tortured about the work. Still, a smart show, possibly Yuskavage's best.
Last, a group exhibit at Friedrich Petzel inspired this comment in the gallery guest book: "PAINFUL (IN A BAD WAY)." Perfectly fitting that description are a crude jigsaw-cut crucifixion scene and a tacky multi-armed jackal-headed goddess of stainless steel that probably shouldn't have seen the light of halogen. The spraypainted walls and ceiling by Katharina Grosse had a nice messy graffitioid feel to them, though.
A friend recently said he never liked Tron (which I talked about here and here) because he thought it looked stupid. Yes, I guess that's true, in the same way Fritz Lang's Metropolis and William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come look stupid: all are exercises in worldbuilding somewhat embarrassingly rooted in the eras in which they were made. Tron may be dated by its technology, but it's interestingly dated: many of the effects involve ways of rendering and makeshift solutions that won't likely be seen again (e.g., "simulated wireframe" using backlit kodalith), because digital filmmaking has utterly changed in the last 21 years. But not necessarily improved--are the plasticine universes of Finding Nemo etc. any more significant, really?
A few years ago I wrote an essay contrasting Pixar's drive for visual perfection with some of the grotty, low-tech things artists are doing. I think this still holds up:
As the corporate entertainment world introduces greater levels of "virtuality" into films (Toy Story, Jurassic Park) and computer games (Myst, Tomb Raider II), many artists are headed in the opposite direction, toward a kind of a sublime indeterminacy. Blurred transmissions, imperfect copies, and other waste products of electronic and digital media are the model for this new aesthetic, which is both symbiotic to and aloof from the global information network.The recent marriage of Hollywood and Silicon Valley has revived the age-old quest for what Norman Bryson calls the "essential copy"--the depiction of seamless reality that preoccupied artists from ancient Greece to the late 19th Century. Instead of complex history paintings full of perfectly rendered figures, the goal of current software writers is to create moving tableaux in which the figures interact, cast realistic shadows, and accommodate changing light sources--all at the click of a mouse.
These discoveries take place within labor- and capital-intensive workplaces like Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic, where employees scramble to top previous levels of verisimilitude. Technical achievement, not humanistic speculation or doubt, is the prime concern in these high-tech factories. Artists, on the other hand, are as interested in the "why" of technology as the "how." Where special effects crews are building images using computer-generated skeletons and fractal outer skins, artists are breaking pictures down into critically nuanced, constituent parts. Increasingly they are gaining access to home equipment that enables unorthodox uses of technology.
So what does this have to do with Tron? Not much, actually. The film's director, Steven Lisberger, is just as rooted in digital utopianism as the Pixar folks; in recent interviews he has spoken of how artists can give inspiring form to new technologies, lamented the failed promise of the internet (he believes it's mainly a haven for gossip and p0rn), and dissed the despairing tone of the (original) Matrix. Yet a lot of artists like Tron, perhaps for the wrong reasons: the provisional, cobbled-together look of its technology; its wonderful mix of formal beauty and supreme cheesiness. Also, readers of William Gibson's Neuromancer inevitably thought about Blade Runner when visualizing The Sprawl, but what movie provided a ready template for the blocks of abstract data comprising Cyberspace? Oh, and speaking of anachronisms, the Pixar short that accompanies Nemo, titled Knickknacks, is pure uncut '80s, from the glossy sheen of the design to the '50s-retro wallpaper to the perky Bobby McFerrin soundtrack that makes you want to run screaming for the exits. Now there's something that's not interestingly dated.