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jimpunk at 544x378 WebTV remixed my atom .gif, so I re-remixed it.
UPDATE: A couple more iterations are in the comments.
Via thickeye we learn about an upcoming Michele Handelman performance where she surreptitiously photographs and audiotapes people in a public park and then, on another day and in the same places in the park, stages reenactments of what they were doing and saying. Live performers--surrogate humans with white hair, white skin, white clothes, and orange-lensed goggles--will sit in the same positions as the tapees and the audio of their conversations will be transmitted through loudspeakers. Fine, so far, but the press release description just gives me hives:
Michelle Handelman will spend one day in Bryant Park clandestinely documenting visitors to the park, recording their conversations, photographing them, and taking note of their location/time in the park. During a single performance, entitled Passerby, she will work with performers to recreate five of the situations she observed in the exact locations at the same time they originally occurred. Handelman's project addresses the possibility for or lack of privacy in public space as well as the prevalence of and high tolerance for surveillance and will take place on Tuesday, June 29th, from 1-4PM in Bryant Park, 6th Avenue between 40th/42nd Streets. Rain date is Thursday, July 1st.The phrase in bold is the type of earnest curatorial recap they use in Whitney wall labels, taking the edge out of the art and making it "socially responsible" for skittish newbies. Plus, it's not accurate. To say the work addresses our "high tolerance for surveillance" is just wrong if these people don't know they're being taped. What if a kid is agonizing out loud about whether to come out, or a couple is trying to decide whether to have an abortion, or, if this seems too farfetched, what if a guy is just obsessing to his girlfriend about his BO? Will Handelman edit conversations down to material she feels is "not too invasive"? Is she going to get releases, now that likenesses and voices are increasingly treated as intellectual property? Or is she just going to throw caution to the winds and see what happens?
Many of the same issues were raised by Sophie Calle 25 years ago in her "Venetian Suite" pictures, where she followed a man around and photographed him without his knowledge. Is the artist critiquing surveillance or just being a voyeur? Also, films such as The Conversation and Blow-up taught us that these little slices of life can be utterly unlike what they appear to be and have only as much meaning as one reads into them. Maybe that's where our tolerance of surveillance, if it's true we tolerate it, comes from? At any rate, those are the kinds of issues that ought to be raised in the press release. I look forward to checking out the performance.
More things will be said about the upcoming show in which Handelman's work appears, "public.exe: Public Execution," organized for Exit Art by Michele Thursz and Anne Ellegood with participating curator Defne Ayas. Stay tuned.
Update: review of the Handelman performance here.
I hereby humbly present my Justin Berkovi Mix [.mp3 removed], featuring several of this UK producer's innovative techno tracks from the late '90s/early '00s. I thought the Village Voice was being perverse comparing techno to bluegrass a few years back (actually it was the other way around, and it was disparaging) but the second track "Gaddster" makes the connection explicit--much more convincingly than the The Grid's early '90s one-off "Swamp Thing." Berkovi doesn't just superimpose a banjo over a dancefloor beat, he actually uses electronic instrumentation and studio wizardry to mimic the rhythm and feel of a thumping hoedown, or maybe "holedown" since the track keeps plunging into the sonic equivalent of the Ketamine hole. Here's a track listing, all mixed live from vinyl EPs:
"Dark Clouds" from "The Storm" (Predicaments 11)
"Gaddster" from the "01273 Predicaments" (Force Inc.)
"Thass Raaht Baaahbee" from "Tanned Lumps With Lipstick" (Predicaments 9)
Track 2, text side, from Nightrax "London" EP (with Ibrahim Alfa)
"Dark Clouds" reprise
The plan was not to post anything too serious today, but here are some rhetorical questions addressed to future Memorial Days:
Did the cold war end because of Reagan's budget-busting military buildup or because the Soviet Union rotted from within?
With America's superpower rival gone, are "rogue states" and Islamic terrorists enough justification to maintain 700-plus military bases all over the world, and thousands of nukes?
Is the Dick Cheney goal of "imposing a fearful peace"1 on the world the right course for Americans?
Is "Islamic terrorism" about taking over America or getting America to leave Islamic countries?
1. Cheney didn't actually phrase it this way--it's what John Perry Barlow thinks his fellow libertarian Wyoming mountain man is trying to accomplish in Washington. Cheney a libertarian--what a joke: he's a creature of corporate and government bureaucracy.
It's a holiday (or post-holiday) so I'm posting stupid stuff today (or more stupid than usual). Like the homestar-ish End of the World (link may be dead because site exceeded bandwidth). This may be old news but I just discovered it. No disrespect meant to the war dead, but if we don't [fill in cautionary statement here].
Guy Colwell is a Bay Area underground comix artist turned mural painter who recently went back to explicit political work, to disastrous effect. As described in this Steve Gillliard post (and original story), Colwell tackled the Abu Ghraib prison torture story and his painting was so effective it got his art dealer literally punched in the face, and spat on, by angry yahoos. The gallery--in the bohemian North Beach area of San Francisco, of all places--was also vandalized, and the dealer closed her business yesterday. The painting is explicit, illustrational agitprop in the Sue Coe tradition, depicting subhuman GIs with American flag patches on their uniforms, screaming in rage at a row of naked figures, hooded, wired up and standing on buckets. All the emotions are right up on the surface, and this is a time when emotions matter.
Colwell has taken the Abu Ghraib photos, which were already starting to lose some shock value through endless media repetition, and dared to nationalize them by making ugly, monstrous caricatures out of "the troops." We aren't supposed to regard our soldiers as bad or suspect, even though the war was launched for fraudulent reasons and no one knew how the "liberated" Iraqis were being treated. (For the record, I support the troops but wish they could be put to work by the Pentagon protecting us from our real enemies.) The people who assaulted Colwell's dealer are still in whipped up "war mode"--which is hard to come down from after all the Fox News and New York Times/Judith Miller propaganda. The dark side of America is an ugly beast and with blood in the air, it's not so easy to calm. When the Japanese attack you, you put all your energy into attacking the Japanese; when an "invisible network of terror cells" attacks you, it's hard to know where the energy's supposed to go. So you hit "sitting duck" countries. And art dealers.
Fortunately there's some counter-energy in the form of concerned artists who fear fascism at home more than randomly-striking terrorists. In this sense Guy Colwell is a sort of anti-Mumford, referring here to Steve Mumford's rapidly-dating "Parisian flaneur in Iraq" sketchbook drawings of American soldiers at work and rest in an exotic foreign land. Those bland, tastefully smeared, courtroom style drawings, purporting to be some kind of art vérité, managed to hide the hatefulness and essential wrongness of the US invasion of a country that never threatened us except with words--a classic colonial adventure fused with misdirected payback. Mumford even got interviewed by CNN, the official voice and supporter of the war. Colwell's art is simplistic, not tasteful in the least, but it cuts right to the subjugating core of the BushCo enterprise. Not that a punch in the face validates art or is anything other than repugnant, but no one will ever be punched over Mumford's drawings.
[UPDATE: Capobianco gallery's "Guy Colwell page," which had a clearer view of the Abu Ghraib painting, was removed a few hours after I posted this (that's the gallery where the dealer was attacked). Its website is now also closed, but has a phone number to view a video of the gallery closing memorial.]
Details from an installation by John Parker at The Front Room, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The compacted, obsessively joined household materials somewhat recall Sarah Sze's early work but with more of a playful, Digimon vibe. I actually prefer Parker's sense of geometric pattern and general all-around oddness using twisty ties, wire, tape, wood screws, electrical hardware, light bulbs, plastic bags, etc. Other artists working in the "geometric assemblage" vein include Lucky de Bellevue and the British artist Daniel Coombs, excellently documented on James Hyde's site. Last day for the Parker show is tomorrow, Sunday, May 30. Gallery info is here. More of my installation pics are here. Parker is also a musician; my review of a recent show of his playing with The Man From Planet Risk is here.