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My somewhat overoptimistic July 4 post from two years ago:
Wrong.
I enjoyed seeing the fireworks over the East River last night and...whoops, wrong picture, this is us blowing up Baghdad. But seriously, talk about a disconnect between American ritual festivities and the chaos in Iraq right now. We're fast approaching the point where the number of our soldiers killed after George Bush's victory declaration tops the number that preceded it. After a few exciting days of monkey-screeching and hard-on flashing, Bush, Rumsfeld & Co. have moved on to other things (campaigning, plotting global domination, plundering public funds) and left others to clean up the mess. American troops are getting shot up, the Treasury's overdrawn, people are losing jobs, and the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.
Fortunately we can all go the polls next year and get rid of these clowns, right? Right?
More work in progress. One thing not clear from the photo is the black and white sheets no longer overlap: they've been cut into jigsaw pieces that mimic the initial one-shot, casual distribution of pages on the floor. You can see where the fragment to the right would fit into the "puzzle": every page is now similarly irregularly shaped. All of this keeps the piece from getting too thick and "multi-ply" when it's eventually taped together into a mosaic. Right now the white pages are held together with low-tack housepainter's tape, barely visible in the photo. The buckyball will be moved to the center for more tracing and trimming of the black and white paper.
Addendum to an earlier post: SCREENFULL had David Lynch's "Daily Report" covered a week before it appeared on boingboing. Just being catty--I hardly ever look at boingboing. I really kind of hate those tech-oriented, gee whiz isn't science weird and wonderful sites. Boingboing describes the Lynch thing as a "weather report," which is a bit like saying Marcel Duchamp was a urinal-maker. It's true Lynch tells you the weather, but I swear I saw one where there was just this waxy, meat-like lump sitting on a tabletop. Also, maybe it should be called the weekday (except holidays) report, since he hasn't updated since Friday. If he doesn't keep it reasonably current there's no point and I'll delink it (woo).
Follow-up: today (Tuesday July 5) it's just a desktop still life and a Lynch voice over. He does recite the weather, but I still wouldn't call these things weather reports--all he does is give the temperature and what the sky looks like outside.
Today I cannibalized an older piece that wasn't working, going after it with scissors and an X-acto knife (woo).
Approximately 5 CDs later (actually LPs, mostly prog rock), the shearing was done and a new background was in place. Now the real work starts--the whole thing has to be cut into pieces and taped back together in a mosaic/quilt that looks exactly like this. (Strips of cloth framers' tape will be applied on the back, along the seams.) Those bar code things are xeroxes of an op art pattern I made in MSPaintbrush and only used once, for a small piece.
Added a left side link for David Lynch's Daily Report. In most of the short Quicktime movies I've seen at this URL, he's sitting in the same spot behind his work table wearing a white shirt. He looks at the sky outside his window (off camera), gives a short synopsis of the weather "here in LA," and looks calmly back at the viewer. The only thing that changes are slight variations in the direction of his towering white wave of a hairdo. It's awesome hair. I like the story James Wolcott told recently about the special critics' screening for Blue Velvet Pauline Kael gave back in the 80s. (Speaking of media objectivity.) She called Lynch to tell him everyone loved his sicko masterpiece and he earnestly replied in his typical schoolboy manner, "Oh, God bless." Dune, the movie he made for Dino de Laurentiis to bankroll Velvet, gets better and more disturbing every year. I had horrible bloody nightmares after watching it recently.
"Mouse Party" [mp3 removed]. Down and dirty, as they say.
One of the umpteen million lies told by the current lyin'-its-head-off US Administration was calling 9/11 a failure of imagination. Man, didn't these people ever watch movies? Executive Decision, a pretty excellent if technically overambitious actioner from 1996, features a band of Muslim hijackers (with submachine guns!) who take over a crowded jet ostensibly to free their jailed Osama-like leader. A bomb is on board containing "enough nerve agent to wipe out half the Eastern seaboard," and the real mission of the cell's Mohammed Atta-like second in command is to crash the plane into the heart of Washington DC and bring the "vengeance of Allah" down on the American people. The part where life-imitating-art completely breaks down, tragically, is that the US government not only scrambles fighters to escort the plane, but literally injects a team of commandoes by means of a flying leech that attaches to the outer hull, giving Kurt Russell and the other good guys access to all the non-passenger parts of the plane. The bomb is defused, the fanatics are all killed, no passengers are hurt (except a smarmy Senator trying to use the event for a photo op), and Kurt Russell lands the plane after the main insane jihadist kills both pilots. Again, what really stretches credulity is Condoleeza Rice never seeing this movie (or a half-dozen like it) flipping around a hotel cable dial late at night.
Good piece by Joe McKay:Press Enter to ExitMcKay's work often features klutzy robotic simulations of the sleek cool computer trappings that enhance our lives, for example, his mechanical progress bar, or a recording light that "blinks" by slowly spinning on a wall-mounted rotor. Maybe in the future he can tackle the "Start" button the majority of the world's computer-users still have to press to shut down their machines. On second thought, Windows is beyond satire at this point.
There are two mesh screens inside the box, one that's shaking and one that's not. This shaking makes the letters shimmer with a moire brilliance that mimics a computer screen.
The text comes from my local deli's ATM machine. I love how messed up life is that pressing "enter" to exit makes perfect sense.
Click here for a link to a small video clip of the sculpture in action.
UPDATE: For those in the greater New York area, Progress Bar will be on display through Sunday, July 3 at vertexList, in Williamsburg. Hours are 2-6 pm today, tomorrow and Sunday. By the way, I disagree with the statement in Marcin Ramocki's exhibition thesis that "Content itself has faded to the background [in the present era] the way an adjective still describes a noun without holding much importance." It's possible to like Joe McKay's work and still enjoy something like George Romero's Land of the Dead on the level of pure story. Content is even triumphing over empty signifiers in the political realm, if Bush's poll numbers on Iraq are any indication. Go see LotD, by the way, it's a hoot. Visualize the destruction of resource-hogging yuppies by the underclass, achieve the destruction of resource-hogging yuppies by the underclass.
