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It's been almost impossible to escape the images of Banksy's street-graffiti cartoons on the Net, for the past couple of years. As Paddy suggests, "Internet nerds" have much to do with elevating this artist to the level where he can be collected by Brad Pitt. This post is a mea culpa for reBlogging an image of the work as an Eyebeam reBlogger in '04. I suppose I was impressed by the scale of some of the pieces sprayed on buildings in rundown neighborhoods--as I recall, I reBlogged a giant rat--but I've never really liked the clip-art-cutesy style and dislike the artist's faux-Dickensian handle. One-word artist names are inherently pretentious! As Banksy gets more and more hyped, the ideas get worse and worse.
Update, from the comments:
tim: i disagree on your take on the one-word artist-name. it comes out of the graffiti/street art culture -- the farthest thing from pretentious. it's a way to preserve anonymity.
tom: I've never thought of him as a street artist, but rather a Young British Artist using street vernacular and every other means of sophisticated self-hype to become as famous as Jesus Christ.
Janice Caswell at Schroeder Romero
Tomoo Gokita at ATM
Fox Grimshaw at Marvelli
Padraig Timoney at Andrew Kreps
Walking around Chelsea with my camera today--took these shots of artists' work. The Caswell and Grimshaw images are details and the Gokita is heavily cropped. Timoney's materials consist of prepaid electricity cards glued edge to edge on aluminum. Yayoi Kusama did this about 40 years ago with airmail stickers, but still, nice--the fore-and-aft diptych appeals.
Paddy Johnson provided the impetus for the trip today with her slam of Greg Bogin's work as "hopelessly stale." The images of his auto-lacquer-on-canvas paintings looked fine to me but I wanted to see the work in person. It's actually a satisfying combination of videogame-cute, corporate logo-esque designs rendered with California "finish fetish" care (as in John McCracken, surfboards). Definitely a few nods to Stella protractors but only nods--they have rainbows in them, for cryin' out loud. The metal flake paint and airbrush color segues are echt '70s but completely conscious and quietly ironic. And corporate logos, yes, but too eccentric to be real corporate logos--the Bogins wouldn't sit easily in a lobby because they would draw attention away from bland, inferior company signage. And I don't see why Brian Sholis has any obligation to mention Fred Tomaselli in this context. Tomaselli doesn't "own" urethane and in fact, the plastic coating on his paintings has always rung false to me--a way of "bodying up" fragile papier colle for the collectors. Bogin isn't coating collages of Adam and Eve in the garden made out of porn mag cut outs (Tomaselli's most recent content)--thankfully!
If you don't think Bush is planning to start a war with Iran, you don't know Junior. According to a Time cover story, which is greasing the skids for another subscription boostin' war, duking it out with the Iranians "is no longer unthinkable." With breathless excitement, the lapdogs tell us that minesweepers have been put on ready to be sent to the Straits of Hormuz. Folks, before you even have a chance to punish Bush's party in November, the little man is about to let fly. The eagle is about to soar again. So, in the spirit of angry punk impotence which was the only possible political posture in the nightmare Reagan years, I offer this video of Lance Blisters on MIDI guitar, with visuals by Ilan Katin, re-performing John Ashcroft's version of that ridiculous "eagle" song: [15 MB Quicktime .mov]
Below are Quicktime .movs depicting the slicing of four-dimensional stellated polytopes, created by Russell Towle. These are hypnotic, complex patterns, strangely organic for being so hard-edged and geometric. Towle explains: "These may be the first animations ever made of the solid sections of four-dimensional star polytopes. [...] Briefly, plane polygons are two-dimensional polytopes, and polyhedra, three-dimensional polytopes. Where polygons are bounded by line segments, and polyhedra by polygons, a 4-polytope is bounded by polyhedra. Just as we may have any number of planes in three dimensions, in 4-space we may have any number of 3-spaces. Two 3-spaces might be a millionth of an inch apart and yet have no common point (thus the popular idea of parallel universes). It follows that, given a fixed direction in the 4-space, we can take solid sections of objects in the 4-space, perpendicular to that direction. [...] In these animations, a 3-space is passed from one vertex of each star polytope, to the opposite vertex, and sections taken at small intervals. The star polytopes were constructed, and the sections found, using Mathematica 4.0. The sections were rendered in POV-Ray (a freeware ray-tracer)." The screenshot above is from the last .mov, "{5/2,3,5}."
[.mov files removed -- they no longer work in current (2017) browsers -- thanks, Apple!]
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Films and/or vids projected against a Williamsburg building exterior at Secret Project Robot. The one-day-only Monster Island Arts & Music Festival, on Sept. 16, was not notable for its sub-slacker gallery art but the moving images outside really popped.
Update: I found this email from Nick Hallett that explains a bit more about the projections: "NEXT SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16th: as part of the MONSTER ISLAND ARTS & MUSIC FESTIVAL, HARKNESS A/V is hosting its one year anniversary. MIGHTY ROBOT, BRADLEY EROS, SETH KIRBY, and TOM DEXTER will join visual forces atop the fortress of Monster Island (in Williamsburg at Metropolitan and Kent), throwing their images onto the giant gas tanks directly across the street. More info to come." Still waiting for that info, but the work looked great.
Update 2: In a subsequent email Hallett added "visiting guest artist: BORIS (from the MODUL8 team)" to the roster.
Red and Green 1-4, 1991, acrylic on canvas, ea. 10 x 8 inches. The red and green* are closer in value than in these photos and vibrate pretty seriously. The "obnoxious Op" factor is critical to these (not previously exhibited) paintings. I had a dream last night about a group of paintings that looked like this--only they were much more elaborate, on shaped panels that followed some of the contours.
*turquoise green, which the camera and possibly your screen makes appear more as a blue.
"Un-tribal" [mp3 removed]
I recycled a riff from "Bass-o-matic" and added some new tunes around and on top of it. Still working with my self-made drum machine samples. I called it "un-tribal" because it has a kind of pounding jungle rhythm but is still inherently geeky.
Update: Took about 50 seconds out of this.