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Televised Abstraction, 1988-2007
Lorna Mills, L to R: Bletchingly, Infomint, Lucky Hubble 2007, MFD, latex, video (at akau inc., Toronto)
Mills' piece (see this Digital Media Tree page, where we are fortunate to have her posting as L.M.) differs from the Staehle in the choice of "formalist forms" used, a sense of heightened artificiality, the oval masking on the screen, and most significantly the real world content: names of racehorses scrolling across the bottoms of her screens, defamiliarized and exoticized in this context. Also, not sure why Staehle was "broadcasting" to his TV--maybe VCRs on the floor were not the norm in 1988.
More cassette madness: Tone Set, where have you been all my life? Found out about this Tempe Arizona duo from Mutant Sounds. John Carpenter-esque minimal moog meets Negativland sound collage, only it was '81-'82 so the sampling is all done with tape. "Synthpunk" probably is the best term, as it's in the DEVO/Wall of Voodoo camp melodically. The title "Cal's Ranch" refers to Cal Farley's Boys Ranch outside Amarillo TX, and some of the samples have ironically appropriated fundamentalist Christian themes. Also bad movies from late night TV, call-in shows, snippets from Rocky and Bullwinkle, all that stuff you get sued for now. My favorite tracks so far are "The Devil Makes the Loudest Noise" [mp3 removed] and "Out! Out!" but it's all pretty amazing.
Thanks to Rhizome for reblogging* this recent sketch. I like what happened when the image resized--the center got white hot and edges became black holes. It's more of a graphic this way, but a mysterious one, I think.
Someone asked if the recent uptick here in drawings and animations was because I was showing the blog in the gallery. That hasn't started yet--end of next week. This blog is a place for my artwork and if I had more discipline I would just draw and post sound files. I post text because (a) some images don't look good adjacent to each other and it helps to have a buffer of some kind, but the buffer can't just be filler so I have to write something cogent, and (b) I'm verbose and have to talk about things (even though it means sometimes people get "insulted.") The writing helps me think through what I'm doing and ties it into a larger context of stuff I like and don't like. [/pure egotism]
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/may/9/sketch-monochrome-gradient/.
Irritants of the Day.
1. Jonathan Lethem's descriptions of art in Fortress of Solitude. Don't know if the Abraham Ebdus character is based on Lethem's father, or if Lethem's father is an artist, but the book feels like an elaborate revenge by a son who essentially hates art against a father wholly dedicated to it. Lethem knows just enough about his subjects to be dangerous. He can imitate the style of an Artforum review, describe an avant garde film screening, or string together a narrative of what is happening in an abstract painting or film well enough to make these things sound completely pointless and ridiculous. The book is filled with fake reviews, of art, music, etc--no one can respond to these because they are pure fiction, straw men for the writer's contempt. Lethem has a vicious wit--one wishes it could be turned on people and things that deserve it (Republican politicians, Judith Miller, etc)
2. Minus Space. If Lethem's imagined world of form-only art existed it might be found on this space. A website devoted to "reductive art"? Surely "reduction" is just one technique or strategy an artist might use to get at some significant content--not an end in itself. One might as well create a blog called Blue and only blog blue things. Yet in fact a longstanding cult persists around this "reduction," which has little to do with minimal art practices as described by Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt (or even Peter Halley) but instead provides a safe haven for late Greenberg disciples proudly entrenched in painting's own greatest area of competence--itself--while the world changes all around them. Not everything on Minus Space is that simplistic, they've added a fair amount of "painting as architectural critique" since the site's inception, but one yearns to pluck the better things one sees there out of the limited context. Many pieces are succulent but the photos are too small; half the time you're not sure what you're looking at and the pleasures you could get from staring at monochrome and shaped canvases are stanched.
Afterthought: Minus Space has changed in the last year or so. It added a blog [wrong--see here] but no longer hosts a deep archive of its past online exhibits. Instead it features links to artists' websites (some of which are Flash--yech.) A link I made to a show they put up online last year (Daniel Gottin) is now dead. Also, the site says it is no longer taking submissions. Perhaps "reductive art" as an organizing principle is petering out. Or Petering to the extent Halley is a mentor for any of these artists.
Update: This quote from Salon's Laura Miller, writing about Don DeLillo, also applies to Lethem: "The weaknesses of Falling Man are DeLillo's long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time -- and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered." It's so stupid. But it does work. Lethem's Fortress was lauded as the Great American Novel because we need such novels and young writers to write them. Whether or not the form is outmoded or the best vehicle there is a myth machine, an industry, behind it. The art world equivalent is painting, which you have to do, no matter how bad or irrelevant, to be a playa.
Lostblogging (spoilers)
The "end of Dharma" had real power but the leader of the Others is...a chair? Actually the latter revelation had a nice "hold a flashlight up to your face and tell a ghost story" quality to it (a la Jin on the camping trip a few shows back) and shouldn't be knocked too much (That baritone "H-ee-elp me-e"--OMG). Great to see Dharma spokesman Marvin Candle (aka Mark Wickmund) back again on tape explaining the compound's security perimeter. And all the weird class issues raised by the Dharma initiative: Ben's dad as a frustrated "work man," the "hostiles" excluded from the compound, etc. Left hanging after the mass murder of the hippies by poison gas: one guesses this means Ben killed his girlfriend. I kept thinking he would find her body, heightening the tragedy of his betrayal. But we never saw what she looked like as an adult so that wouldn't have worked. Expect more Ben back story.
I've been joking about the free music sites linking to my .mp3 output, some of which are a trifle skanky (pop up heaven). This one is pretty handsome, though. I can remember a day when musicians had to join .mp3 sites and upload to them, hoping someone would stumble on their "wares" in those individual archives. (I suppose MySpace still operates that way--with added social networking functions--but I chafe at the format.) My tunes are definitely getting "out there" despite the randomness of the context, judging from the downloads, particularly in Asia, it seems, and all I'm doing is making tracks and posting them. Money would be nice but "airplay" is great, too--as long as the bandwidth stays manageable (which it has so far). This is niche music anyway and will remain so unless vocals are added and stories of heartache and pain are told.