October 2007

Please join me this weekend for "Abstract Horror" at Galapagos art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. I will be playing demo-ing some of my music with accompanying animation. 100% of the material has been posted to the Internet but it needs the occasional meat space trial.

"Abstract Horror," Galapagos Art Space
October 14, 7.30-9.30 FREE
Organized by Aron Namenwirth

Namenwirth's program notes:

Entry wall: Oliver Michaels, "Marching to the Sun" (Quicktime movie loop). Video sculpture spits and spews various mundane objects, questioning perpetual energy and common sense.

7.30-7.45 Matt Freedman and Tim Spelios (performance). In this collaboration these multi-talented artists riff off each other, Matt drawing cartoons as Tim drums. Satire meets absurdity in this offbeat combination.

7.50-8.05 Ken Butler (performance), "Voices of Anxious Objects." The artist-musician performs mesmerizing world textures and driving melodic gypsy grooves with passion and purpose on an amazing arsenal of amplified hybrid string instruments made from household objects and tools. Duchampian Dada meets Hybrid Hindu Hendrix as function and form collide in an environment ofhyperactive hardware. Perhaps he will drag out some of the more "dangerous" instruments for this show. Guns, swords, axes, and knives may sing for their supper.

8.08-8.09 Richard Kern, "Lulu in the woods,"1 minute. A short video of a beautiful young woman (Lulu) moving around in nature in her underwear. Innocence mixes with anticipation of some action.

8.08-8.10 Marcin Ramocki, "Serenity" DVD. Short and funny video depicting a group of people discussing the artistic merits of the sci-fi feature "Serenity."

8.11-8.16 Jillian Mcdonald, "Zombie Animation." A motley crew of zombies--images downloaded from www documentation of flash mob "zombie-walks"--lumber through post-industrial cityscapes long gentrified and now rezoned for condo living.

8.18-8.25 William Stone, "Savage Ferox," DVD. In 2005 Stone traveled 150 miles up a jungle river in Guyana South America with Mark Dion and Bob Braine. Shark the guide tells a story of the only movie that he had ever seen on a big screen as a few bottles of rum were consumed around the jungle campfire. It was an Italian movie called Savage Ferox (sometimes called Let them Die Slowly) that was banned in Italy because it was rumored that real human corpses were used.

8.26-8.30 Linda Post, "Mortal Storm," DVD. Appropriates the opening footage of a Hollywood film of the same title from 1940. A god-like voice booms over storm clouds, lamenting human the weakness to resort to violence. The scene is repeated, locking us in a loop of the dilemma.

8.35-8.50 Tom Moody (performance). For this performance Moody will play demo a selection of his tunes accompanied by looping animated GIFs from his website.

9.00-9.20 Bubbly Fish (performance). Playing with a Gameboy, Haeyoung Kim creates penetrating 8-bit music.

A Rhizome.org front page blog write up* by William Hanley begins thusly:

"If anyone in London for the Frieze fair is still tempted to write off the manipulated electronics of the Beige programming ensemble or the kinetic graphic work of the group Paper Rad as interesting but merely stylish nostalgia..."

Since no one is quoted voicing this criticism, it's actually quite likely that

"William Hanley is still tempted to write off the manipulated electronics of the Beige programming ensemble or the kinetic graphic work of the group Paper Rad as interesting but merely stylish nostalgia."

Beige was anything but stylish. Paper Rad has only recently gotten stylish, with Beck videos, etc. Possibly Hanley's straw man assumption is based on some old New Media people (of the sort who haunt the Rhizome boards and opine about whether Networkism is the next "ism") being threatened by the emergence of talented younger peers getting a toehold in the gallery system after the failure of "Net Art" in the 2000-2002 Whitneys. I don't know, just a guess. I followed some of the Networkism thread and if anything deserves to fail in the marketplace of ideas or otherwise, that is it. Too many warmed over conceptualist assumptions, boring, old, tedious, ugh.

Update: Paddy Johnson notes that I cut off Hanley's quote (I figured you could read the whole thing at the link):

"If anyone in London for the Frieze fair is still tempted to write off the manipulated electronics of the Beige programming ensemble or the kinetic graphic work of the group Paper Rad as interesting but merely stylish nostalgia, the exhibition Tha Click, which opens at E:vent Gallery on October 6th and runs through November 4th, should prove that over the last 10 or so years, both ensembles have made a remarkably substantive and genre-shaping contribution to electronic media-inspired art."(emphasis Johnson's)

Paddy isn't sure why I found the first part of the sentence annoying, because, she believes, Hanley is "right to observe the skepticism that once frequently accompanied media art. Cory Arcangel himself spoke to me several years ago about the difficulties of being taken seriously for precisely this reason, and the problem (though greatly diminished) still endures."

My reply to Paddy, just submitted to her comments:

The art world didn't object to media art because it was stylish, it objected to it because it was boring, incomprehensible, or overly technical. By contrast, Beige and Paper Rad were immediately embraced, put in Biennials, shown at Pace, etc. There's a Paper Rad book out with a foreword by '80s painter Donald Baechler, for cryin' out loud.** What is this writing off Hanley is talking about? When were they ever rejected?

Paper Rad's first NYC solo was April 2004 and Arcangel's was January 2005--I'm not sure where Hanley got this "10 years" figure.

Update 2: Yours truly continuing to belabor the point on Paddy's thread: "Hanley’s implied 10 year epic struggle for acceptance is a false narrative in the case of these two artist collectives. Since the artists weren’t actually rejected for “merely stylish nostalgia” it’s legitimate to ask why he would use a criticism that specific. Not to make too big a deal out of it–-probably the defensive lead is just careless writing."

*Update 3: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/oct/4/8-bit-cliques/.

**Update 4: Ben Jones of Paper Rad points out on the AFC thread that there is no Baechler forward to the Paper Rad book--that was an error in putting together the press materials by the book's distributors.

Jeff at Double Happiness offers a portrait of the neurosis that is our reality (as Adolf Gottlieb once described the subject matter of Abstract Expressionism). All these different electronic media and delivery systems (blu-ray, dvd video, dvd audio, hdtv, hd dvd, hdmi, divx, vhs, thx, dolby digital, firewire, super audio cd, laserdisc, ilink, usb, represented in his post in stark logo form) are somehow supposed to comfortably exist together in our consciousness and as consumers we never, never ask whether they can or should be reconciled because we all understand that constantly changing or conflicting formats are the offshoot of progress and capitalism is messy but forever The Way.