Day: January 19, 2008

Beats Only Sketchbook

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"SQP Memory Drum 100 bpm" [mp3 removed]

"SQP Beatslicer 120 bpm" [mp3 removed]

"Krypt 116-121 (100 bpm)" [mp3 removed]

"Krypt 112-115 (Beat Only - 100 bpm)" [mp3 removed]

I told someone recently that I was going to turn into the Net version of the guy out banging pots on the street (but not as loud). All these "sketches" were made in Reaktor. The SQP is a very basic piano roll midi sequencer; these are all my notes (no loops) but the Memory Drum and Beatslicer ROMplers have some modulation presets. Krypt has its own sequencer but again, these are my notes--not that it matters that much. "SQP Beatslicer" was used as background texture in "Slow and Fast Zombies"; "Krypt 112-115" was previously posted with an overlaid melody. "Krypt 116-121 (100 bpm)" comes the closest to being a complete piece to me. I can't figure out what else to do with it at the moment.

Lo-Fi Baroque

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Just noticed from the MTAA blog that Michael Sarff (M.River) co-curated the "Lo-Fi Baroque" show in 1998 at Thread Waxing.

I saw that show and while I thought it was a mixed bag of work the conceptual Povera aesthetic it limned was influential on me personally and from the photos and descriptions I've seen of the New Museum's show "Unmonumental" (I'm actually seeing it this week) it appears to be a late riff on Sarff's ideas. Rachel Harrison is central to this style and is in both shows--Sarff's exhibit also included James Hyde, Gregory Green, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, and Cary S. Leibowitz/Candyass who were all going strong in 1998 and probably still are but have been replaced in the smart assemblage canon with newer, hotter artists (Jim Lambie, Gedi Sibony, Sarah Lucas).

My own wrinkle (literally) was to apply the aesthetic to digital subject matter. This dropped me into a deep crack I'm still digging my way out of.

girish on Joseph Cornell

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girish on Joseph Cornell's films. This is a good summation of what's good about the films. (These movie blogs--boy--art geeks will never, ever, be this thorough.)

Still thinking about the films and their connection to Richard Prince, whose retrospective I saw a couple of days after Anthology screened the Cornell. The connection is the throwaway quality of the images, the deep investment in something trivial.

In Cornell's the case it was returning to the same images again and again, so they become fixations. The audience comes to love and be haunted by these meaningless filmic ephemera purchased by the foot in junk stores.

In Prince's case it's the investment of the "art aura" in advertising photos through careful cropping, enlargement, framing, and tony gallery-style presentation. All that for a dumb cosmetics ad. Yet one doesn't imagine he has the same longing that Cornell does--he's more of a hater.

When talking about Prince I just mean the early re-photography. The bile yielded something smart and profound, but then art world success necessitated rolling out a new product line every couple of years (or so it seems from the retrospective) and the time to obsess and be haunted from the perspective of total rejected loser-dom was lost.

Cornell made money off his boxes but rarely showed the films. One surmises that lack of exposure kept them pure somehow, maybe that's just being overly romantic. The boxes are ultra-romantic and I don't like them much.