January 2008

1. Joseph Cornell at Anthology Film Archives. His boxes are twee and rely too much on the romance of "old stuff" but the film work--most not shown publicly during his lifetime--is militant in its sentimentality. The way he returns again and again to certain shots grips your brain like propaganda: for pigeons, children's birthday parties and the circus. Yet there is a certain icy strangeness to the choice of imagery which leads us to....

2. First 360 degrees of Richard Prince Guggenheim rampage*--ascending from ground level. The early rephotography--so cold. (*As in frontage, not running amuck.)

3. There Will Be Blood. Please go see it while it's on big screens. This turns "American epics" like Giant on their ears. Yes, McCabe and Mrs Miller already did that, with the frontier western, but P.T. Anderson takes Altman from simple curmudgeonly cynicism into nihilism and the edge of madness. His film is claustrophobic reduction set in an expansive wilderness, transforming the only two things that matter in America, money and religion, into an intricate mating dance of mental patients. Sculptors will appreciate the attention to period detail--the close-ups of wooden oil derrick construction are as obsessive and beautiful as Cornell films.

4. The Wire Fourth Season. Over 13 episodes: Marlo steals the blingy ring from the convenience store dope dealer. Omar steals it from Marlo. The crooked cop steals it from Omar. Soldier-in-training Michael steals it from the cop. Marlo asks the soldier where he got it. You gotta love the continuity of this show, working at every level.

5. The forums at EM411. Lots of articulate process discussion about electronic music. Not so much about content. Everyone might suck and have the most exquisite taste in gear (but I doubt it).

(in joke, sort of--hey to TH)

Following up on an earlier post on recent shows by Wade Guyton and Thomas Ruff and their relationship to new media (computer- and Netcentric) art: the artists aren't doing anything that radically different from, say, Karl Klomp (imperfect scans and printing) or Fake Is The New Real (inadvertently abstract jpegs). The former deal more with scale, and parsing the dynamics of a room, and are advantaged by having bushels of cash at their disposal to make a show of sumptuous objects.

Physical craft and spatial investigation aren't the sine qua non of art; some kind of meaningful content comparisons need to be made between two different spheres--digital and electronic arts, which has its own culture and (mostly uncritical) critical apparatus and the gallery/museum world. It would be good for curators from various disciplines to be talking, to agree on common points of value. No one will prompt this conversation, though, the way the Romans did, for example, with the Nicene Creed (forcing clerics from various rival Christian camps to nail down a charter, with chariots circling the building), until the cyber camp has a significant economic constituency, which may be never.

Aron Namenwirth posted some of Ruff's images, including some of the porny ones, which seem really obvious to me. I prefer the Fake is the New Real images linked to above, which have a more accidental, "oversaved JPEG" aesthetic as opposed to Ruff's photographer-who-just-discovered-Photoshop look. I don't recall whether FITNR made or found his jpegs, which ups their cred even more.

Namenwirth himself has been working with jpeg imagery, in the form of meticulously-executed acrylic on canvas paintings. These take the simple transformation of analog imagery to pixels in a slightly different direction: Paddy Johnson made a good point that "in some sense, he literalizes what might be an imagined physical relationship between the user and a jpg," which I interpret to mean, makes the image a large, tactile presence on the same approximate scale as its original human subject, rather than a small and discardable thing. More tactile than Ruff's work, certainly.