Day: June 22, 2008

If you hate Matthew Barney--and who doesn't?--you might enjoy these stills from Creamistress 6: The Centered Polenta. The artist is Carolyn Sortor.

Exculpatory compliment to Barney: the biotech surrealism of some of his sculptures and images resonates even though the films are too slow and wooden and as the Village Voice noted, editing is not their strong suit. In any case, the vids are effectively self-parodying in their arty pomposity so I hadn't considered that someone could do a brutal takeoff on them 'til seeing Sortor's video stills. (Haven't seen the vid but I almost feel the stills are enough since Barneys are just a series of stills anyway.)

Standing in for Barney is a slightly overweight middle aged man in a tutu with orange hair and ice cream cone horns--yes! At the climax he bends over and some women dominatrixes in garb recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey flight attendants' eat a birthday cake off his backside. Then a gratuitous shot of a vaginal cave entrance in the western US with Orange Hair in his civilian, tourist duds, then some psychedelic end titles. The sleek look of Barneys becomes laughably dated mis-en-scene. It's the perverse future not of a genetically altered, gender-confused mythic dystopia but the '70s high kitsch of Woody Allen's Sleeper. This is "abject Barney" done right.

The question of whether someone is a first or second generation "net artist" is causing some anxiety over at Rhizome.org, the New Museum's net internet art affiliate. Matthew Williamson suggested that a quiz might be helpful, so here it is:

Quiz:
1. Do you know who Marcel Duchamp is?*
2. Do you know who Roland Barthes is?
3. Do either of them have any bearing on art practice?
4. Does an artist who uses a computer have to be able to "program" it?
5. Is a blog a multiple choice format?
6. Does a blog limit artistic expression?
7. Is "finding" enough or must one also "make?"
8. Which is more interesting, the network or the content on the network?
9. Is a scan of a photo of a painting on a blog "net art"?
10. Which is better, blog pages that change every day or static, fixed pages?
11. Which is better, pages where new content is at the top or pages where you have to hunt for the content?
12. Is speed a virtue on the Internet or is slowness a valid experience?
13. Broken links: cool or uncool?
14. Which is the best way to communicate--email ListServs or blog comments?
15. Is the design of a page more important or the content on the page?
16. Are default templates unartistic?
17. Are computers good and are they helping us to be a better species?
18. Should every artwork question its own means of implementation?
19. Is an artwork an individual statement in space and time or could it be cumulative?
20. When a group of artists agree on a set of conventions is that significant or insignificant?

*Sorry, there are no answers to the quiz. The purpose is to help us formulate them. The first two questions are especially snotty but it seemed to me that much blog discussion at Rhizome was either oblivious to these two thinkers (who are fairly central to the the gallery art world's "conceptual" practice) or dismissive of them. Duchamp, mother of the readymade or "found object" is an obvious touchstone; Barthes is mentioned for his analysis of wrestling and other lowbrow forms.)

Update: A number of people answered the questions, starting here.