Holland Cotter on Peter Saul (Times sign-in prob. required). One of Cotter's theses is that Saul is the Real Deal while Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray got careers (to put it more bluntly than Cotter does). Check out the slide show: scrumptiously painted early work gives way to psychedelic boils and sores. Compare CO Itchee Bitchee, 1964, with Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006, for examples of success and failure of politically-themed art.
August 2008
"Dodecaphonish"
"Dodecaphonish" [mp3 removed]
The completed version of something posted earlier. (Minor tweaks may still be done.) A work for oboe, bass clarinet, xylophone and laptop.
Update: Added and subtracted some notes, and removed the "room reverb," which was annoying me.
More on Net Concrète
Comment from TH re the net concrète post:
"that net concrete thing just gets at that some people arent surfing
some of the time, they're skating... on net concrete"
Good point. The enemies of the surf clubs seized on that word "surf," with its connotations of couch potatoes holding a TV remote, to attack the work on the group websites as passive and mindless.
We all know that skating, on the other hand, carved into and "drew" the urban landscape, illuminating America's largely invisible architecture of schoolyards, plazas, and backyard swimming pools as a "massive cement playground of unlimited potential," as Craig Stecyk III wrote in the Dogtown articles. The group blogs similarly intervene into the largely unapprehended Net in an active, quasi-architectural way. Not through dismantling the code but through cogent choices and alterations of subject matter from the great "out there."
Modern Art
Guthrie Lonergan has been bargain hunting in the Google 3D Warehouse and "kept noticing that a lot of 3d-modellers would title their abstract models 'modern art'.. a lot of this is charmingly half-assed : )"
For the essence of modernity click here.
Related: Bertrand Lavier's "Walt Disney Productions."
