August 2010

"Love Reconstituted" and background

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Made/posted this tune a couple of years ago:

"Love Reconstituted" [mp3 removed]

It's kind of an "atmospheric techno" bit with analog synth burbles and a "rave hit" ending consisting of some early '90s house piano stabs. Those were reconstructed more or less note by note from this nutty remix* somebody did of this pop tune.**

As you can hear, the remix* consists of "vocal science" made from clips of the diva's voice over minimal banging piano chords. I've always really liked the energy and simplicity of it. And thanks to the miracle of YouTube (the poor man's iTunes), I recently found the "original" hit that mix was taken from, Bizarre Inc.'s "Love in Motion."** It's pretty lightweight (unlike moi) but not unenjoyable.

*"Love in Motion (Unknown Mix)" [mp3 removed] (sound quality is dicey because it was cassette-taped from a radio mix show in '92)

**"Love in Motion" [dead YT link]

MySpace Intro Playlist - an old mail art idea

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Guthrie Lonergan's artwork MySpace Intro Playlist (briefly summarized here) isn't original by any means but was done in the early '60s as mail art.

Carla Sugarman intercepted a postal sack with letters to an advice column and republished them in "Funny Mail," a widely read general circulation magazine of the day. She didn't merely retype the letters; she photographed them for reproduction as four-color offset images, with the addresses of the senders below the letters. The letters' authors meant them to be public (published correspondence in a newspaper) but not as "funny mail."

Sugarman mimeographed the "Funny Mail" article and mailed it to 300 people on her mail art mailing list. They mailed it to 300 other mail artists. Eventually the entire project was documented by John Held, Jr. and became a canonical mail art work.

The piece gained notoriety after several senders of the original letters sued Sugarman, eventually settling for a large undisclosed sum. "Funny Mail" was also joined as a defendant in the case and ceased publication shortly afterward.

satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...

MySpace Intros and Art History

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A couple of people who police the Rhizome.org comment threads for "correct thinking" love to construct historic timelines for every current development. We can learn from the precedents and mistakes of art history, we are told, therefore these lineages enhance our understanding of work.
But honestly, what kind of precedent (net art or non-net art) exists for this:

pre-institutional recognition
Artist "collects" his favorite MySpace intros (videos people made in the mid-'00s welcoming people to their page), with an eye to: the amateurish, the banal, the pathetic, the cultural "other."
Artist posts the collection to YouTube as a playlist, so that the videos are viewed by a different audience than the original, intended audience (YouTube, where people go to watch music videos and funny slice-of-life videos, and this all happened before the Google acquisition when it was a relatively new video hosting service).

institutionalizing the collection
The slender act of collecting and shifting the context strikes some people as "art-like," so the YouTube playlist is written about and linked to by institutions as "art."
A video "version" of the work is created for museums without any links to MySpace or YouTube.

An artist who wrote about the work pre-institutional phase and the curator who presented it institutionally do not agree on the scope, nature or parameters of the work. A disinterested critic offered yet a third interpretation.
So where exactly are art historical precedents to be applied? What was even remotely like MySpace and YouTube before MySpace and YouTube?

Next: What MySpace Intro Playlist would look like if it were mail art. (Hint: strained comparison)