Day: October 13, 2011

the two kinds of artists

Comments Off on the two kinds of artists

Paddy Johnson quotes Ryder Ripps:

“Art lives within society, and society by definition is social,” he says. “So if you’re not making an impact on many people, you’re not going to be a known artist. There’s the folk model, the Henry Dargers of the world who get discovered after the fact, but to me that’s really bleak and not glamorous at all.”

If the choice is between (a) schmoozer, attention junkie, and starter-of-a-million-projects and (b) Henry Darger, I'll take "(b)," minus the sexual kinks and closet serial killer accusations, if possible. Darger created a world to escape into because he could barely function in "(a)" mode--that's not depressing, it's kind of beautiful.

As for Ripps' work, his GIFs are great and co-creating a website (dump.fm) where they could be part of a common pictorial language is enough to earn him canonical status, whatever the value of all the later bonding and site creation might be. Even outsiders could "shut up and dump."

Ms. Thing

Comments Off on Ms. Thing

A: Stopped reading Andrew O'Hehir's Salon review of the The Thing prequel at the words "tough female protagonist."
B: Why, are you a sexist?
A: Per a theory floated in Anne Billson's thoughtful BFI paperback on John Carpenter's Thing, the tough female protagonist is...the Thing. All the rest of the cast, every hairy one of them, is male, and the movie is about 12 men being ripped open, torn in half, chomped and suffocated by a shape-shifting Will to Chaos that would make Luce Irigaray proud--a "true femme fatale," in Billson's phrase. The mutual suspicion and macho Lack of Community among this crew is ultimately as devastating as the monster. Billson notes that after 1982 no Hollywood movie would be cast entirely with men, and The Thing's political incorrectness is ultimately a strength. (Reservoir Dogs is a later exception but it is an "indie" and its director famously admires Carpenter's Thing.)
B: Huh, well, not everyone likes Irigaray.
A: And besides, the movie about the tough female protagonist going up against the Iragarayan Will to Chaos has already been made, once by Ridley Scott and once by the hack James Cameron. We don't need to see those again.
B: Huh.