Search Results for: surf club

Paddy Johnson has posted her thoughts on the Boris Groys lecture at SVA, linking some of his rhetoric to the surf clubs and other artists working on the internet. Agree his ideas give those activities some theoretical heft (this blog is all over the "weak repetitive gesture" and "low visibility" as strategems, avant garde or otherwise) but it may require some creative misinterpretation since he doesn't seem to actually read blogs.

Last August Johnson tweeted a Frieze article quoting Groys ("Reflecting on the profusion of the blogs and the mysteries of the readership, Groys mused, 'I am convinced they are being written for God,' later clarifying, 'who, of course, is dead.'") which I made fun of ("meaning no one is reading me"). In his lecture he noted the author of personal cat site A never commented on personal cat site B but seemed OK with that; at least they weren't watching TV.

SVA's press release claimed he would be talking about "artistic rights [beginning] to manifest themselves as general human rights" which seemed ridiculous but that was not part of his talk. Elsewhere he differentiates between artists using the "weak" sign subversively and political agitprop-ists (or terrorists) pursuing the "strong" sign but overall his critique seems to be that politics have left art, which is the opposite of what SVA was saying he would say.

Frieze called him an “imp of the perverse” dispensing “nihilist irony” so his actual beliefs may not be that easy to pin down. Will read his recent book Art Power and report back.

I will be playing some of my music live (through a PA at any rate) on Wednesday, April 15 (tax day), with videos of animated GIFs.

It's at 9:00 pm, at Goodbye Blue Monday, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY.

I'm excited to be on the bill with the other musicians. Jon Williams and Poisson D'Avril (Christopher Weingarten) will also be playing in the electronic part of the evening. Our set is followed by an acoustic set by Kaylyn Marie.

The myspace page for Goodbye Blue Monday is here, with streaming video and such, but the calendar on the front page isn't loading correctly and appears to have someone else playing on the 15th. If you click through (and log in to MySpace) you see the correct calendar here.

The online flyer by Jon Williams is here (large file but great--let it load!).

The info is:

Poisson D'Avril
ex-Parts and Labor, local rock writer nuisance, @1000TimesYes

Tom Moody (♬)
art, music, Nasty Nets surf club member

Jon Williams
crazy visuals (Excepter, etc.)

Goodbye Blue Monday!
Tax Day, 15 April 2009, 9pm; $FREE
1087 Broadway (2 blocks from the Kosciusko St. stop on the J train)
Brooklyn, NY 11221
(718) 453-6343

I hope to see you Wednesday!

Update: gear pics

...on WNYU.

It's great to hear "surf club" art explained so well, although that term is not used in the interview.
Topics include: use of large photos ("we are very indebted to whatever community out there exists that seems to post very high resolution photos of family vacations and personal moments"), "that guy" ("the guy tasked with getting a company online and he has some strange idea that this is what the company needs but really just gets it wrong") and an offline project called "the Bar," a metal bar you can add or clip things onto, that is "vastly functional."

Double Happiness explains its three modes of art production as: generative (e.g., an original online painting), digestive (modified video or image), and regurgitative (little or no modification, other than being moved from the web to their site).

This post on William Eggleston a few years ago discussed the difference between two movements, "art photography" and "artists with cameras":

[Jim] Lewis' phrase "new art photographers" glosses over a not-so-old schism in the world of Museum-collected photography, between "art photography" and what might roughly be called "artists with cameras," a distinction outlined in Abigail Solomon-Godeau's famous essay "Photography after Art Photography." Almost exclusively shot in black and white and practiced by the likes of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander, art photography was firmly ensconced in the museum in the '60s and '70s under the stewardship of MOMA curator John Szarkowski; it emphasized darkroom practice and objective standards of quality in photos.

The "conceptual photography" of [Richard] Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and others, however, emerged from the world of painting, sculpture, and video. These artists used photos to document a performance, advance a theory, or critique the mass media, and didn't much give a damn about photographic values (including the old prohibition on color). In addition to this generation change in America, developments in European contemporary art gradually came to light in the late '70s: Gilbert & George, for example, used vivid colors in their photopastiches at least as early as 1975, and the conceptualist Jan Dibbets had no qualms about color in his images of tilted landscapes and car hoods. And finally, as Lewis mentions, color printing technology was vastly improving during this period.

Thus, while Szarkowski may have taken a big leap vis a vis older art photographers by giving Eggleston a one-person museum exhibit in '76, other trends were fast making that radicality a non-issue. The Europeans and young Americans weren’t invited into the tea circle of art photography because William Eggleston opened the door: instead, they found their own critical advocates, and after a few years of publicity and sales, they simply took over the show--and color came along with them.

The same types of distinctions could be made between "new media" artists and what could be called "artists with computers." The latter care about their laptops as much as Cindy Sherman cared about her camera. Necessary mechanical skills can be learned but the habits accompanying those skills need to be unlearned. Also, artists may not always and at all times be "with computers"--it's a tool to be picked up and put down as needed.

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. New media artists tend to germinate in design or media arts programs whereas artists with computers incline to studio arts backgrounds or autodidacticism. Rhizome.org has traditionally been a bastion of new media whereas Paddy Johnson's blog (particularly last summer's IMG MGMT series) has provided a platform for artists with computers. (She may not appreciate being lumped into this diatribe.) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ("new media objects exist as data," etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

The so-called surf club artists come from both schools. Nevertheless, resistance to the clubs (comparing them to George Bush and closed source programming) and sarcasm of certain reactionaries seen in the Rhizome chat boards in June of 2008 could be construed as evidence of the split. New media artists scoff at the art world's notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

[This may seem like a strange time to pigeonhole Rhizome since they are in the middle of a fundraiser (this blog just kicked in for a seedling membership). The staff can't be held accountable for the obscurantists in the chatrooms; there is some sentiment within the organization for "artists with computers" so giving is recommended, enabling the institution to thrive so it can be colonized, ha ha.]

1996 essay is philistine but also largely correct. These poor kids, painters, getting out of Columbia and going straight to Deitch Projects are the proof. That is painting on life support.

"Our admiration for painting results from a long process of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is basically a conventional relationship" (Gombrowitz to Dubuffet). The only question is: How can such a machine continue to operate in the midst of critical disillusion and commercial frenzy? And if it does, how long will this conjuring act last? One hundred, two hundred years? Will art have the right to a second, interminable existence, like the secret services that, as we know, haven't had any secrets to steal or exchange for some time but who still continue to flourish in the utter superstition of their usefulness, perpetuating their own myth[?]

In the web context, compare LM's class notes to Marisa Olson's essay and other attempts to "professionalize" web surfing as art. LM's approach is healthier and more inclusive and fun. She makes no bones about being a participant in what she is writing about, whereas Olson converses casually in the surf clubs but then enters scholarly mode to write the definitive essay canonizing artists she prefers. In the latter role she is like the secret services in Baudrillard's conspiracy, rehashing old tropes of legitimation of art.