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tom moody


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A non-clinical definition of paranoia: you go right past the simplest explanation and look for one that's the most dangerous. In the case of John Woo's film Paycheck, the simple reason why 89 out of 115 critics hated it could be that it's bad. But let's explore the paranoid one. (Spoilers, but this is the type of movie where they don't matter, right?) Paycheck has a point, and the point is this: Pre-emptive war leads to more war, the nasty kinds where A-bombs explode in US cities. This goes squarely against the party line espoused by our chowderhead-in-chief and his gang. And since the majority of the 89 naysaying critics are media whores, they protect and promote the conventional wisdom, aka the party line (such as "everything changed after 9/11/01"). So they want to make sure you don't see Woo's film, that it dies ignobly at the box office, and only a handful rent it on DVD. Whatever their motives, they're wrong: the movie is much tighter than the chase-padded Face/Off (and the pretentious, incoherent Minority Report). Affleck and Thurman are good, the movie keeps you constantly thinking and guessing. And it's fun. Another reason for the critical slam, I think, is that mainstream critics hate "sci fi," as they call it. Until it succeeds at the box office: then they start analyzing it for political portents. I say, both paranoically and simplistically, see the movie, embrace its wisdom, stop Bush.

Afterthought: the film also shows a couple of "good feds" hiding evidence to prevent the Guantanamo-like incarceration of a man they know is innocent. Deep-six that movie!

- tom moody 1-16-2004 6:55 pm [link] [8 comments]



My recent post on Artforum's bestowing of "new artist" status twice to the same person (in 1992 and again 12 years later) led to some unfortunate bashing of the magazine out in bloggerland. One writer told me in an email that he hadn't read anything good in AF since its September 2002 piece on Robert Ryman. This challenged me to look through a stack of 'forums since that date and find good, or at least provocative, articles. What follows is the first in an on-again off-again series discussing what I found. The posts won't always be "positive" (the one below isn't) but the idea is to have a discussion as opposed to just popping off.

January 2003 issue. (Yes, I know this was a year ago.) Philip Nobel's cover story on a Pierre Huyghe-curated exhibition gives the reader much to react to, even though the piece isn't critical enough by half. Huyghe and collaborator Phillipe Parreno purchased the rights to the Japanimation character Annlee (below, left) from "Kworks, a Japanese clearinghouse" for such things, and then a group of artist friends riffed on this piece of readily-available intellectual property. Nobel accurately describes the little girl Annlee as "sad," but then takes a critical kamikaze dive and declares her a metaphor for the Japanese themselves, citing Takashi Murakami's morose thesis: "Behind the flashy titillation of anime lies the shadow of Japan's defeat in the Pacific war. The world of anime is the world of impotence." Right, as we see in the enterprising Japanese space program in Wings of Honneamise, the bickering-but-always-successful robot-pilot cops in Patlabor, the ebullient gender comedy in Ranma 1/2... Anime isn't just Grave of the Fireflies but tell that to an American critic looking for a hook. (For the record, Huyghe thinks Nobel's interpretation of the project overromanticizes it. "We bought a virgin," Huyghe says, sounding like one of those cold, cold Euro-operators in Olivier Assayas' Demonlover.)

According to Nobel, Huyghe "slightly redrew" the character (see two computer images above right), which is true if "slightly redrawing" means removing her pupils, tilting her eyes the opposite way, giving her a perm, stripping off her clothes, and turning her into a robot ET. Huyghe then asked 14 artists to interpret this "open source Annlee" for a group show that traveled to major museums. Once he created the "freeware" prototype, the artists were stuck drawing her that way, that is, like his digital puppet and not the Kworks original (Nobel refers to the show's "many identical video avatars"). So what's the purpose of buying the brand, bringing the "empty sign" to life through multiple interpretations, and then transferring the copyright back to the character, as Huyghe supposedly did, if you're going to make the brand unrecognizable before the interpretation process even starts? The work has a superficial frisson of commodity art but fails as a meme-propagating business model, parodistic or otherwise. It's the sort of high-concept exercise that gives museum curators goosebumps, but based on the reproductions and Nobel's description I'd say it flopped. And now Huyghe "owns" the idea in the copyright office of artist opinion so no one else can ever do it again, not that they should.

This abstract "Annlee" wallpaper by M/M Paris, sorry for the grainy scan, is great, though:



- tom moody 1-15-2004 7:35 pm [link] [4 comments]