tom moody

tom moody's weblog
(2001 - 2007)

tommoody.us (2004 - )

2001-2007 archive

main site

faq

digital media tree (or "home" below)


RSS / validator



BLOG in gallery / AFC / artCal / furtherfield on BLOG

room sized animated GIFs / pics

geeks in the gallery / 2 / 3

fuzzy logic

and/or gallery / pics / 2

rhizome interview / illustrated

ny arts interview / illustrated

visit my cubicle

blogging & the arts panel

my dorkbot talk / notes

infinite fill show


music

video




Links:

coalition casualties

civilian casualties

iraq today / older

mccain defends bush's iraq strategy

eyebeam reBlog

hullabaloo

tyndall report

aron namenwirth

bloggy / artCal

james wagner

what really happened

stinkoman

antiwar.com

cory arcangel / at del.icio.us

juan cole

a a attanasio

rhizome.org

three rivers online

unknown news

eschaton

prereview

edward b. rackley

travelers diagram at del.icio.us

atomic cinema

lovid

cpb::softinfo :: blog

vertexList

paper rad / info

nastynets now

the memory hole

de palma a la mod

aaron in japan

NEWSgrist

chris ashley

comiclopedia

discogs

counterpunch

9/11 timeline

tedg on film

art is for the people

x-eleven

jim woodring

stephen hendee

steve gilliard

mellon writes again

eyekhan

adrien75 / 757

disco-nnect

WFMU's Beware of the Blog

travis hallenbeck

paul slocum

guthrie lonergan / at del.icio.us

tom moody


View current page
...more recent posts



In a comment to a previous post Brian writes:
Interesting you would say, "That show was...critically successful...but the work isn't collector friendly because it's huge, aggressive and made of photocopy paper (precisely the things that make it appealing to critics). I've put a lot of thought and effort into resolving this contradiction." This sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog, no? One of the things I've enjoyed about your work was that it always appears to be undeniably your work, operating in your sphere unaffected by the rumblings from without. Please tell me this is still the case.
My reply: Yeah, I know it sounds like I'm selling out but the institutional frame (as in context) is important. Those big paper pieces appeared in a gallery and were seen because someone thought they could sell them. That's how the system works here in the USA. That validation process gives them an edge, which has always been in my work--a "good bad" painting doesn't really work its magic till you put it in the white cube. The physical framing of my current pieces does something similar: it says somebody thought enough of this computer-, home printer-made thing to plunk down the dough for museum-quality presentation of it. Now it looks like it's in the stream of commerce--something that could travel around to art fairs and be seen and discussed like the other stuff that travels around to art fairs and gets seen and discussed. I think it's better to acknowledge and confront the medium of exchange than adopt the pose of the heroic outsider. The work is just as subversive, trust me.

It's also not really selling out because of the second-tier status of paper. A painter friend said, "You've got to figure out a way to get this imagery printed on canvas, man. Then you could sell them!"

- tom moody 10-29-2004 12:07 am [link] [add a comment]



Claire Corey and I will be speaking at dorkbot-nyc ("people doing strange things with electricity") on Wednesday, November 3. Matt Hall and John Watkinson are also on the program. It's the day after election day and the mood is either going to be upbeat, or...well, you know. I'll be posting notes as the event approaches, but I like this phrasing of Claire's, describing her practice as a digital painter: "This hybrid medium questions both what is expected from works made with a computer as well as what constitutes painting." I've been thinking something along those lines in connection Jason Salavon's "100,000 Abstract Paintings," AKA Golem, where he wrote a software program that encoded parameters (size of brushstroke, color, etc) but also painterly qualities derived from studying the moves of Diebenkorn, Richter, and others. There is a dual critique there. What do we expect the computer to be able to do for us? Assemble cars? Play chess? Paint? Which tasks are necessarily "automatable" and which shouldn't be delegated? But also, what are attributes constituting "good painting" these days? If they're so quantifiable a machine can recreate them, are they really "good"? The critique is more obvious and pointed if you're talking about actually writing a program that does this (and I've seen Salavon's paintings and they're actually pretty "good") but it also applies to those of us just using the machine to make paintings: Claire, me, Millree Hughes... A curated show setting out these issues would be enormously helpful.

- tom moody 10-28-2004 9:26 pm [link] [2 comments]