View current page
...more recent posts
If you write a so-called realistic novel in America--whether it's about the mores of upper-middle-class Connecticut WASPs or growing up in the 'hood in Detroit--your book will be marketed as "fiction" or "literature" and it will never have to "transcend genre." If your aim is satirical allegory, depicting present reality through the distorting lens of the fantastic, you will likely be consigned to the "horror" or "science fiction" fields, literary ghettos that are hard to escape. Gradually the writings of authors such as Philip Dick and J. G. Ballard, which endured years of "peeled eyeball" covers and incomprehension by would-be escapists and lit profs alike, are coming to be recognized as some of the most important writing of the last century. Their books aren't just about "people," in the old 18th Century novel sense, but how a technologically-transformed environment is changing people. Not every writer is lucky enough to get out of the pulp graveyard, however. Doris Piserchia's writing of the '70s and early '80s took a hard look at life in America during that period, just as Dick's did in the '50s and '60s, and reflected it back disguised as "harmless fantasy." Some of her books were more escapist than others--at least four of them seem squarely aimed at brainy teenage girls--but that was a necessity of working in the marketplace, and even those books are full of weird, subversive elements.
As someone who wants to see Piserchia's work survive and be discussed seriously, then, it's with some trepidation that I present the latest additions the The Doris Piserchia Website: the book cover gallery for 1973-77 and the book cover gallery for 1978-83. Here's a slice of marketing from the Great American kitsch factory guaranteed to send Connecticut WASP-fanciers screaming for the exits. But despite their potentially marginalizing influence, there's a lot to be said for these dumb covers--particularly the ones painted by H. R. Van Dongen, whose old school/modern sensibility is strangely matched to Piserchia's. The other (mostly-unknown) artists who labored to find some visual equivalent to her oddball visions should be saluted, too, as torrid and dated as their efforts often are. The only truly bad covers are the later ones by Kelly Freas, which commit the unforgivable crime of making Piserchia look cornball.
This blurb appears in the November 19, 2001 issue of New York magazine:
For his latest series, "Domestic Landscapes," German photographer Thomas Wrede placed a newspaper ad to find German houses wallpapered with those kitschy '60s and '70s-style photomurals of mountain lakes, forests, and beach scenes that make the Today show's autumn vistas look downright gray. Those who never availed themselves of the trend may want to join the current revival after seeing Wrede's large, colorful photographs of living rooms, dens, home offices, and bathrooms (pictured, Toilet by the Lake, 2000-2001). At Cristinerose Gallery, 529 West 20th Street; through December 22.
Now here's the press release for the show, which was ghostwritten by yours truly. It's interesting how the New York writer put a "hip" spin on it:
In "Domestic Landscapes," German artist Thomas Wrede combines still-life and landscape photography in detailed views of home interiors adorned with panoramic, photographic wallpaper. Taking out an advertisement in a German newspaper, the artist found dozens of houses decorated with these full-color murals, most of them dating back to the '60s and '70s. The super-enlarged photos depict mountain lakes, beach scenes, and cityscapes (including a New York skyline with the World Trade Center), that bring an illusion of spaciousness and "elsewhere" into a closed home environment--a trend that is currently enjoying a resurgence.
Setting up his photo equipment inside the houses, Wrede captured finely-wrought glimpses of domestic settings, all with huge, calendar-art vistas looming behind them. Real furnishings such as throw pillows, knickknack shelves, and bathroom fixtures merge with the artificial backgrounds into a kind of seamless, hybrid space. Shot in sumptuous, saturated color, the photos wryly document lifestyles where homeowners "have it all"--enjoying the outdoors without abandoning creature comforts. They are poignant and personal images of utopia.
Below is an image from the Killer List of Video Games website, which maintains a comprehensive database of arcade games. I was surprised to learn that this particular game, "Computer Space," was the first, preceding Pong by a year (CS was 1971, Pong was '72). The biomorphic Fiberglas body got me thinking about sculptures from the late '60s/early '70s that had a similar look or feel, which led me to put together a one-page picture story on connections between video games and contemporary sculpture. I've paired "Computer Space" with an untitled work from 1969 by Canadian sculptor Walter Redinger, and then contrasted another game from the KLOV website, the sublimely-named Xevious (xenophobic and devious?), with an image of Rita McBride's recent sculptures based on arcade game designs. The discussion of the games is interwoven with a critique of the artworks.
Below, left:
Michael Jackson Invincible CD cover, 2001
Below, right:
Tom Moody, La Femme Nikita (detail)
MSPaintbrush drawing, 1999
My article "Palo Alto Dreamin': Towards a New Digital Expression(ism)" appears in this month's Art Papers magazine--the Nov/Dec 2001 issue, celebrating the Atlanta-based art journal's 25th anniversary. To visit the AP website (which doesn't include the text of the article), click here; for the full text of the article (with additional images), click here. Three of the artists discussed favorably in the essay--Matt Chansky, Claire Corey, and Marsha Cottrell--have been previously featured on this weblog: to view a slightly expanded slide show of their work, click here. With respect to the three artists discussed not-so-favorably, it should be mentioned that Jeremy Blake has a show up right now at Feigen Contemporary in Manhattan. Is the work an improvement? In some ways. The video-abstractions aren't as yoked to the Mondrian/Ellsworth Kelly grid--now they're more organic, resolving into occasionally striking, mandala-like images. Yet while freely riffing on the comparatively looser, bouncier oeuvres of Morris Louis and Paul Feeley, they still have that cut-and-dried, predictable feel of a software demo, and the ominous, David Lynchian pink noise is getting very tiresome. Some videotaped photographic images spliced into the abstractions (a burning castle, a girl spinning in a room full of snowflakes or feathers) make the work a bit more eclectic and varied, but also break the psycho-hypnotic mood.
For an earlier-published discussion of Blake, and some of the issues in the "Palo Alto" essay, please see my May 2001 review of the "Compression" exhibit at Feigen.
Artist Claire Jervert derives her work entirely from television. She freezes images on the small screen, photographs them, and then converts the photos into iconic, contemplative objects. Her pictures appear in a variety of formats: laminated on honeycomb aluminum panels, digitally printed on large canvases, arranged on the wall as grids of polaroids. On her website, she presents four series: UFOs (significant blobs and smears from sci-fi films and "documentary" sources--see my essay from 1999), skies (tracking the popular degradation of the romantic sublime), game show audiences (people waving and gesturing in Pavlovian fervor), and something new--"fossils" of the homes of Cleavers, Jeffersons, Bradys, and other TV families (using the "stone effect" in a digital imaging program--this is pretty obvious, but it works).
This weblog is mainly concerned with visual art, but the events of 9/11 have necessitated a certain amount of political commentary. The following is of the latter variety. For recent commentary on art, please see the "Weblog Archive" link above.
From a 10/25/01 New York Times article: "Saudi authorities assisted the United States in confirming the identities of the hijackers, helping American investigators reach the conclusion that 15 of the 19 were Saudis. American investigators also say some recruiting, financing and planning for the attacks occurred on Saudi soil."
It's been blindingly obvious since 9/11 that our attackers are dissident elements within a country that is supposedly our "ally." What we should have been doing since 9/11 is vigorously debating how relations with Saudi Arabia, whose citizens killed 3000-plus of our citizens, should be changed. Do we demand more intelligence-sharing from Saudi officialdom, and reforms of their autocratic government? Do we withdraw our military support, leaving the 10,000 playboy princes to be beheaded by the dissidents, and then cut a deal with the new Islamist regime? (Don't think they wouldn't be corruptible.) Do we just go ahead and invade Saudi Arabia--or "annex" it, as we've done with many territories in the past (Mexico, Phillipines, Hawaii)--making "their" copious oil "ours," and be prepared for a long, ongoing guerrilla war with the dissidents, at home and abroad? Do we rehabilitate Saddam Hussein as our ally, as he was during the Iran-Iraq war, and then bomb the Saudi oil fields, in effect shutting in their oil? Or (ha ha) do we discuss ways to become less dependent on Mideast oil, through conservation, greater cultivation of Western hemisphere resources, etc?
What we've been doing, instead of debating these options, is treating Saudi Arabia like the Great Taboo Subject. Instead of confronting our real problem, we're bombing and starving one of the weakest countries on the planet, to satisfy a desire for instant revenge. Our war against Afghanistan, commenced with only four weeks' planning and against a country not one of whose citizens was alleged to have been a hijacker, is just plain stupid, and has all the signs of a Vietnam-style quagmire. I know, bin Laden and his "terrorist training camps" are there, but ordinary Afghans are too poor and hungry to hurt us. "Ordinary Saudis," however, are rich, educated, motivated, and at least 15 have hurt us. Why aren't we focusing our anger where it belongs?
Someone I know received a cyber-postcard from a friend in Europe, captioned "New York 2006." (To view, click here.) The first thing you notice in this gag rendition of the Manhattan skyline is the big mosque in the center, roughly where the WTC towers were. Next you notice that there lots of minarets mingled with Western skyscrapers. The last you notice is the boat basin in the foreground--is this even New York? Obviously some Europeans are enjoying a little Photoshop humor at our expense, spinning a fantasy that is either vengeful or utopian, depending on how you look at it. The revenge fantasy is obvious: that we not only "lost the war" on terrorism, but surrendered to bin Laden, and our new Islamic masters have been gradually imposing their architecture on us. The utopian fantasy is that we saw the error of our ways, and adopted the architecture of the people we formerly exploited. (Yeah, right.)
Yet for either version to work, an "old world order" of city planning must still be in place. The theoretician Paul Virilio sees something very different looming on the horizon: "...I will underline that terrorism has just inaugurated an anti-cities strategy. This means that all towers are today threatened. Instead of being a place of dominion, as the dungeons of the past, the tower has become a place of weakness: vertically, it is henceforth the equivalent of the outer wall which the artillery blew up...." (Thanks to Jim's log for the quote.) The Japanese, who know something about collapsing cities, have been thinking along these lines for years, at least in their fantasy lives. In the 1995 anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, "Tokyo 3" has skyscrapers that sink into the ground whenever the city is threatened from the air (which is about every other episode). Not only do they sink, they continue downward in rectangular silos and emerge upside down on the roof of a "geofront," which is an enormous cavern with another city on its floor. Below is a view inside the geofront, after the buildings have been lowered:
In this scenario, Virilio's dungeon once again becomes a place of dominion, and the city doesn't have to give up its beloved skyscrapers!