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Opie - Our Greatest Installation Artist
Screen grabs from Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind. In the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, mathematician Russell Crowe sees patterns in newspaper and magazine clippings and sets out to "break the code." Twice (that we see) he fills a room with printed matter and scrawls numbers and diagrams all over everything--above is the second episode, in the tool shed. Of course, the art world is full of people doing this kind of thing, from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg to Thomas Hirschhorn (see below). Director Howard hired some pretty good people to channel this activity as simulated madness. Instead of the Modernist paradigm of "artists taking inspiration from the insane" this is the reverse process, sort of, bringing the visual vocabulary of the art elite (Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone) to a mass audience. Hence, the title of this post.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Plan Moi
From ionarts:
Twice in [Kill Bill: Vol. 2] characters use the phrase "coup de grâce" but pronounce it without the final S sound ("coup de gra"): in French, that would give you the phrase "coup de gras" (S not pronounced), which I guess is the heart attack one would get from eating too much triple-cream St. André (a "blow of fat").I also learned that Tarantino thinks Gibson's Passion "is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I've seen since the talkies—as far as telling a story via pictures." I agree with ionarts' Charles T. Downey that Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was better than 2 (except for that turgid anime), but it's a moot point because they now begin their life as a single film. Will they be watchable in one sitting as a DVD? Or will all the yacking in Vol. 2 grow tedious, as the spectacular Crazy 88 sequence recedes in memory? I went to see Vol. 1 twice (mostly for the densely-layered music) but haven't felt the urge with Vol. 2, much as I enjoyed it.
(From the Washington Post today) In this cropped photograph, Army Pfc. Lynndie England of the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md., holds a leash tied around a naked man’s neck in an Iraqi prison.(From Yahoo News yesterday) President Bush addressed the Arab world on television, but stopped short of saying he was sorry. He said the abuses were "abhorrent" and do not represent "the America that I know."
Midland, Texas, 1950, kitchen of a ranch style home. It's very hot and dusty outside.
Barbara Bush: George Junior, you spilled milk on the table. What do you say?
George Junior: Nothin'! I didn't spill it!
Barbara Bush: Yes, you did, and I'm asking you nicely now, Georgie. What do you say to Mommy when you do something bad?
George: Nothin'!
Barbara Bush: [reaches across the table and raps 4 year old George's head with her knuckles.] Talk to Mommy! What do you say?
George: (crying) Nothin'! Nothin'! Nothin'!
Barbara Bush: [Slaps George on the side of the head.] Little man, you're making me very ashamed! Say you're sorry to Mommy! Now!
[George silently sobs. Barbara begins shaking him violently, slapping his face and shoulders.] Say you're sorry! Say you're ashamed! Do it!
[George Bush Senior walks in.]
George Bush Sr.: Hon, have you seen my golf shoes?
UPDATE: Faced with ongoing, near-catastrophic bad press, the President finally, belatedly apologized today--or says he did. The man still can't say the words "I'm sorry," because of all his Mommy issues. Also, the "apology" is worthless since he still voices support for the creepy Rumsfeld and hasn't fired anyone.
UPDATE 2: An Aussie paper interviewed some folks from Lynddie England's hometown (choice quotes are in the comments). This may not have been the most balanced reporting, but still, one man thinks "we went to Iraq to help the jackasses" and can't understand why they're shooting at us. That should be Exhibit A in the case of how the major media failed to educate the public about our unprovoked invasion of Iraq. More thoughts on Ms. England here.
"Windows Noises" is a short Flash movie by Clown Staples (click here--it loads pretty quickly). It's made using the little .wav (sound file) editor called sndrec32.exe, found in the Windows/system32 folder right next to the viruses and spyware. Windows XP still includes this fun device, although it's usually overridden by RealPlayer or the like. The source material for "Windows Noises" consists solely of four sounds: chimes, ding, chord, and the "Microsoft Sound" (a pre-XP string sample). These have been chopped up, accelerated, reversed, looped, and mixed into a single synchronized file. In the video, an unseen mouse-clicker plays up to six editors like a mini-orchestra. The piece is at once hellishly clever, dumb, resourceful, "deconstructive," and musically very catchy. As explained in the Winnoise FAQ, the Flash film isn't a record of an actual performance but rather a re-enactment of the processes by which the tune was made. All the sound was done with sndrec32.exe but the visuals are animated from cut-and-pasted screen shots of the cursor flitting about the "orchestra," triggering drop down menus and starting and stopping loops. It was actually a relief to learn the piece wasn't done in real time--nobody could be that good. Could they? I still don't believe synch-ing up the parts was as easy as Clown Staples says it was. [via cuechamp, where I also got the screenshot]
Three "work in progress" performances by artists from the 2004 Whitney Biennial debuted at the Kitchen last night. Tracy + The Plastics, a one-woman (virtual) band, consisted of Wynne Greenwood seated at a keyboard, playing and conversing with two prerecorded Wynne Greenwoods on DVD. The three are ostensibly sitting around their "band house" performing snippets of songs and having mock-lame arguments about the direction of their music. While frequently funny, Greenwood's passive aggressive slacker-chick persona wore thin after a while: I know this year's Whitney was about the "quest for the adolescent" but her self-absorbed conversation with the video mirror seemed trivial next to the mid-to-late 90s electro-femme performance work it somewhat resembled (e.g. Kristin Lucas, Monotrona). Alex Bag also inevitably came to mind.
Golan Levin's work was tech-intensive and nerdy (maybe it was the lab coat) but also fun and playful. He and his fellow performer Zachary Lieberman each used a combination of overhead and digital video projectors to make semi-abstract shadow-outlines (basically Rayograms) of their hands and other objects, with the overlap of the respective projector arrays creating dramatic color separation effects. The shadows in turn interacted with custom software to synesthetically translate shapes into sounds. A silhouette of a balled fist opening into a two-finger V caused a sequence of chiming musical notes to alter in mid-cascade; three fingers changed the sequence again, and so on. Clunky cut paper objects dropped onto the projector beds had their own unique audio signatures. Manning their opaque projectors like gamers at battle stations, the performers held a back & forth dialogue-cum-duel of changing silhouettes, which was exquisitely timed and quite charming.
Framing the other two performers was Cory Arcangel's "Pizza Party"--a demonstration of how to hack into the Dom1no's website and order pizza using only command line instructions. These green-on-black text-only options, which Arcangel accessed with a Perl script, lurk below Dom1no's (and every other business's) GUI, or graphic user interface, and consist of filling in "y" or "n" next to mushrooms, anchovies, thin crust, etc. and specifying a delivery address. As he walked the audience through the process on a large screen, Arcangel commented drily (but enthusiastically) on the essential uselessness of online commerce, and even greater uselessness of hacking into it, when a simple local phone call would suffice. And although he warned that failure was a possibility in his performance, his confident demeanor when he came back after the other acts told us that our pizzas had arrived.
UPDATE: "Pizza Party, a free text based software package for ordering pizza, or for throwing pizza parties" is available online here.
UPDATE 2: Somebody posted an article about security vulnerabilities in "Pizza Party," the software. No one seems to know if it was satire or not.
Why Do They Hate Us?
Apparently Fox News and the other major media aren't giving the US torture of Iraqi prisoners as much play as it's getting abroad, but please read Seymour Hersh's report in the New Yorker and look at the screen captures from 60 Minutes at the Memory Hole. The clowning of the "guards" around the naked, humiliated prisoners is truly sickening. The government is of course trying to spin this as a "few isolated instances" but the torture was widespread and systemic, according to the military's own reports. Also, our old friends the "contractors" (mercenaries) are once again involved--apparently they dreamed up the "interrogation methods" of sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners. The 60 Minutes photos were pixelated so you couldn't clearly see that the men are being made to masturbate in some of them, while the "guards" jeered. Such activity is much more taboo in the Muslim world than here, and you better you believe this is being discussed all over the globe right now. "Why do they hate us?", you asked after 9/11--look at the pictures. And it wasn't just forced nakedness and "mock orgies." According to a government report cited by Hersh, activities also included:
[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.And these weren't just hardened criminals, but people picked up at random stops and torn from their families. So who's accountable? Hersh asks. How about Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, the whole decadent, power-mad crew. "The fish rots from the head," as they say.