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Whoops, still tinkering with a post about new "appropriation art" in the galleries. If you got notified by email, sorry, I should have the text back up soon. [UPDATE: Here it is, severely pared down.] In the meantime, here's a nice image by SquareWave:
Follow-up to an earlier post about Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music: Did I forget to mention the guy is funny? Below are some examples of his Lester Bangsian blurbs explaining different genres*:
Acid Breaks! This and Chemical Breaks (and Big Beat, I guess) are the most favorite genres of action movie trailers, sports highlight reels, corporate powerpoint presentations, and spastic TV ads featuring people doing something extreme like driving really fast while birdwatching. I can't listen to this anymore without getting silly images in my head of jumping in the air, pausing while the camera pans around me, and then resuming kicking some guy in the head. This is part of the "electronica" wave of mainstream acceptance in the late '90s.*...which had to be retyped--note to all using Flash or the like: those formats are good for some things, but no one will ever quote you or find your words through a search engine on the Web if you hide them in the stinky folds of a proprietary format. Simple html pages are the way to go.2 Step Garage. God, this stuff is so fucking boring! Retaining the idiotic basslines of Speed Garage, the hiccuping staccato beats of that derivative Top 40 schlock that dares call itself RnB, and even worse: the endless crooning by "guest" popstars (hence all the "featuring" accolades in playlists), divas, and whiny narcissists who like to think of themselves as just too damn cool to be listened to by you. The only good thing about 2-Step is, unlike Speed Garage, it won't be used by invading alien armadas to their high councils as grounds for turning the Earth into a giant ashtray. [This is mostly true but expect a mix of "good" 2-SG on this page soon. --ed.]
Hard Acid Techno. Here we go: the genre that reveals all the awesome destructive power of the little silver box [Roland TB-303, dispenser of the squelchy "acid sound" --ed.]. Hard as fuck acid techno. Acid that'll kick your ass so hard you'll be shitting shoes for a month. This is the kind of music everyone listens to before doing something destructive. Sports teams listen to it before a big game, politicians listen to it before a speech, armies listen to it before they go to war, kids listen to it before they clean their rooms. I bet God was listening to it before he made humans.
Robert Rauschenberg interviewed in the NY Times, Feb. 15:
Are dinner parties as good as they used to be in the bohemian '50s?
Of course not. The art world isn't interesting anymore, because when I lived in New York, the problems in the art world were my fault. But they no longer are. They're the fault of dealers, who are influencing the quality of art.
Reading that, many artists will say "Right on. F-ing dealers, they pick the shallowest work." But one could just as easily say "C'mon, Bob, like you and Jasper weren't jockeying for position back in the day. Whether something was 'your fault' wasn't an issue until a dealer put it in the pipeline." He's right about the dinner parties, though: Bohemia isn't as freewheeling in New York now. Everyone's juggling art and day jobs. Plus people can't smoke. It's still the best art town, though.
Heads of David Koresh, from Mark Allen's weblog. The New York & Toronto perspective on the interactive computer game these came from is here; my photos of the heads in action accompany this post of Allen's about the Davidians' New York debut.
The Videogame Art Show That Wasn't Amusing
Tomorrow is the last day for the New Museum's videogame art show "Killer Instinct", not that it's recommended. I missed the Joe McKay/Kristin Lucas gaming show in the same location in 2001 (the museum's hard-to-hang-out-in Media Z Lounge) but I know some of the work (e.g., McKay's Audio Pong) and it's way more fun, and way less pretentious, than this. You are greeted at the entrance of "Killer Instinct" with a selection of Brody Condon's "fake screenshots," which are lackluster collages mounted on foamcor or sintra board1: I'm revealing my own ignorance/apathy that I don't know if it's the games or the shots that are "fake." Next you encounter a sub-Kenny Scharf, faux ultraviolet installation by Condon & Shih Chieh Huang consisting of agglomerations of plastic toys and containers of water (connected by myriad tubes) with some SEGA type game imagery not doing much on a screen. This looked like bad outsider art. Anne-Marie Schleiner's piece was frozen, the video in Eddo Stern's sculpture was barely moving, and in another Stern piece, the sound only worked in one earpiece in each of the two sets of headphones hanging from a duct-taped rack2 (different ears malfunctioned in each). The Cory Arcangel/Paul B. Davis hacked Nintendo cartridge piece was nice, but shoved over in a dark corner discouraging lingering. Tom Betts's big screen installation work of fragmented, negatively-inverted game elements was hyperactive and psychedelic, but didn't live up to the curators' hype:
[The work] explores how artists translate the aesthetics and tactics of gaming culture into real space and real time--and how this new kind of fluid cinematic "gaming space" affects participants' behavior and experience.Mostly you stood there and worked three buttons until you figured out what formal elements were being manipulated by which buttons, and then you watched the light show. As far as "gaming space," as a friend pointed out, the console was set ridiculously far back from the screen so you never got the full-on immersive experience. Maybe that was the point, but it made it less entertaining. As for the ymRockers game music compilation, that would probably be more effective as a download or CD than a non-interactive art piece that you sit and listen to sequentially through headphones. I know I left out a few things but I wanted to get out of that show pronto so I didn't take notes. This was a perfect example of the type of hybrid exhibit with no appeal to either constituency it supposedly represents (too formally sloppy for the art world, too "deconstructed"--and not fun enough--for gamers). Way to go.
1. The board looked denser than foamcor but lighter than sintra, with some kind of metallic color around the edges(?) Just trying to be accurate in this on-the-fly reporting. 2. Again, it wasn't exactly duct tape, it just gave the same slapdash impression. Where the headphone wires entered the rack somebody had done a bad splice job with white electrician's tape. There's good nerdy and bad nerdy but this was the latter.
Here's a first stab at mixing some analog music (from vinyl) for a downloadable mp3: the Tuxedomoon Mini-Mix [.mp3 removed]. It's approximately 18 minutes, a 17 MB file. This favors broadband users, and I'm sorry, I've really been trying to keep this page surfer-friendly. Just consider the mix a bonus to the online music-crit below (yeah, I know, right).
Tuxedomoon was a kind of art-punk-cabaret band that emerged from late '70s San Francisco, specifically the scene around the Mabuhay Gardens and the Deaf Club: a time and place band member Blaine Reininger described as "our own Belle Epoque." Principal instruments were bass (that's a pun, sort of--the bassist is Peter Principle), sax, violin, keyboards, and rhythm box. Adjectives used to describe the band would be "innovative," "psychedelic" and "angsty." Three vocalists alternated on the singing chores and all sounded tortured, or suffering from post-breakdown ennui; all members were accomplished musicians downplaying their talent at the height of garage band streamlining. The band flowered during the postpunk era with a recording contract on the Residents' Ralph label, then relocated to Belgium before eventually drifting apart in the mid-'80s. In this selection I've somewhat slighted sax-and-keyboarder Steven Brown's contributions in favor of violinist Reininger's, but I love both. Here's the track listing; all songs are by the band unless noted:
"Volo Vivace" from Half-Mute (1980). Jazzy chamber music anchored in organ-and-synthesizer gloom. Principle's ultracool bass, playing counterpoint to a sequencer, supplies the rhythm."Incubus (Blue Suit)" from Desire (1981). Trippy scifi lyrics sung by Reininger, and you gotta love that beatbox.
"Crash" (flip side of Ralph 45 rpm "What Use") (1980). With its flailing drums, repetitive piano refrain, and filtered acid guitar, this is like proto-breakbeat techno. Never made it onto an album, but this is one of my favorite TM tracks. Guest guitarist Michael Belfer resurfaces on Reininger's solo LP described below.
"Birthday Song," from the Reininger solo outing Night Air (1983). Very '80s noir. Steven Brown's charmingly almost-inept sax makes an appearance here.
"Next to Nothing," 1977 rehearsal recording (from the Pinheads on the Move compilation, 1987). Singer and performance artist Winston Tong popped in and out of the TM lineup: his emotional vocals are featured here. The raw use of the analog synth here is inspiring, from the lurching, stop-and-start notes underneath the vocals to the ending where the sound hisses away in ever-rising pink noise increments. Gives me chills.
This "outsourcing of jobs" business--whether it's blue collar ones going to China or white collar ones going to India--should be a potent campaign issue. I'm betting that many workplaces have rumors going around that certain tasks will soon be sent overseas. Why should anyone trust their employers on this issue? As long as no government restrictions on the practice exist, the corporation's job is to maximize profits, so goodbye jobs. The Republicans are speaking out with their usual sensitivity to the problems of the middle class. You may have read that Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, called outsourcing "just a new way of doing international trade." The White House hasn't criticized Mankiw's comment, "focusing on the belief he was espousing that freer global trade benefits workers and consumers in all countries, including the United States," according to a recent AP article. Mankiw said his remarks were "misinterpreted" and he meant to emphasize "the importance of knocking down trade barriers while helping workers who inevitably will lose their jobs to transition into other work," according to the same AP story. In other words, retraining them from computer programming to the intricacies of waiting tables. (Though in the current let's-automate-everything climate, even those jobs are in jeopardy.)
A lot of Democrats moved to the right on this issue during the Clinton years, embracing all that "free market" jabber. Whatever candidate the Democrats put up against Bush is going to be in the pocket of Big Business, so don't expect any change come 2005. What we need, though, is to move away from the kneejerk idea that "market wisdom" is the sole way to run a society. If the market were truly wise child labor wouldn't exist anywhere. Societies (meaning governments) always draw lines regarding what is acceptable behavior. What's needed, now that even the managerial class is feeling the sting of outsourcing, is a bigger national dialogue on the American way of doing business. To me, outsourcing combined with insane executive compensation is fouling our own nest, gradually destroying the communities which originally nurtured the multinationals. Which means, we need to start passing legislation limiting predatory levels of compensation (tying executive earnings to the overall health of the company, not just the perception of being a "mover"), taxing companies that outsource and using the money to create a national unemployment fund, and penalizing corporations that move offshore to evade these laws. Sharp intake of breath from Clintonians and Republicans alike--heresy!