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Jonathan Horowitz looms large in the "art as mediacrit" field. He currently shows with Gavin Brown gallery, and has been an influential force on the New York scene since the early '90s. Although he now uses the Internet as a tool and playing field, his work came to prominence during the VCR era. In his piece Maxell, a tape made in 1990 and projected on a large scale at Greene Naftali gallery in 1998, a black screen with the single word MAXELL has been dubbed and redubbed on a VCR so that it gets progressively grainier. But it isn't just degrading--random visual and audial noise is being picked up and amplified with each copy that begins to aggressively overwhelm the original source, in a way that is almost performative. When projected on a large screen, ugly violent electronic sounds and wrenching, spasmodic lightning zaps build dramatically, so that by the end of the tape the video becomes assaultive, almost scary in its sense of total abject breakdown. The piece shows the unintended consequences of mechanical reproduction, data transmission that is supposed to be seamless taken to its most extreme conclusion, so that it actually feels toxic. In other words, Art reveals a dark side to technology that has been there all along. The ultimate irony is the use of MAXELL as subject matter, a brand built on clarity and trust.
guthrie says on his del.icio.us page: "...youtube is totally reaching its golden peak (like napster did..), really gotta download all my favorites before they vanish....."
No kidding. They're vanishing as fast as copyrightholders decide they have had enough free (grainy) exposure. As far as saving them, the thing is, you won't, and I won't. File that under the best of intentions.
I have some Quicktime vids that I created up on this page--this marks me as a pre YouTubian dinosaur, yet most have been made since 2005.
I avoided YouTube because I dreaded that uniform rectangle and feared the Procrustean distortions that odd-sized formats would suffer. Also, I knew some evil f*ckw*d like Rupert Murdoch would end up with all my content on his server. Turns out it's google, but I don't have a gmail account, either.
I'm enjoying the YT ride, finding out what bands actually look like that I listened to a million times on vinyl and CD, and otherwise glomming onto bits of my cultural heritage, past and present. I'm filing them away in my mind because I don't trust that I'll find them again.
update: some ordinary vulgarities trimmed so the blog maintains its lofty tone
another lunchbox from Kristin Lucas' Happy and Sad Sack Lunch Series 2005...
...and an inhaler.
YouTubin' by categories (mine)
* removed thanks to some dildo
**removed by user
Tornados
Near Attica KS, May 12, 2004 (watch house get sucked up into sky)
New Wave/Postpunk
Throbbing Gristle Discipline
Wall of Voodoo Ring of Fire (live)
Tuxedomoon Desire / Jinx / In a manner of speaking
Suicide Ghost Rider ("America, America is killin' its youth") ('77-'78) / Another version
King Crimson *Elephant Talk
Progressive/Psychedelic Rock
Gentle Giant Give It Back
Van der Graaf Generator A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, Part 4
*Yes Astral Traveler
*Procol Harum Homburg
Anime
Wings of Honneamise Opening credits (music by Ryuichi Sakamoto--wish the resolution on the ink wash drawings was better)
Excerpt from Patlabor 2 (dialogue dubbed in German)
*Another Patlabor 2 Silent Tokyo
Gunbuster - Buster Beam / Die Buster
Film
John Carpenter Dark Star Trailer
*Deleted Bank Robbery Scene from Escape from New York
Tarkovsky - Stalker - the rail trip into The Zone
Art
Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (excerpts)
"Prophet without honor" award to George A. Romero for his 1973 no-budget movie The Crazies. He lives in Pittsburgh and doesn't have Hollywood smoothies vetting his pictures so he gets to say anything he wants. The premise of this one: plane carrying US government-developed bioweapon crashes near a small Pennsylvania town. The pathogen--an "encephalitic mutation"--causes insanity that either comes on full strength or appears intermittently but eventually results in death, after several days. The bug gets into the town's water supply. The government is late on the scene and the best it can hope to do is declare martial law, round up all the citizens, and contain them in the local high school gym while searching for an antidote or an immune person. The Army, wearing hazmat suits, enters into pitched battles with the locals, crazy and not crazy, many of whom are armed and don't want to be "rounded up."
The main protagonists are a group of sympathetic townspeople, including two firemen who are 'Nam vets, who don't know the full symptoms of the virus or which of them might be infected but attempt to blow town. If they succeed, it means "breaching the perimeter" and spreading the infection to other cities. Suffice it to say, in a packed 90 minutes, everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the film is nonstop strife and carnage--but funny, too, that's Romero's gift. The main "villain" is the bumbling ineptitude of the Army and the utter callousness of the government towards the townspeople.
What seemed like overwrought science fiction in the '70s has become all too familiar in the '00s with the neglect that led to 9/11, the government's abandonment of New Orleans to chaos, the Washington sniper, anthrax, and the devastation in Iraq. What The Crazies does is wrap all this horror in one explosive package. A movie like this still could never be made in Hollywood--we have to look back 30 years for an unflinching portrait of our own present.
Found this photo on my hard drive; forgot I had it. Taken during my last open studio, when I still had a studio (that wasn't in my home). I had earlier posted an installation shot of this same work, but it's more effective with a human in it for scale. I was talking with M, an artist from Europe, about the relationship of work like this to Peter Kogler's, who is better known across the pond than in the States. In a nutshell, Kogler makes wallpaper of tubular, computer-modeled patterns and coats gallery floors and ceilings with it. It's hard to say what discourse is associated with it--it's his schtick, and M seemed to think it had slid into the realm of kitsch. "Computer-y" for people in the art world ignorant of computers, but too dumbed down for people working in new media with "generative art" models, etc. Screen saver art on an epic scale. Happily, M recognized that I was working in MSPaint(brush) and my work was a lo-tech goof and therefore not particularly comparable. I'm drawn to the "high school science fair" as a visual model, and the community museum Op art shows I remember from childhood, and I would hope the clunkiness of the work would make the irony and failed utopianism theme immediately obvious. Evidently it's not, though, to everyone. I actually backed off doing this type of installation because the response I was getting in my studio was lukewarm. Also I had to ask myself if I really wanted to go from show to show installing these things. The one above took about 8 hours of standing on a ladder--"I'm getting too old for this shit," as they say. I wouldn't rule it out as a component of a future show, so be forewarned.
"I Hate The Others" [mp3 removed]
An attempt to reclaim drum and bass for all that is nerdy (with anthemic prog chorus, robotic reggae under-rhythm and a cowbell). My aim is the musical equivalent of the sculpture in the previous post.
Related: Neurofunk.
Related: Lost thread.
Update: I decided the anthemic prog chorus was bugging me, so I changed the piece to:
"I Hate The Others (Ethereal Version)" [mp3 removed]
Raisin Bran Molecule Sculpture, 2006, product packaging, ink jet print on cut paper, tape, staples, pushpins, 42 x 30 x 14 inches
series