The only good picture I managed to take at Joanna Newsom’s concert at Somerset House yesterday… some nice disembodied hands and picture in a picture thing going on. I am not a photograher. Proof here… I have never been to a concert where the crowd were so hushed during the performance; emptying their ears of everything except the music. It was an amazing show.
I’m tempted to read this paragraph from Jonathan Jones in the Guardian at least three times before each and every artist statement I have to write:
It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached. If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.
I don’t particularly hold with much he is saying in it - especially the underlying endorsement of artspeak - but it is an elegant mantra to chant while beating a blank piece of paper into submission.
On the subject of artspeak, Paddy Johnson has a good critique in the L Magazine.
It is a strange way to meet, through an obituary, but until last week when the platitudes poured in, I had not been aware of Bruce Conner, or his art. But perhaps it is not such a strange way to meet after all, because Conner, over the course of his life, advertised his death on several occasions. The first was in 1960 when he titled an exhibition of his work “The Late Bruce Connor” and the second 7 years later in 1967 when he quit being an artist for the remainder of the decade – “…At that time, whenever I’d get any letters about art related events, I’d send them back or throw them out. Sometimes, I’d write deceased on them. I was listed in Who’s Who in American Art and I sent back all their correspondence with “Deceased.” After three years, Who’s Who believed me… So the artist is definitely dead.””
By all accounts Conner was a bit of a control freak during his life when it came to matters concerning his work; on one occasion pulling out of an opportunity to hold a retrospective at SFMOMA because of disagreements over the conservation of his assemblages and the fee being charged to get in – Conner wanted the show to be free. From Open Space, the SFMOMA blog -
“They practically informed me it was a post-mortem,” the artist said - invoking, in part, the avant gardist cliché of the museum as mausoleum, or morgue. More to the point, however, Conner was hoping to retain, or recover, some determination over his work, and his public image. “Everything was being run as if I did not exist,” he declared.
This seems to be a concern he had a contingency for. Being opposed to the display of his work online during his life, lawyers have been instructed upon his death to request the removal of as much online content as they can get their hands on. The SFMOMA’s collections access online page for Conner is blank, all 10 images removed. Likewise there have been cease and desist messages to numerous blogs to remove embedded Youtube videos. The request has also gone direct to Youtube.
This appeared in the comments of Chris Ashley’s Looksee blog -
“At the direction of Jean Conner, Bruce’s wife (wdow) and the copyright holder on Bruce’s work, I request and demand that you remove the video “TEN SECOND FILM” from your blog and or website. I am an attorney and made similar requests for Bruce, who was adamantly opposed to on-line display of his films. Ms. Conner is of the exact same view. Please remove the video. Thank you for your anticipated prompt cooperation with this request. Steven Fama”
In 1923, a Los Angeles real estate group unveiled a massive billboard to promote their new Hollywoodland development. The sign is more than just nine white letters spelling out a city’s name; it’s one of the world’s most evocative symbols – a universal metaphor for ambition, success, glamour.
Welcome to Hackney Wick.
Via Anaba
One of the favored analogies of the people on the Rhizome chatboards attacking current art on blogs and WIKIS is “using animated GIFs and default blog templates is like using acrylic paint and prestretched canvases!”
I use acrylic paint, prestretched canvases, and default blog templates. Whoah… short circuit…. against protocol…… getting weaker……
So if I make drawings, pencil on paper, do I default the default?
A little context.
There has been some interesting discussion over at Rhizome.org in the wake of the Net Aesthetics panel discussion held recently at the New Museum in New York. For the most part it is the online after party for several of the panel members as they expand on some of the trains of thought originally conceived and derailed during the sit down discussion. However, one of the more entertaining and contentious points being fought over is an attempt to determine exactly when, or rather where, the separation between the first and second generation of net artists begins and ends. And then, pending resolution of that, what the work produced by the second generation should be referred to as. Net art 2.0?
Anyhow, in response to all of this Tom Moody has come up with a quiz to determine which side of the fence each might fall. Not that ultimately any of this is really all that important. Net art hasn’t reinvented itself so radically in the relatively few years that it has been a concern. It has simply responded and progressed at the same rate as the technology available to it. As the web expands in both its physicality and its capability, so do its uses as a medium and a platform. The redundancy of the art produced 5, 6, 7 years ago is superseded by the redundancy of the software used to create it rather any redundancy of spirit. The net art produced today, especially by surf blogs like Loshadka, Spirit Surfers and Double Happiness do not fetishize the technology they are based on. They may critique it, be playful and laden in irony, but they do so in the context that the platform, the blog, the wiki or whatever, now satellite the mainstream media in increasingly tight orbits. So while there remains to some extent the self reflexive naval gazing always inherent in the guarded clique; what they may be laughing at is increasingly comprehensible as the detritus of the web sinks into our unconscious.
Here are some photographs, the only two I managed to take, from last Friday’s Iceberg Enters Obelisk event at the Whitechapel Gallery. Neither of them will win any awards, but I really liked the giant eyeball decorations that were hanging from the ceiling in the café and wanted to get a picture of them. Nothing beats the feeling of being illuminated by the disembodied glow of the voyeur…
Matt Lippiatt’s sculptures are a ubiquitous presence at an event hosted by the Elevator Gallery. It is their ubiquity that makes them all the more disturbing though. They cut an uncanny figure of someone who either doesn’t know where he is or of someone who knows exactly where you are; someone snared under a duvet, marched anonymously in to the space and made to stand in shame, or of someone in a really big hoodie, lurking in the shadows following you around.
