tom moody

Roberta Smith, writing on Richard Prince's mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1992 (NY Times sign-in probably required):

In addition, whether glamorous or tawdry, the preponderance of photographs in the exhibition's first three galleries can make one wonder if the show wouldn't actually have made a better catalogue. (This speculation is borne out by the show's own terrific-looking catalogue, where these images are arrayed in a snappy scattershot style, undoubtedly overseen by Mr. Prince, and fleshed out by four informative essays and snippets of the artist's writings.)

Fortunately, and unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Prince has gone on to apply the principle of appropriation to a broad number of media, including language itself. In so doing, he has brought into clearer focus the strangely poignant, self-deprecating malaise that pervades all his work. In addition, he has made his obsession with artistic issues, and especially issues involving painting, more and more apparent.

His sculptures, his weakest work from the late 80's, consist of mail-order car hoods, repainted by the artist and displayed on the wall like unusually streetwise Minimalist reliefs. His drawings are stand-up comedy jokes, written by hand on typewriter paper...

Roberta Smith, writing on Richard Prince's mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2007:

Mr. Prince’s ancestors include Duchamp, Jasper Johns and especially Andy Warhol. But unlike Warhol, he is much less interested in the stars than in the audience. Thus he is just as much an heir to Walker Evans and Carson McCullers, with their awareness of the common person.

Over the years, Mr. Prince has shown himself to be in touch with the same shamed, shameless side of America that gave us tell-too-much talk shows, reality TV and the current obsession with celebrity. Practically every last American could find something familiar, if usually a bit unsettling, in his work. If he were the Statue of Liberty, the words inscribed on his base might read: Give me your tired, your poor, but also your traveling salesmen and faithless wives; your biker girlfriends, porn stars, custom-car aficionados and wannabe celebrities; as well as your first-edition book collectors (of which he is one).

It often seems that Mr. Prince has never met a piece of contemporary Americana he couldn’t use. Customized checks with images of SpongeBob SquarePants or Jimi Hendrix? He pastes them to canvas and paints on them. Mail-order fiberglass hoods for muscle cars? He hangs them on the wall — instant blue-collar Minimalist reliefs. Planters made of sliced and splayed truck tires? There’s one at the Guggenheim, cast in white resin, where the fountain should be. Is it a comment on the work of Matthew Barney, a gallery-mate who had his own Guggenheim fete? Probably. But from above it resembles a plastic toy crown or the after-splash of milk in that famous stop-action Harold Edgerton photograph.

What's not said is that between the first and second reviews the artist's stock continued to rise so that he is now an unstoppable "player" in the art world. Oh, sorry, I mean, er, the artist's maturation and the critic's deepening understanding of his work contributed to a mellower, more glowing critical tribute for the second mid-career retrospective.

Thanks for the recent linkage from Glasstire, a web magazine covering visual art in Texas (and named for an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg): Bill Davenport's Dec. 18 Newswire nod to my found seasonal GIF ("Even better after a few eggnogs"), and Ivan Lozano's enthusiastic piece on Net Art 2.0 and the surfing clubs. I have to say I prefer Lozano's take on the scene to the Wall Street Journal's, not just because he mentions this page but because his account is visually lush and gives you a sense of what the fuss is about with net art's second wave*. Also, none of the usual cliches are invoked such as claiming that the art is made by "a generation that grew up with the Net" (beyond a jab at pre-Net-nostalgic "squares" in the opening paragraph) or the all-important "Can these cra-a-azy artists sell this work?"

For more discussion of the latter two issues, please see this Nasty Nets thread. On the issue of age-ism, I think two things are going on here: (a) the same "young is better" media narrative that makes actors washed up at 21, and (b) reinforcing another media script that bloggers are "unruly kids" when in fact the most prominent independent voices come from all age groups. The WSJ article recites a couple of the "pro surfer" artists' ages--one is 23 and one is 33. Are they the same generation? I don't think so. Anyone 33 remembers life before the Net. Whether the art is first or second wave is surely a matter of attitude, not birth year. So, curators, can you please stop saying this?

*the only exception to the "second wave" designation among the works mentioned in Lozano's piece is g_i_o_c_a_t_t_o_l_i's pseudo-pixelated Op Art javascript utility. That is more of an overdetermined net art 1.0 concept, heavy on programming magic and "interactivity" compared to the rather trashy, DIY use of html and GIFs on the surf blogs.

GIF artist unknown

Joe McKay emailed the following list of problems with the highly flawed "Will Smith's I Am Legend" (spoilers). My thoughts are in italics:

I came home to this story in the New York Times ["Scientists Weigh Stem Cells' Role as Cancer Cause"]. YIKES! I really liked the premise of the movie.

The part with Emma Thompson announcing the cancer cure was the scariest moment.

If the serum worked on the rat why not try it on doggie? What the heck right? No need to strangle Sam so quick I say.

Shit, I thought he did the use the serum on the dog.

Why exactly did [Neville] have to die? Couldn't he have tossed the grenade from the door of that cubby hole and closed it really quick?

Beats the crap out of me.

How did the lady and the kid get there if the island was sealed off? Did they swim?

See below.

The zombies seem to be exhibiting pretty sophisticated behavior. They have a system of hierarchy, and they use dogs and lay traps. They have not "stopped being human." Maybe they want to kill [Neville] cause he keeps trying to "cure" them like they are gay.

If Akiva "Utter Hack" Goldsman had stuck to the Matheson story the "smart zombies laying traps" would have made perfect sense. Matheson imagined the dumb zombies were a second, pitiful stage of human before a third stage appeared. The third stagers were intelligent and civilized and figured out how to cure themselves of the degenerating effects of the bacillus (while still remaining night dwellers). Unfortunately Neville didn't know this and was killing nests of healthy zombies. So the girl was bait--it was the only explanation for her sudden appearance. I thought that was where the movie was going until I realized "Shit--there's going to be a colony of human survivors just to prove Neville's downer prognosis wrong." I walked out seething.

Previous post on this topic.

Update: HP (in a three way email confab with Joe and me about the movie) says this, about the "human colony of survivors" added for the happy ending:

So, she drives to a colony in Bethel, VT. You see, I'm from Vermont. I'm there right now. And Vermont is a museum for wealthy people from Boston, New York, etc. Now, I have a problem with this, but not like I used to, and I can get around it, except that all the people who have turned Vermont into a museum don't want to be straight about it. I mean, it's a hard thing to own up to. I'm actually glad that Vermont is a museum, and not something worse. Museums are pretty nice places. But, even if you could find your way to saying something like, "Hey, better a museum than Albany," no one really wants to hear that. Anyhow, that final scene where they open the gates, and there's this quaint, L.L. Bean advertisement with one token black woman standing all alone, kinda off to the side, but still smiling . . . oh my, my. I'd take the fucking zombies any day.

artists unknown

Washington Post maps show the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad courtesy of American tax dollars. The Sunnis have mostly fled and mixed ethnic neighborhoods (Sunni, Shia, and Christian) are just about gone. Not depicted are the high concrete fences around neighborhoods enforcing the Bush/Petraeus notion of peace. Which is better, to live under a dictator propped up by oil money or death squads propped up by foreigners who want the oil? Either way, it wasn't America's choice to make.

Can someone explain this? The artist Julien Bouillon, linked to by VVork, seems to have re-appropriated a piece by drx (Dragan Espenschied)--from a series of MSPaint drawings based on spam stock tips.

This is from Bouillon's site (cropped, sorry). He titles it "Corporate Suite":

And this is from Espenschied's site (also cropped), which includes dozens of others and a system for rating them aesthetically:

What's the story here?

Update: I emailed drx, who said: "[t]hese are just pictures me and probably millions of other people received in spam emails. I got dozens a day during Winter 2006 and selected only the most beautiful ones. So nobody was [reappropriating anything]. On the other hand, i think i loved these spams more than anybody else and should get the world exclusive reproduction rights." My apologies to Bouillon for alleging that the coincidence had any negative intent, but I think I'd prefer drx's comprehensive slide show to a single spam as a lambda print.

Update: Not a clone, more like clonal offspring: Paul Slocum has been painting these spams on sweatshirts using puff paint.

This Wall Street Journal article by Andrew Lavallee attempts to make sense of some of the Net Art 2.0 content that's out there: he zeros in on a group of artists who find boring Internet content interesting. Yr humble blogger is both that content (peripherally) and its regurgitator: The article discusses Marcin Ramocki's Blogger Skins piece (where "Tom Moody" is one of the five "google portrait" subjects) and the Nasty Nets "Internet Surf Club," a group blog where I've been posting work.

The most thoughtful quote comes from Guthrie Lonergan,* who talks about defaults in our culture. He is broadening a technical term--a default is what software ships with as opposed to what you add--to include any kind of societal trope or habit, and (it could be further elaborated) his artistic practice involves using the Internet as a lens to reveal these. The example given in the article is the MySpace intro. Lonergan notes that MySpace doesn't provide a template for this, so people "default" to a kind of telephone answering machine greeting when they first make their pages, with added images.

Taking Lavallee's article a bit further: Ramocki's Google portraits are also a collection of defaults or habits--the Googlebot assumes any photo with the caption James Wagner is James Wagner and doesn't make any further investigation such as: Which James Wagner? Is a caption misplaced? So you end up with a "portrait" of 100 images of James that is a collage of largely irrelevent crap. It is visual proof that the systems we increasingly rely on aren't as smart as they're cracked up to be.

Much of the humor on the Nasty Nets site centers around glitches and technical failures in our brave new cyberworld--it's not just about artists slumming or "looking at the world around them" or "searching for inspiration." And the practice isn't just bookmarking-as-found-object-finding. Manipulation of the found content also occurs, often using default tools such as Photoshop, iMovie, MSPaint, or an off-the-shelf MIDI sequencer.

*Update: On his del.icio.us page Lonergan says, regarding the MySpace intro quote: "The observation about answering machines is a paraphrase of something Sean Dockray said about the MySpace vids."

gif artist unknown--not intended for RSS readers

If you can't get your ass to Mars (Schwarzenegger, 1990), at least get it to Southland Tales while it's in the theatres. (City Cinemas in the East Village still has it.) This is Richard "Donny Darko" Kelly's sophomore effort, booed at Cannes and trimmed down for American release. Gorgeous music (by Moby and others), the same gliding, swooping camera as in Darko (watch for the stunner tracking shot in the zeppelin party scene), and a surfeit of echt-Angeleno characters and atmosphere (shirtless men, Danskinned women with bad dye jobs, ubiquitous tattoos, partying at the beach even in a state of emergency). Reviewers have compared the film to Lynch's Mulholland Drive but one also detects traces of Brewster McCloud and even Nashville. One of the few current (un)popular movies that tackles our culture of omnipresent surveillance and non-stop bogus terror alerts (beach parties notwithstanding), with some strange science fiction overlays including a gigantic offshore perpetual motion machine that harnesses "fluid karma" from the ocean waves and has possibly upset the spacetime continuum. Starring The Rock, who keeps freaking out and tapping his fingertips together in a very spazzy, disturbing, un-Rock-like way. Also featuring Sarah Michelle Gellar as the porn star Krysta Now, Jon Lovitz as an affectless assassin-cop, Justin Timberlake as a soldier watching Venice beach with a telescope and shooting anyone who looks suspicious, and Wood Harris (The Wire's "Avon Barksdale") with an absurd putty nose.