tom moody

girish on Joseph Cornell's films. This is a good summation of what's good about the films. (These movie blogs--boy--art geeks will never, ever, be this thorough.)

Still thinking about the films and their connection to Richard Prince, whose retrospective I saw a couple of days after Anthology screened the Cornell. The connection is the throwaway quality of the images, the deep investment in something trivial.

In Cornell's the case it was returning to the same images again and again, so they become fixations. The audience comes to love and be haunted by these meaningless filmic ephemera purchased by the foot in junk stores.

In Prince's case it's the investment of the "art aura" in advertising photos through careful cropping, enlargement, framing, and tony gallery-style presentation. All that for a dumb cosmetic ad. Yet one doesn't imagine he has the same longing that Cornell does--he's more of a hater.

When talking about Prince I just mean the early re-photography. The bile yielded something smart and profound, but then art world success necessitated rolling out a new product line every couple of years (or so it seems from the retrospective) and the time to obsess and be haunted from the perspective of total rejected loser-dom was lost.

Cornell made money off his boxes but rarely showed the films. One surmises that lack of exposure kept them pure somehow, maybe that's just being overly romantic. The boxes are ultra-romantic and I don't like them much.

top to bottom: digital photo, 2008, of MSPaintbrush image xerox-printed and wrapped around canvas stretcher (just the paper and staples), 1999, 12 x 9 inches; polaroid of wall installation, untrimmed xerox paper, map pins, 2002, approximately 6 x 4 feet; another photo (scan of slide) of the "stretched" version that shows even less about its fabrication.

Below is the hand-drawn (MSPaintbrush, from '99 or so); contrast the hand-coded: the online sketchbook of Rick Silva, who is teaching himself the open-source programming language Processing. He says he's updating it once a week or so.

Some more quick responses to Alexander Galloway's book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004) (about 3/4 read, just want to jot this down before it passes out of my brain)

1. The book assumes we are post-art, that "life" has now become art, and protocol* controls both. (*TCP/IP, html, etc--the book carefully explains to the layman how all these things work and how data circulates around the Web)

2. The best discussions so far are (a) AG's sarcastic recitation of "standards of seamless continuity" (not a quote but that's the concept) that make web surfing so seductive (pp 64-69) and (b) the discussion of viruses and cyberfeminism (pp 176-196) as oppositional strategies (interesting that those are in the same chapter). Deliberately oppositional in the case of the latter and de facto oppositional in the case of the former.

3. As I mentioned in the last post I think bricks (courthouses, corporate headquarters, army bunkers) still trump clicks in our society so I wouldn't go nearly so far in ascribing to protocol the powers of social control that AG does. Also, I don't agree we are post-art, and am more interested in the ways protocol is changing existing expression, such as:
--a certain type of person thrives on TV (Chris Matthews) but is a clown in the blogosphere where his words and gestures can be unpacked. Similarly someone like Atrios wields tremendous influence as a blogger because of a certain protocological skill set (I keep reading that word as "proctological" in AG's book).
--Writers who are terse, funny, and can use images (certain bloggers) have an edge over print writers that take longer to set up a story.
--Music, also, will potentially change to an inverted pyramid form where the strongest (melodic, rhythmic) content occurs in the first 20 seconds to get the casual .mp3 surfer hooked.
--A certain kind of sculptural one-liner that looks good on the "curation sites" potentially assumes larger importance.
--etc.

Since the book was written (2004) we have seen a greater retreat from the endless circularity of the open Web in favor of online gated communities where Biff and Muffy can be among their own kind and have a nice set of multiple choice options to work with (liberal, conservative, libertarian, other). This is a mass, conscious rejection of protocological (lack of) control in favor of older forms of disciplinary control (building with security cam and doorman).

More when I finish. Previous notes.

On the AIDS-3D website (Berlin artist duo recently linked to on VVork), one notices the quaintly agitpropish link "OUR DEMANDS." Who couldn't click that? Here they are:

1. NO MORE DVD REGION CODES
2. FREE WIFI EVERYWHERE
3. RELEASE THE OWNER OF TV-LINKS.CO.UK FROM JAIL
4. STANDARDIZED INTERNATIONAL VOLTAGE
5. CHEAPER TEXT MESSAGING
6. BAN SIM-CARD LOCKED CELL PHONES
7. ALLOW SCREEN CAPTURE DURING DVD PLAYBACK IN MAC OSX*
8. END THE NTSC/PAL COLD WAR
9. DECRIMINALIZE FILE SHARING
10. MORE BANDWIDTH!

*To which I would add, let us printscreen DVD stills in MSPaint and return the "screen grab" functionality to Intervideo WinDVD, you controlling bastards, for those of us too lazy to learn workarounds in code (and otherwise).

Both members of AIDS-3D are using Rupert Murdoch's MySpace to do art stuff, and they obviously use Macs, so certain accommodations to the system are being made here. That doesn't mean you can't have demands, or "demands," and most of these seem reasonable, if doomed in our "bricks over clicks" society.

Update: wizardishungry says he figured out a solution to #7. His proof (but not necessarily the solution) is here.

My blogroll got drastically pared down when I moved to this URL, for reasons that are stupid and trivial having to do with the design of this site. I want my "categories" near the top and can't figure out how to reconfigure this Word Press template to move the blogroll below the categories where they could grow willy nilly.*

On the old blog I tried to avoid a ghetto of "art only" blogs. I've noticed these springing up when newbie art bloggers launch. This is the Internet, it's a new medium, why limit yourself to a field that was defined (and I would argue failed) around the convention of people talking a specialized language about objects and events in certain types of physical spaces?

Presumably artists read and have interests other than the gallery world. A blogroll is a way to define those interests, and yourself.

But mainly it's so you have the sites you visit at your fingertips (it's kind of quaint already with the prevalence of RSS), which incidently serves as a declaration of what (or who) matters to you.

(edited--the original rant may be floating around on some RSS readers)

*Thanks to CA for emailing about this. I have tried to change the sidebar in the theme editor--the html tag "get links list" pulls up both "my pages" and "other pages"--it treats them as a unit when I move "other pages" to the bottom of the sidebar. I want "my pages" up at the top where it is now. My Digital Media Tree blog was much more configurable. I found early on the limitations of Word Press for the casual coder. A lot of changes I'd like to make, such as putting an image in my header, can't be made without screwing up some CSS designer's perfect little scheme. Any changes to the basic layout cause a ripple effect in the delicate pick up sticks pile of commands to put a tasteful underline here or a font such and such size there. So I decided to just use his template in the most generic, off the shelf way. The idea of picking another design from a menu of prepackaged themes to "express my personality" doesn't appeal. There are limits to my interest in presets.

Artur Nowak, "Guitar Granulizer - 10" [1.26 MB .mp3]

A guitar morphs into a church organ-y sound--quite lovely.

(copied from the Reaktions MinuteMann compilation and distributed (via my blog) subject to a cc license)

Revolations from jeff at Double Happiness.

Montage of zooming products and annoying acid guitar loop. It's hard to improve on the commercial stuff that's out there (which is not to say we don't try). "Our displays know no limits; bringing you brands that SELL." (Not an exact quote.)

"Soft Clip Nation" [2.5 MB .mp3]

Almost entirely analog; the polyphonic chord is my patch. There's actually not that much clipping, I just really like that title. This song is much more cheerful than I was when I wrote it, so, so much for art reflecting emotions.

Update, April 2011: Maximized the volume and re-uploaded.

Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled, box tops, tape, 1996

Tom Moody, Wicked Summer Brew, six pack containers, 1996 (hat tip JP)

Tom Moody, Two Granolas, product boxes, tape, 1996

Daniel Argyle, Untitled, 2000, installation: two readymade cardboard washing powder boxes, dimensions variable. (hat tip GG-F)

Tom Moody, Assorted Packages, product boxes, 2007

Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled, 32 coffee containers, 1996

Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled, box tops, 1996