tom moody

Attended the Boris Groys lecture tonight at School of Visual Arts, titled "Everyone is an Artist." Paddy Johnson also attended and her twitter notes follow these transcribed handwritten notes of mine. Groys teaches aesthetics, art history, and media theory at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, and at NYU. He has written on Ilya Kabakov and other artists and, per Wikipedia, "re-evaluated socialist art production [and] challenged the norms of aesthetics by [advancing] a thesis based on Walter Benjamin in the... interpretation of politics, claiming that modernism had survived in the 'total artwork' (Gesamtkunstwerk) of Stalinism." (Which sounds like the statement that got Stockhausen in trouble after the 9/11/01 attacks.)

My notes:

--The deprofessionalization of art is a form of professionalism. Transition from "Old masters --> Malevich --> Duchamp --> 'weak' video loop" still occurs within a specialized field.

--The artist is a secularized apostle, spreading the gospel that time is contracting, time is viscous.

--The avant garde isn't about change but creating weak transcendental repetitive patterns that allow others to recognize and decode images (Kandinsky shows painting is just shapes and colors). These perceptions transcend their time period.

--This creates clarity but also confusion, when the Kandinsky is put next to the Old Master. Now the Kandinsky is historicized, dated.

--This process of clearing and confusion is good and needs to happen periodically; it is how the avant garde democratizes Plato's privileged "philosophical gaze."

--We need new clearing/confusion, new weak signs, new repetitive simplification. Groys shows Francis Alÿs' animated/rotoscoped video loop of woman pouring liquid back and forth between two glasses.

--Groys believes social media and the internet is the new arena for the avant garde's production of "weak signs and low visibility"; the masses creating their own work for minuscule audiences in the 21st Century vs consuming the spectacles created by mass media in the 20th. He mentions people putting up websites about their cats (a late '90s example).

--An audience member asked him how big-box Chelsea galleries could implement these weak signs. He said that a certain part of the art world tries to compete for the production of "strong images" (Madonna, Michael Jackson) and shouldn't.

--I asked him if the professional apparatus he had described earlier (art schools, museums, biennials) needs to retool itself to sift through social media, or if it serves any function at all at this point. He said the Biennales still serve a function--millions of people attend them. It's where they get their ideas. He believes the social media producers would shrivel and die without this stimulus and inspiration. I don't agree. Essentially he's saying cat sites would disappear unless we have art schools.

--A woman objected to his constant use of the word weak. See Paddy's notes below. He also said a "weak sign is not a sign of weakness." He believes you destroy a fortress, city, pyramids, etc when people lose interest in them and become interested in something else. He sees the "weak gesture" as that alternative and believes it can be powerful.

Paddy Johnson's Twitter Notes:

--Groys asks how one distinguishes between the artist and the non-artist. Answer: the artist is simply a "professional."

--Living in Ultra-modern time means nobody has time. It's not an impression or feeling, it is a condition of our social being.

--The true goal of avant garde should not be innovation but transcendental repetitive reductive art.

--The contemporary condition is a repetition of repetition.

--The avant garde opened the flood gate for the "weak gesture."

--Millions of people now producing text and images for the few who have little to no time to view them. Reversal from the media used to work.

--Weak images are without a spectator. Strong images are 9-11, Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc. Art is competing with strong images.

--Groys does not believe the art world is strong enough to compete.

--True belief in art was originally shown through permanent collections. The slowing of this practice represents a deep skepticism in art.

--Groys is crazy: he basically just said kitty websites would disappear without art school.

--Someone just told Boris Groys that he didn't mean to call images weak. Groys says he not only meant to say that but to create a weak lecture.

Update, May 26, 2010: eFlux posted Groys' essay The Weak Universalism.

Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (2006), excerpt of excerpt from Google books (the narrator is describing his son Paul; "Ann" is the narrator's ex-wife and Paul's mother):

[...] It was the time when Ann (for good reason) thought Paul might have Asperger's and was forcing me, at great expense, to drive him down to Hopkins to be neurologically evaluated. He was evaluated and didn't have Asperger's or anything else. The Hopkins doctor said Paul was "unsystematically oppositional" by nature and probably would be all his life, that there was nothing wrong with that, nor anything I could do or should want to since plenty of interesting, self-directed, even famous people were also that. He named Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Carlyle, which seemed a grouping that didn't bode well. [...]

"H.M.M.M. 1" [5.5 MB .mp3]

Collaboration with Travis Hallenbeck. His music setup includes a midi step sequencer, midi mixer, sound module (see YouTube demo), and a vocal synthesizer that responds unpredictably to audio from the above gear.

I recorded some of his live-in-the-studio performance and made this track using editing software, effects software and virtual instruments. It is still a rough draft--I plan to make a few more tunes and then master them a little better.

Need some better rhetoric for my work so went looking for it online. Here's Saatchi Gallery on Kelley Walker:

Using the famous Maui air crash photo which appeared on the cover of Benetton’s magazine Colours in 1995, Kelley Walker explores the currency of media images as a platform where abjection and desire become indistinguishable. Obscuring the picture with a mesh of candy-coloured dots, Walker visualises the clothing company’s 'united colours' slogan, and makes reference to the pixelised format of digital media. Maui is both appealing and appalling: exposing the malleable nature of the meaning of images, Walker questions a world order where human value is calibrated equally by fashion and trauma.

Here's how I could adapt that for an artist's statement:

Using an obscure image of some "wall bangles" captured from the internet, Tom Moody explores the currency of amateur media images as a platform where abjection trumps desire. Crudely filling in the bangles with candy-coloured spheres using the ordinary Microsoft Paint program that ships with Windows, Moody visualises a kind of endless hippie crash pad bending time and space, as filtered through the unhip lowest common denominator of digital media. Enantiomorphic Amulet Chamber is more appalling than appealing: exposing the malleable nature of the meaning of images, Moody questions a world order where human value is calibrated more by trauma than fashion.

"Bluegrass Antimatter" [4 MB .mp3]

Another entry made with the modular synth I posted a drawing of a couple weeks ago.

Title/concept based on a recent one-sided conversation.

internet screen capture, mspaint

update: changed the name

From Google books (excerpt of an excerpt of Waters' 1987 book Crackpot):

The Films of Marguerite Duras. Miss Duras makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them to even your closest friends. If there is such a thing as good avant garde cinema, this is it. Even though I believe pretension is the ultimate sin, Marguerite Duras has taken pretension one level ahead of itself and turned it into a style. She is the ultimate eccentric. Her films are maddeningly boring but really quite beautiful. After seeing her work, I think I know what it must feel like to be hypnotized.

Perhaps her most impossible opus to date is The Truck. The entire film consists of the director sitting in a nondescript room with Gérard Depardieu as they read the script of the film while every ten minutes or so the monotony is replaced by yet another monotonous shot of a blue truck, endlessly but serenely driving through the French countryside. If Warhol did it for the Empire State Building, why can't Marguerite Duras do it for French trucks? All I know is that on my first trip to Cannes, in the cab from the Nice airport, I saw Marguerite's "trucks" a hundred times on the highway and felt hypnotized all over again. That's more than I can say for The Car or Car Wash.

This item from Server Side:

NYmag says that the NYTimes is set to start charging for its online content in the next few weeks. Supporting some of my speculation is this bit: "Apple's tablet computer is rumored to launch on January 27, and sources speculate that Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy."

So we go from "free on the internet" on a general purpose computer (except its not "free" because the Times has always had a sign-up requirement and its pages are chockablock with ads and "rich media" sales tools, aka intrusive popups) to pay-as-you-go on some obnoxious Kindle-like tablet manufactured by Apple and probably DRM'ed out the wazoo. Couldn't happen to two better companies.

I subscribe to Salon but will probably pass on the Times because it isn't trustworthy (Judith Miller's fictional "weapons of mass destruction" reporting, the paper's general cheerleading for the Iraq and other elective wars, or, for a more up-to-the-minute example, yesterday's poorly fact-checked article on tech company IPOs, and on and on). Didn't subscribe to their columnists when they tried the experiment of putting them behind a for-pay firewall: getting weaned off Maureen Dowd was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

This is a classic Thomas Friedman quote, from that New York magazine article:

Friedman recently told me by phone. "What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: 'I used to read you before you went behind the wall.'"

Uh, Tom, that's eleven words. A reader's subscription dollars would be better spent on an honest non-fool such as Salon's Glenn Greenwald.

Having suffered Bill Murchison's breezy, empty newspaper editorials as a Dallas resident many years ago, enjoyed reading this Firedoglake takedown comparing him to Dr. Smith from the old Lost in Space TV show--for the use of self-satisfied alliterations, among other irritants ("Come along, you bubble-headed booby").

Murchison has written an article about how he prefers good writing to bad writing. He starts this article with a first sentence that he seems quite proud of, something Classic along the lines of “Call me Ishmael” or similar. Unfortunately it reads rather more like “Ishmael is the call-me I go by, old bean!” Or something:

Can’t stand to watch the English language’s losing encounter with the culture of who-cares-anyway?

To which the most common answer would probably be, “what the hell does that mean?” A more sensible answer would be, “fuck you and stop bothering me,” because that would not encourage Murchison to explain himself. Which he does, painfully and at length. His point, such as it is, is that he disagrees with a professor who wrote a book arguing that, in his paraphrase, “English, like a turbulent stream, is dynamic: always refreshing itself with new modes and models and images.” He takes exception.

So what about all this, then? Has Lynch got us dogmatic dinosaurs dead to rights? Not quite, I think. English is dynamic. Still, we can’t let the matter drop just there. The notion of language as a bulletin board for faddists needs no new friends. I fear it has too many already.

Dear Lord, someone gave Dr. Smith a Townhall column. This is a bubbling brew of barbarous bullshit, a craptastic collection of vertiginous verbiage!

Before the internet you were a captive audience for local media monopolies and their pet intellectuals--Firedoglake doesn't emphasize enough that Murchison isn't just "a wingnut" but a decades-long columnist for the Dallas Morning News.