tom moody

black

white

by Constant Duullaart, embedded YouTube screens on Nasty Nets

Despite the abundance of monochrome Net Art these are as reductive as it gets--meaning you are stuck with the YouTube graphics and controls which, as we all know, are meant to be invisible. Instead of a surface to pay attention to we get a time span (:13 of each solid color). These could be "airports for shadows" (as Cage called Rauschenberg's white paintings) with the shadows being dust and reflections on your screen.

The embedded versions on Nasty Nets appear to be the ideal screen sizes. On YouTube itself the artist is at the mercy of genius executive decisions such as arbitrarily widening the screen dimensions after a video is posted. There, Duullaart's white one is now letterboxed on the sides, making a Suprematist white on black rectangle.

remixed by enlarging, brightening

Spiegel is known best as a computer music pioneer (see this YouTube). The image above comes from a page on her site called Early Bell Labs Computer Arts Work. The original raster painting was made in 1974.

A screen shot of her playing music on a computer instrument that looks like an Apollo moon mission console (that I put up prior to the YouTube post of her performance) and more about her music here.

Paddy Johnson reviews Tino Seaghal's Guggenheim performance work at the L magazine.

Seaghal practices the "relational" style of artwork, which consists of social interactions structured or set in motion by the artist. Seaghal famously doesn't allow photos of his works, which forces oral and written storytelling as a means of transmission but also gins up controversy among professionals accustomed to communicating in part with their cameras.

In this case guides walk visitors up the winding ramp of the emptied-out Guggenheim, and talk to you about your ideas of "progress." The guide at the base of the ramp is a child, and the guides get progressively older as they hand you off from one to the next. The performers ask you questions and pass along your answers to the next guide, but they also interrupt you and give you canned answers to certain questions.

It all sounds terribly artificial, relational in the same way that certain science-based religions and government interrogators use interaction to break down subjects and make them pliable to suggestion. Without museum sanction it could make an intriguing story; with institutional backing it's a web of rules and consensual submissive behavior that is somehow "good for you."

I didn't experience the artwork firsthand: I am being Seaghal's camera and relaying it to you via the oral tradition method.

More comments on Johnson's review.

Speaking of lumpenfuturism (although this is from the past, and fairly elegant). More from Bill Schwarz.

A tune of mine ("Yog 2012") is used in a YouTube-documented sculpture work by Aron Namenwirth, titled I Can Hear You. An abandoned speaker is filled with soil, which is used to grow an oak tree seedling. The music emanates from the "tweeter" while the tree occupies the slot for the former "woofer."
Namenwirth is using cast-off furniture and other artifacts as soil cases for growing trees--in this case with a literal audio component. Back in the '70s there was much discussion and media buzz about talking to plants and playing music for them. That's somewhere in the cultural background of this electro-eco-botanical artwork. I like the lumpenfuturistic element--it works as an abject counterpoint to all the buff new media pieces that try to incorporate growing things, while still being straightforward in its urban environmentalism (Namenwirth plans to eventually plant the trees and let the casings rot in the ground).

This made no sense to me until I saw "facepalm" next to it. Then I laughed.

frames from lou's pseudo 3D page (hat tip roy stanfield)

Time Out New York reviewlet:

Marvelli Gallery

Skyler Brickley, “Wall-to-Wall”

The digital is rendered with a gestural touch in these large-scale paintings, which, hung together, constitute a chromatic environment within the gallery.

Two missing words: Andy Warhol. But seriously, these paintings grow on you after you stand in the gallery a while. Two artists from Texas, John Pomara and Tad Griffin, have done similar work: their paintings have more tasty and considered surfaces but don't attempt the ambitious wraparound environment Brickley's show does. Not sure how much "the digital" really has to do with this project--it could refer just as much to xerography and Muybridge. Possibly there's something in the back story of the artist's process but it seems more likely the reviewer wants to make the work sound current by invoking 0s and 1s, even though this is old fashioned smeared/squeegeed paint on canvas. (Some screen printing might be involved--would have to delve into it more--but nothing resembling ink jet or other digital printing a la Guyton/Walker.)

Art critic Joseph Masheck puts Josef Albers' 1960s record cover designs in context in an essay for the Brooklyn Rail:

Almost all were done for Enoch Light (1907-1978), a classical as well as “easy (all too easy!) listening” musician and techie hi-fi fanatic. Light was the mover behind both Command Records and his own performance group, the Light Brigade, which specialized in music often built around an instrument I as a youth hated even more than muted trumpet: the vibraphone, with its nagging call to bop cheerfully along. There’s something lily-white about it too. Anyway, middleclass culture has limits that Albers managed to live with without evident compromise on the art’s part. After all, Rembrandt too paid the rent by purveying graphics to the middle class. So instead of describing the covers in the kind of detail that we would probably not even want to devote to seven Albers “Homage to the Square” paintings, I’ll comment on some cultural connections that they make for me —connections of a kind usually provoked only by fine art. (I have been told that the jacket designs make no attempt to caricature the music.)

Was a bit relieved to read this after the Minus Space press release announcing its show of the covers, which described Enoch Light as "a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer" without any hint that he was a known schlockmeister. The slide show accompanying the press release gives a good overview of the exhibit (closing Jan 30), which includes other period jacket design along with Albers' rather slim output (seven covers).

Masheck, who was editor-in-chief of Artforum in the late '70s and now teaches art history at Hofstra, actually critiques the covers!

Persuasive Percussion (1959; in this case not the Light Brigade but Terry Snyder and the All Stars) shows a tightly packed grid or lattice of small black disks from which a few wander up and out like stray molecules of some light gas; or better still, like the diagrams from a classic essay in which Cyril Stanley Smith would show how natural lattice structures are surprisingly tolerant of irregularities (“Structural Hierarchy in Science, Art, and History,” 1974-75, 1978). Persuasive Percussion Volume 2 (1959) features a Judd-like stack of short green horizontal stripes down the center, asymmetrically punctuated by black disks. Then Provocative Percussion (1960) is Lissitzky-like with its larger black rotated squares and single smaller ones. Provocative Percussion II (1960) has smaller and larger disks, bobbing about singularly and paired in the field, very much like the red disks in the paintings of Paul McMahon (as in The Pictures Generation at the Met last spring and summer). Another cover with an evenly spaced lattice of dots, Provocative Percussion III (1961), has exceptions of different sorts, with some dots lighter, some darker, and others missing, resembling the spots of an LED sign, which help it appear pleasantly loose and improvisatory.

And concludes:

This short-lived project was not like Rodchenko doing candy wrappers with Mayakovsky writing the label copy, because the albums weren’t supposedly of “low” music, though from the avant-garde point of view the middlebrow is often more aesthetically objectionable than whatever is authentically low. Well, even as to musicality: one has definitely heard worse. Here Albers was doing a job, and took it seriously. At least he wasn’t doing a number.

collage of screen capture