tom moody

Finally got to spend some time with the Brion Gysin show at the New Museum and highly recommend it. In lieu of a review, I offer the following "cut-up" of two mostly negative reviews (Ben Davis on Artnet [bold text] and Liza Eliano on AFC [italic text]). I spliced them together, "sampled" enthusiastic paragraphs at odds with the respective writers' thumbs down conclusions, removed disparaging characterizations of the artwork and/or ad hominem biographical meandering, and added some sentences of my own. This Brion Gysin- or Kathy Acker-like experiment reviews the reviews as well as the show.

What to do with Brion Gysin, the oddball Surrealist-cum-Beat artist who worked with every generation of creative bohemia from Breton's circle to the '80s graffiti artists? The New Museum approaches his oeuvre cautiously, allotting him only one floor after giving the whole museum to the rather-less-influential Urs Fischer. There’s no denying Gysin's considerable, subterranean influence on art, despite this tepid commitment. The excellent New Museum catalogue brings in a variety of contemporary artists to testify to Gysin’s inspiration on their practice.

The show is eclectic and episodic, reflecting the zigzags of Brion Gysin’s own life. We find traces of Gysin’s early, Surrealist-inspired works; his "writing paintings," canvases overrun with scribbly marks and repeating grid patterns; his extensive collaborations with Beat writer William S. Burroughs, scrapbook-like "board books" and spreads from their schizophrenic 1965 collage tome The Third Mind; his Dreamachine, a motorized spinning cylindrical device intended to induce waking dream states behind the viewer's closed eyes; his experiments in photo collage; a room-filling slideshow recreating the experience of a live Gysin reading of his combinatory poems; recordings of his collaborations with jazz musicians and poets; and much related ephemera.

The exhibition space is divided chronologically into four parts: calligraphic paintings and drawings, the “Cut-Up Method,” The Third Mind, and the Dreamachine. Ultimately Gysin's cut-ups, methodically irrational rearrangements of words and phrases known mostly in the literary sphere because of William Burroughs use of them in novels such as Naked Lunch, come to dominate every chapter of this chronology. The disassociation of language from meaning in these quasi-geometric word experiments also informs Gysin's paintings, collages, sound works, slide projections and especially two collaborative films on view that combine all these media. The grid as a kind of occult code-maker becomes an obsessive motif that unifies the show.

In Gysin’s sound cut-ups, the artist’s enigmatic voice imbues emotion and urgency into superficially nonsensical babble. A museum recreation of the artist's scratched and painted slide projections features audio of him reciting permutations of several poems while calligraphic scribbles and images of his face and figure fade in and out. (The curators are playing artist but this "piece" isn't bad.) In this work we get a sense of Gysin’s obsession with magic, sparked by the years he spent in Morocco listening to the hypnotic music of the Joujouka brotherhood. His chanting arrangements reverberate throughout the gallery, as though he were placing a spell over the viewer.

To experience the Dreamachine, placed in a darkened room in the middle of the gallery, viewers sit with closed eyes around this rotating cylinder with cutout shapes and light bulb suspended in the center. Some adopted meditative poses, others looked confused—one man stood in the corner as if afraid to even get near. I chose not to listen to the Throbbing Gristle soundtrack on a proffered iPod but tuned in to the abundant sounds already in the room, as I watched the pulsing lights on my inner eyelids. Such enlightenment as was achieved will remain undescribed.

In one corner of the galleries, on yet another iPod, you can listen to a recording of Gysin reciting poet John Giorno’s fragmentary ode to New York chaos, "Subway Sound." As the sounds of the New York subway breathe eerily in the background, Gysin performs the hell out of the poem, slowly building, his voice rich and casually expressive, pausing at exactly the right moments, wringing deadpan comedy and then a certain grandeur out of Giorno’s stitched-together mindscape, composed of geographic information and free-floating slogans. "Be a Hair Stylist in 6 ½ months. . .," Gysin rumbles. "Preparation H!" he trumpets. "Does She or Doesn’t She?"

Gysin's liabilities in life--failure to become known in any of the individual media he excelled in--become posthumous credits. Seeing the retrospective reveals a consistency of personality, method, and an odd kind of rhythm, with origins in the grid inscribed on the paint roller that he used in almost every 2-dimensional work, or perhaps just the grid inscribed in his head, which unifies several diverse arts where others have tried and failed to do so.

unplanned collaboration with mirrrroring and illalli on dump.fm

illalli posted a GIF of a pulsing planetoid
i cropped, enlarged, converted to black and white & inverted so it became a quasi-stellar pixel field
mirrrroring added the gymnast
i did a screen capture

a couple of other people's dump.fm dumps in a stacked arrangement
(the truck is shaq's find and i forgot who did the train--in my post they are unresized)

A certain breed of aristocratic right winger (particularly the type that inherited wealth or got rich in the financial casinos) has obsessed about ending Social Security since the days of FDR. Apparently one of these specimens is now a close advisor to Pres. Obama. The crew's current strategy is to claim that Soc. Sec. is "in crisis" and needs to be "fixed." Apparently this isn't true at all. But how not true?

From a press release from Congressman Jerrold Nadler, via Atrios:

[T]he Social Security Trust Fund has a $2.5 trillion dollar surplus, and it will be able to pay 100 percent of benefits through 2037, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees. What’s more, Social Security has not contributed at all to the federal deficit.

The statement you receive in the mail from Social Security corroborates this, but makes it sound more dire:

In 2016 we will begin paying in more benefits than we collect in taxes. Without changes, by 2037 the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted [based on intermediate assumptions from the Trustees] and there will be enough money to pay only about 76 cents for each dollar or scheduled benefits.

Pres. Obama's "Fiscal Commission," also known as the Catfood Commission because it is stacked with people who think you will do fine if you live on Science Diet after age 70, is talking about raising the retirement age or cutting benefits in the next five years to fix this. But there is no present "crisis" in Social Security. Lots of time to think about how to fund it at 100% after the year 2037. One idea might be closing the 700 military bases the US maintains around the world for no reason after the end of the cold war.

Have revised my artwork archive so it's a little more up to date. Style-wise it's still a plain old HTML page but have added some new thumbnails. Like most artists' archives these days it's a collection of bottomless labyrinths but at least the "portal" sort of says where the work is coming from. Lo-fi, old paint programs, cartoony, GIFs, abstraction, photorealist portraits, noise--a true unified vision. [ironic smiley]
But, no tactical media, no back stories, no XYZ narratives, it's mostly WYSIWYG art.

Jane Hamsher has the lowdown on President Obama's so-called Fiscal Commission, a group of mostly wealthy conservatives that has been meeting in secret to draft ways to screw you out of the Social Security benefits you've been taxed for your whole life. It's popularly known as the Catfood Commission because that's what you'll be living on in your old age if this group's recommendations become law.

Commission Co-Chairman Alan Simpson said this:

We’re trying to take care of the lesser people in society and do that in a way without getting into all the flash words you love [to] dig up, like cutting Social Security, which is bullshit. We’re not cutting anything, we’re trying to make it solvent.

(emphasis added)

At least one lesser person would like to tell the entitled Simpson what he can take care of, but would settle for seeing the commission disbanded, as Hamsher recommends. Thanks again, Pres. Hopey McChangelot.

PS The charming Simpson also said:

"And yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"

This is the Co-Chairman of Obama's commission speaking. Congressional leaders are already saying they'll vote for whatever this blowhard recommends.

Update: How solvent is Social Security? Very.

Guthrie Lonergan's artwork MySpace Intro Playlist (briefly summarized here) isn't original by any means. It was done in the early '60s as mail art.

Carla Sugarman intercepted a postal sack with letters to an advice column. They were meant to be public (as published correspondence in a newspaper) but Sugarman republished them in "Funny Mail," a widely read general circulation magazine of the day. The letters weren't just retyped but were photographed and reproduced as four-color offset images, with the addresses of the senders below the letters.

Then Sugarman made a mimeograph of the article in "Funny Mail" and mailed it to 300 people on her mail art mailing list. They mailed it to 300 other mail artists. Eventually the entire project was documented by John Held, Jr. and became a canonical mail art work.

Notoriety for the piece occurred in the non-mail art world after several senders of the original letters sued Sugarman, eventually settling for a large undisclosed sum. "Funny Mail" was also joined in the case and ceased publication shortly afterward.

satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...

A couple of people who police the Rhizome.org comment threads for "correct thinking" love to construct historic timelines for every current development. We can learn from the precedents and mistakes of art history, we are told, therefore these lineages enhance our understanding of work.
But honestly, what kind of precedent (net art or non-net art) exists for this:

pre-institutional recognition
Artist "collects" his favorite MySpace intros (videos people made in the mid-'00s welcoming people to their page), with an eye to: the amateurish, the banal, the pathetic, the cultural "other."
Artist posts the collection to YouTube as a playlist, so that the videos are viewed by a different audience than the original, intended audience (YouTube, where people go to watch music videos and funny slice-of-life videos, and this all happened before the Google acquisition when it was a relatively new video hosting service).

institutionalizing the collection
The slender act of collecting and shifting the context strikes some people as "art-like," so the YouTube playlist is written about and linked to by institutions as "art."
A video "version" of the work is created for museums without any links to MySpace or YouTube.

An artist who wrote about the work pre-institutional phase and the curator who presented it institutionally do not agree on the scope, nature or parameters of the work. A disinterested critic offered yet a third interpretation.
So where exactly are art historical precedents to be applied? What was even remotely like MySpace and YouTube before MySpace and YouTube?

Next: What MySpace Intro Playlist would look like if it were mail art. (Hint: strained comparison)

The Rhizome.org thread about Ben Davis's "social media art" essay briefly erupted into a blaze of gunfire, which many people found massively entertaining, but has returned to the calm drudgery of discussing a single example of misconstrued "social media art."
It's always fun to create grand timelines and argue about "inception dates," but one poor slob on the thread keeps insisting that if we could just agree on what went wrong with a single work, there might be a seed of a broader consensus (the work being a YouTube playlist of MySpace intros that may or may not have been art until we were told absolutely it was).
The slob's comments, in reverse order: 4 / 3 / 2 / 1
He is like the schoolteacher in the western movie that stands calmly at the bar, dodging bullets and flying tables, reading his book (OK, yes, he had an "alter" who was brawling). Won't you please go talk to him?

Update: Fair warning: there is an internet gnome who works for one of the colleges who hangs around the site telling everybody what's what--just try to ignore the advice.

On the Rhizome.org thread discussing "social media art," Duncan Alexander has a comment that's worth a read (except for the cartoon which reduces a certain blogger's keen insights to dog barking--am not particularly wild about that). Alexander says he's opposed to Alfred Barr-like timelines for social media art: agree, especially when they go back to the 1950s. He also resists start dates. Fine, you don't have to have a day and date some "great man" invented something. But you can peg roughly when the music changed. That would be the turn of the millennium, when "blogs" turned fixed web pages into dynamic pages and incorporated chat room chat as a kind of archival record. Since then you have had a process of converting blogs into vast networks of blogs, beginning particularly with MySpace. The art that we are talking about--such that exists--occurs within this continuum. Fixed pages still exist, but you likely will find them through the socialmediasphere and have them "spun" for you within that sphere.

Update: Alexander has already received his first dismissive comment (a picture of a teenager talking on a cell posted by "duh mom"). You gotta love the Socratic dialogue over there at Rhizome.