tom moody

Was somewhat amused to see my handiwork on lovegifs, a tumblr site that, as explained on lalblog, is thought by some to be out of bounds in appropriating others' animated GIFs without credit.

As I explained in my post I took the frames for "my" GIF from a 3D modeling page that cpb linked to. It was three images of a traffic cone, one in full color and two stages of wire frame. They are slightly different sizes, so when put together in sequence they appear to throb. Saving them at a lower resolution altered the color scheme and contributed subtly to the throbbing effect.

It is both my work and a "remix" of other artwork(s), precisely the kind of thorny hybrid courts are so ill-equipped to judge.

Lovegifs doesn't claim to be the author, just the conduit. Apparently Lovegifs ran afoul of a complex scheme within tumblr for giving authors ultimate credit.

It's good the host has something like that in force, I guess, but with most of the tumblr sites I look at I don't have a clue who made what. Some, like Rising Tensions, have a very definite style, but I can't tell how much of what's posted there is original and am unlikely to spend a lot of time clicking flow charts on tumblr to find out the "true" source. Especially knowing that some true sources may be, like mine, a mix of made and found.

Lalblog sums up the issues well:

Though Tumblarity [a utility for gauging popularity of tumblr posts] may have nothing to do with Mogadonia's frustrations, having it there to remind you of how "successful" your work, taste and curatorial skills are makes "credit" that much more important. It's no longer just a matter of properly citing your sources, but also of giving "props", and though I empathise and respect an artist's copyright, I can't help but feel that a lot of this is based more in the ego trip of popularity.

I am by no means above this, I always revel when my "finds" get re-blogged or posted elsewhere, linking back to either here or my Tumblog, but one can't justifiably force themselves upon others by saying "I made this!" or "I found this!" when so little (especially when it comes to animated gifs) is ever found only once or by only one person. Part of the joy of the internet is the anonymity and reproducibility - success is when a gif spreads like a virus and can no longer be traced to an "original" (what and where is the original when it comes to digital material, anyway?) - it is no longer "mine" but of the internet.

Perhaps I'm being too idealistic, but what is represented as conspiracy looks to me like a show of laziness and/or a desire to have (yet another) hot new animated gif Tumblog. Lovegifs is little more than a minor symptom of the internet and, at worst, a major symptom of Tumblarity.

"Dan Graham has always pointed beyond in his work: beyond the art object, beyond the studio, beyond the medium, beyond the gallery, beyond the self. Beyond all these categories and into the realm of the social, the public, the democratic, the mass produced, the architectural, the anarchic, and the humorous."

Text cut-and-pasted from the website of the Whitney Museum, describing the catalog for its recently-opened Graham retrospective. The pounding rhythm and faulty parallelism amuse, but also epitomize the kind of priestly incantation spoken or sung over contemporary art. We must be assured and soothed that every market player in the art world is in fact anti-object and anti-gallery, a selfless Walt Whitman-like figure that embraces, nay, merges, with the democratic mass, doing good works over a lifetime of artistic philanthropy. In earlier posts we have experimented with the above copy, reversing the nouns and adjectives to make the artist sound like an egotist, running permutations of the false parallels, and comparing all the "beyonds" to statements in a newspaper article that suggest that Graham is not really so beyond as all that. We need a New, Improved way of talking about art: the reflexive populism is starting to creak.

"Dan Graham has always pointed beyond in his work: beyond the art object, beyond the studio, beyond the medium, beyond the gallery, beyond the self. Beyond all these categories and into the realm of the social, the public, the democratic, the mass produced, the architectural, the anarchic, and the humorous." (From the website of the Whitney Museum, describing the catalog for its recently-opened Graham retrospective.)

beyond the art object

His glass pavilions have been placed indoors and outdoors in locations as remote as the Arctic Circle in Norway.

beyond the studio

The photographer and art historian Jeff Wall has written that while many other conceptual artists “abjured, apparently for good, any involvement with the world” outside of their methodologies, Mr. Graham’s aim has always been “to remain involved with the wider world as a subject and occasion for art, but to structure that involvement in the rigorously self-reflexive terms” opened up by conceptualism.

beyond the medium

Called “Homes for America,” it is a series of amateur-seeming snapshots of suburban architecture, published in 1966 in Arts magazine after Esquire turned it down. The blandly colored pictures tweak Minimalism — the houses look like Judd boxes — and send up the sorts of erudite essays then being published in magazines like Esquire that probed the standardizing soul of suburbia.

beyond the gallery

His fortunes have improved in recent years; he lives alone in a nicer apartment in NoLIta and is represented by a prominent gallery, Marian Goodman, though he says the work still doesn’t sell well, and he speaks disparagingly of “superstars,” including a few represented by his own gallery, like Pierre Huyghe and Tino Sehgal, making it clear that he is not counted among them.

beyond the self

Because so much of his work — from early pop-culture writing to performances with video cameras to his well known mirrored pavilions — is about what Mr. Simpson called “the way one experiences the space of the self,” it has also seemed more prescient as each new iteration of the Web alters the calculus of media, society and individuality.

Newspaper article quotes from "A Round Peg" by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times.

If David Lynch directed Dirty Dancing: [YouTube]

If David Lynch directed Return of the Jedi: [YouTube]