general

Reasons why assemblage (or "crap on crap") is now the "house style" of the art world (from an artist's perspective):

1. Everybody’s broke and there’s always an abundance of trash.
2. Six years of art education teaches that high art is dead so everyone takes the low road.
3. Disgust with capitalism and consumer culture.
4. “Nihilism.”
5. Genuine love of trash culture and its byproducts.
6. Avoidance of known art materials.
7. A way to make formal arrangements of things without being called “Greenbergian.”
8. A way to be political without sloganeering.
9. Genuine interest in the lineage of Schwitters/Rauschenberg–-considering it an unfinished project.
10. New trash (web and technology cast-offs) necessitates new ways of arranging trash (and new content unknown to Rauschenberg, et al).

From The Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick, 1964:

Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car.

"Get off," he warned it. But the commercial, well-adhered, began to crawl, buffeted by the wind, toward the door and the entrance crack. It would soon have squeezed in and would be haranguing him in the cranky, garbagey fashion of the Nitz advertisements.

He could, as it came through the crack, kill it. It was alive, terribly mortal: the ad agencies, like nature, squandered hordes of them.

The commercial, flysized, began to buzz out its message as soon as it managed to force entry. "Say! Haven't you sometimes said to yourself, I'll bet other people in restaurants can see me! And you're puzzled as to what to do about this serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous, especially--"

Chic crushed it with his foot.

The above quote copied and pasted from a site that seems to rather miss Dick's point and thinks the fly is cool. (I may regret this link.)

digby, guest blogging on salon a few days ago:

Tasers were sold to the public as a tool for law enforcement to be used in lieu of deadly force. Presumably, this means situations in which officers would have previously had to use their firearms... Nobody wants to see more death and if police have a weapon they can employ instead of a gun, in self defense or to stop someone from hurting others, I think we all can agree that's a good thing.

But that's not what's happening. Tasers are routinely used by police to torture innocent people who have not broken any law and whose only crime is being disrespectful toward their authority or failing to understand their "orders." There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped. It is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control.

It's also a subject of humor in popular culture, which helps keep the sleazy taser manufacturers in business. I think I was the only person that thought "don't taze me bro" wasn't funny at all. The media was all over that one--I saw a slickly produced TV ad (for an internet service provider? I can't remember) where the kid not wanting to be tasered was treated as an example of hilarious good fun.

Oh yeah, cops shocking people with cattle prods for disagreeing with them--that's just the country I want to live in.

The "robot Abraham Lincoln" has become a durable web meme. Here is a site with 15 examples (I know of it because it included two images I found surfing around).

When did this start? I had always assumed that Philip K. Dick's novel We Can Build You (written about on this blog a couple of weeks ago) riffed on the famous Disney audio-animatronic Lincoln, a pneumatic device that first appeared at the New York World's Fair and was then reconstituted as a more permanent exhibit at the Anaheim Disneyland.

But according to Dick's posthumous literary chronology, We Can Build You, although published in 1972, was written ten years earlier, in 1962, between The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. The New York world's fair wasn't until 1964. So it appears that once again Dick's fertile, twisted imagination hatched this fake, electromechanical president two years before Disney went public with his and eighteen years before the first one entered actual politics, with the election of Ronald Reagan.

An earlier post made fun of the Whitney Museum's blurb for its Dan Graham show catalog:

"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."

In response I said:

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.

Having now seen the show it can be officially declared what a crock all those "beyonds" are. It's a fine, thoughtful exhibit but it's about as "beyond" as a prison inmate who rarely leaves his cell and instead creates a body of work imagining all the permutations of his cell walls and his thoughts about those walls. Yes, yes, Graham photographed some tract houses in New Jersey in the '60s, but the show is centered around a series of gallery-like spaces with 1- and 2-way mirrors and cameras that seem more like devices for surveillance and stalking of gallery visitors than eyes exploring the world outside ("I'm looking at this woman through my viewfinder and describing to you her nude body while she watches me on TV and describes mine"). Graham's show is a meditation on wall labels, documentation of artwork, an artist talking about his own art, and the architecture of galleries and sculpture gardens. There are exceptions, such as Graham's documentary films about rock and roll, but one of the more telling statements about the show's commitment to the outside world is Graham's written observation, in a text piece listing examples of art and architecture he likes, that he admires Larry Bell's use of plexiglas but wishes it didn't have any color. Tacky colored plexiglas is precisely what the world beyond the art world looks like.