general

A couple of upcoming projects:

This month I will be showing at TELIC Arts Exchange's Distributed Gallery, in Los Angeles. The opening is scheduled for December 6 (details to follow). I am showing four videos, single animation loops converted from GIFs, on screens in different locations in LA's Chinatown neighborhood. TELIC is also publishing a booklet with an interview I did with artist and curator Sean Dockray. Here is a description of the project:

The Distributed Gallery, opening October 3, begins as a network of four video monitors in locations in and around Chinatown’s West and Central Plazas. Monitors will be located at Fong’s, Via Cafe, Ooga Booga, and the Public School. Each month someone new will curate or create an exhibition, accompanied by a small publication. Upcoming shows include: DIY, Tom Leeser, Geoff Manaugh, Tom Moody, the Public School, Annie Shaw, James Merle Thomas, and Wendy Yao.

On December 7, at 5 pm, several of my animated GIFs will be screened with piano accompaniment (yes!) at a Chicago space called the Nightingale, along with the work of other artists. The event is "The Web of Cokaygne; Candle and Bell," and the animated GIF screening is curated by Dain Oh:

"The Web of Cokaygne; Candle and Bell" is a three part screening. In a traditional sense it maintains a beginning, a middle and an end. The first section is 0P3NFR4M3W0RK, an open DIY digital art exhibition initiated by Jon Satrom, instantiated by Dain Oh for the "Web of Cokaygne; Candle and Bell" and previously at (A) r4WB1t5 micro.Fest (initiated by jonCates and jon.satrom). The second portion is 787 Cliparts, by Oliver Laric. A video in which he displays hand-selected clip art that he has found on the Internet in a manner that suggest continuity in motion and the persistence of vision. The third and final section of WoC is a selection of animated GIFs by both artists and non-artists working with the Internet. The artists include Petra Cortright, Olia Lialina + Dragan Espenschied, Guthrie Lonergan, Tom Moody, Jon Satrom and Paul Slocum. The selected GIF's are important examples to reflect the history of the moving image. Examples are gif versions of: a goat found on a bowl from Iran's Burnt City, Muybridge's horse, then moving to commercial cartoons, video games and finally, new media and www gif's. The screening will be executed in real time and accompanied by a live piano performance.

ish I could be there for both of these events ("W" is from the latter's website). More on them soon.
(Will also slip in here that Nasty Nets is doing something at the 2009 Sundance. More on that soon also.)

From IMDb:

Catherine E. Coulson began her professional association with director David Lynch when she worked as assistant director on Lynch's legendary feature debut Eraserhead (1977). This is when the two began discussing the idea of a woman who carried a log around with her. Coulson spent much of her career working behind-the-scenes before finally bringing the Log Lady to life on Lynch's [and Mark Frost's] cult TV series Twin Peaks (1990). The Log Lady was one of the most puzzling and emblematic of the show's characters, and she has ensured Coulson a permanent place in the hearts of cult TV fans.

Log Lady (and Bob Dylan) photo-tribute.

Recently saw David Lynch's short film The Amputee (1974). A rather self-absorbed woman, played by Coulson, writes an overwrought letter about a lover or ex-lover. She is in a hospital and missing both legs--the letter has nothing to do with this, she writes as if she had never been injured. A doctor or medical technician enters the room and begins fussing with the surgical dressing on one of her stumps. The routine procedure goes horribly wrong, and as blood (or some kind of blood-like fluid) spurts out Coulson continues calmly writing and reading the letter aloud (in voiceover). Then the entire scene repeats. The whole thing is shot with grainy video stock. The body horror and obsession with texture is classically Lynchian, but Coulson's "Virginia Woolf in existential hell" narration puts it over the top. Unlike Woolf her recounting of the minutiae of relationships eludes our attention, partly because it is so banal but partly because the gore makes it impossible to focus on what she is saying.

Excerpt from a Mike Kelley/Glenn O'Brien conversation, via NEWSgrist:

GO: I've remembered an event and thought I'd said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious.

MK: I have experienced that often. I've stolen ideas, and people have stolen from me. I'm all for it. That's the way things get created. That's how culture grows. When there's an amazing idea, you take it and run with it. I mean, you're going to take it someplace else than the source anyway. There are a lot of artists who've worked at that specifically. One of my favorite writers is the Comte de Lautréamont, and much of his writing is constructed from plagiarized texts. Who would claim that his work is no different than what he plagiarized?

GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.

MK: That's great. And the corporate entertainment industry is trying to stop it from happening. Think about it: Andy Warhol could not have a career now. He would be sued every two seconds.

GO: It's given a lot of work to the lawyers.

MK: Copyright laws are terrible for culture. It's illegal to respond to the imagery that surrounds you; you're bombarded every minute of the day with mass-media sludge. It should be the opposite: Everybody should have to respond to it. This is what should be taught in the public school system.

William S. Burroughs should be a major role model: All students should be given tape recorders and cameras to constantly record the gray veil that surrounds them, so that they can recognize that it's even there--and manipulate it. Most people are not aware of the white noise they exist in. Tape recording and photography allowed people to become aware of what was invisible to them for the first time. We're surrounded by invisibility. That's what I think art can do--make things visible.

The part in boldface should be repeated like a catechism when you go to sleep at night, to counteract the endless media sludge of your day, for example, what I just heard on the radio at the deli against my will: "The NY Times magazine has two different covers this week, one with Tom Cruise and..." Who gives a flip about that? Really.

A comment yrs truly just made on Paddy Johnson's blog. Seems a blogger stole some of print writer turned recent blogger Catherine Spaeth's words, and Spaeth JUST WENT BERSERK, like Billy Jack kung fu-ing townies in the '70s films.

Coming in late on this discussion. Catherine Spaeth, please get over yourself. Three posts on your blog about this peccadillo you discovered and all your words here in Johnson’s comments are just too much. Publishing "the plagiarist's" picture under the blog title "_____ the Plagiarist," it's just melodramatic overkill.

I'm not sure that what you're griping about (and griping, and griping…) is even properly plagiarism. As you describe it, a blogger used some of your words but "sapped your writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder."

That’s two different issues. If he changed your meaning but attributed the words to you, that's one thing. Using your words verbatim and passing them off as his is another. It seems like the sins somewhat cancel each other out. I'm sure you can lecture me endlessly about why this is not so.

Cribbing others' prose is wrong. Unfortunately the Internet is still an intellectual Wild West, and people do all kinds of things on the fly that won't live up to your ethical standards as a print writer. You are the schoolmaster insisting on decorum while others are ducking from the hail of bullets as the bad guys ride into town. Point out your grievance, move on. No one cares how important you think you are.

This post on William Eggleston a few years ago discussed the difference between two movements, "art photography" and "artists with cameras":

[Jim] Lewis' phrase "new art photographers" glosses over a not-so-old schism in the world of Museum-collected photography, between "art photography" and what might roughly be called "artists with cameras," a distinction outlined in Abigail Solomon-Godeau's famous essay "Photography after Art Photography." Almost exclusively shot in black and white and practiced by the likes of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander, art photography was firmly ensconced in the museum in the '60s and '70s under the stewardship of MOMA curator John Szarkowski; it emphasized darkroom practice and objective standards of quality in photos.

The "conceptual photography" of [Richard] Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and others, however, emerged from the world of painting, sculpture, and video. These artists used photos to document a performance, advance a theory, or critique the mass media, and didn't much give a damn about photographic values (including the old prohibition on color). In addition to this generation change in America, developments in European contemporary art gradually came to light in the late '70s: Gilbert & George, for example, used vivid colors in their photopastiches at least as early as 1975, and the conceptualist Jan Dibbets had no qualms about color in his images of tilted landscapes and car hoods. And finally, as Lewis mentions, color printing technology was vastly improving during this period.

Thus, while Szarkowski may have taken a big leap vis a vis older art photographers by giving Eggleston a one-person museum exhibit in '76, other trends were fast making that radicality a non-issue. The Europeans and young Americans weren’t invited into the tea circle of art photography because William Eggleston opened the door: instead, they found their own critical advocates, and after a few years of publicity and sales, they simply took over the show--and color came along with them.

The same types of distinctions could be made between "new media" artists and what could be called "artists with computers." The latter care about their laptops as much as Cindy Sherman cared about her camera. Necessary mechanical skills can be learned but the habits accompanying those skills need to be unlearned. Also, artists may not always and at all times be "with computers"--it's a tool to be picked up and put down as needed.

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. New media artists tend to germinate in design or media arts programs whereas artists with computers incline to studio arts backgrounds or autodidacticism. Rhizome.org has traditionally been a bastion of new media whereas Paddy Johnson's blog (particularly last summer's IMG MGMT series) has provided a platform for artists with computers. (She may not appreciate being lumped into this diatribe.) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ("new media objects exist as data," etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

The so-called surf club artists come from both schools. Nevertheless, resistance to the clubs (comparing them to George Bush and closed source programming) and sarcasm of certain reactionaries seen in the Rhizome chat boards in June of 2008 could be construed as evidence of the split. New media artists scoff at the art world's notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

[This may seem like a strange time to pigeonhole Rhizome since they are in the middle of a fundraiser (this blog just kicked in for a seedling membership). The staff can't be held accountable for the obscurantists in the chatrooms; there is some sentiment within the organization for "artists with computers" so giving is recommended, enabling the institution to thrive so it can be colonized, ha ha.]