Paddy Johnson on Unmonumental Online

Comments Off on Paddy Johnson on Unmonumental Online

In Paddy Johnson's review of the "Unmonumental Online" show at the New Museum, she refers to the Whitney's 2001 computer art show "BitStreams" as "disastrous" and casting a long shadow over subsequent attempts to show net art or computer art in museums. She doesn't say why that is so or why the NewMu show is an improvement.

Johnson implies that "BitStreams" was not popular (by lumping it in with MOMA's largely undiscussed "Automatic Update" show). It was very popular, attendance-wise, and got barrels of press ink. That's one of the reasons it was disastrous. People saw curator Lawrence Rinder's largely bad taste on display and thought "so that is the art that is made with computers." I wrote about it here and won't go into it again. The show was heavy on bells and whistles, Exploratorium-style art, the most elementary things that could be done with Photoshop, and the usual workstations no one wants to stand at.

Since that time social networking sites have dominated the Web and a fair amount of exchange and cross-pollination has happened with art online. The NewMu show at least acknowledges this with pages lifted from YouTube, LiveJournal, etc. and artists working in the media of blogs and browser-friendly file formats. "BitStreams" was dominated by a group of artists who came to prominence in the dot com, Net Art 1.0 era; "Unmonumental Online" is dominated by a group who came to prominence in the post-dot com, Net Art 2.0 era. More could be written about these two periods and how the shows reflected the strengths and weaknesses of each.

There Will Be Idiots

Comments Off on There Will Be Idiots

Eileen Jones (hilariously) does not like There Will Be Blood:

To rub in this sentimental view of the rich and powerful as spiritually barren—cigars, mansions, private bowling alleys, and yet they cannot love!—Plainview has to acquire and reject some family members. He gets hold of an adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier). At first he does seem to love the kid with an almost creepy fervor. There’s this scene where they’re both on the floor after the boy is deafened by an explosion, and Plainview is sort of pawing and mauling the kid’s head while the kid goes "Mrrrraaawww!!” I’m not quite sure what that was, other than the only preparation the audience is going to get for Plainview baying "Draaaaiiiiinnnnagggge!!" later in the film. Incoherent yelling’s a sort of motif in this movie.

Jones has great fun quoting critics on the movie's greatness: Roger Ebert calls it a "force beyond categories." Where one might differ with her is whether all the weirdness in the film is a bug or feature--evidently she wants her rapacious capitalists and religious zealots played more sensibly.

Crispin Creeper(n) Etc

Comments Off on Crispin Creeper(n) Etc

Two recent posts from Petra Cortright:

Crispin Creeper. A YouTube of a TV commercial for a 900 number for kids. You talk to a demon who tells gross jokes and plays disgusting sound effects. As for the commercial itself, if Clement Greenberg were writing "Avant Garde and Kitsch" today he'd be stymied by this. [forgot to mention this is a "freddy freaker clone," per guthrie]

This hand [5 MB .GIF] is what we should want more of in "computer art" (from her LJ page). Visually seductive, failing in intriguing, destructively random ways. It slightly recalls the architecture of Coop Himmelblau, 3D form based on abstract expressionist smasmodic gestures, yet clinging desperately to the Cartesian grid. Instead of Frank Gehry's kitschy "artistic" curves you have the found curves of a stock videogame hand (what is mostly accepted as "computer art.") The myriad of patterns within the hand's polygonal facets suggests a mise en abyme of Op art, constantly snapping back to a contoured surface. Last, there is no mystification because the program is included in the screen shots.