AsSLowASPossible

In 1985 John Cage composed ASLSP, a work for the organ whose directions are to play it as slow as possible. It's first performance lasted 29 minutes... a more recent performance was 71 minutes. But is that really as slow as possible? No!

Since September 5, 2001 there is an ongoing performance of the piece in Halberstadt, Germany that is intended to last 639 years. The significance of the date, location, & duration is that September 5th was the 89th anniversary of John Cage (and the year of the start of the millenium), the organ is located in the birthplace church of the modern organ, and the performance started on the 639th anniversary of the modern organ.

The computer-controlled performance began with 1-1/2 years of silence (due to the work's first initial notes being rests).

http://www.npr.org/programs/pt/features/2003/sep/aslsp.html
http://www.john-cage.halberstadt.de/new/index.php?l=e

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Super quick post

Today I'm helping friends paint their apartment. That inspires today's posting: Sabrina Raaf's Translator II: Grower (2004-05). The robot draws a bar graph on the wall that documents the CO2 levels in the gallery. It's reactive without being interactive.

Popcorn & parrot art

Here are two interesting works, both dealing with language.

Talking Popcorn by Nina Katchadourian interprets popcorn popping as Morse code. A text-to-speech program provides simultaneous translation. Since popcorn doesn't have short & long popping sounds, the duration of the silence between the pops create the short Morse code "dots" and long "dashes."

I can see how this could create a series of random letters, but I wonder how it is turned into coherent words. Perhaps it waits until a word appears in the gibberish? The problem with that is you might pop an entire batch of popcorn and only get a couple of words. Perhaps the gibberish is translated into the closest matching word (in the same way that spell-checkers work).

In addition to the popcorn machine, Katchadourian has a nice series of spin-off works including The Popcorn Journal which consists of bags of popcorn along side their text output and Talking Popcorn's First Words which are bronze popped corn from the first batch (which was translated as "we").



may-por-e' is a work by Rachel Berwick in which she attempts to teach them the Maypure language. The Maypure were a South American tribe that were wiped out by the Carib in 1799. Parrots were among the items that the Carib's looted after the attack. A few days later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt acquired one of these parrots. Realizing it was the last speaker of the Maypure language, he phonetically recorded the parrot's language. Using that sole record of the language, Berwick teaches contemporary parrot the Maypure language.

Pretentious Art Writing

A while back I won portlandart.net's Pretentious Art Writing contest. I thought I'd use today's post to share that little gem:

The pop-art (yet neo-minimalist) etchings of Ziggy and Family Circus, both liegemen to the Lichtensteinian legacy, question their own raison d'etre. Are they visual tropes? Are they self-conscious (self-mocking/self-loathing) po-mo nombrilisme? Or are they simply (and solely) stochastic snapshots sans lexical basis? The Family Circus series can best be examined as artistic interventions against the oppressive humor archetype, whereas the unappealingly desperate musings of Cathy Guisewite's eponymous series are truly indebted to Jenny Holzer’s oeuvre. Or, as Baudrillard and Guillaume so succinctly state, "What is produced with the romantic turn...is...the...play of...masculine hysteria...of ...sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness."[1]
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[1] Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Figures de l'alterite. Paris: Descartes et Cie., 1994.

Mirror

I created Mirror for my recent show at the PS122 Gallery. It consists of a vertical monitor that displays the mirror image of the viewer, along with superimposed lines displaying where the facial recognition software believes the viewer’s face and eyes are located. Pressing a button uploads the viewer’s image to Flickr.com (click here to view those images) and displays the previous viewer who most closely matches the current viewer. The facial recognition algorithm used in my facial-recogntion projects was kindly donated by Neurotechnologija.

A video of all the snapshots of the viewers can be seen here.

Why don't you just try making art?

The current The New Yorker has a profile of Jeffrey Deitch by Calvin Tompkins. In it Deitch repeatedly says how much he loves the artist as art, meaning (I take it) the artist as an anarchistic holy fool whose life is inseparable from the work created. This kind of art brings to my mind the story about the making of Marathon Man:

Hoffman came to the set one day looking absolutely wretched, and Sir Larry said, 'Dusty, you look absolutely wretched!', and it turns out that he had been awake for twenty-four hours, because at this point in the movie, his character had been, so Larry replied, 'Oh, Dusty, why don't you just try acting?

The article described the Dan Colen/Dash Snow 'Hamster Nest" installation at Deitch Projects (where they filled the space waist-deep with shredded paper and spent a few drugged filled, naked nights partying with friends) as well as a dinner performance Deitch arranged (where the naked Austrian art collective Gelitin wore fetish accouterments and built a bridge over the dinner table so that they could piss on the dinner guests). On these sorts of activities, Tomkins remarks:

Whether this sort of thing represents their defiant rejection of the superheated art market and late-capitalist decadence, as Deitch and others suggest, is an open question. My own sense of it is that the self-indulgence level of these activities keep them at sort of pre-adolescent, or even toddler, stage, where the defiant aspects fail to register.

The problem with this kind of nihilistic art is that it is easy. I'm sure there have been times when flouting society's conventions was a brave or shocking statement (the Dadaists had some bite). But now it is a warmed-over formula. These spectacles don't elicit so much a *gasp* as a *sigh*. How about trying for profound instead of profane?

Four shows

I thought I'd write about the four art shows, of the ones I've seen, that most stand out.

The first gallery experience that I can remember is seeing Guernica when it visited Iowa City. I was around eight years old and my father took me to see it at the University of Iowa. The painting seemed humongous and I was particularly struck by the bull and the horse. I honestly don't know why the memory has stayed with me. It's a powerful painting and perhaps the reason is as simple as that. Maybe it's because it was something that I did alone with my dad--an unusual occurrence since I have two sisters and it was not that long after my parents divorced. As far as I can tell it didn't have an influence on my art or my decision to become an artist... but who knows?

Many years later I was visiting my friends Ben & Esther (this is the same Ben who would later collaborate with me on Anthroptic) in Basel, Switzerland. This is not long after I had returned to making art and, at the time, was focused on stone carving. Ben took me to the Jean Tinguely Museum (Basel was Tinguely's home town). At the time I thought Tinguely's work was pretty cool, but not very relevant to my art. It wasn't until years later when I was half-way through graduate school that I realized the impact Tinguely's work has had one me. The piece to the right is a Tinguely machine for automatically making abstract expressionist drawings.

Shortly before going to graduate school I took an introduction to sculpture course at UC Berkeley. I ended up dropping the course, but before I did the class visited SFMoMA. The museum had a show that explored automatically generated art. It included Roxy Paine's SCHUMAK and Karin Sander's Persons 1:10. SCHUMAK generates plastic out of extruded plastic. For 1:10, Sander invited people to be scanned in 3-D, from which a small plastic figure is made and then painted. Sander doesn't pose the person or dictate what clothes they wear... she doesn't create or paint the figure. Her art is in setting up the system, after it runs on its own. At the time I found Sander's work troubling, thou
gh I have come to love it. SCHUMAK, on the other hand bothered me more over time (though I certainly appreciate it on its own terms).

When my Email Erosion piece shown, I included a statement which contrasted it with Roxy Paine's work. Here's an excerpt:

Later this month, Roxy Paine’s PMU (Paint Manufacturing Unit) will be installed at the Portland Art Museum. Paine’s art-making installations create beautiful works of art and also offer an interesting contrast with the piece Email Erosion installed here. Paine's machines exhibit a kind of self-sufficient solipsism: they have no line of communication, with the viewer. The result is a stillness in the installations: the machines spend most of their time allowing plastic to cool or paint to dry, frustrating the viewers’ natural desire to see them at work. Perhaps Paine’s art-making mechanisms mirror an artist’s fantasy of uncompromising, wholly internal creativity, but the result for the viewer seems to be a machine in a sad and lonely existence. In my work, the goal is to have the machines be lively and engaged with the viewer, collaborating in the process of making art.

The final show in my list is Work Ethic which was at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003, not long after I started graduate school. Here's an ArtForum article about the show. Essentially it looked at conceptual art through the lens of work... whether the artist was creating work for herself/himself (such as Richard Serra catching lead), avoiding work (such as the art generating machines of Roxy Paine), managing work (such as Warhol's factory), or creating experiences (such as Edwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures). The timing of the show could not have been better--the experience of it launched me in a direction in graduate school that I'm still following today.

An Honorable Mention goes to Tim Hawkinson's Whitney show a couple of years ago... I was going to include it, but it's been a busy week and I decided to cut the list short. If I was to be fair, I would've cut Picasso and kept Hawkinson, but having Guernica as a first art memory is too cool not to include.

Any shows stand out for you? If so, please let me know in the comments!

The Power of Sculpture

WARNING: This post may have too much pretentious artspeak. I've been mulling over a few ideas this last week... as I began to write them down, I realized that the thoughts have a semiotic slant to them. It goes downhill from there :)

I was recently looking at a show and trying to figure out why one of the artist's works seemed much more powerful than the others. Eventually I realized most of the pieces were representing a thing rather than simply being a thing. The work that struck me most was different. It was the most object-like; it wasn't trying to present anything other than itself.

I'm not really talking about representation versus abstraction... rather, something like the semiotic distinction between a signifier (the word that represents a thing) and the signified (the actual object or mental concept). Most artistic mediums inherently have a signifier/signified relationship to the world. Almost every painting, even the most abstract, are trying to present something, not just be something. There are exceptions to that (Robert Irwin's work comes to mind).

But setting aside exceptions, most mediums don't lend themselves to an existential solidness. Sculpture, however, is a medium that can simply be (as opposed to signifying something outside of its own existence). Sculpture is the only visual medium that has an natural affinity for this. This doesn't (necessarily) mean that sculpture is the better medium. But I do think sculpture that steps outside of this signifier/signified duality has the power of directness--nothing is loss in translation. What is more, the object gains a measure of emancipation from the artist's intention; it's no longer just a symbol.

I was looking for an artist whose work might show the range of what I'm describing and decided on Rebecca Horn. The first sculpture (located on a Barcelona beach) is Homentage a la Barceloneta. It is definitely has a sense of representing/signifying a warehouse or apartment building. It's made out of COR-TEN steel, which is a fairly common sculpture material and adds to the sense of "artwork" as opposed to it simply being an object on its own terms. This is an unusually conventional (and signifying) artwork for Horn.

This second work from 2000, Schmetterling-Skulpture (Butterfly Sculpture), takes a step away from signfying. The viewer is left to decide whether it is meant to be viewed as a butterfly or whether it is something of its own.

The third sculpture, from her Bodylandscapes series seems to exist in its own right. The ink sprayer, as the series title suggests, may reference the body and perhaps IV drip bags, but it also seems to have its own integrity and power.

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A little off topic, but these thoughts of reminded me of Sherrie Levine's 1979 work where she re-photographed Walker Evans's famous depression era photos. I think the connection is that her photographs can be seen as signifying the photographs (as opposed to the images originally taken). Michael Mandiberg has a pair of websites (AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com) where he presents scans of those images.

Anthroptic

The Gardeners of Rhododendron
Listen to story by calling 212-330-8284 ext. 6 (or clicking here)

Today is the last day of my show at PS122 Gallery in the East Village. Included in the show is Anthroptic, a project I did in collaboration with author Benjamin Rosenbaum.

It consists of eight photos that were selected from Flickr.com by a facial recognition program. Each photo is a "false match" where the face detected isn't human. Ben wrote a short story for each photo (and taken as a set, the stories interconnect and tell a larger narrative).

For the gallery version of the project we have setup a phone system so that people can call in and listen to the stories (as read by actors and, in a couple of cases, AT&T's text-to-voice demo program).

You listen to the stories by calling (212) 330-8284. Or you can visit our web-based version of the project.