Once more, with feeling

Imagine the evening news meets Flight of the Conchords in a project mapping an effusion of feeling onto the flattened affect of reporters and politicians. YouTube video art sensation “Auto-Tune the News” moves an irrepressible infectious sincerity through the surface screens of propaganda and irony which are so often proper to politics. Let’s feel it.

Auto-Tune the News #2: Pirates, Drugs and Gay Marriage

Auto-Tune the News #1: Pentagon Budget Cuts, Economic Woes, March Madness

Flight of the Conchords consider the issues in Episode 2, “Think About It”

BOMB is (back) in the building

Richard Prince, "Untitled (LuAnne)," 1983

After a hiatus, we (the folks from BOMB Magazine) are back to resume our fun and educational guest blogging. We’ll be chiming in once a month with some cool stuff that we hope you’ll like.

For those of you in New York, Rhys Chatham will be performing “Guitar Trio” tonight (April 24th) at 6pm as part of the exhibition The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here’s a video of a past performance if you’re not aware of, or haven’t witnessed, the awesome glory of “Guitar Trio”:

The Pictures Generation exhibition is a massive survey of a group of artists who were using photography in their work between 1974 and 1984, and includes BOMB interviewees: Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and James Casebere. Kruger and Simmons have also been covered by our lovely hosts, Art21.

There’s a good explanation of who exactly the pictures generation is/was here. Also, Charlesworth and Kruger made a piece called Glossolalia specifically for BOMB’s issue 5 that includes images from many members of this group.

The new generation is shaped by its exposure to YouTube, and Kalup Linzy is one of their leaders. His show at the Studio Museum in Harlem is up until June 28th. If you’re not familiar with Linzy, here’s one of his original video pieces:

Christopher Durang’s Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them has been extended through the first weekend of May at the Public Theater.

And in the spirit of torture, sometimes things are just better in song:

In closing, we want to encourage you to get out there and buy magazines, lots of magazines! Shockingly, even in the age of the internets, people are still starting new ones! Here are two that caught our eye: Gigantic (co-founded by intrepid former BOMB intern and current BOMBlogger Annie DeWitt), and Meatpaper (as you’d expect—a magazine dedicated to meat in all its glory).

Obama Special, Part 2

Photograph of President Obama's inauguration by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

This continues my previous post about the laptop DJ/performance artist Girl Talk, in which I situate him in a lineage of intersections between art and music and suggest a link between his concert on November 16, 2008 at Terminal 5 in New York and the election of Barack Obama a week and a half earlier.

Girl Talk’s referencing of Obama through video projections at this performance made explicit his connection with the then-president-elect—not a personal but a formal affinity. The form in question is, simply put, miscegenation: the elimination of difference through the blending of categories. This form was stressed throughout Obama’s campaign, both as a personal attribute of the candidate himself and as his fundamental message that he would transcend Bush-era ideological polarization and unite the country behind common goals. Likewise, in Girl Talk’s mixture of fragments of highly recognizable popular songs, different genres coexist in delirious combination—an effect exploited in his concerts, in which the crowd is invited onstage to take up the role of performer. This is from the opening moments of the 11/15 show at Terminal 5:

Why compare an arty DJ and our current president? To make a case for the value of art that entertains.

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BOMB in the building (What we did last weekend edition)

MoMA takes over Brooklyn's Atlantic/Pacific subway station with reproductions from the permanent collection. This shot taken by Bradly Brown on Feb. 09, mid installation.

Last weekend the BOMB folks cut a swath through the NYC cultural scene, so we thought we would share a sampling of what we found.

We started off at Terminal 5 for the Black Keys show.  None of our faces were intact by the end of the night.  For a two piece band the Keys produce an enormous and mind boggling amount of sound.  Every once in a while its nice to escape into some good old fashioned American blues rock. (Really tried to find a good interview with them, but they seem to be resistant to the form, so went with this interview they did with GZA)

Saturday night we saw the insanely young and wildly talented Beirut at Brooklyn Academy of Music.  They’re amazing, but you have to think this performance would have killed if place in Vienna during the 17th Century.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Lower East Side, stopping in at galleries along our walk.  It was a pretty stark contrast to the Chelsea trudge, and refreshing to pass things other than galleries along the way (and even places to go to the bathroom!).

Highlights included:

• The Brand New Heavies, a show curated by Mickalene Thomas
• Francesca Dimattio’s incredible paintings at Salon 94 Freemans
• Ibn Kendall’s intriguing “Coon Alchemy” at NYSG
• We got “got” by the press release for James J. Williams show at Envoy

Finally, since the Atlantic-Pacific subway stop is right next door to us, we’ve been thinking a lot about the MOMA installation there.  Our first impression was that we loved the idea of blanketing this large public space in art, but didn’t think the show in the end was ambitious enough (and a little awkwardly curated).

Showing only reproductions of works makes us go straight to Walter Benjamin.  The translation of 3-d works into subway ads really raises the issue of how reproduction influences our experience of the work of art.  In light of this issue, some of the curatorial choices struck us as really strange.

The image of  Pipolotti Rists’ installation seemed completely incomprehensible, and was among several works which can only be understood in their 3-d state (a fur teacup comes to mind). MoMA does itself (and the kinds of art that people think of as non-traditional) no favors by showing it in a reproduction that gives little to no sense of the impact of the work .

In the end we wondered why one would show a picture of a readymade when you could just as easily make a fake one and leave it in the middle of the station somewhere? (How much could a stool and bicycle wheel really cost anyway? They could have made hundreds.)  Has anyone else walked through this?  What did you think?

Obama Special, Part 1

What follows is just a bit late for the inauguration, which is appropriate. It is essentially old news.

Let’s start with the “Flash Points” question of the week: how can art effect political change? I worry that this question is a bit loaded. Ordinarily useless and “unreal” art is placed in a subservient position to political “reality,” which demands use value from cultural production. Art has to “do” something for politics; it has to serve the political. But one finds that the political “does” politics much more directly and efficiently than art. Thus the question is whether we can take art and aesthetic experience on their own terms, as valuable in themselves. I am not arguing for a conservative notion of “art for art’s sake,” but a more paradoxical proposal: art’s political contribution is found in art itself, in art’s ways and means. So, to rephrase the question: what does art do with politics, or alongside politics? What is its value as a parallel practice that perhaps intersects but never fully becomes politics (at which point it would cease to be art)?

These are big questions, and I’ll spare you their exhaustive discussion within art history and criticism. Instead, I offer an example that I see as relevant to the present shift in American politics. At a Girl Talk concert at Terminal 5 on November 16, 2008, an image of Barack Obama on the cover of Time magazine was insistently and repeatedly projected on a screen behind the performance. This was more, I contend, than a crowd-pleasing gimmick a little more than a week after the euphoric outcome of the presidential elections. Girl Talk, a.k.a. Greg Gillis, was connecting his form—that of his music and performances—with that of our new political world, and its leader.

Terms for a debate over the canonization of postwar intersections of music and art are now coming into view. On the side of an interdisciplinary redefinition of “high” art is Branden Joseph’s recent book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A “Minor” History), which positions the artist, filmmaker, and musician Conrad as a profoundly influential figure in postwar cultural production, albeit one who kept a quite consciously low profile to avoid assimilation into late-capitalist “spectacle.” Joseph’s approach represents the austere side of the debate in privileging works of art that look critically at their own means of production, and in the process unveils a wealth of relatively overlooked collaborations between artists and musicians. The effect of this text has been swift; Conrad is featured in MoMA’s latest reconfiguration of its contemporary collection.

Conrad, along with his frequent collaborator Tony Oursler, also appeared in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, an exhibition of collaboration between artists and musicians and art-about-music curated by Dominic Molon, that recently ended its run at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal after opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last year. In contrast to Joseph, the curators’ understanding of appropriate material here was far more democratic (although it was an conspicuously white selection of musicians, lascivious Funkadelic posters notwithstanding), ranging from promotional posters and album covers designed by artists to Dan Graham’s video Rock My Religion, from art star Christian Marclay’s use of records and record covers as materials to the ‘zine production of Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s, which bears a striking incorporation of conceptual art’s design and humor. Molon gave equal time to both experimental and popular music, treating both as fair game for artists.

If Joseph relies on the caché of the “experimental” to separate Conrad out from a crowd of interlopers between art and other fields of cultural production, Molon places his faith in the interruption, through aesthetic contemplation and the creation of a “work,” of the immediacy or myth that allows popular music to operate and dominate consumer taste. Art (or the figure or imagined intellect of the artist) mediates, as “not-music,” between music and the listener. Both projects speak to the staggering volume of material that is only beginning to be unearthed in the interstice between contemporary art and music.

Within these coordinates, Girl Talk presents a “problem.” He is an increasingly popular figure (the categories of “musician,” “DJ,” or “artist” do not quite fit) who uses avant-garde aesthetics to produce highly accessible music and a mode of performance grounded in ecstatic and collective immediacy. In short, he enters the forbidden territory of “fun” anathema to many cultural critics, for whom all forms of leisure are mere complicity with the overarching capitalist machine.

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Sugimoto + U2

Word on the street is that one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images will be used as the cover for U2’s upcoming album No Line on the Horizon, scheduled for release March 3rd.  The Season 3 photographer follows in the footsteps of other Art:21 artists who have also crossed over and “exhibited” their work as album art.  Notable favorites include Raymond Pettibon for Sonic Youth (Goo, 1990), Tim Hawkinson for Beck (Mutations, 1998), and Matthew Barney for Arto Lindsay (The Prize, 1999).

In other news, I dare say that I may be the first and only Art21 blogger to have a weird utensil named after him.

Touring Prospect.1, Talking to Curator Dan Cameron (Part 1)

I arrived in New Orleans in December on an auspicious occasion—it was the first snow fall since 2004 and one of only a few that has touched down in this normally warm city in the last forty years. As a Northerner, I felt strangely welcomed to this southern metropolis, and it took me a while to realize that New Orleanians, who aren’t accustomed to snow, seemed confused at first but adapted soon enough.I don’t know what I expected when I arrived in New Orleans but images of Hurricane Katrina were rife in my head as I headed downtown from the airport, thinking I would see signs from that disaster. Little did I know that all the scars of Katrina had all but disappeared from most of the city and what I found was a welcoming place that seemed a fitting venue for Prospect.1.

Judging from the biennial map, the art venues seemed rather evenly sprawled across the city in all directions. A quick orientation at the Hefler Warehouse by a hyperactive tour guide explained that while the tour may appear daunting at first, it isn’t as bad if you concentrated on the 22 main locations (formerly 23) that displayed the work of the primary artists (of which there are 81). For the more adventurous, there were 20 secondary and 71 Art City Site venues, the latter dominated by small commercial galleries showing art by local talents.

After a day of art tourism through the snow and feeling that I had a grasp of how to effectively spend the rest of my four days in New Orleans, I sat down with Dan Cameron, director and curator of Prospect.1, to talk about his vision for this the largest art biennial in North America.

A New York-based curator, Cameron fell in love with New Orleans when he first visited in 1987 and happened upon the city’s renowned Jazz & Heritage Festival. Since that fateful encounter, he hasn’t missed a Jazzfest in 21 years. More recently, Cameron has become the Visual Arts Director of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), a leading venue for art in the South. As he explained what he set out to do with Prospect.1, the conversation inevitably turned to the topic of this unusual city.

“New Orleans is a big work of art itself,” he explained, “a form of social sculpture.” These were words that resonated with me; in my day-and-a-half in New Orleans, I had already sensed a theatrical air both in the streets and the Prospect.1 venues. I immediately noticed that music was more prevalent in the art venues than other biennials I had ever seen. At CAC, Candice Breitz’s Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) consisted of thirty television screens signing Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. The noise resonated throughout the museum. At first it felt nostalgic and familiar, but eventually it started grating on my nerves until I decided it was obnoxious, as it seeped into my experience with at least half a dozen other works. At the Old U.S. Mint, Sanford Biggers’ Blossom (2007) endlessly played Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. But this time, the ominous song made you feel like something mysterious lay around every corner and it felt welcome, if somewhat chilling.

Cameron pointed out that while New Orleans may be best known for its cuisine, music, and nightlife, it was a sensual city that appreciated all forms of pleasure, remarking that, “creative expression is central to New Orleans’ identity.”  He added that New Orleans sustains its culture through architecture, cuisine and the arts, and Prospect.1 is working to ensure that visual art plays a crucial role in that evolving identity.

During our conversation, I mentioned that walking through the biennial felt like I was endlessly learning about New Orleans as I discovered new work and its context within the city. The content felt fresh and even works that didn’t seem to fit perfectly into the biennial, like Isaac Julien’s Baltimore, were different in this context. Cameron admitted that he included Julien’s work simply to introduce his work to the local scene. Julien’s video work is bold and enigmatic. African-American characters walk into different types of museums and make us wonder about the role of artifact and consciousness raising, particularly in a black cultural context. Three screens project various perspectives and narratives that all seem colored by the 1970s. There is a strain of science fiction in the work that added an air of amazement while making me wonder if the artist was trying to speak more about our cultural future rather than our past.

Cameron was pleased with the way the interaction between artists and venues played out and when I pressed him for details, he cited Navin Rawanchaikul and Tyler Russell’s project as a perfect example of what art could achieve on a local scale. As the result of a typo in an obituary, the multicultural Thai artist learned of the death of local jazz great Narvin Kimball. For their contribution to Prospect.1, Rawanchaikul and Russell organized a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral complete with banners painted in a style reminiscent of Bollywood posters. The funerary march took place during Prospect.1’s opening weekend and the result, according to Cameron, was warmly welcomed by the community, which included jazz musicians, family, friends and fans, all of whom seemed to appreciate Rawanchaikul and Russell’s fresh and sincere approach.

I then asked Cameron how locals were reacting in general to this ambitious art biennial that rivals anything that even New York or Los Angeles could conjure up. “New Orleanians are ready for anything,” he assured me. So, I ventured out to see if that was true.

This post is the first of five on my four days in New Orleans touring the sights and sounds of Prospect.1.

Gay Witches, Part 3

Continued from “Gay Witches, Part 2″…

3. The work of sound, visual, and performance artists, Massimo & Pierce, aka Black Sun Productions, could easily be discussed in the What’s So Shocking About Contemporary Art? thread on this blog. Their sexually explicit performances in Europe supposedly spurred police to raid their Zurich offices in 2003, although I haven’t been able to find any archived news items on this, other than anecdotal info on the Wikipedia entry on them and in reviews of their records. Not to cast doubt on the verity of these events, but Massimo & Pierce’s origin story itself has a mythological flair. After the two former sex workers met and became romantically involved, they decided to dedicate their partnership to an artistic and magical multimedia exploration of love. The duo take pornography seriously as an art form, casting it via sex magic as a theatrical ritual of transformation and connection. They achieved some international visibility in 2002 when they toured their Plastic Spider Thing performance with Coil. The performance was akin to an SM scene between two lovers’ spider and fly spirit animals. My favorite project by Massimo & Pierce, however, is less straightforwardly engaged with the symbols and processes of magic: their musical adaptation of the poetry and lyrics of Bertolt Brecht, operettAmorale. Musically, it is a combination of cabaret atmosphere, electronic drones, and chanted vocals.  They manage to inject an extra dosage of darkness and debauchery into Brecht’s famously paradoxical words without seeming redundant. It is both disturbing and quite funny, particularly the campy “Pimp Ballad.”  You can listen to some of their music on their Myspace page, as well as get additional information on their many different projects and collaborations.

4. William J. O’Brien is a Chicago-based artist who works in multiple media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, fiber, and ceramics, all of which he submits to an intuitive, seemingly casual sensibility. Most of his work has a rough, totemic quality that might superficially look like the type of work gathered for the Unmonumental show at the New Museum, but is ultimately too earthy and emotional to sustain that comparison for long.  Credit those qualities of earthiness and emotion to O’Brien’s feel for materials and sense of touch. My favorite amongst O’Brien’s recent work are his ceramic heads, an installation of which are pictured above; a few more examples can be seen here. They make me think of Moche portrait vessels found in ancient tombs, only expressionistically rendered. The melted and scarred likenesses pinched and gouged  from clay are like faces recalled from a nightmare or past-life regression. Or maybe O’Brien is recapping the Modernist principle of truth-to-materials as a kind of animism, as if it were the faces of spirits inhabiting the clay that he ultimately coaxed from the stuff.

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Gay Witches, Part 2

As promised, here is a list of some recent artists and projects, about which I am particularly enthusiastic, that explore the occult from a queer perspective.

1. Originally from Toronto, and now based in Paris, Scott Treleaven is probably best known for his occult/queercore zine This is the Salivation Army (recently compiled and co-published by Printed Matter, Inc. and Art Metropole as The Salivation Army Black Book) and his darkly erotic collages, although he has also made a number of hypnotic, Kenneth Anger-like films. His collage works usually picture young men engaged in mysterious, ritual-like activities. The pictures combine heterogeneous sources and surfaces. We might find any combination of original and found photography (some of it likely film stills), historical prints illustrating alchemical and mystical ideas, cut chiyogami paper, and atmospheric fields of watercolor, etc. Generally, his compositions possess a hieratic quality, achieved through pronounced symmetry and conspicuous framing devices. We know immediately that we are in a mythic space when looking at one of his pictures.

So, what is the nature of the spell cast by Treleaven in his collages? I have a hunch it has to do with imagining some form of ecstatic fraternity as an alternative to the forms of community that are available in contemporary society, including the gay mainstream. I am thinking of the wolves that appear so frequently in his work. They are certainly cyphers for unfettered desire, but their significance also seems to lie in their highly social nature. His boys run in packs. I’ve also noticed that the young men in his pictures either appear alone or in groups of three or more. Rarely are they arranged as a duo, which would connote more conventional ideas of romantic desire. The collaborators he has brought into the fold for his films also leads me to believe that he is trying to reimagine a queer community based on creativity and sprituality: AA Bronson, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and the performance art duo, Massimo & Pierce (see below), amongst others, have been featured in his films. I highly recommend Treleaven’s essay, “My Little Underground,” in Generation Hex (ed. Jason Louv, Disinformation Co. Ltd., 2005), which chronicles his search for identity and community in the occult, queer, and punk subcultures.

2. My favorite record released this past year (which can neither be rightly called a new recording or a reissue—more below on that) is Coil’s The New Backwards. For those unfamiliar with their work, Coil were a post-industrial, experimental electronic band founded in 1983. Along with Psychic TV and Chris & Cosey, they rose out of the ashes of industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle. Although many collaborators have come and gone Coil were, at their core, a duo comprised of John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. A great archive of Coil-related info is maintained by the good folks at Brainwashed here. Describing Coil’s music is difficult as they transformed their sound regularly but, generally speaking, they offered a poetic and emotional take on electronic noise, with Balance’s warm, sometimes foreboding, voice floating through the psychedelic bedlam. Listen here.

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Iceland of Fire, Water and Light

This past week I was in Reykjavik, Iceland attending and participating in the Sequences Real Time Festival. Needless to say, it was a strange time to have come just days after the financial crisis blanketed the entire country. Friends from far and wide were emailing with comments such as “historical” and “unprecedented” to describe the predicament that by comparison, made Main Street look like a ticker tape parade.

The mood was somber, uncertain, and optimistic at the same time as the drinks went down and the show went on. A large contingent of friends and colleagues (from the Kling & Bang collective) who were going over to the Frieze Art Fair to re-create Reykjavik’s defunct but legendarily bacchanal Sirkus bar relayed feelings of reluctance but determination. How will the English react to such potential callous activity in times of turmoil? Apparently, everyone loves a good party, and by all accounts, the reception was just dandy.

At Sequences, related or not, some of the strongest works augured the crises and responded with messages about Nature reclaiming its own, in big and small ways. At the Reykjavik Art Museum, Rúrí, in collaboration with composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, created a visual and sound installation that invoked a quasi international summit on the environment, complete with choir barking texts from the former’s collected discussions on water. Rúrí, a 2003 Venice Biennale artist best known for her “archive of water” project, projected a massive, rushing waterfall on a large screen for the duration of the 45 minute performance, while musicians bearing gongs and flashlights rallied and mixed it up with the assembled mass. The water theme might also remind one of another project in Stykkishólmur, Iceland by Roni Horn, the Season 3 artist who last year created a Library of Water in the little western town.

At the opposite extreme of spectacle, Halldór Arnar Úlfarsson’s intimate Installation for Seven People at the tiny Útúrdúr bookstore was an escapist act. Taking off the mantle of collective social responsibility and in its stead donning a cap of personal meditation, the small performance was activated by the simple push of a button that revealed a private, poetic display of physics for the lucky viewer. As the title hints, the performance happened only once per day over seven days for seven people.

One of the most memorable performances at Sequences was the Helix collaboration between siblings Elin Hansdottir and Úlfur Hansson that took place in the evening at Grótta lighthouse. An American museum’s liability nightmare, one had to walk the rugged landscape in the darkness for a quarter mile, led only by a path of small candles. The foggy night at sea was inverted, whereby once inside the lighthouse, a smoky dense air filled the tower. A claustrophobic queue of people patiently walked up the circular stairway toward a blinding light while an invisible choir sung what is known as the “shepherd’s scale,” a tonal registry whose up and down movement is difficult to determine. As one got closer to the light… well, you had to be there.

Every evening one could also see from a distance Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower project. Located on nearby Viðey Island, the landscape installation honors the legacy of John Lennon, staying lit from his birth date October 9th to the anniversary of his death on December 8th. The single column of light is reminiscent of the September 11th Tribute in Light at Ground Zero. Like its visual counterpart in New York, Imagine Peace Tower’s infinite beam is a presence that is at once awing, ghostly, soothing, natural and manmade. In the barren Icelandic landscape, entwined with the Aurora Borealis, the limits of the impossible seemed within reach. And like the protagonist from John Berger’s novel G., I too felt like I was witnessing something oddly human scale and intimate, behind the scenes of history happening at that very moment.