Untitled (Iraq) 2009 from Richard Mosse on Vimeo.
poem made of place-names from the Iraq war and closely-shot images of war’s desert(ed) refuse.
In the world of computers, the user receives information presented in a way that fits the user’s ordinary senses. When that information-presentation breaks down, the computer is ‘broken’. Failure breaks the film, the suspension of disbelief, that users have to have when they rely on computers to conduct their business and personal lives.
lost in translation : artefacted stream of CSI:NY
Signal : the information stream. We rely on our senses to present good ‘signal’, or a reliable stream of information, to our brains. Our nervous system carries signal; then our brain decodes it, re-presenting the information we use to walk, talk, orient ourselves in space, create memory, and more.
Part of my affinity for working with digital media comes from my interest in signal and its translation, a process we rely on every day without being aware of, for the most part.
- lost in translation : artefacted stream of CSI:NY
The computer user’s ignorance of the underlying process … Well, do we really need to understand the process of combustion and the machinery that harnesses it in order to drive our cars? We have to remember to get the oil changed, no matter if we understand how the failure to change the oil will break the car.
These screenshots were taken of broken stream of the television show CSI : NY. The premise of each of the CSI shows fascinates me, in part because they are driven by the authority of the evidence, or, the examination of material reality. Authority, trust, questions about what is real, representations of reality; the narrative of the episode about a seemingly paranoid young woman whose murder proves she was really on to something. The signal bled all over my screen. The results? Beautiful.
lost in translation : artefacted stream of CSI:NY
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (flight)
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (19)
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (nikita in kitchen)
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (baby crocodile)
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (19)
these stills are taken from a 4 minute sketch i worked up the last few days. this is for the next chapter of the film in progress, i.thou.
the chapter or excerpt is titled “19″. the moshing technique assists the viewer take a meditative journey on identity, memory, witnessing, transpersonal consciousness, the tellable story, and the problem of unbelievable experience.
the still image of the girl named “19″ is taken from the television show CSI. the source video shots used (pre-processing and ‘mosh’) look like the two stills that follow:
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (source still)
i.thou : chapter ~ 19 (source still)
Some voices embody something on our behalf . Aretha Franklin provides the husky strength of presence, power, and integrity, she invokes respect. Amy Winehouse rolls her eyes for us, tells all the fuckery we can’t say out loud.
Some voices by their texture and nature tell stories. Nina Simone’s haunted reedy soulsinging says she sees what we don’t. Edith Piaf’s yearning love paints with a brush made of sorrow. Lady Day’s escapism and loss (Billie Holiday) echoing with her need for redemption by being loved.
Some singers are inalienably wedded to their audiences. Dave Gahan and Freddie Mercury jump to mind, as do Janis Joplin, Edith Piaf, Lady GaGa. There is a love-loop of mutual adoration, a call and response from stage to audience and back, completed in their performances again and again and again.
Some voices are storytelling voices – David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tom Waits, Tori Amos, Bjork. Each tells stories in their songs. Madonna reports on her state of mind, her soul talks when she sings.
We experience these songs as things, as products. They are made by people. No matter how processed, no matter the autotune, there is a soul behind each song. The demand to control the result – the demand for sales, I think, is what has sunk the music ‘industry’. The recipe-distilling, the formatting, the predicting, they’ve distilled out the passion, the soul, the selfhood that great music is steeped in.
Songbirds make music that resonate. M.I.A.’s insouciant mixtapes put a spring in your step. So do Wiz Khalifa or Kellee Maize, those crazies from Pittsburgh who give it away. Lady GaGa’s rich, deep-throated, flaunting, Lilith-evoking, vaguely-rejected strange and crazy artist lady. There’s soul in those voices, there are selves singing.
That’s why they catch on. We need true muses. Those souls speaks substantial companion energy, music, for our daily blahblah.
Laura E Davis Really fascinating book review. This really worries me. I see that children are so encouraged to behave within set gender roles, it’s almost like feminism never happened.
Jessica Fenlon Every generation, it is forgotten. Have you ever had a look at Womanhouse?
Laura E Davis Do you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womanhouse
I had not heard of it, but what an incredible project.
WOMANHOUSE : linen closet : 1972
Laura E Davis Oh man, there is a documentary about it. I can’t seem to find it anywhere though. boo.
Jessica Fenlon It is erased – like the work itself. The house used for the installation work was torn down in the end; it was slated for destruction, that’s how the artists got access to it to begin with. And there are no images on Wikipedia.
WOMANHOUSE : Lipstick installation in the bathroom : 1972
In art history, women’s work tends to be erased because it is left out. The same seems to be true of some gains made by each generation of feminists. Simple human ignorance, each generation is born into it.
WOMANHOUSE : Bridal Staircase : 1972
History makes the metaphor. This symbol-set presenting Female-Body-As-House-Inhabited-By-Her-Personhood was physically demolished. In art historical memory, erased.
I went on an archeological dig through the Internet. I know this content well, having presented and re-presented it to art school peers and students over the years, a treasure of a work never taught to them by others.
WOMANHOUSE : nurturant kitchen : 1972
This particular reconstruction is definitely incomplete. Some images I poached from a blog claiming ‘feminist art history perseverence forever!’. This blog ceased publication after four posts, three years ago.
Art is a language of gestures. How a culture tends to the object-relics related to those gestures tells us about the dominant cultural beliefs of that culture … or at least, what the curators of those cultural beliefs want us to think is permitted.
WOMANHOUSE : f.w. seated in her crocheted 'womb room' : 1972
1972 : Womanhouse is the product of tremendous amount of consciousness-raising in a feminist art education setting. I dare you to discover more about this seminal work of art, work that created environmental installation art.
My assignment to you: find the answers to the following questions. No, you can’t use Wikipedia.
Who “taught” this group of young artists? What school housed the program? Where did you find the art historical documentation about it? Which artists created the specific works I’ve included in this post? What other titles were given to these smaller installations, and by whom? How many installations were in the house? How many performance pieces? What now-famous artists saw this work as audience members?
For extra credit : Why do you think a work of art that lays the foundation for an entire genre can be ignored, overlooked, forgotten?
wheatpaste found in Little India, Tuesday Jan 25 2011
remember, the biggest lie of all . . .
1988
Text excerpted from Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars (1984 in Serbian, 1988 in English). The second paragraph of this excerpt was used by singer-songwriter Peter Murphy in lyrics to the song Shy [Deep (1989/90)]. This creation was simultaneous to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe, which first began to publish October of 1988 (cover dated January of 1989). In Gaiman’s archetypal system, Dream and Death are brother and sister.
Akshany, Yabir Ibn (17th Century)
Anatolian minstrels (lute and tambourine players) believed that Satan used this name for a while and that he appeared under it before one of the most celebrated lute players of the 17th century – Yusef Masudi. Ibn Akshany was himself a very deft player. There exists a written record of his fingering for a song, so we know that he used more than ten fingers to play his instrument.
He was a good looking man; he carried no shadow, and his shallow eyes were like two trampled puddles. Although he declined to make public his opinions about death, he conveyed them indirectly through his tales, advising people to read dreams or to gain knowledge about death from the dream hunters. Two proverbs are ascribed to him: (1) “Death is the surname of sleep, but that surname is unknown to us”; (2) “Sleep is the daily end of life, a small exercise in death, which is its sister, but not every brother and sister are equally close.”
He once wanted once wanted to show people just how death operated, and he did so by using a Christian military commander whose name has been preserved: he was called Avram Brankovich, and he fought in Walachia, where, Satan claimed, every man is born a poet, lives like a thief, and dies a vampire.
Recently Urban Outfitters took Cali Killa’s image for their own line of tee shirts. Cali Killa published the work street side in cities across the US. Posts like the ones found here name this action as “injustice” and provide photographic documentation of the “theft”.
Who owns an image published on a surface not owned by the artist?
@drawclose @hragv When violation of public space creates the canvas, the concept of permission being applied to the work can easily be discarded.
The image in the UO/Cali Killa argument now divorced from the surface to which it was published. Image stripped from context.
Context the nesting box of the situation: the art bloggers consider the image designer its owner. The property owners whose walls are wheatpasted – the literal context for each iteration of the image – the unwitting legal owners of singular impressions of the image.
The image’s original appearances in the world violations of other people’s property to access the prime real estate of other people’s eyeballs … via guerrilla presence, via interruption of ordinary space, via intrusion. Doesn’t street art represent a dual intrusion, one of both property trespass and the hijack of the passersby’s vision?
Who owns the stencil and the right to further publish the image made when the stencil is used?
Cali Killa designed the stencil. Her fellow artist S. Fairey showed when he sent image dissemination kits all over the country to get his images graffitti’d for him by anonymous “collaborators”, the stencil designer may or may not have had a hand in making each iteration of the image. The above-linked blog author does not explicitly connect authorship & ownership to the stencil creation, but the underlying idea is there.
The stencil is the tool which allows the image to be made. Printmaking broken from paper, published to public space. The importance of the literal original image matrix – what some would call “design” – the original matrix from which all instance images are made. Who owns THAT? Does that person own the impressions made by Urban Outfitters, whom, it is assumed, reverse engineered the stencil in order to produce the shirts?
I’ve been following the bicoastal curatorial misbehavior the last two weeks via Hyperallergic. A summary of their coverage under this link.
The actions? After pressure from right-wing groups, Smithsonian director G. Wayne Clough pulled David Wojnarowicz’s video from an exhibition after the show opened. At the LA MOCA (that’s Los Angeles Museum Of Contemporary Art), curator Jeffrey Dietch ordered a mural by Italian street artist Blu to be literally whitewashed a day after it was completed.
Meditation on these actions by two distinct individuals, in two contexts, I have come to the conclusion that neither Dietch nor Clough truly understand the nature of art or human communication. They may be businessmen, they may be art bureaucrats. But they are not curators.
There are a series of illusions I regularly navigate during my life as a working artist and performing poet. This series of illusions are clustered together and represented by particular exhibiting behaviors by gallerists, artists, and others attached to the art world. The underlying belief, the paradigm, is that an art object has a determined meaning, a quite literal “A”, for example, that will ALWAYS cause result “B” in ANY audience.
This underlying belief is the floor the gallerist stands on as he pastes the text to the wall of the gallery, telling the audience how to experience or understand the artwork before their eyes. This underlying belief pays the docent as she points out just exactly what to look at in the painting to decode the secret meaning certainly intended by the artist. And this underlying belief says that Blu’s arrangement of symbols (coffins and dollar bills) will create some result in the audience that Jeffrey Dietch does not want.
A vocal minority determined the meaning of the work at the Smithsonian and called for its removal. Clough fell for the bait that a single symbol has only one possible meaning. He bought into the simplistic equation that A inevitably leads to B in all cases, and that B, in this case, is an incredibly undesirable experience for the audience.
Determinism in art is a lie.
Determinism exists in PR, in advertising, in legal language. In art, it is a lie.
In art, A = Ambiguity. This is why it is so powerful and terrifying. Truly good art opens cans of worms, encourages the audience to question more, to think more, to consider bigger ideas.
Art communicates based on the premise that each person carries with him or her one’s own vocabulary of experiences, ideas, memories. This vocabulary of personal history colors the lens through which a person views the world. As such the meaning of a work of art hangs somewhere between the art object and the viewer who completes it by projecting their ideas and interpretations on the work.
This notion of art object and projection – well, we also have to navigate the projections made by art historions, and by museum workers, as individuals consider the work of art. As Dave Hickey will tell you with his snoot full of vodka, workers in the art apparatus are constantly changing their projections and contextualizations, updating them, re-presenting the work to provide the audience with more interesting fodder for conversation.
One could argue that those objecting to the Smithsonian have a determinist lens of their own, so rigid as to deny all others. Removing Wojnarowicz’s video placed the video in the realm of determined meaning, removing it from the realm of ‘art’ and turning into something else, some ‘not-art’. This is where that word comes up, the right name for what’s going on in both of these actions.
Blu wrote of a private dinner with Dietch, where Dietch gently invited Blu to make a “more inviting” mural. His presumption seems to be that the images of coffins draped with dollar bills is somehow uninviting. I actually want to see that image. If I had been in LA, I would have gone to see that work. Dietch ran a popular gallery in NYC (which has shown people I know) but he’s missing the point if he thinks that presenting some art work is going to guarantee a result. It shows he’s a businessman who knows how to use art to manipulate people, rather than a curator interested in presenting stimulating artwork.
To censor an artwork is to remove the creative authority from the artist, commandeer the work of art, and re-purpose it with fixed meaning that will (in the mind of the censor) automatically create an undesirable experience for the audience. The act of censorship turns the audience into a bunch of mindless reactive puppets subject to the information before them.
None of this has anything at all to do with art, and the natural ambiguity present in good artwork.
Ripley in fighting suit after opening the hangar door
Durga : n (Hinduism) the goddess Parvati portrayed as a warrior: renowned for slaying the buffalo demon, Mahisha
First motion : she raises her armored arms
In one version of the myth, Durga was a warrior goddess who defeated the demon Mahisashur who had unleashed a realm of terror on earth, heaven and the nether worlds.
Mahisa means buffalo, Mahisasur was born from the form of a water buffalo. He could not be defeated by any of the gods because of boons he had received from Brahma.
Over time, each god armed Durga with a suitable quality and weapon, so that with their combined effect she was able to defeat the demon. The word Shakti, or strength, reflects the warrior aspect of the goddess.
In another form, she is also Karunamayi, or one full of kindness.
Ripley catches up the Alien's head in her claw
Durga : In Hinduism, one of the forms of the goddess Devi or Shakti. The wife of Shiva. Born fully grown, created out of flames that issued from the mouths of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and other gods. She embodies their collective energy (shakti). They created her to slay the buffalo-demon Mahisasura, whom they were unable to overcome. She is usually depicted riding a lion or tiger, each of her multiple arms bearing a weapon.
She uses the tools at hand to keep her enemy at bay.
She throws the invading Alien/Demon down the airlock, to exorcize it
The enemy at the heart of the film Aliens are profoundly terrifying creatures. The gory possessions, devourings, consuming of human bodies in order to live point allegorically to possession and exorcism stories, but with absolutely deadly results – no human ever survives an alien possession.
Enemies in horror films have to be absolutely other, yet embody something of ourselves that we are frightened of. The absolutely instinctual nature of these mucus-soaked creatures, whose nested jaws speak to some horrifying devouring appetite, some horrifying devouring reproductive nature . . . draw whatever metaphorical conclusion you will.
Monsters like this are the closest thing to a demon our atheist culture cops to. Our heroine, Ripley, warrior-queen, embodies Durga, that aspect of Shakti who is the original demon slayer, a goddess from a religion tended to by millions in India.
Alien hangs on to Ripley's foot, attempting to avoid her ejection (or exorcism) from the ship into space
She hauls herself up from the edge of the void, against the pull of the void, and prevails.
