Newsgrist: Dominic McGill’s
“Death Wish”..Prada, Toys R Us, and a Dr. Seuss Biennial..email
the dead AND defeat capitalism...Urls, Red Hot..Freebie..Bring On Da Funk..Bi
Bonanza..Derring Do or Die..Book Grist: 1000 Journals; “removed”
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Newsgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
============================
Volume 3, no. 6
(March 25, 2002)
============================
Last Issue:
http://www.geocities.com/newsgrist/newsgrist3-5.html
============================
CONTENTS
- *Splash* Dominic McGill’s
“Death Wish”
- *Quote* Prada, Toys R Us, and a Dr. Seuss Biennial
- *Url/s* email
the dead AND defeat capitalism...
- *Urls, Red Hot* Vuk Cosik’s Hot List
- *Freebie* Free Biennial Opening Party
- *Bring On Da Funk* Tim Griffin frees his mind
- *Bi Bonanza* Even
more biennials...
- *Derring Do or Die* New Media Center unfolding
- *Book
Grist* 1000 Journals; “removed”
============================
============================
*Splash*
Dominic McGill: “Model for
a Death Wish Generation”
[see: http://newsgrist.com ]
============================
============================
*Quote/s*
"If you want to see how
technology can render traditional space
obsolete, Toys R Us demonstrates
it much more effectively
than Prada."
from “High-Tech Emporiums” by PAUL
GOLDBERGER
The New Yorker, Issue of
2002-03-25
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/skyline/
...........................
Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Dr. Seuss
and the Biennial
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 15:10:26
-0500
From: lm sabater
<xxxx@xxxxxx>
To: Rhizome_Raw
<list@rhizome.org>
Just came back from the kids
section at B&N and they have a
special sale on Dr. Seuss'
books. Well, now that I think about it,
that's what is bothering me
about the Biennial It feel like a knock-
off of a Dr. Seuss book,
especially the 4th floor. I don't know if it
is a good or bad thing, but I
just noticed it thanks to my kids.
Liza
============================
*Url/s*
1) http://www.emailthedead.net/
...................
2) The Free Biennial
will take place in New York
during the month April 2-30, 2002
The Free Biennial is an open exhibition of nonmonetary
(free)
artwork which will take place
throughout the public space of
greater New York, as well as on
the internet, by broadcast, mail
and telephone. (see *Freebie*
& *Alt---below)
...................
3) “Come to where the flavour is....”
http://www.whitneybiennial.org/
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH:
www.whitney.org or www.whitneybiennial.com
============================
*Urls, Red Hot*
ArtForum | HotList
by Vuk Cosic
http://www.artforum.com/index.php?pn=inprint&id=2415
* Net-art pioneer Vuk Cosic
lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia,
and represented his country at
last summer's Venice Biennale. A
monograph on his ASCII works, Contemporary ASCII, was
published in 1999 by Galerija
Kapelica: http://www.kapelica.org *
Suggesting Web links is a little like recommending books:
You
don't do it for just anyone. When guests come to my home
in
Slovenia I always offer them something to eat and drink,
and
sometimes a place to stay for the night. If they're people
I really
like, I show them my cherished books, and then we have a
nice
little chat.
But by offering up the following websites here, I'm
escorting you
directly into the library-no
drinks, food, or lodging. (That's the
good news about life in the
virtual community-it's practical and
efficient. The bad news is, it's
practical and efficient.) Consider
this a quick-and-dirty guide to
the sites I've been visiting quite a
bit these days; if you're
looking for a grand unifying theory
behind them, good luck!
Mumbleboy
My daughter Luna is fourteen
months old, and, as a first child, she
is the hapless victim of every sort of pedagogical
experimentation
imaginable. One of my favorite parenting tricks is to show
her
Flash cartoons from Mumbleboy. I
think they're excellent,
especially now that I've
discovered a use for them. Luna
prefers this stuff to the Cartoon Network.
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine
I once gained a certain
notoriety in Net-art circles by copying the
Documenta X site just before it
was taken offline and packaged on
CD-ROM for museum shops. At the time such
"piracy" was quite a
fancy feat, though the site's
author didn't seem too impressed. The
Wayback Machine does something
similar, but on a much more
ambitious level: It's an archive
over one hundred terabytes in size
containing almost the entire Web
in its many evolutionary stages;
you search it by entering a URL
and selecting the date you'd like
to go back to. As a trained
archaeologist I can tell you that it's
highly useful for observing and
studying the stratigraphy of
interfaces. Check out the
special collection of "Web Pioneers"
-glimpses of Yahoo!, Amazon,
etc. in their infancy that are
guaranteed to make you nostalgic
for 1996. How's that for
"conserving new
media"?
Internet Sex Photos
There's something sweetly deranged
about these pictures by Jon
Haddock. Like much art (and
unlike most pornography) Haddock's
work achieves greatness through
what it doesn't reveal. Don't be
afraid to peek.
GPS Drawing
Remember those artists in the
'70s-like Hamish Fulton and Richard
Long-for whom walking was a medium? Well, British artists
Jeremy Wood and Hugh Pryor have
taken that method a step
further. They travel around by
car, train, plane, and boat, recording
their movements with a Global
Positioning System device, and
their itineraries-when viewed
aerially on the map-create line
drawings. They've
"drawn" an elephant in Brighton, a butterfly in
Nottingham, and they even spelled
out GALLERY in Shoreham-
by-the-Sea. In my younger days I
said something to the effect that
all art was a substitute for the
Internet. Voilŕ! an artistic practice
with bona fide predecessors that
becomes real Gesamtkunstwerke
when expressed on the Web.
Netzwissenschaft
www.netzwissenschaft.de/kuenst.htm
While searching for links to my
old vuk.org domain, which I let go
as part of an invisibility
project (it was then bought by a casino), I
found this list, created by Dr.
Reinhold Grether. With some seven
thousand links covering Net
artists, researchers, and publicists, it
might be the most comprehensive
website of what Grether calls
"Net knowledge"-and
possibly the worst nightmare of a link list to
navigate. If you're watching the
Net, Dr. Grether is watching you.
The site itself may not be pretty, but its ambition alone
makes it a
great art project.
============================
============================
*Freebie*
All are invited to the Free Biennial Opening Party
Over 200 artists from around the world are joining to
create the
first Free Biennial which will take place in New York
during the
month April 2-30, 2002 The Free Biennial is an open exhibition
of nonmonetary (free) artwork which will take place
throughout
the public space of greater New York, as well as on the
internet,
by broadcast, mail and telephone.
The Free Biennial launches on
April 2 with a party at the Frying
Pan. Dance to the subcontinental
sounds of the amazing DJ Rekha
(Basement Bhangra, Mutiny) as
you celebrate with the Free
Biennial artists & friends.
Tuesday, April 2, 8PM - midnight, on the Frying Pan
FREE, of course.
DIRECTIONS
The Lightship FRYING PAN is located at Pier 63 in
Manhattan,
at the end of West 23rd Street
at the Westside Highway, just north
of Chelsea Piers.
MAP available at http://www.freewords.org/biennial/fbparty.html
THE FREE BIENNIAL http://www.freebiennial.org
============================
============================
*Bring On Da Funk*
Bi American
The Whitney Biennial opens its
doors
to the country's artistic
diversity
By Tim Griffin
TimeOut New York, March 14-21,
2002 Issue 337
If there's one piece that
captures the spirit of the 2002 Whitney
Biennial, it's the mural by punk
collective Destroy All Monsters,
which depicts the group's native
Detroit as an urban wasteland
overlayed with the visages of
Motown survivors like the Stooges,
George Clinton and Sun Ra-all
self-created celebrities who
couldn't have come from anywhere
else. Similarly, the 2002
Whitney Biennial has the latent
paranoia of the Stooges, the
recession-era futurism of George
Clinton and the cacophonous
mysticism of Sun Ra's
Intergalactic Love Arkestra. It is less a
profile of the art world than it
is a view of America as a vast
archipelago of subcultures; it
takes the nation's wartime
temperature when an era of niche
marketing and a thousand
television channels makes the
task daunting. For viewers with
parochial taste, it won't always
be easy to take. But, in the
words of Sir Nose, D'Void
of Funk, "Free your mind and
your ass will follow."
Start on the fourth floor, where
subcultures abound. One of the
first pieces you'll see is a
video by Ari Marcopoulos that follows an
international group of
snowboarders on tour; at one point, they are
wildly cheered on by a stadium
of Japanese fans, whose intense
adoration resembles the kind
seen on this country's cable-channel
tractor pulls. But what's truly
interesting is that the sport's cultish
fervor spans a global mesh of
cultures. Nearby, Yun Fei-Ji's
Chinese-inspired scrolls immerse
bodies, missiles and overturned
trucks in flowing lines-weaving
together Asian tradition and the
elusive contours of contemporary
worldwide conflict. The identity
politics of yesteryear are
similarly morphed in Sanford Biggers's
collaboration with Jennifer
Zackin-where home movies of his
black middle-class childhood run
alongside, and mirror, those of
his white collaborator-housed in
a wood-paneled rec-room
environment.
John Leańos also plays on this
theme with his installation of
vitrines filled with faux
artifacts from the mythical Aztlán culture;
its sensibility rests somewhere
between Robert Smithson's writings
and L.A.'s Museum of Jurassic
Technology. But the greatest
impact here by far is made by
the Rhode Island-based group
Forcefield; their assembly of
alien mannequins in one gallery
seems like Hunter S. Thompson's
answer to the Met's Costume
Institute. The same floor is
shared by Margaret Kilgallen's
sculptural re-creation of San
Francisco street facades and Christian
Jankowsky's wiseass spin on
Christian television. The net effect of
the installations is to make
America seem like one big fringe
element-a place where the center
not only does not hold, it doesn't
exist at all.
In this respect, art itself
becomes a kind of subculture, which is an
invigorating development. The
sense of burgeoning heterogeneity,
and of things being slightly out
of control, permeates even the
more traditional artworks in the
show. The Biennial continually
runs culture up against culture,
dilating and constricting its view
from local to national scope,
and moves from hi-fi to lo-fi works,
showing how they all exist at
once. Robert Lazzarini's phone
booth has unnaturally elongated
contours that seem warped by
the turn of the millennium. But
it's only steps away from the phone
booths appearing in pictures
plastered onto grungy cardboard walls
made by Chemi Rosado Seijo-and
the juxtaposition shows how our
moment resonates with differing
apprehensions about the past,
present and future. Certainly
that's true of a series of architectural
renderings by Lauretta
Vinciarelli, which recall Mark Rothko's
desire to capture
"disembodied light." Nearby, Vija Celmins's
small paintings of spider webs,
obscure yet intimate, are the
products of intense
introspection as much as they are of a deep
familiarity with art history. A
similar quality of subjectivity within
the grand span of art is evident
here in great works by Collier
Schorr and Jeremy Blake.
Sound is a key component in this
year's Biennial, but isn't limited
to one group of work; rather, it
infiltrates the galleries. Set amid
Celmins and Vinciarelli is a
couch fitted with headphones playing
the "microsounds" of
Richard Chartier. His sonic pulses are barely
audible, and are easy to mistake
for the subtle flow of your own
bloodstream-which in turn render
viewing the other work intensely
psychological. Looking at
Lebbeus Woods's drawings of a ruined
building-which appear beside
Vera Lutter's camera obscura image
of a jetliner-you may hear banjo
music from another gallery, where
a video documents the Alabama
architectural group Rural Studio.
(The vibe is not folksy, playing
as it is in a studio constructed for
sound works on the first floor;
the room is an ominous black
setting worthy of The Parallax
View.)
Is all the best art made in America during the past two years
here?
No. But this Biennial, moving as
it does out of New York's
aristocratic art world, recalls
Norman Mailer's description of the
Democratic Convention of 1968,
in which he divided the
participants into two camps:
property holders and then the people
whom property holders would call
fanatics. Property holders
change their views to fit the
climate and avoid taking risks,
whereas fanatics pursue ideas
that are beyond the scope of their
immediate self-interest,
whatever the accepted social strictures.
This show has the fanatic's soul
and speaks to a peculiarly
American subjectivity, the kind
that continually strives to create a
new sense of self. Which is the
best thing a Biennial could do at
this moment: create an art world
in which more people like the
Stooges, George Clinton or Sun
Ra can exist.
The 2002 Whitney Biennial is on
view at the Whitney Museum of
American Art through May 26
============================
============================
*Bi Bonanza*
Bonus Biennials
by Sherry Wong
Artnet Magazine, March 15, 2002
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/wong/wong3-15-02.asp?C=1
Running concurrent with the
Whitney Museum's celebrated "2002
Biennial Exhibition" are
four other shows that have taken the
opportunity to style themselves
as biennials as well. None of them
have any official
connection to the Whitney, and all are
very
different from the museum's
undertaking. One is a self-described
"tiny" biennial,
another is a large, all-encompassing biennial that is
open to all artists, and the
third is a cyberbiennial taking place only
on the internet. Lastly, there's
a collector's choice biennial.
Begin with the smallest first.
The "195 Hudson Street, Apartment
2A Biennial" is a show in a
private apartment of two works each
by two artists. Our host is
Adrian Dannatt, a writer for Flash Art
and the Art Newspaper who was
also child star of the 1970s BBC
children's comedy, "Just
William." The artists are Pieter
Schoolwerth, who recently showed
paintings (including one of a
particularly nubile Dannatt) at
American Fine Arts, and Ursula
Hodel, a Swiss-born video
performer who now lives in Brooklyn
and has her own website at www.ursulahodel.com . Dannatt's show
opened Mar. 2, several days
before the Whitney's version, and will
close a day later, on May 27.
Appointments are necessary to
actually visit the show, made by
emailing Adannatt@earthlink.net
In dramatic contrast to
Dannatt's tiny biennial, Situationist artist
Sal Randolph's "Free
Biennial" has so far gathered over 200 artists
with its open call for
submissions. The catch is that the show is
geographically dispersed, with
projects, installations,
performances, studio and
apartment shows, net art and video
screenings taking place around
the world -- from Japan to Bulgaria
to Argentina. More works are
still being added to the exhibition,
which is slated to take place
Apr. 2-30, 2002. Maps and schedules
of performances are to be
available at the website http://www.freebiennial.org
-- once the exhibition gets going.
Among the participants in the
"Free Biennial" are new-media artist
Tricia McLaughlin, writer Sam
Truitt and Fluxus net-artist turned
poet and online zine editor Eryk
Salvaggio: http://www.one38.org/ .
Peter Coffin, for his
submission, http://www.freewords.org/biennial/artist/barcode.html
has designed bar codes that
anyone can print out on
labels. If affixed to items in
stores and run through the checkout
scanner, the bar code reveals
text -- "have, take, give, want, lose,
need" -- instead of the
price, creating culture-jamming poetry.
The third spin-off of the
Whitney Biennial, launched on
Mar. 7, 2002, is an Internet
detournement by Miltos Manetas, the
art-world prankster who recently
went to some lengths to invent
and publicize a new word,
"neen" -- see Max Henry's Gotham
Dispatch: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/henry/henry6-5-00.asp
Scamp that he is, Manetas discovered
that the web address
www.whitneybiennial.com was
available, and acquired it himself,
turning it into a lively
cyberspace for net art.
Visitors to www.whitneybiennial.com find not the website for the
Whitney Biennial but rather a
growing selection of flash
animations by artists. So far,
Manetas has posted 19 pages with six
works on each. Artists in the
exhibition are expected to vote on
different works -- good, boring
or bad. The skill range of
animations varies -- some are
made by net-art veterans, others are
unknown and in one instance the
artist is nine years old.
The section titled
"Turntables" offers the viewer a chance to
interact with different
animations with changeable colors,
patterns and sounds. Michael
Rees and Matt Shaw have created fun
animations where the viewer gets
to control variables such as
background, rotation, speed and
color of floating strawberries, pink
triangular octopuses and pizza.
If the screen gets too cluttered with
the figures you have the option
to "kill all."
Barcodes rule again in the
Lot-Ek animation. Their work reads like
an advertisement on a bar-code
background of what good design
should be. There are futuristic
modular sleeping lofts, an airplane
and stackable, mobile dwelling
units. Another work, from http://2noodles.com
is an attractive interactive
animation of concentric white circles
and red shapes that echo from
wherever you move your cursor on
the gray screen.
It seems that more challenges to
the Whitney Biennial are on the
way. As we go to press,
Elisabeth Franck of the New York
Observer reports that collector
Norman Dubrow plans to mount his
own biennial at Kagan Martos
Gallery in SoHo, opening Mar. 25,
2002. Dubrow claims that Whitney
curator Lawrence Rinder tried
to impress the art world with
unknown names, and consequently
overlooked all the new talents
that had made their mark in the last
two years. The Dubrow Biennial
will feature 36 works from
Dubrow's own vast collection,
including works by Jay Davis, Inka
Essenhigh and Malerie Marder.
Unlike the Whitney's exhibition,
works in Norman's show will be
for sale.
SHERRY WONG is assistant editor
of Artnet Magazine.
============================
============================
*Derring Do or Die*
An Avant-Garde Design for a
New-Media Center
By JULIE V. IOVINE
NYTimes, March 21, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/arts/design/21DILL.html
While the 1990's may come to be
known as a decade in love with
eye-popping, crowd-attracting
design, the new century is in search
of a fresh building type, architecture
that can impress but also
reinvent itself in a digital
flash to accommodate the latest
technologies. Determined to get
the ball rolling, Eyebeam, a
nonprofit arts organization, has
announced that Elizabeth Diller
and Ricardo Scofidio, who make
up a Manhattan architectural team
known for avant-garde
derring-do, have won the competition to
design a $60 million institute
for new-media technology that
will make a giant leap away from
brand-identity architecture. The
building will be around the
corner from the Dia Center for the Arts
in Chelsea. The competition,
which lasted 18 months, was difficult
partly because the type of
building being created had barely been
invented. New-media technology -
from videos of virtual ballerinas
to artistic experiments in
genetics - has gained popularity in the art
world. Still, few could pin down
a medium so in flux that the
devices used to create it have a
life span of only about three years,
much less describe a building
that caters to it.
A handful of institutions -
among them the Ars Electronic Center
in Linz, Austria; the Institute
of Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands; and the Center for
Art and Media in Karlsruhe,
Germany - explore aspects of
new-media development. But one
devoted to teaching, exhibiting
and producing the newest of the
new in media art does not exist
in the United States. "It's an
historical opportunity,"
said John S. Johnson, 35, the founder of
Eyebeam and an heir of the
Johnson & Johnson family. "What we
do is nicknamed cultural
research and development; it's
interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary and employs quite a bit of
technology. What we need is a
facility to support that
architecturally in a deep
way." Eyebeam operates out of a
renovated Manhattan garage on
West 21st Street, between 10th and
11th Avenues, where the new
institute will be located. In
choosing an architect, Mr.
Johnson was aided by the architects
Craig Newick and David Hotson,
who renovated the 21st Street
space but also had experience
organizing competitions, and by a
cadre of new-media consultants
from the art and design worlds.
Their target was not the usual
high-profile mavericks (Rem
Koolhaas declined an invitation
to enter the competition), but
rather the young and digitally
inclined. The first round of entries
included 30 submissions and was
reduced to 13 contenders, whose
preliminary designs were
exhibited by Eyebeam in October. Three
finalists were chosen, including
MVRDV of Rotterdam and Leeser
Architecture of New York. Diller
and Scofidio proposed a 12-
story, 90,000-square-foot
building that looks something like
spliced ribbon candy. By making
the ribbon a two-ply sandwich
of concrete and cast fiberglass
with all the cables, fiber optics,
ducts and so forth necessary for
high-tech delivery as the
sandwich filling, the architects
created a framework with a strong
identity whose infrastructure
can easily be sucked out every few
years as new systems supersede
old.
On the interior, the traditional
approach of relegating the public to
the ground floors and tucking
all other rooms out of sight has been
discarded. The ribbon scheme
makes for public and private spaces
- entirely column-free thanks to a sophisticated horizontal truss
system - that are interwoven on
every floor. Liquid-crystal glass
walls turn from translucent to
transparent at a switch, letting
visitors and residents visually
eavesdrop on each other; a
refreshment bar for meeting and
greeting is on a ramp leading to a
new-media library. From a lobby
floor seeded with L.E.D.
messages to a robotic spider
loaded with video cams that creeps
across the building facade
peering in windows to report on the
action, information technology
has infiltrated every surface.
"Some see new media and
architecture on different sides of the
fence," Ms. Diller said.
"Our contention is that we can no longer
think of architecture outside of
computing."
Many of the competition's
entries included folded planes where
floor, wall and ceiling flow as
one; so many, in fact, that Mr.
Newick called it "the form
du jour." But Diller and Scofidio used
the folded plane not only to
create spaces that are as malleable as
any new technology could hope,
but also to integrate the widely
disparate activities in a way
that few institutions have attempted.
For Diller and Scofidio, it was
a chance to think big. Much of their
completed work to date has been
small or primarily conceptual,
from renovating the Brasserie
restaurant in the Seagram building,
where video cams give everyone
at the bar a view of anyone
entering, to designing an
exhibition on tourism for the Walker
Art Center in Minneapolis that
is packed and displayed in
suitcases. The team is in the
early stages of designing an expansion
for the Institute for
Contemporary Art in Boston, the result of a
competition they won last year.
The much-publicized Blur
building, a cloud of mist
created by a complicated fretwork of
spray nozzles for Swiss Expo
'02, is nearing completion at the end
of a long pier on Lake
Neuchâtel.
Mr. Johnson plans to finance the
project institute with a
combination of municipal bonds
and backing from a select few
families, including his own,
that are committed to art. His
background is in independent filmmaking;
in1996 he created the
Filmmaker's Collaborative, a
nonprofit postproduction center in
Manhattan for artists working in
film and video. But the open-
ended network in support of
creative fervor that he envisions for
Eyebeam was inspired closer to
home, at the Johnson Atelier in
Mercerville, N.J.
Established by his father, J.
Seward Johnson Jr., the sculptor of
wistfully generic human types
cast in bronze and positioned in
numerous cities, the Johnson
Atelier is part foundry, resource
center and open house,
supporting artists like George Segal and
Julian Schnabel along with a
steady stream of students and artists
in residence. "A place for
people to make art that is wholly
transparent and putting it in
Chelsea - what a great idea," said Ray
Gastil, the executive director
of the Van Alen Institute, which
promotes public architecture.
"Whether they can pull it off, who
knows?"
============================
============================
*Book Grist*
1)
One Thousand Blank Journals are
traveling from hand to hand
throughout the world... part of
the Free Biennial (see above, Urls)
.......
2)
Removed
The exhibition catalog
accompanying the exhibition "removed" by
Joy Episalla is now available at
Debs & Co. The 16-page, full-
color catalog, with unique
artist's alteration, is $10.00 (including
postage in U.S.)
The exhibition is now closed
(March 23, at 6 p.m.)
Debs & Co., 525 West 26th
Street, 2nd Fl.
New York, NY 10001 t: 212.643.2070
After March 23 the catalog can
be purchased at the gallery or by
e-mail at jepisalla@aol.com
[...]
Two massive couches, partnered
for decades, were slotted for sale
on Ebay. One was nearly
purchased by a woman who only wanted
the couch's “skin.” The velvet
was not quite right for this
purchaser, fortunately, as Ms.
Episalla then took the couch away
for her own plan of
dismemberment and reinvention.
As with early Gordon Matta-Clark
sculptures and interventions,
such as Bronx Floors (1972-3),
the couch is carefully and
methodically sliced, after its
initial sensitive yet dramatic flaying.
While Matta-Clark's interest lay
in unraveling a building's
architectural allegories, Ms. Episalla is interested in the sensual
experience of the long-term
companionship of the things and
the people we live with. Three
simultaneously played videos
accompany the presentation of
the couch in its investigated form:
one of the skinning, one of the
slicing, and an interview with the
artist's mother, who expresses
her hilarity and disbelief when
confronted first with the idea,
and then her eventual excitement at
the actual reincarnation of the
couch.
Ms. Episalla lives and works in
New York City.
============================
Newsgrist – where spin is art
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