sketch me if you can
came across this online demo of some police sketch-artist software. thought i’d test it out, see if the fuzz would be able to identify me with nothing more than a witness’ limited memory and a computers’ limited imagination. the results? not too bad as you can see. though i detect what may be a fatal flaw in the system. i could not add the soul patch to my beard /mustache combo in order to create the all important tri-fecta of facial hair. “hey copper that guy in your sketch looks nothing like me man! he doesn’t have a pussy bumper!” also it seems anyone with a mono-brow or high top fade has free reign to pillage and plunder without recourse. the system did an excellent
job of sketching one particular wanted, fugitive, missing person. if he ever comes out of hiding and shows his face again somewhere other than in a plate of waffles or a grilled cheese sandwich they’ve got him for sure!
lordy lordy lordy. this software might be a perfect avatar generator if nothing else, or maybe they should integrate this with one of those 8 zillion friend / dating sites so you can just rough out a vision of your ideal mate? anyhow, it’s pretty fun to mess around with, check it out. email me your self portraits if you want and i’ll post them.
Read Less...
the inner life of children
check out norwegian born photographer simen johan’s work. his work deals with the unseen fantasy life of children. his work is digitally enhanced in the extreme. the images are creepy, though not in the same way a loretta lux portrait is. this creepiness might be regarded as proof of strength or weakness depending on how you see things. in my opinion his better images are the less explicit more mysterious ones. his newest work takes a great stride in that direction by removing the children all together. in any case they are all interesting, give them a look.
the hedonistic imperative
a massive essay exploring how to eliminate suffering on planet earth. from the abstract “this manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. the abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.” well meaning utopians or strangely optimistic tin-foil hatters? both probably.
new perspectives quarterly
npq’s fall 2004 issue is called the scientific imagination. it’s chock full of interesting reading. from questions like “will the future need us?” to genomics, to the koran and cloning, to stephen hawkings grumbles about the basic flaws of our science-fictional vision of the future. looking into npq’s archive offers endless pieces of interest like the father of chaos theory’s take on creativity in art and nature. good reading if you’ve got the time.
ape shit
i picked up an issue of national geographic at the train station the other day. mostly for the snarky nature of the cover. it read, “was darwin wrong?” the joke is when you open up to the story it says in huge letters, clear as day, “no.” hahaha. thought that was funny. i could just picture some of the mags’ vast readership in their living rooms picking it up and saying “finally! a major publication is outing evolution as the fraud it is!” only to open up to the article and get a 120pt seriffed slap. beeeeotch! anyhow, i went to their website to post the story for my compatriots here (the issue was actually pretty good) only to find that their firm stance on the issue was in fact not very firm. below a snippet of the article they presented a bunch of links for related reading, over half of which are intelligent design / creationist dookie, or centered on “the controversy.” kind of undermines the giant “no” doesn’t it? add to this the fact that they have set up a forum specifically to debate evolution and the “set the record straight” nature of their issue is essentially nullified.
calling this site “the nonist” is in part an admission that we as human’s really don’t know all that much for sure. that we are essentially as clueless, confused, and presumptuous as children when it comes to the big questions. hence grand pronouncements bug me, assumptions about moral high ground bug me, the tendency to reduce everything to black and white bugs me, the inability to admit ignorance bugs me… yaaaarrrrrrrrrrr!!!!! o.k. a lot of things bug me so i’m all for open minds and questioning paradigms. this though, this evolution thing that’s been brewin, well, i just have to draw the fucking line. seems a contradiction in philosophy but i’ve thought about it a bit, and i don’t think it is. you see, the theory of evolution allows for an open mind, it is all inclusive, complex, in motion, and though the mechanics of it’s own functions are clearly defined it does not imply any explicit purpose for it’s own existence beyond those functions. the other side of this supposed battle of notions, however, is closed, irrational, simplistic, and static. it is above all else meant as an explicit implication of purpose. the “creators” purpose. so in point of fact, evolution is much closer in theory to the nonist ideal and does not preclude further inquiry. to put it simply, scientific
theories vying for prominence, attempting to rationally explain observable evidence, whilst shifting to include new data: good. irrational theories seeking to co-opt the language of open minded inquiry to better crystalize human hubris and superstition into an unquestionable final mythos: bad.
to avoid the mistakes of national geographic, which by encouraging a debate seems to cast doubt on it’s own stance, let me also state my feeling another way: creationism as well as it’s masked doppleganger intelligent design are not science, hence have no place in scientific debate, let alone plastered on science textbooks. they are distilled from the same god fearing, uninquisitive, backward, superstitious nonsense which seeks to rigidly dictate humanities morality and identity, and as such create the lion’s share of conflicts world wide, contributing more to humanities suffering and misery than to it’s enlightenment. period.
anyhoo, with that out of the way i can get to what i actually wanted to post, namely a sampling of the many ape related links which have accumulated on my machine here.
fresh fossil evidence has been found which may be a new link in the evolutionary chain. quote: “Scientists in Spain announced that they’ve unearthed a 13 million-year-old fossilized skeleton of an ape that is possibly a common ancestor of humans and great apes, including orangutans, bonobos, chimps and gorillas.” a find which according to new scientist shows that not all great apes were swingers.
online companion to pbs’ evolution series which inhabits my netflix que at this very moment. includes among
many other things (change, extinction, survival, sex, humans, religion) darwin’s diary and a section called evolution revolution a timeline to the inroads of the theory.
the scottsman is reporting that young apes are brighter than human children. ha ha. love it.
the university of utah released a study which argues that “our genus, Homo, evolved from more ape-like human ancestors, Australopithecus, 2 million or more years ago because natural selection favored the survival of australopithecines that could run and, over time, favored the perpetuation of human anatomical features that made long-distance running possible.” essentially the ability to run was the advantage that ultimately paid off in beer helmets, and laz-y-boys.
whose the luckiest monkey?. ha.
carbon dating of plant remains from an archeological site have shown that man was present in north america well prior to previous theories. “The findings are significant because they suggest that humans inhabited North America well before the last ice age more than 20,000 years ago, a potentially explosive revelation in American archaeology.
one man’s quest to catalog every gorilla graced comic cover ever. keep up the good work there whoever you are.
the black bonobo foundation, advocating that we take cues for a happier and healthier life from the horniest apes on earth. “the bonobo way: peace through pleasure” ha ha.
visit the great apes and other primates at the national zoo! i met some of these folks last year when i visited the zoo. swell people one and all, though i was a bit concerned for a fella by the name of kiko, he was one ennui filled, suicidal looking orangutan. i’ve got pictures. seriously. kuja the silverback on the other hand wanted no pity from puny human like me, he was the resident bad-ass. he’s turn his back on you if you stared too hard.
the shaolin society’s explanation of the monkey. “the art of monkey kung fu as it is better known, is considered one of the most unusual and effective styles in kung fu. Its deceiving and unorthodox techniques make it an awesome and strange sight to behold.” more awesome and strange than monkey karate?
ape history the illustrated 70’s kid’s book way. damn!that uakaris is one ugly mo-fo.
become a chimpanzee. a sort of choose your own adventure through quicktime movies. courtesy of the jane goodall institute’s discover chimpanzees web project. cool!
check out howlett and port lympne’s gorilla cams. live gorilla web cam goodness. pretty cool. alternately check out the san diego zoo’s ape cams.
and finally, to wrap it all up: the writings of mr. charles darwin online (“the most complete collection of Darwin’s work ever published- with original page numbers, illustrations etc.” ) for your reading, thinking, inquiring pleasure.
Read Less...
backward christian soldiers
well, everyones favorite evangelist pamphleteer has released a new illustrated glob of bile (now with 60% more xenophobia!! yippee!) this time he speaks up about that insidious blight on humanity, islam. two young girls have a conversation with some new neighbors, amir and safiya. amir’s swarthy sex appeal has the two girls reeling and contemplating a conversion to islam. they spread the good news to their friend suzy. luckily though suzy’s eye patched grandpa is well versed in the contradictions and suspect origins of their holy book the qur’an and warns suzie about the danger. suzy confronts amir, intending to tell him about jesus, but amir and his whole muslim family need to get to the airport
right away. luckily she’s not too late to save her friends though. she breaks the news that mohammed was a slave owning, moon god worshiping, pedophilic scumbag then proceeds to tell them all about the true god jesus christ. wheeew! that was a close one, those two young children almost fell prey to an evangelizing religious zealot! good thing amir didn’t have any muslim propaganda done in a style traditionally aimed at children! thank you st. chick.
time keeps on slippin
came across this project undertaken by a photographer named douglas levere, called changing new york. essentially he has retaken photographs another photographer, named berenice abbott, took 70 or so years ago. he returned to the original sites, with the identical camera, an 8x10 century universal, at the same time of day and year to reshoot the photographs. the resulting photo’s, when seen beside the originals, are evocative but i also found them strangely unsettling. history is laid bare in a concrete way seldom achieved through simply viewing old photos alone. though intended, i suppose, as a document of change, it’s the lack of change which i found so fascinating. so much has remained the same from a physical standpoint. so many buildings appear exactly as they did in the 1930’s. this effect is amplified by the lack of color which strips away the cosmetics. for me these photos made the inherent feeling of anonymity and personal transience which new york imposes even stronger. whose city am i living in anyway? check them out.
a man and his monsters
ever heard of a fella by the name of Ray Harryhausen? i’m guessing not. and yet if you are a kid who grew up in the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s i bet you know his work very well. i for one was pretty into it, though i’d never heard of ray or even thought to wonder who was responsible for so much cool stuff. his work indirectly lead me to steal a book from the library called of gods, men, and monsters which i cherished, (mostly for giovanni caselli’s rocking 70’s illustrations of herculese, the minotaur, icarus, etc) and still own. this book in turn lead me to the book which i truly believe everyone i’ve ever met still has on their bookshelf, namely edith hamilton’s mythology. ray’s work it turns out effected a great many film folk as well, influencing most of the “awesome!” movies of our childhoods. guess who he is yet?
calibos! the kraken! medusa! awwww yeah! some hot clash of the titans action fo yo ass. anyhow, ray was the stop motion animator who worked on clash as well as many older, more influential flicks like mighty joe young, jason and the argonauts, and the seventh voyage of sinbad. i came across a site dedicated to him called the seventh voyage which is just chock full of goodies. there is a section devoted to his creatures, and a section with quicktime trailers for most of the movies he worked on among other things. i found a nice story about him at sci-fi station. turns out he invented dynamation which solved many of stop motions early problems. in 91 he won an academy award.
are his films cheesy to our modern eye? oh yeah. are they great anyway? absolutely. in a way i respect what he did more than the what the whole staff at industrial light and magic does. did anyone, even an 8 year old, say “awesome!” when they first saw the vast, boring, homogenous, robot armies in star wars episode 1? maybe, but ray’s stuff is still cool. i tend to feel like that’s what’s so underwhelming about a lot of our modern special effects extravaganzas. they are lifeless. i much preferred the foam and plastic of the original star wars, or the fur and fake blood of the thing to most of what we pay 10 bucks for today. digital sets and environments? i’m all for it. digital creatures meant to fascinate or scare? eh. don’t think we’re quite there yet. golem is the best so far. and hey, let’s not forget, aside from paving the way for the golems and aliens of today ray’s low brow also paved the way for the high brow artiness of this guy and these two.
anyhow, just thought some light ray Harryhausen goodness might lighten this dark rainy sunday. enjoy.
Read Less...
titles so grand and fertilizer
a few days ago i finished reading the portrait of mrs. charbuque by jeffery ford. a good little book. the main character is a painter in 1800’s new york who’s slipped into the easy life of doing portraiture for the moneyed class all the while regretting having abandoned his real dream of painting something “great”. i enjoyed it. anyhow, reading the acknowledgments page i noticed the book, what painting is by james elkins listed as inspiration. i read that book a few years ago and found it incredibly inspiring. it’s draws a parallel between oil painting and alchemy. gets real down and dirty into pigments, materials and process. i remember rushing into the kitchen after finishing it to do a little home alchemy myself, grabbing the few jars, bottles, cans, and condiments we actually had to mix in with my paints. i seem to remember spices and under the sink chemicals featuring prominently… of course that’s back when we’d drink a bottle of wine every night topped with a splash of bushmills and most likely a few bong hits. needless to say the painting which resulted from that alchemical inspiration was shit, or atleast i assume it must have been, since i can’t remember what it was, where i put it, or if i finished it.
so… this memory then lead me to hop online to search out some more interesting art books. i thought, “hey, books on art can be fun!” i know i was deluding myself, art books are as a general rule depressingly bloodless, but i do come across the occasional gem worth more than the paper it’s printed on. sure enough in my resulting digital travels i came across a book which seemed to fall in line with some of my own suspicions and biases. i figured such a book, written by someone with some actual knowledge of art history, might help clarify my own cloudy puddle of artistic bile. well, hey-presto, i was out of the house and on my way to barnes and noble. i can hear some of you scoffing now, “barnes and noble? don’t you know that store is a shit hole? don’t you know that place is to the written word what television is to the moving picture? 358 channels and nothing on!” well, yes. i do know that. they never have the book i’m looking for. never. but in my excitement it completely slipped my mind. sure enough, they had nothing. (sorry sir we don’t stock that book, but we can order it for you… uh, i came here for instant gratification thank you very much, if i wanted to order it and wait around i’d do it myself and have it sent to my house, so if you can not provide the instant, and i mean instant
, gratification i require then, well, go fuck yourself.) on my slouching walk home i was reminded of that article from wired a couple months back called the long taile, these stores just can’t please us modern consumers, but that’s another story i guess.
well needless to say i ordered the fucking thing and it is, as i write, being sent to my house. the book in question is called the end of art. i know, i know! such a very grand title, just begging to be mocked and stomped back into the fertilizer-heavy soil of the art world. but take a breath and read this review / interview. much of the opinion expressed within rings woefully true to me. like this snippet for instance- “typical ‘postart’ values include: a tendency to mock posterity, a tendency to elevate the banal to the status of the enigmatic and the scatological to the status of the sacred, and a preference for concept-driven art. ‘postart’ is art at the service of the mind and the product of joyless, “clever, clever” theorizing. entertainment value and commercial panache are valued more highly than artistic ability or aesthetic worth and painting is perilously close to becoming a sub-genre of performance art.” that’s a sentiment i often want to express, only in my mouth those sensible words become “oh fuck this man, what a bunch of horseshit, this sucks.”
i realize that grand sweeping pronouncements, especially those of the doomsaying variety are utter folly, pointless in terms of art, which has no firm ground to stand on, no matter how many bones of dead artists are ground to dust below us. subjectivity is king. that’s how i feel about it. but at the same time, much of what the author donal kuspit has to say on the subject, in this interview, i can’t help but feel sympathetic to. it may simply be the old troublesome romanticism biting at my heels again, but so much of what is out there, being celebrated, looks like diseased baboon excrement to me, and sub-par baboon excrement to boot. as stated subjectivity is king, so in my kingdom at least, a crier like kuspit is welcomed. the final judgment though will have to come after amazon directs an offshoot of it’s fleet to my door, bearing kuspit, more victorian era “magical realism”, some sci-fi, and, from the horse’s mouth, the artist’s reality. yippee!
Read Less...
the whole shebang
found this nifty site via sciam’s science and technology web awards. it’s from tufts university and it’s called cosmic evolution. it’s an incredibly information rich timeline of the evolution of everything. obviously considering the scope there is a lot to take in here, including movies, etc. good stuff, how much you take as fact and how much you take as guesswork is up to you. check it out.
the reverse side also has a reverse side
hunt down and kill the evildoers? destroy the infidel? “if only it were all so simple! if only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” a quote which starts off this essay entitled getting beyond good vs evil, a buddhist reflection on the new holy war, which i found it pretty interesting. thoughts?
squashed philosophers
an ongoing project to compress the greatest books of western philosophy to a tenth or so of their original size to allow for a reading of the whole as a single narrative, as “the story of western thought.” how are these different from cliffs notes or the like? well…“what is different here is that these are neither the opinion of one person nor mere extracts. instead, each has begun with a very wide analysis of quotations, citations and, especially, past examination papers, to establish which passages, which phrases, which lines, which words and which ideas, are generally considered the most important. Those essential parts have, as far as is reasonable, been left complete and untouched in the authors’ or translators’ original words. It is just the stuff between which has been squashed up, except when it is really interesting- like st augustine’s mother’s alcoholism, hobbes on angels, or adam smith on why irish prostitutes are so very beautiful.” admirable project i think, and good reading for the autodidact in all of us here.
takin it to the streets
who knows what the future brings my soft flabby american compatriots? will we be called forth to defend our homes from insidious haters of freedom? will we be sent abroad to hunt and kill the demonic minions of terror where they live? only jesus and his apostles in government know for sure, but i, and a couple of news agencies, think it’s high time we brush up on some urban warfare strategies just in case. it’s also high time we check in with our ass kicking brethren over at frugal squirrel. grab your survivalist bible, do some learnin, polish your urine purification apparatus, and gear up for the final quest... seriously, i’m not kidding, these people will be the only ones left after “the shit” goes down. wolverines!!!!!
daddy, how are planets made?
well son, the “core accretion” model says that planets form little by little, as material slowly congeals within the disk of gas, dust, and ice known to swaddle young stars. first, gravity gathers together bits of dust, which merge to form boulder-size bodies, which themselves coalesce into bigger and bigger objects. In about a million years, these form rocky planets, like earth and mars. alternately the “gravitational instability” model predicts a situation in which an object’s self-gravity exceeds opposing forces such as internal gas pressure or material rigidity, and the object collapses. for a gas, gravitational instability sets in when the mass is greater than a certain critical value known as the Jean’s mass. In the early universe, instabilities were large enough to produce whole galaxies.
uh, dad, you don’t really know what your talking about do you?
no son, no i don’t.
the nonist’s cabinet of wonders (1)
ah, a cold sunday morning, coffee in hand, cats laid out luxuriantly on cushions, relative calm and quiet… what better time to lazily click through my own archive of links and begin fresh? you see in my travels i inevitably come across stuff which though eye catching, funny, or interesting never make it into their own post. maybe i simply don’t know what to say about them so they languish in unimaginatively titled folders, or maybe they seemed more naturally part of a larger post which never materialized. in either case i’ve decided to simply round a bunch of them up and share them, a bit of autumn cleaning as it were. today i’ll focus on links which would fit snugly in the sights & sounds category. don’t be fooled though into thinking that their belated posting marks them forever with the scarlet “f” for filler. there are some truly worthwhile sights within.
amateur enterprises a great name but so much more. one of those sites that straddles the line very mysteriously between parody and poetry. i am inclined to think they are deadly serious but that may be a reflection of my own silly earnestness. in either case i think the sites brilliant. think max earnst if he were totally single minded and web savvy. it explores numinosity. “a numinous object is one in which matter, form, and situation combine to ‘haunt’ or otherwise fascinate the imagination.” this site has a lot to offer and requires patience for any reward. a few of the sections include imagined, observed, remembered, words into matter & other machines, and on the manufacture of numinous objects. hidden within are many odd goodies.
the lost museum. “in 1841 the showman phineas taylor barnum opened his american museum in new york city. dominating lowerbroadway at park row, in no time barnum’s american museum became the “most visited place in america. a cornucopia of exhibitions offered visitors, in no particular order, information and entertainment, scientific knowledge and trumped-up fantasy, moral lessons and cruel voyeurism, the sacred and the profane. shortly after twelve noon on Thursday, July 13, 1865, in one of the most spectacular fires in New York’s history, Barnum’s American Museum was destroyed.” explore that lost museum here, reconstructed virtually for your viewing pleasure. fun. reminds me a little of the fantastic museum of jurassic technology featured on egg, and in the book mr. wilson’s cabinet of wonders.
lord whimsey, mammal of paradise. another great title, and ever so much more. titled: “a compendium of deeds and thoughts never before seen, in this, our benighted age; the brilliance of which cannot last long in our world of mud and tears.” this site centers on the quasi-fictional character of lord whimsey himself and revels in all things dandy. essays include on affected provincialism, how to become a bon vivant, and the treatise on onanism, on self congress. the “charts” section includes beautiful and strange pdf’s like dandyism vs. foppery and the wonderful grooming from which the included thumbnail was culled. searching through you can find many fun tidbits. the site is evidently the brainchild of a couple of illustrators / designers from new jersey. their other sites include plankton art co. and the associated affected provincials quartely. these are two very talented and interesting folks.
days in a day. this is another extremely obtuse and well done site. “at a certain age, fascinated by my communist parent’s collectivist and utopian delirium, i had decided to be a member of a bug society… but primates cannot become social bugs…” this is an absorbing trip through a city, told in tiny flash animated vignettes. after each vignette your “notebook” gets updated and a bit more of the tale is told. the story itself is really not the point here i suspect, but rather a framework to present the beautifully designed interactive chapters. taking a look through the links i also came upon these two issues of an affiliated web magazine (the capitalist issue and the raquel issue) which between them showcase 18 different artists. all in all interesting stuff.
the y-leg organism. i’ve been wanting to post this for a while but truly do not know what to say about it. it is mysterious and it is obtuse and because of, or despite that, it’s interesting. there are three texts. titled ram: representative of evil (the anti super hero) , nature man: representative of good (the super hero), and the noseless man book one. these three texts are presented as books whose pages you can filp, but dispersed throughout are other hidden tidbits. this is one of those “when in doubt, click stuff” sites. there are other texts as well as many sketches and audio to be found. i like it because in a certain way it achieves some of the things i initially wanted to achieve with the archeography section of the nonist, before i got impatient and just shoved it out there for public consumption. don’t know what the y-leg organism amounts to in the end, but i like it.
the censored cartoon page. “a guide to the cuts and edits which have been rendered to the classic cartoons of warner brothers, mgm, paramount, and other studios when broadcast on television. gags that are deemed inappropriate for children, racist, violent, etc. are simply edited out of the affected cartoons. this is a guide to these “lost” moments.” pretty cool. i think when i was a lad these characters still got their faces blown off with shotguns. ah, the good ol’ days.
the grand illusion. “Grand Illusions was formed in 1996 (old by Internet standards) and was originally designed as a way of sharing our enthusiasm for various science based phenomena, fun and games, optical illusions etc.” a very cool site. many illusory oddities for your enjoyment as well as a few interesting essays like, why didn’t the roman’s invent photography?, the mystery in the mirror which deals with vermeer’s possible use of the camera obscura, and the strange story of napoleon’s wallpaper. good stuff.
how it works… the computer just found this funny. a book from 71 digitized for you guffawing enjoyment. irony aside i still think these old machines are aesthetically pleasing in a weird way. for similar old timey goodness check out the walkman museum,the phenomenal product design database, and hell, i’ll throw in the arcade flyer archive for good measure.
The Perry Bible Fellowship. a web comic. the link points to the archive. the main page offers other stuff, student films, paintings, etc, but it’s the comic that i like. funny. evidently this strip is now syndicated in the new york press. who knew? i guess people who still read the new york press. at the end of his bio, the creator, a kid named nicholas gurewitch, says: “if you’d like me to make something for you, let me know.” i’m sure we here at the nonist could come up with something, couldn’t we?
crease patterns. silly link i guess, but this origami blew my mind. it can’t be real can it? these people are masters of an art form i don’t really care that much about, but masters none the less. just the diagrams alone are cool. you can print the diagrams out by the way and fumble pathetically with your own lack of dexterity and skill. enjoy.
super marketing ads from the comic books. “they promised us spectacular treasures and secret knowledge, super intelligent pets, and incredible powers… often the spectacular treasures were nothing more than gross misrepresentations and the secret knowledge was a lesson in the value of reading the fine print. this collection represents some of the best, most memorable, most audacious and most bizarre of those ads.” says it all.
lastly i’d like to offer up a cornucopia of record related links, whether to scoff, marvel, or steal from, these albums of days past are worth a browse. bizarre records, cover heaven, rare covers, space age covers, sexy covers part 1, sexy part 2, stolen covers, cover search part 1, cover search part 2, cover artists (including the bad ass mati klarwein), covers by comic artists (scroll down for index), collectibles, and finally the boldly titled album cover art gallery. enjoy
Read Less...
nyc cultura part1: post election gallery going
the following piece was contributed to the nonist by artist, filmmaker, and critic mathieu borysevicz*
So I finally managed to break out of my work around the clock habits and venture out into the cultural elitism of grand New York City. It was my first gallery going experience in the newly arrived era of political despondency and as might be expected the stakes and positions have been dramatically shifted. Art was no longer to be seen in the pre-election light of anticipated hope and cheap shot complacency. However most of the shows, hung in an altogether different atmosphere, did not benefit from the election results but instead were put in the same pathetic glare that most good Americans find themselves burning in right now. It has always been easy to critique but not so easy to create. yet in an age of desperation and destitution real alternatives must be sought whose ingenuity exists somewhere out of the box, because that’s where we’ve been all along, a citizenry boxed and warehoused in altogether incommunicable and different ideologies.
Following the general trend of political art for politically repressive times post-election Chelsea was spotted with various group shows that whined inarticulately to the choir. a choir which, of course, included me and my pinko leftist friends.
A pre-election opening titled, democracy is fun turned into the past-tense democracy
was fun in the white box’s limp wrested attempt at political and / or institutional critique. Ironically the exhibition never was really that fun. The show contained a roster of up and coming and already arrived hipsters sporting that fuck-it-all aestheticism of yesteryear’s east village scene. Opening with a piece by “pursue the pulse” that poses as an interactive, vintage Betamax VCR, the codeck democratically invites you to bring your own video art, created in this defunct format, and play it for all to see. The show continues with an assume vivid astro focus piece, a testimony to why the group should stay working in a large scale installation format. There were soccer balls covered by Bush face-masks that would’ve be fun to kick around only if you were permitted to bust up the other scrappy Bush-bashing collages. there was an ATM machine, and man-on-the-street style video interviews strung together that reminded me of every conversation I’ve had for the last six months, there was a curious assemblage of patriotic pizza boxes and stacks of NY Post’s with Spiderman on the cover, and then there was, as always, the highlight that made coming worthwhile, namely the Sisley Xhafa video. it shows the artist himself passionately gesturing and shouting in a frenzy of stock trading, not on the market floor, but rather at a train station’s time-table. Here the abstract absurdity of international economic ebbs, flows, and sharp time crunches are reciprocally translated into international transport itself, psychotically blurring facets of the global condition.
across the street and up the stairs at 526W26 are a few worthwhile shows. Paul Chan’s show at Greene Naftali is dominated by an enormous double-sided panoramic flash animation installation that, in its high / low-falutin- out of fashion-ability, alludes to both biggie smalls and pier pasolini. you could read more on the show by a more seasoned and insightful critic in this week’s Village Voice.
next door (or was it up stairs at marvelli gallery?) is a compelling display of effective and affective socio / political art. Several near life-size photographs, along with a video of heroin ravaged, homeless, but not entirely hopeless seattle youth make up endurance. the video is a 26 hour timelapsed performance of 26 homeless Seattle teenagers standing on a street corner looking directly into the camera as time, and the general public, indifferently whizz by. In the voice over the subjects, eloquently and often heartbreakingly, tell of their experiences with drug dependency, wretched childhoods, and the street crimes they have endured. The project was made by the husband and wife team of mccallum & tarry in partnership with several non-profits in seattle. In the gallery’s project room is a display of equally striking though more formalized portraits by photographer ingar krauss of juvenile russian prisoners. on a different, more humorous, though still judicious note, adam mcewen’s history is a perpetual virgin endlessly and repeatedly deflowered by successive generations of fucking liars is a show about itself inasmuch as it is about the cooky-ness of present day reality and its vestiges.
The paul pfeiffer show at gagosian was impressive. if by nothing else at least the merit of this dazzling artist’s upward mobility. geez, he must be 34 and already a serious blue chipper. either way, shows at Gagosian are usually impressive because the gallery is impressive… or is it just imposing?… like being in the privileged land of the lost, which brings me to my next thought- there are several new pfeiffer’s cordoned off in a labyrinth of separate rooms… some pieces better than others, most of them displaying his signature non-linear technical virtuosity. Y’know, “hmmm how did he do that?” kind of stuff. My favorite was the tiny portable DVD player piece that displays scenes from vintage and not so vintage TV game shows. Participants stand alone in an environment stripped bare of its monetary and textual signification dazzled by the chromatic remains of the consumer spectacle. The video is dream like, euphoric, with contestants adrift in a blinking candy colored paradise of the promised yet illusory jackpot. The large basketball player prints and the paintings in the main gallery by mark tansey are also enigmatically worthy of view.
there is a show at american fine arts, titled election that seems strikingly similiar to the white box’s aforementioned democracy etc etc. the show is introduced by a self-aggrandizing, wall sized testimony to the gallerist own dedication to the “world of ideas” over the marketplace. right. the stand out pieces for me (mind you I am skipping through the galleries as one does these days) is bush’s tour of the oval office- a found video download (now unavailable, but commented on here) from the white house website. very, very funny. Bush should just be a goddamn comedian, y’know have a late-night show where he talks to himself about the issues… anyway. there’s also this humongous button that says ”have sex in a voting booth” that’s probably John Waters’ piece since I couldn’t find anything else that might’ve belonged to him. Then there’s Paul Chan’s (again) very tried and true “Baghdad in no Particular Order” which is an ambient / documentary video depicting the normal, peaceful lives of Iraqis a month prior to the American invasion… heart breaking only because of historical outcome.
another worthwhile show was david altmejd at andrea rosen. This Whitney Biennial standout produced more psycho-symptomatic jewel case creepiness touching upon everything from Hollywood glam to Madison Ave. decadence to Armageddon to bankruptcy and back… but maybe I’m just looking too much into it.
and finally thomas erben on W21st Street had an eclectic mix of contemporary art from India including this crazy posterized video of a very plump woman improvising ballet and belly flopping around her bare studio in the buff. There are of course a zillion other things out in the Chelsea art maze worthwhile that I didn’t catch, i chose instead to see a lecture at the Cooper Union on the Abu Ghraib prison photos now on view at the international center of photography.
[update]
nyc cultura part2: post election Abu Ghraib imagery and intellectual impotence
The lecture brought together such critical minds as Luc Sante, David Levi Strauss, and Seymour Hersh. The question was basically- what do these images, now post-election (for some godforsaken reason they were absent from any presidential debate) now museum-ified, and ironically largely forgotten by the public at-large, mean? Seymour Hersh with his first hand insight of the Middle East catastrophe dominated the discussion much to the dismay of the other participant’s flowery yet impotent intellectual meanderings. Mr. Hersh laid bare the facts of espionage, deceit and confoundedness endemic to the United States foreign policy. Hersh prophesized “Get your money out of the US because the economy’s going belly up… only until we hit bottom will the US be able to exorcise the demons of its errors.” So it’s all about money. After hours of art-going the discussion shed light on the fact that any fictional image production has even stricter limits on affect. If these horrific images, the ultimate Freudian slip of American imperialism, cannot affect change, can art? Certainly bringing these images into an art context only confounds the answer. Oddly enough the holocaust of WW2 is evoked largely through images, yet here in our time, only a mere few months ago, these digital images have become a lost chapter in the sick fiction of our times. Hopefully battering these images about in the bowels of Cooper Union, where, I might add, revolutions had begun in the past, will affect change for the future… or maybe we’ll all just turn our greenbacks into Euros.
*A Brooklyn based artist, filmmaker, and critic, Mathieu has worked in the production and post-production of films and television for such networks as ABC, CNN, BET, ZDF, Channel 4 UK, Arté, National Geographic TV as well as for various television stations throughout China. He has also made films for The UNHCR, The European Union, and The World Bank. He has edited films that have been shown on PBS’ Independent Lens and POV, Anthology Film Archives, and Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center. Mathieu has also exhibited his art at ICA London, the Bauhaus in Dessau, The Beijing Art Museum, White Box NY, and at Socrates Sculpture Park.
Read Less...
the sciences and ethics
interesting and obviously relevant piece from the skptical enquirer posing the question, “Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments?”. a caveat to the conclusion they come to: “We are continually surrounded by self-righteous moralists who claim that they have the Absolute Truth, Moral Virtue, or Piety or know the secret path to salvation and wish to impose their convictions on all others. They are puffed up with an inflated sense of their own rectitude as they rail against unbenighted immoral sinners who lack their moral faith. These moral zealots are willing to repress or even sacrifice anyone who stands in their way. They have in the past unleashed conquering armies in the name of God, the Dialectic, Racial Superiority, Posterity, or Imperial Design. Skepticism needs to be applied not only to religious and paranormal fantasies but to other forms of moral and political illusions. These dogmas become especially dangerous when they are appealed to in order to legislate morality and are used by powerful social institutions, such as a state or church or corporation, to enforce a particular brand of moral virtue. Hell hath no fury like the self-righteous moral fanatic scorned.” could not have said it better myself. give it a read.