It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's . . .

Wish he'd keep stroking it; maybe there'd be a cloudburst.

Reminds me of this.

Tubenheim

On Oct. 21, Guggenheim NY hosted a production announcing the top 25 in its juried YouTube video competition. The trailer for the event is painful but does give an overview of the videos (some of which you've seen before, e.g., here). (Thanks, Ben!)

You can see the full-length videos here; more info here.

Site Santa Fe: "The Dissolve"

Day after I got back from NYC, I & the sig. other drove to NM. My main objective was Site Santa Fe's biennial, The Dissolve, which is all video.

As I understood from one of the many guides at the facility (ca. 2.3 per visitor), curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco worked with architect David Adjaye to design an exhibition divided into three sections, with dark, gray-blue, -green, and -red walls and scrims respectively (think RGB). The sections were meant to organize the works roughly according to stages in the exploration and historical development of video as a fine art technology (although each section includes videos of various vintages). While I'm not sure I totally got the curators' thinking on that point, I thought the dissolve theme was well-chosen; and the installation was exceptional, given the challenges of showing video in a space not at all designed for it.

I was also told the curators deliberately included only work by artists whose primary media were NOT video. This seemed a little unfair to the early adopters of video as their main medium but perhaps emphasizes to any remaining doubters that even your favorite painters, sculptors, et al. have turned to it.

I'd seen some of the works before; nonetheless, it was "a banquet to me." Some favorites:

• Paul Chan, 4th Light, 2006 (well worth seeing again)
• Brent Green, Paulina Hollers, 2006 (other works by Green were shown by the Video Association of Dallas in 2007 and 2010)
• William Kentridge, History of the Main Complaint, 1996 (shown by the Video Association ca. 1997)
• Avish Khebrehzadeh, Theater III, 2010
• Laleh Khorramian, Water Panics in the Sea, 2010
• Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Traffic #1: Our Second Date, 2004 (this looked really interesting but referred to Goddard's Week-End, which I haven't seen)
• Joshua Mosley, A Vue, 2004 (seen at the Modern of Fort Worth in 2008)
• Oscar Muñoz, Re/trato, 2003
• Robert Pruitt, Black Stuntman (Volumes 1 and 2), 2004
• Christine Rebet, The Black Cabinet, 2007
• Mary Reid Kelley, You Make Me Iliad, 2010 (my favorite new work)
  
• Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926
• Hiraki Sawa, Airliner, 2003 (I've seen another, related work I liked even better, but this cool piece worked perfectly as the opener for the exhibition)
  
• Cindy Sherman, Doll Clothes, 1975 (reprised from the Dallas Video Association archives in the 2007 series, I Heart Video Art)
• Federico Solmi, Douche Bag City, 2010
• Dziga Vertov, Soviet Toys, 1924
• Kara Walker, National Archives Microfilm publications M999, Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: 1) Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009, 2) Lucy of Pulaski, 2009

The Dissolve runs through Jan. 2, 2011; well worth the trip. The website's great, too, with lots of clips.

America for Sale

From Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone reporter who's been doing the work journalists at more "serious" news outlets should be but mostly aren't:

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new stage in your societal development.

Much more at the link above.

UPDATE: More great writing from Taibbi, this time from Griftopia:

"Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won't produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. . . . What voters don't realize, or don't want to realize, is that that dream was abandoned long ago by this country's leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status.

"These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled American's ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what's left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left. Our leaders know we're turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what's happened.

* * * * *

"In the ghetto, nobody gets real dreams. What they get are short-term rip-off versions of real dreams. You don't get real wealth, with a home, credit, a yard, money for your kids' college - you get a fake symbol of wealth, a gold chain, a Fendi bag, a tricked-out car you bought with cash. Nobody gets to be really rich for long, but you do get to be pretend rich, for a few days, weeks, maybe even a few months. It makes you feel better to wear that gold, but when real criminals drive by on the overpass, they laugh.

"It's the same in our new ghetto. We don't get real political movements and real change; what we get, instead, are crass show-business manipulations whose followers' aspirations are every bit as laughable and desperate as the wealth dreams of the street hustler with his gold rope. What we get, in other words, are moderates who don't question the corporate consensus dressed up as revolutionary leaders, like Barack Obama, and wonderfully captive opposition diversions like the Tea Party - the latter a fake movement for real peasants that was born that night in St. Paul, when Sarah Palin addressed her We."

VOTE

The Nov. 2, 2010 elections are almost upon us. If you live in Dallas County, you can find info re- early voting here (it's already begun) and re- regular voting here. If you live elsewhere, please check with your local election authority.

There's a quote somewhere to the effect that those who fail to exercise their rights can expect to lose them (I'm not finding a great source for this; pls let me know if you've got it).

B.t.w., last I checked, in Dallas County you have at least a slightly better chance of generating a paper trail re- your vote if you do so on election day rather than early voting. Speaking of which . . .

Report from NYC: NYFF, "Greater New York," Conflux, "The Last Newspaper," & the Creative Time Summit

There was a lot going on.

Went to some gallery shows in Chelsea; some visuals here. The works I enjoyed most were by Pipi Rist – her installations at Luhring Augustine were gorgeous – Matthew Day Jackson, and Sarah Sze. Also came across work by Aaron Kang (see also here), quoting Kant; c.f. the Perpetual Peace project, near the end of this post below.

I caught one day of the "Avant Garde" at the New York Film Festival. Seemed a bit heavy on the watery reflections, leaves in breeze, and texts coming in and out of focus. But very worthwhile; among other things, I was glad to see new work by Lewis Klahr (see also here) and Dani Leventhal (whose work I've recommended to the VideoFest, but it hasn't been picked up here in Dallas yet; but the NYFF curator indicated there's been a bit of a craze for her work in NYC). I also loved the idea of one video by David Gatten, screened at the marriage ceremony at his own wedding in lieu of speaking any words to his bride (making me think about conducting a semi-legitimate, mass-wedding-via-video here in Dallas – something spectacular, if you know what I mean!)

Saw about 50% of the Greater New York exhibition at P.S. 1 – not only does the show fill that good-sized facility, but much of the work is video – visuals here (shot under, shall we say, extremely adverse circumstances, so apologies for the extra-low production values) – including substantial, recent works by Matthew Barney (Guardian of the Veil), Ryan Trecartin, Kalup Linzy, and many others – one artist new to me whose work I especially liked was Deville Cohen. If you want more than a cursory acquaintance with the works in this show, allow two days. The show offered evidence that whatever media artists may be losing with the death of hardcopy news (see The Last Newspaper, below), they're finding plenty of new material online. (B.t.w., those interested in my reports on Temporary Services' ART WORK project might appreciate this.)

Then caught the last half of the opening presentation at Conflux 2010, New York's psychogeographic art festival, on the subject of little-seen urban ruins and underground spaces – the speaker, Steve Duncan, shared lots of great info accompanied by lots of great photos – my visuals, starting here, don't begin to do it justice (it had already been a long day). Did you know that many of the world's great cities, including Paris, Moscow, London, and New York, paved over and built on top of the rivers that originally sustained them, transforming the rivers into arteries in their storm water and sewage systems? And they did something similar w.r.t. the quarries from which the stones used to build their buildings were extracted. If you're adventurous, you can explore these old, underground quarries and sewers, and see some amazing things. And the speaker mentioned he cut his hand down there once, and by the next day his hand was the size of a baseball mitt, infected with four kinds of deadly bacteria; so don't get cut down there.

Saw the NYC premier at The Kitchen of a "live documentary," Utopia in Four Movements, by Sam Green; he directed The Weather Underground, which I loved. His new project contemplates our relationship to utopias, which he semi-facetiously defined as places that do not exist, where everyone has a good job and a good standard of living. He mostly showed footage of/talked about (1) Esperanto (2) communist states, esp. Cuba, although he consistently used the term, "socialism," in talking about them; and he more or less assumed we agree that our own capitalist democracy has also proved disappointing, if not quite the failure of communist states, and (3) forensic archaeology, i.e., where they dig up mass graves and attempt to identify remains.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked if he'd considered talking about socialist democracies, and what he might have said about those. I asked because I'm genuinely curious about whether their systems work as much better than ours as they seem to. E.g., I have the impression that pretty much everyone there has a good job and a good standard of living – like Green's definition of utopia, only they do exist!

He answered along the lines of, that he was interested in exploring our feelings and attitudes about utopias; and the socialist democracies, well, they're just there, and there didn't seem to be much of a story there. And yet more than once in his talk, he'd mentioned his deep disappointment, and wishing there were a solution or way forward. So, um, like, Sweden and Norway . . . ?

Went to the New Museum's new exhibition, The Last Newspaper; visuals here. It's big and terrific; and also interesting in what it did not do. It did not particularly inquire into what it is that we might be losing with the death of paper news, apart from a cheap, wonderful, ready-made medium; it did not ask, for example, what we may be about to lose in the way of hard archives, or modes of thinking; and it came nowhere near any issues re- what's displacing hardcopy new, i.e., virtual news. Also interestingly, the exhibition was larded with Kant quotations. As I learned later, these quotations were thanks to the Perpetual Peace project – more below.

Possibly coming up in a later post: a few remarks inspired by the Creative Time Summit (a few visuals here). For now I'll just mention, first, that they have a great website with, I believe, videos of more or less all the presentations, here; and second, that the instigator of the Perpetual Peace project (see pics sprinkled among the New Museum vizis, such as this one) was among the speakers, and he explained that it was a "secret" article by Kant that was the foundation for the U.N., and that the little booklet displayed at the New Museum contains this secret article.

Catapulting the ––

(Thanks, Ben!)

Improv Everywhere MP3 Experiment # 7

If I get there in time, the first thing I check out in NYC tomorrow might be this.

Here's one they did last year – corny/scary: