Update Re- Diamond-Coated Skull

Re- Damien Hirst's piece, I asked, "[w]ould we like this as much with cz's?" An artist named Laura took a step toward finding out: she created a replica covered with 6,522 Swarovski crystals and left it on top of the trash outside Hirst's gallery in the middle of the night. (From The Wooster Collective via boingboing.)

Current TV Re-Broadcasting Cindy Sheehan Short

Al Gore's cable channel has asked to extend its rights to broadcast Grace at Camp Casey, my "pod" about Cindy Sheehan's protest outside President Bush's ranch in 2005; they did a nice page on it here; you can see the original version here.

(By now, that subtitle would prolly have to read, "has built.")

If You Liked Macbeth . . .

You'll love this: "James Coldwell, 49, disguised himself as a tree when he robbed a bank in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday. He had tree branches attached to his clothing and head with duct tape. Police nabbed him after surveillance video that played on TV news led to several anonymous tips of Coldwell's identity. This is according to the police captain whose real name is apparently Dick Tracy."

Coldwell was charged with one count of robbery. (From boing-boing, citing The New Hampshire Union Leader.)

Report from the Venice Biennial, Documenta, and Other Fronts:

I.e., the Venice Biennial, Kassel's documenta, the Münster Sculpture Project, and the ZKM museum of tech-based art in Karlsruhe.

Your virtual "Grand Tour" starts here. Sincere apologies for the deficiencies in my photography (conditions were less than ideal) and for the lack of title and artist info in some instances (I didn't quite realize I was doing this 'til the trip was over).

Venice was sunny and suffocatingly hot; Kassel, rainy and cold, with exhibitions too darkly lit not to credit its curator with having intended the eyestrain. Appropriately, since many artists seem more or less urgently involved in dealing with what certainly seem to me to be our dark days (though I'm disappointed to realize I can't read too much into U.S. pavilion artist Félix González-Torres' selection of black candy, since he's dead).

Additional trends:

Tech-based art is getting the love, and much of the more interesting painting is clearly influenced by tech.

Charting, mapping, and architecturally-influenced drawing continue to offer possibilities, if not quite the import of Mark Lombardi's.

Conceptual art, which I like, was well-represented, but it can make for a dry exhibition experience, except when interactive.

Feminism is back, thank goddess. Perhaps because of that, or the aging of the Boomers, so are images of older women's bodies. I've seen enough of Tony Soprano to consider this overdue.

An awareness of multiply-layered referentiality remains supremely useful.

Minimalism lingers but drew little attention. And there's still some not-really-so-interesting video out there. Sorry; I'm just frustrated at what strikes me as more-or-less benighted under-utilization of a medium having the potential for maximal meaning and impact.

Of the work I saw (and I did miss some), a few pieces I especially loved (although there were many other wonderful works):



In Venice, Yves Netzhammer's video installation in the Swiss Pavilion – for me, a total knock-out (starting here); the three-channel video installation by the collective, AES+F, in the Russian Pavilion (starting here); Hyung Koo Lee's video and installation, The Homo Species, in a pavilion near the Russian pavilion (starting here); Joshua Mosley's video, Dread, in the Italian pavilion (starting here), in which the gray, digital claymation philosophers Pascal and Rousseau encounter an oversized dog; Philippe Parreno's video, I think in the Arsenale, The Writer (here); and a video in the Arsenale involving deliciously snarky, naked older women on a VW bus (sorry, thought I shot some video but I either hit the wrong button or somehow lost it).

Also, do not miss the Matthew Barney/Joseph Beuys exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim; it included lots of important videos and sculpture I'd never seen before and strikingly illuminates the relationship between the work of the two.

In Kassel, the replacement of the grass in the square in front of the Museum Fridericianum with weeds, here; a body of work called Virus that grips me more viscerally than intellectually, but I like it, starting here; a piece that looks like neon lettering but which is actually some kind of wrought element glowing merely with extreme heat, which says, "Wir suchen uberall das unbedingte und finden immer nur dinge," which I think means something like, "We seek above all the unconditional and ever find only what's for hire" (here; corrections welcome); Zofia Kulik's re-photographed photo collages in Kassel, starting here; Andrei Monastyrski's Goethe (I don't want to spoil the surprise, but do interact, and look for the other part).

In Münster I think my favorite was a field of miniatures starting here – my photos don't do it justice; it contained miniatures of sculptures by over a dozen artists from Paik to Serra and beyond. Unfortunately, we missed several sculptures, including Mike Kelly's Petting Zoo featuring Lot's rock-salt wife.

Martha Rosler had important work in both Kassel and Münster (unfortunately also not done justice in my pics).

Practical tips:

Re- Venice: Bring a fan (seriously). And note, the Arsenale offers all five parts of Yang Fudong's Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, but they run between a half-hour and an hour apiece; I discovered them too late to watch them all.

Re- Kassel: Bring a flashlight (semi-seriously). And check out the documenta evening film series; they're showing great stuff, and a lot of it's in English.

Re- Münster: Go first to an office for the Sculpture Project for their map; the one our hotel gave us wasn’t as good. You might also want to flip through the official short guide before setting out, because some of the sculptures are not so easy to identify; we found ourselves wondering if every odd object we encountered was supposed to be a sculpture (a great way to go through life, of course) — there are old sculptures from previous exhibitions as well as the new ones. And some benefit from a bit of explanation — e.g., we found Martha Rosler's piece before we read the description, and had no idea that some of the objects were not just large bird cages but mimicked medieval cages in which corpses were displayed.

Finally, if you call ahead, you can get a custom tour of the sculpture show, walking or on bikes. It was €90 or so, so we skipped it, but it might be great if you can split the cost with a group.

I also took the opportunity to visit the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. It proved to be very large and apparently very well-funded, better adapted for technology-based work than most institutions; and on a per-square-foot basis, it may have provided the most exciting art. Two major shows, one entitled Between Two Deaths, "on the political, social, and cultural trend toward melancholic retrospection" (read more here), and the other, Thermocline of Art, an exhibition of work by more than 100 artists from ca. twenty Asian countries. Unfortunately, I'd allotted just one day here, so to my serious chagrin, I barely scraped the surface of the Asian show. Works I especially loved here included Sue de Beers' video installation, Black Sun (starting here) and Elín Hansdóttir's sound and sculpture installation, Drift, here; I also liked Aida Ruilova's Lulu, here, and I'm a fan of Ryan Trecartin's A Family Finds Entertainment, which they also had.

Karlsruhe is close to the border of France – not esp. convenient to anything I know of, other than the Moselle River valley, which was beautiful. We also stopped by the well-preserved, 850-year-old Burg Eltz while in the neighborhood (the castle pics included in my photos are not of Burg Eltz, however, but of Burg Metternich in Beilstein).

Happy 4th

For nearly fifty years, I've basically felt proud of my country, despite its many flaws. Yesterday, the patriotic music clanked in my ears like, shall we say, tin drumming.

The best thing about Zogby's polls is they ask you if you consider yourself a citizen of your city or town, your nation, or the planet. I click planet, wish the universes were an option [plural intended].


If you haven't seen Keith Olbermann on the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, check this out. "J'accuse!" has been in my head for months; KO says it for me, brilliantly.


KO left out that when the White House blew Plame's cover, it also terminated the effectiveness of her unit, whose mission was gathering intelligence on WMD's -- things that make you go hmmm . . .

VidArt from VAD at Conduit

If you're in the Dallas, TX area, here's your chance to catch up on the medium that's now at the forefront of attention in the art world. The Dallas Video Festival has been showing great video art for twenty years, and in celebration of its 20th anniversary, the Video Association of Dallas is presenting a series of five programs of "greatest video art hits" from its archives, co-curated by Danette Dufilho and -- yeah, me.

The series, I Heart Video Art, takes place on five consecutive Fridays beginning June 29, at Conduit Gallery, at 1626-C Hi Line Drive, Dallas, TX (near the Oak Lawn exit off of 35E). Doors open at 7:30 pm; screenings start at 8 pm. For more info, call Conduit Gallery at 214-939-0064.

We're still finalizing the details, but you can see a draft program schedule here.

Alas, Not-So-Poor Yorick

My boyfriend used to say he wanted my skull after my death, but after seeing the Body Worlds exhibit (here's my review), he's not so sure. Too bad, 'cause tombs have never appealed to me; but Damien Hirst's For the Love of God does. (Per the NYT, the title came from Hirst's mother who exclaimed, "For the love of God, what are you going to do next?")

I want mine with little lightbulbs in the eye sockets.

Do you think art, or its patrons, are overly-obsessed with the wrong, or poorly-chosen realities lately? Would we like this piece as much with cz's? (Is what's-his-face using real powdered dinosaur bones, or just patronizing unregulated entrepreneurs? Personally, I'd like to know. Of course, if his real work consists in an experiment regarding our gullibility, GREAT; but then, I'll be annoyed if he doesn't share the experimental results.)

Actually, what I see lately is an existentialist trend -- an epidemic of ennui. Bush's handlers were prolly onto something when they let on he was reading Camus.

(Update here.)

How to Control the Internet (by Transforming It into a Top-Down Surveillance System)

It's not just AT&T you have to watch out for (for more on that, see post and thread here). A variety of efforts are underway to gain control of the only significant remaining independent venue for news and opinion.

David Gelernter, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is working with Ajay Royan, who is employed at a West Coast hedge fund, on another way to control those unruly internets (see article here; you may need to click "skip this welcome" at the top of the page). They want to replace the web with a new system they call the "Worldbeam."

With the Worldbeam, instead of everyone having their own documents stored on their own computers, everyone will access their documents on the Beam through a much simpler box. Not only your current docs, but every doc you ever wrote or viewed -- every e-mail, v-mail, snapshot, every web page visited, etc. -- will be stored on machines maintained elsewhere. You'll be able to access your documents from any box anywhere.

As Gelernter says, "The desktop is dead; all my information must be stored on the Beam . . . ." All your data are belong to us.

Theoretically, only you will have access to your documents, using some combination of biometric identification, a key card, a password or the like, and only you will have the ability to add to or delete your docs.

Mmm-hmmm. As insecure as our individual computers may be now, it's hard to see why our information wouldn't be even less secure if the primary storage is in machines owned and controlled by someone else.

There's no discussion of who would own or control the machines on which all this information is stored. One suspects the system protocols would be secret or proprietary.

How do you segregate your supposedly private docs from those you want to be available to others? "Whenever you create a new document, it's born with the same permissions as previous documents of the same type." (No explanation provided re- how the Beam will determine what docs are of the same type.) Gelernter continues, "Your personal beam contains load [sic] of information about your habits and preferences."

Obviously, the Beam would involve massive centralization of control over all content that might otherwise be available on the Web, plus all documents to which inappropriate permissions are assigned by the system, unless you happen to catch the inevitable errors, plus, potentially, even those docs you successfully designate as private, as well as exhaustive data about your habits and preferences.

You'll no longer own copies or rights to most software. Instead, you'll subscribe to basic service and have the opportunity to lease fancier applications.

The corporations who expect to sell or lease us these subscriptions and applications must regard the Beam with great joy. Among other things, controlling software centrally would enable providers to simply eliminate old applications whenever they liked, forcing customers to "upgrade" to versions they might or might not want. I would no longer have the power to just buy an application once and use it forever if it were continuing to do the job for me.

Gelernter says, "the Worldbeam should strengthen the world's responsible governments against terrorists and criminals and the individual against busybodies . . . . The Internet tells government agencies: You each have a separate information stash and your own network; sharing information requires extra effort. The Beam tells them: At base you all share one information stash: withholding information requires extra effort. . . . no one can plead "technical" reasons for not sharing" (I presume he means, "technological" reasons).

Of course, nothing prevents government agencies from building a unified information system now, other than the cost; and the cost for such a system must surely be vastly smaller than the cost of transforming the entire Internet.

More importantly . . . "responsible governments"? I presume he means the likes of the social democracy of Norway, as opposed to the U.S. government under the Bush Administration? For in the hands of the latter, not to mention even more tyrannical governments, the Beam would make it even easier to spy on innocent citizens for political purposes, etc.

My boyfriend says, don't worry, the Beam won't happen. I hope he's right; but. The Web has become one of few remaining avenues for challenges to the interests that now own and control much of our election process and nearly all of the traditional media. It seems to me the Beam offers a great deal to those interests.

I found Gerlernter's article in the May 7, 2007 issue of Forbes, which featured short articles by "28 Great Minds" on "The Power of Networks." The same issue also contained interesting articles from other authors with a greater appreciation of the virtues of decentralized, distributed ownership and control. In their own words:

"One of the great lessons of the 20th century is that centralized planning and control don't work. . . . Decentralization is fast and flexible. It allows exponential, viral growth." -- Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Community Church ("The Power of Parishioners").

"The biggest mistake marketers make when they see the power of the consumer network is that they try to control it, own it or manipulate it." -- Seth Godin, marketing expert ("Your Product, Your Customer").

"A command-and-control model, the way one runs an army, is not well suited for new ideas." -- Jonathan Fahey, writing about Nicholas Negroponte's wiki-style project to develop a laptop that could be made for $100 each and provided to children around the world ("The Soul of a New Laptop").

"America can still win the battle for a democratic world. The most important weapon is a free, open, commercially and politically unfettered Internet that empowers ordinary people from across the globe to speak and act in the interests of their own communities." – Howard Dean, DNC Chair ("Wikipartia").

"The Internet functions best when its protocols are available to everyone . . . . there is wisdom in crowds, even – perhaps I should say especially – in crowds of volunteers and amateurs. . . . The great lesson of the Web 2.0 is that to control quality, you don't lock things down; you open them up." -- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia ("Open-Door Policy").

Another article touched on important, related issues ("Can You Hear Me Now?"). Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, mentioned ideas expressed by many people that "'we're all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?' . . . When the question of political abuse came up, a common reaction . . . was . . . 'All information is good information' and 'Information wants to be free' and 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'" Turkle is clearly concerned that these ideas lead us to acquiesce in government spying on innocent citizens.

I happen to agree that all information is good information. But what needs to be spelled out in no uncertain terms is that because knowledge is power, a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge.

In a democracy, the weight of power should belong to the people; or at worst, the balance should be equal. That means that our government's activities should be open and transparent to us – we should know at least as much about what our government is doing as our government knows about us. That's not the way things have been going lately.

The same goes with respect to corporations, which have all but superseded governments in terms of their power over our lives.

Centralizing ownership and control of Internet hardware and software might result in certain cost efficiencies, but effective regulation or oversight over those in possession of that ownership and control would become impossible, since they would have the power with a few keystrokes to alter every digital record on the planet – even private documents of my own that I never intended to share with anyone else.

Who controls the Beam will control history, and thus will have the power to botch if not completely control the present and future.

It's worth a lot to me personally NOT to have to cede that much control to any centralized entity, governmental or corporate.

But so long as there's so much power and money to be gained by those who seek that control, eternal vigilance will remain the price of Internet liberty.

(Update here.)