December 2006 Archives

I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building.

Once, I did manage to tell him how much I admired his pieces in the John Cage show that was going on over at the Guggenheim SoHo ["Rolywholyover: A Circus," still one of the most brilliant and exciting museum exhibitions I've ever seen. Incredible catalogue, too.] My favorite was and is TV Buddha, a nearly perfect conceptualized work comprised of a carved Buddha statue , a video camera, and a television. The statue sits enlightened and silent, endlessly watching itself on the screen.

TV Buddha is made even better by the allegedly offhand way it was created, as "wall filler" for a 1974 gallery show in New York, though I wouldn't be surprised if Paik was just being reflexively modest when the work was praised.

He made many versions and variations on the TV Buddha theme over the years, and I'd also imagine it could come to feel like a zen trap, a polite rut, especially for an artist whose work betrays an abiding affection for baroque dadaism and psychedelic media cacophony. TV Buddha feels like a kind of contemplative road less traveled.

The road Paik took instead, was the one he named, the Information Super-Highway, which was signalled by another seminal early piece, the 1973 TV show/control room happening/video art work, Global Groove. Produced with John Godfrey at WNET in New York, Global Groove is at once freakishly prescient and contemporary, and hilariously of its time.

It opens with the bold promise that we're living with right now: "This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book." Which is promptly followed by a groove challenged pair of disco dancers and every psychedelic FX trick in the 1973 TV producer's book. It's at once funny and sad to realize Global Groove's aesthetic has become the lingua franca of Manhattan's public access TV world. Hell, it's probably the same mixing board Paik & Godfrey used.

Paik's TV sculptures and giant video walls which are so popular/populist with museums and lobby decorators feel like continuations of Global Groove's groove, but it doesn't scale. Paik foresaw our TV-webby mediascape and reveled in it; I just wish and wonder if somewhere in Paik's mature-to-late career, away from the bombastic over-commissions, there's some underappreciated body of work that might enlighten us as to how we can live in this worldwide web.

See a photo of the first TV Buddha and watch the first few minutes of Global Groove on Mediakunstnetz.de [mkz]
There's some Paik-related material on YouTube, but not as much as you'd hope [youtube]

Just a couple of photos I took while in Kyoto and Hong Kong last week:

The Third Eye: Olafur Eliasson's installations in the world's Louis Vuitton windows. Here's Hong Kong, which required three to fill it up:

A vintage mid-century Japanese prefab house that looks surprisingly modern these days, and increasingly rare: post-war buildings don't tend to stick around in Japan this long:

I rather impulsively bought an ironing board at Muji, but with no practical way to take it home, I ended up leaving it at the hotel. It was a damn fine-looking ironing board, though, let me tell you.

I mention it because the same hoarding impulse struck me when I saw this eminently restorable black lacquer-finish credenza on the street in Kyoto. The backside was gorgeous, actually. Somehow, I managed to think through--and abandon--any ideas for shipping this bad boy before dragging it across the street to the hotel.

greg.org flickr photostream [flickr]

It's got a bit of that smug, self-congratulatory air that always seems to come through in behind the scenes films for commercials [I'm thinking in particular of the Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad guys]. But still, it's all we've got, and it's kind of fascinating.

Conceiving, speccing and constructing the sequence for "Cog" is hard enough, never mind actually shooting it in one, clean take. Here's the commercial again.

The funniest line so far from coverage of Miami Basel. It's from New York Mag's "Basel Blog," which reports that collectors have moved to buying work by safe artists from established galleries. Which is probably what it looks like if you airdrop into the art world and the only people you can identify are Larry Gagosian and Aby Rosen. They get namechecked in basically every post. Seriously.

Doing Good At Ralph Lauren, &c. &c. [nymag's basel blog]

Sara and Marc are so awesome.

The global street art blowout at 11 Spring Street organized by Wooster Collective opens tomorrow, and it runs through Sunday, 11-5 each day.

Artists from all over, including some who installed their work on the exterior of the once-enigmatic NoLiTa loft building, have been making new work inside. On Monday, demolition and condo conversion begins, though much of the art work may actually remain. From the NYT:

On Monday work will begin that will eventually seal most of the interior artwork behind pipes, wires and drywall.

“In a way the art is all going to disappear, but it’s also going to be sealed up in this incredible time capsule,” said Mr. Schiller.

Last Hurrah for Street Art, as Canvas Goes Condo [nyt]
Wooster on Spring: The Ultimate Art Time Capsule [woostercollective, which also has extensive coverage of the 11 Spring project]
Fortune, 1989: Lost and Found, LeFrak's Warhol [cnn.com]

Sorry, I was out of town. Did anything happen art-wise while I was gone?

On the film/editing front, the votes were in, and I'm pleased to announce a new addition to the greg.org team: a husky MacBookPro and a couple of new external drives for the road.

Thanks to everyone who shared their advice and insights. Ultimately, it was the memory and video processing requirements of Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro [and the slightly unwieldy size of the 17-inch version] that made the decision.