And this, from just one piece in the Times about the Ziegfeld Theater premiere of Farenheit 9/11:
1. “Can an artist have a luckier break than someone in power declaring their work should not be seen?…It is our belief, seeing the crowd, that HARVEY WEINSTEIN should send MICHAEL EISNER a plant.”
Plants replace muffin baskets as the speed-dial thank-you gift of choice in Hollywood. With all the Atkins going around, muffins are now the f***-you gift. Unchanged: still unsure how to read a muffin basket from a 300-lb monster. The unseen impact: slave wage assistants lose their only reliable source of grains.
2. Standing ovation now comes BEFORE the film.
3. “Yhere was some hissing when CONDOLEEZZA RICE appeared on screen.”
Supersized auditorium, darkness, loosen inhibitions and turn the Ziegfeld into the largest, loudest, most accurate test audience in town. [Oh wait, that stays the same. If you want to accurately predict public reception of your film, just run the trailer at the Ziegfeld. Those people know how to boo.]
4. “LEONARDO DICAPRIO, in a backward baseball cap and wispy facial hair, did group interviews at Mr. Weinstein’s request.”
We now care deeply what celebrities think about politics.
5. “Is it important for celebrities to be public about their political beliefs, a reporter asked.
Ooops – we’re running tight on space. YOUR NAME IN THIS SPACE to the person who can tell us what Mr. DiCaprio’s answer was.”
[stet]
Author: greg
How Farenheit 9/11 Changes EVERYTHING
And this, from just one piece in the Times about the Ziegfeld Theater premiere of Farenheit 9/11:
1. “Can an artist have a luckier break than someone in power declaring their work should not be seen?…It is our belief, seeing the crowd, that HARVEY WEINSTEIN should send MICHAEL EISNER a plant.”
Plants replace muffin baskets as the speed-dial thank-you gift of choice in Hollywood. With all the Atkins going around, muffins are now the f***-you gift. Unchanged: still unsure how to read a muffin basket from a 300-lb monster. The unseen impact: slave wage assistants lose their only reliable source of grains.
2. Standing ovation now comes BEFORE the film.
3. “Yhere was some hissing when CONDOLEEZZA RICE appeared on screen.”
Supersized auditorium, darkness, loosen inhibitions and turn the Ziegfeld into the largest, loudest, most accurate test audience in town. [Oh wait, that stays the same. If you want to accurately predict public reception of your film, just run the trailer at the Ziegfeld. Those people know how to boo.]
4. “LEONARDO DICAPRIO, in a backward baseball cap and wispy facial hair, did group interviews at Mr. Weinstein’s request.”
We now care deeply what celebrities think about politics.
5. “Is it important for celebrities to be public about their political beliefs, a reporter asked.
Ooops – we’re running tight on space. YOUR NAME IN THIS SPACE to the person who can tell us what Mr. DiCaprio’s answer was.”
[stet]
On The Art of Speed
Last night while I was rendering some footage in Final Cut, (“Estimated time: about 2 hours…”) I decided to watch the short films in Nike’s Art of Speed series.
The 15 filmmakers were asked to “interpret the idea of speed.” Well, by the end of the first film, David Ahuja’s Obstacle Course, MY idea about speed was, “Damn, I need a faster processor!” WMP generated so many video artifacts, Ahuja’s film ressembled a futurist painting. As the camera followed the running protagonist, the primary-colored objects in the background created jagged smears across my little video window. The guy would stand up, the video would freeze, and suddenly I’m looking at a pixelated motion study photograph straight out of HE Edgerton. Which, considering what I was watching, worked out just fine.
The Futurist Manifesto declared “that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” [Umm, what’s that goddess’s name again?]
Moving to my other machine, I watched Obstacle Course as Ahuja intended. And there were still artifacts, this time by design. Digital palimpsests of the character’s movement through space. They were the kind of 1970’s video effect popularized by the likes of WGBH, the public TV station where many video art pioneers first explored the possibilities of technology. WGBH, which was also the home of ZOOM. [O-2-1-3-4 ]
Ahuja’s film was sweet, and my streaming epiphany endeared me to it, but by the sixth hyper-aestheticized, digitally altered racing film, I wondered if the fix was in. Directors’ attempts to portray the abstracted or metaphorical notions of speed that exist (presumably pure) in their heads too often ended up showcasing the chosen technology or technique instead.
This, too, may be by design, though. Art of Speed was coordinated by the interactive & effects agency RG/A; given all these render-heavy images, maybe processor cycles are the most relevant measure of speed here.
Then I saw Honest’s documentary-style film, The Shortest Race, in which they follow an entire actual competition, from the athletes’ deadly serious pre-race strategy soundbites to the winner hoisting a giant check on the podium. The race itself–a 1-meter dash–pokes fun at the sheer arbitrariness of modern athletic contests. Yet it also distills and preserves both the thrilling challenge that comes from competing and the suspense that comes from watching. Hell, it makes more sense than cricket. This is subversion Nike won’t break a sweat over. Or they will. While they’re running.
[update: AOS posted an interview with the Honest team, Jonathan Miliott and Cary Murnion.]
On Gabriel Orozco’s Photographs
Gabriel Orozco usually installs his photos interspersed with other works–drawings, collages, and sculpture. The Hirshhorn show which opened last week is the first time they’ve been shown alone. The show felt instantly familiar, and not because I’ve been a follower, fan, and collector of Orozco’s work for almost ten years. In that time, the artist has published several text-free collections of his photography. The exhibition feels like one of these artist books.
Each image on its own is almost incidental. This is purely intentional. From one of the earliest, most literal works in the show, My hands are my heart, Orozco takes the gesture of the artist as his theme. The gesture, no matter how slight, is at least one degree more concrete than that holy Duchampian standard of Artistic creation, the idea. But that doesn’t mean a gesture is any more substantial, just the opposite.
Traces of the artist’s breath on a grand piano. Condensation inside a recently removed wristwatch. Ripples from a stone thrown into a rooftop pool. Damp, cyclical bicycle tracks on an empty street. Orozco relentlessly experiments to discover the outcome and significance of even the most fleeting, insignificant gesture. That these gestures won’t last even a few minutes is just fine with him.
In some of his work, it’s hard to even tell what, if anything, Orozco’s done; it’s as if he’s playing a game of Where’s Waldo with us, challenging us to find his intervention. And just as often, especially in the photographs, the gesture is in the snapping of the shutter, the framing of the image. Through the camera’s lens, Orozco invites us to see the world differently, to see it through his eyes.
Given the art world’s current penchant for photography–especially for giant Gursky- and Gaskell-sized c-prints–Orozco’s small format photos seem almost quaint. [Only recently has the artist given in to market pressure and printed his photos in larger sizes. Fortunately, none of these super-sized prints are included in the Hirshhorn show.] Their effect on the viewer doesn’t come from easy, overwhelming spectacle, but through the accumulation of small elements over time. As the Japanese saying goes, Chiri mo tsumoreba, yama to naru (dust, too, piled up, can become a mountain).
And this is where the great power of Orozco’s work lies, and where the Hirshhorn show doesn’t quite deliver. Orozco’s evanescent gestures gain cumulative power when they’re manifested across various mediums, an effect which is muted by the photographs’ formal homogeneity. But put the concentric ripples in a pool next to a boarding pass with compass-drawn circles on it next to a video of a soap bubble floating down the street next to–no kidding–a sculpture consisting of a clear yogurt lid pinned to the wall, and, to the viewer’s surprise and amusement, the specific and banal becomes universal and profound. And I guarantee, you’ll never see a bubble or a cue ball the same way again. You’ll be playing Where’s Gabriel wherever you go.
Related: It’s almost two years since I took New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl to the woodshed over his negative review of Orozco’s work. So Tyler, you’re in good company.
Buy Extension of Reflection, the excellent exhibition catalogue, or From Green Glass to Airplane, the even better collection of stills from Orozco’s video works.
Napoleon Dynamite: Oh. My. Heck.
My heart is full this day, and I would be very ungrateful if I didn’t get up and share my gratitude for Brother Hess, who has blessed us all so much this day with his special film, Napoleon Dynamite.
Brother Hess was blessed with the opportunity to make a movie for $200,000, and he was blessed again with the opportunity to sell it to Fox Searchlight at Sundance for a truly special, inspired price, even $3-4.75 million. It’s a truly special and righteous price. And while choirs of angels sing his praises in heaven, choirs of critics are singing praises for the movie, which has touched so many people this day, and this weekend when it began a platform release. Even the Gentiles’ hearts have been touched by Napoleon’s sweet spirit.
Brother Hess shows us how, if we have faith, we can follow in Neil Labute’s footsteps and someday become like him. [Even if he’s gone astray embracing the fleeting temptation of theater instead of the eternal glory of cinema.] He is also an example unto us of the blessings that can come from exercising faith and hitting up your family and friends for your production budget. Families are forever, so I bet Jared thinks it’s a real blessing that he has the opportunity to actually pay them back now.
We should try to liken the movie unto ourselves and take it into our daily lives throughout the week. Napoleon is blessed with the opportunity to overcome the challenges of being a huge dork, and through his words and deeds, he shows unto us what he does with the talents the Lord has blessed him with.
And while I haven’t taken the opportunity to see the film yet, for I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to take care of one of God’s littlest, specialest spirits, who’s only allowed to see friggin’ chick flicks at Loews on Saturday mornings, I want to tell you this day that I know this movie is good, and I have faith that it’ll be funny and touching like unto Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz’s earlier fruits.
The time is far spent, brothers and sisters, but I challenge you to see Napoleon Dynamite and find out for yourself if it isn’t a truly good way to spend an hour and a half. In these latter days, if you tarry too long, it’ll surely be gone from the theater. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the day will come very soon when it’ll be resurrected on DVD.
British Journalist Mugged by Twin Tower-Rebuilders
A hapless British journalist was jumped and his article about the rebuilding at the WTC site was hijacked by a band of Rebuild The Towers soundbite whores during a recent visit to New York City. James Westcott published his account of the incident in the Guardian, but it appears he has no idea what happened to him.
The number of guerillas is not known. Activist groups such as Team Twin Towers and Make New York New York Again claim wide “populist” support, but most attacks can be traced back to one man, John Hakala. Hakala’s tactic of delivering seductively glib quotes that have no basis in reality is now well known to veteran reporters on the WTC beat.
Westcott’s story on unresolved issues and conflict over development efforts at the WTC site was turned into a disturbing manifesto for rebuilding the Twin Towers that betrays the faulty reasoning, impractical banality, and logical inconsistencies of the guerillas’ position. One “architectural activist” seeking “restoration” of the Towers criticizes the Freedom Tower: “We are replacing a symbol of world peace and human cooperation with a self-absorbed salute to America,” says an “architectural activist”. Yes, echos another, “They [the Towers] were us: stark capitalism, power and beauty without explanation or apology.”
And Hakala points out the fatal flaw of the Childs/Libeskind-designed Freedom Tower: “You don’t see it on a single mug, T-shirt, postcard or pin around the city.”
Observers who wonder how a seasoned journalist like Westcott could be so vulnerable suggest he let his guard down after reading a cryptic outburst of support for rebuilding by controversial Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. Meanwhile, guerillas may have interpreted Muschamp’s reference to “Mnemosyne” as a secret code to trigger the attack. Muschamp has since been relieved of his criticking duties.
A movie about ‘attacking’ museums
From the mixed up files of Mr Arthur Robins, an artist who sells his work in front of the Met:
While visiting the Met, Robins was questioned in the recent guerilla attacks on that museum and the Guggenheim, where an unknown artist surreptitiously installed works critical of George W. Bush. Later, he was visited by a phalanx of police and Terrorism Task Force officers. He videotaped the encounter, and, well, I suggest you read Julie Salomon’s account in the Times, which would make a perfect commentary track if Mr Robins ever puts out a DVD. Biiiizarre.
[Update: For an entirely different kind of video shot, surveillance-style, by an artist, one which also deals, technically, with criminal activity, read Guy Trebay’s piece on Andrea Fraser.]
On Politics and Art
Rob Storr interviewed Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1995. Felix identified Helen Frankenthaler as the most successful political artist alive, and then told about the invitation he received in 1989 to participate in the State Department’s Art for Embassies Program:
It has this wonderful quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says, “Besides torture, art is the most persuasive weapon.” And I said I didn’t know that the State Department had given up on torture – they’re probably not giving up on torture – but they’re using both. Anyway, look at this letter, because in case you missed the point they reproduce a Franz Kline which explains very well what they want in this program.
4/06 update: Creative Time has since removed this interview, and only one other place, the Queer Cultural Center, is hosting it. To make sure it stays out there, I’m reproducing it in whole on greg.org, just because. [note: I formatted it for easier reading.]
Word is, Muschamp is Packing his Bags
There are published stories, and unpublished ones. I hear that Muschamp is moving to the Travel Section. Which makes sense to me. His last real architecture review has me planning a road trip to Seattle.
Check out these excellent photos of Koolhaas’s Seattle Public Library. [thanks, Hap]
WTC Site Cultural Anchor: The Drawing Center??
Wow. There’s opaque and then there’s opaque. The Drawing Center was selected to join The Freedom Center in one of two cultural buildings planned for the WTC Site. Their building will adjoin the WTC Memorial, while the other two cultural organizations–The Joyce and Signature Theaters–will share a performance center across the street.
I’m a huge fan of The Drawing Center, as much as the aggressively unassuming, rather esoteric, old-school SoHo gallery can engender huge fandom. But how in the world did the LMDC come to the decision to put them next to the sure-to-be-corporate-slick American Freedom Experience? Is there some backchannel connection?
If only the artist Mark Lombardi were still alive, he could explain it to us. Lombardi’s intricate drawings traced the webs of corruption, power, and influence that spun out of major scandals like the BCCI bank collapse, Iran-Contra, and, ahem, “George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and jackson Stephens ca 1979-90.” That’s the title of the 1999 work above, which was included in the first major retrospective of the late artist’s career–held at The Drawing Center last fall.
On an Unrealized Art Project
In 1999, I conceived and contrived to make a piece of art. It began as an idea for a commission for the artist Olafur Eliasson, but my idea was so embarassingly specific and complete, there’s no way I could bring myself to ask him to do it. Even though I cannot imagine myself as an artist, or a maker of art, I had to admit that this was not an Eliasson, it was Eliasson-esque, at best.
The piece is a sort of reverse sundial.*
Our apartment in NYC faces north, and so receives no direct sunlight. At various times in the day, the sun would reflect off of windows across the street, creating sharply angled patches of bright light, which would move across the wall or floor, marking a specific moment in the day.
I devised to place a mirror on the roof of the recluse’s townhouse across the street, which would reflect sunlight directly into our apartment. It would have a motor which would track the movement of the sun, thereby maintaining the reflecting angle throughout the day. [Constructing this motorized mirror was a great obstacle. Last year, when I finally told Olafur about this piece, he said a German company made such a mirror, called a heliostat, which was exhibited at the Hanover 2000 Expo.]
Rather than the naturally changing light of a normal day, the apartment would receive constant, consistent, direct light. The light wouldn’t shift, the shadows wouldn’t lengthen, then contract. At first, the brt lt praised by realtors and sought after by apartment hunters would be welcome, but I expected that, after a while, it would become unnerving, even maddening.
[2007 update: soon after posting this, I told this story to a couple of Olafur’s dealers, who, instead of laughing with/at me, said I really should have proposed it to Olafur, because he would have loved doing it. Which is a huge bummer, because then I could have paid 1999 Olafur prices for the piece. Oh well, it’s mine now.]
* Olafur actually made a sundial-like piece in 1997 by cutting a round hole in the roof of the Marc Foxx gallery in Los Angeles. The circle of light tracked beautifully across the empty gallery space. The piece was titled, Your Sun Machine. I never dreamed to call my piece My Sun Machine, though.
On Remembering
I started this weblog to document a documentary I was going to make, a remembrance of sorts of my grandfathers. That film has been subsumed into the souvenir series. This week, even though he was never the subject of that film, I’ve been thinking about my great-grandfather a lot, too. That’s because he died in 1982, at age 90. He had a shorter battle with Alzheimer’s than Reagan did. These men differed in other ways, too:
Reagan: Cut a deal to keep US hostages in Iran until after his election. Incubated Islamic militarism and, ultimately, Osama Bin Laden. Armed Saddam Hussein. Sent Rumsfeld to offer support while he gassed the Kurds. OK’ed the invasion of Lebanon. Cut and ran after terrorists killed US Marines. Sold heavy weaponry to Iran to fund right-wing death squads in Nicaraqua. Prevented the government from addressing the AIDS epidemic. Invaded Grenada.
Great-grandfather: Put a plow on a tractor and plowed under half a field of fullgrown corn next to his house before someone ran out to stop him.
Reagan: Conflated speeches with actions.
Great-grandfather: Never said much.
One of my earliest memories of him was a visit we made one summer when I was 4 or 5. I was already too much a city kid, or a suburban kid, really; visiting the farm was already an exotic, scary adventure.
He was wearing worn overalls and a tan shirt. We were kneeling under a giant willow tree in my grandparents’ backyard (they’d built just down the street; my grandfather had followed his father into farming.), and he was showing me the carrots growing around its base. He pulled one out and offered it to me to taste. It was small, too early to harvest then, but highly marketable as a baby carrot now, I’d imagine. It’s got dirt on it, I recoiled, you have to wash it first. He smiled and brushed some dirt off it, and started nibbling on it himself. Then he pulled out another one and offered it to me. Flush with thrilling fear, I ate an unwashed carrot straight from the ground.
Internet Losers Predict Box Office Winners
[via waxy] Box office performance prediction models are a business school professor’s best tool for drumming up consulting gigs in the entertainment industry they secretly wanted to get into in the first place. For a long time, my old Wharton professor, Jehoshua Eliashberg’s model was the state of the analytical art. Now, he’s got some competition.
According to Prof. Christopher Dellarocas and some other MIT quantjocks, including , the losers who rush home from the theater to post about the movie they just saw can accurately predict the film’s box office take.
We’re not talking about blogger-level losers, though, it has to be the down deepest dregs, the posters on Yahoo! Movies, for example, who best approximate the elusive “word of mouth” effect on a film’s performance.
So now studio suits will sic all their interns on the message boards to talk up a film during its opening weekend, right? While Dellarocas doesn’t make this false logical leap in the study itself , the NetworkWorld reporter gets him to wrongly conflate prediction and causation:
The study also highlights the potential for corporate mischief, given that these review-and-ranking sites are forums for what is essentially anonymous opining.
“Manipulation of forums will become some sort of arms race between studios,” said Dellarocas.
Except, if the population of monkeys typing about The Day After Tomorrow is now only representative of the population of Los Feliz instead of the population of Los Estados Unidos, the forum’s predictive accuracy will drop, right Professor?
Professor? That’s Jake’s trailer, professor, I don’t think you’re allowed in there…
Credit Where Credit is Due
Reagan hits his last mark, stumping for the Bush/Cheney campaign
Love him or hate him, you’ve gotta give Karl Rove credit for pulling the plug at the optimal time. He manages 1) to divert attention from whatever new Bush administration embarassments are set to unfold this week, and 2) he figures out how to get some campaign appearances out of Reagan.
Related: Joan Didion’s Reagan myth-puncturing essay, The Lion King, in the NYRB.
[Update: finally, a Nader for the right wingnuts. Bush/ZombieReagan ’04 campaign site]
Revisiting–and repeating–the past
I just found and reread this post from a couple of years ago, and I still like it very much, unfortunately.
How Conceptual Art is Like a Renaissance Tapestry