Author: greg

WTC Station’s Master in Slate

Heritage Square, 1992, Santiago Calatrava, image:Galinsky.com
BCE Galleria/Heritage Square, Toronto
1992, Santiago Calatrava, image: Galinsky.com

On Slate, Christopher Hawthorne writes about Santiago Calatrava, architect of the transportation hub, um, slated for the WTC site. Hawthorne’s got good architectural sensibility, but I think he’s wrong to worry about Calatrava ignoring the context of his projects. True, many of Calatrava’s flashiest designs look like they’re sitting on a giant dining table, like an overwrought centerpiece, but that’s what he’s been asked to do.
While I haven’t been to the Milwaukee Museum, Calatrava’s pavilion may signal a Bilbaoist nadir; pictures of it make it look both pointless and useless, like the pyramid without the Louvre. But Toronto’s Heritage Square is one of the best public spaces in town. Calatrava carved it out/knitted it together from the interstitial spaces of various downtown buildings, and it’s beautiful. Even if it doesn’t blend in, his Zurich station, too, inhabits its site well.

Beyond Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear

On BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow calls Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World “one of the most important texts of the decade.” I’m pretty sure he means the decade starting in 2000, (or, say, September 11, 2001), not the last ten years.
Schneier‘s a/the security expert, and Beyond Fear, Cory says, “utterly demystifies security” for a non-technical audience. My bet is, it guts every Ashcroftian rights-and-power grab in the name of security like a trout on a church griddle. [I know, Ashcroft is so not Catholic, so the fish thing’s not applicable. Work with me here, people.]
I’m using Schneier’s landmark text, Applied Cryptography, as a reference for my animated musical script, of all things. After all, the video store’s bargain bins are overflowing with tapes of animated musicals that included crypto but couldn’t bother to get it right. Aren’t they?

WTC Memorial Competition Update

Newsday reports the WTC Memorial jury will select up to eight finalists, who will receive over $100,000 each to refine their designs more fully (“to develop models and three-dimensional computerized designs”). A winner (from among the finalists) will be announced in October or November.
Jurors apparently walk around placing dots on the designs they like. Designs without dots are then pulled from subsequent rounds. [No mention of how many dots a juror gets, or if later rounds require multiple dots. If not, a juror may be able to repeatedly dot a favorite design into the final rounds.]
Via Hugh and Ellyn, who submitted a design from Kansas. At first I was surprised, now I’m really pleased, but I’ve now heard from a couple dozen fellow entrants, most of whom contacted me through the site. The competition’s gag rule has thrown approximately 5,199 of 5,200 people into a weird, cagey limbo; we really want to talk about our entries, but don’t want to get disqualified. Maybe we should form Entrants Anonymous. [“My name’s John, and I designed a spire.” “Hi, John.”]

My Video Art Bootlegging Article in the Sunday NY Times

Thanks to the adoring fans who commented on my article in the NY Times yesterday about video art tape trading. I won’t list them by name (mostly because it’s possible to list them by name, and doing so might crush my carefully crafted illusion of worldwide fame).
I met Chris, the “star” of the piece several months ago, a guy in a small southern town who has become an impassioned expert on, of all things, video art. My working title for it was “The Cremaster Thief,” after Susan Orlean’s article/book, The Orchid Thief, about a guy in a small southern town who became an impassioned expert on, of all things, orchids. He’s a fascinating and very helpful guy.
Related:
Chris Hughes’ online collection of video art (Remember, they’re not for sale. But if you have a copy of Doug Aitken’s multi-channel Electric Earth, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Love Is A Treasure, or Salla Tykka’s Lasso, I bet he’d do a deal with you.)
My “research,” watching Cremaster 2 (and other works) on my VCR
Christian Marclay, whose experience with unauthorized dubbing of his work didn’t make it in time for the article. (His work rocks, btw.)
Baltimore artist Jon Routson, whose video works also rock, including his edited-for-TV version of Cremaster 4 .
The “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts that were so popular in Basel last year.
The Cremaster Cycle, an exhaustive and lush reference to the symbolism and interpretations of Barney’s films. By chief Koolaid drinker, Neville Wakefield

Got a Gawker problem? Gawker’s got the answer.

That's what I call service journalism. Gawker's solution to your Gawker Problem

Notice the Google Ads on this Britney Spears post (which I, um, happened to, er, click through to accidentally. Actually, as you can see, it’s an AOL version of IE, so it’s hardwired to load any and all Britney stories immediately).
What words in the story triggered these ads for drapery, I wondered? None that I could think of. Then, I remembered way back to 2002, before “gawker” meant Gawker.
Elizabeth’s out of town one day, and Gawker’s moving to the head of the service journalism pack.

David Byrne’s PowerPoint Art [and another NYT article]

david_byrne_yes_ppt.jpg
Slide from David Byrne’s DVD/Book of PowerPoint Art

Veronique Vienne’s got a sweet article in the Times about David Byrne’s artistic exploration of PowerPoint. She casts a rather benign look at the way PowerPoint influences forms of discourse and thought. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome; after all, Arts & Leisure editor Jodi Kantor used to be at Slate. (“But some of my best friends use PowerPoint!”)
But then, she’s got a pretty clear-eyed quote from Byrne: “You have to try to think like the guy in Redmond or Silicon Valley. You feel that your mind is suddenly molded by the thinking of some unknown programmer. It’s a collaboration, but it’s not reciprocal.” [8/21 Update: the title of Info design guru Edward Tufte’s Wired Mag article says it all: “PowerPoint is Evil” Bonus quote: “PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.”]
David Byrne, captivated by Laura Winters, April 2003

As a PowerPoint geek, exploring the software’s implications is, like fresh breath, a priority in my life. [Cf. PowerPoint as a Creative Medium, which has additional ppt examples and articles.] A couple of months ago, Byrne gave a few of us a tour of his gallery show at Pace McGill, where they pre-released his hypnotic PowerPoint book/DVD, E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information). Good stuff.
And before you leave the Times‘ place, why not look over my article on video art bootlegging.

On the Under-heralded Designer of The WTC Memorial Site

Part Two of a Washington Post series on the rebuilding of the WTC features George Tamaro, one of the original engineers of the slurry wall which is the centerpiece of Libeskind’s memorial site design.

Lochnagar Crater, image: Hellfire Corner, fylde.demon.co.uk

The more I think about it, the more similarities I find between this aspect of the Libeskind proposal and Lochnagar Crater, the powerful, preserved, accidental memorial to WWI’s Battle of the Somme. [This crater was central to my first short film, Souvenir November 2001, where a New Yorker came upon the crater while searching for a much larger, much more “designed” memorial at the nearby town of Thiepval.]
Related:
BBC history tour information on Lochnagar Crater and the Thiepval Memorial
Tales from shooting SN01 at these memorials (Feb. 02)
1972 New Yorker article by Edith Iglauer on building The Bathtub

On Preserving Ephemeral Art

[via ArtForum] An interesting article in the Financial Times on the conservation challenges posed by ephemeral art, especially color photography and video. C-Prints, by far the most popular format for contemporary art photography, have a very uncertain future. Video and film, in the mean time, require a transfer plan, making sure the medium and format stays current (and the work stays true to the artist’s intent).
The article doesn’t quite get it sometimes, though. Advocating for collectors to receive certificates? It’s a dopey collector who doesn’t get them already. And the last quote by Tony Oursler feels a bit too off-hand. Of an old video work he recently remastered for exhibition this fall, he says,”It looks better now than then.” That’s great, but that means that how it looked then is now lost.
Related:
The Variable Media Initiative, which sponsored a fascinating conference on this subject in 2001. (Fascinating if you’re a conceptual art geek, that is.)
AXA’s Ad Reinhardt Research Project, which focuses on the conservation of contemporary painting (and Reinhardt’s work in particular).

Bloghdad.com/Blackout

If karma were an Islamic teaching, the blackout map would’ve included Washington, DC and the Pentagon. And there’d be a teeny, gerrymandered congressional district-style finger reaching down to Crawford, Texas.
As it is, though, the blackout hit New York and war-opposing Canada. NPR’s Anne Garrels sardonically shares thoughtful Iraqis’ tips for surviving a blackout in a heat wave.
Besides, as the occupation governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer explained rather presciently on Tuesday, “Freedom matters. I think it’s important to … look beyond the shootouts and blackouts” and just soak in the freedom.

Fly By Night

I got out of NYC yesterday afternoon–actually, I was on Long Island and apparently couldn’t have gotten back in if I’d wanted to–by flying Southwest out of Islip to Baltimore. It felt like we were the only people getting anywhere.
Of course, now NYC sounds so fun, we’re going back. Besides, I’m sure our fridge has defrosted all over the floor.

On Christian Marclay

Tape Fall, 1989, Christian Marclay, image: hammer.ucla.edu
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Christian Marclay’s awesome Video Quartet is on view now at LA’s Hammer Museum, as part of a mid-career retrospective of Marclay’s art-meets-music work. [In the LA Times, Chris Knight reviews the show–and misses some major points–with nary a mention of the video. the CS Monitor has a better review.]
I remember MoMA exhibiting his 1989 piece, Tape Fall, where an audio tape of running water pools onto the floor. It was cool, but Video Quartet blew me away. Marclay brings his sampling and mixing experience from DJ’ing to his artmaking, “plumbing the deeper meanings of that intersection.”
Telephones, Christian Marclay, image: presentationhousegall.com

Of course, I found out about it one day too late, but it turns out the selling of Marclay’s 1995 work, Telephones, perfectly encapsulates the challenges video poses to artists and dealers.
According to a curator/dealer I’ve known for years, Telephones was sold in two editions: a small, signed edition of 25, and a larger, unsigned edition of, say, 100. They were priced at $1,000 and $200, respectively. [While not Jayson Blairing these numbers, I should say I don’t remember them exactly. They’re directionally accurate, though.]
But several people who bought the unsigned edition apparently felt no compunction in copying it for friends. Without the signature, these dubs were essentially identical to the unsigned tapes. The result [with no offense to the Fab Five]: it queered the market for the larger edition.
Infinite reproduction is, theoretically, at least, inherent in video-based art. But in Marclay’s case, the talismanic, even fetishistic, signature was enough to make some buyers think twice before dubbing. But it’s a little finger-in-the-dike, though, as the unsigned, now-unlimited edition proves. I’ll give Marclay a call about this some time.

Cremaster 2: Videotape Boogaloo


Until this spring, there was still a press release on Art House Films‘ website heralding the coming DVD release of The Cremaster Cycle . If Matthew Barney’s films are obsesed wtih potentiality, announcing and never releasing the DVD’s seems somehow appropriate. After all, cremasters are designed to rein things in, not let ’em hang out, right?
Inexplicably, nine hours in the Guggenheim’s theater didn’t give me enough Cremaster in my art/media diet. So after bailing on the mass market DVD’s, I went out and got me a copy–in the interest of journalistic research, you understand–of Cremaster 2 to watch at home.

Christian Jankowski, Pipilotti Rist, and Cremaster 2 bootleg tape, for research only

As any of you who has dropped the six figs for the vitrine editions know, watching Cremaster at home is a different ball game (some pun intended). I have to say, If I were gonna spend that much money on a film, it’d be my own. And returning Netflix discs is stressful enough, so I didn’t borrow a real copy. Besides, how do you ask someone to loan you their art? Nah, I borrowed a super-clean VHS copy from, well, you’ll know where it came from, soon enough.
1. They’re video. Even in theaters, it was obvious that the first two installments (C4 and C1 had been shot on video. Not so for the last three, which were HD-to-film transfers. Barney squoze far more than ten pounds of production value into a five pound bag. Not since Sally Potter’s Orlando has a filmmaker gotten such an expensive-looking film out of such a small budget. [Howard’s End, yeah yeah, but I digress.] The copy I got was clearly not HD-to-film-to-DVD-to-VHS, though, and it shows. Like when I caught Agnes Varda’s Gleaners on TV; there’s something very “pull back the curtain” about seeing these works as video.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 2 Production Still, image: Barbara Gladstone, biennaleofsydeny.org
Cremaster 2 production still, Matthew Barney
image: Biennale of Sydney.org

2. It’s still long. Even though C2 is my favorite, it still felt long. Argue that Barney wants it to be long, to force the viewer to experience it at that pace, fine. But the power relationship shifts when you pop the tape in. Let me tell you, if you’ve got a remote control, you’re gonna use it. You can use it for good or for evil, of course, and it’s just as nice to rewind the salt flats as it is necessary to fast forward the seance.
3. The DVD’s coming out after all, but it’s The Order, the video game-like segment of C3 which played on the big monitors in the Guggenheim rotunda. It’s on Amazon right now, in fact, for $18.74.

Where the hell am I

Apologies for not posting as much lately. I’ve been on the road a lot, without net access, in the day, and working on an editing deadline for an upcoming, non-greg.org gig. Stay tuned.
In the mean time, I still have to post about the meeting two weeks ago with Avery, who’s composing a great new electronic score for Souvenir November 2001.
For suddenly film-related reading, add Gawker to the list: Elizabeth‘s in LA, doing a driveby of the Mormon temple (as if Spielberg’d live below Sunset. hah.) and not pitching film ideas.
In the mean time, the animation on MTV’s Spiderman is pretty sweet. For all the attempts to coax more realism out of CG, it’s amazing how long it took for people to master the aesthetic benefits of simplicity.