Marcos Vilarino has recreated some early landmarks of modern photography in Lego, including this interpretation of Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Feininger’s “The Photojournalist” {note: it’s Andreas, not Lionel/Lyonel, who was a painter] and the world’s first photo, Niepce’s view out his window in 1826 [discussed previously.] [via kottke]
If Rem Were Just A Lousy Tipper, It Would Be Enough
Philip Nobel encapsulates my hate-to-love/hate relationship with Rem Koolhaas and his work in this greatly entertaining Metropolis Mag column, “I ♥ IIT… But I Still Don’t Like Rem”. [1]
Rem may have changed my thinking about China with a late 1990’s Columbia lecture that should’ve been called Delirious Pearl River Delta, but after being disappointed by supposedly seminal buildings from Utrecht to Lille to Prince Street and more, I can really find no excuse anymore for his antics.
And besides that, the Prada Parfums website is an AGONIZING, MIND-NUMBING EMBARASSMENT. A.M.Oy. [fortunately for the world, no one’s seeing it.]
[1] My tab bar shows that “|” is actually a “[heart]”, but I think a “|” is better, especially for Mies’s IIT. Kind of like those “I [square] Judd” stickers they sell in Marfa.
On Unfilmable Novels
As someone whose desktop contains several drafts of an adaptation of a straightforwardly narrative but slightly magically naturalist historical novel, I’ve watched the discussion of Screenhead’s list of unfilmable novels with vested interest.
It took over forty comments for my personal favorite Unfilmable Novel to come up, though, which gave me plenty of time to get reflexively critical of the list. What hasn’t really emerged, though, is any real discussion or analysis of what makes a novel unfilmable.
There are nods to textual density and complex narrative structure, but honestly, if “unfilmable” really just means “no obvious three-act structure” then we’re really just talking about “Unfilmable by Syd Field alumni,” and guess what? Not interesting.
Whether it’s Pulp Fiction, Requiem for a Dream, Memento, or Koyanisqaatsi, a film can reject quite a few filmic storytelling conventions and be the better for it. So Eoin’s concern about Beckett, “How on earth could anyone adapt a novel that fails to have a character?” doesn’t bother me as much as “How on earth could anyone adapt a novel under the suffocating restrictions of the Beckett estate?”
The problem of filming long and episodic novels like Don Quixote is largely artificial, like trying to turn a novel into a comprehensive sculpture. The Sopranos, The Wire, even Lord of The Rings should show there’s no need to whittle a thousand great pages into a single, 120-page script.
My own favorite novel I can’t figure out how to film is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which turns out to be structurally similar to my second favorite unfilmable novel, DFW’s Infinite Jest. Both are footnoted, hypertextual extravaganzas which require juggling thumbs and threads as you jump back and forth from “story” to “supporting material,” even as they call such distinctions into question.
As it turns out, Soderbergh has talked about his interest in Pale Fire, too. In 1996, Stan Schwartz suggested Nabokov as an interest/inspiration:
:Oh hell, yeah! Pale Fire. Yeah, he’s great. There’s a huge deconstructive element in his work. The acknowledgment that you’re reading a book. And there’s a lot of that in Schizopolis. The awareness that you’re watching a movie, and the film’s awareness that you’re aware that you’re watching a movie.
[He continues talking about the making of Schizopolis and adapting Spaulding Gray’s monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, too; it’s an interesting read.]
The subjectivity inherent in the list is amplified by attaching directors’ names to these dream projects, “if anyone can do it, Tarantino/Lynch/Soderbergh/Aronofsky can”-style. There’s nothing inherently unfilmable in these titles; it’s just that we can’t imagine how to do it. The problem isn’t the novels’; it’s ours.
But maybe there IS something else, a structural problem. How many studio execs or producers have actually read Joyce or Proust or Nabokov–or Cervantes? When I chose the name of my production company from Don Quixote, one project on my initial slate was shooting an adaptation of the novel without having read it. That became citing Don Quixote as an inspiration/reference in press material, knowing full well that almost no one would ever question or refute the claim. People “know” many of these novels as Great and Difficult, but they’ve rarely actually read them. [Hell, I still haven’t read Ulysses or finished Infinite Jest, for that matter.]
The amount of imaginationpower being thrown against possible film adaptations is thus exponentially smaller than we imagine. Meanwhile, in addition to the mindset of executives, the film industry’s production and funding infrastructure is designed not to make challenging, experimental, or unconventional films. The result is not exactly fertile soil for these projects to develop.
Terry Gilliam’s Depp-meets-Don Quixote project didn’t fail because Cervantes is unfilmable; in fact, the unbaked, chaotic ridiculousness of Gilliam’s film/script/vision itself was the least of the reasons that production imploded.
Rick Rubin Reports From The Front Lines
From the Jan. 07 issue of Esquire: What I’ve Learned — Producer Rick Rubin [Johnny Cash, some other stuff]:
Here we were in Mr. Chow’s, and literally, it was like World War III had broken out. And when I really thought about it, this person causing it wasn’t famous for anything that you could really put your finger on. It was an interesting comment on our society
via kottke]
Agnes Martin Documentary at Film Forum
There are very few artists I’d like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist’s story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one can hold still, for fear, I guess, of boring the viewer, so there are invariably lots of slow pans, zooms in and out, dolly shots through empty galleries [if the budget’s high enough to lay track, though I’ve seen a cameraman improvise a dolly by sitting in a mail cart.]
And their ostensible populism usually results in a grating boosterism of PBS or the Hagiographic School, whereby the case must be made for the Artist As Genius. [Damn populist medium again, but the October-y intellectual monkey tricks of art critical dialogue never seem to find their way into documentaries. It’s as if everyone figures they need to dumb it down, or maybe it’s just impossible to edit paragraph-long sentences into anything remotely watchable.]
Which is all a long way around to saying that Agnes Martin is one artist I would love to see working and hear talking, and not just because I miss her in some irrational, oddly personal way. [I never met her.] I have some old lecture notes from a talk she gave at ICA or someplace, and they are windswept-free of pretense and the cruft of art criticism and history.
From the review of Mary Lance’s documentary, “Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World,” which she shot over four years, starting in 1998, Martin sounds like a refreshing, invigorating, and lucid counterpoint to the careerist whirl of the art world today. [And on top of that she sold tons of work.]
Anyway, Lance’s film opened yesterday at Film Forum, and it’s paired with a documentary about Kiki Smith. Lance will conduct a Q&A after the 8pm screening Friday [tomorrow].
Previously: Im Memoriam: Agnes Martin
What’s The Edition Size? Is It Available?
Awesome. Just. Awesome. A couple who lives in the Rockefeller Apartments across 54th St from MoMA was watching the museum test the projections for the their upcoming Doug Aitken installation.
Your Video Art Here [flickr via curbed]
One of my early formative MoMA shows was Gabriel Orozco’s Projects series in 1993, where he ran a scroll made of pages from the phone book down the center of the esclator handrails, and where he placed oranges in vases and cups in the windows of various Rockefeller Apartments residents.
A Day In The Office In The Gallery
For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil’s next project: “finding people who feel their lives have been ruined by appearing in reality television shows.”
Collins used the media hype around the Turner competition itself to garner the attention of his intended subject/collaborators. And according to the firsthand account of Lena Corner, one of the researchers, the strategy succeeded brilliantly.
She wrote about her experience of being on display while trying to actually get work done for The Independent last fall. It’s an uncanny parallel to the spectacle and exhibitionism Collins & Co. were researching, though fortunately for Corner she seems to have suffered no lingering effects.
Gillian, the cleaning supervisor, pops in. Apparently the cleaners have been too scared to empty our bin in case it’s an artwork. In 2004 German-born artist Gustav Metzger created a piece of “auto-destructive art” for the Tate. One element was a bag containing rubbish that he had collected from within the gallery, but a cleaner mistook it for a bag of rubbish and threw it out. Metzger declared the piece to be ruined. No wonder the cleaners are a little nervous.
Turner Prize: Inside one of the installations [independent.co.uk via cerealart’s blog]
The DaVinci Code Code
With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it’s taken this long for other craven museums to get into the movie tie-in game:
In the next two years [the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay] will between them underwrite screenplays by seven critically acclaimed international filmmakers for films to be shot — at least partly — inside their walls.
The Louvre is co-financing and co-producing a film by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang, which will be shot entirely onsite.
Meanwhile, to comemmorate its 20th anniversary, d’Orsay is “working with” [?] director/producer Francois Margolin’s company Margo Films to make four $3mm films starring Juliet Binoche [?], and directed by Olivier Assayas, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Raoul Ruiz, and Jim Jarmusch.
“Though it’s probably not conscious, the ripple effects from presenting an image beyond museum walls is about branding — the art collections and the museum — to potential visitors from around the world.”
says Margolin, just before I smack him on the forehead.
Museums getting key parts in films [thr.com]
How To Tell Cannes And Slamdance Apart
Ian at Water Cooler Games has been writing about an incident at Slamdance. Seems the founder of the alt-alt festival yanked Super Columbine Massacre, a charming -sounding RPG that tells the tale of some innocent, young, all-American scamps, from the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition.
At first, the line was extreme sponsor displeasure with having a Columbine-themed title in competition. [I mean, just look at what it did to Cannes and Cannes. No one’s ever heard of them again.] But now it turns out that it was really just Slamdance president Peter Baxter’s own call in anticipation of possible sponsor displeasure–or else his own distaste for the game itself. Either way, it sounds like crap.
There’s a lot of heated discussion among gamers and developers about the artistic merits of games vs their “mere entertainment” value. I think that’s ridiculous and beyond discussion. Games have as much claim on “art” as film does. If anything, the nexis of creative, literary, and narrative innovation has shifted to games and away from almost any other medium I can think of at the moment.
This just sounds like a dumb-ass move by a blindered geezer whose vested interests are too tied up with the establishment. Exactly the kind of rejection and narrow-mindedness that spurred the creation of Slamdance in the first place. The only proper response, obviously, is for gamers to break off and make their own damn festival in response.
Then after this happens seven times, the Matrix collapses and has to be restarted from scratch.
Slamdance: SCMRPG removal was personal, not business [watercoolergames.org via boingboing]
the always awesome Greg Costikyan’s reponse, plus they posted the game: SCMRPG: Artwork or Menace? [manifestogames.com]
Previously: Gus Van Sant’s Elephant is part of the canon around here. Read my interview with producer Dany Wolf about the in-movie homebrewed video game based on Gerry.
Also: the art-movie-as-video-game-at Sundance, Gerry/video game connection.
1/9 update: Costikyan reports that to date, five gamemakers have withdrawn their titles from the festival. Yesterday, it was just one.
Sent Back To The Manufacturer
Something noticed last week: No, Warranties are not “boring,” Princess. When I went to buy my new coffee grinder recently, I was comparing two grinders, different brands, similar prices, and I wanted to see the warrantee information, right? This is the logical next step, it’s smart shopping, it’s informed consumption. Style is somewhat important, function-wise they are all about the same, color’s rather limited, but the consumer-report-ish side of things, that’s what guides this smart shopper. Until I realize–and have to chuckle–I no longer have to bother myself about warranties because any product warrantee I find is going to last longer than I do. Shit. If a salesperson starts to explain service protection plans, Apple Care, x-years and just-so-many miles to go, I no longer pay any attention. Back in the grocery store, I shake my head at this, and then grab the grinder in the color I like best and get the hell out.
So on the phone, my mom goes, “Oh, did you know Scott Swaner?” “Yeah.” “Dead. Pancreatic cancer. 38.” Of course, I knew his age. We were punks in high school together. Slamming to Black Flag and Madness punks, not “move your Honda, punk!” punks, that is. Being smart was not really an attribute highly prized among our beer bonging, basement concert-going SLC Punk contingent, so Scott–and to a lesser extent, I–toned it down a bit, but you could always tell his synapses were firing a hundred times faster than anyone else’s, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to hear he got his PhD from Harvard in Korean literature and was a star professor and a poet.
No, what surprises me, even though I’ve had a front row seat to the rough, short pancreatic ride, is the utter lack of surprise, just the opposite. Yes, it’s extremely disconcerting that cancer took someone I went to school with, a friend, even [though it was really just temporary, situational friendship, like, you know, prison, only our prison was just the same excruciatingly conservative, affluent high school, and instead of orange jumpsuits, we wore torn, white t-shirts–and Polo].
Pancreatic cancer is its own thing; it rarely, if ever, leaves you guessing about the outcome, and yet it usually gives you a finite, yet manageable window–some months, a year, maybe–in which to wrap things up. The kind of stuff you’d call “living,” if only living were actually Living instead of the cheap substitute we too often put up with. It’s like a whole life in microcosm. That whole “live every day as if it were your last” thing. In fact, if it weren’t for the never-ending pain, sounds like a great way to all-but guarantee the conscientious human a guilt- and regret-free exit strategy. [OK, not at 38.]
Scott began keeping a blog of his final act. I’m only a couple of months in so far, and it’s fascinating and confounding mechanism for getting to know someone again whom I haven’t known or seen for 25 years. I’d say I felt like an interloper, but his writing makes it clear that he’s very aware of his different audiences–his exasperatingly Mormon family, friends and students from his life out of Utah–and his comments about comment volume and hit rates, and referrer logs now strike me as hilarious. [Pretend you have six months to live. Do you a) finish your book of poems, or b) refresh your stats one more time?] Until I imagine the reality and comfort that connectivity and communication could be in a situation like that.
Scott’s writing is ascerbic–the dude’s idea of consolation is to quote Gravity’s Rainbow?–and it has a bit of the impatient, maybe-anger I remember, but it’s also very heartfelt. Though he tries to stay true to his belief system–though to his parents’ regret, no doubt, he traded in Joseph Smith, et al for Bataille–it sounds clear to me that there are no hermeneuticists in foxholes, at least not in this one. Scott read and wrote poetry and literature for its ability to bare and touch the human soul, even if he tried to stay skeptical of their existence. I kind of wish we’d kept in touch.
Do Not Go Gentle — Poetry & Cancer, Life & Death [blogspot]
Scott H. Swaner [sltrib.com]
Quinze Love
Arne Quinze has a posse. The Belgian self-marketer began his cross-country promotional tour for the launch of the new Lexus flagship at Burning Man. Though he didn’t really mention the tie-in to anyone there at the time, he sure has mentioned the Burn since, and how 2-4,000 people a day would come out to the deep playa to visit the Belgian Waffle.
Oddly, there was no mention at all of Lexus again when Quinze and his firm’s US “agent” Antoine Debouverie, spoke last month at Miami Basel to a breathless David Weinstein on WPS1. The Lexus circus had come to town during the fair, and a P.S.1 staffer named Zorana Djakovic arranged for the “emerging master” to be interviewed about his art on ABMB’s official art radio station.
You can hear the whole interview, it’s only 12 minutes long, but here’s my transcription of part of it:
Zorana Djakovic: What do you think, can you imagine one of Arne’s wooden constructions at the courtyard of P.S.1 during the Warm-Up?
David Weinstein: That’s the Warm-Up architecture project at PS1; there’s a special architecture project for the environment for the summer dance parties. It’s a competition, and there’s a reward, but this would be wonderful there. And beautiful with the old building.
Antoine Debouverie: Have you seen it lit up as well? Because when you put together and create that organic, wooden shape with soft lighting and music, it becomes an incredible communal space.
At Burning Man there were 40,000 people there. We were not advertised anywhere. We were not on the agenda, for what parties at what times, you know? We just did it for ourselves, alright? And every night, I guarantee, there were like five, ten thousand people who would converge to our space to experience the space, the lights, and you know the communion that this piece produces.
DW: I can tell you, our staff was thrilled immediately by this piece, and I urge people to go take a look at it. Our description here leaves something to be desired.
Indeed. And to think the title of my first, naive post about the Uchronians was titled, “Uh-oh, I Hope P.S.1 Doesn’t Find Out About This.”
WPS1: Beyond Burning Man: Arne Quinze [pronounced KWIN-zuh, apparently. Now I’ll have to change all my too-clever titles.]
previous greg.org over-coverage of Quinze Milan, Lexus, Burning Man, and the Uchronians
Nam June Paik’s Early Work
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]
Pics From Kyoto And Hong Kong
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]
The Making Of That Honda Rube Goldberg Commercial
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.
“those blank looks, it seems, won out”
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]