Amazing: Sforzian Backdrop-Meets-Human Shield

nrccs_reynolds_sforzian_children.jpg
UPDATE: the video’s been removed from YouTube. Still shot via salon
Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee ignored one of the cardinal rules of stage performance: never appear with animals or small children.
I don’t know what Reynolds was saying; I couldn’t stop watching the Sforzian Backdrop of squirming children. Also, I had the sound off. But I do know what he wasn’t talking about: anything about the Mark Foley scandal that might make the little ones uncomfortable. Which is exactly why he trotted them out to this press conference.

Reynolds Blames Hastert [youtube via tpm election central]

WOW, Southpark

warcraft_southpark.jpg

I missed the hilarious machinimesque World of Warcraft episode of South Park on Wednesday, and I managed to catch half of it last night. Did I mention it’s hilarious? The whole thing is streaming at wowsouthpark.com for the moment. Personally, I’m happy to watch it with commericals.
And while I, too, have a life and so don’t know my Warcraft macros from Final Fantasy’s, but even though the lingo’s as authentic-sounding as any ER claptrap, it was Cartman’s hypnotic ascending tone that had me laughing out loud. [via waxy]

51 Birch Street: Home, Movie

After his mother died and his father quickly remarried, filmmaker Doug Block went to visit his childhood home for the last time, as it was being emptied and put up for sale. He ended up spending two years making 51 Birch Street, an extensive examination of his parents’ lives and relationship. The film opens in NYC and LA Oct. 18:

… I walked inside and saw our entire family history being packed away in boxes and it all hit me like a punch in the stomach: although I hadn’t lived there in over 30 years, on some very primal level I still thought of this place as my home.
It soon became apparent that my father, who never talks about himself, was not just willing but was eager to talk. And that my camera was facilitating the conversation by allowing me to ask the difficult questions I could never have asked otherwise. I saw a unique opportunity to get to know my father better, so I decided to keep coming back.

51 Birch Street website, including Block’s documentary-centric blog [via kottke]

Alberto Burri’s Cretto

cretto_burri.jpg

Like Pompeii in reverse, Gibellina has been remembered by its ghost-like burial instead of an unearthing.
In 1968, an earthquake devastated villages throughout the Belice Valley of western Sicily. The Italian government’s incompetent response to the disaster and the corruption that absorbed rescue & redevelopment funds turned “Belice” into a cautionary touchstone of Italian politics. It’s a scenario that might resonate today, even. In the United States. And/or in Iraq.
Anyway, in the mid-80’s, artist Alberto Burri proposed a memorial to victims of the earthquake. His plan: encase the ruins and detritus of the abandoned hill town of Gibellina in concrete, leaving the roads as a solid, labyrinthine palimpsest of the village’s public spaces. [The whole town had been rebuilt and relocated closer to the freeway soon after the earthquake. No preserve-or-rebuild debates there.]

gmap_cretto.jpg

The remarkable thing: the memorial was built. Cretto is now a 20+ acre piece of mesmerizing land art, the pathways of an entire town petrified in brutalist, post-minimalist concrete. Now, of course, in 2006, it looks like Peter Eisenman’s Berlin Holocaust Memorial, but with content. The other thing it reminds me of is an old NYT Magazine article [date? who knows?] about the challenge of designing effective warning signs for a Nevada nuclear waste dump. To get the “Keep Out” message across 10,000 years from now, someone suggested paving a giant desert quadrant with spiky black stone, which the heat alone would render nearly impassable. Haven’t heard much about that since.
Other things I haven’t heard: anyone–even the memorial experts–discuss Burri’s work in relation to the World Trade Center site, or even in the larger contexts of the evolution of memorial design, much less of Land Art. What gives?
Aleksandra Mir mentioned Cretto in her top ten list for this month’s Artforum [artforum]
Cretto [archidose talked about it, though. twice.]
09/2010 UPDATE Google Maps now has higher res images, and Street View. of BF Sicily.

Four Nudes Too Nude For Texas

As has been reported before, Ms. Sydney McGee, an 28-year veteran art teacher in a Texas elementary school has been suspended after a parent complained that his/her child saw nude art during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art. The field trip had been approved by the principal; there were other teachers and parents along; and the museum reports it has never had such a complaint from a school group in its history.
The teacher retraced the group’s steps for the NY Times, which noted the following nude works:
Figure of a Young Man from a Funerary Relief, Greek; Attic
c. 330 BC

dallas_museum_funerary_nude

The Shade, Auguste Rodin, 1880 [which is under 1m tall, btw]

dallas_museum_nude_rodin

Flora, Aristide Maillol, 1911 [which is actually draped with a robe of some sort]

dallas_museum_maillol

And Star in a Dream, Jean Arp, 1958, the nudity of which seems to me beyond the reach of most fifth grade imaginations.

dallas_museum_arp_star

There is, however, another Arp that fits the description of “an abstract nude sculpture,” a phrase the principal apparently cited in the suspension:
Sculpture Classique, 1960, which the artist made in a “conscious attempt” to “emulate the basic forms of Greek art.” If this is the offending sculpture, I think there’s a parent who needs a time out.

dallas_museum_arp_nude

Still, my money’s on the Maillol, if for no other reason than that it looks suspiciously like Paul Jennewein’s Spirit of Justice, 1933, a statue whose exposed breast made John Ashcroft want to–well, let’s let him demonstrate. In a way, this whole story now makes perfect sense.

ashcroft_justice_breast.jpg

Swatting At Flies

Ever since it was first revealed by, I believe, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice during the 9/11 Commission hearings, I’ve been bugged [no pun] by Bush’s reaction to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s threat, that he was “tired of swatting at flies.”
Or more precisely, I’ve been bothered by the wholesale acceptance of Rice’s interpretation of that remark, with an emphasis on the “swatting.” As CNN reported during the hearings, this swatting meant Bush wanted “demanded a more comprehensive strategy to attack the terrorist network.” [Commission member Bob Kerrey took some issue, asking what flies had the administration swatted? None. But that still left the underlying assumption stand.]
Now that Bob Woodward’s book reveals a previously undisclosed, urgent meeting that CIA director George Tenet and one of his analysts called with Rice on July 10th, 2001, where they discussed the imminent threat of attack in the US, isn’t it way past time to re-examine the “swatting at flies” brushoff and put the emphasis where it actually, originally belonged, on the “flies”?
Judged on the actions of his administration and his own words George W Bush considered Al Qaeda to be flies–not even mosquitoes, flies–nothing more than a nuisance and certainly not a threat. And when faced with imminent attack, they chose to ignore it. Or they chose to let it play out because they had, as Cheney said in another context, “other priorities.”

Condi Rice vs Bob Woodward: Let the Battle Begin [e&p via tpm]

Still Indie At 40?

It’s funny that–oh, wait, no, it’s depressing, no, it’s funny, no, it’s–someone like Mary Harron who has done some good films has also done some great television, but somehow it comes off sounding like a bad thing.
I’d love to see any of the filmmakers in this article try taking the Soderbergh Bubble approach and attempt to break new business and economic ground with their films, too; they sound somehow trapped in a paradigm not entirely of their own making.
All that said, John Jost, whoa.
Survival Tips For The Aging Independent Filmmaker [nyt]

I Guess Everyone’s Gotta Be Known For Something

Carol Vogel has a story about Damien Hirst’s restoration replacement of the shark [yes, that shark]:

Such is his reputation that when a seven-foot shark washed up on a beach in July, and the Natural History Museum in London needed a place to store it until its staff was ready to preserve it, the first call it made was to Mr. Hirst.
“They asked if I had any room in my freezer,’’ he said with satisfaction. He was happy to oblige.

Swimming With Famous Dead Sharks [nyt]

The Highest And Best Use Of A Pen

When I grow up–scratch that, IF I were to ever grow up enough, I wish I could write with half the force of Ada Louise Huxtable.

Given the notoriety of the site, a passionately observant and deeply involved public, and the proven financial advantage of what goes by the dreadful name “starchitecture,” Mr. Silverstein’s move from standard commercial construction to high-end high style required no great sacrifice or philanthropic awakening. Good design makes excess palatable. Marquee names command higher rents. These are all virtuoso performances–architecture as spectacular window dressing and shrewd marketing tool for the grossly maximized commercial square footage that has remained the one constant through the perversion and destruction of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, a process in which vision succumbed early to pressure groups and political agendas. Call it irony or destiny, the architecture once rejected as a costly “frill” is now embraced for its dollar value.

The Disaster That Has Followed The Tragedy [wsj via archinect]

Lost In Translation

walter_robinson_in_tokyo.jpg

I guess if Kaikai Kiki had wanted the name of its biannual Toyko otaku art fair, Geisai, spelled properly, they should’ve upgraded Walter Robinson’s seat for him. Instead, as he wrote, he had to use his own frequent flier miles to get out of coach [which is the only sensible thing to do, of course, on a 13-hr flight. and the article has since been corrected]:

Murakami sat on the floor and spoke briefly about Geisei [sic] #10. It had been a success, he said, to the extent that it had given young artists a chance to show their work and make contacts.This latest fair had also begun to reach an international audience — we ourselves were the tautological proof of that.

Now, I’m actually a big fan of Japan’s otaku cultures and the DIY sensibility that underpins both the kawaii school of crafty, little artmaking as well as the whole jishu eiga/self-made movie trend. Murakami deserves plenty of credit for trying to bring this kind of creative production to the art world’s [sic] attention, or to formulate a more sophisticated context for it, anyway. [That said, Murakami worship needs some context, too; while he creates the open forum for an all-comers art fair on the one hand, he happily sends his characters to the front to provide cultural cover for complicated-at-least developers like the Moris, whose massive Roppongi Hills megaplex is a Kaikai Kiki-branded project. And it sounds like the “fancy downtown hotel” [sic] where the junketeers stayed. Good to hear Tokyo’s “downtown” is improving.]

But from Robinson’s bemused, deracinated gaijin schtick, it doesn’t sound like he even cracked the spine on Murakami’s intensely argued Little Boy exhibition catalogue before he accepted the artist’s hospitality. Fortunately, the movement, such as it is, is probably as uninterested in Robinson’s clueless opinions as he is with trying to grasp what’s in front of him.

walter_robinson_pointy_melon.jpg image: shibuyabuya

I wonder who else went? And while I’m less interested in whether they disclose the junket, and more interested in hearing what someone has to say whose pointy melon hasn’t been so shaped by the art world’s tiny box.
Murakami, Impresario [artnet]
Previously: Tokyo Snapshots – Takashi Murakami Corp. 08/05
Geisai #10 [geisai.net]
Takashi Murakami interview before Geisai #10 [tokyoartbeat]
update: that didn’t take long. I hear that art magazine folks Judd Tully (Art & Auction), Cathy Bird (Art & Antiques), Dan Fox (Frieze) and a couple of others took the trip. I’d be surprised if someone from the new LTB title Culture & Travel wasn’t tagging along, too.

Michael Weiss Devastates His Reputation As A Dude

Michael Weiss’s reading of the crypto-Republican subtext of John Hughes’ 80’s teen films seems remarkably tone deaf, even to someone who was growing up as a clueless cultural Republican teenager at the time.
On the other hand, I don’t know what could be more depressing than to realize the genius behind Sixteen Candles is also behind Beethovens 1-5. Oh wait, I do know: that there are potentially four more Beethovens left.
The Political Conservatism of John Hughes [slate]