Aaaarrrrrttt!

I’m skipping Art Basel this year–got a trip to Iceland and all–with the result that I hear my foreigner neighbors watching TV all day across the courtyard. They may not be able to comply with a “reserved parking” sign, but they can sure cheer the hell out of a soccer game.
Anyway, I’m sad to be missing this art critic match-up tomorrow, which should be exciting, even if it ends 0-0. I know the concept of seeking out poor people–or critics, same thing–at Basel seems counter-intuitive, but take a chance on this one:

“Artworld Evolution, or Future Babylon?” A freeform conversation with art journalist Marc Spiegler and critic Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice.
Between a booming market, rapid internationalization and radical expansion, the artworld’s border lines have become ever more ambiguous. But with collectors and artists curating shows, fairs functioning like biennials, gallery spaces playing kunsthalle, critics not criticizing, and auction houses hyping young stars, all the old roles and assumptions have gone wobbly. So, who will shape the future of art-making and who will shape the future of the art-market? And is there a difference between the two? Q&A follows.

Hmm, is the NYT liveblogging this?
June 14: Art Lobby, near the cafeteria in the Art Unlimited Hall, 17.30-19.00

Polygamist Slang, &c.

The Primer was compiled by the Utah State Attorney General as a resource for state agency personnel who deal with polygamist groups and individuals. It details the known polygamist groups in and around Utah and Arizona and provides background on the particulars of their beliefs, culture, practices, and terminology.
Most of my family’s been Mormon for generations, and I have polygamist ancestors along many branches of my family tree, but in the modern Mormon culture, polygamy has been treated almost entirely as a long-past historical oddity. People who practice it today are not considered to have any relationship or relevance at all to the LDS Church, even though they often see things otherwise. And even though their culture and beliefs are almost always a derivative of mainstream Mormonism.
The result is, I have never heard or seen any of this stuff–except for one word, “polyg”–even if some of the religious terminology is familar, it usually means something different [and it’s different between and even within contemporary polygamist communities.
Anyway, here is some polygamy-related slang:

  • Bleeding the Beast: An expression used by some fundamentalists as a rationale for accepting assistance (i.e., financial grants, WIC, TANF, food stamps, housing, medical assistance, etc.) from governmental agencies that may otherwise not be trusted. Occasionally, the same term may be used to justify abuse or exploitation of such systems. Within certain groups it is taught that “bleeding the beast” will assist God in destroying the “evil” U.S. government and is considered a righteous endeavor.
  • Creekers: Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) who live in Colorado City, AZ, and Hildale, UT are often called “Creekers.” The nickname “Creekers” began when this area was called Short Creek.
  • “Keep Sweet”: An admonition to be compliant and pleasant despite the circumstances.
  • Plyg (or Polyg): A highly offensive and demeaning term for those who practice polygamy. Care providers should be aware that this term is never acceptable and would hinder efforts to provide help.
  • Poofers: A slang term for girls who suddenly disappear from their community in order to take part in an arranged marriage. The girls are either kept hidden or moved to another state or country. This is most often used by the FLDS Church.
  • Second Ward or 2nd Warder: A derogatory slang term for families who left Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona in the 1980’s to start their own community in Centennial Park. However, members of the Centennial Park community do not like this term because it suggests an association between the two groups. Members of the FLDS church in Hildale/Colorado City are also called “First-Warders.” [congregations in the mainstream LDS church are also called ‘wards,’ btw. -g.o]
    The Primer — Helping Victims of Domestic Violence and Child Abuse in Polygamous Communities [pdf, attorneygeneral.utah.gov via deseret news]

    • Or Maybe The Machines Just Don’t Need Human Batteries Anymore

    To watch McQueen and the other cars motor along the film’s highways and byways without running into or over a single creature is to realize that, in his cheerful way, Mr. Lasseter has done Mr. Cameron [director of The Terminator] one better: instead of blowing the living world into smithereens, these machines have just gassed it with carbon monoxide.

    – from Manohla Dargis’ NYT review of Matrix 4: Cars

    Ah, Nobody Does Sforza Like The British

    sforza_qe2_pp_gocarts.jpg

    It just takes one or two photos to remind you that long before there was a Scott Sforza, the British monarchy was using elaborately staged pomp and ceremony to bedazzle its subjects and keep them line.
    On another note, whether you’re a believer in karmic justice or just simply confounded by the crazytalk coming out of Prince Philip’s piehole over the years, it’s good to remember what he does all day. [via wmmna]

    Carbon Copies: Pencils From Cremains

    carbon_copies.jpgFor the writer for whom a $20 Faber Blackwing pencil is just not stressful enough may I suggest Carbon Copies, “pencils made from the carbon produced during cremation. A lifetime supply of pencils can be made from one body of ash.
    “The sharpenings create a secondary ash and displace the pencils as they are used, transforming the pencil case over time, into an urn.”
    Of course, having your notebooks bound in your dearly departed’s skin simultaneously decreases the pencil supply by several years and increases the pressure to write Importantly.
    Carbon Copies, by Nadine Jarvis, exhibited at the 2006 Goldsmith College BA Design & Eco Design show in London [nadinejarvis.com via treehugger]

    Go For The Cornell, Stay For The Brancusi

    brancusi-nortonsimon.jpegNickyskye on Metafilter:

    Joseph wrote me love letters in which he couched his sexual interest in metaphors. I was told he used the image of a bird for penis and nest for vagina. His letters were full of birds and nests.

    Just when you think there are no stones left to unturn in one woman’s firsthand account of being used–as a child, by her mother–to procure art from the pedophilic Joseph Cornell, there’s one more eye-popping anecdote. She took her only remaining Cornell to the art dealer, Richard Feigen, to sell, in order to finance a trip to India:

    Mr. Feigen said that he too had been in India, to meet with the Maharaja of Indore who owned several sculptures by Brancusi, including the elegantly simple, bronze one called Bird in Space. The Indian government would not allow the Maharaja to export this valuable piece of art, so Mr. Feigen took a risk and decided to package the sculpture as a brass lampstand so it could exit India, which it did. He said that it was his first major art deal and that the sculpture sold for one million dollars.

    The perfectly symmetrical irony, of course, is that Brancusi’s Bird In Space was the subject of a famous court case when it was first exhibited in the US in 1926. Customs agents, not believing the work was art, had attempted to charge import duty on the machined metal object.
    In 2004, The Art Newspaper wrote about the Maharajah’s Bird In Space:

    What happened to the Maharajah of Indore’s Brancusi birds?
    In 1973 the Tate wanted to buy Brancusi’s black marble “Bird in space” through dealer Richard Feigen. The sale fell through because the trustees believed the work had been “smuggled” out of India.

    Seems like the trustees were right. The National Gallery of Australia had no such qualms, because it bought two of the Maharajah’s three versions of Bird In Space, even though “the original limestone bases had been destroyed in India.” Brancusi, of course, considered the bases as integral to the works themselves.
    That brass lampstand, by the way, ended up at the Norton Simon Museum, a 1972 purchase.
    Flights of Fancy: Joseph Cornell and his muses [metafilter via tmn]

    Tyranny Of The Beam Counters At WTC Memorial

    What kind of tool do you use for value engineering a half billion dollars out of your terrorist attack memorial project? Well, if you’re Kevin Rampe, you use a Sciame. [rimshot]
    The way Miss Representation sees it, Frank Sciame’s busy doing a “leave no trace” rub-out on the key components of Michael Arad’s original WTC memorial design. Naturally, the details, the process, and any sense of public accountability were the first casualties. But alas, it’s a familiar tale:

    In reality, it is exactly what it looks like: the latest in a series of putative decision makers, people accustomed to conniving and obstruction to get their way when not in charge and who then morph into tinpot dictators when they are (because, like, they are so much more talented the those other pretenders) but fail miserably because everyone else is being as obstructionist and conniving as they can be, in hopes that they are given a shot to be the biggest idiot in the room.

    Meet Frank Sciame, architect of the WTC Memorial. [missrepresentation.com via curbed]

    Zarqawi Portrait Sets Record Price For Photography

    zarqawi_framed.jpg

     

    Wow, if there was any doubt about where the contemporary art market is going, they were dispelled this morning at Christie’s Baghdad, where the US Government paid a record-setting $286 billion–plus $240 for framing–for this portrait of the dead Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. [Note: Sale price also does not include KBR’s premium of 17.5% on the first $200 billion and 10% thereafter or the 2,485 US soldiers killed as of press time.]

    Congratulations, even though it’s gotta suck a little bit; the Administration had been offered the portrait multiple times in 2002 at much lower cost [estimated in the low eight figures], but turned it down. Of course, at the time, the market was more interested in Al Qaeda portraits, and Zarqawi was not connected to Al Qaeda. [thanks to matt for the pic]

    Your Photoshared Experience: Olafur Eliasson On Flickr

    olafur_aedes_republish.jpg

    It’s funny, I’ve never really found the worlds of art and flickr to have that much overlap. Just look at the number of photos posted after the Maker Faire 2006 [4,055] compared to those posted after, say, Art Basel [295].
    But it turns out some artists have a fairly deep presence on flickr–and by some artists, I mean Olafur Eliasson. There are over 600 photos referencing Olafur in either the tags or the text. [At Tropolism, Olafur posse member Chad posted about a particularly sweet photoset [above] from republish.org, which was taken at an opening last week in Berlin at Galery Aedes.]
    [An aside on the one-name thing: people drop single last names all the time in the art world, “Oh, I have some Gursky, some Richter, Demand…” But there are a few artists who get the first-name treatment–Maurizio, Olafur, and Felix come to mind–and it’s funny how different the implications of intimacy make it sound. Whether it’s actually there or not, there’s a hint of friendship/confidance, like saying ‘Marty’ instead of ‘Scorsese’ or babbling about Bob at Sundance. This can obviously be both good and embarassingly tacky.]

    olafur_flickr.jpg

    Anyway, it makes a certain sense that Olafur’s work turns up as frequently as it does. First, it’s pretty sexy, and it looks hard to take a bad picture of it. Second, the elements of spectacle he explores make people want to take pictures of it. But most importantly, I think, is the self-conscious experiential nature of the work itself: it is art about the experience of perceiving and seeing, not just art, but everything. And that’s the sweet confluence with flickr, a site where people who pay attention to seeing–and photographing–the world as they experience it meet and mingle.
    mcleod_carey_lighthouse.jpgTaken even further, you could look at how Eliasson’s own taxonomy/typology/experiential photography resonates with the tag-friendly world of flickr, as if flickr-ites’ collective efforts are generating their own Eliasson-style photogrids of Icelandic landscapes, or waterfalls or geodesic domes. I love this one, for example, “F— Off, Olafur Eliasson,” [left] with the caption, “I was taking snaps of Icelandic Lighthouses long before that twat,” which both hits and totally misses the point. [There are tools now for creating photogrids from flickr images, pal, so have at it.]
    Olafur himself seems to be adapting his work to account for this collective/collaborative element, and not just by making less photographic work [although that does seem to be the case, which bugs, because I still want me some, and it’s getting harder and more expensive to come by]. At least three times, including in the 2004 The cubic structural evolution project , [on flickr here, of course] and his work in the 2005 Tirana Biennial, the artist put hundreds of pounds of white Lego blocks into the hands of the audience, who built utopian fantasy cityscapes with them.
    With flickr, then, it’s Olafur Eliasson’s world; we just live in it. And vice versa.
    Olafur Eliasson: Mediating Space – A Laboratory runs through July 20 at Aedes am Pfefferberg, Christinenstr.18/19, 10119 Berlin.

    Bloghdad.com/The_War_Tapes

    Deborah Scranton got embedded reporter credentials, but her documentary, The War Tapes was largely shot by US soldiers in Iraq using camera equipment she provided. She did much of her directing remotely via IM and email reviews of Quicktime dailies. Here’s ‘s a portion of ‘s discussion of a typical scene, where the troops guard a convoy of supplies being operated by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. The scene provides an indelible insight into the day-to-day situation the troops face, and the complexities that underlie every passing mention in the news about “IED’s” and “convoys”:

    KBR sells the swag to the government (meals, haircuts, styrofoam plates for $20+ bucks a pop) and to the troops. There’s a great scene of soldiers packed into KBR’s amply stocked commissary after a hard day of escorting. They’re there to buy DVDs, Pringles, Becks beer, and soft drinks from KBR. Suddenly, you realize that every copy of “Armageddon” and every bottle of Mountain Dew was trucked in through the same hellish corridor as the cheese.
    “The War Tapes” doesn’t tell us how the war is going, or speculate about the probability of success. Instead, it shows us how much blood and treasure is spent to deliver a single convoy of cheese to an American camp just a few miles outside of Baghdad. The implication is clear but unspoken: The Americans don’t control the main roads around key bases. The fight to keep Camp Anaconda supplied is a war unto itself.

    Citizen soldiers, citizen media: The War Tapes [majikthise via robotwisdom]
    Two of the soldiers, Sgts Jack Bazzi and Stephen Pink, were on Fresh Air last Thursday [whyy.org]

    Dude Learned To Draw Manga-Style In Two Years?

    gezfry_illo.jpg

    Now I like me some Japanese animation, and it’s been a central element to the AYUAM [As Yet Unannounced Animated Musical} screenplay I’ve got kicking around. But when I first approached a couple of anime studios was shocked–but not, alas, surprised–at their kind of hidebound, orthodox view of the medium. There was not much interest, it seemed, in hybridization or redeployment of an anime aesthetic or even production process that didn’t “fit” [I hate to use that word in this context] within the anime worldview.
    Maybe as a gaijin, even one who spoke Japanese, it was already a fait accompli that I was a consumer at best.
    So it’s interesting to read about the experience of Gez Fry, a Japanese/British illustrator who, the legend goes, taught himself to draw in Japanese manga/anime style in “just” two years. Obviously, there’s more to that miraculous achievement than comes out in the hagiographic interviews in Ping Mag and Pixelsurgeon.
    But the essentials are all there: the guy’s very talented, and he didn’t come up within the rigid, apprentice-y Japanese animation/illustration industry. AND, relatedly, he’s viewed as something of an outsider who tends to work with companies and clients from outside the anime world, too.
    GezFry.com [gezfry.com]
    How Japanese style Illustration works [pingmag via coudal]
    Gez Fry interview [pixelsurgeon.com]

    On Making Music For Prairie Home Companion

    On WETA, the DC public radio station, Sunday night, Mary Tripp, the reporter for a program called Out and About, interviewed some of the musicians who performed in Robert Altman’s upcoming Prairie Home Companion.
    The band members are used to live performance and to studio recording, so their perspective is at once professional and distinct. And given the subject of the film, it’s a relevant and interesting window Altman’s work process and life on his set. Garrison Keillor actively bugs, but the rest of the cast–and Altman and PT Anderson–are enough for me to overcome my PHC antipathy and be stoked about the film.
    And even though they also wrongly bullied Rex over his Prairie Ho Companion t-shirts.
    You can listen to the June 4 episode of Out and About for at least this week at weta.org [weta.org]

    Through The YouTube Darkly


    Has anyone ever asked Richard Linklater about the role A-Ha played in the development of Waking Life and Scanner Darkly. Just wonderin’
    A-Ha: Take On Me [youtube]
    update: I mean, I never thought I was very original to begin with, but still… And anyway, this is closer to Waking Life stylistically.

    So maybe the better question is, has anyone ever asked the Beastie Boys about the role of A-Ha in the development of “Shadrach”?

    Long Days Journey Into A Movie Theater

    Like many people who join cults, my route to Kieslowski fandom and membership in the Church of the Dekalog looks a little goofy in retrospect. I was clearly seduced by the romanticism of La Double Vie de Veronique, not just within the movie itself, though there’s plenty there–but by the whole cinema-going experience:
    I’d stayed an extra day on a sudden, unexpected business trip to Paris, moving from my work hotel to a dumpy 2-star, the St. Andre, in St. Germain. La Double Vie, it turned out, was screening in a little theater on the corner, and so I went that night, blind [so to speak.] Of course, I got more from the first, Polish half of the film, because I could read the French subtitles, while the second half blew by me. I had to wait a year or more for the US release to find out why Veronique was talking to that kitschy puppeteer.
    But by then, I was hooked, and I joined the ranks of people who waited for Kieslowski’s true masterpiece, the largely unseen, 10-hour Dekalog to turn up at some festival or college cinematheque or wherever. Comprised of 10 1-hour-or-so episodes, it’s an easier moviewatching experience in some ways than the several-marathons-length films of Bela Tarr or Jacques Rivette, but it still meant reordering a couple of days’ schedules around the screenings.
    Up until the back-to-back screening of The Cremaster Cycle at the Guggenheim, the longest films I’d watched were Sidney Lumet’s classic Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which I finally saw through twice after catching parts of it all week as I was running the projection booth at BYU. And that was only three hours [bah]…
    …and Jacques Rivette’s 1991 La Belle Noiseuse, which clocked in at four hours. Of course, a good portion of that four hours involved the nude artist’s modelling talents of Emmanuelle Béart, so not as much watchchecking as the runtime might lead you to expect.
    Anyway, this is all by way of setup for a link to Dennis Lim’s report of seeing the even more mythical Rivette film, the original 12.5-hr version of Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, which has only screened a handful of times since its 1971 debut. [the 4.5-hr cut, titled Out 1: Spectre, gets a little more play.] Save the date(s), because it’s coming to the AMMI’s Rivette retrospective in November.
    An Elusive All-Day Film and the Bug-Eyed Few Who Have Seen It [nyt]