NEWSgrist: “AUTOMOTIVE”
Vol. 3, no. 14 (Sept. 16, 2002)
============================
============================
NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
============================
Vol. 3, no. 14
(Sept. 16, 2002)
============================
============================
CONTENTS:
- *Splash* Ben Neill’s “Automotive” CD Launches
- *Quote/s*
Disparate Documentas?
- *Url/s* Get
Your War On; Dollars...;Eyeball Marfa
- *Spot On*
Spotlight on Turbulence: New works
- *Falling
Water* Spiral Jetty Emerges!
- *Reel Episodes* Thundergulch series; AIR moves...
- *Obit* Stuart Morgan: Britain’s most significant art
writer
- *Book
Grist* Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture
-
*Classified* Wanted: Artists Who Surf
============================
============================
*Splash*
VOLKSWAGEN and SIX DEGREES RECORDS
celebrate Ben Neill's new CD:
AUTOMOTIVE
with a live performance by
Ben Neill (Six Degrees Records) -
mutantrumpet / laptops
Bill Jones (Sandra Gering Gallery) -
laptop / live midi controlled video
Wednesday September 18, 2002
REMOTE LOUNGE
also performing:
DJ Ben Butler (Mole, Plastic City, UCMGNY)
DJ Eric Calvi
327 Bowery above 2nd Street, New York City
9:00pm / no cover / ages 21+ / 212 228 0228
Ben Neill melds the worlds of electronic dance culture, jazz,
art music, and visual media. His new CD Automotive features
expanded arrangements of music he has created for a series
of groundbreaking Volkswagen television ads.
splash page: http://newsgrist.net
============================
============================
*Quote/s*
It is my opinion that the current documenta is
indebted to the fine
groundwork laid out by the previous director,
Catherine David. She
successfully established a documenta based on
a social/political model,
albeit one grounded heavily within a
western-european vision scope. It
is widely understood that the staff of curators
headed by Okwui Enwezor
has moved documenta beyond this point into the
realm of the global via
the postcolonial - this being understood in a
broader sense. Quite
simply, I believe that this is what they were
supposed to do, and they
have done this convincingly.
For myself, the success of the current
documenta lies in the following point:
In the fact that people are arming themselves
with new information,
knowledge and insight into and about the
current state of art and culture
as it is being engaged within the main-world
exhibition centers of aesthetic
discourse (biennals/museums/galleries, etc.).
Whether one is for or against
this current documenta, it is clear that the
polemics this exhibition is
creating has invigorated an international
debate on art and culture like no
other
exhibition has done in recent years.
The questions being raised now are truly
great, and what can be made of
them is even greater still.
-Odili Donald Odita
(posted to nettime 08/28/02)
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial
use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list
for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural
politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and
"info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact:
nettime@bbs.thing.net
...and from Art Forum online:
http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200237#news3397
In his lengthy assessment, Gregor Wedekind questions what
he views as
Enwezor's "credo of universal realism."
"Okwui Enwezor looked for a way
that would make it possible to redefine the function and
position of
contemporary art as a form of cultural exchange. It was no
longer about
the current state of artas it always was earlier in
Documentabut rather
about making visible the political and social problems of
the current
global social order." After much consideration and debate,
Wedekind is
clearly unimpressed. "The darling of the global
curator jet set has
catapulted himself to this position with his critical
maneuvers. Now he's
the general secretary of all emerging cultural citizens.
In a pinstriped
suit he creates networks with influential people,
represented side by side
with other powerful figures. And in Kassel there's a
professionally
curated exhibition to be seenone that has been
conservatively presented.
An expansive mega-event of the cultural industry."
(Jennifer Allen: ArtForum Online, EVALUATING DOCUMENTA11,
9/9/02)
============================
============================
*Url/s*
1)
"Get Your War On"
by David Rees, author of the hit
self-published titles "my new fighting
technique is unstoppable" and "my new
filing technique is unstoppable."
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war11.html
(...Book
coming out soon—Oct 2002?—from Soft Skull Press):
http://softskull.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.100.exe/?E+scstore
2)
Dollars For Your Thoughts (on Terror)
by
David Greg Harth
http://www.davidgregharth.com/dollars
3)
Hoping to Inspire Talk, Artist Ignites Debate
By JIM YARDLEY (NYTimes, September 5, 2002)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/05/national/05ART.html
And: One of the Eyeball series: Marfa, Texas
http://cryptome.org/marfa-eyeball.htm
============================
============================
*Spot On*
TURBULENCE
For immediate release: September 12, 2002
Spotlight on works by Canadian artists JIM ANDREWS
and DAVID JHAVE JOHNSTON
Visit SPOTLIGHT
on the Turbulence site for new works:
1. ARTEROIDS 2.02 by Jim Andrews is a literary computer
game for the Web:
"the battle
of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness." (Andrews).
2. LIP SERVICE and IRRECONCILABLE by David Jhave
Johnston:
two "mobile text" works.
JIM ANDREWS is a web artist, multimedia developer, visual
poet, mathematician,
and essayist who, since 1995, has published his site Vispo
~ Langu(im)age at
It contains work in Java, DHTML, Shockwave, Delphi, and
Visual Basic in
which poetry meets the visual, aural, and interactive in a
very big way.
Vispo ~ Langu(im)age is the center of Andrews' artistic
output. Andrews is
interested in the synthesis of arts possible with digital
and web technology, as
well as the synthesis of media and coding: "Each poet
will integrate everything
with everything." He's the founder of the
webartery.com group, a collective of
web artists.
DAVID JHAVE JOHNSTON is a multimedia-poet currently living
in Montreal. Among
other artistic activities, he has exhibited site-specific
installations with the
Symbiosis Collective, written and directed multi-media
theater with the
Collective Unconscious Collective, and recorded
spoken-word electronica for the
now-defunct underground ZOI label. He is currently
contributing to a CD-ROM
project entitled Navigateur, modifying video for the
Transmedia 2002 festival,
working on a Kali-scope projection project, completing a
music video for Brian
Sanderson, speaking at conferences on web art, and
studying computer science
at Concordia University. Before devoting himself
completely to digital creation in
1998, Jhave finished a six-year exploratory-font project
of handwritten mixed-
media which was entitled Book. The web project
NomadLingo-a year long
exploration of digitally-generated mobile-text work-was
created from April1/'00
to April 1/'01 and exhibited as monthly installments at
www.year01.com
============================
============================
*Falling Water*
Back From Sleep in the Deep
The Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 8 2002
http://www.sltrib.com/2002/aug/08282002/utah/utah.htm
The Great Salt Lake's falling water level has revealed the
"Spiral Jetty"
for the first time in years. It was created in 1970. (
Francisco
Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)
BY LORI BUTTARS lori @ sltrib.com
Art does not have to be dry, but sometimes it helps.
For instance, the Great Salt
Lake's falling water level has given rise
to Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty," a master
earthwork that has
been submerged near the inland sea's northern shores for
more than
a decade.
"Smithson's own writings talk about the jetty
submerging and
re-emerging as part of the work of art because it changes
every time it
reappears," said University of Utah art professor
Nathan Winters, who has
written several articles about the enigmatic creation.
Built in 1970, three years before Smithson's death in a
Texas plane
crash, "Spiral Jetty" is considered his last
masterpiece.
"It's not only Smithson's masterpiece, it is Utah's
masterpiece,"
Winters said Tuesday. "For all the sculptures and
paintings of the Pony
Express and the Great American West in Utah, you won't
find any of those
in the journals of art. But you will find the jetty. It is
recognized all
over the world as one of the premier pieces of
earthwork."
Unfurling 16 miles west of Golden Spike National Historic
Site in Box
Elder County, the jetty had long been invisible until this
year's drought
revealed it. The ride to the lakeshore attraction is a
rocky one, but that
has not stopped a steady stream of art aficionados from
going there.
"We have absolutely nothing to do with it, but we
probably get about
three to 10 calls a week from people asking for
directions," said
interpretive ranger Bonnie Crossen.
Rangers typically give visitors a crude map, some driving
instructions
and send them on their way.
"We ask them to let us know if they see anything and,
about a week
ago, we had a guy stop by and say it was about one-third
visible,"
Crossen said.
Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey say the jetty
has resurfaced
because the northern Great Salt Lake has dropped to about
4,000
feet above sea level, its lowest point in nearly a decade.
Smithson supposedly chose the spot for the earthwork
because of its
unique rose-colored water, the result of the chemistry of
the briny
landlocked lake.
The earthwork's 15-foot-band stretches 1,500 feet from the
shore.
It was built by bulldozers and made from black basalt rock
that has
turned white with crystallized salt through the years.
An 1850s Mormon legend about a whirlpool in the middle of
the Great
Salt Lake leading to the ocean is said to have inspired
the artist to
choose the spiral design.
Smithson believed that earth art was meant to be
experienced, not
whispered about in museums, Winters says.
Visitors are allowed to walk out onto the jetty if they so
desire.
"I'd hate to see crowds of people out there traipsing
around, but the
pilgrimage to see it is very much part of the
experience," Winters said.
"The best view, however, is by plane or helicopter."
============================
============================
*Reel Episodes*
Artnet News, 9/13/02
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews9-12-02.asp?C=1
9/11 AT THE KITCHEN
New York video maven Kathy Brew, whose Thundergulch
organization put
together new-media art shows in downtown Manhattan since
1997, has
now curated "9/11 Episodes," an exhibition of
videos at the Kitchen Art Gallery
on West 19th Street, Sept. 4-28, 2002. The
offerings include Scenes from an
Endless War by Norman Cowie, Brooklyn Promenade by Mark
Street, To the
Workers of the World by Tami Gold and tapes by Tony
Oursler, Kristin Lucas
and about 15 others. Several of the videos, which are
mostly only a few minutes
long, aired earlier this year as part of the "Reel
New York" series on PBS in
New York. Locals can drop by the Kitchen at 6 p.m. on
Sept. 18 for a "Digital
Happy Hour," when some of the artists will talk about
their work.
A.I.R. MOVES TO CHELSEA
After 30 years in SoHo, A.I.R. Gallery -- the first
artist-run, nonprofit gallery
for women artists -- has relocated to a 2,000-square-foot
space in the
Whitehall Building at 511 West 25th Street, suite 301. A
collaboration with
the Third Wave
Foundation, a grant-making group for young women's
initiatives, helped make the move possible. A.I.R.
inaugurates its new space
on Sept. 14, 2002, with a reception for "New Space,
New Work," a selection
from the organization's national members program. For more
info: http://www.airnyc.org
============================
============================
*Obit*
Stuart Morgan:
Britain's most significant writer on contemporary art, an erudite
and
humane critical voice engaged in a search for meaning
by Ian Hunt and Adrian Searle
The Guardian, August 30, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,783032,00.html
Stuart Morgan, who has died aged 54, became known during
the 1980s in
Europe and the United States as the most significant
British writer on
contemporary art. When he started writing in the 1970s, he
knew that, in a
country not receptive to contemporary art, the mediating
role of criticism
needed defending, and he brought to it refinement and
audacity. His
cadences moved through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Max Miller,
Nathanael West
and his beloved William Empson, often in the same essay.
The liveliness he
brought to his work endeared him to students and those
artists whose inner
lives he fathomed.
Born in Newport, Gwent, he was an able linguist at Newport
Hall school. He
graduated from Southampton University, and after
completing an MA at
Sussex University began doctoral work on American
literature. In Brighton
he walked past the art school's window and, attracted by
the people he saw
through it - unlike any he had met at the university -
walked in, asked
for a lecturing job, and was given one. His literary
energies were
thereafter devoted to contemporary art, and the doctorate
was abandoned.
The art infrastructure in Britain was small then, and he
announced his
stance as a critic with essays on American artists such as
Dennis
Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, mostly in Artscribe, a
newly founded
magazine. Morgan's approach became an essential aspect of
the magazine.
Though he was always ready to go out on a limb for certain
British
artists, he contrived to spend time in New York, Germany,
Austria, the
Netherlands, Spain and Scandinavia. He always talked with
artists, and
pursued the carefully edited interview in its own right,
assisting artists
to a voice in the interpretation of their own work.
His essays were conversational, postponing the demand for
judgment so that
issues from everyday life, as from art, appeared in their
proper opacity
and peculiarity. The movements of the first skateboarders
or tabloid
accounts of religious experience were as worthy of
scrutiny as the
specific knowledge of art history.
By the late 1980s, Morgan was editing Artscribe, and
continued to build up
its international coverage. It became a European rival to
New York's
Artforum, for which he also wrote. Along with analyses of
simulationism
and interviews with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and
Christian
Boltanski, Artscribe published critical interventions that
questioned
art's involvement in fashionability: the reader
encountered patient
analyses of contemporary British painters inspired by
Renaissance
rhetoric. And there were reports on Aids activism as the
virus took its
early toll of those in art. When new owners bought the
magazine and wanted
to make it more glamorous and star-led, he was off.
After he left Brighton to live in London, he was unsettled
and itinerant
between friends' houses; a fire burnt his stored
possessions and papers,
and he struggled to recover from this loss, for which he
was never
compensated. He had become a public figure, of a kind.
The commissions did not stop, and when the new art
magazine frieze set up
in 1991, he was on hand as adviser. He was cross when
people attributed to
him more influence than he felt he possessed. It was
characteristic of him
that he refused to serve as a judge of the Turner Prize -
not once but
twice - saying that artists were 7n competition with
themselves and the
past, not each other.
He did consolidate his work in a different way with the
remarkable
exhibition Rites of Passage, curated with Frances Morris for
the Tate
Gallery in 1995, conceived as a journey through light and
dark spaces. It
was powerful and serious, and engaged a wide audience with
no loss of
intensity. A substantial book of selected essays and
interviews, What The
Butler Saw, published by frieze, appeared to acclaim in
1996; a second
collection, Inclinations, will follow. He also edited a
selection of
writings by John Coplans (1996), the English artist and
co-founder of
Artforum, an independent figure whose thinking and spirit
he appreciated.
Morgan was interested in how artists fashioned themselves.
His reports on
students showed the same care to understand idiom and
motivation as
anything he wrote for publication. Yet he was always ready
to use, at
appropriate moments, the phrase "Our kid could do
that", and his adverse
criticisms, deeply coded as they were, were always
appreciated.
In the early stages of his illness (the neurological
disorder Lewy body
disease) when a carer, impressed by his wall of books,
said he must be
very deep, he replied that, no, he was interested in the
problem of
describing the surface of things, the difficulty of which
he thought had
been underestimated.
He is survived by his mother Thora. His final years were
made as peaceful
as they could be through the care of Angela Lucas.
Although I knew Stuart Morgan for 25 years, I am left with
the feeling
that I barely knew this complex man; except through his
writing, his
highly individual, erudite and humane critical voice. He'd
gossip
endlessly, tell alarming stories about the wilder shores
of gay life in
America, or casually remark that he had lived in a
menage trois, but
would always swing the conversation back to an artist he'd
just come
across, in Amsterdam or New York or in some out of the way
place in New
Zealand.
He drifted in and out of our lives, had a racketty and
fragile private
life, never seemed to own much or live in comfort. Food
and drink never
interested him. He seemed both worldly and apart, and
until he got sick,
he travelled, taught, and wrote all the time - essays
appearing constantly
in respected magazines.
He had the most inquiring of minds. He was the best of the
group of
writers who began their careers at Artscribe in the
mid-1970s (including
Matthew Collings, Terence Maloon and myself). He never
appeared to
struggle to find a style or a position. He wrote, from the
first, with
great intellectual generosity and breadth. He expected as
much of the art
he looked at. Art was a matter of discovery and invention,
and he matched
it with writing which was equally creative. He was neither
prejudiced nor
snobby (two of the most unappealing traits in the art
world), nor did he
feel art should be written about differently to anything
else. He showed
young writers that criticism could be a search for
meaning, and that the
journey of looking, thinking and making connections was
what mattered,
rather than critical closure. This was the enduring lesson
of his writing,
to which I owe a huge debt.
The journeys Morgan took in his writing were intellectual
roller-coaster
rides. He could be hilarious, gossipy or sarcastic, and in
the next breath
theoretical, literary, pithy and touching.
As a lecturer and art school teacher, he expected his
students to be as
well read and intellectually curious as he was, but was
happy to sing My
Guy at a karaoke evening in the student bar. His writing
was never flashy
or lazy, and he never talked down, either to the artists
he wrote about,
or his readers. The artists he discussed always learned
something about
their own work from him, just as he cajoled his readers
into discovering
how important art might be in helping us make sense of our
lives.
One of Morgan's adopted voices, as a critic, was that of
innocence: "Why
on earth did you do that?" he once asked the stern
Christian Boltanski
about an aspect of his work. He cajoled Louise Bourgeois
about her
self-mythologising, what he called her lies, without
offending her.
Morgan, as much as anyone, was responsible for her late fame,
and curated
her first British show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1985.
He was a great
interviewer, and an extremely good curator, though he
never chose to make
a career of it. Morgan never chose a career at all, but
pursued instead an
exemplary, difficult life in art.
Stuart Morgan, critic, born January 21 1948; died August
28 2002
============================
============================
*Book Grist*
Dark Fiber : Tracking Critical Internet Culture
by Geert Lovink
Hardcover: 396 pages
Publisher: MIT Press; ISBN: 0262122499; (September 1,
2002)
(List Price: $29.95)
According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is
being closed off
by corporations and governments intent on creating a
business and
information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a
radical media
pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes
beyond the
engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities,
user groups,
social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
artists, and
cultural critics into the core of Internet development.
In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical
concerns and issues
of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of
the cultural and
economic agendas of those who control hardware, software,
content, design,
and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the
cyber-libertarians
in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized,
accessible
communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of
hackers' groups,
Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the
social laws of
online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of
political and economic
competence into the community of freedom-loving
cyber-citizens, to wrest
the Internet from corporate and state control.
The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for
all, the rise and
fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable
social networks, the
fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies
of Internet
activists, mailing list culture, and collaborative text
filtering.
Stressing the importance of intercultural collaboration,
Lovink includes
reports from Albania, where NGOs and artists use new media
to combat the
country's poverty and isolation; from Taiwan, where the
September 1999
earthquake highlighted the cultural politics of the
Internet; and from
Delhi, where a new media center explores free software,
public access, and
Hindi interfaces.
============================
============================
*Classified* Wanted: Artists Who Surf
...for tv documentary: female artists who happen to be
serious
surfers. Plenty of artist male surf types but not many (or
none) of the
female persuasion. Interested parties please contact Paul
H-O at
gbtv @ spinxs.com
Serious only need
apply...
============================
NEWSgrist – where spin is art
free e-subscriptions:
subscribe @ newsgrist.com
unsubscribe @ newsgrist.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
