NEWSgrist: *Jason Salavon | Bootstrap the Blank Slate* Vol

NEWSgrist: *Jason Salavon: Bootstrap the Blank Slate* Vol.4, no.13 (Sept 8 2003)

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

http://newsgrist.net

{bi-weekly news digest}

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Vol.4, no.13 (Sept 8 2003)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS: [with quik links]

- *Splash* Jason Salavon | Bootstrap the Blank Slate

- *Quote/s* "...globalism's breakthroughs..."

- *Url/s* http://www.thisisamagazine.com/

- *Cool Hunter* Irma Zandl predicts the furor

- *Lure of the Local* Is Tim Griffin Left Wanting?

- *War by Design* Tom Vanderbilt's Hot + Cool battlespace

- *The War Artist* Steve Mumford embedded in Baghdad

- *Unlimited Editions* Greg Allen on the art of DVD bootleg

- *Book Grist I* Books/Monographs: Matt Fuller: Behind the Blip

- *Book Grist II* Journals/e-Zines: 21C Mag (Issue 2)

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*Splash*

featuring:

Jason Salavon: Bootstrap the Blank Slate

http://newsgrist.net

"...Sprouting from a singular null state, the piece records,

converts, and stores the collective actions of its participants

into an ever-growing population of image-pairs..."

hosted at MOCA Los Angeles Digital Gallery:

http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=jsalavon

splash archived at:

http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Salavon.html

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*Quote/s*

"With its polycentric aims, Bonami's Biennale, "Dreams and

Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer," continues an ongoing

curatorial meditation on the form that transnational exhibitions of

contemporary art might take in the new millennium--a meditation

that dares to propose a kind of subjectivity for the viewer who, in

the face of globalization's breakthroughs, breakdowns, and ever-

expanding systems, is forced to retreat into, and then renegotiate,

the terms of identity, regionalism, and personal experience."

--Tim Griffin for ArtForum on the Venice Biennale (see *Lure...* below)

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*Url/s*

THIS IS A MAGAZINE.

http://www.thisisamagazine.com/

IT HAS WORDS AND PICTURES IN IT.

ISSUE 10: (CHAOS HAPPENS)

ISSN 1721-4467

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*Cool Hunter*

The Quest for Cool

"Predicting the future is hard work. Ask any professional trend

spotter; it takes insight, dedication, and secret armies of

superhip teenagers."

"Zandl invented the term alpha consumer, and she's the closest

thing the trend business has to a founder. She's been doing it

since 1986, back when we thought leg warmers were cool. She has

streaky blond hair, oblong glasses and a sunny, irresistible

smile. She looks like the fun, cool mom you never had. Zandl

doesn't give out her exact age (fortysomething is the most

she'll cop to), but she is almost certainly the oldest person in

America who regularly uses "holla back" at the end of her e-mails."

complete feature here:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030908-480225,00.html

If you wish to learn more about Irma Zandl, "holla back."

Contact: VISIBILITY

http://www.visibilitypr.com/

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*Lure of the Local*

LEFT WANTING

by Tim Griffin

ArtForum September Issue

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5330&pagenum=5

A week or so before the opening of the 2003 Venice Biennale, Time

magazine ran a cover article about the malaise of American leftist

politics and, more pointedly, about the puzzling disarray of the

Democratic Party. How could it be that, with a controversial war

in Iraq and the passage of a massive tax cut for everyone but

those below the poverty line, no remotely coherent contrarian

voice was being articulated in the public sphere? Groping for

answers, the periodical unearthed a quote rolling back the decades

to a time when the political war rooms still gulched cigar smoke,

and at the center of that cloud was Tip O'Neill, lamenting the

fissures among his fellows: "In any other country, the Democratic

Party would be five parties."

I couldn't help but recall this line when, taking a water taxi to

the Biennale, I spotted one of the exhibition's signal works: a

large red banner made by Piotr Uklanski and featuring the

silhouettes of all eleven curators participating at director

Francesco Bonami's invitation. Draped high across a facade along

the Grand Canal, the piece recalled the leftist party banners of

yesteryear and heralded both the event's repositioning of art in

relation to changing contemporary politics and its creation of a

loose coalition of curators to pull it all off. Of course, this

case of multiple identities constitutes a kind of reversal of

O'Neill's logic. For what the politician understood as a problem,

Bonami sees as a necessary condition and solution. Gone is the

hour for global-scope endeavors that pretend to any totally

unified view or universalizing theme, he asserts in a catalogue

essay; such attempts, which carry viewers from piece to piece,

bespeak a floating world, not our real one. What's required now

is something else entirely: "The Grand Show' of the 21st Century

must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist

inside the structure of an exhibition. It must reflect this new

complexity of contemporary reality, vision, and emotions."

With its polycentric aims, Bonami's Biennale, "Dreams and

Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer," continues an ongoing

curatorial meditation on the form that transnational exhibitions

of contemporary art might take in the new millennium--a meditation

that dares to propose a kind of subjectivity for the viewer who,

in the face of globalization's breakthroughs, breakdowns, and

ever-expanding systems, is forced to retreat into, and then

renegotiate, the terms of identity, regionalism, and personal

experience. Perhaps the Biennale, in pursuing such fractures and

irreconcilable differences among its own many different parts,

offers a kind of reply to last year's Documenta. Just as Okwui

Enwezor's team of curators created a cumulative exhibition of

distinct elements, the totality of which was bound to remain

beyond anyone's grasp--with such words and phrases as "unformed,"

"unrealized," and "parallel structures" playing key conceptual

roles--so did Bonami's. More artists, more individual

exhibitions, and more national pavilions are included in this

Biennale than ever before. And time and again the curators

point to themes of fragmentation, absence, and the sense of

something unfinished--whether in the wistful, plywood-walled

cacophony of "Utopia Station" and its title's implicit claim to

being merely a single stop in a long line of political thinking,

or in Daniel Birnbaum's assertion that many works in "Delays

and Revolutions" (presented in the Italian pavilion and

cocurated with Bonami) are "late arrivals or deferred effects

in a world characterized by heterogeneity and temporal

polyphony rather than linear progress."

As the art world still attempts to calibrate itself to the past

decade's globalist discourses, the ideas ring true, or at least

lend some gravity to any curatorial investigation. Yet

implemented here such theorization was enough to make Sam

Durant's 'Like, man, I'm tired (of waiting),' 2002--a grand

light box inscribed with its title that hung above the entrance

to the Italian pavilion and initially struck me as a one-liner

--more poignant with every viewing. For Durant's work speaks

perfectly to this Biennale's most pivotal and enervating

quality: In seeking art's critical potential, the show often

looks to examples of radicality from the past in order to

posit ones for the future, and so rarely sets its sights

squarely on the present--leaving audiences with the

exhausting sense of art in a liminal state, full of potential

but unfulfilled. (And what, after all, is "waiting" but the

feeling that the "present" is yet to arrive?) Everywhere

one looked, instead of consummation, there seemed to be

stories of frustration and wanting, of unreleased desire,

or of melancholic attempts to recover, rethink, and even

relive lost passages in history and its vanguard art. Where

was the reflected "contemporary reality"?

>> article continues here:

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5330&pagenum=6

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*War by Design*

War as Architecture

by Tom Vanderbilt

[published August 2003 in The Knowledge Circuit, Design

Institute, University of Minnesota]

http://design.umn.edu/go/knowledgeCircuit/smr03.1.vanderbilt

NEW YORK, NY. War, as the old Clausewitzian saw goes, is the extension

of politics by other means. As we have been reminded in recent months,

there may be cause for a new dictum: War is the extension of

architecture by other means.

Apart from the obvious architectural connotations of war--the need for

defensive shelter, the status of architecture as a target--there is a

breadth of associative meaning between the two enterprises: both are

about the exercise of control over a territory; both involve strategic

considerations of the most apt site-specific solutions; both involve

the use of symbol, rhetoric, and cultural context.

In the Iraq campaign, the architectural connotations were legion, from

the New York Times Op-Ed writer who commented upon the fact that the

Hausmannian avenues and relatively low, dispersed skyline of Baghdad

boded well for its military penetration; to the surgical extraction of

architectural assets, shown in remarkable overhead clarity by the

satellite imagery of Evans and Sutherland, looking like the aerial

mosaics employed by urban planners (in fact, aerial warfare and urban

planning have long shared an eerie confluence of language and tactics,

and even practioners, as in the Air Forces Curtis LeMay, who studied

urban planning before overseeing the devastating aerial campaign on

Japan); to the mere fact that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost far

more than its invasion. More than a war of destruction, this is a

war of construction. The terrain itself was filled with three-

dimensional militarism; an absolutist regime produces absolutist

architecture, after all, and nowhere was that better signified than

in Saddam Hussein’s crossed swords monument, fashioned from the

melted metal of Iraqi weaponry, festooned with myriad helmets (some

even functioned as speed bumps) taken from some of the one million

soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. Architecture, or a gesture

of war itself?

Architecture, like war, is never entirely one thing, but a condition,

occasioned by culture and history, mediated by time and opinion. As

Wayne Ashley, curator of Thundergulch (the new media initiative of the

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) and organizer of "The Future of War,"

said in leading off the event, buildings can be seen as secure environ-

ments, but also as objects to be destroyed. Is that really a hospital,

or a weapons cache? Is that an office building, or a symbol of

imperialist domination? As participants were to reiterate in

different ways, architecture can be the object of terrorism, or it

can be terrorism: Mohammed Atta was a student of urban planning; and

as cultural theorist Benjamin Bratton pointed out, a member of the

"Black September" team of terrorists at the 1976 Munich Olympics was

an architect who had worked on the complex they occupied. War can be

erased by terrorism or in some strange way constructed by terrorism;

who knew anything about the unremarkable Alfred P. Murrah building

before "Oklahoma City" as the event itself has come to be known? The

entire city has been collapsed by the metaphoric weight of the

bombing, turning the building into a shrine, more visited than any

architectural landmark known for its aesthetic merits.

One might reduce war to violence and art to aesthetics, but it is more

useful, albeit more unsettling, to explore what happens when one

removes those perceived oppositions. This was one of the underlying

themes of the "Future of War" conference, to "challenge comfortable

categories" as moderator Helen Nissenbaum phrased it at the outset

of the opening panel, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Technologized

Warfare." While the first presenter, the artist Joy Garnett, spoke

while behind her on the screen flashed images of her paintings drawn

from the haunting imagery of the military complex, stark images of

contrails streaking through a night sky ("Tracer Fire") or stealth

bombers in patterned flight. Her paintings, which seek to use a

more primal medium to wrest meaning out of an image saturated

environment, evoked from one audience member a comparison to the

recent use of "satellite phones" by embedded correspondents in

Iraq. Did the shaky, pixellated images, with literal and

figurative gaps in their composition, obscure the "reality" of

what was happening or did their low-tech immediacy actually

enhance the realism? We needed a McLuhan--was the satphone a

"hot" or "cool" medium?

Imagery is another condition shared by war and architecture: just as

most of us do not experience war, we often do not experience

architecture; rather, we "know" a building (through its repeated

transmission) via photography. But images do not just happen, they

are created, and for a reason. Many of Garnett's paintings were

drawn from weapons effects testing in the Nevada desert in the

1950s. The hundreds of thousands of images (still and moving)

generated by this activity were, largely, classified for many

decades. These were "images as dangerous as the isotopes that

produced them," she noted. Images as toxic waste, to be buried

beneath the sand. Inherent in her work is a questioning of the

"effects" of classifying these "effects tests." What happens when

imagery is removed, left in the dark for decades? What happens

when it is returned to the light? Scratchy footage of atomic

tests from the Nevada deserts, as men in goggles look on,

functions nowadays more as historical kitsch than pure horror.

It has been sanitized by time, rendered as a strictly historical

document. "Declassification" speaks to their political and

aesthetic impotence. Of course, the weapons tests were hardly

secret--people gathered on predawn Las Vegas rooftops to view

them. They saw in the blasts--(they never saw the "effects")—

something else: perhaps a sublime beauty, felt perhaps an

awed speechless and frightened reverence towards man's ability

for self-destruction.

Tom Keenan, director of the Human Rights project at Bard College,

presented a countervailing narrative of sorts: He wanted to explore

what he calls "the paradoxes of openness." In other words, contrary

to the idea that war is a secret activity whose violence occurs off

camera, away from the public eye, and contrary to the notion that

it could thus be fought against if people only knew what was going

on--"mobilizing shame" in the words of human rights groups--Keenan

argued that there is "nothing in art that resists violence." Images

and exposure do not necessarily stop war--in fact they may even

"lead the charge," according to Keenan. He screened footage from

the Kosovo campaign that showed Serbian troops looting villages

near Pristina. They did not seem to be taking much, the BBC

correspondent noted, they merely seemed to be putting on a symbolic

display. The fatal moment came when one militia member, Kalishnakov

rifle in hand, waved to the cameras. The casualness of the gesture was

disturbing: They were not afraid of their violence being exposed,

indeed they seemed to welcome it. Keenan followed with another

example, this time the humanitarian intervention of U.S. troops in

Somalia. He used the example of the first Marine landing, a

supposedly secret, "tactical" approach that came ashore to a

cavalcade of some 600 journalists, in full klieg light, drawn like

moths to the flame. As one Marine commander worried about the

presence of the press, a journalist chided back: "Like you didn't

know we were going to be here." The military, the media, both

were joint players in a performance, each feeling a bit awkward

in the role. Later, when an audience member decried the corporate

ownership of the U.S. media and the shortage of available imagery

and information from Iraq, Keenan begged to differ, noting the

abundance of information sources made possible by the internet

and other outlets. The question was not, as he put it, what the

media was doing about the war, it was what we were doing about it.

Art has been intricately intertwined with war at least since the

days of Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings of siege engines and

other commissions for the Borgias rival anything in his corpus

in terms of technique and mastery. Those drawings, which in some

cases presented fantastic new visions of what war could be, are

echoed in the simulation programs the military now uses, created

by partnerships involving the film and computer programming

industries. Art can even be used in the conduct of war--e.g., it

was recently revealed by a Spanish historian that a group of

anarchists in Spain during the Civil War had employed specially

designed cells, outfitted with surrealist decor inspired by

Dali and Bunuel, for what they called "psychotechnic" torture;

as El Pais described, "The avant garde forms of the moment—

surrealism and geometric abstraction--were thus used for the

aim of committing psychological torture."

So too can architecture become a weapon, as revealed in a fascinating

presentation (part of a panel entitled "Architecture, Violence, and

Social (In)Security") by Eyal Weizman, a Tel Aviv-based architect.

Weizman, detailing the spread of Israeli settlements in the West

Bank, noted their "panopticon" like arrangement over neighboring

Palestinian villages (usually at a lower elevation) as well as their

linkage, in certain cases, by infrastructural devices (roads,

tunnels) that bypass intervening zones of Palestinian autonomy.

Thus the Israeli superhighway soars over Palestinian farmland,

creating, as Weizman put it, "sovereignty in three dimensions." The

landscape as a whole, as he put it, is "in effect an artificial

arrangement of a totally synthetic environment, as designed as

any built environment, within which all 'natural' elements like

streams and mountains, forest orchards, rocks and ruins function

not as the things being fought for but as the very weapons of the

conflict."

Weizman surveyed the architectural history of West Bank settlement,

from the frontier like "tower and stockade" outposts of the 1930s,

in which walled compounds were connected visually by tower

reconnaissance and Morse Code; to the energetic campaign to

colonize the mountaintops (so often containing the historical

sites where Zionists hoped to return) in 1967. As Weizman noted,

as there was little experience of building in the mountains, the

"battle for the hilltops" began with an intensive aerial

photography project; the West Bank became "the most photographed

terrain in the world,"--to the topographic groundwork for

occupation and cultivation. His photos of settlements were

haunting, capturing such bizarre imagery as the trompe l'oeil

paintings of an idealized rural scene on a looming wall dividing

Israelis from Palestinians. His images of stucco-and-tiled

houses surrounded by walls and deserts eerily replicated Las

Vegas suburbia (the American gated community represents a similar,

if less overtly political, securitization of space). For Weizman, the

land-use patterns--characterized by vast walls, barricades, even the

planting of pine trees to forestall the planting of olive groves (by

Palestinians)--amount to a military action, and he says architects

should be prosecuted for war crimes. Weizman did not disagree when

an audience member compared the settlements (a "postmodern

diaspora," he called it, ad hoc nation-building) to some new

version of the shtetl, the Jewish ghetto so ruthlessly and

architecturally demarcated by the Nazis. The "two-state

solution," Weizman conclude, "is a design solution that doesn't

work."

During the weeks of war coverage, it became typical to see a military

analyst or general standing before an aerial photograph of Baghdad,

pointer in hand, cataloging the damage done to a ministry building

while its neighbors, in most cases, appeared remarkably intact

(Michael Sorkin recently referred to this as a "good building/bad

building" dichotomy)—no indication of casualties, no "on the ground"

perspective. And yet how often have we seen this same presentation

by architects and planners, this Olympian perspective of spatial

rearrangement in which humans are absent or simply a statistical

"user mix"? Listening to a number of presentations, it soon occurred

to me, as I grew lost in the fog of architectural discourse, that

much of what passes for the language of architecture--icy, jargon-

laden, bolstered by a reliance on dehumanized, abstract "spatial

production" and other clinical terms--bears a certain resemblance

to the language of modern military planning, with its "battlespace,"

"kill boxes," "network-centric warfighting operations," and

the deck of cards depicting high ranking Iraquis as characters.

What both of these languages, and both of these practices--which both

involve the physical manipulation of human relations--neglect is the

human equation, the people who live and die in these theorized

constructs. When Bratton discussed the suicide bomber as the

proponent of a "counter-habitation" of space, the act of bombing a

"suspension of the premise of habitation itself," or when he described

the World Trade Center attack as a form of architectural criticism,

he was, beyond offering an implicit condonement, resorting to the

spatial, strategic primacy of military thinking itself (suicide

bombing victims would thus be "collateral damage" to act of counter

-habitation), wherein there are no crimes, no victims. Bratton's

formulation was of a symbolic piece with that influential Naval War

College thesis, which bore the infamous title "Shock and Awe," with

the lesser known subtitle, "Achieving Rapid Dominance." That document,

which seeks the immediate control of the "operational environment,"

articulates its mantra thus: "The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to

destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will

have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and

military objectives."

Neither war nor architecture are immune from the violence of language.

+++

"The Future of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Technologies" took place at The

New School, New York, NY, USA, May 2-3, 2003 and was organized by the

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's new media initiative, Thundergulch:

http://www.lmcc.net/futureofwar/main.html

Tom Vanderbilt is a Brooklyn-based writer and the author of Survival City:

Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural

Press, 2002.) http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn=1568983050

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*The War Artist*

Baghdad Journal

by Steve Mumford, embedded artist for Artnet Magazine

August 18, 2003

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/mumford/mumford8-19-03.asp

I arrived in Baghdad four days ago, after a 12-hour trip by

car from Amman, Jordan, the usual route taken by Iraqis, reporters,

NGOs (non-governmental officials) and whomever else cares to enter

Iraq. This was the second time I'd gone this way. I'd been in Iraq

before, for five weeks, shortly after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces.

At that time I traveled from Basra in the south to Dohuk, near the

border with Turkey.

During my first trip, I spent a couple of weeks with the 3rd

Infantry Division in Baghdad, specifically Task Force 2-7,

commanded by Lt. Col. Scott Rutter. Rutter was very helpful; I

showed up one morning at his headquarters and explained that I

wanted to accompany his soldiers and make drawings. He was perched

atop his command Bradley, engines roaring. Make art? Terrific!

That's great, just great! Jump on! Hoo-ah!

This time things are different. Third ID has pulled out, replaced

by 1st Armored Division. Not having fought the war with embedded

reporters, these new forces seem a bit more cautious about press,

so I've been waiting for an assignment, which should start

tomorrow. [...]

August 25, 2003

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/mumford/mumford8-27-03.asp

[...]

We poke around the muddy river edge and dunes looking for signs of

weapons caches. Then it's off to the Indian and Italian embassies

to keep them posted about car bombs; this a day after the bombing

at the UN compound. This part of town is relatively wealthy –

large houses with walled-in gardens, though the streets are still

small and dirty.

The man we meet at the Indian Embassy is a small, puckish fellow

wearing a black tee shirt with the silhouette of a man in a target

sight over the words "shoot to kill." He right away jumps to avoid

Sgt. Koch's gun muzzle pointed at the ground by his foot. "Don't

shoot me with that thing!" While Koch is talking, the man half-

listening, offering us all cigarettes; "Ah, of course, you

Americans don't smoke, so you can live forever." [...]

============================

*Unlimited Editions*

When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free

By GREG ALLEN

NYTimes, August 17, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/arts/design/17ALLE.html?pagewanted=print&position=

MATTHEW BARNEY had long since captured the attention of art world

insiders, but this year he was catapulted into mainstream cultural

awareness, largely by "The Cremaster Cycle," his spectacular five-

film opus. At the Guggenheim Museum last spring, over 300,000

people came to see a huge exhibition of his work, including a

continuous display of his videos. The final and most elaborate of

his films, "Cremaster 3," screened at this year's Sundance Film

Festival. Palm Pictures is currently releasing the entire seven-

hour-plus cycle in movie theaters around the country.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic

expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it

has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the

idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can

be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through

the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film

in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines.

These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other

emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or

Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also

now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and

placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of

collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep

auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling

newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists,

gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg

copies of the coveted videos just as Napster users did with MP3

files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to

duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the

"original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing

challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally

based.

Bootlegs might be made from promotional copies sent out by galleries to

critics, curators and potential buyers, or by artists in search of a

gallery. "Long before the `Cremaster Cycle,' Matthew Barney provided

VHS copies of his works for `private use' to those closely involved in

the productions," recalls Jade Dellinger, a curator and friend of the

artist, by e-mail. "In at least one instance, a former assistant-crew

member distributed some copies (of his copies), and has not worked for

Matthew since." Sometimes collectors who have bought the videos at full

price have even discreetly passed unauthorized copies to fellow

enthusiasts.

Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing

work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it

is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and

control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder,

president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors

copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been

prosecuted yet but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of

online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught

video art expert, has put his entire catalog onli