NEWSgrist vol.4, no.15 (Oct 6 2003): Tom Gleeson: Dark Continent

NEWSgrist: *Tom Gleeson: Dark Contintent* Vol.4, no.15

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

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Vol.4, no.15 (Oct 6, 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:

- *Splash* Tom Gleeson’s Dark Continent + Book Party (Artists Space)

- *Quote/s* Survival of the fairest? (Artnet.com)

- *Url/s* Jackie Goss’s There There (Rhizome/Cabinet Magazine)

- *Regime Change* The New ArtForum (greg.org)

- *A Coin in 9 Hands* Feminism- 9 views (ArtForum)

     - *New Zome* Rhizome partners w/ New Museum (NYTimes)

- *Please Standby* MoMA film series at The Gramercy Theatre

- *Sugar High* Smart billboard in London (boingboing.net)

- *Low Fidelity* Steven Shaviro on moblogs (ArtForum)

- *Book Grist* Baghdad Journal; Guston in Time; CIRCA Magazine

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*Splash*

http://newsgrist.net

"Dark Continent" by Tom Gleeson

http://www.papotage.com/jan03/tom1.html

in a limited edition of 500. Design by http://Neworld.ie

Published in Ireland by YOKE.

Book Party!

Wednesday October 8th, 2003, 6pm-8pm

Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Fl, NYC 10013

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Gleeson.html

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*Quote/s*

“Obviously the question is, can all these art fairs survive?”

Barbara Weidle: “Struggle to Survive,” Artnet Magazine, 10/03/03

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/weidle/weidle10-3-03.asp

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*Url/s*

‘There There’

by Jackie Goss

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/art/index.php

What's in Your Cabinet?

Rhizome: NetArt News - Ryan Griffis, September 24, 2003

http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz?timestamp=20030924

For the last few years, Cabinet Magazine, published by the New York-

based non-profit Immaterial Incorporated, has brought readers

theoretical and artistic investigations into various cultural themes ('Flight'

was the last one) bolstered by commissioned visual and audio artworks.

A visit to the Cabinet website reveals that they have also been active

commissioning works for the web. The most current project, Jackie

Goss's 'There There,' is a click-through Flash site that takes visitors on

a journey through a history of the mapping of North America. The current

collection of nine projects exhibits the same idiosyncratic style as the

magazine's print projects, including a narrative about a Balkan village

built in Colorado for military exercises and an interactive generator of

graphs for universal experiences.

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*Regime Change*

On regime change I CAN support

greg.org  9.28.2003

http://www.greg.org/2003_09_01_archive.html#106478535735563004

Last week, I stopped by a party to celebrate the first issue of Artforum

under its new editor, Tim Griffin, who I've known and admired for years,

ever since he was edited the late Artbyte with ICA Philadelphia's Bennett

Simpson. (For some of their collaboration that stayed online, check out

the great show they curated at Apex Art in 1999, too).

[archive]: http://www.apexart.org/simpson.htm

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*A Coin in 9 Hands*

ArtForum Oct Issue : Feminism- 9 Views

HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM'S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS

SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE?

ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES,

DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE

ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS

QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR

RESPONSES REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE

FOLLOWING PAGES SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST

DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY

ART ARE AMBIVALENT ("IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM," AS

PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5492&pagenum=0

[excerpt]:

CATHERINE DE ZEGHER

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5492&pagenum=6

Today, younger artists are clearly inspired by the legacy of feminist

practice and theory, and at the core of their work is the intersection of

gender, class, race, and ethnicity. Mona Hatoum and Ellen Gallagher come

to mind, for example: Transgressing the racial, ethnic, and gender

dictates of society, their work asks us to consider the ambiguous boundary

between the self and otherness not as an occasion for horror and fear but

as an opening into a new form of identity construction. The daughter of

Palestinian exiles in Lebanon and herself now an exile in London, Hatoum

has had to reconceive herself as "subject matter out of place" and so has

inventively mapped reality at the fringes of vision, reforming female

imagery. Similarly, Gallagher's work resists the intelligible invocation

of identity as it operates through the stylized repetition of bodily

gestures and movements. For Gallagher, the possibility for transformation

is found in the interruption of such repetition--or in a parodic repetition

that, in the words of Judith Butler, "exposes the phantasmatic effect of

abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction."

Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, many artists have

challenged the phallic paradigm of binary thinking--rejection or

assimilation, aggression or identification--that shapes everything from how

art is viewed to how societies treat immigrants. Against this restrictive,

modernist axis, they posed questions of audience and distribution, of

participation and the "feminine"--making art imbued with thoughtful

reciprocity between artist and viewer. New possibilities for connections

in the shared (exhibition) space between work, maker, and beholder

emerged. In this context, feminism, often employing semiotics and

psychoanalysis, enabled us to see what formerly was (or still is)

eclipsed: what does not align with that which is considered important at

the moment, or which has different conditions of perceptibility.

These artists have included many feminist women--Hannah Hoch, Carol

Rama, Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Nancy Spero, Adrian Piper, Martha

Rosler, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Joelle Tuerlinckx, for example--but also

men such as Hlio Oiticica, Paul Thek, Cildo Meireles, Richard Tuttle,

Craigie Horsfield, Giuseppe Penone, and Yun-Fei Ji. All these figures

recognized the great potential for notions of relation and connectivity to

provide alarger understanding of what art could be. Consider Clark, who-

using terms like "matrix," "pregnancy," and "relational objects" to

describe her projects--is only lately being recognized. In her last works,

she called herself a therapist, interpreting the experiences of the

"patients" who entered into her artistic "sessions," creating the possibility

of a permanent change in a person's sense and structure of self and the

world. While neither critics nor psychoanalysts valued this turn in her

work, Clark bridged the separation between artistic domain and

psychotherapy—the latter having provided her with the only theoretical

structure available in the '60s and '70s to apprehend her practice.

Later, in the '90s, artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

developed the groundbreaking theory of the "matrixial": a relational and

fluid space of co-emergence involving not only an altered perception of

art but also a redefinition of the "feminine." She used a metaphorically

loaded image--of mother and unborn child in the latest stages of

pregnancy—to conceptualize an archaic experience of several unknown

partial subjects co-emerging and co-affecting and to generate a symbol

for an intersubjective encounter radically different from the historically

predominant (phallic) model. The naming is most important, as it allows

the feminine to become legible in works of art--radically extending and

reshaping our understanding of some artistic practices and their

temporary eclipse. As Griselda Pollock argues: "If we allow ourselves

to introduce into culture another symbolic signifier to stand beside the

phallus (signifier of difference and division in terms of absence and loss

orchestrating these either/or models), could we not be on the way to

allowing the invisible feminine bodily specificity to enter and realign

aspects of our consciousness and unconsciousness? . . . This feminist

theorization is not an alternative in opposition to the phallus; rather,

the opening up of the symbolic field to extended possibilities which, in a

nonphallic logic, do not need to displace the other in order to be."

The work of Oiticica and Rosler (most recently in this year's Venice

Biennale) and Horsfield (in Documentas 10 and 11) has often included

large-scale collaborative and social projects, another significant

relational model, and their extensive writings have clarified this

sociopolitical attitude. For Horsfield, the artwork is only realized in

togetherness, conversation, and communality--questioning, in effect, the

validity of modernist notions of alienation and separation in the

formation of art. Another current example is the Royal Art Lodge, whose

young artists similarly overturn modernist formulations of artistic

solitude and negativity, but only while appearing to pursue no particular

aim other than to spend time together and share domestic jokes and

concerns. Many other collectives and collaborations appeared in Lawrence

Rinder's Whitney Biennal and also in Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11,

whose curatorial project I consider feminist, despite it not having been

defined as such.

Considering all these artists' practices, I am hopeful that it will be

possible to "degender" and "deracialize" difference and to think of it in

positive, nonreifying terms. If modernism's radical and inventive

strategies were dependent on alienation, separation, negativity, violence,

and de(con)struction, the twenty-first century may well develop an

aesthetics of relation and reciprocity defined by reconstruction,

inclusion, connectivity, binding impulses, and even by healing attitudes.

[Catherine de Zegher is director of the Drawing Center, New York.]

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*New Zome*

New Museum Joins Forces With Artists' Web Site

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

NYTimes, September 30, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/30/arts/design/30DIGI.html

In an unusual instance of an established cultural organization taking an

upstart arts group under its wing, the New Museum of Contemporary Art

in SoHo is forging a partnership with Rhizome.org, an Internet site where

digital artists can exhibit their online projects and crow about their

status as art-world outsiders.

In an arrangement announced last week, Rhizome will become officially

affiliated with the New Museum. Rhizome's staff has already moved into

the New Museum's offices at 583 Broadway, between Houston and Prince

Streets, and the museum will provide Rhizome with accounting, clerical

and other administrative services. The partnership will allow Rhizome to

expand its activities and audience while giving the New Museum's curators

access to a fresh crop of emerging artists.

Lisa Phillips, the New Museum's director, said, "Our audience and

Rhizome's audience will have the potential to cross over and know more

about each other."

In its last fiscal year Rhizome spent about $323,000. Ms. Phillips said

the affiliation would reduce Rhizome's expenses in the current year by

more than $100,000.

But a digital-arts group and a museum, no matter how progressively

minded, can make strange bedfellows. When digital artists began to

create online artworks in the mid-1990's, much of the art form's energy

was derived from the notion that the works did not need museums or

galleries to reach an audience. Spawned by that sensibility in 1996,

Rhizome quickly became one of the most popular Internet sites devoted

to the digital arts. It is an online-only meeting place where members can

announce new artworks, request technical assistance or argue over

obscure aesthetic issues.

As excitement about digital art spread, museums began to commission

online artworks. After the dot-com boom went bust, though, museum

interest cooled along with the economy. The Walker Art Center in

Minneapolis, for instance, dismissed its new-media curator earlier this

year.

As a result it is not clear whether the New Museum-Rhizome partnership

can be viewed as a step in extracting Internet art from its tiny niche or

as a life preserver for a floundering art form. Tim Whidden, a digital artist

in Brooklyn and a longtime Rhizome contributor, said, "I'm wondering if it

means a strengthening of new media, that is, it's being taken out of its

ghetto and put into a larger art-world context, or a weakening, that is,

it can't stand on its own legs."

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*Please Standby*

MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre presents

Standby: No Technical Difficulties

October 9-18, 2003

A selection of twenty-nine titles:

http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/oct_8_03.html

...including Ardele Lister's haunting look at technology:

Hell. 1985. USA. Directed by Ardele Lister. Script/camera Bill Jones.

[MoMA showtime: Fri Oct 10, 6pm]

Inspired by Dante's Inferno, Lister's Hell updates its metaphors and

locations. Accompanied at times by Hell's wacky systems' designer, we

see the spectacle of computerized graphics applied with intelligence and

wit to the concept of sin in contemporary society. Technology, the

information society, and everyday life appear hellish in this haunting

work. 17 min.

...also: Nam June Paik, Betsy Connors, and Paul Garrin's documentary

video on the Living Theater-Standby: No Technical Difficulties provides

an insightful view of media art since the 1980s and celebrates Standby's

twenty years as a leader in audio and video postproduction services for

independent media. Standby's recent co-restoration with MoMA of Tony

Oursler's Life of Phillis (1977) opens this tribute on October 9 at 8:00 p.m.

Organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and

Media, in collaboration with Maria Venuto, Executive Director, and

Marshall Reese, artist/editor, Standby; and Steve Seid, Curator, Pacific

Film Archive.

For full program of screenings:

http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/standby_2003.html

MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre

127 East 23 Street at Lexington Avenue

For ticket information:

http://moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/index.html

SUBWAY: 6 train to 23rd Street

BUSES: M23 to Lexington Avenue; M1 to Park Avenue and 23 Street; M101, M102,

M103 to Third Avenue and 23 Street

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*Sugar High*

Coke's new "smart" billboard in London

Cory Doctorow,

boingboing.net, oct 1, 2003

http://boingboing.net/2003_10_01_archive.html#106511521016656296

Coca-Cola launched what is said to be the world's largest and "smartest"

billboard ever this week: 99 feet wide, full of neon, responds to weather

changes and interacts with people observing it from the ground. Can you say

overkill?

“This is an intelligent sign, with state-of-the-art computer technology,

built-in cameras and an on-board heat sensitive weather station," the

Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement. The sign can respond to weather

and movement. "When it's raining, big drops will appear on the screen

and when it's breezy, the Coke sign can ripple as if it's being blown by

the wind," a spokeswoman for the company said. It will also be able to

recognize if people are waving at it from the ground below and,

eventually, will be able to respond to text messages from mobile phones,

she said.”

from: Coca-Cola Unveils High-Tech Billboard, 9/30/2003

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2003/09/30/coca_cola_unveils_high_tech_billboard/

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*Low Fidelity*

Picture Imperfect

Steven Shaviro on Moblogs

ArtForum Oct Issue

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5497

WHEN MOBILE-PHONE MANUFACTURERS started adding built-in digital

cameras to their phones a year or so ago, they had little idea what such

hybrid units would be good for. There was the usual industry hype--about

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) replacing Short Messaging Service

(SMS, or text messaging on mobile phones, enormously popular in Europe

and Asia, though less so in the US)but in fact, the first camera phones

were just novelty items, developed simply to keep people buying in a

saturated mobile-phone market.

Inevitably, however, "the street finds its own uses for things," to borrow

a phrase from science-fiction writer William Gibson. Camera phones are

now being used for a purpose the manufacturers never anticipated: less

for person-to-person messaging than for posting instant photos on the

Web. Websites like TextAmerica (www.textamerica.com), Buzznet

(www.buzznet.com), and Fotolog (www.fotolog.net) make it easy (and

free) for people to set up their own photoblogs or moblogs (mobile blogs).

You can take a picture with your camera phone and immediately upload it

with a single click, for everyone to see.

To be sure, the images on moblogs are generally of poor quality. Camera

phones produce low-resolution shots, with fixed focus, no zoom, and no

flash. Everything is sacrificed to the goal of making the camera tiny

enough to fit comfortably within a palm-sized device. But these

deficiencies are outweighed by instant gratification. You don't need to

carry a separate camera around; you can take a photo without any fuss

and with hardly anyone noticing; you don't need any additional hardware

or software to transfer and publish the photos; and you can do all this in

real time.

And as it turns out, the "low fidelity" of moblog images is precisely

their point. These small, blurry, underlit pictures should be viewed in

the same spirit as they are shot. They are made not for careful

contemplation but for quick perusal, and their form fits their content. If

I check out random pages on TextAmerica, I am likely to see faces of

people I don't know; close-ups of hands, feet, or bits of food; scenes in

restaurants, bars, cafs, or shopping malls; shots of the street, of

buildings or billboards or store signs, of parked cars or passing traffic;

or even images of text or of Web pages. Moblogs do not bear witness to

epiphanies or significant memories. Rather, they are entrenched in the

ebb and flow of everyday life, in our routines, in the little incidents that

we notice for a moment and then forget. These pictures are, in their very

essence, inessential. They do not strive to perpetuate the fleeting

present so much as they underscore its very ephemerality. Even the

(increasingly frequent) moblogging of events like political rallies and

demonstrations, conferences, and conventions seems incidental and

beside the point; it is more "local color" than it is testimony or reportage.

Cheap, so easy to produce, and so publicly and promiscuously displayed,

moblog photography tends toward anonymity and impersonality rather

than toward the singularity of the punctum--the "wound," or "imperious

sign of my future death"that was for Roland Barthes the essence of the

(predigital) photograph.

How much of this ephemerality is due to the underdeveloped state of the

technology? Most likely, camera phones will be greatly improved in the

years to come; the images will get larger and better, even as the devices

get smaller and easier to use. But this doesn't necessarily mean that the

aesthetic of camera-phone images will change. Forty years ago, Marshall

McLuhan based his analysis of television as a "cool" medium on the

small-screen, grainy, black-and-white images that were state-of-the-art

at the time. But today, even with large-screen color TVs and with

high-definition television supposedly just around the corner, McLuhan's

analysis still seems basically right: TV invites our distracted

participation by being small-scale and intimate, by focusing on the

everyday instead of the extraordinary, by reducing abstract ideas to

questions of personality, and by leaving enough out that we are

provoked, or seduced, into filling in the gaps ourselves. Perhaps a similar

dynamic is at work with camera phones and moblogs: Technical

improvement alone will not change their basic traits of immediacy and

disposability.

As a new sort of "cool" medium, camera phones and moblogs compel us

to reassess the two basic oppositions that have defined photography

since its invention more than 150 years ago: between photographs as

works of art and photos (or snapshots) as souvenirs that cannot be

evaluated by aesthetic criteria; and between the way that photographs

are indexical or referential--offering evidence of something's actually

having existed--and the way that they are fictive and constructed.

Camera-phone images cut across both of these distinctions. Moblogs

contain casual snapshots rather than art photographs, but like art

photographs, and unlike personal snapshots, moblog images appeal to

the disinterested glance of strangers. At the same time, in contrast to

other digital photographs, moblogs restore photography's claim to

providing indexical evidence. Their instantaneous publication short-

circuits the usual tricks of digital manipulation. Yet the immediacy and

"reality" of camera-phone photographs is less a consequence of their

claim to provide "true" representations of the world than it is because

they are additional, electronically relayed images in a world that is

already largely composed of images and electronic relays. Moblogs do

not distill and clarify the visible world, nor do they even really comment

on it. Rather, they add to its hustle-bustle and confusion. They give us

more, and always more, in a time when too much is never enough.

[Steven Shaviro is professor of cinema studies at the University of

Washington, Seattle.]

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*Book Grist*

4th Installment of:

Baghdad Journal

by Steve Mumford

Artnet magazine, Oct 2, 2003

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/mumford/mumford10-2-03.asp

excerpt:

"On the evening of Sept. 18, shortly before midnight, I set out with a

scout platoon from Ghost Troop, 2nd Squadron, of the 2nd Cavalry

Regiment to raid a suspected counterfeit ring situated in what's supposed

to be a small candy factory. Earlier in the day a humvee had driven by

the three-story house to check out the site. The squadron had been tipped

off by an informant who they considered reliable, and the men of Ghost

had been rehearsing for the raid all afternoon, based on what the scouts

had seen as they drove by [...]"

Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston

by Ross Feld

Counterpoint Press; (August 5, 2003)

ISBN: 1582432848