NEWSgrist: *NOWN/Candyland* Vol.4, no.2 (Jan. 27, 2003)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 4, no.2 (Jan.
27, 2003)
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* NOWN: Michelle
Handelman’s “Candyland”
- *Quote/s* Virtual collectives
- *Url/s* CLUI, SCICULT + RUNME
- *Better Than Coke* closerthantherealthing @ THE THING
- *Power Points* Perry Hoberman talk @ jihui
- *Crackerjack* announcing the Low-Level Allstars DVD!
-
*General Idea of Group Material* Making art together...
- *Playing
the Field* The C5 Landscape Projects
- *Southern Comfort* Black
Towns.org: Arts Online
- *Book Grist - 1* ARTFAN launches at Printed Matter
- *Book Grist - 2* Bruce
Sterling’s Tommorrow Now
- *Open Call* Eyebeam’s
Artist in Residence program
- *Classified* Large artist studio in Tribeca
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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net
“NOWN” – a group exhibition
curated by Michele Thursz
at the Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh PA
http://www.pgharts.org/art/current.cfm
This issue’s Splash features a
still from "Candyland" by
Michelle Handelman. Artists participating
in NOWN are:
Karl Ackermann + Kinya Hanada,
Michelle Handelman
Robert Lazzarini, Cory Arcangel,
Tobias Bernstrup
Craig Kalpakjian, Yael Kanarek,
Miltos Manetas
Michael Rees, Willy Le Maitre +
Erik Rozenzveig
“NOWN accesses the space between
fantasy and the
fragmented nature of reality
implied when viewed through
or by an animated object, person
or place.
splash archived at:
http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Nown.html
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*Quote/s*
Many of the new art collectives are virtual: they reside
on the
Internet, that intrinsically collective medium. They are
fluid in
size, and members may not even know the identity of other
members. The kinds of art they produce vary widely, but
when it
is political it tends to be actively so. To much of the
art world,
these collectives barely exist. Their work is difficult to
market;
it's available to everyone free; traditional criteria of
judgment,
the kind that make critics so comfortable with, say,
painting,
don't apply.
(Holland Cotter – see * * below)
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*Url/s*
The Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
SCICULT
RUNME.org Software Art Repository
is now open for upload / download
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*Better Than Coke*
“closerthantherealthing”
an exhibition featuring 8
microinstallations with video work
curated by Caspar Stracke
opens at The
Thing's New York office
January 31 – Feb
7
on view in office + continued online: http://bbs.thing.net
THE THING
601 West 26th Street 4th flr., NYC
212 937 0444
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*Power Points*
jihui - Digital Salon
presents
Perry Hoberman
Friday, January 31, 2003 7 PM
@ Parsons Center for New Design
55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl.
New York, NY 10011
Live Webcast @ http://agent.netart-init.org starts 7pm
EST.
Perry Hoberman will be discussing his current exhibition
at
Postmasters Gallery. In this exhibition, Hoberman tackles
one
of our current dilemmas: in a world of ever-increasingly
"powerful" media technologies, our own power to creatively
make use these technologies is under constant threat on a
variety of fronts. Restrictions and surveillance are being
hard-
coded into the hardware, software and networks we use
daily in
a process that seems determined to make us little more
than
fodder for an ever-more-profitable army of passive and
fearful
consumers.
Several works satirize the endless attempts to price and
profit
from what has become known as "intellectual
property" - a term
that emphasizes ownership above all. A series of prints is
based
on the ubiquitous dialog boxes that appear whenever we
open,
save, close, delete, or do anything at all with the files
on our
computers. Another series of prints consist of
superimposed
images of every spam email message that Hoberman received
over a given period of time, in an attempt to visualize
the
increasing onslaught of unsolicited advertising and to
transform
an utterly debased form of communication into something
beautiful. Several works deal with iconography of the
All-Seeing
Eye, recently repurposed as the symbol of John
Poindexter's
"Total Information Awareness System," thus
shifting its meaning
from a suggestion of divine omniscience to a more
earthbound
ideal of total surveillance.
Perry Hoberman is one of the pioneers of new media art,
having
addressed the form, content and social implications of
media
technology for over twenty years. During that time, he has
exhibited
internationally, with major shows throughout the USA
and Europe. His work is currently on view in the
"Future Cinema"
exhibition at the ZKM Center for New Media in Karlsruhe.
Hoberman has been the recipient of numerous grants and
awards, and is both a 2002 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow
and
a 2002 Rockefeller Foundation Media Art Fellow.
jihui (the meeting point), a self-regulated digital salon,
invites all
interested people to send ideas for
discussion/performance/etc.
jihui is where your voice is heard and your vision shared.
jihui is sponsored by Digital Design Department and Center
for
New Design @ Parsons School of Design
jihui is organized by agent.netart (http://agent.netart-init.org),
a joint public program by NETART INITIATIVE and
INTELLIGENT AGENT
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*Crackerjack*
Radical Software Group (RSG) & Beige announce a new
DVD documenting the Commodore 64 intro scene...
LOW LEVEL ALL-STARS
video graffiti from the Commodore 64 computer
+ DVD (NTSC)
+ 21 minutes
+ edition of 150
+ $20 (post paid)
The DVD contains video documentation of our favorite
intros
from:
Avantgarde, Crackforce Omega,
Eagle Soft Inc., Fairlight,
Genesis Project, Legend, Nato,
Rowdy American Distributors,
Teesside Cracking Service, Triad, West Coast Crackers
We are selling this DVD as a tribute to the intro scene.
The price covers our costs of production.
Order information at HTTP://RHIZOME.ORG/RSG
Video clips and other information at HTTP://RHIZOME.ORG/LLAS
VIDEO GAME CULTURE HAS LONG RELIED ON
"CRACKERS,"
THE FEARLESS GEEKS WHO REMOVE A GAME'S COPY
PROTECTION THROUGH BRUTE FORCE. CRACKERS OFTEN
LEAVE BEHIND MODIFIED START-UP SCREENS AS
EVIDENCE OF THEIR TRADE. THIS SPECIAL CRACKER
GRAFFITI BOTH DOCUMENTS THE INTRUSION AND
PROVIDES A PLATFORM TO SHOWCASE THE CRACKER'S
SKILLS.
"LOW LEVEL ALL-STARS" SHOWCASES THE BEST CRACKER
TAGS SELECTED FROM OVER 1000 GAMES AVAILABLE FOR
THE COMMODORE 64 COMPUTER. ALL CRACKER TAGS
HAVE BEEN RE-CRACKED BY BEIGE AND RSG AND
EXTRACTED AS STAND-ALONE COMMODORE ANIMA-
TIONS. YOU MAY WATCH
A VIDEO CLIP DOCUMENTING
EACH PIECE, OR VIEW STILL IMAGES. ROMS WILL BE
AVAILABLE SOON FROM THIS SITE. ALL DOCUMENTATION
WAS MADE DIRECTLY FROM THE C64 WITH NO COMPUTER
EMULATION.
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*General Idea of Group Material*
Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together
NYTimes, Jan. 19, 2003
To many Americans, the world feels more threatened and
threatening today than at any time since the 1960's.
Terrorism,
nuclear proliferation, the prospect of war on Iraq and
ever
tightening security measures at home have sent a hum of
tension through daily life.
In the 1960's, comparable tension, excruciatingly
amplified,
produced a big response: the spread of a counterculture,
one
that began with political protest movements and became an
alternative way of life. Among other things, it delivered
a
sustained, collective "no" to certain values
(imperialism,
moralism, technological destruction), and a collective
"yes"
to others: peace, liberation, a return-to-childhood
innocence.
The collective itself, as a social unit, was an important element
in the 60's utopian equation. Whatever form the concept
took —
the commune, the band, the cult — its implications of
shared
resources, dynamic interchange and egos put on hold made
it a
model for change.
Even the art world, built on a foundation of hierarchies
and
exclusions, produced its own versions. Activist groups
like the
Artworkers Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural
Coalition
made concerted attempts to pry open institutional doors
and let
in a multicultural world. Simultaneously, nonmilitant
movements
like the Dada-inspired Fluxus produced an ephemeral, give-
away, anyone-can-do-it art that amounted to a kind of
passive
resistance to the existing market economy. Both approaches
—
one forceful, one gentle — changed the way art was thought
about, and the way it looked.
The collective impulse has never died out in American art;
and
now it is surfacing again, for the most part outside New
York. In
cities like Milwaukee, Providence, R. I., St. Louis and
Philadelphia, as well as several in Canada, an old
countercultural
model, often much changed, is being revived, in some cases
by
artists barely out of their teens.
Many of the new art collectives are virtual: they reside
on the
Internet, that intrinsically collective medium. They are
fluid in
size, and members may not even know the identity of other
members. The kinds of art they produce vary widely, but
when it
is political it tends to be actively so. To much of the
art world,
these collectives barely exist. Their work is difficult to
market;
it's available to everyone free; traditional criteria of
judgment,
the kind that make critics so comfortable with, say,
painting,
don't apply.
Other, even newer collectives, while computer-savvy, are studio
-based and are starting to gain attention. They are housed
in
apartments, storefronts, art schools and minivans. Their
members — who often support themselves with day jobs as
designers, programmers, teachers or temps — are identified
by
a group name, like rock bands. And their art is often a
multi-
tasking mix of painting, sculpture, printmaking, design,
digital
art, video, zine production and musical performances.
In general, the collaborative arrangements are superrelaxed. A
few groups, like Temporary Services in Chicago, have a
Fluxus-
like conceptual agenda: an aesthetic of sharing sites,
ideas and
objects with outsiders that extends the collaboration
beyond the
group itself. Others, like Slanguage in Los Angeles, have
established self-sustaining, artist-run workshops and
exhibition
spaces. Still other groups are formed, at least initially,
as more
or less closed social circles of friends getting together
with
friends and brothers and sisters, to make art, a
description that
fits, for example, the Royal Art Lodge from Winnipeg,
Manitoba,
whose work is on view at the Drawing Center in SoHo.
Most of these young artists (many in their 20's) would probably
ot identify themselves as political, never mind use the
word
counterculture, with its uncool, mind-settish, even
institutional
ring. They just do what they do. But what they do, or
rather the
ay they do it, outside the centralized, market-determining
power
structures of the mainstream art world, could turn out to
have
political consequences for the way art develops.
Forcefield, a collective founded in 1997 in Providence, where it
is part of the art-school and music scene, has already
made a
splash in New York with a fantastic appearance in last
year's
Whitney Biennial. For the occasion, the group assembled
dozens
of Op Art-patterned knit costumes — form-fitting, face-
concealing, topped by bright vinyl wigs — of the kind they
wear
in their maniacally edited films, which are like tribal
rites
crossed with fashion shows. They supplemented the
installation
with a deafening noise-band soundtrack and a pulsating
abstract video piece, both of which they produced.
The results, hilarious and slightly scary, brought all kinds of
associations to mind: Rudi Gernreich, Sesame Street, Jack
Smith, cheesy sci-fi, 60's psychedelia and church rummage
ales. This was a zany art made out of seriously worked
things
and materials, as became evident when a selection of
Forcefield
material was exhibited at Daniel Reich, a gallery that
operates
out of a Chelsea studio apartment and has been
instrumental in
introducing collectives to New York.
Forcefield's vividly low-tech approach to art-making has
inspired other, newer East Coast collectives. The members
of
one, called Paper Rad, individually make photocopied
cartoon
zines, combining a grade-school doodle style with
wise-cracking
New Age quest narratives. They also combine their styles
in
animated Web-based Gumby music videos that are like
tripped-
out children's television.
Another group, Dearraindrop, has four artists, the youngest of
whom is 18. Erudite about history, they acknowledge the
influence of past collectives like Chicago's Hairy Who
from the
1960's and Destroy All Monsters from the 1970's. At the
same
time, they prefer a casual just-friends designation for
them-
selves. Their collaborations — which include exquisite
collages
of cartoons, product labels and texts — are often executed
long
distance: one member is in high school in Virginia; others
live in
Providence. Their group name is as recycled as their
materials.
Two of the artists discovered it written on a scrap of
paper as
they were foraging through neighborhood trash while on
LSD.
Dearraindrop's idiot-savant-type aesthetic becomes even more
complex in the work of Milhaus, a Milwaukee collective
that
claims the modernist Bauhaus merging of function and art
as one
of its ideals. The group is largely the creation of Scott
and Tyson
Reeder, painters, designers and brothers who, like the
artist Jim
Drain of Forcefield, also have solo careers. Both brothers
lived
for a while in Los Angeles, but found the formalized,
competitive
atmosphere of the art scene dispiriting and returned to
Milwaukee.
There, with a filmmaker, they produced a smart, slacker Web
elevision show (www.zerotv.com) and turned their attention
in
nondigital directions. For a show in Chicago, they built
bunk
beds and lived in the gallery, turning it into a video
theater one
night, a dance club the next. For the opening, they held
an all-
night drawing party and invited gallerygoers. For the
closing,
they turned the bunk beds into a raft and floated down the
Chicago River, like Generation-whatever Huck Finns.
The self-scheduled workshop, as raucous as a band rehearsal or
as sedate as a quilting bee, is the basic form of several
collectives. The members of the Royal Art Lodge meet in
weekly,
collaborative drawing sessions. Slanguage, begun last
summer
by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Juan Capistran, M.F.A. graduates
from
the University of California at Irvine, uses half of its
space in
Wilmington, a working-class city near Los Angeles, for
experimenting with media and ideas, the other half for
public
performances and exhibitions, which may also be works in
progress.
Such exhibition spaces, which have neither academic nor
commercial support, are becoming ever more important. Not
only do they offer places for types of work uncongenial to
an
increasingly conservative art establishment; they also
provide
a forum for the work of students being churned out of art
schools
every year in numbers the commercial gallery system cannot
begin to absorb.
Slanguage is by no means alone in its thinking. In Philadelphia,
an older, larger and by now semiprofessionalized
collective
called Space 1026 has renovated an old downtown jewelry
store
to include not only studios, a computer lab and a skate
ramp, but
also a street-level gallery and an artist-run shop.
Similarly, a
Manhattan group called Alife runs a store at 178 Ludlow
Street,
on the Lower East Side, to promote and sell work by young
artists, using a corporate paradigm of exchange and
distribution.
(An installation of Alife products is on view at Deitch
Projects in
SoHo through Feb. 15.)
Some collectives blend art and lifestyle in more personal ways.
The 13 members of Flux Factory, which recently showed at
the
Queens Museum, live together in a loft in Long Island
City, in
Queens. The members of Instant Coffee in Toronto use much
of
their collective energy to organize large-scale artistic
and social
events that bring artists, writers and musicians together
in
combinations rarely encountered elsewhere.
Instant Coffee functions on a principle of service-work —
generosity as an art medium — an ethic that is also an
aesthetic. So, in a more focused way, does Temporary
Services.
Members of both groups collaborate with other artists,
organize
projects that insert ephemeral work into public spaces or
bring
otherwise invisible art into public view.
For one project, Temporary Services helped place artists' books
surreptitiously in public library collections. For
another, they
used existing curbside newspaper vending machines to
distribute
art objects. As part of a group show this spring at the
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams,
Mass., they will present drawings by a federal prisoner
named
Angelo of ingenious mechanical devices created by his
fellow
inmates.
The group's play with conventional ideas of aesthetic value is
shared, to some degree, by Beige, a young collective that
takes
obsolete computer technology as its medium. It is probably
best
known for its hacked versions of dumpster-salvaged
games, which they broke open and manipulated to create new
images. As Beige Records, they have released a 12-inch vinyl
disk of sound samples of video games from the 1980's.
In its geek-positive way, the Beige artists deliver subversive
messages. They undercut the notion of technological
progress
and demonstrate ways in which popular forms and aesthetics
can
be taken out of the control of the corporate game
industry. And
they hint at the power inherent even in cheap technology
and
low-level expertise, which are by now ubiquitous and are
sufficient to infiltrate a database or make a bomb.
As if to confirm a crypto-activist agenda, Beige recently
collaborated on a DVD with the Radical Software Group, an
Internet-based collective that is stretching the
definitions of art,
politics and collectivity itself. Consisting of an
ever-changing
group of international programmers and artists, the group
claims
that its main goal is not to make art but to provide
software for
artists. But one of their programs, titled Carnivore,
which turns
individual computers into F.B.I-style data surveillance tools,
is
conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely
attuned
to the political moment.
As innovative as it is, Radical Software Group belongs to a whole
alternative universe of activist artists' collectives that
exists
partly or entirely in the public realm called cyberspace.
Other
groups include RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Ultra-Red,
Reclaim the Streets, Electronic Disturbance Theater (also
called
Electronic Civil Disobedience), Institute for Applied
Autonomy
and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The list is
long and
varied and will surely continue grow in direct proportion
to
increased government monitoring of the Internet.
Such Net-centric collectives are electronic descendants of
earlier American groups that cohered and dissolved from
the
1960's through the 1990's: PAD/D (Political Art
Documentation
and Distribution), Colab, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls,
REPOhistory, Act Up and General Idea, which originated in
Canada, to name but a few. The full history of this phenomenon
has yet to be written, though a few art historians — Alan
Moore,
Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson — have books in the
works.
And what about American art now? It exists in a world where
much indeed has changed, not just since Sept. 11, 2001, but
since the end of the cold war. It is a dangerous place, in
need
of radical change. Not that a return to the 60's is the
answer.
Forget retro. Yes, it's reassuring and it sells, but
contemporary
culture — including a lot of New York art at the moment —
is
about what's reassuring and what sells, and it feels
parochial,
small, out of touch.
Thus a counterculture. I have no idea what it will, or does, or
should look like. An eye-popping hacktivist Web site that
carries transformative information across the globe? A
collective of young artists having fun making books that
only
they and their friends will see? Or something totally
other.
But if contemporary art, marginal and minute as its influence
is,
doesn't get it together to offer new models for a future
some of
s still hope to have, chances are at this point nobody
will, and
that's more than a shame.
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*Playing the Field*
The C5 Landscape Projects Field Mediation January 12th,
2003
Rhizome 1/9/03
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?13989
UTM
10 S 0589631
4145735
DMS
N 37 deg., 27' 24.1"
W 121 deg., 59' 33.5"
C5
http://www.c5corp.com/index.html
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/landscape/index.shtml
In 2001, C5 initiated a series of projects involving
mapping,
navigation and search of the landscape using GIS (Global
Information Systems). The projects are designed to take
place
over the next 3 years and are an extension of C5s research
of
database visualization, networks and cooperative systems.
The
Landscape Projects examine the changing conception of the
Landscape as we move from the aesthetics of representation
to
those of database and interface.
On January 12th 2003, C5 conducts the first in a series of
on-
site field mediations for presentation of research and
theoretical
agendas informing the Landscape Projects.
Over the past decade the instrumentation necessary for
creating
a detailed mapping of the earths surface from space has
become
a reality. The USGS (United States Geological Survey)
together
with NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a host of
international governmental and non-governmental partners
are
moving towards a complete indexing of the earths surface
destined to better than one meter of resolution. Location,
navigation, tracking, mapping and timing within the
landscape
points to a re-conceptualization of the environment and
our
interaction with it. Like the human genome, the scope and
implication this endeavor points to tremendous social,
political
and economic considerations. Technology transfer from GIS
research activities incorporates new data products such as
those in environmental studies including strategic
management
of resources and hazards and disaster analysis. New
discourses
and disciplines have emerged around topics such as
interactive
mapping and archeological geophysics. Combined with
Spatial
Data Systems and GPS (Global Positioning System) postures
an
entirely new relationship with the Landscape that takes
form in
applications for simulation, surveillance, resource
allocation and
management of cooperative networks. It is in this context
that
the C5 Landscape Projects are conceived.
The first in the project series, Analogous Landscapes, was
exhibited at the 2002 II International Art Biennial-Buenos
Aires
Museo Nacional de Bellas.
Joel Slayton, Brett Stalbaum, Geri Wittig, Steve Durie,
Jan Ekenberg, Jack Toolin, Lisa Jevbratt, Anne-Marie
Schleiner,
Bruce Gardner
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*Southern Comfort*
Photographer Captures Towns Where Blacks Found Peace
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes ARTS ONLINE, Jan 20, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/arts/design/20ARTS.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
In the photograph the church appears almost like an animal
shot
with a tranquilizer dart. The structure sags, as if on
sun-soaked
haunches, unable to move from the asphalt veldt. Were it not
for
the presence of a white van in
the foreground, the image might
have been captured by a Farm
Security Administration photo-
grapher roaming the Deep South in the 1930's.
Appearances deceive. The photograph of Mount Moriah
Primitive
Baptist Church was taken just
last year. And although Elsmere,
the town in which the church
stands, once bore the biscuits-and-
gravy name of Eighty Acres, it
is in New Jersey and lies not
much farther south than
Philadelphia. Yet one almost expects to
see cotton growing nearby.
The languid image is part of a revealing online
exhibition, "Small
Towns, Black Lives," created by the New Jersey
photographer
Wendel A. White. Over the past
13 years Mr. White has been
toting his camera through the
state's southern reaches, docu-
menting the existence of a
handful of small all-black commun-
ities that still survive there.
In his back road travels, he has
also unearthed the rich
African-American history of several
towns that are now largely populated by whites.
Mr. White's online photographs depict little-known aspects
of
the nation's past: communities
formed by blacks in the 19th and
early 20th centuries as havens
from racism. Many of these
enclaves, where
African-Americans could raise families and
build careers, were in New
Jersey. For Mr. White there has been
some urgency to document these
insular towns before they
change even further or disappear
completely. "Even if they don't
physically go away, the nature
of the communities is disappear-
ing," Mr. White said. "What we're seeing is
the last bit of the
19th century."
On Saturday Mr. White, 46, put a
newly expanded version of his
Web site online at http://www.blacktowns.org The timing
coincides with the opening of
his photography exhibition, also
called "Small Towns, Black
Lives," at the Noyes Museum of Art
in Oceanville, N.J. The exhibition runs through
April 27.
In the museum's galleries of course the black-and-white
images
are larger and more detailed than when viewed on a
computer
screen. But it is on the
Internet that Mr. White's project leaps to
life. He has augmented its 50
images with digital reproductions
of historical materials like a
real estate map from 1872, and he
has bolstered the site with
evocative audio and video clips and
360-degree panoramic photographs.
For instance, one video, filmed in 2000 during the
rededication
ceremony for a Civil War
veterans cemetery, shows black men in
Union uniforms marching through
a town. The collision of past
and present is startling.
Elsewhere a photographic portrait of the
storyteller Michelle Washington
Wilson, sitting amid the ruins of
her childhood home, is
accompanied by an amusing audio clip
that softens the sad scene. In a
delighted voice, she recalls how
a Halloween visit to a mean
neighbor's house quickly became a
disaster. Exit, pursued by a hog.
The panoramic photographs, which let a viewer make a
complete
circular turn within an online
image, are most effective in
conveying a sense of place. One
taken in the former African-
American resort community of
Morris Beach, N.J., focuses on a
desolate intersection where the
only traffic is a lone chicken.
For Mr. White incorporating these multimedia elements into
his
site was a natural step. He
began to visit the towns in the late
80's. The residents would often
share their stories and family
artifacts with him. Just as he
was seeking ways to illuminate his
images with their mementos, the
Web arrived. He created a site
for the Civil War cemetery in
1995, followed by an early version
of the Black Towns site in 1999.
Mr. White said he was unconcerned that he might be
forsaking
his commitment to photography: "I didn't feel that I
was going
into another discipline as I started to use different
materials
and, in a sense, create a collage." It was the mix of
information
that mattered, not the materials. "It's not that the
photographs
are inadequate," he said. "It's that there were
other things going
on."
But few photographers have embraced the Web to the extent
that Mr. White
has. Many sites are devoted to documentary
photography, but they rarely
amount to more than a slide show.
It's like going to the movies
and finding the projectionist making
bunny silhouettes on the screen.
With its mix of media, the new
Black Towns site is an
impressionistic experience. Those seek-
ing an academic account of the
black-settlement movement
should look elsewhere. Mr. White
said: "I don't feel that I'm
writing history here. I
encounter it, and I want to bring it into
what I'm doing as an artist.`
What Mr. White is doing as an artist is rooted in what
Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange and other
Farm Security Administration
photographers were doing from
1935 to 1945: turning docu-
mentary photography into a fine
art. And his starkly lighted
landscapes, building exteriors
and workers remind one of those
taken in the rural South by
those earlier photographers. The
Library of Congress has put
those images online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
Mr. White said the resemblance was not accidental.
Emancipat-
ed slaves and black Civil War
veterans flocked to southern New
Jersey precisely because its
landscape and climate were similar
to their hometowns. He said,
"As you drive through these towns,
you can't help feeling whether you're in a white community or a
black community that it's very Southern.`
Perhaps this Southern sensibility also explains the formal
elegance of Mr. White's work.
His images are restrained rather
than theatrical. Charles
Stainback, the director of the Tang
Museum at Skidmore College in
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who is
the curator of Mr. White's
museum exhibition, said: "So much of
photojournalism today is about
the dynamic, gritty, shocking
picture. These aren't that. He's taken the time to look at
these
lives.`
For instance, for a recent portrait of Laura Aldridge, Mr.
White
posed her in the middle of a church
in Springtown, N.J. At first
glance the image appears
ordinary. Eventually, though, it
becomes obvious that all the
lines in the photograph are at odd
angles. In the center sits Ms.
Aldridge, defiantly upright in a
world gone askew.
Web Site: Wendel A. White's Site: 'Small Towns, Black
Lives'
Web Site: The Library of Congress: 'Documenting America'
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
============================
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*Book Grist - 1*
A Constructed World: Publication Launch
ARTFAN: Audience as Artist
56-page full-colour publication
Designed by Rina Cheung, Pixelsurgeon
NEW YORK LAUNCH
Saturday 1 February 2003 5 - 7 pm
Printed Matter Inc.,
535 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011, USA
The Serpentine Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of
Artfan: Audience
as Artist. Artists Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline
Riva have been working together as A Constructed World (ACW)
since 1993, when they founded Artfan magazine. This special
edition is the product of their residency at the
Serpentine
Gallery during the summer of 2002.
During the residency they made a number of interventions and
organised regular public gallery discussions which
involved 17
speakers and a five-day long workshop which brought
together
11 individuals aged between 16 and 74, this culminated in
an