NEWSgrist: *Cory Arcangel/BEIGE + Paperrad: SUMMEr of HTML tour (2003*

NEWSgrist: *Cory Arcangel/BEIGE + Paperrad: SUMMEr of HTML tour (2003)*

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

http://newsgrist.net

{bi-weekly news digest}

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Vol.5, no.1 (Jan 5, 2003)

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{h a p p y n e w y e a r}

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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* Cory Arcangel’s SUMMEr of HTML (MTEWW)

- *Quote/s* David Zwirner is shocked (NYtimes)

- *Url/s* ACTUP Oral History Project (Rhizome)

- *Memorial Blues* Eric Fischl at Ground Zero (Artnet)

- *Disasters of War* Nico Israel on artists at the front (ArtForum)

- *Punk’d* Malcolm McLaren discovers chip music (Wired)

- *Toyed With* Court up hold’s artist’s right to parody (SFChronicle)

- *Book Grist* Terry Eagleton on the Death of Theory (NYtimes)

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

Cory Arcangel/BEIGE + Paperrad:

“SUMMEr of HTML tour (2003)”

HTML Sign:
4 large (4' x 8' each) plywood letters (H, T, M and L) made of salvaged
material from the Matthew Barney exhibition at the Guggenheim

Museum. The letters were placed in front of Team Gallery [W. 26th St.]
on the first night of the SUMMEr of HTML tour. After the show, the letters
were cautiously abandoned on the street around the corner...

see more: http://www.twhid.com/photos/summer_of_html/index.html

Cory Arcangel homepage: http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/

Bio: http://www.newmuseum.org/killerinstinct/artists.htm#cory

BEIGE RECORDS: http://www.beigerecords.com
BEIGE PROGAMMING ENSEMBLE: http://www.post-data.org/beige/

Cory Arcangel/BEIGE will appear in these current and upcoming shows:

Killer Instinct: http://www.newmuseum.org/killerinstinct/index2.htm
The New Museum, NYC, Dec 12 - Feb 15, 2004

The Whitney Biennial 2004: http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/biennial.shtml

Opens March 11, 2004

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

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*Quote/s*

"a real shock... our generation doesn't have that aggressive behavior."

-- David Zwirner, apropos of losing the Austrian artist Franz West to

Mr. Gagosian. See: "Art World Startled as Painter Switches Dealers"

Roberta Smith for the NYtimes 12/23/03:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/arts/design/23DEAL.html

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*Url/s*

ACTUP Oral History Project

http://www.actuporalhistory.org/

Refresh ACTUP

Rhizome Netart News, December 22, 2003

http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz?timestamp=20031222

In December 1989, a massive crowd of costumed protestors, including

a Jesus Christ and an entourage of his furious friends, surrounded and

invaded St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. One of many vibrant

and aggressive protests, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power's (ACT UP)

'Stop the Church' action contested the Roman Catholic Archdiocese's

public stand against AIDS education and condom distribution. Fourteen

years later, veteran activists and artists have launched the ACT UP Oral

History Project, a multiple-year venture, which aims to document the

legacy of New York's AIDS activist movement. Founded by Super-8

filmmaker Jim Hubbard and writer Sarah Schulman, the Oral History

Project includes in-depth video interviews with living activists, who

explain both the successes and failures of the movement. At one of the

most oppressively conservative and urgent contemporary political

moments, ACT UP affected concrete change and transformed ingrained

cultural attitudes about sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art,

and media. The Oral History Project online includes video clips and PDF

transcripts of activist interviews and documentation of the deployment

of art in ACT UP efforts, in addition to a comprehensive topical and

chronological index. - Matt Wolf

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*Memorial Blues*

Artnet News

12/23/03

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews12-23-03.asp

MEMORIAL SHOULD REFLECT TRAGEDY: FISCHL

In the face of the sanitized memorial kitsch currently proposed to

commemorate 9/11 at the World Trade Center site, artist Eric Fischl

argues that a proper memorial has to "reflect the tragedy of that day"

to "inspire us to confront it." Writing on the Op-Ed page of the New York

Times on Dec. 19, 2003, the sculptor of last year's controversial Tumbl-

ing Woman bronze [see "Artnet News," 9/24/02] says that the seven

memorial-competition finalists put too much emphasis on the towers and

their footprints. To tell the story of 9/11, Fischl suggests that several

memorials be erected at Ground Zero. "Reconstruct the twisted and

charred steel facade of One World Trade, return the battered bronze

globe. . . to the center of the plaza where it once stood, and keep the

slurry wall exposed." In the end, Fischl says, it may be too soon to

make a final design for the memorial.

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*Disasters of War*

Atelier in Samarra

Nico Israel on artists on the Iraqi front

ArtForum - January 2004

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=6011

DURING THE NAZI OCCUPATION of Paris in the early 1940s, Picasso's

atelier at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins was regularly visited by Gestapo

agents in search of inflammatory material and hidden Jews. Once, an

officer noticed a sketch of Guernica pinned to a wall, and he asked the

artist, "Was it you who made this?" Picasso replied succinctly, "No, it

was you."

Whether or not the anecdote is true—Picasso supposedly told it to a

Newsweek reporter shortly after the liberation of Paris—it reveals a

great deal about the art of war. Picasso had never visited the Basque

town of Guernica y Luno; he learned about the Franquista atrocities

from newspaper reports and photographs. For that matter, despite

adamant assertions to the contrary ("yo lo vi"), Goya, whose

"Disasters of War" etchings have recently been clown- and puppy-

(de)faced by the shrilly naughty Chapman brothers, never actually

witnessed the effects of battle or the execution of anti-Napoleonic

rebels either. Yet Picasso and Goya, through their art, left a kind of

fragmentary testament—not of "man's inhumanity to man," as the

banal humanist credo would have it, but of specific perpetrations of

what we now call "war crimes," their effects on victims, and, above

all, their implications for bystanders.

Picasso and Goya spring to mind precisely because contemporary artists

confronting the war in and on Iraq seem to approach the question of

responsibility so differently. This may have something to do with the

changed nature of war (and war coverage) itself. I suspect it has more

to do with the fact that the nature of artistic production and the

expectations of artistic effect have themselves changed so dramatically

—even in the past thirty years. These days, few artists would dare to try

to make an Esto es Peor–type etching, partly because of the danger of

commodifying suffering and partly because they recognize the political

inefficacy of such a gesture. Never mind Goya and Picasso: Most

contemporary artists wouldn't even bother to attempt to do what recent

exhibitions of Nancy Spero and Philip Guston show they did so effectively

in response to Vietnam, which was to indict something (including

themselves) in the very forms of their work.

One notable feature of some of the contemporary war-related art

recently on view in New York has been a resurgent interest in locality—

in witnessing the effects of conflict unmediated, with one's own eyes.

Last year, after the US invasion, the young American artist Steve

Mumford went to Iraq, once in April for five weeks and once in August

for two months. A talented painter of colorful, figurative, highly

narrative canvases, Mumford had, in the late '90s, been associated in a

few art-press accounts with an attempt to move "beyond irony" (or back

to sincerity), and his two trips to Iraq might be considered an expression

of that conviction in his art—which is precisely what makes it both

interesting and problematic. Alternately following journalists and troops

around and simply acting like a conscientious tourist, Mumford recorded

what he saw in drawings and watercolors, never spending more than an

hour on a single work. He made about two hundred images, posted

dozens of them in his well-written, informative dispatches for the web

publication artnet.com, and showed forty-five in a late autumn exhibition

at Postmasters in New York.

Some of the drawings of ordinary Iraqis that Mumford made initially look

like snapshots taken by a well-intentioned backpacker; their titles—

Backgammon Players; The Suq; Portrait of Mhedi—give a clear sense of

their images. Yet drawing admits shades and nuances that photographs

and television images, despite their pervasiveness, cannot, and Mumford

clearly believes that the exposure to duration inherent in "anachronistic"

handmade art can counteract the waning of affect produced by

information saturation. This is especially evident in the images Mumford

produced on his return to Iraq in late August, when he gained access to

troop life. Night Patrol, Inside a Humvee, Baghdad, Aug. 20 has a creepy,

robotic feel; Pool of Oil, 299 Engineers Battalion, Tikrit, Oct. 4 points at

once to an utter banality and, perhaps, to the ultimate basis for the war;

and Spc. Jose Fuentes Watching [the film] Three Kings While Spc.

Amanda Lusk Sleeps, Samarra, Oct. 8 offers a rather tender portrait of

how US soldiers spend downtime.

The reference to David O. Russell's 1999 Hollywood film concerning the

last Gulf War is apt. Mumford's "en plein air" approach to conflict is

similarly ambivalent and, like Three Kings, could just as easily reinforce

either pro- or antiwar views. Spc. Fuentes might not see (or might not

want to acknowledge) that the film he is watching while stationed in Iraq

glaringly details the blockheaded naïveté of American gung-ho invasion

(and the global pervasiveness of American consumer and media

products) while also upholding an American sense of "fair play";

viewers of Mumford's works might not see (or might not want to

acknowledge) that watching Fuentes watch Three Kings further refracts

and redoubles that ambivalence. Mumford's drawings, usually captioned

with a couple of explanatory sentences, at times seem a bit too

"embedded" in the logic of the military, or perhaps too filtered through

the point of view of the servicemen he befriended. Titles of works from

September and October increasingly refer to equipment with GI jargon

(CMOC Entrance, with a 113 and Mortar Tube, Samarra, Oct. 9;

Two 477s, Tikrit, Oct. 4; Blowing up 3 SA II Missiles and Warheads,

Tikrit, Oct. 3), and even the powerfully drawn Three Suspects, Samarra,

Oct. 9, of hooded and bound Iraqis waiting to be interrogated, comes

off as less sympathetic than simply strange—which is probably the way

the "suspects" do to the US forces who have to question them. While

these drawings are undeniably gripping, it is not easy to say exactly

why. Does their power inhere in the depicted scenes themselves, the

fact that they are handmade as opposed to photographed, or rather

simply in the concept of a quasi-insider artist "being there" where

something potentially important seems to be happening? Is Mumford's

general lack of representation of Iraqi suffering deliberate, or was it

simply that, despite "being there," his view was somehow restricted—

as restricted as, say, an image of a Saddam statue being toppled with

the American tank cropped out of the background?

The UK-born artist Phil Collins was also "on site" in Iraq, but in May

2002, after the bellicose rhetoric had begun but before fighting

commenced. His approach was to film young Iraqis in Baghdad alone

and unscripted in front of his camera in the manner (though hardly the

spirit) of a Warholian screen test. The result, baghdad screentests, on

display in New York in a group show at apexart curated by Vasif Kortun

last spring (and later shown at Tate Modern as part of its Art Now

series), is by turns enchanting, unnerving, and simply sad. Just by

filming people with their permission, Collins, who has also worked in

Belfast, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and the Basque country—maybe he's

approaching hot spots of global conflict alphabetically?—opens points

of potential interpersonal access, reminding both viewer and viewed

(or to use Levinasian terms, "friend" and "enemy") of a shared horizon

of communication. But the objects of Collins's shots often sit silent, as

if waiting for something or simply refusing even to try to be agents in

what might seem an inherently unequal exchange. In this failure to

communicate lies the work's poignancy: There is no presumption here

of undoing mediation, of sublating distance. Collins, who also presented

a solo show recently in New York at Maccarone Inc., has superimposed

sappy British and American pop love songs on the video, thereby giving

the work a perhaps unnecessary narrative shape, at once encouraging

its audience (in the artist's words) to "fall in love" with his images and

simultaneously reminding it of the worldwide reach of contemporary

"Western" culture.

Last summer, the Imperial War Museum in London announced that it

was funding filmmaker Steve McQueen to travel to Iraq to obtain images

and ideas for a new (as yet unmade) art project. In 2002, the IWM sent

the British duo Langlands & Bell to Afghanistan, and they came up with

a digital projection (seen in New York earlier last year at Henry Urbach

Architecture) that imagined "The House of Osama bin Laden" from a

photograph of its facade the duo surreptitiously took while on their state-

funded excursion. Tellingly, McQueen's journey was delayed several

times: The British Ministry of Defense said it could not guarantee his

safety. He was finally able to leave for Iraq in early December,

accompanied by British officials, for a week. Given McQueen's filmic

track record, he will almost surely produce something provocative and

weighty, but can McQueen really learn that much more in seven days

"on site," in the presence of Defense Ministry representatives, than,

say, George W. Bush can learn talking turkey with US servicemen?

For McQueen and other theoretically minded artists, as for military

wonks, it boils down to a question of economy and strategy.

Meanwhile, Iraqi artists, for whom "being there" is less a choice than a

matter of fact, have not yet responded with the kind of artistic energy

one might expect given their own proximity to combat. It may simply

be too soon for the sort of considered reaction that artists require to

respond to such earthshaking events, or it may be that history has

taught Iraqi artists that advertising one's political impressions is unwise.

Among the few examples of war-related art I have been able to find (in

part, thanks to Mumford, who generously shared contact information) is

a photo transfer about six feet tall by Farid al Jabari, depicting an armed

American soldier and a wailing old woman both trapped behind a wire

fence while a fiery inferno rages in the background. It is unclear when

the work was created; given its subject matter, I suspect pre-invasion.

In a quite different vein, in Esam Pasha's allegorical mural painted on a

wall next to the front gate of the labor ministry, the sun rises over a

domed structure (presumably representing Iraq), with white doves

soaring to the sky. It is worth noting that Pasha obtained funds to make

the mural from the coalition forces now housed in the labor ministry. In

a more abstract, contemporary-seeming vein, Dilovan Amin, a painter

and art professor from Duhok City in the Kurdish-dominated north, has

sent me a suite of digital images he calls "Explosions." In each, a set of

building blocks looks as though it is being blasted apart. This, he

commented in an accompanying e-mail, is what "war means"—although

whether the explosions represent mere destruction or blasting out of

captivity (just war or "just war") is far from certain. Amin, who now

says he feels he can finally express what he feels in his art, responded

to my use of the term "occupation" by writing, "We Kurds prefer to use

the word ‘liberation.'"

While this small sample of art produced (or soon to be produced) in

response to the war can hardly be said to provide a definitive account,

viewing these works dealing with the site of Iraq—which itself was for

over a decade precisely in the US's sights and yet maddeningly out of

sight—exposes a constellation of questions revolving around the aurat-

ics of locality, in which Goya's "yo lo vi" has become a kind of ethical

imperative. Is tourism-as-art (Mumford, Collins, Langlands & Bell,

McQueen), one wonders, part of the same set of forces as art-as-

tourism (biennials, art fairs, etc.), with the same power structures

undergirding them? If so, the more difficult subsequent question—

how and whether it is possible to avoid being embedded, either as a

tourist, artist, or journalist (even art journalist)—remains to be

answered.

[Nico Israel is a frequent contributor to Artforum.]

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*Punk’d*

8-Bit Punk

Wired, Nov 11, 2003

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/mclaren.html

Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols,

discovers the new underground sound. It's called chip music. Can you

play lead Game Boy?

We live in a karaoke culture. The Japanese word means "empty

orchestra" - a lifeless musical form unencumbered by creativity and

free of responsibility. Simple, clean fun for the millennial nuclear family.

You can't fail in a karaoke world. It's life by proxy, liberated by

hindsight.

Authenticity, on the other hand, believes in the messy process of

creativity. It's unpopular and out of fashion. It worships failure,

regarding it as a romantic and noble pursuit - better to be a flamboyant

failure than any kind of benign success.

Karaoke and authenticity can sit well together, but it takes artistry to

make that happen. When it does, the results can be explosive. Like when

punk rock reclaimed rock and roll, blowing the doors off the recording

industry in the process. Or when hip hop transformed turntables and

records into the instruments of a revolution. Now it's happening again.

In dance clubs across Europe and America, young people are seizing the

automated stuff of their world - handheld game machines, obsolete

computers, anything with a sound chip - and forging a new kind of folk

music for the digital age.

Until recently, I was feeling stifled by the tyranny of the new. New

corporate lifestyles for doing everything well. Too well. iPod this.

PowerBook that. Listening to albums, like Madonna's latest, that were

made using Pro Tools - software that reduces virtually every mixdown

effect to a mouse click - left me with a depressing sense of sameness,

like everything on TV. I had decided to make an album about the "look"

of music: the visual gestalt of youth culture. For me, music has always

been a bridge between art and fashion, the two realms I care about

most. It's one of the most natural expressions of the youthful need for

confrontation and rebellion. Now it was lost in the hearts and minds of

a karaoke world. I couldn't find my place in it.

Then I discovered chip music.

It all began on a freezing winter evening in snow-capped Zurich,

Switzerland. Some friends of mine had a vague relationship with a

small-label dude who caught my attention at a party rattling on about

lo-fi. He soon had me playing phone tag with a clique of "reversible

engineers" working illegally in Stockholm. I didn't know what that

meant, but I was eager to find out.

The quest led me to the outskirts of Paris: Ivry sur Seine, to be exact,

dead south of Chinatown. In that desolate industrial district, I had a

10 pm appointment with two guys named Thierry and Jacques.

The address turned out to be a forbidding, semi-abandoned factory. I

couldn't open the gate, so I waited nervously in the darkness. After a

while, a suspicious, balding youth came out of the building - Jacques.

He seemed to have trouble finding the keys to undo the heavy chains

that secured the premises. Finally, the doors swung open. After a terse

greeting, he led me up a concrete stairway and through dark,

labyrinthine corridors of peeling plaster.

"What's that smell?" I asked, my nostrils assaulted by what seemed like

a hot pot of hairy horse and curry powder. "It's the Cameroon embassy,"

he answered, smirking. Jacques, a shy young man whose teeth were

nearly black because of his fear of dentists, explained that wood carvers,

graphic artists, photographers, and hip hop kids from North Africa

worked here. Only half the factory had electricity or heat.

Two flights up, Thierry welcomed us into a dim, tiny room at the far end

of the building. To my surprise, I found myself in an Ali Baba's cave of

outdated studio equipment. The chamber was stuffed floor to ceiling with

hardware from the dawn of the 1980s: dinosaurian Amigas and Ataris

once prized for their sound chips and arcane applications, giant echo

plates, and knob-studded analog synthesizers. In the center was a pair

of dusty turntables, one with a 45-rpm single on its platter. Thierry put

the needle to the groove. I reeled as the record player emitted a din like

screaming dog whistles. It sounded like a video arcade gone mad.

The low light revealed the Frenchman's T-shirt. Emblazoned across his

chest were the words FUCK PRO TOOLS. The phrase described perfectly

what I'd been feeling for months. Like any fashion victim who comes

across a new and stylish idea, I was smitten. Fashion is most easily used

as a disguise - it allows you to be something you're not. It's much more

difficult to use it to express who you are. I understood immediately that

this was no facile fashion statement.

"Who made this record?" I asked. In stark contrast to the silent Jacques,

Thierry - once he started talking - could hardly stop. "Mark DeNardo froom

Chicago," he said. This twentysomething Puerto Rican artist, he told me,

is the Velvet Underground of the 21st century, the next step in the

evolution of rock and roll. "This is chip music," Thierry continued, "made

on an old Game Boy. I don't like hi-fi. I can't afford hi-fi. To make this

music costs only 15 euros. You can pick up an old Game Boy from the

marché aux puces," the Paris flea market. He presented an outdated

Game Boy and, maneuvering his thumbs on the keys, showed me how

to create musical sequences.

Thierry spun another record. "This is Puss," he explained. "He's from

Stockholm. He sings with a girl: 'I'm the master, you are the slave.'

They're the new ABBA!" The album cover featured a simple photo of a

Game Boy, nothing more. I loved it.

The next record was an EP - an extended-play 7-inch - by a Stockholm

artist called Role Model. The last time I had come across this format was

in the 1960s, when I bought my first Rolling Stones record. Role Model

sounded like a videogame fashion show, as though Twiggy were

somehow stuck inside Space Invaders. It was intelligent dance music

made using analog approaches, distinctly human and more individual

than simply switching on a drum machine. The more I listened, the more

contagious it became. The names of emerging artists rolled off Thierry's

tongue: Adlib Sinner Forks, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Glomag, The Hardliner,

Lo-Bat, 8-bit Construction Set - an entire lost tribe of Game Boy

musicians. [...] page 1 of 3;

continued: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/mclaren.html

Malcolm McLaren is a recording artist, producer, and clothing designer

based in Paris. His foray into chip music, Fashionbeast, will be released

in spring 2004.

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*Toyed With*

Court upholds artist's right to toy with Barbie's image

Mattel loses appeal on photographer's acclaimed parodies

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle, December 30, 2003

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/12/30/BARBIE.TMP

A photographer's portraits of a nude Barbie doll in encounters with kitchen

appliances were legally protected parodies of the plastic preteen idol, not

violations of Mattel's copyright, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

Thomas Forsythe of Kanab, Utah, produced a series of 78 photos in 1997

that he called "Food Chain Barbie,'' showing a smiling, unclad doll

menaced by various cookware, such as a vintage malt machine, fondue

pot and casserole dish. He described it as a critique of "the conventional

beauty myth and the societal acceptance of women as objects.''

The works were critically praised, according to Forsythe's lawyers, but

earned only $3,659 in postcard sales and also brought a lawsuit from

Mattel Inc., the Southern California toymaker that has jealously guarded

its right to promote Barbie. Mattel argued that the pictures falsely implied

company sponsorship, hurt Barbie's image and could damage the market.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a Los

Angeles federal judge's ruling that the photos were artistic parodies.

Federal law allows an artist to duplicate a copyrighted work to criticize