![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHalfway through Call and Response, the artists' thinktank I'm attending at MUDAM Luxembourg, I'm not sure what I feel about the whole issue of artists' appropriation of popular culture. Candice Breitz gave an interesting talk at the beginning in which she said that all artists draw on the work of other artists, but that this use of existing work is authorized in some cases (usually when the artist involved can pay for legal clearance), unauthorized in others. The poor artists who can't pay for their quotes, samples and steals, said Candice, become "unauthors".
Candice then threw the stage of the MUDAM auditorium over to a succession of "unauthors", who mostly took the opportunity to talk us through their work via PowerPoint and YouTube presentations. First there was Matthieu Laurette, who showed amusing clips of his appearances on French game shows -- TV appearances as media art. Then Guillaume Paris gave a rather desultory glimpse of what looked like very interesting work: he's made a sort of museum of products, and made them speak to each other (in a decayed state which Paris sees as a sort of redeeming de-reification) using the voices of the models who posed for their packaging.
After that, Cory Arcangel played us some very loud Bruce Springsteen live videos off YouTube, playing live glockenspiel along with the tracks. He's recorded a glockenspiel-heavy version of the Born to Run album and put it up on p2p networks all over the world without any warning that it might be anything other than The Boss' original album.
After a while the Plato's Caveness of the presentations got to me, and I skipped the last couple of Saturday sessions, going instead on a glorious walk through some of Luxembourg's dramatic urban ravines, filled with weirs, waterside walks, high bridges and crumbling castles (it reminded me of Edinburgh's Dean Village area).
I suppose my take on the appropriation theme is that I agree wholeheartedly that art should be able to cannibalize other art to its heart's content -- a key point in my Folktronia / Folktronic project was the idea that there's a parallel between the pre- and post-copyright eras, between oral folk culture and the neo-folk art of digital appropriation. And I loved the Steve Harvey deconstruction of Bowie's reading of "My Death" which launched the conference. Yet I find myself unsatisfied by art which comes from the margins yet fetishizes the commercial mainstream. I find myself, right now, looking to art to come up with mysterious, austere, disorienting new forms of beauty (it's the theme of my new piece on the New York Times site) and I feel like commercial TV and pop music and supermarket shelves are not the place to find this new beauty. Artists who squander their valuable marginality on tapping into the undoubted power of the mainstream are shirking the search: unauthors of a different kind.
Candice then threw the stage of the MUDAM auditorium over to a succession of "unauthors", who mostly took the opportunity to talk us through their work via PowerPoint and YouTube presentations. First there was Matthieu Laurette, who showed amusing clips of his appearances on French game shows -- TV appearances as media art. Then Guillaume Paris gave a rather desultory glimpse of what looked like very interesting work: he's made a sort of museum of products, and made them speak to each other (in a decayed state which Paris sees as a sort of redeeming de-reification) using the voices of the models who posed for their packaging.
After that, Cory Arcangel played us some very loud Bruce Springsteen live videos off YouTube, playing live glockenspiel along with the tracks. He's recorded a glockenspiel-heavy version of the Born to Run album and put it up on p2p networks all over the world without any warning that it might be anything other than The Boss' original album.
After a while the Plato's Caveness of the presentations got to me, and I skipped the last couple of Saturday sessions, going instead on a glorious walk through some of Luxembourg's dramatic urban ravines, filled with weirs, waterside walks, high bridges and crumbling castles (it reminded me of Edinburgh's Dean Village area).
I suppose my take on the appropriation theme is that I agree wholeheartedly that art should be able to cannibalize other art to its heart's content -- a key point in my Folktronia / Folktronic project was the idea that there's a parallel between the pre- and post-copyright eras, between oral folk culture and the neo-folk art of digital appropriation. And I loved the Steve Harvey deconstruction of Bowie's reading of "My Death" which launched the conference. Yet I find myself unsatisfied by art which comes from the margins yet fetishizes the commercial mainstream. I find myself, right now, looking to art to come up with mysterious, austere, disorienting new forms of beauty (it's the theme of my new piece on the New York Times site) and I feel like commercial TV and pop music and supermarket shelves are not the place to find this new beauty. Artists who squander their valuable marginality on tapping into the undoubted power of the mainstream are shirking the search: unauthors of a different kind.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-26 10:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-26 10:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:08 am (UTC)Besides, that isn't warmed over techno... it's French electronica! Duh.
(Laurette link broken momu)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:36 am (UTC)When Abba can make a video as sexy as this, get back to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:47 am (UTC)See how throughout ABBA's video, all of them are smiling? Look at Madonna in her video, she ends up looking too serious. Are you serious when you say belches better music than Abba? I'd like to see Madonna try to achieve the immense amount of vibrato of ABBA songs. I'd also like to see her write her own music as well, though I might be asking too much.
(Also it's ABBA in all caps, it stands for all of their names [Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, Anni-Frid])
I will always be upset about Madonna's sample because I grew up on ABBA and whenever I'm trying on clothes and the synth kicks in, I always get excited until I realize it's Madonna's version. I had no problem with her before!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:59 am (UTC)I'm afraid you are overlooking one crucial detail my friend... madonna is hawt!
plus she had Jellybean!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 05:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 05:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 05:25 am (UTC);)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 04:20 am (UTC)Now, if only I could find that picture of Bjorn in that weird bondage outfit...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 10:33 am (UTC)Also, IDK if the glockenspiel is gay enough for our Bruce.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-28 12:40 am (UTC)It's railing against fetishism of the commercial mainstream, yet here you all are going on about banal crap like Abba and madonna!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-28 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 10:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 07:13 pm (UTC)I think ABBA looks kinda FLABBA in those photos. And the chick on the end needs to shave her beard. So there :p
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 08:33 pm (UTC)the bit wot i wrote
Date: 2008-04-26 11:43 pm (UTC)Halfway through Call and Response, the artists' thinktank I'm attending at MUDAM Luxembourg, I'm not sure what I feel about the whole issue of artists' appropriation of popular culture. Candice Breitz gave an interesting talk at the beginning in which she said that all artists draw on the work of other artists, but that this use of existing work is authorized in some cases (usually when the artist involved can pay for legal clearance), unauthorized in others. The poor artists who can't pay for their quotes, samples and steals, said Candice, become "unauthors".
Candice then threw the stage of the MUDAM auditorium over to a succession of "unauthors", who mostly took the opportunity to talk us through their work via PowerPoint and YouTube presentations. First there was Matthieu Laurette, who showed amusing clips of his appearances on French game shows -- TV appearances as media art. Then Guillaume Paris gave a rather desultory glimpse of what looked like very interesting work: he's made a sort of museum of products, and made them speak to each other (in a decayed state which Paris sees as a sort of redeeming de-reification) using the voices of the models who posed for their packaging.
After that, Cory Arcangel played us some very loud Bruce Springsteen live videos off YouTube, playing live glockenspiel along with the tracks. He's recorded a glockenspiel-heavy version of the Born to Run album and put it up on p2p networks all over the world without any warning that it might be anything other than The Boss' original album.
After a while the Plato's Caveness of the presentations got to me, and I skipped the last couple of Saturday sessions, going instead on a glorious walk through some of Luxembourg's dramatic urban ravines, filled with weirs, waterside walks, high bridges and crumbling castles (it reminded me of Edinburgh's Dean Village area).
I suppose my take on the appropriation theme is that I agree wholeheartedly that art should be able to cannibalize other art to its heart's content -- a key point in my Folktronia / Folktronic project was the idea that there's a parallel between the pre- and post-copyright eras, between oral folk culture and the neo-folk art of digital appropriation. And I loved the Steve Harvey deconstruction of Bowie's reading of "My Death" which launched the conference. Yet I find myself unsatisfied by art which comes from the margins yet fetishizes the commercial mainstream. I find myself, right now, looking to art to come up with mysterious, austere, disorienting new forms of beauty (it's the theme of my new piece on the New York Times site) and I feel like commercial TV and pop music and supermarket shelves are not the place to find this new beauty. Artists who squander their valuable marginality on tapping into the undoubted power of the mainstream are shirking the search: unauthors of a different kind.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 12:46 am (UTC)I read your NYTimes piece. But I have to say, little more than 3 months ago, you said to Lord Whimsy regarding his success:
"It does occur to me that you've been able to realize your dreams so thoroughly because those dreams were not, to begin with, anything that would terrify Hollywood. If your book had endorsed a less populist style (and I can hear you spluttering with indignation at the word, but still, to me this is populist), would the film rights have been sold?"
It does occur to me that I'm reading an article written by Momus published by the NY Times, with a Louis Vuitton advertisement to the right of it.
You also say of David Bowie:
"if David Bowie had only made avant pop albums like "Lodger", he probably wouldn't have enough money now to commission the Atelier Bow Wow house"
So, now that you're employed by the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States to talk about design... does that mean that perhaps your musings on design aren't as avant garde as you like to think they are?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 05:29 am (UTC)It's interesting that eco-guilt doesn't pose a problem, but that contemporary art coverage does. I nearly got kicked off Wired, very early on, for writing about art biennials. Pieces attacking cell phones, run alongside cell phone ads, were fine. There's something about art -- I guess it just isn't considered "general interest" or consumer-friendly.
But anyway, don't assume that "the mainstream" endorses this kind of article. Like I say, it's a struggle to get them into print. Generally, people don't give much of a damn about "the search for new forms of beauty". It fits with consumer culture less well than overt critique of consumer culture. And this relates to today's theme. Art that reappropriates consumerism is doomed to chug along in its wake, when it should be out ahead.
there's a third dimension
Date: 2008-04-27 05:50 pm (UTC)Endless regurgitation is a bore to be sure, but the idea that there's an "ahead" anymore seems quaint. It smacks of nostalgia for a modernist avant garde that no longer exists.
Forget "out ahead"--just go with "out". Out. Around. Between. Marginal is more interesting than radical. Stop looking over your shoulder so much. Anything now intended to be "radical" or "out ahead" is guilty of calculated brand positioning. It's jockeying to be "the next big thing". It's playing into the same linear mentality as the pandering, populist pap you've repeatedly suggested (http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/commentary/imomus/2007/05/imomus_0508) I peddle.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 03:50 am (UTC)ww
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 09:31 am (UTC)He breaths life back into faces that have become something more like logos. It humanizes the product in such a way that it really succeeds in peeling back the packaging.
Suddenly the smiling woman on a bar of soap has a personality and a history, which reminds us that so does the graphic designer, the founder of the company, the assembly line workers, and so forth.
To me this work takes a product and back spins it to the idea of an open street market, where the buyer interacts one on one with the seller/product maker.
Then of course there is also all the detective work Paris goes through to find these models, which is another great layer of the work. Some are easy; he contacts the company and they point him to the modeling agency which then points him to the model. But other times he really has to track these people down. All with no guarantee that a guy who posed for a box of cereal when he was twelve is going to want to be interviewed for some conceptual art piece at age twenty-seven.
I don't think Paris is looking to show new beauty, but even as I write this I see how I could be wrong, because really, there is beauty in hearing these product faces speak of their lives which have nothing to do with the products.
P.S., just a tease, but I like how in the middle of all this you slipped in "a commercial" for your latest article for the NYT site.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 11:33 am (UTC)sheapards pie
Date: 2008-04-27 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 06:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 06:14 pm (UTC)I got a good laugh when I read that, thanks.
It’s funny to imagine they don’t, isn’t it? And yet of course they do have stories, some more readable and entertaining than others. Even the factory workers in Taiwan have something more to them than the soullessness of the factory they work most their life in.
Which (you’re going to hate this) reminds me of an artwork I saw where the artist (a video maker) worked with factory workers in (was it Japan?) and they made this film in the factory where people portrayed their fantasies through costumes and movements.
Sure, it’s not an original idea, but it was engaging and well made.
Art has been put on such a high unreachable shelf, mostly by institutions like museums, that people have a knee-jerk reaction to it as something automatically pretentious. The origins of the word, which are better preserved in words like artificial and artifice, are forgotten. Art isn’t trying to be better than anything else, art is a mirror trying to reflect: not being the beautiful thing as much as pointing at the beautiful thing.
Speaking specifically about the work that Paris does, I know he too has been at it for years, though I won’t challenge who thought of it first since that line of thinking doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is the way he does it: not just saying “oh look, this photograph, it’s a real person,” but instead leaving much of the mystery in tact. The videos look at first like stills, until you realize the lips, and only the lips, of the product models are moving. These lips tell a fragment of a story, and (in the installation I saw) they are in a room full of similar speaking products. This means, in order to hear any one pair of lips you have to lean towards one monitor and try and tune out the others. If I recall correctly there are also a number of languages being spoken.
It’s like he tears a small hole in the packaging and from what little you see and hear you have to fill in the rest of the details. This is something else that makes the art I like enjoyable to me: the parts that are left out.
I haven’t seen the blogs or websites you speak of, but just knowing the limitations of the medium, as well as the way it is mostly unsubtle, I know they couldn’t have the same impact or even the same odd sense of humor that comes across when entering a room full of products vying for attention in the way Paris has arranged them.
Maybe someday they will though.
So what is this "new beauty thing" you are on to?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 12:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-27 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-28 12:42 am (UTC)...I feel a critique of postmodernism coming on!