A Folktronian yarn

[imomus]

In October 2000 I held a one-man art show at New York's LFL Gallery (now Zach Feuer Gallery). It was called Folktronia and featured haybales, teepees, a forest walkthrough projection by Florian Perret, recording devices for Harry Smith / Alan Lomax-style "ethnographic field recordings" (in fact just me recording "mistaken memories" by gallery visitors of the songs from my Folktronic album), and a video camera. The video camera was for me to improvise stories into. Anyone could get themselves written into the oral mythology of this imaginary state, Folktronia. (Folktronia was imaginary but real, rather like the "real estate" of cyberspace, still at that point the subject of a dot com goldrush.) For $200 I'd improvise a long, tall tale about you and sing a song about you. It was a folksy continuation of the portrait songs idea I'd introduced in Stars Forever, my 1999 album. (You can read an interview made at the time of Folktronia / Folktronic here.)



Well, my snake oil didn't attract many buyers. But a gay couple from Athens, Alabama (one black, one white) did fork up. In Joseph and Alton I ramble through the tale of a deep south inter-racial gay couple's perfect day. Joseph Whitt (an artist himself, check his blog) recently sent me a DVD of the video tape I made for him and Alton. It was fun to watch it again, because I'd completely forgotten the story I improvised. Here's an mp3 of the outrageous yarn, featuring Una the Bomber, a pair of testicle-dangling dungarees in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 0.5, a bloody Fischerspooner performance, a phonecall from God, and a very poor rendition of the Momus song Heliogabalus.

Folktronia: Joseph and Alton (mono mp3 file, 12.7MB, 27 mins 49 secs)

Comments

no, I didn't cough up either, but...

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

Re: no, I didn't cough up either, but...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A bit of Mumbleboy (http://www.mumbleboy.com/) product placement going on there, I see! The art world's getting as bad as Hollywood...

[lilchiva.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I should be pleased or saddened that you were unable to reuse the Stars Forever concept.

Fakeways: Manhattan Folk

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

OH MY GAWD! :) Nick, this is so flattering. Thank you. You know, it's almost criminal that you haven't posted your Fakeways documentary (from the same period) on your site in it's entirety. I think one of the reasons that I'm an artist in the first place is because of that recording.

Re: Fakeways: Manhattan Folk

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

http://www.imomus.com/fakewaysinstitute.html

Re: Fakeways: Manhattan Folk

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, to continue the Relativism swings right (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2005/03/24/) theme, something that also swung right immediately after I made my Folktronia / Folktronic work is folk imagery itself. I see George W. Bush as the first "folktronic" president. He's completely fake-rustic with his half-remembered Texan proverbs, like some kind of hayseed robot. I think what you see in Joseph and Alton is an attempt to show a paradisal synthesis of advanced-humanist liberal-creative tolerant values and deep south redneck hickdom. It's, quite literally, a fairy tale. Such a synthesis would be the five cent cigar, the Model T, the great leveller, the American Dream, the end of (American) history. But it's currently impossible. Bush, the folktronic president, has made another synthesis: he's united the hicks and the poor with the corporate-military industrial complex, despite the fact that they have no objective interests in common and little to offer each other. The "advanced-humanist liberal-creative tolerant" are completely spurned and sidelined.