Radiohead remix and music blogs galore!

To whoever submitted "Everything In Its Right Place" for our music cds, and anyone else who also digs that song, check out this really awesome remix by Gigamesh. You can download it straight from this link:

Everything in its Right Place (Gigamesh/Discotech Remix) - Radiohead

and if anyone's curious about its source:

Technocolorkids music blog: Gigamesh

its a music blog that is updated almost daily with free downloads, mostly in the house/electronic genre...and here is a similar music blog run by some friends from back home that also has daily downloads for music lovers (again mostly house/electronic and occasional rap):

Shifty Rhythyms

enjoy!!

Group Project - 11/19/09

These are pictures from our group event on Jacqueline's roof. The attendance was a little dismal and the weather was less than ideal, but the sound pieces we put together in combination with the lights and noises of the city (and some wine) made for an atmospheric experience. Also, some orbs showed up to keep us company.









Here is the clip from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive that I based my sound loop on:

Arts & Social Change Internship

Provisions is a leading arts and social change research center in Washington DC featuring library, online publications, traveling exhibitions and interactive public art.

We need highly creative individuals who take initiative in developing and completing topical projects; who are willing to learn by doing; who have excellent written/verbal skills; and fluency with computers and the Internet. Interns are needed in the following areas:

Web development for new website
Blogging and social networking
Community arts project management
Grants and fundraising management
Communications and public relations
Library management
International exchange (Balkans Project)
Video editing

Although these are unpaid internships, they offer excellent opportunities for gaining professional experience and working at a high level of responsibility.

Please attach resume and brief cover letter outlining your interests and indicating the length of time you are available (minimum 2 months @ 20 hours/week). College credit may be available.

More: http://www.provisionslibrary.org/

Tim Burton Major Museum Retrospective

Entering a gallery space through a giant mouth with spiked teeth and shocking colors, Tim Burton’s show proved to be exciting at its very conception. The mouth swallows the viewer down a hallway filled with video animations shooting out into a black-lit room. The feeling was like a set in one of his movies, dark, and yet humorously brilliant. Wall to wall people scrunched together to peek at drawings from his days in Burbank, California. Many of the character studies shown were done after hours working for Disney and all the pent up energy from being an animator and concept artist there. The pent up energy exploded into monsters, exaggerated features and anthropomorphic creatures. Distorted sculptures of metal with the repetition of spiked teeth and big eyeballs continue around the space. Mock ups and video studies along with costumes from many of his movies, including the Edward Scissorhands costume as well as alien anatomy from Mars Attacks. Television ads and music videos further prove Burton’s extensive range of expression. I greatly enjoyed this video “Bones” by the killers using animated gestures of skeletons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar5BKXg60ME

If you are in New York it is a must see.

Murakami at Gagosian

This in-process shot of Murakami's latest painting, Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles in the Darkness of His Mind, is the most engaging image associated with this whole fiasco. I was so excited to see this work, and was so disappointed with the final product. The Gagosian website touts "highly refined classical Japanese painting techniques" used to execute the piece. Something about Japanese laquer? Did they mean to say the airbrushes they used were made in Japan? The surface of the work is complex, but chaotic. Highly predictable marks and patterning leave nothing for the eye to latch onto, and no way to travel over the surface. Maybe I need to watch more anime? I could only get interested when I got REALLY close to the surface, and then I got nervous that the guard watching the piece might have a few choice words for me, or maybe a tazer or something. I also don't feel too convinced with the ties that Murakami claims to be making with Zen Buddhism in this piece. Well actually it's the press release that chooses to do some name dropping of "another famous outsider" from Japan, the aescetic Daruma. I'm not sure Murakami's work is best approached through comparisons with spiritual figures of the long ago past. He seems to be more about the present, especially the Western/Eastern dichotomy. The current "superflat"culture developed following the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man, the first of many uniquely American entities to fall on Japanese soil.
I think this more recent historical issue is an important and engaging aspect of Murakami's work. Also, over the past few years he has gone from selling Louis Vuitton bags to titling works after quotes from Zen monks. Is he making fun of Zen traditions? Or the people who claim to uphold them? I'm not sure. As Alan Watts might say, "Murakami is funny thing". Maybe I havn't figured him out yet. But that is still a bad painting.

Guido in the BlackBox

Guido van der Werve's Everything is going to be alright is one of the most somatic works I have seen this year. Walking into the dark room, before I even sat down on the bench, I could feel the power in the work. It hit me right in the gut, and the feeling slowly went from bodily to mental to back to bodily, tying the two realms together in ways that most contemporary works cannot. As the bass rumbled in my belly, my rational mind reeled with the realization of how dangerous this seemingly simple walk was, and how pitifully small he was in front of that giant boat! I thought of all those painters I never admit that I really like, Friedrick and Church and that whole bunch of landscape painters who were concerned with the now poo-pooed notion of the sublime. I guess this is the part where I should talk about being a hopeless Romantic, as a preface to admiting that watching the work maybe even made me cry. just a little bit. I made sure to pretend everything was cool as I walked out of the BlackBox. But really, I wanted to grab the woman who was watching the video with me and point out, in case she wasn't getting it, how awesome this video was. Here is Guido preparing for an earlier piece he did where he built a rocket to try to send home a meteorite he found.
And here is what the Hirshhorn website says about him: An accomplished classical pianist, composer, and chess player, he studied industrial design, archeology, and Russian before focusing on fine art—first on painting, then performance work, and finally, film. To date he has completed ten short film works that he describes as “possible scenarios of imaginary realities.”

Damn. I know at least one of my classmates has a crush on him. For me the feeling is a little bit different, but equally salient. I just want to give him a big hug and be like, "can I tell people you're my brother?" I think it would be ok, going along with those possible scenarios of imaginary realities, and all.

Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens

The current special exhibition at the Phillips seems to be a "slow read", it has taken me several weeks of seeing the work on a regular basis to start to really get it. or maybe I am just a slow reader. Either way, there is a lot more going on in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens than what a quick walk through reveals. Or, for that matter, than what the docents reveal. My first response to the show was that it is just all about fashion photography and combining art with popular culture. Many of the photographs depict famous 1920s models that some of the museum visitors recognize and get pretty excited about. But there are a few more levels of the show that might attract different crowds. After wandering around the floor and exploring all the rooms, I realized that perhaps the most important part of the exhibition is the map of Africa that is tucked back in the corner of a small room. It is titled something like European Colonialization of Africa in the Early 20th Century. I was surprised to see that less than a century ago, almost no area of Africa was considered an independent entity. Big fat Dutch, French, German, and English fingers are everywhere. So this puts an interesting spin on the photograph of the smiling, shirtless young woman with the slightly dark skin and slightly frizzy hair as she poses with what looks to be an important ceremonial headdress resting on her own carefully styled coif. I won't go into all the unspeakably horrible issues associated with colonialism in Africa, especially stories about childen being thrown into diamond mines to work and never let out until they just die in those dark holes. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcKC6wil0Sg&feature=related for a good overview)
So there is that darker, less discussed historical aspect of the exhibition. And I recently just realized a third aspect of the show that I am really enjoying....the actual sculptures! At first I could only read them as reference props for understanding the photographs. But now I am noticing that some of them are really powerful objects. I spent a solid five minutes staring at one small statue with a painted face, and he won the staring contest. Very creepy little dude.
So this is actually a pretty great show, but if you do go see it, for god's sake don't lean on the cases...it will really piss off the guards.

Yinka Shonibare gave an excellent lecture at the Hirshhorn. He is definitely what I would call an 'artist's artist', as he made no attempt to appease the crowd (especially the historians and critics) or worry with political correctness. When asked about the Black Gold series, and why he chose to make two of them, the curator asking the question was obviously fishing for some sort of deep conceptual aspect of the work to elucidate for the eager audience. Shonibare replied matter-of-factly that he made two because he wanted to sell them. To make money. It was such an honest answer that I think no one could hold that against him, for he obviously does draw on deeply held beliefs and grapple with personal issues when he makes his work. And he knew exactly when to end the playful banter and answer a question with a bit of sober honesty, and just lightly touch on issues of race, equality, and bigotry.
Shonibare's persona falls perfectly in line with his work...somehow both serious and playful, funny, amusing, but more than a little weird. I will even say, fucked up. He mentioned that the movie The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover served for inspiration for his own film, which delighted me. It's one of my favorite movies; its intense weirdness is surpassed only by the beauty of its cinematography. And yes, it is available on Netflix.
Well how did I get from costumed astronauts to genital eating thieves? I'm not sure, but it made sense in my head, and I am sure Shonibare would be ok with that. He spent a good deal of time complaining about how people often are upset by contradictions they see in his work. He explained that artists don't always have to make sense, which was an unpretentious way of pointing out that paradox and contradiction are deeply embedded in reality and make for a richer experience with the art. He ended his talk with little fanfare with a statement that was equally simple, but worthy of going into my notebook with quotation marks and a date..."I make the art I want to see". Could it be I actually learned something tonight?

Matthew Ritchie at Andrea Rosen

Matthew Ritchie presented his most recent body of work at Andrea Rosen gallery in New York, and I managed to stumble into his opening on the evening of our bus trip. Confused and delirious after six hours of gallery hopping, I braced myself for what I expected to be a pretentious crowd of New York art snobs standing around acting cool. I was pleasantly surprised to find a relatively small group of people milling about drinking bottles of beer. They were all dressed in the traditional uniform of black jeans, black shirt, black scarf, and black hat, but other than that they seemed...pretty normal. And unlike DC openings, where I feel out of place when I actually want to sneak a peek at some of the actual artwork, this event seemed to be focused on the work. There was more looking than talking going on, and a few people even pointed to particular spots on some paintings.
So while I was pleasantly surprised by the vibe of the place, I am afraid I can't say the same for the work itself. The sculptures looked very similar to previous 3D works, and the paintings have lost their personality completely. Ritchie works with scientists to build complex ideas and stories about various representations of the universe, and he used to make paintings that seemed complex enough to embody such lofty concepts. The most recent bunch, however, have been created mostly through indirect means, creating hazy, flat surfaces. They could have been digital prints they looked so slick. I didn't stick around to try to see Ritchie, or to check out the band that was setting up to play, but I wouldn't mind having the chance to ask him what he did with all those nice complex painterly gestures he used to put into his work. And I bet if I did ask him, he probably has a pretty legitimate answer. Hopefully I will run into him soon.