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Newsgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.com
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Volume 3, no. 10 (May 20, 2002)
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Previous Issue:
http://www.geocities.com/newsgrist/newsgrist3-9.html
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* Exile in Mexico!/Netherzone
- *Quote* Conservative?
- *Url/s* Minute By Minute
- *Net Family Values* protecting free speech on the Web
- *French Post* New minister of culture
- *MOMA Moans* Brain Drain?
- *All About Eva* Eva Hesse's ecstatic pitch
- *Just Desserts* Conceptual Pie
- *Art_Hack Attack* Mirapaul on New Museum drama
- *Zen & the Art of Sign Painting* Artist dupes authorities
- *Clean Conscience* Mierle Ukeles' latest cleanup efforts
- *Essential Guides* Turbulence at the Newhouse Center
- *Book Grist* Kathe Burkhart's Double Standard
- *Classified* Summer Sublet available
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*Splash*
Mia L'Amar in: "Exile in Mexico!"
…or Eve Andre Laramee's "Netherzone"…
see splash page: http://newsgrist.com
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*Quote/s*
"The so-called death of painting has made sense only when the
medium has been narrowly defined. "
– Roberta Smith, "A Profusion of Painting, Very Much Alive,"
NYTimes, May 10, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/10/arts/design/10SMIT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
…………
"'Black Romantic' attempts to examine our ideas about conservative art.
It addresses where that art comes from and who makes it, calls taste and
criteria into question, and looks at work that speaks its own language."
– Jerry Saltz, "A World Apart," The Village Voice; Artnet, May 8, 2002,
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/saltz/saltz5-8-02.asp
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*Url/s*
Minute By Minute
by Desperate Optimists
http://www.minutebyminute.co.uk/
Over the course of 7 weeks desperate optimists collaborated with 8
artists-including visual artists, musicians, video makers and live
artists - towards the creation of 24 new films made specially for
the internet. All the films were made on location in Newham, East
London - exploiting the boroughs rich and diverse urban landscape
- and had to conform to a series of strict rules inspired by the
original Lumiere Brother films.
The contributing artists include: Simon Aeppli; Gillian Wylde;
Jocasta Lucas, Kevin Keating; Richard Crow; Annette Fry;
Stephanie Turnbull; and Andy Roberts
Further information email [email protected]
http://www.desperateoptimists.com
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*Net Family Values*
ARTNET LEADS ANTI-CENSORSHIP FIGHT
Artnet News, May 16, 2002
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews/artnetnews5-16-02.asp?C=1
Artnet Magazine was proud to see on the May 13 NBC Nightly
News with Tom Brokaw an illustration of the site's homepage as
part of a report on the recent Supreme Court decision on the
so-called Child Online Protection Act of 1999, designed by
Congress to shield children from pornography on the Internet. The
law allows local jurisdictions to apply "community standards" to
identify material that is "harmful to minors," and would therefore
have given "the most puritan of communities" an effective veto
power over online content, according to a decision by the United
States Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The Supreme Court, in
a fractured decision, sent the case back the appeals court for
further analysis. The law was challenged by the ACLU on behalf
of a coalition of internet artistic and literary organizations –
including Artnet.
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*French Post*
FRANCE'S NEW MINISTER OF CULTURE
Art Forum online, May 2002
http://www.artforum.com/news/week 0220#news2859
Jean-Jacques Aillagon has been named Minister of Culture and
Communication in the new French government. Directeur of the
Centre Georges Pompidou since 1996, Aillagon organized the
demonstration "Culture against Le Pen" at the Pompidou and
called on members of the arts community to vote for Jacques
Chirac in the second round of the recent presidential elections.
Le Monde offers a brief portrait of the new minister, who is openly
gay:
http://www.lemonde.fr/recherche_articleweb/1,9687,274933,00.html?query=Aillagon&query2=&booleen=et&num_page=1&auteur=&dansUnsarticle&periode=7&ordre=pertinence&debutjour=&debutmois=&debutannee=&finjour=&finmois=&finannee=&G_NBARCHIVESr5+148
Liberation, too, considers Aillagon an acceptable choice,
http://www.liberation.fr/quotidien/semaine/020508-000008079PRES.html
despite the fact that he has been selected by a conservative
government: "He's for the independence of the large museums, less
firm on heritage and more open to contemporary expression."
Le Monde also presents a portrait of Guillaume Cerutti, who has
been appointed by Aillagon to preside over finance, audio-visual,
and film specialists in the culture cabinet. Aillagon's successor at
the Pompidou will also be named by President Chirac, though
officials at the Pompidou are saying that the search has not yet
begun.
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*MOMA Moans*
BRAIN DRAIN AT MOMA?
Artnet News, May 16, 2002
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews/artnetnews5-16-02.asp?C=1
As the Museum of Modern Art prepares to close its Manhattan
facility for renovation and major new construction,
museum-watchers are expressing concern about a major talent
drain at the illustrious temple of Modernism, especially in the
museum's departments of painting and sculpture and drawings.
Gone or on their way out from the former are Kirk Varnedoe, off
to a Princeton professorship; Robert Storr, who is leaving to be
a professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, according to a report
by Jason Edward Kaufman in the New York Sun; and Carolyn
Lanchner, a veteran from the William Rubin era who is sort-of
retired (though she was co-curator of the Giacometti exhibition
last year). As for the drawings dept., it's lost Laura Hoptman,
now curator at the Carnegie, and Margit Rowell, who retired.
Plus, curator Laura Rosenstock is said to be resigning. "Not too
many of the 1927 Yankees in the dugout anymore," said one
old-timer.
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*All About Eva*
Ambition and Rapture Add Up to Joy
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NYTimes, May 12, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/arts/design/12KIMM.html
SAN FRANCISCO – I'VE been kicking myself for not getting
around sooner to the Eva Hesse retrospective, here at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Great shows must not go
uncelebrated. So, better late than not at all, I would like to wax
briefly about an artist whose hastened career, haunted by big ideas,
reminds us that art, when produced at ecstatic pitch, can seem the
most joyous and important thing in the universe. It's a useful
reminder now that so many young artists are content with trivial
effects and fleeting fame, which were neither Hesse's goal nor
situation.
I begin with joy because everyone ritually focuses on the tragic
angle, which misses the point badly. Hesse's family fled the Nazis
when she was a child; her mother killed herself; her marriage to
another artist soured; she battled chronic depression, and then she
was found to have a brain tumor and died at 34, in 1970. But the
art, even at its blackest, speaks above all of creative ardor, an
optimistic desire to invent something new and the willingness to
fail, which is another sign of optimism. Hesse packed a shocking
amount into a decade, and the results look more impressive for
being occasionally unresolved and even a little desperate.
The desperation bespeaks a generation hellbent on reinventing the
world from the bottom up and nave enough to believe it was still
possible. Back in the 1960's, nothing was a given any longer, in art
or life, at least if you were 20-something and in what was then a
much more circumscribed world of art. You can sense Hesse's
restless drive to do almost anything, day in, day out, to push
headlong toward some prospective, irresistible end: the essence of
the impatient, youthful ethos of the era.
Her progress, as it unfolds in the exhibition, looks amazingly tidy
considering how untidy the work looks untidy in that Hesse, like
all serious artists, resisted easy, conventional beauty. She was after
a more obdurate eloquence, which would retain the capacity to
make you look twice or more. Surrealism was a source, but you
can wander through the big Surrealism show now at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York wondering how that work,
which once seemed shocking, so quickly became banal and quaint.
Hesse's work, the best of it, has not lost its aggressiveness or
ungainly fortitude, which comes to seem beautiful when you adapt
to its terms, as all good art inclines you to do.
It doesn't look like other work: the shapes are abstract and
sometimes organic, like innards or genitals. But sometimes they're
geometric, like rows of tubes or boxes or buckets, except the forms
are bent and malleable, as if made from pressed putty or skin.
Sometimes they're just tangles of rope or wire: Hesse charted a
whole new territory between minimalist discipline and expressive
chaos.
She started in the early 60's by making crusty paintings of heads,
thickly impastoed and self-consciously childlike, and also busy,
heavily worked abstract pen-and-ink drawings. I remember fretting
at a Hesse show at Yale 10 years ago about the awkwardness of
those paintings, which I now find totally mesmerizing. Like the
drawings, the paintings exude an intense, nervous energy, a kind
of architectural presence and a powerful light.
Light was Hesse's gift to organic sculpture. I'm not surprised she
loved Agnes Martin's early drawings and paintings, which are full
of light. Once you pass through the next, obligatory phase of
Hesse's evolution the jaunty abstractions of free-floating shapes,
like Rube Goldberg contraptions, that resolve into loose boxes of
semicomic symbols, then into gaudy reliefs elaborating on the
sexuality in those symbols once you pass through all that to
Hesse's art of the mid-60's, you find light everywhere.
The light often seems as if it comes from the inside out. I don't just
mean the gouaches of windows, whose illusion of light comes
from the reflectiveness of the metallic pigment. I mean the
reflected light against wire in sculptures like "Metronomic
Irregularity II" and the translucent light through fiberglass and
resin of sculptures like "Sans II." Then above all there's the
heavenly light that Hesse miraculously conjures up by erasing,
rubbing and methodically reworking superdelicate, exquisitely
imprecise drawings of grids.
I'm not sure Hesse resolved the scale problem: how big something
must be or how many versions of a serial form are enough. In the
show, a model for a sculpture can make the full-scale version look
clunky. ("Untitled," 1970, is the obvious example.) Clunkiness is a
problem with Hesse's art when it's badly displayed, but that's not
the issue. This show makes the elegant work look elegant.
The issue really is modesty. I imagine Hesse extending the
19th-century American Luminist tradition: extrapolating spiritual
value from classical order (minimalist order in her case). This
depended on a modesty of rhetoric. Fitz Hugh Lane's mysterious
poetics became bombast when Bierstadt inflated the rhetoric and
size. The odd comparison gets to the essence of Hesse's best work,
which derives from its intimacy, directness and immediacy.
That's enough praise for the show, leaving only an obligatory
bashing of the Whitney Museum for dropping it. Who knows
whether another big Hesse retrospective will come around. People
said there wouldn't be one after Yale. All I know for certain is that
young artists in New York, not to mention the rest of us, could
have benefited from her deeply serious and timely example.
Fortunately, this show will still be here through next Sunday, then
it travels to Wiesbaden, Germany, and the Tate Modern in London.
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* Just Desserts*
PIES FOR PASSERSBY
Artnet News, 5/7/02
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews/artnetnews5-7-02.asp?C=1
Conceptual artist Anissa Mack is embracing all that is good
about America – for her next art project, she's baking apple pies
and giving them away to anyone who wants one. Under the
auspices of the Public Art Fund, Mack is setting up a "country
cottage, complete with an oven," outside the Brooklyn Public
Library, May 17-June 23, 2002, and will be making pies from
scratch and sharing them with the public. "Bringing nostalgia and
rural Americana to a contemporary urban setting," says the
sponsors, "Pies for a Passerby is art that stimulates all the
senses." For more info, and a baking schedule, see
http://www.publicartfund.org
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*Art_Hack Attack*
NYTimes, May 13, 2002 | ARTS ONLINE
Museum's Cyberpeeping Artwork Has Its Plug Pulled
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/arts/design/13ARTS.html
An Internet-based artwork in an exhibition at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art was taken offline on Friday because the work
was conducting surveillance of outside computers. It is not clear
yet who is responsible for the blacking out the artists, the museum
or its Internet service provider but the action illuminates the
work's central theme: the tension between public and private
control of the Internet. The shutdown also shows how cyberspace's
gray areas can enshroud museums as they embrace the evolving
medium.
The work in question is "Minds of Concern: Breaking News,"
created by Knowbotic Research, a group of digital artists in
Switzerland. The piece is part of "Open Source Art Hack," an
exhibition at the New Museum that runs through June 30. The
work can be viewed as an installation in the museum's SoHo
galleries or online at http://www.newmuseum.org Although the
installation is still in place, and the work's Web site remains live,
the port-scanning software that is its central feature was disabled
Friday evening and was inactive yesterday afternoon.
Port scanning sounds like a cruise-ship captain's task. The term
actually refers to a technique for surveying how other computers
are connected to the Internet. The software essentially strolls
through the neighborhood in search of windows that have been left
open. Merely noticing where they are is no crime. Things get
dicier, though, if what is seen is conveyed to a ne'er-do-well
relative, who then breaks in somewhere, rearranges the furniture
and makes off with a gem-encrusted putter.
One court has ruled that port scanning is legal so long as it does
not intrude upon or damage the computers that are being scanned.
Internet service providers, however, generally prohibit the practice,
which can cause online traffic jams. That prohibition appears to be
what led to the shutdown.
After the Knowbotic work started its peeping, the Internet service
provider for one of the targets of the scan complained to the
museum's Internet service provider, Logicworks. In turn,
Logicworks notified the museum that port scanning violated its
policies. On Friday, Lauren Tehan, a museum spokeswoman, said
the museum was seeking a creative technical solution to keep the
work online.
That effort did not succeed. Ms. Tehan said the museum, at
Logicworks' request, shut down the work after the museum closed
on Friday evening. On Saturday morning, Christian Hubler of
Knowbotic Research said the group realized the port-scanning
software had been disabled and decided to move the work's Web
site to an Internet service provider in Germany. Ms. Tehan said
that the museum suggested a way to put the work back online but
that Knowbotic rejected the proposal.
The dispute calls attention to one of the very points the piece is
intended to make. Because the lines between public and private
control of the Internet are not yet clearly defined, what artists want
to do may be perfectly legal, but that does not mean they will be
allowed do it.
Before the New Museum exhibition opened on May 3, Knowbotic
Research had already decided to remove the most troublesome
features of the port-scanning software. Mr. Hubler said the group
changed the work after consulting with a lawyer who specializes
in Internet law. "I wanted to know the situation I'm in," Mr. Hubler
said, "because when I work with the border as an artist, I want to
know at least what the border might be."
When it is functioning, "Minds of Concern" resembles a slot
machine. Viewers are prompted to scan the computer ports of
organizations that protested in February against the World
Economic Forum. While colored lights flash, a list of the
vulnerable ports and the methods that might be employed to
"crack," or penetrate, them to gain access to private information
scrolls across the bottom of the screen. No internal information is
exposed, but the threat is suggested.
European digital artists are more politicized than their American
counterparts, and "Minds" is designed to advance a social agenda.
By choosing to explore the computers of anti-globalization groups
instead of Nike or Coca-Cola, Knowbotic is warning those groups
that they are at risk of losing sensitive data.
But to present the work at the New Museum, Knowbotic had to
defang it. At first, the group reviewed the 800 tools in the port-
scanning program and removed 200 it deemed intrusive or
malicious. After consulting with a lawyer, the group then
encrypted the name of the organization being scanned because it
was unsure if publishing the information was illegal. In place of
the name on the screen, one saw the phrase "artistic
self-censorship."
The group's disappointment in having to scale back the work was
obvious in a message to an electronic mailing list: "Due to the
ubiquitous paranoia and threat of getting sued, the museum and the
curators made it very clear to us that we as artists are 100 percent
alone and private in any legal dispute."
There is a sense of a missed opportunity here. The dozen works in
"Open Source Art Hack" are intended to prompt discussion about
the public versus the private in cyberspace while demonstrating
how artists "hack," or misuse technology, to creative effect.
Port-scanning software, for instance, is meant to be used for
reconnaissance, yet Knowbotic has made it a political tool.
But "Minds of Concern" is also the only online work in the
exhibition to operate in a legal gray area. In its fully functional
state, it had the potential to cause a ruckus that might have yielded
some black-and-white rulings. But instead, the exhibition commits
no real transgressions.
Steve Dietz, the new-media curator at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, was one of the exhibition's curators. Its goal, he said,
"was more nuanced than bringing cracking to the dull havens of a
museum."
"Being bad and doing something illegal hold very little interest for
me," he said, "but being tactical and creative hold a great deal."
Artists like to be bad, and although museums are sometimes their
targets, they can also serve as shields when artists become
controversial. A recent example was the exhibition "Mirroring
Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," for which the Jewish Museum,
not the participating artists, took most of the heat.
As museums embrace cyberspace, its fuzzy rules are posing
unfamiliar problems, and "Minds of Concern: Breaking News" is
a case in point. As for how well those issues can be raised within a
museum's walls, Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said:
"That really is the dilemma. We can only go so far."
Other articles, elsewhere:
Wired, May 15, 2002: Museum's Hack Art Piece Pulled
By Michelle Delio
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52546,00.html
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*Zen & the Art of Sign Painting*
In Artist's Freeway Prank, Form Followed Function
Transit: Unauthorized addition to sign went unnoticed for months.
No charges planned.
By HUGO MARTIN, Times Staff Writer
LATimes, May 9, 2002
http://latimes.com/news/local/la-050902artist.story
What more could an artist want?
An unusual medium. A chance to take a jab at the establishment.
An almost endless audience, speeding to see the work.
Richard Ankrom created that enviable milieu above an unlikely
canvas–the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.
For two years, the rail-thin artist planned and prepared for his most
ambitious project, a piece that would be seen by more than 150,000
motorists per day on the freeway, near 3rd Street.
With friends documenting his every move on camera, Ankrom
clandestinely installed the finished product on a gray August
morning. For nine months, no one noticed. It even failed to catch
the eye of California Department of Transportation officials.
And that is exactly what Ankrom hoped for.
The 46-year-old Los Angeles artist designed, built and installed an
addition to an overhead freeway sign–to exact state specifications
–to help guide motorists on the sometimes confusing transition to
the northbound Golden State Freeway a couple miles farther north.
He installed his handiwork in broad daylight, dressed in a hard hat
and orange reflective vest to avoid raising suspicion. He even
chopped off his shoulder-length blond hair to fit the role of a blue-
collar freeway worker.
The point of the project, said Ankrom, was to show that art has a
place in modern society–even on a busy, impersonal freeway. He
also wanted to prove that one highly disciplined individual can
make a difference.
Embarrassed Caltrans officials, who learned of the bogus sign
from a local newspaper column, concede that the sign could be a
help. They will leave it in place, for now. The transportation
agency doesn't plan to press charges, for trespassing or tampering
with state property.
Why didn't the counterfeit sign get noticed?
"The experts are saying that Mr. Ankrom did a fantastic job,"
conceded Caltrans spokeswoman Jeanne Bonfilio. "They thought
it was an internal job."
Ankrom's work has also won praise from some in the art world.
Mat Gleason, publisher of the Los Angeles art magazine Coagula,
learned about the project a few months ago. He calls it "terrific"
because it shows that art can "benefit people and at the same time
tweak the bureaucracy a little."
The idea for the sign came to Ankrom back in 1999, when he
found himself repeatedly getting lost trying to find the ramp to the
north Golden State after the Harbor becomes the Pasadena Freeway.
(The sharp left-lane exit sneaks up on drivers at the end of a series
of four tunnels.)
He thought about complaining to Caltrans. But he figured his
suggestion would get lost in the huge state bureaucracy. Instead,
Ankrom decided to take matters into his own hands by adding a
simple "North 5" to an existing sign.
"It needed to be done," he said from his downtown loft. "It's not
like it was something that was intentionally wrong."
It didn't hurt that his work is displayed before 150,000 people
daily. On an average day, even the Louvre gets only one-tenth that
many visitors. He also didn't mind that his "guerrilla public
service" made Caltrans look a bit foolish. "They are left with egg
on their faces," he said.
Ankrom had planned to wait until August–a year after the
installation–to reveal his forgery via video at an art show. But a
photographer friend leaked the story.
>From his tiny Brewery Art Complex loft, Ankrom said he tries to
use his work to comment on current trends. The Seattle native
fabricates hatchets embedded with roses and produces neon-
illuminated laser guns. To pay the bills, he is also a freelance
sign maker.
The expertise he gained in both fields helped him pull off the
perfect counterfeit job.
He closely studied existing freeway signs, matching color
swatches and downloading specifications from the Federal
Highway Administration's Web site.
His biggest challenge was finding reflective buttons resembling
those on Interstate signs–a dilemma finally resolved when he
discovered a replica sold by a company in Tacoma, Wash.
The video he made of the entire process shows Ankrom snapping
digital photos of existing Golden State Freeway signs and
projecting the images onto paper, before tracing them onto a sheet
of aluminum. He cut and painted the aluminum sign and even
"aged" it with a layer of gray.
Ankrom affixed a contractor-style logo on the side of his pickup
truck to add authenticity during the project. But closer examination
might have raised suspicions. It read: Aesthetic De Construction.
He even printed up a bogus work order, just in case he was stopped
by police."I tried to make this airtight, because I didn't want
anything to go wrong," he said.
In early August, Ankrom launched the final phase of his project.
After friends were in place with video and still cameras, one gave
the all-clear signal via walkie-talkie: "Move in rubber ducky."
He made short work of the final installation–climbing up the sign
and hanging over speeding traffic to install his addition. The main
challenge was avoiding the razor wire on the way up.
Ankrom said he's not surprised that Caltrans isn't pressing charges,
adding, "It wasn't straight-out vandalism."
For now, department officials say they will merely inspect the
elements of Ankrom's sign to make sure they are securely fastened.
They may be replaced in a few months as part of a program to
retrofit all freeway signs with new, highly reflective models.
Caltrans officials had discussed adding more directional signs, but
the agency spokeswoman said she is not sure why the department
never followed through.
Ankrom said he would like Caltrans to return the work. "If they
want to keep it up there, that is fine too," he said. "Hopefully it
will help people out, which was the whole point."
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*Clean Conscience*
Artforum, May 2002
The World's "Pre-Eminent Garbage Artist"
http://www.artforum.com/news/#news2871
05.19.02 Despite many public commissions and exhibitions both
in the United States and abroad, the voluble and often funny
Mierle Laderman Ukeles remains best known for her singular role
as the New York City Department of Sanitation's first and only
"artist-in-residence." She assumed this unsalaried position in the
early 1980's, but she actually earned it while doing a conceptual
piece called "Touch Sanitation," for which she spent 11 months
crisscrossing the city day and night to shake hands with every one
of its 8,500 sanitation workers, telling each, "Thank you for
keeping New York City alive."
See longer article: NYTimes, May 19, 2002:
The Department of Sanitation's Artist in Residence,
By JEFFREY KASTNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/arts/design/19KAST.html
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*Essential Guides*
TURBULENCE at the NewhouseCenter
http://www.snug-harbor.org/newhouse/Turbulence.html
On Sunday, June 2 at 2p.m. New Radio an Performing Arts, Inc.
and the Newhouse Center of Contemporary Arts will present the
third in a series of curated net art events at the Newhouse Center,
1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island. (#40 bus from the ferry
terminal)
Angie Eng will discuss her upcoming work, "The Lost Guides."
The Lost Guides are an invisible, nomadic tribe, who wander the
world transforming perspectives by exposing new origins and new
forms of life. Ancient loadstones once used thousands of years ago
by the Han Chinese in fortune telling and deciphering the direction
of energy flows are used by the Lost Guides in the practice of
erasing existing modern maps and trails which have been
documented and formulated by man over the centuries. They
believe that it is the sedentary lifestyle of modern man that will
lead to an apocalypse. Hence, they remain a nomadic tribe, unable
to be studied, conquered or witnessed in the material world.
Eng will be joined by Michael Mandiberg, who will present "The
Essential Guide to Performing Michael Mandiberg," an online
tutorial that teaches the user the details of performing Michael
Mandiberg's persona. He will also discuss his ten days in the
"Exchange Program" where he learned to be someone else.
The presentations are curated by Helen Thorington and made
possible with public funds from the New York State Council on
the Arts and the SI Bank and Trust Foundation. Helen Thorington,
director of the Turbulence website: http://turbulence.org will
introduce the artists and place their works in its Internet and art
historical context. The overall theme of the presentations will be
"net art in process."
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*Book Grist*
Deux poids, deux mesures (The Double Standard)
by Kathe Burkhart
200 pages (4 janvier 2002)
Hachette Litterature
ISBN : 2012355935
http://livres.telerama.fr/
http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2012355935/qid%3D1021420282/402-6743177-9592922
Reviewed by Christine Ferniot :
Bridget Jones Diary, junkie version: Ruth Less, c'est un peu
Bridget Jones en version junkie. Prete a pleurnicher pour un
garcon qui la regarde gentiment et a se defoncer pour qu'il
reste toute la nuit. A 15 ans, Ruth est une ado trop en avance
sur son age, glissant de bras en bras pour une dose de drogue
gratuite, passant de nuits agitees en journees moroses au
lycee. A 30 ans, a peine plus mure, elle est devenue artiste, a
quitte son bled de Virginie pour Manhattan, mais continue de
tomber amoureuse de types aux bras truffes de piqures diverses.
En mettant alternativement en scene les journaux de Ruth a ces
deux periodes de sa vie, l'auteur reussit un montage qui evite les
flash-back et plonge le lecteur dans les annees 1965 et 1980 par
l'entremise d'une fille perpetuellement egaree. La drogue, le sexe,
mais aussi l'envie de grandir et d'en sortir, sont les leitmotivs de
ces deux voix complementaires. Ruth, la provinciale romantique,
se noie dans les mauvais trips en croyant aimer plus vite, partir
plus vite. Ruth, la trentenaire, cherche toujours a prouver qu'elle
est capable de rencontrer le grand amour pour se ranger des
voitures. Entre humour et desespoir, realisme sordide et reveries
de midinette, Deux Poids deux mesures est le constat d'une
Amerique cruelle etabli par une heroine compulsive appelant a
l'aide : " Au secours ! Je n'ai pas d'argent. Je suis prise dans une
distorsion temporelle emotionnelle ! Mes cheveux tombent ! Et
j'ecoute la musique de Dionne Warwick ! "
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*Classified*
Sublet available 3 months June July August
Williamsburg, 1 stop Manhattan.
$1600 + Utilities and deposit. Maximum of two people.
Roof access.
1800 sq ft loft, funky but liveable
[email protected] or 718 486 7383
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Type: discussion