NEWSgrist - where spin is art
An e-zine covering the arts since 2000
======================
Vol.5, no.27
======================
read it on the blog:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives:
http://newsgrist.net
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Sidewalk Gallery
A great shot from Joe's NYC. (Read more about Joseph O. Holmes),
Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 12:01 PM in Misc. | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/sidewalk_galler.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
ICI: Inside the Studio
Ici_cover_1 DangerousChunky has posted a recommendation for the recent
Independent Curators International publication: Inside the Studio Two
Decades of Talks with Artists in New York
here's an excerpt:
I just started dipping into this rich book nightly, a compilation of 69
artists (of the 208) who participated in the New York Studio Events
Program organized by the Independent Curators International. According to
the introduction, artists were told they could speak on any aspect of
their work they wish. This leads to a broad range of topics and subject
matter spanning from technique to day-to-day issues to philosophies. The
book is chalk full of full color photos and best of all paperback.
The artists included in the book range from Amy Sillman talking about her
painting residencies in India, Polly Apfelbaum speaking on her
installation process, Leon Golub on his subject matter, the dreaded John
Currin discussing how seeing Tintoretto on his honeymoon changed his
painting, and Andrea Zittel speaking to how she came to embrace her
suburban background, and thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Possibly the best paragraph in the book is Donald Judd broaching the topic
he is most linked to- Minimalism:
Ive said this one million times and I hope the recording is working to
hear me say it one million and one: Minimalism was a derogatory term that
someone coined. Barbara Rose gave ABC a try, and that was derogatory. The
Primary Structures term was not meant to be derogatory, but was very
misleading: there is no such style and there is no such group. Its very
easy to find out there wasnt a group. I hardly knew Robert Morris; I met
him in March or April maybe of 63. I had a show at the end of that year,
so I didnt have anything to do with Morriss work. Also his work comes out
of Duchamp. I knew Dan Flavin for about a year prior to that and I didnt
know him well. And there was no discussion. There was no group. Sol LeWitt
is many years later. Carl Andre I met because he was a friend of Frank
Stellas, but he told me on the street, walking along, that he carved
things out of wood, and at that point, he was also flirting with my then
wife, and I stopped listening to Carl. Three or four years passed before I
had any idea what he was doing, when he finally had an exhibition.
Thats the so-called Original Minimal. Since then half the world has
become Minimal, but thats just more publicity. […]
Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 11:55 AM in Books | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/ici_inside_the_.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The End of Days? Falun Gong in NYC
Falungong via Satan's Laundromat:
Falun Gong protesters (seen here outside the Chinese consulate) came to
town for the RNC and never left.
via NYTimes:
Anti-China Protest Outlives Week of Protests By ANTHONY RAMIREZ
Not long ago, when Manhattan was the center of protest during the
Republican National Convention, they were here. Tucked away amid the
protest shantytowns, the AIDS activists, the advocates for the homeless
and the antiwar protesters were the Falun Gong.
Almost three weeks have passed since the convention ended and all the
other protesters have gone. Yet the Falun Gong remain, demonstrating
against what they call the persecution of their movement in China.
There they are in front of the United Nations. There they are near
Bloomingdale's and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There they
are near Zabar's and the American Museum of Natural History. There they
are in Times Square, Bryant Park and Chinatown.
Why are the Falun Gong protesters still here? And why are they seemingly
everywhere?
[…]
Falun Gong's rise can be traced to the Chinese government's relaxed
supervision of private associations in the late 1970's. At the same time,
the government cut back on health care benefits, Dr. Chang said. Qigong
groups, which promote healthful living, therefore attracted millions of
followers. Falun Gong (literally, "Law Wheel Cultivation") is a variation
of qigong ("energy cultivation"), a companion discipline to the
better-known tai chi. Falun Gong focuses on calisthenics (four standing
exercises and one sitting cross-legged), which Mr. Li says confer health
and energy. Falun Gong has familiar Chinese elements of Buddhism, Daoism
and Confucianism, as well as non-Chinese elements, like a belief in
extraterrestrials. The "wheel" in the Falun Gong name refers to an
invisible wheel in the faithful that protects against illness, Dr. Chang
said.
What Falun Gong isn't is political, Dr. Chang said. Mr. Li's writings are
often explicitly apocalyptic, which is why Dr. Chang titled her book, "The
End of Days: Falun Gong," (Yale University Press, 2004). "But the vast
majority of Falun Gong have not done anything wrong or illegal by
international standards, except to do these calisthenics," Dr. Chang said.
[…]
Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 11:15 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/the_end_of_days.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Saving Private Ryan From Fallujah
Ryan via NYTimes:
FRANK RICH Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan' [excerpts]:
As American soldiers were dying in Falluja, some Americans back home spent
Veteran's Day mocking the very ideal our armed forces are fighting for
freedom. Ludicrous as it sounds, 66 ABC affiliates revolted against their
own network and refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan." The reason:
fear. Not fear of terrorism or fear of low ratings but fear that their own
government would punish them for exercising freedom of speech. […]
For anyone who doubts that we are entering a new era, let's flash back
just a few years. "Saving Private Ryan," with its "CSI"-style
disembowelments and expletives undeleted, was nationally broadcast by ABC
on Veteran's Day in both 2001 and 2002 without incident, and despite the
protests of family-values groups. What has changed between then and now? A
government with the zeal to control both information and culture has
received what it calls a mandate. Media owners who once might have thought
that complaints by the American Family Association about a movie like
"Saving Private Ryan" would go nowhere are keenly aware that the
administration wants to reward its base. Merely the threat that the F.C.C.
might punish a TV station or a network is all that's needed to push them
onto the slippery slope of self-censorship before anyone in Washington
even bothers to act. This is McCarthyism, "moral values" style.
What makes the "Ryan" case both chilling and a harbinger of what's to come
is that it isn't about Janet Jackson and sex but about the presentation of
war at a time when we are fighting one. That some of the companies whose
stations refused to broadcast "Saving Private Ryan" also own major
American newspapers in cities as various as Providence and Atlanta leaves
you wondering what other kind of self-censorship will be practiced next.
If these media outlets are afraid to show a graphic Hollywood treatment of
a 60-year-old war starring the beloved Tom Hanks because the feds might
fine them, toy with their licenses or deny them permission to expand their
empires, might they defensively soften their news divisions' efforts to
present the graphic truth of an ongoing war? The pressure groups that are
exercised by Bono and "Saving Private Ryan" are often the same ones who
are campaigning to derail any news organization that's not towing the
administration line in lockstep with Fox.
Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the
current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too
credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to "Saving
Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished." During the early weeks of the
invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be
cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised
skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts
challenging the administration's version of events risk being called
traitors. As with "Saving Private Ryan," the aim of the news censors is to
bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike
World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn't have an assured
triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might
undermine its support among the administration's base. Thus the censors
argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine's shooting of a wounded Iraqi
prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly "overplayed" by the so-called
elite media. […]
Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 09:24 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/saving_private_.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Intellectual Property 'Frozen'?
Frozen [Laila Robins (left), Swoosie Kurtz, and Brian F. O'Byrne in
Frozen; photo by Dixie Sheridan; image source]
The latest on creative property, copyright and artist anxiety…read
Malcolm Gladwell on the Frozen flap…
via The New Yorker:
SOMETHING BORROWED
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? Issue of 2004-11-22; Posted
2004-11-15
"Laverys alleged plagiarism, and the articles were picked up by newspapers
around the world. Bryony Lavery had seen one of my articles, responded to
what she read, and used it as she constructed a work of art. And now her
reputation was in tatters. Something about that didnt seem right."
[excerpted]:
So is it true that words belong to the person who wrote them, just as
other kinds of property belong to their owners? Actually, no. As the
Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in his new book Free
Culture:
In ordinary language, to call a copyright a property right is a bit
misleading, for the property of copyright is an odd kind of property. . .
. I understand what I am taking when I take the picnic table you put in
your backyard. I am taking a thing, the picnic table, and after I take it,
you dont have it. But what am I taking when I take the good idea you had
to put a picnic table in the backyardby, for example, going to Sears,
buying a table, and putting it in my backyard? What is the thing that I am
taking then?
The point is not just about the thingness of picnic tables versus ideas,
though that is an important difference. The point instead is that in the
ordinary caseindeed, in practically every case except for a narrow range
of exceptionsideas released to the world are free. I dont take anything
from you when I copy the way you dressthough I might seem weird if I do it
every day. . . . Instead, as Thomas Jefferson said (and this is especially
true when I copy the way someone dresses), He who receives an idea from
me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights
his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Lessig argues that, when it comes to drawing this line between private
interests and public interests in intellectual property, the courts and
Congress have, in recent years, swung much too far in the direction of
private interests. He writes, for instance, about the fight by some
developing countries to get access to inexpensive versions of Western
drugs through what is called parallel importationubuying drugs from
another developing country that has been licensed to produce patented
medicines. The move would save countless lives. But it has been opposed by
the United States not on the ground that it would cut into the profits of
Western pharmaceutical companies (they dont sell that many patented drugs
in developing countries anyway) but on the ground that it violates the
sanctity of intellectual property. We as a culture have lost this sense of
balance, Lessig writes. A certain property fundamentalism, having no
connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.
[…]
It also matters how Lavery chose to use my words. Borrowing crosses the
line when it is used for a derivative work. Its one thing if youre writing
a history of the Kennedys, like Doris Kearns Goodwin, and borrow, without
attribution, from another history of the Kennedys. But Lavery wasnt
writing another profile of Dorothy Lewis. She was writing a play about
something entirely newabout what would happen if a mother met the man who
killed her daughter. And she used my descriptions of Lewiss work and the
outline of Lewiss life as a building block in making that confrontation
plausible. Isnt that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in
the service of a new idea arent the problem. What inhibits creativity is
new words in the service of an old idea.
And this is the second problem with plagiarism. It is not merely
extremist. It has also become disconnected from the broader question of
what does and does not inhibit creativity. We accept the right of one
writer to engage in a full-scale knockoff of anotherthink how many
serial-killer novels have been cloned from The Silence of the Lambs. Yet,
when Kathy Acker incorporated parts of a Harold Robbins sex scene verbatim
in a satiric novel, she was denounced as a plagiarist (and threatened with
a lawsuit). When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to
match a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone elses idea.
But had we matched any of the Times wordseven the most banal of phrasesit
could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned
into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up
to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level
of the sentence.
Dorothy Lewis says that one of the things that hurt her most about Frozen
was that Agnetha turns out to have had an affair with her collaborator,
David Nabkus. Lewis feared that people would think she had had an affair
with her collaborator, Jonathan Pincus. Thats slander, Lewis told me. Im
recognizable in that. Enough people have called me and said, Dorothy, its
about you, and if everything up to that point is true, then the affair
becomes true in the mind. So that is another reason that I feel violated.
If you are going to take the life of somebody, and make them absolutely
identifiable, you dont create an affair, and you certainly dont have that
as a climax of the play.
It is easy to understand how shocking it must have been for Lewis to sit
in the audience and see her character admit to that indiscretion. But the
truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha,
because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn
from Lewiss life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of
circumstances and actions.
[…]
Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 05:33 PM in Performances | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/intellectual_pr.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Fallujah Shooting Screencap
via BoingBoing [posted by Xeni Jardin]:
Screencap of blogger Kevin Sites' report of Falluja prisoner shooting
A video grab of footage referenced in Kevin Sites' report for NBC News
shows "a U.S. Marine pointing his assault rifle at a wounded insurgent
inside a mosque just before gunfire was heard in Falluja, November 13,
2004… a U.S. Marine shot dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in
the mosque."
Link to image, Link to archived video and transcript of Kevin's report for
NBC News, link to previous BoingBoing post, link to Kevin's blog.
Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 05:19 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/fallujah_shooti.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Fallujah in Pictures
via Julia Set, an amazing blog: Fallujah in Pictures: Pictures from
Fallujah that probably won't be on your television. Email contriubtions to
[email protected]
Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 05:00 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/fallujah_in_pic.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Oh MoMA!
Moma MoMA reopens; there's press everywhere. The best gathering of links
to recent blogs and reviews is over at Tyler Greene's Modern Art Notes.
There's an outpouring at the NYTimes, and here's a short note over at
ArtForum online international news:
MoMA'S "AESTHETICS OF INVISIBILITY"
Die Sddeutsche Zeitung's Jrg Hntzschel welcomes New York's expanded Musem
of Modern Art, which officially reopens this Saturday. The critic predicts
that some visitors might have trouble finding the revamped building, since
Yoshio Taniguchi's design is marked by an "aesthetics of invisibility."
"For over a decade now, almost every new cultural building around the
world has tried very hard to mimic the hugely successful Guggenheim
Bilbao," writes Hntzschel. "Standing in front of the new MoMA, one looks
in vain for blobs, sloping angles or fluttering high-grade steel sails.
The building, with its glass facades and right angles, looks as if it had
always been there." Hntzschel sees a parallel between the subtlety of the
new structure and the intricate and Herculean, but largely unreported,
process of fundraising that was undertaken to pay for the $858 million
project. As he observes, an unassuming surface can be deceiving: "Even
after its fourth and largest expansion, MoMA's architectural history is
far from over." After all, he writes, the museum still owns two
neighboring properties that it has yet to develop.
Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 04:53 PM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/oh_moma.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
10x10: 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Times
Amazingly cool: 10 x 10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Times, by
Jonatha J. Harris. Check out the process.
via Mediatrips:
Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international
news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic
analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this
process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most
important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100
corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of
each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to
conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a
constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent
world events, without any human input.
Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 04:36 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/10x10_100_words.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Monday, November 15, 2004
Terror Auteurism
Saadi_yacef [image: Saadi Yucef, from the Battle of Algiers]
Check out this Sunday's NYTimes magazine article on "terrorist as auteur."
One thing mentioned that is interesting–perhaps only as an
afterthought–is the distinction between political propaganda and that
"something deeper" that Gillo Pontecorvo was getting at in his Battle of
Algiers. The main points of the article though have to do with the
pornography of terror, our complicity as viewers, mutual degradation, etc.
The author, Michael Ignatieff, mentions the 1999 documentary that was made
of the 1972 Munich Olympics, One Day in September in which the last
remaining terrorist is interviewed…
[terror as auteur excerpt]
We now have the terrorist as film director. One man taken hostage recently
in Iraq described, once released, how carefully his own appearance on
video was staged, with the terrorists animatedly framing the shot: where
the guns would point, what the backdrop should be, where he should kneel,
what he should be scripted to say.
Using video cameras as a weapon may be new, but modern terrorists have
always sought to exploit the power of images. The greatest film ever made
about terrorism – Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" (1965) – was
actually shot at the instigation of a terrorist. Saadi Yacef, the leader
of the insurgent cell in the Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in
1957, survived capture and, after Algerian independence, approached
Pontecorvo to make a film, based on his own life story. Yacef helped to
produce the film and actually played himself on-screen. Had it been up to
Yacef, the result would have been pure propaganda. Pontecorvo held out for
a deeper vision, and the result is a masterpiece, at once a justification
for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror's cost, including to
the cause it serves. [end]
Full text: PHENOMENON: The Terrorist as Auteur By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF,
NYTimes Magazine Published: November 14, 2004
Monday, November 15, 2004 at 11:05 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/terror_auteuris.html
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives
http://newsgrist.net
NEWSgrist: Sidewalk Gallery
-
Type: discussion