loud paper

oh, canada

After getting completely soaked in yesterday afternoon's deluge, I tucked my drowned-rat ass into a seat at the ICF to see My Winnipeg. Maddin's dreamscape, "docu-fantasia" of his home city is uneven—part Oedipal talk therapy, part archival record of what appears to be a strange, snowy, haunted, and cold place. Some of the best moments give stylized history lessons, such as the tale of the horses that fled a fire at Whittier Park racetrack and ran into the river, only to be trapped, panicked, in the ice. Clip is here.

Other bits are ponderous, but beautiful, navel gazing, such as when Maddin sublet the house where he grew up and shoots Casavettes-like docudrama. Maddin is at his best when he isn't the subject, but when he finds the quirky stories of loss rooted in buildings and the urban fabric: the dynamited hockey stadium, the Golden Boy pageant held at the Bay department store with the backdrop of a real paddlewheel, the triple-decker public baths, or his aunt Lil's beauty parlor. Maddin was at the screening to take questions and make light of some of the pretentiousness, but mostly he confirmed his mother issues.

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”

steal this couch

Ikea has long tried to make a shopper feel at home. The showroom tableaux feature books and supposedly comfy sofas. Don’t you just want to crawl under the crumpled duvet on one of the unmade beds and eat meatballs? When I was teaching a class entitled Total Design, which explored the integration of interior design and identity, I used to send my students to the blue and gold fortress and ask them to document the areas of slippage. The places contrived to let a buyer project herself into the space.

Guy Ben-Ner took it further. He moved in.

Stealing Beauty, now on view at Postmasters Gallery, is a eighteen-minute video that depicts Ben-Ner, his wife, and kids living in Ikea. It was shot without permission at numerous stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Everyday life is preserved and exposed: sleeping, eating, TV watching, email checking. Family values are both banal and consumable.

I have yet to make it to the gallery, but New York magazine has some fine coverage:

Ben-Ner’s film, while a bit inert and drawn-out, takes cues from Buster Keaton, Rube Goldberg, John Cage, vaudeville, Frederic Engels, and Edward Said. Shots are well-planned but simple, chance dictates results, sight gags reign, identity politics are ever present. In the opening scene, we watch the straight-faced beanpole Ben-Ner duck behind a shower curtain and begin to bathe. Ben-Ner’s wife peers into the shower and catches him masturbating. He throws on a robe and dashes out, protesting that he was only washing. His son and daughter enter as Ben-Ner pours a drink (we hear liquid, but nothing comes out of the pitcher). Ben-Ner’s wife tells him that his children have been misbehaving. He lectures the kids, spouting pseudo-Marxist bromides like “the family stops the property from leaking out,” holding forth on the value of objects, commodities, and the means of production. The son asks, “Is Mom private property?” and the kids write a manifesto of statements like “Children of the world, unite.” If Air America ran after-school specials, they’d sound like this.

Film clips via Structural Patterns.

rewind and play

Photo via Wollaeger’s blog.

Albus Cavus, an artist collective headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, sends news that it is collecting films for its upcoming Street Art Film Fest 2008. This year it’s screening in NJ, DC, and CA. Several films are already listed on the program including a couple by stenciler and performance artist Peat Wollaeger: Casa Del Luchador and Bill Hilly the Stencilbilly.

Not on the program is the apparently well-known (10,000 YouTube hits since it was posted in December) but new-to-my-eyes piece, My Tribute to Keith Haring…Miami 2007. In a subculture that routinely stresses hidden identity and cool posturing, what amazes me is that Wollaeger transforms himself into a Haring doppelganger—hair, eyeglasses, jeans, sneakers—before stenciling a mural in the artist’s likeness. All of which is captured on film. The lines between representation, re-representation, and the pure pleasure of fandom are all blurred.

In an interview at ourartsite.com Wollaeger has this to say about the piece:

The mural is a large scale mural project called Primary Flight in the Wynwood arts district being curated by Blackbooks stencils and will feature murals by Logan Hicks, Michael De Fo, David Choe, Futura, Lady Pink, Andy Howell and many more! I am doing a very special tribute piece to Keith Haring for three reasons. One...he is probably one of my favorite artists of all time. Two...December is AIDS awareness month, and Keth died of AIDS In 1990. Three...because Keith would have turned 50 this year. I am doing a pile of his figures in the background to represent all that have been lost to AIDS and then over the top is a large portrait of Keith Haring in my style. I have cut off all my hair and I will be dressing as the Artist as a tribute...I even purchased 3 pairs of vintage Air Force ones, just to make sure I found the right pair that he would have worn.

 

new old, old new

Best to admit it right now: the New Museum is old news. I was in San Francisco way back when it opened in early December. On return, I lallygagged getting over there. Yeah, I was excited, but then again, I had already read a bunch of commentary. My faves include Kazys’ review over at varnelis.net and Sam Jacobs' scathing photo essay at Strange Harvest that documents twenty fundraising plaques throughout the space. Memorial water fountain anyone?

I made my pilgrimage to the SANAA addition to the Bowery a couple weeks ago. At 4pm, the light was too low for the skylights to work, so the effect of the stacked boxes was lost on me. Collage, the second (and more promising) installment of Unmonumental just opened, so I’ll try to return earlier in the day. Overall, the big spaces didn’t seem big enough. Perhaps unmonumental sums up the building, too. The assemblage art was installed too close together, and little of it made use of the lofty ceiling heights. My favorite moments in the building were the tiny, tiny spaces along the rear stair. Oddball niches no bigger than a closet, they seemed a bit illicit, as if the architects had gotten away with something—an alcove where art lovers can sneak away for a snog.

Much of the criticism of the New Museum frets over what a cultural institution located next to the Bowery Mission is doing to the Bowery. That bringing the arts to the neighborhood is really just giving up the ghost to gentrification. That a beloved grubby street historically dotted by bums and kitchen suppliers represents authentic New York. Sure, I see their point. I too enjoy a bit of grit and a little subcultural tourism. I might even follow it with a vegan BLT at Moby’s Teany. But I also wonder if the artistic commoditization of the Bowery is something that’s been going on since it was Skid Row.

Recently, at closing party of NYNYNY (photos of this great mini-urban assemblage show here), Flux Factory screened the 1956 film On The Bowery by Lionel Rogosin. The award-winning, quasi-documentary tracks real down-and-outers as they try to shake the bottle and get back on their feet. It is true Beat verite filmed under the shadow of the El. The New Museum with its industrial loft gallery spaces and mesh clad façade (to be blackened soon) is just another entry trying to capture some of that patina.

look out, look back

It is no freak coincidence that the Spice Girls announced their reunion tour (complete with Ginger Spice) within weeks of the release of Todd Haynes’ wonderfully arty Dylan biopic “I’m Not There.” At least not to me. A million years ago I wrote piece for loud paper chronicling the intersection of snarl and sass, pop and posturing, bubblegum and cigarettes. The confluent point: the bulbous Royal Albert Hall. A space that brings together “Don’t Look Back” and “Spice World.”

Inspired by Haynes film, which skillfully interweaves genre, poetry, and identity, I’ll subject you to my early, somewhat lushy, ramblings:

There is a revolution brewing in “Don't Look Back.” It seeps out of the architecture, out of spaces with one too many people sitting on a dirty Danish sofa. When one mixes the great unwashed with modern furniture, trouble is bound to happen. The cameraman, Pennebaker, is pushed up against the corner of those close rooms. He is approved to get the entire atmosphere on film. He takes it all in - the excitement, the existential bullshit, the kohl eyeliner on be-bobbed girls. The lens implies a scent: it smells like cinders and cooked cabbage. Steam comes from the kitchen up through the floorboards and, like a draft, encircles the familiar mop of curly hair and hangers on in striped shirts.

The film is composed of seething interiors. Even the walls, wrapped in flaky floral paper, reflect the heaviness of an ancient Victorian status quo and a post-war angst. Although the film was made in the mid-sixties, Modernism is not evident. There is no free plan, no ribbon windows and the closest thing to transparency is Donavan, who is touring simultaneously. All the hallways, the hotel rooms and the dressing rooms make for just about all the claustrophobia one can handle on an El Niño Valentine's night at the Roxie Theater.

The entire piece is here. Also, don't miss David Cross as an inspired Allen Ginsberg.

sonic highway

Courtesy Brooklyn Vegan.

Harmonies, hula hoops, and honking horns. On Friday I caught Sufjan Steven’s performance of The BQE at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), joining some 2,000 fellow aging hipsters decked out in glasses and corduroy and armed with iPhones. If we all disappeared in a Moscow-type tragedy, would Apple sales dip? In the opera house lobby I nearly bumped into BAM regular Lou Reed, thrillingly and neatly bringing my Velvets/Warhol thread full circle. (Apparently Reed and Laurie Anderson attended the evening before, so he was coming back for a repeat performance.)

Sufjan’s composition, commissioned by BAM, is an ambitious addition to his geographic interpretations Illinoise and Michigan (two entries in his Fifty States Project). Sonically taking on Robert Moses’s gritty highway with a thirty-piece orchestra.

Clashing strings and horns evoke swelling traffic jams. Flutes zip through the score, changing lanes with ease. Sufjan paired the music with an abstract film and live hula hoopers. The result is equal parts beautiful, quirky, and a love letter to Brooklyn. With Super-8 shots of neighborhood landmarks and signs—there’s the bright yellow storage building near my house; look, the ugly new loft going up—recognition draws you into the piece.

The BQE is part of a history of orchestrated city interpretations. And there is certainly an Eamesian and Koyaanisqatsi quality to Sufjan’s footage, but I was reminded immediately of the 1927 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which uses the railroad to track the daily life of the city in much the same way as the BQE organizes Sufjan’s Brooklyn. (See Mitchell Schwarzer’s Zoomscape.)

In program notes the musician muses on the mash up of car wheels and hoops:

Perhaps a creative exegesis of the hoop might begin to unravel the bureaucratic mysteries of the interstate roadway, the automobile, and the Hula Hoop’s unlikely nemesis: Robert Moses. A renowned critic of idle recreation, Moses often orchestrated his park projects around more competitive, athletic endeavors: mammoth swimming pools, diving boards, baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. These hefty, utilitarian designs were modern responses to Frederick Law Olmstead’s romantic topography intended for less strenuous activities: afternoon strolls, Sunday picnics, and, perhaps, Hula Hooping. Of course, there was nothing natural, bucolic, or egalitarian about Moses’s park designs: blocky, boxy cement landscapes that resembled more prison yard than public park. Indeed, his roadways often took this aesthetic to the extreme. Like most highway projects of the time, the BQE was an execution of bullishness mixed with economic fastidiousness, a project that championed commerce, cars, and the commuter work force in spite of the “disorderly” charm of Brooklyn’s network of villages and neighborhoods, settled long before the automobile.

Although the triad is almost too much to watch at once, all parts came together at for one brilliant moment: five hula hoopers twisting their hips in unison, speedy road music, and film of driving at night. The conceit drops away leaving only rhythm and motion.

dear diary

Cover by Joshua Davis

In August 2000, someguy founded the 1000 Journals Project, “an ongoing collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels.” Seven years later, the journals are still networked throughout the world and are collecting drawings, collages, and stories: repositories for momentary creative output. It is a simple idea, get a journal, place something in it, and send it on. A website collects user-submitted images of the pages. But finding a journal is tough, says the website:

Unfortunately, you've got a better chance of winning the lottery, then of getting a hold of a journal. That's the problem when there are only 1000 of them. Now, you're best bet is to check out 1001 Journals where you can sign up for a journal, or launch your own traveling, location, or personal journals.

A launch pad for new collective projects, 1000J has spawned a couple of its own: a book and a movie. The film by Andrea Kreuzhage, screens in November at the AFI International Film Festival, Los Angeles. loud paper friends Brian Singer and Ruth Keffer show up on screen.

velveteen vitrine

Last week I was Googling for an image of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 classic, The Medium is the Message, and I came across an archival entry from Sam Jacob’s StrangeHarvest. The amazing post, partly cribbed from an essay he wrote for Volume, places Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground within the Philip Johnson’s terrarium-like Glass House. The same year as McLuhan’s treatise, the Factory tripped out to Connecticut for a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe.

Writes Jacob:

And somewhere between Lou Reed, Electricity, Marshal McLuhan, and Andy Warhol - I forget exactly the circumstances - I drew a comparison between the translucent walls of the Johnson Glass House, and the metallic-reflective walls of Warhol's silver Factory. They seemed like related opposites: spaces that were very similar, famous for the material surface of their walls that were both materials which both fascinated modern architecture. Both had qualities that embody modernity - transparency, reflection, flat and smooth, seamless, almost textureless, technological, industrialised, cold-to-the-touch and factory-formed into sheets from molten state. The Glass House and the Factory are like opposing twins.

It is amazing to think about these opposing scenes, lead by iconic figures (Warhol and Johnson separated at birth?), meshing for a summer afternoon. I am, of course, seduced by the photos, but am also starting to muse about the sexuality of both these men, especially as the 70s codifies the modernist (generally thought of as conservative) camp surrounding Johnson. Or should I say, their sexuality in relationship to how it is permitted or excluded by other parallel art scenes of the era. I was particularly struck by a quote in this weekend’s Times. In an article on Warhol’s films Manohla Dargis writes:

The dread that Warhol’s sexuality inspired is nothing new. On the first page of his memoir “Popism: The Warhol Sixties,” written with Pat Hackett, he explains that Pop artists “did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles — all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” About 10 pages later he adds one other item to the list of things that some Abstract Expressionists tried hard not to notice: homosexuality. “You’re too swish,” his friend, the filmmaker Emile de Antonio, bluntly dropped, when Warhol asked why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg didn’t like him. “And that upsets them.”

There is a curious correlation between a mess of quotidian stuff and gayness that I am still worrying over. It is all the stuff that is banished from Johnson’s manse, and from Ice Storm modernism in general. Is it as simple as a Manhattan vs. New Caanan polemic? I am not sure where I am going with this line of questioning yet, my guess that there is a wealth of texts covering this territory, so I’ll report back soon. Interestingly, around the same time as when Warhol visited the Glass House, he started filming the explicit and hermetic I, a Man, in which Valerie Solanas makes an appearance.

play time

Delve into the psyche of any architect of a certain age and you'll find a stash of LEGOs. The nubby, plastic modulars pack a default ironic punch. BIG’s take on the LEGO—“a homage to the Danish building industry” and commentary on prefab—is now on view at Storefront. Five housing project models fill the space, leaving not much room to maneuver. The twelve by twelve-foot, 250,000-piece LEGO model is pretty impressive and I am sure I am not the only person to find two, of the 1,000 LEGO people, engaged in a naughty activity. (I had to look. I grew up in the age of Slow House cross-sections and recto verso.)

Glowing like a shot out of Jacques Tati’s 1967 Play Time, the piece is described by the BIG team as: “…an elastic field of peaks and valleys. A thousand plateaus ascending and descending, separating and merging to form a fluid space of private and public plateaus. Combining the rigorous and the adventurous. The box and the blob.” Yeah. Those dirty Danes.