pipilotti

pipilotti uses video and appropriated popular songs to enfranchise the music consumer. videos like "sexy sad i", "i'm not the girl who misses much" and "i'm a victim of this song" seem to treat the pop song as a readymade object and foreground the listener's consumption of that song. i can't understand exactly the choices that she makes. beyond this concept the videos' content seems to be intuitively generated. i say this because they appeal to me and they are humorous, but it's hard for me to say why exactly she has made the choices she has.

"sexy sad i", for example, is footage of a naked scraggly man flailing around in the woods. the camera is trained most often on his dick. he seems to be fighting the camera, kicking at it, swinging his arms at it defensively or maybe playfully. his face is never really visible. there is a humor here that derives from such crazy imagery juxtaposed with a beatles song, whose sound i've always thought to be sweet and naive. apparently the song itself is about the maharishi, the spiritual guru under whom celebrities such as the beatles and mia farrow practiced transcendental meditation. apparently john lennon wrote the song about his guru after the guru purportedly made sexual advances to mia farrow.

the naked body in "sexy sad i" is absurd, not beautiful, awkward. the video makes me think about mocking the preciousness of propriety and sexual morality.



image sourse : http://astralwicks.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/442.jpg

matthew barney

as i said, i saw that same cremaster video that we watched last week in class long ago, before i had ever seen the guggenheim, before i knew who richard serra was. nonetheless, i had a similar experience watching it this time as i did then. i have always been annoyed by hero stories, and i'm not sure why. i think because they're didactic. anyhow, matthew barney comes off as pompous to me, a sculpture jock. his costumes are really amazing and imaginative. the rag/vomit thing that's coming out of his mouth is really interesting, the woman on glass legs is great, and all those rockette girls dressed up as sheep are great. there is definitely a sumptuousness of set design and costume design as well as filming technology that is hard to deny. however, there is this macho element to it that really irks me. matthew barney using the guggenheim as his gym while those hard core bands battle it out is totally obnoxious.

(photo source: http://www.cremasterfanatic.com/ephemera/Misc/fuck_matthew_barney.jpg)

response to "overture" (randall packer and ken jordan)

the ideas in this article are taking me to different places at once. i spent some time this summer with susan stewart's book On Longing wherein she talks about the book as both an aesthetic object as well as a site for ideas. on one hand it is an artufully organized and bound material object. on the other hand it is a site where the actions of writing and reading take place, two actions which seem to happen in a virtual time and space. i mean, they are actions which allow the subject (both the writing subject and the reading subject) to leave the cartesian feield of space-time.

when "overture" speaks about vannevar bush's intended goal for science, that (as wikipedia puts it) "scientific efforts should change from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible", i am reminded of this space-time bending. bush wants to take the book and not only shrink it, but twist and contort it so that the progression is no longer linear, from one page to another. rather each point in the book can lead several different places, so the possible lines of progression are increased exponentially. apparently his ideas foreshadowed the hyperlink and the world wide web. it is fascinating to think of the book as a type a technology and the internet as not distinct from the book but simply a more technologically advanced book.

i have to admit that i had hitherto been turned off or wary of cyber culture. perhaps i'm just wary of the aesthetic (pixels, wires, plastic, spikey hair), but this idea of technology that reduces the dimensions of physical world (not only are the devices smaller but the dimensions of the world itself are reduced [spacial and perhaps even temporal]) while an intangible, virtual world grows in size is an exciting idea. it actually reminds me of the work of one of the first modernist novelists marcel proust.

proust's rememberance of things past conveys the idea that reality is actually the domain of the senses and the mind. he likens memories and his six-volume work itself to these little japanese paper toys that sound a lot to me like those little sponges that come in plastic capsules and which bloom once they're put into hot water. out of nothing, out of the the perceiving being blooms an entire experience that becomes the narrator's story.

at the same time i keep thinking about plato's Republic, this idea of people in a cave watching images on a wall. i don't remember plato's work so well, but my impression was that his cave metaphor was delivered as a warning, that representations of a reality manipulated by a priestly caste (or a creative caste, or a corporately sponsored creative class) do not deceive us.

man ray doc

the documentary was indeed informative insofar as it told me about man ray's career, when he started, how he got to france, that photography was not the only medium in which he worked. on the other hand, i objected to the documentary's angle; it placed great significance on his romantic life as well as his social popularity. in that way, the documentary seemed to do little to further its viewers understanding of twentieth century art but rather has given us one more example of a paris/manhattan celebrity artist who rubbed elbows with the brightest, who loved gorgeous women passionately, and whose acheivements we cannot dream of matching. but, like i said, it's always nice to see more work of an artist, beyond the one or two prints that everyone knows.

also, as a big fan of proust's it was neat to learn that man ray was chosen to photograph the reclusive writer on his death bed.