It is appalling that the NSA has granted itself the authority to monitor Americans' nutritional data. Surely we may have security and also enjoy international cuisines without the NSA monitoring every international restaurant we citizens choose to frequent. This is a blatant power grab on the part of the Bush administration, and the Congress must quash it immediately. Dinner without datamining! Tyler Cowan is not a terrorist!
Did anyone go see Mogwai last night? I was dancing my tail off to Ghostland Observatory, happy to be entertained by an Austin band whose it-group status probably expired months ago. I like to dance, even though I move like Michael Stipe in the beginning of the video for "Losing My Religion": picture a hapless, seemingly injured emo-ish octopus. Anyway, G.O. frontman Aaron Behrens has a pretty good Fred Mercury thing going, and he reminded me how tight the kids wear the jeans in Austin. And Thomas Turner surely got a 5 on his Advanced Placement science exam, the way he dropped the Thomas Dolby on the electronics all night. Science!
I'd recommend that everyone go buy tickets for Pleaseeasaur tomorrow night at the Black Cat, but it's sold out. In fact, I already did recommend that you see Pleaseeasaur tomorrow night—in today's City Paper. And now the show's sold out (draw what conclusions you will). Also in the CP is my writeup on Laurel Nakadate at Adamson Gallery.
Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender, 2006. Cast petroleum jelly, cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic, self-lubricating plastic, and black sand.The only meaningful way to suss out the difference between supplemental props and capital works in a Matthew Barney show is to check the tombstone text* for a number after the title—e.g., Somethin' Silly 26. But even that tactic failed me at Barbara Gladstone, where, on first glance, I saw a grab-bag exhibit of sculptures and production drawings from Drawing Restraint 9 (which I have yet to see). On closer examination (of the gallery's Web site, that is), I realize that one—well, one or two—of the sculptures is in fact Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender. I wasn't able to puzzle much from this piece at the gallery, and figuring that the works were mostly supplemental to the film I haven't seen anyhow, I breezed by it, eager to see the drawings that my gallery-going partner JM was so enthusiastic about.
My error, right? The artwork DR13 is (was) a site-specific performance; the sculpture at Gladstone is to some extent an artifact of that performance—which goes some way toward explaining why it's so much less accessible than the other works. It appears to be some sort of platform landing wedged into a vaseline landing. Several meters away there's a cast thermoplastic table that I took to be a different sculpture altogether, what with the realistic (and, frankly, plain stupid-looking) plastic-cast desk implements on top of the table. It didn't occur to me that these two sculptures—joined by a pair of plastic-cast shoes under the table and dollops of vaseline seemingly leading from the tread/landing—were two parts of one work.
I'm willing to accept that I missed the April 2 performance and might not be able to read too much into this particular piece. (The artifact, anyway, was totally obscure to me.) But the show opened on April 7, several days after the ostensible site-specific performance. It makes sense that Barney doesn't do live performances at this stage in his career—the crowd would dwarf the gallery, I'm sure, and anyway I get the sense that Eric Doeringer is gonna assassinate him one of these days. Keeping a low profile is an advisable strategy.
Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender, 2006. Cast petroleum jelly, cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic, self-lubricating plastic, and black sand.Here, again, I'll concede that the functional DR13 artwork might be the artifact-sculpture and not the performance—there's all sorts of precedent for that. (Janine Antoni's Gnaw is the first that comes to mind.) In that case, I'd write DR13 off as obscure, and Lord knows it wouldn't be the first time Barney's taken that hit. But here's why I feel duped: The performance was recorded, and the recording will be played alongside the sculpture(s) . . . at SFMOMA, beginning in July.
Barbara Gladstone is not a gallery of modest means, and it's perfectly within the gallery's power to install an appropriate video display to accompany the work. Five will get you ten that the reason this didn't happen is that Barney requires a more professional film-editing job than could be jury rigged in 5 days.
That's just my speculation, and take it with a big glop of vaseline. But insofar as that's the case, it signals a negative development in art production. Already the pervasive opinion exists that video art does not "compete" with artistic film, since video artists lack the technical knowledge or equipment to make fine-looking movies. That's an unfair attitude that shows a poor understanding of the difference between the two genres. If a film recording of a Barney performance must share the production values of a Barney film, it's an unfair attitude to which Barney lends his weight. Couching the piece in terms of performance but holding out on showing that performance for a slicker production raises the bar for what viewers should expect from video installations and artifacts. If that's what's happening, Barney's dividing the house against itself.
Now, Barney can dictate entirely when and where his art will be received; he was careful about controlling the release and distribution of The Cremaster Cycle. But Gladstone's press release claims that "[t]he site-specific performance DRAWING RESTRAINT 13 acts as a formal and thematic coda for the exhibition." More in sadness than in anger, I say: no such luck. The work wasn't quite installed.
UPDATE: But what was the performance all about, anyway? It looked to me as if somebody "landed" on that vaseline beachhead, marched over to the table, sat down and started signing treaties. Ben Davis says: pretty much.
Near the gallery entrance, there is also a sculpture incorporating a metal platform and a wedge of congealed petroleum jelly, the remains of Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender, a filmed performance executed behind closed doors on Sunday, Apr. 2, during which Barney emerged from a crate atop the platform dressed as General Douglas MacArthur, fell into the jelly and then proceeded to sign several of his works with the aid of two actors.Perhaps Gladstone lacks the jurisdiction to show Gen. Barney's war footage?
* Name, Title, Date. Materials.
Is there really no other hotel available for this sort of thing? If you're a politician, why would you go there? This is a profession in serious need of superstitions. (And, apparently, a new scandal-naming convention.)
From today's live chat with M. Grass, the Washington Oculus:
Grand Rapids, Mich.: What does "blog" mean?Crucial.
Michael Grass: Good to hear from good 'ole Grand Rapids, Gerald Ford's hometown. [blah blah blogs] . . . reminds me of an old broken-down carnival ride at the Ionia County Free Fair, which Grand Rapids, you must know is about 30 miles to your east.
Not only did the U.S. Bureau of Education translate the Star-Spangled Banner into Spanish in 1919, but El Presidente himself has on occassion sang nuestro himno. Gently nudging a stupid argument toward mental gridlock is the fact that we're only having this specific debate because "British music rebel" Adam Kidron recorded the Spanish-language version and released it online a few days ago.
This is so stupid. It's not stupid because mouthbreathing muckrakers like Michelle Malkin—who, by the way, baffles me with a line complaining about liberals' "selective advocacy of force"; it should be what sort of advocacy, exactly? Indiscriminate? Gleeful?—would have us believe that a Spanish translation of the National Anthem, emceed by Wyclef and set to a Casio-issued samba beat, represents an authentic front in the Reconquista effort. No, on this point, conservatives are on to something: they're right to want to protect the anthem from performance. The anthem changes by mediation, whether it's belched or wailed on a guitar or sung by orphans, so if you have a real stake in ensuring that all things patriotic are all things melee to be used to club political adversaries, you must keep the anthem (flag, purple ink-stained finger) far from the hands of a politically inexpedient minority group.
What's so wrong is that the right has so woefully misidentified the enemy. A British person recorded the National Anthem, and the right's fed up because immigrants living in America are listening to it? We have seen the enemy, and the enemy isn't getting off the hook just because he produced The Slits. What a carpetbagger—a carpetdouchebagger. I can't put my finger on why, precisely, but I find it meddlesome and opportunistic and every bit as irritating as the xenophobes complaining about it. Why not put "La Marseillaise" in Arabic next? Kidron could be Sufjan Stevens, replacing states with nations and their distinctive boring intercultural policy disputes that don't involve him. It reminds me of that great Eddie Izzard routine, that one where the Corinthians respond to Paul's letters: "Dear Paul, Fuck off. Where do you get off, writing to an entire city? Hugs and kisses, the Corinthians."
Ultimately, it's a weak thread in the immigration debate, but one Republicans promise to pluck for some time to come. Then again, "immigration debate" itself is such a fruitless phrase for what's in fact happening in the Americas. It was a rather small detail in the article, but in a books review for the Atlantic Monthly Marc Cooper notes that the Mexico-U.S. border is witnessing the greatest human migration in recorded history. There's just nothing to be "done" about it, and all the handwringing—the President interceding in a debate about how people sing songs; the weekend warriors in the Arizona sun, with guns and koozied beer—represents a stark failure of imagination. We're talking about an epochal movement of people. Even amnesty and boycotts and other policies I nominally support fail to appreciate how vast this migration is—as if it is a trend we may somehow permit or not. It's like saying, I support tidal waves.. It's nonsense! Though the followup (My political opponent's anti-moon position is sheer lunacy!) is better.
It's of course important that we ensure fair treatment for all residents, maintain a standard of living that doesn't come at the expense of the lower class, and prevent British people from acting out at all costs. No use kidding ourselves that we can tweak the tides of history—these are things we just ought to do as citizens.
I've run into some wicked luck flying this year, but yesterday's experience takes the cake. I arrived only to find that my flight home from Chicago was canceled due to rain. Despite the fact that Chicago sees months of snow and even massive blizzards every year, a steady drizzle was enough to throw O'Hare off its game. (Now, if they'd blamed the Cubs, I'd've believed that.) I secured a ticket home this morning, but decided to try my luck flying standby before I shuttled to the hotel. Naturally, while I passed through security, the woman who checked my boarding pass marked it with a curious "P," which might stand for "pester," since I was hauled out of line for special security precautions. At which time the airline discovered a lighter in my pocket that the standard security gate failed to detect—a sign they read as a Plot Against America, rather than incompetence of a kind with canceling all outbound flights to the eastern seaboard at the first sign of April showers. (This post is brought to you by Midway Airport Co.)
But I skated through on that standy flight last night, which was delicious; many passengers didn't make it onto the flight, and Schadenfreude is the best compensation an airline can deliver. Anyway, you know you've got a severe puntuality problem when your friends aren't surprised that your flight returns late. Back in the District now and looking forward to writing about Nova. In the meantime, check in with Icono-Dan, who's back to blogging (and is a helluva nice guy IRL to boot).
