As promised last week, due to my laziness, this week’s Sunday Video is by The Residents. The group has remained anonymous for more than thirty years, and continues to develop some of the strangest and interesting performances in rock music.
The Residents – One-Minute Movies.
This post was contributed by Bob Snead.
Susan Lee-Chun, Screen Capture from Suz-ercize (from Chained to a Creature of a Different Kingdom). Image courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.
Our Jet Setters are in Miami this week on mass for the opening “Chained to a Creature of a Different Kingdom” at David Castillo Gallery. Curated by our very own West Coast Editor, Annie Wharton, the exhibition includes works by Skip Arnold, Angela Dufresne, aaron GM, Kate Gilmore, Ann Hamilton, Micol Hebron, Dawn Kasper, Susan Lee-Chun, Marilyn Minter, Shana Moulton, Ali Prosch, Yvonne Rainer, Pipilotti Rist, Jimmy Joe Roche, and Mark Verabioff.
Gallery says: “An exhibition of corporeal, temporal works, the idea of Chained to a Creature of a Different Kingdom was fueled both by a recent conflagration of performances and performative video works being made, and a dearth of international video exhibitions. From humorous to political to surreal to physical, [...] many of the body-based, time-based works within the exhibition beautifully straddle the creative line between madness/”illness” and brilliance.”
Also in Miami tonight, events that we will likely be visiting with a view to discuss include: Psychic Youth’s “TRI“, the first installment in the project room of the newly opened De La Cruz Collection (23 NE 41st St.); Dead Dads Club Corporation’s “Final Performance” and Zach Balber’s “My Americans“at Spinello Gallery (155 NE 38th St.); Jay Hines’ “Aint No Dispute’n The Rasputin” at Dimensions Variable (171 Ne 38th St.); Drew Heitzler’s “The World is Yours” at Locust Projects (155 Ne 38th St.); Noah Sheldon’s “Miami, Miami” at Bas Fisher Invitational (180 NE 39th St.); Nick Klein’s “O Mio Babbino Caro/ Toomus Meremereh Nor Good” the inaugural exhibition at CMG Projects (40 NE 29th St.) – a newly redeveloped project space of Christopher Miro Gallery; SunTek Chung’s “10 Years” at Charest-Weinberg Gallery (Space 408, 250 NW 23rd St.); Martin Murphy’s “Don’t Forget To Crash” and Elizabeth Condon’s “Walkabout” at Dorsch Gallery (151 Northwest 24th St.); and Diego Singh’s “Pathological Liar/Stalker” at Fredric Snitzer Gallery (2247 NW 1st Pl.).
And that’s just a slice!
This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.
Thanks to my friend setting their GMAIL status as the link to a website, I was exposed to what is in my opinion the powerful cultural experiment called Chatroulette. Essentially, the site is a place to video chat people from around the world, but unlike most chat programs in the Chatroulette world you have no control over whom you chat with and your identity is never recorded. Upon allowing the site to access your camera and microphone you have only to click ‘New Game’ before the program pairs you at random with a fellow Chatrouletter, bringing them into your life and vice versa. At anytime either player may move on to another randomly selected person by clicking the next button. The only options available are to disable audio and/or video and to automatically generate a new partner.
After a few rounds, we are safe in reality and free digitally. I believe we are getting to witness a fine distillation of human exhibitionism and voyeurism functioning at the scale of the masses. The cultural elements that form the underpinnings of this behavior are not new. The new part of the system plays on the fact that for most of us our image today is essentially worth nothing and risk of physical repercussion is seemingly zero with this anonymity.
The majority of what you will find is people alone with an explicit sexual fantasy in mind or made obvious. What makes Chatroulette different from pornographic web chats is that in order to web chat you are never asked for information about you – no proof of age, gender, bank account. Free love then it seems is not dead, its digital. Chatroulette is a sterile worldwide orgy; in the video chat room we don’t touch each other, we can only touch ourselves.
Initially, I wasn’t going to Chatroulette for sexual reasons, but eventually I couldn’t help it, partially out of curiosity, partially because I wanted to be part of the orgy. So with my camera aimed at my crotch, penis exposed occasionally, I waited. The first people to stop and look were two girls cruising; they found it funny. I would throw my genitals on screen and off screen. The next person to stick around, we ended up video fucking. I asked to see her ass and she got on her hands and knees, ass to the camera, and shook it around, spanked herself, and put her fingers into her pussy from between her legs. I just continued masturbating. We decided to get off in front of each other, so we timed it to cum simultaneously. Then we both exchanged thank yous and goodnight. I never knew her name, where she was and I will never see her again. It was a clean and efficient form of sex. The next night I thought I’d test the men masturbating. So I sat with my face onscreen and when a penis or male masturbating came onscreen I wouldn’t hit “next”. Interestingly, something unexpected happened with the men I found in these situations. Instead of moving on, leaving me at the mercy of the randomizer, they would continue to masturbate. Even after I put my genitals onscreen they would stay and look at another penis. I wonder what sexual orientation that is? Were these by chance gay men or does it simply not matter when you get to the point that no girls or anyone at all will watch?
Oh, there is a way for someone to report you, but instead of a scary warning or sirens the only punishment one receives is ten minutes without access, effectively a timeout. But what policing system could exist for this? First, it requires someone from the masses to snitch. Does one ask them self before reporting what the consequence will be? The issue of self-surveillance from computer crimes, indecent exposure or ‘child grooming’, a common abuse comes up. The creation of the I.R.O.C.’s (The Institute for Responsible Online and Cell-Phone Communication) is “based on overwhelming public evidence that many individuals are not aware of the short and long term consequences of their own actions when utilizing our world’s rapidly evolving digital technologies irresponsibly.”1 They claim “if you knowingly or ignorantly utilize technology irresponsibly, your life can be altered in 0.1 seconds! Without a proactive understanding of how to use all current and future technology safely, responsibly, and with awareness, digital devices are nothing more than weapons of self destruction.”2 In Florida the law “Use of a Computer to Seduce a Child” makes doing so a felony “Authored by then State Senator Mark Foley, who as a Congressman authored the federal law against grooming and resigned from office due to allegations of grooming and sexual harassment of underage males.” 3
Publicly, people do not accept this behavior. The news is not equipped to talk about Chatroulette without shunning it. ”There’s a new place where creeps like to dwell, its called Chatroulette” said Katie Couric as part of a skit on The Daily Show with John Stewart. The reports in the mainstream news cannot help but spread propaganda that denies an image of sex anywhere in American culture. The other opportunities in Chatroulette can hardly be talked about without a forewarning to those maybe hearing it first. For parents the only method to protect your kids would be to block it or contact an agency to help you.
Some things about Chatroulette, however, should not be stopped. It is a beginning. Actually, a lot of the talk about it is that it will be bought out. Unlike a creation like craigslist it can morph. Chatroulette is a website that allows a version of free speech and free assembly by exploring the Internet’s lack of censorship. I have had web parties where my momentary partner and I dance to music together. Other people play music together, draw each other, talk about loneliness. Sure I watched someone from Paris jerk off and yelled at a racist college student who called my Haitian roommate a nigger, but its not all risque. Unlike playing video games with a camera on you, the partners entertain each other, unprescribed.
But ultimately we, and when I say we I mean everyone in the world, go predominantly for sex at the website’s current state. Chatroulette is gaining recognition, but is not the cultural resource it could be. That’s not to say that we aren’t evolved enough yet not to squander such a valuable opportunity for connectivity, however, some questions are raised by our wanton behavior in the face of progress: What is the potential of human culture with a digital arena? How can anonymity be 21 century? How can the format have ingredients added? Is Chatroulette a web app or a model for more specialized web apps?
From the same comedy skit with John Stewart, Keith Olberman called Chatroulette ”the surveillance state gone viral.”4 Possibly to be able to have conversation with a mass of individuals one on one immediately is 21 century. It reminds me of Damien Hirst’s book title I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always forever, now.
1. http://www.iroc2.org/page/about-the-institute-1
2. http://www.iroc2.org/page/office-of-the-cyber-general#.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_grooming
4. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-4-2010/tech-talch—chatroulette
This post was contributed by Cassidy Fry.
Monday was my birthday, so I thought for this week’s Sunday Video I would focus on a song by The Residents, a longtime experimental art collective/ rock band that tops my list of faves. But the song, Birthday Boy doesn’t have a real video (besides the fan videos on YouTube) and it’s really hard for me to pick just one video to sum up The Residents. However when I’m feeling lazy, probably next week, I’ll plop one down here for you to enjoy. In the meantime, in doing a search on YouTube for ‘residents’ and ‘birthday boy’, I came up with this gem of a slide show. After watching it and feeling a bit depressed about the first days of my adult years now that I’m thirty, this video reaffirmed my desire to die ‘with my boots on’.
Our Residents Birthday My good friend JohN!
The video is for John, a resident of an old folks home named Mimie’s House. It was his birthday and so the home celebrated. But an image at 0:15 (streaming time, not photo taken time) reveals the nurse responsible for picking up the cake didn’t even bother to have the grocery store bakery write “Happy Birthday John” in the space obviously left open for text on the cake. Maybe the nurse was in a hurry, because he/she totally forgot it was John’s birthday and only had a lunch break to pick up the cake, and the grocery store deli people were really busy cutting meat for other customers, and the nurse didn’t have time to grab a number and wait to be served. Once you get past the initial presentation of the cake to John much is revealed about being a resident in Mimie’s House. At 2:23 the lady on the front left seems to be thinking, “keep him away from my purse,” (a look repeated at 3:58) while the lady on the front right is hoping for a timely death. Thinking it may have just caught them at a bad angle, 2:35 shows that no in fact, she was praying for death in the previous photo. Some people try to put on a happy face in an otherwise miserable situation, but more often than not the images reveal the grim reality of these old folks’ lives. Most of them seem to say, “thanks a bunch for taking a picture of me at my worst,” particularly 3:46 where it is clear that for some time a smile has not graced the face being fed by the grinning nurse. And all of this is compounded by the ‘inspirational’ soundtrack which attempts to conceal the depressing truth. Man, this post took a really dark turn. Sorry about that. Happy Birthday to Me! and to John!
This post was contributed by Bob Snead.
2.20.2010 installation view. Image courtesy of the artists and Twenty Twenty Projects.
Interspersed within the perceptual mechanisms by which we account for tangible reality we humans are reputed to possess a number of latent faculties, their fruits often discredited as mere superstitions, which when developed can facilitate skills that open whole other worlds. Irrespective of conventional lore, peoples throughout history have always been moved to build monuments to things they don’t fully understand. This natural inclination to devote to and express that which we feel transcends or explains corporeal manifestations has been our common legacy. The fact that we have yet to attain ‘it’ fuels a faith that the answer is out there. And while the majority of us are distracted, lead from the path by our own puerile machinations, there are those who are still looking for a system, something other than “just this” that can be tapped into, still given to an obsession to find ‘the code’.
The current exhibition Twenty Twenty Projects, a collaborative effort between Daniel Newman and Matthew Schreiber, features a massive black box. Looming harmoniously from an angle discordant to the perimeter of its white cube setting, this imposing edifice would perhaps be sufficient as an impenetrable conundrum. However, much like its counterpoint, Bert Rodriguez’s 2008 Whitney Biennial contribution In The Beginning, this latest offering from Miami’s ever-snowballing ‘big cuboid movement’ also has a way in and happily an engaging, if not initially disorienting interior.
Upon entering the structure one is lead through a series of 180 degree turns to the viewing space. Once inside, engulfed in a befuddling, claustrophobic blackness, the glow of a screen and a reassuring sense of camaraderie among fellow viewers slowly bloom. It takes a few minutes for the eye to adjust, a process eventually made tiresome by occasional cell phone illuminations that, like snakes in the game ‘snakes and ladders’, blind you back to the beginning. When an uninterrupted ten minutes presents itself, which with any luck it does during the 40 minute film, a succession of grainy black and white images emerge silently from gloom. Blurred, cropped, and fractured, beyond any hope of positive identification, these vague forms – Chinese paper fortune tellers, crystals, snowflakes, pentagrams, concentric circles, and dancers – appear to materialize despite peripheral vision bleeding into an indecipherable, floating mass. Clattering one by one with giddy disability from the void into equally blinding light, viewers, upon regaining a familiar grasp on their environment, encapsulate their experiences as brief, somewhat unreal memories.
Matthew Schreiber’s “Mysterium Cosmigraphium,” a kinetic wall sculpture/performance in progress. Image courtesy of Matthew Schreiber.
Prior to 2.20.2010 the pair collaborated on a performance called Nocturne that recently took place in New York. 12 hours long (7pm til 7am) it involved choreography, glowing orbs and endurance and centered around a 17th Century (1603) book entitled Somnium (or Kepler’s Dream) by Johann Kepler, a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion – a laser wall relief based on his geometric model of the solar system is pictured above. Credited by writers such as Isaac Asimov as being the first ever work of science fiction, the book, which is incredibly rare, is only 30 pages long, but contains hundreds of pages of notes in appendices. The synopsis is that there is a witch that makes a potion in order to summon a warlock to transport a man to the moon through the shadow of an eclipse. Both Nocturne and 2.20.2010 are influenced heavily by the reappraisal of what darkness – shadows etc – can be.
Incorporating often overlooked, but culturally significant times – witching hours – the performance took place in almost complete darkness with dancers making waves with light. Like the video in 2.20.2010, Nocturne required a period of adjustment and like the book; the video conveys the making of the witches brew not only in content, but also because the bucket of chemicals assumed in the development of film acts as a metaphor. These works – Nocturne and 2.20.2010 – exist not just because the artists responsible for making them are exploring pseudo sciences, but because hither-to disregarded learning becoming increasingly practically applicable in the ‘real world’ – magnetism, sacred geometry, frequency and tone – not to mention the pull of fascination and the resulting inclination to devote one’s self to the discovery of unknown truth. With that in mind, these works and the very act of their creation become ritualized. Like Brakhage, whose interest in mythology, poetry and visual phenomena spurred him to reveal the universal in the particular by exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality and innocence, Newman and Schreiber have succeeded in framing the supernatural. And while unlike Brakhage, neither is particularly noted for his expressiveness, their current symphony is comparably lyrical.
For Newman the video follows a disjunctive tendency to explore the endless palate of black. This investigation began for the artist in 2000 when he made two quite different video works, UNTITLED (COMING SOON) and NIGHTLIGHT (FOR BRAKHAGE). Admittedly lacking the technical wherewithal and budget to complete an epic science fiction film the former became an unchanging shot of deep space black; the latter an early attempt at non-narrative structuralism. For Schreiber the element of darkness was a guiding light. Working with experimental film in grad school on a very Brakhage oriented program where he would shoot film, stick it in a bucket with chemicals, mix it up, rip the film to pieces, re-assemble it, optical print it, and then make holograms with it, lead to his current interest in the qualities of time based media and exposure. In 2.20.2010 these concerns are manifest in the manipulated video and the electro chemical process of adjustment by the retina comparable to the chemical development of film. Converging in 2.20.2010, these contrapuntal concerns of exploring blackness and extruding form from it became one. Rationalizing that 100% black is nearly impossible and that the aim was to show ‘something’ the pair arrived at a result similar to “rods vision”, a term used to describe the difficulty the eye has in focusing and identifying color in very low light conditions.
2.20.2010 installation view. Image courtesy of the artists and Twenty Twenty Projects.
The viewing room itself also consolidated a number of issues, specifically those pertaining to “video installation”. The necessity of viewing rooms and the manner in which they complete or compete with the work being screened is a matter of ongoing debate. Often artists and institutions improperly address the exhibition space, the content of the film and the manner of display. Sometimes an otherwise poor video is elevated to the level of installation simply by virtue of it being encased in a purpose built structure that actually serves no purpose at all. Other times props or set elements are included in the arena and in the case of the “film loop” even the projector itself often makes a cameo, although this does little other than satisfy a presumed need for novelty.
First and foremost in the case of 2.20.2010 there had to be a room. If not there would be no way to actually, physically see the video. Unlike a perfunctory screening room however, the 2.20.2010 box relates to the video, juxtaposing the loose, almost abstract nature of its editing with an austere, rigid aspect and color that offers another culturally associative layer. The parts then become a cohesive whole and unlike so many near attempts to bridge the gap between intellectual and physical experience, 2.20.2010, in contextualizing fascinating subject matter with an economical yet pointedly practical (yet still elegant) presence evokes everything one can reasonably hope for from a video installation.
And this is exactly the kind of thing we hope for from Twenty Twenty Projects. While other Miami gallery’s are exhibiting design, or in some cases nothing at all, it is reassuring to see the alternative space trading conventionally hung, framed-work for ambitious, immersive media [.]
For more information please visit: www.twentytwentyprojects.com
This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.
I was visiting New York City several months ago feeling like I had to cram in as much as possible since I only get to the city once or twice a year. On my last night in town I elected to go with some friends on a non-stop tour of every opening we could muster in Chelsea and by the end I could hardly stand up from all the free beer and wine. Everything from that night was pretty hazy until I stumbled upon this week’s Sunday Video. I remember walking into a stark gallery space with a lonely four foot tall potted ficus in the middle of the floor, and whispered to one of my friends, “great another bullshit concept piece.” But the gallery was serving Grolsch, so needless to say it was pretty packed out and we stuck around a while to down a few. At some point I started to hear a commotion from the middle of the gallery. I turned around in time to get a precarious view of the ficus with a steaming pile of shit in its soil and a man next to it pulling up his trousers. I only got a glimpse before my friends grabbed me to move on to the next opening. I never got the artist’s name, and to be honest I sort of forgot about it until now. I had no idea he was also doing public installations. Can anyone help me out with a name?
This post was contributed by Bob Snead.