Another Night of Wild Sex

it's MAGIC every time it happens

...even if I am too lazy to get out the ol' tripod to better record it...

I wish you could smell it when it's peaking.

morning after

a slew of really boring criticism but one

Summer is almost over. The Venice Biennial has come and not yet gone. The art season is resuming. And like the fall harvest, art rags are coming off the presses once more containing reviews of Venice, this time, ‘09.

As it does every two years, Art Forum has enlisted contributors to review this latest version of the Grand Damme of biennials. This current slew of sedate and rather boring articles will certainly not engender the venomous, if fun to read from the boonies, exchange between critics of the last V biennial, some of which are art directors and curators with their own agenda, and its director Robert Storr. See original reviews of that biennial in the September 2007 issue and the letters (!) going back and forth between director and critics in the January and February issues of that same year. You’ll need to go to a library; interestingly enough, for a left leaning operation, Art Forum is rather proprietary and yanks their old articles from the net as soon as the month expires. I digress.

The exception to the rule of sedate writings about this year's Venice Biennial seems to be the review by Diedrich Diedrechsen. He actually gives those of us non-visitors who can’t afford to fly to Venice every two years an overview, and what’s more, an over-arching opinion of Making Worlds (a shortened version of the name of this year's extravaganza). In the process, he also evaluates key pieces in order to illustrate his more general points about the exhibit. Ma foi, honest to goodness criticism! Unlike Diedrechsen, most the other reviewers seem to concentrate on describing some of the works without giving us a feel for the whole.

What follows is one of my favorite paragraphs. You can link to some of the other reviews through http://artforum.com/inprint/; however, DD’s is not posted. To read his opinion, one has go to the library once more ...let’s hear it for the physical world of locomotion and of printing presses; maybe keeping us modern is ArtForum’s agenda after all...

Here goes:

Another dominant strategy that art shares with the culture industry is that of pseudoparticipation. This encompasses the so-called prosumer, or professional consumer, and partakes of the permanent animation of audiences on the Internet and in other consumer-culture contexts under the neoliberal regime of unfocused attention. With its remaindered Situationist vocabulary, pseudoparticipation often even considers itself the present-day continuation of radicality. What artists who make this kind of work completely fail to notice is that the apparently permanent collapse of the validity of forms is possibly the most important challenge facing contemporary art—the trick is knowing what doesn’t work anymore because it doesn’t mean the same thing or have the same effect it once did. In “Making Worlds”, the palest vestige of the pseudoparticipatory model is surely Miranda July’s outdoor installation Eleven Heavy Things 2009—nightmare of smirking cuteness; purgatory of putative lightness; apotheosis of harmlessness—which invites the audience to pose and to be photographed on top of pedestals with funny inscriptions. As someone near me astutely said, "Erwin Wurm for the even poorer.” But this same work was extolled by the press, evidentially because it successfully liquidates any difference between an artistic demand and the general program of entertainment. (ArtForum, September 2009, p.243)

God I love this guy!

part and parcel

Woke up this morning, got on my bike; and for the first time in months, it was cold. Well, most people would call it “lovely”: a dry cool sunny morning. But to me, it is just one of the many harbingers of winter, like the tired green color that the leaves acquire at this time of the year. That dark and leathery green reminiscent of so much tattooed skin one sees these days. I HATE WINTER. There, I’ve said it.

Another thing I hate is when people insist on telling me how nice it is to have season changes. They say it in a moralistic way that implies that those of us who would like nothing better than to live in an eternal summer are somehow lacking in moral fiber. I could give a fuck about season changes. Well, from an ecological point of view, I understand that life on earth would not be possible if there were no season changes, they’re part and parcel of how this planet functions; but that “don’t” mean I have to like it.

If I could move my life (not my “body”, my “life”) to the Tropics, I would do it in a New York minute. Unfortunately, my life also seems to be part and parcel of this so called “moderate climate” environment. ...Time to find my fucking sweaters and start wearing pants... ugh

same old same old

President Obama meets John Roos (left), U.S. ambassador to Japan, in the Oval Office at the White House on Aug. 6. Roos is a Silicon Valley lawyer who had not been to Japan before his appointment — and who raised money for Obama's presidential campaign.

Surprise surprise: Obama is a big fat liar.

Worse, I fear he really is much more of a nothing: he promised a bunch of cool stuff to get elected to an office where he thought he could just sit back and tell people what to do. He figured others would do the dirty work while he continued to bask in the limelight of adoration. I guess that's what community organizing is all about....

Well, other than hackling the congress into coming up with a health care plan that is even worse than the system we currently have (though now he seems to have come up with some bad ideas of his own to hackle them with); he has not done much of what he promised: no move on gay issues, and no move on not kissing the asses of big donors -> Hey, it's whoring (gay and straight) as usual in Washington...

what else? tattoos again

I know I’ve waxed "poetic" about tattoos tw ice already on these “pages”. This time: again tattoos, but no more poetry. I’m sick and tired of looking at way too many, what looks like, green ink smudges on people: ugly people, pretty people, little people, tall people, big ol’ fat fucking people. When something becomes this ubiquitous it starts losing any and all meaning.

Although it received an average of only a 2 to 3 star rating on internet reviews, I thought John Irving’s Until I Find You was a beautiful book using the obliteration of a person through tattooing as the centerpiece of its narrative. Yeah, the end, as with most of his novels, is indeed weak; but one does not read John Irving for his endings. The book was art and imbued each tattoo etched on the skin of one of the central figures with meaning. What I see out there is just a lot of ugly crap.

That’s what bugs me the most; the undifferentiated horror vacui of it all. The complete lack of breathing space; and when there is space, the complete disregard for composition, placement, or beauty. The whole thing is starting to offend me from an aesthetic, as well as, from a symbolic point of view. I am feeling claustrophobic, drowning in sea of "green" ink on flesh, with none of it looking any different from the rest. It’s just too easy to get tattoos these days; and obviously too easy to become a tattoo “arteest”.

I wonder if in the future (assuming there is such an animal) some archeologist, excavating the earth looking for signs of early 21^st century Homo (certainly not) Sapiens Westernensis, won't find us by searching for heavy metals in the soil where our bodies were buried. At least all this ugly crap will have a purpose, if only as subject matter for some kid's PHD thesis on soil analysis.

A Man I can Understand

I tend to avoid parties because I can't think of any small talk to make.

-Richard Rorty-

Obama's Plan

Subject: Failsafe Plan

Let me get this straight.

We're going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose

head says he doesn't understand it,

passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it,

signed by a president that also hasn't read it and who smokes,

with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes,

overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and

financed by a country that's nearly broke.

What could possibly go wrong?