Stanley Glacier, October 2011
You’ll be able to see this one at the Latitude 53 Parka Patio tomorrow night, and perhaps purchase a copy from its limited edition in the silent auction.
Adam Waldron-Blain is a famous artist in Edmonton. More »
Stanley Glacier, October 2011
You’ll be able to see this one at the Latitude 53 Parka Patio tomorrow night, and perhaps purchase a copy from its limited edition in the silent auction.
Fish strikes again
Gotta be honest, I’m not a fan of the Sh*t Edmontonains Say video. As many have already pointed out, it...
Key & Peele - Dungeons & Dragons
This was my favorite sketch to direct from last night’s episode. It guest stars Alex Fernie and...
I ________ the UK today
Oscar Peterson & Clark Terry “Mumbles”
Watch as Mr. Terry takes my mantra and puts it into song.
The Future Is Not What it Used to Be
March 1–April 7, 2012 at the Michael and Noemi Neidorff Gallery at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.
Curated by Amanda Mayo / work by Ansel Adams, Jeana Baumgardner, Edward Burtynsky, Sandy Carson, Erik Grow, Caleb Jagger, Todd Jagger, Adam Katseff, Leigh Anne Lester, Allie Mount, Kristin Musgnug, Scott Polach, Adam Waldron-Blain and Liz Ward.
The first time I wrote about Lana Del Rey, in a column, a few months back, I said I was pleased that when she invoked the name ‘Lolita’, she actually seemed to be talking about something like the character in the novel, and not whatever strange mincing porny thing people use that name to refer to today.
Now, having heard her song ‘Lolita’, I would like to apologize and mostly retract that. I wrote a review of her album for Vulture, findable here. I suppose the bullet points are as follows: It’s a so-so moody pop record that stumbles around a bit, and there are things about Del Rey’s attempt to pull off a persona that are campily interesting and/or poignant, and a lot of it reminds me of Showgirls. I have many more thoughts and feelings about related topic,* but I’m sure there’s more than enough to read about this artist at the moment, so I’ll save the bulk of them for another time.
Except for one thing. One novel I really adore is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s about two prisoners, in Argentina, sharing a cell: Molina’s there because he’s gay, and accused of corrupting a minor; Valentin’s there because he’s a leftist revolutionary. Through most of the novel, Molina is recounting to Valentin, from memory, the plots of films he loves. He has a keen memory for the sensual, glamorous, swooning side of them. One of the films he recounts is, essentially, a Nazi propaganda thriller, and he describes the things in it the way the film sees them — at some point, he’s describing all the beautiful, masculine German soldiers marching through Paris. This annoys Valentin, who challenges him on it. And Molina’s answer, as I remember it, is to just let the issue pass for a moment, and appreciate the type of beauty that this film, right or wrong, is trying to offer at that moment.
And that issue, the thing that’s contested between them at that moment, has more to do with ‘camp’ than laughing at things because you think they’re bad — to me, camp is always about seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed. It’s like a touchingly grand expression of a belief that has no worthwhile purchase on the world.
Nitsuh Abebe – Important Retraction / Note on Camp
This is relevant to everything.
(via towerofsleep)
Bootleg video from the Soirée by Domingo Castillo.
It has been a while since the Turner prize really enraged me. Only yesterday I was praising it. This art prize often used to make my blood boil. Then in 2009, I was on the Turner jury: I didn’t annoy myself at all. I worked hard to make sure that every decision the jury made was one I was happy with – especially the winner, Richard Wright. Then, last year, there was a kind of OK, slightly so-so shortlist, no disgrace to the Turner, yet nothing to arouse my passions either way. But this year I fell in love with the art of George Shaw, and to see him shortlisted for the Turner then cast down as an also-ran infuriates and, to be honest, disgusts me. I had forgotten how stupid the Turner prize can be.
It’s nice to know other people are upset about George Shaw being snubbed for the Turner Prize.
Jonathan Jones being on the jury for the 2009 prize also explains my psychic visions. Peas in a pod him and I.
Yo Martin, I’m really happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but George Shaw had one of the best paintings of all time!
With Performa having recently concluded and in the wake of the Marina Abramovic kerfuffle at the MOCA gala, I have been giving a lot of thought to the difference between visual art performance and contemporary performance – more specifically, Time-Based Art with its origins in dance and theater. This is an ongoing obsession of mine and one that I feel needs to be addressed critically. Thanks largely to RoseLee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on performance art, the visual arts world has “rediscovered” performance in an unprecedented way. Unlike RoseLee, it seems that many of the visual arts curators currently working to promote visual arts performance lack knowledge in contemporary performance, and I think this presents a problem, as well as a challenge.
Visual Art Performance vs. Contemporary Performance | Culturebot
Although this article is about dance– and theatre-based performance rather than music, this is what my work is about.
I think the writer has a bit of a blind spot that shows here:
From the artistic director I was told, “The visual arts world hates craft, they’re seeking ‘authenticity’,” suggesting that when a visual artist stages a performative event it should not have any degree of artifice, that it be perceived as “real”.
The director I spoke to said that the visual arts world, somewhat understandably, finds theater laughable and as a result rarely studies it. While I share the visual arts world’s distaste for popular theater predicated on “psychological realism”, I lament the fact that there are many, many devoted practitioners of contemporary performance who are as dramaturgically engaged in the construction of their time-based work as visual artists are in creating the intellectual framework around their object-based work, and that this is, apparently, not recognized or valued by the visual arts world. It is as if when visual artists and curators “discover performance” they think that they are the first to ever encounter the aesthetic issues it proposes. It would seem that they are frequently unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there is a long history of performance theory; that theater, and especially dance, have for many years explored issues around presence, embodiment, presentational aesthetics, the observed/observer relationship, the visual presentation of the constructed environment, the semiotics of representation, etc., etc.
And yes, thats exactly right—but Horowitz’s focus on craft in relationship to performance is too limited. His model for the two modes of performance is that visual artists are object-based and dramatic performances are experience-based, which is a useful over-simplification, fair enough, but not necessarily accurate, and there’s something strange about the way he talks about narrative forms and psychological drama etc. I think he’s misreading the distrust of craft in visual art—it’s not something confined to performance. In the comments someone suggests that “if I go out and make a painting and claim that it is somehow more authentic and real because, well, I don’t know how to paint—I’ll get laughed out of the room” but that is in fact categorically not true, and you can confirm that by going to any little show with paintings in it here in the UK (not so much back in Edmonton, or maybe elsewhere in Canada, but so much here).
Contemporary visual art has a very complicated relationship to craft, and just as I would say some of the best object work engages with that directly by creating a contradictory experience, the best performance work engages with it by being careful about creating a complicated experience of dramatic quality, and by very directly engaging some of the things Horowitz feels are so unfashionable, like narrative drama.
(I wanted to reblog this article from where I found it but it was a couple of days ago and I don’t remember, and couldn’t track it down. Sorry someone!)
15 years after it was coined, the term RA has perhaps saddled the art it purports to group together with unrealistic or inappropriate expectations. Ms. Smith may have put it best in her 2008 review of “theanyspacewhatever” when she wrote that “the claims by these artists and advocates that their work can help heal human relations and create a sense of community, any more than any other art does, are hard to prove.
The Fall of Relational Aesthetics,” Andrew Russeth for the New York Observer. (via jenlindblad)
About art that is sometimes good but associated with bad philosophy, with a touch of car-theft.
As we neared midnight, the rational American in me freaked out. You could feel many in the audience carefully counting the minutes down, anticipating the amazing conclusion. Then Icelandic time kicked in. Out of nowhere, at about 11:50 p.m. the conductor raised the orchestra to booming pitch and crescendo, stood on his chair, waved his arms wildly, imploring the singers to let loose. At the end of that aria, at ten to midnight, he ended the performance. Everyone went bananas, breaking into wild applause, raising glasses, cheering, shouting. People began rushing back from the lobby and the bathrooms, startled to have missed the finish. A backstage party followed for anyone who wanted to come. Suckling pig was served; wine flowed. As I left at 2 a.m., a bunch of the singers — including women from the great Icelandic band Mum — joined Ragnar and the lead tenor, locking arms and belting out Shubert lieder at full volume.
Wild is the Wind
I started a new band blog. All heartbreak all the time. http://nothingbutthehits.tumblr.com.
intentionally ‘broken’ or otherwise incomplete game systems can help support a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play. From a design perspective, the key to making these kinds of broken games work is to frame them in the right way. In this view, the practice of game design becomes less about crafting systems, and more about mood setting and instilling into the players the appropriate ‘spirit.’
…What distinguishes B.U.T.T.O.N., then, is that it is actively self-effacing. The game does invite physical and subversive play, hinting to and even telling the players that the terms of the game are up for debate. Thus, it is not just that the rules are ambiguous; it is that the game signals an acute self-awareness of this ambiguity. The game makes it clear that players are consenting to something different than when agreeing to play a more traditional digital game. It is then up to the players to negotiate what, exactly, they have consented to.
Game Studies - Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now: On Self-Effacing Games and Unachievements by Douglas Wilson
This is a very interesting essay to me. It talks about the same kinds of things I was dealing with in International Espionage, and Douglas Wilson’s term for ambiguous social rules, the “unachievement” is neat. I’m also seeing a nice simultenaity with this thread on The Forge, which entails a discussion about whether silliness and anachronism is actually a necessary element or necessary possibility in true “sandbox” play (we’re talking D&D now):
my experience as the GM of the White Sandbox is that the gonzo Acid Fantasy kitchen-sink approach…is indeed a necessary part of the method of sandbox play. When a player says “I want to be 23, a robot cleric who gets his spells from worshipping the Server, a vast computer at the center of the earth”, for me to say yes to this—the aesthetic decision that anything can potentially fit into the setting—is part and parcel of me saying yes to…the sandbox method that leaving the edges of everything undefined and having robust tools for creating what’s there procedurally provides infinite scope to handle player-driven exploration.
As a player in the Glantri campaign, when I’ve been allowed to name a cleric the Boss and have him inspire his own religion, the sandbox sings for me—even though the result is essentially silly, I enjoy taking it seriously, and the fact that it runs contrary to the tone of the game is part of the point: having GM Eric provide seriousness and drama is a necessary foil for our comic relief. When other players have been told that they can’t name a character Sosexia, this to me feels like my agency and scope of action in the sandbox is limited; there aren’t rails exactly, but now there are walls on the sandbox that will keep us from ever traveling to wherever Sosexia comes from and learning about a land where that’s a normal name.
This is the same issue: the game designer/referee deciding to step back from the enforcement of certain parts of the fiction, allowing the players to decide for themselves what is “rules” and what is simply background or shared cultural knowledge—something that a game like D&D, or International Espionage equally is built on: you know what the fantasy-medieval is, you know what spies do. Although Wilson presents the unachievement in opposition to the achievement (a digitally enforced, centrally recorded coding of “good play”) or the anti-achievement (a bizarre version of an achievement that rewards uncompetetive play), I think that this moment where the rules of the sandbox’s culture are broken is its real counterpart: the player makes a decision to not seek out the unachievement of staying within the unenforced parts of the rules—maybe even doing so in an attention-grabbing way.
On a somewhat related note I’m looking right now at putting something together for a memories-of-games-themed exhibition call, from my copious visual record of D&D at the Banff Centre. I don’t know how it looks right now, we’ll see. Galleries are weird. But I’ve got lots of unachievements and anti-unachievements to choose from.
