Cool, Spider-man

This was originally posted as a comment to Brian's post.



So we all recognize this, right? It's not a person. It's an idea. Spider-man and the symbol that represents him has a specific meaning that brings up specific thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc. to various people that are more or less the same to different degrees of severity.* What's interesting to me is whether or not it's useful to employ these symbols. If people already know what a thing is and more-or-less what it means, to what end is one using it? Certainly it can't be argued that something "new" is being presented.

When I painted Spider-man (all of a few months ago) I was under the impression that I was "bringing something new" to the table by painting a well known thing in my "style" or with my "attitude" or whatever. Horse apples.

A former friend of mine also painted Spider-man and a few other super heroes and his paintings really bothered me to the point of disgust. It couldn't be the symbol (the character) or comics that I don't like in his work, I told myself. I didn't like the way it was painted, either; but, why was it OK for me to paint Spider-man and not for him? It boils down to the fact that I like my style and not his. Adding to an unliked style someone else's character/symbol that is already understood by millions of people on Earth (nothing "new") leads to something that seems superficial/bad.

bad + not new = bad.

good + not new = ??? (I'm going to guess "mediocre")

You see the problem. Now I make no claim to a universal law on what is OK and isn't OK but personally it's kind of ended up as this: comic books are amazing as they are, in comic books, as pop movies, basically as pop. Pop and art, as far as I'm concerned, aren't one in the same. Art can borrow and comment on and be inspired by pop but once it's pop it ceases to be art. This is why it's hard to make a "Batman painting" or a work with Spider-man in it. You see Batman or Spider-man first. Your mind isn't allowed the "going in" because it's just "Batman!" followed by however you feel about Batman.

It's probably a finer or blurrier line than I'm leading onto. The best thing is that none of it really matters because it is all what you want it to be, but in the spirit of a spirited discussion I'm chiming in on how it is for me. Art is deeper than pop. Even Warhol wasn't really pop (not all of the time). He was more of an influenced-by-pop artist.

When I saw the image from Brian's post I thought "cool, Spider-man" and then everything I think/feel about Spider-man. Then I read that it made Brian think about my super hero masked people paintings and I thought "yes! I have figured out why those paintings bothered me!" They are an attempt to for my style(s) and its attributes on something I think is cool that is already stylized. It's putting a glaze onto something that isn't mine. When I was a kid I believed in Santa Claus and maybe, just maybe, that Batman was real. Maybe then I could've done good Batman paintings because I was convinced of his existing in the flesh. I'm interested in how these pop-things express for us the "cool" and the "magical". Art does that, too, but in a different way that maybe I'll get into in another post.

Adding one's art or style to a comic book character ends up being superficial, a glaze, and piggy backs on the unavoidable "cool, Spider-man" reaction. Figuring this out has made my day.


*a lay person may think "Spider-man's a good guy" while a comic geek could think "Spider-man's the best comic hero ever" while I think "Spider-man's a good guy but he's kind of lame in all the ways that I consider myself lame and because of this identification I don't really like him that much".

are we going to shana moulton people?

yes or no

Artists Anonymous

Hey people. I saw this image that compelled me and reminded me of Matt Jones paintings of people in superhero masks. Apparently the image on the left is a painting and the image on the right is a C-Print.

These works are by "Artists Anonymous" and the show is up in Zurich at Haunch of Venison right now.
Anyone going to Switzerland any time soon?

Here's a link to the show on the website.

SHANA MOULTON!!!

There's an opening/performance by Shana Moulton on Monday, January 21.
Get excited people. She's great.
The opening is 6-8pm and the performance is at 7:30pm. It's at 1182 Broadway, Suite 1602 (which is between 28th and 29th) - take R to 28th st.

A video of hers can be found at http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yb5yhRD5cKc

more info:

SHANA MOULTON

SAND SAGA

OPENING RECEPTION MONDAY JANUARY 21, 6 – 8 PM

LIVE PERFORMANCE 7.30 PM

EXHIBITION JANUARY 21 - FEBRUARY 16 2008

New York based Video and Performance artist SHANA MOULTON invented a genuine
feminist aesthetic after postmodernism: the creative language of hopeless but touching
dysfunctionality, characterized by elegiacally desperate urgencies and escapist worlds of
petty pop refuge, driven by a radically mediated esprit of liberation.

In a continuing series of films SHANA MOULTON creates her notorious alter ego 'Cynthia', a
highly discouraged woman, in a red wig, (reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's mildly disturbing
impersonations), who fails to face the conditions and challenges of a contemporary
everyday life. Tortured by the tristesse of her social isolation and personal idiosyncrasies,
she develops a bizarre agency, leading her to find temporary release in a parallel universe
of companionship, inhibited by artistic idols (such as Piet Mondrian and Georgia O'Keeffe)
and pop cultural creatures.

The 'neon' color temperature and studio realism of amateurish interiors in MOULTON's
films recall the early video art aesthetics of the late 70s/early 80s. She works consciously in
regard to influences such as Maya Deren, Michael Smith and Eleanor Antin.

In her performances SHANA MOULTON acts as an integral part of the video projection. In a
recent live performance at Gimpel Fils (London) and Electronic Arts Intermix (NY) the artist
came out to the audience in white overalls on which the projection reflected. She became
part of the video and started to dance with the creatures of her own filmic imagination.

Born in California in 1976, SHANA MOULTON studied at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon in
Pittsburgh and attended the "De Ateliers" program in Amsterdam.. She had recent solo
shows at Gimpel Fils (London 2007) and Bellwether (NY 2007). Her films were screened at
various international festivals and she held live performances at The Andy Warhol Museum
(2004), at Electronic Arts Intermix (NY 2007) and in many international venues.

I am rebuilding this piece . . .

from scratch. Found all the parts on ebay. The original was never returned by an Italian art dealer. Go figure. I'm much wiser now.
Mattingly is expected, at earliest, to be out on the date of the release of "Cloverfield". Perfect timing. Thus her old nickname, given by yours truly, TIAMAT, seems about right. Tearin' up shit in her cool Mattingly way. That flick is about the best thing I've seen for pure entertainment movie type thing. Not to mention all the fuckups running amok. Awesome. What would be great is if Matt J would be there and in the middle of the carnage says "hey. should we get sandwiches?" Will see it friday or this weekend. A longish preview at this site: http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/12/lengthy-cloverf.html#previouspost
Checked out a blog on it -- possible tie in to a manga story about a kid who is linked to the monster. God, I love monsters. Why can't they be real? Or, they are -- just waiting to surface.
Josh -- got your note about show. will be there this time depending on the time of my return from first day on LI teaching punks.

Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr

Buy, borrow, steal this book, read it. It's reverse propaganda/brainwashing. It amends the "moping" and helps you realize that you don't want to smoke, etc., etc. It's a fucking good book and it's helping me a bunch.

Love,
Matt

send your best to Mary

She's in the hospital. But seems to be doing well.

Week of Jan 21 meeting?

Is there a meeting Jan 21?

Was there a meeting this week (Jan 14)?

Matt

BD DM 10000

What do you all think of this amazingness?

it's an event.

Matt and I are going to this - it's Friday at 7pm at the New Museum. 8 bucks!
It's video/animation/musci -Wizardzz (member of Lightening Bolt plus another dude).

Continuing Education for Dead Adults

$8 General Public

Three multimedia performances riff off youth culture and adolescent education. East Coast collective Paper Rad will premiere two videos: the twenty-minute "Problem Solvers" (2008), and a three-minute short, "crank dat spongebob batman dropdead robocop" (2008). New York-based artist Ben Coonley will present a new fifteen-minute performance, "Kindred Spirits is the Working Title," and the Providence-based experimental band Wizardzz will perform in front of a mesmeric animated tapestry composed of images taken from the Web.

My Brightest Diamond

I like this video.
It's an acapella version of a Nina Simone song
by My Brightest Diamond (her name's Shana something).

response to Steph about Kara Walker

I saw the Kara Walker show with Matt J. I took my time and watched films, read text, inspected paintings and drawings. I think that a good quality to her work is that it requires or mandates that you spend time with it for a while. Saying that Walker's work is charged is both an understatement and oversimplifying the matter. I think that her work offends me at first, and then as I spend time with it, it offends me more deeply and in a more complicated way. When I say "it offends" I mean that it never allows me rest easy and I find my self laughing at things that are horrifying.
Kara Walker doesn't get along with feminists very well and I bet there are lots of African American artists who don't like what she is doing. I think that she is not one-dimensional, but rather she employs and combines modes of artmaking that are one-dimensional to create blurry often contradictory and very messy pictures of race, gender and sexuality. I see this kind of work as necessary in a country which has been dominated by political authorities that want to perpetuate their power and this war by polarizing debate in black and white terms and playing on the fear of the people.
Vote people.

I can't attend or post good books . . .

unless I figure it out. or one of you tells me. I seems like it should it be far more intuitive (i.e. easy) unless I missed something. Of course one of you may have covered the what for in an email. Please post here so I can do what must be done. thanks.

last night's play reading

first: check this:

Between 1993 and 1997 the researchers questioned 20,000 healthy British men and women about their lifestyles. They also tested every participant's blood to measure vitamin C intake, an indicator of how much fruit and vegetables people ate.

Then they assigned the participants -- aged 45-79 -- a score of between 0 and 4, giving one point for each of the healthy behaviors.

After allowing for age and other factors that could affect the likelihood of dying, the researchers determined people with a score of 0 were four times as likely to have died, particularly from cardiovascular disease.

The researchers, who tracked deaths among the participants until 2006, also said a person with a health score of 0 had the same risk of dying as someone with a health score of 4 who was 14 years older.

The lifestyle change with the biggest benefit was giving up smoking, which led to an 80 percent improvement in health, the study found. This was followed by eating fruits and vegetables.

Moderate drinking and keeping active brought the same benefits, Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues at the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council said.

"Armed with this information, public-health officials should now be in a better position to encourage behavior changes likely to improve the health of middle-aged and older people," the researchers wrote.

NOW my play reading comment: I'd like to discuss this a bit at the next roundtable. By then I'll fill you in with the gist of what it was about. I think it will make for some Art discussion due to the nature of the play (it had some good performance overtones, but other things I think were a bit off.)

Jesus. And that is a prayer.

See my email. I swear, David, that I will be leaving the MMA after March. If you saw my email I used it as a way to blow off steam. Seems like there really are no cool people working here.

Anyway, I have to attend my friends play reading -- it better be good. BUT I hear Steph has something planned for Wednesday? I'm down with anything. Lemme know.

I hope all was well with everyone over the holidays. I am gearing up for the best year of my life. yeah, I know. We'll see about that . . .

Monday meeting

I can meet Monday if other people can.

walker at the whitney

I got to the show with only an hour of it left.  In the past, like I said before, I've felt mostly nothing when I've been to shows of hers; it didn't make me go one way or the other.  At moments it was beautiful or terrible or made me think.  But mostly I could just shrug my shoulders cause if there was something more there I didn't really get it.  She's so angry, and race is a huge complicated issue, but still, I couldn't connect with her specific anger because it didn't really feel personal to her, to me (that one-dimensionality I think Matt spoke of.) Basically, I suppose I mostly felt like she had her shtick and that part bored me right away, of course.  

All that aside, I did wish they hadn't kicked me out of the show yesterday.  I would have like to go through the whole floor.  I felt more open (maybe this was only because I know you had a change of heart, Matt, and that influenced me? not sure).  I can't say that I loved the show, or even liked it, but everything seemed to be more open and softer, maybe?    She's so angry, but somehow I was more tolerant of that this time around.   Or maybe it is that she changed something, however minuscule,  and brought people into her world in a better way?  What are your thoughts, Matt?  Anybody else see the show?

~steph

Kara Walker

Happy New Year!

Quick question: Has anyone seen the Kara Walker show at the Whitney?

It is to be taken down on February 12th (I think).

I've seen it three times and am anxious to hear what anyone has to say about her work. In the past I was a bit anti-Walker's work as I thought it was a bit one dimensional. I have since then had a bit of a revelation and deem it highly meaningful. So it is written, so it is said.

Hugs not drugs,
Matt