BigShinyThing

Evan Calder Williams talks of salvagepunk — “a return to the repressed idiosyncrasy of outmoded things”.

By (sic) opposition to postmodern pastiche, in which any sign can be juxtaposed with any other in a friction-free space, salvagepunk retains the specificity of cultural objects, even as it bolts them together into new assemblages. That’s precisely because salvagepunk is dealing with objects rather than signs
— Mark Fisher: Desecration Row, in The Wire 319, page 46

The Wire magazine, ear to the grounds of crit-think and artistic practice both, has astutely flagged salvagepunk as informing a breaking musical microtrend (works incorporating elements of Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red are cited amongst the examples).

We predict that salvagepunk will break out of this music context, to become a key aesthetic for a new stage of post-postmodernism. The affordances of the internet will enable this to happen. That the first works informed by salvagepunk are musical is, we conject, due to music’s status as the popular art form access to the historical corpus of which has been most transformed by the internet. Other media, particularly time-based, will follow.

Here’s our thinking.

Kenny Goldsmith wrote of nude media — digitised content stripped of context. But: a denuded copy of a familiar song gives itself away by the patina of experience we individually and collectively attach to its content; still evokes time and place; is loaded with signs, a wingful of eyes.

For nude media to become amenable to salvage, there’s a harsher stripping-bare to be undertaken than that of which Goldsmith writes, subsequent to which salvage operations proper can begin — the calcination and burning off of, or turning-aside-from all signification, to locate the object as object, song as sound, form not even form, but shape.

Time can serve that function — the glories of the forgotten whitelabel in the dusty crate at Dalston Oxfam testify to that; but cultural Time is driven by the fidget wheels of Progress. There’s a gradient to cultural Time; the suck towards that compressive depth into which most of everything made, sinks, lost to salvage deep under the midden-heap of consumer culture disjecta.

The internet not only flattens that gradient, thus making findable nude media from everywhen; but often presents such already de-signified and in gorgeously ambiguous contextual conjunction.

If postmodernist aesthetics led to “everything the second time around, without the innocence“, salvagepunk perhaps points to the field of possibilities opened up to those who avail themselves of internet-mediated access to “everything around, still, forever, without the memories“. Not an overloaded gluing-together of the familiar, but a reconsideration of the utility for assemblages of everything — of a kind which can only be possible when everything is always to hand.

To our ears, cosmic disco god Daniele Baldelli’s 80s mixtapes are exemplars of proto-salvagepunk. Hunt them down online (not too hard a task), lean back and enjoy the sounds of his Opera Salvage.

Here at BST we have a ‘kid test’. If kids immediately ‘get’ a piece of interactive art and are engaged with it, then that’s a clear indicator of the effectiveness of the piece. Of course, all art is subjective, but interactive and new media art in particular can suffer from a degree of convolution and — to be frank — irrelevance. The kid test filters a lot of that out. One parent was overheard patiently explaining to their daughter that ‘not everything moves’, but if the art fair is called ‘Kinetica’ that’s a fair expectation.

There are lots of pieces which pass the kid test at this year’s Kinetica art fair at P3 in Marylebone. Special props go to Squidsoup‘s Ocean of Light, a startlingly beautiful ‘dynamic light sculpture’ that reacts to music. We can see all kinds of amazing artistic and commercial applications for this piece, not least in live performance. Bjork, get in touch! Cinimod Studio‘s Flutter which produces a rabble of virtual butterflies is also charming and effective — a real example of how digital art can be humanised. On the more Dorkbot-esque side of things, Monomatic’s P.E.A.L. replicates bell ringing with tubes of light, lasers and a iPhone remote (note, expect to see A LOT more iPhone remote controlled applications).

The fair also has some neat examples of first generation hacker art, such as Miss Rosa Bosom, a robot created by Bruce Lacey which won the Alternative Miss World in 1985 and SAM, a sound reactive cybernetic sculpture from 1968 by the late Edward Ihnatowicz. As an argument for the continued importance and relevance of digital and electronic art (are you listening, ICA?), Kinetica 2010 makes a pretty compelling case.

Face On is an interactive art installation incorporating a 3D face powered by a 10,000 lumen projector, bespoke 3D graphics and video content combined with laser sensors. As a piece of public art, the installation dramatically raises the stakes of what can be done with projector technology as well as providing a new surface for artists to work on.

The installation is the product of Hear Colours who worked with a number of different artists to produce the work. We spoke to one of them, avant garde artist Patrycja Grimm.

BST: How did your involvement in Face On come about?

PATRYCJA: I got involved in the project through a friend who recommended me as I was often in an audio visual environment and would wear colourful faces and costumes on a daily basis.

I use my face as an alternative surface on which to paint; I experiment with colors, shapes, decorative writing and tagging the skin. Through this I’m looking for a more graphical way of reflecting my own personal being away from the traditional use of beauty make up.

As I grew more experienced I found people’s response to my self-expressed exhibition very positive, and this soon lead me to be invited into professional collaborations like the Face On project with Nicola Romanini.

What are your ambitions for the project?

The aim was to create animation with expandin face-paintings and also capture facial expressions to use as samples for each of the sensors that the public will activate. With Nic’s agreement my proposal was to implement tribal designs from Kabuki, the Congo, Kathakali, and Papua New Guinea — as these are disappearing arts, along with more contemporary face-paints — such as clowns, pierrot, and some modifications with free-styling. It was a great opportunity to combine my need to paint with video art and interactive installation.

With these designs I wanted to reflect the subjects impression, aura, as well as their natural qualities and energies.

The project is visually stunning, but what — other than spectacle — do you hope people will take away from it?

From my personal point of view, I think Face On has good potential for interactivity which brings about a great joy of discovery.

As well as making people perform, The Mask brings a relaxed confidence about their own image which can now be used as a canvas for a visual game and hopefully reflection on our appearance in the era of absolute conformism.

Face On will be at the Glastonbury Festival 26-28th June and Glade Festival 16-19th July.

Just a reminder that BST‘s Anne-Fay is featured in King Adz‘s upcoming book, published by Thames and Hudson. The launch party is at Cargo on October 9. Come down and say hello.

[BST-exclusive image by Adz]

Nagi Noda was maybe best known for her “Sentimental Journey” video for Japanese pop star Yuki, which featured multiple “analog” clones of the singer and influenced Jack White’s 2006 Coca-Cola commercial. Noda’s body of work included short films, sculpture and even character art like Hanpanda, the half panda/half other beast who appeared in her art exhibits and was also part of a collaboration with L.A./N.Y. fashion brand Libertine. Last year, she collaborated with painter Mark Ryden on her own fashion label Broken Label. Her most recent creations included delightfully strange hairpieces in the shapes of various breeds of dog.

“Beyond being a brilliant artist and wonderful talent, Nagi was one of the most incredibly unique spirits that I have known,” says Sheila Stepanek, CEO/EP Partizan US, which represented Noda. “Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends.” Stepanek says that Noda passed “in her Mark Ryden dress, Chanel boots, perfect make-up with Viktor & Rolf lace black eye lashes.”

Source: Creativity Online.

For the past few months, the river-facing façade of Tate Modern on Bankside has featured ‘street art’ works by Blu from Bologna, Italy; the artist collective Faile from New York, USA; JR from Paris, France; Nunca and Os Gêmeos, both from São Paulo, Brazil and Sixeart from Barcelona, Spain.

But what goes up, must come down, and today was the day for cleaning specialists Grafitti Busters to bring in their cherry pickers and hoses to strip it all away. Strangely, Tate hadn’t worked up the same frenzy of PR around this event as they did for the launch, but we were there to record the moment anyways. First to go was JR’s signature blow-up of a black guy wielding a weapon video camera. We arrived a bit later, to catch them tentatively starting to strip down Faile’s comic-book Native American superhero (above): give it a couple of days and all will be pre-post-modern business as usual at the Tate.

Get down there early tomorrow if you want to catch that familiar London street-scene — high-pressure art removal — on the grandest scale.

More pix on Flickr.

[Photo ©2008 Darrell Berry]

As part of its California Video exhibition, The Getty launched a website called Video Revolutionaries. This website invited the public to upload their own video art inspired by the works of the artists in California Video collection. In spite of this request for work influenced by many of the outrageous and transgressive artists in the show, the website also lists criteria that the public’s videos must abide by. A list of rules and regulations imposes traditional censorship upon the applicants. The site then also gives the public rules on how they can interact with the videos on the website.

The “Video Revolutionaries” website states that all video posts will be reviewed by the Getty and deemed acceptable before being posted to the Video Revolutionaries website. It further explicitly forbids sexually explicit material, certain kinds of violence, and the use of any sort of automated voting methods. So much for artistic freedom.

Now, there’s nothing like a little bit of censorship to provoke the online anarchists. Hence a collective known as The Infinity Lab took it upon themselves to produce a number of very silly videos for the site which they then pumped to the top of the ‘most viewed’ list. They pretty much own this section of the site now. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would be proud. Small act of subversion? Yes. But also a reminder (as if one were needed) that the Internet remains an anarchic space. And one which brands and institutions should still engage with carefully.
Getty’s site rather archaically doesn’t allow their video to be easily embedded elsewhere, so you’ll need to click here to view the currently-top-rated content.

Via Nettime.

If anyone asks me why I live in London, I always say, “For the culture, darling, for the culture”. Unfortunately my life usually revolves around working till I drop occasionally punctuated by wine fuelled loiterings in a pub. Recently, however, I managed to spend a couple of weeks soaking up culture enough to last a year.

Wagner was the major motif for this cultural overdose, with the added bonus of a visit from Father and Sister – long overdue and acting as the catalyst for the other events. Although the trip was organised a year in advance I made the significant sacrifice of giving them the two tickets allocated my “Friend of Covent Garden” status. With hawk-like concentration and swooping tactics I managed to get returns for all performances except the all important Walkyrie featuring Domingo as Siegmund. Undaunted, I queued for hours outside the ROH for the privilege of a daily return. (Note to anyone who queues for day return tickets: If the person in front of you asks if it’s okay for her friend to join her in the queue the answer is No. However, Karma made a brief visit and allocated me the next return two minutes after they got the last of the day release tickets – and a much better seat it was too. Ha!)

As an opera lover, I am amazed at how infrequently I manage to get myself to the ROH or ENO. Perhaps it’s a bit extreme to do no opera for 7 years and then cram 20 hours into 1 week – and since I thought I’d not be able to get tickets for the performance I also went to the rehearsals. Mmmm. 40 hours of opera in the space of 3 weeks. But absolutely worth it. Not for the fainthearted, what with all the naked rhinemaidens and incest, but a glorious celebration of some of the world’s most debated music. And the lights. My god the lights.

Not sufficiently sated with this mammoth Wagner-fest, I felt honour bound to offer my family an insight into all this culture I supposedly drown myself in on a regular basis. We went walking in Kew Gardens and admired the Henry Moore. I can recommend this to anyone as a fantastic day out – and if you arrive by 11:40 sign yourself onto the free guided tour.

We followed this up with a performance by Einaudi and Friends – and my, what friends he has. A real treat to hear Ballake Sissoko on the kora, and Djivan Gasparyan on the diduk.

All fired up with the washes of emotive sounds from one of the leading minimilists of our time, we hotfooted over to the Barbican for a little Sibelius. Nothing like Sibelius to rouse the blood. Throw in an entirely unexpected debut performance of Saarioho’s Quatro Instants with an inspired rendition by Karita Mattila and you have an evening of glorious culture which deserves extended wallowing.

And in amongst all this opera, symphony and art? Trundling over to nearby Peckham to attend the “Fall into Place” art event: an unexpected experience I am convinced could only happen in London. Housed in an unassuming terraced house on a quiet residential street accessed through the ground floor window, this innovative celebration of art and music was great fun. Unfortunately, I timed it badly to coincide with a non-musical half hour, but after a slightly ungainly entrance, and possibly more literal interpretation of falling into place than was wise, I had a jolly wander through the rooms. I particularly liked Alice White’s portraits in the main room, and the bathroom decorations.

All in all, a couple of weeks to remember. I live in London for the culture you know, darling.

Thus far, SL’s excitement eludes us. Which, on reflection, is maybe a bit unfair: SL is a platform (albeit a creaky, laggy, jaggy one). It’s really up to the inworld community to use it to make engaging spaces. Any number of artists are using SL as an environment for their work. But, as very very occasional visitors inworld, we only find out about their stuff when it surfaces on our lists and feeds: we’re simply not engaged enough with SL itself to track what’s going on there.

So props to the Australia’s d/Lux/MediaArts and their SL project, the d/Lux Pony Club:

[...] a new initiative developed by d/Lux/MediaArts to encourage arts practice and critical dialogue in Second Life. Participants are encouraged to climb aboard one of our uniquely designed magic ponies from a meeting point. From there you will be taken on a teleportation trail ride through galleries, installations and interesting new communities in SL.

As we see it, the Pony Club performs an editorial/curatorial role: choosing the best bits of SL-based art and facilitating access to those, like ourselves, who are outsiders to the SL ‘scene’ (much like those art tours of London’s East End galleries, which we’ve always found vaguely amusing in their assumption that ‘it’s all a ghetto out there’). And those ponies are cute. Kinda.

We missed the last tour, and are kicking ourselves for the lapse: word is that there was much fun to be had, and some genuinely interesting SL art to be seen on the way. Keep an eye on the d/Lux blog for future events.

We tripped along to the Surrealist Ball at the Victoria and Albert Museum last night where lots of people had made a Big Effort to dress up — as is the way in London nowadays. With thanks to the people we photographed who patiently waited for us to work out how to use the camera.

Late last year we noted how similar some ads for a Chinese Italian restaurant chain were to the photography of Jill Greenbergh. At the time we noted that while Greenbergh’s work had caused controversy in the UK, similar images were being used to sell pasta in China. We never thought that the agency would be foolish enough to have not actually asked permission, or — if they hadn’t — that they thought that they could get away with such blatantly copycat work. Shanghaist now kindly alerts us to the fact Greenberg was neither involved nor was she asked permission.

According to Photo District News — which has reported on the story independently from us:

The O&M ad, credited to art director Ng Fan and photographer Connie Hong, according to the site AdsoftheWorld.com, shows a 2- or 3-year-old girl with angel wings, apparently distraught because a strip of hair has been shaved off her head. The ad’s tagline says, “Freshly made angel hair” (a reference to the pasta served by the restaurant). The photograph strongly resembles not only Greenberg’s “End Times” concept, but her shooting style. The images from Greenberg’s exhibit were widely published and reprinted both online and in print, and can be found on her web site.

Pursuing a copyright infringement claim in China can be expensive and difficult. Even if Greenberg pursued legal action, “she would probably have a difficult time making a case,” opines intellectual property attorney Nancy Wolff. Wolff explains that subject matter—in this case, crying children—is not protected by US copyright law, at least. And the ad may not be similar enough to any particular image by Greenberg to meet the threshold for infringement, even though it evokes Greenberg’s style. “Style is not something you can easily protect in terms of copyright,” Wolff says.

Greenberg declined to comment on this story.
Responding to an e-mail request for an interview, Michael Lee, managing director of O&M Advertising in Shanghai, said that the agency is “working with Jill for a solution.”

In our hyper-networked times, why do ad agencies think they can get away with this? There are even websites entirely dedicated to spotting when commercial interests rip off independent artists: check out You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice. Note to agencies: you will get found out.

Clearly a lurid palette helps you live longer. The artist adored by 1970s households and kitsch revivalists died on 26th August. In his prime, the painter of that curiously green Chinese Girl was the wealthiest artist in the world after Picasso — despite being at the opposite end of the market.

His garish colours matched exactly the fixtures and fittings of the average 1970s household (avocado bath tubs anyone?) but Tretchikoff defended his somewhat startling representations of women saying,

If I wanted to convey ideas through my paintings, why should I obscure the subject?

During the revival in interest in his work in the 1990s, Tretchikoff maintained his poise as a serious painter and refused to allow one of his paintings to adorn the cover of a book on kitsch. His work, he maintained, was symbolic realism. His adopted homeland of South Africa begged to differ. The National Gallery in Cape Town has never deigned to purchase an original Tretchikoff on the grounds that “he is not really regarded as a South African artist”.