POPmusicART

In all my years of art school, there has never been a shortage of weird looks when I put in the new Britney Spears record, or the Kylie Minogue album-the very day it came out. In art school Justin Timberlake isn’t quite as highly revered as the Decemberists, or Hendrix. My art always employed pop-y, shiny, brightly colored consumer products, but I’ve avoided placing the bubble gum slice of culture known as pop music into my art. At least, that is, until now: pop music has infiltrated my art.

I’ve always been shameless about raiding my memory banks, using kitschy objects such as pencils, matches, candy or shopping carts in my art. Yes, as objects these things are memorable; but these things are around us everyday. Would I remember something like a shopping cart if it were only popular for 2 months in 1994?(*) Why is it I am able to recall Snow’s Informer, Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You and Kriss Kross’ I Missed the Bus, or U2’s With or Without You (**) with ease, yet I have trouble remembering what I ate for dinner last night. Pop music, like celebrity is hardly timeless, on the play list today, gone tomorrow. Why am I able to recall the first time I heard Michael Jackson’s Bad: on a family trip to Canada (or it being introduced by an over-zealous DJ on 93Q… today’s hit music.)

How could I work these ever-resonant songs into my art? I decided to make a composite soundtrack, “an auditory history of my life as an American.” I took the top hit from each year, beginning with the year of my birth, 1981, and plucked from it, a memorable portion of the chorus. I then layered the clips into 3 tracks, so each song had 2 other songs competing for the listener’s ears. The resulting sound was dissonant and obtrusive; not necessarily my intention. My initially clear objective in the piece became muddled. People generally didn’t like the piece, it needed to be clarified; and there needed to be a better solution.

In search of that better solution I began to search for similarities in song titles: it turns out that themes and common lines from choruses appear again and again. First off “love” is everywhere: just look at a few no.1 hits: in 1982 Lionel Ritchie crooned Endless Love, while ten years later Whitney Houston was belted out I Will Love You. Eternal love isn’t the only option, of course: for instance 1987, 2 singers had hits entitled Is This Love (***). How can America’s taste be so generic and over-simplified? It is in the exposure of these ridiculous, nausea-inducing similarities that I begin my voyage into the realm of sound art; not having even an inkling of an idea where it might take me.

(*) I digress in saying if it was nearly as ubiquitous as POGs were in 1994 I might…

(**) And the infamous Saved By The Bell episode in which the gang camps out for U2 tickets inside of a mall.

(***) 1987 featured Bob Marley and White Snake; see also: Chris Brown Is this Love?, Groove Da Praia, Is this Love?, Frankie J, Is this what you call Love?, etc.

Graduate Open Studios@ RISD...

This past Friday was open studios at RISD... Which for me personally was an absolute blur (well more of a "Karkov" blur I guess...), we went through 8 cases of energy drink (courtesy of the good folks at Rockstar) and 3 handles of vodka over the course of the night; and that was just in my studio. When I awoke the next morning my studio (and the entire building) looked like a war zone. About 500 people came through that night and fun was had by all.



Though most response Friday night was positive, on Sunday evening I heard that someone described my studio as, "The worst art ever; the artist took a couple stereos they bought and had some junk-noise coming out of them, with a pile of promotional materials." Worst art ever: I win.

Italian Police Impound Toilet Art...

No, not that toilet art...


The following was obtained from Artforum.com:


11.07.06 - A toilet made by two artists that flushes to the sound of Italy's national anthem has been impounded by police in northern Italy, sparking a debate about patriotism and censorship, reports Christian Fraser for the BBC News. The offending piece was on display at the Bolzano Museum of Modern Art. Prosecutors say the Fratelli d'Italia anthem is a national emblem which should be protected and should never be open to ridicule. A judgment is expected to be made later this week. Defense barristers for the museum argue that while the anthem does have patriotic and sentimental value, it is not a national symbol.



---In regards to my previous post from Monday, maybe the NYTimes isn't slow; could Artforum just be the quickest to report on the new and happening in the artworld?

Art magazines, the New York Times, originality...

Pierre Huyghe, with the overly reproduced image of Le Petit Pierre.


Recently I have started trying to read all the art magazines every month (which takes nearly a weekend, btw), and I've started to notice a trend; they all copy eachother. Not just a little bit either, in the months of July and August sculptor Pierre Huyghe was in every single one of the art magazines (quarterlys excluded). I understand sometimes an exhibition is big news, but could they at least pretend some of the readers read the same articles? This month Gabriel Orrozco and Carsten Holler made repeat apperances (Gabriel in Modern Painter, then Art Forum; Holler in Parkett and Art Review), but at least these articles were somewhat varied.

What really irked me as far as arts coverage goes (the straw that broke the camel's back) was the article writen in the New York Times comparing the new installations of the permanent collections of the (UK's) Tate Modern and (NY's) MOMA. Art Forum came out literaly 4 days before the NY Times article, and each of them compare the same two institutions? You would think that being a daily the Times would've had a jump on the Art Forum crew, at least beating them to press by a couple days if not more. The NY Times is supposed to be the biggest and best newspaper for arts coverage (the Gagosian of the newspaper scene if you will), so why can't they be the first to break the news?

Sonic.focus Friday Night Performances@ Brown University...

AGF/Sue C. live performance

sonic.focus 2006 was a 2 day sound art symposium that was held at Brown this past Friday and Saturday. In additions to lectures and roundtable discussions during the day, performances of music/sound/video were held late into the night.

Amazingly Providence had the Kronos Quartet playing downtown Friday night, but seeing the conference was sans-cost I (wisely)chose the cheaper alternative (though I'd still love to see Kronos). On Friday about 50 people watched the performances, which started off with Robert Lippok. Lippok energetic, bopping around as he used his laptop, guitar pedals and various knobs on sound generators to produce noises that, though at time ambient, had a beat. He performed with the lights up so the audience could see that each knob he turned or switch he flicked affected the sound coming out of the speakers.

Following Lippok was a quartet of performers, led by Guitarist/sound artist Christopher Willits and visual/video artist Scott Pagano, who were joined by a drummer and a female vocalist. They played music that ranged from the dissonant sound often associated with noise/sound music to more pleasing (to my ear) music that verged on mainstream sound (think Postal Service). With each changing sound Pagano manipulated between his two video sources (camcorder and mac mini) using a video mixer. Imagery switched between the architectural, organic plant life, and the digitally constructed seamlessly. It was difficult to decipher what the highly manipulated voices of the harmonizing singers was saying, but for some reason I don't believe it was of extreme significance.

The third group, and my favorite of the evening, was AGF/Sue C., who presented a live presentation of their film "Mini-movies". AGF produced the ambient musical backbone of the performance using her voice to recite partial sentences and phrases, creating the loose, non-definitive "narrative" of the "film". Utilizing a light board, drawings on vellum, photographs, a small flashlight and a camera with live video feed, Sue C. produced all of the visuals for the 40-minute presentation, improvisationaly matching AGF's soundtrack. This cross-continental (Sue being a Long Islander and AGF from Berlin) duo met in 2002 at a sound festival in Montreal. A DVD studio version of Mini-Movies (Which is more photographic-based) is available through Asphodel.

All in all the night was a great evening, though being somewhat of an audio-visual overload.

My work...

untitled, taster spoons, January 2006.