The one I liked was this:

while the one that goes further is this:

Both are fragments of works by Cory Arcangel.
The difference between them is significant. The first one is a joke – it is a repetition, a trick played on the idea of reproduction or universality.
The other one too. But the other one moves towards something else. It provides us with the doubt as to what it should be like. I don’t know Schoenberg’s op. 11, 3. I might have heard it, but I’m not sure how it sounds. Yet it certainly doesn’t sound like these cats. Or does it? What is it about Schoenberg that makes him sound like Schoenberg? And why do we need him to sound like Schoenberg? (Why do we call artists people who interpret in the most faithful way? And no, this is not a rhetorical question. What is it about repetition that still makes it move us aesthetically? And no, any form of the answer “the difference within the repetition” will not satisfy me as long as I keep putting the same piece on my mp3 player and enjoy it beause it is the same, and still appreciate its freshness, not its “difference”.) The thing, here, is not just about the cats, it isn’t the old elephant-making-oil-paintings trick. It is rather about other possibilities of listening, of paying attention, of defining what you hear. Can we hear the Schoenberg in the original cat videos? Can we hear Bach in the original music versions? The Bach composition, in that sense, says too much – it states a clear correspondence between the original YouTube videos and Bach’s work. The second says less: it says “it is out there, but it’s hard to say where exactly, and why exactly we would stop there”. (And does it while being damn funny). And that’s when our ears melt and reconsolidate, they become other ears, and other, and other. We are forced to listen to what might be there, and not what we think is there.
So why do I like the first video more? Maybe because I still enjoy what is there a lot.
Or because I’m not a fan of Schoeberg.

What you like is to look.
You like to suck it up in your gaze, you like to smear your innocent mind with the flesh of sight.
What you like is to become dependent. To let go of the constructions and make them make you.
This is the universe of the aesthetic. It is where you can always find a haven. Where you can let go of your constrained negotiations with what surrounds you, and be indulged, and be spoiled, and be challenged just safely enough to get back home.
What you like is when necessity becomes an ice-cream cone. Be it vanilla-flavored or razor-edged.
What you like is the place which is a place but requires no consequences. Of you.
Where the fish sing gentle songs and have human heads and human breasts, so you can see this is not real, and you can join the part of it that is real enough to be like you.
And you can be like you. Only less conspicuous. Or less conspicuously limited to what you believe you are.
What you like is to look, to admire, to appreciate, what you like is to jump in, when you were keeping yourself outside for some absurd reason. What you like is to overcome the feeling of absurdity through the feeling of empathy. You like to believe the thing there brings you closer to the thing here. And when you’re back – well, when you are back, you leave.

(The video features work by Harrisson and Wood)

Oh, and on a different note, here’s a little bit of pre-mash-up mashing up, for your listening amusement, the one and only John Oswald:

It is a fascinating feeling, to realize that today’s contemporary is tomorrow’s retro, that no matter what, everything we wear, listen to, appreciate or create today will be looked at in just a few years with a paternizing, if not condescendent, smile. Timeless art? Pl-lease. The very feeling of them not being timeless, of being dated, is part of the pleasure of appreciating them. Age can work for the work, but it is still at work.

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture – entitled (…) – is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

Remember Al Magnus?

This is not a review. And it will probably remain incomprehensible if you don’t at least read what the Wooster Group show is about. So you might want to start off with a positive review and/or a negative one.
(And, possibly, move to an insight into how they prepared it. And an insightful interview about the group. And an interview with Kate Valk.)

I had been waiting to see this for a long time. This is the group I always talk about during workshops and I have never seen act live. This particular show, well, could be an experimentum crucis of my (wavering) faith in theater as a live form of live art. I leave you with my transcribed raw notes from the show, and below, a couple of ideas.

Theater as reproduction
- of what?
of our reality
=> cinema (is our reality)

other way: reality reproduces art
body is our basic reality

body as choreography

BUT it’s first and foremost a SHOW

spaces of absence

The dance of the impotent body

to perform = to enact

puppets

retro

conventionality of movement

performance as video art or rather as
echo of image
=> afterimage

–

The action lies between the acts

–

Playing on the players like on instruments
The players accompany a great
video
Is that bad?

“They killed theater” (audience member, calmly)
(So many deaths of theater before)
Good Heavens,
if that be so,
if this is the thing,
I humbly thank you.

Musical work – when works.

Women have more problems with show formula- because of
more emotional roles?

2nd part much better – uses the new convention.
(but also ends up more conventional)
Hamlet – actor – manipulates the actors – logical gesture.
Strong
–
search for an
aesthetic experience
(e.g. songs)
showSHOWshowSPECTACLE

5 technicians operating video/sound/lights
–
Brilliant technical solutions – eg. moving screen in loop CCTV.

Warping time/space

But then it becomes simply multimedia entertainment.

+ + +

A man crosses the stage, says Peter Brook, and you have theater.
Pathos. That’s what you get when a man crosses the stage. Anthropocentrism. The idea that it’s all about us, really. The sin of vanity in all its splendor.

Who are we, really (on stage)?
How do we conduct our paths (on stage)?
What can we see if we introduce breaks into the surface of our behavior (on stage)?

The body becomes heavy.
It becomes an accessory. An object more than a tool. An instrument that cannot be played in a clean way is more of itself. It is less melody, and more instrument.
This body that struggles to fit into the image that will always outsmart it.

Their “on/off” stage presence (in the middle of a scene: “Let’s skip this dialogue”) is not shocking, it is part of the language of contemporary performance. It is part of our thinking, feeling of the frame/work of art as ambiguously present, intermittently present. Nice: it’s when it turns us on, not the other way around. Hence the decadent flirt, hence the false opening, hence the play outside of a play outside of a play.

______________________________

What do you want out of this? Out of this experience? What do you want out of a play?

Try this: Say: This is silly. Say: Theater is the essence of the misconception that it is all about the human. It is the place of the old-fashioned, stubborn faith in 1) the communion of the believers, and 2) the hierarchy of presentation. It is a stage which seems so enchanted with the universal human condition, it forgets the subtle yet profound changes of the aesthetic, the sensible, the eye of the beholder. It is a place whose very existence in this time is so out of joint, it is funny.

What if we accepted this as part of the game? What if we played this game, using this as a platform to inquire into what conditions we are in, as the humans that have no choice but to, at one point or another, remain anthropocentric? What if we surrendered ourselves to the collision of times, this our present time of, say, having to read this text one line at a time, and the time of too many lines behind, and the time of too many lines besides, after, above? What sort of figures are we once we let go of our need for the unique now? Entirely?

Sensation> This our too too solid flesh is extremely flexible. And it goes along with the lines of tension, it follows the cracks and bounces off whatever is left as the aftermath.
Abstract? No, this is not abstract. It means: somehow, miraculously, we deal with change, since we live through it. And yet, we do not melt, we do not resolve ourselves into a dew. If we manage to tune in – we dance. Every step, stumble, vibration becomes a choreography of ourselves.

Sensation> We are not enough. The body fights to correspond to the twitches of the images, yet it lags behind. The eyes go back to the screen. We have no way of knowing how correct we are, yet the need of knowledge unveils our total, complete inadequacy. We are but thinking puppets, we are but repeating Plato, we are but warming up the stage for the image that comes behind. Whatever surrounds us is more powerful, and yet -

Sensation> The eye of the beholder might make a difference. The beholder as object, the beholder as a weaker alter ego. The beholder as the one who submits to the role of a prop, and whose tragedy, a subject realizing he is an object, becomes the juiciest work, the perfect crack in the façade of the perfect spectacle.

Oh, and don’t pay attention to the ending. Don’t pay attention to the illusion that the slave has become the master, that the technology is, after all, a tool, that we can use the past, control the present, cope with the future, that things are what we want them to be. Don’t fall in the trap of theater, which numbs us into believing it’s okay, images end, we are here, devising our entries and winning our exits.
There is a stage behind that one, and on it, well, take a peak.

Phil and Kat Taylor are husband and wife art collectors. They live just outside Toronto, Canada which is a cool art city. One day, out of the blue, Phil emailed me and we started chatting about our common interest. I thought that he would make a great interview subject. He has a forthright, down to earth, yet very polite air about him. To me, this makes him “Clearly Canadian.” Read on and you’ll see.

MICHAEL: Hi Phil. Thanks for talking with me. You and your wife Kat (Katherine) are collectors. What got you into collecting? How did you begin?

PHIL: Well, my parents were both professional actors in Canada, so I grew up in an arts saturated environment – literature, music, acting, and of course visual arts. My early passion was photography since I could not draw very well, but I was always drawn to the fine arts of painting and sculpting. As a young adult I started to buy prints of popular master works though I always kept an eye on the contemporary scene as well. But it took many years to figure out what I really liked. We are bombarded with so many opinions and views on art that it can be very confusing. And when you start to buy original art, you really want to be sure of yourself, because it usually costs quite a bit more to buy good originals, even from unknown artists. And about 10 years ago I bought my first quality original by a fine Quebec artist named Louise Dandurand. The art dealer knew it was my first buy and could see I was nervous. When we completed the deal he said “I know it’s a bit scary buying your first original, but it gets easier.” He was right. I married my wife a few years after that and found that we have similar taste in art, and we have been buying new works from living artists ever since.

MICHAEL: Phil, I’m so glad that you got over your fear about how did Kat become a collector? Kat, are you there?

KAT: Hi Mike, this is Kat. Phil does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to our art … but here is a bit about myself. I am a professional singer/actor, and I have been active in the arts generally throughout my life. During my undergrad degrees at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. I studied in Europe … “Music History and Performance Practice”. One summer the course was offered in Venice and the next it was in Vienna. During this time I saw a tremendous number of masterpieces. Certainly I never imagined that I would live in a ‘gallery’ of original art! Phil’s enthusiasm has made this possible for me.
MICHAEL: Phil, it seems that your enthusiasm has conquered your early fear of art. I think that fear is the number one thing that keeps people from even visiting art galleries let alone becoming art collectors. Much of society has been brainwashed into believing that art is so far above their comprehension that they dare not aspire. What do you think?

PHIL: I agree with you Michael, but it’s more than just fear. Many people are turned off by art today because they simply don’t like what they see. I am speaking of course about much of the art created since the beginning of the 20th century. And it certainly doesn’t help that the larger art establishment swoons over work that leaves the average person scratching their head. And I have to confess right up front that I am pretty average too. The vast majority of art I see today seems amateurish or uninteresting. The truth is that I have to force myself to go into galleries. I know that most of what I see will not interest me in the slightest, but I do it because I never know when and where I might find a gem. It doesn’t surprise me at all that many people don’t even make an effort. But for me its like a treasure hunt.
MICHAEL: Art is a treasure hunt for me as well. The last time that I went gallery hopping in Chelsea (New York City), I was stunned by some of the crap that I saw! You don’t have to be an “expert” to recognize junk. Fortunately, Chelsea has more than 200 galleries, so there was also some truly fantastic work to see. What really bothers me is when it appears that the artist/curator isn’t interested in trying to engage or inspire us. Not long ago, I visited a new contemporary art museum that staged a BIG exhibition, but I felt that the curators intentionally made it the opposite of what had been promoted. I think it was their way of saying, “We’re beyond caring what you think because we’ll never allow you into our club!” Such a disservice.
PHIL: Well it’s hard to know exactly what many curators, gallery owners, art critics and artists themselves, are really thinking about the average person. But sometimes they let their guard down. I read an interview with a gallery owner who said she only shows art she really hates. I wonder if she tells prospective buyers in her gallery how much she hates the work she is trying to sell them? Fact is I stopped caring what the art establishment was saying or doing, years ago. I keep my eye on the ball – the ball being new art. I make my own judgments and keep moving forward. And you hit the nail on the head. I look for art that inspires and engages me.

MICHAEL: So, what kind of art do you and Kat collect? How would you describe your collection? Is there a common thread?

PHIL; Well Michael, I thought you would never ask. Our taste is quite eclectic in that we do not look for a particular style or theme. Most of the work is two dimensional and all of it is by living, working artists. They are mostly Canadian, but we have also bought pieces from American, French, and Chinese artists. There are four essential elements we consider when buying art, and in no particular order they are:

1. Technical mastery by the artist in his chosen medium. As you know the importance of mastery has taken a beating in the last century or so. The message is all important now, but there are still artists who strive for the kind of excellence that we saw during the Renaissance for example. And mastery takes years, so most of our artists are in their 40s and 50s. We keep an eye on promising young artists,

….

Created by Michael Corbin On 07/06/09 At 12:31 PM

Here’s an interesting quote from Robert Genn’s latest newsletter called “Transartistic meditation,” which is something like Transcendental Meditation.

“Studies of “flow” and “the zone” have been done using all stripes of artists. This is where the artist gets into a relaxed, intuitive state somewhere deep down in the lizard brain and the good stuff rains down like ripe pomegranates. Tired of rotten apples, I was curious about these concepts as well.” Robert Genn

I have never been able to figure why artists would want to waste their time meditating as they drink from the same pond while they have their tools in their hand. It may be an active form of meditation, especially if you’re an expressionist of any kind, but you’re forced to hang out in places that zen monks would be comfortable in. Personally, I think it’s why so many artists suffer from depression or are just downright wacky; as they can’t handle being in that space. You have to look at yourself naked in silence, which is why television, radio, and any other distractions are so popular with society.

These color photographs were all taken in the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1918.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer born in 1863. After studying chemistry with Mendeleev and later with Adolf Miethe – one of the crucial figures in the invention of color photography – Gorskii started developing his own techniques and processes of color photography, giving it a quality that even impresses even today.
In 1909, he convinced the tsar Nicolas II to send him on a trip across the Russian Empire, to document its impressive diversity. It was a 10-year project, during which Gorskii took over 10 000 pictures, and it ended up outlasting the tsar himself, and the Empire for that matter, as the October Revolution swept away the monarchy. In 1918, he emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1944.

The image archive of 1902 negatives which were left was bought by the Library of Congress a few years after the artist’s death, and was put online in 2004. You can find it here.

Prokuda-Gorskii’s most famous photo is of Leo Tolstoy, dated 1908.

But I prefer this monumental, megalomaniac and modest project of documenting Imperial Russia, which at the time was larger than the USSR ever came to be. The diversity of the people, and the shockingly modern colors of their portraits, make them impossible to forget. They are our contemporaries, now that they stopped hiding between the unfocused black-and-whiteness.
They are almost too present.

Austrian (probably meaning also Polish and of other origins) prisoners somewhere in Russia. It’s really worth seeing a high-resolution image.

Here he is, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. In a landscape that is (eerily?) ours.
PS. The amazing color bars that appear on some of the pictures are the result of Prokudin-Gorskii’s ingenious process, which consisted in taking three subsequent, monochromatic photographs, one with a green filter, one with blue and one with red. He then superimposed the three projections using lamps with a corresponding filter system. I adore these frames, unfortunately some of the images needed additional computer editing (by the Library of Congress) and in this version were cropped.
You can find an extended biography of Gorskii here.