GIVEN ENOUGH EYEBALLS: YOSHI SODEOKA

Yoshi Sodeoka creates internet-based art, video art, design, and experimental noise. He's done pretty well at it, creating projects for websites like the Whitney Museum's Artport, rhizome.org and Wired.com, receiving grants from the likes of the Greenwall Foundation, and having works in the permanent collections of San Francisco MoMA and the Museum of the Moving Image.

A good many of his projects are available for your eyes to and ears to view on his website c505. You could spend all day on it, as I have done, and not be any closer to describing what you like about it and how you think it's relevant. Many of the articles on Yoshi like to point out that "he's a man of many hats" which makes it a little hard to pin-point a portrait of what his work is. He has many projects under many names and combined this makes for an awesome web experience.

The video on view in Given Enough Eyeballs is Let It Bleed (Left) Let It Be (Right), The Stones And The Beatles Getting Tweaked At The Same Time. It is a mash-up of documentation of The Stones playing Let It Be with The Beatles playing Let It Bleed. The audio of both songs has also been mashed, so what you have is an audio/visual portrait of what happens when you combine Let It Be with Let It Bleed. One reason Yoshi was drawn towards creating this frankenstein video is the history of similarities between the two songs and groups who wrote the songs.

Combing The Stones and The Beatles doesn't give us any new tangible information about a heated pop-culture discussion, but it may be the last word in discussing the discussion.

GIVEN ENOUGH EYEBALLS: A J BOCCHINO

Hey, welcome back.

If this is your first time visiting the blog this week let me fill you in; This Friday an exhibition I curated is opening at the The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery (3600 Market Street, Philadelphia 5-8pm). I'm taking the week to introduce the public to the artists in the show.

Today I'm sharing the work of A J Bocchino. Here are some pictures I took of A J's work as it appears in his studio during a recent trip to New York:





A J Bocchino seems to be most known for his New York Times Headlines pieces but he also makes prints of systems that involve flags, corporate logos, images, and other forms of data.


A J's work is different from most of the other pieces I have chosen to include in Given Enough Eyeballs, mostly because his work retains many of the properties of "traditional art". That is, it's on paper, you can hang it up, he creates large series of similar works, and you get more out of seeing the work in person then you do by looking at it on-line. The large, color-coded, images and headlines differ from our usual idea of a static work in that they are (usually) all on disk and A J can print them out to whatever scale fits best.

Two pieces by Mr. Bocchino, The New York Times Headlines (1976-1985) and (1986-1995), will be on view. They are just what the title makes them out to be, the headlines of the New York Times from the years in question, all laid out in order, and awarded a color that corresponds to a category (i.e. politics, war, entertainment, etc.). When looking at the pieces you feel as if you've been given the cliff's notes for a decade, and it's rather unsettling to see all the names and histories you have forgotten. Every time I encounter one of A J's works I can't stop looking at them, It's startling to have history laid out in a comprehensive way in front of you and the prints almost fool you into thinking you can figure it (meaning life and etc.) all out. The work has the added bonus of being lovely, if you unfocus your eyes or stand back far enough you can pretend you are looking at an abstract formation of random color.

You can familiarize yourself with some of A J's other projects by following the links below:

An article in Downtown Express.

A large wallpaper print.

A slide-show at neoimages

GIVEN ENOUGH EYEBALLS: Kendall Bruns

The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery
Opens Friday March 14th (5-8pm) - April 26th


This is the announcement card. It is a photo of the plants in the lobby of The Science Center

This Friday a show I put together for The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery is opening. The work all somehow relates to open source, a computer term that refers to a set of principles for designing software in which the source code, which you can think of as the building blocks for a software program, is openly available for any and all parties to use or learn from. Because a lot of the work is more cerebral then visual I've decided to spend this week blogging about the artists in the show and highlighting how cool their work is, this makes double sense because many of the artist's work is readily available to view online. If you take the time to visit the exhibition you will also benefit from a personal experiment; is it necessary to investigate artworks in person or do you get more out of the online experience?

Today we will cover the work of Kendall Bruns, a Cincinnati-based artist who spends most of his time making videos and pod-casts that are freely distributed on the inter-webs.

Kendall has a dry sense of humor that is a little hard to take at first. His artwork is also really self-absorbed but, taking these factors in mind, I think you'll come to love him as I do. He has two pieces in Given Enough Eyeballs.


Kendall's haircut history chart.

The first is entitled The Haircut Entries and this is a grid of entry forms for a contest to create a new haircut for Kendall. The artwork isn't really the entries but the documentary, which turned out a lot like a reality tv program, called The Haircut. You can view the documentary online by accessing Kendall's you-tube or Vimeo channel Pizza Infinity, which is also the name of his podcast. I've embedded the first part of The Haircut here, altogether there are four parts. I suggest watching them as they are pretty funny and in a mixed-up way a sort of poignant metaphor for the condition of public image and art:



My favorite moment is in the second part when Kendall says "People don't like art because it's pretentious and boring. This may be pretenious but it's at least not boring." I think this quote explains the heart of the whole project.

Mr. Brun's second work is called Landscape and it's the first world of Super Mario Bros with Mario removed. I wanted this piece in the exhibition as sort of a homage to all of the artworks and etc. that have been created by hacking Mario Bros.

Here are some links to just a few of the things regular people and artists have created using this video game:

Cory Archangel scroll down the page until you see his "Mario Clouds" project which you can download the source code for.

Mario Air Hack, if you follow this link you will find many related "hack" you-tube searches, happy hunting.

Garfield minus Garfield

A link to follow

Air-Kissing at Arcadia University

It was discussed, during the talk between artists and curator, before the opening of Air Kissing at Arcadia University's Art Gallery, that a group show is often seen as a competition for "most-noticable art work" (this was stated by James Mills, a Philadelphia-based artist, who coincidentally, has never sold a piece of art.)

When I arrived home and looked at my pictures of the exhibition, I found that I was only interested in one thing and it was a piece I had heard of before but never really thought about: Prada Marfa, a life-size sculpture of a Prada Boutique created by Germany-based artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset. Below is one of the pictures (the opening) of the sculpture on view at Air-Kissing:



On a website devoted to Marfa I found this description of the project:

"The work will be located on the outskirts of Valentine, Texas near Marfa on desolate ranching land with no other visible trace of civilization. As one drives toward the artwork it will appear to be a large minimalist sculpture, as one gets closer it will look like a luxury boutique where a display of Fall 2005 high-heel Prada shoes and bags will be seen through the store front windows... [It]blends into the exciting historical structures of the area in which it will be placed... As we purposefully will not preserve Prada Marfa, it will eventually become a ruin so that even in a future decayed state it will remain relevant to the time in which it was made..."

With a 13-note long comment thread that included gems such as:

"Don't mess with Texas. This sounds like littering to me." and

". . . As to how this is different from the rest of the Marfa circus, well, there's a line in there somewhere between bringing something to town and just using the place, gobbling it up to serve your own ends. Thank god a lot of the new arrivals fall in the former; I reckon, however, that we will see more and more of the latter as the years go by."

One gets to thinking the population of Marfa, Texas are a good, well-meaning and honest people who are the unwitting targets of a zombie-art invasion that started with Donald Judd.


Everything Must Go! by James Mills, is a wiry comment on the state of the art market that typifies the exhibition's love-hate relationship with the art world.

As for the rest of Air-Kissing I only mention this highly-romanticized piece of art folklore: Marcel Duchamp "quit" art to become a master of chess, only to secretly create the best piece of kitsch road-side attraction-art on the planet that now resides in the Philadelphia Art Museum; Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, French: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage.)

Truthfully, though I really like many of the artists in Air-Kissing and often critique the art world in a similar fashion. . . if all of them never made a piece of art again I doubt I could bring myself to really care, just as you, dear reader, could easily replace me if I never blogged again. If art is a job it has little stability and no benefits (in terms of healthcare), perhaps we should all send in letters of resignation?

Air-Kissing: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art about the Art World
March 5-April 20th at Arcadia University.
Curated by Sasha Archibald, originally at Momenta Art (Brooklyn)

MICHEL GONDRY AT DEITCH PROJECTS

BE KIND REWIND
Deitch Projects February 16, 2008-March 22, 2008.

Michel Gondry has the sort of not-easily defined and boundary-stepping career that many people seem to have these days. No longer can film-makers stay film-makers, or music-video-makers stay music-video-makers, or artists stay artists, or commercial-makers stay commercial-makers. No. You have to be all of thee above. I wonder how the kids are going to turn out without any of these distinctions?

I missed Gondry's first foray into installation art, for The Science of Sleep, at Deitch Projects on Grand. In fact, it didn't even cross my radar so I was surprised (and a little bit giddy) to find an installation about a movie I had seen advertised on TV at Deitch Projects on Wooster. I think I said "I saw this on TV!!!"



As I stare at my powerbook today I wonder why I was so excited and I blame it on working for too long at cross-marketing things (I am, after-all, a blogger). My first thought is to think that Gondry's installation at Deitch is great promotion for his movie and vice versa. My second thought doesn't even go that far and I simply try to figure out if I had a good time at the exhibition.

What Gondry's done is to set up a maze-like world of movie sets. The "opening set" is the video store from Be Kind Rewind the movie (which I have not seen yet), which you pass through to journey a labyrinth of fake trains, cars that look as though they are moving due to video screens behind them, bedrooms whose windows change from day scene to night scene, little cafes, doctor's offices, escalators and etc. You can sign up to make a movie while you're there and Deitch provides the camera, you can leave the movie you made in the video store and people can watch it there. All of this is very cool and you know how much I love to take a good picture. The area was ripe with the means to take a good picture.




Here, provided, is the means to make yourself a local celebrity (A local NYC celebrity!). You could film a bad-ass zombie movie with a group of friends after you all went out for a sushi dinner. People could watch it. People could bootleg it and you-tube it. Part of me would really like to do this, while another, bigger part of me, grows more apathetic by the minute. That part almost wishes for the "good old days" when you could be a faceless entity, entertained, but not expected to do any of the entertaining.

B+

DUNE THEME ON PODCAST

The One Culture Podcast

I've decided to start posting random music to my podcast in between interviews because interviews take so much time and effort and posting music does not.

Working on: An Interview with Alex DaCorte about, or more surrounding, his up-coming exhibition at Fleisher-Ollman, and re-vamping an old interview with the creators of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle because the second one is on it's way out. . .

This post is the theme to Dune, done all midi-style.