NEWSgrist: Videodrome - Vol. 3, no. 16 (Oct. 14, 2002)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.net
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 3, no. 16 (Oct. 14, 2002)
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* Videodrome II at the New Museum
- *Quote/s* Madonna of thought…art of the future
- *Url/s* hot new [and old] online art/writing zines…
- *Secret Handshake* Joseph Nechvatal's Alchemical Hot List
- *Mouth-to-Mouth* Per Ora at Visual AIDS
- *Verticality* Freight Elevator's of DUMBO: Art Under the Bridge
- *Rhizome's Wry Zone* Mirapaul on the virtual art community
- *Black Squares* Censorship or tact at the Royal Academy?
- *Our Bodies, Our Art* Holland Cotter on 'Gloria' & revolution
- *Book Grist* Tom Sherman's I-Bomb at Printed Matter
- *Classified* 7th Annual Webby Awards - call for entries

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

[David Krippendorf, still from video "There's No Place Like Home"]

Videodrome II
October 1-November 3, 2002
Organized by Anne Barlow, Johanna Burton, Dan Cameron + Anne Ellegood

"The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the
television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain.
Therefore, whatever appears in the television screen emerges as raw
experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality,
and reality is less than television." –David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

Videodrome II is the second incarnation at the New Museum of an
exhibition of works exclusively in video. Inspired by David
Cronenberg's investigation of the integration of television into
daily reality in his 1983 cult classic film Videodrome […] The
work of twenty-seven artists will be presented one artist per day
over a period of twenty-nine days; during two "open call" days
visitors can request a particular work or compilation be screened.
Working as a collaboration, the organizers of Videodrome II viewed
numerous video works before making a heterogeneous selection of
some of the most challenging and innovative video of recent years.
The final selection is a diverse group of artists hailing from
Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Los Angeles,
Miami, New York, and elsewhere.

this issue's splash page archived at: http://newsgrist.net/Splash\_Videodrome.html
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*Quote/s*

"We culture-istas know Derrida is the Madonna of thought. He's
antiphallogocentric and a total diva."

[Rhonda Lieberman on Derrida: "Jacques Le Narcissiste."
ArtForum - October Issue http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id476 ]

"…What art in the next 30 years will look like I don't know,
but feminist influences will be at its source."

[Holland Cotter, NYTimes: "Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed
by Curators" – scroll down to *Our Bodies, Our Art*]
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*Url/s*

new and old online zines, art/poetry/fiction/crit/design journals:

Alt-X Press: a must-have library of artist ebooks, post-pomo novels,
collections of new media (h)activist writings, and digital picture books.
http://www.altx.com/

Black Ice: Fiction For A Wired Nation
http://www.altx.com/profiles/

Lab71: International Art Content (Issue 3)
http://www.Lab71.org/

Delve: art+design (Vol. 1, Fall 2002)
http://www.delvemagazine.com/

Born magazine - art + literature
http://www.bornmagazine.org/youandwe/
http://www.bornmagazine.org/

Fence magazine (Vol.5, no.2 Fall/Winter 2003)
http://www.fencemag.com
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*Secret Handshake*

Joseph Nechvatal: Hot List - ArtForum October Issue
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id479
[see article for full descriptions]

It's tough to learn the ins and outs of a secret society if you don't
know the handshake. Happily, the Internet makes available esoteric
traditions that were once virtually inaccessible–from Gnosticism
and Hermetism to Tantra, magic(k), and Freemasonry. Many arcane texts
and images, once difficult to obtain and prohibitively expensive, can
now be downloaded free, making this material available to artists–or
anyone–with special affection for esoterica. As Yves Klein said in
his Chelsea Hotel Manifesto: "Long live the Immaterial!"

Fortean Times
http://www.forteantimes.com
Esoterica
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu
The Dark Arts
http://www.banger.com/banger/art
Alchemy
http://www.levity.com/alchemy
The Gnosis Archive
http://www.gnosis.org

[Joseph Nechvatal has been making computer-assisted robotic paintings
since 1986. His most recent show, "vOluptuary: an algorithmic
hermaphornology," was on view this summer at Universal Concepts
Unlimited in New York, and reviewed in the Fall issue of Tema Celeste]
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*Mouth-to-Mouth*

"PER ORA: Consuming Desire" curated by Koan-Jeff Baysa
October 1- October 31, 2002

VISUAL AIDS WEB GALLERY at http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/web\_gallery/index.html
Every month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the
arts and AIDS communities, to select several works from the Visual
AIDS Archive Project. Koan-Jeff Baysa curates the current on-line
exhibition "Per Ora Consuming Desire" features the work of Archive
members Michael Borosky, Valerie Caris, William Donavan, Felix
Gonzalez-Torres, Frank Green, Max Greenberg, Godfrey Hayles, Bryan
Hoffman, Barry Huff, David Krueger, Jonathan Leiter, Elliott Linwood,
Gin Louie, James Reich, Paul Thek, and Martin Wong.

from curator's Statement:
"The mouth is a portal of pleasure, the portal of food and drug
administration. "Per ora" refers to the prescribing physician
shorthand for the Latin words "by mouth," the entrance to the
gastrointestinal tract, rich in sensory innervation, and a way
of exploring and knowing the world with which it is topologically
continuous. While initially combing the Visual AIDS image bank
for more medically-oriented subjects, I discovered numerous
images of food, drugs, and references to the body, reflecting
on how certain terms and images of affection and desire are
formed by conjoined terms of food and sexuality. I've deployed
these references to foreground the oral issues of sustenance,
satiety, pleasure and peril, along with the medical treatment
of AIDS and the complex issues of polypharmacy, adverse drug
effects and the consequence of noncompliance."

Koan-Jeff Baysa is an independent curator, writer, specialist
physician and alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program in
Curatorial Studies.
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*Verticality*

The 2002 D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival
Presents
The Freight Elevator Project 2
Conceived and Curated by Ombretta Agro
October 18-20, 2002
http://www.dumboartscenter.org/festival/main.html

The 2002 D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival presents a project
curated by Ombretta Agro showcasing the work of 20 international artists
in 20 working freight and passenger elevators throughout Brooklyn's
D.U.M.B.O. neighborhood. Each artist explores themes relating to the
psychological and physical effects of an elevator's vertical journey
through time and space. The first Freight Elevator Project took place
last September as part of the Downtown Arts Festival's Chelsea Art Walks.

Ombretta Agro, will lead tours throughout the afternoon through all the
locations, where the artists will be present at their respective
installations to answer questions about their work. All who are
interested in taking part in the tour are asked to please reserve by
RSVP'ing to oma@rnapartners.com

All Freight Elevator Project elevators are open to the public on
Friday 10/18 6-9pm, Saturday 10/19 and Sunday 10/20, 12-6pm

Artists and elevator locations:
Amy Albracht - 57 Jay Street.
Nicola Bolla - 50 Washington Street.
Andrea Cohen - 56 Adams Street
Cecilie Dahl - 35 York Street
Cosimo Di Leo Ricatto - 35 York Street
Mark Esper - 25 Washington Street
Michelle Handelman - 20 Jay Street
Lynne Harlow - 70 Washington Street
Richard Humann & China Blue - 100 Water Street
Jillian Mcdonald - 45 Maine Street
Juan Matos Capote - 68 Jay Street
Victor Matthews - 70 Washington Street
Tom Moody - 50 Washington (access from 5th floor)
Angelo Musco - 50 Washington Street
Gregory Okshteyn - 45 Maine Street
Mark Orange - 56 Adams Street
Leemour Pelli - 25 Washington Street
Birgit Ramsauer - 55 Washington Street
Mary Temple - 68 Jay Street
Miyuki Yokomizo - 55 Washington Street
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*Rhizome's Wry Zone*

Digital Artworks That Play Against Expectations
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes ARTS ONLINE 9/30/02
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/30/arts/design/30ARTS.html

da1852 is a digital docent. She conducts tours of the online-art site
Rhizome.org by replying to questions that are typed and transmitted over
the Internet. Through these exchanges, she can respond to a visitor's
interests and suggest viewings of specific Internet-based artworks, and
then supply links to the pieces.

Like a human museum guide, Ada1852 occasionally departs from the
scripted commentary to make oddly personal remarks. During a recent
chat session, the virtual character was asked about a site and replied,
"Perhaps I am slipping into madness."

Ada1852 is the creation of Christopher Fahey, a New York artist who
rewrote an existing artificial-intelligence program so that its bland,
computer-generated conversations with people would seem less
mechanical. "I did not want to build a person whose primary function
was to be a nonperson," Mr. Fahey said. By giving Ada1852 a personality
that verges on the disturbed, he is subverting many notions about
artificial intelligence.

Mr. Fahey's troubled tour guide is one of five online-art projects
commissioned by Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization in New York. (The
new works were to be put online today at http://rhizome.org/commissions
Starting Wednesday , they also can be seen at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in SoHo.)

With more than 16,000 members, Rhizome is among the most popular
virtual communities devoted to the digital arts. It is an online-only
meeting place where participants can announce new artworks, request
technical assistance or debate obscure issues. (Other sites that focus
on digital culture include http://nettime.org & http://bbs.thing.net )

But while most virtual groups are content to carve out a comfortable
corner of cyberspace, Rhizome continues to expand its domain.
Commissioning the five new works cost $20,000, a substantial sum for
such a young genre. Rhizome also has started to sell Internet services
to its members, and has a partnership with the New School in Manhattan
to offer online-education courses about new-media subjects.

These initiatives are something of an accomplishment for a nonprofit
digital-arts group that a year ago wasn't sure it would survive the
double whammy of the collapse of the dot-com economy and the cutbacks
in arts grants after the attacks of Sept. 11. Mark Tribe, Rhizome's
founder, said it had been living from grant to grant.

Gradually, though, Rhizome has acquired an aura of respectability that
Internet entities rarely achieve. As a result, Mr. Tribe, 35, is less
concerned that his donors including the Rockefeller, Jerome and Warhol
Foundations will desert him. "Things are rosier now," he said.

Karen Helmerson, director of the electronic media and film program at
the New York State Council on the Arts, said of Rhizome: "They're
definitely established. Straight out of the gate they were
demonstrating leadership in the field." She said the agency would
support Rhizome for a third year. Rhizome, which has an annual budget
of $440,000, has also turned to its members for donations, mounting an
annual fund-raising campaign modeled after those for public television.
Despite the widespread conviction that everything on the Internet
should be available free, the site's members contributed $25,000 last
year.

Mr. Tribe founded Rhizome in 1996 while in Berlin. An artist interested
in the Internet, he realized that at that time the only way to monitor
developments and trade ideas was to attend the digital-art conferences
in Europe. He said, "It just seemed like, we all have e-mail, we all
have access to the Web, there should be some sort of online space where
this kind of exchange could take place."

So Mr. Tribe started an electronic mailing list and about 100 people
joined. He soon moved to New York and like innumerable dot-com
entrepreneurs set up a Web site. Mr. Tribe said: "It was a time of
incredible optimism. There were a lot of people who, like me, truly
believed in the transformative potential of the Internet."

Rhizome began as a commercial venture. But by 1998 Mr. Tribe saw that
this approach was doomed and applied for nonprofit status. "I turned
away from the money before it turned away from me," he said. "Some of
my friends were worth hundreds of millions of dollars briefly on paper,
and I'm one of the few who still has a job."

Rhizome takes its name from the botanical term for a rootlike structure
that grows horizontally, and Mr. Tribe envisioned the site as a
grass-roots endeavor. Anyone can post messages on the site, and the
content is uncensored.

This openness is not always a delight. For every notice about a new
artwork or a forthcoming conference, there are a dozen sophomoric
messages. One writer noted last week, "I just discovered that you all
seem to be addicted to insulting each other over a safe distance."

As Rhizome has expanded, it has been criticized for being too populist.
Ms. Helmerson praised Rhizome for making digital art accessible to
general audiences, but not everyone thinks this is so great. Josephine
Bosma, a sound artist in the Netherlands and a longtime Rhizome
contributor, said the site "might be a nice pool of information on
developments in the digital arts, but it lacks critical perspective."

Rhizome may prove to be a valuable resource for historians, however.
With nearly seven years of messages in its archive, it documents the
Internet's chaotic birth as an aesthetic medium. Someone interested in,
say, cyberfeminism in the arts could search for the phrase and receive
two dozen links to artworks, interviews and reviews.

Rhizome's database for digital artworks contains more than 700 entries
of variable quality. Many of the entries are merely links to other
sites, but 200 of them are digital duplicates of the original pieces.

This ArtBase, as Mr. Tribe calls it, provides the raw material for
another of its new commissions. "Context Breeder," a clever work by the
New York artist John Klima, invites viewers to select four works from
the ArtBase. These four choices prompt the appearance of another group
of four, and the two sets of four are "crossbred," creating a third
set of four works. Pieces that are chosen most frequently become
stronger and appear more often on the screen, making them and their
"offspring" more likely to be chosen in the future, while rarely
chosen works will become extinct.

This is cultural Darwinism applied to the Internet. But is Rhizome
itself strong enough to survive? Ada1852 had a ready answer,
"Why not?"

{Note: Since this article went to press, Rhizome has encountered an
unexpected financial emergency and is now conducting a fund drive.
For information see: http://rhizome.org/support/
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*Black Squares*

Censorship or tact?
Anti-American slogans by artists are painted over,
allegedly for fear of alienating a US sponsor
By Louisa Buck
The Art Newspaper, Oct 4, 2002
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart076

LONDON. At the opening of the RAs "Galleries" exhibition on 12 September
the talk was not of the big bang caused by phyrotechnic Chinese artist
Cai-Guo-Qiang's giant exploding money bag (which was accompanied by
complimentary earplugs) but of less conspicuous financial matters. The
evenings hot topic was the censorship of a text by artists collective
"Inventory," whose anti-imperialist tirade, sprayed directly onto the
RAs walls, had been expunged of all American references.

According to several sources, this blacking-out had taken place at the
last minute in order to appease the offended sensibilities of one of
the RAs major backers.

"The alterations were made the day before, when one backer threatened
to withdraw his support of the Academy if the piece remained up in
its original form," says one source who preferred not to be named.

"Everybody has their own interpretation of what happened here," says
Galleries show co-curator Max Wigram. "All I can tell you is that the
RA decided that it was too close to 11 September; we thought it was
rude, and we didn't see the point. I'm not particularly happy about
what happened, but I do understand the sensitivity of the matter."

Neither Mr. Wigram nor the RA would confirm whether this sensitivity
extended to the Patrons of the august institution. According to Jake
Miller, director of The Approach, who are showing Inventory's piece.
"There was a lot of debate and discussion; they [Inventory] were very
opposed to the original proposal that it be completely whitewashed out.
Of course, the artists would have been happier if nothing had happened
at all, but they are OK about the fact that there are visible signs of
it being altered and that this is giving cause for discussion."
Sometimes, it seems, black squares can speak louder than words.
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*Our Bodies, Our Art*

Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed by Curators
By HOLLAND COTTER

NYTimes, ART REVIEW 10/11/02
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/11/arts/design/11FEMI.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

Most of the interesting American artists of the last 30 years are as
interesting as they are in part because of the feminist art movement of
the early 1970's. It changed everything.

It gave a new content to painting, sculpture and photography. It pushed
performance, video and installation art to the fore. It smashed the
barrier between high art and low art, and it put folk art, outsider
art, non-Western art, not to mention so-called women's art (sewing,
quilting, crafts of all kinds) center stage. What art in the next 30
years will look like I don't know, but feminist influences will be at
its source.

All this should be obvious, but it needs to keep being resaid. Of the
liberation movements for which the late 20th century will be
remembered, few have been as disparaged as feminism, and that scorn
extends to the women's art movement. Even presumably well-intentioned
art-worldlings seem incapable of talking about it without
condescension, as if it were some indiscreet adolescent episode best
forgotten.

This attitude helps explain why no major museum has put together a
comprehensive exhibition of the women's movement. We have career
retrospectives of every market-approved minor "master" who comes down
the pike, and group shows of hot young up-and-comers who in many cases
owe their existence to the women's movement. But an all-out
institutional consideration of how early feminist art took shape, who
made it and why?

Dream on.

So it's worth taking note that two modest surveys of such art are on
view, one at an alternative space in Manhattan called White Columns,
the other at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton on Long Island.
Even with some overlap of artists, they're very different shows. And
although between them they hold a fair amount of material, they only
graze the surface of their huge subject.

The first thing to know about the women's art movement is the scope
of its ambition. Basically its aim was to turn the existing social
order upside down; to wipe out an entire cultural databank of corrupt
images and replace it with new ones. In the late 1960's and early
70's many female artists didn't have studios, let alone galleries and
careers. What they did have, in addition to talent and drive, was
histories, bodies and feelings, and these became the stuff of their
art.

In some ways this was a magical time (as revolutionary moments can
be) when people were thinking idealistically and acting audaciously.
And in an American era of collectives, countercultures and
consciousness raising, the women's movement went through changes,
from political feminism to cultural feminism to many other feminisms
built on racial, sexual and spiritual platforms.

A sense of this spirit, however tamed and cleaned up, can be found in
"Personal and Political: The Women's Art Movement, 1969-1975" at Guild
Hall. Organized by Simon Taylor and Natalie Ng, the show concentrates
on what is usually identified as the first generation of feminist
artists and includes a large amount of painting, a medium now not
usually associated with feminist art.

But certain formative figures like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,
who organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of
the Arts in 1972, were abstract painters looking for ways to cut loose
from a male-dominated field without abandoning painting itself. For
Ms. Schapiro this meant exploring non-Western decorative design, while
Ms. Chicago combined mandalalike patterns and words to address the
female body and psyche.

Painting by women took many directions. And the show points to some of
them in anatomical close-ups by Eunice Golden and Joan Semmel,
portraits by Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh, and language-based work of
Louise Fishman and Nancy Spero. Betty Tompkins's formidable Photo
Realist images of heterosexual intercourse, now on view at Mitchell
Algus Gallery in Chelsea, could easily be included here. And given
this diversity, the old cliche about the first wave of feminist art
being "essentialist" and fixed on anatomical images seems like
nonsense.

A smaller section of the show is given to performance and video, media
that brought feminist thinking into the art world mainstream. Certain
performances, like those by Carolee Schneemann, were done for live
audiences. Others were created as documents, as in the case of Eleanor
Antin's record of a weight-loss regime in the form of anthropology-
style photographs, and a sound piece by Adrian Piper about social
class and female solidarity, an issue that, along with race, the
women's movement badly neglected.

As to video, Guild Hall's program is a help-yourself affair. The tapes
are there; you play what you want. Without exception, they're worth
watching. Hannah Wilke and Martha Wilson do riffs on physical self-transformation. Lynda Benglis explores the expanding art of female
erotics. Hermine Freed and Martha Rosler tap deep resources of parody.
Ms. Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen," in which she plays a robotic
killer-housewife, is one of the funniest and scariest videos of the
period.

This film is also in "Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the
1970's" at White Columns, which focuses on media and performance
works. In an exhibition essay the curators, Catherine Morris and
Ingrid Schaffner, explain that they made this choice because they
sensed that for young artists today "looking back 30 years,
ostensibly at one's parents, the issues and icons of feminist art
may seem remote or worse, ridiculous."

However wry a view they take of this situation, what they've produced
could still be considered an example of historical editing motivated by
embarrassment at the past. And I suspect that many young artists would
find the work of Ms. Semmel or Harmony Hammond or Faith Ringgold, all at
Guild Hall, intensely intriguing and possibly inspiring. That said,
"Gloria" is on its own terms a good show, and an apt counterweight to
the one on Long Island.

Among other things, it gives a far more candid sense of how physically
confrontational early feminist work could be. For her "Interior Scroll"
performances, Ms. Schneemann pulled a text-covered paper scroll from
her vagina and read the words aloud; one such scroll is in the show.
Ms. Benglis is represented by a bronze cast of the dildo she brandished
in a notorious 1974 Artforum advertisement. The Austrian-born Valie
Export is seen on a poster in pants with a cut-away crotch, her
customary attire for guerrilla-style public performances.

The presence of other artists who did other kinds of art, like Nancy
Grossman, Joan Jonas and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, is a reminder of how
many rich, seasoned careers still await full attention. Contributions
from the 1970's by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman
foretell some ways the feminist torch was carried forward in the
theory-savvy 1980's and 90's.

And what about today? As Ms. Morris and Ms. Schaffner observe, a few
fashionable young figures have been promoted in old-style feminist
terms of women taking control of their own image. But in their case
the argument too often sounds forced, too transparently an effort at
star-making spin. At the same time, at least one area in which radical
versions of feminism are still alive is barely touched on in either
show.

I'm talking about work by lesbian artists, the "lavender menace" that
Betty Friedan said would ruin the credibility of the feminist movement.
These artists young, old, undefinably diverse have sustained
something like the movement's original, paradigm-shifting impulse
into the present, as is suggested by even a brief glance through Ms.
Hammond's indispensable book, "Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary
History" (Rizzoli, 2000).

Clearly here's a subject that needs a full-fledged museum survey of its
own. So does the topic of the countless male artists, gay and straight,
whose work has been influenced, if not directly shaped, by three
decades of feminist art. I trust that alert young curators, critics and
art historians are already on the case. And maybe, in the process of
getting history told right, they can reconnect feminism to its
revolutionary roots.
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*Book Grist*

Saturday, October 19, 2002, 5 to 7 PM
Book Signing for Tom Sherman's

Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment

at Printed Matter
535 West 22nd Street,
between 10th and 11th Avenue, in New York's Chelsea district.
(212) 925-0325 http://www.printedmatter.org

Tom Sherman got wired early and has spent much of his career leading
the way through the aftershocks of the "I-Bomb" and its information
explosion.