I’ve been saving this one up for a while. Anyone who’s known me for a few years has probably already seen this thing because I am Obsessed with it. I’ve forgotten how I ran into it, but no matter how many times I watch it, it still cracks me up. It is possibly the most action packed Flash animation I have ever seen. Without further ado:
There are so many questions! Is it some sort of ad for a gaming site? If so, what’s the significance of the naked catman dance? Why is that poor stick figure being run over? Why is the guy in the jumpsuit showing us some chest? Who is the target audience here? Teenage boys? If so, see question #4.
Someone out there must be able to decipher it. But the question is, do I really want to know? Should I leave the mystery intact?
Merce Cunningham died last month. (Did Michael Jackson really start a wave of celebrity deaths?) It only came to my attention now that in June, Microcinema released a DVD of two permutations of Split Sides, which I had the pleasure of seeing in 2005. I’ve seen the company since, but that was the performance that left a real impression. If you think $40 is a bit much to pay for a DVD, even if it includes two performances, they are also offered on Netflix!
I thought I’d reprint some thoughts I wrote down after seeing the performances. (Blogging is in my blood, you see.)
Friday and Saturday night I went to see Merce Cunningham. His technique tends to get an initial reaction of “you call that dancing?!” I didn’t immediately like it, but it grew on me. A dancer at a pre-performance panel said that the Cunningham technique involves being ready to move in any direction from any movement. He choreographs with a software program called Lifeforms, which helps him come up with unconventional and very difficult steps that look deceptively simple.
I think this is why some people left at the intermissions — the dancers’ muscle adjustments were clearly visible due to the difficulty of the steps and Cunningham doesn’t like his dancers to prepare for turns, but since the steps don’t look difficult the dancers appear to suck, an impression that’s exacerbated by the fact that the company is composed of dancers of all shapes and sizes; there’s definitely no thin/lanky aesthetic there. Of course, they didn’t suck.
The interactions of the dancers seemed more organic and natural than other companies — they supported each other and used each other as axes but also very readily split apart and did their own thing. I liked having a visual buffet of different movements and spaces on stage to choose from, and if you pay attention, the pieces have structure and repetition.
They were dressed in bright single color body suits in the first piece (1956’s Suite For Five), and on the first night the man in green was plump, which had the hilarious effect of jolliness. Especially since a lot of the moves involved hopping. Green Giant? The second night a slim dancer took his place and it was a wholly different effect. In the second piece, Views For Stage, the set could only be described as globs of milk dripping from the ceiling and a big sleepy rodent head on stage.
Split Sides, with its booming music (I was sitting right in front of the left stage speaker, which I thought would cause me great pain but just ended up being totally hot), was almost cathartic after an hour of piano plinks and occasional dissonant horn blasts. At the beginning of the night the curtain had risen to reveal Cunningham, who says in a deliberate, almost noble voice: “Ladies. and. gentlemen. We are here. To cast the die.”
So they cast the die to determine the order of the dance lighting, costume, set and music changes. There were ballet shoes set up in the orchestra pit, so out of curiosity, I approached the music director for the company, Christian Wolff. He told me they’d be used for improvised clicks, rubs and percussive strikes during the Sigur Ros. The Radiohead is played as is, though it is mixed live. On the second night I can’t resist dawdling near all the mixing equipment in the pit again as he shows his piano scores to someone. There are no measure delineations and the notes are sparse. There are no set rhythms, so he just ‘estimates’ what the spacings mean. There is no coordination of music and dance; apparently Merce is obsessed with “chance happenings and procedures.”
I ask him why Merce wants any music at all if the performances are completely independent of each other, and Wolff can only say that to Merce the music is like decor. No one really knows what’s going on in Cunningham’s head since he never talks about how he wants a piece to look or even what it’s about. By doing different combinations you can happen on moments of briliiance (like the Bokaer solo), but then why not just methodically go through the combinations? You’re more liable to repeat yourself and explore fewer possibilities if you leave it up a die. Wolff notes that Cunningham of course knows the work of the people he asks to contribute so it’s not completely random.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see a different combo of dance and music; only the order of the lighting and costume changes was different on the second night. Dance B set to Sigur Ros was followed by dance A set to Radiohead on both nights. The Sigur Ros felt more coherent in the context of the dance, but Radiohead exploited speaker placement.
Jonah Bokaer’s solo in dance B with the black and white costumes may have been the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I was right up close in the third row, and every aspect of the performance — sound, visuals, movement — came together so perfectly. The moves were fluid and without the constraints of classical dance but contained semi-birdlike jerky little flourishes that fit in perfectly with Sigur Ros’ electronic sounds. The abstract black and white costume — Pollock in bodysuit form? — also evoked machines.
The second night, he did it in a color costume and I was sitting farther away, so it wasn’t the same, but I’ve mentally saved his image; from now on it will be a Bokaer body that does my mental dancing. According to the program, he is also a volunteer librarian, choreographs on his own, and won a humanitarian award. Wow.
RIP, Merce. You danced before my time so I’ll have to take other people’s word that you were great, but your company certainly is great, not the least for letting scientists attachment sensors to their bodies in order to study human movement!
“Being an active artist/photographer has such unpredictable ebbs and flows. In order to put 100% in, it seems you sometimes have to pull 100% back to stop and look at where you are. Perhaps this is all babble that others don’t relate to, but lately I’ve just really felt the strain of wanting to produce new work beyond the capacity I’m able to. In shooting lulls I’ve found such importance in looking back at work and reconsidering it. I’ve been reading, writing, watching for inspiration. It becomes so easy to want to shoot, shoot, shoot. I think often all these steps before and after get neglected due to time restraints.”
-Amy Elkins
“What do you do when you’re a photographer whose pictures are somewhat reminiscent of other photographers who have gotten more exposure than you?
“It’s a problem that I’m sure affects many photographers and I guess the only advice is to keep taking pictures and looking for places to photograph that differentiate your work based on the originality and freshness of the subject/location. In the face of so much photography, it is increasingly clear that we are in a post-post modern world where concept comes first followed by execution. After that it’s a race to the finish line. It doesn’t matter if you’re Hillary Clinton, the Zune, or ‘Infamous’. ”
- James Danzinger
“Photography is a reason to go somewhere and to develop a relationship with somebody or something.”
- Tema Stauffer
“Watch films. Track down some art films. Documentaries. Fantasies. Seek out your local art house cinema, or download some films that you’d not ordinarily put atop your list. Reach out to friends and colleagues for their most inspiring flicks.
“Become a voracious reader. I chow down on a steady diet of biographies of artists I admire, classic fiction, philosophy, books on cultivating creativity, and monthlies in design, obscure fashion rags, or inspiring foreign design magazines. Blogs too – especially ones that keep me guessing on their content – less how to and more ‘why’. Whatever your ‘thing’ is. Read about it.
“Do something creative everyday as a practice. If you sit around waiting for the perfect inspiration, you’ll make a lot less stuff, and the stuff you do make will be of a lot lower quality because your skills will be in the gutter. Creativity can be fostered.”
- Chase Jarvis
The only thing that I would add is just to take a look at what’s going on in the world and find something that interests you. Then creativity a focused and sometimes urgent process of making a statement about something you care about rather than a search for a new style or look. It is that too, but there’s nothing like having subject matter you care about to fan that fire under your ass.
Our Daily Bread is a narration-free documentary film on the western industrial food system. Instead of the usual slew of facts and talking heads, there are no spoken words except what is heard incidentally in the background. Without the facts, sometimes you do wonder what you’re seeing – is that a salt mine? A quick subtitle for location might have been nice, but perhaps that’d disrupt the visual reverie.
But as it is, you are left simply to observe what is happening visually. No podium pounding or political messages, just the neutral footage of livestock being birthed, raised and slaughtered, and plants being harvested in greenhouses. It feels more sympathetic in some ways than the activist-type messages, which talk over instead of let play out. No one tells you what to think, so you decide for yourself whether what you see on the screen is the picture of a productive and efficient society, an unethical method of killing, or both.
That’s not to say that the film doesn’t lean one way or the other. I’ve not sure that any film that sets out to show an hour and a half of dystopian machinery, handfuls of yellow chicks on a conveyor belt (though the sight is admittedly a bit comic), bull semen being extracted by people, pig slaughter, salmon run through machines for gutting is truly neutral.
What it does accomplish for me that PETA has never done is to give me a sense of having decided for myself that there is something deeply troubling about all of this. The message-oriented films inevitably perk up my propaganda radar and put me in the position of rejecting the whole thing if any of it seem too skewed or unreliable. If there’s even on piece of information that I don’t trust, how can you trust the rest of it unless I do hours of verification research myself? Our Daily Bread doesn’t put me in that position. What I see if what I see. Selective eye of the filmmaker or no.
When the camera settles on a person, I want to ask them, how do you feel cutting pigs’ feet every day? How do you feel about eating after seeing that? There’s no smooth voice spraying a layer of meaning over their actions, and they can exist as individuals who for one reason or another ended up in a job like this, rather than a pawn in an atrotious trend or corporate scheme.
I’d imagine that different people might draw different conclusions though. Without a moody soundtrack or a concerned narrator, these images are not as obviously negative or depressing as you’d think they’d be. I thought the images were almost hypnotic. (Not to mention the first screenshot there is the exact replica of a building I once photographed in a dream!) It’s a very visual film. How could it not be, since that’s all that you have to focus on?
The entire film is available in 10 min. increments on Youtube, so you don’t have to watch it all at once. (For those who are squeamish, the slaughter happens in the last 3 parts, part 9 especially.) But I imagine the DVD is more of a feast for the eyes.
I hadn’t realized that Ian Teh was the photographer who shot the photos of Li Yang’s school of Crazy English (popular in the pre-Olympic flurry of preparation) for the New Yorker. Good read.
This photo is so very Chinese – the red, the group shouting, the chair. I meant to post this a long time ago, but now is opportune. I’ll be prepping for and in China for the next three weeks by the grace of aid from family, but I’ve instructed the WordPress bot to entertain you. Toodles!
Twistori uses publically available information on Twitter in the same way that We Feel Fine uses info from the web at large (mostly blogs?). Tweets that contain the colored I-statements above are collected and displayed (usernames are omitted). My favorite is Wish and I can’t stand Believe.
You would not believe how long I had to wait to grab a six-statement screenshot that didn’t contain anything about clothes or celebrities, so please go to the site and look around. It’s a fun bit of harmless voyeurism. You can even download a screensaver if you have a Mac.
While doing my usual web rounds, I ran into a couple of individual net fundraising ventures.
Seen on La Pura Vida: Hamburger Eyes photo collective published their latest issue with funding from Kickstarter, a fundraising site that currently invite-only, though you can contact the staff and make a pitch to get your project up there. You set a $ goal to meet and people pledge however much they want, but aren’t charged unless the goal is met by the deadline you set. You can, however, encourage them to pledge more by offering various perks at certain donation levels (“give $15 and get a copy of the CD when it’s done!”). Amazon seems to be handling the money changing, but unfortunately it only works in the US now. So far it is free, aside from Amazon credit card processing fees.
For something that isn’t invite-only: I was reading about a recent copyright fiasco in the design world which may be worth a read in its own right (“the immediate lesson to be learned is that in today’s Web 2.0 world, with its instant internet echo chamber, mob mentality can be a very dangerous thing” – see 1, 2) on An Art Producer’s Perspective and came across Fundable, another site for individual fundraising. It isn’t quite as smoothly designed as Kickstarter, but all you have to do is sign up to start a collection. However, Fundable takes 10% if the goal is met and allows you to request a 2 day extension if you’ve met 90-99% of your goal by the deadline. You can also lower goal to as low as $100 if progress isn’t what you expected and you still want to collect, which seems a bit shady to me, but it doesn’t seem to be limited to the US since it is done through PayPal, which converts to dollars.
All in all, it seems the projects on Kickstarter might be more legit, though at the end of the day it seems up to pledger to decide about validity.
I was also checking out Triple Base Gallery, which is set to co-curate the Art in Storefronts entries, and saw this:
Friday, August 21, 8pm-dawn
David Horvitz will organize a walk through the streets of San Francisco from dusk on the 21st of August to the dawn of the 22nd. Everyone will meet in front of Triple Base Gallery around the time of sunset, to depart at 8pm.
After taking a look at his website, I’m not sure what to expect. Unfortunately I can’t make it, but what do you know, Horvitz has been doing his own version of pledges and goals.
David Bailey is fed up with fashion photography. “D’you know,” he rages, “any model over the age of 23 has to be touched up these days. Twenty-three? It’s f***ing ridiculous but that’s what you have to do for American Vogue and it’s getting to be the same over here.”
British fashion photography has lost its edge, he reckons. “They want shoots that look like a shop window in Knightsbridge. They always have the same kind of dead-looking girls. It isn’t interesting and the girls aren’t interesting. Because they aren’t girls. They’re androids. Airbrushed and cleaned up and not real. And you can’t tell any more who took the photographs. You used to be able to tell; there was character to the pictures. You could tell this was a [Helmut] Newton or that was a Beaton or a Horst or whatever. A Bailey woman has a distinct look. A Bailey woman is a real woman of flesh and blood and sex.”
I need to lighten up, not the least because for the past day workmen have been pounding and sawing away upstairs like it’s an endless hallway of doors and angry door-bangers. It sounds like a hoard of lumberjacks with power saws chasing a T-Rex through a Home Depot. Can’t a girl scan in peace? So here’s something for ya… Yes, it’s already happened: The Squirrelizer.
And some very silly photos. Click to go to the source… but actually, you probably don’t want to click.
Notice the expressions on the pig’s face and the woman’s face. Har har. (Thanks to Adrian for the non-fail animals!)
One thing that does worry me about this need to be uber professional – I wonder if it has an effect on our attitudes about work and the creative process. Ken Robinson’s TED talk about schools and creativity comes to mind.
There is quite a bit of a punishment or disincentive to being “wrong,” which is a natural part of the process of experimenting to find new things that are viable, built into the education system and a lot of workplaces. When everyone is encouraged only to show the best of the best and you never see the ideas that failed, it breeds the perception that creativity is something that can’t be taught, that you either have or don’t have, and if you have it, you have the ability to churn out one successful work after another. Isn’t this part of the reason that the idea of genius is so popular?
I love the fact that any and everything can be addressed through art, but I wonder if more can be done on a systemic level to foster creativity not only in art but in all fields. If creative endeavor was more respected, the arts would be less grudgingly funded. It seems that the public loves to partake of successful art (whether that’s out of love of art or a need to display sophistication is another question entirely), but when it comes to career choices for children, many parents would steer them clear of art. Out of certain circles, announcing yourself as an art major elicits looks of pity or derision. It feels like the equivalent of saying, “I’m not competent at anything useful” or “the only thing I want do in school is party.”
How might we begin to encourage folks to associate creativity with productivity? A question I’ve been asking myself is – what does the manufacture of ideas look like? I’d like to address this question in Sept after I return from a trip to China in the coming weeks. (Congratuations to me, I’m going to China!) After all, the reality is that many successful people have gotten where they are because of creative thinking. Many tech gurus are making careers out of thinking up new ideas and implementing them. There is no doubt more money in creating something new and interesting than in doing what you’re told, but we train our kids to do what they’re told. The most memorable moment in the video is when Robinson notes that little kids are always asking questions – why this? why that? – but somehow by their teenage years they are no longer doing so. We train it out of most of them! (Is this a consequence of busy working couples plopping their kids in front of the TV with an ‘educational’ DVD to get some quiet time to themselves?)
He argues that most primary schools are a vestige of industrial times when we wanted to train children so that they would be prepared for lives of dull routine, but now, with the automation of everything and costs of living such that having your average white collar office job is no longer enough to pay for much of anything, we’d be wise to train children to generate new ideas, to think creativity, critically, divergently. This happens more frequently at universities, but oughtn’t we start much earlier than that? (How many interviews with working photographers – and successful people in many fields – yield answers that begin “when I was a kid…”)
Alec Soth posted some thoughts on art and schools when he was still blogging: Can / Should Art be Taught? I do think creativity can be taught in the sense that it can be encouraged. Half the time the people who are better than you have just spent more time and effort at it. It’s somehow more romantic or accomplished to be self-taught, but schools offer the benefits of any large organization. There is manpower for advising and support, it is a natural meeting ground to start building your social network and there is of course the access to equipment and expertise.
The end of Soth’s post is interesting – student have no idea what their career will consist of. Which makes me think that school if anything should be focusing more heavily on career-building at the college level. All successful artists are in essence self-taught anyways, since no one can possibly teach you what’s coming, what’s next in the future of art. What’s perhaps more valuable is learning your own process of being creative, which is something that is only partially about knowing theory or history, a lot of which can be had for free online these days. What do schools have to offer that the blogs haven’t shown me already?
Then of course there’s the issue of cost of school and how artists must make a living in existing markets while hashing out something new. Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City just wrote a very interesting article on the matter.
We should figure all of this this out. There are reasons to encourage creative thinking beyond the technological or economic. I think creativity is the flip side of the ability to question existing paradigms. On my bookshelf: The Death of Why? The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy.
And if creativity and imagination are correlated in anyway, this second TED talk by Dan Gilbert suggests that we use imagination as a future simulator. Is forethought the result of imagination? The main topic of the video is happiness, but inside is a nugget on imagination:
It sure explains something I’ve been stumped by for a long time – why do we love stories? Perhaps it’s because we use it as a way to imagine ourselves in similar situations, to mentally explore what we would do in those situations. Maybe it’s why coaches tell their gymnasts to visualize themselves doing the routine successfully before the meet. Haven’t studies shown that this actually changes physical performance? (Google search.)
Bottom line is that there are a lot of benefits, some potentially unexplored, to increasing creativity!
And you know what really can’t be taught? Having a sense of humor. That’s the one thing that can’t be taught.
Just caught onto the world of European board games... which may be definitive proof that Americans are not interested in thinking...05:31:01 PM February 01, 2012
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