Yes, back in KY for almost a whole week now. Its fun to go away, especially to a place as exciting as NYC, and drop into a fantasy life of a different bed, a different mode of transportation, and a different structure to the day. To get lost and then, to find yourself again in the old way, home again, with a few subtle changes of mind.
What’s changed is not huge, but for me this week NYC has been a bigger influence than NYE. I never really made new years resolutions because I never really felt like Jan. 1 was a new year. It’s always been summer for me and I can’t wait to shed this iceburgian skin of winter.
Here’s the reveiw of the “Generational” show mentioned above (or below). Earlier.
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April 13, 2009 at 5:00 am
MJS
Hi Josh, I thought this was the most provocative bit of the review:
“‘Younger Than Jesus’ indicates that . . . life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free.”
What do you think this means? Is it substantive or just mystification—a willful, playful obfuscation?
April 13, 2009 at 4:38 pm
dovetail
My gut says that its not substantive. It feels like the tip he’s feeling is the same as “art schools gone wild”. When the professors are baby sitters that are tuned out so the kids take the opportunity to mess up the walls. Some of the ‘kids’ have a theory and illustrate it (Trecartin), others feel like the freedom is short-lived, like a quick streak thru the house before bathtime (Galliard and Chu Yun).
I like the word (new for me) obfuscation. I don’t think its playful though, I feel like the boomer is stripped bare, not sure what to grab hold of so instead of saying whats what, he calls it freedom. I didn’t feel a sence of necessity coming thru anything I saw. But then I’m still a hair younger than Jesus too, but on the outside looking in.
April 14, 2009 at 12:04 am
MJS
“Life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal.” That part especially needs explanation and elaboration, but it sounds pleasantly similar to J.G. Ballard’s idea that the world we live in is dominated by “sinister technologies.” So it’s no longer the artist’s job to create an alternate, fictional world to this one (as in the traditions of modern fiction inherited from the nineteenth century), but to create reality itself out of all the media consumption masquerading as living/reality.