I finally made good on a promise to Fagistani president Joshua Gibson to contribute a piece to his blog. Gibson's foul-mouthed and always insightful commentary has been on my short list of must-reads since I discovered his blog a year ago, and he has contributed here more than once. You can read my piece, which concerns an egregious bit of journalistic mumbo-jumbo on display at the Huffington Post, here.
Fox and CBS have both rejected a new Trojan ad because they say that ads for contraceptives "must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy."
Supporters of the condom company were not surprised. The New York Times article has two standout quotes:
Mark Crispin Miller, media critic at New York University: "Let’s get real here. Fox and CBS and all of them are in the business of nonstop soft porn, but God forbid we should use a condom in the pursuit of sexual pleasure."
Carol Carrozza, VP of Marketing for Ansell Healthcare (LifeStyles condoms): "We always find it funny that you can use sex to sell jewelry and cars, but you can’t use sex to sell condoms."
You can watch the ad online here.
Embracing new technology in political campaigns can be tricky business. Howard Dean pulled it off seamlessly with MoveOn.org in the 2004 primary season. John McCain in 2008? Not so much.
John McCain has a MySpace page. Great idea, right? All the politicians are doing it. But McCain is in the spotlight, and it's not because of anything he has done. It's because his web publishing crew sucks.
First, they ignored a basic rule of web etiquette (I refuuuuuuuse to say the "n" word today). Techcrunch explains:
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
The result (image composite by Techcrunch):
The next day it was fixed - but a spelling error was introduced, along with an atrocious design:
The error was gleefully highlighted on Newsvine this morning. If the error is still up, you can see it here.The first time around this could be laughed off as a simple mistake, although it highlighted McCain’s flip-flopping positions on gay marriage. But now some people are going to question whether the guy can hire competent people to surround him. The original story will hit mainstream press this morning. Lots of people will be going to McCain’s MySpace page. And they’ll see a sloppy site.Behold the power of incompetent spellers (and mishandlers of apostrophes).
Our favorite gadfly Joshua Gibson is back, this time with a few choice words for John Sinno, who sent an open letter to the Academy Awards committee to protest the portrayal of documentaries at this year's Oscars. TiP discussed Sinno's letter last week, which was published online in Art Threat.
________________________________________________
Dear John,
Every year we get treated to at least one wounded nominee bemoaning their treatment at the Oscars. Last year, we got E. Annie Proulx's mean-spirited attack on Crash, which she calls "Trash," in defense of her own idiotic, bland Brokeback Mountain. Now it's the documentary's turn, with you as its standard-bearer.
Listen, John, the Academy is not designed to award documentaries. The standards are so different, so difficult to understand, that it's difficult to call documentaries "art" at all, and handing out awards for them in the same ceremony with narrative films is troublesome at best.
While your concerns about "independent" documentaries are worthwhile, it's difficult to sympathize. Why should documentaries be held to a different standard than narrative films if they wish to play the same Awards field? And besides, documentaries produced by Spielberg and directed by Michael Moore have won the award in recent years, making it difficult to see how small films benefit from the current system in any event.
The Oscars are, in essence, a commercial enterprise. To argue against that is futile. Just be happy your film made it at all!
As for Seinfeld, the mocking of the awards and the nominees is hardly a new tactic and hardly one worth crying in one's milk over. Will Ferrell was more or less explicitly mocking a whole range of actors (from Sean Penn to Meryl Streep to Daniel Day-Lewis) who portray the mentally and physically challenged in his song about having sex with Helen Mirren. I didn't see Javier Bardem writing any open letters about the inherent dignity of his work being sullied by Ferrell's mockery.
If anything, documentary filmmakers should be happy their work is now seen as worthy of mockery by high-profile presenters and proud that the Academy now believes documentaries have the ability to compete on a commercial stage 75% larger.
It's hard to be taken seriously when you spend so much time taking the Oscars seriously, Mr. Sinno.
Art Threat has published an open letter director John Sinno (Iraq in Fragments) sent to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after attending this year's Academy Awards:
I had the great fortune of attending the 79th Academy Awards following my nomination as producer for a film in the Best Documentary Feature category. At the Awards ceremony, most categories featured an introduction that glorified the filmmakers’ craft and the role it plays for the film audience and industry. But when comedian Jerry Seinfeld introduced the award for Best Documentary Feature, he began by referring to a documentary that features himself as a subject, then proceeded to poke fun at it by saying it won no awards and made no money. He then revealed his love of documentaries, as they have a very "real" quality, while making a comically sour face. This less-than-flattering beginning was followed by a lengthy digression that had nothing whatsoever to do with documentary films. The clincher, however, came when he wrapped up his introduction by calling all five nominated films "incredibly depressing!"This is a legitimate complaint in its own right; Sinno is standing up not just for his film, but for the documentary filmmakers who don't even make it to the Academy Awards, who suffer even more from the stigma of such characterizations. In fact, Sinno sees an even bigger issue looming:
Seinfeld’s introduction arrived on the heels of an announcement by the Academy that the number of cities where documentary films must screen to qualify for an Academy Award is being increased by 75%. This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios. Fewer controversial films will qualify for Academy consideration, and my film Iraq in Fragments would have been disqualified this year. This announcement came as a great disappointment to me and to other documentary filmmakers. I hope the Academy will reconsider its decision.The Academy has an easy out if they want it - they could use the letter to further paint the documentary filmmaker and his kind as just the sort of dour, fun-free folks Seinfeld already insinuated they were. In the age of Sundance, Cannes, and other highbrow film awards, there's really no credibility to be lost by doing so (although many Academy judges would bravely protest this claim). So therein lies the question: Will Oscarville declare its seriousness about documentary filmmaking and the real-world issues films like Iraq in Fragments represent for the "movie magic" industry, or will it defend its commitment to a lack thereof? Read the full letter here.
We just posted this badge on Z Recommends, along with a Statement of Belief for anyone to use. Click here to read about the badge and get a link to the MSNBC report which inspired it, or here to read the statement. Displaying the badge and linking to the statement is an easy way for parents to document their adherence to this position and link a personal statement to a list of trackbacks at ZRecs, but anyone is welcome to use the badge for any purpose and explain it in their own way, as we are releasing it under a fully free Creative Commons license.
I found some of the camera techniques to be a bit out of sync with the animation style, but this seven-minute-long film is well-worth watching through to the end and shows off some of the talents of Soyuzmultifilm's animators, circa 1986 (previously referenced in my blogging here).
I've seen some of Mark Jenkins' "Embedded" street series (see one of my favorite figures below) but have only now learned from his website how much more his work encompasses. The balance of political messages and absurdism is pitch-perfect for illicit public art - it confronts through engaging viewers' curiosity and imagination, and ultimately has opportunities to get people thinking where many graffiti messages only generate a combative response.
Knitta is a Houston-based group of knitting graffiti artists. I saw this piece at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle after seeing an interesting exhibit of Henry Darger's Vivian Girls drawings, and had a few thoughts on it.
The pieces seem to be generally made for standard-sized objects like this guardrail - they also make sleeves for car antennas, scarves for light poles, and hats for fire hydrants. The pieces are knitted in advance and zip-tied to their host objects.
On the simplest level, the artists are playing with the tension between the domestic connotations of knitting and the public perception of graffiti as an antisocial and radical act, and this may be the group's main purpose. The Stranger (a Seattle weekly, which I used to freelance for when I lived in Seattle) wrote a straightforward piece about Knitta's visit and basically took this position.
Personally, I think this work is a direct descendent of the '90s soft-punk movements (Riotgrrl, emo) and the subsequent '00s punk-craft movement, and in this sense is actually quite unsubversive - especially against the backdrop of a city like Seattle, which, along with Olympia, Portland, and the rest of the Northwest, gave birth to most of the above. For the casual viewer, it does not seem obvious that this should be compared to graffiti, and thus really challenges no one's assumptions. Ironically, their ingratiating and playful form exclude them from the class of objects they hope to parody, comment on, or contribute to, as far as the "audience" of non-graffiti-thinking folks is concerned, which is why I think the Stranger's view misses the point here.
The works are a little more subversive seen from the perspective of graffiti writers and their fans. Knitta's practices violate one guideline of the medium and highlights another in an interesting light.
In terms of contrasts, almost all graffiti is created on-site, and in that sense is both site-specific and a story of its own creation. Knitta's works, while carefully hand-crafted using methods that involve great skill (like good graffiti writing), are not created on-site and appear to be created as a stockpile of materials to be applied to found surfaces and objects. In this sense, Knitta's work is similar to the wheatpaste graffiti art movement, which uses pre-printed posters cut into the shapes of drawn creations, and which have faced challenges by some in the graffiti writing community as thus not qualifying as true graffiti writing, but as simple "tags" - marks that someone has been there and made their mark, but not in a thoughtful way. One argument has been that they do not demonstrate comparable skills, but I think it is equally important to recognize that most of them are not inspired by, that is, drawn out of, a space, but are applied to a space that meets the artwork's preestablished criteria. (Some of the best wheatpaste graffiti works are an exception to this rule, and are clearly site-specific.) In this sense, Knitta pieces suggest some of the strengths of each of these graffiti formats while being very different from each of them.
Wheatpastes also lack some of the excitement of painted graffiti writing because they are relatively quick to put up. A graffiti mural shows off the artist's willingness to take a substantial risk by hanging out somewhere and creating something complex in an illicit context. A wheatpaste takes as long to put up as a poster.
But knitted graffiti speaks to the medium in its acknowledgment of the fragility and short-lived nature of graffiti artworks. Murals are painted in depressed or inaccessible locations in hopes of lasting a while, but with the full knowledge that they might be painted over the next day. A viewer does not see this, however, and without a familiarity with this context the piece may suggest a permanence that it does not enjoy. Knitta's works, however, feel fragile and very temporary. They capture for a casual viewer something of the privilege of spotting something worth looking at, which clearly might not be there tomorrow or the next day. Anyone could come along with a pair of scissors and remove it.
The Stranger also reports that Knitta will be back in Seattle for the music fest Bumbershoot 2oo6:
Along with Knitta—who will be hitting some very big (think landmark-sized) Seattle targets on their Labor Day return—artists like Australia's Brett Alexander, London's Craig Fisher, and New Yorker Orly Cogan will confront preconceptions about the applied arts, via everything from subversive candy making to soft-sculpture weaponry. And on the evening of Saturday, September 2, the Knitta crew will host a workshop. The plan is to offer instructions for making some of their basic tags, like car antennae sleeves.I look forward to seeing some Christo-like knitted objects, but again, I bet it won't look like graffiti to casual viewers. Knitta, prove me wrong!
I spoke with Rice University earth sciences professor and photographer Colin Zelt at the Houston Center for Photography's annual print sale last month, where I bought a print of his View from Elysian Overpass, pictured above. Colin was nice enough to send me a high-resolution photograph of the photo to reproduce here with his permission; click on the image above to view it at a larger size, or click here to visit his website and see a lot more of his very interesting work. Colin takes most of his photographs in his own industrial neighborhood in Houston, and also has a great series of photographs taken at Sea Arama, once an aquarium-amusement park in the oceanside tourist town of Galveston and now a city of concrete ruins and graffiti.
Colin's urban landscapes differentiate themselves in from postcard scenes in their color and lighting, as well as in the starkness of the scenery he chooses to capture. He frequently shoots multiple, bracketed exposures of scenes under challenging lighting conditions. He then combines them seamlessly in Photoshop to create crisp images of floodlit no-man's-lands between and within a major port city's industrial core, where train tracks meet the blank stares and broken windows of dilapidated warehouses and factories. In the View above, he explained, he used the sky from one exposure, the factory at left from a second, and the rest of the scene from a third, combining them to even out his lighting and capture the best face of each part of the scene.
The quality of color and sharpness of detail he captures in that hollow between twilight and darkness is even more stunning in his actual prints than in his web portfolio; I had only seen them online prior to the sale, and wanted one then, but seeing them in person sealed the deal.
The real-world viewing also made immediately clear to me what, exactly, I found so attractive about many of his photographs of Houston. This had eluded me previously only because I usually pay little attention to photographs of downtown skylines or urban landscapes, and have never found Houston to be an exciting city. Standing with a couple of matted prints in hand I quickly recognized that despite all of the grim features of the photographs' setting and subject, the cast of blue-black nightfall that suggests coldness even when nights may be hot, there is an essential calm in Colin's openness to seeing what he sees and working so painstakingly to recapture what he sees there. In my experience, this type of calm is frequently claimed for photographers but is often a mere ratification of that objectivity imposed by the medium itself, and feeds into many fine art photographers' work in ways that do not complement their subject or their author. But I find myself influenced by the calm in Colin's industrial landscapes and invited to view the world with an objective, inquiring, and patient eye, taking in all that is around me and acknowledging the beauty even in ugly circumstances.
"Some people would call it manipulation, to use Photoshop in that way," he said in a later email correspondence. "I think it's just recapturing something that is closer to what was really there. Film or a digital sensor is limited in what it can see under those conditions. By bracketing and then combining images in Photoshop, I can better approximate what the eye is actually taking in at that moment. Alternatively, you can use this approach to interpret the scene in a subjective way to achieve an image that best represents how the real scene made you feel at the time, as opposed to what the real scene might have looked like."
To read my previous post on the topic, "Graffiti As Art," click here.
Marianne Joergenson, a Danish graphic designer and artist, coordinated a volunteer army of knitters from Europe and the U.S. to produce the artwork above, "Pink M.24 Chaffee," which placed a decommissioned WWII tank outside of the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center and wrapped it in a shared blanket of inspired protest. Joergenson wrote about the project at length on her website, and the following statement caught my eye:
Unsimilar to a war, knitting signals home, care, closeness and time for reflection. Ever since Denmark became involved in the war in Iraq I have made different variations of pink tanks, and I intend to keep doing that, until the war ends. For me, the tank is a symbol of stepping over other people’s borders. When it is covered in pink, it becomes completely unarmed and it loses its authority.
Change a few of the words and you'd be listening to an urban graffiti writer. Joergenson's act was coordinated with authorities, "permission-based," and perfectly legal. What if it had not been - if her group had snuck the tank into a public square in the middle of the night? Would this increase its power or decrease its legitimacy? At left, also posted to the Wooster Collective, is an illicit and anonymous artwork spotted in Basel, Switzerland.
In contrast, an increasing number of idea factories on the web are relying on advertising and graffiti's shared emphasis on producing intuitive, targeted graphic messages that will rise above the - above this - clutter of words and have a rapid, unmistakable impact, like Moiz Syed's Israeli, Lebanese, and now U.N. tally of casualties and the unceasing barrage of pop-culture critiques like the one above from one of Worth1000.com's many Photoshopping contests.
If you haven't thought much about graffiti and its role in public debate, cultural life, and even civic beautification, the current political situation in the United States is making a pretty good case for its value. Public frustration with government is at an all-time high, the U.S. is on the brink of a third concurrent war, and the current administration has controlled the American media better than Reagan, with none of Reagan's finesse. If Reagan's was the Teflon presidency, that of George W. Bush could be remembered by friend and foe alike as the Katamari presidency: ever enlarging, ever strengthening, every potential crisis lending new momentum.
Advertising agency BBDO West recently offered its services pro bono to the city of San Francisco, and chose graffiti cleanup as its Up With People message. For the agency executives it may have seemed like a safe issue. (One of the three advertisements it produced is at left; the others can be viewed here.) But the frustration and anger the agency's outdoor advertising campaign has generated within the graffiti art community has given some of the form's practitioners ("writers") an opportunity to explain their work in both words and images on such websites as the Wooster Collective, which posts photographs of graffiti art from around the world. Graffiti boosters responded to the ad campaign with a series of inspired response images, and the Wooster Collective synthesized the messages of these works by taking the unusual step of responding in writing to BBDO and the mayor's office of San Francisco in a recent text post. The schism the conflict reveals is as transparently class-based as the sick feeling you should be feeling during the current Stanley Steemer Carpet Cleaner commercials where the happy housewife boasts about how "clean" the servicemen are who come to clean the carpets in her spacious and otherwise spotless home. She isn't cruel so much as pathologically insensitive, and her steam-cleaned existence speaks to a dominant culture that runs roughshod over many in its pursuit of narrowly defined goals.
Ironically, BBDO and the community it took on have much in common. Like billboards, wall advertising, bench advertising, posters, and flyers, graffiti art meets you on the street where you live. Depending on its content, it may be designed to elicit shock, anger, amusement, joy, desire, or introspection. But graffiti art was written or drawn on-site by someone, often displaying great skill with spray paint or imagination in setting an incongruous scene into your environment, and is by its nature illicit; while graffiti styles and techniques may be exportable to the gallery, the civic mural, and even the artist's canvas, many writers would agree with my belief that true graffiti is illegal by definition, and that much of the charm of the exported stylistic qualities are borne of guilt by association. In this view, graffiti is a protest against everything every successful ad agency stands for: the commodification of public space, the standardization of the built environment, and the permission-based, central control of communication in the form of visual display, which dystopians and state planners the world over agree is the most powerful way to communicate with large groups of strangers who are busy doing something else - the definition of a modern city.
The political nature of the act itself takes much of the pressure off of writers to supply politically-charged content; the accusation is implicit in the act, and the resulting image can be purely ornamental and still carry the same weight. For the creator, this protest is often so internalized as to feel like a purely natural expression, without malice or anger. As one writer put it in an interview with Art Crimes:
Many people have the urge to write their names places to commemorate being there. People don't get upset when they hear stories of "Kilroy was Here" or kids scratching in Janet + Joe on a tree. But somehow when writing gets associated with the city, and kids from all races and backgrounds get together to express themselves in some rebellious way right in the face of everyone, it gets associated with evil. Then officials feel the need to go over graffiti with plain flat paint. The thing that they don't understand is that they are expressing themselves just as much as we are when we put our name or crew up. Unfortunately they don't have the creativity that we do.Taking its name from an Italian term for a method of ornamenting architectural plaster or pottery by etching into it - graffito, "little writing," "little scratching" - the term was adopted to describe the type of graffiti art that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in American cities, and which still constitutes a major strand of street art. In the words of Ilse Scheepers:
Although the general public criticises graffiti for contributing to the 'ugliness' of an area, graffiti writers as a rule do not write for the public as an audience. They write for themselves, and other writers, engaging in a dialogue with others who they may have never met, who inhabit the same city or visit the same areas.This is the motivation that most people who have spared a thought for graffiti art can quickly recognize: These people feel cut off from other channels of communication; and, for some, engenders a curiosity about an otherwise "invisible" class of people who surround them. But there is another major strand of the modern graffiti art community which, while undertaking its project in the same spirit, attempts to communicate with its local community about issues of concern using a wide range of techniques and levels of meaning.
The anger expressed by the members of the Wooster Collective is largely a product of BBDO and the city of San Francisco's refusal to acknowledge the sociological significance of the former type of graffiti or the intrinsic value of the latter as an art form. And their argument has merit. In a city with a median income of $60,000 and a median home value of $750,000, in a nation where protest can be consigned to fenced "free speech zones" and where a programmer just testified to helping write code at the request of the Speaker of the Florida House that would use electronic voting machines to throw an election, those with alternative opinions have ample opportunity to feel like an outsider. (The best of several response images to the advertisement above is shown at left.) Why, they wonder, can Coke, Wells Fargo, the IRS or the Army inject themselves so easily into our public space, while artists and activists with a variety of critiques must stand on the sidelines or be accused of creating "visual pollution"?
