Chasing The Cheap Ass Sublime

My joke earlier wasn’t clear enough: I wasn’t writing a memo to MOMA curators telling them how to evaluate this work, I was imagining a leaked internal memo telling curators what to take into consideration when analyzing videos that could as easily be a street product as Art.

@paddy well i think it’s clear that howard and i look at this piece in very different ways. to me, whatever informational connection one can deduce from a mashup based on it’s source material, i’d really doubt it’s something due to seeing it as a mashup…as in it’s something you didn’t already know about the source material on it’s own. so then, what is the potential of a mashup to say anything new?

a crude analogy might be to say that i know 3 + 2 is 5. i wasn’t thinking about it at the moment it was pointed out again in a mashup, which adds a 3 with a 2, but that doesn’t mean the artwork has any information in it.

so all of howards connections make sense, but for me they don’t support the work cos in the way i’m interested in looking at artworks, those connections are more or less meaningless. they aren’t specific to the action of the artist in the work i’m viewing, they are specific to source material i’m already familiar with on its own terms. unless a mashup has some insane technical apparatus behind it, i don’t think it can function as anything other than a guilty pleasure if that. and i learned this from making and exhibiting mashups

to quote craig mack’s verse on flava in ya ear remix, one of the videos featured in Conductor’s first movement (and which of course we don’t hear):
“Word up don’t rap no crap you bore me,
Wanna grab my dick…too lazy…hold it for me.”

if it aint broke dont fix it, right?

i think the reason is that the language of mashup is so limited. you have two sources, edits, and that’s it. it’s a bit like working with presets in a way, in that the thing you make is actually a comment on the the self-imposed limits you’re employing, perhaps the social conditions that predicated them, etc. but presets can be many things…code, interface, hardware, microsoft word, protocol, whatever – there’s room to move and material selections to make.

with a mashup you don’t even have that…by definition you have flattened youtube pop culture element a and you combine it with flattened youtube pop culture element b. it’s 2010, so a and b are almost equivalent anyway. good luck coming up with anything to say in that system!

I’m proud of a “mash” I did where I took a slick New York Times video of Guggenheim artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploding some fireworks on a canvas with a team of assistants, and intercut it with YouTube footage of David Carradine in Kung Fu performing a fire ritual and batting some spears around. It “exposed the racist underpinnings of the Western curatorial project with its ongoing devotion to stereotypes of the Mysterious East” and was well done, too (in a self-effacingly crappy way). I don’t expect it to be in a museum, though. In fact that would kind of defeat the purpose, which was being annoyed by the pretensions of the system to understand stuff it doesn’t know anything about. I mean, China, fireworks, c’mon.

sounds riveting, tom

In the best tradition of “institutional critique.”

If only I had a nickel for each time I came here! Amazing article!

If only I had a nickel for each time I came here! Amazing article!