betacorpo.net>>

11/27/02:

Salut from "n'AH-lins"!

I'm broadcasting via this charming little CyberCafe space at the Contemporary Art Center, across from the D-Day Museum. I walked through the latter for about 20-minutes + a 45-minute Spielberg-produced documentary (humouring my step-dad, but still interesting nonetheless) and it actually becomes a nice little prologue to the two immediately exhbition-conscious shows at this empty but well-designed new art space.

2nd floor of the CAC is new work by Christian Marclay, anchored by the guitar-drag piece that visited Chicago. The curators allow the din of the room to bleed through the rest of the area, grounding the three other language-based pieces with the randomly generated music that links each work, creating a fluid transition between senses and spaces as one pulls the layers rom each piece.

I'm becoming aware more and more that my immediate cognition is always juxtaposing two levels of concentration. This is always dramatically clear in my web-browser use (2-3 open windows, one loading a new page while i read another), constant media-related sensation that regulates desire with ironic sublimation, and detatchment and bitter surrender that fuels my spoken sarcasm. Having spent most of the past 48-hours in the familiar simulacra of the New Orleans French Quarter, I'm aware more and more of our daily manic sweeps through fantasy and the "practicalities" of the inability for the dirty contexts of the past to exist on their own.

the CAC's first floor is a wonderful installation by Peretti and Day, two glass artists currently based in Germany. The piece consists of five rooms that chronologically become both stages of grief and rites of psychological maturity (of an apparently male orientation). The materials consist mainly of found objects, much like the nostalgic antique tchotchkes found in Cracker Barrel-type restaurants(link via Excitement Machine) mixed with digital prints, video, mannequins, poetic texts woven into sculpted pieces, and yes, a little glass.

In the second room (called something like "Duchamp's Garden Shed") there is a readymade of a log stuffed with vintage pornographic magazines, illustrating a certain male sexual awakening of finding pornography hidden in some outlying woods. As the entire installation plays with notions of universal rites and particular cultural expressions, I can relate the same experience from age twelve or thirteen - my friends and I finding nasty magazines anonymously hidden away in a natural place, a primal awakening, revulsion and excitement, as inevitable as a gaze, as hidden, public, and necessary as bathroom stall graffiti.

Nerve's Grant Stoddard also shares the exact same thing in the opening anecdote of this cheeky essay.

A Gallery For Fine Photography -

Photo-philes, if you're ever in New Orleans, check this place out. A hodge podge of gorgeous vintage prints that rivals even most archives in Chicago (and elsewhere). It definitely favours a salon-style jumble of master photographers over any interest in display and space, but it is a definite treat to peruse the stacks of flatfles for Atget, Bernice Abbot, Jan Saudek, Yousef Karsh, and other personal favourites from the college textbooks. Their Website has lots of information on the artist's, the original editions of their work, and other little tidbits that collectors would concern themselves with. Chatting with the slacker art students watching the counter about Canadian grad schools was also nice.

There, I found myself drawn into a few Henri Cartier-Bresson images, although before I'd always associated him w/ slightly higher design postcards. After a few days in these ramshackle neighbourhoods, these pictures of quick, eccentric anecdotes had a greater resonance. If only I could remember all the bizzare little flashes that've popped up and disappeared along these tight crumbly streets.