Pinter, The Nobel Prize, and the Frozen Pool

Harold Pinter, on receiving his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize on Wednesday, spoke in an unadulterated voice rarely heard in the US. This from a NYT report:

He returned to the theme of language as an obscurer of reality, saying that American leaders use it to anesthetize the public. "It's a scintillating stratagem," Mr. Pinter said. "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."

This idea of language as an "obscurer of reality" is a potent one. Warm, fuzzy, easy conceptions keep us a managed population, as Curtis White has described. The fuzziness makes criticisms and harsh truths seem fantastic and truly out of this world. "This world" is a carefully manufactured set of safe, simple mental way points that keep away troubling thoughts about some of the assumptions that form the foundation of modern western consumer culture, and its leadership by the United States. As Pinter says, it is "a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Moving Pictures Review

Janet Kutner wrote a review of Moving Pictures in the Dallas Morning News today:

Experimental Art on the Move

ART REVIEW: Internet's influence seen in Dallas show
11:03 AM CST on Thursday, December 8, 2005
By JANET KUTNER / The Dallas Morning News

Now you see it, now you don't. Digitized paintings displayed at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art provide an ever-changing array of colors, patterns and iconography.

"Moving Pictures" is the title of the show, which was co-curated by Dallas artists and University of Texas at Dallas professors John Pomara and Dean Terry. "Narratives with no beginning, middle or end" is what Mr. Terry calls these experimental works, which represent art on the run - symbolic of the Internet's pervasive influence and of the curators' desire to "open the gallery up to outside influences."

The professors put their philosophy into practice at UTD, where Mr. Terry's art and technology students take Mr. Pomara's painting classes and vice versa.

Everything here is in a state of flux, and some works are actually being created over the course of the show's seven-week run. An interactive installation by Max Kazemzadeh of Denton includes electromechanical pencils suspended from the ceiling, which produce abstract drawings on papers spread across the floor in response to people passing through the space.

Mr. Terry's own work, a vertical diptych titled 100lies.com, requires more effort on his part. Each morning he shoots a two- to three-minute video with his cellphone and e-mails it to the gallery, which digitally projects it on the lower portion of the wall. The previous day's video moves to the top, where it shares time with those that came before.

The imagery is hard to decipher, given the limited capabilities of Mr. Terry's cellphone camera and the blown-up proportions of the projected images.

But traces of landscapes, buildings or people can be detected here and there, including an organic shape that turns out to be his wife's knee.

Continue reading "Moving Pictures Review"

100lies featured on MoBuzzz TV

A Spanish show that focuses on mobile culture called MoBuzz TV has done a piece featuring 100lies.com, the web version of my mobile video painting project in the Contemporary. Check it out here!

The host comments that some of the work looks like what a camera phone would do if just left on. The pieces are actually planned, labored over, and reshot, but having them come off seeming casual and random is a plus.