The Hydra
>Present and yet uncannily absent
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Micheal Krimper on hidden graffiti in the New York City subway tunnels @ The Hydra.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Right now, somewhere underneath Manhattan in an abandoned subway station, is a hidden art project consisting of over a hundred murals painted by graffiti artists on dusty, moldy, concrete walls. PAC and Workhorse, two prolific NY vandals, discovered the hidden tunnel a few years back and decided to invite other graffiti adventurers to paint. And they painted, in the indigo dark, near the crack of dawn, all while avoiding the authorities. The discarded tunnel, an unfinished space abandoned nearly 100 years ago, provided a sphere of neutrality, removed from the now fairly marketed and predictable culture of street art on the city’s visible surface.
I was surprised, like many, to learn about the project’s existence from a NY Times article written by Jasper Rees on Underbelly’s unlikely origins. But be forewarned fellow explorer of the unearthly nether-regions beneath the crust of everyday humanity! Since the article was published, at least a couple urban explorers have purportedly been arrested in New York’s subway tunnels, searching for the mysterious, rhizomatic mural rooms. Why, then, did PAC and Workhorse want to let us know about the project? What’s the point of producing a huge gallery of underground (this time indeed really subterranean) street art, removed from the public eye, and then let the public know that it exists somewhere just beyond its grasp? Why would they even create an homepage for it? The story seems a bit maddening, if not, if you would allow me the indulgence, the least bit cruel.
>At what altitude did the liberty of space begin?
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Edgar Garcia explores just where outer space begins @ The Hydra.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The ‘conquest of space’ was the benign concept by which the United States finally came to terms with itself as empire, with a fully operational imperium in imperio to boot. During the Cold War, Arthur C. Clark writes: “Interplanetary travel is now the only form of ‘conquest and empire’ compatible with civilization” (“Space Flight and the Spirit of Man,” 1965). Project Paperclip brought Nazi rocket scientists to the deserts of the southwest. Working within with the OSS (the then CIA), ex-Nazi Werner von Brauen spearheads a multi-platform popularization of the idea of space exploration. And Walt Disney is there to help.
Prez Ike uttered the phrase ‘Military-Industrial Complex,’ to warn against the increasingly intertwined policy relationships between the industrial sector and the national armed forces. While Americans were urged to defend liberty in the face of a global red scare, the same urge was depicted as the force of circumstance by which the massive centralization of resources that only big government could organize became total necessity. NASA and the CIA came from this single gargantuan womb. And we began to send people into outer space.
>We live in a world of tunnels
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Adri Wong @ The Hydra on our lives underground.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Some evidence: the overwrought celebration surrounding the world’s longest tunnel, newly completed, in Switzerland. Also: the recent spike in illicit tunneling activity between the United States and Mexico, as reported by the New York Times.
The craziest thing about our tunnel-world (shall we say – our Tunelandia) is its mirror image quality. Above every tunnel runs a highway (kind of like the old joke about the cat-buttered-toast monorail). Just think: at the exact moment that two desperate immigrants were using a shoe-horn to tunnel from Belarus to Poland, EU passport holders were cruising through the gates into the Schengen region above them with the blink of an iris scan and the swipe of an ID card – a biometric booya, if you will. And as drug cartels industriously burrow below Nogales and Calexico, thousands of trucks coast across the NAFTA-highways atop those cities’ surfaces, their flatbeds laden with sneakers, tortillas, steel.
Herman Melville once wrote: In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. I think about that quote a lot when I’m in Texas.
>He brought the graffiti way of life to the studio
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Michael Krimper on the a new documentary about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat @ The Hydra.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )For too many years I’ve been convinced of a ridiculous legend behind Jean-Michel Basquiat, street scribbler and painter, hustler and wandering youth. I would find myself cornered in louder than necessary conversations concerning weighty things like ‘the history of art’ and ‘dealing with the tradition.’ ”But what about Jean-Michel Basquiat?” I would say. He invented from a state of radical purity, tapped into the bestial imagination of a feral childhood, magnified the thunderous crashes and torrential past of black-America, channeled the ghosts and fossils underneath a New York on the brink of the apocalypse, a destitute horizon, haunted and monstrous, where giant steel carcasses were thrown into the littered streets next to bass heads and the new wave. Pause. I had no idea what I was talking about. A couple nights ago I watched Tamra Davis’ new documentary on Basquiat, Radiant Child, which successfully dispelled the last remnants of my illusions.
>Culture Remix
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Michael Krimper @ The Hydra considers a new book about art and originality.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Media writer and theorist Aram Seinrich just finished an intriguing new book, Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Influenced by the aesthetics of DJing and sample-based music production, Seinrich sketches an emerging, and still hazy concept of art at odds with the Romantic notion of the artist as a pure originator of a creative work. Sinnreich calls us to drop the notion of such an artist: the introspective and surely depressive genius who, in gathering waves of inspiration from within or without or whatever, produces a decidedly original — a wholly new — work of art. At first blush, this point seemed like a bit of a straw man to me; I mean, who really believes in the notion of the artist as absolute originator anymore? But then I realized there was one powerful force that still seems to rest on this outdated idea — and that’s really what Seinrich has beef with: copyright law.
>Invisibilized Realities
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In the September issue of the The Believer there is an interview with Robyn Nagle, the athropologist-in-residence for the New York City Sanitation Department. Nagel is trying to build support for a Museum of Trash in the city, but such an idea is not easy to persuade in a city that is often overwhelmed with its trash and simply wishes it to be taken away. Nagle notes that everything we see is eventually trash, and yet we love to ignore this reality–or rather “invisibilize” it–thus making our response to trash a complex cognitive act: “it’s cognitive in that exact way: that it is quite highly visible, and constant, and invisibilized. So from the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? Nagle’s ideas prompted me to think about all the ways we might enact this cognitive process in other parts of our lives, and how writers and artists provoke us to see those realities we invisibilize each day.
At Cerise Press, writer Sun Yung Shin goes searching for the word adoptee (that doesn’t exist in English), as she tries to recover memories she never had: “It is a word that refers to a permanent exchange, it refers to the choice of the adopter, it defines the adoptee as an artifact, something created by the will of the adopter. The mother or father or parents do not have any word related to adopt attached to them.”
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Edward Schwarzchild meditates on writing and art at The Rumpus, moving between a number of fragmented memories that each seem to connect to the writer Nick Flynn: “When Nick speaks of what it means to be lost (as he does powerfully in Some Ether, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and The Ticking Is the Bomb) he occasionally cites a line from D. W. Winnicott: “It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.””
Spotlighting the influence of Western, liberal philosophies on Iranian intellectuals and activists, and the problems of the Left in Europe and North America to recognize this, is the subject of Danny Postel’s essay in The Liberal: ““There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language”, reports Vali Nasr, “and these have gone into multiple printings”. Abdollah Momeni, the leader of Iran’s most prominent student-activist group (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), claims Habermas as his chief inspiration. The speeches and writings of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, are peppered with references to Kant, John Stuart Mill and Albert Camus.”
In exploring the hidden, and not so hidden, sexual pleasures of malls, Molly Young dissects the experience of shopping at Hollister at The Believer: “The employees are selected for their insane good looks and friendliness, which creates the disorienting customer experience of receiving attention from people way out of your league over and over again. You can’t avoid having a sexual experience at Hollister, even if it’s just to stare at a greeter’s bullet-hard nipples. Hollister’s strategy may not be subtle, but it is clever. By literalizing the mall’s sexual promise in actual naked flesh, the brand makes it unnecessary for shoppers to wander elsewhere.”
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Oscar Paul Medina at The Hydra Magazine writes on the influences of Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo’s “art of noises” on contemporary music: “For Russolo, noise carries a two-fold meaning: the discordant atonality of machines and also natural non-traditional sounds. Animals, cars, waterfalls, jet engines, trains — the cacophony of coitus and the shrieking of a child crying — all these fall within the rubric of noise.”
Reflecting on the pleasures and limits of walking through nature with his ipod Simmons B. Buntin, editor of terrain.org, considers our current conflicts around listening and experience: “I accepted the digital music player with a mixture of anticipation and regret. As with my adoption of any new technology, I knew it would change my habits and relationship with the wider world. Though I design websites and work on computers all day, I’m always wary of new gadgets. It’s not that I’m old-fashioned; instead, there’s something about losing a connection to the visceral world, an unwillingness to substitute virtual for actual.”
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