Paul McLean: NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME [BONE artist statement (Title Sequence)]

BONE [SEGMENT 1]: Title Sequence
(moving image)
NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME
ARTIST STATEMENT
by Paul McLean



For the first time in @5 years of posting to YouTube, I included copyrighted material in an AFH-prodution piece (the Waylon song), as a test of corp-media response. This video was immediately flagged by YT and blocked in Germany. I believe I can argue for fair usage, although I do intend to contact SONY and the owners to request the usual permissions & to discover the fee schedules, if there are any. Apparently, SONY has leased such content to YT in an ad-scheme arrangement for most of the major markets. I find the double standard for "CONTENT" worth a response, given the hundreds of 1000s of AFH views/downloads we've provided, including posting-reposting features on the AFH site array. The corp-media vehicles promote a broad agenda for protecting "art" properties they "possess," while building features into their distribution networks that ensure profit/market share for them, without embedded reparations for all "content-providers." For amplification: FB/Google/Myspace, etc., have generated Billions $ selling their services on a secondary market either using ad-models or other means (e.g., stocks), or by compiling huge databases of personal information which they sell/monetize or otherwise "share" to dataminers (gov't or econ).

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FUCK THE SUCK! - MILO

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When I first moved to Nashville in the mid-90s, after a 10-year stint in Santa amassing artist chops and a working-artist art-market praxis, I would introduce myself and, as the common social inquisition goes, my new acquaintance would usually ask me what I did for a living. I would reply, "I'm an artist." In Santa Fe, since, as the saying goes, "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an artist," I would be operating under the assumption that the inquisitor would have an idea what an artist is. That assumption, in Nashville, would prove incorrect. When one claims to be an artist in Santa Fe, if the response weren't a cagey eye-roll (you could never be sure whether you might be talking to world-class A-lister or a stoner wannabe living in a trailer in Pecos, Galisteo, Madrid... or a tourist on the make for a City Different rep), the conversation routinely would evolve into a discussion of mediums, aesthetics or gallery affiliations, since nearly always the person asking what you did for a living was an artist of some variety, too. In Nashville, though, the inquisitor (about your "living") would cagey eye-roll (you could never be sure whether you might be talking to world-class A-lister singer-songwriter/producer/agent etc., or a stoner wannabe living in a beat-down shack in Dixon, Belleview, East Nashville... or a tourist on the make for a Music City rep) and ask you what instrument you play, or whether you were a vocalist. Artist had come to mean "musician" in Nashville, thanks largely to the corporate music industry. In Nashville, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a "muso."

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Over a 5- to 7- year run in Nashville, I enjoyed a rare confluence of artistic support and opportunity. I've written about this elsewhere in detail. With regards the 4D collective schema: DDDD could not have evolved into the successful and ongoing praxis-as-proof for dimensional multi-disciplinary, multimedia presentation anyplace other than Nashville, in my estimation. The culture of Nashville's musical community and the city's largely "open" (as in "open range") infrastructure was the fertile turf for our explorations, and provided most of the seminal informatics required to modify the de-finition of "artist" to make space for "4D artist." Nashville's converging and burgeoning arts system during that period benefited from many emergent or embedded facets. From the huge wealth generated from managed-health-care giant HCA to the pre-Civil War ideologies adhering to Classicism, to the globalization of country music and fundamentalist Christianity (and Christian culture/publishing), Nashville with its neo-demographic (rich in yuppie itinerant knowledge workers) pushed briefly forward into the "Creative Class" near-future as a media leader on several important fronts. The potential for Nashville to surpass other established US and world culture-centers came (and went) in a temporal flash. Unfortunately, as with many great Western Art stories, Nashville's ends in tragedy, to be slightly hyperbolic or hyperreal. Call it the legacy of the Greeks and Baudrillard. I tore out of Nashville in 2002-3 - on a professional basis - like a rat off a sinking ship. I would like to at some point relate the depth and the breadth of the tale - meaning, the 4D analysis - as I would for any of the locations where I've set up a studio over the past 25 years [Beckley, Santa Fe, Scotland, Nashville, Eureka, Austin, LA, NYC (the World-Wide-Web)]. For now, though, in composing an artist statement for BONE [Notes on Dimensional Time], I'll be brief and cryptic. Nashville sold out, AND was dragged down by the weight of its corporate orders.

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What a waste. - Zeelio

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BONE (the video on YouTube) is not art. It is dimensional and exists in numerous locations, both virtual and real. The movie is animated by narrative and content (and, not least, myself). As an "object lesson" BONE illuminates the power of the timeline in software. The arrangement of components is not a design. In fact, it is design's antithesis. The most important notation for the viewer is: inspect the communication between the video as it appears and the CONTEXT, which is served to you by (PJM/AFH) via YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Tumblr and the AFH Blog, with multiple linkages to funnel-programs like Twitter. Pay attention to the ad scheme, brought to you by VIVAKI. Notice how the ad-content collaborates with any data pushed in the upload notes in real-time to generate a "cloud" of useless clickable shite, even interrupting or interfering with your viewing of the video, requiring action on your part to mitigate the intervention. Until the mid-2000's, publishing a video involved a skill-set and bandwith/software/hardware requisites that were "involved" but proprietary by degree and choice. Not to mention other ware-ops, which allowed the economically-challenged hacker to get the tools and tricks he needed to succeed as an operator from sources other than the proscribed ones. Now, your experience of "art" as "content" on a platform on your mobile or home "device" is mediated substantively beyond your means to contravene, depending on your desire to "reach" the "consumer." Which has nothing at all to do with art.

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It should be telling that with a remote click a corporate operative, in conjunction with protectionist legal protocols, can "ban" BONE for every German national, because I chose to include (a modified digital version of) a track downloaded from a purchased CD [the movie soundtrack for "Crazy Heart"][an "ancient" but supremely relevant song by Waylon Jennings that speaks to the selling of Nashville and the realities of touring-musician life, in the early stages of the consumer-portable corporate takeover of "the music industry"]. This case illustrates one of the real attainments and aspirations of the corporate media monopolies and their "cloud:" the enforced mediation of the de-finition of art. Waylon, though he is no less of an outlaw bad ass today than he was when he recorded "I Don't Think Hank Done It This Way," is not an artist. He is, in percentages, an artificial person, too, serving the aims, the anti-art goals, of a global media monopoly made of artificial persons that practice their "governance" at the moment through artificial nations serving as corporate ordinaries, or proxies. As an aside, one of the founders of DDDD was Ellen Rudick, who during her tenure in our collective, at her day-job at Team Design in Nashville, managed the assemblage of the Grammy-winning Hank Williams Boxed Set. That's the "Hank" to which Waylon refers.

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BONE consists of stills [digitized photographs, "pure" digital files built in Photoshop, downloaded and transformed files from the web, etc], that have been animated, and video shot on location or in set studio vignettes. The non-CP audio: such as Percy Person's beautiful and lyrical improvisational piano piece for "Heartless01," tracked into "Central Park Diamond Bouquet" (my condolences to the victims of 9-11 executed in October 2001), recorded at a major Nashville studio by famed engineer King Williams; such as the Preacher soundtrack "hidden" under the conversations of West Virginians in the title NoDT sequence; or "underwater," the bed for the "SWIMMERS" symmetric pattern video concluding the segment - are typical of the sound sculptures AFH/PJM projects incorporate both online in virtual spaces and in actual exhibit spaces, usually presented in multi-source or layered arrays in the architectural environments, for effect. BONE encourages comparison between the "tune" and the dimensional sound framework. The fact is, as a lead artist and preparator of many dimensional exhibits, I can suggest from experience that "tunes" do not hold real space. Tunes are not real art. Even when they happen to be great tunes.

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"Crazy Heart" provided a moving cinematic experience for me, personally. Some of the set locations used to shoot the film pack a punch in my history, like the Thunderbird Inn in Santa Fe. The story-line also resonates deeply. I won't explain how, here. Watching ten seconds in passing while riding a stationary cycle at the gym, of Jeff Bridges receiving various awards for his performance in that film, I couldn't help but juxtapose the Avatar push with the Crazy Heart response. Me, I'll take real actors any time. Congratulations, Jeff! Still, Jeff Bridges and James Cameron are not artists, and what they do is not art, anymore than the Avatar XBOX game is art, anymore than Jeff Bridges is a real Nashville singer-songwriter. Not that SONY would likely agree with me. Or any of the other Billionaire beneficiaries of either of those two multi-platform media "vehicles" would agree with me, either artificially or in a court of law. Not that the professional (or unpaid) "critics" who championed or poo-pooed either movie would concur. And so on. On to the next "Indie." On to the next "Blockbuster." Get it at NetFlix. Download it at iTunes. Play it on your computer. Subscribe to it through your cable provider. Get the ringer. Put it on your desktop. Get it at Amazon. Watch the making of- on E! See the interviews on the official website. Check the returns in Variety. Read the review in the New York Times. Own it now on DVD. Then ask yourself, which part of this is art?

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A few comments. Tyler Green recently celebrated a biography of Chuck Close and put forth the proposition that his self-portrait might be the best contemporary iteration of that artist-genre in the domain. Chuck Close sat on the Intelligence Squared panel on the ethics of the art market and proclaimed that - I'm paraphrasing, more or less, decidedly as a dimensional contextualization in reference to BONE [the video] - that there were no undiscovered artist geniuses currently. I can't help but think of that young fruit loop who ODed - when was it? Last year, the year before? ...Who was pushed by Peres Projects and others in the SUCK market as the next artist-genius. What was his name? Deitch would know. CHUCK: you're a great technician, and a true innovator in the studio, a real dedicated painter. You're also a SUCK hack. You're a commercial artist who tiptoes that fine line between filling orders and doing the next best "Chuck Close painting." You are the status quo. As for comparisons, your work looks flat and boring and big now, but not enough. Thanks for your indelible and important contributions to American art, but like all Heavyweight champions, you're coming, you shine in the dirty corrupt spotlight, and then you're going, and in a while, gone, but for the paintings. In the end, the paintings are what tell the truth. Right, Rembrandt? With respect to advancing dimensional aesthetics, you certainly played your part. The grid-work was excellent. The pixelization reference - whether you intended it or not - was good. Your studio creativity, mechanically-speaking, was dynamic, especially early on. As a factory director, your dedication to quality is outstanding. Without the industry leverage, though, you're still a one-trick pony. That's good for Sotheby's, and your important SUCK collectors. As for art and genius in the perceptual evolution from 3D-4D, dude, you failed to plug in. What's more [N + 1], the sick inflation of your worth in the market makes you and your paintings a central cog in the SUCK-corp machine that has oppressed and continues to oppress the generations who have come after you, and will, until the Close-pushing artificial market is permanently displaced. I thought about putting one of your portraits or self-portraits [shot at LA Art Show 2009] in the video, but decided against it. Whatever. Seen one. Seen'm all, an' a' that. I integrated a couple of (multitudinous) better examples (Napoleon and Remmie's autoportrait - now there was a mechanic, and monoptical, like me - and if I recall correctly, you too! What a coincidence, dimensionally, I mean!).

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Finally, a few words about Google, mountaintop removal, the Massey Montcoal mining disaster, the de-humanization of the subject, the endless revenge on [corporate-artificially-designated] "terrorists," the artlessness of VIVAKI's pool... The good guys always win in the end. Real nature will crush artificial "nature," and "persons," [unfortunately taking most or all real ones in the action], or die trying. Which I guess, in the big Universe, happens. Art doesn't "happen." ART and PROPERTY are not compatible concepts. Art is not a stuffed animal carcass behind glass, anymore than life is. In a free society, a human life is not "owned." No one, including YouTube, owns "BONE." I shared it. You get what you get when you steal the gift. An' a' 'at.

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NOTE: When I return from the summer course at EGS, I am considering the Web 2.0 rollback, starting with the AFH Nings, but likely also the YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Blogger, Google Reader, Delicious, etc., platforms, once again reclaiming the locus for AFH in a closed, meaningful system of distribution. One of my goals in the summer work, facilitated by some accomplished media/communications philosophers, is to explore the proposition that there is no ethical means left for continued artist investment in the corporation-mediated and -monopolized CONTENT field, except in free radical opposition. I look forward to sharing the results with you, dear real people, here or there.

- PJM May 20, 2010
16:19 PM PST