that was the title of the best video art piece i saw at the video art festival this past weekend...by marc vives, and david buestue....imagine two twentysomething guys doing the oddest ODDEST absolutely oddest things in their apartment....hundreds of things....the video went on for over half an hour, and it was incredible. no dialogue either, just one-line scene numbered scene descriptions. so in "pyrotechnics", one of them gets all of the liquids out of his fridge and cleaning supply cabinet, puts them on a table and performs a pyrotechnics show by squeezing all the bottles ! ketchup, milk, soap, mustard and on and on. in another scene "risk your own life", he puts two bars of soap on the floor, takes off his slippers, and stands on the soap, while pouring water out of a flowering can onto the floor and then trying not to crack his head open while cleaning the floor and "dancing" on top of these soap bars and slip sliding around....and then of course in "cross the living room without stepping on the floor" he jumped from object to object and then used the mop as a pole to get across....if you want to see it,: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNXP1qu5RQA i think that's the longest fragment you can find on the web.
other than that, went to WAMP, the monthly fashion/design/crafts fair on sunday....alright stuff, wicked overpriced. didn't really get anything. hung out at a cafe reading "the journey of man" which anat sent me a while back - about what genetics can tell us about our shared heritage....
yesterday was rainy, so dorian - my roomate - and i went to school, and then i met up with a friend for dinner. started reading "free culture" by lawrence lessig. it's really worth reading if you're interested in any or all of the following: IP law, the "rip, mix, burn" culture us 'young kids' are participating in, copyrights, the Internet, media ownership in the US, 'piracy'....I've spent the past few days researching organizations that engage in archiving, digital libraries....
Today, I met with one of the founders of ARTPOOL (www.artpool.hu), the leading archive on underground Hungarian art during the Communist era and beyond. It was INCREDIBLE. First of all, Julia, one half of the founding couple - her husband being the other half - was wonderful. For almost two hours she took me on a tour of the place and told me stories about art during communism in Hungary, the story of the "Bolgar chapel", which was an art space by Lake Balaton (about an hour outside Budapest), developed by her husband...the idea was to convert it into an artist's colony. But then the authorities caught wind of what was going on there, and after two years of struggling with how exactly they would shut it down: 1. the church was a very delicate matter in those days, 2. there were no laws per se about art exhibitions in non-official, non-public spaces, and since this was a private space.... the state finally shut it down in '73. Then in '79, Julia and her husband founded Artpool, made a newsletter, by utilizing the black market (i.e. bribing the few with access to xerox machines to make some copies) and their contacts with foreign institutions, they told artists about upcoming exhibitions, where they could send submissions, and asked artists to send Artpool their art, music, etc. so that it could be archived. As time passed, the newsletter turned into a samizdat (self-published) zine. Julia laughed as she told me that the political samizdat of the time was so ugly, and so unreadable, that she and her husband just wanted to create something that was designed better, that samizdat didn't have to be ugly....But the magazines weren't just designed better, they were extremely valuable. The zine was published monthly, and each issue would contain articles about the underground art scene in Hungary: happenings, exhibitions, artists, etc. And they contained articles about foreign art trends; for example, she showed me this issue from 84 about Scharf and Keith Haring, and then she said, this was the first issue about graffiti and street art, and it was the first source available to Hungarians to present this culture/movement. The zine also contained removable art books - one called Imaginable Music, contained clever drawings constructed out of a simple musical note.
Now almost 30 years later, the archive is MASSIVE. Artpool has the largest art stamp collection in the world. One of the largest Correspondence Art collections. A massive room in the back contains International material. And everything is organized VERY WELL - so you can pull out a folder about a gallery from a certain year, and then all of their pamphlets, exhibition catalogues, etc. are right there. I spoke with Julia about the digital library movement, and how the archive has been digitizing aspects of its collection. To date, they've transferred their entire VHS collection onto DVD, and their cassette collection on to CDs. But she criticizes the move to digital libraries as an inefficient use of money and resources. For one, she asks, who knows whether any of these digital libraries will hold up in terms of technology in even three years. Secondly, she thinks that many of the people employed to do archival work probably don't know the ins and outs of the collection, so likely spend more time then they need to. She says that Artpool has been invited to join in these projects, but that they have declined. For now, she says it's not urgent. What is urgent? Organizing the material and the database in a way that is most beneficial to researchers.
I also asked her whether they had ever had any legal issues b/c some of the art is posted on parts of their page, and she said that she is anti-copyright laws, that most of the artists are, and that if someone sends something to them, she assumes this means that she can post it, and that if they didn't want it posted, they shouldn't have sent it. But, she also told me about how when they were putting together an anthology/exhibition catalogue to complement their recent exhibit on Fluxus in Central/Eastern Europe, they asked all of the artists for their permission to reprint some of their texts - because printing/publishing is "different." A few of the artists said they didn't want their work published "in that context," which Julia thought was strange considering as how their work had been published in other Fluxus contexts! And one of the artist's wives - the artist is deceased - demanded some sort of payment....
Well that's all....sorry for the longer post...but I think this stuff is very cool.
I'm off...
beijoux,
amie
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