super mario kart
I'll fess up: I like talk radio. I start most days listening to the Tony Kornheiser Show, then Don and Mike in the afternoon. NPR fills the lunchtime gap. Occasionally I'll even drag out Charles' XM receiver and turn on Al Franken's show. I know it's not good for me, but it's easier than picking out music.
It's a shame that I mostly listen on weekdays, though -- in the DC area, Saturdays are when things get really good. I'm thinking in particular of This American Life and Studio 360. I usually prefer TAL, but this week's Studio 360 was all about videogames -- so naturally I was intrigued. You can find the "this week's show" page here; it looks like eventually the videogame episode will move to the archives here.
The episode was quite good, providing listeners with a quick background summary before launching into a piece on how games affect people and a segment on the military's use of game-like simulators for training. All of this was tied together by insightful banter between Kurt Andersen and Clive Thompson, Slate's videogame critic.
But the most interesting segment focused on an guy named Cory Arcangel, an artist who uses old NES cartridges as his medium. Arcangel's been shown at the Whitney Biennial, where, among other things, he displayed what seems to be his most heralded work: a piece called Super Mario Clouds. SMC is an installation of three projectors showing a looping animation of clouds coming from a hacked Super Mario cartridge. It looks like this (taken from Arcangel's site):
This may seem a bit silly and frivolous. I think that's normal; it's pop art, after all. Irritating though these NES references may be, we're only going to see more of them. The MiniBosses are enjoying considerable success doing rock covers of songs from classic videogames; and apparel pushing 8-bit nostalgia is keeping our nation's unemployed musicians warm. It makes perfect sense: loving videogames is as close to a universal boyhood experience as anything. It's a touchstone, and both marketers and artists are going to use that to their advantage.
But which is Arcangel? I can't say that I'm sure. Looking at a sampling of his work confronts the tech-savvy viewer with a chicken and egg problem. Much of his art can have conceptual significance ascribed to it -- but did Arcangel himself know the piece's meaning prior to its completion? Customized Nintendo games will no doubt seem novel and impressive to the normal, non-geeky art-lover. But people have been hacking cartridges for a while without demanding artistic kudos. Making Tetris insanely slow only requires the alteration of a few bytes of the game's code. So Arcangel isn't inventing a new type of canvas, or even pushing the boundaries of an established one. It therefore seems critically important to know whether he's coming up with new ideas, or just a new way of marketing a dorky hobby.
The case for Arcangel as a serious artist trying to communicate his ideas isn't helped by stupid, jokey pieces like NIpod -- a hacked cartridge with an iPod-like interface that can play the likes of Weezer and Lil John; or I Shot Andy Warhol, a modification of the light-gun game Hogan's Alley that turns the bad guys into pixellated Warhols; or, most despicably, Doogle, a version of Google that only returns results related to the show Doogie Howser, M.D.. These last three works all seem pretty lousy to me, but they're also considerably more complex technical achievements than the relatively pleasing Super Mario Clouds, adding to the possibility of SMC and Arcangel's other best pieces being merely the good bits culled from mountains of thoughtless technical noodling.
I think this opens up a more fundamental question about artists and the materials they use. Arcangel seems beholden to his medium. Did he conceive of Super Mario Clouds and then decide to implement it? Or was he fucking around with ROM hacking and realized he could market a sub-par tech demo as art? I don't know the answer to that, but I think the line between those processes marks the delineation between "art" and "arts & crafts". I suppose this puts me in the unpleasantly complicated camp of believing a piece of art can't be divorced from its creator's intent and personal history. But for all the pretension and subjectivity such a stance introduces, it still seems preferable to getting suckered by endless medium-specific variations on solarized photos: engaging tricks with meaning ascribed only after their fabrication.
Unfortunately it also means I won't really know what I think about Arcangel's work until I know exactly how he makes it.
Comments
I don't think you need to make the jump into the uncomfortable and unprofitable realm of artistic intention to judge the art/craft distinction. The long version of why you don't want to end up there is here, but in short, I think it's more practical to grant Arcangel his art but call it very bad art. It's not a Warhol-school investigation of the NES phenomenon (or if it is, it doesn't say much) and it's not Lichtenstein-school appropriation of the media to achieve traditional artistic goals (or if it is, it doesn't say much).
Because he doesn't seem to have either vertical (medium) or horizontal (thematic) range, I think your suspicion is warranted. I could imagine ways that he could go in either direction, so maybe there's room to develop, but the fact that he made it into the Whitney horrifies me.
I can appreciate the sentiment expressed in the Barthes essay you linked to; I agree that there's no reason to insist on a "theological" interpretation of a piece, and that a postmodern approach to understanding art is a more appropriate and rewarding tactic.
But more realistically, the author is very much alive and necessary for many pieces. Isn't the art world obsessed with finding auteurs with interesting backstories and youth? Heck, you wrote about Jerry Saltz calling for MoMA to exhibit young artists just last week. From a higher level, what's DuChamp's Fountain without the author? Sure, the idea could be applied to any urinal throughout the history of bathroom fixtures. But it wasn't, and the piece is still different from all those others. I suppose you could argue that the act of submitting it to the proper artistic authorities is what made that particular piece what it is, but personally I wouldn't agree.
As long as good art needs to be produced we'll need to (or ought to) assign plaudits for it, and for that the author will have to remain. That's not to say the viewer should be forced or expected to consider him or her along with the work, but it does means that the artist and their intent is still relevant. If someone's moved to tears by Super Mario Clouds well, that's great, but if my maximally cynical interpretation of Arcangel turns out to be correct it still seems like it'd be sucky for him to win fame and fortune.
At least, that's how I feel about this. For all I know the Barthes position is considered canonical. It it is, though, it seems like the art world isn't really practicing what it preaches.
You should really check out Day 2 Day on NPR during week days.
Like any theory I think you can apply it maximally or minimally, and Barthes art theory is some distance removed from the gritty, blue-collar reality of contemporary art criticism. So when Saltz calls for younger artists, I think he's just calling for younger art (post-1980) to bolster their contemporary showing. Duchamp is a good case, though: It's not that everyone really loved Marcel or anything, but he had to accrue a certain amount of cache before he could pull off a few of his early stunts and have gallerists take him seriously. (He was a technically astute painter, so it wasn't much of a problem.) But if you take a weak Barthes reading, there's nothing really inconsistent going on there, I think, because it's his body of work and how the art operates that counts.
Take Arcangel—what it would take for you to agree to his work? For me it would take some expansion beyond the NES cartridges, so that I could see he was addressing art questions first and NES second, or other approaches to the Pop/nostalgia NES angle. Because he's working in a Pop style, I don't feel like I need much more explanation—it's better to just wait and see whether he does it well. The unfortunate effect of Barthesian patience is that the art world gets suckered on lots of gimmicks.
But to re-ask the question I asked and then answered, what would it take for you to accept Arcangel's work as valid? Is there a tech angle here?
Well, I think he has expanded beyond the NES cartridges to some extent -- just in awful, stupefyingly bad ways (eg Doogle). I don't think there's a tech angle to it, necessarily -- certainly the complexity of the work as an engineering feat shouldn't be factored into evaluations of its artistic merit (although I'd still be irked by anybody hailing Arcangel as technically innovative).
For me to appreciate the work as worthwhile (even if I didn't really like it) would probably just require me hearing Arcangel talking like a thoughtful person. I've made plenty of technical accidents that ended with me saying "huh... that's kind of cool". I just need to know that isn't how Arcangel makes his art.
Oh, yeah, I get you. I have some friends back at home with whom I used to sit around and whine about how all artists should be like Jeff Wall, who's as fine a writer on photography as he is a photographer.
But! all this said, I'd pay good money for a huge digital window that showed me a backyard drawn from Mario 2, rather than the slush-n-dogshit I see now.
You can listen to This American Life every weekday on XMPR. It's a happy thing.
Post A Comment