TFM > PG.121
Back to Eagleton on Zizek, for a sec: “Zizek has only to clap eyes on a received truth to feel the intolerable itch to deface it.” What does this have to do with Art?
Pg. 85: A review of the movie “Hostel”: Most interesting line in essay to me is “But just as he’s about to make his getaway, “Pax” succumbs (in typical American/messianic style) to misguided heroic ambition.” Pax’s failure to save the horribly mangled girl from murder & suicide & her various cruel injuries & Pax’s attempts at first aid are described in some gross detail in the article. The movie’s director says he got the idea for “Hostel” “from a website advertising a murder-for-thrills business in Thailand (another must-go destination for dudes): For $10,000, you got to kill a person. Tourism and capitalism gone berserk.” Second most interesting passage in essay is: (A NY Times reviewer who objected to “Hostel”) could start with Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible” (2002), a favorite among art dudes. Somehow, a nine-minute-long anal rape of a pregnant woman in a public space strikes us as less artistically valid than the atrocities depicted in “Hostel.” Anyone with a modicum of street experience know that the average rape, anal-pregnant or regular takes about two minutes or less.”
& Why is this relevant to the state of Art in summer 2006. Of all the men & women making moving images for exhibition today, why is a movie about “dude-ism and the evil New Europe, two of our (the reviewers Rimanelli & Liden, a couple, I suppose) favorite obsessions!” inhabiting two of Artforum’s incredibly limited column pages?
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Pg. 97: An essay on a Japanese architecture firm. …Hmm… Why did Artforum have to travel to Tokyo for vaguely art-related subject matter? Ah, here it is on the next page: “Yet Atelier Bow-Wow also seems lately to be trying to hide the elements of architecture altogether…they advanced their assault on traditional architecture and its determinism by partially dismantling a house, Gordon Matta-Clark-style, and planting weeds in its former interior. In an ironic reference to Japanese Zen gardens…” and so on.
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Pg: 121: Coverage of a panel discussion, attended by artists & scientists & Calvin Klein: “…repeatedly uttered modesty topos soon began to wear thin, leaving some of the invited artists asking what they were there for, save for testimony of what being an artist was like.” Evidently, some of the scientists investigating the brain’s artistic functions (presumably with an eye towards replacing artists with science-machines down the line) were humbly admitting to “only catching up” with the human art-machines. Of all the panels discussing Art this summer around the globe… Why?
