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Sep. 11th, 2006 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby1. Andy Warhol / Supernova
Guest-curated by David Cronenberg
My attempt at depicting the crowd. It was actually less lively than this, and they were all holding cell phones.
I managed to catch the second-last day of the Andy Warhol / Supernova show at the AGO, courtesy of Starbucks (long story). That was Saturday; I've since been mulling over what I should write about it.
One phrase springs instantly to mind: highly appropriate. It's small (three rooms!), shocking, and it's clearly the AGO's attempt to raise as much money to fund their extension of the building while expending as little effort as possible. Andy would have been proud. You can do it in 15 minutes. In fact, you should do it in 15 minutes.
All cynicism aside, it features some of Warhol's better work—more porn, less pop; more murder, less Monroe. Cronenberg is a twisted fuck, and I can dig that. But it's a spectacle of a spectacle, an exhibit of an OMGfamous! artist curated by an OMGfamous! film director. And it's designed, in a brilliant twist, to alienate and isolate the spectator.
As you walk in, you're handed a complementary audio guide, featuring Cronenberg's narration. You resist listening to it, because seriously, does anyone like audio guides? But inside, the gallery is dead silent. Everyone else is using audio guides. So you listen to Cronenberg wanking on about meanings that Warhol may or may not have intended to put in his pieces. (Who knows? Best Warhol quote ever: "I think everybody should like everybody.")
So you're viewing art at Cronenberg's pace, not your own, and instead of forming your own relationship to the work, or understanding it through dialogue with your fellow gallery-goers, the experience becomes instructional, the expert telling you what to think. The audience is standardized, mechanical, and once I turned off my own audio guide, becomes a far more fascinating installation piece than the art itself.
In essence, it was a very meta swindle. I can't help but be impressed.
2. They Came Back (Les Revenants)
Robin Campillo
I'm not sure how I managed to miss this one (it came out in 2004). This is a rare thing—a zombie movie that managed to disturb me. A lot. Just not in the usual way.
The premise, for those of you who also missed it: 70 million people unexpectedly return from the grave. In one small French town, 13,000 people, mostly elderly, shuffle out of a graveyard. They don't seem to want to eat anyone's brains, but they're also not the people they were before they died. They're mentally slower, their body temperature is five degrees lower than normal, and they don't sleep. At first, the government treats them as refugees, setting up a holding centre for them while trying to locate their relatives, and eventually helping to reintegrate them into society. But things get progressively creepier from there, as it has to do with language and memory and what it means to lose both, and that's a hell of a lot scarier than the possibility of getting eaten.
It's a quiet, subtle, bleak little movie that manages to be unsettling without resorting to a single zombie cliché. Like any good zombie movie, it's a metaphor, but ultimately, not the one that you're expecting.
3. Day By Day
Chris Muir/Photoshop
Is even more surreal than usual lately. How is it that Sadly, No! isn't all over this?
Guest-curated by David Cronenberg
My attempt at depicting the crowd. It was actually less lively than this, and they were all holding cell phones.
I managed to catch the second-last day of the Andy Warhol / Supernova show at the AGO, courtesy of Starbucks (long story). That was Saturday; I've since been mulling over what I should write about it.
One phrase springs instantly to mind: highly appropriate. It's small (three rooms!), shocking, and it's clearly the AGO's attempt to raise as much money to fund their extension of the building while expending as little effort as possible. Andy would have been proud. You can do it in 15 minutes. In fact, you should do it in 15 minutes.
All cynicism aside, it features some of Warhol's better work—more porn, less pop; more murder, less Monroe. Cronenberg is a twisted fuck, and I can dig that. But it's a spectacle of a spectacle, an exhibit of an OMGfamous! artist curated by an OMGfamous! film director. And it's designed, in a brilliant twist, to alienate and isolate the spectator.
As you walk in, you're handed a complementary audio guide, featuring Cronenberg's narration. You resist listening to it, because seriously, does anyone like audio guides? But inside, the gallery is dead silent. Everyone else is using audio guides. So you listen to Cronenberg wanking on about meanings that Warhol may or may not have intended to put in his pieces. (Who knows? Best Warhol quote ever: "I think everybody should like everybody.")
So you're viewing art at Cronenberg's pace, not your own, and instead of forming your own relationship to the work, or understanding it through dialogue with your fellow gallery-goers, the experience becomes instructional, the expert telling you what to think. The audience is standardized, mechanical, and once I turned off my own audio guide, becomes a far more fascinating installation piece than the art itself.
In essence, it was a very meta swindle. I can't help but be impressed.
2. They Came Back (Les Revenants)
Robin Campillo
I'm not sure how I managed to miss this one (it came out in 2004). This is a rare thing—a zombie movie that managed to disturb me. A lot. Just not in the usual way.
The premise, for those of you who also missed it: 70 million people unexpectedly return from the grave. In one small French town, 13,000 people, mostly elderly, shuffle out of a graveyard. They don't seem to want to eat anyone's brains, but they're also not the people they were before they died. They're mentally slower, their body temperature is five degrees lower than normal, and they don't sleep. At first, the government treats them as refugees, setting up a holding centre for them while trying to locate their relatives, and eventually helping to reintegrate them into society. But things get progressively creepier from there, as it has to do with language and memory and what it means to lose both, and that's a hell of a lot scarier than the possibility of getting eaten.
It's a quiet, subtle, bleak little movie that manages to be unsettling without resorting to a single zombie cliché. Like any good zombie movie, it's a metaphor, but ultimately, not the one that you're expecting.
3. Day By Day
Chris Muir/Photoshop
Is even more surreal than usual lately. How is it that Sadly, No! isn't all over this?
