NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Spiral Jetty: Good Morning Entropy

Spiral Jetty (1970) and oil jetty (ca.1920-1980), IKONOS satellite image (11/11/02)

For more recent updates read the Feb 8 post and the Feb 21 post.

UPDATES 2/2/08: 

good points from greg.org:

Brilliant comment from Mr. A. Bitterman, on AFC:

Allow me to clarify regarding the DIA Fdn.
What once began as an agency of change, a foundation dedicated to artists engaged in projects and strategies that defied commodity status or simply fell outside the boundaries of prevailing market structures, has now achieved its own antithesis as a commodities broker specializing in the reconstitution, reclassification and preservation of trans-historical artifacts.

DIA’s reversal of mission was concomitant with its reversal of fortune in the mid-90’s when the foundation was commandeered by entrepreneur Lenny Riggio. One need only visit DIA Beacon, a veritable Disneyland of 60’s and 70’s art, much of it recreated and frozen in time, to appreciate the fact that the market never sleeps, and the dreamer only dreams.

While Spiral Jetty will never post returns to anyone’s bottom line, its careful administration (preservation) affords DIA something better than money - profile. (A similar situation exists in the current plans to restore Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and regulate visitation.) And profile, in Lenny’s world anyway, is the best and cheapest kind of advertising. And if that means stopping time, and subverting provenance, then so be it. It’s worth it, as long as it’s worth it.

Bitterman // 02 Feb 2008, 2:41 am

In response to an earlier post about the Jetty on AFC, Bitterman wrote :

Smithson was not an environmentalist by any stretch of the imagination, nor did he believe there was any such thing as “Nature” - as something separate and distinct from human endeavor. In fact, the notion that progress and technology (even in its most egregious uses) have somehow removed us from “Nature” or set us against “Nature” is patently absurd, a fiction sustained by arrogance religion, and feeble reasoning.

Ironically, 50 years ago, Smithson was not only inspired but strengthened in his resolve by the wreckage and debris that once greeted the visitor to the site of Spiral Jetty, the wreckage and debris of a failed oil drilling operation of the mid-20th century. In his eyes, these things, this industrial junk (now removed - sanitized in the last few years by the DIA Fdn in the interest of stopping time for profit)was of the highest aesthetic value, a motivating factor in his placement of the work.

The cult of preciousness, the very thing Smithson held in contempt throughout his career, has finally caught up with him; the meaning of the work has finally been separated from the work itself; entropy has finally been defeated.
Nancy Holt is wrong. And if Robert Smithson himself were to rise from the dead and rail against the oil industry I would call him a liar and a fake.

I have been to Spiral Jetty, and as excellent as that experience was, it wasn’t the jetty that set me free, it was the intention, faint but still sensible, like the sound of the sea in a shell.

Bitterman // 31 Jan 2008, 3:59 pm

and Today via Modern Art Notes:

First national org. statement on the Jetty

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is out with a statement on the Spiral Jetty situation. From NTHP prez Richard Moe: "The National Trust for Historic Preservation believes that Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake is a significant cultural site from the recent past, merging art, the environment, and the landscape. We are deeply concerned about the potential harm that energy development could bring to the Spiral Jetty."

UPDATE 2/1/08: While there are several practical updates on the blogs for those concerned about the potential impact of drilling near Spiral Jetty,

[Via]: The comment period about the Spiral Jetty-impacting energy development has been extended to Feb. 13. For more information from the state of Utah, click here. For more information on how to comment, click here.

--there is also no small amount of hyperbole flying around; as far as I can tell this amounts to irresponsible reporting: no one's digging up the Jetty.

From two days ago, via BoingBoing, 1/30/08 :

Paddy from the blog Art Fag City says:

I just received an email from a colleague of mine informing me that new oil development plans threaten the integrity of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. According to the artist's widow Nancy Holt, a number of pipes and pumps will be laid beneath the water and shore, as well as roads built for oil tank trucks, and cranes for other project needs, all of which promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral Jetty.* A call for help is currently being circulated, the protest deadline, 7 PM ET today. Those wishing to voice their concerns should email or call Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 [email protected]. Refer to Application # 8853.

*Is this in fact the case? I first noticed the story on Tyler Green's blog yesterday (Spiral Jetty threatened by energy development). My initial reaction was, perhaps oddly, not to man the battlements. (I'll explain why in a second). Later in the day my Inbox was flooded with concerned emails from friends, including sculptor Stefanie Nagorka with whom I visited the Jetty in 2002 right after it first re-emerged after many years of being submerged underwater. I found myself writing back variations of this paragraph:

I saw it too this morning on Tyler's blog, and I wonder about it. That landscape is anything but pristine; it has been a site for drilling for decades, it's not a new thing, and Smithson chose to build Spiral Jetty right next to the much larger, pre-existing, smelly and foul "oil jetty" for a reason. One might say it fit well with his idea of entropy. The assertion that re-newed attempts at drilling for oil in Great Salt Lake would upset the "natural environment" may well be unfounded -- will it upset the jetty structurally? Who knows. I think we need more information before we jump on that bandwagon... Also, access to Spiral Jetty is through Golden Spike National Park, [the site of completion of the first transcontinental railroad... no oil company is going to be allowed to disrupt a National Park -- read description of historical significance!] On another note, I think Smithson might actually have loved the idea of more drilling, which goes back to the 1920s and is part of what defines the terrain. However, he would have been truly horrified by the idea of turning the place into a museum-ified tourist trap, a project Dia was batting around a while back... There must be more to it than this; will see if more info turns up.

Above: the "Oil Jetty" not far from Spiral Jetty, that predates it. Photo: Joy Garnett, 2002.  Some rights reserved. [more photos]

The "oil jetty" is mentioned in the directions to Spiral Jetty that are posted on Dia's website (see item 11 below). Note: back in 2002, upon our arrival at the oil jetty, Stefanie and I got out of our rental truck to stretch our legs and take a few pics -- oil jetty and environs is probably one of the most foul, stinking, detritus-strewn patches of post industrial wasteland I've ever had the pleasure to experience. There's no doubt that Smithson was into it, and that it was part of his decision to position the Jetty where he did:

11. At this gate, the Class D road designation ends and the quality of the road deteriorates markedly. If you choose to continue south for another 2.3 miles, and around the east side of Rozel Point, you will reach the Lake and see a jetty (not the Spiral Jetty), left by oil drilling exploration in the 1920s through the 1980s. As you approach the Lake, on your right you'll come across a concrete foundation remaining from a previously demolished structure.

From this location, the concrete foundation is the key to finding the road to the Spiral Jetty. After you drive slowly past the concrete foundation, take the fork in the road to the right up and onto a two-track trail that contours above the oil-exploration area. Only high clearance vehicles should advance beyond the concrete foundation.

A PDF of the drilling document did turn up via BoingBoing's post of ArtFagCity's entry regarding the Jetty. Also interesting are the comments to AFCity's post, some of which echo my thoughts; here's one via Michael Buitron's Leap Into the Void:

The issue at hand is that the proposed drilling site is within eyeshot of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. A look at the drilling application shows that the staging area will be Little Valley Harbor, about 50 miles away by my best guess. One can't be seen from the other.

Abandoned mobile home ("all shot-up") Photo: Joy Garnett, 2002.  Some rights reserved

I remember from my visit to the Spiral Jetty years ago. An abandoned mobile home--all shot up, an old half-buried pick up truck, and the remnants of a wooden oil exploration jetty that dotted the landscape. The rusted equipment brought to mind Smithson's Tour of the Monuments of Passaic and the pier Entropy and The New Monuments. I'm sure Smithson viewed that same dilapidated jetty next to his that was under construction. I expect thoughts of entropy danced through his mind too. Thirty years later (after my visit) I've read that Dia has removed the debris, too impatient for its eventual decay.

For those who are opposed to all oil drilling on principle, that's another story. Living among the oil rigs of Long Beach, I'm willing to accept the anti-aesthetic, for the benefit of oil that hasn't been shipped from the other side of the planet.

Cattle guard, en route to Spiral Jetty. Photo: Joy Garnett, 2002. Some rights reserved

New Copyright Sanity

Great article in The Guardian by Cory Doctorow:

Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses
guardian.co.uk,Tuesday January 29 2008

In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids.

Regardless of who wants to make a new Spider-Man comic, movie or other derivative work, that person has to hire a lawyer, have that lawyer call up Marvel Comics, set up a call or a face-to-face, negotiate a contract, sign it, pay a fee, and report on their ongoing uses, opening their books for auditing and inspection.

Sony Pictures can do this. It can send lawyers to Marvel and Marvel will send its lawyers back to Sony. Everyone gets to sit at a long table and hammer out the deal, then they issue a press release and go into production.

But little Timmy can't do it. He never could. And yet when you talk to comic book creators, they'll tell you that they got started by drawing copies of other peoples' work.

Musicians start by playing the music they love. Painters start by copying other painters. Filmmakers try to recreate the effects and scenes they've been inspired by in big-screen releases.

Aping each other

This seems pretty basic: even primates watch each other and copy (or, if you will, "ape") each other, so when one monkey figures out how to improve a potato by dipping it in salt water, the whole gang follows suit.

We copy each other to learn and to improve - it's one of the things that makes us human, because we're a lot better at it than chimps.

It's not just Timmy's Spider-Man comic. The babysitter brings over a bag of DVDs to keep the kids quiet; you organise a singalong at the pub; you make a mix tape as part of an awkward teenaged mating ritual: all these uses fall on the wrong side of copyright law unless they are preceded by a complex legal dance of the sort that mere mortals rarely even glimpse, let alone partake of.

Through most of copyright's history, we had two de facto systems: industrial regulation (governing what big companies did with each others' stuff) and folk-copyright (the rules of thumb that most of us understood to be true).

Spider-Man knock-off

This meant that it was OK to photocopy a Dilbert toon for your cubicle wall, make a copy of a record for your pal, or publish your own low-rent Spider-Man knock-off in the school newspaper.

Folk-copyright didn't have a lot of legal authority - it was completely backwards on any number of subjects - but it worked. The likes of Time Warner, Sony, Universal or EMI weren't going to bust you for what you got up to at the OAPs' campfire singalong, and not just because they'd look foolish for doing so.

It just wasn't cost-effective to hunt down all the kids flogging fan-fiction Star Trek episodes in the dealer's rooms of small regional science fiction conventions. Aside from the negative PR, there was the sheer cost of wasting billable lawyer-hours on something that couldn't possibly make you any money.

Then came the internet, which introduced two critical changes: it made it easier for folk-users of copyright to find each other and spread their creations and copies farther than ever, and it made it easier for enforcers to find them and threaten them, especially once tools like the "notice and takedown" regime in the European Union Copyright Directive and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act came on the scene.

YouTube dance

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.

New regime

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.

The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes representatives of creators' groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators' works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like Médecins Sans Frontières.

A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It's the first breath of sanity in the copyright debate. Let's hope it's not the last one.

Wendy Seltzer on Mukurtu Contextual Archiving

My earlier post on this development sparked a lively discussion on the icommons list. Here is a great post on the topic by Wendy Seltzer :

reblogged via WendySeltzer.org, 1/11/08:

Mukurtu Contextual Archiving: digital "restrictions" done right

Filed under: culture, commons — wseltzer @ 10:37 am

I'm accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad one for the public.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped the Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts digital restrictions in a very different light. 

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn't be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions.

They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu protocols for accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One of the first mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that they could only see materials that they were meant to see based on their family/country/community status.

Kim's response was to help construct a digital archive with access controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a person's community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see. The community can thus give objects context in the online archive similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu's form of "DRM" is fragile.  Users are encouraged to print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu's development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most restrictive state when exporting or communicating with "unsigned" devices (such as blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access.  It's up to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms, rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails — the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the human choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

One of the lessons of the recording industry lawsuits and growing shift from DRM'd music is that community norms don't support current copyright law. Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice.

Further good news: Kim says she and Craig Dietrich will be releasing the archive's code as Free Software.

Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

via BBC News,  Tuesday, 29 January 2008:

Aboriginal archive offers new DRM

A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it themselves."     Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.
   

Offline website

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.

Vanessa B: the Art World's Answer to Brangelina?

Image via The Stranger

Artstar Vanessa Beecroft is being showcased/skewered in a new documentary now screening at Sundance. I was alerted to this short article about it in NYMag's Vulture via AFC and MTAA; the former says:

Um, ew! Beecroft shames the fine art profession with her racist and self involved behavior.

And the latter:

It's pure vapidness masquerading as a critique of the same. And I hate it when one not-very-talented but high-profile artist does or makes stupid things thereby justifying all the morleys in the world (as the comments here exhibit).

Read it and cringe:

Vanessa Beecroft in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.Courtesy of Pietra Brettkelly

'Art Star' Vanessa Beecroft: Slammed at Sundance
by Logan Hill

Vanessa Beecroft had better prepare for some serious damage control, since director Pietra Brettkelly's documentary on Beecroft, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, opens at Sundance tonight. The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist. The film is brutally effective because it lets Beecroft hang herself with damaging quotes and appalling behavior.

The documentary explores Beecroft's experiment in Sudan, in which she attempts to adopt two Sudanese orphans and use them as subjects in her work. Wise to theory, Beecroft says her adoption will be "not just fetishization of the blacks. It will be a beginning of a relationship with that country." The film documents the significant gap between Beecroft's theory and her actions.

Upon her arrival in the Sudan, Beecroft hurries to set up a photo shoot, hiding the cameras from the orphanage's sisters, calling the babies "these poor creatures." Which baby should she photograph? "Either one or the other," she says, "it doesn’t matter."

Repeatedly, Beecroft claims that she "loves this culture" — but, in the film's most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping children naked inside a church. "Christ, these people," Beecroft moans, as she barricades herself inside, pushing a pew up against the door to keep the sisters out of their own abbey.

"My husband says, 'You are so superficial,'" Beecroft admits. But Greg Durkin, a social anthropologist, says much worse in the film -- in part because Beecroft spends months attempting to adopt these two children without informing him. (When she finds that she needs to have his approval, she considers a divorce.) He notes that Angelina Jolie's and Madonna's adoptions rated them "a lot of press and publicity … Vanessa's always been very receptive to that." Beecroft blithely agrees, noting that she's always been obsessed with "the romance" of celebrity magazines.

When Beecroft finally installs her final work, VB61: Still Death Darfur Still Deaf, it's the standard Beecroft hokum: mostly-nude women in a public place, only this time they're painted pitch black and covered with buckets of fake blood (get it?). Intended to disturb, it mostly provokes giggles from gawking tourists, but Brettkelly films the performance like something in a David Fincher film. Beecroft stands over the bodies, with red liquid dripping from her hands and splattered all over her feet -- a murderer at the scene of a crime.

"Is it difficult to work with 30 black women?" a spectator asks. "Yes," Beecroft replies. "It is very stressful."

Repeatedly, Beecroft claims that she "loves this culture" — but, in the film's most disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping children naked inside a church. "Christ, these people," Beecroft moans, as she barricades herself inside, pushing a pew up against the door to keep the sisters out of their own abbey.

"My husband says, 'You are so superficial,'" Beecroft admits. But Greg Durkin, a social anthropologist, says much worse in the film -- in part because Beecroft spends months attempting to adopt these two children without informing him. (When she finds that she needs to have his approval, she considers a divorce.) He notes that Angelina Jolie's and Madonna's adoptions rated them "a lot of press and publicity … Vanessa's always been very receptive to that." Beecroft blithely agrees, noting that she's always been obsessed with "the romance" of celebrity magazines.

When Beecroft finally installs her final work, VB61: Still Death Darfur Still Deaf, it's the standard Beecroft hokum: mostly-nude women in a public place, only this time they're painted pitch black and covered with buckets of fake blood (get it?). Intended to disturb, it mostly provokes giggles from gawking tourists, but Brettkelly films the performance like something in a David Fincher film. Beecroft stands over the bodies, with red liquid dripping from her hands and splattered all over her feet -- a murderer at the scene of a crime.

"Is it difficult to work with 30 black women?" a spectator asks. "Yes," Beecroft replies. "It is very stressful."