31st Jul 2008
Update: Tom Moody “Paints” a Picture
In an update to the July 7th post here about his work, Tom Moody comments:
This is the demo Rob was referring to–he gave it a shout on his blog (which appears to be down now?):
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/image/tommoody/Painting_Demo/?view=thumbnail
I forgot I did this!
You can follow how one of these pieces goes from bits and pieces to cohesive whole. Tom’s works on paper is intelligent while remaining visceral, beautiful and open, is complex and visually compelling, incredibly well-crafted using simple materials, and uses technology while still being in control of it in a way that feels natural and about that medium. There is never this feeling that a computer made this work, but that a person used a computer as a tool. I would love to see a whole show of this work. It’s great stuff.
So, take a look at the process.
The title of this post relates to the early 50′s Artnews regular feature “So-and-So Paints a Picture”, for example, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” interestingly, to me, written by painter Robert Goodnough in 1951.
It does look like http://www.robmyers.org/ is out of commission, at least for the moment.
BTW, Tom is at http://tommoody.us.
I loved watching the making of Tom’s images. I don’t think I’d followed the making of a piece of art (or a series of artworks) on a blog before, and Tom was a good guide. Tom’s transformation of the knowledge-work-office straw of MS Paint and copier paper into artistic gold was inspirational.
What would it look like to see the making of one of your HTML images, Chris?
My site is down at the moment but it will be back next week. Changing hosts is taking longer than it should have…
Thanks. Not to revive an old argument too much, but I could have used some of that “haven’t seen this on a blog before” support during the recent Rhizome discussions about Net Art 2.0. The tenor of those “talks” was that “it’s all been done before blogs” and anything possibly “new” with the advent of blogging was crappy kid stuff.
The lack of respect in those “talks” was hair-raising.
I can’t follow those Rhizome discussions. I don’t have the time, and not much interest. It reminds me of the roundtables with Newman, Motherwell, Rothko, et al, talking about what an artist’s subject ought to be. Ultimately it becomes a bunch of people arguing about what is right for them but will never be right for others. Newman’s famous quote, “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds,” makes me think that discussions like those at Rhizome are for me just more ornithology.
The argumentative, grandstanding, let-me-top-you graduate seminar tone doesn’t help. My feeling is that if more artists shut up and showed what they mean through their art everyone would be a lot better off in the long run. Unfortunately, these discussions seem less like long-run thinking and more like king-of-the-hill territory staking. Mind, I don’t really follow them regularly, so I’m sure something interesting is said there now and again.
I’m guessing that lo-fi users of technology will always be bashed by the hi-fi set. I don’t know if you’d label yourself lo-fi, Tom, but I definitely think of myself now as falling under that or a similar label. We’re both working with deprecated mediums. To someone working in Java or some other programming language, HTML and old paint programs might as well be something like eight-cake tins of cheap watercolor. Fortunately, there are audiences that rightfully don’t care about any of this.
Rob was involved in those discussions and we were basically on opposite sides of the fence. Except saying you’re on opposite sides of the fence is wrong because it’s one of those icky binaries.
At least at the Cedar Tavern you took a position and your sock on the jaw for it.
The Rhizome chatboards are more insidious than that. The hi fi set wants to bash the lo fi and at the same time claim they are lo fi, in fact they invented it.
Belated response to this:
“It reminds me of the roundtables with Newman, Motherwell, Rothko, et al, talking about what an artist’s subject ought to be. Ultimately it becomes a bunch of people arguing about what is right for them but will never be right for others. Newman’s famous quote, “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds,” makes me think that discussions like those at Rhizome are for me just more ornithology.”
That I disagree with. Movements happen when artists agree (or at least agree on what they disagree on). Movements are good. “To each her own” and “I don’t need none of that consarned book-larnin’” are provincial attitudes. It’s why I had to get out of Texas–everyone saying “I just do my thing” was getting too painful.
In theory the Rhizome discussions are good and valid. The problem there is lack of manners and the convoluted, multiple-nested discussion threads. When you suggest they need a moderator, someone immediately screams “Fascism” (one such person said “I bet you’d like that, so you can eliminate all the comments you don’t like”–classic projection.)