This piece takes as its starting point a dialectical inversion of Dario Escobars" 12 Minutes, 8 Seconds" (2008). "Does Modern Art Give You A Headache" was shot and edited in less than an hour on 16 June 2009. The film came about as a result of my having attended two evening screenings of Guatemalan art videos in London on 5 and 6 May 2009. In a blog I posted about that event on 8 May 2009 entitled "Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video", I included the following observations about Escobars work: "..."12 Minutes, 8 Seconds" (2008)... consisted of a fixed shot of a lit cigarette placed on a public fountain and filmed until it had burnt down to the butt and the remains were blown away by the wind. ...(T)his piece was a real groove sensation! You knew there would be a pay-off when the ash fell from the cigarette, and the way this was stretched out proved a real gas. This... made me think of Fluxus, and in particular of its simple instructional performances that were theorised by Maciunas as the monomorphic neo-haiku flux-event and which he counterposed to the self-indulgence of the mixed media neo-baroque happening. Needless to say, the soundtrack to "12 Minutes, 8 Seconds" was simply ambient city noise captured as the film was made!" To see this blog entry in its entirety go to: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=1269 This blog entry brought a comment from someone identifying themselves simply by the English first name Simon, who said: "Escobar makes me want to plink, plink fizz a couple of ALKER SELTZER in a glass of water, recording the event." (Comment left May 8, 2009 at 2:26 pm). I decided to treat this comment as a Flux Script and went ahead and made this version of the piece. Many other versions could be made with different framings, backgrounds, light etc. I decided not to use live ambient sound and so stripped that out and replaced it with an audio piece I'd previously made with Nigel Ayers entitled "Genetically Modified Metzger Manifesto". My lyrics to this were deliberately buried into the mix, so to make disentangling them easier, I reproduce them below: The damaged nature of industrial societies leads to auto-destructive art. The sound of amplified jet engines cruising a mile above the earth. The bombers circle and circle and circle around acid on nylon. Machine produced and factory assembled art works by Gustav Metzger. Combustion, compression, concrete, corrosion. Convulsion, subversion, defection. Random activity and the tangential slogan no more beautiful ruins! Smash the picturesque, smash capitalism, smash realism and smash abstraction. Suited beings in Regent Street are monsters of self-regulation. Everything, everything, everything else is an echo of Russian futurism Combustion, compression, concrete, corrosion. Convulsion, subversion, defection. The greatest art of the sixties was dumped nightly on the streets of Soho. The greatest art of today is the spam filling your email inbox. Far better than those poetry sites where people cut and paste words and phrases, Is junk email which uses exactly the same technique to avoid spam filters. Combustion, compression, concrete, corrosion. Convulsion, subversion, defection. Thank you for purchasing my instructional video Make Money While You Shower. I think you'll agree it is the best $200 you'll have ever spent because let me assure you that there are a lot of men out there who will pay handsomely to film young women taking a shower, and they range from glamour film makers to rank amateurs. Of course you can make extra money from professionals by charging an additional fee for signing a release form... So how do you reach these desperate men? Just send me $200 and I'll tell you how in my instructional video Make Money From Your Website! Scientist must collaborate with artists, engineers, grifters and con-merchants. Peoples power will accelerate the disintegration of the institution of art. A total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the work. Words in freedom machine produced and factory assembled. Combustion, compression, concrete, corrosion. Convulsion, subversion, defection. Auto-destructive art is an attack upon capitalism and the drive to annihilation. Glass, heat, human energy, electricity, feedback, explosives. Duchamp said art works die and end up in the graveyard of museums. Metzger proposed they should have a life varying from a few moments to 20 years. Combustion, compression, concrete, corrosion. Convulsion, subversion, defection.
Visibility: 3009
Duration: 4m 49s
Rating: 14