{"id":77,"date":"2005-10-07T14:55:47","date_gmt":"2005-10-07T14:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=77"},"modified":"2018-07-19T15:35:07","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T22:35:07","slug":"empire_of_the_h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2005\/10\/empire_of_the_h\/","title":{"rendered":"Empire of the humdrum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your homework for today, class, is to identify what you feel are the essential differences between this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Empire\"<\/p>\n

and this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Hobokencam\"<\/p>\n

I don’t intend to throw stones at Warhol, but to exalt webcams just as highly as they deserve. I adore them. If art\/drama\/whatever is life with the boring bits taken out, then a webcam is \u2014 ought to be \u2014 life with all the interesting bits taken out. And that itself I find interesting: looking into the forgotten, elided, in-between places with a steady gaze. In that respect Empire<\/em> isn’t my sort of webcam: its subject is just too iconic. But a webcam is exactly what Warhol produced. It’s not art, because a webcam makes its single profound virtue of being artless. Make it steerable or zoomable, or too well-centered on the relevant, and that’s lost. It’s all about not selecting, not filtering.<\/p>\n

Can’t resist this bit of art-wankery<\/a>, though:<\/p>\n

\nCurator Clare Carolin said Empire raised issues about “time and space”.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those ‘issues’ presumably being: time passes<\/em>, and space is filled by things<\/em>. However meagre the idea, there was an idea behind the film, but it’s not an artistic one, except insofar as it’s about seeing<\/em>. The important component of the work is the other side of the equation’s LHS:<\/p>\n

\nIdea + Chutzpah = Conceptual Art\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe that’s what I love so much about webcams: they don’t claim anything, not interest, not value, not relevance. They absolutely must be statically locked-off, continuous \u2014 potentially infinite, even, capable of recording the passage of time with a dispassionate long-eye in the manner of those sequences in George Pal’s The Time Machine<\/a> where a shop-window is a metonym for human ephemera. It’s about stopping to smell the flowers, but also to watch this<\/em> piece of concrete, or that<\/em> empty beach. Peace, I suppose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your homework for today, class, is to identify what you feel are the essential differences between this: and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}