Promptly at 10pm every Wednesday (well, more like quarter after) I turn into a pumpkin, which is to say that I find myself being pulled away from the podcast we’re recording and back into my normal life. This means that I’ve had to leave every podcast we’ve recorded a little early, which is fine and all, but it also that there’s work left on BiW that I really wanted to get to… but didn’t have the chance.
So very very very briefly, here are a few pieces that impressed me and I wanted to point out:
The atari station created by Oxoc Ah. (The snake in front of the Atari is not, so far as I can tell, part of the piece.)
Generally speaking, we’ve been turning our collective noses up to stuff that’s been left on the island that could be made just as easily in real life. As a general rule I think this works, but I do find myself really liking this piece in particular. Its absurdity is its charm. It’s funny - a sight-gag, but a very good one at that.
On a much more serious note, there’s this by Angrybeth Shortbread:
I can say with no hesitation that Angrybeth is easily my favorite artist working in SL at the moment.
Looking at this, I immediately think of a Donald Judd piece that’s been recreated in, I don’t know, Jell-o or something; I look at it and I don’t really know how I’m supposed to engage it or what really it’s supposed to do. That’s the first thing I like about it: While it alludes to art and has its feet planted firmly in that context, it doesn’t announce itself to be ART!!!! and beat you over the head. It’s not monmental; its pallette is pared down to almost nothing. It could just as easily be an unfinished build or a casual experiment - it doesn’t have to be art.
I like the movement that the layering of the cubes makes - the way in which it looks like there is this radiation of cubes forever moving toward me, which in fact it’s static. I also like the way the edges are nondistinct and it’s a little hard to tell where the sculpture ends and SL begins, unless you spend some time looking at it.
If you run your avatar through the cubes, tones are played and a series of other cubes appear. The music created is mysterious and haunting, and that ghostly feel is only amplified by your avatar running towards and away from that ectoplasm green. I’m fairly sure it all means something - that the artist has some concrete, specific method to having set this piece up in this way - but I’m not sure what that is. Having said that, I don’t care - it is fluid enough in what it reveals to me as a viewer (even as an uninformed one) that I want to spend time with it and investigate it more.
Nearby is this work by Juria Yoshikawa:
Juria’s work is similar in that it has these translucent colors that your avatar can run through and then music is played. It’s larger, brighter, and more concrete (”monumental” I suppose) than Angrybeth’s, but is otherwise very similar.
I should say before I go any further that I know, from talking to several Angrybeth fans, that there is an idea out there that her work has been “copied” or “ripped off” by other artists. This is an idea I would like to dispense with completely. If you think to the history of RL art, there are easily a half dozen or so artists who could be pointed to has having “invented” abstraction in the early part of the 20th century. Ideas pass like viruses from one person to the next - it’s impossible to be in an atmosphere where you’re creating art, looking at other people’s art, talking about art, and yet somehow not incorporating what you see and hear into what you make. (How many times as artists do we find ourselves at a gallery thinking, “Oooh! That artist gave me a good idea!” and then you wind up basically picking up a conversation that was started by some artist you don’t even know? That’s the nature of the process. It happens a million different ways, all the time.)
But the ultimate reason why I think that this argument should be dispensed with is that it reduces Angrybeth’s work to simple innovation when it is so much more that that. There are several artists in SL who are now doing this running-avatar-plays-music type thing, but I still like her work the best. It’s not the gimmick of “look what SL can do!” that’s amazing; it’s how she combines it with completely other ideas and makes it all come together that’s amazing. I don’t care who did something first; I care about who does it best.
So then, how to discuss Juria’s work in relation to Angrybeth’s? I do like Juria’s pallette and use of scale. The playful jungle-gym feel of the work makes it incredibly attractive and the kind of thing that I am instantly drawn to and want to engage. However, I don’t know if its interactive element (the tones that are played as you go through it) work as well in Juria’s piece as they do in Angrybeth’s. In Angrybeth’s, I am confronted with this scaled-down, minimal thing that I don’t know what it is or how I’m supposed to respond. The tones then seem to come out of nowhere and create that haunting feel - they don’t make the situation any more grounded or certain; if anything, they confuse me as a viewer all the more which makes the piece more elusive and interesting.
Juria’s work, meanwhile, announces itself as a cacophany from the moment you first see it. Engaging it and creating the tones seems almost beside the point. It’s already disorienting and over-the-top - the tones should either be way more of an assault to the senses or not present at all.
Ok, I think you guys are going to kill me when this gets posted, so let me stop delaying the inevitable and post it already…
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