joy garnett
Since the beginning
Works in United States of America

ARTBASE (1)
BIO
Joy Garnett is a painter based in New York. She appropriates news images from the Internet and re-invents them as paintings. Her subject is the apocalyptic-sublime landscape, as well as the digital image itself as cultural artifact in an increasingly technologized world. Her image research has resulted in online documentation projects, most notably The Bomb Project.

Notable past exhibitions include her recent solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, New York and at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; group exhibitions organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Artists Space, White Columns (New York), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (UK), and De Witte Zaal, Ghent (Belgium). She shows with aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels, Belgium.

extended network >

homepage:
http://joygarnett.com

The Bomb Project
http://www.thebombproject.org

First Pulse Projects
http://firstpulseprojects.net

NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/

Discussions (685) Opportunities (5) Events (8) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

NEWSgrist: *Jason Salavon: Bootstrap the Blank Slate* Vol.4, no.13 (Sept 8 2003)


NEWSgrist: *Jason Salavon: Bootstrap the Blank Slate* Vol.4, no.13
(Sept 8 2003)

============================
============================
NEWSgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.net
{bi-weekly news digest}
============================
Vol.4, no.13 (Sept 8 2003)
============================
============================
*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:
http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum

DISCUSSION

FACT Vacancy (fwd)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 12:16:37 +0100
From: Zoe Chapman <chapman@fact.co.uk>
To: Zoe Chapman <chapman@fact.co.uk>
Subject: FACT Vacancy

FACT is one of Europe

DISCUSSION

DEANIMATED, a major new exhibition by MARTIN ARNOLD (fwd)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 20:33:57 +0100
From: Eddie Berg <>

Z

List to forward SC details to.

E
--
---------------------------------------
Eddie Berg
Executive Director

FACT, the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology
88 Wood Street
Liverpool,
L1 4DQ

t: + 44 (0)151 707 4444 [reception]
t. + 44 [0]151 707 4420 [direct line]
f: + 44 (0)151 707 4445
www.fact.co.uk

"At the present moment in time, when new technologies and old aesthetics
meet, Martin Arnold has revived the question: What is cinema?"
Laura Mulvey

DEANIMATED, a major new exhibition by MARTIN ARNOLD
4 July - 25 August in Galleries 1 & 2

http://www.fact.co.uk

FACT is proud to be in LIVERPOOL, EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2008
http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/capitalofculture/ecard/
--------------------------------------------------------

DISCUSSION

Future of War conf., reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt


hey all -
this just in:
------------

War as Architecture
by Tom Vanderbilt

[published summer 2003 in The Knowledge Circuit, Design
Institute, University of Minnesota]

http://design.umn.edu/go/knowledgeCircuit/smr03.1.vanderbilt

NEW YORK, NY. War, as the old Clausewitzian saw goes, is the extension of
politics by other means. As we have been reminded in recent months, there
may be cause for a new dictum: War is the extension of architecture by
other means.

Apart from the obvious architectural connotations of war the need for
defensive shelter, the status of architecture as a target there is a
breadth of associative meaning between the two enterprises: both are about
the exercise of control over a territory; both involve strategic
considerations of the most apt site-specific solutions; both involve the
use of symbol, rhetoric, and cultural context.

In the Iraq campaign, the architectural connotations were legion, from the
New York Times Op-Ed writer who commented upon the fact that the
Hausmannian avenues and relatively low, dispersed skyline of Baghdad boded
well for its military penetration; to the surgical extraction of
architectural assets, shown in remarkable overhead clarity by the
satellite imagery of Evans and Sutherland, looking like the aerial mosaics
employed by urban planners (in fact, aerial warfare and urban planning
have long shared an eerie confluence of language and tactics, and even
practioners, as in the Air Forces Curtis LeMay, who studied urban planning
before overseeing the devastating aerial campaign on Japan); to the mere
fact that the rebuilding of Iraq will cost far more than its invasion.
More than a war of destruction, this is a war of construction. The terrain
itself was filled with three-dimensional militarism; an absolutist regime
produces absolutist architecture, after all, and nowhere was that better
signified than in Saddam Husseins crossed swords monument, fashioned from
the melted metal of Iraqi weaponry, festooned with myriad helmets (some
even functioned as speed bumps) taken from some of the one million
soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war. Architecture, or a gesture of war
itself?

Architecture, like war, is never entirely one thing, but a condition,
occasioned by culture and history, mediated by time and opinion. As Wayne
Ashley, curator of Thundergulch (the new media initiative of the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Council) and organizer of "The Future of War," said in
leading off the event, buildings can be seen as secure environments, but
also as objects to be destroyed. Is that really a hospital, or a weapons
cache? Is that an office building, or a symbol of imperialist domination?
As participants were to reiterate in different ways, architecture can be
the object of terrorism, or it can be terrorism: Mohammed Atta was a
student of urban planning; and as cultural theorist Benjamin Bratton
pointed out, a member of the "Black September" team of terrorists at the
1976 Munich Olympics was an architect who had worked on the complex they
occupied. War can be erased by terrorism or in some strange way
constructed by terrorism; who knew anything about the unremarkable Alfred
P. Murrah building before "Oklahoma City" as the event itself has come to
be known? The entire city has been collapsed by the metaphoric weight of
the bombing, turning the building into a shrine, more visited than any
architectural landmark known for its aesthetic merits.

One might reduce war to violence and art to aesthetics, but it is more
useful, albeit more unsettling, to explore what happens when one removes
those perceived oppositions. This was one of the underlying themes of the
"Future of War" conference, to "challenge comfortable categories" as
moderator Helen Nissenbaum phrased it at the outset of the opening panel,
"The Aesthetics and Politics of Technologized Warfare." While the first
presenter, the artist Joy Garnett, spoke while behind her on the screen
flashed images of her paintings drawn from the haunting imagery of the
military complex, stark images of contrails streaking through a night sky
("Tracer Fire") or stealth bombers in patterned flight. Her paintings,
which seek to use a more primal medium to wrest meaning out of an image
saturated environment, evoked from one audience member a comparison to the
recent use of "satellite phones" by embedded correspondents in Iraq. Did
the shaky, pixellated images, with literal and figurative gaps in their
composition, obscure the "reality" of what was happening or did their
low-tech immediacy actually enhance the realism? We needed a McLuhan was
the satphone a "hot" or "cool" medium?

Imagery is another condition shared by war and architecture: just as most
of us do not experience war, we often do not experience architecture;
rather, we "know" a building (through its repeated transmission) via
photography. But images do not just happen, they are created, and for a
reason. Many of Garnett's paintings were drawn from weapons effects
testing in the Nevada desert in the 1950s. The hundreds of thousands of
images (still and moving) generated by this activity were, largely,
classified for many decades. These were "images as dangerous as the
isotopes that produced them," she noted. Images as toxic waste, to be
buried beneath the sand. Inherent in her work is a questioning of the
"effects" of classifying these "effects tests." What happens when imagery
is removed, left in the dark for decades? What happens when it is returned
to the light? Scratchy footage of atomic tests from the Nevada deserts, as
men in goggles look on, functions nowadays more as historical kitsch than
pure horror. It has been sanitized by time, rendered as a strictly
historical document. "Declassification" speaks to their political and
aesthetic impotence. Of course, the weapons tests were hardly secret
people gathered on predawn Las Vegas rooftops to view them. They saw in
the blasts (they never saw the "effects") something else: perhaps a
sublime beauty, felt perhaps an awed speechless and frightened reverence
towards man's ability for self-destruction.

Tom Keenan, director of the Human Rights project at Bard College,
presented a countervailing narrative of sorts: He wanted to explore what
he calls "the paradoxes of openness." In other words, contrary to the idea
that war is a secret activity whose violence occurs off camera, away from
the public eye, and contrary to the notion that it could thus be fought
against if people only knew what was going on "mobilizing shame" in the
words of human rights groups Keenan argued that there is "nothing in art
that resists violence." Images and exposure do not necessarily stop war
in fact they may even "lead the charge," according to Keenan. He screened
footage from the Kosovo campaign that showed Serbian troops looting
villages near Pristina. They did not seem to be taking much, the BBC
correspondent noted, they merely seemed to be putting on a symbolic
display. The fatal moment came when one militia member, Kalishnakov rifle
in hand, waved to the cameras. The casualness of the gesture was
disturbing: They were not afraid of their violence being exposed, indeed
they seemed to welcome it. Keenan followed with another example, this time
the humanitarian intervention of U.S. troops in Somalia. He used the
example of the first Marine landing, a supposedly secret, "tactical"
approach that came ashore to a cavalcade of some 600 journalists, in full
klieg light, drawn like moths to the flame. As one Marine commander
worried about the presence of the press, a journalist chided back: "Like
you didn't know we were going to be here." The military, the media, both
were joint players in a performance, each feeling a bit awkward in the
role. Later, when an audience member decried the corporate ownership of
the U.S. media and the shortage of available imagery and information from
Iraq, Keenan begged to differ, noting the abundance of information sources
made possible by the internet and other outlets. The question was not, as
he put it, what the media was doing about the war, it was what we were
doing about it.

Art has been intricately intertwined with war at least since the days of
Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawings of siege engines and other commissions
for the Borgias rival anything in his corpus in terms of technique and
mastery. Those drawings, which in some cases presented fantastic new
visions of what war could be, are echoed in the simulation programs the
military now uses, created by partnerships involving the film and computer
programming industries. Art can even be used in the conduct of war e.g.,
it was recently revealed by a Spanish historian that a group of anarchists
in Spain during the Civil War had employed specially designed cells,
outfitted with surrealist decor inspired by Dali and Bunuel, for what they
called "psychotechnic" torture; as El Pais described, "The avant garde
forms of the moment surrealism and geometric abstraction were thus used
for the aim of committing psychological torture."

So too can architecture become a weapon, as revealed in a fascinating
presentation (part of a panel entitled "Architecture, Violence, and Social
(In)Security") by Eyal Weizman, a Tel Aviv-based architect. Weizman,
detailing the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, noted their
"panopticon" like arrangement over neighboring Palestinian villages
(usually at a lower elevation) as well as their linkage, in certain cases,
by infrastructural devices (roads, tunnels) that bypass intervening zones
of Palestinian autonomy. Thus the Israeli superhighway soars over
Palestinian farmland, creating, as Weizman put it, "sovereignty in three
dimensions." The landscape as a whole, as he put it, is "in effect an
artificial arrangement of a totally synthetic environment, as designed as
any built environment, within which all 'natural' elements like streams
and mountains, forest orchards, rocks and ruins function not as the things
being fought for but as the very weapons of the conflict."

Weizman surveyed the architectural history of West Bank settlement, from
the frontier like "tower and stockade" outposts of the 1930s, in which
walled compounds were connected visually by tower reconnaissance and Morse
Code; to the energetic campaign to colonize the mountaintops (so often
containing the historical sites where Zionists hoped to return) in 1967.
As Weizman noted, as there was little experience of building in the
mountains, the "battle for the hilltops" began with an intensive aerial
photography project; the West Bank became "the most photographed terrain
in the world," to the topographic groundwork for occupation and
cultivation. His photos of settlements were haunting, capturing such
bizarre imagery as the trompe l'oeil paintings of an idealized rural scene
on a looming wall dividing Israelis from Palestinians. His images of
stucco-and-tiled houses surrounded by walls and deserts eerily replicated
Las Vegas suburbia (the American gated community represents a similar, if
less overtly political, securitization of space). For Weizman, the
land-use patterns characterized by vast walls, barricades, even the
planting of pine trees to forestall the planting of olive groves (by
Palestinians) amount to a military action, and he says architects should
be prosecuted for war crimes. Weizman did not disagree when an audience
member compared the settlements (a "postmodern diaspora," he called it, ad
hoc nation-building) to some new version of the shtetl, the Jewish ghetto
so ruthlessly and architecturally demarcated by the Nazis. The "two-state
solution," Weizman conclude, "is a design solution that doesn't work."

During the weeks of war coverage, it became typical to see a military
analyst or general standing before an aerial photograph of Baghdad,
pointer in hand, cataloging the damage done to a ministry building while
its neighbors, in most cases, appeared remarkably intact (Michael Sorkin
recently referred to this as a "good building/bad building" dichotomy)no
indication of casualties, no "on the ground" perspective. And yet how
often have we seen this same presentation by architects and planners, this
Olympian perspective of spatial rearrangement in which humans are absent
or simply a statistical "user mix"? Listening to a number of
presentations, it soon occurred to me, as I grew lost in the fog of
architectural discourse, that much of what passes for the language of
architecture icy, jargon-laden, bolstered by a reliance on dehumanized,
abstract "spatial production" and other clinical terms bears a certain
resemblance to the language of modern military planning, with its
"battlespace," "kill boxes," "network-centric warfighting operations," and
the deck of cards depicting high ranking Iraquis as characters.

What both of these languages, and both of these practices which both
involve the physical manipulation of human relations neglect is the human
equation, the people who live and die in these theorized constructs. When
Bratton discussed the suicide bomber as the proponent of a
"counter-habitation" of space, the act of bombing a "suspension of the
premise of habitation itself," or when he described the World Trade Center
attack as a form of architectural criticism, he was, beyond offering an
implicit condonement, resorting to the spatial, strategic primacy of
military thinking itself (suicide bombing victims would thus be
"collateral damage" to act of counter-habitation), wherein there are no
crimes, no victims. Bratton's formulation was of a symbolic piece with
that influential Naval War College thesis, which bore the infamous title
"Shock and Awe," with the lesser known subtitle, "Achieving Rapid
Dominance." That document, which seeks the immediate control of the
"operational environment," articulates its mantra thus: "The goal of Rapid
Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an
adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and
military objectives."

Neither war nor architecture are immune from the violence of language.

+++

"The Future of War: Aesthetics, Politics, Technologies" took place at The
New School, New York, NY, USA, May 2-3, 2003 and was organized by the
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's new media initiative, Thundergulch.

Tom Vanderbilt is a Brooklyn-based writer and the author of Survival City:
Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural
Press, 2002.) http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?isbn68983050

DISCUSSION

DELVE 04 launches (fwd)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:18:06 -0400
From: Paul Lombardi <paul@delvemagazine.com>
To: paul@delvemagazine.com
Subject: DELVE 04 launches

DELVE
An Exploration of Visual Culture

launches it's fourth issue: Vex & Siolence

http://delvemagazine.com

DELVE was created to explore visual culture through experimentation
in design, photography, illustration, and other related visual arts.
Contributing artists are encouraged to explore aspects of their
chosen medium that fall outside of conventional or commercial
applications. DELVE is published online quarterly and in print
annually.

DELVE is a product of www.nosignal.com
There is no signal except the one you choose to receive.
you are receiving...

My thanks to those who contributed, and to those who continue to
support our endeavor.

-Paul Lombardi

If you have received this message in error or wish to be removed from
this list please let me know by replying to this email.