I’m beginning to think that our sense of time is rather arbitrary. The way our minds work we organize information to make sense of it. This continues to happen when I sit down to mash-up Art Dirt Redux. Rob says the theme of Chelsea is alienation and obfuscation. I crack a bad joke. Later in our walk we go to the Richard Prince exhibition that has several paintings of bad jokes. While mixing the tracks I overlap our walk through Jasper John and John Simon Jr. What occurs is an overlap discussion of a computer painting program and the structure of Japer John’s paintings, which is also a painting program or logical structure of sorts. As we sit down to eat Rob talks about how his apartment search is becoming a performance piece with him as the audience. I didn’t know we would see the joke paintings yet I cracked a bad joke. The question is how fluid is time?
Much of what’s being shown in the galleries reflects post war American culture. The references to Alfred Hitchcock are everywhere in filmic analysis works. Puerile jokes, self-centeredness, car culture and the Soviet bogeyman all figure quite large. I’ve been reading all of Philip K. Dick’s books. His point of view is a documentation of post war American culture with a slight twist. People are beginning to talk about the influence of the 1970’s on the art discourse. Perhaps one should also look at The Twilight Zone and Philip K. Dick as progenitors of conceptual art.
It amazes me that Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967 is just now being discussed and taught in America academia. It all seems so backwards. We knew back then the marketing arm of consumer culture was the mass media and that media was the essence of the post war capitalist arena.