Word: avant
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Sadie Benning was unimpressed when her dad, an avant-garde filmmaker, gave her a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera for Christmas when she was 15. Only after New Year's did she turn it on in her bedroom and start making movies about coming of age as a lesbian teenager in Milwaukee, Wis. Her grainy, black-and-white compositions soon made their way to film festivals, and by the time she was 20 her "Pixelvision" videos were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her 1998 video Flat Is Beautiful was screened at this...
Doblin first tried MDMA in 1982, when it was still legal and when the phrase "open the unconscious" didn't sound quite so gooey. At that time, MDMA had a small following among avant-garde psychotherapists, who gave it to blindfolded patients in quiet offices and then asked them to discuss traumas. Many of the therapists had heard about MDMA from the published work of former Dow chemist Shulgin. According to Shulgin (who is often wrongly credited with discovering MDMA), another therapist to whom he gave the drug in turn named it Adam and introduced it to more than...
...year 1900, the apparent history of art did not have the profile it possesses today. Different artists were considered important; different painters and sculptors exerted an influence on what was then the present. In some respects the art world was more tolerant, because the notion of an avant-garde was not yet all-encompassing. The ideal of high craft, of sheer manifest skill as a criterion of aesthetic success, had not yet been consigned to the trash can, and artists placed a value on drawing--however mistakenly they might sometimes have interpreted it--that was still very much alive...
...shaky fantasy that there's such a thing as progress in art. Looking back on 1900 from the year 2000, we see a lot of images and objects whose authors were long ago banished from right-thinking, modernist art history--corpses strewn behind the merciless juggernaut of avant-garde "progress." Some of these are stirring, and quite a few are weirdly interesting. Many can be experienced only as camp, raised by the artists' obsessions to a level of superheated conviction. But many more are just God-awful, period. They are turkeys, duds, complete stiffs...
Aside from that, the installation was as simple as advertised. In about 15 minutes. I created my own site, Little Al's Video Horror Show, within a channel called Warp ("Avant-garde, urbane, sci-fi, beyond"), which is one of 14 channels on SpotLife. I also tweaked the performance of my site; I could tell my Webcam to click an image of me once a minute, or every few seconds, then upload it to my site. Or I could send live video out to the Net; users are limited to 240 "live" minutes a month. I could make...