A Mere Sliver Of His Brilliance
Mr Philip Fryer is, it says here, a Boston-based artist who “explores concepts of mortality, chaos and order, the body as a circuit, and the omnipresence of sound,” and whose work “draws connections between mortality, queer identity, chronic illness and memory decay.” Well, indeed. Obviously. In the all-too-brief video below, filmed at Boston’s Proof Gallery in September 2011, Mr Fryer performs a thrilling and ambitious piece titled Wall Melody, in which he “explores” the theme of commitment by holding down one note on a child’s musical toy, while accompanied by an unspecified power tool, operated elsewhere by persons unknown, for reasons unclear. Apparently, the work “mimics the drone of our blood flow, and gives us the opportunity to meditate on our own audio output.”
Sadly, I was unable to find video of the full one-hour performance. What follows is merely an appetiser, a highlight:
Brief as it was, I’m sure you feel better for that. Enlightened, even. Do note the superb camerawork, which is uncredited but possibly the handiwork of collaborator Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose own artistic stylings will be forever seared into the memories of regular readers.
The best bit is when it stopped.
No, the best bit was before it started. We’ll never get that back.
No, David. Not even the highlights for me.
I am obviously a cretin and a philistine, but for some strange reason I just can’t push the start button on the video. Joan’s comment sort of sums it up.
And yes I have a pretty good idea what I am missing.
Incidentally the power tool noise: could it be the maintenance men/women (eek, nearly caught out there, this damn patriarchy)putting up shelves over the other side of the rooom? Maybe they didn’t realise the importance of the moment?
Also
I work, employ and/or collaborate with quite a number of gays. Normal people to the last one. Average to good to very good professionals. One or two play a little to the gallery, but I put that down to the fact they are young, single and randy and don’t want to miss any chances.
Why are all the people that perpetrate this stuff (and I am going on Joan’s comment again here and your unerring eye for the bizarre)gay (or at some other place on the ever more confusing spectrum) and truly weird and pathetic?
Fortunately they are not representative. Clearly they have no self-awareness. Is it living in a bubble that does it?
And yes I have a pretty good idea what I am missing.
I suppose that’s a defining feature of performance art in general and the arse-end of it in particular. You rarely get more than you expect, and often much less.
Why are all the people that perpetrate this stuff… gay (or at some other place on the ever more confusing spectrum)… and pathetic?
It does seem to attract a very high concentration of the self-absorbed and comically talentless. The Dunning-Kruger demographic. Which may explain the reliance on fairly tedious personal details – “I’m fat or gay or female and therefore my flummery is terribly radical and interesting.”
Sadly, I was unable to find video of the full one-hour performance.
My guess is, the search didn’t occupy a great deal of your time.
My guess is, the search didn’t occupy a great deal of your time.
[ Faints with indignation. ]
I’m watching this on a works computer that doesn`t have sound,but even silent I know the talentless pretentious dross this is going to be,does anyone not in the taxpayer funded arts world actually take any of this shit seriously?
and how can arty types keep a straight face when they demand the arts be funded from the public purse when this is the type of thing it pays for?
Sadly, I was unable to find video of the full one-hour performance.
– To quote my nephew, “wah.”
[D]oes anyone not in the taxpayer funded arts world actually take any of this shit seriously?
Blame the lack of general European wars. A hundred years ago, this Fryer fellow would’ve been limply draped over some barbed wire in Flanders somewhere instead of bothering us.
Apparently, the work “mimics the drone of our blood flow, and gives us the opportunity to meditate on our own audio output.”
Yes, well, it is one thing to be a pretentious twit, and another to be an abjectly ignorant pretentious twit. Yau may feel free to substitute a vowel in “twit” if you so choose.
Not to get all sciency, but “blood flow” does not drone, nor could it as a “drone” is a continuous sound, and last time I checked the mechanism that causes flow is not an axial flow pump, but biphasic, hence that whole “pulse” thing.
Further, unless there is something causing impedance or turbulence to the flow, it is quite silent which is why doppler ultrasound is used to detect blood flow if one suspects flow is compromised, e.g., diabetic vasculopathy, or suspected carotid stenosis (which one can hear with a stethoscope).
I hope this doesn’t give this asshat new ideas, but I doubt he’d spring for the device, nor bother to learn how to use it.
So, I watched the video. I see, he’s using his middle finger to play the note in question. Expressing his feelings about the audience which endured an hour of that perhaps?
Do note the superb camerawork,
Competence is bourgeois and oppressive.
I would have chosen B-sharp myself but beauty is in the eye of the beholder
You do have to be careful with this sort of thing.
You never know (initially) if you are over-reacting to a spoof.
But to settle that question, all you need to do is to check the suspect’s ‘credentials’.
All doubt is then washed away.
I miss the old days when performers would at least dress up a little for their audience. Not saying I expect them to put on a tie or anything too formal. Sigh.
I thought it a powerful and moving work, the sublime final stanza, in particular, lending a verite to the artist’s vision of… er… Well, it’s better than this crap at any rate: http://bit.ly/2cEVGnh
For me the best part was right before I hit play. I look forward to laughing at how awful these little acts are, but this one wasn’t even good enough to be called bad.
It was merely boring…
Curiously, Farnsworth, when I read stuff like this I’m fairly sure I can hear my bloodflow as I get a ringing in my ears and my sight grows dim. I should probably get that checked out.
“I’m fat or gay or female and therefore my flummery is terribly radical and interesting.”
I think you have reversed the narrative there. I wish to be radical and interesting, so step one is to invent a new gender identity.
Is this a reenactment of the last scene of the Blair Witch Project?
“Further, unless there is something causing impedance or turbulence to the flow, it is quite silent which is why doppler ultrasound is used to detect blood flow if one suspects flow is compromised, e.g., diabetic vasculopathy, or suspected carotid stenosis (which one can hear with a stethoscope).”
Don’t you oppress me with
big words I don’t understandyour white cis-male science!Sadly, I was unable to find video of the full one-hour performance.
Gasp. Woe is me/us. What will we do?? Oh, the humanity. Think of the children. Eek. The horror, the horror.
‘I will,’ cried thirty voices all together: but one cried much louder than the others and its owner had stepped into the middle of the room before anyone could do anything about it. He was one of the bearded men and wore nothing but a red shirt and a cod-piece made of the skins of crocodiles: and suddenly he began to beat on an African tom-tom and to croon with his voice, swaying his lean, half-clad body to and fro and staring at them all, out of eyes which were like burning coals. This time John saw no picture of an Island at all. He seemed to be in a dark green place full of tangled roots and hairy vegetable tubes: and all at once he saw in it shapes moving and writhing that were not vegetable but human. And the dark green grew darker, and a fierce heat came out of it: and suddenly all the shapes that were moving in the darkness came together to make a single obscene image which dominated the whole room. And the song was over.
— C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress
…I get a ringing in my ears and my sight grows dim.
As long as it is ringing and not droning you are good to go, that droning blood is bad business indeed.
@Sam Duncan – I shall go now to denounce myself and report to Sector 9 for re-grooving.
I get a ringing in my ears and my sight grows dim.
But does your head grow heavy? Do you feel that you have to stop for the night? If so, I prescribe wafting the warm smell of colitas while enjoying a cool wind in your hair. That’ll fix you right up!
He’s holding down the key with his middle finger prominently displayed; is he sending us a subliminal message?
When I first started watching I thought he was just trying to pee in the corner.
When I first started watching I thought he was just trying to pee in the corner.
I’m sure it’s been done. And if that lasted an hour, well… I suppose it would be fairly impressive.
jabrwok, it’s more of the as-though-of-hemlock-I-had-drunk variety, except not in a good way.
I’m sure it’s been done.
David, at about 5:00 into this masterpiece you linked earlier you will see you are indeed correct. My apologies if you gotten this un-seared from your memory.
It’s not real performance art. He’s wearing clothes for a start.
I’m watching some students finish off an assessment so effectively locked here with nothing much to do and I followed a link from our genius’s outfit for the lolz. I was surprised that it took until page 2 before people started getting their kit off.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlottestreet/albums/72157671000519376/page2
There’s some viewers, but a high school football game would get more. It’s a niche market, to put it mildly.
“When I first started watching I thought he was just trying to pee in the corner”.
Where’s Rocio Boliver when you need her?
When I first started watching I thought he was just trying to pee in the corner”.
There you go. You were immediately sucked into the drama of the performance, and forced to reconcile your bourgeois expectations with the tonal reality of his meditative pose. You must see the entire performance.
It’s not real performance art. He’s wearing clothes for a start.
I thought the genre was beginning to show some promise when Mattress Girl™ released her Art Porn, but alas, she hasn’t followed up with anything of note that I know of. Is there a Mattress Girl Does London yet?
I felt an urge to share this again.
Can’t imagine why.
I’m also a Boston-based artist, and I look forward to congratulating Mr. Fryer on this piece. “Yo, Wall Melody? That shit rocked. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
“Yo, Wall Melody? That shit rocked.”
Do artists fist bump?
You know how like when you take some drugs, and you get these really brilliant and profound ideas so then you write them down so that you’ll remember them later, but when you finally do straighten up and read them they turn out to be utter crap?
That’s what this modern conceptual art reminds me of. Bizarre, drug-induced crap that somehow made it to market.
David, I think you will appreciate this article from the Graun:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/20/white-men-media-now-show-autumnwatch
The sentence “maleness and whiteness are still, by an incalculable quantum, the turbo-boosters of mediocrity” (since deleted but recorded in the comments) might be a contender for a ‘classic Guardian sentence’
The Graun seems to have a lot of competition in the pretentious piffle category these days.
maleness and whiteness are still, by an incalculable quantum, the turbo-boosters of mediocrity
Isn’t it just lovely how, for some, “white male” is now the most fashionable term of abuse?
When does the art happen?
The longer and more hyperbolic the description of the artist and their work, the more mediocre the art.
You will stand in that corner and listen to that noise until you learn to eat your spinach, and like it!
When does the art happen?
The longer and more hyperbolic the description of the artist and their work, the more mediocre the art.
Art?—Again, also didn’t bother to watch, the description was enough . . .
A number of years ago I saw Boleslav Polivka and Chantal Poullain perform The Jester And The Queen.
For that show, the stage was empty except for a round platform with a throne on it. A short time into the play, Polivka had just been dragged out of the audience, planted on the platform, and Poullain was putting makeup on him to make him her jester. She had her back to the audience, and at one point he leaned around her to announce out at us that This is what we in the theatre call A Boring Bit. I’ve seen some productions that were just one long Boring Bit.
At the end of the show, the packed audience in a rather large hall rather filled with performers gave them a fifteen minute standing ovation. They were that good.
I don’t think commenters properly appreciate the way this artist juxtaposes his body in space as an instrument to place awareness back inside the viewer so that he may properly recover the childlike wonder of Self-Discovery and Sensory Exploration within a framework of group frolic and hushed, collective consciousness.
I rarely use the word ‘genius,’ but here is a mastery of body as brushstroke and creative invocation and evocation to raise epistemological questions of being, knowledge and what it means to be a Self in the Modern World.
Bravo. The amount of personal pain and doubt made visceral and abstract is a thing to behold.
This is ‘Deep Fryer’ at his best.
Meanwhile, some of us, for whom the arts are a mere avocation, aim for beauty and transcendence, and, whether or not we attain it, we are labelled “delusional” or purveyors of “kitsch,” even derided for the “whiteness” of our efforts.
https://soundcloud.com/philip_daniel/
“Incidentally the power tool noise: could it be the maintenance men/women (eek, nearly caught out there, this damn patriarchy)putting up shelves over the other side of the rooom? Maybe they didn’t realise the importance of the moment?”
I was considering a circumstance of childhood trauma for him as a wee lad. Maybe not being able to hear his noise maker over those of others. Or having HIS noisemakers confiscated for overindulgence.
how can arty types keep a straight face when they demand the arts be funded from the public purse when this is the type of thing it pays for?
Because their pockets are filled in response to their demands.
The iron laws of causality, in other words.
I think you have reversed the narrative there. I wish to be radical and interesting, so step one is to invent a new gender identity.
They USED to use gay or female or disabled to be Interesting and Exotic. Now they have to claim to belong to a plant genus.
o_0
Don’t you oppress me with
big words I don’t understandyour white cis-male science!The Twitter convo I posted in the previous thread with a college professor continued and ended fruitlessly (as it must). https://twitter.com/ProfAFinlayson/status/788849106974310402 It’s worth scrolling to the top of the convo at the link.
I couldn’t tell if he were Blind or Disingenuous (the healing Boolean AND does not obtain in this context); probably Wilfully Blind, because his bio indicates his predilection for Pseudo-Scholarship:
Speaking of Twitter, I’d like to put in a plug for avoiding the Internet of Things (IoT); the Kool factor is not worth the security risk. Taking Twitter and Box down for a few hours using a lot of little devices is not a big deal — I’m surprised it took this long — but it does point to the folly of interconnecting things just so you can adjust your thermostate with your iPhone. (I turn on my furnace using an innovative little device called a programmable timer. Works even while I’m sleeping!)
Because I work for one of the world’s largest security companies, I’ll tell you the only foolproof way to protect yourself against hackers: Install this radical device between your RJ-45 jack and your Ethernet plug: an air gap.
That’s what this modern conceptual art reminds me of. Bizarre, drug-induced crap that somehow made it to market.
What market? It’s public-funded twaddle, not a Shark Tank investment.