First Art Post Ever. Beware.

A quick hit, Kevin, and I'll try to make you aware of how totally fucked up the appearance in town of Christian Tomaszewski was. He's a Pole who works in video and installation. His main body of work is cardboard constructions derived from scenes in cult movies. Devoid of human actors, spare and clean, they are meant to delineate the "cold space" of film, said the man himself.

CT is tall and blond, in typical gear, black pleather jacket, black pants, etc., with an annoying habit of sucking on his face as he watches his own work. I couldn't tell from a distance if this was a smile or an uncontrollable tic. His English is probably as good as mine, and the proof lay in that in his answers to questions he always took the last two words of what you said and just riffed on them, without regard for the meaning of the rest of the sentence. It's possible that that was a coping mechanism for not having functional English, but selah. In either case, it made getting an answer a labrynthine process, full of hedges and diversions.

The work is about the space of film made real; except by CT's own admission, the particularities of the films don't matter, the filmic qualities might as well come from YouTube, and I'm pretty sure he's never seen all of Blue Velvet because his "clip representative of his working material" was an iMovie-edited montage of song sequences from BV.

In the original release, that we all saw in high school, we don't flashback to the scene at "Pussy Heaven," we just watch Hopper beat the crap out of McLachlan. CT was like, "I watched this film 138 times when I was making this." Really. I'm confused: is there a cult investment here, or does he just pick shit up off of YouTube and install it somewhere? Will we soon see a Christian Tomaszewski "Nora, the Piano Playing Cat"?

So that's just one beef: laziness masquerading as intellectual investment. It's bad enough when you do all this work and yet have nothing to say. It's worse when you front like you did all this work, and still have nothing to say.

To continue, in Tomaszewski's words, the work is a lot of effort for no purpose (except the filmic purpose stated above). It is practically about narrative (except no one knows what you mean when you say that; it's a scare phrase). There are no humans in the work (except that there are always humans in the work). There is just nothing at the center of this whirlwind.

So for all you other rubes out there who, like me, heard the words "European" and "Design" and saw visions of an upper-middle-class future and a subscription to Dwell, there's always the very classy Indianapolis Museum of Art...with a fantastically bad flash animation...

Also, check out CT at the Sculpture Center. This was to a word what he said last night in Columbus.

How is the title "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" anything other than kitsch? This could be some meta-joke about the vaingloriousness of art-making, its empty pomposity, but I fear Tomaszewski is serious, and that "Erotic Misery" is an actual, meaningful phrase for him, not something plucked from a random text generator.

The most telling thing last night was when CT alluded to "different narratives" in the US and Eastern Europe. He couldn't or wouldn't clarify, though he made certain to say he wasn't judging. (Seriously, my people are killing Pakistanis with space robots, and you think I care what you think about American narratology? Please.) But clearly, the things he finds serious (footage of contortionists, cut with drip torture, cut with a guy screwing in a light-bulb, like first year film school) other people have found hilarious.

I'm pretty sure this rules out the meta-joke possibility. Which means he's essentially remaking another montage of pilfered classics, "L'artiste est morte" by Jay Sherman...



--
ds