The concept is simple, take two bands which are characterized as opposed (culturally, personally, ideologically) and superimpose a song from each band on top of one other (mending the rift). Concept developed by Tao Wells and myself one weekend in New Plymouth and eventually spawned my Britney Spears Best of Noise solo project.
These are not ‘remixes’, though we are interested in their relation to remixing. We have simply laid two songs on top of each other (a rhizome, a remedy) in the hope that there will be moments of connection between the layers. The points at which these two layers touch (caress) offer moments of “mending.” While mixing makes use of the cut, mending makes use of care.
Inspired by the Tao Wells video “A View To A Kill,” which consisted of a split screen video recording of Wells playing a two player first person shooter. In the top screen stands Player 1, unmoving. In the bottom screen Player 2, controlled by Tao, begins searching for Player 1. When Player 2 finds Player 1 he shoots him in the head. Cut. Repeat. Player 1 is still motionless in the top half of the screen, while Player 2 starts the hunt again. Finding Player 1, he slits their throat. Cut. Repeat ad nauseam. In Tao’s film there is a detailed exploration of our love of killing others. Here, we have the natural conclusion – we kill ourselves over and over again.
“Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It’s enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too — one must say that it has “assumed the social desires,” including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don’t thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it’s organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system.” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium)
“On FRAGMENTATION: This is indispensable if one does not want to fall into REPRESENTATION. To see beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.” (Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography)
“Some feminist critics (most notably Linda Nochlin) have argued that the nineteenth-century male artist’s preoccupation with languid, nude odalisques who are “veiled” from the European male gaze and yet blatantly engage in self-display on the canvas, repeatedly feminized and sexualized the Orient in disempowering ways. Recent studies by Alison Smith, Carol Ockman, and Griselda Pollock, however, have demonstrated that the cultural tensions within which the odalisque/nineteenth-century female nude emerged were more complicated. All exoticized female or male bodies were not displayed in the same way… If we look closely at several French works that spanned the nineteenth century – Ingres’ Grande Odalisque (1814); Henri Regnault’s Salome (1870); and two works by Gerome, The Almeh (1878) and Woman of Cairo (1882) — the body of the odalisque is layered, revealing tensions and ambiguities. The Grande Odalisque was commissioned by a female aristocrat, Caroline Bonaparte Murat — a practice which was common among aristocratic women in the early nineteenth century [which] allowed them access to modes of self-representation outside the range of what was considered ‘acceptable’ and consolidated their socially and politically powerful roles.” (Piya Pal-Lapinski, The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration)
Part of a series of works superimposing still images from Paris Hilton’s ‘bath’ video (which has commonly been labelled a ‘sex tape’) over top of classical paintings of women bathing. See more from this series.
“Historically, the bending-bather pose goes as far back as Raphael’s tapestry cartoon. As a bodily trope, the bending single female bather traces it ancestry to Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream of 1654-1656 in the Nation Gallery, London… It may owe its longevity as a pose at least in part to the challenge it presents to the skill of the artist in terms of foreshortening. The bending-bather pose is picked up in the nineteenth century, outdoors, in the bending-bather figure of in Manet’s Le Bain/Dejeuner. And in the Twentieth [Century], it is spectacularly reworked by Picasso in his endlessly inventive series of grotesque variations on Le Dejeuner, which to me, at least, owe as much to Degas’ bathers as to Manet’s. Yet, while such tracing of the motif tells us about its long-term endurance and the challenge it offers to succeeding generations of artists (head low, long expanse of back, foreshortened view), it does not help us with the more difficult task of interpreting this image, of accounting for its vividness and seductive complexity…” (LInda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye)
Part of a series of works superimposing still images from Paris Hilton’s ‘bath’ video (which has commonly been labelled a ‘sex tape’) over top of classical paintings of women bathing. See more from this series.
“The thrust of [John] Berger’s argument is that the artistic nude is no different from the soft porn nude, existing to fulfil male voyeurism and desire for possession. He argues that all but a few of the hundreds of thousands of nudes in European painting were designed to appeal to sexuality of the man looking at the picture. The sexuality of the woman, he says, ‘needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion. Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own… You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure’.” (John Robinson, The Judgment of Paris)
Video mashup of Walk Disney’s speech at the opening of Disneyland, one of Hitler’s speeches and Star Wars. All footage sourced from YouTube.
“Werner von Braun entered the consciousness of America as its prophet of space travel on a Sunday evening in 1955. He had been hired by Walt Disney to develop a series of stories for his Disneyland television program With his smooth German accent, von Braun came across as foreign as outer-space; yet with Disney as his patron, he became familiar as Mickey Mouse and he seemed as squeaky clean as Snow White. We eventually learned – if we did not know already – that von Braun had designed the V-2 missile that had rained terror on London during World War 2 According to his story, von Braun had little choice but to let his genius be exploited by the Nazis. Now, in the mid-1950s, he was working for the United States Army to build rockets that would defend us from the Communists. About a decade ago, as many government documents from the end of World War II were declassified, von Braun’s true story began to emerge. The documents told of the Nazi activities of von Braun and other German scientists who came to the US after the war. It was no longer credible for them to say that they were not dedicated Nazis and only did what they did to protect their jobs They belonged to the Nazi party, the SS, and other Nazi organizations. They were honored by the Nazi party and by Hitler specifically. They were indirectly – and in some cases directly – responsible for the deaths of thousands of concentration camp slave laborers.” (Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War)
In 1933, the German American Bund was founded by Fritz Kuhn. An association of German immigrants to America, the Bund had a definite pro-Nazi slant. Disney animator Art Babbitt claimed his boss had a strong interest in, if not outright sympathy for, the Bund; “In the immediate years before we entered the War there was a small, but fiercely loyal, I suppose legal, following of the Nazi party… There were open meetings, anybody could attend and I wanted to see what was going on myself. On more than one occasion I observed Walt Disney and [Disney's lawyer] Gunther Lessing there, along with a lot of prominent Nazi-afflicted Hollywood personalities. Disney was going to meetings all the time. The German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose documentaries in the mid-30s had helped to glorify the Nazis, claimed that “after Kristallnacht [1938], she approached every studio in Hollywood looking for work. No studio head would even screen her movies except Walt Disney. He told her he admired her work but if it became known that he was considering hiring her, it would damage his reputation.” (Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince)
“I define feminist art as images and visualizations and actions which readdress the suppression, the marginalization and the denigration of works made by women for… for me, for over a thousand years. That’s the repression that I’ve been addressing.” (Carolee Schneemann)
“I have been thinking about something I’m been hearing, reading, everyday, especially now with politics, how he changed his mind, he changes his mind. Changing one’s mind as something bad, evil almost. I think that changing one’s mind is one of the best things that there is… Why I was thinking today about changing one’s mind — you won’t believe me — all the papers writing and making jokes about Paris Hilton. Paris saying that she changed, that she is not what she was two days ago, three days, changing her mind. And everybody making jokes, you know, that’s about her saying this. I was thinking how people don’t believe that any change can happen that would be positive. We have become so skeptical, so negative. We don’t believe anymore in slow or sudden changes… I am not saying that Paris has really changed – I am only reacting to the press, to their reactions, to their negativity and attitude towards changing of one’s mind, of becoming different.” (Jonas Mekas)
