LMCC 200 Hudson, Saturday, April 25

First off, don't show the same videos in the screening that you are going to have looping in your studio.  That's annoying.  We sit down in the darkened room, and spend two hours watching videos stumble by just to have the same damn things shown to us again later.  Except all at once, so they are all loud.

Second, go see video art before you make video art.  It's hard, yes, but it's worth it.  It's a crying shame to see the same videos made again and again.  And again.

Third, it's okay to NOT make video art.  You don't have to, really.  Sure, all the cool kids are doing it, and it's really easy to just pick up a camera and stagger around with it, or appropriate or whatever, but don't.  If you're a good painter, paint.  If you stop painting and make a video, make sure it's a good one before you let it taint your overall practice.

We leave the screening and head up to the studios, enter and are assaulted by Generic Art Noise.  Man that's awful.  At least with video folks have an excuse to have not seen it, but shit, we've all heard the endless droning of installation noise.  God.  

One poor guy, Nathan Bennett, seemed to have a sort of interesting thing going on in spite of the somewhat generic art noise pouring out of his humorously crafted speakers.  There was a nice feel in his space, a sort of gothy techno vibe that didn't take itself too seriously.  A record was spinning out to some speakers, a cool looking record whose appearance somehow defused the generic art noise coming out of it by a trick of self-mockery.  Sadly, Bennett's studio was drowned out by a less considerate neighbors generic art noise coming off of a generic Let's-Run-Some-Reel-to-Reel-Audio-Tape-All-Over-the-Room-and-Back-Through-the-Deck-Like-We-All-Did-In-College.

I can only hope that the neighbors work was about nostalgia and I am too dense to get it.  

The LMCC Studio Program is supposed to compete with the AIM thing, but it seemed to fall flat for the most part.  It seemed to feel a little too pre-emerging, a little too undeveloped.  I caught myself thinking that if these folks had nine months of free studio in the greatest art city in the world and this is the point they wound up at, then they must've started out TERRIBLE.

(Mind you, not everyone was bad.  Mike Estabrook was bizarre and bad enough in some magic way that the work was good, like a car wreck where no one gets hurt.  Eric Sall had some very nice paintings, and Jason Keeling's work was pretty smart.  I think.)

Good party, though.