{"id":172,"date":"2008-10-10T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2008-10-10T18:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/10\/10\/dogtown-oh-my-god\/"},"modified":"2008-10-15T10:45:50","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T14:45:50","slug":"dogtown-oh-my-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/archive\/2008\/10\/10\/dogtown-oh-my-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Dogtown, Oh My God"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Ali and I had lunch at Dogtown Hots<\/a><\/strong> (691 Monroe Ave.<\/a>), I headed to The Rochester Contemporary Art Gallery<\/a><\/strong> (137 East Ave.<\/a>) to check out the installation there: Sam van Aken<\/strong>'s Audition<\/strong>. Ali and I went to the opening reception last week, but both Thumper<\/strong> and Oh My God<\/strong> were works based on sound, and it was pretty much impossible to fully experience them with all the crowd noise.<\/p>\n

I have to admit I was enamored of the idea of Oh My God<\/strong>: a 60-foot-long, 10-foot-high wall of mismatched speakers, impossibly arranged to form a perfect rectangle. I knew from the opening that it sporadically played voices and sounds. I sat in front of it for (what turned out to be) nearly the entirety of its 7-minute loop. The phrase \"oh my God\" — versions thereof collected from famous and not-so-famous media sources — emanates sporadically from one randomly-selected speaker. And then from another, and another, and so on — gradually playing more and more frequently until building to a cacophonous and overwhelming climax.<\/p>\n

As I was letting myself get lost in the experience, I recognized a few of the voices and their sources from popular movies and television. Sometimes I'd recognize a voice that was played earlier being played in a new location. I was also aware of the digital distortion from the variety of low sampling rates and MPEG-styled compression artifacts — a specific kind of harmonic whine that tended to distract me. But certain voices I didn't recognize (save for their intonation), and they brought me specifically to the events of September 11.<\/p>\n

In reading the information binder for Oh My God<\/strong>, it turns out that was, in fact, Aken's inspiration. In unavoidably viewing the terrible footage that day over-and-over until he became numb to it, the one thing that rang out was a woman's voice saying, \"oh my God\" in one of the clips. [In case you don't recall, the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists piloting hijacked commercial airplanes on September 11, 2001.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I was kind-of saddened that the point was so … simple: that this impressive-scaled work, reminiscent of the ideally-packed order of Manhattan's maps and its skylines, was just a reflection of the numbness achieved by repetitive playback of an event by the media by creating numbness to a phrase by parroting its own frequent use in media.<\/p>\n

I still want to like it so bad, but I'm at a loss to find any more depth in it. But hey: maybe that's the point too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Ali and I had lunch at Dogtown Hots (691 Monroe Ave.), I headed to The Rochester Contemporary Art Gallery (137 East Ave.) to check out the installation there: Sam van Aken's Audition. Ali and I went to the opening … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,4,611],"tags":[435,2891,229,784,344,781,780,782,783],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-blog-entries","category-for-the-parents","tag-435","tag-art","tag-critique","tag-oh-my-god","tag-rochester-contemporary","tag-roco","tag-sam-van-aken","tag-september-11","tag-world-trade-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayceland.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}