Box in a suitcase

I love my iPhone, especially the massive screen and the room it gives me for wallpapers. Of course, I had to make a load of old-school computer themed ones. I put the full images after the jump, they're all sized to leave space for the top and bottom graphics on the interface. Once I sort out how to do regular file uploads to this blog, I'll put my Photoshop template up so anyone can make their own to fit the iPhone's UI.

The images look like this when they're on the screen. Use the "continue" link for the jpegs.

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Every person lives at the furthest edge of human history. There is not one human being who has not spent every second of their existence at the very top of all the accomplishments of mankind, at the most advanced stage of civilization known to that moment.

When you're young, and you see old images, whether they are film, photographs, or just paintings, the medium defines the era. There are other ways to judge the age of an image, sure. Look at the cars, the clothes people are wearing - if it's old enough, even the architecture might tell you the era. But ultimately it's the medium itself. If I saw a video, clearly shot on a modern consumer camcorder, and all the environmental cues told me it was shot in the late nineteenth century, it would be obvious to me that it was a reenactment. I wouldn't even have to think about it. Knowledge of what media goes with what era is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we react to it as instinctively as we catch a ball.

That's why it's so disruptive when a color photograph appears from World War I, or should I say The Great War (after all, they had no idea it would be numbered - any more than Plato would have used the letters B.C. after telling you the year). It's completely mindboggling when a color film turns up from the '40s or the '30s. We know these things existed, but we never see them - color film was a rarity then, and it's even rarer for it to have survived the few decades to today.
Just six decades and nearly everything disappears. We sure are a temporary species...

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Now-a-days, in the future, we've democratized everything, including art. In the past, there was outsider art, art brut, folk art, art naïf, but it all had to wait until some patronizing soul brought it into a proper gallery before it could be seen. Then somewhere between the Situationist International and Fab Five Freddy, people realized that they didn't need a gallery to be seen.

When I was in college, we studied people like Nam June Paik and Karen Finley - video and performance artists whose work should have been available for anyone, but really ended up relegated to college campuses and elite art circles. There was the occasional late night cable venue, like USA's Night Flight, but even then, it was a select few that would see their work shown. There was no equivalent of spray paint and a wall for video or performance art.

What struck me about YouTube, and the countless video sharing sites like it, was that the people making videos now aren't calling themselves video artists, they're just people who have something to say. That's the way it should be. If the clip below were turned in as an assignment in my multimedia art class back in '91, she probably would have gotten top marks. Now, it's just her video equivalent of a can of spray paint and a wall. I love it.

The title of this blog is a reference to Marcel Duchamp's boîte-en-valise, a name he gave to his portable museums. They were fun little suitcases (valises), modeled on the travelling salesman's display case. Each boîte-en-valise, or "box in a suitcase," contained miniature versions of his works, so that he could carry them around, or give them away easily.

I was introduced to the idea of the portable museum by Megan O'Connell, one of my instructors at the University of Iowa. We had an assignment at the end of one semester's art class to create our own boîte-en-valise, able to contain the work that we had done for the entire semester. We students were all given identical pieces of cardboard, capable of being made into a box about the size of Duchamp's suitcases. For my own valise, I managed to fit my semester's work inside by burning it all into ashes, and placing the ashes in the space provided. I got an A. To this day, I credit Megan O'Connell for reinforcing my ridiculous attitude towards problem solving. Thanks, Megan. This boîte's for you.