From: Mark Toscano (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2008 - 16:09:57 PDT
One of my main criticisms of this aspect of ubu's venture continues to be the laziness of the "curating". I had enjoyed their site immensely for some time, feeling there was for the most part a strong curatorial hand and thoughtfulness behind what they presented. But with some exceptions, the film section is just a bunch of bullshit-quality videos nabbed off the net with no regard to anything - presentation, context, artists' intent, blah blah blah everything that's come up on Frameworks before about ubu.
The previously cited example of Surfacing on the Thames is probably still the best. It's laughable. That video looks like gravy sliding down the screen of a Gameboy, and then rephotographed with a cheap webcam.
Furthermore regarding the lack of original thinking or curating here, their recent addition of Robert Nelson's 'The Awful Backlash' even appropriates a blurb that I jokingly appropriated and edited for use in a film festival screening of it and the Canyon catalog. So they're presenting a joke blurb as a "real" critical one with no other commentary or context. Now that's funny.
Mark T
--- On Tue, 9/9/08, Marc Couroux <email suppressed> wrote:
> From: Marc Couroux <email suppressed>
> Subject: [FRAMEWORKS] latest ubu
> To: email suppressed
> Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 3:23 PM
> Hello all,
>
> Just to let you know that ubu.com today put up a bunch of
> Stan
> VanDerBeek work, which is always hard to get a hold of.
> Much else of note, as usual, including Yvonne Rainer,
> Standish Lawder,
> Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Richard Serra, Joyce Wieland
> (note
> spelling)... a veritable treasure trove.
>
> http://www.ubu.com/
>
> Cheers
> Marc
>
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