Wander any of the world’s increasingly deserted urban jungles- the empty downtown streets and avenues of crumbling wealth and you can still count on being ambushed regularly by apparently lunatic vagabonds. The lucky creatures who are still too in touch with their own reality. Homeless, heedless and helpless folks so in touch, in fact, that their shrill, mumbled diatribes spew shared truths. Ragged creatures on dissolving cement street corners give voice to our universal discontent. A scorching unhappiness buried beneath the quotidian blankness of our cellular culture.

The zombies glued to portable communication devices numbly dismissing each other in the fast lanes of the city sidewalks can still be jolted out of their crowded isolation by the ravings of people who by circumstance and poverty cannot avoid the world.

G.H. Hovagimyan a Performance and New Media artist based in New York has harnessed the power of this seething population. His ongoing Rant series started in the 70’s. In the raging shadows of punk and performance art, these works have evolved in their content while maintaining the raw energy and volume of the first recorded rant.

…What follows is an interview with G.H. by Eliza Fernbach a fellow member of the New York Collective ArtistsMeeting.

Rant Interview – Eliza Fernbach

EF:
Why did rant begin?

GH:
I was doing performance art in the 1970’s. The first rant I did was a performance at Artists Space in 1977 at an exhibition called ‘Open Mic’. The piece was called Rich Sucker Rap. It was a punk performance piece. It was very aggressive and confrontational. I was drumming in a punk band at the time. I used rock drumbeats as the basis for the piece. The words were simple repetitive rants like; fuck you rich suckers give me your money and no money, no art and art whores, artists as whores, whose art. I repeated the phrases as fast as possible sort of like a country auctioneer but the words were effectively drumbeats.

Later that year I was invited by Jean Dupuy and Davidson Gilgliotti to do a performance for a videotape called, Chant Acapella, I did the Rich Sucker Rap. This tape was a series of two minute performances by young performance artists. Among them were people like, Laurie Anderson, Charlemagne Palestine and Julia Heyward. The video was shown at the Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition called video-views. At the private opening (to which I was not invited), some of the patrons were so offended they asked for the piece to be removed from the show. The tape Chant Acapella is now in the Electronic Arts Intermix catalog. A few years ago I asked for a copy and was told I had to rent the tape and dub it myself. Which I did. I then digitized it and have included the Rich Sucker Rap in many exhibitions. I have a copy on my cellphone. The piece was also included in a cellphone video show at the Pompidou Center called, Pocket Films in 2007. They are also going to include my rantapod podcasts in this years (2008) exhibition. Of course I haven’t seen a penny for all this art work which reiterates the original rant. You have to be rich to make art.

EF:
What has been your most surprising response to a rant?

GH:
People say to me that the Rich Sucker Rap looks current and has meaning for them now, thirty years later.

EF:
Aside from “Rich Suckers” who and what inspires a rant?

GH:
There are several inspirations for the rants. They come out of Punk Rock lyrics but they are also informed by 1970’s video-performance practices. Another inspiration is the madman on the street. There was a guy in the early days of the new York Soho Art Scene who used to shout the headlines and rant about the government and anything else that came to mind. You can see these people in every country. They are hooked into the public discourse and the media-logos but they are psychotic and the boundaries between information and identity are fuzzy or non-existent. We all see and hear these street psychotics. They tend to speak the truth in an unfiltered way. It makes everyone uncomfortable. I’d also have to say that both the British bands like the Sex Pistols and X-Ray Spec and American bands like the Ramones were part of my inspiration. But my position was to make art rather than to try and be a pop star. On the other hand performance artists such as Vito Acconci were an inspiration but they were way too arty. I operate in the interstitial places. It gives me freedom. I’m always looking for a way to advance beyond what is proscribed at any given period of time.

EF:
Does it matter who is ranting?

GH:
Yes it does. Performance art is not acting. The best work springs from the need to heal or explore an emotional wound/crisis. The rant would have to involve an issue that the ranter can explore and also improvise on. It’s not a memorize by rote type of performance. The performer must be able to skate close to the edge of psychosis for the performance to be effective. That’s the difference between a genuine emotion and play-acting.

EF:
If you could have anyone else deliver a rant that you have created – or perform a brand new one who would you ask and what would it be about?

GH:
I would choose Eric Bogosian to deliver a rant. I would make it about genocide denial. Since I am Armenian and so is Eric it would be a particularly emotional work. The rants need to be painful for the performer in order to speak the truth. I could also get someone like Sinead O’Connor in that case it would be about damage to the earth/home soil. I can also see blood, lies and an end to manliness as a virtue for the subject of a rant.

EF:
Ok, I’m opening the floodgates…how did the project evolve? What is the history of the rant?

GH:
The rants are an ongoing project. I have already spoken of Rich Sucker Rap. That was the beginning of me using the idea of percussion instrumental structures and pop music postures in an art setting.

The next time I took up the issue was after I started working with computers in the 1990’s. I was working with web video and also teaching video streaming at the School of Visual Arts. I noticed that everyone was trying to figure out how to get the highest resolution and the best image for their video. I decided to do the total opposite simply to show that technology and all the bells & whistles are no substitute for hardcore performance. I did a piece called Entertain Me. It started from the premise of early video performance art that was in essence a person doing something in front of a video camera. The thing about live video is that it is immediate and involves a reflexive state of mind, you see yourself and are talking to yourself in some manner. I noticed that web cams and web chat often had your image in the chat window as well as the person you were chatting with. This allows you to see yourself. That’s a key feature of computer video. Anyway, I used a web cam and reduced the image to 8 bit black and white with a 10 fps compression. This gave the video an almost old black and white movie feeling. I then did a reflexive rant about people looking at screens and demanding to be entertained every minute. It was again very confrontational but then again I was simply talking to myself or my digital reflection.

Around 2000 Patrick Lichty curated an online show about handheld and PDA works. There weren’t any handheld devices that show video at that time. I was able to create videos for Palm OS with a small piece of software. I had it set up so that people could download the videos from the web onto their palm pilots. My notion was to do a series of rants concerning various topics. The idea was to deliver personal media rants a sort of rhizomatic information structure.

I was doing a lot of collaborative work with Peter Sinclair in France at the time. We did an interactive laser and sound installation called Shooter that was shown at Eyebeam here in New York in 2002. Peter got me to do a bunch of xenophobic rants for the piece. We later started a series of performance called rant/ rant back/ back rant. Peter & I sat at opposite ends of a long table. He had a computer with a sound manipulation program. I had a microphone. I prepared a psychotic rant based on news items that at the time involved the Iraq invasion, Abu Ghraib etc.. I would start ranting and Peter would grab snippets of my voice and through the phrases into the sound mix. This created a time shifted feedback that I then jammed on. We also did this in a remote performance format where I streamed video and audi from New York to Peter in Aix-en-Provence, France he then mixed the sound and sent it back via the web. I then Jammed off that system. We also did this in the Netherlands where we added a live video jamming component with a video mixing program.

EF:
Are there artists working in other media whose work you align the rants with?

GH:
The rants in and of themselves are language art works similar in some measure to what Jenny Holzer does but very different. I work with language and specifically language that is set in the media-logos. Much of this was talked about by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his postulates on specialized languages and also by Regis Debray in his Medialogy investigations. What I mean is that mass media language is different from poetry and literary traditions. I use the language of slang, advertising, propaganda, war and soldier short hand, construction lingo and song lyrics to build the message. The performative state is one of borderline psychosis that can be frightening and liberating at the same time. For example one of the more pithy phrases to come out of Abu Ghraib was the phrase, ghost detainees. This was a person who was captured but never bureaucratically processed into the prison. In some measure we are all ghost detainees of global capitalism hegemony. We don’t exist except to consume and produce.

EF:
And rant…here, there and everywhere?

GH:
After doing the rant performances with Peter I took up the issue of small video rants distributed over the Internet to handheld devices. I decided to do a series of video podcasts that people could download onto their video ipod. I began again with the idea of a person doing a mediation/ contemplation rant into a video camera. The subjects were anything I was thinking of or various types of Art Scene issues such as the Market or the death of the author/ artist or steroid monsters in the gym. What happened as I did these was that when I imported them into an editing program I noticed I could slice and sample the videos giving the rant/ mediation more impact. I began to realize that I could perform with the idea of cutting out and rearranging the parts in post production editing. I began to perform with a notion of what would happen with the digital effects. This would be similar to the idea of Charlie Chaplain doing a skating routine backwards and then playing the film forwards. I was performing for the computer rather than the camera. I also took up the notion of percussion by using small ticks an mistakes in my performance. A normal editor would take them out. What I did was sample them and then duplicate and multiply them as a rhythmic element. I then began to sample short phrases of my rants and then randomly reassembled the performances for the final video podcasts. What I found is that the mind assembles the meaning even if the sequences are jumbled.

EF:
What distinguishes the latest rants from the original 70’s templates?

GH:
The most recent rants are done in high definition video in collaboration with Brian Caiazza. Brian is a production and Adobe After Affects genius. He saw my rantapod and wanted to collaborate so we did a series of rants. He set up 3 cameras, a professional Sony HD, a consumer HD video camera and an SD video camera. We did two takes of every rant setting the cameras up first in a vertical line and then in a horizontal half circle. Brian then spent a month in after affects taking some of what I had proposed in my earlier rants, pushing the effects as far as he could.

EF:
Do you create rants all the time

GH:
At the moment I’m not doing any more rants. I’m Actually waiting to see what happens after the US Presidential election.

EF:
Who is your target audience?

GH:
That’s an odd question. I’m an artist so it would be anyone who is interested in experimental art. Let me make an opposite answer. I’m not interested in becoming a corporation sponsored pop star (at least not on their terms). I’m not interested in being entertaining. I am interested in having my works shown in an art context such as museums, galleries, project spaces, new media festivals etc..

The work is also accessible on the web so anyone can access it if they so desire. I don’t really make art for an audience. I make art for myself. This is a psychological process, and I feel curious or uncomfortable or I have an idea. I am also really uncomfortable with society, the social order and so on. What is most popular and attracts the greatest audience, I find boring and inconsequential. I find the arena of art to be the most intellectually and socially free. It is where there is a constant proposition of what the world might be or become. It is also a discourse on ideas. Art has nothing to do with capitalism and marketing other than we are in an economic system that uses those ideals. Indeed the notion of an audience implies a sales/ entertainment matrix. That is part of the larger consumer capitalist structure. I think that structure constricts art just as the Church as a patron restricts art to religious subjects.

EF:
Well, then if they aren’t going to find the rants in church, where will the interested audience access your work

I first got involved in the Internet because of its ability to go around the existing distribution systems for art. My video podcasts rantapod uses the Internet to do just that. If you have iTunes on your computer you can search for rantapod. It is listed in iTunes. Anyone can get these video performances and put them on their iPod. If you have an Apple TV box and an HD video screen you can see the video rants on your large screen TV. This means that my art can be displayed in the homes of people who have that type of technology. These new media distribution systems continue to evolve. So my rants function and are distributed to handheld devices, computer screens and flat screen TV’s.

G.H. Hovagimyan most recently ranted with fellow ArtistsMeeting member Lee Wells at the Democracy in America gathering at the Armory in New York City October 2, 2008.
He is reworking Godard’s film Alphaville in an online project called “Plazaville”.

Links —
rich sucker rap (mp4) http://nujus.net/gh/dupuy_print/rich_sucker_rap.mp4
Palm Rants — http://www.voyd.com/ia/pdagh.htm
entertainMe – http://medialab.ifc.com/film_detail.jsp?film_id=1496
EntertainMe – http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery5.html
Shooter – http://nujus.net/shooter-new-site/index-1.html
rant/ rant back/ back rant – http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery9.html
rantapod – http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod
HD Rants – http://nujus.net/gh_04/hd_rants/index.html
ARTISTSMEETING http://artistsmeeting.org

G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/gh
http://artistsmeeting.org