:: Listing

:: Introduction The Bastard Art Gallery presents a number of "Bootleg, Mash-up & Remix works"; installations, performances and webworks by Belgian artist DDV (1959 - Vilvoorde). Latest update: The Bastard Art Gruppe Blog. DDV is widely known since the late seventies for his self-destructive art-performances, his so-called "True Crime Art" about serial killers, and his vicious aural attacks as 'screamer' with the Club Moral noise-band. We at the Bastard Art Gallery want to focus on some of his recent projects regarding "Diggin' for Gordon". The term Bootleg may refer to an otherwise unavailable audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority, distributed without the artist's consent. The first bootleg was "The Basement Tape" from Bob Dylan, released in 1969 (Jerry Hopkins. "'New' Dylan Album Bootlegged in LA.', Rolling Stone, 20 September 1969, pp. 5-6). "Bootleg" may also refer to bootleg liquor, an alcoholic beverage sold without regard to legal regulations and taxes. In the early 2000s, "bootleg" became an alternate term for "mash-ups" or "bastard pop". Mash-up is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts. A Remix is an alternate version of a song different from the original version. It can often include 'featured' artists. A song is often remixed to extend its popularity or to give a song that wasn't popular a second chance. Remixes are 'the norm' in Modern Dance Music allowing one song the ability to appeal across many different musical genres or dancefloors. The general "mash-up" idea also had some origins through painter and writer Brion Gysin who fully developed the "cut-up" method of writing and painting after accidentally discovering it at the Beat Hotel in Paris on 20 september 1959. He had placed layers of newspapers as a matt to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. His book "Minutes to Go" resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. Gysin introduced writer William S. Burroughs to the technique and the pair later applied it to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out". Our main focus at the Bastard Art Gallery is DDV's project "Diggin' for Gordon". On 20 feb 2006 DDV started digging a hole at an unknown location. It is a tribute to Gordon Matta-Clark who made his last monumental work "Office Baroque" in Antwerp. DDV's hole is 130 x 130 cm and cuts through the basement floor of a brick building, the earth is shoveled into buckets and hauled up by use of a pulley. At first the earth was dumped at a container park, then some of it was distributed in the performance "13 Galleries and only One DDV in town" and recently it is used to fill up "James Lee Byars' Tomb". The diggin' action is visible 24 hours a day through a webcam. To enlighten the action "Dan Flavin is descending steps into Hell" by a row of slant placed fluorescent lights. The Bastard Art Gallery provides you with full access to the "Diggin' for Gordon" webcam still images, movies and sound. We also offer previously unreleased documentation on all related projects and full covering of the events happening in and out of DDV's wonderful world. The Bastard Art Gallery opened on 20 september 2006 and welcomed 8418 visitors until this day.