Thursday's Guest

Guest For Thursday July 5, 2007

RON ROCHELEAU

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Catch the original Concrete TV on NYC Public Access. Friday Late Nights. 1:30 AM. Channel 67.

Artist

Producer:

Concrete TV

www.concretetv.com

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The program can be viewed in it's entirety by clicking on the You Tube link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMWKLruVRQA - RON ROCHELEAU

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More about: RON ROCHELEAU

RON A. ROCHELEAU

Selected Works Press Release

Sotheby’s, Christie’s and sometimes Phillips

May 31 – July 30, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 31, 2007, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m

Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the first exhibition of graphic works on paper by Ron Rocheleau. These new works are as visually intricate and intellectually engaging as Rocheleau’s infamous videos and television show, Concrete TV, which was said to be the best TV show in America by Rolling Stone magazine and voted twice as best cable show by TimeOut New York.

In this new body of work, Ron Rocheleau has reinvented his acclaimed appropriation-based, pop-cultural montage sensibility by literally cutting and pasting, by hand, images and text from contemporary art auction catalogs. At first glance, Rocheleau's new work appears to be a page from an oversized glossy magazine that has yet to be produced, but in fact has been meticulously woven into an idiosyncratic composite. He has formed a tightly organized compression of pictures and type that serves the dual purpose of being both visually and cerebrally seductive. What is revealed on close inspection of Rocheleau’s “old school” design method is a compulsive revision of the contemporary art world through the exclusive palette of the big three auction houses; Christie’s, Sotheby's, and Phillips. The by-product of Rocheleau’s obsessive and intricate cut and paste technique is a highly evolved collage, using a particular style that makes even more sense if you are familiar with the idioms and argot of the blue-chip art market. The work literately illustrates the interconnectedness and symbiosis occurring between these artists and the industry that commodifies as well as contextualizes their production.

Asking and in part answering the question, “What if Jeff Koons collaborated with Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas?” Rocheleau’s collages commingle and conflate works by these well-known artists and hundreds more. In his collages, Rocheleau explores their aesthetic clichés and styles while taking pains to consider the over-all look and design of each of his compositions. He chooses the artists he “works with” based on a delicate balance of content, color, form and historic context. Armed with an X-acto knife, glue stick and a ruler Ron Rocheleau has managed to transform the art auction catalog into an alternative world of unlimited possibilities.

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Concrete TV

Ripped from the headlines over at Fleshbot:

Concrete Ron describes himself as "perhaps the greatest video editor of all time", and anyone who's ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn't argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of "raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort" in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup. If we ever had to show visitors from another planet what's going on in our collective brains at any given moment, we'd make them tune in here.

Link

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By Ned Vizzini

..If you’ve been in enough bars on Thursday nights, chances are you’ve seen Concrete TV, the monumental cable access show that consists of car crashes, motorcycle chases, gunfights, hardcore porn, Chippendale’s stage footage and blips of dialogue cut together in half-hour action-movie montages. The show is favored by bartenders, because you can leave the sound off and it’s just as mesmerizing for drunks.

Concrete TV has been around since 1994, when creator Ron Rocheleau’s cable access sitcom ("It was bad because I was on drugs") began evolving into a "music video show." "I thought, what would it be like to make a movie with all cliches? So I started pasting cliches together, with background music, and that’s what became Concrete TV," says Ron.

Rolling Stone cited the show as a "Hot Pick" in 1996, and MTV came on the scene. But things didn’t work out. "They offered me this shitty gig to do Concrete TV with all footage from the MTV archive. You know how they are. They wanted ‘Behind the Scenes on the Making of Behind the Scenes.’ I told them: this isn’t interesting. This is bad."

MTV stopped calling, but Ron soldiered on, producing–to date–17 episodes of Concrete TV that he constantly edits and rotates, so you literally never see the same show twice.

Unfortunately, some cheap imitators have cropped up. Public Sex Acts, Liebography and Media Shower are three local cable shows that crib heavily from the Concrete TV formula. Public Sex Acts is the worst, with no continuity, shaky camerawork and a total lack of public sex. Liebography is story-oriented, with each show devoted to a figure like Calvin Klein, but it’s made by a Concrete TV devotee who recycles the same clip format. And Media Shower, which features "odd, rare, or unsettling video," is the yuppie Concrete TV for people who have not yet discovered the real thing.

"There are many imitators," Ron says. "But when I’ve seen the shows, they’re not very good... I can spend four-five hours on a few seconds of [Concrete TV]. I come from a fine arts background. So I have the patience to put it together slowly, and if I mess up, I start again. They don’t have that patience.

"It’s like, you know if you have a phat beat, people are going to steal it. All you can try to do is make it so good that you outshine all the imitators."

Don’t be fooled. The real Concrete TV airs Thursdays at 1 a.m. on MNN (channel 67, in Manhattan only).

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Thursday July 5, 2007

10:30 - 11:30 AM / (NYC Time)

Channel 34 of the Time/Warner & Channel 83of the RCN
Cable Television Systems in Manhattan, New York.

The Program can now be viewed on the internet at time of cable casting at

www.mnn.org

NOTE: You must adjust viewing to reflect NYC time

& click on channel 34 at site

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