Tuesday afternoon the fat letter from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities arrived, awarding me with my second (and final) Young Artist Project grant award. (Rejection letters are typically thin because they do not have all the additional tax paper work that needs to be filed upon acceptance).
The proposal was to create visually interesting work (for the bulk of us) that was also aesthetically interesting to the visually impaired.
The project proposal stems from a student I interviewed at American University (Paul) who is blind. The intention of that interview was to create a sort of video documentary/profile to gain some understanding - as a sighted individual - about how the world is perceived when blind. However, what I was learning in the course of the interview became far more interesting than a video piece. I knew, going into the interview, that Paul played saxophone in a jazz group, and was also a very talented classical pianist, so he did have some appreciation for the arts. But, part of what interested me was when he told me about experiencing the Torqued Ellipses and other serpentine sculptures of Richard Serra.
Every time I go to the National Gallery I marvel at Serra's steel sculpture that, if installed improperly, will kill the preparator. It's a piece that really cannot be felt like one of his Torqued Ellipse (at least, I'm not brave enough to touch it). You can walk through the ellipse and it will affect how you hear the space. If you are prodding through it with a white cane, it will also affect the dimensions of your boundaries - for example the wall might meet the floor over there, but every time I walk there I bump my head.
Think of how many other works of fine art can be experienced like that? Pieces that are heard and touched - as well as seen. My grant from DCCAH will fund a few pieces that should affect at least three of our five senses.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Read the Fine Print
After completing another application for a Small Project grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities I found the one line that may explain my last few project proposals getting rejected. "Priority will be given to applications who have not received grant funds from the DC Arts Commission within the past five years."
Of course... maybe it has something to do with my last few proposals funding the Graviton - my project which will pull the moon out of its orbit, closer to the earth.
Who knows?
Of course... maybe it has something to do with my last few proposals funding the Graviton - my project which will pull the moon out of its orbit, closer to the earth.
Who knows?
Thursday, April 03, 2008
When it rains it pours.
Confirmed today - August is going to be a busy month of exhibiting.
- Moment of Zen will play in the Transformer window.
- The latest incarnation of America's Grave, my ongoing collaboration with Randall Packer's A Season in Hell project, will be installed at Arlington Arts Center with its most recent
- Mark Cameron Boyd invited me to exhibit new text-based work at The Athenaeum in Alexandria, VA. I am currently painting approximately 400 words: 1 word/canvas for the show.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Dumb Pondering
I don't pay attention to NCAA basketball. Or sports much, for that matter (it's been 14 years since the '94 MLB strike, so I should stop blaming it). And I don't have a TV.
I noticed that American University and George Mason University were in one bracket (are they called brackets?) of the Road to the Final Four, and that Georgetown University and University Maryland Baltimore County are in a different bracket. I thought, "well that's odd... I drive past Georgetown on my commute between American University and George Mason University. Why aren't they in the same bracket?"
I noticed that American University and George Mason University were in one bracket (are they called brackets?) of the Road to the Final Four, and that Georgetown University and University Maryland Baltimore County are in a different bracket. I thought, "well that's odd... I drive past Georgetown on my commute between American University and George Mason University. Why aren't they in the same bracket?"
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Four Letter Words
One of the previously mentioned "upcoming projects," from a few posts back, is entitled Four Letter Words. The project is a bit more intelligent than it sounds, but before venturing in depth with content I have to post a few rules regarding the project. Rule No. 1 is don't talk about fight club. Rule No. 2...
That stated, of the 3900 words I pulled from a Scrabble word list, I have been sorting through them with a 1994 copy of the Merriam Webster Dictionary (MWD) - one of those cheap pocket garden variety that every would-be-student gets for high school graduation, or prior to matriculation. Needless to say, not all 3900 words accepted by Scrabble were accepted by the MWD (and fewer still accepted by the genius that is Microsoft Office); it is not a massive volume. It is also not up-to-date and does not include such hip new words, like w00t. (w00t is typed with zeros and I am ashamed that Google spell check isn't giving it the red line.)
Dictionaries can be rather frightening objects. I've seen some as thick as a toddler is tall, and that was usually just the first volume of a three book series. But, those ridiculous monstrosities typically engage the etymology and evolution of a word. They require a spotter to lift onto a sturdy oak table that is buttressed. And while particular rules regarding my project began eliminating some of the words typically found as associates in the dictionary (plurals, past tense, etc), some of the words I came across I had to raise an eye-brow.
"Cwms" is a word. I kid you not. It is Welsh for "valley" and pronounced cooms (as in Sean Puffy). It's also drunk-typing for "cwms."
That stated, of the 3900 words I pulled from a Scrabble word list, I have been sorting through them with a 1994 copy of the Merriam Webster Dictionary (MWD) - one of those cheap pocket garden variety that every would-be-student gets for high school graduation, or prior to matriculation. Needless to say, not all 3900 words accepted by Scrabble were accepted by the MWD (and fewer still accepted by the genius that is Microsoft Office); it is not a massive volume. It is also not up-to-date and does not include such hip new words, like w00t. (w00t is typed with zeros and I am ashamed that Google spell check isn't giving it the red line.)
Dictionaries can be rather frightening objects. I've seen some as thick as a toddler is tall, and that was usually just the first volume of a three book series. But, those ridiculous monstrosities typically engage the etymology and evolution of a word. They require a spotter to lift onto a sturdy oak table that is buttressed. And while particular rules regarding my project began eliminating some of the words typically found as associates in the dictionary (plurals, past tense, etc), some of the words I came across I had to raise an eye-brow.
"Cwms" is a word. I kid you not. It is Welsh for "valley" and pronounced cooms (as in Sean Puffy). It's also drunk-typing for "cwms."
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
...and now a word from James Agee
A while back Bill Christenberry told me to read Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. Bit by bit I get through it, struggling to find the time to complete it in a succession of sittings. I wanted to share this stretch on page 126 (of my copy, anyway):
...the work is done by half-skilled, half-paid men under no need to do well... and this is what comes of it: Most naive, most massive symmetry and simpleness. Enough lines, enough off-true, that this symmetry is strongly, yet most subtly sprained against its centers, into something more powerful than either full symmetry or deliberate breaking and balancing of 'monotonies' can ever hope to be. A look of being most earnestly hand-made, as a child's drawing, a thing created out of need, love, patience, and strained skill in the innocence of a race. Nowhere one ounce or inch spent with ornament, not one trace of relief or of disguise: a matchless monotony, and in it a matchless variety, and this again throughout restrained, held rigid...A part of me thinks he looks upon that "powerful" nature as beautiful and poetic. Another part of me thinks he looks upon that "powerful" nature as desperate and hopeless. Not to miss the point of Agee's text, but I always find it interesting to be able to walk away with art lessons from unexpected places and at unexpected moments.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Nay Sayin' - Kehinde Wiley
During a conversation Thursday with Mark Cameron Boyd, he mentioned that Kehinde Wiley has his paintings made in China. The statement stopped me dead in my tracks and I felt like Steve Martin in The Jerk when he learned he was adopted.
After seeing Recognize at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a bland tribute to hip-hop culture (if you call a tribute bad graffiti and photos of rappers with microphones to their mouths a tribute), it was easy to walk away from it mesmerized by the saccharine colors and fluorescence of Wiley's work. As an artist mired in the drivel of Post Post Post Post Post Modernist critique, it becomes easy to prattle off the questions related to the form of portrait painting and the history associated with it, as well as ponder his brilliance with words like recontextualize, appropriate, and juxtapose. These were things I pondered with my wife over dinner the night after seeing the show. She looked at me a little bored and said, "you are thinking way too much into this."
Wiley's work is painted in China by Chinese laborers and artisans. Scour a Google search of "Kehinde Wiley China." Some critics will call it his studio. One called it an atelier, which is the fancy word for studio. I think it is safe to label it what it is: manufacturing. And, apparently, Wiley intends to open "ateliers" in several other emerging markets to outsource the manufacturing of "his" paintings. (This is in step with some current Chinese business practices - China is doing this now with several products because the cost for Chinese labor is not as cheap as it used to be.)
With the new revelation, the idea becomes much more interesting: outsourcing the labor of a painting. It isn't new. Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Thomas Kinkade all do/did it. Three of the four are found in museums across the globe, with Kinkade found mostly in shopping malls. But, would any self-respecting artist really want to be lumped into that category? I suppose if work is selling for five, six, seven and eight figures, the integrity of the label "artist" can be bought out for "entrepreneur." It is an interesting business plan, for sure, and possibly outweighs the b.s. about the 'appropriation from multiple cultures juxtaposed with the borrowed works of Western history to create a portrait painting that both follows and questions the craft of portraiture.' (yawn.)
I think the critics might also be excited because he is young, possibly hip, and Black. Draw what parallels you will to Basquiat, but Wiley won't O.D. However, the market might O.D. from Wiley's paintings as it did with the flood of Basquiat forgeries that filled the market shortly following Basquiat's death. That begs an interesting point: if Basquiat's works are devalued because they are discovered forgeries, what happens to the work of a painter that hardly paints his own work? Whatever. As Chuck D once wrote, "Don't believe the hype."
If there is anything to Recognize, it's that Kehinde Wiley can't "keep it real." But, he's more a pawn than a player - his celebrity is the act of a market, fueled by curators and critics, to pull Chinese rayon over our eyes. And, it's only fitting. Everything else we own is made in China. The backbone of our credit card economy is made in China. So, why not also our art. After all, when it comes to a knowledge of art history and art appreciation, we in the United States are a dim sum.
After seeing Recognize at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a bland tribute to hip-hop culture (if you call a tribute bad graffiti and photos of rappers with microphones to their mouths a tribute), it was easy to walk away from it mesmerized by the saccharine colors and fluorescence of Wiley's work. As an artist mired in the drivel of Post Post Post Post Post Modernist critique, it becomes easy to prattle off the questions related to the form of portrait painting and the history associated with it, as well as ponder his brilliance with words like recontextualize, appropriate, and juxtapose. These were things I pondered with my wife over dinner the night after seeing the show. She looked at me a little bored and said, "you are thinking way too much into this."
Wiley's work is painted in China by Chinese laborers and artisans. Scour a Google search of "Kehinde Wiley China." Some critics will call it his studio. One called it an atelier, which is the fancy word for studio. I think it is safe to label it what it is: manufacturing. And, apparently, Wiley intends to open "ateliers" in several other emerging markets to outsource the manufacturing of "his" paintings. (This is in step with some current Chinese business practices - China is doing this now with several products because the cost for Chinese labor is not as cheap as it used to be.)
With the new revelation, the idea becomes much more interesting: outsourcing the labor of a painting. It isn't new. Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Thomas Kinkade all do/did it. Three of the four are found in museums across the globe, with Kinkade found mostly in shopping malls. But, would any self-respecting artist really want to be lumped into that category? I suppose if work is selling for five, six, seven and eight figures, the integrity of the label "artist" can be bought out for "entrepreneur." It is an interesting business plan, for sure, and possibly outweighs the b.s. about the 'appropriation from multiple cultures juxtaposed with the borrowed works of Western history to create a portrait painting that both follows and questions the craft of portraiture.' (yawn.)
I think the critics might also be excited because he is young, possibly hip, and Black. Draw what parallels you will to Basquiat, but Wiley won't O.D. However, the market might O.D. from Wiley's paintings as it did with the flood of Basquiat forgeries that filled the market shortly following Basquiat's death. That begs an interesting point: if Basquiat's works are devalued because they are discovered forgeries, what happens to the work of a painter that hardly paints his own work? Whatever. As Chuck D once wrote, "Don't believe the hype."
If there is anything to Recognize, it's that Kehinde Wiley can't "keep it real." But, he's more a pawn than a player - his celebrity is the act of a market, fueled by curators and critics, to pull Chinese rayon over our eyes. And, it's only fitting. Everything else we own is made in China. The backbone of our credit card economy is made in China. So, why not also our art. After all, when it comes to a knowledge of art history and art appreciation, we in the United States are a dim sum.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
WPA Auction 2008 - Katzen
Note: I didn't apply to be in it, I'm not bidding, I'm not attending, and I'm not covering the attendance/process.
The hall outside the Katzen Museum, in the Katzen Arts Center at American University, is lined with many framed works (and a couple sculptures, too) all prepared for auction to help support the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA).
When Alice Denney first started the WPA in the mid 1970's, like most things Alice was involved with throughout her tenure as DC Art Provocateur, the WPA began with a whim and a prayer, a shoestring budget, and the hope that artists would rally behind the idea to make the thing thrive. And thrive it did. But part of what made it thrive was the novel idea that she would show virtually unknown (or at least unrepresented) artists and keep the price of the work affordable for anyone to collect. Right now it feels (and looks) like the WPA has strayed off course a bit.
Why the quip? Some of the work at auction for the WPA is of established artists and outside the price range of young collectors. This is important to note. Granted, as was heard on Kojo Nnamdi's show recently, most people don't know how or where to begin collecting, get sticker shock, and would rather pay $200 to frame a lousy print of a Post Impressionist that they know than they wold to buy a real work of art for $700, or $1000, or $3000. But, since so many of us live in homes furnished by Ikea, maybe it is only appropriate that the crappy work on the wall match the crappy furniture. But I digress.
Lenny Campello (one of Kojo's guests on that show) has been writing bits on his blog lately about "art collection," and in some of those instances it is really about art investment. To paraphrase, "buy this person's work now before it's too late!" Should that be the motivation?
With that it is necessary to distinguish between collectors and investors.
Collectors are people who buy work based on a personal connection with the work. It isn't motivated by the prospect of investment. It is motivated by the jaw-dropping awe of inspiration and epiphany; by the upturned mouth at a clever execution or proposition; by the ah-hah!; by the integrity of the object or concept or both.
Investors look for names. They get on a list for the next Jasper Johns. The namesake of the building hosting this year's WPA event was an investor - he collected blue-chip-name art investments: work that inspires at best a sigh - but at least it is a Picasso!
Buying art work should be like that silly saying: dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening. It doesn't matter what your friends think of the work - you are the one who lives with it in the end. People probably laughed at Castelli's clients in 1958 for buying the pieces of trash glued together that Leo Castelli was passing off as art. At one point in time Bob Rauschenberg was a nobody. The people who bought Rauschenberg's combines out of Castelli's bathtub for a couple hundred clams had the last laugh.
Hey! Artists create work, but it doesn't always mean they want to live with it for eternity. I'd happily trade some pieces for a bagel* if I knew the person "purchasing" the piece was passionate about it and felt a connection to it. Studio spaces need to remain studio spaces, and not become storage spaces (like Raoul Middleman's).
*bagels must be toasted with lox. bagels may vary.
The hall outside the Katzen Museum, in the Katzen Arts Center at American University, is lined with many framed works (and a couple sculptures, too) all prepared for auction to help support the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA).
When Alice Denney first started the WPA in the mid 1970's, like most things Alice was involved with throughout her tenure as DC Art Provocateur, the WPA began with a whim and a prayer, a shoestring budget, and the hope that artists would rally behind the idea to make the thing thrive. And thrive it did. But part of what made it thrive was the novel idea that she would show virtually unknown (or at least unrepresented) artists and keep the price of the work affordable for anyone to collect. Right now it feels (and looks) like the WPA has strayed off course a bit.
Why the quip? Some of the work at auction for the WPA is of established artists and outside the price range of young collectors. This is important to note. Granted, as was heard on Kojo Nnamdi's show recently, most people don't know how or where to begin collecting, get sticker shock, and would rather pay $200 to frame a lousy print of a Post Impressionist that they know than they wold to buy a real work of art for $700, or $1000, or $3000. But, since so many of us live in homes furnished by Ikea, maybe it is only appropriate that the crappy work on the wall match the crappy furniture. But I digress.
Lenny Campello (one of Kojo's guests on that show) has been writing bits on his blog lately about "art collection," and in some of those instances it is really about art investment. To paraphrase, "buy this person's work now before it's too late!" Should that be the motivation?
With that it is necessary to distinguish between collectors and investors.
Collectors are people who buy work based on a personal connection with the work. It isn't motivated by the prospect of investment. It is motivated by the jaw-dropping awe of inspiration and epiphany; by the upturned mouth at a clever execution or proposition; by the ah-hah!; by the integrity of the object or concept or both.
Investors look for names. They get on a list for the next Jasper Johns. The namesake of the building hosting this year's WPA event was an investor - he collected blue-chip-name art investments: work that inspires at best a sigh - but at least it is a Picasso!
Buying art work should be like that silly saying: dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening. It doesn't matter what your friends think of the work - you are the one who lives with it in the end. People probably laughed at Castelli's clients in 1958 for buying the pieces of trash glued together that Leo Castelli was passing off as art. At one point in time Bob Rauschenberg was a nobody. The people who bought Rauschenberg's combines out of Castelli's bathtub for a couple hundred clams had the last laugh.
Hey! Artists create work, but it doesn't always mean they want to live with it for eternity. I'd happily trade some pieces for a bagel* if I knew the person "purchasing" the piece was passionate about it and felt a connection to it. Studio spaces need to remain studio spaces, and not become storage spaces (like Raoul Middleman's).
*bagels must be toasted with lox. bagels may vary.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Frozen in Grand Central
This is more interesting than riding on the subway without pants day... or whatever that was a couple months back.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Recent Exploits
About a year ago I was charged with the responsibility of rebuilding and updating Katja Oxman's website. It was a casual assignment that was completed a couple weeks back.
In addition, a recent essay (ramble?) of mine has been published on the blog Kill Film Students. Most of those associated with the blog are former students of mine at American University, and in the last five months I've assumed a sort of advisory role and solicited critic of their projects. The ramble deals with the need for art students to grasp their education and shake of the malaise of latent adolescence. It comes about from conversations I have had with several students I have taught at the three universities where I have taught and reflections on my own art education, which tie to things heard recently on various shows on National Public Radio. Of course, since these are film students, there is a heavy slant toward cinema.
In addition, a recent essay (ramble?) of mine has been published on the blog Kill Film Students. Most of those associated with the blog are former students of mine at American University, and in the last five months I've assumed a sort of advisory role and solicited critic of their projects. The ramble deals with the need for art students to grasp their education and shake of the malaise of latent adolescence. It comes about from conversations I have had with several students I have taught at the three universities where I have taught and reflections on my own art education, which tie to things heard recently on various shows on National Public Radio. Of course, since these are film students, there is a heavy slant toward cinema.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Happy President's Day, Stephen Colbert
A month ago I stopped by the National Portrait Gallery to see it for myself - I was in the neighborhood, so why not? (I lost my card reader, hence the delay.)The pic is of students from George Mason University taking photos of themselves in front of Colbert's portrait, located between the bathrooms outside the Hall of Presidents.
Colbert stated a good case to get his work into the museum. He established his national importance and influence and then critiqued work on the wall around the galleries of portraits. He protested Alfred Stieglitz's portrait, which depicts a diagram of a camera. "If it's on aesthetic values, (the Stieglitz) is better than your portrait," stated NPG Director Marc Pachter. In terms of aesthetics, Pachter is correct. Colbert's portrait is a series of three digital photographs, put through a paint or pastel filter in Photoshop, then printed on canvas. It is "art" that looks better on television than it does in person.
The humor is two-fold. The first is a commentary on the cheesiness of political portraiture in recent decades (exception - Kennedy). Historically, the portraits of presidents consists largely of a white guy in a chair. Of course, the portraits represented in Wikipedia do not necessarily speak for the portraits on display at The National Portrait Gallery - but you get the idea.
The second is a commentary on the art world - or rather how those outside of the art world (makers, sellers, collectors, and educators) appreciate a work of art. Without question, more people have flocked to the museum in the past four weeks to look at this Colbert piece than any other museum or gallery in the area in recent months - with possible exception to the Annie Leibovitz / Ansel Adams double-billing at The Corcoran. And why do they flock? Is it to look at a notable piece of art? If in reference to the work on the wall, it only looks like art: a "painting," in a frame, hanging on a wall. If there is any art in this work, it is in the spectacle. People trying to read the wall text - which discusses the production process - are asked to kindly step aside (by the guards) so that people can take a picture of/with the work. It is a spectacle so popular that the initial viewing of six weeks, for this accidental piece of performance/audience-art has been extended until April first. Pachter has taken a page from John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. The museum can only benefit.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
On The Horizon
January succumbed to the boondoggle otherwise known as application season, wherein I devoured a considerable amount of time and energy applying for F/T professorships, exhibitions, awards, and residencies. February has since lost production time to that miser influenza: herbal teas, acetaminophen, long naps, and spoon-fulls of chicken soup. Regardless, this has also been about the most productive I have been in the studio in months.
In November, for a plethora of reasons, I decided to decline most adjunct teaching offers I received so I could freelance as a graphic designer throughout the semester. This might seem contrary in some regard, but so doing created the long missed free-time that teaching had consumed. In effect, teaching 5-6 courses/semester between 3 universities usually created a 60-hour + work week. And, since teaching doesn't pay very well, a little extra work had to be done on the side to make ends meet. This left only time for thinking about art. Doing 25 hours of freelance a week (and 12 hours devoted to academia) not only pays better, but allows me to work on painting, drawing, and digital media.
Now, the four or five projects I have been stewing over for the past 13 months can finally be executed - or at least begun. One notebook has already been filled with presketches. Talking about the work to come is like a catcher discussing a no-hitter with his pitcher during the seventh inning stretch. This blog won't be very busy, needless to say - but there will be new images posted this spring.
In November, for a plethora of reasons, I decided to decline most adjunct teaching offers I received so I could freelance as a graphic designer throughout the semester. This might seem contrary in some regard, but so doing created the long missed free-time that teaching had consumed. In effect, teaching 5-6 courses/semester between 3 universities usually created a 60-hour + work week. And, since teaching doesn't pay very well, a little extra work had to be done on the side to make ends meet. This left only time for thinking about art. Doing 25 hours of freelance a week (and 12 hours devoted to academia) not only pays better, but allows me to work on painting, drawing, and digital media.
Now, the four or five projects I have been stewing over for the past 13 months can finally be executed - or at least begun. One notebook has already been filled with presketches. Talking about the work to come is like a catcher discussing a no-hitter with his pitcher during the seventh inning stretch. This blog won't be very busy, needless to say - but there will be new images posted this spring.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Film, Video, and Installation Art Practices-A Series
This just in from SAAM - another John Hanhardt lecture series.
Re:Making the Moving Image: Film, Video, and Installation Art Practices-A Series
In this three-part lecture series, John G. Hanhardt explores the different
strategies artists employ to create work using the moving image. Each talk includes
examples from the classical cinema, independent film and video, and installation
art.
See SAAM's online calendar
(http://americanart.si.edu/reynolds_center/calendar.cfm) for details.
McEvoy Auditorium --Lower Level
Thursday, February 7, 6 p.m.
Wednesdays, February 13 and 20, 6 p.m.
Monday, January 28, 2008
The Audacity of Hope
When it was announced late Friday, or early Saturday, that Barack Obama would have a rally at American University's Bender Arena, I actually thought if I went to Obama's website and got an e-reservation that it would actually mean something. The event, scheduled to start around 12:30 (doors opened at 10:30), had lines stretching from the arena to Massachusetts Avenue and down to the Seminary School at 9:30 AM. Getting into the arena truly became the audacity of hope. An overflow was established in "The Tavern," AUs former on-campus bar before the school went dry in the mid 1990s. The started refusing admittance around 11:45. Now there is another overflow in a basement auditorium in one of the buildings across campus.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Your Apple Isn't Vegan
I'm in the finishing stages of determining the budget for a grant application, and I was looking for some inexpensively priced shellac. Shellac's wikipedia page popped up, though I had not intended to do any wikiResearch today. Do a Google search a wikiPage pops up.
Shellac "is also used to replace the natural wax of the apple, which is removed during the cleaning process[2]. When used for this purpose, it has the food additive E number E904. This coating may not be considered as vegetarian as it may, and probably does, contain crushed insects. It is definitely not vegan."
Interesting. Just when you were questioning your carbon footprint when buying an apple from Ecuador or New Zealand comes the news that the apples you serve at parties can no longer be consumed by that one vegan friend you have. Pity.
Shellac "is also used to replace the natural wax of the apple, which is removed during the cleaning process[2]. When used for this purpose, it has the food additive E number E904. This coating may not be considered as vegetarian as it may, and probably does, contain crushed insects. It is definitely not vegan."
Interesting. Just when you were questioning your carbon footprint when buying an apple from Ecuador or New Zealand comes the news that the apples you serve at parties can no longer be consumed by that one vegan friend you have. Pity.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Stephen Colbert at the National Portrait Gallery
Apparently Stephen Colbert will have a portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, near the President's hall (and the entrance to the bathroom), for the next six weeks.
Monday, January 07, 2008
I Love DC
A Story Problem for the Modern Mathematician.
I live within ear shot of the D2-bus, and a 6 minute walk of Wisconsin Avenue, where I can find half a dozen 30-buses. Leaving Canal and Wisconsin, and seeing no bus in sight, I decide to walk to Q street where the aforementioned buses intersect. It takes me 8 minutes to walk the distance of .5 miles. At the intersection of Q and Wisconsin I wait... and wait... After 16 minutes of waiting, two 30-buses finally arrive. It takes 4 minutes to travel the distance between Q and Calvert, whereupon I take 6 minutes to walk home. 2 minutes after I arrive home, I hear the D2 pass.
The total distance between my apartment and the intersection of Wisconsin and M is 1.8 miles.
Based on these figures, estimate how many more months it will take me to realize that it is in all likelihood faster to walk to Georgetown, from my apartment, than it is to rely on DC public transportation?
I live within ear shot of the D2-bus, and a 6 minute walk of Wisconsin Avenue, where I can find half a dozen 30-buses. Leaving Canal and Wisconsin, and seeing no bus in sight, I decide to walk to Q street where the aforementioned buses intersect. It takes me 8 minutes to walk the distance of .5 miles. At the intersection of Q and Wisconsin I wait... and wait... After 16 minutes of waiting, two 30-buses finally arrive. It takes 4 minutes to travel the distance between Q and Calvert, whereupon I take 6 minutes to walk home. 2 minutes after I arrive home, I hear the D2 pass.
The total distance between my apartment and the intersection of Wisconsin and M is 1.8 miles.
Based on these figures, estimate how many more months it will take me to realize that it is in all likelihood faster to walk to Georgetown, from my apartment, than it is to rely on DC public transportation?
Odds and Ends - Part One
Preparation for an Invasion of Chinese Soldiers.
Last month I was excited to learn that portions of Emperor Qin's Terra Cotta Army is going to be on display at the National Geographic Society Museum. I found the press release... it turns out they'll be in DC beginning November 2009. I don't even know if I'll be in DC come November 2009!
Textile Museum
Gretchen and I spent a portion of our weekend visiting the Textile Museum, which is tucked away in the Kalorama neighborhood of DC, north of Dupont Circle on S street between Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. It was the final day of Textiles of Klimt's Vienna, which displayed an array of fabric samples from the Weiner Werkstatte, which date back to the turn of the last century. I suppose Klimt was used in the title because if you mention Kolomon Moser or Joseph Hoffmann to anyone as an influential designer, you'll get a strange look. Gustav Klimt, however did "that kiss painting. Right?"
A surprise was seeing the work of Lia Cook, who creates photo-representational tapestries. In the summer of 2005 I got to hang one of those tapestries at the CCVA Gallery in Chautauqua, New York, when I was working there as an assistant gallery manager. Of late, Chuck Close has been receiving a lot of attention for his recent exhibition of tapestries at Adamson Gallery, and his tapestries closely resemble some of Cook's (and probably sell for double or triple).
There is a discrepancy between what we define as art and what we define as craft.
Etymology Lesson
While on holiday in Boulder, I thumbed through a book on Etymology. The first word I looked up was art. If I read the text correctly, the word first appeared in the 13th Century. It's meaning then: the execution and application of a craft.
Annie Leibovitz at the Corcoran.
I interviewed Paul Roth several months ago about this and Ansel Adam's exhibitions. Unfortunately, I haven't had a time to venture down there, until this weekend. Gretchen and I trapsed from 23rd and S (Textile Museum) to 17th and E to see the exhibit. Instead, we saw a line. A long line. Stretched along 17th Street, from the front door to E street. As encouraging as it was to see a line in front of a DC museum, after walking two miles to get there I was a bit irritated. It's funny, people won't go to an exhibit if they don't know an artist - which is the very reason why they should go. However, show an photographer readily available at any magazine stand, or on a calendar, the masses flock.
Last month I was excited to learn that portions of Emperor Qin's Terra Cotta Army is going to be on display at the National Geographic Society Museum. I found the press release... it turns out they'll be in DC beginning November 2009. I don't even know if I'll be in DC come November 2009!
Textile Museum
Gretchen and I spent a portion of our weekend visiting the Textile Museum, which is tucked away in the Kalorama neighborhood of DC, north of Dupont Circle on S street between Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. It was the final day of Textiles of Klimt's Vienna, which displayed an array of fabric samples from the Weiner Werkstatte, which date back to the turn of the last century. I suppose Klimt was used in the title because if you mention Kolomon Moser or Joseph Hoffmann to anyone as an influential designer, you'll get a strange look. Gustav Klimt, however did "that kiss painting. Right?"
A surprise was seeing the work of Lia Cook, who creates photo-representational tapestries. In the summer of 2005 I got to hang one of those tapestries at the CCVA Gallery in Chautauqua, New York, when I was working there as an assistant gallery manager. Of late, Chuck Close has been receiving a lot of attention for his recent exhibition of tapestries at Adamson Gallery, and his tapestries closely resemble some of Cook's (and probably sell for double or triple).
There is a discrepancy between what we define as art and what we define as craft.
Etymology Lesson
While on holiday in Boulder, I thumbed through a book on Etymology. The first word I looked up was art. If I read the text correctly, the word first appeared in the 13th Century. It's meaning then: the execution and application of a craft.
Annie Leibovitz at the Corcoran.
I interviewed Paul Roth several months ago about this and Ansel Adam's exhibitions. Unfortunately, I haven't had a time to venture down there, until this weekend. Gretchen and I trapsed from 23rd and S (Textile Museum) to 17th and E to see the exhibit. Instead, we saw a line. A long line. Stretched along 17th Street, from the front door to E street. As encouraging as it was to see a line in front of a DC museum, after walking two miles to get there I was a bit irritated. It's funny, people won't go to an exhibit if they don't know an artist - which is the very reason why they should go. However, show an photographer readily available at any magazine stand, or on a calendar, the masses flock.
Friday, January 04, 2008
They Never Learn.
I am a little behind on the news, but apparently Iowa State (my alma matter) unveiled a new logo for the 2008 academic year in September (pictured above). The last time they changed their logo was in the mid 1990s when they merged the marching cardinal and the cyclone into this:
Which everyone hated.I might argue that the I is an improvement. But, much like polishing a turd, no matter how much you polish, it's still a turd.
The great issue here is who the Athletics department consults. Or, rather, who they don't consult, which is the Graphic Design department. If memory serves me correctly, the graphic design department at Iowa State never got a say in the design chosen in the mid 1990s, and I will wager my two BFAs from Iowa State that they did not consult them for the new I-logo, either. My former professors regarded the Cardinaclone with light-hearted scorn, rolling their eyes on how much money Iowa State University wasted to buy that crap.
I have no idea who created the proposed version for 2008 - it looks like some generic computer rendering from the late 1980s that a teenager with moderate sense created in MS Paint - but I know how it was selected: the fans voted! How heart-warming... (groan) And irresponsible! Sweaters, t-shirts, caps, uniforms, folders, stationary, etcetera will be created in the next few months for a logo that will likely be replaced in less than 10 years.
They have a well respected and highly ranked graphic design program, and yet they let corporations design the logos and morons vote on them. Strategery inaction.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
It's That Time Of Year Again...
As final projects are being handed in and assessed, and grades are being posted digitally to on-line resources, I tend to get a couple of letters every semester from students pushing for a change in the grade. Here is a sample of a letter I shall never receive:
(spelling errors and formality issues were added to suspend disbelief)
Hey Professor,
I cant believe you got grades up on line so quick. I was amazed by teh A-. I was hopping I could get you to reconsider the grade. Normally I don't do so well in collage courses, and I don't wanna upset my parent's expectations of me. Is there any kind of extra course work I can complete to get a lower grade? I'd really, really appreciate it.
Thanks, and have a good break!
(spelling errors and formality issues were added to suspend disbelief)
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Roden Crater
I stumbled upon an interesting article from the NY Times about James Turrell's Roden Crater. A couple of months ago I stumbled upon an article that said the crater opened last year. Apparently plans have been delayed. 2011 is the opening date. It doesn't stop people from trespassing.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
James Rosenquist at SAAM
Last month when I learned Jim Rosenquist would be lecturing at the McEvoy Auditorium in the basement of the Smithsonian American Art Museum I quietly rejoiced and then began showing students images of his work on Google.
Back story: Two years ago I was helping Barbara Rose move stuff to New York, and after a long day of working we sat chewing the fat over a bottle of wine. She asked me who I thought the five best living US painters are. I spit out Rauschenberg, Johns, Stella, and Rosenquist before I could blink an eye. Then I stopped speaking and sheepishly admitted I couldn't think of any other living painter that I was passionate about. I think I followed up with , "Elizabeth Murray, I suppose. " (I know she's no longer with us... this was 2005.)
Barbara stated sharply - "Now, Jim Rosenquist. That's interesting. He has to be one of the most gentlemanly artists I have ever known." Perhaps I am paraphrasing.
The lecture Jim Rosenquist was supposed to give was entitled Fine Art Is Not A Career. I don't think he ever broached the subject. His talk was mostly war stories: growing up in the Midwest; his parents being aviators; working as a sign painter with ex-convicts in ND, SD, NE, IA, & WI painting signs for Phillips 66; a scholarship to New York; the cost of George Grosz's apartment in the 1950s; his first apartment in Coenties Slip; and the differences in price between paintings he sold in the 1960s and what they recently sold for at auction this year. Basically, things you could read in the catalog published by the Guggenheim five years ago, during his retrospective.
But, my, was he entertaining! He speaks with a voice reminiscent of a quiet Harvey Keitel. He fidgeted with his glasses, wiped his face with his hands, hiked up his trousers, lost his place in his lecture, and told little more than amusing anecdotes. He had the charm of an afternoon out with my grandfather, sitting in a boat, lines in the water, waiting for the catfish at the bottom of the river bed to come up for a bite. And he was capable of mastering that poise in front of an audience of hundreds. He's as cool as his paintings.
Back story: Two years ago I was helping Barbara Rose move stuff to New York, and after a long day of working we sat chewing the fat over a bottle of wine. She asked me who I thought the five best living US painters are. I spit out Rauschenberg, Johns, Stella, and Rosenquist before I could blink an eye. Then I stopped speaking and sheepishly admitted I couldn't think of any other living painter that I was passionate about. I think I followed up with , "Elizabeth Murray, I suppose. " (I know she's no longer with us... this was 2005.)
Barbara stated sharply - "Now, Jim Rosenquist. That's interesting. He has to be one of the most gentlemanly artists I have ever known." Perhaps I am paraphrasing.
The lecture Jim Rosenquist was supposed to give was entitled Fine Art Is Not A Career. I don't think he ever broached the subject. His talk was mostly war stories: growing up in the Midwest; his parents being aviators; working as a sign painter with ex-convicts in ND, SD, NE, IA, & WI painting signs for Phillips 66; a scholarship to New York; the cost of George Grosz's apartment in the 1950s; his first apartment in Coenties Slip; and the differences in price between paintings he sold in the 1960s and what they recently sold for at auction this year. Basically, things you could read in the catalog published by the Guggenheim five years ago, during his retrospective.
But, my, was he entertaining! He speaks with a voice reminiscent of a quiet Harvey Keitel. He fidgeted with his glasses, wiped his face with his hands, hiked up his trousers, lost his place in his lecture, and told little more than amusing anecdotes. He had the charm of an afternoon out with my grandfather, sitting in a boat, lines in the water, waiting for the catfish at the bottom of the river bed to come up for a bite. And he was capable of mastering that poise in front of an audience of hundreds. He's as cool as his paintings.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Thanksgiving recap.
Thanksgiving involved a five hour drive to New Jersey on a Tuesday evening, and near six hour return on a Saturday afternoon. This afternoon as Gretchen and I listened to the radio we heard I-95 was jammed up and down the Eastern Seaboard between New York City and Richmond, Virginia. No doubt the bottle necks somewhere south of Exit 8 in Jersey, and somewhere south of Ikea in Northern Virginia - where six lanes of traffic become three and two respectively - contributed to this. So too did the Deleware Memorial Bridge. We paid $7 between the two ends of a four mile stretch, waiting 40 minutes to drive through it.
More trains in the Easter corridor, please. At least more rail cars would be nice. A drop in ticket prices would be beneficial to buoying the mass-transit commute along the coast. Less gasoline will be consumed. More people will read books and periodicals. And, when not reading, they'll be rocked to sleep like babies, or skimming the landscape with wide-eyed curiosity. Better than sitting in a parking lot, wading through a sea of brake lights in the EZ-Pass lane, a kettle of anger boiling over in the sternums of thousands, reflexively displaced to the accelerator stitching accidents between lanes of traffic at 90 MPH.
More trains in the Easter corridor, please. At least more rail cars would be nice. A drop in ticket prices would be beneficial to buoying the mass-transit commute along the coast. Less gasoline will be consumed. More people will read books and periodicals. And, when not reading, they'll be rocked to sleep like babies, or skimming the landscape with wide-eyed curiosity. Better than sitting in a parking lot, wading through a sea of brake lights in the EZ-Pass lane, a kettle of anger boiling over in the sternums of thousands, reflexively displaced to the accelerator stitching accidents between lanes of traffic at 90 MPH.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Mark Cameron Boyd at Galerie Ingrid Cooper
A little over a week ago I traveled up the Rockville Pike to see Mark Cameron Boyd's recent exhibition at Galerie Ingrid Cooper. Seldom have I ventured north into Maryland to view an exhibition, and I became a bit dumbfounded to learn the gallery was in the White Flint Shopping Mall. This would be curious, at least.
Art in a mall conjures up images of strange poster/prints replicating paintings derived from movie stills and promotional advertising for movies: stuff to hang in a dorm room. But, the idea of selling and purchasing art in a shopping mall makes perfect sense. There is a high volume of foot traffic; people are going there specifically to spend money; and there is no limit to that money to spend. Down the hall a visitor may spend several hundred or thousand dollars on furniture, commercial jewelry, shoes, literature, computer equipment, or cooking gadgets. Never mind the pop melodies of Amy Grant and Debbie Gibson in the background! If the opportunity should arise, "how much is that painting in the window?"
Ingrid Cooper has been operating her small boutique for a dozen years. Raised and educated in Germany, she mentioned that students were exposed to two hours of art education every week. "That doesn't mean it was quality; that depended on the teacher you had," she said. Students were educated about the aesthetics of composition, about classical art, and about how art evolved into and through the 20th Century. Though Ms. Cooper modestly questioned the quality of the art education as a whole in Germany, there is no question that she had it - something that a growing number of Americans cannot say they have had. For many in the States, mandatory art education stopped before the end of elementary school, if it was even offered. Keeping Ms. Cooper's education in mind, it will be certain that the "painter of light" will never make an appearance in her quiet space - painted prints of cozy cottages on canvas tend to clash with DeStijl walls and stainless steel counter displays (Galerie also displays artisan jewelry).
Mark Cameron Boyd has received his fair share of recognition lately for his chalkboard pieces: phrases or statements, written on alternating stripes of slate and tape, with tape removed, something he calls text bisections. What is revealed are half-strings of words that Boyd allows the viewer to sometimes fill in with an abandoned stick of chalk. They are ephemeral, require audience participation, involve looking and reading. The chalkboards might be too theoretical for the mall.
Created between 1998 and 2003, Boyd's work, currently on display at Galerie Ingrid Cooper, is a plausible step backward in time to what influenced the chalkboard pieces. Each composition is painting and decollage: an act of collage that involves cutting and tearing away from the compositional surface.
Decollage first came into vogue during the middle of the 20th Century when artists like Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villegle and Raymond Hains admired the abstract nature of the vandalized posters on their respective city streets to such an extent that they pulled the posters down from the walls, carted them to their studios, and pasted them onto canvas and board.
Boyd's work does not share the vocabulary of street poster. Instead, it has newspapers from several cultures piled atop one another and stripped away. The layering of languages - Japanese, German, Spanish, French, English - is the cacophony of the DC street, the texture of sound heard passing between point A and point B, the poetics of language. Through the act of decollage, and the design of painting, the work becomes unified and whole.
Seeing the influence and execution of decollage from earlier work, the process for the chalkboards begins to make sense. Removing a strip of Japanese newspaper in the past is similar to removing a text-strewn strip of tape from a chalkboard.
Mark Cameron Boyd's exhibition at Galerie Ingrid Cooper will be on display through November 19. Galerie Ingrid Cooper is on the second floor of the White Flint Mall, 11301 Rockville Pike.
pictured: Thing in a Ringer, 2002, courtesy Mark Cameron Boyd.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Get Thee to the Katzen
I had half an hour today and wandered over to the Katzen between meetings at American University. Between the Feminist work on the ground level and Botero upstairs I was blown away. I cannot recall who was on the second floor - Metropolis in paint - but even that was astounding.
Last month there were nothing but lemons hanging in the Katzen. I've actually blocked those shows out of memory - they were so bad. And, in looking at the work on exhibit now, I can see why: the energy of the past year has been invested in this month, these shows, this opening. And, it might be the best grouping of exhibits, in one space, in all of DC, at this time.
Botero may be one of my least favorite artists. It is possibly because his stylized paintings of rotund figures never "speak" to me. I find them as empty and hollow as Jeff Koon's bunny rabbits. His images of Abu Ghraib, however, truly capture that Joseph Conrad-ian psychological fracturing of humanity. What does it take to bring one human being to such moral depths that he or she performs those acts to another human being? It is more than just a fissure in the system.
But, it does make me think, under the proper conditions, there might be some sort of evil inside each of us that could take us to those depths. That might be the most frightening thing about Botero's paintings. When humanity and self-respect are lost, we become animals - rabid as dogs on the end of a tightened leash. Abu Ghraib is what happens when that leash goes untethered.
Last month there were nothing but lemons hanging in the Katzen. I've actually blocked those shows out of memory - they were so bad. And, in looking at the work on exhibit now, I can see why: the energy of the past year has been invested in this month, these shows, this opening. And, it might be the best grouping of exhibits, in one space, in all of DC, at this time.
Botero may be one of my least favorite artists. It is possibly because his stylized paintings of rotund figures never "speak" to me. I find them as empty and hollow as Jeff Koon's bunny rabbits. His images of Abu Ghraib, however, truly capture that Joseph Conrad-ian psychological fracturing of humanity. What does it take to bring one human being to such moral depths that he or she performs those acts to another human being? It is more than just a fissure in the system.
But, it does make me think, under the proper conditions, there might be some sort of evil inside each of us that could take us to those depths. That might be the most frightening thing about Botero's paintings. When humanity and self-respect are lost, we become animals - rabid as dogs on the end of a tightened leash. Abu Ghraib is what happens when that leash goes untethered.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
French Notes
Yesterday was Claude LeLouch's 70th birthday. Gretchen and I honored the occasion by watching A Man and a Woman. For the cinefile it might be worth a look (and by cinefile I mean someone who appreciates watching French films from the 1960s, not someone who has seen every Jerry Bruckheimer production). There is a tremendous sense of realism between the two main characters as their relationship develops over the course of the film. But, for a contemporary America audience, it feels like 15-20 minutes can be removed without it losing much (perhaps gaining). I am not suggesting a re-edit, just stating the perception that, by and large, as a culture, we prefer something that is fast-paced and brief. Unless, of course, it involves a hobbit, a quidditch match, or something with lots of explosions.
In other things French, I made my first soufflé the other night. While I have yet to consult my dictionary, I firmly believe that soufflé roughly translates into "lots of time and effort for little reward." Here is part of the recipe I followed... and be patient with it because there is a joke at the end.
Take 12 eggs. Using 6 eggs, separate the whites and the yolks. Beat yolks together with 3 Tbs of milk and 3 Tbs of flour. Bring to boil 1C of milk. Slowly pour boiling milk into yolks while stirring rapidly, so as not to cook the eggs. Pour mixture back into the pan and place on the stove and simmer to thicken. Beat whites with electric whisk until they form stiff peaks. Check on the yolks in the pan. Throw the yolks away because they have now turned into scrambled eggs. Take the other 6 eggs and separate the whites from the yolks. Throw whites away. Repeat process with yolks, but don't scramble.
This is only part of the process. At some point you take whatever goes into the souffle and mix it in with the yolks. Then you mix some of the whites into the yolks. Then you mix the yolks into the whites. Then you bake it. 40 min of prep. 25 min. of baking. 10 min. of eating. Hours of dissatisfaction. I suggest avoiding this cuisine unless it involves copious amounts of chocolate or cheese.
Finally, I'll be heading up to Kensington to see Mark Cameron Boyd's exhibition at Galerie Ingrid Cooper. In keeping with the theme of this post, a noticeable resemblance to the work of Jacques Villegle (and Mimmo Rotella) can be observed.
In other things French, I made my first soufflé the other night. While I have yet to consult my dictionary, I firmly believe that soufflé roughly translates into "lots of time and effort for little reward." Here is part of the recipe I followed... and be patient with it because there is a joke at the end.
Take 12 eggs. Using 6 eggs, separate the whites and the yolks. Beat yolks together with 3 Tbs of milk and 3 Tbs of flour. Bring to boil 1C of milk. Slowly pour boiling milk into yolks while stirring rapidly, so as not to cook the eggs. Pour mixture back into the pan and place on the stove and simmer to thicken. Beat whites with electric whisk until they form stiff peaks. Check on the yolks in the pan. Throw the yolks away because they have now turned into scrambled eggs. Take the other 6 eggs and separate the whites from the yolks. Throw whites away. Repeat process with yolks, but don't scramble.
This is only part of the process. At some point you take whatever goes into the souffle and mix it in with the yolks. Then you mix some of the whites into the yolks. Then you mix the yolks into the whites. Then you bake it. 40 min of prep. 25 min. of baking. 10 min. of eating. Hours of dissatisfaction. I suggest avoiding this cuisine unless it involves copious amounts of chocolate or cheese.
Finally, I'll be heading up to Kensington to see Mark Cameron Boyd's exhibition at Galerie Ingrid Cooper. In keeping with the theme of this post, a noticeable resemblance to the work of Jacques Villegle (and Mimmo Rotella) can be observed.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Claude LeLouch
Since I have never taken a film history or film theory class, I'll excuse myself from not knowing Claude LeLouch or his films, though I am now inclined to learn about him after he spoke this afternoon in the Wechsler Auditorium at the School of Communication on American University's campus this afternoon (three of his films now reside in my Netflix queue). But, what struck me were some of the things he said, which were undeniably French.
What does that mean? Something that in the American culture that would be regarded as outrageous or romantic. For instance, after declaring that he was a self-taught filmmaker, he said "the only school I ever attended was the school of failure." Later he stated that "the only life worth living is one of suffering."
Of course I am paraphrasing, but there is great profundity in what he said. There is also something that, out of context, is truly worth rolling your eyes over. I recall saying similar saccharine sentiments when I was in high school, and looking back, it was no wonder I could hardly get a date to the movies. Sure, back then I wasn't 70 or French (Okay, fine... 69, his birthday is in 4 days). Last I checked, I'm still neither.
Another thing he stated was in response to a what if question he received from the moderator: what if he were to make an adaptation of his 1966 film, A Man and a Woman, how would it be different?
He didn't answer the question directly. That is to say, he talked about the difference between 1966 and 2007. Back then a letter would take 8 days to go from lover to lover, with an 8 day wait on the return. Today you can send 15 text messages, have a dozen phone calls. A relationship can begin and end in 48 hours, with no sense of mystery or romance - no chase. An interesting concept.
What does that mean? Something that in the American culture that would be regarded as outrageous or romantic. For instance, after declaring that he was a self-taught filmmaker, he said "the only school I ever attended was the school of failure." Later he stated that "the only life worth living is one of suffering."
Of course I am paraphrasing, but there is great profundity in what he said. There is also something that, out of context, is truly worth rolling your eyes over. I recall saying similar saccharine sentiments when I was in high school, and looking back, it was no wonder I could hardly get a date to the movies. Sure, back then I wasn't 70 or French (Okay, fine... 69, his birthday is in 4 days). Last I checked, I'm still neither.
Another thing he stated was in response to a what if question he received from the moderator: what if he were to make an adaptation of his 1966 film, A Man and a Woman, how would it be different?
He didn't answer the question directly. That is to say, he talked about the difference between 1966 and 2007. Back then a letter would take 8 days to go from lover to lover, with an 8 day wait on the return. Today you can send 15 text messages, have a dozen phone calls. A relationship can begin and end in 48 hours, with no sense of mystery or romance - no chase. An interesting concept.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Interview with Paul Roth - Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz at The Corcoran
This fall the Corcoran Gallery of Art is hosting two traveling exhibitions showcasing two of the United States’ most iconic photographers: Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz. I sat down recently to talk with Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran to discuss these two exhibitions and the work of these two photographers.
The Corcoran is exhibiting two different photography shows. Aside from medium, what are similarities and what are the differences between these two shows?
I have been thinking about this a lot because there are real similarities in a way, but the differences are far more compelling. And, I think it is very unusual to do two major shows by two completely different artists working in the same medium.
Why is that unusual?
When a museum does a major show it does so in order to draw all the attention to that one stand-alone show. In this case we are doing two, and we are doing them both because they are [by] major and important populist photographers who are interested in reaching the largest possible audiences for different reasons.
In the case of Annie Leibovitz, her work in a single issue of Vanity Fair or Vogue magazine finds an audience in the millions – a magnitude far larger than any museum could ever hope to get. That has clearly been the audience she has been interested in since she was hired by Rolling Stone when she was still in art school.
In the case of Adams, he saw that photography was a democratic medium. He worked commercially, a lot. He used his own art making activity not just for museum shows, but also to make books that would sell a lot of copies, and also to be printed in magazines that had large distributions. He was really interested in popularizing his own work and getting a big audience for it.
How do they differ?
Of course, Adams was making spiritual works of art that are intended to convey a private experience to a larger audience. Leibovitz is making works that are really about the connection between the audience and the [famous] subject. Adams is about nature. Leibovitz is about culture. Adams is about awe. Leibovitz is about breaking down awe and creating something more personal. It is really interesting how different they are when thinking about what connects them.
How did Adams come to Photography?
When Adams was a teenager he instantly fell in love with photography and the Sierra Nevada on a family trip to the Sierra Nevada. That changed his life in a dramatic way. He essentially had a spiritual awakening at that juncture. He was a sickly and kind of odd child. He was very unsuccessful in school and wasn’t good at socializing. After that trip to the Sierra Nevada everything changed for him. He became intensely social, rejuvenated, and charismatic. His health problems cleared up to a great extent. As a result he was powerfully, spiritually driven by landscape, by nature and by the notion that people could have transformative experiences with nature. That feeling he tried to evoke in certain of his pictures.
He joined the Sierra Club when he was quite young. As the Sierra Club grew and expanded he was there, from his teen years to his early adult years. As a young man he joined the board of directors, and was a key transformational figure in the expansion and growth of the conservation movement because the Sierra Club was really the driving force behind that at the time.
Do you view Adams as a political artist?
I wouldn’t say it quite that blatantly, but it is difficult for me to think of an artist that has a more purposeful, sustained, and successful impact on public policy.
How did he have an effect on public policy?
He made work from an impulse that was a piece of a burgeoning political movement: the conservation movement.
That moment in history his photographs were implicitly a political act. He took that implicit political act and he lobbied for change based on the pictures, which he often would take and show to people whom he was lobbying. He personally lobbied corporations and developers and got them to stop developing pieces of property in California. He was able to keep oil wells off of shorelines. FDR set aside Kings Canyon in the Sierra Nevada as a national park, and Adams was credited by Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior under FDR, for convincing them with his photographs.
He was as key in his way as some of the people who are regarded as the major figures in the conservation movement, like John Muir and David Brower. And he was intensely involved in the Sierra Club’s internal politics and in their strategizing and lobbying efforts in Washington. In time he became one of the best-known members of the Sierra Club, and was one of the few people in the conservation movement that could get a Secretary of the Interior or the President of the United States on the phone. He personally lobbied every president from LBJ to Reagan.
A lot of people don’t believe this, but he used his pictures rather aggressively, to promote the generalized idea of the sanctity of nature by making calendars and greeting cards and coffee table books that dealt with this spiritual side of landscape. He also made several books that were deliberate public appeals toward a certain kind of public attention to saving the landscape: books like This Is the American Earth or The John Muir Trail of the Sierra Nevada.
It is really interesting to think that Ansel Adams, through much of his career, was thought of as being apolitical in a negative way. Colleagues of his, like Dorothea Lange the documentary photographer (whom he was friends with and worked closely with, developing her film for the Farm Security Administration), berated him for being too conservative or for doing commercial jobs or just being insufficiently politicized. But this is an interesting irony. Over the course of his career Adams had as great a political impact if not a greater political impact than Lange.
Do you think because his work was on the greeting cards and the calendars that it became misunderstood?
The popularization of the work, its saleability on calendars, helped establish a market place for other similar works. Now, National Geographic photographers doing landscape in color also have a market place. Therefore, I think Adams work became seen as generic and pretty over time.
On the other hand the political value of his work came from the really wide spread distribution. It’s hard to find an art-market equivalent for reaching tens of millions of people during a Christmas rush in a bookstore, when people buy that calendar, year after year. A lot of people don’t remember this, but many of those calendars were published under the auspices of the Sierra Club.
That is subtlety: to engage someone politically through a stocking-stuffer.
It’s easy to look at those purchases as a Capitalist activity, and I don’t think that’s wrong. It is just important to remember that Adams didn’t go into it without thinking about the politics of it. Adams was very interested in popularizing his ideas about the environment. At the end of the day that’s how you change things. You don’t change things by preaching to the converted. The way you really create policy in your lifetime is working to change policy. Adams did that in every imaginable, possible way. He did it in broad commercial ways and he also did it as directly as sitting across a table with Ronald Reagan, a person who angered him deeply on a personal level.
Both of these shows are traveling exhibits. How have they evolved coming here?
The Adams show is essentially 125 works drawn from the collection of Sandra and Bill Lane. We have added 9 things: a couple from our collection and some are from local collectors. Part of the subtext of the show is collecting. She encouraged me to seek out local collectors and borrow works from them if they fit so that we could call attention to collecting as a practice. In the case of Adams, the Lanes collected directly from him. They bought about 500 works in order to represent all phases of his career. During tours we are going to talk about the idea of collecting and what roll Adams plays in the collection of Photography. Adams is really the key figure in the expansion of the fine art photography marketplace. His photograph, Moon Rise, Hernandez, New Mexico, was one of the first photographs to be aggressively collected by people as an art object to hang on the walls.
There are a few new things added to the Leibovitz show. To great public acclaim, she recently did the official portrait of the queen of England. Two photos of the queen are being added to the show for the first time at the Corcoran. Because of the conjunction of the shows she has also added a photograph she made of Ansel Adams shot in 1976 for a pictorial essay she did for Rolling Stone. I asked her if she would look at her original negatives and see if there was something that might be interesting. Adams is one of her heroes as a photographer. She really liked this idea and made a print of him in his dark room in homage. We found a spot for it that is between the shows; it doesn’t fit into the narrative of her show and it is obviously not an Ansel Adams photograph.
Since Leibovitz has been photographing cultural icons for decades. Has she changed the way we perceive them?
There is no question she has had a major impact on public perception of cultural figures. Not just through her own photography but because of her influence A) on other portrait photographers and the kinds of standards other photographers have to take due to her initial success at Rolling Stone and the reinvention of that style at Vanity Fair and B) her effect on the way that cultural figures are depicted in magazines. This isn’t just photographically but the way that she has influenced the type of attention paid to cultural figures. She is by no means the only person. You could look back to Esquire magazine in the 1960s, which predates Leibovitz at Rolling Stone by several years.
Like the way George Lois was depicting people on the covers of Esquire?
Partly, but I do think of her in some ways intrinsically tied to the advent of new journalism and journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Annie Leibovitz tapped into that with her kind of documentary style. She also evolved a new style of single image color portraiture for the covers of Rolling Stone. In those she used humor and a certain way of evoking the public image of a person while simultaneously poking fun of that public image, which made people [feel] really connected to the subject. For example there is a great picture of Clint Eastwood trussed in rope in the middle of a dusty Western town, but wearing a Lacoste shirt; of Pete Townsend with blood streaming from his fingernails after a concert, poking fun of him giving his all for Rock and Roll; of John Belushi, an on the edge comedian, who took risks with his life, standing on the edge of a highway wearing fatigues and a fedora. Those evocations of the public perception of people are all so powerful that they have an intimacy to them.
The Leibovitz exhibition places images from her private life against how she depicts other individual’s public persona. What does this show reveal about Annie Leibovitz?
The threading together of her personal and professional work throughout the show is essentially chronological and yet, there is no explicit narrative. She has a way of making images of people that feel very intimate and therefore it’s as if you’re there through her; her eyes are your eyes. People like to imagine themselves as being connected to the movies they see and the actors that are in them or the records they listen to and the musicians who record them. I think that people crave that kind of connection.
Over time, people have been told about Annie Leibovitz. Vanity Fair has this feature where they have pictures of their contributors and little blurbs about them. For many years she has been featured in those. Occasionally they do entire stories on her photo shoots. That has evolved a kind of ready-made audience for information about her.
I also think people will be very interested to see that her life is so non-celebrity. Her partner, for many years, was Susan Sontag, and there are many pictures that show their lives together: Susan writing, their vacations together, tourist photos. The rest of them are pretty much family photos, like many of the photos we, ourselves, have in scrap books. That thread of personal imagery is quite different from the celebrity images.
How is that thread different?
There is a relationship that is not entirely comfortable between those images. As an audience you are being asked to make the connections between the people you love and the broader cultural context. Take, for example, a photograph of Jim Carrey that is part of the marketing of a movie he has coming out. What is the connection between that and the picture you might have of you with friends on a beach vacation? Photography plays a key role in connecting us, not just to the celebrities but also to the pictures you see of the people living in poverty throughout the world. You become aware that you really do connect to all of these people.
While I get the idea of being connected to all these people, I still wouldn’t think to put Jim Carrey in a family scrapbook.
An interesting part of this puzzle goes back to the early days of photographic scrapbooks. In the 19th Century the carte de visite – a French term for visiting card – was used in formal society in France, and in the United States. When photography was added to those cards they became collectibles. People might go to a house and present their cards, perhaps to a butler, so the host would know whom he was receiving. The photograph was a gift. The host would keep the photograph and put it in an album.
The carte de visite evolved. People would actually give each other photos of famous people: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War generals, PT Barnum. So, you would have a photo album at home that would have pictures of yourself, your family, the child that died as a baby – they would include post mortem photography – pictures of friends that visited and pictures of famous people. So, when you think of that context, Annie Leibovitz’s exhibition is not unprecedented.
Ansel Adams runs through January 27, 2008. Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 runs October 13, 2007 – January 13, 2008, The Corcoran Gallery of Art is located at 500 17th St. NW.
Images:
Ansel Adams, Monolith–The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927
© 2007 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Annie Leibovitz, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990, Photograph © Annie Leibovitz, From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005
The Corcoran is exhibiting two different photography shows. Aside from medium, what are similarities and what are the differences between these two shows?
I have been thinking about this a lot because there are real similarities in a way, but the differences are far more compelling. And, I think it is very unusual to do two major shows by two completely different artists working in the same medium.
Why is that unusual?
When a museum does a major show it does so in order to draw all the attention to that one stand-alone show. In this case we are doing two, and we are doing them both because they are [by] major and important populist photographers who are interested in reaching the largest possible audiences for different reasons.
In the case of Annie Leibovitz, her work in a single issue of Vanity Fair or Vogue magazine finds an audience in the millions – a magnitude far larger than any museum could ever hope to get. That has clearly been the audience she has been interested in since she was hired by Rolling Stone when she was still in art school.
In the case of Adams, he saw that photography was a democratic medium. He worked commercially, a lot. He used his own art making activity not just for museum shows, but also to make books that would sell a lot of copies, and also to be printed in magazines that had large distributions. He was really interested in popularizing his own work and getting a big audience for it.
How do they differ?
Of course, Adams was making spiritual works of art that are intended to convey a private experience to a larger audience. Leibovitz is making works that are really about the connection between the audience and the [famous] subject. Adams is about nature. Leibovitz is about culture. Adams is about awe. Leibovitz is about breaking down awe and creating something more personal. It is really interesting how different they are when thinking about what connects them.
How did Adams come to Photography?When Adams was a teenager he instantly fell in love with photography and the Sierra Nevada on a family trip to the Sierra Nevada. That changed his life in a dramatic way. He essentially had a spiritual awakening at that juncture. He was a sickly and kind of odd child. He was very unsuccessful in school and wasn’t good at socializing. After that trip to the Sierra Nevada everything changed for him. He became intensely social, rejuvenated, and charismatic. His health problems cleared up to a great extent. As a result he was powerfully, spiritually driven by landscape, by nature and by the notion that people could have transformative experiences with nature. That feeling he tried to evoke in certain of his pictures.
He joined the Sierra Club when he was quite young. As the Sierra Club grew and expanded he was there, from his teen years to his early adult years. As a young man he joined the board of directors, and was a key transformational figure in the expansion and growth of the conservation movement because the Sierra Club was really the driving force behind that at the time.
Do you view Adams as a political artist?
I wouldn’t say it quite that blatantly, but it is difficult for me to think of an artist that has a more purposeful, sustained, and successful impact on public policy.
How did he have an effect on public policy?
He made work from an impulse that was a piece of a burgeoning political movement: the conservation movement.
That moment in history his photographs were implicitly a political act. He took that implicit political act and he lobbied for change based on the pictures, which he often would take and show to people whom he was lobbying. He personally lobbied corporations and developers and got them to stop developing pieces of property in California. He was able to keep oil wells off of shorelines. FDR set aside Kings Canyon in the Sierra Nevada as a national park, and Adams was credited by Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior under FDR, for convincing them with his photographs.
He was as key in his way as some of the people who are regarded as the major figures in the conservation movement, like John Muir and David Brower. And he was intensely involved in the Sierra Club’s internal politics and in their strategizing and lobbying efforts in Washington. In time he became one of the best-known members of the Sierra Club, and was one of the few people in the conservation movement that could get a Secretary of the Interior or the President of the United States on the phone. He personally lobbied every president from LBJ to Reagan.
A lot of people don’t believe this, but he used his pictures rather aggressively, to promote the generalized idea of the sanctity of nature by making calendars and greeting cards and coffee table books that dealt with this spiritual side of landscape. He also made several books that were deliberate public appeals toward a certain kind of public attention to saving the landscape: books like This Is the American Earth or The John Muir Trail of the Sierra Nevada.
It is really interesting to think that Ansel Adams, through much of his career, was thought of as being apolitical in a negative way. Colleagues of his, like Dorothea Lange the documentary photographer (whom he was friends with and worked closely with, developing her film for the Farm Security Administration), berated him for being too conservative or for doing commercial jobs or just being insufficiently politicized. But this is an interesting irony. Over the course of his career Adams had as great a political impact if not a greater political impact than Lange.
Do you think because his work was on the greeting cards and the calendars that it became misunderstood?
The popularization of the work, its saleability on calendars, helped establish a market place for other similar works. Now, National Geographic photographers doing landscape in color also have a market place. Therefore, I think Adams work became seen as generic and pretty over time.
On the other hand the political value of his work came from the really wide spread distribution. It’s hard to find an art-market equivalent for reaching tens of millions of people during a Christmas rush in a bookstore, when people buy that calendar, year after year. A lot of people don’t remember this, but many of those calendars were published under the auspices of the Sierra Club.
That is subtlety: to engage someone politically through a stocking-stuffer.
It’s easy to look at those purchases as a Capitalist activity, and I don’t think that’s wrong. It is just important to remember that Adams didn’t go into it without thinking about the politics of it. Adams was very interested in popularizing his ideas about the environment. At the end of the day that’s how you change things. You don’t change things by preaching to the converted. The way you really create policy in your lifetime is working to change policy. Adams did that in every imaginable, possible way. He did it in broad commercial ways and he also did it as directly as sitting across a table with Ronald Reagan, a person who angered him deeply on a personal level.
Both of these shows are traveling exhibits. How have they evolved coming here?
The Adams show is essentially 125 works drawn from the collection of Sandra and Bill Lane. We have added 9 things: a couple from our collection and some are from local collectors. Part of the subtext of the show is collecting. She encouraged me to seek out local collectors and borrow works from them if they fit so that we could call attention to collecting as a practice. In the case of Adams, the Lanes collected directly from him. They bought about 500 works in order to represent all phases of his career. During tours we are going to talk about the idea of collecting and what roll Adams plays in the collection of Photography. Adams is really the key figure in the expansion of the fine art photography marketplace. His photograph, Moon Rise, Hernandez, New Mexico, was one of the first photographs to be aggressively collected by people as an art object to hang on the walls.
There are a few new things added to the Leibovitz show. To great public acclaim, she recently did the official portrait of the queen of England. Two photos of the queen are being added to the show for the first time at the Corcoran. Because of the conjunction of the shows she has also added a photograph she made of Ansel Adams shot in 1976 for a pictorial essay she did for Rolling Stone. I asked her if she would look at her original negatives and see if there was something that might be interesting. Adams is one of her heroes as a photographer. She really liked this idea and made a print of him in his dark room in homage. We found a spot for it that is between the shows; it doesn’t fit into the narrative of her show and it is obviously not an Ansel Adams photograph.
Since Leibovitz has been photographing cultural icons for decades. Has she changed the way we perceive them?There is no question she has had a major impact on public perception of cultural figures. Not just through her own photography but because of her influence A) on other portrait photographers and the kinds of standards other photographers have to take due to her initial success at Rolling Stone and the reinvention of that style at Vanity Fair and B) her effect on the way that cultural figures are depicted in magazines. This isn’t just photographically but the way that she has influenced the type of attention paid to cultural figures. She is by no means the only person. You could look back to Esquire magazine in the 1960s, which predates Leibovitz at Rolling Stone by several years.
Like the way George Lois was depicting people on the covers of Esquire?
Partly, but I do think of her in some ways intrinsically tied to the advent of new journalism and journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Annie Leibovitz tapped into that with her kind of documentary style. She also evolved a new style of single image color portraiture for the covers of Rolling Stone. In those she used humor and a certain way of evoking the public image of a person while simultaneously poking fun of that public image, which made people [feel] really connected to the subject. For example there is a great picture of Clint Eastwood trussed in rope in the middle of a dusty Western town, but wearing a Lacoste shirt; of Pete Townsend with blood streaming from his fingernails after a concert, poking fun of him giving his all for Rock and Roll; of John Belushi, an on the edge comedian, who took risks with his life, standing on the edge of a highway wearing fatigues and a fedora. Those evocations of the public perception of people are all so powerful that they have an intimacy to them.
The Leibovitz exhibition places images from her private life against how she depicts other individual’s public persona. What does this show reveal about Annie Leibovitz?
The threading together of her personal and professional work throughout the show is essentially chronological and yet, there is no explicit narrative. She has a way of making images of people that feel very intimate and therefore it’s as if you’re there through her; her eyes are your eyes. People like to imagine themselves as being connected to the movies they see and the actors that are in them or the records they listen to and the musicians who record them. I think that people crave that kind of connection.
Over time, people have been told about Annie Leibovitz. Vanity Fair has this feature where they have pictures of their contributors and little blurbs about them. For many years she has been featured in those. Occasionally they do entire stories on her photo shoots. That has evolved a kind of ready-made audience for information about her.
I also think people will be very interested to see that her life is so non-celebrity. Her partner, for many years, was Susan Sontag, and there are many pictures that show their lives together: Susan writing, their vacations together, tourist photos. The rest of them are pretty much family photos, like many of the photos we, ourselves, have in scrap books. That thread of personal imagery is quite different from the celebrity images.
How is that thread different?
There is a relationship that is not entirely comfortable between those images. As an audience you are being asked to make the connections between the people you love and the broader cultural context. Take, for example, a photograph of Jim Carrey that is part of the marketing of a movie he has coming out. What is the connection between that and the picture you might have of you with friends on a beach vacation? Photography plays a key role in connecting us, not just to the celebrities but also to the pictures you see of the people living in poverty throughout the world. You become aware that you really do connect to all of these people.
While I get the idea of being connected to all these people, I still wouldn’t think to put Jim Carrey in a family scrapbook.
An interesting part of this puzzle goes back to the early days of photographic scrapbooks. In the 19th Century the carte de visite – a French term for visiting card – was used in formal society in France, and in the United States. When photography was added to those cards they became collectibles. People might go to a house and present their cards, perhaps to a butler, so the host would know whom he was receiving. The photograph was a gift. The host would keep the photograph and put it in an album.
The carte de visite evolved. People would actually give each other photos of famous people: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War generals, PT Barnum. So, you would have a photo album at home that would have pictures of yourself, your family, the child that died as a baby – they would include post mortem photography – pictures of friends that visited and pictures of famous people. So, when you think of that context, Annie Leibovitz’s exhibition is not unprecedented.
Ansel Adams runs through January 27, 2008. Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 runs October 13, 2007 – January 13, 2008, The Corcoran Gallery of Art is located at 500 17th St. NW.
Images:
Ansel Adams, Monolith–The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927
© 2007 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust
Annie Leibovitz, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rob Besserer, Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1990, Photograph © Annie Leibovitz, From Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Meeting Buddha in the Road
In the month of September I had the great fortune to begin and finish a video production (with assistants Apollo Gonzales, Stephen Tringali and John Arturo). This is the piece, below.
The video was shot in nine hours over two days using a maximum of four cameras. It took about an afternoon to capture, a couple days to edit and sweeten (as best as I can sweeten), and it is currently being mas-produced (with packaging) by Duplium in Texas.
I am now finally getting around to capturing (and soon editing) a six screen video sculpture that was shot in June with seven cameras. Apparently there is a work flow option in the latest version of Final Cut Pro that will allow me to edit the six screens of the video simultaneously. I look forward to learning.
There are three or four more pieces I was hoping to get into production before the end of the year... with crossed fingers maybe that will happen. Although, with my recent luck at getting adjunct teaching gigs, I'll be happy if two make it into post production before finals are under way.
The video was shot in nine hours over two days using a maximum of four cameras. It took about an afternoon to capture, a couple days to edit and sweeten (as best as I can sweeten), and it is currently being mas-produced (with packaging) by Duplium in Texas.
I am now finally getting around to capturing (and soon editing) a six screen video sculpture that was shot in June with seven cameras. Apparently there is a work flow option in the latest version of Final Cut Pro that will allow me to edit the six screens of the video simultaneously. I look forward to learning.
There are three or four more pieces I was hoping to get into production before the end of the year... with crossed fingers maybe that will happen. Although, with my recent luck at getting adjunct teaching gigs, I'll be happy if two make it into post production before finals are under way.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Promise to Fabian
I guess it was three weeks ago that, as a friend coined it, DCist and I "broke up." It started with a critique I wrote about the most recent show at Meat Market. My review was received (by an editor) as condescending and academic. I was asked to do a rewrite.
This reception hinged on my start: mentioning both artists are/were students at the Corcoran. When the editor retorted something along the lines of, "you act like you are the first person to look at a student show," I knew I had to correct the beginning - somehow. It is not a student show. It just happens to be a show with one current student at the Corcoran and one former.
To rewrite, I looked at the press release to give me a starting point. No good - it was actually some diatribe on how people look at art (at least, that's what I think it was about). After eight hours of unsuccessful rewriting, I decided priorities took precedent: grading papers, projects, and finishing a grant. I informed DCist I did not care if the article was published - I would rather focus my efforts on things I get paid to do. Let's face it, when you spend 60 hours a week scraping together a 30K "living," there are more important things to do than kowtow to claims of condescending and academic. The next day I was divorced from their list serve, thanked for my time, and then informed we were parting company. For the best: more time to make art.
Here is the Meat Market review from early this month, sans rewrite. My last piece never published for DCist.
This reception hinged on my start: mentioning both artists are/were students at the Corcoran. When the editor retorted something along the lines of, "you act like you are the first person to look at a student show," I knew I had to correct the beginning - somehow. It is not a student show. It just happens to be a show with one current student at the Corcoran and one former.
To rewrite, I looked at the press release to give me a starting point. No good - it was actually some diatribe on how people look at art (at least, that's what I think it was about). After eight hours of unsuccessful rewriting, I decided priorities took precedent: grading papers, projects, and finishing a grant. I informed DCist I did not care if the article was published - I would rather focus my efforts on things I get paid to do. Let's face it, when you spend 60 hours a week scraping together a 30K "living," there are more important things to do than kowtow to claims of condescending and academic. The next day I was divorced from their list serve, thanked for my time, and then informed we were parting company. For the best: more time to make art.
Here is the Meat Market review from early this month, sans rewrite. My last piece never published for DCist.
The recent exhibition, conscious inaction, at Meat Market, might have all the problems one would want or expect strong undergraduate students to have: high polish, remarkable craft, forced irony, and maybe a touch too much effort to be banal. These are not bad things to have and can likely be expected of the conscientious art student that has one eye looking back at the 20th Century in a history book while the other eye gropes at the 21st Century through glossy magazines.
Benjamin Jurgensen’s sculptures of discarded junk and ordinary objects are gathered in groups and evenly spaced throughout the front half of the gallery. In the corner is a car door with fire extinguishers and a forest of air-fresheners. Next to it is the frame of a large tricycle on bricks and cinderblocks. Painted many times over in latex paint, with a reduced palette of 6 colors, the work appears to be made of plastic. The general idea is for the juxtaposition of elements to force new narratives. But, those narratives are no more interesting than the rubbish thrown out to the curb by the average urban dweller. It is not to say the sculptures are not fun. There is something compelling about the diligence and craft of an individual willing to carve a folding chair and stanchion out of medium density fiberboard and wood.
In the back gallery are the photographs of Paul Jeffreys exploring the predatory identity of masculinity in two environments. One environment documents the directly conquered taxidermy displays of heads and carcasses within a hunting trophy room. The other, an empty strip club, explores the environment of pseudo-sexual domination. Both traipse through the fantasy of machismo. Hunting excursions via game farming and hunting pens are on the incline. And just how elevated can the male libido get when his sexual prey is dancing on a stage fit for the price of admission? The game he can kill but not eat; the dame he can view but not touch. Greed and insecurity gets the better of guys in both instances, and the end result is the sum of shortcomings rather than the actualization of being a man. The images are enough to roll your eyes over, and what a mockery we might make of a sex that can’t hit the inside of a urinal in a public bathroom.
With this exhibition, what is of greater interest is potential. What are these two capable of creating a couple years outside of the womb of the Corcoran, having kicked loose the opiates of academia? With conscious inaction the two artists are true to the title. But every conscious inaction has an unconscious reaction.
conscious inaction is on display at Meat Market, 1636 17th Street NW, through September 30. Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Things Learned at the National Gallery
I'm bored of Hopper. The exhibition is pleasant, but how many paintings of a building can a person see?
Ben Stein is taller than I imagined. He was wandering around the exhibition: suit, pink shirt, tennis shoes.
There are some pieces on exhibition that have a telephone number next to them - audio tours visitors can access with their cell phones. Granted, they haven't told the guards this. I looked at Richard Serra, dialed the number, walked away and got told by two guards to get off the phone.
Ben Stein is taller than I imagined. He was wandering around the exhibition: suit, pink shirt, tennis shoes.
There are some pieces on exhibition that have a telephone number next to them - audio tours visitors can access with their cell phones. Granted, they haven't told the guards this. I looked at Richard Serra, dialed the number, walked away and got told by two guards to get off the phone.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Kid Collectors
On Friday, September 14, the Wall Street Journal had an article on young art collectors: kids. I suppose since the bottom dropped out of baseball cards earlier in the decade this makes a bit of sense. Why drop several thousand dollars cumulatively over the course of adolescence when it can be done in one big purchase that likely won't devalue like Donruss.
Here are the best quotes.
Here are the best quotes.
"So far, Dakota (9) says she has focused her 40-piece collection on works featuring animals and "happy colors" such as pink and yellow. An early buy, hanging above her tea-party table, is an Andy Warhol panda from his 1983 series on endangered species. Her dealer spotted it at a gallery in Los Angeles. "Panda is darling and chubby and cute, and at night he protects me," Dakota says."and...
"Children tend to focus on art that mirrors their interests, which is why animals are a popular theme, as are flowers, cars, graffiti, and the cartoon-like characters found in works by Takashi Murakami and Yoshimoto Nara. For the most part, young children sidestep art containing nudity, extreme violence or irony, dealers say."Oddly, both quotes kind of mirror the preferences of adults. The creme della creme is this one:
"And Taylor Houghton says his friends are often tempted to break into his Jan Albers wall art, which consists of real candy bars lined up behind plexiglass. "I have to remind them the candy was made, like, eight years ago," he says. "Nobody likes old candy.""Tell that to the kids in the late 1980s chipping teeth on old sticks of gum found in Topps wax packs from the 1970s.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Insight: Ansel Adams at the Corcoran
I am no longer with DCist, so I guess my insight goes here.
From the first images of the Ansel Adams exhibition at The Corcoran there is a rush of nostalgia. I wonder if there is any child or any art student in the country, or perhaps the world, that has not looked at an Ansel Adams photo and been inspired to do the same. He didn't invent the landscape, the photograph, or the photograph of the landscape, but he may as well have. Every photograph of every tree from my youth, every mountainous vista I crossed, every detail of leaf or bark or petal that I felt so quick to snap as a child points its influence to him.
But this is not about Ansel Adams, or the Corcoran.
While I have walked through several collections of photographs in the past (MoMA, SF MoMA, Getty, Walker, AIC, etc) I cannot recall if I have ever seen an Ansel Adams print, which is ironic because of their iconic nature. Of course, that iconic nature stems from how we access them today: coffee table books, day calendars, and posters in dorm rooms or resting on fire place mantels. To physically see one is a different experience.
My wife, Gretchen, and I were invited to a preview of the exhibition this evening, and as with other Corcoran openings, it was a delightful event (thanks, Paul). We paced through the individual galleries with the dozens of other attendants pausing, reflecting, looking, discussing and staring.
The word grandeur came to mind. I also thought they were smaller than I imagined. There was an intimacy within every photo, in part because of size. But, the intimacy was also due to content. Paul Roth, curator of media art and photography at the Corcoran, and I talked last week about Adams and Liebowitz. He talked in explicit detail about the sense of spirituality conveyed within each Adams photo. A communion with nature that he wanted to convey with every photograph. The epiphany. The conversion.
And it is all there in every image. But, about halfway through the gallery it is impossible not to feel overwhelmed. While the intimacy is there in every photograph, it is difficult to sustain that through all 134 images amongst a crowd of strangers.
This is not a fault of The Corcoran, or of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (who organized the show) for that matter. With the commercial distribution of Adams, the near ubiquity and recollection of his work - through reproductions - the one thing that ends up missing from the entire gallery experience is the living room: the solitude of a chair with big arms giving a front row seat to the stoic beauty of Monolith, Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927 (above). It is that association, that context, that needs to be checked at the door with coat and hat.
A Smashing Experience
For the past couple of weeks I have been in the production phase of a video art piece. The above is the climax of the work, though likely not the final video edit of the climax. Four cameras were used for this scene. While no animals were harmed in the making of the production, the television wasn't so lucky.
Production assistants are Apollo Gonzales, Steven Tringali and John Arturo. The video is funded in part by a grant from the DCCAH.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Odds and Ends
All four lanes of the Rock Creek Parkway head toward the Kennedy Center during morning rush. Convenient, but confusing the first time.
When I returned to the Kennedy Center to leave GWU yesterday the wonderful smell of burning cedar greeted me before I hit the parking garage. I steady stream of smoke was rising from a location near the steps up to the Kennedy Center. I walked past, thinking nothing of it, but Midwestern sensibility got the better of me - that wasn't normal. I turned around and noticed a little flame peeking above the ivy in the landscaping, and kicked the flame. I guess I did learn something in Boy Scouts after all.
Lenny published an interview I had with Adrian Parsons about his circumcision performance at The Warehouse in April. Initially it was proposed to DCist. However, since parsons used to contribute to DCist, they opted against publishing it. So it goes.
When I returned to the Kennedy Center to leave GWU yesterday the wonderful smell of burning cedar greeted me before I hit the parking garage. I steady stream of smoke was rising from a location near the steps up to the Kennedy Center. I walked past, thinking nothing of it, but Midwestern sensibility got the better of me - that wasn't normal. I turned around and noticed a little flame peeking above the ivy in the landscaping, and kicked the flame. I guess I did learn something in Boy Scouts after all.
Lenny published an interview I had with Adrian Parsons about his circumcision performance at The Warehouse in April. Initially it was proposed to DCist. However, since parsons used to contribute to DCist, they opted against publishing it. So it goes.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Losing Hair over GW
The joyous thing about working as an adjunct faculty member at numerous institutions is sifting through the bureaucracy, or as I like to call it, bureaucrazy - because it is poorly designed and makes you crazy.
To access an ID number, at George Washington University, one site says
"Go to this URL and enter this personal information."
Once at that URL and after entering that personal information, the response received is
"We no longer accept your personalized information. Please enter your ID number."
There is a number to call for help. At that number, callers are directed to call another number. The second phone number leads to an answering machine that repeats the information found on the URL.
At an institution where the incoming freshman class is paying $50,000/yr, one might hope they had this sorted out. Apparently Major Major is a live and well and working at GW. You can make an appointment to see him when he's not in.
To access an ID number, at George Washington University, one site says
"Go to this URL and enter this personal information."
Once at that URL and after entering that personal information, the response received is
"We no longer accept your personalized information. Please enter your ID number."
There is a number to call for help. At that number, callers are directed to call another number. The second phone number leads to an answering machine that repeats the information found on the URL.
At an institution where the incoming freshman class is paying $50,000/yr, one might hope they had this sorted out. Apparently Major Major is a live and well and working at GW. You can make an appointment to see him when he's not in.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Interview with John Hanhardt
About two weeks ago I met with John G. Hanhardt in his office at the Sithsonian American Art Museum to talk about his career, what brought him to DC, and issues in new media. It was the longest interview I have conducted to date and it took hours to transcribe.
About half of it appeared on DCist today. The other half fell onto the cutting room floor.
So much gets said in the course of an interview that distilling it to the essence of the discussion and maintaining the integrity of what was meant is a challenge - a worthy problem to solve.
The imperfection of the questioner can be eliminated. I asked this lemon of a question about concerning energy conservation and the use of new media. Any person who has seen a Nam June Paik television piece knows it is on for many hours and can involve several hundred television monitors. How much energy does that consume? Perhaps no more than a Radio Shack.
In a very long and winding discourse, part of which sought to find the essence of the question, this nugget can be removed from the answer.
I've been talking with a couple of other curators recently that I hope to publish in a couple of months or so. I still feel like I need more material. Part of the Hanhardt interview will fall in there (not published on DCist).
About half of it appeared on DCist today. The other half fell onto the cutting room floor.
So much gets said in the course of an interview that distilling it to the essence of the discussion and maintaining the integrity of what was meant is a challenge - a worthy problem to solve.
The imperfection of the questioner can be eliminated. I asked this lemon of a question about concerning energy conservation and the use of new media. Any person who has seen a Nam June Paik television piece knows it is on for many hours and can involve several hundred television monitors. How much energy does that consume? Perhaps no more than a Radio Shack.
In a very long and winding discourse, part of which sought to find the essence of the question, this nugget can be removed from the answer.
Artists are always concerned about concerving technology because they want to preserve their work. And artists are not generating enormous bodies of work [that consume a lot of energy] in any case. So, I find it a higly efficient use of technology as opposed to where it is all brought into an office and gotten rid of and dumped [a couple years later for newer models].Additionally, there is an issue of grammar. The slip of the tongue, in the last several decades (at least since political correctness took over, but maybe even historically) is to dumb down the plurality of pronouns, such as they and them, into singular pronouns describing a viewer, or an artist, or a person. It happens during interviews heard on NPR, CNN, Fox, and so forth. When transcribing such an occurance into print it can evaporate. Grammar can take over.
I've been talking with a couple of other curators recently that I hope to publish in a couple of months or so. I still feel like I need more material. Part of the Hanhardt interview will fall in there (not published on DCist).
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Top 11 Most Influential in the Arts in DC
Today DCist published a list of most influential people in the District in response to a GQ article of 50 most powerful people in DC. Power aside, the question was shot out to the DCist bloggers today and some of us (me) got to it too late and with too few suggestions to back up the arts side. So, below are the 11 most influential arts sources, for better or for worse, past and present, that I could think of before I need to get back to real work.
Artomatic: for providing an outlet for anyone who thinks he's is an artist to have an opportunity to show of his talents (or lack there of).
Lenny Campello: Since late 2003 he has written between four and ten posts on his blog, nearly every day, about upcoming events in the DC Arts scene. His influence doesn't encourage a style or trend, it encourages involvement on any level within the greater DC arts community: from attendance of art events to kindling the interests of artists and gallerists to get on TypePad, Blogger, or Movable Type and plug away about anything and everything.
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: provides a financial resource to arts of such grand variety (even mime has its own numeric code) that, while it may not be capable of sustaining artists, it is capable of sustaining many projects that benefit the community.
Alice Denney: From the Jefferson Place Gallery to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, The 1964 Venice Biennale to the Washington Project for the Arts, in her hey-day she brought introduced the District to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Pop and Performance Art, and helped iron out a solution for that sticky Mapplethorpe mess a couple decades ago.
Giorgio Furioso: his building at 1515 Arts Space on 14th Street, helped fuel the lane between N and U streets, NW, into a destination.
Blake Gopnik and the Washington Post: The combined effort (of the Post to no longer be the paper of record and of Gopnik for reporting on arts events in NYC and Europe) have done what they can to keep DC arts wallowing to get out of the dark.
Lyndon B. Johnson: The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts during his administration gave artists a chance to sustain a livelihood and production. Inflated into a bureaucracy under Nixon (and Carter), the Endowment has catapulted some of the biggest and most treasured names in American art from the last half century AND gave legitimacy to Jessie Helms' need to carry pornographic pictures in his pocket (in supposed protest of who the NEA funded... I think we can guess the truth of what Uncle Jessie was really doing when reporters were not around).
Cy Katzen: His multi-million dollar contribution to American University has produced an arts center dedicated to his name which includes an additional gallery space for residents north of Glover Park to visit (apart from the Finnish Embassy).
Lawrence M. Small: his mismanagement of funds at the Smithsonian was so bad even the mannequins of the Air and Space Museum are losing hair over it.
Street Artists: While we may get tired of the likes of Storker and Borf, and their wannabe knock-offs, their events and tags give us a moment to reconsider the function of art and our civic space, no matter how repetitive.
Washington Color School: What was hardly a school has become the one art “movement” DC has latched onto so tightly so much so that this summer began with a region-wide retrospective of work that ranged from interesting to pattern and had Ken Noland up in New York questioning what all the scuttlebutt was about.
Of course... by mentioning anyone from the past, or even the contribution of Cy Katzen, it would be necessary to at least note the contributions of the likes of William Wilson Corcoran, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and Duncan Phillips.
Artomatic: for providing an outlet for anyone who thinks he's is an artist to have an opportunity to show of his talents (or lack there of).
Lenny Campello: Since late 2003 he has written between four and ten posts on his blog, nearly every day, about upcoming events in the DC Arts scene. His influence doesn't encourage a style or trend, it encourages involvement on any level within the greater DC arts community: from attendance of art events to kindling the interests of artists and gallerists to get on TypePad, Blogger, or Movable Type and plug away about anything and everything.
DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities: provides a financial resource to arts of such grand variety (even mime has its own numeric code) that, while it may not be capable of sustaining artists, it is capable of sustaining many projects that benefit the community.
Alice Denney: From the Jefferson Place Gallery to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, The 1964 Venice Biennale to the Washington Project for the Arts, in her hey-day she brought introduced the District to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Pop and Performance Art, and helped iron out a solution for that sticky Mapplethorpe mess a couple decades ago.
Giorgio Furioso: his building at 1515 Arts Space on 14th Street, helped fuel the lane between N and U streets, NW, into a destination.
Blake Gopnik and the Washington Post: The combined effort (of the Post to no longer be the paper of record and of Gopnik for reporting on arts events in NYC and Europe) have done what they can to keep DC arts wallowing to get out of the dark.
Lyndon B. Johnson: The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts during his administration gave artists a chance to sustain a livelihood and production. Inflated into a bureaucracy under Nixon (and Carter), the Endowment has catapulted some of the biggest and most treasured names in American art from the last half century AND gave legitimacy to Jessie Helms' need to carry pornographic pictures in his pocket (in supposed protest of who the NEA funded... I think we can guess the truth of what Uncle Jessie was really doing when reporters were not around).
Cy Katzen: His multi-million dollar contribution to American University has produced an arts center dedicated to his name which includes an additional gallery space for residents north of Glover Park to visit (apart from the Finnish Embassy).
Lawrence M. Small: his mismanagement of funds at the Smithsonian was so bad even the mannequins of the Air and Space Museum are losing hair over it.
Street Artists: While we may get tired of the likes of Storker and Borf, and their wannabe knock-offs, their events and tags give us a moment to reconsider the function of art and our civic space, no matter how repetitive.
Washington Color School: What was hardly a school has become the one art “movement” DC has latched onto so tightly so much so that this summer began with a region-wide retrospective of work that ranged from interesting to pattern and had Ken Noland up in New York questioning what all the scuttlebutt was about.
Of course... by mentioning anyone from the past, or even the contribution of Cy Katzen, it would be necessary to at least note the contributions of the likes of William Wilson Corcoran, Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and Duncan Phillips.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Two More Posts on DCist
Between teaching and freelance graphic design, this is what I do for fun.
You aren't as green as you are cabbage-looking
Interview with Paul So, Founder of The Hamiltonian.
You aren't as green as you are cabbage-looking
Interview with Paul So, Founder of The Hamiltonian.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Know Your Audience
Yesterday another of my reviews was placed on DCist, this time reviewing the recent exhibition, Transform/Nation at the Ellipse Arts Center.
There are two things I try to do within my writing: 1) give a broader context for the work or highlight the social issues it may contend with. 2) implant a touch of humor. After all, if art is just about the subject void of context, or about color and movement and composition, reading art reviews is a little dry. Unfortunately, both of my objectives were removed from my post yesterday with the final edit.
One section of the review was a 183 word summary on the political changes in Iran over the last century and how it informs contemporary Iranian identity. Interesting stuff, and if you are interested in engaging it for yourself you can go here or here. The 183 words were cut because 1) it wasn't necessary with relationship to the show, 2) people in DC are aware of the history, 3) it's a blog -- people like to read short things. All three reasons I can agree with. However, what could it hurt?
I had this great line about Hijab that I wanted to keep. Backend: Part of the review dealt with Hijab in Western culture. While Hijab is a practice of modesty through dress, there is also a garment called a hijab that is worn around the neck and head, exposing only the face. For those who have paid attention to the news in the last couple of years, there have been movements in some European countries to ban the wearing of a hijab in public schools, which is ridiculous. So, I wrote this:
For a woman who chooses to faithfully practice Islam in the west, abandoning Hijab for the fashions of Sports Illustrated swimsuits may be as anathema as abandoning Halal to wash down a pork-chop with a beer. (Would we ask Amish women to remove their bonnets or adopt electricity?)How often do pork chops and beer make it into an art review? To go along with the statement I was going to include the above image from Haleh Anvari's Chadorama (courtesy Ellipse Arts Center).
Heather and Sommer (at DCist) do a fine job with how they edit my posts and they manage to maintain my voice, which is incredible because at times there are significant changes. I am pleased to be under their guidance and a contributer to the blog. But, yesterday, after my most recent post was put up, it almost felt like I wrote it. I guess I need to get to know my audience and my editors a little better so that I can satisfy DCists editorial process and my writing interests. It's a learning process.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Recent post on DCist
Yesterday was a fairly kind day. My most recent arts-post went up on DCist (Addison/Ripley) and got a thumbs up from James W. Bailey and Lenny Campello.
Frankly, I think the editors did it more justice than I. They have the eye to move things around and make it flow with better grace. They've been doing it longer. So, kudos to Heather and Sommer.
Now, if I could only manage to use the following correctly: burrow, borough, borrow, burro, burrito, Borghese.
Frankly, I think the editors did it more justice than I. They have the eye to move things around and make it flow with better grace. They've been doing it longer. So, kudos to Heather and Sommer.
Now, if I could only manage to use the following correctly: burrow, borough, borrow, burro, burrito, Borghese.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Things Present Things Past
Geez. I've been bad with this toy. About three weeks ago I submitted the following article (later than I wanted) to my editor at DCist and it was eventually rejected (because it was too late). So here it was,... a review of the last show at Glenview Mansion...
As a note, my latest review of the exhibition at the Sackler can be found here.
Currently, on display at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery in Rockville, Maryland are the works of three artists: Michael Baltzer, Margaret Paris, and Lisa Aerianna Tayerle.
The Glenview Mansion Art Gallery, in casual discussion, is an often forgotten or unknown arts place – known to some in Rockville, but more obscure to those living south of the Beltway. This is probably due to the complications of finding the venue off of I-270, after the 4A Exit, past Viers Mill Road, resting on the corner of Edmonston Drive and Baltimore Road. It is a sprawling 150 acre estate, run by the city, and nestled amid a bumper crop of post World War II housing. In the evenings it is not uncommon to see deer wandering about nibbling on clover. Unless a person lives in the neighborhood, it is not a destination a anyone might think to go out of the way to see. However, every four weeks there is something new as the Mansion has a steady rotation of two and three person exhibitions for (nearly) each month of the year.
Greeting the visitor up the stairs and in the hall is the work of Michael Baltzer whose mixture of paint on various layers of Plexi-glass teeters on the line between grotesque and eloquent. The work could be labeled as sloppy or highly methodical. They are not pretty, nor do they aim to be. The paints drip and flow, puckered and piled like pustules. Melted plastic and acrylic clings like flesh to the surface of its support. Compositions are overlapped to exercise the property of transparency, punctured with rods and nails, sewn and sutured together, or held by industrial staples. Medical tubing peaks out from some. The major impetus for this work stems from a relationship with the body. If that association is overlooked in his handling of paint, the astute observer will at least notice the illustrations from old medical texts that are used as the ground for some of the paintings.
The works of lesser strength by Lisa Aerianna Tayerle are the many small drawings throughout the gallery. They encounter a number of problems, some stemming from a sense of preciousness. Most of their compositions are static with objects and illustrations placed in a manner that nullifies their potential dynamism. Some colors are muddied or arbitrary. Granted, this is not true for all of them, and they are the ones marked with little red dots. Where the drawings have strength is as food for thought – a sandbox for exercise and moving ideas around until they form monumental castles: her altarpieces. Here, the preciousness works to her advantage in her reliquaries and shrines to nature’s objects. The hinged boxes contain wonderful illustrations and gold leafing, echoing Catholicism, for the worship of the custodians of fertility, decomposition and inertia: bees, tiny rodents, and corals – the creatures that hold nature in the balance. And it seems that preciousness is befitting for these subjects. With a population of bees on the decline, the price of corn is not only going to be affected by its use as biofuel, but by its scarcity in Midwestern fields.
The Polaroid transfers of Margaret Paris – consisting of sepia toned images of the Florida Everglades – are nothing spectacular, but they are pleasant and easy to live with. Branches and grasses weave together in abstract geometries much like any glade. Each photograph, roughly 5” x 6.5” inches in size, possess the intimacy of a family snapshot: a work to be viewed on a leisurely stroll from the den to the kitchen. Still, without this work, the thematic context of these three artists assembled together would not feel as apparent. Paris’ directness is counter to Baltzer’s subjectivity.
Exhibited together, they give a sense of faculty and awareness of interior and exterior environment, and on a subtle level question what is sacred and profane. This is something our politicians have backwards as they discuss about God rather than environment in their pre-election debates, a discussion better left to Mullahs and Cardinals than legislators. Such an argument is an abase profanity in the presence of code orange afternoons and corporate-sponsored fast-food school lunches. This is not to confuse the art for the argument; that would be conjecture. But, seeing as how art can function for critical commentary, it would seem that if it is not the position of the artists it is the position of the jury to place these three artists together and create a form of dialog that illustrates the fragility of the body and the world it inhabits.
As a note, my latest review of the exhibition at the Sackler can be found here.
Currently, on display at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery in Rockville, Maryland are the works of three artists: Michael Baltzer, Margaret Paris, and Lisa Aerianna Tayerle.
The Glenview Mansion Art Gallery, in casual discussion, is an often forgotten or unknown arts place – known to some in Rockville, but more obscure to those living south of the Beltway. This is probably due to the complications of finding the venue off of I-270, after the 4A Exit, past Viers Mill Road, resting on the corner of Edmonston Drive and Baltimore Road. It is a sprawling 150 acre estate, run by the city, and nestled amid a bumper crop of post World War II housing. In the evenings it is not uncommon to see deer wandering about nibbling on clover. Unless a person lives in the neighborhood, it is not a destination a anyone might think to go out of the way to see. However, every four weeks there is something new as the Mansion has a steady rotation of two and three person exhibitions for (nearly) each month of the year.
Greeting the visitor up the stairs and in the hall is the work of Michael Baltzer whose mixture of paint on various layers of Plexi-glass teeters on the line between grotesque and eloquent. The work could be labeled as sloppy or highly methodical. They are not pretty, nor do they aim to be. The paints drip and flow, puckered and piled like pustules. Melted plastic and acrylic clings like flesh to the surface of its support. Compositions are overlapped to exercise the property of transparency, punctured with rods and nails, sewn and sutured together, or held by industrial staples. Medical tubing peaks out from some. The major impetus for this work stems from a relationship with the body. If that association is overlooked in his handling of paint, the astute observer will at least notice the illustrations from old medical texts that are used as the ground for some of the paintings.
The works of lesser strength by Lisa Aerianna Tayerle are the many small drawings throughout the gallery. They encounter a number of problems, some stemming from a sense of preciousness. Most of their compositions are static with objects and illustrations placed in a manner that nullifies their potential dynamism. Some colors are muddied or arbitrary. Granted, this is not true for all of them, and they are the ones marked with little red dots. Where the drawings have strength is as food for thought – a sandbox for exercise and moving ideas around until they form monumental castles: her altarpieces. Here, the preciousness works to her advantage in her reliquaries and shrines to nature’s objects. The hinged boxes contain wonderful illustrations and gold leafing, echoing Catholicism, for the worship of the custodians of fertility, decomposition and inertia: bees, tiny rodents, and corals – the creatures that hold nature in the balance. And it seems that preciousness is befitting for these subjects. With a population of bees on the decline, the price of corn is not only going to be affected by its use as biofuel, but by its scarcity in Midwestern fields.
The Polaroid transfers of Margaret Paris – consisting of sepia toned images of the Florida Everglades – are nothing spectacular, but they are pleasant and easy to live with. Branches and grasses weave together in abstract geometries much like any glade. Each photograph, roughly 5” x 6.5” inches in size, possess the intimacy of a family snapshot: a work to be viewed on a leisurely stroll from the den to the kitchen. Still, without this work, the thematic context of these three artists assembled together would not feel as apparent. Paris’ directness is counter to Baltzer’s subjectivity.
Exhibited together, they give a sense of faculty and awareness of interior and exterior environment, and on a subtle level question what is sacred and profane. This is something our politicians have backwards as they discuss about God rather than environment in their pre-election debates, a discussion better left to Mullahs and Cardinals than legislators. Such an argument is an abase profanity in the presence of code orange afternoons and corporate-sponsored fast-food school lunches. This is not to confuse the art for the argument; that would be conjecture. But, seeing as how art can function for critical commentary, it would seem that if it is not the position of the artists it is the position of the jury to place these three artists together and create a form of dialog that illustrates the fragility of the body and the world it inhabits.
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