Counterforces and Other Little Jokes

Celje, Celje...where in the world is Celje?

2011-12-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

Proving that publicity in English pays off on some level, the art center in Celje, the third largest city in Slovenia, has just advertised its newest exhibition by Franc Purg, "Coming Soon, The Future" (or some such title, it's quoted from memory).

Purg's Celje projects, or the older ones of Skupina ("Group") described on his website, sound like they might be of interest to artists operating in cities in similar global situations; the fact that the Skupina projects described below are over a decade old indicates one of the problems that artists have globally, even when they have a website, in getting their message out somewhere past the city limts of their locality:

MANIFESTO – SKUPINA ("Group")

Manifesto, Celje, 2000

Established in the "historical" town of Celje, we are an informal and exclusively voluntary group that does not bow to any pressures and interests dictated by capital, political parties or institutions. Because we feel a void in the civil sphere or public activity, we wish to fill it by freely responding to problems in the town, Celje. By means of a public manifestation of different opinions, and through provocation, we wish to encourage critical thinking and action on the part of the population of Celje. We are working to turn Celje into a place which allows the coexistence of a wide range of social groups and individuals, thus improving the quality and variety of life in our town which is drowning in passivity and growing increasingly negative towards open-minded initiatives. We are working to improve urban culture, and make the streets a place for communication, social events and the expression of creativity accessible to all inhabitants and visitors.

Miha Ceglar, Brane Piano, Tone Zimsek, Franc Purg are the founders of Skupina. Skupina's activities centre on the local society. Its membership is flexible, changing according to each project.

I HATE CELJE – SKUPINA ("Group")

Roundtable, Celje, 2000

Skupina's first action was a roundtable discussion with various speakers who experience the town of Celje in different ways and who hold a critical view of the town and its life. The event, which took place in the courtyard of the Lower Castle, was attended by a high number of young and middle~aged local people. The speakers were mostly former citizens of Celje, but now live elsewhere. They spoke about how Celje left them indifferent and how the passivity of the local environment cancelled almost all possibilities for articulating different opinions and expressions.

Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape

2011-11-15T05:42:00.000-08:00

Noplaceness is now available from www.atlantaartnow.com and from amazon.com.

The book is in English, Portuguese and Chinese, and deals with some of the themes that have been dealt with extensively on this now all but dormant blog: the fate of art in the world's regions, how the regions link to one another in the digital era, how the world's different subcultures are to communicate messages intelligibly to one another now that it is technologically feasible to do so almost instantaneously.

It deals with these topics using the example of some thirty-six artists living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Co-authors are Cinqué Hicks, Catherine Fox and Jerry Cullum. It is one of two books I have co-authored this year, the other being In the Eye of the Muses, to which I contributed a long chapter on Hale Woodruff's murals at Clark Atlanta University.

Design and Time: A Fragment from an Unfinished Essay

2011-08-16T04:29:00.000-07:00

Design and Time: Hussein Chalayan, Karim Rashid, Deyan Sudjic

The sensibilities of would-be world-changers often conflict with those of what vulgar Marxists would call “the broad masses”: all those folks who like objects that fit the hand, doors that are easy to open, and cooking just like Mom used to do it.

But in practice the world has multiculturalized in recent decades, and some of the broad masses have become migratory multitudes who are considerably more design-savvy than their confreres who stayed home in rural South Dakota or rural segments of Senegal. (There is hipness to be found in unexpected sections of South Dakota, and urban Senegal has been a pioneer in art and literature and all the rest, so it is lack of exposure to cultural hybridity, not physical location, that is the problem. In the era of the Internet, anyone even with dial-up or spotty satellite access has the potential for productive cultural collisions, even if most digital users make sure they do not happen.)

This fragment from 2009 is probably the most resonant unfulfilled promise I have ever produced, not least in that ambiguous “most digital users make sure the productive cultural collisions do not happen.” Does that mean that individual users pursue their own preferred topics to the exclusion of all else, ignoring happy accidents and unwanted challenges as much as possible? or do information providers tailor available information to suit the proclivities of the consumer? or do governments and corporations actually suppress disapproved aspects of the digital revolution? No “or” about it; the shaping of consciousness goes on from infancy through schooling and on to popular-culture socialization just as much as it ever did, and the subversion of it likewise. But the terms of engagement have changed as new media have altered expectations and modes of perception.

Rashid’s modestly titled book I Want to Change the World, Chalayan’s philosophical approach to fashion design, Sudjic’s The Language of Things, all suggested a way of approaching the further reaches of design, but I never followed up on the suggestions. Since then, the astounding response to Alexander McQueen’s dark fashion retrospective suggests even more that the nexus between psychoanalytic territory and political territory in a field of endeavor usually thought of as trivial is a topic that ought to be pursued in greater depth. It would fit nicely with Sudjic's ruminations of 2009, and with Chalayan and Rashid somewhat differently, and the conclusions would be even more pertinent to present discontents.

Apopcalypse Now (see www.treetopquartet.com for details)

2011-04-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

The aPoPcalypse is Coming
May 14, 2011!

FUNCTION DESIGN
508 EAST HOWARD AVENUE
DECATUR, GA 30030

Common and Controversial Perspectives on the Apocalypse Explored in Multi-Arts Event, Pop-Up Book, Roadside Billboard and Radio Spot

“The aPOPcalypse Show” is a multi-arts exploration of the story of faith, hope and dreams through contemporary feminist perspectives of the Book of Revelation. Artists bringing the full range of common to controversial perspectives to encourage dialogue include visual artists and filmmakers, performers and authors: Sylvia Cross, Krispin Harker, Lance Haugan, Tina Pippin, Natalie Pharr, Amy Zeger, “Shanti” (Lisa Price), Hilena Haile Selassie, Gabriel Moscowitz, Will Eccleston, Mary Jane Mahan, Chris Moore, Forrest Benz, Damon Young and Randy Taylor.

*
“This event is about hope for the future, rather than despair.” --Sylvia Cross

the first Counterforces in a very long time

2011-03-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

A recent upsurge of requests for a history of the Atlanta art scene since 1960 (of which I know at first hand only the past quarter century) has reminded me of how I came to conceive the Counterforces blog in the first place—it was originally intended to be the prototype for a magazine, whose time may now have passed, to coordinate recognition of the perennially unrecognized outside their own communities—what Art Papers was intending to do and to some extent still does, within the limits of art that is most likely to be approved by the world's collectors and curators. I wanted to find the art all over the world that was so culture-specific and sometimes so idiosyncratic that no one but an insider of the culture could explain why it was such an extraordinary work, preferably in terms that would make sense of it to readers from other cultures.

This approach would have had something to do with Paul Rabinow's anthropology of the contemporary, and something to do with the condition that Grady Harris presciently termed Besiderdom—for some are insiders, and some are outsiders, and then there are the besiders, a pun on "B-siders," referencing the sometimes perfectly good song on the flip side of the top-selling 45 rpm single—the song that nobody ever heard of, even if it was more interesting than the hit. (The term is obsolete in the age of the mp3, of course, even though the age of the CD produced more than one no-longer-B-side song on the misnamed CD single that turned out to be the really cool stuff next to the commercially inflected main event.)

I never fulfilled my goal of traveling to the world's lesser-known artworlds and putting together a Besider Biennial under some more dignified name. (Thomas Pynchon's preterite Counterforce of the overlooked, insulted and injured, poised over against the self-anointed elect of the global economy in Gravity's Rainbow was my inspiration for the name of the blog, but Counterforce was already taken as a blog name by a Chinese blogger.)

A problem with any such venture is that the efforts in the world's marginal art scenes have so often been underfunded, and the artists have too infrequently made a virtue of necessity by incorporating the arte povera approach into their practice even in the decades when that sort of thing was trendy. Plus the problem that the provinces are sometimes provincial, just like the blinkered mainstream; pre-digital networks, isolated individuals were more likely to be polymathic and interdisciplinary by virtue of having to substitute their own research and ingenuity for enriching intellectual encounters, but they too suffered from the restrictions of what resources could be acquired on a limited budget.

This realization first came home to me long ago when I was invited to be a visiting critic in Shreveport, Louisiana in a year when everyone in town was envious of the sculptor Clyde Connell for achieving national recognition in her old age, and wondered how to get the same fame for themselves. One problem was that Connell fit into a certain national discourse of the moment, and they didn't, whether their work was any good or not. I wondered if there were a way for Shreveport artists to make themselves more interesting to a national audience than they seemed to be at that moment, to make Shreveport known as more than the hometown of Leadbelly. Much has changed there since then, and the town has become a popular site for moviemaking, among other things.

I went on to other geographically isolated but not always unrecognized smaller art scenes, continuing to ask myself the question of how some scenes contextualize themselves successfully and others never do, how some scenes over-congratulate themselves for their accomplishments and never quite address the issues of how they fit into the conditions of a rapidly changing global context, while others slip smoothly into the world of the dominant discourse.

Twenty years on, the issue has been explored tangentially in global biennials, and indeed the institution of the global biennials itself has been deployed as a possible way of addressing the problem in the larger cities of less economically dominant or emerging-dominance cultures. (There are now some two hundred biennials, and the supercool and would-be supercool curators know which ones they wouldn't attend no matter how good they might become, unless their best friends were curating them.)

I knew things had changed when the video showed up of the two Turkish artists wandering through Anatolia asking passing shepherds, "How do you get to Tate Modern?"
Soon thereafter an artist from Skopje produced a video consisting of his monologue on what kind of work he should make to get himself into a global biennial.

The problem I haven't seen addressed is that there are so often single works by single artists that deserve to have gotten global recognition—or sometimes, in the case of Kate Kretz's Blessed Art Thou, have achieved global fame without getting the artist into a single major exhibition or even sold to a collector.

How to contextualize such works and such artists is one of the problems I eventually walked away from on the grounds of being too much an outsider (or besider in Paul Rabinow's sense of the term as well as Grady Harris') to be able to diagnose the difficulty and find a solution.

I do recall a moment in which an official representative of the New York artworld managed to misinterpret a significant moment in regional art—not at all his fault, since we misinterpreted it as well, it having been an urban intervention avant le lettre.

In 1989, our little Thursday Night Artists group of six or eight artists tried to find a new alternative space to follow up on a successful storefront intervention in a freshly gentrifying intown neighborhood (The Reliable Art Show, in the space vacated by the Reliable Paper Company in the then still mostly working-class neighborhood of Virginia-Highland).

Evan Levy got us the raw-space top floor of what was then called the IBM Tower, Philip Johnson's newly opened and much hyped One Atlantic Center.

Art in America managing editor Richard Vine, whose wife Naomi held a top administrative position at the High Museum, served on a panel during the Floor Fifty exhibition in which he dismissed the alternative-space show as a useful place for beginners to show work that wasn't yet ready for galleries.

This was in fact true to some degree—the Thursday Night Artists weekly group attendance had suddenly grown tenfold as soon as word of the show got out, and the original concept morphed a great deal—the four coordinating artists were soon termed the Gang of Four by some of the newer members, and we were accused of elitism in spite of having made clear that this artist-organized exhibition was not the Mattress Factory, there being not enough room for three hundred artists to claim space, much less get past lobby security to install the show.

But the point of the show was less the overall quality of the work as it was the successful insertion of the Atlanta artists who had no gallery representation into the very center of corporate power at the moment, the building that possessed that year's wow factor, and the very height of that piece of architecture, such that developers barged in to use the immense windows to survey the terrain beneath them, refusing to pay the three-dollar admission fee charged on behalf of Art Papers, which at that time was still allowing the group to use its office as a meeting place. (This changed later.) It was a social and political intervention of significance only in Atlanta, so I don't fault Richard Vine for missing the point. (I do have problems with his later attack on Walter Benjamin as a man who was obviously worthless as a theorist because he never could earn a decent living, much less establish a professional practice in business or academia.)

Unlike the organizers of the Mattress Factory, whose slogan was "We know no one on Andrews Square" (a metaphor mostly for the Fay Gold Gallery that showed all the trendy artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and a little later Robert Mapplethorpe), we knew the folks on Andrews Square and we wanted to do something different anyway.

Clyde Broadway's installation summed up the secret goals of many of the artists in "Floor Fifty," however; like the Turkish videographers trying to insert themselves into the financial success that comes with inclusion in global biennials, Clyde was both satirizing and celebrating the overheated art market of the Eighties that was about to be clobbered by the great recession of 1990.

Goghing My Way? depicted the artist as a hitchhiker in a formal suit, trying to be picked up by a chauffeured convertible conveying ukiyo-e geishas holding armloads of Van Gogh irises. (A Japanese corporation had made history at that moment for buying a Van Gogh at an astronomical price, though it was Fifteen Sunflowers rather than Irises, which had gone to another collector.) Broadway's painting was cordoned off by a velvet rope and priced at the selling price for the Van Gogh painting.

Dorky the joke may have been, but it was elegantly executed and summed up the mindset of the Eighties just as they were coming to a spectacular end that would be succeeded by the focus on globalism and diversity that was marked the following year by "The Decade Show" and prefigured that year by the controversial and perhaps—or perhaps not—misguided "Magiciens de la Terre."

Clyde, whose deliberately confrontational Trinity is the most popular painting in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, remains one of those transgressive painters who operates so far on the margins that he has very nearly fallen off the page. I have written about this "Floor Fifty" episode previously on this blog, back at the end of 2008 when i was establishing a theoretical basis for what turned out to be an effort displaced by the need to earn a living writing about the local scene on a week-by-week basis, plus of course natural inertia and lack of opportunity to look at shows relevant to the issues on which I like to reflect.

2010-12-29T07:14:00.000-08:00

Other entanglements, plus my wish to complete long trains of philosophical thought on my other blog, have led me to neglect Counterforces, which keeps getting links to it nonetheless.

The death of longtime Museum of Fine Arts Houston director Peter Marzio, and the unrelated news that what might be termed Max Anderson's Thornton Dial retrospective from the Indianapolis Museum of Art will be shown in Atlanta, has reminded me of one of those utterly forgotten controversies that caused a huge storm at the time, as so many artworld events have.

Whether Dial's homage to John Lewis and the Selma Bridge would have been better served by being in Houston rather than in the city for which it was commissioned, I leave for others to decide. It was sited in its present Freedom Park location after having been intended for a more visually prominent space, and indeed it tends to be overlooked by drivers to the point that it rarely arouses even curiosity.

Anderson's longtime involvement with the work of Thornton Dial roused its own controversies, but this may be a case of all's well that ends well, although it has not ended completely and it has taken the better part of two decades to reach this point in the sometimes less than edifying tale of artworld reception of this extraordinary self-taught artist.

long absences from this blog

2010-12-07T11:10:00.001-08:00

I have been writing reviews, mostly on artscriticatl.com though some on burnaway.org, that explore (by implication) the theories behind a regionally inflected but globally focused art; what it would require, whether it is possible, whether it is possible for the world to comprehend the stakes behind the local in ways that would make the local of interest to all the world's other localities.

While I ponder whether it is possible to put all of this in a generalized blog post, I shall say that I am pleased with Adrian Searle's description in the Guardian of Turner Prize 2010 winner Susan Philipsz' work as affording "difficult yet accessible pleasures."

more theory-minded thoughts less likely to stir up trouble

2010-11-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

I have written a temporarily postponed post that I believe I should save for a more propitious moment. This one is less intellectually defensible but less likely to irritate people since it can be dismissed as a piece of whacked-out off-the-cuff fantasy.

Someday there will be time to have arguments but right now there is too much to be done.

Patrick Harpur, in his maddeningly elusive "history of the imagination" The Philosophers' Secret Fire, resurrects the Eastern Orthodox (among others) notion of "spirit" versus "soul" as opposites that nevertheless complement and complete one another: "Not only purity but order, clarity, enlightenment are spirit's watchwords.... but soul is always at its side, obscuring, muddying, and muddling. For soul favors the labyrinthine ways of slow reflection, not rapid thought. Things cannot be made straight because they are intrinsically crooked and ambiguous, cannot be spotlit because they are intrinsically twilit; cannot be wiped away because they are harnessed to a long history whose traces cannot be kicked over." (That errant extended metaphor, like the divagation of this parenthetical aside, illustrates the point I am about to make.)

In reality, each side needs the other to achieve anything like depth or profundity; highbrow spiritual abstraction without the messiness of a recalcitrant materiality becomes dry, detached and generally uninteresting, while lowbrow soul without the ordering principle of style or a sense of doing things well turns quickly into sloppiness. (This is why Lowbrow's meticulous attention to a sense of craft and/or craftiness makes it a two or three generation art movement, while bad art remains merely bad art, and not the Bad Art of the show of that name that changed the art world at the end of the 1970s.)

Or as Immanuel Kant put it, "Concepts without [physical perceptions] are empty; [physical perceptions] without concepts are blind." (That's my combo of the old translation "Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind," because I don't like the unstylish lack of parallelism in the new translation. Plus I want to distort Kant for my own purposes here.)

Okay, so all this is a commonplace: Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, all that stuff. It doesn't mean anybody has quite gotten what it all means. "You say I am repeating something I have said before. I shall say it again," as T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets.

I want to say it again because I want to revisit the idea of the carnivalesque, not that I remember that much of what Mikhail Bakhtin actually had to say about it. Maybe I just want to rethink the notion.

I want to do this because the closing event of the Art of Such n Such's "Inspire! Incite! Ignite!" is coming up on Friday November 12 (http://www.artofsuchnsuch.com/) and I have been trying to get my head around the larger implications of all this stuff without complete success ever since the opening night. (The multi-artist, multi-state assemblage of mostly non-sexual transgression that is the wall-sized Peep-O-Rama—a structure constructed by Jeffry and Nanette Johnson to house the dioramas' transgressive weirdness—deserves a critical commentary all its own, independent of the fire sculptures and the many varieties of performers and purveyors of puppetry and possible prevarication.)

Since I not going to get round to writing this rethinking, check out what these folks did in Austin: http://austinist.com/2009/10/09/art_outside_interview_the_art_of_su.php

And those of my readers within driving distance of Atlanta can always tool over to Eyedrum on Friday night at eight p.m. for the festivities: www.eyedrum.org for calendar and directions for those of you who need either one.

Meanwhile there are other art reviews to be written which also raise the issue of craft and the carnivalesque, at least implicitly. I shall get at it.

the global, the local, and this coming weekend in Decatur

2010-11-02T07:14:00.001-07:00

Right now I am mostly writing art reviews and posting vast theoretical speculations on joculum.livejournal.com, but life is thought globally and lived locally (the old slogan evinces a firm grasp of the obvious). So for those readers who need to know that the Atlanta artworld holiday-sale season is beginning post-Day of the Dead, be aware that Decatur's Beacon Hill Studios will begin the process with a fundraiser that should be as memorable as last year's, which featured the first Atlanta screening of Sara Hornbacher's video meditation on architecture and Walter Benjamin that premiered at a conference in France and has since found its way into the wryly titled Greater Decatur Quadrennial.

Anyway, those who are looking for ideas from me should go to my joculum blog or to burnaway.org and artscriticatl.com, and those who are in need of information should read the following:

Art 4 Art’s Sake

Beacon Hill's Artists Open Studio Tour & Art Benefit for Decatur High School’s Art Programs

Beacon Hill Artist Studios
125 Electric Avenue
Decatur, GA 30030

Friday, November 5th, 5 - 9 pm

Saturday, November 6th, 3 - 8 pm

$10 suggested donation at door.

Reception: Part of Decatur Art Walk
Friday, November 5, 5 pm - 9 pm

Open Studios & Demonstrations:
Saturday, November 6, 3 pm - 8 pm

Beacon Hill Artists:
Sarah Collman, Rebecca DesMarais, Rodney Grainger, Tony Greco,
Ron Holt, Sara Hornbacher, Lynne Moody, Patty O'Keefe-Hutton, Jo Peterson

Guest Artists include:
Mario Petrirena, John Roberts, Steve Sachs, Helen Durant, Candace Hassem,
Jill Ruhlman, Judy Parady & Tom Meyer, Suzy Shultz, Melissa Walker,
Richard Walker, Andrea Emmons, Stephanie Kolpy & Matthew Sugarman,
Brian Randall, Stephanie Smith, Karen Tunnell, Eilis Crean, Nancy Hunter,
Elizabeth Lide, Terence Monaghan, Kathy Colt, Teneisha Jones, Valerie Gilbert,
Gena VanDerKloot, Michelle Jordan, Xenia Zed and more.

Directions: The Beacon Hill Artists Studio are located at the corner of
W. Trinity and Electric Ave. in downtown Decatur. (The studio entrance
is on the backside of the building off Electric Ave.) Parking is available i
in the rear lot and kitty-corner across W,. Trinity in the county government lot.

For further details contact the studio director, Rodney Grainger (404) 210-9846

Art also plays a role in all of this, but for now....

2010-10-20T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am still trying to absorb the implications of the Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal functioning as the keynote speaker at the Symposium on Compassion Meditation on the second day of the Dalai Lama's visit to Emory and at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in ten days' time, both events following his October 17 New York Times op-ed "Morals Without God": http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/?src=me&ref=general
—an essay copiously illustrated by images from Hieronymus Bosch, incidentally.

The Dalai Lama, as one might expect, was fascinated with the notion that empathy exists in species that have the mirror-recognition capacity (i.e., the capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror, an ability thus far discovered in dolphins, elephants, apes, and humans) and wanted to know if self-recognition and empathy was possible in other species. De Waal opined that dogs seem to have a certain empathic capacity without the mirror-recognition facility, and certain birds, suggesting that the link between avian and mammalian species would be the reptilian, where crocodiles share the capacity for proto-empathy in that they nurture their offspring. (There was much else said about all this, some of it leading one audience member to remark that they could have used an evolutionary biologist up there among the psychologists and primatologists, to straighten out the details of which species possessed which capacities and why.)

The keynote address to the AAR will also be on empathy in mammalian species, the subject of de Waal's latest book. The panel discussion was on how empathy evolves into actively self-aware compassion in human beings and whether there are practices that can heighten compassion by inducing changes in brain physiology.

The Dalai Lama's visit was inaugurated with the presentation of four new science textbooks from the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a project to make all 20,000 Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns literate in the basics of contemporary scientific disciplines. Paging through the new books on Evolution, Cells and Genes, and, I believe, brain physiology (I didn't see two of the four titles), I reflected that this was uncompromisingly serious material, introductory but not oversimplified, and that I rather wished I could buy copies and refresh my own knowledge with the English text on the left-hand pages.

The most promising candidates from the monasteries will be sent to Emory to pursue advanced study in physics, psychology, et al., having completed the advanced course of study in Tibetan Buddhist academic institutions. The intent is to create an intensive dialogue between Tibetan Buddhist knowledge of the mind and body and the scientific disciplines as presently constituted in world society.

The Dalai Lama was once again fascinated by the results of experiments conducted with compassion meditation techniques in terms of measurable changes in the amygdala and other physiological as well as psychological results. The aforementioned skeptic in the audience suggested that at the very least the variables of age and cultural experience of the research subjects should have been factored into the experiments.

Whatever one thinks of the adequacy of the experimental parameters (and it seemed to me that the mere fact that the research subjects were motivated to enroll in the experiment was a variable to be considered, though control groups given standard cognitive-psychology methods were used as well as meditators), what seemed most significant was the fact that three different universities (Stanford, Wisconsin, and Emory) have considered secularized forms of Tibetan meditation worthy of study as behavioral modification techniques measurably affecting brain physiology, and that the spiritual head of the world's Tibetan Buddhists was eager to absorb any and all such materially based insights into the structure of Buddhist education.

The outcome of the scientific education of 20,000 practitioners of a sophisticated Buddhist system of psychological education and theoretical debate will be fascinating to witness. Leafing through the textbook on evolution, I found myself thinking that standard Buddhist notions regarding conditioned origination would be reinforced by the shifting degrees of reproductive success found in changing environmental circumstances. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that the Buddha insisted that when a doctrine has been found to be contradicted by the facts, it must be discarded. Thus traditional Tibetan cosmology is to be replaced by contemporary models of the universe, for example.

At the same time, what John Blofeld wrote some decades ago regarding Tibetan Buddhism still obtains: the practice is culturally specific, even though it encodes a level of psychological insight that Blofeld had not discovered elsewhere. He was fearful to discard what seemed to be extraneous aspects, lest they turn out to contain some key element he didn't understand was such. This hasn't changed among American adherents.

Thus at the North American seat of Drepung Loseling monastery, there are an impressive array of teachings and empowerment ceremonies by visiting Tibetan spiritual teachers, all of them arisen from the circumstances of a culture at the far end of the Silk Road where practices and beliefs from Isfahan and Alexandria mingled with those of India and Central Asia. The cultural differences matter; for example, the colors of the robes that were meant to make the monks physically unattractive to laypersons turn out to be enormously appealing to American audiences. There are issues of cultural collision and fusion to be addressed that lie beyond the immediate challenge of reconfiguring Tibetan Buddhism for its historic adherents while preserving the essence of Tibetan culture in the diaspora. (A two-day conference on this latter topic is in progress as I write this.)

But the experiment of bringing a formerly isolated spiritual practice into the twenty-first century is one that raises so many compelling intellectual and existential issues that I am truly delighted to see it taking place. These confrontational times scarcely seem propitious for the rise of a radical religious empiricism, but that is what seems to be evolving at a speed I wouldn't have thought possible.

Antakya weighs in with its 2nd biennial

2010-10-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

Having missed the 1st Antakya Biennial altogether except as a concept, I am thrilled to learn of the second one. Antakya is one of those contested cities and districts whose history fascinates me. Under its colonial name of Hatay, the district found its way in fictionalized form into one of the Indiana Jones films, but its actual history is as improbable in its own fashion as anything in Indiana Jones. Today the city is undergoing the same transformations and tensions of globalization as anyplace else.

What interests me also is that there are fewer international artstars than one has come to expect (Renzo Martens and Cyprian Gaillard head the list); most of the artists in the biennial are Turkish, but the international co-curator alongside the one from Istanbul is a Bulgarian living in Brussels, who is organizing parallel events for the Biennial in Sofia and Brussels. (That both curators are female is no longer an event out of the ordinary; neither is the notion of a curator from one country living in another, but the mix of regionality and trans-European location is intriguing to an untraveled provincial like myself. We are used to the same fifteen curators being brought in with great fanfare rather than a just short of homegrown international biennial that nevertheless undertakes its own brand of border crossings.)

Here is an extract from www.antakyabienali.org regarding the biennial, which seems to be addressed simultaneously to the citizens of Antakya and to a global public (but not particularly to a global artworld, most of which will most likely ignore the event):

"'Thank you for your understanding' is the title of a work by artist Simon Kentgens, which will be shown in the 2nd Antakya Biennial. It refers to the signs we often see in the city, when public or private interventions obstruct our common spaces.

"In the context of Antakya, 'Thank you for your understanding' is a way to address the relationship between the city and its inhabitants, but also between the biennial and its local public, as a mutual effort for understanding and working together. More generally, 'Thank you for your understanding' explores the im/possibilities of finding a common ground on which we can stand as public - both in the exhibition and in the city.

"Today, our world remains fragmented and our individual efforts dispersed behind the unifying façade of globalization. Discovering what could be truly common means finding solidarities and shared sensibilities that are not based on the reigning form of universality today: capitalism. In the 18th century, aesthetics seemed to promise such an alternative - a universal common ground or "common sense." For Kant it was in beauty that such a common sense was to be found. Even though beauty in the classical sense is not a category we would assign to art today, can we nevertheless take this example and imagine art as proposing such an alternative common space, a commonality beyond the market?

"Starting from the aesthetic grounds of our common existence, the Biennial will focus on the particular case of Antakya as a city in the process of rapid globalization and transformation. The city as the spatial model of the way society is organized and functions today is one of our common grounds of experience as human beings. Following David Harvey we will claim that the question of what kind of city we want cannot be separated from what kind of people we want to be and what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. Therefore the remaking of ourselves through changing the city is one of our most fundamental, human rights.

"Finally, the Biennial will experiment with its own form as a global, temporary, exportable structure. Instead of negating its role as a universalizing agent, the Antakya Biennial will try to challenge it specifically by offering a common space for both international artists and the local public."

The description I have since found at http://ferhatozgur.blogspot.com/ confirms my beliefs regarding the biennial's intentions (and provides much better information regarding Antakya's condition as a zone of multiple cultures, religions and languages):
"Antakya is a place where the streets and even the shops still do little to encourage a hectic consumerism. The banks of the river and the hills outside the town offer benches to contemplate the view but no cafes or restaurants to capitalize on it. The many historical and architectural sites continue to be part of the daily urban life and cultural heritage programs have not yet turned the city into a museum. The only museum has no shop and it is even difficult to find postcards from Antakya. However the city culturally, socially, spatially and economically going through a rapid transformation. A new airport is being constructed, most of the big old houses are being turned into hotels, each day a new souvenir shop or tourism office is being opened instead of small ateliers and etc. Just recently a big shopping mall construction has started in the outskirt of the city, which will definitely change the social, and public life of the inhabitants and understanding of the public space. And inevitably these transformations are followed by gentrification process (or we should say concurrently) in the city center and Antakya Biennial is also a result/part of this transformation. The Antakya biennial finds itself in between the needs and ambitions of the growing and developing city, and the foreign, often nostalgic, gaze. But between the drive towards globalization and its reverse but inherent demand for local difference, is there something of the old universal we can rescue, some common ground that can unite us, while still respecting all particularities?

"...the 2nd Antakya Biennial is aiming to explore the social and cultural structure of today’s society through Antakya and build a discussion platform for Antakya inhabitants to question these changes and to invite them to take an active part in remaking the city—in other words remaking themselves....

"The biennial will also expand internationally and each of its editions will collaborate with different partner countries. In 2010 these are Belgium, Holland and Bulgaria. Under the umbrella of Antakya Biennial, parallel events co-organized with local institutions will take place in Brussels, Amsterdam and Sofia. They will extend the questions we pose in Antakya and confront them to different local contexts.

"Antakya Biennial is the sole international art exhibition in the region. As a result it has a stronger impact on the locality than most other biennials. This is why Antakya biennial proposes a structure that is much more locally oriented. Such a structure will be a more challenging but less standardized framework for the collaboration of local and international artists and organizations on the grounds of the biennial. However, Antakya biennial is not simply a "regional" event. Instead we see the biennial as a global laboratory for artistic and intellectual exchange that has its starting point in the local situation of Antakya but reaches out and exchanges experiences with other locations since the specifics to Antakya mimics the global transformation."

It will be interesting to learn how the citizens of Antakya respond to this highly public presentation of contemporary art. Since two of my friends are fluent in Turkish, I suppose I could find out in detail.

In lieu of the much more ambitious things I wanted to post

2010-10-11T05:30:00.000-07:00

It would be good if all of us knew our specific neurological deficits. There are so many ways of being miswired that most of us are compensating for lacks, and also using additional capacities, that we don’t even know we have.

I suspect that curators and specific types of artists don’t get along because they view the world differently…not that they are differently acculturated, they just don’t see the same things the same way even when they are using the same language.

It would take entirely too much time to unpack the meaning of this proposition. It isn’t particularly materialist-reductionist, but it seriously modifies the social-reductionist side of things.

Perhaps the point is that nothing can ever be reduced to anything else. Far from being explicable by simpler causes (although we do like to disguise the causes that embarrass us or that we don’t even wish to know), we are usually so encapsulated in our own imprisoning partial viewpoints that we don’t even understand what it is we don’t understand.

Convergent Frequencies, The Sartorialist, et al.

2010-09-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

So, okay, let’s ask it: Is The Sartorialist an August Sander for the twenty-first century?

Being practiced at condensing conversations, Scott Schuman brought up August Sander almost at the utterance of the words “art critic” by the gallery manager introducing me to him last night. And being as how a traveling show of Sander portraits at the Goethe-Institut was one of the first exhibitions I reviewed for Art Papers, I responded viscerally and positively to the reference.

Actually, the globally famous photographer and blogger also brought up the names of street photographers and such projects as Bruce Davidson’s East One Hundredth Street, but only to compare them with Sander’s practice, and with his own, which is something like a blend of the two.

Sander was looking for social typifications, and that required photographing significantly attired Weimar Republic individuals in settings that represented their environment. The results were haunting works of art. The Sartorialist is also doing something more art-oriented rather than simple trendspotting/coolhunting, but the typifications he seeks out are ones of creative style, not social roles. Even so, Schuman considers it important (as do I) to contextualize the place in which the styles were individually generated, so the backgrounds in his photographs count for as much as the faces and clothes.

Okay, I’ll drop the sociology of knowledge “typifications” verbiage regarding August Sander. Sander was convinced he could show how different people’s self-perceptions were revealed by what they wore, because in the Weimar Republic, clothes really did make the man. (It was the 1920s, and Germany’s women also went in for self-definition that revealed profession and social rank more than personal preferences.)

Fashionistas around the world are as often as not trying to project an image that has nothing to do with their day job, and sometimes is meant to disguise social rank rather than advertise it. One notable exception is the distinguished businessman or -woman, whose fashion sense is meant to convey a blending of personal identity with professional demeanor. The professions also generate fashion trendsetters, of course, adept at combining the expected dress code with subtle transgressions that make for a creative projection of individual style in a visually repressed environment.

(This is my opinion, not Schuman’s, and I may be dead wrong because I’m missing the alertness to subtle social clues and signifiers that goes into serious coolhunting. I imagine the skilled trendspotter can guess income level and likely place of employment no matter how clever the individual thinks he or she is at obscuring it. Certainly the blog comments on a Sartorialist photograph, pointing out $1200 sneakers, are from fashion-informed individuals who can probably also tell what came from a last-season thrift store discard and what's being worn as a personal statement. This is not my area of specialization. However, I can see that The Sartorialist incorporates a lot more analytical savvy into the mix than most fashion enthusiasts or academic theorists would suspect—it just isn't expressed in theory-heavy terms. People are always doing and saying more than they believe they are doing and saying; it's what makes personal style so revelatory in the first place.)

So here is The Sartorialist, traveling the world making on-street portraits of strikingly attired individuals, and everyone is trying to figure out how to get The Sartorialist to notice them.

The fact that Schuman's portraits, like Sander’s, are serious art probably doesn’t matter to most of his would-be subjects. The instant global fame does. Motivations differ, of course, and some presumably do care about the art as well as the fashion.

Knowing that nothing I could do would impress The Sartorialist, I opted for the best projection of my individual identity with a decades-out-of-date look for the disheveled critic: a black Franz Kafka in Prague t-shirt worn with my one threadbare grey jacket. (It is almost time to hit Finders Keepers in search of the new autumn jacket.)

I was not surprised to see that the art and design students who worship The Sartorialist had turned out in their Sartorialist-pleasing best. The level of enthusiasm was gratifying.

William Gibson has devoted his newest novel—the logical conclusion to the trilogy that began with Pattern Recognition—to the topic of secret brands, anti-commercial marketing, trendspotting, coolhunting, and such, and I confess that if I had had time and money, what would have delighted me most would have been to show up in a denim jacket with a Gabriel Hounds logo, which coincidentally sounds like it is very close to the baby-headed bird logo of Susan Bridges’ now-defunct Big Angel Blowout. I don’t think I’ll have one ready in time for Gibson’s book tour appearance at SCAD on Monday evening, either.

There is much, much more to be said in that regard, but it will have to wait for a later post. Barring misadventure, I shall write a review of the show at Hagedorn that will discuss individual works from The Sartorialist.

In the meantime, please check out "Convergent Frequencies" at Krog and Irwin Streets tonight (Saturday) or Sunday evening, before it goes away. Matt Gilbert's computer-altered videos, collaboratively produced with live performance by musicians and dancers, blends with Nat Slaughter's extraordinary sound pieces and Matt Haffner's wall murals in a one-weekend-only pushing of the boundaries for this Southern city. Kudos to i45 and Possible Futures for creating a kickoff event for the season that was the only possible followup to Hagedorn's spectacular reception for the Sartorialist exhibition. Crossing paths there with Caroline Hust, fresh from her $10,000 Kate Spade Award as a freshly graduated RISD textile designer, it was very nearly possible to believe that Gibson is still as much in touch with the subterranean social trends of his time as he was in the days when he ruled the world of cyberpunk fiction.

Actually, I do believe that, but what do I know?

I'm excited, but a little bit at a time

2010-09-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

For those who imagine I have recently received a windfall, my grant will be disbursed in installments over the course of two years to permit me to continue my practice.

Just so you'll know. I am, of course, unimaginably grateful to Louis Corrigan personally and the new foundation, to which I have alluded obliquely in the previous post.

Notes Toward A Future History: a first draft? an outline, anyway, perhaps better titled

2010-09-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

Notes Toward Any Future History of Art and Gallery Practice in Atlanta

I have come to realize that people’s selective recollections of the Atlanta art scene resemble the old saw about the Sixties: it is indeed as though if you remember it, you weren’t there.

We probably need to cut through the generational legends that have already formed for the current generation of the DIY scene almost as much as for those who speak of the Foundational Years (whatever those may have been). There ought to be meaningful lessons to be extracted from all the anecdotes, if we could ever get past the premature nostalgia, the pseudo-heroism, and the general reconfirmation of Henry Kissinger’s famous observation that the passions run so high because the stakes are so low.

I would like for a rough structural chronology to be established, less for scholarly reasons than for practical ones. What the practical ones are—that will emerge only at the end of this verbal peregrination.

I would like for, say, Dick Robinson and Annette Cone-Skelton to contribute recollections of what it really was like in the Sixties, a time when I was still off in the even more artistically marginal state of Florida and then in the midst of moments in California that were closer to the action than I ever wanted to be.

Atlanta at the time had something of an alt-culture scene surrounding, I believe, the Tenth Gate, a space that was in the last phases of disappearing when I first arrived in Atlanta for graduate school. But more to the point, the city had developed a significant regional school of Minimalist painting, already nurtured and brought into focus by a tiny handful of gallery owners. Electronic music was flourishing (in its own way), and in those years pre-Callanwolde, poets hung out with James Dickey in Buckhead. My impression is that these various subgroups were of slightly different generations and mostly did not know one another any more than they knew the would-be underground scene around Tenth Street.

Whatever was going on in those years on the grassroots level—and it was already inordinately proud of itself—the serious DIY scene seems to have been kick-started in the latter half of the financially troubled 1970s by a flood of economic stimulus money that funded community arts programs. The election of Maynard Jackson as mayor of Atlanta and Jimmy Carter as President of the United States was one of those happy overlaps of progressive sensibilities that led to the creation of a city administrative entity (the Bureau of Cultural and International Affairs) just at the moment when there was federal money available to allow it to do something. Arts centers were founded in disused school buildings, from the Little Five Points Community Center to the Forrest Avenue Consortium that housed such collaborative institutions as Pynyon Press and Nexus Gallery. The Urban Walls program funded murals that inspired local businesses to follow the city’s example, and wondrously visionary wall paintings appeared under the sponsorship of building owners.

The funding patterns shifted as the Reagan Revolution came on apace, but corporate sponsorships kept High Museum shows of regional artists in operation, and imaginative academic conferences stirred things up intellectually even as the DIY spaces stirred things up artistically: Emory University’s “Intellect and Imagination” conference proved that it was possible to bring together nationally renowned biologists, art historians, and conceptually minded performers for a few days of lectures and conversations that were as consequential as the Critics’ Forum in which Art Papers paired national and local critics to report on the condition of visual art throughout the South.

All things pass, and such conferences were not repeated. However, DIY scholarly conferences were staged from time to time in which imaginative groups of local artists raised the money to bring a few of their favorite national figures to town to sit on panels with local artists and academicians. Art shows were staged in conjunction with these.

Galleries such as Fay Gold’s arose—actually, very nearly exclusively Fay Gold’s—that imported the New York flavors of the month, such as graffitists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring in 1983, with Basquiat returning for a solo gig in 1986. The general scorn with which this trendiness was met by the anti-establishment wing of local artists was reflected in the rise of the enormous artist-staged exhibitions in disused factories and warehouses (the Mattress Factory shows, so called from the space in which the first one was staged): 300 artists paying $25 apiece (refundable at show’s end) and collaboratively rehabilitating a derelict space long enough to stage a three-week exhibition created an annual event at which 3000 people paid an entry fee to see the most spectacular array of local work available all year. (Installation artists were delighted to have whole rooms to transform as they saw fit…in spaces slated for demolition, the work was sometimes simply left in place when the show was over.)

Liability insurance and the acquisition of derelict spaces by pre-Olympics speculators put an end to that. Less transient alternative exhibition spaces took up some, but not all, of the slack. Occasionally it was possible to stage storefront exhibitions, and on one occasion in which I was involved, the raw space atop the city’s newest big-ticket building was secured for a short-term DIY art show.

And every so often the scene would go into a downspin as the prime movers burned out or moved on. Even as the city grew richer and richer, the alternative arts found less and less money with which to make things happen, and more and more regulatory obstacles put in their path.

So subversive ways of working were developed that had nothing to do with graffiti and more to do with slipping public events in between the expectations of public authority.

But all the while, art was kept before the eyes of the general public by the well-funded Piedmont Park Arts Festival, a decades-old institution that brought nationally famous site sculptors to the city to create temporary installations that were complemented by imaginatively curated exhibitions in the park’s permanent buildings. The cheesy artists’ market and food stands were the main draws for the crowds, but the crowds had to endure a great deal of serious art en route to the stuff they really came to see.

Then the site program went away when the federal funding was yanked, just as some years earlier the Southern artists series at the High Museum went away in the wake of the general reaction against arts funding in the wake of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe scandals. (We should recall that Fay Gold then hosted Serrano while he produced his Klan portraits…by this time local artists had forgiven Fay her fashionable location and were perfectly willing to show up at Fay Gold Gallery to see Piss Christ or, behind black curtains, the X Portfolio.)

All along, there were careerist moves, crossovers, fashionable and anti-fashionable hybridities: folk art came and cycled through and was incorporated into a piece of Olympic-era public art and largely went, with the passing of Howard Finster and his generation; African-American vernacular (please don’t call it “folk”) art remained a focus of contention up to and including its mainstreaming with the quilts of Gee’s Bend (preceded by the unnoticed placement of Thornton Dial’s much-contested piece of public sculpture); generations of art school graduates went into bands that paid off better (from Michael Stipe onward); subgroups came and subgroups went; great grassroots ventures to bridge ethnic divides were founded and went by the wayside. Things changed. Things remained the same.

The only reason to rehearse all this is to suggest that (1) some things that were once possible are no longer possible. It would be as anachronistic and pointless to revive most of the events in this history as it would be to reinstall telephone booths. And, (2) some things are now possible that were not possible in earlier moments of a perennially globalizing city (which Rem Koolhaas had named circa 1985 as being already the city of the future, the centerless, multinoded network of geographically dispersed, interlinked social and economic forces only dimly aware of one another yet creating intermittent synergies all the more vertiginously powerful for their degrees of invisibility and lack of physical infrastructure, the whole strung together like an interminable sentence composed of digitally composed and transmitted symbols).

We had joked in the early ’70s that Atlanta was determined to become “the world’s next great international city” without first becoming a great national one; but it was so, and it got the Centennial Olympics to prove it. And the place remains as bumptiously oblivious in that regard as ever, and that combination of obliviousness and accomplishment is something essential about us and about the world in which we find ourselves living. That is a situation that has existed for some thirty-five years, and it is a situation shaped by our history as well as by the economic forces of the global networks within which the city functions.

However, beginning to map the history of the Atlanta art scene and its (frequently failed) interactions with the city in which it exists is potentially helpful on a very elementary level, one that is unrelated to the vast claims of social theory.

It is useful to know that there are things that once were being done that are no longer being done, that there are ventures that crumble again and again for exactly the same recurrent reasons, and things that could be done now that we know are possible, because comparable things were being done in previous decades.

And that is the level on which we ought to be comparing notes on the past, and imagining possible futures.

not all counterforces are little jokes: Hussein Chalayan at Lisson Gallery

2010-07-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Lisson Gallery is as mainstream as it gets in the world of art, but this is the kind of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary enterprise I have always championed. The press release, verbatim:

"Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce further details of their collaboration with Hussein Chalayan whose new installation will be exhibited during a solo show, 8 September – 2 October 2010.

"Chalayan says 'My approach has always been interdisciplinary; the new work is an extension of this. There is a certain freedom to working in an art context that has allowed me to further explore the ideas that underpin my work.'

"The new installation explores music as a cultural form, creating a 'disembodied experience' of a performance of a traditional Turkish folk composition by Sertab Erener, one of Turkey’s most successful female singers, accompanied by an Ottoman orchestra. The installation is made up of a nuanced combination of audio, film, sculpture and musical notation. Here Hussein examines the experience of music as layered, exploring both the sounds created by different instruments, and the diverse cultural influences on the composition, which include Persian poetry and Greek orthodox chanting.

"Hussein Chalayan is one of Britain’s best known and most respected designers, and was the recipient of the Designer of the Year awards in 1999 and 2000. Chalayan represented Turkey in the Venice Biennale in 2005 and presented a critically acclaimed survey at London’s Design Museum in spring 2009, which later toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and is currently on view at Istanbul Modern.

"The project has emerged from a longstanding dialogue between the designer and Lisson Gallery’s Curatorial Director Greg Hilty who says: 'Hussein Chalayan is rightly celebrated not just for his fashion but as one of London's leading innovators in visual culture. His sensitive play with the history and poetic potential of wide-ranging cultural forms make him a natural fit for Lisson's programme of exhibitions.'"

2010-07-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

George Steiner wrote My Unwritten Books a few years back; I am increasingly accepting the need to write “My Unwritten Essays.” This is a note about one of those essays.

C. G. Jung’s The Red Book, published at long last after decades lost in legend, is one of those confrontations with the unconscious that deserves to be contextualized in terms of literary and art history. Art history in particular, because The Red Book is such a sui generis work that at the same time is of its time, and comments upon it. Carl Jung’s unconscious when he began the book was the unconscious of a German-speaking citizen of Switzerland ca. 1915. When he ended the venture in 1930, in the middle of a sentence and the middle of a painting, he did so as a different person in history, and it was the historical fact that Richard Wilhelm and others had made the visual and literary materials of alchemy available to him that led him to abandon his personal researches in favor of inherited imagery.

However, it isn’t like no one else was plumbing the psychic depths with visual and verbal resources in those years. Symbolist art and its self-consciously decadent offshoot were florid explorations of the mind’s swamps and gardens, even as Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing that “the mind has mountains, / Cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”

Jung’s visual resources included at least some of those paintings (Hodler in particular, but we don’t know, or I don’t, how far afield the work of Jan Toorop or any of the other artists of his generation got…there were widely distributed art magazines at the turn of the twentieth century, and as a different psychologically inflected modernism got underway a dozen years later with publications like Der Blaue Reiter, there were at least cultivated discussions going on about the strange doings of the new art. Jung knew what the Dadaists were up to in his own city of Zürich, and he didn’t like it. He almost certainly would have felt differently about the Symbolist generation, because the paintings in The Red Book are so often so Symbolist in their visual orientation. (They also owe much to medieval manuscript illumination, of course, since the book is self-consciously medievalizing, but most of all they look like the works of Hodler, or Munch, or Toorop or even Mossa and lesser lights whom Jung is unlikely to have seen. This similarity to painters Jung couldn’t have known as well as ones he could have isn’t an argument for the collective unconscious per se, because the styles seem to have been infectious; similar unconscious contents spawned similar paintings if the artists were inclined to paint in a certain manner already. It is the identity of consciously acquired style that reveals the structural identity of unconscious contents expressed in the individual artworks.)

Anyway, I don’t have time to sit down with recent books on international schools of Symbolist painting (and there have been several such books) or even with Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition and do this right. Rosenblum’s general hypothesis is germane to Jung’s book; the long crisis of Protestant theology gave rise to a visual tradition of ecstatic relationships to the natural world in which the unpleasant as well as the delightsome facts of biology were subsumed into a profane mystical vision. At once anxious and celebratory, human beings were inserted through art into a new world of earthly and more than earthly delights that grew out of doubts about human destiny.

And Jung’s psychology is a historical response to that crisis, in the same way that Freud’s is albeit with different conclusions. The look of The Red Book, if not the details of its contents, certainly arises out of its moment(s) in time, and I suppose others are already investigating shifts in style and content over the course of the fifteen years Jung spent producing it. I certainly had meant to do so.

But since I seem not to be finding time to do it, be aware that William Willeford is speaking about the overall topic at Atlanta’s Jung Society meeting on Saturday, July 17. Those sufficiently interested in the subject should be able to locate information online here:
http://www.jungatlanta.com/schedule-willeford.html

Kandinsky's project revisited

2010-06-18T05:49:00.000-07:00

Every so often someone comes along to have a go at a classic attempt, in this case Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee's statistical surveys at the Bauhaus trying to determine correlations between color and number and shape. The difference is that this artist in Ormond Beach, Florida has recognized that the correlations will change with culture and history; it isn't entirely biologically or spiritually fixed, even if very few cultures use red to symbolize passionlessness and tranquility or blue to symbolize restless agitation. (The dominant appearance of these colors in the environment may be enough to explain this without resorting to the electromagnetic spectrum. Kandinsky's own announced correlations of shape and color have always felt very odd and wrong to me, however—in sharp contrast to his usages in paintings—so it isn't just sky and blood and fire that shape our visual metaphors.)

Anyway, though I won't take the test myself, I feel inclined to pass this along for those who will:

Public Participation Wanted: Symbolism in Contemporary Western Culture Survey released on internet.

Like our individual signatures or fingerprints, we each see and interpret shape and color differently based on our experiences. Traditionally meanings have varied around the world. Has the diversity of America blended meanings? What are the characteristics that define your beliefs by color, line, shape? Can these elements be isolated? These are some of the underlining questions behind this project by Margaret Schnebly Hodge entitled “Glyph: Visual Interpretations of Contemporary Western Culture”.

Hodge is an artist fascinated by the blending features of contemporary western culture. “I believe that we are born with a primal belief system some refer to as an internal compass which is influenced over time by external forces, becoming a more complex cumulative belief system” says Hodge. “Participants are asked to provide meanings of basic shapes, objects and colors for Hodge to evaluate and discover the meanings in today’s western society. Is it different from our ancestors? Is there a transcendent core universal system?

In an effort to bring visual reality to the intangible values found in public belief systems, Hodge has developed a fun and simple 18 question survey and placed it on the internet. “I believe the survey phase may take up to 6 months in order to get the appropriate number of respondents” says Hodge. Asked why she chose the electronic system she explained “I want to let the project web out to a broad sampling of the public, individual to individual, and not be directed to any specific group of people.”

The survey is the first phase of and creates a foundation for Hodge’s upcoming multimedia project. Go to www.glyphproject.info to find more information on the project and complete the survey free online. Everyone, age 18 or older, who resides at least 6 months of the year within the United States, may participate in the survey. You do not have to subscribe to particular belief systems or be a citizen of the United States and no identifying personal information is required to participate.

Hodge is an award winning artist who resides in Ormond Beach, Florida. She has spent the past 5 years preparing for this project while remaining dedicated to her painting and completing other projects that included public participation. Her 2007 project, Art In the Sunshine, was proposed over the internet and through news media, then allowed to evolve on its own. Over 100 self enlisted artists generated more than 300 pieces of art from old signs that had been illegally placed on roadways. The art was legally installed along 20 miles of roadway for a three month period. This project brought together city, county, not for profit and private partners. For information on the artist go to www.mshodge-art.com .

everything is contextual. by definition.

2010-06-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

That's to say, we perceive from a perspective, one determined by our prior experience, which includes upbringing, personal encounters, and theoretical apparatus that we buy into, whether that apparatus be Calvinist, libertarian, mystical or Marxist.

And that means that certain exhibitions are just plain troublesome to write about, just as they were troublesome to curate. But whether they in fact create trouble depends on the age and perhaps the nationality of the viewer.

Such is the case with "Incendiary Exposure," the exhibition of work by Daryl Harris and Michael Morgan that runs through June 27 at Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta.

Morgan combines an allegorical series about the pain of the oppressed (by racism, mostly, but also by economics and...other things) with a series of box assemblages about the pain of the boxed-in African-American homosexual. Even ten-year-olds get the picture, according to curator Kevin Sipp.

We must suppose they also get the picture in terms of Harris' paintings that deal with the pathology of continuing white racism and the different pathology of the violence-ridden culture that Harris encountered among his students and that he considers a particularly dysfunctional response to diminished economic circumstances. (I'm using this ludicrously highfalutin language for a reason, if only for Brecht's good old "Verfremdungseffekt," q.v. on Wikipedia.)

Sipp suggests that the pathological legacy of Jim Crow lingers in part because the United States has never squarely confronted the topic, but rather attempted to deal with this or that individual aspect of the problem. Distorted versions of self-awareness would be a side effect, from gangsta culture to homophobia, but for different reasons having to do with how prestige is established. In other present-day macho American subcultures, street cred was established until very recently by getting a high-powered trading position at Goldman Sachs.

While I am on the subject of subcultural self-awareness, I wish I could see the new show at the Art Pavilion Zagreb, a building that is apparently an inheritance from the Hungarian Millennium Exposition of 1898 in Budapest. The Hungarians wanted to spread the wonders of Magyar culture to their subject peoples, so the pavilion was exported to the Croatian capital (then the provincial Hungarian town) of Zagreb to use for art shows.

No, actually the canny Croatians told the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary that no way were they showing up in Budapest without getting some architecture in return. And since it would have been embarrassing to have had one of the nations of the great multi-ethnic, multicultural empire turn up missing, the Hungarian authorities assented.

And now we have, as an oblique commentary on this history, a show called "Neither From Nor Towards...Did You, Upon Awakening Today, See the Future from the Still Point of the Turning World?" This must be the actual title, in English rather than translated, because the keywords are all taken verbatim from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

The show is a commentary on the heritage of illusory optimism bequeathed to us by world expositions (and we should note that one is taking place at this very moment in Shanghai...I hope to acquire a catalogue as I have done for most of the world expositions—and also the colonial expositions—from 1924 onward). The text of the "Neither From Nor Towards" press release says it all:

"The histories of world exhibitions are scripts for reading the histories of the world, revealing the global economic, political, ideological and power relations of an era, beneath their usual optimistic glow highlighting utopian visions and glorious prospects for the 'future of mankind.'

"The exhibition recalls not the structure or 'intent' of the world fair exhibitions, but what is left of the ghosts of their proclaimed belief in mankind and its future. Situated in the historicist art pavilion, exchanged between Budapest and Zagreb at the turn of the last century, it reflects the relations of histories of architecture, photography and the ideology of exhibition with histories of power and subjugation, as well as the histories of past utopian and futurological visions, embodied in the promises of architecture and technology. It wonders if it is possible today, after an era of identity politics and fragmented narratives, to see the world 'as a whole' and simultaneously question the very idea of the wholeness as one belonging to the Western imagination related to the ideas surrounding modernity, progress and colonial equations."

So is it possible to view the world as a whole in an era when we can't even view the history of the United States as a whole, as witness the divergent responses of different generations (if not ethnicities) to "Incendiary Exposure"? Good question, and Croatia has its own much-disputed ethnic histories to worry about, or, rather, to try not to think too much about. For when people think too much about them in the wrong way, bullets start flying.

If anyone can elucidate the image from "Neither From Nor Towards" with which this essay begins, I'd appreciate it. I have the feeling that the images by Morgan and Harris will be similarly opaque to the Croatians, although they might get Harris' The Greatest Fear, a race-reversed antebellum plantation scene set on the front lawn of the White House. Gone With the Wind was popular in the war-torn Balkans to the point of being parodied by the Trio collective in a Clark-Gable-and-Vivien-Leigh postcard announcing "Everybody wants to see GONE WITH SARAJEVO—most famous movie of all time."

A Google search for that postcard, of which I own a copy, turned up nothing until I typed in different keywords (duh) after writing this essay—I have deliberately retained my not-quite-right recollection of the text, above—but it was good to discover en route that Bosnian design continues to produce hiply contemporary and ironic pieces of design in the ensuing decades of fragilely enforced peace. Trio's most famous design, incidentally, is "Enjoy Sarajevo," the 1992-1993 ripoff of the Coca-Cola logo that they joked would rescue them from besieged Sarajevo, because the Coca-Cola Company would want to put them on trial in Atlanta for copyright infringement, and that meant that the Americans would have to come arrest them and remove them from the war zone.

This has been a digressive post, but as always, digressive by design.

ends and odds

2010-06-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

The promised reviews of Atlanta exhibitions are piling up unwritten, between one thing and another that I'll reveal later.

I was reminded today that it had been a long time since I last tried to contribute to +rosebud, the design magazine edited by Ralf Herms and others out of Vienna. (I had work in number 4, "Action," and 5, "Mystery.") I discover that not only have I missed number 6, "Ideal," but number 7, "Very Funny," came out last year, featuring the world's longest joke, set in 3 point type.

No joke at all is Dominic Stevens' design for a $33,000 (at current exchange rates) environment-friendly house. The Times says that "you and I could build it," but since they didn't list a URL for the plans that he is giving away for free on the Internet and there are too many Dominic Stevens stories for me to find the right one in my spare time, I am presuming that one of the architects who reads this blog will have the details. (It would be nice to have comments from someone besides Chinese spammers.) The April 8 story appears here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article7090211.ece

I think I shall have a go at an image-heavy post about one of the exhibitions I've promised to do something about.

September Songs access, Skies Over Atlanta ditto

2010-05-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

My thanks to everyone who came to the CD launch reading for September Songs. The print version thereof, with extensive notes, is only available online via this URL:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/september-songs-twelve-poems-of-early-autumn/8435890

which can be accessed directly off my joculum.livejournal.com blog where the links seem to work, as they do not here.

Also, the "Skies Over Atlanta" installation in which I was involved along with Neil Fried, Evan Levy, and Priscilla Smith can be viewed, at least in part, in a five minute video here: http://www.rre.net

or more specifically, here: http://www.rre.net/SkysOverAtlanta.shtml

advancing slowly on all fronts

2010-05-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

There will be time later to explain a few of the things going on in Atlanta at the moment, some of which have generated a certain amount of transient admiration and some of which may yet birth other things. For now, however, I want to pay homage to The Front, a New Orleans artists' collective profiled by Paul Chan on e-flux (in an essay linked to from Inside New Orleans, whose online link was forwarded to me by D. Eric Bookhardt).

Chan's essay, which essays much larger issues regarding community and communication than I have time to rephrase here in between my other commitments, describes the New Orleans tradition of artists' collectives which predates Katrina and continues to be carried on by those artists who were part of the scene before Katrina and continued to insist upon the survival of the N.O. art scene after it. The Front, whose website is www.nolafront.org, is one of the more intriguing of these, although you wouldn't know it from this extraordinarily lame post.

Trust me enough to navigate to http://e-flux.com/journal/view/144 for Chan's remarks. Bookhardt also has an appealing interview with Patti Smith in the current issue of Inside New Orleans at http://www.insidenola.org

meetings with remarkable men and women, semi-revised

2010-04-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote an anecdote-filled essay at the time of learning about my Nexus Award back in January, intended to allow me to mention all the people I thought were equally deserving of having been one of the two first recipients thereof.

A good many of the anecdotes turned out, on second reading, to be less entertaining than I had thought. I rewrote the piece as an expanded acceptance speech accordingly, only to learn that I had five minutes for remarks in what turned out to be a ten- or twelve-minute speech. Back to the delete key, plus rewrite.

A number of people wanted a permanent record of what I said, but a good many remarks were extemporaneous. The following is more or less the script from which I deviated.

Meetings With Remarkable Women and Men: A Retrospective Look at My Life in Art (and the Standard Rhetorical Reverse)

Jerry Cullum

The Atlanta art world, to which I have now devoted an entire quarter-century, is a curious place. It is a place where the vast majority of participants, whether working artists, alternative-space directors, art show organizers, or working art writers, are expected to do what they do after they have got done earning a living doing something else. This week I am in the final stages of co-creating a site-specific installation in a former church building adjacent to this weekend's Inman Park Festival with Neil Fried, Evan Levy, Priscilla Smith, and a few helpers, none of whom are receiving any more financial reward for doing it than the i45 gallery owners who sponsored it are for having had the idea in the first place. Like the much-appreciated patrons who form the boards of our nonprofits, and like the unsalaried staff of the smaller nonprofits, they are trying to make things happen in the artworld in between their paying gigs.

I feel very privileged that for more than twenty years both my day job and my freelance nights-and-weekends job involved writing about and editing other people's writing about over a thousand such self-sacrificing individuals, plus a few museum shows when somebody else didn't already have that slot covered. Now that the print media's arts coverage has dwindled and I no longer derive any significant income from art writing, I find I can't break the habit of writing about artists and keeping up with what they do. But at this point, the digital world pays no one for such services.

The new dispensation isn't a completely radical departure; it was standard practice for the curator and/or catalogue essayist to donate the promised fee as matching funds for the grant money. Today we continue to have independent art centers and art reviewing websites in which the only money changing hands goes to the landlord or the internet service provider.

But without them, and without this city's more adventurous owners of commercial galleries, our artworld would be little more than a subset of interior design. Adventurous designers also deserve to be celebrated, incidentally. Almost as much as architects, they take risks that are sometimes compensated by nothing more than professional recognition.

I hear complaints about our poverty mentality, but if we waited for compensation before we did anything, this would be a much more culturally impoverished city.

If I am one of the two initial recipients of this award, it is only because somebody had to go first, and I'm glad it happened to me because I need a platform to market my collaborative electronic-music CD with Dick Robinson that will be launched on May 20 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, not to mention my other....uhhhhhhhhhhhh no, on second thought I think I'll leave that for some other time. That is what e-mail lists are for. Sorry, I don't twitter if I can help it.

Seriously, I do want to blow my own horn for the remainder of these all too un-brief remarks, by recounting my past art exploits in a way that will let me name some of the remarkable men and women with whom I have worked over the years, many of whom cannot be here tonight because they could not afford the forty dollar admission fee.

In the mid-1970s, freshly Ph.D’d and with few prospects in a recessionary economy, I joined Harriette Grissom in creating the letterpress-based Omnivore Press chapbook series. The linoleum print I cut for one chapbook cover was my first-ever work of visual art (experiments in Chinese brush painting were the second and third).

Though I had been friends with artists ever since college, I never expected to be writing about art except as a subset of the history of consciousness. In 1984, however, Art Papers editor Xenia Zed succeeded in convincing me that it was possible for me to write about art that didn't yet possess secondary source materials. Feeling that anyone who produced such critical commentaries ought himself to be subject to critique, I began to produce art myself again shortly afterward, in both conceptual and traditional media.

I also found myself guest-editing two special issues of Art Papers and assisting Robert Cheatham in interviewing Jacques Derrida, but that is another story. Robert Cheatham can tell it in his own time.

Soon after that I found myself curating my first gallery show (a shout-out here to Lynn Loftin), and not long after that, on the recommendation of Virginia Warren Smith, I began writing freelance reviews for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. At about the same time, Evan Levy made it possible for the artists' group we had organized to present an alternative-space show on the top floor of the IBM Tower. It was the first of many opportunities to learn how few resources and how much effort it required to produce amazing results that would create momentary excitement and no lasting impact. (Ask the surviving members of the Mattress Group.)

Somehow, the doubtful advantages of an interdisciplinary Ph.D. led to a productive life on the margins, and eventually I co-curated with Tina Dunkley a show of Atlanta artists that traveled to European venues during the Olympic year of 1996. (Gilla Juette's grass-roots efforts made that one possible. I also assisted with Gilla’s international artist program, which brought to Atlanta, among others, the artist who was the Republic of Georgia’s representative in that year’s Venice Biennale (thanks to Cay Sophie Rabinowitz). Mamuka interacted brilliantly with the members of Neil Fried’s Railroad Earth collaborative, who co-hosted the monthly Artists in Residence International art and performance events then, and who have now revived Artists in Residence International for new events beginning this very weekend with the "Skies Over Atlanta" installation at 580 Euclid Avenue during the Inman Park Festival, and continuing May 15 with an iron pour at Railroad Earth.)

As Xenia Zed once put it, Atlanta artists and curators and critics can spend their whole lives emerging. But the advantages of the margin included the fact that at the time, things that would have been impossible in a more hierarchically organized scene could be produced on minimal budgets with volunteer labor.

I did what I could to interpret that condition (and to overcome its limitations), and in my spare time curated shows for Georgia State University (thank you, Teri Williams, for co-organizing and nearly killing yourself with work in the process), Agnes Scott (thank you, Lisa Alembik, for doing the same), the Artists in Georgia exhibition in Savannah, and so on.

I insisted, and still insist, that the only way to understand a local scene was to place it in the context of the challenges experienced by comparable scenes elsewhere (a concept once known as "international regionalism" and now not known as anything at all, as far as I know). This was what led to the two or three international trips of my career that were not self-financed. (The dirty little secret is that art writers don't get travel budgets, and are barred by conflict of interest rules from accepting press junkets. The redoubtable African-American artist Mildred Thompson got both of us to Berlin on an independent reporting trip in December 1989, courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.)

That was the decade or so when I was donating my full-time services to Art Papers. After I had got done circa 1997 with such editorial adventures as translating a Gerardo Mosquera essay with edits done via a dicey international phone connection, I left the editorial decisions to my superiors and devoted myself almost exclusively to analyzing and reviewing the local, Atlanta having by then spawned almost too many galleries for anyone to visit all the openings. (But I tried, most recently courtesy of rides with friends like Carole Lawrence and Shawn Marie Story.)

There have been too many incidental enterprises to mention without trying your patience. Rhode Fraser and I inaugurated a video series that lasted for only one incarnation. Carol LaFayette made me star and scriptwriter of a video of our own.

I was always going to look for a standard-issue job someday instead of cobbling together a living from bits and pieces, but as I have now said three times, bits and pieces are how most artists and intellectuals of my generation have always gotten by in Atlanta. Besides, there were always things that needed to be done, and no one else immediately visible to do them. Now there are, and not a minute too soon.

In memoriam Purvis Young

2010-04-21T06:50:00.001-07:00

I don't ordinarily post about topics that hundreds of other people are posting about, but I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of the Miami vernacular artist Purvis Young.

109 works from the Rubell Collection were donated a couple of years ago to Morehouse College's African American Hall of Fame to form the largest permanent installation of Young's works anywhere in the world. (http://www.morehouse.edu:16080/youngcollection/index.html)

Before that, Atlanta had had a unique role in Young's growing global fame: Young had done site-specific work at Mark Karelson's folk art gallery (since closed as Karelson went on to become gallery director of Mason Murer Fine Art) and been one of the major artists of the 1996 Cultural Olympiad exhibition "Souls Grown Deep," and of the two-volume work of the same title published subsequently. Skot Foreman Fine Art later exhibited Young's work extensively in Atlanta, and in New York following the gallery's relocation.

Young represented a new generation of urban vernacular artists whose work was simultaneously informed by art history and an integral part of his Overtown community.
Others will write more comprehensive obituaries and homages, but as one who wrote about Young more than once at an earlier stage of his career, I feel compelled to offer this all-too-preliminary reflection.

What Is Art, Anyway? IRWIN Answers With Hugo Ball's Reply at the Cabaret Voltaire

2010-04-19T10:09:00.003-07:00

"What Is Art Hugo Ball" is an exhibition by IRWIN at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich which was scheduled to open on April 20.

Methodius Zlatanov, depicted here, is the Metropolitan for the United States and Canada of the Macedonian Orthodox Church. I have no idea whether he actually read from his "Die Energie des Unaussprechbaren: Gebete für H.B." I must presume that my readership will recognize the famous photograph of Hugo Ball reading at the Cabaret Voltaire, which he is holding in lieu of a more traditional icon such as the thoroughly customary ones on the iconostasis behind him. (I shall refrain from exegesis of the functions of the icon in Eastern Christianity.)

I'm hoping to track down more details on all of this because Hugo Ball's eventual embrace of Byzantine Christianity as well as Dadaism and IRWIN's dryly witty and paradoxical repetition of moments of modernism are both topics with which I have been intimately involved since I began my career as an art critic.

N.S.K. passports were issued during IRWIN's visit to the Atlanta Olympics, and many of my colleagues are passport holders of the first state in time rather than space. I have been a fan of N.S.K., IRWIN, and Slovenia for many years now though I am highly unlikely ever to encounter any of them again in whatever future remains to me.

It is curious that this exhibition should appear at just this moment in time.

The German original of the more or less translated document below can be found at http://www.cabaretvoltaire.ch/aktuell/aktuell.php?ID=179

What is art Hugo Ball

The Slovenian artist group IRWIN presents the exhibition "What is Art Hugo Ball" dealing with with Ball's book, "Byzantine Christianity" and illuminated with a Dada Byzantine Orthodox Gnosticism.

IRWIN was called at its founding in the early 80's Rrose Irwin Sélavy, marking their relation to the work of the most radical and most famous representative of Dada, Marcel Duchamp. IRWIN is working with selected and existing images - symbols, figures and compositions - on a similar principle to the one with which Duchamp dealt with the cylinder dryer, the urinal basin or the front wheel of a bicycle. The hallmark of IRWIN are sedate large frames in which they present works that are often not by themselves. One such work is the famous icon of Suprematism, the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1913). IRWIN explores with him the function of art, using icons that are not only images but also ritual instruments. They have now reached the founders of Dada and say: What is art with Hugo Ball. Hugo Ball and his "Byzantine Christianity" connects IRWIN to the Orthodox icon and gives Dada the same function as the icon as Hugo Ball understood this, as a Gnostic experience.

At the opening of the exhibition "What is art Hugo Ball" the Orthodox Christian Metropolitan of Macedonia, Bishop Methodius Zlatanov, travels to Zürich to read poems from his series: "The energy of the unspeakable: Prayer for HB."

Pandra Williams: An Experiment Succeeds at Kiang Gallery

2010-04-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

Pandra Williams, Radicis, 2010
Installation consisting mainly of solar panels, battery bank, microprocessor, 465 l.e.d. lights, laminated mulberry paper, hand-built porcelain objects

•

Please contemplate the images at left, borrowed from the relevant page on the Kiang Gallery website, http://www.kiang-gallery.com/artists/williams/index.html (which will change soon enough, in the nature of changing exhibitions).

The piece will be installed through May 1, but I have been unable to revisit the gallery during its Thursday - Saturday days of operation, and haven't been able to focus my attention sufficiently to do justice to this remarkable artwork in a style that would be suitable either for burnaway.org or for artscriticatl.com.

So I am throwing in the towel and typing words straight off the top of my head on Counterforces.

The LED lights, powered by the solar panels on the roof, blink off and on in a variety of rhythms derived from mathematical relationships that have a long and arcane history. A real review would delve into that history (the relationships, which are found in universes of discourse ranging from yoga to evolutionary biology, are merely summarized below). It would then discuss how brilliantly Williams has united the perennial themes of history and nature, nature and culture, biology and mathematics, the underpinnings of our material world and how human beings have interpreted and analyzed those underpinnings. It's all right here.

That the sculptural shell of Radicis is made from mulberry paper and thin porcelain is a material wonder in and of itself. The interplay of highly traditional craft media—here used to create an object that is indisputably a contemporary sculpture—with a highly contemporary combination of solar-powered batteries and LED-light patterns controlled by a microprocessor: well, that imaginative mix and the question of the customary genres that the work productively violates—those two issues deserve extended analytical reflection just by themselves.

The fact that these traditional and contemporary media are shaped into the form of a branching tree suggests the need for another few thousand words on Radicis' implicit combination of literal and symbolic meanings, and the amount of theory and history that has gone into the making of this piece. ("Radicis," as anybody who took Latin in high school knows, is a genitive that means "of the root." But this is root and branch at once. And the forms along the stems are not fruits, but analogues for types of organisms situated on the great tree of life...see Williams' quoted statement, below.)

The problem for me is, it's all too much. The sheer quantity of issues requires extended reflection, condensation—nobody really wants to read something of New York Review of Books length in a simple exhibition review—and an adroit prose style, so as to produce a readable yet adequate review of something so incredibly ambitious and complex.

As with "Folium Darwinii" last month, the challenge is more than I can face at this particular moment. These are pathetically preliminary and offhand prolegomena to any future review of Radicis.

Instead of a review, this is an unambivalently emphatic heads-up for reviewers and viewers to make maximum use of this month of April and get to Kiang sometime during their hours of operation. (Thursday - Friday 11 - 5 pm, Saturday 12 - 5 pm).

Here is Williams' summation of the various cycles at play in Radicis. Please note that her programming of the cycles combines a knowledge of the current state of research into human physiology and the psychological reactions that stem from that physiology; a quotation of the basic rhythms of breath in traditional yoga; and the fabled Fibonacci series reflected in the structure of so many forms in nature.

Thus Pandra Williams:

"Short summary of the 4 light cadences in Radicis:

"Cadence #1 is a 'steady state.' I assigned steady state to the root forms, as plants and trees are constantly interchanging the food materials they produce with other organisms.

"Cadences 2 & 3 were tied to human body rhythms in part to control the impact of the Radicis environment on its viewers. If the cadences were too frenetic, the mood of the piece would be very different.

"Cadence #2 is an 8 beat cycle, timed to a pranayama breath cycle. This yogic breath cycle tends to induce a calm, alpha state. The objects signifying single celled symbiotic organisms were assigned this cadence.

"Cadence #3 is a 4 beat cycle, timed to a regular daily breathing pattern. This is an everyday, beta state, breathing cycle. The objects signifying either single celled predatory (plant eating) or parasitic organisms were assigned this cadence.

"Cadence #4 is a small section of the Fibonacci number sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55... Fibonacci series are commonly found occurring in biological structures such as pine cones, sunflower heads, fern fronds, etc. This number sequence is also closely tied to the golden means, or golden ratio, an algorithm also commonly found in biological structures. This number series was assigned to objects signifying multicellular, complex organisms.

"The higher up in the sequence, the closer two consecutive 'Fibonacci numbers' of the sequence divided by each other will approach the golden ratio (approximately 1 : 1.618 or 0.618 : 1)."

Why this extraordinary sculpture has not been the only topic of recent art conversation in the city of Atlanta, I have no idea. Go see it. Go write about it.

I wish I could. But I can't. Someday, maybe.

—Jerry Cullum

Annunciations After the Fact

2010-03-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

So Celeste Miller's splendiferously ambitious "The Annunciation...Sort of: Mary Says No" is history, having gotten, so far as I can tell, no reviews during its run.

It deserves more of a review than anyone who didn't take notes could give it, combining as it does alternate takes on our multiverse of discourse, from feminist readings of Mary's laundry-folding condition in Nazareth to a remarkable evocation of the wonderfully lovely and ambiguous history of the Apparition of the Virgin in the water-stained windows of a Clearwater, Florida office building (an image shattered eventually by a troubled slingshot-bearing boy) to explorations of the paradoxes involved in the notion of a divine nature outside of time and continuing all the way to strategies of parthenogenesis in nature and to Charles Darwin's dicta in The Origin of Species, the other primary text for this performance alongside the Gospel of Luke. "Did Mary have volition? Dictionary: define 'volition.'" Change partners; Gabriel ponders the laws of salesmanship and wonders if Mary will buy a vacuum cleaner from him if he lingers long enough in the world of time and learns his lessons well enough. Mary ponders the alternatives to her outright rejection of the original offer. They do not include vacuum cleaners, either.

And Mary of Nazareth in this alternate no-saying option of the multiverse can reach the age of ninety without the burden of knowing that the act of redemption for which she suffered will someday engender wars and inquisitions.

If the offer were of knowledge instead? if Mary were to become a different revealer of this universe, the only one in which we can live, in our one-at-a-time-ness? Gabriel considers the annunciation as the proclamation of discovery, the revealing of a new vision of earth and history. He has been sent off by God to learn about time from Charles Darwin, but as he announces disconsolately, "He refused to see me."

And the dance goes on. And the text and the recitation, improvised and memorized, also. The original text. The performers, and their choices. Mary says, and will say....

We live in a single history of the world, or we think we do. But there is more than one history of the world. And in this city, in this time, in this history, what things slip away almost unnoticed, because they do not suit our tidy categories?

Will we understand, ever, even, what it means to ask if we have the knowledge of our choices?

Well, you won't get the answers from the reviews, because they don't exist. Nor from this curious verbal outbursting.

There is some question as to whether you will even get the question. As though there were only one.

As though how the question were asked would not help determine the universe in which the answer would begin to make any sense.

You had to be there. But who outside the longtime circle of followers could know?

We live in a time bereft of messengers, on a very mundane level.

Paradise and Its Transformations

2010-03-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

Paradise: Somewhere Between Lost and Found, as Always

Stephen Dupont at Jack Bell Gallery, London

Jerry Cullum

The purpose (or one purpose) of art is to wake us up, but it seldom wakes us up according to art historical or curatorial schedules. Like the patch of yellow in the View of Delft that alters Bergotte’s consciousness in Proust, art always communicates more (or less) than the maker of the art intended. All art is relational art, but it is the audience that provides the majority of the long-term content; the artist provides the catalyst, via an immense amount of craft and imagination.

Stephen Dupont’s photographs from 21st century Papua New Guinea are a provocative catalyst indeed, but I shall not address them directly. This is not a review, for I have not seen the exhibition itself.

Works of art such as Dupont’s serve to remind us of just how many countries there are that seldom or never send representatives to more than regionally specific biennials (or to residence in the world’s art capitals, which is usually a prerequisite for representing one’s country in the global biennials). They also seldom generate world-changing events, and until they do, we tend to know about them only through the equivalent of high-class travelers’ tales—when we know about them at all.

Given the number of microstates generated by the accidents of colonialism, such countries cover a substantial part of the world’s surface (albeit as islands in the midst of oceans) and may now constitute close to a majority in the United Nations.

Papua New Guinea is no microstate, given its occupancy of the eastern half of one of the world’s larger islands plus adjacent archipelagoes. Given its proximity to Indonesia and Australia, it is anything but isolated from global currents. Yet most artworld habitués outside of Australia and the Pacific are likely to know it only from college courses in cultural anthropology.

My first contribution to newspaper (rather than art magazine) reviewing dealt with “The Art of New Guinea,” a Georgia State University exhibition drawn from the personal collection of Atlanta artist Michael Murrell. I delivered the standard thousand-cultures-and-languages now-an-independent-country spiel as a way of getting into the discussion of Sepik and Highlands art and personal decoration. There was no room to do much more. (Murrell hadn’t traveled to the Asmat, so the West Papua issue didn’t arise.)

I had gotten deeply interested in the politics, economics, and art of Papua New Guinea during the mid-70s run-up to independence, and was happy to revisit the topic thirteen years later. I knew a fair amount about the paradoxes of the place; the highlands that hosted the tribal sing-sings that were such a tourist draw were also a place of smallholder coffee farms, which had brought relative prosperity to some of the individuals who annually changed out of t-shirts and khaki shorts and into traditional sing-sing regalia. The birds of paradise whose feathers were used for the costumes could now be hunted with shotguns, according to one commonplace. The standard journalistic contrast that followed such observations usually cited the traditional communal houses along the Sepik River versus the gleaming multi-story architecture of Port Moresby, usually with the note that there was no way of getting from one to the other except by airplane or, in the case of the Sepik, thoroughly versatile boat.

I was fascinated by the fact that the national airline Air Niugini’s in-flight magazine was called Paradise. The title was suggested by the association of PNG with the aforementioned birds of paradise, which had gotten their name centuries earlier when the legless condition of the skins sold by traders suggested the myth that the birds soared eternally in the skies of Eden.

PNG’s major brand of export beer also promoted itself as “the beer of Paradise,” and a decade or so after Murrell’s show I duly included one of its magazine ads in my own Georgia State University exhibition, “Paradise and Its Transformations.”

But Paradise as mythic topic goes hand in hand with Fall and Expulsion. Reading the updated Lonely Planet guide to PNG at the time of Murrell’s show, I noted that once-recommended idyllic spots on the fringes of urban areas were now regarded as off limits to lone travelers because they were frequented by the local “raskols.”

I had previously been aware of the existence of a PNG urban gang culture that derived its visual style from the sources that gave birth to such films as The Harder They Come. Until I received word of Stephen Dupont’s show at Jack Bell Gallery, I had no idea that raskol culture had not only survived into the 21st century but had helped to gain Port Moresby a reputation as one of the most dangerous capital cities on earth.

The reasons cited in online sources are standard-issue: as the urban magnet for the displaced and disaffected of every one of the country’s subsistence-economy regions, the city has an unemployment rate of sixty per cent. Insufficient revenue has led to the effective abandonment of a few of the handsome buildings bequeathed to the government at independence, and the resultant migratory quality of some government ministries is said to be symptomatic of far more consequential financial shortfalls.

The commonplaces regarding the country have shifted without tourists outside the region paying much attention. And indeed, there seems to be little enough reason to do so for most visitors; urban areas hold only eighteen per cent of the population, and the Sepik River of the tourists and anthropologists is very far away. A perusal of on-site blogs (one discontinued due to inconsistent availability of broadband) reveals that even the volcano-devastated town of Rabaul seems to be rebuilding with some placidity. (Lonely Planet also remarks that "gritty" Port Moresby's reported problems are somewhat exaggerated.)

Stephen Dupont’s “Raskols” and “Sing Sing” portraits, viewable online as well as at Jack Bell, provide an abbreviated symbolism for PNG’s present-day stresses. The sing-sings, colorful tribal get-togethers that were begun fifty or sixty years ago at the encouragement of Australian administrators as a means of cohesion among rival groups, remain popular tourist attractions as well as genuine local social events. (Think Mardi Gras…these are not like the familiar rituals that are revived whenever a tour group shows up to pay for them.) The raskols are better thought of as a tourist anti-attraction. Dupont gained access to both. (Last year the Highlands were reported as inadvisable for tourists due to renewed inter-tribal conflict...and yet the 2009 Goroka Show went on without incident after financial issues caused its near-cancellation; see http://www.trupela.com/2009/09/13/more-photos-goroka-show-2009/. The same site reports a November 2009 clash "between two rival clans from the Upper Asaro area over the ownership of a Coffee Plantation" and offers video documentation of the robbery by raskols of a Madang computer store in October 2009. The details of both stories are instructive. Without Dupont's show, it wouldn't have occurred to me to follow the links leading to this remarkable in-country online source.)

Dupont’s striking documentary portraiture doesn’t give us a total picture of today’s PNG, any more than Vermeer’s patch of yellow gave Bergotte a total view of Delft. It does, just like the symbol as cited a generation ago by Paul Ricoeur, give rise to thought—and to productive investigation. I am en route to renewing my long-distance acquaintance with a complex and massively changing country.

those of you who write about 1930s design....

2010-03-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have decided to post a possible writing opportunity (and possible press trip with editorial guarantee of publication) on the joculum blog where my diverse readership seems more consistently into the non-contemporary and the well nigh traditional re-read in an untraditional sense. joculum.livejournal.com

palimpsests

2010-03-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

Palimpsest Projects of All Sorts

There is in fact in Atlanta at the moment a Palimpsest Project designed to approach history through fiction, to allow the revelation of past layers through the productively distorting lenses of a present buffered by imagined narrative. There will be a time to consider this one at length. But for the moment I want to write about layerings and palimpsests in general, and someplace else.

Anyone who has been reading me for any length of time knows that I am fascinated by restorations that go awry, adaptations that aren’t quite, and in general things that are not what they seem, even or especially when they try oh so seriously to be exactly that.

It is a model for the self that we inherited from Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud alike, those figures of nineteenth century modernism whose models of the psyche bespoke the era from which they sprang—whether they intended it or not.

It is also a model of postmodernity, a now-dated term that I like to keep using because modernity was such an identifiable project that anything that came after it was indisputably “post-.” And since the postmodern was irredeemably plural and plurisignative, the twists and turns of the contemporary since the heyday of the postmodern have remained, irresistibly, postmodern, even if it is no longer cool to call them that. Contemporaraneity takes place under the sign of the aftermodern; the altermodern is somewhere else and something else, no matter what Nicolas Bourriaud may think.

As with all overlapping epochs, there are still quintessentially modern and modernist moments in contemporary history, and I hope to write about one of them in a subsequent Counterforces post—or, rather, to write about the story I wish I were capable of telling, which is a typically postmodernist take on a modernist tale of historical restoration and homage to the failed determination of a previous generation. But let that pass.

Back when my own palimpsest had considerably fewer overlays and erasures, I wrote in Art Papers about the Spanish monastery in Miami, Florida: a medieval cloister, disassembled for transport to the Hearst mansion and then hopelessly jumbled when its packing straw was burned to prevent the transmission of hoof and mouth disease. “The world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle” was eventually put together, sort of, in Miami as a tourist attraction that only partially resembled its lost original, and is currently both a not-quite-museum and an Episcopal church.

That is a different kind of palimpsest of history from the exquisite piece of medieval architecture of central Germany that turns out to be a completely reconstructed replica of a building that itself was actually a Wilhelmine replica of medieval architectural fashions. It is also not the same as the Margaret Mitchell House that was twice reconstructed in the wake of arson and today serves as a center for contemporary literature that contains the apartment in which Gone With the Wind was written, in which it is uncertain what, if anything, is original. These two are instructively variant reconstructions, belonging to the same species as “This is my grandfather’s hammer. My father broke the handle and put on a new one. I broke the head and put on a new one. This is my grandfather’s hammer.”

It is, as I wrote in Counterforces a while ago, fascinating that the palimpsest of the imagined and the real that is symbolized and summarized by and in the Margaret Mitchell House should now exist in proximity to the Millennium Gate’s faultless mix of reproduced-Roman and plate-glass-Parthenon architecture. The blend is brilliant, and as fine a tribute to the irresistible acids of postmodernity as the Ikea store in the complex to which it forms a point of entry. As I wrote in that truncated essay, when the Millennium Gate is combined with the statues of Peace and Justice whose pedestals already look like they have been restored after a conflict, it constitutes the filling in of a niche of architectural history that had been missing because of the South’s postbellum poverty. Atlanta did get, and later barely preserved, the neo-Egyptian and neo-Orientalist Masonic syncretism of the Fox Theatre; now, thanks to the Millennium Gate, Atlanta has a neo or creatively alternative version of the Greco-Roman triumphal-arch syncretism it didn’t get.

What occasioned this particular chain of reflection was a press release from Bénédictine liqueur regarding the art exhibition they are staging in honor of the liqueur’s 500th anniversary. It is a more multi-layered tale than one might expect.

Curator Ami Barak’s exhibition of work by Yves Klein, Wim Delvoye, Davide Balula, Richard Fauguet and others is apparently focused on an alchemical metaphor, with the unexpected and distinctive transformations of material in these artists’ assemblages being considered parallel to the transmutation of Bénédictine’s 27 herb-and-spice ingredients into the unique liqueur of which the integrity is reported to have been maintained over the course of five centuries.

Apart from the contents of the exhibition, which runs from May 13 through October 17, the building in which it is being held is already a metaphor of creative transmutations of history.

The Bénédictine Palais (so the press release names it, though one might think it is the Benedictine Palace or the Palais Bénédictine) in Fécamp has nothing to do with the Benedictine order in which Dom Bernardo Vincelli created the liqueur in 1510. The monks passed the recipe down through the generations in Fécamp until 1789, when the Revolution sent them fleeing from the country. How the recipe was discovered by Alexandre Le Grand in 1863 would be worth discussing, were it not for the more immediately relevant fact that what the industrialist did with it is a model of proto-postmodernity in the heart of the nineteenth century's moment of the high modern. (The company website reports that Le Grand found the formula in a “book of spells” acquired for a private library in 1791 and thereafter forgotten.)

Le Grand persuaded the Benedictine order to allow him to use their name commercially, in exchange for royalties. (The preceding words are borrowed verbatim from the press release.) He registered the brand as a trademark, designed a label, and the rest is history.

After that, things really get interesting. Circa 1888, give or take a reconstruction after a catastrophic fire, Le Grand erected the Bénédictine Palais in Fécamp. The press release describes this building as “Le Grand’s ultimate marketing tool, a modern building with a 16th century feel, completely dedicated to his beloved spirit.” It’s the sole distillery for the liqueur. It is also home to the Le Grand family’s collection of religious artifacts from the 13th century onward, plus a library of a thousand volumes dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Since 1998, it has also been a gallery for contemporary art, in spaces previously used as industrial bays. It has hosted 70 or so exhibitions that included such figures as Niki de Saint-Phalle and Andy Warhol.

The liqueur has its own mystique without the hybrid history and architecture of the building…I’m sure the description can be found online readily enough, including the fact that only three people know the secret formula at any one time (I omit the obvious reference). But it is the Palais that caught my attention.

As much as other buildings I have discussed, the Palais was clearly created to fill in a gap. I am curious as to what became of the Fécamp monastery after 1789*, but even a secularized medieval building, had it survived, would scarcely be appropriate for the production of a liqueur in 1864…even though the monastery presumably housed a distillery of some sort or another prior to its dissolution.

Thus we got a Palais that looks authentically 16th century but is authentically of its 19th-century industrial day. And that, plus the juxtaposition of Klein and Delvoye in the same exhibition, is enough for me.

*An innocuous press release, on which the draft of this was based, often leads into thickets of Wikipedia entries. We learn if we are persistent that the abbey church survives in the city (but the entry is vague as to details) and that Fécamp was noted for miraculous doings: “According to legend, the trunk of a fig tree carrying the Precious Blood of Christ collected by Joseph of Arimathea was washed ashore on the riverbank at Fécamp in the 1st century. Immediately, a fountain of Holy Blood gushed from the site and the relic quickly attracted many pilgrims, enhancing the reputation of the city. The name ‘Fécamp’ was artificially connected with this legend by monks: Fici-campus, the camp of the fig tree.” A church associated with the Precious Relic still exists in Fécamp, which shrine apparently was unconnected with the Benedictine monastery. The “ruined buildings of the Benedictine abbey” are mentioned in conjunction with the Bénédictine Palais, so apparently there was some effort on Le Grand’s part to build on the original site.

If so, the Palais would be a literal as well as a metaphoric palimpsest. But I have traced this particular palimpsest as far as I am going to.
.

and if you're passing through Valenciennes this Friday....

2010-03-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

The retrospective of the work of the late Mildred Thompson that opened a year ago in Düren, Germany continues in Valenciennes, France, though only her semisculptural wall pieces will be exhibited (the one illustrated here is from the Düren exhibition):

March 12, 2010 6 p.m., opening

Place: Galerie Laquarium, 6 rue Ferrand, 59300 Valenciennes

Falling Through the Cracks: "Folium darwinii" at the Seen Gallery, Decatur, through March 17

2010-03-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

One of the many pitfalls of transitional art reviewing in metro Atlanta is that shows presenting a certain number of practical and conceptual challenges tend to slip by unreviewed.

"Folium darwinii" is an exceptionally interesting portfolio of prints produced in 2009 for the Darwin bicentenary by Asheville Book Works and the Atlanta Printmakers Studio. My attempt to photograph the individual works failed dismally and insofar as I can determine from a quick survey of websites, the actual pieces are not reproduced online.

The works range from an attractively ambitious timeline with portraits to allegories of the voyage of the Beagle to an evocatively lyrical nightscape. The whole portfolio holds its own against other Darwin homages from the bicentennial year, and deserves the kind of reflectively critical review that I have found myself unable to write for a wide variety of reasons.

Apparently no one else was able to write one, either. As one might expect from a collaboration that was based on a call for entries from two membership organizations, some of the contributions are more conceptually inspired than others, but none are unworthy of consideration. In a less disordered art critical universe than the one we currently inhabit, "Folium darwinii" would have gotten its due, even if that due would have included some moments of negative critique.

In the year 2009, in the American South, the simple collaboration on an homage to Charles Darwin, using traditional printmaking media for contemporary critical purposes, was a political act as well as an artistic intervention. It should have stirred at least a little conversation.

But first somebody would have had to have found the time and the mental energy to discuss the individual pieces in some depth, evaluating their successes and failures and asking whether any of them delivered a successfully complex message as well as an aesthetically pleasing homage to the author of The Origin of Species.

And this, for many reasons, I was unable to do. Given competing needs and the brief time remaining before the close of the exhibition, I am assuming that no one else will feel inclined to do so, either.

If they do, I hope they find it easier to produce acceptable photographs of the artwork.

Limitless horizons, or museum illusions, with theremin

2010-02-07T07:42:00.001-08:00

The Roman playwright Terence (I think) is famous for his “Homo sum; puto nihil humanum alienum a me.” Kwame Anthony Appiah points out that this Family of Man type of saying, “I’m a human being; I don’t think anything human is alien from me” is followed up with the line that therefore “if I think you’re right, I’ll leave you alone; if I think you’re wrong, I’ll endeavor to set you right.”

But those of us who never feel completely at home in any situation are painfully aware of the problem of communicating across cultural boundaries, including the communities we actually live in, and of the particular difficulties of ever “being right.”

So imagine my surprise the other weekend when I dropped by Agnes Scott College’s art gallery to take another look at “Limitless,” and found myself in the midst of what appeared to be a tour group of retirees from Eastern Europe. I imagined how the tour guide must be challenged with explaining Didi Dunphy’s padded see-saws, E. K. Huckaby’s deliberately distressed paintings and Department of Dysiatrics, Klimchak’s theremin and homemade musical instruments, and Martha Whittington’s erasing machine, where its origins in a Leonardo da Vinci design would be the easy part of the explanation.

Actually, the group was as sophisticated as you would expect a tour group from somewhere in the former Soviet bloc to be, one of them asking to be reminded if the theremin wasn’t invented by a Russian “twenty, thirty years in the last century” (meaning the 1920s-1930s), and another taking enormous pleasure in Huckaby’s not-so-Southern Gothic sensibilities and asking how to get in touch with the artist.

I was tremendously worried, though, as to what they would think of Joe Peragine’s huge, allegorical diorama of a military invasion, a commentary on the tidied-up world of history dioramas in general. Peragine mixes historical era and levels of skill, emphasizing the artificiality of the diorama genre by using unpainted cardboard cutouts in the foreground, more convincingly painted ship models behind those, and a large background painting continuing the theme of overwhelming seapower, with fleets of B52-like bombers massed in formation overhead.

It’s a complex commentary on how we perceive the messiness of history through a romanticized filter. (The luridly sentimentalized colors of the backdrop refer to Peragine’s previous series of paintings exploring this topic.) I suspected that all the retirees would see was a vivid reminder of the Wehrmacht rolling across the plains of Ukraine and Byelorussia or blitzing the cities of the Russian Front.

And I was right. They said through their translator that this reminded them of things they had seen in the Second World War, and one wanted to know if this represented a specific battle. So the work required some explanation of the place of artifice in the representation of history and how combining successive generations of military hardware and levels of sophistication in the representation meant that…well, actually, gallery director Lisa Alembik and I made no such remarks. She did talk about museums and how they tidy up history with adorable miniatures when the original was a big, horrible in-your-face reality. This latter fact, these folks remembered very well.

When I asked where they were from, there was a debate about how to describe “a country that no longer exists,” and the translator settled on, specifically not Russia, but “the former Soviet Union.” (From the discussion I began to wonder if they were from two or three adjacent former Soviet republics; one of the younger members of the group, perhaps even from the immediate postwar generation, introduced herself in English as being from Leningrad.)

In any case, I suspect their country was indeed still the Soviet Union when most of them left it to come live in metro Atlanta. I once learned from the daughter of a post-WW2 Russian émigré that many members of the postwar emigration never completely mastered English even after decades of living as almost the only foreigners in the smaller cities that accepted them. Later generations of émigrés would presumably have faced even greater challenges of adopting a very different language later in their lives.

The young translator, whether out of incomprehension of my question (but not because of any lack of fluency) or unwillingness to discuss it further, would say no more than these were part of a local adult day care program that arranged day excursions. “Adult day care” might be taken to imply some degree of impairment, but the only obstacle these folks were facing was a need for company and a lack of fluency in the English language.

So I felt I had had an instructive day trip, myself. Just when you think you have gotten to know all the diverse communities in this very multicultural burg, another one confronts you with a challenge of translation in more ways than one. I once wrote about the challenges of writing art reviews just tailored for audiences aged eighteen to eighty who shared historic U.S. ethnicities; throw in not just the rest of the United States but the rest of the planet, and—well, there you have it. On the internet, but not only on the internet, the world is already here. (But the whole world is not watching, and that too is part of the problem.)

But the Truth Is Simple

2010-02-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

I suppose that since Image Not Available didn't reach a level beyond the standard Collector's Discount on Listed Retail at the auction, I ought to play the art version of Seinfeld's soup Nazi: "No private artist's statement for you!"

The physical portion of the work can be viewed here: http://joculum.livejournal.com/243961.html#cutid1

As is stated there (and as wasn't actually visible at the auction, either), the words "image not available" are hand-printed in gloss on the seemingly blank matte white canvas. The object on the square canvas below it is a small branch coated with acrylic gesso, so it isn't an image any more than the words about lack of an image. It's the real thing.

The art historical precursors are pretty obvious (Malevich, Ad R., Magritte, Yves Klein, Tino Sehgal), beginning with witnesses to an invisible spirituality and ending with purveyors of invisible zones of commerce. The bluntly commercial offer made in the poorly written artist's statement framed above the painting(s) has now been carried out.

The presence of the material question, however, does not negate the question of the spiritual. What we don't see, don't notice, or deny is even there remains a presence and a problem just as much as the fact that the words that elucidate this mystery are invisible in all but the most unusual of lighting conditions. (I did manage to photograph them, more or less. But only the word "not" is legible.)

It's Complicated

2010-02-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

It’s Complicated; or, And Now for a Completely Gratuitous Moment of Unconcealed Self-Promotion

Jerry Cullum

The retail value of Image Not Available as listed online for the 11th Annual Art Papers Auction (www.artpapers.org) is for the artwork illustrated only. The originally listed retail value, not amenable to automated formats, was “It’s complicated.”

As set forth in a framed artist’s statement, which should appear above the artwork on the wall and which has been added free of charge as an additional incentive for bidding, the shape of the final artwork will be determined by the final purchase price and by factors to be determined by the artist.

The "value" of the final artwork is thus a variable function of the final auction sale price.

If and only if the price and other concealed but arguably rational factors make the gesture appropriate, the artist will provide an explanatory text that completes the artwork, for the purchaser’s exclusive use and enjoyment. If any of the unstated conditions are not met, the artist reserves the right not to provide such text, or to make such text publicly available to any such persons as he deems fit. The definition of “arguably rational factors” shall be determined by the artist and not by the purchaser and need not be disclosed upon delivery of the artwork. Image rights to the nonverbal components of Image Not Available are to be made publicly available to all potential users for noncommercial and scholarly purposes by Creative Commons license, or something like that that meets the actual requirements of legally binding description of availability.

I just thought y’all ought to know.

If a spoilsport Buys It Now, you won’t get to go through all this fun. The Complimentary Framed Statement will be yours to keep in any case along with the original artwork, to avoid pointless legal proceedings. Rights to the text of the Complimentary Framed Statement, including the production of subsequent limited or unlimited editions of said Statement, are retained by the artist for his sole use and for any such purposes as he deems fit. Purchaser may quote said text under current laws governing Fair Use.

How Not to Write Art Reviews in 2010 (Never Mind that I Claim the Contrary Herein)

2010-01-31T08:10:00.000-08:00

For every art review in which I have taken pleasure or have enjoyed writing, there is probably one I either regret painfully, or suffered miserably to write, or both. There is seldom enough time to do it right, either in terms of thought or back-story research, and finding short cuts becomes essential, in spite of what my old Austrian professor said in a doctoral seminar about stopping and learning a whole new academic discipline if that is what it takes to do it right. (Deadlines won't allow it, and one can't always beg off on grounds of lack of information.) On the other hand, the late Gregor Sebba also said things like "Always look for something that does not fit when you begin to approach a topic. That is often the key to understanding the whole work of art because that is the problem the artist could not quite resolve." I forgot this recently when omitting mention of something that had annoyed me as an anomaly; it was indeed the key to the whole exhibition.

There is seldom enough time to do it right no matter how much leisure time we carve out to devote to the project, and the digital age has even more factors militating against a considered judgment than the print era ever did. The need for speed has made snap judgers out of us all, as many a person who hit "send" has reflected a moment or two later.

Blogs at least allow for a slight and mutilated piece of reflection that does not pretend to definitive status (only to the status of, say, the Oracle at Delphi).

I wrote the fragment below a number of days ago, then circulated it to see if it warranted expansion, but have decided, in the absence of sufficient feedback on the subject, that it began as a blog post and should remain one in exactly the form in which it was originally written. It contains an obscure private joke that I wager no one will read closely enough to ask me about. Here 'tis:

Crying over Neil Gaiman’s Cat: or, How to Write Art Reviews in 2010

Jerry Cullum

I once managed to upset a gallery owner who had long begged for a “critical review” by pondering why one of her best artists made so many charming paintings of children playing on the seashore when an edgily unhappy-looking female nude, hung way in the back of the gallery, showed there were more things going on in her head than that.

A few days ago, I was led by a blog post to look at Neil Gaiman’s story of one of his cats that got trapped in the depths of a newly installed bathroom, which had to be torn apart to rescue the cat. We learned from the back story that the cat is blind, has been diagnosed with an inoperable tumor, and has an irresistibly odd cry that does not resemble a meow.

Put that way, the story almost makes us giggle from discomfort at the emotional buttons it pushes. Set forth as Gaiman recounted it, it was almost impossible not to burst into tears, even for those who have always enjoyed the joke that the internet was invented to transmit pictures of cats.

The two stories are related. I wrote in the review that life is hard, and people have the right to buy pictures that make them feel better when they get home, whether those pictures be children playing by the seashore, baskets of kittens, fields of wildflowers, sexually arousing figure studies, or snarky pictures of blood dripping from skulls and daggers, or patterns of exact geometry or atmospheric swirls of contrasting or complementary colors. The problem was how people went about evaluating the aesthetic qualities of what made them feel happier, and whether the art writer could modify what made art audiences feel happier by writing about what made this a good or bad example of art.

We cry, if we do, over Gaiman’s cat because we identify with primary processes: the desires that date from before we had words to talk about them; desires such as a love of softness and warmth, of certain kinds of food, of being accepted unconditionally and held close or left alone as we found preferable, of communicating our needs just as we chose and having the needs met in general. Those needs and desires, and our rages at the world’s failure to meet them, get carried on into our adult lives, as we all know. Today, people seem to derive great pleasure in reverting to toddlerhood in dozens of different ways, usually while being self-congratulatory at the quality of their grown-up responses.

So how do we disentangle our primary processes, the stuff we got in toddlerhood, from the pleasures and methods of making judgments that we acquire later on: the things that happen to us as we get polite social behavior beaten into us, and as we begin to figure out how to create our own distinct versions of what our society or our peer group would prefer that we do instead of what we would really like to be doing?

I have suggested that there are good and bad ways of making almost any type of art. (I am sure there is some type I can’t conceive of that is so pre-infantile, so unreflectively “not even wrong” that it is inevitably, intrinsically bad. There definitely is, at the opposite extreme, a species of conceptual art that makes failure or badness impossible, because to imagine anything at all that obeys its rules is to make a successful and ipso facto profoundly illuminating piece of art. Potato.)

Given the different types of people that we are and the different types of experiences that made us who we are, from skateboarders to sedentary readers, Orthodox monks to hedge fund managers to gang members to poets and devotees of Salvador Dali, it may be almost impossible to make the same people enjoy diametrically opposed types of art.

The most we can hope for is that we can explain why a given example of a type of art is a good or bad example of its kind, and explain who it is intended to address, and whether this mode of address comes with inbuilt difficulties. (It is possible to take a photograph of a kitten that does not evoke the “awwwww” response, for example, but there are major psychological hurdles to be overcome, just as it is difficult but not at all impossible to make a work of graffiti art or its precursor genres of psychedelia that does not simply evoke the “oh, wow” response.)

There is much more to be said on this topic, but that’s as far as I can push this before showing up for my day job.

Paul Jones, in memoriam...this is a first inadequate sketch, with apologies for the sketchiness

2010-01-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

I may yet post the autobiographical sketch I had promised Klimchak I would put up in this space (basically, it recounts all the people I have worked with who have equal claim to the Nexus Award, but somebody had to be shoved through the door first, and I am grateful to be one of the two inaugural recipients).

However, I cannot in good conscience say anything about myself at the moment when we all ought to be remembering the immense contributions (in more ways than one) of Paul Jones, the influential African-American collector of whose death some of us have just now learned.

I wrote more than once about exhibitions of the Paul Jones Collection, and was constantly astounded at his ability to extend recognition to emerging artists even while acquiring enough signature or unusual works by recognized figures to create not one creditable collection of African-American art, but two or more (considering that large parts of the collection were divided between two universities in Delaware and Alabama, and I presume he didn't stop acquiring work in his last years, though he and I lost touch with one another).

Since URL links drive me crazy, especially when they don't work, here is the basic text from the WSB website to which Judy Kuniansky so kindly directed us via the artnews listserv:

ATLANTA -- Paul R. Jones, a collector of African-American art who donated troves of works to universities in Delaware and Alabama, has died. He was 81.

Jones died in Atlanta on Tuesday after a brief illness, said University of Alabama spokeswoman Angie Estes. The university established an art collection in Jones' name after receiving some 1,700 pieces valued at $5 million in 2008.

Despite humble beginnings in Alabama and never independently wealthy, Jones began buying pieces in the 1960s after noting African-American art was underrepresented in public galleries.

As the drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and other works grew into the hundreds, part of his collection was exhibited at the University of Delaware in 1993. He later made a gift of several hundred works to the school.

"My goal has been to incorporate African-American art into American art," he told The Tuscaloosa News in 2008 when he made his donation to the University of Alabama with a plan for it to be part of the curriculum.

News from Lodz, or, And Now for Something Completely Different

2010-01-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

This comes courtesy of one of my LiveJournal Friends on joculum (where, by the way, I have just posted notice of a forthcoming book of poems by Derek Walcott that painters, at least, will enjoy). I am not sure whether any of my readership is old-school academic enough to be submitting paper proposals to anything, but if so or even if not, you might enjoy knowing that Lodz (or Lódz´, which is as close as this interface will let me type the proper Polish orthography) was the center of the pre-WW2 Polish avant-garde and is the European City of Culture for 2016, just to contextualize this a (very) little:

The Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz
is happy to announce
that an academic conference in cultural studies

Monty Python in Its British
and International Cultural Contexts
or:
How to recognise the Spanish Inquisition
from quite a long way away

will take place in Lodz on 28 - 29 October 2010

The suggested areas for discussion will include:
- Monty Python’s humour
- the language of Monty Python
- the visual poetics of Monty Python programmes and films
- Monty Python and the British tradition of humour
- Monty Python and the idea of Britishness
- Monty Python and stereotypes
- cultural subversion and iconoclasm
- Monty Python and counterculture
- The postmodern contexts for Monty Python
- The influence of Monty Python on British/international culture
- The reception of Monty Python abroad (in Poland and elsewhere)

The conference will take place in the University of Lodz Conference Centre.
The conference fee is 70 € for foreign scholars and 200 PLN for Polish scholars.

The reviewed selection of essays following the conference will be published.
Abstracts ca. 300 words will be sent by 30 April 2010 to:
mpconference@gmail.com

The organizers of the conference are
Prof. Jerzy Jarniewicz
and
Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, PhD

new book on Pam Longobardi's project on ocean refuse published

2010-01-26T09:42:00.001-08:00

Those who have followed Pam Longobardi's project of making sculpture from vast quantities of plastic detritus salvaged from the world's ocean beaches will be pleased to learn that Charta (Milan & NY) has published a book devoted to the body of work, $29.95. Or it will be when it's published in the US in the fall; available now in Italy, and limited quantities via Longobardi's website, http://www.pamlongobardi.com.

As a matter of full disclosure, I have not seen a copy of this but it is my practice to pass along information in lieu of reviews from time to time, especially when I have seen examples of the work with which the book deals.

the things one learns messing around academic biographies

2010-01-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

Perusing Jeffrey Kripal's bio on the Rice University website (in conjunction with the issues I have raised in three years' worth of essays on my other blog), I have belatedly discovered that Rice University Press is fully engaged with the digital era, publishing rigorously edited peer-reviewed academic titles that are available for reading online or for purchase as an on-demand hard copy. They include at least two titles on problems of art history and intellectual-property rights in the age of digital reproduction.

At least some people are entering the twenty-first century without an undue amount of flouncing and hand-wringing. Even though I am the ultimate print-oriented late adopter, I am always excited to see an academic institution that has figured out how to use appropriate technology:

http://ricepress.rice.edu/

bourgeois hen excrement! or, news from the neglected world

2010-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Through the excellent e-artnow.org media service, I have been apprised of the work of Kosova artist Petrit Halilaj, who divides his time between his hometown of Runik and various bigger locales, including, in the past couple of years, group exhibitions in Istanbul and Berlin and other European cities. His current show is on his native turf, in the capital city Prishtina.

But wherever Halilaj's artwork travels, a differently repeated thematic installation is They Are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens, a migratory or displaced troupe of seeming would-be space travelers whose coop looks like the remnants of some unsuspected cargo cult for domesticated fowl.

The traveling chickens form an essential source of art materials for some of Halilaj's drawings, the ones described as consisting of "ink and hen excrements on paper."

This is certainly not all there is to Halilaj's oeuvre, as a brief perusal of the appropriate websites makes plain. See, for a bio, http://www.chert-berlin.com/ita/artisti.asp?id=34&subsezione=bibliografia

His work is, overall, an exploration of those realms of displacement, derision, and deliberate humiliation that have been the unchosen fields of play for many, many artists of the world's narrower margins. Outside the safe havens of the unwarring parts of the world, irony is often a habit born of necessity. It remains a habit long after the immediate crisis has been replaced by the luxury of contemplation and, as Halilaj's bio puts it, "research."

And that makes Halilaj's work a splendid topic for this 2010 relaunch of Counterforces, which in 2009 fully deserved the contempt that eggtooth expressed for it in his "Worst of Atlanta" list.

We are all of us lucky to be bourgeois hens. Though, as the guide from Mount Analogue says to Father Sogol's expedition in René Daumal's Mount Analogue, "If a hen doesn't lay eggs at the appropriate time, what becomes of it?"

If any of my readers happen to be passing through Kosova, the show is up at Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina through February 6th.

endings, beginnings, and things that remain

2009-12-31T07:52:00.000-08:00

I pass along the following because it relates differently to the theme of the exhibition at Connexion Gallery (see my earlier post, and their website where photographs of the exhibition are now available: http://counterforces.blogspot.com/2009/12/connections.html) on reuse, refiguration, and sustainability. It is, however, a quite different inflection of the set of topics.

"From: The Center for the Study of the End of Things [mailto:director@endofthings.org]
Sent: Wed 12/30/09 11:30 PM
Subject: February 5, 2010: The Center for the Study of the End of Things

To Whom It May Concern:

The Center for the Study of the End of Things, a creative organization
affiliated with the the McIntire Department of Art at the University
of Virginia, will be holding its Inaugural Symposium on February 5,
2010. The venue is a vacant 10,000+ square foot building in
Charlottesville, VA, which will be demolished shortly after the
exhibition. We are seeking work from a wide variety of disciplines,
including painting, film, drawing, sound, sculpture, architecture, and
printmaking, in addition to collecting found objects of natural and
mechanical origin. Our Call for Submissions, and the Application Form,
are available on our website (http://endofthings.org). Please forward
this information on to anyone that might be interested. A flyer
summarizing the event is attached. The submission deadline is January
25, 2010.

Milholen + Williams, Co-Curators
The Center for the Study of the End of Things
http://endofthings.org

Tahir Shah, Meet Bruce High Quality

2009-12-16T08:50:00.001-08:00

This is one of those crossover posts that ought to be worked out in detail but almost certainly will never be properly upgraded. I had originally thought to post it to my joculum.livejournal blog, where the readership is more familiar with the context. But the readers of Counterforces will know more about the art issues.

There have been a growing number of crossover fictions gaining popularity in the artworld in recent years. An artist was invented and memorialized in a UK-published biography with illustrations, with both artist and artworks a complete fiction (the paintings did actually exist, though in the era of digital reproduction this was no longer an absolute necessity). This came a bit after a feature story in, I think, Esquire that profiled an unaccountably unrecognized younger actress who was unrecognized because Esquire had made her up. These exercises in documentary fictions have since been succeeded by a variety of made-up artists, though one needs to go back to Smile magazine and Karen Eliot and many other precursors to do this properly. Claire Fontaine and the Bruce High Quality Foundation are examples of currently popular artworld collectives using the concept of the fictionalized biography as a vehicle for collaborative endeavors (so it would be particularly appropriate to revisit the Karen Eliot model, but life is short).

Now, it so happens that the father of writer Tahir Shah engaged in a certain number of collaborative fictions of his own over the years, involving made-up characters. He used some of them as a test for would-be devotees of his thought: one anthology of writings was handed to an academic in America for publication, and when the academic published the entire collection verbatim, it was reportedly pointed out to him that the essays were internally contradictory, and that anyone taking all of them at face value was failing to absorb the specific lessons that were the whole point of the materials' overt content. The volume appeared under a different title in a much-diminished mass-market version later on, and there is still some question as to the intent behind what was included and omitted from that rendition.

So it comes as less than a complete surprise that earlier this year Tahir Shah (who is best known most recently for The Caliph's House,, which has done for Casablanca what Peter Mayle did for Provence) announced that he was in the midst of writing a novel based on the life of the forgotten Edwardian adventurer Hannibal Fogg, under the working title Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man.

Well, actually, the novel-in-progress came as a surprise. What was ultimately less surprising was that Hannibal Fogg proved to be even more elusive a character than the website of the Hannibal Fogg Society promised. Within a very short time indeed, researchers had determined that this individual whose works were supposedly suppressed for political reasons (though the Society had recovered many and recently begun to post them online) appeared to be a complete fiction inserted into online discourse only a matter of weeks earlier. Trails of site registrations and Wikipedia entries appeared to lead back to names associated with Tahir Shah.

Now, anyone familiar with the biographies of Percy Fawcett and Roger Casement, among others, could perceive a suspicious similarity between elements of Fogg's story and theirs. And of course, the echo of the name of Jules Verne's Phineas Fogg seemed a bit too good to be true. The titles of Fogg's suppressed books seemed to smell of a send-up, and Fogg's prose style in the online extracts seemed a trifle anomalous for someone writing a century ago. So it isn't surprising that searchers were on the case immediately.

What's curious and yet to be determined is where to place this incident in the realm of online hoaxes (which the evidence thus far—assuming we can take the evidence at face value—appears to suggest that it is).

People reading the texts on the site of the Bruce High Quality Foundation with its slogan "Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions." do not take the foundation's declarations at face value. It is understood that artists' collectives have intentions and uses of online resources that do not coincide with the goals of historical research. But the BHQF has gone out of its way to make itself ineligible for a Wikipedia entry (by declaring that all the media reports have "misrepresented" it and by producing fact-subverting reportage), rather than inserting a fictional Wikipedia biography of the late sculptor Bruce High Quality.

So is Tahir Shah following in his footsteps of his trickster father or creating a less successful version of this young collective that has now found its way into the 2010 Whitney Biennial (BHQF's success thus proving that ridicule of artworld pretensions is sometimes as much of a path to fame as the more standard career-building route is)?

Ought we to be discussing Tahir Shah's literary gambit in the context of hoaxes, history of religions, or interdisciplinary artmaking? You tell me.

I Grew Up There. I'm Entitled.

2009-12-08T08:37:00.000-08:00

For reasons on which I shall not speculate, the publication that pays my salary has received a review copy of Gary R. Libby's Reflections: Paintings of Florida 1865-1965 from the Collection of Cici and Hyatt Brown published by the Museum of Arts and Sciences of Daytona Beach. Since I grew up in Sanford and remain interested in the inadequately studied history of art in the various regions that have been regarded as "picturesque," I am choosing to write about the book even though it wasn't sent to me and I can't keep this copy for reference.

Private collections are sometimes singularly illuminating when the topic is inadequately represented in public ones. And the imaginative response to the geography of Florida by visual artists is a distinct subtopic of art history that deserves greater analysis, as this book's essays indicate more in passing than in detail.

As the introductory essay points out, from the moment that Silver Springs became a tourist attraction in 1878(!), tourists were on the lookout for high-grade souvenirs as well as the familiar kitsch that has been the subject of any number of popular-culture and material-studies volumes (as I've indicated in past essays about books that I wished I owned from the press of Florida's state universities). Hence a good many creditable landscape paintings (a long way from being kitsch in themselves) were produced for sale to upscale visitors.

But above and beyond that, the spectacles of virgin nature and the agricultural ambiance of large parts of the state made for an exoticism that was attractive to artists in and of itself. Very few of these painters were regional; far more were sometime visitors themselves, and at least one of them, who shall go unnamed, produced an appallingly stereotyped work in response to his visit.

The intriguing thing is that so many of the others got beyond the most obvious stereotypes. There aren't exactly any social-critique paintings in this collection, but there's a painting of one of the distinguished elders of the African-American town of Eatonville (hometown of Zora Neale Hurston) by Jules André Smith, a visitor who stayed and established the Research Studio of Maitland, where he played host to any number of visiting artists, including Milton Avery.

None of this adds up to an unfairly forgotten chapter of global art history, except insofar as it is now possible to realize that global art history has many more chapters than the abridged edition would lead us to believe. Waldo Pierce's painting of himself hunting sharks with Ernest Hemingway is just one more reminder that no matter how exaggerated the mental images of the Sunshine State may be, the reality usually exceeds them.

Connections

2009-12-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

Zamila Karimi & Magdalena Bach operate Connexion Design Studio in Dunwoody, Georgia as a design and architecture firm and as a gallery that aims to bring together a variety of academic disciplines and artists from different cultures to address contemporary problems and issues.

"LESS IS MORE 2010" is an attempt at reflection on "sustainability and simplicity" that comes at the topic from a variety of unexpected viewpoints. A dulcimer is made from wood salvaged from the renovation of a historic home in Atlanta. An exquisitely modernist house is constructed to cutting-edge environmental standards while fulfilling some of the most extravagant dreams of modernist utopianism. A design studio in Athens (Georgia) creates a simple, elegant unit for cigarette disposal that adds beauty to the urban streetscape, is easy to maintain, and difficult to misuse for any other than its intended purpose.

As usual I find it difficult to write about the show in this format, hence am withholding names of the makers of the few selected outstanding examples I've cited above: there are too many others who deserve recognition. There are artists so emerging as to be virtually unknown, and artists who have been the subject of feature stories in art magazines (including the one that pays for my health insurance).

The basic premise of the exhibition is given on the gallery website:
http://connexiongallery-studio.com/connexion/gallery/gallery_currentShows.asp

Given the technical challenges met and overcome with skill, intelligence, and an unfailing sense of aesthetic integrity, the show serves as a confirmation of the long-neglected slogan "Be realistic. Demand the impossible."

submitted for your approval

2009-12-07T06:52:00.000-08:00

There are far more readers of burnaway.org than of Counterforces, but since the two audiences do not entirely overlap I recommend, highly, Karen Tauches' review of the documentary photographs of Oraien Catledge, or more accurately art photographs combined with documentation, as one would expect from someone with Catledge's background:

http://burnaway.org/2009/11/oraien-catledge-at-opal-gallery/#more-9663

Catledge, self-trained as a photographer, established close personal relations with the residents of the former mill town neighborhood of Cabbagetown, now one of Atlanta's gentrified neighborhoods. The former mill workers and their families whom Catledge photographed in the 1980s have been fully displaced and dispersed, and it would be desirable for another equally sensitive photographer to follow up on their stories. (Catledge kept complete records of names, ages, et cetera, and stayed in touch with many of his subjects until recent years.)

But for now, it is enough to view the show at Opal Gallery (or read Tauches' review of it) and to know that Catledge's body of work and documentation will eventually be preserved in museum archives in Mississippi (Atlanta institutions having shown no interest) and that an ample selection of his oeuvre will be published with commentary in a book scheduled to appear in August 2010.

essays that will never be written (as usual)

2009-12-07T06:23:00.000-08:00

Henry Adams' Tom and Jack is a brilliant, provocative re-reading of the mentor-student relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, based on the premise that Benton retained more of his modernist beginnings than is generally thought, and communicated the formal lessons of his modernist phase to Pollock in the way he taught figurative painting and representation.

The forgotten school of Synchromism is key to this interpretation, based on theories of color that, strictly speaking, are not true.

But there are moments in which untruths are more central to artmaking than conventional truths.

Looking at a few essays in Roger Shattuck's book from some decades ago The Innocent Eye in conjunction with Michael Taussig's new What Color Is the Sacred? I am left with the feeling that there are provocative juxtapositions to be made.

But I am not likely to be the one who makes them.

As the Year of Astronomy Comes to a Close (Who Knew?): An Exhibition at the Atlanta Airport

2009-11-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

"Everything and the Space Between Everything," curated by Katherine Marbury and Lisa Alembik, is an exhibition in the Atrium Gallery of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. I seem to have dropped off the Airport Art Program's media list again (or possibly simply overlooked the e-mail), but the redoubtable Lisa Alembik posted the essentials on the artnews listserv today. With the informality that the blog format permits, I am here reproducing a work by Alejandro Aguilera along with word that the show exists, and the bare minimum of recognition, a list of its splendid roster of artists:

Alejandro Aguilera
Larry Anderson
Linda Armstrong
Don Cooper
Pam Longobardi
Yanique Norman
Joe Peragine
Vicki Ragan
Paul Rodecker
Nell Ruby
Richard Sudden
Lisa Tuttle
Caomin Xie

Do I have any idea of the exact content or appearance of this homage to the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic observations? No. But now that I am aware of its existence I hope to make my way there on MARTA. If I cannot travel anywhere for budgetary reasons, I can at least view the art that a good many other travelers will have the option of seeing en route to their destinations throughout the world.

last minutes and never at alls

2009-11-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

I am delighted that the estimable Robert Cheatham has called our attention to the blog of architectural theorist Lebbeus Woods, who has been revisiting highlights of the long-deceased architectural theory of the 1980s. Of particular interest is his post on the Rem Koolhaas design for Paris' legendary Parc de la Villette, a five-layer project that was passed over in favor of Bernard Tschumi's fabled collaboration with Jacques Derrida:
http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/another-rem/

I have decided it is time to make public my post on the Millennium Gate in Atlanta, which I consider one of the most significant pieces of postmodern creativity of the early twenty-first century, the filling in of the gaps left by history, by the absence of projects that, like Koolhaas's Parc de la Villette, should have been constructed but were not, or were never even imagined in their rightful time.

Whether I do that or not, I am chagrined that I have been unable to write a decent review of an eminently viewable show at the Millennium Gate Museum, major works from the Bank of America's collection of American Impressionism. George Bellows' Old Farmyard, Toodleums alone would be worth the rather hefty price of admission:

The exhibition closes on December 6. There are more familiar, signature works by the major figures of American Impressionism, but as always I am attracted most strongly to the works by lesser known figures or the works in a style not always associated with the more famous artists.

Thus I make no judgments as to the art historical adequacy of the collection, though it seems that Bank of America has made judicious acquisitions. All I can say is that I'm glad "Transcending Vision" has been here lo these many months, and I offer apologies for not having said so much earlier. I was working on a four-part essay on hybridity, cross-cultural stereotypes, and other topics not immediately thought of when the topic of American Impressionism arises, not to mention the Millennium Gate.

But all that will have to wait, since the show is on the verge of closing. Fragments of the essay in question already exist on this blog, but I am not about to make things easy for the merely curious by cross-referencing them.

but wait, there's more

2009-11-22T07:36:00.001-08:00

However, my remarks on Sarah Hobbs' visually involving and humorously cerebral approach to assorted psychological syndromes will have to wait for another time. The show just opened at Solomon Projects and will be getting immense amounts of publicity so my disinclination to put myself out there prematurely (or at all) should be no great loss.

Unless I'm just covering the mirror with origami butterflies as in "Denial."

if you can't say something intelligent, don't say anything at all. not a maxim to be obeyed in certain cases

2009-11-22T07:17:00.000-08:00

Monica Cook's show is on the verge of closing at Marcia Wood Gallery (November 28, to be exact) and it needs even more analytical study than it has thus far received.

The newest works in Cook's oeuvre are far more complex than I can tackle at this point, indeed obscurely Swiftian in her tangles of slender and corpulent naked females...though the one shown with lilliputian figures is anything but a feminine version of Lemuel Gulliver. Thomasine Bradford, thou should'st be living at this hour. But you're not, and whether Drs. McClintock and/or Richmond will step forward, or a number of other writers I can think of, I am far from certain. Dr. Cullum makes no hypothesis.

The sheer allure of painterly renderings of physical texture in Cook's depiction of naked women entangled in tentacles or smeared with glorious foodstuffs is another matter. This is a Freudian feast of material celebration, probably going in directions I am not qualified to pursue beyond the triumph of painting involved.

Cook is, in some ways, accomplishing in painting a continuation of the incipient investigations that the too-early-gone Helen Chadwick accomplished in photography. I still recall vividly my sense of astonished shock at the encounter with "Of Mutability" produced in 1986, and my pleased feeling of discomfiture at all of Chadwick's subsequent studies of bodily limits and art based on bodily emissions (which, so far, Cook has approached only symbolically).

Views of "Monica Cook: Seeded and Soiled" are currently available at http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/ and the works themselves are, as I have remarked, on view through November 28.

fyi for folks in Atlanta...or those few who still read this blog, anyway

2009-11-17T06:50:00.000-08:00

Another year having gone by without a completely satisfactory solution to communicating art information to the various non-overlapping art audiences in metro Atlanta (despite the best efforts of the several online sources to remedy the situation), I am once again volunteering to put out the basic info re the first-weekend-in-December sale by the artists' studios in the Little Five Points Community Center. Perhaps someone will read it who shops at studio sales.

Tom Meyer's bio is deserving of quotation (as his photos are deserving of acquisition, but that accolade would go for any of the artists in the studio sales): "T.W. Meyer: 'I have been using a camera seriously since about 1976. I am a geezer. A geezer/hipster. Charming, capricious in word and harmless in deed, prone to solitary activity but witty and gregarious at a party (lala!). Boringly trusted by women young and old, a harmless flirt free of embarrassing ulterior motives (apparently).' www.twmeyerphoto.com, twmeyer.com and on Facebook (Tom Meyer)"

- - - - -

Four Euclid Arts Collective Studios, Ten Local Artists

Hold Holiday Open Studio Tour & Art Sale 1st Weekend in December

at Little 5 Points Community Center in Inman Park

Studio 102, Studio 204, Studio 207 & “Kitchen” Studio

Fri, Dec 4th, 7-9 pm; Sat, Dec 5th, 10 am – 4 pm; Sun, Dec 6th, 12 - 4pm

EAC artists Michelle Jordan of Studio 102, Chantal Gadd & Carla House of Studio 204, Henry Leonard of Studio 207 and TW Meyer of the ‘Kitchen” Studio will open their studio doors to the public and display their work along with several local guest artists, including Cathryn P. Cooper, Yvonne Dauria, Susan McCracken, Becky Sizemore and Christine Stanton.

Come tour four separate working art studios, meet local artists, and view a wide variety of artwork, including ceramic sculpture, watercolor and oil paintings, fiber & acrylic on canvas and other mixed media, photography, paper collage, gourd vessels, hand-made glass beads, ornaments, bookmarks, jewelry, stained glass and hand-woven wearables.

Free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Michelle Jordan at (404)759-0851 or michelle@jordanclaystudio.com

comments to come re Frank Hunter's photos

2009-11-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

It seems appropriate on Friday the Thirteenth to reflect on the ill luck attending Frank Hunter's current show at Thomas Deans; a very distinguished guest (distinguished, so obviously it was not me) came by at the one moment when an emergency resulted in the gallery being closed for a brief period; the photos themselves, which take the platinum-palladium print medium firmly into the contemporary moment, lose their impact almost entirely when rendered in tiny low-res format online (but for those who know how to see, they can be viewed on the Thomas Deans and Company website).

Fortunately, the "Iowa Signs" series will be on the walls through Thanksgiving, but they need contextualization both in terms of art history (the compositions are more reminiscent of historic etchings than of contemporary photographs, in spite of being night shots of illuminated billboards) and in terms of scale: the image of a billboard silhouetted in its own lights with a bolt of lightning arcing horizontally across the dark sky above it requires a certain size to achieve its impact. Reproduced without the richness of the platinum-palladium print and in a tiny format, the "Iowa Signs" photographs feel like the Old Master paintings reproduced on Christmas stamps.

I hope to be able to write a sensible review helping readers to see what is in the miniature images available online, and I understand that Thomas Deans is writing a few paragraphs setting the work in historical context.

The contemporary context needs to be spelled out: there is a mini-history of photographs of billboards (including Gregor Turk's color images of desolate blank billboards), and Hunter's particular camera angles that situate his billboards in dramatically lightless settings is at once realistic and surrealistic—which itself is part of a contemporary tradition. If his photographs of forests and mountain glades hark back to a nineteenth century idiom, the "Iowa Signs" reach forward towards a twenty-first century one.

multitudes and common wealth or common weal

2009-11-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Abernathy presents a mutual-aid challenge worthy of Pyotr Kropotkin at burnaway.org:
http://burnaway.org/2009/11/art-papersstephen-colbert-green-screen-challenge/#more-9368

Speaking of Kropotkin, Rebecca Solnit's new book A Paradise Built in Hell has been getting considerably thoughtful reviews, especially the one in the New York Review of Books November 5 issue. Sorry, Bill McKibbin's review is only available online to paying electronic subscribers, which even us print-subscriber-types are not:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23321

how time flies regardless of the given amount of fun you are having at any moment

2009-10-30T14:06:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the past couple of weeks I marked, or more accurately did not mark, the 25th anniversary of my first day of proofreading at Art Papers. Thank you, Xenia, though you should have been thanked back in the spring when the 25th anniversary came round for my first published piece of art criticism.

too late is not better than not at all

2009-10-17T14:02:00.001-07:00

I have been meaning to write about the problem of exhibitions that cannot be adequately represented online by images. Holle Black's just-closed show at Sandler Hudson is a case in point: the image of Alice here looks insipid if you can't see the faint drawings in pencil and the very thin lines of paint that enliven the basic composition and make it into something quite other than what this photograph only appears to reveal.

If I had had more intelligible notes earlier I might have been able to do something to rescue the situation. As it is, it is a reminder that when it comes to 72 dpi images of paintings, what you see is what you get, but is decidedly not all there is.

Since galleries cannot afford the high-tech magnifications that museums can post that show more detail than the viewer in the museum itself can see, I am not sure what the solution to this except better online art criticism.

Chi Peng at Kiang

2009-10-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

When I was an undergraduate back in the Early Pleistocene, the junior-year Asian Studies course everybody had to take included Arthur Waley's translation of Monkey, extracted from the monumental Chinese novel The Journey to the West. The novel is an episodic adventure based on the real-life journey of Hsuan Tsang (here known as Tripitaka) to India to acquire and translate the Buddhist scriptures that were lacking in China when the religion was first introduced.

This setup allowed for the invention of traveling companions and hazards that were the distant ancestors of the genres that evolved into today's Chinese action flicks.

I subsequently spent years wanting to know more about the real Hsuan Tsang (Arthur Waley's book on the topic was unavailable to me in those long-gone pre-internet days) and forgot about Monkey until my friend from college Larry Schulz translated the sequel novel The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, which had been written during the Ming Dynasty to explain how Tripitaka's ill-tempered companion the Monkey King could attain enlightenment while violating every credo of the Buddhist canon in his furious protection of the traveling monk.

This long digression explains why Larry and I are supposed to be among the discussants at 2 p.m. Saturday Oct 17 at Kiang Gallery, regarding Chi Peng's 21st-century photo update of The Journey to the West.

This much-discussed young Chinese artist has digitized satirical comments on today's journey to the West, with elaborate set-up scenarios in which Buddhist dialectics have been replaced by The Matrix (which of course is a Buddhist-inspired movie also dependent on the tropes and genre conventions of Chinese action flicks) and the internet has become the web of conditioned origination in which the commodity fetish...just as Marx said it would...no, actually, I'm writing nonsense just to be mischievous, which is much in the spirit of Chi Peng's brilliant digital and thematic manipulations.

If you've seen one, you haven't seen them all, because the visual sources that are transmuted vary from the conventions of scroll painting to the conventions of moviemaking to...well, go and see.

also not for my profit, except indirectly

2009-10-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

Those within easy driving distance should contemplate patronizing Café Cliche, in the downtown Decatur building formerly also housing Little Azio. Not only is there considerable free parking (especially now that Café Cliche, which sells pastries and sandwiches, is the building's only tenant) but the ambiance is pleasant and I am often the only customer.

A reasonably priced wi-fi spot with available seating is a terrible thing to waste.

shameless self-advertisement, but not for profit

2009-10-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Carol LaFayette's 2003 video based on my poem "Skateboarding in Sarajevo: Prelude to an Ordinary Evening in Atlanta" is finally up on YouTube after being effectively out of distribution as a DVD for a couple of years. It pleases me that on YouTube in 2009, this meditation on the 1990s war in Bosnia and the 1860s American Civil War with which Atlanta is associated via the Cyclorama and Gone With the Wind appears alongside a number of recent videos of actual peacetime skateboarding in Sarajevo, unlike the Sarajevans' skateboarding past snipers that gave my poem its title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSizqAiBYxM

Also posted at http://www.vimeo.com/6837107 where the E. K. Huckaby cover design of the limited-edition DVD is reproduced.

2009-10-03T14:11:00.001-07:00

This Museum Is My Proof: A Meditation for the Month of Atlanta Celebrates Photography

Duane Michals’ This Photograph Is My Proof was one of the quintessential postmodernist documents of the first wave of conceptually inclined picture taking.

If you recall, this 1974 photo with text asserted that the photo accompanying the impassioned scrawl was proof that things had once been “still good between us…see for yourself!” But the photo theorists taught us that maybe the whole scene was a pose, and the earnest handwritten plea might be a manipulation that is part of the whole fiction woven around what we regard as solid evidence…. (Or it might be totally the sincere outpouring of some goof for whom the photograph really is, as in the Ringo Starr song, “all I’ve got.”)

In Atlanta, Robert Stewart had gone with the other end of the proof-positive department, creating “nude self-portraits” that consisted of nothing but a block of text describing in detail the scene in front of which he was supposedly posed nude as he took the picture we could not see.

The two poles of photo-trustworthiness and storytelling in word and image ultimately spin off, in one sense, from André Breton’s photo-illustrated novel Nadja, where the photographs are certainly proof of something, but we cannot quite be sure what, even though we know the real history behind the novel (or, after the efforts of many biographers, we believe we do).

And in the fullness of decades, we got W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and his other novels in which emotionally or physically injured individuals illustrated their monologues with photographs that might or might not be genuine documents of events that might or might not have ever happened.

And this led to a spate of non-graphic novels with photographic accompaniment, from Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to Jonathan Saftan Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close …a transient trend about which I meant to write back in 2005, and, because it was a pre-blog time for me, I did not.

Now we have the fascinating example of Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel, newly translated by Maureen Freely. And Pamuk, as always with his extraordinary novels, exemplifies a trend that has scarcely even been identified as such yet.

Although regional folks including a certain guy in Tennessee were creating fictional museum displays decades before they were internationally cool, the tendency to make up documentation of non-existent events has lately become a veritable obsession.

In the case of Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, he is said to be creating an actual museum of Istanbul paraphernalia that corresponds to the museum through which his narrator is leading the reader as he tells his story.

But there are no photographs of the displays in this novel. As in Stewart’s self-portraits, words do the job.

And yet there will supposedly someday be real physical objects to look at, in Istanbul, presumably at the spot shown on the map in the novel. Pamuk already cancelled a preview exhibition at a museum in Germany thanks to delays in publication of the novel, so those of us who read news stories about such things have been waiting for this museum almost as long as the good people of Istanbul have.

News reports say it will open in 2010. In the meantime, the museum, like the novel it does not illustrate but exists alongside, constitutes the latest chapter in a long history of interchanges between images, objects, and words.

I wrote about Leanne Shapton's novel-as-illustrated-auction-catalogue earlier this year, here: http://counterforces.blogspot.com/2009/02/leanne-shapton-important-artifacts-and.html

as per request, news release re Beacon Hill studio tour reproduced below

2009-09-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

Beacon Hill Artists will celebrate the Fourth Annual Open Studio Tour
Friday, Sept 25 (5-9 pm) and Saturday, Sept 26 (3-7 pm).

Beacon Hill Artists will be celebrating the Fourth Annual Open Studio Tour
on Friday, Sept 25 (5-9 pm) and Saturday, Sept 26 (3-7 pm).

Beacon Hill Studio Artists include: Tony Greco, Sarah Collman, Rodney Grainger,
Sara Hornbacher, Ron Holt, Patty OKeefe-Hudson, Jo Peterson, Rebecca Des Marais,
and Lynne Moody.

Thanks to the City of Decatur, Georgia, which provides support to the Beacon Hill Studios, the space formerly occupied by Theatre Decatur will be available this year to display the work of 22 invited visual artists including: Photographer John Ramspott, Ceramic Sculptor Jill Ruhlman, Fabric Artist Kathy Colt, Sculptor Corinna Sephora Menshoff, Painter Helen Durant, Quilt-maker Candace Hassen, Painter/Printmaker Stephanie Kolpy, and Interactive Media Artist Hartmut Koenitz. among others. Atlanta Printmakers, Kathy Garrou, Suzy Schulz, Jerushia Graham, and Jan DiPietro will show their work and demonstrate the printmaking process

Mario Petrirena’s outdoor sculpture will be on exhibit in the open courtyard and sculptural welding demos by Corrina Sephora Mensoff will take place at times to be announced.

Food and beverage will be offered and music will be performed by various musicians throughout the open studio tour.

A video screening, curated by Sara Hornbacher, featuring artists Robin Brasington, Dan Walsh, Faith McClure, Matt Gilbert, Al Matthews, Stephanie Kolpy, Neil Fried, Monica Duncan and Hornbacher/Koenitz will take place in the Black Box Theatre for the duration of the tour.

The Fourth Annual Open Studio Tour is a special benefit for the Decatur High School Arts Program and 20% of any artwork sold will be donated to them

Suggested minimum donation at the door is $5

See website for additional information about the Beacon Hiill Studio Artists, Guest Artists and directions to the Studios www.beaconhillstudioartists.org

For further information contact:
Rodney Grainger graingerart@gmail.com 404-210-9846

2009-09-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

I now realize I never posted my philosophical statement regarding the possibility of the Counterforces blog, which should be expansive enough to range from review essays addressing global issues to shout-outs to the most local events imaginable. (Well, maybe not so far as imaginable.)

One of these would be the Sept 25 - 26 Beacon Hill Open Studios, this Beacon Hill being not the more famous one but the art studios in downtown Decatur, Georgia.

Once I get details from video artist Sara Hornbacher, I'll get round to putting up details. Better to wait until the weekend now upon us is over, anyway, to avoid confusion.

new books

2009-09-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

Most amalgams of art and science end up being neither. Art that considers itself a species of scientific investigation too often ends up being second-rate investigation or a badly metaphorized analogue of the process; and the kind of art that some working scientists create as an illustration of their process ends up, too often, as a clunky type of kitsch that does more to create aversion than understanding.

In spite of this, there have been ample numbers of collaborative ventures in the twenty-first century, many of which have actually created viewer encounters in which direct experience amplifies or concretizes the implications of experiment.

Sean Caulfield and Timothy Caulfield have edited a collection of essays, Imagining Science: Art, Science and Social Change, that asks blunt questions (not about aesthetics but about the appropriate parameters of the art-science encounter in various fields of investigation). David Garneau suggests that art and science are antithetical systems that meet productively only in a third field that embraces both, namely, ethics. (And we may remember, though Garneau doesn’t cite it, Wittgenstein’s “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”) Jim Evans puts forth a view of science and art that could be embraced by sociobiologists and anthropologists and traditional aestheticians alike, though not by a good many contemporary theorists. It is worth quoting in extenso for the sheer transgressive outrageousness of its limpid (but not limp) style: “At its essence, the purpose of art is to invest our lives with meaning. While strictly practical criteria define what is and is not science, art is not shackled by such rigid criteria; it is a pure product of the human mind and culture. Its only rules are that it must evoke emotion and resonance. The universe simply ‘is’ and science is our way of knowing it. But the universe of art is infinite, defined and limited only by the human mind. We define artistic reality, as Duchamp so elegantly demonstrated with his urinal cum art. … If, one day, we finally stumble upon differently evolved beings elsewhere in our galaxy, the idea that a Hopper painting or a Beethoven sonata will deeply touch them is as unlikely as the proposition that their fundamental laws of motion will differ from ours.”

This neatly phrased binary opposition is guaranteed to get the social constructionists up in arms, or some of them, to be more accurate. But this is because social construction isn’t adequately understood by the social constructionists. Anthropologists have increasingly discovered, for example, that aesthetics exists in societies famed for not having the concept: you don’t have to use the same word as we do to be performing a similar human activity. (Borges’ famed fable about categories for animals comes to mind: “belonging to the Emperor,” “which when viewed from a great distance look like flies,” and so on. What would be shared in that case is not the categories but the human wish to make categories for dividing up the world.)

I have to come to the defense of the sociology of knowledge on this score, since my old faves Berger and Luckmann were unfairly lumped into the camp of extreme social constructionists in John R. Searle’s recent review of Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (recent indeed; in the current New York Review of Books, Sept. 24, 2009). To assert The Social Construction of Reality as in their 1966 book isn’t to say that there is no physical reality outside of social categories; it’s to say that how we think about that reality is effectively modulated through our prior assumptions and received ideas. “Relativizing the relativizers” is the logical next step.

Searle, in fact, blunders as badly as Richard Rorty in his critique of Rorty’s phrase “Given that it pays to talk about mountains….” Searle goes on, “Why does it pay? Because there really are such things, and they existed before we had the word and they will continue to exist long after we have all died. To state the facts you have to have a vocabulary. But the facts you state with that vocabulary are not dependent on the existence or usefulness of the vocabulary.”

Well, no. Actually the relative usefulness of the vocabulary depends on how you think about the protrusions from the earth’s crust we choose to call mountains. As everyone knows (so that it seems quaint that J. H. Van Den Berg made such a big deal out of it) mountains seem to have been thought of in Europe mostly as obstacles to be overcome (even when they were spiritual and metaphoric mountains) until influential paintings and literary documents made them into sublime sights to be seen and enjoyed. Geologists may find the commonplace category “mountain” disagreeably imprecise, since it raises the issue of when a sufficiently old mountain has become worn down and soil-covered enough to count as a “very high hill.” We don’t think of the high islands of Fiji as mountain tops, even though they are; mountains, in our category of ordinary usage, have to extend far above sea level, so undersea mountains that start tens of thousands of feet in the depths are discomfiting.

But the protrusions from the planet’s crust are there, regarding of how we categorize them or think about them. The protrusions are not socially constructed. Mountains are. As every cliché-user knows, we can make mountains out of molehills if we put our minds to it.

But as we also know, the categories of contemporary scientific investigation came out of the evolution of worldviews that would make sense out of finding things out in just that way, and no other. There are ample quantities of empirical investigation in which the laws of motion or the growth and decline of mountains have been interpreted in quite different ways in spite of being descriptions of the same physical processes.

And that is why, in spite of its flaws including minor grammatical errors, we may find both instruction and delight in a new...in the U.S., still forthcoming—book that is likely to disappear very quickly.

Spike Bucklow’s The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages is the wide-ranging production of a scientifically literate writer who “prefers to avoid the modern world whenever possible.” In other words, he recognizes a chemical reaction when he sees it; he simply finds it more interesting when it occurs in the metaphysical and symbological context that the medieval artists and thinkers gave to it.

The book is likely to disappear quickly because the publisher, Marion Boyars, has declared its intention to quit business after publishing its autumn list, and so far only the top list of titles have been sold to other imprints.

One hopes that Bucklow’s book will find an ongoing distribution source, because his style is straightforward and agreeable, even if sometimes specialists may quibble with a few of his conclusions. He has done considerable homework, and his bibliography contains as many references to the Journal of Chemical Education and A Glossary of Greek Fishes as to Thomas Taylor’s translation of a Neo-Platonist life of Pythagoras and the Warburg Institute’s explorations of similar arcana.

Bucklow states his conclusions as baldly as Jim Evans states his in the previous citation, and it is worth quoting a representative passage to see his method at work: “The worlds of things and thoughts came together in recipes. Colour hovers somewhere between the two worlds and it has been approached in this book so far through its tangible sources; dyes, pigments and metals—or, in the case of the non-existent metallic blues—as if the sources were tangible. But to understand the artists’ intangible world of thoughts in more depth it is necessary to take a leap of faith. …Dragonsblood is made of the mixed, coagulated blood of dragons and elephants, This might seem unlikely but appearances can be deceptive. Unlike the non-existent metallic blues, with their apparently straightforward recipes, dragonsblood actually does exist despite its distinctly implausible recipe. One might consider the pigment’s alleged origins to be poetic packages for prosaic ingredients, instructions and rules. But the poetry is not peripheral—it is central to the traditional world view.”

It is central, yes, and it is central even to world views that also do not know their own metaphors as metaphors. I could go on to discuss Michael Taussig’s vertiginous views of anthropological topics in his relatively new What Color Is the Sacred? but this little review essay has gone on too long as it is, and I have presented preliminary remarks on that book in another location.

Suffice it to note that too recently to figure in anyone’s book, the world’s oldest textiles have been discovered, and they turn out to be woven linen threads dyed in bright colors even though they almost certainly did no more than hold together animal furs in a fashion close to the cartoonists’ vision of Early Caveman. Asked by the radio interviewer why anyone would bother to find bright dye for the world’s first version of string, the anthropologist being interviewed replied to the effect that we are color-loving creatures; given the chance, we go right to it.

And that takes us so deep into Taussig’s book, and to Bucklow’s in a different way, that I had better stop right this minute.

this should post in the position in which it was originally written, many posts down the page. good.

2009-09-15T10:11:00.001-07:00

This multi-part essay will never be completed. Leaving out the sections that follow from this (or that were supposed to follow from this), here is the untitled prologue and part one (which is sufficiently outrageous, I surmise, to make up for the absence of the remaining three parts):

“The classics can console. But not enough.”
—Derek Walcott, “Sea Grapes”

We can’t get rid of Greece and Rome, any more than we can get rid of the building of the Pyramids, the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses, or the construction of the Erie Canal. They are facts that had material and spiritual consequences, of which we are the inheritors.

But we can supplement them.

We can also re-dream our our relationship to them. Derek Walcott has produced, over the years, an immense, sophisticated literary re-imagining of what Greece and Rome might mean on an island such as St. Lucia where the benefits of “a sound colonial education” were overlaid on a place in which the very language spoken by the descendants of a slave population (and of their onetime masters, plus a few other strands of intermingled ethnic inheritance) reflects generations of European politics and of the wars of France and England.

We can’t truly get rid of our history, for it comes back to bite us even in our own tastes and our own pathological excesses. It is present in the distressingly seductive grandiloquence of Thomas Wolfe’s rhetorically Southern articulation of the theme: “…and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern because a London cutpurse went unhung.” It would be fun, albeit unproductive, to try to imagine Robert Lowell’s Puritan-haunted New England rhetoric inflecting the same theme. (Actually, we don’t have to imagine; we only need to find the correct quotation.)

Now we have, in Cathy Gere’s books The Tomb of Agamemnon and Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, the tools to re-dream our relation to the classical inheritance—or a major thread to lead us through the labyrinth, anyway.

I have already written my own review essay of sorts about these books at http://joculum.livejournal.com/219287.html and will not elaborate here except to say that Americans and Europeans have viewed the origins of Greek civilization through the distorting lenses of nineteenth through twenty-first century history, just as the Renaissance viewed them through its own perspectival distortions. It doesn’t diminish the value of the Greek and Roman inheritance to realize just how much we have selectively re-invented and re-imagined them to meet our psychological and social needs in every generation, any more than it diminishes the inheritance of the Egyptians or the Mayans. It just gives us permission to bend and twist the template, and to continue the perhaps impossible quest for comprehending the Greeks’ and Romans’ self-understanding. (How could we understand them? We do not even understand ourselves.)

Since what reaches us from the past is always already impure and distorted, we are most true to our classical inheritance when we make it our own: digital and virtual, or solidly mashed up in a remix and graffitied over by the tides of contemporary history.

So I am overjoyed, personally, by the mix-and-match juxtaposition of the classical arch of Atlanta’s Millennium Gate with Atlanta’s quintessentially modernist Ikea, on a site formerly occupied by a major steel manufacturer. There is no better way to dream the myth onward for the twenty-first century than thus to embrace our contradictions and our paradoxes. The whimsical photo posted somewhere by the Millennium Gate Museum, showing the heroic structure framed by its distinctly downhome mailbox across the multi-lane street, sums up the problem, and/or the solution.

This is not, by the way, a “transgressive” reading. That worn-out option is already so late-antique twentieth century, and so bound up with a certain kind of geeky academic snideness that is as dead and over as is the short-lived postmodern era, a period style that lasted a couple of decades instead of the couple of centuries allotted to modernity.

Since we are no longer modern or postmodern, but something else entirely, we are free to re-create our history in the present moment, secure in the knowledge that six months or six minutes from now, some snarky twitterer will be tweeting chirpily about how ridiculous it is that anyone ever thought something like that.

So let’s go for it. Or whatever argot we ought to be using to express that concept in the autumn of 2009. No one will remember, or even notice the first time round. Or we can hope that most earnestly, anyway.

A Four Part Essay in Defense of Hybridity, Inheritance, and Multiple Heritages

Part One:

I vividly recall my naïve shock on my first visit to Germany in 1996 (or, more accurately, to what had been West Germany, or the Federal Republic proper—I had seen the formally four-power-Allied-occupied Berlin of 1989, including the sector that had served for forty years as the sort-of-disputed capital of the German Democratic Republic, and revisited the once and future capital thereafter, a few months after unification).

Just as Germany’s postwar political status ended up overlaid with long-lasting leftover anomalies, the historical buildings ended up as reconstituted anomalies—sometimes rebuilt exactly as they were even though scarcely one stone had remained intact.

Even more disconcerting was the realization that certain impressive Gothic public buildings were rebuilt versions of destroyed Wilhelmine-era historical revivals—a postwar replica of a nineteenth-century reinvention of medieval architecture. (The Thirty Years War had greatly diminished the number of surviving authentically medieval structures some centuries earlier.)

So I have a soft spot in my soul for the notion of giving a city the past that it should have had but didn’t, or of updating the past, or of reproducing the past it had once but has no longer.

And despite the occasional victory with such buildings as the Fox Theatre (itself a lovely amalgam of imaginary North African and Near Eastern histories derived from Masonic allegory), Atlanta is a city that has excelled at pulling down what passes for its heritage, then sometimes (only sometimes) regretting it.

But lately I have been more fascinated with the attempt, not just to blend the historical with the contemporary—the stairs and planters from the 1895 Exposition that are meshed beautifully with the 1985 Atlanta Botanical Garden—but to create reminders of a past that never existed, but that should have. The retro lampposts of Freedom Parkway, suggesting a past history but more or less contemporaneous with the 1996 Olympics, are just one example.

The Millennium Gate arch and its flanking statuary at Atlantic Station are a more spectacular example. Considered as purpose-built entranceways to an immense mixed-use development, they would seem absurd. Considered as reminders or replicas of the past that ought to have existed but never did for various historical reasons, they look splendidly appropriate.

They are an excellent alternate history in a city that has often seemed modeled on some never-filmed sequel to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (Not for nothing did the late and much-missed Charles Huntley Nelson create an Afro-Futurist remix of Lang’s original film.)

The arch and its statuary are already en route to acquiring the patina that accumulates rapidly in an accelerated culture, as it essays to negate the change-oriented downside of that patina; in our day, wear and tear and vehicular pollution too often conspire with urban redevelopment not only to take the gloss off things, but to suggest that maybe it is time to tear them down. A once well-known example of ‘80s postmodernism is already gone, having failed to survive changing tastes, and an anonymous shopping district has replaced it. But intrinsic architectural quality has nothing to do with it: One of the city’s most distinguished and internationally recognized examples of 1980s architecture narrowly escaped demolition, or replication elsewhere as in a proposed compromise. (An early example of the work of I. M. Pei nearly suffered a similar fate, and Marcel Breuer's final architectural commission has likewise been proposed as a candidate for obliteration by the winds of change.)

So if the Millennium Gate’s insistence on the remembrance of history does no more than remind us that Scogin, Elam and Bray’s Buckhead Library is a key part of our recent historical inheritance, it will have done its job in keeping at bay the barbarians who build in styrofoam, instead of in stone, steel, and structurally solid polymers. Mack and Merrill design things worthy of the ages, but the things themselves sometimes get ripped out after a decade or two.

One might note that the Vestiges Project out of New Orleans chose to use the Buckhead Library as their base this October for their Atlanta segment. So we are making progress in terms of realizing that in our thoughtlessly throwaway society, the past we have to preserve may barely have become the past.

Now that it has a little age on it, the Millennium Gate demonstrates perfectly that our heritage is not the past that we falsely believe that we merely inherit, but rather the past that we re-interpret and re-imagine. (Witness the two architectural styles blended in the Gate, the reference to a Greek temple done in supremely Modernist glass architecture that perches atop the arch itself.)

A city is only as good as the past it makes up from the available materials. Or as the late Kenneth Burke used to tell his students, “Be careful how you talk about the world; it is like that.”

with other projects on indefinite hold, news of all sorts, some of it self-serving

2009-09-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't thought a great deal about zombies since I read Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow years ago (on the biochemistry of zombification, which mimics death rather than revivifying the deceased). But Stan Woodard has clearly noticed the recent popularity of zombies even more than I have...the term being ubiquitous as a name for technological phenomena and financial institutions that are under the unwilled control of others or dead-but-still-walking-around.

Hence his day of all things zombie on September 12, of which the part that interests me is the academic panel "The Zombie Perceived: Religion, Media and Society," at Clary Theatre at Georgia Tech from 1 to 3:45 p.m. on which, see for more information:

http://www.stanwoodard.com/zombie/index.html

More than a few years ago, someone wrote a book called Our Vampires, Ourselves, which could be updated since I believe it long preceded the Twilight phenomenon. It was a sociopolitical look at the many modes and identities of vampires since they first put in an appearance in literary culture...the point being that we re-invent the vampire in every generation to address different situations and different fears and desires.

Obviously the present moment also needs a Our Zombies, Ourselves. But I am not volunteering to write it.

What I am volunteering to do is read a few new poems and later try to do an improv performance with electronic composer Dick Robinson on September 13, 2 to 4 p.m. at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center: for details thereon, see http://www.aszc.org/activities/zenartshow.html

We knew better than to go up against a Zombie Fest in terms of an audience.

We will perform our improvisation as the Hallucination Sextet. Of the six performers, only the two of us will be live. (Dick describes the other four as "virtual.")

another global exhibition you probably can't go to (and I certainly can't)

2009-08-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Though there was no way of knowing it at the time, it was an excellent day for artists when the family that owns Glenfiddich distillery (today part of the still family-owned Wm. Grant & Sons) made the imaginative leap of marketing their product as-is worldwide as single malt Scotch, instead of following the tradition of traveling the world, first on steamers and later on jetliners, selling it off to blenders in the traditional manner.

For in the fullness of time, the family proclivity for imaginative gestures bore fruit in the decision to start a summer-long artist in residence program, invitation only, giving a few artists the freedom to create what they would, the only requirement being the donation of one piece to the company's collection.

In 2007, New York-based artist Romeo Alaeff produced a series of prints titled "War on the Brain," gorgeously revamped Rorschach blots containing references to conflicts from William Wallace and All That to the smell of napalm in the morning in Vietnam. Another 2007 artist, and if I were not writing away from my CD of images I would say who, produced a conceptual paradox worthy of Marcel Duchamp: a sweeper's broom thrust through a standard-issue barrel, to be filled with new-make spirit and laid down for however many years, at the end of which time it would still not be considered Scotch whisky because the invading broom handle would have violated the terms within which the company's whisky is defined.

That year, the workers were also creating art: the distillery's barrelmakers were having a go at energetic self-taught evocations of the years in which certain barrels then due for bottling had been laid down in the warehouse (the Berlin Wall and the logo of Windows come to mind as subjects they chose for sculpture).

Now the 2009 residency has culminated in the annual exhibitions of work made in residence, and I regret that difficulties in revising this piece have prevented me from publicizing it in any meaningful way.

The program is one of those marvelous gestures that adds its small bit to the web of world culture, and one ought to be pleased to see the money spent intelligently in this fashion.

Full disclosure requires me to remind you (remind because I've written this before) that the only paid-for-by-others press tour of my life allowed me a firsthand experience of this program, which has obviously had a lasting impact. They will never spend another U.S. dollar or Scottish pound on me, so I feel justified in providing once again this complimentary meditation, especially since it allows me to mention once more the work of Romeo Alaeff, who also will never get another U.S. or U.K. penny from Wm Grant & Sons and who could presumably use the money if someone feels inclined to look up his website and invest in one of the "War on the Brain" pieces.

And anyone within driving distance of Dufftown still has a couple of weeks to see the second exhibition in this year's series.

more, but not much more, on "Dissolving Stereotypes/Forging New Dialogues: An Exhibition Beyond Race"

2009-08-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

Blogs and long essays may be mutually incompatible. Having gotten written the first two parts of a four-part meditation that was to end with a series of provisional conclusions regarding the state of ethnic identity in America in the early twenty-first century, I have realized that the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia will have ended even before I can offer tentative remarks on why I cannot write a meaningful review of it.

So here, a few days before the show closes, are a handful of notes on the rightness and wrongness of Walker’s curatorial premises.

Walker, who by the way is the father of Kara Walker as well as a distinguished artist himself and longtime professor at Georgia State University, has taken it upon himself to bring up to date the notion that artists are artists foremost and ethnically oriented beings second, even when their topic is their own ethnicity. Put another way, he states that ethnic groups are poorly served when bad art is fobbed off on the public as being somehow the authentic voice of this or that people. Before a work of art can express a meaningful opinion on ethnic identity or anything else, it has first to be a well-conceived and executed work of art. It may then violate expectations or express respect in a way considered invalid by some (Walker's exhibition includes Pat Drew’s painting based on an antique photo of an African-American family, part of her effort to represent the family resemblances between Southern ancestors of all races)…or as he puts it more vividly, “Isn’t that a no-no?”

Two of the best works in the show, both formally and conceptually, are Kevin Sipp’s reinventions of Ki-Kongo ritual objects blended with allusions to René Depestre’s negritude poem A Rainbow for the Christian West and Bad Brains’ hardcore in an Afro-Punk amalgam to set alongside the Afro-Futurism espoused by Sipp’s prematurely deceased onetime collaborator, Charles Nelson.

Yun Liu’s translation of a Rothkoesque abstract expressionism into an overlay on panels of Chinese characters is one method of creating a hybrid aesthetic culture. A more contemporary form is Yi-Hsin Tzeng’s video of herself being drenched in successive layers of red, yellow and blue paint followed by a coat of white concluding and wiping out “The Last Painting in Modernism.” Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue, indeed. The video is reminiscent of the version of bodily intervention undertaken by the first generation of Chinese artists to become global superstars, making its allusion to Barnett Newman as distinctly grounded in (contemporary) Chinese practice as Yun’s (or should it be Liu’s? It’s hard for some of us to tell when a name has been reversed to conform to American expectations, without the telltale hyphen linking two of the names.).

The exhibition cries out to be evaluated both in terms of the extent to which the art plays into ethnic expectations and the extent to which the aesthetic success of the work varies wildly. But it’s a non-starter; an Anglo (I like to use the Southwestern term for us descendants of southern United Kingdom émigrés) male of a certain age still cannot toss around glib opinions or even considered ones without being accused of having the cultural blindnesses and defects of personal vision that all of us humans in fact possess, regardless of our ethnicity and our preferred theoretical practice. (In theory, the right practice ought to make perfect, but it’s not so.)

So one hopes that the show has gotten a decent number of viewers during its run. It’s too bad that the lively symposium that inaugurated the exhibition couldn’t be repeated in these waning days of August.

in memoriam Turner Cassity and homage to surviving writers

2009-08-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

Randall Jarrell wrote, in an epigram I used as an epigraph to my first published essay, something to the effect of "The poet in America has a unique relationship to the general public: it doesn't even know he is there." (Jarrell wrote this a fair number of years pre-1970, so the masculine universal was the grammatical norm.) He also wrote that publishing a volume of verse in America is like throwing a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the echo.

So I suppose it is not surprising that Atlanta Review should be world-esteemed and largely unknown in its eponymous city, its editor Dan Veach the creator of Flowers of Flame, the first anthology in English (I think) of present-day poems from Iraqi writers, a book that has not gotten all that much press in his hometown. In previous decades, Veach has been able to coax contributions from Nobel laureates without getting much credit for it.

It is, then, also not surprising that in spite of his having lived in a city that sponsors art and literature festivals both at the beginning of summer and at the end of it, the recently deceased Turner Cassity's books are largely unavailable both in local bookstores and in the public library.

Cassity was no self-published wonder, but an idiosyncratic, deeply learned and deliberately irritating writer with decades' worth of volumes from university presses. He went against the trends of his day and of almost any day one cares to think of, writing vastly cynical verses alongside loopily-titled looks at forgotten aspects of twentieth-century history (or outright fantasy; "The Airship Boys in Africa") and giving his first volume of collected poems a title so politically incorrect that I blush to write it even now.

I suppose anyone who set out to be so consciously, wittily offensive would not have been the sort of fellow who received or accepted frequent offers to perform his poetry. But he co-founded a monthly forum for poets that survives after three decades, one that gave me an early moment of visibility alongside many other emerging writers— the majority of whom, like the majority of Atlanta's visual artists, remain emerging to this very day. And he was genuinely generous to writers who did not share his point of view, though it helped if they could comprehend the perspective of a poet who could return from North African travels praising the quality of Morocco's art deco architecture.

Don Bryant's documentary photos of Tiny Town

2009-08-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

An exhibition currently at Atlanta Photography Group's gallery in the TULA art center documents the final days of Tiny Town, a folk art environment in New Mexico that was bulldozed in relatively recent days, photographer Don Bryant informs us. (He photographed the site almost exactly a year ago; the site was destroyed in January.)

Wondering how much the site had been documented otherwise and why some site-preservationist group like Intuit hadn't been asked to intervene, I looked up the place online and discovered that, as with so much folk or outsider art, the whole story is impossibly ambiguous and the reports preceding Bryant's are contradictory.

Here is one website's description: "Earlier reports by travel writers describe this acre as having its own saloon, church, courthouse and jail; rivers made of broken glass, and roads made of tarpaper, complete with yellow lines. However, when Legends of America visited, there was little sign of the acre of haphazard material resembling a town. Perhaps this is because several years ago an art scout came upon Lange’s town and arranged to have much of it boxed and shipped to the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Evidently, this was the jumping board for success, as the artist now sells many of her creations in local shops." http://www.legendsofamerica.com/NM-Quirky.html#Tiny%20Town%20-%20Art%20That%20Dies%20to%20Live

And here is another, http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Region/17-TINY-TOWN :
"The term "outsider art" does not begin to describe what's on display at Tiny Town. Even so, the roadside attraction just north of Madrid just isn't what it used to be. Wind, weather, sun and the passing of time have turned the one-time sea of broken glass and artfully arranged bones into ramshackle, dilapidated outdoor display.

"Artist Tammy Jean Lange has been called a visionary and a 'human firecracker' as well as a local icon in so-called outsider art, using roadkill, rusted objects and broken toys as her media. A discarded cigarette machine, rust-red iron cookstove, set of putt-put clubs and dozens of partially clothed dolls are among the current occupants.

"Lange does not pay rent to use the 1 acre site, and over the last four years has done less and less to keep the place looking like the small wonder that it used to be, said longtime benefactor Bille Russell.

"Russell has for more than a decade allowed Lange to set up her found art on about an acre of her 112-acre Lodestar Ranch. When Lange, 49, also known as Tatt2 Tammy, started using the area as her primary residence and drifted away from what Russell called 'brilliant things,' Russell said she reluctantly took steps to change the situation.

"'I think her art has a right to exist,' said Russell, who met Lange when a friend helped get her art into the Mineshaft Tavern gift shop. 'So the initial deal was that Tiny Town could be there and she could work there, but she could not live there.'

"Russell said she was worn down by neighboring landowners who called the project an eyesore and wanted it cleaned up. 'It had its peaks, but in four years it's taken quite a dive,' she said. 'It became more like a dump instead of her working her art.'"

Bryant informs us that the site was finally destroyed, but the overall story turns out to be impossibly complex.

And this is the case with most folk art environments in this day and time, the seemingly downhome marker of rural authenticity shading off into postmodern tangles of narrative and motivation in which not only is one person's trash another person's treasure, but one person's folk environment is another person's leftover from better days in the folk art world, with the masterworks already hauled off for a museum. (Howard Finster's Paradise Garden would be worth preserving for the World Folk Art Church alone. St. EOM's Pasaquan is certainly in need of continuing preservation. Lonnie Holley reconstructed his environment after the original was bulldozed to make room for an airport expansion, but in the case of less robustly architectural environments than Finster's or St. EOM's, the issue will always be for how long the whole will be more than the sum of its parts.)

notes from the good intentions road paving company

2009-08-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

Essays and exhibition reviews are at odds with one another. I have been wrestling for weeks with a four or five part meditation on history, shifting models of ethnic identity, and continuities in hybrid cultures; but while I struggle with a topic that somehow will sweep in Thomas Hart Benton, Russell Lee and the FSA photographers, Frederic, Lord Leighton, the Millennium Arch, and Larry Walker's "Dissolving Stereotypes/Forging New Dialogues: An Exhibition Beyond Race," the local shows in Atlanta are moving inexorably towards their scheduled closing dates. As with Michi Meko at Beep Beep, I may find the implicit issues so unwieldy that the online review will never appear. But I am having another go at it. First drafts of at least two of the four (or five) parts already exist, though they are too drafty to exist even in the provisional world of the blog.

In the meantime, the opening tonight of Maria Artemis' exhibition at MOCA GA should serve to draw fresh attention to "Dissolving Stereotypes" in the museum's adjacent gallery.

Eyedrum art auction: not a self-promoting announcement in spite of the picture below

2009-08-13T07:34:00.001-07:00

It is well known in metro Atlanta, though not necessarily elsewhere, that the extraordinary all-volunteer art and performance space Eyedrum is in dire financial straits. Some 150 artists, including nationally known figures—we are promised unadvertised surprises—have donated work for a benefit auction on Friday, August 14, 7 - 10 p.m., details at http://www.pd.org/~eyedrum/calendar/index.php?id=3175.

Among the donors is yours truly, Jerry Cullum the sometime painter and occasional conceptual artist and creator of digital photocollage, this being what could be my final appearance in the first-named function, since I have produced only conceptual and digital pieces since this painting was created and posted to Facebook and to either this blog or joculum.livejournal, I don't recall which.

The painting is properly dated, titled and signed on the reverse, unlike some work I recently acquired from emerging artists who continue to forget that collectors will have no recollection twenty years from now of whether this painting was by painter X or painter Y or possibly by the guy whose solo show at Highland Bakery never materialized in spite of the evident quality of his work. I am sometimes tempted to post a photograph of that one (from back in the day), and ask if anyone recalls who painted this.

Not to be too judgmental; after writing for years about the importance of establishing chronology for pieces of folk art I neglected to note dates of acquisition for the various pieces I bought from the late R. A. Miller, who unlike Howard Finster was disinclined to date his works, much less number them. And I have let far too many of my handful of artworks leave my hands without adequate photo documentation, or in one or two cases without any documentation at all.

Alec Soth at the High, and memories of a monastery

2009-08-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Art traditionally archetypalizes. This is so even in the astonishing documentary photographs of the civil rights movement that were the chief feature of last year’s “Road to Freedom” exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum: somehow, in the midst of massive and obviously unrehearsed moments of violence against demonstrators, more than one photographer captured pictorial compositions so energetic yet perfectly balanced that Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson would be hard pressed to replicate them.

The twelve photos of Alec Soth’s “Black Line of Woods,” the newest in the High Museum’s “Picturing the South” commissions and the nucleus of what has now become Soth’s larger project, are somewhere in between the documentarians’ decisive moments and the careful set-ups of the Crewdson generation. Soth has sought out the isolates, the marginal by choice, the sorts of characters who might have shown up in a slightly less Gothic version of the Flannery O’Connor stories from one of which the title of this exhibition is taken. He has chosen the poses and the natural lighting carefully; one detail shot of an otherwise unaltered portion of an improvised encampment was clearly made when the shadows were less extreme.

Soth has gone out of his way to conceal even his consciously chosen social references, so far as titles go. “Murphy, North Carolina,” 2006, is a photograph of an unremarkable building and van in late sunlight, but the site in Murphy is the one where Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph was apprehended after a long and fruitless search for him in the deep woods.

Soth states in “Five Questions for Alec Soth” on the High’s website that “I wanted to investigate this romantic notion of escape, but I didn't want it overly politicized. Rudolph represented one extreme version of this escape fantasy.... I also wanted to look at more spiritual versions of escape. So, in northwest Georgia I visited a monastery. Elsewhere I photographed hermits whose intentions were neither political nor spiritual—folks who just wanted to get away.”

The most memorable apparent hermit of the series is a grey-bearded gentleman who appears surrounded by his fruit-filled tomato vines in “S. J., Nubbin Creek, Alabama,” 2007.

Soth aestheticizes his marginal places and sometimes renders them symbolic, as with the fragile-seeming clean, well-lighted place overshadowed by a literal black line of woods in the photograph that introduces the sequence, or the single light bulb hanging over what looks like a blanket or a sleeping pallet in an otherwise virgin-seeming woodland. Like the disco ball visually echoed by a basketball in “Enchanted Forest, Texas,” 2006, that light bulb implies a story that is left utterly untold.

In the case of the Eric Rudolph-related convenience store, it is the untold story that lends romance and/or a sinister air to the image; in the case of the lights in darkness, it is the image that conjures up an imagined narrative. And that tale may well be more wonderful than the real back story.

“F. P., Resaca, Georgia,” 2006, the photo above (©Alec Soth and courtesy of the High Museum of Art), is the quintessential meeting of Soth-imposed romanticism and a back story that is perhaps even more wonderful than the image.

F. P., whoever he may be, is an Orthodox monk from the Monastery of the Glorious Ascension, which has maintained a legitimate affiliation with one Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction or another since its foundation by, I believe, a group of converts to Orthodoxy. (Many would-be Orthodox outfits have ended up being, ironically enough, jurisdictionally heterodox, but not this monastery.)

The monastery in Resaca is situated in a hilltop house from the 1950s surrounded by woodlands. It first gained national prominence as the house of the computer programmer monks, who realized that at the time of their 1977 arrival, some of them had computer skills and equipment that their neighbors did not. They earned income by processing accounts for local businesses.

A visit to the website of this monastery, of which I had seldom thought since visiting it decades ago, reveals that the monks are as tech-savvy and concerned with traditional spirituality as they ever were, though by now there must have been some degree of generational turnover. Apparently Soth established a particular rapport with the monk who is most practiced at photography, who helped him do the setup for the photo of the robed monk alone in the line of woods. The monastery’s darkroom facilities are reportedly impeccable, regardless of the monastery’s current digital focus.

The once much-noticed miracle-working icon of the Virgin continues to weep tears of fragrant myrrh, but no longer as frequently as it did in the days when it was lent to nearby congregations seeking intercession.

product placement and other less than amusing anecdotal incidents

2009-08-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

It comes to me that a 21st century Karl Kraus is an impossibility...an updated version of, say, "Package Tours to Hell" would simply be regarded as a successful case of viral marketing.

Which reminds me that I am actually delighted that the new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys will contain commissioned work by a stellar list of contemporary artists. Fourteen names not typically associated with football stadiums, and I am still trying to make myself believe this is not some kind of conceptual intervention by one of those dynamic duos of artists who go in for that sort of thing. But it appears that Mel Bochner and Teresita Fernández and Franz Ackermann will in fact be doing what they do, which puts the Dallas Cowboys in a whole 'nother league—which was, I assume, the point.

meanwhile, from less lavishly funded enterprises....upcoming events at MODA

2009-08-10T08:03:00.000-07:00

Museum of Design Atlanta is the little operation that manages to be a museum of design within the limits of being a Smithsonian affiliate that nevertheless attracts far more in-kind donations than offers of operating or programming income.

Having just completed its summer-long run of a remarkable exhibition of social-activist posters (including an archetypal Angela Davis from back in the day that illustrates why Ian Wright's portrait of her, cited below, would be considered cynically transgressive), MODA's plans for the fall include a major Marcel Breuer exhibition to be divided between the MODA galleries and the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library downtown headquarters that was Breuer's last completed design. The exhibition opens on October 27 and runs through January 16, 2010.

Though this would surely be enough for any one season, MODA will present an off-site traveling exhibition (traveling among metro Atlanta venues, that is), sponsored by the Kendeda Fund, that will highlight Atlanta's status as one of the cities with the greatest number of LEED-certified eco-friendly buildings. (Atlanta was briefly the city with the most LEED-certified structures.) One hopes that this exhibition, in a city not always thought of as oriented towards environmental issues, will stir some much-needed discussion, or at least provide public education via interactive technology.

outrageousness works brilliantly as an advertising tool

2009-08-10T07:27:00.001-07:00

Consider that I have not been compensated by even so much as an offer of a plastic shopping bag for reproducing this extract from an online press release, verbatim:

Saks Fifth Avenue is thrilled to announce the nationwide launch of Fall Want It! featuring the artwork of renowned London-based contemporary artist Ian Wright on September 9, 2009.

Ian Wright’s artistic career spans many disciplines, from illustration to mixed media. His work has been featured in exhibits all over the world. Recently, he has created a wall-sized portrait of Mao Zedong made exclusively of hand-covered fabric buttons, and a 3-D portrait of Angela Davis made from mascara wands.

one of the best artworks I have seen in 2009 (reproduced with permission of the artist)

2009-08-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Kate Kretz: At the end of each day, if Kate has not been able to get into the studio, she pricks her finger and writes the word "art" before going to bed. Appeases the art gods, tells them that she is still here, has not abandoned those who have been so good to her & saved her life. Marks the day. Makes SOMETHING.

R.I.P. Charles Huntley Nelson

2009-07-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

I had had in mind a number of posts regarding exhibitions, but find myself compelled instead to offer a preliminary memorial note regarding Charles Huntley Nelson, who died of complications following a stroke. He had been ill for some months with advanced stomach cancer.

I asked Charles to co-curate "Speed: Life in an Accelerated Culture" at the inception of the twenty-first century because he had already curated exhibitions that introduced me to the work of many of the younger artists who I wished to include in the "Speed" exhibition I had been invited to curate. I was deeply impressed by his sense of professionalism and reflections on the shape of a rapidly changing global culture.

His conceptual querying of issues of race and class in his remixes of Metropolis and The Invisible Man made me anxious to see his similar treatment of Alphaville, of which the preliminary results have been on exhibit at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

He was a midcareer artist whose work had slowly gained national recognition, and his loss at this stage of his mature output is a particular tragedy.

The trajectory of his career can be viewed at www.charleshnelson.com.

now this: as the National Black Arts Festival 2009 begins

2009-07-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier's curation of the Morgan County African American Museum and Madison-Morgan Cultural Center's two-venue exhibition of art commenting on the experience of the African Diaspora looks to be as sensitive a treatment as one would expect from this distinguished artist, who has a background in documentary photography and accompanying written documentation of communities.

The ten Atlanta artists of African-American descent (the members of the Sistagraphy photo collective are also featured) include Daniel Hoover and Lillian Blades, both familiar to metro Atlanta audiences from past solo shows. The exhibition runs through August 29, and I hope to be able to offer a direct evaluation in the near future, rather than an impression gleaned from a press release and past acquaintance with many of the artists.

Information on Madison-Morgan Cultural Center is available at www.mmcc-arts.org.

odds and ends, or short notes in several topics in Atlanta

2009-07-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

I have been holding off on commenting on Eyedrum pending clarification of the situation, although I have an editorial of sorts that I wrote on the day the news broke. It now seems there will be a fundraising auction on August 14.

And I withheld comment on Emily Amy Gallery's summer show featuring some of my favorite artists because it seemed to be scheduled for newspaper review at an early date, and it has now has been written up quite well on burnaway.org. I have written about Whitney Stansell and Meta Gary several times previously. It isn't part of the aforementioned exhibition, but Jennifer Cawley's work can now be viewed at the gallery on request, which comes as good news to longtime Cawley fans.

Curator Larry Walker's "Dissolving Stereotypes" show at MOCA GA is indeed the "Exhibition Beyond Race" that the title promises. The dissolution of stereotypes should by now be self-evident and taken for granted; but as recent events might be taken to indicate, we are not beyond any of that even in artworld expectations, and that fact alone makes it difficult to write about the exhibition with any degree of adequacy. Walker intended to start a conversation, and it is one that still needs to be engaged in, in depth, in These States. Longer commentary later, I hope.

A gallery conversation with the curator will take place on Tuesday, July 28, at 7 p.m. and if I can find a way to get there, I shall attempt to be present.

What Is To Be Done, Part Four: The Enigma of Sins of Omission

2009-07-13T05:55:00.001-07:00

The joke will be lost on those not brought up in certain types of Christian theology, but my subject heading reminds me of the, probably Reader's Digest, tale of the child who was asked by the Sunday School teacher to define sins of omission, and who said, "They're the sins we should have committed, and didn't."

In any case, I am feeling appropriately guilty for having passed over in near-silence or total silence a certain number of exhibitions I should have made a greater effort to cover, especially in our present condition of inadequate arts coverage in general.

But once freed from the constraints of editorial word counts, all the suppressed issues of arts coverage become almost paralyzing. What if one has only fatuous or possibly outright wrong things to say about an exhibition, because to do it justice would require more interview and research time than one has available (given that most of one's reading and writing takes place very late at night)? What if one's provisional judgment, in a first draft, sounds dismayingly like damning with faint praise when one intended no such thing? What if one's first burst of unrestrained enthusiasm proves distressingly hard to justify on more than subjective grounds?

For there are probably thousands of artists in the world, if not tens of thousands, whose work deserves some form of recognition, but what sort remains to be worked out. Is the artist destined for global fame? Probably not, but then some make it onto the covers of magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, or into world-famous biennials. Is the artist reworking well-worn genres? Sometimes. Is the artist supreme in the field in a local context that may or may not be able to stand against competitors in comparable cities? Sometimes. Is the artist as good as anybody in a genre that the tides of fashion have deemed unworthy of further discussion except to local yokels? Sometimes. Should the tides of fashion be queried appropriately? Always. Should an emerging artist be recognized for what may or may not mature into something far more intriguing? Always. Should an emerging or even a midcareer artist be recognized for a personal best that may not yet contribute much to a larger dialogue? Well, at this point we are getting into the problem of neither exaggerating the accomplishment nor damning with faint praise. And when one is consumed with such baroque niceties, one's most offhand adjective is likely to be misconstrued as conveying unqualified celebration or disguised disapproval.

It is so much easier just to say, "Here's some stuff," and sometimes to explain why one is forgoing evaluation. But there are times when forgoing evaluation is itself a form of evaluation, and that is when after the first couple of drafts, one simply gives up in mild embarrassment. The beauty of print deadlines was that something had to appear, however inadequate or formulaic, and sometimes it was both.

Three Loosely Related, Worse than Provisional, Meditations re the Unsatisfactory Condition of Regional Art Coverage; & Also A Note on Kibbee Gallery

2009-07-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Three Loosely Related, Worse than Provisional, Meditations Towards Resolving the Unsatisfactory Condition of Regional Art Criticism. Plus a Kibbee Gallery Review. Keep Scrolling Down, It’s There

expect a rewrite, even if one never comes; corrections welcomed

What Is To Be Done, Part One. Preliminary Considerations, or Prolegomena. Or Whatever.

Reading Deyan Sudjic’s The Edifice Complex (The Language of Things has me working backwards through his oeuvre), I realize, and not for the first time, the degree to which contemporary art and architecture appears in an intellectual arena divorced from intellectual history in general.

For a concept-laden field so taken with its own interdisciplinarity, this seems extremely odd. Granted, the field admits only a limited number of literary figures, just as literature admits only a limited number of artists and architects into the imaginative realm of the verbal. Each seems inordinately proud of the degree to which its own area of discourse encompasses the entirety of human activity.

Of course, there is only so much any one area of specialization can do. Art makes use of language in a way quite different from that of literature: there are fewer words, usually, and what words there are usually spill over into the more image-laden areas of discourse, such as film and video making, fields which at one end of their spectrum have simply been incorporated into art—as contemporary literature has not been incorporated into philosophy and sociology and anthropology and political science…although all of those fields are pleased to be superior analysts of art, literature, architecture, and the creative endeavors in general; and, at least in the case of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, the compliment is returned by novels that incorporate theoretical essays.

Each field tends to incorporate only those aspects of the others that it (or a practitioner of it, to be more exact) finds most interesting or valuable. This is normal. But the world of visual art, and to a slightly lesser degree architecture, seems to be shunted to a sidelines that is not visible as such only because the specialists in the sideline have the possibility of earning enormous sums of money, or because they themselves don’t keep up with the general-interest journals in English. (But online compilers like Eurozine, summarizing publications from all over Europe, and signandsight—despite its punning name—seem to suffer from the same site-blindness.)

One can read the New York Review of Books for a very long time without ever coming to much of a perspective regarding contemporary art, in spite of that publication’s tendency to commission articles that go far beyond mere book or exhibition reviews. Book reviewing publications in general, however, don’t seem to cover exhibition catalogues. NYRB does, but very selectively and even more historically than is the case with its surveys of science—and its economic and political book reviews consciously supplement its coverage of current events. Events outside the museums tend to be relegated to the realm of generally uncomprehending journalists, though the demise of print newspapers is rapidly changing this for the even worse.

The problem with this is that people of a certain generation who get their news from print aggregators like NYRB or the various multidisciplinary intellectual journals never even learn what it is they aren’t learning. One has the feeling that some of them would let loose withering salvos at the art world, if they could be stopped long enough to consider it. The art world might return the compliment if it had time to contemplate these particular men and women, rather than the slender selection of them who become the thinkers du jour for the various curators and critics of the planet.

Sudjic’s wonderfully disgruntled survey of the social compromises made by contemporary architecture has the distinction of understanding the contexts of the many buildings he is discussing…apart from his confusion or conflation of two of the secondary territorial claimants in the Munich Crisis of 1938, I haven’t found any significant miscomprehensions in the social or political background he lays out, including the history-of-religions situation of Richard Meier’s visitors’ center for Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral.

Sudjic is one of those glorious exceptions who ought to be critiqued (for like any other thinker, he rides his particular hobbyhorses to excess) by assorted anthropologists of the contemporary, at the very least. He at least knows a great deal about both his field and the forces that shape its day-to-day preferences, and as I noted regarding The Language of Things, coming at contemporary art from the related but differently blinkered field of contemporary design suggests a different set of problems and perspectives, and that the two approaches ought to be brought into dialogue with one another.

What Is To Be Done, Part Two: The Look of a Multidisciplinary Regional Website

Thanks to my own blinkered perspective, I tend to consult Denis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily almost on a daily basis, and, since I like to be reminded of past contexts and perspectives when viewing the new, I look at the essays page of Erik Davis’ techgnosis.com irregularly instead of subscribing to an RSS feed.

Davis’ field of interests doesn’t overlap at all with Dutton’s (you not only won’t find his essays in Dutton’s daily roundup of the intellectual journals, you won’t even find his subject matter), but the two pages possess some of the characteristics that make such websites superior to even the most wide-ranging and multi-authored of blogs.

Mostly, for me, it’s the extensive amount of information that can be gleaned at a glance, without ever scrolling down the page; Davis prioritizes his own work (sometimes bringing back some essays from the journalistic equivalent of Late Antiquity) so that his main interests can be perceived at a glance (along with sidebar updates on what he’s up to in the lecture and performance world), and Dutton reaches for a range of topics limited only by his own prejudices and preferences, which he tries regularly to overcome at least a little.

It’s that range-of-topics problem that defeats most regional-art websites. I believe it was the poet Robert Dana who told the story of an Iowa Writers’ Workshop seminar that involved the usual disparaging of poems written by little old ladies in Dubuque, which led to the retort from one of the students, “If little old ladies in Dubuque didn’t write that stuff, little old ladies in Sauk Center wouldn’t have anything to read.”

This is the case with some of the more godawful flower paintings that bedeck walls of galleries from Timber Creek to Timpson’s Key (I hope neither place exists, since I just made those names up), and some of the most hideous examples of the genre—the ones that would make both contemporary practitioners and the painters of the Dutch Golden Age shrink back in horror—sell for many thousands of dollars in urban shopping malls, and raise issues of just why so many codes of social pretension owe nothing either to tradition or to contemporaneity, but only to…well, that is one of the topics that a good regional online journal (anywhere in the world, almost) would want to discuss.

But the problem is one of priorities. What was recently described in a local symposium as the entertainment-oriented “butts-in-seats” outcome is a desirable one, after all: little old ladies in Sauk Center need to be kept up to date as to what little old ladies in Dubuque are up to and when they are coming to do a reading. And in the fields of literature and theatre and fashion and rock and hip-hop and folk and flower arranging, this seems to happen already. But in the field of visual art, it does not happen.

And this is in part because it is impossible to craft a site that will appeal equally to the interior designers and the serious collectors and the even more serious conceptualists and the casual connoisseurs of lowbrow and pop surrealism.

But somehow Dutton’s visually boring site offers an equal playing field for a variety of intellectual topics, with teasers that draw you off into the world in question—or not. Art is seldom or effectively never one of those worlds on Arts & Letters Daily, but I cite his site only to suggest that some similarly simultaneous sense of diversity is what we are looking for. The very neutrality of his layout allows for quick decision-making (and allows one to forgive Dutton’s particular peculiarities of choice—but the site we need would cover just about everything going on in a particular time frame).

Since critics are accustomed to writing to the peculiar specifications of editors, who will rewrite without hesitation if they don’t like the finished product, I suppose it is theoretically possible to produce a descriptive opening paragraph for a piece with a link to the more art-critical component, if there is one. No critics are psychologically neutral, anyway; even a description contains implicit judgment just in what it highlights and what it leaves out. Sometimes even a photograph of a gallery installation contains implicit judgments, as a gallery installation itself certainly does.

What Is To Be Done, Part Whatever: The Impossibility of Avoiding Distortions

One perennial problem is that regional (and not-so-regional) critics are mostly young, or very poor, or both. If they are not poverty-stricken, they will be after a career of expending the proceeds of their day job on going to every gallery in town after work, in order to write something about one of them for a pittance, or for no money at all.

The blinkered perspective of the critic in question is the next problem after that.

But once we have accepted that there is no universal perspective and that nobody can write about everything and get even a tenth of it right, we still have the question of how the art shows of a region (or of all the regions of the world) are to get reasonable coverage so that an audience of whatever size can know that they are there.

And that is always the first problem: no one can go to anything if they do not know that it exists, or do not know from the capsule summary that it is something to which they would like to go.

Atlanta’s Kibbee Gallery presents an interesting case study. The downstairs space in a house is effectively too small to harbor more than a tiny crowd on opening night; once the friends of the artist arrive, there is often already no room to look at the art or sit down to watch the longer video. (I have often thought it productively ironic that what used to be called new media have produced viewing situations that are akin to Eastern Orthodox church services; instead of ranks of seats focused on the central stage, there is an indefinitely arranged space in which devotees stand for up to two or three hours, hopefully transfixed by the ritual being enacted.)

And since almost no one comes to art galleries after the opening, Kibbee is open for viewing thereafter only by appointment with the artist. This is the case with many of the world’s alternative galleries; and given the increasing dominance of what used to be called new media, it presents the ongoing problem of forgoing more than one-night events, or hauling personal equipment onsite to meet the request of a single viewer, or risking breakins during the run of the show for the sake of the viewing equipment. (Hardly anyone has ever had a burglar steal emerging artists' paintings, though it has happened, and more than once.)

One wonders if advance viewing of the work by would-be writers would solve part of the problem. Movie critics and theatre and music critics currently have an advantage over art critics; they have a pretty good idea of what is going to be onscreen or onstage, at least in the case of theatre companies that engage in rehearsals or do the same type of improv work on a regular basis. Critics of installation or performance are seeing things that did not exist prior to presentation to an audience, and sometimes will never exist again in the same format.

One would like to see spaces like Kibbee get their due, without being artificially highlighted. And this is the problem: in small spaces, success chokes out the possibility of a satisfactory experience (we have all had performance events we abandoned because it was impossible to see what was happening) but subsequent viewing opportunities seldom attract more than the handful of hard-core fans who came to the first event.

But as can be seen from a look back at various shows of emerging artists (I leave to one side the largely marvelous “Buy Local” show currently at Emily Amy), those who miss such exhibitions often miss moments like the fabled occasions when now-famous musicians played to audiences of half a dozen at local venues. (I still cherish the long-ago time when a future Whitney Biennial artist hung his photographs on the walls of Sylvia’s Art of This Century—or was it Sylvia’s Atomic Café?—a moment that keeps me coming back to Sylvia Cross’ current venture, Sycamore Place Gallery and Studios.)

Anyway, one really ought to consider “In the Flesh,” the current Kibbee exhibition by two freshly minted SCAD BFAs. McCalla Hill has created a couple of provocatively documentary or poetic videos on issues of feminine identity (the poetic allegory of “The Rice Eater” in sharp contrast to the intercut two-screen interview format documenting issues of gender and weight and circumstances of birth), and Kelly Cloninger has transformed the main exhibition space with delicate Micron-pen drawings that are extended onto the walls by webbing that echoes the cellular implications of the drawings. Cloninger allegorizes conception and gestation in botanical parallels that deserve to be looked at in detail.

The exhibition, which I am told runs through August 1, can be viewed by contacting the artists at 2055637359 (or more accurately, one of them; I’ll let you discover which one). I add “I am told” because I have learned never to trust closing dates even when informed by one of the participants.

And, I have now learned from an unimpeachable source (I resist the two parenthetical jokes that occur to me re my adjective), there will be a closing reception on August 1 from 6 to 9 p.m. for those who missed the opening and would rather not go through the hassle of making an appointment. There is much to be said for this way of doing things.

Reproducing Replication: Take Two

2009-07-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

A quarter century ago, before fashionable irony had morphed into pointlessly reflexive snark, artist Barbara Schreiber would sometimes play a game with the press releases she organized into a bimonthly calendar of regional art exhibitions.

Calling her fellow editors to attention, she would announce, “I’m going to read a list of exhibition titles, and you have to tell me whether this is an Ironic Postmodern Gesture or a Really Dumb Show.” The physical location of the institution was typically the clue as to whether an exhibition referencing, say, tourist memorabilia was an irony-laden cultural critique or a desperate attempt to put together a crowd-pleaser. (The double irony was that the ironic postmodern gesture was as likely to be a desperate attempt at a crowd-pleaser as the earnest piece of populism; it was just aimed at a different crowd.)

Some exhibitions in that long-gone era managed to be both, or perhaps a third thing. “The Cow Show” was an exhibition at Madison-Morgan Cultural Center that addressed the institution’s physical location in the middle of farm country and the need to present the many ways that even the most unlikely of topics could be addressed by contemporary art, in terms of style, emotional register, and philosophical assumptions. Since the art steered clear of the politics of dairy farming and beef production, everyone who attended the opening was pleased.

And I wore my “Cow Show” T-shirt to gallery openings for the rest of the warm-weather part of the Atlanta art season. I was younger; it was a double-edged postmodern gesture.

Now that “The Pictures Generation” has gotten its earnestly historical museum retrospective, we are more aware than ever of how many spins of the irony wheel have gone down since then.

Back then, Umberto Eco was suggesting that irony was the only way to express sincerity, as in “As a Barbara Cartland novel would put it, I love you.” Several faster-than-usual generations later, irony is the only way to express irony, masked by snark to conceal or reveal sincerity. Fake snark masks real resentment. Real snark also masks real admiration, or at other times is used to imply an admiration that is actually false, with a complexity worthy of the proverbial politics of the Renaissance.

And ironic once-postmodern gestures in art become ironic art-historical quotations. (Or perhaps they do. If you catch my meaning, if you get my drift.)

I once curated / juried “The Pear Show,” based on my observation of the remarkable diversity of the earnest amateur replications of a then-ubiquitous subject for art-association still-life painting. Though the organizer felt the need to spell it all out in the call for entries (titling it "Jerry Cullum's Fantasy Pear Show"), I had the expectation that professional artists would understand the implications. And they did; I got few enough straightforward paintings or photos of pears per se, though I also got no conceptual disquisitions on the economics of pear production or food distribution, or pseudo-psychoanalytic reflections on why pear-shaped objects might be pleasing subjects in standard-issue painting-class assignments.

It gave me an opportunity to quote Wallace Stevens’ manifestly untrue observation “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (since everything else in Stevens is exactly about how the final belief must be in a fiction that is a collision of the world and the observer’s will). It also gave me an opportunity to create a soundtrack featuring Erik Satie’s “pieces in the form of a pear.”

All this feeds back into my observation of Maurizio Cattelan’s sausage in the biennale gift bag, and the multiple generations of art objects and gestures to which it alludes and which it simultaneously honors and ridicules. It isn’t a great work of art, but it’ll do as a seasonal hors d’oeuvre.

Readymades, Reproductions and Repetitions

2009-07-05T07:09:00.001-07:00

Deyan Sudjic’s comments on design and art in The Language of Things slides over into the old argument regarding the original and the copy, the readymade and the altered object and on and on.

There is either no more to be said on the topic, or entirely too much, depending on the medium and the history under discussion.

Duchamp’s original readymades may have been altered only by changing their placement and giving them a title, but it seems more than possible that they were as individually fabricated as his later handmade copies of the originals. Apparently there never was a commercial snow shovel designed like the one exhibited as In Advance of the Broken Arm, and apparently no one has ever found another bottle rack quite like that one…and no such French window…which leaves Fountain. But the picture is thoroughly muddled.

Maurizio Cattelan, if I read the newspaper story rightly, has advanced the cause of the readymade substantially by producing an edition of 500 sausages that are indistinguishable from any other sausage of the day’s production run. All that permits their identification is their inclusion in a Venice Biennale gift bag with appropriate identification, not attached to the sausage.

As with the Oxford University stonework that is replaced every century or less by new copies of the now worn-down original, presumably the Cattelan sausages could be replaced by counterfeits bought from the same manufacturer, so long as the paperwork was the original and the design of the label hadn't changed (whether subsequent printings of the label would be identifiably different takes us into the realms of collectibility described by Sudjic with regard to mass-produced objects of design).

And given the dilemmas that a collecting museum is having in figuring out how to acquire and preserve the sausage, Cattelan’s commentary on the cult of the collectible edition is raising issues as provocatively as Damien Hirst’s shark, which already has had to be replaced by another shark.

It is, of course, not raising new issues by any means. Practitioners of relational aesthetics, most notably in such now-classic acts as Rirkrit Tiravanija's cooking food for gallery visitors, have often tried hard to overcome the infinite regress of commodification by providing nothing at all that could be successfully commodified (unlike, say, the now enormously valuable matchboxes or other would-be throwaway multiples that constituted the unsuccessful attempts of earlier generations at defeating the art market).

Cattelan ups the ante by providing, if I have understood the story correctly, a simple commodity, and one that requires refrigeration. Like Joseph Beuys' famous fat corner, it challenges museological preservation techniques and requires a meticulous record of provenance to determine authenticity, and is highly likely to be discarded by an overly zealous cleaning crew.

Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things

2009-06-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

In his new book from W. W. Norton, The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic occasionally seems like a man having an argument with himself regarding the historic nature and function of design. Associated in modernity with function and utility made attractive—the aesthetics were not an add-on in modernist design, but also weren't allowed to get in the way of efficiency and elegance of operation, about which Sudjic also has a great many useful observations—design has become increasingly preoccupied with creating the "desirable objects"of his subtitle. And that means manufacturing consumer desire in a mode previously associated with the fashion industry, using superfluous surface characteristics to present newness itself as a gotta-have-it quality in which the sense of obsolescence is not necessarily related to the onward march of technology. (This is the kind of novelty that leads inevitably to the feeling of "What were we thinking?" when surveying the once-fashionable design disasters of only yesterday.)

Like everything else, design is bound up with larger cultural forces that are easier to discern than to analyze. Some design one-offs of recent years have called attention to this fact, most notably Marc Newson's prototype Ford designed for an alternate present in which "the Soviet Sputnik was the last word in modernity"—a plausible evolutionary track that did not happen—and by Newson's famous Lockheed Lounge, an edition of ten thoroughly elegant but dysfunctional chaises fabricated of aluminum aircraft skin studded with rivets in homage to the impulses of Streamline Moderne's love affair with flight, here incorporated in an ironically metallic, near-unusable object. Made by a surfboard fabricator, it bridges decades of institutional fetishes.

Modernist design, of course, was often more about sculptural quality than functional comfort, but the quality of function puts it in a market category far inferior to sculpture. Sudjic makes much of the disparity in auction prices between a one-of-a-kind version of the Rietveld Chair and a contemporaneous canvas by Mondrian. The singular painting, one in a familiar series, was valued at one hundred times the sales price of the designer's unique object.

This is one of several points at which Sudjic engages in dialectical pirouettes. Design still suffers price-wise from the taint of being good for something—a Rietveld original may be rare, but the design it embodies was meant to be mass-produced, and once one has left the world of unique prototypes it is challenging to set values on early versus late production runs of the object. (However, as any collector of first editions also knows, values are set—in the case of books, this is in spite of the fact that most second printings are indistinguishable from the first). A Rietveld Chair done to specs today isn't appreciably different from the earliest commercially produced examples. The whole point is to eliminate the hand of the maker as a significant variable—a realization pioneered some years before Rietveld in the factories for Thonet bentwood furniture that were scattered along "the edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire," as Sudjic elegantly puts it.

The prototype of Newson's Lockheed Lounge has sold for prices closer to Mondrian than to Rietveld, or at least at prices closer to contemporary art. This is enough to set Sudjic to musing about Andy Warhol's effortless-looking effort to blur the lines between art and design, between the reproduction and the unique object, between art and outright commerce. The boundaries between art and design have always blurred on the design end of the spectrum—Sudjic cites the Baroque suits of armor never meant to be used for more than public display, and might have cited many more instances where fashion trumped functionality.

In the final stages of writing this book, Sudjic was in the thick of condemning contemporary design's prostitution to ever fluffier tides of fashion and dysfunction when the global financial collapse brought design, for the moment, closer to stripped-down basics. How long it will remain there before market forces resume their normal distortions depends on the response to the bullet that global capitalism appears (appears) to have dodged. Just as with the literal lethal object that gave rise to this commonplace metaphor, it seems unlikely that the close call will result in the financial equivalent of gun control. The forces of excess will doubtless be back in both finance and design, albeit perhaps less forcefully. And it will be time for Sudjic to continue his campaign to ponder what exactly it is that ought to make desirable objects desirable. (His historical reflections on the concept of "luxury" alone are worth the price of the book.)

An Essay on Art Blogging, plus Four Atlanta Shows

2009-06-21T06:49:00.000-07:00

An Essay on Art Blogging (for Those Who Care About Such Things, It Also Discusses Exhibitions by Marcia Cohen, Tom Ferguson, Paul S. Benjamin, and the Photographers of “Emerging Visions 2009”)

Jerry Cullum

What art journalism shares with journalism generally is the necessity of creating a nuanced portrait of events in the time available for a tight deadline; the writer is compelled to acquire all the tools of scholarship in a matter of a few days, then discard all the information (or at best inter it decently in long-term memory) because a new deadline demands detailed insider knowledge of something completely different.

In practice, not even magazine art reviewing, which operates on a longer-term deadline than art journalism, gets it right in this department. When more than one reviewer of the recent Tate Triennial harks back to Hiroshima or has recourse to recondite theory to interpret a mushroom cloud sculpture that alludes to a boundary dispute between two of the world’s most recent nuclear powers, it is a sign that such reviewers need to get out more, or at least read more than the online headlines and instant updates. As do we all.

One of the few benefits of blog writing is the permissibility of random commentary. The blogger is expected to allude rather than to explicate, and that is a small but significant compensation for the lack of anything resembling material recompense for the money and time expended in traveling to see and think about the art.

The difficulty for artists is that, because of the lack of comprehensive reviewing at present in most of the world’s art scenes, random blog references are often the only documentation of the details of a show—unless the gallery engages in unusually good online archiving practices or the artist has or is a really good web designer.

Lifetime retrospectives like Tom Ferguson’s at Eyedrum or major exhibitions of recent work like Marcia Cohen’s at MOCA GA (both in Atlanta, for the benefit of readers elsewhere) will doubtless get their full-fledged reviews from writers who have devoted a lifetime to reporting on and evaluating the work of such longtime career artists. So it is perhaps enough to note the interesting presentation of very nearly the full spectrum of Atlanta art practice so far as painters are concerned.

Cohen, of course, is an empirically minded color theorist whose versions of abstraction are conceptual investigations rather than emotional expressions, and everything from the specific environment in an Azores residency to the historically shifting tests for color blindness in textbooks are grist for the color-theory mill, or for the color theory compilations in a conceptually oriented Rolodex.

Ferguson, though his practice pays particular attention to color and texture in the large-scale paintings, is mostly a conceptualist of the concrete world (or of the world of concrete, plus the invisible webs of financial exploitation that get the concrete poured). It would be comforting to divide his work into transient political cartooning and long-term painterly expressions, but the political shenanigans he chronicles are perennial.

These two will get extended attention in print venues far removed from Counterforces. I, Jerry Cullum the blogger (to be distinguished from the differently motivated art reviewer, even if the reviewer was the same person and appeared in print under an identically named byline), am more puzzled and concerned about those who really needed the validation of the superseded format of the print review, and now are typically getting little more than the shout-out of the blog post.

In some ways, the format is advantageous. A clever writer can arrange keywords so that, say, someone looking for Cory Arcangel or even for Paul Klee will encounter a websearch sentence that also mentions Paul S. Benjamin, who has absolutely nothing in common with either of those artists and should not be thought of in the same sentence with them except to illustrate such subterfuges. (In practice, the citations in question would be more probable ones. I have chosen ones designed to come up very far down amid the thousands of results from most websearches.)

But the ephemeral quality of the blog medium ensures that hardly anyone will see the reference unless they stumble upon it for such unintended reasons or already know the artist in question and are looking for the name.

Benjamin, the recipient of the 2008-2009 Forward Art Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, has his new assemblage sculptures on view at Swan Coach House Gallery in Atlanta through August 8, with artist’s talk scheduled for July 11.

This would appear to be Benjamin’s breakthrough show, though I do not know his earlier work sufficiently to make that assertion myself. The plethora of found objects and discards from an earlier day are recombined into more than the usual pleasingly decorative abstraction of so much assemblage: the objects that aren’t painted matte black are mostly bright red or occasionally metallic: what we have in these symbolically overdetermined pieces are apples, eagles, axes, goblets, bullets, plus a veritable Freudian-fetish of a shiny red shoe that contains the inscription on its lining “all man made materials – made in China.”

One could go on, and a proper review ought to: there is a Cupid and a cornucopia on a made-up captain’s wheel of fortune, and in general the emblems of history gone askew are syncopated visual rhythms mingled with depth psychological metaphors beyond easy counting.

But there is seldom world enough and time for such reviews unless someone is at least paying for transportation if not for lunch, and galleries are forbidden to do such things.

This becomes a major dilemma in the case of juried shows such as Atlanta Photography Group’s “Emerging Visions 2009” (on view until July 3), where juror Chip Simone assembled nine contemporary fresh practitioners who could use all the publicity they can get. (The trade used to call such coverage “ink,” but these days the reportage is as digital as most of the photography.)

Here things become particularly difficult, because though all of these emerging artists are worthy of some degree of recognition, the things they are doing are quite different from one another and really ought to be discussed in terms of their intentions and degrees of influence. Amy Arrington’s digitally manipulated images could be critiqued in terms of small problems and larger successes (I would have done something a little different with the fire-and-ice motif of her most striking image); Margaret Strickland’s photos could be discussed as a continuation of the posed re-creations or reformulations of actual domestic life that we associate with Angela Strassheim and others; Artem Nazarov could be discussed as a digital formalist working beautifully in the aesthetic modes established by earlier generations. (The Wind makes visual poetry from bright window light and a windblown curtain and a tilted mattress and boxspring, the ensemble bespeaking fragility and transience.)

Yen Ngoc Phan should be discussed in detail for the semisurreal transformation of subtle codes of dress and behavior and ethnicity: the images explore a globalized, transcultural world of identity and immigration in which everything without exception has become exotic. (“Alle Menschen sind Ausländer, fast überall,” as the slogan had it a few years back: “Everyone is an alien almost everyplace.”)

Maria Joyner’s silver gelatin prints of railroad tracks and houses in mist and the other mistily mysterious components of A Wonderful Life would be celebrated, in a proper review, for their poetic visual metaphors for subtle emotional conditions: one traditional function of traditional photographic media, and these prints seem to commemorate the degree to which those media, like the objects in these photos, are passing into history.

But some of the digital work is equally nostalgia-laden or history-conscious, and one really ought to look in detail at the images presented by Kevin Tadge, Patricia Chourio, Amelia Alpaugh—and in particular at the exuberant diversity of the work of William Hogan, who seems to range from quietly monochromatic honoring of the isolated object to meticulous documentation of the real world’s range of outrageous color.

But all of that would require the leisure or at least the financial and professional incentive that a print-publication deadline used to afford. Until online editorial guidelines have filled in the gaps in most of the world’s art coverage, blog posts like this one are the less than satisfactory alternative. Sorry.

Without whom, not; footnote to the foregoing

2009-06-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

Dr. John Decker curated "Images of the Apocalypse," based on his course on the topic, with the jurying assistance of Tim Flowers, Pam Longobardi and Ruth Stanford.

And while I am at it, I have come across an agreeably post-apocalyptic publication, Volume magazine #11, "Cities Unbuilt," a book-length study of well-nigh apocalyptic destruction and modes of restoration in sites and situations from Beirut to Kosovo and the South Caucasus, but a volume of Volume that may already have become a collector's item.

Rem Koolhaas is a driving editorial force behind Volume, which permits me to use this excuse to remind Atlanta readers that Angelbert Metoyer and Charlie Koolhaas' inconsistent but intriguing collaborative work is still on view at Sandler Hudson Gallery through July 11.

The End of the World (As We Know It), or....

2009-06-18T10:12:00.000-07:00

The End of the World (As We Know It), or, Smiling Through the Apocalypse

Jerry Cullum

The 2008-2009 art season in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. has been bracketed by apocalypse, though nobody planned it that way.

Wm. Turner Gallery’s Matthew Rose exhibition “The End of the World” opened, purely by chance, a day or two after the beginning of America’s financial crisis of mid-September, causing one viewer (me) to misremember the title consistently as though it had been borrowed from the song from another season of financial and cultural upheaval, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” (“Smiling Through the Apocalypse” is the title of a completely unrelated book.)

In the parts of the world dominated by Peoples of the Book, apocalyptic thinking has wrung multiple metaphoric meanings from history: the end of the world has often been a vision of renovatio or of the Great Instauration of ultimate perfection rather than of the end of all things. (But note that 1 Peter’s “the end of all things is at hand” would have remained in the Christian scriptures even if the Revelation to John on Patmos had been expunged by the church councils, and Islamic and Jewish visions of the sky rolled up like a scroll are firmly fixed in the words of the respective scriptures.)

But rather than running off to the loci classici of books by Norman Cohn or Ernst Bloch, let’s note that Georgia State University has just opened a summerlong (through August 12) “Images of the Apocalypse” exhibition, giving us often paradoxically lovely new work by Stephanie Kolpy, Etienne Jackson, and many others. (Dahlan Foah’s video of images of the apocalypse contains some images that aren’t entirely of the End Times—Dante’s tripartite Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso being the pre-apocalyptic arrangement that will, as Dante tells us, be greatly modified when time shall be no more—but the point here is the structure of the human imagination, and its repeated returns to the issues associated with the sense of an ending.)

The G.S.U. exhibition is primarily about the contemporary religious and secular responses to notions of the end of all things. These begin with the imaginative consequences of Christian fundamentalists’ expectations of the Rapture or of the Second Coming, depending on their particular version of Protestant theology. (See my citation in a previous post of the bluegrass song in which the lyrics’ response to a beautiful day is to think about how great it would be to have all this loveliness abruptly brought to an end in the ultimate Beautiful Day…it’s part of a dialectic that is at least as old as the prophet Amos’s “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light….”)

The Gospel’s declaration of a final judgment in which those who did not feed the hungry or visit the sick and prisoners will be sent into everlasting fire isn’t the predominant model of the Apocalypse these days. Prevailing imaginative models are more like…well, let’s not go there, but get back to the art at G.S.U.

For in any case, the art responds more often to the other current models of the apocalypse, secular but nevertheless archetypal expectations of imminent machine-based or nuclear obliteration and/or environmental catastrophe. If we are about to (metaphorically speaking) topple over the cliff as in one of Kolpy’s images, the issue is whether we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

And all the old predilections show up in these latest incarnations of an ancient imaginative structure. The recent pastoral visit by Daniel Pinchbeck to the faithful in the evolver.net(work), discussed in an earlier post, reveals an approach to the anticipated end of all things that ranges from the ultimate optimism that Pinchbeck claims as revealed truth (articulated by the elders) to others’ gleeful or apprehensive expectations of utter destruction instead of fundamental positive transformation. Those who believe themselves to be relentlessly secular are still enraptured by images of an ending that have more to do with ancient modes and models than with realistic statistical mappings of what is most likely to come.

And that version of visionary expectation makes the vehement comic-book weirdness of Leisa Rich’s “Beauty from the Beast” of particular interest. Rich’s show, at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center through August 28, features a 3-D garden of soft sculptures that imagines the vegetal forms evolved through the mutation with the physical detritus left behind following humankind’s extinction; the forms, which quote the shapes of actual flowers, incorporate hundreds if not thousands of cut-up plastic straws, recycled carpet samples, recycled food labels, and too many other found materials to list comfortably.

This lush garden of all too earthly post-artificial delights pretty much covers the floor of the gallery; the walls contain a stitched and collaged oversized comic book wiping out the planet (or actually, just the United States’ portion of it) in eight concisely imagined disasters: “Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake,” “N.Y.C. Hurricane,” “Asteroid Impact” (that could take care of everybody else, too), “L.A. Tsunami,” “Supervolcano,” “Midwest Earthquake,” “Heat Waves” (that would also be sufficient to finish off the rest of the planet), and “East and West Coast Tsunami.”

The environmental apocalypse may arrive whether anyone tries to stop it or not; certain Pacific and Indian Ocean island countries are making real-life plans to evacuate. Nuclear proliferation remains whatever threat level it always was, even if the scenarios for total obliteration shift.

The alternate positive version of the apocalyptic vision, of the renewal of all things, is changing moment by historical moment just as past political versions of apocalyptic thinking did; as predicted a couple of generations ago, the revolution will not be televised, but we are in an era when forces that came to power through yesterday’s technologies now confront the elusive counterforces of digital networks. The end of the end will not be what was born in dreams at the beginning.

Which is how the imagination of apocalypse, for good or for ill, has also always played out. Our beginnings never know our ends, but as the pre-post-millennialist voice called from the audience at Pinchbeck’s appearance at Eyedrum, we know what we wish would happen.

in lieu of a review...images tk, I hope, from MINT's "Outlines and Outliers"

2009-06-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

Anyone coming to art writing with vague recollections of reader-response theory rather than Greenbergian formalism may have fewer problems than most with the notion that purported art critics’ first reactions to work are “I like this,” or “I don’t like this, but it needs to be reviewed positively,” or “I like this, but I know I shouldn’t, and I need to explain why,” or “I don’t like this, but other people do, and it would be worth discussing why they do and perhaps ought not to,” or “I like this, and I need to do a lot of research so I can explain what else is going on beyond my first positive reaction,” or occasionally, “I like this, and the reasons I like it have nothing at all to do with why the work is good.”

That being said, I must confess that the pressures of earning a living constrain me from doing justice to “Outlines and Outliars,” a three-person show at Atlanta’s MINT Gallery. I initially misread the title as “Outliers,” for a good many of the isolated figures in this trio’s drawings and video could be read as lying somewhere just outside the boundaries of whatever ingroup they are not members of. The young women in the images seem to have greater emotional kinship with the birds and animals around them than with the human society that is implied by their different and distinct modes of dressing. Occasionally, as in Kelly McKernan’s Cuckold, the animals become purely allegorical, the bird tied by thread to the woman’s more perfunctorily rendered cuckold’s horns, a literary symbol older than Shakespeare.

But it would require more time than I have in the duration of this two-week show (open two more weekends, actually) to deal properly with the reasons why McKernan and her fellow artists Chelsea Raflo and Cristina Vidal have individual visions of particular interest. Raflo’s video and her diverse drawings all seem to focus on unexpected complexities, and experiences that prove elusive to the experiencer and the society around her (or him, but the focus is on the females). Vidal’s conceptually and imagistically elaborate drawings deserve to be revisited, and I hope that this initial shout-out of a blog post will evolve into something more like a full review as time goes by.

The work in this exhibition ranges from pieces only slightly more than simple drawing exercises to ambitious, immense compositions. It is in the interests of full disclosure that I reveal that I bought one lowest-price-range work each by Raflo and Vidal to accompany the McKernan postcard reproductions I bought at Artlantis the previous weekend. (McKernan’s original work at MINT is accompanied by some of her eminently affordable reproductions—let’s not confuse the issue by calling them “prints,” unless there is no original of the image other than the file on the computer. Does “digital re-creations” work as an intermediate category?)

I was instantly struck by the quality of the exhibition’s one video work, which had no label apart from the brief identification of the artist at the end, and found myself inquiring as to the artist’s identity, to someone who turned out to be the artist. Raflo identifies her influences as Casey Jex Smith, Alex Lucas (who I suppose is not to be confused with Alex Lukas), Alex McLeod, and Whitney Stansell. It was the loose kinship with Stansell’s work that struck me at first viewing, and it is a pleasure to find that Stansell is coming into her own as an influence so relatively soon after becoming a fixture on the Atlanta scene. (For the record, I have never bought any of Stansell’s work, and of course I am aware that Stansell has her own influences.)

This first-person exploratory account (not review) is an initial attempt at the type of hybrid genre we shall have to evolve in the world’s local art scenes—and one that should have evolved in global art scenes, given the extent to which art gossip has been based on which artist or gallery is presumed (not always correctly) to be financially or erotically entangled with the curator or critic. On the world’s local scenes, it is seldom the case that the curators or critics are trying to increase the value of their own minimal acquisitions—apart from such exceptions as major museum shows, they would fail dismally if they did try—and critics are more often complained to sarcastically than courted. Most local curation and criticism is effectively invisible and without impact beyond a minor viewership, even though the era of viral media may be beginning to change this.

However, as I have remarked over the years in the now-fading print media, artists had rather have their names in print, or accessible to a Google search, than not; and as Henry Kissinger noted long ago regarding the struggles of university faculties, the passions run high because the stakes are low. Credibility is built at first by accretion and only later by more substantial modes of validation. It is the more substantial modes of validation that kick-start careers, but it does begin with having one's name spelled right.

Understanding What It Is We Don’t Understand: Notes towards an anthropology of the Atlanta art scene (or part of it, anyway)

2009-06-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

The challenge of art reviewing that has no deadline or word count and is uncompensated financially (I was going to call it an artwriting gig, but thought better of it) is that the review may blossom into a full-blown essay that is completed long after the show that inspired it has closed.

Paul Rabinow, in his brilliant 2008 Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, calls for a new anthropology in which the research can be done and the book published within the course of a year. Art critics don’t get nearly that long to do the fieldwork.

So my essay in the making based on Rabinow's book combined with a few of my deliberately inflammatory observations from a preceding essay will have to wait. This won’t be even a review, but more like a “listen up, y’all” for a pair of exhibitions that will be down before we know it.

Then I can focus on a couple more exhibitions that will also be down before we know it, given the short length of alternative-space exhibitions at places like MINT Gallery and Beep Beep Gallery. But first-ending things first.

The conceptually focused and ambitious visual explorations of George Long’s solo show and of the Sunday Southern Art Revival collaborative (who describe their practice as "making stuff" that challenges each other's notion of art while they collectively insist that they are having fun rather than being academic) are at Marcia Wood Gallery through June 20. There is something about the blend of personalities, backgrounds, and ethnicities that makes SSAR hard to ignore, even though much of the Atlanta art world has been very successfully doing so with this show: it may have been the temporal proximity of two other alternative art events, but their June 6 real-life conceptual-art cookout proved that you can’t even guarantee a crowd if you offer free beer and free chicken and free artwork.

Rabinow's book discusses the unsatisfactory quality of journalistic reports, which follow a prescribed format rather than getting into the real dimensions of the phenomenon; art journalism is no exception, but in its defense I would point out again that Rabinow calls for an anthropology of the contemporary in which the fieldwork would lead with stunning rapidity to a book in no less than a year’s time from the initial encounter. His own book has the minimally invasive copy editing (mostly regarding the correct use of the comma) and proofreading that may be required for such a fast-paced venture (relatively speaking).

The Internet, unlike print, gives us the instantaneous capacity to get things wrong, It also gives us the capacity to correct ourselves, but increasingly I am reluctant to hastily put portions of my anatomy out for public pillorying, as distinct from recommending that people take advantage of the presence of the art on the walls, and images of it online for preliminary perusal.

So I’ll say no more about the antiquely evocative yet distinctly contemporary (and not at all sentimental) imagery of our multiethnic downhome art revival. Except to remind you that you have about a week left in which to make haste to Castleberry and look, or to examine the work online in a more leisurely fashion if you live in the 99.44% of the world for which Castleberry is not an accessible commute. (The statistic is a reference to a vintage advertisement that passed into the language and presumably passed out of it again.)

I hope to have something more coherent to say about the newly opened show at MINT Gallery, which apparently is up for only one week longer than the show at Marcia Wood, and SSAR member Michi Meko’s newly opened show at Beep Beep Gallery, two exhibitions that take diametrically opposed approaches to the problems of historical and personal memory (we are all part of world history, even if the abridged version manages to leave us out of it—as a friend says of himself, he is famous, it’s just that not very many people are aware of that fact).

The Java Monkey coffeehouse where I frequently take advantage of the free wireless has a satellite-radio bluegrass show on the sound system that is closing with a song that somehow summarizes the double edge of irony and total sincerity on which SSAR and company dance so effectively: "What a Beautiful Day for the Lord to Come Again."

An anthropologist of the contemporary would love it.

An interim post between global academic disciplines and local artistic interventions

2009-06-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

Readers in the United Kingdom will know, but other Counterforces readers may not, that Anthony Gormley has created a populist form of performance art as his contribution to filling the famous vacant fourth sculpture plinth in Trafalgar Square: the first 615 of 2400 hourly presenters have just been named, chosen by computer algorithm from all over the United Kingdom to do whatever it pleases them to do with their hour of international attention (courtesy of Sky News real-time coverage at www.oneandtheother.co.uk).

Since the good publicists of boltonquinn.com presumably have connections, the following extract from their release will be published verbatim in more print and online outlets than I care to imagine, but some of you read it here first: the first-chosen participants “include David Rosenberg, 41, a designer from London who plans to use his hour at nightfall to pedal his folding pink bicycle to generate the energy to light up a specially created suit he will be wearing.” And the others likewise range from brilliant and earnest to merely brilliant:

“Oliver Parsons-Baker, 26, an aquatic scientist from Birmingham, plans to highlight the importance of clean water for people’s health by dressing up in a poo costume for half his time on the plinth. Then he’ll change into a fish costume to illustrate the dangers of overfishing.

“For Kay Lockley, 48, from Oldbury, her place on the plinth is an opportunity to raise awareness of Lupus, an incurable disease of the immune system from which she suffers. 'By putting myself forward to go on the plinth I am both excited and terrified. Excited to be part of such a brilliant project and terrified to put myself in the spotlight.'

“Mari Beard, a 24-year-old barmaid from Cardiff, hasn’t decided what she’s going to do, but whatever it is, it will be fun.

“Heather Pringle, a student from Hexham, will be celebrating her 20th birthday on the plinth. ‘I plan to celebrate in style, a good old fashioned birthday party. There will be cake.’”

We now return the Atlanta segment of the Counterforces readership to incipient reviews of local shows, which I intend to post in the next day or two.

I shall not attempt to offer a review of Atlanta painter James Dean’s tenth-birthday party for his much-celebrated fine-art cartoon character Pete the Cat, at the Seen Gallery in downtown Decatur (or deCATur as Dean’s coffee mugs spell it). There was cake. And it was fun.

Three or Four Events and More Than Three or Four Ideas

2009-06-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

or, On Connecting Even Without the Dots

Jerry Cullum

Three or four events over the weekend (five if you throw in a followup lecture on Monday), all but one of them public, have left me considering the disconnects in artworlds and in the world at large, and in Atlanta in particular.

I've written already about Saturday's events: Artlantis and Gather Atlanta, both devoted to DIY community-building and the reform of the actually existing (Atlanta) art world.

On Sunday, Alan Balfour, dean of the school of architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, offered a digital-slideshow summation of his career, at the invitation of a newly reactivated art-technology-and-science discussion group.

Balfour's larger message was about the shifting boundaries of art and architecture, the place of spatial aesthetics in shaping as well as responding to the cultural imagination—but also the unspoken issue of the difficult relationship between on-paper or onscreen projects, where the architects' imagination and attendant investigations have free rein, and the built environment where the imagination is firmly reined in by the constraints of budgets and the wishes of clients whose priorities typically have little enough to do with the future of the culture.

Meanwhile, over at the Lake Claire Community Land Trust, there was an EvolverFest, organized by people who might or might not have included active members of the mutual-aid bike repair shop that was such a prominent model of community-creating at Gather Atlanta.

Daniel Pinchbeck of 2012 and Reality Sandwich fame was there, proclaiming the good news of sustainable society and responsible practice to this one of the new urban groups formed in response to the evolver.net message of practical transformation—a message being assiduously transmitted by Pinchbeck, a skeptic who grew skeptical of his own skepticism.

When Pinchbeck asked at his Monday night public lecture how many audience members expected some kind of fundamental planetary change on the winter solstice of 2012, almost no hands went up, but a voice called out from the back of the room, "No, but we wish that kind of change was going to happen!"

And that less than millenarian outburst was another expression of the immense local and global community of mutual aid, of microresponses to macroforces. And that led me to ponder the relationship or lack of same between sobersided arts organizations (not to mention art communities), emerging architects prodded to produce impossible projects that may eventually inform their actual practice, and the sometimes semi-crazed theorists of the supposed emergent synthesis, whom Pinchbeck studies with occasional bemusement and summarizes along with the evidence or lack of same for each of their frequently incompatible fantasies. (The general rule seems to be that if each day you believe six impossible things before breakfast, maybe one possible thing will come from it before the year is out.)

The financial stakes in the artworld and in architecture alike often lead to imagination being placed in service to arrogance and personal profit. Even alternative art tends to fulfill the desires of the audience for plain-vanilla versions of underground movements that arose thirty and forty years ago. It would be hard to tell from most graffiti and lowbrow practitioners that in the past two decades we have lived through an economic and environmental upheaval that came very close to destroying global capitalism after destroying global communism, and that still bids pretty fair to leave us with the inundation of a few small countries before we are done with the highly-leveraged legacy of our carbon emissions.

No wonder the UFOlogists indulge in conspiracy theories while urban agriculturalists fiddle with ways to maximize yield in their own little postmodern versions of Victory Gardens.

At the same moment, young architects design spidery structural embroideries out of fever dreams that sometimes seem more akin to the dark delusions of the ashes-of-angels hypothesizers, and endless panels on sustainability can dream vast visions of the possible future, and long hours can go by before someone says, "Paint your damn roofs white!" (Giuseppe Terragni and Richard Meier turn out to have been harbingers of the world to come, after all.)

And no group seems aware of its own culturally imposed blind spots (how could we be?), and people who might unsettle or at least productively query one another's visions pass by one another in the early-summer sunlight, each blissfully ignorant of the other's existence.

Each would think that the other was a little crazy or dorky. And they would be right.

For we exist in community in part in hopes of reducing or modifying our craziness and our dorkiness, or at least of rendering them less immediately harmful.

When we go on in unabashed isolation or collectively pursued unenlightened self-interest, the result is the world in which we now live. Oops, there goes another glacier and a couple more piscine populations.

And the Icelandic currency hasn't been doing too well recently, either. Something about international banking making up for all those threatened livelihoods in the Atlantic fisheries.

How else am I going to celebrate my birthday? posting solo from Java Monkey on two art events of some significance

2009-06-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

It may be merely coincidental that the Artlantis outdoor festival of alternative art and the Gather Atlanta conference of grassroots arts organizations and (mostly) younger artists were staged on the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings. As anyone who has ever organized such an art event can tell you, the process resembles a major military operation in terms of the coordination of large numbers of incompatible personality types and diverse sorts of recalcitrant equipment, with the same sort of inevitable wastage, unanticipated blunders, and moments of stark terror. If the results are less horrifically bloody, the ground conquered or recovered is frequently far less consequential to subsequent history, even within the art world in question. (And that is an outcome that such organizers expect, but they keep on keeping on nevertheless. And just as in long, slogging military campaigns, small movements forward sometimes bring about the resolution of what seem to be hopelessly protracted conflicts.)

Artlantis took place on the territory between Urban Outfitters and the Druid Hills Baptist Church, on one of Atlanta’s historic east-west traffic arteries. It is to be hoped that the event was digitally recorded for posterity; for the artists involved represent a significant segment of the global art world, whether they know it or not.

There were artists who have garnered major commissions from past shows in galleries, and who were offering deeply discounted items from their immense inventory. There were artists with substantial formal training who were offering a lifetime’s worth of idiosyncratic work. There was artwork ranging from subtle, careful and imaginative to appallingly awful, in many cases all by the same artist. There were savvy artists who offered almost no originals and a full range of reproductions from postcards to poster prints. There were artists ranging from the slickly commercial to the unmarketably earnest, plus a fair number of the options in between.

What they had in common was that the world in general has never heard of them, no matter how many enthusiastic regional collectors they might chance to have.

What they also had in common was the willingness to work and exhibit in the face of financial unsuccess, a willingness that they share with regional art writers (and with regional writers of any sort, for that matter).

What might be further done about the discontents of the local scene was addressed, at least embryonically, in the panel discussion at Gather Atlanta, an indoor event at Eyedrum art and performance space. Here, the information tables were occupied not by solo artists but by organizations ranging from nearly newborn to cutting-edge ones that are hitting the quarter-century mark.

What was surprising was the absence of a few organizations that seemed to fall into the same category as the organizations that did show up. As with any self-selecting event, there were doubtless reasons why some were able to put in an appearance and others were not. Frequently the reason is as simple as the incapacity to be in two places at once. Some organizations consist of not much more than a single charismatic figure enlisting the aid of a shifting group of unpaid staffers.

And every one of the artists exhibiting in Artlantis, and every one of the organizations at Gather Atlanta, would love to have their names come up high on a Google search featuring their keywords.

Anyone who has ever had the thankless job of composing the laundry list of participating artists in a big group show (or, worse, picking out the artists to discuss in a 350-word review) knows the pain inflicted by the inadvertent and/or structurally necessary omission of anybody.

And this is why I am naming no names, positive or negative, in this little essay. If you want to know who should be given credit for having pulled off these near-miracles in one specific art scene, kindly google (or bing, as the competition would have you do) the relevant terms, and honor the lists of names that pop up.

More Notes Towards an Essay That May Never Be Written

2009-05-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Jerry Cullum

Angelbert Metoyer and Charlie Koolhaas’ collaboration is meant to direct attention to particular ways in which the world’s beloved specificities are being diluted and diverted by the currents of global commerce. You can’t count on not finding the most culturally improbable imports even in spots that seem unlikely to have the wherewithal to pay for them. Toss in the imponderables of global migration, and you have the recipe for the cultural collisions and negotiations that are C. Koolhaas’s photographic bread and butter.

Ms Koolhaas (who almost certainly doesn't require these attached honorifics or first-name cites to avoid confusion with her architect father) documents the indistinguishable components of the world’s conurbations, set cheek by jowl with the cultural inflections that remind outsiders of where they are. And the juxtaposed results are precisely part of what the writers in the Huyssen anthology would call an urban imaginary: the shifting imaginative nodes whereby residents not only navigate in an urban space but re-interpret its shifting physical modes and moods. It is possible, these days, to feel lost in one’s own home territory, and that particular condition has led and will lead to moments of spectacular violence.

But for every displaced migrant community or discomfited longtime local population at one another’s throats, there are dozens that seem to have settled into a functional style of co-existence that is not quite tolerance and certainly not cosmopolitanism. But it is a style based on the realization that in the absence of intolerable immediate conditions (and what constitutes “tolerable” shifts according to moods and modes of the moment), everyone is better served by going along to get along.

There is a great deal of impassioned theory-laden rhetoric about the lives of urban populations that we will not revisit here. What is at stake is how the imaginative lives of those populations shape the urban imaginaries of cities that have been tossed into the global discourse in ways that are distinctly their own, using the same components that the forces of multinational capitalism and state socialism have distributed unevenly across the planet.

Pico Iyer has written some of our best subjective impressions of the condition of the global soul, that particular socioeconomic class that is formed by not just the ability bujt the necessity to travel from one globalized cultural bubble to the next, on business or on the business of making and exhibiting art. (Nicolas Bourriaud is the most recent curator to write about artists as global nomads, a topic on which I noted a dozen years ago that not only are most artists the opposite of nomadic, but that most of the people who are actual global nomads are individuals who in other circumstances might not have chosen to wander the globe in search of better-paying work.)

So there really is what Iyer poetically (if with some degree of alarm) calls a global soul, a globalized social type. But ironically, globalized consciousness and what used to be called cosmopolitanism do not go hand in hand; some of our better-compensated global nomads are as provincially encapsulated in their own quite limited social worlds as was any young Englishman off on the Victorian version of the Grand Tour.

Metoyer and Koolhaas are not in that category, and the fruits of their world wanderings are meant to be explorations of the personal and social underpinnings of identity and difference. Metoyer’s mystical cross-blendings of cultural symbolizations overlay prettily on Koolhaas’ documentation of the parts of cities that could be anywhere, and the parts that are distinctly of their own time and place, and the parts in which whole genres of time and place collide and intermingle or sit uncomfortably adjacent.

Whether all their ventures communicate adequately, or whether all are successful as aesthetic objects: that, formalist critics can address. The mirrored hypercubes in the Sandler Hudson exhibition seem like windows into another world, but a world that is the one we live in. The single film out of the fifty-two currently in Metoyer’s oeuvre seems another such window into the not-yet of the time that is coming and in some ways is already here, and in many ways right outside the window in Midtown West. As William Gibson famously wrote, the future is already here, but is unevenly distributed. As is obvious once you think about it and bother to look around with eyes that are more than half-open and a mind more than half-awake.

I believe that Metoyer wrote in an earlier exhibition that we are enlightened but we are not yet awakened. But now it is high time to wake out of sleep.

Dufftown to Istanbul, or the wages and wagers of globalization

2009-05-31T07:14:00.001-07:00

Dufftown to Istanbul (going westward?)

There are many reasons why my 2007 essay “Dufftown to Istanbul” was never completed (and why the chief documentation of that trip is the long poem Changing Planes in Prague, now apparently available on amazon.com as well as the lulu.com website…at a 30% markup that goes to Amazon).

Planning the extension to a proffered press tour, I had been struck originally by the curious appropriateness of traveling from the northwestern fringe of Europe to the southeastern fringe of the continent…and in fact I stayed on the European side of the bicontinental city, when eventually I flew there (changing planes in Prague) to attend the press conference for the Istanbul Biennial. Asia remains outside my personal experience.

Dufftown, Banffshire, Scotland was a planned community of the eighteenth century that has become a center of the distilling of single malt Scotch, the one commodity that has continued to do well in the midst of the great global downturn, apparently as the one affordable luxury of which no one has felt they could postpone or reduce the consumption.

Glenfiddich, the distillery that pioneered the single malt concept (after generations of selling their product for inclusion in blended whiskies), has for half a dozen years sponsored an on-site summer residency program for a number of global artists (not coincidentally from countries where Glenfiddich is already a valued product). I was brought over with the assignment of writing about the multicultural, complexly encoded artwork of Romeo Alaeff, which I eventually did in a couple of online posts.

Scotland had earlier voted in a majority of nationalist parliamentarians, leading London alarmists to write as though the Scots were on the verge of, as it were, firing on Fort Sumter. It led me to think of the oddity of Scotland’s position as a fringe country within Europe, so opposite in every sense to Turkey’s position on the other fringe; the dualities being too many to enumerate, with the position of the geographic margin being the single point of similarity between a little-known Scottish town and the onetime capital of a continent-spanning empire.

But the products of the Speyside district (and I might have more euphoniously and accurately titled my never-written essay “Aberlour to Istanbul” were that town name not also the brand name of Glenfiddich’s French-owned competitor) are distributed globally, and what comes out of Dufftown in green glass bottles finds its way to the farthest corners of the planet’s marketplaces. (Contemplating Glenfiddich’s global reach during my August 2007 visit, I found myself recalling the moment in the film Hotel Rwanda when the military strongman reminisces fondly about having visited the Scottish distilleries and muses, “I wonder if I shall ever see those places again.”)

All of this was brought to mind by the arrival at Atlanta’s Sandler Hudson Gallery of a collaboration between Houston- and Guangzhou-based artist Angelbert Metoyer and his wife, photographer and sociologist Charlie Koolhaas (Rem’s daughter, if you really must know, as I did).

And the implications of their particular take on globalization may form the subject of yet another unwritten essay. (Cf. my fortunately timed preliminary Counterforces review of Andreas Huyssen’s Other Cities, Other Worlds: though they never use the term, Metoyer and Koolhaas are very much tackling the issue of urban imaginaries in the era of globalization.) Guangzhou to Lagos, Dubai to Shanghai, it’s all one global city (I don’t mind)…inside my heart remains the same? or not, and that is the point. (Apologies for thus mangling the lyrics of a 1980s song familiar to fans of Wim Wenders.)

The photographs above are all by Jerry Cullum, 2007; images from the Sandler Hudson Gallery exhibition will appear in subsequent posts specifically about that body of collaborative work.

what is to be done and not done, version the whatevereth

2009-05-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

I have written repeatedly about this odd transitional moment, in which, in Atlanta at least, all the art reviewing is being done by unsalaried volunteers (and likethedew.com has become the uncompensated feature-story base in which assorted ex-AJC writers and photographers address Southern mores and matters other than the artworld—if as one friend says, "a job is something you wouldn't do if you weren't getting paid for it," writing research-based prose is clearly not a job, just as the non-writers always suspected).

I haven't been fully understood when I write about the ways in which nobody has yet figured out how to take full advantage of the technology available to us, and I'm not sure if this attempt will be any less subject to misprision, misinterpretation, and misreading, pick your term and pick your theorist.

I have written some downright wrongheaded pieces on the Counterforces blog, in the expectation that, a la Wikipedia, the self-correcting function of the Internet would quickly come into play. Perhaps because Blogspot makes it a pain to record comments (LiveJournal is better in that regard, and debates happen on my joculum blog regularly), my blog posts are being treated as though they had the status of full-blown reviews. (And indeed, some of my two thousand word essays are meant to be regarded as such.)

But the nature of the digital medium allows for immediate corrections. Just as it was once possible to alter copy (or at least headlines) in time for the afternoon edition, today the digital equivalent of the afternoon edition can happen any time somebody points out an egregious misperception.

In parallel fashion, the half-formed opinion on a blog can be reformulated in a finished piece for an art-reviewing website in a matter of hours, if the writer is accustomed to meeting tight deadlines from the days of print and hard copy. There is no need for reviewing sites to compete for turf with blogs, which are playing different games and which, as I have said, are too diverse and too dispersed to make for a very efficient means of communication with an art audience that, unlike us art types, does not spend most of its day thinking about what is out there to be contemplated or purchased art-wise. Reviewing sites, supplemented by print for the bereft readers of newspapers, are the wave of the future. Individual reviewers, however, are currently living in their own separate bloggy worlds, and need to be approached to write something more formal and complete when it appears they have said something that needs to be seen by someone other than their own loyal readership.

So why do we persist as though our digitalia possessed the unalterable status of cold print? In part, I presume, it's for reasons of recollecting Orwell; having been assured by a novelist's number one fan that I had offended the novelist's sensibilities, I deleted an observation and informed said novelist that I had done so, remarking that except for those addicted to downloads or screen captures, there was now no evidence that the remark had existed, save on Google's servers: "Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

But surely it ought to be possible for the digitalized artworld to take on some of the positive aspects of Wikipedia, through an agreement to refrain from snark in the comments section and make one's remarks focus on areas where one feels or can demonstrate that the reviewer has gotten it wrong. Said reviewer can then revise, rethink, retort in kind, or delete as he or she sees fit.

And eventually an agreed-upon format will emerge that will be the twenty-first-century replacement for the kind of newspaper review that, in the Atlanta metro print market, appears to be effectively extinct.

I now wish to illustrate the truth of my original observations regarding the capacity for quick updates, by adding a centrally important piece of news:

Former AJC arts reviewers Cathy Fox and Pierre Ruhe have instituted a blog devoted specifically to supplementing AJC arts coverage with the sorts of reviews for which both of them became highly respected prior to their departure from the publication (for which both continue to write on a freelance basis):

http://www.artscriticatl.com/

Scott Silvey at Whitespace

2009-05-25T06:17:00.000-07:00

Scott Silvey's ambitious sculptural installations will be remembered by those who attended various alternative-space shows prior to his decamping for parts ever further afield.

His new and quite different paintings of flowers and architecture, transported to Atlanta at immense expense from his current home base of Tokyo, reflect his sensitive effort to transmit the spiritual currents of a culture via visual metaphors. But first and foremost, they are uncommonly fine paintings.

Though the show runs into July, it should be visited early and often (and for once, that cliche should be taken literally). Silvey's combination of painterly gesture and precise drawing technique results in a body of work that rewards extensive and repeated viewing.

One hopes that the various artsites on the Web will provide full-length reviews in due course, or are already in process of doing so. There are formal and factual questions that ought to be addressed in greater depth.

http://www.whitespace814.com/