I used to be a huge fan of maps. A little attention turns up wondrous anomalies: the patch of the Dutch-Belgian border where a couple of villages of the one country are an exclave that exists completely surrounded by the other country, a condition that doesn’t much matter in Baarle and Hertog but matters very much in places like the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, where a good many Azerbaijani (or is it just Azeri?) and Armenian soldiers took bullets over which country got to control which ethnicity.
I suppose this was also related to my childhood bewilderment with the multiple entities to be found in Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue or even more in the baffling map to be found in vintage stamp albums; not only were there countries that didn’t exist any longer, but their boundaries overlapped two and three and four times, even worse than the maps of Europe in which the countries as well as the boundaries shifted with monotonous regularity. I loved realizing that Europe had been a different continent in terms of countries as recently as 1939, but my eyes glazed over when I tried to contemplate the fact that neither Italy nor Germany had existed as single countries as recently as seventy-five years or so before that. It took me decades to figure out that if the Far Eastern Republic was an offshoot of the Russian civil war (easy), the mysterious Republic of Hatay was basically a handoff mechanism for transferring Antioch and its surrounding sanjak from the French protectorate of Syria to the Republic of Turkey in 1938-39.
Later on this fascination fed into my obsession with knowing what was going on in every single country on earth, and my annoyance at how hard the job was (and still is). I have given up wondering what’s new in the Netherlands Antilles, or whether wi-fi has come to Wallis and Futuna, or even whether Mauritius got its own wireless network to stretch across the side of the island with all the sugar cane fields, but every so often I feel guilty that I no longer care as much about it. (Some of it matters. A lot. Look at the labels on your clothes and contemplate which countries have graduated from being suppliers to the bins of Ross Dress for Less.)
And while USA Today gave us the illusion of being comprehensive a generation ago, presenting a single snippet of news daily not only from every state of the U.S.A. but from its associated territories, today the illusion of being comprehensive has vanished from newer media; one can browse not only Google News but even the BBC websites without finding news of more than a fraction of the countries that march past in the Olympics opening ceremonies. (It used to drive me crazy that the network cut away to a commercial just when my favorite national entities were about to send their handful of athletes past the camera.)
“All Things Considered” is another globe-spanning enterprise, intermittently offering reports from insufficiently recognized parts of the planet. But there are only so many minutes in the day, and even the newer program “The World” is less than fully worldly.
So it is excellent that Kathryn Refi’s exhibition at Solomon Projects has set out to map this omission for us, recording over the course of some months the place names mentioned on the National Public Radio program, and showing us just how many things are unconsidered.
Refi’s maps of the month give us the red dots of the mentions on a map minus the map, and geography freaks have already had what felt like hours of pleasure trying to figure out where the coast of Korea stopped and Japan began, what the islands were that seemed too far south to be Hawaii but too far west to be the Galapagos and too far east to be the Marquesas, and so forth. It comes as a shock to realize that parts of the world are hundreds of miles distant from the longitudes and latitudes where you had placed them.
But the only way we can puzzle some of this out from Refi’s works is by looking for the clusters of dots that signify Baghdad in most months, or the State of New Hampshire in the 2007 run-up to the presidential primaries. Not only are all parts of the world not equal, they are not equally newsworthy.
So every so often we find out that thousands of people have been dying in places other than Darfur or Anbar province, and we didn’t know a thing about it. (And some of us old-timers then sing to ourselves the closing verses of Bob Dylan’s “Black Diamond Bay.”)
Refi’s dot clusters actually indicate what a good job “All Things Considered” is doing in reminding Americans that places remote from them exist; it just reminds them very selectively (or not at all) of the locales that are neither natural headline makers nor popular tourist spots. The greater part of the Russian Federation (or whatever they call it these days) remained blank throughout on each of Refi’s monthly mappings; one month brought a tour of Siberia by an NPR roving reporter, but the Finno-Ugric Republics remained a great void for anyone who didn’t read the unrelated online Eurozine that reported on an art show about them that was staged in Estonia.
And even Eurozine’s roundup of the contents of the continent’s news magazines is singularly selective. Moldova is entirely out of luck for the most part.
I once met a man at an Atlanta art opening who was the sole North American importer for Moldovan wines (or was at that point of 2005 or 2006) and realized it was the first time I could recall having met anyone with direct connections to Moldova. I doubt if I thought much about the country again until I picked up a tiny aluminum coin from Moldova on an arrival ramp at the Istanbul airport in 2007.
The Palestinians reportedly tell a joke about a survey asking Americans their opinion about some social condition in the rest of the world that failed because the Americans couldn’t understand the meaning of “the rest of the world.”
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
nobody reads this blog to speak of, but....
more evidence that Atlanta needs one go-to site for art info is that various people have spoken with some bewilderment about how Hushpuppy Gallery seemed to disappear without so much as a whisper.
Well, it turns out that Hushpuppy had an opening on July 19 that was not promoted on the Allison Rentz art calendar creation, on the artnews listserv, on the blogs of Cinque Hicks or Jonathan Bouknight or Jeremy Abernathy or any of those other folks who go to everything alternative and report what is cool that one must absolutely go to.
and today I found by dint of long searching the info that Hushpuppy had an opening on July 19th and who knows how long that show ran? Pine magazine ran a story about the gallery and its imminent closing but most of us thought it was long gone.
http://pine-magazine.com/content.php?id=1376
So what does it take to get galleries to TELL US THAT THEY EXIST?????? I got on their e-mail list and got nothing at all from them about this July 19 shindig.
Well, it turns out that Hushpuppy had an opening on July 19 that was not promoted on the Allison Rentz art calendar creation, on the artnews listserv, on the blogs of Cinque Hicks or Jonathan Bouknight or Jeremy Abernathy or any of those other folks who go to everything alternative and report what is cool that one must absolutely go to.
and today I found by dint of long searching the info that Hushpuppy had an opening on July 19th and who knows how long that show ran? Pine magazine ran a story about the gallery and its imminent closing but most of us thought it was long gone.
http://pine-magazine.com/content.php?id=1376
So what does it take to get galleries to TELL US THAT THEY EXIST?????? I got on their e-mail list and got nothing at all from them about this July 19 shindig.
Monday, August 4, 2008
and this is what some cities are managing to do....
Jacksonville, Florida has an amazingly comprehensive site with which to report on its visual art doings...comprehensive at least at first glance, with photos and video interviews and commentary upfront and easy to locate.
http://www.JaxCAL.org/
http://www.JaxCAL.org/
No Sooner Asked for Than Done; Done Already, Actually, Even Before I Asked
"In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" at Laguna Art Museum is a survey of 150 artists and a first effort at a history, so in due course I suppose the multiple interactions I discussed in the Andy Howell post will find their way into art discourse. But damned slowly. Catalogue TK from the museum, according to their website.
The show was probably announced elsewhere in the issue of Juxtapoz that carried the Andy Howell interview.
The show was probably announced elsewhere in the issue of Juxtapoz that carried the Andy Howell interview.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Recontextualizing Andy Howell, or, How Can I Make This Essay Sound Even More Unappealing Than It Already Is?
Art, Skateboarding, and Life: Belated Notes on Andy Howell
Jerry Cullum
My chief professional distraction from practicing intellectual history and exploring the condition of consciousness studies consists of the need to visit more or less non-mainstream galleries, in search of two-hundred-word writeups for the entertainment section of the daily print medium.
I have, for years now, been slightly baffled by the question of where such an obviously coherent alternative aesthetic came from, in terms of skatepunk, hip-hop visuals, and many assorted other movements that are associated with, but not really part of, the greater Lowbrow movement.
Few things are more annoying to would-be art historians than art movements whose history has not been adequately chronicled. And this set of them seems particularly under-researched.
So imagine my surprise when I finally discovered, on perusing the interview with Andy Howell in the June 2008 issue of Juxtapoz, that a significant part of this international aesthetic was birthed in Atlanta circa 1991 when skateboarder Andy Howell got to know hip-hop artist Lil Jon, who worked at Skate Escape.
Howell says that in 1991 he was “fusing Sesame Street beats with GI Joe music and adding punk beats and making this weird hybrid that ended up sounding like carnival hip-hop with ADD.” Which beats all hollow the kind of cultural fusion that James Clifford was then recording in anthropological circles, but who knew?
The cartoony creatures crawling across the iconography of this mash-up (before we learned to refer to hybridity as mash-up) were enough to keep the uninitiated at bay. Heck, we hadn’t quite picked up on “hybridity” yet, even if Les Magiciens de la Terre in Paris and New York’s three-venue extravaganza The Decade Show had cued us in to the possibility that there were more ways of putting the pieces together than we had previously thought.
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was still a couple of years away, Cornel West was still pretty much doing liberation theology coupled with deconstruction, and nobody, but nobody, was noticing the creative output of guys working at skate shops in Atlanta, Georgia.
But Howell and Co. brought forth Ma$$ Prophets t-shirts and music that, as Lil Jon put it in 2008, “sounded really good for 1991.”
And, Howell testifies, the birth of the politically minded Zero Sophisto came about in this wise: “Zero Sophisto started as a reflection of Atlanta and us all skating the city with everyone in our crew. Skateboarding was universal. All sorts of different races and cultures together, and in the middle of Atlanta? That was an anomaly. …I started drawing graphics with crayons for clothes to make it appear as if all these political statements were coming from a kid writing them on the street in the middle of the city. I wanted to show that this new language, which I called Zero Sophisto, was being created by kids with skateboards and paint cans.” [p. 64 of article cited below]
And in the fullness of time Mary Jane Jacob brought the globally approved version of public and political art to town for the Cultural Olympiad, and meanwhile a whole movement remained underground in spite of all the declarations that “the underground” was, like, so over.
It was, but apparently the systematically overlooked was not.
And outsiders could peruse all the near-illegible little magazines (literally little…a friend remarked that the type on the tiny pages was too small to be read by anyone over thirty), and still have no clear idea what was going on. Graffiti continued as it had for decades (and still continues, wild style and the rest being some thirty years old this year), but the other meldings and fusings and gatherings-up were something else entirely. Except when they weren’t.
Howell, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere. “New York influenced me a lot. … The hip-hop kids in NY were really looking across the club at that point [“between ’89 and ’92,” he says elsewhere] and kind of nodding to the skate kids. There was no crossover, just a mutual respect creatively. It was an infant scene at the time of hip-hop kids, skaters, and street artists. It was even smaller in Atlanta at the time, but there were a group of us making beats and skating and writing graffiti. Of course my graffiti became skateboard graphics, and then started getting into some of the original art shows at Alleged Gallery on Stanton and Ludlow.” And the Atlanta music scene was birthed “even more underground, and just dirty and raw like the South was at that time. Jon actually branded the ATL sound in a way with Crunk.” [p. 67, op.cit.]
All of which would find its way, distorted and in pieces, into the mainstream media with terminology that now functions as a set of marketing tools. But there were Howell and Jon, out in front without quite intending it, and Shepard Fairey remarks admiringly, “Seeing the connection between music, skateboarding, and art, and seeing how you took creative control of the cultures you were participating in was always something that was huge for me. Especially how you were one of the first people to really embrace graphic design intertwined with illustration. You seized the coming of digital media and art really seamlessly.” [p. 67 of “You Will Be the Guest of a Gracious Host: Andy Howell interview by Shepard Fairey, Lil Jon, and Evan Pricco,” Juxtapoz vol. 15, no. 6 (June 2008), 58-73.]
On page 64, the large quote, which is all some people notice while they look at the pictures, reads “For me everything culturally, artistically, and even technologically has merged.” And it has, for sure.
Now, my actual point is fairly elementary. Howell addresses his interviewers thus: “Jon, you never thought you were going to create a new genre of music when you were listening to punk and skating; Shepard never expected to inspire a wheatpaste and stencil movement when [he] first put up those stickers in Providence; and I never thought I’d help influence the fusion of art, skateboarding, and hip-hop culture when I was rapping in my high school art class. We all ping-ponged ideas off each other over and over again, indirectly at times, which is how popular culture evolves.” [pp. 67, 70]
Well, actually, that’s how culture evolves in general, as anyone who has ever put together a collaborative art or performance piece or work of scholarship can testify. And there are loads of theoreticians whose insights could be applied to understanding the history of all this stuff.
But first somebody has to wade through enough issues of Juxtapoz to do it, and that will require a Ph.D. candidate who grew up with the stuff instead of being turned on by the idea that there were the Cantos and The Waste Land to be had instead of the Top 40 rock crap on their smalltown radio stations. It will require somebody who grew up on the far side of the dissolution of the old high-low distinctions and somebody who likes low and high together from the times before.
And to quote the prophet of my elderly generation, it ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.
Jerry Cullum
My chief professional distraction from practicing intellectual history and exploring the condition of consciousness studies consists of the need to visit more or less non-mainstream galleries, in search of two-hundred-word writeups for the entertainment section of the daily print medium.
I have, for years now, been slightly baffled by the question of where such an obviously coherent alternative aesthetic came from, in terms of skatepunk, hip-hop visuals, and many assorted other movements that are associated with, but not really part of, the greater Lowbrow movement.
Few things are more annoying to would-be art historians than art movements whose history has not been adequately chronicled. And this set of them seems particularly under-researched.
So imagine my surprise when I finally discovered, on perusing the interview with Andy Howell in the June 2008 issue of Juxtapoz, that a significant part of this international aesthetic was birthed in Atlanta circa 1991 when skateboarder Andy Howell got to know hip-hop artist Lil Jon, who worked at Skate Escape.
Howell says that in 1991 he was “fusing Sesame Street beats with GI Joe music and adding punk beats and making this weird hybrid that ended up sounding like carnival hip-hop with ADD.” Which beats all hollow the kind of cultural fusion that James Clifford was then recording in anthropological circles, but who knew?
The cartoony creatures crawling across the iconography of this mash-up (before we learned to refer to hybridity as mash-up) were enough to keep the uninitiated at bay. Heck, we hadn’t quite picked up on “hybridity” yet, even if Les Magiciens de la Terre in Paris and New York’s three-venue extravaganza The Decade Show had cued us in to the possibility that there were more ways of putting the pieces together than we had previously thought.
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic was still a couple of years away, Cornel West was still pretty much doing liberation theology coupled with deconstruction, and nobody, but nobody, was noticing the creative output of guys working at skate shops in Atlanta, Georgia.
But Howell and Co. brought forth Ma$$ Prophets t-shirts and music that, as Lil Jon put it in 2008, “sounded really good for 1991.”
And, Howell testifies, the birth of the politically minded Zero Sophisto came about in this wise: “Zero Sophisto started as a reflection of Atlanta and us all skating the city with everyone in our crew. Skateboarding was universal. All sorts of different races and cultures together, and in the middle of Atlanta? That was an anomaly. …I started drawing graphics with crayons for clothes to make it appear as if all these political statements were coming from a kid writing them on the street in the middle of the city. I wanted to show that this new language, which I called Zero Sophisto, was being created by kids with skateboards and paint cans.” [p. 64 of article cited below]
And in the fullness of time Mary Jane Jacob brought the globally approved version of public and political art to town for the Cultural Olympiad, and meanwhile a whole movement remained underground in spite of all the declarations that “the underground” was, like, so over.
It was, but apparently the systematically overlooked was not.
And outsiders could peruse all the near-illegible little magazines (literally little…a friend remarked that the type on the tiny pages was too small to be read by anyone over thirty), and still have no clear idea what was going on. Graffiti continued as it had for decades (and still continues, wild style and the rest being some thirty years old this year), but the other meldings and fusings and gatherings-up were something else entirely. Except when they weren’t.
Howell, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere. “New York influenced me a lot. … The hip-hop kids in NY were really looking across the club at that point [“between ’89 and ’92,” he says elsewhere] and kind of nodding to the skate kids. There was no crossover, just a mutual respect creatively. It was an infant scene at the time of hip-hop kids, skaters, and street artists. It was even smaller in Atlanta at the time, but there were a group of us making beats and skating and writing graffiti. Of course my graffiti became skateboard graphics, and then started getting into some of the original art shows at Alleged Gallery on Stanton and Ludlow.” And the Atlanta music scene was birthed “even more underground, and just dirty and raw like the South was at that time. Jon actually branded the ATL sound in a way with Crunk.” [p. 67, op.cit.]
All of which would find its way, distorted and in pieces, into the mainstream media with terminology that now functions as a set of marketing tools. But there were Howell and Jon, out in front without quite intending it, and Shepard Fairey remarks admiringly, “Seeing the connection between music, skateboarding, and art, and seeing how you took creative control of the cultures you were participating in was always something that was huge for me. Especially how you were one of the first people to really embrace graphic design intertwined with illustration. You seized the coming of digital media and art really seamlessly.” [p. 67 of “You Will Be the Guest of a Gracious Host: Andy Howell interview by Shepard Fairey, Lil Jon, and Evan Pricco,” Juxtapoz vol. 15, no. 6 (June 2008), 58-73.]
On page 64, the large quote, which is all some people notice while they look at the pictures, reads “For me everything culturally, artistically, and even technologically has merged.” And it has, for sure.
Now, my actual point is fairly elementary. Howell addresses his interviewers thus: “Jon, you never thought you were going to create a new genre of music when you were listening to punk and skating; Shepard never expected to inspire a wheatpaste and stencil movement when [he] first put up those stickers in Providence; and I never thought I’d help influence the fusion of art, skateboarding, and hip-hop culture when I was rapping in my high school art class. We all ping-ponged ideas off each other over and over again, indirectly at times, which is how popular culture evolves.” [pp. 67, 70]
Well, actually, that’s how culture evolves in general, as anyone who has ever put together a collaborative art or performance piece or work of scholarship can testify. And there are loads of theoreticians whose insights could be applied to understanding the history of all this stuff.
But first somebody has to wade through enough issues of Juxtapoz to do it, and that will require a Ph.D. candidate who grew up with the stuff instead of being turned on by the idea that there were the Cantos and The Waste Land to be had instead of the Top 40 rock crap on their smalltown radio stations. It will require somebody who grew up on the far side of the dissolution of the old high-low distinctions and somebody who likes low and high together from the times before.
And to quote the prophet of my elderly generation, it ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.
Rajni Shah's Dinner With America(ns)
Rajni Shah's dinners with Americans (a fair number of Atlantans in particular) were used as raw material for her Dinner With America performance piece in the United Kingdom, which has gotten a significant review that should be of interest to those Atlantans who recall Shah's long residence here, and to those readers who just want an insight into how one culture takes an unconventional look at another:
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/dinner_with_america/
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/dinner_with_america/
Monday, July 28, 2008
gnomonics
"The Gnomon Show" at Railroad Earth on Saturday was apparently unattended by any of the blogging public, so I shall self-advertise that the multimedia combination successfully re-invented the Chautauqua for the twenty-first century, though whether the genre needed to be brought back is dependent on whether anybody had missed the notion of live performance combining lecture, poetry, video, digital images, and sensory overload with ideas tacked on as an essential component, the paradoxical combination being essential to the nature of the Chautauqua in a time in which live performance is an anachronism pursued only by obsolete hipsters and antique elders, for opposite but possibly equal reactive reasons.
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