too few hours in the day...notes on newness

Eventually there will have to be some way of compensating people for their time and wear and tear on equipment (unless they use the public library's computers)...I am sure that all the Atlanta bloggers could spend the better part of an eight-hour day writing proper commentary on what's going on around the city.

Item: Gregor Turk's tenth-anniversary showing of the "Interstate 50" blank billboard series alongside new photos of walls where the painting over of graffiti has created inadvertent allusions to color field painting and, in one case, to Mark Rothko.

This show at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery is accompanied by two elegant volumes from Shutterfly that constitute catalogues of the two series. They are elegant because Turk designed them, of course. The same principle applies to the lovely catalogue of the Swiss and American cut-paper pieces currently at the Papermaking Museum at Georgia Tech. Blurb manufactured that one, once again to the standards set by the designer who uploaded it.

The advance over where lulu.com was in its pioneer days (i.e., three or four years ago) is marked and remarkable. We're in an era in which there is no excuse for putting out a shoddy publication if it's actually being purchased rather than given away.

There are a good many other things to discuss, probably better separated out in terms of posts.

a very quick note on Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley, who began life as a classicist, branched out to write about global contemporary art before global contemporary art was cool. In more recent years he has been collecting his essays on such topics as conceptual and performance art.

And now he has published a new book on Sappho, a reminder that he never quite quit writing about the ancient Greeks as well as about the global reach of contemporary forms of art.

The book is from Spring Publications, and amazon.com lists it as though it were incredibly rare, only one copy available from one of their sellers. But in fact it has just been published, and apparently is simply not in their warehouse yet.

I mention all this not because many readers of counterforces care about scholarly studies of Sappho, but because not many practicing art critics still publish books in their original specialties. Arthur Danto, whom I first encountered through his Nietzsche as Philosoper, hasn't published a book devoted solely to philosophy in a decade, and a flood of titles devoted to his essays on contemporary art.

"The torch is passed to a new generation." The torch...what happened to the torch?...it was right here a minute ago

The familiar quotation from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address is also an obscure allusion to Karl Kraus' fabled magazine of social critique Die Fackel (usually only referred to as such, but as the current issue of the New York Review of Books reminds us, the title's English translation is The Torch).

And that's an appropriate lead-in for a plug for a new Atlanta art-reviewing website, Burn Away, at http://www.burnaway.org. It is attempting to bridge the various gulfs in the Atlanta art worlds, though so far its practitioners are still happier writing about the spaces they already frequent, so we are unlikely to see reviews of the Signature Shop or Atlanta Art Gallery any time soon.

Which is fine, although somebody needs to evaluate Atlanta Art Gallery's would-be blockbuster "Jacob Collins and the Water Street Atelier," for example, and the Signature Shop is still the longest-surviving craft gallery in the city, which in itself is reason for commemoration.

We are in dire need of a single print-plus-online source for art information that will link the art public with artists and the venues that exhibit them, and the problem that confronts us in Atlanta is how to produce something that will appeal to all social strata and ethnicities and political points of view...or at least annoy all of them equally. It's okay it becomes the source they love to hate, but that they go to because there isn't anything else they trust for information, and because, daggone it, they like a lot of the stuff in it.

Right now we don't even have a fully reliable source for information, though we have a lot of different blogs and websites serving different communities.

And at a moment when the survival of a healthy art community depends on the circulation of information as well as money, that is a distinct problem that needs to be addressed, if not ASAP, then even sooner. It is an excellent time to revive the slogan from back in the day, "Be realistic. Demand the impossible."

a piece of sententious and possibly fatuous advice

Go buy something from a small and/or low-end gallery. The world's financial wizards have accomplished what the terrorists could not.

The time is now. The collapse of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it is far harder to rebuild networks than to keep them in precarious existence.

Only you know what your disposable income is at this point, and only you know which artspace you would miss most if it went away.

As it was not in September 2001, strategically situated spending is a patriotic act. At least as far the local artworld is concerned.

I know who I would like to recommend you do business with or donate to, but my opinion wouldn't mean much, anyway.

I do know that there are art institutions we can scarcely afford to lose, and too many of them operate too close to the edge in the best of times.

I would add that there are exceptionally cool objects on view right now at the institutions that will survive anything short of total apocalypse, and it would be shortsighted to forego seeing them just because those places don't need your money.

Just be aware that your present short-term decisions will affect the look of the long-term future in the entire community.

the right uses of riches

No sooner had I begun reflecting on different religions' grappling with "the right use of riches" than Oglethorpe Museum of Art announced the arrival from the Rubin Museum of Art of a few works depicting Tibet's "wealth-creating deities," which have heretofore been omitted from exhibitions emphasizing the Buddhist tradition of detachment and renunciation.

"In the Himalayan tradition of Tantric Buddhism, there is a class of deities dedicated to granting and guarding wealth. This divine category appears contradictory, coming from a belief system that is identified with nonattachment to material well-being. Nonetheless, it is justified by the belief that wealth can provide freedom from the cares of human life that divert us from finding a path to liberation from suffering. In the hands of one who seeks enlightenment, wealth may become an instrument of compassion and a means to achieve spiritual goals."

There are more secular traditions that have asserted similar things with regard to any goal whatsoever; I recall one hardscrabble thinker who asserted that the familiar saying "Money is the root of all evil" should be modified to "The lack of money is the root of many ills."

The more general maxim is that when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember you came to drain the swamp.

And the traditions are down on grasping in general; but that is another story, and another genre of artwork.

genteel gospels and socially engaged art

Whatever one thinks of the two Reinike paintings in the previous post (and they aren't compositionally his strongest, by any means), they do encode the social teachings of a Christian church that has only been able to excuse its more reactionary moments by overemphasizing the poor's rewards in heaven and ignoring the Gospels' condemnation of the consequences of wealth here on earth.

I have long insisted that while it is a mistake to ignore formalist issues (if a message-laden work is too cluttered or outright ugly, it is hard to get an audience to look at it), there are artworks that gain enormously in interest because of when and where they were created. I still remember my sense of surprise when I first encountered Reinike's Cacophony, an extremely polite but blunt reminder that the frenetic laying up of treasures on earth then going on had an air of the Golden Calf about them. One didn't expect to find such sentiments expressed openly in the context of an immensely reserved and literate appreciation for the accomplishments of traditional culture, but Reinike has always been a very genteel version of the big-picture kind of guy, and I've grown accustomed to surprises from his work.

I free-associated my way to recollecting Reinike paintings, which I hadn't thought of in some time, by way of thinking about the late Atlanta folk artist Ned Cartledge's social-commentary bas-relief panels from the Reagan years. I'm surprised to find almost no images of them online, though a Nexus Press book reproducing them is still available from the Contemporary.

Cartledge was an enormously reflective working-class progressive, an anti-racist Southern white who once produced an image of Uncle Sam crucified as a protest against those who were putting religion to regressive political uses.

In decades when Southern folk art (I leave to one side the then-controversial "African-American vernacular art" championed by William Arnett) was identified with flamboyant showmen and rural apocalypticists, Cartledge was a quietly urbane urban folk artist making witty but carefully reasoned points about the condition of society.

These two artists have almost nothing in common, except that each one's work goes against the prevailing stereotypes associated with his position in the art world.

The only lesson to be drawn from this is that the South, and the planet in general, is a much more complicated place than we think. And short of going into the two-thousand-word explications of the sort in which I indulge on the joculum.livejournal blog, that is a fairly pathetic excuse for a conclusion, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

flatlining

It's interesting that some of the most relevant paintings in Atlanta right now were made by one of the most tradition-aware and stylistically traditional painters, Charles H. Reinike III, the latest of whose tradition-focused "Arches Series" are about to be exhibited at Reinike Gallery (well, actually, as of mid-November, which in times of fast-breaking events is more like half an eternity from now).

Cacophony and Three Temples are unfashionably wedded to blatantly traditional symbolism, and will not be to everyone's taste, but I've always liked Reinike's image of the stock market graph flatlining, as in an EKG of the world of financial exchange. It's the credit markets rather than the stock exchange, which has lately been in free fall reflected in the shape of the charts, but the free fall is related to the flatlining of finance: no one ever expected the world's economic ministers to be performing CPR on a world of interbank credit that has unexpectedly gone into total arrest.

And yet a painter came up with a lovely little visual metaphor for it before it happened. One of the painters least naturally inclined to political activism, at that.

I'm sure the image has occurred to many other people, but Reinike came up with it on his own.

And little surprises like this are why I like to go to all kinds of galleries, from underground to upscale...most of the time they are exactly what you expect, but it is the unexpected encounters and moments of illumination that make one inclined to keep trying to write about art.

That "trying to" is subject matter for a later post. We in Atlanta are in need of some creative re-inventing in the world of art reviewing, of the method of providing information and of connecting audience and artist, as the world is in need of creative re-invention in the domain of global financial markets.