I am reminded, on perusing the most recent issue of the unaffordable Art Newspaper (roughly $200 for 11 issues), of just how isolated the vast majority of the art world really is. I have been trying without success to acquire the catalogue of the show of Finno-Ugric artists in Estonia (the catalogue costs US$15 but shipping costs US$100), and a brief perusal of the Art Newspaper exhibition calendar for the summer reveals a host of major shows in the world's major cities that one ought to attend, if one had any money at all for travel.
But of course none of us do, and that is why we look for ways of responding to the global condition of online visual communication combined with physical isolation. Things like videos from installations rendered on YouTube so change the conditions of scale and surroundings that they are fundamentally a different experience (and cf. such sensurround events as Olafur Eliasson's installation in the Tate Modern turbine hall a few years ago, which we know well from photographs, which means we do not know it at all).
It is why I cannot condemn blatant knockoffs if the knockoffs show some genuine familiarity with the original being knocked off, rather than with the magazine photos or online videos of the original that is being knocked off. Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it is the only way most of us will ever get more than a miniaturized, digitized idea of what is going on out there in the vast stretches of the planet where we are not.
Hence my fascination with the stretches of the planet that definitely do not make it to the global biennials. The art may be less interesting, indeed it frequently is, but it is something regarding which all of us stand on a more or less equal basis because we not only have not made it to the Finno-Ugrian republics of the Russian Federation, we have not made it to the museum show in Estonia either.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
I am but mad north by northwest
...though sometimes I do have trouble telling the difference between hawks and handsaws.
Anyway, I would commend to the reader Mircea Eliade's odd dictum that it is important to find mythic patterns in experience even if they aren't there. Richard Sudden has imposed an order on his experience that would do the Modernists proud, and his enterprise is even more Modernist than he intended, for he wasn't fully aware of just how much it echoes the great imaginative monuments of the twentieth century, Modernist or not.
Anyway, I would commend to the reader Mircea Eliade's odd dictum that it is important to find mythic patterns in experience even if they aren't there. Richard Sudden has imposed an order on his experience that would do the Modernists proud, and his enterprise is even more Modernist than he intended, for he wasn't fully aware of just how much it echoes the great imaginative monuments of the twentieth century, Modernist or not.
she's as fine as Tupelo honey: Richard Sudden suddenly remembers, and kicks our butts at Whitespace
And then:
Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, that we do not learn but only remember that which was already embedded archetypally in us, is rightly derided by empiricists. Plato probably had his head up his posterior, a posture that can only be assumed by those philosophers who, as Friedrich Engels said of Hegel, are standing on their idealist heads and need to be turned round and set on their material feet.
But one almost has to suppose that Sudden has remembered a good many things he claims he never knew, in order to explain the cumulative impact of “For the Waters of Lethe,” one of the great accomplishments of mythic thought in recent times in this benightedly flatfooted burg called Atlanta.
In addition to providing a spectacular number of full-scale symbolic and sometimes also functional kayaks (about which, more below), Sudden set out to make his myth of Mnemosyne into a black-and-white film that was a conscious homage to Ingmar Bergman. Thus, his star and Swedish translator Ms Liselott Johnsson (whose Madison Contemporary art center in Madison, GA is a venture for which we need to be on the lookout) and his film editor Jason Vise collaborated with Sudden's deliberately Bergmanesque camera work to produce a myth for our times that is also an echo of an earlier cinematic one. As is appropriate for a tale about memory.
Johnsson provided the voiceover and the Swedish, but it was Sudden who wrote the story in English, and a good story it is, too. An old story, skating along the edge of twice-told tales told two times too many, but his use of resonantly archetypal shapes helps give appealing form to the narrative…kayaks like ritual coffins returning the dead to their mortal domain in an act of contrition, undoing a goddess’s rash magic. Memory/Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses of art and science, repents in time to rescue from forgetfulness the artist and wife/personal muse whom she has driven to suicide, and they return to earth recollecting their fortune because they have not drunk of the waters of Lethe.
The task of memory is what Rainer Maria Rilke says we’re here for, and which the Duino Elegies is all about. As Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, “It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise 'invisibly' inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great, golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work ...”
Well, Sudden has the relevant volume of Rilke on his bookshelf right next to the collected poems of yours truly Jerry Cullum in which the Elegies form the scaffolding for my poem of memory in Atlanta and the Balkans, “Skateboarding in Sarajevo.” So there’s a pretty good chance he saw at some point that famous footnote to Rilke’s poem, because the boats (built from kayak plans) that are the major sculptural aspect of his exhibition include an homage to the shifting seasons in which illuminated honeycombs are a major focal point.
But he had forgotten having read Rilke’s claim that we are the bees of the invisible, even though his whole metaphor of memory is that we are, in fact, the gatherers up of the visible aspects of the world, turning it into the invisibility of what we recollect because we collected it in the first place.
Sudden’s beeswax-covered drawings in the Whitespec project space continue the metaphor of human beings as bees of the invisible, as well as voyagers on the waters.
But we are, he implies, blind voyagers, because his drawings of the meanings of myth are done on Braille paper. (I have no idea, being sighted, what the Braille text on the paper actually says. Like those nonsense Chinese characters used in hip interior design or the nonsense English words that appear on European sweatshirts, the Braille is there to deliver a metaphor, not a message...but Sudden informs me that the pages that I cannot read are from the Book of Psalms.)
Sudden’s extraordinarily delicate drawings are shorthand symbols for the wanderings of Odysseus and a couple other of the odysseys of mythic heroes, involving arrival at the Isles of the Blessed or other risks of the underworld, of departure and return, of the hero’s journey not as a macho conquest of obstacles but a risk-laden search for knowledge and return to an original home that has been lost and must be found again. And found, perhaps, without all the senses that one would need to find it with clarity.
Odysseus bound to the mast, with his men's ears stopped up with beeswax(!), the neo-Platonic allegorists knew, is a type of the searcher who must learn to overcome the lures of the senses in order to stay focused on the goal (and to make sure his associates avoid temptation, while he is at it). And the same lesson is taught by the Asian models of spiritual search that Sudden also knows and loves…Tibetan tantricism and Late Antique neo-Platonism preach parallel doctrines of liberation, though they are not identical doctrines of liberation.
So Sudden has got it all together, although he may not know why or even whether he has got it all together. And he certainly doesn’t communicate his intuitions with any degree of clarity. They sink in slowly, and it takes several viewings and a few days of contemplation before there is any confirmation of the initial reaction that this is so emotionally overwhelming that it must all add up to something.
And as in any traditional tale, in which figures drop in and leave the story at will, there are probably still loose ends left hanging. But the human story is a tale of unfinished ventures, and none of us can be expected to remember enough to recall our real destiny and what all this assorted pile of fragments shored against our ruin has to do with it.
There are traditional spiritual techniques by which memory can be and should be extended. But there is also the hard reality of the decay of our brain’s neurons and synaptic connections: it was watching a case of Alzheimer’s that set Sudden off on his latest symbolic quest, and we do well to remember that this vast mythic apparatus stems from a very specific and mundane pain. This huge array of sculpture and cinema springs from what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
Thursday, May 8, 2008
bulling one's way through
Art, Sociology, and Bovine Excrement
A Meditation for the Birthday of Thomas Pynchon
creative commons copyright Jerry Cullum, ‘cause I’m cool like that
A familiar eight-letter English word that tends to get blocked by parental-advice and work-safe language filters has had an entire book devoted to it, usually rendered in newspaper references as “On B***s***.” I have no idea what is in the book, but since I dislike typing asterisks I shall substitute, in this essay, the word “bulldot.” Copy and change it globally if you so choose.
I have always admired, both for its profundity and its alliterative “b”s, the saying “If you can’t bedazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bulldot.”
I have noticed, however, that very few of those who are less than confident of their ability to impress with brilliance understand the necessity of well-crafted bulldot.
Before encountering the artworld object that is the actual subject of this essay, I had been thinking of a brief exchange in the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously, in which rival journalists are fuming over the explosively revelatory contents of an essay by a young competitor that has been reprinted by their editors. The younger of the aggrieved pair says to the elder, “Come on, Wally, you know that piece is bulldot!” to which the older man replies, “Yes, my friend, but it’s well-written bulldot, and it’s sitting right there on the front page of my employer’s newspaper.”
Provincial art scenes, too, have difficulty distinguishing between what is brilliantly baffling bulldot and what is merely blather, so I have always admired the Slovenes in this regard.
Even after Austria lapsed into its own post-imperial provinciality, Slovenia was still considered the minority province on the wrong side of the border; thought of as the least among the Yugoslav republics, it was the one you never heard anything about in the twentieth-century days when the Croats and the Serbs were inordinately proud of their writers and sculptors who attained world prominence.
But in the waning days of united Yugoslavia, a puckish group of intelligent merry pranksters who called themselves many things, Neue Slowenische Kunst, Laibach, and Irwin among them, set out to offend the powers that were in every artistic genre they could think of---including the academic disciplines of the social sciences.
NSK became an artists’ state, the first “state in time instead of a state in space.”
I leave Laibach’s rock music and various other aggressions to one side for the moment; these folks first gained fame for winning a competition for a Yugoslav government poster with a design that replicated, except for the flag and the specific wording, a Nazi propaganda poster. They gave their movement a German title and named their band after the German name for the Slovene capital.
And when, improbably, Slovenia seceded peacefully from the Yugoslav federation while the other republics sank into years of internecine warfare, NSK claimed the Republic of Slovenia as their most successful conceptual art project.
The NSK passports, which were issued to a good many Atlantans during the 1996 Olympics, had been used to cross physical borders successfully because the numbers coded into them had been lifted from the Slovene Foreign Ministry by a friend of the artists’ group. (How come nobody ever reminisces about the good old days when NSK and the director of Skuç in Ljubljana and Dah Teatr from Belgrade and similar folks came to Atlanta on an ongoing basis?)
And a present-day Slovene artists’ publication currently findable (not for long, I should think) in the Little Five Points Community Center illustrates on its front cover a webpage of the Slovene Foreign Ministry explaining that the NSK passport is not issued by the Republic of Slovenia and cannot be gotten from the Ministry. (I’ll believe in the authenticity of this web page when I access it myself, having had my name inserted into international news stories on newspaper web pages by a prankster friend who didn’t know he was doing conceptual art.)
Now, there is a longstanding relationship between some Tennessee conceptualists and Slovene conceptualists, which I assume is how this Slovene newsletter found its way into the Little Five Points Community Center. I have forgotten who is responsible for this longtime collaboration, though I would suppose that the infamous Beauvais Lyons has something to do with it.
I’ve always had problems with Beauvais Lyons because his elaborately thought out cultural fakes always have more ambition than consistent success (a more generous way of putting it is that the bodies of work are designed to make obvious that his archaeological reports and folk art collectors and such are completely fake, and I put it that way once in a review of his show at Eyedrum). His ideas sometimes outrun his capacity to pull them off, and a collective effort might have worked better than a solo operation if he had wanted to produce a fully convincing piece of smart fakery.
But at least Lyons understands what intelligent bulldot ought to be. And so do the Slovenes, to judge from this publication, which is as full of pompous bulldot as any post on the Atlanta artnews listserv ever was.
The Slovenes, unlike many of the Atlantans who blather on, have absorbed the lessons of the adjacent cultural capitals and produced their own equally ambitious parodies, queries, and more than merely querulous interrogations of the big boys. They have understood the big boys (and they are boys, mostly) at least well enough to make fun of them.
It helps to have a history of being a cultural and political outrider of an empire a short train or bus ride away, but there have been years in which artists had no money to ride the train, or passports to cross the border. They figured out ways to do it anyway.
And, of course, one not only has to know what the other folks are doing, one has to have the inspiration to create something original that will stand up to criticism. If one is supporting one’s efforts with theoretical bulldot, the efforts had better look good enough, and the bulldot had better be brilliantly baffling.
And by the way, it helps if the artists actually have something to say that is worth saying, although to judge from the lesser scions of the Slovene conceptualists that seems to be optional.
But thoughts that are well thought but poorly expressed will also get no points for trying, simply because (and I can testify to this from my own experience) no one will even be sufficiently baffled to bother with them.
A Meditation for the Birthday of Thomas Pynchon
creative commons copyright Jerry Cullum, ‘cause I’m cool like that
A familiar eight-letter English word that tends to get blocked by parental-advice and work-safe language filters has had an entire book devoted to it, usually rendered in newspaper references as “On B***s***.” I have no idea what is in the book, but since I dislike typing asterisks I shall substitute, in this essay, the word “bulldot.” Copy and change it globally if you so choose.
I have always admired, both for its profundity and its alliterative “b”s, the saying “If you can’t bedazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bulldot.”
I have noticed, however, that very few of those who are less than confident of their ability to impress with brilliance understand the necessity of well-crafted bulldot.
Before encountering the artworld object that is the actual subject of this essay, I had been thinking of a brief exchange in the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously, in which rival journalists are fuming over the explosively revelatory contents of an essay by a young competitor that has been reprinted by their editors. The younger of the aggrieved pair says to the elder, “Come on, Wally, you know that piece is bulldot!” to which the older man replies, “Yes, my friend, but it’s well-written bulldot, and it’s sitting right there on the front page of my employer’s newspaper.”
Provincial art scenes, too, have difficulty distinguishing between what is brilliantly baffling bulldot and what is merely blather, so I have always admired the Slovenes in this regard.
Even after Austria lapsed into its own post-imperial provinciality, Slovenia was still considered the minority province on the wrong side of the border; thought of as the least among the Yugoslav republics, it was the one you never heard anything about in the twentieth-century days when the Croats and the Serbs were inordinately proud of their writers and sculptors who attained world prominence.
But in the waning days of united Yugoslavia, a puckish group of intelligent merry pranksters who called themselves many things, Neue Slowenische Kunst, Laibach, and Irwin among them, set out to offend the powers that were in every artistic genre they could think of---including the academic disciplines of the social sciences.
NSK became an artists’ state, the first “state in time instead of a state in space.”
I leave Laibach’s rock music and various other aggressions to one side for the moment; these folks first gained fame for winning a competition for a Yugoslav government poster with a design that replicated, except for the flag and the specific wording, a Nazi propaganda poster. They gave their movement a German title and named their band after the German name for the Slovene capital. And when, improbably, Slovenia seceded peacefully from the Yugoslav federation while the other republics sank into years of internecine warfare, NSK claimed the Republic of Slovenia as their most successful conceptual art project.
The NSK passports, which were issued to a good many Atlantans during the 1996 Olympics, had been used to cross physical borders successfully because the numbers coded into them had been lifted from the Slovene Foreign Ministry by a friend of the artists’ group. (How come nobody ever reminisces about the good old days when NSK and the director of Skuç in Ljubljana and Dah Teatr from Belgrade and similar folks came to Atlanta on an ongoing basis?)
And a present-day Slovene artists’ publication currently findable (not for long, I should think) in the Little Five Points Community Center illustrates on its front cover a webpage of the Slovene Foreign Ministry explaining that the NSK passport is not issued by the Republic of Slovenia and cannot be gotten from the Ministry. (I’ll believe in the authenticity of this web page when I access it myself, having had my name inserted into international news stories on newspaper web pages by a prankster friend who didn’t know he was doing conceptual art.)
Now, there is a longstanding relationship between some Tennessee conceptualists and Slovene conceptualists, which I assume is how this Slovene newsletter found its way into the Little Five Points Community Center. I have forgotten who is responsible for this longtime collaboration, though I would suppose that the infamous Beauvais Lyons has something to do with it.
I’ve always had problems with Beauvais Lyons because his elaborately thought out cultural fakes always have more ambition than consistent success (a more generous way of putting it is that the bodies of work are designed to make obvious that his archaeological reports and folk art collectors and such are completely fake, and I put it that way once in a review of his show at Eyedrum). His ideas sometimes outrun his capacity to pull them off, and a collective effort might have worked better than a solo operation if he had wanted to produce a fully convincing piece of smart fakery.
But at least Lyons understands what intelligent bulldot ought to be. And so do the Slovenes, to judge from this publication, which is as full of pompous bulldot as any post on the Atlanta artnews listserv ever was.
The Slovenes, unlike many of the Atlantans who blather on, have absorbed the lessons of the adjacent cultural capitals and produced their own equally ambitious parodies, queries, and more than merely querulous interrogations of the big boys. They have understood the big boys (and they are boys, mostly) at least well enough to make fun of them.
It helps to have a history of being a cultural and political outrider of an empire a short train or bus ride away, but there have been years in which artists had no money to ride the train, or passports to cross the border. They figured out ways to do it anyway.
And, of course, one not only has to know what the other folks are doing, one has to have the inspiration to create something original that will stand up to criticism. If one is supporting one’s efforts with theoretical bulldot, the efforts had better look good enough, and the bulldot had better be brilliantly baffling.
And by the way, it helps if the artists actually have something to say that is worth saying, although to judge from the lesser scions of the Slovene conceptualists that seems to be optional.
But thoughts that are well thought but poorly expressed will also get no points for trying, simply because (and I can testify to this from my own experience) no one will even be sufficiently baffled to bother with them.
Monday, May 5, 2008
on the nature of semi-hierarchical networks
I think "semi-hierarchical network" is my coinage, but it is based on the observations of a very large number of people, some of whom write utterly unreadable theory.
So I will not direct anyone to the original unreadability. I'll merely cite rough-and-ready examples.
Networks are semi-hierarchical because inevitably, some contributors are more dominant than others, and influence a larger number of people. But these contributors do not have the dignity of official titles, usually; they simply occupy the nodes of communication through which others get connected. They are the equivalent of those folks in the six-degrees-of-separation model, the one in which you only have to go through six successive individuals to find anybody on earth. (The flaw in this model is that having once met, let's say, Dave Hickey does not mean that Dave Hickey remembers who you are, or remembers the person you need to find. The two on either end of the network both remember meeting Dave Hickey, but he probably mislaid both your business cards, or cannot recall why he has an e-mail address written on the back of an envelope. So you are connected to the person at the other end of the network, but the person who "knows" both of you, or more accurately who both of you know, is of no help whatsoever.)
Nonetheless, networks work, and they are a little bit like the old Silk Road: People communicate who never meet one another, and they communicate via intermediaries as well as via posted messages on blogs or websites. One part of the network only occasionally knows what is up with other parts of the network, because they only check in on them when it's directly relevant to their immediate needs or concerns.
[Pages of illustrations.]
Rigidly hierarchical structures the world over are being replaced by loose collectives that may all work for a single corporate entity, but that get the job done through communications that never filter through a single centralized source. This makes it possible, unfortunately, for a few ambitious traders to collapse entire investment firms by buying up half the futures contracts on the planet, but it also allows for the flourishing of more modest enterprises, such as reporting adequate on Atlanta art.
Now, anarchists will get all excited about this because it is a model of cooperation like what some folks fantasized back in the day, but the point is that present-day subterranean subcultures and mainstream multinationals have an embarrassing number of things in common when it comes to using semi-hierarchical networks. And the folks who insist upon a rigidly hierarchical the-buck-stops-here mentality are being left behind by the more fluid, adaptive folks.
The problem with being fluid and adaptive is that liquidity flows. (That's a joke on "flows of capital" that takes us back to the current global financial crises, where we will not go right now. We are talking about art, and I recommend folks read Kevin Phillips' Bad Money for some insight on how the world got into its present fix.)
People's natural tendency to be self-destructive and behave like dysfunctional idiots and be aggressively self-aggrandizing does have to be addressed and restrained. Otherwise you do get the biggest egos and the biggest loudmouths drowning out the other voices.
So even self-organizing networks have to establish rules and regulations as unforeseen problems arise. And in a loosely networked community, it is hard to establish how the "hierarchical" part of "semi-hierarchical" plays out.
And that takes us out of the world of global finance and global politics, about which whole books have been written. (I have deliberately not referred to Certain Well-Known Organizations of the past half-century that have proven difficult to deal with because they have no fixed center, a shifting network of people in charge, and indeed entire sub-networks that barely even do more than share the goals and strategies of the original network. But forty years ago, a great search for a nonexistent center of control never did turn up the expected location against which a knockout blow could be directed. And Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts has some interesting observations about the consequences of the lesson that strategists learned from that futile quest.)
No, it brings us back to the question of how you get a bunch of maverick individuals who write about art to find a way to write about art in a location where lots of people will actually want to read it, because they will not have to wade through things like this arcane essay about semi-hierarchical networks, and can just find out what's cool to go to this week and why, in a post written by a person whose opinion they trust.
So I will not direct anyone to the original unreadability. I'll merely cite rough-and-ready examples.
Networks are semi-hierarchical because inevitably, some contributors are more dominant than others, and influence a larger number of people. But these contributors do not have the dignity of official titles, usually; they simply occupy the nodes of communication through which others get connected. They are the equivalent of those folks in the six-degrees-of-separation model, the one in which you only have to go through six successive individuals to find anybody on earth. (The flaw in this model is that having once met, let's say, Dave Hickey does not mean that Dave Hickey remembers who you are, or remembers the person you need to find. The two on either end of the network both remember meeting Dave Hickey, but he probably mislaid both your business cards, or cannot recall why he has an e-mail address written on the back of an envelope. So you are connected to the person at the other end of the network, but the person who "knows" both of you, or more accurately who both of you know, is of no help whatsoever.)
Nonetheless, networks work, and they are a little bit like the old Silk Road: People communicate who never meet one another, and they communicate via intermediaries as well as via posted messages on blogs or websites. One part of the network only occasionally knows what is up with other parts of the network, because they only check in on them when it's directly relevant to their immediate needs or concerns.
[Pages of illustrations.]
Rigidly hierarchical structures the world over are being replaced by loose collectives that may all work for a single corporate entity, but that get the job done through communications that never filter through a single centralized source. This makes it possible, unfortunately, for a few ambitious traders to collapse entire investment firms by buying up half the futures contracts on the planet, but it also allows for the flourishing of more modest enterprises, such as reporting adequate on Atlanta art.
Now, anarchists will get all excited about this because it is a model of cooperation like what some folks fantasized back in the day, but the point is that present-day subterranean subcultures and mainstream multinationals have an embarrassing number of things in common when it comes to using semi-hierarchical networks. And the folks who insist upon a rigidly hierarchical the-buck-stops-here mentality are being left behind by the more fluid, adaptive folks.
The problem with being fluid and adaptive is that liquidity flows. (That's a joke on "flows of capital" that takes us back to the current global financial crises, where we will not go right now. We are talking about art, and I recommend folks read Kevin Phillips' Bad Money for some insight on how the world got into its present fix.)
People's natural tendency to be self-destructive and behave like dysfunctional idiots and be aggressively self-aggrandizing does have to be addressed and restrained. Otherwise you do get the biggest egos and the biggest loudmouths drowning out the other voices.
So even self-organizing networks have to establish rules and regulations as unforeseen problems arise. And in a loosely networked community, it is hard to establish how the "hierarchical" part of "semi-hierarchical" plays out.
And that takes us out of the world of global finance and global politics, about which whole books have been written. (I have deliberately not referred to Certain Well-Known Organizations of the past half-century that have proven difficult to deal with because they have no fixed center, a shifting network of people in charge, and indeed entire sub-networks that barely even do more than share the goals and strategies of the original network. But forty years ago, a great search for a nonexistent center of control never did turn up the expected location against which a knockout blow could be directed. And Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts has some interesting observations about the consequences of the lesson that strategists learned from that futile quest.)
No, it brings us back to the question of how you get a bunch of maverick individuals who write about art to find a way to write about art in a location where lots of people will actually want to read it, because they will not have to wade through things like this arcane essay about semi-hierarchical networks, and can just find out what's cool to go to this week and why, in a post written by a person whose opinion they trust.
explaining my very obscure idea once again
I find that my ideas are almost invariably misunderstood in terms of the ideas that people already have. This is probably because, as with the late Marshall McLuhan, there is something wrong with the ideas I have, and something right with the received ideas already out there for generations on end.
But I’m surprised that, thus far, nobody has gotten the point of my collectively edited continuous anthology of the Best of the Atlanta Blogs (let’s use AJC cutesiness, shall we?).
The problem: how to overcome our natural tendency to self-promotion, and to be excessively pleased with our own ideas. (Witness my championing of this one.)
The proposed solution: A modestly elitist (nobody who doesn’t write SOMETHING about art can nominate stuff) compilation of the best blog posts of the day. But nobody can put up their own stuff: that is what they do on their own blogs.
No, they can only post (or post a link if they can’t get the technology down, which I probably will not be able to) whatever they find of particular interest in blog posts by other Atlanta writers.
The editors: all the bloggers. The moderator: serves only to mediate disputes about legitimacy of posts, and otherwise has no more rights than the rest of the collective.
The collective: is not organized, but self-organizing; members get to know one another because they read each other, even if they never meet. New members come on board by getting in touch with the blogger most compatible to themselves, via the comments section of the relevant blog. The comment says, “I’ve started my own blog, take a look and see if you like anything.”
Possible disputes: One blogger genuinely loves somebody else’s blog so much that they simply transfer the entire long-winded contents to this hypothetical anthology site. Two best friends, neither of whom can write and neither of whom have anything to say, simply post one another’s logorrhea to the site.
Resolution of this is open to discussion, because it’s where communities of any sort break down. Ideally, the requirement that the posts have something to do with art and its contemporary condition would at least limit the excesses. It might be permissible to have friends write and post one-line summaries such as “Joculum is blathering about the New York Review of Books again over on his blog. Check it out.”
But the main issue is to address the problem that most people have lives. They simply are not going to click through two dozen URLs a day to see what the bloggers are up to.
But the bloggers are, in this underserved art community, the closest thing to a network of art reviewers that we have. Other cities around the world have websites in which unpaid reviewers post large quantities of reviews and analytical previews, in formats organized by editors.
In a city where even the working critics (unless they have other, non-critic duties) get paid by the column, not by the month, and where expense accounts for automobile travel or MARTA fares are unheard of, there is no one who has the spare time to be a webzine editor, not if they want to attempt to see all the art about which the unpaid critics are writing.
[I say "writing" because some people can only access this stuff at work, where there simply is not time to listen to a video of unknown length, much less a bunch of videos. And we have two websites already that post almost nothing but video interviews about Atlanta exhibitions, so another video site seems superfluous.]
A semi-hierarchical network seems like the only solution. And it needs to be in a format that the technologically semi-literate can handle. (Facebook has been suggested. Can non-Facebook members access all the posts on a Facebook group? Remember, this is for the general public to read, not just us blog-type folks, and some of the general public have enough trouble just remembering not to type "www" before they type the blog name and the blog hoster. Every week somebody tells me they can't find my blogs for that reason.)
And because I would like someone to give me the correct term for which I am using “semi-hierarchical network,” I am going to write some posts about the rise of semi-hierarchical networks in the 21st century and why they have both intended and unintended consequences.
But for once I shall try not to lump them all into a single post.
But I’m surprised that, thus far, nobody has gotten the point of my collectively edited continuous anthology of the Best of the Atlanta Blogs (let’s use AJC cutesiness, shall we?).
The problem: how to overcome our natural tendency to self-promotion, and to be excessively pleased with our own ideas. (Witness my championing of this one.)
The proposed solution: A modestly elitist (nobody who doesn’t write SOMETHING about art can nominate stuff) compilation of the best blog posts of the day. But nobody can put up their own stuff: that is what they do on their own blogs.
No, they can only post (or post a link if they can’t get the technology down, which I probably will not be able to) whatever they find of particular interest in blog posts by other Atlanta writers.
The editors: all the bloggers. The moderator: serves only to mediate disputes about legitimacy of posts, and otherwise has no more rights than the rest of the collective.
The collective: is not organized, but self-organizing; members get to know one another because they read each other, even if they never meet. New members come on board by getting in touch with the blogger most compatible to themselves, via the comments section of the relevant blog. The comment says, “I’ve started my own blog, take a look and see if you like anything.”
Possible disputes: One blogger genuinely loves somebody else’s blog so much that they simply transfer the entire long-winded contents to this hypothetical anthology site. Two best friends, neither of whom can write and neither of whom have anything to say, simply post one another’s logorrhea to the site.
Resolution of this is open to discussion, because it’s where communities of any sort break down. Ideally, the requirement that the posts have something to do with art and its contemporary condition would at least limit the excesses. It might be permissible to have friends write and post one-line summaries such as “Joculum is blathering about the New York Review of Books again over on his blog. Check it out.”
But the main issue is to address the problem that most people have lives. They simply are not going to click through two dozen URLs a day to see what the bloggers are up to.
But the bloggers are, in this underserved art community, the closest thing to a network of art reviewers that we have. Other cities around the world have websites in which unpaid reviewers post large quantities of reviews and analytical previews, in formats organized by editors.
In a city where even the working critics (unless they have other, non-critic duties) get paid by the column, not by the month, and where expense accounts for automobile travel or MARTA fares are unheard of, there is no one who has the spare time to be a webzine editor, not if they want to attempt to see all the art about which the unpaid critics are writing.
[I say "writing" because some people can only access this stuff at work, where there simply is not time to listen to a video of unknown length, much less a bunch of videos. And we have two websites already that post almost nothing but video interviews about Atlanta exhibitions, so another video site seems superfluous.]
A semi-hierarchical network seems like the only solution. And it needs to be in a format that the technologically semi-literate can handle. (Facebook has been suggested. Can non-Facebook members access all the posts on a Facebook group? Remember, this is for the general public to read, not just us blog-type folks, and some of the general public have enough trouble just remembering not to type "www" before they type the blog name and the blog hoster. Every week somebody tells me they can't find my blogs for that reason.)
And because I would like someone to give me the correct term for which I am using “semi-hierarchical network,” I am going to write some posts about the rise of semi-hierarchical networks in the 21st century and why they have both intended and unintended consequences.
But for once I shall try not to lump them all into a single post.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
like ships that cross or collide in the night
border crossings of all sorts, Atlanta version
Friday was one of the most counter of counterforce days I’ve had in a while in Atlanta.
Sheila Pree Bright’s Young Americans images of folks aged 18-25 performing symbolic feats with the American flag is one of those High Museum exhibitions that will get more than adequate press coverage locally and nationally. I thus resist the temptation to report on the press tour in this particular post.
But in accordance with the hard fact that if I miss one press opening at the High I may not get back until the next press opening, I took the occasion to view the final weekend of “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle” and “TRANSactions”…two shows that should have gotten different coverage from the relative invisibility in which they have been placed (though bloggers have supplemented local media).
The latter show of Latino and Latin American art contains the mash-up of Warhol and R. Crumb “Keep On Crossing” posters that other bloggers have commented upon. But the major point to be made is that the manifesto on Crossing covers all contingencies…the borders are infinite, the crossings too many to number, and the action of crossing constant. We are not separated only by political or ethnic or linguistic borders.
So I feel impelled to cross a few borders of history, race, class, age and gender in this post, quickly.
I may have to contribute a post to joculum (where John Crowley’s fans are into fantasy illustration) about the need for a full-length study of Pamela Colman Smith…the non-catalogue for the exhibition forces Smith into a methodological mold that ill suits her and is not reflected in the show itself. The tantalizing wall text suggests that she adapted a Jamaican heritage that may or may not have been hers (? the text is strangely dismissive of her self-willed exoticism) to her own purposes, as she adapted Beethoven and Baring-Gould and the whole symbolist-decadent milieu within which she moved before Stieglitz exhibited her watercolors, then discarded her when it became evident she couldn’t be fitted into the emerging modernist mold. She lived in London at one point and produced the familiar A. E. Waite Tarot deck, which is part of the exhibition along with some remarkably symbolist watercolors that are replaced in the “Women of the Stieglitz Circle” book by ones that make points the author wishes to make.
Pamela Colman Smith, a rather mysterious border-crosser, deserves better. There is a catalogue from a 1975 Princeton exhibition that seems to be utterly unobtainable, at first search. Thanks to the Rider-Waite Tarot, there is an entire PCS website about her career including her actual Jamaican experience (already more useful than the exhibition wall text) that seems to indicate a biography may be in the works (but if so, it’s been in the works for a very long time): http://home.comcast.net/~pamela-c-smith/home.html
Another crosser of borders was at Tew Galleries last night, Olena Zvyagintseva, whose grandiosely described “important new paintings” really are, within their limited genre. If one has suffered through sufficient flower paintings, Z’s Ukraine-based productions are stunners. Z herself is in the States from Kiev for only two weeks, courtesy of her U.S. art rep who is also her translator.
And that brings me, one week after, to Abby Banks and the Punk Houses photos at Get This! Gallery, which also cross several boundaries of culture and state lines and publication history simultaneously. Her book of documentary photos, enabled by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, went through an interesting cover redesign from the first illustration on a punk-culture website to the listing on amazon.com (the design of the book as published, available for sale at Get This!).
There is much that could be said about all of these topics but there is never time to do so.
Friday was one of the most counter of counterforce days I’ve had in a while in Atlanta.
Sheila Pree Bright’s Young Americans images of folks aged 18-25 performing symbolic feats with the American flag is one of those High Museum exhibitions that will get more than adequate press coverage locally and nationally. I thus resist the temptation to report on the press tour in this particular post.
But in accordance with the hard fact that if I miss one press opening at the High I may not get back until the next press opening, I took the occasion to view the final weekend of “Georgia O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle” and “TRANSactions”…two shows that should have gotten different coverage from the relative invisibility in which they have been placed (though bloggers have supplemented local media).
The latter show of Latino and Latin American art contains the mash-up of Warhol and R. Crumb “Keep On Crossing” posters that other bloggers have commented upon. But the major point to be made is that the manifesto on Crossing covers all contingencies…the borders are infinite, the crossings too many to number, and the action of crossing constant. We are not separated only by political or ethnic or linguistic borders.
So I feel impelled to cross a few borders of history, race, class, age and gender in this post, quickly.
I may have to contribute a post to joculum (where John Crowley’s fans are into fantasy illustration) about the need for a full-length study of Pamela Colman Smith…the non-catalogue for the exhibition forces Smith into a methodological mold that ill suits her and is not reflected in the show itself. The tantalizing wall text suggests that she adapted a Jamaican heritage that may or may not have been hers (? the text is strangely dismissive of her self-willed exoticism) to her own purposes, as she adapted Beethoven and Baring-Gould and the whole symbolist-decadent milieu within which she moved before Stieglitz exhibited her watercolors, then discarded her when it became evident she couldn’t be fitted into the emerging modernist mold. She lived in London at one point and produced the familiar A. E. Waite Tarot deck, which is part of the exhibition along with some remarkably symbolist watercolors that are replaced in the “Women of the Stieglitz Circle” book by ones that make points the author wishes to make.
Pamela Colman Smith, a rather mysterious border-crosser, deserves better. There is a catalogue from a 1975 Princeton exhibition that seems to be utterly unobtainable, at first search. Thanks to the Rider-Waite Tarot, there is an entire PCS website about her career including her actual Jamaican experience (already more useful than the exhibition wall text) that seems to indicate a biography may be in the works (but if so, it’s been in the works for a very long time): http://home.comcast.net/~pamela-c-smith/home.html
Another crosser of borders was at Tew Galleries last night, Olena Zvyagintseva, whose grandiosely described “important new paintings” really are, within their limited genre. If one has suffered through sufficient flower paintings, Z’s Ukraine-based productions are stunners. Z herself is in the States from Kiev for only two weeks, courtesy of her U.S. art rep who is also her translator.
And that brings me, one week after, to Abby Banks and the Punk Houses photos at Get This! Gallery, which also cross several boundaries of culture and state lines and publication history simultaneously. Her book of documentary photos, enabled by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, went through an interesting cover redesign from the first illustration on a punk-culture website to the listing on amazon.com (the design of the book as published, available for sale at Get This!).
There is much that could be said about all of these topics but there is never time to do so.
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