I’m merely batting around an idea like a cat with a ball of yarn when it comes to whether an art object is a “Work” (objet d’art), “work” (residue of practice), or “text” (which is constantly re-written). SW, on the other hand, hits a grand slam with this brief, potent first-person narrative on how difficult it is to pin down what makes art significant these days in his blog post, “Embedded.”
Late Summer, Cross-Country Points of Reference
August 18, 2010I’ve just crossed the country from San Francisco to New York by car. That’s three thousand, eight hundred miles in 14 days: camping, sightseeing, a few gallery visits and more than a few BBQ meals. The experience increased my appreciation for friendliness, waving at strangers, America, the grandeur of the West, the rich musical history of Tennessee, the quaint main streets of the lush Eastern seaboard—and most of all, the astounding diversity. I love that so many people can epitomize being American, while freely espousing indigenous, foreign, and home-spun cultures without a sense of paradox. From West to East, a few of my strongest visual impressions:
Dockside with Friends
Lake Merritt, Oakland, CA
A gathering of friends on a beautiful July evening at sunset. Celebrating friendships and the blessed life I’ve enjoyed since moving to Oakland in 1994.
The West
I’m California-born and raised, but I haven’t really seen the “West until now. It’s stunning. My fears that the world is crisscrossed with interstates and civilized with Walmarts are not completely warranted. The drive from Las Vegas, N.V. to Santa Fe, N.M. showed me that much of the West is still wild; the dramatic red bluffs are nothing short of breathtaking. I snapped some pics, but they fall terribly short; you have to be there to experience sense of scale and grandeur.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, America
M and I played tourist in Santa Fe, seeing sites in the historic downtown (and crashing a church festival for some G.O.A.T. carne asada tacos). Santa Fe is gorgeous, scenic, historic, and bursting with culture. Tons of visual art, Native American art (so many images from art history classes come to life: black-on-black pots by Maria Martinez, squash blossom turquoise-and-silver-necklaces), Spanish colonial architecture, and fun stuff like Native American papercuts, paper machê crafts, and—yes, ya’ll—Southwestern regional woodcut artists (and why not?). Our brief visit was far too short; I was struck with the feeling that I could easily spend more time there. So I’m putting it out there, Universe: Have Me Back To Santa Fe.
The Dissolve: SITE Santa Fe’s 2010 biennial
Santa Fe, NM
A strong show of videos made and manipulated by 30 contemporary international artists, including biennial-circuit usual suspects (Kara Walker, Paul Chan, William Kentridge) and more. Thomas Demand’s video of raindrops hitting a glossy concrete floor is another impressive feat of stop-motion paper animation, very sweet in its mundanity. Robin Rhode’s short video in black and white, largely about inversions, race and light, is another favorite of mine. I just didn’t have time to see the whole show (which would have taken days), but many of my impressions were influenced by the forceful exhibition design, for better and worse. The first room successfully featured scrims dividing roughly equal-sized screening rooms.* But the exhibition design of later rooms overpowered the ther works. The light and audio seepage in the cyclorama-like oval were missteps, as was the integration of solo viewing booths into a bench in theater with one dominant screen. The experience was unpleasantly akin to screen-in-screen browsing; I could focus on neither screen in front of me. I think this kind of overwhelming media experience is fine for solo shows, but in a group show, it shafts the artists who’ve drawn short straws. It’s a strong curatorial statement to feature 30 videos, and it would be a challenge to any institution, but you have to wonder what the architects were thinking. SITE Santa Fe had some flaws but it was energetic, now, and smart.
Who Shot Rock & Roll?: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present
Brooks Museum, Memphis, TN
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Gail Buckland
Who Shot Rock & Roll is a large, highly enjoyable exhibition of photographs of rock and pop musicians from the last half-century. The celebrity, glamor, pop culture, and sensationalism appeals. Those who dig deeper will find insightful captions about the technique, ingenuity and chance that went into the making of the famous photographs. Having spent my fair share of adolescence studying trippy album covers, I also appreciated the didactic texts and displays about the surreal, pre-Photoshop images by artist-designer Storm Thorgersen and Jean-Paul Goude (of superhuman Grace Jones, natch).
Photo: Michael Yap
Hatch Show Print
Broadway, Nashville, TN
In our improvised gander at Nashville, we stumbled into a beautiful, huge, working letterpress shop and storefront. Downtown Nashville is anchored by a shiny new country music museum, the usual Hard Rock Cafe and BB King blues club, so I wasn’t expecting to see such historic, indie culture. But there it was on touristy Broadway, with its fittingly nostalgic relief prints, cheeky and upbeat typography, and endearingly worn sign type. While we were browsing the wares, I overheard the proprietor mentioning CCA and the SF Center for the Book!
Roanoke, VA
That the two most interesting contemporary art exhibits on my eastern migration (the SITE Santa Fe biennial and Rock & Roll) were curated by New York curators/institutions was not a good sign for the idea of a de-centralized contemporary art world. So it was a pleasant surprise to come across SF Bay Area artists Binh Danh and Primitivo Suarez in, of all places, Roanoke, VA. Danh (whose solo show opens at Mills College Art Museum August 21) mentioned that he was doing a residency, but I forgot until I saw his artist’s talk advertised in the local paper. Suarez has a large installation on view at the Taubman Museum of Art, a swooping steel-and-glass trifle that contrasts sharply with the colonial railroad town.
Roadside America
Shartlesville, PA
Perhaps M was right—this is a tourist trap. Or maybe I’m right—a miniature village hand-crafted by two brothers at mid-century, which sprawls over several thousand square feet, loaded with electric trains, lights, fountains and a waterfall is art. Or at least it is artistic production worth a visit, because it says something about tinkerers, hobbyists, miniature culture, maker culture, and the urge to create and reflect the world you see. In either case it is odd and wonderfully preserved, though you get the sense that it is anachronistic enough that its future is in jeopardy, and you feel lucky to have seen it.
Brushy Lake State Park, Oklahoma
National Forests and State Parks
Despite serious weather (lots of thunderstorms, and threats of flash floods, hail, tornadoes and severe heat), our car-camping trip was safe, fun, and scenic. Here’s a brief round-up of our stays made possible by the U. S. of A.’s government-run, social programs:
·Coconino National Forest, A.Z.: Friendly park hosts, beautiful pine grove at elevation that brought the oven-like southwestern heat to nice cool temps. Absolutely pristine and sparsely populated in a way that you’d never see in California.
·Ute Lake State Park, N.M.: Your basic horseshoe campground in a great plain. Curious and friendly park hosts and RV campers. Apparently we visited during monsoon season; hot, humid, windy.
·Foss Lake State Park, western O.K., and Brushy Lake State Park, eastern O.K. Oklahoman reservoirs tricked out for RV camping and water sports, a study in contrasts. The former filled with empties-throwing, nappies-leaving, jet-skiing yahoos and not a ranger in sight; the latter, alcohol prohibited, but quiet, scenic, clean and staffed by a generous host.
·Edgar Evins State Park, T.N.: A unique campground situated on a steep hillside. Sites were wood-plank and I-beam pads jutting out from the road. The reservoir was clean and calm, great for swimming. Fireflies abounded.
·Hungry Mother State Park, V.A.: Hands down the best park: natural lake with diving boards, lots of swimming, lots to explore, cute discovery center. The only downside was that the sites were too close together, but the neighbors in our RV subdivision were nice enough.
·Fort Frederick, M.D. Self-pay, no water, no bathrooms, lots of rules, and a train passing nearby. The fort itself had a neat history (at one time owned by a formed slave) but the campsites weren’t nothing special.
A pleasant greeting
Queens, NY
My new neighbors shouting from the patios of their tidy brick townhouses:
“Welcome to Astoria!”
[*In a previous version I got my German filmmakers with the initials L.R. mixed up, committing a cardinal sin of be-smirching an innocent leftist with Nazi support. It was a mistake. Apologies.]
Adventures in archiving
July 24, 2010As a book-end to photos of my workbench and pegboard glory when I first moved into my West Oakland studio, I’ll share some pictures of the crates that will characterize my move out…
Crates!
As I’ve been decommissioning art materials and deciding which artwork to store or bring to New York, I’ve also been building and modifying crates as needed.
My painting rack (made of old paintings on plywood that I couldn’t bear to part with) will make a great crate. I can fit boxes in there too, now that I’ve added a shelf. It’s now a split-level bobber:
This guy will be great in storage. It’s not air- or water-tight by any means, but I’ve got poly and tape. Otherwise, it’s got a small footprint, casters and storage space on top.
For the move, I’ll put all my tools, materials and artworks into one large crate. That will be my studio in a box! Only the essentials are coming with me: very recent and pertinent art works, major tools like the miter saw and sewing machine, my first and only screen (just the hinges, no baseboard), my Alumi-cut and Alvin mats, my 24″ level-ruler combo. Gloves, goggies and a mask. Only two framed artworks, with the glass swapped out with acrylic.
I’m re-purposing the design for an old crate for my new studio-in-a-box crate. Huge time-savers were finding the original schematic and shopping list in an old notebook, and cutting diagrams of the sheet goods on an archived CD. (Between my compact car and temperamental hand-me-down circular saw, I often have the lumber yard cut the full sheets. Presenting a schematic with dimensions, as well as with the work pieces and remnants labeled, seems to help garner accurate cuts.)
Inventory software!
In the past, I kept records of artwork in two places: my website (copy and pasting to develop image lists) and my head (remembering what is where for the most part). Now that my inventory is undergoing a bi-coastal mitosis, I realized having some kind of tracking software will help.
This ArtBizBlog post was insightful:
The software below was designed specifically for artists’ special needs. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend one of these over the others….
The blogger also noted
Amazingly, most of these are unattractive.
[That's an ongoing gripe of mine; acute reactions to user experiences are the burden of being married to an interactive designer.]
Since the price was right ($30) and the interface straightforward and functional, I thought I’d try Flick, a Filemaker adaptation created by a software developer in Australia. Having some familiarity with Filemaker helped me jump right in—even though I last used it in the early 2000s.
So far, I think it’ll work for me. It’s pretty basic. Not very powerful, and can be a bit slow when you’re scrolling through multiple records. It’s also short on shortcut keys, but for the price it works fine.
I wish I knew more about accession numbers, especially one that suits my idiosyncratic output. I can already see that my naming convention—[year]-[medium]-[series]-[number]—could use improvement. It probably should have been [year]-[series]-[medium]-[number]. This is where being able to do some batch processing would be nice. Luckily, I’ll have some in-house systems management know-how in New York.
Drucker @ SFAI: Enjoy in my stead
July 24, 2010Readers of this blog will know that I’m quite a fan of Johanna Drucker, which puts me in the new position of sharing an event in San Francisco which I will not be able to attend, as I’ll be on the East Coast then.
The artist, theorist and author presents “Reversing Polarity: Aesthetics and Criticism after Adorno,” her keynote lecture at SFAI’s Art Criticism conference on Saturday, August 14th.
I recommend going with friends, as you will want to have a debate afterwards.
voice, perspective, position
July 23, 2010This week I had a lively conversation with an actor, designer and musician who are all actively developing their respective disciplines. There seemed to be an unspoken balance that everyone sought between becoming established and experienced and acquiring new skills and ideas.
One person brought up the idea of finding a voice. What does it mean to have a voice in art? In one of my very first art classes in my BFA studies, the instructor had each student say what he or she wanted to learn. I said I wanted to learn how to be honest in my work. Thankfully, the nagging feelings I had as a student—that I was merely emulating styles and techniques—do not plague me much anymore. Not that there aren’t frightening similarities between my works and other artists’, of course, just that it’s rarer now, and I’ve learned how to not be hamstrung by them.
The idea of having a voice made me think about having a perspective, of which a stronger extension, perhaps, would be taking a position with your work. And this brought up the different approaches within our crafts. I asked the actor if an actor is supposed to have a voice, perspective or position? Should an actor just disappear into the role? She explained the creative challenge and collaboration of acting—that a good actor can take crappy lines and turn them into a compelling character. This is much different from my approach as a designer, where I feel like without strong content, graphic design is just surface treatment. Because it’s a communications art, the form ought be in service of the content.
For actors and musicians, whose roles are largely interpretive, how much authorship is possible? We had an interesting dialog about whether the concept of voice is always tied to authenticity or authorship. Can one have a purely formal voice? When is form content? When isn’t it?
The musician shared a current debate in music theory about whether sounds are inherently meaningful or significance is culturally assigned to sounds. He then argued for the autonomy of the work; that a piece of music retains an essential identity outside of our social and cultural associations. To take a position in relation to a piece of music would be to deny the autonomy of the work, or to capitulate to the idea of complicity or relativism.
Unrealised Potential on Vimeo
July 23, 2010I’ve got an idea!
And the idea is for sale in an exhibition at Cornerhouse, a fantastic ICA, in Manchester. Have a look at a video of the exhibition, narrated by one of the curators, Mike Chavez-Dawson.
