Required reading today is Alina Stefanescu's indictment of Ayn Rand, whose aesthetics came a little close for comfort to Soviet Socialist Realistm (and not just by the boxy characters on her paperback covers). Great fun. Stefanescu made me recall an artist who tried to figure for a third art determinant party: democracy. Witalij Komar and Aleksander Melamid, contemporary Russian "Sots" artists (Soviet realism but ironic, more or less) started a project about a decade ago in which they conducted polls in various nations on their aesthetic preferences and painted the results.
It turns out that the People have left Rand and Lenin and their love of steel and jutting chins behind. Now, you might say that Komar and Melamid skew the field somewhat by including all the preferred characteristics in one painting (and all the discouraged preferences in another), but they're still on to something:
Using the data collected in the survey, they painted a pair of canvases of classic proportions ("the size of a dishwasher," the preferred choice according to the poll) and called them America's Most Wanted and America's Most Unwanted, including in each painting what the respondents said they wanted or did not want in a painting. America's Most Wanted features a historical figure (George Washington) and wildlife (two deer, a hippo, and some trees), but mostly blue water and sky, which cover 40 percent of its surface; and America's Most Unwanted consists of dozens of overlapping triangles and squares of different sizes and colours (mostly pale yellow, orange, and blue), surrounded by a soft border in black.It turns out that the Earth's favorite artwork resembles a somewhat political Thomas Kinkade print. This link purports to show all the world's nations' choices for best and worst; thankfully, the link isn't working. Check here if you must. Given what the Market, the State, and the People are offering, I'm not sure where to turn.[. . .]
The results of the international polls are surprisingly consistent. Blue is the preferred colour of a majority of the world's citizens. Abstract art is overwhelmingly disliked, with the exception of the people of the Netherlands—the country that gave the world the geometric abstract artist Piet Mondrian. The Chinese answered the most questions with "undecided," but did express a preference for art that shows people at work rather than involved in a leisure activity, in contrast to the Americans, who prefer seeing recreational subjects. The apparent scientific basis of the poll not only lent credence to a host of preconceptions and prejudices but also seemed to legitimise the whole idea of creating democratically determined popular art, giving it an aura of objectivity that is antithetical to any kind of authentic art.
While I'm as sympathetic as the next Austinite to Amanda's impassioned pleas to spare Austin from the curtain of smoking bans closing on the nation, except, well, I'm not as sympathetic as the next Austinite. I should be. Not only am I a smoker, but the thought of someone asking me to step outside the Casino or Lovejoy's or (God forbid the day ever come to pass) Nasty's to have a smoke makes me want to have a full-bore seizure. It kills me to break ranks with Norbizness and out myself as a prude favoring the slippery slope toward a dystopian Austin of wheat-grass shots, hybrid sushi/Baja-style Mexican restaurants, and David Gray concerts, which is I assume precisely the sort of godless liberal anthem a smoking ban supporter would march to—because deep inside I know that cigarettes go with bars go with cigarettes, and anyone who doesn't understand this is someone I don't want at the Showdown.
But I have to give my full support to the smoking ban because those few bar employees who don't smoke—hypothetical though they may sound—are on the side of science. Environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or passive smoking is the most harmful indoor air pollutant, a class A carcinogen up there with asbestos. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, along with every Western nation's leading cancer agency (if I recall correctly, there are no longer any exceptions, but check me if I'm wrong), has identified a causal link between passive smoking and lung cancer. Suffice it to say that my uncle is the only person left who refuses to acknowledge that secondhand smoke is terrible, and that's because he's been auditioning to become the Marlboro Man since he was 12. (Yeah, I smoke too, but he smokes way more.)
Lindsay Beyerstein notes that 15-year-old OSHA standards suggest that indoor ETS isn't usually sufficient to amount to overexposure. (It's very clear that OSHA has never been to Nasty's. On any given night you've got, what, 4 feet of visibility?) These data require some caveats—one, these standards are old. The entire Western world only came to agree that ETS was a carcinogen in 2002, so it's possible (and probable) that we've learned some things since 1990. Two, even if these standards aren't arbitrary measures antiquated by newer, different data, it's hard to see how the newer context of ETS hasn't affected the OSHA standards. Did OSHA set its limits at the atmospheric levels at which ETS is no longer carcinogenic, or the levels at which ETS is not recognized to be an irritant? Those are my complaints before we even introduce the lobbying factor and the effect of the politics on the implementation of these standards.
I would definitely be willing to reconsider my opinion if the answers to these questions revealed a favorable correlation between the science on smoking and the OSHA standards, and I admit that it's bias that assures me that the answers would show otherwise. (Lindsay would, too.) Nonetheless, the accompanying OSHA directive—"[i]f the [permissible exposure limits] or [short-term exposure limits] for any of these air contaminants is exceeded, corrective action must be taken by the employer to reduce employee exposure to the contaminant"—is a joke. How can a bar know whether it is within the appropriate range? Smoking bans work; toothless standards don't.
As for the caveat emptor argument—employees can choose to work somewhere else if they don't want to work at smoke-filled bars—I'd remind that the same defense stood when the few non-smoking stewardesses rallied to have smoking banned on air flights; and the fact is now as it was then that so long the culture generally tolerates smoking and there is an enormous financial incentive behind permitting smoking (and selling cigarettes), smoke-free alternatives aren't going to emerge. I remember listening to Julian Sanchez debate against a District smoking ban on the Kojo Nnamdi show, and—I mean, I know he's doing the Lord's work, because I'd hate to not be able to smoke in bars—he offered that the Health Bar on U Street shows that the market tolerates non-smoking bars. It was a bit flimsy, given that Health Bar is, well, it's called Health Bar, I think you can infer what that place is. It ain't the Black-Cat-just-without-smoking—and as far as I'm aware, that bar doesn't exist.
If, if, one could be reasonably assured that every employee of every smoking bar in Austin (or DC, or whever) is a smoker who will never want to quit smoking, then I think it would be reasonable to say that everyone involved assented to the tremendous health risks involved with ETS—but that's really not the case. If ventilation systems sufficient to mitigate the risks of ETS could be required in such a way that isn't disadvantageous for smaller bars, that would be a reasonable application of basic health standards—but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. If a market existed that tolerated non-smoking bars, it would be reasonable to say that the market provides for bartenders et al. who mind the risks associated with ETS—but the market doesn't tolerate non-smoking bars, except in the form of abhorrible Health Bars. So I think you have to give that joyless son-of-a-bitch bartender his healthy workplace and support the smoking ban.
God forbid they ever pass them, though—what the hell kind of good is a bar without smoking?
Molly Springfield provides a subtext to her show at Jet Artworks in the form of a quotation from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Time Regained) [À la recherche du temps perdu (Le temps retrouvé)]:
Anything we have not had to decipher and to clarify by our own effort, anything that was clear before we came, does not belong to us. There belongs to us only what we extract from the obscurity within us. And since art reconstructs life exactly, around these truths that we have found in ourselves floats an atmosphere of poetry, the charm of a mystery which only the inner darkness we have traversed.She offers as her own petite madeleine a series of personal texts, rendered in representational works spanning oil, photography, and graphite—media she uses, respectively, to mediate memory by way of palimpsest, landscape, and catalogue.
That’s the system Springfield uses to categorize the works in her show. It should be abundantly clear that she’s a cerebral artist. That makes the central juxtaposition in her show all the more emphatic: The object of her urbane considerations is a trove of her secondary school notes.
I’m willing to bet that “notes” don’t require any introduction. The ones I passed from about 7th to 10th grade document an expansive romantic tragicomedy, starring Amanda W_____ (first chair clarinet; captain of our Academic Decathlon team), Erica B____ (last chair oboe; first girl to visibly become a woman in junior high, and therefore the universe), and me, though there is significant debate as to whether either Amanda W____ or Erica B____ ever realized their prominent roles in Kriston C____’s life. I bet you have your own (surely less doomed) story. One of the properties of Springfield’s show is that as she works to universalize her own experience (by transforming her documents into artworks), the viewer is framing her art in the context of his own documents.
There are two series of paintings in the show: one, a four-painting series of phrases drawn from the afore-mentioned Proust quotation, the other, six paintings comprising the entire text of one of her notes. Springfield erases, blurs, and buries the text to arrive at artifacts that relate to the originals but are nonetheless ultimately obscured. Springfield works from a trompe l'oeil tradition, and her paintings tend to resist the Ed Ruscha, word-object-as-abstraction reading, tempting though it may be. She doesn’t render them to be (easily) read and emphasizes their formal qualities over their literal meaning, but she’s working with words nonetheless.
Molly Springfield, Please don't show this note to anyone, 2004. Oil on panel, 24" x 16"
These series recall the early Christian codices, e.g., the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (one of four manuscripts from which the Greek Orthodox Bible was compiled, the text of which was obscured by the meditations of St. Ephraem the Syrian). Springfield's palimpsests operate as restorations in reverse, in which one Molly Springfield (protagonist of her notes; Proust reader) is replaced by another (the historical author of the artifact; Proust annotator). The purpose is not, I think, to spark some self-reflexive circuit, but instead to force one text to engage another.
Molly Springfield, Please don't show this note to anyone, detail.
I read something in that dialogue. It seems to me that those notes as such provide a crystal clear illustration of Proust’s observations on experience. The subject of all that adolescent correspondence was the “obscurity within us”—assessing it, measuring it, defining its borders, clarifying and deciphering that constant feeling of urgency and by doing so, realizing our personalities. I think the experiences I personally documented were small (arguably, imagined), but that process of documenting everything laid a crucial framework for the real experiences that eventually came. More on the mysteries of adolescence, I’ll leave to a better poet.
Springfield’s photographic landscapes, presented in the exhibit as a slideshow, deviate from the tight discussion of her paintings. Before she had decided on a medium for this series, Springfield arranged a tableau of notes and figurines from a certain period of time. After photographing the landscape of the arrangement, she declined to do as she’d intended and paint or draw from the photographs. The slideshow offers one kind of memory (literal documents) in the form of another (imagery); chevrons and squares that mark these panoramas are distinguished by the different line weights and handwriting styles that cross these surfaces. The slideshow medium is appropriate for her work, but the apparently but not actually scattered quality of the landscapes seems to indicate an unintentional, or perhaps unexplored, comment on how memory works.
Molly Springfield, Untitled (memory landscapes) 2003. Digital video still.
Her graphite drawings are a strong return to form. The gridded, clinical presentation on the wall emphasizes the dark manifest of the show; scribbles, conversation snippets, and math equations, all categorized by date and time, are presented as autopsied and splayed for the viewer.
Molly Springfield, 06.05.03, 1:57 pm–07.13.04, 12:20 pm, 2004. Drawings installation view [from artist’s studio].
There are some interruptions in this catalogue—her decision to include drawings of objects (figurines, a cassette, a condom wrapper) strikes me as a mistake. Easily the notes, in their inaccessibility but familiarity, make for a potential that preconfigures all those things. (People at the opening hummed over the Admiral Ackbar drawing in particular, which made it seem like a distraction (if not a trap)—though the artist can’t be blamed for that.)
Molly Springfield, 5.31.04, 3:14 pm, 2004. Graphite on paper, 10" x 7"
Springfield's capable drafsmanship, the glue of the show, enables her to experiment in various media without the viewer ever finding the seams, as it were. She idles at points, but she doesn't waffle. And she's bound to idle at times while she's developing her thesis, but the artist who is willing to commit herself to a literary problem is the kind you ought to follow.
I put in all sorts of spam safeguards over the weekend, and while I was tinkering in my Web site's garage, I decided to reshelve all the links to the left. Visit them and be amazed and also let me know if any of the links don't work. Not quite done with everything, so now's the time to whine about how your link has been mislabeled and no one understands your unique position in the universe.
Those of you who are seeing this site through the lens of Firefox will notice a horrifying, blunt red border around the Beck album thumbnail. I can't make it go away. If someone can take a look at the div class below that governs the section and tell me what might be doing that (or what might prevent it), I'd appreciate it. Is there a span code I can add? I don't seem to have this problem in Safari, mind you.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't sweat it—neither do I. CSS makes me curse like my grandfather.)
.side {
font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif;
color:#333;
font-size:x-small;
font-weight:normal;
background-image: url(blah blah blah spacer blah);
line-height:140%;
padding:2px;
}
I feel so exposed.
Don't start your weekend until you've had a good snortle with Banksy, the guerrilla artist who recently snuck about and installed his own work in the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History. Wooster has the exclusive. The piece pictured below found its way into the Museum of Natural History.
Banksy, Withus oragainstus (United States), 2005.
Funny stuff, but it's Banksy's street art that's really impressive. I'm hesitant to say anything bad about Borf lest he spraypaint my dog or something, but I'm not a huge fan. Much prefer Kelly Towles.
(Now's probably the time to mention the "Never Mind the Corcoran" punk-art show. This one, I gotta say, this one caught me by surprise—all this time I thought that punk was, in fact, quite dead.)
If you've seen these clips somewhere—and maybe you were aware all along—you know that octopi are smarter than I am. Those are some sweet moves. If I knew these tricks, I would never be in danger.
UPDATE: But I could kick a Tremoctopus violaceous's ass.
I know I didn't get much material up on the page this week, and I know that a few people are and have been waiting patiently for a few reviews. (Thanks.) I've come down with something like writer's block. Granted, that's not an affliction that interferes with blogging, but reviews are formal and are therefore composed in Microsoft Word, you see, where these types of germs thrive in the damp, dark crevices of the formatting palette. I'm sure I'll iron it out over the weekend. But, but, at least I haven't written anything resembling what New Republic art critic Jed Perl wrote about Gerhard Richter in 2001:
Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter. His retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art until May, is a colossal bummer–a hymn to deracination, a visual moan. This seventy-year-old artist works in paint on canvas, but what he sends out into the world are not paintings so much as they are Neo-Dadaist puzzles engineered to inspire philosophical flights of fancy among art professionals who are more interested in massaging their world-weary minds than in using their jet-lagged eyes. [emphasis added]Which he then repeated as the Richter show toured. Can you imagine, first of all, having the gall to dismiss a minor master such as Richter? Prefer him or not, Richter is simply too dominant to be called "bullshit," unless you have the credibility to spend to call the entirety of the art world into question. I remember when Perl junked John Currin—I was listening, I was nodding along, okay, Currin can certainly be didactic—but when Philip Guston ended up as collateral damage in that thrashing review, I realized I'd been led too far off the reservation. Something about a "wholesale derangement of values." I think it's the purposefully counterintuitive take that has to mind the needle on the values compass. J. Seward Johnson, Jr. is bullshit. Richter's only bullshit to someone who knows he really isn't.
And what about repeating the review for different cities? "New York San Fran, don't put up with Richter's bullshit!" Maybe this is done more often than I realize, but I don't know that reviews are typically repeated in a single publication. (I'd hate to have my office broadcasting my mistakes like that.)
Check out Margaret Wertheim's interview with geometers David Henderson and Daina Taimina for Cabinet Magazine. When I saw the images of Taimina's crocheted hyperbolic figures, I was immediately struck by how instructive it could be as an applied tool to teach non-Euclidean geometry, because—well, I don't know anything about crochet, but I get the sense that this is true—one could viscerally experience ultraparallel lines or even space curvature. It turns out that Taimina, in fact, invented the first workable model of Lobachevskian, i.e., hyperbolic geometry by abandoning paper and turning to crochet. Certainly makes a great deal of sense after the fact, doesn't it?
Daina Taimina, Crocheted model of hyperbolic plane, 1970s.
See Taimina's pseudosphere, too. And the interview isn't a bad introduction to non-Euclidean geometry, either.
I'd definitely love for them to have expanded on the conversation about hyperbolic forms in nature, particularly the nudibranch. I was happy to see that Taimina was appropriately dismissive of hyperbolic lettuce, which one can find in the grocery store but not nature. The purist knows that exotic forms of geometry are to be found under the sea, damnit. (In another life, I study the Ordovician Period ancestors of my favorite cephalopod and sea creature, the chambered nautilus—how time has humbled that once fearsome predator!)
Nature, Nudibranch, Cambrian period.
And on an unrelated note: If you're interested to see the form of awesome executed in nature, see the eurypterid, the ancient chambered nautilus's greatest enemy (except the former was freshwater and the latter seawater, so they never fought per se though I don't see how that's relevant).
To: House Government Reform CommitteeWhich arrives precisely at the impulse behind the Schiavo case that has occupied Florida courts for nearly a decade: After your (effective) death, you can no longer control your interests. Yet always you will always be asked to do so—to distribute your property, arrange your funeral, have someone feed your pets and water your plants. You know you're going to need to feed your pets, but can you really be expected to describe your wishes should, say, a potassium deficiency stop your heart from pumping blood to your brain, leaving you in a permanent vegetative state, a condition over which a family feud arises, the legal component of which eventually commands the curiosity of the American media and the attention of the United States Congress?
From: James David Velleman
Re: My Advance DirectiveHaving discussed with my wife how I wish to be treated in case of irreversible brain injury -- a private matter that I choose not to air here -- I hereby inform you of my refusal, in advance, to respond to any subpoenas with which I may be served while in a persistent vegetative state. Since I will not in those circumstances be able to assert this refusal, or my preference to be held in contempt of Congress, I am asserting them publicly now, in the hope of forestalling such ghoulish theatrics on your part, which would richly deserve my contempt. Should this hope be frustrated, I have instructed my physicians and my attorney to deny you access to my hospital room.
It's a court's job to determine the deceased's will when unforeseen circumstances arise, and even given the lengthy legal battle in this particular case, the Florida courts did exactly as they should. James Wilson outlines in the Wall Street Journal the only remotely respectable conservative claim I've seen: that it ought to be illegal for a person to refuse medical services if doing so will result in his death. I think that's absurd (and, you know, not-conservative), but at least it's an approach that acknowledges that there are laws, that these laws were applied in courts, and that he doesn't like the conclusions that were made in the application of said laws. What President Bush said about the case as he signed an 11th hour legislative stay in the execution of Schiavo's will—"In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life"—it not only saccharine, but reveals an authoritarian contempt for the justice system.
Now that Congress has intervened in a state's legal proceedings in order to force an outcome favored by Republicans, there's something more significant at stake than another awful front in the culture war or even Schiavo's unfortunate fate. I think it's pretty damned important that this GOP tactic is successfully resisted, and that effort probably has little to do with the Schiavo trial. Republicans acting in the name of Christ cannot be allowed to govern the minutae of our lives.
Mona Hatoum, Over My Dead Body, 1988–2002. Jet ink print on PVC with grommets.
UPDATE: If you are interested in the medical merits of the case, I found this post by Rivka persuasive and accessible. Ezra Klein posts a poll that shows that most Americans disagree with the Republican take on the Schiavo case—on the morals, but more importantly, for reasons of separation of powers.
We can all breathe easy—The Wire has been renewed for a fourth season. If you haven't seen it, quit your job and rent seasons one and two.
Tyler is trashing the New York School of the Visual Art's new art criticism MFA program. Fair enough. I'm by no means opposed to the notion of graduate education, but browsing through the course catalogue, it sounds a little loosey-goosey to me—nothing you couldn't come by in undergrad or with some focus in other graduate departments. (Or, to borrow from what the man said, with a library card and $20 in MoMA tickets.)
But I have to wonder about the merits of SVA given the fact that the school runs an art therapy master's program. At the very least I would seek assurances that there is not so much as overlap of the premises between the two programs before I asked for a pamphlet. Art therapy is a profession in which questionably licensed individuals seek to cure people of various afflictions by orchestrating tonic-seekers' emotions in the presence of art. Worse still—for various reasons I have had some contact with literature related to complementary and alternative medicines—art therapy primarily targets people suffering from addiction and cancer. Which are—incidentally!—very persistent, very cure-resistant afflictions.
The National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine* at least does the courtesy of distinguishing veritable (measurable) and putative (wholly imaginary) types of CAM. And I would believe that even the really egregious stuff could potentially induce beneficial psychosomatic effects. As with hypnosis or prayer, I personally don't see that fooling yourself with energy-field rituals and abstract landscape paintings is worth the trade-off in the alleviation of stress, blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc.
But cancer and addiction are a different league entirely—people recover by the aid of doctors and prescriptions, and these diseases are prevented by conscientious politics and early detection. What a cruel trick to use art to inspire false hope. Again, everyone has to find his way to sleep at night—but the academy shouldn't be selling snake oil.
* Your tax dollars at work. At one point the acronym for the agency was OCCAM, leading me to believe it was an elaborate joke.
Tuesday night at the Corcoran Biennial turned out to be more party than preview (at least for me), so I'll be going back on Saturday to take notes and reacquire the sharp impressions that I bartered for martinis at the Perry's afterparty. (Where, for reasons not entirely clear to me, I was told upon entering by my friend Allison that I should give the name "Mark." Yes, Mark would love some sushi. No, Mark probably should not have another drink. —Oh, but you know Mark.)
As a way of talking around my forthcoming review—and the show is better than I expected, with a strong stable of District aritsts and only a few gaffes throughout—let me say that I could have assembled a compelling District edition of GawkerForum had I trotted out my camera. There were photographers taking pictures throughout (which I'd love to see, and who-knows-maybe-post, if any parties in the know are reading).
I was happy to meet Vesna Pavlovic for the second time. She's not in the show, but recently I had a chance to see some of her photographs (she's represented in DC by Fusebox) from a series she did several years ago in the former Yugoslavia, and the images are some of the strongest I've seen in an arts-intensive few weeks. A document of hotels designed in the strength of Yugoslav socialist rule, the series finds the heavy presence of decay and relic—she doesn't alter the locations and susses several time-frozen artifacts that seem as if they have been hidden in the open. That in itself is an interesting but rudimentary aspect to this style of post-political photography; more distinctive in Pavlovic's work is the dignity that she offers to the viewer. I didn't find any of her works to be condescending (something I'm sensitive to in works by many of her American contemporaries, who troll the South in search of the anachronism of a self-serious cowboy or the romance of an abandoned gas station).
Vesna Pavlovic, Kasina Hotel, Majdanpek, 2001. C-print. [Can't get the diacriticals to work—sorry!]
Now that I've given her work something of a gloss, I should mention again that she's not in the show—I'll be keeping tabs on where she shows next. Also not showing at the Corcoran was Brandon Morse, whom I met for the first time and who has a new home at Conner Contemporary. Nor could Valerie Soles or her main squeeze be found exhibiting, though it was her birthday, damnit. Jason Gubbiotti was to be seen afterward and promised to send me new images, so his name's on this list too. Everything you need to know that doesn't concern the Biennial.
Special thanks to Sarah for inviting my friend Magnum PI and I out to her party while we were in Pittsburgh on Saturday. For whatever reason I can't upload any images right now, but as soon as whatever's broken fixes itself you'll have the pictorial survey of what happens when art bloggers collide. (As it turns out: alcohol is consumed.) Some reviews are also on deck.
Tonight I'm getting gussied up to preview the Corcoran Biennial; I may or may not have more pictures (that I may or may not be able to upload) from the party afterward—I always feel so déclassé toting a camera around. If social anxiety doesn't get the best of me I should have some District party pictures for you later.
UPDATE: Snapshots—Sarah and I; the city of Pittsburgh featuring Magnum PI.
Check out Austinist!
Who start the damned thing off right by praising Maria's Taco Xpress ("Fucking moon people know about Maria’s tacos") and the notorious Austin Craft Mafia. Austinist can just repeat those posts and every once in a while note the interesting new ways in which "every band" and "OU" are worthless beyond reason. And then take a week off for tubing!
I think DCist is making the right decision in expanding its art coverage and increasing the number of contributing arts writers under their imprimatur. It's bitchy of me to say—and I don't know the extent to which Lenny Campello of DC Art News contributes or what Cyndi Spain has to say on the subject—but I twitch whenever I see a feature with Lenny's name attached on DCist about work on display at the gallery he operates. I don't doubt the conviction Lenny clearly feels about the art he represents or enjoys, and I don't think that it's unreasonable that he writes about artists he represents on his own blog. But you really can't don the critic's cap when you're a producer in the community.
Criticism isn't what DCist is doing, but it's something like it—this show is worth going to, this artist is moving here or moving on, this area is worth keeping an eye on, this genre is what we're good at. If they do for art in the District what they do for music and food in the District, I think they'll be doing us a hell of a service.
Anyway, more people, more hats—and more beer: Don't forget to stop by the DCist happy hour tonight and raise a pint or nine with a bunch of the Districters who write these curious Web-logs.
Burqa and cleavage? Can one singer actually manage to unite the world in infuriation?
A self-styled "suicide bomber" musician who sings in Arabic and performs in a full-length burqa is planning a "terror concert" in Britain.Let me say that the music may be the most offensive part of n.A.T.o.'s act (listen to her single, "Chor Avon" ("Black Widow"—yeah, no kidding), if you must. Courtesy of Justin Logan.). She's said to sing in Tajik, Georgian, and Farsi, but I can't exactly tell exactly what language she's singing in; I'm assuming she's not singing about making out with other teenage girls, but that is only an assumption. Potentially more offensive than her sound: Shapovalov apparently considered staging some sort of publicity event on a plane. Pravda, proving with aplomb that Russians are at best deaf to and more likely immune to extreme absurdity, notes that "[t]he performance was slated to take place in September [2004], although the show had to be cancelled on account of plane crashes in Russia."The Russian teenage singer, known only as n.A.T.o, performs with her face covered by a veil in front of screens broadcasting images from al-Jazeera, the Arab television station, interspersed with flashing words such as "al-Qaeda", "Iraq" and "Nasdaq".
Her manager, Ivan Shapovalov, who last year launched the controversial lesbian pop duo t.A.T.u, plans to give a concert in Britain in November after successfully organising a similar event in Moscow on September 11.
Though it would be doltish to be provoked by n.A.T.o. herself, doesn't Shapovalov seem worse than a huckster? Staging very young women in conceptual, ideological, or sexual roles, in which they do not seem invested and for which they do not seem prepared? The gig he is running strikes me as a fetishized American Idol. Not to say that there isn't a great deal of fetishization to American pop culture—just that American pop incorporates sex in a consensual if dumb and overstimulated way, whereas Shapovalov is using teenage sexuality to pour salt in the world's rawest wounds. A trick as old as Homer and Helen, but still, ugh, it's pretty gross.
I'm playing around with the new MyBlogLog tool, which allows you to track which links are most popular among your blog readers, and it appears that the most popular links at G.p by far right now are, hmm, Susan and Catherine. Neck and neck, too. While that catfight ensues, let's see how they do against . . . Nazi loot intrigue at the MoMA! Or this adorable sock monkey!
Blake Gopnik reviews the Tim Hawkinson exhibition at the Whitney, his first museum-level survey—but I'm not reading it until I finish my own review. The show is massive and exciting, but I have a number of serious problems with Hawkinson's work, which I'll explain in the review I eventually publish (here or (potentially) elsewhere). Those of you who are heading up to New York tomorrow for the Armory Show might want to consider stopping by to refresh the visual palate after so much art-world bacchanalia.
No less a welcome home awaited DemocraSue when we returned from the airport than an acceptance letter to the University of Chicago. How can flowers compare? Also leading the huzzah list is Catherine, who finangled her way into both Berkeley and Northwestern. Should these two hellcats wind up in a Windy City flat together, I leave it to Tom to design the surveillance camera we'll be installing above their entryway.
Nicole Kidman playing Diane Arbus? The ARTSTAR reality television show? With the relative success of films such as Frida, Pollock, even going back as far as Basquiat (but purposefully excluding Surviving Picasso), I don't understand why we don't see more of this stuff. Most people don't know who Diane Arbus is, but they may love seeing Nicole Kidman shooting transvestites and lunatics. Fewer people still know who Ana Mendieta is, but I bet they'd watch her wipe blood all over skeletons, especially if by the end she's going to jump out of a high-rise window (or be pushed out by sculptor-husband Carl Andre, if that's your take on that scandal). Crazies, skeletons, interesting lives and interesting deaths—it's good copy!
Okay, sure, America's Next Top Video Installation Artist rubs me the wrong way. But at the same time, there's an enormous chasm between what the laity accepts as appropriate for contemporary art and what actually constitutes contemporary art and criticism. People like Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer have made a career in exploiting strident postmodernist language, abstruse forms of art (e.g., installations, performances), and the lack of training needed to understand contemporary art strategies, all in order to propagate the perception that any art that doesn't fit between Vermeer and Rothko is a scam. It's a fault highlighted by conservatives but not limited to them; for many intelligent, educated people, the art world gets fuzzy just after Jackson Pollock and screeches to a frustrated halt at Minimalism.
I don't think that the contemporary art reality television show is going to peel families away from Wife Swap. But if by exploiting the salacious details of Mendieta's biography, people come to accept her strategies of artmaking as non-hostile and even worthwhile—if a hypothetical Ana did for Ana what Frida did for Frida—I would be comfortable with that compromise.
This comment thread is precisely why I can't read Martin Bromirski's blog. He kicks off the post with an egregious ad hominem spur, and the discussion quickly descends to a point below sea level. It's a trend that's too common in art blogs and needs to be addressed. Especially in the District, which seems to be, I'm sorry to say, the capital of artblog nastiness. Ask Tyler or Caryn—both of whom have been slurred by DC art bloggers—about their impressions of the District corner of the art blogosphere, and I think they'll tell you that it embodies the provincial tag that the District is trying to shed. Worse still, tell a gallerist in the know that you're a blogger and more often than not she will visibly recoil. God in His Seat in Heaven forbid that you mention you're there to review a show, at which point the scornful glances are likely to make a greater impression than the art on display.
I see the art blogosphere as a galaxy in formation: solar systems coming together, a few massive giants starting to emerge, some good news and criticism accreting. Mostly it's a lot of stellar goop. But there are a handful of black holes, from which common courtesy cannot escape, and they're a drag on the whole scene. And unlike the greater blogosphere of which our galaxy is a subset (call it a multiverse?), we're still sufficiently small—and will probably stay that way—that a few negative nodes can characterize what everyone is doing in an unfortunate way.
I can't tell anyone how to run his blog, but if a few characters ratcheted down the asshole factor a notch or two—cut the anonymous and ad hominem attacks and maybe asked before allegating—we'd be better off. Any suggestions? And how come the science and food blogs don't have to have these meetings?
UPDATE: Yeah, I know, I know, you're all snoring, no one cares. The cup overfloweth.
I never gave Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections a fair shake when it was published—I was turned off by the Oprah Book Club mention, I was turned off again by his overturning Oprah's nod, I picked it up half-heartedly, eh. Fast forward: The discount sticker at Half-Price Books has plunged low enough by the time I drop in a Dallas location that I can't not buy it. A little further: I take a hiatus, finish the novel, adore it entirely, immediately start rereading it. (Fact: Any truly enjoyable book I finish I immediately reread. I once got stuck in a loop and read Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita three consecutive times. Drives Susan batty.)
Unrelated except insofar as it corresponds with my reading of Franzen, but I owe Kelly Towles an apology. He told me about his "Bollocks" show—exactly the sort of show I had hoped to see him do, which I promptly failed to both mention and attend. I ran into Kelly at the Black Cat and I thought that I'd missed his show because I was in New York the weekend in question, but, nope, sorry, I'm just bad with a calendar looking forward and backward. So, yeah. Try not to forget things.
Courtesy of Ezra Klein, the LAT notes a few changes ahead for the Walt Disney Concert Hall:
Construction crews are set to take hand sanders to some of the shimmering stainless-steel panels that have wowed tourists and architecture lovers but have baked neighbors in condominiums across the street.Hilarity. I read this story in the NYT a while back, which outlines the functional complaints that have diminished several key buildings, but I don't mind seeing it repeated. One common complaint that I read is that the extraordinary resources required to make Gehry's mathematical modeling work limits the firm's ability to make lateral moves with respect to design; i.e., all his work looks the same. But to be honest, I'm less concerned about the style-substance issue at hand than I am disappointed that Gehry has become the lowest common denominator in American architecture. Can't very well blame Gehry for the lack of diversity in new, important architecture awards, sure, but it doesn't make me feel any more comfortable with Gehrification.Beams of sunlight reflected from portions of the hall have roasted the sidewalk to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to make plastic sag, cause serious sunburn to people standing on the street and create a hazard to passing motorists, according to a report from a consultant hired by the county to investigate the problem.
Taking a momentary break from my hiatus to note Sarah Boxer's article about the New York Public Library image archive, which just went live. It can be found here and it's wonderful. The poor man's digitally reanimated Joseph Cornell (though I don't recall who has the claim to more images: Cornell's studio or NYPL). And on Cornell, Adam Gopnik.
Hiatus resumed, see you on Monday. If you need me I'll be at Jet Artworks tonight to see Molly Springfield's opening, whose work I'm jazzed to see.
On March 2 of every year, the genuflexuous meditate on the glorious promise that is the birthright of every ethnic Texan—independence. The Sherman-Denison Herald Democrat gives a solemn sermon on our origins:
The government in far away Mexico City had failed its basic duties to its citizens in Texas. General Santa Anna had abrogated the constitution of 1824 and taken over as a despot. The people of Texas would suffer the yoke of oppression no longer. They would be free and independent from Mexico, and the declaration signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos that March 2, 1836 made those intentions clear.We also remember the martyrs who have sacrificed themselves for the cause of Texas. It's been nearly a decade since a clash with the Federal Government left faithful Texans dead (the Davis Mountain Stand-off of 1997). Texas has not been paid the restitution owed her ($93,492,827,008,096 by her enemies (the United States, the Federal Reserve Board, the International Monetary Fund, and the Holy See of the Catholic Church), a sum that would boost our standings from a paltry eighth largest economy in the world to our destined hegemonic spot. But Texas is not diminished by her enemies, and last week our long-lost freedom fighters, The Republic of Texas, resurfaced in Overton, Texas.
Their fight is an uphill battle. Consider the revisionist apostasy of the decadent, liberal-elite professor Felix Alamarz of the University of Texas-San Antonio:
For those handful in the Alamo who were fighting, their goal was to restore the Mexican constitution of 1824 that Santa Ana had abrogated. . . . They were looking for an opportunity, because if they ended up on the winning side, the reward would be in the form of money.What use is money for the Texan who looks forward to 99 Shiner bocks in the afterlife?
Diaspora Texans who want to celebrate without fear of mockery or oppression should make their way to The Austin Grill, where a traditional holiday dinner is free for anyone who can prove his Texan ethnicity. Which, of course, a Texan can recognize by the spirit in yer eye.
I'm taking a hiatus—time to catch up on some books. Cheers, and I'll be back next Monday.
. . . shoulda taken that left toin at Albuquerque.
"Earthworks in the Wild West," from the New York Times, May 13, 1979.
(Really, isn't this the most useless graphic? Click to enlarge to make it readable and even more useless. I found this while looking up something on Michael Heizer's City. Why would they make all the symbols triangles?)
