Team Response Not Responding

Jonathan Padget writes in the Washington Post that he was tipped off about Jason Balicki's "Barn Barnacle" from a comment in a local cultural blog. Hey, well, it turns out that Balicki's comment appeared in this post. Maybe we were being browsed?

I sort of hope not. I haven't had the time or energy to keep the ol' G.p up to snuff (or breathing), plus my laptop (finally) died, also I broke my toe (stubbed it to death), then my girlfriend moved to Georgia (Tbilisi, not Hotlanta), and it's still August (a month like molasses). I'm planning on resuming some semblance of my life in September (not a day before).

Mope, mope. Anyway, that's great coverage for Balicki's DIY space, and I wish I could've made the show. I'm all the more excited for the next one. But the article shared some sad news: Team Response is no more. I assumed as much but had never heard for sure. They were rad.

And Her Handwriting's Better Than Mine

A few days' furlough while I see Sue off to (the nation of) Georgia, where she'll start her Fulbright. Asdf. Jkl;.

Getty While the Getting's Good

Tyler Green scoops two coasts' worth of fishwrap by scoring an interview with the soon-to-be director of the Getty Museum, Michael Brand, who currently mans the helm at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Brand describes the "bully pulpit" of a museum directorship and provides Getty watchers with an insight into his early thoughts about the job:

I think the Bill Viola project that the Getty showed in 2003 [a series of video works, "The Passions," that explored the power and complexity of emotions and was inspired by works in the Getty’s collections] was fantastic. He had a residency, spent time there, looked at the collection, thought, made new work, and showed it there. I think that’s a really good way for the Getty to involve people with contemporary art. I’d like to make those sorts of things an ongoing program.

I'd like to see that too. A link to Viola's work with the Getty.

Should We Talk About the Weather? Should We Talk About the Government?

(Hi, hi, hi.)

Some might have noticed that the installation of Jim Hodges's "Directions" exhibition for the Hirshhorn, titled don't be afraid, was delayed this week. The work, a 70-foot-long billboard featuring reproductions of the phrase "Don't Be Afraid" as written by a host of United Nations delegates in their respective native languages and scripts, will run along the façade of the building. Naturally one might have suspected that a mustachioed man showed up and put the kibosh on the whole affair, but no: it was just the weather. I'm told that barring wind and rain it was planned to go up early this morning, but so far this morning has been . . . windy and rainy. Maybe next week.

Raymond Uhlir at Deborah Colton

Raymond Uhlir’s first solo show, “Hooray for Sanctimony: A Calvinist Adventure Through the Sophist Temple of Doom,” is a Saturday-versus-Sunday mashup of scriptural illumination and cartoon-morning psychedelia. In seven paintings and more than a dozen drawings, Raymond drafts the fundamental template for a fundamentalist mythology—told with a syntax borrowed from video games, cartoons, and choose-your-own-adventure serials. His superflat style is cousin both to Inka Essenhigh’s dramatic narratives and Takashi Murakami’s reflections on popular culture. And, almost as an afterthought, Uhlir captures the two crucial factors that have made religious observation the worldwide hit that it is today: fear and sexual repression.

“In the beginning was the Word” is the kick-off to one of the more storied traditions from which Uhlir borrows; if there were a similar preface to Uhlir’s universe, it would go “PRESS SELECT / START.” A pair of portraits—Sinistral, an icon featuring an astronaut performing a sort of benediction, and Tiger, the blue satanic specter who prowls Uhlir’s landscapes—show us the interpretive options available to the viewer. But it’s clear enough from Golden Egg that either Uhlir has cut off one avenue to the viewer, or that the viewer has “chosen” the spiritual over the scientific, and we progress from there with an ecclesiastical understanding of the universe.

Raymond Uhlir, Golden Egg, 2005.

In The Cape, a godhead figure wearing a mitre (and bearing some resemblance to Martin Van Buren, had he dressed like Kaiser Wilhelm II) opens wide his cape to spore the denizens of Uhlir's universe, a bunch of befuddled-looking teddy bears. Local flora and fauna—ornamental flowers, perhaps poppy or hibiscus, and the afore-mentioned tiger—lend the landscape a specifically Oriental flavor: full of wondrous delights, curiosities, trinkets and totems. Uhlir's cartoon aesthetic is neatly juxtaposed with the pessimism underpinning this mythology. One gets the sense that this god's chosen people, endowed by their creator with overlarge, bulbous genitalia and a vacant disposition, are perhaps not the noblest of creatures.

Raymond Uhlir, The Cape, 2005. Click for larger view.

Any viewer who has spent time as or around an adolescent boy recently will recognize Mega Man in two of Uhlir's paintings, The Fall and The Death. It’s a risky reference: Uhlir's imagery is otherwise universal, making Mega Man a jarring focal point. (But not the only video game reference; throughout the works the landscapes are chock full of perilous cliffs, jumps, enemies, treasure chests, and power-ups.)

Raymond Uhlir, The Fall, 2005.

Is Mega Man too glib a dismissal of, you know, Paradise Lost? Let’s say that this isn’t a belief system for Harold Bloom. But Uhlir’s universe is more democratic. I know the passage describing the fall from Lucifer’s plunge through the realms of Chaos, but hell, I also know Mega Man’s pose from the video games—the various points in which he falls through screen after screen of darkness. I recognize the glint of existential crisis in Mega Man’s pixellated eyes.

I think the gamble paid off, but that doesn't purchase these two paintings entirely. Stylistically, Uhlir is looking at Essenhigh’s work; both artists use oil enamels and have a mordant sense of humor, but Uhlir's black comedy is zanier. He lifts the traffic cones for the pentagram outline featured in both The Fall and The Death from Essenhigh's Daedalus and Icarus, and to good effect, though the all-over black in The Fall doesn't work as a fluid, liminal realm the way that the pink field does for the figures in Essenhigh's painting. The vacuum in The Fall might be necessitated by the narrative, but the allover black—though rich—doesn’t quite live up to the exceptional compositions in Uhlir's other paintings.

The drawings are a spare presentation of apocryphal and secondary material. Far from being simply supplementary to the paintings, the drawings—not all, but several of them—introduce a different storytelling strategy: metonymy. As opposed to the metaphorical symbolism, in which a metaphor is used to relate distinct things ("that car is a lemon"), metonymy involves the use of the synecdoche, a construction in which a part of a thing is used as a substitute for the whole ("that team has good hands"). In Sexy War Time the bishop and cardinal stand in for the church; the vagina, for the sexual freedom in opposition to which the church stands. The drawing is a double-edged pun on the word “fold”; symbols from Uhlir’s stable of creatures also make appearances in the soup.

Raymond Uhlir, Sexy War Time, 2005. Click for larger view.

It’s not ultimately clear from the show—just closing at Deborah Colton in Houston—whether Uhlir’s exhausted this universe in a narrative sense, but there’s surely room for another testament if it shows the same flex in color and composition.

School of Rock

I sincerely hope that The Willie Mae Rock and Roll Camp for Girls is funded by our tax dollars—I want to believe that we all had a hand in this.

"The Pink Slips." Fantastic. Eyeball Skeleton had better watch their backs.

Courtesy of Drunken Bee.

UPDATE: It is crucial that you listen to The Bookworms' "The World Is Becoming a Wasteland." More stuff here.

Kid A

David Velleman at Left2Right argues dispassionately against gay marriage based on the (U.N.-recognized) right of children to know their biological parents:

Yet reversing [the practice of omitting reference on a birth certificate to the biological donor in favor of the adoptive parent] would bear differently on heterosexual and homosexual marriages. It would affect only a small percentage of heterosexual marriages, and it would be no more prejudicial to their parental rights than openness in adoption, which is now widespread. But a requirement of openness in donor conception would affect all homosexual marriages as a class. Homosexual marriage would be, by its very nature, marriage that can lead only to qualified parenthood—qualified, that is, by the legally recognized parenthood of donors or birth parents. Maybe same-sex couples would be willing to accept a form of marriage that is second-class in this respect—but I doubt it.

Velleman continues: "My worry is that a purely affectional conception of marriage will tend to favor a purely affectional conception of parenthood." The problem being that it's a little late to turn back that tide now. In his argument, Velleman consistently uses "marriage" when he means something like "parenthood." Consider that birth certification has almost zero bearing on families that do not include children—not just gay couples that don't adopt but the many heterosexual married couples that do not or cannot have children. Furthermore, our society is already asked to navigate the sensitive issues of "qualified parenthood" when heterosexual couples, for reasons of infertility (to cite one example) adopt a child. If we must prevent even the possibility that adoptive parents might violate a child's fundamental rights, then we will have to begin by reversing longstanding rights for heterosexual couples.

I sympathize with Velleman's distaste for the argument, put forth by a Massachusetts gay-rights organization, that birth certificates should replace "Mother" and "Father" with "Parent A" and "Parent B," whether for a child of a straight or gay couple. That's stupid. The suggestion fails to account for the actual world to which it refers, where children don't go about holding hands with A+B. Certainly gay marriage introduces some new questions—what label to put on the form for the adoptive woman who is married to the biological mother? I don't know, but I'll hazard that a reasonable (if not apparent) answer is at least feasible; and that we shouldn't put off the many questions regarding gay couples' legal rights and recognition because another murky question may or may not come up. These questions are soluble.

On a related note: Gail Armstrong has a wonderfully dark post about adoption and, in a sense, how murky every family is. It's a succinct complement to Velleman's sharp, starched argument.

The Battle for Duffy's Hits the MSM

Did you guys see that your humble correspondent merited a mention in WaPo Express today? They have a section on blogs, and they quoted a few crucial talking points from my white paper on Duffy's Irish Pub. Thanks, fishwrap!

I might've caught it earlier in the day, but today's Sudoku was set on "HARD," and lord, is it ever—at least an hour of my day has been spent staring at that grid. I've filled eight squares. Eight! Stupid MSM.

Strictly For My Neighbaz

Hey you, U Street/Shaw denizens! Been by the 930 Club recently? And did you see the Irish pub across the street, at Vermont and Florida? It's called Duffy's, and Duffy's needs your help.

If you live nearby, you know there isn't a comfortable spot for a pint for at least three Metro stops in any direction (no, that sorry new joint in Adams Morgan isn't fit for a wanker). And what with tasty Little Ethiopia just around the corner, frankly, our neighborhood would benefit from some bland fare. Clearly, this is a much-needed local resource—yet some members of the community are trying to prevent Duffy's dream from becoming a reality. Specifically, a band of fuddy-duds (no doubt local British instigators) are holding up the liquor license process; in response, Duffy's has offered to abide by all sorts of grossly un–Irish pub–like restrictions, such as not playing rugby in your yard or fighting Scotsmen on the roof. No live music (on the patio (except for on St. Patty's, natch))? These people are trying to be reasonable.

So what can you do, reader? First, let's review the Top 5 Reasons To Support an Irish Pub in Kriston's Our Neighborhood:

1. Beer at Duffy's can reasonably be referred to as Duff Beer.

Whoa! See, that reason's so good, I don't even want to show you the other four.

So (again), what can you do? Sober up and send an e-mail expressing your support and enthusiasm for Duffy's Irish Pub to these members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) and Alcohol Beverage Control Board:

• Phil Spaulding, ANC Secretary: ANC1B02{at}PhilSpalding.us
  
• Dee Hunter, ANC Chairman: DHunterlaw{at}aol.com
  
• Alcohol Beverage Control Board: Cynthia.Simms{at}dc.gov

The e-mail must list your address and state that you live in ANC 1B (and, yes, you motley fools, your address actually needs to be in 1B.) Andy Duffy asks that you copy him in on the correspondence: amduffy{at}prodigy.net. Send me a line, too. If you're suffering from writer's block, Mr. Duffy offers some boilerplate: "I truly believe Duffy’s will be a great addition to the neighborhood, providing neighbors a friendly place to gather, have a bite to eat, a pint of beer and relax."

Remember: DC9 doesn't open until 7. At night. You want to always have to wait that long to start the evening?

Some Artists Will Install Some Projects in Some Different Places

Sarah cuts to the quick. Reading about Fake Estates is awesome. Seeing it, probably not so much.

"Seven" at Warehouse

The Warehouse Theater complex could fairly be described as shabby chic, with paint flaking from every wall, revealing a color that comes closer all the time to matching the faintly yellow light that illuminates several rooms in the building. Everything you could hope for in a great café, in short; but for the purposes of a large art exhibit—like “Seven,” a WPA\C fundraiser curated by Fraser Gallery co-owner Lenny Campello—the space is more like an obstacle course.

In the most notorious of alternative art venues—the café—it's always the case that doorways, corners, windows, tables, counters, and chairs have all spoken for the spots that are best for showing art. (Why some cafés truly believe they do the proletarian work of demystifying art by hanging artworks over tables in dark, smoke-filled room, I'll never understand.) With that said, the perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Plenty of the work in “Seven” should stand up well despite the subpar space. But even forgiving the setting's drawbacks, there is, unfortunately, a much worse problem—the show is drastically overhung.

It's not a problem that can be glossed over. The rooms are stuffed to the gills with art, and the overcrowding truly hurts several works. For example, while one trompe l'oeil index card painting by Molly Springfield called what i still don't understand (first semester) is hung at eye level as you might expect, her other entry for the show, unavoidably affected by these developments (second semester), is hung above the first painting. So the higher painting can’t be seen well at all. Same goes for the text-based photography by Denise Wolf: Her four large photographs not only suffer for being hung two by two (meaning that the two high photos can't be inspected), they've also been stashed in an unlit corner (meaning that none of them can be seen anyhow).

The most alarming mishanging really kills a piece by Virginia Arrisueño. Her work, Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, is an open, coffin-shaped box, about two to three feet long, that encloses a puffy, fiber material (like this kind of jacket). The pillowy material is printed with a transfer image that appears to be a person, but because the work is installed above a door frame (!), there's simply no good way to take in the image. There are only a few sheerly criminal examples like this in the show, but in general all the work is hung too closely for comfortable viewing.

If the hanging is awful, the room dynamics exceed lowered expectations. Campello organizes the larger rooms thematically. There is, for example, an admirable stab at a room roughly compelled by artists who emphasize surface values, including Springfield and Wolf along with J.T. Kirkland, Mark Boyd, and others. But the inclusion of too many artists, particularly so many artists working with text, makes the room gabby.

The nude room is easily the show's feature, the traditional figure study being one of Campello's principal interests. The room strikes me as a good idea on paper (no pun intended): The contemporary art world isn't exactly inundated with figure study shows; such a show has the potential to be very fresh. A thorough look at a traditional genre is often an opportunity to showcase artists who have been working under the radar, especially those older artists who are skipped over by the hustle and flow of the gallery scene. But the figure receives brusque handling by the artists Campello has selected. From cropped, cramped, and graceless erotic photographs by Samantha Wolov to Gary Medovich's Warholesque pop repetitions of an enormous, fat nude body, there's more skin sensation than figure study in the room. A photograph by Tracy Lee, in which a painted figure crouches below an Anish Kapoor–looking sculpture, seems to sublimate nudity and speak about the body less harshly. The viewer will appreciate Lee’s reminder after Manon Cleary’s cheap, adolescent photos of penises personalized by adhesive googly eyes—funny ha-ha photos, yet god-awful works of art.

Another room features a backdrop mural by Kelly Towles similar to the one he made for last year's solo at Adamson; again, here's another punch that gets pulled. Towles’s work ought to have been given some room to breathe, but this room is as packed as the others. Another feature of the room that deserved to be highlighted was the correspondence between Reinvented Landscape, a mixed media landscape featuring bits of broken porcelain, by Margaret Boozer, and Sculpture, a glass work protruding from the wall that looked like a fungal growth of orifices, horns, and cochlea, by Graham Caldwell. These works should have been shown far from Mark Jenkins's tedious tape sculptures, which are neither very interesting (as sculpture) nor very ubiquitous (as a Borf-type public phenomenon). But Boozer and Caldwell are fantastic choices to anchor an interesting dialogue about sculpture, craft, and traditional genres taken in new directions.

A small upstairs room is given to photographs and an installation by Alessandra Torres. Her six large C-prints, titled From the Portable Winter Series: Snowfall, show the artist engaged in a wintry wonderland, seemingly manipulating the snow with what looks like an oversized, antique brush for applying a powdery makeup. The accompanying installation is like an extras feature on a DVD: The snow (i.e., white sand) from the photos is piled in drifts on the floor and windowsills of the room; the pictured white dress hangs in a small adjoining closet; a terrarium of the hilltop scene depicted in the photos stands in the center of the room. The disrepair of the room matches the evocative installation, but the whole set-up risks a Tori Amos–styled emotional overindulgence. The photographs themselves are inviting and inscrutable, but potentially too frosty and pristine for the viewer who's had his fill of pretty, color C-prints over the last few years.

Another artist who stands apart in the show is Kathryn Cornelius, whose videorecorded performance, Resolve, is a funny, charming contribution. The viewer can't help but appreciate the strain in Cornelius's calves as she vacuums the beach backward and forward, strongly recalling the monotonous video performances of Bruce Nauman. The contrast between the little black cocktail dress and the vacuum, both customary images speaking to very different roles, plays on the expectations facing young women. It's a simple and outstanding piece.

The fact that there are strong works in the show—including contributions by local luminaries like Sam Gilliam and Chan Chao, whose works must contend with the furniture, noise, and bustle of the café floor—doesn't rescue “Seven.” The good are lost among the bad (the show features four times as many artists as I’ve mentioned here, including one large room of painters that’s a total mess).

The elephant in the room(s), of course, is Art-O-Matic, the semiregular District disaster in which everyone is invited to participate (and no one is refused). “Seven” is a lot better than that, but nonetheless shares the same number-one priority: inclusiveness. That's an admirable motivation, but not a reason alone for a show.

words drawn on water

Schedule half an hour this week to take in Janet Cardiff's words drawn on water on the National Mall. The latest installment in the Hirshhorn Museum's "Directions" series, Cardiff's piece is an audio walk recorded with binaural sound technology. You can read about the specs here.

I caught a preview of the show yesterday—it's different from The Paradise Institute, her collaboration with George Burres Miller for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and that's the only other work I've seen (heard) by her. I'm now anxious to see Pandemonium at Eastern State Penitentiary near Philly in order to hit the trifecta.

If you go see her work on the Mall soon, here's a tip—jack up the volume at the beginning once you start walking so that you can hear her footsteps, then turn it back down to a normal conversational level once you have an idea of her pacing. You'll want to keep time with her. Also, try not to run into any fourth-graders while you're in the Smithsonian crypt, because they suck. They will laugh at you for reasons you don't understand.

Fun fact: I understand that Cardiff was busy tweaking the sound file up until the day before yesterday.

RELATED: More on Cardiff from back in June.

Steven Vincent

I was not kind to his work—in fact, I have to own up to calling him a hack over a relatively insubstantial matter—so it's with real regret I express my sympathies to Steven Vincent's family and friends in light of his tragic murder in Basra.

Yes, it's too easy to cock off on a blog. Yet I don't think it's appropriate or even possible to consider all the morbid possibilities of this world when we do write about other people and their ideas. I don't feel particularly ashamed for using the word "hack," but I am sorry that I was wrong. Dying as a result of pursuing the truth is a display of integrity that should never be asked of a journalist.

Hilarifying

I frankly don't possess the emotional resources to handle this sort of artifact before noon. In fact, I might not have the emotional template to process this feeling. I . . . I-I think it's called . . . hilarifying:

America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists. In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sites on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. On one dark day, in 2006, many conservative voices went forever silent at the hands of terrorist assassins. Those which survived joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League,” aka F.O.I.L. The F.O.I.L. Organization is forced underground by the “Coulter Laws” of 2007; these hate speech legislations have made right-wing talk shows, and conservative-slanted media, illegal. . . . Rupert Murdoch’s decision to defy the “Coulter Laws” hate speech legislations, has bankrupted News Corporation. George Soros has bought all of News Corps assets and changed its name to Liberty International Broadcasting. LIB’s networks have flourished and circle the globe with a series of satellites beaming liberal & U.N. propaganda worldwide. The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a bio mechanical engineer affectionately nicknamed “Oscar.” F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee.

I shit you not.

See a few pages here. Just a few points while I continue the war against losing my breakfast:

• It's only a small-press publication. It's only a small-press publication.
  
• Of course, if you ask anyone listening to the AM dial right now, he will tell you that the state is heading directly toward this "Orwellian" nightmare. I'll be a very happy (old) man the day that this generational martyr complex has passed.
  
• Can we talk about "Orwellian"? Does that mean "dystopian by any other means than nuclear apocalypse"? That word has long since lost its usefulness.
  
• No Hitlery Clinton? We're dealing with amateurs.
  
• Starring Sean Hannity? We're dealing with douchebags.
  
• It's only a small-press publication.
  
• Maybe this comic shouldn't be so surprising—after all, a strong South Park–conservative current runs through the comic book universe, from the very conservative mass cult hit Cerebus to the Rudy Giulianism of the commercial mainstream (e.g., Spawn) to the gritty GWOT themes of realist comics (e.g., Avengers Unlimited, The Authority). Feminism has no real presence in comic books outside the rare asylum offered by the likes of Grant Morrison [ed. (twice) for clarity]; I can't imagine "liberalism" is much more popular among comic writers. (Which is not to say that what we need is more comics about universal healthcare.)
  
• I believe that's the first political appropriation I've seen of Libeskind's design.
  
• Fair enough—we'll take Batman.

You also want to know this item:

Reagan was born on September 11th, 2001. He is the son of a NYC firefighter whose life was spared by attending his son’s birth. Reagan has grown to manhood in an ultra-liberal educational system: being told, not asked, what to think. With personal determination, which alienates him from his contemporaries, he has chosen the path less traveled . . . the path to the Right."

An allegory! A clever effort to undermine the tenure and peer-review system upon which the nation's university system was built. We've been F.O.I.L.ed again!

UPDATE: Do we all appreciate the clever superimposition of the UN logo over "Ali" in the book's title? Superb.