Negislation (n): A legal act which, by design or accident, achieves the opposite effect to that which it purportedly intends. See also negulation.
Coined at Crooked Timber, which provides by way of example the Travel Promotion Act, which would levy a $25 fee against anyone visitor to the United States in order to subsidize the tourism industry's efforts to attract visitors to the United States.
Laffy-taffy–shakin' president of Prussia Spencer Ackerman has a new blog home with no holds barred. Attackerman—try it!
Via Jezebel: Would Kara Walker agree that her success is "a form of oppression"? She certainly seems to have anticipated that notion with her work.
Walker's medium is the cut-out, the silhouette. That medium, to put it plainly, is cheesy. With only a few exception in portraiture, it barely has any history or precedent in fine art. It has some commercial applications—I'm thinking of cartoons, or the zoetrope—but more than anything it falls within a folk category of images. Certainly, it doesn't hang in a traditional hierarchy of media: It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's not drawing. It's not pedigreed.
So Walker is setting her work up for exploitation. It's folk-ish and it's concerned with black historical narratives, but it's sold and seen by a world that is predominantly white and moneyed. Walker isn't naive to these facts. She's staging her works to be considered in that context. What you see in her work is one narrative, but when you see them—the see-ing of her works—that's narrative, too. And it's a somewhat different narrative from that in her works: A level of institutional critique to add to work that might otherwise come across as resonant but potentially one-dimensional.
Betye Saar never gave her enough credit when she said that Walker sold out black women. At root Walker's images are about the sale of black people—about chattel slavery. What makes them great contemporary art is that their situation makes a similar statement. When you see Kara Walker's work in a museum, alongside the typically white painting and sculpture with which they're inevitably paired, you cannot help but notice those circumstances.
Not every black working artist is going to appreciate or care for this fact about Walker's work, or necessarily agree that her consciousness approach to her situation matters absolves her from potentially playing token in a commercial art world that will only take diversity so far. It's that tension that Henry Thaggert and Jeffry Cudlin had in mind for "She's So Articulate", I think, and it's that tension that both Jessica Grose at Jezebel and Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post are responding to.
To my mind, Kara Walker holds the same controversial ground that Louis Armstrong did in the 1940s and 50s.
Other musicians, most notably his peer Dizzy Gillespie, were uncomfortable with Armstrong's peripatetic relationship with white audiences. Armstrong's performer persona was a minstrelsy shtick that set white fans at ease but simultaneously interrupted the language that white oppressors would use to mock a man like Louis Armstrong. Even Armstrong's critics within the black community would have to acknowledge that even if his humor failed to present a progressive model, he was the leading figurehead of the most subversive, liberationist art form of the generation, possibly even the century: jazz. Walker, like Armstrong, knows exactly what she's doing.
Dia hires Philippe Vergne, chief curator at the Walker Art Center, as its director, less than one year after the organization hired Jeffrey Weiss, who resigned. [Read an interview with Weiss here.] Weiss left after nine months, saying that he felt he didn't have the time to focus on curatorial and scholarly work. If there's a lesson there, it didn't take at Dia, who tapped another prominent curator for its directorship.
Vergne specifically comes as a surprise appointment for Dia, though his departure from the Walker is no surprise. By all accounts Vergne was going to follow Kathy Halbreich to MoMA—so he may well be foregoing a very prominent research position for a more administrative role.
In any case, Vergne's our man at Dia. My question for Vergne remains the same as my question for Weiss: Is moving back to the Chelsea space out of the question? Why not, with the High Line space gone? And is finding a new New York space still the board's priority?
UPDATE: Note that Paul Schmelzer broke the news. Schmelzer writes, "Vergne, who co-curated the '06 Whitney Biennial, has been a driving force behind some of the more interesting Walker shows during his 10 years in Minneapolis, from the recent Huang Yong Ping retrospective to his three-artist Heart of Darkness show (which featured Thomas Hirschhorn's haunting Cavemanman) to 'How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age,' a curatorial group effort that benefited mightily from his vision."
On newsstands soon(ish), featuring reviews and articles I've contributed.
Were I a teacher, I'd make it a point to take my class to see "Diebenkorn in New Mexico" at the Phillips Collection. It's a show of works dating from the painter's 1950–2 stint in Albuquerque, a surprisingly productive but little-known period in the artist's life during which he completed his Master's degree. Several works from his academic thesis are on display; the works as a whole serve as a sort of thesis, a discrete examination over a defined period during which Diebenkorn confronted one macro problem (the New Mexico landscape) and several issues therein concerning palette and line.
Best of all, everyone knows what Diebenkorn did next, so there's no guessing about what lessons he would take or leave behind. You can reverse engineer from what you know about the artist—to some extent—to arrive at a few transitional moments in his career.
Diebenkorn was already an emerging artist by the time he left the Bay Area for a stint in New Mexico, so it would be wrong to say that the period was marked by discovery. He defined his problems from the start and he set about solving them.
Unfortunately this exhibit will no longer by up by the time I do have a class. Yes! I'll be teaching a graduate colloquium at the University of Maryland for the 2008–9 academic school year. The class will be divided between critiques and a curriculum that's still mostly TBD. I'm grateful to the UM art department for the opportunity. In short order my explanations for long blogging absences will change from "I was at the beach" to "I was grading papers."
This year Fort Reno needs a kick-start in the way of a few donations. If you've enjoyed free shows there in years past, give them all your monies. Gestures will be playing Fort Reno—assuming that arsenic remains low, the generosity remains high, and the rain remains on some other plains.
Speaking of: I'm playing sax every night this weekend. For The City Veins's CD release party tonight at Iota, I'm sitting in on a couple of songs (with a new friend Tim, who's playing trumpet). The horn section is your new bicycle.
Then on Saturday, Gestures is playing with The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm (that's one band) and Belltone Suicide (that's the other). We're playing at the Kansas House, a show house that's been mentioned by Buddyhead, Brightest Young Things, and Philadelphia Weekly, which makes it true. (It's also where some of Gestures lives.) Kansas House is in Arlington, but it's still kind of fantastic: 900 North Kansas Street, Arlington VA. Please don't harass my bandmates outside party hours.
This is the second time recently that we've paired up with fully electonic-y groups, ambient wizards, DJs, mixmasters, and IDM scientists. I feel so crude, humming air through curved metal!
Sunday, same same bands, this time earlier in the evening and at Big Bear Cafe. We set up the show after the Richmond stop in the other bands' tour fell through.
Come check out EEA and Gestures and enjoy live music at for-donation cost!
Maybe I should start taking the train. From Wired.
I didn't even know it was possible. I tip my hat to Lorrie Moore:
For Obama: "The Portrait of a Lady," by Henry James. A virtuous orphan is plotted against by a charming, ruthless couple the orphan once trusted and admired.Yeeouch!For Clinton: "Macbeth," by William Shakespeare. The timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.
For McCain: "Tales From the Brothers Grimm." In case more are needed.
