A little bird sent along the names of the semi-finalists for the $25,000 Sondheim Prize:
Seth Adelsberger, Baltimore, MDFinalists will be announced April 14. Very briefly I'll note that there are many more Washington names on this list than we saw last year but fewer of the names that I would expect to appear (and usually do).Alzaruba, Baltimore, MD
BDC (Baltimore Development Cooperative), Baltimore, MD
Lisa Blas, Washington, DC
Rachel Bone, Baltimore, MD
Jessica Braiterman, Beltsville, MD
Travis Childers, Fairfax, VA
Mary Coble, Washington, DC
R.L. Croft, Manassas, VA
Alyssa Dennis, Baltimore, MD
Liz Ensz, Baltimore, MD
Leslie Furlong, Baltimore, MD
Ryan Hackett, Kensington, MD
Christian Herr, Lancaster, PA
Jason Horowitz, Arlington, VA
Jessie Lehson, Baltimore, MD
Kim Manfredi, Baltimore, MD
Katherine Mann, Baltimore, MD
Baby Martinez, Washington, DC
Sebastian Martorana, Baltimore, MD
Lisa Moren, Baltimore, MD
Ellen Nielsen, Baltimore, MD
Louie Palu, Washington, DC
Molly Springfield, Washington, DC
TwoCan Collective, Baltimore, MD
Karen Yasinsky, Baltimore, MD
I reported for DCist on the city's move to close "Here & Now," an art exhibit staged at the 14th and T Streets NW building that used to house the Church of the Rapture. And on the goldfish that are still trapped inside.
In its continued war against the Florida Flophouse, the District of Columbia sent operatives from a different agency to threaten us with fines. Yesterday we were visited by the Housing Regulation Administration, who told us to bag up the cardboard that the city won't collect or pay the price. Today, the Department of Public Works came by to tell us that bagging the garbage wasn't good enough: the city won't collect trash that's not in cans.
When I told him that the city wouldn't deliver recycling cans even though I've asked for them twice (confirmation number: 1692544), he said that the city in fact would not be giving us more cans for trash or recycling because—hang on—we residents of the Flophouse number five and that marks our house as a commercial property.
Then, to truly break our house's spirit, the guy made me move all the trash bags that the city pledges not to collect five feet to the right so they were centered in front of our house. Filth, we can live in—but indignity??
So I'll see you all at Borders downtown tonight to see Yglesias give a talk on Heads in the Sand? Thought so.
No, I'm not a newly minted commercial curator. I have no financial stake in Christine Gray's paintings. For reasons that will be clear once my exhibition essay is available online (or alternatively, when you see the show), I think that her work is smart and significant and I hoped to introduce her to East Coast audiences. In the interest of avoiding impropriety or its appearance, it will be some time before I review Project 4 shows. In the meantime, if panels or happy hours are convened to discuss the matter I'd love to attend.
As it happens, Gray is now teaching painting at VCU and so I imagine that the District will be seeing more of her work in the future.
Christine Gray, If It's Yellow, 2007.
Last month in the Washington Business Journal, Erin Killian and Melissa Castro reported that District Councilman Jack Evans decided to drop legislation exempting churches from historic designations—a dead giveaway to the Third Church of Christ, Science, whose building at 900 16th St. NW is the subject of some controversy. (Background here and here.) A detail from the WBJ report caught my eye:
The preservation board then designated the church as a historic landmark despite the congregation's opposition. In order to redevelop the land and build a new chapel, the church and ICG Properties are seeking a demolition permit, which is scheduled for a March 27 hearing before the preservation board.Why should Dupont Circle residents care? The building is two blocks from the White House, nearly a mile from Dupont. I seem to recall the same residents raising a stink when it was announced that a high-rise would be built at 14th and U Streets NW—which is also not Dupont Circle.A number of Dupont Circle residents are also in favor of tearing down the church, Evans said.
Courtland Milloy, if you're so damned opposed to a man smashing his penis with rocks, why won't you support HPV vaccination? We all wish the world were a disease-free place, but wishin's just wishin'—it's time you considered the bottom line about the world we live in. Even the most enlightened sex education isn't good enough when there are women's lives and men's penises on the line and curbing mortality is a real possibility. And clearly enlightened sex education isn't in the cards now—the best anyone can hope for is that the Bush administration's strenuous public support for abstinence education hasn't permanently burned Dick Cheney's scowling visage onto so many young retinas that we wind up with a Children of Men–style population meltdown. Maybe after the 2008 election? America is in some ways growing more liberal, but Silda Spitzer will take Elliott back in her bedroom before we, as a nation, are in the mood for reliable sex education in all our public schools.
But support for HPV vaccination, at least, is widespread, and the opposition (yourself included, Milloy) isn't yet so intractable that they've managed to find the narrative handhold on the issue that somehow skirts over the fact that one shot will prevent many, if not most, cases of cervical cancer among the next generation. (As for your angle, Milloy, it should be clear by now that calls to racial conscience don't exactly resonate in conservative eardrums.) So then: You may choose a Stone Age world where men smash their penises with rocks and women die of utterly preventable cervical cancers, or you may choose a world enlightened by sound science, where cock goes unmolested except in the best sense of the word and cancer-causing HPV is prevented by simple vaccination. Embrace perfect penises, Milloy—for the future.
Someone convince me that this AIGA panel on DIY in D.C.—hosted at a posh bar, promising exclusivity and restricted access to the panelists, and charging between $50 and $65 at the door—is intended for an audience broader than District arrivistes. From the press release:
Which of the following might describe a typical day in the life of a D.C. designer?Joining the jetset sounds quite glamorous and Marvin's a fine establishment, but there remain institutions in town—Provisions Library, Busboys & Poets, area museums and galleries, and various coffee shops among them, as well as any number of nonprofits—that promote debate about effective advocacy for art and social change, gratis.A. Moderating a panel at a graffiti art show, meeting a band on your record label for lunch, and making some logo sketches for that new wine bar opening down the street from your office.
B. Traveling the world taking photos of your world-famous dj friends on tour, filming a documentary about disarming land mines, and building a web site for an airline.
C. Curating a roaming art gallery, hosting a live-art "happening," and just plain having fun.
D. All of the above.
Semi-finalists for the $25,000 Sondheim Prize (artists from the District listed in bold):
Becky Alprin, Laura Amussen, Rachel Bone, Ryan Browning, Mandy Burrow, Linda Day Clark, Brent Crothers, Melissa Dickenson, Eric Finzi, Laurie Flannery, Shaun Flynn, Dawn Gavin, Geoff Grace, Maren Hassinger, Kay Hwang, Courtney Jordan, Bridget Sue Lambert, Youngmi Song Organ, Beverly Ress, James Rieck, Christopher Saah, Lynn Silverman, Molly Springfield, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Calla Thompson, Edward Winter, Erin WomackMany fewers artists from the capital this year than in last year's crop.
Matthew Langley, Stylus, 2007.
A short item in the City Paper on Matthew Langley: "His paintings draw easy comparisons to a host of latter-day abstract-expressionist titans, from Agnes Martin and Sean Scully. Make no mistake, Langley courts those comparisons—his emphasis on the grid places him squarely within that Lacanian camp that finds the sublime through repetition, variation, and trauma."
And so on. The artist keeps a blog—here he mentions former WPA director, Jock Reynolds. I have heard that Reynolds's name was bandied about for director of the Corcoran after Levy's departure, back when.
Eric Powell, Untitled, 2005.
Mary Early, Untitled, 2007.
Check today's City Paper for a feature review of two ongoing gallery shows: "15 for Philip" at Curator's Office and "New Sculpture" by Mary Early.
The crooked angle in that Powell photo drives me absolutely bonkers.
DCist reports that Mayor Adrian Fenty is sooooo dreamy, having dropped the taxi fare flag drop to $3, eliminated the ridiculous surcharges, and capped fares in the District at a maximum of $18.90.
Just the other day, I took a taxi from Dupont Circle four blocks or so west before I realized I had forgotten something, at which point I asked him to take me back to where we started. With a straight face he asked me for $16: two trips, one stop, some surcharge each way. I'm ashamed that in the argument that followed, I called him a criminal; but that fare was certainly highway robbery.
I understand you are planning on seeing your favorite dark-calypso combustion ensemble, Gestures, play tonight at the Velvet Lounge. This is a good plan that you have devised. It is, frankly, one of the more sensible decisions that you can make, given a primary season full of confusing candidates, inevitable disappointments, and electronic amplification. None of that is on the agenda tonight at the Velvet Lounge—and that's a promise I intend to keep.
Claudia Rousseau, writing about Amy Lin for the Gazette:
The work of emerging regional artist Amy Lin, now on view at the Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, presents something of a conundrum. The interest it has generated, and the sales, threaten to make it suspiciously too popular to be taken seriously. Couple that with a widespread fascination with the artist's technique — hundreds of small circles of varying sizes hand-drawn in curving strings with little tail-like ends — discussions of Lin's work tend to be on the level of a "temple of toothpicks" rather than the kind of analytical response usually accorded abstract compositions. What passes for commentary on her work has tended to focus on the amazing number of dots, the sort of thing that could be done with a computer in short order, but which Lin tediously, obsessively, draws with colored pencils. But does this emphasis on the "wow" effect do it justice? If there were no more interest here than the dazzlingly meticulous way they are made, would they really be worth looking at?That lede alone is easily one of the most useful things written about Lin's work so far—though there has been no shortage of articles about her. Outlets that have crowned the young artist include the Washingtonian, which listed her as one of 2007's forty Washingtonians under age 40 to watch. The Washington Post has heaped praise on the artist to the point of redundancy.
Rousseau continues:
The fact is, once past that level, there is much to be seen and thought about here, and the artist's much overlooked serious intent, particularly in terms of self-expression, deserves some attention.That is where our opinions on Lin's work diverge. (For reasons not least of which being that artist's intent is cited as the work's saving grace.) I have never seen an inkling of the Eastern influence, artistic or philosophical, that Lin's admirers seem to find in her work. I don't think her work shows incredibly obsessive markmaking—in fact I wouldn't even think to describe it in those terms, even if she does draw many circles on medium- to large-scaled canvases. I don't understand either why this technique is fascinating. Frankly, I don't buy that people truly believe it is. Lin's work is colorful, it's precious, it's easy and accessible, market friendly, decorative. The work I have seen by the artist (which does not include pieces recently shown by Heineman Myers) is out of step with any conversation about abstraction, medium, composition, etc., taking place in the art world today. It escapes me why her work has garnered any attention at all; at best, she's the poor man's Linn Meyers.
Now I find myself in a band called Gestures. I'm playing tenor saxophone. The picture above does not feature me; nor do the songs on the Web site. You can only find me by showing up at the Velvet Lounge on Wednesday, January 9, where we're playing with Adventure (from Baltimore) and Terrior Bute and Big Fun (both from Milwaukee).
Gestures seems in this case to be the butt of a which-one-doesn't-belong joke by the booking agent, since the other acts on the bill are crisp and electronic whereas we proffer acoustic noise. But the hope is that we'll find instead that we all belong (and you, too).
My year-end galleries column for the City Paper, concerning art parties I don't really enjoy and the final nail in Dupont Circle's coffin. Click click. Jeffry Cudlin has written the report on museums—read that one, too.
Photo by rodeomilano.
In The American Spectator, Charles Paul Freund takes up the cause of the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, writing that preservationists are pressing too far for the Brutalist church:
Whether an appeal to expertise in Brutalism trumps philistinism, along with property rights, spirituality, and the church's own sense of its religious mission (and thus the First Amendment) remains open both to debate and to legal action.By the sound of it, the Historic Preservation Review Board violated every enumeration of the Bill of Rights except the Third Amendment—which only means that they haven't made the Christian Scientists quarter troops yet.
The Spectator deems blood and treasure central to the defense of the church. Freund writes:
Federal law protects churches from local preservationist enthusiasms. Many congregations are cash poor, and are often housed in old buildings that may be appealing and arguably historic, but which they cannot afford to maintain. Forcing such congregations into a preservationist box may, as one lawyer told the Post, inhibit the congregation's religious expression.Is this the case at the Third Church of Christ, Scientist? Is Christian Science strapped for cash? The article doesn't say. Or rather, the report won't commit to the implied suggestion that the church's small draw (its congregation numbers 40–60 members) owes to a repugnant temple. (Is fifty so surprisingly small a number for a Christian Science congregation? One reader suggested that the Brutalist design is most fitting, given the extraordinary violence that Christian Scientists commit against their members (primarily, in the form of child abuse and neglect).)
But that's all beside the point, insofar as preservation is concerned. From the Washington Post's report:
Tersh Boasberg, preservation board's chair, said during the hearing that the board would not address First Amendment issues in its assessment of the church's architecture.Rightly so. Were the Historic Preservation Review Board to consider the "property rights, spirituality, and the church's own sense of its religious mission"—in this case or in any other case—the sensible conclusion would be that an organization's situation would almost certainly change at some point, and therefore, preservation would never be warranted. It is hardly palatable, especially from a libertarian perspective, for a public group to go about telling organizations that they can't cast off their architectural albatrosses, all in the name of "local preservationist enthusiasms". Nevertheless, the price of architectural continuity is some degree of rigidity that must inevitably be borne by the people who inhabit the buildings.Instead, he said, the board would base its ruling on whether the church's architecture is historically significant.
Given that groups like the Becket Fund exist to protect the flexibility of religious organizations, it is fitting—it is balancing—that the Historic Preservation Review Board considers architecture and architecture alone in making its decisions. Its judgment is not always right—but the suggestion that its conclusions are ill motivated does not hold up in this case.
UPDATE: According to a reader with ties to the church, the national Christian Science organization is in fact in dire financial straits.
Just about all my photos from Miami are up, and they're available here. Some didn't turn out, and I didn't take my camera out every day, so there's plenty I can't show you: Red Dot, Aqua Wynwood, and of course the things that for whatever reason just did not catch my eye.
In other online image news, the Wpa has at long last put its art registry online. They'll still publish the physical catalog, though.
Coty Jones, a photography student at the Corcoran, took down a rather large black bear. Bears live around here?
Maybe it's my mood today but that story does not provoke me. There's something primal about the notion of hunting that formidable a creature. Though the idea of waiting silently in a tree stand for one to meander by doesn't exactly correspond to that romance. But the patient waiting taps into another romantic vein, doesn't it? The severity and concentration juxtaposed with awesome wild power.
I thought immediately about Jason Zimmerman's video, Spotting, and that I felt no remorse about the kill or reflected glory in the hunt. It was the largest bear—now it is not.
Grab a copy of today's City Paper and check out my cover story on the Corcoran Gallery of Art, will you? It's about Modernism, staffing, the board of trustees, the state of the building, and future programming—roughly, a survey of the institution's fortunes following the resignation of David Levy and appointment of Paul Greenhalgh. If these names don't mean anything to you, read on.
In the same issue you'll find a feature review of two exhibits—the Wpa's 2007 "Options" and "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution"—both of which are ongoing. Feel free to compare notes in the comments.
I'll be back with more later, but right now Wrecky and I are going to go indulge in a spa and pedicure day. That's how I'm framing it, anyway; point of fact, I'm taking him to the Laundro-Mutt to give him the hose, and on the way he will resist by barking, snapping, pulling, running if he can make a go for it, and eventually falling totally limp in protest. At which point he's eighty pounds dead weight.
I had to be a little late to the story on the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran, now the Wpa, but click for some reporting about the organization's long-term plans. I've been working on some other projects (that's why, as of late, this blog is little better than a graveyard for puns).
I missed my chance to use the best lede for this story. That one got swept up by Mike DeBonis: "Copy editors across the District rejoice: The end of that infernal fucking backslash."
Leah Dickerman is leaving the National Gallery for MoMA. This year has witnessed the departures of Jonathan Binstock, Jay Gates, Olga Viso, and Jeffrey Weiss. With exceptional curatorial and directorial talent draining from the District, and with an excess of demand for museum curators and directors at a national level, the city is looking forward to a serious problem. "Crisis" is not overstating the matter.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller, The Killing Machine, 2007.
Jury duty today.
UPDATE: Wi-fi! I'm sitting at a table with George Hemphill. Both of us just got called for voir dire.
UPDATE II: Wi-fi in the courtroom, too! Since they made a fuss about my digital voice recorder, I'm not sure why I'm able to use my laptop in here—pretty sure I could record a courtroom conversation better with my Macbook than with my Olympus—but no one is telling me no, even after I rather pluckily plugged my charger into the wall socket.
There was a sweet moment in the jurors' lounge. Sitting across from the table where I was working was a blind woman, probably in her late 50s, cute as a button. When the administrator called her number, she answered "Present" and said, under her breath, "Yes! I'm going to be on a jury!" Imagine the mental fist pump.
On Sunday everyone should go visit the Crafty Bastards fair. Jurying that show is one of the funner things I get to do every year. For next year, however, I have a vision for a booth of my own. I think I'd like to set up shop as Sarkt the Illithid Sorcerer and sell a range of hand-crafted potions, spellbooks, summoning scrolls, wands, alchemical supplies, restorative draughts, and so on. A picture of what I have in mind. The entries we receive for Crafty Bastards are all pretty great, but every year (okay, both years) I register the same complaint: not enough unguents!
If you say that out loud, it scans like, "Spare a little change for the homeless." See?
The Washingtonian profiles Lili Montoya, my favorite bartender in the city. So pro style.
Emerging from the salt mines to note that I've been selected to participate in this year's Maryland Art Place Critics' Residency program. I don't have a ton of information for you—I only just got the call last night, and I couldn't totally hear what she was trying to tell me because I was in the midst of a nonpolitical journalists' happy hour. But I'm pretty sure she said I was in, and that means I'll be spending some time in Baltimore. More details to come, I'm sure. Back to work!
Culture Warrior reads the NYT T Mag piece on the District and asks, "[W]hat the fuck are they talking about?" My response falls along the same lines. And wtf with that Legally Blonde Real Doll they use for the slideshow!
A piece on Noelle Tan in this week's City Paper. Writing this piece made me realize that I desperately badly need to take a road trip. I'm more of the summer/desert driving sort than the Vermont/autumn turning kind, as evidenced by my affection for America's "Horse With No Name." The research is vigorous, the methodology beyond reproach: It has been proven absolutely that only those people who really get off on the idea of driving around in an El Camino in the glare and the heat will tolerate that song. The point being, I'm planning a road trip for next summer, and you're going to read this article now.
Fellow District citizen and art blogger Tyler Green says that it's high time that the city's museums had a come-to-Jesus meeting.
They don't program contemporary art and, in a rare convergence of frictional unemployment, a number of them don't have the staff to show contemporary art. The Hirshhorn is without a director; the Corcoran Gallery of Art has no contemporary art curator; the National Gallery of Art has no contemporary art curator. (Two of these three things will change.)
In the next six months, we'll have some better sense of where the District stands on contemporary art. One thing that won't change, unfortunately, is the lack of a dedicated contemporary art space. The District needs a Kunsthalle, either a New Museum–esque space for temporary exhibitions or a dedicated contemporary extension to the National Gallery or the Smithsonian.
I know for a fact that there's institutional interest in re-purposing the Mies-designed and much-maligned Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library as a contemporary-art center. It would take a larger meeting of the minds than has assembled to date, but it's something that people think about. I was more supportive of the notion back when it looked as if the building itself might be in jeopardy because it houses a deficient library, but as the terror alert level on that threat has fallen, so has my desire to see the library turned into something other than the library. I still use it as a library, and I think it could be a great library.
And in any case, there is all of Northeast to consider! Warehouse space abounds; while gentrification has transformed some of the available area, it will be a long time coming before Trinidad gets the full Logan Circle treatment. To be sure, a space in the warehouse district in NE is far from the tourist circuit. You know—so what. The people who want to see, say, John Bock's Zero Hero will surely find the Red Line and hop on the train. The people who are merely curious will, too. (People actually like contemporary art, quite a lot. They'll find it.)
It would take the kind of corporate philanthropy that Olga Viso says this city doesn't see, and it would demand the sort of curatorial vision that the city can't seem to keep. The city might have the collector class to do it—certainly something like this doesn't happen without the support of people like the Ernsts, the Lerhmans, Lorie Peters Lauthier, and Mitch Rales. One snag: Mitch Rales—who happens to own his own contemporary art gallery—also serves on the board of the National Gallery, which has proven reluctant to invest in develop its contemporary art holdings. Then again, National Gallery trustees don't have to advocate for the National Gallery's interests, so perhaps he could work on another project. Given his investments and his stature, the most likely (and I think, the best) prescription is for a collection-free Kunsthalle.
Point of fact: There isn't a space in the District to show Bock's Zero Hero. (That's my example because it's the last rilly big installation piece I saw.)
UPDATE: Made some minor language edits.
The spirits were high at gallery openings across the city over the weekend—in fact, the spirits were flowing, what with the vodka sponsorship on 14th Street. But after talking with artists and dealers, my understanding is that the market for art in the District has cooled. Waiting lists and sell-out shows seem not to be a feature of this market, this season.
Pumpkin ale: acquired! Texas football: watched! Art: seen! All in all, a banner weekend.
A conversation from last night's Options opening has stayed with me all day today: What's wrong with the National Museum of Women in the Arts? I can hardly even tell you what's wrong with them, because they don't talk to anyone and no one talks about them. They have no presence. They have no programming. They have no press people. They don't support local artists. They don't cater to women who aren't white and ludicrously rich. It's as dead a museum as they come. You'd scarcely guess that they're hosting a major West Coast exhibition ("Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution") based on the utterly deafening silence about the show within this city. I'm told they had the option to book "Global Feminisms" to run next year, but declined. Why? Why not host these shows back-to-back and make it the conversation in the District? These shows represent the two most important surveys of women artists done in the last 30 years—at least. The NMWA won't pony up for both?
What they also don't have: a director. Maybe that means they do have an opportunity. But before they so much as peak at resumes, Mary Mochary et al. need to get religion. It's time the board sat down for a serious come-to-Jesus meeting.
Carol Vogel scoops all the local outlets with the news that Olga Viso is leaving the Hirshhorn. She'll be the new director at the Walker. This satisfies the loudest rumors about changes over at Bunshaft's Bunker, but I hear that's not the end to personnel changes there.
Photo by Matthew Worden
Two pieces in this week's City Paper:
Conner Contemporary, the most prominent contemporary art gallery in the District, is moving from Dupont Circle to H Street NE. I write up the details in today's Express.
I really only did need to pop back into the house for a split second to grab a slip of paper, so I thought nothing of leaning my bicycle against the iron railing in front of my house. The man who was holding the handlebars when I came outside must have expected me to be away longer. Next was the charged, silent debate: That's my bike, I'm not doing anything, You're trying to steal my bike, fuck you, fuck you, I could still take it, I could prevent you. Of course it took only a fraction of a second, before he acceded to my logic and casually slipped away as I stood there looking stern but foolish, dressed up in the proprietor's costume: bicycle helmet, backpack, rolled-up pants leg. Not for one second can you let your guard down around people.
Overhead yesterday near Gallery Place:
Corner guy (to passing woman): Damn, you look gorgeous.Later, I saw the Nation of Islam dude again, and the woman clearly was his girl—I conclude he was feigning otherwise in hopes that the corner guy might learn the larger lesson.
Nation of Islam: I don't think you need to be saying something like that to her.
Corner guy: Sorry, I didn't know that was your girl. It was just a compliment.
Nation of Islam guy: She's not my girl. In my faith, the best compliments are kept in the heart.
Corner guy: I'm not Muslim.
Nation of Islam guy: I know this. But compliments shouldn't creep people out.
I still thrill to walk into a Half-Price Books when I'm home in Texas, but around here, I shop almost exclusively at Kramerbooks. There, despite the anxiety that settles in knots along my neck and shoulders whenever I walk into the store, which seems designed not so much to gently guide the curious book-lover to his destination as to forcibly herd the frantic book-shopper to the market. Browsing the new books on the front table? It's a thrilling pile but it's nerve-racking to go up against other customers like fashionistas at a sample sale. Then there's the appallingly bad cafe, where both food and service never fail to disappoint.
Two things draw me to Kramerbooks. One is the air-conditioning. I swear, Kramerbooks is the absolute coolest place in the District on a hot day. The other is the tiny bar, where they serve Shiner on tap. Hey, I know I'm easily swayed by a pint of Shiner—I can only be up front about it. But frankly, when I have the time and cash, nothing sounds more relaxing than picking up a new book from the list of authors I mean to investigate and siding up to the bar in the back, removed from the crowds but well within the purview of the industrial-strength air conditioner.
Not exactly what Mark has in mind. I don't even know: Does anyone have strong opinions about the used bookstores around here?
New baby anteater at the National Zoo!
Verdict: adorable! Read this WaPo article about it and tell me, don't you think the prose is sassy?
In darker news from the animal kingdom, I am sorry to tell you that an estimated half of all koalas have Chlamydia. It's true, they are very slutty bears. For koalas, the clap can lead to blindness, infertility, and a condition called "dirty tail". Fortunately, the outlook is good for the development of a new vaccine. No word still on when we're getting koalas at the National Zoo.
Jessica Gould at the CP confirms that the owners intend to move the Warehouse to 3400 11th St. NW, two blocks from the Wonderland Ballroom. Great news.
I've heard this same rumor that The Warehouse will re-open in Columbia Heights at 11th and Park, and I think it's the god's honest truth.
Other longstanding local art institutions will be changing addresses well before summer 2008; more on that soon enough.
Here's one asinine video by ANC commissioner and busybody Frank Winstead, who asks whether it's safe that people play ping-pong on a table out front of Comet. Maybe not, but God deliver us the city in which this is a problem worth attention.
I'm gonna risk it all tonight. First, though, I hope to see some rhetorical table tennis as Bob Novak takes all comers at Politics & Prose.
I'm jurying Crafty Bastards today and tomorrow. Probably gonna be slow here until Monday.
My tribute to Herb White is now on newsstands and, while you can read about his rather remarkable life online, I recommend that you grab a physical copy of the paper if you're able. City Paper art director Pete Morelewicz did a wonderful job putting together a map of the city with pinpoints linking to blurbs showing, location by location, the span of White's influence on the District. I'm grateful that he didn't say "No wtf" when I asked him for "map maybe with bubbles lol".
It was affecting to write an observation about a man I've never met, especially given how many people tracked me down to say some words of respect about the man for the record.
Consider dropping by DCAC on July 3, which the city is recognizing as Herb White Day. Councilmember Jim Graham speaks about White here.
Anyone going to the reception in McLean for Strictly Painting tonight? Want to give me a ride? E-mail me: specialcapps $ gmail # com.
Another Corc kernel to pass along: Sarah Newman, who replaced Stacey Schmidt as junior curator, is curating "Postmodernism", the followup to the Corcoran's "Modernism" show. That show started at the V&A and traveled to the Corc with Paul Greenhalgh; the Postmodernism starts here and will wind up there. More about Newman here.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the V&A is also staging an intermezzo exhibit that won't travel stateside: "Cold-War Modernism". Never heard of it.
Jonathan Binstock, contemporary curator of art at the Corcoran, has left that position for . . . Citibank?
Kevin Drum is right: the "Stars & Bucks" signage in Brian Ulrich's photo from Ramallah is something.
Which brings to mind Megan Stack's LAT piece: a female correspondent's perspective on life under "the world's most stringent public moral code" in Saudi Arabia. She writes that Western franchises like Starbucks abide by the prevailing code governing the appearance and behavior of women. There's a sensible, colonial prescription for change in there: If Saudis want their frappuccinos, they should be asked to wait in a single co-ed line, just like everyone else in the world does. The draw of the Colonel's 13 original herbs and spices might be the only force in the neighborhood powerful enough to shake society free from the deeply ingrained, but generally disfavored, grip of old tradition. Say what you will about crass consumerism, but it can be an excellent vehicle for transmitting and incentivizing some very base standards for sexual equality. (And transfats. Delicious, delicious transfats.)
In the absence of any domestic pressure, of course, these corporations are under no obligation to take on any business risk abroad. So stop buying Starbucks, already, and ask them to pair their generally broad and generous benefits for employees at home with principled community standards abroad.
This call-to-arms probably deserves a disclaimer. I'll explain. So, I've always taken real satisfaction from idle, manual labor, from helping people move (seriously!) to pushing a broom around (of course, this doesn't apply to my own home). No, really, I'm not kidding. I need something to get me away from the computer and criticism. When a couple of friends—one who works as a Senate staffer on the Hill, another who just finished law school—took up some shifts at the 9:30 working the kitchen, I felt a little bit jealous. As it happened, the timing worked out just right for me to moonlight with the working ranks: I met a nice couple from San Francisco who were opening a great coffee bar about a mile east of my house; I bought a bike (a spunky hybrid named Topanga!); and summer arrived, and with it, a lull in the galleries.
So, to break up the day, I'm working a couple shifts a week, really just a few hours, at the Big Bear Cafe, which is fantastic and won't ask you to stand in line according to your sex and doesn't even have any Riyadh branches for you to worry about. I'm already miserable about a couple of early mornings I have scheduled, but otherwise I get to load up my iPod and wipe down counters and indulge for free my considerable caffeine addiction. Structured work in a nice, clean neighborhood spot. So stop by already! BBC @ R and 1st NW.
(This is your thread for jokes about how, 10 years after enrolling in college, I'm still serving you coffee.)
In the Express today I have an exclusive on seven new acquisitions by the Hirshhorn:
Washington Watchman Mike Licht passes on an item in the Examiner on the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The article reports that the Commission botched a deal to put art—craft, sculpture, site-specific yadda yadda—in the new baseball stadium. Here's the long and short of it: The Commission couldn't fit $850,000 under the stadium construction cap, so the item for the 2008 city budget was billed to general obligation bonds—the idea being that the Commission would then own the art and lend it to the Nationals at no cost. Councilor Kwame Brown, who has "oversight of the arts commission as chairman of the economic development committee", oversaw right through this clever ruse. Now, the stadium has no art and the Commission is out $850,000. Whoops!
Licht is quoted in the article as saying that the Commission's play was an "absurd attempt to get around the spending cap." Or, in site-specific terms, an error. In brighter news, the 2007 Nationals may not turn out to be "historically bad" in the final analysis. I'm sure Charles is thrilled.
Jessica Dawson is right: Joshua Shannon does get the best line in "Ian and Jan". I did like Tyler Green's dry suggestion that video performances by Ian and Jan had to be depixelated lest they overwhelm the tubes themselves.
The show, by the by, is a great show, a deadpan spoof that lampoons local prejudices and industry cliches. (I have a short item about it in this tomorrow's City Paper.) After I'd taken a tour, I brought a friend along who doesn't follow the art world so closely—someone on whom all the in jokes would be lost. She loved it. So the show passes a crucial test.
One question I have, though: "Ian" of Ian and Jan is pronounced "Yan". Is that a local thing? I haven't met enough honest-to-god Washingtonians to get a good sense of the accent. And I'm told that around Baltimore "Ian" is pronounced "Ann" by the local yokels.
Mary Coble performs Aversion tonight at Conner Contemporary. Through video installation and performance, she will stage (and submit to) an electroconvulsive aversion therapy session. In a typical session, positive sexual stimuli (photographs) are coupled with negative stimuli (electrical shocks) in order to shock gay people in hopes of making them straight people. The practice was finally, fully disavowed by the psychiatric establishment as a recognized, endorsed treatment within the last decade. That was long after the end of the psychiatric ex-gay movement, which collapsed in 1973, when the best minds in minds declared that homosexuality is not actually a mental disorder. The religious ex-gay movement, of course, persists today—as does aversion therapy, albeit not in any professional medical setting.
(Writing this brief just now led me to look up American witch trials, and you know what? The last trial was held in Salem in 1878, some 250 years after the first one. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise.)
Read more about Coble and Aversion in my City Paper piece this week—then see the performance at Conner Contemporary tonight.
New Yorkers can catch her work in the "Global Feminisms" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. And anyone with a modem can see her discuss her work in that show, Binding Ritual, Daily Routine.
UPDATE: At 7:30 p.m. tonight, you can watch the performance via. Note, though, that the piece also includes three videos—not sure how much of that you viewers at home will be privy to.
A letter to the editor with regard to an item I wrote; my response follows the letter. See also.
As the risk of relentless self-promotion, here is a link to the online version of my City Paper ColorField.remix feature. And there's more! Click away, God help you, to hear me talk about the works highlighted in the article in this slideshow podcast.
It is bad practice to use one's blog to expound ex ante defenses of one's potentially pain-inducing forays into new new media, so I won't. Much as I love to hear myself talk, I find it painful to listen to the sound of my own voice, so I haven't heard past the part where I say "drop E" when I mean "drop D." Apologies to any doom-metal guitarists out there.
UPDATE: Link fixed.
Item! My City Paper feature on the ColorField.remix festival hits newsstands today. Pick up a paper and you'll find:
Quite fortunate that the City Paper got color before this article. The B&W-printed mockup came with a funny comment, a note scrawled over a foggy, halftone image reproduction : "Is this a painting?"
If you're Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas and you've just suffered (or at least observed) as your season ended with a whimper, where do you go to shake it off? You go to Buboys and Poets, right?, because the NBA is just your deskjob, and you are, in your own words, more than an athlete.
In fact, you slouch at 24/7, a U Street joint that we Flophouse writers sometimes hit up for shawarma. Better luck next year, Thomas.
Blake Gopnik writes a great review of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, a soccer film—"portraiture in its purest form"—that I tried my best but failed to catch at the Hirshhorn a week and a half ago. By "my best" I mean that I got there on time, expecting the usual handful of art wahoos that shows up for experimental film screenings. Instead there was a line stretching around the perimeter of the building. Moreover, this was a line for just the first viewing; the museum had already added a second, later show and distributed raincheck tickets for that. Oh, and the line? Full of soccer hooligans. Where are these people during the day, and what do they do when the World Cup isn't on? It was like a LeftBank happy hour had been relocated to the National Mall.
Gopnik's review is clear and informative, and he avoids a lot of traps he could have fallen into: lame soccer jokes or, worse, informed soccer references. But I must protest his self-effacing jab at "sport-ignorant art critics". Some of us are reeling today not just from the weekend's schedule of art-fair parties and gallery openings but from some devastating losses to the Golden State Warriors. I'm with Sir Charles—Golden State sounds like a place where they play a lot of soccer, damnit.
UPDATE: Yglesias saw the film and says it's sux0rz. One thing he mentions that Gopnik neglected to emphasize: Zidane muses metaphysically about soccer over the soundtrack of the film. I like Gordon's films, but that sounds intolerable.
What awful news—Eastern Market burned down! This is truly sad news, right as spring was hitting its stride.
On Friday, entrance to artDC is free to one and all. Pick up a paper, read about it, and head over. Assuming there's scene to report, I'll be blogging from the fair grounds.
That is, if there's wifi. There's always the Warehouse nearby—though, Jessica Gould reports, there may not always be the Warehouse. Ouch.
It's been quiet here, but only here. In the Express I have reviews of Barbara Probst's "Exposures" at G Fine Art and Alberto Gaitán's Remembrancer at Curator's Office. Click here for a Guardian piece about Jonah Goldberg, Richard McBeef, Va Tech ribbons, and Cho Seung-Hui. Then, on Thursday, pick up a Washington City Paper for a feature on artDC, the art fair that hits the District . . . on Thursday. I'm running out to see two shows just this second, so I have no time to gab, but let's catch up later, okay?
UPDATE: You know what? At some point in the past several years, I dropped the two spaces after a period. Am I making things up, or wasn't that the rule?
Many congratulations to the roommate, who will now be hawking his blogospheric wares from an Atlantic Monthly address.
From Yglesias's comments
During last night's art collectors panel, I got served.
I asked a simple question. Twice during the panel discussion, someone mentioned a NYT story about collectors buying art, site unseen, having seen the work only through jpegs. It was this article, about a show at Gagosian of new works by Tom Friedman that sold out before the opening, in large part because Gagosian set up a private Web page featuring Friedman jpegs and then invited select collectors to buy these works online. (Discussed here not so long ago.) I phrased my question by first summarizing the article and then asking whether there's anything peculiar about buying art, site unseen, based solely on an impression from a jpeg.
The panel members, well, they protested. They thought the real nut of the issue was in the first thing I said, which I lollygagged right past. What about the damn dealers, eh, selling art over exclusive invitation-only channels? Selling art but not selling it to them? In my question (my question) I thought I was touching on something ineffable, a boundary that distinguishes collecting from purchasing. If collecting is a thing that art lovers do that builds cachet distinct from the prestige of the artworks, is there a value or ethic that informs that activity? And two of the six collectors there did tell me afterward they had hesitations about buying art that way (one said outright he'd never do it).
They said so afterward, because a confusion had broken out over the panel right after the question. Some were musing outwardly: Well, I don't mind of course when I'm getting the phone call or the password. The moderator was still trying to figure out what the hell I was asking (okay, so it wasn't a simple question). Someone in the audience joined in. It was chaos! Okay, it was more like mumbling—in any case, the answer that emerged, to one of those questions anyway, was no.
In my work, reviewing a show having only looked at jpeg attachments would be a discrediting thing. That's where I was coming from, and it just pushes that button to read or hear about collectors buying art without seeing it. I don't mean a piece seen at a different show or at a fair or on an earlier date; no one expects someone to stare at the art while she's writing the check. And I don't mean buying a piece by an artist whose work you know and trust and maybe even own—I know that's different, I see a gray area. And I know that some art doesn't require or even ask to be seen—I know! But I'm not talking about those pieces.
Buying art online, the work itself very much unseen, as straightforward as that. This is still collecting. Ninety-nine percent of artists won't care, and tombstone tags by a piece list name-title-date-materials-c/o—never the way by which someone was moved to buy the work. Collecting is support and stewardship and buying art online still accomplishes those things. It's only egregious if collecting art, as a practice, is a way to establish a different kind of bond between art and viewer. It isn't. I had confused my own instincts with a broader notion about collecting, of which I'm now disabused. It isn't participatory, it isn't theatrical, and as obvious and senseless as it might sound, it isn't a way of viewing. It remains weird to me and I'd check the store's policy about returns if I were you, but buying art over the intertubes: fine. I'm a devout instrumentalist on the topic.
Nevertheless, the answers of the collectors on the panel (James Alefantis, Monica Bussolati, Allison Cohen, Melvin Hardy, and Michael Pollack) didn't jibe with an attitude they all endorsed earlier in the evening. Hardy, asked something about what it means to collect, said the most classist thing I've heard all year. (Classist, as in class warfare–ist, not classiest.) He said something to the effect of, You get the measure of a person by what he puts in his homes. And to a one, the crowd nodded affirmatively, which vies for the most clueless expression I've seen all year. Hardy said, You can tell what kind of relationship you'll have with a person based on what's hanging on his walls. Much nodding. You can know a person based on the first thing you see in his home. Unanimous.
What, huh? You need to collect good art to be a good person? If there's a moral imperative to collecting art, but no prohibition against speculating on works site unseen, then I'm convinced that the art collector is a soul assassin–sniping away at our opportunities for good character with the click of a mouse, from the comfort of his own artfully decorated, morally sound, broadband–enabled homes. A samurai who finds his honor at the sample sale battleground that is the art fair. The checkbook, his katana; the openings calendar, his code. His flute plays no mournful tune, for it is filled with champagne.
So I'm walking away with my preconceived notions intact: Art collectors support artists and, crucially, vitally, serve as stewards of artworks. Collecting is a peculiar hobby. It takes a lot of money, and (right now, anyway) it's a decent way to invest, too. But collecting isn't appreciating—not necessarily. I'd never considered the thought that collecting makes you a good person, but no, for chrissakes, no it doesn't.
Many thanks to Civilian, Transformer, James Alefantis, Marissa Long, and Bridgett Reyes for organizing this series, by the by.
From the call for entries for the new media contest hosted by artDC:
Video works should be single channel in DVD format; sound works must be recorded as a CD. For internet art, no viruses please.After all, viruses were so 2005.
Spencer "Too Hot for Ramadi" Ackerman is home, safe and sound. He's sitting across from me at the office* as if he hadn't been gone a day. Look for him to be sounding off about his month in Iraq in a media outlet near you.
* Dining room
In a Boston Globe piece on "Training Ground for Democracy", an imminent Christoph Büchel exhibit, Geoff Edgers quotes Mass MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson:
"Did we get the 727 fuselage, blown up, burned, and suspended in the gallery as he had asked?" he said. "Well, that one we couldn't come up with. But we looked into it."In a followup on the Exhibitionist blog, Edgers quotes one bullet from a seven-page ultimatum, penned by Büchel to outline his frustrations and demands for satisfaction:
There is NO negotiation about the scope of the project. It will be realized as proposed.Yikes. Based on the article, the directors at MASS MoCA are handling this cavlierly, saying things like "the show must go on" but not explaining how they plan to cater to the artist—or, more importantly, whether they feel that they are obligated to. Installation is 9/10 of the show, right? Büchel could raise a holy stink about the show, but could he force MASS MoCA to not show the work they've installed to date? You'd think that a contract for such a materially ambitious show would offer some guidance . . . but then you'd expect the same contract to include an agreed-upon, itemized costing for such elements as disassembling a two-story house and reassembling it within the show.
How about that MASS MoCA space? When I was in Miami in December, I saw John Bock's Zero Hero at the 7,500-square-foot Moore Loft space. I couldn't think of a place in the District that could host that show, but since then I've heard loose talk about creating a contemporary art center in the District. Now, you'd have to go well beyond the city far from the suburbs past the exurbs to find 13 acres for a campus like MASS MoCA—perhaps farther than North Adams is from Boston. But a more modest space is within the Red Line's reach. Having plans that brought me to the area anyway, I took a walking tour of the vast, gentrifying warehouse district near the NewYoFlo Metro station—an ideal setting for a contemporary art space of this magnitude. (This trip led to a hilarious exchange with police, who took me for a very lost tourist. "Excuse me, mister, are you from Europe?")
What's the benefit to WPA\C membership? Apparently, card-carrying members don't get free entry into the Corcoran's Modernism exhibit, or any other ticketed show. This came as a shock to me, but it's all outlined here. Of the other advantages, the 40-percent price kickback at Capitol Art and Framing in Fairfax seems to be a real boon (however, I don't know their work and I doubt that every WPA\C–listed artist frames through them).
Then there's entry in the ArtFile slide and media registry, which is listed as the big kicker. The ArtFile isn't (yet) an online directory. Now, I have some nostalgia for my college days, when I'd load a tray of slides about some era or genre and click the day away. But that's not how I or most people browse art today. Same can be said about the hefty white-pages directory: It's fine for looking up a phone number, but not for discovering new artists. It's a reference source. When people go looking for artists, they turn to Firefox.
But all that will change when the WPA\C digitizes its directory, right? Here's the deal: While the online directory will make it much easier for users to access the information, it won't make the information more useful. Back when I used to sift through slides, I had already done a significant part of the sorting process by the time I'd turned on the projector—loading works by so-and-so, works in such-and-such style, and so on. And I never loaded, you know, 60,000 slides. The iArtFile might be easier to browse than the organization's book or slides, but will it replace artists' Web sites, or just replicate the information that's already available?
Then there are the shows. Some artists' works are only ever shown at WPA\C member shows, and these artists draw an enormous benefit from these programs. The viewer does not. There are, of course, decent WPA\C–programmed shows, like Kelly Towles's "Wall Snatchers" and the new media series curated by Djakarta and Kathryn Cornelius. But in at least one of those shows, the curator had to resist efforts to make it a members-only free for all.
For the many Sunday-painters-club-type artists, this is A Good Deal. But there's a broad category of artists that no area nonprofit (not just the WPA\C) services: emerging artists, post MFA but pre representation, who are competing to be shown by commercial galleries. The WPA\C exhibits that draw the most critical applause are those featuring this category of artists—but, by design, there's more chaff showing than wheat.
The Hirshhorn After Hours party? Kind of dope. Nothing like browsing the galleries with an Old Dominion Pale Ale in hand: that adolescent high that comes from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place never goes stale. Now, the notion of paying to get inside a museum doesn't sit well with National Mallrats—ten dollars is an outrage! even when music and mingling is involved. But plenty got over it last night, and the museum was apparently 300+ over capacity, with many people turned away at the door. Ian Svenonius is an able DJ (he's indirectly responsible for introducing me to Stereo Total), and the Lite Brites were a hit (even if HH ran with the hussied-up new Lite Brite design). Obviously the light works show is going to be a fun one to see at night.
In today's City Paper, I've got a piece that's graduated from the arts section to the plush city front pages. It's a story about a handshake deal gone awry, and the artists who got screwed when the people who did the handshaking split. Click-click.
Friends, I give you: Julian Sanchez. He is a man of marvel, and his performance as Chairman on Iron Chef Blogger is absolutely not to be missed. As the resident liberal judges, Kate and I apologize that we failed to deliver a sympathetic verdict to Iron Chef Liberal. Believe you me, before the contest started, we demanded a slew of regulations to increase kitchen size while curbing kitchen efficiency. So close, so tasty, but in the end Iron Chef Libertarian was not to be denied (as we judges explain).
To peak into the lives, or at least the kitchens, of the Casa de Libertarios and the Florida Flophouse, Mac users will need to download Real Player 10 and fire up the application before loading the page in Firefox.
Charles Meissner, Fort Reno
Find time on Saturday between the hours of 4 and 6:30 p.m. to wish Art Enables a happy birthday. If you haven't visited recently, they're not at the MAC any long (no one is, in fact). But they're sitting pretty in new digs at Florida and New York Ave NE. Don't let the "NE" scare you, you petticoated pansy: It's just a couple hops from the NewYoFlo stop on the Red Line and easily accessible by bus. (It's the trip to Hornfleur that's going to kill you.)
The AE gang has invited a visiting artist to celebrate Art Enables's fifth: Abe Graber, who is celebrating his (holy crow!) 103rd birthday.
Art Enables is "is an arts-and-enterprise program for adults with developmental and/or mental disabilities," which is great, of course. You want to support them for the warm fuzzies you'll feel—but also because Art Enables promotes distinctive and sharp work. (You won't find a bigger fan of Charles Meissner's work than me.) In addition to paintings in many media, they offer some sculpture and zany craft objects. (If you've been to my house, you've seen the coasters.)
Come meet the artists and celebrate a ton of birthday years.
Michelle Johnson, I Just Called To Say I Love You
Michael Thompson, Kill All Artists (Cynic), 2000.On March 7 I'll be joining a panel to discuss art criticism, old media, new media, and dead media. "The Role of the Arts Writer: Critiquing Art Criticism" is the fifth in the Framework panel series held by Transformer Gallery; the panel will assemble at Provisions Library.
The other panelists include Rachel Beckman, who does the arts beat for the Washington Post; Glenn Dixon, former arts editor at the Washington City Paper and current WaPo Express contributor; Corcoran instructor and author Andy Grundberg; and Glenn Harper, editor of Sculpture. Hirshhorn curatorial research associate and manager of interpretive programs Ryan Hill will moderate; he, by the way, will be giving a lunchtime talk on Arshile Gorky and another one on March 2 about the current Horn of Hirsh show, "Refract, Reflect, Project".
Okay, names and hyperlinks dropped! With that out of the way, let's kick off the panel now.
One thing that I—as the lone, lowly new media writer—have to emphasize is that new media isn't the end of editorial standards for art criticism. There is an editing process that takes place, though it's a distributed process; and anyway, old media institutions are absorbing new media, for better and for worse; and anyway, it's not as if traditional media outlets don't have their own pitfalls. Washington Post art reviews are written with an eigth-grade audience in mind not because Blake Gopnik is stupid—not because Blake Gopnik thinks you're stupid—but because the Washington Post thinks you're stupid. Jessica Dawson's gallery reviews are only ever about 100 words long not because she has only 100 words' worth of ideas—not because local shows are only worth 100 words—but because the Washington Post doesn't give a fig more than that. [SEE UPDATE BELOW.]
New media has unique problems that go well beyond not-being-old-media. The first time I saw a G.p review listed on an artist's CV, I got nervous as all hell. I don't even always proofread, y'all. But that review was something like 800 words, not 80, and 800 words I'll stand by, not 80 words that don't exceed a single syllable. Since then I've been more careful about distinguishing between entries and reviews; I'm careful not to start a review with notes about which cereal I ate for breakfast or the bus ride on the way to the show, and yes, bloggers can be incredibly lazy about style, because many bloggers are bad writers, and even good writers who write blogs sometimes sacrifice style to get the posts up, to feed the beast. But this assumes that there's some sanctity to art criticism in the first place. I think there is: There are standards, duties, obligations, and so on that an art critic has to live up to; we are the few, the proud; etc. I just think that new media neither alleviates nor drastically reimagines these concerns.
But these are all ideas that the panel will address in detail in March. I figured it would be especially bloggy to invite all the internets to join the panel—just like when Buffy and Willow turn every potential Slayer into the real thing.* The discussion is "The Role of the Arts Writer: Critiquing Art Criticism"—consider it an open thread.
* A sci-fi/fantasy reference, per the terms of new media union rules
UPDATE: My comments about the Washington Post were both too brash by half and not representative of my opinion of the paper's writers, editors, and content. Occasional misgivings with specific articles are bound to come up in a field where subjective opinion is crucial; a fit of pique such as the one I've written is neither a substantive nor worthy way to express any sort of disagreement. Specifically, I do not believe that Post writers or editors belittle their readers and I regret saying so.
By not seeking comment from the Post about their direction of the section, I abused the unique platform that blogs offer to complement and supplement mainstream media coverage. A better journalist would seek comment and information before blasting any publication with this sort of diatribe. And since then, I've written on this blog and in other outlets critical and supportive things about the Post's art coverage with fairness and measured voice—I think I have become a better journalist.
—ed., May 2008.
Drew Goerlitz, Explico, 2005.
Fenty fundraiser Max Brown may not get a seat on the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission—but he did pick up this hefty Goerlitz sculpture at the WPA\C Art Auction Gala (so a little bird tells me). However, Brown's guests—the Fentys—left the auction empty handed. There's still time for them (and you) to reconsider your stingy/philistine ways: about a dozen pieces that didn't move are up for grabs.
Giving up smoking means giving up on some favorite pastimes: kindness towards your fellow man, for example, or walking outside. Nevertheless, as we in the District today enter into a new dispensation under the smoking ban, the denizens of the Florida Flophouse have pledged with fellow travelers to join in a pact of steel: to quit and not look back. Now a center of rehabilitation, our house is an institution resembling something between a Betty Ford clinic and a 19th-century lunatic ward. From the grouchiness and aimless pacing of the social smoker to the 50-yard stare and perpetual shiver of the life-timer, the prescription is the same—assign the ward to a corner, and throw a shroud over him if the shivering gets too violent.
Asylum professionals and their clients share one fantastic notion: that quitting smoking is rewarded with athletic excellence. Each of us may look forward to rock climbing, goal keeping, hurdle leaping. Sounds good—I'm interested in competitive mountain dangling—but addiction consultants might do better to address some of the daily fears. That the Nine will be as appalling as I bet it is without the thick pall of smoke. That I might become the sort of person who's always chewing gum.
I don't mean to make light—I know that some of my friends are struggling with symptoms like numbness of the extremities, whereas I for the most part limited my smoking to the social hours, and won't feel it until I have a poured draft in hand. Still, I'm sure that professionals will say that you have to change your context, or whatever, and to that end I say we take over this new Axis Bar & Grill as our own. It's sure to be a Blue-and-Orange Line destination by the end of the month, but I bet we can hold it down for a couple weeks. New year, new nanny state—new haunt?
WaPo:
In its last item of business yesterday, the D.C. Council rejected a frantic attempt to move forward with the construction of a $275 million downtown central library, which has been seen as Williams's legacy to the city.But what is a "discharge"? For what kinds of unhygienic acts is this maneuver usually reserved?The Council Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation voted 3 to 2 last month to keep the legislation in committee for more study. Opposing council members said they had questions about the cost of the project and whether the flagship Martin Luther King Jr. Library could be renovated.
But Patterson, who is the committee chairman and a library supporter, tried to force the legislation onto the agenda, a rarely used maneuver known as a "discharge."
Fenty, who is the Ward 4 council member and a library supporter, said the city had exhausted numerous studies and public hearings to conclude that it needs a new downtown library. He said Williams's plan was a "good jumpstart" for improving the library system as a whole.
But some opposing council members described the city's neighborhood libraries as "shameful" and "disgraceful" while questioning why the city would pour millions of dollars into a new central library when other libraries are closed or in disrepair.
Brown said residents go to the MLK library because it is in better shape than the facilities in their communities. "I can no longer sit here and listen to this foolishness," he said.
Patterson had the support of seven council members, but library ally Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) had to leave the council session early because of illness. Library supporters offered to send a car to get Ambrose, but they said she was too sick to return for the vote.
The effort failed in a 6 to 6 vote.
I'm willing to buy that Williams's plan is a good one to "jumpstart" the city, insofar as he's released a 370-page blue ribbon taskforce report that the community has had little time to digest. There are other considerations that were never discussed—in particular, the city's official cost estimate and plan for renovating the MLK Library—and those should come next.
I haven't blogged about every one of Mayor Williams's herky-jerky moves to push forward the library legislation, but suffice it to say that today's rumor that sympathetic outgoing Council chair Kathy Patterson is plating an 11th hour library bill—after the last one got tabled—should be no surprise.
Except that I don't think she's able to do this in the way the Friends of the Library describe. I'm pretty sure any bill brought forward at this point can only be considered as emergency legislation. Of course, no one knows how this process works—it was a subject that perplexed everyone after the legislation was tabled. If I recall from a discussion of the Councilmaster's guide (for it has not come into my hands), Patterson will need to tap two mana, convince nine Councilors to vote to consider the bill as emergency legislation, and hope she has the HP to endure the counter in the following move.
DCist picks up the story here. As Sommer notes, the library has 99 problems. And now there's this gaping hole in the OCC footprint to think about. But it's easy to bury the lede in this story: Mayor Williams hoped to slip under the radar an ambitious restructuring of the DCPL. From the beginning his plan has resisted scrutiny, and the press has mostly not bothered. The Mayor released his Blue Ribbon Task Force report on the future of District libraries, a 370-page monster, the day before the Council's scheduled markup session on the legislation. And all this happens the week of Thanksgiving. I mean, come on.
Today Kojo Nnamdi—oh, go ahead, treat yourself, trill his name! You know you can't resist lolling those mellifluous tones over your tongue—will talk with new library chief Ginnie Cooper. Given that NPR just mentioned the tabled library bill in its hourly news roundup, I'm betting the question will come up. (NPR's angle, for what it's worth, was that the caucus found that the OCC site was too profitable to be given over to a public library. That's definitely Carol Schwartz's reasoning for opposing the Mayor's plan, but not Gray's position, that is, not his position before the vote. Now, it's harder to say. Barry's position is, as ever, mysterious. You know, I think I might have even said something like this to NPR's cub reporter.) Just a few more minutes of listening to poor Art Buchwald slowly dying on air on the Diane Rehm show, and then I'll be updating.
Here's the Mayor's response:
It's disappointing that the Education Committee did not approve our library plan but it's a good sign that the members tabled it rather than voting no. That suggests to me that they see the value of a new, clean, high-tech, child-friendly modern central library that is worthy of our great city and want to revisit this issue again soon. I will be redoubling my efforts over the next few weeks to work with Councilmembers to respond to any unanswered questions they have about the project.I understand that yesterday Mayor Williams called Marion Barry three times before the committee vote, so phones will be ringing off the hook—now, he has to convince nine members to introduce the library bill as emergency legislation, if he has any hope of establishing the library transformation as part of his legacy.
Tomorrow, the City Paper's Jessica Gould will run an item on the Hirshhorn's loading dock renovation woes. Woes? Woes.
And cheers & bon voyage to folks departing and joining the paper.
MLK Memorial Library. Picture by Rob GoodspeedSCOOP: Are the Mayor's plans to create a new library on the grounds of the Old Convention Center DOA? That's the story, after the D.C. City Council just voted to table the legislation in committee by a 3–2 vote. Councilmembers Marion Barry, Carol Schwartz, and Vincent Gray caucused before the meeting began, delaying quorum for nearly 20 minutes. After chair Kathy Patterson finally called the session to discuss Bill 16-734 (The Library Transformation Act of 2006), Schwartz immediately motioned to table the legislation. Patterson called for a roll-call vote, and the motion carried: Barry and Grey voted with Schwartz.
So, with the legislative session winding down, any other attempt to pass the legislation during Mayor Williams's tenure will involve introducing emergency legislation. That requires nine votes. Whether he has that many votes in the Council or not, and it's not clear that he does, it probably won't happen: Vincent Gray is the chair next term, and members are likely to defer to his vote on legislation that immediately impacts the next session. And really, for all its woes, the library is hardly the stuff of emergency legislation—unless you're preparing your legacy, that is.
I've been sitting on the news for a bit now, and today it's official: Numark Gallery is closing. Best of luck to Cheryl with her future ventures. But of course the rest of us are wondering, what's it mean for the District?
In certain terms, the city has lost its last interesting storefront gallery space. Plenty of people will tell you that you don't need large white cubes with bay doors to show interesting work—look at all the stuff at Conner, or Jae Ko at Marsha Mateyka, or whichever show in Bethesda, all residential or nongallery commercial spaces that have been converted into galleries. I appreciate those spaces, but there are modes of contemporary art that just won't fit through those doors. Artworks that just don't hang right in a Dupont townhouse. Numark Gallery was the biggest gallery in town and, yes, was able to show the biggest work (for whatever that counts&mndash;I think there's a point about diversity there), but it was also the best looking gallery in town and while I'm not going to say that one followed the other, Cheryl Numark set out to make a Chelsea art space and attract not only the brightest local talent but also bona fide international stars, and she did that. I don't remember Numark ever putting on a chintzy show.
So there are real, material losses with that space closing. At the same time, I'm not convinced that there were real, material deficits that led to that space closing. I'm confused about what advantage the virtual space/art "advisory" role has beyond the gallery space—since it seems to be the case that Numark wasn't forced to close her gallery but rather decided she didn't need one.
How can a gallerist not need a gallery? Two reasons why come to mind. One, the District buyer base is so anemic that one doesn't need a physical market to host all the market transactions. The dealers know the buyers and work with artists to supply those sales, and whether for good or bad, they don't trust that exposure to the marketplace will grow more buyers. So Cheryl Numark pours the rent money into art fairs and developing patron relationships between her clientele (artists and buyers), and so on.
Or two, Cheryl Numark just wasn't very interested in operating a gallery, and is perhaps better at other things and will do those things now and she won't really be doing exactly what people assume she'll be doing (dealing without a space). I don't know her personally and haven't worked with her; I don't know her health issues, which she's cited; I take with a grain of salt claims about what it's like to work with her—but the turnover in gallery staff was high. The space has been around for a damned short time. I never saw a chintzy show there, but I also didn't see Numark do enough with a star like Dan Steinhilber (whom, I'll go out on a limb and guess here, will be swept up by Annie Gawlak). Not to speak ill of the recently space-departed, but it does have some bearing on whether the District gallery scene is collapsing.
I do think that we have an opportunity to put some metrics to the District's ability to attract buyers. Remember the upcoming District art fair, which I mentioned back in July? At that time, none of the District gallerists knew whether they'd sign on—most fearing that it'd be a sure loser. By now, nearly all of them are on board. I've asked a few (not a scientific survey, by any means) why they're doing it and they've all given me the same response: If they to grow* the city's reputation, they need to show up, and so on and so forth.
It sounds to me like paying to be disappointed, but I'm hoping it won't turn out badly for the galleries. I don't think the District is a bad city for art—for all the hemming and hawing and recent gallery closings, it's still a top-tier art destination. If the market's less zippy than it used to be, there are a number of concrete factors that account come into play well before intangibles like aesthetics and appreciation. It's absolutely bad news that Numark's closing because we're losing a great space—the best in the city. But I don't know that that means the market's less zippy than it was in 2001.
Just putting that out there. I'll be mulling it over with "Sweet Child of Mine" on the repeat. Where do we go, where do we go, where do we go-oo-whoa?
Apologies for the use of the transitive "grow" not once but twice. I'm in an economics kind of way today. An Axl Rose, microeconomics mood. Axlnomics = the study of human sway and voice warble.
Jae Ko, Untitled, 2006.
Shorts in this week's CP: Jae Ko at Marsha Mateyka; documentaries on Iggy and the Stooges and Dead Boys at the Black Cat.
Did you know that the current City Paper features the fall arts guide—the complete autumnal calendar for cultural events in the District, presented in a handy pull-out format perfect for stashing in your glove box, man-purse, or messenger tote? In it I wrote a preview for Leo Villareal's show at Conner Contemporary. Note that I don't know what I'm talking about in that piece, exactly, since that show opens November 3, and I can't see into the frickin future.
Also, you have just two shopping days left to read my profile on Baltimore-based artist Ledelle Moe before some other, sorrier feature takes its place in the print edition.
Tonight the WPA\C continues its experimental media series with its first fall installment, Cowboys, Cliches, Codes, and Conspiracies. The spring editions, curated by Djakarta and Kathryn Cornelius, were both well received, so head down to the Corcoran before the 7:00 p.m. start. There will be video and other works by Lisa Blatt, Paris Bustillos, Jennifer Levonian, Chris Lynn, Lilly McElroy, Roger Ngim, Erik Olofsen, Randall Packer, Rob Parrish, James Schneider, Ann Steuernagel, and Gail Scott White, with a special presentation by Ben Coonley.
This evening I'll be busy making stocks—have to be ready for fall soups when the weather turns and the squash appears. If you attend, look out for Chris Lynn's work. And follow up in comments here about what you saw, will you?
On a different note: Today is apparently Blogger Appreciation Day here in the District; all the press offices have sent atypically chatty e-mails along with their releases. Is it the weather or the power of teh internets (!!1!) ?
City Paper items this week: Teo Gonzales and Inigo Navarro Davila at Irvine Contemporary and Alex Gutierrez at Project 4. I'll add links when they're available on the CP site and Spanish diacriticals when I'm feeling less lazy.
Also this week I have a feature profile on artist Ledelle Moe. Excerpt:
Given that the giant heads in "Memorial (Collapse)" appear to have been haphazardly lopped off a trio of disfavored colossuses, you'd expect the faces to be drawn from those of Saddam, Lenin, Kim Jong-Il, maybe even the National Party pols of Moe's homeland. "Coming from South Africa, people who have died are [seen as] a microcosm of a bigger political ripple," says Moe, explaining how some people tend to read her work. However, the faces reference not despots but people in Moe's life who have died. She doesn't say who, but she's still apparently trying to get over the loss.Sounds sinister. You can read it today."[P]eople who I knew personally, or not personally—their deaths stayed with me," she says. The heads, she says, "are about my own overturning."
Kathryn Cornelius, Deliverables [still], 2006.Tonight the Art Not Ads trucks roll out to patrol the District over the weekend. An updated Web site lists the artists who are participating and provides a few snapshots of their work. So if you position yourself well, you may catch a glimpse of a truck (or trucks) hauling billboard paintings made, respectively, by Maggie Michael, Karen Schoenstadt, and Ian Whitmore.
To the right is a still from Kathryn Cornelius's video, Deliverables, which will be shown on a truck-mounted video screen, along with Colby Caldwell's Know There There—which looks like it continues on the recent video work he's done—Brandon Morse's Non-Sequitor, and Jose Ruiz's Wife Beater.
There are also trucks featuring poetry by E. Ethelbert Miller and Lucille Clifton, among others.
Now, where you'll need to set up to catch the trucks is up to debate. As I understand it, the organizers don't want to list the info on the Web site for fear that trucks that take divergent routes, get lost, or hit traffic will not reach their destinations at the right time, which would disappoint viewers. I understand that, but look—this is a city that runs on WMATA's public transportation. We're used to the trains not running on time. If the trucks never came at all, it'd be no different than waiting for the Green Line on off hours.
Nevertheless, G.p knows where (most all) the trucks will be when. Of course, just about everyone who's interested will see them along the 14th Street corridor outside the galleries, where they'll be parked temporarily on Saturday night. That's a real problem with the organization of this event—many more people should be interested. Many more people should be interested without even knowing that they're interested, and they should only realize that they're interested when they see the trucks and make the mental connection to the street stickers and ads all over the city. And they should see those trucks—which should circle like sharks in the stop-and-go traffic connecting U Street, Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Tenleytown, Cleveland Park, and H Street NE. (Fuck Georgetown.)
Why, for example, the organizers decided to chart the trucks' course as if it were a marathon—plotting the Whitmore truck through Arlington and Clarendon for two hours today, or sending the video truck to Shirlington at 10pm tonight—is completely beyond me. This project thrives on interaction with pedestrians—the pedestrians who aren't walking around Shirlington on a Friday night.
Below the fold I've posted the dizzying, far-too-complex driving instructions, which I'm told the drivers have already all but ignored anyway. The hope is that they'll get into the heart of town and stay there. But I don't mean to end on a sour note—I like projects like these, and they always suffer for execution, and I think I'll see it Saturday night and that'll be fine. To end on a brighter note, and to kick off your weekend, here's a shot of Ian Whitmore dirtying up his billboard with mud (a picture his girlfriend probably doesn't want me broadcasting to the world).
FRIDAY
Video
Route for video truck/ Friday September 15 from 6 pm till midnightVideo truck will meet Welmoed Laanstra at 1515 14 Th Street NW Washington DC
at 4 pm. Truck driver will receive maps and magnetic logo door tiles there.
Truck will drive as following. I have maps for each area.6 pm ,Arlington. Start at the Ellipse Art Center, Arlington VA 4350 North Fairfax Drive, suite 125. Contact is Lisa Marie Thalhammer, 703-228-7710( she will meet you and say hi if she can. Please drive into the driveway for a few minutes.There used to be parking meters in front of the Center that they have turned over into ZIP car spaces. See if you can park around there. If not, drive around the area for about an half an hour
6.30 pm- make your way over to Clarendon Metro down Clarendon Blvd, onto Virginia Square Metro, Courthouse Metro and Rosslyn Metro..Just past the Rosslyn Metro entrance on N. Moore street, cross 19th and pull over in front of the new
Bike Oasis( NW corner of 19th & N. MooreStreet). It will be open until 7pm that evening. Then make your way into Washington DC by way of Key Bridge that will take you into Georgetown.7.30pm Georgetown/ Dupont Circle. As you enter into Georgetown, drive on M Street . Take a right on Wisconsin and drive south till you hit K Street. That is Georgetown Harbor. Take a left on K Street and drive around a bit. Then make your way back to M Street by taking 30th or 29 th Street. Cross M Street and drive up 29 th or 30th Street up to P Street. Take a right on P Street and that takes you to Dupont Circle. Arrive at the circle, drive ¾ around the circle and take a right onto Connecticut Avenue. Drive by Provisions Library and then take a right on Florida Avenue. Take another right on 19 th Street and then make a right on Q Street. Cross over Connecticut, you are now on the 1100 block on Q Street and take another right at Florida Avenue. At the intersection, take another right at Connecticut and drive down Connecticut Avenue, past Conner Contemporary Art . Drive around the area between Florida Avenue, Massachussets Avenue and Connecticut Avenue for about an hour.
9pm- Adams Morgan Make your way to Adams Morgan, going North on Connecticut pass by the Washington Hilton,, stay to the right and go on Columbia Road. Take a right on 18 th Street and drive down and up 18 th Street between Florida and Columbia Road for about 15 minutes.After that , going down on 18 th Street, towards Mass Avenue, pass Lauriol Plaza and make a left on Massuchussets Ave. Take Mass Avenue to the first circle, Scott Circle drive around for about ¾ of the circle and take a right onto Rhode Island Avenue. Take a left on 14 th Street, pass by the Studio Theatre on 14 th Street and Viridian Restaurant and make your way up to the U Street Area. Take a right on U Street , drive by the Lincoln Theatre and then make your way back via 13 th Street to Logan Circle. At Logan Circle make a right onto P Street . At the intersection of P Street and 14 th Street, take a left onto 14 th Street South
10 pm Shirlington make your way on to 14 th Street downtown that will take you to the 14 th Street Bridge into VA. Then you make your way to the 4000 block of South 28th Street into Shirlington . This is where the WETA studio’s are located, and many restaurants etc. This particular block might be a bit tricky but see where you can drive around for a bit.
11 pm Downtown/ Georgetown and Howard University Make your way back into the city via 395 , take the 14 Street Bridge again( route 1) on your way to the Capitol Building and Union Station which is at the intersection of Mass Avenue and North Capitol Street .Drive around that area for a bit and then make your way back into the city by taking Massaschussets Avenue, go by the Convention Center and NPR (intersection 7 th Street NW , New York Avenue and Mass Avenue) . Stay on Massuschussets Avenue till you hit Dupont Circle, drive half way around the circle and make a right on P Street. P Street will take you into Georgetown. Take a left on Wisconsin and a right on Prospect Street( there is a restoration hardware store at the corner) Pass by Café Milano.. Take a right on 35 th Street and go up to Q Street. Make a right on Q Street and a right on Wisconsin . Drive down to M Street and take a left on M Street. Take M Street to 22nd street and make a left. At the intersection with Mass Avenue go straight and that is Florida Avenue again.Pass by restaurant Nora.Take Florida Avenue all the way to Georgia Avenue and make a right on Georgia Avenue. You are now back at Howard University.Drive around that area on Georgia( same as 7 th Street) up along Howard University and drive around the Shaw Metro stop.
12 midnight/ end of shift
Painting (Whitmore)
Painting truck12 noon / Arlington - truck starts at the Ellipse Art Center, 4350 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA .Telephone is 703 228-7710. There is no parking but there is a driveway in front of the art center and if you could just hang out there for a few minutes that would be great. One of us will be there to meet with you and hand you over the magnetic logo tile for the door. Then make your way to Central Library on Wilson and N. Quincy Road (1015 N Quincy St, Arlington, VA 22201) . Drive around there for a bit and then make your way to Clarendon. At the Clarendon Subway Station, across the street from 3101 Wilson Avenue (SW Corner Wilson Blvd and Highland St, Arlington, VA 22201), there will be three parking meters reserved for the truck. W13100N, W13102N, and W13104N, They are reserved for Friday afternoon from noon till three but you will not spend that much time there. If you can park the truck, please stay for about an hour . From there, move on to Rosslyn, In Rosslyn right across the street on the Rosslyn Metro Entrance (1700 N Moore St, Arlington, VA 22209), there is a new bike” store” called Bike Oasis and if you could stop there for 5/10 minutes if you see a space and/ or drive around that area for 5/10 minutes, that would be great. And then make your way over the Key Bridge into Georgetown
2 pm/Georgetown/ Dupont Circle/Takoma Park/ Silver Spring.Now you are in Georgetown on M Street.Take a left onto New Hampshire Ave to Dupont Circle. Drive around the Dupont Circle area for about 15 minutes. The traffic circle at the center of Dupont Circle is a good way to get attention.You can go up and down Connecticut Avenue a bit as well. Drive by Conner Contemporary Art (1730 Connecticut Ave NW # 200, Washington, DC) and Provisions Library (1611 Connecticut Ave NW).Go back to the circle and then go up New Hampshire Ave, right of the circle and make your way up to the district line. You are now driving up to Takoma Park , stay to the right , the left lane turns into Blair Road, and you will see the sign for 410 ( East-West Highway) and take that left. Stay on East West Highway, pass the Takoma Park Library (101 Philadelphia Avenue, Takoma Park, MD 20912) on your right and cross over Piney Branch Road. Stay on 410 until you get to the intersection with Colesville Road and drive around the new downtown Silver Spring area for about 15 minutes. Do not forget the Silver Spring Subway. The subway is at Colesville Road and Wayne Avenue. Fenton Street, Wayne Avenue and Colesville Road are good streets to drive on. Once you are in the center of the new downtown Silver Spring, drive by AFI (American Film Institute, 8633 Colesville Rd, Silver Spring, MD 20910) and the Montgomery County Arts and Humanities Commision (801 Ellsworth Dr, Silver Spring, MD 20910) and Whole Foods (833 Wayne Ave, Silver Spring, MD 20910).
3 pm / Howard University/ New Convention Center Get back to 410 in the center of Silver Spring and take Colesville Road North to University Blvd. At that intersection you will see Blair High School (51 University Blvd E, Silver Spring, MD). Drive around in front of the school for bit and then make your way back down on Colesville to downtown Silver Spring. Take Georgia Avenue South, pass Pyramid Atlantic (8230 Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD) on your right and make your way to Howard University (2041 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20060). At the intersection of Georgia and Florida, drive around a bit in that area for about 15 minutes. Go back onto Georgia Avenue South (becoming 7th Street) and make your way to the intersection of Georgia, New York and Mass Avenue. You will see the Convention Center on your right and the NPR studios on your left (635 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20001). If you stay on Georgia (it is now 7th Street) you will pass the Goethe Institute (812 7th St NW, Washington, DC) on your right and drive under the China Town Arch (H Street, between 6th and 7th St) and then make your way back to NPR. Drive around that area for about 15 minutes.
4 pm / Tenley Town. Take K Street West to Penssylvania Avenue and then take a right on Wisconsin to go north on Wisconsin. Drive up Wisconsin Avenue to Tenley Town Circle. Take the Circle southbound (the direction you came from) and take a right on Nebraska and pass the NBC studios (4001 Nebraska Ave NW, Washington, DC), and drive by the American University Katzen Center at Ward Circle where Mass Avenue and Nebraska Avenue come together. Take the circle twice and go straight on Nebraska. That will change into Loughboro Rd. Drive up to Sibley Hospital (5255 Loughboro Rd NW, Washington, DC). Right before you reach hospital grounds, take a right on Dalecarla Parkway, that will turn into Western Avenue if you just keep going straight and make a right on Wisconsin Avenue to Friendship Heights.
5 pm Friendship Heights. Drive around the Mazza Gallery area for about 15 minutes and then take a left on Militairy Road to go to Connecticut Avenue. On Connecticut Avenue you take a right and drive towards downtown. Pass by Politics and Prose, Buck’s Fishing & Camping (5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC). When you hit van Ness /UDC university and Subway, drive around there for a bit (10 minutes) and then keep on going on Connecticut Avenue until you hit Cleveland Park. Spend a few minutes in that area and then drive on towards the ZOO (3001 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC). If you could find a place to stop there for a 15 minutes, that would be good but if not, move on Connecticut Avenue over the bridge , by the Washington Hilton and then you hit Dupont Circle again.
6pm K Street and Capitol Hill. Stay on Connecticut Avenue till you hit K Street. Farragut North Subway entrance on the left hand side. Make your way on to 17th Street. Drive by the Corcoran Gallery of Art (500 17th St NW, Washington, DC) by making a right on F Street. Make a right on 19 th Street . Drive by the World Bank Headquarters (1818 H Street NW). Make right on M Street towards Thomas Circle. Go ¾ on the circle and get on to Vermont Avenue and drive by Americans for the Arts at 1000 Vermont Avenue. Go down 15th Street to Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue and make your way to Capitol Hill. Pass the Senate Office Buildings, The Dirksen Building and The Russel Building, on your left hand.
7pm H Street Corridor. Take a left on Maryland Avenue and make your way up to H Street NE. Drive up and down H Street for a bit and pass by the Atlas Performing Arts Center (1333 H St NE, Washington, DC). H Street turns into Benning Road. Drive around that area and make your way to the Armory Stadium (2001 E Capitol St Se, Washington, DC) .
8pm /end shift
SATURDAY
Painting by Maggie MichaelI know, right? Do you know where to go now? Just don't hang your night's plans on seeing them at a given intersection on a given hour.2 PM–4 PM. Arts on Foot / entrance on 7th Street NW/ F Street
6 PM–8 PM 1515 14 th Street/ between P and Q Street NW.
------------------------------------------------
Poetry by E. Ethelbert Miller and Lucille Clifton
noon–2 PM Arts on Foot/ entrance on 7th Street NW / F Street
6 PM–8 PM 1515 14 th Street/ between P and Q Street NW.
------------------------------------------------
Video by Kathryn Cornelius, Colby Caldwell, Brandon Morse and Jose Ruiz
6 PM–8 PM 1515 14 th Street NW/ between P and Q Street NW
9 PM–11 PM The Green in Downtown Silver Spring/ Ellsworth Drive ( accross from the Whole Foods)
11.30 PM–2 AM- Adams Morgan/ U Street /Cardozzo/ Georgetown
In this week's City Paper, I sound off on recent sculptures by Evan Reed at Flashpoint.
James Rieck, The Board of Directors, 2006.
Here we go:
James Rieck of Baltimore, MD was named the Best in Show winner of $10,000; Kristin Holder of Washington, D.C. was awarded the Second Place prize of $2,000; Molly Springfield of Washington, D.C. was honored with the Third Place prize of $1,000 and Jason Zimmerman of Washington, D.C. was given the Young Artist Award of $1,000.When I announced the Trawick finalists, I didn't weigh in on their prospects. (Molly's a good friend.) But yeah, all of these were predictable choices (if not exactly in the right order).
Tomorrow night there will be a reception for the Trawick exhibition, which will run through September.
OKAY: As I said, I sort of have a dog in this race, so discount my opinion as you like, but I've had too many conversations today about this award to not inveigh publicly. Rieck is just the wrong choice for the award—his work is garish and dull. I'd very much like to hear Ashley Kistler, Jack Rasmussen, or Gerald Ross explain his or her reasoning for this selection. I'd be curious to hear anybody's defense. Rieck is a consensus choice for a crucial District award that has previously recognized ambitious, innovative talent. Technique is not the be-all and end-all.
![85.buster.bio[1].jpg](http://grammarpolice.net/archives/images/85.buster.bio%5B1%5D.jpg)
Kendall Buster (image courtesy of the Mattress Factory)G.p has the scoop on the Kreeger Museum artist award nearly a month before its release: The museum has selected Kendall Buster for its 2006 award. The Kreeger established the $10,000 award in 2004 to recognize outstanding vizh art talent from the District. The first recipient was another sculptor, Jim Sanborn.
Buster's a natural choice for the museum—in 2004, the Kreeger hosted an exhibition of the artist's sculptures and models. Viewers will remember last year's Fusebox show, Model City, an installation that earned a rare gallery writeup from the Post's Blake Gopnik.
From a short item I wrote about that show:
On first glance, Buster's installation is a grand iridescent swoosh of blue nylon cutting across the gallery in an arc. The fabric forms an undulating plane that intersects the white cube, slicing from just above the door to a point waist high, before rising again to roughly eye level. After walking, kneeling, and finally crawling under this draped ceiling to the far end of the room—the work almost but doesn't reach the end of the gallery—viewers realize that the swatch of nylon, in fact, comprises the joined bottom edges of 52 pup tents.Parabiosis, a 2003 sculpture, is installed at the Convention Center. More G.p news: Buster will install a large permanent piece in a downtown lobby this year (on K Street, if I recall correctly).Model City makes tactile Buster's training as a scientist. While under the installation, the viewer feels that she is enclosed by a breathing membrane; from the perspective at the far end of the space, the viewer looks out over the other side of this skin and sees that it is pockmarked by simple architectural structures that, in context, resemble hard, chitinous, protective scales. Attending the crowded opening was like walking into a cross-sectional model of an organism, with viewers (crawling around the floor, stooping while mingling, "camping out" in corners) playing the part of a culture under the microscope.
UPDATE: The jurors for this year's Kreeger award: Andy Gruenberg, Milena Kalinovska, Robert Lehrman, Jim Sanborn, and Sarah Tanguy.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The cat's out of the bag, and earlier than the Kreeger intended. (The site originally listed an announcement for late September. Which isn't very good scheduling, since the reception is slated for very early October.) There's not yet been any press push, as far as I know. Tsk, tsk.
SHELLAC plays next Thursday at the Black Cat—as the bloggers say, Aaron Leitko gets it exactly right. I'm sore about missing Beirut last night at the Warehouse—when I arrived before doors' opening there was already a line around the block, and they're no Charming Hostess or anything so I wasn't inclined to wait to try my chances, but if I'd shown some patience, my latecoming friends who got inside tell me, I'd've been able to see them—but I won't be so careless about lining up for Shellac. SHEL-LAC: Invite it in through pursed lips, loll it around on your tongue, punctuate it with a guttural stop like a crash symbol.
A fire at DCAC burned down the stairs between the gallery space and the theater. Neither space was damaged. Casualty of a discarded lit cigarette or promotional stunt for Home Fires (now playing)?
UPDATE: I put the full report on the City Paper blog.
In this week's City Paper I've got a short bit on Santana Miyazaki at Touchstone Gallery and more on Remix: East-West Currents in Contemporary Art at the Arlington Arts Center.
"Academy 2006," in this week's City Paper.
I plum forgot to mention last week that I'd written about "Conversions" in the City Paper an issue ago. Fresher is this week's piece on "15 Minutes" at Project 4.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to run to Union Station to make the final maildrop in order to mail my voter registration form to the District government, which does not seem to recognize that I voted in the ought-four general and primary elections. It's last call for voter registration. I recommend clicking here, whether you're sure you're registered or not.
While Mike Grass is away for a couple of weeks, I'm picking up some of his Express-ive duties. Need to catch up on the haps in the District as of 6 a.m. this morning? I'm your man. In case you don't click over, I'll take the opportunity to especially plug Lynn Berenbaum's tennis blogging. She's covering the Legg Mason Tennis Classic here in the District, and while I couldn't tell you Legg Mason from Foghorn Leghorn, I can absolutely recommend Berenbaum's easy, locally focused, just-gossipy-enough writing style. If you, in fact, actually enjoy tennis, you'll love her stuff.
People keep asking, so I'll give the people what they want to hear: Walking home from Tom and Charles's place on Saturday night, someone fired a gun from a Volvo about a block from where I was standing. I know, I know, I've told these true tales of crime too often to believe them myself. But there I was, dropping toward the pavement and reaching for my phone and sort of awkwardly falling around to look at the car (which blew through a stop and hightailed out of Shaw), thinking to myself that it was anything but a gun, but I'm pretty sure that it was a gun, and the other guy down the block was also freaking out. Then I called Charles, who was nice enough to talk to me about continuity in the DC Comics universe until I had walked home. And then I called the police, who could give a shit, that is until they realized they'd already sent a car to the cross (Rhode Island and 10th or so), a gesture that they seemed to think was in itself like closing the case.
No more crime stories! If thugs want another post out of G.p, they're going to have to shoot me.
New in the City Paper this week: A short item on E3, the painting symposium currently showing at Transformer, and a longer piece on the DC Free Recording Project. Excerpt:
"I'm not doing it to say, 'Hey, look at what a bunch of great fucking guys we are,'" [Ian] MacKaye says. "It's more like the Diggers," the late-'60s San Francisco guerrilla-theater group that operated a bread line. "It's just free because it's free."I managed to piss off MacKaye and the conversation quickly descended into Deadwood-ian levels of profanity. Guy could use a drink or something.
I should have some stuff on Cap Fringe this week, too, but I haven't seen the issue yet.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art
There's not much new news in Jacqueline Trescott's WaPo profile on the Corcoran's new helmsman, Paul Greenhalgh, the former president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Dispatches from the front lines at New York & 17th have been few and far between—but no news doesn't always mean no news.
Recently, Greenhalgh hired Sarah Newman, formerly an intern with the National Gallery of Art, to fill the vacancy left by Stacey Schmidt. Schmidt, the associate curator of contemporary art, left the museum in March—just days after Greenhalgh made like Sherman for the Atlantic through the Corc's curatorial department.
But as of now, the status of Newman's position is "transitional." She will serve as assistant curator on a temporary basis through the end of August (at least). Newman isn't listed on the curators site (yet?).
Something else missing from the Corcoran's Web site: a future exhibition schedule. The "Joan of Arc" show is the only exhibition listed, running from November 2006 for some unknown duration. Someone recently pointed out to me that the High Museum's Morris Louis retrospective heads to San Diego from January to May 2007; this would be a perfect show for the Corc to pick up.
There is one exhibition we all know the Corcoran is planning to run: the 49th Corcoran Biennial. There's no news about that one, either—and by this time, 2004, the museum was spamming everyone with an inbox with news about Corc 48. Why the radio silence? The Corcoran has (tentatively) scheduled its next biennial for late 2008. The museum is skipping a year.
Now, obviously, the gallery is rebuilding its programming from the ground up, taking its time to develop an overall strategy. But the Biennial is Jonathan Binstock's bag, and how much tweaking does his operation need? Given that Greenhalgh has signaled his hopes to overhaul the Corc has a sort of experimental "think tank," the Corc 49th could be a critical division in that effort.
Consider also that the DC Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development allocated $8 million in its fiscal year 2007 budget for improvements to the Corcoran's roof, with another $10 million proposed for fiscal year 2008. This falls short of the $40 million tax increment finance deal that DC promised the museum, contingent on the (failed) Gehry deal. Nevertheless, the Corc is now making up that shortfall.
The debriefing, in brief: temp labor, monies for repairs, no exhibition schedule. Is the Corc pulling out of 2007?
UPDATE: Greenhalgh's bringing "Modernism" from his former V&A digs to the Corc early in 2007. And I forgot to mention that Margaret Bergen has left the Corc, though her voicemail's still active. Rebecca Gentry's directing communications now.
Tyler Green mentions that the Hirshhorn will be showing film from their permanent collection next year (and will host the U.S. debut of a piece by Isaac Julien). This sounds like the perfect show for a museum that plans to renovate its loading dock next year.
(And how extensive are those renovation plans, anyway?)
The management would like to express its regret for misspelling Kelly Towles's name here.
Next week I'll have some news about an artist with whom you're all familiar and that artist's plans for a new permanent installation in the District. I mean, I have the news now, but I can't tell you yet. For now, note that CP's Show & Tell column is back. Nell Boeschenstein has the goods on the Source Theater, which has stood empty for as long as I've lived here.
I'll be a juror for this year's Crafty Bastards exhibition. Saturday's the deadline for vendor applications, so hop to, and make cool stuff. The guidelines suggest that "[y]ou won't find knitted teapot cozies, floral wreaths, carved wood ducks or batik jackets here." Don't be discouraged, coziers! I'm sure there's another fair for you out there.
Washington, it's time I let you know—I actually quit my job to build an Ark. I'm a little late getting started, what with the not having any sons to lend a hand, and the instruction manuals only come in cuneiform, and you try measuring out a cubit with the tape they sell at Logan Hardware. The deluge is coming down now—but it's okay, it's cool, I like to work against a deadline.
For the second straight day there have been intermittent power outages at my house, and I keep thinking I'm going to have to toss the food from my refrigerator, but that's a silly concern if you know the grand plan that's been revealed to me: I am to finish this Ark, sail it down Florida Ave. to Connecticut, where I'll bear north toward the National Zoo. We'll make one last stop at Whole Foods and, I guess, the pet food store, and everyone better use the restroom then because I'm not tolerating any nonsense on my boat.
I'm now taking applications for spots on the Ark. Preference will be given to those who can sail, tie knots, clean fish, and tend to exotic animals. Application instructions may be found by clicking here. Many will enter; few will be selected, so be sure to emphasize why your antediluvian qualities ought to persist into the new world.
Here are the finalists for the Trawick Prize:
Time permitting, I'll get hyperlinky with that list so that you can browse at your leisure.
Even though the blog was down, life went on for your writer, sometimes even culminating in the rare productive exercise. Here are a few recent shorts for the City Paper: "Remastered" at Studio One Eight, the 48 Hour Film Project, and "Mine" by Jeff Spaulding at G Fine Art. The latter two shows have already come and gone. There's another piece (lost to the archives, it seems) about Miguel Covarrubias, whose prints and sketches are showing at the Cultural Institute of Mexico until July 7—scroll down on this page to read about it.
On the music tip, I wrote some stuff about Zodiac Mountain (Wooden Wand + Davenport Family) and Queering Sound 06.
I also appear from time to time in the WaPo Express blog under the guise of Sight Scene. It's mostly newsy stuff, but I'll point you to an item on recent noteworthy achievements by people in the vizh scene (including Jeffry Cuddlin, Gabriel Martinez, Ian Jehle, Jiha Moon, Molly Springfield, Jason Zimmerman, and others).
Oh, and I wrote a review of "Animalia" at Irvine Contemporary, an excerpt of which is in the paper edition (I think). Here's a teaser:
After a selection process that ran longer than a year, Irvine Contemporary's associate director, Heather Russell, has assembled "Animalia"—a show featuring artists who use animals as principal elements in their work. The show, which opened last Friday, brings to mind the parting lines of Puck in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Excusing the bad behavior of he and his cohorts, Puck begs pardon for "this weak and idle theme/no more yielding but a dream." The concept behind "Animalia" is at least as simple—animals in contemporary art—and it stumbles upon similar moments of comedy, mischief and dark portent.Click click.
Did anyone go see Mogwai last night? I was dancing my tail off to Ghostland Observatory, happy to be entertained by an Austin band whose it-group status probably expired months ago. I like to dance, even though I move like Michael Stipe in the beginning of the video for "Losing My Religion": picture a hapless, seemingly injured emo-ish octopus. Anyway, G.O. frontman Aaron Behrens has a pretty good Fred Mercury thing going, and he reminded me how tight the kids wear the jeans in Austin. And Thomas Turner surely got a 5 on his Advanced Placement science exam, the way he dropped the Thomas Dolby on the electronics all night. Science!
I'd recommend that everyone go buy tickets for Pleaseeasaur tomorrow night at the Black Cat, but it's sold out. In fact, I already did recommend that you see Pleaseeasaur tomorrow night—in today's City Paper. And now the show's sold out (draw what conclusions you will). Also in the CP is my writeup on Laurel Nakadate at Adamson Gallery.
I didn't plan for my first post on Free Ride to be about crime, but I also didn't expect to wake up to a murder outside my front door. But I saved the real-time skinny for G.p:
Cappseus: dude. murder in my neighborhood this morning.But it's not even that hot yet!
KvnMustPay: if you remember, kriston, 50 fortold this: "in the hood, the summertime is the killin' season/ it's hot up in this bitch, and that's a good enough reason."
. . . uh, probably I could be less callous about this. Gotta work on those human emotions.
In today's CP I've got an item on "Compelled by Content II" at Fraser Gallery. One of these days I'll see whether I can add an item to ye ol' sidebar so I'm not posting the same CP notice every week. In other admin news, I've received a couple of complaints that my e-mail address isn't readily available on the blog, so it's on the sidebar now, bright as day. So shoot me a line, no, fire away, I mean, write me if you please.
DCist graciously lent me their megaphone on Sunday to opinionize on the Mies. Some of my thoughts follow from the Saturday town-hall meeting. And the rest of those thoughts from Saturday, I shouldn't say in polite company.
Tonight I'm going (to try) to see a preview of A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner at the Rorschach Theatre. The cost is "pay what you can" for the preview; my thinking is that I'll just pay whatever the ticket price is. But wouldn't it be smart for the theater to make these things "pay what you can after the show"? My bet is that folks might regard it as a dollar referendum on the performance, but in practice would be more generous than they might expect going in. You know how these things go: It's exciting to see new shows, it's Friday night, the weather's nice, the Nats are winning, and even a bad performance usually has some entertaining element. Total flops are, you know, kind of rare. So long as the players are capable and don't have too many last-minute kinks to iron out, I bet the theater would rake it in.
Anyway, I guess it's not really crucial for the theater to bank on preview night, but seeing as how opening night is very much sold out, it's very important that I get some things done so that I can make it to Columbia Heights to stand in line.
UPDATE: Friday night is looking dim. I'm still stuck in a Bright Room Called the Office, while the performance's curtain rises . . . right . . . now. Shoot.
A thanks and horns-up to fellow Longhorn J.H. for e-mailing the text of the article I mentioned below. It's a 2003 WaPo spotlight by architecture critic Benjamin Forgey on the Mies Van der Rohe Farnsworth House ("one of the most important—and beautiful—creations in the history of 20th-century architecture") on the eve of the building's sale at Sotheby's, an auction that might have imperiled its existence. (Had the Farnsworth House been sold to a private buyer, that buyer could have altered the original design to make it more "livable" or even attempted to take down and move the House to a different spot.)
Forgey wrote that "the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages." One might say nearly the opposite about the MLK Memorial Library, the limits of whose public service was never tested, given the library system's gross mismanagement.
Regardless, Forgey suggested that potential buyers consider donating their auction bids to the joint campaign between the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the Farnsworth. And those are the organizations who own the building now, exactly as it should be.
Here's hoping that we'll yet see Forgey prognosticate about the fate of the District Mies very soon. Full text of the 2003 article (and a pony!) below the cut.
The Washington Post Saturday, October 25, 2003And for dessert (because I know you read every nutritious word) (via):SECTION: Style; C01
HEADLINE: Sheer Treasure: Fate of Mies House Is on the Block
BYLINE: Benjamin Forgey, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: CHICAGO
They were going to show the Farnsworth House this morning, busing folks 60 miles from the Loop into the Illinois countryside for brunch and "a private viewing" of the famously beautiful -- and exquisitely impractical -- weekend retreat.
But the party was canceled this week, say the real estate marketers, because it wasn't private enough. "Once the invitations were received, the response we got was very, very overwhelming," explains Stuart Siegel, president of Sotheby's International Realty. "People told us they didn't want to see it with a group. 'We know the house,' they were saying, 'and we want to see it at our own pace, in privacy.' "
Oops. You will have to give Siegel a call in New York if you'd like your own private tour of the world's best and best-known glass house at its wooded, 60-acre site in the fast-suburbanizing farmland near Plano, Ill. Be sure of your finances before you call, however. The Farnsworth House is being offered for sale at a Sotheby's auction in New York on Dec. 12 with a pre-sale estimate of $4.5 million to $6 million.
Here's a better idea. If you want to save this great treasure, you can do it for less. A donation of $1 million or so, or indeed of any amount, would boost a last-minute campaign by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to buy the house.
In announcing the campaign on Oct. 16, the two organizations pledged $1 million each to seed the fund. "We've had some interest, but we're not there yet," reports National Trust President Richard Moe. "We're trying to identify individuals and institutions in the limited universe of those who are passionate about modern architecture."
The cause is just. Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1946 and completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is one of the most important -- and beautiful -- creations in the history of 20th-century architecture. Its cultural worth far outweighs its monetary value or its status as a private residence.
But money is what auctions are all about, so it remains crucial that the two public organizations succeed in their last-minute campaign. They propose not only to preserve the building on its original site, but also to guarantee public access by operating the house as a museum.
Yes, there may be a buyer out there who would treat the house with due respect, but such a result is far from certain. Because there are no restrictions on the Sotheby's sale, a purchaser would be free to alter Mies's masterpiece -- to add a bedroom for the kids, say, or to screen in its airy porch -- and thereby disturb or destroy its subtle harmonies.
Or, a new owner might even decide to take the house apart piece by piece (no simple task given the precision of Mies's detailing) and move it to another location. Moe and David Bahlman, president of the Illinois preservation group, rightly point out in a joint statement that this would be "an architectural disaster of the first order." It also would
be quite loony, but there's no telling what kind of loons might be attracted to Sotheby's in December.This uneasy situation came about because the State of Illinois, under budgetary and political pressure, reneged on an agreement to buy the house from Lord Peter Palumbo, its owner for the past 31 years. Palumbo, a real estate developer and collector of modern houses -- he also possesses a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and one by Le Corbusier in Paris -- purchased the property in 1972 from Edith Farnsworth, a medical doctor and the original owner.
By all accounts Palumbo has been an ideal custodian, using the house as it was intended to be used -- as an intermittent retreat -- and maintaining it in pristine condition. After a damaging flood of the Fox River in 1996, he hired Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, Mies's grandson, to carry out a $500,000 restoration. On my recent visit the house looked as good as new. The hundreds of lady bugs attracted to its white steel piers did not in the slightest mar the splendid lines.
The Farnsworth House is more about ideas than practicalities. Its everyday deficiencies have been almost legendary from the time they were first enumerated by Farnsworth in an Illinois courthouse in the early 1950s, during a bitter legal dispute with the architect.
For instance, there's the mosquito problem. Mies did not want screens to mar the transparency of his porch or the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, but Farnsworth put them in anyway. One can easily imagine how the screens did indeed taint the beauty, and also how they must have made summer evenings more bearable. (Palumbo, in contrast, has made do without screens and attacked mosquitoes at the source, replacing the prairie grasses they adored with a conventional lawn.)
Then there is the decoration issue -- in Mies's carefully calculated interior, one cannot even move a chair a few inches without altering, and possibly spoiling, the carefully calibrated whole. More fundamentally, there's the contradiction between residential privacy and all-glass walls, made all the worse when the house in question is famous and lacks any interior walls. Farnsworth once was startled coming from her shower by a group of Japanese tourists, busily snapping photographs.
These and other impracticalities, however, pale in comparison to the building's sheer presence in the landscape. And its other transformative qualities. The house is simplicity itself -- a long box measuring 28 feet by 77 feet and constructed of glass and white-painted steel -- yet simple means have been deployed with such definitive precision that the effect is magical and complex.
Supported by eight wide-flange steel columns and raised five feet off the ground, the horizontal box at first view appears to hover amid trees. The slightly asymmetrical placement of a long entry platform contributes to this dynamic effect. Yet, paradoxically, the transparent building stands solidly and authoritatively in the land -- there are
echoes of stone Greek temples in this harmonious box with steel legs.You see right through it, but it refuses to disappear.
The house has a handmade feel, too, despite its industrial materials. During construction Mies insisted that the steel columns be painstakingly sanded and covered with several coats of thick white paint to eliminate any sign of the welds and bolts that connect the column to the steel roof and floor beams. It's as if the architect wanted his house to be as perfect in its way as the gorgeous old sugar maple that shades it from the south.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of architects have gone to school on the building's nonpareil conjoining of outside with inside, man-made with nature. It is in a sense an observatory more than it is a house, a contemplative pavilion in a glade alongside a river. In fact, the Farnsworth House's useful life as a house is perhaps over. The building's public time has come, one hopes, because like all great cultural artifacts, this one belongs to the ages.
I was thrilled to see confirmation that the Yellow Line will be extended to Ft. Totten next year—but why should I be? My landlord told me last night that he's selling the house that I'm renting. He didn't so much tell me as show up unannounced with prospective buyers hoping to take a walkthrough (interrupting ANTM, no less!), but whatever. It's bad news and I have no interest in looking for another place and I already proactively miss my lovely home on V. Now every barbecue will feel like the last.
So, what next? H Street? Trinidad's supposed to be cheap—I guess that's where I'll be looking. I could probably get used to the Argonaut.
Let's get rid of the fuckin penny already!
Tomorrow's CP pick: Connie Imboden at Heineman Myers.
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, MLK Memorial Library, 1972. Click to enlarge.
Those were the words of the Washington Post's architecture critic, Wolf von Eckardt, in 1972 upon the opening of the Mies Van der Rohe–designed MLK Memorial Library.
We've heard precious little in recent days from the WaPo about the fate of the building, even as it's become increasingly clear that District developers and government officials emphatically do not share von Eckardt's flattering and considered opinion of the building. With last week's announcement that Benjamin Forgey, the WaPo architecture critic since 1981, will retire in June, I don't imagine that the paper has plans to act as an advocate for high architecture or as a local educator on the architectural and civic history of the District's most important Modernist building.*
Months ago readers of the WaPo—Metro section, not Style—were treated to a two-fer by Debbi Wilgorin (here and here ) concerning the library's administrative hurdles and the concomitant fate of the Mies building. On February 6, Wilgorin wrote:
[M]any civic activists and library advocates are reluctant to abandon the existing library named for the civil rights leader, which is a badly neglected but architecturally significant building designed by famed modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.Levy's interest is in moving new property, architectural landmark be damned. Neglecting the stamp of one of the Big Three (Mies, Wright, Le Corbusier) is an architectural crime.A task force Williams appointed last year to study overhauling the library system estimates the cost of building and endowing a new central library at $280 million. The mayor and the library board, which he also appointed, say a top-quality public library would draw people to the new neighborhood. [Note to Mayor Williams et al.: The spot in the "new neighborhood" is located in the heart of gentrified DC . . . just two blocks from the Mies. —ed.] They also say the existing headquarters facility lacks the openness and flexible programming space that are the hallmarks of 21st-century libraries, and that it cannot be renovated and rewired to adequately serve today's patrons.
"Besides being depressing, and aside from all the deferred maintenance, the Mies building is a very inefficient building," said developer Richard Levy, who heads the library board's facilities committee. He said the city would get more value for its libraries by selling or leasing the Mies building as office space and putting the proceeds toward library improvements elsewhere.
It's been a crime long in the making, and one that contributes to Districters' disconnect with the building. Alexander Padro of the Recent Past Preservation Network writes about the effects of decades of neglect on the building:
As a result of the District of Columbia's chronic budgetary woes and spending less than a third of the national average on library building maintenance, the MLK Library has suffered significant neglect. Among the signs of neglect are stained and threadbare carpeting, inoperative drinking fountains, an HVAC system unable to provide consistent temperature throughout the building, long-abandoned dumbwaiter and pneumatic tube stations, and obsolete card catalogs built into the floor of the main lobby. Importantly, while much of the library's valuable Mies-designed furniture has been discarded, the building is virtually unchanged in terms of its appearance and plan since it opened. Three spaces on the fourth floor, the director's office, the board room, and the director's reception room, all of which have multiple pieces of original furniture by the architect, best reflect Mies' design esthetic.Executive spaces, notably, that aren't well traveled by the daily library user. Not that it has to be that way. The DC Preservation League notes that, as one of the most functional buildings the architect ever designed, the MLK Library "was constructed with a flexible interior plan and the capacity to add a fifth story when needed. These measures were taken to ensure the building could continue to serve its intended purpose for approximately 150 years."
Setting aside for a moment the question as to whether the Mies serves the community well as a library—but noting in passing that there is no architect whose building could undergo 30 years of severe decline and still be prized by the community—other questions stand regarding Mayor Williams's business model for the future of the library. Writing in the Intowner in 2003, P.L. Wolff reports that the Mayor's plan vision called for a "smaller main library" in the old convention center—at a cost of $150 million. Since then, the Mayor's estimates for the new library headquarters have nearly doubled to $280 M.
His specific intentions for the Mies are no clearer. Richard Huffine, president of the Federation of Friends of the DC Public Library, writes that the Mayor has convened one public meeting on the Budget Support Act of 2007, which "would allow the current home of the main DC Public Library to be leased to a private entity for 99 years." (That April 11 meeting was not open to public testimony.)
More from the WaPo Metro desk: Minus site acquisition costs, the (most recent) mayoral estimate for the cost of the new library headquarters is $180 M. (Don't ask how this cost jibes with the Mayor's 2003 cost—it doesn't.) The new costs assumes a site acquisition bill of $100 million,* which the Mayor suggests will be offset by the lease of the Mies. While it might be reasonable to assume that a century lease for the property could garner $100 M, the costs to restore, refurbish, and repurpose the building are unclear. Assuming that these costs are minimal, why wouldn't the District pay to preserve the architectural gem in its pocket, thus saving the District at minimum $100 M in site acquisition costs?
If those restoration/refurbishing/repurposing costs are maximal, what assurances does Mayor Williams have that the linchpin sale in his plan is feasible? In other words, if the chips fall the right way for a developer, they could work for the District—more so, since the District already owns the building. If the cost is in fact no good for a developer, the Mies won't be developed. And if the Mies can't make for a decent library, what sort of project space can it provide? Who's going to lease a building that "cannot be renovated and rewired"?
Suspect is the fact that the Mayor has not completed a cost evaluation for restoring the Mies. According to architect Stuart Gosswein (excerpted by urban restoration consultant and blogger Richard Layman—and I apologize for the convoluted quoting, but follow me here):
In a letter dated February 20, 2006, the Committee of 100 asked the city's chief financial officer, Nat Gandhi, to undertake a cost analysis on renovating MLK vs. building a new structure. The letter to Dr. Gandhi was copied to the library task force and all members of the DC Council. There has been no response from Dr. Gandhi to date.I have not read any followup to the question. If the cost evaluation has been performed and I simply don't know about it, as ever, I stand to be corrected. Frankly, isn't this a crucial piece of data—a question that should have been asked before February 2006? Shouldn't the Mies cost be square one (if you'll pardon the light pun)?
The Wlliams administration has provided one concrete estimate, anyway: $450 million, the cost of repairing the District's public library system. At a half-billion dollars to remake the entire system, I'm not convinced that a Modernist building is at the root of the problem. Nor is it apparent that a chi-chi, WiFi-enabled centerpiece library will solve those problems or serve the system's core underserved constituency. And even granting the Mayor's goals, it's not clear that the Mies can't be that building in the first place, at better cost and to the pleasure of architecture fans the world over. Or that a new flagship building won't undergo the same fate as the Mies, if the District doesn't address the substantive structural problems that created the mess in the first place.
The Mayor owes the District a few assurances. One, that he has his numbers straight—and that he's considering all the numbers. Two, that the Mayor doesn't plan to demote the District to the architectural backwaters by compromising the Mies. Third, that there actually is money to fix the baseball stadium library system, and it's not contingent on the sale of a building they've been badmouthing as impossibly retrograde for years. There's finally an opportunity to bend Mayor Williams's ear on Saturday, April 22 at 1:00 pm in the MLK Library, and I plan to put in my two cents—so if you care about the issue, I hope to see you there.
Is there any hope that the District can keep the Mies if the District government sells or leases the building? Can everything yet come up Millhouse? Short of inventing a new public purpose for the old MLK Library (contemporary arts center, anyone?), no. Divesting a public building of its public use, especially in such a rushed and unstudied job as the Mies has been given, is a surefire way to serve developers, not the city's non-federal architectural heritage. If it were extremely profitable to lease/renovate the library (so profitable, it'll practically pay for the new one!), we wouldn't be having this discussion—we'd be renovating the one we have. I'm not convinced that Mayor Williams's conviction that saving the library will be accomplished by abandoning the "depressing" Modernist aesthetic/delapidated building at a very high cost—which will be borne by the lease of the "depressing" Modernist aesthetic/delapidated building—is honest, much less responsible.
No, I expect brief public discussion, more of the financial shell game, followed by bulldozers and then a hotel.
One more link: read Leonard Minsky, who's written a great deal on the subject and advocated specifically for the public library system. Books—check 'em out!
* Ben Forgey's written about a Mies preservation project before, just not (to my knowledge) our Mies. A link to the article by Forgey about the Farnsworth house can be found on the sidebar to the right at this National Trust for Historic Preservation site—but the link to the WaPo article no long works. If any reader has a Lexis Nexis account or can otherwise find the original article, and would like to pass it on to me, I'd appreciate it.
** The cost of the Mies was $18 M (which adjusts to around $40 M; I'm pretty sure the reported $18 M is not adjusted for inflation). Unlike the current MLK Library, the proposed library site will not be a standalone building. What will we be getting for $100 M? This question is nearly moot in my mind, since you're not going to do better than a Mies.
UPDATE: Another Gay Republican (yes, another one) writes along the same lines. See you on Saturday, AGR.
UPDATE II: So Benjamin Forgey is still filing reports at WaPo—here's an article about the neighborhood politics surrounding the expansion of the Phillips Collection. I'd assumed that he just wasn't writing for the paper any longer. No one is better suited than Forgey to report on the issue, and no one is more obliged to do so.
Sorry that I've turned this space into a City Paper update blog—I have a lot of shows I'd like to write about here but not nearly enough time to get down to it. For now, how about . . . a City Paper update? In today's edition look for an item about "Micro-Monumental" at the Gallery at Flashpoint. I'll link the pick once it appears online tomorrow.
UPDATE: Click.
. . . about an item in the CP on Ruth Levine at Gallery 10 Ltd. It's on page 97, so I'll wait until you get there. This was my first trip to the gallery, which apparently predates the migration of Asian land mammals across the Bering land bridge into North America. A gallery more than 30 years old doesn't "close" at the end of its life, it sets sail from the Grey Havens to the Undying Lands in the West. (Not to say that Gallery 10 is closing; I'm sure the gallerists have much work to do yet in Middle Earth. I don't know what I'm talking about.)
In other news, if you are an artist, I don't want to be friends, because our friendship will introduce a conflict of interest should your work come up in a show I might review. At the same time, I like friends! So I don't know what's going on with that.
Next week I ought to have a couple more items in the CP, and mebbe news about another project, too.
If Trader Joe's opens a location at 14th and V Streets NW, I'll never step foot into Whole Paycheck again. Let's make this happen. Please, please, please.
As far as I'm aware, I don' t have anything in tomorrow's City Paper. So by all means, don't read it. Instead, pick up this week's issue and re-read that great Molly Springfield profile again. Her Web site is here, and if you click through this horribly formatted search page and you can find a few things I've written about her stuff.
Items for the social calendar:
(courtesy of Sommer)
The Embassy of the Netherlands is way up in Woodley Park, nearly in Chevy Chase. The Embassy of Denmark, on the other hand, is just off Mass Ave on Embassy Row. Two distinct locations, two distinct Web sites, and who knew! two distinct countries!
One of them needs your solidarity and support right now: You can show the Danes that Americans don't kid about our commitment to free speech by gathering for a peaceful demonstration outside the Embassy of Denmark at noon tomorrow. If boycotts by Muslim importers are costing the Danes millions, I say it's high time we dig deep and buy that LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer. This is about ham and Havarti on Danish rye—I don't know what you call that, but it tastes like freedom. Wash it down with a Carlsberg, friends.
Speaking of a lunchtime beer or 12, the impresario for tomorrow's counterprotest is none other than Christopher Hitchens. Fail a breathalyzer with the Hitch before 1 p.m., get a free Rose of the Prophet Muhammed!
If you need another reason to read James Huckenpahler's art blog: he's into The Apes!
Or at least links to them!
Fusebox, one of the District's top-shelf galleries is closing. I'll post the press release:
After a remarkable and rewarding five years, co-owners Sarah Finlay and Patrick Murcia regretfully announce the closing of Fusebox effective February 11, 2006.So, this opening will be the gallery's last, which I'll miss as I'll be in Dallas. Speaking of, my brother just showed up to take me to Big D, so I don't have time to comment, but best of luck to Sarah and Patrick going forward.As many of you know, Patrick Murcia, my husband and co-director of Fusebox, has for the past 5 years diligently balanced his demanding full-time position in the nonprofit housing world with his substantial responsibilities here at Fusebox. He now has an opportunity with his organization in San Francisco, and we, as a family, have made the difficult decision to close the gallery and relocate.
We can never fully express our gratitude to this community for its overwhelming support. We believe more than ever in the viability of Washington as home to a vibrant, internationally relevant contemporary art scene. We hope above all that our success has helped to affirm that potential. We are indebted to the other galleries and nonprofits on 14th for their collegiality, professionalism, and commitment to excellence; and for taking the risk to come here and create a critical mass of exceptional art spaces on the 14th Street corridor.
Of course, no commercial gallery can survive without avid collectors, and we have been so fortunate to work with an amazing community of intelligent, passionate people. These individuals deserve so much credit for substantially raising the bar in Washington--for zealously participating, for educating themselves, and for enthusiastically supporting excellent artists both within and outside this community.
Most important, we want to publicly express our deepest gratitude to the 18 artists who have been such an integral part of our lives for the past 5 years. Beyond providing us with a first class program, they have generously shared their time, their ideas, and their friendship. They have made it incredibly easy for us to realize our mission of furthering their careers. Every one of them has made huge strides professionally during our tenure representing them. We have every confidence that all of these extraordinary artists will continue to do great things.
Special thanks also go to our Assistant Director, Kevin Hull, for his uncompromising commitment, and to the many talented and ambitious young interns who have enriched our lives and helped in every aspect of the gallerys operation--without them we could not have succeeded.
In closing, we want to reiterate that this art community has so much to offer and so much potential for continued growth and significance. We hope that any void we might be leaving will be quickly filled by another promising new gallery, and that this rich community of critics, curators, academics, gallerists, artists, students, and collectors will give them the same generous support and encouragement they gave us. Thank you one and all.
CNN has love for the District's arts. The article mentions the upcoming Capital Fringe Festival, the first in the area. This editor is friendly with one of CapFringe's directors, and I'm pleased to see her hard work pay off in official acknowledgment.
I'm not excited about leaving Texas, but I'm happy to come home to the spring art season. No tasty enchiladas, the arts, but they'll do.
I wouldn't be surprised if the artists participating in "Found Sound" were extremely annoyed with Mark Jenkins for appropriating their exhibits with his tape sculpturesthese, in the form of feces. He's punning off the Port-O-Lets in which the exhibits are installed, which is smirkworthybut is Joseph Grigely happy that Jenkins wrote "hot poop" on his exhibit? The Numark Gallery associate or volunteer who's probably going to have to clean it off? What about the not-exactly-subtle negative comment about the project? (Link courtesy of DC Art News.)
The kids these days. No respect for private property public art. Click away for more about "Found Sound" (PDF).
UPDATE: Here's a non-PDF link to the "Found Sound" site, which features a sample of Brandon Morse's installation.
UPDATE II: Jenkins has removed the images at the link and issued an apology to the "Found Sound" folk. It's not my place to say, but I think it's big of him to apologize.
See, all this buzz? Now you really want to check out the installations, right?
Nearly every other day, it seems, Tommy does something to make the internets work just a little bit better. Today, it's in a way that I actually understand! Check out DCist Maps, the new and ridiculously useful Google Maps application he's written for the Districtthe app charts Metro paths and stations over Google Maps searches. Then pester him to build one for your town!
Tom mentions this Washington City Paper piece about the blight on 9th Street NW and its gardener, Shiloh Baptist Church. Shiloh has blocked efforts by developers and entrepreneurs hoping to use the liquor license to transform the areaa strategy they've had a hell of a lot of success with in, for example, all the areas south and west of 9th St.
From the quotations in the article one gets the impression that the Shiloh antagonists are mobilizing for the usual reasons: concerns regarding the pernicious influence of nightclubs, alcohol, and rock and roll. I have my doubts. The fact that the church officials cite concerns about nightclubs but are, in fact, activizing against Ethiopian restauranteurs and the people behind a vegetarian cafe suggests that they have their eyes on the larger wave of gentrification. Nightclubs would likely follow development that linked the growing Convention Center area to U Street.
Perhaps more importantly, development begets development. I can think of a compelling reason or two for Shiloh Baptist Church to work to maintain derelict, low-cost properties in its immediate vicinity. The church recently completed a $5.5 million expansion, an option that might not have been available to them (and would not be in the future) were the surrounding properties undergoing a commercial revival. Tellingly, the article hints at further expansion efforts.
Possibly the church's leaders recognize that gentrification might change the racial make-up of the neighborhood and thereby its flock.* And, hey, it may be the case that the church's leaders are just that ignorant. Maybe they're willing to cultivate a nasty 9th Street in order to ensure local prohibition (despite the fact that the run-down liquor store near the church will probably only close once newer establishments squeeze it out). But maybe they're just business savvy developers themselves.
* Tommy says that the church's parishioners are largely suburban, so maybe this explanation doesn't apply. Since the church is organizing against the interests of the neighborhood, the flock's actions are all the more deplorable if they aren't local. Regardless, I've read conflicting accounts about the demographic groups in the District that gentrification actually forces out of neighborhoods, so it's hard to say whether this fear is founded under any circumstances. But it certainly seems as if the criminal element are among those dislocated.
Briefly:
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 resourceyet 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 unIrish publike 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:
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:
Remember: DC9 doesn't open until 7. At night. You want to always have to wait that long to start the evening?
Kathryn Cornelius, still from Resolve, 2005.
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 caf, in short; but for the purposes of a large art exhibitlike Seven, a WPA\C fundraiser curated by Fraser Gallery co-owner Lenny Campellothe space is more like an obstacle course.
In the most notorious of alternative art venuesthe cafit'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 cafs 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 problemthe 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 cant 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 Kapoorlooking sculpture, seems to sublimate nudity and speak about the body less harshly. The viewer will appreciate Lees reminder after Manon Clearys cheap, adolescent photos of penises personalized by adhesive googly eyesfunny ha-ha photos, yet god-awful works of art.
Margaret Boozer, Reinvented Landscape, 2005.
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 Amosstyled 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 showincluding contributions by local luminaries like Sam Gilliam and Chan Chao, whose works must contend with the furniture, noise, and bustle of the caf floordoesn't rescue Seven. The good are lost among the bad (the show features four times as many artists as Ive mentioned here, including one large room of painters thats 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.
You know, Borf got a raw deal. The expos published by the Washington Post following Borfs arrest and the compromise of his identity was misguided. It places a great deal of emphasis on John Tsombikoss apparently facile political motivations, distracting details upon which his detractors quickly seized. But it wasnt political edification that made Borf a phenomenon. Instead of questions about why Tsombikos went to all the trouble, I wouldve asked why the rest of us care: Is there any estimate to the number of Borf tags out there? Wheres the most unlikely place he hit? Does he have a favorite among the sites hes tagged? What do other artists, graffiti or otherwise, say about his arrest? What about the man off the street? Are District officials able to estimate the amount of money spent cleaning or restoring spots that he tagged? Where's the nod to the Wooster Collective?
Instead the article condescends with something called situationism and then tries to make me cry with the back-story on the iconic Borf image. Whatever, Im with Tom and ValerieBorf was witty, prolific, and irreverent, and he'll be missed in the District, if this is the end. I dont know if theres anything in the Graffiti Tagger Guild codebook about retiring with honor upon arrest, but I cant imagine that one stint in jail or even a revealed identity will keep him out of the game if he still wants to play. If he's gone, its nothing but Mara Salvatrucha tags and iPod DJ nightstories for the rest of us.
Dying to plant your nicotine-stained fingernails into somebody's face? Wish you could tell smoking ban opponents that it's no use blowing smoke up your ass? Hooray, interminable debate! Stop by the Lincoln Theater tonight for a townhall meeting on the proposed District smoking ban; I'm planning on taking notes. I'm curious to hear more about Council member Carol Schwartz's proposed compromise bill:
The Schwartz bill would offer bars and restaurants that go smoke-free a two-year tax break equal to 25 percent of the sales tax they generate while increasing license fees and ventilation requirements on those that don't.Though if I recall correctly Council member Kathy Patterson's out-and-out smoking ban stands a fair chance at passing, since its path to passage bypasses Schwartz's Public Works committee, whose members comprise the largest bloc of ban opponents on the Council, in favor of David Catania's Health Committee, whose chair (Catania) cosponsored the smoking ban. Regardless, I'm taking notes tonight, and I'll post them tomorrow (more quickly if there are curse words)."It's truly a carrot-and-stick approach," Schwartz said. "It does not mandate it, it does not coerce it, rather it gives businesses in this city freedom of choice while we maintain our freedom of choice of which establishments we patronize."
For the record I'm sympathetic to the argument that identifies secondhand smoke as an absolutely heinous toxin that ought to be banned in bar, entertainment, and restaurant workplaces so long as there are not viable alternatives for staff who do not smoke or relish constant exposure to secondhand smoke and its gazillion carcinogens. I also am of the opinion that bar and restaurant staff have less job mobility than some other professions and can't simply work some place else if they don't prefer a smoking environment. On the other hand, I love to smoke when I drink and think that an important aspect of the American character would be lost if bars were sterilized, so I'm open to proposals to bolster market incentives for nonsmoking barsI'm just not convinced that they'll strike an effective balance.
I'm hostile to two positions in the debate: 1) It's hogwash that smoking bans hurt local business, and 2) groups like Smokefree DC, with whom I nearly agree on the issue, except for their insistence that a right to smaller dry-cleaning bills is somehow relevant and that whole part of the charter that says its members must be drawn from the most uptight, sanctimonious members of the community.
UPDATE: So I didn't end up going to the townhall meetingsome good news that required celebration. Nevertheless I did see Brooke Oberwetter from Ban the Ban walking down the street afterward, talking very heatedly into her cell phone.
UPDATE II: Ms. Oberwetter may have been angry because Council member Jim Graham, who was an undecided on the smoking ban as recently as yesterday, through his support behind a comprehensive smoking ban.
Yesterday evening some friends and I caught a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Shakespeare Theatre. Top notchthe production value was high (and dark), the humor was appropriately bawdy and physical, and the performances were all more or less spot on. And even though it was 147º in the shade, a sultry sunset concluding the first hot day of a muggy summer seemed like an appropriate setting for the show. A pic-a-nic basket's worth of beer helps with the heat, anyway.
But every director knows that there's one absolutely indispensable element to success in the theatre: electricty. And I don't mean jazz-hands enthusiasm, but honest-to-goodness AC/DCa District black-out in the fourth act brought the house down, literally. Know what? The show does not, in fact, go on once it's in Pepco's hands.
So we had to pack up and make our way through the dark before the final curtain, but I thought I'd post some observations in the hopes of drawing out a genuine Bardophile.
One: Unseen acts notwithstanding, Bottom easily stole the show. Now, I have it in my head that Puck is far and away the meatiest role in the play, but now I'm not surePuck's performance was okay, maybe too sissy, but moreover the role itself looked less substantial than I had thought. Did we get a bum Puck, or is there a little more room for Bottom at the top?
Two: Not a question, but the actress who played Hermia (Noel True) was fantastic. A little like Maya Rudolph doing Diana Ross on SNL, if you can imagine that in iambic pentameter. (Side note: We're the first hit for "Damn, Tanina," which makes me think that I'm the only one who thought that skit was funny.)
Three: Again, the art direction was top shelf, especially the costume and concept for the edgy faeries, which were a cross between the flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz and the music video for Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away," so no complaint there. Except. The faeries weren't very sexy. Everyone is supposed to be crazy from the heat and the faeries are supposed to really drive that home, and though they did a lot of slinking, it wasn't hott.
And if anyone reading ever has a performance cut short by a blackout, take a bow! In the absence of that closure the audience actually resorted to The Wave. I kid you not. Had a police official not taken the stage to tell us that the show was over, I think the actors could've rightly been held responsible for the carnage and cannibalism that would have inevitably ensued.
Blake Gopnik had a modest proposal for the Corcoran:
With that modest change of name [to the Corcoran Museum of Photography]and ambitious change of mandatethe Corcoran would go from being a very poor relation of the city's great museums, with their world-class collections and shows, to being the only full-scale museum of photography in the United Statesand possibly the biggest in the world. New York would have nothing to compete with it.Corcoran director David Levy demurs:
Taken in its entirety, Gopnik's proposal might be hard to reconcile with our continuing mission to present the Corcoran's choice collection of American art (of particular resonance in this capital city) or with its very strong educational and community orientation. Still, he suggests a promising direction, not just for this museum but for our city and our national patrimony.Art Institute of Chicago director James Cuno speaks at the Corcoran and, at Tyler Green's prompting, tackles the subject of the Boston MFA's lending a dozen priceless Monets to a commercial gallery in a Las Vegas casino (Cumo says this is extremely unwise). At this point, according to MAN, Levy defends Malcolm Rogers's direction of the MFA and its practice. Defending a fellow moneylender in the temple up the coast?
So there's your good advice, and there's your bad advice. Levy's seeking out the worst of the latter in following Gladwell's lead. Tyler noted that "at a recent Corcoran opening shindig, the gallery allowed someone to stand next to their admissions desk, hawking rugs 'inspired by' The Quilts of Gee's Bend exhibit;" Wednesday one can see food gossip writer Liz Smith speak for an exorbitant fee (she's serving "the dish," but she's some sort of cookbook author, so I guess vegetables are sluts or something?). Small potatoes. I had assumed that more J. Seward Johnsonsytle atrocities were in the works to secure the funding for the Gehry faade, but perhaps Levy has his eye on the permanent collection.
A harbinger of dubious things to come. Wonder whether any of this will be hashed out at the May 23 board meeting?
UPDATE: In the Corcoran's defense, the gallery is hosting the last 36 hours of Melissa Ichiuji's Stripped performance right now, which sounds like the sort of thing you expect a contemporary museum to endorse.
UPDATE II: DCist elaborates.
Glenn Ligon is speaking at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Horn of Hirshthose of you who don't have opening day tickets for the Nats should check it out.
UPDATE: Gloating aside, I do wish I could see the lecture. I'm not exactly sure what's responsible for his recent rising star, but I've seen a lot more of his work this year than I expected. If any reader out there is planning on attending the lecture, take notes and send them my way! I'd like to post them here or at the very least peruse.
Incidentally, while I've got the window open: Podcasting. What's that about? Do we like it? I guess I don't understand the difference between this and uploading an MP3. Anywaywhat sort of institutional barriers are there to recording a lecture (say, tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Hirshhorn) and podcasting it? I'm sure lecture policies vary person, place, and event; just curious whether anyone has any specific experience to share.
UPDATE II: A Hirshhorn associate tells me that the lecture will be available in audio format at their library in 12 months. I'll put it in my calendar and let you know in June.
A few things for your calendar: First, Julian has sounded the call for another Blogorama on Kalorama; come by the Rendezvous Lounge in Adams Morgan tonight at 7 p.m. and say hello. Maybe some of the DCist folks will show up and make it a District route.
Next: The AU MFA thesis exhibitions just started yesterday. Scouts eager for the next Maggie Michael/Dan Steinhilber breakthrough will be camping out in the AU bleachers for the next few weeks:
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 sayand I don't know the extent to which Lenny Campello of DC Art News contributes or what Cyndi Spain has to say on the subjectbut 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 itthis 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 hatsand 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.
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.
I never gave Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections a fair shake when it was publishedI 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" showexactly 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.
Lenny asks whether anyone will second the description of the DC Warming discussion provided to Lenny and published anonymously. Frankly, I think Lenny is missing a crucial pointhe published a review that stinks of both dubious charges and an overt agenda, so it seems to me that the burden of proof is on him. When you give an anonymous voice access to your forum, you're not quoting, you're corroborating.
Regardless, the description Lenny published ranges from uncharitable to outrageous. For example, as I recall, one question in particular was phrased and moreover intended quite differently than Anonymous put it. Ms. Porran asked how Tyler's blog relates to his criticism, why he links to other writers, and how that supplements his criticism. Tyler said that he hoped to give other writers exposure and that Internet-based or blog criticism in particular represented a link between the cube and "kitchen table" discussions of art. Tyler very definitely provided an answer, and Anonymous, who doesn't bother to disguise his dislike for Tyler, absolutely mischaracterized the event by saying that he was "unable to answer." That is not just uncharitable but completely false, and, moreover, a characterization that could potentially damage a critic's reputationif Anonymous's summary weren't so obviously the work of a hack.
So there, it's my word against Anonymous's, but I'm signing my name to mine.
. . . you know, this is the stupidest scandal ever. You knowfrom reading Joseph Barbaccia's version of events, I can tell that he and I came away from the evening with distinctly opposite impressions. But that's fine, that's what's supposed to happen. Done, good for Joe, good for me. Yet that isn't ever the end of the story, because the District plays host to an overly loud negative chorusa histrionic column, an aureate estatewho are waitingeager!for Blake Gopnik or Tyler Green or whoever to say something, anything, that isn't dogmatically grassroots or populist or I'm-not-sure-what-but-something. I even received an e-mail on Tuesday afternoon from someone associated with the DC Warming event who noted worriedly that every DC art blogosphere discussion gets mired in this sort of dramatic, flame-prone bullshit.
I swear, DC, I can't take you anywhere!
On Tuesday I attended the "DC Warming" panel lecture organized by the District outpost of Art Table, a national organization for professional women working in the arts. The event was initially intended for Art Table members only, but since it was held at DCAC, the invitation was extended to that organization's listserve, from which it eventually trickled down to the Internet and its unruly masses (and moi). Faith Flanagan (whom I recognized as a former contributer to Cultureflux, if you remember that old site) helped organize the event—three cheers for her. Courtesy of HTML bullets, the panel members:
Pollan opened up by establishing a rule that would greatly behoove every DC arts conversation: No mention of any local newspapers whose names start with Washi and end with ngton Post. I came in expecting to gag over denunciations of Art-O-Matic and medieval cries for Blake Gopnik's head. It didn't happen. We're all better off if it never does again.
On the general state of the arts in the District, Tyler sized up our place pretty neatly:
"They're putting up Anish Kapoors in Chicago with public money, and we're putting up panda bears."If there was a dominant narrative thread of the evening, that captured it. It's not so much that the District has conservative tastes per se but that its progressive arts community has been on the defensive for some time. I think there was some consensus among the group that this is changing—nationally visible artists and the emerging 14th Street corridor (maybe we should start saying emerged?) being the hallmarks of the sea change. There's something to be said for the way that the federal museums abet this growth: Since the Hirshhorn and Corcoran and NGA are national points of interest, a prominent gallery culture stands to capture some share of that attention. Especially for those who can take some share of credit for this progress—these panelists all can—a guarded optimism is certainly warranted.
A few turns in the discussion struck me as exceedingly interesting. The first was pretty much everything Allison Cohen had to say. She's an IP lawyer who has transitioned into entrepreneurial arts consultancy (she operates Sightline). Which means that she helps people who lack specialized knowledge of art with their decisions about purchasing and investing. Cohen noted the predominant attitude among cautious, first-time buyers: "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." Which she says is as much an intentional barrier, an insecurity, as it is a revelation. Cohen is certainly right that people ought to have as little compunction about seeking out guidance with decisions regarding art as they do when they seek a lawyer to answer questions about the law—not only is that practical advice, it's a hell of an elevator pitch. I would certainly like to be able to discuss her business in greater detail—I'm sure that I'm making her sound like an art world madame, guiding tender novices in their search for beauty. But as she said herself, she respects art for its ideas and not its potential to supplement home decour, and she wants to help people make sound decisions. I hope to find out more about what she's doing—broader Internet visibility wouldn't hurt.
Pollan, McClellan, and Reis had a few commentworthy observations about the psychology of the gallery. That the bright white of a contemporary gallery seems to suit contemporary art better than other setting options is a given, but that such a space is hostile to most people sometimes escapes me. Different communities have addressed this paradox with different strategies: As Tyler explained, it was years ago (so the story goes) when Mary Boone commanded her gallerists to be unfriendly, a strategy intended to make the white space the least intimidating aspect of a gallery visit. Here in DC, the galleries are "personable." I think the alcohol helps, personally. No word about how they cut the tension in LA . . . I'm inclined to say Qaaludes, but that's probably ungenerous.
Hearing Philip Barlow speak was the first time I'd ever heard a collector address how one gets into the business of being an art collector. As one might suspect, it involves acquiring large sums of money. So that's a scratch. He did say that he does not (yet) consider his collection to be a document of the 90s/00s District progressive arts, and he does not buy work from good artists whom he does not care for. He also says that the work he collects fills his home and offices, which made me wonder—if Barlow buys a Steinhilber, does he just end up with scores of plastic junk everywhere?
[As Philip notes in comments: "What I said on the panel was that I started buying art when my income started growing faster than my rent. Admittedly this was 15 years ago, but I started saving $100/month expressly to by art and only spent what I saved. That was hardly acquiring large sums of money." I didn't mean to disparage the man's hard work or thriftiness. Philip struck me as a funny guy, so I was having some undue fun at his expense. All apologies. —Ed.]
Some odds and ends:
That's the name of DC ArtTable's panel lecture: DC Warming. So tonight at 6:30 p.m. you can participate in your own self-ridicule by venturing out into the absolute freezing coldit's a well-known fact that the District is the currently the coldest place in North Americato go to a lecture about how hott DC is. The art scene, anyhow. And they'll only ask $20 in admission for your efforts! Like a trip to the MoMA!
Okay, I kid, though twenty bucks is on the steep end of the bills I'm carrying in my wallet. Tyler Green, Maggie Michael, Philip Barlow, and several other local laudables will be in the house, so if you find the District art scene as interesting as I do, you'll pony up the scrylla to chat with the people who make it interesting. Great people though these may be, however, it's still miserably fucking cold out, and there are some things art can't change.
UPDATE: Not every panelist was aware of the admission price before agreeing to the lecture. That's important to note since there is something distinctly Marie Antoinette about taking $20 from people and telling them that DC is warm when the District is, in fact, so cold that it can't even be metaphorically warm. So I say we hold DC ArtTable to the fire for this one.
Much like its author, my blog has been experiencing technical difficulties on and off all morningand I'm inclined to blame last night's DCist happy hour. As Cath and Tom explain, the night was a rout. It was good to see Kyle and meet Missy and several other folks, drink copiously, and sprint home only to decide I urgently needed to make 80s-country mix CDs for my coworkers for Christmas shortly before utterly passing out.
Until someone hands me a bloody mary, I won't be writing anything brilliant. I'll hand off writing duties to guest-blogger Kingsley Amis:
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as loking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.He has no idea. (From Lucky Jim.)
So I believe G.p eclipsed 1,000 unique visitors yesterday. I know, I know, you collected Ks back in your blogspot days. If you really want to marginalize my achievements, just note that 600 of those were probably spambots and at least a handful were looking to me to decode the "he's the Matthew Barney of LAC arts" namedrop from Six Feet Under. Those HBO writersso witty!
If any of you non-spambot readers live in our fair nation's capital, stop by DCist's happy hour tonight at the Big Hunt near Dupont Circle. You need not be a blogger or art fan or even believe as DCist does that bubble tea is a phenomenon currently "sweeping the nation"all you need is a taste for alcohol and an ID authorizing you to drink it.
Jonathan Padget in the WaPo writes somewhat dismissively of artist Linda Hesh's recent Art Ads project, for which she attempted to post ads, in both the WaPo and the NYT, featuring photographs of couples combined with text that addressed the gay marriage debate:
[Hesh] dubbed the project "Art Ads" and created two portraits of friendsa mixed-race couple and a male coupletaken at a Sears Portrait Studio, "a familiar format that you can instantly relate to." But Hesh wrangled with both the Post and Times advertising departments over their objections to the original phrases she chose to accompany the images: "At least they are not gay" for the mixed-race couple and "They could ruin your marriage" for the male couple.Information artists are an easy target for that second question, especially when they can't claim the stature or project visibility of, say, Jenny Holzershe put to bed this question of whether sloganeering can be done as art. Maybe we don't like Hesh's work, but let's not kid anyoneHesh is working in a well-established genre and medium.Ultimately, Hesh says she gave up trying to clear the ads with the Times. They were finally approved by The Post's advertising department with the phrase "Do you notice their race or gender?" for the mixed-race couple and "Could they affect your marriage?" for the male couple. Each image ran in a not quite two-inch-square space in the Post's A section in October, along with a post office box number to which readers were invited to send feedback.
Cost for the ad space? $2,828. Number of responses? Six.
Given the effort, expense and outcome, Hesh may end up inspiring more dialogue about issues much different from marriagesuch as "Was the project worth it?" and "Do tiny newspaper ads with cheap pictures and generic layouts count as art in the first place?"
As to Padget's first questionwas the project worth it?I'm not sure he realizes what a strong case his august employer has, unfortunately, made for Hesh's work just recently. Some of you may recall that around the time when Hesh's art ads were originally run, one weekend, print editions of the Post featured an insert called "BothSides magazine," a multi-page, full-color pamphlet that proffered anti-gay propaganda targeted specifically at Washington, DC's black community. Courtesy of the outraged liberal blogosphere, BothSides is available as PDF documents (sections one, two, three, and four), so you can see it for yourself.
I have a few highlights. From section 2:
Proponents of the homosexual lifestyle argue that as race is merely a byproduct of inherited genes, so is homosexuality. The weakness of this position is that people of color reproduce and pass on the DNA that makes the skin brown; however, homosexuals cannot reproduce. If homosexuality were a generic trait and homosexuals were true to their orientation, the trait would die in their first generation. Nature does not perpetuate homosexuality.Amateur hour with Punnett squares! I'll assume for the sake of space that you're all sufficiently crafty armchair naturalists to navigate your way through the allelic mayhem implied in that paragraph. Next: the Church takes on the myth of red-heads!
Elsewhere the median age of mortality for homosexual men (discounting AIDS deaths, even) is listed as 41a notorious statistic from a 1994 study conducted by the discredited anti-gay researcher, Paul Cameron, the meaninglessness of whose data ought to be readily apparent regardless of your scientific background.
Needless to say, Family Guy James Dobson makes an appearance in section 3 to explain that while being black isn't black people's fault, homosexuals can and ought to be held accountable for being gay. "Civil rights is the shorthand way of referring to the struggle to overcome discrimination based on unchangeable physical characteristics, such as skin color or ethnic heritage." Emphasis addedit's a theme the pamphlet reiterates several times. Who thought it would make for good copy to reframe the Civil Rights movement in terms of its applicability to the nature/nurture debate? Moreover, who goes around talking about the "changeability" of being blackwhat?or thinks that this has any mitigating impact on the culpability of white, heterosexual Christian intolerance?
I've strayed far from my original thread to show what a cooky job these fundamentalists can pull offlow-hanging fruit, maybe. A better point is that recombinant art serves multiple functions; in the case of Hesh's work, as both art and media criticism. While her ads did not spark controversy qua art, the questions naturally follow from the latter aspect of her work:
Linda Hesh, Art Ad, 2004
UPDATE: Michael O'Sullivan discusses Hesh's "(In)visible Silence" show at Baltimore's School 33 Arts Center. O'Sullivan grants Hesh more than Padget:
But Hesh doesn't measure the success or failure of her work, whose costs were underwritten by donors (each of whom received artwork in exchange), on how many people wrote in. Her main objective, she says, was simply to put the pictures in front of the largest possible audience, not the art-world elite who, presumably, will come to School 33 to look at the supporting, after-the-fact documentation. Most gallery-goers, Hesh believes, are liberal to begin with, and support the cause of gay marriage.Fine, fine, but I still don't think you can discuss the piece in any valuable way without evaluating its context. You know, how does the piece work, not just is it important that people people didn't write letters. O'Sullivan's responding more to Padget than the piece itself.
