From Glasstire:

At first we thought this was a hoax, but it's true: the Irving Bible Church has opened a gallery space next to the Ugly Mug coffee shop in Irving. According to church sources, the space is not devoted to Christian-based work per se, and is being programmed by Donnie Copeland and Kyle Garrett, members of the congregation and students at the University of Dallas. Currently on view? Piles, an installation by Copeland of piles of fast food. Email him (dcopela2001@yahoo.com) to propose shows.

From what I've heard, Irving is become another one of those quirky little Texas towns that mysteriously becomes a haven for contemporary art. Marfa and Lubbock are two others.

If you're in New York, you might be interested in this:

At the South Street Seaport Museum in conjunction with the exhibit "Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas" (in cooperation with the NY Museum for African Art)
Friday, February 6, 2004
7-9pm Panel Discussion: Digital Diaspora
Explore how new technologies in the entertainment industry, the arts and the sciences are transforming concepts of identity, community and diaspora. Featured panelists include digital artist Tana Hargest, Ellen McDermott of Africa�s largest Cybercenter, Dr. Alondra Nelson, co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, and Gary Dauphin, Editor-in-Chief of Africana.com. Wine and refreshments. Free ($3 suggested donation).
South Street Seaport Musuem
Schermerhorn Row at South Street Seaport Museum
12 Fulton Street

current music: still haven't taken This Needs to Be Your Style out of the CD player...

I will admit that I am as tied up as anyone in defining what is "real art" and what is not, probably moreso. In theory, this is inconsequential since art simply is and will be itself with no help from any of our definitions.

Still, let me discuss last night's Zack Simpson event in those terms. Gallery Lombardi turned over its whole space to Simpson last night for a one-night-only event in which he displayed some of his famous shadow technology work in which one's cast shadow interacts with projected images on the wall or on a screen.

Zack Simpson's "Mariposa"

It's pretty spectacular stuff. You catch virtual butterflies or swat marbles around, etc. The piece I came for and in my opinion the standout among them was the Virtual Calder. In this piece you stand in front of a screen and using only your hands and a simple set of rules you "construct" a Calder-like mobile and set the whole thing flying into motion. It was beautiful. Depending on how well-balanced your construction was it would either float gracefully or flop around clumsily, as the computer would have your construction follow actual laws of physics. There is a much less intuitive and less graceful version here, but it will give you some idea of what was going on.


Zack Simpson's "Calder," 2004

A similar piece was devoted to reconstructing the work of Piet Mondrian.


Zack Simpson's "Mondrian," 2004

But is it art? One of Rachel's email solicitations for the event stated with a kind of bewilderment that Simpson has been embraced with open arms in the science community, but not so much in the art community. His work is on display at a number of Science and Industry museums worldwide and at the Sony Museum, but his art resume is a little thinner.

And as beautiful as his work was last night, I have to say I can see why. In reconstructing the work by Calder, you think of two things: the amazing effect of creating virtually without tools and then the marvel of the physics and computer programming behind the resulting mobile. It's a "gee wiz" moment about the technology of the process.

But when you see an actual Calder work, it's the beauty of forms floating in space, the space created by those forms that is right at the forefront of the work. Calder was interested in physics, but he didn't want us as the viewer to be thinking about that. He wanted us to marvel at the mystery while he erased the technology as much as possible.


Alexander Calder's "Untitled (Standing Mobile)," 1960

Simpson's Calder piece makes the problem of physics and form and technology explicit--it can't help but do so--almost the exact opposite of Calder's intent. So you have to view this piece, then, as an amazing art appreciation tool, more than a work of art itself. I could see a string of patrons interacting with Simpson's piece and then going to a museum with a real Calder and having a deeper appreciation for what's involved, but the "wow" moment you have in front of a Calder will always come back to the mystery of the forms in motion, not the technology of creating them.

That's fine. They're two different pieces and nowhere did Zack Simpson make the claim that he was trying to duplicate the experience of seeing a Calder. In fact, I overheard him say that it's "about the creation" rather than the artifact, which is why when you walk away from the screen, the construction comes crashing to the ground, again following very convincing laws of gravity. This is why his work is pretty much where it probably fits best-in the science world. Nothing wrong with that. The best capital-A Art enjoys mystery and taps into things--passion, death, love, loss, sex--that are ultimately inexplicable. Even digital art can do this. Check out Jess Loseby sometime. Science, however, prefers to explain things, clarify things and provide a set of documentable, repeatable rules. This seems to be closer to Simpson's project.

That for me is the difference between Calder and Simpson. All of this sounds very grumbly, like I have a bone to pick with Simpson. I don't. The experience was worth so much more than the $5 I paid to get in there. His stuff is genuinely amazing and everyone should see it. And simultaneously it doesn't act as art in the way I need my own art to act.

My guess is that Simpson doesn't give a shit about that. Nor should he. He's created magnificent works that are what they are. And I had fun watching them. That's enough justification in my book for their existence.

A windmill, a birdcage...the illustration project trudges on.

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are showing art at Rice University through March 4. They do everything in shades of healthy and unhealthy grass, making use of photosynthesis, chlorophyll, and the impermanence of nature. Since I missed Chuck Close at the Blaffer Gallery, I'm going to try and make it to Houston for this. If I do manage to escape, I'll report on it here.

A work from the Rice show


Dilston Grove, 2003, (Former Clare College Mission Church), grass, clay, water

This latter work is like a softer, cooler take on Olafur Eliasson's recent blockbuster, the Weather Project:


Eliasson's the Weather Project installed at the Tate

Savage.

current music: Donna Summer, This Needs to Be Your Style

Proving that some ideas are just in the air and happen through us rather than because of us, Johannes Gees's Helloworld is almost an exact duplicate of my own Global Nomads project, only much bigger and much better:

Helloworld Project received 38,000 messages from all over the world with peace emerging as the most dominant theme. The Helloworld Project closed with the last messages flashing across the mountain Morro dois Irmaos in Rio de Janeiro and the UN Headquarters building in New York. The artist and creator of the Helloworld Project, Johannes Gees, in New York to witness the final spectacle, thanked the United Nations for hosting the project.

From the finale of Helloworld

Tonight, I'll be drawing: a camera, a stamp, an aquarium, an igloo. If I get that much done, it'll be a great night.

After drawing a battery, a cave, a mushroom for the 15th time, a whale and a butterfly net for that cursed illustration project, I went and checked my email.

It turns out the mayor of Austin's wife is an artist and had personally tried to save the Capital of Culture program. She caught wind of the rabble rousing I'm doing and emailed me to see what's going on. She even offered to join the resistance, so to speak. Even I'm amazed now at the legs this letter has gotten! I emailed her back proposing a meeting. Democracy is cool, although it would have been even cooler if the city were behind this like they said they would be in the first place.

Here are 2 views on the future of music on the Internet, one exciting and potentially revolutionary:

Just Say 'No' to Record Labels
Rock veterans Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a provocative new musicians' alliance that would cut against the industry grain by letting artists sell their music online instead of only through record labels. Wired

The other clumsy, disingenuous and beside the point:

Beyond the Antipiracy Suits
There's been much criticism leveled at record executives, but not much credit given for their behind-the-scenes work to revamp and resurrect their business. Though it started with cost-cutting, the prescription has also combined four principal elements: embracing new business models; overhauling the industry's marketing and promotion practices; adding value for consumers to current products; and educating the public and enforcing copyright laws. Wall Street Journal

current music: Nara Leao, Garota de Ipanema

I've avoided talking about the Barnes affair and have offered no opinion on the World Trade Center Memorial design controversy. But I will say something briefly about the Israeli ambassador who went crazy and attacked a piece of installation art in Sweden that he claimed glorified a Palestinian suicide bomber.

In this article, Roger Kimball condemns the vandalism, but agrees that the art is a morally irresponsible, leftist "orthodox" propaganda piece, and bad art to boot. This article sounds as if the interviewer and the ambassador were in separate rooms on separate days, so little communication was actually happening between them. But importantly, the reporter, Jonathan James, claims a more complex morality for the artwork, seeing instead a condemnation of the violent act and an ironic comment on the subsequent fame of the suicide bomber.

I've only seen this piece of art in reproduction, and only small, online reproductions at that, but what I see in these pictures is mediocre art, but not art that glorifies violence or sanctions killing. The boat floating on a pool of blood is macabre. It is not glorious; it is not triumphant. It is sad and tragic.

Gunilla Sköld Feiler and Dror Feiler with their work "Snow White and the Madness of Truth"

I am apparently in the minority here as most other talking heads on this issue seem to accept wholesale the idea that the depiction of a suicide bomber automatically equates with an endorsement of same. I just don't see it as an endorsement. I don't even see it as neutral. As does James, I see in the work a dramatic condemnation of the bomber and the literal bloodbath that resulted from her acts. Think of the conceit: the blood of 21 Israelis is metaphorically transformed into an ocean of blood, a sea of suffering. Anyone wanting to apologize for the suicide bomber would have wanted to minimize the blood, not maximize it, not make it literally bigger than life. If you wanted to celebrate the bomber you would have played up her humanity, not reduced it to a garish high-contrast photocopy whose lips are the same color as the blood on which she floats. That alone tips the scale for me. Nobody has positive associations with people who wear human blood on their lips. If these artists are apologists, they are the worst apologists ever.

As art, the work comes up short, in my estimation. It is aesthetically flat and thematically it sounds one note and then stops. This is why I have some sympathy for Roger Kimball's argument regarding "statement art" that goes nowhere. Such art usually suffers the same shortfalls. But he's barked up the wrong tree in this case. This work is not a masterpiece, but neither is it morally bankrupt.

******

The Mark Moore Gallery in LA happens to be showing two artists that I feel a particular affinity with. Gail Dawson does paintings of video captures, mostly birds and people in brightly lighted spaces.


Gail Dawson's "Male Cardinal and Sparrow," 2001

And Belgian painterTill Freiwald paints giant Chuck Close type watercolor portraits of people from memory.


Till Freiwald paintings, installation view

current music: D'Angelo, Brown Sugar

It rained all day, so it was the perfect day to stay in and do spring cleaning. I can see more of the floor now than I've seen since April. Also, I'm finally giving away all my Global Nomads gear, now that I'm finally admitting I'm done with it. I've sent a "come and get it" email around to AMODA, The Blue Theater, and Fresh Up Club for anybody who wants the hundreds of feet of extension cords, the sledgehammers, work gloves, duct tape, wireless Internet cards, adhesive velcro and so on. It feels good to let it all go, something my therapist has been hinting at me to do since July. Well, Bob, I'm finally getting rid of it!

I'm happy with what that project accomplished, except for one fact: seems like the minute we pulled the screens out of the ground, the whole phenomenon vanished from the cultural memory of the city. I spent six months of my life and several thousand dollars to pull it off and the next day it was as though it never happened. I had had some idea that people would remember it for a little while and that it might come up in conversations about what the arts could be in this city. By in large, that didn't happen.

We All Are Global Nomads at Republic Square Park, 2003

Meanwhile, I took fifteen minutes to dash off a letter to the city saying how pissed off I was about the cancellation of the Capital of Culture Program, and it's causing a whole stir among the art world. It got forwarded all over the Internet, and I can't go anywhere now without someone telling me how great they thought the letter was. Some people are even starting to talk about going ahead with the program in a grassroots sort of way without the official sanctioning of the city. I don't know if that will happen, but it's being talked about as a direct result of that letter.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: you can't control your own legacy. You are at best a consultant. History makes up its own mind.

I promised some insight into the Sweden affair. Not today. We'll see how tomorrow looks.

I went to 2 different art shows last night and knew I'd be writing about them here. So I went in with that in mind. One was an exhibition of art from students at Austin's Regan High School, curated by Deborah Roberts and held at UT's Center for African and African American Studies. The other was Arthouse's Going West group show at the Jones Center.

I was determined not to fall into a bunch of clichés about how much better the high school art is, or how the kids are so fresh and honest and the professionals are all a bunch of cynical, unfeeling effetes. I was determined not to think this.

oil pastel work by Cynthia Tejeda

And I largely succeeded. I mean, certainly, some of the high school kids were better than some of the other high school kids. But by the time you get to high school, inhibition has gained a firm foothold on the psyche. Someone will correct me if this doesn't pass the Piaget smell test, but it seems to me that by the time you reach the age of 7 or 8, the direct impetus of expression starts to take a back seat to the goal of "getting things right." In other words, we pass from an expressive impulse to an observational impulse. Then we spend the rest of our artistic lives working to get the two back into a meaningful balance.


Young child's art--pure expression


Older kid's art--expression is hampered by observation

So this was everywhere evident in the work of the high school kids, that struggle between expression and observation, subjective experience and objective truth. None of them had resolved it, of course, but the struggle was beautiful and engaging to watch.

Deborah Roberts made the somewhat risky choice of mixing in work by mature artists like Tonya Engel, Charles Randolph and John Yancey, all the usual suspects from the COABA mafia (Coalition of Austin Black Artists). The professional work could have completely overwhelmed the work by the kids, but it didn't. It was actually pretty amazing to watch--it was a dialogue between generations, kids speaking to and questioning their elders, and the elders responding. A conversation rather than a confrontation.


Tonya Engel's "The Game," 2001

Then there was the crowd: the kids and their parents, then grown folks like myself, Deborah, Michael Ray Charles came by. And then this, which was pretty amazing: people were actually looking at and responding to the art. Actually engaging. People were speaking out loud to the artwork. "I like that eye." "Why is that guy standing backwards like that," etc. That's what art is supposed to do isn't it? People are supposed to look at it and have responses that are direct and meaningful. It's very rare to see that at an art opening.

So then I dashed downtown to the Jones Center where I walk into a much tonier, thinner and whiter crowd, and where the art is barely being noticed. The low point was a darkened side room where a projection art piece was being shown--it might have been brilliant, I don't know. I couldn't tell because of all the talking and schmoozing going on in there. Half the crowd literally had it's back to the screen talking to the other half of the crowd. Why does this even surprise me?

I did manage to see some gorgeous, frosty airplane paintings by Johnny Robertson that were mysterious and nostalgic in a quiet way.


Johnny Robertson, "South LA II," 2003

So what is it about these two crowds? What differentiates them? Crowds at the Fresh Up Club tend to be somewhere in the middle--there's lots of schmoozing going on, but the art isn't forgotten. AMODA Exhibition crowds are all about the art, in a quite intense way usually.

Is this it: Arthouse has always gone after an icy, cool, detached contemporary aesthetic. And that's how the crowd responds; they are detached and uninvolved. AMODA and the high school kids, on the other hand, are interested in engagement and those crowds respond in kind.

Now that I think back on the d berman opening, everyone on the Bucknall side (which was about twice as crowded) examined the art, studying it up close and for a long time, whereas people tended to drift through the Bale Creek Allen side. They glanced here and there with their "yes, I get it" checklist and moved on.

Am I becoming an art conservative? It's possible, but I'm not Hilton Kramer yet. I'm just reading crowds and reporting what I see. I'm not even sure all of this is exactly true; it's all being filtered through my layers of memory and thinking.

But this I know: there is something real and something true about expression and about passion made manifest, two things that ironic, detached contemporary art has always been suspicious or downright contemptuous of. And this real thing speaks to audiences, who hear it and respond. As an artist it is that communication that I am interested in.

current music: Ekova, Heaven's Dust

So I'm trying to sell an article idea to Art Papers magazine; essentially a roundtable discussion with young, interesting artists on the subject of the future of black art. I pitched the idea of involving people like DJ Spooky and Susan Smith-Pinelo and Mark S. Bradford. I managed to get in with the editor, Charles Reeve, but he rejected me mostly on the grounds that he doesn't particularly buy the idea of "Post-Black," an idea pushed hard by Thelma Golden, but that Reeve finds suspect. The idea was integral, but not essential to my whole proposal.


Susan Smith-Pinelo's breasts in "Sometimes," 2000

So undeterred, I wrote back and said, "Fine, we'll do an Afrofuturism thing." That was the other half of my idea and I have no problem honing in on just that. I'll see what kind of response I get on that. But what do I care really? Now that I've been rejected, I got nothing to lose.

Although, I have heard Callaloo is doing an entire issue devoted to Afrofuturism in the fall. So if I can get my stuff together in the next week, I may try to ride that bandwagon.

Here's good news: I have finally been to an art event that I was actually happy to go to and didn't walk out feeling like it was a waste of time. It was at the needlessly lowercased d berman gallery, and while none of it moved my spirit, it was all good and I appreciated having seen it.

After being waylaid by Rachel Koper, whose Gallery Lombardi has had some of the most interesting shows in Austin in the 2 years since it's been closed, I was able to actually see the art. Bucknall's monkey pages and kangaroo kings are pretty exquisitely crafted and their sense of humor rides long and high because of the meticulous paint handling it's set against. These aren't easy one-liners. They're witty instead of just slapsticky, as they would have been under a less competent painter.


Malcolm Bucknall's "Ripeness is All" 2002

Bale Creek Allen was less coherent, and the reformulations of Salman's Head of Christ are so played out. (Allen's wore a bandana cholo-style, and I believe there was some reference in the title to East LA.) But there was some nice stuff there, too. Again, some wit came through.


Bale Creek Allen's "Holy Dirt" 2003

This art night almost made up for last weekend's trail of tears.

Other news: The NEA is returning to discipline-based grantmaking, as opposed to all those bizarre post-Culture Wars categories they had before, though they are very clearly still granting to organizations only. I guess the wounds are still a little fresh to risk another maverick Mapplethorpe or Finley getting through.

Also this from Wired:

Gay Marriage Poll Gets Annulled
When the American Family Association posted an online poll last month asking its constituents their position on gay marriage, it thought it was engaging in a straightforward exercise. But the AFA never counted on the power of the Internet. And once the URL to the poll escaped its intended audience, everything went haywire.

I don't honestly care that much about gay marriage (I should, but I don't), but I do like the idea of cyberspace running amuck and the voting getting out of control. Now that's radical democracy!

Finally, I normally hate gratuitous uses of Flash on any website, but especially gallery websites. But I have to admit this one is pretty cool. Also the artist they are showing now, Robert Olsen, looks phenomenal. That hard light that is somehow dangerous and inviting--like a dark secret you know will destroy you and yet you wrap yourself in it like a blanket--that's what's intriguing about these works. Philip-Lorca Dicorcia does the same thing.


Robert Olsen's "Untitled (Tram Interior)"

Tomorrow, I'll weigh in on that whole Swedish affair and the suicide bomber that everyone in Blogland is yammering about. All, of course, without the benefit of my enlightenment... stay tuned.

current music: Chris Whitley, Hotel Vast Horizon

From Wired:

Here's the Price of Fame: $218.32
Tarnation may be the first feature-length film edited entirely on iMovie, and it cost $218.32 in videotape and materials. Despite its low budget, the film has already earned a high profile. Both John Cameron Mitchell, the actor and director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and independent film maverick Gus Van Sant have signed on as executive producers.

If anyone ever says they don't have the materials or the money to make meaningful work with an impact, show them this article.

Meanwhile the illustration is getting a little easier... I'm moving my projected completion date up to sometime in 2006.

current music: Musiq Soulchild, Aijuswanaseing

Happy MLK Day everybody!

From the Chicago Tribune:

Remembering King's `forgotten years'
As Americans prepare once again to take a day off to honor the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., I wonder whether America would be as eager to honor him if he were still around.

I worked a little on the illustration job that I was contracted to do months ago--the drawings for the kiddy vocabulary test. They're coming along, but every drawing reminds me that I'm not a cartoonist, which is really what they need. It's a struggle for me to flatten, simplify and reduce everything. That comes naturally to some artists, but me, I'm having to remind myself with every sketch, "no perspective, no dimension, no detail!"
At the rate I'm going I should be finished sometime around the summer of 2009.

I'm in the worst mood after a horrible art weekend.

Last night I hung out with my friend Andy and we attempted to go to the Zandoozi Gallery, which was advertised on another website as being open until 9pm. Come to find out it closed at 6. That actually wasn't so bad, though, as we took the opportunity to just walk around downtown looking at art through windows.

The lovely Jennifer's art was showing at Zandoozi and although I feel her brushwork is a little bit overwrought, her work is admirably assertive for someone who up until two years ago was a demographic numbers cruncher. I'll be interested to see where she is in another 2 years. The gallery has chosen to show her most boring painting on its website.

It all went downhill from there. We cruised over to the Kathy Womack Gallery, just because I could see its lights from where we were standing. My God... This gallery has replaced the pretentious, yet serviceable Raj Gallery, which specialized in poorly framed art photography and digital prints. Womack's art almost defies description in its bubbleheaded, insipid vision of the world.

Womack's dopey, cackling, skeletal socialites turned my stomach. These anorexic shells of women live in some dream world where the champagne is always flowing, someone has always just uttered something witty and acerbic, and (one assumes) the husbands have just successfully closed that big merger at a healthy profit.


One of Womack's gross portraits

On her website, she insists that she herself is not an upper crust socialite, but you have to wonder at the company Womack keeps that all of her women literally have grins bigger than the spaces where their brains would be. Thank God she's also a racist so that black women are by and large spared the treatment of her grotesque imagination. Her misogyny reminds me of a Vanessa Beecroft installation, except that Beecroft at least has the courtesy to make her hatred of women blatant. Womack hides hers behind bubbling champagne and layer upon layer of chiffon and taffeta. And tiaras for crying out loud! Tiaras!!


Some crap by Vanessa Beecroft

As if all this weren't enough, I went by testsite tonight in hopes of something thoughtful, interesting. Testsite is The Fluent Collaborative's revolving exhibition space, housed in the home of the guy who runs the thing. He basically turns his foyer and living room over to an artist to install some art project.

This month it's an Anjali Gupta/Jason Singleton collaboration. I was a little disappointed by the installation: shelf after shelf of identical card files in vaguely oldfashioned boxes with little post-it notes stuck out of them here and there. (I discovered that the "cards" were fake, like stage props--they're all stuck together and hollow on the inside.) For the first one and a half seconds the boxes made sort of a nice visual rythm throughout the room. But after that, they just sat there and gave you nothing. The post-it's all had what appeared to be little hand-written snatches of unattributed quotes from some high literary source. They were dimly interesting, but overall I was left with a very "so what" feeling.


One of the Gupta/Singleton boxes (detail)

But then I came home and read this shit at the Fluent Collaborative site:

We are pleased to announce the fourth installment of testsite, which pairs artist Jason Singleton with writer Anjali Gupta. Their collaboration will fall loosely between a semiotic assault and an ongoing architectural intervention, documented in the form of exegetic diagrams, official status reports, and finally, a transcribed discussion of the success and/or failure of their endeavor.

Give me a fucking break! What the fuck is a "semiotic assault and an ongoing architectural intervention"? Cut the MFA crap already. I'm willing to be talked into believing that that description means something, but what I saw tonight was surely an assault of nothing but boringness. What started as something tolerable, if disappointing ended up being some of the worst stuff I've seen in a while thanks to that description.

This is the kind of thing that makes me more sympathetic to Sir Kyffin Williams with all his old fart grumbling. Talk about art with no love, no passion. It almost makes me long for the foggy moors of Wales.

current music: Donna Summer, This Needs to Be Your Style

From the Austin Chronicle:

At Least We're Still the State Capital
This time last year, Austin's then Mayor Gus Garcia signed an agreement proudly accepting the designation of our fair city as an American Capital of Culture for 2004. Now, here we are two weeks from what was to be the official ceremony kicking off Our Culture Year, and, well, current Mayor Will Wynn has said, "Thanks but no thanks" to the international honor.

This is embarrassing. A city of our size couldn't sustain an investment in its own cultural health, an investment that Panama City somehow found a way to sustain, by the way, along with Curitiba, Brazil and some place called Iquique in Chile. What the hell is going on here?

current music: Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon

Obviously, I needed to catch up on some sleep. I went down at around 7:30 last night and didn't regain consciousness until 6:45 this morning. When you get sleep like that and end up all refreshed, you look back and wonder how you ever walked around that tired.

From BBC News:

Sir Kyffin attacks art 'fame-seekers'
One of Britain's leading painters Sir Kyffin Williams has accused modern artists of being more interested in fame than art.

First of all, this artist has a show at Oriel Gwyngyll Gallery in Llanfairpwll. Are they kidding me with this? Where is that, Middle Earth? (OK, it's in Wales.) More seriously, Sir Kyffin has a bone to pick with conceptual artists and what he somewhat sloppily calls "modern art." He says this: "There is very little love in art today...very little humanity in the work people do." In broad strokes I agree with this sentiment, as I have alluded to elsewhere (12/10/03). But we part company there.

Sir Kyffin's main complaint lies somewhere at the crossroads of content (no love) and form (conceptual art in general). He's not real precise in his criticism, at least not as this article presents it. So he comes off sounding like some crusty, old-fashioned academician who basically just doesn't like anything new.

Then you look at his art. It's pretty. But it is almost wholly irrelevant to any kind of life anywhere. Not only in content, but even in its formal backwardness, it comes across as the work of someone who hasn't been living in the same 20th and 21st centuries as the rest of us. Before you say that some people really do live with sheepdogs and quaint cottages and foggy moors, that may be true, but no one does so in a totally uncomplicated, un-self-aware way as this art presents it, unless they literally have been isolated from the rest of society.


Sir Kyffin's Mot the Dog

The experience of living in the 21st century in the industrialized world is necessarily an experience of being fractured, being irretrievably multiple. It is an experience of being, but then separately being aware of being, in a way that was not true 200 years ago. It is also an experience of speed, change and perpetual vertigo. Even if you live in a cabin, if you're at all aware of the world "out there," this is the case. Kyffin's art ignores this the same way that Thomas Kinkade does. In its utter idealism and uncomplicated pastoralism, it is a total lie. And his appeal has to be on the same grounds as Kinkade's, even though Kyffin is in the end a much better artist. It the appeal that in a scary, vertigious world, this art affords an escape to a world of simple wholeness, as the world existed before trains and industry and World War I. That's sweet and fine as far as it goes, but it's also false.

[A side note: Kinkade--who I know is barely worth discussing--talks about his art illustrating some sense of peace and hope. But one gets the distinct impression from the isolated winding roads, the vast barrier-like lawns that that peace is arrived at not by solving any of the problems in the world or in life, but by escaping from them. The hope seems to be a hope to shut out all the troublesome unfortunates of the world who presumably could never avail themselves of a two-story cottage nestled in the Swiss Alps. Take a look at his work sometime--that sense of safety and seclusion is very much at the expense of some great danger that's kept safely "out there" beyond the edges of the frame. That explains his claustrophilia, the sense of willful closed-inness his paintings evoke. That's why his work is so reactionary and disgusting.]

So while I will also insist on redeeming content in art (and redeeming can be tough, pitiless, difficult, too), I don't feel the need to do so in a backward-looking way towards the good old days of the academy, but rather in a forward-looking way. This admits the possibility of digital art, conceptual installation, or any number of new and interesting possibilities.

current music: Joao Gilberto, Joao

Yesterday, I went crazy and for 5 minutes considered becoming an engineer for NASA.

Artists and the Red Planet
BBC News Online looks at how writers and artists have embraced the theme of Mars during the past century or so as America considers sending men to the Red Planet. BBC News


Image from Mars rover Spirit

current music: Oasis, What's the Story Morning Glory?

Finished the latest portrait this morning. I'll wait until it's dry this time before I scan it. It was very touch-and-go last time with wet paint on my scan bed. I left this latest one a bit more raw and "chunky" than previous paintings. You have to work a lot harder to make it resolve into a figure. I think that fact makes it all the more engaging and interesting.

I wasn't feeling particularly inspired while painting this one, but that was nice in a strange way. It's a very dangerous thing always to wait for inspiration before painting--it'll only happen in fits and starts that way. It was nice to feel like I could finish something and have it turn out fairly good even when I wasn't ablaze with passion.

current music: The Radar Bros., The Singing Hatchet

I've started on the new painting, plus have some ideas for the previous images in the series. I'm going to try mounting the small images on larger canvases, probably painted mostly white, similar to the way the background is done here. It's a risky move that may not work, but if I don't try I feel like these paintings will never feel pushed quite far enough.

******************

This on Iona Rozeal Brown who is burning hot right now:

Brown is Beautiful
Iona's work is bewitching and desirable. In terms of drawing, color and complexity in the picture plane, one thinks of Degas. She is a true master of the eye and hand. Artnet


Iona Brown

On Vermeer:

He's the painter of light. Period
Vermeer painted more than two centuries before the invention of cinema, but he anticipated the way films make a world and fill it with light. "The only thing that really interested him was light," comments Eduardo Serra, the cinematographer on Girl With a Pearl Earring. "He's really the painter of light. Rembrandt is light on faces; Vermeer is just light, period." The Guardian


Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher," 1664-65

This is a film I will put on my list to see and probably never get around to. But I am fascinated by the figure of Vermeer. First, he shows how fickle history is. Apparently, he was considered pretty much minor until the advent of cinema when everyone realized how amazing his technique was. Artists who go around trying to determine their own legacies are WASTING THEIR TIME.

Also, many people (especially artists) are apalled by David Hockney's claim that Vermeer used lenses and basically traced from the reflected image onto the canvas. Why is that so troubling? Artists have always used whatever gizmos and contraptions they could find to create the illusions they were after. Today it's computers and Polaroids, then it was lenses. People who are upset by this notion are the same luddites who cling to a romantic image of the artist as some kind of transcendent idiot savant who does everything the hardest possible way, a kind of artist that never actually existed in history, by the way, but only in some people's imagination of history. A good friend and artist put it best when he said, "If Michelangelo could have found a way to project his sketches onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and trace them, he would have done it in a heartbeat."

current music: Morcheeba, Who Do You Trust?

I did some nice cross-contour drawing, per Nicolaides. It's been a while since I felt fully present while drawing, not thinking of a million different things.

I also talked to fellow earthling Charles Nelson, via email. He's showing a piece in London that combines DVD projection and raw canvases in a mix of traditional and digital media. We're so on the same wavelength.

******************

Some links for today:

The Robots Are Getting Closer - 4 Computer Technology Forecast for Robotics (For super-dweebs only)

Jessica Loseby's art. I wish I could spend an entire day swimming through this.

The Austin Chronicle names Eric Gibbons one of 10 artists to watch in 2004. Finally, a Chronicle ranking that makes some sense.

Blogs Coming of Age in Spain
As the number of weblogs continues to bloom, so do jokes about the navel-gazing personal details they tend to chronicle. But blogs are gaining serious influence as they become an increasingly important part of media and social dialogue worldwide. Wired

current music: Virginia Rodrigues, Nos

I went to the sparsely populated Fresh Up Club opening tonight, hungry as I was for some new art. It was on the early side, which explains the light crowd, and frankly it was kind of a nice departure being able to actually see the art at an opening rather than having a hundred different interactions that are either unbearably perfunctory or that get interrupted as soon as it starts to get meaningful.

Anyway, the art was as light as the crowd. Other than Jack Shelton's huge and magnificent wood and cord sculpture that looked like some kind of schematic diagram of a viking ship hull (or a strange, giant harp of some kind), I wasn't really knocked off my feet. Usually you can count on the FUC to be at least funky if not good. And this was sort of neither. Not that it was bad art, not at all, just sort of not-quite-there. Shaune Kolber's large format photographs--of tourists shooting photographs in some state park somewhere--were conceptually interesting, but technically a little weak. They demanded a tighter film grain, which I didn't see why they wouldn't have considering how sunny all the shots were.

All in all, it was a little bit of a letdown. But at least I was able to see Peat, whose drawing prowess is well-known to be my personal oracle.

*************

I thought of a few more greatamericanclassic films that I have seen, which makes me realize that maybe I'm not as out of the loop as I think I am:

Psycho
The Wizard of Oz
The Wiz
The Big Chill
The Breakfast Club
Star Wars (all three)
It's a Wonderful Life
E.T.
Singing in the Rain
Jaws

And a couple more runners-up to the Should See in 2004 list:
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Spinal Tap
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

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From Artnet:

NEW SHOW FOR L.A. AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS
Los Angeles is beginning the new year with a 18-month-long, city-wide survey of art made from 1930 to the present by African American artists. Titled "African American Artists in Los Angeles, A Survey Exhibition," the show is being presented in three parts. First up is "Fade," a show of works from 1990-2003 organized by critic and curator Malik Gaines and presented at three venues: the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Luckman Gallery and the California State University Fine Arts Gallery, Jan. 16-Feb. 29, 2004. Among the artists included are Mark Bradford, Charles Gaines, Kerry James Marshall, Adia Millett, Dominique Moody, Senga Nengudi, Kori Newkirk, John Outterbridge, Sandra Rowe, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, Lezley Saar, Gary Simmons, Rufus Snoddy, Eric Wesley, Pat Ward Williams, Ian White and Kehinde Wiley.

The second part of the show, organized by Dale Brockman Davis, opens on July 10 at the Watts Towers Arts Center, the William Grant Still Arts Center and the Museum of African American Art. Part three is scheduled to debut on Jan. 15, 2005, at the City of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the California African American Museum. The survey is supported by L.A.'s cultural affairs department; for more info, see www.culturela.org.

Painting by Kerry James Marshall

I wish I were there. I've already talked about my KJ Marshall aspirations.


Apple Unveils Fashion IPods
As expected, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new line of smaller, sleeker, iPods at Macworld Expo on Tuesday, and they probably will sell by the boatload, if reaction at the show is anything to go by. Wired



These seem cool, but at $250, not going to be one of the first to get one.

Starting a new portrait tonight, none of the pics I had on file seemed to be working, even (especially) the one I had picked out a few days ago as the next up to bat. So I went back to Black Planet to cull a few more possibilities. That always takes a while though, so I didn't do any actual painting.

I enjoy this feeling that I am being compelled toward a crisis, a feeling that I've got all these ideas cooking and that as I finish up the current series, each painting shows me more and more what I want the next phase of artwork to be about. I've already talked about scale, but I'm also interested in complicating the composition and bringing more of a narrative element in, branching out from strictly portraits to portraits in a larger context. This will also give me an opportunity to relate more directly to the spirit of the times, more able to talk about right now, and play down somewhat my references to art from 2 centuries ago.

**************

Fresh from his own disgruntlement about the East Coast, Kenneth asked me last night why I was so anxious to get back there. Why? Because you just don't get this in Austin that often:

Examining Photography's Link to Stereotypes and Identity
Race and nation⤲and, indeed, photography itself⤲are fictions, cultural constructions that shape our social interactions. If photographs are not inherently truthful representations of identity, but must be read to find their meaning, can a different reading of these images break down their distorting stereotypes? Village Voice


Gordon Parks's Emerging Man, Harlem (1952)

Meanwhile Thailand seems to be turning into a cultural powerhouse of a particularly progressive kind:

Smithsonian-style museum to eye three million visitors a year
The planned Smithsonian-style museum complex will be modern, lively and interactive in order to attract the target of at least three million Thai and foreign visitors a year, Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisaeng said. Bankok Post

Switch Media Chiang Mai
Switch media supports not only project-realizations but also a discourse about the socio-cultural role, impact and possibilities of new media art - be that media-historical, media-theoretical (from communications-theory to art-theory), sociological, asf.

I proud to say that my own project debuted in this city last year. What a cool tradition to be standing right at the beginning of.

current music: Radiohead, OK Computer

Just went to dinner at El Arroyo with Ken who's in town from New Jersey where he's in law school. I had the highly mediocre carne guisada. I pay the price every time I stray from the golden rule of restaurants: when you find something you like, STICK WITH IT! Experimentation just doesn't pay. I could have had a perfectly decent plate of sour cream enchiladas instead of the weird, gray sputum I ended up with. I considered sending it back, but I was starving and just wanted to eat.

Anyway, Kenneth is sick of the weather already up North, even though it's only just beginning. I will likely be going up that way right around the time he gets fed up enough to come back.

******************

Here are some articles:

Burning Man, the Simulation
Now the regional has gone virtual. Oakland, California, artist Andrew Johnstone has built an interactive, 3D Black Rock City using the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 and 2004 platforms. And, in the spirit of Burning Man's no-commerce, gift economy philosophy, he's making his project available for free. Wired

How Far Can You Go?
With male nudes in full display, pornography a common source material, and explicit imagery the norm in galleries and museums, sex in art has become fun, disturbing, raunchyâ⒬�even cerebral ArtNews Online

Cocks still drive everybody a little bit crazy. They're disturbing, dangerous. This is useful in art. Still, most of the calculated, in-your-face cocks that show up on gallery walls come across as just that--calculated. They're often manipulated to provide shock value and not a whole lot else. That's why so much of that art doesn't pass the "double take" test. You do a double-take when you realize "hey, there's a dick!" and then the art falls flat and you're done. Someone like Cecily Brown steers nicely clear of this by having her paint do so much other work than just dick depiction. Or better yet, check Carroll Dunham. His penises (or proper plural "penes") are a ton more interesting than the typical "shock cocks."


Carroll Dunham's "Island"

It's also a little hard to get a grasp on why dicks in art are so affecting. When you see one in real life, it's usually pretty unassuming, if not downright comical. But the second you photograph one or sculpt one, suddenly it takes on all this power. Me, I've always thought the covered phallus--the penis seen, but not quite seen--is much more erotic and therefore much more powerful. I'd like to see a mini-trend of veils and loincloths and such. I bet a whole different set of people would find a way to get off on that.

current music: BYOB (best line: So what's the Statue of Liber-ass-ty? Just a big, green biotch to me.)

Today was not so bad--not a total loss as has been known to happen sometimes.

After a morning jog, a pretty good workout, and about an hour and a half worth of checking and responding to email, I finally got started on an illustration job I was contracted to do months ago. This is for a vocabulary test for kids and involves drawing very simple images of mushrooms, stairs, tents, etc. It does get pretty advanced toward the end, though; I have to draw ballast, an aglet (that little plastic tip on a shoelace) and a spinnaker sail (whatever that is).

Sweet Jesus, it was boring as fuck. I don't know how I'm going to get through all 46 images. Deep breaths.

So I took a break from that to fiddle around on the cello a little bit. I'm also writing a song called "Headway." Ironically, it's a song about getting nowhere. I finally nailed down the basics of the melody, the chords and the rythm. The lyrics still have big gaping holes though that I'll have to let my subconscious fill. I'm supposed to be getting together with Kazki sometime next week to do some recording. I hope to have it pretty solid by then.

So of course, I never got back to the vocab test. And I won't tomorrow either since I'm meeting another friend for dinner. For all I know, I may not even have this job anymore.

I'm trying to remember that the world is abundant. It's hard when the day job takes up such an overwhelming chunk of the day. Eventually, the art and everything else will crowd that out and let me tell you, I'm counting the days...

current music: Flaming Lips, Fight Test

I love lists and for a long time I thought about doing some kind of Top 10 of 2003. Top 10 Art Events in Austin? I couldn't come up with more than 4 worth mentioning. Top 10 Art Events Anywhere? What's the point of that; just check out ArtForum. How about Top 10 Events in the Life of Yours Truly? I started that list, but April through October was so depressing I can't bring myself to memorialize it.

Then I thought of it: When I was home in California, I finally saw The Godfather. I know, everyone's already seen that a million times a million years ago. Not me, though. Even though it is a greatamericanclassic. So I decided I really ought to see some more of these greatamericanclassics (and foreign classics) so I can dip into the same putrid cultural well everyone else is dipping into! (By the way, I did like The G-Daddy.) Also, these are films that other artists and filmmakers are constantly referring to as source material and as an artist it really would behoove me to partake. So without further ado here are:

The Top 10 Movies I've Never Seen That Everyone Else Has Seen That I Really Ought to See in 2004:

10. American Graffiti
9. Brazil
8. Dog Day Afternoon
7. Apocolypse Now
6. North by Northwest
5. M*A*S*H
4. Scarface
3. A Clockwork Orange
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

and drumroll please...

1. A Hard Day's Night


A few runners-up:

Carrie
French Lieutenant's Woman
Sunset Boulevard
Full Metal Jacket
Midnight Cowboy
The French Connection
Terms of Endearment
Whatever movie it was where someone said, "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

To my credit, here are a few greatamericanclassics that I have, in fact, seen:

Do the Right Thing
Citizen Kane
Birth of a Nation
The Birds
The Shining
Alien
Boyz in the Hood
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Sound of Music (but never all the way through)

And one I will never see, thankyouverymuch:
The Exorcist

I think I'll start tonight with this one:

Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange"

Trying to do art at the end of the day is really a drag. My patience is getting short with the day job. Everything happens at half-speed at the end of a long day.

I was doing some of my Nicolaides exercises and I just petered out after about an hour. Some of that can be pretty draining, high concentration stuff, it's true, but still...an hour is not that long.

I'm hungry to see some new art, but as far as I can tell, this town is completely dead. I've either seen everything that's up or I'm not interested. We should be getting some new shows in the next couple of weeks as the galleries and alternative spaces shake off the holiday slumber, however.

Let's see.

current music: Flaming Lips, Fight Test

Happy New Year.