I met Cauleen Smith for drinks (chai tea) the other night. She's one of those people that's so brilliant she makes everything you say sound broad and hamfisted.

She gave me an excellent term for what missing in a lot of the art I've been complaining about: "joy quotient." Apparently it's a very common crystal-hugging, new-agey term, but it fits here. Art without a certain joy quotient, even when it's angry, shocking, or cerebral, means very little.

Speaking of joy quotient, it turns out Kerry James Marshall is coming to UT Austin in March for some kind of residency. Very exciting!! I'm relying on Cauleen, who is UT faculty to get me an introduction to him at some point. Don't fail me now, Cauleen!

I'm wrapped up in the world of PHP development right now for Electric Skin. And graphic design. I've never been a fast designer, but now that I'm out of practice I'm soooooooo sloooooooow. I've now put in...20 hours?...to designing the new home page, rejecting design after design after design. That's typically how I work. I usually come up with something pretty good, and it's always very simple, which is a big plus to my mind. But man does it take forever.

current music: Jimmy Scott, Heaven

Ok, so the first public performance is officially over. Kazki and I played tonight at Cafe Mundi. I was terrible, but I had fun anyway. And Kazki still wants to play together in the future...which I am totally amazed by, because I was sure he'd say, "Thanks, have a nice life," and never speak of it again. I should feel good about that, but for some reason I feel crappy. I hate doing a bad job at anything, even though the cello is supposed to be my "just for fun" hobby.

I also feel crappy about missing the Dario Robleto reception I was invited to at the home of Arthouse president Don Mullins. Don lives on one of those hidden little streets that comes off another hidden little street and I drove around after the gig tonight for about a half hour and never found it. I really wanted to meet Robleto, plus Dave Bryant was going to be there and we need to talk...about postmodernism. I was amazed to even have been invited, since Don has always treated me ice, ice cold.

I apologize for yesterday's hissy fit. I was overreacting to something I saw posted somewhere that I won't even dignify by discussing. I suppose I am a journalist of sorts. Every blogger is in a sense. And I have my own way of doing things, and that's that.

According to the blog that my friend Alex says I refer to "every 5 minutes," the Larry Fink show that I wrote about on 2/4/04 wasn't all it was cracked up to be. According to Rosof and Fallon the photographs would have been quite at home in the fashion spread they were designed for, but don't quite cut the mustard as fine art.

Meanwhile, the gallerists and curators of the high-handed art world are showing themselves to be the most insecure members of the greater art community. How else to explain the spate of baaad, baaaad shock art shows whose only reason for existing seems to be the gallerist's desperate desire to be seen as hip by exhibiting art that is (gasp!) "shocking," even if in fact it's not shocking at all, but merely pretends to shock? I'm talking about this show specifically, but really take your pick. There are plenty of them out there. This one may be another example, even though it was "curated" by an ooh-la-la famous artiste. Take 1 part public sex (or the simulation thereof), 1 part assorted bodily fluids, and 1 part incomprehensible video art. Shake well. Voila! Instant shock art! (Right, photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, the paragon of shock)

To be fair, many of these shows were likely designed and programmed long before Terry Eagleton declared postmodernism passé. And gallerists aren't visionaries, they're business people. So there are probably a few more seasons of shock-lite to get through the pipeline.

I'm not against shock art, per se; actually I love it when shock is well deployed. That can be very useful, especially when it's well done. I've been known to be mildly shocking at times. But shallow stunts? No. Shock art, almost more than any other kind, has the responsibility of being done with absolute sincerity and packed with redeeming content if it is to mean anything beyond itself.

current music: Danger Mouse, The Grey Album

Let me clear up any confusion: I am not an art critic. I am also not a journalist, professional or amateur. I am an artist. I have some ideas about art and about the world. I write those ideas here, and I sometimes express them strongly. I also write about the things I see and experience daily, my life, my artwork, my circle of friends and acquaintances.

If you would like to read these types of things, by all means stop by every day. If you don't, here is a site that has some real Austin-area critics. They have advanced art degrees, they practice objectivity and observe professional decorum and probably don't use any curse words or talk about their own neuroses.

Enjoy!

current music: My Education, 5 Popes

I read my log files religiously. The best parts are the referral URLs and the Search Results, which show, respectively, where people linked to my website from and what searches people performed that landed them here.

It was in that way that I discovered that a Google search on "artists about race" (without quotes) retrieves my writing as 3 of the top 20 matches, including matches, #1, #4 and #19. Specifically it calls up an article I wrote a million years ago for Rhizome on race in digital space. That article got shunted around the 'net and is apparently still getting read as I got some comments on it this afternoon from Ana Sisnet, head of Austin Free Net and techno-activist. I have to re-read her email, but I think her basic point was that digital artists suck because they/we don't make stuff accessible and we should all just stop what we're doing.

This could make for an interesting discussion and I'd like to make an interview with her one of my first original pieces on Electric Skin.

I'll be doing my first public cello performance in a couple of days. I'm not at all nervous since I'm totally in it for fun and just going where it takes me. I'll be playing with my friend, the rocker Kazki--one reggae tune and one straight up rock number called "Clear Plastic Case." In stores soon.

That 3-part posting on the state of Black art really absorbed a lot of my time. And to think, all I set out to do was write 1 grousing paragraph about the state of affairs. Next thing I knew it was a 3-part series.

Meanwhile, all the support I've gotten for Electric Skin has made me decide to go ahead and add a couple more little features, eventually including orginally content. I'm not going to rush it, but I did buy a copy of pMachine to do some basic content management. If that works...watch out! It could make website updating so easy I may never again have to worry about recoding web pages every time I want to add something to my portfolio. HTML is dead! Long live PHP!

Dave Bryant of FUC emailed me in stark disagreement with my take on the Jason Singleton work I talked about on 1/18/04. He explained a bit more of the project and it actually lowered my opinion of the work. I wrote back and told him how my tolerance for postmodernism is rapidly diminishing. Hopefully, we'll get together to talk about this in person because I'd actually like to do some stuff in cooperation with Dave that could be pretty interesting.

Here are some other things from the past few days:

* a new film on the life of one of my favorite modernists, Amadeo Modigliani. I'll put this on my "to see" list and then not see it.

* a fascinating article in The Economist on deaf children who have made up their own language.

* how embarrasing is this? The National Gallery just bought a Raphael for $41.7 million (US) that turned out a week later to be fake.

current music: The High Llamas, Hawaii

Part III: A Brief Appendix, in which I offer some suggestions on where to go from here.

Once again, I am amazed by the lack of information available about progressive, contemporary black art. My venom is renewed after searching several databases, this time for blogs covering black art (of any kind) and coming up empty handed. I'm not naive enough to think that just because something isn't online that it doesn't exist, but I do take it as a barometer of what's generally available in the "real" world.

There are, on the other hand, plenty of sources about black pop music, black popular film stars and other entertainers, both online and off. And there are major institutions devoted to their support, development and promotion--institutions like Vibe Magazine, Interscope Records and the NBA. Major institutions. What if there were equivalent institutions for the visual arts, and specifically black visual artists?

Before you laugh, remember England's Turner Prize. This prize is only 2 decades old and has become as big as the Oscars are in America (ok, maybe the Emmys). It has helped to ignite the British public's knowledge of and interest in contemporary art as a popular pasttime. It has made celebrities of the likes of Isaac Julien and Tracy Emin. The press follows them to parties in the same way they follow Ben Affleck and J. Lo in the States. And remember it wasn't that long ago that the idea of women's professional basketball was unthinkable by most redblooded Americans. Now Cheryl Swoops is a household name. Things change. (At left Isaac Julien's "The Long Road to Mazatlan;" 1999, installation view)

It's not all about celebrity, but it is about reaching in and being relevant to people's daily lives. It's about helping to shape how we think about the world, how reality is to be ordered. That's always what artists have done traditionally anyway. What I've been calling "Prog-con" art is particularly well positioned to offer new kinds of meaning about and within black communities. We're in a position to offer alternatives to the worldviews offered by the Romantics (largely stuck in a politically castrated neverland) and the recent hiphop artists (increasingly offering defeatest nihilism). We are in a position to do what the jazz musicians and poets did in the 50s and 60s: that is offer new, meaning-rich, forward-looking ways to view blackness that are simultaneously new ways to view universal humanity.

A huge part of this new vision is contained in the sheer act of creating differently. That there can be such a thing as a black digital artist at all is already a revolutionary idea to many people. That such an artist might live in Nairobi or Port-au-Prince is even more radical. That a black painter can move outside of the accepted canon of styles and subjects already begins to create a space for seeing ourselves in a richer, more complex way. Lots of artists are doing this. We need more. (At right, DJ Spooky, mixologist and digital artist)

The second part of the effort is coalescing into a recognizable force and building institutions that keep that momentum going.

This is a tall order. The effort is undermined when prog-con visual artists remain isolated units moving around in a largely white art world with little connection to black communities and institutions, or it would seem to one another. Again, the lack of infrastructure is to blame here. When Nayland Blake opens a major installation show at Matthew Marks, there are unfortunately few if any black-centered publications or web sites that cover this. Meanwhile, Artnet jumps right on it. And so once again we've lost another opportunity for new ideas to be infused into the black world. (At right, Nayland Blake at Matthew Marks, installation view)

How do we rectify this situation? This is that dicey part of the article where I attempt to move from theory to practice, where I attempt to get specific. It would be nice to have several glossy magazines, a museum in every city, progressive black art galleries in every metropolitan area (or better yet, progressive black art districts), a television network, and an annual awards show. That may take a while.

In the meantime, here is my stab at a few small actions that individual artists and artlovers can take:

1. Include and mantain a links page on your website to other prog-con artists and outlets. Not providing links is like having a gallery with no windows and a door that locks behind you.

2. Have a website.

3. Write. Get the discussion going in any forum possible about interesting new visual art and what it could mean.

4. Stay in touch with the black press. Better yet, schedule a meeting with the culture editor and get a discussion going about interesting movements in contemporary art. (While we're on the subject: editors of many black news sources in America seem to have a fairly low opinion of their readers. While the Boston Globe assumes its readers might be interested in Anna Deveare Smith or Lorna Simpson, the editors of Black Voices assume we only care about Beyonce and Janet Jackson. Not that there's anything wrong with Beyonce and JJ, but only Beyonce and JJ?)

5. Talk to local gallerists and curators with whom you already have relationships about doing black-oriented group shows. I wouldn't be surprised if many gallerists think that such a thing would necessarily mean a dip in quality. After all, they are seeing the same regressive black art the rest of us are seeing. It doesn't have to be that way.

This is perhaps a start. I'd be willing to hear other ideas. In any case, we have clear opportunities ahead of us for making a difference. And perhaps sometime soon the notion that art can be relevant to daily life, exciting and challenging all at once won't be such a farfetched idea.

Part II: Righting Art History's Racist Wrongs, in which I explore some thoughts on how black artists are represented to the culture at large.

In researching yesterday's post, I figured I'd say a few words about The Studio Museum in Harlem's "Black Romantic" show, but didn't get it into the essay. In that show (April, 2002), curator Thelma Golden went outside of her admitted comfort zone and mounted a show of black popular art, what I've called the "mainstream," albeit the cream of the mainstream crop.

Artforum did an article on the show complete with a bunch of nonsense about how the show shifted paradigms and challenged artistic notions of this, that and the other, and about how everyone better go home and re-examine what they consider real art. No.

"Black Romantic" gained its artistic currency from two facts: 1) that no one, black or white, was used to seeing this kind of art in a museum and 2) white people in general weren't used to seeing that kind of art at all. Neither reason has much to do with the art, per se, but with the position the art occupies, en masse, in the culture. In short, it was as much an anthropology show as an art show. So the show's organizers were free to rhapsodize about the importance of a whole category of art "out there" being made by this teeming mass of underappreciated movers and shakers, thereby shortcircuiting the idea that the artwork could, or should, be viewed and judged as individual works that failed or succeeded by their own merits. (At right, Kadir Nelson's "Kiowa Dawn," one of the artists featured in Black Romantic.)

In so doing, the Studio Museum did a thing it otherwise never does: it openly subsumed itself within the framework of the white art world. It positioned itself as a magnanimous, highhanded institution curious about "those people" outside and only too eager to let them in, provided they stick together and essentially be regarded as a social category rather than an artistic school. That's why the ideas in the art were not open to criticism. They were, like tiki idols from some South Pacific island, to be taken whole and assumed to be discontinous from the viewer's own frame of reference and judgment criteria. The Studio Museum became the Smithsonian, and the whitest part of the Smithsonian at that. (At left Fred Brown's "Prince Street," 1977-1996. More typical of the studio museum.)

That's also probably why it made the cover of ArtForum--an inset, but the cover nevertheless. The "Black Romantic" inset is one of 2 pieces of art by black artists worldwide to have made the cover of ArtForum in the last 2 and a half years, by my very unscientific count. That's 2 out of about 76 images, give or take (Each issue carries a main image and an inset, plus the year-end issues carry a montage of 15 or so images). That's dispicable. Why? ArtForum considers itself the publication of record about what's going on in the worlds of fine art and ideas, and sadly the demographics of its covers are probably a pretty accurate depiction--not of what's being made, but what's being paid attention to.

This struggle for recognition is paramount for black artists and takes on a double meaning for "Prog-con" black artists (see yesterday's post for a definition of that term). Prog-con artists often have few outlets other than predominantly white galleries and publications and then these spaces (in the words of art critic and professional curmugeon Charlie Finch) tend to prefer their blacks one at a time. Thus in a field where nobody has it easy to begin with, black artists unsurprisingly find it that much harder to rise out of obscurity.

Such obscurity becomes historicized. I became a visual artist only after years of being a writer. When I knew that my direction had in fact changed, I figured I had a lot of catching up to do. So I read. A lot. A lot of art history, art philosophy, and art criticism. And in all of these thousands of pages it's still stunning to me how polarized these art histories are. Many of the volumes still in use in art history classes today completely or mostly avoid art made by black artists. (Actually, the common strategy seems to be to offer an African art section, which pretends that art stopped being made on that continent 2 centuries ago.)

I have to imagine that art history professors have awakened to this problem and use supplementary texts to fill out art history studies. Still, what does it say to a young mind when Gardner's Art Through the Ages, one of the most often used basal textbooks, fails to even mention as of the eight edition Henry O. Tanner, William Henry Johnson,Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Jean-Michel Basquiat? It says that black artists, if considered, should only be considered apart and as a specialized subcategory of art, rather than simply participants in the parade of art history. It's what allows galleries the steam valve release of being able to say, "We've covered black art" with the display of a single black artist. (At right, William Henry Johnson's "Jitterbug V," 1941-42)

I am an optimist in the end, though. And I do believe we are seeing fundamental shifts in how black artists are being represented within the culture at large. The Internet has not only helped to decentralize the dissemination of information, it has turned a high-capital venture, publishing, into a low-capital venture. It's now possible to get more information out from and to a greater number of people with fewer resources than has ever before been possible. We have quite a ways to go in achieving parity--obviously, no web network comes anywhere near having the power that Viacom or Time Warner exert over information. That's fine. The underground is alive, nevertheless, and it's happening, and right now it gives us the best shot of shaping our own futures.

In observance of Black History Month, I'll be doing a 3-part series on my thoughts about Black art in America. Today: Problems and Limitations, in which I take the Black art world to task and coin a new term.

Late last year, I decided that I was not nearly educated enough on the state of contemporary visual art, the trends, the events, the gossip and the scandals. Living in Austin and communicating by in large only with a small group of likeminded friends, I felt I was producing art in something of a vacuum. All my news about the contemporary art world was second hand. Even my subscription to ArtForum was an empty gesture, as I rarely actually read any of the articles.

So I did what any good digital-age, world citizen would do: I hit the search engines and I hit 'em hard. In a matter of minutes, literally, I was connected to a universe of news and information. The half dozen solid websites I came across in that first hour (through search engines, links and previous knowledge) still form the basic core of my news gathering months later--sites like Artnet, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog, The Art Newspaper, and of course, the ArtsJournal network. I didn't find much in the way of coverage of the black contemporary art scene. In fact, I found none at all. But no matter, I thought, I'll come across it eventually.

September came and went, October, November, December. By January, I still hadn't stumbled across any coverage focused on the world of progressive, contemporary black visual art, least of all in black culture sites like Africana, Black Voices and the black popular press, which does an even worse job of covering black contemporary art than "white" publications like the Toronto Star and the Boston Globe.

I felt sure the coverage had to be out there if I just looked hard enough. So I undertook weeks of systematic searching, combing through pages of matches from search engines, systematically clicking through each entry on every "links" page. I checked university databases and public libraries to no avail. There was literally no alternative for someone such as myself for whom Artnet's one article a month on William Pope.L or Iona Brown just wasn't enough. (At left, William Pope.L's "Shopping Crawl," 2001)

So I started Electric Skin as a response to that frustration. Electric Skin doesn't make it any easier for me to get the news I'm hungry for--I still have to search it out and collect it. But I hope that it keeps other people from having to go to the same trouble. To my knowledge--and I would love to be proven wrong about this--Electric Skin is now the only Web site that regularly collects news and information on progressive, contemporary art in the black diaspora all in one place. That's sad, because as proud as I am of Electric Skin, it has its limits. It doesn't generate its own original news, it is completely beholden to reporters and writers from other sources, and worst of all, it's limited by whatever time I as one person am able to give to it. It could disappear tomorrow. I update it between meetings at my day job and rely on shaky, slow internet service to canvass some 50 news sites. Electric Skin is a newborn calf, wobbling on spindly legs.

I tell this story to illustrate one of the major problems facing contemporary black visual art: we have almost no infrastructure. Aside from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center, and a couple of email listservs such as the Afrofuturism list we have few institutions, few publications, few membership organizations, few thinktanks, few websites, few if any dedicated gallery spaces. The institutions that do exist are often put in the position of having to fill so many gaps that their mission statements can't help but be diffuse and all-purpose. Many individual artists set up personal web sites, but none of these, my own included, makes any real attempt to bring visitors into a wider realm of information and ideas apart from the artist's own work, the way an e-zine might do for example. (At right, New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

Before I go on, let me first clarify what I mean by the term "progressive, contemporary" (let's say "Prog-con" for short). I include in this term work that is not only being made in the present time, but work that on some level reveals a clear-eyed understanding of its own place in art history, work that responds to current movements and developments in art, either through exploration and extension, through intentional negation, or some combination of these. Prog-con work may accept or reject postmodernism, but either way is deeply aware of its existence. Under this definition, Iona Brown does Prog-con work, Dexter Griffin does not, though it may be brand new. (At left, Iona Brown's "Untitled (Male) II," 2003)

The opposite of Prog-con work is the bulk of what's marketed to us at black art fairs and black art stores in towns across America. It's that godawful airbrushed portrait of the little girl praying that your aunt has hanging above the dresser. In fact, to judge by this mass of black art, one would think that art history had slammed on the brakes just after the heyday of Jacob Lawrence, and in fact has been steadily regressing since then. (At right, Dexter Griffin's "Rose Garden")

The history of black art from the early 70s forward has unfortunately been the history of a bifurcation: the "mainstream" which largely clings to works of illustrational naturalism clustered around a few predictable themes (folk life, religious, African imagery, etc.), and the fringe: the Adrian Pipers, Isaac Juliens, Martin Puryears and Glenn Ligons. Paradoxically, the latter group has all the name recognition mostly due to their success in the largely white art world, while the former group enjoys the majority of institutional support within black communities.

That this mainstream enjoys not only popularity, but black institutional support was reinforced to me during my weeks of Internet searching for news sources that cover black Prog-con art. A Google search on "contemporary black art" turns up thousands of matches, commercial galleries, online stores, publications, etc. To a one, these resources--what I am here calling "institutions"--support and propagate the mainstream art vision, in opposition to the Prog-con vision. In short, there are almost no institutions devoted to Prog-con visual art. In most towns, if you see a local black arts organization mounting an art exhibition, you know by in large exactly what you're going to get, and it ain't gonna be Tana Hargest's "Bitter Nigger" CD Rom. So black Prog-con art finds a home where it can. (At right, screenshot from Tana Hargest's "Bitter Nigger")

On the face of it, the situation might seem to echo the same social construct that white (or other nonblack) artists face. After all, the mass of art being made by any race consists mainly of paintings of nice flower arrangements, seashores, kittens, and horses. Most art being made is nowhere near Prog-con, and doesn't want to be. Fifteen minutes at your next local art fair should remind you of that.

The difference--wait, this is important--the difference is that while the white contemporary artist can succeed at Mary Boone, at Art Basel, on the pages of ArtForum, and on Artnet.com, surrounded by his or her peers and within his or her community, the black artist can do so only at the expense of being a fly in the buttermilk. His success necessarily has to take place outside of his community and its institutions. Success is always happening in a foreign land. The alternatives are obscurity or compromise.

The predicament of black contemporary artists will sound familiar to any member of the rising black middle class--the barely-tenable position of duality, the schizophrenic identity of simultaneously having to live always within and outside of one's community. One is always alien in both worlds.

There are those that successfully straddle the fence: the Kerry James Marshalls, the Faith Ringgolds. These are artists who deservedly have gained wide artworld success, but whose formal sensibilities are not necessarily at odds with the black mainstream. Which is why you will find Ringgold on africanartworld.com, but not Norman Lewis. You will find reproductions of Horace Pippin, but not Kojo Griffin or Julie Mehretu. The mainstream does have its boundaries, but there is some play around the edges. (At left, Faith Ringgold's "A Family Portrait," 1997)

Still, those are the exceptions that prove the rule. More symptomatic of the black mainstream art world is africanartworld.com's pious menu of subject options. Site visitors look up oil paintings by subject matter and the following menu is provided: African American, Religious, Jazz, Urban, Social Leaders, Portraits, African Art. ("African American" seems to be a catchall category including work from every other category. I'm not sure why it's there other than bad organization.) Can you imagine any other American ethnicity confining itself to such a rigid and small set of concerns in art? No other group would ever conceive of itself as being that limited. I'm picking on africanartworld.com. I do so because they unambiguously illustrate so many of the points I'm trying to make. Many other organizations, many black "institutions" are just a less egregious form of africanartworld.com.

This matters. I cannot walk away from it, or ignore it with that deeply American idea of "to each his own." The mainstream in black American visual art constitutes what amounts to a monopoly. Prog-con artists have mainly either been too busy, too distracted, too timid, too defeated, or too unaware to create countervailing institutions. What we are left with then is that monopoly of style within the black world, a juggernaut of irrelevant and largely outmoded ideas. Black communities are culturally poorer as a result of this, as black Prog-con artists struggle for recognition and cultural support.

Is there a current of elitism here? Absolutely. And I won't apologize for it. I happen to believe that what I'm calling Prog-con work carries with it a far, far greater potential for revolutionary thought and action than the conservative mainstream. That's the danger I see. Any such monopoly is inherently stultifying. Imagine if ten thousand Thomas Kinkades ruled the white art world and the only way for a progressive white artist to succeed was in Harlem or Atlanta. Oh the hue and cry that would go up over that. It's time for our own hue, our own cry.

Tomorrow: Part II: Righting the Racist Wrongs of Art History

I just got the heat fixed (during which I had to tune out the paranoid, anti-foreign, anti-American, anti-government, anti-white, anti-black, anti-muslim, anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-socialist, anti-education, anti-everything ramblings of the maintenance man. You could see the whites all the way around his eyes when he spoke. Just fix the damn heat, wouldja? Next stop for this guy is walking into a municipal building with explosives strapped to his chest.)

Anyway, so now the water is shut off. I have no idea why. On the plus side, my apartment complex made the front cover of Ghetto Homes and Gardens.

Electric Skin has received a warm welcome among friends and in the immediate art community. The emails of support have been encouraging. For now there are few enough that I can answer each one individually. Also people are already starting to "submit" articles to me, though it doesn't seem to show up in search engines yet.

I'll be posting the first of that promised 3-part series tomorrow morning. It's a doozy.

The heat broke down in my apartment last night. This meant that I could not keep the window open while painting--too cold. I only lasted about an hour with the fumes and had to close up shop after that.

I still haven't heard back from Anne Wynn, the mayor's wife, regarding the Capital of Culture debacle. That's fine. If she doesn't contact me, I'm not going to re-contact her. I hate to let an advocating opportunity like that go, but I promised myself that I wouldn't overstretch myself. The current painting series, plus Electric Skin together with the illustration work and the article I've proposed for Art Papers are all keeping me plenty busy for now.

Tomorrow or the next day look for the first of my 3-part series in observance of Black History Month. In part one, I savage the poor state of contemporary black visual art.

current music: Dave Navarro, Trust No One

AT&T has started screening these weird commercials, featuring half of a person's face spliced onto the other half of another person's face. The faces keep changing out represented a variety of ages, races, etc. Over this, Primal Scream's "Come Together" is playing, but in some kind of distorted way I haven't fully figured out yet. (The image at left is my quickie attempt to duplicate the effect of the commercial.) I think the mood is supposed to be uplifting and celebratory, and there's certainly some lukewarm message they're trying to get across about people joining together despite racial and other personal differences. But the whole thing is rather creepy to me. It looks like some kind of Dada-inspired opium trip. Everytime I see the invading army of drug-tripping, genetically spliced cyborgs I just want it all to end.

BUT in creating the above graphic, I did stumble across an interesting effect (at right.) I feel like it's been done before, but I can't quite place what I'm tapping into. Maybe it's just Picasso; it could be that simple.

Meanwhile, this unsurprising inevitability surfaced today in the Austin Business Journal:

Austin Museum Cancels Building Plans
Citing the difficulty of raising $43 million, the Austin Museum of Art has canceled plans to build a new home.

I'm not surprised and I'm too jaded by the Austin art "scene" to be disappointed. So once again, it's clear that for my artistic sanity, I have to leave Austin as soon as it makes sense.

For the first time in my adult life, though, I'm seriously considering not moving back to New York City. It's always been a foregone conclusion that I would go back, but I'm doubting that now. True, there is more opportunity per square foot in New York than anywhere else in the world, but we're living in a high-speed Internet connected world. Physical distance hasn't disappeared, but its meaning has changed entirely. It's more possible than ever to find that elusive opportunity through a distributed network of places, people and connections, in no way bound to a single geographic loaction. The artists who know how to live in that space are the artists who'll get somewhere in the economies of information and data transfer.

Cities, then, are sort of secondary, just a place to park your physical body. So Atlanta is starting to look more and more attractive. I'm far from deciding, but it has potential.

current music: Joan Armatrading, Classics Vol. 21

Now that I've finished the first phase of the illustration project (the sketches), I'm having a hard time getting back to my previous projects. I thought I'd just be able to swing right back into painting and writing, but it's been a few days with not much going on.

This is the last painting I did, last month.

"Erika," 2004

Strange. This was one of my least favorites on the wall, but somehow online it has a whole different presence. Unlike a lot of the others, this one looks like a complete thought in itself, instead of just a sketch for a bigger idea.

The same thing happens with photographing art. Some art photographs well, some doesn't. Unfortunately, given the way the academic/gallery world works, photogenic art has an advantage. I don't know that that's a good or a bad thing, just a thing...another condition of the contemporary world. It occurs to me that a whole new strain of art is gaining an advantage: that is, art that happens to look good on a web site. Art that benefits from being reduced to postage stamp size and reproduced with heightened digital color. I wonder how many artists are making art with that knowledge in the back of their heads, as there certainly are artists creating with the photo shoot in mind.

I keep obsessively going back to look at Electric Skin. I'm so excited that it's finally online. I may have to move to publishing 3 days a week. It looks like there's enough news in that vein to support that schedule. The tricky thing is going to be collecting Electric Skin news without getting tunnel vision and forgetting about the other art news out there. I actually saw that happening over the last couple of days. I scan the table of contents on a newspaper website and my mind says, "Nope, no Elec. Skin stuff here." So I click off and move on. Only later do I think, "Wait, maybe there was something else there that I might just be interested in personally." So I have to go back and check again. It's hard to keep two sets of filters going at the same time.

No matter, I have high hopes for Electric Skin. I have to imagine that there are a lot of other people out there looking for similar information, and who have been as stymied as I've been in the past. I hope this fills a need. The older I get, the more anxious I get to serve someone other than myself. The happier I am made by giving.

I had a daymare yesterday afternoon: I dreamt--imagined--that Cory Arcangel had taken over the art world, and the entire art establishment degenerated into a chaotic, meaningless anarchy in which there was no room for any art with any meaning beyond self-righteous, nihilist, postmodern posturing.

It occurred to me that at some point there will be a generation of art world power elite one generation removed from those who have been steeped in postmodern theory. They will be the ones who have gotten all their theory third and fourth hand. They will have all the jargon and all the trappings of postmodernism, with none of the revolutionary impulses that first breathed life into that worldview. They will be left with a worldview of emptiness. They already are.

I'm picking on Arcangel because of what I saw the other night at FUC. He's just a symbol. I guess I'm feeling a little bleak tonight.

current music: the symphony of the cosmic spheres

It looks as though the Swedes have caved to pressure and removed the display of "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," which I discussed here. (Sorry, I can't get the dang links to work right so you have to scroll down to Jan. 26th.)

If you've been following my line of thinking on this, you'll know I was not a fan of that piece as art, but when any art is supressed because of a spat between state bureaucrats, we all have reason to shudder. Far from being a popular uprising against the piece, this art is effectively being shut down because of overreaction and misinterpretation by one man. Those in the bookburning club, such as this ambassador, would sooner stifle all discussion, silence all thinking rather than admit the possibility that someone might make up their own mind about what they see.

In other news, I'm giving B&BS readers a sneak preview of my brand new syndicated news blog! Electric Skin is an Afrofuturist art news site that I plan to publish twice weekly. I was really tired of hunting all over the Web for that kind kind of news, and even though I still have to search like crazy, I thought I might as well give others the benefit of my searching. What a gaping hole in the cyber-landscape. I'm amazed someone else hasn't already filled it.

Enjoy!

current music: Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light

Fresh Up Club had another tasty opening last night. I felt a range of emotions from indifference to outright rage at the art being shown, but as I've said before, the FUC experience is always stimulating and worth going.

Lisa Choinacky had an entire wall of maybe 50 to 60 encaustic paintings of album covers done in that tiresome, overexposed faux-naive drawing style that's so popular these days.

Encaustic painting by Lisa Choinacky

It tried my patience at first, but then I stepped closer and the paintings did have that encaustic-y luscious surface that's really hard to resist. And to her credit, her sense of nostalgia came off as endearing rather than maudlin as it could have done had she not had the variety of subjects (Carole King to The Eurythmics to The Roots), nor the kind of detached rendering style that she went with.

So in the end, I was begrudgingly won over. Those paintings were also a great example of art that engaged the viewers and invited responses. All night the paintings acted as catalysts for memories, associations, dreams, and people responded in smart ways to the juxtapositions of images one against another.

I think I counted 3 that I owned on vinyl and maybe another 10 in other forms. R was there and he counted 10 or 12 that he owned on vinyl.

I had heard that R would be there. Even though I was holding so much tension in my jaw that I later gave myself a headache, it actually wasn't so bad seeing him, as I thought it would be. He makes me nervous, but that night I realized that I make him nervous, too. You could tell that everything he said embarrassed him. And I kind of perversely enjoyed that. I always feel that sense of competition with men I perceive to be crossing the line I've already peed on, like Bill from the cross country team in high school. You gotta break that shit down to the animal level. I think a lot of men, if they were honest, would admit to feeling the same thing.

I was in my element, among the freaks and weirdos of the Austin art scene. So if there was a score to be kept, I was ahead, what with the sparkling conversation and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) praise that other people dropped on me in his presence. I was in rare form. I know this is only a reaction to L's party and the need to recover my ego from that, but hell, I'm allowed to bathe in my id sometimes.

The rest of the art was risky and to my mind largely unsuccessful. Cory Arcangel, who will be represented in the next Whitney Biennial, showed another nihilistic, muddled video that made me want to cry for the future of art. Horace McQueen's wall installation of newspaper clippings, notepad scrawls and sketches around the theme of Mumia Abu-Jamal and marijuana was at least coherent, but I think I walked away with a concussion, so much did the art beat me over the head with its point. Then there was Kyle Field's coffee shop napkin doodlings. Whatever.

I also ran into Eric Gibbons. He discovered this blog somehow and specifically my unstinting praise of his talent elsewhere. It's true what my friend, Brian, said: this is a small art community and word tends to spread fast...

After the opening, I headed out to a party--one of my collectors. He throws a small shindig every month, and every month he gets buffer and buffer. He also always has great shirts.

current music: Talvin Singh, OK

My new theory is that life is only about 8 years long. You live the first 8 years and then compulsively reproduce those first 8 years again and again for the rest of your life. The names of the characters change, the settings change, but it's basically the same story over and over.

My story is the story of having to choose between being abandoned and being smothered. There simply was no middle ground in those first 8 years.

It's liberating to come to be aware of patterns like that. I learned that again today after another 45 minutes on the therapist's couch. I love that guy; it's amazing what Bob can pull out of me. We talked all about L and R and why every time L ran her hands through R's hair at the party it felt like a personal assault. Every smile toward him, a betrayal.

I remember Megan, the only girl on the cross country team in high school. We were practically joined at the hip, always warming up together, complaining about all the same teachers. Then one day she spent a workout with Bill (was that his name?) and some of his buddies. After that, I basically never spoke to Megan again. I even went so far as to pretend I couldn't hear her or didn't understand what she was talking about. Extreme, isn't it? I was so, so cruel.

Age mellows you out, of course, but isn't L just another Megan? Isn't every woman in my life Megan? And every man my father? And the choice always seems to be: let her in and be smothered, or let her go and she will abandon you forever for someone else.

current music: Radar Bros, The Singing Hatchet

The Lehigh University Art Galleries are showing a series of Larry Fink photographs that were scheduled to be printed in the New York Times Magazine on September 16, 2001. Well, September 11th happened, and that made it illegal to think critically, so they've been bouncing around without home ever since. Until now. Check 'em out here.

Photograph by Larry Fink, using George W. Bush lookalike

Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz wrote this weird review in the Village Voice:

Modern Gothic
Elusive, deluded, and chic, a new version of an old style takes hold among young artists

First he declares Modern Gothic to be the Next Big Thing:

Call it Modern Gothic. As cringe-worthy as my term for it is, there's a lot of work around right now that fits the designation. Young critics are keen on it, magazines are featuring it, galleries are showing it, and next month's Whitney Biennial will have a fair share of it. "Scream: 10 Artists x 10 Writers x 10 Scary Movies," the group show at Anton Kern, has caught the zeitgeist.

And then he goes on to squirm around, reaching for anything positive to say about the show:

Initially, it's hard to see how. "Scream" makes a weak first impression and looks decidedly un-Gothic in this space.

And then this:

The claims made for "Scream" are more interesting than the show itself.

That's when he gives up entirely and just spends the rest of the article talking about the show catalog and the art world in general, all but forgetting about the actual art. And yet, in a complete departure from logic, he still decides that the Modern Gothic trend is da bomb. Normally I like Saltz, but this is trendwhoring at its worst.

Tonight, I'm drawing a speedboat, a spinnaker sail, ballast, a caster and a shoelace. Then I'm done! With the sketches at least...

From The Art Newspaper:

California, Florida and Michigan slash funding for the arts
Overall, State subsidies are cut from $355 million to $274 million for fiscal year 2004, while New York City remains the most generous public funder of the arts in the US.

From the NEA:

President Bush Requests $18 Million Budget Increase for National Endowment for the Arts, Largest Since 1984

Critical theory is everywhere in a state of retreat. I won't miss it and rather enjoy watching it implode in on itself. First there was the publication of Terry Eagleton's new book where he pulls a deathbed conversion and declares the reign of postmodern gameplaying pointless and irrelevant. Then there's this Christian Science Monitor article quoting the likes of Homi Bhabha and Skip Gates, who apparently agree that we've reached an end to the ritualistic, academic denial of things like truth, love and beauty.

I welcome this, although I also remain vigilant to the fact that pendulums rarely swing to the middle and stop. Physics dictates that they hit one extreme and then the other. With the return of truth and ideals, we are likely to see a retrenchment of a whole range of oppressive and exclusionary practices. As curators and gallerists gradually, slowly come to embrace things like standards and traditions, if that ever happens, then we'll also be likely to see some pretty fierce turf battles as we all fight over just what those standards should be and whose traditions count. For all its very real problems, at least theory did bust up a lot of old geezer networks and musty old ideas about art and power.

Here are some quotes from the article:

Viewing literature through the lens of some "ism" seemed revolutionary in the 1960s. Today, many are calling it an irrelevant approach. According to some, theory has been losing its grip on academia for years now. "For me, theory reached its apogee in the early 1980's and has since been declining," says Roger Lathbury, professor of American fiction at George Mason University. Today, he says, it's a matter of "the pendulum swinging toward the center." Some of the biggest names in the field would seem to agree. In Chicago last spring at a discussion sponsored by the journal "Critical Inquiry" cutting-edge thinkers such as Stanley Fish, Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. spent two hours saying that postmodern theory was ineffective and no longer mattered in the world outside academe, if it ever did.

Specifically, says theory's reformed bad boy, "[theory] has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil..." And that, as Eagleton says, "is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on."

A second problem for theory is theorists themselves. Fundamentalism is always ugly, and many of the second generation professors who followed famed theoreticians like Derrida merely applied their ideas dogmatically, thus guaranteeing that theory would became static and stale. Eventually, theory's freewheeling skepticism became as one-dimensional as the celebrations of objective truth it sought to replace.

Franklin Einspruch at Artblog has posted some good thoughts on synthesizing ideals of truth with personal subjectivity and a fluid consciousness. I already don't pretend to like sterile, postmodern theory-drenched art. Now it looks as though I won't have to feel like an outsider for feeling that way.

***********

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

'31' ways to tell the truth
Lorna Simpson's video installation "31," now at Northwestern University's Block Museum, approaches this [reality show] genre at the opposite extreme of sophistication and experience. As an artist, Simpson knows that artful manipulation is sometimes the only way to tell the truth. Her "31" is a blend of fiction and documentary that offers a view into one month in the private daily life of a young, attractive, anonymous African-American woman who works in an office and lives alone in a big city.

Lorna Simpson, "31," 2002, still from film transferred to DVD, 20 minutes

current music: Tabula Rasa, Water Lily Acoustics

Last night, I went to see my good friend Kazki play and sing at Cafe Mundi. It was an unusually light crowd for a Saturday night, but he expertly engaged the small crowd and made the room feel full anyway. That's professionalism.

He came off the stage after his set and the waiter brought him a dessert he'd thought he'd cancelled, but ate it anyway. Kazki just got back from LA where he said he'd made some major breakthroughs with singing, mainly having to do with really being in the moment while performing, being radically there with each of the words. I said that I imagined that when you first write the song, it's new and clear and you can't help but be immediately present inside the song at every moment. But the more you sing it, the older it gets, the easier it is to just let it go by like a train passing in front of you, and next thing you know you've sung the song and you can't even remember what you just sang. He said, "Exactly. How do you know that?" And I said, how do I know that?

I know that because it's like painting. When you're doing something new--new subject matter, new techniques--you're there radically present in the moment of creation. You have to be or else nothing would happen. But the more you do it, the easier it is to drift away from it, the easier it becomes to simply quote yourself rather than speak afresh each time. The problems have been worked out, the message has been clarified, and there you are--the need for inspiration replaced by a roadmap, a textbook you've created for yourself on how to do this.

The trick is to keep refreshing it for yourself. That's growth. That's development. It's also, for me, one of the fun things about being an artist.

You begin to explore something...


You find ways to keep moving the idea forward.

Sitting there at Cafe Mundi was the most relaxed I'd felt in a long time. The atmosphere, the chai tea, it all helped to take the edge off of seeing "L" and "R" get cozy at L's party recently. I've had big obsessive crushes in different ways on both L and R over the past couple of years, and yet nothing has really come of either one. I'm trying to understand what that triangle is all about, triangles being the most stable shape in nature, there's something to that.

It drove me nuts watching L and R be affectionate, yet not quite physical enough to definitively know whether or not anything is going on between them. Someone else at the party even asked if there was anything going on there. Apparently L claims that R is just her "friend." Why don't I believe that? And why does it torture me this way?

The feeling of being on the outside looking in is a familiar one to me. And it feeds a good part of my artistic output, that voyeuristic quality. A feeling of being able to see, but not quite connect. The webcam-based paintings are all built on voyeurism and even Global Nomads was just a sanitized system of carefully coordinated voyeurism.


The voyeuristic impulse is front and center on the World Wide Web

L quietly said that she'd give me a call to go to dinner sometime soon. She said it in a way that implied that she didn't particularly want R to overhear it. I realize this is a game to her as well. I willfully submit to playing by her rules, and maybe R is doing the same. We'll see if she calls. If she does, I plan on asking her point blank about what's up with R, though it will tip my hand with regards to both of them.

Being an artist, I know that seeing is salvation. But being a person, I know that seeing is torture, too.

By request from my friend, the children's book illustrator, Brian Yanish,, I am posting the letter I sent to the Mayor regarding the Capital of Culture debacle:

17 January 2004

Mayor Will Wynn
PO Box 1088
Austin, TX 78767

Dear Mr. Wynn:

I read recently that the Capital of Culture program has been cancelled for 2004. As an artist, I find this distressing, annoying and embarassing. The City of Austin has repeatedly neglected opportunities to invest in its arts infrastructure, and in this case has once again shown its indifference to making Austin a world class cultural destination.

Thanks to the work of Camille Donoghue and others, the world community saw fit to name Austin the first US city to qualify for Capital of Culture status. Yet in the final analysis, the city decided there was not enough money to make this investment in its own cultural health. It is a shame that Panama City, Panama; Merida, Mexico; Iquique, Chile; and Maceio, Brazil were all able to come up with the funds to make this happen in their cities and Austin could not.

Know that I will be watching arts funding even more closely under your administration, and I am encouraging fellow artists to do the same. Ours is a talented and enegetic creative community, and it's time the city put its weight more squarely behind its cultural development.

Thank you,

Cinque Hicks
Artist

As I've reported elsewhere, the mayor's wife wrote me back personally and here's that letter:

Dear "cinque",

I am not sure who you are, but I am Anne Elizabeth Wynn, wife of Mayor Will Wynn. I was involved in trying to salvage the CAC program for 2004. I am contacting you because I was copied on an email you sent to Camille Donoghue. I'd love to fully explain to you what went wrong, and I'd love to know if I could help with this "life of its own" letter and help with a grassroots arts celebration.

Please respond. I hope to help.

Sincerely,
Anne Elizabeth Wynn

My favorite part is how she put my name in quotes. I wrote her back, saying that we should put our heads together on this. To date, I have yet to hear back from her.

NEW ENGLAND ALL THE WAY!!!