This is why neither Eric nor I were invited to the most recent Austin Museum of Art fundraiser. They're still reeling from our rockstarness from last year.

hello my dearest cinque,

i was just thinking of you, i dont have anything important to say but why put such pressure on a lil ol e mail any way? i just want to say sup. how you been? my band just went on a 4 day mini tour. we played houston austin denton and ft worth. In ft worth i got pretty drunk (suprise). any way after about 8 gin and tonics and countless beers (possibly in the 20's) i was tipsy. me and our drummer went to whataburger and as he was ordering(drivethru) i was puking up judas, brutus and goodus out the passenger window.. it was reallly funny. and then i ate a jr bacon cheese burger and a tylenol pm and called it a night. i woke up to a hangover and i soon as i opened my eyes, my nose began to bleed. i love rock and roll so put another dime in the jukebox baby.

eric [Gibbons]

The broadband Internet connection is due to be hooked up at last on Wednesday morning. Finally, I'll rejoin the land of the virtual people. They're coming sometime between 8 and 12. They can't be more specific than that. You know how it is.

The blogging will soon return to normal with a brief, highly-biased report on the Austin CDC's meeting regarding art business in East Austin. Soon to have real internet access.

current music: iTunes random shuffle

After a marathon coding session, I finally finished the re-redesign of Electric Skin. Go ahead, check it out. This is the last redesign for a while...I swear.

Let me start one of my auto-rants here: just insert quarter and press the red button. In this case, the red button is paintings of black jazz musicians like the ones I saw last weekend at the The Guadalupe Arts Center.

Granted, one does not go to the GAC for cutting-edge art. If you see something really good anywhere other than at Chris Warner's Art Farm and possibly at Pro-Jex, it's likely to be an accident. Still, one hopes. (After all, it was at GAC that I met and fell madly in love with the talent of Eric Gibbons.)

It was in that spirit that I checked out DiverseArts. I've written for DiverseArts, shown art there and am fairly tight with the guy who runs the space, but no, the jazz portraits have to go.

The whole black jazz musician genre is one of those easy, easy default subject areas for a lot of black artists, and they (these paintings) can be found in spades (pardon the expression) in black-themed galleries and shows around the country, taken sometimes quite seriously.

Never mind that they all look the same, never mind that they all use variations on the same palette and evince that same showy, impressionisty brushwork. Its real crime is in the way its old-world, star-worshipping attitude evokes a dilapidated range of political and social ideas that 40 or 50 years ago were revolutionary, but are now outmoded and antiquated. (right, Bruni Sablan, "Miles Davis")

What you find here is this gaga celebratory attitude without a drop of irony, without a hint of alternate readings. What you have is more sloganeering than artwork. And while I deplore irony deployed simply for its own sake, irony, nuance, ambiguity and paradox are all welcome devices when used in the service of reflecting the complexity of a real subject, that is when reflecting lived experience.

It made sense 50 years ago to present an unambiguously celebratory image of Ella Fitzgerald as fine art because that was a new idea then. It was revolutionary to assert the unambiguous humanity of a specifically black subject. To make that same assertion 50 years hence is to be worse than politically neutral, it is to be politically retrograde. It cries out, "See, I'm fully human!" when that should be a given. That should be understood and then the art should proceed from there through its handling of subject matter, medium and technique to express something more about humanness, about blackness, or about art itself.

I'm pretty hard on this stuff. I expect a lot. I could excuse them as just pretty pictures, mere decoration. But like Thomas Kinkade paintings, they actually have quite a bit of currency, quite a lot of social resonance and so they are, in my view, fair game for criticism.

Elsewhere, Fallon and Rosof are also underwhelmed by Ann Craven's birdy paintings. A whole lotta nothin'. (Right, Ann Craven, "I'm Sorry," 2004)

A couple of days ago was the 1-year anniversary of "We All Are Global Nomads." So much has happened in a year...so much hasn't.

Blogging is getting tricky now with one computer on the fritz. (Damn viruses!) So instead of fixing the one computer I'm using this as an opportunity to get broadband access on my Mac, which I should have done a long time ago.

So my Internet bills will soon be going through the roof. But all that nice, speedy image downloading should help soften the blow.

Not that I can really afford it. I just went to visit a financial planner (analyst? advisor?) now that I'm keeping my head above water. And I got all excited about investing and whatnot. I really should have done this a long, long time ago. Time to be a grownup. My generation...we're mostly laboring under the delusion that remaining in a suspended state of eternal adolescence constitutes some moral victory. It don't.

Zakia Carter finally wrote back from Africana and let me know that--and I quote--"your joint is tight." So I am psyched about the article, which she will be publishing before the end of the month. More importantly, she wants to make this a regular gig. So I'm going to pitch an interview of Kerry James Marshall for my next article.

Meanwhile, as soon as I can get the template right on Electric Skin I'm publishing a discussion between DJ Spooky and Chris Ofili (he of the Brooklyn Museum elephant dung Madonna).

I love finding stuff like this. Makes you feel like someone is paying attention.

Tomorrow: a summation of my trip to d berman gallery and the carnival ride that is the Artplex next door. Preview: if I see another lame portrait of a black jazz musician...

current music: Propellerheads, Decksandrumsandrockandroll

Word of warning: when in Austin, do not go see Kazki play live unless you are ready to be awestruck and moved, possibly to tears. You could end up in the restroom at Café Mundi for 10 minutes trying to pull yourself together because the music has released something deep, beautiful and painful in your soul.

So it looks like despite my best efforts and ultra-conservative approach to opening emails, I nevertheless have become the victim of some nefarious virus. Blogging may be touch-and-go over the next few days until the situation is remedied. More later...

After catching up with superbitch of the century, Omarosa of The Apprentice, I headed down to Arthouse for a look at the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, which is in town for a few weeks. I wish I could have stayed longer because I got a kick ass parking space 20 yards from the front door, and it always hurts, hurts, hurts like hell to pull out of a space like that, knowing it will never happen again.

I don't know what's wrong with me lately, but I walked in exhausted and already ready to leave. I don't know if I came off as standoffish or boring or what, but I just could not muster conversation. I really did want to talk to Regine, Arthouse's curator, and a couple of other people, but more than that I just wanted to look at the art and then come home and be alone with my thoughts. (left, Hernan Bas)

The first of which is that I was wrong, wrong, wrong about Hernan Bas. That's why you gotta see stuff in person, not rely on how something looks in photographs or on the Web. His work is deeply affecting, tender and moving. The image in the collection was from what I gather is a series called, "There's a Little Moby Dick in All of Us," and its feather-light touch only communicates in real life.

Along those same lines, Daniel Zeller's amassed graphite tick marks created undulating waves and sensuous textures on paper that will be impossible to show on a computer screen, but that are deeply absorbing in reality. That kind of compulsive markmaking is a trend right now, but that's ok. Zeller uses it to gorgeous effect, creating images that are both mesmerizing and intellectually cool. (right, Daniel Zeller, "Lung Meter," 2002)

Iona Brown was in the show as was Mala Iqbal, who does large, saturated acrylic landscapes that reference digital compositing techniques and big budget animation aesthetics. I don't know if I was blown over with them, but they were kind of nice to look at it, which is getting a lot these days. (left, Mala Iqbal, "Red Landacape")

At the other end of the spectrum was Aida Ruilova's stupid, stupid video piece, "You Are so Pretty," or "I am Pretty," or something equally calculated to show how cool and ironic she is, featuring a guy hugging an amplifier and scratching a record along a stone wall. Then there's Ann Craven: c'mon now, let's be honest. The work stinks, no matter how much art critical mumbo-jumbo you throw her way. I know she's supposed to be all cool and everything with her detached ironic treatment of innocent looking subjects bordering on kitsch. (In this case, some kind of orange-breasted birdy on a pink background). But really, it's just terrible painting.

Now let's talk about Brad Tucker. Brad, Brad, Brad of the charming, disarming smile. If you're going to recreate mundane objects in carved and painted wood (an exercise bicycle, a skateboard with floppy disks), you gotta be spot on and really transform the objects by putting their very mundaness right up against the high level of craft and attention paradoxically paid to them. Think Warhol's Brillo boxes or better yet, Duane Hanson sculpture. If you kind of half-ass it as he did, it just ends up looking, well...sloppy and even more mundane than the original object.

The "undecided" award goes to Joe Fig with his scale models of famous artist's studios. The first time I encountered his work, I took it as a symptom of having completely run out of ideas. With everything happening in the post-ERA, post-civil rights, post-nuclear, post-modern world, why on God's green earth would you build a model of Inka Essenhigh's painting studio? In this case, the gallery presented a large-scale c-print (is there any other kind these days?) instead of the actual model, which seemed to double the offence. I could be persuaded to think otherwise. But this seems to me a case of imbuing a subject with a wildly disproportionate sense of importance, bordering on the offensive. Do we really need more of the art world gazing at its own navel and pondering its own overwrought sense of self-importance? That's not a rhetorical question. Do we?

Finishing up the vocabulary test illustrations, now that the sketches have been approved. Now I do the inking and scanning, then the digital coloring. The glamorous life of the artist...

current music: whirring computer fan

Electric Skin is getting ready to undergo another major upgrade: original content. For now I'm reprinting articles from other sources, but eventually, I hope to get a few new articles in--mostly of the interview/profile type, which don't take up so much time to write. So far I've gotten Michael Betancourt, art critic from Miami and Sean O'Toole, editor of Artthrob (South Africa) to contribute articles. I'm also working on DJ Spooky, a Cauleen Smith piece and a few others.

I'm bummed out because I thought I'd be able to add a nice search feature, but with the publishing engine I'm using you can't specify which fields to search on. This makes searching a site like Electric Skin pretty limited. For example, if you're looking for "painting" it will only bring up the articles in which the word painting happens to appear in the headline or in the summary copy. It won't search the keywords (which are invisible to you just browsing the site).

This may be a blessing in disguise. It means I won't have to spend a bunch of time customizing and massaging the feature. I did have some grandiose vision of Electric Skin becoming a vast storehouse of collected information, which it will be, but without a good search function, doing any research will either be marginally useful or very, very tedious.

2 weddings in 2 days. I thought I'd be all wrecked by now, watching everybody pair up and be all happy together. Shades of junior high school...and high school, and college, and... Anyway, I had a good time at both events. Adam had pretty much given up on love when he met Gwen 2 years ago. They were married on Saturday. I was surprised how sentimental I got, especially at wedding #2. I coulda sworn I was too cynical for that. My therapist wants me to do some writing about the weddings. Does this count?

Maybe the Music's Just Lousy?
Researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering the music industry's central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales.
Wired

Music giant EMI axes artists and 1,500 jobs
The sweeping measures at the world's third largest music company come amid continued strife in the recording industry, beset by piracy and declining music sales.
Forbes

As a testament to my unlimited ability to create dramas in my own head and then act on them in the real world (that's called neurosis). I found out today that L went back to her previous man at least 2 or 3 months ago. That means that while all that drama was going on at the dinner party with me and with R, she had already been back with man #1 or was getting ready to go back to him. When I think of all that emotion I wasted wondering what was going on, and all the cloak and dagger for no reason at all. Not surprisingly, this news is going to make it a lot easier for me to get along with R since the whole thing now is officially sort of "game over." I can finally exhale about that.

In other news, a brochure from this company just showed up in the mail yesterday and they used my drawing "William" to illustrate what appears to be some kind of technology conference. I don't know what this company is or what they do, but they credited me in the brochure. (left, William," 2001)

After seeing Eric Gibbons's band play at the Alamo Drafthouse the other night (the writeup is here), I hung out for a while with Dave Bryant, talking about the Whitney Biennial and this and that, learning about the near future plans for the Fresh Up Club. He clarified his conversation with Cory Arcangel whom he had met up with at the Whitney Biennial. Cory, it appears, had never read a negative word about his "art" until he read what I had to say about it here (Feb. 7 and 10). This fact stuns me, and in fact rings true to the tepid nature of mainstream American arts writing that's all "ooh and ah" about people's shit without truly investigating, questioning or challenging them. There's a great article about that here.

If I was reading Dave right, Cory's main thrust was, "Why is he reacting to it like it's supposed to be serious art when that's not what I intended?" Now this is completely news to me. At least as far what Dave told me that Cory told him, Cory "never sought" to be seen as an art figure. He's a software guy. For whatever reason, the art world embraced him and all his production, but he doesn't consider himself an "artist." Or some argument along those lines. If this is true, then I revise my opinion, and my hatred falls not upon Arcangel, but on the whole art establishment that is so bereft of ideas, so desperate to seem cool, so utterly out of touch with all that is good, that it will promote the most banal digital and video twitterings to the level of the best this nation has to offer.

And yet it seems weirdly appropriate as the swansong of this particularly nihilistic moment-the anthem for this "nothing really matters anymore" generation. Apparently, Cory's just doing his thing. That's fine. It's the art world that oughtta know better.

So later that night, out of nowhere Horace McQueen shows up--in town from, I guess, Denton or Tyler or wherever he's from. Seemingly, this was my night to get pissed at the frat boy club that is the art world. He knew about what I had written about him here (also Feb 7) but he was really very open and nondefensive. We got onto a whole tangent about whether the work could be considered a kind of "folk art" (nah), and what the role of race is in the whole enterprise and how to make change in the art world. I laid it on a bit thick, making it seem like the only two choices are to be a racist or a radical revolutionary. The truth is a lot more nuanced than that, but I was trying to make a point about being "neutral" in a rushing tide--you can't do it; if you're not actively swimming against it, then you're going right downstream with the status quo.

Feels like an eternity since I�ve blogged though I guess it�s only been a few days. I�ve been experiencing life faster and in a greater quantity than I can even assimilate it, much less write it down.

I went to see Kerry James Marshall lecture yesterday. That was brilliant despite all the people leaving in the middle and the fact that he tended to be long, long winded about certain phases of his development.

He discussed going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a young man and seeing no representation of black art or black artists, and having a sense of mission at that moment to correct that absence. His guiding impetus was the desire to create works at such a scale and in such a quanitity that they could not be ⤦overlooked, dismissed or ignored.�

I strongly identified with this desire to change shit. To insert myself into the thick of art, not as a footnote or a side thought, but as integral to the thrust of what is happening in art. Marshall returned to this theme at the end of his talk by noting how marginal blacks have been to the history of art in America. ⤦Try,� he said, ⤦to tell the story of music in America without talking about black folks. You can�t do it.� Yet somehow, the history of visual art gets told all the time as though black artists did not or do not figure into that story at all. The goal then for black artists is how to make ourselves indispensable to art history, the same way that Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Diana Ross and Run DMC are indispensable to music history.

Iconoduel posted a very interesting critique of Marshall�s current show, which he found, ⤦diffuse, dull and ultimately disappointing.� Marshall also shed some light on this during his discussion. The idea behind that show was to combat the viewer�s tendency to glance around an exhibition space and sort of sum it all up neatly in his head, to say, ⤦OK, I get what this guy�s about.� In order to frustrate that, he sought to create a show entirely without overlap. Everything in the show had to be completely different from everything else, thereby making it impossible to sum up from the doorway as often happens with single-artist shows. So the viewer, if interested, has to work a lot harder to make connections between the pieces and in this case to figure out the meaning of Marshall�s vision of blackness.

I don�t know if that strategy works, because I haven�t seen the show. But there you have it⤲the method behind the madness.

I was able to talk to him a bit afterwards. We spoke briefly about his Lost Boys series, which I intend to base some digital work on, and I told him about Electric Skin. It�s funny when you meet one of your idols in person⤲they�re never quite what you thought they�d be. Marshall is brilliant, of course, but also kind of dorky in an endearing way. He always seems excited by everything around him at all times and you get the feeling that his mind is moving about a thousand times faster than he can talk.

After the lecture I was please to find that my car hadn�t been towed even though I had parked illegally. I was fading out, dizzy from allergy medicine, but I still had to finish up my article for Africana, which was due today.

I went to write it and it just flew right out. Easiest article I ever wrote. It's due to drop on the 8th.