Continuing my exploration of outré film, I stumbled across Spermula, a beauty directed by Charles Matton circa 1976. The basic plot is that the all-female race of Spermulites have about a week to conquer the earth by rendering earth's men incapable of reproducing. How? By sucking out all their sperm, one by one. It's genius. Plus there's transsexuals, a really cheesy painter, a horny midget, and a guy with a 1-centimeter penis who keeps trying to score with all the ladies. This you gotta see.

current music: Orfeu

I thought it would be a breeze moving into the studio, considering how much cleaning and purging and organizing I did last November and December. But nooooooooo! As always happens with moves, I have about 3 times as much crap as I thought I did. So the move continues deep into the night.

If I had more time, I'd talk more about the show over at Art Palace I saw last Thursday. The show consists of the older works of a few artists, including Michael Sieben and Andy Coolquit, and is worth a trip out there. Sieben's draughtsmanship is top notch. Andy is nutty as usual, coming with a sort of mock interview video with a porno soundtrack, one of the digital print works and some other miscellaneous trashy treasure stuff. I've officially decided that I gotta take his pieces one at a time, as I can never really reconcile that many disparate visions all in the same room at the same time. Shades of Kerry James Marshall's more recent efforts.

Meanwhile, Mat Gleason dogpiles on the already aggrieved "Greater New York" show at PS1. Ah, New York. America's own Blanche Dubois. We love you. Really, we do.

current music: Macy Gray

I've signed on the dotted line and Saturday I'll be moving into my first studio space ever that does not coincide with my living quarters. Quite a step up, I think, and overdue. It's in that little warehouse complex south of Oltorf and east of Lamar. Now to decide what stays here and what goes there.

Up all night on the most recent book deadline. Also, I went to check out a warehouse studio space just off Oltorf near Lamar. If I decided to take this space this would be the first time I've ever had a studio space other than in my own home.

Next time someone tells you it looks like your art was made by a chimp, tell them that chimps have culture, too.

For August 2005 Right this second.

Kabuki. What comic book art is capable of.

The Mars Volta, De-Loused in the Comatorium. If this was on a previous list, then yes, I've come back around to it.

Sweet Sweetback's Badaaaasss Song. Holy shit.

Pink Narcissus. Again, holy shit. The senses overwhelmed.

Make Blog. Do it Yourself. No really, do it yourself.

Leonardo da Vinci

Mendi + Keith Obadike, The Sour Thunder: An Internet Opera Sometimes high concept, digitally-based performance art actually works. And works well.

Lore. Gorgeous comics rock.

Dallas was a woman yesterday, great and sprawling and imperious. I haven't been to Dallas since I moved to Austin 8 years ago. This is an embarrassing fact because there is lots of good art in Dallas and it's not too far away.

I took my time driving on the way up--as all my trips recently, this one was as much about the voyage as about the destination. I stopped here and there, sketched this and that, and snapped photos of the satellite dishes at KCEN-TV. The head engineer was not too happy about this and demanded my credentials. I showed him my sketchbook. He liked the drawings and went through them one by one telling me all the reasons the satellite dishes I had drawn were inaccurate and would never work. This was good information, and I filed it away for my continuing work on the space stories and drawings. I took a few more pictures and headed off. By the way, this was the guy that shot the video of the space shuttle Columbia as it burned up on reentry a few years ago.

No one was at Dunn and Brown Contemporary when I went in; as it turned out they were between installations. Trenton Doyle Hancock was mostly installed, however, including one huge, direct-on-the-wall work--a trend I'm frankly getting a little sick of. I discovered that I didn't like the big fabric pieces as much--they seem too self-consciously anxious about avoiding beauty, but I loved the small drawing-based paintings, which were just weird and disturbed. He seems to have been looking at Hieronymus Bosch. Next door was a series of heart-breakingly simple and engaging Louise Bourgeois drawings, all lined up on the floor.

The space-invaders show at UT Dallas was worth the trip out north to Richardson. A few gems here: Raychael Stine's confusing and confused animal paintings that somehow inject a little bit of pop onto an expressionist canvas. Same with Ed Blackburn's acrylic paintings, though with the accents reversed. Also some nice moments in Lily Hanson's fabric sculptures. (left, Raychael Stine)

But also an awful lot of ironic tributes to the fact that pure abstraction has been quite picked over by now and you'd better be prepared to go deep if you want to say something interesting. Robert Daniel Flowers's digital animation would have been revelatory 7 years ago; now it's just a screensaver. Tom Orr's striped panels seem like a lot of work to reveal ultimately very little other than about 3 and a half seconds of retinal pleasure. (right, Tom Orr)

There was a time not long ago when all of this would have stopped me from liking the work. I'm able to like things on different levels now. I'm able to like things even when they seem to fall short.

Often.

This is a relief.

Still, looking around the gallery, I couldn't help but notice the frequent tendency toward cleverness and slickness. That plague shows no sign of abating, that we as artists want to be so fucking clever all the time, and that that should substitute for being honest. Honesty is hard--I rarely get to it myself--but the effort, God, why else do this?

Honesty? I mean, if you ever stifle an impulse toward beauty or ugliness, clumsiness or elegance, openness or obscurity, then you are not honest. If you want to be funny but keep a straight face instead, if you want to be serious but laugh it off, then you are not honest. If you are making work and the thought in your head is, "this will totally wow 'em," or "so-and-so will think this is so cool," then you are not honest. If you are making work and simultaneously composing the paragraph about yourself that you imagine will appear in all the art history books or in the newspaper or in the press release, you are not honest. If you look at your own work and say, "shit, that looks too much like artist X; let me change it," or, "dammit, I have to make it look more like artist Y," then you are not honest. If you pursue something only because it's sure to gain the respect of your peers, your teacher, a curator, a gallerist, your father, or your girlfriend, you are not honest. If you do something only because it is sure to piss off anyone from that same list, you are not honest. If you neglect your desire to do X because everybody has come to expect Y from you, then you are not honest. And if you're an artist and claim never to have had one of these moments, then you are really not honest.

It's tough. Do you sometimes have to trade honesty to make a living? Probably. But that doesn't turn the dishonesty into honesty, it only turns it into a paycheck. And maybe that's ok sometimes. See, I'm still a purist, but no longer an extremist.

I attended the Austin Museum of Art's 22 to Watch opening on Friday. This is the show that I was shortlisted for back in January and then subsequently booted from. Anyway, Sterling Allen is an artist that almost nobody talks about, probably because his demeanor is so yin, so understated. I admit I had to meet him 2 or 3 times before his face stuck in my mind. His drawings are awkward, beautiful, dumb and transcendent, and totally honest. Worth the price of admission. (left, Sterling Allen)

Meanwhile, I was hoping that I would like Jason Singleton's entry because I like him and had a good time with him at Peat's party the other night. But after finding out that the artwork consisted of the museum's hours and admission fees scraped off the front window and run backwards on the inside of the glass, I just wanted to ask him, "why do you hate your audience so much? Why would you want to treat people with such disdain?" My options are a) to be annoyed [or "frustrated" as the catalog description would have it] or b) to decide that I "get it," that I'm in on the joke and that this work is really designed to annoy some hypothetical lesser minds out there. Neither of those is an appealing option.

Elsewhere, Michael Osborne's freeway overpass photographs are still revealing worlds. Alia Hasan-Khan's postcards detailing the difficulties middle eastern and south Asian people have had in airports since 9/11 were slyly affecting. There were others, too. Zack Booth Simpson's immersive computer game, Young-Min Kang's cut paper fantasms. Go see the show. Some parts are more successful than others, but there is enough honest searching here to be worth the trip.

UPDATE: This is what you get when you try to look at art through people at a crowded opening and then rely on written descriptions to fill in what you couldn't see. You run the risk of misrepresenting someone's art, which I believe I did with Jason Singleton's work. Apparently it also involves mirrors in some way, though I missed this. The gist of the work seems to be the same, however, so I don't know that my opinion changes, but I at least owe it to the art to get the description correct.

My ongoing discussion with Charles on the future of afrofuturism has gone semi-public as he brought up our divergent viewpoints in the Afrofuturist Art Yahoo group, thus opening the discussion to all the artists who will be showing at the Afrofuturism show in Minneapolis in September and October.

To recap: he favors expanding the term "Afrofuturism" to include work that doesn't necessarily stick to the racialized science and technology tropes inherent to Afrofuturism's history, while I favor letting it lie and carving out a new cultural space altogether that gets around some of Afrofuturism's historical limitations, not the least of which is its reliance on 3rd-generation identity politics as its raison d'etre.

We're making our cases now, and I suppose we'll let it all hang out at the forum in Minneapolis in October. But as many have said, history will ultimately adjudicate this no matter what we say about it now.

Recent sketches:

Getting carried away (as usual) with ideas for design, assembly and packaging, I spent several hours --many, many hours-- creating this booklet and CD for my friend Paul. It was really an excuse to try out some new things with binding and also a way to see how some of my recent sketches would look in a different context. Ok, it was an excuse to play with art tools.

Another day of blowing off the book project means I'll have to add an all-nighter somewhere along the line before the next due date. It was worth it though to finish the gift I've been working on for my friend Paul. It's the mother of all mixe CDs and the complicated, arty packaging that started as an estimated 5-hour job turned into a 3-day odyssey.

After spending all day making a present for a friend (and I'm still not done), I went to Club DeVille for a few rowdy rounds of drinks with Peat and about half a dozen of the other artists who beat me out for AMOA's "22 to Watch."

I used to be on the cutting edge of Austin art world insider knowledge, but I've somehow slipped to the dull back edge and so I was probably the last person to find out that the Fresh Up Club is officially closed and Dave Bryant is moving to New York (Williamsburg, he told me shamefacedly) in about 10 days. I'll miss that character. 5 years ago in Austin the loss of a risky, alternative space like FUC would have been a disaster, but now Art Palace, Camp Fig, Studio 107 and a few others are doing a lot to cover that ground. We've made some progress, no?

I spent the entire day drawing, sketching and painting. I wish a full day like that weren't so unusual, but it is. Not that I didn't have other things to do, I just decided to ignore everything else for once. Not something that comes naturally to me.

Spent most of the time playing with details of my "star tripper" character and the star-trippers' towers at the Luminoir Academy. It is from the towers that the star trippers are launched into space, never to return. The longer I spend in this vein the more obviously narrative the work becomes. Characters, plots, scenes, locations. It all seems to be leading inevitably to some massive graphic narrative type work, just as I predicted for myself here.

I've been sketching and drawing for the past few months in homemade sketchbooks. Making your own sketchbooks is something I'd recommend to any artist, especially ones like me who need as few barriers as possible to daily practice. Nothing available commercially was functioning the way I needed it to (which is why I have a shelf packed with half-filled sketchbooks that kinda worked for a while and then stopped working), so I started making my own.

Custom making my books means they do exactly what I need them to do for the way I work. For me the important things were: the right size (about 7.5x10.5), landscape orientation, hard cover, heavy water media paper, no spiral in the gutter, lay flat when open, and most importantly short. I don't like carrying around old, stagnant things (like drawings I did a year ago that now have nothing to do with me), so none if these books is longer than about 32 pages. Long enough to develop an idea and then move on. More...

Another reason for my pilgrimage to Atlanta was to plug back in to the local network of Atlanta artists, or more specifically to touch base with Charles and Kojo. I accomplished that in one shot, meeting Charles at his studio first and then rendezvous-ing with Kojo at his house later. (left, satellite photo of Atlanta)

I'm always inspired being in Charles's space. For so long, our work was stylistically so similar that we ran up against a lot of the same problems--the comparisons to Chuck Close, the tedium factor inherent in such a repetitive system of markmaking, trying to balance system with expression. He investigated that mode deeply and long enough to have developed some answers whereas I've ultimately decided to abandon that motif entirely. So actually it's nice to see where that could have led.

Kojo's space is in his garage, and I found out quickly that the new work-if it's top secret--is such because he's still working out what it is exactly. And as we talked it was uncanny to me how similar our struggles are. It boiled down to this: how to be a black artist who can claim the authority to make universal statements about universal things. This is a difficult thing, as least to do so while remaining in the realm of figurative or representational art, which all of us do. Kojo said a couple of times, we should be able to do whatever the fuck we want without these limitations, these ineffable pressures. Yes, we should. And therein lies the problem.

After a few drinks, I was feeling especially argumentative and we all got into it a little bit over Afro-futurism, whether that's a dead end or not, and the comical realization that some people are apparently using my article on the subject as some sort of bible of Afrofuturist visual art. Such a thing only barely exists, but the big show next month in Minneapolis should prove whether the concept really has legs in the visual world.

I say it has become exhausted to some extent, espousing a set of ideas that are by now irrelevant or obvious. I say bring in the next set of ideas and set them right upon the grave of the old while the dirt is still freshly turned. Charles meanwhile argues for hijacking the term and stretching it to include new ideas. Kojo with his distrust of -isms and groups, says to hell with the whole thing; fly around the labels and you don't have to worry about obsolescence.

The evening ended late with a brief tour of Charles's section of suburbia, which is basically suburbia like any other suburbia--strip malls, lawns, and homes that all look alike. My Austin crew (and the New York crew before that) is so bohemian. No on is married, no one has kids. Only a few even own a house. So people are constantly coming and going, myself included. This makes community-building always a temporary proposition. Which may all be well and good. Still it was nice to imagine being part of a slightly more fixed community. Charles, Kojo, and a couple of others I know here are all attached to wives, houses and children. And even though they claimed to envy my alleged freedom, they of course have the much better deal.

current music: Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous

Mickalene Thomas's flat-color, multimedia works in The Atlanta College of Art's Maximum Flavor show are the exact opposite of what their description in the show brochure claims for them. "[The paintings] explore the exoticism of African-American identity and specifically the consumption of black femininity within US popular culture."

No, they don't.

They put bad-ass black womanhood on display. Period. These are latter-day Cleopatra Jones homage and they succeed beautifully as that--without the battery of art theory apologies for being extremely pleasurable, bad-ass and gutsy. Though their description is laced with the language of Marxist baggage and post-colonial critique, the paintings in fact countenance neither. That little bit of pink panties showing through the girl's legs--a stand-in for labia--is in fact a giant "fuck you" to the supposed grief that being objectified is supposed to cause. The paintings say, "Go ahead, look at me. I like it." That's power.

If there is any critique here, as classically understood, it's lost amid the pure pleasure of the surface, the rewards given for just looking.

These were the paintings that quietly stole the show for me during this trip. I had been looking for any excuse to come to Atlanta, and this small, tightly curated show was it.

The show included its share of the tragically predictable (Sara Haas's dress made of scissors--read: the feminine that is both dangerous and endangered, or Hank Willis Thomas's photograph of a black basketball player chained by the ankle to a basketball, a visual metaphor so obvious and heavy-handed it doesn't even require commentary). But it also offered many sublime moments. William Cordova's gorgeous meditations on paper and Nikki S. Lee's weird ganguro photographs come to mind.

For sheer artistry Cordova takes the prize for me, but Mickalene Thomas will leave me more to work out for longer. Not that it's a competition. Anyway, look, enjoy. Ignore the sales pitch. These paintings are much bigger than the words that surround them.

I'll be leaving for Atlanta in the morning. Rumor has it that this cat is working on a whole new body of top secret work. I'm supposed to hook up with him at some point during the weekend and he already knows I'll be trying to get him to lift the curtain at least for a second. I'll also be cruising neighborhoods, checking out the art scene a little bit and generally renewing my standing threat to move there.

current music: Brian Wilson's Smile

I just set up my first wiki site over at Jotspot.com. This is for the folks in my burgeoning little art group to be able to collaboratively work on documents and plans. For those who don't know what a wiki is, get with the program. It's essentially a website that allows anyone who views it to also add and modify the information. I saw my first wiki-enabled site at the Austin Wireless User Group while working on Global Nomads, but was basically too overwhelmed by my own project to comprehend the full awesomeness of wiki technology.