R.I.P.

The state of Georgia and the city of Atlanta have seen fit to commit $32 million to the proposed NASCAR Hall of Fame while simultaneously committing... let's see... zero to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's new concert hall.

ASO, unfortunately, sits between a rock and a hard place. The Rock: mid-size and large cities all over the globe consistently fork over big bucks and prime arts-related real estate to build grand mausoleums for dying art forms. The most conservative art forms get the best funding. It's expected. It's what makes you a serious cultural city.

The Hard Place: more people are actually interested in NASCAR. The governor knows this; the mayor knows this. That's why mayor Franklin pulled the old, "Oops, sorry, no more money," and why Gov. Perdue's recent letter to the Symphony included a hearty "Go get 'em, slugger!" but did not include a check. Meanwhile, ASO sits on a stunning Santiago Calatrava design (left) that could make Piano's museum addition look like some kid's backyard tree house. Price tag: $300 million.

That's a lot of cash.

So what to do?

The Neilsen ratings people have some kind of calculation. I forget how it goes, but they know that people filling out those little surveys always overstate the amount of Masterpiece Theatre they watch and understate the amount of COPS they watch. People always want to appear more cultured than they really are. And culture means a big, bad symphony hall, right?

I hope ASO gets its building built; the architecture alone will be worth it. Then maybe we in the arts community can lobby to pack its schedule with plenty of more... current cultural events there. I don't know. Maybe a NASCAR afterparty?

That pesky/brilliant laundry room continues to keep me busy as I now find myself in possession of a brand new 16-gauge cordless finishing nailer. The nail gun: mightiest of all power tools. If a nail gun and a table saw got into a fight, the nail gun would definitely win.

Meanwhile, I begin the long march known as fundraising for the Eyedrum show slated for late June.

current music: Mystique, Think it Over

I attended an artists' discussion on the crisis in arts criticism in Atlanta this afternoon at Eyedrum. It was an animated discussion, contentious even, about how to or not to engage in the art system, the exchange system, the value system. As I have been quietly doing now for a while, I defended the metric of pure use value, even though that strips away many of the saintly myths we artists carry around about ourselves. Art as usable commodity, whether it's being used to bolster someone's fantasy of their own good taste or as a shim to prop up a wobbly table.

Mostly I was surprised by how little people knew about the whole art blogging thang. At one point someone said, "Wouldn't it be great if there were a way for a wide variety of critical voices to be heard and some kind of collective thing where people could respond anonymously and have a dialog?" Hm, yeah, that would be great...

It seems my boy over here is the only one holding it down for the local scene, at least the only one anyone present had heard about. The reason? There's no money in it, and Atlanta folks just don't do shit if it ain't moving towards getting some money.

Frequency, the current survey show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, heralds the end of Black Art.

I don't mean to say that black artists won't continue to make art; of course we will. Nor do I mean to say that the show somehow does violence to some fixed genre or set of ideas. (left, Karyn Olivier)

I mean that Frequency arrives in the place that follows logically after having declared that blackness is disposable as a signifier in the work of black artists, something the Studio Museum essentially asserted in the wildly popular Freestyle exhibition. The artists in Freestyle were said to have reached a stage of "post-blackness," a sort of lofty stage at which race no longer registers as the seismic force in artmaking it once was.

That many of the artists involved in the show rejected the term is neither here nor there. The Studio wore the term with palpable honor.

Frequency has commonly been taken as a follow up to Freestyle. Curators Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim disavow this comparison, claiming that they have no thematic connection. But this is a little disingenuous. Both shows feature a broad cross-section of emerging artists whose work shares no aesthetic, material, or philosophical commonality. The only thing the collected works can be said to accomplish in both cases is that taken as a whole they challenge the notion that black art is a quantifiable entity, that it can be said to look like this or behave like that.

But where Freestyle held up the question for inquiry, Frequency pushes the question aside entirely in favor of... well, in favor of what is never quite clear.

The curatorial statement touts this ambiguity as a virtue:

"...there are no prevailing themes in this exhibition, except perhaps an overwhelming sense of individuality."

This begs the question then: why this particular show? Usually the point of curating is to draw out themes and common ideas, not to deny their existence. This puts the show in the untenable position of having to do two contradictory things at once: 1) assert that black art is a meaningful category worthy of exploration and 2) assert that in itself "black art" has no particular meaning. This makes for a necessarily troubled show.

Not that Frequency didn't include some truly bad ass art. A full week after seeing them, I continue to be haunted by Leslie Hewitt's multilayered composed photographs that evoke both personal and cultural memory. Sedrick E. Huckaby's nearly trompe l'oeil paintings of quilts were old-fashioned and brilliant. I continue to like what Wardell Milan does with photographed collage dioramas. (right, Huckaby)

Still, walking through the show I couldn't shake this sense of loss, a sense that was reflected back to me in flashes in the artwork. As we become less and less "black artists" and more and more simply "artists," we inevitably take on the color of the art world as a whole, for better and for worse.

This means that, just as with the rest of the art world, I am mostly bored by what the artists in Frequency are doing with video--this disavowal of craft that smacks of mannerism now, the art that points to its own unwillingness to engage either the image or the medium (Isaac Diggs, Shinique Smith). Most of it had the feeling of having run out of steam. I was left longing for more of Jefferson Pinder's simple elegies to the moving image, often through stillness, or repetition that reduced to stillness.

Rodney McMillian engages in the surprisingly tenacious trend of displaying a beat-up chair as a readymade object, showing that yes, even black artists can participate in that ongoing bit of art world silliness. (left, McMillian)

Make no mistake: I have been on the front lines leading the charge against pigeonholing. Don't fence me in, I said. Don't presuppose that my being black in any way limits what I produce or the readings available to my work. Hence the Carbonist School. Hence my intentionally varied output.

Frequency, however, made me realize what I had been taking for granted. Namely, that black artists had this predisposition to enthusiasm, if not downright exuberance. The art could be angry, cerebral, or even unbearably maudlin. What it had in common was that it wore its engagement on its sleeve. Black artists weren't afraid to "get down in it," so to speak, which was always the advantage that art made by black artists had in my view. We were always aware that our utterances were themselves important The inherited legacy of speaking meaningfully and deeply had to be dealt with, even if in the end the art consciously rejected it.

Frequency shows that this default is disappearing. More work now is tending toward the cavalier and/or degraded end of the spectrum (Rashawn Griffin's dirty laundry fabric collages, sorry). Enthusiasm is abandoned in favor of a hip, disengaged artlessness (Roberto Visani's clumsily made plastic props).

This is why I say that we face the end of Black Art. And why that makes me feel both incredibly liberated and regretful at the same time.

As the notion of "Black Art" slips away, the limitations, the rigid categories, that dogged anxiety all die with it. Not a moment too soon--I work daily to catalyze that very change. But the specificity that comes from our multidimensional experience of blackness also fades. (right, Kadir Nelson)

Perhaps this merely reflects a social reality; the experience of blackness is more varied now than it ever has been. In many ways, I have more in common with my fellow white Harvard alumni than I do with Joe Perry across the street who's lived in this black neighborhood all his life. It only makes sense that artists would reflect similar realities.

Kojo once said that it was simple: a work made by a black artist is black art. Yes, maybe that is true. But Frequency clues us in that increasingly even that tells us nothing.

The pattern goes something like this:

Decide on a project, say, weatherproofing the house or painting the laundry room. Realize 5 minutes into the job that if I'm going to do it right instead of just faking it with a hack job I need a whole different kind of screw / hammer / adhesive / saw blade. Traipse down to Lowe's in East Point. Realize that I don't know whether to get the 3-inch or the 4-inch, the flexible tip or the rigid tip, steel or brass, acetone-based or water-based, high-density or low-density, 5-hole or 7-hole.

Make educated guesses.

Find out upon getting home that half the guesses were right and half the guesses were wrong. Go back to Lowe's, make exchanges. Resume job only to realize that if I use that new screw / hammer / adhesive / saw blade, then I'm going to need a whole different drill bit / drop cloth / solvent / c-clamp to use with it. Go back to Lowe's. Make more educated guesses.

Repeat as necessary.

I got em in Harlem.

I'm beginning to get the hang of working with skilled labor people: Basically their job seems to be to badmouth each other. The electrician badmouths the home inspector; the landscaper badmouths the tree doctor; the plumber badmouths the HVAC guy. Pretty much everyone thinks they are the only ones who know how to put together a house.

Off to New York in the morning for a quick look-see at Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

current music: Eric Anders, Not At One

This article should be required reading for anyone who cares about the nefarious ways racism operates in America. My old friend Max from New York who happens to be black (and gay) wrote it and forwarded it to me. This article explains in a more articulate way than I could ever muster why we flip out at seemingly random, unprovoked moments; how a deeply race-flawed social system makes the sensitive among us insanely doubt our own reality; and how racial bias is everywhere even when it seems to be coming from nowhere. Thank you, Max.

Call it a dip in the Castleberry Hill pool.

After a harrowing case of making one wrong turn and ending up in a whole different part of town than the one intended, I finally reoriented myself and got to the chi-chi Castleberry Hill arts district for last Friday night's stroll.

Wertz Contemporary featured Carl Pope with an expanded version of work he showed at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis last October-all angry slogans and funny quips about blackness both in reality and fantasy, done in ancient letterpress posters and mounted in an artistic composition.

Carl has excoriated all things Afrofuturist very loudly and very publicly; which I always found to be over the top. He is sure that black folks will be locked out of the technological future based on a dismal track record of technology having been used against us. The problem is it's already not true. The opposite has already happened. But anyway, I've always liked Carl's work.

The show also featured a William Cordova, hung low to the ground and some naughty-but-nice Yun Bai "Porn Flowers" and some bad-ass, multilayered Lester Merriweather drawings on velum hung cheaply by the bathroom. Yeah, they're traced--obvious once someone pointed it out to me, but that in itself kind of became the point, the mechanical reproduction of the image somehow taking on the sensuous textures of memory. Nice.

But mostly the show featured a lot of overworked or underworked abstraction. I've noticed lately that representational work is faring better than abstraction, which seems to be caught in trying to shake itself from its influences (mostly Robert Rauschenberg in this case) or giving up and collapsing under its weight. Even Cordova's representational stuff worked better than the untitled cardboard constructin in the middle of the floor, which I just now realized was his looking now at the list of artists and works.

So I took a quick spin by a couple of others spaces, most notably Garage Projects where Michael Gibson's staged chess match resonated on lots of levels: artistic, social and psychological.

Then it was a quick retreat back to Wertz to sneak into a back room with William C. and Rashawn Griffin to filch some elicit wine and poof I was off.

I turned in early so I could hit today's Garden and Patio Show at the Cobb Galleria to look for potential landscapers. Never, ever in a million years did I ever think I'd be at any event with the words "Garden and Patio" in the title. How times change.

If everything works out, Charles Nelson and I will be co-curating a group show at Eyedrum this summer on the Carbonist School philosophy, or as I like to say, curriculum. Dashing a letter over to Woody helped me to distill some of the central ideas even further, and we've begun to put together a prospective artist list.

Doing this show will help breathe new life back into the project, the momentum of which took a hit by my move to Atlanta, Bea working on the Austin First Night project and Cauleen being in Africa filmmaking for a while. Fortunately, we had worked out most of the major ideas before all of that happened.

current music: Inobe, I Am Inobe