Read this quote:

"In contrast to the experience of Art in Freedom Park, public art has flourished in other cities, the most famous example being Christo's saffron gates that lined walking paths in New York's Central Park last year. Said Levy: "I think it's really the fastest-growing opportunity for artists to get exposure for their work."

These are the last 2 lines from Kirsten Tagami's AJC article covering the recent AIFP defunding debacle, and hoooo-wee! I myself could not have penned a more precise summary of the strange neurosis that besets this city's art scene.

First, this kind of comparison to New York's art scene, a comparison that invariably finds Atlanta wanting, is as prevalent as the city's bad drivers. Atlantans seem always to be trying to be as good as New York in the game that New York invented: Big ass mega-art palaces, juggernauts of public funding, crowded gallery districts in chic, yet unsavory neighborhoods. Not so with many other US cities. San Francisco, Austin, Santa Fe, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia... none of these cities is perfect, and they all have some NYC style characterstics, but each also has its unique character that puts it first place in the game that it invented. This city's art community is largely too skittish to invent a new game.

Why? Enter the career obsession. Career nervousness breeds a safe, boring art scene.

Though there's a missing referent ("it" in the quote above doesn't refer to anything), I assume Levy is talking about public art in his quote.* I got nothing at all against public art. I've done it myself. But let's have a reality check: "the fastest-growing opportunity for artists"? How about the Internet? cable television? even commercial galleries? In fact, I'd say public art is pretty much the slowest-growing opportunity, with the possible exception of alternative galleries, which don't seem very plentiful here.

So what is that quote? It's some kind of weird boosterism that reduces the whole purpose of the AIFP to a giant portfolio showing. As if the artist's career is the art. I have no objection to AIFP as a concept. It's good to put art in places, really, fine, but when it is heralded as one of the best art ideas to come out of Atlanta as some have said, I have to say, "what idea?" There's no "idea" there. I suspect that if the heavy varnish of art world sanctimoniousness were removed the truth would be that the AIFP is a good marketplace. That's the idea, that it pushes artists' careers. And somehow looks good to outsiders from up north, thereby heightening artists' careers even more. Fine, but those aren't art ideas; they're marketing ideas. If AIFP is really about promoting artists, which the quote suggests it is, then why not make it an actual art fair? Ain't nothing wrong with that--booths, vendors, go for it. The precious art-for-art's sake topcoat distracts. (Gordon Chandler, Madonna and Child).

This confusion is compounded by the odd placement of the quote; the paragraph weirdly slips from a statement about civic art culture to a statement about artists' personal careers, as though there were no difference between the two. That kind of slippage happens constantly in this city. People assess an artist's career position and think they've made a statement about the art. In fact, when I tried to point out exactly that over at View from the Edge, I was roundly and immediately condemned.

This art scene is incredibly status-conscious, career-paranoid, and it's unofficial motto is "you go first." But it is also unfinished, raw and available for molding any number of ways if we artists take the opportunity to do risky, playful, crazy things. Atlanta's art scene is still in the middle of becoming, which is why I moved here. And at the end of the day, I want to be on that adventure to see what the becoming becomes.

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*I've been interviewed by the press enough times to know there's a good chance he didn't even say this, so he's off the hook from my point of view, but the sentiment itself is not off the hook since it has been "amen-ed" by so many others.

Oh, and THE COMMENTS ARE BACK ON...FOR NOW feel free to let 'er rip.

People really used to put a lot of time and thought into their hate mail to me. Nowadays, it's all drive-by style. This one (see #5) is a real disappointment. Come on, what happened to the creativity, people?

At this stage the house changes little from day to day. At least the visible parts. It's at the stage where small things take a long time. The job won't ever be finished in fact; a house is a living organism, an asymptotic line that rises and rises but never quite hits the vertical.

OK, so the comment thing looks like it's going to work, but I have to back up the entire site and then jump through 15 flaming hoops and balance on my nose to get it to happen. Also, trying to jump start Electric Skin and curate a show at the same time is grueling! Whenever I work on one, I feel like the other is being neglected.

Time for bed!

I admit it: I am somewhat...detail-intensive. But I looked more closely at the exposed rafter ends that I praised yesterday and realized they are not all I cracked them up to be. Look, first, at the way they process to the gable at the end:



See how the visual rhythm has been completely messed up by the uneven spacing? Yuck! And I don't even understand why that little fascia board thing is there. Huh?

Then there's this hack job:



One of the rafters has been sistered with a plain 1x3 that sticks out almost as far as the rafter itself. This has been done to provide seating for the plywood decking above, which has a seam right there. How this should have been accomplished is the plywood should have been trimmed to fall right to the middle of the length of the rafter instead of being allowed to run over. This sucks, but they might clean it up in finishing somehow.

Here's how all of that should look, courtesy of ma maison, of course:



Exposed rafter ends in all cases are basically decorative and provide no structural support, which means you are free to play with them to make them look right. That is, if you understand the aesthetic reason they are there. This butcher job shows that someone's understanding of this architectural detail is about as shallow as the plywood its nailed to.

I have one goal for tomorrow: reactivate the comments feature, while making the site manageably spam-resistant. I don't have the stomach or the time for the heroics needed to take to make the site totally spam-proof, but let's see how close I can come.

The house is huge. But not too huge.

Atlanta is in the middle of a debate over McMansions, as small, dilapidated homes in chic in-town neighborhoods are razed to make room for gargantuan superstructures that look like as though they've been airlifted from the suburbs. So far, however, this house passes my smell test.

Size alone does not a McMansion make, as Prentiss Riddle rightly points out here with regards to Austin's similar woes. This house, though bigger than any other house in the immediate vicinity, sits on an equally generous lot. The structure comes nowhere near the edges on any side, including the back. In other words, it is in correct proportion to its available space.

The other positive omen is that the house (so far) picks up its design cues from the neighborhood rather than imposing a bland suburban aesthetic in an urban setting. Note the wide porch and the basically box-like, symmetrical shape. All classic early 20th century. Also, these exposed roof rafter ends (right). Very characteristic of 20's and 30's bungalow style, though at that time they were often fake, while these are real.

I was hoping they'd go for the clipped front gable, another popular design touch on the older houses in this area, but alas they opted for the standard peaked gable. The clipped gable is self-effacing. It draws attention to the building's lowness. It tends to make the structure look smaller than it really is; the house with a clipped gable essentially kneels as you approach it. The clipped gable pretty much died after World War II, a canary in the coal mine of the coming architecture that for a good 3 decades now has valued the impressive, showy and rigid over the inviting, comfortable and homey.

I like how, during the building of a house, all these various temporary structures get built as a part of building the main structure. The application as a metaphor for life is obvious.

The southeast wall went up on the house next door. This is the wall I'll be staring at through my bedroom window for the next umteen years. I was glad to find out that it cut out not even a drop of sunshine to my house.

In my ongoing new house adventures, I've stocked up on my library of handyman books. I ordered a few carpentry books on the internet, the last of which came today, based on the recommendations of still another book on restoring old houses.

These books are a metaphor for the artist's life in the art world.

William P. Spence's Finish Carpentry is comprehensive. It shows every kind of chair rail, the exact construction of every kind of door jamb, and all the different ways tongue-and-groove flooring can be assembled.

It is also mostly fiction. The book assumes that every 2x4 will be perfectly straight and will not change with the weather. It assumes you will always have room to get a proper swing on a hammer and that you will always have 2 hands available to start the nail. It assumes you will never drop a sheet of drywall, that crown moulding will magically float into position, and that plywood will always measure exactly what the lumber yard says it measures.

That's where the other book comes in. Both of Bob Syvanen's Tricks of the Trade books assume none of this. The books are far from comprehensive, but they do acknowledge that a theoretical right angle will never actually be a right angle, and that the easiest way to fix a hammer dent is not with some complicated steaming and filling technique like they tell you on This Old House, but by spitting in it.

Maybe it's Sesame Street that ruins us; it implies that the world is this orderly meritocracy where if you just follow the rules you will be rewarded handsomely. We get a little older and learn that things like race, gender, politics and money in fact make a big difference, especially in the art world. But somewhere underneath this is the idea that all of these are only aberrations in what should otherwise be a pure system. That's what keeps artists (myself included) complaining, constantly measuring reality against some platonic ideal of a fair and just system.

That's the wisdom of that carpentry book for me. It starts from the premise that there is no flawless system. It doesn't even raise that expectation. It acknowledges that life is all the bowed wood, the dropped nails and the mis-measured mitre cuts. It understands that there is no theory in carpentry, only reality.

The subfloor of the house next door is now sitting straight and level. Why? Because the entire set of floor joists on one end is sitting on a piece of wood about the size of a deck of cards. I saw them put it in there.

Just back from Minneapolis where I had a series of fruitful meetings with the Obsidian Arts folks. Subject: let's breathe new life back into The Electric Skin. Even after a year I still hear every now and then through the grapevine, that the site is missed. Plans are in progress...

current music: Joni Mitchell, Night Ride Home

The show that just can't win, formerly known as the Whitney Biennial has been up for its usual round of asskicking lately. Midnight Dusters's review over at January Blog is a keeper. Didn't I used to be that cranky?

Sayeth Midnight:

"The Sturtevant installation remaking 12 of Duchamp's readymades made me realize that we have a crisis in graduate art programs that really has to be addressed."

Priceless.

Oh these people are fast.

Meanwhile, what is this, 8 weeks now I've been finishing out the laundry room?

Now that the bad old tree is gone, they're building a house next door.

Goodie, process in action!

NASCAR announced officially that it's taking its billions to Charlotte, NC, home of Dale Earnhardt Jr., despite Mayor Franklin's and Gov. Perdue's last-minute scramble for big bucks to woo the organization's hall of fame.

Overnight, the city's $32 million bid turned into $102 million and then a last-minute surge reportedly pushed the bid to $165 million, which was, I guess, going to materialize from thin air. Hocus-pocus! Viva Reaganomics!

This, literally within days of the city having gone on record that it just could not spare a dime to help build Calatrava's symphony hall. Now that NASCAR has decided to "marry the girl next door," in Perdue's words, the city has been caught with money it said it didn't have--or at least the political will to get it.

All of this would be merely amusing if it weren't for the comments of Felix Sabates, Nextel Cup team owner:

"Think about this,'' Sabates said. "Would you want to go to Atlanta at 8 o'clock at night and walk around by yourself? I told [NASCAR president] Mike Helton one day, 'Do you want to take your wife and kids and walk the streets a few blocks away from the Hall of Fame in Atlanta?' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'Just try it and you'll see.'"
It's the kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge comment loaded with racism, yet safely doesn't actually talk about race. Oh, how clever of you, Felix! And totally bogus to boot, since that whole area down by Centennial Park and the Aquarium is practically Disneyland these days.

Unfortunately, the ASO and half a dozen other arts organizations still lose big. The press has turned this into a zero-sum game: either NASCAR or ASO, pick your side. It's a false dichotomy, but one that may prove useful for getting the city to shift revenue into the arts. We'll see what happens to that original $32 million, money that at least had the benefit of not being imaginary.

So I just had to be one of the first ones to see the Bodies exhibition at the Civic Center. I'm glad I was. The massive throngs organizers were apparently expecting never materialized, but that only made it easier and more comfortable to see everything.

Everything.

The show is basically real human bodies that have been dissected, picked apart, flayed, filleted and preserved in plastic. They shied away from nothing; sex, disease, death, birth are all there.

The show was incredible. I expected to be intrigued, but didn't expect to feel so inspired, dare I say, uplifted. At times I remembered being a kid while my mother was in medical school, following her to the room where they kept all the cadavers. My brother would gleefully poke eyeballs and pull people's skin. I mostly tried not to look. The years have changed me and this time I couldn't look away.

For some reason, this show is being covered in the art press. Mainly I think because it's a copy of Body Worlds from a few years ago, which as I recall did vigorously market itself as art. Well this is purely "science and industry" type stuff, not art precisely. But really what more thrilling work of art is there than the body itself?

When I moved into this house, the one outstanding question mark was a 200-year-old dead oak tree on the vacant lot next door. Home inspector said, "Yep, it could go any minute." The arborist came in and said, "Yep, it could drop any minute. And when it does, it's going right into your house."

I bought the house anyway.

So I immediately set about becoming a pain in the ass to the owner of the property: "When are you cutting down that tree? When are you cutting down that tree? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" Meanwhile, I'm going to bed every night with this thing literally hanging over my head. When most people say "literally" they usually mean "figuratively." I mean literally literally hanging over my head.

The owner finally got into gear and the guys showed up yesterday to start hacking the thing down and came back today to finish the job.

All morning today I'm feeling...malaise... No particular reason, just one of those occasional attacks that feels like boredom, annoyance, stress and fatigue all rolled into one. Then I hear that tree start cracking and teetering and beginning to sway. And I tell you it's thrilling. It is unstable, drunken and tilting. And then 60 feet or more of tree go rushing to the ground. It crashes and the earth rumbles. Car alarms go off. Birds flutter in the underbrush.

And in that moment, the texture of the world changed. Suddenly anything seemed possible. All old and dead things had fallen away. The path was cleared, again, for something new. The air comes in and a new space was opened in the sky.