I feel like most of my posts lately have been short headliners followed by a promise to fill in more details later. Today's no exception:

Several of us Atlanta arts bloggers got together last week at Darwin Brown's place. The talk got very rangy, but we did decide to meet again. The needs are great: more arts criticism, higher profile for the arts in the city, better communication infrastructure. So blogs definitely have a role to fill. More info after my camera is liberated from Darwin's custody.

I'm looking for a project or two to be completed and then maybe a little better posting.

Just back from another LA trip, where I hooked up with the lovely and talented Caryn Coleman (much younger than I imagined) and the lovely and German Susanne Vielmetter, followed by the West Coast premier of my brother's new play, and a spin around the Brewery Artwalk with my college-age sister. More later. Perhaps.

Weatherwise, LA has apparently become Seattle. I'm told it's been overcast for a year and a half.

This is Ernesto Cuevas. He works for the Office of Cultural Affairs. Many Atlanta artists have demonized the Office (formerly "Bureau") as ineffectual, obstructionist, and downright evil. Maybe it is, but check out Ernesto. He's a good guy. He even smiles. Like a normal human being. He's the human face of the OCA.

I had lunch with him today near City Hall East and sprung this semi-surprise interview on him. I wanted to ask him about the series of meetings he's been holding with artists in various locations around town, like last night's meeting on the MARTA train. What's going on in them? What are they supposed to accomplish?

We went to a little pita joint where I had a falafel sandwich that was good, but full of a lot of weird vegetables I'm not used to seeing in a falafel sandwich. Like beets. WTF?? Ernesto had the seafood pita, a good portion of which ended up on his pants.

When I first heard about the meetings, which have been going on since December, my first reaction was, good God, not another set of grievance meetings where artists get together to present a wish list to a government agency to promptly go fuck up. But that's not Ernesto's game plan at all.

The purpose of the meetings, according to Ernesto, is merely to "provide a forum for artists to develop their own agendas and identify their own needs." This isn't about the city coming in and forming a group. It's about a group forming itself, with support from the city office that's supposed to provide that kind of support. In Ernesto's words, the group should end up being "bigger than the OCA."

Over the last couple of meetings, for example, the artists decided that the group should begin to formalize its own identity, partly in order to be identifiable by other entities as some real thing. There are about 13 artists at this point who make up the core of that effort. What that thing is has yet to be determined, but it's likely to have elements of advocacy, resource pooling, and may draw some particulars from the union idea that Jason Johnson has been floating around lately.

It makes a difference, I think, that Ernesto himself is an artist. He's most interested in murals and silkscreen printing. "I'm hustling in the street just like everyone else," he says. He's particularly interested in involving youth in that particular form of art making and dovetailing it with other kinds of organizing among Latino constituencies. If it were up to him, Atlanta would be as full of public murals as, say, San Antonio or Philadelphia.

It's sort of a shame that a city department founded to support arts and culture has to then go and hire someone to patch up its relationship with that very community, but Ernesto has in fact come to fill that role. And some artists apparently are even letting their guard down enough to look at it as a ray of hope.

There's another meeting next week. Maybe someone will be kind enough to post the time and place here.

City of Atlanta
Office of Cultural Affairs
Tel: 404.817.6815

Checking the site stat page this morning...

Is the 'net trying to tell me something?

So MARTA went and spent $190 million to install the new Breeze system in Atlanta's 38 rail stations and 556 buses. According to the AJC this was supposed to make MARTA "one of the most technologically advanced transit systems in the country."

Hahahahahah!!!!! That's rich...

Technologically advanced? Ok, maybe. But usable? Not at all. At least not along the rail lines. Here are a few open suggestions to MARTA to make the rail system something people can actually use:

1. The Breeze card looks like this:


It is exactly the shape and size of a bank card or a credit card. What do we do day-in and day-out with bank cards? We swipe them. That's why people keep getting these cards and then hunting around on the turnstile for something to swipe it through. Major usability rule: People will spend 99.999% of their time somewhere other than at a MARTA turnstile. Don't ignore how the rest of the world works, because your riders won't.

How about Breeze "tabs" that look maybe something like this (front and back):


or this:



These shapes are more like the kind of thing you would tap or wave in front of something rather than swipe, which is what the current card shape implies.

2. OK, so I read online that this card I have is apparently reusable. Who knew? How about the word "reusable," printed on it? Or even better, the card (or tab) should have more of a plastic-y feel and less of a papery feel. People would assume it is reusable and you wouldn't even have to say so. Even better if it has a perforated hole, as in "put this on your keychain and don't lose it."

3. On a similar note, let's use colors that don't already look like the thing has been left out in the sun for a week. It looks like trash, it feels like trash, so that's how people will treat it.

4. Those gates really do take too long to open. I understand this might be some kind of mechanical limitation. The problem is the human brain works much faster than that; when the gates don't open immediately (which they should), people assume they are broken. Thus all the gates disabled due to being forced open. A little light that comes on with a little beep would solve the problem. At least that way you would know that the gate knows you're there, even if it takes a minute to open.

Well, you say, people just have to learn how to use the stuff. Fine. But even if Atlantans eventually learn all the quirks, that doesn't help the thousands (tens of thousands?) of guests to the city who use MARTA every day. In all fairness, MARTA is still better than Austin's truly execrable "transportation" system, which seems designed to maximize car sales. But still she's got a long way to go, baby.

Working its way through the Atlanta art world's digestive system is this great interview with illustrator slash artist Gary Baseman. In a discussion about the differences between one-off fine art works and other kinds of serial artmaking, the interviewer asks Baseman about making limited edition works versus mass market works. Baseman wants to do all of the above:


I want to take what Warhol did with The Factory and turn it into, like, a true art company, where I almost use a fashion model [he means to say "use the fashion industry as a model" -ed.]. So a little bit of Ralph Lauren, a little bit of Warhol, a little bit of Walt Disney, and creating a company where there's a business model set up to allow me to experiment, take risks, and pretty much fall on my face and fuck up, and really take chances for pieces of art that [are] probably way too expensive, but will create dialogue. Down to artwork that's a little more limited, more affordable that people can collect. Down to work that isn't limited at all, really affordable, little kids or anyone that wants to get, they can have... and keep it good quality.


Ideas like these touch nerves with artists. Baseman's earthy (some would say perverse) awareness of market forces and his willingness to manipulate them to his own ends strikes some as crass or worse, a form of "selling out."

I disagree. In theory. From a creative production point of view, I back Baseman 100%. His message is mainly that artists can and must take control of the distribution of their own ideas, that doing so does not constitute "selling out." Rather, it constitutes simply selling. It means ensuring that there is a receiver to the artistic message, not just a sender. To him this means working through the merchandising and mass market models he learned as an illustrator.

Baseman's motivation is always rooted in his desire to communicate a particular vision about the world. He speaks, more eloquently than the above quote would suggest, about how his strong, iconic, cartoony images are really the kind of visual communication that makes most sense for a fast-food, cell phone, pop culture generation. And judging by the way the trend is sweeping Los Angeles, he may be right. He doesn't judge or reprimand this culture, he communicates with it in a language it understands. That's generous and refreshing.

Things get a little stickier, however, when all of this work is thrown together en masse and takes the form of a cultural movement, which quickly then becomes a cultural mandate, then another form of style tyranny, in this case one marked by all the cool posturing and hip commercialism dragged in from the corporate world.

Baseman makes a pretty clear distinction between selling and selling out. Maintain your artistic integrity, he says, keep your visions unpolluted, your voice clear. Then feel free to sell as much as you want. I am so down with this idea. As Dave Eggers pointed out 6 years ago, there is nothing inherently evil in participating in the market. The problem is not what or how artists produce; the problem is what happens when market forces find a way to herd them all together to enact a corrosive influence on their ideas. Like when Nike sponsored a whole show of 25 hip, Japanese artists at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Their job: make art responding to an all-white athletic sneaker.

Read that again.

Art responding to a basketball shoe.

Torkwase Dyson's work is all allusion to personal symbols that are at once baffling and highly intentional. (left, "Hurry You're Rich") So I was glad I tore myself away from my other artly duties long enough to check out her talk at Ty Stokes in Castleberry Hill.

It was less a didactic art talk and more of a story about an artist struggling to find her voice and arriving via many wide detours and byways at her current body of work wherein she feels she is finally beginning to say meaningful things about the world.

Here, I think, is the tension that other bloggers have been posting about recently (Eva Lake and Tom Moody among others). Though Torkwase is young by any normal standards (early 30s?), she is approaching the top of the hill from the point of view of the get-'em-right-outta-grad-school gallerist and collector class. And I disagree with Eva on one thing: while the youth obsession does hit both men and women, it hits women much worse. Torkwase's had a few years to figure some things out, hone some things, and the work is all the better for it.

I intended to list this resource months ago, but never got around to it. Calling Marcel is a handy running list of submission deadlines for all manner of arts opportunities, including visual, literary and performing arts. You can find listings by field or by date. I don't know how complete this is, but it may supplant any number of smaller lists.

current music: Floetry, Floetic

Just returned from a quick little New York trip. Let's make this quick and painless: The Whitney Biennial was terrible. Of course it was terrible. Chelsea had vomited up all its MFA students with their shitty little piles of things, shitty crap glued together, crappy shit glued to paper, and that whole genre I call the "you know what I meant" genre, which consists of art illustrating some arcane process or obscure experiment that is executed half-heartedly and crappily so that you say, "OK, I see where he's going with this," but you don't actually see them get there. But nobody needs me to dogpile on top of all the other very competent and complete reviews already written. (See esp. Midnight Duster's take on the whole affair.)

Instead I will highlight briefly a hand full of exceptional works that made it worth the trip to New York and the $15 admission ticket:

I loved Francesco Vezzoli's "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula." His tongue is in his cheek the whole time, but still the sex is sexy and violence is violent in this work, which is rare in an art world that pretty much dictates that sex and violence be rendered as banal abstractions free of affect.

Paul Chan's floor projection "1st Light" is gorgeous and tragic. Cell phones and cars float gracefully upward in silhouette crossed by falling bodies in varying states of resignation and struggle. I could have watched that all day.

The materiality of film was treated differently, but masterfully by both Tony Conrad (mason jars of pickled film stock with peppers and tomatoes) and Rodney Graham (film loop of a slowly spinning chandelier projected by film apparatus that by now looks archaic). No surprise that these are two of the older artists in the exhibition.

Kenneth Anger got his mini retrospective. Micky Mouse fetishism that is wicked but not cynical.

Mark Bradford's shitty stuff glued to canvas is on a whole 'nother level. Informed by hidden social structures, expressionist materiality, and bad ass posturing, his canvasses speak their own language, but are still completely comprehensible.

I liked Urs Fischer's kinetic sculpture--candle-bearing arms that spun slowly, dripping wax in perfect overlapping circles that accumulated slowly on the museum floor. The Biennial web site says that Fischer's work is concerned with the "unpredictable processes" that result from combining "the nature of substances [and] the act of making." Bullshit. This sculpture is as predictable as the time it makes visible. That's what makes it so sublime, so urgent and yet filled with a sense of tragic inevitability.

It seems impossible that the Biennial is getting worse and worse every time. And yet it's happening*. There is a crisis in western art: it is making itself less and less relevant every season. The less oxygen it gets, the harder and more desperately it scratches for attention. It's starting to get painful to watch. Thankfully, these and a few other artists are still holding it down for art that matters.

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*Then again here's a museum that misspells its own name on its website. Check here in the menu under "The Whitney Community."

Jide and I have been talking in the back channel about this whole issue of money and blogging. This is a topic at the forefront of my mind as I rev up for the re-release of Electric Skin*, which started as a bare-bones blog, but which I am taking into more of a webzine format.

This has meant wading through mountains of research from sources I never thought I'd visit like the Magazine Publishers of America and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results are fascinating, and what I'm learning is influencing the project in ways I wouldn't have predicted: it's getting more "pop," I'm planning to slice the content in a different way, it will likely carry advertising or something very much like it.

Okay, stifle the groans.

Two baseline truths keep reappearing through all the various configurations for this project that I draft, refine and discard:

1) People (as opposed to businesses) expect information online to be free. Period. If they don't get it from you, they will go somewhere else for it.

2) Putting together significant amounts of useful information is difficult and time-consuming, and in many cases requires substantial expertise. It is sometimes frustrating and usually thankless. Somewhere along the economic chain someone has to pay for that. An exchange has to take place somewhere or the inevitable result is burnout or meltdown. Who can count the number of otherwise thoughtful, insightful bloggers whose expired bodies are now littering the ditches alongside the Information Superhighway?

All of this has meant making a deal with one devil or another to serve the greater good of putting a certain kind of information together and delivering it to people who want it and need it in a way that they understand it and value it. And I very much think of it as a greater good. I wouldn't be doing this otherwise. Nobody assigned this to me.

My principle aim then is to find the devils who propagate the least evil and go with them. I've learned to put my academism in the proper context. I've learned that there is a place for it, but that it might not be at Electric Skin, which would serve more people as a more engaging and broad-based publication. And if that helps better information circulate then it's done its job.

We have the world we have, not one in which most people want to read dense, exacting art critical analysis every day. That's too much. Who wants to live in that world anyway? It's a difficult lesson. A balance is required, figure out how to serve some good, fibrous green vegetables along with cheesecake. Trust people to make choices for themselves. Understand that there is no inherent virtue in limiting your audience to only the hardiest and tenacious of readers. Be generous. That's a new viewpoint for me. We'll see if I can pull it off.

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*For newbies, this is a site devoted to "black art and technoculture" that I founded and ran for a couple of years a while back. I attempted to hand it over to another editor, but it was abandoned shortly thereafter. A couple of strange postings have appeared lately. I have no idea where they came from.

Ok, you knew that title was coming. And here it is, hand's down the worst the Atlanta Art scene has to offer: The Metro Atlanta Arts & Culture Coalition, which from what I can tell should have been disbanded within minutes of its founding. I referred to the MAACC yesterday--an organization too dumb even to buy the maacc.org domain name, even though the only thing there is one of those fake search sites. But I didn't mention that the full-on bullshit organization has no definable mission and is working toward a set of goals so vague that they can pretty much claim credit for anything that happens anywhere in the art world.

Allegedly, they meet with business bigwigs to get them interested in the arts, though no one has actually witnessed that happen. And all this costs Atlanta $826,000 a year. Meet with business big wigs? I woulda done that shit for cab fare and a brew. And I'd even let them touch an actual artist.

Thumbs way down.

Atlanta Planit is dumb, but harmless. Rumor has it this $2 million(!) site commissioned by the MAACC is the only reason the MAACC hasn't been run out of town on the receiving end of a pitchfork. Now I know all my old web compatriots from Austin are looking at Atlanta Planit and thinking, "2 million?! I coulda did that shit for $25,000." Well, you're right, you could have. But they didn't ask you. Instead they overpaid for a site with functionality straight outta 1998 and a logo clearly resulting from some sort of open submission contest.

Still, I could see that if you were an out-of-towner unfamiliar with any of the city's cultural offerings, you might be able to find an event or two to attend. Plus it looks like they have up-to-date gallery listings. So it's not all bad. But it's mostly bad.

So it looks like Hilary King is a one-woman army against the chaos that is the Atlanta art scene. Her link-filled site deserves a medal. Seriously. This is exactly the kind of just-get-up-and-do-it-ism that the Texan in me responds to. A lot of sites like this turn into link graveyards, but King apears to be tending the garden fairly nicely. Right on.

Notice this the next time you get together with a group of friends at a party or an event: the women will always work harder than the men. The women prepare, collect, fix, arrange, and plan, while the guys all sit around hoping everything works out somehow.

That's sort of what's happening in the painting show currently in Eyedrum's big gallery, (that's the actual title: "A Painting Show"), which consists of 2 women painters and 3 men painters. The boys string together series of well-worn formulas and tried-and-true ingredients, while the girls struggle with their own new languages.

I didn't notice the split until I questioned the gender of the artist "tindelmichi," who has some large scale collage-y, Basquiatesque paintings that actually look good in the space. Turns out the artist is a duo, two guys who work on their pieces collaboratively. That explains the deftness in the work, how it moves between various kinds of mark making (graffiti, stencil, expressionist, scrawly, cartoony) so effortlessly. If I turned off my critical mind I actually liked what it did to my retinas. So it really is accomplished work. But it is also standard issue bad-boy painting. The compositional strategies, the layering effects, the mixing of high and low forms, the easy references to just not giving a fuck--it's all been worked out and shown to be successful. So of course it succeeds here. Just follow the rules you claim to be breaking. (right, "tindel vs. michi," tindelmichi)

Speaking of formula, Michael Thrush's outsized canvases featuring excerpts from kitschy advertising, decorative patterns, road signs, neon-candy-fast-food-wrapper cultural detritus is very familiar by now. The language, the gestures, the content of this kind of painting have been so thoroughly worked out, so precisely mapped by two generations of painters, they feel like the kind of paintings that could be made from a recipe book. There is very little risk here and so of course they, too, succeed.

Bracketing tindelmichi's work are the smallish, glassy paintings of Laurel Hausler and the sprawling, messy works of Samantha Barnum. Unlike the men, neither of the women entirely succeeds to my mind: Hausler's work seems a little flat, while Barnum's messiness needs to be either messier or more focused if it's to achieve the expressionist quality it seems to be after. (left, "Grey Gardens," Laurel Hausler)

But both of these women are exploring their own inner worlds, they are developing languages unto themselves. Hausler paints weird little portaits, strange Modigliani girls who might be dolls or mannequins except they show evidence of life, stroking a cat, for example. Her world is discomfiting, a place where everything that is safe is simultaneously creepy. Barnum paints messy domestic scenes like the corner of a dirty studio, and seems to be searching desperately for magic in settings that are mundane or downright oppressive. That is brave. Because it's easy to fail at that search. But it's also what makes painting matter.

Unfortunately, the house next door is getting stupider and stupider. And it all started out with such promise.



First, they covered over the exposed rafter ends that I had admired early on. Oh well, a cool architectural detail lost, but not a crime against humanity. Probably would have been much more expensive to vent the attic that way. At least it explains why they let a couple of sloppy touches show early on.

Once the exterior finish started, however, it quickly turned into a train wreck of architectural history. The colonnade is quasi greek revival, kicking the prairie-inspired windows right in the groin. Meanwhile, a babble of siding on the facade proceeds from faux rustic cottage-style on the first floor to all-purpose clapboard to gothic-revival board-and-batten on the gable, finished off with the arts and crafts detailing at the apex. Wow... There's going to be no right way to paint all that. (Below, 1st story detail).



I'm not a purist. I like the post-modern mish and mash thang. But it's got to be done with some consciousness. Am I reading it wrong?

current music: Sade, Lover's Rock