Alan Riding basically uses his New York Times review of the National Gallery's "Rebels and Martyrs" show as an excuse to finally stick it to self-indulgent artists by claiming their rhapsodic bohemian personalities are not only historically conditioned, but are (he implies) mostly false and put on. And while I could have done without the snide, told-you-so tone of voice, I actually agree with many of Riding's major conclusions.

This is the prickly, hoary point that comes up whenever anyone brings up "business" among a crowd of artists. One is always slapped down with the artist stereotype of the heedless naif, the spiritual genius who cannot be polluted with thoughts of mailing lists and showing up to meetings on time.

Mostly bullshit.

Like so many of our received notions, the idea that artists are necessarily wild, rebellious creatures helpless before their own sensual appetites and doomed by their own tragic clairvoyance is a relatively new idea. It wasn't that long ago that what we now call "artists" were lumped in with carpenters and locksmiths, at least in the west. Simply skilled craftspeople.

Why do I care so much? It's not because I want to take the "magic" out of being an artist; for better or worse, we have largely inherited the keys to the unknowable realms and the inchoate magic of our forebears. And I actually enjoy that role.

No, my objections are practical, because a community that has invested its identity in martyrdom and oppression, will constantly create ways to ensure that they continue to be oppressed martyrs. This is why so many artists are so good at self-sabotage. This is why artists who begin to achieve a modicum of comfort will so frequently rush to lose it all. This is why many artists will weep and wail at being treated as an underclass as they simultaneously reinforce the very conditions by which that oppression is maintained.

It's a neurotic cycle, and for years I doubted my own artistic bona fides as I grew increasingly suspicious of it. In short it occurred to me at some point that there was a way to be both creative and rationally thinking, to be both level headed and free. I don't think I'd go as far as Riding and allege disingenuousness on the part of artists. But I do think our assumed identities can always use a re-examination.

Caryn Coleman's recent post about the End Times controversy touched on that dogged meta-question of how important blogging has become in the scheme of writing and journalism. I maintain that in the arts, blogging is still print media's backwater country cousin. But it's the country cousin who's moved to the big city with the hound dog and the shotgun in tow. The inevitable result is current culture clash between blogs, the art establishment, print media, and artists.

The momentum is, however, is pretty clear toward an increasing prominence for bloggers and blogging. I have stumbled across more than a few citations of Bare and Bitter Sleep on artists' resumes and CVs, for example, listed right alongside the Village Voice and the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm wondering how many other art bloggers out there have been surprised to see themselves cited on an artist's resume?

(above, Jill Greenberg, Trillions)

Apologies for this obnoxiously large ad placed in the middle of my blog, but it's rather late and presenting this in a more high-brow way would take more energy than I can muster at the moment.

Programming and editorial work on Code Z have me all tied up, but Audiologo covered the opening of Study Hall much more thoroughly than I did. Check here and here.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released its latest report on blogging. I've only read the report summary, but a constellation of figures caught my eye:

12 million U.S. adults are bloggers. 44% of bloggers have re-mixed found online content (music, text, and images) to create new works.

By my calculation, that's a minimum of almost 5.3 million new creative works, assuming each blogger has done this only once. This is a tidal wave of creativity, something that would have happened in no other medium. Obviously, very little of that output will be of any great quality, but the exercise of creativity has value in itself as creative act. Too much of current copyright legislation is designed to stifle this creativity, when it should be used to encourage it.

Last night's opening of Study Hall at Eyedrum pretty much went off without a hitch, which was a nice resolution given that there were lots of ups and downs during the show's installation. The show was well-attended and well-received, and now we're working all kinds of documentation schemes so as not to lose the momentum that this show has created.

All the preparation meant that I can only take the briefest spin through Embrace today before leaving for a planned family trip to North Carolina. I'll have to do the accelerated tour.

I'm up all night again (!) preparing for a talk tomorrow at the High Museum, where I have to pretend I know something about "the meta spaces of digital art," but there's still time for a quick rundown of some Castleberry Hill finds.

If you're heading out for the art stroll tonight, check out 3TEN Haustudio. The unfortunate timing of the CD show makes it look like a miniaturized and less intense recapitulation of the Vinyl Show at New Street. Go past that, however, and you'll find Diane Haus's own work, which is stunning. (above, Haus, installation view)

"Quest for the Echo's Source" is old fashioned in all the best ways: epic in ambition, heavy on the symbolism, and an attention to the textural qualities of the materials. Good stuff.

Kalup Linzy has some strange little narrative ink drawings at Romo that evoke 19th century silhouettes. They're interesting, but they falter next to Charles Nelson's watercolor stills from his "Invisble Man" video, which are compelling and expertly handled. Charles is a personal friend and colleague so my recommendation is biased, but the pairing of the artists does feel out of balance.




Finally, Marcia Wood is showing Chris Scarborough's recent surreal and funky manipulated photographs. Scarborough is from the Loretta Lux school of subtle digital manipulations that engage the truth/lie dichotomy that photography has been grappling with with increasing self-consciousness over the last several years. In this case, he has manipulated the faces of his portraits to assume the proportions of anime characters. The results are disturbing and strangely confrontational. [above, Chris Scarborough, "Untitled (Erin) (clouds)" and "Untitled (Erin 2) (portrait)"]

But not anime-ish. Instead, these images formed a coda to Brian Parks's performance from last week. Maybe that's just where my head is these days--on the decline of the myth of the bright and shining future. But I couldn't get the phrase "wide-eyed" out of my head while looking at these. As in, "wide-eyed innocence." It's as if these characters are willing their optimism despite the obvious emptiness or degradation of their surroundings, despite even their own deaths, to the point that they have been rendered grotesque by their refusal to see what's before them. Their eyes are wide open, but they see nothing.

In this way, I'm reminded of David Huffman's "Trauma Smiles"; frozen facial expressions that arise from having experienced too much horror, historical or personal. Both artists mine the territory of an emotion that is not an emotion. A lie which simultaneously masks and reveals a deeper truth.

"Untitled" by Patrick Kamau Ngugi

Somewhere in the back of my mind I am planning an exhibition of cheap art--brilliant stuff that I've picked up for under $100. So far, the show will include a couple of pieces I got at the Arts Exchange rummage sale a few weeks ago, a piece I found while moving out of my apartment in Somerville, Mass., and the work illustrated above, which I just purchased online from The African Children's Art Project. I found it rather arresting and hope it looks as good in person.

current music: Wu Tang Killa Bees, The Swarm

I've been in a whirlwind of activity to capitalize on the presence of the National Black Arts Festival opening Thursday and Friday all over town, to push both The Carbonist School show at Eyedrum and the Code Z launch. Yeah, see that timestamp up by the date? That's Pacific time and I haven't been to bed yet.

So the promotional placards look great, don't they? But take a closer look:



Right. Log on today...and then wait about a year. D'oh! That'll be another hour with the printer and the Exacto knife.

Chicago's "Bean" (Anish Kapoor), recently liberated from overzealous copyright protection

The Fair Use Network is a compendium of resources geared toward activists, artists, and scholars who have questions about intellectual property law (copyright, trademark, etc.). The Network's purpose is to protect activities such as criticism, satire, and research by helping people understand where the legal limits are.

To this I would add activities such as remixing, sampling, and collage, though I haven't yet seen those words on the Network's site.

I'm not pro-piracy. I am pro-generosity, however, and the current climate around copyright enforcement is fast creating a culture of paranoia and stinginess, which are anathema to a free flow of creativity. When tourists were being hassled for photographing The Bean in a public park in Chicago, things had gone way too far.

[via Newsgrist]

I picked up an issue of the new Atlanta lifestyle magazine Skirt!, as I make every effort to keep up with local media. It's well put together, intentionally shallow and light.

Take a spin through images, though. The images and illustrations in any magazine will tell you not who the readers are, but who the readers fantasize themselves to be. This is especially true of the advertising, which specializes in selling our aspirations back to us as novel ideas.

Here's what I found (cover image aside):



Got that, ladies? 95 pounds is average. And you can have hips, but only by virtue of having a 14-inch waist.

It is a testament to women's resilience that there are any healthy women at all out there.

Sigh.

If you don't already know about the Dutch Playstation controversy, go here for a mild and inadequate summary of the situation. I tried checking both the Dutch and Belgian Playstation sites to see if I could get a broader perspective of the ad campaign, but found nothing. Playstation's defense is:

"All of the 100 or so images created for the campaign have been designed to show this contrast in colours of the PSPs, and have no other message or purpose."

as if their "purpose" is the problem here. As if the effect is not the issue. As if the image that hits our retinas isn't the problem here no matter what the other 99 ads look like. As if power relations don't come raging out of history and land full-force through an image in an instant. As if the colonial legacy of Belgium and the Netherlands should be forgotten or ignored. As if... as if... as if we've learned nothing.

After soaking in Brian Parks's eulogy of the American dream, I popped over to New Street Gallery, where Meshakai Wolf was opening the Vinyl Show silent auction. The idea was a few dozen artists each do an original work on a vinyl record album and they go up for sale to fundraise for the gallery.

The art is always erratic in shows like this--like Austin's 5x7--some artists spend weeks preparing a work, while others wake up that morning thinking, "Wasn't I supposed to be in a show somewhere today?" I know this from experience. A few pieces that stood out for me here, though, were J. Ivcevich's haunted, confectionary garden, Jason Johnson's photograph in a warped bottle, which evoked the unpredictable contortions of memory, and Michi Meko's vinyl-on-vinyl(?) appliqué, which was tidy and simple and right.

I regret not staying longer, because it looked like the pool party was just getting started as I left. And that, after all, was probably the real point of the show.

current music: Tizba, Vent

Alvaro Alvillar, "Stand Up"

Welcome to Independence Day, my most despised of all holidays. This is not a political statement. This is a statement about the kid with the sensitive ears for whom every firecracker sounded like a bomb going off right behind his eyeballs, and yet being dragged to fireworks-ridden parades, festivals and picnics anyway. This is about the kid who ran away from all the noise with a sparkler in hand (oh wonderful, quiet sparklers!) to salvage the holiday with minimal threat of nerve damage. Those who know me: can you recall ever seeing me outdoors on the 4th of July? That's right, and you never will. (Sure, there was that one year when I met you, Cherylyn, downtown and you remarked how the entire East Village was drenched in the scent of CK1, which was popular at the time, and that goddam kid lit a fire cracker right in front of me. And I spent the rest of the night jumping at every crack and pop, which was pretty much constantly. That was an anomaly.) No, Independence Day circa 2006 features Cinqué at home, searching the internet for suitable, America-themed art and refreshing himself on the proper use of a fire extinguisher.

Oh say can you see how much I hate you, you cursed holiday?

Let's remember the real reason for it anyway. Celebrate your independence, you bastards! Write something, say something free! Say it loud and don't let any motherfucker tell you you can't say it.

Pianist Brian Parks has been mounting his Performances in Near-Inaccessible Environs, Private and Public Spaces throughout the spring and now into the summer. The 6th in the series took place yesterday in Inman Park in an abandoned and crumbling building that you can only get into by crawling through a hole in a chain link fence.

The space was decadent in that uniquely southern way: languid and beautiful even as it fails both structurally and economically. The graffiti-ridden walls, the peeling plaster ceiling, the accumulations of grit and rubble on the floor--all testaments to loss, decay and broken histories.



Parks played improvised compositions on the virginal (something like a harpsichord) in the middle of the front room. He was accompanied by a percussionist who played subtle, dysfunctional rhythms using the floor, a rusted skillet, and various bowls and bells to augment his 2-piece drum kit. Parks's melodies tended to get caught in 3- and 4-note ruts in the middle of the keyboard, but the restrained, self-effacing music invited us to put the aural experience right alongside the visual, tactile, and kinetic experiences of the space, making no attempt to compete with or cancel out these other experiences. It takes guts to be that respectful.

That's what I liked about Parks's experiment here: that interplay between the performance and the space it occupied. He's not just performing in an incongruous space; the performance itself is creating the space it comes to occupy.



Tyler Green recently cited degeneration as the biggest non-art-world influence on art being made now. But then he goes on to give all the wrong examples: he talks about destruction and disaster, examples of spectacular collapse, none of which is degeneration. Degeneration is gradual. One recognizes it only after it has happened, sometimes decades or centuries after.

Parks's performance is actually a much better example of that zeitgeist. These performances occupy a space, transform it, and then abandon it, leaving the space to revert to what it was before. Unlike with a concert hall which bears the history of all the performances that have occurred within it, this performance will disappear utterly, leaving only the barest trace of its ever having existed; some footprints maybe, the marks of the virginal's legs in the dust on the floor. The refusal to enshrine the performance foregrounds its own fragility, it speaks to the fragility and temporary nature of all experience. Ultimately, all of our performances come and go.

That's the new mythology of our time, isn't it? And that is a kind of degeneration from previous myths of permanence, immovability and the unshakable nature of western cultural superiority.

In that broken space, surrounded by all that beautiful decay, Parks's performance became for me a metaphor for a culture watching its own demise; a metaphor for the declining west having watched its hegemony on expression circle the drain for decades. And we are in Atlanta, so of course here we do it southern style, with facile grace, on the front porch with a Jack Daniels in hand as the sun sets on the American Empire.