I'd been headachy for days. Keyed up with pages of ideas, aching to be written down. Putting that aside last night, I went to the Contemporary's panel discussion titled "Curating in the Expanded Field," helped Stuart Horodner try to pull a movable wall out of the storage area to use as a projection surface for the panel presenters' slides. Somehow the wall had gotten into the storage area, but we couldn't get it back out. It needed another quarter inch of clearance, maybe an eighth. In the end we gave up and used a smaller wall.

It was just as well; the presenters' PowerPoint slides didn't require much room. So it seems that Stuart had an "a-ha!" moment a while back and put together this panel of folks who all share the title of "curator"--the CDC's curator of poxviruses, Zoo Atlanta's curator of primates, and a curator of music for an independent record company. We were on fertile ground there; space to mine both obvious and less-than-obvious connections. I kept waiting for some transparent moment of discovery when one panelist would turn to another and say, "Isn't it interesting that we're all dealing with ideas of scarcity and abundance in similar ways?" But that didn't happen so much. I often felt as though Stuart and we in the audience were the only ones who "got it," that the other panelists in fact were unaware of the hermeneutic potential of the exercise before them.

Or maybe it just wasn't that interesting to them.

Either way, we had to draw our own conclusions and find our own through-lines from a wealth of (often fascinating) raw data. The woman from the CDC showed us diseased Gambian field rats. The Zoo guy showed us baby gorillas being nursed by hand, and the record guy pulled out music catalogs from the early 20th century that would otherwise have been mouldering in someone's basement or attic. If the term "curating" could be distilled from the air without regard to discipline or field of knowledge, this would be its raw precipitate--a lovingly hand-set hymnal and the lung tissue of a dead rat.

The curator works in a killing field surrounded by death. I had always thought of the curator as an essentially creative person, working in the way that a farmer works, collecting living things and bringing them to market. But it's more urgent than that, in fact. The curator is constantly mitigating against death. Sometimes it's against the death of a gorilla not properly cared for, sometimes its against the death of an idea that is circulating around in culture, looking for an outlet to the sun. Without curators, things die.

One hears a lot these days about a crisis of curating, meaning "activist" curators who spend more time creating fictions of art history than discovering something real and true about art, much less about artists. GSU's recent Brazilian project is a case in point. I found it baffling to say the least. Row upon row of identically framed, more-or-less uniformly sized works in a huge variety of media by a huge variety of artists. All you could see were the frames, and I couldn't escape the feeling that every single artist in this show had been mightily disrespected. Each one had been turned into a piece of data about a process--of seeing, collecting, and finally exploiting. The art had been sublimated into an abstract concept about the curator's experience of traveling repeatedly to Brazil. It was sickening in its ego indulgence.

This was why Felicia Feaster's TEW gallery show came as a welcome relief. The show was not hugely ambitious; it won't go down in history for having changed the discourse on art history. But it was small, tight, beautiful, neat and genuine. I like that I actually remember the works in the show and that they spoke to one another with a strange, dark humor that was surprisingly inviting and sometimes unsettling.

Less tight, but somewhat more ambitious is the installation of D.E. Johnson and Tae Earl-Jackson at Hammonds House Galleries. I could barely tear myself away from Tae's totemic coffee-and-resin sculptures. They engaged multiple senses: the eyes, the nose/tongue, even the kinetic sense of the body as they invited touching or lifting or throwing. I want to see where these go, because they seem to be just at the beginning of what she's trying to communicate with them. In some odd sense they formed a counterpoint to Mitzi Pederson's raw, fraught, post-minimalist beautified objects installed at The Contemporary. They're both about reclaiming and transformation. Mitzi asks whether transformation is possible, and Tae answers "yes."

I chose the word "mitigate" carefully, that the curator mitigates against death, because without death there is also no renewal. And so the curator must open a valve occasionally, invite death in and allow it to wash away old things and make room for new things. It short, the curator also must engage in a constant dialog of transformation.

I became a little less headachy after the panel. It was nice to go to bed with some problems for my subconscious to chew on. I like that process. Which, I suppose, is why I slept so well and dreamed that I opened my desk and was greeted by the impish face a Gambian field rat.

Ok, so a couple of people have asked... the sleep is indeed still bare and bitter. Just lots and lots and lots going on--too much to live it and narrate it at the same time. In brief: we continue to build up the board and staff at Code Z, which is turning into a "real" organization now. Bioneers Southeast forum begins today; I'll be speaking on a panel (or a workshop or a presentation or something) tomorrow a.m. (better come up with something brilliant fast!). Stuart Horodner held a fantastic public forum at The Contemporary on the state of the art scene in Atlanta, lending credence to my notion that we are indeed at a critical juncture where good ideas are starting to germinate and come from this city and resonate more widely. Meanwhile, Obsidian Arts is back in the picture, as I'm now pushing to bring them together with The Contemporary and Hammonds House to host Obsidian's new touring project, tantalizingly titled "Your Black Death." Went to the Foundation Library on the GSU campus to research funding and got an instant headache. And Brian came to town and finally the new floor is down in the laundry room. And that, as they say, is that.

It could be that something is afoot in this town.

I woke up early yesterday in an attempt to catch Karen Tauches' Requeim for the building at 615 Peachtree Street that just came down. I don't know if I was too early or too late or what, but I didn't see anyone there. That was fine. It gave me a chance to get some nice shots of the wreckage, which was strangely beautiful in the morning light.

Atlanta has a strange sense of architectural history. The whole city was, of course, famously burned to the ground. So it has the feeling of an old-ish city that nevertheless constantly has to renew itself better and higher. Hence 615 is reduced to rubble to make way for... I'm not sure yet, but it will certainly be very large and modern.

Things sprout up. The funky, hipster coffee shop Javology on Edgewood (Austinites should picture The Hideout on Congress) I'm told would have been unthinkable a few years back. I was having breakfast there with an old coworker, Sarah, who coincidentally moved to Atlanta right around the same time I did. I looked at the vacant buildings across the street and said, "See it's gotta happen here. That space is just calling out to be developed into a funky boutique or cool gallery or something." Sarah looked over at the space. She was born just outside of Atlanta and has seen it go through its various levels of rebuilding. Then she said: "Yeah, but what they'll do is they'll knock it down, build some condo lofts and put a gate around it. That's how development happens here. There's no sense of a communal space." So interesting things sprout up, but in a very uneven, seemingly accidental way.

Death means renewal. The loss of 615 means that the space around it will change, and could change in an interesting, even pleasant way. Maybe not, but maybe so.

Something happened over the past couple of weeks. Everyone's talking about this new energy in the art scene here. I've heard it from 3 or 4 different angles. It's like optimism is the new trend. People are excited about making ideas happen and are concentrating more on the things that can happen instead of the few things that can't. I wonder if a critical mass has been reached, some kind of tipping point brought on by energetic idea people like Iyabo Shabazz, Matt Haffner, Ernesto Cuevas, Karen, Alice Lovelace, et al., brought on by Atlanta's finally making a dent at scenes like Portland's AFFAIR, brought on by at last being fed up with malaise.

So I choose to read 615 as a positive metaphor in the end; a loss that, once mourned, opens the way for new growth.