Sedrick Huckaby was one of the few artists that came off looking good in the lukewarm and rambling Frequency survey at the Studio Museum a few years back. Huckaby managed to pull off traditional subject matter (quilts) in a traditional format (rectangular 2-D image on wall) using traditional materials (oil on canvas) and not look completely retrograde in the process. After all, trompe l'oeil is not a word you hear a lot in relation to contemporary art, and this is what Huckaby does. Add to that references to jazz and quilts and in the work of a black artist the opportunity for cliché looms almost irresistibly large.

Fortunately, Huckaby navigates that minefield unscathed in his solo gambit at Hammonds House. He avoids the big bombs, although strands within his work ironically succumb to some of the smaller grenades.



The mural-size oil paintings of the artist's grandmother's quilts are epic; big statements displayed in a city of cash-and-carry smallness. The largest in the series are some 20 feet wide by 7 feet tall, though the largest in this exhibition had to be broken in order to fit into smaller spaces. With an extraordinarily confident handling of paint, Huckaby renders cotton, silk, denim, polyester, and whatever else comprises the quilts with a tactile depth that's more than mere rendering and instead approaches performance. This, I suppose, makes him an expressionist as the visible paint strokes and brushy curlicues record the movement of his body across a wide space, in much the same way that a quilt records the movement of hands across fabric. Close up, the threads are uneven and patches of fabric are set at not-quite-right angles, but from a distance the effect is graceful, powerful, and profoundly human.

The performance aspect is not an accident. Huckaby refers to jazz (specifically Coltrane) as a touchstone in the making of his work. Small improvisations accrue within the framework of a larger structure. The intervals between any two notes may be nonsensical or dissonant, but at a distance the whole effect is revelatory.

The effect is less compelling in the portraits that round out the exhibition. Unfortunately, the entire exhibition is curated as a retrospective for an artist that is way too young to have a retrospective, pulling work from at least three distinct periods and modes of working.

The monumental portraits, meant to "aggrandize" (artist's word) ordinary people, do accomplish this, but to questionable effect. If size is the issue here, then they need to be much bigger, as in Chuck Close big, Close being one of his stated references. If size is not the point, then they need to be as psychologically penetrating as his other touchstone Lucien Freud, or as socially devastating as, say, the early work of Van Gogh or Kerry James Marshall. Instead they are half of one and half of the other, arriving not at a whole, but two halves.

Huckaby also piles up paint on these portraits as an exploration of the sculptural possibilities of paint. Huckaby is not fresh off the apple cart; he received his MFA at Yale and has been through the Studio Museum in Harlem. He must know that the likes of Cecily Brown and fellow Texan Trenton Doyle Hancock are doing this in much more complex ways that go beyond the merely anatomical.

In any case, we don't need it. That's the good news. The quilt paintings are more than enough and worth a visit for these alone.

Delaying my post on Sedrick Huckaby at Hammonds House yet again, here are some outbound links worth a gander:

Franklin Einspruch takes on the dead animals as art issue, and comes out swinging from the "con" corner.

Salvador Castillo complains about poor audience/collector education in Austin. We say, Oh Salvador, you ain't even seen bad outreach...

Red Dot Fair in New York hosts art bloggers on Sunday, talking about what we bloggers love talking about most: ourselves.

The prof I'm courting at Georgia Tech talks about Interaction Design for Community Empowerment.

I'll be hitting the Castleberry Hill Art Stroll tonight, with particular attention to Fahamu Pecou's house (pre-)party and Anita Arliss at Garage Projects.

Also on the agenda: Karim Rashid at ACA Gallery of SCAD; Art Fair & Biennial Culture panel at The Contemporary; and Electro-Scuro just cuz I'm a sucker for 1-night events.

I'm obsessed with information and data. Lately, I've been coming up with little models for how the art world works. The art world ecology; and even though I'm pretty sure I've been thinking about this issue for a while, someone pointed out to me recently that Cathy Fox used the word "ecology" prominently during her comments on the panel at the Contemporary a couple of weeks ago. Could be a seed was planted there.

Is anyone else is doing this?

Larger size is here

current music: Janelle Monae

But yes, I'll eat a burger in a New York minute. In all seriousness, if you have the stomach check this work by Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Habacuc that involves tying a starving dog to a rope in a gallery. (Thanks Salvo Cheque.) This raises the bar yet another notch.

I'm generally against needless cruelty. And I'm definitely against ham-fisted art. But I'm also against hypocrisy, which is why the argument against the Adel Abdessemed piece that the killing is somehow more horrible because it happens in front of us doesn't wash. If you believe killing animals is wrong, you should believe it's wrong whether you see it or not. But then, that would imply an agenda much more time consuming than just sending an angry letter to a gallery, wouldn't it?

We love controversy. Now it's this: Paris-based North African artist Adel Abdessemed kills medium-sized (but--significantly--nonaggressive) animals in front of a camera for display in an installation at the San Francisco Art Institute. It's called "Don't Trust Me."

There are many reasons for me to object to this work--mostly because I react badly to ham-fisted shock art--but the ethical objections around treatment of animals say much more about us and our own squeamishness around the violence we create than they say about the art or the artist. There is no objection I can mount that doesn't contradict some other action I have already taken or failed to take: I just had bacon for breakfast...again. That bacon didn't grown on a tree. Also, butterfly taxidermy, natural history museum displays, and snakeskin purses--dead carcasses all--don't offend me. Third, according to the gallery's description, these animals are killed far more quickly and painlessly than your average burger-to-be in a slaughterhouse. And I don't write angry letters to The Sportsman Channel for doing what they do. (And my guess is most people reading this haven't done so either.) They show animals being killed all the time. Watch some of those videos; you know where they're headed. It's only the fact that Abdessemed's videos are in a gallery and being called "art" that offends. How Victorian of us. Death is all around us, but when it's stripped of ceremony and pomp, when the curtain is lifted then it offends.

This is about us, not about the art.

Ironically, the fact that it's in a gallery being called art is the only thing that redeems it for me. If the current display at SFAI offends you, floss your brain with this: what happens when these videos end up on Youtube, which they inevitably will if they follow the arc of so many contemporary images? Do they become any different from Soldiers killing dogs? What happens when someone remixes it to a Motorhead or Slim Thug song? Will curator Hou Hanrou still claim that it's art? Is the artist responsible for the entire life cycle of the images s/he creates?

The problem for me is that Abdessemed is just not a very good video maker. That offends me mightily. Big caveat: I haven't seen "Don't Trust Me", but I've seen others of his videos. (Some of his installation work actually seems very compelling, but I've only seen it online in reproduction.)

Why does this remind me of "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" from a few years back? Another mediocre piece of art that misses the mark on whatever it's trying to communicate but nevertheless unleashes collective outrage based mostly on the outraged being too repelled by it to spend enough time with it to actually interpret it. The truth is the liberal left (of which I am a card carrying member) hates to have its cherished idols skewered just as much as the right does. Big-eyed animals. Suffering poor people. And we frequently react with the same automated demand to Shut It Down that's more frequently attributed to the anti-intellectual and anti-curiosity forces of the right.

I don't know what this exhibition means for the State of Art and the State of Humanity. Personally, I'm taking a break from making grand predictive pronouncements. I do know that the video exists, that I underestimated it at first (dismissed it as too easy, too academic, too boring), and later came to appreciate its power (it truly has sparked conversation in a way that little else has done in recent months), but based on the description and the artist's other videos it's pretty likely to be badly made art.

I also know that humans love big fuzzy things, the charismatic macrofauna. And so we attempt to imbue those things with human traits like "personality" and "innocence." But even the urge to kill for sport is not limited to humans. Watch a cat play with a roach and then leave its mangled corpse behind when it gets bored. Some animals will kill for pride, for mating. Hell, if it's able, an animal will kill you in a heartbeat just for irony.

Automobiles emit too many pollutants to be driving around the city for no reason. Thankfully, Rocio Rodriguez's gutsy abstract paintings at Fay Gold justified the carbon emissions in a way that Christopher Parrott's sallow, tepid figurative paintings could not. I’m sure some tree frog with a collapsed lung somewhere feels good about this.

Rocio Rodriguez makes big abstracts. Abstract painting these days is both very easy and very hard. A grammar has emerged in the last few years that, executed faithfully, is almost sure to please. It's what Hatchets and Skewers calls that painting. You know the one: a Mehretu-esque collision of graphic symbols and kinetic lines in an empty field all tumbling together across an energetically decentered composition. Get away from that (or the Cecily Brown school of laying-it-on-thick) and you're in less popular territory.

This is where Rodriguez lives. Rodriguez paints in a personal language that feels both expressive and mechanical. In each work, emotive, hungry, nasty brushstrokes converse with erratic, irrational, spindly lines that look like the test patterns from the first time you use a Wacom tablet. The larger canvases (around 8 feet wide or so) were painted in oils, while the smaller works were acrylic.

They're stunning.



These compositions by in large do not carry an obvious focal point of energy or appear to unfold across the canvas in a linear fashion. That makes them instantaneous. They deny the passage of time.

I was awed by the painter's control of the vast pictorial space, and Rodriguez's earthy palette made the works feel primal as though painted on the inside of a cave. Our 21st century digital Lascaux. And--aside--I'm a sucker for references to maps and geography, both of which occur in healthy doses here.

I liked how Rodriguez alluded to dense, layered-up painting without actually doing dense, layered-up painting. Often the marks that appear to pass under and over successive layers of paint are in fact disjointed segments painted to suggest continuity instead of actually being continuous. See the blue zig-zag detail below. It is not passing underneath the gray box and back out; instead that's a completely independent stroke on the right in no way connected to the strokes on the left. The whole thing is fitted together like a giant jigsaw puzzle to look as though it's spontaneously layered up. So what appears at first to be an unanticipated irrationality is here and there only a depiction of irrational movement. Illusionistic pictorial space has sneaked in under abstractions nose.







This collision of forces makes sense though. Throughout all these works we witness again and again the clash of the rational mind with the unmappable forces of chaos.

In the left gallery, Christopher Parrott's portraits of what appears to be the cast of Gossip Girl fall flat. Parrott paints a world of (seemingly) well-bred, well-heeled, beautiful kids, all of whom seem vaguely depressed over the burden of being well-heeled and beautiful. The gazes in these small-to-medium size paintings and charcoal drawings are most often downcast or set dreamily off in the distance. Meanwhile, the subjects are engulfed in the trappings of their privilege: glasses of white wine, tailored dresses, and socially inoffensive haircuts.

Just so we don't forget that the work exists in the continuum of High Art, Parrott routinely includes headless, armless marble antiquities or minimalist hard-edge paintings within the compositions (art within art), drawing a rather clear parallel between his human subjects and the art subjects they are juxtaposed against. So what ties the kids to the art? That they are both passively decorative? (After all, all the boys are pretty but powerless, and all the girls are happy to be caught taking their clothes off.) Or are they alike in their inert impotence, like the truncated torsos possessing neither eyes nor mouths, neither dicks nor arms? I don't know and I found halfway through the viewing that I didn't care.

I suppose we are to believe that these characters' ennui is somehow redemptive. We are to believe maybe that the pain inflicted by their moral vacuousness is its own punishment. Or perhaps we're supposed to find that their boredom is evidence of a greater moral character.

Parrott unquestionably has the painting chops; the technique is solid if not exciting. But for excavating privilege, I prefer Delia Brown's skewering brush, the over-the-top luridness of Daniela Rossell, or Tim Gardner whose embrace of boys gone wild hints at all sorts of social energies, both light and dark. Even Ryan McGinley's "fuck you, we own the world" brand of nude photography carries some energy with it. Not so with Parrott's works, which are insensate. They are so cool they feel nothing.

Take heart: I am sure this show will sell quite well.

Your weekly dose of Afrofuturist indie badass-ism tonight at Smith's Olde Bar

Wymyn in/on/of film at Spelman

Rocio Rodriguez at Fay Gold Gallery. Wish I'd seen her lecture at the High.

Linda Armstrong collects specimens at Emory University

What? Are the 80's back. Apparently so sez Gnarles Barkley. Cool.

Our own Stuart Horodner pulls the plug on the Jupiter Hotel.

Just. Can't. WAIT. for my copy of this from Digital Urban. Apparently, there's a limited number, so back off!

Thoughts about our city's collective allegiance to "in-the-box" modes of production, display, and distribution were bouncing around my brain as I headed off to At First Sight II one cold night a couple of weeks ago. Chilean artist Denise Lira-Ratinoff had installed in a 16th street loading dock a series of light boxes and LCD screens that very simply, very elegantly displayed exquisite photographs of melting ice floes somewhere in or near Antarctica.



The photos where themselves impressive in their tonal qualities and were elegant in their commentary on both the majesty and fragility of our ecosystems. But I was grooving even more on the installation; the ballsy placing of the whole thing, installed right there in one of those peripheral cavities created by the city's digestive system. It's the kind of space that exists because it has to, not because anyone would particularly want it to. Lira-Ratinoff left the space raw, unadorned except for those beautiful photographs and the ambient sonic blanket of a soundtrack, all floating in an eerie blue-tinged darkness. (Unfortunately, the only way to get photos without a tripod was to flood the space with light and thus ruin the effect.)

Through her installation, the space became activated in two ways: honored for its native raw utility and transformed into something utterly otherwordly. The photos above in no way do justice to what has so far been the best art event of the year.

Last Saturday I attended the Contemporary's panel discussion on The Atlanta Art Scene. Discussions like this usually cause people like this guy to engage an involuntary gag reflex. And normally, yes, a discussion of the Atlanta Art Scene with more than 3 people in the room is usually an invitation to oscillate between poles of rage, despair, and bemused humor. But in this case, I found the talk refreshingly non-whiney. I hand most of the credit to moderator Andrea Barnwell Brownlee for setting the right tone.

So here in a nutshell are highlights from the panelists' main points, distorted I'm sure by a week of misremembering:

Jiha Moon, artist--We're in a global world and, New York City aside, making art here is pretty much like making art anywhere else. Also, people hide away in their private camps and you have to seek them out.

Cathy Fox, critic--Atlanta needs a kind of high-end Kunsthalle. The Contemporary is almost it, but not quite. Meanwhile, say goodbye to the long form critical review at the AJC. It's gone and it ain't coming back.

Andrea Barnwell, curator--Go out and see art before you complain about what is and isn't available.

Sam Romo, gallery owner--Market's down, gotta work harder. But on the upside, 5 Atlanta galleries got invited to Scope last year. Up from 0 five years ago.

Toward the end of the Q & A period, someone brought up Atlanta's bias toward 2D art. And while the official, panel-sanctioned answer was that there is other stuff out there--installation, sculpture, performance, new media--I had to agree with the commenter. We're full up on painting, drawing, photography, and even sculpture, what Sam Romo calls the "cash and carry" stuff with lugubrious air quotes.

There's nothing wrong with that stuff; after all it's the stuff I make. But still, where are the spatial interventions? The integrated performances? Where is the art that fucks with the architecture that encases it? (I remember a sculpture at the Austin Museum of Art that pierced the wall--the motherfucking wall!--and through a series of pipes, siphoned off water from the fountain outside to repurpose it in the entrails of the sculpture.) Where is the multi-site stuff, the projects that unfold over time--not in seconds, but in days or years? In short, where is the art that doesn't resolve down to a series of discrete objects displayed on a wall or ranged on a shelf? It's an important part of the ecology that appears here and there, but is all too underrepresented.

Outside the Welch Galleries at GSU. Anonymous art emerges as if spontaneous, like a carbuncle in the fabric of the city. The box is at once an enclosure and a mirror of the city back on itself.

The threat of tornadoes was enough for Susan Bridges to cancel Fereydoon Family's artist talk last Saturday at Whitespace, but the gallery came out of hiding the following day, this time with petits fours, and so the drive down storm-battered Edgewood, not once but twice was worth it.

If you haven't seen Family's show, Local Ephemera has a pretty good summary of it here, and Felicia Feaster reviewed it for the Loaf here.

Like a lot of other people who saw the show, I saw these as exceptionally violent images. At their expansive scale the whiting out of the faces is neither neat, nor precise, but instead feels like the kind of careless collateral damage that results in bombing a city from a thousand feet up. You know, a city like Kandahar or Baghdad.

But to hear Fereydoon tell it, this was not his intention at all. He views his practice as a form of embellishment; a way of getting past the mask of mass reproduced images to get at the psychology of the human subject behind the veil of skin and flesh. They are x-rays, not defacements, which puts them in line with the grotesqueries of maybe Jenny Saville or Wangechi Mutu in their use of the brush (or scissors) as a scalpel to slice up the flesh and reveal both a personal psychology and a collective history.

Yeah, but... they are also defacements. And this is where the power lies in these images. They are violent--amazingly, hotly, and magnificently violent. The images would tear away the social masks of politeness and decorum to get at the truth of our animal urges. And so I would speak up for the usefulness of violence as a productive mode of social interaction; defend the fact that a stripping down to truths under many layers of platitudes and pieties will always be experienced as a form of violence. This is the violence that saves, the violence that rights a foundering ship.

current music: Om Shanti Om

I'm recently back from a brief trip to Nashville, and though I mostly sat around in my parents' house somewhere deep in the eastern suburbs catching up on cable television (I'm still using rabbit ears), I did manage to do a little walking downtown. I did not grow up in this city; it's mostly an unknown to me. But it's a pretty place, clearly not having suffered the rapid depopulation and repopulation that gives Atlanta its layered look of neglected decay and shiny newness.

Also, there's a lot of this:



And this reminded me that while Atlanta may not have enough public art, we also have mercifully little of the silly public bronze statues that make trade and tourism bureaus believe they understand something about art and culture.

Back to school, muthafuckahz! Now I gotta get all my school gear, yo.

I went all the way to the Draw Off at Eyedrum last Saturday and all I got was this red paint stain on my mitten.



Not really, though there was a good bit more painting than drawing at the Draw Off. That was neither here nor there. Meanwhile, this was here:



and there:



Susannah Darrow collected a dozen or so artists to draw all day (noon to midnight) in the Eyedrum main gallery, limited in their materials only by what would stick to the wall.

I was hoping for something combative, some fierce competition as was alluded to in the show's promotional graphics. Maybe some overpainting of someone else's drawing or an encounter in the form of dialoging marks the way we saw at Whitespace last August. There may have been that earlier in the day, though by the time I showed up the display had resolved into a nice series of individual paintings that were exceedingly polite to one another in their careful delineation of space. Reminded me of the way people park neatly between the painted lines in parking lots even when they are the only car in the lot. We think in parcels.

Still there was this piece that responded nicely to its own space. Jesse Cregar? Sara Emerson? [EDIT: It's Maxwell Sebastian, who was actually my first guess before I was thrown off by the deer imagery.]



And TindelMICHI took full advantage of the possibilities of a buckwild space ramble.



So the Eyedrum crowd showed its usual mono-racial leanings. A good time was had by all, but what would it take for art events to routinely reflect the diversity of the city? Strangely this is one area where the politics of Atlanta's mainstream (the High, GSU) are light years ahead of the institutions of the so-called underground. Down here, we love our ghettoes.