An early life drawing, the likes of which I have not done in a few blue moons

Aliza Shvarts's ludicrous (and possibly fictional) abortion art is already beginning to fade into the compost heap of yesterday's scandal. Shvarts's work came nowhere near "sparking conversation and debate" on the relationship between the body and art as the artist claims to have hoped for. Instead predictable outrage was followed by predictable character assassinations followed by predictable questioning of Yale's undergraduate art curriculum.

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Lewis launches a restrained, but heartfelt plea for retuning to a focus on craft in general, and on life drawing skills in particular. He says:

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity -- and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make "real art," but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

So we're back at that old question--the one that had Ingres throwing mud at Delacroix 200 years ago--is drawing the basis of all art or not?

Here's what drawing gave me:

Learning to draw taught me how to see the world, internalize it and render it in a way that engages all the senses. Nicolaides will tell you that drawing is not only about sight--in fact it's not even mainly about sight, but about touch and feeling. These skills translate into everything else, whether as an artist you end up drawing, making videos, or doing installations with the fuselage of a 747. Drawing taught me how clunky the hand can be and how tentatively a work can hang between the sublime and the disastrous based on tiny, tiny manipulations of space, form, and content.

I'm not sure that drawing is the only way into that sensitivity of sight, but for my money it's the fastest.

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Allison Rentz in "Truebador" (installation view)

Last Friday's Castleberry Hill Art Stroll was an improvement over last month's stroll by about a factor of ten. If March's shows appeared to be organized by safety-minded accountants at CNN, April's shows are by in large gutsier and riskier with bigger payoffs and grander, more exhilarating flops.

Which side of the fence Allison Rentz's "Truebador" at Garage Projects fell on is a matter of debate, but I for one won't quibble with her willingness to take a broadminded risky leap.

The installation consisted of her usual materials--plastic sheeting, recycled plastic waste products, rope, tape, sharpie marker, and chains--in a minimal palette of black, grays, white, and red. This is the palette of death metal album covers and Tim Burton flicks. Rentz also seems to allude to heavy metal tropes in the spiky gothic imagery of her ink drawings and in her personal calligraphy, which I always imagine has an Iron Maiden soundtrack playing behind it.

Throughout the performance Rentz engaged in a self-absorbed monologue of gestures, including wrapping, tying, excavating, and rearranging of pieces that recalled imagery of birth, loss (breakdown), and recovery. Periodically, the artist would stop all other activities and intone some speech into a resonating container of some kind (a water bottle?) using long, distended syllables. I wish I could have made out more of the speech, but the noise from the street and the jazz band at Noir competed sonically for attention. Nor did the speech seem particularly intended for me, or for anyone other than Rentz herself and that water bottle or whatever it was.


Drawing from "Truebador," ink on paper in plastic sheet

Rentz's performance was an exercise in public vulnerability. The artist seemed to be trying to figure things out as she went along in an intuitive and naive sort of way. This stands to reason since Allison Rentz has been living more or less in public for the last several years. She begs on the internet for money to help pay her credit card bills. She appears at public lectures and forums and makes loopy announcements about her art empire. For Rentz, there appears to be no distinction between the public and the private. Her performance then took on the feeling of watching a teenager playing with things in her room, refusing to clean it up, while the volume in her earbuds is pumped up to 10.

The whole death metal thing enjoyed a brief, black explosion in the art world a few years ago. Banks Violette and Sue de Beer were displaying their adolescent melancholy to an art world that seemed happy to revel in public teen angst. Is Rentz's work an extension of that aesthetic? Maybe. It certainly shares the same sense of a teenager's personal world of dark forces that require signing a pact of irreversible damnation before being admitted. Her work, too, is adolescent in that way; that is, awkward and looking at itself as a dark imponderable. It is always occupying a space where the world is a terrifying carnival ride of disequilibrium.



But if it is gothic, it's gothic as filtered through a southern sensibility of layered age, rot, history, and decay. Where Violette is shiny and slick, Rentz is worn and broken. She is Southern Gothic. This brokenness in the face of great dark forces brings to mind the southern gothic of Michi Meko's latest gambit at Eyedrum or Brian Parks's lonely music in lost spaces.

These artists are all cringe-inducingly vulnerable. They let their flaws direct their work toward what always feels like a demise or endless struggling of some sort. They are all William Faulkner characters, producing "horror as well as amazement." Succeed or fail, I'm enjoying the experience as they take us down this long, dark slide to oblivion.

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Gregor Schneider, Mann mit Schwanz/man with cock, Rheydt, cast, mixed media [silicon, trousers, shirt, garbage bag], 21 x 186 x 70

Other projects continue to keep me occupied, but in the meantime I notice the obvious profusion of death in the art world. If the artist is not inflicting death, then s/he is documenting it, threatening to let it happen, or simulating it. And in most of these cases, it is a flatly-imagined brand of death; death as it emerges from the autoclave, with neither fervor nor nuance. Academically inclined artists have already become an undifferentiated pastiche of gray resignation, but it may be that we've now entered a nihilist neverland of suicidal death wishes as well.

I don't mind contemplating death, but at the moment I'll be seeking an antidote; with any luck I'll go back again to fight in Eyedrum's small gallery, even though I've already seen it once. My advice: go before it's too late. (Show closes April 26).

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Above, Alex Da Corte. Hasn't every career artist secretly wanted to make this piece at one time or another?

In other news, Photo Awesome, the photo and art club-slash-blog begun by SCAD photography grad students, seems to have been saved. Last I heard their ISP was threatening to commandeer the domain over some flap about overuse fees. Anyway, there they are.

It seems that every blogger in North Georgia was at the Art Papers Daniel Canogar event Wednesday night. It was a spectacular talk, and the ART BaBeL round table at Solomon Projects was even more stimulating, if that's possible. Canogar's lecture at Tech was all about the evolution of the work, while the round table was all about Canogar as art activist and working artist. Pimpin', it would seem, ain't easy.

I'm all into Ezra Johnson's commissioned project for Dia Art Foundation; a series of paintings that are animated into screen savers. I got four. (left, still from Shapeshifter)

I just became aware of Jon Ciliberto's Slow Web movement.

Via The Art Section I was hooked for a minute on Jason Freeman's iTSM software, which creates a aural signature of your musical tastes by analyzing and compiling your iTunes playlist. Here are mine: one based on most recently played (40 seconds) and the other based on most frequently played (40 seconds). Yeah, that's me all right.

According to Miss Darrow, MOCA GA's new space shows great promise for great new programming. And word has it they may have designs on acquiring even more land mass. That news makes my day. Seriously. And speaking of Miss Darrow, we are waiting for girlfriend to allow comments on her blog from non Blogger members. [taps foot expectantly]

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Nina Katchadourian and I have all the same obsessions: maps, information, charts, and genealogies. I just finished interviewing her for some other writing and she told me about how when her Airplane Family Tree project first opened in New York, one reviewer talked about how well-researched the piece looked and how he had learned so much about aviation history. He didn't get the joke, that it was all a fiction. Or I should say, he missed the point, which goes way beyond a simple joke and instead makes a pretty cogent argument about how in our minds certain forms of precise presentation often equal authority. (above, Nina Katchadourian, World Map, detail)

Above, Airplane Family Tree and detail

W. Gerome Temple's work in the back gallery at Eyedrum (closing April 19) play with similar notions. This idea that precision somehow equals truth. Or at least looks like it does, although in Temple's exquisite drawings, etchings, prints, and paintings, the subjects are obvious fantasies. I guess that's what we might call visual truthiness; something speaks the visual language of things that are factual no matter how at odds they are with testable reality.


Above, very bad photos of great work by W. Gerome Temple

Most kinds of writing do the same thing; writing precipitates and then confers authority. In case you missed the huge dust up between The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Art Notes, and the Village Voice, this is the very thing that's at stake here. Who has authority to talk about art and in what way? Ed Winkleman has gotten in on the act with his own questions and responses, and has defended himself rather vigorously on his own participation in the ArtBloggers@ panel at Red Dot, which raised a whole other set of questions about authority, art, and writing a few weeks ago.

Art criticism is not arts journalism. They are separate things. Sometimes the same person does both. Sometimes they exist in the same publication side by side, but they are not in fact identical activities. This fact confuses people. Art criticism comes out of the tradition of poetry and philosophy (Diderot), which explains why artists themselves so often undertake it. Their task is to clarify and sometimes render meaning. Arts journalism is an outgrowth of journalism proper, which is historically concerned with reporting on what powerful people do. Tyler Green mostly does the latter, Mr. Viveros-Fauné does the former, or did at the Village Voice before he was canned.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this issue since Debbie Michaud at the Loaf and I have had some recent interactions. I don't know where, if anywhere, that will go, but I know that Atlanta has a strange opacity, a strange sense in which people feel that they ought not talk about things "publicly," or else you'll--I don't know--get in trouble somehow. Ethics weirdness thrives is dark silences like those. But outside of the bubbleverse ringed by 285 all this careful quietness is reading as apathy, or worse absence. I for one have an annoying tendency to shout.

[Edited to remove link in poor taste.]

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Nashville isn't that far away. If you can pack in 3 good gallery and museum shows it's worth the drive from Atlanta; 2 if one of those spaces is Ruby Green or Tag Gallery. Jonathan Bouknight (Atlanta), John Trobaugh (Birmingham), and Adam Davis (Claremont, CA) opened at Ruby Green earlier this month and the Atlanta contingent rolled up 5 deep and kept the owners up way past their bedtime.

In large scale C prints, Trobaugh poses male dolls in ways that distinctly subvert their intended use as just another accessory for their far more famous female counterparts. The dolls take themselves very seriously, but the photos do not. The images are always morbidly playful.



Meanwhile, Bouknight makes gender roles problematic by juxtaposing the inherent ambiguity of gender-as-performance against the ironclad specificity of the body.



Male things attempt to float free into something less determined, but are always brought down by their hairy, tattooed, earthbound bodies.



I'm also fascinated by Jonathan's obsession with sinews. These sinews--a thick braid, an exaggerated nightgown--signify by turns anchors, weights, and ropy streams of jizz. They tie all ethereal things tragically to the ground.

The photos are all hung in eccentric arrangements that imply connections and narratives. I know Jonathan sweated mightily over the exact placement of each one, but looking back I'm not convinced this added much. The images contain their own narratives, and we're smart enough to see connections between them without the artist adding formalism on top of form. I suspect simple diptych and triptych arrangements might have accomplished the same thing without the conceptual pretense. A few last-minute images had to be installed in the show to replace other damaged works. There was no time to mount these on plexi. Good thing. They were among the strongest pieces in the show in part because the artist was forced to trust them enough to just let them be.



Adam Davis is a strong conceptual artist. I assume the cost of shipping had something to do with what work was chosen because his contribution here was all relatively small stuff. Good stuff, though and it rounded out the show's third dimension. A visit to Davis's web site is worth it for a gander at his breadth and sense of intellectual adventure.



More discussion and better photos of the show are here.

I'm running out of time, so I hope this doesn't come off as a slight, but I'll let Vadis Turner's work do most of its own talking. Turner upends femaleness at Tag Art Gallery as completely as the boys at Ruby Green upend maleness. Turner's hilarious installations, sculpture, paintings, and other objects have catapulted the modern female through the looking glass.



One suspects that Turner dreams of being a crazy old cat lady some day.



Lingerie meticulously made of wax paper.



Foreground: Fabergé eggs made of birth-control pills; background right, working chandelier made of tampons



Candy boxes made from what has to be the tons of shit littering this woman's studio. Deerhead made from fast food wrappers; quilt made from lottery tickets, "While You Were Out" memo pad paper, and Dunkin' Donuts bags

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The high point of my visit to the Whitney Biennial last week had to be when one of the 3rd floor security guards convinced me to "accidentally" bump into Carol Bove's "Night Sky over New York," a work made up of bronze rods suspended from the gallery ceiling. After some hemming and hawing I did it. The security guard had been right: it made a beautiful, magical ringing noise. Why wouldn't it? It's a wind chime and should therefore chime. I've developed the theory that the security guard is actually a paid actor participating in the piece; this is a performance work that relies on the viewer to take a childlike leap of engagement with the work in order to complete it. How else to explain a wind chime located nowhere near any actual wind? That's my story and I'm sticking to it.



The Whitney Biennial is not a show designed for transcendence or epiphany. This is where most reviewers misfire. It happens to take place in a space designed precisely for those experiences (i.e., the museum of modernist design), but that's just a coincidence. The Whitney Biennial curators are always very clear that this survey is meant to "take the temperature" of the art world. Translation: to excavate and then codify that which has already been vetted by the gatekeepers of Chelsea galleries, the Times art pages, and the international art fair circuit. Nothing more, nothing less. Your stimulation is quite irrelevant. (Above, a favorite piece: Mika Rottenberg's "Cheese")



The 2008 edition paints a picture of an exhausted art machine. News Day's Ariella Budick calls it a "wasteland" in which "a sense of decline, decomposition, and chaos" prevails. Jerry Saltz has bemoaned the oppressive presence of 3 floors of "academic orthodoxy." Peter Schjeldahl meanwhile cites "impressions of a new, gray mood among younger artists." (above, 4th floor view, William Cordova at right, Mitzi Pederson at left)

Indeed, all exuberance, sex, and wanton irrationality seem to have been replaced this year by flaccidity and depressed sobriety. Look at a compilation of images from the Whitney Biennial 2006:



Now look at a compilation of images from the Whitney Biennial 2008:



Make up your own mind. A few other trends:

Abject Architecture
Artists used form architecturally, but with a consistent sense of failure and breakdown.

William Cordova at top of page, (l-r) Heather Rowe, Mika Rottenberg exterior view, Rodney McMillian, Daniel Joseph Martinez (with details; other plaques read "Central Intelligence Agency" and "Al Qaida")

Beautiful Video
The video works in the show often served as refuges of engagement, passion, honesty, and retinal pleasure. Mika Rottenberg's crazed, precarious shack (above) housed videos of women with fetishistically long hair, milking it, making cheese, and engaging in various irresolvable rituals. Javier Tellez had blind people feeling and then speaking movingly about an elephant. Omer Fast's 4 channel interview video of a soldier telling intermingling stories of a date gone horribly wrong in Germany and accidentally shooting an innocent bystander in godforsaken Iraq was a tour de force.



Rottenberg interior views and video, Javier Tellez; next row: Omer Fast, Edgar Arcenaux

People are Still Gluing Stuff to Paper
Um. Yep, that's still popular.


above, Adler Guerier, Frances Stark

Painting Limps Along, But Drawing is Comatose
Painting was rare and mostly represented by a few old heads. I can't think of a single instance of drawing, other than Stark above. All the reviewers I've read, however, consistently fail to identify Lisa Sigal as a painter. All the decay, wear, and decomposition in Sigal's installation is painted imitation--not real.



(above, l-r) John Baldessari, Robert Bechtle, Mary Heilmann, Lisa Sigal with detail

Meanwhile, Karen Kilimnik installed a little set of 3 paintings in a room with a chandelier. It was a sad little display. I wish she had installed them as theatrically as she did at the ICA in Philadelphia. See below for the Philly install:



Identity Politics Peters Out
In what might be the most diverse biennial since 1993, there were more overt references to gender than to race and more references to race than to nationality. But overall, there were few references to any of them, and almost no references to sexuality of either the hetero or homo varieties.

People Used Stuff They Found, Garbage Mostly
Jedediah Caesar casts studio debris in chunks of resin; Charles Long encases all sorts of trash, debris, and garbage in long, spidery plaster and papier mache sculptures that turn out to be 3D models of 2D stains made by the droppings of blue herons and white egrets along the L.A. river. I found them haunting, sad, and beautiful.


above, Charles Long with details

A Few Uncategorizable Projects that I Loved
Eduardo Sarabia's storage room of "tawdry contraband" that suggested travels to and exploitation of some banana republic as filtered through Andy Warhol. Leslie Hewitt's large scale photographs repurpose collective and personal memory.


(above, l-r) Sarabia, Hewitt

Walead Beshty's photographs of the abandoned Iraqi embassy in the former East Germany are made by passing film through the damaging x-rays of international airports. And his glass cubes are given their form by being shipped around the world and damaged in a box whose dimensions FedEx owns the international rights to.



above, Walead Beshty details

Although Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin began curating this biennial began over a year ago and the artists presented have been working in their modes for--in some cases--decades, the timing of all this decay and exhaustion seems somehow serendipitous. 2008 is the year of the subprime meltdown and the 5-year anniversary of a war that was officially over 5 years ago. 9-11 comes home to roost... again. Art falls away from engagement. Everything seems pointless and ineffective; why should art be any different? The artists seem to be running out of steam and at every turn are passing very bad judgment over the value of their own undertakings.

None of this is a value judgment on my part. If artists feel gray, then artists feel gray. There is nothing for curators, institutions, or critics to do about that but report it. If anything, there is a ray of hope here: a generation of the post-modern moratorium on value clears space for a much needed reset. We're free. The destruction of the old world contains the seeds of the new. There's reason to be happy after all.

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The photo above is one of the few illicit photos I managed to snag at the Whitney (no photography please) Museum yesterday. That's Rodney McMillian in the background, Brian's elbow in the foreground. I found that it was too unnerving trying to be all guerilla about it, and it detracted from actually seeing the art. Anyway, I'm working up thoughts on it now.

Meanwhile, a few links to keep you hopping:

The local blog scene continues to expand. Proclaim it Lost has coined possibly the best art world term ever. And an interesting dialog has erupted in the comments at Local Ephemera about the crisis of curating as prompted by City Gallery East's pin-up show.

National flags are rendered as pure information by Shahee Ilyas.

I was turned on to Mutual Art by a New York friend, and it instantly became my new home page, replacing The Guardian web site, whose recent podcasts have been... well, kind of pointless and pre-packaged feeling.

So it turns out Adel Abdessemed's dead animals were being eaten after all. Not only that, but being eaten by inhabitants of rural Mexico as a matter of course. I don't know if this revelation has slowed down the censorship crusaders, but it's pretty clear how fast this slips into imperialism and racism as the good, moral U.S of A declaims its outrage over depictions of how those nasty, immoral Mexicans live. There's a nice summary of the whole bloody mess at Forward Retreat.

Meanwhile, with any luck I'll drop in at Whitespace and Swan Coach House (Debra Wolf's review changed my mind) this weekend, finally get to the second half of the Spelman show, and maybe crash the MOCA GA fundraiser.

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An art crawl through an entire district of galleries, such as... oh I don't know... let's say Castleberry Hill, is a dangerous thing to judge. It's like trying to get a read on a group show; the enterprise succeeds or fails as a unit. The individual artists have no control. Worse, good art can be made to look quite bad by association or bad art can escape detection altogether as the good art picks up the slack. That's why I'm trying not to hold the individual Castleberry Hill galleries responsible for the lackluster art stroll on the 28th, even though it yielded mostly a mix of half-baked ideas and slick, yet sadly vacant gestures. (above Kate Javens, Named for Derrick Bell; right, hanging out with Fahamu and Mike before the stroll )

Things started off decently at Marcia Wood with Kate Javens's large-scale oils of mythical chimeras and other animals that seemed to hold some operatic sense of portentous danger. Starting here was like walking in on an action movie 15 minutes late; there is some sense that you've missed the big explosion in the opening scene, but what follows is interesting enough. Many of Javens's works might better be called drawings made in oil paint or perhaps a series of grisailles, the monochromatic underpainting that props up most western art made before the mid-19th century. The big works seemed calculated to fill grand foyers without offending the society ladies, but that was ok. The breathy brushstrokes and the erie compositions still made them seem infused with light, or possibly even a little magic.

Things took a downturn at Gallery Stokes, or GaFKATS (the Gallery Formerly Known as Ty Stokes). Scott Griffin had encased medium-scale collage work and iridescent oil pigments in thick blocks of resin, creating a kind of is-it-or-isn't-it optical illusion of three dimensionality. The images are of otherworldly plant life that seem to be simultaneously underwater and floating in space. They are very slickly produced; the fabrication is impeccable, and conceptually, they are boring, boring, boring; fit for decorating the hallways of waiting rooms, middlebrow hotels, or any other location where people need to be given a sense of "wonder" while being reassured that everything really is okay. The unsettling subject matter is ironically tamed and undercut by the very slickness of the finish and the modesty of scale. We're just not asked for much here. (left, Lifescape No.29)

I should have counted my blessings at Stokes, because 3 minutes at Krause Gallery had me longing for Scott Griffin's depth. Zac Freeman's photos of light particles made pretty rainbows and unfortunately not much else. According to the artist, the work somehow relates to Einstein's theory of relativity, though he never quite spelled out how. In another strand of work, Freeman uses bits of junk--bottle caps, broken keyboards, buttons, glass fragments--that when accumulated and seen from a distance create portraits. There's a little bit of the ooh factor here. And if we ignore the entire oeuvre of Vik Muniz this might be enough. But Vik Muniz does in fact exist and is dealing with the same issues of representation in the same way only more profoundly and with many more layers. (above, Zac Freeman, installation view of light particles; Courtney; Courtney detail)

I don't want to say too much about Wyatt Graff, the other half of the two-man show at Krause. The work is very slickly produced (are you picking up a theme here?), and makes fairly modest claims for itself. It's decorative and pretty and looks good on a wall. It doesn't rewrite art history or engage deep contemplation, but I'm guessing in the right home it catches the light nicely. I'm not sure it's trying to do anything else. In any case, I counted at least $40,000 worth of art sold at Krause by the time I left. And it was still early. (right, work by Graff; detail)

Maybe I should stop here. It's too depressing. What happened, Castleberry Hill? I know it's been some months, but geez, you've really let yourself go.

Things were a little better at Romo. The Boys Are Back in Town featured a group of 10 Brooklyn artists with a distinctly messy, DIY, fuck-it-all approach to painting. These probably looked good in a trashed out Williamsburg loft; here they just looked trashed out. This seems to be a generation that's been looking at artists like Dana Schutz, Kai Althoff, Peter Doig, and Carroll Dunham; but--it would seem--substituting compositional strategies drawn from pop culture references that don't always hit the mark. In any case, the stylistic similarities between the ten young men made it nearly impossible to judge the success or failure of each one independently. Which perhaps is they way they would have wanted it. (left, Paul Brainerd, The President of the United States of America)



Sister Louisa came to the rescue a few doors down. Sister Louisa is Grant Henry, and his/her irreverent glosses on thrift store finds and cheap-y paint-by-number pictures came in as a breath of fresh air. They were direct, simple, unpretentious, and hilarious. Still, the underlying paintings are inescapably earnest, painfully earnest, and that made the jarring distortions of the overlaid painted phrases somehow weirdly moving. Maybe they were too easy. I didn't care; after Krause, I was just thankful that they didn't seem cynically calculated to be featured in a 4-page feature on interior design in The Atlantan. The work was priced to go and the party atmosphere made a person want to hang out for a while. (above and right, some dude with work by Sister Louisa)



The party continued at Garage Projects with Anita Arliss and a couple of pizzas cut into bite-sized pieces. The show stayed afloat. But only barely. The paintings themselves--renderings of personal shots from a Japanese social networking site, digitally manipulated and then rendered in ink jet and paint--were clean, focused, and conceptually interesting (amen!). I just couldn't figure out why they should be at Garage Projects, which normally excels in unconventional production presented in unconventional ways. This made it among the worst places Arliss could be shown. The venue did nothing for the paintings and the paintings did nothing for the venue. The show proved that you can't just pick up paintings and throw them anywhere. Place matters. Romo, yes. Get This!, sure. But Garage Projects? That one was a headscratcher. Maybe this was just a symptom of the city's lack of exhibition spaces. (above, Anita Arliss, installation view; right, Shop Here Dream)

Meanwhile, across the street Jason Wertz showed 3 paintings by Kevin Archer that mostly failed to fill the space they were given. Did a painting or two get lost in shipping? Did the artist flake out? The place didn't even look like it was really open, and I kept waiting for someone to come in and tell me to leave. That didn't happen. Kevin Archer does thickly painted, melty abstracts that... oh, what's the point? You've seen them a million times before, always with the same tired justification in the artist's statement: something about questioning the true nature of painting or what's really legitimate painting or some such rote repetition. We might have bought that explanation in 1944, but it is not 1944. It's 2008 and using pure abstraction on a wall-hung canvas to question the nature of painting just isn't an interesting strategy anymore. (left, Kevin Archer, Painting One)



I was glad I ended the evening at Get This!, far and away the bright spot of the entire art stroll. Bill Daniel's Sunset Scavenger juxtaposed large scale silver prints of houseboats and landscapes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The images were beautifully made markers of loneliness and ruin. Rounding out the exhibition was a ton of stuff; postcards, placards, posters, letters, photos--the artifacts of wandering, the detritus of homelessness. Even though this was not a "Katrina show," the gravitas of that paradigm shift hung heavy over everything. It was compelling stuff installed in a compelling way. (above and right, Bill Daniel, installation views)

At the end of the night, I was left with an overall feeling of littleness; little ideas, little executions, little scope. So much of it felt like student thesis projects, trial balloons floated before the art making begins in earnest. With the exception of Get This! and possibly Marcia Wood, there was no sense of big risk taken and invested in a big idea.



At a recent Contemporary panel discussion on art fairs and biennials, talk turned to thoughts of Atlanta as a biennial city. Can it support a true biennial of the type that are popping up all over? Someone on the panel said, "Well, then you run into the problem of scale; no one is going to fly from all over the world just to see 13 little things." That is probably true. And yet. And yet, I maintain this hope based on the slimmest of evidence that a critical mass of the big gestures is out there, cooking, gestating, coalescing, waiting for an opening to be coaxed out into the sun. (above Bill Daniel at Get This!; right, artist Jacob Dwight cleverly disguised in "homeless guy hoodie")

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I've picked up where I left off some 3 years ago making new work. I had starting thinking about maps and data as both subject and process. Above is a diptych study.

current music: Fink, that album after "biscuits for breakfast"

I went to see Anne Wilson speak last night in the Hub at SCAD. She tried to deliver a smooth, scripted speech about the relationship between textiles, digital media, urban space, and architecture, but the mic kept cutting in and out. This was a nice effect. It made the speech more like performance as she kept having to repeat phrases over and over until the mic cut back in: "What we see... what we see... what we see here is an evolution from past to present. " It was a nice turn of hip-hop epistemology.

I liked Wilson's tiny little things. She works mainly with different kinds of textiles, including hair, the raw textile material produced by the human body. Earlier work was based on small scale table linens, weaving human hair into the holes produced naturally by age, overbleaching, or accidents with cigars. Later work involved accretions of more tiny little things--little swatches of net knitted with insect pins, miniature tubes, rails, and shafts. In accumulation over an expanse of 12 or 14 or 18 feet of fabric, these tiny bits took on the look of a ruined city or an incomplete urban plan. Wilson called these an "imagined city of tensile networks."

What still rings in my head, though, were comments she made toward the end during Q&A. In reference to the fact that she would be visiting with students the following day for studio critiques, she spoke of the skill of generosity. Generosity, she said, not as a form of politeness, but as the breadth of spirit that it takes to engage with someone else's work, process it, and give it a full and thoughtful response. The challenge of the critical voice.

I'd been thinking a lot about that... the challenge of the critical voice. The line between rigorous critique and the kind of vicious slam that inhibits creativity or--depending on the writer--ends careers is constantly in motion. The first stimulates growth, the latter stifles it. Eva Lake has posted some thoughts on the matter, saying in part:

In the public pursuit of art making, it's not for the weak or timid. If you seek approval - to have everyone love you - you are going to have a rough ride! Because even if you become very "good" at what you do, not everyone will agree. Art is subjective. People have very strident opinions about it.

The key word there is "public," the public pursuit of art making. To engage in an activity in the public sphere is to invite conversation about it. When you take it out of the studio, out of the classroom, it becomes part of the visual discourse of the city. It is shared property. The public pursuit of art making is to invite sharing and therefore to invite disagreement. But this disagreement, entered into with generosity, creates something like a dialog. And that in turn creates something like a creative community.

That's why we need critical voices here. Desperately. A dozen more than we've got. A hundred more. I hung out for a while this afternoon with Meshakai Wolf at New Street Gallery. We talked for 3 hours about how even if there were enough people in this city to do critical writing, we lack the outlets in which that critical writing would be seen. Anyone who has started an arts publication of any kind in this city deserves a medal as far as I'm concerned.

Here is where the blogs come raging into that vacuum. This phenomenon isn't unique to Atlanta. There may be no real crisis of criticism, but there is a crisis of critical voices. I like what Steven Alexander has to say about it. Writing about the recent Red Dot Fair bloggers' panel he says:

It remains to be seen how [blogging] will affect the larger art dialogue, but for the moment, it is a vital, highly diverse, and fast-growing global forum for frank observations and interesting ideas. Something that, with very few exceptions, cannot be said about conventional art criticism today. The bloggers who are donating their time, energy, intelligence and insight to a new vernacular form of information sharing and discourse are pioneering a completely new approach to engagement with and communication about art.

So true. We can be accused of ignorance, overzealousness, or callousness. But most of us cannot be accused of apathy, not when it can take the better part of an afternoon to write a well-crafted, detailed blog post stuffed with opinions you know will likely be thrown back in your face eventually. No one is getting rich doing an art blog. And only about a dozen people are getting rich even doing criticism in conventional outlets. The rest of us are building communities. The rest of us are raising barns.

Anne Wilson's speaking of generosity reaffirmed my faith in the rigorous critique. She reminded me of its importance in the art ecology. She reminded me that the critique made by the hungry eye and the sharp mind is not an act of terrorism. It is an act of respect. It is an act of love.

Below: Outside of the talk the SCAD students provided a tasty buffet, though Eddie thought some of the portions were rather large.

Philadelphia OBs (Original Bloggers) Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon have posted very nice and thorough reviews of several of the New York art fairs at Artblog, including Volta and Pulse. I'll be going to the City that Never Sleeps for the Biennial next week, Unfortunately, all that will remain of the fairs by then will be a few used condoms and the stench of buyer's remorse. Just as well; less to look at = more time to see. Meanwhile, Atlanta artists and galleries are starting to show up more and more in these mass art world conversations. Pulse coverage included Marcia Wood and Brian Dettmer, and I know that Saltworks showed up with Jiha Moon and Michael Scoggins. Also, Jack Shainman was in the house, so I have to believe Radcliffe Bailey was somewhere in evidence. (above, Brian Dettmer dictionary sculpture, image shamelessly pilfered from Roberta and Libby)

Post-tornado, the Georgia Dome Georgia World Congress Center becomes a postmodern riff on the already postmodern Bernard Tschumi.