Title Unknown, Salvador Diaz

It's tough all over for newspapers these days, and at the AJC the hemorrhaging just won't stop. Managing editor Hank Klibanoff just stepped down, and according to a memo to his staff, he's got nothing else lined up. He apparently thought that doing nothing was preferable to keeping his day job at the paper.

But that's not so bad. What's worse is that the paper that made national news for cutting its book review editor is getting ready to make further cuts in the newsroom. That's the rumor from a very reliable little bird, and yes arts staff once again feels vulnerable.

There's no actionable intelligence that I know of yet, but anyone who cares about the arts dialog in Atlanta should ready their poison pens for Angela Tuck if the shit really goes down in the arts pages. Actually, there's no need for vitriol right off the bat; Ms. Tuck takes phone calls and actually returns emails personally.

I'm not one of those people that thinks that the existence of newspapers is synonymous with all rational thought. In fact, I'm convinced that something much more subtle, flexible, timely, and accurate will replace it soon enough. And that something is a digital something. But until it comes along, the papers are what we've got.

Yes, I know I write for the competition. But a diminution of the arts dialog leaves everyone worse off.

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I haven't heard much from Dearraindrop lately, but four or five years ago, that quintet of Virginia-based artists rode the crest of the wave of so-called "bedroom shows" that took over the art world for a minute. Generally the idea seemed to be to gather up as much crap as you could, cram it anarchically into a single room, and then sit back and watch the sensory overload. And everyone from Cory Arcangel to Michael Velliquette to Assume Vivid Astro Focus was doing it. The artistic impulses at work seemed to be (in descending order of importance) obsessive compulsion, democratic idealism, contagious generosity, and rank sadism. As a friend of mine said at the time about one of these shows, "It looks like a homeless man, a crazy old lady, and a teenager all moved in together and became roommates."

That trend faded as quickly as it emerged, but the strategies of accumulation, information overload, and dross elevated to the status of art have stayed with us, if somewhat toned down from its giddy 2004 highs. Three Atlanta artists are making use of this aesthetic right now to very different effects.


The Gospel Truth #2, Danny Bruce Campbell, 2008

Allusion
Danny Bruce Campbell, the clear standout in the Hammond's House Praise Songs trio exhibition seems to willfully carry the entire weight of history on his back. In "The Gospel Truth #2," his accumulation is not the accumulation of a lifetime over years, but the accumulation of an entire race over centuries.



His encyclopedic, 2-wall installation includes: an old sewing machine, a Bible, license plates, quilts, kuba cloth, "whites only" signs, family photographs, cooking utensils, food packaging, a model ship, an American flag, and that portrait of Jesus Big Mama had hanging over the TV set.



Here, meaning is made through allusion; to a complex and rich set of intertwining histories of blacks, whites, and everyone else in the peculiar American context. The risk is that all these ready-made objects function as easily manipulated symbols, but Campbell avoids that risk through brute force of volume. It's as if historical memory itself has erupted through the walls and left us to wonder, given the millstone of our collective past, how we ever got from there to here.

More photos from Praise Songs here.


A Shrine to Nothing, Squanto, 2008

Metaphor
If Campell's installation is the eruption of history, Squanto's "A Shrine to Nothing" in MINT Gallery's Employee Picks show is the eruption of a hallucinatory psychotic break. Color is everywhere. Glitter, books, toys, religious icons, stickers, flags, all manner of paint on paper, on photographs, on collages, and just about every other surface imaginable.

There is a recurring motif of Native American-related imagery, but the motif seems to punctuate the work rather than unify it.



The work is fun, but hard to consider. How to look at Squanto's shrine to nothing after seeing Campbell's shrine to everything? The differences feel generational to me. The kind of breezy flippancy that my generation pioneered was institutionalized by the next generation, but this sort of lurid pop cultural anarchy already feels slightly dated. (By the way, I have no idea of Squanto's age; I'm talking about the work, not the artists.)



Here, metaphor makes meaning, such as there is. The collected dust and dross of culture become a metaphor for the leveling effects of kitsch. Everything is reduced to the importance of a disposable McDonald's figurine. This could be an interesting explosion of the language of kitsch, but I did not get the impression that the artist was entirely in control of this exploration. I'm looking forward to giving her work a second try; rumor has it she's coming back to MINT at Thanksgiving.

More photos from Employee Picks here. (Side note: a first-hand experience of Joy Prasavath's lyrical "Up on the Roof" alone is worth the trip to MINT.)


Junk in My Trunk, (detail), Emily Maxwell, 2008

Synecdoche
More successful was one of Emily Maxwell's works in Welcome Home at the new Art House Gallery in Castleberry Hill where Romo used to be. Maxwell is a young artist (a SCAD student?) who's still finding her voice, but her work is unfailingly honest and what my old painting teacher used to call "felt through."



"Junk in My Trunk" is Maxwell's careful, catalogued excavation of her own personal space (or at least what appears to be). Unlike both Squanto and Campbell, the work is deliberate, confessional, and unmannered. Arranged in a near-grid, Maxwell includes personal notes, cigarette cartons, sunglasses, advertising, CD cases, snapshots, ticket stubs, and a tinny radio playing a barely-audible song.



Each item is available for inspection and consideration, almost like an anthropological dig on her own life. This is synecdoche; each item stands in for a whole story, and it was fascinating to imagine the entire life that was built up around these objects. Emily Maxwell is quite good at this kind of unflinching self-examination; and I expect her to go far.

More photos from Welcome Home to come.

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Containing = Hate, installation view, Allison Rentz, 2006. Photo: Stan Woodard.

My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Klages, once told us kids an apocryphal story about how circus elephants are trained. Apparently, when the elephant is a wee calf, the trainer ties a rope around its leg and tethers it to a stake in the ground. At that age, the elephant is smarter than it is strong, so it realizes that it cannot move beyond a given radius and sooner or later it stops trying to do so.

Elephants have emotional memories as long and as strong as any other higher mammal, and this turns out to be their undoing. As it matures the calf learns to associate the rope with immobility. This association remains into adulthood, so much so that in order to stop a circus elephant from charging, one need only tie a rope around its leg. The other end is tied to... nothing. That elephant will go nowhere.

Now I'm sure to get email from someone who knows someone who knows someone who was in the circus who will insist that Mrs. Klages was a damn dirty liar, but don't harsh my buzz. I'm making a bigger point.

I hate standing around with a rope around my ankle tied to nothing. And I don't like it when other artists do either.

That's why I jumped at the opportunity to get involved with Idea Capital earlier this year. Basically, Idea Capital (web site to come) is just a small group of artists and cultural workers* that have gotten together to help make someone's art happen**. We all pony up a little cash and then select an artist who could use a small, but important boost to make art that wouldn't receive support anywhere else.

So we just announced the first winner: Allison Rentz, she of the plastic sheeting and self-appointed dictator of her own art empire. This is what we'll be supporting (from the press release; pdf):

Ms. Rentz will receive the inaugural $500 prize to support a new work titled “Pool.” The artist describes the work as a multi-media “immersive world” in which invited “art students, architects, artists, designers, musicians, and chefs” will engage in a total sensory installation that “lives in and out of the water.” The work will also include a video projection and scripted audience participation.

Why Allison? One of the many, many, many complaints I continue to hear is that anything risky, edgy, and progressive languishes in this city while paintings of grapes and dilapidated houses fly off the gallery walls. So it became important to me—I'm speaking for myself here—to reverse this trend, to pointedly support that which wears its freakishness on its sleeve, that which celebrates the odd thought and the unresolved consciousness.

This was a competitive thing, and we got a decent number (18) of very competent entries. Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised. But selecting one artist means that 17 or more didn't get selected. There is room to do so much more, which is why want to see other groups start to do similar things.

Or better yet, join Idea Capital. We've already gotten 3 18 new inquiries. Positions are open and anyone is welcome.

*Stuart Keeler, Pam Rogers, Louise Shaw, Susan Todd-Raque, and myself.
**Some of you undoubtedly know about the artists' association I've been clanging pots all over town about starting. No, this is not that. This is direct peer-to-peer funding.

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Rendering of Rem Koolhaas's design for Dubai Waterfront City to be built on 1.5 billion square feet of artificial island. Is that a giant web cam?,

Every day I toss in the garbage half a dozen links to national and international art news stories that I want to say something about, but never find the time. But I can't let this one get by.

According to Time's Richard Lacayo, Rem Koolhaas speaking at a the Van Alen Institute spoke of the problems of the contemporary museum last week. So what do you suppose he singled out as the chief evil bedeviling the modern institution? Lack of democratic principles? Chronic underfunding? Racism? No.

The main threat to the museum as he sees it is people. "Flow is what is ruining the contemporary museum, the flow of visitors."

Waitaminute waitaminute waitaminute. The main problem with museums is that people go to them? Amazing that Lacayo let this one get by without comment.

This attitude shouldn't be a surprise from an architect who has always been more interested in illustrating architectural theories than on making livable buildings. Meanwhile the Piano-designed extension to the High looks better and better every time I see it, even with its "dreaded atrium."

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I've heard good things about "The Wreathmaker," Richard Sudden's 2005 site-specific installation at Whitespace. I wish I had seen that one, because then I might feel better about "For the Waters of Lethe," Sudden's current multimedia installation in the same space. I won't do a comprehensive description of the show--Local Ephemera does an admirable job of that here--but I will point out a few highlights and sore thumbs.

Everything in the show looks good. Sudden's precisely wrought kayak hulls (based on plans he and his brother had ordered in the late 60s) remind me of some of Robert Witherspoon's fabrication intensive sculpture. And a series of mixed media works on braille book pages all have rich, tactile surfaces.


The Secret Language, encaustic on braille paper, 21" x 11"


detail

But I was dogged too often with the sense of showiness from the work, the sense that all of this was designed to look deep and evocative without actually being deep and evocative. The braille pages for example seem to want to suggest weather and age, but are not actually weathered and aged. And so they have the feeling of movie props, designed to seem ancient and spiritual on camera. The video "For the Waters of Lethe" meant to suggest and look like an Ingmar Bergman film, instead was vaguely silly with its putatively Greek goddess walking around in a bed sheet making arm movements that feel like they're lifted from a high school production of Oedipus Rex.


2nd room, installation view. Background: "For the Waters of Lethe"

To be sure, isolated moments were pleasurable and affecting: the pair of kayaks in the second room were understated talismans of grief and longing. And the pair of truly weathered canvases "Memory and Oblivion I" and "Memory and Oblivion II" are onto something important in the post minimalist dialog with their surfaces manipulated by man and nature.

But these moments of direct connection were too often overshadowed by the more surface-oriented elements of the exhibition. A little makeshift shed on the Whitespace grounds is bedecked with symbols originating from a panoply of cultures and belief systems: Ashanti, Rastafarian, Talmudic, numerological, Daoist, Tibetan, old norse, Hindu. The shed, called "Xin's House" was peaceful and lovely in its own way, but the leveling ecumenicalism of it all made it unconvincing either as art or as genuine spirituality. The artist seemed to be asserting that a vague and generalized belief in beliefs adds up to insight. But for me it didn't, any more than a grocery list adds up to a meal. Up through June 21.


Xin's Houseinterior detail


Xin's House, artists revealing secret Rastafarian panel

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Darren Saravis's "Body/Text Project" at Composition Gallery fails on almost every front. The conceptually thin conceit of projecting texts onto the bodies of female models is the weakest excuse for turning women into passive objects since Vanessa Beecroft marched her stilettoed fembots into the Venice Biennale a decade ago. Although some of the projected texts are written by the models themselves, they are rendered unreadable and therefore serve as a mere prop to justify the act of making a nudie shot. The texts are an extraneous crutch that give the work the superficial whiff of conceptualism, but deliver no actual conceptual payoff. Simple nudes might have been boring, but at least they would have been sincere.


Alma #7428, 25" x 32", inkjet print

Saravis's work makes Jock Sturges look like a radical.


Maria #6464, 40" x 32", inkjet print

Some of these shortcomings might be forgiven if the images were technically proficient. Unfortunately, awkward poses, distracting shadows, and mediocre prints make this show one to pass over.

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The Mattress Factory Loft's open studio tour took place in the midst of last weekend's heatwave and none of those studios has air conditioning. I sweated it out though, in the name of art, and actually saw some promising work. Above is Esteban Patino standing in front of a recently finished piece. He's still trying to assimilate the influences of Dali and Miro, but is coming up with some interesting work.


work by Matt Griffith



I was most excited by the discovery of Christopher Bost's sugary, psychedelic landscapes.


work in progress by Christopher Bost


work by Tony Hernandez

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Study for "Never Scared", 18" x 24", mixed media on digital print

After recovering from the heat of the day at the Mattress Factory, I dropped by Fahamu Pecou's Something Like a Phenomenon at Vaknin. The theme was speakeasy and the dress code was strictly 1920s, Harlem Renaissance, flappers, and gin joints. The party was pure spectacle, and it was impossible not to get infected by it. A room-sensitive DJ and a string of alterna-hop vocalists kept the energy going through the night.


Artist Toya Northington in speakeasy style


Study for "Black Guys R Cool", 20" x 24", mixed media on digital print

I wasn't expecting to actually see any art that night, but it was interesting to see that Pecou is showing a number of the photographs that served as studies for the paintings. These were a pleasant surprise. Far from being merely functional mockups, they are in fact fully produced photo shoots. And they work surprisingly well as finished works in themselves. All of Pecou's claims about performance and the putting on of costumes as social devices actually pay off here. The paintings tend to obscure these claims, but the photos clarify them.


Study for "Crystal Stare", 16" x 20", mixed media on digital print

The image quality in most of the photos is hasty and low res, presumably because they were never meant to be shown as finished works. However, given their inherent multi-level signifying, I think the whole relationship between the studies and the paintings needs to be rethought.

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PACE, detail, 4" x 6", digital prints

I remember the shock to my system when I first decamped from New York City to Austin in early 1997. It was the first time in my adult life that I had ever lived in a pedestrian-hostile city with poor public transportation. And 110-degree heat. Three months in, it became clear that I either had to get a car or lead a radically different and slower kind of life. I chose the car.



Artist Hadley Breckenridge has so no such option. Because Breckenridge has epilepsy, she cannot drive, and therefore must navigate Atlanta in an entirely different way than most of us. Her current solo show PACE at VSA Arts for All Gallery downtown explores the condition of forced slowness, of negotiating a city built for cars without a benefit of a car.





For one month, Breckenridge took photos of all of her daily movements, by foot, by public transportation, by bummed rides. She began with a photo of herself and what she carried around for the day, and then snapped digital photos of her surroundings intermittently throughout her travels to art classes, the grocery store, the doctor, and around the house. In the gallery display, each day begins with a record of how far she has traveled (in miles and steps), the number of seizures that day, and whether the journey was ultimately successful or not.



The photos are lined up in chronological order, ringing the gallery. Arts for All Gallery is devoted to artists with disabilities and--not coincidentally--has had a number of shows that echo this brand of obsessive documentation. As invisible populations seek visibility, this kind of documentation overkill often becomes a powerful weapon.





The photos are meant to document the artist's constantly frustrated movements. Breckenridge says

I wait for trains, buses and other rides. Sometimes it takes up to an hour and a half to get somewhere that would otherwise take 15 minutes by car. I have no control over the delayed sense of time that I experience. Life seems to be eaten away with this constant waiting.

Ironically, if anything, the photos in PACE are not tedious enough. Like most good photographers, Breckenridge is particularly talented in isolating the decisive moment and the telling detail from the noise and flux of her surroundings. I had to constantly remind myself that these photos were attempts to document an exhausting and frustrating process--getting from point A to point B.





I was reminded of Emily Maxwell's "24 Hour Hands" at Mint Gallery's 404/912 show a couple of weeks ago. In that piece, Maxwell documented the variable steadiness of her hand with repeated hash marks drawn consistently (and tediously) over a 24-hour period. Both artists are dealing with the limitations of the body, the interaction between their medical states and their art making, and the confessional documentation of failures. In Maxwell's case, however, the form more closely matches the content.





Without enough tedium--that is, an overabundance of pure, rote repetition--Breckenridge's exhibition actually leads one to the conclusion that her life is rather fascinating and full of interesting details and moments throughout the day.



Which it may be, too.



It may be that through her frustration, Breckenridge builds a compelling argument for living life more like her. Though she speaks of guilt over having to bum rides and wishing that a grocery run was not an involved, time consuming affair, she leaves us with all the acutely observed details of the city that can only be registered by slowing down and getting out of the car.



PACE runs through June 20.

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Given the number of times I've crisscrossed the country, it's fairly remarkable that I'd always managed to miss Florida until last week. A family vacation set that aright.

I visited the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg,





stayed in a hundred-year-old haunted Victorian mansion in Clearwater,



that included a ghost hunting tour of the abandoned fourth floor (with no electricity and no AC),



and discovered a beautiful--albeit absolutely artificial and disneyfied--garden in Tampa.



...among other things.

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