A contemporary, sometimes historical, art, social, political, blog in and around the art world and its artists. Poetry, litterature, commentary, images, music, books, life... Et aussi, un peu de la culture Française et ses artistes contemporains. A place to come to read, relax and contribute your ideas and projects
Art as Authority is dedicated to catalyzing critical discussion and disseminating information about art as filtered through San Diego and beyond.
Nepotism and Other Character Flaws
FILM SCREENING & PANEL DISCUSSION
Friday, March 12th, 8 PM
Nepotism and Other Character Flaws is the title and sole requirement for this evening of artist-made films. Four artists from the Family Matters exhibition are charged by curator Brian Goeltzenleuchter to develop a film series comprised of "artists, friends, and/or colleagues to whom you owe something or from whom you want something." Extending the theme of "family matters" and opening the typically derogatory concept of nepotism up for debate, this evening promises lively discussion between audience and panelists.
Panelists include Lisa Hutton, Andrew Kaufman, Lauren Tyler Norby and Donna Stack
Film and video by Justin Beckman, Mike Celona, Andrew Filippone Jr, Kip Fulbeck, Preston Poe, and Chris Todd
This Film Screening is part of the FAMILY MATTERS exhibition series
Special Price for our Electronic Friends: Tickets to the March 12th Nepotism and Other Character
Flaws screenings are two-for-one, or $7.50/general public and $5.00/members and students. Email us
with your reservation at info@sushiart.org
An installation by Dave Ghilarducci at ART Produce Gallery
March 13 - April 18 Opening Reception: Saturday March 13, 6-9pm
Rattle and Hum is an interactive, room sized installation. The viewer enters a narrow gallery to find what, at first glance, appears to be a postminimalist sculpture: Two identical steel cages, each containing an imposing rusted steel panel, are placed opposite each other. However, motion sensors, electronics and motors are embedded into the artwork, endowing it with the potential for kinetic and acoustic theatricality. When the viewer enters the installation, motion sensors gage the viewer’s position relative to both of the cages and commands motors to vibrate the rusted steel panels. These vibrations change in intensity and duration based on the movement of the viewer. Yet, as the viewer lingers in the installation, the vibrations begin to change with apparent randomness. As the viewer moves toward a cage, the intensity may wax or wane, and the opposite cage may or may not also do the same. Each time the viewer changes direction, the piece randomizes again. Ultimately, an indeterminate relationship between the viewer and the objects becomes the basis for a time- and motion-based spectacle for other viewers.
Half-consciously, though, there is the more indigenous dream that the adventure is everything…
— Kaprow, Happenings in the New York Scene
Last month Agitprop presented Coatlicue mi Amor, a performance by The Border Corps, a group of San Diego artists, musicians, and performers. In its density of information and feeling, Coatlicue was by far the most ambitious and successful event I've witnessed to date at Agitprop, and not by coincidence it's taken me a month to figure out how to write about it.
Billed as a happening, Coatlicue felt more closely positioned between traditional performance art and current trends in interactive theatre. Its hybrid nature made for a wild ride: rather than simply disappearing, the fourth wall seemed to be in constant motion throughout the Agitprop space, flying up, down, or inverting polarity as various scenes unfolded.
Throughout the fourth-wall gymnastics backstage remained overhead and crucial, as Border Corpsmen Armando de la Torre and Anthony Vasquez worked full-time through the performance spinning a dense web of real-time audio and video around performers Endy, Perry Vasquez, and Shondra Dawson.
The work was structured in three parts: the dreams of two vividly REM-state dreamers; a satirical review of recent and ongoing commercial crypto-genocides (the gods are more subtle these days); and a traditional Catholic liturgy recounting in lurid detail the historical genocide of the Island Carib people at the hands of conquistadores.
At this point I'd normally attempt a detailed description of these parts, but doing so would require more pages than could fit on this blog, and would only lead the reader further and further away from the intense theatricality engendered by the performance. Words fail me — you had to be there.
Never overplaying its hand (except perhaps in the topical Haiti references), the entire production displayed subtle signs of being well-thought-out to the n'th degree:
The audience was materially encouraged (via an admission discount) to attend the performance with sketchbooks and pencils. The presence of sketchers sketching throughout the performance mere feet from the performers seemed to insert them into the story itself, as complicit documenters of historical phenomena.
The climactic genocide liturgy was delivered directly to the artist-heavy audience, reframing them as members of the Church and so complicit participants in the recounted genocide. And so we are: you and I live where we live and how we live on the bones of a destroyed people. It's an old story, and not an uncommon one, but some old stories deserve regular retelling.
Post-performance some remarkably good food was made available to the audience for free. Perhaps not by coincidence, most of it seemed to be round.
I know of several people who missed this event and regret it. Word is that a repeat performance may occur at Agitprop in the indefinite future — watch for it.
9.00 AM – 12.00 PM Breakfast at Sustainability Resource Center (next to PC Theater)
9.30 AM BSU Rally at Chancellor’s Complex
11.00 AM Faculty Press Conference at Cross Cultural Center,Comunidad Rm
11.30 AM Walkout/gather at Gilman Parking Structure
11.45 AM March to Geisel Library
12.00 – 3.00 PM Rally at Silent Tree (Library Walk)
including the Arts Collective, Sam Jung, Jake Blanc, Fnann Keflezighi, Mar Velez, Edwina Welch, Kuttin Kandy, Micah Cardenas, Yen Espiritu, Ivan Evans, K. Wayne Yang, Maria Tillmanns, Carolan Buckmaster, Matias Marin, L. Chase Smith, Krishna Sriram. And MCs: Chevelle Newell and Bryant Pena.
2.30 PM Buses leave for All San Diego Rally from Chancellor’s Complex
March begins at Centro Cultural de la Raza (Park & President’s Way) @ 3.30 PM
March Downtown to Governor’s Office (1350 Front Street)
· first-come-first-serve on buses
· travel to downtown also by Rt. 150 atGilman
In light of the recent events taking place on the UCSD campus, spurred by both the continued privatization of the University as well as the organization of racially derogatory events by some students and non-students, there will be a series of protests happening today on the UCSD campus and throughout San Diego. This is an invitation to join in.
11 AM - 7 PM Thursday, February 25
11 AM - 10 PM Saturday, February 27
11 AM - 10 PM Sunday, February 28
Folks who attended the opening said the show looked especially good at night, so here's the opportunity.
Meantime, Donovan herself will be giving a talk in the gallery Saturday afternoon at 2 PM. Note that the museum warns: "Space is extremely limited due to restricted gallery capacity. There are no advance tickets for this event. Entry will be on a first-come, first-served basis."
On that basis I'm skipping the talk, partly out of unwillingness to camp on the doorstep overnight, and mostly due to putting in a full day this Saturday at the sdspace4art community build.
Anna Zappoli's show at the San DIego Art Institute ends this weekend. The show is remarkable in several dimensions:
After a decade of cycling her paint between poles of superflat and superexpressive, the two come together here, perfectly integrated, and often on the same canvas. It no longer feels like two styles: just one, utterly, unique, signature. She owns it — it's hers.
Color-wise the work is more cohesive than I remember from shows past: various flavors of black and red.
The color cohesion is force-multiplied by the hanging of several works as de facto diptychs, a move that concentrates the show spatially while generating some striking contrasts not normally associated with the diptych format.
At this point I need to mention that the greatness of this show is due in no small part to an unadvertised collaboration: for this show Anna turned her work over to SDAI President & CEO Tim Field, who was solely responsible for the exhibition design (including those diptych pairings). The design is frighteningly perfect — it more than qualifies as an installation in and of itself.
One of the things I love about the art world is how crystalline talents can reside in eccentric and even ignoble containers. (Guy, take a bow.) In such cases I dig the art while giving its maker a moderate berth. And goodness knows I've had my run-in's with Tim: the very idea of an SDAI CEO makes me LOL.
But here's the thing: once upon a time I myself was a member of SDAI (Hi, my name is Richard and I'm…). That's where I got to know her work and Anna. And Tim was new on the scene back then, and the guy was there as an artist. And evidently still is: no doubt assisted by a Jack O'Brien-esque run of putting together a gazillion shows at SDAI, the guy has developed a major eye for designing clean-looking shows. Or in Anna's case, great ones.
Last September Garage posted an open call on the net requesting submissions for a video exhibition investigating "paradoxes within performance/performative actions that find their way into video/editing."
This Saturday Garage presents the work selected.
The screening is at 6 pm. Seating is limited — if you have a chair to bring, Larry would appreciate it.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House is pleased to announce its most ambitious project to date: How Many Billboards? Art In Stead. This large-scale urban exhibition debuts 21 newly commissioned art works for billboards in Los Angeles.
Participating artists:
Kenneth Anger / Michael Asher / Jennifer Bornstein / Eileen Cowin / Christina Fernandez / Ken Gonzales-Day / Renée Green / Kira Lynn Harris / John Knight / David Lamelas / Brandon Lattu / Daniel Joseph Martinez / Kori Newkirk / Yvonne Rainer / Martha Rosler with Josh Neufeld / Allen Ruppersberg / Allan Sekula / Susan Silton / Kerry Tribe / James Welling / lauren woods
Each artist has produced a work especially for this exhibition that responds to the medium of the billboard and interprets its role in the urban landscape. How Many Billboards? investigates art as an idea as well as art as a media for critical intervention.
I cannot help but think that this horror [of empty spaces] that drives artists to incessant production is the apprehension that the time of art is over. Duchamp announced as much with his ready-mades but we’ve pretended that those were just provocations. We’ve read Walter Benjamin on the death of the aura and technology’s reduction of art to distraction.
But the aura of the artwork, which was its connection to the sacred, couldn’t be allowed to evaporate because, strangely enough, art cannot be commodified without some remnant of the sacred remaining associated with it. The paradox is that we need art to have something like a “soul” in order to trade it at a price above what mere goods fetch.
The last purchase that art had on something resembling spirituality was through the much-abused notion of criticality. That too is now used up thanks to the postmodernist conflation of critique and complicity.
And despite attempts to reinvent the idea of community through subcultural affiliation, community would seem to require a foundation that exceeds the atomizing power of capital, which ceaselessly uproots and disperses people...
The larger question of what art’s purpose might be beyond amusing jaded rich people or contributing a veneer of [civic] sophistication ... will remain.
This should not be seen as a manifesto to commit identity suicide and take up volleyball, but rather as a call to think and think hard about all aspects of your practice, and then strive to ensure that none are based on the boatload of received ideas that pass these days for art.
One possible art centers on the idea of user experience — a kind of interactive participatory static theatre — which can be pursued in venues as large as the Jacobs building, or as small as a zine. In such a paradigm the traditional art object assumes the role of recyclable prop. But this is only one of many possible approaches: the important thing is to pursue a practice that actually fits with what's happening today in your life, in your society, on your planet.
Emerging artist definition: artist [sic] who are emerging with new, fresh ideas. This is not about the age of the artists or the exposure they have had, but what art they are creating now and in the past three to five years.
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."
Specifically, one that integrates the following information in a single pocketable interface:
Gallery map
Directions
Exhibition images
Artist statements
Event schedule
Art reviews
Discussion forums
Currently such apps are available only on the iPhone, which remains cost-prohibitive for many people. This, however, will change as smartphones with app stores quickly become the norm for all mobile phones and service plans.
At that point, once the costs have come down, this sort of app will be the art publication, on the strength of its ability to provide everything one needs to go out and look at art.
by Richard Gleaves Fringe Theories (at Agitprop through January 9) is billed as "the work of five artists and scholars that thrive outside of traditional and accepted rules and boundaries."
What's most striking about the show as a whole is not its fringiness but rather an odd formal emphasis on oldness: old newsprint, old photos, old paintings, old sculpture. The work itself is recent, but — with the exception of Keith Engeron's modest deployment of corporate logos and Tony Allard's use of layered space — otherwise avoids the look and feel of contemporary art.
It's interesting to contemplate just why this is.
My first thought was that the curator (Katherine Sweetman) was asserting the notion of fringe theories as a historical phenomenon: a plausible hypothesis given how the 1960's engendered greater cultural weirdness (spoon bending, pyramid power, Kirlian auras) than we experience today, while in times pre-60's the absence of science-based consumer protection laws enabled entire socioeconomic classes of theory-pitching charlatans and mountebanks (Pirelli in Sweeney Todd).
A brief conversation with the curator dispelled this hypothesis: it turns out she wasn't aware of the thread of antiquity running through the show. But the thread was still there, and in need of explanation.
My second thought fit better: namely, that the curator was subconsciously mapping the notion of "fringe" to outsider art — though the artists themselves were not necessarily "outsider" — and that in doing so the formal baggage of outsider art was serving as a de facto constraint on the work selected for the show. Hence the virtual lack of contemporaneity, and the focus on traditional forms.
And what, pray tell, is the formal baggage of outsider art? Simple: the esthetic engine driving outsider art is the pairing of traditional form with eccentric content. The work must be recognizable as drawing or painting or sculpture. Only savvy professionals with insider credentials can adopt forms such as digging holes in the floor or cooking in the gallery — if an institutionalized schizophrenic were to try this, they'd get solitary, not a retrospective.
A few additional thoughts:
The show copy implies that Noah Doely's ghost-story photographs overlay a contemporary sensibility on traditional techniques. In fact his images are straightforward (and beautifully executed) derivations from the historical genre of occult photography.
Allard's newspaper installation was the sole work in the show to offer extended visual pleasure: wallowing in the information overload made me think of how often pigs look happy.
Agitprop's gnarly upstairs corridor space finally met its match in the muscle-bound sculpture of DJ Brelje and Erich Winzer. I'm nearly certain that putting the very same objects in a white-cube space would gag me by their overstatement. Yet I'm equally certain that any white-cube art hung in this rustic environment would die a thousand deaths. Here the fit's perfect — Fringe Theories is worth seeing solely for this rare conjunction.
The United States Postal Service caused an outcry last month when it decided to stop delivering letters addressed to “Santa Claus, North Pole.” It quickly reversed itself after members of Congress intervened. “We never wanted to spoil people’s Christmas,” an agency spokesman said.
Saturday December 19, 2009
12:00 pm - 12:00 am
Balboa Park fountain (starting location)
San Diego's SantaCon will be on Saturday, Dec 19th, beginning at high noon at the fountain in Balboa Park. We will start out with some reindeer games in the park, then proceed to raise merry hell throughout Hillcrest, North Park, City Heights... wherever Christmas cheer and excessive drinking drive us. Bring cash for cabs, buses, and booze. Bring bullhorns, presents, and coal. Bring your sweet, unsuspecting Santa friends. Bring Santa a shot. Be there.
Editor's note: Art as Authority neither condones nor is liable for the effects of chemically-induced consciousness. The event should, however, make for excellent viewing.
YTPMV is a subgenre of YouTube Poop which uses the traditional YTP source material as a basis for composing original music.
Unlike the makers of classic music videos, YTPMV artists compose all aspects of their work: sound and image. They also take great pains to distinguish their work from the more popular AMV genre, which overlays pop songs with anime imagery.
YTPMV music itself hews closely to pop forms, but it's user-generated and (in the spirit of YouTube Poop) splats vast amounts of energy.
The Fab Lab is a non-profit community laboratory where members can use advanced digital design and fabrication tools to make almost anything. The Fab Lab in San Diego is one of thirty in the Global Fab Lab Network, and the only one on the West Coast.
Fab Lab is intended to serve people who have ideas but lack the tools necessary to realize them. It is a place where advanced technology is accessible, and where anyone can invent and execute an original design.
The Fab Lab offers access to and classes for the following tools:
Last Friday I went to the Body Narratives opening at NTC Promenade in Point Loma, not so much for the art but to see how the show was put together by the five students in Mesa College's Museum Studies program who made it happen:
Maria Bolivar
Megan Daly
James Johnson
Kevin Kao
Samantha Nessel
I spoke with Johnson and Nessel to get a sense of the thought processes that went into the exhibition design, and came away impressed. The thinking was solid, and the design reflected it: fresh use of diagonals in siting the room dividers, a central sweet spot for viewing two of the largest works, and partial visibility of additional works from the sweet spot to lead viewers into the rest of the show.
Johnson explained that exhibition design is one of the topics covered in Museum Studies, and noted that the program brings in experts (such as Michael Fields, lead exhibit designer for the San Diego Natural History Museum) to speak on various topics.
For me the interesting thing about the Museum Studies program is what its name doesn't convey: that the students are being trained not just as potential museum staff, but also as cultural entrepreneurs with all the skills necessary to make successful art shows from scratch.
They're scouting locations, finding artists, doing press releases, designing show cards, contacting newspapers, and signing contracts to secure the exhibition spaces. And they're getting this experience not from an MFA program but from a three-class certificate program at a regional community college. We can only benefit from having such people and programs around.
Program director Alessandra Moctezuma explained that in the past few years the program has moved the student-produced shows out of the Mesa College art gallery and into the community (such as the NTC Promenade space). This makes for a better learning experience for the students, not to mention more art shows around San Diego.
The program's final class places students as interns in local museums or galleries. Johnson is interested in the Mingei, while Nessel is hoping to work with Quint. I wish them the best, and look forward to seeing more shows from them in the future.
Art Joins the Internet of Things With IntelligentArt™
by Richard Gleaves
International art blog ArtAsAuthority has just released a new device and web service for helping artists track their artwork. Called IntelligentArt, the device is embedded into the artwork itself, and keeps tabs on the work's temperature, location, and other vital signs — including who's looking at the work, what they're saying about it, or whether it's being stored in a closet.
AAA is currently running a one-year trial with 500 visual artists, tracking the status of their paintings, sculptures — and even performances.
We spoke with AAA head of innovation Kevin Freitas about IntelligentArt, and how AAA is tapping into the emerging trend called The Internet of Things. This is where everyday objects become connected to the Internet through sensors and wireless data links. In the case of AAA's IntelligentArt, it is powered by multiple sensors including light, motion, temperature, and remote videocam.
AAA's Freitas described the IntelligentArt device as a "quad-band world phone with data capabilities." Along with the device, IntelligentArt includes a web application which enables artists to actively track the status of their oeuvre from the convenience of their personal computer. Users can set up triggers, alerts, and notices — for example using GPS sensors to alert them when one of their works changes locations.
IntelligentArt users pay a single monthly fee of $15 for the browser-based web service and an unlimited number of tracking devices. Freitas noted that AAA worked with the American Association of Museums to get permission to use the product in their museums — the only such device to have permission from the AAM, he told us. AAA assembles the components for IntelligentArt from a collection of manufacturing partners, using AAA's design specifications.
Real-Time Decisions Based on Sensor Data
Freitas said IntelligentArt will enable artists to make real-time decisions much more easily. For example, if the webcam sensor data indicates that a collector (or one of their associates) is disparaging an artwork, the product enables users to transmit live audio responses through the device's embedded speaker system. Alternatively, users have the option of triggering the artwork's remote self-destruct mechanism.
The initial trial period targets museum-grade artists (for example, Roman DeSalvo), where things like security and knowing the vital signs of an artwork are very important. Also, Freitas highlighted that such artists can collaborate with their dealers on monitoring the sensor data, to ensure proper siting and maintenance of important work.
The trial with professional artists is designed to help them make the "last 20%" of the art lifecycle more efficient. After about a year of this trial, AAA will then launch the product globally as a generally available platform. Freitas expects it will be used by any artist wrestling with personal vision, investment management, control issues, and a buyer's market for art.
Freitas told us that he expects this type of sensor product to "mainstream over time as collectors become used to long-term interaction with artists through their artwork."
Deth P. Sun is among the handful of Giant Robot artists (Souther Salazar, Saelee Oh, Ray Fong) who can make GR2 the sole reason for an LA art run.
Sun works in the school of illustration-flavored painting that is the house style of Giant Robot. What sets him apart from the cartoon crew is a melancholy poetry that's hard to put one's finger on, but utterly compelling to look at.
Sun lives in the Bay Area but grew up in San Diego, taking art classes at Patrick Henry High School from the gifted artist and teacher Tina Brown.
Normally I loathe articles that link national artists to local roots (Baldessari! Zittel! Go Padres!). But in this case it's useful for understanding the work, since Sun himself likes to throw in the occasional hometown callout, wherever home might be.
Rothko's a must-see, but like Martin or Turrell you've got to show up in person — photos steal their soul.
Which brings us to American Artists from the Russian Empire — currently showing at the San Diego Museum of Art — and its promise of a Rothko experience to anyone who shows up.
The promise is false: the Rothkos at SDMA are entombed in glass which throws up a shiny reflective surface in front of the picture plane, obscuring the essential Rothko magic (which normally happens 1 to 100 feet behind the picture plane, virtually speaking).
So what to do? Go to SDMA for the Tchelitchews, two alarming exceptions in an otherwise staid show of period art.
Of the many fascinating aspects of Donovan's work, perhaps most intriguing is the oblique relation between how it's promoted as visit-worthy, and how it works as art.
The hook is the novelty of a mass accumulation of everyday objects, while the actual esthetic engine is the work's deft exploitation of a bi-level figure/ground inversion:
At the micro level the action centers on the play of light between or through the objects, rather than on the objects themselves.
At the macro level the focus on large-scale bioform enables the work to engage (and thus appropriate) the rectilinearity of the containing museum spaces.
These levels are linked by the work's crucial dependency on formal properties of surface:
ART AFTER DARK: THE ZODIAC LOUNGE Friday, November 20, 2009
What is your astrological sign? Find out at The Zodiac Lounge, Oceanside Museum of Art’s Art After Dark on Friday, November 20th from 7:00-10:00 p.m. Have your astrology, numerology and tarot cards read by Five Muses Entertainment or have Natasha Papousek of Crescent Moon Designs adorn you with a henna body art tattoo. Chris Brotzman will be spinning funky disco tribal Latin afro beats while video performance artist Megan Pogoda creates live video to his music on the façade of the museum. Inspired by all the creative energy you can make three dimensional figures in the sculpture center or hang out in the Kool lounge and experience Dave Ghilarducci’s Interactive Proverb Generator and site specific light and sound sculpture entitled "Pinholes in the Curtain of Night" that uses Morse code to communicate the twelve signs of the zodiac. Four art exhibitions will be on view, An American Dream: Gregg Jabs, Industrial Alchemy: John Zabrucky, San Diego NOW: Eight UCSD Visual Artists, and the Art of Les Perhacs. Guests will also have the chance to win Tim McCormick’s original oil painting The Stars with the opportunity drawing.
San Diego NOW: Eight UCSD Visual Artists
San Diego NOW: Eight UCSD Visual Artists presents artists from the MFA program at University of California, San Diego. The show was curated by Danielle Susalla, and features work by James Enos, Jesse Mockrin, Zac Monday, Omar Pimienta, Lesha Maria Rodriguez, Tim Schwartz, Julia Westerbeke, and Suzanne Wright.
A preview reception will be held on Friday, November 20th from 7 to 10 PM. Admission is $15 ($10 for OMA members) and includes, art, music, multimedia entertainment, art activities, food from Harney Sushi and Santino’s pizza, beer from Lost Abbey Brewery, and wine tasting from PRP Wine International.
Ticketless reservations are available by calling OMA at 760.435.3720. Or pay at the door the night of the event. Guests must be 21 or older.
An artists' forum moderated by UCSD professor Ernest Silva will be held on Thursday, December 3, from 7 to 9 PM. Meet the artists and learn about their methodologies, techniques, and the UCSD MFA program. The forum admission is $5 (free for OMA members).
OMA is located at 704 Pier View Way in downtown Oceanside, within walking distance of the Oceanside Transit Center and its Amtrak, Sprinter, and NCTD Coaster stops. Oceanside, California is half an hour north of San Diego.
Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 4 PM and Sunday 1 to 4 PM. General admission is $8, seniors 65 and over $5, students and active military free. For information on current exhibitions or other museum programs call 760-435-3720 or visit www.oma-online.org.
Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests.
“The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”
De Salvo's tree-branch networks at Quint serve as pods to his Caltrans mothership: a translation (and refinement) of public-art-scale technology down to the level of portable object.
The pods work beautifully, not just formally but as markers of de Salvo's progress in contemplating the role of mechanism in the world, a train of thought which seems to have evolved of late away from an affinity for per se mechanical ingenuity and towards an appreciation of general systems thinking... something we all need to do these days.
And how do they work formally? Let me count the ways:
They lie flat on the wall, a move that — along with the studied avoidance of conventional branching structure — precludes a simplistic abstract-diorama reading.
But not too flat: enough warpage exists to make the shadowplay pop, while suggesting (if not actually implying) that the works themselves are still settling in structurally.
The small rectilinear bursts of the wood spline joints neatly punctuate the larger biomorphic forms they're embedded in (yielding a beautiful conceptual metaphor).
The material semantics of the planed and finished wood radiates furniture yet is perceptually detached from furniture's archetypal corners and straight edges. The effect is pure Nakashima: a deft borrow.
The original tree bark lines the finished edges of each branch, activating them like the neon lips of a Chihuly vase. Less borrow than extremely elegant design freebie.
This is a great show. Let's hope some curator pairs it with Ann Mudge's wireworks. One can dream.
Until recently my exposure to anime had consisted primarily of a satisfying addiction to anything Miyazaki. But then I learned of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series written and directed by Hideaki Anno which spans 11 hours of television episodes and a concluding movie.
If Miyazaki's work embodies classical art cinema à la Kurosawa, NGE comes off as a kind of mad dog masterpiece which strains so hard at its genre seams that it finally bursts into something entirely one of a kind. (Think Wagner making Saturday morning cartoons.)
NGE themes include adolescent fantasy, rampant Christian symbolism, sex, opera, penguins, budget battles, gods, angels, robots, Nevada, domestic chores, death battles, clones, computers, mental illness, the United Nations, hubris, teen angst, global warming, bad parenting, mushroom clouds, beer, Antarctica, spies, aliens, poetry, human extinction, crotch shots, Tokyos, origin myths, psychoanalysis, the Dead Sea scrolls, Beethoven, global conspiracies, existentialism, homosexuality, watermelons, and more, all set in a plot line as elliptical and labyrinthine as any novel you've ever tackled, and laced throughout with a pervasive underlying sadness.
Anno, who clearly knows his art house, created such a compelling pop series that when in the final episodes he abruptly took the story in a 720-degree left turn, the resulting viewer uproar included not just blistering criticism, but death threats. Hence the concluding movie, End of Evangelion, which attempts to tie up various loose ends.
If you're willing to invest 12 hours in close-attention viewing — a task made considerably easier by the oft-beautiful imagery (Anno launched his career working for Miyazaki) — you'll come out with a pretty good handle on how far anime can be pushed as an art form. The general consensus on the net is polarized between WTF and "the most moving story I've ever experienced", which given the work is only to be expected.
The TV series and movie are available on Netflix, and can also be found (in 10-minute chunks) on YouTube.
Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate is arguably the most successful public sculpture in the United States today. It draws the same number of annual visitors as the Statue of Liberty and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, yet derives its appeal solely through aesthetic pleasure not historical content. In short, it's a people magnet.
Accounts of the work uniformly cite its mirrored surface as the active ingredient — which it is — but then settle for comparisons with funhouse mirrors or the joy of narcissism.
While it's true that the work's close-range perceptual narrative initially engages the viewer in mapping themselves in a nonstandard visual field, that convex surface does a curious and wonderful thing: it visually situates each viewer not only in the context of the transformed landscape, but also — and more crucially — in the context of all the fellow viewers of the sculpture.
The movement of those others animates the surface in a way that could never be achieved by a single viewer... and animation (in its core cinematic sense) is the foundational property of our popular art.
After the debate over the 2009 San Diego Art Prize about what exactly is an emerging artist, it was fascinating to come across the very same debate taking place in a parallel universe.
Here are the relevant quotes:
After awarding Tony Kushner a record-breaking $200,000 for distinguished playwriting last fall, the Steinberg Trust suddenly realized there was a problem with its plan to present its other newly created award to two emerging playwrights this year. “What we immediately discovered was that we all described ‘emerging’ differently,” said Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York and a member of the selection committee. Some of his colleagues thought the prize, created by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, was geared towards writers just a year out of school, while others considered “emerging” to refer to a playwright in mid-career.
Defining “emerging playwright” turned out to be like grasping a handful of Jello. Committee members settled on the idea that a writer was still emerging five years after a first production, only to soon note that someone could still be emerging 10 years out, said Ms. [Polly K.] Carl.
Mr. Eustis joined Ms. Carl’s end of the spectrum. Though the final selections are “not identical to who I would have picked,” Mr. Eustis said, he too understands the rough financial circumstances that face even accomplished playwrights. “It wasn’t really bitter, but every one of us is acutely conscious of how hard a life these writers have,” he said. “We didn’t feel like we could give a prize on the basis of need, but what would burst out consistently was, ‘Do you know what this money could mean?’”
This year all three winners have been produced by at least one member of the advisory committee. To Mr. Eustis, such connections are inevitable, since they are in the business of producing promising playwrights. As he said, quoting another producer, “No conflict, no interest.”
But Bertoia was also a sculptor, and beginning in the early 1960's he focused on sound sculpture to the extent that his sculpture evolved into instruments for making music, qualifying Bertoia as the plastic-arts obverse of Harry Partch (an American composer who in pursuit of his own music invented instruments so eccentric as to qualify as sculpture).
In 1970 Bertoia released a set of LPs containing original music he created playing his sculptures. The LPs — collectively titled Sonambient — anticipate by almost a decade both the sound and title of Brian Eno's highly-influential Ambient albums.
One of Bertoia's sound sculptures can be found in Chicago at the north end of Millennium Park, on the corner of East Randolph Street and North Columbus Drive.
The work in question exhibits far more sensitivity to site than the money-shot sculpture Chicago's famous for.
Agitprop moves into a new phase of agitation and propaganda by illustrating some of the work it has done in the past and asking you to participate in future projects by becoming part of a “brain trust”. This installation addresses issues of social economics, art markets, commodities trading, and community engagement.
In “Brain Trust”, Agitprop turns corporate and art world institutional conventions on their head as a method of generating support for projects based on connectivity and community at the scale of the neighborhood. “Brain Trust” asks people to become “investors” in Agitprop. Agitprop is a space in North Park which attempts to blur the lines between individual art practice, the Studio, the Gallery and the Neighborhood.
The Agitprop “Brain Trust” is established through “Brain Blocks”, an edition of 1000 sculptures which when purchased serve as “stock” in Agitprop. “Brain Blocks” simultaneously reference the art market, think tanks, commodities trading, and the “Cube” as an art historical sculptural form. Each sculpture consists of a 4¼ inch concrete cube with a surface pattern resembling the human brain.
Sculptural “shareholders” will become facilitators of Agitprop’s upcoming projects and will be asked in the future for feedback on these same projects. Past projects include the Agitprop space itself, literature readings, Art Tap Outs I & II (live critiques in the form of underground pugilism), artwork in empty storefronts, collaborations with other neighborhood entities, etc.
The initiation of Agitprop as a space, and subsequently the “Brain Trust” project, stems from an examination of and response to current art support structures. Contemporary practice tends toward two approaches to art distribution: art works presented as commodities by commercial galleries and dealers, or conversely as visual culture by universities and museums whose funding, when traced backwards, often leads to a corporate source. This exhibition asks the question “Is it possible to have a neighborhood art practice supported wholly by those who the practice serves?”
In addition to the “Brain Blocks” component of the exhibition, several single-day events are scheduled over the duration of the exhibition, including a walking tour of residual spaces in North Park, self-portrait photography sessions, free soup, and more. A calendar of events will be available at the exhibition, as well as in postings on the Agitprop blog.
If you were wondering how one goes about launching something as big as an art fair, but in San Diego in the current economy, the answer is better magic through good design.
The BTB booth design, with its strong emphasis on diagonals and irregular booth spaces, resembled nothing less than a Menger sponge, creating the illusion of an infinite exhibition hall while fitting in a room the size of a medium theatre.
While definitely sympatico with the "Juxtapoz" philosophy and aesthetic, we are by no means limited to lowbrow, pop surrealism or any other genre (in fact, the market seems to be getting a bit crowded with cute, big-eyed girls lost in ominous forests with cuddly animals and pop cultural references). That being said, if you're a traditional plein air master or water color diva, we're not the place for you. Other than that, it's game on.
Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times writes fascinatingly of a new service offered by the Bank of America: turnkey art shows, precurated for convenience, and offered at little or no cost to cash-strapped museums.
Among the choice revelations:
BofA's corporate art collection of more than 60,000 works was assembled not by collecting art but by collecting other banks with art collections.
After considering selling off the collection, BofA realized they could make more money packaging it as art shows, which serve as effective marketing tools for creating new business.
MOMA-level museums won't touch corporate shows unless the work is donated to the museum. Rationale: the space outranks the work, so showing the work in the space would increase the value of the work.
Small regional museums, on the other hand, are embracing the corporate shows. Rationale: the work outranks the space, so showing the work in the space increases the value of the space. And in bad economic times the shows are lifesavers.
Tellingly, BofA initially hoped to place the shows in high-end museums, but eventually realized the smaller venues were their target demographic. Said a BofA spokesperson, “Smaller community museums with more need began to ask for our program. They just don’t have the deep pockets, and they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We don’t do corporate collections,’ nor do they frankly have the snobbery about it.”
And here's a quote from the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, which has one of the BofA shows scheduled for exhibition: “There are people in the art field who think that somehow businessmen are evil, and you shouldn’t deal with them, but they have no trouble taking their money. I’ve always thought that was the ultimate hypocrisy. You almost can’t do a contemporary art show without borrowing from some gallery, and those paintings are for sale."
I've been friends with Anna for easily fifteen years. She paints: canvas, wood, paper, flowerpots, construction walls, pretty much anything she can get her brushes on. She never stops.
The painting above is on bubblewrap: it's big, about five feet square. The first time I saw it I nearly jumped out of my shoes. The thing radiates light — the photo doesn't show this; no photo could.
The Inn can now add another notch to its belt under the category of Marketing So Advanced It Qualifies as Museum-Grade Art. I'm referring to their current promotional offer entitled Survivor Package, which in its studied blurring of corporate practice, long-term global economic trends, cultural and institutional self-critique, subtextual subversiveness, and (not least) downright cheek makes it a worthy match of Brian Goeltzenleuchter's current show at OMA.
The deal is straightforward: from August 16 to 31 the Inn is offering rooms at the following rates:
$219 standard luxury
$199 without breakfast
$179 without honor bar
$159 without A/C or heat
$139 without pillows
$109 without sheets
$89 without lights (except one bulb in bathroom)
$59 without linens
$39 without toiletries (BYOTP)
$19 without bed (tent provided)
For more information (including a priceless photo of the tent) see today's Union-Tribune.
In his works on paper Joe Nyiri uses stencil, spray paint, broad line marker... all the tools of a state-of-the art graffitist. He works fast too, which gives his line a high-energy crackle rivalling the best taggers.
Nyiri has been teaching art for over fifty years.
The work below is part of a one-person show currently at the Taylor Library in Pacific Beach. Through September 4, which gives you many opportunities to not miss it.
This summer Southern Californians have a rare opportunity to see the work of Agnes Martin in numbers and variety far beyond the ones and twos typically offered by regional museums.
Martin is commonly labeled a minimalist, but her work differs so markedly from that of other artists so labeled that it exposes the term itself as semantically overextended to the degree of buzz.
Perhaps a better term for Martin is "low stimulus threshold", as a way of foregrounding the visual subtlety that is her trademark. A Martin painting whispers in a way that makes a Judd box or Flavin light shout: all the difference in the world.
Art can take a million paths up the mountain, but the art that interests me most is the kind which challenges viewers to see the water they're swimming in. We live in a consummate high-stimulus-threshold society (the planet Soundtrack), and as a result much easy art exists which parasitizes the spectacle while claiming to comment upon it. Martin, on the other hand, took the hard road of making an art of the radical act of quiet contemplation.
A caveat on making the journey to Newport Beach to see the show: the curators — apparently influenced by their own elevated stimulus thresholds — decided the work was so quiet they could stuff far too much of it into two smallish galleries without causing a stir. Bad move: it reflects poorly on the museum. Each large Martin deserves a room of its own.
Iz the Wiz — a writer who lived largely for sex in a can, and died largely of it, kidney and heart.
The NY Times obit mentions that Cooper and Chalfant's classic Subway Art was recently reissued by Chronicle Books. An art book's art book, this one's for the ages... check it out.
On June 18, the supremely talented filmmaker and photographer Shirin Neshat appeared at MCA San Diego to present her feature-length film/work-in-progress Women without Men.
The film, based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s magic realist novel, is set in 1953 Iran during a period of national political turmoil, and uses the deaths of three Iranian women to explore a host of social issues involving personal and political freedom.
During the post-performance conversation, Neshat and film curator Neil Kendricks spoke extensively about the work's prescience given current events in Iran. What neither of them knew was that two days later, on June 20, Neda Agha-Soltan would lose her life and become an instant world symbol of the current political turmoil.
As a result, Neshat's film — which is six years in the making — has been given the semiotic equivalent of a spin dry set on "hot". It will be interesting to see how this work-in-progress resolves now that life has told its story.
The current show at Quint is billed as an exhibition of San Diego's 50 top-tier contemporary artists, which immediately begs the usual question “1: Why X and not Y?”. Here there be dragons, so let's instead home in on "top-tier" and see how it holds up. Eleanor Antin, David Avalos, Robert Irwin, James Luna: they're not on the list, which effectively toasts “top-tier”. Nobody’s perfect — let’s hope they were invited.
Once past that, writing about a 50-artist group show is not unlike seeing one: disorienting, especially in where to start. The best way to make sense of it all is to frame the event not as an art show, but rather as a diverse (and crowded) ecosystem within which the players adopt various strategies to survive and thrive.
Allison Wiese, Woods (non-installation photo used in show announcement)
Conceptually, Wiese's wired networks of altered appropriated paintings are much richer than the work she's shown previously in San Diego. In particular, their use of archetypal semantic primitives — wiring, blinking red LEDs, traditional landscape paintings — goes a long way towards dispensing with the need for any supporting text (a tell-tale signature of weak conceptual work).
The LEDs multi-function gloriously: blinking red points of light are ubiquitous symbols of caution, most commonly signaling the threat of protection via car alarm, but also (thanks to Hollywood movie conventions) equally well-known for signaling the threat of imminent destruction via terrorist device.
These double readings interact with both the image and object properties of the appropriated landscape paintings, evoking with sheer mathematical elegance issues of art commoditization and avant-garde backlash, global urbanization and anti-globalization, society and environment, and various combinations thereof.
In short, the work is extremely strong, as are the shelves of small abstract mountain sculptures in the gallery's front room. But the show itself — and by "show" I mean not just the display of the objects but their categorization as collections of salable art — suffers from a serious flaw: certain key formal elements of the works as displayed turn out not to be intrinsic parts of the artwork, but rather extraneous elements intended to serve as display supports for the work.
GARAGES is a one-night exhibit of art, performance, spoken word, and experiments in five garage spaces in the Bankers Hill neighborhood of San Diego.
Artists
Tom McDermott
M.A.G.N.U.S. & THOR
Kelly Schnorr
The Illuminauts
Kevin Oberbauer
DJ Unwell
Chris Warr
Nathan Gulick
The San Diego Poetry Slam Team
James Gielow
and more...
For more information contact the curators Erica Overskei and Alexander Jarman.
In its current ad campaign BMW is working harder than ever to elevate its product by association with visual art.
But this begs the question of whether visual art wishes to be associated with fossil-fueled personal-transport dinosaurs on the verge of extinction.
Which in turn begs the further question of whether — in a global future of greater population, scarcer resources, man-made natural disasters, and the sustainable practices that will necessarily follow — visual art itself, at least as currently practiced, will go the way of the BMW.
Envisioned as an interactive collage, the installation is a giant pop-up book which tells a story you can walk through and contribute to. The idea is to physically, metaphorically, and cognitively “Map the Hood” of North Park and City Heights with all our various collaborating partners, including architecture students, professional artists, children, teens, and community members.
Stone Paper Scissors, Eveoke Dance Theatre, TranscenDance Youth Arts Project, North Park Main Street, and the Cultural Worker have collaborated to create Art @ the Core: Building Community, with the goal of increasing access, engagement, and participation in the civic process through community cultural development.
The work of San Diego’s top-tier contemporary artists hasn’t been seen in the same place at the same time since 1985, when the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art presented “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists.”
— Quint Gallery promotional copy
Quint's low profile among the non-cognoscenti should prevent a recurrence of the grand community stink that was raised over that museum show: irate artists, impromptu salons des refusés, and coverage of the controversy in the local family paper.
Answer: the latter, as a factory cost-saving measure.
The technique of rotoscoping enables an animator not only to create animation from live-action film by tracing over individual film frames, but also to recycle existing animation by tracing over individual cells. The only costs incurred are for redrawing — the movement comes for free.
Jason Sherry & Neil Kendricks: In Conversation, April 18 @ Seminal Projects
by Richard Gleaves
I picked this because it's the most beautiful clip in the world. And I think you'll enjoy it. How it relates to my work is something about being a low-budget director, and you just have an idea that you have to do that means nothing to the entire movie — that's totally ridiculous — but you have to do it.
— Jason Sherry
He's sort of this archaeologist in terms of pop culture and movies.
— Neil Kendricks
Sherry's work is described in the gallery press release as "audio-mechanical sculptures and photo/print collages," but a more elegant way to conceptualize the work is as "image and non-image collage."
Image collage is in essence technically trivial: scissors, glue, and a magazine suffice. But non-image collage — a turntable with a bicycle; a pump organ with a pile of magazines; a hair dryer with ... an image collage! — takes mechanical genius, and Sherry's got it.
A worthwhile reference point here is Tim Hawkinson, who deploys similar levels of genius toward the very different goal of realizing Rube Goldberg. Hawkinson celebrates mechanism, while Sherry works to achieve a seamless whole: the collage ideal.
Update: 4/24
Michele Guieu has posted video of the full conversation.
... to sound art, which though technically not music can't help being so, given how music reigns as the supreme art form of electronic-age humanity.
Drawing from a national call for submissions, Garage Gallery (aka Larry Caveney) recently curated a high-quality one-hour set which played straight through in the darkened BYO chair garage space.
The eight works presented hit various points on the sound-to-music spectrum, depending on one's ears: the musicians in attendance said they heard everything as music.
That the musicians were there is due to the cryptic sagacity of CityBeat, which chose to list Garage's art show announcement as a music event. Wise move: the musicians were stoked, and said they'd be back.
Garage needs to consider doing this annually; otherwise, aside from the occasional Céleste Boursier-Mougenot or wind chime, the closest we get to sound art is SoundWalk, and that's up in Long Beach.
Fifty MFA candidates open their studios and invite the public to view their work. The artists will be present to discuss their practice. The event includes performances, film screenings, and symposia.
UCSD Open Studios is free and open to the public. For more information visit ucsdopenstudios.com.
MOCA's current show consists of two unequal parts:
A large group show from the permanent collection, including works by Judd, Benglis, Chamberlain, and Rothko
A retrospective of the conceptual artist Dan Graham
To anyone considering a visit with hungry eye or mind, consider yourself forewarned: the former makes the latter feel like a long string of late-night TV commercials (notwithstanding the occasional Glenn Branca score).
It's not every day — or decade, for that matter — that one can spend quality time in a roomful of Rothkos. For this, go.
But as for the half a museum of Graham, it left me in a state of anesthesia to a degree I've never before experienced from a major museum show. Out of profound respect for and affinity with conceptual art — good conceptual art — I'm considering a return trip to try and determine whether, as the museum claims, anyone's home.
On May 22 the Las Vegas Art Museum will present Selections from The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. The members opening preview will be on Thursday, May 21, from 5-7 PM.
In 1970 a graffiti culture emerged in New York. Less than a decade later the cultural practice had become an urban fixture, public scourge, and (not least) a full-blown art movement which in its stylistic innovation rivaled anything in modern art history.
The rapid evolution of graffiti art followed from a specific set of circumstances:
Ready access to the necessary technology
A medium uniquely suited to reaching a large and diverse community
A team of dedicated practitioners driven by social ambition
A core set of aesthetic values shared by the practitioners
Such movements are easy to recognize in hindsight — but spotting them as they unfold can be a tricky proposition, for two reasons:
The practice often remains hidden from or inaccessible to potential viewers.
The esthetics employed are insufficiently mainstream to be acknowledged as art.
Fast-forward to 2009: graffiti is now a standard tool in the arsenal of corporate marketers. But what rough art lurks out there, waiting to be born?
When I heard Ray at Night was being thrown to the cars, I thought maybe this was it. But by all accounts the show went off as big as ever: party, crowds, even art.
I hate Ray: for its circus carny atmosphere, for the way it denies contemplation its place in art, and for that supremely cheesy shop that shows that same tasteful oil of that same giant orange on that same damned wall for month after month after month after month after month.
I love Ray too, for the great art I've seen there (most in galleries long gone or off Broadway).
Gustaf Roothis Ray, so I hate and love him too. And all of it — hate, love, absurd laughter, and sincere gratitude — is neatly encapsulated in the above video, wherein Rooth accepts his Academy award for Largest And Longest Art Event.
Mad props to you sir, in all your unspeakable glory. Continue!
Unaltered photo and headline from today's Yahoo News, demonstrating a longstanding American tradition of official disrespect towards lame-duck Presidents.
Machine Project is a Los Angeles based non-profit arts organization, a storefront exhibition space, and purveyor of DIY workshops in the spirit of the Maker Faire.
LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago, and a patchwork complex of seven buildings ranging in style from 30's streamline moderne to Jetsons 60's to bad 80's to Wright-ian organic to bland contemporary. (Hold that thought.)
Machine Project at LACMA was a one-day event where MP took over the LACMA campus, inserting Machine esthetic into a museum setting to the tune of 55 artist projects.
The polemics in The Futurist Cookbook were followed by an elaborate account of some Futurist banquets. One of the more memorable of these Aeropranzi futuristi was a banquet for 300 people held on 18 December 1931 at the Hotel Negrino in Chiavari. Guests were delighted and terrified as they braced themselves to ingest dishes prepared by the famous cook Bulgheroni, who had come especially from Milan to this small Ligurian town to preside in the kitchen over the burial of pastasciutta.
Although the Futurists had advocated the abolition of eloquence and politics around the table, the guests nevertheless first had to sit through a lecture by Marinetti on the state of world Futurism. Afterward, the meal began with a flan of calf's head seated on a bed of pineapple, nuts, and dates, stuffed—oh, surprise!—with anchovies. Then, to cleanse the palate, Bulgheroni served a decollapalato (a pun on decollare, meaning "to get off the ground"), a lyrical concoction of meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals.
The main dish was beef in carlinga (another aeronautic term, probably referring to a kind of Dutch oven), meatballs—whose composition was best left uninvestigated—placed over airplanes made out of bread crumbs. After a few more dishes the dessert, named eletricita atmosferische candite, arrived, consisting of colorful little cubes made of fake marble crowned with cotton candy that enclosed a sweetish paste containing ingredients only a long chemical analysis could disclose.
Linguistics professor Ed Klima passed away on Sept. 25.
Best known for his research on the signed languages of the Deaf, Klima and co-researcher Ursula Bellugi showed that signed languages are the full equivalent of spoken languages, with detailed grammars expressed in a purely visuospatial modality — a notion with serious implications for the visual arts, and one yet to be explored.
Ed is less known as a teacher, and a great one. He taught an undergraduate poetics class which revealed both a love of poetry and a soul that radiated a highly-refined bohemian goodness. His bio shows him having spent a year in Paris during the 50's, and everything beneficent that one might imagine from such an experience seemed to have infused his soul.
Eleanor Antin's show at the San Diego Museum of Art is currently the best in town, and maybe the best in the country.
Her large-scale staged photographs thoroughly master the vocabulary of classical painting — symbolism, allegory, posture, eye gaze — then redeploy it to address contemporary social and conceptual issues.
For instance, The Tragic Performance uses posture and gaze — and crucially the line of a shadow — to systematically enumerate the roles defined by the nexus of artwork, artist, and audience. How does one respond to Angels in America when HIV-positive? Or in love with someone who is? Or a connoisseur of theatre? Or a Kushner fan? Or a critic? The answers are all here, carefully encoded in a single image.
A curious omission in the show is its failure to include the image The Last Day in the photo series The Last Days of Pompeii. This series is Antin's historical remapping of the classic cautionary tale onto the carefree lifestyle of Southern California wealth, with the image in question depicting the apocalyptic aftermath.
The Last Days of Pompeii was shot at a home in the wealthy San Diego community of Rancho Santa Fe. Six years later wildfires burned through San Diego, destroying hundreds of homes in the region, including many in Rancho Santa Fe.
A good hearty meal, all in one pill that can be carried in a vest pocket, is the dream of scientists of today, according to Hugh S. Cummings, surgeon general of the public health service. (Rock Valley Bee, August 17, 1923)
Whereas the visual arts of the past were strictly material (stone, canvas, paper, pigment), and those of the present increasingly electronic, expect the future arts to be biochemical in nature, as artists exploit advances in neuropsychopharmacology and the brain sciences to create well-defined aesthetic experiences with none of the undesirable side effects of today's primitive psychotropics.
The following is an annotated version of the July 31 issue of Night & Day, the weekly online arts section of the San Diego Union-Tribune. All text but the article category headings has been redacted.
POP MUSIC (lead article)
POP MUSIC
ON STAGE
AT THE MOVIES
AT THE MOVIES
NORTH COUNTY NIGHT & DAY (music)
NORTH COUNTY NIGHT & DAY (music)
EARTHLY MUSICAL MUSINGS BY GEORGE VARGA
POP MUSIC
POP MUSIC
POP MUSIC
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
ALBUM REVIEWS
EVENTOS LATINOS (art, music)
OUT GOING (circus)
DINING GUIDE
In his book Beyond the Brillo Box, the critic Arthur Danto introduces the notion of comedies of similarity to describe the phenomenon of art critics grossly misreading radical artworks in their attempts to shoehorn them into known categories of art. As an example, Danto cites Hilton Kramer's critical dismissal of Eva Hesse's sculpture Metronomic Irregularity II as a derivative attempt to translate Jackson Pollock's drip paintings into a three-dimensional medium.
Which brings us to Larry Caveney's painted sculptures, now on display at the Expressive Arts Institute in Point Loma. There's no question that Caveney's work is formally rooted in Hesse's pioneering painting/sculpture hybrids, and little question that the work strongly evokes 3-D Pollocks.
Marcel Duchamp; Isamu Noguchi; Robert Smithson; Robert Gober
none
Critical keywords
allude; blurring; fine line; gift; homage; metaphysical; passion for subtlety; slyly
depress; direct confrontation; elusive; inspire; maturity; poetic seductiveness; surprises
92 words (17%) of review devoted to artwork and show originally written about on 17 Feb 2008.
Second review created by appending introductory paragraph to first review. Paragraph includes promise to write third review, presumably derived from first two.
Gray's current show (at Garage Gallery in North Park) consists of 18 paintings on wood panel.
The older works — which make up the majority of the show — derive formally from the 1950's-style geometric abstraction of period jazz album covers and Saul Bass film titles.
As such they are well-made and have retro appeal, but then things get interesting: the paint handling foregoes 50's modern flatness for the patchy quality of do-it-yourself faux-antique finishing, while the colors themselves are escapees from the 80's designer era. In a word the works are asynchronous.
In addition to these works, the show includes a handful of recent paintings which diverge from the earlier work in two ways.
First, their formal complexity is greatly simplified, leaving behind the 50's residue in favor of a pure timeless abstraction.
Second and crucially, Gray introduces black to his palette — flat black — while retaining the faux finish in the rest of the colors. The resulting dual contrast — between black and non-black, flat and faux — makes these works pop.
City officials suspect that 40 percent of Los Angeles' 11,000 billboards were installed illegally, and that the city Building and Safety department has not been enforcing the billboard laws.
In 2002 the LA City Council voted to require city inspectors to inventory all existing billboards. One month later the billboard companies filed a federal court injunction which stopped the inventory effort.
A 2006 legal settlement with the city allowed the billboard companies to begin converting a portion of their billboards to electronic LED displays. In return the companies agreed to provide the city with a list of all their billboards, both legal and illegal.
Two weeks ago the City Council learned that rather than providing the list, the companies instead delivered several boxes of documents and an unreadable electronic file purporting to contain the list.
CBS and Clear Channel, two of the largest billboard companies, are now suing the city to prevent it from releasing any list of billboards to the public, on the grounds that such a list constitutes a "trade secret."
City activists have demanded that the list be made public so they can protest the billboards that illegally deface the city.
Contemplating the ineffable sublime: the human mind as a virtually infinite state machine, with any given culture mapping only minuscule subsets of the full state space (but different-enough subsets to make anthropology an interesting proposition).
The Czech art collective Ztohoventagged the morning weather show on Czech Television’s CT2 channel with a simulated nuclear explosion. The tag was accomplished by switching the cables on an unmanned remote camera and routing in an altered video stream. Members of the group face up to three years in jail for "attempted scaremongering."
The show has earned notoriety for including not only the usual museum shop stuffed with artist merchandise, but also a gallery which is a fully functional Louis Vuitton store selling thousand-dollar Murakami handbags, and another gallery configured as a retail display case for the artist’s lower-end products.
Framing MOCA as a traditional museum space for presenting art objects, the show represents not only yet another crowded blockbuster but also a new low in the commercialization of visual culture.
But reframing MOCA as a neutral site which can be temporarily transformed into any kind of social space, the Murakami show functions not only as a presentation of visual art but also as a representation of the social phenomenon of commercial art.
In this perspective the viewer experience crucially depends on the presence of a crowd looking at the art, watching the anime, and — depending on their class — buying handbags from the boutique or knickknacks from the gift shop.
And so it does: for those with ears to hear, the ka-ching of a cash register in a museum gallery is not the same as one in a mall outlet. The sound gets neatly delimited by critical air quotes.
This is supported by a comment from the curator, who has said about the boutique that “the visitor’s relationship to that part of the show is the action that takes place in it."
Additional support comes from a nice bit of temporal assemblage by the MOCA programmers: the show immediately following Murakami’s is a retrospective of Allan Kaprow, who would rightly identify the show preceding his as one big happening.
One of the big surprises of the San Diego wildfires is the instant rise to international fame of Qualcomm Stadium as shelter, haven, and general beacon of humanity for tens of thousands of refugees. Photojournalists the world over descended on San Diego, and their collective photographer's eye discovered a little-known fact: Qualcomm Stadium is in fact a stunning and historically significant piece of mid-century modern architecture.
Tickled by the stadium's proto-Bilbao-esque forms, the photojournalists proceeded to invent a new genre of architectural disaster photography, equal parts Shulman and Salgado. The resulting images carry the story, and they look great.
The irony in this sequence of events is that ever since the city built the new Petco Park downtown, Qualcomm Stadium has been portrayed as a civic white elephant in need of extensive and architecturally fatal multi-use redevelopment. But now that the stadium has received (both in name and in image) an inestimable amount of solid gold international media exposure, any future efforts to bury the existing stadium beneath high-density housing and parking garages will likely be seen as the civic equivalent of tearing down the Statue of Liberty. It will make for interesting media coverage.
Photo credits, clockwise from top left: Robyn Beck (Agence France-Presse); Chris Park (Associated Press Photo); Stan Liu (Reuters); AP Photo.
Trolley Dances is authentic homegrown San Diego culture: an annual event of site-specific dances linked together by the city's light rail system.
Like San Diego's other indigenous art forms — surfing, sailing, scuba — Trolley Dances is site-specific in a larger sense by happening mostly outdoors, and in environments far less organized and more dynamic than the typical performance hall. As a result, Trolley Dance viewers seeking to optimize their esthetic experience are obliged to work hard at siting themselves, at the risk of just plain missing the show.
At this level of commitment one does not attend Trolley Dances so much as surf it: the crowds are thick, the sight lines few and shifty. You have to plot strategy, keep your eyes open, and stay light on your feet.
Today's national news reports that a 19-year-old MIT student was arrested at Logan International Airport for wearing a circuit board with blinking LEDs on her sweatshirt. She told authorities it was an artwork.
This event, taken together with the digital graffiti scare from earlier this year, firmly establishes digital circuitry as a symbol of terror in the American visual lexicon. Which is deeply ironic given that under their smooth plastic covers every cellphone and iPod in America carries the very same circuitry and blinking LEDs.
iPods are to Big Macs as bare naked electronics are to blood-spattered cow intestines: both cross-relations involve deep consumer ignorance and denial. So when one encounters the real thing in public, the response is likely fear.
If the traditional avant-garde suffered a fatal commoditization from the one-two-three punch of a taboo-free liberalized society, a cultural fetish for novelty, and advanced real-time marketing, then the neo-avant-garde thrives by simply flouting the law: specifically the victimless laws of defacement and theft: aka graffiti and copyright infringement.
The irony here is that the same radical advances in information technology that are rendering tagging an ever more problematic practice (due to the remote monitoring of private and public space) are simultaneously creating a golden age of infringement (due to the ready availability of technology for capturing, manipulating, and distributing digital information).
Expect these two neo-avant-garde practices to merge in the future, as taggers discover the virtual new worlds. And expect the most skilled and visionary practitioners to display legal virtuosity in skirting not flouting the law:
The Rothko in room 623 of the La Jolla Sheraton Hotel is in fact a second-order derivative: an oversized giclée print of a Rothko knockoff. Oversized here refers not to the knockoff - Rothko's paintings being even bigger - but rather to the size of the print in the hotel room: the effect being more Magritte than Ab-Ex.
The image is printed on an inkjet-friendly canvas which in turn is mounted on a stretcher bar to simulate the object-like quality of an actual painting. The canvas on the sides of the object is printed in black. The object is securely fastened to the wall - it cannot be moved or removed without the use of tools.
In the photo above, the color on the right side of the object is washed out by reflected light. While this is partly a result of the camera flash, the effect is also distinctly visible in normal room lighting. This reflectivity is a product of the glossy ink and canvas used in the giclée process: it creates a subtle glass-like sheen on the surface of the image, effectively eliminating the illusion of atmospheric depth that is key to the visual power of a Rothko. The object thus fails as a Rothko imitation.
Careful study of the photo - in particular, of the gap between the ceiling molding and the top of the object - reveals that the object has been hung at a slight angle, with the left side being lower than the right. This is not a photographic artifact - it is distinctly visible to viewers in the room. Though not obvious in the photo, there is an apparent logic to this noncanonical orientation: the two horizontal bars in the image tilt slightly to the right, so by hanging the object itself to tilt slightly to the left, the bars achieve true horizontality relative to the room.
Rothko-esque imagery is a visual motif in the hotel: the second photograph is a detail of the paper card that guests leave on their bed to request new sheets.
Careful study of this photo reveals a decidedly nonRothko-esque pattern of spirals in the blue area of the image. Possible interpretations of this pattern include (but should not be limited to) allusions to textiles, or perhaps to the maritime component of the signature La Jolla sublime.
I don’t think the removal is slower, it is just that more graffiti than ever is popping up. Our contractors removed a record 27 million square feet of graffiti from 489,000 locations last year.
-- Paul Racs, Office of Community Beautification, City of Los Angeles
Graffiti is, in theory, an open ended system. If you had multiple lifetimes and a vast squad of goons you could saturate every surface available with markings. But in reality it's all about what spots you hit and if you have enough respect not to get your spots ragged out and enough luck and skill to get a few that can escape the eye of the buff squad.
- KAI1
Police and academics in Cambridge are trying to find a graffiti artist who could be Britain's brightest vandal. The artist spray-painted part of a chemical component of DNA on the road outside a lab where the double helix was unveiled 50 years ago.
- BBC News
In molecular biology, "junk" DNA is a collective label for the portions of the DNA sequence of a chromosome or a genome for which no function has yet been identified. About 98% of the human genome has been designated as "junk" ... much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose.
- Wikipedia
The era of garage biology is upon us. ... A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA.
- DNA Hack (the website for Amateur Genetic Engineering)
Maybe bathtub biotech will be the next to capture the mindshare of the techie tinkerers. Maybe bioinformatics and the diffusion of genetic engineering technologies will inspire a new generation of bio-hackers. Certainly the technologies are there for those inclined to genetically edit their plants or pets.
- MAKE Magazine
Perhaps the recipient of the gift is a neophyte who does not have the knowledge or skill to decode the complex typography ... When you throw a bottle into the ocean it might not be discovered by its intended recipient. Would you be able to understand a message in a bottle written by someone in the past? How about someone in the future?
- KAI1
After testing his own DNA at the request of a distant cousin, Mr. Grieve was shaken to discover that he did not match any of his extended family, including his first cousin, the son of his father's brother. That could only mean an occurrence of what genetic genealogists call a "nonpaternal event."
"Outfitting graffiti writers, artists and protesters with
open-source tools for urban communication."
Unfortunately this statement contains an internal contradiction: "open-source" by definition means the tools are available for use by anyone, including the ideological opposites of "graffiti writers, artists and protesters." Read: corporate ad agencies.
As a result, the G.R.L. home page currently reads as follows:
You may have heard about the most recent terror attacks in Boston. This is NOT the work
of the Graffiti Research Lab. ... It’s just more mindless corporate vandalism from a guerilla marketer who got busted. Interference Inc, welcome to the world of being misunderstood, scapegoated,
demonized and wanted by the law. Still wanna be a graffiti artist?
The Anti-Advertising Agency offers a cogent explanation of how the soon-to-be-defunct ad agency Interference Inc. ended up creating a nationwide terror scare, while G.R.L. and its followers threw up Night Writers without ever catching radar:
The G.R.L. Night Writer is done with materials bought at a hardware store. It’s made with cheap LED’s, tape, and magnets. It’s designed to be a low-cost, small-scale project with a strong visual impact. It works well, but it takes about an hour to make if you are experienced, work quickly, and have some help. This wouldn’t work for mass production, so Interference Inc built on the idea, adding a custom designed and manufactured circuit board, a photo cell, wiring, resistors, and large D cell batteries. Arguably a better design if you are producing 400 at a time to distribute around the country and you have backing funds from Turner Broadcasting. ... The perfect irony to this story is that advertisers can’t get it right. What attracted the attention of the bomb squad was the wiring, circuitry, and large batteries that Interference Inc. added to G.R.L.'s original design...
An object lesson in how 9/11 has made unauthorized public sculpture a vastly trickier proposition: the problem being how to create and install unidentified public objects which read as harmless while still hitting esthetic goals.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego opens its new facility
by Richard Gleaves
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO OPENS ITS
NEW FACILITY ON JANUARY 21, 2007 AT TRANSIT AND CULTURAL HUB IN DOWNTOWN SAN DIEGO
San Diego, CA—With a community-wide free opening day on January 21, 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) celebrates the completion of its new downtown facility located at a historic and international crossroads.
The Jacobs Building — a new exhibition venue — shares a historic arched concourse with the Santa Fe Depot train station, an important transit hub for regional commuter trains and trolleys, the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, and travel to and from Tijuana, Mexico.
On view in the new Jacobs Building, as the inaugural exhibition in the Wortz Gallery, is Modern American Masters. This outstanding group of post-World War II American works by Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol represent the pinnacle of American mid-century art practices, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to early Minimalism.
MCASD loading dock, January 28, 2007. Writer unknown.
Last spring the unsolicited magazine gods began mailing me free monthly copies of Ranch & Coast, "San Diego's Luxury Lifestyle Magazine."
For persons outside the target demographic, R&C makes for fierce entertainment: it's glossy,
beautifully designed, and filled with ads and articles broadcasting the obsessions of the nouveau riche:
real estate, travel, fine dining, kids, fashion, fast cars, and above all, all possible means --
whether surgical, physical, or spiritual -- of attempting to regain one's lost youth.
In short: a good read, with the occasional delicious tilt into sublime moments of absurdist horror.
After receiving a few issues I decided to reciprocate the publisher's generosity by deriving
simple (i.e., uni- or dual-element) digital collages from the pages of each issue, and emailing
them to the R&C editor. Artwork as payment: a time-honored barter.
Some of the less easily
identifiable collage sources include a Corvette review, a high-tech leakproof silicone breast implant,
a blonde bouffant hairdo with dark roots, a computer-spell-checked article showcasing a fifteen-acre
ranch estate, a New Year's-in-Rio panorama, Breakfast With Shamu,
and an article on teeth-whitening.
Abstraction in art traditionally refers to nonrepresentational art. But in informatics it refers to a more generalized process of complexity reduction which is used in all domains of art and life.
Richard Gleaves joins the editorial staff at Art as Authority. This is his first essay. We wish him "bon vent" and many articles to come. KF
The following images are commercial advertisements from recent mainstream publications (both print and online). The three exceptions - a 16th-century painting, vintage comic strip panel, and contemporary pornograph - are from art/performance web sites and John Berger's classic book Ways of Seeing.
The images share a common image schema, and the schema itself begs several questions regarding its apparent absurd meaning, its function, and above all its cultural persistence. For lack of a better term, the schema is called The Designated Voyeur.
Four Walls Gallery present:Collecting Dust & Other Things
14 Interviews from artists and
professionals living and working
in the San Diego arts community.
Collected into one volume, they
demonstrate the diversity,
methodologies, opinions and
individuality of its cultural
ambassadors and the growing
artistic scene.
Featuring:
Patricia Frischer, Kevin Freitas,
Michelle Robinson, Monica
Hoover, Hugh Davies, David
White, Kinsee Morlan, Emily
Fierer, Lea Caughlan, Carly
Delso-Saavedra, Betti-Sue Hertz,
Larry Caveney, Doug Simay,
and Luis De Jesus.
Four Walls Gallery present:
Collecting Dust & Other Things
