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Saturday, January 24, 2004

No escape

 
Post from Warren Craghead

[Note from the editors--This is a response to Libby's Jan. 22 post, "Thai food for thought."]

Cartoons and comics can also deal with real issues - they aren't all escapist (shown, Michael Ray Charles' "After Black" and "Before Black").



I would argue a lot of contemporary art is only superficially about it's "content" - much of the time it's about the artist's celebrity or a clever trick they've found (shown, David Salle's "Tragedy"). THAT'S escapist...

AND, who ever said art has to deal with those issues of life and death?

AND, [Matthew] Ritchie IS dealing with those things - his work is a visual exploration of the most powerful philosophy we have today - modern science and it's attempts to understand how we are here (shown, Ritchie's "Day Three"). His work is not some cocoon as you've implied. You can say it ain't great ( I think it's ugly sometimes), but it isn't some li'l fantasy-land.

--Charlottesville, Va.-based artist Warren Craghead is founding editor of Salvage Magazine.
permanent link  libby and roberta 10:07 PM
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Potter Grayson Perry and ceramist Jeff Koons

 

Post by Jack Regalado
[Ed. note. See Jan. 19 post for more on Grayson Perry] Although his transvestism seems calculated to get attention, and to my mind is both counterproductive and irrelevant, Grayson Perry's work appears to be earnest and honest.

That does not, however, necessarily translate into artistic merit.

I have rather more respect for Perry's pots than for the ceramics of Jeff Koons. (image is Koons's ceramic "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," 1988)
--Jack Regalado is a regular artblog reader
permanent link  roberta 10:57 AM
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Thursday, January 22, 2004

Thai food for thought

 

My daughter just returned from Thailand with a backpack filled with photos and art. These giant political cartoons--paintings the size of theatrical backdrops--came out to the street for Democracy Day, basically a political demonstration against Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (left figure in top photo).


I was stunned by their scale, and amused by their content, which was not so different from the content and style of our own political cartooning. This one shows Dubya as a big dog leading around Thaksin, the little dog, on a leash.



The animal approach is no surprise; it's universal. My daughter tells me the biggest selling movies of all time are animal movies like Jurassic Park, where every culture can relate to the creatures and the issues.

All of this brought me to thinking about the place cartooning has risen to in recent art making in this country. I was wondering if it's partially a product of a generation raised on He-Man and Thundercats and the mythology of Star Wars, in which monsters and robots or cyborgs can be good guys or bad guys.

These self-contained worlds avoid the intractable issues we face of pollution and poverty and provide a scripted antidote to powerlessness and frustration. Just like George W. Bush is escaping the mess he's making in Iraq by flying us to Mars, so does Matthew Ritchie (shown with some of his art work) make up a world of his own, safe from reality.

The cartoon world is also a lot friendlier than the art world of Jackson Pollack and Barnett Newman.
permanent link  libby 4:45 PM
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Danto speaks, PAFA listens

 

I got this note from Shelley McCaffrey of PAFA in response to my question about the topic of Arthur Danto's lecture Jan. 29. (Free, 11:30 a.m., Furness auditorium)

"...[Danto] is planning on speaking about something new he has been writing with reference to his theory on the end of art, and perhaps a bit about his most recent book The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Paul Carus lectures).

See you there.

permanent link  roberta 11:47 AM
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Wearing your heart on your wall, inside variety

 

"Homage to the Barnes" at Seraphin Gallery installs some fourteen small, gilt-framed paintings and a drawing on a wall in the contemporary art gallery known for edgier stuff. The wall is a curatorial show of solidarity with the beleaguered Barnes. "We hope they move to Philadelphia," says Assistant Gallery Director Lorraine Seraphin Rainey, just in case you want clarification. (image above is the "Homage" installation)


"Homage" sports work by Arthur B. Davies, Joseph Stella and others -- traditional Cezanne-esque landscapes, some portraits and still lifes and one excellent small pencil drawing by C.K. Chatterton (shown above). Seraphin deals in the 19th and 20th Century works as a sideline to the contemporary work they show.


For my money, the best part of the outing was seeing the Barnsian moment that arose from the placement of a Victor Vazquez photograph, the Santaria-imbued "Birdman," on the wall facing the fussy, Western work. "Birdman" seems fixated as if trying to figure out what it is he's seeing on the wall before him.

Vazquez, who lives in Puerto Rico, will debut new work in the gallery in February. Rainey says the artist has been working in video lately. Let's hope we see some. (image bottom is "Birdman")
permanent link  roberta 10:07 AM
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Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Parking lot trifecta

 

This morning I headed out to David Guinn's recently completed, triumphant doggy mural (shown) on the side of the Morris Animal Refuge overlooking a parking lot at 12th and Lombard.

It's Guinn's best mural yet for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, at least to my taste, the playful puppies creating trouble in the equivalent of doggy paradise, the painted trees and their painted shadows blending with the real shadows of the real trees on the left. The dogs tumble across the wall without perspective, animating the spectacular green lawn that rises without ever hitting a horizon line.

The approach to space is outsider, but not the quality of the painting.


By switching from pixel squares to giant dots as a way to organize his activation of large color areas, Guinn suggests refracting dew drops on grass and at the same time suggests that the old pixel squares, like these circles, were really impressionism--all light and color and motion (shown, "Spring," painted four years ago, just a few blocks north on 13th Street, with its impressionist pixels).


The circles (and formerly the squares) were his brush strokes, his Seurat dots (shown, Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte").


"Spring," which is also above a parking lot, offers a prior glimmer of doggy love, with a lone puppy (alas, I took this picture too early in the day for the dog to show up properly) amidst the glowing trees.


The third mural I visited this morning, also above a parking lot, was Michael Webb's "Tree of Knowledge," at 13th and Market. The expected content (a p.c. united nations of fruit pickers reaching for tools of knowledge like an abacus, a horn, and scientific instruments) was almost fully redeemed by some surreal weirdness, beautiful colors and nice execution.
permanent link  libby 5:40 PM
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Take the A train

 

Libby and I were talking about web art and it turns out we both independently happened upon David Crawford's "Stop Motion Studies" and enjoyed what we saw. (Go to Inliquid or rhizome or better yet cut out the middleman and go to the SMS website where it's all laid out nicely.) (image is from Stop Motion Studies, Tokyo 2004)

Crawford, a film and web guy who likes subways and the riders who populate them shot sequences in the world's undergrounds (Paris, Tokyo, New York, Boston, London) with a Canon PowerShot A40, a consumer-grade still camera. He translated his shots via Flash technology into little stutter-step vignettes that last seconds and focus on subtle (or not so subtle) behavior of the subway riders.

What you see is people nodding, twitching, playing with their fingers, blinking, or, my favorite, in vignette thirteen of the series shot in Paris, a man in a fedora reacting not very happily to an accordian player plying his trade on the subway. Even though the studies are all silent, I imagined the sound -- and the rocking, side to side sway of the car.

Part of the Stop Motion Series was commissioned by The Whitney Museum's New Media Artport. For the Whitney, Crawford made a four-panel, interactive piece in which viewers can choose four segments to view simultaneously from what was shot in Paris, London, New York and Boston. I liked the interactivity but didn't have the time -- or the interest -- for more than one grid's worth.

Crawford's stated objective was to study people's behaviors and make some universal statement about character. That's a bold charge and I'm not sure any art project can rise to it. But I found the work comforting for its familiarity, interesting for its motion -- and quite beautiful and colorful for a project shot in the subways.
permanent link  roberta 6:14 PM
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Two week calendar bust out

 

Start your engines, here come the end of January art sweeps.

--Thursday, Jan. 22, at Moore College of Art and Design. Opening of Jorg Immendorff "I Wanted to Become an Artist," the 58-year-old German artist's first U. S. solo museum exhibit, co-curated by Robert Storr and Pamela Kort. Opening reception is 5:30-7:30 pm.

--Friday, Jan. 23, Moore College. Symposium on Immendorff, with Arthur Danto, Pamela Kort, Steven Ellis and Isabelle Moffat, moderated by Storr. (Reservations required. Brian Wallace, Moore Curator, says you can still reserve a ticket -- $20 ($10, Moore gallery or community members). Read more here about getting a ticket. Symposium is 2:30 p.m.-5 p.m.

--Friday, Jan. 23, at ICA. Four exhibits, including a major retrospective of local painter Sarah McEneaney's work and the travelling Yoshitomo Nara exhibit. Exhibition walk-throughs at 5 pm. Opening 6 p.m.-8 p.m. (image is plastic dish designed by Nara for local toy company bozart. image on the dish is based on Nara's painting "Too Young to Die." 2001)

--Thursday, Jan. 29, at PAFA. Arthur Danto gives a visiting artist lecture at Broad and Cherry in the Furness auditorium. 11:30 a.m. Free

--Thursday, Jan. 29, at Arcadia Art Gallery. Biennial Works on Paper show opens with a lecture about new trends in contemporary drawing by juror Jordan Kantor, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings, MOMA. With 72 works, it's the biggest Works on Paper show at Arcadia ever, says Gallery Director Dick Torchia, who used a salon-style approach to hanging the work. It's a snug but comfortable fit. Lecture at 6:30 p.m. Reception follows at 7:30 p.m. (image is "I would be different, 2002" by Joseph Hu, one of the 62 artists in the show)




permanent link  roberta 12:35 PM
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Monday, January 19, 2004

Turner vs Kyffie

 

We find it very interesting that Sir Kyffin is up in arms at a time when the Turner Prize goes to transvestite potter Grayson Perry (shown receiving his prize at the Tate Museum) .

We find Perry's decorated pots rather conservative. Read more about Perry.

Meanwhile, Kyffin, 85, a Welshman, painter and member of the Royal Academy of Art, is offering his own new prize for drawing. Call it "the Kyffie." How about everybody sends in an application? Read this for instructions.


permanent link  libby and roberta 10:01 AM
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Sir Kyffin's complaint

 
Post from Cinque Hicks

Dear Roberta and Libby, I was wondering if you'd seen this article.

In it, Sir Kyffin Williams of Wales complains about what he considers the garbage of contemporary art (which he calls "modern art"). (shown, "Art Dealer Being Beaten to Death" by this year's Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry.)

Some of the strands of thought seem tangentially related to some discussion a while back on your blog re: abstract art, new art. I've responded to the article in my own blog [named bare and bitter sleep, see post date 1/14/04]. -- post from Cinque Hicks, an artist and writer in Austin Texas.

permanent link  libby and roberta 9:41 AM
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Sunday, January 18, 2004

The art of talking to God

 
Post from Mark Barry
I must preface this by saying, I have been associated with AVAM [the American Visionary Art Museum] from it's beginning and my wife is a founding board member (shown, outsider artist Augustin Lesage's "L'esprit de la Pyramide").
One of Emery Blagdon's healing machines graced the stair well of the American Visionary Museum (AVAM.org), here in Baltimore also a few years back. If you can't connect to the healing spirits with his wonderfully complex and beautiful creations, then you'd better double up on your yoga classes!

When the Visionary first opened there was a plague of - negative - thing - thinkers, debating the relevance of a museum for "Outsider Art", or whether it was art at all, or my favorite, "now that it's "discovered" this can't be called outsider anymore, so there's no reason to have a museum devoted to it." (Shown, piece by outsider artist Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern.)

I can't remember ever leaving an AVAM exhibit without being moved and inspired, that's more than can be said about "mainstream art".

Visit the current show, "Golden Blessings Of Old Age" and let the work will speak for itself.

...Mr Blagdon didn't think of his work as art, most Outsiders don't, they make things that are much more practical to their lives--very often a direct conversation to God, or in some cases [to] aliens (shown, Howard Dorset's The Shell Garden, possibly a tribute to his son who died of meningitis). What ever we choose to call the work, most importantly, it's relevant to the discussion, and more often than not, amazing!
--Mark Barry is a painter living in Baltimore.
permanent link  libby 8:55 PM
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O-MATIC, O-YES, very good

 
Thinking about web art this morning, I decided it was about time to check out the "New Directions in New Media" button at Inliquid. I knew none of the names of the artists listed, so chose one at random from Menu 3, Marina Zurkow. I'm always interested in work by women in what's perceived as male-dominated fields (computers, animation, video).

Zurkow's project "O-MATIC," includes seven short animated videos, and some of them are stars.

The artist's resume says she started out as an art director in horror movies and there's a little bit of that weirdness in some of the work.

Zurkow collaborates with other artists, technicians and musicians in her work. Her aesthetic is mostly hand-drawn and hand-painted although some of the pieces use collage and what looks like cyber drawing. The imagery ranges from Monty Python does South Park (low production values, humor, some scatology and repeated choppy motions) to anime-inspired -- invoking alien life forms and all things intergallactic and sci fi. There is a sad, sweet tone to many of the pieces that I also bought into. And a minimal but sufficient audio or musical presence.

Best of all, I liked the pieces' brevity. The shorter the better for this type of art, I think.

Not only that, but because of the episodic nature of the projects, there were many options, many buttons to try and basically, the viewer is the boss, driving the experience. I love that.

I looked at all nine, and my favorite was the one I picked first, at random, "Advent Moment," a triptych of short, repeat-motion gif's, made with what look like hand-drawn or painted cells. There's some Hallmark card sweetness in the big mix of imagery (a dolphin jumping, a snowflake spinning). But there's also more real-world stuff (a blinking eye, a person getting up from a couch) and some out and out unexpected (an airplane pilot seeing an apparition through his cabin window). (dancing images from "Advent Moment")

This was a completely non-narrative piece where images cycled past with no apparent connection to each other. In its triptych of rotating imagery, it kind of mirrored a slot machine. I let myself get mesmerized with one triptych. It made for a kind of giddy, visual stagger, like a skip in a record that -- if you're in the right mood -- can be soothing instead of annoying. But I also clicked through the piece quickly which made it more of a crazy, kaleidoscopic, merry-go-round. That was also good.


"Braingirl" and "Parthenogenesis," which I also recommend, have more story-telling in them -- and a completely different drawing style. Flat and cyber-drawn in affect, with a minimal pallete of red, black and white, the pieces felt like cartoons from a series, which, perhaps they are. (image above right is "Alien Sex" creatures, from some other Zurkow project.)

The number of web artist projects on the site is overwhelming --three menus full of names. But since I had such luck with this morning's random selection, I'll be back to sample more. In fact, if anyone wants to steer me to other urls with good web art, I'm up for it. It's a genre I believe in, and I'm quite interested in the experience of viewing art in private online. I'm not sure it's good for art or not, but I'd like to do a quck immersion and think about it.
permanent link  roberta 12:00 PM
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Who says it?

 

If someone says their work is art, well, we accept it as art (or at least some of us, myself included, do).

But what of someone who says their work is something else? I'm referring to outsider artist Emery Blagdon, who's featured in today's Times as an outsider artist and who was included in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's outsider show several years ago.

He said he was making "healing machines."

I guess the work can go in the category of shaman art, except his society was a society of one, he, himself and him.

As for his two collectors, they of course say it's art. But they have a vested interest.

I want to add (on the pro-art side) that seeing the recreation of his shed at the PMA was a memorable experience, although I'm still not sure I buy the art part (maybe I'm feeling a little curmudgeonly today; maybe tomorrow I'll say of course it's art).

Just wondering.
permanent link  libby 9:26 AM
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