tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49573018609574101282024-03-13T19:38:54.445-07:00eyeball kicksA blog about art since 1945shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-42809493211979745052011-12-01T08:48:00.000-08:002011-12-01T10:32:21.144-08:00Meghan Boody, "The Lighthouse Project"Houston Center for Photography has a show on right now called "Magical Realism in Photography." It's one of the most interesting shows I've seen there in a long time.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinJk2ZnUDBvy3QaB96QDmC3oj2vJ5UsdUvtsWLjPUn2dKPxChOm2zH7AWp_E3b00c02hiUlm92tQFccQUkxVHmMTm7nFOf7fhT4xDwW3_7NK07enWDzo0OSl8V5J5mrCU7aS1nWfGXip4/s1600/709bg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>Most people associate magical realism with literature, particularly with Latin American literature. But it seems that the term was actually first used in relation to visual art, in the 1920s in Germany. A German art critic named Franz Roh came up with the term, "Magischer Realismus," to describe the post-expressionist, hyper-realistic painting that was being done in Germany at the time by painters like George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. The funny thing is that when you learn about these painters nowadays, they're usually introduced as part of a movement called The New Objectivity, or Neue Sachlichkeit in German. But these paintings are far from realistic in the normal sense of the term. Fantastic elements sit side by side with hyper-real, very sharply delineated painting of people and objects. For example, in this searing but satirical picture of some war veterans playing cards, their hideous war wounds and prostheses are painted with devastating clarity and sharpness, but the scene itself is not "realistic" in the sense that its perspective is distorted.<br />
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</a></div> Neue Sachlichkeit grew out of the terrible violence of World War I and the meaningless slaughter of millions of men, along with the maiming of millions more. It seemed imperative to depict this horror in visual art, yet somehow without implying that the suffering was in any way ennobling or meaningful in a larger, heroic sense.<br />
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It's likely that magical realism in literature serves the same purpose: it's a way to depict the true story of, say, colonialism in Latin America in a factual way, while also implying that this historical reality was so extreme that it violates one's normal expectations of how things will be. We live now in a time when new events are occurring that do not seem possible: American skyscrapers being brought down by Arabs in jets, European countries on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, humans changing the climate so that it will eventually revert to the climate of the earth in the time of the dinosaurs, the industrial revolution and Western "progress" coming to an end. Magical realism fits our need for a strong dose of reality coupled with a sense that this reality is somehow unbelievable.<br />
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Photography is a perfect medium for magical realism, as the photograph has a strong claim to being the most "real" representation of visual reality. Photographers have always manipulated negatives and prints to create fantastic scenes, even in the 19th century. Henry Peach Robinson was already using "combination printing" to create invented scenes from multiple negatives in 1858.<br />
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In the 1970s, I thought Jerry Uelsmann's photomontages were very cool:<br />
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I've played with photomontage myself, using the Holga camera to superimpose exposures on top of one another in the negative:<br />
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But the magical realism tool par excellence has to be Photoshop. The power is awesome. We can take any image, from anywhere, and put it in anything. The possibilities are so endless, and the process so relatively quick and easy compared to the way Uelsmann made his prints, that it's almost paralyzing. When you can do anything, what <i>should</i> you do?<br />
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This show has some answers. There were seven photographers represented in the show, and I hope to have time to write about more of them later, but the one who impressed me the most was Meghan Boody. She has done what I wanted to do when I first started playing with Photoshop: tell a magical realist story.<br />
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Boody's three enormous photographs in the show are from her series, T<a href="http://www.lookingglasslabs.com/lighthouse.html">he Lighthouse Project.</a> This project imagines the story of a young orphan girl who escapes from confinement in the orphanage and goes out onto the heath, almost like Lear. It's not clear from the images exactly what happens, but the story seems to be a composite of many Victorian orphan stories, from <i>Jane Eyre</i> to <i>Agnes Grey</i>. ( I remember as a child being struck by how many English children's books involve children who are either orphaned or separated from parents by war: <i>The Secret Garden</i>, the Narnia stories, and many of Dickens's novels. It's an archetype that centuries of war and turmoil have seared into European brains, apparently.) There are fifteen photographs in the whole series, and they are composed like history paintings: huge set pieces with many costumed characters and elaborate sets. Boody photographs the people--often young girls--in her studio, and then she places them digitally in the gorgeous landscapes and great manor houses that she photographs separately. <br />
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Here's one from the show, "East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon."<br />
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The lighthouse was photographed in Ireland, and the young girl heroine was photographed in the studio. The same girl serves as the heroine in all the pictures, but at the beginning of the series she is twelve, and by the end she is sixteen. The lighthouse keeper at the far right is a sort of romantic, yet fatherly figure that "saves" her for a time, apparently.<br />
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Not all of the photographs include overtly magical elements. There's one that has a ghostly figure of a woman gazing out from a doorway. But most of the images are not in the realm of the paranormal. The sense of magical realism--"this is real/this couldn't be real"-- comes, I think, from the fact that we seem to be seeing actual scenes from the 19th century, apparently photographed with incredible fidelity and sharpness, but they're in color! And they're really big! (The biggest photographs of the 19th century were only 20x24, and they were virtually all black and white.) It's as if Thomas Struth had been teleported back to 19th century rural England with an 8x10 view camera and a scanner (or a high-end digital Hasselblad), and a Fujiflex Crystal Archive ultra-wide digital enlarger. The medium appears to be partly 19th century, possibly using a large-format film camera, and partly 21st century, since these huge color photographs could only have been produced by modern high tech digital printing. This juxtaposition and blending of technologies from different centuries creates a confusing, yet pleasurable sense of real-but-impossible.<br />
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The huge photographs--50 by 70.5 inches--reward a lot of careful looking. The details in the ground--the grass and rocks--are amazingly sharp, hyper-real, as befits magical realism. They are gorgeously colored and composed. There is much pure visual pleasure in them, as well as the frisson of suspense and dread that seems to permeate the story. The viewer--I almost wrote "the reader"--is forced to invent the in-between scenes of this "movie" or novel. It's as if you received a beautifully illustrated book for Christmas, with fifteen color plate illustrations in it, and you paged through the book looking at the illustrations, imagining what the story might be before you get to read it. Only you never get to read it: you have to make it up.<br />
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Actually, the story seems to end with "to be continued." We see the young girl, now sixteen, in the last picture, standing against a wall in a fancy drawing room. She and the girls next to her are plainly dressed, whereas the foreground people are richly dressed. It's as if she's a servant in somebody else's household, much like Jane Eyre. Will she ever marry the rich heir to the estate? Or will she get pregnant by him and be cast off, sent back on the road, as if in some tragic George Eliot novel? Magical realism doesn't lend itself to easy, Regency novel-style resolution. Like real life, it's too strange for that.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRVjNSUrjy2KHSb_4mEqqIKDxd9HVcJUSSc40UkoLuJynhMbjS8osLwAaGkTufzjIs8LFCVfYQ07SFKyakmSfo_y9ytaJ28mJ-J5aMOaBNFPwYDMZoth7xAgoLSmXbbpWJcVjeptE9VWI/s1600/15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRVjNSUrjy2KHSb_4mEqqIKDxd9HVcJUSSc40UkoLuJynhMbjS8osLwAaGkTufzjIs8LFCVfYQ07SFKyakmSfo_y9ytaJ28mJ-J5aMOaBNFPwYDMZoth7xAgoLSmXbbpWJcVjeptE9VWI/s320/15.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-34989484258331669002011-11-21T09:09:00.000-08:002011-11-21T11:06:50.150-08:00Toward a Theory of Thanksgiving (pace Freud)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9tU3XCbmS-jrnWakhnuO89d12dKNNtCbf-4k3i0zTGV0g7WT9_9Z8id1lrQsBfeOWEacdthpQfOOxVz99dLlpI7-1gar04M1GbJxk7BgfoPflZao835epiA7rsr4w4tf5ii5I9I-KCo/s1600/feast.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9tU3XCbmS-jrnWakhnuO89d12dKNNtCbf-4k3i0zTGV0g7WT9_9Z8id1lrQsBfeOWEacdthpQfOOxVz99dLlpI7-1gar04M1GbJxk7BgfoPflZao835epiA7rsr4w4tf5ii5I9I-KCo/s320/feast.gif" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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I went to art school in 2003, and my school was really big on what they called "theory." This word seemed to refer to pretty much any long-winded writing that was inscrutable; it didn't have to be about visual art at all, really. The argument for this course of study was that back in the 1980s, there was a lot of theory-driven art. True enough. It didn't seem to matter that most people hate theory-driven art, and that nobody was making any theory-driven art any more. Academic art is by definition twenty years, at least, behind the times.<br />
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So every week we read hundreds of pages of prose I would never have read except under duress. With one exception: Freud. I really like Freud. He's not really that inscrutable, and he's all about sex, of course, and he has a wonderful 19th century writing style, with long, meandering, thoughtful sentences. At least it's wonderful in translation. (It could be horrible in German for all I know.) Like the best Victorian writers, Freud manages to be both prim and salacious at once. He describes the most perverse goings-on with a clinical detachment that barely masks his delight in them.<br />
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His writing style is also wonderfully parody-able. So one time, when we were assigned to write an essay about "Totem and Taboo," and it happened to be around Thanksgiving, I was inspired to write this "theory of Thanksgiving turkey-eating." I hope it's funny even if you haven't read "Totem and Taboo" recently.<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The inhabitants of the continent of North America have some </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">strange customs, which, nonetheless, psychoanalysis is able to elucidate, if not penetrate. Perhaps the strangest is their custom of murdering and then devouring millions of turkeys on the last Thursday of November of each year. The Americans do not eat turkey at any other time of year, or only rarely. And, they do not commonly murder turkeys individually, as the wild turkeys of that country are practically extinct, and the domestic turkeys are known for their propensity to shit upon people’s porches, as they love to roost on the porch railings. So, turkeys are not much kept as domestic pets. Indeed it could be said that the Americans have a taboo against killing turkeys individually (which certain white male inhabitants of the rural South ignore completely, as they do other taboos generally). How, then, can we account for the mass murder of turkeys each November? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">First, it is important to know that the inhabitants of the United States, for the most part, have only been in that country for a few generations, with few exceptions. They are of European, African, Asian, or South American extraction, whose ancestors came to the North American continent as recently as last week, or as long ago as the 17<sup>th</sup> century. We are excepting from our survey of this population the native people, who were practically exterminated between the time when Europeans first arrived, bringing diseases to which the natives were susceptible, and the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, when the last of the native people were exterminated. Nonetheless, some of their genes doubtless survive in the present population of the United States.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">So, acknowledging that the history of the United States is rooted in a murder, nay, a genocide of several million of the original inhabitants, what connection could this have to the ritual murder of millions of turkeys every year? The ritual murder at “thanksgiving” is no less than the commemoration of this “original sin,” which the Americans have largely forgotten, of the murder of the ancient ancestors of their land, the native people. These people are, as it were, the “ancestors” of the present inhabitants, in the sense that they owned and controlled the motherland. In order for Europeans to gain access to her fertility, the ancient native patriarchs had to be destroyed, and even devoured. We see this cannibalistic destruction in the pictures of the first thanksgiving, displaced, however, as the native ancestors are portrayed as “guests” at the feast rather than as the dinner itself. In fact they were the hosts, who ended up giving their own flesh as food to the Europeans. But such an unpleasant and disagreeable thought is not palatable at the thanksgiving table; thus the European Americans represent themselves as the hosts, the Indians as their “guests”, and the turkey as the meal.</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What drove the European Americans to commit this atrocious sin that they now cannot contemplate, and have even forgotten?<span> </span>Lust for the land that the native people controlled, is the only possible answer, as psychoanalysis makes clear.<span> </span>The Europeans felt excluded from the use of the “rich virgin wilderness,” as they described it.<span> </span>They felt that the native people monopolized her fertility, and didn’t even use it to its fullest.<span> </span>The native people were mere hunters and gatherers, the Europeans thought, rather than sophisticated farmers like the Europeans.<span> </span>Thus they justified the murder of the patriarchs and the seizure of their fertile virgin motherland.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But once the murder had been accomplished by the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, remorse set in immediately.<span> </span>The band of Europeans remembered how quaint and picturesque the native people had been in their full regalia. They found themselves unable to mate with the female natives, and in fact they erected a taboo against Europeans mating with dark skinned women of any race. It is as if, by murder of the Indian fathers and by the seizure of their lands, they had in fact become the kinsmen of the Indian women and new members, initiated by violence,<span> </span>of the same turkey clan.<span> </span>Similarly, they began to lament their own destruction of the once-great forests, the despoliation of the streams, and the destruction of the prairie grasses.<span> </span>Almost immediately they began to set aside the most beautiful of the lands they had seized as national parks, which were never to be touched by any white man for his use. The analogy of land use with mating thus becomes explicit, as the incest taboo is operative even environmentally.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now we can see the strange custom of mass turkey murder in its full meaning.<span> </span>The turkey, it will be seen, stands for the ancient ancestor, the patriarchs, the native people of the Americas who were themselves murdered en masse so that food could be grown for Europeans on their fertile motherland.<span> </span>In that sense, the native people <i>became</i>, as it were, the food of Europeans. The turkey is the perfect, although unconscious, symbol for the Europeans of the native people that they exterminated:<span> </span>it is a bird native only to the Americas and was not known to Europeans before they came to this new continent; and it has a reputation of being a somewhat guileless bird, easy to hunt and kill, although somewhat shy and very elusive in the wild.<span> </span>Therefore, in celebrating its murder and devouring every year, the European Americans are re-enacting their original sin, both celebrating their defiant triumph over the former holders of the land, and propitiating their totem, the bird, which they revere even as they slaughter it.<span> </span>For no less a person than their beloved Founding Father Benjamin Franklin proposed that the turkey be the totem animal of the newly created United States. In fact the official totem bird is the bald eagle; however, psychoanalysis easily recognizes the bald eagle as nothing other than a displacement of the turkey into a form that is more palatable (no pun intended) to the American mind, being less of an explicit reminder to the European Americans of the bloody origin of their nation-state.<span> </span>The totem animal—whether turkey or eagle—embodies their community, which is the true object of their worship. And yet also the embodiment of their sin:<span> </span>“in the beginning was the Deed.”</span></div> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-73026187744794947712011-11-14T08:09:00.000-08:002011-11-14T08:18:07.209-08:00Sky SpaceOn Saturday we went to a gathering at the Live Oak Friends Meeting House in Houston. This Quaker meeting house has an installation designed by James Turrell, an artist who works primarily with light. He grew up as a Quaker himself, and he remembers going to the meeting house with his grandmother, who said they were going to "look for the light." Quakers no doubt mean the light within, but Turrell took this metaphor rather literally, and he has been searching for ways to represent and frame light ever since.<br />
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We could not go in the Turrell installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center last weekend because it is being renovated, so it was nice to be able to see a similar piece in Houston. The sky space is a rectangle cut into the roof of the Friends Meeting House, with a retractable roof that rolls back over the hole if rain threatens (which, in Houston these days, is practically never). It was open when we got there.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRPjbJJbqCA7I0Sc8446BnzufnjYkzZfaEza1nvcxfL7T7sDgoVf28_CbOCdNiWnHNCs3PG1uZcUNQKEV6NzejQHorK5m81p3MbrrrsGZ6aflsTb5NEEbES2orR9xtfqFyrljQArNIW0A/s1600/skyspace1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRPjbJJbqCA7I0Sc8446BnzufnjYkzZfaEza1nvcxfL7T7sDgoVf28_CbOCdNiWnHNCs3PG1uZcUNQKEV6NzejQHorK5m81p3MbrrrsGZ6aflsTb5NEEbES2orR9xtfqFyrljQArNIW0A/s320/skyspace1.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>The ceiling of the meeting house is curved, so the rectangular sky space sometimes doesn't look rectangular when you look straight up:<br />
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</a></div>Also, as afternoon progresses into evening, the color of the sky begins to change rapidly:<br />
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It's amazing how entertaining it is just to watch these colors slowly change. It is similar, although better I think, to the tunnel at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston that Turrell created: it too changes colors gradually, although the effect is created by artificial light rather than by the natural light from the sky.<br />
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There is more entertainment to be had from watching the clouds and jet trails move across the sky space.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aLL1RNpRSMQ" width="420"></iframe> <br />
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The effect is very contemplative. It sort of conflicts a little with the hard pews in the Friends Meeting House, which are more like the pews in the Grand Ole Opry House than like the sort of chaise lounge that would have been perfect for sky gazing.<br />
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Turrell talks in <a href="http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/james-turrell">an Art 21 segment </a>about how the idea for this wonderful space came about. He talks about the fact that the sky space seems to bring the sky and the atmosphere closer, just by framing it (and framing the horizon, trees, and buildings out). He says that by looking at the sky space, you realize that the sky is close to you all the time; in fact you're walking around in it! You're in the atmosphere! I think that's a really accurate description of how it feels to watch this space: it creates a kind of intimacy with the sky. And that's important these days, given how imperiled our atmosphere is, and by implication, the whole biosphere. You begin to love it a little more, rather than just taking it for granted or ignoring it.<br />
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The sky space also gives a city dweller an opportunity to experience what residents of the wide-open spaces of the Far West feel all the time: the beauty and importance of the sky. When you're out in the Big Bend, for example, there are places where there seems to be almost nothing but sky. In the Chihuahuan desert, you can see the horizon around you for 360 degrees, and then there's this enormous bowl of the sky inverted over the apparently flat Earth. At night this bowl becomes alive with stars and meteors, and it's a show more impressive than any puny thing that happens on the ground. The spectacle sort of puts things in perspective.<br />
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At the meeting house, though, after it got dark, the roof rolled over the sky space, and an artificial light show came on, which was also pretty nice. You can't see stars in Houston anyway.<br />
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Turrell is working right now on a decades-long project at <a href="http://rodencrater.com/about">Roden Crater</a> in Arizona. This is a huge volcanic cone that Turrell is remodeling to be the Mother of All Sky Spaces. It will be a sort of Stonehenge of contemporary American art, if the<a href="http://rodencrater.com/friends"> drawings</a> are to be believed. I can't claim to understand Roden Crater really, but I hope it opens soon so I can go try to understand it. The Dia Foundation is supporting its construction in large part. It's a natural project for them, given their interest in earth works and the legacy of Minimalism and Donald Judd. It's good that the wealth created by oil in Texas has contributed so much to monumental projects like Roden Crater that could not be built without a lot of support. But it's also great to have smaller, more modest, yet sublime pieces like the sky space in the Friends Meeting House.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-77571896348195419212011-11-08T06:33:00.000-08:002011-11-08T06:34:39.337-08:00Nasher Sculpture Garden; Tony CraggWe had a nice time at the Nasher Sculpture Center on Saturday morning. It was a free admission day and there were dozens of small children running around the shaded lawn of the garden, trying desperately to touch the sculpture that they weren't allowed to touch, and sometimes succeeding.<br />
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One of our objectives had been to go in the James Turrell piece, which is a kind of underground kiva. You look up at the ceiling, and there is a square opening through which you see the sky. Sometimes it's a blue rectangle; sometimes clouds scoot by. If it rains, the rain comes inside, but you can sit on benches around the edge of the kiva and not get wet. The benches are warmed by internal heaters, and they are deliciously sensual to lie on, even though they are hard. But sadly, the installation was closed: Turrell is re-designing the kiva to take into account the presence of a new tower that blocks the view of the sky. The Dallas Museum of Art is building this tower to lure its members to live in the area, apparently in the hopes that the same people will bequeath their art collection to the museum when they die. Apparently the ceilings of the penthouse apartments are 18 feet tall, to accommodate these prospective tenants' art collections. We all know that art these days has to be big to be any good!<br />
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This cross section gives you an idea of how the kiva works.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL39BmgkoW4S557_SJWsn2Aeni82_QPZe-sHRwmVuyGhr75r73ocfe9nlk73ifYJ-cL1qb3MYTP5kZnzJo5s2nDMFWVzqowN6TeJ6_8w8EmL7xz6HKRv7r518SHPzZ2UDCTZmkYc-TtdQ/s1600/turrell1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL39BmgkoW4S557_SJWsn2Aeni82_QPZe-sHRwmVuyGhr75r73ocfe9nlk73ifYJ-cL1qb3MYTP5kZnzJo5s2nDMFWVzqowN6TeJ6_8w8EmL7xz6HKRv7r518SHPzZ2UDCTZmkYc-TtdQ/s320/turrell1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>And this is what it looks like when there are a few clouds in the sky.<br />
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But as I said, we couldn't go in. However the area right around the kiva is quite lovely:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ2PjK1XVjF0opgXcV8KAjscaPWZif-iQzAer0cDm1maINLqyhak5ZkHiwETpWcRYhrNNMa4EDNwem3rne8re-VstUvPSVWbJGRB9qVPtRjJj0WudxaClOJG6_sKhLpGVMtfOrUw_xav0/s1600/lilies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ2PjK1XVjF0opgXcV8KAjscaPWZif-iQzAer0cDm1maINLqyhak5ZkHiwETpWcRYhrNNMa4EDNwem3rne8re-VstUvPSVWbJGRB9qVPtRjJj0WudxaClOJG6_sKhLpGVMtfOrUw_xav0/s320/lilies.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>The featured exhibition was by a sculptor from the UK called <a href="http://www.tony-cragg.com/">Tony Cragg.</a> I had never heard of him before, but I liked his work quite a lot. There were somewhat biomorphic shapes made out of all kinds of things. The ones I liked best were carved laminated wood.<br />
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Also there was a boat with all these hooks screwed into it, almost like barnacles. For some reason both Tom and I really liked this piece. It just bristled with energy, and it had a kind of light-hearted humor about it.<br />
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Cragg's work is quite varied: some is straight-up sculpture, cast bronzes and carvings and the like, and other stuff is Rauschenberg-like combines (the boat), or assemblage, like these bottles.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzrd8njXYFY3cHFxNxdzl3GUbdiG86fMENofZkY_z709oMdt0vcI464PSKa44fr8hRY4goD4PDE4B0P20t50WEL3wtSdqCQtj5YiyS6AWSoWYNXHNzkqg6ohtxvFme47WWKX5HW2Vif58/s1600/bottles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzrd8njXYFY3cHFxNxdzl3GUbdiG86fMENofZkY_z709oMdt0vcI464PSKa44fr8hRY4goD4PDE4B0P20t50WEL3wtSdqCQtj5YiyS6AWSoWYNXHNzkqg6ohtxvFme47WWKX5HW2Vif58/s320/bottles.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>There were also some drawings. The drawings of sculptors are always interesting: how does a person who thinks mainly in three dimensions work in two dimensions? Cragg's drawings, as one might expect, have a strong sense of depth and space.<br />
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The drawings did not seem to be preparatory to any particular sculpture, but rather just explorations of ideas that might lead to a piece of sculpture. The one above seemed to relate to a piece made out of dice. It was like a huge coiled basket with a lid. The photograph below barely hints at the size of this object: it was as tall as me, made out of thousands of dice glued together very precisely. The example at the Nasher is just one of many pieces Cragg made out of dice.<br />
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One great thing about sculpture gardens is the opportunity to draw things that stand still: sculptures.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ-t_2aLvr_yz_OObxuMQWalUr_JhnVm56eSTDTqSPgExCqaOhvr5aVQpKdWLB4uTQdtHtoRk2QUMUxgQSPvucFxiBZ5QLs-jUgUg3QLb6meoM-g86ZENrX3ohQsoYLABwZkclwRfFtRk/s1600/drawing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ-t_2aLvr_yz_OObxuMQWalUr_JhnVm56eSTDTqSPgExCqaOhvr5aVQpKdWLB4uTQdtHtoRk2QUMUxgQSPvucFxiBZ5QLs-jUgUg3QLb6meoM-g86ZENrX3ohQsoYLABwZkclwRfFtRk/s320/drawing.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
I made a drawing of a Calder piece called "Three Bollards." I had to look up the word "bollard." It means a post by a quay for mooring ships to.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPDcLx-12cUqj15J82YYO6RRC0xhmTV0H-RpSY_6jVzS0hDU1l_c0HyJC65m0dWrl60vrRWM90jJTEG_SjsqrMu-6KlrDzMGsEYJxGwLDE_BAcB-IPKpOlqqUPmMjTjc8J9xSLoMF4Ek/s1600/3+bollards030.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMPDcLx-12cUqj15J82YYO6RRC0xhmTV0H-RpSY_6jVzS0hDU1l_c0HyJC65m0dWrl60vrRWM90jJTEG_SjsqrMu-6KlrDzMGsEYJxGwLDE_BAcB-IPKpOlqqUPmMjTjc8J9xSLoMF4Ek/s320/3+bollards030.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-84853041377518831042011-01-01T09:58:00.000-08:002011-01-01T10:01:22.250-08:00Great Show at the Frist Center in NashvilleThe Frist Center is just going from strength to strength. Each show that I see there seems better than the last. Right now, there's a show there called The Birth of Impressionism, with paintings from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.<br />
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Some of these paintings are familiar, like Manet's <i>The Fife Player</i>:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJbdAFp49UzNQBXc022pggDsTQKkHAShM_s_tq6TgL8PuBLxMHrvMi-qj7biwrMfXJK5If4xElfla_hQO2fUqmIYtxbw8yubbAGv6irhQPa67ZTU54sAnCUE91ntWVvt0cMNL17ATfbRU/s1600/Manet-LE-FIFRE-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJbdAFp49UzNQBXc022pggDsTQKkHAShM_s_tq6TgL8PuBLxMHrvMi-qj7biwrMfXJK5If4xElfla_hQO2fUqmIYtxbw8yubbAGv6irhQPa67ZTU54sAnCUE91ntWVvt0cMNL17ATfbRU/s320/Manet-LE-FIFRE-web.jpg" width="194" /></a></div>And "Whistler's Mother," which is really called <span style="color: grey;"><i>Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1</i>, or <i>The Artist's Mother</i>, 1871:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjdF8HeQWdADCwoLvbHA6RCsHe8KkfHm8uvopIMRL-mafLonbtbWxYvJowu9YpDNvjyRwkEHVrt0NJ1yN91idr7zSpR9TmdxPICtiJ7Bb27QeSppzSJ4Pwpz7cLkfiacPRRLhu9C_i-I/s1600/Whistler%2527s-Mother-no-frame-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjdF8HeQWdADCwoLvbHA6RCsHe8KkfHm8uvopIMRL-mafLonbtbWxYvJowu9YpDNvjyRwkEHVrt0NJ1yN91idr7zSpR9TmdxPICtiJ7Bb27QeSppzSJ4Pwpz7cLkfiacPRRLhu9C_i-I/s320/Whistler%2527s-Mother-no-frame-.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">One important thing to notice in both these canonical paintings is how there are large areas of basically flat, relatively unmodelled shapes. When you take an art history course, you learn that this was a new thing in mid to late 19th century painting, especially in Manet. Apparently French painters were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, which had large flat unmodelled areas. But this show makes this innovation really jump out at you, because the first room is full of Salon-style paintings, which were highly modelled and much more "realistic," except for the fact that they included so many winged cherubs and mermen, and the fact that none of the women have any body hair except on their heads (Ok, maybe not so realistic, but realistically<i> modelled</i>.)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWsGBHXR0pmAwxJJP1mknsv6K5tgOn7xI4oFMbjAmBNKOn7oDiaTgJIy8XBvzUsqyGpxV8iLlRKDvc6O0HJm1QxU94xSb9qljVACzrnR6A42YZRkzAmHEq0dple2vGYEzHcqp4kHtWiLs/s1600/the-birth-of-venus-by-william-adolphe-bouguereau-1879.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWsGBHXR0pmAwxJJP1mknsv6K5tgOn7xI4oFMbjAmBNKOn7oDiaTgJIy8XBvzUsqyGpxV8iLlRKDvc6O0HJm1QxU94xSb9qljVACzrnR6A42YZRkzAmHEq0dple2vGYEzHcqp4kHtWiLs/s320/the-birth-of-venus-by-william-adolphe-bouguereau-1879.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Impressionist painters and (big R) Realist painters like Courbet were reacting against the silliness of these paintings of mythological subjects. They preferred portraying peasants and ordinary people, like the exhausted haymakers below:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwtTtu9jLp7TVaWgsDlcLFf2mkKH4O3i2st0WR_pGT43OVgioNIoHDEhd153YPEYmaXIV13CSWsVjg7T_X_zwWP0Ho8Wi5-S-n6GZ41G5zxfqa3ELMLXKe-CdyFgwb3yL5wjVfkE_g9D0/s1600/Jules_Bastien_Lepage_Haymaking_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwtTtu9jLp7TVaWgsDlcLFf2mkKH4O3i2st0WR_pGT43OVgioNIoHDEhd153YPEYmaXIV13CSWsVjg7T_X_zwWP0Ho8Wi5-S-n6GZ41G5zxfqa3ELMLXKe-CdyFgwb3yL5wjVfkE_g9D0/s320/Jules_Bastien_Lepage_Haymaking_5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">These two paintings, though worlds apart conceptually and thematically, are both equally huge. So painters like LePage, who painted the haymaking scene, were stating that ordinary people were as heroic in their own way as the gods and goddesses of mythology. Some of the paintings of peasants at work remind the viewer of Soviet realism, with its idealized portraits of muscular peasant women.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have always been sort of ashamed of the fact that English and American painting could never rival that of France in the 19th century, and well into the 20th century. But a wall plaque in this show pointed to the influence of Constable on French landscape painters, particularly on the Barbizon school, the members of which painted in a forest near Paris. But Renoir ventured further afield, to Algiers:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMyiXyp0CcgkOnTp6P6CvXIvhyp49bcextvJjCruL1ZVFq-_2_PKG4Tjbqt_6WNRrAI344DdxhXWMMSQavO0h2drS_cAPAJLi27f3uNTvaOVj6q9bB0cZrggzge5RueErYRcMtQtnZ1Ng/s1600/renoir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMyiXyp0CcgkOnTp6P6CvXIvhyp49bcextvJjCruL1ZVFq-_2_PKG4Tjbqt_6WNRrAI344DdxhXWMMSQavO0h2drS_cAPAJLi27f3uNTvaOVj6q9bB0cZrggzge5RueErYRcMtQtnZ1Ng/s320/renoir.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This kind of painting--devoid of narrative, a "painting of nothing"--drove the academicians and traditional painters in Paris crazy. But you can see what it owes to Constable's </div><i>Dedham Vale</i>, painted in 1801, eighty years earlier:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZXzGZMfkQ6JLw4xfbulbBkTz9YIa6_Aw77VNhFCt8bMPeYhK3N07VouFVJWVmZWO4qVy_lA0Yc0pQtWkdV5QeG6-mYqQcvHgyvx81Qyza-WlJL1u7JQs65Rf2SoXUd2FlGp08m0iQnc/s1600/constable006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyZXzGZMfkQ6JLw4xfbulbBkTz9YIa6_Aw77VNhFCt8bMPeYhK3N07VouFVJWVmZWO4qVy_lA0Yc0pQtWkdV5QeG6-mYqQcvHgyvx81Qyza-WlJL1u7JQs65Rf2SoXUd2FlGp08m0iQnc/s320/constable006.jpg" width="247" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> But the Impressionists of the late 19th century had an advantage over Constable, namely, new colors! When you enter the room with the Algerian painting, everything suddenly lightens and brightens up. The colors are fresher and clearer, fewer shades and more tints, and the tints are very pure hues. This is due to the presence of colors like viridian (a clear green), aureolin (yellow), cerulean blue (a greenish blue) and a new, cheaper synthetic ultramarine blue. These are colors that I've taken for granted my whole painting life, but they were brand new toys for the Impressionists.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Another advantage for the Impressionists over their mentor Constable: paint in tubes. Constable had to mix his own paints and store them in little skin containers. But Renoir could carry his colors outside in tubes, as we do today.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There are many more interesting things to look for in this show, such as the influence of photography on the way painters cropped their paintings; the appearance of "art within art," as in the painting of Whistler's mother; and the effect of the disastrous Franco-Prussian war on the nascent modernism of French painting. We in Middle Tennessee are lucky to be able to see these paintings from the Musee d'Orsay in Nashville.</div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-68005872572859987562010-10-12T06:19:00.000-07:002010-10-12T06:43:45.447-07:00More pictures of Marfa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Tom also made a lot of photographs in Marfa, with his new digital SLR. Here are some of them.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div> This is Building 98, where the show of photographs about the Adobe Alliance is for the next three weeks.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8wdC3lC8rc8BxLnO07dLhbPAwhW_yisAx_nCtTzntl6hVhbPdUn6BWnp2U6Z9l06UTbtkq3NPqn5eFOLbQKG3PDpzBnc32A2d5jkScXRMToZEWzpjENl8MDbbjP8ZK4wYDfOz_RhhE4/s1600/building98.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8wdC3lC8rc8BxLnO07dLhbPAwhW_yisAx_nCtTzntl6hVhbPdUn6BWnp2U6Z9l06UTbtkq3NPqn5eFOLbQKG3PDpzBnc32A2d5jkScXRMToZEWzpjENl8MDbbjP8ZK4wYDfOz_RhhE4/s400/building98.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Building 98 has an interesting history. It was the Bachelor Officer's Quarters for an army unit in the thirties and forties. During WWII, some German prisoners of war were kept here, and they painted some murals about West Texas on the walls inside.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVchf67IjpNWiTU-8_uX7aDlp0p31X8FwZWI9CHEH1wVNKSHB_6VDPkjTkaVglD_gN99CW7ZMroZC1zqa0wzS4lEIFzav8BEl4PqpkhrxzU7kU5TIO29fRkIEIBw9vBi8OpsyZqBhsPOs/s1600/murals.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVchf67IjpNWiTU-8_uX7aDlp0p31X8FwZWI9CHEH1wVNKSHB_6VDPkjTkaVglD_gN99CW7ZMroZC1zqa0wzS4lEIFzav8BEl4PqpkhrxzU7kU5TIO29fRkIEIBw9vBi8OpsyZqBhsPOs/s400/murals.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>It's interesting to imagine how surprising the landscape of West Texas must have been to the average guy from, say, Bavaria.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu88ZplsnHcw_otNvm-Xt7EdpoH18RjH_4Es72su3om1VH5wvZbU2qApbIWKhc3Ii4jkEBCy2xE6lDcvz_AzkCQCpbqxh8RGPo1Lkk3MRuqHF-P4uC_v55bomtiKobdxfxTzttBSJQ7xo/s1600/insidegallery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu88ZplsnHcw_otNvm-Xt7EdpoH18RjH_4Es72su3om1VH5wvZbU2qApbIWKhc3Ii4jkEBCy2xE6lDcvz_AzkCQCpbqxh8RGPo1Lkk3MRuqHF-P4uC_v55bomtiKobdxfxTzttBSJQ7xo/s400/insidegallery.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Below is a picture of Mona Garcia, the gallerist, and a board member of the International Woman's Foundation:<br />
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Here is the Arcon Inn, the bed and breakfast where we stayed, also owned by Mona Garcia:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRUJ8ks270NLENGDqueG0CwDKqnmi4sB_ktyaFwwP4zia-H133hsbWotjcX47zw_owohEjzFMfgAFN-VGESNdoBXWvAVy6SfQ76fkAAv_xcFRsAlN83KQ-Aq47a01hzhurdYZ9ENWj8U/s1600/arconinn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRUJ8ks270NLENGDqueG0CwDKqnmi4sB_ktyaFwwP4zia-H133hsbWotjcX47zw_owohEjzFMfgAFN-VGESNdoBXWvAVy6SfQ76fkAAv_xcFRsAlN83KQ-Aq47a01hzhurdYZ9ENWj8U/s400/arconinn.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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It's conveniently located near the center of town, right behind the courthouse. Speaking of which:<br />
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</a></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-16245037950792304672010-10-11T08:51:00.000-07:002010-10-13T05:18:46.444-07:00Trip to MarfaTom and I just returned from a trip to Marfa, TX. Our main purpose was to install an exhibition of my photographs about the Adobe Alliance and Simone Swan at Building 98, near the Chinati Foundation. Building 98 is a gallery run by Mona Garcia.<br />
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Here are some pictures of the pictures:<br />
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It was Chinati Weekend in Marfa, and there was a lot to see and do. We made the rounds of the galleries. I was really impressed by the work of Claire Oswalt at Galleri Urbane. She does wonderfully detailed graphite drawings, some of them quite small. The tree picture is maybe 5x7 inches, and the head portion of the portrait is maybe an inch and a half!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiilZ2vl6BEcqkxPy8ILnOnIy2wMUQEHIYPbqYEtPXJlWJGYVvwfqhyJd5CFgu0JO-CaeKN3oSlejjfLi9iMVwwANaq2BtCjNmY_N8uBxR6ZLfdjZRJFgb30-ukfs9vUziVfph-xTkOeZI/s1600/treelationship.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiilZ2vl6BEcqkxPy8ILnOnIy2wMUQEHIYPbqYEtPXJlWJGYVvwfqhyJd5CFgu0JO-CaeKN3oSlejjfLi9iMVwwANaq2BtCjNmY_N8uBxR6ZLfdjZRJFgb30-ukfs9vUziVfph-xTkOeZI/s400/treelationship.jpg" width="301" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2smoh1PHyhGKX69ZBfj6GdJqXM7yUfCp6GaUpcC3gSkQ80-Y8_657FX-jQrSTZTs-VhdcazyWGvWH56z_8qLhujOU6zx7MTllmufmBSJLcibWkwM_K7CoXDLU7dJjsZDGiEmw8vN6tjg/s1600/treelationship_small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbP4jyfPZODATmwhd-bYtFPbfJ0_htvGIkKvWF8qWMdp4j38euqvX9QFrf6MzAOHfDAF2x37aCnSOaFqqlkBmLnSeSn0mAz5XizAKU_qqfZxboHV89MyN6vXDY8M6VmMSDrkWTGO-zCK0/s1600/dustin_det.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbP4jyfPZODATmwhd-bYtFPbfJ0_htvGIkKvWF8qWMdp4j38euqvX9QFrf6MzAOHfDAF2x37aCnSOaFqqlkBmLnSeSn0mAz5XizAKU_qqfZxboHV89MyN6vXDY8M6VmMSDrkWTGO-zCK0/s400/dustin_det.jpg" width="297" /></a></div>The other thing to look at in Marfa, besides all the art, is just the wonderful light that bathes and beautifies everything in the town and on the streets, and also the wonderful spaces outside of town. I found a footpath through a scrubby desert pasture, with a sign saying that people were allowed to walk there, so I did.<br />
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We also went to a football game, where the Marfa Shorthorns demolished the visiting team. The band played "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and "Deep in the Heart of Texas." Some of the football players did double duty, playing for their school on the field, and playing in the band at half time. People who live in small towns have to be multi-talented and play many roles, in order for everything to get done that needs to get done. No One-Dimensional Men or women in Marfa!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmwBy5wDBod2BSwe3ASLRVUXSlPxHw7QrwLOj9a-0SJrfNIX_b7K7apBinni-MO1JAGcm3gfkflfW8Srd35N8_t_rixUbmZOoOsS2S2JreWTWH_62n0OI-xys2DPGt1j_XICr1GM9R4c/s1600/football.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNmwBy5wDBod2BSwe3ASLRVUXSlPxHw7QrwLOj9a-0SJrfNIX_b7K7apBinni-MO1JAGcm3gfkflfW8Srd35N8_t_rixUbmZOoOsS2S2JreWTWH_62n0OI-xys2DPGt1j_XICr1GM9R4c/s400/football.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-75127844730028860752010-06-30T11:29:00.000-07:002010-06-30T11:33:39.115-07:00Chihuly in NashvilleTom and I went to see the Dale Chihuly shows both at Cheekwood and at the Frist in Nashville. We thought that the big, organic form glass pieces looked better outside in the landscape than in captivity inside the old post office. Still, wherever you see them, they are amazing. Tom called them "eye candy," and he meant that in a good way.<br />
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We weren't allowed to photograph inside the Frist Center, so all the photographs here are from the Cheekwood show. First you go in the Botanic Hall, and you see the "Macchia." Like most of Chihuly's work, the Macchiae seem to be abstractions of some sort of organic form, maybe a sea creature of some kind. I have always loved the tropical plants in the atrium in the Botanic Hall, which themselves have amazing forms, so these glass plants or sea creatures seemed right at home there.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKJUUaryCxiCsh_ZMRc95_t_D8-YVQFsaF7IuhdQ-CR_WGg_hb-6yjBxg2LwbJWsvcn103m8bSS1MxNwynDDAaRTngUscROyGedEkjOEI-vNCGr4HJhi11R9j3GXKcKJYOmWsIWGLrHA/s1600/macchiasmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqKJUUaryCxiCsh_ZMRc95_t_D8-YVQFsaF7IuhdQ-CR_WGg_hb-6yjBxg2LwbJWsvcn103m8bSS1MxNwynDDAaRTngUscROyGedEkjOEI-vNCGr4HJhi11R9j3GXKcKJYOmWsIWGLrHA/s400/macchiasmall.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Later Tom pointed out that these "cups" couldn't be outside or they would accumulate water, and maybe even breed mosquitoes. True.<br />
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Next you go behind the Botanic Hall and you see a tall "Saffron Tower," which probably looks better lit up at night. (Cheekwood is open on Thursdays and Fridays at night, when all the glass is lit up. I'm planning to go back and see it at night sometime.) Next to the tower are the "Cattails," which look perfect in their garden setting. Whoever sited them paid close attention to color harmonies.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMoOQ2NMzrvlWbwGdtDolsGbNPCsJOfw31JKscCSnbCgbReIvUvUWc768LZnCx6UQ0hnfEX4VyXhMxsQmLVAUskOxWxyaWkal82ibfw-pNTqTvzgRPMSJQ41oqjbQLp2OA5G91gHSWiGM/s1600/cattails2small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMoOQ2NMzrvlWbwGdtDolsGbNPCsJOfw31JKscCSnbCgbReIvUvUWc768LZnCx6UQ0hnfEX4VyXhMxsQmLVAUskOxWxyaWkal82ibfw-pNTqTvzgRPMSJQ41oqjbQLp2OA5G91gHSWiGM/s320/cattails2small.jpg" /></a></div>I love the way the orange complements the purple foliage below.<br />
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After the cattails, you walk down an allee, and you see in the distance some blue pointy things that turn out to be more pieces in Chihuly's "Fiori" series. I think "fiori" means flowers in Italian. Chihuly studied glass-blowing in Venice, where glass-blowing reached a peak in the early Renaissance.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvPAXd8g58sFmMrrHjsqZAscmwNrOwz5w40JpFwr7OWR_pJzSsGc1cEUSNsmHWUylb15vpoOJG8HF6Q_ZzfdTm94Cz2-yq24nr9yvffjkmNGrH8NYN07bccKjui0wu7-tewapmqT62ZHE/s1600/alleesmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvPAXd8g58sFmMrrHjsqZAscmwNrOwz5w40JpFwr7OWR_pJzSsGc1cEUSNsmHWUylb15vpoOJG8HF6Q_ZzfdTm94Cz2-yq24nr9yvffjkmNGrH8NYN07bccKjui0wu7-tewapmqT62ZHE/s400/alleesmall.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>Up close, the blue and green spikes look like this:<br />
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Again, the color coordination is very good:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9eKcvEgKyHC8ncU3wcQ9UGbjEpuaMer5DEoOOSA_WrtkusWiGKoD1reaOu18U9boLWLqbZxNaXHqfSnY2ftvIx9Hv341AFmCHCvScs3V0p6-2yqEOhVLJt3QGC-1HsahFkQuMiNr6fk/s1600/fiorigrassessmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9eKcvEgKyHC8ncU3wcQ9UGbjEpuaMer5DEoOOSA_WrtkusWiGKoD1reaOu18U9boLWLqbZxNaXHqfSnY2ftvIx9Hv341AFmCHCvScs3V0p6-2yqEOhVLJt3QGC-1HsahFkQuMiNr6fk/s400/fiorigrassessmall.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
It's fortunate that Cheekwood has a Japanese garden, because Chihuly has some pieces that have a Japanese theme. "Niijima Floats" is based on fishing floats used in Japan.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga2NP_DilJfgJgYBeOoH2t3BfwstE2KkBB3R80tBv9uWx2SUPJkDthwpHHpg8WxmF_rCtnmckxzmK-HA1KWnHt2Msu2NsSvo7zOTZj61O7jATy4fkZqE8XiI_4Wfm6O4ToU-qJRreY9hQ/s1600/niijimafloats.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga2NP_DilJfgJgYBeOoH2t3BfwstE2KkBB3R80tBv9uWx2SUPJkDthwpHHpg8WxmF_rCtnmckxzmK-HA1KWnHt2Msu2NsSvo7zOTZj61O7jATy4fkZqE8XiI_4Wfm6O4ToU-qJRreY9hQ/s400/niijimafloats.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Sadly, you are not allowed to walk around in the Japanese gardens and get up close to the "floats." You can look at them from a Japanese-style pavilion, though.<br />
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There are also "Bamboo Reeds" among the real bamboo, which I particularly liked, being aficianado of bamboo and a prolific grower of bamboo myself. Bamboo forms are among the most subtle and beautiful of the plant world.<br />
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Then you progress to the three large koi ponds at Cheekwood. Well, at least, when I was a little girl there were huge koi in these pools. I seem to remember that we had to release one of our own overgrown goldfish into one of these ponds once. Anyway, this summer they are home to an installation called "Walla Wallas," named after the onions from Chihuly's home state of Washington. But these are onions that float.<br />
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Above the waterfall in the upper right, you can see a boat filled with heron-like figures of many colors.<br />
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One thing that's great about this show is how kid-friendly it is. There were a lot of little kids in strollers and on foot running around Cheekwood ooh-ing and ah-ing at the brightly colored objects. Too bad you can't touch! One little kid even pronounced the biggest piece on the front lawn to be "breath-taking."<br />
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Here it is, the piece de resistance, called "The Sun":<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEico4p0kSlz6w2Bc7rv90a65xIDZoRMtFoLGUMZ53OiTyoWeZeppzaiC149tCuQzhahlx93UlqnAEeJCX7MD1Zt7yjJxRUiQ5EejoMGClCLX2xOSC0TyfBG6b3xOANghBbe4HCnBtksyfI/s1600/thesunsmall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEico4p0kSlz6w2Bc7rv90a65xIDZoRMtFoLGUMZ53OiTyoWeZeppzaiC149tCuQzhahlx93UlqnAEeJCX7MD1Zt7yjJxRUiQ5EejoMGClCLX2xOSC0TyfBG6b3xOANghBbe4HCnBtksyfI/s400/thesunsmall.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>To me this piece resembled something you might see at a very ambitious birthday party, where the parents have hired a balloon artist to blow up a lot of balloons and twist them into funny shapes. But it's glass! And it's very big. Chihuly wrote, of the inspiration for this piece:<br />
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"If you take a thousand blown pieces of a color, put them together, and then shoot light through them, that's going to be something to look at. It's mysterious, defying gravity or seemingly out of place--like something you have never seen before."<br />
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I like Chihuly's idea that it's ok to make something that's just pure spectacle, pure intense color and light. Color and light are what visual experience is made of. Why not push that to the limit? Of course, in this piece, the elements of line and form are also "something to look at." When I look at visual art, I want it to be "something to look at." A lot of visual art of the last two or three decades has been more "something to think about," rather than something that's there for pure visual pleasure. It's refreshing to be handed some pure visual pleasure, almost like a flavor. "The Sun" looks delicious, like some kind of Dairy Queen extravaganza. Or again, like a sea creature or tropical plant. The huge boxwoods in front of Cheekwood (themselves something to look at) were a good foil for this big yellow flower.<br />
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Inside the big house, there were more marvels, but we weren't allowed to photograph. Chihuly made some chandeliers for Cheekwood, and there's one in the spiral stairwell, and three in the glassed-in porch. I hope they're there to stay. The Swan Ball will never be the same again (not that I've ever been to it). There was also a small exhibit of Chihuly's drawings. Chihuly himself doesn't blow glass any more, due to a shoulder injury. He works with "gaffers," strong guys who blow and tilt-a-whirl the glass into the shapes that he's drawn. He works collaboratively with a large team of helpers. You can see a very interesting film about the process in the courtyard gallery at the Frist Learning Center, next to the big house. (Don't ask me why so many things in Nashville are called The Frist Something or Other. The same is true at Princeton.)<br />
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One thing I liked about the drawings, which were really paintings on paper, was that Chihuly used iridescent watercolor paints. Go for the gusto! Don't worry about being tacky! Just do it! Now I want to make a bunch of iridescent watercolor paintings. Again, Chihuly's design sense is kind of child-like and playful, uninhibited, in an admirable way. As Picasso said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up." Answer: use a lot of bright colors and sparkly things. And then make it really big.<br />
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On to the grotto and the shell fountain, over beside the big house, near that spectacular wisteria arbor. Here we find the blue marlins and yellow herons:<br />
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You can see Tom looking down over this scene in this picture:<br />
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Since Cheekwood is built on the top of a hill, the gardens around the house are terraced, in a lovely way. Below this grotto is a reflection pool, and Chihuly placed an installation there called "Mille Fiori," or a thousand flowers. Chihuly's mother was an avid gardener, and she remains an influence on him.<br />
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The way the forms reflect themselves in the water adds to the pleasure of looking at and photographing these pieces. The many new forms created by the reflections and the sky and the clouds remind me of Monet's water lily paintings. I really wanted to come back and spend a day at Cheekwood drawing some of the installations.<br />
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Walking back to the parking lot, you pass another little pond that DOES have a waterlily in it!<br />
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In the background you see the "Blue Polyvitro Crystals."<br />
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Finally, there's a piece that is pink, a color not seen in the other pieces. This glass also has some iridescent colors in it:<br />
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It reminded me of Victorian glass Christmas tree ornaments, only really big.<br />
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This show is really worth seeing. Take a child and a picnic, a camera and some Prismacolor pencils and paper, and enjoy the eye candy.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-63098907204456858722010-04-15T15:08:00.000-07:002010-04-15T15:34:03.610-07:00Andrea Dezso: Houston, We Have an ImaginationThe Rice Gallery on the Rice University campus always has interesting installations. Artists are invited to create installations specifically for the space. These installations often have a light-hearted, even humorous feel to them, like <a href="http://eyeballkicks.blogspot.com/2009/09/big-lectric-fan.html">Wayne White's Big Lectric Fan</a>, which I wrote about in this blog last fall.<br />
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Andrea Dezso's wonderful installation, "Sometimes In My Dreams I Fly," is not as laugh-out-loud funny as White's big puppet head of George Jones, with its mouth opening and closing as he snores, but it is still delightful. Dezso's sensibility is that of the rare adult who has preserved a child-like faith in the importance of imaginary worlds. Her installation takes the space program as its starting point--appropriate for Houston on the fortieth (!) anniversary of Apollo XIII. But Dezso grew up in Communist Romania. The space program that fired her imagination was the Soviet space program. She collected stamps with images of astronauts and space travel and followed the news of their flights.<br />
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In a video on a screen in the foyer, Dezso explains that she thinks the ill-fated Apollo XIII flight ("Houston, we have a problem") was actually interesting mostly because it didn't get to the moon. She says that even if we don't actually get to go to the moon or into space in our real physical bodies, we can go in our imaginations.<br />
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When I was a child, I had a book called You Will Go To the Moon. It was written in 1959.<br />
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It's amazing that in 1959, people really believed that children born in the fifties would someday vacation on the moon, sort of like people in the fifties drove to the Grand Canyon. Like Apollo XIII, though, I have not gone to the moon and never will.<br />
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Dezso's installation is based on her previous series of tunnel books. A tunnel book is a three-dimensional book that you look into as if looking into a tunnel. Pages are partially cut away in front to reveal other scenes behind them.<br />
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These books are small, perhaps 6"x 8" and about six inches deep. For the Rice Gallery installation, she imagined tunnel books big enough to walk into! And then she built them in the gallery space. You can't actually walk into them: you look into them through the big glass windows in front of the gallery.<br />
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The effect is mysterious and tantalizing: you can see deep into this "scene," but you can't exactly crawl in there and explore it. Careful lighting makes the back of the "tunnel book" brighter than the foreground, creating the "repousse" effect of 19th century romantic landscape painting. Silhouettes of strange creatures are seen prancing and flying against the background colors.<br />
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The invented creatures are probably the most interesting part of the show. Part insect, part animated plants, part astronaut, they fly and swim and crawl, reminding me of Arthur Rackham's silhouette illustrations:<br />
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Like Rackham's fairies, Dezso's space plants, insects, and people seem not entirely benign, although they are not exactly monsters. Carrot Man, for example, has a kind of manic grin. The average child would not be entirely pleased to meet him.<br />
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(Dezso has cut out huge life-size versions of some of her creatures and attached them to the exterior doors of the gallery. Carrot Man is one of them.)<br />
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But who wouldn't want to be a Female Astronaut with a Leaf-Powered Propeller? As a child, I, like most children, sometimes did dream I could fly, and the cartoon images of the Jetsons flying around with jetpacks on their backs made it seem that maybe I would Go To The Moon, or at least fly around Nashville with my jetpack on. Apparently Romanian children were having the same dreams and fantasies, as we all cowered under our mutually assured mushroom clouds. For the space program was the flip side of MAD: technology's benign side, like Our Friend the Atom. We all loved Tang and Space Food Sticks, the only discernible benefits of the space program.<br />
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And so there are both utopian and dystopian elements in these scenes: the leaf-powered propeller hints at a time when plants might provide people with some new kind of alternative "green" transport; but at the same time the landscapes are replete with machines and power lines. However, the machines look more like carnival rides than like gritty industrial rust-belt relics.<br />
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The power lines just look like power lines. That in itself is a little jarring: in this fantastic world where people have propellers on their heads, they also have these banal power lines or drilling rigs. It looks like Texas.<br />
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Dezso has impressive paper-cutting skills. I'm impressed because I think she must have done most of the cutting with an Exacto knife, and I am trying to get better at using one of those tools. Paper cutting is hot right now in the world of contemporary art: there's a show at the Museum of Arts and Design called <a href="http://collections.madmuseum.org/html/exhibitions/485.html">Slash: Paper Under the Knife. </a><br />
Dezso has a tunnel book in that show, and another long-time cutter of paper is also in the show: Kara Walker, whom I immediately thought of when I first looked at Dezso's show. Walker's cut paper figures are, of course, much more disturbing, even nightmarish:<br />
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Dezso seems to draw on this work, and perhaps that of Arthur Rackham, to evoke a not-quite-benign, but nonetheless tantalizing dream world, in which one might experience flying, if not to the moon, then at least with a leaf propeller on your head.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-58895645774379193712010-02-18T16:47:00.000-08:002010-02-18T16:50:42.837-08:00Sally Heller, "Ab-Scrap"<i>Ab-Scrap </i>is an interesting installation at Lawndale, by New Orleans artist Sally Heller.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2FhBjZSv0UN6k_VBIHuMQKTZJOawcEWMV3Wv94ruvDmczO6xsOjI8Nu7KW6MTz5Is94t6-50utNWd1UAwgg1VxlmEMfXMjHghfMF57_Rd72hr4jjj5JYII3-ptLynZ164EzAWGHwMMys/s1600-h/abscrap2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2FhBjZSv0UN6k_VBIHuMQKTZJOawcEWMV3Wv94ruvDmczO6xsOjI8Nu7KW6MTz5Is94t6-50utNWd1UAwgg1VxlmEMfXMjHghfMF57_Rd72hr4jjj5JYII3-ptLynZ164EzAWGHwMMys/s320/abscrap2.jpg" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The title seems to refer to the fact that the installation is a kind of abstract three-dimensional "painting" made with scraps of fabric and jewelry, beads, mirrors, string, and wire. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You can walk around in the installation, as if it's a kind of landscape. It even has trees.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgApSUjDqsf4JXQCbYHH_nZ9wsUoQ5yUKqCcurPjzrw3TEAgOM2kllef0dPZ1nokSy5MbsTnSy3a5aYyLbyXq2BhiCqJiqIKIZY82NbP5isc7GGfIoRgNkAKcOsOXeC-IOob2xec8oAyww/s1600-h/tree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgApSUjDqsf4JXQCbYHH_nZ9wsUoQ5yUKqCcurPjzrw3TEAgOM2kllef0dPZ1nokSy5MbsTnSy3a5aYyLbyXq2BhiCqJiqIKIZY82NbP5isc7GGfIoRgNkAKcOsOXeC-IOob2xec8oAyww/s320/tree.jpg" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The colors, beads, and trees reminded me of New Orleans after Mardi Gras, when you see beads hanging in live oak trees.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioYNcrQE-0FkNnFd-KxKVmYoRxq7naBM6RUTORZor-MjqhHGAS6-NgbppQHllqWwdsr9kB-IpHShA8KDVJrwQZU5Mq_4iHt72erxrilqGavfdnwCEIjXMhUWIcoJs3Q9DQjUT-_DWjeBA/s1600-h/pearls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioYNcrQE-0FkNnFd-KxKVmYoRxq7naBM6RUTORZor-MjqhHGAS6-NgbppQHllqWwdsr9kB-IpHShA8KDVJrwQZU5Mq_4iHt72erxrilqGavfdnwCEIjXMhUWIcoJs3Q9DQjUT-_DWjeBA/s320/pearls.jpg" /></a></div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-26473675504619562862010-01-09T13:58:00.000-08:002010-02-06T15:04:05.726-08:00Charles Brindley, part II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWVjIAKxC2ToOmno2IJ8undvcllbT9mdFQ2CwtuznOFwfAnl5QaTJiQgLjIjuGcjacY4AisR-30Ur7dZR0eB8WIHH3SQiKWJsONFlZmm8UuSbjrE8FeEm12Ky-3QziEm74Osu3KstcQwo/s1600-h/brindley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWVjIAKxC2ToOmno2IJ8undvcllbT9mdFQ2CwtuznOFwfAnl5QaTJiQgLjIjuGcjacY4AisR-30Ur7dZR0eB8WIHH3SQiKWJsONFlZmm8UuSbjrE8FeEm12Ky-3QziEm74Osu3KstcQwo/s320/brindley.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Yesterday I wrote about Charles Brindley, an artist who lives in Kentucky near the Tennessee border. He grew up in Nashville, and so Tennessee can claim him too. I am especially interested in his large-scale drawings of deciduous trees in winter. But Brindley also makes large oil paintings of our local rural landscape.<br />
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Brindley traces his interest in landscape back to his childhood in Nashville. He was the youngest of several children, and his grandmother and great-grandmother lived with the family. So sometimes his mother would take the elderly ladies out for a drive in the country. He was too little to stay home by himself, so he went also, and spent long hours gazing out the windows of the car at the landscape. This was in the early 1960s.<br />
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I think a lot of Americans experience the landscape at first this way, and mainly this way. I've wondered why there aren't more paintings and photographs of the road, with the landscape falling away on either side. I guess it's because it's hard to draw and drive. I remember long drives in the country in the early 1960s also, when my family would drive to Wilson County to visit my grandparents at their farm. My earliest attempts at landscape painting probably resemble the view through the back seat window.<br />
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Of course, Brindley gets out of the car now and draws on site. His graphite studies are used to make large oil paintings in the studio. Some are panoramic in format, such as "Flat Agricultural Landscape":<br />
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When you drive to Adairville from Nashville, you drive through an area known as the Hidden Corn Belt. This is a four-county area north of Nashville where a great deal of field corn is grown, in huge fields. Brindley's landscapes often reflect a fascination with the graphic qualities of the lines of the furrows, some just beginning to sprout corn. When you get up close to this painting, you can see that the earth is rendered in an almost Pointillist style, with tiny touches of color juxtaposed. The color is not simply naturalistic: it seems saturated, and oddly, more saturated in the background than in the foreground, which is the opposite of classical atmospheric perspective technique. This gives the impression of bright sunlight falling on the yellow field at the far right, whereas the foreground appears somewhat overcast.<br />
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The lines of the furrows on the middle field create regular linear perspective, but in a way that actually suggests a mound rather than a flat landscape. Is it flat, or hilly? This ambiguity gives the space a sort of vertiginous quality, as if you are flying over it and changing your angle of view as you fly. In some ways it reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton's undulating landscapes:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Benton has been called a Regionalist painter. American Regionalist painters in the 1920s through the 1950s rejected abstraction and modernism in favor of a more representational style of painting, and their subject matter became the rural landscape and small towns of the United States. You could say that Brindley's work could be categorized this way. His landscape painting, though, is much more representational than Benton's.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">An example might be this painting of the trunk of an old beech tree. In this painting, there are no large passages of hyper-saturated color; the overall effect is more naturalistic. But when you get up close you can see again that Pointillist effect of juxtaposed intense color. This painting reminds me more of the work of American 19th century landscape painters of the Hudson River School, like Cole and Durand, than it does of any 20th century painting. I saw a show once of small oil studies by Asher Durand, and Brindley's study of this beech tree seems to have much in common with Durand's meticulous studies.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPK2SPPRTA8GlDuzRA4NlbU_XG6ytrgvRJ6qI_4s0ZpXWMPOnXVKQw2RIGopEcao0vsUxdyVRpz7aHT3hThpbZgUGcfCUglSqaC8o8IMGGWlrOyRVLnsAHYKe_NchiN7uHOuqlbcDCIbE/s1600-h/AsherDurand-Study_Woodland_Interior.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPK2SPPRTA8GlDuzRA4NlbU_XG6ytrgvRJ6qI_4s0ZpXWMPOnXVKQw2RIGopEcao0vsUxdyVRpz7aHT3hThpbZgUGcfCUglSqaC8o8IMGGWlrOyRVLnsAHYKe_NchiN7uHOuqlbcDCIbE/s320/AsherDurand-Study_Woodland_Interior.jpg" /></a>But of course, as a 20th and 21st century painter, Brindley has a different attitude toward the application of paint. His paintings don't have the "licked" surface that the almost photographically real Hudson River School paintings of the 19th century had. Brindley draws your attention also to the flat surface of the canvas and the fact of the material presence of paint on it, like a good modernist would. He has obviously thought a lot about how tiny spots of colors work when juxtaposed, which was the obsession of 19th century French painters, Seurat being the most famous practitioner of that technique. But Monet also thought deeply about the effect of small touches of color that the eye mixes, instead of the painter mixing the colors on the palette.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This juxtaposition of tiny touches of color hits a high-water mark Brindley's "The Green Man":</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF9X89NBQBz4yrCvku58r56xDrznZGnJCSOC7jbNdRhevHexXG8j_WcvUcz8F7kDP47_sgzpghC24hyphenhyphenUAuPZLuJJaos1v-QTCnewZcUTVkpl_CS9hOrszSGkO3OsUaUrgX-_bJOP5ZJbU/s1600-h/thegreenman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF9X89NBQBz4yrCvku58r56xDrznZGnJCSOC7jbNdRhevHexXG8j_WcvUcz8F7kDP47_sgzpghC24hyphenhyphenUAuPZLuJJaos1v-QTCnewZcUTVkpl_CS9hOrszSGkO3OsUaUrgX-_bJOP5ZJbU/s320/thegreenman.jpg" /></a>The subject matter here is a rock formation, another favorite landscape feature for Brindley. But the real subject is the broad spectrum of lichen colors on the rocks. It takes a minute to find the Green Man: a green figure reaches toward the center of the painting from the right hand side, as if he is jumping to catch a ball. The Green Man is described by thousands of tiny spots of color, mimicking the tiny spots of lichen on a rock. The rocks themselves seem to be abstract paintings made of many touches of color: nature as Abstract Expressionist? And the forms of the rocks, cropped and devoid of any other context, compose together an almost abstract, sculptural form.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There's a tension in Brindley's work between his representational impulse--the desire to record every branch and twig on a tree for example--and this drive toward abstraction. But they are not really contradictory: the Romantic landscape painter has been a driving force in modernism, and toward abstraction, from the beginning of Romanticism in the early 19th century. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-19211255616133128382010-01-08T11:03:00.000-08:002010-01-08T11:03:42.041-08:00Charles Brindley and Big TreesOn New Year's Eve of 2009, instead of buying a bottle of champagne, my partner and I treated ourselves to a visit to an artist we admire: Charles Brindley, of Adairville, KY. Brindley grew up in Nashville and studied art at MTSU and at the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg. He is best known for his large-scale, meticulous graphite renderings of giant, ancient deciduous trees of the Southeastern mixed hardwood forest.<br />
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I first encountered Brindley's work on the cover of a program guide from WPLN, Nashville's public radio station, in the 1990s. It was a drawing of a bare tree in winter. I pulled the cover off and thumb-tacked it to the wall over my desk, and I looked at it every day for a long time. I think it may have influenced my early photographs, many of which were studies of trees. Brindley's monochrome drawings are so detailed that they look like photogravures from a distance, with their matte surface and their long gray scale.<br />
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My second encounter with his work was recently, at the Belle Meade Club in Nashville. Three large drawings of trees on the Belle Meade Club golf course are hung in the downstairs lobby of the club. Again, from a distance, one might mistake them for photogravures, but on second inspection they have an otherworldliness that is definitely not photographic. One notices, for example, that there is nothing in the drawing but the tree: no background of other trees, no hills, no people, no golfers. A few birds may perch in the bare branches, and a few old leaves cling to the branches. There's a suggestion of a big cloud behind the tree. The tree stands alone.<br />
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The drawings at the BMC are oaks, but this osage orange portrait below suggests the scale and ambition of these drawings.<br />
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These drawings are impressive on several counts. First, they are big. The one above is 23 inches by 29 inches, and Brindley does the drawings on site. (Sometimes, if it's cold or rainy, he draws from inside his car, a feat in itself.) Second, the draftsmanship is very, very good. Brindley has been drawing for thirty-seven years, and he became obsessed with drawing trees in 1985. From 1985 through 1991, he says, he drew trees almost constantly. It shows. Eventually he challenged himself to do twelve large drawings a year, and he has done this consistently every year since, amassing a large body of work on the subject of deciduous trees, especially large, old trees, and mainly depicting their forms in winter when the structure of the tree is easiest to see.<br />
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Brindley's medium for these drawings is the humble graphite pencil. He goes through a lot of them every year, and he uses all the grades.<br />
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For early 19th century American landscape painters like Cole and Durand, drawings done on site in the landscape were a means to an end: they used these drawings as references when making larger oil paintings in their studios. In the late 19th century, the French Barbizon painters pioneered the idea of painting directly from nature, "sur le motif," instead of in the studio. This became the signal method of modernist landscape painting, in the hands of Cezanne, for example. <br />
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Brindley does both. He makes large, finished drawings "sur le motif," in five or six visits to the site, but he also makes reference drawings outside, in the landscape, that he uses later to make larger composite drawings later in the studio. And he makes paintings from these reference drawings.<br />
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Here is a study with notes written directly on the drawing, in true 19th century style:<br />
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And here is a composite drawing based on several drawings put together. This is a commission for the MBA school, and the subject is some trees on the MBA campus.<br />
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Tomorrow I will be writing about some of Brindley's paintings and more about him, his work, and the Northern Romantic landscape tradition.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-63517832174258475642009-11-29T07:44:00.000-08:002009-11-29T13:22:42.382-08:00Contemporary Korean Photography<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxBBbY5gVE76_0HYSfwQDFmVikDmdHAmIid5KrNqH5qf2FSFK8PoV3r_y_7sxNTxQyOGxPcMdgq_PtkGvAbAdIjFdzOSYHMjVCFEKXHhBmGIcEdbPUaFN1i_8H-8wPYyYD7aTl2VBhAqE/s1600/art2609.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxBBbY5gVE76_0HYSfwQDFmVikDmdHAmIid5KrNqH5qf2FSFK8PoV3r_y_7sxNTxQyOGxPcMdgq_PtkGvAbAdIjFdzOSYHMjVCFEKXHhBmGIcEdbPUaFN1i_8H-8wPYyYD7aTl2VBhAqE/s320/art2609.jpg" /></a><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The MFA in Houston has an interesting exhibit of contemporary Korean photography. The above image is by a photographer called Sungsoo Koo, and it's titled Tour Bus. Most of the photographs in the exhibit were very large, very sharp color photographs like this one.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But this one was not my favorite: my favorite was by an artist named Won Seoung Won. I could find nothing about her on the internet, but her photograph was a digital collage that showed a fantasy world with a castle, a dragon of some kind, and two little girls, one riding a dolphin in the water below the castle, and the other riding a carousel horse on the land. The photograph is called "War of Sisters," and the wall plaque says that the photographer wanted to make a piece about the rivalry between her two little nieces. The younger one is cuter and gets more attention from the grownups in the family, which makes the older sister jealous. Won Seoung Won imagined a world where the younger sister could rule the sea, and the older sister could rule the land. The charm of this photograph is that the scene looks entirely convincing, as if she actually photographed it rather than collaged it together, and so it looks like a photograph of the world of mythic struggles that children inhabit in their imagination. The older sister is wearing a Snow White costume straight out of the Disney cartoon, but she's not a cartoon character. Somehow the juxtaposition of these cartoon elements and real little girls is powerful and wonderful, as if somebody photographed a dream.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The color photographs show a Korea that is much like the United States: an affluent consumer society. Sanggil Kim's photograph, "Offline Burberry Internet Community," shows a group of Koreans who met online because of their fascination with Burberry plaid products.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I had just read an article in The New Yorker about people starving in North Korea, forced to eat weeds and corn cobs just to fill their stomachs. Estimates vary on how many people starved to death in Korea in the nineties, but some estimates go as high as 2.5 million people, 10% of the population. So it was strange to see these photographs of South Korea, where apparently people live in a fully modern, high-tech, consumer society.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">There were a few black and white photographs too. One was truly monumental: about seven feet tall, and its subject was the pine trees around a temple in Korea.<br />
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</div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-oghaRCxJ63K3D7mOcNCBX9scIllUUGfjbFTkIuM9z-SwnDIjW-Ns_i8eMYsom1XmIu9ABnbYgQLibAjt5XdCh3H73LLPOKZOe2Rz2152AKCcTyF1FPUriuRcSTZBSibqZ_pMXI5mrno/s1600/Bae_Bien-U-ZurStockeregg-snm1a-179v.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-oghaRCxJ63K3D7mOcNCBX9scIllUUGfjbFTkIuM9z-SwnDIjW-Ns_i8eMYsom1XmIu9ABnbYgQLibAjt5XdCh3H73LLPOKZOe2Rz2152AKCcTyF1FPUriuRcSTZBSibqZ_pMXI5mrno/s320/Bae_Bien-U-ZurStockeregg-snm1a-179v.jpg" /></a>I thought a lot about how this photograph by Bae Bien-U was made. I think he must have used a panoramic camera set up vertically. Then the film was scanned and printed with a digital enlarger, like other large color photographs are printed these days, but with silver gelatin paper and chemistry rather than C-print paper and chemistry. I think there are a few labs that do this in the states. I liked it a lot.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The Korean landscape is apparently spectacular. Another photographer, Kim Young-Sun, photographs the many dolmens in Korea. I had no idea that dolmens were found in places other than Europe. They look very much like the dolmens in the UK and France: standing stones and also post and lintel structures like Stonehenge. They were erected around 3000 BC. Korea has about 25,000 megalithic dolmens, but it once had as many as 80,000. Some were destroyed by development. I couldn't find a copy of the photograph in the show online, however.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Korea is undergoing rapid transformation and development. A tryptich called "Lights of Weolgok-dong" by Ahn Sekwon shows the destruction of a shanty town on the outskirts of Seoul. The brightly-lit shanty town gradually fades as bulldozers destroy it to make way for more construction:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">South Korean photographers are obviously ambitious and technically very skilled. We can only imagine what their cousins in North Korea could be photographing if they had access to cameras, photo labs, and an audience. Maybe some day we'll find out what North Koreans were looking at while South Koreans were busy buying Burberry accessories.<br />
</div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-13712871788136435532009-11-21T10:17:00.000-08:002009-11-21T10:17:19.136-08:00Cool Globes in HoustonThere's a show at Discovery Green in Houston called Cool Globes. Fifty styrofoam balls about six feet in diameter have been decorated by artists to illustrate various themes related to climate change and the environment.<br />
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It seems that each artist or group of artists got to pick a theme from a list, as no two themes were alike. There was one about windpower:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">And one about the curse of the car:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The car one reminded me of an art car, in that it had a lot of little cars glued to it. Art cars frequently have a lot of little things--sometimes other cars--glued to them. (The Art Car is a special Houston art form, and we have a big parade and contest in the spring of Art Cars. There's also an Art Car Museum in Houston.)<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This one was about biofuels. It had a nice painting of a corn stalk on it, but it didn't really examine the ethics of using corn for fuel instead of to feed people:<br />
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</div>In my view, perhaps the most important thing we could do to "save the Earth" is to stop making so many new people. It's hard to get away with saying this, though, because people think that means you want to kill babies or something. I was glad to see that there was a globe about population growth. It had different colored dots on it, and presumably the dots represented a certain number of people, but there was no legend with it, so you couldn't really tell how many people an orange dot represented in India, for example. But at least this globe had a kind of elegant minimalism about it.<br />
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</div>This one was about recycling, I think. I liked it because it had a kind of Rauschenberg combine style:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Usually I think that overtly didactic art doesn't work very well. This exhibit proved me right, I think. It's really hard to make something with a clear political message that doesn't beat you over the head with its message. There's so little ambiguity and room for interpretation that the Cool Globes come across more as propaganda than art, albeit propaganda for a good cause. <br />
</div>shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-22742620306659431942009-10-03T12:58:00.001-07:002009-10-03T13:31:11.776-07:00Art Zone<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmTNGRQKSgwakh4CGVZ0F5Dw2JSTDT35TEvnb5qLRws8LsEaU1AokkbHFZZd_gjmzBIhy6eNS7aV384K46J6gedrY8gmFezCesigcvZ78y9wrZrQlv8ZDGgvdMTm0Qb6vKsanKerkOjgQ/s1600-h/TXHOUflower_bikecu.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 260px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmTNGRQKSgwakh4CGVZ0F5Dw2JSTDT35TEvnb5qLRws8LsEaU1AokkbHFZZd_gjmzBIhy6eNS7aV384K46J6gedrY8gmFezCesigcvZ78y9wrZrQlv8ZDGgvdMTm0Qb6vKsanKerkOjgQ/s320/TXHOUflower_bikecu.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388473185466061650" border="0" /></a><br /><br />At the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, there's a show called No Zoning. The name alludes to the fact that Houston is the only large city in the US that doesn't have some sort of zoning, and that that creates a kind of creative anarchy that artists thrive on.<br /><br />Well, maybe. It also means that some people have to live right next to refineries, but so what, if it results in great art? Besides, the people that like to go to the CAM and buy the book about the show are not the people who have to live next to the refineries.<br /><br />The show itself, in the cavernous dark spaces of the CAM, is a bit depressing. There's a big ark of a disassembled house in the center of the space, put there by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck. They took apart a bungalow that was about to be razed, and moved part of its insides to the inside of the CAM for us to look at. It's kind of interesting, and that's about all you can say about it.<br /><br />Somewhat similar is a boat-making workshop in another corner of the space, where apparently a boat was actually built by Benjy Mason and Zach Moser, but it was gone by the time I got there.<br /><br />The handrail outside the museum was decorated with some knitting done by a collective of knitters called KnittaPlease. They "tag" signs, handrails, fire hydrants, etc with knitting. It's as if they make cozies, or socks, for various metal things sticking up in Houston. It reminds me of a jokey poem I heard once:<br /><br />"In days of old when knights were bold and rubbers weren't invented,<br />They tied a sock around their cock and babies were prevented."<br /><br />Sadly, the knitting is very ugly: the yarn is awful acrylic and they knit it on huge needles, so there are lots of holes when it's stretched over whatever metal thingy they're covering, and it doesn't look very good. Also, it's never cold in Houston so it just looks strange, and not in a good or edgy way; just in a sort of cluttered, trashy way.<br /><br />The best thing in the show is the allusion to the work of the Flower Man, Cleveland Turner. I found out about his house shortly after I moved to Houston. His house was covered with fake flowers, dolls, toys, stuffed animals, and just anything colorful or shiny that he could find. I loved it immediately. But sadly, it burned a few years ago.<br /><br />Then Cleveland Turner moved to a house of his own (rather than a rental) and began working on a new installation, near Project Row Houses in the Third Ward. We drove by it today on the way home. It's not as ornate and baroque as the previous place was, but it's getting there. It sustained some damage during Hurricane Ike, but volunteers helped Cleveland Turner repair his installation.<br /><br />The CAM invited the Flower Man to make a similar installation outside the museum. Some of his objects were displayed on the lawn in front of the museum, but the rest were locked up in a sort of shed in front. An employee of the CAM told me that Mr. Turner comes by on Saturdays sometimes and gets the stuff out of the shed and arranges it around on the lawn, but he didn't come today because it looked like rain. This is somewhat ironic, because his real installation, on his house, is there to get rained on and bleached by the sun all the time, and that's part of its appeal: the way it has weathered.<br /><br />The effect of the Flower Man's installation outside the CAM was nowhere close to the way it looks at his house. At the house, the sheer amount of stuff, the crazy juxtapositions of stuff, the wild color and sparkle of it, and the rich texture is what makes it great. At the CAM, there just wasn't enough stuff and it wasn't close enough together.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCXZuvZhCLJhGc7kWj5y2aLGb2fkiJEwtexpfd9njraPinoRlfcyJ1ru7cuM-fxS0chfWnWbGUe3C1n_MsRKuPfce72ozW-Fi-dszlozpydPwbt0iP-MmKLwAOjYJRJVouqnTk6AdO_No/s1600-h/3612236687_4b85b202fa.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCXZuvZhCLJhGc7kWj5y2aLGb2fkiJEwtexpfd9njraPinoRlfcyJ1ru7cuM-fxS0chfWnWbGUe3C1n_MsRKuPfce72ozW-Fi-dszlozpydPwbt0iP-MmKLwAOjYJRJVouqnTk6AdO_No/s320/3612236687_4b85b202fa.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388473377882078850" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />The theme of "junk" was repeated throughout the CAM: another artist, Bill Davenport, made a mock-up of his junk shop in the Heights, called Bill's Junk. I used to live in the Heights, but he started the junk shop after we left last summer, so I haven't seen it yet. But the Heights has always had great junk shops, and I'm sure his is no exception. Still, the fake one in the museum wasn't particularly interesting.<br /><br />Downstairs there was another show by an artist named Jason Villegas. Again, it was made out of junk: mostly old tee shirts from thrift stores it seems. It seems as if there is a lot of this kind of sculpture around: assemblage made from stuff that would have otherwise been thrown away. The work in the show I reviewed at the Blaffer last week was largely made out of old toys and stuffed animals. There's nothing wrong with this idea; after all, it goes back to Picasso and Braque, who sort of invented modernist collage. Assemblage is just the three dimensional version. But not everybody can pull this off. A lot of times it just looks like...a pile of junk.<br /><br />The problem, I think, is the palette: too often a pile of old tee shirts is used willy nilly with some plastic tarps and some painted lumber, and the colors of all this trash don't really go together. It's important to pay attention to formal elements like color even if you're using junk as your medium! The people that do pay attention to color are the ones that do this most successfully I think: people like Thornton Dial, who sometimes uses the junk as texture and then paints it all one color; or people like Jason Villegas, who is careful in his selection of his old tee shirts.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPtLBStkCGIlHOOaBflOpyby0qJw7qGzohn0GfLGreSfuCAq_rNuy4D2JVwUHhLkbG-pBXDXiKAyuanS09zl29RtQ9huFwROjPyg-LuY4vahmtNkeTvR4vqLlm8z9iAikY5jfOQEfFS0/s1600-h/3854256218_50a2949cbf.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPtLBStkCGIlHOOaBflOpyby0qJw7qGzohn0GfLGreSfuCAq_rNuy4D2JVwUHhLkbG-pBXDXiKAyuanS09zl29RtQ9huFwROjPyg-LuY4vahmtNkeTvR4vqLlm8z9iAikY5jfOQEfFS0/s320/3854256218_50a2949cbf.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388471908252921682" border="0" /></a>This particular piece looked a bit to me like a Tibetan thanka, or some other artifact of an Asian religion of some kind. The little flags looked like prayer flags to me, and the whole thing looked a bit mandala-like. But the video running next to it made it clear that it is also meant to allude to a used car lot, and the little triangular flags that for some reason always adorn them. The piece is called "UB Sales Banner." So, maybe consumerism is like a religion for us? On the wall a sign said that the objects are "totems that speak to the zealousness of want and the consequence of waste." Ok, maybe. But nobody would want most of the stuff that these "totems" are made out of; the second part seems more plausible, about the "consequence of waste." What it looks to me like is, some future dystopic civilization making use of what it can find, after the apocalypse, to make religious emblems with.<br /><br />Houston is a junky, ugly place. It's amazing when somebody can make all this junk look pretty good, as Cleveland Turner does. But it's not easy, and most of the artists featured in this show don't really succeed. The Art Guys married a tree, for example, as part of their participation in No Zoning. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-46097828301204550432009-09-30T11:06:00.000-07:002009-09-30T11:24:55.314-07:00Adobe AbodeA show of some of my photographs is opening this weekend at the <a href="http://www.center-arts.com/exhibits/exhibits_home.html">Center for Contemporary Arts in Abilene, TX. </a><br /><br />The photographs are about an adobe house near Presidio, TX, that was built by the Adobe Alliance and Simone Swan in 1998. The house belongs to Simone, and in the fall of 2007, my partner and I visited Simone and photographed the house. We were spending a couple of weeks in Marfa, TX, and our visit to the Swan house was a side trip. It was a very special evening: we went to Ojinaga, Mexico, across the border for dinner, and this was my first visit to Mexico. Then we slept in the domed out-building, where moonlight streamed in through the tiny skylights in the adobe dome roof. The next morning I got up and photographed the house at daybreak.<br /><br />Simone's house is different from most of the other adobe houses in the area, in that its roof is also adobe. There are vaulted roofs and one domed roof. Simone learned the technique of adobe vaulting from the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, who wrote Architecture for the Poor. His idea was that if the poor folks of Egypt could built their houses entirely of mud, rather than having to buy wood and other materials for the roofs, they could be houses very affordably. The Adobe Alliance has taken the same approach.<br /><br />Simone's house is also entirely off the grid, powered by solar panels and a windmill. Water comes from an underground well.<br /><br />The vaults and domes are very beautiful. When we first arrived on Halloween night, the house and its outbuildings were bathed in the rosy glow of the setting desert sun. I photographed Simone beside her house that late afternoon.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQEsYJ989z1fFONIzkKfRO27SSzq0C2CtnuCDnLa-oZEnw-9atIn_NsAzn34-qdm8WHQ6Dz3Q41IL-NtlSiaJ9VNLzTM1XotP4s56tF4dZQJslFLnUwz7rp2KhZuV0XJlveiYufBVMqs/s1600-h/simonewallsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 291px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQEsYJ989z1fFONIzkKfRO27SSzq0C2CtnuCDnLa-oZEnw-9atIn_NsAzn34-qdm8WHQ6Dz3Q41IL-NtlSiaJ9VNLzTM1XotP4s56tF4dZQJslFLnUwz7rp2KhZuV0XJlveiYufBVMqs/s320/simonewallsmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387327485886459554" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />The next morning I photographed the view from the roof, across the border, where I could see the lights of Ojinaga twinkling right before sunrise.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqsagfTf05wZKzJU1EfxjSc2_xPdPVyD1qsFlli87QB9KR9CTfS-YOd1gRQQeC4BRSuCS_cuyE4x9Ia9EaeCysMG74y_cfZ9UlLeYis33EKnAOm0HWh1R9Cuq8nlWsW0Jaao8DICusw0/s1600-h/ojinagasmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 254px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqsagfTf05wZKzJU1EfxjSc2_xPdPVyD1qsFlli87QB9KR9CTfS-YOd1gRQQeC4BRSuCS_cuyE4x9Ia9EaeCysMG74y_cfZ9UlLeYis33EKnAOm0HWh1R9Cuq8nlWsW0Jaao8DICusw0/s320/ojinagasmall.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387326698116807602" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In two weeks I am going to travel to the Swan House again for an Adobe Alliance workshop. I am going to document the raising of an adobe vault and talk to members of the Adobe Alliance about their work, in order to write an illustrated article for Cite magazine in Houston.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-26048942016577654622009-09-22T11:42:00.000-07:002009-09-22T12:27:12.867-07:00Why Not Beauty?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWiCvMxzNHqyiiTQmiBc5dYMSNuJQ8zoZ0_C1NJYCmlYUIEd55VoPT6m4hwHIzYEqJgci_xLRVj8LpjuPOs-KdM6Ou1x_yHr8txOshhHD61kg-QJayU30T4C0ulYX5uSx35U0aarHgsQg/s1600-h/The-Milkmaid.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWiCvMxzNHqyiiTQmiBc5dYMSNuJQ8zoZ0_C1NJYCmlYUIEd55VoPT6m4hwHIzYEqJgci_xLRVj8LpjuPOs-KdM6Ou1x_yHr8txOshhHD61kg-QJayU30T4C0ulYX5uSx35U0aarHgsQg/s320/The-Milkmaid.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384367808640731778" border="0" /></a><br />Why is that contemporary artists have such disregard, even scorn, for the beauty of the ordinary world, or of anything? In my last post I wrote about a horrible show at the Blaffer Gallery that revels in ugliness. A recent review of a Vermeer painting, by Peter Schjeldahl in <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span>, is about what art can do when it acknowledges and adores the beauty of the world, of visual experience.<br /><br />I remember when I was in art school, I asked, "Why can't we make a photograph about visual experience?" The teacher told me that that would be too boring and not "critical" enough. But visual experience is not boring at all. It's a big part of what makes life worth living. This is what Schjeldahl says about Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher": "Beholding it, I feel that my usual ways of looking are torpid to the point of dishonoring the world." Exactly! Visual art is supposed to make us more alive to the glory of visual experience. Eyeball kicks. Even Neil Cassady, orphan of the Denver streets, knew that.<br /><br />The Met has another Vermeer painting on view right now: "The Milkmaid." Schjeldahl doesn't love it as much as he loves "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher," but still, Schjeldahl says, "it exercises more dazzling virtuosity than I quite know what to do with." Part of the virtuosity is in the color, but it's also in the almost photographic, yet mystically transformed, realism of the painting. Look at that bread, and that copper thing hanging on the wall. What about the wicker basket! No wonder Vermeer only produced two or three paintings a year: the detail in this is as painstaking as one can imagine.<br /><br />Amazingly, Vermeer painted this when he was twenty-five. Schjeldahl says that the sublimity of this painting resulted from Vermeer's absolute loyalty to "a perceptual realism as thorough-going as the medium allowed." Schjeldahl quotes another critic, who wrote, "Something well worn in Dutch art (like an old shoe) has become something never seen before (like a glass slipper)." Schjeldhahl adds: "That's beauty in action."<br /><br />The message is that the world is incredibly beautiful, often for only a moment in a certain light. But you have to be alert to those moments. And that's what the subject of art should be: these transformative, illuminated moments. I don't believe that we aren't capable of this, in the 21st century. Of course we are. But we don't seem to believe in the value of it, if our art is any indication.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-6704953445313122032009-09-19T08:52:00.000-07:002009-09-19T09:25:21.242-07:00L'Enfer, C'est les AutresSartre's famous dictum could be the title of a current show at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston. Sartre's words are usually translated, "hell is other people," but in this case you'd have to say, "hell is other animals." Maybe there's not much difference.<br /><br />Jon Pylypchuk uses bits of junk and "scrap," as he terms it, to make paintings and sculptures about a horde of little ferret-like animals who all hate each other. They are constantly fighting and cursing at each other, in the most painful way imaginable. In this dystopian world, fighting is mainly what the inhabitants do, physical fighting that is, interspersed with bouts of insults. Very occasionally, one of them comforts another one with a touch or word, but this is very rare.<br /><br />The paintings are well-composed. Other than that, they are very ugly. Garish, clashing colors and revolting textures created by disgusting bits of mangled fur are the order of the day. One almost feels as if one needs a bath after seeing this show: it feels unhygienic.<br /><br />I remember once I found a dead rabbit on my farm. Whatever had eaten the rabbit had left its head. On a whim, I put the head on a stick, a la Lord of the Flies, and paraded it around the neighborhood. I sneaked up behind a neighbor and patted her on the bottom with the rabbit's nose. She jumped, but she didn't scream, to her credit. After this exercise, another neighbor said, "Go wash your hands!"<br /><br />That's how I imagine Jon Pylypchuk must feel after working on his pieces. Or maybe not. He seems to take pleasure in rubbing our noses in the ugliest sides of human nature. Because in fact animals are rarely as mean-spirited as his little cartoon animals are, or not for long anyway. The worst thing I've ever seen a dog do is take a bone from a smaller dog. Animals don't engage in exchanges like this:<br /><br />"Cut the act you phony cripple."<br /><br />"You try living with your legs bent up."<br /><br />That's the dialogue that goes with the following sculpture:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs90hWp5tzyU2h8mVervdA0a-vQvgbNRinSM2bui3HOz4ttY2oE8u_l4sSLXrcC9MMFGUfj8y5i_I2ikk_2zeyMabpLIizBxW2TdwyFmLddNGRSvE_T2sXYsLcH0NKnfbR7fJuEqSLWPg/s1600-h/big_2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 269px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs90hWp5tzyU2h8mVervdA0a-vQvgbNRinSM2bui3HOz4ttY2oE8u_l4sSLXrcC9MMFGUfj8y5i_I2ikk_2zeyMabpLIizBxW2TdwyFmLddNGRSvE_T2sXYsLcH0NKnfbR7fJuEqSLWPg/s320/big_2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383209090637484994" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I can't imagine why the Blaffer gallery decided to exhibit this work. Apparently Pylypchuk has a bit of an international reputation, but that doesn't make it right. The Blaffer has repeatedly shown a preference for "confrontational" (read: ugly and offensive) work like this. I suppose that's because fifteen years ago, ugly art was kind of fashionable and a new idea. But now it has become the academic art of our time. Witness Jessica Stockholder, who also had a show at the Blaffer four years ago. Stockholder teaches sculpture at Yale.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjahyphenhyphenzvyy4z8WyX2B_Cg6b9p1-FxlFZVBmLVNgNz0lcJp5zga9IVrh7wib76SRq5sJ6GkvE4947DV0qhsjBaqdeZ7YLExahkffX_1j5hwboWaLQsiqHSI5P1s6I7nIIqCT6ryCqMERbaUU/s1600-h/stockholder.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjahyphenhyphenzvyy4z8WyX2B_Cg6b9p1-FxlFZVBmLVNgNz0lcJp5zga9IVrh7wib76SRq5sJ6GkvE4947DV0qhsjBaqdeZ7YLExahkffX_1j5hwboWaLQsiqHSI5P1s6I7nIIqCT6ryCqMERbaUU/s320/stockholder.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383210226238451858" border="0" /></a>Stockholder's work, while deliberately ugly, at least doesn't add the element of interpersonal abuse that Pylypchuk seems to revel in. I suppose he sees this as progress in the pursuit of ugliness.<br /><br />Now, it is true that there is a certain representational bent to all this ugliness, particularly in Houston. Houston is ugly. People in Houston frequently treat each other in very ugly ways. It's a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog kind of world, and Pylypchuk's little and big animals could represent the ids of Enron executives and other gangsters. But Pylypchuk doesn't seem abhor the violence of their interactions. He not only records them; he revels in them. He's much worse than Weegee, photographing a crime scene; he's not just a voyeur; he's a participant.<br /><br />So what's wrong with this? Weegee was a reporter. Maybe Pylypchuk sees himself as a reporter of sorts, but he's also a dramatist and a fabulist, creating sordid fictions to add to the pile of sordid truths. Worse, he finds himself cool because he's so "honest" about the way humans interact. He identifies with the little furry self-pitying animals; they are his alter egos.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0rCl7n6pzDvOzPa0rGbYwyoSKUyPgzLQl9A8q3VBgFmrr8R57Au8jHm_9NiP1E4WYmoGT7D_8KRnhKwkDqGXbdeTjhit0JRneHD77xkNiTGfdp9kjh9W4X5alZD6OG9nAaEubDlkPGCU/s1600-h/big_8.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 269px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0rCl7n6pzDvOzPa0rGbYwyoSKUyPgzLQl9A8q3VBgFmrr8R57Au8jHm_9NiP1E4WYmoGT7D_8KRnhKwkDqGXbdeTjhit0JRneHD77xkNiTGfdp9kjh9W4X5alZD6OG9nAaEubDlkPGCU/s320/big_8.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383213140511294162" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The above painting is in fact titled, "my life would be good if I didn't have so much to complain about." One of the little animals in the painting has a piece of white paper emerging from his mouth with these words written on it, like a scroll emerging from an angel's mouth in a Renaissance painting. Obviously, this is meant to demonstrate some self-awareness and wry humor. But this one moment of irony can't outweigh the preponderance of self-pity in the rest of the show.<br /><br />The real irony is that artists get recognition, fame, and sometimes even money for indulging in their "complaints." One would think that after almost twenty years of artists doing little else, they would be tired of it. The fact that this show is in an academic gallery, though, maybe reveals the bankruptcy of this aesthetic of complaint and ugliness: it's academic art, encouraged in MFA programs, but it's old, it's tired, and it's time for it to go.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-90160348662757579002009-09-12T07:24:00.000-07:002009-09-12T09:40:17.759-07:00Big Lectric Fan<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKLS7jfVfmrBayiHx1UGrVoSKvOaX-dm0_-Je975R9lIhkiJ2pXTnEqwV9FCrzqwBP9ihSEOpuzPf6BohtHteoaSBNv4Yi-HUBScVJchTswIWxQgxeUBAOfpGi-GklY0bvX_I6IqJ3yQ/s1600-h/head.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKLS7jfVfmrBayiHx1UGrVoSKvOaX-dm0_-Je975R9lIhkiJ2pXTnEqwV9FCrzqwBP9ihSEOpuzPf6BohtHteoaSBNv4Yi-HUBScVJchTswIWxQgxeUBAOfpGi-GklY0bvX_I6IqJ3yQ/s320/head.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380590706217036290" border="0" /></a><br />I'm back in Houston, and it's hot. The air conditioner runs pretty much all night to keep us cool while we sleep. I have thought a lot about what it must have been like to live here before air conditioning was everywhere. I guess people had Big Lectric Fans.<br /><br />Wayne White has been thinking about this too. He's a Tennessee-born artist who has made a career out of making puppets, for PeeWee's Playhouse and the Weird Al Show. Now he's made a huge puppet head of George Jones, one of his heroes and one of mine. George Jones recorded the old song, "Ragged but Right," in the 1950s. The lyrics mention a "big electric fan to keep me cool while I sleep." It's a great song in its original old-time music incarnation. It was cleaned up a bit for George Jones's recording; the persona in his recording is much more of a family man than the persona in the original song, and much more of a family man than George Jones himself was for most of his life.<br /><br />The fifteen-foot puppet head is in the Rice Gallery at Rice University. This gallery specializes in site-specific installations built especially for the gallery. Wayne White visited the gallery in June of this summer, when the temperature outside was 102. He says that he was lying in his air-conditioned hotel room, thinking about what it was like to live in Houston before everybody had air conditioning everywhere, and the George Jones song, "Ragged but Right," kept running through his head, especially the line about the big electric fan. He remembered that he had a small puppet head of George Jones that he had never made into a puppet. When he got home, he made a small macquette of the Rice Gallery and placed the head in it. Voila! That would be his installation.<br /><br />When you enter the foyer of the gallery, you see the huge fifteen-foot head lying on its side. The eyes rotate so that sometimes they're open and sometimes they're closed:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBKPN5CX7aI4UfiqoEZdgvNxOgCo-pz-qbU1GqWrBzLz9_QdwEBBmZeu8OKE_I2KmiLG0s7x8FRXV7-FrFqILV8RWCTZ4rZiOmS8Niz21j9lk6vz7Z4qTOPeaT4I-go5lvAgOslU6ZGPM/s1600-h/eyes1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBKPN5CX7aI4UfiqoEZdgvNxOgCo-pz-qbU1GqWrBzLz9_QdwEBBmZeu8OKE_I2KmiLG0s7x8FRXV7-FrFqILV8RWCTZ4rZiOmS8Niz21j9lk6vz7Z4qTOPeaT4I-go5lvAgOslU6ZGPM/s320/eyes1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380590960274644386" border="0" /></a><br />Also, there's a rope in front of the piece that allows the viewer to open and close the mouth. When the mouth opens, a snoring noise comes out.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimphkQCMcuF8fB24xHxAXoBjrk2QKI7L_EDvVW3ynxMTu8MVGd1u9m8_tHduVhOC9bBQTNt6qeKnteeGYnO6uyfSN8xKr7VALTGRBlrY98Xf3tJAheyN6_rtgZY15togS_Yh_CADVH6yU/s1600-h/rope.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimphkQCMcuF8fB24xHxAXoBjrk2QKI7L_EDvVW3ynxMTu8MVGd1u9m8_tHduVhOC9bBQTNt6qeKnteeGYnO6uyfSN8xKr7VALTGRBlrY98Xf3tJAheyN6_rtgZY15togS_Yh_CADVH6yU/s320/rope.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380591280554306482" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Walking around to the back of the head, you walk past George's flat-top crew cut, which is made out of hollow tubes. Then you see a little hole in the back of his head. Why not look inside? Why, there he is! A puppet of George Jones, inside George Jones's head! A dancing, string puppet, apparently inside a low-rent honky tonk.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag6MuvZYfhtKcSxEEvOa82Qp8Yrq8U5JUTBws4lhRtxzpPWW4QSP1JX6iCaNhPjULKym43B3ppFbS2XiM8thnToELa4k-5-kKk9UmlUiFAz9LzyTg-M2PpRV6MuqYozEFdiIht-Vxeeg/s1600-h/puppet.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag6MuvZYfhtKcSxEEvOa82Qp8Yrq8U5JUTBws4lhRtxzpPWW4QSP1JX6iCaNhPjULKym43B3ppFbS2XiM8thnToELa4k-5-kKk9UmlUiFAz9LzyTg-M2PpRV6MuqYozEFdiIht-Vxeeg/s320/puppet.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380591781228995202" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Finally, at the base of the head is the eponymous Big Lectric Fan:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKrj2WXts2K0QxDiaOonmh5arvGRiGLQJAoi4mX4DkfCiUaSLWVELT-yrq83MLis2AphSDzuRSmK1ktdwn4d9xNjVuSFl1s999IaztMZkJ0fqFI-S1CnRyC9qf0HzHqn2vIasLocYgZGE/s1600-h/fan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKrj2WXts2K0QxDiaOonmh5arvGRiGLQJAoi4mX4DkfCiUaSLWVELT-yrq83MLis2AphSDzuRSmK1ktdwn4d9xNjVuSFl1s999IaztMZkJ0fqFI-S1CnRyC9qf0HzHqn2vIasLocYgZGE/s320/fan.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5380592070510165938" border="0" /></a><br />There's also a room off to the side called The Ice House. It has a big carved piece of white styrofoam in it, bathed in a bluish light.<br /><br />The whole effect is fun, funny, and a bit mysterious. There is a video in the foyer in which Wayne White talks about the piece and shows the process of building it. It's basically made out of carved and painted styrofoam. He says that the head reminds him of a relic of a lost civilization that worshiped country music stars. I suppose he means that it looks like an Easter Island head, and it does. And, our society, particularly Houston, does seem a lot like Easter Island: we're consuming ourselves out of existence, and building huge, wasteful monuments to ourselves that require enormous amounts of energy, just as the Easter Islanders did.<br /><br />The irony is that back in the days of Big Lectric Fans, and at the time George Jones recorded "Ragged but Right" in the 1950s, Houston was still on the cusp of its explosion as a megalopolis devoted to the wasting of energy. In the 1950s, the US consumed about a third of the energy that we do now, and we still were big producers of energy, <a href="http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/eh/total.html">according to the DOE</a>.<br />(But, I bet it was hot at night.)<br /><br />In the brochure accompanying the show, Wayne White writes, "The sleeping figure is one of the great subjects of art....My big puppet head also references Goya's 'The Sleep of Reason.' The peep show inside the head is the unleashed demons." Goya's print read, "The sleep of reason produces monsters." One could say that, again, this puppet head is thus a perfect metaphor for Houston: our ability to reason about where the energy will come from to drive our Big Lectric Fans (which are now Big Lectric Air Conditioners and Factories and Light Rails) has gone to sleep. We think we can invent our way out of the end of peak oil, but we are possessed by the demons of wasteful consumption, those dancing, manic puppets in our heads that are manipulated by advertising and Big Energy.<br /><br />Wayne White goes on to say, "An all-night, unstopping fan is the merciless and eternal cycle of everything. The puppet head has a moving fan appendage which morphs man and machine into a surrealistic symbol of anxious existence."<br /><br />At first I thought this was just more artistic bloviating. But wait a minute. Houston DOES feel like an all-night, unstopping fan. I can hear it whirring all night long: trains, planes, and automobiles roar by and vibrate the house. The refineries never stop refining. People never stop moving. The city feels like a machine, and we humans feel like small parts--appendages--in this giant machine. The fan on the puppet is where its body should be; all that's left of the human is the head. The machine IS the body: in Houston, all our bodily needs and functions are fulfilled by machines. We don't grow food; we drive to the grocery store and buy food that has been produced by machines. We don't have to take care of our wastes; we flush them away with a machine. We don't walk anywhere; our car machines take us places. We don't sing or play music; our tv and computer machines entertain us.<br /><br />And then, for some of us, even our heads and our thinking are controlled by machines. They pull the rope; our mouths open and close. The machine whirrs; we open and close our eyes. Inside our heads, somebody pulls the strings that make our inner demons dance.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-6506357208076171252009-08-01T12:10:00.000-07:002009-08-01T12:50:34.612-07:00Exquisite Corpse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTalKBwldQV6d_9JnDpr4Cg9b1J8I5a5bakXnfYbMqnTI2RIwTroSd5K2QjPK1b_A0k6qxaKnu0_GIfZs6R4-jmANCtldppgHL9LGb68k297K3DqonwAXkKXQFHP7CV66IhRAy72tkXf8/s1600-h/dash070115_1_198.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 198px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTalKBwldQV6d_9JnDpr4Cg9b1J8I5a5bakXnfYbMqnTI2RIwTroSd5K2QjPK1b_A0k6qxaKnu0_GIfZs6R4-jmANCtldppgHL9LGb68k297K3DqonwAXkKXQFHP7CV66IhRAy72tkXf8/s320/dash070115_1_198.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365083629582077650" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Dash Snow, on the High Line in Manhattan</span><br /><br /><br />I had never heard of Dash Snow when he died last month of a drug overdose in a Manhattan hotel. But when I read the story in the New York Times, I became immediately fascinated by him: here was a guy who was exactly my son's age, who had been living on his own in Manhattan since the age of 14 or so, and who was an established artist. What's more, he was a scion of the Menil family, the family someone has described as the American Medici because of their enormous patronage of the arts, especially contemporary art. But according to the article, he was in more or less constant conflict with his illustrious family, and he saw himself as a rebel against their patrician lifestyle. Was he? I wondered how much of Dash Snow's life and work could be understood in light of the family he came from.<br /><br /> In June, I visited the Dia Foundation's Dia Beacon gallery in upstate New York. The Dia Foundation was started by Phillipa de Menil, Dash Snow's great aunt. The Dia Foundation funded a lot of Donald Judd's work in Marfa; it takes care of De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico. Phillipa's sister, Christophe, is Dash Snow's grandmother. The family's money comes from oil, and their museum in Houston, the Menil, is the most beautiful buildings in the city. The collection centers around ancient artifacts from the Mediterranean, and Surrealist works from Europe. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2W-mBkcJS44OEwVGGoZyXnjl6wZQP6TjkmEXXr_fil9hV8pCb2CRNdiag5Kf8sORtMr9dgMYvEeL_2_ls-oDPvL310pYAX8KQu1s_0eRi8g8VcbXNtSwlDaDBrxUuVKvWFLCO9xfYbm8/s1600-h/29057168.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 253px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2W-mBkcJS44OEwVGGoZyXnjl6wZQP6TjkmEXXr_fil9hV8pCb2CRNdiag5Kf8sORtMr9dgMYvEeL_2_ls-oDPvL310pYAX8KQu1s_0eRi8g8VcbXNtSwlDaDBrxUuVKvWFLCO9xfYbm8/s320/29057168.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365083413595993970" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Collage by Dash Snow</span><br /><br />There is not a lot of Dash Snow's work to be seen on the internet. What I could find was a few photographs--Polaroids--and some collages. The collages did remind me of work I've seen in the Menil museum in Houston, in Mrs. de Menil's Surrealism galleries.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh01MzfdFxlVdMAwQvxToqzvyuJ8TdgFHjhPhfuX-YJz7JsIrjEHg0oeOFCfJ2GjOKuV6-BbZDkFmPxbnbYNDKRz2gWTRpF264oR-lXAd5dZDRo8N0kppuaFYwolrgn_I0bc8rz2snQDec/s1600-h/29057154.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh01MzfdFxlVdMAwQvxToqzvyuJ8TdgFHjhPhfuX-YJz7JsIrjEHg0oeOFCfJ2GjOKuV6-BbZDkFmPxbnbYNDKRz2gWTRpF264oR-lXAd5dZDRo8N0kppuaFYwolrgn_I0bc8rz2snQDec/s320/29057154.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365083515673207714" /></a><br /><br />The polaroids seem to be more influenced by Dash Snow's immersion in the Bohemia of the downtown art scene than by the art that his family collected. There is almost a tradition now of photography about this scene, the most famous practitioner of that tradition being Nan Goldin, who photographed her friends shooting up and dying of AIDS and being starving artists. Dash Snow was no starving artist: he had inherited enough money to live without a job, it seems, and enough to do quite a lot of drugs, including heroin. His addiction was a cause of conflict with his mother in particular, but his grandmother seems to have remained close to him. There was some suggestion, in the stories I read online, that his mother thought that his grandmother was enabling his addiction.<br /><br />It seems that Snow went into rehab multiple times, beginning when he was a young teenager. His most recent stint in rehab had been this past spring. When he got out, friends noted that he looked healthy and happy. He had a partner, and together they had a young daughter, age two. But by late May he had relapsed again, and it seems that the overdose might have been a suicide. Did he despair of ever breaking away from his dependence on his family? Or on heroin? Was he ashamed of his freedom, and his lack of real work in the world? He had a lot to live for: apparently he loved his partner and his daughter.<br /><br />This sad story seems to suggest that there is such a thing as too much money and too much freedom, too early, even for an artist. Most artists dream of having unlimited time and resource to make things without worrying about whether the work would sell or not, and without having to work a day job. Dash Snow never worked a day job in his life, and sold little. But his oeuvre seems to have been pretty small. Granted, nowadays making a "hamster's nest" out of shredded phone books and living in it for a few days is an art work, as is running around spraying graffiti on the city; so maybe if you count those things, he worked harder at art than it seems. Still, one can't help wondering if a need to work could have saved Dash Snow from himself. A much older friend, Jack Wall, said in one of the Times articles, "In my day...when we wanted a fix, we had to go work--we couldn't just sit around getting high for three straight weeks."<br /><br />Count your blessings, starving artists.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-83602185436538908752009-07-24T18:05:00.000-07:002009-07-24T18:55:02.781-07:00Isamu and the Giant Peach<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwd38M0YPtlXy1lrBNInvITWtn2Xn_qqhnIA5gbHrz1v8Q9zSGDnyoRskXVikB7WD31_wyn7umrrw5Ut9KYn5Cm5YL_jCtVBmVBB157IVhWOqhCUgIR-_FSZ5JH5K57whiuuej79Hy5-I/s1600-h/noguchi1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwd38M0YPtlXy1lrBNInvITWtn2Xn_qqhnIA5gbHrz1v8Q9zSGDnyoRskXVikB7WD31_wyn7umrrw5Ut9KYn5Cm5YL_jCtVBmVBB157IVhWOqhCUgIR-_FSZ5JH5K57whiuuej79Hy5-I/s320/noguchi1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362202920546188818" /></a><br /><br />When we visited the Storm King Art Center, the first sculpture that I really wanted to look at carefully was "Momo Taro," which is on a little hill near the house at the center of the Storm King Art Center campus. It was made in 1977-78 by Isamu Noguchi, who was then in his seventies.<br /><br />At Storm King, they're always telling you not to touch anything, so I didn't touch "Momo Taro," or only a little. Later I found out that Noguchi intended it to be an "interactive" sculpture. One really wants to crawl inside that cozy hole. I wish I had done that.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjpyEIlQL0PUBE_As4GfaBxst1yflxm4aLN45qf8l7SpGIeX7fKHKGNYvnqLLeBh_XtzJfHrvjsIEvamoulkt2ksjSqiNGdTc22gsCJgogHnD-bxg8j-SJBxDlVQeUFr7kfEobk8qlg2g/s1600-h/punoguchi.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 256px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjpyEIlQL0PUBE_As4GfaBxst1yflxm4aLN45qf8l7SpGIeX7fKHKGNYvnqLLeBh_XtzJfHrvjsIEvamoulkt2ksjSqiNGdTc22gsCJgogHnD-bxg8j-SJBxDlVQeUFr7kfEobk8qlg2g/s320/punoguchi.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362202688433593938" /></a><br /><br />"Momo Taro" is made out of granite. (A somewhat earlier piece, above, "White Sun," in the Princeton University Museum of Art, is made of marble.) The Momo Taro name comes from a Japanese folk tale about a giant peach that came floating down a river. An old childless woman found it, ate some of it, and instantly became young again. Her husband ate some too, became young again also, and they made love. She had a baby, named "Momo Taro," or Peach Boy. Later variants of the tale had the boy emerging from the peach after the woman brought it ashore. In Japan, peaches are thought to resemble a woman's buttocks. (In my neighborhood, I recently learned, they are thought to resemble women's breasts.)<br /><br />After Noguchi got the Storm King commission, he went back to Japan to look for a stone to place on the chosen hill. He found a big round stone, but it was too big to haul back to his studio in one piece, so his helpers split the stone in two. Inside they found this hollow space, and that made them think of the tale of the Peach Boy, Momo Taro, who had sprung from the inside of a giant peach. <br /><br />That tale in turn made me think of the great Raoul Dahl story, James and the Giant Peach. I don't know if Dahl knew of the Japanese story; I think not, because his story was originally called James and the Giant Cherry. Anyway, in Dahl's story, a boy escapes his terrible childhood by getting inside a giant peach, which rolls away from his mean aunts. Eventually he flies to New York inside the peach. The inhabitants of New York see the giant peach flying through the air and mistake it at first for a nuclear bomb! Maybe Noguchi knew of the Dahl story, because it was written in 1961, fifteen years before Noguchi made his Giant Peach. I wonder if the giant stone "peach" that Noguchi found in Japan was flown to New York, or if it arrived by ship.<br /><br />Noguchi apparently also visualized the split, hollow stone as an image of the sun, and as a mirror. There are eight other stones surrounding it, and they look somewhat like seating for some esoteric ritual. The whole arrangement looks a bit like a small stone henge, although the stones are not arranged in a circle.<br /><br />I had a strong desire to spend some time drawing the stones and the shadows that were cast inside the hollows, but we only had a short time at Storm King and I didn't have time to do that.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-43527388233938766022009-07-09T12:40:00.000-07:002009-07-09T13:18:28.297-07:00Andy Goldsworthy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM2g8F3m7TcSLXaG8hi_xIc16Dq-_2J4O_xZ76NEHaq0GZvbgZLfSXRmLJT7eNXVxNB55Q2mZ-_9bPHbP_vT9917RK7EtoWgYX8FZwkUM9WhzkHivli_KZQA-tc0Pqgit_Gm7VGoMCpOc/s1600-h/goldsworthy2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 236px; height: 250px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM2g8F3m7TcSLXaG8hi_xIc16Dq-_2J4O_xZ76NEHaq0GZvbgZLfSXRmLJT7eNXVxNB55Q2mZ-_9bPHbP_vT9917RK7EtoWgYX8FZwkUM9WhzkHivli_KZQA-tc0Pqgit_Gm7VGoMCpOc/s320/goldsworthy2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5356556045865002194" /></a><br /><br />I've been a fan of Andy Goldsworthy's work for a long time. But I only knew it from books, photographs of his ephemeral works. I gave the book I had to a young friend who was beginning to make works out of sticks and rocks himself, at the tender age of ten or so. The impulse to make sculpture out of natural objects--sticks, rocks, leaves, flowers, and water--seems to happen sometimes in young men who grow up in the country. Goldsworthy grew up on the edge of Leeds, England, a landscape I remember myself from the time we lived in Leeds in the early sixties. Little did I know that Andy Goldsworthy was my neighbor then, sort of, although he was a few years younger than I.<br /><br />On my recent trip to the Northeast, I got to see two works by Andy Goldsworthy in person. The first one was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It was called "Roof," built in 2005. It consisted of shiny black slate that had been stacked into domes, with a hole, or oculus, at the top. But I didn't know about the hole at the top until I got home and looked at an article about the work on the internet. You can't see the hole from the ground floor of the National Gallery's East building: you can only see the sides of the dome, and you can't tell that it's hollow. Most of the domes are in a sort of courtyard beside the museum, but two of them penetrate the glass separating the courtyard from the atrium. I think it's unfortunate that a large part--and point--of the structure of these domes is not discernible from the main space in the museum. Goldsworthy was interested in recreating the ancient structure of the cantilevered dome, a structure that was used in the beehive tombs of Greece, and to build homes in the British Isles in Neolithic times, but you wouldn't know that unless you are looking down on them. Maybe you can do that from another place in the museum that I didn't find.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7jPu2DIpDBBnAdOyTTJluL9U01J-EhyphenhyphenGGeCU9NjykiBfjhIGBZr9vRgV6dj713w00-4heJoZIIBGDcB22jkM7Y93-5fb6VmYCPhnnXEb5Qp952JBhH1a1PrR2Gpq3dvM_mPIl1WKxrtg/s1600-h/roof.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7jPu2DIpDBBnAdOyTTJluL9U01J-EhyphenhyphenGGeCU9NjykiBfjhIGBZr9vRgV6dj713w00-4heJoZIIBGDcB22jkM7Y93-5fb6VmYCPhnnXEb5Qp952JBhH1a1PrR2Gpq3dvM_mPIl1WKxrtg/s320/roof.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5356555958265472354" /></a><br /><br />My sister told me that when she and her children visited the National Gallery's East building, her son Jack desperately wanted to climb the sides of the dome that protrudes into the atrium, and a guard positioned himself between Jack and the dome!<br /><br />The second Goldsworthy piece that I saw was at Storm King Art Center in New York state, "Storm King Wall." This piece is actually earlier than "Roofs"; it was build in 1997 and 1998, while Goldsworthy was working on a similar piece in England called "Sheepfolds." Both pieces are based on vernacular rural structures: stone walls. Stone walls are an important feature of the landscape in rural Yorkshire, and in rural New York state as it turns out. (My surname, Stoney, was allegedly adopted by our ancestors who built stone walls in Yorkshire, when the time came for everybody to get a last name.) "Sheepfolds" was started in 1996. Rather than build original structures from his own designs, Goldsworthy "fixed" sheepfolds that were already existing. (A sheepfold is a small pen for sheep, sometimes attached to a stone wall.) Of course, the "fixing" sometimes included new elements, such as stone arches, added to the four-square or round shape of the original sheepfold. Similarly, in New York state, he took the stone from a falling-down old stone wall and fixed it up and re-imagined it. The new wall starts out conventionally enough, straight down a hill, and interrupted by a space for a gate. But then it dives down into a pond and emerges on the other side! Now, it's not unheard of for farmers to fence across creeks here in TN. But a submerged fence makes you think: what is it for? In this case, it is art: it's not for anything except to look at.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOk6FNzADNAIQst_hEsvoySB1CaaBHEuBEVAGuchFkSnqcy664SpmPXyBwVTfy_0ou02uKYEahrM_V0DYmOyAq7oCTQhRMtQW55BTbSla5mc7yomwId6nozXZZGvi0YIwwpiPRNqkdhWY/s1600-h/stormkingwallsmall.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOk6FNzADNAIQst_hEsvoySB1CaaBHEuBEVAGuchFkSnqcy664SpmPXyBwVTfy_0ou02uKYEahrM_V0DYmOyAq7oCTQhRMtQW55BTbSla5mc7yomwId6nozXZZGvi0YIwwpiPRNqkdhWY/s320/stormkingwallsmall.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5356555797221799074" /></a><br /><br /><br />Once the stone wall emerges from the water on the other side of the pond, it snakes and curves through the woods, around trees. It becomes serpentine. At this point, you could say that the wall is still functional: farm walls also snake through the woods to some extent. But this wall seems to exult in its curves and snaking, more so than a purely functional wall would. This makes it very beautiful and delightful. Its business seems to be to celebrate the trees that it snakes around, rather than to keep cows in.<br /><br />This sculpture was my favorite thing at the Storm King Art Center, which is full of other wonderful things. (Storm King is there to provide exhibition space for monumental sculpture and earthworks.) I think I loved "Storm King Wall" the most because it was so humble, so ordinary, so rural, so vernacular, so respectful of the ordinary beauty that ordinary rural people have created for centuries, and yet it took that to the next level with a dash of exuberance that was pure art.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-62962210556396563542009-06-15T14:52:00.000-07:002009-06-15T16:59:28.739-07:00William Christenberry<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbPCnzgE5fQtwtP4mbM-KE_OxMc6aBvOsWxBRXbjYttGLRXwpQMQ3fvcp8hLIiuI4Cc9ofO_xHrGh9UrompjplKtwN56Szt7sgk6YD0g73q3vNbTsdQsTMZjaJqznzLtTR56tDtDC9-xs/s1600-h/painting.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbPCnzgE5fQtwtP4mbM-KE_OxMc6aBvOsWxBRXbjYttGLRXwpQMQ3fvcp8hLIiuI4Cc9ofO_xHrGh9UrompjplKtwN56Szt7sgk6YD0g73q3vNbTsdQsTMZjaJqznzLtTR56tDtDC9-xs/s320/painting.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347686670693179986" /></a><br /><br />Yesterday I went to see a show at the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville that was a retrospective of the work of Willim Christenberry. Christenberry is a painter, sculptor, and photographer from Alabama, and his work is about rural Alabama and his memories of growing up there as a child. <br /><br />Christenberry began as an abstract expressionist painter, and there were a few paintings in the show. He moved away from pure abstraction in the 1960s and began to make a kind of landscape painting about the subject that would obsess him for the next forty years: the house in the rural landscape. These houses are often abandoned farm houses, often derelict, and sometimes disappearing back into the woods of which they were made, over-run with kudzu vines. The houses in his paintings are pretty abstract, though, and it's hard to tell exactly what kinds of houses they are.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1mEO5ClzmZds9NPtOq-qkg05t6sIeqsgn-42WBbz3arfu7MMV6tlEgX7IvTiwZxUt3SOpOW8GUQ1BD3CGGMg2iqTgYAEFDyAMEFHhqxc-QRja049UhI1OQgvDmzQ0JRvgp_c_m60MtLc/s1600-h/dreamhouses.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1mEO5ClzmZds9NPtOq-qkg05t6sIeqsgn-42WBbz3arfu7MMV6tlEgX7IvTiwZxUt3SOpOW8GUQ1BD3CGGMg2iqTgYAEFDyAMEFHhqxc-QRja049UhI1OQgvDmzQ0JRvgp_c_m60MtLc/s320/dreamhouses.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347686559133376402" /></a><br /><br />When you enter the Cheekwood show, the first thing you see are tall sculptures: white pointy steeple-like things that are vaguely menacing, but also rather like church steeples, arranged in a kind of installation. Christenberry calls these "dream houses." In the late seventies, after the theft of a body of work about the Ku Klux Klan, Christenberry had a vision in a dream of a tall, pointy house with no windows or doors, covered with signs like some of the old grocery stores in his photographs. This image has recurred in his work ever since. The tall white dream houses seem to evoke all the themes of his work: old buildings; the hooded head of the Klansman; and even the trees that surround the abandoned houses he loves to photograph. The lack of windows and doors seems to indicate a kind of blindness: the buildings have no "eyes" to see out of, and the viewer can't see into them. Perhaps this indicates a certain mystery, or a secret, about the Alabama landscape and its history.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqNC0wnXJF8vf5Ru0qjhNuEM-SpUceYO9LDNbP9fCwkoivdC6AocquZinrJKdEVvyYTrFbqQuyi_DZ6tFnOCtQ1Sr6p6aMT07e8jLFYzdNj9bPrmKVG6X96MiB7GVEQCTspC0Q44ArK2s/s1600-h/4houses.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqNC0wnXJF8vf5Ru0qjhNuEM-SpUceYO9LDNbP9fCwkoivdC6AocquZinrJKdEVvyYTrFbqQuyi_DZ6tFnOCtQ1Sr6p6aMT07e8jLFYzdNj9bPrmKVG6X96MiB7GVEQCTspC0Q44ArK2s/s320/4houses.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347686471654949378" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />Christenberry started photographing with a small Brownie camera that had been in his family. But Lee Friedlander persuaded him to try photographing with larger view cameras. He uses both a 4x5 camera and the 8x10 camera to shoot his color landscape images. But Christenberry uses the larger cameras in the same way that he uses the Brownie camera: he doesn't use the tilts and swings, or even the rise and fall of the front standard very much. His photographs have the very four-square look of the buildings themselves: they are simple, matter-of-fact, nothing fancy, but despite the surface simplicity, they contain a weird pathos and a kind of menacing tension.<br /><br />After photographing some of these rural buildings for years, repeatedly going back to the same spot to rephotograph the building and record its changes, Christenberry started making "sculptures" of these buildings. They seem to the viewer like models of the buildings, although he insists that they are not literal models, because he often creates them from imagination as well as from reference photographs. But they looked like pretty meticulous models to me. At first I didn't understand why Christenberry felt compelled to make a model of the green warehouse that he had photographed yearly for 20 years. What did the model do that the 20 photographs, arrayed in a grid, did not already convey? Then I realized that the point of the photographs--that the warehouse is gradually decaying, being overgrown by vines and trees--is offset somewhat by the model, and that there is no inconsistency in this: human artifacts like warehouses are transient, and nature wins in the end, but art is a way to make something permanent out of all the flux. In the end, when the real warehouse is gone, the model will be a "dream house," a work of memory and imagination. On one of the wall panels in the show, there is a quote by Faulkner about this: "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."<br /><br /><br /> The models may also have something to do with Christenberry's love of actual objects, as opposed to images of objects. Some of the most powerful pieces in the show are made from objects he has collected. There is a collection of nearly identical Tops Snuff signs, in various stages of decay. The wall panel noted that it was sort of like Warhol's soup cans, only the opposite. I guess that means that Christenberry did not make an image of a soup can label; he took commercial signs and made an image out of the actual signs. In that respect, he is working more like Rauschenberg in this piece.<br /><br />In another piece involving found objects or "ready-mades," he framed the pages of a calendar that belonged to his grandfather. His grandfather had a 1947 calendar, advertising various patent medicines, hanging by his bed. Over the years, he penciled onto the calendar important dates in the family's history: the date of his mother's birth in the 19th century; the date of his son's death; the date a tree fell down in the front yard. It is a bit like the ledger books that the McCaslin family keeps in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. The juxtaposition of the very personal family history with the artifacts of early consumer culture is somehow moving. One is exhorted by the calendar to take "Black Draught Laxative," on the same page that a marriage, a birth, or a death in the family is recorded.<br /><br />This piece--the framed collection of 12 calendar pages, juxtaposed with the grandfather's handmade walking cane--turns both Warhol and Rauschenberg on their heads in a very Southern way: here we have Pop art, sort of (the advertising); we have a combine, sort of (the calendar pages plus the cane). But the impersonality and slickness of Pop art and the surrealistic humor of Rauschenberg's combines have been transmogrified into something that's both more serious and less "arty" than Pop art or postmodernist art: the piece is like a magical totem, something ancient, more like folk art than fine art, a piece of a person's family history that goes back a hundred years. It has almost nothing to do with Duchamp, it seems to me. Something that seems at first like an object on the wall of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, once one examines the tiny penciled-in narrative in the squares on the calendar, becomes more like an ancient book or epic poem.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-85248896692025885252009-06-07T09:16:00.001-07:002009-06-07T09:50:00.461-07:00Sam Wagstaff<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQeYySg6oMTZC1qyxqPX1IW7khbNogs2proT2M392visJCWgV5tyCAX-67JMVgbAar4LJU4gmIgZw1M1183Adj5qngmxOdhbQ63XZ25DLPIyAuYfkRIpCV3kqupaF4PrrTVlUKA1IpYQU/s1600-h/bwgray_365.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQeYySg6oMTZC1qyxqPX1IW7khbNogs2proT2M392visJCWgV5tyCAX-67JMVgbAar4LJU4gmIgZw1M1183Adj5qngmxOdhbQ63XZ25DLPIyAuYfkRIpCV3kqupaF4PrrTVlUKA1IpYQU/s320/bwgray_365.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5344628753587385634" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Mapplethorpe (standing) and Wagstaff</span><br /><br /><br />I watched a movie last night called "Black, White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe." Every photographer knows who Robert Mapplethorpe is: the creator of immaculate black and white photographs of flowers and naked gay men. But I had never heard of Sam Wagstaff.<br /><br />Sam Wagstaff was only a casual photographer and probably didn't call himself an artist. But many of the people interviewed for this documentary thought that Mapplethorpe would not have had a career in photography if it had not been for his friend, mentor, and lover, Sam Wagstaff. (Both were also involved with Patti Smith in the seventies.) Wagstaff was 25 years older than Mapplethorpe and Smith. He came from a patrician New York family, went to Yale, served in the Navy during WWII, worked in advertising for a while, and then went to graduate school in art history. He served as a curator of painting and sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and then at the Detroit Institute of Art. <br /><br />But then in 1973, Wagstaff suddenly decided that photographs were more interesting as an art form than painting or sculpture. When his mother died and he inherited quite a bit of money, he began collecting photographs frenetically, especially 19th century photographs. I was amazed to see, in the film, how many really important 19th century photographs he owned; I saw a lot of the photographs that are in textbooks about the history of photography. I kept saying to myself, "He owned THAT?!?"<br /><br />In 1984 Wagstaff sold his collection of around 30,000 photographs to the Getty Museum in California for $5 million. He died in 1987 at the age of 65 from AIDS.<br /><br />Wagstaff put together a book of photographs, the highlights of his collection, called <span style="font-style:italic;">A Book of Photographs from the Collection of Sam Wagstaff.</span> But unfortunately, the least expensive copy I could find online was $250! Maybe the library at the University of Houston has it.<br /><br />Wagstaff's great contribution to our modern understanding of photography stems first from his willingness to see it as an art form, which, in the early seventies, it barely was. As Bruce Hainly said in a review in Artforum of a 1997 show of Wagstaff's collection, he rehabilitated photography from its "disreputable position." Although Wagstaff embraced what he called "pleasure" and beauty in photographs, his collection contained some photographs that are still difficult to look at: medical pictures of deformed people and amputees, horrible skin diseases, and the bloated bodies of soldiers on a battlefield. Hainly wrote that "he ultimately foiled photography's domesticity by embracing its vicious nature." Mapplethorpe's study of these "vicious" photographs influenced his style, as we can see in his photographs of sado-masochistic sex.<br /><br />It's nice to know that the man who made photography less "disreputable" also kept it from becoming "domesticated," and that a central part of his interest in photographs was the pleasure of looking at them. Since the mid-eighties, in certain theoretical circles, pleasure in looking has itself been considered "disreputable." But photographers photograph things that they long to look at again and again. We all have our "vice," as Wagstaff called his collecting, the vice of a compulsion to collect the things we love to look at in the world by photographing them. This may in fact be somewhat "disreputable," like so many pleasures.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4957301860957410128.post-37125595738631798272009-05-31T12:15:00.001-07:002009-05-31T12:27:09.117-07:00Phillip Toledano photography<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HI_dqk3rfscwDfZdyuncNJiz3-_4gwzriQWmr_2jvrvgnINEj_LYCP_PztlUBJkBGn8Yt4VjsINj33rca204WrjKDJsckXYT7_DPxV-EhMCHJfdaDkZYWFbaNLlkj9sviMYLZrhm1-w/s1600-h/days-with-my-father.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 163px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1HI_dqk3rfscwDfZdyuncNJiz3-_4gwzriQWmr_2jvrvgnINEj_LYCP_PztlUBJkBGn8Yt4VjsINj33rca204WrjKDJsckXYT7_DPxV-EhMCHJfdaDkZYWFbaNLlkj9sviMYLZrhm1-w/s320/days-with-my-father.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5342071813095320338" /></a><br />I have been wondering about how I was going to write about contemporary art in a place like rural Tennessee, where there are lots of eyeball kicks from nature, but few from art. I'm not worried about that anymore. The internet has made art, especially photography, available to everybody in the hinterlands, as well as to the cognoscenti on the coasts.<br /><br />I found a <a href="http://www.dayswithmyfather.com">beautiful piece</a> today by Phillip Toledano. Somehow I got there through the Aperture magazine site. Toledano's piece is a very personal memoir in photographs with text of his time with his father, when his father was very old, until he died at 98. Toledano's mother had already died, but his father had trouble remembering that.<br /><br />The photographs are square format, so perhaps they were shot with film. They are presented beautifully, on the right of the screen, with text on the left. You simply click on the image to progress through the images. It's like turning pages in a book.<br /><br />Many of the things that Toledano says about his elderly father rang true for me: the alternating sadness and humor in very old people; the shock at seeing their very old face in the mirror; the constant looking for beloved people, even those who have died; the loss of inhibition in talking about sex; and even the occasional flash of real joy, love, and gratitude for life and having lived.shannonstoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03732140813186253428noreply@blogger.com0