Archive for March, 2009
Contact Form Updated
Thumbs Up by Flickr user Vernhart. Click image to view its source.
Some readers were having a little trouble with the contact form, so I’ve updated it with a new plugin. Thanks for your patience!
Friskee Trax 4 Cover
Cover illustration for Friskee Trax 4 compilation from Friskee Media. Ink on found paper, 2009. Click image to view larger.
My friend Josh Heilaman of Friskee Media commissioned this cover for the Friskee Trax Compilation vol. 4. Head on over to the Friskee site to sample the tasty beats buffet.
The original drawing is about 5 inches square, a marker drawing on an old map.
London Shop Fronts
Hao Wah, Peckham High Street, SE15, from the London Shop Fronts blog. Click image to visit the site.
As the London Shop Fronts blog reveals, every place in the world has a unique character that may be difficult to define, but is instantly recognizable. It’s one of the things I love about Oklahoma City.
I’m drawn to the flat, almost clinical documentary style of these photographs. Although these are architectural spaces, the frontal perspective flattens the real-life objects into an abstracted array of color and texture. And the homebrew typography is always wonderful.
Related
Paho Mann, photographer. See particularly the Reinhabited Circle-K series.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, architectural photographers. See the Framework Houses series at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for examples.
Alison Bechdel on Creating Fun Home
Alison Bechdel is the creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. Her recent book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a frank and tender deconstruction of her childhood and adolescence. It’s never easy to understand one’s parents from an adult perspective, and Bechdel uses Fun Home to explore her father’s identity through fresh eyes.
Note: If you are reading this blog (and watching the videos) in Firefox, good for you! (If not, please switch browsers right away. You won’t regret it.) Since you are a savvy Firefox user, you might benefit from the Flashblock plugin, which reduces the load time for web pages with embedded videos.
Seriousness Abused
Tate I, photo by Flickr user Martino’s Doodles. Click image to visit the Flickr page.
It’s easy to label me as an artist: I paint. I paint pictures. I paint pictures of people. Easy, right? I don’t happen to be particularly turned on by conceptual art, or art that’s deliberately obfuscated, or art objects overshadowed by the artist’s mission to “break boundaries” and “challenge preconceptions.”
Before you click away, conceptual artists, please hear me: I love you. And also you guys, who like to paint pictures of kitties and geraniums: I love you, too. Art is art, and it takes all kinds. There, I’ve said my thing.
Art can be difficult for us to swallow. As Dan Fox writes in this editorial for Frieze Magazine, difficult art has become the norm in the art world.
Boundaries are ‘broken down’ and ‘preconceptions challenged’ so often as to make subversion and radicality seem like a mandatory daily chore rather than a blow to the status quo. They perpetuate old-fashioned notions, such as that of the artist visionary liberating the masses from mental enslavement by bourgeois values. Overuse has made these words sound strangely toothless, for what’s at stake in the art is often less important (but not necessarily without value) than the language suggests.
Of course, what constitutes “the art world” is an ever-shifting tapestry of popular opinion, preconceptions, and nebulous reputations. (Perhaps some boundary-breaking is warranted here.) It seems one is either in it or not. It’s hard to say when exactly an artist becomes part of the art world, we usually rest upon the consensus that they have arrived. This vague notion of the art world as an establishment points out our links to the tired cliche of the artist as revolutionary. At what point does the liberator become the institution?
This is just one of the many questions I asked myself while reading Fox’s article (via Kristin Anderson). I didn’t come up with many answers. I’ll continue to think about how deeply the following resonates with me:
You have to understand the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many times their name crops up on e-flux announcements; someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze; the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by plane, you must be high-powered because your business reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.
I Met The Walrus
From I Met The Walrus’ YouTube page:
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation.
Back To Normal Announced for July through September
Tishomingo “Mingo” Yale, acrylic on found panel, 2008. Click image to enlarge.
The first Art 365 exhibit came to an end at the beginning of this year. Oklahoma artists and audiences can now look forward to the next one, not to mention OVAC‘s other great events, like Momentum (this weekend!). Fortunately, my series for Art 365, titled Normal, OK, continues to grow. I have booked a new showing of Normal, OK at the Oklahoma Heritage Association’s Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City. The show is scheduled to open the first week of July and run through the end of September 2009. We are tentatively placing the public reception at Thursday 17 September. More details as they come.
I am working on new character portraits for Normal — folks you may have read about in the book, whose faces have yet to be revealed. (Kind of like cylons.) Stay tuned.