Artist Lecture Series/Bidonville Cafe, Dec.7

The first Sunday of the month is upon us again and so another "slide show". I really encourage people to come out for some old fashioned art banter at Bidonville. The lecture series has been consistently good and I for one am glad to get another dose before the Holiday crunch fully descends. This month is Nancy Goldring and Zoe Pettijohn Schade and I think both are doing interesting work. So if you are not in Miami, stop by ...

Sunday, Dec. 7 @ 7:00 pm
Bidonville Cafe in lovely Fort Greene
Willoughby Ave. (b/w Clermont & Adelphi)
Bklyn, NY 11205
718.855.4515
G or C train to Clinton/ Washington and march north

This month's artists:

Nancy Goldring

“Foto-projection,” is a term I coined for a unique process I have been developing over the last 24 years. This approach proposes irreconcilable time frames, shifting vantage points, and changing moods, and corresponds to my understanding of human perception. Though itself a synthesis, each foto-projection represents only one of the many possible ways of depicting or evoking a place. When viewed altogether, the non-narrative sequence of images offers a personal system for ordering the multiplicity of experience.

“Goldring’s images are the tools of an understanding located in a discrete zone somewhere between philology and an impression of reality, an understanding that must never be lost…”

- Paolo Barbaro, from Palimpsest: The Photographs of Nancy Goldring

Zoe Pettijohn Schade:

The artist works from the tradition of painting textile patterns with gouache, while burying each repeating layer of imagery beneath other layers. The embedded and abstracted images rise to the eye in their own time like memories. The geometry of repetition has as much perceptual and psychological ramifications as the image. Working with historical decorative structures and personal imagery, a constellation of associations is woven through each painting.

anatomy of a painting [5]

So before taking off again this week, I wanted to post the latest update on this piece. I went back into the midsection and I'm getting closer to the space and feel of the final piece. Still laboring on the grid and think I am closer to understanding it's role which will likely be more of a subtle aspect of the ground and less of an overlay. But then again, who knows...

anatomy of a painting [4]

A little time has passed since my last update on this painting. The election consumed much of my head and heart space and then of course other works were demanding more of my attention. Last week, I got back into this one. Mostly still adjusting the grid and have some play with the colors. Tiling and discothequing endlessly, which turned out to be a good exercise and annoying at the same time. I decided to move into the center of the work with a different read of daytime. I moved heavy on the turquoise- really just to see it as I haven't explored the color enough. It's not really what I want at this stage but it has been useful to have it there for a day or two. Ultimately what is above is now a pretty well aligned ground for the painting to be which should more or less see this come to completion. This is the ugly duckling part of my process or the transition point where it seems like nothing is working but all most of the clues are there speaking in some way, however muffled.

Color adjustments for the grid are in order, more recession and sublimation as well as a new resolution for the midsection. After that the main focus will be to determine if this painting has an action, what player will activate the field or will I go another route. Perhaps some doubling/repetition of a sequence. Not sure and I'm guessing that makes little sense to anyone, but I know what I mean....the piece is coming into focus for me as you'll see in the next "clip".

A detail in closing with a somewhat better color accuracy.

Stop proposed budget cuts for the arts

As many of you know, New York is heading into some perilous financial times. The financial crisis has hit this city and state quite hard as it is overly dependent on Wall Street. Big cuts are in the making across the board from fire station closings, police cuts and so forth. As you might expect, the Arts are front and center when cuts are needed. The following if from CAA. Take some time and call or email your rep.

Governor David A. Patterson proposes emergency budget cuts to the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).

Send an email to your senator, assembly people, and the governor today to oppose these reductions.

We only have a few days to make our voices heard because the special legislative session convenes on November 18, 2008.

The New York State Senate and Assembly will consider the governor’s proposed cuts, including an additional $7 million reduction to the current arts budget. This could mean that almost four hundred grantees in the October cycle and a similar number in the December cycle would receive almost nothing. The inequities are staggering.

Governor Patterson’s proposal comes after $2.6 million (6 percent) already cut from the NYSCA budget a short time ago—thereby potentially decreasing the council’s total budget by about 20 percent, from $49 million to $39 million midyear.

The governor called the special legislative session to deal with the additional shortfall in the current year. His proposed plan is a comprehensive, two-year $5.2 billion deficit-reduction plan that he says will entirely eliminate the state’s $1.5 billion current-year shortfall.

The legislature can alter the “cut list” and make different recommendations. The governor proposed significant cuts to all sectors, so let your legislators know that the tiny savings they gain from the arts cut pales in comparison to the resulting social and economic losses in communities across the state.

Send an email now. It takes only two minutes to do so.

Thank you,
CAA

James Castle retro in philly

The Philadelphia Museum of Art still has an ongoing retrospective of James Castle through January 4, 2009. I haven't seen it yet but a day trip is in the planning as this is a first and a must see. Also, a great new and comprehensive catalog is available. Do yourself a favor and check out this national treasure.

Here's the blurb:

James Castle: A Retrospective marks the first comprehensive museum exhibition of the work of James Castle (1899–1977), an artist from rural Idaho who, despite undergoing no formal or conventional training, is especially admired for the unique homemade quality, graphic skill, and visual and conceptual range that characterize his works.
By all accounts deaf since birth, and presumably never having learned much language, Castle turned his obsessive and constant production of drawn images into his primary mode of communication with what must often have seemed the strange and baffling world around him.
The exhibition consists of some 300 drawings, color wash pieces, handmade books, assemblages, and text works selected from museums and private collections, including many from the holdings in Castle’s estate.

a field guide to melancholy

Here's a new author for me and a title that I'm itching to read. Not quite available yet in the U.S. but it has been released in the U.K.

Dylan Trigg has this brief assessment:

As though to perfectly coincide with the onset of winter, Jacky Bowring’s new book, A Field Guide to Melancholy has arrived. I am working through it, slowly. Already I sense it is a book that deserves to be read with a particular kind of pace. Somewhat like memory itself, a book that is conducive to a certain light and rhythm, full of both twilight and permanence simultaneously. Recommended.

Jeff Sharlet - the Family interview

Guernica recently conducted a fascinating interview with religion journalist Jeff Sharlett regarding his recent publication: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Excerpt from the (Rawlinson) interview:

One of the most interesting things about anti-intellectualism in American life is that it’s a very intellectual project. Real anti-intellectualism, the Family kind, you know, “Jesus plus nothing,” the systematic stripping away of history, of theology, of any kind of influence—that’s an intellectual project. Not for nothing does Doug Coe express some admiration for Pol Pot. In year zero, he did the same thing. Pol Pot had all the intellectuals killed. You only do that if you have an idea. That’s an extreme form of ideology that says: I can purify things.

There are two great traditions that have been written about before, which are American rationalism and American sentimentalism. What you see in the Family’s expression of power is that these are not two opposite poles, but the head and heart, the realpolitik of world power. The sentimental narrative, which is anti-intellectual—is absolutely interwoven with the rationalist Family agenda.

All Obama - the covers

I never did get a paper yesterday, but here is a link to all the cover pages from around the globe. Incredible.

Alain Badiou - tonight LES

Miguel Abreu Gallery presents:

ALAIN BADIOU
Is the word 'Communism' forever doomed?
Thursday, NOV.6 7PM
HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT
Harry de Jur Playhouse
466 Grand St.

For the launch of Lacanian Ink #32

Seating is first come, first served basis

the new sheriff

The tsunami that we all hoped for. Let's get to work!


image: Iglesias

voting in Greenpoint

This was my view this morning heading into the gym where we vote. It went smoothly but I have never seen a crowd this size. The wait was 30 minutes which is quite different from what people are experiencing in the Bronx or even Bushwick. I have to say, I got a little choked up watching everyone eager to cast their vote.

VOTE TODAY

idealogues and the philosophical pragmatist

We're heading into the final hours of this historic campaign and it seems as good a time as any to look at the nature of Obama the candidate. This entry over at Phronesisaical truly renders why there should be excitement and interest in Obama the President. It also reminds me what is sadly missing from not only the GOP but our national punditry at large. I highly recommend you spend the time to read the full post.

Here are some of the juicier bits from Helmut:

To put it simply, Obama seems to me an experimentalist problem-solver of a pragmatic stripe.

A pragmatist thinks in terms of problems and tools and experiments for solving them. A problem arises, which is such precisely because we don't have the conceptual or normative tools at hand to solve it. The pragmatist looks around for explanations, interpretations, analyses, arguments, and new understandings to try help us resolve the problem. If it's political, or a matter of policy, or a matter of ethics or legal interpretation, the pragmatist understands that we start from an irreducible pluralism of values that are crucial to even understanding the problem, let alone resolving it. In a pluralistic country such as the US, policy and political disputes are often disputes involving complex, competing values and ideas. They are problems of intelligent cooperation.

Ideological commitment of the sort that drives the US political system is problematic here - it may provide us with some useful interpretive tools, but it more than likely frames and constricts our understanding of the nature of the problem and the range of possible solutions a priori, prior to investigating the problem. This suggests that the truth of the matter comes prior to testing ideas and policies. The ideologist ends up, by default, resolving problems from a partial and usually self-interested perspective. Pragmatists think this has it all backwards.

continues-

The pragmatist seeks to suspend prior ideological commitments and focus rather on generating ongoing dialogue, attempting to build a community of public discussion, in order to gain the fullest possible view of the problem as well as in order to eventually engage the most democratic means for resolving it.

What does this mean for Obama the president? I'd like to hope that the office doesn't convert Obama into yet another pragmatist of the crass, non-philosophical version I mentioned above. I'm not worried about him being an ideologue. Despite the right's best efforts to paint him as such, there's little evidence that he's that sort of person. He's going to make a lot of people unhappy on both the left and the right when he doesn't follow the rules of prior ideological commitments. That unhappiness will unwittingly reflect something profoundly wrong with the older and hopefully dying form of polarized ideological politics in the US. But, unlike how many pundits put it, the problem is less "polarization" than it is the epistemological backwardness of ideology-driven politics.

But can Obama function as a genuine philosophical pragmatist? I think so. Given the serious nature of the problems he'll be dealing with as president - from the wars to climate change to poverty and economic collapse to education and healthcare - we really do need someone who's not blinkered by prior ideological commitments and hackneyed policy ideas and tools. We need a philosophical pragmatist with a rich understanding of the complex diversity of the US and the world, a morally reflective person who's willing to listen, to experiment, to involve and engage, and to lead when it is time to lead. Everything in his background says this is precisely who Obama is.

Now vote Obama!


Via: Phronesisaical

votevotevotevotevotevote

Tomorrow is the big day even though millions have cast early ballots. Here’s a video worth watching about a very important ongoing project called Video the Vote.Everyone who goes to vote, and has the technology to do it, should document their experience. Disinformation? Purged from the list? Long lines? Vote flipping machines? Turned away because of "missing" registration information? Harassment by partisan "monitors"? This collective effort will go a long way towards election reform, which I hope will be a big priority for the new congress and president but it can only happen with a mandate from us.

The clip above is from Video the Vote, a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. They organize citizen journalists—ordinary folks like you and me—to document election problems as they occur. VV then distributes their footage to the mainstream media and online to make sure the full story of Election Day 2008 gets told. You can watch another video here. If you have footage from your polling place you can upload it at the videothevote site.


via: Mudflats/videothevote

happy halloween

voter crunch time

Yes, we're still old school in NY and rockin the lever machines. I have to say, I love these things. They really are time capsules. Things are coming to a close after almost 2 grueling years for this presidential contest. Hard to believe because it seems more like 10 years on most days. I'm anxious to be less anxious and also fear the huge depression that may come as a result of a McCain coup. Regardless, if you want to follow what is happening state to state with all the controversy over fraudulent registration forms, voter purges, touch screens and intimidation in these waning days please saty tuned to the following blogs.

1. The Brad blog

2. Election Law blog

Artist Lecture Series/ Bidonville Cafe, Nov. 2

The next installment of this intimate lecture series continues this Sunday. I encourage any readers to make it out or inquire about participating.So far so good with this fledgling effort.

Sunday, Nov. 2 @ 7:00 pm
Bidonville Cafe in Fort Greene
Willoughby Ave. (b/w Clermont & Adelphi)
Bklyn, NY 11205
718.855.4515
G or C train to Clinton/ Washington and march north

This month's artists:

Josh Jordan

Jordan's ideas stem from his prepubescent and high school experiences from there. They were the emotional basis for his desire to pursue art as a young adult. These ideas are expressed in scenes of various delusions of grandeur. He creates passive/aggressive and sometimes self-deprecating scenarios of heroism, glory, or ardor to illustrate these delusions.The content of his work focuses on adolescence, its persona, and its tendency toward dreams, melodrama, fantasy, and infatuation. The focus of those states of consciousness is motivated by the seemingly mystical energy of adolescent girls and their ability to inspire longing, elusive flirtation, clumsy acts of chivalry, and inevitable humiliation. Jordan also calls upon the psychic, social, erotic power of pop idolatry to realize the extent and scope of the delusional narrative.

Timothy Hutchings:

"Some time ago I consciously chose to adopt a lackadaisical approach to the intellectual rigor of my art making. I'd decided that I was out to make work to amuse myself, not to communicate carefully crafted ideas about the world. By letting my brain go slack, I could accidentally create things which I could find pleasure in for myself - just as a sloppy hand can create a line which surprises it's owner. This has something to do with the structure of joke making, I think. My brain finds pleasure in the off-handed quip more than the finely crafted story, and finds little joy in telling the same joke twice. In retrospect, this may not have proven to be a very good tactic.

hidden water atlas

This is fascinating (via BLDGBLOG):

An "atlas of hidden water" has been created to reveal where the world's freshwater aquifers really lie. "The hope," New Scientist reports, "is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world."
This prospective hydro-geopolitical legislation currently includes a "draft Convention on transboundary aquifers."

"What the UNESCO map reveals," New Scientist adds, "is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia." One of these is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose waters are nearly a million years old.
According – somewhat oddly – to the International Atomic Energy Agency:

The ancient system’s massive reserves, estimated at 375,000 cu km of water (equivalent to about 500 years of Nile River discharge), are confined deep inside the earth’s underground chambers – staggered, tiered, and pooled beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, oasis settlements, wadis (dry riverbeds that contain water only during times of heavy rain), small villages, towns, and large cities.

obama-quins

This election has permeated all walks of life here in the city. A friend and I saw these funny, enthusiastic (and creepy) "Obamas" at Triple Five Soul downtown on Lafayette Street.


image: Lucas Thorpe

country first

ha ha ...art imitating life once again.

oh shit

Finally, a snarky piece that actually made me laugh instead of implying that I'm supposed to laugh. The ultimate salesman strikes again.

A piece of art by Damien Hirst has set the new record for a single item at auction. The piece entitled ‘Oh Shit’ fetched £2.3bn after frantic bidding by an anonymous investor. The work, which features a Merrill Lynch employee suspended in a tank of formaldehyde secured the highest price yet paid for a single piece of banking history.

my friends

my friends, who IS that dark knight, hengghhhh... priceless parallel to the prez debates!



via Wonkette

sticky sublime and the pusuit of strangeness

I've been thinking about this comment recently:

But to get back to the sublime, if you start out academically and you are a student and you are trying to understand some of the networks behind art, and you are getting more comfortable with what might be, what it could be, what some of the apparatus might be, there still is this very self-conscious deliberate journey you are on and that is much of what I felt in graduate school. This journey oriented to assuming a belief that through this intelligence, through mental acuity, you are going to try to pressure these doors open and to give you some sight. And all that is done without being in tune, necessarily, with the enormous levels an artist can bring into himself, and assume, and let open, once you are relaxed about the arena you are in. Your mind is like a blowtorch, trying to burn down things so you can find a home. You’re in the woods, and now it’s time to both feel the repercussions of what you did, and to flavor yourself with a little more feedback from Camus. I thought a lot of that early stuff of mine was deliberate and intellectually oriented. The piece with the spider, where I coaxed the spider through the tube, some of that stuff started to allow certain chemical and psychological things in, that didn’t get in at the start, because you were too targeted. Like the case about the object, the anti-object and the role of galleries. Soon there came a time when the decisions were made in less calculated ways. They were a bit more mysterious. These are the elements that were going to separate you from other people. They were not strategic. They were violating strategy, and in its place there was a kind of uncertainty. So through this mystique I would find references operating in a large universal, or perhaps, in an arena more capable of strangeness.

Dennis Oppenheim speaking with Bill Beckley

Sticky Sublime, 2001 – pg. 109

faking it

October 18, 2006 -St. Louis

via Kos

U.S.A. #1

I had to reduce my posting this month and have made a conscious effort to scale back my news consumption for my own sanity. Still, my friends and I have been batting around McPalin rally footage during the last 2 weeks to diffuse our horror with some sarcastic nervous wit. It helps, but watching these crowds makes us all sick and alarmed at yet unsurprised. Huge swaths of our peers are still mired in a 1960's and increasingly a 1950's culture war of bigotry and willful ignorance. You really begin to understand how easy it is to sway ordinary law abiding people into acts of hate. Imagine how little it might take to insight these people at this stage of the campaigns. How will they handle an Obama victory? Will it be excepted on any level? The GOP is morphing real time into a national "white's only" party right. The apartheid mentality is deafening.

video: TPM

the sky IS falling

Like many of you I have been trying to overcome a major learning curve regarding the economic shock waves over the last couple of weeks. I’m somewhat more educated but still a ways to go.
I’m at least far enough along to know that deregulation and Fannie/Freddie are not the sole causes – no thanks to the candidate sound bites. One positive development has been the emergence of the British /Swedish proposal as the front runner of a solution, even by an increasingly humble Hank Paulson whose warts are abundantly clear. We all can be glad he did not act on his initial unitary money grab. I’m also pleased to observe the emergence of Paul Krugman and Brad Delong as leading voices on the meltdown. They’ve been on course from the beginning and seem to be getting more play in the MSM because of it. A less familiar name is Nouriel Roubini, who is now likely to be a household name. Oracular in scope, the economist is now being echoed by the IMF.

Here’s the latest somber insight from Roubini:

At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster. Urgent and immediate necessary actions that need to be done globally (with some variants across countries depending on the severity of the problem and the overall resources available to the sovereigns) include:

- another rapid round of policy rate cuts of the order of at least 150 basis points on average globally;

- a temporary blanket guarantee of all deposits while a triage between insolvent financial institutions that need to be shut down and distressed but solvent institutions that need to be partially nationalized with injections of public capital is made;
- a rapid reduction of the debt burden of insolvent households preceded by a temporary freeze on all foreclosures;

- massive and unlimited provision of liquidity to solvent financial institutions;
- public provision of credit to the solvent parts of the corporate sector to avoid a short-term debt refinancing crisis for solvent but illiquid corporations and small businesses;

- a massive direct government fiscal stimulus packages that includes public works, infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits, tax rebates to lower income households and provision of grants to strapped and crunched state and local government;

- a rapid resolution of the banking problems via triage, public recapitalization of financial institutions and reduction of the debt burden of distressed households and borrowers;

- an agreement between lender and creditor countries running current account surpluses and borrowing and debtor countries running current account deficits to maintain an orderly financing of deficits and a recycling of the surpluses of creditors to avoid a disorderly adjustment of such imbalances.

At this point anything short of these radical and coordinated actions may lead to a market crash, a global systemic financial meltdown and to a global depression. At this stage central banks that are usually supposed to be the "lenders of last resort" need to become the "lenders of first and only resort" as, under conditions of panic and total loss of confidence, no one in the private sector is lending to anyone else since counterparty risk is extreme. And fiscal authorities that usually are spenders and insurers of last resort need to temporarily become the spenders and insurers of first resort. The fiscal costs of these actions will be large but the economic and fiscal costs of inaction would be of a much larger and severe magnitude. Thus, the time to act is now as all the policy officials of the world are meeting this weekend in Washington at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.

In closing, cheers to Krugman for his Nobel!

read the minutes - Wasilla town

those Fleet Foxes

A great show on Sunday at Webster Hall, the above clip is a new song debuted by Fleet Foxes. Another studio soundtrack staple, I was super impressed with the force of their vocals. It is not a studio trick – these guys are for real. Obviously, the triumphant quality for me in their music is the harmony of the vocals. Harkening back to that Laurel Canyon sound, FF conjures two of my favorite records from that era– David Crosby/If I Could Only Remember My Name and John Philips/ Wolf King of L.A. This coupled with some Beachwood Sparks, Shins, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ve got a hell of a sound for making art.

Artist lecture series at Bidonville Cafe (Oct. 5)

Last month I mentioned a new grass roots lecture series put together by some friends of mine in an effort to get a conversation going. This Sunday is the next installment. If you can travel out to Brooklyn it will be worth the trip. We had a great discussion last month and I think it safe to say that each presenting artist walked away a little re-charged. This series is happening the first Sunday of every month. If you want to participate send me an email and I'll put you in contact with the peeps in charge. Here are the event details for those interested in attending.

Sunday, Oct. 5 @ 7:00 pm
Bidonville Cafe in Fort Greene
Willoughby Ave. (b/w Clermont & Adelphi)
Bklyn, NY 11205
718.855.4515
G or C train to Clinton/ Washington and march north

This month’s artists are:

Josh Peters:

“Photography taken from 1960s and 70s advertisements and other sources of popular culture are seen through the distorting prism of memory. The images are viewed from a psychic distance, but it is not ironic or coldly critical. Instead the images are imbued with even more mystery and desire, and underlying darkness is brought to the fore.”

Bill Powhida:

“Last year around this time I was in panic mode of a different sort trying to finish a solo show and make enough work for Aqua Art and Pulse in Miami. I managed to get my show A Study for Sofia Coppola’s Film ‘Powhida’ finished and sent off to San Francisco by the end of September. The show opened enthusiastically, but I quickly realized I wasn’t going to sell out the show at the opening. In fact, I only sold two small works—one to the gallery and the other to a collector who explained that he found my work ‘both intellectually challenged and challenging.’ After I assured him that I wasn’t going to suddenly start painting landscapes and would indeed continue developing work about William Powhida, a fictional artist of dubious worth, he bought a modest painting.”