I'm here because of Ashley.
It was an example of what J. L. Austin called doing things with words -- getting things done with words can mean something beyond mere speechifying. Sometimes talking is action.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Dumped
Crushing news. I'll not be working in the fall. I didn't get the job.
"What must we do?" asked Billy Kwan, quoting Tolstoy (who in turn was quoting the Gospel) in Peter Weir’s film “The Year of Living Dangerously.”
John Dewey writes in Art as Experience that an injured organism may retreat into itself, may accept defeat and withdraw from external contact. I imagine a snail curling inside his shell. But Dewey saw another course: the creature may react to irritation by expanding into new territory. What he apparently means is a life-affirming adaptation, not merely lashing out but creative engagement with the world. This is the rhythm of the aesthetic experience couched in terms of an animal’s interacting with an environment which both nourishes and injures. He describes an alternation of undergoing and doing – suffering and acting.
Today, I’m rather like a snail.
One should never wallow in self pity. While preparing to write a review of a folk art exhibit some years back, I came upon an interview with the Mississippi Delta bluesman Son Thomas. Thomas was never a great financial success. Several versions of the story I remember from that interview are out there, but the version I recall was that his family was so poor when he was a kid they sent him to live with his uncle, a one-armed grave digger. They'd sit on the porch from time to time, broke, no groceries in the pantry, no work. "Don't fret, Son," his uncle would say. "The Lord will provide."
A desperately impoverished, African American, one-armed grave digger in Leland, MS before the Civil Rights era -- that's a man with trouble. I'm just looking at a lot more free time come the end of August.
Even if I do feel like a snail right now.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Dog and Pony
One of the jobs an artist must perform from time to time involves lecturing about his/her artwork to fellow artists and persons with widely varying degrees of interest in the topic. That's what I did yesterday, and the job was hard. Wore me out, in fact.
The lecture was an attempt to use an early 19th century entrepreneur (name of Zadok Cramer), who each year between about 1803 and 1814 published a book called The Navigator, as a foil for writing about art and making paintings which incorporate snatches of text from critical writing I've done. Cramer's book provided maps, directions, advice, and a host of references to the political and economic ideology of his time to people in Pittsburgh, PA who wanted to get their produce (often whiskey) to New Orleans and from there to the great markets of the world. Here's one of his maps showing a stretch of the Ohio from Cincinnati to Louisville.
Between each map (they were woodcuts) Cramer provided descriptions of islands in the river, the locations of the various navigable channels, descriptions of the scenery, the location of farms where the reader could buy a good meal. He also opined about working hard and improving nature's gifts so that a man could enjoy the fruits of his labor and retire wealthy in a world he'd made better by clearing forests to plant crops.
I wanted to compare what he'd done to writing about art exhibitions for a readership which likely never sees the original exhibition. There are certain parallels, and the plot thickens when the fact that Cramer made his maps not from first-hand observation but from interviews with men who'd made the trip. The only time he went down the river was just before his death from tuberculosis. He was trying to get to a healthier climate.
Along the way, the lecture noted that Kandinsky's defense of abstraction made its case by asserting that his new paintings made visible what was invisible, like maps. (At the birth of abstraction, the concept of representation was conjured to its defense) That maps are indexical signs. That Umberto Eco wrote that signs are what we use in order to tell a lie, because they have the ability to refer to what is distant in time and space, making a lie more difficult to catch. That the inevitable rightness of westward expansion espoused by Cramer constituted a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes used that term.
And that I can't tell what myths I unknowingly incorporate into my work as a critic and as a painter. Seeing Cramer's mythologizing is a simple thing 200 years after it was published. And dismissing him as just wrong about what was to become of the Ohio Valley would only be bad faith. Or at least an egotistical sophomoric exercise. Honesty requires that I admit there are errors in what I write that I can't see because I am too close to detect the lies. The evidence is over the horizon.
The editing process gives one a hint, I suppose. It opens the internal dialog of the writer to the scrutiny of another. I used to fight with editors, but I've calmed down in recent years. And I've begun to use the editorial process as a seed for paintings. Once I wrote the phrase "painting is always," and it came back from an editor in New York canceled by a line through it. After some photocopying and digital printing and stenciling with map fragments, the erased, but still legible phrase became a painting that looked like this:
The lecture was an attempt to use an early 19th century entrepreneur (name of Zadok Cramer), who each year between about 1803 and 1814 published a book called The Navigator, as a foil for writing about art and making paintings which incorporate snatches of text from critical writing I've done. Cramer's book provided maps, directions, advice, and a host of references to the political and economic ideology of his time to people in Pittsburgh, PA who wanted to get their produce (often whiskey) to New Orleans and from there to the great markets of the world. Here's one of his maps showing a stretch of the Ohio from Cincinnati to Louisville.
Between each map (they were woodcuts) Cramer provided descriptions of islands in the river, the locations of the various navigable channels, descriptions of the scenery, the location of farms where the reader could buy a good meal. He also opined about working hard and improving nature's gifts so that a man could enjoy the fruits of his labor and retire wealthy in a world he'd made better by clearing forests to plant crops.
I wanted to compare what he'd done to writing about art exhibitions for a readership which likely never sees the original exhibition. There are certain parallels, and the plot thickens when the fact that Cramer made his maps not from first-hand observation but from interviews with men who'd made the trip. The only time he went down the river was just before his death from tuberculosis. He was trying to get to a healthier climate.
Along the way, the lecture noted that Kandinsky's defense of abstraction made its case by asserting that his new paintings made visible what was invisible, like maps. (At the birth of abstraction, the concept of representation was conjured to its defense) That maps are indexical signs. That Umberto Eco wrote that signs are what we use in order to tell a lie, because they have the ability to refer to what is distant in time and space, making a lie more difficult to catch. That the inevitable rightness of westward expansion espoused by Cramer constituted a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes used that term.
And that I can't tell what myths I unknowingly incorporate into my work as a critic and as a painter. Seeing Cramer's mythologizing is a simple thing 200 years after it was published. And dismissing him as just wrong about what was to become of the Ohio Valley would only be bad faith. Or at least an egotistical sophomoric exercise. Honesty requires that I admit there are errors in what I write that I can't see because I am too close to detect the lies. The evidence is over the horizon.
The editing process gives one a hint, I suppose. It opens the internal dialog of the writer to the scrutiny of another. I used to fight with editors, but I've calmed down in recent years. And I've begun to use the editorial process as a seed for paintings. Once I wrote the phrase "painting is always," and it came back from an editor in New York canceled by a line through it. After some photocopying and digital printing and stenciling with map fragments, the erased, but still legible phrase became a painting that looked like this:
Monday, March 3, 2008
Political Robots
For the first time in my life, my vote in the Democratic presidential primary here in Texas means something. I'm going to help decide the nominee. It's a good feeling.
But everybody knows it, not just me. And the robots have been calling at quite a clip to solicit my vote. They vary in their degree of automation. Some are robot-assists to mammalian contact with actual persons participating after the robot dials my number and screens it for answering machines, busy signals, and bad connections. Some are robot polls like the Republican one last night that asked me if I had a favorable opinion of George W. Bush (no), Sen. John Cornyn (no), Gov. Rick Perry (nope and no again). I then asked me if I was a codger (yes) and thanked me for my time. Okay, it actually was interested about my age. Some sort of demographic thing that identified me as a rare bird: white male, over fifty, Texan, and anti-Bush.
More often the robots are shills for actual mammals. Barack Obama called last week to pass the time and opine about what is in my best interests when I vote tomorrow. Gen. Wesley Clark called on Saturday offering to help me decide to vote for Sen. Clinton and make him happy for my wise choice. Hillary Clinton herself just left a message on my answering machine explaining why a vote for her was a vote for...something good, but I forget. In each case, the calls were simply canned recordings pumped into my house by speed dialing digitized gadgets.
Robots.
But -- oh, wonderful thing! -- just now a fresh, energetic and distinctly chilled young man rang my doorbell. He wanted me to vote for Obama. A brisk mammalian conversation ensued. I told him he had my vote. He reminded me about the caucus in the county seat after the polls close tomorrow. I let him know I was planning to attend.
It makes me wonder what market analyses exist that justify all those robots that keep calling.
But everybody knows it, not just me. And the robots have been calling at quite a clip to solicit my vote. They vary in their degree of automation. Some are robot-assists to mammalian contact with actual persons participating after the robot dials my number and screens it for answering machines, busy signals, and bad connections. Some are robot polls like the Republican one last night that asked me if I had a favorable opinion of George W. Bush (no), Sen. John Cornyn (no), Gov. Rick Perry (nope and no again). I then asked me if I was a codger (yes) and thanked me for my time. Okay, it actually was interested about my age. Some sort of demographic thing that identified me as a rare bird: white male, over fifty, Texan, and anti-Bush.
More often the robots are shills for actual mammals. Barack Obama called last week to pass the time and opine about what is in my best interests when I vote tomorrow. Gen. Wesley Clark called on Saturday offering to help me decide to vote for Sen. Clinton and make him happy for my wise choice. Hillary Clinton herself just left a message on my answering machine explaining why a vote for her was a vote for...something good, but I forget. In each case, the calls were simply canned recordings pumped into my house by speed dialing digitized gadgets.
Robots.
But -- oh, wonderful thing! -- just now a fresh, energetic and distinctly chilled young man rang my doorbell. He wanted me to vote for Obama. A brisk mammalian conversation ensued. I told him he had my vote. He reminded me about the caucus in the county seat after the polls close tomorrow. I let him know I was planning to attend.
It makes me wonder what market analyses exist that justify all those robots that keep calling.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
CAA side show
This week the College Art Association held its annual meeting in Dallas, and that means that artist friends from around the country were an hour's drive away from my prairie home. What luck! Wednesday after a department head meeting and after a departmental meeting, I drove into the big city to visit with my friend Kevin and a couple of arts professionals. It was mostly a dinner at an Italian place on Main St. down town. Even though I was pretty winded from all the administrative shenanigans of the day, it was really good to spend some time with a man I respect and to reconnect with his friends Chris and Charla. Chris wrote a decent review of my last show in Kansas when he was living there. Now that he's here with Charla, I probably should do a few things to connect him to the Dallas scene.
Friday night we drove in to the big city again for dinner -- this time with Kevin and John, a friend from back in our days when was working on my MFA in Terre Haute. Nandina was our destination, and it was quite good. But I have to say that the restaurant isn't as fine as our first visit a few years back. And unfortunately Kevin isn't a fan of seafood -- even when it's cooked. So sushi didn't work at all for him.
We hadn't seen John for several years (he's on the faculty of a university in North Carolina), but our conversation never missed a beat. I suppose that's evidence of the nature of our friendship.
Saturday, we met John and his friend David at the conference hotel at lunch time. They wanted barbecue, so it was obvious that Sonny Bryan's was the destination. It's the classic Dallas BBQ joint. They've opened branches in other parts of town, but the original on Inwood is the real deal. I mean, I've eaten at other locations, but BBQ in Macy's at the Galleria somehow misses the mark. We had beef sandwiches, of course.
After lunch, I drove us to the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art so John could see the video show. Next it was Barry Whistler's place where Scott Barber's paintings from the mid 90's are on exhibit. Scott died a couple of years ago -- complications from a bone marrow transplant he underwent to fight a recurring cancer. Some of the last paintings he made were based on photomicrographs from his lab work. Big, generous, and beautiful abstractions derived from images of a disease that threatened his life. Around the corner from Barry's Road Agent Gallery offered a stylish, elegant show of four artists from Chicago. Next we headed up to Dunn and Brown to see Beverly Semmes' outsized dresses. I was able to show John a copy of Trenton Doyle Hancock's book, Me, a Mound, and one of Robyn O'Neil's very large graphite drawings. The two of them graduated from my school a few years back and are responsible for alumni of our program being represented in three Whitney Biennials in a row.
After drinks at the Stoneleigh P, I drove us to S&D Oyster house for dinner. For the table: four beers, two dozen on the half shell, a fried oyster po' boy, two shrimp cocktails with remoulade, two bowls of gumbo, a slice of lemon meringue pie, and two orders of bread pudding.
It's a little embarrassing to confess, but that was my total involvement with the 2008 CAA: Meeting friends from out of town for restaurant meals and a little gallery hopping. Not exactly career building, I suppose.
Friday night we drove in to the big city again for dinner -- this time with Kevin and John, a friend from back in our days when was working on my MFA in Terre Haute. Nandina was our destination, and it was quite good. But I have to say that the restaurant isn't as fine as our first visit a few years back. And unfortunately Kevin isn't a fan of seafood -- even when it's cooked. So sushi didn't work at all for him.
We hadn't seen John for several years (he's on the faculty of a university in North Carolina), but our conversation never missed a beat. I suppose that's evidence of the nature of our friendship.
Saturday, we met John and his friend David at the conference hotel at lunch time. They wanted barbecue, so it was obvious that Sonny Bryan's was the destination. It's the classic Dallas BBQ joint. They've opened branches in other parts of town, but the original on Inwood is the real deal. I mean, I've eaten at other locations, but BBQ in Macy's at the Galleria somehow misses the mark. We had beef sandwiches, of course.
After lunch, I drove us to the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art so John could see the video show. Next it was Barry Whistler's place where Scott Barber's paintings from the mid 90's are on exhibit. Scott died a couple of years ago -- complications from a bone marrow transplant he underwent to fight a recurring cancer. Some of the last paintings he made were based on photomicrographs from his lab work. Big, generous, and beautiful abstractions derived from images of a disease that threatened his life. Around the corner from Barry's Road Agent Gallery offered a stylish, elegant show of four artists from Chicago. Next we headed up to Dunn and Brown to see Beverly Semmes' outsized dresses. I was able to show John a copy of Trenton Doyle Hancock's book, Me, a Mound, and one of Robyn O'Neil's very large graphite drawings. The two of them graduated from my school a few years back and are responsible for alumni of our program being represented in three Whitney Biennials in a row.
After drinks at the Stoneleigh P, I drove us to S&D Oyster house for dinner. For the table: four beers, two dozen on the half shell, a fried oyster po' boy, two shrimp cocktails with remoulade, two bowls of gumbo, a slice of lemon meringue pie, and two orders of bread pudding.
It's a little embarrassing to confess, but that was my total involvement with the 2008 CAA: Meeting friends from out of town for restaurant meals and a little gallery hopping. Not exactly career building, I suppose.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Duck breast prosciutto
A couple of years back, we spent Christmas with our daughter who was then living in the city of Montauban near the French city of Toulouse. There were many amazing things to love in the regional food stores, but one in particular stayed with me -- little slices of cured duck breast set on rounds of chevre. Tom Colicchio has a recipe for duck prosciutto in his book The Craft of Cooking. There's another one in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie. I've made it before, using both recipes. This time it was the Colicchio version. After 24 hours in a salt cure and a couple weeks hanging in the pantry with the window open, it looked like the photo above.
Much distinguishes the cultures of Cow Hill and southwestern France. But some things can be approximated even on this prairie.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Phone videos
Last night we attended an opening for a show ("Real Time")at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art -- curated by a couple of friends of mine, John Pomara and Dean Terry. Okay, I'm stretching to call Dean a friend, but we have worked together and he and I have engaged in friendly conversations from time to time. (John and Dean teach at UT-Dallas, where I once worked as a painting teacher.) The premise of their show is projections of camera phone videos by a number of artists and art collectives in the area -- videos which are refreshed daily in short snippets they're calling microart. Uber-techno-guy that he is, Dean has set up a Web site for the show here.
The opening was rather odd. They charged admission, for one thing -- Joan Davidow, the director is working hard to raise big dollars for the joint's new building, but jeeze, a sawbuck to drink art wine, groove to a DJ's turntable tunes and nibble from a fruit plate struck me as a PR mistake.
On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that the show itself will evolve into a really interesting event. Any exhibit that includes Ludwig Schwarz singing "Time after Time" to his cat holds promise for seriously whacked future antics.
Here's an excerpt from Dean's curatorial statement: "Microart is about accepting and exhibiting (mostly) failure rather than (mostly) success. It is about the composite and sequential effect of a large number of small bits that create a stream rather than fewer, individual substantive statements. And its about honesty and directness of the process. Individual posts may be disposable, like most cultural productions in consumer society, but the goal is that the cumulative effect is not."
Some ifs:
If you're reasonably competent and if you hang around long enough, you run into certain sweet ironies like the fact that I was the first art teacher of Kirstin Macy, one of the artists in John and Dean's show.
If anybody wants to participate in "Real Time," Dean said there will be a portal for video donations on the show's Web site. When I checked just now, I didn't see anything that looked to me like a way to contribute. But I've missed things like that before.
If you visit Dean's personal site (linked above), be sure to check out his documentary "Subdivided." It ran last fall on KERA, the Dallas PBS affiliate, and I was quite impressed. We're going to get him out here to Commerce to lecture soon as we can.
The opening was rather odd. They charged admission, for one thing -- Joan Davidow, the director is working hard to raise big dollars for the joint's new building, but jeeze, a sawbuck to drink art wine, groove to a DJ's turntable tunes and nibble from a fruit plate struck me as a PR mistake.
On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that the show itself will evolve into a really interesting event. Any exhibit that includes Ludwig Schwarz singing "Time after Time" to his cat holds promise for seriously whacked future antics.
Here's an excerpt from Dean's curatorial statement: "Microart is about accepting and exhibiting (mostly) failure rather than (mostly) success. It is about the composite and sequential effect of a large number of small bits that create a stream rather than fewer, individual substantive statements. And its about honesty and directness of the process. Individual posts may be disposable, like most cultural productions in consumer society, but the goal is that the cumulative effect is not."
Some ifs:
If you're reasonably competent and if you hang around long enough, you run into certain sweet ironies like the fact that I was the first art teacher of Kirstin Macy, one of the artists in John and Dean's show.
If anybody wants to participate in "Real Time," Dean said there will be a portal for video donations on the show's Web site. When I checked just now, I didn't see anything that looked to me like a way to contribute. But I've missed things like that before.
If you visit Dean's personal site (linked above), be sure to check out his documentary "Subdivided." It ran last fall on KERA, the Dallas PBS affiliate, and I was quite impressed. We're going to get him out here to Commerce to lecture soon as we can.
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