Connecting the dots; counting the beans

One of the ugly things that precipitated the current financial mess involved large financial institutions holding assets that turned out to be a lot less valuable than they wanted them to be when they had to state what stuff they held was worth against what they were obliged to pay out. Specifically big finance found itself holding a lot of paper last year that should by rights be worth billions, but turned out to be illiquid in the skeptical market that followed the credit meltdown. So a bank with a buttload of collateralized mortgage obligations in its portfolio that they valued at a buttload of bucks had to let the world know every once and a while that their buttloads were basically half assed. Or worse. This made them less able to borrow money themselves and so they began to contract. Stating the market value of their holdings was integral to the current meltdown because a lot of their holdings were considerably less valuable than they'd thought. But the rules said they had to tell the truth.

I've blogged about this before -- over a year ago, in fact -- but some bad ideas just won't go away. Now the money boys want to put the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the folks charged with setting standards for honesty in accounting, under an oversight committee that will have leeway in calling for honesty in assessing the value of "distressed" holding during times of extraordinary financial conditions. There's to be normal honesty and another -- abnormal -- sort of honesty, when conditions mandate.

Last night at a gallery in Dallas, I spoke with a woman who, informed that the painting we were admiring was on sale for $95,000, asked why it cost so much. My answer was that was what the market would bear. It is worth what can reasonably be expected, given prior sales and the condition of the market so far as the artist and his dealer can assess it. Under those conditions, the painting was offered at that price.

Will it sell? Hell, I don't know. I own a six-year-old car. It is available for a price. If I set the price too high, it won't sell. Price it low enough, however, and I make a sale. Will that painting sell? It will if $95K is the right price.

The same is true for a CMO. Its value is what you can sell it for. A financial institution with illiquid assets on its books can not arbitrarily assess the value of its holdings apart from what they will sell for. What does it cost to buy it? Well, that's what it is worth. This is what is called mark-to-market accounting.

And yet it would appear there are arguments for another valuation system -- one based on the wishful thinking of bankers, not their much loved market. There is a move underfoot to move FASB into another realm, a realm devoted to loosening standards of valuation when "systemic risk" is abroad in the land and children are routinely devoured by wild things. The story is discussed here.

Meanwhile, check this:

(Image from Ritholtz)

The people of our nation are not working. This is because of a financial crisis. The crisis was caused by inadequately comprehending the values of assorted financial instruments and consequent recklessness in trading them.

Two thirds of all the economic activity in America is consumer spending. Jobless folks are way less likely to spend than their employed counterparts. And even employed folks who fear unemployment are less likely to buy stuff.

Loosen accounting rules? Sure. That's a great idea.

Dallas gallery hopping

I prowled the scene this afternoon. Here's what I saw and thought.

At Barry Whistler Gallery, Lawrence Lee is still up and shining with some of the most elegant lines I've gazed upon since I first got acquainted with Fragonard's tree drawings back in the days of Bush I. Lee mines old racist depictions of African Americans and his supple imagination to produce some truly witty narrative-based graphite and ink and tea and who knows what drawings of crazy-assed tall tales that probably make sense only to him. So why tell the stories? Because they look great. And there's always that astonishing line of his.

The image above is from Lee's show at the now-defunct Clementine Gallery in Chelsea a couple of years ago. He's getting better.

Road Agent may or may not be defunct also. It still has the "Installation in Progress" sign on the door from last month. As I understand it, gallery owner Christina Rees has accepted a position as director at TCU's off-campus exhibition space over in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Dunn and Brown is offering Dale Chihuly glass stuff to discerning folks in the Metroplex. Why? I don't know. Maybe the bills are coming due. Still they had a kickass small group show in their "project" space with works by Trenton Hancock (whom I love and not just because he once speculated that everybody's soul looks like a pre-teen Caucasian girl), Jeff Elrod, Erick Swinson, Vernon Fisher, etc.

Swinson's savagely trompe l'oeil sculptures of a pre-hominid creature and a stag shaking off the bleeding"velvet" from its new antlers take the Halloween prize for amazingness and craft.

Down in the Design district, Conduit offered Michael Tole and Joe Mancuso. Too many flowers on one picture plane (yes, that's the point) and painstaking renderings of Chinese decor. Cool, but why? I can't say. Somebody tell me.

I tried to see the new stuff by Dornith Doherty at Holly Johnson, but the place was temporarily shut when I dropped by. Should have called first, I guess.

Over at Marty Walker, I caught a sneak peek of William Lamson's new work, and it was a pleasure. Building on his videos from last year, he set up several ad hoc machines designed to use wind and waves to make drawings during his recent tour of South America. The Chilean coast wave works were delicate and appropriately atmospheric. Others were bolder and more aggressively "expressionistic." Whatever that might mean when a kite is doing the expressing.


Above: William Lamson, Kite Drawing Jan. 31, 2009. 740-915 PM. Colonia Valdense, Uruguay.

The Goss Michael Foundation offered a small Mark Quinn survey. He's the dude who cast his own head in his own blood. If he makes it, he means it. Got it?

Quinn's Mother and Child (Alison and Parys), 2008, a marble sculpture of a nude woman and her baby, was an extraordinary thing to behold. Handsome and at peace with her body, Alison was born without arms and with improperly formed legs. Gallery literature quotes him as saying "She's very beautiful, she just looks different."


He's right.

A food show

My piece is up and running at Project Gallery in Wichita, and I'm quite satisfied with it. Here's a quick, down-and-dirty edit of some installation shots.



The opening was Friday night. Saturday, the gallery organized a potluck dinner. Everybody brought something to share. My wife and I brought some homemade, locally sourced food: home cured bacon, home cured pastrami, a salad of purple hull peas we grew in the community garden, some home canned okra pickles, and some home canned pickled watermelon rind.

I fried the bacon for about the first half hour of the event, feeling a little bit like Rirkrit Tiravanija, but sillier and more bacon-y.

It was a lovely weekend.

Cow Hill tonight

(Image from Keri Oldham's Web site)

I'm just back in from the front porch, the coyotes are howling out on the prairie and the street out front is damp. It shines under the lamps.

Last night we attended an opening for Peter Barrickman and Keri Oldham at Centraltrak in Dallas. Keri used to be a gallery manager at the now defunct And/Or Gallery. I reviewed a show they had last spring. Keri's watercolors are endearingly creepy, a blend of fashion illustration and automatic drawing where somatotype and psyche meet on an uncomfortable picture plane.

Barrickman's work is all over the map, but the fractured and squashed pictorial space of a landscape and idiosyncratic expression would seem to be his interest. Not surprisingly, collage enters into the mix often. Collage can do that to space.

At present, I'm imagining a review of Amy Blakemore's show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The magazine's deadline is Tuesday, and it's not yet written. Tonight I'm thinking of remembering the times I was disabused of comforting, but false, notions of how the world is. Amy's pictures are like that. Hard as stone and sweetly, achingly melancholy. Here's a beautiful picture. You loved him. He's dead. But still you love him. Let this picture's beauty comfort your loss. It's not love, but beauty is at least something.

Houston trip -- two kinds of strangeness

My wife and drove to Houston last weekend to see the Amy Blakemore show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and to spend a little time away from this tiny town.

Blakemore's photos are powerful evocations of disillusionment and fading memories. Some of them are evocative of the emotional content in James Joyce's short story "Araby" in their sense of melancholy epiphany: "I thought it would be better, more than this..." Other times, her blurred and granular exposures suggest tilt shift digital photo processing. Always they are strange and haunting.


(Images via Inman Gallery)

Before we left for home this morning, we visited a Salvation Army thrift store on Washington Ave. in Houston because of an article I'd read in the NY Times about some works said to be by Salvador Dali that are up for sale there. Opinions vary concerning their authenticity, naturally, but I've seen them in situ. The drawing, sculpture, and prints are indeed on display in a glass case in the thrift store.



I took some pictures of the display, and my wife got a real bargain on a light sweater and some tops.

Hardiness zones and climate change

The USDA is reportedly redrawing its plant hardiness zone map this year. Last time the map was updated was in 1990, although the National Arboretum Web site does indicate that their map was revised in 2001. The map above is part of an update I found on the National Arbor Day Foundation site. Areas in pink represent territory which had shifted one zone warmer between 1990 and 2006.

I'm making a stencil to plaster the map on a gallery wall to accompany my Twittervore video.

Twittervore

This is the first minute or so of the Twitter-based video I'm working on. As noted earlier, the pictures were harvested from PingWire which presents images hosted by three sites serving tweeters. I pulled a couple thousand pictures of cooking, eating, and sometimes growing food from the constant image stream over the course of a few weeks in July.

The soundtrack was generated by an iPhone app called Bloom, which was designed by ambient sound guru Brian Eno and programmer and musician Peter Chilvers. The app costs four bucks, but that's considerably less than I'd have to pay Eno for his services.

I jacked the iPhone into a laptop running Audacity and recorded about 22 minutes of digitally generated ambient drones, gongs and chimes, which I next imported into video editing software along with the pictures. Aside from editing out some noise and reorienting a few sideways pictures, the pictures and sound are as they were when I got them. The video presents what the Internet and my iPhone churned out while I was paying attention.

I'm starting to really get off on the whole mashup of found image/found sound and future-cheesy technology. Maybe I should run it on a stack of Commodore monitors.

Looming destruction

My friend Josie directed me to this video:


She saw a longer version of it last month at the Hirshorn, where the scale of the projection and the audio of the ship crushing through the ice added much to the experience. Even at this diminished scale, the imagery is powerful.

Kentridge in Fort Worth

My wife and I paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth today. We drove to Cow Town to see the William Kentridge show, and holy mother of charcoal, the man is much better than I thought he was. I already knew he was remarkable, but the FW show is a revelation. Here's a version of a film that's in the show:



The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.

I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.

More raw footage

PingWire is a live feed of all images posted to one of three sites that host pictures for Twitter users. This means that anything of interest to tweeters for any reason (love, hate, desire, fear, you name it) appears on the site once it has gone through the uploading and publishing process. PingWire offers a glimpse into the collective mind of a significant subset of the Internet -- a visual guide to the unconscious. Like the Internet is dreaming.

Porn is there, of course. So are injuries, tourist destinations, and boyfriends. Last week there were scores of pictures sighted down the picture takers' supine legs at assorted beaches.

It turns out that a sizeable portion of the pictures tweeters share with the world involve food -- eating, cooking, and sometimes growing food. Some photos document a pretty child eating an ice cream cone. Some show empty plates. Others offer scrumptious desserts or elaborate platters of sushi.

Their motives vary widely. Some images appear because a besotted mother wants to show us her son's reaction to (e.g.) a crate of strawberries. Some are offered by disgusted patrons repulsed by the fare at a sub-standard diner. Some are snarky. Some celebrate pleasures.

Many are badly composed and unfocused. Others are professionally exposed ads for restaurants.

Last week I saved as many food and eating pictures as I could during a few hours spread out over four days. I harvested about 1300 pictures during that time. Today, I imported them into a video that turned out to be a little longer than 11 minutes at 1/2 second per image. There is no sound so far, and I'm probably going to rework it considerably, but even the raw footage is interesting to me.

At least it is tonight.

Raw video

I'm starting to think about food distribution for a show I'm going to participate in this fall. This video clip was shot a couple of days ago in the parking lot of a local supermarket. Sketchy quality video on an iPhone and didactic right now, I guess. But still...



The clip above is one of two I shot on the Fourth -- iPhone video again. It's less didactic than the first one, but food-related nonetheless. Barbecue might the be only valid reason to dump carbon into the atmosphere.

This post might mean my blog is becoming a sketchbook, but I can't yet tell.

From oxymoron to hypermoron

I'm not sure what to do with a twitter account. Yesterday I tweeted: "Harvesting arugula seeds. Gonna make everyone I know an elitist when I hand them out."

That small joke came to mind this afternoon when I read Randy Kennedy's piece on Dan Graham in the NY Times because it offered this nugget:

The photographer and art historian Jeff Wall has written that while many other conceptual artists “abjured, apparently for good, any involvement with the world” outside of their methodologies, Mr. Graham’s aim has always been “to remain involved with the wider world as a subject and occasion for art, but to structure that involvement in the rigorously self-reflexive terms” opened up by conceptualism.

Stating it more simply, Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, calls Mr. Graham’s work “elitism for everyone.”

(Image: Two Adjacent Pavilions, 1978-1981 via Artland)

We all know he's ridiculous

But just how ridiculous is he? Consider this a challenge. I know you all can do better than I did.

Swap meet

Swap meet today. I was selling cabbage and onions with two friends.

Tehran art, Tehran courage

At least one pro-democracy activist in Tehran is putting up some very witty pictures around the city during the current civil unrest (to put a polite face on thuggish government agents beating students in the streets). The one above with the curious face card beastie obscuring Ahmadinejad's face on a political poster is typical. More pictures here. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Some of the protesters are very brave, particularly the Twitter posters who worked the past few days under the collective name of persiankiwi. I've been following them off and on for two days as they tell of danger and violence. A few of their tweets from today:

Militia still attacking people in sidestreets but main roads are peaceful marchers.

reliable soure from Ahvaz. Situation there is bad - violent clashes in streets.

confirmed - there is shooting in Azadi sq. protesters wounded and shot, no numbers yet, still hearing gunfire.

people are running in streets outside. There is panic in streets.people going ino houses to hide.

Baseej shooting in Azadi sq - army standing by and watching for now.

streets very dangerous now. groups of militia on motorbikes searching for protesters.

3 ppl from our group still not returned from march. no mobile contact. last phone contact 2 hours ago.

confirmed - khamenaie website hacked - the dictator of iran.

we honour and thank the people of Iran and especially the hackers. Baseej have guns we have brains.

tonight Kamenei will fight hard - he knows he is close to finish.

cnfirmed - karbaschi and karoubi heading to Tajreesh sq tonight at 11pm - now after 10pm

Tajreesh is close to Jamaran where Khamenei live. maybe marching to his house. unconfirmed

we are going offline to get a phone free for calling out. we are also moving location - too long here - is dangerous.

were attacked in streets by mob on motorbikes with batons - firing guns into air - streetfires all over town - roads closed;

3 of our group missing from afternoon - we have no news from them;

confirmed - homeowners in Rasht are giving refuge to people running from Baseej attacks.

Gohardasht in Karaj - confirmed - people in street batles with militia -

most activity is in north - Gheytarieh, Pasdaran, Gholhak and Niavaran still busy and noisy -

more than 100 students missing from Tehran Uni dorms - reports of several dead from last night

thanks to all people following us and trusting us. we are trying to give you correct info -

it is very hard here - we are under big pressure and risk - we are being tracked on twitter -

we are all tired - no sleep for 3 days - one of us is injured from baton - waiting for doctor

we only want freedom - we are peaceful - we have no life no future in IRI without freedom -

one of us is injured and we have doctor - we cannot go to hospital now as plainclothes are at all hospitals

we are routed thru mirror proxies - but service is unreliable - keeps cuting out - have to switch off lights now

our street is quiet now - we cannot move tonight but must move asap when dawn starts

All normal proxys out - all normal ISP's out in Tehran

reliable source - many arrested taken to Evin in past 24hrs - evin under heavy protectionwe must log off - will update asap - sources pls keep info coming - we thank u and will not print your id's - u know who u are

The dumb picture I had up in my profile changed to a green rectangle tonight. That's the color of the opposition, the color of that swatch covering Ahmadinejad in the pictur at the top.

Greening Dallas?

Dallas used to look like the future. Parts of it did, anyway. Logan's Run (released in 1976) was filmed there (also in Fort Worth, Houston, a sewage treatment plant in El Segundo, CA, and other locations). The 1980 PBS TV movie based on Ursula K. Leguin's excellent novel The Lathe of Heaven was shot largely in Dallas, as well. Something about Dallas' sun-baked, concrete public spaces and impersonal, corporatist architecture appealed to filmmakers of the time when it came to imagining, say, the 23rd century. This likely says a lot more about the filmmakers and their audiences than it says about the 23rd century.

It certainly says a lot about Dallas, where the future used to go to get strange.

Another future Dallas was revealed near the end of last month when the winners of the Re:Vision Dallas architecture/urban design competition were announced. The contest invited architects and collaborators in the fields of urban farming, sustainable land use, etc. to create a city block that:

encourage[s] and value[s] relationships, while fostering respect for nature and our neighbors, privacy and resources, economy and consumption.

One of the three winning designs came from the San Francisco-based firm of David Baker and Partners. It looks like this:

The image is via the architect's Web site, where several others are available, as are some words which expand on the images:

Rather than simply placing a single building in the middle of a neglected space, the design team's conceptual reach extends beyond the property line into the larger city. The team proposes creating intersecting greenways pieced together from open space and disused lots to set up a framework for future development and to connect existing but disparate public amenities, such as the Farmer's Market and the Trinity River.

At the center of the greenways’ "X", Lone Star Square will function as the public heart of the new food/agriculture district, with orchards, garden plots, and historical elements from the city's past. Running through the system of greenways are a series of water features that filter harvested rainwater and convey it in a stream to the agricultural fields to be used for irrigation.

It's good that people in Dallas and elsewhere are looking into future green buildings and alternatives to the dystopic present in which a paucity of shops and amenities, multiple days of unsafe air quality, and oppressive summer heat make the urban experience just plain bad. Like the impossibly strange Dragonfly Building proposed for New York, the project arises from a good heart and good intentions, even if it is a latter day Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And I'm most hopeful for the idea of harvesting rainwater, even though we're now at the beginning of the dry season in this part of Texas, and some parts of the state to our south are well into a drought. But somehow the whole bigass shebang strikes me as just so very Dallas in its scale and structure and attitude. Consultants and experts and government workers decide solutions to problems that earlier consultants and experts and government workers inadvertently created via their solutions to earlier problems.

Meanwhile, up in Milwaukee, a guy named Will Allen -- who last winter was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- has worked patiently and persistently to create an urban farm in a blighted neighborhood. He's featured in the trailer below.



(The trailer is from the film Fresh, the Movie, which I have not seen) What I find admirable and encouraging about his project is that it is not the work of designers, but of a man and his compadres who want to make a place to live and live well. There is a connectedness both to a community and to an idea of living with the means of feeding ourselves that really good designers sometimes miss and Dallas implementers of designs have consistently missed.

I mean he's the author of the sentence "And believe in what the worms will do for you."

Found at the market

As Laurie Anderson once sang: "All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me."

Seduced

Nobody is like Isabella Rossellini.



Nobody.

The "Green Porno" series of short films is extraordinary, as are the sets and costumes designed by Andy Byers.

More here.

Spring storms and me

About three weeks ago, we had one of those Toto-I-don't-think-we're-in Kansas-anymore spring storms that occur in this climate from time to time. My wife, our two dogs, a radio, a lamp, and I spent a good deal of the evening sitting in the hallway while the storm raged outside. We heard unusual noises. The dogs made unusual noises, as well. The power failed. Howls and moans occurred. Some of the howls came from the dogs. Some came from the storm. Some came from assorted transformers and power lines.

It was scary.

But the storm passed. And the house held together. In fact, we went to a dinner party at a friend's place later that night. We had great fun eating by candle light, even after the power came back on.

My studio was another matter. It's a building next door to my house. The power of the storm was great enough that the roofing was lifted up and the wind forced rain water through the decking, saturating the ceiling. Waterlogged, it collapsed under its own weight.

No paintings were damaged, though a few minor studies now look rather more aleatory than they did before the event. The situation may be a lesson in using weather maps as sources of imagery (as I have done in recent years). Be careful what you deal with, boy; it may be stonger than you'd anticipated.

The insurance guys say they'll cover almost all of the cost, and I plan to angle for a little more than they have so far offered.

Meanwhile, I won't be working in that room for a while.

Another one shuts down

The latest e-missive from young Dallas artist/gallerist Paul Slocum reports that his And/Or Gallery is closing when the next show (his 23rd in a little over three years) closes. The reason given is that he's going off to New York to pursue other plans. Slocum writes: "most of the artists that I personally work with are in New York, and I've decided that I need to be in closer contact to reach my full potential."

Slocum's Web site features some serious seizure-inducing wall paper, but more than that he's very carefully documented his art and culture activities over the past few years on it. He took a painting class from me back when I taught at UT-Dallas and successfully managed to vault far beyond it after graduating (computer science, summa cum laude). No wonder his Web site offers links to (among other things) numerous Atari hacks, a project to convert 1985 Epson dot matrix printers into musical instruments, and other nerdly items like a stop motion animation made of thousands of screen captures of found homepages.

Over the years, And/Or has featured works by Tom Moody, Cory Archangel, and many other edgy, intelligent artists. The last And/Or show will feature works by Austin artist Chad Hopper.

Image via the artist's Web site, which is worth checking out, especially for the Roz Chast-meets-Kurt Schwitters pictures.