Judy Byron & Art Matters

Last Wednesday (November 28), Judy Byron organized and hosted a panel discussion called WHAT MATTERS: ART MATTERS -- An evening of conversation about making and presenting visual art in the District of Columbia. The panel was in connection with her current exhibition WHAT MATTERS, an ambitious installation of drawing, sculpture and sound recordings of women (who are also the models for the images in the show) conversing about life and priorities. You can participate by describing what matters to you. The exhibition is on view by appointment [judy@judybyron.com] until January 27; there are also more events coming up. (installation detail pictured; photo by Rick Rinehard)

At the panel, DCCAH Executive Director Tony Gittens described Commission programs and initiatives; Tim Davis, artist, teacher, and director of International Visions, Jayme McLellan, director Civilian Art Projects and I talked about our experiences in the world of Washington art. Mayor Fenty talked about art and community building and was able to stay for a summary of panelists major points. Photo by Rick Rinehard (from left, Mayor Fenty, Rex Weil, Tim Davis, DCCAH Director Tony Gittens, Jayme McLellan)

I first met Judy at a meeting she organized to establish a DC chapter of Artists Call Against Intervention in Central American, a group that sent art supplies to artists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and opposed illegal US support for death squads and the Contras during the Reagan years. The group was later memorialized by conservative critic Hilton Kramer in an overheated essay bemoaning the intervention of politics in art. He called it "an undisguised propaganda effort in support of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement in Central America." Well, as John Berger [more calmly] once commented, artists do not necessarily welcome "the intrusion of politics into art." On the contrary, it is adverse political conditions that force artists to engage the issues.

Cuba & Culture

Sign the petition for cultural exchange

with Cuba (and freedom to travel

for US citizens).

NBC Universal to Sell Young Women

"We want to create a virtual women's network where we go to market selling young women and affluent women in a way that virtually no one else can," NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker said yesterday in a conference call with reporters and analysts. (Washington Post, Business page 1, 10/9/07).

It would be tedious to enumerate all of the many things wrong with Zucker's statement. (Where are The Yes Men when you need them?)

Instead, I suggest a visit to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. It's massive and it's required viewing. It also constitutes an interesting contrast to the Morris Louis show at the Hirshhorn. If you were trying to explain to someone the shift from modernism to postmodernism, now would be a good time. WACK! demonstrates that new forms of artistic practice come about by necessity. You can find here early examples of nearly all now familiar conceptual art strategies. Save time for the many, many films and videos. The show can easily consume a whole afternoon. Also, Linda Nochlin will speak at the Katzen Center on Friday, November 30 at 2:00 PM. I heard her speak in New York last winter; she was brilliant, witty and on the mark. (The image on the catalog cover is a detail from a Martha Rosler collage.)

Yuriko Yamaguchi at the University of Maryland

Yuriko Yamaguchi's exhibition at the Art Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park opens this Wednesday evening, September 26. I worked on the show as curator and writer, so I can't tell you how terrific the work looks without sounding prejudiced. It's a big show with new work -- only one piece has been exhibited in Washington before (and even that one in a different configuration). The Art Gallery's spacious quarters are a perfect venue. The reception is from 5 PM to 7 PM. Parking should be fine; there's also Metro Green line to campus. Photo by Chan Chao. For more information: http://www.artgallery.umd.edu/exhibit/07-08/yamaguchi/index.html

Work Ethics in Cincinnati

(Cincinnati, August 28, 2007 ) Procter & Gamble Co, headquartered in Cincinnati, announced that its chief executive received $27.7 million in compensation in the latest fiscal year....

(Cincinnati, August 29, 2007) Cincinnati's 2006 poverty rate was 27.8 percent. That's third-highest among major cities behind Detroit and Buffalo - according to a new estimate released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau....[For a family of four with two children the 2006 poverty level was $20,444.]

Can you help work this into my sentence on art theory? In any event, if you're playing the numbers, 27 looks hot.

One good sentence on art theory?

Now, gone again [to Ann Arbor] and back again. Preparing for my first art theory class of the semester. Trying to condense into one sentence the reasons for the explosion in art theory, critical theory, visual studies, visual culture, etc., etc. Why have these courses? Why is this important at all? Why does this discipline [essentially super-charged art criticism] always bleed well beyond the confines of art history and art practice? Here's a candidate for the sentence. It's awkward and portentous, I know. So help me out.

As the advocates of real power [centralized, integrated economic and military authority] * become more adept, more agile at the nearly instantaneous appropriation and assimilation of art's techniques, art criticism and theory become indispensable for analyzing and challenging power.

I'd also like the sentence to incorporate the sense of John Berger's idea that [paraphrasing] only ill-informed people think artists/critics welcome the intrusion of politics into art. Politics intrudes, period; it's already there and it's always been there. Also, the sentence should convey to students the ideas that (1) art refers to a vast array of practices; (2) since the cradle, they have been tickled, taught, comforted, persuaded, lied to, assaulted, smothered with art; (3) and

someone, please stop me before...

*Should I just use Ike's 'military/industrial complex?' Sounds too tendentious, right? And, who are the advocates? Corporate media, major political parties, advertising firms, lobbyists, public relations firms, [art museums?], etc. -- just follow the money.

Back from Cincinnati and Wisconsin

Thanks for asking. I was gone, but I brought you something. In Cincinnati, I attended the shoot for Bootsy Collins' new video. You know Bootsy, right? He's from Cincinnati, where he got his start at age 15 playing bass for James Brown (who recorded at the Queen City's famous King Records). Now Bootsy's settled there and has his own recording studio. My brother's a musician and teacher in Cincinnati and recently worked on a project with him. So, when Bootsy needed some young musicians for his Bengals music video, "Who Dey," he called Bruce. (The Bootzilla devoted Bengals fan.) I took some pictures. The setting is a tacky river boat nightclub on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. Those are real stadium characters around the margins. (If you click on the pix they should get bigger.)






ps: some more Bootsy sites:
http://www.funky-stuff.com/bootsy/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlHzHLGL60c&mode=related&search=
(this is a highly recommended campy funk Godzilla inflected weirdness)

Art and Inconvenient Truths

As it happens, I finished Kurt Vonnegut's novel Hocus Pocus (1990) and watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth on the same day, yesterday. The connection: both are tendentious, both are concerned with environment degradation. One is good art, the other is decidedly not and doesn't pretend to be. One is naïve and bitter, the other is slick and evangelistic. At the same time, one convincingly makes the difficult connections between damage to the environment and religious beliefs, capitalism, greed, racism, class pretensions, and Yale. The other, with the approximate scientific depth of your average commercial for a headache remedy, pulls heartstrings and concludes with a web link. Two notes on that: (1) Yes, I admit, Al Gore brought me to tears several times; KV manifestly did not –even though there's a hell of a lot more to weep about in Hocus Pocus; (2) If Vonnegut had written another novel, I think he would have ended it with "go to http://www.tralfamadore.net/" [don't click on that]. And, don't get me wrong – of course we all want to fix global warming [and save…what? In memory of KV, let's be clear – it's not necessarily the planet we're trying to rescue, but our own miserable species]. Could it be that, ironically, the right wing is correct about the ill effects of profound reform on life-as-we-know-it: the whole deal, the ship of state, the health of the economy, etc., is, in fact, hopelessly tethered to waste, militarism and the heedless exploitation of labor and resources? And so it goes... R.I.P. KV 1922-2007 (photo by Jill Krementz/cover design by Paul Bacon)
from H/P:
It was speech by God to Adam and Eve supposedly…"Fill the Earth and Subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the Earth."
_______________________
Cough.
_______________________
So the people on Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint.

Artists and Authority

Is it true that artists are constitutionally hostile to authority? I just came across A Fine Madness (1966; 104 minutes) quite by accident, which makes the case. A young Sean Connery is poet Samson Shillito, who just can't abide employment, police, lawyers, responsibility, sobriety, ex-wives, psychiatrists, etc. He has a soft spot for Joanne Woodward though -- she's a waitress, who is Samson's meal ticket, manager and loyal protector. Unfortunately, but with the best of intentions, she hooks him up with a shrink specializing in creative types. Things seem to be working OK 'til Samson seduces the shrink's wife, played by Jean Seberg. (What a wrenching, tragic irony that Seberg in real life was pilloried and driven to despair by FBI dirty tricks in retaliation for her anti-authoritarian political views; she died by probable suicide in 1979). Anyway, when the Doc finds out, a lobotomy is scheduled. Oh yeah -- this is a comedy. I won't ruin the ending for you.

p.s. You can see an actual copy of an FBI planning memo that describes one particularly loathsome plot to defame and embarrass Seberg at this link (click on politics). The memo says: "Seberg has been a financial supporter of the BPP (Black Panther Party) and should be neutralized." Note that the memo comes from the FBI's 'Racial Intelligence Unit.'

More Intelligence: some list servs and feeds

Americans for the Arts has the really intelligent Cultural Policy Listserv. It's a once-a-week free e-mail briefing on a variety of issues, including government support for the arts, copyright, censorship, community arts, education and lots more, with links to pertinent sources and background. Sign up here. I'm guessing you already subscribe to artsjournal; if not, I highly recommend it for a vast amount of news, commentary and a family of the best arts blogs. One more? You can subscribe to the Village Voice arts coverage (or other sections) here.

Best of Intentions

Not surprisingly, given the name Central Intelligence Art, we have apparently attracted the attention of whatever spy agency tracks art theory. Onkafatso, code name of the agent assigned to us, though, in some weird inversion of the Stockholm syndrome, can't lay off commenting on my posts. And, he/she is certainly quite articulate (art theory literate spies are probably as difficult to find as those that understand Farsi, so we should be flattered). Now, Onkafatso is unhappy with my disparagement of artists' intentions – in one of my Serra posts I suggested that artists' intentions are not controlling in our analysis of the impact, experience, or social function of their work. (It's the last of 4 comments on that post.) Onkafatso thinks that if artists' intentions are not respected, it leaves the door open for art critics to make up all kinds of shit and, ultimately, to control the universe. But, I'm right. Artists' intentions are interesting, of course – and should be consulted. Nonetheless, if artists' intentions were determinative, African fetishes would cure river blindness, Byzantine icons would be portholes to the godhead, Frank Stella would be the incarnation of Caravaggio, and all artists would be great ones. Anyway, it's reassuring to know that deep in some airless, dark bunker, probably in the neighborhood of the Naval Observatory where you-know-who lives, someone is always listening and thinking. Thanks and keep those comments coming.

Ken Ashton at Civilian Art Projects

I visited photographer Ken Ashton's admirable show at Civilian Art Projects (CAP) late last week. It's a selection of images from his ongoing 'Megalopolis' series that memorializes the vast array of quotidian urban spaces we normally take for granted: backyards, alleys, warehouse districts and low-rise storefronts. He captures intense natural light (seemingly often daybreak or deep afternoon shadows), but the dramatic illumination is not so much for beauty or sentiment. Rather, it particularizes Ashton's subjects -- makes them fresh and real. We see our cities with the stone cold lucidity of a hangover. (You might not know that Ashton's work is included in two recent books: Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, Selections from the of Julia J. Norrell Collection and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 To The Present by Deborah Willis.) Lily Cox-Richard's looming, impressive 'At Stake and Rider', also on view at CAP, shifts attention from the urban present to the rural and the past. Fragments of classical architecture support an apparently calcified split rail fence that juts through the back gallery. Both artists will be at the gallery on Saturday, July 21st at 3 PM for a discussion and reception.

While I was at the gallery, I had an interesting talk with CAP's director Jayme McLellan about politics and art in Washington. More on that later. It is, however, noteworthy that CAP has already done some interesting programming on Darfur and on government surveillance. Both events were well attended, but there was very light representation from DC's art community. Strange… It reminds me of a piece I wrote a long time ago about politics and Washington art for the Corcoran's 1985 The Washington Show. No link for that - it was pre-web, but nothing's changed. Anybody remember The Washington Show?

Hirst Skulls, 'Nam Skulls & the Whitney's Summer of Love

On the subject of Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted cranium, here's an article in the Washington Post about GI's psychedelic painting and graffiti on VC skulls brought home from Vietnam. The photo by the Post's Gerald Martineau is available online, but not with the story. For now, the skulls are stored at Walter Reed's National Museum of Health and Medicine. (I told you to go to there, remember? But, sorry, the skulls are not on view.) Instead, a last minute loan has just been announced to the Whitney Museum for its Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era. That's false, of course, but you heard it here first, anyway. For that matter, Summer of Love, up until September 16, is required viewing. Check the film schedule before you go and plan to spend a couple of hours. (I especially recommend the documentaries: Peter Whitehead, Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, 1967, 70 min.; Paul Sharits, Piece Mandala/End War, 1966, 5 min.; Howard Lester, One Week in Vietnam, 1970, 3 min.; Third World Newsreel, America, 1969, 31:30 min.)

Re: macabre souvenirs, it's old news that Rumsfeld secured a piece of the plane that flew into the Pentagon. I prefer Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym's Buildings of Disaster (see, Design Intel sidebar). At any rate, souvenirs are, generally speaking, better than memorials. They take up a lot less space and accomplish more or less the same thing. The mall is getting crowded.

Serra, Serra: last call

Insightful commentary by Gainesville subterranean bodhisattva JCS claims Serra's recent work constitutes a monumental gesture of resistance to authority. It's an attractive, if romantic, idea and it's certainly consistent with Serra's intention. Nonetheless, I have my doubts. The flaw is that you need the Serra back story to make that argument: tough guy, against the odds, hostile public, etc., etc. (I'm sympathetic - my self-image was forged by TV and movie cowboys, too.) But artists don't get to decide how their work functions in society. The work functions on its own. An important part of the critical enterprise is to figure out the actual, on the ground, impact of specific works of art. In my view, Serra's scale virtually guarantees its future as just another (loud) phrase in the vocabulary of wealth and power. Another way of asking these questions is an old one (Benjamin's): what is, really, the political tendency of this work? Or Marcuse's: How does this work help to demystify institutions and relationships in society and , thereby, 'break the power of established reality (and those who established it) to define what is real'? Can 'Serra' (the brand) escape becoming an emblem of capital? As to net social impact, it would be interesting to compare Serra and Gordon Matta-Clark (the recent Whitney retrospective was fascinating) and, for good measure, add in Damien Hirst's new $100,000,000 skull.

Note: to follow up on an earlier post where I wondered why Wal-Mart had not seized the opportunity to sponsor the Serra MOMA retrospective – the actual sponsor is conglomerate LVMH / Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Serra, Sculpture, Serpents, Cincinnati

If you had been born and raised in Cincinnati like me, you would have been haled along to the ancient serpent mound near Peebles early and often by enthusiastic elementary school instructors, camp counselors, Sunday school teachers, troop leaders, parents and relatives. Made for an extremely dull day. Can't really see shit from the ground. Even aerial photos are pretty boring -- the most prominent feature is the contemporary visitors' walkway. Nonetheless, the adults always seemed to enjoy it and that kept them off our backs for awhile. And, the little maps are cool.

I remembered them yesterday as I was looking again at the Serra Guggenheim Bilbao photograph. All of which lends support to the idea about autocratic power and death.

For information call 1 800 BUCKEYE.

Speaking of Richard Serra...

In the language of art, work of this scale signifies two things (1) the aggrandizement of autocratic power and (2) death. These are the pyramids of the twentieth century. Perhaps each should contain a burial vault or, better yet, cryogenic chambers. (But, seriously, we don't care about earthly remains so much anymore. The secular version of the afterlife is "being remembered." And that's what museums are for.) Tell me I'm wrong because I love this work and it's important to me. Alert: The MOMA show runs only 'til September 10th. Given lazy summer attitudes, vacations, etc., that's going to slip by quick, fast, in a hurry. You can see a video walk through, along with Serra interviews here. Also - check out MOMA's video of Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992) being installed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (!) Sculpture Garden.

ps: did you know that Tony Serra is Richard's brother?

intelligent hoodlum

Hard to believe I bought this album 17 years ago. It still sounds terrific and the President still has the same last name. Just re-released this spring with Tragedy's other record in a 2-CD package. A Marly Marl production.

cia family jewels and spies

muttering to myself:
'The CIA 'family jewels' are, among other things, a reminder that the world of terrorist provocateurs and arms peddlers is actually rather small and exceedingly inbred. Maybe that explains the infantile urgency of Cheney's desire to clamp down on captives. The objective is not really to get information from them. The overarching concern is to keep former 'assets' quiet and away from the press. It's what they know about Cheney, the Bushes, Rumsfeld, et al., that keeps them isolated and shorn of due process -- not what they allegedly know about future terrorist activity.'

Well, I don't actually mutter in complete sentences, but that was the gist of it. Paranoia, anger and dismay strike deep while browsing the Spy Museum gift shop, in the old Atlas and Ledroit buildings at 9th and F Streets. Along with dozens of other artists, I had a studio in Atlas-Ledroit way back before the sports complex and steakhouses – i.e., before it became an 'arts district." The street level, occupied now by the spy shop, was a wig store. It was patronized by the transvestite prostitutes that populated the neighborhood and serviced customers of the porno emporiums around the corner. There was also a donut shop I used to like until I saw the proprietor unloading the pastries early one morning on open trays from the filthy trunk of his ancient Pontiac. And a down-at-the-heels florist that might have been a bookmaking operation.

I won't go in the museum proper unless someone pays me to – the whole idea is nauseating. It's particularly galling that years of urban planning have replaced studio space with a tourist trap. Nonetheless, a visiting friend from Gainsville, FL stumbled into the gift shop a few weeks ago and suggested I check it out. It is, in fact, a trip. Mostly, of course, the sensibility is '50's Playboy pipe smoking spy-glamour – a pose that functioned then, just as it does today, to obscure the violence and mendacity of US covert ops, a/k/a state sponsored terrorism. Still, the gift shop isn't entirely one dimensional. Maybe you'll be surprised to see a reputable book on Soviet poster art and current, critical books on Iraq, etc. All that, I guess, functions as deep cover for the salacious, goofy spy stuff. It may also creep you out that you actually like the goofy spy stuff. Born and raised on it, let's face it. (The next time your gift-giving imagination is hobbled by that special someone's inscrutable tastes, we suggest the revolutionary red 'What Would Che Do?' t-shirt (don't look for it on their website which is decidedly tamer than the shop). I'm so confused and
still muttering……..

targeting target

The obvious, maddening, difficulty with Target support for the NGA's Jasper Johns show was the explicit identification of the corporation's logo with the painter's imagery. No doubt, it constitutes a real coup in the history of corporate buy-outs of the ostensible authority and legitimacy of art. Maybe we've forfeited earnest outrage because we -- in the business -- don't really believe museums and artists have that kind of moral heft to confer anyway. (For better or worse, the public-at-large still believes.) So, we're stuck with just laughing it off ? It is funny in a pathetic sort of way. But the memo reproduced above from the NGA press packet for the Johns exhibition is over the top. Targeting the Community? That has an unpleasant, ominous ring. Could this be more absurd? Somebody call Hans Haacke ... What's WalMart's likely response? How's "Walling the Community" sound? They missed the boat on Richard Serra's MOMA show ....
(Serra picture from the MOMA website)

wrestler on tv/general archive

italian quiz show/design intel archive

____________________________
design intel archive:
fiesta disc pitcher
seiu t-shirt megaphone
chantal tea kettle
oxo
electric bike
Pentagon souvenir
PE girl's t-shirt
blik wall decals
parker pen
semi-hollow telecaster
lodge skillet
chauvet mini-bubble machine
rosie t-shirt

guggenheim museum garbage/briefings archive

briefings archive:
7/1/07
how good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!
friedrich nietzsche (1881)

the preachers of death/surveillance archive

surveillance archive
read: The Dollmaker by Harriette Simspon Arnow (1954)
listen: The Great Summit: Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington (1961)
visit: National Museum of Health & Medicine at Walter Reed

listen: James Brown, Startime (polydor, 1991) (4 discs)

listen: Lonnie Smith Trio with John Abercrombie & Marvin "Smitty" Smith, Foxy Lady, A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix
listen: Lonnie Smith Trio with John Abercrombie & Marvin "Smitty" Smith, Purple Haze, A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix
read: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer