Luxury for the new depression

I found this on the Hermes site, and thought it was both funny and sweet. I imagine a snowdrift of soft-sculpture Kelly bags; commenting on consumer culture, luxury, and thus tangentially on the current economic situation.

If you find yourself consumed with desire to make one, let me know, and I will email the pdf (I couldn't get it to upload).

Happy stitching/folding!

string, kitten whiskers, raindrops

A couple of years ago, I wrote a small piece for the Times Union on hip hop in Jacksonville. In it, I covered three “acts,” the smallest and possibly the most atypical of the hip hop genre was Astronautalis, nee Andy Bothwell.

I wanted to write the article not just because I love hip hop, but because at the time, I was regularly checking out Hip Hop Hell (thanks Ian) and I was blown away by a few of the local and national acts that got booked (Louis Logic). It was there, one tipsy summer night, that I saw this skinny white kid in a blazer and tight jeans get up on stage and craft a pretty flawless freestyle of topics suggested by the crowd.

It was then that I knew the kid--and hopefully by extension the scene--had something viable and unquantifable. Since then, I learned that Astronautalis’s feat is not without precedent, but still, his music, his ability to transform and transcend the specifics of his chosen genre, are dazzling slight-of-hand tricks.

So, it’s with all that gushy loviness that I am super-stoked to say that he’s about to drop another album, Pomegranate, and for those that are curious as to the new sound, here’s his myspace link.

“Then there was me,
I was born a charming man with silver tongue and pearl teeth, this was never how it was supposed to end, we were promised all we dreamed. The envy of the everyman our family seemed complete, our father was a charming man, our mother a Siren. But, now I'm on the run again, this hotel's home to me, after they found the eldest's skeleton floating face down in the stream. The youngest was still tucked away in bed, they thought he was a sleep, till they moved the mirror from his mouth, and the fog that should remain was not to be seen.”

Whats up nerdzzzzzzz?

To the Art Institute:
95 to Baymeadows.
West on Baymeadows.
Right at 2nd light (Baymeadows Way)
Right at 1st light (Baypine Road)
Follow that around to the parking garage, gallery is right there.

Expect a review to follow.

Sometimes, Obvious is OK

I ran across this article in the Times today about the Lichtenstein show at Larry Gagosian’s gallery.

In addition to writing a bubbly, sort of sunny review of the show, Roberta Smith makes a few really wonderful points:

“These paintings are themselves bursts, hot flashes of composition, America, humor and color galvanized and made one by pictorial intelligence. Because their visual machinations are perfectly obvious, they make normally arcane terms like form and formalism exhilaratingly accessible. Basically we watch them work.”

dot*dot*dot*

"This show makes especially clear how Lichtenstein’s work functions as a kind of prime in looking at and understanding the grand fiction of painting: the thought it requires, its mechanics, its final simplicity and strangeness. These great paintings convey all this in a flash of pleasure, compounded by the thrill of understanding."

“Roy Lichtenstein: Girls” continues through June 28 at the Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, near 77th Street, (212) 744-2313, gagosian.com

Perfect Coffee, Every Time

Coffeemakers are ugly. They sit on kitchen counters like cranky gargoyles that are good for only one thing: infusing the senses with a clanging energy--a bullet in the brain.

For most of the Western world, I’d hazard a guess that a morning cup of coffee looks less like watery, bitter mud, and more like salvation in a cup. However, as a confirmed non-drinker of the stuff, I see the coffeemaker perched on my counter less as harbinger of the day-as-yet-unfolded, and more like an assault on the already limited aesthetics of my kitchen (a former crackhouse we’re trying to restore to wholeness).

So when I wandered into Nestliving a few days ago, I was thrilled to discover that they carry the Chemex brand coffee maker. I’d been researching this product for awhile: in addition to the wonderfully simple lines of the mid-century-esque carafe, it supposedly makes the best cup of coffee in the world. And for those of us who like to support good design but have limited means, the 6-cup version (which is for sale at Nest) is a reasonable $33.00. The same price as the website, but sans shipping.

Since I was so pleased with my find, I got to chatting with the owner Shaan Batten. Though admittedly I was a little suspicious as well: the shop seemed to be very similar to Roost, which was in 5 Points a few years ago. I felt a little defensive for Roost, not least because I count its former proprietor, Tonya Lee, among my friends.

However, after Shaan let me wave my arms around and shout about ideas of authenticity and opportunism (okay, I just did that in my head, in reality I brought up the similarity to Roost in a very civilized manner), it turned out I was being ridiculous (a condition I'm pretty used to). Shaan said that he’d taken pains to not carry the same lines as Roost had, and, that his impression had been that the Roost space had been more experimental than what he was attempting to do. And I had to concede the point, in fact, Tonya herself once said, “The shop was never to generate revenue…it was an extension of my obsession with paintings; just more disposable decorative objects.”

Plus, it is really nice to have a shop selling modern-wares in the neighborhood again—it feels like a commitment not just to design that for purely aesthetic reasons feels contemporary, but to design that functions with people. That’s really the crux of good design whether contemporary or Modern: design that functions within the rubric of its time and place.

Sometimes, there is also hope that thoughtful, deliberate, design can begin to permeate other aspects of life…if we were to all become more present and aware, who knows what changes could be wrought? Maybe just golden tiger wallpaper in the dining room…maybe a whole new way of thinking.

So, does that coffeemaker make the best coffee I’ve ever tasted? I don’t know. But it does look wonderful with cut flowers in it.

Incidentally, there's a Grand Opening party at the shop on the 24th. Go out and show some love.

*click on the title to go to Nestliving's webpage.

Quiet Resonance

When I first moved to Jacksonville, a million years ago, I was appalled at what I thought was worse than a dearth of art and culture, a void of art and culture. Those things weren't missed here because they never had been known here. Or so I arrogantly thought.

Then one of the first artists I became aware of was David Engdahl. An architect by trade, Engdahl builds sculptures with the most archaic of tools, resulting in works that are by turns sublime, straightforward, and somewhat redolent of the ’70s.

Engdahl’s work is the natural outcome of the ideology prevalent in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, that is sometimes hard to see built renditions of in an atmosphere that increasingly finds itself bound by code and regulation. Not to mention the arrival of the McMansion…

With his work, Engdahl is able to explore those forms that once seemed to herald the arrival of a new way of thinking about living…a thought process (I believe anyway) that is shared by architects Bob Broward, Bill Morgan, and Taylor Hardwick. Forms that mirror nature and are designed to work with the land, not to struggle against it.

In his studio, Engdahl’s tools, covered with a fine silt of sawdust sit as unprepossessing witnesses to his quiet process. A process that involves a monk’s portion of patience, and the willingness to distill forms to their most basic parts. In his most successful works, a simple form that references nature and logic in equal parts engages that part of the viewer’s mind that delights in the slope of a leaf, the sway of a boat’s hull, or the curled horns of a bighorn sheep.

So I was utterly delighted when an invitation to Engdahl’s April 11 show, “David Engdahl Sculpture,” arrived in today’s mail. The show, at the Ponte Vedra Cultural Center, opens on April 11, 6:30-8:00 p.m. I plan on going and taking in some tangible quiet.

Ponte Vedra Cultural Center, 50 Executive Way, Ponte Vedra, 280-0614.

Hold {them} in Your Heart

Generally, I am not given to overt gestures of sentimentality, and even less often to displays of militaristic, nationalistic, pride.

However, on the way home tonight, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” was playing excerpts from the messages of family and friends of fallen soldiers. It crept into my consciousness slowly...and then I suddenly realized that I wasn't listening to the usual programming anymore. So why this broadcast on this day? Because sometime between today and yesterday, the death toll in Iraq (American deaths) rose to 4,000.

4,000 is a vast number of lives, too many to consider as singular individuals, while seeing their memorials and eulogies in print is reductive to the point of redundancy; four or five lines in black and white cannot convey the depth of a life. That’s why NPR’s broadcast of messages was so powerful. The memories shared aren’t being intoned by a professional broadcaster’s carefully neutral voice, instead they are the voices of those left behind, those for whom even speaking a name aloud can provoke a slew of memories. There are hitches and odd pauses as one memory slides into another; and suddenly the war isn’t about propaganda and ideology, it is about the weight of each life.

The memories, though American, serve as a reminder of the costs borne on all sides of our war...a war which Bush still asserts we're winning, "...this is a fight that America can and must win.”

Click on the title for a link to the NPR piece, it's only 3 minutes and 38 seconds long.

*the pictured image is from the project “Eyes Wide Open,” a project of the American Friends Service Committee. Since 1917, the American Friends Service Committee has championed the dignity and worth of every individual, the sanctity of human life and humanity's collective responsibility to promote peace. www.afsc.org.

Cerca Trova: art history mystery

Listening to NPR today, they mentioned that a long lost mural of Leonardo da Vinci (500 years lost) The Battle of Anghiari has possibly been located. With clues that include a passage in a diary, and the phrase "cerca trova" the story unfolds like something out of a Dan Brown novel. "Cerca trova," which, translates roughly to "search and you will find," was painted on a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio by Giorgio Vasari. It is believed that Vasari painted over da Vinci's mural because after he completed it (at the suggestion of Niccolo Machiavelli...yes, that Machiavelli), that the ruling family was displeased with the image because it depicted the folly, not the glory of war.

But there's more to the story: originally, the mural was to be coupled with another scene of war by an artist half da Vinci's age, Michelangelo. But this artistic battle of an era was never to happen, Michelangelo was lured to Rome by the pope, and da Vinci left his mural unfinished to go work for the king of France.

There is certainly enough extant da Vinci information for study. However, the more interesting facet of this story is the idea that da Vinci was painting an anti-war message for one of the most powerful families in Italy. It might force a re-imagining/thinking of political art...or at least a little revision? 

*the pictured image is one of da Vinci's preparatory drawings for the mural. 

Drawing update

There are a few things happening soon that seem to be an organic outgrowth of the act of drawing; of working with limited resources to great effect.

The first, perhaps works on a metaphoric level:

“Next Things Next” the February show at OPAQ gallery. But before I speak too highly of this show, the reader should know that I am not an entirely objective source: two of my new works will be included in the show.

However, if one cares to overlook the self serving nature of the post, I was intrigued after chatting with Matt and Katie about the the works to be included in the show…Katie said that many of the works have been executed with “a delicate hand.” That phrase, somehow so old-fashioned, yet evocative piqued my interest.

Matt and I also talked about the suite of drawings he’ll be installing at the show; he said that the images he’s creating have their roots in technical drawings…but that he doesn’t really have experience in executing them.

Further in line with the drawing theme, MOCA is examining drawing as a process in a series of exhibitions which open in mid-April 2008. The featured show is works by LA artist Chris Natrop (pictured top). Also on exhibit will be drawing by John Bailly (second image), a Miami based artist who teaches at FIU.

Natrop’s work has similarities to Swoon’s installations and to Tord Boontje’s gorgeous work, especially the uber-popular lamp-shades (final image) and wall panels. The Miami-based Bailly’s work recalls Phillip Guston and, to a lesser extent, Anslem Kiefer…pieces with a “lexicon of spattered gestural marks and weblike textures.”

Also, the 3rd floor will host an exhibition entitled “Making Marks: A Survey of Jacksonville Drawings.”

Exciting no?

Drawing: Personal and Practical

According to Holland Cutter, "For Michelangelo drawing was the most practical and personal medium; it was a laboratory, a diary, an end in itself. If you could do a perfect drawing, he came to think, why bother to turn it into a painting or sculpture? Perfection in any form was the goal."

The show up at the Morgan Library and Museum in midtown Manhattan, examines the role of drawing in 16th Century Florence. It triggers thoughts of the current role of drawing; what an intimate gesture, unaffected by artifice it is. How immediate and wholly satisfying it can be, and how the disparity between the formal works an artist presents, and casual drawings and studies can be quite startling. 

Closer to home, the best example of this I can think of is the Lucian Freud etching currently on view at MOCA. Freud's paintings are celebrated as violent, deliberately ugly and ungainly portraits of the human body on par with those of Titian, Rubens and Velázquez, but the etching on view (in this case taken as an example of the artist's drawn work) lacks the power of Freud's paintings, and instead exists for the viewer as an example of process. 

Perhaps that is the crux of the drawn line, it is a look behind the curtain into something honest and unadorned; relying on a quality of of line and an arrangement of form in (or against) space.

  

Simple. Lovely. 

Optimism Shines

I love hip hop music, one of the things I love most about it though, is that like jazz, it can be stretched in so many directions.

This summer, I met and had the good fortune to hear the band Zullo. Recently, the collective (and that they truly are, there's like ten people up on stage), released their first EP, (appropriately) entitled Bricolage.

Though clearly a fledgling band, Zullo has wed their talent to funk, jazz, soul and blues with a little post-Tribe-esque hip hop thrown in to round it all out. The result? A sound whose roots are clearly traceable, yet unique: a little deconstructed jam band, mixed with a little Wu Tang that makes heads bob and bottoms shake (and hippies do whatever it is they do).

Perhaps the best part though, is their youthful unjaded approach to the material, clearly, the band loves the music just as much as the audience does. That in and of itself is a nice break from the “uber cool” techno/pop/electronica crowding out airspace and clubs in recent years.

Check them out at: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=98494912

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

When I was a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with Egypt. I've followed the discovery of various treasures and tombs in Egypt my entire life. And more than one Saturday night has been passed on the sofa in sweats, watching an Egypt or pyramids marathon with bated breath.

So when I read that King Tutankhamen was being unmasked and placed on display, it was simultaneously exciting and disheartening. Recently, King Tut has been the focus of renewed scientific inquiry. His face has been reconstructed (which was itself the cause for controversy as he was represented with lighter skin) and somehow I suspect it really satisfies no-one as each person associated with the pharaoh must’ve had his or her own idea of what he looked like.

Now, Zawi Hawass and the Egyptian Antiquities Board have decided to put the head and feet of the boy king on display in his underground tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The move is designed to help preserve the mummy, which has been damaged by the thousands of visitors that come to gaze on the king each year.

The display, while macabrely interesting, raises questions of the respect for human remains and the appropriateness of ogling one who has made that long journey into the afterworld.

On that same track, if one takes the ancient Egyptians’ own views into consideration, then King Tut is truly living and being worshiped forever. It also probably helps that he’s been dead for 3,200 thousand years and now looks more like a sculpture, less like a man.

Nonetheless, its easy to imagine that it is a humbling experience to gaze upon Egypt’s golden boy; to wonder what his life was like, and what remains to be discovered about the immortal 18th Dynasty.

8 BIT

I love documentaries. Give me a narrator with a well-modulated voice, thoughtful and nostalgic shots, and I'm in heaven. Of course, I realize that this Discovery Channel model isn't exactly revolutionary and even as I nod off midway through many of the shows I attempt to watch, that's not a ringing endorsement.

So, when I went to see "8 BIT," the movie about video game and video game art, I didn't really know what to expect. Its garnered accolades from around the world (which alone suggests it won't be constructed a la Discovery or A&E), and indeed, it is an interesting look into a subculture. But really, that's about all it amounted to.

The premise of the film is simple, it looks at old, outdated technology like 8 bit computers and the ways in which the code can be broken and forced to do new things. And its pretty interesting, as one artist in the film says, "graffiti for the computer nerd set."

Here's what Moca Jax had to say about the film: "By weaving together arcane histories of digital subterfuge, candid interviews with cutting edge artists and theorists, wild videogame concerts, and highlights from the best digital artwork being made today, 8 BIT exposes the cultural ramifications of video games and proposes that Generation X’s coming to grips with its digital heritage signals the beginning of a new social and artistic reality."

And its true, the art/music/performances being made by some of these artists is quite interesting with overtones of nostalgia and innocence. Perhaps the most compelling work being made are the chip tunes, musical compositions created using the audio signatures of early video games.

However, the discussion of chip tunes is also where the film becomes overly indulgent and tedious. Despite interesting and funny interviews, the segments where the audience is treated to selections of chip tune performances is intriguing at first, and then descends into annoyance. Not least because the music closely resembles trance and techno, and a little electronica goes a long way. That's not a wholesale dismissal of the form, just a warning. In fact, I had to leave early because the music triggered a migraine.

Overall, this film was worth the price of admission, just don't plan on watching it if you tend to headaches.