Emvergeoning

Back in March, i2i Gallery changed it’s name to Vtrue, and now it’s gone. There were hits and misses, as with any gallery, but Vtrue made a great contribution to the San Antonio art community, and will be missed. On the positive side, maybe this will give owners Gary Smith and Judith Cotrell more time to work on their own art. Emvergeoning covered two exhibits at i2i / Vtrue:

• Jerry Monteith’s Hilarious Wounds
• Pattie Chalmers’ What I Meant to Say

Now, of course, I wish we’d written more on their shows. But that’s how it goes. Mark Jones managed to document Vtrue’s swan song, Kerri Coar’s Sweet Tooth.

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As regular readers of Modern Art Notes know by now, the body found off the coast of New Jersey last month has been identified as Jeremy Blake’s using dental records. Something tells me this tragedy will be discussed for many years, from many different angles — but most likely we’ll never know what was at the root of the apparent double suicide.

I agree with some that Theresa Duncan’s blog seems like some elaborate message, full of hints and subterfuge, but perhaps it’s just the sort of text that lends itself to that kind of reading. In any case, as MAN notes, the final post on her blog was written by Glenn O’Brien, who is also writing the text for the catalog of Jeremy Blake’s show at Corcoran in October.

UPDATE: For those unfamiliar with Blake, here is his obit at NYT, and his page at the Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery. Theresa Duncan had a lower profile, but here’s an interview with her in LAist.

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Now the news comes that Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both died yesterday. While I have found much to admire in Bergman’s work, Antonioni will always hold a special place in my heart. I considered his film Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) to be the pinnacle of art for a period in my adolescence. It is a near-perfect expression of the disconnection, emotional instability, and confusion of this stage of life. But more than that, I think that this may have been the first work of visual art that made me understand how powerful the intersection of aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy could be. Of course it is not just visual — the poetry of the dialogue, the strangeness of the music, the striking imagery, combine to express not just a mood, but a metaphysical statement.

At the end of this film, the main character (played by Monica Vitti) tells a story to her daughter:

“There was once a little girl who lived on an island. Being with adults bored and frightened her. She didn’t like kids her own age because they pretended to be adults. So, she was always alone playing with cormorants, seagulls, and wild rabbits. She had discovered a tiny beach far from the village, where the sea was transparent and the sand pink. She was so silent there. She would leave when the sun disappeared. One morning she saw a sailboat. It was different from the other sailboats that usually passed by. This was a real sailing ship! One which must have seen all the oceans and storms and had maybe gone around the world. From afar it was magnificent. Up close it was mysterious, with no one to be seen on board. For a while it was motionless. Then it turned and sailed out as it had come in. The little girl, used to man’s strange mentality, was not really surprised. But, as she turned away… wait. One mystery was perfectly normal… but two? Who was singing? The beach was deserted, as usual, yet the voice was there… now closer, now further away. At one point it seemed to be coming from the sea. Beneath the rocks… many small rocks… that she had never noticed… and they looked human. And at that moment the voice was very soft.”

“But who was singing?”

“They all were singing.”

Update: Sorry, I can’t help it. I just came across another quote from this film. This one always gave me goosebumps.

Giuliana: I feel my eyes tearing up. What should I do with my eyes? What should I watch?

Corrado Zeller: You ask what you should watch. I ask how I should live. It’s the same thing.

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Just like everyone else, I don’t really know what to make of the Theresa Duncan apparent suicide and the Jeremy Blake disappearance (which is widely assumed to also be a suicide). The MSM is not offering much in the way of confirmed facts. And some of these “facts” appear to be speculation or exaggeration. The whole thing seems very fishy, and responsible news organizations would be wise to steer clear of the whole mess until the facts are known. Needless to say, Emvergeoning is not a responsible news organization.

So, with all due respect to Ms. Duncan and Mr. Blake, I’m going to link you to some strange analysis of this case from Dream’s End. Even just looking at Theresa Duncan’s blog in a cursory manner, there is much to ponder. It just doesn’t add up.

I don’t have time to read, much less analyze all of this, and I really don’t want to seem disrespectful. At least one person is dead, possibly two, and all of this analysis may be focusing the wrong kind of attention on their lives and deaths. It’s just a very strange case, and I thought y’all would like to know about it. I’ll post updates, but probably not do much analysis. It’s just too complex, and I have too many other things to deal with.

Here are the posts at Dream’s End so far:

This is Not a Game: The Mysterious Death of Theresa Duncan, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4 (which also contains Part 3).

Edit: Ok, well, those Dream’s End posts do get pretty wacky, and some of connections being made there are kind ridiculous, but in a nutshell: something doesn’t add up here.

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I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts about the tragedy surrounding artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. The way Blake apparently pushed himself out to sea is puzzling. It shares the poetry of a similar act by Bas Jan Ader [though his coda was unintentional]. In hindsight, all three artists investigated emotional landscapes that sometimes prove to be unnavigable.

Bas Jan Ader, Tea Party, 1972

[photos: Galerie Chantal Cruesel, Patrick Painter Editions]

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This afternoon comes another great loss for the arts in San Antonio: Linda Pace died in hospice care. Although I didn’t know Pace personally, her dedication to contemporary art touched all of us involved in the art community in many ways. Her most ambitious project, Artpace, brought San Antonio into a dialogue with the national and international contemporary art world that has changed the way the city as a whole views art. Since 1995, Artpace has been a paragon of arts organizations in San Antonio: the quality of the work, the involvement with the community, and the professionalism of the organization have been consistently impressive. Beyond Artpace, Pace has contributed to the community in innumerable ways, through her own body of artwork as well as her support for other organizations.

I have heard that Pace left her collection to form the basis of a new museum, which will be a lasting legacy to her love of art and of the city of San Antonio. As I learn more about the form this will take, I’ll let you know.

I would encourage those that knew Pace better than I did (and there are a lot of you out there) to leave your thoughts on her life and her work in the comments.

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It is with sorrow that I write to say that Alberto Mijangos died in the hospital last night. When I last saw Alberto, he was weak, and was preparing himself for death. He asked me about reincarnation, and wondered why people would want to come back to this world. Why not go somewhere else? Those who knew Alberto well saw his attachment to this life and the beauty of this world — to which he dedicated his life — but also sensed his longing to transcend the mediocrity in which he saw most people living. In his work he strived to critique the failings of humanity, without “pointing the finger,” as he said. He saw himself struggling to rise above the fear, the insecurity, the shit of being human. Through it all, though, he always had faith in the possibility of transcendence. The last years of his life were deeply dedicated to the exploration of Taoist philosophy; not so much as a scholar, but as a practitioner, living out the principles of the Tao as well as he knew how. During my last visit with him, I read a poem to Alberto which concludes with the lines: “On the door it says what to do to survive / but we were not born to survive / only to live.” One could say many things about Alberto and his work, but perhaps his most important gift to the world was his ability to simply live. His death can do nothing to diminish that.

UPDATE: For those of you who did not know Alberto or his work, I plan to do a little retrospective on Emvergeoning in the coming weeks. Also, here is the poem I referenced above.

SEE ALSO: For more on Alberto’s life and work, see our posts on his Chones series and his T-shirt series.

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Bad news on the architectural front in Tokyo. According to Architectural Record, Kisho Kurokawa’s cubic creation, built in 1972, will cease to exist in the high rent Ginza neighborhood. The interior design gives it such a dated yet idealistic expectation for the future. It’s unfortunate that some of these individual units can’t be extracted as architectural artifacts, particularly since there’s a trend to create tiny, customized houses such as Tumbleweeds.

***UPDATED PHOTOS***

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On the news of Kurt Vonnegut’s passing, a friend sent me this passage from , which I think is appropriate for the occasion:

“Bill,” he said, “I like you so much, and I am such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.” He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn’t have done in a thousand years.

Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.

“Your second wish is about to come true,” said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of he window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back to his cage and hopped inside.

Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. “That’s the most intelligent use of three wishes I have ever heard of,” he told the bird. “You made sure you’ll still have something worth wishing for — to get out of the cage.”

So it goes.

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“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” — Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)

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I’m a little slow on the uptake here, but Fluxus poet, performer, and artist Emmett Williams passed away on February 14. He was an important innovator in the areas of concrete poetry, visual poetry, text-sound, permutational poetry, text art, etc. He collaborated with people like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Filliou, Deiter Roth, La Monte Young, and others. Interesting that he died on Valentine’s day, considering two of his more important works are A Valentine for Noël and Sweethearts, an erotic concrete poem cycle which is a “full-scale, permutational masterwork of the concrete movement” (according to the editors of Poems for the Millennium). Most of his books are out of print and fairly rare, but as usual, UBUWEB comes to the rescue.

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