Emvergeoning

The new issue of Art Lies should be hitting your favorite news stand soon; but they already posted it online, including my review of the Triangle Project Space tps show Standing on one foot, and an interesting conversation between San Antonio’s Potter-Belmar Labs (Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens) and Oakland’s Double Archive (Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh). Enjoy!

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WWII Anti-torture poster (hat tip)

Study for Self-Portrait by Francis Bacon (1985)

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Following up on my post earlier this week about the history of the Wilhelm Scream, here’s a video about one of the most ubiquitous samples in contemporary music — the Amen Break. Like the Wilhelm Scream, the Amen Break has been woven into an astounding number of otherwise unrelated works from a wide range of styles and genres. Towards the end, this video also deals with the copyright issues surrounding sampling and appropriation art, and while it doesn’t really break any new ground in this respect, it may be of interest to those who haven’t spent much time with these issues.

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Obama by Zane Lewis

Coincidentally (as far as I can tell), Kriston Capps and Edward Winkleman both posted on Barack Obama’s arts policies today. (I’m guessing they’re focusing on Obama because he’s the only major candidate to put out much of a policy statement on the arts.) Capps lays out Obama’s modest but well-intentioned white paper on the arts, and then suggests a couple of policies of his own. First he suggests amending the tax code as it relates to fractional gifting of artworks to museums. Second, he advocates for the creation of a Department of Culture:

Nothing would do more to promote cultural diplomacy and attract foreign talent than to join the world by creating a proper ministry of culture. And in fact, recent experience has proved that the United States cannot afford to act without one. The disastrous looting of historical artifacts from Iraqi museums and sites might have been avoided if there were an official organ advising the President on the cultural situation of nations and regions that also represent strategic U.S. interests. To the extent it behooves relations for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to play Pyongyang, it behooves the nation to seek out and sanction similar opportunities. And by all means, a Department of Culture could guide policy.

The upshot of Winkleman’s post is that although arts education should be funded,

I don’t think art’s potential as a social force in its own right is affected by how much the government supports it financially as much as personally, actually. I think a President should demonstrate this potential by inviting artists to the White House and being seen taking in exhibitions at museums and such, sending the message that art appreciation is a personal experience. Trying to suggest it benefits our national soul will enrage a good portion of the population. You can’t make that horse drink.

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Some enterprising movie nerds have traced the history of a stock scream sound effect now known as the “Wilhelm Scream” (the original title in the Warner sound effects archives was “Man Being Eaten by Alligator”). The sound effect has been used in over 75 movies, including all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, as well as a number of TV shows and even video games.

This is an interesting counterpoint to a performance by Chris Kubick and Anne Walsh at UTSA last spring, which paired movie sound effects with their titles from the stock sound effect catalogs. Kubick and Walsh built collections of comparable sounds such as various recordings of ringing bells or galloping horses and created a program that projected the name of each sound effect as it was being played, showing the huge variety of linguistic associations that can be made with very similar sounds.

(via The Plank)

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I snuck in and got a photo of SA’s Karen Mahaffey working on her new show in Gallery 4 @ Blue Star yesterday. Its opening this coming Thursday March 6, 2008. The usual First Friday festivities will follow the next day.

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This is the first half (or so) of Garth Clark’s Subversive Majesty: Peter Voulkos’ Rocking Pot (included in , his brilliant book on ceramic art):

Rocking Pot is inarguably one of Peter Voulkos’ most inventive and important works. Its strength comes from its intense mixture of ambiguity and ambivalence. Its form is perplexing because it seems familiar; a relative of the domestic pot. Yet its self-penetration of volume and its strange base, made up of two curved feet or “rockers,” sows confusion and challenges its claim to vesselness. It presents itself simultaneously as a pot, a sculpture, and a demented birdfeeder. But Voulkos has no such confusion about the piece. Unequivocally he has stated, “I claim this as a pot.”

That, then, should be the last word on the subject. But in the world of ceramics there is a curious tendency to “upgrade” pots to sculpture when they project the energy of art, as though the pot is too lowly a medium for higher levels of expression. Obviously this is often at the hands of critics who have not spent any time with a Ming vase or a Mimbres bowl. But this elevation to sculpture is meant to be a compliment to the artist (albeit backhanded), and undoubtedly this is what Rose Slivka intended when she described Rocking Pot as “one of Voulkos’s earliest outright sculptures. The pottery technique is evident, while the pottery function is subverted to the formal invention.”

This statement perhaps best reveals the core misunderstanding among the fine arts in the (under) appreciation of the dynamism of pottery. Pots do not cease to be pots when function is subverted. Indeed, for millennia, denying function has been one of humankind’s ways of setting aside certain vessels for a different role, one that perforce became ritualistic and contemplative. Sometimes the act of removing function was profound, as in the Mimbres culture’s practice of putting a hole into the bottom of bowls of the deceased, to allow their souls to escape into the spirit world. This precluded domestic/utilitarian ideas of containment in favor metaphorical containment, in this case a purposeful permeability. In other cases function was obscured rather than denied for reasons of whimsy — to tease the user, as with the so-called puzzle jugs and mugs of the Medieval period.

What supports Voulkos’ insistence that this object be seen as a pot is that it becomes more intriguing when viewed in ceramic terms rather than from a purely sculptural viewpoint. The act of cutting holes into an abstract sculpture is primarily a formal act. Cutting holes into a pot is a violation. It upsets orderly notions of utility and culture. In pottery, volume is a sacred space. Holes deliberately placed by the potter provide entrances and exits. But when punctured in the seemingly destructive and random manner of the Rocking Pot, the vessel can no longer serve its literal purpose of containment. By further skewering the interior of his pot with his curved rockers, Voulkos adds an edge of surreal spatial violence.

Violence against the vessel, however, was not Voulkos’ goal. If the sanctity of the pot has been bruised, it is simply because it has come up against the intense energy and physicality with which the artist imbues his vessels. The holes serve many purposes in this piece. On one level they are drawings in three dimensions (much like Lucio Fontana’s paintings and sculptures from his Concetto Spaziale series). One may even view them more conservatively as pottery decorations in their most abstract form. But they are also spy-holes into the interior architecture of the vessel. They reveal the pot’s powerful inner structure, which those who admire pottery as an art already know exists, but few have seen exposed in so visceral a manner.

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(The community gives him a saucy welcome.)

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Bruce Nauman, Walking in an Exagerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68)

Monty Python, The Ministry of Silly Walks (1970)

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I’m going to start spending some time here discussing the mutual influence between music and visual art. Despite the supposed openness of the visual art world, these connections are still overlooked by too many of us. I plan to flesh out this intersection quite a bit in the coming weeks.

In 1952 John Cage composed a controversial work that has now become canonical, although it still arouses a great deal of suspicion among those who are inclined to think that starting in the second half of the 20th century, art became one big put-on. This piece, titled 4′33″, consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence (here’s a ). Unfortunately, many people associate John Cage so closely with 4′33″ that they don’t know of any of his other compositions. I think some of these people might be inclined to take it more seriously if they were aware that this piece is part of a long career of very sincere exploration. In many ways, this composition is much more accessible than a lot of more “appealing” art, in the sense that it doesn’t hide anything — the idea of the composition is right there on the surface.

But there is a bit of history to the work that belies its apparent simplicity. The idea came about as a result of Cage’s Zen Buddhist practice (he was an original board member of the Zen Mountain Monastery near Woodstock, New York). Cage’s first public discussion of the work comes in his 1948 book “A Composer’s Confessions”, where he says that he would like to “compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 4 [and a half] minutes long — these being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music, and its title will be ‘Silent Prayer’. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the color and shape or fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibly.” But it wasn’t until four years later that he actually realized 4′33″. What happened in those four years?

Robert Rauschenberg sits in front of his “White Paintings”

According to Cage, it was seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” that finally convinced him he had to move forward with 4′33″. These paintings consist of a uniform layer of white paint on canvases. In the words of Cage, these paintings “were airports for shadows and for dust, but you could also say that they were mirrors of the air.” Similarly, Cage’s 4′33″ is an airport for sound; a hub of perception. He realized that the space of a gallery, or a performance hall, is a cathedral for perception. Why not use this space to create an opening for heightened perception of life, of the present moment in general? Rauschenberg and Cage turn the compartmentalization of these art spaces against themselves by making the invisible background noise of life the focus of our attention.

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