Emvergeoning

The photographic archives surrounding two iconic war images have recently been discovered. In December of 2006, the Wall Street Journal tracked down the anonymous photographer of a Pulitzer-winning photograph of a 1979 execution in Iran. Now we learn that a suitcase full of negatives by Robert Capa of the Spanish Civil War have been discovered in Mexico City.

These two images have kept people searching for decades, trying to the find the stories behind the photos:

1979 Iranian Execution by Jahangir Razmi

The Falling Soldier by Robert Capa (Spanish Civil War)

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Argentine artist Jorge Macchi has been all over South Texas lately — he was a resident at Artpace in 2005, he currently has a piece in the Triangle Project Space’s Standing on one foot, and the Blanton is showing Anatomy of Melancholy, his first “comprehensive U.S. exhibition,” through March 16.

As I wandered through the Blanton exhibit, I was reminded of the scene in The Breakfast Club when Allison (the “psycho” girl) puts on makeup and everyone realizes she’s a fox. Jorge Macchi has put in a lot of effort giving Fluxus a shave and a haircut, and what do you know, it fits very nicely into a standard gallery format. Macchi’s Caja de música, for instance, draws on the chance operations that ’60s experimentalists picked up from John Cage. Taking video of cars on a 5-lane highway, Macchi assigns a musical note to each lane, and as a car enters the frame the note corresponding to the lane it is in plays, creating a kind of randomized music box (you can watch this video on his site).

He’s also very fond of finding the edges of things, the demarcations, and focusing on those rather than the intended content of an appropriated work. For instance, at his Artpace residency, he took the final moments of several old movies and created video loops of the “The End” sequences. In an analogous move at the Blanton show, he cuts everything out of a map except the graveyards. These pieces draw our attention to the liminal moments, the insecurity of transition. Despite the summoning of these precarious situations, though, Macchi’s work feels very comfortable. He’s taken the ideas pioneered by Dada and Fluxus artists, art based on the awkward and the random, smoothed out the edges and made it feel very safe within the white walls of the museum.

There are some very elegant pieces in the Blanton show, including Caja de música, and Fuegos de artificio, a piece in which footprints made of soil expand outward on the wall, progressively losing their form like ripples on a pond. This is a concise and beautiful statement about the impact we have on the world as we move through it, bringing with us the dirt of another place, which gradually loses the significance of having come from our shoes.

But I’m left wondering whether the ideas Macchi draws from are best expressed with the sort of finesse and refinement he brings to them. Maybe the chance operations of Arp, Cage, Maciunas and all the others are better left in a raw form. Maybe Allison was hot without the makeup.

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exhibit a : Audio from Karen Mahaffy describing the execution.

exhibit b :

(photos copyright Justin Parr 2008)

INTRODUCING NEW EVIDENCE:

exhibit c : futureWorkerGirl reflects on artist as murderer, victim, pimp and ho.

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[The following post is about Episode 3, Season 5 of The Wire, and contains some pseudo-spoilers. Nothing very important is revealed, but you might want to hold off until you've seen the episode if you worry about things like that.]

This may be a bit hasty, but I can’t help thinking that The Wire is in mid-jump over the proverbial shark (and apparently at least one or two people agree with me). What I’m thinking of primarily is McNulty’s attempt to create a serial killer out of thin air in order to scare up some funds for the BPD. In Episode 2 I was willing to roll with it, since “the smartest guy in the room” is apparently spiraling into full-on alcoholism. But now they have the imminently reasonable Lester Freeman buying into the plot. And to top it all off, Omar surfaces in some unnamed tropical paradise, while Marlo heads down to the French Caribbean so he can see his money. I’m withholding judgment until Episode 4 makes it to the torrents, but I don’t like where any of this is going. Happily, the dynamic in the mayor’s office and in the newsroom at the Sun is pretty solid so far (although I’m a bit wary of this Jayson Blair-type business developing at the Sun).

Of course, my concern comes with some caveats (as if I hadn’t hedged my shark-jumping proclamation enough in the first paragraph). The Wire is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, and the writers have done a terrific job of weaving together complex plot lines without straining the characters through four seasons. With McNulty in particular they’ve flipped the script on me in the past — through most of the first season I thought McNulty was a glorified McGarnagle, and that assessment turned out to be dead wrong. So here’s hoping The Wire’s writers have a plot twist up their sleeves that elegantly resolves all my worries and cements the show’s reputation as “best ever.” But if they don’t, I think Episode 3 will be seen as the moment everything started falling apart.

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Contact Sheet of Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park by Diane Arbus, 1962 (Detail — full image here)

Tattoo flash sheet by Gus Wagner, ca. 1900 (via )

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D14 by Man Ray

Lillyputti by Marilyn Minter

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As many of you know, San Antonio sculptor / performer Jimmy Kuehnle has been in Japan since August working on a Fulbright project. He recently posted photos of his first two exhibits, at the Kyoto Museum (Artjam 2007) and the Aichi Geidai Gallery in the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music. Continuing a body of work he started in San Antonio, Kuehnle fabricated huge, inflatable sculptures, which also served as interactive / performance pieces.

Mr. Bubble Head, which Kuehnle made for Artjam, is a huge orange inflatable sculpture with ropes criss-crossing inside. Kuehnle spend much of the opening inside the sculpture tugging on the ropes as people walked by, creating an impression of organic response to the viewers’ presence. Museum visitors were also allowed inside the sculpture at various points, turning it into an interactive sculpture.

His piece at the Aichi Geidai Gallery, called Big Blob, was another inflatable sculpture made of the same orange material. This piece, however, was a suit which Kuehnle could walk around in “like a large leviathan.” After his performance in this enormous suit, Kuehnle invited audience members to try it on — but it seems a bit more unwieldy than those ridiculous sumo suits.

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A few days ago, Speak Up posted an interesting analysis of Obama’s campaign logo and its many, many variations. He’s definitely not skimping in the graphic design department. Today they take a stab at his brand message — the “change” mantra. A lot of people justifiably complain that he is short on substance (read: concrete policy proposals), but he sure has the image put together.

UPDATE: Fixed the first link (it originally went to the same place as the second link).

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There’s a study making the rounds which investigates the connection between cultural consumption and social position. The findings are being trumpeted as “There’s no such thing as a cultural elite” — but this is a bit misleading. What the study finds is that first, cultural proclivities are determined by social status rather than social class (i.e. it’s more about your education and occupation than your tax bracket). Second, people tend to either seek out popular culture, or to seek out both popular and “high-brow” culture. The interesting point here is that there is no statistically significant group that pursues high-brow culture while shunning low-brow culture. So, for the most part, people are either passive consumers of culture (or “univores”), soaking up the popular types of music, theater, and art that surround them, or they are active consumers (or “omnivores”), spending time and energy pursuing the more rarefied art forms, while also enjoying the arts of the common man.

However, as the study notes, this “univore-omnivore” distinction gets a bit murky when it comes to the visual arts (there’s also another paper by the same authors that focuses specifically on the visual arts). If you clicked on the link at the beginning of this post, you probably noticed that the article in the Toronto Star suggests that the study finds that “the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone’s to-do list.” This is where things get complicated, and naturally, where the journalist gets lazy. The survey the study is based on asked about 6,000 people in Britain what kind of cultural events they attend, including things like rock concerts, jazz concerts, operas, movies, gallery openings, etc. In the visual arts, all five categories boil down to the question: how many museums, galleries, or art / craft fairs have you attended in the last 12 months? Those types of events that could be classified as popular (craft fairs and cultural festivals) actually received much lower attendance than those classified as high-brow (museums and galleries), and thus the “univore” group doesn’t really apply in this area.

The authors of the study also admit that they don’t have any data on home or street consumption of visual art (paintings, posters, graffiti, advertisements, or coffee table books). In a footnote they point to showing that in the working class home, most visual objects are either mementos or decorative objects, both of which are taken as “not artistic.” I think at this point we can begin to see the problem with these findings. Popular forms of visual art are practically defined out of existence, as cinema is grouped with theatrical arts, and all the graphic design, architecture, and other “decorative” elements that constantly surround us are taken to be something other than art. There are numerous ways to engage in visual culture besides going to galleries, museums, and craft fairs, none of which are captured by the dataset used for this study.

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