Emvergeoning

Armin at Speak Up gives us the 2007 typographic design trends round up (via Design Observer). Apparently legibility is out, along with counters (I blame the street artists). Image shown here is from a poster by Andrei Robu.

2 Comments »

I just got an email asking why we hadn’t covered the Paul Feeley show currently on exhibit at Lawrence Markey, and my excuse was that I’m not good at writing about that kind of art. However, it’s an impressive show, and deserves more attention. So I decided to quote from a catalog / book of Feeley’s work put out by Matthew Marks and Lawrence Markey back in 2002. This passage is from a short essay about Feeley written by Lane Relyea. is definitely worth picking up if you are interested in Feeley’s work. I’ll also take this opportunity to scold our San Antonio readers for not attending Lawrence Markey’s openings with more consistency (you know who you are) — he consistently puts together great shows by important artists.

Feeley’s paintings from the ’60s betray too much of High Modernism’s earnest optimism to be characterized as primarily subversive, and yet it’s also hard to see them as bent on autonomy. With their extendable patterns of simple, interlocking forms and their nondeclarative quality gained by the back-and-forth play of assertive and recessive shapes, they’re too suggestive of tiles, fabrics, and other such prosaic materials. These references might in turn place Feeley’s art within [Constructivism], except that there’s no mistaking Feeley for a harbinger of revolution. Feeley’s mature work seems to bear the influence of postwar industrial and commercial design and the intense interest paid to it by college art curricula, lifestyle magazines, and museum curating (including the series of “Good Design” shows MoMA mounted in the early ’50s). In Feeley, as in all these instances, the attempt to merge art and life was made without any nervous glancing at the clock of revolutionary history. Historical time-keeping was also a prominent feature of Modernist painting as Clement Greenberg conceived it, which may help to explain why the critic’s support for Feeley was only lukewarm. Paintings were less likely to participate in grand historical advances if they nestled too comfortably in the private spaces of home and daily social life, where history loses sight of its main actors and staging grounds, its leaders and elections and wars, and instead moves almost imperceptibly.

1 Comment »

A friend pointed me to this excellent analysis of the end of the new Coen brothers movie (obviously, there are spoilers) by film critic Glenn Kenny. Kenny does a good job of pointing out divergences from the novel on which the film is based in order to pinpoint the significance of the Coens’ ending. He also does a fine job of putting the final scene into historical context. And for good measure, here’s a rebuttal from Alicublog. I tend to side with Kenny on this one (who apparently considers the film a masterpiece), although I’ll have to see it again before taking a strong position. Throughout the work the Coens refuse to show you what you want to see, ultimately transforming a thriller into an elegy. The question of whether this is a great film hangs on whether the transformation is successful, or is an overreach, an unraveling. That question’s not so easy to answer on just one viewing.

1 Comment »

(updated on 11/29/07) follow up by the landowners “buff” crew :

Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

I recently picked up Walter Bejamin’s . He’s one of those writers who eloquently expounds some fascinating ideas, but often doesn’t offer much in the way of evidence. In his essay The Task of the Translator, Benjamin asserts that “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language. Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, and George have extended the boundaries of the German language.” Although he points us to examples of what he is talking about, he stops short of explaining what about these authors’ translations illustrates his point (he does, at other points in the essay, talk specifically about Hölderlin’s translation style, but in a way that is abstract enough as to not be really convincing to someone, like myself, who can’t read German).

Because of these concerns I was particularly glad to come across this essay by Seamus Heaney in the Guardian recently (via The Page). Heaney illustrates quite clearly how translations of English poetry (Shakespeare, Tennyson and Longfellow) influenced Japanese verse in the late nineteenth century; and how, a few years later, under the influence of translations of Japanese haiku, Pound and Eliot helped change the way the western world looked at poetry, giving birth to Imagism. Heaney then compares traditional Japanese verse to Old Irish verse, pointing out that the seeds of this “Japanese” vein of writing had also been buried in the western tradition.

But what I’m most interested here, coming back to Benjamin, is the notion that these were translations that Eliot and Pound were reading. Perhaps there is a sense in which the translators of Shakespeare into Japanese or Basho into English deserve more credit for helping to move the target languages in a certain direction than do the poets writing in those languages. Heaney clearly isn’t setting out to prove this point, and he certainly doesn’t demonstrate it, even inadvertently. It could very well be that Benjamin’s notion that the “character” of a particular language is actually shifted by (good) translations from another language is faulty, and that this blending of traditions has more to do with how writers choose to use a language rather than its underlying character. However, I think some of the evidence Heaney introduces about the historical development of poetic traditions could serve to bolster Benjamin’s argument.

The more I think about these ideas, the closer I get to the black hole of linguistics debates (especially when pondering Benjamin’s appeal to “pure language”), so I think I’ll stop here, before I get sucked in.

4 Comments »

The San Antonio Museum of Art recently acquired this Armando Morales painting called Trapiche (Moulin a Sucre) (although the museum seems to be referring to it by the English translation of the title, The Sugar Mill). This 1991 oil on canvas showed up in a Sotheby’s auction in 2003, and this was their description:

In Trapiche (Moulin a Sucre) Armando Morales seems to break with his own tradition of presenting the jungle as timeless and dislocated. In fact the painting belongs to a series executed between 1991-92 based on sketches of buildings on the border between the natural and civilized worlds. As in other paintings in the series, Morales forces the viewer to cross these boundary lines through a series of intersecting axes: the unexpected break in the forest wall that permits a view through to the open sea and distant horizon; the plume that rises from the sugar mill’s chimney to join the clouds that form a second skyline; and of course, the elongated tree trunks that terminated in a billowing foliated canopy.

On Thursday, November 29, Marion Oettinger (SAMA’s curator of Latin American Art) will read from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez essay on Morales to celebrate the acquisition. The reading will start at 6 pm, and is free to the public.

2 Comments »

San Antonio mayor Phil Hardberger has thrown his weight behind a downtown “arts night” called Luminaria to take place on March 15, 2008. A few people in San Antonio’s grassroots contemporary art scene are trying to make sure that this community is involved. Jason Stevens (of Potter-Belmar Labs) has started a Luminaria blog to give some information on the event until the official site is up. Jason has posted a map showing where the event will take place on Houston Street, an artist proposal form, and more details about the event and how it is being organized.

There have been rumors that out of a $200,000 budget, no money for this event was set aside for artists. These rumors appear to be false, and money will be available for artists to cover expenses, although not for honorariums. We’ll try to keep you posted on future developments.

UPDATE: As noted in comments, the official Lumaria web site is now up and running.

4 Comments »

Heres a little recap of the Ken Little performance of Yoko’s “Cut Piece.”

(all photos by Justin Parr, click here for a more extensive folder of images)

Continue Reading »

12 Comments »

Is Damien Hirst working on the new Indiana Jones movie? Or is this some stunt by Saatchi to make sure everyone knows that crystal skulls are hot?

3 Comments »