Emvergeoning

Bill Daniel breezed through town earlier this year to screen his hobo film, Bozo Texino. He just printed a bunch of amazing photos from Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans as well as photos of hippy houseboats in northern California. The “Sunset Scavenger” show at Rayco looks fantastic thanks to Daniel’s analog aesthetics when it comes to printing photos the old fashioned way. Highly recommended show if you happen to be strolling around the SFMOMA. More photos…
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Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin sift through new media with a sharp and calculating statistician’s sensibility. The result, currently at Yerba Buena, leaves audiences reeling with the brainiac implications involved in such a complicated, perfectly orchestrated piece of musical, LED sublimeness. Here’s an example of the listening post in action at the Whitney in 2002.

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It’s time for someone to please bomb the billboard entranceway to Southtown. This is our neighborhood and Emvergeoning is publicly inviting you to paint something new on this old billboard. The previous artist, Mark Hogenson, has personally given the green light to cover up this fading mural. Supher, Clogged Caps, Illego…I challenge you to give this billboard new life. Ideally, this would be a monthly installation…

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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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Anne Hamilton’s installation at SFMOMA takes working class artifacts and transforms them into a monumental homage to indigo blue. The pile of 18,000 janitors’ uniforms was accompanied by a humble “attendant” that sat patiently at a desk and proceeded to erase names from a small book. You can watch a funny time lapse video of the 3-week installation and listen to an interesting interview with the artist about this piece that she originally made in South Carolina.

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The Artist Foundation just posted the application for the 2008 grant period on their web site. All applications must be submitted through the web site this year (don’t worry, they’ve gone a long way toward making the site usable).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the grant, it offers up to $5,000 for professional Bexar County artists to create original works of art in the areas of literary arts, visual arts, media arts, and performing arts, as well as new awards in the areas of classical singing, set design, and costume design. (Their definition of “professional” is somewhat loose, but you have to demonstrate that you’ve spent some real time and energy focused on producing new work). The deadline is September 14.

Although this is basically the same deal as last year, there are a few changes. Rather than awarding one grant per category, the Foundation plans to dole out 15 grants across the 7 categories. In addition, all 15 grant recipients will automatically be considered for an additional $7,500 award for artistic excellence.

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… in the age of Web 2.0.

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“It should be clear that in the applied arts, innovation is not an unceasing hunt for heterodox and unseen things from desert islands; it is not merely an image surgery soliciting the senses, or a tension tickling the nerves. The idea of seeking the new for the sake of being different is nonsensical, resulting from the prevailing contemporary ‘market and goods’ ideology. True innovation is one that is rightly able to link the adaptive history embodied in any artifact with the changes of production tools, whenever they occur.” — Sergio Polano, Emigre 26

“But these forward gropings, this anticipation of an undefined future and the cult of the new mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The new time consciousness, which enters philosophy in the writings of Bergson, does more than express the experience of mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.” — Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”

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Andrew Waggoner sends a 3,000 word battle cry into the ether, begging us to beat back the “colonization of silence” before it’s too late. He juxtaposes complaints about the overabundance of music in modern life (music while we shop; music while we drive; music while we wait for the AT&T customer service rep to answer our calls) with praise for the powerful use of silence by composers such as Webern and Morton Feldman. I can’t help but wonder if the solution to this problem is as simple as replacing Muzak with, say, the Lovely Music catalog.

On the other hand, here’s a video of John Cage . He, too, waxes eloquent on the limitations of “what we call music” (does this include Feldman?), and the power of silence. And somehow, in this 4-minute video, Cage seems to say more than Wagonner can pack into 3,000 words. You get the feeling that Cage has absorbed silence, that he embodies silence, while Wagonner pines away for it.

PS. Here’s another discussion of silence in the context of poetry for those that missed it.

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Enough about money, it’s time for some poetry (the poorest art form around):

Existence

The man of dark politics
in a gold-buttoned boudoir
watched the untying of a black chignon
the hair rolled out like a torrent
in the torrent roses tumbled
and in one rose the mute insect
would not abdicate its existence
and clambered alone slowly
on the trembling petal of the flower
plucked from the ravines of death
in the course of a long day.

– Jean Follain (, trans. W. S. Merwin)

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Speaking of money, the Arts Writers Grant Program, funded by Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation, is now accepting applications for their 2007 cycle (deadline is September 12). Categories include books, articles, short-form writing (1,000 words or less), and “new and alternative media”. But if you’re thinking about applying, keep this mind:

Though nearly every project given in the last round of this grant project is legitimate and deserving, the grantees are hardly an undistinguished bunch. Every single one has a university affiliation (except for the director of the Drawing Center), a quarter of them are editors at Artforum, and though I can’t be positive, I don’t think a single one is under 30, most over 40.

Tyler Green, linking to that post at The Expanded Field also comments: “Last year the foundation asked me to encourage writers who blog to apply. This year? I’d say don’t bother. After seeing who the grantees (and the panelists) were last year, I’m not.”

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A few days ago a friend sent me this article reporting that stock in Sotheby’s dropped in value by over 11% in two days due to concerns that the super-duper rich are now only super rich, and won’t be buying as much art. That is to say, market performance in general  impacts on the art market specifically. Now Todd Gibson, Tyler Green’s stand-in at Modern Art Notes, points out that the art market has been growing too quickly, and was due for a realignment anyway.

This is probably true, but in my opinion, the art market will continue on a long-term upward trend. As China becomes more liberalized, we will see its economy grow substantially, and a new upper-class elite, participating economically and culturally with the Western world, will start buying up more and more art. Similar trends could emerge in India and other countries as well.

But I’m also interested in what the economic situation does to the actual art. There has been concern lately that the overheated art market is leading us to a point where the art follows the money, rather than the other way around. The importance of critics and curators is ebbing as value is determined more by major private collectors than major art institutions. So if these concerns are valid, then perhaps a cooling of the market will lead to more meaningful work as the artists try to create markets rather than following them. It’ll be interesting to watch, in any case.

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I knew I had to find the antidote to that Hall & Oates video, and I think this is it. Mike Cooper has been one of my favorite musicians lately, embracing blues, free jazz, experimental electronics, and even exotica — and yet his recordings never sound contrived. Here’s a video for a recording he did back in 1984 with Tim Hill, Gary Jones and Paul Burwell (as Beating Time). This fits somewhere in the No Wave / Free Jazz Fusion territory…. Be sure to check out too.

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The Dark Matters show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts stunningly displays contemporary artworks that puncture complacency and give us a glimpse into clandestine military operations, death and starling migrations . Initially, I plotted an epic post full of everything I saw in San Francisco. However, the work was so different and so in depth that I’m just going to write reviews seriatim to keep things succinct and accessible.
David Maisel is a photographer that I can’t stop thinking about. The artist’s initial interest stemmed from this question:
What happens to our bodies when we die? And, too, what happens to our souls?

These copper canisters contain the unclaimed remains of patients that inhabited the Oregon State Insane Asylum [in the days before euphemisms like "San Antonio State Hospital"]. Maisel said he was photographing the corroding urns when a prison worker assigned to clean up at the facility leaned into the room and whispered “The Library of Dust…”

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