Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art

he totally DID

2008-08-22T01:04:00.000-04:00

he called her a cunt. watch.

don't you-know-what with me, sister!*

2008-08-21T23:16:00.004-04:00

so has anyone else seen the new tampax commercial with the mother nature lady bringing the girl her period while she's on vacation in hawaii? "no backup???" ok. point: you can wear just tampons with your white bikini (who has these?) because you don't need a pad as backup like you used to. so far, no problem. (i mean. except that tampons are full of bleach and perfumes and produce a whole bunch of chemical filled waste that just gets flushed - where does it go after the chemicals go in your vagina, ladies???) it's the implication of the last line of the commercial that made me go hmm... mother nature says "ooh... newlyweds." uh. translation: "period sex: eeeewwww." wtf tampax? quit making public judgments about which times during the month we ladies should be sexing it up. that shit's my business, yo.

*the quote is from tim gunn. not that it's related except that i've seen this commercial on bravo like 60 times in the past two days. bravo's new lineup of shows is totally magical. se in particular: "tabitha's salon takeover" and "the rachel zoe project".
**tampon weiner from crabmommy. thanks!

Fourth of July Party Outfit

2008-07-01T16:03:00.003-04:00

In honor of the DC Militia's piggybacking on our Hurray for the USA party on Friday, I have selected the following ensemble:

Gold Shiny Pants:
Patriotic Bathing Suit:

Rubber Cowboy Boots:
Super Soaker Max-D 300 Twin Pack (in pink and purple):
Anybody know where I can pick up a some holsters for these guns of mine?

txt msg rvw: The F Yeah Tour at The Black Cat 6/18/08

2008-06-20T14:25:00.003-04:00

{a review in both real and imagined text messages}

Act 1: Mannequin Men
J to M "these guys really want to be rock stars"
J to M "i have a soft spot for drummers who sing"

Act 2: Team Robspierre
M to J "probably really from shirlington"
J to M "not. good."

Act 3: Comedian Josh Fadem
J to M "crowd = assholes. point?"

Act 4: Monotonix
J to M "old hairy guys"
M to J "they move around! fun!"
J to M "drummer = hot bod. sound their age."

Act 5: The Death Set
M to J "just realized i don't like these guys"
J to M "they trick you with that dance music btw songs"
M to J "crappy early 90s punk"
M to J "why is dan deacon associating himself with all this crap?"

Act 6: Matt & Kim
J to M "i like how he talks a lot"
M to J "like he's getting through some stuff"

Act 7: Dan Deacon
J to M "incapable of rocking out after 4 hours of crappy bands"
M to J "this crowd is really young"
J to M "maybe should have skipped the 1st 4"

F Yeah Tour.

Jordan Knight: my heart still throbs...

2008-06-18T18:33:00.002-04:00

props to my all time fave new kid for still being the best boybandmember evs and for obviously refusing to work out and oil up for the new vid. you rock that t-shirt, j!

Bike to Work Day

2008-05-16T16:57:00.002-04:00

Big ups to my girl Kathy whose 2 seconds of fame can be found here. Other than Kat, who looks lovely as usual, all of these people look totally ridiculous. I understand that it was raining and covering up was necessary so as not to ruin your working clothes, but shoot. You guys are really ok with going out in public looking like that? Also: no kickstands? Really?

The Redheaded Step-Child

2008-05-14T00:04:00.004-04:00

My parents got a kitten. His name is Birdie and he is my new brudder. How long til he notices we look different and starts to ask questions???

India Bike Pictures

2008-05-13T23:20:00.008-04:00

I was in India back in February with my girls and today I finally got around to sifting through some of the pictures that Kat took (I never carry a camera with batteries in it, obvs). Here are some neat bike pictures that she got. The above picture is not of a bike, but it IS a very sweet picture of a pigeon at the Amber Fort.
In India all the bikes I saw were these ancient, increadibly heavy, black (and usually rusty) things with tons of options for carrying stuff (including hooks that hang off of the handlebars) and big metal kickstands that went around the the back wheel and lifted it up off the ground (do those things have a name?)
Here's one in action in a slum near the train tracks taken from the train from Mumbai to Delhi. Un-PC Sidenote: where do people in slums worldwide locate all their sheet metal?
There were lots of bicycle rickshaws in Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Most were carrying overweight white people, so we decided it was human abuse to take one and opted instead for walking, cars or auto rickshaws.This is a bicycle ferris wheel that we saw at the Mumbai Arts Festival. If you look closely you can see the tiffin boxes on them. Sadly appropriate for today, this photo was taken at Jaipur Village, which is like the Sturbridge Village of Rajasthan but with rides and with everything made out of plastic. Fun and kitstchtastic!

Hellraiser 8: Even Crappier Than Hellraiser 3

2008-05-06T14:03:00.003-04:00

We watched Hellraiser 8 (Hellworld) last week, but then I had to go to Chicago to act as a sounding board for the complaints of a bunch of lawyers and psychologists, so I didn't get a chance to do the run down on it that I know you all were waiting for with baited breath. Here it is. Hellraiser 8, perhaps solely due to the fact that it is the EIGHTH in the series and should have had SOMEONE (anyone???) on board who had actually watched the other seven movies and said "maybe this isn't really what this series needs", is the WORST. HELLRAISER MOVIE. EVER. For serious.

I don't want to spend too much time on this movie because I can only think of one scene that was sufficiently satisfying. The part where we learn about the history of (my FAVORITE) the female cenobite. She was a slutty nun. Unfortunately the only continuation of that little tidbit that we get in the movie is when one of the internet-role-playing teens gets drugged and imagines effing her. And not even violently or grotesquely as the fact that it's a damn Hellraiser movie would lead us to expect. Just regular old imagined sex with the ghost of a dead evil nun. What a waste of a good plotline.

So basically with Hellraiser 8 they went back to the Hellraiser 3 trope. Make a regular crappy horror movie like everyone else is making contemporaneously, but make it about the Hellraiser junk. So we have a group of attractive fun-loving young people who love playing the Hellraiser internet game (how'd it become an internet game? in the last one it was a secret underground Eurotrash cult) and whose friend died a mysterious death that was somehow related to said game (and digging. they generally show him digging). There is some tension within the group with regard to whether or not this kid's death was partially their fault because they all loved this internet game so much. Two years after his death they are all invited to a Hellraiser-internet-game-playing-nerd party. So they all hop in a car and head off on a fun teen roadtrip Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style. When they get there mysterious scary things happen involving people in masks, cell phones and Hellraiser imagery. It actually reminded me a bit of Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave in its "Things are scary! It's supposed to be scary! Are you evil or just partying?" attitude (yeah, let's all thank JJ for introducing me to all this craptasmagoria).

That's all I've got on that really. The commenters on imdb say it way better than I have. Now that we're done with the Hellraisers maybe all that brain space I've been wasting on Pinhead will become freed up for something more worthwhile. Gardening? Art? Feminism? Eh. Eff it, we're watching the Wishmaster series next. Yeah.

a waste of good suffering

2008-04-29T12:50:00.003-04:00

two things.

1. i stopped moderating comments on my bike post because it got boring. i'd open it up, but i was getting a lot of comment spam a few months ago, so i can't do that. anyways. all the comments are pretty much the same. "wear a helmet." "u.r.stoopid." "i heart spandex." blah. anyways. i'll do another bike post for y'all to get hot and heavy over soon-ish.

2. jj and i watched hellraiser 7 over the weekend and it was total poo! it started out so GOOD though. i loved the imagery of the freaky coming-back-from-the-dead eurotrash hipsters. and amy kline's flashbacks. and the awesome knife-in-the-back scene. also, the hooks and chains were bigger in this one, which makes them a lot more scary than those weak fishhooks. but, like most of the hellraisers i've seen so far (yeah. i've seen 7 now. i'm a completist), it starts out really potentially cool and then kind of peters out in the middle. also - still not enough cenobites and pinhead. but i hear from nerd comments on imdb that it wasn't written as a hellraiser movie originally, so maybe that explains things. and the story wasn't really clear. what's the deal with that editor sending hot chicks out to romania to investigate the eurotrash hipster zombie cult? how does the video tape get back to him? do they still exist after the building blows up??? i hope to find out in the eighth and final hellraiser, which i hear takes place in the internets. again - clive barker, moar cenobites!

Explorers in the Further Regions of Experience

2008-04-22T11:09:00.003-04:00

Well, I had intended to try to think of something witty and rant-worthy to post about today, but all I've been thinking about or talking about much lately is the Hellraiser series. Srsly. JJ and I are on number 7 now. One more to go! So I'm actually just re-posting these remarks from an email convo we've been having on the series. I know. Lame. But I kind of wanted to get it all in one place to work it out for myself. Warning: this is going to get totally nerdy very soon.

I think that JJ and I disagree a bit on the purpose of the series. He wants less Pinhead and more psychological stuff like in Inferno (5 if you're counting) about what peoples' individual hells are like. I actually thought there wasn't enough Pinhead in that particular movie, even if it was the best since the first one (or perhaps better if taken as it's own movie out of the series context). I liked the idea of Inferno, but I felt that the Hellraiser imagery wasn't used enough. So Pinhead, the Cenobites, that spinning post thing, the hooks and chains and the Lament Configuration box could have been used a little more and I think the movie would have been a good movie while also having more continuity in the series. Because ultimately I think the imagery is good and interesting and has the potential to be really scary. They're just not using it well enough.

I do agree with J that Pinhead needs some reinvention though. In his own words: "he shows up, says some evil shit and then throws hooks at you." Agreed. He's pretty predictable at this point. But I think that is inevitably what happens when you make 9 movies about the same thing. He's not supposed to be a multifaceted character. That's how he can be so evil. Because he is purely what he is. I think they tried a little in 2 and 3 to explore Pinhead's history and character and it was a total failure. I'm not saying it's not possible. Those were terrible movies in general, so the fact that they mangled the Pinhead characterization doesn't mean it can't be done. But it's pretty tough to go back. The fact that it's a series kind of means they're stuck within the constraints of the previous movies. Or at least they should be. Unless they remake the whole series. Which I would be in favor of (and which I'm hoping this will lead to). Just scrap all that old 80s movie crap and start over with the same characters and concepts and make good movies this time.

In the first one he wasn't even Pinhead. He was just listed in the credits as "Lead Cenobite." I liked that. When there were other cenobites and they talked too and were just as powerful. I'm not a huge fan of the singular evilness of Pinhead. He's neat and all, but I think it would be more scary and a better story if it was about the concept of good/evil, pleasure/pain, etc. and the cenobites were just tools in that story. As it is now, Pinhead is this one dude who goes around and perpetrates evil on people. Over that.

Also, remember how in the first one there was that homeless man who liked to hang out and eat crickets with the lizards at that pet store that Kirsty worked at? And then how he turned out to be the devil? And how he was the one who planted the box at those crazy antique stores in Thailand or whatever so that world travellers looking for the "greatest pleasures and pains of heaven and hell" would buy it and then get fishhooked alone in dirty attic rooms? And how when Kirsty tried to burn it he swooped in as the devil bird guy and took it back to Thailand or whatever? Yeah. What ever happened to him? I think they replaced the concept of that devil guy with Pinhead, thereby simplifying the concept of the series.

Clive Barker, bring back the devil. Bring back the other cenobites (especially Chatterbox and that chick from the first movie - they were so rad). Try harder to make more sense. Thank you.

Speaking of baskets...

2008-04-22T11:05:00.004-04:00

WANT.

from Design House Stockholm (via AGAIN)

DC Bike Culture?

2008-04-18T10:44:00.003-04:00

Commuting to and from work yesterday, it almost seemed to me as if DC actually had a strong bike culture. Maybe it was the weather. Do DC cyclists not come out until the temps get above 70? Now, don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to live in a city where more people commute by bike than car (hello Copenhagen!) and I'm overjoyed to be the living in the first US city to have a bike sharing program (not that I'll be using it as they didn't think to install any racks north of U St), but from what I'm seeing out there on the roads, DC bike commuters fit extremely well into the generally held stereotype of DC young professionals in general. This is a very. bad. thing. Perhaps DC cyclists could benefit from studying up on the Manifesto. I understand that in a city full of people who persist in the "it looks good enough for work" mindset, that the concept of chic-ness (on or off a bike) may be just a bit beyond. But PEOPLE! The spandex! The bike shoes! Those silly velcro things used to protect your pant legs! The ugly college-style backpacks! Please, lovelies, invest in fenders, a chain guard, a basket and some g.d. NORMAL pedals. Then wear whatever cute little thing you were going to wear to work, play, dance, drink, etc. and get ON with your life. Nobody is going to think you're extrasuper athletic if you persist in wearing flourescent spandex on your commute. I bike to work each day (on a 5 mile route that I have carefully planned to be mostly downhill each way, natch) in a dress and 4 inch heels. If you got to work on foot would you wear jogging clothes? Lord, please tell me the answer is no.

Also, I get chided a lot by my public health-concerned friends for prioritizing my (admittedly very cute) hairdo over my personal safety from head injury and death. And while I really really respect the creative efforts of some safety-minded friends, I never really felt like I was in much danger. Until yesterday. I do not intend to turn into an all-the-time helmet advocate, but please, people, when riding throught the Dupont Circle/U St. area in summertime, be sure to wear a helmet. The warm weather not only brings out spandex-clad bikers, it also brings out the HUGE threats to public safety that are small dogs. While biking around that area yesterday, there were three seperate occassions when I almost smacked into a car while staring at chihuahuas, little fluffy puppies and old fat bassett hounds. Talk about death by cute. Please be careful of the increased volume of cuteness in the atmosphere in that neighborhood due to the warm weather.

Anyways, now that the weather is nice, I might finally get around to giving my baby a tune up and getting a shiny new basket on her.

Back Again

2008-03-04T11:53:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note to say I'm back again. I was in India for a little while visiting my girl and then scrambling to get everything back in order post-vacay. I'll post something a bit more substantive soon. Promise!

sex in the library

2008-01-16T13:42:00.000-05:00

One ticket to Paris, please? I would LOVE to see this.

"Where has everybody been?"

2008-01-16T11:48:00.000-05:00

The cable news channels revel in stories about women (almost always young and attractive) who come to a gruesome end at the hands of violent men. The stories seldom, if ever, raise the issue of misogyny, which permeates not just the crimes themselves, but the coverage as well.

Oh Bob Herbert, thank you. Maybe if a dude says it someone will listen...

Male Sartorial Splendor I Can Get Behind

2008-01-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

Thanks to M for passing this on to me. From the WSJ LawBlog via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel... The snappily ascoted man to the left is attorney Warren Zier, whose old timey neckwear has raised the hackles of Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge William Sosnay. Yeah. Read it all here.

Personally, I applaud Attorney Zier on his unconventional neckwear choice, particularly given the size of his neck. It is both a stylish and practical choice, the combination of which I can really get behind. Of course, having known a favorer of idiosyncratic neckwear (cravats et al) whose sartorial selections I did not always agree with, I would caution those who admire Mr. Zier's style to, like him, keep it classy. As a very young girl watching Elsa Klensch (back when they used to have a weekly fashion show on CNN) I learned a few things:

1) If you think it might be too much, it probably is. Example: brown jacket, yellow sweater, blue shirt, gray pants, green ascot (I'm not making this up, folks, I've seen it) - too much. Grey pinstripe suit, quiet grey-on-white striped shirt, maroon ascot - perfect.

2) If you're going with an unconventional fashion choice, be immaculate. No dog hair, no lint, no frayed or falling hems, and EVERYTHING must be impeccably pressed. Nothing ruins an adventurous sartorial statement like looking sloppy.

3) Know yourself. If you're a woman, this is nothing new. TV Gays like Carson have been telling us this for years. But men aren't raised on teen magazines and TV homos and at times tend to be much less obsessively conscious of how they look. How they REALLY look. The man above is a large middle aged man. There's really no way around that. But he rocks it because he knows how to style himself. Comfortable, neat, paired down and impeccably cut in a style that flatters your shape ALWAYS looks good.

new post, new life, new concept

2008-01-14T22:37:00.000-05:00

I'm back. For real this time. The problem with blogging about something I'm not so into anymore is that it's just not gonna happen. But I like my blog and I'm sure the readership has dwindled such that not so many humans will notice if I just stop writing about art and commence to writing about other stuff. I have wide and varied interests, people, and cannot be confined to ranting on one subject alone. So, as you may have noticed in my newly updated sidebar, I will now be composing relatively brief, strongly worded screeds on all that interests me. Namely media, fashion, art and culture - high and low. Yes, mostly low. I promise to post more frequently if you promise to read, my sweets (all two of you).

On that note, my dad sent me these two sheep cartoons made by Edward Tufte about the obtuseness of art theory that I really appreciated:
Find them full sized here.

i expect nobody reads this anymore

2007-10-05T16:21:00.000-04:00

as i haven't written anything in months and i told everyone i was moving away. i'm still here actually.

anyways, a couple things in the post today:

1) from an article on local museum curators' favorite pieces in their museums' collections:

"For biologists that work in a museum, who look at specimens all day, who go out and collect things, it's a largely visual, aesthetic kind of undertaking.

"For us humans and mammals, the soft tissue is all on the outside and the hard bones are all on the inside. For insects, the soft stuff is all on the inside, and the outside is sculptured. It's hard sculpture. We become connoisseurs of these miniature sculptures."

- Ted Schultz, research entomologist and chairman of the Department of Entomology, Museum of Natural History

2) Blake Gopnik throws a little unnecessary Lewis Carroll into a piece on museum expansion and gets some great comments on the topic from: Yve-Alain Bois (be still my heart), Susanne Ghez, Philippe de Montebello (" I never know the attendance of anything, and I don't care. And I never give the attendance to the trustees." yeah, right), and Timothy Potts (quel snob).

3) i don't think that the potential presence of a newseum in second life raises as many "questions about the very future of museums" as joel garreau seems to.

that's all for now.

rapture ransom

2007-05-10T18:06:00.000-04:00

someone has an adorably precious sense of humor. noogies for you.

Artomatic Top 10 (er 9)

2007-05-10T17:44:00.000-04:00

Yeah yeah. It's late. I just got over to AOM last week. Blah Blah... lots of bad art... it's the event that counts... Some jewels amidst the crap... Didn't get to see everything... Blah Blah Blah... Anyways, in the order that I saw them, here goes...

- Kristina Bilonick
- Elizabeth Lundberg Morissette
- Tim Tate (nach)
- Joseph Merchlinsky
- Susana Raab
- Kenneth George
- Veronica Szalus
- Laurel Lukaszewski
- Novie Trump

OK that's only 9. I don't want to say anything about them because I was sort of overwhelmed by everything when I went, so I don't have stuff to say about each one. You can check out the links and see what they're about. Also I tried to leave out people who I know well. Because no fair only liking my friends' work and also no fair if friends get peeved if they don't show up on the list. So you don't know if you'd be in my top 10 (9) or not, friends. Ha.

ArtDC thoughts

2007-05-04T14:12:00.000-04:00

it's a little late. but i wanted to get my thoughts on the art fair down before i forgot about it entirely.

- too much stuff. not enough of it good and hard to focus on anything at all.
- bad venue for the video installations over in the lounge area and that media space over in the back corner. in general i think that an art fair is a bad venue for small scale video installation. there's too much outside visual noise to deal with.
- the larger stuff was more successful, clearly, because it was easier to see and focus on.
- that all makes me a little sad. because i actually prefer smaller, more intimate artwork.

eh. that's all. i didn't really have strong feelings about the fair one way or another. it was an art fair. i still prefer to go to galleries.

Thursday Night at Supple

2007-04-29T12:55:00.001-04:00

I helped JT Kirkland with a couple of minor logistical things to do with his exhibition Supple, currently up at the Warehouse. Thursday night was the opening reception and in addition to spending hours scrubbing the walls of the Warehouse with four Mr. Clean Magic Erasers during the daytime and downing innumerable gin and tonics at the reception, I watched this brief and adventurous performance by Adrian Parsons. Suffice it to say that my date to the opening was an amazingly good sport about my desire to stay and watch the whole thing (unlike many other arty DC folk who poured out of the room as soon as the penis and the knife came out). Ouch, Adrian. I will never forget this as long as I live. Flickr photoset here (in case, you know, you wanted to turn it into your desktop background or something).

no news is good news?

2007-04-02T10:47:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a rough couple months and the blogging has fallen by the wayside. I try not to dwell on private matters here, but for a while now I haven't been able to focus on anything else. In short, my engagement to Mark ended and there was a lot of very exciting reality show-style drama for a while afterwards. The drama has subsided, I'm very happy to no longer be avoiding thinking about a wedding, and I've decided to move to Maine. While I've had my ups and downs in Washington I've overall been quite happy here. I've met some fantastic artists, curators, gallerists and collectors and I've had some wonderful opportunities. I might be back eventually, but for now I cannot imagine spending another disgusting summer in Washington, DC when I could be summering on the Maine coast (ur, in my parents house). I'm planning on leaving some time in May. So until then I'm hoping to get back to blogging and visiting shows and generally living my life. Last weekend I was at the International Panorama Council Annual Conference at Yale. I didn't speak this time, but there were some fantastic talks, so look forward to some very brief remarks on that in the coming days.

rien ne m'est plus, plus ne m'est rien

2007-03-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

My First Burlesque Show

2007-03-02T14:39:00.000-05:00

This post is about art because burlesque is clearly a type of performance art. Also one of the performers was artist/illustrator Molly Crabapple.

Last night I saw my first burlesque show ever at Bossa in Adams Morgan. Thank you to Alex, Demelza and Lauren for joining me in the rain for this adventure. The crowd was sort of embarrassingly quiet and the announcer didn't really make much effort to get us into the show, but the three performers - Amber Ray, Molly Crabapple and DC's own Casey Wilder - were gorgeous, talented and funny. There were three sets and the first and last were pretty much straight burlesque - posing and dancing to old timey music while provocatively removing sparkly and feathery items of clothing. There was some very nice tassel twirling from Molly Crabapple and some crazy good color guard-style flag twirling from Casey Wilder in the last set which brought me back to my high school drumline days (I always knew the color guard girls were dirtier than the cheerleaders - bigger asses too). The middle set, though, was what really impressed me with these women's artistic brilliance. Molly performed a fantastically warped strip tease in a straight jacket to "Your Love is Driving me Crazy." Casey did a brilliant and sexy-in-a-bird-like-way father fan dance to Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." And Amber shocked us with her perfect voice and vinyl ensemble as she sang "Whatever Amber Wants." It was really quite amazing and I'm sad that I didn't take pictures.

Mark said that burlesque performers are just strippers who don't take their clothes off. Mark is a hater. These girls were awesome and funny and skilled and so effing hot. This is certainly not my last burlesque show.

Sidenote - Casey, get thyself an internet footprint. I know DC's a stodgy town, but there must be at least a few folks who need a good panty thrower/flag twirler/fan dancer at their parties.

The above photo is of Amber Ray. It was taken by Dale Harris. I assume you can buy 8x10 prints from her; she was selling them at the show.

Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting High/lowlights

2007-02-11T14:30:00.000-05:00

On Thursday I was up in NY for the day to check out the NY Design Fair at the Armory. Total yawn. When I got the free passes from a gallerist I know up in Nantucket, I thought "Neat! Art and design together - a festival of modernism, whee!" Visions of sleek, Dutch design and giant paintings for sparse lofts filled my head as I trekked up to the Armory in the bitter cold of New York. Eh. Not so much. There were just a couple good contemporary art galleries, the rest of the art was folky landscapes and (I'm not kidding here) portraits of clowns. The design part was disappointing as well - mainly boring American antiques, jewelry and flowery china. I was out of there within 20 minutes and heading down to the Museum of Art and Design to see the Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting exhibition.

First, HATE the title. I think there should be a 5 year moratorium on the work "radical" in all writing about art. Also, for an exhibition of "women's work," the chosen work and artists weren't nearly as radical or subversive as they could have been. With the exception of a few politically charged works, most of the works in the exhibition were about beauty, skill, and applying modern technology to old art forms. That said, I was overall pretty satisfied with the exhibition itself.

I tend to agree with the NYT review that there probably could have been more actual lace and knitting. Calling sculptures of drizzled porcelain slip and thin rods of blown glass lace-like is a bit of a stretch. The work itself was lovely, but didn't really fit into the "radical lace" or "subversive knitting" categories. The one work in the show that I though was just terrible as a work of art and didn't fit into the theme of the exhibition at all (except that it had some vague associations with weaving), was Edward Mayer's "Drawing Over," a construction of white metal shelving and furniture and household items wrapped in while electrical tape that cascaded down from the balcony of one floor down into the basement level of the museum. The work was clunky and ugly and just didn't work at all.

Not that I thought all the work in the show should be fiber art. Niels van Eijk's "Bobbin Lace Lamp" (2002) is a lamp made from strands of optical fibers woven together in traditional lace-making techniques (the knotting of the strands "breaks" the fibers inside and makes the lamp brighter at the top and dimmer at the bottom). van Eijk, an industrial designer, said that he learned lace-making from an elderly neighbor and wanted to find a modern way to use it in his designs. Carson Fox's "Hair Filigree #3" (2004) is a wall hanging made from wire to look like giant piece of Victorian hairwork jewelry (which was made from the hair of the deceased when in mourning). Cal Lane's rusted out metal delicately carved into lace with a blowtorch was a fantastic meeting of the cocky, Modernist sculptor trope with softer, traditionally feminine design.

I liked the idea of Freddie Robins' 'It Sucks" (2005), but had problems with the execution. Basically the work was a hand knit Shetland nursing shawl with the words "It Sucks" elegantly knit into the center. It's about how these ladies have to knit these shawls constantly for the tourist trade and that sucks. Got it. Cute idea. However, Freddie didn't knit it. She had a woman named Audrey Yates hand knit it. That kind of sucks. In fact, none of Freddie's work seems to be hand knit. Most of it is machine knit. I don't have a problem with conceptual work being made by machine or by assistant if that is how the artist can most eloquently express his or her, um, concept. However, Freddie's work, in particular the work "Craft Kills," also in the MAD exhibition, is about, well, craft. "Craft Kills" was machine knit, not hand crafted. I understand that knitting machines require some hand manipulation and that the patterns are created and fed in by the artist, but it just seems like such an iconic work about craft should be just a bit more crafty. It's a minor point, but one that nags at me nonetheless.

Finally, Liz Collins' "Illuminated Veins (after EV)" (2006) made from silk organza, silk yarn and 3M Scotchlite reflective film. Makes me want to finally start using the sewing machine my mom gave me for my birthday six months ago. (excuse the grainy picture, I had to scan it in from the catalog since I couldn't find it online anywhere)

Gopnik on What is Good Art

2007-02-11T13:41:00.000-05:00

"Is it good art? It must be, because nothing else unsettles quite like this."

Oh, ok. Got it.

omg i'm totally famous

2007-02-05T12:22:00.000-05:00

thanks, alexandra, for making me feel so special and interviewing me on your blog. i'm afraid i come off as awfully dorky and totally preoccupied with panoramas, but i suppose that's me. here's a photograph i bought from alexandra recently. i've been slacking off on the "new to the collection" feature, so i'll run around my house today taking pictures and hopefully have all the great art i got in the past few months up for everyone to be totally jealous of by tomorrow.
Alexandra Silverthorne
Watts Branch Park, 2005 from the WDC: 8 x 10 series

Where's My GP?

2007-02-04T17:41:00.000-05:00

For over a week now Grammar Police has been missing from my internet. Fortunately I can get my RDA of Kriston Capps via CP, Express, Eyelevel, etc, but it's just not the same. I get a little sad whenever I see that little red exclamation point next to GP in my Bloglines sidebar. Does that make me an internet stalker? Gosh I hope not (for reals- I don't do very well with new people; I far prefer small, furry critters).

UPDATE: And he's back. Phew.

i need this essay

2007-02-01T12:10:00.000-05:00

Thierry De Duve, "When Form Becomes Attitude and Beyond"

I don't want to buy anymore art theory anthologies since I have so damn many where I only want to read a few of the essays. So if anyone has a copy of that essay that you could send me, or can find a copy online or something it would be greatly appreciated. There's no rush on this because it's just something I want to read for pleasure.

Thanks!

Fuzzy Animals Are Back!

2007-01-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

OMG. I know this is way old news, but I just came upon it today. To the left is Tillie. Tillie is a Jack Russell Terrier. She is also a very successful artist. As my darling K'ello lies sleeping at my feet I feel totally ashamed as a doggy mother that I am not encouraging her to pursue art as a career. The only things she produces are mounds of yellow fur in every corner of my home. Perhaps, though, the Peruvian Sandwich Dog has less natural inclination towards mark-making than the Jack Russell Terrier who was bred for digging. Anyways, this was really just an excuse to post a picture of my baby girl:

Vagaries

2007-01-24T15:42:00.000-05:00

“Built for Crime” might describe architecture, or capitalism, or the big, expensive sculpture itself. It’s hard to say.

How Mr. Einarsson relates to the original, and the rebel culture that produced it, is left unclear.

Everything is loaded, but no shots are fired: no statements issued, opinions offered, directions given. You are invited to be bewildered.

I have no idea what the film is exactly about, if it is exactly about anything, but it has been replaying in my mind for days.

Her SculptureCenter installation, which refers to activist politics of the past as well as art world communalism in the present, is very much in this mode. Is her work nonpolitical? Apolitical? Post-political? Crypto-political? Take your choice.

These are all paragraph endings from a January 12 NYT review of the current shows at SculptureCenter by Holland Cotter. At first I couldn't tell whether this was a problem (if in fact it is a problem) with the art or with the writing about the art. Then I read the conclusion:

Its bottom-line impulse seems to be to keep all ideology unstable and to treat all forms of power — including the art industry — with suspicion. To do so an artist has to travel light, stay alert and keep her tracks covered, a healthy way to go.

Which made me conclude that it is both. Cotter describes the work as evading explanation. But in so doing he fails to criticize. Not much opinion is given on the work at SculptureCenter; it's just described to the best of the author's ability - which in some cases seems specious - and then the reader is left with the same perplexity that the author seems to have experienced.

I've commented in the past on the disappointment I feel when the only response I have to a work of art is "okok, I GET it." Maybe I'm in the wrong business though. Because work that is purposely vague also kind of pisses me off. Not because artists shouldn't be able to express themselves in as vague or clear terms as necessary, but because of the reaction to vague work from arts writers, curators, etc. and how that affects the way that artists work (and talk, damnit!). Nobody wants to look stupid. And criticizing a vague work leaves you open to the claim that maybe you just didn't "get" it. Ouch! So being vague can be a sort of defense mechanism for artists against criticism. It also serves to uphold that silly artist-as-misunderstood-genius myth that is so important for maintaining some sense of the inherent value of art. That's all I've got on that right now.

Winkleman on Craftsmanship

2007-01-18T13:19:00.000-05:00

I do so often see work that insults the ideas behind it because it's so poorly made and wish the ideas being offered had a little more help from the handling of the materials. Often such work comes with posturing defenses of "personal aesthetic choices"...as if poor craftsmanship truly underlines one's insights into man's inhumanity to man, or whatever.

Edward Winkleman has a great post up today on artists who refuse to be labeled by their media. I tend to agree with Winkleman that if you're going to make art and call yourself an artist then you damn well better be as skilled as possible at working in whichever medium or media you choose and not think that you can hide behind ideas and theory. I'm reminded in particular of Rachel Harrison's work in the just-closed Recent Sculpture show at the Hirshhorn. Her handling of materials was awful and her work did not live up to the theories of commodification expressed in the wall texts. Winkleman again:

Excuses about budgets, time constraints, or lack of expertise may be valid in terms of exhibition deadlines, but don't expect the authors of art history to care. Especially lack of expertise. Unless a work is about carelessness, or unless an artist truly believes they regurgitate "art," I can't fathom a justification for making something less than as well as humanly possible. In other words, to my mind, there's no excuse for not becoming a master of the medium, so that the work looks exactly how the artist intends it to.

Read the entire post here.

i wish i could go to:

2007-01-12T17:09:00.000-05:00

this. Local artist and a blogger who I always read, J.T. Kirkland is mounting a show for himself in a hotel in NYC next week. I'll be in Maine for the weekend or else I'd go. Come to think of it, I'll be back Tuesday morning - I could take the train, get there in time to see the show, stay with a friend, then take the train back Wednesday... No, Julia. NO. Too much travel makes you grumpy.

Also I wish I could go to the Jesse Mann/Len Prince exhibition opening at Adamson Gallery this weekend. I found out about the show when it was in NY through the website of Mary Chiaramonte, whose work will be in a group show I curating at the gallery in March. Mary is friends with Jesse Mann, who is also an abstract painter. Anyways, I was sad I didn't see the show in NY and now it's here in DC and I'll be missing the opening because I'll be in Maine for the weekend. Hopefully I'll make it to the show eventually.

for mark...

2007-01-12T13:19:00.000-05:00

(via) Tricia Wang of Eyebeam reBlog:

"I asked my friend Yusuke to translate this blog post about the Booby art that was written in Japanese. He says this is a Chinese artist from Beijing who has created the biggest booby sculpture in the world, measuring 2x3.6 Meters. The artist says that the boob is one of teh most important parts of the body and is also a human desire, regardless of culture, economics or politics. The evolution of the boob is one type of capital in the long history of human beings. The booby is the most powerful organ. Elsewhere he says that he says this will be a multi-media exihibit. Ok - there you go! Remember this is not representative of all art and scultpure in China. I promise. fyi: Yusuke says that the term used in this post translates to 'boob,' not 'breast.'" (also via)

in more artist-hating news

2007-01-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

"man i fucking hate artists." -mark in response to this.

while i think it's a little silly to pass off your emails with your mom as art, i also think it would be a fun exhibition to see. my mother and father send me lots of cute emails that i sometimes like to forward to mark or el. and i understand that by putting these seemingly fleeting and unimportant messages onto canvas and hanging them in a gallery they gain importance. the medium is the message. but it just seems a little trite. i remain undecided.

i tend to base my opinions about art on how it makes me feel rather than an intellectual assessment of it. i know a lot of guys who think that's just awful. why are dudes always so into over explaining and over thinking things? maybe they're just into proving that they know stuff. but i digress. to be honest i'm sure that i'm smart enough to understand most of what i see (or consider it or do further research to figure it out), but i just prefer to judge artwork on the feelings it gives me. often the feelings that the gallery's press release or the museum's wall text give me get mixed up in there (and usually push the feeling toward the negative). most art makes me feel this: "ok ok i GET it." i can't tell if that's good or bad. i just leaves me undecided.

this is what i'm talking about people

2007-01-11T12:52:00.000-05:00

Oh Jesus. Somewhere here there's a clue to understanding that sinking feeling that lots of high-profile contemporary art gives me.

“I’ve always been a big fan of the Post, and I remember in 1992, or whenever the fuck it was, Desert Storm, the Gulf War? Remember? I’d always read the Post, and there’d be really rad headlines about it,” said Snow. “I was just down for it! I’m down with anyone, even if they’re bad people, if they’re just, like, anti-American, you know what I mean? This is a series I’m working on,” he pointed at some collages on the wall with lots of pictures of Saddam Hussein, whose likeness is also tattooed on Snow’s arm. “They’re old headlines, and they all have come on them. Yeah, mine.”

Snow has been working with his own ejaculate a lot lately; his contribution to the Saatchi show was a piece called Fuck the Police, which featured sprays of his sperm on a collagelike installation of tabloid cutouts, headlines about corrupt cops.

I hate all three of these assholes. Thanks New York Magazine. I had almost forgotten why I didn't want to move back to the city.

I'm somebody's favorite; what are my favorites?

2007-01-07T17:37:00.000-05:00

I always knew I'd make it big! Thanks, Alexandra for naming lil ole me as your fave new art blog of 06! Flattery will get you everywhere.

Everybody's posting what-I-thought-was-awesome-in-06 lists. By the time I remember all the stuff I saw in 2006 and vet for my faves it'll be mid-way through 2007 and that won't be very timely. So here's a few things I can remember right now that I discovered, loved, wanted, read, etc. in 2006. In no real order:

Loved seeing: Jesper Just's videos at the Hirshhorn
Loved buying, selling and following daily: Paintings by Molly Brose
Wanted more: Prints and books by Moira McCauley
Loved meeting, loving and becoming engaged to: Mark
Discovered and coveted (and still want): Sculpture by Sean Hennessey and Prints and Collages by Melissa Hackmann
Beyond grateful for having met: Denise Graveline
Eternally thankful to/for: Sondra (for getting me involved with the Wilson Building Art Collection) and Nevin (for trusting my judgment and taste and giving me increased gallerina duties)
Happy that I saw in DC and not NY: Dada at the NGA
Excited to have met: Alexandra, Sean, Kristina and Moira (hopefully we'll chat more in '07)
Loved seeing: Maggie Michael at G Fine Art and Frank Day at Addison-Ripley
Always excited to read (no matter where he's blogging): Kriston Capps
Read too much of: P.G. Wodehouse and Gawker (blush)
Happy that I let Mark drag me to see: Weird War and Boris

OK, That's all for now. I might end up adding more if I can think of anything else. I feel like there are probably more things I read and shows I saw that deserve comment.

Gadgets

2007-01-05T13:17:00.000-05:00

Neat. Thanks Mark.

Made the Switch

2007-01-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I made the switch officially from Blogger to Blogger Beta with both this blog and the gallery blog. Problem is now I can't be stealthy and pretend that the Brightstar blog is written by someone totally different from the gallery blog. Ok, so it wasn't much of a secret. But I just don't like that Google is consolidating my accounts like this. Shouldn't I be able to choose to be JM here and Julia Morelli, Deputy Director there? Guess not. So expect fewer snarky rants about DC art world stuff in future unless it is officially gallery-sanctioned snark. We all must answer to the man.

Click my button!

2006-12-30T18:50:00.001-05:00

From checking the Bloglines stats I see that I have two subscribers (and I know who you two are too!), but from the neat reports from Sitemeter that come to my inbox every week I know that there are at least 100 of you who are reading my little blog every week. OK, that's not a hell of a lot, but at least it's not just my mom and dad (actually I don't think they read this at all). I don't mean to sound like a commercial for Bloglines or anything (although I adore the Bloglines Plumber), but might I suggest if you are coming back to this blog over and over again as you would a regular website that you sign up for a Bloglines account, or an account with one of the many other fantastic RSS feed readers? If you are a regular reader of blogs and online news feeds, using a blog aggregator like Bloglines (or FeedReader, Syndic8, FeedDemon, GoogleReader, etc) will vastly reduce the number of websites you go to every day. I personally read 68 blogs and news feeds every day, but I only go to one website to look at them all. Guess what that is! Bloglines! Suggestions for alternate aggregators are welcome in the comments. If you have a Bloglines account and haven't subscribed to the Brightstar blog yet then what are you waiting for? Click the big sexy button to the left! Now here's the plumber:

Subversive Knitting

2006-12-30T17:52:00.000-05:00

"Common sense would suggest that perfectly normal human beings would rather not face that."

That's a quote from John Shenefield, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius taken from this WaPo article of June 23, 2005 (a date also notable for having been my 24th birthday). It's about the above work by Ming Yi Sung, which was hung in the Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space at the time for a show called "Not The Knitting You Know." The gallery also happens to be the lobby of the building where Morgan, Lewis & Bockius' offices are. You can read about all the ridiculous furor over the piece and Ming's decision to crochet fig leaves and a cod piece shaped like a cod to cover the naughty bits that the prude lawyers didn't want to face in the WaPo article here and Bailey's hilarious response here. Only in Washington are people this prudish and humorless about art. In New York I used to walk by a sculpture of a two-story, partially flayed, nude pregnant woman guarding the entrance to an office building in midtown (in the year I walked by it every week I never stopped to get the artist's name - that's what NY does to me). Nobody seemed at all concerned about the piece. And I can tell you that she was very naked and very flayed and totally Godzilla-sized. But put a few crocheted monkey penises and some lady muff made of yarn in the lobby of a Washington law firm and you get responses like this:

"I thought instantly that there will be women in this organization who will be offended because of the exposed genitalia and the exaggeration of the female form."

Ah yes, Mr. Shenefield, we need to assiduously guard the delicate ladies in the legal profession from exaggerated depictions of the female form... made of pink and blue yarn.
Why do I bring this silliness up now, a year and a half later? Well, AU film student Brandon Bloch recently made a short documentary on the controversy for which he interviewed Nevin Kelly, the current owner of the piece at top (which is now equipped with detachable fig leaves). Ironic that the complaints about the work came from lawyers and now the owner of the work is a sometimes-recovering-sometimes-practicing lawyer. The 5 minute film was such a success in Brandon's film class that he's asked to have the world premier (think big!) of the film at the Gallery in mid January, for which we also plan to hang some of Ming's work. I'm so excited!

Ooh Pretty

2006-12-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

Carved crayons by Pete Goldlust. Brilliant. So delicate and colorful. I want. (via). See more here.

Positive Energy

2006-12-01T18:42:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that some of my recent posts have been excessively negative. In an attempt to curb my personal tendency towards snarkiness, I will now post something entirely positive.

These are two artists who I met recently and absolutely ADORE. Seriously. I have total art crushes on them both:
1. Molly Brose. Molly wandered into the gallery a little over a month ago and I have since acquired a pair of earrings and two paintings from her. She launched her new website and her painting-a-day blog last week and is selling gorgeous little paintings at awesome prices. She does very tight watercolor drawings of old photographs with gorgeous washes in the background (ok, I don't know much about watercolor so my vocab might be off, but just visit the site already). Hooray for Molly.
2. Melissa P. Hackmann. I was introduced to Melissa through Denise Graveline, a friend of the gallery and Blogging for your Business guru, and went out to visit her studio shortly after. Melissa was super accommodating (picking me up at the Metro, feeding me cheese and fruit, chatting with me about local printmakers) and her work was worth the trip out to Clarendon (I'm a citygirl, I don't get out to the suburbs much, ok?). Melissa teaches a sketchbook development class at the Corcoran and makes wonderfully textured monotypes, books, mini collages and assemblages. She has the impeccable color sense of a graphic designer (natch, she used to be one), but more freedom in her work than I generally see in art done by graphic-designers-turned-full-time-artists. Check out her blog here.

too pop for pop

2006-11-16T15:50:00.001-05:00

So I was down in "Chinatown" the other night and I finally realized what that pink bird painted on the windows at Addamson Gallery reminds me of - the window decorations at Urban Outfitters. They always have those swirly, quasi-Victorian hipster decals on their window in some iteration. And usually they have vases, wall hangings and pillows with the same or contrasting designs. It's supposed to look modern and artistic to people who don't actually care (or know) about art. It is mass-produced "art" and I actually find it very striking. But what of young artists who recycle the idea and pass it off as something new and original? It's sort of a chicken and egg debate I guess. As quickly as artists can come up with new, interesting, attractive or provocative ideas and objects, consumer culture finds ways to appropriate them and mass produce them. Perhaps this pink bird window decal (and the continued use of graffiti imagery when t-shirts in that style have sold like hotcakes to teenage boys for two decades now) is something of a white flag to those who mass produce design to pass as art. Perhaps the artist is saying "I give up guys. Just buy this and pay me royalties, ok?

Maybe I'm old fashioned for preferring art making to art designing. Andy Warhol would be very disappointed. Not that I'm anti-conceptual. I'm no po-mophobe. But the pink bird and the graffiti lack even an interesting concept or idea to support them. I also don't think that good art is necessarily totally new and different. Like hip hop, all art is quoting the past with a more modern spin. But, well, look at what's happened to hip hop. In rap as in art too much of what people love and are comfortable with can eventually just seem like too damn much. Yes, the Sugarhill Gang wrote catchy rhymes and yes, Apache is a great song with a great beat, but if you add nothing to your quotes and samples but an image, I might as well keep with the old stuff. The same is true for art. If all you've got to give me is a copy of something an overpriced hipster lifestyle purveyor has been doing for years, why am I still going to art galleries? Why don't I just go to the mall instead?

Frank Day at Addison/Ripley

2006-11-15T15:46:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went over to see the Frank Day show, Vessels, at Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Georgetown. I don't usually go out to Georgetown, but I find that I usually like the shows at Addison/Ripley. The DCCAH bought two works from this Vessels series for the Wilson Building collection and one for the Art Bank, so after I saw them in City Hall I knew I had to run over to Addison/Ripley for the show. All I can say is wow. Day spent some time risking his life in Lagos Harbor in Nigeria shooting rusted out ship hulls. I don't know much about photography, but I do know when I love it. Usually when I love it is when it reminds me of painting (call me old fashioned). The best word to describe Day's photographs is painterly. His close-up shots of the sides of boats could easily be mistaken for abstract paintings with the gradations of color on the ships its reflection in the water below. Pictured: Hull #18

Thanks!

2006-11-13T11:32:00.000-05:00

Belated thanks to Bailey, Jesse, and Wonkette for linking to/commenting on my Art-o-Meter post. Thanks again to Mark for making me aware of the device in the first place. And thanks to Denise, whose class I so rudely interruped with my excited typing in order to post it right away (yes, I was blogging for myself in the Blogging for your Business seminar!). Also thanks to Sean, Lenny, and Bailey for linking to me.

If you haven't yet, please check out the recently added "Required Reading" section to the left.

Gopnik on Morris Louis

2006-11-12T13:04:00.000-05:00

Just read Blake Gopnik's WaPo review of the Morris Lewis show in Atlanta and I really really hope that a Washington museum picks up the show after it goes to San Diego. It sounds wonderful.

Louis painted big, lucid canvases that seem meant for distant viewing, and yet he rarely got to take them in that way himself. It's as though the fact of making the pictures mattered as much as someone else's later act of viewing them. For Louis, painting seems to have been more like practicing a solo sport, and becoming very good at it, than like producing fancy goods for others' pleasure. Thinking in these terms gives Louis's work some of the impact of performance art.
Louis himself could be amazingly cavalier about the final look of his art. He once sent a picture to the Guggenheim Museum as a rolled-up length of canvas, leaving it to the art handlers to decide the size of stretcher it should be tacked to. What does an inch or 10 of extra cropping matter on the museum wall, when it's an earlier moment of making that matters most?
Louis didn't even seem to mind which way many of his pictures ended up being hung. He was happy to let Greenberg, his critical guru, decide which side was up -- and then find that decision overturned by a dealer or client.

I love artists like this. Brilliant, but unfussy. But perhaps that's why Lewis' star has faded since the 60's, while contemporaries with more distasteful personalities (Pollock, et al) have remained huge. The art world loves difficult personalities for some reason. I think it may be because it's easier to call someone a genius if you feel like you don't understand them.

There is a local artist who does graffiti-style work who is very popular right now and has a very nice show up in a respectable local gallery. I suspect the reason that his work is so popular is that older, white, rich, art-world-y people (and young middle class hipsters) don't really understand that what he does is not very interesting or original. It is attractive, and well done and sometimes funny, but, well... WHY CAN'T MIDDLE CLASS WHITE BOYS GET OVER THIS DAMN GRAFFITI THING? Honestly, people. Something that was interesting and edgy 20 years ago because of it's associations with race and class, and gave a voice to frustrated outsiders has now become the purview of middle class white boys with nothing to rebel against but bourgie parents who forced them to eat their natural peanut butter and fruit preserves on whole grain bread rather than allowing them to have regular old pb&j on white bread. Effing hell. There's something about the general idiocy of young white men that reduces me to incoherent ranting. I'll try to rein it in. Apologies.

Anyways, this is one of the reasons I fear for the DC art world in general. Because what passes for interesting and innovative is generally what was interesting and innovative in New York 5 or more years ago. We have many very good artists and some great artists, but most of those who become celebrated as young, edgy talent actually just try too hard to be like whatever they read about and liked in back issues of ArtForum.

On a more positive note, I also saw the Maggie Michael show at G Fine Art yesterday and adored it. More on that later when I see it again.

Art I'm Coveting

2006-11-10T19:22:00.000-05:00

Working in a fledgling art gallery is not the most lucrative of fields. It has it's ups and downs - in months with huge sales I feel pretty comfortable, but in dead months I find myself scrounging around in the backs of my cupboards trying to avoid costly trips to the grocery store. I'm ok with this lifestyle for a while if it means I get to spend time around art and artists and do what I love. Problem is, temptation is inevitable. Working with so much art around me is one thing. There's inevitably one work in every show we hang that I adore, but I can usually resist temptation because I know that either the work will be sold to someone who loves it as much as I do or the work will still be in the gallery and I can look at it whenever I want (and dream about purchasing it during one of the good months). My main temptation for art purchases involves artists whose work I see in other shows, whose blogs I read (they work!), or who submit their work to the gallery, but don't fit into any of the shows we have planned (that's where I got the awesome blackberries work by Maremi Hoof).

So here's a list of art I've seen and am currently coveting:

1.) Sean Heannessey's Paint Tube and Crackly Lightbulb. The Paint Tube because it reminds me of Thierry de Duve's essay "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint" about Duchamp, etc. (I won't get into it, you already get that I'm smart). The Crackly Lightbulb because I just think it's so beautiful.

2.) A couple of watercolors by Molly Brose, In One Basket and Keep Busy. Until recently Molly was making beautiful jewelry with tiny abstract watercolors in silver frames hung on chains. Next week (she promises!) she will begin a painting-a-day blog. Today she brought in some examples of what she intends to do - very precise watercolor drawings of old photographs set against a swirlier, more colorful background. I am absolutely coveting these small paintings of a bee and a nest or basket (or something!). She has a wonderful color sense (as evidenced in her jewelery) and a tremendously controlled hand.

3.) This is a work that's still in the gallery from our last show, Ellyn Weiss: Circular Reasoning. I adore this work because I think it's a little more complicated and slightly messier than some of the other 12"x12" oil bar on wood works that were in the show. It has a certain unfinished look to it that I really love. It's pretty obvious by now from the works above that my tastes lately have tended towards highly controlled chaos.

4.) OK, this isn't art, but I wanted to add it to my wishlist because it is art-related. I need FRAMING! The major problem with collecting works on paper is that they all need to be famed. So you can pay under $100 for a lovely print or drawing, but then it'll cost you another $100 or so to get it framed professionally. So anyone who knows where I can get low-cost framing, let me know! I'm thinking of trying to learn it myself, actually, but, well, there's not really so much space in my basement apartment for that.

More Madness (This Time Art-Related)

2006-11-10T15:48:00.000-05:00

Wow, the Bloglines account is really paying off today. From the Eyebeam ReBlog (which was one of Bloglines' suggested "art" feeds, but mainly focuses on technology), come these two gems (which I am Re-ReBlogging):

1. ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show. While I'm not really so into robotics technology, I have a big ole' soft spot in my heart for robots (they rank way up there with dinosaurs in my book of awesome). Anyways, the ArtBots Regional Robot Talent Show is going on this weekend in NYC as part of the Science and Art Festival. Awesome. Also, they have a theme song.

2. In Japan karaoke is legal, cover bands illegal. Or something like that. Masami Toyoda, the 73-year-old manager of a bar in Tokyo, was arrested for playing copyrighted songs on his harmonica (to the accompaniment of a female pianist).

Investigators accuse Toyoda of illegally performing 33 songs such as the Beatles' songs "Here, There and Everywhere" and "Yesterday," whose copyrights are managed by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.

Read the whole thing here.

BBC News Feed Made My Day

2006-11-10T12:44:00.000-05:00

OK, these are not entirely art-related. Well, technically they're not at all art-related, but I suspect that some more recent graduates of art and art theory programs than I could successfully argue the significance of these articles/events as artistic phenomena. But I digress. This morning BBC News Feed proved to me their worth beyond keeping an otherwise entirely uninterested human (me) apprised of world events (via mainly headlines and the occasional abstract - I rarely actually read the news, geez) as well as "rows" in various silly named places in England (Tipton-on-Sea, anyone?) and the all important cricket and rugby scores (UK and international), by giving me these sweet nuggets of news:

1. OMG they found a hurricane on Saturn! And from the picture, gaseous hurricanes (it's gas because there's no water on Saturn) are quite yonic.

One Nasa scientist, Michael Flasar, told Reuters news agency that the storm looked just like water swirling down a bath plug hole, only on a colossal scale. "We've never seen anything like this before," Mr Flasar said. "It's a spectacular-looking storm.

Yes, spectacular like swirling, um, bath water... or lady parts. Also I found out that Italy has a space program. Wha? Yes, it is true! My people are in space! The spacecraft that took pictures of Saturn's girly bits is named Cassini and Cassini's mission to find the sexiest spots in the universe and photograph them is supported jointly by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). Hooray for progress!

2. This one is so good, I have to let the BBC tell it in their own words:

Millions 'hit by toilet phobia'
A campaign is being launched to raise awareness of the crippling impact of toilet phobia.

That's right. Toilet. Phobia. Apparently there are at least 4 million British people who are afflicted with this disorder. Over 4 million uptight Britons can't do their duty! There seems to be a broad swath of bathroom-related activities that this phobia covers. For example, some people are so afraid to use the potty that they stop drinking liquids and take drugs to avoid "going." In other cases people just have "shy bladder" and "bashful bowel" syndrome, which means they can't or won't go #1 or #2 in public bathrooms.

A source of anguish for many

They post this picture and caption with the story and link to this hopeful tale of a Jamaican man named Pete who is obsessive compulsive, which he blames on having a dirty old lady yank out his baby teeth when he was a child in Jamaica. Apparently he not only has problem "going" in public restrooms, but he also won't let his kids sit on public toilets. Very sad.

3. Finally, in just plain good news, Mexico City's assembly has voted to allow civil unions for gay couples (as well as unmarried straight couples). Awesome!

Tuesday Evening - DC City Hall Art Collection Opening

2006-10-30T22:35:00.000-05:00

So I've been working like crazy with Sondra (who is working like super super crazy) on getting together the catalog (I'm listed as editorial assistant- yey!) and publicizing the opening, and it's finally here! Tuesday night, 5-8pm at the Wilson Building - opening of the new city hall art collection. There's some fantastic stuff in there by some fabulous local artists (including Ellyn Weiss, who will be up in the gallery through Wed.). Let's all get out there and show the DC government that we care A LOT about the visual arts in DC, ok? Ok!

I'll be working at it (and munching free candy - yum!), so look for me in black and silver (yeah, we all have to wear black and silver) with a nametag that says Julia. Hopefully I'll finally get to meet some of the artists (and catalog authors) whose work I've been admiring in the collection.

"Are you gonna link to my blog?"

2006-10-30T22:32:00.000-05:00

Yes, Mark, I am. My darling fiance Mark sent me that wonderful piece about the Art-O-Meter and I didn't even link to him. Now it is rectified.

New NevKelGal Blog

2006-10-26T19:26:00.000-04:00

I started a blog for the gallery this week and Lenny has already found it and blogged about it. Wow, he's quick. I wasn't going to publicize so quickly, but now it's out there, so I'm going to stick with it. Fun new work project!

In other news I visited Meat Market Gallery on Tuesday. There were some neat shiny assemblage works made out of toys and glitter and plastic and some photorealist paintings of furrys and some little marshmallow paintings and a nice wall drawing. Cool stuff. Check it out if you're on 17th St.

Art-O-Meter

2006-10-23T10:46:00.000-04:00

M. just sent me to this wonderful device. It assesses the quality of a work of art in a given exhibition based on how long people spend in front of a work of art compared to the total time it is on exhibit.

As someone with VERY populist views about art, I find this device amazingly intriguing. Also pretty awesome is that it says "piece of crap" in french in the image shown. It also appeals to my sense of indignation at bad art. Technology is wonderful.

Long Absent

2006-10-22T16:20:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's been over a month since my last post. I've been crazy busy with shows at the gallery, including our current Ellyn Weiss show, which is only up for another week and looks absolutely fantastic. What that woman does with color is just amazing. And Mark and I have decided to purchase one of her small oil bar on wood works. Wow! Our first art purchase as a couple. Anyways, get down to the gallery to see this show before it closes!

Another thing that's been keeping me super busy and far far away from my blog is assisting Sondra on the Wilson Building installation, publicity, catalog, and opening. Tons of work, but worth the effort to show the DC government that it's citizens really do care about having a vibrant local arts scene. Come to the opening on Halloween (Tues, Oct 31) and check out the 177 fantastic works of art by 100 DC-area artists (including Ellyn Weiss!).

There's also been a lot of traveling that's been keeping me busy. Driving up to central CT with my cousin for my grandmother's funeral; driving up to upstate NY with Mark for his cousin's wedding; taking the train up to Philly for a lovely little two-day vacay. And that was all in the past two weeks! Hopefully things will calm down after November 4, which is the date of the next opening at the gallery, for Eugene Healy.

I meant to get to the Philadelphia Muesum of Art while I was up in Philly last weekend, but instead Mark and I spent the entire afternoon at the Mutter Museum, which was awesome and totally worth missing out on the art museum. So many fetuses in jars, and wax models of skin diseases, and stuffed and preserved anatomical oddities. It was a small museum, but it was densely packed and designed like a 19th century cabinet of curiosities. Perfect! Their motto is "Disturbingly Informative" and it really hits the mark. I learned so much about infectious diseases, physical deformities and their causes, old fashioned medical practices (enemas were HUGE in the 18th century), and preservation and presentation of human remains for teaching purposes. Also, I picked up a couple of really great prints in the gift shop of conjoined hearts and pelvises as a present for Mark. I'll photograph them and post them eventually. They're really lovely work, and were so cheap! I will have them framed together as a symbol of our love! (sorry, I just got vomitously gross).

In even further news, I will be attending a seminar with friend-of-the-NKGal Denise Graveline on Monday in order to set up a blog for the gallery. I don't know many other galleries that have blogs, particularly in the DC area, so this will be a fun experiment and a good way to get out news and thoughts to our clients quickly. I'll let y'all know when it's up.

Theory Now-ish

2006-09-03T16:56:00.000-04:00

So I'm reading and theorizing along with M. Cameron Boyd's Theory Now class at the Corcoran via his blog. This week's readings included Marcel Duchamp's "The Creative Act," "The Richard Mutt Case" and "Apropos of Ready-mades" as well as Benjamin Buchloh's essay "Hantai, Villgle, and the Dialectics of Painting's Dispersal." I just read the Duchamp essays, but haven't been able to bring myself to begin the Buchloh. Maybe it's that obtuse title. What does dispersal mean anyways? To spread, right? And what indeed are the dialectics of the dispersal of painting in particular? I'll find out tonight perhaps. I took a class with Professor Buchloh back in school and if that experience has taught me anything it has taught me that I may in fact never learn what the dialectics of painting's dispersal are. But I digress. Here are my thoughts on the Duchamp...

I’ve always been a bit perplexed about Duchamp’s aim. Does he intend with his ready-mades to debunk the idea that art has inherent value by turning it into a joke? That seems somewhat to be the case with the R. Mutt “Fountain.” Or rather, does he aim merely to expand the boundaries of what we consider art to include the conceptual productions of an artist along with his physical output?

The statement in “Apropos of Ready-mades”¹ regarding the “danger” of producing too many ready-mades in order to “protect” the form/concept from “contamination” seems to negate the former query above – he understands that his artistic idea loses value if over-used and therefore reinforces through limiting ready-made production the inherent value of his art, and with this all art.

In regards to the latter query – is Duchamp really just a very early proponent of conceptual art? – it seems as though some of his statements in “The Creative Act”² complicate this. His argument that the artist is never fully aware of what he will produce – the “difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of” – seems to posit that even if the conceptual output of the artist is valid as his artistic product, he isn’t really in control of how this conceptual output is absorbed and interpreted by his audience and what the final meaning behind his work becomes. This brings us back to the first question though. If the final reckoning on a work of art is entirely dependent on the spectator, then all art – no matter how conceptual or inaccessible – is ultimately at the mercy of its audience and therefore not inherently valuable. (Have I gone too far here? I’m not sure)

So I’m left with my questions remaining. If all art – good, or bad – is art; if the conceptual products of an artist are just as valid as art as his physical artistic output; if the audience is the final arbiter on the value of a work of art or an artist’s oeuvre, then Duchamp seems to be calling for a democratization of art in general. But just not his art, as his work is de-valued – “contaminated” – not by the spectator, but by over-production:

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of "ready-mades" to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my "ready-mades" against such contamination.
(bolds added)

Help!

1. Marcel Duchamp, Apropos of Ready-mades
2. Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act

Internet brilliance

2006-08-27T23:56:00.000-04:00

Three things. Not entirely art-related.

First, as a follow-up to my thoughts of four months ago about NYC, Gawker has some brilliant snarky homo words on how over the city is. Good points one and all.

Second, Mark sent me this amazing work of video art. So mesmerizing, small boy in orange shirt. I can't stop watching.

Third, some slightly less awesome, but fascinating and mildly pornographic viedo work here. Shocking.

I promise some real art stuff soon.

Surprise! Bad Writing Ruins Good Art

2006-08-17T18:19:00.000-04:00

Speaking of the Wilson Building project, over the weekend I was moonlighting with a local artist who is organizing that project, helping her to choose which works installed in the building will have chat labels explaining technique, subject matter, etc. for the viewer. This required going through the answers that the 98 artists whose work was purchased for the building gave to a questionnaire about their work, etc. Oh man, was that hard. It took me two days and my brain kept turning off due to the excessive amount of think-y crap and "look at how arty I am" BS they spewed, but I finally narrowed it down to about 20 favorites whose technique or subject matter would be fascinating to the average viewer (read: non-arty types). I sort of realized in this process that these works I found most accessible were also the ones I was personally most interested in. I hate to get all anti-intellectual here, but really the art that most appeals to me is appealing on a level outside of the theoretical. Highlights from this particular collection for me fell into three categories:

1) Works that were made in an interesting manner (an abstract "painting" that was constructed of colored handmade paper, abstract digital photographs made by feeding a photo of a person's face into 3D imaging software and then exploring that "landscape for interesting aspects, a painting done on the spot at Art-O-Matic where the process and the work become melded)
2) Works where a traditionally "crafty" technique was used to create works of fine art (glass sculptures, art quilts, etc)
3) Works that teach me about history, culture or my environment (woodblock prints made from photographs of former slaves whose stories and images were recorded in the 30's by the WPA)

Reading what artists have to say about their work can be a real turn off. It's sad to say it, but in this process I’d see an image of an appealing work and then read the pile of BS the artist had written about “text” or which theorist or philosopher said what and how that relates to his or her work and I would develop a violent reaction against that work of art I had previously been attracted to. I’m not always this anti-intellectual. It just makes me sad when good artists ruin their work with bad writing. If you’ve created something interesting it should be able to speak for itself. If you believe it requires some explanation (such as your process or your ideas behind the work), only give as much as is needed and no more. Don’t compare yourself to the Situationists or quote Jacques Derrida and Guy Debord for me. An please please PLEASE don’t use the adjective “radical.” I find that art that labels itself radical is usually just a little pesky at best.

I think that this is a larger problem in the art world in general. It was my experience in arguably one of the best art history programs in the country that in our writing about art we were encouraged to value dense theoreticalness and frequent citing of critical theorists and philosophers over clarity. Thus, many of us ended up producing abominations like this, taking up a lot of space explaining how we were going to say something and who had said things about the topic in the past, but never really getting around to saying anything at all. I will assume from the submissions we get from young artists almost daily in the gallery that in actual fine arts programs the same is encouraged. Which is unfortunate. Again, I’m all for explaining your process or ideas behind creating a work of art. I just cringe when I come across an artist who, rather than letting his or her art speak for itself, feels the need to inject a (false) sense of importance to the work by referencing as many post-modern and post-structuralist theories, movements and theoreticians as possible. Damn. If the work is about urban life just say that. Don’t talk to me about Baudelaire.

9/11 Art BS

2006-08-17T16:34:00.000-04:00

There’s been some talk lately on other arts blogs about a lack of art that responds to the 9/11 attacks. I tend to agree with J.T. Kirkland in his assessment that

“Americans understand 9/11 and we were/are all scared to some degree. Why do we need an artist to capture the fear Americans felt after the attacks? It's our fear, we already felt it.”

Discussions like this tend to produce in me a visceral, angry response and I find myself unable to think or write clearly. Perhaps it is because this was one of the scariest days of my life. I was living in Manhattan at the time (going to school) and on that morning I happened to have woken up early and gone for a walk downtown. I don’t really remember much about the day actually except for the fear. I walked back uptown in the smoke (I didn’t know where it came from- I thought it was fog) and went to my 10:00 Italian class- they hadn’t cancelled classes yet because we didn’t really know what was going on. I heard someone yell “they bombed the Pentagon.” When I arrived back to my dorm the TV was on and everyone was huddled around it. I tried to call my family from the phone in my room but I don’t think it was working. I just wanted desperately to know what was going on and to let my parents know I was ok for now. My friend who went to NYU and lived downtown IM’d me to ask what was going on. “There’s a ton of smoke outside my window,” she said. That’s all I remember of that day. In the weeks and months that followed the attack they closed all the gates around my school as some kind of security measure (as if terrorists would want to attack one of the less important ivy league universities), police men with huge guns patrolled the subway stations, and everywhere I went in the city there were shrines to the lost. Pictures of missing relatives and loved ones plastered up on makeshift bulletin boards in subway stops and the exterior walls of fire houses and police precincts surrounded by candles and flowers. Color copies of pictures of smiling people whose captions contained desperate pleas for information. In the beginning these were hopeful; they were looking for relatives they thought were still alive. Months down the line these same posters became far more tragic. Transferring trains at the Times Square station became a daily funeral. Until, like most things in the city that produced emotion, I learned to block them out.

This was the art of 9/11 and nothing that any official artist produces can capture that event so well. Any attempt seems almost like exploitation rather than respectful tribute.

New Acquisitions

2006-08-16T15:22:00.000-04:00

I've made two new art purchases in the past week from fabulous local artists.

The first, as described in my last post, was a print of four 50's style bullet bras (like the above, but in blue) by Bookish Lady and co-owner of Junction Vintage Moira McCauley. Moira also makes fabulous books. I'm absolutely in love with these horse journals (sorry, no more fuzzy animal talk- promise).

The second work is this little painting of blackberries on a rope by Maremi Hooff, whose painting "International Market 3" was acquired by the DC government for the Wilson Building project. I don't usually go for still lifes, but I just love the paintings Maremi does of fruits and veggies all tied up and hanging from ropes. I think they take a somewhat dull subject matter and bring out its violent sexiness. Mark disagrees (he thinks I'm reading too much into it); he prefers Maremi's newer work where she inserts fruits and veggies into colorful abstractions. Maremi was kind enough to give me a tour of her studio (and her lovely house in Mt. Pleasant) and she has some really great work. She's currently switching over to acrylic to do her more colorful abstract pieces, which I can totally understand after years of doing such meticulously realistic oil paintings- it must feel very liberating to be able to paint quickly without being confined to rendering an image of what is in front of you. I wish her the best of luck in figuring out where she'll go next.

Wall Mountables Show at DCAC

2006-08-10T18:41:00.000-04:00

Last night I finally made it to the DCAC 1460 Wall Mountables show, which I believe closes tomorrow (Friday). As usual with these pay-to-play shows ($5 per 2’x2’ spot for DCAC members and $10 for non-members, max of 4 spaces per artist) there was a lot of really bad stuff and some pretty average stuff. That goes without saying (too bad I just said it). However, I was quite a bit more impressed with this year’s show than last year’s. I just found the notes I took after last year’s show and I notice that I only wrote down three names of artists whose work I really enjoyed. This year my notes tell me that I was inspired to look more closely at about 15 artists’ work (and inspired to purchase one- maybe two if I’m feeling wealthy by Saturday), which leads me to the completely unscientific conclusion that more local artists are making higher quality art. Anyways, here are the 12 who I found notable in the order that I saw them (traveling left from the top of the stairs around the room).

Briony Evans hung 8 small paintings on glass called “Small Paintings.” I loved the look of them before I even knew what they depicted. Upon closer inspection I discovered that the paintings were of pretty standard stuff – birds flying, etc. If these works had been large I probably wouldn’t have liked them, but the delicate size and medium made them look like lovely little 19^th century relics.

I’ve talked to Laurel Hausler on the phone a couple of times and have seen images of her work and by and large I like her style. I was only drawn to one of the two works she had up in this show- a girl on a red background with (if memory serves) a demonic creature next to her. I like the feel of Laurel’s work and I think she has a talent for capturing an old-timey cartoonish horror movie mood. Laurel’s husband John Lancaster had several drawings up in the show as well. I’ve seen images his work before as well and I think he has a great talent for funny and slightly creepy illustration. (As an aside, they both have fantastic websites).

Amy Lin has been getting a ton of attention lately and will probably do quite well in the next year or so with her intricate geometrical drawings in candy colors. This is in part due to her fabulous visual sense and artistic ability, but I also think it has something to do with her polite and professional approach. This is not to denigrate Amy’s work. It is fabulous. All I’m saying is that she sends polite, well written letters with professional-looking visual materials, has a very easily navigable website and follows up quickly with letters and phone calls. She also had some of the few professionally matted and framed pieces in the show. I was hoping to purchase one of her pieces, but at $350 for a framed 5”x5” work on paper I was strongly discouraged by my companion. (Another aside: I noticed this morning in the shower that the Garnier Fructis label appears to have been designed by Amy Lin – thoughts?).

Anyone who is familiar with my past art purchases knows that I have a weakness for small paintings of robots. Candace Keegan’s were very hard to resist. I wasn’t as huge a fan of her small oil paintings of toys and I really dislike her paintings of naked blonde chicks coyly eating candy, but the robots were fabulous.

Hunger and Emily Greene-Liddle caused a fight between my boyfriend and me last night after the show. I’ve always had a fascination with colonial gravestones. I grew up visiting and studying Victorian Park Cemeteries. No, I’m not Goth. I just have a family that’s really interested in the 19^th century urban parks movement and the mass-produced art aspect of the older, more attractive gravestones from the 17^th-19^th centuries fascinates me, OK? OK. So when I saw Emily Green-Liddle’s bright green and bright orange Pop Art versions of death’s head caps on Colonial gravestones my feelings bordered on euphoria as I contemplated the significance of applying Pop Art techniques to depict an antique form of mass-produced art. Then I pointed them out to my boyfriend. He told me he hated them and I shouldn’t even think of buying the orange one because he didn’t want it hanging in his home. Dang. Some people.

I met Denise Graveline at our last show in the gallery, which had a lot of collage/assemblage works. At the time she was taking a collage/assemblage course at the Corcoran with Katie Dell Kaufman. I assume that the works she hung in the DCAC show were the products of that course. I think her work shows great promise and I was particularly attracted to the mid-century-with-a-twist feel of the two monochromatic pieces (one black one white).

Mark DeRosa’s boxes with layered silk screens on clear plastic were cute and very well executed. A major pet peeve of mine are artists who think sloppiness is artistic and many of the works I was inspired to look closely at were works that were neatly executed and professionally framed. Mark’s works had nice, clean lines and seemed to tell abstracted parts of lovely little stories with images on each layer of the plastic overlapping, as though looking into the frames was akin to looking into someone’s mind.

Trish Tillman’s photograph of bright green napkins on an old yellow and white quilt was striking and the transition from her photograph to Kid Flash/Steve Frost’s textile works was probably a hanging accident that turned out to be a great curatorial decision. It would be insincere to say that I’m interested in all of Kid Flash’s work. However, I think his use of textile arts (chintz fabrics, needlepoint, felt) to create edgy, abstract works is a marvelous idea and I think it might be part of the point that I’m not supposed to think that all of his work is pretty. By making unattractive, statement-making works in materials that usually speak softly and cutely, Kid Flash draws us in and makes us re-consider the medium.

The piece I finally did end up buying was a print of a series of 60’s style bras by book artist and vintage clothing store owner Moira McCauley. In spite of them being unframed, I was really drawn to Moira’s prints of old fashioned underwear. When purchasing Moira’s work I met the lovely and talented Kristina Bilonick whose blue and purple screen print of overlapping necklaces I was also quite drawn to and am still considering purchasing.

I thought that the protest art and the attempts to shock were pretty much all dull, stupid and messy. Why is it that people who think they have something significant to say refuse to say it in a manner that makes it interesting or appealing to the viewer? Please don’t spray paint your protest slogans on cardboard and call it art or show me a bunch of pictures of your penis unless you are going to be extremely clever and ironic about it. Conceptual art has been done by people far more intelligent and challenging than you.

One more thing: I am way past over graffiti-style art. Yes, I have a couple small stencil graf pieces on canvas in my own collection. I do think the graffiti aesthetic is interesting visually at times, but at this point in 2006 the work itself is no longer very interesting or edgy as it was in the 1980’s and it’s done mostly by middle class white boys who are into old school hip hop culture, rather than by people for whom spray paint on trains is their only mode of communicating their dissatisfaction to upper class city dwellers. It turns out to be a great style with which to advertise Jeeps, PlayStations, and Verizon Wireless (to name just a few brands who have recently used the graffiti aesthetic), but I don’t think it’s really that interesting as an art form anymore.

New Posts, New Content, Refined Mission

2006-08-10T13:18:00.000-04:00

So I've resolved to start updating the blog more frequently and to narrow the focus a bit. As my lifestyle and every cute thing my dog does are of interest only to me (and maybe my mother), I've decided to focus the blogging mainly on arts-related stuff: arts issues, art theory, articles and essays on art-related topics of interest to me (and hopefully you), and (most importantly) reviews and thoughts on exhibitions and shows I've visited. I did some of this stuff before, but found that I was getting more into personal crap that wasn't at all interesting. So add me to your bloglines account under "Art blogs" (if you are organized and have one of those) and you'll find updated info somewhat more frequently. I'll aim for updates twice a week, but it may turn out to be more as I've been reading a lot of articles/blogs/essays on art that I've been dying to respond to.

* Pictured above is an aquaforte by Polish artist Elzbieta Bocianowska. Not for any real reason, I just happen to really love the work. If you love it too I might sell it to you as it is for sale in my gallery (it's pretty cheap too), but shameless promotion is not my aim and I've actually been hiding this one because I'm saving my pennies to buy it for myself.

co-workers

2006-05-11T15:48:00.000-04:00

Boone is a very helpful co-worker. Here he is editing a Powerpoint slideshow that I am putting together for the boss' lecture on contemporary Polish art at the Polish American Arts Association.

Tara admires the work of local artist Tom Walsh

no news is good news

2006-05-10T13:35:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a minute since I last posted, but I really haven't got much to report. Last Saturday (April 29) was my honey's birthday and I baked him a buttermilk chocolate cake with coconut pecan marmalade and also a batch of turtles. The turtles were my first foray into candy making and I must say that they were quite good, if a bit inelegant. For his actually birthday we had dinner with a bunch of his friends at Mercato, which is a Latin-Asian fusion place across from the Whole Foods on P St. between 14th and 15th. The cocktails were very good and the food was also quite satisfying if slightly overpriced for the small-ish portions. The decor kind of made the place look like a grocery store or a community center with all the giant portraits of happy Latin and Asian people painted on the walls.

Last Monday I went to the DC Mayoral Candidates Forum on the Arts. It was pretty dull and uninspiring. The DC mayoral candidates didn't appear to have thought much about the arts. Their answers to questions pretty much steered the topic back to whatever they were really interested in- police, education, gentrification, etc. So I didn't learn much about anyone's positions on actual arts issues. Adrian Fenty didn't even show up. Vincent Orange seemed kind of petulant and unintelligent. He didn't understand many of the questions and was braggy and mildly defensive about his accomplishments. Linda Cropp seemed nice, but she didn't really stand out for me, which is sad because she seems like she could be a good leader. My boss was attracted to Michael Brown and I admit that he seemed well-spoken, composed and intelligent, but he seemed a little slimy to me, a bit to politician-y for a city government position. I was impressed by Marie Johns. She seemed smart and driven and engaged. And she seemed like a lady who knows how to get things done.

Last Thursday was the opening for the Robert Saunders show here at the gallery. It was quite busy and I was pretty tipsy by the end, which made it quite difficult to shoo all the art groupies out of the gallery so that I could go home. Robert's drawings, books and assemblages are lovely, romantic little works, somewhat reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters-style Dada. he sees himself more as a visual poet, and his drawings are daily journal entries in visual form. Christie from DC Style blogged about the show here. Robert will be giving an artist's talk this Friday at the gallery from 7-8pm.

Aside from the above the past week was essentially uneventful. Lots of snuggling on the couch with the dog watching TV and cooking yummy dinners with the boy.

Spelling Bee

2006-04-26T15:42:00.000-04:00

Monday night I biked down to the Warehouse with my roommate for the DC Bee, an adult spelling bee at the Warehouse organized by a bunch of hipsters. We happened to be there in time to sign up for 2 of the 18 precious spots in the Bee, so we though "why not?" and did so. The folks who were meeting us were all too late (and too pussy, I might add) to join in the spelling fun.

So the spelling bee starts and the roomie and I are up on stage with a bunch of other dorks and hipsters. I honestly was not intending to win. In fact, I thought I'd be out in the first or second round. But then after three rounds had gone by there were three of us left. I spelled conjunctivitis, gangrene and Guatemalan. Then there was a break and then a lightening round and I got all nervous (and also I'm not actually a very good speller), and I placed third. Which means that I won some CDs by some bands I've never heard of, a spanish magazine, a $5 bar tab at the Warehouse and a $10 gift certificate to Tryst. Also I have a spot in the finals on June 5. Ur. I don't know if I want it. They will find out that I am not actually a very good speller and also it is very nerve wracking to be up on that stage with everyone looking at me and all those lights. I am too shy for that.

Micro Monumental at Flashpoint and some Warehouse shows

2006-04-26T14:21:00.000-04:00

So last Friday I went with a new arty ladyfriend to the opening reception for the Micro-Monumental show at CuDC's Flashpoint Gallery. First, it's a good thing that Flashpoint is a nonprofit gallery rather than a commercial one because I can't imagine anybody actually buying any of these overpriced paperweights. Essentially the concept was that they would have a juried show of small sculpture. I'm not sure how small it had to be, but everything was under six inches and sat (or hung from) a shelf around the perimeter of the gallery. The show featured works by the Washington Sculptors Group, Sculptors Inc. of Baltimore, Philadelphia Sculptors, and the New England Sculpture Association and was supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Geez. You'd think that with all these profession sculptor's groups to pull from and with a budget provided by the DC government they'd be able to pull something presentable together. Not so much.

Out of the 47 little pieces in the show only 5 of them were worth a second look. And it's not as though we didn't try to like the show. We walked through it three times in an attempt to find something ANYTHING lovely or exceptional that we might have missed. To no avail. Much of the work (including 2 of the good ones) looked like prototypes for larger pieces. Now this may seem like splitting hairs, but I think that if Flashpoint decides to do a juried show of small sculpture, the works chosen should be exceptional works either because of or in spite of their smallness. Not because they'd make great large sculptures. "Micro Landscape," a lovely little abstract landscape in red earthenware and porcelain slip by Margaret Boozer of WSG and "Period Shedding its Skin," an interesting (and self-explanatory) bronze by Gwendolyn Holbrow of NESA were the two good examples of this type of work. They were lovely works of art, but not actually lovely on their own; more as prototypes for larger works.

Many of the works fell more into the category of design than actual art. I know, this sounds like splitting hairs again, but what I'm essentially getting at is that many of them looked more like paperweights or tchochkes one could buy at a museum shop than objects that could actually be contained in an art museum and this is an important distinction. Ami Martin Wilber's "Dilate," constructed of two 2 inch stainless steel cubes connected by a long cord of translucent blue rubber, looked more like something you might pick up for under $30 as a birthday gift at the MoMA design store than an object for sale in a gallery with a price tag of $800(!!!). Another artist whose two works in the show fell into this category was Helen Glazer, whose works "Amorphophallus" and "Cicada Nouveau" were art nouveau-style constructions out of cicada wings. I was initially attracted to them, but I think that it's just because they are shiny.

Works that didn't fall into either of the above two categories were mostly just plain ugly without any cleverness or intelligence behind that ugliness.

Pieces that I found successful as small works were as follows: David Meyer's "Natural Selection #6," a construction of fluffy dandelion seeds sticking out of rectangular acrylic posts under a glass dome, which I was attracted to for it's elegance and simplicity and it's associations with old cabinets of curiosity; Joyce Audy Zarins' "Wheat, the American Staple," a painted plaster stack of wheat crackers that reminded me of 70's and 80's pop art sculpture (Oldenberg, et al); and finally, what both my companion and I agreed was by far the best work in the show, Adam Bradley's "Floating Woman," a graphic novel-like portrayal of a tiny plaster woman dramatically suspended in mid air as if falling from a building. I think that the Flashpoint audience, packed though it was with members of the various sculptors groups, agreed with my assessments. Bradley's work was one of the only ones we noticed with a red dot.

After the Flashpoint show we wandered up to the Warehouse in seek of a non-chain restaurant location to grab a beer in the Gallery Place hood (impossible), and stumbled upon two more openings. The first, "By Women, For Women," an exhibition of Turkish women's photography in the Warehouse Cafe had some stunning photographs in it. I didn't get a chance to pick up a price list because it was crowded and I was a bit drunk, but my favorite piece was one of a group of women in a changing room photographed from behind. I don't know why, but even with my background in art history, postmodern social analysis, and an appreciation of the development of visual culture (of which photography is an essential piece) I'm still a bit suspicious of photography as an art form. Perhaps because it is so accessible- most people have cameras and can go find a great picture to snap. Or perhaps it is because of the perceived lack of skill required- pictures taken with an old film camera and developed in a dark room = art; photos snapped with autofocus on your Nikon CoolPix and posted on flickr for all your friends to see = not art. Or perhaps it is because of the unlimited number of prints possible with a photograph- prints like etchings or woodblocks change with the edition as the plate or block gets filled with ink or smushed down, but digital images and even film can be infinitely reproduced without change to the original image. Let's all re-read Benjamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and search for clues to this conundrum. Anyways, the show was lovely whether or not photography is inherently valid as a fine art form.

Upstairs in the Warehouse Gallery was a small show of creepy works by the Washington Glass School's Evan Morgan (recently graduated from MICA and soon to be represented by Irvine Fine Art). The first two pieces that greeted us as we walked into the gallery's entryway were hanging pink lights reminiscent of the flow of a lava lamp. They looked like they belonged in some quasi-rebellious teenage girl's bedroom. But that didn't really set the tone for what we were to find upstairs. Yeah, as I said, it was creepy. Morgan makes long mirrored glass globules filled with dead baby mice that hang from the ceiling. A nice but artily pretentious young woman pointed out the correct term for baby mice to us in a tone that implied that she knew what the heck this creepiness was all about and really thought it was marvelous, but we quickly forgot. Then there were the deer. These were a better kind of creepy than the mice. Because they were not made out of actual dead animals, but rather porcelain and glass. Basically it was a room full of two-foot high ghost Bambis with various different missing limbs. They were kind of nifty. Then there were four sculptures constructed solely of these missing Bambi legs. I have to say I really didn't know what to think. I was attracted to the ghostly, post-apocalyptic lawn sculpture feel of the deer and their missing limbs, but the hanging bubbles of dead mouse babies was a little much for me. Maybe if I had had one fewer glass of cheap wine at the Flashpoint show I could have constructed an intelligent question for the artist who was one of only four other people there at the time, but it was too late for me and I just stumbled about trying to understand.

That's all the shows I hit last week. I'm trying to get to Terrie Pipa's "Small Gestures" show this week, which the boss went to last weekend and seemed to really like. I'd also like to get over to the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda to see Compelled by Content II and see what all the fuss is about.

Stay tuned for my report on becoming the spelling champion of the world (well, when I say champion I mean third place, and when I say world I mean the small world of DC hipsters gathered at the Warehouse on Monday).

Recent Events

2006-04-21T14:17:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday (April 9) I was supposed to go to New York, but the Chinatown bus for which I had tickets was full. So I went to a show at the Warehouse Next Door with the boy and his friend. It was a band of sad interchangeable hipster boys who played lots of instruments and kept switching, so I couldn't tell them apart because they all looked alike and just kept changing places. Maybe that is why people like them. Because their act is more avant garde theater than musical entertainment. The sound was very loud so I had to go outside a few times. After that band came another band that was also more performance than musical act. They had a keyboard lady with blonde pigtails who made vocal noises a bit reminiscent of grace slick and a very excitable drummer boy and a guy who played a guitar and also made the computer cheer for them like there were 10,000 people in the audience rather than the 20 people at the Warehouse who hadn't gotten tired or had their ears blown out yet. I didn't want to like them because of their screechiness, but I did. They reminded me of something Andy Warhol would create.

So Monday I got up to catch the Chinatown bus replacement at 8:00, but that one was full too so I cried and got on the 9:30 one. The thing about my time in New York last week that was so upsetting was that I pretty much disappointed everyone I went up to see. I lost an entire day of work with the lady I was supposed to work for because of the stupid Chinatown busses and then I felt bad so I sat and listened to all her problems and was consequently late for dinner at my friend's apartment and then I was also late to meet my other friend who I hadn't seen in months. And everyone was disappointed and I couldn't please anyone. So on Tuesday night when I was waiting for the bus home I just wanted to talk to the boy or sleep and feel like poop. But then I got on the bus and the Chinese dude next to me kept touching me inappropriately. so I got pissed and shoved him away, but he didn't stop. So I asked the guy behind me to switch seats. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say that it was awful. Then the new guy I was sitting next to turned out to be this Asian Australian guy who was really un-PC and kept saying loud things about how he didn't like recent Chinese immigrants to America and I was like "dude, we're on a bus full of them." But he didn't care and he was loud and chatty and I was kind of annoyed at first, but his uncouthness and bluntness was kind of refreshing and funny.

On Friday night my darling friend Joey invited me to join him and some lovely ladies at the Billy Joel concert at the Verizon Center. I'll be honest here, I've never been a huge Billy Joel fan. I can get all retro kitschy and sing along with Only the Good Die Young, but he's never been an artist I've listened to much. So I really went mostly because I wanted to spend time with Joey. i don't see him so much now that I live far away. The concert itself was very good and I was surprised at how many Billy Joel songs I did know. And I had tons of fun booty dancing with Joey and the girls to all of the songs about the common man working hard to make ends meet. And Billy Joel was a charming, short old man. The one caveat I had was that even though we had really good seats (go Joey!) it was in such a large arena that it felt like I could have been watching it on TV. So thank you for such a lovely night, Joey my darling.

Saturday through Tuesday my parents were in town. We mostly spent our time in museums or restaurants or playing with the dog. This was the first time they met the boy and it went marvelously. They all got along very well and talked about research and small animals and me and other various things of interest to the three of them. And my mother sent me an email on Wednesday saying that the three of us (the boy, the dog and me) were all very nice critters. Score!

That's all the news for now. Stay tuned for a brief review of the Micro Monumental sculpture show at CuDC's Flashpoint Gallery that I attended last night (hint: it's not a very good one).

I [what's the symbol for feel quite ambivalent towards?] NY

2006-04-21T13:50:00.000-04:00

I'm done with New York. I know, I know, all my New York friends are gasping and fainting as they read this. How could anyone ever be over the "greatest city in the world"? New Yorkers (both native and adoptive) have this intense self-righteousness about the city. I think that it is because if they stopped being so adamant about how GREAT New York is and how everywhere else is backward and slow paced and uncultured and dull, they might have time to pause and realize that New York just isn't that great.

Have I lost you yet, my NY friends? Well, I'll explain for the rest of you who keep reading. The thing about New York is that it is a wonderful, sparkly, beautiful, magical place. Sometimes. Very rarely. Mostly it is loud and busy and stressful and unaccommodating and brusque and intimidating. It is the most bipolar city in the world and I think that may be why so many maladjusted people live there and seem to love it. It's like dating a hot girl who is super crazy. Mostly she is annoying and frustrating and she makes you feel like shit, but on those rare occasions where she shuts up and is nice to you, you appreciate it even more. Plus she's really hot. So you find it hard to justify leaving this amazingly hot girl even if she makes you feel like trash. Well, that's how I see New York. It's hard to leave because it is beautiful and you can get falafel or liquor or drugs delivered to your door at 3 in the morning, but mostly it makes you feel like shit because you're not fast enough or hot enough or efficient enough or as well dressed as all the other young women making $30,000 a year (how do they do it?).

But guess what? If you live in places that don't make you feel like shit you don't need to have falafel, liquor, and drugs delivered to your door at 3 in the morning. Because you are happily asleep in your spacious room on your quiet street. Yes, the bars stay open hours later in New York, but partying all night is only really necessary if the daytime is unfulfilling.

So I'm over New York. It is too stressful and high pressure and expensive for me. That is not to say that I am totally committed to Washington DC. I'm not. But its nice and casual and non-threatening and I can really get into that right now.

I'm in the NY Times!

2006-04-14T13:58:00.000-04:00

Well, the gallery is mentioned here: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/travel/escapes/14washi.html

More on my awful trip to NYC and my Chi-town bus molestation later.

Rainy Day Musings

2006-04-08T18:57:00.000-04:00

I love rainy days. And not just the ones where fat drops of water fall from the sky. I love drizzly, gray days. And I love summer thunderstorm days. And I love days where it rains on and off, but it always feels dark and brisk and gloomy. That's the type of day it is today. It hasn't actually rained in hours, but it's still a rainy day.

When I lived in New York rainy days were magical. I would go for evening rain walks with my boyfriend in Morningside Heights and we would splash in puddles along the Broadway sidewalks. New York is a sparkly, magical place, but it always seemed even more magical in the rain or late at night when the sidewalks would be empty and things would move slower and you could look around and see all of the beautiful, magical things that you never noticed during regular days. Rainy days make me look up towards the sky, and some of the most beautiful things in New York can be seen by looking up. Elegant architectural details I had never noticed would appear to me through the rain.

I used to like to walk around without an umbrella on rainy days trying to will myself to not mind being dripping wet. "I can always go home and change," I'd tell myself. This works better during summer rain, when the wetness comes as a relief from the sticky, dirty hotness of city summers. I did this a lot when I worked at the NGA. I would walk home up Capitol Hill on wet evenings and let the rain soak through my dull professional-wear outfits as a tiny act of rebellion against the misery-inducing conformity of my job and my neighborhood and all of the Hill staffers and summer interns who would stare at me from under their black umbrellas. I would arrive home and my hair would be dripping wet, my shoes soaked through, and my white oxford and boring brown tweed skirt would have to wait another month for me to get around to washing and ironing them again, but I would be happy. Because the physical sensation of getting soaking wet and tripping up the hill through the rain had distracted me from my insane boss and my soul-sucking job. The cold wetness briefly trumped the mind-numbing routine that my world had become. The gray drizzly evenings served as welcome distraction to the dismalness of my workdays.

On sunny days I feel guilty for being inside. Rainy days, drizzly days, gray days- they all remove that guilt. Whether it's being inside at work, not minding spending eight hours cropping photos or sending out press releases because a small art gallery with a couple of sleeping dogs feels cozy and cheerful when it's gray and damp outside, or being inside at home, snuggling up with a book or a boy (or both) in a mound of blankets and pillows just to read and sleep and be happy all day, the rain makes these activities feel like an escape- a mini vacation from everyday life.

The rain serves as a break from the everyday for me. The environment becomes just different enough to encourage me to notice what is always around me. So this morning with my feet soaking wet in my rubber flip flops, clutching my cheap H&M umbrella which spends more time flipping inside-out in the wind than actually protecting me from the rain, I boarded the 14th St. bus to work and listened to a rainy day mix on my mp3 player (mostly sad love songs) noticing more of the beauty passing by me through the raindrop-covered windows of the bus than I would on any sunny day. I haven't yet reached a point where I find DC as magical as New York or as lovely as Portland, but every rainy day helps me to notice more loveliness and become more attached to my adopted home.

Texas Dinos

2006-03-22T15:26:00.000-05:00

I was drawing this picture of dinosaurs in MS Paint at work today and they decided to go to Texas while I was drawing them! Silly dinosaurs. So I had to go along with them. We picked up a cactus, a "lone star," and a Texas flag. Wherever will the dinos go next?

In other arts news, I developed a performance art piece entitled "The Sweatpants Dance" last night. It requires a DJ (or an iPod) with lots of beepy music (or the Ying Yang Twins), but can pretty much be done anywhere sweatpants can be worn. Which is everywhere really.

I can't help but love...

2006-03-18T17:09:00.000-05:00

Samantha Wolov, who was written about recently by DCist art columnist Adrian Parsons, takes dirty pictures of her friends having sex in her basement and her shower. I ran into her website a few months back while bopping around local arts blogs (hers is Nekkid with a Camera). She's 21-years old and you can totally tell from the stuff she says to Parsons in the article (sounding young and innocent while attempting pretention like any good art student). Anyways, aside from the hot pics she takes of freaks schplocking, she's also done this great series on Barbie sex (If you can't link to it through that, it's under "Plastic" on her website). It's well shot and clever and reminds me of what I used to do with my Barbie dolls (sorry, mom and dad, your little girl's kind of a perv). This one's my fave (you can probably guess why). Here's one for the Sunshine (happy now, Alex?).

It's Spring! (almost)

2006-03-18T13:07:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been two weeks since my last update. I'll try to get better with this. I've just been really busy and stressed and didn't really have anything I deemed think-y enough for posting. So instead here's a little gossip compiled over the past two weeks (warning: it's a bit long):

The boy returned on Thursday, March 2 from his gallivant throughout Europe and brought with him some lovely Icelandic trinkets for his adoring ladyfriend (she being me), including a pair of dangly silver earrings, a hippie scarf, and a wool purse. I am so spoiled! That Saturday (the 4th) we had a fun but mildly awkward dinner at U-Topia with my cousin and his girlfriend who live out in Annapolis and design boats and submarines. It made me miss my extended family quite a lot. It was also a bit of a "step" for me in that I've never really introduced anyone I've dated to the fam, while all my cousins are always bringing the new loves of their lives to all our holiday gatherings. It was a bit awkward when they asked how we met and I had to tell them - gasp! - we met on Friendster. We've made up another story about our meeting involving performance art at the Giant in Columbia Heights, but somehow I find that a difficult one to tell without breaking into uncontrolled giggles.

I was in New York Monday and Tuesday (March 6/7) working for a lady I used to edit quilting books for in college (long-ish story). Her husband recently passed away and I've been going up a couple days every month to help her sort things out with the estate and selling her apartment. They had a pretty extensive post-war art collection, which is what most interests me. So on Monday I went through their collection in the Cirker's warehouse in midtown with a couple people from Christie's. Lots of artists who didn't really go anywhere, but also a lot of William Wegmens, Christos, and Robert Maplethorpes. Really fun stuff. My favorite piece was a giant (probably 75 high by 90 wide) photorealistic-style painting of the Supremes doing their "Stop in the Name of Love" dance on a white background. It was an amazing piece and it looked really contemporary for something done in the 60s or 70s. They didn't know who the artist is, so if anyone knows anything about a post-war American artist who painted like that, let me know. Monday evening I had a fantastic meatloaf dinner and an amazing peach cobbler cocktail (I drink my dessert, darling) with my New York lovelies at some new place on Prince St. and then we headed over to Pravda for flavored vodka. Something that I really love about New York is the prevalence of specialty cocktails everywhere. They have some here in DC, but usually they're pretty sub-par. This requires further investigation, so suggestions on where to get a good creatively designed drink are more than welcome. I’m into quality over quantity these days in just about everything.

Last Friday night my flaky friends flaked on me and blamed it on the fact that I have a boyfriend (this excuse is getting old, flaky friends). So I went with that lovely boyfriend to see a band called Weird War World at the Black Cat. I had never heard of them because I am not indie and my hipster cred only goes as far as being able to chat about art and liking dirty bars. So I was hesitant because I kind of have this theory that if nobody's heard of a band or an artist, they're probably not that good anyways (societal vetting as it were). And the boy is super into discordant music that nobody's ever heard of (I think it makes some people feel better about themselves if they have music snob power over others, but that is for another post). But apparently lots of people who used to be arty in high school have heard of them (or at least lots of people who used to be arty in high school go to the Black Cat), and they turned out to really be quite pop-y and fun. I hear they're actually local celebs, so if you live in DC (or anywhere really), check them out. You can bounce and sing along to their pop rock loveliness.

What I did last Saturday and Sunday is a big secret, but it was warm and sunny and lots of fun.

Tuesday I went to a ridiculous All-Ivy Happy Hour with a couple of ladies who I went to college with and don't see nearly enough. I talked to one interesting Indian man who went to grad school at Harvard and is very socially conscious and works in Afghani economic policy at the Treasury Dept. I had close to zero interest in anything he said, but he was very nice.

Wednesday I went to a workshop on how to be a successful artist at the Arlington Arts Center. No, I’m not an artist. I’ll discuss this in my next post.

Thursday I had tapas and cocktails at the grossly overrated Tabaq on U St. with my favorite sorority girl and her work friend. It was fun and we talked about all the sex toys she won at Drag Bingo (butt plugs, dildos and nipple clamps, oh my!). For any of you who haven't been to Tabaq, don't bother. I'd heard fantastic things about it, and the environment was lovely (a retractable glass roof on the upper deck is the major feature), but the food was only kind of average for tapas, which is always overpriced and in small portions so should therefore be very very good, and my cocktail was crap in a glass for $12! So if you're in the U St. neighborhood and want tapas, cocktails and a semi-chi chi environment, go to Chi Cha Lounge instead. It'll still be filled with post-work Dupont tools, but at least the food will be good.

Finally, last night, in an effort to avoid the sloppy drunken St. Patrick's Day revelers, my bestest ladyfriend and I headed out for nachos and a 48-ounce pitcher of margaritas at La Frontera Cantina on 17th and Corcoran. It was good and low key and pretty cheap. Definitely a place I'd return to. We had girltalk about relationships and space and love and lady stuff. Something I sometimes really miss as a girl with only a couple close girlfriends. Most girls talk about feelings and relationships and stuff. I think maybe there isn't enough estrogen between the three of us to manage that without the aid of frosty alcoholic beverages and a few cigarettes (I have essentially quit for now, but I know a certain lady who uses lots of peer pressure on me to make herself feel better about smoking- why can't you just do it and not feel guilty, dear? I am not judging you. If I felt the need for a Parliament light I would smoke one guilt-free).

That is all for now. Stay tuned in the next couple days for further info on specialty cocktails, music snobs, and how to be a successful artist (really, it’ll be more about curmudgeony old lady artists). Pray for a return of last week's warm weather and for a departure of this awful cough that comes from deep within my ample chestals and keeps me up into the night.

Saintly Sinners (Mary and me)

2006-03-02T17:28:00.000-05:00

Both Jerry and my father have recommended this article to me and if two of the most important men in my life (I suppose there are six in all) strongly encourage me to read an article that seems like it'll probably be mind-numbingly boring, I do it (mildly grudgingly, but I do it). Once again, they were right and I was wrong. This New Yorker article on Mary Magdalene is totally interesting and not at all painful to read: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact2

Also, I bought a painting at the Arty Gras show. I can't really afford it, but it's cheap in terms of paintings. It's a small 12 x 12 canvas of a robot holding a human heart in his hand. The friend who was at the show with me said that I liked it because it was like an allegory for me. I am a robot holding a human heart in my hand? I can't tell if he's holding it and feeling sad that he doesn't have one, or holding it with more ambiguous intent. We'll see. I haven't paid for it yet, but it's reserved for me and I must pay up within the week. I can't pick it up until April though- that's when the show comes down. I also bought a small print of a happy robot by the same artist, which was significantly more affordable and in keeping with my future hobby (the collecting of works on paper). Some artist out there knows my weakness for cutesy renderings of automatons and is exploiting it. She happens to be a very sweet prop maker for the DC Shakespeare Theater who seems to also really like robots. So I will have to forego smoothies, lattes, and breakfast sandwiches for a month to finance my addiction to small, "affordable" works of art.

lovely "weekends"

2006-03-02T16:38:00.000-05:00

Since I work in an art gallery my "weekends" are not on Saturday and Sunday when the rest of the world is canoodling in bed all day or going out for swanky brunches or taking yoga classes. Rather it is on Monday and Tuesday when everybody else is grumpy and at work, but the banks are open and I don't have to wait forever for a table to sit and drink my coffee at in Love Cafe. Many mistakenly think that this means I get a double weekend. While I do still go out many Friday and Saturday nights, I also have to wake up and be hung over but perky and helpful at work all day on Saturdays and Sundays when I know that the rest of my barmates from the night before are still in bed trying to sleep off their headaches. But I digress. This post was supposed to be about what I did with my "weekend" and this primary paragraph was just to help you make that mental shift from "weekend" as a term for two particular days (Saturday and Sunday) to "weekend" as a term for any two days one isn't working (in my case Monday and Tuesday). But I'm blathering.

Monday I spent the morning sleeping in with the adorable little doggy that I am taking care of for the absent boy while he gallivants across Holland and Iceland no doubt in search of the perfect garden gnome for his adoring ladyfriend. Her adorable picture is posted above. Then I spent the afternoon at the NGA in the marvelous Dada show (see the review below).

Tuesday evening I hit up the Arty Gras New Orleans benefit show opening at the Warehouse Gallery. It was quite crowded and much of the art was just ok, but I was a particular fan of Jane Hill's elegant (and sold out) Safe House Group Ladder Series. On a slightly different birdhouse theme, Ryan Ballard's Forced Migration Series was fun and kitschy, but symbolically overpriced ( the price was the date Katrina hit: $8,292.05). Emily Hogan's Easter series with paintings of Renaissance-type religious imagery being overwhelmed by giant Peeps (yes, Peeps) were funny in spite of her mildly pretentious and overly fair artist's statement. Tom Drymon's Cleanse and Purify paintings would have been lovely and serene if he hadn't signed his name in giant penciled-in letters in the bottom corner like a child would. I also really liked the photorealistic painting of a giant cup of tea on a brown background (I can't remember the artist's name), but my companion thought it was ugly (she said something about not liking the way the light hits the cup- geez, picky picky). Then we went to the Chinatown Chipotle and made friends with Devon, the manager, who gave us free Chipotle visors and talked to use for a long time about the delights of managing an ethnic-themed upscale fast food restaurant. He's a big Chinese dude in a red shirt, so if you're in there say hi to Devon; he's super friendly.

All in all a pretty fantastic "weekend" in spite of the fact that I didn't get done any of the real errands that I was supposed to do (laundry, bank, shopping).

Art is Dead

2006-03-01T14:59:00.000-05:00

Monday I spent the afternoon at the National Gallery of Art checking out the Dada exhibition. It was AMAZING. Absolutely wonderful and characterictically thorough. I was there for 2.5 hours and didn't get through the whole thing and will have to go back next week. It is ok because I want to spend as much time as possible with that amazing art.

I found that I preferred the artists farthest from the norm – Taeuber, Hoch, Schwitters, Baroness Elsa – because they felt more like real Dada. Not self-proclaimed geniuses. The more Dada men tryed to get away from the idea of genius as elitist and exclusionary, the more they seemed to fall victim to it themselves, declaring themselves the most Dada of the Dadas (Haussmann the Dadasopher, Baader the Oberdada, Ernst as Dadamax). It takes people clearly outside of the art norm, not just people trying to distance themselves from it, to actually produce revolutionary art that still seems revolutionary.

I’m usually skeptical when art institutions prop up relatively unknown female artists in an attempt to present a more balanced art history. The reasons why we don’t study many Renaissance artists who are women is not due to the oversight of sexist art historians. It is because very few women were trained as artists and even fewer became great artists. Even in the beginning of the Twentieth Century when the Dada movement started, very few women studied or practiced fine arts. Women went to schools for applied arts- needlecraft, woodcraft, etc.- because they were never going to be artistic geniuses, clearly. Only men are genius artists. Women produce attractive, useful things that are well-designed and commercially viable.

Both Sophie Taeuber and Hannah Hoch, the two women artists in this show (aside from the Baroness Elsa who was a work of art herself), went to schools for the applied arts. And I would argue that it gave them each a better sense of design in their works than most of the male Dada artists. I had never heard of Sophie Taeuber before and was hesitant about her after reading a review that said many of her “paintings” were actually needlepoint and her sculptures were of turned wood. But I was significantly more impressed with the tremendous sense of balance and what seemed to be innate aesthetic sensibility in Taeuber’s works (particularly the abstract needlepoints) than I was with the works of her more famous companion Hans Arp. Her abstract head sculptures and her puppets were absolutely marvelous. While Hannah Hoch is about equally as famous as any other Dada artist for her feminist photomontages, I had never thought much about her talent as an artist (or even seen any of her works in art history textbooks aside from the hugely famous “Cut with the Kitchen Knife…”). But upon viewing many of her smaller, and arguably better composed, photomontages and her Dada dolls at the NGA I was impressed at how Hoch was able to succinctly and attractively express her socio-political viewpoints. I know that it is un-PC to use the term “attractive” when discussing the works of women artists, but they are, so there.

Kurt Schwitters, who lived in Hannover, was rejected by Berlin Dadaists as too romantic in his sensibilities. Maybe that’s why I like him so much. He was both Dada and Anti-Dada. He constructed 2D and 3D collages out of small pieces of junk he found on the street and called them Merz (if you speak German you might know what that means, I don’t). He really liked to work with pieces of fabric, but he wasn’t that picky. They are mostly very lovely and random and remind me of outsider and visionary artists. Eventually he made his whole house into a Merzbau – a giant, all-encompassing wood construction with angular and oddly shaped white walls and ceiling and lots of little junk balanced everywhere. Rock on.

Finally, the star in this exhibition, as in many other “blockbusters” at the NGA (the recent Toulouse-Lautrec show comes to mind), was of course the museum itself. In particular the Exhibition Installation and Design Department for the amazingly evocative installations they constructed. The Hannover section with a partial reconstruction of Schwitters’ Merzbau is a particular favorite. Also, the Berlin section with it’s evocation of the “Club Dada” environment and the Cologne section with it’s restrained period décor were evidence of spectacularly flawless exhibition design. I’m also a bit obsessed with the Dada poetry listening stations and the screen with shadows of Readymades between the theater and the New York section. Also to be commended is the NGA Web Team (go Suzie, Memo and Phyllis!) for their informative and easily navigated online extras, and the show’s curatorial staff for writing such accessible interpretive texts and pulling together such an amazing collection of works.

Finally Part two: so all art talk aside, I really admire the Dada artists for not being ashamed to bring a little fun into such a stuffy and serious business as a revolution in the art world (with it’s inevitably accompanying manifestos, public events and seminal works of art). Hans Arp used to like to play a game that involved dropping raw eggs on a table or floor. That’s the game. I guess it’s supposed to have something to do with randomness, but I suspect he just liked to get messy. Tristan Tzara recommends we cut up a newspaper article into its individual words, then pull random words out of a hat to create a Dada poem. And the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was even a bit too Dada for New York Dadas to take. She used to steal trinkets from Woolworth and hang them (and crap she found on the street) off of her dresses and was really into sexually assaulting artists and writers (William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens are two examples). She was obsessed with Marcel Duchamp, who along with Man Ray made a film of her entitled “The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair.” Indeed.

Following Good Fortune with Hostile Intentions

2006-02-26T16:06:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately- whether it can be attained through self-control and aggressive vetting of unpleasantness and uncertainty from one's life, or whether it is better attained by giving in to one's passions and letting go of emotional self-preserving inhibitions. What do we have to lose anyways? Life is filled with pain and suffering anyhow, so a little heartbreak couldn't be that bad for us if it is accompanied by brief moments of overwhelming happiness, right? Well, it'll take more thought I guess. Until then, I recommend reading this book review, which I read in lieu of actual books: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060227crbo_books

Sage advice from the yuppies

2006-02-25T13:13:00.000-05:00

I'm getting really into clean living. Well, clean-ER living. As in, living like a normal human adult rather than a greasy, arty, hipster-student type. I actually enjoy waking up in the morning and going to the gym before work. Well, enjoy is strong. It makes me happy to be able to wake up in the morning without a struggle because I didn't drink too much the night before. And it makes me happy to have sore muscles every day because it reminds me that I have those muscles. And eating actual meals is so much more satisfying than living on popcorn and cookies. When I get 8 hours of sleep and eat breakfast I feel perky and alert. Sometimes I fancy myself prone to melancholia, but really it's just that I drink and smoke too much and don't get enough sleep. The yuppies have much to teach us about the positive effects of clean living on one's mood. Also soy lattes and low fat breakfast sandwiches from Starbucks - quality of life improving gifts from yuppie culture.

The more I think about it the more I realize that I'd prefer to be a happy, healthy, and relatively well-adjusted regular person than a depressed, unwashed, and poorly fed romantic artist-type. The spark of genius and its accompanying moodiness are of far less interest to me than comfort and practicality.

I'm still sort of coming to terms with this idea that my life will be comfortable and happy, but not particularly striking. The impetus to do and accomplish great things has been fading recently
and I'm mourning it's immanent demise. I guess eventually we all have to switch out of self-destruct mode.

I will get two dogs and live in a smallish brick house with lots of books and I will collect framed works on paper and have weekly dinner parties and go antiquing with my mother and troll used book shops with my father and read Victorian novels and listen to NPR every morning while I'm drinking herbal tea with soy milk. I've always sort of known that this would be my future (but replace the dogs with cats until I became allergic). I'm really looking forward to having a dining room and the disposable income to purchase exotic foreign foods with which to make luxurious dinners to feed to my friends.

Dino Pics

2006-02-19T17:53:00.000-05:00

Tyrek Drew this picture for me. I think it really gives great evidence of the young artist's strong grasp of the importance of effectively using negative space. The small dinosaur is saying "Revenge!" Indeed.

This is a study for the work. I think it's interesting how he switched from Dinosaur vs. Dinosaur to Dinosaur vs. Man. I prefer the story in the final work, but the style of the study is freer. I think this artist is really going somewhere.

Works on Paper

2006-02-19T17:44:00.000-05:00

Tyrek is a 12-year-old child who comes into the gallery on Sundays when his grandfather is in the church next door. He says he's not a kid, but a pre-teen. Anyways, today we made some drawings. He said he wanted to be a cartoon character because bad things happen to them and they never get hurt. Good point. So I drew a little cartoon of him with a puggle (his new favorite dog), and then him getting smacked on the head with a hammer and then laughing because it didn't hurt. Then I drew the Julia the Elephant vs. Tyrek the Mouse DeathMatch. Tyrek the Mouse has a triangle on his forehead from which he gains his strength. Finally, I drew a dinosaur in honor of my favorite Monty Python skit.

Like a Frog...

2006-02-19T17:02:00.000-05:00

Beginnings

2006-02-19T15:27:00.000-05:00

Blogging is a self-important activity based on the assumption that others are interested in everything we have to say. I suspect that we do it because we wish that everyone really were interested. Or was? I think "were" is correct, but it's pretty damn awkward.

Anyways:

"... on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. "

That's Keats.