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The view from the new Locust Projects back yard.38th street enters into the local "scene" during the off season with several new spaces,spotty parking,and an onslaught of hipsters wanna-being themselves. ...
what will follow this?hopefully something othes than exercises in relational aesthetics and the like.

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The Hunger

VIRILE TO RISK AND FIND; KINDLY WITHAL
AND A READY HELP.
FACING THE BRUNT
OF FATE; INDOMI-
TABLE.-UNAFRAID.


The Donner Party inspires stoic poses.
Good thing it's summer.

at the entry to churchills there's this

shuckers at dusk. margaritas squared.

Hurry before it's gone.

There is a little over a week to see the 2009 South Florida Biennial at the Hollywood Art & Culture Center. I think it ends June7th. I have a piece in it. Shown here, the 2007 multipanel painting titled "Portal One (hungry ghosts two)".

I confess to not seeing it yet, but I hear that it's plenty worth the short drive north.
I plan on going to see the show next week

Is there Anybody out there?

What is this strange and elegant fruit?

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Aging simulator.Regard the hydraulic lifts/actuators.Shown here unpowered.

Bruce Nauman, "Stamping in the Studio"

performance art and video works in mind..
Bruce Nauman. Few do this better.
1968. Relevant as ever...

iconic hand gestures future looks good.

MIT's Media Lab and TED lectures.

(so awesome...no other single word for it)

Iquique, Chile

Iquique, Chile. I'm here for a couple days.

Similar to Baja California, large sand dunes meet the south pacific in dramatic sweeps. Excellent seafood and wine. Cheaper than Santiago de Chile. And, sea lions bark in the shorebreak not 20 yards from my hotelroom.

Vignetted to accent the stark landscape.

More to come.

night and day and night

Day and Night in Miami during the only bearable time of the year:winter.

Unfortunately the heat and humidity are back as of tomorrow, alas we are back into the terrarium.

(daytime pic taken with the Holga120...beautiful camera..)

(nighttime pics taken from Loft2 with CanonEOS..lovely piece of equiptment also...)

big fish eats the little one?

Frank WIck, untitles piece at an unnamed location. Frank and I disgree on the notion that art should be "gotten" within the first few seconds of viewing it. He thinks it should. I don't. Art shouldn't be obliged to reveal itself immediately. If it does,then great. I prefer a more novelistic approach where layers of meaning are shed over time.

Frank, title please?

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Anri Sala at MOCAnomi.

jorge on the ukelele

It's my pleasure to present Jorge Alvarez of SOLO DOS EN TIJUANA, playing a tidy, bad arse Ukelele.

REVOLVE with the left foot as an axis.

The Knight Center, above,  pre Whirling Dervishes of Rumi. Because the cosmos are spinning, from nanoparticles to entire galaxies, it is evident that our fundamental condition is to revolve. The Whirling Dervishes demonstrated this idea beautifully, quietly,precisely, last saturday night. It was not a performance, but instead a prayer slash ceremony dating back to the 13th century. One of the oldest such things still being performed on this planet. 

NonFictions

.800 section of the MDPL Main Library. Where lewd, subversive, and sometimes disgusting things happen towards the rear. Out of sight, the riffraff like to do nasty things back there...

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The latest build-up in Jacin's studio area.

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a parenthetical thought

http://www.mediafire.com/?wkaltvemdss




A minor musical interlude here at the failure of knowing brings us a tribute of Radiohead's OKcomputer. Downloadable and highly listenable.

Good listening for those long days in the studio, Miami....

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b

while you sleep, horses fly overhead.

The 44th President

An historical moment such as this needs a brief pause of levity. Of the Drunken History videos, this one is the best.
We watched the inauguration from Churchill's Pub in Little Haiti (for those of you who don't live in miami..)

On another note" Prepare for the upcoming Miami Public Access Show .

this speaks for itself

things to do and not to do

more posts to come. 2009 will be busy with upcoming projects, a recent installation,flying (with far-away layovers), switching to Mac from PC (i'm a whole-hearted convert) and related activities lately.

if anyone out there is reading, please stand by. 

any suggestions?

I can't remember the name of this artist, though I'm going to look into it. But, it was at ArtBasel in a dark room behind curtains.

oh, johannnson...

Christopher Johannson at artbasel.
two beautiful pieces. I saw some drawings that were mildly unflattering for his work, but these two are another story altogether.

the news from here

Meg riggs(?) @ p.p.o.w.

the dead speak

Jack Goldstein. R.I.P

a curatorial fad...ages grouped as one..

Werner gallery @ artbasel. A good wall of Picabia and Doig portraits.
(denise makes a cameo appearance in the lower left....)

the friendliest black artist in america draws

William Pope L. 's "failed drawings @ artbasel.
i can not remember the gallery.

Deuces Wild

The Duece.
after-the-everything place to go. Good margaritas, though not particularly strong. Typical South beach limp wristed bartenders. Nice old ladies, but they need to pour stronger drinks.
Odd crowd, the art crowd.
Byron, you're a weird one.
The only worthwhile dive in miami, really.
But, won't be back 'til next year.

quid pro quo?

5dollars for an honest appraisal of your looks @ envoy enterprises.
pulse art fair.
I was tempted, but did not care enough to do it. Plus, there were a few in line already for their fair assessment.

4 years of handwriting, an artist and a noose.

Unit Maker @ Geisai.
I wish we could have communicated better. I'll post his website later.

an excellent drawing.

Ben Peterson at ratio 3
NADA Art Fair.
A rare gem. This drawing is about 8ft x 5 ft...
I was disappointed by Nada this year. I hate to generalize an entire fair, but there was a homogeneity with what I saw that wasn't present at the other fairs.
more on this later.

nowhere, everywhere...

This is Nowhere, on view now at the Hollywood Art & Culture Center.
Reception is on the 12th.
Going? You should...

From the Gesai art fair

Kyoko Nakamura
gold medal winning japanese artist at geisai.

the spirit of the netherlandish lives on....

Erik Sandberg @ Conner Contemporary.
Pulse Art Fair

lowlit.

If Jacin says so...
(another post Latin2K moment at Eileen & Jacin's place.)

More from Gesai

Susan Lee Chun at her Gesai booth.

Not Pictured: Tom Scicluna's booth. I'll shoot it next time.

this is nowhere (december 1st)

2 weeks until the show opens.

the miami international book fair

miami int'l book festival opens soon.we here at the failure of knowing would like to see russel banks, rick moody,anthony bourdaine,among others...

Obama.

I predict a winner...

Non sequitor wax.

As summer fades from the calender and our collective memory, we are left with the lingering fact that all words in every book will end with a last thought. Good riddance,

All Hallow

Halloween is tomorrow with a selection of slasher flicks to choose from on the telly. I haven't seen the list yet, but when I do I'll post it.

An abbreviated list of Books I've given as gifts over the years:

The Book of Imaginary Beasts
Invisible Cities
Things That Fall From The Sky
As I lay Dying
Fictions
Birds of America
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Pending,really.

I owe a few emails. All apologies as the demon has kept my hands busy <and other excuses>.

Polls open

We are the last in a long line to vote on this first day of early voting.
Democracy in action.

Deadline looms.

The Art & Culture Center has posted something about my upcoming installation...

click on exhibitions.

Emotional response cannot...

From the closing night performance of Federico Nessi's solo show at Spinello Gallery. It was very uncomfortable inside, almost hostile. Good show. Above Ana Mendez performs as part of the piece.

Solo Dos En Tijuana

World, I present to you :

Solo Dos En Tijuana.

Enjoy.

and the beast lunged forth...

[...]"I considered fire, but I feared burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite and suffocate the planet in smoke."
JLB, "the book of sand"

fair warning

In an effort to curb, or at the very least manage, my irrational fear of bears, I went out and hunted one down.
Turned to from hunted into hunter....

Shelf life

2020's temporary high profile space where Placemaker once was. Group show.
3852 north miami ave.
The piece below above is by Frank Wick. Scott wouldn't let me try them on.

roman signer on the brain

this was summer on the oregon coast.*.

*note famous rocks in the distance.
** before avian flu was part of the collective paranoia

if you're in Germany

If you happen to find yourself in Heidelberg, after checking out the oldest Apothecary in Europe, and sampling the local Reisling (the only white i can stomach), do check out the following show that I'm in:

Click the link embedded in the above title for more info..

close your eyes and .....

This is James Casabere. He creates these miniatures of stark and desolate spaces which are then photographed and printed (in large sizes..). I haven't seen one in person. I just ran into his work for the first time a few weeks ago so I'm not familiar with it at all.

july and it's hot

This image is incredible. I'm not sure the distance from the explosion that it's shot from, nor the altitude of its top (10thousand to15thousandfeet?).

Sabre-rattlers out there take note, and be wary of your war mongering.

I just began reading Kevin Brockmeier's new collection of short fiction, The View From the Seventh Layer. After Things That Fall From The Sky, and A Brief History of the Dead I've developed a real appetite for his work.

In an effort to save cash, more frequent trips to the Library have temporarily added these books to the coffee table:

1)Phaidon's SCULPTURE TODAY

2)The Architectural Unconscious (James Casabere + Glen Seator)

3)The New Urban Landscape , edited by Richard Martin

4)PAUL McCarthy, published by the New Museum of Contemporary Art , NY

a great list...I'm suddenly very interested in James Casabere's photographed miniature spaces, especially the flooded ones. I'll have to look for an image to post here.

Inbloom

The sausage tree on lincoln road is blooming.

from the wit of the staircase

So here I am, in the middle way, having had

twenty years -

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of

l'entre deux guerres -

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind

of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better

of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or

the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so

each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what

there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already

been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom

one cannot hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover

what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now,

under conditionsThat seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither

gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not

our business.

--T. S. Eliot

East Coker

Four Quartets

missing, sort of...

Where is Rob?

bulletproof

The above link is to a video of Radiohead's Bulletproof. We saw them a few nights ago in West Palm Beach at the Cruzan Ampitheatre. It was an incredible show. Nothing short of amazing. There are already dozens of videos slash songs from that night posted on Youtube, for your (our) viewing enjoyment.

This picture was taken with my phone. It's of the stage moments before the show started.

y'all fixed her gallbladder, right?

From the acidic & animated comedy of Squidbillies,
its intro diddy:

"my dreams are all dead & buried
sometimes i wish the sun would just explode.
when god comes and calls me to his kingdom
i'll take all you sons a bitches when i go...."

hilarious.

this is nowhere too

I've been thinking about the precise center of nowhere.

(Negative Space)

I offer a non-sequitor to begin with (above):
A DC10 full of well-behaved, though understandably impatient, horses.

Second:Things I am taking in at the moment:

1) too much Vetiver,Sufjan Stevens, the new Of Montreal, Greg Ashley and/or GrisGris
2) Peter Doig, late 70s Chris Burden, plus Eva Hesse's formal compositions (among others things)
3) Just read Chuck Palhniuk's (sp) Survivor, and save for a few interesting chops here & there I thoroughly hated his writing. Deeply, horribly, terribly hated it. He tells & retells the same story over and over again from book to book.
4)watching on the telly anything to do with ghosts or UFOs (as usual)
5) Debating whether to read Flannery O'Conner or F.Scott Fitzgerald
6)Jerry Saltz's reviews
7) the games our cats play


morelater...

(more) Minor Transgressions....

We saw Michel Gondry's new film last night, Be Kind Rewind. A lite comedy about two videostore goofs who ,after filming short and glib low-budge remakes of well-known movies , reclaim their town's past and in turn their own. Propoganda for relational aesthetics, and a democratization of the art making process, the film insists - as does so much of community based art - that there is redemtion through art, and that feel-good conclusions are an inherent product of these all-inclusive formats. Gondry's film falls subject to the fluff that dooms so many egalitarian / community participation based projects: It is overly sentimental and sappy.
Despite moments of genuinely funny moments, it wasn't Gondry's best.

And, a last word on relational aesthetics. I just don't buy so much of this kind of work that seeks to branch out and include "everyone", that seeks individual epiphany and growth via communal experience. Harrell Fletcher, Miranda July, and all others alike, I don't buy it. Their comes across as genuinely insincere and, frankly, lazy. I'll admit that the organizational abilities of these and like-minded artists is applause worthy, but their works (and i realze i'm generalizing here..) tend to leave me feeling empty, uninspired, bored.

and to combat said boredom, I give you the above....

the sun as seen

"The Sun is ball of incandescent gas, a gigantic helium furnace."
I can't remember who sang the song.
I took this picture from the Wilson Observatory's Solar Telescope last year.

haunt?

this is the view into the hall from our new apartment. 3 minutes driving time to the studio.

time to get a bike.

more frequent postings upcoming.

The End

There's a show that you should see up at 2020 Projects. Here at The Failure of Knowing we have been recommending only the shows at that little-gallery-that-can lately, but it's not without reason. Curated by Jacin Giordano and titled The End, this exhibit takes us into a tightly constructed mindspace full of black paint, nearly apocalyptic visions, allusions to the cyclical nature of things, a healthy sense of paranoia, and a fin-de-seicle air that would have fit neatly into the atmosphere surrounding anyone with their pulse on the socio-political undercurrents of American society in 1999. Instead, this is late 2007 and we are no longer perched at a precipice before a rapid slide down into disillusion, disbelief, cynicism, social malaise. Giordano's curatorial statement shows that we may have hit bottom, that all is not well and good in the world. The end is not only nigh, but has been here for some time and the best we can do is make some jokes, look for poetry in the drek, laugh it off until we're ready to scrape the shit from our shoes and take new steps away from our own ends, thus completing a vicious cycle.



This show features Daniel Newman, Frank Wick, Ethan Ayer, Joshua Sigman, and the late John Howlett, all offering a diverse array of works that, due to their exceptional placement within the white walls of 2020, work in ensemble to produce something like a darkly funny poem and a glib confession about the sardonic forces within us all.

Frank Wick's work is the main standout here, with a tongue in cheek humor that left me feeling uneasy and odd after the initial laughter wore off. Die Unicorn Die, a life-sized Unicorn drawn on the wall with washy Flavor-All drink powder and Rat Poison, asserts that truths are illusory at best and possibly fatal if ingested. During the opening, Frank served Flavor-All drinks laced with vodka instead of poison to footnote the reference to Jim Jones. (note: I don’t think too many people got the reference, but who cares. They drank it anyway, all too trusting of free liquids in small paper cups…) Another piece, Everything is Coming Up Roses, is a cast arm clothed in business attire. Its realistic hand, covered in band aids and offering us a good 'ol American Thumb’s Up, insists on a job well done despite the obvious wounds. Sarcasm wins out here as the sculpture jumps out from the wall at waist level with forced engagement, demanding mediocrity from us all, mocking our serious efforts with banality because in the end even the sincerest of gestures is ultimately trite and moot.


Painter John Howlett’s works are like neon signs charged with celebrating an esoteric glam and kitschy rock and roll idealism: Pentagrams, hidden symbols, naked women aflame and pulsing with dangerous sex, youth's ideology run amok…Was John Howlett serious? Yes, I think he was. But, was he laughing when he made these insane paintings? I think so. Actually, the joke's on us for looking past the anxiety and rebellion inherent to them for something deeper and attributable to theories and formalisms. Howlett's work screams for us to employ our insubordinate demons, to sample a world where desire and fear could possibly lead to an uncertain end if we are gullible enough to take it all so seriously. Flanking Daniel Newman’s Shroud, Howlett’s paintings Untitled and Unconventional Beauty strike a deal with darker forces, and we the viewers become unwitting devotees to Giordano’s dark orchestration.

Humor is not at play with Daniel Newman's work. His work doesn't feel funny to me. Not at all. At least not what I've seen. These paintings, second-hand and store bought before applying the black pigments onto them, imply (in this show’s context) and contest the death of painting that the art world was going on and on about a few years ago and invariably returns to every so often. They possess an ascetic minimalism that favors cancellation, the void and its uncertainties, heaviness as opposed to lightness. Newman’s painting Shroud becomes an altar piece, an icon of black mass, a doorway to an end, death, the tidy center to all black holes.
Geological time is sped up, in effect aging the canvas so that it conceals its true age. This makes for a fascinating surface, like a desolate landscape scorched long ago with primal fires. Newman has a knack for black, but I'd like to see him try something else with pigment aside from layering its handsome black varieties over thrift shop paintings.


Joshua Sigman takes us into a parallel universe where sci-fi type laws apply and the burden of paranoia carries the weight of contemporary anxieties. In Debra, a small sized digital image, a queue of riot cops stretches into a tentative horizon. The cops seem to duplicate exponentially like hungry insects eager to unify and become one in order to serve their angry hive. Joshua Sigman’s other piece, Vicious Cortrilla is a couple of poems on postcards stacked atop pedestals curiously presented as sculpture. Sigman’s poems are emphatic tomes on death with psychedelic undertones. Short and uncomplicated, their immediacy quickly transports us into a Borgesian style riddle where the transitory nature of being succumbs playfully to an otherwise existential dilemma.

Ethan Ayer uses black paint to create awkward abstractions that leave only sections of more conventionally rendered passages beneath exposed and cancelled out. Referencing subjects particular to traditional easel painting, this censoring is evidenced in a suite of 4 paintings Untitled (grains), Still Life (Hand and Harvest), Horse Study, and Still Life (Harvest). Not only are we purposely shut out from these pictures and their significance, Ayer is in effect choosing abstraction over other modes of representation for us. He tells us that we are not allowed to view what is beneath, that we cannot have the experience of relishing in what we assume to be beautiful application of craft and technique, and that we are not permitted to tell stories based on these hidden images. These paintings are extremely conscious of being paintings. They have their own elitist meta-psyche which dares viewers to spar with them and offer no answers in return. Perhaps we are meant to be left with a desire to see more of the obfuscated areas, but I was not. Instead, I was left with the conundrum of what these paintings are, and where they lie in the long history of art about art.

The End’s strength is Giordano’s ability to cull together the disparate voices that are these artists. His curatorial effort overshadows the fact that these pieces are made by individuals. Maybe this was an unavoidable effect since The End and its conceptual carry-ons automatically place the works in a corner where all we have is The End and there is no room for anything else, which is to say there is a definite opinion at work here; Though Giordano insists that he's merely "organizing" the show, his point of view comes across like a lawyer adamant to argue his/her case. This strong curatorial stance in such a small space is a welcome change to the run-of-the-mill group shows that have been taking up entirely too much wall space in contemporary galleries as of late, mostly under the auspice of loose and allegedly unifying themes. A focused curator can nearly negate the artists' hands, and in The End Giordano’s curatorial vision threatens to do this very thing.

labyrinths

I was in Buenos Aires back in February or March and had the opportunity to wander through this labyrinth of a necropolis, La Recoleta, looking for my grandmother's family (Angelini) crypt. I never found it, and have since learned that it may or may not be there. But, before she died, she told me that this is indeed where the family crypt is, and even offered to leave me a key as an inheritance.

earshot

When I was in LA last December for a few days, I got together with my father and went for a day of sightseeing. First we went to the LACMA , where the Magritte: The Treachery of Images show, designed by John Baldessari, had just opened. After a couple hours of works by Magritte and those influenced by him, we went to the gift shop (strategically located nearly inside the exhibit itself....). There, I bought 1) the exhibition catalog 2) Michel Foucalt's This is Not a Pipe. 3) post cards of favourite pieces from the show. My old man bought 1) The exhibition catalog, and 2) a bowler hat.

On the way out, he insisted on taking this pic.

(note the fancy photoshop work...)

The Only Thing Worth Seeing

A new art season is upon us here in balmy miami. After what seemed like a short summer and even shorter art-interlude with few worthwhile shows, the pace is quickly picking up. I've been meaning to start writing about others' works, so here it is. I only saw one memorable show in Miami this summer. Sure, there was the Confluence show at Snitzer Gallery, which despite all the self-congratulatory hoohaw and flag waving, left me dizzy and understimulated, unexcited and hungry for something else: my expectations obviously unchallenged.

Tom Scicluna at 2020Projects offers the most interesting summer time piece, executing what some have mistakingly labeled as a found-object work: Mast, a 30-something foot boat mast maneuvered into the tight confines of 2020's space through seemingly effortless means, is a meditation on space itself. Touching on more Eastern notions of the nature of objects, Mast concerns itself with the space surrounding the mast, our relationship to it and the space it bisects at a nearly severe angle. Not exactly an exercise in formalism, Scicluna's piece begs viewers for associations and selfmade narratives. Despite the artist's laissez-faire attitude toward viewer-played associative games, I do think there is more at work here beyond a minimalist aesthtic and rigorous formalisms.

Digging into his bag of tricks, Tom Scicluna performs a sleight of hand that seems to make the piece just appear out of the thinnest of airs, into the 2020 Projects space. It is this mystification of process that makes this piece so unique. As in an early scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the intrepid academics stumble upon a frigate in the middle of the Gobi desert, the Mast simply appears, monolithic, full of of kinetic energy despite its stasis, as if it was frozen in mid quantum tumble. The silence surrounding the Mast belies the countless miles it may have sailed the seas, wind driven and howling. It is deceptive and paranormal, eerily balanced between the physical world of gravitational laws and sub-atomic particles, and the world of metaphysics where it is a ghost, an apparition, a semi-solid memory transmutated into our vision where we as viewers are privvy to it in a moment of suspended time .

Herein lies the secret of Mast: its ability to straddle opposite hemisperes: To be This and That simultaneously without ever really being one or the other.

connecting to andy g? hmmmm......

Last night I watched a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy. It was satisfyingly hypnotic to hear him talk about his meditative work. It's not really my cuppa tea, but I can't argue that some aren't moving and intense pieces. His stuff exists in a space between down to earth and accessible , almost egalitarian in its earnestness and simplicity, yet it wants to refer to the larger invisible forces of the universe which lay hidden behind the rigours of metaphysics and applied physics.

This all reminded me of the work I first made in art school when I first moved to Portland years ago. Being in the Pacific Northwest gave me an awareness of my surroundings that I had not previously been privy to: the geography of the land, the huge green trees, the size of the sky, a volcano nearby...Suddenly I was using drift wood and stones in pieces for foundation year classes. And I wasn't using them in hippie-reverance to the natural world, rather it was more out of a sense of discovery and a need for free material (due to my low income status as a poor art student). There was driftwood every where in Portland, it seemed. Along the banks of the Willamette in industrial North Portland, in the parks, in yards, even downtown had driftwood somewhere. (Portand had less of a glimmer shine to it in the early 90's..).