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..).