Novels for other times or our times

Every couple of years I take a run at L'Education Sentimentale. My French is good enough that it doesn't make sense to read Flaubert in translation, but not so good that it's actually easy, so I usually run out of steam before I get too far. My dad lent me a new edition with the promise of better notes, so I'm at it again. This book has always had an allure. Things like a Woody Allen movie listing it among some essential things, or Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. We'll see how far I get this time.

Even a handful of chapters is enough to bring some ideas to mind. One of them is the way this book and so many other 19th century novels turn on economics. More precisely, on the precariousness of people's personal financial security and way the lack of money gets in the way of characters realizing the life to which they aspire. L'Education Sentimentale (at least these early chapters) is filled with material on how much money the characters have, how much they spend, what they can count on or hope for, and the things they have to do if they are to make money. Of course, Flaubert's Frederic Moreau is a fool, committed to living as an artist, not to making art. L'Education Sentimentale, at least as much of it as I've gotten through, is heavily comedic.

Flaubert was not unique in this. Novels throughout the 19th century, as least up through Edith Wharton, turned on the drama of the precarious situation most people lived in--needing money to keep themselves out of a state of wretched deprivation, but usually finding it very hard to make any. The main form of security comes from inherited wealth, and if you don't have it you are often SOL.

The centrality of economic precariousness as a dramatic engine seems appropriate today. Every conversation is about the economy, about how bad it is and how bad it's going to get, the cuts that are coming. By and large I don't find people in a state of despair or panic, a gallows humor prevails. But there is also a serious undercurrent to the conversations, about how to hold on for months and years, and about what one can do if the economy collapses in a fundamental way. It is easy to fear that it will become as rare in our society for people to be able to provide themselves a comfortable living as it apparently was in the 19th century. Will ruin loom again as the most likey outcome for dreamy people?

My night with Tristan und Isolde

I splurged this week and went to the Tuesday night performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera. Thanks to my father and the Saturday afternoon broadcasts, the Met was part of my childhood’s sonic background and I’m still attached to it. But outside of a bad touring company performance in DC, maybe at Wolf Trap, in the 70s, I’ve never heard it live. I happened to be in New York this week, and happened to be there on one of the weeknight performances of this production.

This is the first time Daniel Barenboim has conducted the Met, and it’s been reviewed extremely well . I don’t have too much to add, other than concurrence. And some fragmentary comments that follow.

As a neophyte Wagnerian, this proved to be an intense experience a bit different from anything I’ve encountered before. I was tired, so I had trouble staying awake in parts of the second act, but by the end I desperately didn’t want it to end. I was pleading inside for each note of the Liebestod to stretch to infinity, and then for the last few orchestral chords that end the opera exquisitely and almost understatedly. It reminded me of the immersion effects of an Indian music performance, where the urgency of the performance builds by accumulation over a couple of hours and the music, the very notes and sounds themselves have an effect on the cells of your brain and body. As you move towards the third hour of a concert at Sri Ganesha, you start to enter a realm of timelessness. Same with Wagner.

The Met orchestra sounds amazing. The string sound is maybe the best I’ve heard, buttery. They responded so well to Barenboim of course. Often his direction consisted of holding a closed hand out and then opening it suddenly, prompting the orchestra to release a burst of tension building in its lines. It wasn’t always a burst of sound, often much subtler than that, a pulse of energy. There was great evidence of his knowledge of the score—I feel like an idiot even mentioning this. One example was seeing him bring out a little inner line that was nothing more than some tremelo notes in the strings, not a melody at all, but that little bit of texture was essential.

The singers were uniformly great, although it was “one of those nights” and the Isolde, Katarina Dalayman, had a cold and had to step aside after the first two acts. This was disconcerting, and one man near me left before Act III started. She was replaced by Susan Foster, whom I don’t know much about, but I thought she did a fine job—a strong voice, although not as subtle as Dalayman. Still, you do get attached to singers as actors, and it was strange seeing her emerge onto the stage when Isolde enters well into Act III. Most of Act III belongs to Tristan and Kurvenal (Peter Seiffert and Gerd Grochowski). Isolde shows up half way through, sings just a bit with Tristan, he dies, King Mark (Kwangchul Youn—very impressive throughout) shows up, Kurvenal and Melot (Stephen Gaertner) are killed, and then Isolde sings some of her most important music, the Liebestod. But it’s not like Acts I and II where she is singing reams of music, and much of it as duets with Tristan, so it makes more sense to bring a substitute in for this last act, if you have to. (I've mentioned all the other primary cast members, so let me add Michelle DeYoung who sang Brangane to complete the main roles.)

Act I was about the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. I teared up from the sound of it, the progress of the sound. It is exquisitely constructed as music and drama, and when the Tristan and Isolde drink the potion that frees them to become lovers to each other (as the opera opens they are nominally distanced from each other and even antagonists, their underlying attraction is apparent from the start—Isolde is fixated on the hero, and the hero cannot trust himself to meet her gaze) the music breaks off starkly and then is set loose through the reappearance of the famous “Tristan” chord from the opening into an arena of harmony unleashed from solid ground, ethereal and cosmic. The characters and the sound are in a state of pure transformation at that point. It’s overwhelming to experience directly.

I’ve been listening to Tristan und Isolde in an ongoing but disorganized way in the last year or so. I’ve got a Furtwangler recording with Flagstad on my iPod. What’s struck me about that recording is how the music seems intent on embodying passion and bliss (Lust is the German word used) in the most extended way possible. In this performance, I was aware of how discursive the piece is. Tristan and Isolde’s engagement with each other and passion for each other is expressed through and across passages of dialogue where they talk about the nature of passion and everyday life, playing word games about light and dark, day and night, and making a claim for the primacy of passion, lust/Lust. These ideas go back to the Troubadours’ alba (and the Minnesingers’ Tagelied), in which the lover curses the coming of the day which will require separation from the beloved. But this is a dialogue, not a poet’s monologue, and lengthy dialogue, not a short lyric in Provencal, and it leaves you with two people making love to each other by entwining their words, wrapping them around each other ever more tightly as the music follows suit.

Wagner glorifies Lust in a highly idealized way, no doubt utterly ridiculous. It’s hard for me to avoid thinking that only a man could quite go here, utterly disregard the practical sides of passion and seek something so ethereal and sublime.

Nashville Visual Arts Events mid-December update

I missed a couple of things coming up this weekend so I’m sending out a mid-month update. One thing I missed before was the lecture tonight at the Frist on Civil War photography. For the middle of the holiday season, there’s a fair amount going on this weekend.

In addition to these shows in galleries, my friend and band mate Peggy Snow is at work on a new painting of the Church of Christ at 46th and Charlotte. For those of you who don’t know, Peggy does paintings of endangered buildings, sometimes as the bulldozers are rolling in, sometimes when the forces of commerce are gathering around. It’s not just an act of nostalgia, but an imaginative form of painting activism. Peggy gives voice to what is wrong about so much development and real estate speculation, the damage it does to the character of the places we live, the history and cultural inheritance it blows away. The constant churn of development results in the destruction of an important shared form of wealth, the wealth of memory. Peggy’s pictures pinpoint where that has occurred, and Peggy’s act of painting itself, always en plein air, makes for a kind of protest and vigil. People see Peggy painting. They ask what she’s doing. Sometimes the media come along and broadcast something.

Peggy’s subject this time is a fairly large church at the corner of Charlotte when you drive to it from Murphy road or get off the interstate. There was a group of local artists and arts organizations looking at the space, but I haven’t heard much about that in a while, and otherwise it would be prime land for yet another CVS, Walmart or Eckerd. The oncoming global depression might give the property a reprieve, but a lot of times the developers just level a place and grade it so it’s “development-ready.” In the mean time, Peggy’s doing her thing to call attention to the building, and to what gets crushed when the wheels of commerce grind away.

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December 11

Frist Center, Brooks Johnson lecture on Civil War photography. Johnson is associated with the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk. The Civil War was incredibly important to the history of photography in America. The war came along at just the right time in the development of the medium to become a key testing ground for the new medium and its images established photographers like Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan. 6:30 P.M.

December 12

Renaissance Center (Dickson), Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart. An exhibit by a printmaker who has recently joined the faculty at Belmont.

untitled, Winter show (Abominable Art Show), Gallery East. This quarter’s show by the venerable, vibrant and open-minded group. Gallery East is at 1008-C Woodland Street, behind the Alley Cat in East Nashville. 6-10.

Crema, Benefit Art Sale. Crema is an awesome new coffee shop on Hermitage Ave. on the edge of downtown. They make lattes the right way and I’m increasingly looking for excuses to stop there. This month they’ve taken over some adjoining space and are offering art work on sale to benefit the Safe Haven Family shelter. The artists are Thomas Petillo, Janet K. Lee, Stacie Berry, Taunia Rice, Aaron Grayum. They’re holding a closing event on Friday from 6 to 10. 15 Hermitage Ave.

December 13

Ruby Green, The Best Private Collection in Nashville. From the artist listed, the title may not be hyperbole—Marina Abramovic, Raymond Pettibon, Picasso, Man Ray, Annie Liebowitz, and R. Crumb. This exhibit is drawn from pieces owned by an anonymous private collector in Nasvhille who agreed to lend the art to Ruby Green. In addition to big names nationally, the collection includes work by the best Nashville artists, like Chris Scarborough, Sam Dunson, and Bob Durham. This show only runs through Dec. 20.

magpie, etc., Mark Sloniker. A mixed media installation from an artist who creates elaborate scenes with cartoon-like characters.

Done Made, 226 3rd Ave. North (work by students in Kristi Hargrove’s drawing class). A one-night show by the students in Kristi Hargrove’s drawing class at Watkins. The last show I saw that Kristi organized of work from one of her classes had some really good work, some of it defining big steps for the artists involved. This show includes several people who already doing sophisticated work (Kelly Bonadies, Beth Gilmore, Erin Plew, and Nick Stolle for a few). The entire list of participants includes Adrienne Bailey, C.J. Fasshauer, Alexis Hicks, Camille Jackson, Robbie Johnson, Justin Patterson, Mandy Stoller, and Myrna Talbot.

December 16

Gallery F., Wish List artists’ talk. This is a show of work by students from TSU, some of it very good. Several of the artists have had a piece or two in shows I’ve seen like the show of student work at the Frist, but this exhibit gives you a better sense of what they are up to. Brandon Donahue, whose piece at the Frist caught my attention, holds up well here. Ash Lusk is someone with a mature voice, and the work here is at an additional level of complexity. In addition to these two, the artists in the show and scheduled to speak are Mandy Sauer, Marjorie Ward, Jared Freihoefer, Sara Estes, Holly Settle, and Vincent Black. 6-9

December 26

Plowhaus at TALS, Art and Artisans Holiday Show. This is the reception for the affordable art show that opened earlier in the month.

Nashville Visual Arts Events December

Your country needs you. The economy sucks. Phil Bredesen is going to cut every budget he can find. Gas is cheap again, but no one can afford to go nowhere. But buck up. We’ve got a brand new President, and unlike the current one, it looks he will not be a bummer from start to finish. In fact, he shows every indication of being good at his new job. But your country needs…hell, Barack needs you. He would never say that, because it sounds too much like Bush and it’s passive in a way that Obama isn’t (“what do you expect me to do, it’s up to you, I’m just the President”). But I’m not President and am not otherwise doing the country much good, so I can say it. It’s the holiday season. The economy and Barack need you to spend some money. And why not buy some art? There are friendly people all over town anxious to help you stimulate the economy. Just a thought to go with this month’s art listings, which includes several galleries doing “Art under ___” shows (in addition to the shows opening this month, Cumberland is continuing its Small Packages show which opened last month).

And this month, the second Saturday (the 13^th) might be as good as first, Ruby Green having got its hands on someone’s private collection, and magpie is turning its space over to Mark Sloniker.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

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Dec. 4

Zeitgeist, Jeeyun Lee gallery talk. One of the 3 artists in Zeitgeist’s current show, Lee has contributed really nice ink drawings, long scrolls of paper unveiling delicately patterned forms. The other artists in the show are Christie Nuell (engravings with a kind of industrial feel) and Megan Lightell (calm, crespucular landscapes).

Dec. 5

Threesquared Gallery, Kaaren Engel and Dane Carter. The two artists are exploring imagery of road trips. This gallery is at 427 Chestnut, suite 223.

Sewanee University Art Gallery, Greely Myatt. Myatt is a sculptor in Memphis, one of the main people in the art scene there. His pieces are often visual jokes, rooted in Southern life through forms and materials. The gallery talk is at 4:30.

Dec. 6

Rymer, Inside Out. Pieces by Jon Coffett, Catherine Forster, Brett Osborn, and Casey Pierce. In addition to paintings, Rymer is showing a video piece by Osborn. He attached cameras to the front and back of a car, drove around Atlanta, and then projects the footage onto the windows of Jeep, which have been frosted. The Jeep will be parked out front ofr the gallery.

Twist, Rocky and Mandy Horton, Duncan McDaniel, and JJ Jones’s 12 Minutes of Christmas Rocky is one of the professors at Lipscomb and is leading those students into interesting places. His own work, at least what I’ve seen, is often subdued abstractions, sometimes using materials like photo paper. Mandy’s work (again what I’ve seen, primarily her exhibit last year at Twist) is also abstract, but it’s fleshier and more expressive. McDaniel’s drawings represent on a microscopic level yeast and taste buds, a visual essay on the phenomenon of tasting wine. But, there’s more—JJ Jones will present his 12 Minutes of Christmas performance, where he encloses himself in a big plastic globe and sings Christmas carols until the air inside runs out, about 12 minutes. He will repeat this performance at the top of the hour on Gallery Crawl night. It’s like David Blaine without the international media attention.

Estel, Branch Out: Artists Interpret the Holidays Cynthia Bullinger has had artists associated with the gallery put together pieces that interpret the symbols of the holidays. There are some of Sean O’Meallie’s clever and slick wood sculpture, and ornaments made from cut-up Metrocards by Desi Minchillo, who turned in one of the best shows at Estel last year. There are 9 other artists in the show, including Mr. Hooper.

The Arts Company, Wood, Canvas, and Clay. This group show features artists new to The Arts Company: furniture-maker and painter Randy Shull, mixed media artist Maria-Louise Coil, painter Sarah Emerson, and sculptor Krista Grecco.

Tinney Contemporary, Lost Boys of Sudan. Art work from the Sudanese refugees living in Nashville and making art under the guidance of photographer Jack Spencer.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Art from the Congregation and Friends. This is the second or third time we’ve done this, ask members of the congregation and friends to bring in a couple of works of art from home to explain. I’ve finally contributed a couple of things this year.

Watkins, Senior exhibits by Jenn Campbell, Shauna Currier and Lisa Deal. All three are doing photography. I’ve seen Lisa’s work in other media, including installations, although this sounds like it will be “straight” photography.

Plowhaus at TALS, Art and Artisans Holiday Show. Affordable art from folks like Andee Rudloff, Ayjey, Carrie Mills, Denny Adcock, Franne Lee, Marlynda Augelli, Miranda Herrick, Tracy Ratliff, and many others. The reception is actually on December 26!

Sera Davis, In a Nut$hell: Under a Grand. The title is pretty self-explanatory. I don’t have information on the artists included.

Mir Gallery, August Hampton. The new gallery in the Arcade, this month with mixed media work on paper and canvas by Hampton.

Gallery One, Group Holiday Show.

Firefinch, Sarah Shearer and Laura Baisden. One-night only “trunk show” of Sarah’s paintings and prints by Baisden. This is at Firefinch’s downtown location on Church near Printer’s Alley. 6-9.

ASK Apparel open house, 5001 Indiana. ASK Apparel is an enterprise by Ali, Sarah and Kate Bellos, who are getting together with the Connect 12 artists group and Thistle Farms to offer art and crafts for sale to benefit four local community organizations (including the homeless meals programs at my church). 2-6 p.m.

December 7

The Rutledge, in.FORM.all fundraiser. A fundraiser for the Happy Tails Humane Society with work by Merry Beth Myrick, Shonna Sexton, Arlene Bates, Judy Klich, Hans Mooy, Jessica Helmey, Gina Emmanuel and Betsy Clapsaddle. 3-6 p.m.

December 10

Gordon Jewish Community Center, Mel Davenport. Black and white Deco-inspired paintings and Pop Art inspired work. Reception from 7-9.

December 12

Renaissance Center (Dickson), Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart. An exhibit by a printmaker who has recently joined the faculty at Belmont.

December 13

Ruby Green, The Best Private Collection in Nashville. From the artist listed, the title may not be hyperbole—Marina Abramovic, Raymond Pettibon, Picasso, Man Ray, Annie Liebowitz, and R. Crumb. This exhibit is drawn from pieces owned by an anonymous private collector in Nasvhille who agreed to lend the art to Ruby Green. In addition to big names nationally, the collection includes work by the best Nashville artists, like Chris Scarborough, Sam Dunson, and Bob Durham.

magpie, etc., Mark Sloniker. A mixed media installation from an artist who creates elaborate scenes with cartoon-like characters.

December 26

Plowhaus at TALS, Art and Artisans Holiday Show. This is the reception for the affordable art show that’s opening on December 6.

Couple of Watkins Senior Shows

I finally got over to Watkins to see a couple of the student shows.

Mai Lick has an utterly likable exhibit, Earthly Delights. It's a dizzy paean to things that are bad for you--sculptures of candy, cupcakes, pills, lollypops, and cigarettes (and real condoms) piled up, with paintings of the sweets, all of it done in a palette that needs a name--sugary pinks, reds, oranges, greens, it made me think of Amy Sillman's colors, but this pops up lots of other places. The parts also reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud's cakes and Red Grooms' stuff, and the accumulations of material made me think of Vadis Turner, who's on my mind since they included several pics of her work to go along with my article in the latest issue of Number (now discretely stacked in galleries all over Nashville). Mai makes a point that's kind of obvious, but worth making, that all this stuff that's bad for you is undeniably pleasurable. That's why we want to indulge in these things. Pleasure gets drowned out in the emphasis on fear.

Fear runs through all of Adam Nicholson's work here. It's an extended riff on government secrecy and conspiracies going out of control, taken through an interesting lens--Dwight Eisenhower's promotion of the interstate highway system and his warning against the military-industrial complex. Nicholson includes several cartoon-style narrative drawings, sculptures, and video. They cast the interstate highway system as a kind of invasive growth that wraps its tendrils around the folds of the human brain and that introduces "development" that really consists of knocking things down, all the while people work in underground labs on fantasy weapons. The capstone element is a sculptural bust of Eisenhower perched on a stand made of auto parts--seat belts, shock absorbers, wiring. The exhibit as a whole sure has a strong paranoid element, casting the interstate highway system not just as something wracked with unintended consequences, but part of the takeover of society and politics by shadow forces trading destruction and liberty for profits.

These exhibits will probably be up through the weekend if you are in town and can swing by Watkins.

Viewing Notes: de Balincourt

Finally got over to Vanderbilt to see the Jules de Balincourt show. The pieces Joseph Whitt put together make a lot of sense as a group. I want to just run through impressions in sort of the sequence they occurred to me, taking some license. And these will be rough notes tonight. I might polish them later.

The first thing that struck me was how vivid some of the color is. Several paintings are dominated by the bright, almost day-glo colors of spray paint and tagging. It's a quality that doesn't come across in jpegs. A reddish/pinkish color dominates the first painting (going through widdershins), a picture of a bulletin board covered with blank notices. I'm pretty sure I read someone else point out the connection to the postings after the WTC attack. So you start with this image of disaster, the apocalypse that happened in real life, not just our imaginings.

You have images of collapse throughout. The postcard image for the show is one where a group of masked characters have invaded a Hollywood hills house, hanging out and partying. In another, masked figures steal or carry animals away from a house in the hills, a helicopter overhead blaring down its searchlight. Another image of a desolate street, post riot, has a multi-colored beam of light shooting overhead. These Southern California images of desolation and disorder reminded me of Octavia Butler.

Against the images of desolation you've got images of a kind of self-indulgent cluelessness--naked people at picnic table on a tropical beach, some sort of Club Med, or people scatterred through a room, disco ball overhead, blissing out on a raindbow that winds through the room. They've got candles burning in little bunches, which is another connecting element--the interloping partiers on the terrace have candles lit, and one sculpture is a sort of mannequin corpse laden with bunches of candles. The candles bring to mind meditation practices, a leisure time activity for priveleged people, but also power outages, as civilization temporarily stumbles backwards.

The images reflect the cultural environment as much as the political or social environment. One almost incidental painting has Neil Young's name in a cursive script, highlighted with different colors. It's like a high school student's fan-boy or fan-girl doodling. It's all about the pleasure of pop culture. And a lot of the material in here connects to pop cultural reference points. The colors remind me of graffiti, and some of the paintings, like the one of the people grabbing the rainbows, are in part done in a spray paint technique. Even the images of catastrophe and collapse speak as much to the world of movies and TV shows where the apocalypse is a popular trope, going all the way back to Twilight Zone episodes where someone finds themselves alone in an abandonned city.

A few pictures step out into more concretely political territory--an open boat filled with dark-skinned passengers cruising into the lights of a big city, or stern men seated around a big table (this one reminded me of one of Oswaldo Guayasamin's paintings, it was a series of paintings called something like Meeting at the Pentagon).

Overall, I was impressed with how densely stuff piled up in these paintings--political and cultural overtones, a willingness to indulge in the pure pleasure of bright colors, overlapping elements that tie the paintings together into different packages. Some of this sensation is due to Joseph's choice of paintings and position in the gallery, and he's certainly brought out those qualities through his curatorial choices.

The density of the work means that a work like Remembering Our Great Dead Heroes--its those words underneath multicolored curlicues--could be a reference to war dead, but in context those words and traces of color could be heroes from any cultural realm--maybe the heroes are Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Visual Arts events update but really self-promotion

I’m sending out a late month update primarily in the interests of self-promotion, but will add a few other events to salve my conscience. The self-promotion part is that I’m playing a show this Saturday afternoon at noon at Twist. That’s right, noon. We’ve set up this show for a group from North Carolina, Savage Knights, who are on their way to gigs in Louisville and Chicago (playing at the Hungry Brain there). As an opener or closer (we’ll see), Joseph Hudson and I are playing. He plays piano and accordion with my saxes. We’re working with material that has a lot in common with one of my great heroes, Fred Anderson of Chicago, but that might not be entirely obvious since it’s overlaid with things like minimalist obsessive repetitive patterns.

So there’s a few other events and openings coming up this weekend. And then it’s Thanksgiving—I hope everyone has a great holiday.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

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Nov. 20

Frist, Susan Edwards lecture on photography. The director of the Frist Center takes center stage to deliver a lecture “Is the Medium the Message?” as part of the center’s photography lecture series to accompany their exhibit of works from the Eastman House. Yes, it is a consideration of McLuhan’s ideas as they relate to photography from a phenomenological, sociological, and aesthetic point of view. The lecture is at 6:30.

Nov. 21

Gallery F, Wish List. The second show at Gallery F features work by students from the TSU art department. This department really seems to be blooming, as evidenced by the work on display at the Frist last year. This might have work by some of

those artists. Sabine Schlunk tells me the students are pushing into some experimental territory in their pieces for this show, and I think she’s been encouraging them in this direction. In that spirit, Ash Lusk and Jared Freihoefer will provide “spontaneous sound performances” at the opening.

Watkins, Krstine Larsen, Adam Nicholson, and Mai Lick. The second round of Senior Thesis exhibits for this semester.

Nabit Gallery, Sewanee, April Hannah. Hannah is a Brooklyn-based artist who integrates chance elements into 2- and 3-D work by start with forms generated by automatic drawing.

Nov. 22

Twist, Savage Knights and the Hudson-Maddox Complex. This is that show at Twist. Jack Silverman did a nice write-up in th

e Scene with this description of Savage Knights: “instrumental music that blends the noirish intensity of a Tarantino soundtrack with Ethiopiques-style harmonies, splashes of Moog, droning horns and dissonant explosions.”

Plowhaus at TALS, Something Green: A Children’s Art Show About the Environment. Plowhaus asked 50 children ages 5-10 to make art works showing what the environment means to them. This is

an inherently good idea and I do not doubt it when the Plowhaus’ PR says the children have made some amazing works of art. This show nicely continues Plowhaus’ tradition of community engagement. They will have the opening from 2-6 on the 22^nd (so come to our concert at Twist, then go to TALS) and is only going to be up through November 30.

Cumberland, Small Packages. Cumberland’s annual holiday show of small works mostly by gallery artists intended to be a bit more affordable, more in the gift range.

It happened!

I wish we all could be in Chicago tonight.

They asked John Lewis whom he thinks of at this time. I want to remember Harold Washington. Tonight reminds me of how happy I was when he was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983. Thank you Harold for giving us some hope then, you were taken from us too early. May Barack Obama fulfill that promise.

Now's the time

Scene article on Grooms and Luong collection

As promised, here's this week's article in the Scene. It's a review of the show at Cheekwood of art from the personal collection of Red Grooms and his wife Lysiane Luong (there are two art pieces in the paper this week, the other one written by Maria, covering the show by Michael Oliveri in the Temporary Contemporary gallery--Cheekwood and our household take over a whole page in the paper).

I thought the Grooms/Luong collection review out pretty well. I did rely on one of my tried and true tricks--grab a volume of Walter Benjamin and see if there's something in there that gives me an idea. Benjamin is great for this. He has all these great sounding quotes, but so much of his stuff is in aphorism and fragments, which is perfect for a lazy writer like me. But there's stuff in the last few paragraphs about the ownership of meaning that catch something I've been thinking about for a while and its good to get it out in print.

The review is definitely not an assessment of Grooms work, but I ran across something in Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library" that seemed like it would work great as a starting place for discussing his work.

I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals--the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.

Painting of objects, cutting out of figures, application of decals--this sounded oddly like Grooms' artistic practice, especially in the 3D stuff, from pop-ups and cut outs to installations. Its interesting to think of his activity as a collector of art not as some side-line hobby but as integral to and of a piece with his art-making. To think of his art-making as a kind of collecting--his drawn, painted, printed, and fabricated figures have a quality of being picked up directly from the street. He stops short of actually gleaning, picking up objects and bringing them back to the study--plenty of artists practice that, which is another way back into this Benjamin quote--but Red Grooms' figuration is so tied to observation that it depends on the actual physical world in a particularly intense way. His figures are not figments of his imagination.

Off to New Orleans in a few hours. Maybe I'll blog from there. I'm sure the trip will at least be good for a post-trip post.

Making up for that last post

OK, that McCain post was kind of gratuitous. When I think about zombies, this is what I really want to think about, one of my favorite songs--RE: Your Brains, by Jonathan Coulton. My favorite part is the way he uses office speak. I have to confess that I am perfectly capable of talking like that at work, without the eat your brains stuff. And the video has lots of clips from Shaun of the Dead, another favorite.

McCain wants your vote...on second thought...

McCain wants to eat your brains.


John McCain doing the zombie walk at a rally in Iowa last weekend.

The New York Times published this in their print edition, but from what I can tell they swapped it for a more flattering picture in the on-line editions.

Nashville Visual Arts Events for November

Again, I’m trying to get everything into one listing. I figure the last half of the month should be pretty slow with Thanksgiving week, and I’m going to be off doing things elsewhere much of the time. This weekend I’ll be getting a chance to hear Dr. Michael White, one of the very best practitioners of traditional New Orleans music. I hope I’ll also get a chance to see a lot of the Prospect .1 biennial on this trip. Later in the month I’ll be seeing The Black Watch. Should be a good month.

But the point is just I’m kind of excited about these things, not that there isn’t plenty going on in Nashville. There’s a bunch of stuff from students this month—the Mt. Olivet cemetery event on Halloween, Senior shows at Watkins, and TSU students at Gallery F. And right now I’m listening to clips by Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam, who will be singing at Sri Ganesha, and that sounds good. The Clive King drawings at Austin Peay look like they could be great.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

Oh yeah, everyone who hasn't vote. It's important. Vote for the right person. If you don't know who that is, email me and I'll tell you.

October 31

Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Watkins Student illustrators. Check this out—Watkins illustration students showing illustrations of “restless souls” in a crypt at Confederate Memorial Hall at the cemetery. The show commemorates cold winters in the 1870s when the ground was too hard to dig graves, so the dead were held in a temporary holding crypt at Mt. Olivet. The students will display their work just for a couple of hours on Halloween morning, from 9-11.

November 1

The Arts Company, Ansel Adams and Bob Kolbrener. Ansel Adams, who died in 1984, was a founder of American art photography in many ways. His images of the American West are some of the most famous photos, and they define how we see landscape in photography. He also made a huge contribution to photographic technique with his Zone system for composing, developing, and printing black and white photos. Finally, he was also a father of the modern photography market—his photographs were some of the first to gain the attention of serious collectors and some pioneering dealers built their business selling his work. Kolbrener worked with Adams as a student and then as an instructor at Adams’ workshops. He has continued in Adams’ footsteps, taking photos of Western landscapes and printing them with traditional darkroom techniques. The Arts Company is also opening an exhibit of paintings by April Street.

Society of Nashville Artistic Photographers, Pushpin/Clothespin Show. This year SNAP is doing this show at the Tennessee Art League space on Broadway. SNAP is a cooperative of photographers with different styles. Consider them Adams’ heirs.

Twist, Tara Murino-Brault and Ulana Zahajkewycz. These two women have ties to Minneapolis, and Twist is developing a nice pipeline from there to here, Both of the artists are working with nightmares, monsters, and fears in a playful way. The band Eastern Block is going to play at the opening.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Connect 12. DPC is hosting an exhibit by the Connect 12 group, organized by Ben Vitualla. The artists in this show are Alesandra Bellos, Jimi Benedict, Rick Bradley, Samantha Callahan, Eric Denton, Tiffany Denton, Chris Hill, Stacey Irvin, Sean Jewett, Erika Johnson, Shana Kohnstamm, Daniel Lai, Andee Rudloff, and Ben. I’m kind of always going on about Erika’s work, but her piece in this show sure sounds interesting—titled “Saved,” it deals with the financial crisis, poverty, and related sensations, but it’s also an interesting name for a piece showing in a church.

Rymer, Color is Relative. This show features Rymer Gallery curator and Crayola master Herb Williams, as well as work by James Pearson, Gabriel Mark, L.A. Bachman, Barbara Coon, Jordan Eagles, and Emily Leonard. Pearson does really nice abstractions that were in a show at TAG a couple of years ago. Leonard does dark, brooding landscapes.

Gallery One, Lorraine Glessner and Jennifer Bain. These artists come together around their use of encaustic, which produces a nice fleshy surface. Bain is more of a straight painter, Glessner uses elements of collage, embedding objects like threads and fabrics in the encaustic. Both of them achieve effects of layering and depth. The reception will run from 6-8.

Estel, Harry Underwood. A closing show for the latest group of paintings by Harry. He makes densely packed pieces, filled with words and images that reward sustained viewing. Harry’s also got a unique process, creating limited multiples of most of his works, and working with a stock of images he reuses. The paintings draw from a shared world of nostalgia and fantasy, but each piece feels like a carefully thought-through world of its own.

Tennessee Arts League, Edie Maney. Abstract paintings inspired by the Frist Center’s Color as Field show. She’s using some of the techniques of the Color Field painters in the ways she moves acrylic paint around on canvas.

Cheekwood, Dia de los Muertos. Cheekwood’s annual celebration of the Mexican commemoration of the dead, with events running all day.

Tinney, Manuel and Cambridge Jones. This is an exhibit of photographs by Jones of country music stars wearing outfits created by Manuel.

November 2

CRAFT: A Creative Community A group of local artists/artisans, bringing Nashville into the world of DIY crafts, holds its monthly sale/fair in the parking lot of Lipstick Lounge from 11-5 on Sunday.

November 3

APSU, Clive King. King makes intricate, large scale drawings, some of which draw on his roots in a small Welsh village and others more recently have taken a turn into political issues like the war in Iraq. The exhibit at Austin Peay’s Trahern gallery opens with an artist’s talk at 7:00.

November 6

Frist Center, Morna O’Neil lecture. O’Neil’s a faculty member at Vanderbilt specializing in 19^th century art. Her lecture will focus on photography during the Victorian era, the medium’s earliest years. 6:30 p.m.

November 7

Sri Ganesha, Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam. Subramanian is a vocalist from Chennai—she will be accompanied by Avaneeswaram Vinu on violin and Shertalai Ananthakrishnan on mridangam. Regular readers of this listing know that I am an avid fan of the music program at Sri Ganesha. The concerts there are consistently of high quality, but every few months one jumps out as particularly promising, and this is one of those. Subramaniam looks and sounds to my untrained eyes and ears to be a substantial artist.

Watkins, Jennifer Knowles McQuistion, Stephanie Brooke West, and Jonathan Abarquez. The first round of Senior shows by Watkins students graduating this year. McQuistion and West are both in the photography program but will use multiple media including live performance in these shows. The performances start at 6:30. Abarquez is involved in the construction of life-size avatars, so he’s moving across media boundaries as well. This exhibit will only run through Nov. 14.

Watkins Yart Sale. Art by Watkins students for sale, 10-4 on the 7^th and 10-5 on the 8^th.

Centennial Art Center, Kathy Carter, R. Lafayette Mitchell, Eva Sochorova. Opening reception from 5-7.

November 8

Artrageous. The annual party and benefit for Nashville CARES. The participating galleries this year are Art & Invention, Bennett, Estel, Richter, Tennessee Art League, The Arts Company, Rymer, Studio B, and LeQuire.

Very Vine Craft Show. John Schramlin has organized a craft show to provide some alternatives during downtown Murfreesboro’s weekend holiday shopping event. It’ll be at the Vine, 118 W. Vine St., from 11-6.

November 11

Parthenon, David Petrain lecture. Petrain is a professor at Vanderbilt. His talk is titled “Homer, the Iliad tablets, and Visual Storytelling in the Early Roman Empire” 7:00. Call 862-8431 for reservations.

November 13

Sarratt, Gina Binkley. Assemblages made from found materials which look to combine qualities of Leonardo Drew, Joseph Cornell, and Louis Nevelson. It has an aged, hand-made feel.

November 15

Snow Gallery, Portals and Vessels. Another conversational show at Snow Gallery. This one takes work by Kinjo Jiro (1912-2004), a Japanese potter who was designated a Living National Treasure, and presents it with ceramics by Bill Dale and books made from hand-made paper by Claudia Lee. (If I may digress—I have always liked the idea of Living National Treasures. We should have this in Nashville, but only if I get to pick them. First one in—Dave Cloud.)

November 20

Frist Center, Susan Edwards lecture. The director of the Frist Center will deliver the second of a three-lecture series on photography. She is going to discuss McLuhan’s ideas about media, the physical processes of photography, and its influence on many aspects of society, not just art. 6:30 p.m.

November 21

Watkins, Krstine Larsen, Adam Nicholson, and Mai Lick. The second round of Senior Thesis exhibits for this semester.

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, Wish List. An exhibit of work by students and graduates of TSU’s art department. Everyone who saw the Frist Show of work from the local art programs will remember how well the work from TSU students came across, so here’s a chance to see work from them. Curator Sabine Schlunk says the participants are being encouraged to experiment for this show. The artists will present sound performances at the opening.

Forget the Bradley effect...

Given the encouraging state of recent polls, the big concern for Obama supporters is the Bradley Effect, in which poll respondents say they are going to vote for the black candidate because they don't want to seem like racists to the poll takers, but then go out and vote for the white candidate. But now there's evidence of a Reverse Bradley Effect, in which white voters say they'll vote for McCain, but they are really going to vote for Obama and don't want to say so because there's some sort of expectation that they should vote for the Republican (or the white person). As far as I know this effect was first postulated by my wife, but now two academics from the University of Washington have found evidence of it in this year's Democratic primaries.

With all due respect to the UW researchers, I'm sure the Obama campaign is with me, and has moved on to think about even more insidious voter behaviors. Don't forget these guys--Obama and even more so David Axelrod--are from Chicago.

The real thing to look for is the Double Reverse Bradley Effect--
1. White people say they are going to vote for McCain;
2. But something about the way they say it makes you think they're going to vote for Obama;
3. But what they're really going to do is write in Bernie Epton.

Something to think about

Went to hear John Dear speak this Sunday--he's a Jesuit peace activist, someone Geoff Little has gotten to know. He is radically non-violent, committed to it on every level of living. This most notably has led him to dedicate himself seemingly full-time to anti-war and disarmament protests, and writing and speaking about it and all the other stuff that goes with that. He's a friend of the Berrigans, and has been arrested a ton for civil disobedience. He's the kind of person who forces you to think about what you are doing and not doing other than opinionating excitedly from time to time.

Jude Adam asked him probably the question, what to do in the case of Hitler and Nazism. He responded by talking about the history of non-violent resistance to the Nazis. I've recently run across a reference to the Danes collective refusal to collaborate under occupation, which included saving the country's Jewish population. John doesn't concede the ground of this example, but it does still hang out there. However, it also doesn't really matter--the ground between that example and almost everything else that goes on is vast. The things he is working on, like resistance to our ungreat wars, to the accumulation of nuclear weapons, to the distortion of public wealth by directing so much to warmaking, the realities of empire, all of that holds true--there is no Hitler to excuse those things. It may just be a lack of imagination.

Varieties of silence

Just re-read Kirkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Originally the plan was to talk about it in church, but this book wasn't right for that, so I used some other SK stuff, but I went and ahead and finished re-reading F and T.

SK's book is a long meditation on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, taken from several angles that all burrow into what Abraham as the exemplar of faith says about the fundamental nature of faith. In short, faith is something other than ethics, or heroism, or aesthetics, it is a relationship to the absolute, a strange territory past renunciation, where the absurd reigns. If heroism and ethics serve universal values, faith involves establishing a relationship to the absoluate, which is purely individual and singular.

Kirkegaard ends this essay by considering Abraham's silence--he tells no one what he is going off to do, offers no explanation. It's a point you could easily overlook.

Since Abraham is involved in an act of faith, he cannot speak because human speech brings the human making the speech sound into the service of the universal, in that words must engage universals in order to be understood. Abraham's necessary silence made me think of Pasolini's film version of the Gospel of St. Matthew. It is filled with silence, and in this and many other ways I think Pasolini did a marvelous job of capturing what the gospel text describes (thanks to Tom Wills for putting this film on a program where I was able to see it and discuss it).

OK, all that setup is to get to this little point about silence. Abraham's silence is different in kind than the way we often think about silence. I think we usually assume silence generates information richly if we slow down to "listen" to it. It might be John Cage's silence, filled with incidental sound and the essence of Being. Or the silence of meditation, out of which God speaks or the divine emerges. But Abraham's silence is a silence of muteness, of the inviolable singleness of an individual human, standing in relation to the absolute, which language takes away by introducing general categories.

Of course, by Kirkegaard's view, music has the same qualities of silence, in that it is not tied by semantics to the universal. Of course by music I mean, real music, not lyrics delivery systems. OK, OK, instrumental music. Without the words, the sounds of a performance take place only in one place at a single time. The most innocent of these sounds are the most particular and local (and look at Olson for everything local means).

So to recap, we have:
Fecund silence, with meaning and messages bubbling up.
Mute silence, where meaning is cut off in deference to singularity and the relationship to the absolute.
Noisy silence, that strips off the extraneous material of syntax.


This is Rotten Piece, the band of my friends Shaun and Carol Kelly in Houston.

Yes, I'm still writing for the Scene

I've been asked often enough whether I'm still writing for the Scene that I'm going to try to start posting the articles here when they get published. But yes, I am still writing reviews, about one a month. I'd like to do more, but it's hard to line up my travel schedule with show openings and press deadlines.

To get us caught up, here's my articles this year in reverse order.

September: Lori Field and Anna Jaap, TAG at Estel

August: Line Up drawing show at Estel

August: Glexis Novoa and Yvonne Buchheim at Cheekwood

July: Color Field show at the Frist

June: Quinn Dukes performance at Twist

May: Nashville Library show on works with words. I think I gave this show more credit than it was due. I was going through some references images, and they weren't so good.

April: Zeitgeist Dialogues painting show

April: Aaron Morgan Brown at The Arts Company. This sure was a good show, nice to recall it.

March: Sam Dunson at TAG. Looking forward to seeing the new work at Vanderbilt--it looks (and from a report tonight sounds) like it builds nicely on the stuff in this show. Or maybe the addition to his visual vocabulary are starting to settle in for me.

February: Oswaldo Guayasamin at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery

January: Lisa Solomon and Aurora Robson at SQFT (the gallery's last show)

January: Aaron Douglas at the Frist. While we're at it, in the second to last paragraph (it appears as the last graf on the first page on the web), the reference to "performance utterance" should have read "performative utterance." We missed that in the editorial process.

Thanks Amanda

Amanda Dillingham was nice enough to do a Best of Nashville on this blog. With the dearth of posts for a while, it hardly seems to deserve it, but knowing this was in the works (the list goes around at some point to all the writers) chastened me, and I've been trying to make an effort to come up with stuff more often.

On the topic of Best of Nashville, I was too clever for my own good with a few of my titles and the editors provided titles that would be comprehensible to actual readers of the paper. But for my entertainment, here's the original titles for the ones that were changed:

Best Installation = Best Shower Curtain. Erika Johnson's installation at Parthenon. I was glad I got some chance to talk about it, and at least make the point in print that this was a really ambitious piece, with a real sweep. She captured big junks of history and cultural change, and made all of it personal and visceral.

Best Drawing Exhibit = Best Birds. For Erin Plew's drawing of a bunch of birds and bird parts. Technically this should have been "Best Drawing" and leave off Exhibit. I saw that she was exhibiting the drawing again at the Arcade last Art Crawl (I had to go by early so I only got to look in the window at the show).

Best Interactive Work = Best Interactive Housekeeping Exercise. Libby Rowe's show at Belmont. Again, one of the nice things about Best of Nashvilles is the chance to mention something when I missed the chance to write about it first time around.

In retrospect these titles are not as clever as I thought they were at the time, and the editors did keep Best Exploding Whale, which might actually have been a clever title. Let's face it, I ain't going to be writing for the Simpsons any time soon.

On the topic of things not written about (yet), don't forget that Amanda's in the show at Gallery F, The New Dress Code. She has a video about herself, her mother, and bodies and skin, installed in a fabric structure, kind of womb-like. It's gotten me to thinking about what I think about pieces that combine video and sculpture in this way, about the way the elements balance. Video demands your attention in a specific way, I don't know to what extent you take this in as an integrated visual experience--that can be part of the point, but it's one of the things I want to look for when I go back. There is all sorts of logic connecting the tangible and video elements in Amanda's piece. The show's up through November 16, which is helpful for me. And there's an artists' talk at the gallery at 7:00 next Tuesday, the 21st. I didn't get this talk into the events listing.

P.S. One more thing on Best of Nashville--as usual my wife hit it out of the park, packing her art BON dense with ideas and interpretation of Lauren Kalman's work.

Process of elimination

The new Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle has a fun inaugural show, which works out to be in large parts the greatest hits of what I've seen in galleries for a couple of years. There's a Tara Donovan piece made from buttons, one of Chakaia Booker's shredded tire sculptures, a faux museum display by Fred Wilson, one of Devorah Sperber's amazing pieces where she forms an image out of an array of spools of thread seen through a clear acrylic sphere that inverts the image and by reducing it in size smooths out the forms. There's piece after piece that you can remember, using every kind of material imaginable--plastic utensils, record albums, US Army dog tags, plastic shopping bags, quarters, and so forth.

This museum used to be called the American Craft Museum--I thought it was affiliated with the American Crafts Council, but I think I was wrong about that. The Museum of Arts & Design has put together a good show, but it does raise the question of what this museum is--how does it differ from say the New Museum in the Bowery or any number of Contemporary Art centers? I'm not sure it's a problem, but it has been interesting to think about this.

What I've come up with is that MAD distinguishes itself by what it does not show, if I can use the inaugural show as a guide, which is exactly what I'll do. In the past, it was a museum for work that could be identified as the crafts, largely defined by media, techniques, and aesthetic intent. Its inaugural show seems to say it will not be limited to those media--clay, glass, metal, fabric, wood. But maybe it will be defined by what it does not show--paintings (unless it's on clay or similar material). Prints. Photographs. Sculpture in stone, metal, wood, or cast resins (unless it has reference to a functional items). These of course are the media of the traditional fine arts (as opposed to craft). So the New Museum can do a show of Elizabeth Peyton, that would never happen at MAD (the process of elimination is yielding benefits if it saves the museum from that fate). Also, it is probably the case that MAD will stay away from video, although there was at least one piece with some.

I think it's interesting to think that the museum will become the place for "everything outside" of the most familiar vehicles for art.

To be fair, MAD does retain its ties to the crafts. After you get done with the inaugural show, the selections from the permanent collection go back to the familiar forms (if the choices are somewhat skewed to recent work). In a section for jewelry, in addition to display cases they have a whole bunch of drawers you can go through, each one filled with a few items from the collection. It's similar to a section in the renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has an even bigger section of cabinets filled with small items that they could not otherwise find room to display.

This approach seems to be coming into favor to deal with the sheer volume of material museums have, balancing access to this material with view-ability. In old days, museums displayed cases jammed with everything the museum had--100 stuffed specimens of finches, woven baskets from Western Native American tribes, samples of quartz crystals, whatever. This was overwhelming and bewildering, so museums turned to selecting a few items and displaying them carefullly, often nearly boasting about what a large percentage of the collection was out of public view. This new technique attempts to balance the two--highly edited display cases as the central focus, but much more material available off to the side for anyone who wants to take the time and dig deeper. The Met has done this in a few of its collections, notably in the mezzanine floor of the Greek, Roman and Etruscan department, where they have cases filled with material that you identify by checking on an interactive video screen.

All of this seems like a fine thing. It does mean you need to think about what kind of experience you want to have when you go to a museum, whether you want to go and settle in for something a lot like archival work.

Oh yeah, the new building looks good and seems to work well. It's got kind of a small footprint, but that's not really a problem, a lot of times it's better to have an exhibit broken up into bit-sized pieces. And it will seem like a lot more room when they do exhibits of more traditional "crafts." I don't know whether I miss the Edward Durrell Stone facade--I didn't have any particular objection to it or any particular attachment to it.

I feel like Balboa

Seeing the Pacific again always seems like arriving some place, getting to the end. I never feel that way about the Atlantic. Partly, no doubt, this is an ethnocentric tribal memory--the Atlantic has always been there, if you assume you are starting in Europe. After all these centuries, the Pacific is still new. It is also the case that one approaches the Pacific so often from above, from high cliffs that look out far to sea. In almost every case, you walk up to the Atlantic.

Off the edge

On the topic of unchecked, destructive chaos...

In discussion of the current economic crisis, I haven't run across anything that interprets this as economic end times, the absolute collapse of the economic system as we've known it. It's probably bad analysis, or maybe irresponsible, or too scary. Oh, and there's probably someone out there writing this, I just don't read that avidly.

I don't have any empirical basis for my sense of what we might be facing. It's a reaction to the tenor of things. Is this the big one, the final structural crisis that has been predicted over the years by left wing theorists? The stock market keeps plummeting. Is there any reason it couldn't go to zero--that we just can no longer fund productive enterprises this way, no one will hand over money to people they don't know who say they are using it for a productive enterprise, but who knows, the level of fraud and pure bullshit is so high and the incentives so skewed to encourage it. And there will be less going to the market because we moved from a regime of dispersed consumption to a regime of dispersed deprivation. Say the airlines keep cutting back flights and making the ones they have more expense, until there's little reason to even try to travel by air. A whole sector of the economy essentially disappears.

The slow or not slow unraveling of the globe as a hospitable environment keeps throwing us into a hole. It becomes more expensive to do everything, and more of life is a recovery effort. Nashville, thanks to the storm-driven gas shortage, got a taste of a Mad Max future.

Is the question now how we will survive and who will survive? Is there any model for people, communities, or nations to come together in the absence of a functioning market to produce and distribute food and services? What are the aggregations we need to form--do all people need to be tied in some way to productive farms? Does it come down to provision of potable water or household level energy? Yes, there are theories, but is there anything that's worked in practice?

It seems the crisis comes at an inopportune time, when alternate social structures are not waiting for their turn, the pursuit of something different anemic after years of disillusion.

Maybe everything will look better in a few weeks. Maybe we'll bump on bottom. Maybe Obama will make a difference--I'm looking forward to the prospect of his victory, and maybe the very idea of him will give people the idea that something decent actually can happen in our national culture.

Chaos connections

Let's start with one thing I saw in a brief stop in Chelsea last week--photographs by Kay Hassan, a South African artist at Jack Shainman. They were photos of multi-colored debris that had floated onto a beach in Mozambique. Rags and plastic in wild range of colors function as abstract art in big, gorgeous pictures. But the seductive qualities of the images don't mask that it's a scene of devastation, human trash overrunning the landscape.

The next day I saw Pam Longobardi's show at Tinney in Nashville, which deals with a similar material, just a different ocean. In her case, she has collected debris that washed up in Hawaii, I guess some of the huge mass of human trash that has collected in the North Pacific Gyre. In the main work, she takes some of those artifacts and lines them up in groups on the wall, ordered roughly by size. It's a touching gesture, responding to this overwhelming, world-destroying chaos by trying to retrieve a little bit of it and put it in an order, straight lines, like with like, the utter opposite of what happens when the sea is forced to absorb our monumental wastefulness.

Chaos can be a source of energy and creativity--I like to think of it that way, because my life is an exercise in chaos. These two pieces put chaos back into the realm of destruction. The forces that produced these art works can't really be redeemed.