Maynard Ferguson

Maynard Ferguson died this week (I’m doing too many RIPs here). He was the kind of jazz musician you aren’t supposed to admit you liked, but for a jazz musician of a certain age (let’s say in one’s 40s), he was unavoidable. Every geeky jazz wannabe listened to his band’s albums, went to the concerts. The problem was that he wasn’t cool or intellectual, not a musician who crafted subtle and sophisticated statements, but a flamboyant showman (Buddy Rich comes to mind as another band leader in this vein). He was the high note player – in big bands there was a tradition for the lead player to be a guy who could nail the really high notes, with someone else on the second chair who could improvise fluent solos. Maynard had an unmistakable upper range sound, he’d just charge right up in the stratosphere, a strident sound like Pavarotti in comparison to other tenors. But his improvisation was pretty pedestrian. And he left most of that to band members anyway.

In the 70s he was everywhere with crossover big band music, playing arrangements of songs like Hey Jude. He dressed in jump suits, and sort of had a William Shatner thing going (fellow Canadian). We knew it was tacky, and made fun of it, but the thing was the music really had some of rock’s energy. I remember seeing the band at Montgomery College and in Hey Jude at the end where they’re repeating the theme over and over, all of the trumpet players went out into the audience and played from behind everyone. It was a simple theatrical trick, but it worked like the action sequences in a movie.

What do they call pot, a gateway drug because it leads you inevitably to smack addiction or some such crap. Well, Maynard’s music could be a gateway. People got into it, and maybe they listened to other stuff. Hearing the stories on him this week I’ve only thought back on his music with the affection that inevitably flows to the things that were part of your growing up.

RIP Dave Schnaufer

Dulcimer player, virtuoso really, David Schnaufer died today from cancer. A lot of people I know really loved this guy. I got a chance to play with him through the Transcendental Crayon Ensemble. We played a tune of his and an arrangement he had done of I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry which gave that song a completely new character. I remember most was the ringing, clear sound he got off his amplified dulcimer. Wonderful. And he was very generous to do this show with us, considering the level he was at and the kind of people he played with.

Briggs and Scarborough at Arts Commission

The Tennessee Arts Commission gallery is opening a new show this weekend with the work of Jason Briggs and Chris Scarborough, two interesting artists. Briggs does ceramic sculptures in strange, biomorphic forms, using clay with a high level of craft but completely divorced from crafts aesthetic conventions. Scarborough's got strangeness on his side as well, in his case by manipulating people in photographs to give them the over-sized eyes of anime cartoons or using similar figures in drawings that play games with whether you are seeing a disturbing mutation or some perspective trick. The opeing reception is this Saturday from 5-7.

Tennessee ♥ Road Kill

Road kill seems to be a minor fixation in these parts, to the extent that we even have a law in Tennessee assuring our right to take anything we hit for our “personal use and consumption.” (Actually, you have to get a kill tag from a wildlife resources agent to take any bear you kill with your car.) This law actually makes a certain amount of sense, especially if you drive around in a Hummer so you don’t have to worry about the hundreds of dollars in body damage the deer left you with as it passed out of this life into the next. But it’s more fun to imagine a bunch of slack-jawed hillbilly citizen-legislators sitting around coming up with their legislative priorities for the session, and this makes it to the top of the list.

I think maybe people in this state, where you are more likely to experience a rural environment than elsewhere, may have more awareness of road kill and the death of animals in general. When I ride my bike on the roads near my house, or take a walk, at some point I am likely to pass through an area dominated by the smell of rotting animal flesh. The scenery may look pretty, but this is not a pristine pastoral setting, and that’s the way it should be. Real pastoral involves zoological and botanical churn, stuff growing and dying. It’s not all designed with pleasure in mind, or a pleasure that’s much more complicated and difficult.

In a nice addition to the annals of road kill culture, April Hale, a jeweler at the Appalachian Center for the Crafts, had two “Road Kills Rings” in an exhibit at the Renaissance Center in Dickson. Working with very simple silver rings as a base, one had a small tuft of raccoon fur stuck on top of the ring, the hairs pointing straight upwards. The other had a tiny raccoon tooth on a tiny bed of red velvet and encased in acrylic. My wife described it as a reliquary for the animal, and it had a sense of appreciation for the delicate shapes of the tooth and the range of colors and tones on the strands of hair, and respect shown in the way the remains were preserved and presented. And it’s road kill!

Current LeQuire Gallery show

A couple of artists worth checking out at LeQuire, in their summer show that’ll be up the rest of this week and maybe next.

The show was organized by John Reed, who also contributes a series of pieces that repeat a single image of a cartoonish jackass, big teeth and mouth hanging open. He repeats it at different sizes, on strips of paper, within a large panel of woven paper, on blocky wood panels. Many of the pieces break up the image, which is not stenciled or reproduced uniformly but seems drawn freehand, sometimes verging on a scrawl. The scratchiness of the iterations of the image and all the varied ways it is fragmented give it a goofy ghostly feel.

The most appealing work in the show is a series of plein air urban landscapes by Todd Gordon. He goes to scruffy parts of Brooklyn – empty lots, industrial zones, canals – and paints what he sees in a horizontal format. Many of the pieces are framed out to capture fundamental symmetries of form. I was reminded of several photographers, like Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao who had photos of some similar settings along the IRT 7 line in Queens, or people like Hiroshi Sugimoto or Dodo Jin Ming who make water a major character in their photos. The last association came to mind particularly with Gordon’s painting of New York Harbor, where the image is almost all water (it’s the main image on the LeQuire Gallery homepage right now). I find it interesting that photographers come to mind. Some of it is that Gordon includes a curvature to his perspective lines like lens fisheying, but I think it also has to do with a sense of the work being involved in framing and capturing the pieces of reality caught in the frame.

There’s also some irony in Gordon’s application of a plein air approach to these gritty settings as opposed to the idyllic countryside you associate with those fine French words. And I always find extremely urban landscape paintings refreshing, like some I can think of by Rackstraw Downes at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. And of course there’s the lineage to the NY Ashcan School.

There are four other artists in the show: Julia Martin, Kelly Williams, Art Poledno, and David Guidera. Of these, the one that interested me most was Kelly Williams, with appealing botanical groupings and landscape details.

Nice Quote from Hanna Fushihara

Saw this nice quote from Hanna Fushihara, which was in an article in the NY Times about a Southern California sportswear/surfwear company that is operating at intersection of various subcultures, mainstream business, and celebrity culture. Hanna probably comes from the freakier side of the spectrum of things this outfit is into. I have a typically east of the Rockies distrust of all of that surfer/skater/snowboarder stuff. But here's what Hanna said:

“It was Ms. Fushihara of Little Cakes gallery who pointed out in an ANP Quarterly interview the existence of little pockets of “weirdos” like herself living all over the country, “making music, touring, sleeping on each other’s floors, having weird plays, lots of costumes and masks, posters, self-released CD-R’s, records, etc.” It doesn’t matter anymore where one lives, she added last week in a telephone interview. “You could be in Idaho or Iowa and be connected,” she said. The point by now is beyond argument.”

Albany Waterfront Park

Albany is the town next door to Berkeley in the Bay Area, and among its other landmarks is a park that used to be something like a cement factory that was then abandoned and became a big squat camp for homeless people. The city or some other level of government has reclaimed the area, right on the bay, but it retains the remnants of the self-organizing culture that thrived there. The park is filled with art made from junk and cast off material, much of it elaborate. There are sculptures fabricated from twisted sheets of metal, branches, and wood scraps, including a person riding a dragon, a huge woman who seems to come out of the bay, strange giant figures sitting by the water. You find little shrines in cavities in the underbrush, a few objects arrayed on the branches of a bush, or an enclosure of concrete and metal scrap decorated with mirrors that could have been a work of art or someone’s self-fashioned living room.

My friend Paul and his son Liam took me down there today. The section of the park with the heaviest concentrationsof art is on the backside of a point of land that faces on a calm arm of the bay. In addition to a bunch of these sculptures, there is a series of paintings done on large pieces of scrap wood or other materials, propped up on impromptu easels and lined up along a path like the corridor of a museum. The paintings are heavy on images of violence and decadence, mixing elements from circuses and religion. Many seem to be from one guy, who signs himself as Sniff and makes work with strong recollections of Max Beckmann, only a little bleaker and more violent. It looks like he may still be at work.

On the immediate level, this park is a collection of interesting art works presented in a completely unexpected setting. Part of the impact comes from the density of the work, when you look for these human inventions and start seeing them everywhere. It also goes to say something about the impulse for art. A group of people, left on their own to develop some sort of society, end up naturally inclined to make art in proliferation. The urge for self-expression comes to fore, as one of the most important activities the society, in this case the homeless society of the Albany waterfront, can undertake. Art making shows itself as an essential activity.

Kaushiki Chakrabarty

Last Saturday's concert at Sri Ganesha featured Kaushiki Chakrabarty, a young singer who won a big prize from the BBC last year. I'm not a great judge of where the musicians who come to Sri Ganesha fall out in relative prestige, but I'm guessing she is one of the bigger people to perform there. She appeared with her husband, also a singer, named Parthasarathy Desikan. They both have studied with Chakrabarty's father.

She is a tremendous singer. Particularly impressive singing fast and precisely, through all sorts of patterns that seemed fresh and surprising, and she could run all over a huge range. At each point in a long phrase, the notes were perfectly distinct and perfectly placed. Listening to her makes you so aware of how this music is analogous to extremely finely detailed ornamental drawing, with complex patterns and elaborations that weave together to cover expanses of space in wonderful colors.

So acknowledging the extremely high quality of the singing, the concert was not all it could be. She was distracted by the sound system, made several comments about not being able to hear herself in the monitors. I imagine sound in the Temple hall is a challenge. It's not a concert hall, but more of an all-purpose room with a low ceiling. The result for Chakrabarty was a performance that seemed disjointed. The flights of technical brilliance were delivered in bursts that seems to stand separately, rather than building upon each other. The more sustained passages were sometimes strained, and again did not achieve the kind of spiritual intensity I have experienced with other vocalists in this room.

Desikan, for his part (the majority of the concert consisted of two separate performances by each singer, alone with the accompaniment of harmonium and tabla), sings more from power, a very strong voice. At critical points he came across with a jarring abruptness, hitting a loud, intense, and high sustained passage in a way that jumped out. His singing did not always lead up to those passages and let them grow in intensity. I think that more integrated approach produces a stronger emotional sensation.

At the end, Chakarabarty and Desikan performed a duet. At times during this section her voice was so sweet I wished it would go on for a long time. As concerts at Sri Ganesha go, this was pretty short at something like 2 hours (but non-stop).

The Fallen Idol

A very fine film at the Belcourt this week that you might overlook, The Fallen Idol, a 1948 film by Carol Reed with a screenplay by Graham Greene, starring Ralph Richardson. In short, the story takes place in the French Embassy in London, where the head butler (Richardson) is in love with a French typist on the staff but married to the head housekeeper. He's also buddies with the ambassador's young son, who ends up in the middle of this triangle, aware and unaware at the same time of what's going on. I don't think I should go into the plot details too much. The whole thing is very well done, for instance in the way several critical plot developments don't lead to the obvious places but still drive the plot. It also has this Graham Greene sourness -- things end up well inspite of bad things happening, although the twists that deliver the characters from the worst possible outcomes don't exactly deliver them free of damage. And one of the keys is the tension between whether one should tell the truth or keep one's secrets. The boy is tutored in this by the various adult characters, who push and pull him between those who tell him he must tell the truth and others who tell him he must keep secrets, and in the end he finds himself trying to tell the truth but getting ignored because the larger truth has already been established, and his little truth would actually lead people away from the truth. A very confusing place for a young boy to find himself.

Congratulations downtowners

Tonight was the twin openings of TAG's new space on 5th and Twist's new space period. TAG looks great, a nice main room that feels big, with couches that make it truly inviting, not necessarily what you always get from a white walls place. I've talked to Jerry Dale McFadden pretty regularly during the construction, and I know he's done a ton of work, and probably still has some finishing touches to go. But he must be so satisfied with what he and Susan have here. And it was great to see people hanging from the balconies of the Arcade, shuttling between Twist and Dangenart. Beth Gilmore, never exactly the most subdued person in the world, embodied pure joy. It was just what you would expect from her (and Caroline Carlisle I imagine), a three-ring circus with Tom Wills films, Todd Greene with his art on the walls but hanging out in the back playing music with Lain and Tony, and wine and Las Paletas popsicles and other food that I did not inventory. This is going to be great fun.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died

My first reaction was Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was alive? Yes, lived to be 90, died this week. She had a practically perfect voice. Listen to her recording of Strauss' 4 Last Songs. I had never looked into her personal history, just listened to the voice. It turns out she was quite the Nazi. The Times obit goes into the details. File her right after Leni Riefenstahl I guess.

Mess in Chicago

I just got wind of the mess in Chicago right now surrounding the HotHouse. This is a club that used to be in Wicker Park, in the Flat Iron building, finally got yuppied out, and moved to the South Loop. A minor miracle that it survived. I haven't been since the move, but in the early 90s it was the center of the cultural universe if you cared about avant garde jazz or politics. Michael Zerang used to tend bar, Todd Colburn would do sound, and I heard a lot of stuff, and played there a time or two although it was hard to get a show there so I was lucky for that. The show that comes to mind is a duet by David Murray and Kahil El-Zabar, but it was also a place you dropped into on the way to and from things. The HotHouse was the child of Maguerite Horberg -- she went back with all the 60s rads, was big on Cuba solidarity, had a big picture of Che on display. Well, somewhere in the move to the South Loop the place became a nonprofit org, with a board and fundraising, and a couple of weeks ago the board put her on leave. Here's a write up from the Reader. Definitely click through on the link to Carl Davidson's blog. It sounds like a big ole shit storm. What a mess. I hope they are able to save the place.

On better Chicago news, Fred Anderson has relocated the Velvet Lounge to new space on Cermak and reports from the new place are good. Here's a review by Howard Reich of the Trib.

Wise Man Thurston Moore

So often the aesthetic goal of underground music is assumed to be the pursuit of novelty or newness, an idea inherent in the word avant-garde. Then the music can be criticized when it fails a newness test, which all music does because most sounds (or any other form of expression) has existed before. Thurston Moore has a great counter to this in The Wire’s piece on Sonic Youth:

“I don’t like the idea of reaching out to do something new with [our] music, it’s kind of a living organism in a way. I talked to Evan Parker about it once, and he said, ‘We focused on certain aspects of those ESP records, because we liked the ending parts of these pieces, where they were really playing free, and we would just take those and make whole pieces out of them.’ That’s what they wanted to do, those were the moments they wanted to expound upon. I think somebody in that scene called it ‘the living music’. It’s not about any concept of newness—who cares? I have no interest in newness.”

I particularly like the formulation of the goal being to expound upon something you have experienced, therefore it follows upon something.

He’s also got this great take on the noise scene:

“I just think [that scene] has created its own identity outside of any pre-existing genre, and that’s what I’m most interested in, where genre terms become blurred. I know, like, when I get involved with playing with people in the avant garde jazz tradition, they have such a history of language development, with harmonic concepts and fairly sophisticated melodic concepts. I feel like I’m more involved with a scene that kind of explodes that.”

Seems to me this gets at what is so vital about it. It also seems to be a scene that can put down roots everywhere, unlike things like avant garde jazz which has a more of an exclusive character.

Sunset Strip paintings at Belcourt

Since I’m on the board at the Belcourt Theater, I don’t write about the art shows in theater lobby in the Scene. But everything’s fair game on a blog, no? I’m not sure how much I have to say about this, but the current show is a really appealing series of paintings by Christopher Kuhn of the Sunset Strip streetscape in LA. This of course is a tribute to Ed Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, updated to what Kuhn saw when he lived nearby recently. And of course the series are paintings, not photographs, done in a loose style in which the buildings are sketched pretty cleanly but the cars (the other primary figures in the series) come through in a blur of a few brushstrokes. The images have clean, airy light, like Wayne Thiebaud. They’re just nice to look at, and they also have the pleasures of series and the compare and contrast with their historical precedent in Ruscha. Go by and take a look. And see a movie. Lady Vengence is playing for 2 more days.

Contemporary Indian Art in Berkeley

If you are in the Bay Area between now and September 16, check out the show of contemporary Indian art at the Berkeley Art Museum, Edge of Desire. This show was at the Queens Museum last year, and now that I’ve finally seen it I’m starting to run across references to the people in it.

As you would expect, there’s fascinating stuff to look at. You run across vernacular traditions treated as an equally valid path to contemporary expression as artists from more conventional art school preparation, like pieces by Manu and Swarma Chitrakar, who are members of the Patua community in Bengal. This is a formerly nomadic group that developed a narrative style of painting and the members of this group traveled around painting to make a living. The pieces here include a poster about the war in Afghanistan and a scroll summarizing the highlights of the movie Titanic. There are some great crossovers with pop culture, like Cyrus Oshidar’s mock small-goods stand which serves as an elaborate frame for a video monitor running Indian MTV filler spots that are pretty hilarious.

What struck me was how political so much of the art is. Communal violence between Hindus and Muslims looms large, especially the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and subsequent riots (like a big piece by Vivan Sundaram that takes the figure of one dead body and builds a kind of shrine around that. You also see the figures of India and Pakistan’s founding (Nehru, M. and I. Gandhi, Jinnah) appearing as powerful mythical characters with an ambivalent legacy of violence, cruelty, and neglect in the politicians who have followed and in the political and bureaucratic structures they created. It is strange to realize that a new country, although also a very old one, creates these instant icons from a heroic era that has just occurred. In a longer established political entity the founders recede into a historical past that is safer because it is further past. India and Pakistan are roughly in a position analogous to the U.S. of Martin van Buren relative to our founding.

Stuff from Shaun Slifer in Pitttsburgh

What better way to celebrate our national holiday than with news on Shaun Slifer’s latest project in Pittsburgh. The former Nashvillian went north after he got done at Watkins. From what I’ve always heard, there’s a healthy grassroots scene there, and as one of the old industrial capitals it’s got a good institutional base of museums and universities which should help provide spaces and programs in which interesting people can operate.

So Shaun’s latest project is a stamp and ink pad set out in a gallery, where people are encouraged to stamp their $20 bills, right next to Old Hickory’s picture, with the message “Great Heroes of Real Estate: The Indian Removal Act of 1830” and then put the bills back into circulation. It seems like there have been protest actions of writing messages on money, but this puts it on a different level, meets the money on one of its natural levels as a bearer of cultural iconography and therefore of historical interpretation. You can look at money as filled with subliminal messages, or not so subliminal messages. Thus agitation about “In God We Trust.” Or trying to decode the eye on the pyramid. Or a local activist putting his stamp on the currency.

Shaun is also involved with a website, the Pittsburgh Art Review that includes open-forum art reviews. Looks like a good thing to have in place.

So on this 4^th of July, think about ... I don't know, either where you get your history from, or where to get fireworks to shoot off in your backyard.

More Chicago jazz guys in town

Lately it seems like there has been, thanks to Chris Davis, a steady trickle of the best younger jazz players from Chicago making their way through town: Keefe Jackson and Josh Berman, then Mandarin Movie with Frank Rosaly and Jason Ajemian. Now bass player Ajemian is back with the trio Dragons 1976, which also includes Aram Shelton, another one of the sax players you hear about these days, and percussionist Tim Daisy, who among other things is the drummer in the Ken Vandermark 5. This show, like Mandarin Movie, is at Ruby Green this Sunday (July 2). Starts at 9:00. Hands Off Cuba is also on the bill, and another Nashville group called the Potato Battery Experiment. I'm not sure who that is.

Back to the blog

For several weeks I’ve left the blog aside to keep the piece on Will ClenDening on the top to make sure people saw it and took the opportunity, if they wanted, to add a comment. It’s been almost a month, so I’ll get back to posting. (BTW, I think some folks are working on a memorial to Will on the Watkins website.)

The Scene announced this week that our former Managing Editor Jonathan Marx has taken a job at the Tennessean, filling Alan Bostick’s old job. For those who don’t know, as Managing Editor, Jonathan coordinated and personally edited most of the visual art coverage. Nothing against Bostick (whom I’ve never met although I have benefited from his coverage for projects I’ve been involved with), but having Jonathan at the Tennessean is a big deal for the Nashville art community. He is so well tuned in to art and artists, and so smart about it, that having him at the Tennessean will expand the range of coverage. As a daily paper, there are some things the Tennessean can and can’t do in comparison to an alt-weekly like the Scene, but there is no doubt that Jonathan will look for every opportunity to say something insightful.

Just look at his first piece for the paper, on the Frist’s Egyptian show. He covers a lot of ground. In addition to describing the material in the exhibit and the main themes, making good use of curator Mark Scala’s voice (whose presentations on the exhibit are, not surprisingly, very good), JM has also worked in observations about the curatorial process and the logistics of putting on the show. With an exhibit like this (really any exhibit), it pays to think about the institutional as well as the aesthetic dimension.

One thing to consider is that up until now, Jonathan has mostly exercised an indirect influence on visual arts coverage as the editor of other people’s writing, outside of picks (where he was able to make significant comments). Now people will read his articles on art. People in the art community are going to want to keep up with what he is writing about and what he is saying.

Will ClenDening

Will ClenDening died in a motorcycle accident last week. This is a terrible loss. For his family and anyone who knew him, it goes without saying that they are suffering, but Will’s death tears away a piece of the entire Nashville art community. He was an incredibly gifted artist, and there was never more of a case of a young man who had an entire life of living and making art stretching in front of him which was snuffed out too early. You never know where someone will go with art, but Will looked like he was going to take things to the highest levels possible.

Will’s work has been some of the most consistently stimulating stuff I have seen in Nashville in the last couple of years. He had that rare combination of a good eye and a sharp mind, making pieces that were strong formally and conceptually.

• In one Watkins show he made a column out of unwound videotape. It worked as a simple sculpture, running from ceiling to floor with a clear form and the texture of the curling videotape, forming a presence in the gallery, but there was also a subtext about looking at the unseeable.
  
• I saw several pieces from him which involved really great experiments with sound and video feed, sometimes just minimal signals. I find it very useful to think about the quality of those signals in focusing my own music.
  
• He did a series of sculptures that involved pouring molten metal into molds containing books, the metal partially burning the paper and then cooling in jagged, surreal forms (these were at a show at Ruby Green).
  
• And there were his machines, which converted signals from the worlds of sound or motion into automated mark-making activity. I wrote a post about them a year ago.

He created an impressive variety and quality of work at a young age. Anyone who looks at art has lost something with his death.

This death will be felt especially hard by everyone in the Watkins family, Will's teachers and fellow students. They have such an intense bond, I can barely imagine how they feel right now. And all of them are so important to our community, and Nashville is so small and interconnected, that none of us is unaffected by their grief. And the grieving goes way past Watkins, since Will made a lot of friends with other artists in town. This ploughs right through the middle of us.

The Secret Show has a page with a couple of Will’s pieces from Secret Shows.

Visitation and Will’s funeral are this week, Tuesday and Wednesday. I don’t have more details yet. [Monday: Heather posted a comment with the details on visitation and the service.]

More updates, Monday PM: visitation is Tuesday from 4-8 at Woodlawn Funeral Home, which is in Woodlawn Cemetery on Thompson in Berry Hill. The service is 2:00 Wednesday at St. Mark's Episcopal, 3100 Murfreesboro Road in Antioch, pretty close to the intersection with Bell Road.

Finally, the family has set up a memorial scholarship fund in Will's memory at Watkins. An email from Melissa Means at Watkins said "A scholarship has been established by the family in Will's memory.Donations can be sent directly to the Development Office at Watkins College of Art and Design." Their address is Watkins College of Art and Design, 2298 Metrocenter Boulevard, Nashville 37228.

More additions: Melissa Means posted this URL for Will’s student page with images of his work:

http://students.watkins.edu/wclendening/index.html

Also, I hear that Watkins is considering creating an artwork or sculpture in his memory. I’m sure they’ll be working out details on that over some period of time.

MTSU Performance Art

Cindy Rehm had her students present performance pieces at Ruby Green tonight they developed in a three-week workshop. True to the workshop’s name, Body + Process, most of the pieces either used the performer’s body as a central element and/or established a process of actions which the piece then played out.

• Natalie Harrison set up a game piece. She sat on the floor with a laundry basket filled with shirts and then started to pull shirts out and fold and stack them. Three other members of the class stood across from her and took turns taking a shirt out of the stacks (messing up the stack in the process), putting it on, taking it off, and then throwing the crumpled shirt down. The game was Harrison trying to complete the task of folding in spite of the interruptions. The folding did proceed faster, so eventually she got ahead of it, and the piece ended with all four women facing the stacks, then one of them (I think) messing it up. On the one hand this was a piece that involved watching someone fold clothes. Tedious and annoying. But it was a bit complicated semiotically. In addition to its game logic which once started had to be followed in this obsessive manner, it mixed up shopping and household gestures, and also patterns of domination and humiliation. I was also very aware of how arbitrary the control/humiliation relations were. Any one of the four young women could have been the one folding the clothes.
• Several of the pieces focused their actions on performer’s body. Erin Piper rubbed a viscous blue liquid on her lips and kissed her body wherever her lips could reach. It reminded me of a Tim Hawkinson piece that recorded the parts of his body he could see directly as he saw them, so the proportions were distorted. Piper does something similar by marking all the places she can kiss. And the action has other overtones: masturbation, isolation, even beauty treatments (“kiss your body”). And I couldn’t help but think this piece would be a lot shorter if I did it—in my middle-aged decrepitude, I’m not exactly a yoga master, so my lips don’t get around as well. Sarah Medsker had another simple and lovely piece, rubbing dirt over all of her body. It was a reversal of cleaning, and a kind of return to Earth, with a hint of self-damage as you heard the small stones in the dirt hit the ground.
• Jeremy Braden did a complicated piece that involved a tower of stacked Crayolas that he exposed to a heat lamp, which he taped to his arm cyborg-style. He kept the lamp until enough melting occurred so it fell down. He did the exercise in a one-eyed mask and with a soundtrack of a couple of boys goofing around with a tape recorder, talking about Frankenstein and Dr. Seuss and just nonsense. Chris Davis said that the piece was about W letting the tower fall while he was just goofing around. I can see it. But I found this one kinda of tedious. It worked out that a good portion of it was sitting in the dark listening to the boys use up the tape. They were hilarious, but more so in small doses.
• Jacqueline Meeks had the shortest piece, very clear. Dressed in black, she stepped into a basin of water and poured water all over herself with her cupped hands. Then she got out and laid down in a square of sugar she had spread on the ground. First her front, then her back, then she stood up, faced the crowd, licked her fingers and held her arms out like a T. The sugar formed this messy pattern on her black clothes like some sort of forensic trace on CSI or the Shroud of Turin. There’s obviously a lot of religion in this short piece: baptism, foot washing, crucifixion. And she turns herself into food. Sugar-coated. Her impression of herself on her own clothes was the single strongest image of the night.
• Cindy Rehm also did a piece: dressed in white, kneeling on a small round table cloth, she had a stack of jelly doughnuts that she picked up one at a time, stuck her finger into, then rubbed the jelly on her lips and smeared it in a T shape across the front of her dress. She handled each successive doughnut more roughly. And after each doughnut, she lifted the back of each hand to her nose. The piece followed a rule set like many of the others, but it was less literal so it established more of an independent place for itself.

Glad to see the MTSU students doing this. Last year, Tom Thayer brought a workshop group to Angle of View, and it was very good to have some cross-pollination between them and the AOV scene.

Announcement #2: TN Arts Commission Gallery call

Nicole Pietrantoni has sent out a call for proposals for exhibits at the Tennessee Arts Commission gallery. Their exhibits have become a really fine series, and provided the occasion for artists to try out some interesting ideas. The space is compact, and seems to lend itself to coherent shows. The Commission also seems open to people developing socially significant material. The current show by Vitus Shell is a case in point. So if you've got an idea for a small show, maybe an installation or a particular body of work, and you're a legal resident of the state of TN (but not, per the instructions, a full-time student or State of TN employee other than an instructor at state-supported educational institutions), I'd encourage you to submit something here.

Here's the brief description. There's a three-page Word document with full instructions that I'm sure Nicole will send if you ask her for it. It might be on the Arts Commission website too, but I didn't see it.

Call for Works
Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery
2007-2009 Gallery Exhibition Schedule

Postmark Deadline for Applications: Friday, August 18th, 2006

-Overview-
The Tennessee Arts Commission is seeking applications for exhibitions
from Tennessee artists for the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery's
2007-2009 exhibition series.  The Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery is
dedicated to exhibiting and promoting the talents of professional
artists from across the state of Tennessee.  Located in the heart of
downtown Nashville, this unique space features rotating exhibitions on
display for 6-8 weeks.  Named the "Best Exhibition Series" in
Nashville by the Nashville Scene, the TAC Gallery is committed to
presenting diverse and challenging shows of consistently strong work.
Applications for visual art, installations, craft, media, and design
arts are welcome.

Please see attachment for more information or contact Nicole
Pietrantoni, Director of Visual Art/Craft/Media program 615-532-9798
nicole.pietrantoni@state.tn.us. 

Announcement #1: Indian Dance

Sankaran Mahadevan sent around this notice of a dance concert by a student at the Vandy Medical School. One of the remarkable things about Indian culture in Nashville is the number of people who pursue music and dance at a very high level but make their living in other ways. Mahadevan, for instance, is a really accomplished singer, but his day job is as a School of Engineering faculty member at Vandy. I suspect that Haritha Bodduluri is very good at what she does. People don't take on big public recitals like this lightly.


Indian Classical Dance (Kuchipudi) by

HARITHA BODDULURI

on Sunday, June 4th, at 3:00 pm
in Sarratt Cinema Auditorium, Vanderbilt University Campus

Suggested Donation: $ 5 (Free for children under 10)
Additional donations for Operation Smile appreciated.

Haritha Bodduluri is an accomplished Kuchipudi dancer of the Sri Nritya Art Academy in Vijayawada, India having trained under its founder Bhagavathula Venkatarama Sarma since 1992. Haritha’s dance training began in 1987 in the Bharathanatyam style with Padmini Ramachandran in New York and has since performed throughout the USA and in India. Haritha's formal debut was in 1996, to lavish praise by critics and well known senior performers, including Kuchipudi legend Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma. She has won the first place at the TANA dance competition in Los Angeles. She created an Indian Classical dance group at Duke University where she is the recipient of the Edward H. Benenson Award in the Arts. Haritha is now studying at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Operation Smile: Throughout the world, children born with facial deformities lack the resources for corrective surgery. This non-profit organization has provided over 98,000 free life-changing operations since 1982. See http://www.operationsmile.org for more information.

End of TV Season Wrapup

I don’t think I watch a lot of TV, but I’ve got a few shows I can’t resist. Two of them are American Idol and CSI and both wrapped up seasons in the last week.

Both shows are all about their own mechanics. On CSI you figure out how to make lab work visually interesting and comprehensible to audiences who know no science. So the characters natter on about what they are doing. In the real world, they would kill each other. “Now I’m going into Excel and making a copy of the second sheet in your workbook which I will place in a new workbook, then go in and do a copy/paste special/values to get rid of the cell references to other sheets.” Shut up already and do your job.

On American Idol, every week they go through the same process of announcing the low vote getter. They have to vary it somehow to keep it interesting, so they come up with new ways to lead in to the annoucnement. Three people on this side, three on the other, which one are the top three. Of these two who got the smallest or highest number of votes: Suzy, you are/are not the one. Etc.

I heard someone argue that American Idol is good for pop music, I think they were saying because the Idol singers sell a lot of records. For me the statement is true but for a different reason. Hearing the contestants struggle through the songs makes you realize how good the best pop stars are. None of the contestants, even the finalists, seem comfortable and in control. Then you hear Stevie Wonder, and you realize how he nails each pitch, with a full, confident tone, and makes it look easy. On the show Wednesday, Prince came out and everything was dead on, the pitch, phrasing, and dancing. Of course, then you have Mary J. Blige beating up on U2’s One. Seemed like she wanted to kill the song. Guess Bono gets on her nerves.

Idol struggles with racial undercurrents. In one of the first seasons I recall that Simon Cowell complained callers were voting off the black singers. On the Wednesday show they had gag awards for the worst singers. There were more blacks than whites, even though blacks seem to be a minority of the contestants. It came awfully close to “let’s laugh at these ridiculous black people.”

CSI has cruised along for years on unconsummated sexual tension between the characters: Gil and Sarah, Katherine and Warrick. Gil’s ineptitude in this area is a key part of his character. In the finale they gave in and put Gil and Sarah together in a post- or pre-coital scene. They’ve hinted at this more heavily in the last few episodes with meaningful glances between them. Usually a series goes downhill once it gives in and resolves this tension. In Western drama, coupling constitutes the end of the story. The objective has been fulfilled. And there isn’t the same tension once you put people together. Now Gil and Sarah can argue about whose turn it is to empty the cat’s litter box.

But the producers of CSI are smart about TV, and I bet they know that putting Gil and Sarah together lets a bunch of air out of the balloon. So there’s only one thing to do. Kill off one of the characters. Then the survivor can continue on, haunted by the memory. Lots of opportunities for music video sequences contemplating some object that recalls the dead one. And since William Peterson carries the show and is a producer… The only question is whether they kill off Jorja Fox in the opening episode or try to lead up to it through the season. There’s your cliffhanger.

Dixie Chicks in the desert

I caught the Dixie Chicks doing “Not Ready to Make Nice” on Letterman last night. Natalie Maines is a fine singer, and she really got into it, letting her voice fill with anger just up to the point where it would become something more radical (like what Sleater-Kinney does every day). Then I read in the Tennessean today how the group is getting no radio play for this album, especially on country stations. At first this seems like country music being boneheaded and skipping over music within the traditional and style that sells a lot of records but happens to come up through an unexpected channel. Peter Cooper compares it to O Brother Where Art Thou? But really the guys in the industry aren’t so dumb. The banishment of the Dixie Chicks shows the extent to which consumption of country music as a category is a marker of social and political allegiance. You listen to country music to place yourself within the cultural landscape in a place you feel comfortable and that seems to reflect who you think you are. The music itself hardly has anything to do it, like Christian churches where people seem more interested in politics than theology (cf the piece on NPR about the Delay crony Ed Buckham who basically fleeced his preacher).

Furthermore, when you think about it, this reduction of country music fandom to a badge of social affiliation is not in fact a unique condemnation of country music. Most musical genres that have any sort of identifiable fan base serve as cultural and social markers. Hipness (or inclusion) is accorded in different circles with an association with often very specific musical choices. I remember fearing to confess that I enjoyed KPFT’s Sound of Texas music program around some of my free jazz friends in Houston. There were all sorts of pop and rock music that would have been cool, but not the polished mix of country, rock, and whatnot that makes up that Austin sound. Willie Nelson is cool, but not Tish Hinojosa.

Now it seems inevitable that the Dixie Chicks will get picked up by a lot of people who don’t care about country music who will see them as a cultural marker in the opposite direction. Air America listeners, not today’s KDF. I imagine it will work out fine for them, they will sell a lot of albums, which they deserve to do. The sad thing is some sense that the family of country music has been sundered. The Dixie Chicks are one way of doing country music, they carry on important parts of the tradition, and one wants to see them embraced for that. And one maybe one dreams of cultural spaces where political diversity of opinion can exist. It might be easier to see it when it comes to Ricky Skaggs (prominent on stage at Nashville’s big Bush fundraiser in 2004). But does it also mean you have to listen to Lee Greenwood. Or can we agree that he just makes crappy records?

Pro-Am

I don’t always find myself agreeing with Bill Ivey’s ideas about the arts economy (he seems to put a strong insistence on markets as both the best way to support art and the judge of value, discounting the idea that there would be organizations or art forms that should receive other kinds of public support), but he and Steven Tepper from his research center at Vanderbilt have a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that includes a couple of points near and dear to me: that art-making is increasingly driven by what he (or actually Charles Leadbeater) call professional amateurs, people who take it seriously but don’t make a living at it, and that this is a “revitalization of folk culture” (a line written by Henry Jenkins in an upcoming volume Ivey and Tepper are editing).

Ivey and Tepper go from those points to argue that this sort of folk cultural experience is a matter of elite privilege, something available to people with leisure. That doesn’t match my experience so much, where it seems that the most serious people are accepting pretty marginal standard of living to pursue this, and that the socio-economic backgrounds represented are pretty broad, although most of the people I run across have had at least some college.

I'm not entirely sure, but it seems like Ivey and Tepper may be willing to take the artistic production from these sources seriously. In one sentence they credit "pro-ams" with "producing high-quality innovatice work." I'm always on guard for the tendency to dismiss as the work of hobbyists the efforts I see going on all around me.

West Wing RIP

With sadness I watched the West Wing wind down its run. Obviously it either did or did not have the ratings to make it worth it for NBC to keep airing it, and with the plot wrapping up the final term of Martin Sheen/Jed Bartlett there wasn’t much point in going on. You’d be going over most of the same ground with Jimmy Smits/Matt Santos. Hostage crises, potential scandals, etc. The soap opera stuff is what would keep you going. What will happen with Josh and Donna, that sort of thing.

The big thing West Wing did was provide an alternate reality. It was a place you could go once a week for an hour and pretend like the country was led by wise and decent leaders who wanted to make the world better for as many people as possible, surrounded by talented people who were bright and also cared about the world. The show should have been kept on not as a commercial proposition, but as a public service for the mental health benefits it bestowed, part of MBC’s FCC license requirements.

The TV West Wing was a utopia, a place that does not exist and I doubt it ever did. Maybe a brief period during FDR, but even then I imagine the staff was split by much harsher internal rivalries. I would definitely be suspicious of claims for this sort of ideal environment in the Clinton administration. I don’t think the Clinton strategy of triangulation would have been inspiring to watch..

When the show ended, it was like waking up into a cold reality and no escaping it. The sensation was like the day Bush was first inaugurated: a cold and wet scene with the parade rolling slowly down the nearly empty streets of Washington, small clutches of protesters milling around and nearly as numerous as the thin groups of people attending to celebrate. Every day of Bushworld has had the same spiritual tenor. With the TV series over, all you are left with is the bleak, dispirited reality of that day.

But at least Jack Bauer will be back to make us feel not just good, but pumped about torture.

Mazurek's Mandarin Movie

Rob Mazurek brought his Mandarin Movie group to Nashville last week (at Ruby Green). Groups like this don’t make it here that often – big enough that they might reasonably expect to get paid a fair amount, but esoteric to some degree, so Nashville’s population gets in the way. Just not enough people who will pay to hear it. I gather there was a good house for a show his better known groups Isotope 217 and Chicago Underground Duo did, but I don’t know how often those groups have come through.

Mandarin Movie has a core of four guys: Mazurek on cornet and electronics, Jason Ajemian on acoustic bass, Matt Lux on electric base, and Frank Rosaly on drums. On records and some gigs guitarist Alan Licht and trombonist Steve Swell are also in the group. In the recording I focused on all that bass frequency that gives the sound a wide foundation that seeps into every corner of the aural space and sets up dense harmonics above it.

The performance on this show was more muscular, some of it because I didn’t watch much of the show from the middle of the sound so maybe the low sounds didn’t have the same physical impact. But I think it was also the case that there were more active lines coming from the basses and Rosaly was more prominent in punching the sound.

The music sounded like a lot of things, but what struck me was the role of Mazurek’s cornet playing, and its strong jazz qualities. At many times the focal point was the line Mazurek was setting out on cornet, spaced and phrased with an impeccable jazz sense of time, pace, and shape. The closest analog at times was Bitches Brew, where the trumpet picks a path over the churning sound underneath, but Mazurek’s playing was less constrained and limited than Miles on those recordings (Miles is great on the recordings of that era, but within the context of a perfect pitch minimalism). The frame of reference seemed broader, calling on the core jazz tradition of playing and also more of the range of free jazz playing.

http://www.robmazurek.com/

Elemental saxophone sounds

Saxophone player Keefe Jackson and cornetist Josh Berman from Chicago came to Nashville last night to play a show at Dino’s. It was very jazz-rooted, heavy on contrapuntal textures and low on extreme technique, much of it in the middle ranges of their instruments. The two have played together a lot, and they’ve worked out pretty structured approaches and trade off and combine fluently.

Jackson surprised me, pleasantly, with his sound which has a pre-bop softness to it. It was somewhere in the range of Lester Young, but that wasn’t quite it. I was trying to explain the difference and said most guys have a tenor sound that is harder, more like wood than cloth. Later I realized an even better way to get at the difference would be to use the elements in Chinese medicine: water, wood, metal, earth, and fire. Jackson has a water sound. Chu Berry might be an earth sound. In most contemporary players you hear wood, metal, or fire, passing from a muscular, thick sound to something more strident until you get to shrieking freak-outs.

Chinese medicine uses music in healing practices based on these elemental qualities. It also assigns sounds to the elements: shouting, laughing, singing, crying, groaning. I found something on-line that lines those sounds up with the elements wood-shouting, fire-laughing, earth-singing, metal-crying, water-groaning. I don’t know if it always lines up that way.

I’ve at times thought about the idea of approaching improvisation as a cycling though those sounds, following the natural progression from one state to the next. Anything formulaic gets old, but it suggests a variation on the typical Western structure of development, climax, denouement. The Chinese sounds would be more circular, although you should still be able to have forward motion with it.

MTSU Senior Show

MTSU’s Art Department has its show of graduating seniors up now through April 20 in the gallery in the Todd Building.

Jacqueline Meeks is one of the people in it, and she had interesting work in a group show at 310 Chestnut a few months ago. The pieces here confirm that she is worth keeping a eye on. She has just three pieces in the show, a video, a sculpture, and a drawing. The video, called Breath, projects separate images of a man and a woman cropped so only their mouth is visible. I’m guessing it’s her and her boyfriend, Ryan Lewis, who also has work in the show. Their faces are pretty still, and you just hear the two of them breathing, and then at intervals they put a sheet of plastic to their faces and open their mouths, breathing in so the plastic gets sucked into the mouth cavity. Then they take off the plastic, close their mouths, wait a bit, and repeat. This performance of suffocation and silencing, if you take it as a reflection of being a couple, could be seen as very cynical about the possibility of relationship, but it also acts as a shared suffering.

Her sculptural piece consists of several white trash bags stuffed with something, laid out on a plastic curtain, lit by a bright lamp hung on a wooden ladder. The elements seem dirty and messy, but well-composed. The bags have the right mass to them, and the curtain and some ropes form a pattern base for them. The lamp gives the idea of surveillance. Her other piece is a drawing in red ink of boy’s legs attached to a shark’s body, the shark body cut away to show its inner organs. It shows she has traditional technical skills and the ability to imagine very detailed images, in contrast to a kind of crudeness in the sculpture.

Ryan Lewis’s pieces in the show are a comic book, a couple of short stories in zine form (about the size of those Joe Chick religious comics), an audio piece and a video that wasn’t playing when I was there. The comics made me think of Daniel Clowes’ complaints about art school not acknowledging comics as a legitimate form. That’s changed. Ryan’s comic started like a diary, cataloging fairly trivial events in a student’s day, but then took form as a story about his grandfather’s death. I liked the way he eased into this narrative, and he does some really smart graphic things with the narrative. The audio piece seemed to be journal notes from maybe his grandmother, talking about her two daughters, performed with a man (presumably Ryan) reading in falsetto the stuff quoting the kids. I wasn’t crazy about this piece as I was listening to it, but it was interesting to think back on. The material in the journal is mundane and does not have a clear narrative, but even so some ideas come up (how does the child understand or express love for the mother). More interesting to think about was the reversal of elevating this non-dramatic material into an obviously dramatized context (the male voice undermines any illusion of verisimilitude). I saw it as a subversion of the idea of drama, and of the material presented for consumption within the modes of drama and narrative.

The last person in the show I’ll mention is Sher Fick. She produced several pieces for the show. Several of them were sculptural assemblages taking things like a gumball machine and a spice shelf and filling them with objects, mostly broken, crushed, or discarded. A number of the pieces included capsules that encased small objects in a dome of acrylic or plastic. Stuff like pieces of toys, a blade of grass, an entrance button from the Neue Gallerie, small bits of flotsam. Dolls, usually broken apart and even crushed figured in a lot of the pieces. There were also some 2D works with images embedded in encaustic. The childhood and domestic imagery were handled with a pleasurable liveliness. One piece that seemed of a different character was called Ashes, Ashes, and consisted of neat piles of stuff arranged on a bed of moss-covered sod. Each pile consisted of different material that from a distance looked like mounds of spices ready for a ceremony, but when you got up close you could make out each was originally –milk glass, a doll, foam stuffing.

Kendall Buster at Cheekwood

I’m a sucker for artists who fill a space with stuff, like Tara Donovan’s million plastic cups at Pace Wildenstein in New York, Ludwika Ogorzelec’s web of plastic strips in Nancy Margolis, or Deborah Aschheim’s growths that invaded the Frist Center. This mode seems to be a specialty of Kendall Buster, a faculty member in VCU’s sculpture program. I saw her show at Fusebox in DC last Fall, which consisted of a bunch of blue tents hung from the ceiling and placed edge to edge to create a false ceiling that filled the gallery and sloped from a height you could walk under and a dimension that squeezed you to the sides of the room. Now she’s got Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary space filled with yellow fabric columns hung from an irregular grid of hexagonal frames. The piece is called Subterrain (Column Field), and when you enter the small room you can imagine you are in a cavern or underneath a surface. The color and shape also put you in the mind of honey combs, and the artist’s statement points out architectural associations. I’m not sure there is too much to make of these sorts of pieces from an interpretive standpoint, but they are pleasurable in a visceral and intuitive way. It’s great fun to go into any environment utterly transformed by art (Dan Flavin and other people who work with light achieve this too), and it provides a kind of release. This piece wraps you in color. The kinesthetic effects of her pieces stand out, and I find them directed more at pleasure centers than intellectual or linguistic centers.

Repurposed art at Alter in Clarksville

I got up to Clarksville today to see the show at Alter Gallery. Alter is a small nonprofit space run by a few young recent APSU grads on what I assume is a near-zero budget. They have a single large second floor, windowless room in Clarksville’s old downtown. It’s got a good rough feel, and well-lit enough to make up for the lack of windows.

The current show is work by Blayne Clements and Miranda Herrick (Miranda is one of the people running the gallery, and really seems to be the prime force behind it). The two artists both did work with reused materials, playing off of each other while they were developing it. Miranda’s main piece is a large rag rug, made out of plastic bags rather than scraps of cloth. Rag rugs are one of those pieces of Southern vernacular home furnishings made by tying together bit of cloth in a continuous spiral. Miranda learned how to make them from her grandmother. Her grandmother used to buy cloth for the rugs, although I think the original idea was you could make them from scraps. Like a quilt. So it makes sense to make one from plastic bags, although it creates what Kristina Arnold calls a “tacky crafty” effect, its smooth surfaces glistening rather than offering the soft, rough texture of cloth. It also ends up weighing 75 pounds as Miranda points out in the gallery guide, and took her a year or so to assemble. The piece looks like a pool, with a dull blue aqueous center, and it makes you see the similarities between this common home décor and mandalas and other circular forms for meditation.

Clements cuts up product packaging and reassembles it into abstract and figurative shapes. He does things like rearrange Kool cigarette cartons to separate the blue, green, and the white letters, rearranging them to create a sort of iris. Beer 6-pack cartons turn into a landscape. I liked the more abstract pieces best. One consists of many UPC bar codes shingled, with an image of a woman in a breath mask with a bar code across it. “Square Study” has a whole bunch of panels, each one running a riff on a different texture and color of packaging – popcorn, some sort of decorative gray and black pattern with an Indian motif, one that’s silver, another dark blue, and so on.

The work in this show reminded me of several other artists working with product packaging and discarded materials: Louis Cameron, Mimi Moncier, Dan Peterman. It’s a pretty rich vein, and these two artists make nice statements of their own from it.

Alter is located at 124B Legion Street in Clarksville. The only scheduled gallery hours are 2-4 on Sundays, so this show will also be open next Sunday (April 16). You can probably also try them at to arrange a visit another time altergallery@yahoo.com.

Disoriented with satellite radio

Had XM satellite radio in my rental car this week. It makes music even more like wallpaper than commercial radio. Some of it is the lack of talk breaks. Just this smooth, endless flow, one song after another that fits together without interruption. Airless. Even when it’s a show that has someone tending it, it still seems deracinated. Part of it is the excess of polish that comes from something deployed on a national scale, but it’s also the lack of any reference to the ground it sits on, whether a DJ’s reference to the weather outside or a sports score, or an ad for a car dealer. It so obviously comes from no place, and this leaves me feeling depressed and alienated. I think of the automated radio station in Night of the Comet. Something left over after the world has been destroyed. I guess I feel the same way about most nationally syndicated radio shows. Radio is a lot better when it comes from some place – even if you are at a distance, listening on the internet.

Heard a concert tonight at UC Santa Cruz featuring microtonal works for piano by two Canadian composers, Bruce Mather and Jacques Desjardins. But you ask, how can you have microtones on a piano? One pair of works was written for three pianos tuned to A440, a third of a half step below that, and a third below that, so that between the three pianos you got 36 tones. More amazing was a DVD they showed of Mather playing a piano that had been tuned so that the distance between middle C and the top of the keyboard was one octave, the same below – giving you 96 tones in each octave. Extremely cool things happen then. The key seems to bend out of tune or into another tune. Kind of a Doppler effect. When he plays a run, it initially sounds like repetitions of the same note, or like the pitch is just sagging. Interior lines seem to crawl around. Especially with the 36 tones over three pianos, the overtones with the sustain pedal seem more metallic, like the decay on a cymbal.

The two-octave piano was built by Sauter, modeled on ideas of the Mexican composer Julian Carillo.

Tyler Green on Without Boundaries

Tyler Green, who writes the country's leading visual arts blog , Modern Art Notes, published this review of MOMA's show of artists mostly from an Islamic background:
link to review
A lot of people have seen this show while they were in NY to see the Whitney Biennial. Green's point is the show's lack of political context for the works. His discussion of Emily Jacir should make sense to anyone in Nashville who saw her piece on the Ramallah border crossing at Cheekwood. The elision of politics from the show strikes one first-off as fear of taking (or being perceived to take) a position on the war or on Israeli policies. However, one can imagine a more well-meaning reason, the desire to show that Islam and Islamic culture means more to these artists than political polemics. A desire to avoid reducing artists to a cariacture of the angry Muslim. However, even if we assume such a well-intentioned motive, it doesn't give the artists or audiences much credit that they need to be saved from themselves. People would be able to get that the idea that political concerns are unavoidably important, but others are going on at the same time.

Here's Modern Arts Notes:

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/

Yesterday in Chelsea

A good part of the point of Chelsea is to come up with gee-whiz stuff, going for the reaction “did you see that.” The winners in what I saw yesterday were first of all Tara Donovan’s piece at Pace Wildenstein – one of the large cab garages, fill with millions of plastic cups stacked up at different heights to create an arctic environment. Total gee-whiz. Then on a smaller scale there was a piece from a collaboration between Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger at Frederieke Taylor. There’s a mirror on the wall, and coming up in front of it is a metal element that has two loops on it. There’s instructions to blow through it softly. This produces a cloud of little avatar creatures that appear on the surface of the mirror, covering up your own reflection and then fading back. It’s the last thing you expect to be asked to do and the last response you expect from the device.

Some good stuff:

• Didier Mahieu’s sprawling memory piece at the Chelsea Art Museum, which also has a good exhibit on Andrea Zittel (I guess the first floor is really the New Museum of Contemporary Art).
• Jil Weinstock’s clothes encased in rubber, although maybe she reduces it too much to minimalist gestures.
• Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao operatic photos of Queens and other NY streetscapes.
• Masato Okazaki b&w photos of interior spaces that open out into winter landscapes. I don’t have the gallery name handy. It was on 25^th.
• Holli Schorno’s collages constructed from illustrations of machines drawn out into delicate forms.
• Scott Peterman photos at Silverstein. Some are pretty Misrach-y desert landscapes, but they include Mexican housing projects that have a massive repeated patterns of structures and Sao Paolo cityscapes that surprised me because I’m not familiar with the city and it seems denser and more developed than I thought.
• Adam Fowler, a DC guy who draws looping structures in pencil, then cuts out the drawing and overlays it. A really nice texture.

Also, Kara Walker’s exhibit at the Met is great. Some of Barbara Yontz’ students at St. Thomas Aquinas said they liked her writing the best. They have a point. She makes a beautiful statement about Katrina and the way it connects to larger issues of water, disaster, and race in history. The exhibit itself is wonderfully indirect, in combining obscure pieces from the Met’s collection and Walker’s work.

One Day in New York

Annual art trip to New York going on now. Yesterday the Whitney Biennial, David Smith at Guggenheim, and MOMA. I wasn’t as excited about the Biennial this year. Much of the work seemed admirable, but I have to admit being turned on by surprising and well-made stuff. The work seemed more political, like it absorbed all the energy that went into the 2004 campaign. In some cases what you see here are the results of that period, like Richard Serra’s Stop Bush poster with the hooded image from Abu Ghraib.

One exception was Urs Fischer’s big piece, two large branches painted silver, rotating from the ceiling with a lit candle at their ends. The candles deposited thickening circles of wax, and their own remains.

Peter Huyghe’s video about a trip to Antarctica and its reenactment in Central Park was very lovely. Except for opening narration, it was wordless but very emotional. It was all images and very slight motions. A woman on the boat turns her head slightly. What more do you need.

Chicago prejudice also kicked in. Jim O’Rourke’s video, where two opposing images of a door flashed across from a dark cityscape was pleasurable, largely because of the lush series of drones and overtones on the sound track. And Paul Chan’s animated silhouettes in a city sky projected onto the floor, objects floating up and bodies falling down, was so direct in making use of the 9-11 images but made it all a magical and fluid experience. In important ways an outrageous piece, but also one with a much broader perspective than we seem capable of these days.

At MOMA, they had a great little show of work by people from the Islamic world or interested in Islam. Raqib Shaw had this spectacular large painting, Garden of Earthly Delights III. In an Islam miniature style, blown up to grand proportions, it contains all manner of beautiful transgressions. Some of the paint seems to be auto body paint, thick enamels, and cheap spangles are affixed throughout. In the same room were smaller pieces and an animation by Shahzia Sikander, also using the miniature style, and pigments like tea and vegetable colors. One image that has been reproduced widely has a horned woman, some sort of pagan god as I imagine it.

This was my first time in the new MOMA. I've avoided it up til now. A lot of the spaces felt too garage-like. Big rooms with really tall ceilings. I was surprised the flows in the exhibits weren’t clearer. But there’s more floor area, and they were able to put out some amazing stuff, particularly in prints and drawings.

Gilgamesh and David Lynch

My wife bought me a copy of a new translation of Gilgamesh, really a poetic version of it taken from other translations, by Stephen Mitchell. I haven’t read this since college, so it was nice to go back to it today. When Gilgamesh goes to seek Utnapishtim, the man granted immortality, he must go to the underworld which you enter at a place called in this version Twin Peaks. I had never made this connection with David Lynch, but it makes sense. I’ve always thought that images and sounds in Blue Velvet paralleled elements in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, like the sputtering of lamps. I don’t think you can draw a one-to-one comparisons, so his film is not a depiction of the Book of the Dead, it’s just similar enough to suggest that he’s passing into or through the same realm, a realm of the dead or of immortals. Ditto with the TV show.

Susan Maakestad catalog essay

This winter I wrote a short essay for Susan Maakestad's show at Rhodes College. I was pleased with how it came out, and she's got a PDF of the catalog on her website:
link to essay

Frederic Koeppel wrote a good review of the show in the Memphis Commerical Appeal:

Koeppel review

Koeppel's reviews are always very good - intelligent, honest criticism. And he writes for the daily newspaper!

Nashville Aradhana

A week ago Saturday I had the good fortune to attend several hours of the Aradhana at Sri Ganesha Temple. An aradhana is an all-day gathering of practitioners of Carnatic music. Performers, mostly vocalists, from all over the Southeast came and performed. The event has a pedagogical level – the theme this year was the Post-Trinity composers, which refers to the many composers in South Indian music who came after a trio of 19^th century musicians (Tyagaraja Swami, Muthuswamy Dikshitar, Shyama Shastry)

who are considered the guiding lights or founders of South Indian music. Rather than something like a fiddler’s convention, where everyone comes in and plays selections of their choosing, the program was coordinated to avoid repetitions and demonstrate the styles of as many composers as possible. The aradhana is also considered to have a devotional character, and ended with blessings by the Temple priests for the performers and all in attendance. Some concerts at the Temple, depending on the material presented, have a more devotional character than others and therefore involve the priests officiating at some point.

I got there around 4:30 and stayed through the end of the performances at 10:00. The entire day started at 10 in the morning I believe. I’m afraid that I have not always made it to the end of the concerts there, but it is highly recommended. Some of the music’s effects occur through the temporal immersion. I could feel the solid beats of the mridangam for easily a day afterwards somewhere inside my body.

This program provides a chance to hear many vocalists from Nashville or nearby. It is surprising to realize the depth of talent present locally among people who cannot make their living doing this. Then again, it is really not so surprising, and not so different from the way people make music in every other community around here.

Let me mention some of the names of participants who stood out. Keep an eye out for their names, and if you are ever aware that they are performing, try to catch them. (And I apologize for any spelling errors in these names.)

Preetha Narayan: soon to graduate from Vanderbilt, trained as a classical violinist as well.

Sandhya Mudumbi. From Nashville but in college in St. Louis. In the tillanas (group songs) that ended the program, she served as a lead female voice balancing Sankaran Mahadevan. She matched his voice well, and gave that performance great energy. She’s also a talented dancer.

Ram Kaushik: From Nashville, and I hadn’t put his name and face together before, but I see him at a lot of these concerts and he gave a concert himself at the Temple in December I think. Which I missed. Too bad. I particularly enjoyed his phrasing, which seemed to be placed behind the beat like a jazz musician.

Ramesh Rebba. From Detroit, and provided some insights on the variety of voices that this music accommodates. He has a reedier timbre, which gives his singing a different energy.

Sankaran Mahadevan gave the final solo performance. He organizes the music program at the Temple, and he organized this aradhana. He also teaches many of the people who performed. And as I’ve posted before (link), he is a superb singer and this came out even more clearly through comparison with the others on the bill. This is not to denigrate the quality of the others, but simply to acknowledge that his place of honor in the final spot was well-deserved. An event like this makes it clearer how he is participating in the work of building an outpost of Indian culture here that extends back to India in immediate ways.

It was a complete pleasure to attend at least part of this musical day, and afterwards I had a great conversation with Monica Cooley, Sankaran’s wife and the main teacher of Indian dance in the community (Global Education Center, Vanderbilt, her own studio).

Persian Music web radio

Just discovered this web site that streams Persian classical music

http://www.radiodarvish.com/

What I've heard so far sounds first rate, unadulerated by cross-overs. It mixes up meditative pieces for small ensembles with one or two solo instruments (tar, setar, violin, etc,), vocals of various sorts, and larger, more orchestral groups. Radio Darhish doesn't give any information on the tracks, but you can find info on many of the artists here:

http://www.iranian.com/music.html

Persian music, much of which is steeped in Sufi mysticism, has a controlled fervor that I find very moving.

Ask Maddox

In a comment on the post on the Lucy Lippard lecture, someone remarked that she didn’t really answer the questions asked from the floor. I'd agree, although it's not that uncommon in a talk like this and it seemed exacerbated by the fact that it was hard to hear the questions. But one question asked that night seemed pretty easy to answer, so I might as well try.

A woman asked if activist art was the same as political art, whether activist art is always political and vice versa. After trying to determine what the questioner said, and then making a self-deprecating comment (refreshing but not that clarifying) about sometimes being sloppy by using these words interchangeably, I didn’t hear Lippard give what should have been a pretty easy answer. At least it seems that way to me, once you start from Lippard’s own formulation of public art, community art, activist art. Political art seems one more in the series. I would define it as art that addresses political or social issues, but does not necessarily seek to bring about social change, which would be the defining characteristic of activist art. Activist art would probably always be political, but political art would not necessarily be activist. Political art includes work that goes for of commentary but remains disengaged from solving the problems. With all of these types of art, different artists and different art works will involve combinations of the categories. Activist art might or might not involve the community. Community art can easily have no activist agenda. Political art might take a public form (e.g., politically-oriented stencil art in a public place).

It was interesting to think about examples of each form in Nashville. Public art we have plenty of – Musica is a pure example, no political content, purely the product of a single artist’s vision, no community involvement. Community art – the dragon in Fannie Mae Dees Park. Political art – say Abby Whisenant’s photos from antiwar protests in DC and a whole range of people who comment on social issues like sexism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, militarism. But now try to come up with a good example of activist art. Something that really seems engaged in changing policy or people’s behavior. That’s a lot harder. Greg Schlanger’s installation at the Tennessee Arts Commission on mountaintop removal mining fits, as did the work Shaun Slifer and Ally Reeves made before they graduated and left town. But I’m not sure there’s much else I can point to with confidence that fits within this framework.

Many of the artists Lippard showed as examples of activist art were working in a medium that you can call performance art – people doing things in public, the artist staging events and encounters. Well, there is very little performance art occurring in Nashville. Heather Spriggs-Thompson has done a number of performance pieces. Tom Thayer’s students did this puppet-based show that clearly had a performance dimension (as I recall the PR on it rejects the phrase performance art). Lippard made a pretty good case that activist art has to get out of the gallery, but maybe this lack of performance-based work does reflect the development level of the local community. We are just getting used to the idea of art in galleries that challenges us more, and artists may not yet have the sense that the gallery could be exhausted for some purposes.

Octavia Butler RIP

Science Fiction writer Octavia Butler died Friday in one of those freakish accidents. She tripped outside her house and hit her head. She was only 58 years old.

Seattle Times obit

I've posted on her books before. The Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower are really intriguing views on possible near-term endpoints of current social and political forces.

Weird day. Dennis Weaver also died. He was a lot older. I loved McCloud as a kid. Part of the Sunday Mystery Movie series.

Lucy Lippard’s Vanderbilt lecture

In preparation for Lucy Lippard’s talk last Wednesday at Vanderbilt I’ve been reading her work much more carefully than I ever have – in general I don’t fill my reading time with art criticism. It’s been very stimulating. She’s a fantastic writer and thinker, and during her career she has grappled with how to be a critic, and with the result of very imaginatively structured texts that weave together her judgments, her explanatory description of works, biography, the artist’s own words, and the words of others. This makes her books a little harder to navigate, as you move between a main text and substantial captions that are not to be skipped over, but it creates something that has some chance of standing on its own longer.

The lecture at Vanderbilt, titled “Common Ground: Art and Communities,” was disappointing, as talks often are. To be effective takes very different skills than writing, but I expected more because of the care Lippard has taken with her texts over the years. The lecture was about the community basis for activist art, differentiating it from public art (almost anything in a public space) and community art (the community has a say in the work). Activist art is issue-oriented. It can be public and community-based as well. These distinctions were useful, and she had slides of artists who were new to me, like Suzanne Lacy.

There were things I wished she had addressed more, such as the aesthetics of this art, what differentiates it from community organizing, and some of the implications of art coming from a local source rather than rooted in the major metropolitan cultural centers. I believe she is making a case for this art having value over non-activist art, but I am not sure. Some statements, most of which I think came up in the question period, seemed off mark. She asserted that no one realized that Picasso’s Guernica was about a Fascist bombing. The Modern may not have stressed that information (I remember it just appearing dramatically in front of you as you got out of the elevators), but I think many people who don’t know much about art knew that. A friend of mine in the audience who is not from the art world had the same reaction. In another case someone asked why this stuff wasn’t getting into museums and Lippard encouraged the idea that museums resist it, but she failed to go after a larger point about the institutional context. Often activist art will live best outside the museum. In some cases the forms of the art tie it to a place outside the museum or it takes a form that just cannot be bottled. And a lot of this art is making its way into shows. Of the artists she showed, at this point the Guerilla Girls and the Rural Studio are in the canon, you see Charles Simmonds’ little buildings in many museums, and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party will be installed in the Brooklyn Museum.

I also was surprised by some technical lapses. I expect Vanderbilt to do a better job providing technical support for a speaker. There was no remote control for the projector, so Donald Woodman ran it by hand. There was no microphone set up for questions in the scheduled question and answer period, so Lippard had to spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out what was asked.

Go see Matthew Shipp Friday

Nashville’s biggest jazz concert since McCoy Tyner is coming up this Friday: Matthew Shipp at the Primitive Baptist Church, 4602 Indiana Avenue in Sylvan Park, scheduled to start at 8:00. Also on the bill are Lambchop, playing a very rare Nashville show, and Hands Off Cuba. The fact Lambchop is doing this show gives you some idea about Shipp’s standing. He is one of the most significant jazz pianists in the world today. I think people would probably call him a free jazz player, although it’s hard to know what that means. Lambchop’s website refers to him as an avant-garde pianist. He is a member of saxophonist David Ware’s quartet, and has been one of the primary people involved with the Thirsty Ear Blue Series experiments that cross Free Jazz and electronica (involving people like DJ Spooky). And he has recorded with Yo La Tengo and the Yo Las are very close with Lambchop, so you can some of the connections in bringing Shipp and Lambchop together.

Shipp has a new solo album out on Thirsty Ear and he’s been doing concerts around the country “in support” of it, if you can use such a heavy industry term in his case. This concert came about because John Rogers, former Nashville musician and current New York resident, writer, etc. got a ball rolling and Chris Davis made it happen.

Anyway, to get back to Shipp. (Matthew's website) I know him best from a tremendous album, duets with bassist William Parker called DNA. His playing has a classicism like Cecil Taylor with the ferocity turned down a bit. By that I mean the music works with architectural structures that build up in steps and combinations rather than a purely adrenalin-oriented arc. Shipp plays very clear lines, and in keeping with the ideas on DNA seems to work from small groups of material, a kind of coding similar to the way classical composers grow music out of cells of tones. You also hear bits of new textures emerge from the whole the way musical quotations float into the proceedings in a Charles Ives. The talk of classical forms shouldn’t throw anyone off though – this is passionate music, but Shipp builds up to climaxes rather than dumping them on you. And you don’t mistake the music’s grounding in the harmonic progressions and rhythms of jazz.

This is a chance to see a great musician in his prime at very close quarters. Not to be missed.

Criticism and self-indulgence

“I've never had much faith in art criticism as a primary form because you are leaning on somebody else's work. It's not that it can't be a positive parasitic process, not that you can't bring new insights to the work, or get out the artist's intentions better than the artist himself or herself might be able to do, but I can't think of any criticism that has ever stood up in the long run as a real parallel to the art. Some of the critics we respect the most didn't write good criticism-they were good poets or something. It's self-indulgence when you come right down to it, you like something and you enjoy plunging into it with words. I don't finally know what the hell criti­cism does for anybody except the artist and the writer.”
Lucy Lippard, “Freelancing the Dragon,” From the Center, p. 20 (Dutton 1976)

This is a great quote, and makes several points I believe strongly, like the self-indulgent quality of writing criticism, and the impetus to do, to “plunge in with words.” Her description of criticism by poets and others fits some cases well, like Baudelaire. His criticism makes some fine points, but they mostly take the from of aphorisms isolated in the midst of more topical observations.

There are exceptions to this characterization. Walter Benjamin for instance, unless you want to call him something other than a critic. Susan Sontag for sure, and I think everyone sees her as a critic primarily. Of even more recent people, it seems someone like Tom Frank, and Lippard herself, might hold on and be worth reading years from now.

The final comment in the quote reads initially as a condemnation of criticism, but I’m not so sure it is. If criticism forms a place where a writer and an artist can establish communication, that seems valuable as a human phenomenon. Criticism as a public correspondence, a conversation with a performance dimension. If the artist is one of the two primary beneficiaries of the writing, other people in the society or community benefit by the encouragement the artist gets to keep doing what she does. This view has a strange effect of relegating the general readership to a critical secondary position. Private correspondence does not have the same impact as knowing that the writer made statements in front of anyone who would read or listen. So you need readers, but you need them more as witnesses than as recipients of communication.

After putting it in those terms, I remember my own experiences as a reader of criticism. It spurs my thinking, teaches me things about works of art, and in some cases gives me a feel for an exhibit or movie I won’t see, music I won’t hear. Sure that’s frustrating, and sometimes it serves to make me feel isolated, but it also gives me some of the pleasures at second hand. For some reason, in some frames of mind a review or critical essay is exactly what I want to read.