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.

Something missing from the Frist’s African art show

To cut to the chase–Christianity and Islam. OK, let’s take a couple of steps back. The Frist Center’s current big show is a selection of African art primarily from the collection of the Seattle Art Museum. It’s a well-done show, chock-full of interesting objects. The primary organization is a sequence of sections that focus on the emblematic art forms of different cultural groups: Asante kente clothe and gold jewelry, Maasai beadwork, Dan masks, and so on. A critical part of the curatorial stance is that these are not archeological remains, but forms currently in use. For example, one of the kente is a pattern (or maybe it’s the cloth) worn by Kwame Nkrumah when he was released from prison by the Brits. Each of these sections has narration from a person from that cultural group, who put the works in cultural context. In almost every case, they refer to how these art objects fit into practices that continue into the present, maybe something they remember as a kid (and a lot of the speakers are relatively young). To stress the quality of the art as living practice, the show ends with work by contemporary Africans.

I reviewed the show in the Scene a few weeks ago: http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Arts/Art/2006/02/02/Africa_as_We_ve_Never_Seen_It/index.shtml but there’s this gap that has been bugging me. The idea is that these artworks represent a contemporary African culture, not some pristine and lost cultural state. The exhibit jumbles artworks dated (generally imprecisely) as 19^th or 20^th century, indicating that you don’t need to segregate older and newer works. I have no trouble going along with that. I like the idea. And they didn’t shy away from works that reflect the contact with the West, which of course has been going on a long time.

But based on what I know about African society, I was surprised to see no reference (that I remember) to Christianity or Islam. As I understand it, a majority of sub-Saharan African identify themselves as Christians. Western Christians frequently hear about the rising influence of their African branches, whether it is in the controversies around homosexuality in the Anglican church or the selection of a new Pope. Several of Carlton Wilkinson’s photos from his travels to Africa show Christianity as part of the life of everyday, contemporary Africans (there were several in his show at the Parthenon, and you can see them over at In the Gallery). The displays in the Frist show don’t stress religious practice and traditional cosmologies, although that does come up from time to time. More of the works had to do with social, “folk” practices like European town festivals that have their roots in non-Christian ideas about the world of spirits.

I can believe that African Christianity is very syncretic, and that folk practices survive alongside the new religion, but I have trouble imagining that Christian images aren’t starting to creep into some of these forms, or that Christianity isn’t adapting some of the forms for worship and evangelism. And then you wonder if the curators have avoided these crossovers in the interests of an idea of authenticity, or a judgment of quality, that second-guesses the Africans themselves.

The same could be said of visual references to Islam, similarly lacking, although my understanding is that Islam is less pervasive than Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, the focus of this show. And I would expect that Islam is less likely to adapt older cultural forms, but maybe I’m wrong about that.

The one place where I saw the clear presence of Christianity was in video of Ghanaian funerals that involve wood coffins built to look like objects of importance to the deceased. At one point women are dancing around the coffin, and if you look close you see they are all wearing T-shirts with an image of Jesus on them.

I don’t have an answer to whether this show fails to show us this latest step in what African art looks like. Maybe somebody has some insight on it they want to put in a comment. Otherwise, it’s just something I’m going to keep an eye out for. The best answer would be to get to Africa myself. Not sure if that will happen.

A Couple of Fine Printmakers

Jerry Dale McFadden at TAG has a couple of really nice young printmakers on exhibit who are new to Nashville and to his gallery: Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden. They’re also engaged to get married soon and they have plans to open a press together.

Lueth does very detailed etchings that have qualities of cartooning and obsessive drawing, while Roden does politically oriented woodcuts. As a way of encouraging marital concord I suppose the proper stance is to praise each of them equally, or else you’re feeding some sort of movie melodrama. Oh well. Her stuff appealed to me more. She fills most of her pieces with detail, lots of biological, mechanical, and botanical entities that seem to have roots in geometric free association. You see it also in drawings, some of which are built on a base of crossword puzzle-like grids of dark and light squares. But I think the most striking piece in the show is one where she lightens the amount of information. Called Twins, it is a pair of figures partially rendered – faces from the nose up, one set of joined hands, another hand and arm holding a lock of hair, and the torsos ending in cocoon-like bundles rather than legs and feet. Their eyes have no pupils or irises, defined only by the shape of the eyes, but a sense of wariness and inscrutability comes from those shapes and the molding of the cheekbones.

Roden obviously has strong command over the woodblock medium, with the ability to shift between pieces that have that obvious woodblock quality of simple modeling to something closer to drawing. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil is a really good image, of a charging elephant with especially heavy feet, ridden by three monkeys brandishing swords and holding a large menacing lance. Just to keep the political balance, it is paired with an image of a donkey in a wagon being pushed and pulled by the three blind mice. I think one of the tricks with work like this is how much you are in the mood for political satire and allegory at the time you are looking at it.

Jerry Dale puts a lot of images of his artists on his website. Here’s the page for the Lueth-Roden show, with pictures of the opening:

http://www.tagartgallery.com/

Tomight's Olympics Spectacular

The Europeans do have a way with pageants. I wish I could get my hands on footage of the parade through the streets of Paris for the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Storming of the Bastille in 1989. It was just one odd image after another, ending with Jessye Norman singing La Marseillaise, which was a great touch – on the one hand a simple choice of production values over nationalism, but also making broader claim for the French Revolution as an event that shaped and belongs to the world. I guess. But c’mon, this was a national celebration.

So you see the same stuff in Cirque de Soleil, and then tonight in the Olympics opening ceremony. The athletes came in accompanied with cheesy 1980s disco music – it’s only fitting that a celebration of winter sports acknowledge the cultural contributions of the Eurotrash, high end Roma moving between ski resorts all winter long. Much opportunity for making fun of costumes. The Jack Abramoff fedora and trenchcoat look seemed popular. The Germans had colorful knit caps with visors for their athletes, but had to put strands of Heidi braids on the ones for the women. That was gratuitous.

The Olympics are now required to have an impenetrable and haphazard allegorical pageant in the opening ceremony. Women in elongated Amy Cutler clothes floated around in midair, a couple of them attached to big balloons of the moon and sun that wandered around aimlessly. A woman, I think she was singing, stood in a clam shell. But she had clothes on. Then there was a dance, and oh yeah, before that there were a couple of guys with things on their backs that shot out sparks like the circular saw girl on Letterman. A driver toured the stage in a Formula 1 racer. And some other stuff I didn’t see. All the time the athletes were standing in this big bowl in the middle of the stadium, like they would pour in water and cook them. It ends with a couple of speeches and the torch thing, which gets you back to Speer, Riefenstahl, and Nuremburg every time. Luciano Pavrotti closed it, nearly, with luridly dyed hair and eyebrows and a rendition of Nessun Dorma. He marshaled his resources for the final climax, and the athletes cheered it like one of their own had come out of retirement to nail a triple axel. Curtain down. But it’s not over yet. Then fireworks shot out of the roof of the stadium.

When the teams march in, a lot of them had digital cameras and were snapping away at the crowd, at themselves. It was cute, and broke the ceremonial illusion with people acting like people, excited to be there. I’ve known a couple of people who competed in the Olympics, not big media star types, and their international competition days were a great ride. For the people I’ve talked to most, they had not previously had a chance to travel, see the world and interact with people from all over.

With their cameras, the marchers are both spectacle and spectator. You can look at this a couple of ways. One is that with those cameras the marchers make the spectacle complete and all-encompassing, in that everyone gets incorporated into in the event in the role of spectator. Not even the actors can get behind the illusion. The other view is what I first mentioned, that exercising acts as an individual in the view of the spectators breaks the smooth image that the spectacle is trying to create. They are engaged in personal actions (getting a picture for their own memory purposes) that do not contribute to the creation of the spectacular form. I don’t remember anyone in Triumph of the Will breaking out of line to wave at the camera.