Put the blindfold on

This Sunday, the Spanish sound artist Francisco Lopez is going to do a performance at Ruby Green. Jonathan Marx’s article on it in the Tennessean did a good job of explaining the gist of the performance. Lopez constructs complex sounds from industrial and natural field recordings that he plays back in environments he plans carefully. I’ve only heard clips, but his recordings seem to push out a fluid stream of sound that takes on shifting characteristics that bring to mind various possibilities for source material but ultimately confound associations. His goal is to move towards non-representational sound. In a recent interview he described it in terms solidly rooted in cultural history:

“Ecstasy sounds good to me as one possible descriptor (there are some other possible ones) of the immersive experience in sound -not document- I'm often involved with in the work with sound, both in the solitude of the field recording or the studio, and in the live performances. I'm definitely engaged on a quest for 'losing myself' and being 'confounded' by that immersion. All of this speaks of an ineffable perception of the sonic/music experience, which was probably best described by the expression 'belle confusion' in the conception of absolute music of some poets of the Romanticism. Music/sound can be foreseen in an amazingly wide variety of ways, especially when the conception of music can include any possible sound and any possible way of using it. From all of these, I find particularly uninteresting those perspectives centered on communication and representation, and particularly appealing those focusing on the instinctive / non-rational aspect of sound. To me, this is precisely the best feature of music, to be away from language and specific meaning. It's a quality of immense potential and strength, and it is sadly dissipated very often by multiple attempts at connecting music with external purposes or unnecessary additional elements, like the multi-media fad. This is actually a historical debate that spans centuries of discussion, and I guess there's something natural in human nature that pulls music to other less-free realms. I naturally do the contrary.”

His reference to Romanticism makes a point I feel strongly about, that noise music and the like involve an extreme, almost unbearable commitment to the emotional potential of sound. To listen, you have to let yourself feel directly. You have to abandon rational guards. The music that passes for emotional, certain kinds of pop songs for instance, all involve tons of calculation and professional polish that gets in between people and sound for the most part. I think outsiders see this music in ways that the term “experimental” might suggest, pseudo-scientific and intellectualized. Of course I'm playing right into that with the picture I chose to include from the press materials. There was another one I was going to insert as well, but Blogger doesn't seem to like Tiff format.

To encourage this immersion experience, Lopez’ performances occur in darkness with the audience wearing blindfolds. This should push people to concentrate on the sound, but I would imagine it may also produce anxiety, and even some weird overtones of hostage-taking. The audience clearly has to surrender itself to the experience orchestrated by the artist. But isn’t that always the case, if a work has any power? Most of the time the art and artist take over the audience more unobtrusively, or within the bounds of familiar performance conventions.

One of the reasons to go to this show is because John Sharp is organizing it. Given the quality of his own sound work as Mr. Natural and the connections he has with musicians around the world, John is a trustworthy guide. If he thinks it is worth something, it probably is.

The show has a 9:00 PM start time, with 3 other groups on the bill, including Harmaline, Leslie Keffer and Black Natural, a collaboration between John Sharp and Graham Moore. Ruby Green is at 514 Fifth Ave. South, just off Demonbreun.

Crafts Third Stream

A couple of things converged in recent days. On Sunday, the style section of the New York Times had a piece on the Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, a gathering of what you might call DIY crafters. Labels are always tricky. These are people I think of as operating in various corners of fringe culture, affiliated aesthetically with all of the musical successors of punk. Last week I got notice from Ali Bellos about Craft: A Creative Community, the monthly craft fair she organizes (or at least publicizes) that takes place in the parking lot of the Lipstick Lounge. The next one is the afternoon of Sunday, July 15. This is like Nashville’s local version of the fair in Brooklyn. And for good measure, let me throw in running across Tiffany Dyer-Denton’s booth at the American Artisan Craft Fair a week ago on Sunday—she has participated in the Lipstick Lounge event, as well as the Nashville Craft Mafia, a similar grouping.

Seeing Tiffany and fabric doll sculptures at the American Artisan fair surprised me a little, and made me think about the different worlds of crafts. I was at the show with my mother and 3 of her friends, all of whom are jewelers; they were on their way home from the Society of North American Goldsmiths’ annual conference in Memphis. In the world of groups like SNAG, crafts are done by highly trained people, with a hierarchy of success that leads into American Craft Council-sponsored fairs, high end design stores, and inclusion in the collection of the Renwick Museum or the Museum of Art and Design. Crafts in this sense are something you learn in university-level programs.

On the other hand there are the crafty types, who make handmade things with a traditional design sense. It’s the kind of stuff you find in a “craft” store or a handmade gift shop on Main Street in a small town like the one I live in, or at the county fair.

Then there is this new world of crafts, largely self-taught people who start doing crafts with the spirit of DIY music. My friends in the Hawthorne Improvisation Collective in Houston had the belief that you should make music within the means available to you—don’t let technique keep you from making music, use whatever you’ve got. Within the broad visual arts world, you are running across people who seem to just say “why not make this.” They are not hung up on mastering some body of technique first, and only then exhibiting and selling (although many will have plenty of technique). They go ahead and run with their ideas. The aesthetics are also rough in a way that makes sense in comparison to various strains of fringe music and phenomena like self-published magazines and comics. But the aesthetic seems daft in comparison with the refinement of high crafts and the vernacular steadiness of Main Street crafts.

The new crafts people are creating something very much like folk art, put together by members of a community for use by other people in that community. Like our classic ideas of folk art, it is made by people who are not so different than other people in their community (although we are talking about an urban, artistically oriented community).

Like fringe music, these craftspeople are reclaiming the idea of a participatory culture. People make things. They make them based on their own designs. They don’t depend on metropolitan authority to dictate technique or aesthetics, or on distant companies to produce the goods.

It was surprising to see Tiffany’s work at the Centennial Park craft fair, a couple of feet away from a major jeweler like Tom Mann. Tiffany had art training in college, but she got to her current methods of working in fabric through non-institutional channels. She says she grew up around quiltmakers, so part of her background includes traditional family-based learning. And she describes the way she arrived at her current practices in a typically DIY, self-directed way: "About 4 years ago, I decided to pull out some fabric and I started cutting, piecing and stitching together recognizable images to be framed for an art show. I knew at that moment that this would become my true passion. I had wonderful response to this show and my new found love for creating with fiber emerged." You don’t hear “so I went to the Appalachian Center for Crafts to learn how to do this the right way.”

By contrast, jeweler Thomas Mann, one of the most well know people at the fair who had a booth a few away from Tiffany, cites teachers like Bob Ebendorf, Anton Cepka, and Hermann Junger. He also cites modern art movements like Cubism and Futurism, but it wouldn't surprise me to see artists in Craft Creative Community or Nashville Craft Mafia make similar connections.

The third stream of crafts has a strongly youthful energy, uninhibited and idealistic. Art and life seem tightly intertwined, and the artists seem to have a strong internal motive to make things.

Getting to alchemy

Connie Noyes is clearly a passionate artist. This takes the form of reusing leftover paint, collecting the merest scraps of debris for use in her art, and even the causes she supports like African AIDS orphans. They have something in common—multiple manifestations of a desire to find a place for what has been discarded.

All of the work in Noyes’ show at Estel (“Re-fuse/Ref-use”) incorporates debris of some sort–everything from fishing line filament and scraps of tape to small chunk of architectural molding and cast-off equipment parts. While it all inevitably uses collage and assemblage techniques, she has pursued 3 or 4 methods of composition and construction in this show, each with its own look.

One bunch of the works (or maybe two, depending on how you count), involves combining painting and found objects all encased in a thick resin. Several elongated panels are flat enough to be mistaken for pure painting until you see the objects embedded in them. A thin detail line comes from fishing line, not pencil marks. In another approach to using resin to meld disparate elements, she produced a series of small panels each of which incorporates a piece of material taken from a building near her in Paducah, KY that was being destroyed (she’s offering a portion of the sale of these panels to a charity that supports African AIDS orphans).

Noyes relies more on construction techniques in a series of panels that incorporate a single object or a small number into compositions with simple, often monochromatic color schemes. A metal brush from some machine sticks out of a surface covered with a sheet of perforated metal. The entire background is covered in gray paint applied with a dry matte surface—most of the pieces in this series have that paint quality, which contrasts with the slickness of the other pieces. These pieces share a compositional simplicity with the panels using the building debris, both of which contrast with the complex patterns in the other resin cased pieces.

Finally, there are several pieces in which Noyes builds up a central circular form that crowds the frame by piling up bits of shredded material slathered in multicolored paint. Each work uses something different for that shredded material—plastic bags, plastic bottles, roofing paper, email messages. While the material is different in each piece, the effect comes out the same. They all look like thick impasto oil built up to the point where the paint is three dimensional, like a Jay DeFeo painting.

The first 2 (or 3) series are carefully composed and polite. The steel brush is placed carefully just off center on a square background, tastefully asymmetrical, with a circular pattern in the background to echo the brush. In compositions where she uses roofing paper, it is incorporated into calm abstractions. The color of it is heavy and dark, but the resin reduces the visceral sense of texture, smoothes it out. The safe abstractions in combination with slick surfaces are aesthetically offputting. The resin casing gives the pieces the cold feel of having been manufactured. Some pieces include graphite powder, but the organic graininess is lost under this surface. And the matte surfaces in the assemblages are so even, they seem air-brushed. The artist’s hand is hard to discern and missed.

The variety of materials is entertaining – look at what I’ve found, let’s see what we can do with it. But once you accept the materials as parts of an art work (and Lord knows artists have been picking up material and sticking it in art for a long time), they are less surprising in terms of composition, the range of sensory experience and meaning.

Where Noyes really lets go are in the pieces with the masses of shredded material. These are messier, more complex, and more effusive. All of her pieces tend to equalize materials as they become part of her collages and assemblages, but the equivalence goes furthest when she shreds the material and piles it up. In the other pieces, the incorporated objects are still identifiable. The shredded stuff could be anything, and it takes on completely different characteristics. Heavy, spiky, and complicated even though it might have started out as light, smooth, clear plastic. Thanks to associations like Jay DeFeo, the many kinds of material all look like paint. It’s at this point that some alchemy starts to take hold, and it raises the stakes in Noyes’ work.

Sounds right to me

Margaret Renkl, books editor at the Scene, pointed out this blog post. Pretty well sums up something.

http://www.lookydaddy.com/weblog/2007/06/no_more_gallery.html

Annie Sellick -- at Twist Gallery no less

Always up to something different, Twist is hosting a concert by Annie Sellick this Saturday (7/23). They’ve had pretty extensive performance before in association with openings (Todd Greene’s band Bulb or variations on it for one), but this is a pure music event. Annie is a remarkably good jazz vocalist, arguably the best in Nashville (I say arguably because there’s a number of other jazz singers in town, and there are the definitional questions of who you include as jazz singers). The times I’ve heard her she performed standards, old-school style, done really well—technically on, well-chosen songs, interpreted in interesting ways. She’s accompanied on this show by a piano trio. Apparently the guys in the trio are all from Atlanta and this is their first show in Nashville.

Of course a performance at Twist is the very definition of intimate setting, and the art will have a strong presence. I assume Kristina Arnold’s installation will still be in place in the front room, and that’s not exactly a bunch of pictures that will fade into the background. She’s made this garden of real plants – those spindly wildflowers with the small white flower with a yellow center – positioned underneath some of her acryllic globes hanging in long pink netted socks.

They’re charging $12 at the door for this, scheduled to start at 7:00. (The Arcade can stay open only so late.)

New Acquisition

I picked up this nice little pot at the American Artisan fair on Sunday. It’s a small raku pinch pot by Tim Weber. Tim was for many years a program director at the Tennessee Arts Commission and then had a short tenure as director of the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville. When that didn’t work out (one assumes that’s the case with a short time in a job like that), Tim stayed in Smithville to focus on making and selling his own work.

My wife pointed out that I am enamored with organic surfaces on pots, and that’s just what got me interested in this. The colors and are textures are varied and subtle, rough, not shiny, like animal skin. One pitfall for raku pots is that sometimes the color can be garish, but Tim avoids that. There are shades of yellow and iridescence here, but not too much.

Like any craft artist trying to make a living from his work, Tim makes usable pieces like vases, covered jars, and platters, wheel-thrown with less delicate surface treatments. But he also goes in a more sculptural direction with things he calls “Neo-Primitive Objects.” A lot of them have the general shape of tea pot or some other vessel, but for the most part their lids don’t open, and they are definitely not functional vessels. He impales bits of bamboo through the sides or works them into the lid as if were a handle (but it's not). In the past I had the feeling these pieces were too busy, too much going on, but I didn’t feel that way with the pieces I saw in his booth Sunday. It seemed like he is using a more limited range of surface coloring (I may be misremembering the older pieces), with the primary colors coming from the carbon smudges produced when the pieces are put red hot into sawdust or whatever combustible material Tim uses at the end of the firing process.

Tim needs to get a website so I can show some of these images. I’m sure I’ll acquire one of the neo-primitives one of these days, and I’ll post pictures then.

Matt Mikulla's Nashville Postcards

Matt Mikulla is showing his best series of photos so far. Matt, for anyone not familiar with him, has workspace and spacious gallery for his own work in the Arcade. He opened up in that big round of new activity last summer.

Sometimes Matt seems overly caught up in the technical process of his photogrpahy (a lot of what he does is interesting) and the aesthetics are not taken as far as I’d like. But the current series has plenty going on.

These are color shots of Nashville scenes—some landmarks like the Country Music Hall of Fame, others more anonymous streetscapes. He manipulates them in Photoshop, and that’s where things get interesting. First of all, the focus on the images is handled so that a few details come out in sharp definition, with the rest fairly blurred. He’s also manipulated the colors so they don’t look quite real—the green leaves of trees look like the lichen used in model railroads. The combination of these elements, and also the lighting/exposure, make it look like he has photographed miniatures. The palette is also similar to old postcards with their colored black and white photos. (BTW, these are not postcard sized prints, but normal sizes for photo prints.)

A photo like this one, of the Country Music Hall of Fame, could be a postcard image, almost, except for the odd effect of the Hall of Fame standing out clearly and background elements like the crane on the apartment building fading into a blur. The grass in the foreground seems a little too yellow, like a color print that has faded (although taken at the right time of the year, this might have been close to the actual tone).


In this one, the Customs House seems to have a flat exterior surface with details painted on, and the light seems artificial, somehow too even or too white.

He also finds unlikely landmarks, like this metal scrapyard. But the same thing, the mid-ground building and the pile of metal in focus, the rest not.

In this shot of the intersection at 5^th and Commerce, taken from high in one of the buildings on Church Street, the cars look like nothing so much as toys.

Things seen from a height often seem like toys, so try this one from Broadway with street-level perspective, especially the trolley and the frontloader.

I don't know if the sensation of these as miniatures comes out over the web, but the effect is very strong in the gallery.

On one level these photos are Matt’s entry into the scenes of Nashville photography market, with a nice twist to differentiate them from the many other versions of some of these scenes. Commercially, it's a good idea to have something like this to offer people who walk into his gallery. But his twist turns the images into imagined ersatz versions of the landmarks and streetscapes. And that suggests the idea that downtown Nashville, like any place that caters to tourists, has become a sort of Disneyland recreation of a place where music is produced and performed, empty facades and too obviously mass produced surfarces. And in the context where the urban downtown becomes the scene for spectacle, which both celebrates consumption and itself becomes an object of consumption, even the gritty, “real” places like metal recycling plants get swept up into this spectacle landscape, somehow playing into the overall drama of consumption that is the purpose of these spaces in the contemporary socio-economic order. (Thank you Guy Debord)

It makes these photos right odd as momentos of downtown, with their subtle reference to the artificiality of spatial relationships mediated through a speculative and spectacular economy to such an extreme degree that the living city seems replaced by a brittle representation of the city.

Killer of Sheep

This is one of those join the band wagon posts. My wife and I went out to see Charles Burnett's film, Killer of Sheep, at the Belcourt. Every single reviewer has raved on this film, and I have no dissent from that.

I'm not sure what I thought it would be, but it surprised me how non-narrative it was. There are events, but not really a story line. It's a few days in the lives of a working class black family in LA. These events provide a context for watching the rhythms of these people's everyday lives, whether it's some men negotiating to buy a motor or playin dominos, or kids engaged in perfectly random kid behavior. "Hey man, let's pile up these railroad ties." It also allows for beautiful black and white images -- like a stream of kids one after another leaping between two rooftops, shot from below.

The word that came to mind was "tone poem." It's hard for a film to pull off a poetic method of juxtaposing images. In film it is more likely to end up feeling like unassimilated clips.

There is a subtle arc and structure to the piece, like an abstract painting formed from minimal gestures in a limited palette. The film switches between scenes of the neighborhood lives of this family and their relatives, friends, etc., and scenes from the slaughterhouse where the main character works. Each of these elements has a subtle arc--the slaughterhouse scenes work up to the point where the sheep are killed--the preliminary scenes show what comes before and after. And the neighborhood and home scenes end with the character experiencing the slightest bit of relief from the emotional darkness that weighs him down. It's not much, he does not end up liberated or saved. It's just a point of release, a subtly flexed emotional arc.

The film is showing through the weekend at the Belcourt in Nashville. If you live here, go. If you're in another town, the film's website lists where and when it will be screened.

Art in a trailer in Memphis

Hamlett Dobbins has a really sweet setup on Broad Avenue in Memphis, not too far from Rhodes, the Brooks, and Memphis College of Art. Hamlett’s got a building in this short stretch of old commercial buildings, cut off from the main thoroughfares by confusing traffic patterns. In the front room of the ground floor he has a gallery space which he calls Material, which has a regular series of monthly shows. Hamlett’s studio is in the back of the ground floor, and he and his family live upstairs.

I got a chance to drop by over a year ago, but basically I don’t make it up to Memphis very much so I don’t have much to say about the shows. But I’m on his email notice, and I couldn’t pass up a mention of one thing taking place on the night of the reception, this Friday. Piecing bits of Hamlett’s announcement:

Nathaniel Parson’s show will be in “Chuck,” the artist’s 1964 Serro Scotty camper trailer parked in front of the gallery for the exhibition reception. The artist is moving from his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio to San Francisco, California and will present I’M FROM WHERE I’M GOING at a number of venues along the way.

About I’M FROM WHERE I’M GOING, Parsons writes:
“The project locates a portable artist’s studio in a town’s public space, where the artist’s door of solitude can be opened to encourage all who visit to participate and view that which has been created previously. Using the traveling road show format, I wish to demystify the production of art by creating a showcase of a town’s excitable talented citizens.”

I don’t know quite what’s going to be in the trailer (at least one of Parson’s previous shows recruited local artists in Memphis for a sort of performance. Look at the description on his site). But this has got to be fun.

This is just one thing Hamlett’s got going Friday night at Material. Amy Enkelmann-Reed and Tom Reed are also showing work—I was able to find GIFs of his work, and it looks good. All three of the artists are University of Iowa MFAs, like Hamlett.

The creative class, who needs 'em

Just saw this article in the Houston Chronicle, a dissent from the ideas of Richard Florida about how to promote the development of a city. Florida is the “creative class” guy who argues that cities prosper when they attract high-skilled people engaged in creative pursuits, broadly defined. It means making the place attractive to artists, but also to people like web designers and ad agencies. I think he would include programmers and industrial designers, but it tends to be discussed in terms of folks who would create gaming systems, not so much applications for back office processing of banking transactions.

Joel Kotkin says no, this is crap, what you need is low taxes, limited regulation, and vocational education. According to him, parks and cultural institutions come from prosperity, don’t cause it. Big surprise from a report sponsored by a Houston booster group—Houston is an exemplar of the success of this approach.

He makes a distinction between superstar cities which can pursue an elite-oriented strategy, and every place else which seems broad-banded. I think that distinction is valid. The concentration of capital in the global economic centers puts them in a different class. But I’m not sure Kotkin’s really dealing with some of Florida’s ideas, to the extent I understand them. One phenomenon behind the creative class concept is that as income disparity and real estate prices take off in places like New York, places with a slightly lower cost of living become attractive to various kinds of creative workers. Especially artists, who are not particularly well-positioned to hang on in the highest cost cities unless they start selling art to the hedge fund managers. As I understand, Florida’s idea is that a leveling effect occurs, and in that environment cities can attract some of these people which will allow some towns which are not New York to differentiate themselves from their peers.

I think the “creative class” idea gets oversold, and there’s a lot of murkiness about what categories of activity count in that. It also seems to skip right over class--there's a difference between a poor musician trying to make ends meet and a well-compensated dot.com employee, perhaps more difference than similarity. But Kotkin’s argument just encourages cities to pay no attention to their artists, a neglect that really isn’t benign in a place like Nashville. The almost complete lack of governmental engagement in promoting the arts makes important parts of the art scene extremely vulnerable. The visual arts struggle to establish footholds, the Frist Center notwithstanding, and even the famous music community has more gaps than not. Kotkin’s case is stronger for Houston, which has a good range of arts institutions, and reasonable living costs that provide the capacity for people to survive and work at the margins. But the laissez-faire qualities have a lot to do with making it a rough city, with bad air, infrastructure and services that seem constantly at risk of succumbing to the elements, and an impressive homicide rate. Houston may be a place where people can make money and can make some interesting things happen, but you’ve got to be careful how far you go in making it your model.

Tom Wills at Portland Brew

It was good to see Tom Wills’ work up at Portland Brew/Murphy Road. In addition to a series of his pastels (I think most of these are older pieces, but I could be wrong about that), he is doing one of his projections of clips from his huge collection of old home movies. These aren’t from his family, but footage he purchases like the family photos you find in antique stores and flea markets (I think Tom’s flea market is more of an on-line thing). He puts clips from them into compilations from time to time, sometimes for art shows at Downtown Pres, sometimes for services, Belcourt events, etc. This was the first time I’d seen one of his films in conjunction with his pastels, and this will give me something to think about. He maintains a blog where you can see the raw material.

Tom’s pastels are mostly of the marginal, overlooked spaces on highway borders, places occupied by a few forlorn cedar trees. A lot of the scenes are in winter, not with snow on the ground, but the grasses dried out and the light overbright in the dry winter air. Sometimes his own shadow is visible, which echoes the shape of the trees. It’s been a while since I’ve read his statements about these pieces, but as I recall he talks about these spaces as representing a transitional point between the self and the divine. I think it was something like that. At any rate, over the years his images have caused me to be much more alert to the landscapes on the side of the road as I’m blasting down I40 into town.

And it’s going to be interesting to think about how those images relate to the home movies, with their images of families, but lost families, families who have forgotten about these documents of themselves or who have fragmented and splintered in the ways families can over time. Tom doesn’t do much to these films—there are probably a lot of choices about sequence that would be apparent if I took a bit more time to watch them, but to a great extent he collects and then puts them out there. I always feel like Tom is trying to let these films speak for themselves. It might suffer in certain regards from the lack of a stronger authorial hand in the composition and presentation, but there is something humble and humane in the act.

Now that was a magazine

Got this note today from Scott Marshall:

"My pal Ethan's latest project; four old issues of Paul
Krassner's legendary magazine The Realist posted
online every month until all 146 issues are compete.

http://www.ep.tc/realist/ "

I've heard of the Realist (I think my friend Warren Leming knew Krassner), but never seen the issues. It's off-the-chart sharp, subversive on multiple levels, finds common ground between Lenny Bruce and R. Crumb.

Also, check out my wife's post about John Rogers and his awesome new Ornette Coleman tatoo.

Another group

Continuing the theme of artist/activist groups gets me to something that struck my fancy in the Beyond Green: Toward A Sustainable Art show at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. It was organized by the University of Chicago, which as a UC grad I was glad to see, and it made me sorry I wasn’t on campus while it was going on. From the information provided for some of the pieces in the exhibit it sounded like there was a lot of activity related to the show.

The show of course includes Dan Peterman, a Hyde Parker who works with the neighborhood’s long-established recycling program and makes out of a seeming endless cache of flotsam and jetsam discarded from labs in the area. Many of the pieces are clever solutions to problems (like Michael Rakowitz’ ingenious inflatable shelters for the homeless that appropriate exterior ventilation ducts of buildings for heat and to sustain the structures) or public information or education campaigns (Free Soil’s fruit wrappers). You might ask is this art or design, but that of course would be narrow-minded and categorical. Ok, ok. I won’t ask.

My favorite idea here was the underground mushroom farming system (and here) developed by The Learning Group, a collaboration of people from Denmark, Mexico, and the U.S. They’ve built these growing structures that could be installed under the streets of a city like Chicago. I could just see these pods appearing in the nooks and crannies of Lower Wacker Drive, or in the crawlways underneath houses. I love the idea of making such dead spaces productive, and of anything that causes life to grow in places where the city’s concrete, steel, and grease would seem to have blotted it out. Gardens and crops intertwined with people in dense ways. What's the phrase: urbs in hortus? Or maybe better hortus in urbs.

ICI has picked up this show and is traveling it around. Maybe it will make its way to the South. It would be great to see it in Nashville, to spend some more time with it. My trips to Cincinnati are always a bit on the run, so I didn’t look at everything as carefully as I could have.

Sara La at Zeitgeist

There are several worthy shows opening this weekend in Nashville, it being the first weekend of the month and all. Sara La has new work at Zeitgeist, and that's the one I'm looking forward to the most. Not everything she does works for me, but when she's on I think she's dead on. The pieces I've responded most strongly have had her Chinese heritage as the first layer content, although what appealed to me as form and a very touching mingling of frailty and strength. There's another more surrealistic thread in her work, and some of those pieces haven't done it for me. But because of the quality in other places, I'm always interested in taking a look -- I'm convinced her paintings in that vein will start to register with me. It looks like that's what is in this Zeitgeist show (this one below is called "Ward"), so I'm hoping this will be the time it all comes together.














Zeitgeist is doing their opening on Saturday night, like all the downtown places. Some of that looks good, like Connie Noyes at Estel, which I did a pick on for the Scene, and Kristina Arnold at Twist. which Joe Nolan wrote up. For the last couple of years, Kristina has been undergoing big life events like getting married, getting step kids, moving to Bowling Green. It's great the way she processes these things into her work. Her installation at the Tennesse Arts Commission (a year and a half ago?) was much about moving to Kentucky--bubble wrap figured prominently. The Twist exhibit is called Twins and apparently takes up her evolving role as stepmom. I'm sure her previous work had personal narratives entwined in it, but what struck me then was the voice of the former biomedical researcher. I saw the pieces as more analytical, almost scientific expressions. Now the personal narrative is impossible to miss.

More Alexis Rockman

As with Tara Donovan, I seem to be a sucker for Alexis Rockman. In Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago I got to see a new work, Romantic Attachments at the Contemporary Arts Center. It’s a large scale painting that recasts Bernini’s Ecstasy of S. Teresa with a modern woman and a recreation of the hominid species Homo Georgicus serving as the angel. The figures are posed exactly as in the Bernini sculpture. Since this is painting, not sculpture, Rockman needed to fill in the setting of the scene. He puts the characters on a cliff over a desolate, stormy, deep perspective landscape. The foreground has vegetation details, insects, like any good Baroque painting. He gives his work the full Baroque treatment, even in the production process—he included a large number of studies of individual characters, landscapes, and the figure groupings, going so far as to do some of them in red chalk. It reminded me of Jeff Hand’s studies for his sculpture of suspended faux fur teddy bears, although the historical reference was more implicit in Jeff’s case. Working for a museum context, Rockman can afford to go whole hog with it. Of course Rockman also has a model of Homo Georgicus built by an artist at the American Museum of Natural History. (Homo Georgicus is a recent discovery (the species was identified in 2002), according to Wikipedia a connection between homo habilus and homo erectus, and maybe the early hominid to make it to Europe.)

The Rockman painting and subsidiary works are put together with sculptures by Tony Matelli of compromised chimps. As in dressed up in t-shirts, one impaled with a battery of implements (machete, shovel, garden sheers, arrow, crowbar, screwdriver) with an arm cut off and lying a few feet away, another guy leaning against a wall puking. A picture of how we anthropomorphize and torture primates.

It’s a good match with Rockman’s piece, the visual similarities between the early hominid and the chimpanzee and the two putting these figures into anachronistic and whatever the comparable word would be for making an animal do something not natural to it.

Beyond the fun of Rockman’s painting, and the loving embrace of the Baroque (seeing the Bernini work as a teenager was one of the strongest responses I remember having to any single piece of art), I thought about the substitution of the human ancestor for the angel as the messenger of divine or spiritual ecstasy. In some ways there is something primitive and primal about angels. I suppose people (but not Frank Capra or Wim Wenders) think of them as ethereal, perfected beings, but they are also less developed than humans. They are not possessed of the same free will. They are messengers, phenomena. Shaped like a human, but not capable of interacting on the same level. A different species, same genus, so a pre-homo sapiens ancestor is a good analogy.

There’s also the perspective of the woman who replaces Teresa. As a contemporary, where can she experience a similar sort of ecstasy? Apparently in encountering the connection to the deep history of human descent that places people in the evolutionary chain. Part of biodiversity, part of long timelines.

Collective Foundation

Every day, another tidbit from the most recent California trip. This time the Collective Foundation, featured at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (along with an R. Crumb retro and a fascinating William Pope L. project, the Black Factory). They describe themselves as

“a research and development organization offering services to artists and existing arts organizations. The Collective Foundation focuses on fostering mutually beneficial exchange and collective action by designing practical structures and utilizing new web-based technologies. Ultimately the central concern of the Collective Foundation is to serve as a catalytic and experimental beginning, proposing 'bottom-up' forms of organization and investigating new resources. This means inventing new forms of funding, and new ways of working together. Like the Art Workers' Coalition, who proposed pragmatic solutions to problems faced by artists, the Collective Foundation seeks alternative operational solutions, while reducing the bureaucratic formalities of overhead and administration.”

They’ve set up a multi-pronged operation supporting artists and arts organizations in the Bay area. To this end it has an audio stream people can upload contributions to (I’ve got it on now – it started out not so interesting but the last few entries have been better), makes grants, does some publishing. It supports things like Josh Greene’s Service Works, a micro-grant program for artists that he funds from one night a month of the tips he earns as a waiter. Mike Calway-Fagan from Nashville got one of these. Check out the pull-down menu on the main page, select “Service Works” and hit the $253 project. It looks like you can go to it directly. To me the most interesting component is their on-line journal, the Shotgun Review. They’ve published over 100 reviews of shows in the Bay area in less than 2 years. That’s hell of a lot, even for an open source approach.

Pencil stubs at Berkeley

Got a chance to stop by the Berkeley Art Museum this trip to California. There’s always at least a few delightful things there. This time one was Colony by Tara Donovan, a ridiculous number of pencils cut off to stubs of various lengths and stood up on end in bunches to create an island-like topographic blob covering several square feet of floor. This sort of fantasy landscape never ceases to entertain me, like Charles Simmonds’ little cliff dwellings. Donovan’s landscapes have something to do with dreams, something to do with fantasies of all sorts. Their scale also produces this little shiver of excitement—they are big and small. This piece is a miniature, but it’s big enough to also constitute a pretty sizable object. While I've never seen it, I'm thinking of the effect the Queens Museum's Panorama of the City of New York must have.

Of course I first noticed her with a piece that was completely over the top, her installation at PaceWildenstein last year in which she filled one of those big, first-floor, Chelsea former garage spaces with plastic cups arranged into a translucent, imaginary topography.

Here’s a picture of it we took of it. All of that stuff in the center of the room is plastic cups, stacked up and piled next to each other.

Here’s one of me and Dad posing with it:

Mail Art to Twist

Twist Gallery in the Arcade is doing a mail art show this summer. All of the details are below. Make something and send it to them.

Mail Art Show

Twist Art Gallery

August 2007

For our 1^st Birthday, Twist Art Gallery announces a call for your small art! We are having a mail-art show this August. If you can make it and mail it, we will show it.
Deadline: Postmarked by July 15^th

Theme is Summer

Mail to:

Twist Art Gallery

73 Arcade

Nashville, TN 37219

Questions?

Email twist@twistartgallery.com

Your art will be shown in a gallery show August 4^th through 26^th, 2007.

Select art will be featured on www.twistartgallery.com.

Artwork will not be returned.

Twist Art Gallery reserves the right to control and curate the content of the exhibition.

Adrienne Outlaw on Watkins Senior Show

I really should do a post every time Adrienne runs a piece on WPLN. Her profiles only run so often -- it's not the kind of thing you crank out several a week or even a month. This time she reviews the current Watkins Senior show referenced in my last post a couple of weeks ago. I haven't gotten over there yet, but I’m in town this week and should be able to stop by. You can find Adrienne’s story on the WPLN front page now, and later on it’ll be in the archives. She's got some good photos from the exhibit. Looks and sounds good.

A new Watkins Senior show going up

The Watkins senior shows are always worth checking out, usually coming in groups at the end of the semester. This weekend Mahlea Jones, Debbie Kraski, and Elizabeth Moore open their show. I've seen a few of Mahlea's pieces over the years (and missed several chances to see her work in Off the Wall shows), and have always liked the look of them. The description in the press release talks about "using the allure of female visual and fragrant adornments." If it's not a typo (fragments of adornments or something like that), it sounds like she's doing something interesting like working in olfactory elements (like that Soares piece at Cheekwood with the lilies entombed in it). I think I've seen Debbie Kraski's work before, not sure, and pretty sure I haven't seen Elizabeth Moore's stuff. But from the PR description, she's unapologetically talking about God and grace, and I always want to see if people can really work with that and not end up with something trite, that basically invokes faith in place of craft and conceptualization in the production of art work.

The show opens on Friday (the 20th), the reception is 6-8.

Ganesh and Kumaresh

Just got back from a lovely concert at Sri Ganesha, Ganesh and Kumaresh, two brothers who both play violin. They’ve got an interesting thing going, integrating lots of Western elements—playing techniques, harmony, and counterpoint. Some pieces were very traditional, based on Carnatic song forms, but others sounded nearly like Western classical music. The brothers are both extremely virtuosic—they can play really fast, in tandem, and seemed to be having a great time. They made very effective use of short, abrupt figures, and they were accompanied by both mridangam and ghattam, so there was a lot of energy. In certain pieces they would use surprisingly Western techniques like having one violin accompany the other with a little pizzicato figure, something I don’t think you ever hear in Indian music, or harmonizing in thirds. Some of the ragas they chose had many characteristics of a major scale, and they seemed to play that up. On one piece where the percussion dropped out, the violin lines at times sounded like Ralph Vaughan Williams, say The Lark Ascending. It was something about the way some lines would end downwards, and the quiet, delicate fast passages slipped into this lyrical piece.

Sankaran Mahadevan says the brothers have not studied Western music, just picked up ideas from listening and working on it on their own. Well, it seems to work. Their cross-over use of Western elements in a fundamentally Indian context worked a lot better than what you usually get when you go the other direction and use ragas in a classical, pop or jazz piece. And even when the notes and counterpoint sounded very Western, the structure was still Indian. Pieces still ended with a typical sequence of gestures—a fast passage repeated several times, then a languid line, and maybe a final punch from the percussion. However, at the end of the day I think their more traditional pieces were more moving. The Westernized figures have an abstract quality that shaved off a little of the soulfulness.

Bennett Bean

Hearing that Bennett Bean was going to be at the Temple Arts Festival this weekend set off some serious nostalgia. In the 80s he was the happening potter—I remember people in the crafts world saving their pennies to get their hands on one of his pots. As I recall, and I might have this history wrong, he was one of the first people to make pots that were flashy, all bright colors and paint, and especially the little squares of gold leaf on them. The prevailing aesthetics of ceramics had been restrained, earth-toned surfaces, descended from the orderly Japanese-inspired aesthetic of someone like Bernard Leach or the rough-hewn action-pots of Peter Voulkos. Bean’s pieces had real eye candy quality, which in retrospect was very ‘80s. Probably too 80s. I’m more drawn to rougher, more tactile surfaces, and to pieces where glazes and the reactions of surface materials provide texture and pattern directly.

For example, the favorite piece in my collection is by Charles Bound (an American based in Wales). It’s got an asymmetrical shape, red glaze the color of red clay dirt sticks in flakes to the outside, which is covered with heavy grains of what looks like melted salt. All of these elements produce a continuously shifting variety of color and texture on surface, and give it a strong appearance, although the pot is relatively small and the walls thin. But it also seems fragile, as if parts will fall off in flakes, like the baking powder on the surface of Rusty Johnston’s paintings or on Becky Wehmer’s glass pieces. But so far the piece has stayed intact, and I’ve had it a number of years.

If you are going to the Temple Arts Festival, and especially if you are thinking of spending some money, check out Susan Maakestad’s paintings. (Here’s a link to an essay I wrote for the catalogue of a show she had last year.) Her work is lovely and complex.

Amanda Dillingham at Sarratt

Amanda Dillingham is showing work at Sarratt right now. The set of pieces constitutes incremental development from work she’s shown previously, although this may be the best chance I’ve had to see the range of ideas she is playing with. The show also includes Ben Matthew’s paintings of faux 19^th century posters and advertisements for improbable products like Mick’s Vacation Helmets, which transport you to a Wyoming mountainside thanks to what looks like a WWI vintage gas mask. His pieces go pretty well with Amanda’s but it’s her work I want to talk about.

Start with Amanda’s basic vocabulary: communion wafers, flowers, images of women (their bodies), bees/honey/honey combs. The elements in this limited set bring in several big phenomena and the relations between them—the church, women, the body, eating, making and producing food, self-sacrifice and self-denial, fruition, beauty. Self-sacrifice, the celestial dinner, these things mean one thing to the Church but something completely different when you bring women’s bodies into the picture. And make it clear that they are part of the story all along, even when erased.

This show has pieces or parts of pieces seen elsewhere, but I think there’s some new stuff too. To start on one wall, there’s a honey comb pattern made from communion wafers—the white, thin, tasteless lozenges—that Amanda has drawn flowers on in red ink. She’s used these wafers several times now, tattooing decoration and variability into something nearly featureless and almost perfectly uniform. On either side of the wafers are arrays of holy cards of female saints, everything except the flesh scraped away, meaning the cards are mostly blank except for faces, sometimes the hair, hands, and occasional feet or toes. This erasure on the cards goes to show how thoroughly the female body has to be kept under wraps. So many female serve as models of objects of devotion, but their bodies have to be sequestered for fear of breaking the spell.

Next there’s a sculpture of a shrouded female figure, called Mistress of Bees as if it were a non-canonical saint. It is made from beeswax molded into a large honeycomb pattern. The honeycomb pattern rules out detailed modeling of the figure or face, making it that much more ghostly. The statue has been drenched in honey, and dead bees and roses lie at its feet. It’s unappetizing, but still gives the idea of an overripe lusciousness.

On the next pedestal is a piece called Impregnated Host, which is a pretty literal description of what’s going on. It’s a pile of bread balls apparently made by treating communion wafers with yeast and baking them—un-unleavening them. The yeast makes the flat wafer rise and swell up, and in the baking process they got a toasty color. The point of communion wafers seems to be to make something to be eaten with no sensory pleasure. Turning the wafers into little buns makes them almost seem like something you would want to eat. Also, as they puff up the cruciform indentations on the wafers become more pronounced. They’ve been despoiled, taken out of their pristine, unleavened, virginal, perfect state into a state of fecundity. But it’s also the state bread is meant to have.

Finally, there’s the video of Lesley Patterson-Mark, Heather Spriggs Thompson, and I think Amanda’s sister each in turn eating a flower. This was the focal point of Amanda’s installation for the Judy Chicago project at Vandy last year. The footage is reversed, so they are actually shown issuing forth a flower, bit by bit, from their mouths. The women all go through the process differently. Lesley grimaces and lifts her eyebrows, mostly pulls the rose petals out of her mouth one or a few at a time. Heather is more deadpan, but she attacks the carnation stem directly with her mouth. Amanda’s sister (if I’ve got that right) also plucks petals from her mouth to make a tulip. It’s a process of generating beauty by reverse consumption, consumption with the pleasure element removed.

The common elements – women, flowers, bees, honeycombs, communion wafers – create a dense symbolic space which invokes all sorts of words and images. The Lord’s Supper. Take, eat, this is my body. Hail Mary, full of grace. The queen bee, entombed in the hive to be fed and reproduce. The cells of a honeycomb.

The other presence here is Will ClenDening. Amanda’s erased holy cards seem to me a tribute to her dear friend, who died less than a year ago in a motocycle accident in Dickson County. One of Will’s major pieces involved scratching off the printing from playing cards, leaving ghost cards and a pile of shavings. Amanda’s using the same technique here. It’s the best sort of tribute—look Will, here’s something I learned from you, but here’s what I’m going to do with it. I’m listening but not mimicking.

I wonder if she held onto the shavings for some future use.

Amanda’s in graduate school right now, and I wondered if this show would present more of break with her previous work. I don’t think it does, although it may be a fuller picture. I bet the results of her grad school growth aren’t ready yet (I could just ask). There can be a surprising lag between what you see and what the artist who made it is currently thinking about.

Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant Jesus

My lovely wife got me Aimard’s recording of Messaien’s monumental piano suite for my birthday. I’ve been wanting to get to know this piece for some time but have always put off buying a copy. So over the last two weeks I’ve been going through it for the first time. On purpose I didn’t read liner notes at all, not even the movement titles, just listened.

You expect a big piece like this to cover a lot of moods, still, it went places I didn’t expect. There was the tenderness one associates with traditional depictions of the Christ child, but some movements were aggressive and angular. Nearly the attacks of Beethoven. From a purely musical perspective this makes sense as a strategy to sustain almost 2 hours of music, but from a theological or devotional perspective it is more interesting. The music acknowledges a tremendous range in Christ, an infinitude, present even in the child. So much devotional music and poetry, whether hymns to Siva or Rumi’s contemplation of Allah, expresses the multiplicity of the divine by naming the God or describing it in as many ways as the artist can imagine. It’s a common trope. Even within that sort of approach, Messiaen seems to have more range, a willingness to include tones that are messy and harsh, bitter flavors as well as sweet. I thought of Pasolini’s portrait of Jesus in the Gospel According to St. Matthew.

Of course, Messiaen’s piece is also about the viewers, not just intrinsic and essential characteristics of God. The effect of the incarnation was to take God, who had been mostly ineffable except for isolated occasions of revelation, and provide a human form that anyone could look at—gaze upon. God became something/someone to be regarded in human space and time. The incarnation gave a new interface between divine and human—in the Christian scheme. Obviously, in other traditions like Hinduism, ancient Greece, Egypt, gods made themselves present in the world all along, available for viewing. Messiaen’s piece can also be seen as a portrait of multiple perspectives on a singular focal point which is not expressed directly.

I was surprised to see this was a relatively early piece (1944). On this first listen it had much to do with the late Saint-Francois. Some sections seemed to be built from one false resolution after another, extending out into the infinite. At times the musical language borders on cloying, but always redeemed by a shift or the revelation of false resolution. I’ve also been listening to Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande lately, and there is a strong continuity between the two. Some of it is certainly the role of whole tone scales for both composers. And a particular sweetness that comes naturally to both/

I wanted to take a leap and toss off these initial impressions of the piece. Maybe I’ll write more when I know the piece better.

Hunter and Chattanooga

I went up to Chattanooga yesterday to see the Carrie Mae Weems show at the Hunter Museum. It’s got to be the best looking city in Tennessee, with Lookout Mountain over it and the river curving through town. It’s been 10 years or more since I’ve been there. I think the pedestrian bridge from the Bluff View arts area to Frazier Avenue on the north bank is new. Chattanooga has done a great job of reclaiming their riverfront. It was a gorgeous day, warm and sunny, and there were tons of people out. Of course, on a pleasant day like this you’ve got to keep in mind that the place is overrun with Christianists. Actually, it’s pretty obvious. There was a new store going in on Frazier Avenue that was called fish something and looked like it was going to specialize in Christian gifts and jewelry. But being there, Bob Corker makes sense. He comes across as quite competent, and you can see that in the city—they’ve done a good job of building the city.

This was my first time at the Hunter. They’ve got a very attractive new wing (ca. 1995), and many nice pieces in their collection—a good, big Rauschenberg from 1975, an attractive Frankenthaler in reds and pinks, an interesting Hans Hoffman (no rectangles). Good contemporary works by Lorna Simpson, Leslie Dill, Robert Longo. And crafts – a spectacular Albert Paley wrought iron fence made for the first new wing in 1975, and lots of glass including one from William Morris, the ubiquitous Dale Chihuly and important people like Harvey Littleton and Howard Ben Tre.

My big discovery was a landscape in the Hudson River style of a storm in the Tennessee Valley. It was the pre-TVA river, wild and rocky. Three horsemen are in the mid-distance, still tiny in relation to the scene, negotiating a crossing. The clouds are moving through the valley, interspersed with breaks of sunlight. The painter was William C.A. Frerichs, whose dates are 1829-1905. He traveled and painted a lot in the South. Here’s the thing—Frerichs is my mother’s maiden name, not one you run across every day. The bio says he was Dutch, but my ancestors were from a German town close by, Etzel.

Seeing the Hunter, a museum with an actual and growing collection, makes you long for the same in Nashville. The Hunter doesn’t have a cache of old masters assembled a hundred years ago, but puts energy and money into buying contemporary art, art that is available. In Nashville, it is Cheekwood’s role to do collection building, and one can only hope that some day they will get to the point financially, and probably in mission clarity, to start acquiring comparable works.

Reunited with my books

My parents came to visit and loaded their car down with boxes of books of mine that have been in their possession for decades, in attics and storage spaces and any place else they could keep them out of the way. While I appreciated being able to use my folks as off-site storage all these years, looking into the boxes was to be reunited with parts of myself. I was sure I had a copy of The Cost of Discipleship, and periodically I’ve turned my house upside down looking for Call Me Ishmael. Now they are back in my home. It also reminds me of things I’ve forgotten about myself, like the fact that I own several books by Georg Lukacs, not just History and Class Consciousness. I had no memory of those. But owning them was a way of telling myself about a certain kind of intellectual atmospherics that I aspired to develop. Serious. Tough-minded. My mind didn’t necessarily form up that way.

And the books that looked interesting at the time. A collection of radical revisionist history essays. Various books on the crisis in higher education. When I picked up Do It by Jerry Rubin I probably had the idea it contained important clues about something, but now it’s an interesting artifact (pretty interesting in fact). And some things mean something more or different now. I've been reading Barth's book on Romans, so it's nice to realize I have a copy of his Outline of Dogmatics.

And delightful surprises. I was sure I had thrown out the copies of that Downbeat subscription I had in high school during the 70s, but no, I kept them, and here they are, with cover combinations like Andrew Hill and George Duke, or John Klemmer, Sam Rivers, and Leroy Jenkins. Now I remember—during various cleanup projects I thought about tossing them, but always decided against it. I’m a pack rat, but it’s going to give me a few moments of idle distraction now.

Nashville Arts Summit

I went by the Belcourt for two of the Arts Summit panels on Saturday. This was a more or less day long event organized by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt (Bill Ivey’s outfit). As I understand it the point of Saturday was to assemble a lot of folks from every part of the arts, get them to describe Nashville’s “assets” (assume they’re think Asset-Based Community Development) in their area, the barriers, and what should we do differently/new/in addition. For theater, visual arts, music, film and I don’t know what else they assembled a panel who spoke to this and then took questions from the audience. The Curb Center folks were writing it all down and I guess they are going to write a report and take it to Metro and whomever else will listen. I think it’s meant to be a followup on the arts survey that was done years ago (I think the Frist Foundation funded it) and was one of the things that led to the creation of the Frist Center.

The visual arts panel was not great. It was a small group, which should have worked out better than it did, and most of the comment were of the variety of “let me tell you about this great community arts program we have going.” Try to get more involved in the schools and in promoting arts education. Lots of nice advice about how to make a living as an artist here. One person (I think he was from the Nashville Composer’s Association) said we should bring the Artspace group from Minneapolis down to do an assessment of developing some artist live/work/performance space. Of course, he really pushed the idea that we need a 300-500 seat performance venue—and he was standing in the middle of one, the Belcourt’s 1925 hall, the original home of the Grand Old Opry. Of course, you have to sell a few tickets to pay the rent on the Belcourt.

The music panel was a lot better. It was all people who are involved in genres other than Country and Christian, and it included Alan Valentine from the Symphony and Carol Penterman from the Opera. The others were someone from the blues community, Lori Mechem from the Nashville Jazz Workshop, someone from the Americana Music Association, I think a bluegrass guy, and Chris Stenstrom from Alias.

Valentine in particular had some great ideas. One was to do a big festival covering a lot of genres, like Spoleto but a wider range. His main point was to start out big, do something the national music audience and press have to pay attention to, like the new hall. That made sense, even if everyone did get a little carried away—“look at the range of music on this stage, no other city can do this.” False. Just about any major city and lots of smaller ones. Although the panel didn’t represent our newer communities (for one, Sankaran Mahadevan wasn’t there), tons of cities can claim a lot more going on in a variety of Latino styles, strong local African scenes, etc. But it doesn’t really matter whether another city can do this. Nashville can. Why not. Just need some money. I hope they'll keep the Lincoln Center summer festival in mind, which every year has a really great global reach.

Valentine also talked about starting “the world’s best art school” in downtown Nashville. I don’t know if he was talking about secondary school or college. My guess is the former. Another good idea. Why not. The Ensworth School sprung up almost overnight.

One thing he brought up, and some other people made similar points, was the lack of media coverage for the arts. Now he started by acknowledging the Scene and saying we do pretty well because that’s what we’re there for, and that the Tennessean has gotten better. I was wondering if he was envisioning another media outlet, but I suspect he was more concerned with seeing the Tennessean give the arts more space in the daily, and maybe wanting to see more on TV. I have a feeling that for the Symphony and other big organizations, all that really matters are the big outlets, and I can imagine that’s frustrating.

The contributions from Valentine and Penterman on the music panel point to one problem with the visual arts panel—the Frist Center and Cheekwood really should have been there. One of the major gallery owners would have been good. I don’t know if they asked and got turned down, didn’t ask, etc. The music panel worked because it had the big guys and some smaller ones. That would have helped kick the visual arts discussion to a different level to deal with creating distinctiveness and stronger performance.

Alicia Henry and Sam Dunson show at Watkins

Watkins is opening a show on Saturday of work by Sam Dunson and Alicia Henry. It’s sort of a change of pace for the college’s gallery, a show by two artists not affiliated with the school. They picked well. Sam and Alicia Henry are two of the “fill-in-the-adjective” artists – best, hottest, most well regarded. You pick. They are both African-American and teach at TSU and Fisk respectively. I don’t think they’ve ever done a joint show, and that should be interesting. Henry works with all sorts of materials, creating cutouts of people and things from fabric or paper that lie somewhere between sculpture and pictures, and making sculptural forms like a series of whisk brooms that have pictorial qualities from hanging pretty flat to the wall. Sam is a pure painter (although there are constructed aspects to some of his works). He has a keen figurative imagination and a thing for story-telling, but he’s someone who keeps questioning and looking for next steps. Last time I saw some of his work was in the final days of In The Gallery this Fall. It will be interesting to see what he brings to this show.

It doesn’t look like Watkins is doing an opening for the show, but there is a closing reception and talk on March 30.

Musical innovation courtesy of the US Navy

A friend of mine is in the process of making funeral arrangements for his father who died recently. He was a Navy vet, and they are giving him an honor guard and the other trappings that go with that. But one thing’s been a problem—finding a bugler to play taps. The Navy can’t find someone, and my friend’s family doesn’t want them to come in and just set a boom box down on a chair. Apparently this is not an uncommon dilemma, because the Navy has a solution. To quote my friend: “they've got a fake horn with a microchip, amp and speaker inside. The sailor holds it up to his lips and presses a button. Taps comes out.” Go here to check it out and place your order.

First of all, this has got to be another example of how people used to know how to do stuff they just can’t do now. There’s no way buglers did it full time. It must have been just the job of someone in the unit. Maybe the guy who played cornet in high school band. But now there’s no one around who can figure out how to buzz their lips enough to get those few notes out.

It’s also so fitting that there’s a technological solution. Why get someone to learn how to do something when you can pay a contractor $500. It doesn’t really save much effort, because someone still has to stand there and hold the thing. But demand is hopping—the website talks about backorders.

I love the imitation of someone playing the bugle. It’s the same as a boom box—actually it might sound less like a bugle depending on the source file and the amplification. But what matters is there’s some guy standing there, pretending like he’s doing something. They should just get a guy in uniform to hoist a boom box on his shoulder. But I guess that wouldn’t provide, in the words of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense John M. Molino, “a dignified 'visual' of a bugler playing Taps, something families tell us they want."

Call me when they've got one programmed with Clifford Brown solos. Now that would solve a problem I've got.

Frida Kahlo print at Frist

On Sunday I did a quick walk through the Mexican prints on the second floor of the Frist. I need to spend time with it. Among all the serious, socially conscious figures of peasants and workers (I will look at them and feel virtuous), two prints stuck out. One is a Frida Kahlo print, called El Aborto or The Miscarriage that she did after having a miscarriage. It’s a picture of her, with a fetus inside, another fetus or baby outside attached to her with the umbilical cord, some strange things that look like they could be scientific drawings of a zygote splitting, and a bunch of plants, blood or tears flowing down one of her legs. If you like Lesley Patterson-Marx’s stuff, you should see this. The combination of images, their arrangement. It’s like Lesley’s aesthetic grandmother. And right next to it is this wild Diego Rivera piece that seems out of character for him. It’s called The Communicating Vessels, a tribute to Andre Breton. Tree roots encircle the mouth and branches wind into the eye sockets of a face whose brain sits exposed on the forehead, in the third eye position. It’s done in real strong red and black and looks like it could be the poster for a rock show.

Terry Thacker is one impressive guy

Terry was on a panel discussion at Downtown Presbyterian Church yesterday, the topic was sacrifice and the death penalty in keeping with this year’s DIG show theme. It was a good group, moderated by David Dark, and the other panelists (other than Terry, who if you don't know is chair of the Fine Arts department at Watkins) were Rocky Horton from the Lipscomb art department, Harmon Wray, who directs a program in Faith and Criminal Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Josh Perry, a medical ethicist from Vandy, Jewly Hite, who writes for the Scene some and other places, plays music, and is getting a degree at the Vandy Div School, and Stacy Rector, the Exec Director of TCASK, probably the main groups trying to get rid of the death penalty in Tennessee. It really was too big a panel because one wants to hear what all of these people have to say.

So everybody had something interesting to say, but Terry took things to a different level, contrarian up to a point and erudite. I can’t do justice to his remarks, but he challenged religion for purveying dead, codified forms. He sees art as having the role of breaking down those dead forms to recover conversation and intimacy. It is the role of art to replace these monolithic systems with truncated forms that allow room for the conversation, and this is the foundation for polis (very pleased to hear him reference polis, not sure if he had Olson in mind). True religion, and art, want to destroy the things that get in the way of genuine polis—Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed when they stopped functioning in the way a city should as a human system. Art confronts the dead forms with semiotic violence, deploying a “mobile army of metaphors” in Nietzsche’s words (quoted by Terry, not something I came up with). He also touched on a great quote from Heidegger, to “joyfully dance outside the house of Being.”

The panel (and people in the audience who spoke) seemed uniformly opposed to the death penalty, and there was a lot of agreement that support for it is just mystifying. Terry turned that discussion upside down by forcing an acknowledgement that there is a reason why the death penalty is so compelling, even though its stated purposes (deterrence, closure for victims) start to spring leaks as soon as they are subject to scrutiny or facts. Using the insights of someone engaged with art, he pointed out that the death penalty has a symbolic purpose that is still powerful, although it qualifies as an ossified symbol that no longer serves its purpose. The only way to challenge its hold on society is to break it down on a semiotic level. This struck me not as being a naïve assertion of the power of art to change people’s hearts, but a fairly pragmatic invitation to join a necessary sort of culture war that started from a clear-eyed assessment of social truths.

This is not the first time Terry has said things that caused me to sit and take notice.

Again none of this is take away from the other panelists. In particular, I was pleased to see Stacy participating just because I’m very glad she’s taken over as Executive Director of TCASK. She’s smart and articulate, and I have the sense that she will bring something of a pastoral spirit to the problem (she’s an ordained Presbyterian minister). I also think it reflects well on the Presbyterian Church that she has found her call for now in this role. It’s a good place for a collective prophetic voice.

Good and Bad

Last Friday I got a chance to play in a group Ben Marcantel put together to do music for a screening of a video piece of his. The film was great, lots of color and patterns evolving and spinning around, spiders from the backyard, good goofy parts. The playing was really fun. Ben on guitar, his wife Amy on vibes and voice (she was going to play keys too, but didn't get around to it), Ryan Norris on Fender Rhodes, and a friend of theirs from South Carolina, Casey, on drums. Ben and Amy had worked out modes for each of four sections that went through whole tone scales, major scale, mixolydian mode, a modified harmonic minor, and a couple of pentatonic things. I like structuring stuff this way -- not too much, but something. Things were also shaped a lot by Ben's playing. He had a definite sense of the arc he was looking for. His playing reminded me of the French player Raymond Boni's sound on Joe McPhee albums. Not a bad thing to be reminded of Joe McPhee.

I played soprano, which gets to the bad part. I was also going to play tenor, but before the show I dropped my mouthpiece on the concrete floor of the theater. It bounced several times in slow motion, and sure enough, when it stopped there was a big chip off the tip. This has been my mouthpiece for 30 years, a Herb Couf J10*S that I got when I got the Couf/Keilwerth tenor I play. It was my sound, it was me, and now it's gone. I'm not a particularly big gear head, but as near as I can tell this mouthpiece is very rare. I never see it listed on comparison charts. I suspect Couf just made it for a little while in the 70s. It's a weird one, with a very small chamber (takes an alto ligature), a very high baffle and a wide opening.

Here's a couple of pictures of the mouthpiece in its post-mortem state. You can see the big chip in the bottom picture.

I know I'll get over this and find something that gets me back to a sound I want. I picked up a Berg mouthpiece on Saturday that'll be OK, might even be good with the right ligature and reeds, and I'll keep looking. But for now it's RIP to this mouthpiece, thanks for 30 years.

This weekend's Arcade openings

This month’s round of openings at the Arcade galleries features the first collaboration by two of Nashville’s best proponents of performance art, Heather Spriggs-Thompson and Quinn Dukes. They both are interested in the conflicts and tensions of women’s experience, which can translate in their hands into a collision of traditional feminine qualities with downright messiness—you are never surprised to see either one end a performance covered in goo, ashes, or dirt. The title of their piece at Twist is “Eros and Thanatos: Between,” a consideration of the love and death principles that dance with each other and which Heather and Quinn will play out in a sort of pas de deux all along the Arcade balcony. They are scheduled to start the piece at 6:00 and are planning to let it play out over 3 hours, although they are never sure how long they will sustain a piece. There's an endurance quality to performance art.

Elsewhere in the Arcade, SQFT presents prints by Chicago-based artist Shawn Stucky--he's got strong connections with bands and has a kind of old-timey surrealist style that fits well the tone of a lot of smart bands. Dangenart opens its annual juried show, which reliably attracts intersting young artists from around the country whom we haven't seen before.

As usual, the gallery openings will run from 6-9 on Saturday. (March 3). Downtown Pres is having a pot luck before all of that, with a preview of the annual DIG Art Show in the Fellowship Hall. You enter on the 5th Avenue side of the building.

Also, I'm playing tonight for a film by Ben Marcantel tonight at Watkins. There's a reception at 7:30 and the film starts at 8:00. I got together with Ben yesterday to try out what he wants to do musically and it was a lot of fun.