Dennis Hollingsworth

Currently...

Ooh. You make me so angry!

The Illmatic is Back!

Or so I had hoped. But no. Wishful thinking.

I was checking in to Kim Jong Ill's site, he hasn't posted for a while now. As far as I could tell, there was a case of plagerism that interrupted his blog or something like that.

There are some moral problems with the rendition of a dictator in terms of cuteness, but this humor seems to just float away from a sensible sanction.

But I was bummed that that blogger checked out, it's been a year now. Funny, funny stuff.

Take a look, this the last post as KJI's blogger voice on August 11th, 2003 before it shifted to instant messaging and dialog scripting:

Holy cow so I finally saw that James Bond movie. Well, the first half anyway. I just got a Describeable Video Disc player from some foreigner I kidnapped. I mean I didn?t kidnap him myself, you know, I have people to do that sort of thing for me. Errand boys, military commandos, call them what you will; I call them Hey You.

Hey You could be a Korean name. ?Hae-Yu.? Okay maybe not quite. Chinese, perhaps. ?Heyu.?

?Heyu Tsang, nice to meet you. Hi, how are you, I?m Heyu. Heyu Tsang.? If I ever give birth to illegitimate Chinese children I will name one Heyu. I?m not saying I?m going to have illegitimate Chinese children--?cause god knows I?ve got enough illegitimate Korean children, Ha! Ha! Ha!--I?m just saying, if.

So where was I. Oh yeah, the James Bond movie. Yeah! It was set in North Korea! Wooooo! Party people! Woooooo!

I was surprised and delighted by how accurate some parts were. Like the beginning. I mean we totally have all those high-tech rifles and hovercrafts and fast, pointy cars. Like that pointy orange car in the beginning, that is just a taxi here. We have many, many of those.

What we don?t have are Korean people that turn white. That was so scary, right? Oh my god! Like when Rick Yune was running around with blue eyes I got so scared! I was kind of hiding behind my blanket, you know? So scary! I liked him better in ?Fast and Furious.?

?Fast and Furious,? that was another screenplay I wrote that Hollywood stole. One of my commandos liked my script so much he brought it with him on a mission to America and lost it somewhere in Los Angeles, and obviously the right people found it. They are thieves. All of those cars in the movie are North Korean, you know. Except ours go even faster. We are faster and furiouser.

Hmm, Faster and Furiouser. I like that. I think I just got an idea for a sequel.

So yes, overall I liked the first half of the James Bond movie. Though I will say the torture scene was kind of underdone. I mean god, it looked like a job interview to me. We don?t really have job interviews under Communism but I like to do them once in a while; it?s a great way to humiliate somebody in a new, interesting way. I like to keep it fresh.

Well, I have to go. I told my Hey You?s I would kill one of them as an example to the others and, well, today?s the day.

Tonight.

It's a familiar feeling, that disatisfaction in the making of something like this. Always, there are things I like and things I don't and each accumulating action in the making of the thing tries to maximize the former and minimise the latter. That means that you therefore proceed with caution, trying not to disturb the leaves as they fall.

I'm not saying that this painting dissatisfies, but that the act of making it negotiates with a feeling of disatisfaction and if things are going well, that feeling of lack is moderated until it is finally gone (an evolving ratio of like over dislke mentioned above), usually with a crescendo and finale that caps the whole experience. Caps it positively, else I take out the big knives and scrape the whole thing off and start again.

And concentric ovals will always look like eyes, either in the familiar horizontal pairing, or singly, or sideways, or in a multitude. I always insert them after scooping out a chunk or undesireable patch... one disk on top of the other... the higher the stack, the more the visual screw. But the purpose wasn't to plug ojos onto the mass, it was to bring a difference to the trend of blue, yellow and green that was premominate in the work, to do this without eliminating that color and massing story. So I scooped out the parts that were... redundant (I'm not sure of that term, but so far it works) and inserted disks of black and white, knowing that they would spike up the visuality of those areas. I have this theory of a "corona effect" of when a structure such as the stacked disks or the "monads" (spikey balls) (what used to be called daubs) of paint that is sufficiently articulated, can heighten the visuality of the area surrounding it. A visual corona.

In other words... I didn't set out to paint a flounder.
(A rim shot if you please, Mr. bandleader!)

UPDATE: Stephanie walked by and said "Hmmm, Laker Colors.". That's right, it's all about the Lakers.

Currently...

Rip and Curl. Maybe I'm a surfer. Toes grip the edge stylin'.

Social Network Analysis

Wretchard from the Belmont Club wrote about Social Network Analysis, by Vladis Krebs:

Social Network Analysis is a mathematical methodology for connecting the dots -- using science to fight terrorism. Connecting multiple pairs of dots soon reveals an emergent network of organization. Once you have a network map, you can measure parts of the network, or the whole, using social network metrics.

I used public information, from major newspapers on the WWW, to map the terrorist networks. In the network map above, the hijackers are color coded by the flight they were on. The dark grey nodes are others who were reported to have had direct, or indirect, interactions with the hijackers. The gray lines indicate the reported interactions -- a thicker line indicates a stronger tie between two nodes. Notice the clustering around the pilots.

The graphic came from Orgnet. It'd be interesting to apply this analysis to the artworld (eh... the interest would likely probably wear off quickly). Especially after Paul Schimmels' MOCA LA show "Public Offerings" and the tacit admission that the artworld as a system is the only valid subject (so says the intelligencia) for making art (shades of the artist as courtier!). Check this out, from Jerry Saltz in ArtNet:

That world has been compared to a machine, a circus, a cult and a club; it's been called a brothel, a dinner party and a high school with money. I called it a trading floor in 1999. In 2001, ultra-observant Frieze magazine publisher Amanda Sharp declared it "a wounded animal." Regardless, the city's art world is expanding, and money is conspicuous. Idealists open galleries to add to the discourse but are often turned into selling machines. Artists go from unknown to mainstream overnight. Youth is worshipped. Art fairs proliferate, although many who participate say they hate them. The underground is vanishing. Consensus stands in for criticality. Avoidance and denial are everyday things. Private dissatisfaction is rampant, yet this discontent turns passive in public. So many people have so much invested in the system that the New York art world feels as if it's trapped in a paradigm it can't escape.

He goes on to write about a "Super Paradigm"... but I think it's wishful thinking. I'd rather call it a "Super Interregnum".

Hat Tip: Mat Gleason's blog. Happy Birthday, Mat.

Berman on Che

I read everything Paul Berman writes. This, from his article in Slate:

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction,

I remember wearing a Che t-shirt when I was a kid. The graphic was easy and appealing to a kid who liked to draw people. The image was simple as outline implied volume, the graphic appeal when simplicity implies complexity. I remember thinking of him as an expression of good qualities, something like independence, strength, integrity, freedom, a macho virtue with a conscience... how wrong I was. Clueless.

Here's s'more from the Slate article:

The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Ra?l Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.

These Cuban events have attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals and liberals around the world. V?clav Havel has organized a campaign of solidarity with the Cuban dissidents and, together with Elena Bonner and other heroic liberals from the old Soviet bloc, has rushed to support the Cuban librarians. A group of American librarians has extended its solidarity to its Cuban colleagues, but, in order to do so, the American librarians have had to put up a fight within their own librarians' organization, where the Castro dictatorship still has a number of sympathizers. And yet none of this has aroused much attention in the United States, apart from a newspaper column or two by Nat Hentoff and perhaps a few other journalists, and an occasional letter to the editor. The statements and manifestos that Havel has signed have been published in Le Monde in Paris, and in Letras Libres magazine in Mexico, but have remained practically invisible in the United States. The days when American intellectuals rallied in any significant way to the cause of liberal dissidents in other countries, the days when Havel's statements were regarded by Americans as important calls for intellectual responsibility?those days appear to be over.

I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, as the Sundance audience did, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba?will ever lift a finger on behalf of the Cuban liberals and dissidents. It's easy in the world of film to make a movie about Che, but who among that cheering audience is going to make a movie about Ra?l Rivero?

This is the t-shirt I should have worn when I was a kid:

The blogger Merde in France has a more cutting comment on the cult of Che.

UPDATE: Go Aznar:

He spoke at a meeting of the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, which is examining ways to support resistance to Fidel Castro's regime

Participants highlighted the case of Raul Rivero, a dissident journalist and author who was arrested in March 2003 along with 74 others in a crackdown on the opposition.

"There's nothing to justify that people like Raul Rivero should be imprisoned just because they wrote a critical poem against a dictator," Aznar said.

UPDATE2: Check out this 1967 Guardian Article on Che, the last eye witness.

UPDATE3: This post from Bad Hair Blog sums it all up pretty well:

Now we have a romanticized story coming to a cinema near you, telling us of Che's "strength and tenderness", along with articles from his loving daughter in the newspaper of record. No less obscene than the worst pornography, the lyrical and beautiful film's become a Sundance Festival and Cannes Festival success. How ironic that the film synopsis reads "Their experiences at the colony awaken within them the men they will later become by defining the ethical and political journey they will take in their lives".

It is estimated that Che Guevara sent to the firing squads some 15,000 Cubans. Untold number of people died in Cuba, Central America, Bolivia and Congo from his guerrila wars. The real number might never be known.

No movie will be made from their stories.

Good Stuff: Schutz & Moody

I've just bumped into a site on Dana Schutz' paintings:

"My paintings are loosely based on meta-narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lives become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lives, people who make things, people who are made, and people who have the ability to eat themselves. Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don?t exist, objects transcend their function, and reality is malleable."
- Dana Schutz, January 2004

I found it after finding Tom Moody's blogsite:

I have an animated .GIF in the online exhibition "Sunday Afternoon," curated by MatCh-Art (Matthew Fisher and Christina Vassallo). The show of approximately 25 artists, described as "an interdisciplinary exploration of leisure, love and obligations," showcases, among other things, what Jerry Saltz has called "puberty escapism" and what I would call the The New Dumb Little Painting, a style sweeping New York, if not the world. I don't mean the term disparagingly at all: antecedents would be Laura Owens and Karen Kilimnick and the reigning queen, I suppose, would be Dana Schutz (even though her paintings aren't very little). The style is marked by faux naive paint handling, disguising sharp, emotionally punchy, and/or socially-tinged observations; MatCh-Art and its earlier incarnations specialize in fairly intimate and ambiguous twists on the genre.

Going for a Walk

Last week, Stephanie took Robbie and I out of the studio for a breather. She knew of a walk up to see a tower (torre) nearby in the hills overlooking Tossa. here are a few pics:

Getting up the hill.

The view... I can't spot our house, but it's just past the church. This is what you see from the base of the tower.

Afterward, we trek toward the "mirador", over the hill towards the palisade that forms the bluff at the water's edge.

Robbie for the ages.

Robbie takes the couple shot. I look like hammered sh-t though.
(Then I remind myself of Dennis' maxim?: "If you compare yourself to what you used to look like, you will always be depressed... but if you compare yourself to what you will look like... you will look marvelous!")

We peer over the cliff...

And back down we go...

A last bit of the summer for the cove "Codolar".

MonkeeDo

My project with Robbie is over... at least the big burst we had to do to get it started. Robbie is going to take it from here and we will continue long distance. Sorry about the operational security, it's the nature of the business. If it all goes well, you'll be the first to know.

I had always thought it would be fun to collaborate with Robbie, and lo! It was an unusual opportunity for me, and I had to jamb it into my schedule, chewing up a week of time, my schedule packed with many good things already. But I had learned alot. Like my grandfather used to say: "Knowledge takes up no space in the mind". (I think it is a Spanish saying.) Besides, my shipment of paint supplies was becoming ridiculously late (they arrived last night).

The monkee? It's from the efforts of the previous owner of our house, Tito. He, like many people here, paints. If they aren't amateur painters, they are amateur poets (more often than not). Here, Tito was wielding enamels long before the fashion to do so in the artworld.

;-)

MonkeeDone.

SPAM BOTS FROM HELL

I've been swamped in spam bots in the comments section. I'm trying to clean them up... usually I get a few of them per day. Today, I've got about four hundred infesting my comment section. I've been under the hood of this machine and I've tinkered witht he settings, hoping to put a stop to it. I'd hate to turn off the comments... I've enjoyed the spontaneous comments from people about the paintings, especially the attaboys and virtual handshaking.

The bots deliver html for their website, here's a sample:

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

and another:

You might just take Bertrand Russell on a beach holiday, as I once did; but Kant, never.

The spammer seems to have gone to college... what a waste of a mind.

UPDATE: Robbie had an observation. The ultimate effect of the SpamBots aren't as pernicious as I had thought. Effectively, they pad the comment section, and the density is much less than the popular bloggers get with real comments anyway (at least now, but what happens over time?). And the canned comments they insert could almost pass for a philosophical comment if you aren't looking too close. It would look as if I had a bigger audience than I really do... and in these days where artists are busy trying to BRAND themselves, how could it hurt?

DUNNO.

I guess I will weed the garden anyways.

Top Secret

Our friend Robbie Kinberg is here for a couple of weeks to collaborate on a project together. Operational security for this thing is set very high, muy seccreto, mis amigos... can't tell you about it yet... hush hush, on the QT...

I'd love to drop hints and tease... but I'd best not do it.

After all, loose lips sinks ships.

Progress Report: Los Vecinos

Continuing to monitor the progress of the construction next door, here is a report for you. As an aside, the construction crew had an accident that stopped the jobs over most of the summer. It seems that as they were pouring concrete and vibrating it into place, the worker handling the vibrator was shocked and had to be taken to the hospital. Whoopsy daisy.

Here's a couple of pics of yesterday's work:

Works on Paper

Finally, here are some works on paper I've been thinking aloud with...

These two were painted on supports that were previous scrape offs. I like the red ground, it reminds me of the Greek vases from antiquity, figures in black suspended in atmospheric vermillion.

These were extensions of the open architecture of the last few paintings in Mark M?ller's Gallery: A marblized fling and subsequent srape off, prints, smooges, taps, monads throughout, stomps... the yellow was to bring the tone up key a bit.

This one was a turn away from the open architecture, back to old school with the screed of paint forming the background and what is nearer to drawing to initiate the painting. The figure is more evident here with delineations that give it away here and there. But there is a confusion that is barely resolved by the green stomps. So I tried again...

Here, I discover a way to draw with cut paper laid over sediments of paint, essentially a decalcomania (Max Earnst's term for laying paper into wet paint and peeling it up again... DeKooning did that too, paper as an equal to the brush).

Back to the open architecture thing. I still like the clot and crush of paint, but if I am to see the first marbled daubs, the skein has to be a net of marks and not a clot and scrum front and center.

Most Definitely Preoccupied

The following sentence is a classic line in the bloggerverse:

Sorry about the lite postings lately...

Yep, things are popping here, lots of stuff to do... done. I've been building a reserve of posts that will erupt pretty soon, so please stay tuned: A visit from a VIP, a good friend is staying with us for a couple of weeks to collaborate on a secret project, I've got several works on paper to show you, I've got a few pics from the constructioin site next door, Kiko gave me a skin diver's flashlight for night diving adventures, I have a couple of pics to show you of that.... ?MUCHAS COSAS PARA MIS AMIGOS!

In the meantime, check out this article and ask yourself why the USA shouldn't consider joining the EU someday. (I found it on this very excellent site: we-make-money-not art)

A Poco Preoccupado

I check out Mat Gleason's blog from time to time to get a feel for LA. Here's his latest:

By my count, there were 59 openings at art galleries last night. Throw in MOCA's reception for their Robert Smithson show and you get an eeven 60. This is not counting almost two dozen other openings Friday or seven today.

In the last several years of living in Los Angeles, I've given up on seeing all of the art openings in the city. After a while, all that culture starts to spill out of hand, too much of a good thing. Even if you concede that openings are social cookers and resolve therefore to see the art afterwards, thereby doubling the commute to do both... the ambient pressure (the dinosaurs like Baldasari reflexively do the rounds like a retired nightwatchman who can't sleep at night) to be "professional" and double-attend the shows becomes crushing as the number of shows grows so large.

Studio, family, jobs, life... How can one do it all?

You can't. It's not only a bigger artworld, but one must realise that there are many artworlds, and only a few make the shortlist. In some ways, the artworld is as big as it ever was (I'm thinking of say, early New York, where you can see all the shows in an evening walk in SoHo), it's just that there's a thick peel of other artworlds that have expanded like foam. Tunnelilng into the culture-verse become unavoidable as it grows like the blob.

UPDATE:
Stephanie alerted me to this article concerning NY fashion week:

There are 169 shows on the eight-day bill, which ends Wednesday, and to see them all you would need eyes not only in the back of your head but also at the sides, since many shows have to run concurrently to avoid the possibility that people will be looking at sundresses at midnight.

It's a big world, isn't it?

And as an aside, the article makes a couple of other points:

The runways have become a platform for anyone with a sewing machine and a press agent, a sequined version of "The Apprentice." But for designers like Mr. de la Renta or Ralph Lauren, who have done the most to raise American fashion's profile in the world, the shows offer a strange repudiation: the spotlight has shifted to the young and unknown, many of unproven talent.

interesting...

Markus' Studio

Earlier, I wrote about visiting Markus Weggenman's studio shortly before departing Z?rich. Markus was kind enough to send me these jpegs.....

I thought I would play with this here computer and see if I can point out a few things in Markus' fotos:

M51

These times have been about a slow regeneration in the studio and the life that surrounds and supports it. My friend Marcus Adams used to say that to get anything done in the studio, you have to let the rest of your life fray (laundry, fast food, the stuff you have to knit together daily for survival). And while I do not believe in this literally and therefore I believe in applying tension to the equation of life and art. If not, one can become a monster or somehow distorted from the lack of temper... and surely there are many practices in art (studio and otherwise) that reconfigure the equation... but when I get into it in the studio- and by this I mean the heat of painting, not the prelimiinary motions of the beinning and not the final clean up -life takes a holiday. It has to be this way.

And maybe it is because painting (for me) is like an ascent on Everest*, it is best that it is hard lest I linger at the top too long as life frays and disintegrates intolerably. Here I am after the Z?rich show, setting up the first base camp for my next technical climb: the show in K?ln early next year.

I am also knitting:

Spanish (Castelleno) class. I remember a story about a teacher who was becoming bitter about "teaching alone". You need active participants or else a teacher becomes a babysitter. A charade. Right now, our language instruction is at a tipping point, and we've got to push into it with some homework. It was so easy to prioritize the show in the past few months, and even though there are terrific obligations I have arranged recently (one must accomodate fortune)... but now the tide has to lap back onshore. That means doing some old fashion rote memorization and habla-ization (talkin') conjuntos (together). We still speak too much English together at home, within the home. That'll change with practice and a little more vocabulary.

The floors. Ther's been a light cement (mortar) film over the floors, first and third (top) and we had to take a day and a half in an semi elaborate procedure involving acid baths to wash them clean. That's done. The top floor is looking good: a small timber framed room with three sides of white plastered stone and the fourth wall is glass and wood and doors that open out onto a big terrace, a view that frames the hill and the lighthouse on top of it all. We bought a light at a local store (the owner dropped heavy hints that we should learn Catalan) and the room is dellightful.

I was going to go on, and write about the big root I've just pulled out of the well and how I soiled it and how I made ammendsn with the neighbor and how we've imporved the computing and whatever. Better not to. I'm not a Llileks type, you know.

This blog is about the studio after all.

*Do I accept this simile entirely? Is painting like belly surfing in a muddy river delta? Is paintig like an afternoon paseo? Is painting like washing a car? Is painting like snorkeling into underwater tunnels that you have no idea how long they run as the tidal surge thrusts you against the sharp and encrusted rock and maybe you might not make it as you trail the flash of Kiko's light?

Yea. All that.

It's not easy but you've got to have the chops to make the difficult look like a lark. And chops can erode in days, thus a little anxiety.

The image? M51, through RefDesk.com, I think to a site called "Astronomy picture of the day". Good stuff.

PruessPress.com

My good friend Joel Mesler from ChinaTown Los Angeles has booted up the PruessPress website, thus realizing a dream of creating a publishing activity, the latest form of art in the expanded field. The animating idea of our times is the ability to do more with less, and now Joel and his team (see the credits on the site: Mark, Tif, Tony, Rabbi Milkblood and a cast of near hundreds...) is able to renew the printing/publishing house artworld entity (the legacy of the great LA print houses such as Cirrus and Gemini Gel) with a nimble and natural (emphasise on the latter) un-strategy based on keeping it real (with a vengance).

Check it out and download the music, it's free and flowing. There's a lot of good stuff on it (good, then as you listen, it becomes great), especially Mark Stan Rogel and Rabbi Milkblood's vocalizados:

Well, listen for a moment lads
Hear me tell my tale!
Across the seas from England
I was condemned to sail...

The journey found me giulty and
Says the judge, says he
Ah, for life Jim Jones
We're sending you across the stormy seas...

I want to get a gig for them here in Tossa, maybe radio Tossa and a live performance in Ramon's basement of the bus station.

It's great to see friends noodle into their curiosities and fry up an offering such as this website. Joel's going to take this publisher's thing very far, this is just the beginning. He's already got an art print activity threaded (we collaborated last Fall) and downloadable movies are on the way.

Wirelessness

Here it comes:

Software giant Microsoft has unveiled a string of initiatives and new products designed to take on Apple's iPod and position the company for a world in which it sees consumers buying films, music and TV shows online before beaming them around the house and watching them on the move.

Bring it on.

Good Stuff

Check it out...

Has anyone seen this on LA cable tv? This, a review from LA Weekly's Doug Harvey:

When I first saw Let?s Paint TV, I was almost certain that this was a clever parody of the Bob Ross tradition of painting programs, perpetrated by some CalArts performance or video graduate who had never touched a brush in his life. Kilduff?s tone is slippery and a little sarcastic, and he was doing a portrait of some kind of rowdy street freak (probably another cable-access host), using what appeared to be an enormous house-painting brush. Later shows introduced a very peculiar array of models and still-life objects ? 99-cent-store toy insects, a clown dressed as Uncle Sam on stilts (who chased the artiste around the studio), a thrift-store ceramic bust of JFK and, for four entire episodes, a potty-mouthed Saddam Hussein brought in to experience the rehabilitative power of painting practice. It all smacked of prankish subversion. The problem was, Kilduff was too good. In spite of the zany antics and rough-hewn, possibly naive expressionism of the images, you could tell this guy had pushed some paint around.

And SpiderMan reviews Crayola Crayons (via Mat Gleason):

My oh my, can it be? Is it true? Do I have before me the ultimate crayon? The crayon to end all crayons? Have I found...black gold?

Posted by Dennis at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)