Dennis Hollingsworth

Ahora

Please Stand By

Ahora

Please Stand By

Image Source.

Rapids

(Scroll up and down repeatedly to approximate the actual experience.)

(Scroll up and down repeatedly to approximate the actual experience.)

Please Stand By

Passage to the Sky

Hiroshi opens tonight at Tomio's place.

Please Stand By

Image source.

Parti

I'm listening to Melvyn Bragg this morning:

SYMMETRY

Today we will be discussing symmetry, from the most perfect forms in nature, like the snowflake and the butterfly, to our perceptions of beauty in the human face. There's symmetry too in most of the laws that govern our physical world.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described symmetry as one of the greatest forms of beauty to be found in the mathematical sciences, while the French poet Paul Valery went further, declaring; ?The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect?.

The story of symmetry tracks an extraordinary shift from its role as an aesthetic model - found in the tiles in the Alhambra and Bach's compositions - to becoming a key tool to understanding how the physical world works. It provides a major breakthrough in mathematics with the development of group theory in the 19th century. And it is the unexpected breakdown of symmetry at sub-atomic level that is so tantalising for contemporary quantum physicists.

So why is symmetry so prevalent and appealing in both art and nature? How does symmetry enable us to grapple with monstrous numbers? And how might symmetry contribute to the elusive Theory of Everything?

Contributors

Fay Dowker, Reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London

Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford

Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick

Ahora

Some context here.

Ahora

Went to the openings last night, missed some (there's too much going on at once in this city, I guess that's good), late night, drank too much bad wine. Sunday morning. Five asprin, won ton soup, curtains half closed and with the music turned up, I've got a handfull of vermilion to deal with.

More hablaba later.

Paper Bombs in the LAWeekly

Peter Frank is a gentleman as always.

Ahora

Study War

I went to the UCLA antiterrorism conference last week and took a few videos, the one above was taken by someone else who had a better shot from a seat closer to the podium. You can see my videos here, here, here, and here., such as they are. Wafa Sultan is an amazing speaker, forceful and without pretension. While Daniel Pipes and Yaron Brook emphasised war (that the only way to prevail is to possess the willingness to prevail... implacability), Wafa Sultan insists in her own quiet way that Islam/the Muslim world needs a reformation, that only Muslims can fight Islamfascists. I have long thought that we can only fight a holding action until a true civil war erupts in the Ummah itself.

After the conference came the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech. If one can put aside the mediated political dimension of suicide bombing (it's probably wrong to do so, but I'm exercising artifice here to make a point), it is striking how the Virginia event resembles a terrorist action. Columbine, the Oklahoma City bombing the list gets uncomfortably long. In terms of sheer mayhem, the high bar has been set by Beslan and there is no reason not to anticipate a monster with ambition would try to surpass that standard. I used to read New Perspecitves Quarterly back in the late 80's and I remember the assertion there of the idea that since we are living in an age where people can do more with less, they/we can also do more damage with less as well we can do good. Once you yoke this potential with a utopian ideology to get closer to Allah via global sharia law, you have the classic force multiplier that brings on a 21st century perfect storm. Grimly, I am suggesting a continuum-- from teenage revenge fantasies to axe grinding atavistic throwbacks, that "doing more with less" is going to get extremely vivid as time goes on... this might sound cloying or superficial but today the question has to be asked: is there any way to maximize the good and minimize the bad creative potential here? What safeguard can we devise to protect us from human potential gone bad?

This morning, I read Ralph Peters' recent article with this deadly spectrum in mind:

This is where terror gets personal, in a variety of ways. First, virtually any target is fair game, invading the personal sphere of the average citizen. And when anything can be a target, everything must be protected - an impossible mission for any government.

Second, the mission is the suicide bomber's reward from his terrorist masters.
It's incomprehensible to us that even the maddest fanatic invoking any god's name can bomb a clinic, market or school and enthusiastically kill himself in the process, but his action springs from a general anger at life and an indiscriminate desire for vengeance.

By taking the lives of others, the suicide bomber acts to assert his identity and to escape his personal unhappiness. The religion with which he has intoxicated himself just flashes the green light.

The dark men steering him from above understand his psychology perfectly. We don't.

In today's "asymmetrical conflicts," this is a fundamental asymmetry - between the state's need to provide collective security (the one essential commodity every government must offer) and the terrorist's intimate need to violate that security. At a time when our expensive arsenal is poorly matched to our patchwork strategy, our enemy's ultimate weapon, the suicide bomber, precisely matches the strategy of his masters.

And in this contest of commodities, he's cheap, expendable and grimly reliable.

As we try to "flood the market" with security in the hope that we'll eventually drive down its cost, the problem is that the price will never stabilize. There's no "now we can relax" answer to Islamist terror - a phenomenon in which impossible ambitions employ logical strategies that rely on irrational actors.

But we have to go on fighting. We have no choice.

Think of the world as a security marketplace, where the state's monopoly is constantly challenged by everyone from terrorists to private security companies (in some states, such as Zimbabwe or Sudan, the monopoly should be challenged). Healthy governments may suffer, but they'll survive. The crucial battleground lies in the many states whose futures are up for grabs.
The state that can't provide legitimate security to its citizens today will threaten our own security tomorrow. And the suicide bomber will be there.

(Emphasis Mine.)
As we get closer to the end of history, it should not surprise us that our dream come true will still have monsters in it, and yet some of us believe that tehy are not in the dawning liberal democracy of Fukuyama and certainly nor in the car wreck of the classless utopia of Marx. Denying violence in mankind will only have it coming out the seams. Better to know it's there, especially when life is hunky-dory. The "dark men" are everywhere*.

Everywhere.

Be ready. Study war. It will never go away.

A PostScript:

Now this guy's mug probably doesn't grace any art critic's refrigerator, but consider what he is saying:

"I would hope that the administrators and folks that are making the decisions would understand that it?s difficult to negotiate with a bullet," security consultant Allen Hill told TODAY. "A person that comes into your facility with a gun intends to kill and do you harm."

The founder of Response Options, a Texas-based security company, said, "Get past this paralysis of fear over liability issues. Our country is so litigious and concerned about doing the wrong thing and about doing the politically correct thing that we don?t do anything."

That only helps people like Cho Seung Hui. "The bad guys are counting on Americans to sit still and do nothing," Hill said.

Students and others need to realize that they do have options, Hill said.

The "bad guys" plan their attacks. Schools need to plan and rehearse their defenses and responses just as aggressively.

"The training should be just as intense and be taken just as seriously as the bad guy takes their mission to kill," he said.

At Virginia Tech, Cho Seung Hui walked into classrooms and simply shot people. There are reports that he even lined up victims to shoot them one by one. But in one Norris Hall classroom, student Zach Petkewicz led his classmates in barricading the door, saving all inside.

Petkewicz? response was instinctive, prompted by "adrenaline and fear."

Hill?s company teaches acting from knowledge and a well-rehearsed plan.

"Once the bad guy?s inside, how hard is it to hit a non-moving target?" Hill observed.

"Get up and move," he advised. "Do whatever it takes to create chaos and mayhem. Disrupt them. Make them go into a protective mode themselves. We feel that we can become actively aggressive for our own benefit, whether that?s actively running out of the classroom, having to face the gunman and take him down, breaking out windows and escaping that way."

You can?t wait for something to happen and then try to form a response, he said. It?s got to be done in advance.

Security systems are passive, he said. But those under attack can be active.

Said Hill: "There are things that you can do to take the initiative away from the bad guy, to disrupt their plan and to create a situation that?s winnable for you."

PostScript Prescript 2: It'd be good to brush up on your first aid too, you first responder you.

Postscript 3: What's this post doing in an artist's blog? There will be resonances to pay when the issue of represention in the world of our imagination becomes a matter of life or death. Don't like surveillance culture? It's going to get a lot worse unless we all get implacable, on the same side of civilization.

Magpie Aesthetic

Aaron Parazette told me about how Sally Mann's talk at UT Houston was so moving, entertaining, heart warming, gut wrenching and wonderful in turns. So I found this and like the Magpie Aesthetic that she refers to, I pluck it up for the diary and to share with you all.

A note on this video: While it was nice to hear the self mocking "...just for fun" end, I think that the cynical postmodern critic that she refers to needs to look to the first ideas in the clip and not sit passively and ask to be led around: "...what I like is the ambiguity... the mendacity of photography..."

For Whom are Your Soldiers Fighting?

A friend forwarded an email to me from Lane Relyea who has a class at Northwestern University on "Relational Aesthetics". The class has a blog, so we can follow along. From the masthead::

Relational Aesthetics & The Instrumentalization of Everyday Art.
In what ways do the networked forms of recent art, from relational aesthetics to artist cooperatives to multiple and fictive artist-identities, oppose the New Economy's promotion of entrepreneurialism, flexible management, participatory architectures, and loose and mobile social commitments? Or does relational art instead romanticize and idealize such current conditions and behaviors, thus serving as an ideological asset rather than a critique?

Now that's a mouthful.

"...rather than a critique." A fine criteria at face value, critique. But for me, the notion of critique qua critique often leads to a strange place, art-wise. Even critique can be co-opted for mercantile objectives (I'm thinking of the artworld at the end of the 80's). Reading through the jargon above (even though I try to keep my own jargon closer to the street, I'm sure the language in this blog can be too specialized for people outside of the artworld), it seems to me that the question should instead be: "Throughout all the types of networked forms of artmaking, when do they serve curiousity and when do they serve ambition... and how can we know the difference?"

The identification of the "New Economy" as a problem is alirght, I guess. But a vibrant and expanding artworld economy is what we all wanted, isn't it? The problem is that the discourse (academic, intellectual, intra-artist or otherwise) seems to have waned as the New Economy waxed. Is a zero sum game necessary here? Does the economy have to take a hit before the cream of intrisic curiosity can rise to the top? Many people seem to think so with collectors' inventories bulging with art as investment rather art for its' own sake, they seem to long for a recession to wash the streets clean again with another collapse of the art market.

I prefer to think that art that is made for its' own sake still exists, even in this New Economy. The question is how can one recognise the curious mind in a bloated environment?

Ahora

BART EXPOSITO, "DESIGNOMITE" Black Dragon Opening Night

"Figure Looks a Lot Like Me in Paint"

The interesting thing for me about Bart's show is that he references the design world several times over while avoiding formal superficiality by internalizing important aspects held in restraint. Some examples: 1) the centrality of drawing that slides into painting through exhaustive revision, 2) an emphasis on site specific installation that focuses on the spatial relations between paintings while ultimately disregarding the actual site of the exhibition, 3) the "project" orientation of his work which is ultimately disposable in service of a larger oeuvre of painting.

What-you-say? Let me expand a bit.

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1) Bart draws studies of his work prior to attacking the canvas. What's unusual about that? Most artists do it this way, but Bart really works this aspect over pretty well. He has a nice parallel body of work in drawings, and someday that might make an interesting show somewhere. Bart could easily take mechanical means to delineate his forms and yet he insists on small incremental adjustments done by hand to bring each painting to completion. By approaching a standard of perfection that he never arrives at, his paintings have a kind of wobble that for me is full of humanity. More to my point, this is a striving type of humanity, something about aspiration and if I may say a word not common to today's art discourse: nobility.

2) Bart is always talking about site specificity and when he does, I constantly think about how the site of a gallery installation is so furtive, so temporary. How can an artist be so focused on such a thing when that thing disappears after the show? A show lasts a month and then the space devolves as all architecture does, entropy brings the mother of the arts (architecture's conceit) to dust faster than the rate of our own mortality as human beings. Collectors collect and thus dismember the show, eras change, our memory fade, the building crumbles. I've come to think of Bart's site specificity as an abstracted relational configuration. It is instead the physical schema that he is shooting for and not the literality of place.

3) He tends to group his work into strategic arenas, this show being one where he had washed out color a bit, the astringence evoking a harder edge. He also ramped up the project into stages of scale, from notebook size paper to large study paper to a 11' tall painting. The conclusive masterwork aspect was grounded by the long tail of prepratory stages, the whole enterprise was very much a project in the fullness of that term. And while he might make a couple of subsequent paintings, this project has come to fruition. New work will most likely be configured in the frame of another subsequent project.

Black Dragon Society

Pentti Monkkonen's "DESIGNOMITE": Artists: Chris Beas, Liz Craft, Evan Holloway, Piero Golia, Jason Meadows, Pentti Monkkonen, Ruby Neri, Colin Roberts, Josh Stone, Eric Wesley...

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Bart Exposito Install

Bart Exposito has installed his show at Black Dragon Society, the opening is tomorrow Saturday April 14th. In this video, he takes down a framed painting on paper off the wall in order to fix it. Director Parker Jones evades the camera, Bart groans about the blog, Jed Ceaser ties his shoe.

It looks like another big art opening night Saturday at ChinaTown tomorrow.

Doug Henders in Germany

HERZLICHE EINLADUNG ZUM ATELIERFEST / WERKSTATTPARTY
AM 13. APRIL AB 20UHR

BRUNNENSTRASSE 196 IM VORDERHAUS
BERLIN

Doug Henders started up a weblog and jumped on a plane bound for Germany where he is hanging out for a month to see ArtCologne. He isn't posting too much on the run, but he is sending me bits of information along the way, the invitation to a "studio work party", or so my Apple Dashboard language translation Widget tells me.

He also sent in this link, an interesting videoblog of sorts that lets us in on the art scene in Germany in and around K?ln while wearing a strange DIY helmet-cam. Strange but very nice. You can see in the current video (03/07), a best of Berlin, a glimpse of Sergio Prego's installation at my gallery there, Andr? Buchmann Galerie.

Maybe he'll upload a few pics from his travels in his new blog when he gets back?

The Art World Thinks Flat

(Read the following, bearing in mind that most dealers out in our art world are talking loudly about an immanent collapse of the art market. They think we are living in a bubble that has to pop sometime soon.)

Marc Spiegler for ArtWorld Salon highlit breaking achievements in cradle robbery at this year's ArtChicago:

However, one innovation strikes me as likely to draw criticism: The NEW INSIGHT section, described as ?an amazing display of the future emerging talent in the art world? comprised of artwork from 24 graduate students at 12 of the country?s most influential Master of Fine Arts programs,? including CalArts, Yale, RISD and the Art Institute of Chicago. Especially given the fact that these students were selected by renowned Renaissance Society director Susanne Ghez, I?m predicting a stampede by neophiliac collectors to buy their work. Unless some draconian mechanism has been put in place to make sure that doesn?t happen - an idea which might be considered advisable in some quarters, but would almost certainly be a) an infringement of some Constitutional right and b) totally ineffective in the face of aggressive collectors.

Offhand, I cannot recall ever seeing a section of exclusively graduate-student work displayed as part of an art fair. (Although one certainly comes across the occasional artwork by a graduate student who?s already joined the roster of a participating gallery.) In this sense, New Insight marks the latest stage in the crumbling of the wall between art schools and the art market, the earlier stages having been 1) the prowling of art-school studios by dealers and collectors, 2) the growing professionalization of degree shows, and 3) the ?School Days? show at Jack Tilton last spring. Honestly, this is a topic on which I feel divided. Part of me sides with the logic that led Columbia arts dean Bruce Ferguson to close the studios of first-year grad students to collectors. Then again, I think, maybe it?s totally reactionary to think that we can sequester students from the art market, or even that doing so would be a good idea. Thoughts?

The last time I taught ('91-'99), I noticed that some of my students wanted to boot to the bottom line: "What do I do to get the 'A'?" Well, first you have to demonstrate competence specific to the objectives of this course as outlined in the curriculum, that would get you a "C". If you did this with a minimal panache, we're in "B" territory. If you light it up with inspiration, that's an "A". I was taken aback at the lack of concern for the realm of the imagination.

If the market asks, students of this persuasion will submit. Formula will be codified tacitly, everyone will move smoothly into position. What we are heading towards is a feedback loop that will choke off innovation. (Maybe the hive mind has determined that innovation rocks the boat too much?) Once implicit value will be engulfed by explicit value (PA#5), we will be left with an imitation art world, a facimilie of creativity. What good is this for students? What good is this for academia -or have we/they defaulted into the vocational school mentality? What does higher education really mean anymore?

I'm with Bruce Ferguson, he's got the right idea.

Meanwhile, we will have our intelligencia taking the dias with agendas like this, perhaps fresh from the NEW INSIGHTS opening. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Anyone?

Paranoic-Critical Methods

I'm hearing these words a lot around here: the paranoic-critical method. I won't name names just yet. I would like to talke to them and suss out their relation to this idea. Attributions to Dali, our neighbor north of Tossa, I like howSurrealism has long been associated with Catalunya, land of caganers, a vital skeleton key for understanding Salvador and the whole art movement so invested in the psychologist's couch.

I backed up into this territory as I looked closer into the medium via painting as I repulsed from what I considered the hyper-conceptualization of art theory in grad school at the end of the 80's. My architectural background was a big influence in appreciating the nature of materials argument. If painting and drawing can be existentialized, then they will be strung between abstraction and representation and with such a compass, one is not obligated to actually travel to each pole to get the most out of it. One can build architecture, cities in between --instead.

We Shall Learn to Grow Trees on Comets.

I keep thinking about a conversation I had with Andrew Hahn. He said that he read the blog and was piqued by this post, where I mentioned something about a concern for beauty. The spectre of "mere formalism" haunts us in the artworld, the words seem to conjure each other.

But who doesn't have a standard of beauty? Even the "anti-aesthetic" is another aesthetic. As we talked like this for a bit, Andrew sheathed his blade.

Later, we talked about how art and how optimism or an art of affirmation is supremely difficult and the drift of the conversation was that optimism might very well be impossible. It is remarkable to me that history of all kinds: including art history itself and surely the ur-history of the torah/the bible... are a chain off peccadillos. Trouble. Picaros, the picaresque, picaroon. Bad things happening, people making tragic choices. Art is linked to an idea of revolution, the upsetting of the applecart, changing the world in some way. We talked briefly about the revolution post, about how revolution can also be so facile as to effect style over substance with revolutionary trope.

I wanted to lay out the idea that given how revolution can be embodied in so many ways, that while it can be dangerous in terms of mortal safety (weaponized irony and bloody revolution), it is central to who we are as artists in that every time we make art, we must break the model of the last time we made art... even if it is just a little fracture in the facture... to allow the new to rise up through the cracks. Different people have different ways of crack-making whether by carefully stressing or smashing to smitherenes.

I wanted to talk about the existence and use of artifice in argumentation and conceptualization, how pervasive it is, how necessary it is, integral to the formation of idea and theory... about how artifice is the stuff of trangression, a kind of exaggeration, Picasso's lie that tells the truth, and how I think we have lost sight of that by and large.

By that time, the evening was over for me and I had to jet home. That was Saturday evening and my head has been wrapping itself around this topic like a python about too large of a meal. This interview of Freeman Dyson just barely seems to scratch the itch in the meantime:

Benny Peiser: In a chapter about the scientific revolutions in modern physics and mathematics, you describe the deep intellectual confusion in Weimar Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. You portray a society troubled by a mood of doom and gloom, a milieu that was conducive for scientific revolution as well as political upheaval. Unmistakably, the Great War set off a major shift in German thought, from the idea of progress and technological confidence to cultural pessimism and apocalypticism. As we know, the consequences of this mood of despair was calamitous. Do you see any comparison with the gloomy frame of mind that seems to be on the increase among many Western scientists today?

Freeman Dyson: Yes, the western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence. Fortunately, the countries that matter now are China and India, and the Chinese and Indian experts do not share the mood of doom and gloom. It is amusing to see China and India take on today the role that America took in the nineteen-thirties, still believing in technology as the key to a better life for everyone.

Benny Peiser: One of your most influential lectures is re-published in your new book. I am talking about your Bernal Lecture which you delivered in London in 1972, one year after Desmond Bernal's death. As you point out, the lecture provided the foundation for much of your writing in later years. What strikes me about your remarkably optimistic lecture is its almost religious tone. It was delivered at a time, similar to the period after World War I, when a new age of techno-pessimism came to the fore, reinforced by Hiroshima and Vietnam.

It is in this atmosphere of entrenched techno-scepticism and environmental anxiety that you advanced biological, genetic and geo-engineering as industrial trappings of social progress and environmental protection. At the height of ecological anxiety, in the same year as the Club of Rome proclaimed the "Limits to Growth," you envisaged endless technological advancement, terrestrial progress and the greening of the galaxy, famously predicting that "we shall learn to grow trees on comets."

At one point towards the end of your lecture, you christen your speech a "sermon." Indeed, your entire lecture reads as if it was written for a tormented audience searching for a glimmer of hope. In his book "The Religion of Technology", David Noble claims that the whole history of technological innovation and advancement has been primarily a religious endeavour. Noble claims that even today your ideas of technological solutions to terrestrial problems constitute in essence a religious conviction. How much of your cosmological view of the world has indeed been shaped by Judeo-Christian traditions? And do you see that there is an inherent link between your religious and your philosophical optimism?

Freeman Dyson: It is true that the tradition of Judeo-Christian religion is strongly coupled with philosophical optimism. Hope is high on the list of virtues. God did not put us here on earth to moan and groan. As my mother used to say, "God helps those who help themselves."

I am generally optimistic because our human heritage seems to have equipped us very well for dealing with challenges, from ice-ages and cave-bears to diseases and over-population. The whole species did cooperate to eliminate small-pox, and the women of Mexico did reduce their average family size from seven to two and a half in fifty years. Science has helped us to understand challenges and also to defeat them.

I am especially optimistic just now because of a seminal discovery that was made recently by comparing genomes of different species. David Haussler and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz discovered a small patch of DNA which they call HAR1, short for Human Accelerated Region 1. This patch appears to be strictly conserved in the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee, which means that it must have been performing an essential function that was unchanged for about three hundred million years from the last common ancestor of birds and mammals until today.

But the same patch appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations in the human genome, which means that it must have changed its function in the last six million years from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to modern humans. Somehow, that little patch of DNA expresses an essential difference between humans and other mammals. We know two other significant facts about HAR1. First, it does not code for a protein but codes for RNA. Second, the RNA for which it codes is active in the cortex of the human embryonic brain during the second trimester of pregnancy. It is likely that the rapid evolution of HAR1 has something to do with the rapid evolution of the human brain during the last six million years.

I am optimistic because I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature. I see it as a big step toward the fulfilment of the dream described in 1929 by Desmond Bernal, one of the pioneers of molecular biology, in his little book, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul". Bernal saw science as our best tool for defeating the three enemies. The World means floods and famines and climate changes. The Flesh means diseases and senile infirmities. The Devil means the dark irrational passions that lead otherwise rational beings into strife and destruction. I am optimistic because I see HAR1 as a new tool leading us toward a deep understanding of human nature and toward the ultimate defeat of our last enemy.

(Blued bolded italics and link mine)

Mark Von Schlegell

Art Center's MA dept. presents
critic and award-winning science fiction writer

MARK VON SCHLEGELL

2:00PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 13TH
AHMANSON AUDITORIUM
hillside, Art Center

***

I remember Mark telling me of his thoughts about Napoleon, of how he made his reputation from the tactics in one of his first battles, one that happened to also be less heroic than David represented (he hung on to the back of a donkey over the Alps... I guess the decision to cross the famed mountain range was acurately portrayed, but not the act itself). They called it "Marengo", and later people made chicken dishes christened with that name. Subsequent battles would invoke the legacy of the first, and yet it was the donkey ride that colored Napoleon with glory thereafter. This, he said, is a model that also describes the art world.

...Or something like that.

We'll have to see this Friday what exactly he meant.

Sol LeWitt, Dematerialized.

Sol LeWitt has passed away, an end of an era. Christopher Knight has an obit in the LATimes here, the Chicogo Tribune here, and the NYTimes' Michael Kimmelman here.

I have long thought that the fruit of the postmodern tree was the conceptual. Sol LeWitt is the exemplar of conceptualism. From Be Mistrustful of History:

I love the Lawrence Weiner quote: "We had to question the answers given to us in school." Artists at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties questioned the answer of high modernism and flipped it on its head. A true revolution, Coprenican, like the invention of zero or negative integers. A cone of innovation reached an apotheosis and disappeared at its zenith. And what appeared was a raging mountain stream, a torrent of innovation that prized the conceptual over the material. Pop was followed by the Minimal, followed by the Conceptual, followed by Theory. The fruit of the postmodern tree was the conceptual, to be sure (Sol LeWitt, as far as I'm concerned). Art had to be dematerialized. It had to be in its essence, an idea. The stream flowed and broadened over time into a grand and stately river, soon into a slow and wide delta. That is where we are now: silted, fetid, and oozing out to sea, to be evaporated into oceanic clouds, ferried along the winds to mist the mountaintops.

Posted by Dennis at 7:29 AM | Comments (0)

Justin Moore at Cirrus This Saturday

Justin opens this weekend at Cirrus:

J U S T I N ?M O O R E:
Time Machines and Paranoid Landscapes
April 7 through May 26, 2007
Opening Reception April 7 - 5:00 to 7:00 pm
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Cirrus Gallery is pleased to present Justin Moore?s Time Machines and Paranoid Landscapes.
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Moore continues to explore monumental landscape and the relationship between nature, technology, and human experience.? His work allegorizes aesthetic experience through visceral and disorienting representations of nature and architecture.
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In this exhibition, the viewer is drawn into the space by the optical gravitation of a pulverized moon, while a video projection invokes the mechanized gaze of the Mars Rover.
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Delicately rendered ink wash drawings represent ecological cataclysms that combine the vocabulary of monumental Chinese landscape painting with the surrealists? paranoid-critical method.
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Inspired by the Japanese kaijin, or humanoid monsters, a series of paintings depict ecological monstrosities on a human scale through a time-sensitive process of pouring and removing oil paint from a smooth surface, while skyscrapers struggle with the nature of their verticality in ten foot-tall ink drawings.
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In addition to Cirrus Gallery, Justin Moore has exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Art Chicago Project Space, Mario?s Furniture (Los Angeles), Scope Miami, Scope New York, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Western Project (Los Angeles), and Antai Gallery (Los Angeles).? He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Works on Paper

Ahora

Stephanie in Tokyo

My wife Stephanie has returned recently from an around the world business trip, the first stop in Tokyo with a couple of pics to share. First, the cute expresso van... next, the fluffy eared daschunds that to my eye seem to be a national mascot in Japan.

The last time she brought back pictures of a dog that caught her eye, we had Beaucerons for ten years.

Deviation

This makes my week, already. Hilarious. I like the groundhog day-game reality connection and the dissenter who runs against game program. Someday one of our avatars might achieve a separate consciousness just like this. Or perhpas contrariwise: we get sucked into a virtual world and can't get out.

So Twilight Zone-like. That boundary between the imagination and reality --the blur means madness, doesn't it?

I know this map, it was a tough one: two ways into a terrorist hideout to free hostages inside, one above and the other below ground. Popping out of that hatch wasn't easy. Boy, I sure miss the days of Counter-Strike at Cyber-LAN.

A big plus: a good add for the bloglines list.