news from around the world

Hey everyone

Soooo since the last time we talked, there have been many many new things happening. I live in my studio now, which is good and bad, good for work, bad for soaking in the culture. None the less, I have managed to make it out to do some good old art watching. First on the list, I recently saw a show of chinese artists, mostly video. Highlights for me were Yu Xudong pill and candy. here is a link with a few stills from the piece. Also there was Cao Fei with is piece Cos Players. All in all an interesting show, the work, i think, (at least to the best of my translation from estonian) was about celebrating life and taking a step back from the seriousness of it all. Very cool. And if you know me, you kow that it takes a lot for video work to impress me...

so next, in helsinki, at the Finnish contemproary arts museum Kiasma a show on the role of landscape in contemporary art. A great show if i may say so. There was your conventional Long, Morris, and Oppenheim that you might expect in this kind of show, but also A few Finnish artists that really stole the show for me. One, Tuula Närhinen and her piece wind tracers. She noticed that the wind, while playing a vital part in the experience of the land, disapears in almost all forms of landscape. so she puts bright lights on tree branches and photographs them with long exposure time so that the wind moving the branch traces a light path on the film. Very cool. Also, in sculpture department Lauri Astala Songlines. This peice was my favorite. play the audio at this link to get a better feel for things.

In other news, I have been set up with a few exhibitions, a solo show at the sculpture Gallery, as well as the Erasmus show in the old town. Also In a group show with some students from the Finnish art academy on the Paldiski penninsula. here.

no real other news, other than busting ass and finally making some reasonable art. I found a bag of old soviet gasmasks.... hmmm what to do with those?
also rusting stuff and puting it on things, hanging stuff.

I have also started doing drawings of trucks and tools with cosmetics on glass. they are fun, but not really that interesting. Well whatever. hope all is well there, I probably should spell check this but i am not going to. too bad i guess. maybe pictures soon.

Who says the Undergrads are unmotivated?

Kick ass! Who's sculpture is that? It's fucking incredible!

Art Fair

Hey dudes.

I attended the Stockholm art fair this week. Sounds cool right? Not so much though. The sculpture that I helped build was one of only a few examples of contemporary sculpture at the fair. There seemed to be a sort of generation gap there. things were either craft, or contemporary, or classical. Not much to get fussed about. Villu Jaanisoo, the artist I am working with, was kind of the surprise hit of the show, (partly because his sculpture was so damn loud) (this was where i would like to embed a video of the piece but the connection will not allow it.)

The coolest thing that went on was across town at an opening I kind of gatecrashed, at Magasin 3 , a sort of Swedish WPA/c. The art was great, but unfortunately as things go, the better the art the weirder the crowd. Pipilotti Rist gave a quick blurb about her work and a thanks for coming, but the work pretty much spoke for itself. There was also a series of prints from the Chapman brothers on display, pity they weren't there though, I hear that they are wild guys.

in closing, i really need someone to pick up a sculpture at the WPAC office, because it was apparently too heavy for their auction and balancing it made it inappropriate for their needs. If anyone can do this for me, or is going to be in DC sometime soon, please let me know.

Thanks, and I hope things are good in ol' CP. Say hey next time you drop by the S&J for me.

P.S. you can also keep up with my less than scholarly activities at my other blog,
you and your beer and how great you are.

My first blog - holy cow! Haha. Hey Meg, great job on the open studio - thanks (once again) for all your effort.
Some of us are interested in making the lounge area a bit more pleasant or presentable esp. since this semester we are expecting plenty of visitors. Let's make a date for a few of us to do some of the work - it would not take long with 3 or 4 of us. How do you feel about that? Doable?

Workload

So whats up dudes

I have seen the facilities and have my work cut out for me, literally.
I am currently working on refurbishing a room that i will get to live in rent free which is awesome. Next week, we start with the studio, my assistantship here involves rebuilding a foundry, including ceramic shell and resin bonded sand, bronze, aluminum, iron, copper, and glass. and when I say rebuild i mean basically mean build. there are remnants of a foundry here, but the sculpture department has big plans.
Oh, and as an extra challenge, the whole thing has to be wired with 220, and it has to run on oil. two things which i know very little (nothing) about.

But we have an experienced staff and enthusiastic students, so it seems very possible.
Now if i can just squeeze time to make art into this, things would be all set.

I hope the studio tour goes well, just remember that all my sales go through Pete. Pete I can trust you with all the money I'll make right? Meg you are in charge of keeping tabs on how many people ask if my studio is a storage space.

Eesti

dudes.

It is cold in estonia. There is snow everywhere. I met the other students and had a tour of the facilities. things look great, there is glass working here, and i am eager to get into that. The school seems to have its base in clasical styles, with newwer staff adding a more contemporary point of view. Here is a link to the schools website Kunstiakadeemia. The language is tough, it is humbling, to be able to talk, literally only when spoken to. most people here speak english, but not primarily, and everyone seems to speak more than one language.

Before I left, I had a dream that was in Spanish, or spanish gibberish, except i could understand everything that was said. I dont speak Spanish, not well enough to dream in it anyway. I think i had gotten druk before i went to sleep that night. Maybe that was it.

Either way, I am hoping that i can use some of the snow that is around tomorrow, and hopefully by then i will have pictures to post.

see yas

Yarns from the Material World

New Year, bells and whistles

There is now an image archive, which is a receptacle for all of the images posted to the blog, and then some. That's right, look to your right!

new blog for a new year

Well, I'm trying to be a blogger.

Not much on the page so far, but I'm hoping to put up some sort of observation or other every day.

See it here:

http://hatchetsandskewers.blogspot.com

COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT AND THE CREATIVE ANTI-COMMONS

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/index.html

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html

> A Genealogy of Authors’ Property Rights

The author has not always existed. The image of the author as a wellspring of originality, a genius guided by some secret compulsion to create works of art out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is an 18th century invention. This image continues to influence how people speak about the “great artists” of history, and it also trickles down to the more modest claims of the intellectual property regime that authors have original ideas that express their unique personality, and therefore have a natural right to own their works - or to sell their rights, if they should choose.....

ed. I thought this was a really interesting essay on the "author." We've been mulling over this in the course, "Markets, theory and collecting," but I think this conversation might find its way into other discussions. This is a good read for anyone who engages in appropriation or rails against traditional concepts of mastery and singularity. Oh whee.

The Last Show

In this week's CP: The Last Show at Numark.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/2006/gallery1201.html?navCenterBot

So, does any one want to

So, does any one want to talk about relationality and/or autonomy? It seems pertinent to some of the conversations I’ve been having with fellow grads recently. I saw a presentation last year at CAA called “From database and place to bio-tech and bots: relationality vs autonomy in media art.” It got me looking at Bourriaud and Bey. Jeremy, you’ve read Bourriaud, non?

Most of us are functioning as image makers, in the sense that the work will be viewed after the fact via video or photo documentation. As artists, are you complicit in that relationship or do you take it on?

How do some of you use the spectacle in your work? How does your work negotiate a pull towards academicism? Do you employ traditional forms, or go with the aura of the new(er) medias?

studio tour 2

My first post and it´s a plagiarism, shame on me..

this one time i got to first and second base...

so i win the who can post an image first race

i made both of these things

again with the links?

My students are confused

Below is actual text from an actual student e-mail, followed by my response:

Wed, 8 Nov 2006 01:55:57 -0500

You probably already know about this, but Marcel Duchamp!!!!! is coming to the Phillips Gallery this Thursday, to speak from 6-8. Is is possible for our class to go? I know that our papers are due that day, but it just sounds like a cool trip.

Wed, 8 Nov 2006 06:01:34 -0800 (PST)

???

Duchamp is very, very dead.

Will this be a viewing of his desiccated remains?

Confusing.

--Jeffry

Visiting Artist

VISITING ARTIST LECTURE SERIES

Israeli Sculptor Orna Ben-Ami will give a lecture in the WEST GALLERY
(ASY 1309) TOMORROW Tuesday 7th November 11.00 am - 12.30 pm.

Also: Orna Ben-Ami's work is currently on show in Washington D.C.

"LInks: Iron Sculptures by Orna Ben-Ami"
A Hillyer Art Space
9 Hillyer Court, Washington D.C.
November 2nd 2006 - January 25th 2007

"Critically acclaimed for the surprising contrast between the
material and the themes of the sculpture, 'Links' presents a
collection replete with personal content that intersects with
collective memories."

Constable at the NGA

I've got a review of the Constable show at the National Gallery in this week's City Paper:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/2006/gallery1103.html?navCenterBot

It's been awhile. Mostly because we're between arts editors right now.

Know any?

Visiting Artist/Curator

George Ciscle will be delivering a talk on Nov 6th at 7:00 pm.

Pictures--or the lack thereof

It's a tired, tired strategy, but so many young painters keep throwing their time and effort into it: Take a piece of canvas or paper--unprimed, or stained with some monochrome wash--and scrawl a tangle of graphic signifiers across it, like you're laying out a picnic spread of pictorial conventions.

I see it with Jiha Moon's blooms of watercolor that carry along fauns and dragons and clumps of silly string at their edges, or Maggie Michael's knots of airbrush, pooled enamel and calligraphy. I saw it at Irvine's old location last year, with Nicola Lopez, who makes apocalyptic doodles using blotches of ink, ruled lines, and cartoonish drawings of drain-pipe labyrinths...and I saw it last weekend at their current front room survey of works on paper--clearing out old inventory, natch. There's Christine Kessler's greatest-hits-of-Rauschenberg-and-Twombly collages, or Susan Jamison's graphite and string drawings of birds, hands, and spiders against blank backdrops, or Peregrine Hong's unicorn kiddie-porn drawings, or...well, it just goes on and on.

Nobody's interested in pictorial space or chiaroscuro or even composition, it seems. The page or the canvas becomes an arena in which to have fey little graphics, detached from context, fumbling around one another--an illustrator's warmed-over approximation of good ol' flat-bed construction.

Decorative, unnecessary, played-out. A lot of gallery-goers mistake these pictures for actual displays of skill. Instead, they're avoidance strategies. Why choose the rectangle if you're not interested in it? Why use the tools of illusionistic rendering to dot the unconsidered page with little episodic meanderings?

What about pictures? And I don't mean illusionistic windows onto another space or anything--just the evidence of an artist looking at the substrate/format and responding to it in some constructive, considered, foundational way.

That's my big, obvious rant for the evening, anyway.

Thoughts?

...with no posts, as of yet.

So, did anyone go to the Numark opening on Saturday? Nikki Lee, Dan Steinhilber, Doug Hall, Shimon Attie, etc.

Very sad that they're shuttering the doors on the space-age garage. Now there will officially be no reason whatsoever to go to Chinatown.

Except for maybe Flashpoint. Which is only almost a reason.

Otherwise, it's vanity galleries in a repulsive Georgetown-like setting. Whee!

I wanted to go, but had to *bring the rock* to the Velvet lounge. Which we did, albeit sloppily. An improvised cover of "Thriller" was attempted for reasons that still elude me.

So, there you have it. Post number two. Thoughts?