CAPITAL LETTERS ARE CATCHING ON

my body is sore from sanding the glen ligon text on the floor.





coming soon:

-summer camp

-flash animation (four dimensions!)

-screen printing (respectable reproducibility)

-installation for marshall arts, feat. indoor grass and televised landscapes

-installation feat. tiny reproduced molds, action words, and projected video

-official website

-less money, less problems



what are you doing this summer?

MEMPHIS GALLERY TOUR

It is an interesting experience to see the way art is viewed differently in different parts of a city. In Memphis, a city where the gallery scene is especially odd, this experience becomes especially interesting. If you start out on the eastern side and make your way west, you will notice dramatic shifts in the perception of art that are on par with the way you can see economic class shifts taking place across the span of single city streets here.

We started in East Memphis at the David Lusk Gallery. The placement of this gallery seems to give it away before you even enter the space. The gallery is located towards the back of a shopping center, sandwiched between two recognizable chain home decorating stores. This gives off the impression that this would be an appropriate place to go if you want to buy a painting to match the new curtains you just bought, but despite this impression, the work we see here is actually turns out to be engaging. There are two artists with work on display at David Lusk right now. Kat Gore holds it down in the front of the gallery, with a series of paintings mostly in the 30x30” range focusing on pattern. Seeing this work in a space like this conjures thoughts of the painting as decoration. However, there does seem to be a sort of valid conceptual dialogue taking place here. There is layering present in the pieces that seems to ask the viewer to contemplate what is being hidden and what is revealed. Sure enough, if we choose to read her statement, which turns out to be quite well written, this idea is central to the work. Behind the wall of the front desk, the work of painter J Ivcevich is on display. To me, this work seems immediately more appealing. The work shown here are mostly quiet paintings of urban scenes with Arabic script showing up here and there. The paint is handled in the manner of flatness, with embossed outlines that jut out from the canvas just enough to give them personality and establish a relationship with the viewer. There is a focus on looking up within the images, and the quietness of the flat colors in juxtaposition with urban themes seems to reflect on ideas of urban living, and the way you can stand in a crowd of strangers and still feel alone.

In the David Lusk Gallery, no ID tags are placed next to the paintings. On one hand, this is frustrating, because we don’t know the titles of the paintings. On the other, it is a relief that we don’t know the price of the paintings. This is very different from the next stop on our gallery tour, Perry Nicole Fine Art. If you go there now, you will find a collection of overpriced, ready to buy landscape paintings and abstract sculptures. If the David Lusk was a gallery geared towards the art-buying patron, at least it was either a patron with shame, or one legitimately interested in the work they are buying. The paintings and sculptures at Perry Nicole are above-the-mantle pieces at best, and the buyer who goes here is probably not ashamed of that. The cheapest painting here is over $800 and less than 10x10”, not counting the gaudy frame. If you’re in the mood to splurge, you can walk away with a mediocre bronze-cast abstract sculpture for a mere $45,000.

The Memphis art scene manages to redeem itself as we get back to it’s roots. Downtown at the Powerhouse, the Glen Ligon exhibition “Love and Theft” is on it’s last week of display. This exhibition is one that was long overdue in Memphis. The show combines a wallpaper installation of an twice-appropriated civil rights demonstration photograph, several black on gold text paintings of Richard Pryor jokes, the word “America” spelled out in the form of a flickering neon sign, along with other elements, all into a powerful installation that challenges that challenges racial stereotypes in a city where racism is still undeniably a huge problem. There are less commidifiable art objects in this show, but the ones that are (the neon "America" sign) are being bought by the likes of museums, rather than individual patrons. The Glen Ligon show is proof that Powerhouse is meeting it’s intended goal of bringing nationally recognized artists into the Memphis art scene, and furthering this idea by bringing artists this relevant to our experience.

GUSHING

Disclaimer: The assignment was to write a visceral response to an artwork. My writing is never too visceral. This is the best I could do.

FRANCIS BACON



The paintings of Francis Bacon seem to be solely about invoking a kind of visceral response. Even though when Francis talks about his work, he says a lot about the beauty of the colors of flesh and the human form, this is not really what we get from the images. The images seem to be more about power than beauty. We often see figures placed against sickly, undefined backgrounds. Sometimes they are deliberately confined within line-drawing-style cubes representing architecture. The stark environments read as a sort of psychological landscape, but not one that is healthy. The cubes drawn around screaming figures read as a sort of confining architecture of the psyche, or the inevitable psychological distance that is always present between two humans. The images are bleak and borderline frightening, but they possess their own kind of beauty in a tortured way. Francis talks about desperately trying to imitate the colors of the flesh on the inside of the mouth, but the mouths always turn out black. This kind of desperate approach, or always trying to get at something but never actually getting there seems to exemplify the human condition in and of itself. The figures keep screaming, and most of the time they are not anchored within the space; They seem to be vanishing, sometimes literally with halves of heads evaporating into space; Francis Bacon dosen’t let us forget our mortality. All of these ideas come to us in the form of immediate sensation. The images of Francis Bacon have a starkness and power that penetrates our psyche within the first few seconds of viewing the paintings. They are psychologically tortured images coming from a psychologically tortured man reminding us of our own psychological torture, even if we’ve never had any. In this sense, these images transcend interpretation. These were never intended to be overanalyzed. It seems the only proper response to one of Francis’s paintings is to scream back at it.

POSTMODERN CATALOG ESSAY

The assignment was to write a catalog essay in the postmodern tradition of excessive citation to an exhibition of our own work. Here it is:


What is a photograph (for “photography” see “Photography for Dummies: Second Edition” by Russell Hart)? To understand the work of Taylor Martin we must find an answer to this question, so we can therefore gain an understanding of underlying concepts (for “concept” see “The Big Book of Concepts” by Gregory L. Murphy). When we have come to a reasonable conclusion to this problem, we can then begin to unpack the work. Everything we see in Martin’s photographs is real (for “the real” see “Desert of the real, five essays on September 11th and related dates” by Slavoj Zizek). Taylor is the author (for “the author” see “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes) of photographs that question our standard conventions of processing information (for “information” see “Information: The New Language of Science” by Hans Christen von Baeyer) and put all other preconceived modes of representation (for “modes of representation” see “Les Modes de Representation Dans L'Union Europeenne by Sabine Saurugger) to shame. All of a sudden, after viewing this exhibition (for “exhibition” see “What Makes a Great Exhibition” by Paula Marincola), our place in the world seems to make sense. Maybe our human (for “human” see “Human, All Too Human” by Fredrich Willhelm Nietzsche) condition (for “condition” see “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard) really isn’t so bad.

ALBUM REVIEW

No Age -- "Nouns" released May 2008


LA based group No Age gives us the the perfect summer record for 2008 a month early. This album is the duo's first full-length, following up 2007's critically acclaimed EP Weirdo Rippers. e got to hear the band's more experimetal side with Weirdo Rippers, and Nouns is a great follow up with coherence that was not present in the EP. You could fit the band's sound within the genre of garage rock, only coming out of LA seems to give the group an edge. We hear sunny guitar riffs and a quality of recording not so typical to garage rock you hear coming out of Memphis. The band consists of two members, a drummer/vocalist and a guitar player. We also hear some intense layering of self recorded samples. The duo aspect gives the band's sound vitality and directness that is refreshing, yet they make us wonder how just two members are able to make this much noise. While some tracks are in keeping with their experimental roots, we also get single-worthy summer tracks like 'Eraser', along with power driven anthems like 'Teen Creeps'. While this is probably the poppiest record we've heard from No Age to date, it is also the most well rounded and fully realized.

SNAP JUDGEMENTS

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography


Nontsikelelo "Lolo" Veleko -- "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder"


If you plan to view this new exhibition of contemporary photography only once, you are in for an overwhelming experience. "Snap Judgements" is a collection of over 200 photographically-based works representing contemporary art practice over the whole continent of Africa, put together by curator Okwui Enwezor. The show is undeniabley powerful, and carries with it intricate layers upon layers of the history of an entire continent, and presents it to a Western viewer to comprehend, one typically unaware of the complexity of this history. An exhibition like this one is rare, and difficult to find comparisons for. One of the only exhibitions of it's kind was also organized by Enwezor himself for the New York Guggenhiem in 1996, called In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present". In a way, Snap Judgements is the sucessor to this show. However, "In/Sight" showed works made in more Modernist traditions, while "Snap Judgments" shows cutting edge contemporary works of photography, installation, and video documentaton of performance.

Shows at the Brooks are always inevitably a little crowded, but the hanging of Snap Judgements is handled better than shows we've seen here in the past. This time, they've managed to put together 200+ works challenging photography as a medium of representation into a space that could stand to be larger, but have still managed to give everything room to breathe. You might say that a show like "Snap Judgments" is one that is long overdue, because it is. Yet it is exciting that this show is in Memphis, a city where the message of the collection resonates louder than it would in other cities.

PROGRESS REPORT/BIBLIOGRAPHY

So far, I've been able to do some research, and I have about two pages of solid notes ready for the presentation.

Here's my official topic:

I'm focusing on the state of the photograph in contemporary art. Some critics say photography isa medium inherently connected with the representation of reality, since that in order for a photographic image to be made the object or scene being photograph must in some way exist in front of the camera in order for the camera to affirm it's existance. While this is essentially true, this does not mean that photographs are an honest representation of reality. The critical argument this whole idea brings up is whether or not photography is a medium that can represent reality more accurately than say painting or writing. My presentation will be an exploration of this idea through artists and photographers who are conscious of this idea of photography's 'inherent connection' with reality. In other words, I will look at artists who make something happen for the camera in order for it to be documented and therefore somehow anchored in reality. Examples of this include preformance artists using the photography asa a document for performance, such as Gabriel Orozco, Cindy Sherman, Vito Acconci, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, etc. I'll also look at conceptual artists from the 60's using photography for it documentary properties and exploting them to talk about ideas of the banal, such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Yves Klein, among others.


Books i've looked at so far:

-Art In Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

-The Photograph as Contempotary Art by Charlotte Cotton. Thames & Hudson, 2004.

-Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

-On Photography by Susan Sontag

-Criticizing Photographs by Terry Barrett

-Conceptual Art A&I (Art and Ideas) by Tony Godfrey

-Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, Introductory Essay by Rick Moody

-Cindy Sherman: Retrospective by Amanda Cruz and others

-Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on their art by Brooks Johnson

DON'T DO DRUGS

We all remember these.


The problem with anti drug ads like this classic becomes apparant once you search "anti drug commercials" on youtube. On the first page, out of 20 videos, only two of them are actually real anti-drug commercials; The remaining 18 are parodies of drug commercials. These ads simply can't be taken seriously. If these silly stoners are actually watching these ads, it seems that they are more likely to make a spoof and post it on the internet than to actually consider giving up their habit.

Reports are showing up everywhere that say the ads simply don't work. Some suggest the ads actually encourage some teenagers to experiment with drug use. Yet still, the government put hundred of millions of dollars into these programs, and taxpayers fund the free airtime the commercials recieve. Something isn't working. Perhaps the condescending, contrived delivery so characteristic to these ads is what causes them to be recieved so poorly. Maybe teenagers just aren't stupid enough to believe that if you do drugs that your dog will start talking to you or that if you're high you will inevitably do something you regret that will end up on the internet in the form of a video. The only thing I see ending up here are videos making fun of what just seems like misdirected propaganda. It is pretty funny. Don't do drugs.

ALBUM REVIEW

Kala by M.I.A.
Released August 2007

M.I.A. put herself in a situation where she had to live up to the tremendous hype of surrounding her first album, Arular, released in 2005 only after being widely circulated via the internet in 2004. If she were to continue building on ideas brought up in her first record, the context in which this album was made is in a strange way probably the best thing that could have happened to her. The first album was a group effort of sorts, where afterwards she would receive a lot of criticism for not putting enough of herself into the album. With Kala, we get to see M.I.A. at full force. What better circumstances are for an artist to follow up an album dealing with third world politics and globalization than to make a record in a constant period of transition from place to place? The record was supposed to be made in the States, but she only ended up getting here to record one track because of issues with customs concerning visas ("If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name"). The said one track (“Come Around” feat. Timbaland) happens to be the most bland, radio-friendly song we hear on the album. For the rest of the album, we hear M.I.A.'s politically-motivated digital weirdness shine more it ever has.

After Arular, critics went further to say that her politics were confused. While in Kala, the heavy one-liners using western slang as a sort of new, profound poetic device are not crystal clear in their intentions, they still carry the weight and have power to speak to the masses. She let us know her stance on global poverty on Arular with songs like “Pull Up the People”, and this time she gives us just enough to make us think with self-referential short statements like “third world democracy”, combining them with the wake up call sounds of gun shots and clanging cash registers. If you are still confused after hearing songs like “20 Dolla”. “Paper Planes”, and “World Town”, you just simply might not be spending enough time with the material. While in “20 Dolla” she might raise our eyebrows with statements letting us know the cost of AK47s in Africa, a price that is “not shit” to the typical westerner, she clarifies herself by setting up a familiar scene. If we stand on almost any street in Memphis, the statement “the price of living in a shanty town just seems very high, but we still like T.I., but we still look fly” has incredible resonance. It seems to me she is suggesting that violence is not something inherent to human behavior, but instead that it is the product of a class struggle. With lines like this, M.I.A. is fully utilizing her position as musician to advance social critique. She has the ability to reach a wide audience, and she is doing it with this record. Perhaps the only shame of this album is that it’s weirdness makes it not exactly the most radio-friendly of the year. But when “20 Dolla” goes into its chorus, and she throws back to The Pixies by reminding us that “our heads will collapse if there is nothing in them,” I can't help but wish that this could be the next top 40 club anthem.

TOP THREE

We did this on the first day of class. This is my first attempt at picking my three favorite books, albums, and films. The list is okay but needs to be revised a little.

BOOKS::

1. ThreePenny Opera by Bertoit Brecht
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. The Rover by Aphra Behn

(two plays?)

FILM::

1. Alphaville by Jean Luc Godard
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick
3. Annie Hall by Woody Allen


MUSIC::

1. White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground
2. Doolittle by The Pixies
3. Pet Sounds by Beach boys OR Goo by Sonic Youth

FIRST POST

This is the first writing assignment for class. We were supposed to take one of our choices from our three top 3 lists and write about it. This is about Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.


When reading in my free time, I usually find myself with an essay or article that the typical reader seeking an escape would try to avoid. This is probably just laziness on my own part, since I do this out of a desire for clear, concise, developed language that seeks an immediate point, rather than being drawn to a conclusion through prose spread out over several hundred pages. However, when I do find myself wanting to read a novel, I prefer one that is complex, and will be a challenge for me to make my way through. One that creates it’s own history that is intricate and layered, and is continually self-referential with this idea. I am not necessarily interested in linearity of narrative, or one that dwells on allegory, but instead I prefer a type of writing that challenges these conventions. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia- Marquez is a great example of a novel that meets these said criteria. I could place this novel within a list of favorites because of its layers of interest and a complexity of history that is intricate enough to hold my attention.
On the first page of the book, we are shown a diagram tracing the lineage of the Buenida family. This diagram becomes a lifeline for the reader, placed where it can be found easily because it is necessary to constantly refer back to it in order to not get lost within the narrative that unfolds. However, there is no concrete, linear narrative that is taking place here. The novel follows the Buenida family through several generations, following the events of these family members and constructing a loose narrative based on the reader’s ability to recognize reoccurrances through generations and keep in mind the history of the characters we are dealing with. The novel dwells upon this idea of the importance of family history, and asks the question how essential this idea is in creating a personal sense of self for each character over the years. There are also political ideas embedded within the novel, as the whole novel becomes a metaphor for the political condition of Latin America. I’ve found my personal connection to the novel through themes dealing with history and it’s relationship to subjectivity. The complexity of the novel is continuously engaging, and the story becomes a signifier for a long list of relevant ideas.