it's all around you

I attended a panel at USC on Monday night that is part of the series "Art in the Public Sphere" (I think it's a forum lecture series class for their arts grads.) At any rate, I was very excited to have the opportunity to hear Doug Aitken talk about his work, which he did in the way that someone whose tools for communication are visual as opposed to verbal (uh, read: somewhat tangental and very poetic; if words were too specific of a way to relate the slippery ideas he is trying to impress on the viewer.) I'll admit that my art crush has now been transferred from Sam Durant (sorry man) to Doug Aitken. The thing that seemed strange to me was the lack of video that he showed during his talk. I first saw his "Electric Earth" piece installed at the Whitney biennial and the thing that made it stand out from other emerging video work at the time was his fantastic sense of marrying the visual image to the audio, as well as a sensitivity to how the viewer experiences a projected work (thankfully, not on a monitor.) Aitken never seems to use the audio as a secondary sense, but as something that works in tandem with the visual experience (I think I've gushed about this before after seeing his "Migration" piece when I was still living in NYC.) At any rate, I really enjoyed hearing him talk about creating experiential work in his mystical and dry-humored way, and I've included the trailer for "Sleepwalkers" in case you've missed seeing how he works his magic in the past....
p.s. I also loved loved loved Ann Pasternack (of Creative Time); her enthusiasm and finesse for creating public art that was always a required see and opened up a community conversation has been one of my fondest memories of living back east and completely romanticized all my memories, making me want to get on a plane and go back there.

I know a great pizza place in Los Angeles, but I can't tell you where it is because I've been told my legs will then be broken as I wait in an even longer line for food. It has very tasty eggplant and tomato pie and serves Moretti....

Most Wanted

I watched the film My Kid Could Paint That this morning and could not help but feel compelled by the discussion of what makes something genius and what makes something original. I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's articles for the New Yorker the past year (I believe they culminated in Outliers) and have been thinking a lot about what may constitute genius, or even talent. Although the perception of talent seems to be that it is innate and apparent in the object itself, this documentary looks more to the fact that success comes from the context that the work exists in and the communication of that context. The gallerist, journalists and parents have much more to do with the sales of a four-year-olds artwork that the painting itself (Michael Kimmelman of the Times does a great job talking about that in this film.)
I thought the film would mostly look at art and the accepted perceptions of what defines it (which is what a four-year-old selling painters forces us to look at), but it is also looks at the story itself. , as it moved away from narrative and towards documenting the movements of the artist's gestures, now directly told the story of the artist and the personalities became part of the understanding of the work. The mythos around the object helped to dictate the understanding of it. Jackson Pollock became the James Dean of modern art. Most of the adults in this story seem to be projecting onto Marla and her paintings what they want from the worl of art. But as the filmmaker looks at all the forces surrounding the myth of the child painter Marla, he also looks at how the construction of his film adds to that myth by how it presents its subjects.
I couldn't help coming back to the mother's desire to protect her children from what she intrinsically felt were the pitfalls in the life of the child prodigy. The families desperation to have Marla's work validated as autonomous and original, without any outside coaching, becomes fully apparent when she pleads with the filmmaker to believe her, that it is of the utmost importance that he does. It made me realize that we forget the human once they have been put into the machine of a market.

support responsible abstraction

One of my favourite artists and graphic designers, Geoff Mcfetridge, will be showing work at the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park from March until August.
Here's a video he did for the Whitest Boy Alive

as long as i gaze on

	Islands - Waterloo Sunset (Kinks Cover)
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Wendy and Lucy

I don't think I ever experienced with more frequency the immediacy of helping a stranger than when I lived in New York. Not in the sense of giving directions to a tourist or dropping a dime in a bum's cup, but in the sense of being face to face with a person in a situation that probably defied some city ordinance or park rule or code of conduct and forced to choose whether to engage with them or stay safely in my own life. I guess I stopped thinking twice about helping someone after that, mostly because I thought that in a place with such a large population, so many people lived under the radar or fell beneath the cracks. What happens to a person when they are not in a community? How do we form a sense of community with the individuals we share physical, real space with?
It seems a much more curious dilemma now that friendships are mediated through social networks like Facebook and micro-updated with applications like Twitter. Our closest friends are virtually present while the physically present are our nearest strangers. The difference between living the real versus "knowing" the virtual becomes very apparent. Which makes it odd to consider this idea through safely watching a film... Kelly Reichardt's latest, "Wendy and Lucy," follows a young woman as she makes her way to Alaska in what may be a futile attempt to find work at a cannery. The whole premise could not be more relevant in a time when the population is feeling the effects of downsizing and "re-organization" and are faced with the task of building new communities and sometimes starting over in other geographic locations. What happens when you don't have your trusted neighbor in the adjoining apartment to ask for help, or need transportation home and your bus doesn't come, or are not sure if you are safe in the neighborhood you are walking through? I read a good review of the film on the New York Times' website citing this circumstance as "the nature of solidarity in a culture of individualism." More here.

the persistence of memory

"We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

I've had perception on the brain lately. I've been thinking quite a bit about my relationship with the world around me, from the smallest, most mundane moments. How do we process what happens during the course of a day? Since losing my job, moving cross country, having a near-death experience and suddenly being in a very domestic relationship situation, I've been forced by my own decisions and circumstances to look at every aspect of my day. There is something oddly disconcerting about not knowing where to pick up a loaf of bread if you forgot it at the grocery because you are unfamiliar with where you are. Moving to a new place creates a situation of having to learn new patterns for things that were before a given or taken for granted in that no research was required to do them. The desire for patterns is a curious thing: do we need shortcuts so that we do not dwell on the decisions that are made every moment, to clear the brain for larger decisions? It's 10 am and I'm not sure where to find lunch if I cannot just cook something from what I have here. What is around me for restaurants? How adventurous am I (or should I say, how much work do I want to put into finding something to eat?)

Not a complete thought, I guess. Seems to me like a few months of research may enlighten me on this matter...