LOVE IS A STAR-GUIDED BRICK

In one of his most famous sonnets, Shakespeare claims that true love is the permanent thing, the polar star by which we can all guide our ship. Love, he explains, never alters its path no matter what kind of impediment it encounters:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark [ship]....

But here is an opposite view from Yeats. For him, love is crooked and bewildering. And you can forget about that polar star business, love will continue to drive us nuts until those stars have all gone out:

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.

The following episode from the ongoing love/hate saga of Krazy Kat and Ignatz mouse shows Ignatz determined to overcome all obstacles and consummate a brick toss:



Notice how Herriman has provided us with a polar star to make sense of the visual pandemonium. That sun appears to bounce up and down on the horizon, but we soon realize that it is the horizon (along with everything else in the picture) that is bouncing around. The sun is the only thing that remains constant. It is the fixed reference point that gives these drawings the continuity necessary for us to figure out what the heck is going on:











Herriman doesn't side with either Shakespeare or Yeats. Artists speak in pictures rather than words, so Herriman does not need to worry about reconciling the two conflicting texts. Leave that dirty work to poets and lawyers. Pictures enjoy an ambivalence (and a truth) that words can't match; Herriman depicts an undeterrable Ignatz and a polar star such as Shakespeare might expect, but any love that involves being brained by a brick probably belongs on one of those crooked corners Yeats describes.

Herriman does contribute the insight that sometimes the only resolution of conflicts is found in the limp exhaustion of the couple (whether from happy activity or sad).

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Don't you hate it when big commerce does something real good

See Sprint's Plug Into Now project (launched about a year ago and created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners). Get impressed. And then goddamn it, move forward, do things no commerce can think of. Because it does have the feel of some excellent live art that's been around in the recent years. And let's say it feels just a tad late (and shallow, and not moving forward - but it's selling a product, for chrissakes!). Just late enough to feel that artists can still handle the commercial pressure.
Yes, they've been counting on viral marketing.
Yes, they think they might tap into a blog like this one.
Yes, they just did.
Because they're good. Is it a sin for a commercial enterprize to be good?
Well, they have the means. Get it while it's now. They play around with this idea, and they do it well.
I'm glad they do - it's an inspiring project. It makes me want to move beyond this. Now.
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Moebius Bach

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FLAGS: ART ON A STICK

Putting an image on the end of a stick and waving it around adds emphasis that you don't get when the same image is lying flat on paper.

For example, soldiers aren't likely to follow a nice lithograph into battle no matter how tastefully it is framed. They would not die fighting to keep their enemies from taking down their country's oil painting. And while composers have written stirring songs to the "star spangled banner," no one seems to have been similarly moved by a star spangled silk screen print.

I don't know if this is due to the fact that moving images attract more attention than static ones, or that graphic symbols typically serve different functions when they are placed on a flag, or just the excitement of marrying a picture with the wind. But somehow images are a totally different artistic experience when they are placed on a banner in a parade, or a flag leading a charge, or a tapestry wafting in the breeze.

Here are some designs on flags and banners that I think are really splendid:

It would be hard to appreciate-- or even see-- the subtleties of these lovely designs once these banners are in use. You just have to remember what they looked like. In that sense, loose cloth is an odd medium for visual art. But I suppose the wind contributes its own designs; it may sacrifice detail but it gains a lot of drama.


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Cheerup

Bibi Tanga.

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Far Away So Close

The San Francisco LAB just closed their 25th-year-anniversary exhibition called PastForward, where they made an open call to young artists to respond to works of the established ones who came out of The LAB. The result seems to have been quite exciting - you can take a look at some pictures at this site (with some great jazz playing on the site - which unfortunately can't be turned off...).
My favorite work, especially given the distant perspective (I'm in Warsaw now) is the Viewing Platform by Ellen Babcock:

Perfect for any vernissage! (And after all, what would contemporary art be without the vernissages!) It plays with an essential trait of contemporary art: centrality. You are taller, you see further, and as if by chance you are hence appreciated. You become the spectacle. Very tiring indeed. And fun, if you forget the impossibility of an intimate contact with the remaining works. I know, the people become the work, and still...
I would love to create a portable version of this. Like a small podium with railings that you could carry around the opening (wheels?), or rent, or receive if you are a VIP guest. Or just have one of my own, though the most enjoyable part might be having several people on this higher level, among the crowds. And believe you me, at the exhibition openings of the main Warsaw art centers, it would come in handy.


--
Here is what the curatorial note says:

Ellen Babcock responds to Lauren Davies with a sculptural installation
that addresses Davies’ engagement with representations of the natural world. Based upon Babcock’s visit to a tiny museum in Twillingate, Newfoundland – a visit Davies herself had made prior to Babcock – the sculpture teases out the differences between the two artists’ approaches to the tropes of natural history display. Encountering a stuffed polar bear in the museum, Davies responded with a gently mocking mixture of humor and pathos meant to remind us of the absurdity of the way taxonomies simplify and freeze the fluid mysteries of life. Babcock, on the other hand, found the quasi-encounter visceral and beautiful. While she sees Davies as opening up a space for the Real in an iconoclastic rejection of the traditions of natural display, Babcock looks for vestiges of the Real in the moment of encounter when disbelief is suspended.

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Quote of the day

To me it seems as though a lot of this... this work is people who are scared to live a life in the first place. Incredibly unradical people who play a game of a radical life within very safe confines of some Kunsthalle or other museum in Germany or France.

- Gavin Brown, gallerist, The Gavin Brown enterprise, about artists related to "relational aesthetics".

The quote comes from a film by Ben Lewis called "Relational Art: Is It an Ism?" (2004).
What I like about the film is that it's (sometimes) funny and doesn't fuss around.
What irritated me though was that beyond the humor I kept feeling a bitterness I despise. So when we discover in the film that Ben Lewis used to make art (with vegetables) and then decided he wasn't good at it and stopped, Lewis' slightly too aggressive attempts to ridicule the artists he talks about become, well, put into context. I would love to see the rest of the Art Safari series to see if it's juat the case of this episode, or is this the "intelligent irony" we should expect in every episode. (correction: I just realized I had seen an episode with Sophie Calle. And it's pretty much the same thing).
But then... I found this famous article of his about the art world - "Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?" which basically claims it's all an evil world, a clique that only wants profits. And although I agree with some of the statements he is making, it's the tone that really discredits him. (The joker became the prophet!) Especially given he is publishing on the site of... the Saatchi Gallery!


The paintings, (which in my humble opinion are rather unrelated to the topic of relational aesthetics), are by Peter Doig, at the Gavin Brown enterprise. (They are here because of solitude, reflection, one's place in the world as an artist and a person. And skiing.)
The photo is by Ryan McGinley. Read more "Quote of the day..."