Destroying The National Parks
Yesterday’s New York Times featured an interesting but very disturbing editorial on forthcoming policy decisions which may wind back the clock on America’s National Park system…… Mother nature seems to be having something to say about her treatment of her ocean and sky lately. I wonder how she will react to more carelessness in our national parks?
Another poem – “Voluntary Servitude” by Mark Wunderlich
I did some research on the poet, Mark Wunderllch and found another poem of his that I liked. VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE In a valley in Wisconsin there is a graveyard where the graves are flooded by spring. You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that? To see a man in shackles, how you feel about that, depends on whether the servitude is voluntary The bodies are intact in their gloves, soaked in a bath of ice…. In the dark she could hear it—dry, slipping onto boards like a stocking rolled from a leg…. Some think to say the bodies are intact is wrong…. Some shackles too— Some you can remove. But this story— you start in the middle, in the thick and marrow of it.
Art and the Environment
An interesting article at Grist (thanks to The Artery) had me thinking about our response and role as artists to all the changes going on in the environment around the world…. What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art | By Bill McKibben | Grist Magazine | Soapbox | 21 Apr 2005: Here’s the paradox: if the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter…. The great subplot of these few years involves the introduction of Indians and Chinese as principal players, a fascinating confrontation between old privilege and new assertion…. Art, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action…. To document the buzzing, glorious, cruel, mysterious planet we were born onto, before in our carelessness we leave it far less sweet…. That famous picture of the earth from outer space that Apollo beamed back in the late 1960s –already that’s not the world we inhabit; its poles are melting, its oceans rising. We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?
Getting Your Foot into the NYC Art World
Edward_ Winkleman has an excellent post on how to get your foot into the NY Art World…. No one is a better ally in your fight to get the recognition you deserve here than other artists. They’re undoubtedly the most qualified critics of your work, they understand completely what you’re going through, and if you share what you hear about opportunities with them, you should be able to expect the same in return…. These are curated generally, so your work may still be rejected, but they do indeed lead to group exhibitions and other opportunities. There are two primary registries you should apply for: the one at Artists Space and the one at White Columns. Please note that both of these spaces focus on emerging artists engaged in the “contemporary” dialog, so if you’re more of a traditionalist, you might not be accepted…all I’m saying here, is consider their mission before you submit…. And the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ “Artists in the Market Place” is a remarkable program that I’ve seen change everything for some of its alumni…. So organize an exhibition, write reviews, work for an art handler, work for a museum, hell…work for a gallery, teach, join an artists’ crit group, start an artist crit group, go to salons, go to lectures, go to openings.
Lego Art Exhibition
I came across an interesting gallery exhibition called Art Craziest Nation – The Little Artists: (thanks to Art in Liverpool): “The Little Artists (John Cake and Darren Neave) immortalize iconic artists and their artworks in un-manipulated Lego. In Art Craziest Nation they have curated and built their own mini-exhibition of modern art. Cake & Neave have transformed themselves into two loveable, mischievous cartoon characters, The Little Artists. They exist in the realm of merchandise, between aggressively marketed children’s culture like Pokemon and gallery gift shops, where art becomes a commodity: “We question what it means to be an artist in the current super-branded cultural climate.” Priding themselves on the integrity and accuracy of their hybrid artworks, their knowledge of Lego is comprehensive and respects its association with learning and creativity. The Little Artists’ ambition is to be considered great artists and win the Turner Prize. Art Craziest Nation is a bustling gallery featuring an array of modern art masterpieces. Look out for Damien Hirst with his Shark Tank, Tracey Emin’s infamous Bed and the transvestite, Turner Prize-winning potter Grayson Perry, and of course the gallery shop.”
Cezanne and Pissarro at the MoMA
Last night I visited the Cezanne and Pissaro exhbition at MoMA which focuses on the dialogue between Cezanne and Pisarro which spurred them on to become better painters. I am fascinated by friendships between artists or writers, where without the friendship , neither would have become the artist they were destined to be. For example, Van Gogh and Gaughin, O’Keefe and Steiglitz, Michealangelo and Pope Julian. The exhibition is extremely comprehensive although I would have liked more commentary on how the friendship affected each other’s thoughts on the practice of art. At the start of their friendship both artists shared a need to overturn the established art institutions. They were looking for a new visual language. They met in Paris in !861 and both felt like outsiders in the Parisian art world. Cezanne set out to “enrage the Salon” and Pissaro to “set the Louvre on fire.”
Friday’s Featured Painting – Kona Morning
The light in Kona haunts me. This painting was created in the early morning with the light washing out the windswept bay in the distance.
Should Art Museum Directors be Curators or CEOs?
The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article looking at the qualifications most needed to run a modern art museum.
A poem from the Living Poetry Blog
I got this poem from Amy’s blog. She has the most wonderful poems there…. The Hammock Your hand pushes me away so that I float into the night, then swing back, back from the nebulae to our drifting conversation. Among the race of star demons what I saw out there– golden chains, the spindle, sirens chanting the music of the spheres– blurs and streaks across star-flung distances the chain-link fences can’t fence out. Between your hand and the hammock’s slow rocking the Void expands, twisting threads tautening, slackening, stretched almost to breaking: Do you feel that wobble of earth’s axis, space whirling past the ice-capped pole? The pines like judges stare down at us: What should we recant, here, tonight, as if we’d only just begun: Off-center already, losing equilibrium? The world-soul moving through the strung-out stars moves in threads that creak and moan, breathes between your mouth and mine. Pushing me away, you bring me home, your attraction drawing down the alchemical sign: Love draws the soul the way a magnet draws iron.
The drumbeat of Africa
A few years ago I had the good fortune to visit Ghana on the west coast of Africa…. The feeling haunts me still, along with the voice of a young girl who sang and took me straight to heaven…. One of the highlights was a visit to see the Golden Stool of the Ashanti kings. The Ashanti tribe is the largest tribe in Ghana, and one of the few matrilineal societies in West Africa. Ashanti kings retained figurehead status after colonization, and even today great pride in the Ashanti King lives on in the tradition of the Golden Stool…. As an Ashanti symbol, the golden stool represents the worship of ancestors, well-being, and the nation of Ashanti…. The sounds of drums and the unearthly early morning chanting of religious devotees used to wake up me up early in the morning…. The talking drum is a traditional Ghanaian drum and the sounds it makes mimic the ten sounds of the Ashanti language.
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