2 + 2 = 5

Monsters of the World

2012-02-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

Andrew Cole

Dean Millien

I went to the 20th Anniversary Outsider Art Fair last weekend in NYC with friends, and it was a lovely, cleaned-up, curated carnival of an experience. It was a lot like going to the Folkfest in Atlanta without the folk-artsy "Southern Charm" booths and wares. All the booths exemplified what "the field" of outsider art has become: examples of works from programs for artists with disabilities intermingled with "high-end" galleries representing mid-level and higher-level outsider artists. Lots of gorgeously meandering drawings, flashy expressive paintings, home-made dolls, found-object sculptures. Etc.

I kept hearing the refrain from the Talking Heads song in my head as I walked through: "Same as it ever was." The newness of "outsiderness" has completely worn off, at least for me. Now everything about the concept has the gleam and gloss of "establishment," an enterprise that has settled into itself and has become what it is supposed to be, and what it will be from now on.

I wasn't bored or outraged by this epiphany. The experience was completely pleasurable. I appreciated what the fair was. I enjoyed the works. But I also felt my interest slipping away from the concept as a whole. Putting all these works together under the rubric of "outsider" seems kind of old-hat and a little ersatz now. Antiquated in a way that can't be addressed through an essay or a symposium.

In the program that accompanied the fair, Critic Edward M. Gomez writes: "As many of these outsider art admirers regularly point out, there is one inescapable aspect of the most compelling work made by self-taught artists that never fails to seize their imagination. That is that it is always profoundly, unmistakably, inexplicably moving." He goes on to paraphrase Jean Dubuffet, the Godfather of all of this stuff: "Dubuffet insightfully noted that each of these art-makers produced his or her work primarily for himself or herself, not for a broad public and certainly not for the art market or to grab media attention."

Gomez never really gets at the central irony of all this: celebrating "outsiderness" by celebrating the way it has become celebrated and commodified, when in effect the whole idea was to shield the concept from this inevitable process. Or at least complicate it some.

We stayed with our friends Andrew Cole and Cathy Dailey in Princeton, NJ and took the train in to see the fair. Andrew and Cathy are really incredible people. Cathy is a self-taught artist in her own right, and Andrew is a professor at Princeton. One night Andrew showed us some drawings from his childhood that his mom had saved for him. They are incredibly silly and potent renderings of reptiles and outerspace creatures and superheroes, all done on notebook paper and stashed inside a green three-ring binder labeled, "Monsters of the World."

These drawings, to me, were just as exciting as a lot of the stuff I saw at the Outsider Art Fair. I loved their delicate nostalgic obsessiveness. Their sweetness. Knowing Andrew for 20 years also helped. Something about the intermingling of that self-taught creepiness and knowing the artist in a specific way somehow helps to separate the art you like from the Art World you don't, which is the central problem I think I'm trying to get at. When outsider art becomes a part of the everyday world, the intimacy becomes commodified. The stories behind its making evaporate into aphorisms and appraisals. But those childhood drawings of Andrew's have an authenticity and a preciosuness I can champion without feeling like a douche-bag art critic; they are fun to look at and were produced because of a need to sanctify the delirious love of dinosaurs and lazer beams. Period. My pleasure at their creation is fortified by the fact that these works were made not to be seen but to be collected in a three-ring binder dream-bible hidden under a little kid's bed.

That same sort of sanctification happens in Dean Millian's work above. He makes animal sculptures out of aluminum foil, and his work (supported by LAND Gallery, a program for artists with developmental disabilities in Brooklyn) was the best stuff I witnessed at the 20th Anniversary Outsider Art Fair. I don't know Dean, but I somehow felt the same nostalgic and obsessive sweetness coming from his work as I did from Andrew's: a sense of play, and a sense of devotion to playing. But, unlike Andrew's childhood drawings, there is a posh finesse to Dean's work. He takes the simplest of materials and fashions them into a sophisticated silver menagerie. It's like merging those high-end aluminum foil swans fancy restaurants give you as doggie-bags with the mythology and grace of Noah's Ark.

Andrew is a Princeton University Professor. Dean is an artist labeled with a disability. But looking at their works I felt the same drive to make something out of nothing. They both create art that has left its artifice and became blatantly something else, while also maintaining a certain stubbornly authentic aesthetic. Purity is no longer an issue now that outsider art is what it is. But purity and an intensity that "is always profoundly, unmistakably, inexplicably moving" comprise outsider art's essence, the reason it exists as a genre. Placing Andrew and Dean's works side by side complicates "outsiderness" to the point it does not really make sense anymore, and yet maintains the idea that art set free from having to be art always somehow finds a way to exist with or without a fair or a genre or even an audience.

How do you celebrate that?

Cat People

2012-01-14T16:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I'd pick up Vickie, our cat, and tell her, "I don't know what I'm going to do when you die." It was kind of a joke to show that I wasn't sentimental. That I wasn't one of those "cat people" who think their pets are their babies.

Beyond being unsentimental, though, I needed to make a joke of the situation because it was the truth more-than-likely. And it turned out to be yesterday. We took Vick to the vet. She was blind and her back legs were paralyzed. Something neurological, the vet said. She was 17. Always a skinny wild baby freak, she got precious as she grew old -- so precious that she went from furious snapper if you touched her the wrong way to lap cat purring instantaneously if you picked her up. That transformation happened quickly, and she was like that for the last year or so. It was as if she had found a way to understand what dying is by becoming the sweetest thing on earth so she could leave it on good terms.

Poof.

Before we took her to the vet I was upstairs brushing my teeth and I just started bawling. I mean it was like a force of nature. I felt like that little kid in Terms of Endearment when he goes in to say goodbye to Debra Winger.

Then the vet injected Vick, and she was gone, on a white towel in the examining room. It was cold as hell yesterday, and we took the basket and towels we brought her in back out to the van. Went to Cracker Barrel, because (keep those jokes coming) that's where Vick would have wanted to go. We always characterized her as pure white-trash, but lovingly so, as we are too. She was born in a factory in Hamilton, Ohio.

She used to run out the back door and over the back yard fence, up to a neighbor's pool. Whenever we wanted to find her when she ran off, we knew she'd be up there suntanning by the pool. Bumming cigarettes from people. Wanting a margarita.

I know I'm being sentimental and I should tell myself a lot of stupid jokes about cat-people and their eccentricities, but you know what? I'm a cat person. I loved that little stupid thing. 17 years knowing her. It was like time dying somehow right in front of you.

One more thing: she got really hungry as she got old and precious and sweet. She ate like a pig but lost weight. She would eat her food every day like it was her last meal. God help anybody who got in her way.

The Holier-Than-Thou Trinity

2012-01-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

Star Jones, Danny Deutsch and Dr. Nancy Snyderman get on my nerves. They comprise a segment on the Today Show called "Today's Professionals," which basically is a three-minute-or-so group-rant that makes the three of them come off like a tri-headed hydra. A moderator hurls "headlines" at them and they state the obvious in a fashion that makes you feel like you are at a party full of starchy, big-mouthed, arrogant fools masquerading as The Supreme Zeitgeist.

Jones especially is hilarious. In one segment the moderator showed a clip from an anti-child-obesity ad campaign, and that gave Jones the inspiration to go all evangelical about her past struggles with weight gain and shame. But with Jones (and the other two) it's not the freshness of the message that matters, as much as the peacock-in-full-splendor delivery of it. In other words, Jones was only stating the obvious ("I was once morbidly obese, and now I'm not, so I know a thing or two about childhood obesity thank you very much"), but she did so with such horrible over-the-top aplomb it made me feel like I was in the presence of someone doing a parody without knowing it. She doesn't seem to have that interior voice many of us are blessed with, the one that allows us to know we are full of crap. Without it her "professionalism" becomes a megaphone for whatever she thinks people will find "stimulating." She's the crazy sherriff of Water-Cooler-Moment County.

All three utilize that special egotistical panache often associated with the word "professional." They sit in high-chairs like pedigreed babies and/or 16th Century Royalty spouting off bromides in a resplendence born of privilege and more than a little vanity. They do all this pontificating in a safe and scolding manner, like Fox News merged with Old-school Phil Donahue. My favorite moment so far with "Today's Professionals" was yesterday when the three were shown a clip of that new black and white and very boring Casey Anthony You-Tube video. Blond and sporting the librarian look, Anthony sits in front of her web-cam and talks about herself and her dog and herself. "Today's Professionals" went rabid on that acquitted murderer's ass. They diagnosed her as a sociopath and a narcissist and they just wanted to never see her again! That triple-rant went on for what felt like an eternity. Good use of a doctor, a lawyer and an ad executive's very expensive and very precious billable time.

"Professionalism" can be a word attached to any endeavor you choose. In this case, all their degrees and experience are being used to create a Board of Directors for a lynch mob. The main theme of the Anthony rant was that this woman is out of the public eye, let's keep it that way, but she just put a video up on You-Tube so we better take advantage of that while we can. The triple-headed Cerberus loves barking at the gates of hell, and then it's onto another segment about how men are biologically programmed to cheat and women are biologically programmed to put up with it.

Welcome to 2012 everybody.

Hot Mess

2012-01-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

This is from a blog post Aaron Betsky, the Cincinnati Art Museum Director, wrote concerning "The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art," a big new exhibit at the CAM:

"The one issue that will not be addressed through these additions is whether these new displays treat the works of art with appropriate respect. The Schmidlapp Gallery turns each work into an icon, and in so doing removes it from the historical context in which most art museums (including this one) usually show such artifacts. In The Collections, the opposite happens: you have to look at what we think is an important work of art without many of the usual framing devices. For us, the questions both of these approaches, as well as some of the others we will be unveiling over the next year or two, raise get to the point of what an art museum does: at least in part, it makes the artifact into what we think of as a work of art through the way it displays that object or image. By varying how we do that, we want you to be aware of that process, and maybe even to be part of it."

Beautiful things to think about.

When you are in the thick of the exhibit, confronted with the "salon-style" onslaught of paintings and objects in "The Collections," meaning gets twisted out of itself until all you have left is stuff. For the most part it is beautiful and interesting stuff, but stuff none-the-less. Pictures and objects get summarily delegitimized through this process of egalitarian chic, and yet they also become somehow more sympathetic, more of this earth, to the point you start thinking about how much money these things cost, and why are/were these things worthy of museum-ness in the first place? Just because they're here doesn't mean they mean anything. That's kind of what this "hot mess" tactic of display shows us, and I'm happy about that. The honesty Betsky is extolling is worth a little brain time. It seems like he's deconstructing the institution he is in charge of. Good for him.

Museums. churches, universities, and other institutions that are in charge of delivering meaning to us can often ossify into palaces ran by emperors with no clothes. "The Collections" at its very core is allowing us to reconsider that hierarchy thoroughly and without a lot of drama. The Schmidlapp Gallery becomes a cosmic, epistemological Salvation Army Store. I felt both inundated with objects and somehow set free from their preconditioned purposes and attractions. The one painting that makes its way out of the mess most distinctively (for me at least) is Phillip Guston's magnificent mean-spirited celebration of creepiness. It has the vibrant stasis of a concussion taking place inside an overdecorated dream.

"Grace" Is the Word

2011-12-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

Ultra-Suede is a new documentary by Whitney Sudler-Smith focused on Halston, the fashion designer who started out as a hat-maker (Jackie O wore his pill-box hat to the inauguration) and transformed himself into a household name in the 70s and 80s by simplifying fashion and marketing and personality into a crystal-clear fever-dream disco-ball.  The movie mines old video and film footage archives to produce a phantasmagorical set of montage sequences that fuse Good Morning America circa 1979, Studio 54 prancing, valcano-lit fashion runways, mayonnaise commercials, Versailles 1973, day-glo Andy Warhol portraits, beige-gray hyper-architectural party rooms filled with white orchids, the Twin Towers echoed in a hall of mirrors, etc. into a Rasuchenberg-like setpiece about the famous designer who seemed to piss away his fortune all so he could brag about how much he loved America.

Halston was a genius, the movie argues, and the way Sudler-Smith investigates his subject-matter mesmerizes you into believing. Plus interviews with everyone from Billy Joel to Liza Minnelli allow us insight into a world of fashion, freaks and friends. Halston was a tragic figure, Warhol sycophant Bob Colacello tells us, because of his greatness. That greatness manifests itself most glamorously and amazingly in his clothes. Using a wide concatenation of fabrics and hardly any sewing, Halston created caftans, blouses, skirts, and evening gowns that seem to flow out of a dream and onto a body without losing anything in the process; in his designs he took form, function and style and allowed simplicity to dictate almost every move, and yet there was nothing simple about the finished products. "Grace" is the word.

Sudler-Smith insinuates himself into the movie's narrative in set pieces about his love of the 70s (he even drives around at times in a Smokey and the Bandit-era Trans-Am), but he truly is most effective as a naive dumb-ass asking the questions we would when confronted with people like Liza. He seems to idolize Halston, and not understand why until he starts figuring out Halston's eminence and more importantly how human and fallible and strangely sweet he was.  I mean, as the movie points out, Halston's most tragic flaw was his love of JC Penney's, and his trust of CEOs.

By the end I felt as if I had gone back to that time, in the late 70s and early 80s, when the world seemed horribly and beautifully off-kilter, as if the decades were crashing into one another and throbbing disco lights were being summarily extinguished by "Just Say No."  Ultra-Suede has the charm, innocence and decadence needed to both eulogize and re-crown a genius.

Welcome to the Monkey House

2011-12-28T12:33:00.000-08:00

Diane Arbus: "A Woman with her Baby Monkey, New Jersey 1971"

Andy Serkis as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Movies do things to you, even movies that you think you are too good for. Like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a late summer blockbuster that seemed like a waste of time, one of those "franchise" movies trying to squeeze whatever juice it can from a mostly dried up concept: monkeys ruling the earth.

So I saw it on TV the other day and I was floored. Emotionally crippled for a little while.

The movie has the grace and pace and eeriness of an early Cronenberg masterpiece like Dead Ringers smashed together with the popcorn glee of the very first Planet of the Apes.  Rise tells the story of Caesar, a chimpanzee born in a medical lab whose mother, Bright Eyes, is being injected with an experimental drug that supposed to eradicate Alzheimer's.  At the very beginning of the picture, Bright Eyes goes berserk because she does not want her secret child discovered. Once he is discovered, however, James Franco's goofy. sweet, intense scientist adopts him, and they become linked parentally, spiritually, and morally. It's the Moses story spliced with Spartacus.

What allows Rise to escape its conventions is Andy Serkis. Through the "magic" of motion-capture technology, Serkis portrays Caesar without wearing a monkey mask.  He is transformed digitally into his chimpanzee-ness, but that transformation somehow increases the emotional power of what he accomplishes as an actor.

It's all in the eyes.

Rise reminds me of how intimate, creepy, perfect, and simple movie-acting should and can be. Serkis's eyes carry the movie through its many plot machinations, as if behind all those glossy computer-generated cosmetics are beams of light so strong you are allowed to forget the fakery and enter a place where chimpanzees actually do feel, talk and organize themselves into a kick-ass army about to take over Planet Earth.

But the quintessential moment of the movie, for me, comes in a scene early on, when Caesar is taken for a walk in the park and he sees a dog on a leash, and then realizes he himself is on a leash too. The expression in his eyes is one of disappointment, terror, fear, and hurt: all this time he was actually thinking he was the equal of his human counterparts. Now he knows he is not, and that knowledge is our doorway into his pain, and the movie's triumph.

I remembered a photograph taken by Diane Arbus while watching Rise. It's titled  "A Woman with her Baby Monkey, New Jersey 1971," and I saw it in September at a retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern in London. A skinny, ghostly and kind of ghastly-looking lady holds a baby monkey in her lap. Both sets of eyes look right into Arbus's camera, as if to challenge us out of mockery. And then as you look deeper you see there can be no mockery because this is life: this is kindness, weirdness and bravery. The baby monkey is being protected by this possibly insane lady, and yet the baby monkey seems also to be protecting the lady from something all of us fear: being alone, being disconnected from the world, shattered and lost. That baby monkey on the lady's lap is her connection to us somehow.

When Caesar recognizes he is just a goddamn dog on a leash I felt that same sense of displacement, and the movie guides us into an understanding of how horrifying and eventually empowering choosing not to be a dog on a leash can be.

Hijacked!

2011-12-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

Will Tucker and Jacob Isenhour's onesheeter for "Buy an Hour."

The post below this one is my personal, kooky, and freewheeling take on an art exhibit at a little local art gallery here in town called Museum Gallery Gallery Museum. The exhibit is titled "Buy an Hour," and it features art by two gentlemen with BFAs and MFAs, Will Tucker and Jacob Isenhour. Upon seeing the show on its opening night I was truly inspired.  It seemed to me to be about a mystical yet landlocked convergence of working-class angst, visual mischief, and poetic ambitiousness, a dreamy vignette in which William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp have started running a meth lab together.

Here's the artist Will Tucker's response to what I wrote: "Although I appreciate the complimentary tone of this review such cannot justify the kind of hijacking it attempts. This review reproduces that Dickean trope that buttresses a modernist teleology against a pre-modern Appalachian/rural other. Such fascination with the grotesque is an expression of the uncanny shock where modernity experiences its land base."

I wrote a smart-alecky response back to him, which you are welcome to read in the comments section below the original post. But I got to thinking Sunday as I was watching football all day about Will Tucker's weird, over-the-top, and somehow anxious reply to my reaction to his show, and I remembered the onesheeter that had accompanied "Buy an Hour." (I scanned it in; see above.)

A brief little comment on the show's intention and the artists' relationships and credentials, the onesheeter states, "With a common concern for how labor conditions and production time dominate environment and energy relations, these artists look for ideas and potentials that outfall property lines." At the time of seeing the show I remembered reading this sentence and that is kind of what made me go with what I wrote. I thought embedded in that rhetoric was a desire for transgression somehow. "Potentials outfalling property lines," etc. The show itself transgresses playfully, mixing "nature" and "man-made" in little sick ways that reminded me of my white-trash childhood. I remembered the boredom and fear of being left alone when I was little and my mom and dad had to go to work, and all the trash and objects in and around our rundown house turning magically into objects that could "mean" something beyond just being there. This transformation occurred because the circumstances of being left by myself dislocated my perception of the natural world, spun me out of the norm and into the universe left to me when I was all alone and afraid no one was coming back.  The art in "Buy an Hour" allowed me re-entrance into that world. It allowed me to rehash my "fascination with the grotesque." And by "grotesque," I'm referencing Bahktin's version, the one in Rabelais and His World, the grotesque trope used as a comic figure of profound ambivalence, displacement and transference. The kind of literary and philosophical grotesquery that allows you the pleasure of reversing your idea of good and evil, beautiful and ugly.  (By the way, I could be identified as possibly the penultimate "Appalachian/rural other." I'm from Johnson City, Tennessee, working-class, raised Fundamentalist Baptist, and yup: gay. You name it. In other words, I wasn't being "teleological." I was being "ontological.")

However, Will Tucker seems to want to block that entrance in his response to my post. He seems to have found meaning in his work prior to it being seen, and that meaning, he seems to feel, needs to be protected with a fence made out of $100 words.

I wonder if Will Tucker was not credentialed and not making art in that sense of what "meaning" means he might allow for meanings beyond philosophy and post-structuralism.

Which brings me around to the topic I beat like a dead horse: outsider art. "Outsider artists" simply by BEING "outsider artists" are posited as not "owning" the meanings of their works; they make art reclusively, so the story goes, without regard for the art-world or its meanings and meaning-makers.

BFA- and MFA-less, Antonio Adams is an artist we champion at Thunder-Sky, Inc., the art gallery I oversee along with a few other folks.  Often working under the title "outsider artist," Antonio does his artistic "research" when not being a busboy at Frisch's. Antonio creates buckets and buckets of meaning, but he doesn't claim that meaning as his sole property I don't think. I really don't think he cares too much about what people think, other than folks showing up and possibly buying some of it. Or cute girls telling him how great he is. However, the universe he is creating, the identity he is trying to fashion (as an artist outside of dichotomies, institutions and academies), is quite precious to him. And to me and several others who know his work.

Take a look:

Antonio Adams' new painting

In many of his paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures, Antonio is positioning himself as a maestro of an ongoing orchestra. This new painting has the absolute clarity of a WPA mural mingling with the bright lights of Broadway and the chaos and absurdity of your favorite guilty-pleasure reality show. "Meaning" in Antonio's aesthetic is (another Bahktin term) "heteroglossic," a matrix of conflicts, comedy and just plain moxy. In fact, Antonio references every form of culture (both high and low) in his oeurvre. In other words, the "meaning" in Antonio's work comes through a little clearer than in Will Tuckers' because of the confidence of not wanting to control outcomes, not caring who sees it or how it buttresses a reputation. As the saying goes: show, don't tell. I think the same thing could be said of Will Tucker and Jacob Isenhour's "Buy an Hour." No hijacking was intended at all, but what I assumed was that their art was up for interpretation and celebration in terms beyond "deterministic time systems." I guess I just wanted the gloriously evokative simplicity of their art to be what I wrote about, sans the self-made complexity of what they think it should mean.

"Nothing Would Sleep in That Cellar"

2011-12-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

I went to the opening of a show at Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum last night, in its new space in Brighton here in Cincinnati, and as soon as I walked in I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. Which is a good thing. "Buy an Hour," a two-person gig starring artists Jacob Isenhour and Will Tucker, comes complete with a one-page Xerox explanation about the genealogy and purpose of hedge-apples, the credentials of the artists, and some abstract notions about "discipline, regimented labor, and deterministic time systems." But all that is truly just hokum when you experience this show in the flesh. Words spin and melt away like your dead grandpa's pills tossed into the commode, and you are at once confronted with a feeling of awe, comfort and nausea. The gallery space has been transformed into what happens when boredom meets ambition, when all the crap left behind at construction sites intermingles with nature's dross and the desire of a couple of really serious artists to grapple with re-imagining what "country living" actually means, and can do to you.

The art on the walls and floor is beautifully curated and oneirically off-kilter. All of it is lit in a mishmash of lighting reminiscent both of a barn in a horror movie and a one-act play about loneliness in a small town. A strand of gangrene-colored hedge-apples are tossed onto the floor like a giant's horrible, tacky jewelry. Hybrids of potted concrete and rotting hedge-apples with sticks sprouting from the top anchor the whole gorgeous mess, and catercorner to the hedge-apple necklace are two spinning pickle-buckets, making a noise kind of like hamsters on amphetamines. On the walls are blond-wood framed detritus, beautifully unfinished yet completely "there" paintings/collages/whatever captured from demolished rooms.

Serendipity transforms into perception in this show. Both Isenhour and Tucker re-purpose to the point of no return, and beyond even that -- conjuring a backwoods laboratory where hedge-apples morph into heroin-tumors, and "crystal-meth" is just another word for nothing left to lose. The gallery space is a limbo of objects and waste, a place between Heaven and Hell where you go to wait for bad news, and the only solace is that you are indoors. Industrial, sleek, bluesy, creepy, working-class, and very distinct, "Buy an Hour" is one of the best shows I've seen around here in a while.

I kept hearing Theodore Roethke in my head as I walked through. One of the greatest 20th Century American poets, Roethke's works often celebrate the dank and dark place where man tries to find peace in nature, and nature doesn't actually ever return the favor. His poems about ditches and graves and journeys into the wild represent a dangerous world of objects and emotions preserved in a silence you can only hear when you're not there. I'll end with one of my favorite Roethke poems, which for me is a replacement for the perfunctory "Buy an Hour" Xerox:

Root Cellar

Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

John Hinckley, Jr., Captain America

2011-12-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

The other day on the radio the announcer said John Hinckley, Jr., the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 and was found innocent by reason of insanity, wants more privileges. Instead of going home to stay with his mother for ten days a month, he wants 24. The Federal Attorneys in John's hearing on this matter quoted the Secret Service as saying that John is a liar and narcissist. They said, for example, this summer his mother dropped John off at the movie theater to see Captain America. But instead of going to the movie, he walked over to the Barnes & Noble and looked at books about presidential assassinations. Then he went out to a bench, the Secret Service said, and sat down in front of the movie theater, telling his mom when she picked him up that he saw Captain America, and also later that week John went to a gathering with his mother and told friends and neighbors how wonderful Captain America was and how they must see it.

This story is reminiscent of the ridiculousness of a really good Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, but also showcases the tragic banality of real life. The core of it is John searching out images of his own ghostly fame, that secret stardust the Secret Service will never see. The unmitigated gall of this insane assassin! Or is it just human nature? Puffy-faced, intent on shaping his own weird shady legacy, John is a performance artist in this vignette, using Captain America as his cover and his allusion to bigger and better worlds, and to normalcy itself. I haven't seen Captain America, but I did catch a preview of it, and it seemed to focus on the transformation of a skinny, heartfelt little guy who gets beefed up by a sci-fi machine in order to fight Nazis. In the process of transformation a costume appears: red white and blue with a shield and mask and everything.

Flash on John: pants that probably don't fit, pit stains, hang-dog yearning. A sadsack with mental problems looking for love in all the wrong places, dreaming of that one day when he got what he wanted. All that attention, all that drama. He still walks the earth like that. And the Secret Service follows. There has to be a loneliness like a hot light reaching through his clothes, burning and not burning his skin, like someone is always taking a picture of his heart.

He doesn't know any better, and yet he's guilty none-the-less. The subtitle of Captain America is "The First Avenger." John could have chosen ten or eleven other summer blockbusters at the multiplex as his alibi. I'm betting that subtitle was what drew him to that initial scheme.

Ghost of a Chance

2011-12-01T11:39:00.000-08:00

Susan Boyle's new album, Someone to Watch over Me, kills me.

And it's only partially because she won that big contest despite looking like a Neanderthal merged with Little Orphan Annie back in 2009. The songs she and/or her managers/producers have chosen have a resounding oddness and poetry simply because of her voice, status and charm, a bone-deep mysteriousness both from the musical arrangements and the singular, studied, mystical way Susan sings.

Susan actually offers up a rendition of "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode that brings me to tears. The way it's been produced, the song is no longer a vibrating neo-disco chant, but a sleepy, sophisticated, seductive ballad. I play it going on home visits, driving through rundown working-class neighborhoods. The journey kind of goes cinematic and spiritual, Susan's voice turning peeling vinyl siding and wet barking dogs and upside-down toys in the mud into images from a tragic, delicate independent movie in my head. Some sincere, enchanting documentary about abandoned hopes and dreams, etc.

"Enjoy the Silence" bleeds into Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and that ethereal treatise on something being lost and something being gained in living everyday bleeds into the late Jeff Buckley's "Lilac Wine," one of those songs that make you feel like you've dropped in on a dream while it's still in progress.

This is an album that makes you want to succumb to its bittersweet spell so you can officially be invisible.

Susan's transformation from that creepy kinky-haired She-Devil to Sophisticated Song Stylist is no longer the main story here. However it happened, Susan has started to create a body of work that feels authentic and has a comforting melancholic gloss. Like the Carpenters' or Bread's or Gordon Lightfoot's, Susan's oeuvre has a lasting sting to it because of the mix of easy-listening approachability and sorrow, show-biz and serious longing. Someone to Watch over Me is a slick, rigorous, and slightly off-kilter collection of songs about not getting what you want. One of the few newly written songs on the album, titled "This Will Be The Year," already feels like a classic. All about lost chances and trying over and over to get things right, Susan sings the song with the depth, hurt and majesty of all people who've not been taken seriously and who stow away doubts and taunts until one day they get the chance to fly out of the ashes of their lives. Revenge somehow leaks out of every note in "This Will Be the Year." It feels like Susan is confronting all those people who laughed at her, or considered her a lost cause, or just plain ignored her. That's the feeling I get: all those people who never thought she had a ghost of a chance, and now here she is ghostly and powerful, haunting pop culture with a grace and dignity that almost out-shimmers Adele.

Here's to you, Susan: to who you were but especially to who you are now, and to that lovely, distinct, musical pain and suffering that allows us a brief respite from true sadness.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

2011-11-22T10:31:00.000-08:00

Evan Glodell has made a strange, vicious, creepy, fascinating, hyper-romantic little movie, a visionary melding of David Lynch's Blue Velvet and David Fincher's Fight Club with a spastic splash of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. High style without losing itself in style, the movie zooms out and back into itself in fire-breathing intervals; the cinematography exhibits symptoms of high blood pressure, each scene and image coming at you in a dizzying swirl of unmedicated colors and textures.  (Joel Hodge, the cinematographer, cannibalized lenses and parts to create a new kind of camera to shoot the film, and the result is both visceral and virtuoso, like a Hot Wheels commercial directed by Lucifer Himself.)

The plot and atmosphere have a major Lynchian scorch without the latter-day Lynchian propensity for self indulgence. Two dumb-ass buddies in California spend their days building a flamethrower, inspired by their childhood obsessions with a VHS copy of Mad Max. For a break they go out to get wasted and meet up with two girls who party all the time and wreak havoc the way only white-trash party girls who party all the time can. Glodell plays the main dumb-ass Woodrow, a sweet, kind, enthusiastic dweeb who falls in love with Party Girl Milly (played by Jessie Wiseman, an actress that re-brands the Scarlett-Johanson brand with more junk in her trunk and more innocence in her eyes).

Eventually Milly ends up hurting Woodrow really bad by having sex with some guy in Woodrow's own bed. Woodrow catches Milly and the dude and loses it, driving his motorcycle into an oncoming car. The movie then spirals into a dream/not-dream epilepsy that reveals the madness, ecstasy, torture and glory of lover's scorn transforming into perpetual revenge.  For all its flame-throwing and booze-soaked antics, however, Bellflower is lushly romantic, a sort of meditation on what it means to be "masculine" without caving into the pseudo-masculinity most movies try to reify. Woodrow is a sadsack Mad Max, adolescent, pouty, and possibly brain-damaged; his gorgeous fury and nihilism form the center of Bellflower's core meltdown. The energy of the film-making allows Woodrow's desperation to intermingle with the memories of your own misspent youth. By the end of this thing you feel like you were at an all-night party in hell with Woodrow and his peeps.  You wake up with a beautiful hangover.

Hopelessly Devoted to You

2011-11-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

From Obey Giant's Facebook page: "This poster represents my support for the Occupy movement, a grassroots movement spawned to stand up against corruption, imbalance of power, and failure of our democracy to represent and help average Americans. On the other hand, as flawed as the system is, I see Obama as a potential ally of the Occupy movement if the energy of the movement is perceived as constructive, not destructive. I still see Obama as the closest thing to "a man on the inside" that we have presently. Obviously, just voting is not enough. We need to use all of our tools to help us achieve our goals and ideals. However, I think idealism and realism need to exist hand in hand. Change is not about one election, one rally, one leader, it is about a constant dedication to progress and a constant push in the right direction. Let's be the people doing the right thing as outsiders and simultaneously push the insiders to do the right thing for the people. I'm still trying to work out copyright issues I may face with this image, but feel free to share it and stay tuned... -Shepard Fairey..."

I don't know. Really. I don't. But one of the greatest things about art for me is that it moves us away from propaganda, chills the stupid heat that inspires political rants and lazy "us versus them" naivete. And that goes for propaganda even if it's propaganda for "our side." Fairey comes off opportunistic and self-involved and indulgent and teenaged-romantic in this little diatribe about his "new" piece of artworld branding that isn't new, and definitely does not add anything incisive or realistic to the conversation. I especially love the part about "copyright issues." And the way he positions himself and whoever is on "his side" as "outsiders." The image is lifted, the politics are worn out, and the message feels like head-shop pontificating. "Occupying" public parks and changing the system are actually not linked: the style subverts the subject matter, and most of the main points in the media become about "free speech" and how a bunch of folks have a right to pitch tents and hold onto their sleeping bags before The Man comes in with power-washers. These are serious times, possibly beyond "hope" and other nice little abstractions that only add idealism to a bunch of tired ideas. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then run-down leftist political propaganda is the saddest refuge of an artist. It's too easy and only recycles the same emotions and the same dance of right and left, conservative and liberal. I know everyone means well, but at the end of the day pretending you're Guy Fawkes in the 21st Century is pretty close to pretending to be John Wayne. Symbols are fine, but they don't get the job done. You have to get elected to school-boards and file law-suits and out-think and out-organize your foes -- not out-camp them.

Writes Fairey: "We need to use all of our tools to help us achieve our goals and ideals." What are the "tools'? What actually are the "goals and ideals"? I don't think anyone really knows at this point, and until they are known and spoken eloquently and forcefully (and by "forcefully" I don't mean "drum-beating" and "chanting"), the same old rhetoric achieves the same old results.

Beginners' Luck

2011-11-18T12:20:00.000-08:00

Beginners is a sweet, super-precious, sometimes annoying but also oddly satisfying movie by Mike Mills, a graphic designer whose 75-year-old father came out of the closet a few years before he passed away. The movie's plot is basically that: a graphic designer's 75-year-old father comes out of the closet and a few years later passes away. During and after all this, the sad and lonely graphic designer falls in love with a sad and lonely actress who luxuriates in hotel rooms and makes funny faces and loves love but also has a suicidal father who keeps trying to call her so she is afraid of intimacy, etc. In fact both the actress and the graphic designer, even though thoughtfully portrayed by Melanie Laurent and Ewen McGregor, never really seem to come to fruition as the center of the movie's concerns. It's the periphery that takes over, and that periphery is astutely and hammily brought into the foreground by Christopher Plummer as the gay old dad. He is both charming and ridiculous, stubborn and free-wheeling, a precise depiction of something I don't think I've ever seen in a movie before: an elderly homosexual who is conveyed to us without a lot of frills or apologies or gimmicks. There are no cheap laughs. He is so happy to be gay it is both funny and true, a joke but not. I think we owe this beautiful portrait not just to Plummer's incredibly delicate yet hilariously bold performance, but to Mills, who seems to have made this movie as a love letter to his dead dad. This could have been horribly sentimental (and it kind of is sometimes), but there's this magical atmosphere in Beginners that seems to permeate almost every scene, like the afterglow of a memory that won't let itself be erased or cheapened. The loveliest image in the movie: Plummer lying on the floor with his new boyfriend, smiling at the camera, overcome with joy.

Tara and Bella

2011-11-14T22:27:00.000-08:00

I saw this story about an elephant and a dog becoming friends at a nature preserve near Nashville, Tennessee on TV Sunday, and it haunted me to the point I had to revisit their relationship via You-Tube. And by "haunted," I mean bursting into tears every couple of hours after seeing it. The dog was a stray who wandered onto the preserve grounds, where elephants from all over the world are given sanctuary. Tara is the elephant's name. Bella was the dog's. The images illustrating the story were like Utopian picture postcards -- Bella following Tara around, Tara petting Bella with her trunk. Bella was killed (possibly by coyotes, although no one is sure) in the middle of the night. But it turns out Tara carried Bella's dead body to the main office on the grounds, as if to somehow rescue her from death. Now Tara is in mourning, and all the other elephants on the compound are trying to soothe her by giving her portions of their food. Kindness is devastating. It is wordless and conjured through very simple actions that have no other way to enter the world. What happened between Tara and Bella is not human or animal. At the risk of sounding completely flaky, it's spiritual. A connection that can't be explained or replicated, just recognized.

School Spirit

2011-11-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

The child molestation scandal at Penn State, for me, is yet another rendition of how institutions turn into monsters while no one is looking. Certainly the assistant coach who did the molestation is the nucleus of the cancerous cell, but the whole body is Penn State, a culture trying to grow itself into a sort of deification. On the Today Show Thursday, a columnist from the New York Daily News told Ann Curry that the whole horrible issue is about "branding," and it is: the need for the institution to "grow" beyond its natural state of being, into a way of life, into a way to worship not just academics and sports, but the institution's scope and swagger, its ability to keep growing. That's what Joe Paterno and everyone else involved had on their minds when they made decisions. Sure they also had a relationship with the molester, and sure they did not want to jump to conclusions, but as all this is coming out you can see it was incredibly hard to ignore the truth. Janitors saw it happening. Another coach witnessed it. Families of the victims were complaining. And still the primary goals for the institution and its mandarin society was the "brand," keeping that "brand" clean and shiny and ready to grow even larger.

That's what happens when people begin to lose the understanding that what has been created for simple purposes like learning and playing sports has somehow become a behemoth based on congregate arrogance. So those kids and others who stomped around Penn State campus this week, pissed because Joe Paterno had been fired are just continuing that zombie dance of "branding." They don't want to stop that growth; they want to believe in the invincibility of tradition. It's a mirror image of the scandal that has momentarily limited the growth of the Catholic Church. It's institutional arrogance. School spirit turned into mob politics.

The coach/molester was allowed to thrive within the institution's blindspot because the institution willed that blindness on itself. No ugly stories, no horrible nightmares please: this is Penn State.

It just so happens that I bought the first season DVD of Friday Night Lights this week, and watched the first few episodes. I had stumbled across the show on a flight to London in September, and it blew me away. What this TV show does best is dramatize that "branding" process I'm talking about: small town high school football being turned into a reason to live, an institution that blocks out truth in order to keep the "brand" going, because without that "brand" many people's lives would somehow be not worth living any more.

However, Friday Night Lights also allows us to see that those lives are worth living, with or without the Friday night game. It conveys small-town life as beautifully complex and strange in many ways, and also lets us see how everyone both contributes to the institutionalization/deification of high school football, while also trying to struggle against its omnipresence. Kyle Chandler plays the head coach, and of course he is gung-ho and a little jingoistic about the game, but his love for it does not allow the game to eat his common sense alive. In one episode from this first season, the coach first stands up for one of his players when they are caught beating up another student in the parking lot of a local hangout. The player says the kid he beat up, a fat, geeky loser who was overheard talking about how stupid football is, was "talking smack" about the team, and that justified the beating. Chandler plays the coach with a finesse and intensity that allows us to see how he both wants to ignore the incident and also somehow applaud the beating as the ultimate example of "school spirit," and yet also we can see in Chandler's face a sort of dawning of skepticism as he inspects his own motives with the help of his wife (a guidance counselor at the school played by Connie Britton, one of the best actresses I've ever seen on TV). Finally the couch musters the guts to confront his player and kick him off the team. It turns out the beating was just plain old bullying. And at the end of the episode the coach goes over to the fat geeky kid's house and apologizes to his mother and him.

That last scene was haunted for me by the Penn State scandal. Of course I understand the difference between TV and reality, but this time TV held the higher moral ground. It made me think: what would it have taken for Paterno and some of his henchmen to let go of their egos and their sense of institutional obligation, and to go over to the houses of the molested kids, and to look their parents in the eyes, and say, "We are so sorry. We believe you." What would it have taken for Paterno to call the cops?

Common sense.

And an obligation to a power higher than even Penn State: common decency.

Curated Lives

2011-11-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

This is an illustration from a 1960s psychology textbook depicting the Eugenics process as "revealed" by the studies of Dr. Henry H. Goddard. Goddard wrote the ur-text for Eugenics in 1912, depicting the fictitious "Kallikak" family in which he plots the "beginning" of "feeblemindedness" by finding its essences in a moral binary: a "moron" line of descendants spawned by a "dalliance," and a "superior" line of descendants from an upstanding marriage to a "Quakeress." While Eugenics was essentially gutted in the 1930s and 1940s, its imagery and symbolisms and metaphors still remain intact culturally (and sociologically, psychologically and morally too) in multiple ways. In art this echo works itself out via biography and credentialization: an "outsider" line of "instinctive, accidental" artists who make art in institutions (hospitals and day programs), and an "insider" line of professionals creating and showing their works in Institutions (art schools and museums). When an "outsider" (like Judith Scott [see below]) is inducted into the "insider" world the explanation of his/her diagnosis and struggle becomes one of the primary reasons for seeing and understanding the art. The "outsider" lineage is based in the schematic above; the "insider" lineage is not connected to that. In other words, "Quakeresses" don't have to explain where they fit in the scheme of things. "Feeble-minded tavern girls" always need to be explained to the lay audience.

cu·ra·tor
1. the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc.
2. a manager; superintendent.
3. Law: a guardian of a minor, lunatic, or other incompetent, especially with regard to his or her property.

Institutional art (sanctioned by art schools, art historians, museums, etc.) is curated of course: paintings, sculptures, performances, photographs, etc. all ordered and categorized, labeled, cataloged and consigned, placed in spaces that are designated as worthy of Art.

But lives are curated too, often using those same lofty and often meaningless verbs. In fact, the lives of people with developmental disabilities have been curated in the United States for over 200 years, when some of the first "special schools" were founded (and "special schools" here means huge institutions where people with "it" were colonized). And still today people with intellectual difficulties, what many people call "mental retardation," are still consigned, labeled, ordered, categorized, and consigned into institutions deemed worthy of their status and abilities. People with "it" often live in group-homes, foster-homes, and larger institutions. They often spend their days in day programs where other people cosigned and labeled just as they are also are placed, overseen by staff. They live under the weight of curation everyday of their lives, and the curators don't often understand that they are in fact curating, managing and supervising, using the tools of their historical (and kind of retrograde) practice. They apply generalizations and abstractions in order to let everyone else know what to do and think when approaching the people they curate. They surround their curated people with paperwork and rules in order for the rest of "us" to understand who they are -- in much the same way a gallery or museum curator fashions wall texts or writes an essay for a catalog, or juxtaposes one picture next to another. These meticulous decisions are freighted with meaning for art curators -- but for curators of the lives of people with "it" no so much. These curatorial powers (used by social workers and teachers and doctors and lawyers) have devolved into a standardized practice. This is who you are, this is what is wrong with you, this is what you need to be safe, and these are the places you can go to be who you are. To be what you are.

Now let's zero in on the main reason I'm writing all this. It's about when people with curated lives make art. Really great, interesting art. How do we take a curated life and attribute art worthy of curating to it? History and common practice devalue these lives to the point they need to be curated; artists without "it" (and who make great, interesting art) are curated in exactly the opposite way. Their art is curated by credentialed specialists whose mission it is to find what is worthy of being institutionalized. People with curated lives more often than not are just plain institutionalized (whether it's a nursing home or a group home or their own apartments with supported living staff).

What I want to try to figure out is how great art made by artists with "it" can smash through the complacency of both poles. And how the curation of this art can somehow critique and replace the curation of art in the lives of artists with developmental disabilities. This means you have to almost pull away from both mindsets. Often when people with "it" make art they are grouped together, and the shows they are in consigned to the level of "community outreach." When these artists with "it" are included in non-"it" shows, "it" always has to enter the picture and jargon and conversation somehow. Maybe one of the best moves when this happens is to have every artist in this kind of show reveal their own personal diagnoses -- what society has deemed wrong with them. Maybe then the playing field might be completely fair.

Maybe the problem isn't about "it," but the way "it" becomes the only way into each sphere.

Who knows.

Here's a snippet from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle introducing Judith Scott (above) to the world in 2002: "Some favor the totem figures for their primal, symbolic quality. Others are drawn to the boulder forms -- bulky, egglike works that seem complete from any angle. Still others see something simple and gorgeous in the papery sculpture that resembles an ancient Egyptian mummy. These are all works by Berkeley artist Judith Scott, pieces that have traveled in an international tour, that sell for thousands of dollars. Some of those who like and collect the art know Scott's story. Others are drawn to the pieces for their elemental quality, for their bursts of color, for their mysteriousness -- the sense that they convey something at once hidden and exposed. Only later do fans learn that Scott, 59, has Down syndrome. That she is deaf and mute. That for more than three decades, she was shut away in an unforgiving institution, all but forgotten. That Scott, who is one of those rare creatures, an art world star, doesn't know it." Why do fans need to know her diagnosis? What does this information add to the objects? How did the writer know Scott (who passed away in 2005) "doesn't know" she was an "art star." Is her art stardom predicated on the fact that she "doesn't know it"? Isn't the "mysteriousness" better served by not aligning her work with diagnostics and her supposed "not knowing"? I guess what I am trying to think through is how to separate Scott's art from a world Scott probably did not participate in: while she had to put up with the after-effects of diagnoses and institutions created to "improve her," she resisted by making art. But the art is not just evidence of that resistance. It is a product of her intellect and her ambition to be an artist. She is a "Quakeress" much more than a "Tavern Girl."

Philadelphia Freakdom

2011-10-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a scummy, shoddy look to it and a fevered meanspiritedness at its core. It's a really bad episode of Seinfeld directed by John Waters. And bad on purpose. Really, really, really bad on purpose.

I only started watching it this season so I don't exactly get the relationships and/or the premise. But that doesn't really matter. I have gleaned from the four episodes I've seen this season that a bunch of smarmy, creepy idiots who interact like white-trash anchor-people about to go to commercial (one female and four males, one of them being Danny Devito, who seems to be the magic-worm in this cheap bottle of tequila) are always looking for a way to, well, I really don't know. Always looking for a way to be the penultimate smarmy, creepy idiots they are supposed to be in this universe of dead whores in hallways, chimichangas in garbage bags, and (my personal favorite) rum-ham floating delicately on the ocean's surface.  The nastiness of the show is its surrealism, and each of the puppet-characters are hell-bent on being horrible and stupid to the point there's a magical rhythm, kind of like when the Three Stooges really get going. Only these stooges don't move around that much. No pies or slaps in the face. Just constant bull-shit talking. And a sucky, vast abyss always around every corner.

My favorite episode happened a week or so ago when Danny Devito's Frank Reynolds decides to host a kiddie beauty pageant in the bar all the characters seem to either co-own or maybe just co-habitate. The first scene is a true slapstick gem: Devito jogs into the bar to tell everyone about his beauty-pageant idea and falls flat on his face, busting his nose. Horrible horror-movie blood trickles down Devito's troll-like face in a gruesome, hyper-real pattern copied it seems from the Busted-Nose Hall of Fame dictionary. The episode quickly descends into beautiful and completely politically-incorrect madness: Frank tries to cover his broken nose with funeral-home make-up, giving him the pallor and soullessness of Nosferatu with a hangover, and he spends all his screen-time with a microphone telling everyone in the audience how much he is not going put the moves on the little girls in the pageant. Tall and blond and gawky, like a slightly less stressed Ann Coulter, Kaitlin Olsen also stands out, turning one of the contestants into her little dancing and singing co-partner, in a duet about how horrible mothers are.

In every episode I've seen, Charlie Day's weaselly face and high-pitched voice always add a sort of terrifying joy to the atmosphere.  He's the Willy Wonka on this melted-candy-bar planet.  The atmosphere rots your teeth, the people are worthless, the candy is poisonous, and every situation is contrived and quite stupid: God do I love this show.

Too Good to be True

2011-10-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is an organism constructed from completely disparate bits and pieces. Moments most other writers would edit away are taken into the laboratory and turned into voluptuous Frankenstein fantasias: its aesthetic can be located on an imaginary scatterplot documenting the exact location where John Barth has stopped trying so hard and Joyce Carol Oates has stopped taking her meds. Each chapter has a new voice extolling the banal yet somehow significant (and oddly nostalgic) experiences of characters you barely get to know, and yet love and take into your soul almost instantaneously. Passers-by become central figures, the periphery the focus. And in these fringes Egan finds an apoplectic and apologetic record producer and his klepto assistant bumping into people and falling into their lives; each bump (like cocaine) creates a new way to reinvent the novel's plot.

What could be seen as gimmickry transforms into bliss. Your heart aches with each sadsack yet somehow triumphantly alive character: a once top-notch NYC publicist in sad decline, a beefy closeted gay college student about to find a way to completely ruin his own life, a Lindsay-Lohanesque starlet about to be disappeared, a bipolar journalist trying to reinvent the reason he is what he is. And so on. The writing never gets in the way: it whispers/hisses/mumbles like a voice climbing out of your head but not through your mouth. There's even a chapter done completely as a Power Point presentation from the future.

"Something was funny a while ago," Egan writes in one chapter. "But you can't remember what." Goon Squad is about laughter in the face of amnesia and laughter in the face of memory: it merges the two into a slightly uncomfortable yet completely exquisite dreamworld where no one is important and yet everyone is. It's like one of those long, boring, beautiful Andy Warhol movies edited into coherence and transformed into a glamorous, hellish TV miniseries from 1982 that never aired because it was too incredibly strange, too good to be true.

Three-Ring Circus

2011-09-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

"Direct Contact: Self Made Pop” opens October 22, 2011 at Bromwell's Gallery, on the second floor of Bromwell’s (117 West Fourth Street), the longest-running business in downtown Cincinnati. Bromwell’s Gallery’s mission is to bring Cincinnati fine art that is accessible to all art enthusiasts, and “Direct Contact” is an accessible, fun, unpretentious survey of art made by unconventional artists including Antonio Adams, Todd M. Coe, Cedric Cox, Tony Dotson, Drew Kidd, David Mack, Bill Ross, Spencer van der Zee, and the late Brian Joiner and Raymond Thunder-Sky. The show is a three-ring circus, and in the center ring will be the first-time screening of "Thundeer-Sky!", the new feature-length documentary about Raymond Thunder-Sky directed by Alfred Eaker October 27, 2011 at Bromwell's....

David Mack

Raymond Thunder-Sky

Spencer van der Zee

Raymond with his drawings surrounded by clowns

Spencer van der Zee

Todd M. Coe

Tony Dotson and Antonio Adams

Tony Dotson

Bill Ross

Antonio Adams

Raymond Thunder-Sky

Bill Ross

Wrecking Ball Afternoons

2011-09-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Guy Tillim's "Avenue Patrice Lumumba" just left the Contemporary Art Center here in Cincinnati. I went to the CAC Monday and got to see it, not even knowing it was there and it was the last night. I am so glad I got to see the work. The walls of photographs were an amazing experience. Tillim's pictures have a poetry deeply embedded inside them, as if not only light, shadow and shapes got in through the lens, but an exhausted universe making its last claim on consciousness. Ghosts of bureaucracy, ghosts of statues that have lost their meanings and their heads, ghosts of grand hotels resembling ship-wrecks far below the ocean... Tillim's worldview reflects a need to make meaning out of what is left behind, and to find a moment in the lonely stillness of it all that allows you to recognize what has been lost and won't ever come back.

This is from the CAC's website:

In his project Avenue Patrice Lumumba (2007–08), South African artist Guy Tillim (b. 1962) records the architecture and infrastructure of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Patrice Lumumba (1925–61) was one of the first elected African leaders in modern times. In 1960 he became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo after his country won independence from Belgium. Only ten weeks after his speech at the independence celebrations, in which he listed various injustices and human rights violations implemented by the Belgians, Lumumba’s government was deposed in a coup. He was imprisoned, beaten, and murdered in circumstances suggesting the complicity of the governments of Belgium and the United States. Lumumba became revered as a liberator of independent Africa and his legacy has made a lasting impression in many cities throughout Africa. The streets and plazas that bear his name in western and southern Africa have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream for unity.

That decay becomes a way of life, and in all the photographs you can see that evolution slowly losing its reason to evolve and yet there it all is, brick, concrete, steel and shade, vast boulevards and balconies haunted by emptiness. You can't erase the world. You can only watch it slowly try to erase itself.

And of course I thought about Raymond Thunder-Sky. How his drawings depict that same sort of alienation, that same sense that everything goes away and stays at the same time. Especially in his drawings of interiors, Raymond seems intent on finding that exact moment when you feel both lonely and yet also past loneliness: the room becomes what you are feeling, and you lose a sense of yourself.

Then you disappear.

That Blackness Before You

2011-09-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

Richard Wilson's "20:50" is the only permanent installation at the Saatchi Gallery in London, and its permanence is beautifully terrifying. It occupies Gallery 13. You approach it from a specially made platform, a sort of balcony onto an abyss: a vast expanse of blackness reflecting a dreamscape of windows, light fixtures, corners, slick perfect surfaces. The smell arrives almost as soon as you start questioning what the hell is going on here. It's the clammy, caustic stink of the way we all live without thinking, oxygen merging with exhaust, and the smell of that overwhelming all your other senses until the whole world somehow emanates from that blackness before you.

This is from the Saatchi Gallery website:

Viewed from the entrance platform 20:50 appears as a holographic field: simultaneously a polished floor, infinite clear pool, an expansive and indefinable virtual space that clinically absorbs and mirrors the gallery architecture. The room is in fact entirely flooded in oil.

That oil becomes the way you see the world. It's one of those experiences that transcends art because the artfulness of the stunt problematizes what art can do and mean, while also giving you a trippy, creepy epiphany that lingers and somehow pollutes the way you think and feel. In a consciousness overloaded with computer-generated news footage and political bull-shit about gas prices and the Middle East and offshore oil-drilling and tar-balls floating onto beaches a year after an oil spill and fossil fuel emissions overtaking the actual climate here is a piece of art that sucks perception itself into its horrible pupil, and you are somehow sucked into that pupil as well, until you don't see what you're seeing. That blackness, in fact, seems to be seeing you.

Hands down one of the most intense and terrible and gorgeous pieces of art I've ever seen.

Everything Is Everything

2011-09-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

We got back from London Sunday. What a great trip... Went to Tate Modern, Saatchi Gallery, Tate Britain, saw Buckingham Palace, the Thames, etc. And of course: The Museum of Everything. Pictures below...

We went there the day Everything opened. It's in a high-end department store in Selfridge & Co. on Oxford Street near Soho. The Selfridge is a huge glamorous place (white tile floors, chandeliers, etc.), and the Museum of Everything occupies a lounge area, as well as a store upfront in the perfume department. The store has posters, t-shirts, pencils, buttons, and other souvenirs featuring the work in the lounge. Also, outside on Oxford Street, the display windows contain set-ups dedicated to some of the artists inside the lounge display: think big-scale collaged dioramas, including a beautiful architectural sculpture of a dream building by Stefan Hafner.

What I noticed first when I toured The Museum of Everything Exhibit 4 is the sheer magnitude of the project. It turns out the main objective of this Everything enterprise is to survey studio programs for artists with disabilities across the world, almost like a visual census. This is problematic for me because I think categorizing and grouping artists into diagnosis-driven programs often limits the way people might be able to access and use the art in their imaginations. Think about when you first are "introduced" to people with disabilities when you're young (when I use "you," I'm referring to everybody, including people with disabilities). They are often grouped into "special" classes, driven to those classes on "special" buses. They are often segregated from you even though the politically correct mantra is "inclusion." That vague term evaporates in practice, of course, and in fact a large amount of people with disabilities live their lives in group-homes, institutions and other isolated venues, despite "deinstitutionalization" and other advocacy stances that try to ameliorate and reinvent the relationship between people with and without disabilities.

Art for me should be a way for artists to break away from the cultural and social constraints of a preconditioned life. Art should help us decode and deconstruct all the ways we are different, while also glamorizing and particularizing what make us different. When you group people together under one programmatic tent you automatically limit the way the way they are perceived. That goes double for artists with disabilities, because the product of who they are -- their artwork -- becomes a casualty of that perception. Their art is "saving" them from their disability, or it's a way for them to "communicate," or because they have a disability they are artists. All of this may be partially true, but still the cliche eliminates news ways of seeing.

The day Exhibit # 4 opened, Andrew Searle wrote a lame, oblique and kind of morose review in The Guardian. Here's a portion:

This fourth Museum of Everything show focuses on art made in studio workshops, some attached to hospitals, around the world, from Japan to Brazil, Germany to Australia. These places are part refuge, part studio, safe havens for the troubled individuals who use them. The show occupies a specially constructed warren of dimly-lit rooms in the basement of Selfridges department store in Oxford Street. Selfridges has allowed art through the door before, but it is an unlikely and discordant setting. Mostly produced by people who suffer a variety of psychological, neurological or physical problems, the art is often fascinating, winning, hugely talented (in a narrow kind of way), but falls outside the cultural and social mainstream, mostly because it is neither intended as art nor produced with other viewers in mind. There's no sense of development or critical distance.

Searle's critique has the creepy, arcane tone of a prickly nurse mad at the staff. In it he shows no inclination toward even the possibility that art made by people not normally considered "artists" should ever be considered worthy of our attention -- outside of possibly being "fascinating" because it "falls outside the cultural and social mainstream." I love the line "hugely talented (in a narrow kind of way)." That is the crux of his understanding: he wants to tiptoe around his own revulsion and compliment this group of people with "psychological, neurological or physical problems" and throw these guys and gals a bone ("hugely talented"), but he can't resist letting his own version of the truth parenthetically seep through: "in a narrow kind of way" is the way he can relegate their efforts at art-making. This narrowness is not defined by him, just assumed.

In the comment section Museum of Everything Curator James Brett writes:

We can assure you that the artists in the show are rarely troubled, certainly not when they are making art. There are films playing throughout our space which show them at work in the studios, doing what they love. One of them, Marianne Schipaanboord, was at our opening last night. Marianne is deaf, has cerebral palsy, a learning disorder and is confined to a wheelchair. We would suggest she is not in any way "troubled" and celebrates her life every day with diaries of delicate pen and watercolour drawings. Is this the "worrying" and "painful" work of which you speak? And if so, who is worried: Marianne, us, the people who visit the museum? You are welcome to ask her herself and she will tell you, by spelling out words in Dutch on a small laminated alphabet sheet.

In his response to Searle's cranky artistic bigotry, Brett allows disability to take up all the room, kind of like in the way "disability" and "programs" overcrowd Exhibit # 4. Brett singles out one of the artists in order to show Searle the error of his ways, and yet in the exhibit itself Marianne Schipaanboord's work becomes a part of a program-crowded Super Display. Hundreds of works, all of them wonderful, many of them sheer genius, are framed in Plexiglas and mounted on top of antique wallpaper, lit in some rooms only by battery-operated candles. In fact, some of the rooms in the lounge are so dark you can barely see what you're looking at, and in others there's so much stuff to see you have to look away to make sense of it. The strategy it seems was to overwhelm all of us with joy and mystery and strangeness and kindness, but after a while the show turns into overt branding. The central focus, the "spine" of the exhibit, is the Museum of Everything's whimsical typography (red, white and black cardboard constructs placed all over the exhibit, and all over the store), as well as its shabby-chic aesthetic approach. Broken, pretty/ugly pieces of furniture, peeling wall-paper, and other ephemera share the stage.

In other words, when Brett needs to defend the show to a heathen like Searle, he singles out one of the artists, lets us into her world, and yet the show itself seems almost to provide obstacles to this kind of connection. It becomes about "program" imperatives and heorics just as much as it is about "art."

Also while in London, we went to the Tate Modern. And while there I came across some posters done by Guerrilla Girls, back in the day (1985 or so). Guerrilla Girls were a punk tribunal and street-art force in the 80s dedicated to rectifying discrimination in art galleries in NYC. Their posters (two of them pictured below) pointed a graphic, no-nonsense barrel of a gun at the windows and doors of elite galleries and museums that were excluding women and African Americans. It's a reductive, kind of cute stance to take of course, and probably didn't do too much to sway any one's opinion, but I like the bite and char of their rhetoric, the simplicity of their plea. What if we started making posters like this about artists with developmental disabilities? What would they look like? The Guerrilla Girl's rhetoric is group-centric, but their message is about single artists having shows -- it's about the right to be seen as a singular artist in a white-male-dominated world. It's a form of identity politics that assumes every artist has the right to be seen as an equal to every other artist. In the posters for artists with developmental disabilities, we might start with a slogan like: "NO MORE PROGRAM SHOWS." Or: "I AM AN ARTIST. NOT A DIAGNOSIS." The critique would not only be about the artworld, but the world as a whole consigning people to places they don't need to be in order to be who they are.

Also at the Tate Modern is this piece by Matisse, titled "The Snail." It is a huge collage that takes up a whole wall with a bench in front of it. I sat there and stared at this incredibly simple object for close to a half-hour, overwhelmed by its directness and savvy streamlined beauty. The wall-text next to it reads:

The Snail is one of the last and largest pieces in Matisse’s final series of works, known as cutouts. Confined to bed through illness, he had assistants paint sheets of paper in gouache which he then cut. The shell of a snail inspired the spiralling arrangement of roughly cut pieces of paper. Compared to his earlier paintings, Matisse believed that he had gained ‘greater completeness and abstraction’ in the cutouts. ‘I have attained a form filtered to its essentials’, he remarked.

Matisse was an artist with a disability when he made this work, and although he is the opposite of an "outsider artist" his work shares many qualities with much of the works in The Museum of Everything Exhibit # 4. At the end of his life he needed help, but that help is not the way we perceive his work. It's only incidental to the manufacturing of it.

I could also sit and stare at many of the works in the Museum of Everything Exhibit # 4, but this one below, by Paulas de Groot, totally captured me while I was there -- in that same "Snail" way. It seems to be a product of elimination, of working toward not needing a lot of artifice, but finding an aesthetic that matches the intensity of your quest for that essential simplicity. I love the blank expression, the streamlined oddness of each shape, the orange and red and black, and those eerie iridescent fangs. I'm sure de Groot has helpers too, but at the end of the day they are just part of the process, and the process is important for sure, but it should never get in the way of the finished product: the destination is a work of art. Pure and simple. "I have attained a form filtered to its essentials," Matisse says. Damn right.

"Hair," by Micah Freeman

2011-09-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

At a poetry reading organized by Cy-Press Poetry at Thunder-Sky, Inc. last week, Micah Freeman read this beautiful poem about Amy Winehouse. We wanted to share it...

HAIR

"Physical ain't even my type." -Amy Winehouse

Me and Amy Winehouse are eating a sandwich together and being followed. "Sandwich," she says.

"Next door, let's go." Funny Games is being filmed shot for shot. Most of the time I want to ask Amy
about the weather but we discuss sandwiches instead. By the time we get to the weather we're already in Louisville. Driving around. Collecting every copy of the Gremlins series on VHS. Burning them at the Speedway. Get hype off horse race long passed. We start working together. She talks about her lunch she brought or a spinach ricotta pie. I know she hates the pie though. It's been two years. We scratched the shit out of our hood. "O' Dunes," Mountain Dew tempts us both. We start wearing yellow flip flops. There is no gate keeper for all the Ipods and Wonderlands. How many people are going, it's like who's going paint balling.

Me and Amy have enough room/puppies.

Start staring off into space. "I absolutely agree." Assess the situation. Me and Amy, a war going on, Cadillac's crashing into each other, doesn't know them as well, nothing last is forever, so we cut our losses, and open some Tanqueray. The Lord of Cars intersects with our lunch. I love Amy but today we're in trouble.

We've been through a lot. The cards are stacked. Lay against them motionless against us. This is the end I know. Me and Amy eat candy just like honey. We've tried everything.

We live in a landfill but Amy's happy as long as she's got a green cushion couch or bed. We bathe all day on this particular day we can't get a break. We're picking up dust and silos get to the side of us. Amy wants to run in that. I'm sorry Amy, you're bathing with a green cushion. We lay back and enjoy the panoramic view, the chance of the landfill being a fragile environment. Amy produced a dune. It went to Detroit. We both looked at a note in Farsi. Tried to make a license plate brochure from scratch. We eat some tic tacs and watch the hitch hikers grow beards and teeth. We slowly drove around it. Amy, if they would have known you had your choice between the U.S. Europe & Israel. "Yeah." Do you have Wisconsin?

It's being ripped out of my mouth. Amy Winehouse is the best. Of all people, sometimes I take forever,
using the bathroom with Amy Winehouse. I have a lens. It will exit you. That is correct, Me and Amy get some ice cream. Me and Amy come home from work early. We make jewelry. We are water animals.

"It's because there are so many variants, Amy. There are so many, that, do you do, dead to me, slashed in a recession, with one waterfall, if you met another it would be starting, I know that it's begging stop. A waterfall skips. Why heard two three going to get asked the question, bang. Me and Amy share a few slim jims and drink some white wine, rest in peace Randy.

Me and Amy are suddenly fried. We eat some grilled cheese. We secrete fun. All these dudes just walk on over there. Me and Amy go to a historic fish town.

Me and Amy eat some nicotine lozenges.

Me and Amy go fishing for nickel. We catch some pennies on the wall. Me and Amy go on a cruise. We hit on bald people. Somebody will want it. Me and Amy enjoy it. Me and Amy talk to two cute ladies.

Me and Amy wake up together week after week. We catch up mid day. Amy wants more tattoos, but it won't be enough combat. We need to introduce more hair spray and twenty seven beds to live. Amy glanced at me today, I thought, feral hint, I thought, but she just wanted her beat box and ice. I play piano in the next room. It's the most house like room in the building. My apartment leads in to the commons. The piano is surrounded by garments and rugs and a window in the middle of the out doors. It echoes perfectly. I can hear Amy going to town on a sweet track muffled through the wall. I strike the piano and we can't hear each other.

Every day it rains for one unmemorable minute especially. Acknowledged and forgotten, intermittent categorical rehash episodes that delve next door, out wafting the air, but never a drop of rain. A particular kind of notice every once a while. It's that deep deep hair that drives me back to Amy Winehouse. She forfeits a normal hair. It is deep and wide and tufts out, whirling about, she keeps her hands in it and shouts. She grows unusual, she says nothing to me. She will not come to this room. I play a piano track.

What she said to me was, are you having a good time Micah? I said, Amy, please.

If Amy is on the top than I'm in a pinecone.

Me and Amy want to color but we can't find a coloring book. I don't know a thing about it.

Me and Amy put two pieces together. We brush our teeth.

Me and Amy wear shoes. Prada and Jimi Hendrix wear us. Me and Amy walk around Kroger's with a watermelon.

It's Tuesday.

It's Wednesday.

My whole salty dogs in this game above the spin. Me and Amy spin city, airing hopes in that has always been obscenely hidden. On the catwalk under bridges. On a few imbedded exposures. Inbound, durable as my local Walgreens. Forever a hut reminds us.

Me and Amy got drunk last night.

Me and Amy enter liberation. We leave the city in a few, nothing to talk about. We leave and say goodbye with words.

I'm not sure I can write anymore about me and Amy. Our grid effaced with future maneuvers, heaving delicate membranes, caught up in the obvious and unreal. Me and Amy indifferently pick matching tattoos.

Me and Amy go fishing on time. When we aren't fishing we wear socks and dip our feet in the pool next to the piano. We love the cool sopping pool water clinging to our feet. The pool makes reflections against our front teeth. A pine falls in the pool with extra force. I speak for myself when I say we had a great time. I have a headache momentarily.

Me and Amy convince a police officer to take a scenic beach sunset photo with us. We grab my camera and we all stand together. It doesn't make sense for me and Amy to make a pontoon boat together.

We have no materials and share nothing. It would be sweet if me and Amy could split up the check. I feel like me and Amy are starring in Lost in Translation.

We both play some of the parts. The side characters and story and filming and production come together and clobber our fake history. We search each other out or somewhere filming in Japan. Me and Amy are waiting for the shoot. Me and Amy sketch each other more frequently.

Me and Amy buy a shirt that says "Me and Amy kissed the Moose, 2011".

Me and Amy eat a nicotine lozenge in the shower.

Me and Amy blow dry our hair. We look good.

Me and Amy see so much blue and go back. "I am alone just with two other people." With each piece that goes away, it gets a little easier. Me and Amy drive to Florida, stop at a gas station, get a coffee and vermouth. Drive in to the pines. We're both blue and lit like a flock in sky. "Do you know what travel means in an airplane?" "Don't you have to see two things?" Me and Amy have to meet in this no wake zone. Tis a good lake but equally squeaky. It's best not to ask questions so specific. We get dressed up, try really hard, and travel at night. I get back late tomorrow night. What's maneuver. There were moments where a celebrity would be talking to me, and I'd look at them, and they'd still be speaking, and I'd blink and hope that by the time I'd un blinked back to sight, you would have parachuted down through the thin limbs of the sappy pine needles and shouted, NO TIME TO REGRET and ran to BP and stole a bunch of lighters and sap from the trees.

Amy makes a rule about putting beverages next to electronics. We went to a restaurant. Coffee and vermouth. We watch a DVD. Me and Amy have something weird. We taste it. Me and Amy don't write in the book. You got sixty pictures of me and Amy. You got a picture with a backdrop.

"Jamaica & Spain"

Food for Thought

2011-08-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

Sharon Butler pulling things together...

The food table: above all the dishes was a clothesline where people hung their written-down memories and recipes.

In the middle of dinner...

The sky above it all...

Last night, Bill and I and a bunch of other people attended a Food Memory Dinner at Sharon Butler and Karl Dye's house. It was Sharon's inspiration, and Bill and I helped out a little bit with the organization of it, along with writer Lorna Gentry. The whole evening was about nostalgia and how memories find fruition and even majesty through food. Guests were asked to bring dishes from some of their past family reunions, and Sharon and Karl's backyard was transformed into a dreamy stageset where everyone's dish was presented on a long table, and then after everyone filled their plates we all sat together at another long table, eating and talking, reminiscing. Sharon's email invite summed up the vision we all had while planning: Families come together to catch up on each other’s lives, and to share that inexplicably weird and wonderful family reunion food.

And that's exactly what happened. The summer sky was beautiful, the temperature perfect. It felt like being in a sophisticated, kind-hearted movie. At the end of the meal, I read a short story I wrote a while back called "What We Ate After Church," which described all the food I remembered when I was a kid when we would all go to my grandma's or aunt's house after church in Tennessee. Sharon and Karl had made a little stage at the back of the yard on the porch of a playhouse, so I set up shop there. The food being presented in "What We Ate" (fried chicken from an ex-KFC, tomatoes from the garden, corn on the cob, etc.) is the way the story moves: each dish the characters add to the table pushes the narrative forward, and reveals not just character but also scene and meaning. And that's what happened at the Food Memory dinner last night. After I read people started to come up to the "stage" and tell their food stories -- all of them interesting and interconnected, stories about all-day sauce simmering on the stove and bacon cooked out in the woods and polenta being stirred with a specially-made stick... Bill told a story about Raymond Thunder-Sky and his love of ribs, and it reminded me of how what we eat somehow becomes a way to let other people know about desires and wishes we often can't communicate any other way. Raymond, who didn't really speak that much, maybe 4 or 5 words a week if we were lucky, called us up one day and left a message on our answering machine: "Birthday," he said on the message. "Ribs."

So many wonderful sense memories and stories...

Thanks to Sharon and Karl, and to everyone who showed up...

Artists as Activists

2011-07-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

"Ode to Matisse," one of the collaborations by Bill Ross and Becky Iker that will be "Artists as Activists"

ARTISTS AS ACTIVISTS

A two-year anniversary ART SHOW of works by artists featured in the semimonthly column “Artists as Activists” in Streetvibes since September 2009...

August 5 – September 23 @The Artisans Enterprise Center (AEC) 27 West 7th St, Covington, KY

Opening Reception: Friday Aug 5, 6-10 pm

Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri: 8am-5pm

Artists:

Farron Allen * Lauri Aultman * Gordon Baer * Keith Banner
Mary Pierce Brosmer * Carmen Bush * Jeff Casto * Jan Brown Checco
Halena Cline * Suzanne Chouteau * Cedric Cox * Scott Donaldson
Andy Fausz * Steven Finke * Dorothy Fraembs * Gary Gaffney
Barbara Gamboa * Stephen Geddes * Melvin Grier * Gena Grunenberg
Kymber Henson * Barbara Houghton *Jimi Jones * Jerry Judge
Kevin T. Kelly * Aaron Kent * Mary Ann Lederer * Gloria McConnaghy
Paulette Meier * Kelly Phelps * Kyle Phelps * Tom Phelps * Ellen Price
Matt Reed * Bill Ross * Kim Shifflett * Thom Shaw * Kurt Storch
Steve Sunderland * Ken Swinson * Leigh Waltz * Roscoe Wilson
Martin Zeinway

Curator: Saad Ghosn

And Then the Awe

2011-07-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

Russell Brand has written a beautiful elegy to Amy Winehouse. In the often stupid and meanspirited blogosphere, where jokes and juvenilia can sometimes be the most popular form of communication, Brand delivers a poetic, real, urgent, elegantly written paen to somone who was both a great artist and a tragedy. Winehouse's dark-chocolate-and-red-wine voice has stained the world's white table-cloth: it has the rudeness and staying power of primal myth. God bless her and Mr. Brand both.

Here's the elegy:

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.

Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.

I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.

I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.

From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh. She was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers. I was one of them; even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks, didn’t especially register.

Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.

I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.

Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

Nothing's Shocking

2011-07-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

At the end of Role Models, John Waters' talky, self-involved, and still somehow entertaining memoir about the people who have inspired him over the years, Waters gives a pretty good description of what art needs to be for it to be successful: "purposely homely, haughtily failed, and passively confrontational."  He uses Cy Twombley, the Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss, and Mike Kelley as prime examples of winners of this aesthetic taste test, and it's a fascinating bit of art criticism, a full-on ironic monologue that also praises these artists while pointing out the limits of their worth. Twombley's scribbles, Kelley's dirty stuffed animals, and Fischli/Weiss' hyper-banal photographs of airports all become examples not just of contemporary art, but also metaphors for the way Waters sees the world. He positions himself as a cherisher of the uncherished, a snob among snobs, with a heart as big as a sweaty, low-rent circus tent, and just as sad and cheap.

Waters is one of my role models, but as I read Role Models I felt like I was on the phone with a loquacious and very drunk best friend.  A lot of the time I wanted to hang up on him and go to bed. In the book, Waters' voice is chatty to the point of annoyance: he seems almost too eager to please, as if he is trying to reinvent the past so he can shock people all over again. In his early movies, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living, Waters' excitement and chutzpah in spotlighting the demented perversions of his cast of misfit talents (Divine chief among them) was bubbly and somehow innocent -- a dreamy catalog of raunchy dramas and activities. The clothes, props, and sets were the objective correlatives of Waters' meanspirited rainbow frenzy: whore/clown make-up, thrift-store S&M, flabby flesh inside a dirty pink playpen, a trailer set on fire, an Xmas tree falling on a sour housecoated old lady.  And so on. He was inventing a way to focus his attention on grotesque freaks by beatifying them, pickling them in their own horrible juices. All those early movies fit Waters' "homely/failed/confrontational" matrix. They are even better examples than the examples he sites in Role Models.

I guess the problem is that once you burn down a trailer, push an Xmas tree onto your sadsack mother, and eat dog poop, what else can you do but feel nostalgic? That's the tone of Role Models, but the tone doesn't fit the subject matter.  Waters seems hellbent on being "shocking" so he can relive what "shocking" used to be. But there's no shock left now, so his chatty, gossipy takes on Johnny Matthis, Little Richard, Zorro the Infamous Lesbian Baltimore Stripper, and all the rest come off like longwinded but usually entertaining stories about The Glory Days.

The only chapters that broke out of this nostalgia were the one I mentioned about Twombley, et. al., and the chapter about Leslie Van Houten, ex-Manson-Girl. Waters in this part of the book deconstructs his "love" for the Manson Murders, and gets serious about how being a fan of murderers like Van Houten is a pretty complex position to take. But he's not trying to shock or lead us into temptation here: he's writing about personal responsibility and guilt. It's a sober chapter, and yet it seems more energetic and alive than all the other chapters before and following it. He comes off like a true friend to Van Houten, a friend who knows all the horrible things she's done and yet he still stands by her. He stops name-dropping and starts questioning his own life in a lot of ways, as well as trying to figure out his art: "I [like Van Houten] am guilty too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families."

You start to appreciate Waters in this part of the book. Not as a shock-art auteur, but as a human being coming to terms with his past and how that past intersects with who he is now. I am one of his biggest fans. His movies and persona have been so inspirational to me. For the majority of Role Models, though, Waters seems dead set on being who he used to be. He has a strange, vociferous need to please us by shocking us with stuff that doesn't really shock us anymore.

God Bless Patti Smith

2011-07-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

I finished reading Just Kids last night while gallery-sitting at Thunder-Sky, Inc. It was devastatingly beautiful, precise without being perfect, compressed and controlled but expansive like a dreamy encyclopedia. I never really thought of Patti Smith as a great rock-n-roll priestess. I always considered her a sort of 70s belch of Rolling-Stones chic and creepy feminism. In fact Gilda Radner's Candy Slice had replaced the real thing in my head. I didn't know shit. Just Kids educated me about a bookish, working-class girl who took off for the big city after dropping out of college because she got pregnant, had the baby and gave it away. The scene Smith sets the day of her departure: a sad drab going-away party with her family, and then she walks to the bus station and realizes she doesn't have enough money to get to the big NYC. In despair she goes to a phonebooth in the station to call her sister, and in the booth is a little white patent leather purse with thirty bucks in it. It is a tiny miracle that sends her on her way, and Smith delivers that miraculousness without one false note.

Smith is a writer who can write without showing off, and yet every paragraph in Just Kids is a polished fender, pure chrome precision. The poetry fits snugly into each moment. She never languishes in her ability to lyricize: she uses her lyricism to let us know what life can be.

Her depiction of Robert Mapplethorpe, her eventual best friend and lover, (and another cultural titan who in my mind had become a Bonfire of the Vanities parody -- snickering, silly/lurid 1980s bad-boy artist) releases Mapplethorpe from his own self-made cage of S&M stylizations. He is beautiful and real and frenetic in the book, an angel with a devilish smile, trying so hard to make something of himself he makes something out of the world.

The book chronicles Smith and Mapplethorpe's relationship as they struggle to become icons. That alone sounds cheesy, I know, but it's true, and Smith never apologizes. She just moves the story to its inevitable and devastating conclusion: Mapplethorpe dying of AIDS at the peak of his success.

Here's one of the last sentences in the book:

"So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger."

Nothing is better than that. God bless Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I stand corrected.

Wisdom Is Mystery

2011-07-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

At the end of Another Year, a Mike Leigh movie that came out last year but I just stumbled across this week, there's a moment of pure and devastating melancholy: Mary (played by Lesley Manville), a working-class friend of a complacent and cozy middle-class couple Tom and Gerri (played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Steen), is sitting at the couple's dinner table, staring off into space while the rest of the table, including Tom and Jerry and their son and his new girlfriend, chat. "Chat" in this case is a listing of all the travels they have done, all the greatnesses they have accomplished. Leigh's camera slowly pans around the table, the chitchat filling the air like confetti, and when Mary finally comes into focus her face enters your consciousness like something primordial, something so real you automatically flinch. At this moment she is either at the beginning or the end of a downward spiral.  The movie dramatizes her confusion and desperation in a one-year arc in which she grows more and more dependent on Tom and Gerri's upper-middle-class comforts.

Another Year, although it focuses on the lives of a jovial social-worker and her geologist husband, is really a character study of someone who is lost without a lot of hope of ever finding out why. Manville inhabits Mary body and spirit: she uses a language of stutters and gestures to show us how eager Mary is to break free from her habit of loneliness and desperation, and yet she can only stir herself up into a frenzy that finds no release.  Manville is masterful in the movie. Her acting is all in, and yet Mary is not an overacted stereotype. She's a living breathing poem of what can go wrong in your life if you're not very very careful.

"Very very careful" is the best description of Tom and Gerri. As played by Steen and Broadbent, they are a lovely, loving couple whose security and self-satisfaction is assured: they garden together, he cooks her gourmet dinners while she talks about her social-worker woes. Mary's desperation finds shelter in their suburban oasis, but eventually the two tire of her, and at the end their carefulness somehow becomes Mary's doom. Mary's need to insert herself into their perfection damns her to being ex-communicated. Her only solace is downing a bottle of white win to soften the blow of her own mistakes.

This is a movie about social class without overtly choosing sides. You understand the creature comforts and condescension involved in the lives of Tom and Gerri. They are fine, upstanding citizens after all.  You also understand Mary's need to be a part of their upstandingness, as well as her unspoken hurt and anger that she is not truly "one of them." Gerri and Mary work together at a hospital. Mary processes paperwork, and Gerri, as a counselor, creates it. Their connection is found at work, and as they carry that connection outside class enters into their relationship without being spoken: it's just in the way they deal with one another -- in the way Jerri seems to completely understand Mary will never change, and in the way Mary seems to completely understand she needs help to break away from her self-imposed crises.

But guess what? The help's not free.

Toward the end, Mary confesses to Gerri that she needs to talk to someone seriously about her life. Gerri lets her know she can refer to a professional.

"No," Mary says. "I need to talk to you."

Gerri lets her know that she does not think this wise. It wasn't a friendship they had after all, it seems: Mary seems to have been a kind of charity case for Gerri, an adopted, working-class "friend." As soon as Mary starts getting on her nerves, Gerri offers professional intervention as a way out for both of them.

Another Year lets us in on secrets about class and humanity most movies steer to miss: wisdom to Gerri is a referral to a professional counselor who will use canned questions and forms to "see what the matter is." Wisdom to Mary is something mysterious -- something far beyond her reach.

Love and Hate

2011-06-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Louis CK is a genius because he is pissed off and trying to figure it out, without allowing his rage to become his schtick. He deals in taboos (chief among them both loving and hating your kids, loving and hating your friends, loving and hating the whole damn world really), but he does not seem like he is conspicuously pushing buttons just to go blue. His new TV show, Louie, on FX Thursday nights at 10:30, is a revelation. Low-budget (the network made a deal with him to give him minimal money upfront for each episode promising no network-exec notes), fidgety and full of feeling, Louie feels like a cinema-verite 1970s movie with a long haired Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman sauntering somewhere around in the background. Louis CK basically plays himself, and in the episode I saw the whole thing was a slice of his weird, boring life done so stylishly drab it felt like art. Intermingled with the scenes of domestic "bliss" (like his daughter bitching because she doesn't get a Popsicle like his other daughter did, or his middle aged pregnant sister farting in the ER) are bits from his hilarious standup. Louis CK is the 21st Century Jerry Seinfeld in the standup gigs: foulmouthed but genuinely interested in real life, finding laughs in banality but also miffed that reality is so stupidly funny and banal. "Performance art" is one of those pretentious terms we often slap onto whatever seems smugly self-contained and well just plain obtuse. I'd say Louis CK is a "performance artist" let out of the constraints of that trope: he brings new insight into what performance means, while creating a small, sharp TV show that's reinventing what "TV shows" can do and be.

Phony Narrative

2011-06-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

It's on the cover of Time Magazine this week: the old "insider/outsider" waltz. In this instance, the headline is THE INSIDERS VS. THE OUTSIDERS, and the story is about how more mainstream candidates in the Republican party, chiefly Mitt Romney, the Robot of Gibraltar, seem to be losing a battle for the heart of the Republican party to The Outsiders like Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ron Paul. Outsiderness in this case is theorized (kind of clumsily by Time writer Joe Klein) as loud-mouth dissent, an "amateurish" band of "purists" bragging about the total absence of governmental experience, to "roars of laughter and approval on the stump."

Conversely, Klein uses these words to help paint a picture of Insider Romney: "thoughtful, nuanced, focused, efficient." The whole drama is boiled down to, in Klein's words, "country-club aristocracy vs. pitchfork populism."

The simplification is brought to you by The Professional Narrative, Inc., a way of constructing a dichotomy that reifies the ingeniousness of the "Professional," while dispensing with those "amateurs." Never mind that all the Outsiders mentioned in the article are all Professional Politicians themselves. It's their artificial positions on a made-up game board Klein seems interested in...

Just like many people construct the Outsider Artist narrative.

On this side of the dance-floor: "focused, thoughtful aristocratic" professional artists inhabit a museum/universe of credentialization, working within the art historical narrative, studying it, researching it, and perpetuating its messages of professional ascension. On the other side of the dance-floor, well, on the actual outside of it: the unestablished, uncredentialed makers of "pureness," amateurs on their way to ascending in a different less-than-professional way chiefly because of their lack of thought and nuance and efficiency.

In Klein's political-science version of the insider/outsider, the insiders are at the mercy of those vulgarian outsiders, but you can tell by the smugness of his prose he just knows the Professional must win for the sake of the country, for the sake of the common good.

I don't really care too much about the Republican party, Its innards are like any other organization's that has outgrown its purpose and is just growing for the sake of power-acquisition... But that outsider/insider split is instructive. Sarah Palin defines herself as "rogue." "Outsider" is now a trope of Tea-Partiers and Time Magazine pundits.

The whole concept has outlived its usefulness and is just another way for the Professional Narrative, Inc. to increase it ubiquity, continue to perpetuate the idea that all Romneys are meant to be next in line, and all Palins are amateurs barking at the gate.

It is a phony narrative, a way to turn political (and really any) ideology into a game-show, and to find new ways to make the Established and the Establishment more established without admitting a weird and wild little truth: all these Republicans, insiders and outsiders both, are knee-deep in the same hoopla, saying basically the same thing. Being an insider or being an outsider really has no meaning when everyone is part of the same circus.

The Artworld (and yup I am purposefully using this vague and hegemonic term) has that hothouse sameness as well. The Professional Narrative, Inc. wants to separate the Insiders from the Outsiders, but in reality there's a lot of disintegration happening between those two poles. We might want to celebrate that disintegration. We might want to start the official attack on that professional narrative soon...

Play The Game

2011-06-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

(For Andrew)

Sometimes the best way to watch a movie is when you're drunk and tired at about 9 pm, with a couple of really close friends who are that way too, and the movie turns into a collage of laughter and whispers and imagery you remember but the meaning gets dislocated, and that movie becomes an installation art project in your head. David Fincher's The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, is one of those movies. I've only seen it that one time because I don't want to spoil that initial silly serendipidy that got into my brain. All I remember is being dumb and ripped and enveloped: Michael Douglas in an Armani suit, lit in gun-metal-blue light, with a bleeding forehead. A frantic clown-doll haunting every other scene. A huge mansion. Shiny floors. A taxi cab and a car chasing each other. Wine glasses in a fancy restaurant. Scenes with a lot of talk about nothing, plot details spilling out of chandeliers and a sexy ice-blonde waitress climbing out of her apartment in high heels. A nothingness is at the center of it all: meaninglessness that gives you a sense of how important meaninglessness is. Beautiful, foreboding music like a music-box lullaby played with the intensity of Psycho violins. And the three of us wrapped up in, and not understanding, all that pomp and style. Laughing and being stupid.

It's a beautiful way to be.

Down to Earth

2011-05-31T11:03:00.000-07:00

U-Turn Art Space is about to come to an end. It feels sort of like the last episode of Friends , that weird nostalgic ache, that sense that a group of people who made something both approachable and unique, culturally aware but also down to earth, is over. And there's nothing that can take its place, not even reruns.

I first stumbled onto the space last July and got mesmerized by the glamour and chutzpah of a show called "The Place You Made to Find One Another," featuring the works of Eric Ruschman and Patricia Murphy (two artists who also helped run the space). The exhibit had a ghostly cast of misfit sculptures and intricately conceived paintings, but also a sense of finish and what I call "there-ness," meaning it just seemed like a show that came fully intact from somebody's brilliant brain, like Athena busting out of Zeus's skull, or a crazy chandelier dropping out of the sky and landing without breaking right in front of you. There was an easy-going pretentiousness that I loved in that show, and every other show I saw there also had that knack to be both sophisticated and unfussy, brave without showing off. Each show examined the limits of what art can be, while expanding the way you can appreciate those limits, like Duchamp without fustiness. Each exhibit, it seemed, offered a new brand of readymades, a new centerstage urinal.

But something else: an enthusiasm and naivete tempered with glittery wisdom. Nothing heavy-handed, but a sort of gravity through the curatorial choices made, the careful consideration of how art got installed and lit and talked about.

So thank you Matt Morris, Molly Donnermeyer, Zachary Rawe, Patricia Murphy and Eric Ruschman. What an incredible sitcom you created.

Here are the shows I wrote about:

"The Mechanics of Joy"
"moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve"
"The Place You Made to Find One Another"

The final show at U-Turn, "Aloha Means Both Hello and Goodbye" opens this Saturday, June 4, 2011, witha a reception at 7 pm to 10 pm. (Bill and I were asked to be a part of it, and we're so happy to be.) U·turn Art Space 2159 Central Ave. Cincinnati, Ohio Please come and show the U-Turners how much they meant to Cincinnati art, and just plain old art in general.

Butch Freak Goddess

2011-05-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

Bridesmaids, the new Kristen Wiig chick-flick/raunch-comedy that came out last week, is a total pleasure to experience: smart, heartfelt, and silly, with a sidecar of Brazilian-food diarrhea. It has its own rhythm and pace, guided by Wiig's eerie, brilliant comedic timing.  Wiig's setpieces are like elongated SNL sketches, only better because Wiig and the filmmakers have created an atmosphere in which the creepy/zany sketch-comedy routines are braided into an overall narrative that satisfies your inner-fratboy, while also allowing you to catch the bridal bouquet. It's Mary Richards and Rhoda climbing on board the Farelly Brothers train to Apatow Junction.

But truly the main reason I love this movie is Melissa McCarthy's Butch Freak Goddess Megan, sister of the groom.  In the beginning of Bridesmaids, at the initial engagement party, Megan is a total throwaway cliche, one of those goofy grotesques comedic movies often trot out for cheap laughs and also to get us to "like" the main character by comparison. She's all huff and puff and dyke-like moves, dressed in boy clothes, overexcited and a little stalker-scary.

As the movie progresses, though, Megan stops being the butt of jokes and transforms into its moral center.  McCarthy hams it up in a way that isn't hammy somehow, providing breathing room for Megan's innocence and intelligence.  One of the best images in the movie is of Megan abducting nine puppies from the bridal shower (it's a site-gag: the party is so plush that parting gifts are gorgeous, pedigreed little doggies). She's in her minivan, puppies all over the place, driving like mad to get home.

Megan is also the slap-in-the-face Wigg's Annie needs to get over her funk.  In this scene, we find out how accomplished and how triumphant Megan really is. We can see her work her magic. Only in this bell-jar of chick-flick-raunch-comedy weirdness, I'm thinking, could such a wonderfully full but still hilariously broad character be hatched. McCarthy is blissfully unaware of her looks, and yet there's an inherent beauty pulsing out of Megan's hungry eyes.

Of course there's the food-poisoning in a wedding-dress schtick and lots of Wiiginess, all of which is spectacular. But at the end of the day, Megan feels like something new: a masculine, overweight, kind of freaky lady unapologetically in charge of her life.

The Bare Bones of Belief and Decency

2011-05-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

We went to Finster Fest at Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Georgia over the weekend with a booth of Thunder-Sky, Inc. art. It was one of those experiences I'll never forget -- being in the epicenter of a universe I have been circling most of my life.

Art is often a way out for many people: making it, buying it, loving it... Art-making for Howard Finster was a way for him to find a sort of heaven on earth. He seems to have relished the idea of Slipshod Utopia, and that aesthetic is in full-bloom now, with all his sculptures and installations slowly (and some quickly) deteriorating. But it is a spiritual disintegration, isn't it? All that art and love and godliness left to the elements, being eaten up by rain and time. It seems almost like a prophecy, Biblical, humble and small. Finster's art has the same effect: his paintings and other works may come off to some as Bible-belt kitsch, when in reality he was doing what William Blake did, creating his own aesthetic and philosophy using organized religion only as a platform for something bigger, stranger, and kinder.

I felt as if I had drifted into somebody else's dream being there, but it was my dream too somehow. Finster has made sure of that. Concrete facades built from bear faces and pop bottles, old costume jewelry and broken dinnerware. There's that initial whimsy to it, of course, but that has worn off now, and what's left is the bare bones of belief and decency. Finster did not construct a Paradise that would last. I think that's part of his meaning: you can't get there from here. You can only find glimpses and create idols that crack and melt into grotesques.

The area around Paradise Gardens is residential, and many of the other homes are abandoned. There's a state prison in Paradise's backyard. Highway 27 toward Summerville is green and raw, a landscape of hollow trees and overgrown grass and static cows, old ranch-style houses and barns, and a sky above it all as blank as thoughts before you go to sleep. I kept thinking of a phrase Flannery O'Connor said of her version of Georgia -- that it was "Christ-haunted." That's the feeling. A holy ghost barely visible, being chased away.

Paradise Gardens is not paradise of course. Its poetic decay is incredibly moving, but also very sad. It makes you wonder if Finster had not been categorized in the way he was (as an "outsider/folk/self-taught/visionary artist"), maybe we would not be losing Paradise in this way. Finster made immense contributions to culture from this location. Respect needs to arrive soon in the form of conservation and curation. Here's the website if you're interested in providing any kind of support: Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens.

Below are photos we took... An incredible place...

No More Drama

2011-05-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

Elle Fanning and Steven Dorff in Sofia Coppola's Somewhere

Reality TV shows like The Real Housewives of (Fill in the Blank), Mob Wives, and Bad Girls Club, etc. are really inexpensively produced soap operas without actors and writers:  the national neighborhood trash getting together and performing their version of Greek tragedies after downing a box of wine. There's nothing outside of the scope of these made-up, people-pleasing pseudo-dramas, and each character/real-person knows he/she needs to make enemies and not friends in order to be central to the episode. The pleasure of watching these programs is in the hyperbole and crash; they are drag shows without drag-queens and have a bad-art glitter and sheen Andy Warhol craved.

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is an antidote to reality TV, a slim, sweet, posh curio of a movie about a dazed and confused movie star who lives at the Chateau Marmont.  Steven Dorff is the actor, and he glides through Coppola's beautiful atmosphere like a lost dolphin. He can hold the camera's attention without desiring to be filmed: that seems to be the essence of anti-reality. Elle Fanning, as well, effortlessly embodies his daughter, an eleven-year-old girl on the verge of both tears and laughter as she makes Eggs Benedict for her movie-star dad and then sits at the breakfast table on her laptop typing in the stuff she'll need to take to summer camp. Ease and gravity merge together in Coppola's universe. She has turned out to be a great movie-maker, lingering on scenes that most directors don't even consider filming, and through that process of paying attention delivers intimacy instead of phony drama, beautiful moments instead of personality clashes.

There are moments, in fact, in Somewhere that have the kindness and sweep of dreams you want to go to sleep to re-enter, as if you are channeling lives you'd never have access to. The pleasure comes from the smallest details, the softest voices. Coppola is a Beverly Hills Vermeer, stylishly creating vignettes that seem frozen and yet incredibly alive at the same time.  Somewhere is a lovely experience, and a relief from reality overload.

Blind Taste Test

2011-05-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

A photo of the judges of the new reality singing contest show The Voice. It's on NBC.

At one point in the new reality/contest/talent show The Voice, one of the contestants who has just been deemed worthy by the judges, a beautiful, thin, brunette young lady says something like, "All my life I've been the girl with the pretty face who can sing a little. Now I really feel like this show has shown that I have talent, not just a pretty face."

To which Dick Clark's heir apparent, and host of The Voice, Carson Daly, says something like, "That's why this show is so important."

Seriously.

This moment should go down in reality-show history as one of the smarmiest, silliest, hype-tastic ever recorded. But actually I found myself agreeing with Daly. I was happy that he had pointed that out.

Let me walk you through my line of thinking...

The Voice harnesses the powers of a Prefab Pop Music Mount Olympus (Christina Aguilera, Adam Levine from Maroon 5, Cee Lo Green, and Blake Lively) with their thrones turned backwards so that they can only hear, and not see, the singing contestants as they belt out their auditions. This simple gimmick is what moves me, and probably many others, not because of the gimmickry, but because a genuineness settles in with all the phoniness. You start to believe in people actually developing tastes and making artistic judgements without having to know anything other than art.

Of course I know using The Voice as a metaphor for understanding art and culture is a bit of a stretch, but I keep going over it in my mind, and it makes so much sense because of the transparency and simplicity of the exercise. And also because if the Pop Music Zeuses and Athena do decide to flip their thrones around with their magic buttons that make a totally cool "whoooosh" sound, and there's two or more who want to choose the singer to be on their "teams," the power of the whole enterprise switches over to the amateur: the singer is now in charge of the Mythology. Nice.

And of course now I transpose this narrative onto (you guessed it) the machinations of "outsider art," especially in examining the way this kind of categorization often dictates a biography about the artist prior to, or during the viewing of the artists' art. In an "insider art" context, "biography" often enters the picture as a resume or curriculum vitae, allowing perspective collectors and other interested parties a view through the lens of "professional accomplishment" or whatever. "Outsider" artists usually don't have a lot on their scorecard professionally speaking. They've been shut out of that possibility because they don't have opportunities to go to art school, to network, to play the game. And of course the vast majority of "insider" artists don't have that "in" either, but they do have the opportunity at least to pretend, and to have a pretense of "accomplishment" is much the same anyway in the art biz.

"Outsider" artists (especially those with developmental disabilities) are cordoned off: "special" is often the word. A list of diagnoses, or idiosyncratic "tricks" they have up their sleeves, or another list of all their hardships often becomes the substitute for a resume, and that in turn becomes the conversation: not art, but "special struggle," not aesthetics but a cultural vacuum created by good intentions and a need on the part of "outsider art" collectors and curators to critique "insiderness" via "outsiderness," ie: "Look what this artist who has never been outside of her home has accomplished with house-paint, broken bottles, chicken wire, and ink pens! Take that SNOBS!"

The sad fact is that the SNOBS! run the show, and the SNOBS! work in a world of pedigree, politics, and just plain old power.

Enter The Voice: would it not be lovely if all artistic decisions in galleries and museums across the world took Voice lessons. And had all their curators/board-members/partners take blind taste tests. No categorization, no resume, no social-networking allowed. What would happen?

Maybe this:

A big tall overweight kid from Texas, on a stage with the Pop Music Mount Olympus Gods' backs to him, sings some schmaltzy, over-the-top country ballad like a combination of Jeff Buckley and Garth Brooks. And it makes you cry. And then Cee Lo Green turns his throne around and says in that Cee-Lo-Green-godly-raspy way: "When I pressed my button and turned my chair around, I was so glad that voice was coming out of you."

"The Moon of Tomorrow"

2011-04-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

"2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" opens Friday (4/29/2011) at Thunder-Sky. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a work that hasn't been exhibited in over two years, a collaboration Antonio Adams did with Brian Joiner back in 2008 titled "Those Who Want War Warring Against Those Who Don't." (on loan from Country Club Gallery). This triptych is an incredible example of how collaboration can push two artists toward newer, fresher ideas and images. The surface of the large three-panel painting has a luster and bustle to it: superheroes and angels, the Twin Towers, minarets and missiles all combining into an elaborate dream/nightmare inspired by Picasso and updated by Adams and Joiner.

Antonio also was given some of the art supplies Brian left behind after his death last year. Circular slices of woods onto which Brian had glued an odd assortment of shapes were taken by Antonio and transformed into a 3-D cosmology. The silver piece above Antonio titled "The Moon of Tomorrow," and that seems fitting. From the sorrow of Brian's death, Antonio has been able to forge a new style inspired by Brian's legacy. Collaboration indeed.

Italo Calvino + Courttney Cooper = What It Is

2011-04-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

I was so looking forward to Matt Morris' take on Courttney Cooper's show at PAC Gallery (in Walnut Hills) that I was afraid maybe I was expecting too much. I wasn't. His review of "Cincinnati USA: Before and After" is an amazing exercise in pulling two disparate worlds together in order to show that these worlds are interchangeable in ways we never allow ourselves to consider.

Calvino, a canonized literary figure who passed away in 1985, wrote neo-Realist fiction, fables and meta-narratives that question the very necessity of literature while proving how important it is. Morris quotes from Invisible Cities, a tall-tale, prose/poem novel featuring Marco Polo explaining his travels to Kublai Khan. The book is beautifully pretentious and yet completely down-to-earth, and as you read it you become lost in Calvino's trickery and style while also understanding how trickery and style can become platforms for philosophy and morality.

Cooper, a local Cincinnati artist who is just beginning his career, draws intricate maps of Cincinnati on a large-scale with an ink pen, creating webs of streets and buildings and words with a high-intensity series of lines that mutate and vibrate like ghosts anxious to tell you secrets. He is a master of both obscuring and clarifying: his maps, as Morris points out in his review, resemble Calvino's sense of literary constructions in poignant and precise ways. Specifically Morris writes: "Like the world Calvino writes about, Cooper’s Cincinnati is one that is lost in time, where buildings, construction projects and festivals from different points in recent history are conflated into a single view."

Morris merges Calvino's fantastical depiction of a bustling dynasty with Cooper's fantastical depiction of a bustling Cincinnati, and the comparison allows you to conflate the works of Calvino and Cooper in a way no one would have done unless Morris wished the two together.

The juxtaposition allows Cooper, who could be defined as an "outsider artist" or an "artist with a disability," to be defined only by his work, just as we usually allow with canonized figures like Calvino. It doesn't necessarily "lift" Cooper up, as much as level the playing field -- as if Cooper, in his drawings, is not only drawing a city, but creating his own identity.

Matt Morris' "Midwestern Marco Polo" in Citybeat.

Ai Weiwei: Don't Let It Be

2011-04-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

I write and think a lot about "outsider artists." I ran across an essay about Ai Weiwei yesterday and I have been thinking about his status both as an artist and activist, and how his art/activism created for him an identity that he now can literally not escape. Weiwei is an "outsider artist," even though he is pedigreed and championed, and is shown all over the world. Weiwei has become one of China's most visible "disappeareds." He was detained April 3 by Chinese officials, and has not been heard from since.

His art is humorous, sneaky, and Duchampian. The political has given Weiwei a reason to be pissed and allows his work a vicious, smart-assed strength and validity, but he uses an aesthetic approach to both question authority and poke fun at himself as an Artist. (Witness the perfect "Coca Cola 'Han Dynsasty'" urn above, as well as the straightforward beauty of giving the finger to the White House, part of a series of photographs that include giving the finger to the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square, among other landmarks.) His work reminds me of Jeff Koons if Jeff Koons gave a shit.

Weiwei returned to China in 1993 after going to art school in the US. In his own country he is a prisoner for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. His art won't let it be. And even though he is well-known and one of China's most celebrated artists, he is an outcast.

"Outsider art" in this case has something to do with what artists are expected to do and be. Weiwei's bravery, I'm sure, has been duly noted, but what I find fascinating is his need to do the art he does in a country that would rather silence him than tolerate him. This need seems to come from a very pure place. Maybe that's a definition of "outsider art" I can deal with: art that needs to come from a pure place.

Not Evidence of Identity But a Way to Create It

2011-04-18T07:01:00.000-07:00

I'm working on an essay about Thornton Dial's retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and I keep coming back to what "outsider art" represents, and how the meanings it conjures can often be reductive.  Putting art and artists into an overarching, identity-based categorization system eliminates almost any other area of inquiry or interest.  Any other narratives and contexts become unnecessary because the story behind the art-making pigeonholes the artist and situates his/her art in another sphere, "outside" of Art, capital A.

From its very beginnings, via Jean Dubuffet, "outsider art" was a reaction to "insider art," not a new way to see, but a way to criticize the hegemony of Western culture. In philosophizing about "art brut" (the forebear of "outsider art"), Dubuffet writes, "Personally, I believe very much in the values of savagery. I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness."

"Savagery, violence, madness" are of course wonderful things for artists to indulge in and play with, but they are also words that delegitimize and colonize artists who may not be art-schooled or have access to pedigree status. Often "outsider artists" don't have the choice of how to construct their own narratives. The identity of "outsider" fills in the blanks. All the artists labeled "outsider" I've come across are not violent or mad, moody or savage: they are just hard workers, trying to create their way out of being obscure or ignored.

In positioning an artist (especially if she/he is labeled "developmentally disabled" or "African American working class") as "outsider," the art produced by this artist becomes evidence that he/she is human and capable and talented, even though they are "mad or moody" and outside of "our world."  We assume these characteristics in other artists who are not labeled "outsider." An "insider," non-labeled artist's work is not seen as evidence of identity: it is seen as the way they create it.

What the exhibit of Thornton Dial's works does is allow us to envision an "outsider artist" creating his own identity, breaking free of the cliches and pigeonholes "outsiderness" creates. Comparisons to Matisse and Rauschenberg are necessary because Dial is not "outside" of the Matisse/Rauschenberg radar. He is participating in art history, whether he knows it or not,  His art demands that kind of attention. When we juxtapose Dial's works with the works of more famous artists we start to understand that Dial is working towards clarity and his own aesthetic. He is doing this not because he is "mad or savage, insider or outsider," but because he is "omni-sided," approaching his work as work, creating art because that's what artists do.

I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This

2011-04-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

(We're publishing a book of poems/prose inspired by Dale Jackson's text-works (titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This), to debut at the opening of "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" 4/29/2011. This is my contribution -- a villanelle (sort of) made up of lines from Dale's pieces... [Keith Banner])

Nobody’s Nothing

How long does it take to find out?
Batman needs a new partner.
Nobody’s nothing.

It fits just right.
The driver starts turning the wheel.
How long does it take to find out?

Remember it comes back in the night.
(I say forget it.)
Nobody’s nothing.

This is American Idol
Flying out of the Batcave.
How long does it take to find out?

They out of luck.
Look at the price.
Nobody’s nothing.

Black SUV come flying down the road
90 miles per hour.
How long does it take to find out?
Nobody’s nothing.

Courttney Cooper

2011-04-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Courttney Cooper has a one-man show at PAC Gallery in Walnut Hills opening April 15, 2011. I wrote this poem about Courttney's work in 2007. He is an amazing artist and human being... (Keith Banner)

Courttney Cooper

A map of a city
Nobody else can see,
Lines drawn with ball-point pens
Bought at a drug-store on the way home.
The paper gets picked up off the ground.

His brain needs those buildings.

Every neighborhood is revealed,
Every piece of river,
Every street-corner
Like an eyelash trapped on a fingertip.

His architecture devours
All the words we use. Every moment
Is a rafter, every window
A hymn.
All door knobs are
A reason to exist.

Grocery carts lined up in the rain
Are like numbers in a phonebook
Only shinier
And more useful.

The bones in his hand
create this
Utopia,

The one place
he must get to.

Passover

2011-04-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago this month downtown Cincinnati was in an uproar. Police shot and killed an unarmed man named Timothy Thomas in Over the Rhine; frustrations and furies had been brewing for years, and suddenly the streets became the place where they were unleashed. One of the first shows featuring "outsider artists" here in Cincinnati had just opened at Base Gallery a couple weeks before. It was titled, "Art Thing," and featured Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland and Antonio Adams (pictured standing in front of Base), as well as Richard Brown (not pictured). Base was located in the middle of the riots, on Main Street in Over the Rhine. During the overnight violence, cars in front of the gallery were destroyed. Windows and doors beside the gallery were smashed. But Base's large, plate-glass windows were left untouched; the art was not bothered. It was like a version of passover. I always remember that because it was a small glimmer of grace in an otherwise horrible and horrifying situation. Another bit of grace came a little later, when 19-year-old Antonio, whose apartment was one block away from where Timothy Thomas was shot, did a series of drawings about the riots. In one, he imagined Timothy Thomas' mother and the officer who shot Timothy falling in love while walking on side-by-side treadmills at a gym.

Below is video from the opening night of "Art Thing."

Becky Iker + Bill Ross + Ten Years in the Making

2011-03-31T04:58:00.000-07:00

This is a fraction of the pieces Becky Iker and Bill Ross have completed in the last ten years. A couple will be featured in "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" opening April 29, 2011 at Thunder-Sky, Inc.

Hog Heaven

2011-03-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

CBS's Mike and Molly is neo-Roseanne: a working-class sitcom that finds its metaphors and purpose in the beautifully ironic predicament of obesity and activity, being fat and being overworked and being in love. I just saw a repeat of the Thanksgiving episode -- it was my first Mike and Molly experience -- and I was in hog heaven. The two leads, Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy, have a banter and chemistry hardly ever seen on TV. They don't preen or pose ala Friends or all the imitators of Friends. They actually have a strange familiarity, a language first created for Dan and Roseanne in that preeminent 80s/90s working-class sitcom, one of the first representations of working-class fatties that didn't make dumb jokes at their expense, but allowed the jokes to come from the mouths of the fatties: tired, mean spirited but ultimately gorgeously moral put downs and asides that allowed the tired and depressed and over-weight a voice and a flare.

Mike and Molly's style evolves from that Roseanne-fat-ass-venom. But this is also a love story at its core: Mike and Molly are courting, and their love is both innocent and worn out. And when push comes to shove, Molly, a school teacher with papers to grade, makes jokes about Mike's sleep-apnea machine, and Mike, a cop with boyish charm to spare, finds solace in someone who understands him enough to make jokes about his sleep-apnea machine.

Mike and Molly are trying to escape a universe of skinny people, it seems: trying to find a way out of being gazed-upon as freaks.

Which is a great segue into the whole Marie Clare controversy from back in the fall. A bitchy Marie Clare editor wrote a blog about Mike and Molly in which she penned crap like: "I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything."

This show is a direct assault on skinny bitches. And also on the way we tend to try to overlook what makes us human. We want perfection given to us often so we can validate hating ourselves. Mike and Molly allows us a respite from that. "Skinny bitches" are often the punchlines on this show. The gaze is not on their side. And really what the hell is wrong with that?

Humorless Camp

2011-03-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

What is it about guys? I guess I should put "guys" in quotes, because that's what this is about: masculinity threaded through the needle of accoutrements, props, tokens and signifiers. "Guy" movies versus "Chick" flicks. "Guys" just being "guys." So the other day I stumbled upon John Luessenhop's Takers, a "guy" movie starring TI, Chris Brown, Hayden Christianson, and Matt Dillon, among many other "guy" actors. It was generally hilarious without meaning to be, and had the pseudo-intensity of a GQ fashion shoot merged with the superficial and bleak philosophy of film-noir: all style, no substance, but even the style seemed borrowed and blue. Too blue. All the actors seem to be directed to hide everything they are supposed to feel and yet they don't seem to be feeling anything anyway, other than the need to be in a really intense heist movie with guns and cigars and scotch. Exposition is handled by the ladies: a junkie sister here, a sweet little daughter there, are touchstones of sweetness for these "guys" who spend their days plotting bank robberies and their nights partying in dark, glamorous, mahogany lounges, no girls allowed unless she's getting you something to drink. And it better be scotch.

Takers is a direct descendant to Michael Mann's Heat, the ur-text to "guy" movies. Made in the 1990s, this slick, smooth, blue-steel, moon-lit crime epic has all the brooding silence and synthesizer elegance of other Mann movies, but it also seems so self-important as to wipe away any respect you might have had left for Al Pacino and Robert Deniro. It's all hyperbolic and humorless: scenes go on for too long because basically the only thing at stake is the next violent outburst.

Susan Sontag nailed down camp in her seminal essay, "Notes on Camp." In it she writes: "Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea ."

These movies both signify things way beyond their reach: masculinity as a desire to escape actually being a man, guns and posing as a structure for identity, stylish clothes and cars and promises of ass-kicking masquerading as "strength." It is a sensibility hardening into an idea, bad art ossifying into cliche and yet the very high-toned seriousness of the product gives you the feeling no one has any idea, and in fact may have the notion that this is the way things actually are "on the streets." There's no tongue-in-cheek, no signifiers that this crap is really crap. No fun. Fun is not what "guys" in this context want: they want pork-pie hats, tailored suits, and a gun to go with it.

This is "guy camp," humorless and dull, and yet if you look at it through the lens of Sontag's Camp you see the sadsack guy behind the curtain. This is wish fulfillment, just like in a "chick" flick when Matthew McConaughey chases after Kate Hudson with a bouquet of flowers on a New York City street. "Chicks" just want to get married; "guys" just want you to shut your mouth so they can get down to business. Either way it's an alignment of stereotypes, a way to "cram sensibility into a mold," creating more of the same.

One of Those Things

2011-03-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

There's one startlingly poetic piece in the "The Way We Are Now" exhibit at the Cincinnati Art Museum: Shih Chieh Huang's "EX-C-FW." It outshines all the other art in the show because it creates its own element and does not seem interested in announcing itself or even desiring attention. Positioned in a portico upstairs, all alone, this flimsy bag-and-battery jellyfish haunts space. It might be giving birth to itself. Innocent junk and cynical science intermingle: plastic bags breath in and out, as if they are being sucked through broken car windows. A little video screen located inside the "body" of the piece reveals odd-shaped eyes staring out at you like the dream sequence Dali did for Hitchcock's Spellbound. Electrical cords spill in and out, vines twisting into the carousel that slowly oscillates the whole contraption. Technology has blurred into daydream, and daydream has concretized into living and breathing nothingness. When you approach Huang's "EX-C-FW," you are in the presence of some sci-fi-funky Medusa, and yet also you feel the vibration of a hummingbird wings. It's a beautifully tender trap.

Above are photos of some other Huang pieces I found online... He's definitely one to watch.

"2 + 2 = 5" News Release

2011-03-23T14:27:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release

“2 + 2 = 5” Features Collaboration as a Way to Transcend

Cincinnati, OH – March 23, 2011 – "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" opens April 29, 2011 with a reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc. Gallery in Northside. The show features variations on the theme of "collaboration," and how getting rid of "one author" can open up new vistas and territories to investigate. “Those Who Want War Warring against Themselves,” a large-scale collaboration done by Antonio Adams and the late Brian Joiner in 2008, is the center-piece of the exhibit. (Photos below.)

Based on Picasso’s "Guernica,” the work is a triptych that re-imagines not only the work of a great Modern Art Master, but also reconfigures and re-conjures that visual feast into a sort of parody and homage simultaneously. Antonio was an “outsider artist” whom Brian met when Antonio was still in high school; Brian was more than a generous mentor to Antonio – he was a classy example of how to make art and to live the life of an artist.

The Antonio Adams/Brian Joiner collaobration as it first appeared at Country Club Gallery in Cincinnati in March 2009, in an exhibit along with Antonio's solo works...

When Brian passed away last year, he left behind not just a beautifully prolific suite of works, but a huge backlog of art supplies. Antonio has taken a small portion of those supplies and created Brian-inspired works.

Elsewhere in the exhibit are other examples of how collaboration in visual art can sometimes help artists transcend circumstance and pedigree.

Large prints were made of some of Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished works, and David Mack, Antonio Adams (one of his Thunder-Sky collaborations is pictured below), Cedric Michael Cox, and Aaron Olive Wood have reworked Raymond’s uncompleted drawings into finished collaborations that have lives all their own. Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder Bill Ross has several collaborations in the show, including pieces he did with the late Donald Henry. Katie Brenner, as well, has collaborated on works with the late DJ Maes. Thunder-Sky, Inc. is also publishing a catalog that chronicles the exhibit, with an essay by Pamela Rhodes Myricks concerning her collaborative relationship with Joiner. As well, a book of writings based on Dale Jackson’s text-based works will be published. Titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, the book will feature color reproductions of Jackson's text-based works side by side with the writings done by local and national poets and writers.

Contact:
Keith Banner, (513) 823-8914
Thunder-Sky, Inc.
4573 Hamilton Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45223
thunderskyinc@gmail.com

4 + 29 = 2011

2011-03-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland, Antonio Adams: 2000

Raymond Thunder-Sky, David Mack: 2003

“2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations”

Adams + Thunder-Sky
Adams + Joiner
Brenner + Maes
Cox + Thunder-Sky
Echo-Hawk + Dotson
Iker + Ross
Jackson + Henry + Ross
Mack + Thunder-Sky
Morris + Ruschman
Ross + Henry
Weber + Ross
Wood + Thunder-Sky
(+ more)

Also presenting the publication of I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, a chapbook of writings based on the text-works of Dale Jackson

Opening reception: April 29, 2011 6 to 10 pm
Thunder-Sky, Inc.
4573 Hamilton Avenue
Cincinnati, Oho 45223
http://www.thunderskyinc.org/
(513) 823-8914
Hours: Friday 6 to 9 pm, Saturday + Sunday 1 to 5 pm

Show closes 6/10/2011

Alive + Well = Collaboration

2011-03-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

Bill Ross and Becky Iker: Over the years Bill and Becky have created close to 50 paintings together. Becky does the drawings and Bill does the painting. Above: one of their pieces...

Collaboration Is alive and well via V&V’s “Double Vision II” and Thunder-Sky Inc’s “2 + 2 = 5”

It is great to see Visionaries & Voices (V&V) continues to embrace and celebrate ‘collaboration” as a way to make art with their one night exhibit and fundraiser called “Double Vision II”. For me, making art is probably the only real form of magic that exists in the world. Artwork that emerges from collaboration can be more powerful than a solo project. In fact, collaborating can change your life.

I know this because in my early art school days, my painting instructor, Sue Johnson, randomly assigned me to collaborate with another art student. That student was Keith Banner. We became great friends and continued to collaborate from that point forward. In fact this May will mark our 21st year together as a couple.

So when it came to developing V&V back in 2002/2003, one of the cornerstones of the enterprise had to be, you guessed it, “COLLABORATION”. Bringing artists together with and without disabilities was a way to move things forward. Shows like “We Come in Peace” and “Same Difference” at Artworks and even “Pop Life” at the former UC Gallery on Sycamore were all vehicles showcasing the power of collaboration. Our training as artists and our jobs as social workers helped us to synthesize into “Culture workers”. Collaborating became a way to see results more quickly.

In those days and still now, collaborating can do a lot of “culture” work. When two artists come together to create regardless of backgrounds or history or issues, perceptions can change. The community can be made richer, more colorful, more, alive. Artists who may otherwise go unnoticed can be more quickly woven into the fabric of a larger conversation, a larger art world. Artists who may feel they are accomplished or established can be challenged or inspired in a new way. New techniques, imagery or ideas can develop, barriers can be eliminated.

What I have grown to appreciate over the years is that collaborating can be extremely difficult, but when it works it is great. A truly brand new piece can emerge that would not be possible without the other artist’s involvement… a new vision, experience or clarity can be derived. It can be exciting stuff. It can be more than the sum of its parts.

At our new gallery "Thunder-Sky Inc” we have not forgotten about the power and importance of collaboration. Stop by any Saturday and you may find a collaborative piece being made. In fact at the end of April running through mid June, Thunder-Sky Inc’s ninth exhibit will feature “2+2=5”. This show includes a number of collaborations, both new and old by such artists as Brian Joiner, DJ Maes, Donald Henry, and even Raymond Thunder-Sky himself. Artists who are no longer with us but are very much alive in the works they left behind or inspired.

Reconstruction: Four Antonio Adams/Raymond Thunder-Sky Drawings

2011-03-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

Raymond Thunder-Sky left behind a number of unfinished drawings. We made large-scale prints out of a few of them, and Antonio Adams took the prints and "finished" them. Part of the "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" show at Thunder-Sky, Inc. opening April 29, 2011.

Art and Everything After

2011-03-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

"Those Who Want War Warring Against Those Who Don't," Antonio Adams and Brian Joiner, 2008

We're pulling together "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations," the next Thunder-Sky show opening April 29, 2011. This large triptych is a collab done by Antonio Adams and the late Brian Joiner back in 2008 (and was last exhibited at Country Club two years ago) in response to Picasso's "Guernica," and it's going to be the centerpiece of the show. The show is shaping up to be not just about collaboration in "real time," but also about spiritual collaborations as well. Antonio is working on a few homage pieces to Brian, using some of the materials Brian left behind. Also, David Mack, Cedric Michael Cox, and Antonio are working on "finishing" a few of Raymond's unfinished drawings. Raymond left behind hundreds of half-completed drawings; we had some of these printed on a large-scale, and the three are adding their touches to the prints. Bill Ross has several collaborations in the show with the late Donald Henry, and there will also be a piece by Katie Brenner and the late DJ Maes.

"One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels."

2011-03-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

"Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: 'One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.' So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you–of how you were brought into this world and why–and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange." (from Katzuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go).

Mark Romanek has made a beautiful film based on Katzuo Ishiguro's beautiful novel Never Let Me Go, and I finally got to see it last night. It is crucial and fierce in its own secret, sad way, like a terse stern poem that blossoms into a life-changing philosophy inside your head. The imagery is stark yet banal, intended to be forgettable and yet the amnesia of it all forces you to turn everything you see into nostalgia: a brick boarding school, an old wire fence festooned with litter, a rusty abandoned boat on a beach, a cloudy sky, a wet gray road... There's a tension in every moment among the three main characters, Ruth, Kathy and Tommy (played by two sets of actors, one as children, one as teens and adults), but the tension is somehow sidetracked by the dreaminess of it all. From the start you know these kids stowed away in boarding-school in England aren't actual "kids," as much as strangely over-alert facsimiles, not robots as much as wannabes.

Romanek's eye provides both distance and subtlety to the happenings and surroundings, and as the movie progresses you begin to understand what is at stake, just like in the novel: the secret that's not really a secret, just life itself.  Ruth, Kathy and Tommy were created for their organs, and their organs only.  What's inside them will eventually have to be harvested so that "actual people" can live. The brutal honesty of their existence is mollified by the manners and routines of Hailsham, their school, but it's always in the air, a feeling that they aren't real enough to be human but everything human about them is all that matters -- everything human, that is, except their souls, which are defined as throw-away commodities in order to make killing them for their kidneys, etc. palatable, even ethical.

This situation of course sounds sci-fi-morose. The way it is delivered, however, is pure finesse, and the sadness creeps through the circumspect words, the beige and gray uniforms of the school, and the tenderness the three main characters share as they grow into adulthood, an adulthood that will be cut short through a series of donations that quickly deprives them of the organs they need to stay alive.

In the teen/adult phase, Carey Mulligan plays Ruth, a quick-witted girl who falls in love with Andrew Garfield's Tommy; the triangle is completed by Keira Knightly as Kathy, a twitchy, energetic girl who steals Tommy from Ruth in their childhood and lives to regret it. The triangulation gives Never Let Me Go its drama, but that drama is given meaning through what the three have to go through in order to find reasons to be who they are. The three all have to figure out how not to be heroes, in other words; institutionalization has made them docile and compliant, and yet the need to love makes them want to break apart from who they have been told they are. Never Let Me Go's story is kind of an exercise in Stockholm Syndrome, capturing both the masochism and the tranquility of finding a way to exist in a world that wants to ignore you until you can be used properly. That dark truth guides the way each of the actors perform their roles, and gives the movie a cohesion so compressed and grim you feel a part of their world in a way that most movies never accomplish. The imagery gets layered into your own scrapbook, and you feel an essential connection to the people and the places, especially at the end of the film when Kathy and Tommy reach "completion," the euphemism used to define what happens after an organ-donor has donated so many organs they die.

Ruth is a "carer," an organ-donor who has the job of assisting other donors in the process -- a sort of on-site social-worker/nurse who reads to them and counsels them through the process. Mulligan gives Ruth a depth and energy that allows her to become the movie's moral center as well as narrator.   She struggles not with her fate as much as with how to accept the fate without losing everything in the process.  Garfield's Tommy is a lost genial man-boy who is trying to return to a time when he could believe the lies he told himself. Knightly's Kathy is an exercise in cynicism and vulnerability simultaneously, and at the end of her life she's crippled and manic, also wanting to return to the youth the three of them shared in order to give all of them another chance to be innocent and alive and without pain.

The core of the film is loss and yet the drama is not about trying to escape heroically (as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or Girl, Interrupted), but how to take it all in stride and to force yourself to feel authentic feelings, to be strong enough to know everything is worth it even when it's not. That's the hardest discipline, and the most honest: to know how worthless you are and yet still maintain a life. In the quote above from Ishiguro's novel, Ruth says:   "Maybe from as early as when you're five or six, there's been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: 'One day, maybe not so long from now, you'll get to know how it feels.'"

Never Let Me Go allows you to know how it feels to be Ruth, Tommy and Kathy, and by the end of it all you feel a sort of rapture from the experience. You are able to understand what it truly means to never let someone go, while actually watching them leave this earth one piece at a time.

Outwitting Oppressors

2011-03-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

"High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man," Thornton Dial

Richard Lacayo has written a brilliant article about the "Thornton Dial: Hard Truths" exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Read it yesterday and was completely inspired. You can't access it on Time's website (just a teaser that tells you to go out and buy the magazine to read the whole thing), but there is a great photo gallery with information on the site: Thornton Dial in Time.

Here are some quotes from Lacayo's smart, concise, and on-point piece about an artist whose work can't be pigeonholed, even though his bio (African American, non-credentialed, illiterate, etc.) would seem to dictate that status from most arts writers.

Thank you Richard Lacayo...

The introductory paragraph masterfully sets up the case, without using the word "outsider" once:

"American artists don't have to be licensed -- a good thing, that -- but they do tend to be credentialed. The art world is bristling with degrees from Yale and Cal Arts and hundreds of other academies. In that world, Thornton Dial stands out. He has no formal training and very little schooling of any kind. To be blunt, he can't read or write. But sometime during his long years as a metalworker in Alabama, he turned to making what he at first simply called "things," because it would be a long time before he, or anybody else, realized that those things are better described as art. And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around."

Lacayo also surveys the meaning, purpose and history of assemblage in modern art, mentioning high-art touchstones like Schwitters, Picasso, Braque, Nevelson, Twombley, and finally Rauschenberg, in order to not just contextualize Dial's personal history, but to give his work a place in the artworld outside of biography and "outsiderness." He also finds a way to do exactly what I always want writers about unconventional artists to do: he places Rauschenberg directly beside Dial, and finds a way to unite their works through what inspires them:

"Just like Dial, Rauschenberg, who grew up in the largely black town of Port Arthur, Texas, was influenced by the 'yardshow' assemblages he saw as a boy. The memory banks of small-town African America, yardshows were pieced together from things discarded without losing their residue of personal history, the kind from which the larger varieties of history are built."

And toward the end of the essay, again using art history and world history to invert the way people locate and relegate artists and art, Lacayo finds a way to champion Dial as a contemporary artist worthy of art-historization, without losing the authenticity and grit of what Dial is trying to accomplish:

"When Dial is at his best, he even manages to inject new life into one of the most cliched images of postwar art. Mickey Mouse, who usually gets dragged into service as a symbol of the trivial strain in American culture, does much more complicated double duty in High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man). A stuffed Mickey doll, the white portions of its face smeared in black, hangs in chains in the midst of a wire-and-rod construction meant to signify a slave ship with goat-hide sails. With one compact gesture, Dial invokes the atrocity of the Atlantic slave trade and the minstrel-show culture the descendants of those slaves adopted to entertain and outwit oppressors. It would all be funny if the laughs didn't come so hard.... In a piece like that, Dial claims a place within the line of history painters stretching back to the 18th and 19th centuries. He doesn't try to call on their visual language -- who would anymore? -- but at the same time, there's very little in his work you could call folkloric."

Damn. That's it.

Baby Cried the Day the Circus Came to Town

2011-02-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

"New Shrine Circus Fun Amusement Park," Raymond Thunder-Sky, marker on cardstock

"I Want to Be the One with the Most Cake," Bill Ross, acrylic on canvas

"Ringling Bro and Barnum & Bailey" poster

"Will You Say Good Things About Us?" Eric Ruschman, oil and enamel on MDF panel

"Baby cried the day the circus came to town," sings Melissa Manchester in that beautifully cheesy late-70s pop song "Don't Cry Out Loud." And that mix of melodrama and spectacle gives the idea of "the circus" a sort of David-Lynch exoticism: surrealism born from innocence and seediness, transient people and caged beasts. There's a couple of exhibitions coming up this month in town that pay homage (one intentionally, one not so) to this strange spectacle and the need to contain it elegantly and painstakingly in visual art.

"It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This: New Paintings by Eric Ruschman" opens March 4, 2011 at Aisle Gallery (424 Findley Street 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, Ohio) and surveys the newest works by Ruschman, a Cincinnati-based artist who seems to be on a safari for storybook perfection: shiny surfaces, frighteningly vivid colors, simple, plush imagery. His paintings and other works imply a frozen carnival of the mind, porcelain-precious but also eerily alive. The title of the show, as well, allows for the innocent imagery and the methodical attention to detail to combine into a narrative of leaving for some far-off adventure. Like maybe joining the circus.

"The Amazing American Circus Poster" at the Cincinnati Art Museum spotlights the wit and cagey intelligence behind circus posters created in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. 80 posters make up the exhibit, and the richness both of imagery and composition comprise a catalog of functional elegance and dreamy nostalgia, like a beautiful scrapbook of hidden Americana. As part of the Art Museum's Family First Saturday program, Thunder-Sky, Inc. co founder Bill Ross will be talking about his colorful, animal-centric works, which are bizarre, twitchy great grandchildren to the straight-forward design and splash of the circus posters. He'll also talk a little about Raymond Thunder-Sky and his work -- and Raymond's deification of all things circus (March 5, 2011, 1 to 4).

Mystery, Mischief and Meanness

2011-02-22T08:42:00.000-08:00

Keith Haring

Thornton Dial

Jimmy Baker

Bunky Echo-Hawk

Tony Dotson

It's an incredible time in this part of the world to love art: five great shows are opening within a span of two weeks, in Indiana and Ohio. Each of the artists are incredibly different in what they do and who they are, and yet their works have a sort of commonality: a seriousness that is tempered with humor and electrified by mystery, mischief and meanness.

Thornton Dial: Hard Truths is a retrospective of an African American "outsider artist" who has become canonized; his paintings and assemblages have a high-art resplendence like Robert Rauschenberg's works, and yet they also have more of a bite to them that allows the subject matter to be go mythic but stay intimate: a disheveled household becomes the end of the world, a plastic doll gets smothered in love and paint, raw sad objects and new ways of seeing them get swept up in the flood of Dial's persistence and joy. Opens February 25, 2011 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Keith Haring: 1978 - 1982 and Jimmy Baker: Remote Viewing are two exhibits opening at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati February 25, 2011. They survey two artists' careers in ways that pay homage to youth and ingenuity, optimism and wisdom. The Keith Haring show looks at Haring's early work, and finds a celebration not just of high and low art, but also of spirit and body, innocence and experience. Haring's work is well-known, even a little ubiquitous now, but it's such a pleasure to have the opportunity to go back to where he started and to feel that exuberance of not knowing anything but what you want to do. Baker's show promises to have that same thrill. He's at the beginning of his creative output but he has a prowess and promise and a sort of worldly stubbornness in his work, constructed and deconstructed collage-like large oil paintings that blur the oversaturated world of media and information into blissfully creepy nowheres.

Bunky Echo-Hawk: New Works is a show we're doing, featuring Native American artist Bunky Echo-Hawk. He's going to show up on Friday February 25, 2011 and for a couple days paint/perform in the gallery, producing the works that will make up the two-month show. His paintings, music and poetry all revise and re-invigorate the way Native Americans have been represented. He has a sarcastic, clean, clear and Pop-Art-instinctive eye that telegraphs meanings within meanings, while also telling jokes. His performances take away the preciousness of "art gallery" and replace that with "party." And yet the works produced become a part of his constant reinvention of the way we're taught to see. Show opens February 25, 2011.

Tony Dotson: Shock and Awe pushes Dotson's mean-spirited yet innocently and gorgeously streamlined aesehetic into newer and fiercer territories. While you might think Dotson is telling the same joke over and over, he is also stubbornly dedicated to allowing that one joke to splinter into hot little sparks that burn your eyes. His pictographs, painted on wood usually in bold but somehow placid colors, make you want to laugh not just because they are funny but also because there's truth embedded in each painting's core. And while he wants to eliminate the decorative, Dotson comes up with devious little tableaus that are as pretty as a picturebook. The dangers and shock-values of each painting increase due to his dedication to that simplicity. Inspired by outsider artists, Dotson's work does not pay attention to that canon as much as parodies the way most people view outsider art, as a sort of "kid's table" of the art world. Dotson wants to make outsider art the "adult's table" feast: a violent, drunken Thanksgiving dinner with John Wayne Gacy at the head of the table, ready to carve the turkey. Show opens March 4, 2011 at Pac Gallery in Cincinnati.

"Insiderness"

2011-02-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

Above: Dale Jackson. Below: Cy Twombly.

Colin Rhodes' definition of "outsider art" might be my favorite. In a New York Times article about the new Outsider Art Fair happening in NYC this weekend: “Pathology is not the defining criterion [for outsider art],” he said. For him, an outsider artist is not an amateur, just someone working outside the regular art world structures."

If that's the most appropriate definition, then a lot of time seems to be wasted in trying to figure out the meaning of "outsiderness." Really we should try to understand more fully what it means to be an "insider artist." Even though there is a sort of cache in defining yourself as an "outsider," the categorization depends on the power and hegemony of "insiderness" to exist. It is always going to be the redheaded stepchild in a family of power-brokers. Outsider = Kid's Table. Insider = The Only Table That Matters.

In purposefully naming art "outsider" because it does not really exist to the power-brokers, purchasers and purveyors in the "regular art world," we seem to allow that art to become both an inspiration to insiders (check out how "outsider art" has influenced an insider artist like Tara Donovan, whether or not she talks about it) and a way for insider artists to reduce the playing field to pedigrees, networking, and well "insiderness."

Maybe the anxiety of what to call art that is unconventional and not about trends and art-history and fashion should be placed on the other side of the equation: what is "insider art" and why should we care?

"Circus-Like Atmosphere: Bill Ross Paintings"

2011-02-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

Bill Ross, Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder, will be the Visiting Artist at the Cincinnati Art Museum March 5, 2011, 1 to 4 pm. He'll be showing some of his work, as well as Raymond Thunder-Sky's, in context with "The Amazing American Circus Poster," a new exhibit at the museum. Here's a sampling of Bill's circus-like atmosphere:

"The Party Crasher," 4' X 5', acrylic on canvas

"Be Aware of Your Surroundings," 3' X 4', acrylic on canvas

"Boil Water Advisory," 3" X 4', acrylic on canvas

"Poem for a Birthday," 4' X 5', acrylic on canvas

"Mama Bear Syndrome," 3' X 4', acrylic on canvas

"Mother's Day," 3' X 4', acrylic on canvas

"Sweet Tooth," 3' X 4', acrylic on canvas

"Housework," 3' X 4', acrylic on canvas

Ultimate Outsider

2011-02-02T05:58:00.000-08:00

Before Ted Haggard got caught getting a "massage" and buying crystal meth from his masseur four years ago, he was having breakfast with George W. Bush, shepherding a huge mega-church flock, and writing books about how to be a Christian in a complicated world. Now he's a strangely compelling has-been living in the same city in which he was disgraced, with the same wife and family, and even in the same house. He is a total exile, however, in every other aspect of his life, including his Christianity.

Kevin Roose writes about this exile in a masterful article in this month's GQ. This portrait of Haggard gives to us an odd hybrid of therapy-speak-ness, Jesus-freak-ness, sweetness, and Neo-Golden-Rule-ness, developing eventually into the ultimate depiction of an outsider. Haggard exists in the shadows of Huge Ideas; his very existence is in contrast with "normal" dichotomies like Christian/Sinner and Gay/Straight. His life after the bombshell that he was a homosexual (he now says he is "bisexual") mega-pastor has taken a twisted and absolutely novel route: he seems to be trying to make sense not just of what happened to him, but how what happened to him might alter the way he treats other people. He seems like a loudmoth, egotistical creep, of course, a sort of parody of a parody now, but he also has a strangely beautiful message: "Do unto others as nobody did unto me." And his relationship with his wife and children, in the way Roose represents it, seems authentic and loving and real.

From politically correct, left/right prospectives he is a traitor and a hypocrite -- a shapeshifter who deserves erasure. But Haggard has survived in the shadow of everything he tried to accomplish before he was "outed," and he still seems hell-bent on staying on message. That's an accomplishment I think, and sheds light on how people who can't have access into the mainstream often develop their own subcultures, aesthetics and philosophies through reimagining themselves and their struggles in tropes and narratives beyond "therapy," "religion," and "politics." Ted Haggard as Outsider Artist. What the hell?

Read Roose's brilliant article if you get a chance: "The Last Temptation of Ted," by Kevin Roose in February 2011's GQ.

Shut Your Beautiful Mouth

2011-02-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

Michelle Williams is a movie star who can disappear into the people she plays and the places where they live. Watching her performances, you get the feeling that she has an intense desire to be anonymous merging with an overriding passion to be filmed being anonymous. And it's in that mix of obscurity and fame where the magic of her acting happens: she becomes another person and yet there's an almost silvery Warholian glamor to the whole process. But still it's an overall emotionally satisfying transformation: you ache right along with her. You're actually exalted by that ache.

In Blue Valentine, she outdoes herself.

Williams plays Cindy, a nurse with a young daughter and a husband (played by Ryan Gosling) who paints houses for a living. The movie is a paean to love and the torture and ecstasy it causes, but it's grounded in a lyrical drabness; this love and its downfall take place in a doctor's office, a kitschy "space-age" motel room, a nursing home, a community college campus, a weed-covered backyard with a little girl trying to find her lost dog. In those dreary but poetic spaces, the writer/director Derek Cianfrance allows moments to happen without a lot of push or pull, just a steady intensity that pulls back to catch the landscape and other surroundings, but then goes in for the kill: juicy, nervous close-ups of the faces of his stars as they kiss, yell, laugh, sing.  Cianfrance knows that the true pleasures deep inside all movies are those moments when a close-up becomes a whole universe: one face transmutates into a new way to feel.

Williams' face is moony but wan, pale but tinged with a fury of pink, and her eyes carry a loss inside them Cindy the nurse can't express but truly needs to, a truckload of poetry, ambition, and sadness inside each iris. When Cindy is driving to work in their minivan, about to take a big bite of a jelly donut, with Pat Benetar on the radio singing "We Belong," there's an instant when Williams' expression goes from everyday-driving-to-work to Joan-of-Arc. The transition works seamlessly, a pulse of charisma that dislocates both her and the audience watching her. The camera shows us why: her daughter's lost dog is dead at the side of the road. But Williams and Cianfrance do not use that scene to make us cry; it's to show us how beautiful and lost Cindy is, how she was just about ready to go into her work-trance, but then there the dog is, and all that she is capable of feeling unleashes itself in one brief flash. You just want to go into the movie and help her right at that moment. You also want to be wrapped up in Williams' ability to make that pain so glamorous yet real.

The movie is organized in a simple past/present feed: the innocent past and the very tried present bleed into each other. In the expositional scenes, Ryan Gosling gives the young Dean a swagger that lets us know it's Deans finest moment. Right now he is at his peak: rugged, lean young hipster working for a moving company, a smile that is somehow indecent yet boyish, not mischievous as much as trying to find out how to be obedient so he can get what he wants from Cindy.  Cloudy eyes, blissful thoughts, just trying to get there. Unlike Williams, Gosling does not disappear into his performances as much as reappear; he merges with Dean, all in, but also is astute enough to give Dean a metrosexual attractiveness in the beginning scenes, a masculine prettiness that calls to mind Brando in Streetcar Named Desire, dirty enough to be "real," preened enough to be sexy.

In another expositional scene, Dean helps an old man unpack all his wares in his new nursing home room. Dean does not treat the process like your average everyday mover. He turns himself into a makeshift interior decorator, trying to please the old man. Gosling's face is lit up like an artist on the verge of finding his true voice. It's in that same scene that he first sees Cindy for the first time. She's there visiting her grandmother. He is automatically smitten, and you can see in Dean's expressions and gestures that he realizes at that moment all he needs to be happy for the rest of his life is to have this girl.

At the end of the movie, when Cindy and Dean are trying to rekindle their relationship in a really cheap-ass "outer-space-themed" motel room called The Future Room, Dean tells Cindy that all he wants is to get drunk, paint houses, and come home to his wife and daughter at the end of the day. This is happiness for him, he says, and yet you can tell it's prison for her. That loop of misunderstanding -- Cindy falling in love with that sensitive swaggering beautiful fool only to end up with a guy with a receding hairline and lowered expectations and 24-hour beer-breath, and Dean falling in love with a girl he thought would be able to save him only to find out she's just plain sick of him -- is what gives Blue Valentine the heft and depth of great literature. There's no way out except the way Dean and Cindy are doing it: haphazardly, violently, blindly. And no one is to blame.

Dean of course has to follow Cindy to her work that last day they are together. He has to be completely drunk and stupid and full of love, barging in and throwing things around. But as he does this, he's sobbing, not wanting to be "a big man," but just her man. He is trying to re-enter that early phase of swagger and masculinity he performed back in the good old days, but this time desperation and hurt turn it all into a sad, awful parody of what he used to be. And then there's Cindy, frustrated, teary-eyed, trying not to remember how much she loved him, just wanting to move on.

This is one of those movies you can't shake out of your head. As soon as it ended, I remembered a scene that happend in the cheesy motel room, when they were trying to revisit who they once were. Cindy is trying to tell Dean all that's wrong with their relationship, and Dean just looks at her, smiling, trying to turn everything into a joke so they can laugh like they used to.

"Shut your beautiful mouth," he says to her.

Cindy does that. She just shuts up. Williams and Gosling are actors who can even make that short exchange seem as meaningful as wedding vows. He playfully grins and tries to turn on the charm, and she just closes her eyes, wanting everything to disappear.

Nightmare Window-Dressing

2011-01-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

"I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it." Gertrude Stein

Joey Versoza's "moon in the wall, hope it don’t dissolve" at U-Turn Art Space is a nightmare reinvention of window-dressing, cold and brutal with lamps precariously positioned on the floor with paper-towel rolls and other apparatus. There's a black-eye brewing in the shadows of the space, a flicker of violence that turns to bruise and then thought and then just absolute nothingness. Each of the works free-floats, like items from a shipwreck surfacing through black water. I loved the feeling of the whole thing, like spelunking through subconsciousness itself. It's a rabbit-hole reinvented by Raymond Carver, minimal and mean and yet also starkly lyrical. "Dear Summer" captures it all: curtain and opened window. Period. That's it. All that cold air blowing through the space, giving the sight of those prostrated living room lamps the chill they need to turn into Martians. And then the apotheosis: a Faulker tribute way off in a corner. One rose in a glass vase spotlit by one of those lamps, a brittle little poem extracted from a big dark world.

Joey Versoza's "moon in the wall, hope it don't dissolve" closes this Saturday, January 28, 2011. U-Turn 2159 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH.

Magical Misery Tour

2011-01-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

"Namaz Khaneh (House of Prayer)," Sheida Soleimani's one-woman exhibit at Semantics Gallery closing on Saturday, is a quietly unnerving, beautifully accomplished journey to the interior: each of the photographed dioramas/shadow-boxes has its own gorgeously glum sensibility, like intensely personal poems written with the left hand then rewritten with the right, that process repeated until the scribbles become calligraphy and the mistakes turn into religion. There's a yearning for perfection in each tableau, and yet the perfection is somehow channeled through a riveting stubbornness that deconstructs that initial desire to be perfect. There's the obsessive, burnished carefulness of De Chirico here, plus the tidy, doll-inspired surrealism of Cornell, but there's also a rich tapestry of shadow and broken eggs, sloppily-constructed mouse furniture, an elegant decapitated fish head, a crucified baby bird, all of it enshrined somehow in the smoky afterglow of what's almost forgotten but too ferocious to disappear. These are postcards from another world. Thank God Soleimani went there.

Go see this show... Last chance Saturday January 28, 2011. Semantics: 1107 Harrison Avenue Cincinnati, Ohio...

"The Kindness that Gazes upon Itself..."

2011-01-17T14:44:00.000-08:00

This is a horror movie.

Kathy Lee Gifford's vanity seems to flourish when she's indulging in this charitable act: over-thanking a boy for befriending another boy who just happens to be labeled "autistic." She humiliates and condescends without even blinking. The song alone makes you want to die. She reduces kindness to ego, and shows off her "sweetness" like a gangster shows off his machine-gun. The trick to being nice is knowing the limits of your own "niceness" and also understanding what your "niceness" means once it's let out into the real world. Kathy Lee unleashes her "niceness" at that kid, a huge horrible parade of self-congratulatory bull-shit, wreathed in a treacly meolody.

Kathy Lee and anybody else who thinks they really are "great people" because they do "good deeds," heed this:

"Verily the kindness that gazes upon itself in a mirror turns to stone, and a good deed that calls itself by tender names becomes the parent to a curse." (Kahlil Gibran)

Nobody Is Retarded. Not Even You.

2011-01-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

"Cool shit," so sayeth the asshole.

From Bill Ross, cofounder Thunder-Sky, Inc.:

I have been stewing over something that happened earlier today. When Antonio and I arrived at Thunder-Sky, a guy and his buddy were having a smoke outside the Comet. One said he liked Antonio's art supply bag and then as I pulled a painting I am working on out of the back of the van, he again commented "Man that is good! Did you do that?"

I said yes and thanks.

The guy followed up with "So are you mentally retarded?"

It kind of took the wind out of my sails, so all I could come up with as a comeback was: "Yes I probably am."

The guy said, "Man you retards are making some cool shit."

What I should have said is: "Nobody is retarded. Not even you asshole."

The Worst of the Worst

2011-01-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

The worst movie of 2010 is Dinner for Schmucks. Starring Paul Rudd as Tim, an uptight/upright executive on the rise, and Steve Carell as Barry, a cipher and metaphor for all things "different" (person with a disability, self-taught artist, a guy with a bad hair-cut and goofy glasses, techy nerd/geek, etc.), the movie is a strange exercise in worthlessness. You can feel a sort of vapid desperation coming from it, as if the people who made it really were excited about the concept but had no idea what to do with execution.

So they place two "opposites" like Tim and Barry in kooky situations that aren't really that kooky or worth watching: breaking into a weird-o artist's loft to confront Tim's gal pal, Barry interfering with Tim's relationships via sneaking outside his apartment, and finally in the flattest epiphany any movie has ever offered: the dinner for schmucks. Ths dinner is a mean-spirited exercise by the executives Tim works with to humiliate freaks these executives bring with them without letting the freaks know. Not only does the whole premise of this dinner sound completely phony, it really is horrible watching the way the actors who play the executives have to preen and be enthused about the freaks they have to offer, as if each one is an offering to the High Class Executive Gods or something, when in reality the Dinner for Schmucks freaks are just your plain, everyday sideshow performers (a ventriloquist who sucks, a psychic who makes bird noises, a guy [not even a lady] with an extravagant beard, etc.) The movie does not even have enough imagination to invent really freaky freaks. If the writers and director had, the movie might have snapped into a surrealism that's both mean-spirited and takes flight, an unforced riff on Todd Browning's 1934 picture Freaks maybe, or a reinvention of the whole genre of man-boy movies (usually starring Will Ferrell) this movie seems to be the death of.

But nothing works in this thing. It has a soullessness borne from a one-note joke that really makes no sense. It's like the kids in Carrie grew up into big-time white-collar workers and they have evolved their antics into parlor games. But it's not even like that either. It's just laziness. Bad art. Every scene goes on too long, every gesture and moment manufactured for big laughs that never materialize.

Poor Paul Rudd. He's been turned into a sweet-guy robot. And Steve Carell's Barry is just a flaky, ticky non-character used to represent what all of "us" aren't: normal sweet-guy robots like Rudd. What's kind of even sadder is that Barry, like most other people with disabilities in movies like this, is used as a foil to provide a redemption for Mr. Sweet-Guy Robot. He's a throwaway novelty, that crazy loser! But God love him.

The only thing that really is worth watching: the opening credits. The Beatles' "Fool on a Hill" plays over beautifully photographed versions of Barry's art and pastime: taxidermied mice in elegant poses, like a boy mouse pushing a girl mouse on a swing, etc. These dioramas make more sense in their static precision than anything in this awful movie.

A diorama Steve Carrell presented to David Letterman when he was on promoting Dinner for Schmucks.

Seance with Art Supplies

2011-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

Antonio Adams working on one of the large-scale "reinventions" of a large print of one of Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished drawings. Raymond, when walking around the city drawing deconstruction sites, would often not finish some of the drawings -- possibly because of the volume of pieces he did. There are approximately 400 unfinished drawings in the archive.

We're pulling together the "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" exhibit, opening April 29, 2011 at Thunder-Sky, Inc. The show will feature variations on the theme of "collaboration," and how getting rid of "one author" can open up new vistas and territories to investigate. We'll have the "Guernica" pieces Antonio Adams and the late Brian Joiner did together in 2008, a triptych of large golden panels reenacting Picasso's famous grand-guignol masterpiece, re-configuring and re-conjuring that visual feast using superhero and urban imagery. Amazing work. As well, Antonio is working on pieces, utilizing remnants donated from Brian's studio. Pamela Rhodes Myricks has written a beautiful elegy about Brian, and we'll be publishing it along with a brochure about the Antonio/Brian collaborations. We've had large prints made of some of Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished works (thanks to Dan Leesman from United Electric), and David Mack, Antonio, and a few other artists are working on "finishing" them. Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder Bill Ross has some collabs he did with the late Donald Henry. The exhibit is shaping up to be about how collaboration is not just about people working on art together, but about how collaboration can be a sort of a continuation of a conversation, a seance with art supplies...

We're also going to publish a book of writings inspired by Dale Jackson's text-driven works. Titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, the book will feature color reproductions of Dale's works, side by side with the writings done by local poets and writers, including Patricia Murphy, Matt McBride and Micah Freeman. We'll be sponsoring a reading of these works along with the opening in late April. Matt Morris and Eric Ruschman are also going to contribute a sculptural piece.

Dale Jackson beside his work in January 2011's "Mechanics of Joy" exhibit at U-Turn Alternative Space in Brighton.

April 2011 is going to be a great month for collabs. We're doing the "2 + 2 = 5" show, and Visionaries & Voices has a fundraiser called "Double Vision" at Memorial Hall April 22, 2011, featuring collaborative works by "established artists and V&V artists." Which begs the question: what is the different between Thunder-Sky, Inc. & V&V? They were both established because of Raymond and Antonio basically. Bill and I started supporting both Raymond and Antonio and many other self-taught artists back in 1999, and from that initial support grew V&V, a studio for artists with disabilities. Bill and I left V&V in 2009 because it was a project we no longer needed to be a part of. We cofounded Thunder-Sky, Inc. to underline the importance of collaboration and also to problematize/reenvision the notion of "outsider art" and programs for artists with disabilities...

Can't wait for April!

Donald Henry and Bill Ross, "Dreamhouse," acrylic and marker on canvas, 2009.

"Vonnegut's Ballerinas: Deprogramming 'Outsider Art'"

2011-01-08T09:44:00.000-08:00

Raymond Thunder-Sky

Here's a link to a paper I've written for a conference about "outsider art" and its meanings: "Vonnegut's Ballerinas". Below is a synopsis of the piece...

Rosemary Garland Thomson writes in her landmark essay “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” about the way “non-disabled” people view images of people with disabilities. Thomson's “wondrous” rhetoric especially reads like a dictionary definition not only of the way people with developmental disabilities are codified and colonized by cultural norms, but also the way art made by “outsiders artists” labeled with developmental disabilities is often marketed and explained. The “wondrous rhetoric,” Thomson explains, is the oldest mode of representing disability. This classification includes “monsters and prodigies.”

“Outsider artists,” especially those labeled with developmental disabilities, often have to take a seat at the kid's table culturally speaking, with the caveat being they are “wondrous” but not quite sophisticated enough to have a seat at the “adult table.” In my paper, I use Thomson‟s “wondrous” concept, as well as a reading of Kurt Vonnegut‟s short story “Harrison Bergeron” and a brief survey of the histories of “outsider art” and people with developmental disabilities to critique the manner in which “outsider artists'" lives and art are “programmed” around anachronistic concepts of segregation and “wondrousness,” all based on concepts of “outsider art” that seem to ignore the social and historical colonization people with developmental disabilities have gone through.

I also tell my own personal story in helping to develop an arts program for "outsider artists" with developmental disabilities in Ohio, based on meeting an artist named Raymond Thunder-Sky through my job as a social worker. My initial vision in doing so was to ensure that Raymond's art would be placed side by side with the art of other artists, no labels required. Instead what happened is that I unintentionally created a trap with my good intentions: a program that segregates artists (like Raymond).

We as curators, writers, collectors, and lovers of art made by unconventional artists have to be in the business of pulling apart the clichés and categorizations that plague how these artists are viewed and relegated so that everyone can have access to art that transcends those notions. Without that help, I'm afraid, we'll be constantly reconstructing those clichés until they become the norms we intend to defeat.

Ice Melting

2011-01-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

Shots from last night's opening for "Ice Ice Baby! New Works by Bob Scheadler & Mike Weber," with a sound installation by Adam Maloney, and a beautiful ice-sculpture by Tom Tsuchiya. A truly 2 + 2 = 5 experience.