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Welcome
Journal entry for 03 May 2010 | Link
Welcome to the new journal. I want to start by thanking you for your attention. It was not a small thing to walk away from Artblog.net, which in retrospect was an unqualified success as far as the genre goes, having accomplished substantial intellectual work, fostered lively discussion, and attracted a few hundred dedicated readers and a few thousand casual ones. Why end it, then? To paraphrase something I said to Greg Cook, who was kind enough to interview me about Artblog.net a couple of weeks ago, access to the stuff of art—good form, good technique, and the inspiration to work—requires alternating cycles of commitment and reinvention. Seven years is a long run for a blog, and towards the end, the feeling that a reinvention was necessary was growing intense, and finally intolerable.
By way of warning, this journal is not going to resemble Artblog.net in most respects. Maybe the only thing being brought over is the guy writing it. First of all, it is only going to publish on Mondays, albeit every Monday without fail. Secondly, the format will be more informal, less topic-driven, less art-focused, and longer-form. I'm thinking of it as an avuncular cultural farm report. Thirdly, and this is going to be a big change for Artblog.net readers, there will be no comments section. Aspiring commenters can contact me by e-mail, and especially choice remarks will appear as part of weekly posts. I have huge respect and enormous feelings of gratitude for Artblog.net's hardcore commenters, and I know that many lurkers gathered 'round to watch them. One reader likened the exchanges to Chaucerian drama, with each character an embodiment of some basic human trait that proved a virtue here and a vice there, given enough time to unfold. There will be no recreating that community, and any other would look wan in comparison.
Too, social media and microblogging have made certain aspects of blogging obsolete. For the ringside commentary, you can follow me on Twitter. For the discussion of the big thought of the day, you can friend me on Facebook. They're not perfect. In some ways they're not even acceptable. But it's not 2004 anymore and blogging as if it were is not going to produce the results that it used to. (If you despise social media, thus putting yourself in honorable company, e-mail me.)
Thus I've decided to concentrate instead on producing the forthright, honest prose that drew readers in the first place and hope for the best. It may never "count." But I'm bolstered by my constitutional indifference to such things and the persistent delusion that I can comprehend and outsmart my circumstances. That the latter is sometimes true does not undermine its essentially delusional basis.
Cue Avuncular Cultural Farm Report in Three, Two...
The big feature of the upcoming week is Face to Face, a group exhibition at Edge Zones in Miami themed around the self-portrait. It includes yours truly and four artists whose work I esteem: Lucas Blanco, Ernie Sandidge, Claudia Scalise, and Juan Carballo, who was a private student of mine in the '90s and is now curating this exhibition. Alas, I won't be able to attend the opening on Saturday, committed as I am to incoming in-laws en route to Boston in honor of Lilac Sunday and accompanying observances of motherhood. But this show will offer another chance to look at a series of self-portraits I did in 2004 that represents a peculiar, quasi-mystical phase in my work that I still don't quite understand and possibly never will. After taking my cues from the observable, visual world for five years previously, I started using colors in an expressionistic, impulsive manner that alluded to my psychic state. One method is not inherently better than the other, of course, but the results were pretty interesting, and they ended up informing later work that freed me up from the observable world in a useful way. It was one of those revelations that came out of intense studio work, by which I mean that one would never be able to navigate that course by planning it out. The path appears by treading it.
So, I've been working
In a perfect world you would be looking at a Django-powered website, and soon you will be. The move is imminent, but executing it before the end of my school semester is going to throw some material I've created for my students into dissaray, and they have enough to deal with in that class without my tossing needless curveballs at them. We're done on the 12th and a full-blown CMS will replace these temporary static pages.
My first impression of Django was that it was a crutch for weaklings who fear XSLT. Then I tried to implement a site with mod_python and XSLT and got kicked up and down the street. Next, I started working through Beginning Django E-Commerce by James McGaw. Do not make this your first Django book. Even if you succeed at implementing the projects, you will have no idea how you managed it. (This was rather similar to my first attempt at Ruby on Rails.) So I bailed on that as well, and picked up The Definitive Guide to Django by the Django creator and two core developers. The light began to shine through. Start here.
There's a new installment of The Moon Fell On Me, entitled Forsythia. Check the source code for the URL of a rather nice piece of concrete poetry by Mary Ellen Solt on the same topic.
Too, and this is cause for wonder, it only occurred to me earlier this year to apply the heavily impastoed knife-work I had been doing since the late '90s to the landscape. I attribute this to the fact that the landscapes of South Florida and Southern California never called to me as a subject, and I attribute that in turn to the lack of obvious seasons. The overhaul of the scenery every three months all but forces you to attend to it, I think. Over the last month I've had the opportunity to paint a few keepers and photograph the ones I did in March and April.
Slow Maynard, 2010, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
Metropolitan Fall, 2010, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.
Commons Fall, 2010, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches.
Arboretum Fall, 2010, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.
Readings
We talk about the art world these days as if everyone everywhere who appreciates art belongs to the same global tribe, united by jet travel, integrated markets and the Web. But there are many art worlds, countless ones, which often don’t talk to one another, don’t know or care about one another, and that are no less potent because they’re not, strictly speaking, universal.
Judith Schaecter (via Post Artblog.net):
I am not interested in ideas about beauty. I don’t find it thought provoking. On the contrary, I find beauty to be thought annihilating. Which is as it should be. I believe the experience of beauty to be universal. Every culture has a sense of beauty—although we could argue the details and the semantics.
Critics make much of the ways artists allegedly change our perceptions of things, allow our minds to reboot in some sense, destroy invisible boundaries or at least make viewers question their beliefs, confront this or that, and in general, make us think about lots of stuff. Of course there is absolutely no concrete evidence that any of these things really do happen when one looks at contemporary art.
Believing then... that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There are the grand resources of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. One can appreciate and treasure the symmetry and grandeur of the ancient Greek Parthenon, for example, without needing any share in the cults of Athena or Eleusis, or the imperatives of Athenian imperialism, just as one may listen to Mozart or admire Chartres and Dhurham without any nostalgia for feudalism, monarchism, and the sale of indulgences. The whole concept of culture, indeed, may partly consist in discriminating between these things.