Light reading - Thesis '09

I wish I could have had these up for the critique this weekend, but it was not to be. But I've finally put up a link to the thesis papers I've received (others will be added as they are sent my way).

You can start reading here.

Congrats to all the thesis students for an outstanding show and a weekend of interesting discussion. It's a privilege to have worked with you andd I hope you'll all keep in touch.

Some images from Winter Crit and Thesis Presentations...

...maybe more to follow. Hope all are well ~gb

What with thesis coming up...

...in the past I've posted the drafts of thesis papers presented at Winter Crit on my own website. I will be happy to do that again if there's interest (and approval from the authors). I've emailed the students I have digital copies from, but comments here encouraging them and promising you'll read 'em would no doubt help...

Immersion at the Kimmel Center

Immersion
November 14, 2008 - January 15, 2009

In today’s fast-paced, media driven world, moments of immersion can be fleeting. This exhibition presents matrixes and multi-layered works that invite our delving into subjects and images that captivate and hold our attention.

The exhibition features five artists from Moore College of Art & Design’s faculty whose work in various media deals with concepts of immersion. Participating artists include: Nicole Dul, adjunct faculty, basics and fine arts departments; Karen Lefkovitz, adjunct faculty, basics and photography & digital arts departments; Tara O’Brien, adjunct faculty, graphic design department; Alice Oh, associate professor, basics and fine arts departments; Theresa Saulin, adjunct faculty, fine arts department.

Nicole Dul presents two different images of immersion as it relates to the landscape. Her colorful, multi-layered paintings of Mexico present a rhythmic barrage of images that provide a snapshot of the many facets of a place and culture. Her black and white lithographs of stark and dilapidated interior spaces are emotionally evocative images that immerse us in a world of emptiness and despair.

Karen Lefkovitz’s photographs depict a child immersed in play. The images appear surreal in the way that they invite us to join into the fantasy world of a child’s imagination, where inanimate objects are transformed into a crowd of quirky characters who inhabit a child’s rich inner world.

One can easily relate to getting lost in a good book. For Tara O’Brien, books are a metaphor for the structure and process of creating a life. We delve into it, get lost in the pages, the action, the characters, never knowing how it will end. She creates stoppages and moments of reflection in each of her sculptural forms that serve as metaphors for contemplation of the story each of us is immersed in.

Alice Oh’s abstract layers of paint and repeated forms immerse us in a microscopic world of our own body’s physiology challenging us to look closer at the matrix and patterns of light and color of life’s cellular structure that simmers beneath every surface.

Theresa Saulin’s delicate, alternating smooth and densely textured, porcelain sculptures are physical explorations of philosophical ideas. Without beginning or end, the sculptures suggest forms from nature but, just as easily, they mimic the branching, burrowing, nonhierarchical structure of the internet. Saulin’s objects are both immersed in being about an endless process as well as a final product.

About Moore College of Art & Design’s Galleries at the Kimmel Center The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts provides two exhibition spaces on the Center’s Second Tier Promenade for artwork by students, alumnae and faculty of Moore College of Art & Design thanks to the generosity of an anonymous Kimmel Center donor. This year, Moore celebrates 160 years of educating women for careers in the visual arts. The nation's first and only women's art college, Moore's student-focused environment and professionally active faculty form a dynamic community in the heart of Philadelphia's cultural district. The College offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with ten majors. In addition, Moore provides many valuable opportunities in the arts through The Galleries, continuing education programs for professional adults, the acclaimed Young Artists Workshop for girls and boys grades 1-12, The Art Shop and the Sculpture Park. For more about Moore, visit www.moore.edu.
The Galleries at Moore are open to the public, free of charge. Visit us on 20th Street and Race on the Ben Franklin Parkway. Hours: Monday – Friday 11am – 7pm and Saturdays 11am – 5pm. For current exhibitions visit www.galleriesatmoore.org.

Moore College of Art's "Footsteps" Project in the News!

Hi Folks,
Here is the article in full...
http://epaper.philly.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=13_11_2008_141_006&typ=0&pub=519&mode=1
My "boot" (shown on the left) is now living at The Graham Building on the SW corner of 15th and Ranstead. Ranstead is located between Chestnut and Market Streets in Philadelphia. It was an interesting project to work on. I learned allot about some new materials and how a project like this is coordinated and distributed. Good stuff!!!
Best,
Terri

Oh, that Cunning Countess

Cross in the Mountains or Tetschen Altar
Caspar David Friedrich, 1807-08
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden
(image used with the courtesy of http://www.joybunny.artfriend.com)

Art students know the situation well. It's the big critique and they have to present their work in their studio or in a classroom as if it was in a gallery. Perhaps this means painting a wall white, tidying a corner, adjusting the lighting, or preparing a pedestal among other things. But no matter how hard they try, anxious what-ifs float around like, "Would it fold this way if it was in gallery?" And a feeling of artificiality, like watching a concert on DVD, permeates the exchange.

This act of "putting on airs" characterized the setting of Caspar David Friedrich's presentation of the Cross in the Mountains in 1808. He made the painting, as one story goes, specifically to be an altarpiece in a small chapel within the Tetschen Castle in northern Bohemia. After its completion, however, it didn't have a public place yet and due to his friends' demands, he reluctantly decided to show it in his "atelier" i.e. his home studio.

As German painting scholar Joseph Koerner documents in his book Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, educator Johann Jacob O.A. Ruhle von Lilienstern (a mouthful, eh?) wrote, "In order to counteract the bad effect of the totally white walls of his small room, and to imitate as well as possible the twilight of the lamplit chapel, a window was veiled and the painting, which was too heavy for an ordinary easel, was erected on a table over which was spread a black cloth." Amusingly, today, most of our efforts are put towards achieving white walls. One can imagine Friedrich saying, "Now, if the painting was in its proper setting, the effect would be such and such as I intended." or "Pay no attention to unwanted variables A, B, and C..."

As most art students do, Friedrich put on this show with the hope of the work eventually achieving its intended setting. The immediate display simply being a trial run for the real thing. The problem for Friedrich is that its promised place wasn't available. To explain further: Countess Maria Theresa von Thun-Hohenstein supposedly had commissioned the work specifically for placement in her husband's private Tetschen chapel. It turns out that the painting was originally dedicated to Friedrich's king, Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden and not commissioned by Maria. Only when the king was overthrown in 1809 did Friedrich then agree to sell it to Maria. He and his "circle of friends" reconstructed the story of the origins of the work to make it seem as if he had created every detail to suit the Countess' chapel perfectly.

After Friedrich had sold the work to Maria, he wrote that he would like to "oversee the painting being installed and consecrated as a working altar." However, the work was never actually going to be placed in its promised spot. In fact, there was already an altarpiece designed by Joseph Bergler, the director of the Prague Art Academy, in the chapel in question. So, when Friedrich inquired about a visit, Maria had to make up a story that the piece was actually going to be installed in a chapel in Prague. When he said he would then come to Prague, she had to "give him the slip" again.

Hilariously, instead of the work being in a chapel it was in Countess Maria's BEDROOM! She had concocted the scheme to convince Friedrich to part ways with his masterwork. No wonder she didn't want him to come and see it...it was hanging above her bed. Rather than being a central object in worship ceremonies, I'm sure Friedrich would've loved to have seen his work shaking as the countess made love to her husband! When Friedrich was adjusting the black cloth in his atelier I'll bet that he never considered the possibility of undergarments hanging on his painting...and maybe the cat at rest on top? Perhaps he would've been better off naming it "Headboard" instead of Tetschen Altar. :P

The Boundless Landscape

Capuchin Friar by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich
Oil Painting
(used with the courtesy of www.humanitiesweb.org)

I've been reading about Caspar David Friedrich, German landscape painter from the 1800's, and his boundless landscapes. The sentiment that I get a whiff of even by studying pictures in books is expressed exquisitely by Carl Gustav Carus, one of Friedrich's disciples, in the following words:

Stand on the peak of a mountain, contemplate the long ranges of hills...and all the other glories offered to your view, and what feeling seizes you? It is a quiet prayer, you lose yourself in boundless space, your self disappears, you are nothing, God is everything. (1)

Immediately German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to mind. Other than with my own eyes, the times I've experienced said feeling profoundly was through Herzog's films like Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Grizzly Man, and the portions I've seen of Encounters at the End of the World. Here's a still from Fitzcarraldo:

Still from Fitzcarraldo
(used with the courtesy of http://brzinnyc.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_archive.html)

Conveniently, this shot of actor Klaus Kinski even includes Friedrich's Ruckenfigur motif, that of showing a figure, male or female, from the back. The scene from the film that I recall so vividly, and of which I draw a sufficient parallel to the mood of Friedrich's work, is that when Fitzgerald (Kinski), is playing opera as his boat of disgruntled natives travels down the river. In this particular scene, Herzog highlights Fitzgerald's small presence in the vastness of Peru's landscape. The connection between how impossibly grand and brilliant nature is and how diminutively small Fitzgerald is easily relates to Friedrich's rendering of the monk by the sea. And Friedrich's Woman in the Morning Sun among others.

In the more than a century of separation, however, one big difference changed from Friedrich's perspective to Herzog's. Friedrich's boundlessness was a mirror of God's infinity while Herzog's is one of The Great Void. Friedrich wanted to exhibit the religious presence of nature while Herzog wants to show the terrifying, indifferent beauty of it. Don't associate "religious presence," however, with joy. Friedrich, despite God's existence, felt painful isolation in the "anxious silence" of landscapes similar to the way Herzog does.

In the Friedrich works I've "seen" (by way of reproduction), the landscape dominates the helpless figures. And while the same occurs in Herzog's films, in Fitzcarraldo, Fitzgerald attempts, unsuccessfully, to fight against the deafening quiet of nature by playing opera. It's an astounding scene in which opera represents civilization and the riverscape, the harsh brutality of existence. Herzog remarked of the jungle, "The birds don't sing; they scream out in terror." While Fitzgerald screams, Friedrich's Friar stands defeated.

(1) Taken from An Outline of 19th Century European Painting by Lorenz Eitner

The Mirror Stage

Video Stills from Keith Sullivan's Dasein
3 channel video installation for flat screen monitors
15:00 running time
Lycoming College's Digital Media Gallery
Williamsport, PA

While I watched Keith Sullivan pantomime drumming, singing, dancing, and dunking a basketball in his multi-channel video installation Dasein (pictured above), I imagined him doing the same. As I envisioned Mr. Sullivan viewing and listening to himself, he suddenly turned into me. Then, strangely, I stood there looking at myself.

To explain: I am a video artist who has also put myself in some of my work. While I always convince myself that I do so with good reason, others aren't so sure. Some of my closest friends recently told me that the biggest flaw in my art was my "egotism." I took note of their critique but didn't agree. It wasn't until I saw myself reflected in Sullivan's art and got a glimpse of what it must've been like (fictionally, of course) to see Narcissus gazing at his own reflection that I thought, "How vain!" Whatever points Sullivan has (and due to the mention of Ginsberg and semiotics, I'm sure he has many), they are lost in his enjoyment of himself.

And, much to my dismay, what is true of him in this respect is true of me. "Dammit," I thought, "I just like watching myself do things." Sullivan and I both disguise our mirror-impulses with philosophical backgrounds. We think that since we have read Heidegger, our being is more aware and therefore, innately artistic. This point reminds me of an episode of Malcolm in the Middle in which Francis berates Malcolm for his elitism. Francis says something to the effect of, "You think, because you're so smart, that you experience things deeper than the rest of us. So, you complain until you've made sure we all know how aware you are."

The title Dasein says it all. It's an exclusive term. if you've read philosophy you're in, if you haven't, you're out. And it's a German word for "existence" or "being-here." As if that were enough. "I'm here, I'm smart, and you should care."

To not be too hard on him (and me), I'll say that Sullivan does pull off some nuanced karaoke and his Jordanesque dunking is a hoot. One can tell that he's spent a lot of time perfecting his performances and the production value of his videos is impressive. The black backgrounds achieve an atmospheric quality like those old, minimalist Shakespeare plays one can find on VHS in library basements.

But, again, Sullivan is too satisfied with doing things that other people did because he is doing them. Sullivan's work, and some of mine, fits all too well into what Rosalind Krauss calls "The Aesthetics of Narcissism."

--------------------------

Keith Sullivan is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, and installation. He received a Master of FIne Arts degree in visual art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2007) and a Bachelor of Arts in sociology from Emory University (2000), where he graduated with highest honors. His work has been shown in New York, Boston, and Atlanta.

Footsteps Opening Reception

Hello Friends!

Please join us for the opening reception of Moore Footsteps
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
7:00 - 8:00 pm

To celebrate Moore's 160th Anniversary, Moore Alumnae have organized the Moore Footsteps exhibition.
Darla Jackson '03 created 12 six-foot boots.
Selected alumnae have altered the boots, illustrating their ideas about women and the arts.
All of the boots will be on exhibit at Moore for one week before being installed throughout the city.
Participating artists include:

* e Bond '96
* Heather Bryson '92
* Dorothy Collins '93
* Collaboration -Aubrie Costello '07,Laura Graham '03, Darla Jackson '03
* Karen Daroff '70
* Gail Gaines '89
* Rochelle F. Levy '79
* Longina Rossi '70
* Theresa M. Saulin '92
* Jane L. Walentas '66
* Cathleen White '96
* Janell Wysock '04

Sponsored by Fran '66 and Bill Graham
http://moore.edu/

Instant Art Grant Program

The Instant Art Grant Program - The funniest home videos are here

Blindness

Futuristic or Post-Apocalyptic movies have a tendency to be ridiculously awful and this one does nothing to improve upon that history. While not as bizarrely cheesy as The Day After Tomorrow, as endurance-testing as The Postman, or as banal as Code 46, Blindness is nothing short of laughable.

One only has to watch the Sci-Fi Channel for a few Saturdays (Or any of the Resident Evil or Underworld series) to realize that the first sin of bad science fiction movies is self-seriousness. When everything is dark and gloomy and nobody's laughing, you know you're in for a tough ride. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series that mastered the art of blending irony and humor with sci-fi drama, should be required viewing for any future director of the genre.

Try not to chuckle when people begin stripping at random times (just because I can't see doesn't mean I won't want to be WARM) or when Julianne Moore is being tackled by zombie-like blind people (who inexplicably all found her in a hurry) in a grocery store as she struggles to hold on to the food she just found.

One positive element of the film is how Meirelles enlivens transitions by weaving the camera in and out of strange spots. One never knows where a scene will start or end and whether we'll be able to see it clearly. His best tricks call to mind the hazy imprisonment of Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The coldness of Meirelles' characters seems less like the result of a skillful hand and more like the consequence of ineptitude. So, if you enjoyed the scarily realistic City of God and the suspenseful but forgettable Constant Gardner and are hoping for another score, you'll be disappointed.

The Plum Tree Massacre

When my girlfriend Liz gave me directions to our new apartment in Williamsport, PA, she said, "Turn right onto Cemetery Rd and then left at St James Place." Temporarily ignoring the Monopoly reference I said, "Cemetery Rd? How close is the cemetery to our building?" She replied, "The strange thing is that I haven't seen a cemetery anywhere. Maybe you'll find it when you get here."

Several weeks went by and I had yet to find any cemeteries. It was somewhat eerie walking down a street named "Cemetery Rd" and not knowing where the graves were. "Perhaps this house was built on top of the graveyard and it's haunted by the unsettled souls." Liz said.
"You're paranoid." I replied.

As we were driving home from the library one day, we saw what seemed to be the whole town standing along E. Fourth Street, waiting. Unbeknownst to us at the time, every year on September 11th, all the motorcyclists in Williamsport drive through center city in tribute to those who died in the attacks.

We dropped the car off at the apartment, walked a few blocks and joined the crowd right as the motorcycles began barreling through (there were 1600 in all).

After I had my share of leather jackets, waving flags, and children running around, my wandering eyes spotted a large rock with a plaque on the lawn of the church at the corner of Cemetery Rd and E. Fourth Street.


I looked closer and read:


The fact that I had passed this rock nearly every day for weeks without noticing it attests to its unassuming appearance (or my obliviousness). The same modesty that makes it easily overlooked begets a sense of sincerity and necessity that may have been trampled by a spectacular sculpture.

Words like "settlers," "indians," and "massacre" suddenly transformed the corner of this street from a thing unnoticed to a documentation of the bloody history of America (one that was far more engaging than shiny bikes and neon Mohawks but they do their best). A little section of town that seemed Dollar Tree empty a moment before changed into an important piece of our story.

I was compelled to go digging for any information about this tragedy. "Whose stories are locked within this rock?" I thought. Due to a recent string of disappointing gallery shows, it felt good to be captivated by an object in an entirely different context and for a reason far removed from the artistry of the thing.

In 1778, a group of sixteen revolutionaries, six men, eight children, and two women, traveled through Central Pennsylvania in order to get to Lycoming Creek, meet with relatives, and settle. There had been several recent attacks by Indians, "Brits", and Loyalists, so, John Harris, a man who had heard gunfire earlier that day, warned the group, led by Peter Smith, that they should turn back. Smith, however, said that no amount of firing would stop them. They kept on.

Before they got to the creek, gunshots fired. One man fell dead and apparently, the other men, with the exception of Michael Campbell who charged the attacking Indians, attempted to flee while the women and children were being struck down. The only two to escape were a boy and a girl, the children of William King, a lieutenant in the revolutionary army. They ran off and told local men of the skirmish.

However, due to their frenzied condition, the children weren't clear about the details of the attack. The locals thought that a canoe had been overtaken, so, they errantly went to the river and didn't find any trace of a struggle.

After a few hours, a messenger who had heard gunfire reached Colonel Hepburn who rounded up several of his soldiers to go see what happened. Among them was lieutenant William King.

By the time the soldiers neared the scene, they only found two bodies and due to the darkness, couldn't make out the identity of either. They decided to wait until morning to continue the search. When they returned the next day, they found the entire group shot, "tomahawked," and/or scalped. All were dead except William King's wife who had been tomahawked and scalped and yet, amazingly, had survived. She apparently recognized her husband as he approached but almost immediately upon grasping his knees, she died.

King's kids who had escaped were passed along to safety and eventually ended up in Canada. He, after seven years, somehow managed to track them down and reunited with them. William King died in 1802 and is buried just near the memorial.

Now I know why it's called Cemetery Rd.

"This terrible massacre occurred at the point where West Fourth street, Williams-port, crosses the little stream which flows down Cemetery street. At that time a natural thicket of wild plum trees grew there, which yielded fruit of remarkable size and flavor for nearly a century after the tragedy." - History of Lycoming County Pennsylvania

I didn't relay this story to make you sad, although it did. I didn't relay this story for you to pity these people, although you did. I relayed it because

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

-Marcel Proust from Remembrance of Things Past

Every time Liz and I pass the rock, we grow serene smiles that I can only attribute to an experience of the sublime.

-----------------------------------------------------

If you want more information on this story (there are lots of interesting details I omitted for brevity), check out (especially the second link):

http://www.lycolaw.org/history/sketches/06.htm

http://www.usgennet.org/usa/pa/county/lycoming/history/Chapter-07.html

A Tribute to David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

MANNY COON

Calling all Art Writers

September 10, 2008
SEPTEMBER 22 DEADLINE
FOR ARTS WRITERS GRANT

http://www.artswriters.org

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program awards project-based grants to individual authors writing on contemporary visual art. In its 2008 cycle, the program will fund approximately 20 projects in amounts ranging from 3,000-50,000 USD. All writers who meet our eligibility requirements are encouraged to apply.

For guidelines, eligibility requirements and application materials, please visit http://www.artswriters.org

Deadline for Applications: September 22, 2008, 4:59 p.m. EST.











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Helvetica

I recently saw the odd documentary Helvetica and wanted to pass on the recommendation to anyone who is interested in design and the world of fonts and type. The movie tells the history of this ubiquitous typeface and through interviews with many designers discuses the various trends in font use and design over the past 50 years.

If you have not heard, SUMFA Alum Jane Craven has a piece in an Urban Sculpture Park in Long Branch, organized through The Shore Institute for the Contemporary Arts. The New York Times has written an article on the park and has reviewed her excellent work! The paper version includes a few more pictures - online there is only one, and the article is in today's (Sunday, August 31st) New York/ Region section- ie: New Jersey http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/31artsnj.html?ref=nyregionspecial2

For Example...

June 12, 2000 cover of Time
Illustration by Brad Holland
used with the courtesy of http://www.time.com

Brad Holland isn't big on the zaniness of 20th century and contemporary art. At 17, he skipped art school, moved from Ohio to Chicago and then to New York, and became a famous illustrator working for the likes of Playboy and eventually Time. His philosophy is that modernism was all about "rule breaking" and that postmodernism is just playing in chaos.

Recently Mr. Holland lectured to support his show, "Third Eye" at Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA where he reliably supported statements like the following one taken from his article "Express Yourself: It's later than you think" (published in Atlantic Monthly in July 1996):

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth and myth truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It was called psychosis.

While I read his words prior to the lecture and while I listened during it, I cheered him on: "Art should be more than shock. Yes! Art should be more than silly. Yes! Art should be more than pranks. Yes! Abstract Expressionism has turned into interior decoration. Yes! Avant-garde culture is outdated. Yes!" However, something unexpected happened. When Holland started using examples for how ridiculous contemporary art has become, I stopped pounding my fist and started reflecting. His perfect model for the absurdity of experimental art was a New York Times article about an artist eating Sheetrock. He mockingly said, "Oh, but she isn't a performance artist! You can't watch her eat it. She munches at night while no one is looking." As he said this last part, he shot the audience a look that read, "Seriously, folks?"

Despite the strength of the work at Holland's show in the beautiful space that is Pennsylvania College of Technology's gallery, all I could think about was this anonymous artist who was eating Sheetrock in secret. What stuck with me wasn't necessarily the shock value of someone eating Sheetrock, a stunt that one might see on MTV's Jackass, but rather that she did it when no one was looking. So, I went home and found the aforementioned article online. It was published on February 6, 2005 and the artist's name is Emily Katrencik. The Sheetrock she ate was part of a wall in the LMAKprojects satellite gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that separated "the gallery's exhibition space from the bedroom of its director, Louky Keijsers."

Emily Katrencik nibbling away
Image used with the courtesy of http://www.nytimes.com

In my mental recreation, Katrencik becomes like Franz Kafka's "hero" in The Metamorphosis: a shunned creature who sneaks out at night seeking nourishment but isn't sure where to find it and is too ashamed to be spotted. One who is driven by instinct to perform a destructive deed but survives by way of the calcium and iron in the Sheetrock (who knew?). One who is deprived of freedom and is forced to sustain by any means necessary like the women in Suzy McKee Charnas' dystopian The Slave and the Free who are turned into baby-making machines and left to survive off of their breast milk.

At the same time, Katrencik is exposing by dissolving the wall between the private and the public, the professional and the personal. Through invading Louky Keijsers' bedroom and uniting it with the gallery, Katrencik is building a bridge between the sometimes distant and uppity gallery owners in NYC and the viewing public. But she's not only "tearing down the wall" Berlin-style, she's ingesting it, making herself and her health vulnerable like a Bushido warrior who's willing to risk everything for his cause.

Holland said, "If you can't laugh at that, there's something wrong with you." And he's right. On some level, Katrencik's art is silly but it's also thought-provoking, unsettling, intimate, desperate, educational, layered, and memorable. Every time I'm ready to dismiss contemporary art as meaningless, frivolous, devoid of artful composition, casual, or shallow, something comes along like Katrencik's art to remind me that maybe all those rules being broken did lead somewhere and if navigated right, maybe the pluralistic sea does have pearls.

In "Third Eye," Brad Holland's Pearl consists of two sciency men measuring the size of a wondrously large, rosy-pink pearl in a clam. It seems out of place for these men to be trying to qualify this surreal treasure because whatever world they're in, their tools aren't going to be sufficient. It would be like counting inches in a dream.

Pearl Brad Holland
acrylic on panel

The problem with placing a cut off point and saying, "Here's where art stopped making sense!" is that it impairs one's tools for comprehending what can make contemporary art good. I'm not accusing Holland of anything because I make this mistake too and many people are looking out at the art world and thinking, "Where did this go wrong?" I'm just saying that assumptive dismissal is the inevitable conclusion of closing oneself off to anything that isn't in a traditional frame.

Dear Gilles and Felix,

Hello Friends,
I'm doing a small installation in the window of Moore College of Art and Design's ARTShop. The opening is Monday, September 8, 2008 from 5-7pm, 20th and Race Street in Philadelphia. All are invited to attend!
Hope you are well and looking forward to Fall!
Best,
Terri

President BUSH PARDON's HIMSELF against POTENTIAL WARCRIMES

Whip it at the WIP Show

Greetings,

We the artists of the UArts Summer MFA invite you, the public, to attend the crowning achievements of our collective summer. This show presents the soft pencil traces, the starting marks of the potential lifelong trajectories of our artistic lives. Pretty super stuff. It's a chance to see a swatch of lives on the brink, not of fame (necessarily, but who knows...) but of that amazing thing your life becomes, post-click. It's not the period at the end of the sentence but the very well worded starting clause that longs to be completed.

On that note we invite the established into the academic. Please come, if not for art than in the name of free food.

Thanks so much, we hope to see you there:

Wednesday 8/6/08
6pm-8pm
(open studios begin at 4pm)

W.I.P Show @
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
333 S. Broad St
Philadelpia, PA 19102

Drawings
Arronson Gallery
320 S. Broad
Philadelphia, PA 19102

We are also hosting open studios, starting at 4pm





--J.A. Clark

MFA Alum in PMA Collection!

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that….
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired my large photogram titled Optical Bridge.
It is in the museum's permanent photography and print collection.

Sincerely,
Walter
http://www.walterplotnick.com

Wooster Collective

Hi Folks,
Here's a great link showcasing ephemeral street art.
Often very smart stuff!


www.woostercollective.com/

woo·ster (noun)
A street in the Soho section of New York City

col·lec·tive (noun)
Of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group: a collective decision.

The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.

Sadashi Inuzuka Coming to UARTS 6/23!

This week's lecture...

This week, we're welcoming Jane D. Marsching to the program, where she'll talk about her work and offer crits. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of her practice (Ms. Marsching works in photo, video, writing, has a curating practice, occasionally works in collaboration, on research-based projects...among other areas of interest), it would be wise for you to check out what she does and contact your faculty if you're especially keen on getting a visit from her. The image above is from a 1998 project in Philadelphia; more recent work can be seen here.

For more, you can go to her website from here. Enjoy.

Visitors from other studios

I finally saw the photos Fred Gutzeit took of his visit - they're great. See Andrew Rodgers, looking tough? Thanks, Fred. You can see more on his blog. Enjoy.

Free Art? ICA Goes Mad!!!

(from an email sent by the ICA on July 1)

Beginning July 1, 2008, ICA will be free to the public for the first time in its history!

This initiative is made possible by a generous gift from Glenn R. Fuhrman. ICA Overseer and contemporary art collector, Mr. Fuhrman is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (undergraduate 1987; graduate degree 1988).

The Fuhrman gift will underwrite admissions at the ICA for the next five years allowing access to all exhibitions. ICA plans to celebrate this new initiative with a community-wide event Thursday, September 4, 2008. This event, which will also be free and open to the public, will kick-off our fall exhibition schedule to include the work of artists Douglas Blau, Robert Crumb, Kate Gilmore and Odili Donald Odita.

Still haven't a clue what's what? Go to the ICA website.

BBC Photos

BBC News "Day in Pictures"
(click on the link above)

The BBC posts gorgeous pictures from around the world daily and this time, there are two artistically-flavored ones...on of a Martin Creed exhibition at the Tate Britain and the other of an anonymous sand artist.

All Change Hats

I wanted to just give a heads-up about a blog posting by Chloe Veltman (Sports Writers have the Edge) I found on ArtsJournal.com.

Veltman writes about an experiment conducted by the Guardian in which the paper's sports writers covered art events and the art critics covered sporting events. She comes out strongly in favor of the sports writers, though the whole enterprise gets a less-than-ringing endorsement.

It caused a little bit of deja-vu for me because I vividly recall when the Boston Phoenix played this game with its culture critics in the late 80s or early 90s, sending the movies writer to a restaurant, the art writer to do dance, the dance critic to the movies, etc. It was a really interesting moment for me as a reader (and one I pestered my editors to recreate when I starting writing for a weekly...finally getting the chance to do books and restaurants and even a theater review) because it suggested that what really mattered in criticism in these media outlets was not a deep knowledge of the specific subject at hand, but a deep knowledge of some subject coupled with really great writing skills.

Artists might bristle at this idea, but it's something I hope we'll explore a little in the class this summer: to what extent are critics writing for an audience of rreaders as opposed to an audience of insiders?

Making You

Love - is anterior to Life -

Posterior - to Death -
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth -

- XXXVII, Emily Dickinson, 1864
(copied with the courtesy of http://www.emilydickinson.it/j0901-0950.html)

Richard Hell "You Make Me" Outtake from photos for his album The Blank Generation
(Click on the link above to see the photo)

The preceding juxtaposition is not my own. We can thank Jessica Jackson Hutchins' (b. 1971 in Chicago, IL) recent show "The Exponent of Earth (You Make Me)" at the Derek Eller Gallery in Chelsea for this sublime contrast of classic literature and early punk. When I read a press release (found at http://chelseaartgalleries.com) and discovered that Hutchins had mashed Dickinson with Hell I thought that it was a lame attempt to unite disparate elements (poetry and punk together at last! We get it). I wasn't affected until I actually placed the poem next to the picture and dove in between.

As Dickinson's words ignited a debate in my mind about whether saying "love is all" was more pukingly sentimental or seductively eternal, Hell's open chest wound just knocked me out. So, not only is love all but you give it to me. This unification leaves the "I" incredibly vulnerable and if it wasn't for Hell's punk aesthetic, this bleeding patchwork would be too much to bear. There's just something disarming about a man looking so raw and yet being so exposed (the line "You Make Me" is directly taken from the picture).

And that's just the title. What about Hutchins artwork? How does this riveting name actually relate to the show?

Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Convivium, 2008
table, linen, paper maché and ceramic
52.75 x 56.75 x 53.75 inches
(image used with the courtesy of http://www.derekeller.com)

The following is my account of the exhibition before my knowledge of the origins of the title:

Upon walking into the Derek Eller gallery, I realized that I was being confronted by that pesky "anti-aesthetic" again and this fact usually leads me to the questions, "How could this artwork possibly fail?" and "If it's supposed to be awful, where does that leave a judge?" Hutchins' sculptures are made up of old furniture surmounted by globs of plaster and papier mache along with poorly made ceramic kitchenware that seem like rotten cherries atop melted ice cream.

It wasn't until I saw Convivium (pictured above) that I was granted entry into Hutchins' world. The definition of "convivial" from Merriam-Webster is "relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company." The "um" on the end calls to mind "continuum" which is defined as "a coherent whole characterized as a collection, sequence, or progression of values or elements varying by minute degrees." We can then view Convivium as a collection of the elements of feasting with good company. However, the piece itself is far from jovial. The table is dirty and looks like it was extracted from an abandoned basement where someone was desperately trying to recreate the--at this point--romanticized memory of a family gathering with old pictures of flowers, some bags of plaster, and ceramics made for necessity rather than beauty.

If you're keeping score, we have 1. love is all 2. you give me love 3. I'm in a dark, dirty, soul-crushing, abandoned house trying to build that love for myself with the only stuff I've got. It's sweet in a depressing, post-apocalyptic kind of way.

Thank you, Mrs. Hutchins.
Sincerely,
Matthew Parrish

Great website

Hey guys -
After stumbling upon a very interesting artist at Max Lang yesterday in Chelsea, I stumbled upon what looks to be a pretty interesting website while doing searches on her. I saw work on this page that I thought several of you in the program might find interesting, so decided to post it for the whole class to enjoy...
It's called the Daily Serving.com but I believe the link i found was an older one to these artists I thought were interesting...
http://www.dailyserving.com/2007/02/

Hope you all had a good time yesterday...
Melissa

Mark Dion’s Bartram’s Travels Reconsidered

June 19, 2008
The Weekend Guide
What to Do This Weekend
follow the trail!

SEE
Mark Dion’s Bartram’s Travels Reconsidered
What: Artifacts, drawings, and other magical creations (natural and unnatural) that Dion curated on Bartram’s Trail and displayed in Bartram’s Garden.
Why: You’re lacking inspiration.
When: Fri., 5:30-8:30 p.m.
Where: 54th St. & Lindbergh Blvd. (215-729-5281). R.S.V.P. to rsvp@bartramsgarden.org.

Swoon Discusses Portrait of Silvia Elena, Now At Honeyspace May 30-July 5, 2008

Hi Folks,
Swoon's Portrait of Silvia Elena will be at Honeyspace Art Gallery, May 30 thru July o5, 2008.
I'd love to hear a response to the work as I can not make the NY trip.
Honey Space is at 148 11th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd Streets, Chelsea; honey-space.com
Best,
Terri

About artists

It's always good to see artists being talked about in the press, so I was pleased to see the lengthy profile of Marlene Dumas in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Hope you have a chance to flip through it. Enjoy!