Wednesday, March 31, 2010

This Spring: Treat Yourself




Sometimes it's just too much that George Kuchar lives six blocks away.
Too amazingly much.

The Mongreloid, 1978

Feel the love.
xo j

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Houston, We Have Kind of a Whitney

 
2K10 Whitney B.'s got me feeling like a traditionalist.
Best work in the show is the stuff you could live with most easily.

Never not watched so many videos in one museum visit.
Never less interested in large scale production value.

that said.
THE HIGHS!..

Roland Flexner


SN70, 2007, ink on paper, 7 x 5.5"
SN25, 2007, ink on paper, 7 x 5.5"
SN37, 2007, ink on paper, 7 x 5.5"
SN02, 2007, ink on paper, 7 x 5.5"

Japanese sumi ink marbling process interrupted and manipulated by gravity and the artist's breath. A wall, of like, 60 of 'em.



Leslie Vance


Untitled (18), 2009, oil on linen, 18 x 15"
Untitled (16), 2009, oil on linen, 20 x 15"
Untitled (12), 2009, oil on linen, 18 x 15"
Untitled (21), 2009, oil on linen, 18 x 16"

Still-life arrangements get photographed then painted. Wildly delicate, nearly translucent dimensionality that makes scraped paint look like stringy tendons. Butcher block mindscapes.

More at David Kordansky


Charles Ray



Just plain beautiful. And strangely emotive.
Couldn't be more different from the Charles Ray we know.

"The drawings I do at night at home to relax. And for a long time I just gave them to friends or my wife and didn't really show them. A few years ago I started showing them in a limited way and just decided to do this for the Whitney."

More at Matthew Marks Gallery

....

G-d help me before my taste becomes decorative.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Dancing with Myself/Yourself/the Stars/Everyone

      
       
  
      

Isn't it the best when you suddenly get wrapped up in something hilarious that you'd never really even considered before like the history of avant-dance on film and you realize that amazing people know an amazing amount about it and you find a book that's about exactly what you're interested in and read it on a plane coming back from a springtime weekend in New York where your friends are expecting a baby?

Dance With Camera, ICA, Philadelphia

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Brighton Beach Memoirs

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Mummy Dearest

Maz K!

Expert woodworker, garage sale Poul Kjaerholm chair-detector, jewel thief look-alike, proud poppa, sweetheart of a dude.

Uhh -- also played bass in legendary San Francisco garage spaz-spook maniacs The Mummies?

The other night he helped me strategize construction of a super deep triangular maple frame for the handsomest poster on the west coaster, celebrating the 1970 opening of the Berkeley Art Museum. Tops in California design. Teepee color field.

So I built the thing, brought it home, plonked it on the wall, and turned up the Mummies real loud.

The Mummies: Stronger Than Dirt


Meanwhile, check out this 1990 promo shot for their Shitsville 7".
Equally astonishing California design.

Great Gauze Almighty.



Oh! some days are good.
Thanks Maz.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Starting To Talk While Doing This Dance Is Like Opening A Front Loading Washing Machine While Doing A Load Of Typewriters



Not really intended to read like a Jeopardy! column, the images above mark the opening credits of Trisha Brown's Accumulation With Talking Plus Watermotor, a 1979 dance captured in an extraordinary 1986 short directed by Jonathan Demme for Southern California PBS(whaa?).

Thankfully!Annoyingly! you can't find it online. So you oughta rent/buy the inspiring DVD, Trisha Brown: Early Works 1966-1979. Get prioritized, yo.

In Demme's film, she improvises(?) her way around the studio for ten minutes, tracing the transformation of the piece (which is really three conflated works) through epic body work and fragmented narration.

As she toggles back and forth between telling two different stories (sometimes in midair), we watch her physically inhabit two different histories. She remembers, then forgets, then remembers what she's talking/moving about. She's no longer a character in her life and work, she is her life and work.

Does me well to be reminded that we're always improvising, teetering between remembering and forgetting as we move through experience and understanding. The details and the telling are -- and will always be -- variable. A person's relationship to gravity!

When she's talking, she can't keep up with her dancing. When she's dancing, she can't keep up with her talking. But she's doing both.

And, amazingly, she's never out of breath.


Roof and Fire Piece, 1973 (also on DVD)

New: Hero-Styles
And Kicking: http://www.trishabrowncompany.org/

Friday, March 12, 2010

Widow's Peak (Mont Blanc)

Deranged excitement of the repeated track.
Fair to say 300 times yesterday?

Grass Widow: To Where

Have Eet

Beware the geodesic Grass Widow.


This exquisite/scurvy-esque feeling captured awfully well this past Sunday by Laurent Brancowitz, high-haired Phoenix guitarist, D'Angelo disciple, recent NYT interviewee.

Q: Do you think of your own music as romantic?
MR. BRANCOWITZ: Actually, yes. I think there's maybe one theme in our music, and it's something like romantic abandon. We call that teenage abandon, that kind of anxiety and abandon that you enjoy.
Q: How do you hold on to that as adults?
MR. BRANCOWITZ: It's not hard. I mean, it's not related to age -- I say teenage because it's something you experience with the most force when you are young. You know this emotion you have when you see a movie that's so beautiful or you hear a piece of music that sounds perfect? It's this kind of anxiety and joy. So it's very easy, actually. You just have to see the right piece of art.
Full Article

Next flight to De Gaulle?

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Alvin Robinson: How Can I Get Over You (1965)



Have It

Dude never made an album.
How can someone who knows everything about songwriting never make a full album.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Liz plays our kitchen.
Breathtook.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Group Under: Heavy Water

Grouper (Liz Harris) makes music for the headphones of headphones of headphones. This Thursday evening she makes music especially for your headphones -- at Chris Fallon's Partisan Gallery, where her Escheresque pen drawings will be up for the month.

Drawings: Liz Harris
Video: Jamie Potts

ART 6-9PM /// MUSIC 8PM.


Grouper (music).
Root Strata (label).

Grouper: Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping

Monday, March 1, 2010

Natural Histories

Unearthly archival images from the American Museum of Natural History. Neatly divided into four species: Dioramas, Education, Exhibitions, Exhibition Preparation.


Weirdly, any/all of these would do for my wedding invitation.

The AMNH images share cosmic b&w space with Evidence, the radical photographic appropriation project published in 1977 by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan (RIP, recently). Somehow gaining access to the archives of more than 70 corporations, labs, and government agencies, Mandel and Sultan put together an enigmatic collection of arrestingly beautiful, boring and strange images without the help of explanatory text. Sequence, authorship, intention? Who -- after all -- needs it.

                              
Ditto on the wedding thing.

BOOK (nice article)