Better

It’s hard to remember sometimes that I actually have my own life, my own interests outside of sitting in hospitals and nursing homes—the activity that has dominated the last month for me. I had conferences with students this week and it felt good to get back to being a different sort of care provider. Maybe it’s just that I’m in a generous mood, but the professional and technical writing class I’ve had this semester has been one of the best of my career. People are engaged and involved for the most part, and have picked projects that have some relevance to their career paths. That always makes a difference. Although Krista has taught a unit for the past month so that I could tend to my mother, I still think of them as my class.

One thing that has really made this class click is the use of more technology—I used google docs for the first time with great success, and Krista has taught the instructions module using wikis. I am a firm believer in technology in the classroom, and this has been effective both as a way of presenting material and concepts, but also in just plain getting the job done. Being separated by several states has not made me lose touch with the class at all. It may have its dark side, but I really do think that technology is mostly good.

In the shower this morning, it dawned on me that at the core I really believe that technology has the ability to tell us more about the world. The danger, ultimately, though is losing sight of the world part of that equation. Fantasy has its uses, but in the end, reality is what matters.

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Posted by Jeff at March 28, 2008 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Not real

I’ve been in Oklahoma for the last couple of weeks. I didn’t take any pictures at all, though I had a much better camera with me than I’ve had on previous trips. For some reason, I really didn’t want to remember the reason/circumstances of the trip.

I think people are most driven to take pictures when they want to remember a certain place and time as being “real.” All critiques that center on the unreal or fabricated nature of pictures miss the core of image making in practice. Most people photograph to make things real, to fix evidence that a thing or place actually exists outside the mind.

Sometimes you don’t want things to be real. Nothing traumatic has happened (yet) and the knowledge of its inevitability is best left unreal.

Posted by Jeff at March 8, 2008 9:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

clavahead.com

Nothing much at clavahead.com yet, but I'm intrigued. Via Wooster Collective.

Posted by Jeff at January 5, 2008 11:29 AM

Interface

I’m still working through thoughts about the relationship between visual art and narrative, but I want to record some observations about the present and future of interfaces, music, and paintings occasioned by Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings (now in its second edition) and an Edward Hopper retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. Oddly enough, both involve music—and unusual interfaces. But the central concerns of these two exhibitions are different, as is the web presence used to market them. I’ve written briefly about Eno before, but the Hopper thing is relatively new to me.

To begin, Brian Eno is alive. He can speak for himself, and does so on YouTube, in galleries, and even in Second Life. Hopper’s dead. He won’t be getting any more paychecks from his work. Eno’s monetization scheme is pretty traditional, i.e. limited editions:

My copy came from the first edition (just barely, from the numbers on the case). The normal concept of a “limited” edition is that the price is driven by scarcity—but Eno does not use any sort of DRM to keep you from installing the software on multiple computers. The success of the concept (into a second edition) allows him to improve or alter the software for newer machines, to expand the book (I can’t tell for sure, but the Amazon page suggests that the second edition is better than the first) and generally to surpass the original. Not to mention the fact that the software is meant to generate a nearly unlimited number of original works of art (hence the title, of course). Why the heck is the software’s package attached to the ploy of a “limited” edition? Seems absolutely the conceptual opposite of the package’s contents.

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Posted by Jeff at December 27, 2007 12:32 PM | Comments (1)

Bone Lens

I see so many things, a primitive ring,
a nest with a fallen-out bottom,
a white rubber band snapped into blue.
But mostly it's real memory
and the doctor holding up my x-ray
to the screen of light, a mini drive-in.
. . .

Denise Duhamel, Reminded of my Biological Clock -- While Looking at Georgia O'Keefe's Pelvis One

Last week we went to go see Georgia O’Keefe: Circling around Abstraction at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. It was disappointing, given that there were only 42 or so works displayed and they charged a premium for entry. Looking at the video online from the same show at the Norton Museum, it seems as if there were a lot of works missing. I didn’t buy the monograph, but I had wondered why there even was a monograph given the less than earth-shattering premiseof the unremarkable collection. The really interesting thing to me isn't simply that O'Keefe "circled" abstraction, but that she steadfastly refused to land. The primary reason usually given is that she was horrified by the interpretations attached to her abstract works by critics.

But the show made me think just the same. One of the placards referred to the pelvis series as an exploration of the “bone lens.” This phrase has stuck in my head for several days now. A quote purported to be from a 1944 exhibition catalog tends to support this quirky interpretation of the pelvic bone paintings:

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Posted by Jeff at December 10, 2007 2:21 PM

Spam Gate

One thing that always bothers me about the weekend is being forced to watch Fox to get local coverage. However, yesterday evening there was an interesting story about a local “meat sculptor” who entertains herself during the cold weather by making spam candles, hot-dog necklaces and such. I looked at the Fox web site to see if there was any mention of the story or web links and found that they do not update the site on weekends. So I googled around, and found the wonderful sculpture displayed above (completely unrelated to the story).

The spam sculpture of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate warmed my heart. It’s from 2005, the same year I presented a paper on the legal and social controversies surrounding public photography of this sculpture at the Sweetland writing conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The paper is supposed to be included in a forthcoming anthology. I wish I had known of this fabulous sculpture then; I might have included it in my presentation.

Posted by Jeff at December 9, 2007 12:08 PM

Haas (plural)

I became strangely obsessed with Chocolate Haas by Sander Plug. It seemed that for a day at least, everywhere I turned there was a Haas of some variant or another. On the CBS evening news, Richard Haass suggested that GW has to tone down his rhetoric about Iran now that there is no evidence of a nuclear conspiracy. Trying to figure out who he was, I stumbled on Richard Haas, a wonderful painter of trompe-l'œil works on the sides of buildings. An odd confluence, triggered by a melting chocolate bunny. Each in its own way involves a magic trick.

I suppose what really drew me into the film was the emotional nature of what is essentially a good science project for a ten-year-old boy. The beauty of the collapse leaves you feeling oddly guilty that you find it aesthetically pleasing. Ruins have that sort of pleasure: the scars of misfortune find a sort of resonance to people constantly under assault from the new. There’s a question of course, “what would happen if,” that seems to underwrite such experiments with ruin. In that sense, the piece seems to be as much an experiment as a beautiful object. The remix with a death metal soundtrack recasts it in a different adolescent milieu.

The beauty is strictly in the facade; underneath the bunny is hollow. It’s a moving trompe-l'œil, disappearing in moments before our eyes. But perhaps it owes its impact to a visual variant of the Haas effect—the first sense impression persists, even as the contradictory impressions flood across the visual field.

Posted by Jeff at December 5, 2007 12:59 PM

Dirty Pictures

We went to go see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Walker last Tuesday; seeing things in person often gives you a different slant or provokes questions that you hadn’t expected. Exposure to Kahlo’s paintings has been pretty universal for many years now, to the point where my Spanish instructor in Little Rock absolutely forbade her students from presenting on that topic. I’ve spent more time researching and looking at Diego Rivera myself, largely due to my fascination with monumental works. Rivera’s choice of fresco as his primary medium was certainly a political one; I’d never really thought about Kahlo’s materials before.

While there was one fascinating fresco fragment chipped from a wall, most of her paintings were on masonite, with a few on tin or sheet metal. The surface was absolutely flat, with little in the way of texture or brushwork. The pigments were largely earthtone, and there was a certain flavor of dirt in the work, perhaps amplified by the natural browns of the masonite. I love dirt. But why masonite? I kept finding myself thinking about that—and I began to wonder just how long masonite had been available as a material. I found the answer in a corporate history. It was invented in 1924, and attained broad distribution in the 1930s. For Kahlo, it would have been a brand new material. But perhaps the most compelling factor, then as now, would be simply that it was cheap.

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Posted by Jeff at December 1, 2007 11:20 PM

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