moratorium

Or wait, let's call for a permanent deletion of this phrase from the English language:

"the esoteric wisdom of the East"

Christ on a crutch, people, can we let go of the Orientalist tropes of previous centuries already? I ran across this phrase in a tome on Chinese snuff bottles published in 1993, a full 15 years after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. Any art historian worth her salt should've known better than to engage in such stereotypical and antiquated rhetoric by the 1990s. Alas, the snuff bottle obsessives who wrote this tome - and good lord, is it a high-falutin' tome - had been publishing since the 1960s and had probably been so obsessed with the ins and outs of snuff bottles, spoons, and stoppers that they hadn't bothered to keep up with, you know, *art history" per se.

I am also in a bit of a snit about Hester Bateman, but I'll save that for another day.

An Open Letter to Apartment Therapy Commenters:

You are a denizen of a website that regularly features $4000 coffee tables and $10,000 sofas. It fetishizes *original* Eames and Saarinen furniture and all things mid-century modern. The AT philosophy advocates saving up and investing in quality design for your home, your furnishings, and your decor, rather than buying whatever cheap crap from China fills up Walmart this week. And yet you accuse me of snobbery for advocating the purchase of art made by artists, and suggest that just anyone can make good "abstract art" with some paper and black ink. How does this compute? Abstract art, like good design, is a matter of connoisseurship. Anyone who reads AT often enough to comment regularly should be able to understand this. Why, I ask you, should someone who has carefully designed their entire living space give up on quality when it comes to the artwork on their walls? This is not snobbery any more than preferring an original Eames to a knockoff is snobbery.

Quality artwork at reasonable prices can be found at your local gallery, your local college art department, and online. "DIY"ing abstract art will result for 99% of DIYers in splashy shitty decorative crap that looks like something from a reality design show on HGTV, not something good enough to frame and hang in one's home.

Finally, if you can't tell the difference between Modernist abstraction and Asian calligraphy, you aren't looking very hard, and you have proven yourself a less-than-capable judge of artistic quality.

Hugs,
Jezebella, PhD

Surprise!

Los Angeles does not suck. I was SO sure it would. The legendary L.A. weather really is amazing. I was in downtown the whole time, where there is, you know, *diversity*? Like multiple ethnicities, sizes, social classes? Yeah, I dig downtowns. I did not go any of the trendy celebrity kind of places. I didn't even see anybody that looked like Stripper Barbie, which I totally expected to. I guess I sort of believed the television image of L.A. Error! Error!

Got in Wednesday night, ate amazing Greek food (downtown takeaway joint), did meetings all day Thursday, ate at California Pizza Kitchen Thursday, then Friday, a morning session.

Friday afternoon: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Holy freakin' moly, the place is huge. HUUUUUGGGGEEEE. I spent four hours there and saw only European, American, modern & contemporary stuff. Honestly I just sort of trotted through the European galleries. The German show (Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures) was an absolute revelation. I know a lot about contemporary art, but to be honest, Germany since WWII was a bit of a blank spot for me. I mean, okay: Anselm Keifer, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Hannah Hoch, Hans Haacke, sure. But this was two floors in the Broad Museum building of artists from both East and West Germany. I feel like I should get the catalog because there was just so much brand new information, beautifully contextualized, and clearly, they had ACCESS. And MONEY. The loans were from private archives, artist's estates, I mean, they were tracking stuff down in the far corners of Europe. I can't say I loved everything I saw, but I do feel like I have a grasp of 60 years of German art after only spending 2 hours or so in those galleries. It was, I will not deny it, a tad grim. I mean, you know, defeated in the war, Cold War, East Germany, poverty, terrorism, etc. But art, after all, does not have to be happy and pretty. It ended on a positive note (for me anyway) with a completely amazing and enormous Gerhard Richter painting. Ah, Richter, how do I love thee? My wee formalist heart adores you, mon herr, master painter, wizard with brush and oils. He may - it's possible - be gaining on Mark Rothko, who I usually put at the top of my favorite artists list. I see one more painting like that and Mr. Rothko may be demoted to No. 2.

Finally, Friday night, my internet feminist buddy FH took me to a vegan Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo called Shojin. SO. GOOD. So good. I want to live in a city with vegan & vegetarian restaurants. It's such a joy to sit down, open a menu, and know that every single thing on the menu is something I could order. A menu like that is a glorious sight to behold, and it usually brings me near to tears. Srsly. I usually open a menu to see if there is, maybe, hopefully, ONE thing I can order. It usually involves cheese and starch. Sigh. Anyway, FH is a lovely and adorable goth girl who took me on a scenic tour of Skid Row on our way to Shojin and we had a great time at dinner talking about art, boys, radical feminism, and Los Angeles.

Get this! They let homeless people pitch tents on the sidewalks there! It's kind of humane, if one can say that sort of thing in the context of urban homelessness.

So, I am a convert. Will have to go back because I need a day to go to the Getty. Also need to get out to Pasadena for the Norton-Simon Museum, and should go back to the LACMA. It's an all-day haul to get from here to there (drive 2 hours to Jackson, wait an hour, fly to Houston, change planes, wait some more fly to LA, wait for a shuttle, hour to hotel, adds up to a whole day), but with good weather and the miracle of modern medicine (read: Xanax), it's tolerable.

What I will be doing this holiday weekend

Visiting as many of the Prospect.1 sites in New Orleans as I can manage.

More info here:

Prospect.1


And a review in the New Yorker here:

Peter Schjeldahl

Loving these: Arthur Wesley Dow prints

I have got a giant case of WANT:




Arthur Wesley Dow
Snowy Peak, Los Angeles, about 1912
Color linocut
3 9/16 x 5 13/16 in. [462-1]

This is one of a whole series of fantastic little woodcuts and linocuts in a current Hirschl and Adler exhibition. Inspired by Japanese Edo period woodblock prints, but simplified, at a smaller scale, more intimate. More hand-made feeling, you know? Also, I love that this is Los Angeles. I mean, really: L.A.? Used to look like that? Who knew? It wasn't even all that terribly long ago. And the shrubberies, they kind of look like centipedes, so I get this kind of visual bounce back & forth from alien-looking wormy things meandering across the landscape to these homely little chubby shrubberies.

Go, look at all of them:


Along Ipswich River: Color-prints by Arthur Wesley Dow

Presidential Candidates on the Arts

First, the link:

Arts Vote 2008

Next, the brief summary:

McCain's policy on art is one paragraph that, roughly, says "Um, art? Sure, schools should teach it, if they feel like spending money on it. Wev."

Obama's policies consist of three briefs with specific things he has supported and will support. It's a.... whaddya call it... a "platform". Yes. That's it. With details and stuff.

Go, read.

The Republican candidates and the Arts.

You know THIS will be a short post, yeah?


Here's what you need to know about McCain's policies re: art and culture:

Desperately Seeking John McCain's Arts Policy

and, a little tale from a small museum in a small town, circa 1997:

Anchorage Daily News (Alaska)

August 6, 1997, Wednesday, FINAL EDITION

MUSEUM STAFF QUITS IN ANGER

BYLINE: S.J. Komarnitsky; Daily News Mat-Su Bureau

SECTION: NATION, Pg. 1A

LENGTH: 975 words

DATELINE: Wasilla

Opal Toomey, Esther West and Ann Meyers don't seem like politically active types. There are no bumper stickers on their cars, no pins on their lapels.

But the three gray-haired matrons of Wasilla's city museum decided to take a stand last week. Faced with a $ 32,000 budget cut and the prospect of choosing who would lose her job, the three 15-year-plus employees decided instead to quit en masse. They sent a letter to the mayor and City Council announcing they plan to retire at the end of the month, leaving the museum without a staff. They also sent a message: They'd rather quit than continue working for a city that doesn't want to preserve its history.

"We hate to leave," said Meyers, who at 65 is the youngest of the three. "We've been together a long time. But this is enough." If the city were broke, it would be different, she said. "If they were even close to being broke."

Instead, the city is flush thanks to a 2 percent sales tax passed in 1994 that has left it with $ 4 million in reserves. There is no reason the museum's budget should be cut, Meyers said.

But the mayor and several City Council members who supported the cut say the budget surplus is beside the point.

They were elected on a platform to minimize government and concentrate on infrastructure -- paving roads and extending sewer lines. They appreciate the museum and the work the women do to manage it and several buildings that make up a historic townsite in downtown Wasilla. But the operation needs to be more efficient, they say.

"I think everybody was in agreement there were ways to make the museum more efficient, to spend taxpayers' dollars wiser over there," Mayor Sarah Palin said.

The museum, which had an annual budget of more than $ 200,000, was costing roughly $ 25 per visitor, she said. Besides, she added, "if you talk to someone in Wasilla (about) where they want their tax dollars to go, nine out of 10 say, 'Fix my road. I still don't have water in my area. And protect our lakes with a sewer system.' "

That philosophy, supported by Palin and many City Council members, has been debated in the town since the mayor took office last fall. Some say the museum is just the latest example of cutting government at the expense of the community.

The women are only the latest to leave the city payroll, noted John Cooper, who was the museum's director until Palin fired him last fall.

In addition to Cooper, Wasilla Police Chief Irl Stambaugh left last winter after Palin fired him, and planning director Duane Dvorak and Public Works director John Felton turned in their resignations this summer.

"People are voting with their feet," he said.

Palin maintains she is doing what voters asked. To have $ 4 million in reserves is prudent. That's not even an entire year's budget, she said.

Much of the latest flap over the museum is a misunderstanding, she said.

All the council wanted was to cut back the museum's hours in winter from seven days a week to five. The women made the decision to resign, Palin said.

West, Toomey and Meyers disagree. They say they were told that one of them would have to leave in September.

Regardless of what was intended, museum supporters say, losing the women will be a blow to the city.

The three have run the two-story building just off the Parks Highway since the early 1980s. And while it is no National Gallery of Art, its collection of mining materials, homestead memorabilia and early Wasilla history has its charm, said Fran Seager-Boss, Mat-Su Borough anthropologist.

"It's people and characters of the area you wouldn't find anywhere else," she said. "It reflects their location and is unique."

Several of the items in the museum were donated or are on loan, including an ore stamp mill built in 1900. Used to crush ore, the hefty-looking piece of steel machinery was carried from Knik to a mine north of Wasilla by four Chinese laborers, according to the man who donated it.

Nearby is an ancestor of the modern game of foosball, with handcrafted soccer players in place of molded plastic figures. Miners paid a dime a game to pass long hours at the mines. The outside edges still bear burn marks where the players placed cigarettes.

The three women bring their life experiences to the collection. During a recent tour, Toomey, 77, added snippets of her years growing up and homesteading in the Wasilla area. She remembers riding the train from Anchorage to Wasilla and waiting at the freight station where the family received its furniture, lumber and other goods.

"That was how everything came in those days," she said.

West, 74, recalls wearing metal hair clips similar to ones under a glass display at the museum. The metal curling irons next to them, which were heated on stoves, were before her time though, she explains.

The three also bring their institutional memory. The museum used to be a community hall that was built in 1932, they said. Dances were held there, and the City Council used to meet in the basement. It was dedicated as a museum in 1967.

Seager-Boss said she frequently calls the three for information that could take much longer to gather from traditional sources. "Opal is my source," she said.

The museum and a farmer's market held each Wednesday in the old townsite, she noted, have given a heart to a town that is mostly business.

"Everything else is strip mall," she said. "But suddenly there's a nice little area right in downtown."

Palin said she doesn't downplay the museum's importance but at the same time she has to look out for the city's budget.

For now, there are no plans to try to woo the women back. For their part, none of the three expects it. Palin said she plans to meet with members of a local historical society to discuss options for finding replacements.

LOAD-DATE: August 7, 1997

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo By Stephen Nowers; Anchorage Daily News; DOROTHY PAGE MUSEUM EMPLOYEES ESTHER WEST, OPAL TOOMEY AND ANN MEYERS

Copyright 1997 Anchorage Daily News

my new favorite mississippi moment

This afternoon, I went out to a friend's country property to help critique the site-specific sculptures her students had produced out there. About every ten minutes, she would warn us of some new danger. Watch out for snakes! Oh yeah, and the brown recluse spiders. Next it was fire ants, and then the poison ivy and the slippery muddy swampy bits. Seriously, why do people even LIVE in the country? It's freakin dangerous. And there are bitey things.

So, one of the students had accidentally placed her piece outside of the friend's property, in her neighbor's field. The field was right next to the driveway, just a chunk of field, nothing much happening. She dug a hole, inserted a 10' I-beam, and attached on top a ring of metal (imagine a really big iron stop sign, only with a ring instead of a circle). There's another piece on the ground that fell off during installation, but that's neither here nor there.

What *is* important is that the neighbor came rolling up as we were all standing around, having just finished critiquing the work. He was the very picture of a pissed-off redneck, in his ginormous crew-cab pickup truck and his triplet-sized beer-belly. He was on the phone until he stopped the truck, then got off the phone and started snapping pictures of us with it. He shouted "Do you all know what you're doing out here?" Which, to my mind, is a dumb-ass question. Anyway. My friend walks over to chat with him, and tells us to go back to the house, since we're done with the critique. A few of us kind of linger around for a few minutes, because he really seems pretty pissed. She looks around, says, no, she's fine, head on back, and we mosey back slowly.

Ten minutes later she returns. What's the deal, we ask? This is rich. Wait for it.



He was convinced we were performing a Satanic Ritual on his property and was outraged. Yes. He thought that it was an Satanic symbol of some kind and we were out there sacrificing goats or whatever the hell. As soon as he said that, she knew it would be fine and she'd be able to calm him down, because it was so freakin absurd. Look, he was DEAD SERIOUS. Somebody had called him and told him that satanists were preparing to worship the devil on his land.

I mean, I must've laughed for ten minutes straight when I realized what he was so het up about. Satanic Rituals! On his PROPERTY! Goldangit! Do you people realize what you are doing? I'm surprised he didn't launch into a preachin'.

So that was the surreal end to my very sweaty, swampy, buggy, arty afternoon.

pang

I have a fondness for mid-century modern design. It's sleek and beautifully designed, but made of homely industrial materials. My house is by no means sleek & efficient enough to really come close to the mid-century modern aesthetic, but sometimes, I see a thing that I want, and it gives me a pang. I want it, because it's beautiful and red and rich, and the curves are perfect, the form and function are in perfect sync, and the pang, well: I can't afford it. I can't see ever having so much disposable income that I can buy this, this perfect, beautiful, red chair, for eight HUNDRED dollars:



Here's an alternate view, in plain wood, so you can see how delicious and perfect and loungy the bent plywood is:



Really, if I think about it too much, I might just cry. Wah.

1 week late, or 51 weeks early

Whichever the case, William S. Burroughs is genius. I miss that guy. I saw him speak at The Nova Convention Revisited in Lawrence, KS, back in the late 90s. He could've read a phone book and I'd have been on the edge of my seat. Of course he didn't. He talked about art and using his fame as a writer to get a museum exhibition and I don't know what all any more, but it was mesmerizing. I was on the fourth row, center. Debbie Harry performed, and Laurie Anderson, and Patti Smith (who scared the crap out of me by stalking back and forth the front of the stage and sneering at us), and Gregory Corso talking about fooling around with Andy Warhol, something about shoes and ejaculation. That whole night was a high point in my cultural life.

Yankees, take note:

Thanks to my pal Dick Ford, you can see what Real Southern Cooking and Eating looks like.

Check it:

southern eating

(Yo, Dick: if I'm farking your bandwidth, let me know and I'll cut it out.)

Note that the giant pan of fried chicken is the first to fall.

While you're there, go look at his video art: Dick Ford

Unrequited Art History Crush

I've seen Sven Haakanson speak at several conferences, in sessions ranging from large to rather intimate. I was watching a documentary about grizzly bears last year sometime and about fell out of my chair when he turned up as one of the interviewees. I think the person I was watching the movie with didn't really know what to think when I said, "Hey! I know that guy! I've seen him at AAM."

Anyway, I have a big art history crush on him, as he is charming and brilliant and passionate and, yes, pretty dang cute.

And now, my unrequited art history crush? He's a MacArthur Genius.

Alutiiq anthropologist honored as a MacArthur 'genius'
Award comes with $500,000 for Haakanson

Sven Haakanson learned of his award in an early-morning call.

By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com

(Published: September 25, 2007)

An Alaska Native anthropologist from the Kodiak Island village of Old Harbor has received one of the most prestigious -- and lucrative -- awards for intellectual achievement in America. Sven Haakanson, 41, is among 24 new MacArthur Fellows announced Monday.

A press release from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Fellows Program called Haakanson "the driving force behind the revitalization of indigenous language, culture and customs in an isolated region of North America." It also mentioned his artistic accomplishments as a mask carver and photographer.

The so-called "Genius Award" comes with a f $500,000 grant that recipients may spend as they see fit. The selection process is famed for its secrecy and candidates usually have no clue that they are under consideration.

Haakanson learned of the award in a crack-of-dawn phone call on Monday of last week/ "They woke me up at 6:30 in the morning," he told the Daily News. "Anybody calling you that early, you think: Is this a joke?"

When he realized the caller was serious, he felt humbled, he said. "To have someone even nominate me is wonderful."

Then the caller informed him that he would receive a half million dollars, no strings attached, over the next five years.

"I was shocked," Haakanson said, still sounding a little breathless.

For 20 years, Haakanson earned money as a commercial fisherman. He is the son of the late Sven Haakanson Sr., the longtime mayor of Old Harbor and a respected elder.

The younger Haakanson said his interest in anthropology began when he attended a youth conference in Denmark in 1988 and heard University of Alaska Fairbanks professor Lydia Black speak about the history of "Aleut people."

"I thought to myself, 'Why am I on the other side of the world learning about my culture when I should be at home doing that?' " After the lecture, he sat and talked with Black for an hour or more.

Inspired by Black, he attended the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he received a bachelor's in English in 1992. He then went on to graduate studies at Harvard University, where he earned his master's and doctorate in anthropology. He was selected as the executive director of the new Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak in 1999, a year before receiving his doctorate, and had to defer taking the post until he could finish his degree.

Through the museum, Haakanson has spearheaded efforts to acquire and exhibit rare items from Alutiiq history scattered in collections around the world. His recent projects include taking a group of Kodiak elders and artists to France to inspect Alutiiq masks collected in Alaska in the 19th century. As a result of that trip, some of those masks will be displayed in Kodiak, then in Anchorage next year.

He's also in the process of identifying a trove of petroglyphs and other stone carvings near the village of Akhiok, on the south coast of Kodiak. Working with villagers, he said, he has been able to locate 800 such carvings in recent years.

He relishes such fieldwork, he said, but can break away only for about one week each year. Administrative responsibilities keep him near the office in Kodiak, where he lives with his wife, Balika, and daughters, Eilidh and Isabella.

He hopes that the MacArthur money will free him up to get out to historic Alutiiq sites more often, he said. And some will be used to send his mother, Mary, on a pilgrimage to Orthodox churches in Russia.

But the majority will go into savings, Haakanson said, because "I don't have retirement for my job at the museum."

This is the second time an Alaskan has won a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2004, Katherine Gottlieb, president of Southcentral Foundation, received the award for helping to streamline the health care services for Alaska Natives.




Linky:

Sven Haakanson

Jezebella on Tour: Two things about Kansas City

1. I got to spend about an hour in the newly expanded Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Nicely done. It's got great soaring ceilings and terrific light, great for big-ass paintings both modern and contemporary. Yet the space flows slowly downward from one room to the next - I hesitate to use the word "room" here because they're more like separate spaces with some architecture defining your movement from one area to the next. Beautifully done. Nice floors, good collection, good lighting.

I love their Rothko. I was going to add a link to it, but Rothkos are impossible to understand in photographs. You have to get up next to the canvas to see the subtlety and sublimity of black-on-burgundy-on-black that goes on in his dark paintings.

I saw this show: Manet to Matisse which was kind of, meh. It's a private collection so it's a little uneven. The Cezanne oil study of a man smoking a pipe is FANTASTIC. Nothing else really stuck with me.

I got to see the first two rooms of this show: Developing Greatness and wish I'd had time to see all of it. I love daguerreotypes. I have no idea how they managed to light a zillion hanging daguerreotypes so visitors could see them. If you've ever handled one, you know that you have to kind of tilt it back & forth to get a good view of it. It's a thin metal layer on glass, a positive one-of-a-kind image, not a print made from an original negative. I'd go back & see the rest of that show if I could.

And, continuing my newly-found love for Kiki Smith, I totally fell for her installation called Constellation Totally love her work. Want to see more, and more, and more.

2. I got on the elevator at the hotel where two large, burly, black transvestites were meditating upon the buttons. "They said Room 237," said one. Said the other, "But there isn't a button for 2." I said, "L is the same as 2. The lobby is the second floor." And then I pushed the open door button and off sauntered the most deep-voiced man in extensions, a denim miniskirt, and acrylic nails I'd ever laid eyes on. The two of them seemed to have some sort of, ahem, *appointment* in room 237.

I use the word transvestite intentionally, because these were not drag queens in overdone makeup and sparkly dresses. Nor were they transsexuals, as neither had used hormones, depilation, or was even bothering to try to raise their voices. These were, simply put, dudes in skirts, extensions, and a little makeup. With fancy nails. One of them even had some razor stubble on his/her cheeks.

My people, it has been a long time since I've been on an elevator with a transvestite.

Jezebella is fixin to go on tour...

to Noo Yawk City, woot.

On the schedule: Kiki Smith show at the Whitney, Design Life Now at the Cooper Hewitt, the new MoMA expansion/reinstallation, and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which finally has a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Sunday, the Whitney, I have a drink at Sardi's, go see Spring Awakening, thence out to dinner.

Monday, shopping (Town Shop for bras, Saks for Bobbi Brown makeup, and H&M for a cute new outfit that will be up-to-date in NYC, but is ahead of the curve in Mississippi)

Tuesday, dinner with mathematician ex-boyfriend, thence to the Cooper-Hewitt

Wednesday, Brooklyn and conference

Thursday, MoMA in the morning and then two (TWO!) job interviews in the afternoon, then dinner with my grad school best pal Sam

Friday - Saturday, conference nerdifying, including an all-day Feminist Art Project session on Saturday

and, sadly, Sunday: I have to come back home

We are just going to have to pretend like it is NOT Mardi Gras, and most definitely deny any knowledge of this thing they call Valentine's Day. I refuse to acknowledge a holiday designed to make single people feel like crap for weeks on end.

Report to follow. Possibly with pictures, even.

Jezebella on tour: Jackson

Took a quick trip Saturday night to Jackson. Had dinner at Keifer's Greek Restaurant, home of the best veggie gyro I've ever had. I love that joint.

Proceeded to go the wrong way on State Street and end up way the hell north at Target instead of going south to downtown. I love it when I take one of my "scenic route" detours with a witness in the car. Have I mentioned that I'm geographically challenged? My instincts for directions are almost always wrong. I've grown accustomed to it, and always factor in extra time to get to new places, but it's still kind of embarrassing.

Next up: the Mississippi Invitational 2007 opening at the Mississippi Museum of Art. My favorite artists included are Jeff Schmuki:





Lee Renninger:




and Carlyle Wolfe:



This is a view from an installation elsewhere; the installation in Jackson is bigger and features more paintings. I would say, actually, too many paintings for the space. Her piece mounted in glass, though, paper with sewn flowers and cut-out flowers and drawn or printed flowers, was very strong. I'd like to see more of those.


Otherwise nothing really jazzed me up. There was a lot of post-storm photography and I found it reportorial.

Jezebella on tour: Atlanta

Went to Atlanta this weekend on business, and visited, as usual, some museums.

If you dig Western art, which is not so much my cup of tea, go to the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, which is north of Atlanta. The building is astonishing. The elevator is the size of my office. The collection is top-notch, for what it is. I totally dug the Duane Hansen Cowboy and the Andy Warhol Cowboys and Indians prints. Nice gift shop.

I went to the High Museum, recently expanded, and as always, found it incoherent and disappointing. Their collection isn't really top notch, the spaces have no flow, and I refuse to pay another ten dollars (after paying ten dollars for parking) to see a few dozen third-rate pieces from the Louvre. I have an AAM card, after all, and I get into the ACTUAL Musee du Louvre for FREE, so why do I have to pay to see Louvre paintings in Atlanta? I protest. I did not go. I hear it's a smallish show, and nothing so spectacular I needed to see it. The next installment may include some must-see pictures. I did see the Morris Louis show, which was very nice. I love big giant Abstract Expressionist paintings, and Louis' post-painterly abstraction is pretty spectacular. Master colorist, amazing technique that no-one knows how to replicate, good stuff. I could've looked at more and even more of them. There are 27 altogether - and beautifully selected, major pieces - but I could've stood another fifteen or twenty.

Thence, to the Atlanta History Center, an impressive edifice. I went for the quilt show which was of personal interest, as my grandma taught me to quilt in the same tradition as these Georgia quilts. As soon as I get my back room cleared out I need to get out my quilting things and try and remember how to put together a quilt frame. The Atlanta history exhibit there was nicely done, and the '96 Olympics exhibit. I don't really care so much about the Olympics but it was a good exhibit. The gallery about money, snooze-o-rama, and I just passed right by the one about a golfer. I couldn't give a crap about golf, though I did note some very nice mahogany casework. I wish the weather hadn't been so crappy, or I could've visited the gardens, which I hear are very nice. I'll try and go back next time I'm in the ATL to see the grounds and outlying buildings.

I'm really about to give up on the High, though. Next trip, it's the Carlos at Emory for me, unless there's something at the High that I just cannot miss. Even then, I'm not going to bother with the permanent galleries again.

I did finally bring my mp3 player to a museum and discovered that it's much, much nicer to listen to Sufjan Stevens than to a bunch of people saying stupid shit about abstract art. Call me a snot, I just don't care: it greatly lessens my enjoyment of art to hear people saying dumb stuff all around me. I will never go to a museum again without my own personal soundtrack. I do not, however, plan to listen to Metallica:

http://www.theonion.com/content/from_print/area_man_takes_metallica

my new favorite political artwork

Hell, it ain't pretty, but 37 years later, the sentiment still holds:



Larry Rivers, America's No. 1 Problem, 1969
acrylic on shaped canvas sheathed in plastic with cut plastic affixed to silver metallic paper

Reproduced without any permission whatsoever.

[haters, before you get all hinky, Larry Rivers was a MALE ARTIST, so get a fucking grip already]

Hey, hetero!

I would totally love to see this in Mississippi:

Hey, hetero!

How is this legal??

Corpse for sale

So I'm flipping through the Autumn issue of Tribal Art magazine, and lo, what do I find but an ad for a mummy. Unwrapped, Nazca/Huari, c. 600-1000 AD. With "extreme cranial elongation," the result of head-wrapping during infancy and early childhood, practiced primarily by cultural elites. It's been on display since the late 19th century, so at least I know the mummy was dug out of its grave before UNESCO and other international laws prohibiting grave robbing. Price available upon request. Jamieson's website also has a mummy of an Egyptian child for sale, including x-rays so you can be sure you have a REAL mummy, not a fake.

But "legal" doesn't make it okay. I'm surprised it's STILL legal to trade in human remains. The dealer is in Canada, and I'm not familiar with Canadian law, but he is advertising in a magazine with a strong American readership. I've always gotten the heebie-jeebies at museums with human remains on display. The peat bog mummy at the British National Museum bothered me. The Metropolitan's show of late Egyptian mummy portraits, also disturbing. Depressing.

Displaying dead bodies, the bodies of people lovingly wrapped, interred, or mummified, seems wrong to me. Distasteful. Disrespectful. And wrapped up, deeply entwined, with the racist history of Western anthropology and ethnology. These bodies on display are almost always of people of color, not Europeans. They are Indians or Egyptians or Africans or South Americans, not whitey. They are someone else's grandmother, not yours.

There are people who think NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act) is bollocks, that museums should be entitled to keep what they have no matter what. But then I say to them: "Mainly, they just want their grandmother's bones back." This way of looking at things never fails to stop a whiner in their tracks.

They just want Grandmother's bones back.

Is that so hard to understand? So why are we as an industry - museum/collector/gallery - still dealing in human remains? I don't have answers. I don't mean to demonize this particular dealer because he's one of many in the trade dealing in sacred things, in human remains, in things stolen and looted from tribal cultures. Because some of these goods have been legitimately sold or traded by their rightful owners. Museums, anthropologists, researchers, all benefit from the study of material culture of ancient civilizations, whether mummies or pot sherds. But there comes a point where the line is crossed, and corpses on display is definitely on the other side of that line.

[that contemporary body art show where people donated their bodies to the artist to be flayed & artistically embalmed, that's a whole other story, because the participants were willing]

best part of my job:

Buying art with someone else's money! Woot. Granted, I don't get to keep it, but still: shopping for really cool stuff that someone else pays for is a whole crapload of cool.

I'm just sayin'. Kind of makes the board meetings, navy blue suits, and all that worth it.