Beautiful Title

I went tooling through the Luce Foundation Center yesterday and was overjoyed by the collection of folk/naive paintings, which as you probably know, I adore. I don't remember seeing the above image, but I found it on their website and loved the title: "And The Moon Became as Blood" It sounds as though Cormac McCarthy wrote it, but in fact Revelations did. I can see that I am going to have to steel it.

You can look at this image, among others, here.

Hals Cures What Ails Ye

I went to NGA yesterday to visit Franz Hals' paintings and to check out Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life cycle. Not because of his great painting cycle, but because of the captions that he wrote which were very...oh, what's the word...dripping with sentiment. I went to see how these texts - posted next to each of the four paintings- functioned with the paintings. There is also some audio that goes along with it, but I didn't take an audio guide.

I had two conflicting thoughts:

1. This could be a good model for the Flashpoint show, however the overtly poetical narrative isn't really what I am after. However, the fact that Cole provided these narratives collapses the experience of viewing and thinking about what you're viewing. I anticipated this, but haven't considered that textual information is prioritized over visual information for knowledge. The irony, for me, is that text is largely apprehended by looking. There are other factors at work at NGA that I won't be dealing with. For instance, the color of the octagonal gallery is very dark green; the frames are gilded, and for some reason this makes the paintings less present. They get swallowed by the room.

2. How is the experience I am going to make at Flashpoint any different from the experience one can have with the Cole paintings? What do I have to offer my little contemporary art chapel that will both critique this idea of superfluous context and offer a resolution/realization, or even some kind of new experience that won't immediately be likened to the Voyage of the Magical Canoe?

Re-Arson (Narrative Building)

"No one builds much of anything these days. We've lost the trust we had in the idea that building begets building, that that domino effect creates the energy that sustains us."

words via: Marc Fisher
image via: Web Gallery

I Just Had This Idea

"William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o'clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Shelton, a carriage driver. Lyons and Shelton were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Shelton's hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return. Lyons refused, and Shelton withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Shelton took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Shelton is also known as 'Stagger' Lee."

This is from the Globe-Democrat, St. Louis 1895 via Wikipedia. I think there is something in this for me.

Virilio Strikes Again

"...the entire history of Quattrocento perspectives is only ever a story of struggle, of the battle of geometers vying to make us forget the 'high' and 'low' by pushing the 'near' and 'far', a vanishing point that literally fascinated them even though our vision is actually determined by our weight and oriented by the pull of earth's gravity, by the classic distinction of zenith and nadir."

-Paul Virilio

Open Sky

Notes To Self

I have started collecting interesting little snippets from artnews related items. Here is a taste from last Tuesday by none other than Alex Ross: " ... rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs with a package of Twizzlers..."

Perhaps you will remember this tidbit from the other day? That was from a WSJ article about Wrastlin' in Seattle -which, come to think of it "Wrastlin' In Seattle" is a serviceable title.

I thought it might be good to keep a record of such things. Or at least it takes the pressure off of me trying to invent a narrative. As you can tell writing isn't what I was put on Earth to do.