War & Peace: Feint, Strike & Retaliate

Life in Death by Benji Williams.

I wonder what's going through his mind?
Maybe it's some wild, cartoon vision of the storming of Normandy on D-Day.


Works by Leslie Ditto:
Similar Sorrows and Bullets and Blood.

Cavalry Saber by Sid Watters.

Our photographer is quite a tall girl.
See that camera angle? She simply towers over the masses...


Also by Benji Williams:
Tank Flowered and Parade.

You were fooled: life doesn't happen at Atlantic Station...

In the field of strategy, there's a maneuver called "feinting." It causes confusion, suspense, and ultimately, surprise. An exceptionally useful technique...

**Apologees for the recent Ghostmap delays.**
Expect reviews in the very near future.

...
Captions in blue = courtesy of Christ Warner @ Alcove Gallery.
Captions in red = photography by Kristin Quackenbush.

* ~ *

Fay, Fay! * - * Fay, Fay!

Concentration by Ron Balser.

Bench sculpture by Ron Balser.

Comparative History by Christopher Parrott.




Assorted photos by Arno Minkkinen.

* - *

Art Books & Nonfiction: Suggestions?

I haven't read these books...
Should I?

Various works of nonfiction on the visual arts, intellectual property, piracy, and the "politics of culture" in general.

I don't read many books that are newer than 20 years old, and I wonder if I'm missing out. See, a lot of people are really into reading the "latest political bestseller" – stuff written by radio personalities or sensational polemics like God is Not Great. (I made the mistake of reading The FairTax Book. It was terrible. It's reassuring to know that there are even some Republicans in this state who, in reasoned terms, take issue with the Boortz plan.)

Although I've highly enjoyed books like Jon Stuart's Naked Pictures of Famous People, I haven't found many that could hold my attention. But I suppose I shouldn't give up.

Above: Culture Critic Susan Sontag's text on photography (2001) is the second oldest in the cluster, clocking at 10 years "younger" than Imagined Communities (1991). I've never read her before, but she's been mentioned on NPR several times. The book, although its subject is an intensely visual phenomenon, contains no illustrations. The Guardian cites it as evidence of her "immense [and perhaps audacious] self-confidence..."


Books published by Taschen are awesome.

Occasionally, you'll find these bastards on the Barnes & Noble bargain table. To appropriate from our dear friend, Jonathan... it's a $teal!

Any other good suggestions on art books? Any particular artists you'd recommend? I don't own any books on photography whatsoever. This is a problem...

Sometimes I just need a good clean image; the writing isn't very important in that case. With books, it seems like a sort of inverse relationship - as the images improve, the writing gets smaller. And worse. Although Susan Sontag is certainly one extreme of the sliding scale, I'd like to think there's a way to harmonize good writing with a healthy amount of graphics.

Technology helps.


Graphic novels: New Avengers and Doom Patrol;
Nonfiction: Batman and Philosphy: The Dark Knight of the Soul

Someone recently made the suggestion that I'm a "book snob." Although I am very picky and although I think the comment was intended as a compliment, I just wanted to let everyone know:

Comic Books also = Awesome.

A is the End of A and She's Got a Gun by local Atlanta artists Ben "Bean" Worley and Nancy Floyd

Does anyone have any other suggestions besides what I've posted here - similar or radically different? I'd like to try my hand at a few book reviews this summer... Preferably newer titles - focused on art history, pop culture, theory, etc.

Of course, there's always a few 'zines popping up by various other dear friends...

**

Friday Shenanigans: Guns, Games & God...

Photos by Nancy Floyd - from She's Got a Gun. Floyd, who showed a selection of her gun series at Solomon Projects, received a glowing review from the late Felicia Feaster. The qualifiers for Olympic rifle competition are incredibly rigorous. Above: this young competitor - no more than 19 years old - is "meditating" between shots. The idea, says Floyd, is that if you can actually lower your heart rate, your accuracy will improve.




Charlton Heston, recently deceased.

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. - Psalm 23

A religious man, Heston was a champion of the Faith. Despite his increasing age, he proved to be as mighty in American politics as he was on the silver screen. Naturally, he found no contradiction in trading one phallic instrument for another. All for the glory of Jeezus.


And lookey here... it's a Lego Moses!! From a wonderful webcomic devoted to the truthful and accurate retelling of the Bible. With Legos.


Also recently deceased: Gary Gygax, cofounder of the pop culture phenomenon, Dungeons & Dragons. America's most formidable secret agent, Vin Diesel, explains just why D&D is so freaking cool.






Screen shots from the recently released Grand Theft Auto 4. The game sold over 6 million copies in its first week. But the word on the street is... not everyone likes it. The gaming company, Take-Two Interactive, has already filed a lawsuit against the activist and Florida attorney, Jack Thompson. Good times.

(Has anyone played this game? I've been away from games - and the TV - for a long time...)

Above: it's still incredibly fashionable these days - regardless of how "thug" one may be - to sport tattoos of Japanese or Chinese symbols. This clever fellow has marked himself with the character for "self." This tattoo - I suppose - was chosen just in case he gets "the shiv" in the middle of the night and can no longer recognize the man standing in the mirror...

Happy weekend! So long luvs. ::: )

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Truebadoor: Helpless, naked, piping loud

Truebadoor, performance by Allison Rentz. (Images courtesy of Proclaim It Lost. You can read Ben's reaction here.) As Allison transformed herself into her interpretation of a modern-age troubadour, she used black Sharpie to draw designs on her skin.¹

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
- William Blake, "Infant Sorrow" from Songs of Experience

I arrived at last month's Castleberry art stroll with fairly high expectations. The formula in my brain looked something like this: Allison Rentz + Garage Projects = delightfully Surrealist performance art madness. Yet unfortunately – and I say it with genuine regret – Truebadoor was a disappointment. Part performance, part sculptural installation, and part drawing exhibition,² the mission of the show remained unclear. What happened?

Truebadoor installation at large. I was (pleasantly) surprised to read Cinque Hicks' reaction to the show; although we were apparently in the same room, our minds were in entirely different solar systems. His interpretation cites the aesthetics of Southern Gothic as well as, amazingly, death metal album covers. Wow.³

Upon entering Garage Projects’ modest exhibition space, the visitor was confronted by a large, biomorphic mass of chains (above and below), twisted aluminum, and great sheets of stretched plastic. The installation created several organic planes of negative space set at different angles and degrees visibility. Allison navigated through these various spaces, either at a distance or sometimes at less than an arm’s length from “the audience.” Her performance, while not exactly dance and nothing at all like stage theatre, was inspired although haphazardly executed.

Her instrument of choice – while it certainly looked great – may have been the critical point of sabotage. In another clever use of recyclables, Allison transformed a two-liter bottle into a bright red, dreamworld equivalent of a troubadour’s flute. This one, however, was designed to muffle the human voice rather than magnify it. Unfortunately, it did its job a little too well. Truebadoor – in a show that, with its name, paid homage to the traveling poets of 12th century Europe, it’s a bit disheartening when you can’t hear the performer.

And trust me – we really wanted to hear! It must have been a conspiracy of accidents: equipment malfunction coupled with the nonexistent acoustics of the room and the distracting, ambient roar of Atlanta nightlife. As the eponymous garage door of Garage Projects yawned open onto Peter’s Street, city noise and foot traffic passed freely into and out of the art space.

In fact, it was the show's architectural aspect – both in terms of Garage Projects and as manifested by the artist’s created environment – that amplified the difficulty of the performance. Allow me to use the concept of the fourth wall. If a stage director wants to "break the fourth wall" – to penetrate the audience's physical comfort zone – the director must develop strategies and stage notes well in advance.

But in performances like Truebadoor, the situation is completely reversed. There simply was no fourth wall, and although they had no cognizance of the fact, gallery visitors had little to discourage them from walking into or through the performance area. When I look at our photos, taken from within that womb-like spider’s nest of a space, it’s hard not to imagine the artist’s terror: What the hell am I doing here? Do these people understand at all?

Some sort of "device." Perhaps this is like that other device installed closer to the head of the room. Allison said it was some sort of laundry pulley mechanism, and she's used it as a kind of personal symbol in other installations.

Untitled, another "naïve" image suggestive of some major themes: maternity, being born, giving birth, etc. During the performance, I noticed that Allison would periodically stop to gaze toward this image for a few seconds before returning to her routine. She said that she was "listening" to the painting. for inspiration. It doesn't sound crazy to me; I seriously admire her candor. Plus I'm still a fan of concepts like psychic automatism and visual free association. Those crazy Surrealists!

It's an important fact that artists who turn to performance don’t have the same training as stage actors; the difficulty of Truebadoor certainly earns my respect. But all artists (and writers) have to develop a certain relationship to fear – a type self-knowledge that we master in order to effectively engage the public with our various dreams and cultural interrogations.

So with that said, I'd like to offer some words of encouragement. Though it's an often recited 20th century cliché (as in the attributed "shamanism" of Jackson Pollock, Joseph Beuys, or Ana Mendieta) I'll say it anyway: if you really have a vision - whether it's a troubadour or whatever form this vision takes - we, the public, need our artists to Become It.

Become our Troubadour, our Shaman

piping loud / Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Oh, and don't forget to laugh. : )

--

¹ On the use of Sharpie: Although it seemed a bit unprofessional, somehow it added an unexpected aesthetic effect. Instead of simply covering or decorating her body, it actually emphasized the unclothed, and therefore vulnerable, quality of her skin. Although no one likes to be reduced to a stereotype, she seemed to incarnate the heroics of "struggling artist." (I mean that as a compliment.)
Otherwise, I didn't really like the use of Sharpie on plastic and on metal. I'm certainly no expert on sculpture, but maybe something else would have been better. Nothing against Sharpies; Mike Germon has mentioned a plan for a show of images created with nothing else. I wonder if he still wants to do it.
² On the drawings: sorry, I thought the drawings in Truebadoor had little value other than as thematic ornaments of the larger installation. Call it a personal fault of mine, but something really turns me off when I see drawings displayed in plastic sleeves. (Maybe I just need a couple more years to outgrow my roots as a custom framer…) I wonder if Allison has considered teaming up with a photographer for her 2-D images.
³ Meanwhile, over in my metaphorical solar system, the planets were revolving around singer Björk and The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney. (Not to mention
Hugo Ball's concept of gesamtkunstwerk and the feminist performance tradition of Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann) If you want to know more, you should buy me a drink.
Also, on death metal: The Nov./Dec. issue of Art Papers ran a cover story on this same subject. They called the article "Crypto Logo Jihad: Black Metal and the Aesthetics of Evil," and the cover image is an appropriation of the black-and-white cosmetics made famous by Kiss. I wasn't sure if it was a sign of progress or of decadence... until I read the article. It's fascinating and a little wild: discussions of murder, encryption technology, and the dialectics of "ruthless individualism" and "collective empowerment." I guess what interests me the most about Art Papers is when they break what appears to be their own sense of taste...

**

Being & Time (& Time)

Gather It by Stephanie Dowda

Somewhere on the top floor of Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, there hangs a certain photo. Or, rather, there are four photos – individually framed in an attractively simple, blond wood – which, collectively, form the shape of a Tetris block. (You know the one: it looked like a plus sign with the bottom chopped off, and it rained down endlessly when what you really needed was “The Daddy Stick.”)

The title of this piece is Gather It (above). At once familiar and alienating, the leftmost image throws us into the turf, where, as we move to the right, we brace ourselves at the edge of an earthen crevice, grasping hold with a single right hand – a hand which, shown in the image directly above, actually belongs to our denim-clad companion. The unnamed figure seems to share our confusion: Gather It? What precisely are we supposed to “Gather?” What is this mysterious “It?”

Yet the title sheds little illumination on the photos’ meaning. Perhaps Prof. Eco can provide a bit of wisdom:

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations… A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them.
- Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose

Gather It, Persist, Rehearsal, etc.: there’s nothing flashy or overtly intellectual about Stephanie Dowda’s titles. But in the case of her polyptych series, Time & Time, I think Stephanie’s word choices are excellent.

Consider Gather It as a primary example. Each image shows the scene from a different perspective. The rightmost frame highlights the shadows of autumn, crawling like dark centipedes over a dried-up creek. Yet the subject of attention, and its pathos, changes completely when we look back at the girl crouching at the creek’s edge. The goal, it seems, is a visual deconstruction of lived experience. And the title’s misdirection aids in this process of confusing, and thereby renewing, the meaning of the work.

“So, Stephanie,” I asked at last Thursday’s opening, “would you be willing to split up the set? What would you charge for an individual piece?” I asked only partly in jest, since, hey – we’re all a little poor, right?

Something in Stephanie’s brain clicked, and she smiled – without any sense of irony or ill will – and responded confidently: “No.” She continued, “There’s something challenging about [triptychs and arrays]. A lot of people think, ‘Is it just one picture? Why is it split up?’ That’s how I shot the photos, so – sorry – that’s how they’ll be sold.”

Touché indeed. I was impressed.

Rehearsal (image courtesy of Local Ephemera) is another photo set that contradicts its title. Whereas the name suggests some sort of activity, the images instead convey a sense of repose, an almost intoxicated calm. An incredible red, like in red velvet cake or lipstick, complements shades of white and the vivid textures of fabric.

What is it a picture of, you ask? A man reclining on a couch. But as in the other arrays, Rehearsal is fragmented into a rigorous gestalt of angles and closeups. The effect approaches dizziness. Although Stephanie retains the grid structure for its installation, the layout is a little more aggressive, recalling the face of a mixed-up Rubik’s cube rather than an ordered, predictable chessboard.

As a whole, Time & Time gravitates toward scenery rather than shots of people. Although the bottom-right quarter of Persist (below) is a self-portrait, Stephanie uses cropping and strategically oblique poses to obfuscate the identity of her human subjects. The piece is really about color: salmon and turquoise and light shades of beige. Nothing in the show really struck me as what you’d traditionally call “portraiture.”

Of course, we all “learned” these concepts back in Printmaking 101. The balance and unity of formal elements: color, shade, and movement. The trouble is – we tend to forget. After visiting so many shows dedicated to the fun vulgarity of D.I.Y. or to the celebration of Atlanta Lowbrow, it’s refreshing to encounter a young artist with a firm command of the basics.

* * *

Songs of Experience? Banks, Dowda & Rentz...

Persist by Stephanie Dowda
(Courtesy of Stephanie Dowda, also known as the female half of Click Clique)

Truebadoor, installation and drawings by Allison Rentz
(Exhibition photos by Ben Grad)

Abby Banks, photography from the Punk House book project
(Also c/o Ben Grad)

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Rematch @ Eyedrum: Tonight

As a final addendum to the last post: Michi extends a warm, last-minute invitation for a "Rematch" event at the Eyedrum tonight. I'm not sure how many people could make it for the Comfort Kills opening, but this is the time to make it up. Definitely worth taking the folks.

On a related note: it may be seem foolish to use concepts like "earned media" when we're talking about a blog, but it is something I worry about. I try not to write about the same subject twice in a month. Sometimes you just have to break your own rules. My hesitance to write another post about Art Papers, on the other hand, was proven valid: almost every single blogger out here had something to say about those Canogar talks.

It makes you wonder if one well-timed tomahawk missile could
simply wipe us all out and, for a whole generation, cripple the development of some unknown, "critical" Atlanta arts movement. (We're a fairly predictable lot...)

:::)

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Comfort Kills: I will

deliver the Explosion. Bomaye!!!

Fight!!! - from Michi's solo show at Eyedrum. (Photos by Ben Grad)

Yesterday, I decided to send Michi a little text message during my lunch break:

can you explain "Fight! Bomaye!" i have no freaking idea...

I never expected what I got in return. I was simply curious about the Eyedrum installation, and I still couldn't make sense of some of Michi's themes. It was like a sudden deluge of holy mana - like a soothing shower amid the desert of normal, workaday life:

Bomaye is african for kill him made famous by africans when ali fought foreman for my metaphor fight its a chant for layers and layers of thought the v

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arious obsticals in our lives so jeremy bomaye his issues or your opponent and that opponent could be spiritual physical or a say an idea maybe a feelin

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g of doubt its a motivating tool like i think i can

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Brilliant! It was, unmistakably, the coolest text message I've ever seen. In retrospect, I don't recommend doing interviews via text message; I admit, it was sort of irresponsible and, for that matter, just a little cruel. (Imagine holding a cell phone and typing all those letters...) I had no intention of causing Michi to write such a detailed response.

One Wit The Win

Comfort Kills Pursuit: a show concept centered around the mythology of Muhammad Ali and that particular era of Civil Rights. The paintings address a theme of catharsis, reflecting the personal struggles of one individual as well as the fight waged by a whole generation of Americans (not to mention a race of people).

It reminds me of that Blue Scholars track, "The Long March." (Please click on this link; it takes you to the audio. At just over two minutes' length, the song is a fun, extended allusion to the early days of Mao Zedong). Another fun Blues Scholars song, one called "Blink," has some clever lyrics about our now legendary Cassius Clay:

If it happens god damn it, if I get drafted today
I swear to God, Jah, Allah and Yahweh
I’ll toss the letter away and I’ll pull a Cassius Clay,
In the military
Minorities comprise the majority, Surprised? are you kidding me?
The lies rely on brown bodies to fight for white puppet masters
I cannot fathom how the caged bird drinks
Until he thinks he is free

Triptych, detail below.

You can't exactly see in the detail, but the dripping tar pools onto a stack of quilts, where a little wooden figurine drowns in a shallow puddle of black. This tiny, cartoonish man might actually represent a self-portrait. I'm not sure what to make of the symbolism, but several of the pieces include these sort of miniature doppelgängers. The one in One Wit The Win is slightly transparent, using the color of wood as flesh and, perhaps, serving as a Caucasian "self."

Another piece, one marked Glory Glory, is similar to the figurine used underneath Michi's triptych. "Dolled up" in the style of a tar baby, it clutches a boll of cotton as if it were an Easter flower. (The same cotton stalk appears in One Wit The Win.) I'll be watching the TindelMichi blog for, hopefully, an official artist statement.

Fight!!!, detail.

Artist as black Nietzche Michi beyond good & evil [sic]: some of Michi's typical word-play shenanigans.

Michi Bomaye!! and detail.

Thrill is to make it up, the rules I break
got me a place Up on the Radar

A coworker pointed out to me that this piece, with its bolls of cotton and suspension-style installation, sort of resemble a cotton scale. Cotton scales were used to determine if a laborer (the paid variety and otherwise...) had fulfilled his or her cotton-picking quota for the day. Fascinating.

Safe

Everlast

These two entries illustrated what I understand is Michi's abstractionist style. The diamond shapes suggest the patterns of a folk art quilt. That Everlast bag is pretty impressive.

Something about the Eyedrum inspires wacky creativity. This is a page from my "notes" on Sunday. Part diagram, part (crappy) conceptual drawing... maybe you could call it a "ghostmap?"

And this little guy was the "door greeter" for the gallery space. Nice! Real is a mother fucker, isn't it?

Comfort Kills Pursuit: Fight! - show continues at Eyedrum through April 26.

* * *

Comfort Kills: Details

Some (delayed) notes on

the March-April issue of Art Papers:

Speechless Grey Horse by Berlinde de Bruyckere
(From "Views of Pain" at the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin)

Sylvie Fortin devotes a couple paragraphs in her masthead introduction to the tornado that hit Atlanta in March:

It was too early for tornado season, said meteorologists who, bolstered by statistics, added to the confusion. And so, despite their first-hand experience and the spectacle broadcast on television, victims and viewers had to await confirmation from the authorities. It seemed they were the ones empowered to define what many had experienced... Too early for tornadoes, too late for snow - so much meteorological excess in two days.

She then used the weather-talk to segue into a brief discussion of global warming and, as per usual, allusions to the apparently ubiquitous "sweeping discursive shifts" in visual culture.

Ah, yes. See 'em every day.

Although I've failed to locate a reference on the internet, there was a curious sign posted at the Art Papers Auction back in February. It read something like this:

ART PAPERS - From Cairo to Cabbagetown.

I shook my head, "That'll never happen!" But now it's April, and here's Sylvie, proving me wrong. Writing about a local issue, she addressed an event that actually had something to do with Cabbagetown and other Atlanta neighborhoods, although an event that had destructive consequences. I was amazed.

(At the same time, I wondered if we would've gotten so much press if there wasn't a basketball game that night. "Oh no - God just tore a hole in the Georgia Dome...!" Yahweh always did have a strange sense of humor.)

So, what I'm trying to say is that I really liked this issue of Art Papers. Below, I posted a few images from shows discussed in the magazine, including reviews of Jiha Moon, an Atlanta artist, and The American War exhibition that toured at the Atlanta Contemporary.

Although it wasn't exactly a flashy show, The American War was still pretty fascinating. The artist, Harrell Fletcher, completely re-appropriated images that were originally on display at a Vietnamese exhibit at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. The museum's original name was the Museum of American War Crimes. (In Vietnam, they refer to the conflict as "The American War;" I don't think anyone there would understand why some Americans just call it "'Nam.") The new display was, essentially, an exhibit of an exhibit, leaving the Vietnamese picture captions and somewhat naive English translations intact.

The image above, on the other hand, comes from the Schmerz/Pain exhibition in Berlin. The show was split up into thematic sections: "Views of Pain," "The Ecstacy of Pain," "The Time of Pain," and "The Expression of Pain." At this point it's impossible to avoid redundancy; you've probably intuited that "schmerz" is the German word for "pain." But it's more than a concept. The curators made some bold decisions as to installation and juxtaposition of various art objects.

The somewhat horrifying Speechless Grey Horse, a "sculpture" that incorporates real horse skin, is placed in the same room as Francis Bacon's Crucifixion (you can see the bastard in the far background) along with a shelved display of medical instruments and jarred specimens. They played Bach's St. Matthew Passion as background music. (I have no idea what that sounds like, but right now I'm imagining an orchestral horror movie soundtrack. ...Some help from you music people?)

But in terms of writing, I was really surprised by Gean Moreno's review of Kader Attia's installation project out in Boston. It's not easy to see at a glance, but this is very clever, negative review. I don't have the energy to really explain it fully at the moment. Here's a basic summary: just because a body of artwork 1) claims inspiration from Chinese philosophy, 2) is inspired also by the poor, difficult conditions of immigrant life, and 3) is executed by an artist from Paris, does not make it good art. It's a much more condensed, and perhaps more crudely iconoclastic, argument than Moreno, but I think it works.

Here are his words:

The installation reeks of the symbolic orphanage, the teen-movie set for the repressed, that suburbia has always been.

He's essentially saying that, in the pursuit of egalitarianism and urbane "diversity," the folks over there in Boston have almost completely erased what authentic content the exhibition could have had. Just look at this thing. WTF?!

**

So, good reading in general. Although the train hasn't quite made it to Cabbagetown all the way from Cairo, we are making progress. Art Papers is forum for trading ideas. It's just that, for me, the emphasis is a bit heavy on importation. I want to think about the future: production, dissemination, and, ultimately, exportation.

And if you allow me to paraphrase a statement by a certain writer for Creative Loafing: Art Papers looks like it was written by English professors for reading by other English professors. (Just don't quote me. Or her.) I don't exactly agree with that statement; the writing is extremely academic, but it's not universally dry, or bad, for that matter. I like it.

I mean, they let one of their reviewers get away with this opening sentence: "Much art is funny, though rarely LOL." Seriously, that's the first line!

Again, WTF!?

**

Kader Attia, Jiha Moon... a Suffocating Bird

Rhetoric Channel by Jiha Moon of Atlanta

The American War: an image of water torture in Vietnam
(From the exhibit at the Atlanta Contemporary late last year)

Robyn O'Neil, The End

Works by Kader Attia: Childhood #1 and views of an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston

Cairo, Egypt (known as Al-Qāhirah in Arabic). You can see the Cairo Opera House near the center of Gezira Island, which, I am told, is actually a good distance away from Cabbagetown. Apparently, pyramids have little to do with Cairo these days.

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Cost of Enlightenment?

Above: Dainichi Nyorai, detail
Attributed to master sculptor Unkei (11th century)

Last week, Christie’s auction house sold this Buddhist statue for $12.8 million. Once you include the related fees, the sale was worth over $14 million, making it the most expensive purchase of Japanese art in history. It simply boggles the mind. How do you justify that kind of price tag?

You can check out photos and a pretty fascinating audio link on the Christie's website. When a group of scholars examined the statue using x-rays, they found three devotional objects sealed inside the Buddha's wooden body. The relics have remained intact after some 800 years.

The figure represents Dainichi Nyorai (大日如来), the chief deity of the Shingon sect of Japan. Dainichi is also known as Vairocana or the "Great Shining Buddha." Although it makes little sense, the deity is also associated with the Sanskrit letter "A." Maybe it helps to frame the idea in terms of the West. Instead of saying "I am the Alpha and the Omega," this is the god that says:

I am the Alpha, here becoming the Alpha once again.

Here, you can see Dainichi's hands forming the mudra usually identified as the "Wisdom Fist." (Sounds freaking awesome to me...) Of course, the translation may seem a little strange; "Wisdom Fist" sounds like it belongs in a video game rather than in a sacred text. But the intention is highly serious. Unkei is the most well-known sculptor of the Kamakura period. He's responsible for several gorgeous statues at Todaiji temple located in Nara.

The story cuts through a bizarre cross section of issues: religion and history, globalization, and the decline of the American dollar. Was there a more enlightened use of that money? I'm sure that they could use some help in Tibet, where the death count has climbed to 130 according to some sources.

**

Dainichi Nyorai

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Details: Br'er

Change Come (close-up)

Stay Cool Br’er (close-up)

Ghee from India (super-close-up)

This is the last weekend to catch Br'er, a collaborative show by Michi and Dosa Kim over at Beep Beep Gallery. Photos courtesy of Denys, also known as "Kneesee." You can check her original Br'er post and Br'er preview on Kneesee's blog.

Below: On opening night, a live storyteller performed renditions of the old Br'er Rabbit stories. She periodically ripped audience members into the scene to play various Br'er characters. And it was a riot! I want to see more events as authentic and inspired as that one.

Images from Wildpeaches.

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Diachrony: Narratives (and the lack thereof)

Br'er Rabbit illustrations, 1881 and 1994.

Early and late Kandinsky.

Early and late Pollock.

El Greco and Basquiat.


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