Luv Beer

For the weekend: Green's Package on Ponce has Duck-Rabbit! It goes on sale starting today. Duck-Rabbit is a high grav craft beer from North Carolina. It's not one of those fancy Belgian brews, but their porter is delicious. Yes!

Luv on Valentine's.

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TRANSactions

“When I went into advertising, I wanted to airbrush naked people on ice for a whiskey commercial, but they wouldn’t let me do that.” - Vik Muniz¹

Marble sculptures, porcelain ornaments from Napoleon’s court, some vaginal flowers by Georgia O’Keefe: that’s what I expected when I walked into the High Museum this week. Although the museum’s current headliner is an exhibition dedicated to O’Keefe and several of her female contemporaries, don’t be fooled. There’s a wholly different reason to drop by the High.

TRANSactions is a diverse cross section of contemporary work from Latin America and by Latino artists living in the U.S. The Last Supper (above) is a chromogenic print of Vik Muniz’s original. He made it out of melted chocolate and wire. Irreverent and yet so exquisite, somehow the parody still shines with a kind of warm, informal piety. Muniz has a knack for unorthodox materials. He even made a chocolate Jackson Pollock.

Video, sculpture, paint… the types of media represented ran the gamut. Gabriel Kuri’s Untitled is a tapestry fashioned in the image of a Wal-Mart receipt from Mexico. It’s a bit mesmerizing. Over nine feet tall and woven by hand, the piece painstakingly documents globalization in progress. A receipt - one of today’s most mundane, disposable items. Somehow the machine process has turned in reverse: human hands mimic the product of a computer.

If for no other reason, TRANSactions worth a visit to pay homage to Ana Mendieta. Mendieta fell to her death in 1984, under curious circumstances. Her seaside compositions, spattered occasionally with a volcanic, sanguine red, highlight the invisibility that women can feel in society. The image is also a tribute to the Minoan priestess.

For such an institutional venue, I was pretty satisfied. TRANSactions is definitely one of the better shows that’s come through the High.

Both shows, TRANSactions and Georgia O'Keefe and the Women of Stieglitz Circle, run from Feb 9 to May 4.

¹From a hilarious artist talk by Muniz posted here. Just wait through the foolish advertisements; the guy is pretty smart.

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TRANSactions, etc.

Above:
Hugo Crosthwaite (a show flyer)
Ana Mendieta
Gabriel Kuri
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Hugo Crosthwaite

The two panoramic paintings above are actually very large. The one by Ovalle, called Paternity Test, is based on a DNA scan.

Also at the High, Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. The show includes Pamela Coleman Smith, who illustrated the original Rider-Waite Tarot. (Some nifty thumbnails here. Java script is magic.) The High doesn't have her Tarot paintings, but there's a display case that seems to draw a lot of attention from middle aged hippie women. I also noticed that neither exhibit had an audio tour. Maybe later in the month?

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Art Papers Auction: Locals?

Above:
Robert Sherer
John Folsom
Danny Campbell
Kate Crosby
Matt Haffner
Allison Rentz

Artists with whom I have little to no familiarity - all billed as Atlanta artists at the auction. I've got to admit, Sherer's Daddy's Little Fascist freaking cracks me up. And the next to last piece, the graffiti photo by Haffner, was apparently part of some installation?

If you've heard anything, care to clue me in?

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Art Papers Auction

Mason Murer last Saturday. As I walked by this painting, a drunken lady cornered me with about 8 minutes' worth of comments. She looked like she could have been someone's trophy wife 10 years ago. I'm sure she had good intentions - a nice gal, really. I said the piece reminded me of Henry Darger's Vivian girls. Of course, Darger's girls had penises...

Jennifer Jones schmoozing with other Atlanta artists and being a social butterfly in general. I couldn't stop laughing. This cat here was pretty jolly. More fun pics on Jennifer's blog. As usual, I lacked the fashion sense of most of the males in the room. For better or worse.

I wonder what this would have been like hanging at Beep Beep? Subverted expectations, societal norms, the idea of a "boy toy." True, it's a little obvious. I was thinking about Local Ephemera's comments last week. In what ways can we be critical about pop culture in addition to celebrating it?

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The auction had a staggering variety of works: a couple of interesting abstracts, a lot of sleek photos, and a handful of works by better-known locals. Mason Murer is enormous after all. But it was just that deliberate sense of "quantity" that really took hold. The quality wasn't bad, but I wasn't really floored by anything I could see through the crowd. On the other hand, the energy in the room stayed high as auctions were closing left and right.

I'd go again.

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If you haven't voted yet,

I promise the internet can wait. Seriously.

I'm abstaining from checking primary coverage until the official throw down tonight. In local political news, on the other hand, there may be a bipartisan coup this week to unseat the GA Speaker of the House, Glenn Richardson.

A true egomaniac, Richardson has turned the statehouse into a high school drama:

- In 2008, Richardson threw out Peachcare, a health plan for kids, based on ridiculous (and false) arguments;
- He had an affair with a lobbyist from Atlanta Gas Light
- He stalled the legislature for days over a senseless bull match with the Governor, a fellow Republican (they did this two years in a row); and
- He wants to pass a suspicious sales tax sleight-of-hand called the GREAT Plan. (No joke. That's the legal name, caps and all.)

Below: a spoof image from Creative Loafing's "10 Plagues of Georgia"

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Sounds like Johnny Cash; Looks like...?

Art.
Carol Ashley, Mr. Hooper, Jason Limon, & Shaunna Peterson.
Opens at Alcove this Friday night.

Music.
Folsom Prison Paul.
Nashville vibes. Sponsored by Stomp and Stammer.

New website... New art? We shall see.

(Is anyone going to that "ArtWino" thing at Foundation? You have to bring a bottle of wine to get in, though they never said what type of wine... I wonder if it'll work.)

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By the by: If you're

registered to vote in Georgia, you can actually vote for the presidential primary THIS WEEK. You don't have to wait for that "Super Tuesday" foolishness. Some advance poll locations are open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. If you've moved around since you last voted or if you have chronic memory loss like your's truly, you can check your GA voter registration status here.

More Love for Beep Beep

As a late New Year's resolution, I'm going to avoid making awkward comments at galleries. Beep Beep was thoughtful enough to send me a holiday card this winter. Given the opportunity this Saturday, I totally botched a simple "Thank You."

Plus, it didn't help that one of my companions, a couch-surfing Frenchman in a pirate hat, wasn't being a great example of European manners. I mean, his idea of a handshake - making to choke slam one of the gallery owners - was pretty hilarious. But the timing wasn't especially great. (I didn't think he had that much to drink.)

Still, Mark was a good sport through it all. Southern hospitality withstood the insults of the Old World. In another time, it might have been cause for pistols or rapiers...

At any rate, I really did appreciate the card. Best of luck guys.

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Death's Head

Review - "Skull Fuck 2" at East Side Lounge
(Above: Fly Away by Charlie Owens)

Saturday night. As a rare Atlanta snow melted into oblivion over Flat Shoals Ave, I ducked into the East Side Lounge. The title of the night’s art show is "Skull Fuck 2." I expected the worst, already my mind’s eye recalling the bad horror movies of yesteryear. "Ah," I thought to myself, "yet another crawl through some dark alley of Atlanta Lowbrow."

Sure enough, the narrow bar was transformed into a bazaar of skull-themed paintings. Skull mirrors, skulls with chicks, and skulls patterned in tan and magenta, à la Warhol's Marylyn Monroe. But it wasn't quite the dive bar I had expected. Just a little on the posh side, the place was surprisingly bright; at least you could see the paintings over and between the heads of late night regulars.

Executed in his usual style, Charlie Owens’ entries dominated the first floor. Although there’s nothing particularly new about Fly Away (above), the aggressive colors and smooth finish stood out from the crowd. The lines on Charlie’s cartoon ghosts, part flesh but mostly bone, are whimsical yet confidant. What really electrifies this painting, though, is the intricate layering of elements, ephemeral butterflies dancing over interlocking fleur de li. I couldn’t stop staring at those blues and cloudbursts of gold dust.

Yet as I nudged through crowded elbows and dangling handbags, I felt a lingering déjà vu. Yes, there is something universal about skull pictures: most every boy grows up scribbling skulls or robots or medieval weapons into the margins of their math homework. I admire the populism, but why is it so predictable?

Upstairs, pieces by Jonathan Callicutt caused me to take a second look. His horizontals look like banknotes¹ from some unknown empire: birds of peace crossed with militaristic five-pointed stars. A message written in cursive: “Poor uneducated people will be made noble in the fire.” Although lacking the graphic punch of Charlie Owens, the collision of cryptic text and unlikely symbols approaches meaning. Something sublime lurks behind the rough, working class exterior.

It begs the question: how do you get mileage out of repetition and cliché? Skulls - a motif with such an ancient history in the medieval vanitas, Aztec rituals², and the death’s head of the German S.S. – are more likely today to make us think of Pirates of the Caribbean. Looking at some of Jonathan’s other work, there’s something much more mysterious about his use of Michelangelo’s Pieta and statue of Moses. And those kabuki demon masks, which are said to combine a face of intense anger with one of sadness, are especially haunting.

“Skull Fuck 2” delivered what it promised, an informal tribute to the skinless human face. I was just hoping for a little more.

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¹It's a strange fact that some the world's first paper currency wasn't for the living. It was for the dead.
²Books by George Bataille, Erotism and The Accursed Share, have some hypnotic descriptions of death traditions in colonial Aztec culture and medieval art.

Jonathan Callicutt

False February: Public Space

(Above: conceptual drawings and schematics for a proposed Beltline property by Architect Mary Clare DeReull)

Deconform is gearing up for a February release under a new publication name: False Magazine. The intention is to open up a dialog about the use of public space and the impact of development schemes on our way of life.

Do eminent domain laws really serve the public good? What constitutes a greater "blight on the community" - a neglected townhouse or the ugly subdivision that gets built on top of it? How can we think constructively about new construction?

More updates soon.

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Reconstructing Atlanta: Beltline

Inman Park, Huff Road, the Vulcan Quarry... the photos below show wildly different areas of Atlanta, each spot located somewhere in the proposed Beltline loop. The Beltline web gallery allows you to click on a different Atlanta neighborhood, navigate via Google map, and check out shots submitted by volunteer photographers. They still need images from a lot of uncovered neighborhoods.

All part of the Reconstructing Atlanta series put on by GSU and the Fulton County Arts Council.

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Beltline Photos

Kinetic Electric

Kinetic Electric is precisely what it appears to be: a self-produced effort by an untested yet talented sequential artist. Saint, also known as Alan Hemphill, premiered his graphic novel at MINT Gallery last Saturday. Rendered in pen and brushed in savage, sometimes oppressive sumi ink, Saint's science fiction brainchild is promising but a little rough around the edges.

Flipping through its 32 pamphlet-sized pages, the book tells the story of a punk rock chick who wants to play God. Before biking out to market to buy robot parts, the unnamed girl narrates, "I will gyrate to the orgasmic throbs of Mary Shelly.” Bursting at the seams with raw energy, statements like that characterize the project as a whole. Kinetic Electric’s enthusiasm helps forgive its shortcomings.

The world Saint envisions is, in his words, an “Orwellian wet dream.” The flavor is pure cyberpunk, borrowing imagery from The Matrix and comic titles like Ghost in the Shell or Transmetropolitan. The future is dirty. Technology thrives like an ambiguous cancer, and everyone is still in search of their own personal gods, their next “big fix.” Additions like advertisements in Hindi script and shots of Buddhist monks with neural implants are a nice touch. Saint comments that the urban decay was also inspired by life experience, living homeless on the streets of New York.

Our would-be Mary Shelly covers herself with "holo-film tattoo spray." The substance turns her skin into a living television screen (using nanotechnology perhaps?). The convention allows Saint to decorate his lead girl with a different exotic tattoo in every panel. The reader is left wanting a little more exposition about gadgets like “holo-film” and the mysterious “uncertainty engine."

And you have to wonder: “Why the hell is she building this robot?” The answer is, it seems, out of sheer boredom. The twist is that technology is so common almost anyone can scrounge the parts to create artificial life. Future Kinetic issues will develop the melodrama further: this new android consciousness awakens to discover an imperfect creator who had nothing better to do with her Saturday night.

Riffing in a violent, almost Dadaist fashion, the writing is chiefly concerned with attitude: “This is the birth pain of ball driven Tantric super science bashing the head meat of god, gyrating in the soft warm centers of its heavy thunder and pouring lightning.” The style is immediate like high-powered automatic writing, but the type needs some editing. Plus there's little to break up the adrenaline pitch.

Kinetic's story text follows the drawings on separate pages in irregular order, so unfortunately, you never quite know when to turn forward or back. In one scene, the girl tries to haggle a price with a market robot. It made me laugh, but it really took a second look for the sequence to make sense. Framed panels may not solve the problem, but just a slight modification will make things easier on the eyes.

With so many conflicting forces, I know the balancing act is daunting: image vs. text, the printed product vs. the quality of each original, etc. When working with less than a shoestring budget, you can’t expect amenities like custom framing or high quality printing. And it’s too bad since the guy is really good with color; just check out Saint’s myspace.

Kinetic Electric has the first main ingredient for creating a great pulp story, what Warren Ellis calls that “true seed of madness.” Otherwise, it just needs some polish.

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Earth Rat eats Fire Pig

2007 is over, yet according to the Chinese zodiac, we're still in the Year of the Boar. A "Fire Boar," actually, followed by the "Earth Rat." I imagine some gargantuan, muck-covered rodent devouring one very unhappy piggy. On fire.

Hoping to check out The Contemporary sometime this week for the winter film series: documentaries on the New York Abstract Expressionists, Francis Bacon, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Emerging from a period of low activity (both online and off) with only a couple of highlights from last month. Winter Soulstice was a heartening success: I've forgotten the numbers, but Groove Muse not only broke even, they raised a respectable chunk of cash for those foster kids. Not bad for a first event.

I dropped by Push Push for a screening and short discussion of the documentary, ¡Salud!, a fairly even-handed look at Cuban medicine. Unlike Michael Moore's film, the documentary tries to assess just what is good about one system (Cuba) instead of focusing on all the negatives of another (The United States). It's amazing that the Cubans were actually willing to give full scholarships to Americans - so long as they went back to the States to practice medicine in poverty-stricken areas. One of the academics on the film called it either a brilliant piece of Machiavellian diplomacy or an inspiring show of genuine compassion.

With Castro readying to step down officially and with the financial controversy surrounding Grady Hospital in Atlanta, the screening couldn't have been timed better. It was nice to sit in a room with a dozen or so well-informed people seriously talking out the issues (although admittedly still a bit above my head...).

"Bean" Artist Talk

Beep Beep Gallery hosted an artist talk with Ben "Bean" Worley this Sunday. Although it's not something that would compliment every exhibit at Beep Beep, incorporating "talk back" events when possible will lend the gallery a more well-rounded repertoire. Art affords a unique opportunity for discourse, and encouraging that communication between artists and spectators can only increase the depth and staying power of the gallery experience.

Bean's presentation was a digital mixed media presentation covering the history of the Encyclopedia project. Creative Loafing does a pretty decent job describing the still images, although Felicia Feaster overemphasizes the connection between Bean and Andy Moon. A deadline must have demanded some sort of Frankenstein graft of two articles into one.

Considering the coverage there and on Thoughtmarker and Access Atlanta, I decided to offer little commentary on my own and post images (which are unfortunately lacking on the Creative Loafing website) and some excerpts from the talk itself:

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Bean: If you have any questions feel free to pipe in and let me know what you’re thinking. Think of this more as a dialogue between people interested in art.

The first thing I was looking at in terms in theory was Roy Ascott. He was writing a lot in the last 40 or so years about the integration between technology and the arts. It’s still relatively new in the field today. A lot of media programs are now popping up in universities, but things really only just started in the 70s with Nam June Paik and Fluxus and movements into video art.

[Bean discusses an image, a word art quotation by Ascott, unable to reproduce here.]

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When you’re making artwork, it develops by experimenting a lot through a series of changes. I’ve got to talk a little about the creative process. I think the spectator is really important: how do I interact with or impact the audience? I like to create situations where it’s not so closed off and I’m not saying specifically I’m “anti” this or that. I think of myself as an explorer or a junk collector. I think there are specific connections with how you inundate yourself in the medium. The more I’ve spent with this process, the more I sense what it is now and how may turn out in a year.

Right now it’s about defining problems and not solutions. There’s an organic process, and there’s a lot of random developments. The way I think is way up here in a large bubble up of thoughts and books I’ve read and then it filters down into specific mediums.

So basically I found this first set of encyclopedias, 1977 Britannica, basically from the around the time I was born. And they had a lot of images, not as much as World Book, but there was something there. When I first started working with books I didn’t really limit myself to one set, I added yearbooks and images from other encyclopedias. I went to the old thrift store and found some encyclopedias in the trash. Working from there, after a year I began physically experimenting with the books and looking at the artistic/social value, sitting there reading them for hours.

* * *

I did this show where I took the set, putting it together in minimal arrangements. But I actually want to talk about how I get from minimalism to actually opening them up and manipulating images. I thought: what if I tried making an installation in the college library? I found this stairwell, well lit, windows all up the side. It was nice white marble, seven or eight stories tall. A really beautiful stairwell architecturally. Starting really simple, attaching images end to end, let it waterfall and walk up and down the whole length. The library was just a perfect place. There were books being thrown away, and books that would never be read, and it was like a memorial. It was fun to propose artwork there in a place that wasn’t designed as an art space.

There I first thought of exploring the books and images, photographing and elaborating. I liked the movement and how it became sort of a film. I had the idea to make a video installation with those books and images in hybrid. It goes back to being a child being fascinated with books and images. I created a screen with blank pages from books, and I created an entire room out of all of them, taking those pages stapled together like brick walls built in an old projector room. I put a hole in some books and projected a video that was actually made from these images. So you were sitting in this space and the video was made from the space you were actually sitting in. I had to manufacture everything, looking where the air vents were… I felt like a builder, a construction guy coming in and placing my material, creating the roof in this space with my materials. I made separate films for each of the books. So I started to take these ideas from the installation and the sculpture.

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I was creating work outside of school trying to develop a creative self in Atlanta. I did a number of small shows, some themed shows I don’t necessarily to do most of the time, getting into the Juxtapoz kind of art. I’m trying to stay away from that, though I get put into the those themes sometimes because that’s the environment where I work or because I’m a working class person. I’m tied to the working class, because I work really hard as a sound engineer. With philosophy, higher education, or high end art you get locked into the system, and you don’t realize the reality of the world. I think you have to find a happy medium: it’s a fine line to walk.

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Images: Encyclopedia Studies

H.C. Wonko

(John Tindel, Sexual Chocolate)

Earlier this year, Chris "H.C." Warner mentioned that his dream was to make Alcove Gallery a Wonka-esque wonderland. Although his "Wonko" show (Dec. 7 - Jan. 20) is a long way from achieving something like a magical chocolate empire, it's clear that Warner is doing well to deliver on his word. The move from affluent Buckhead to a somewhat industrial section of East College Ave. seems to have little effect on gallery attendance.

Again demonstrating his love of things Gene Wilder (the last show was titled "It's Alive!" after Young Frankenstein), Alcove continues in a spirit akin to the 1971 flick. The overall sense of the place is a celebration of returned youth. Take for instance the submission, Wonka Garden, by Barcelona artist Sergio Mora. Although the haircut on the central figure resembles Johnny Depp's rendition of the character, the tone of the piece is pure psychedelia. With a mystical third eye emerging from his hat, a rather androgynous Wonka rides a pale, blue and magenta spotted horse. Several fairy-sized (and notably caucasian) Oompa Loompas dance amid mushrooms and lollipops. One of the Oompas is especially enjoying himself, urinating on a nearby flower.

I regret not writing about Mark Henderson or Lelsie Ditto's work last month, as some of their pieces have gone elsewhere. One of Leslie's entries into the show, a piece I believe called Veronica, captured a bit more of the darker side of the novel. A girl looks directly at the viewer holding the menacing swirl of a giant lollipop. Casting a long, heavy shadow, the strained lines on the girl's face contradict her implied age, an effect reminiscent of bad plastic surgery.

The menu may prove a little too whimsical for some. The taste is indeed saccharine and can tire after repeated servings, but few would argue that Alcove hasn't carved itself a niche. The expanded floorspace of the Avondale location, for instance, makes the gallery more child friendly (without an increased danger to the art). I'm sure the decision is good for business, but it really gels with Warner's overall mission without the hint of anything disingenuous.

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Winter Soulstice

Check out these snazzy flyers for Winter Soulstice next Saturday, Dec. 15 at the Variety Playhouse. It's a live music/art auction/charity event to raise money for Let There Be Music, an organization that gets music lessons for kids in foster care.

It's the first event put on by Groove Muse, a new Atlanta group formed by some really positive folk I met this year. Live music and an art auction featuring local artists, including Andrew Bellury of MINT. $15 for advance tickets; $20 at the door.

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