Playin’ in the 925 band
Well hell, what do I have to complain about after a great weekend like that? First off on Friday the Student Show at the Blaffer was cool. Tons and tons of derivative work stolen from all parts of the artworld. I even saw a shopping cart cut in half and placed in vitrines. Cual Damien Hirst, yo. Pop paintings and Ab-ex and conceptual jokes with thrift store shoes and a plush sculpture right out of the Blaffer’s last show, Damaged Romanticism. The graphics work mixed in better with painters and photogs than in previous shows (check out the Pope in the hallway) and there was video too. Better than the rest was Vanessa Van Alstyne and her Second Life obsession (doesn’t really translate to the gallery) and the performance art lab’s interrupted triage, where patient and surgeon alike stop to watch a very special episode. Up in the studios the party went all night.
The Mirror Ball rocked David Adickes’ studio with silver and bourgeois everywhere. They had an auction and Ernie Manouse, sold some shit (thanx to the Rentz!) and wrapped it all up for gift bags. I wonder how that monster piece by Brian Piana did. Anyway, they danced and danced and fell down. Roller girls hung out all night and sexyATTACK paid the party a call. A crowd gathered around them as they danced and poured Dr. Pepper all over themselves.
On Saturday it was all Heights, as Redbud, G Gallery and Nauhaus had openings reppin’ their block. Check out the candy in the back of Redbud if you have a chance, good shit and Sharon Kopriva’s Martin Luther King Jr. portrait. Speaking of candy, Wayne Gilbert is building a tidy collection from floor to ceiling. So Redbud’s got Lacey Crawford– the gallery is covered in bronze bras and panties as well as paintings of vaginas on oxidized copper. Nauhaus has four Lubbock artists, the best of which is Ryder Richards’ AT-STs painted in pastels with brains of ball bearings or jellybeans. Piotr Chizinski’s whitewash pipe bombs are cool too. Of course, later that night I jizzed in my pants.
David Graeve, Through the eyes of a child
Sunday we went ice skating at Discovery Green, ten bucks for all you can skate! I saw some guy wearing an Oilers jersey eat it hard. The installation in the park by David Graeve and Buffalo Bayou Art Park is great, it really activates the promanade by the Grove Restaurant. With the Texans spanking Green Bay up on Lake Superior, what would I have to complain about? Oh yeah, the global economy is screwed. Well, I wasn’t in Miami, so I could ignore it for a minute. Fun in the land of gross shitty awfulness, huh?
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Am I gonna have to school you on how to stalk artists?
A quick look at your missing info reveals that Paul Valadez is in Edinburg, one can assume that Kana Harada is in the D-FW area and last Biennial, Tom Matthews was actually in Lubbock.
More as time becomes available.
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I THOUGHT I was good at internet stalking, but I guess I’ve been shown up… I added info to the previous post’s list and will be remaking the graph ASAP.
Sensationalist? Crisis? Really? The article struck me as the most un-sensational, almost journalistic attempt to characterize an aesthetic i have ever seen in an art magazine. Aside from Duncan’s paragraph, and the quotes from other artists and curators, there is almost no judgment or accusations made on the part of Pollock. If anything it provides a small sliver of historical context for itself in 2003, and now us in 2008. If any discussion of historical or contemporary aesthetics is automatically written off, or mis-characterized, as the sensational products of desperate art historians than we are in big trouble.
I cited the term “deliberate primitivism” as i think it provides an interesting lens through which to view this kind of work, and Duncan’s Biennial choices. Especially because he himself was skeptical of the term, yet made so many choices that can be seen as fitting into aspects of it. I don’t disagree that the term is problematic, of course it is. I think that its important, more-so for artists than historians, to objectively ask why this aesthetic has contemporary significance, and how we distinguish between that which is deliberately adopting it as simply a “style” and that which is not. The problems should continue to unfold from here.
Carolyn Zacharias McAdams, Valley View, Texas
Yeah, the article seems sensationalist to me. The crisis mode comes from the severely broad generalizations, lumping artists as aesthetically, conceptually and materially as David Shrigley, Paul Chan or Margaret Killgalen in pretty much the same breath. it’s a completely manufactured aesthetic, a shapeless mass created by hype. It served its purpose for collectors and gallerists and certain artists for a second, but it’s a total invention. I read a lot of anxiety in between the lines. It reminds me of music journalism, how the NME invents microgenres, like new rave, or how the New York Times sometimes features “genres” that everybody’s already over and declares them some sort of cultural shift (eg. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/arts/music/18herm.html).
I really disagree with your assertion that it’s especially important for artists to “objectively ask why this aesthetic has contemporary significance.” I don’t think that artists need to give a damn about things like these. Obviously there is no harm done if they do, but not everyone is interested in becoming an artist that leaves behind tomes of criticism and academic texts. I would dare to say most artists don’t care and don’t need to care.