SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH

Last Monday Hans-Ruedi and I practiced out on his terrace, as we frequently do in warm weather. The day had been hot and still, and as we played we could see thunder clouds and occasional lightning flashes to the north over the Hegau across the Rhine, a plateau studded with ancient volcanoes. Hans-Ruedi and I have been playing together for two or three years now, more since Thomm Jutz moved to Nashville. A landscape gardener by trade, he plays upright bass in the Western Store country band from Schaffhausen, and in several Swiss folk music ensembles. We were remarking on the departure of our young friend, Tabea who used to join us for Monday night practice, recently departed for a job in England. “I’m afraid our friend, my neighbor Alfred is also gone. The family has been here since yesterday.”

“He came home from the hospital?”

“There was nothing more they could do for him. He was working until two weeks ago; and now…”

“That fast.”

“He was a good friend to me since I came here seventeen years ago. I’m going to miss Alfred. He may be gone already.”

We drank a bottle of Chilean wine as we played; going over some new songs I’d been working on for my next recording project in Texas. We played some old songs too, in no particular order, letting one suggest another. I can’t remember for sure; I know we played “Snowing on Raton,” a Townes Van Zandt song, and “Wabash Cannonball,” trying to get that lonesome train-whistle sound on the harmonica. We played for a couple of hours, immersed in the warm sound of the big upright bass, on a warm, late summer evening, in the warm glow of wine. Darkness grew over the ridge across the river, the rolling mass of cloud looming closer. A sudden wind gusted through the trees; a tossing of branches, scuttling and swirling of dry leaves.

“I think I better get rolling if I don’t want to get soaked. I don’t have a light on my bike.” I put my guitar in the gig bag and zipped it closed. Hans-Ruedi walked me down the stairs and we said goodbye out in the front. Lightning flashed behind us as I hitched the gig bag up on my shoulders and tightened the straps. We shook hands, the way the Swiss always do, and I peddled home just before the rain. Edith met me at the door.

“You’re home early.”

“The weather was getting funky; I thought I’d get home before dark.”

“You need a light for your bicycle.” She used the word Velo, the Swiss-German word for bike.”

“Hans-Ruedi thinks Alfred may be dead already. The family has been there since yesterday.”

“A nice man; such a pity, he was not so old.”

Hans-Ruedi confirmed that Alfred was gone when I ran into him a couple of days later. “And do you know— he died exactly when we were playing. They could hear us and they said he was smiling when he went. He must have heard us. The family has asked if we can play a couple of songs Friday at the funeral service, and I said I would talk to you.”

“Sure, what should we do?”

“I was thinking of “Old Friends,” and the river song, “Across the Wide Missouri.”

“Shenandoah.”

“That’s the one.” We agreed to meet on Thursday to go over the songs. The service would be at two o’clock after the people walked over from the cemetery.

Two or three times remodeled, the Evangelical Church in Diessenhofen sits atop the ruins of two or three earlier churches. Once Catholic before the Reformation, it is plain and austere, with clean Romanesque lines, soaring ceilings. Though packed, with standing-room only at the back, it was pin-drop silent when we played “Old Friends,” a song I wrote with Guy and Susanna Clark, early on in the program. The priest, who I recognized from my Rhine walks, delivered a sermon and one of Alfred’s daughters gave a talk. After a group prayer we got up again and played “Across the Wide Missouri.” Hans-Ruedi brought his oldest bass, the one he plays at our practice sessions and my favorite from the several he owns. I played my good Martin, the maple SPD-16M that rarely leaves the house. Hans-Ruedi got a severe case of nerves before; I felt weightless and dreamlike as the first notes floated out. It was one of the most perfect places I have ever sung.

Alfred had many friends and family members, and it took two bars on Diessenhofen’s Hauptstrasse to house the after-service crowd. The family members went to the Löwen and the workers from his firm gathered at the Linden by the town tower. We went to the latter place where we drank a couple of beers. Several people congratulated us, saying the music was very nice. When I got home Edith told me she had heard the same from some of our neighbors who had been at the service.

This was my second acoustic performance at a family event. Not long ago I played for the party following the baptism of Edith’s grandkids, the twins Emanuel and Leander. I felt like I had passed a milestone, some unspoken right of passage with these two events, celebrating the beginning—and end—of life. Our Swiss television debut in July, on “bsuech in” im Thurgau, hardly seemed to merit comparison. But looking back, what seemed strangest was our performance last Monday, when we thought we were only practicing. The rain never did come that evening; only lightning and surging darkness when the gust of sweeping wind came down and carried away Alfred’s soul.

It’s raining now, a soft coming down I can see it thorough the window, dimpling a puddle on the rooftop opposite. There will be no music practice tonight, as Hans-Ruedi is at this very moment in the air somewhere over the Atlantic, bound for Atlanta, and Nashville with his band mates Rene and Martin, to make a record with my old friend Sergio Webb.

Posted by Richard Dobson at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wisps of precipitation streaming from a cloud but evaporating before reaching the ground.

Posted by Simone Muench at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that scientists with x-ray eyes are suggesting that the smirking subject of history's most famous painting may have been knocked-up while posing there will be a slew of theories suggesting the connection between her enigmatic smile and the babe within. As intriguing as that smile may be, I've always been drawn to her hands for some reason.

If memory serves it was only a few short years ago that some were suggesting that Mona was actually Leo in drag, and anyone who hasn't been living the life of Ted Kazinski knows that there's been a whole lot of hoo-ha surrounding the fresco known as The Last Supper. My question is this - what do you suppose accounts for the fame and relative longevity of this canvas? I'm certainly not the first to suggest that Mona is not Leonardo's finest painting, so what gives?

Posted by david roth at 01:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank
to the ground. No one would help him even if they could.

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Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no Good Samaritan would halt…
How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time?
And now he had reached the summit.

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Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expected to see below him,
the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those
peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all
had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed.

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But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit
a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base.

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It was crumbling, too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano,
he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horrible,
it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the volcano…

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The world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space,
with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium…
through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling into a forest, falling—

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Suddenly he screamed and it was as if this scream were being tossed from one tree to another,
as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer,
huddled together, closing over him, pitying…

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Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.
—From “Under the Volcano,” Malcolm Lowry

Posted by Ray Pride at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Several years ago I became the pariah of my social scene when I suggested to some painter friends of mine that painting was "dead." Far from being a celebrant of this news, I was more interested in engaging my brothers-of-the-leaf, all of whom were committed painters, in a vital and interesting dialog about art, meaning and the nature of what is "real."

I can hardly lay claim to the genesis of this argument, but I did think at the time that there was something to it, especially as it pertained to "objective," or "representational" or "realist" painting. No surprise then that this particular group of artists demonstrated nothing short of antipathy for me, not to mention anger and dismissal for the argument. I'm not sure if it matters, but I don't think any of them are still painting.

So what, exactly, is the argument? Having read a little of Plato's "Republic" in college, augmented by more than a few ponderous listening sessions focused on John Lennon's "Watching the Wheels" I felt pretty comfortable with the concept of the Platonic Essence. The gist, for those who don't know, is that we are all living in a sensory puppet-play, and that everything we see is simply a "shadow on the wall."

True reality lies in a nether-world of conceptual perfection. Thus there is one chair, and all chairs here on planet Earth are "one step removed" from the essence of chairness. Whew! It makes the oncoming traffic a little less intimidating.

Following this line of reasoning we see that artists are faced with a conundrum, because we are basically charged with an analysis of the nature of things, while anything we create is actually two steps removed from reality.

Clearly Plato never saw an Ad Reinhardt canvas, and I doubt he could have conceived of art as we now consider it. "Artists" in his day were actually considered highly-skilled technicians (I believe the Greek word for art was "techne"), and it wasn't until the "artist-as-genius" concepts of the Renaissance came into vogue that people started question just what art was for.

Now I will confess with alacrity that such philosophical gyrations will not by necessity yield better art. Nor will they endow one with a better sense of esthetic judgment. But I do think there may be something there, and my reasons follow.

It seems to me that the real magic of art is the power to manifest ideation in tangible form. This, in many ways, is the power of language. But given the notion that a manifestation of electrochemical activity is somewhere close to the focal point of artistic value, then wouldn't one by extension recognize a responsibility to create something as self-sufficient as possible?

Representational (or objective, or literal, etc.) work by definition relies upon language for its success. I happen to love a great deal of such work, and personally find much of it essentially valuable. But there's no getting around the fact that language creates a necessary reliance upon external reference for meaning.

Words are abstractions, as are brush strokes, as are patches of sfumato and chiaroscuro. And all too often we are confronted with rendered images which have absolutely nothing to do with the substrait upon which they exist. As a result 3-dimensional objects often attain "thingliness" with much greater ease that those which are rendered. That doesn't make them better art, mind you, as a stroll through the Skokie Sculpture park will readily demonstrate.

OK. I can already hear the cries from my friends who paint, and draw, and create brilliant objects which are often about 2-dimensions. Please understand - this is not an indictment, and even if it were, it's not my indictment. Truth be told, there's probably more 2-dimensional work in my collection than otherwise.

The salient question here is one of the nature of what's "real." Do we really live in a society where the story is more real than the event? That would be the case if you really think that "representational" work is more "realistic" than "abstract" work.

But Autumn Rhythm, for example, is reality - it is it's own self-contextualizing little world, and even though we can take pleasure and wonder in the evidence of Pollock's dance, we need not know the language in order to apprehend the form. It is self-reliant. It self-sustaining: it is real.

I bring this up because I think we're seeing a new sense of appreciation for form. Dance is a form. Painting is a form. Drawing is a form, and so on. Provided we know the songs, it's much less important to know the chords. As they say in the blues, it ain't the meat, it's the motion.

So where's all this leading? Well, ironically enough (and it is really ironic) I think it's leading art away from overt intellectualism and back to the essential, somewhat ineffable empirical existentialism of the past. What I'm getting at is that real art, regardless of form, provides us with a transcendent experience which is somehow empirical at the same time. I recognize the inherent contradiction here - how can the empirical and the transcendent coexist in one object?

But maybe, just maybe that is the real power of real art - it braids together and makes sense of the two most powerful, confusing, potent and at times vexing aspects of the human experience - ideation and external reality.

Posted by david roth at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I was raised on matinees on Saturday afternoons
Looking up at Hoppy, Gene, and Roy, oh boy
I grew up a thinking the best a man could do
Was to be a rootin-tootin straight-shooting
cowboy buckaroo…
Mason Williams

I knew we were in for a long evening when we showed up to interview cowboy singer Todd Fritsch at the Bonanza club and the manager refused to let us in. It was going to be a long evening anyway but the fun went out of it after our run-in with this Arschloch.

We’d heard something about a thwarted terrorist attack just as we were leaving the house, something about planes being grounded in the U.K. but there was no time to follow up on the story. A western-style saloon, the club was about forty minutes away in Canton Thurgau and we didn’t want to be late. We had never been there, though there had been a misunderstanding over a canceled gig back in March because there was no PA there in the club. As stipulated in our contract. It was the manager’s fault; and he had lied about the incident, telling people we cancelled on account of sickness. I didn’t think this would have any bearing on my present mission, arranged through Todd’s publicist in Nashville. With the distant drumroll of yet another terror conspiracy, the threads of at least two stories were running concurrently when we stopped to pick up our neighbor, Hans-Ruedi who was coming along with us to see the show.

Driving east we followed the Rhine upstream, then along the shore of Lake Constance as far as Steckborn where we turned right, climbing through a range on hills and coming down into the Thur valley. Skirting Frauenfeld, we followed the river upstream, crossing it a couple of times. Described as the “breadbasket of Switzerland” in the Lonely Planet guide, Canton Thurgau is also known for dairy, apple, and wine production. A patchwork of farms, villages, and twisting roads, this looks nothing like the alpine Heidiland Switzerland, but it is pretty country all the same. We found the place, on the far side of a village called Bissegg, a tall barn-like building. The sign had western-style lettering and featured a bigger-than-life black and white mural of the Bonanza cowboys. I vaguely remembered the television series, tried to recall their names: Hoss and Curley, something like that. I remembered the theme song that sounded like galloping horses, and I dum-da-de-lum-da-de-lum-da-dum’ed the intro as we pulled into the drive.

We found two doors in front, both locked and tried knocking. Hans-Ruedi pressed his ear to the door. “I hear music, they must be inside.”

“Let’s go around to the back.”

We found a kitchen-delivery door in the back and Edith knocked. A man came to the door, blond with sharp features. Later he would be wearing a bright red western shirt with white yoke. He was not friendly. “We are not open until seven o’clock.”

“We have an appointment to meet Todd Fritsch here at five o’clock for an interview.”

“He is not here.”

“What do you mean he’s not here? We know the band is sound-checking. We can hear them.”

“He is not here.”

“Where can we find him?”

“He is at the hotel.”

Following directions, we drove back the way we had come. We found the hotel, a Gasthaus in the next village. “That SOB is lying.”

“He is the same person I talked to on the telephone in March. Lügen haben kurze Beine; lies have short legs. ”

“I thought so; he’s a liar twice over. So or so, we have to wait until seven. Maybe the band will come back to the hotel after soundcheck to change before the show.”

Edith and I ordered coffee and Hans-Ruedi a beer. A girl behind the bar told us there were rooms booked for the band but that they weren’t there; they were at the Bonanza club, she said. We returned to our seats. I finished my coffee and after awhile ordered a beer, watching the parking lot through the window. One wouldn’t hurt. “This is not the only way into the hotel; they can come in by another door, Edith said.”

“I’ll go check.” I had to go to the men’s room anyway. Returning from the toilet, I walked out to the other door and saw two guys with bags and instrument cases approaching on foot. One looked slightly familiar. “Are you with the Todd Fritsch band?”

“We just came on the train from Munich. I think I know you, aren’t you Richard Dobson?”

“You look familiar.”

“Scot Shipley, I met you at Merlischachen when I was touring with Gail Davies and Sergio Webb.”

“Right, I remember. The rest of your guys are sound-checking at the club. We’re waiting to do an interview with Todd.” We shook hands. Scot introduced me to the other musician, a large man carrying a violin case, whose name was Aaron. I went back to my seat, rejoining Edith and Hans-Ruedi. After a time a short, breathless woman came in whom I recognized as the Swiss promoter for the show, Amalee, who also went by the name of “DJ Röteli.” She was giddy, starstruck, and nervous. It was almost seven o’clock. We explained our difficulties, and that we had not been able to get into the Bonanza. “Don’t worry; you will get your interview.”

“Please make sure we’re on the guest list. There are three of us.”

“No problem, I will arrange this.”

The doors were open at the club when we returned, a man and a woman at the desk by the entrance. But when we tried to enter the main hall the manager blocked the way. “Have you reservations?”

“DJ Röteli said she would make arrangements for us.”

“She can say what she likes; all the places are taken. We are full.”

“Never mind, we can wait back stage.” I didn’t catch all of the conversation but I picked up the drift.

“Danke fur ihre grossen hilfe,” Edith said, “Thanks for your big help.”

There was no back stage; only a bar and restaurant across a hall. We sat down again at a table opposite the service bar. The place was decorated theme park western, with American flags, and pictures of Indians; and band posters, some of them of Jonny Hill, a German country singer who had made a career out of a Deutsch version of “Teddy Bear,” a treacly, maudlin truck-driving song. Rumor had it Jonny Hill, who lived in Switzerland, was owner of the Bonanza.

Again we sat down to wait. Scot and Aaron came and ordered dinner. The others had already eaten. Several band members wandered in and out. None of them looked like Todd Fritsch. In the main hall we could hear DJ Röteli spinning platters for the line-dancers. Hans-Ruedi ordered two beers. When they had finished eating I asked Scott, “Where is the singer? I’m still waiting to do an interview.”

“I don’t know where he is, he’s supposed to be here. We gotta go on right now.” It was already after nine o’clock.

It was getting late, by Swiss standards, for a show advertised to begin at eight. We hadn’t seen DJ Röteli since we came in. We heard the band start up in the main room. The manager came and went in his red cowboy shirt. Years of meditation and hewing to the mandate of compassion went out the window as I fantasized on the satisfaction it would bring to stuff his head in the toilet. The waitresses came and went from the bar with food and trays of drinks. I walked to the front door where the ticket takers were sitting, and seeing two of my posters that had been there since March, ripped them from the wall. Returning to the table, I tore the posters into bits. We had been waiting four-and-a-half hours, and I was about to lose it. I wasn’t even making any money for this.

The sight of a frantic D.J. Röteli allowed me to recover some composure. Not that I took pleasure in her discomfit, but I sensed that things were going wrong generally, and not just with us. The star was missing, the band finishing their first set without him. Hans-Ruedi and I speculated on his whereabouts… kidnapped? Lost? Hans-Ruedi ordered another beer and a hamburger plate. A tall guy introduced himself, Doug DeForest, Todd’s manager-producer-bass player. “Did you find Todd?”

“There was a mix up. He’s back at the hotel. Someone’s gone to pick him up. You’re still waiting to do your interview.”

“We were here to interview at five, but we couldn’t get in.”

“Sorry about that; you’ll get your interview, I promise.”

“That’s okay, it wasn’t your fault.”

Todd Fritch, when we finally caught up, was young, sincere, polite, and looked just like his photos. He had a working man’s handshake. A real cowboy from a Texas ranching family it said in his press kit, and I judged this to be true. Knowing the crowd was impatient, I kept it as brief as possible, working from a short list of questions. I had never done an interview before where I was asking the questions, though I had done it the other way often enough. This turned out to be the easiest part of the evening. The tension seemed to slack off a notch as the band started up.

“Schätzli, you like a drink?”

“I guess I can drink another beer. That will only make three in more than five hours.”

“You like to eat something?”

“Thanks, I’ll have a snack when we get home.”

Todd Fritsch and band played a long set, and we could still hear fairly well from the other room. They played straight country, a full band of six pieces with pedal steel and fiddle. We stayed until the end of the final encore. I drove carefully on the way back while Hans-Ruedi and Edith carried on a palaver in Swiss German. I had the interview on mini-disc. It would take a day to transcribe and get it ready, but I thought it had come out okay, considering the circumstances.

Posted by Richard Dobson at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Right now on Business POV you can watch a short, very nicely shot and edited interview with Sharkforum's very own Wesley Kimler. The topic at hand is pricing, but there's something much more important beneath this discussion - just how much is art worth? Have a look.

Posted by ed at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michelle Noteboom won the 2006 Heartland Poetry Prize for her first book Edging (Cracked Slab Books), chosen by Ray Bianchi and William Allegrezza. Other work has appeared in Verse, Fence, Boston Review, Sentence, Columbia Poetry Review and Gargoyle, among others. She's lived mainly in Paris since 1991 where she co-curates the Ivy Writers Reading Series with Jennifer K. Dick. She works as a freelance translator in the French audiovisual industry. She also translates French poetry.


Chafed

In the stylized abstract chess I was the checkered queen.

By sequined greeting atmosphere beckoning, token to the new entrance
and evening game with several. The marbled nymphs in wigs to
scandalize right through the recondite arcade, stepping to a hellish
realm of players clad in townhouse-flanked orangish art. Organs.

A heady door.

Taking a hungered lure through the techno throb-plastified feast, full
moon rising on their heels. A real princess, her bleached busted form.

Tossed round a honeyed make, I was right-fingered fashioned spread
out on the overly-bare haunches, reigning in a fleecy crop of pawns and
prize. Hardened lurid becoming. A gold-earned kiss
                                                                        and entrails. . .

Posted by Simone Muench at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Posted by Todd V. Wolfson at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One who swerves from and is unfaithful to the marriage vow.

Posted by Simone Muench at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent review by Roberta Smith in the NY Times (Sept. 22) caught my attention. In part, Ms. Smith wrote: "Some younger painters seem to be countering the strictures of Late Modernism by revisiting the early modernist cusp between abstraction and representation...where the figurative, the geometric, the spatial, and the visionary still remain tangled."

Smith's comment reminds me of the situation in Chicago art over thirty years ago. At that time the Chicago Imagist style was at its peak. Less recognized Chicago abstractionists were divided between mainstream formalists (via the Chicago Bauhaus and NY) and what might be called quasi-formal-allusionists. This latter group was actually larger than the former but since the work was idiosyncratic, aside from abstract intent, individuals often went unnoticed.

But in 1974 local critic Dennis Adrian curated a pair of exhibitions he titled The Chicago Style: Painting and Sculpture. He included both imagists -- plus the "Monster Roster" -- and abstractionists. In a brochure for the painting exhibition he wrote:

"...another aspect of Chicago painting [is] intermingled with and inextricably a part of the Imagist contingent. This quality is a preoccupation with formal structure and even completely abstract composition...It developed alongside and even within the more widely known imagistic tradition and is actually at one with it...The thread of this common factor is evident...in the very basic issue of attitude toward form...Simply, then, the character of this preferred language of form is organic and complex."

To me, Dennis Adrian's comment was extraordinarily profound and I believe it remains fresh and relevant, as suggested by Roberta Smith's own observation a few days ago. By uniting imagism and abstraction through "organic and complex form" Adrian articulated the same "entanglement" that Smith speaks of now.

In visual art, organic form denotes aliveness and that leads to spatial and even visionary depiction. Add paradoxical geometry and you have a good map of what lies at the heart of Chicago art, from way back in the 1970's at least. Just as the early 20th C. abstractionists had no fear of allusion through organic form and no fear of the spatial or the visionary through illusion, so have many later Chicago artists forged ahead without fear of theoretical strictures. They make art that explores what early abstractionists pointed to. It is a vital pursuit in the renewal of painting.

With respect to the visionary, the aura of surrealism has never left Chicago. If the New York AE artists sought to excise their surreal histories, Chicago artists continued to embrace a quality of surrealism even as they pursued formalist modernism. The idiosyncratic Chicago abstractionists wanted to put everything into their art, not take it out. Frank Piatek is one of the Chicago abstractionists, whose work -- even from the late 1960s -- mixed imagist, surreal, and formal approaches into a complex organic form. In varying degrees, the same can be said about Miyoko Ito's work and a sizeable group of others. In fact, although much huffing and puffing was made of an artificial split between abstraction and imagism in Chicago, primarily by the editors of the New Art Examiner and a few critics, a review of the most characteristic abstraction of that time shows that Adrian's view was on the mark.

Chicago art has been examining the cusp between abstraction and representation for decades. Look at the work -- past and present -- and you will see that it's true. It's the Chicago Tradition, which is not to say it is a regional or isolated provincialism. No serious artist aims to make purely local art. I wholeheartedly agree with a statement by Peter Schjeldahl: "Conscious, sophisticated art of all times has a profound independence from place." What counts, as we know, is to make something local become suddenly universal. So I'm happy that Roberta Smith is writing about good artists who we can say "Chicagoize" current New York abstraction. That helps to universalize what has been perceived for so many years as merely our local art history.

Is there a distinctive Chicago art? Yes. Does it reach beyond place to become one with a universal modernist-postmodernist art discourse/s? Yes. Does it reconnect to early modernism and does it resonate with contemporary directions? Yes.

William Conger

Posted by William Conger at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A few months ago Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen hosted an open house at the still-under-construction Experimental Station, acknowledging the fifth anniversary of the predawn fire that left only a shell of brick from what was then mostly called "the Building," and which had formerly housed Ken Dunn's Resource Center and most recently served as Dan's studio and hosted a number of other community-based concerns.

I was surprised to learn it was only five years ago, April 2001. It seemed much more time had gone by. I remembered hearing about the fire from Stephanie Smith of the Smart Museum. She had just completed a project that featured Dan's work, and being on the south side, where the Building stood on the south edge of the University of Chicago's domain, she knew about it before most of the rest of us did. She wrote urgent letters to everyone she could think of who might help. Dan needed all that help, as apparently City of Chicago workers had showed up at 9 am the day of the fire with demolition permits in hand. Regardless of the cause of the fire, it seemed pretty clear someone wanted that place, and whoever that someone was had no idea of the integrity and tenacity of the admittedly ramshackle building's owners, Dan Peterman and his wife Connie Spreen. The help helped, but it was Dan and Connie that made the Experimental Station happen.

I've been in touch pretty consistently with Dan over these past five years. I had the idea, almost immediately post-fire, that the best balm might be a time-consuming and resource-taxing solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Fortunately, Dan had the luxury of knowing I wasn't entirely insane to propose that out of the ashes of the Building he mount a 6,000 square foot museum show consisting of at least five major new projects, for we had worked together before. In fact, we went way back, to the Randolph Street Gallery days, where I walked in one day to see a pleasing contraption that purported to (and actually did) distill pure water from soda pop. This contraption and concept were intriguing enough, but it was the title "Eau Claire" that alerted me to the presence of a major new artist. Object and concept were seamlessly and wittily integrated. I was further delighted to learn the artist was from Wisconsin, where of course there is a town called Eau Claire. So the piece was personal as well. Always a plus in my book. And while I don't require of artists I admire that they be shining paragons of dignity and integrity, it is always delightful to find one who is. I quickly discovered that Dan in his artistic project was realizing his vision from the beginning, not learning how he might realize his vision by stabs at this and that (and learning from the "feedback" that most artists so rely on, as this is how they are trained in graduate school, of course). This is not to say Dan Peterman sprang whole from Athena's brow - no artist is fully formed from the beginning, as they are, we must remember, human beings - but he was well along the path that many others were peering down in the mid-1980s. The whole idea of reexamining paradigms, and not just aesthetic paradigms, but social paradigms as well. The idea of not just working with communities, but creating one. The idea of applying aesthetic thought to what might seem to be impossibly entrenched ideas, like the economies of material production and distribution.

For many years Dan was thought of as "that recycling guy" which frankly rankled me. Not because I am against recycling, but I knew that even in a world where pigeonholes must be to some extent tolerated for the convenience they afford, this description was completely off the mark. If anything, Dan was casting a jaundiced eye on notions of recycling as some sort of quick fix or salutatory behavior that can make otherwise wasteful beings sleep better at night because they'd sorted their plastics from their paper earlier that day. But I quickly realized that as are all true innovators, Dan was ahead of the pack, and that my scorn was not in any way matched by Dan. He was tolerant, respectful, and a true gentleman, able to express his ideas and opinions and not put anyone on the defensive about their own ideas and behaviors. And most interesting of all to me was that he dealt with "societal issues" yet he was no mere polemicist. Much like another artist I admire, Alfredo Jaar, he lived his aesthetics and ideology. No retiring to a summer home on Sag Harbor he. Dan labored in a disorganized, broken-down building not only on his own art works, but in concert with other like-minded individuals to enable such projects as the Blackstone Bicycle Works. And then his Building burned nearly to the ground and the Experimental Station was born.

To walk through the Experimental Station is to be perversely grateful that the Building did burn. The salvaged bowling alley flooring used in the upper levels is worth the price of admission alone (a figure of speech, because the Experimental Station is not a place that charges admission). It is a place vibrating with joyous potential, solidly and aesthetically built, and redolent of the passion and commitment of Dan and Connie. We ll be hearing a lot about this place in the upcoming months and years. It is making Chicago a better place.

Which leads me to the topic of expectations. I had a discussion with the Shark the other day about the state of things. He thinks things in the realm of ethics and political discourse are worse than ever in the United States. And in the arts? Well, you all know what he thinks there. I disagree. I pointed out that it is way too typical for us human beings, as we inevitably age, to think that things are much worse than they used to be (at the same time, paradoxically, that we tend to pine for "the good old days" that never were that good). I'm completely convinced this is a natural biological process that probably one day will be mapped out by neuroscientists, an evolutionary survival mechanism that allows us to be mortal beings and still have eternal thoughts. Otherwise we might all die of broken hearts at our intimations of eternity, and very few of us actually do.

This is not to say that "things" can't bear improvement or that certain "things" haven't gotten worse (there are definitely more deaths from HIV than there were fifty years ago, when there were none. But then there are definitely less deaths in childbirth, which used to be the leading cause of death in women of childbearing age. One could, of course, go on and on). But by almost any measure, Americans are better off, if one agrees that "better off" is defined by measures of income, longevity, health, access to clean water, etc. I recognize that some disagree with these bellwethers, and I respect those who might be described by the majority as Luddites in expressing an opposing viewpoint, that it might be "better" to live a meaningful life cut short by hard work and disease than a long, soft, and idle one. But most US citizens aren't Luddites, and wouldn't want to give up their "things" (triple frothy loco-mocha lattes with caramel drizzles; designer toasters in a wide choice of decorator colors; botox injections; frequent dining at sushi bars) but are convinced that things are much much worse, leading to much mental anguish and despair, which I know is real and powerful and very much interferes with the quality of life. I agree that the safety and abundance of food in America has lead to a problem that would have been virtually unknown for the average person living during the Great Depression - obesity and all its attendant problems. I could even nod in compassion listening to someone argue that safe and plentiful food is an evil and we were "better off" living on fewer and considerably less delicious calories, as we didn't suffer diabetes and high blood pressure and so on. But then I would look around and think, "If given a chance of when to live, in the 1930s or in the 2000s, I choose now." Perhaps I am remembering my mother's tales of all the children she knew, when she was a girl in the 1920s, who had tapeworms, and how absolutely fortunate it was that she never had a tapeworm. Imagine, eating not very many and not very delicious calories, and on top of it, a tapeworm is getting most of the nutritional value.

It seems like the largest burden of contemporary life just might be inflated expectations. The hot air generated by 19th and 20th century mercantilism has resulted not only in bloated bodies, but seriously puffed-up habits of mind. And one of the most airy regions is that "life," especially in America, can do nothing but steadily improve (the old "I want my children to be better off than I was" notion). Blowing briskly alongside the notion of "improvement" is the notion of "expansion." If one's health is "improved" (no tapeworms sucking you dry), one can physically accomplish more. If one's good health allows more to be accomplished (including inventing technologies that assist the individual and thus society in accomplishing more), this should be rewarded via a calculus that ever increases. Thus yesterday's "Be grateful for good fortune" turns into today's "You deserve everything and more." Inflated expectations turn into grotesquely inflated expectations and before you know it you are in a whirlwind whose political manifestation is dubbed "American exceptionalism."

Interestingly enough, Dan Peterman's show at the MCA was called Plastic Economies. Exactly, I thought, when he came up with the title. He is interested in the plasticity of economic systems, and of course there is that allusion to the plastic arts. Witty and rich, like all of Dan's thought. He did pieces that dealt with various economies of manufacture and consumption and the "afterlife" of materials and products. Most poignant for me were piles and piles of clothing and booties that were the required uniform of workers in food processing plants. Now is it "surplus," and what does one do with these sorts of "surplus." Perhaps look at them and recognize that they are symbolic of the safety and wealth we enjoy.

And now MCA has the extraordinary design exhibition "Massive Change" organized by Bruce Mau and an energetic group of people out of the University of Vancouver and the Vancouver Art Museum. (Read the Sun-Times Kevin Nance's excellent article here.) It is divided not into "product design" or "graphic design," but "economies," including Military Economies; Movement Economies, Image Economies. Go see it. It is worth the price of admission alone to marvel at breadth and depth of human ingenuity embedded in the flying-saucer-ish object that is a virtually fail-proof, indestructible, and inexpensive personal water desalinization device. (Oh, and this isn't a figure of speech, MCA does charge admission, but it is free on Tuesdays thanks to the support of Target, which of course is a major source for most people of designer toasters in lots of colors.) You and I may never need such an object, but if we had, through the accident of our birth, been placed on the planet say in sub-Saharan Africa, I would hazard to say we would value this humble plastic thing more than ten thousand designer toasters. And recognize that we were better off for having clean water, which in this country we squander by packaging it in plastic bottles as part of our "lifestyle."

I expect only one thing these days, that I will have to battle my own expectations. That on a daily basis I must open my eyes and look about me and seek to understand all I observe the same way I needed to the day before and day before. That nothing can ever be "solved" or even "resolved" once and for all, and despite all my informed decisions and the plans I lay from them, it's still largely a matter of improvising from moment to moment. And that in a painful paradox, the energy I have in my human container isn't infinitely expandable and "renewable." Unfortunately if I eat more, I don't have more energy. I just get fat.

More later,


Lynne

"Uptime at the Experimental Station" is a play on the title of Dan Wang's interview with Dan Peterman, Downtime at the Experimental Station published by Temporary Services.

The current issue of Art Review is filled with thoughtful writings on "Enviro/Mental: Can Art Save the Planet?" (www.artreview.com)

Posted by Lynne Warren at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a little self-lampooning banner for Wesley (and Dave and Lynne). Although, yes, I take both this and my political blog below seriously too.

Posted by Mark Staff Brandl at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I took my son, (age thirteen) to the Chicago Theatre to see a performance by a guitar player who, when I was young, (age thirteen) was one of my heroes.

Jeff Beck was one of a small, elite group of lead guitar players in the late 60’s and early 70’s who took on a sort of mythological status; i.e. “Guitar God”. This “elite group” was primarily made up British musicians who saw the Afro-American blues music of the previous two decades as exotic and important. Not the old-timer’s race music, which had lost its earning power here in the states. Oh yeah, I’m including Jimi Hendrix in this Brit bunch. After all, Hendrix was just another sideman in America. It took the Brits for him to be perceived as an artist. We just followed their instructions.

I was excited about seeing Beck for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being something my son and I could experience together. We’re both musicians. In my house, this would count as a sort of “Andy and Opie” moment. “Throwing the old pigskin around” type of thing. After all, my old man took me to see Art Blakey when I was ten years old. I can still remember every minute of it and how proud I was, knowing that Dad trusted me enough to dig and decode be-bop.

The other was potentially rediscovering the Nick I was in those early days: The boy who played guitar eight to ten hours a day, every day, who fell asleep most nights with a guitar in his hands and had no use for people, school, words, love and money. Just music. Fuck the rest.

Learning to play guitar in the early 70’s was all about these “new bluesmen” and the competition amongst kids my age was ultra-macho, bordering on violent. There was no camaraderie among bands. We hated each other and were often placed together on “Battle of the Bands” promoted bills. Even in this casual and often suburban setting, competition was bloodthirsty. In fact, one of the main reasons I became a serious musician, for the most part, was being cut down at a jam session. I went home and practiced non-stop for six months, went back and put them out of business. These first few years of my musician life were spent strictly playing guitar. No singing or writing songs. Just the pursuit of the perfect solo, tone, vibrato…I guess you could call it technique.

If you played guitar in those days, the bar was raised high as hell. There was no way around it. Even the folkies were screwed, what with Leo Kottke hitting the scene. By the time the Mahavishnu Orchestra came around I seriously thought I might be out of a job. It wasn’t just the physical aspect of playing guitar. If it were just speed that had mattered, I’d have eventually overcome it and joined the club. It was the wild individuality of the way these guys played. These were innovators, not content with joining the club, but starting a new one only they could be in. I was well schooled in the definition of the word “innovation”. My old man’s heroes were cut from the same cloth. He once told me the key to being a great musician was to never play a guitar like a guitar. Don’t make the instrument more important than what you here in your head. Coltrane had practiced with violin books. Parker jammed on Stravinsky. All the greats made their instruments sound wholly their own. You could tell who they were within the first couple of notes. It seemed the better I got the more I noticed that I was sounding like everyone else. I was becoming competent. An inevitable part of any musician’s education. It was time to set out on a new road. I put away what I knew, started to dig much deeper and stepped off the comfort of my “competent” ledge, into the unknown.

Beck hit the stage with one of his first-ever instrumental tunes as a solo artist: “Beck’s Bolero”. (“Beck’s Boogie” was written during his Yardbirds days.) His style has always had this graceful jaggedness. No waste. Always unpredictable and death defying, but never for the cameras. Even the cheap riffs refuse to be cheap thrills. No falling to the knees or valets waiting with capes in the wings. It’s hard to explain.

Jimmy Webb’s song, “Wichita Lineman” is one of my all time favorite tunes. It’s like an actor’s actor. Every line and movement in its right place. Always hitting its mark at the exact right moment. Think Spencer Tracy. Now let’s talk Townes Van Zandt. Always unpredictable in verse, yet always pure perfection like Brando in “Last Tango”. His chorus a perfect touchdown yet never optimized for greedy revolves or pop star status. A Townes chorus just flies right by you while you ball your brains out. You can’t even sing it to somebody yourself. Just lend them the record so that they can be just as fucked as you now are for knowing better.

People keep running up with their cell phones to try and get a snapshot of Beck, then go running back like little kids on a dare. My son thinks this is funny. “What a bunch of dorks.” He says, then laughs, “You can’t catch this.”

Jeff Beck looks and dresses exactly like he looked in pictures from the 70’s. Vest with no shirt, old time English looking tie, London post-mod shag. A uniform of sorts. On anyone else, you’d think he was trying to reclaim old showbiz glories. The tough guy rock star.

When I was turning thirteen I had mastered the art of disappearing. I could walk down a hall without making a sound. Teachers at school never called on me. No one talked to me. It’s as if I wasn’t there at all. Thought about floating off forever more than once in those days. Came close a couple times. Had my ticket and everything. Guitar and puberty hit me at just about the same time. Now there was a reason to stick around. Talk was now cheap, compared to the sound a guitar could make. I didn’t talk to anyone for at least a whole year. Just me and my guitar. One day in Math class a girl asked, “Hey kid. Do you ever wear anything else besides that black sweat shirt?”

“Like taking a picture of fireflies.” My son gets it.

Every once on a while during the show, Beck strikes a pose. It happened about four times and always seemed a bit strange and awkward. It never really fit the action of the moment. I think he stops like that to make sure someone will see him, but the stop is just too abrupt to make any sense to the naked eye. Maybe he’s afraid the guitar is winning. Remember that ventriloquist doll in The Twilight Zone? Either way it’s no use. You can’t put a hood ornament on a rocket ship.

Beck has a singer with him on this tour. People talk about this like it’s a big deal, “He hasn’t had one in about twenty years!” She sings great but it’s just no use. The human voice just can’t compete. Even the band, who are playing for their very lives, seem blurred to the edges of the frame. I think it would be great if his band members were all thirteen years old. Remember that drawing Picasso made with his grandchildren? I wish the band were Beck’s grandkids.

In the mid-seventies popular music, on all fronts, was becoming a bit too polished for anyone’s good. The term “corporate rock” was invented. The rock critics blamed it on the record companies twisting the arms of their recording artists to squeeze out more money, but I think it was just the musicians falling for themselves in the poster rack. One look at pictures of bands from those days tells you all you need to no. The truth was that it all started to sound like the same band.

Punk rock came in as kind of a house cleaning, “everything must go sale” for all the 70’s stuff that came before it. The sound and especially the look of it felt revolutionary and new, but it really grew out of a love for a handful of bands and singles from 60’s and 70’s that were dismissed by the critics of their time as amateurish or “one-hit-wonders”. I’m sure these so called “punk” bands all started the same way as the Brit-blues bands of the 60’s did. Somebody having the same obscure record collection. Seperated at birth. Remember that feeling?

Beck is now playing “A Day in The Life”, The Beatles imploding treasure. Can you imagine even attempting this? Somehow, he makes it a more singular experience, letting our heads fill the words in.

To this day, people still talk about the death of Jimi Hendrix as a dream denied. “He was going to record with Miles Davis.” “He was going to make an orchestral symphony with Gil Evans.” A sort of rock version of the death of Bobby Kennedy. The future stopped dead in its tracks.

Maybe Hendrix would have would have been this great, modern unifying force in music. Maybe he was just burnt out on the whole deal and decided to float off. Maybe Bobby was just saying what he thought would get him elected.

For the next decade or so, Jeff Beck quietly picked off “the dream denied,” year by year, record by record.

To the left of Beck’s horizontal Marshall Amplifier village that he plays through, is a stack of Fender amps. I just figure that he uses both of them, but at the beginning of the evening a friend of mine attending the show tells me Beck never plays through Fender’s and that Clapton is in town tomorrow night. The buzz in the theatre is of a potential Beck/Clapton reunion. I try and explain the gravity of a moment like this to my son but end with the old fart answer, “Someday, you can tell people you saw this.” But as the night went on, it became evident that Beck had left his contempories wheezing in the dust years ago. Clapton wouldn’t be able to rise to the occasion. Beck would have to keep it in second gear. We walked out the front door as the first enchore began. “Maybe we should jam when we get home.” My son said. “Let’s give it a day.” I answered

Posted by Nicholas Tremulis at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

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My brother, Stevo hosts a great radio program every Halloween.
He is in Chicago, but the show can be streamed as well...
Please put this on your Calendars....
Nightmare City Halloween Website

Halloween Art Exhibit Site

Posted by Todd V. Wolfson at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Courtesy of today's Chicago Tribune - ed.

Artist defends sculpture for CTA station
Sculptor scoffs at riders who say the piece is pornographic

By Virginia Groark
Tribune staff reporter
Published September 19, 2006

Lakeview artist Josh Garber insists his intent was to design a sculpture for the Brown Line's Kimball station that would inspire the community and give people a place to sit.

But the proposed piece, "Hope and Renewal," instead set off a mini-firestorm in the Northwest Side neighborhood after e-mailed images of it drew comments that it resembled parts of the male anatomy.

Despite the controversy and requests to alter the design, Garber has decided to stand his ground. He's not altering the artwork.

Read more here.

Posted by ed at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Paolo Javier is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books, 2005), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada, 2004), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He edits 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

Nocturnally
     for Bonnie Chang

A castle, hollowed-out, abandoned
of red brick, white ivy-scaled
     in the center of a swirling lake
of black moss & broken branches
I point to it.
Here, all of my joys, yung pagkabata ko. . . .
I try to feel for who it is I've missed with desire to visit.

But it's graduation day. Ministries of families arrive, arrive.
Is it at the heart of Central Park that you prove valorous?
I don't know. I just.....feel. & what
an immense sadness to bear. I keep missing all of my life
as it comes full circle, a violet swirl of monuments here, I mean there.

Papa, he assures us of a clearer path back in.
Pero sa tingin ko, to swim across is to sink. Before the world
discovers its way, or perhaps that way discovers him, down the slope
of a misty hill rising behind it, a hidden metal rampart is revealed.
Sure enough, troops of yammering adolescents begin their slippery descent,
they will infiltrate the only home I hold traces of
     the woman I loved at both ends of the lake
I feel her mostly, somewhere within the blood red walls of this fortress
I loved her. & still, one discovers lots & lots to unpack.
What a bright yellow summer it was.

A computer monitor      sky darkened      Papa repeating
"leave the multiple brown extension cord on the floor where
you picked it up."      Only natural light for this room & its inhabitants, my love.
Newly-minted cement floors, a blue kitchen table you steal glances across
on the way up. I see every sharp occurrence
from beyond unbreakable distance, crystal clear, like silence.
I feel it mostly, such method of events as you prescribed
in the accurate world. Each time since then you question
     my place
in like surroundings, I think to feel to know it's real.

Posted by Simone Muench at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ABC, renowned for its blatant pro-Bush and anti-Kerry propaganda during the last election, including its link to the Sinclair Broadcasting group, those radical conservatives behind the Speed-Boat smear, is up to similar tricks with a perfectly-timed, patently bogus "docudrama" on the 9/11 tragedy.

Perhaps ABC/Disney thinks they can sell a 9/11 Fantasia because creating ‘fantasyland’ is ALL the Bush administration does day in and day out.

ABC has caused a bit of an uproar over its decision to air a docudrama called "The Path to 9/11," giving the film six hours of prime time the evenings of September 10 and 11. The project is little more than a conservative fantasy, in which the Clinton administration is to blame for the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush gang has always been serious about counter-terrorism and the true heroes. ABC is billing the program as "an objective telling of the events of 9/11," which uses the official 9/11 Commission report as a guide. All available evidence suggests the docudrama to be perfectly cobbled propaganda. Greetings from Goebbels and Stalinist Russia.

“The Path to 9/11” – ABC’s miniseries was written by Rush Limbaugh’s friend Cyrus Nowrasteh. Those having previewed the miniseries (even many Republicans), which ABC erroneously claims is based on the 9/11 Commission Report, insist that it would give millions of Americans the impression that legal protections for civil liberties and liberal politicians were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That message isn’t just wrong, it’s the linchpin of Karl Rove’s strategy for winning the mid-term election.

ABC has already decided to make tiny edits under pressure, but that’s not enough. I urge you to call ABC parent company Walt Disney President and CEO Robert Iger, using this automated tool, and voice your opinion.

http://www.CallABC.org

“The Path to 9/11” is frightening not only because of its politically motivated errors and fabrications, in short lies, but also because of the insidious message it sends about how the Constitution supposedly got in the way of preventing the attacks on 9/11.

Specifically, the “docudrama” reportedly portrays Clinton administration officials reining in CIA operatives ready to strike Osama bin Laden because those officials are hog-tied by legal restraints. That is entirely fabricated by the author and its implication is that 9/11 was made possible by weak people following outmoded laws. The corollary is an endorsement of the Bush administration’s legislative and PR effort to scare the nation and Congress into rewriting and severely restricting our freedoms and legal standards.

Further facts about the docu-lies:

* Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, is helping set the record straight and correcting fabricated stories included in the movie.

* ABC has ended its online discussion of the film by yanking the blog it created for the project.

* A number of high-profile conservative bloggers received preview copies of "The Path to 9/11" last week, which seems like an odd step for ABC to take if the docudrama is supposed to be an "objective telling" of the events.

* According to Variety, ABC, which is now airing the movie without commercial interruptions, is "sending 100,000 high school educators a letter from 9/11 Commission co-chair Tom Kean informing them of the various platforms on which the mini is available. ABC and Scholastic have pacted to produce an online study guide."

Also note, the website ThinkProgress, which has done a tremendous job taking the lead on this, has created a page that allows readers to share their concerns with ABC directly.

Posted by Mark Staff Brandl at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (0)

You know how it is. You’re superproductive, and then all of a sudden, you seem to get nothing done. Paperwork piles up. Faucets start dripping and the toilet clogs, and you vaguely think you need a plumber. But my god, getting a plumber. That’s almost a full-time job. You don’t have the time or energy. There’s so much to do, but school hasn’t started yet, and it’s really hot, but then all of a sudden you are behind paying your bills, and you haven’t kept up with your friends, and on top of it you pick up a bug that your son caught on a flight to Paris. Fever dreams, and you wake up to notice the weather is very cool, and it has been raining for days. Raining, raining.

It all is completely unreal. The nation is at war, and everything seems unreal, because nothing is different for you except that you have a friend who was in Baghdad doing good works until it got way too dangerous because members of her team were kidnapped and one was killed and you’re on her e-mail list. She was at the funeral, which was a national news story, so you got to compare that ‘coverage’ to what she wrote. But still you cannot even imagine it, despite your friend’s eloquent e-mail descriptions. You can’t even imagine it, and you have a very good imagination. After all, you’re in the arts. So she’s back in Chicago, and then you get an e-mail from her saying she’s in Duluth, and you cannot imagine the things she’s seen, and you cannot imagine why she would return from Iraq and go to Duluth, Minnesota. It makes you cry to try to wrap your brain around it.

It is all completely unreal. The future stretches out precipitously, or does it? Things are really going well. You’ve driven a Saturn all along, and ride your bike mostly, so elevated gas prices aren’t really affecting you. You can even congratulate yourself for not falling prey to the relentless advertising of SUVs over the past decade. You don’t know any one of your friends who is on food stamps. That’s really different than it was when you were in your twenties in the seventies and even you were on food stamps. The seventies were really bad. If there had been Starbucks, you certainly couldn’t even have considered patronizing it, because you really couldn’t have afforded it, and decrying it as a symbol of whatever negative thing it is supposed to be (something about gentrification) wouldn’t have even entered your mind.

And most of your friends and acquaintances are doing pretty much exactly what they want to be doing, and if they hold two jobs, it is because they want to. Even your brother who has been more or less unemployed for a number of years isn’t on food stamps. The White Sox are your main source of anxiety, not the shadowy terrorists plotting to blow up whatever it is they are plotting to blow up. And you think, ‘Isn’t it really so typical of our pampered American-ness that the main lesson of the recent disaster drill enacted by the City of Chicago was that women wearing flip-flops or high heels would be in big trouble if there was a "real" disaster?' And thinking about this, the fact that your frame of reference in the arena of civic anxiety is the amazing piece by Deb Sokolow, Someone Tell Mayor Daley, the pirates are coming on view in a show you did at where you work is actually reassuring.

So why is it after being superproductive, all you can do is lay around, thinking about nothing much of all except all the things YOU HAVE TO DO and wondering when it was it started raining constantly. Is that how it usually is in September in Chicago? You’ve lived here for thirty-five years. Does it rain all the time in early September and you just haven’t noticed it?

You think, ‘Oh, I need to write something for Sharkforum. I really do.’ But you have to pay your bills and there is that infestation of pantry moths that you really need to deal with. And because it is raining all the time, your front steps have gotten so slippery that the mailman probably is going to fall and then you’ll really be screwed. And oh, you wanted to go to Around the Coyote because after all, you’ve lived in the neighborhood for thirty years, way before any of those others decided Wicker Park was the hip place to be (inexorably drawing Starbucks franchises to the neighborhood), but there’s the horrible bug you got from your son who flew off to Paris, leaving you alone with the crazy dog for a week. So you really can’t get out to walk the two blocks over to the Flat Iron building, past Sultan's Market. Oh, Sultan’s Market — which you remember way back when as a corner grocery trying to get a liquor license because there really wasn’t that much money in selling a gallon of milk here and a can of dog food there and mostly surviving off selling lottery tickets — now takes out full-page ads in Conscious Choice, which you looked at the other night after picking it up during your visit to The Center for Green Technology, which was the best thing you’ve done for months and months. The wetlands area alone was enough to make you cry. But then the ads in Conscious Choice are enough to make you weep too, but not from joy.

So what is it, that you can be superproductive for such a long time, then nothing. You have nothing to say. Your mind is blank. You worry about your reputation. But things are going well. The panty moth traps you ordered have really worked. You don’t see nearly as many moths, yet still you think ‘I bet my colleagues at The Art Institute don’t have pantry moths.’

And the White Sox! You listen to every game, but have no faith that they are going to get into the playoffs, and you fear the Tigers. And then you realize when you are blogging on Bad at Sports that Dave Roth is from Detroit and he’s a Tigers fan, and he’s probably feeling really good, so that’s good. And you did manage to get out to Architrouve and see their opening show, which included Dave’s work, so that’s good. And you know you can’t be snotty about the 2006 performance of the World Champs toward the only Tigers fan you know, because the truth is the White Sox are just not playing well. You just have to take it, because you really value the truth, regardless of your Major League Baseball affiliation.

And because you’re sick, you don’t make it out to Fall Season gallery openings, and you really want to see a lot of the shows. Really.

But, you think, ‘At least I got out of jury duty.’ You were called for jury duty which coincided with the first day of school. So you phoned the number on the summons and said, ‘I can’t report to 26th and California. I have to be at my son’s first day of school.’ And amazingly enough the person who had a very thick Chicago accent so you knew you were talking to someone really official gave you no guff at all, and said, ‘That’s fine. Don’t worry about it.’ ‘Well, things are going well if I can get out of jury duty so easily,’ you think, ‘even if I haven’t posted anything at Sharkforum for weeks and weeks. If I had to serve on a jury, it might be weeks and weeks more before I could even think about writing anything.’

So now that the weather is cool, and it gets dark at 7:30, and it has been raining for seemingly days and days and days, it doesn’t seem like things will get better. I mean, what happened to summer? But, you remind yourself, ‘Things are really not that bad for me,’ when you read that dozens of tortured bodies are discovered dumped around Baghdad on a daily basis. ‘No one I know is currently living in Baghdad since my friend returned home and inexplicably went to Duluth,’ you think to reassure yourself. But why does everyone seem so anxious? Things really aren’t that bad. What a luxury it is to be an American, living in 2006. You think that you were rereading the classic study on the bubonic plague, The Black Death, this summer. And you finally watched Band of Brothers on DVD even tho’ the Shark insists the HBO program to watch is Deadwood. ‘My god,’ you think, ‘I have it so good compared to the average person in the 1300s, or the average person in 1944 in Europe.’ Things are not perfect, but are they really that awful? ‘No,’ you decide, ‘things are not nearly so bad since my pantry moth infestation has subsided.

More later,

Lynne.

PS. Here’s a poem I wrote a while ago about a dripping faucet:

The Lives of the Kitchen Faucet

The melody that fills the room—
the drumming of water on tin.
And all the life that’s held within
Is suddenly atmosphere.

And now the drum’s inside a tin
Once filled with olive oil
The noise is ploppy, pretty, royal
In lovely temperance.

The water’s now a spinning boil
Gushing from the spout.
Drumming loudly, drowning out,
The melody gone to bass.

Spin free, in all your merry glee
Toyish things of the world.
Whether tin and pipe, or paper twirl’d
There is always so much joy

In space and sound in well-loved rooms
in which we live our lives.
Filled with life that sings and thrives
Including that of the kitchen faucet.



© copyright 2006 by Lynne Warren

Posted by Lynne Warren at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There was plenty of blood in the water at the Cultural Center yesterday evening as Shark Ed, The Shark, StingRay and The Curadorsal staff all showed up along with our pals from Bad At Sports and Lumpen, the whole messy affair refereed by pelagiac researcher for an hour or two Allison Peters, to partake in a feeding frenzy; -complete with the marvelous scenic backdrop provided by Shark Theory himself......I leave this thread open and invite the other Sharkpack members and others present to discuss the proceedings....or,...er,.....swim around and luxuriate in all the carnage and krill!....

Posted by The Shark at 04:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Sharkforum's very own John Kruth will be working with Shark-in-absentia Alejandro Escovedo (as well as husband of Shark Kim Christoff) in Brooklyn this weekend. Greatness is anticipated...

From September 16 - October 20th John Kruth will be co-producing a series of great concerts for the Culture Project's Impact Festival with producer/promoter Danny Kapilian. The first concert will be tomorrow afternoon:

CITIZENS BY ANY OTHER NAME featuring DON BYRON (MUSIC FOR SIX MUSICIANS), SUZANNE VEGA, AND ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO

Saturday, September 16, 2006, 4:00 pm
(gates open at 3:00 pm)
Free at Empire Fulton Ferry State Park at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Dumbo, Brooklyn (Water Street and Dock Street) This will be a free concert on the dramatic East River waterfront under the Brooklyn Bridge in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn (NOTE - in case of rain, the concert will be moved inside of the Tobacco Warehouse tent immediately next door in the Park, and will proceed in full).

I will let you know about future concerts which - 8PM, Saturday, October 7th - Protest:The Concert to Close Guantanimo at Town Hall with a great line up that includes:Angelique Kidjo, Tom Paxton, The Mammals, Rutha Harris, The Klezmatics, Marshall Crenshaw and the Urban Word Poets - more details to follow (Tix will be $25-65)

And the final concert will be Friday, October 20th at the fabulous Apollo Theatre in Harlem - Time for Change - A Tribute to Miles Davis (the line-up looks really great for this show as well, with Roy Hargrove, Gary Bartz, Badal Roy and many other greats of Miles' funk period - details to follow (Seats will be $25 -65)

Hope to see you at Dumbo tomorrow afternoon!

Posted by ed at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A receptacle, such as a coffer or shrine, for keeping or displaying sacred relics.

"Corinna's eye socket is her glass eye's casket, her mouth a reliquary that contains her dead teeth, her body melted down to an anamorphic spill."

—Rikki Ducornet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous

Posted by Simone Muench at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Editors note: We're please to announce the additon of William Conger to the Sharkpack. As both a painter and an educator, William has been a vital and essential player in the Chicago art scene for over 30 years. His work has been widely collected and reviewed, and we're proud to add him to our ranks. -Ed

Wesley has defended and praised Leslie Hindman, as do others. I am not one of them. She has posted her upcoming auctions, including one set for Sept, 26. Look at her site and review the pieces up for auction from various collections including the recently dismissed K-Mart collection. There you will see what I perceive to be the usual Hindman tactics: grossly underestimating values for art by established, collected artists (which I also perceive as a tease for eager dealers) and overestimating values for ordinary run of the mill prints and bad pretty pictures. For instance, there is a Richard Hunt bronze sculpture, a wonderful example of his work, estimated at $600 to $800! Who can justify such an insulting value for anything by Richard Hunt, especially any piece of his sculpture. even if it had been run over (which it has not) by the METRA express to Highland Park? There are a number of other egregious and utterly reckless estimates, including, you might guess, for two of my paintings (here and here) from 1992, little oils on wood panels 12x12 inches each. They originally sold for something close to $2,000 each in 1992 and the same sized work would be at least twice that today. But wait, these works are estimated at $800 to $1,200 by Ms. Hindman and her employees. What do they do to establish such estimates, roll tin cans or toss darts?
It's understood that auction estimates are not retail prices but are they really only 20% of retail? Absurd! Blatantly damaging! The values of my work have not fallen over the years. So far as I know there's no record of my work being sold below its established retail value (not counting the odd things for the donated benefits) . People who have bought my work should know that over a few years' time its value is almost certainly well above what they originally paid. So there is no quantifiable method or resource by which Hindman Auctions can set the estimated value of my work at ridiculously low levels. If there is, show it to me. Some artists who have survived well enough without the gaudy star-status do not have significant auction records. People keep my art. The only auction record for my work that I know of is, surprise, one conducted by Leslie Hindman which was also deeply underestimated and hurt my career because her auction was held while I was having a solo gallery show of new work. It didn't occur to her employees to walk a block or two to my gallery to see what my prices were at the time. They simply guessed, in total ignorance of the market and my hisotry. Self-serving at my expense.

What artist could abide such vulgar and ruthless treatment of his or her work by an auctioneer who, inexplicably, earns Wesley's happiest shark smile and wave of the topfin? In friendship, I am baffled by Wesley's defense of Leslie Hindman Auctions.

Instead of glowering over artists who are always 22 places below him I wish Wesley would use his considerable insight and judgment to notice the harm done to all artists when the marketplace is rigged to exploit them by self-serving fire-sale auction houses. After all who but the artist loses when his or her work is pandered by buyers and sellers giddy for an obscene or an insider tradeoff? Who are the enemies? Not artists, not even the mediocre ones and never good ones; rarely the serious collectors and dealers, curators and critics. And not the art audiences. Who (and what) does that leave? Leslie Hindman Auctions?

Posted by William Conger at 06:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Cartoon by Mark Staff Brandl

---

Clipped from the Chicago Artists Resource web site:

Artists at Work 9/14: Strictly Alternative
Thursday September 14
6 - 7:30 pm
Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington Street

Mainstream media is rarely the place to find out what's really happening in Chicago's art world. Instead, there are several new alternatives that probe and stimulate, revealing and challenging the conventional wisdom and the status quo.

Join Allison Peters, Director of Exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, as she referees a conversation between the folks at Bad at Sports (Amanda Browder, Duncan MacKenzie, Richard Holland and Kathryn Born), Sharkforum (Wesley Kimler and David Roth) and, representing Version Festival, Select Media Festival and Lumpen, Ed Marciewski. Whew.

Admission free.

Posted by david roth at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

11.5 weeks
a little over 2 months
since my dad died.

11.5 weeks
a little over 2 months
since my dad died.
time flies,
i forget how long it has been.
grieving.
hurting.
happy. artistic. sad.
listening to alot of electric miles davis.
tears flow.
i sigh.
i miss you, dad.

Posted by Todd V. Wolfson at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is clipped from the ever-so-indespensible Boingboing.net:

The First Amendment Project is auctioning off an opportunity to have your name and likeness appear in a Chris Ware comic strip. The eBay auction ends September 18 and the current bid is $1370. All proceeds go to the First Amendment Project, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and promoting freedom of information, expression, and petition." From the auction listing:

"The appearance in name and approximate drawn likeness, either as a 'supporting character' or more forthright personna, of the auction's 'winner' in an upcoming comic strip by the author/cartoonist, to appear sometime before the end of 2008 in serial (probably newspaper) form, and later to be reprinted in collected form at an unspecified, and probably quite alarmingly later, date." "I'll be happy to send a signed copy of the strip in which the person appears (which will likely be in the local weekly newspaper) but only on the proviso that the person in question doesn't get mad or otherwise grow to despise me if their likeness is construed as satirical, incorrect, unflattering or in any way unliterary. I'll do my best, however, to maintain veracity and allegiance to the general rules of propriety (unless, of course, the winner offends me, in which case he/she may appear as any variety of disagreeable and distasteful ruffian.) The winner should also realize that if his or her character ends up contributing significantly to the development of said story that the author/cartoonist cannot be held liable for any confusion, affront or life complication said appearance might subsequently engender."

For more click here.

Posted by ed at 05:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lampblack & Ash
by Simone Muench
Winner of the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize
Sarabande Books
Reviewed by C. J. Laity

Before you read Simone Muench's new book Lampblack & Ash, take this little test. Define these words: adder, ferric, phosphene, scrim, stridulation, threnody, virga. Easy enough? Read the book then. Can't do it? In that case, I advise you to have a real good dictionary handy while you read this book for the first time, and use it often. It will be a rewarding experience, I promise. Then, read the book again without the dictionary, after you've familiarized yourself with detritus and alluvium and sediments and pigments used in ink as well as fertilizer, when you've practically become an amateur botanist. Now you can discover a beautiful love letter to Robert Desnos.

Read the entire review here.

Posted by ed at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by ed at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These are not words set down for the rejected






Nor for outcasts cast by the mind's pity



Beyond the aid of lip...



...or hand or from the speech


of fires lighted in the wilderness by lost men


Reaching in fright and passion to each other


This is not for the abandoned to hear

---

From "A Communication to Nancy Cunard," by Kay Boyle

Posted by Ray Pride at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Anania is a native of Omaha who attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha (BA), and the State University of New York at Buffalo (PhD). He is the author of Selected Poems (Moyer Bell, 1994), the novel The Red Menace (Moyer Bell, 1986), and In Natural Light (Moyer Bell, 1999), among others. His most recent collection is Heat Lines (Moyer Bell, 2006). In addition, his work has been included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. He is a former poetry editor of Swallow Press, director of CLMP, and member of the NEA literature panel. He is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Illinois — Chicago and currently lives in Austin.

De Kooning

          NY, April 1997

How is it the light
grows furious once again,
yellow and orange,
then wafts into
a green clarity?

She waits in curve
and fold, the cleft
of her drifting
in a white rest,
a blank space
that urges space
along, the way
in music silence
drives the song.

Posted by Simone Muench at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first time I witnessed our friend, The Shark, in action, Big Black was providing the live soundtrack in a loft somewhere west-Loopish (was it on Lake?- what year was it? My memory flags after so many years). Could you imagine anything more menacing? Albini, slinging his guitar from a guitar strap on his hip, scraping chords like rusted steel and The Shark, fin barely visible, weaving through the crowd. Back then you could be assured that you would see the same people at any underground event; and I’m not sure if Corey Rusk was there, but the attitude was what Touch and Go records has created for at least a couple generations of musicians, filmmakers, and artists.
If you want to create and have fun doing it, make it happen on your own-don’t trust the suits (or satin jackets). Don’t let money influence how or why it’s happening. Touch and Go is celebrating an anniversary this weekend, and to count how many people the label has influenced worldwide would be an exhausting task.

I’m no expert on the label itself, although I’ve known many band members and employees over the years (I’ve witnessed Yow’s blooming rose at close range more than any fan deserves), so I’m not going to try to spew any history; the papers have done a nice job of that. But I will say that the business model that the label has run and the spirit in which it has operated since its inception is the biggest reason Chicago’s music scene and collection of bands is what it is- world class. Bettina at Thrill Jockey and Dan at Drag City run their houses on the same premise that the bands are full partners, not to mention people that you would go to dinner with or hang out with for some beers. No one loses. You can imagine how many times bands on these Chicago labels have been wooed by the majors. The short term gains may have been sweet, but in the long run it could never pay off.

So hats off to you Corey Rusk and the bands that have faithfully made lives (not just livings) together with you at Touch and Go. I’m not sure what the next 25 years will bring, but I know it’s going to rock.

Here is a short list of songs that stick in my craw:
Didjits- “Plate in My Head”
Shellac- “Doris Wingwalker”
Big Black- “He’s a Whore”
Slint- “Good Morning Captain”
The Jesus Lizard- “Bloody Mary”
Killdozer- “Lupus”
Mekons- You name it
Wow- what a roster!
…and that Barclords song by those movie guys

Posted by Rick Rizzo at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a hugely important music weekend in Chicago, what with the Hideout Block Party devoted entirely to the Touch and Go 25th Anniversary. Anyone who's anyone will be there dahling, and it promises to be a smashing good time. KEXP, the much-loved FM station from Seattle (there was a bit of attention devoted to that city a while back...something to do with flannel) will be setting up a remote command post right here in Chicago at the oh-so-cozy Engine Music Studios.
The schedule follows, and it's a doozy (don't miss Sharkforum's very own Rick Rizzo and his partners-in-crime Eleventh Dream Day on Saturday). The only catch is they'll most likely be working with this guy. He's a real Svengali. (And no, I don't mean Svenghouli)




KEXP Live music schedule:
Thursday 9/7/2006
9:00AM : Jon Langford FULL
11:00AM : Devin Davis FULL
1:00PM : The Ms FULL
3:00PM : Walter Meego FULL

Friday 9/8/2006
9:00AM : Catfish Haven FULL
11:00AM : Scotland Yard Gospel Choir FULL
1:00PM : M. Ward FULL
3:00PM : The Changes FULL

Saturday 9/9/2006
3:00PM : Sally Timms FULL
5:00PM : Eleventh Dream Day FULL
7:00PM : Moxie Motive FULL


Block Party Schedule:
Friday, September 8
9:00pm !!!
8:00pm Ted Leo + Pharmacists
7:00pm Girls Against Boys
6:00pm Supersystem
5:00pm The Shipping News

Saturday, September 9
9:00pm Shellac
8:40pm Big Black
7:45pm Man…or Astroman?
6:50pm Scratch Acid
6:30pm Sally Timms
6:00pm Negative Approach
5:40pm PW Long
4:55pm Didjits
4:35pm Jon & Kat (Mekons/The Ex)
3:50pm Killdozer
2:55pm The Ex
2:35pm Tim & Andy (Silkworm)
1:50pm Pegboy
12:55pm Uzeda
12:00pm The New Year

Sunday, September 10
9:00pm Calexico
8:00pm Pinback
7:00pm CocoRosie
6:05pm The Black Heart Procession
5:45pm Brick Layer Cake
5:00pm Seam
4:40pm Tara Jane O’Neil
3:55pm Three Mile Pilot
3:00pm Enon
2:00pm The Monorchid
1:00pm Quasi
12:00pm Arcwelder

Posted by ed at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fall comes on like a coma
a burden on the grass
to dress it, in quiet
the despair of a tortured debt
is blossoming. A flowery death
song of a thief waking me;
I leave with the coiled tear
and the cursing spit
from the widow's fire dream.

Here, the clouds diary my reflections,
their silvery eyes, now cross-hatched.
Their whites hang my powdery side
like I'm a cyclops or the nut bag
the cypress divorced. Reddened
by the weight of myself.

Sliced by a hurried bitter tongue
a slope once a mountain with its head on.
Trees whipping the silence.

The flame, you've insisted
won't straighten, like sweat
slipping away a future.
Mine is the bent spoon, laughing
daughter of the hair-sprayed eye.

The future's blue ox without
bells to ring off its neck,
the stars drowning their reflections
in a littered glitter
everyone has run away from.

Posted by Kim Christoff at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Memorial
By Bruce Wagner
507 pp.Simon and Schuster

One of the two or three best novels of the last five years, Bruce Wagner’s “Memorial” is a towering achievement on almost every level: emotional, linguistic, political and spiritual. Wagner is writing at an altitude which will make many readers gasp and others feel truly high.

Wagner’s tale is told in four contemporaneous parts. Each subsequent chapter is told by one of four different characters. There is Marj, a wealthy widow with two estranged children. There are her estranged offspring Chester and Joan. There is Marj’s ex-husband (and the two kids’ father) Ray.

Marj has become the victim of a very sophisticated con scheme that almost always succeeds in bilking older, rich women out of their lives’ savings. Joan is a hard-driven, hard-bitten career woman. An established architect, Joan is intent on getting the commission for a memorial (the title character) to victims of the 2004 tsunami. She is also a neurotic, guilt-tripping nymphomaniac. Her brother Chester (“Chess”) is, by contrast, merely a lazy drug addict (and occasional movie-location scout). Ray is an old man with medical problems. Ray also has a problem: the LA cops have broken into his house, scared the hell out of much-younger Indian girlfriend and shot his dog in the ass. The dog pulls through. Similarly, Ray has a heart attack but recovers.

These four people and a handful of others (not forgetting their pets) are connected in a way that only a truly great novelist can explicate. What is really amazing is the amount of anger Wagner can pump into a story that is essentially a story of the innate goodness of humanity. This is not to say that the story is sugarcoated. Everyone in the cast of stumbling characters comes to a pretty bleak resting place at the conclusion. The journey along the way is by turns harrowing and hilarious. There is long buried family intrigue a-plenty. The characters all (to varying degrees) are obsessed with the culture and religion(s) of India and in particular the fate of the tsunami victims. That doesn’t mean Wagner can’t tee off on “grief junkies” – people who get major kicks by seeking to “help” victims of disasters. Katrina and the World Trade Center get the same withering appraisals as the tsunami and Oklahoma City. That doesn’t mean, either, that he can’t tee off and vent his truly vicious spleen on any other number of modern targets including modern health care, the media, celebrities and the business and cultural peculiarities of Hollywood.

Still, Wagner’s inner compassion is in evidence. By the end of the novel as he begins to pile on the serious violence, it almost seems the author regrets telling this particular tale. There is a scene of violence toward the end of the novel which places Wagner squarely within the tradition of John Irving and Hubert Selby, jr. as a weeping connoisseur of exquisitely horrific violence. Suffice it to say that the power of the book’s denouement is sufficient to make even the hardest hearted find him or her wiping away tears.

Posted by Paul K at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Josh Garber has a show opening this Friday, September 8th at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago.

Having watched Josh develop a unique and personal vocabulary over the past 15 years I've found his work to be increasingly interesting. His ability to manipulate steel and aluminum rod in a manner which is both fluid and honest is really something. The works are organic and flowing in form, yet they are not fussy, as they still show the unpredictable marking of the welding process.

The result is an artistic language which is strangely quiet, given the number of visual elements represented by the collection of aluminum rod ends. But it's precisely this multitude of visual points which provides the calm of these pieces, as their organization creates grain which flows seemlessly over the work.

While it's fair to say that the primary visual thrust of this work deals with formal concerns, it's also clear that there's a deep (if obscure) psychological territory being navigated here.

For fans of Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, David Smith, Richard Serra, James Surls, Mark di Suvero and Martin Puryear.

Shown above: Collective 2005, Aluminum bar, 16 x 15 x 15 inches

Posted by david roth at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For a guy who called himself "The Crocodile Hunter," Irwin was in reality a fearless champion of biodiversity and a living example of someone living a life of respect for all living things. Here's a link to the CNN piece on him.

Posted by ed at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

THE GIG IS CANCELLED - SORRY. REFUND TICKETS AT PLACE OF PURCHASE, OR SOMETHING.

the issues: 2 sets

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 10TH
SIMON'S TAVERN
5210 N. Clark
(Clark and Foster)

9:00 Set 1
10:30 Set 2

Posted by ed at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. Abnormal in growth or structure.
2. Of or relating to teratology--the biological study of birth defects.

". . . their skulls are yet another sort of cabinet rattling with fetal thoughts, teratological thoughts."

--Rikki Ducornet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous

Posted by Simone Muench at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ray Hsu grew up in Toronto and studied at the University of Toronto. He is the author of a book of poems, Anthropy (Nightwood Editions), which won the 2005 Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poetry has been published in Canadian, American and British journals, including Fence, The Fiddlehead, New American Writing, nthpposition, Exile, and The Literary Review of Canada. He is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Many died.
        La Jetée

Ladies and Gentleman
on your right you will see foothills
where your ancestors fanned themselves
before battle. A trick of the heat
but the trees are moving
like water. At night they would clean
the fruit and eat slowly
under thirsty skies because
this was not the age for keeping
food. Yes ma'am it was easy
to get lost then walking was an illusion.
Many small acts before war.
You may miss the colours
which are basic like fever.
If the enemy downhill
sharpened their eyes they would see
tiny entrails of plums lace
their arms like a puzzle. On your left
such things as the taste of iron
the smell of pulp
from their hands. The style
of poetry at the time was classical
and lean. Words to describe dawn
and blood rushing to your face
and god they
protected those      Keep
your arm inside the rail
please. Moonlight
was a later invention.

Posted by Simone Muench at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a review in the current issue of Art in America (September 2006) of Swiss artist Leta Peer's recent exhibition at the Augsburg Museum for Contemporary Art in Augsburg, Germany. I would like to draw attention to that, to her, and to post a slightly expanded and personalized version of the review here.

In my opinion, Leta Peer (pronounced "Lay-ta Pear"), a painter of wonderful, sensuous, images, is one of the best artists in central Europe. This exhibition is her first major solo museum show. In it she displays 8 oil paintings and 5 photos of installations with an additional "interaction" at the nearby Schaetzler Palais. Peer creates luscious, naturalistic paintings of mountains from her home area, the Swiss Engadine, a long mountain valley located in the Romansch -speaking part of the canton of the Grisons. Peer's works reflecting this setting are generally minutely small, 4 by 6 inches. Surprisingly, in this show, the paintings were all circa 47 by 71 inches.

What exactly are Peer's "interactions"? Well, they are installations or the records of temporary installations of paintings. The artist frequently hangs her oil paintings in contrasting sites such as ornate palace rooms, half-destroyed buildings, or, once, New York City's Grand Central Station. She photographs and exhibits oversized prints of these hangings as independent artworks. For this exhibition, Peer inserted paintings in a Rococo palace under renovation. Five of the photos of these insertions among the plastic drop-cloth covered surfaces, plaster chunks and half-pitted walls were printed at 39 x 55 inches, and included in the exhibition.

Peer works in a direction which it is almost entirely impossible to appreciate through reproductions, whether high quality photos or on-line. Composition can be appreciated, and therein the artist is highly creative, but her works are strongly dependent on appreciation of their scale and surface. Her oil paintings are not smoothly photorealistic, featuring instead sumptuous variations of glaze and impasto. Furthermore, they are not Romantic — the pathetic fallacy is never suggested. Most hackneyed representations of mountains attempt to encompass and control the image, conquer the summit, by making it emblematic — a simple, identifiable logo-like outline against a pleasing backdrop. In contrast, in a work such as Landscape No. 21, of 2005, Peer deemphasizes the outline of the mountains by allowing the peaks alone to rise into the painting at its bottom edge. This accentuates its vastness and intimates the vertiginous feeling one has in the Alps. The color is rich, but speaks of neither postcards nor Caspar David Friedrich. Peer's works combine the shimmering, pearlescent colors of Vermeer with the facture of Velásquez.

In the exquisite accompanying catalogue, titled To Inhabit a Place, Peer's work is described by exhibition curator Thomas Elsen as "startlingly" or "disturbingly beautiful." This is true due to the adverbs more than the adjective. The artist's paintings are unmistakably attractive, but unexpectedly so. Describe her scenic subject matter verbally and one anticipates artworks either formulaic or at least highly conservative. However, when directly, visually experienced, the paintings are refreshingly original. For Peer, the genre, mountain paintings, and her recuperation of it clearly operate metaphorically as a salvaging of vision itself. Although now living in urban Basel, Peer is truly seeing anew the area from which she comes, drawing back the veil of past cultural cliché.

Although quite successful, Peer is in no way as appreciated as I personally feel she should be. Perhaps that is due to her subject matter, her emphasis on "classic" technical facility, or simply the position of painting in the artworld today. Peer once said to me that a treasured teacher of hers commented that painters of her generation and younger were now going to have to carry on the theory, understanding and development of the discipline on their own, as so many curators simply no longer had a clue. If that is indeed so, then I propose that Peer is accomplishing an enchanting part of this task.

Consider a few of my friends: David Reed is achieving the painterly absorption of electronic-mediality; Wesley Kimler is realizing the great question of how to transume and extend Portrait and a Dream (rather than avoid it), painterly endeavor as aspiration; I'm grappling with the subsumption of installation and the political vernacular into painting; — and many more are with us. Peer, too, as she supplies an impressive, contemporary incarnation of ability, of mastery.

Image Info: Leta Peer: Landscape #21, 2005, oil on canvas, 47 by 71 inches; at Augsburg Museum.

Posted by Mark Staff Brandl at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Amidst the froth of so many meaningless "Hallmark holidays" comes one that really makes sense - happy labor day. Americans seem to have a very short attention span when it comes to historical and cultural memory, so it comes as no surprise that many have already forgotten the sweatshops filled with children which were a common site in this country not so very long ago.

I suppose we're not alone - it's probably true that any community which has enjoyed better-than-average success would forget so easily. But there are still those who remember, and in a round-about way it pertains to Sharkforum.

When we started this thing 10 months ago we had several things in mind, but pretty near the top of the list was the agreement that the one essential ingredient in any endeavor is good ol' fashioned hard work. This country is lousy with professional polemicists and pundits spouting platitudes about American Exceptionalism. But what, specifically are they talking about?

Is it the fact that we've got the largest virtual penis, represented so horrifyingly by our glimmering collection of ICBM's, Abrams tanks, Stealth bombers and HUM-V's? Could it be the cultural heft we sport in the way of all things Hollywood? Could it be the magnificent geological diversity we enjoy?

Sadly, I think the question doesn't ever get asked, let alone answered. It's easy to point to World War II as an example of American Exceptionalism, but can the same be said for the current war in Iraq? What about our conduct in Afghanistan? Just the other day the Chicago Tribune ran a story laying out the current state of affairs in the international heroin biz. Afghan poppies account for something like 92% of the world's opium supply, and one reason given is that the southern portion of the country is currently operating under the control of the Taliban.

So what does make this country so great? Can American Exceptionalism be found in the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks? Is it readily found in the swamped and fetid streets of New Orleans shortly after the trainwreck-in-slow-motion which followed Hurricane Katrina? The short answer is "I dunno." We see astounding acts of heroism anywhere disaster strikes, and while it's true that Americans can demonstrate tremendous generosity worldwide in response to disaster, I hardly think we've got the market cornered.

While I'm hardly a historian, I do know a thing or two about the founding of this country. As far as I can figure, the really revolutionary aspect of the founding of America is that we're a nation generated by ideas. But that's wrong, because we're also a nation animated by ideas, and one idea in particular seems to have provided the dynamo which has accounted for so many of our accomplishments: each individual owns their labor.

While this may seem axiomatic to the 21st century mind, it was hardly always an accepted notion. In my short stint as a pre-law student at Michigan State's James Madison Residential College I had the good fortune to read John Locke's "Two Treatises of Government." To paraphrase in the most crude fashion allowable by law, Locke sets out the notion that in the days before government and law, when land and resources were abundant, "man" lived in a "state of nature." In this state of nature anything that an individual "mixes his labour with" is then something that individual can use at his or her discretion. In other words, the labor required to convert the potential value of that resource is the coin of the realm.

It seems to me, a somewhat-more-than-casual observer and much-less-than-academic source on the subject that this is the real animating idea behind America, and that this simple yet revolutionary concept is the font from which American Exceptionalism flows. While I readily admit that the concept of inalienable rights to "life [and] liberty" are essential, it just seems pretty obvious that it's the "pursuit of happiness" which really makes the difference.

I would submit that you can't have real liberty without an equity in the transaction of labor and compensation. The concept that an American can make it by dint of hard work and gumption is so central to the success of this country that I seriously believe that we can't survive without it. And yet there are those working day and night to pervert this concept, and in so doing they seek to return us to the day when the right of prosperity is passed down through the genetic rules of sovereignty and little else.

So what has all of this got to do with art in general, and Sharkforum in specific? Open almost any art magazine and you'll see a lot of didactic fashion-based object making. The tendency to establish artistic value by "virtue" of historical reference and "analysis" is nothing more or less that a return to the norms of patriarchal lineage as a criterion for value. Art about art can have no real value in the agonizing effort to express just how hard it can be to be alive.

I believe it was Aristotle who said "the unexamined life is not worth living," and I'm here to say that a didactic emphasis on art history as a primary thrust in any body work just can't accomplish the goal. I've got a friend in Texas who's a brilliant inventor, and he's made a fortune as a result of his gifts. We used to have a friendly argument about the relative roles of art and science in human history. My thesis is that science, for all it's value and wonder, will never compete with art for longevity, mystery and meaning.

The truth is that almost anything of any value requires hard work. If you're confused about that just ask anyone who's tried to make a marriage work. And art, perhaps the highest of high stakes philosophical games, is no different. Last week Wesley and I were talking about art, and we both came up with the same thing - it's hard to really do it right.

So here's the little bow that wraps it all up - Sharkforum, even though it's international, is about this American Exceptionalism in so many ways. We started this thing because we believed that our hard work was the answer to so many of our problems as individuals, as artists, as a community. And the results have already made themselves visible in the form of the friends we've made, the opportunies which have presented themselves to us, and the impact on our lives as artists.

Sharkforum is not meant to be a panacea, anymore than the Declaration of Independence was. Rather, it's a medium which helps to activate and contextualize the labor which we're convinced can only lead to great things.

Now get working.

Posted by david roth at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Possible Christoff / Wolfson Art Post in the works !

Look right here, in the future!

Posted by Todd V. Wolfson at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. A red dye made of the dried and pulverized bodies of female cochineal insects. It is used as a biological stain and as an indicator in acid-base titrations.
2. A vivid red.

"A spot among the quinces blazed,
a bug—cochineal.
We heard the pony rear up at
the comb—then sleep was all."

—Eugenio Montale, "In the Greenhouse" (trans. Jonathan Galassi)

Posted by Simone Muench at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)