Look, See

Red Blocks

Red Blocks, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (2 minutes and 28 seconds, looped), 520 x 420 pixels

Strummer

Strummer, 2006, oil on canvas, four panels, 12 x 9 inches each (12 x 40.5 inches installed)

Red Split

Red Split, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (8 seconds, looped), 134 x 515 pixels

Red Hoops

Red Hoops, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (3.85 seconds, looped), 380 x 640 pixels

Red Gate

Red Gate, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (24 seconds, looped), 500 x 500 pixels

Red Field with Blue Character

Red Field with Blue Character, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (10 seconds, looped), 380 x 380 pixels

Red Machine

Red Machine, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (10 seconds, looped), 380 x 380 pixels

Red Horizon

Red Horizon, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (24.6 seconds, looped & synched), 500 x 440 pixels

Red Horizon

Red Horizon, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (3.52 seconds, looped), 486 x 525 pixels

Reading

Things to read:

Out Standing in His Field: Gustave Courbet and the landscape of Modernism by Doug Harvey

For starters, landscape became Courbet’s most successful vehicle for flipping off the Man. Many of the artist’s career highlights pertained to this ongoing endeavor: his establishment of a separate, pay-per-view pavilion devoted exclusively to his own work in direct competition with the state-sponsored 1855 Salon; his increasingly explicit erotic content in unexhibited but nevertheless notorious works like The Origin of the World (Google it — you won’t be sorry); his refusal of the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1870; and his subsequent service as head of the Arts Commission for the fleeting proto-anarchist Paris Commune the following year, which ultimately led to his imprisonment and exile.

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Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery by Joan Waltemath

Is it the pleasure in seeing the experiences Walsh offers that points the way from sensation to sentient? Or is it in rendering the modernist grid as an inhabitable space that Walsh shows the end to materialism in sight?

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Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protech by Ben La Rocco

An artist today must do more than simply make things. It would be nice, of course, to churn out work and exhibit it as a pure, and therefore valid, expression of your most immediate impulses. But it is not enough, though it is important, merely to yell, “Here I am!” An artist must additionally yell, “This is what I mean!” Artists must represent something. They must stand for something beyond a success story or a market value. Tom Nozkowski does this. Through and through, his work bespeaks a faith in unadorned painting to communicate the immanent reality of a richly imagined and complex world.

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Charlene von Heyl at Friedrich Petzel Gallery by Roger White

A set of framed black and white works on paper, featuring Xeroxed images treated with spray paint, washy ink or charcoal, sheds more light on von Heyl’s paintings. If the master metaphor of postmodern abstract painting was the flatbed of the printing press, von Heyl’s work has more to do with the glass sheet of the copy machine: a transparent surface onto which disparate images can be momentarily gathered, and which the viewer necessarily encounters at one remove from their source.

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In Conversation: Karin Davie with Joan Waltemath

Davie: Well, I‘ve always been interested in (Tricia Brown's) work because of the way she dealt with the mechanics of the body, the edges and where they lie, the sense of natural gravity that she uses and defies at the same time, and how she was able to extend all of that beyond the boundary of the stage, out of the concert hall into other alternative spaces like rooftops and walls as well as gallery spaces. I try to think all of that in relation to my painting in some capacities, not just the verticality of the stripes, allowing for the paint to drip but also the physicality and the property of paint, where the form bulges, bends, twists and distorts. In some ways, I intentionally set out to use the stripe as something that everyone already knew. For some reason this was very liberating for me, and it was also a thrill seeking exercise, because I felt the stripe was so overdone and has been absorbed into the language of art. It almost has become a Pop icon in itself. I thought it had been emptied out of meaning, so if I was to take and carry it on, I have to add something else to it with some kind of representational meaning. I wanted to embody a certain image, but it wasn’t like I consciously knew what I was going to do. I felt an affinity to the form on a basic level. What I was interested in was using the body, bringing back gesture into my work, and it seemed appropriate to reduce it down to something like the stripe or the dot.

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Korean immersion in Kensington: Studio visit with John Tallman (via dgls)

"I'm attracted to minimalism -- casual, hand-made minimalism," he said. I don't put all of my thought in one work. I take five percent of it. Each thing I do I'm trying to break it apart. "

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Birnbaum v. Alberto Manguel by Robert Birnbaum (via artblog.net)

Alberto Manguel: One thing I find very worrisome in the theoretical and critical movement in the 21st century in art is that it deliberately does not acknowledge feeling—the emotional response to art.

Robert Birnbaum: Why not?

AM: I have had art critics say to me, “What you are talking about is what we feel when we look at a painting.” I don’t know where the dialogue goes from there. If we leave that aside, for me there is absolutely nothing left. I am not interested in what I can elaborate afterwards, if the first impulse is not one that is emotional. It’s impossible. So, yes, I’m very uninterested in looking at that. As a way, also, of saying this belongs to us all. This is how we used to look at art and this is how we have the right to look at art again—I like it, I don’t like. That’s where we start.

RB: In fiction, many writers will attest to the reader being the one who completes the work.

AM: Oh, yeah.

RB: And there is a way of broadening that to include all works of creation. What is a work of art without the viewer?

AM: It doesn’t exist. If I told you that I have written a novel or painted a picture and destroyed it afterwards or locked it up, I may tell you it’s the greatest thing since the Bible, but it doesn’t exist. It has no value. It has no presence; it simply doesn’t exist.

Red Horizon

Red Horizon, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (3.65 seconds, looped), 290 x 250 pixels

Red Green White

Red Green White, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (6.2 second, looped), 399 x 333 pixels

Red Pyramid

Red Pyramid, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (6 seconds, looped), 575 x 500 pixels

Radio Nova: Blê blê blê

From what I can tell this weblog was mentioned on a program called Blê blê blê on a Portuguese radio station, 98.9 in Porto. A synopsis of the program online includes the following, in Portuguese and roughly translated via Babelfish into English; the greater context is Artnews.info, at which I have a page:

Um sítio muito interessante para procurar informação sobre determinado artista contemporâneo é o Artnews. Tem pequenas biografias, criticas, reproduções e links. Tem ainda por cidade, incluindo Lisboa e Porto, listagens de galerias e museus, excelente para quem quer saber o que visitar no estrangeiro. Ao passear por lá descobri um artista muito interessante, Chris Ashley, uma das críticas começa com, “Chris Ashley é pintor mas não usa tinta”. Sim porque ele faz arte digital, usa html, em vez de óleo, o resultado é muito curioso e podem assim ter no vosso computador uma obra de arte.

A very interesting small farm to look to information on definitive artist contemporary is the Artnews. It has small biographies, it criticizes, reproductions and links. It has for city, still including Lisbon and Porto, listings of galleries and museums, excellent for who it wants to know what to visit in the foreigner. When taking a walk for I discovered an interesting artist very, Chris Ashley, one of the critical ones there starts with, "Chris Ashley is painter but it does not use ink". Yes because it makes digital art, it uses HTML, instead of oil, the result is very curious and can thus have in your computer a work of art.

Which I rewrite as:

Artnew is a very interesting place to look for information about particiular contemporary artist. It has brief biographies, criticism, images and links. It includes information about cities, including Lisbon and Port, and listings for galleries and museums, which is excellent for tourists who want to know what visit. When looking around I discovered a very interesting artist, Chris Ashley, about whom a critical piece begins, "Chris Ashley is a painter, but he doesn't use paint." Because he makes digtial art he uses HTML instead of oil; the result is very curious, and you can have a work of art on your computer.

Red Equinox (For L.- Happy Birthday)

Red Equinox (For L.- Happy Birthday), 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (20.8 seconds, looped), 394 x 394 pixels

Red Corner

Red Corner, 2006, HTML & animated GIF (3 seconds, looped), 250 x 250 pixels

Red Gradients

Red Gradients, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (21 seconds, looped), 380 x 400 pixels

Red River

Red River, 2006, HTML & animated GIFs (approx. 28 seconds, looped), 505 x 490 pixels

Anniversary

It's round about this time in March 2000 that I started weblogging, six years ago.

I started by running a copy of Manila- one of, if not the first weblogging applications- on my own desktop NT box in my office. That weblog was called XYZ, and is no longer on line. I have most of the files stashed on this very computer on which I type, and have posted a couple below.

In the first few months I learned how to use the software- weblogging back then was much less user-friendly than now- and developed the habit, my personal policy, of posting something, anything, everyday. The policy has made me what I am today: slightly neurotic about posting everyday, but at least I didn't fall by the wayside, like a million and one others.

In July 2001 I wrote an article for Berkeley Computing and Communications titled Weblogging: Another Kind of Website. I wrote:

One day in mid-March 2000 Raymond Yee of the Interactive University[1] thought it would be a good idea to buy and experiment with Manila, a web server application capable of supporting literally thousands of weblog websites. A bargain-priced education license was purchased, and Catherine Yoes downloaded and installed it on a rather ordinary NT server. Within weeks the IU experienced a revolutionary change in thinking about what a website is, how they're hosted, what they're used for, how they're built, and who owns them. A year and a half later all of the IU's websites are being produced using weblog technology, our team communications and sharing has been vitally enhanced, a number of our team members are regularly writing on the web, as are many of our University/K-12 projects and the K-12 teachers we work with.

Read the rest of it...

XYZ went offline in Jan 2001- too much of a hassle running upgrades, keeping my machine, the server, nice and secure, so I established another weblog called A Place to Write, Nothing Fancy, hosted on another Berkeley machine by the group with which I worked at the time, the Interactive University, a K-12 outreach and technology program. About a year and a half later I realized it wasn't all about the writing; I had started making dorky little images with HTML, and after months of that renamed the weblog A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy. That weblog lasted until February 21, 2004, its three year anniversary. It is still online. The preference for "nothing fancy" followed me here.

This weblog, Look, See, was established in October 2003. I posted here and at APTWNF simultaneously during October-February 2004, and finally just here since February 22, 2004. That's a lot of posts. I have posted nearly everyday for six years. My record is not as good as my friend and colleague Lloyd Nebres's; his is perfect. Mostly I missed when I was out of town without access, but that has decreased- not the out of town part; access has improved tremendously. I remember during January 2001 I had a kind of crisis- what am I doing?- and stopped posting for three weeks or so. I'm not sure how long I've been posting HTML images, maybe five years, except for taking last August off (I still posted, however) when I thought I'd figure out where this going and then just resumed in September not having figured anything out. Why am I talking about this? I must be thinking about many of the same questions that have popped up periodically over the years about this dang habit: why, what for, for whom, how to, how long, what next?

January 14, 2001: swimming, massage, mushroom burger

swimming, massage, mushroom burger

January 12, 2001: flying dream

I dreamt that I was flying, and that it was happening in pre-modern times.