MixedMedia

During a brief family holiday along the Erie Canal last week, I had the pleasure of stopping in at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. What a thrill! Why? Several reasons:

•  Its a bright open physical space in the heart of a city ready for a rebound. Artists know what that feeling is like: a kinetik sense of opportunity that can be won or lost at any moment.
• A great show on the walls. Richard Rockford is a mixed media and assemblage artist with a knack for subtle colors, balanced proportion, and ingenious mystery.
• A working, rentable printshop crammed with manual and automated machinery dedicated to keeping the craft and art of book- and print-making alive.
• A schedule of workshops and open studio sessions through which artists, crafters, and the curious can learn basic and advanced printing techniques and more.
• A tidy shop topped off with papers, cards, notebooks and  more titillating to the fingertips, staffed by knowledgeable staff in love with the printed letter.

Overall, I was enlivened by the sense of possibility and exploration at the relatively small corner space. Buffalo you must know is a city that peaked maybe in the ’20s and ’30s, immortalized by the contributions of canonical American creatives Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles Burchfield and many others. One can’t help wondering on arrival, “What the hell happened – where’d the vision go?” I have a belief that, like with the Roycrofters and the Arts and Crafts movement, these traditions emerge slowly, of a synchrony of many visions that seek to reconcile an impulse to shape the future with an instinct to draw forward gleanings from the past. Anyway, that’s more philosophy than I’m used to. But my point is that efforts like the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative are inspiring because I believe they are similarly inspired – a recognition that through preservation, inspiration and reinvention we can build great movements. I wish them much success and will look forward to any opportunity to revisit. I hope you will too!

This summer the Africa-India Technology Institute (AITI) in Accra, Ghana will host Maker Faire Africa, a two-day showcase of African ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Modeled on the popular Maker Faire format developed in the U.S. by Make Magazine and O’Reilly media, the festival will include exhibitions of functional devices invented locally, artwork derived from found objects and materials, workshops and demonstrations such as cellphone hacking, and panel discussions across a range of topics, including financing invention and the challenges of moving from invention to production.More information and a program available at http://www.makerfaireafrica.com 

The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table – he’s as playful and anti-establishment as the range of media and styles suggests. The artist as subject, director  and actor in the social struggle to communicate. While the rest of us bicker about what’s a more relevant, authentic, salient, expedient or efficient mode of expression he tested them all, not binding expression to a fetish or a movement of the day. Perhaps that’s why “peter” – Martin’s term for all unnamed forms – is such an endearing and appropriate expression: compact, unadorned, slightly naughty (in the American context?) and affectionable. Holland Carter put it nicely in the New York Times: “If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.”

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit.  Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com 

While in New York recently for a “Greening the Arts” symposium [see below], I had the very good fortune to meet an artist, preservationist, and self-described “recycling fanatic” Victoria Romanoff. Touring her converted firestation – which serves as her home, studio, and office – I was struck by how full and well-lived her life is, a life reflected in a rich, multilayered perspective so richly conveyed in everything that she produces. The title of this post is inspired by what little I gleaned of her life and work and our shared interest in cities and towns, and our efforts to incorporate their influence into our artwork.

Victoria has this eye for the scuffle, bumps, and scrapes of life that are bound up in a scrap of wood or painted façade alike. Her materia prima is the detritus of decline – joints, pulleys, columns, slats, plugs, rods, handles, adornments and other objects salvaged from the waste-streams of the new-obsessed.

A group show curated by Ms Romanoff, titled “Haven’t We Met Before,” was recently brought down at the Thomkins County Public Library – I wish I’d been there in time to see it! Nonetheless, an exhibition catalogue is available online and I was able to both see a few of the works and get a better sense of the materials that compose her works during our visit.

Most important to me, I was introduced to the range of motifs captured in her dense works. I caught whiffs of the gothic, romantic and even baroque mustiness bound up in these very modern works (Constructivism meets Duchamp with a nod to Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’?). Here is her artist’s statement for the “Haven’t We Met Before” show:

I like to conjure up lost civilizations, improbable resorts, crumbling monuments, over-the-top architectural follies, opinionated statutory and other imaginary settings. Along with that, I enjoy puncturing pomposity and do my best to lead the viewer astray with absurd but hopefully humorous titles. My sculpture is always built from recycled elements: discarded wood, architectural remnants, cardboard tubes, old ropes, washboards and other flotsam and jetsam. The paper mosaics, as well, are reborn from scraps cut out of previous creations.

As far as I can tell, just about all of her materials could be found at historic preservation sites and dumps, which she gives new life through spontaneous composition, clever joinery, and uniform coating treatments. Another interesting aspect of Ms Romanoff’s work is that is serves equally well as functional and decorative works.

One disappointment: there’s not alot of her work online. You’ll have to meet her yourself and seek out every opportunity you can to find her works on view!

[Both images are nicked from the Thompkins County Library exhibition materials and the Havent We Me Before Catalogue]