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!

Paris Review 188 has a lovely collection of eleven collages by the American poet John Ashbery, 81. He’s a very interesting fellow, and if I’d ever been at Bard would have enjoyed learning from him. Academically credentialed, literarily plugged in, culturally invested – at least through the ’70s. Its not clear to me what has roused him since.But what I like to see in these collages, some of which are recent, is a bit of the hiking up of the cultural skirts and having a good romp through the puddles of whimsy.Curiously, the New York Times published 11 of Mr. Ashbery’s collages in 2008, when he had his first solo New York Gallery show.

Last week’s New Yorker cover struck me with some mixed emotions. Great to see it take the format of Time, Life and other “people” oriented news magazines by featuring the portrait of a person of prominence (yeah, whatever). Actually, a very important figure, our new President, Barack Obama.But a couple of things seemed amiss. First, it didn’t really look like the thin and point-featured Barack Obama I’d come to be familiar with from news sources. No, this one looked more like… Denzel Washington?  Then again, what was with the Washington wig?The portrait is called, “The First.” Its clearly intended to give the subject, our 44th, some historical weight. Wait, except he doesn’t need any. His movement, his message, his election *are* the historical weight.To be fair, this cover is about race. At least that’s what the association between the portrait and the title is intended to inspire. And I don’t want to dismiss that. In fact, I think David Remnick’s piece in this week’s magazine is an eloquent, memorable testimony to this important moment in history. Putting a wig on the President and dressing him in 18th century attire and associating him with a leader who, having showed great courage in many ways, did little as president to support the cause of slavery seems awkward and confused.No doubt as President Obama builds his own legacy as the nation’s top leader, the need to project the trappings and images of history will fall away and he will emerge into popular art unadorned, unencumbered. I will look forward to the end of the backward glancing arts.

NetSquared’s N2 Think Tank asks, “What was the best example or lesson learned about leveraging social media from the political campaigns this year? We saw candidates speaking to citizens through various mechanisms, but we also know that candidates have a lot more money than most of our nonprofit organizations (even if the tools are free, staffing and strategy development isn’t). What social media tools, tricks, and strategies were employed that could be used successfully with nonprofits?”

So I’m not going to talk about a particular technology (its pretty clear from basic data available that the Obama Campaign ran a stronger presence across pretty much all platforms and tools, and part of that is money and lessons from ’04 and netroots connections into the campaign HQ) but rather about something I sensed is very unique to this year’s contest, and to the Obama campaign in particular, which is this:

Appropriation and DIY messaging. (more…)

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