MixedMedia

Around the holidays last year I’d made a promise to knock out a washboard table with a collage top for a family member. I’d gotten the basic idea from the remarkable Victoria Romanoff in Ithaca, New York at a meet up we’d had years ago.This go around, I’d found a couple of pricier washboards with glass rubbing plates. Cleaning them was quick enough, and the greatest challenge was compensating for their irregular sizes, which was accomplished by simply adding a 1-inch riser to the top of the right board, allowing equal heights and the lining up of the joist piece.The collage top itself was a lot of fun to create. Given that the intended recipient is a family member, I had lots of raw materials to cull from: maps from trips we’d taken together, cutouts from visits we’d made to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, scraps of my daughter’s artwork, etc. The piece came together well – unexpectedly “white” but to good effect.For the joist piece I simply cleaned up a piece of antique board found in the barn, painted it white, and sanded it down to enhance the texture and integrate it with the top piece.The most pleasant discovery in this piece of work is that one can place a light within the recess of the table between to the two legs and achieve a very nice glow to the piece. Something to think about for future, more sculptural works might be having the table closed on all four sides and illuminated. 

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 

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.

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.”