Engineer's Daughter

be back soon

Things have been a little hectic lately, but as of tomorrow morning I'll be on a plane to Bangkok where I plan to spend a week sipping fruity beverages by the river, checking out the local art scene and eating a ton of amazing food.  Oh yeah and getting a massage every day.  Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I'll see you on the other side.

seeing double

Janet Cardiff has long been one of my favorite artists, ever since one of her site-specific audio walks brought me literally to tears at SFMOMA soon after I first moved to the city.  Since then I've sought out her work in London and in New York, and as I wrote in my Collection Rotation I even named my cat after her.  Cardiff's work with her partner George Bures Miller often takes the form of rich, music-accented multimedia installations that play with ideas of storytelling and memory, and they currently have a show up at Modern Art Oxford called The House of Books Has No Windows, named after the piece pictured right which is one of seven installations on display there.  Adrian Searle, however, in his review of the show feels like the duo work better with simpler concepts and that some of the more complex works can be overwrought:

Opera for a Small Room is something of a tour de force. Inspired, in part, by an old collection of opera LPs found in a sale, its most salient influences were apparently Krapp's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, and Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire. But an artwork can be less than the sum of its influences. To me, the unavoidable model for the unseen narrator is less Beckett's Krapp, with his old spools of memories, or the old man in Wenders and Peter Handke's filmic homage to Berlin, than Tom Waits, with his ruinous voice, his rancid memories and stewed regrets. He don't need no installation. He can do it all in a song.

I might have to disagree with Searle as I love teasing out the layers of meaning involved in a detailed installation, though I also enjoy the subtle shifts in perspective that occur on the more stripped-down audio walks with only Cardiff's voice in my ears.  For more pictures from the Oxford show, please click here.  As for me, I'm going to try to sneak out at lunch to go do The Telephone Call at SFMOMA, currently available as part of their Art of Participation exhibit.  More on that later.

the fall of a legend

So I finally saw Velvet Goldmine, thanks to it being available on Aimee's On-Demand tonight.  Yeah I don't know what took me so long either, considering it's a veritable Easter egg hunt of music references, Oscar Wilde quotes, dreamy Todd Haynes direction, sly nods to literature, killer '70s glam rock style and some extremely hot men.  Rather than try to divine any deep messages about art or fame I just let it flow over me and hung on for the ride.  It was highly enjoyable that way.  And oh my hell, the soundtrack.  Pure awesomeness.  Now I'm dying to rent Far from Heaven, to see what Haynes does with '50s film.

new londoners

British non-profit PhotoVoice asks the question: What happens when those individuals who are traditionally the subjects of documentary photography are given a camera and the chance to speak for themselves?  For their recent book New Londoners: Reflections on Home PhotoVoice paired young refugees with photographer mentors and asked them to spend three months capturing their experiences on film.  Eleni Stefanou spoke to Mussie Haile, an 18-year-old who fled to the UK from Eritrea:

"I haven't been alone before," says Haile, who lives in Ilford and has secured refugee status for the following five years. While we look through a collection of his selected photographs: an ironing board, a bowl of pasta, a self-portrait conveying a state of pensiveness, he explains: "I wanted to clarify my loneliness and to describe how the way of life changes from time to time or from place to place."

That self-portrait was actually taken after Haile's first run-in with the British police, and can be seen in the gallery here.  The book received an official launch at Tate Modern last month, and photographs from the project were also included in the autumn Affordable Art Fair.  Brave voices, all.

byzantium at the royal academy

Founded in 330 CE by Emperor Constantine at a time when the Roman Empire stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Sinai Peninsula, Constantinople would remain the center of the Byzantine Empire for the next thousand years until it was captured by Ottoman forces in 1453.  The new Byzantium exhibition at London's Royal Academy brings together hundreds of objects from Constantinople and elsewhere around the Empire, including rare icons like the one at right portraying a likeness of Christ with saints Sergios and Bacchos.  Many of the pieces come on loan from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Arts in Kiev and also from the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai desert, whose monks have sent art that had never previously left the building.  Curator Maria Vassilaki spoke to Maev Kennedy about how the monastery is the one place in the world where Byzantine Christianity is still practiced:

"It is the only place where you can still see these wonderful objects in the place where they were made, still serving the purpose for which they were made."

My favorite of the monastery icons that I've seen is that of the heavenly ladder of St John Klimakos, where winged demons are lassoing some unfortunate souls and dragging them off the rungs to certain spiritual doom.  You can see that bizarre image and some other objects from the exhibition in the gallery here.

prolix

Richard Estes, Drugstore, 1970 (USA).  I like the appropriateness of this Estes image on a day I'm home from work trying to shake a sore throat that came on fast and that I hope will leave just as quickly.  At first glance I assumed the picture was a photograph, but it's actually a painting with even the reflective surfaces of the windows and chrome exteriors meticulously rendered by the artist.  Like many other photorealists Estes uses photography to set up the composition of his paintings, and he has captured city streets, storefronts and waterways from around the world.  For more of his work please click here.

inspiration input

Being the first in an occasional series in which I ask you, my readers, to show me something good. 

Please leave a comment on this post with the URL for a cool photo (especially if it's one you took!), a must-read blog, a YouTube video or a song you can't get out of your head.  Or just tell me a story.  Even with the hundreds of items I read in my RSS feed every day, so much slips past me.  And I want to see what's been turning you on.

show 104

playlist

collapsitalism

DJ shift tomorrow:
3 - 6pm PST, Sunday, November 16
KALX Berkeley 90.7fm
This is my last shift before I'm out for two weeks for my upcoming trip to Thailand.  And special guest DJ Prime8 will be joining me in the studio.  You do not want to miss it!

Another gorgeous warm night tonight meant more running around in the balmy weather.  A few highlights:

• The Collapsitalism opening at Johansson Projects, featuring some excellent artworks all priced to sell at $500 and under.  I lusted in my heart for Andrew Benson's tiny acrylics, one of which is pictured right, but I only looked and did not buy.  While I was there I took the opportunity to admire Kate Stone and Yvette Molina's pieces again too, a little easier to do without the crush of humanity we were experiencing at last week's Art Murmur.
• Wonderfully imaginative sci-fi at the Variety Preview Room from Ellen Klages, Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman at a reading presented by SF in SF.  I totally want to read more by all of them now, but I especially need to hunt down Klages's books set in and around Trinity Site and White Sands. 
• A suitably boozy release party at KoKo Cocktails for both McSweeney's 29 and First Winter, a brand new anthology from brand new publisher flatmanCROOKED.  A full roster of McSweeney's and fmC authors read typically eclectic pieces to the crowd, and topics ranged from the many statues of Chicago to a very particular category of porn photograph.  That last one even had visual accompaniment.  Good times.

the art market bubble bursts?

I'm not really surprised the economic downturn finally hit the previously insatiable art market, with some major sales recently reporting far less than stellar results.  I do find myself morbidly curious about what sold and what didn't.  At an auction at Christie's last month, for example, the rare Lucian Freud painting of Francis Bacon pictured at right sold for over a million pounds under its estimated price, and a beautiful abstract work by Gerhard Richter didn't sell at all.  To see more pieces from that sale at Christie's and another similar one at Sotheby's that sold well under expectations or never even left the wall please click through to the gallery here.  And as long as no one else wants it, if someone was to snap up that Richter for me...