Engineer's Daughter

monday melange

Tanja Geis at Headlands Center for the Arts

-Fundraiser - Aggregate Space Gallery
One of the most consistently thrilling spaces in Oakland is holding their annual fundraiser this Saturday, to help them not only survive but prosper in these trying times for Bay Area art galleries.  Experiences will be auctioned off, experiences will be had in the gallery, and it's going to be one heck of a party.  Do not miss!

-Art exhibit - I'll Tell You Later at Headlands Center for the Arts
It's always exciting to see the Graduate Fellows exhibition at Headlands after the seven artists have completed their year-long residency post-graduation, and this is a particularly strong group.  Themes of temporality, environment, social conscience, and play all make appearances in their work, and I liked how the art is curated by Joanna Szupinska-Myers into a "light" room and a "dark" room.

-Theater - The How and the Why at Aurora
Playwright Sarah Treem finds an electric plot device with which to explore the issues contemporary women face, and how two particular generations cope.  Martha Birgham and Nancy Carlin are riveting as they spar over scientific ideas and feminist ideals, and they should receive an award for remaining complete pros even when the theater had to be evacuated for a medical emergency during the performance I saw.    

-Book - Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor
Not an easy read, but an important one, as Secor traces the history of Iran's intellectuals and reformists since the revolution.  I finished the book with a much richer understanding of the many viewpoints that have shaped present-day Iran, and with so much respect for activists like Asieh Amini who fight for change even under threat of severe torture and death.

-Online magazine - Art Practical
AP's current issue "Moving Target" takes on the idea of collaboration/cross-pollination and features some real gems, among them a story/illustration project from the trio of Lindsey Boldt, Anne McGuire, and Steve Orth, as well as video pieces by Jennifer Locke/Camille Roy and Elaine Kahn/Trisha Low/Monica Raden.  Also keep an eye out for a yet-to-be-published conversation between Margaret Tedesco and Kevin Killian.

 

 

 

apocalypse and utopia

Gene Youngblood

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a lecture by renowned media and art theorist Gene Youngblood at SFAI, the first in the Institute's spring Radical Directing series and co-presented by SF Cinemateque.  Although Youngblood didn't speak at length about directing as such he did have a lot to say about living outside the broadcast, finding media that is speaking truth and not just repackaging counterculture as consumer culture.  Thanks to the internet truthful news sources are definitely out there, and it is up to us to construct a media diet that encourages conversation in a way that refers to the Latin origin of the word, a turning around together.  Because we need to get radical, get back to the root, if there is any chance of turning around the apocalypse we seem intent on creating for ourselves.  Just today Art Practical published a profile of Youngblood that opened with a wonderfully prescient quote of his from 1993:

I make a rather modest proposal that world peace, human liberty, and a healthy environment can only be achieved through a communications revolution.

His idea of utopia revolves around what is not permitted, "leaving the culture without leaving the country."  And he calls upon artists and writers to be disciplined dreamers, to lead social modernization with the artistic.  This was really only the first half of the lecture too, with the second part "The Challenge To Create On the Same Scale As We Can Destroy" delivered at Yerba Buena tomorrow night.  Go get some tools for the revolution.

See also:

• San Francisco Art Institute
• SF Cinemateque
• Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema
• Profile in Art Practical

bbc puts the nation's paintings on the web

Just a few weeks ago the BBC announced their goal of putting all of Britain's 200,000 publicly-owned paintings online, including JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire pictured here.  And as ambitious as that particular project sounds, it's only one small part of an extensive new arts program that the BBC has promised as part of its "deeper commitment to arts and music."  Jonathan Jones says that what the BBC is doing is a wonderful service, and he hopes that other organizations around the world will follow suit:

Paintings exist to be seen, and anything that makes them more visible increases their standing. We are done, surely, with the old Marxist cultural theory of Walter Benjamin, who argued in the early 20th century that reproduction destroys the "aura" of art and so liberates us from the supposed tyranny of masterpieces. On the contrary, the more easy it is to study reproductions of, say Leonardo's notebooks, the more we revere them. The rise of the photo-based art book a century ago made art history visible in a depth and breadth unimagined before. Now, we are at another turning point in the way we see great art. It is becoming theoretically possible for every painting in the world to be digitally accessible by everyone on earth.

I still say nothing beats seeing a work of art in person, and it is one of my greatest pleasures to encounter a piece in some out-of-the-way museum or gallery and experience that sudden, "So that's where this lives!"  At the same time I cannot deny how great it would be to have reams of virtual art at my fingertips whenever I wanted it.  I do love living in the future.

screen actors guild: how the statuettes are made

Anyone who has ever wanted to take a class at the Crucible needs to see this excellent gallery of photos that captures how the statuettes for the upcoming Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony are created.  The talented folks at the Fine Arts Foundry use the same "lost wax" process the ancient Romans perfected to make the bronze figures, and then coat them in a chemical called Patina that, you guessed it, creates a lovely faux patina.  I dig the awesome space suits the artisans have to wear while pouring the metal to protect themselves from hot bronze, and also the shot of one of the statuettes getting a bum buff.

conor cruise o'brien 1917-2008

Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish author, politician and journalist, died at the age of 91 Thursday night.  He lived the kind of life that seemed to invite controversy at every turn but was certainly never boring, from his presence in the Congo during the mess there in the early '60s to his vocal criticism of the Vietnam war while teaching at New York University to his intense anti-IRA sentiments while serving as an Irish cabinet minister.  Writing for the Guardian, Brian Fallon attempts to encompass O'Brien's many contradictions:

O'Brien was a maverick, both as a writer and politician, and to accuse him of inconsistency is beside the point. Some shrewd analysts viewed him as a fine intellectual led astray into public life by ambition and the desire to prove himself a man of action. Others saw him as a courageous radical nonconformist who challenged the forces of obscurantism. It is certainly arguable that, like [British statesman and philosopher Edmund] Burke, he began as a Whig radical and ended up as almost a reactionary. The warring aspects of his personality partly had their roots in old Parnellite and home rule politics, which personalised and sometimes embittered public debate, partly in the example of the generation of French intellectuals that emerged after the second world war, partly in the liberal leftism of the 1950s, and partly in 1960s protest politics. But the crucible of all these was his own mercurial, restless personality and intellectual brilliance, backed by a historian's sense of history and the born journalist's flair for being in the wrong place at the right time.

i google, therefore i have lost the ability to think

While I was doing my customary pre-breakfast blog-scroll this morning, a column by John Naughton in last week's Observer caught my eye.  Naughton takes a recent article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic as his starting-point, a piece in which Carr worries out loud about his inability to focus for long on any given text, citing Google and the easy access to information on the Web in general as the root cause of his newfound ADD.  I have to wonder if it isn't a matter of discipline, however.  I am a bona fide internet junkie, spending several hours each day just surfing around, but I am able to turn off the computer from time to time for the purposes of giving a book or a film my full attention.  Naughton also reminds us that when Tim Berners-Lee designed the Web the computer scientist had his own poor memory in mind and wanted to create something that would help.  It's exactly the moments when I'm trying to remember an actor's previous work or a particular album title that I'm most grateful for that giant repository of data online.  As for concern that the Web breeds poor memories among its users, Naughton looks to history:

But people have worried about this since... well... the Greeks. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells how the Egyptian god Theuth tried to sell his invention - writing - to King Thamus as 'an accomplishment which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt [recipe] for memory and wisdom.' To which the shrewd old king replied that 'the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it... Those who acquire writing will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful... What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory.'

It's true that few of us can sing epic poems from memory anymore, but admittedly the pool of people who can appreciate Homer in the original Greek these days is small anyway.  As humans we leave certain things behind as our technology changes, and new things take their place.  We can remain selective about what works for us personally and what doesn't, and it's even fascinating to watch which new tools take hold while others never quite catch on.  As a firm believer in the power of associative thinking I get excited when the Web encourages me to connect seemingly disparate topics, leading me down paths I would not have seen otherwise.  And then I share my thoughts with you, and here we are.