Racism Revisited

by Drew Martin

I recently read Jerry Saltz's review for New York Magazine of Kara Walker's current shows at two New York galleries. I printed the article and read the hardcopy, which noted there were 23 comments but only two are shown on my sheets.

One remarks:

I always find it curious when I hear some folks expound about Kara...so much baggage they bring to her work - so much pseudo-intellectual analysis, and this and that...

I was intrigued by that honest response to Saltz's expounding and although I am not a fan of Walker's artwork, I thought I would visit both of her exhibitions with fresh eyes to find some enthusiasm for her and try to see beyond the hype. Most importantly, I really wanted to question myself...my biases. Her in-your-face product is not the kind of work that encourages this, in fact, it does quite the opposite. But I like to understand why I do or do not like something.

On Tuesday I went to the Lehman Maupin gallery at 201 Chrystie Street. It is a very cool space, with a balcony view of the main gallery. Walker's most awkward work is her filmed puppetry. The main, cavernous room is devoted to one of these films, depicting rapings and such (pictured above). A much smaller room upstairs shows a brief, looping video of Walker picking a guitar and trying to sing. Apparently Saltz enjoyed that she was "pantless" and was focused on "glimpses between her legs." Personally, my immediate reaction was to sigh and tell myself there is much better talent in the world to devote this kind of space to than such a self-indulgent, YouTube-quality production.

Saltz promised a more powerful show at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery at 530 W 22nd Street so I walked there in the blistering heat on Wednesday. I think I was going there to confirm my convictions but that immediately changed when I passed through their clean, transparent doors and was enveloped by the calm, chilled air. As an aside, I must add that the gallery is gorgeous...museum quality, a beautiful space and with the right tone of lighting.

It is hard not to be impressed by what Walker has created. The scale of everything is immense...huge sails of creamy paper and well-made black and white frames with panes of glass the size of storefront windows. This is a big production show, with a lot of calculated support behind it. No artist would (or could) create such works without being assured (he or) she would be exhibited and that the pieces would sell like hotcakes.

At times I did find the scale of everything distracting. The easy look of the drawings makes them seem like sketchbook doodles that have been sized up simply for a wow factor. Not only is this part of the territory, but with many artists it is the process. Whenever I see something blown up with the size matters attitude, I like to think of Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory hanging on the wall at MoMA. It is so small and yet it had such an impact on the history of art because of its concept and quality.

Saltz likens Kara's previous work to Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War and the current show to Pablo Picasso's Guernica but Walker's work lacks Goya's depth and Picasso's vision. Instead, her drawings at Sikkema Jenkins actually remind me more of Honoré Daumier, especially because of their social commentary and the bulbous characters.

Although the forms are cartoonish, I was impressed by Walker's complicated layering and subtracting of charcoal and pencil, especially the broad strokes from erasers that bring back the white of the paper to highlight certain areas and to contrast the pitch-black shapes. These drawings are not just done with her hand but with her whole arm in full swing.

There is a conflict between her slightly goofy forms and display of abstraction, which reminds me of William De Kooning. It would be nice to see Walker jettison the caricatures for pure abstraction and let her stormy gestures speak for themselves. She is certainly positioned in the artworld to do so.

At Sikkema Jenkins, I got past Walker's dependence on racism as a theme...or maybe I simply became numb to it because she constantly hits you over the head with it. Perhaps there is something conceptual to be said of her exploiting the exploited.

Goya and Picasso had so much more range in subjects and styles. Their horrors were matched with beauty and love. They showed us a full range of emotions and perspectives. When an artist such as Walker has this narrow a focus, one has to ask what more is she capable of. Saltz wrote that her new drawings have "taken leaps forward" but it actually feels like "more of the same" just a different medium.

I like what the minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt wrote in Daybook, that she would not want to create cathartic work and have to face it again, frozen on a canvas, as did Frida Kahlo with her physical and emotional suffering. Goya and Picasso, with The Disasters of War and Guernica (respectively), were coming from a very different place...reacting to their immediate environment and threats: Goya's "I saw this" and Picasso's reply to the German officer's inquiring about who painted the canvas, "You did."

Walker is doing something very different though. As a privileged art professor at Columbia University and an artworld darling, she is stretching for the material and knows what she has as an marketable artist. I once read a remark by her that her silhouettes "saved her" (from obscurity). One would now only expect Walker to keep racism alive and center stage in her work, but personally I would like to see her make a true leap and explore multi-racial respect and love. But then again, I do question whether this is simply my wanting the horrors of the past to simply go away.

Captions Contested at The New Yorker

by Drew Martin

I just thumbed through 18 issues of The New Yorker (from the beginning of January through the end of May, 2011) in order to do a little informal survey. People always suggest that I submit my drawings (i.e. pictured left) to them but the truth is, my work is not something they would typically publish. My drawings are entirely visual while the overwhelming majority of The New Yorker cartoons are dependent on text.

My survey of the The New Yorker cartoons was to categorize what they publish and tally up the differences. I was not looking at the article illustrations or the little space fillers, just those stand-alone cartoons, which The New Yorker is best known for. In the 18 issues there were 233 cartoons that depended on captions, 42 that depended on text within the drawing itself and only 13 that were entirely visual. Roughly only two thirds of the issues contain one purely visual cartoon.

Let us have a look at each type. Here is one by Peter Vey that appears to be a cop interrogating a suspect. There is not much to it without the caption...it begs for a caption.


Roz Chast is a New Yorker cartoonist who requires the most patience. Her cartoons typically have both; labels and balloons. Here are two examples.


And here is one by Danny Shanahan, who typically uses captions, but in this instance delivers a purely visual cartoon. It is great: bringing life to the seemingly innocent yellow rubber ducky who has made a nest and laid eggs in the bather's hair. It takes a little longer to absorb because it requires you to make the connections in the absence of text.


The typical New Yorker cartoon, delivers information with the image but whispers the punchline in your ear with the caption. There are variations to these. This one by Jack Ziegler of a dancing king could go a number of directions but requires the internal text box "The Royal Ballet" to focus the joke.

This one by David Sipress sets up the text within the cartoon, which is essential to the joke, and then contains the "voice" in the caption.

This one by Tom Cheney would have been fine with the billboards alone, but the caption does give the joke a bit more of a punch to it.

Likewise, this one by Kanin, would have worked well as a pure visual. I think in this case it would have been funnier without the caption because it would make you think up different scenarios.

Although the disproportion of captioned cartoons makes sense, The New Yorker is, after all, a publication with well-written articles for a literary audience, the three classic New Yorker artists who first come to mind are Charles Addams, Edward Gorey and Saul Steinberg, who had some brilliant entirely visual contributions. They did make use of text/captions but their work was so much more visual than what we see today...each in their unique way. While Addams and Gorey had very illustrative images, Steinberg (pictured below) was by far the master of the pure visual image.

The Paper-Free Drawing Center

by Drew Martin

One thing about The Drawing Center is that it likes to go out on a limb. This is in part due to its very narrow mission "to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings." With certain shows one might perceive that the Center is interested in anything but drawings, however, the scope is broadened by the Center's loose definition of drawing.

Drawing down on Wooster Street is an all-encompassing term, akin to thing or stuff, because it references anything with a line/edge/border/direction, which includes wire, yarn, a tree branch, even the narrative of a video.

The current show Drawing and its Double, which displays the printing plates of various artists since the 16th Century without their respective prints, may seem like a stretch but it is one of the Center's more conservative exhibits.

The paper-free concept so perplexed the Instituto Nazionale per la Grafica that it initially declined to part with these pieces from their collection. After seeing the show realized, the Institute has asked permission from The Drawing Center to show it (as is) in Rome, where the Institute is based.

The exhibition is quite remarkable. Shown in chronological order (starting with Giorgio Ghisi, whose work is pictured above-left), the progression of the plates reveal an evolution in styles and printmaking techniques. Even though all of the plates have a very tangible and sculptural presence, what we see from the 1960s on is an experimentation with the surfaces and imagery.

One of these is Umberto Mastroianni's plate for Lo stregone, which is engraved on lead and has holes in it. Pictured right is a print from the plate (not on display at The Drawing Center). The pure white circles and triangular spaces correspond to the rough holes in the plate.

The Drawing Center does not show the prints in order to focus on the plates as objects, the way perhaps a museum of technology would, but to emphasize the process, effort and skill of the artists' involvement with the plates. While making prints from a plate is a repetitive reproduction process, the preparation of the plates is where the true act of drawing is transferred and captured.

The problem with the show is that many of the glimmering surfaces are very difficult to see because of how they are hung and lit. Investing in non-glare glass would have been a wiser decision: the plates are ingeniously sandwiched in plexiglass so they float within the frames but the protective panes reflect you, the viewer, and the Center's interior. Magnifying glasses with small lights are available for the viewers but they are cheap aids and do not help that much...although they do like cool when you see someone else using them, as if they are scanning the works with a tricorder.

In the center of the space is a specially designed Drawing Room (it used to be across the street in a garage of a location). This area is designated to Paolo Canevari's show Decalogo. Although this body of work was originally commissioned and exhibited by the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica it seems a little out of place. The ten oversized nickel plates are flashy. The etched and inked images are cartoonish and blatant, such as the one of his burning skull, pictured below-left.

As explained by the Drawing Center:

Decalogo, the Italian shorthand for the Ten Commandments and perhaps the most well-known social contract or "rules to live by," continues Canevari’s investigation into how dynamic imagery can reveal political and social crises. The plates reverberate on both technical and emotional levels, and lay bare the artist’s acute and perceptive understanding of our times.

That being said, the biblical references do not affect me as much as they would someone from a strong Catholic background. It reminds me of one of my first art reviews for a show by Javier Velasco, “Linea Sutil” (Subtle Line). While I liked it and wrote favorably of it, the work was heavy in religious references, which lost their impact on me.

Of Mouses and Men

by Drew Martin

The first time I was introduced to Malcolm Gladwell's writing was in a book club at work. I had hoped we would be reading literature so I was disappointed when the first assigned book was The Tipping Point. I tried to muster some enthusiasm for the selection but I felt that I would be wasting my time by reading it so I borrowed a CD version from my town library in order to listen to it while I did domestic chores. I reasoned that since this kind of book is simply informative, I would not be missing anything.

Despite my first somewhat bemoaned experience, I went on to read Blink, which a coworker lent me, and Outliers, which I bought as a gift for my father because I had heard good reviews about it and I thought he would like it: I read it after he did.

Gladwell is no doubt a smart guy with a lot to say but his curious books leave a bad taste in my mouth. The reason for this is that he reads best when he is brief.

Writers are like runners. The journalist/blogger is the sprinter, someone like Gladwell is middle distance and a novelist is the marathoner. Gladwell is not the first out of the blocks and he runs out of steam after a few laps.

I am not alone with this sentiment: I recently came across a post from just over a year ago on the Volume 1 Brooklyn blog with the title: I Don’t Like Mondays/Smurfs/Long Pieces by Malcolm Gladwell.

What works well at length is good literature, which develops and embraces the reader into its microcosm. What you get with Gladwell's books, however, is an upfront idea followed by a bunch of case studies and a lot of referring to the title of the book in a kind of mantra/marketing slogan. Finally, there is a conclusion that merely repeats the idea he opens with.

This is not a criticism of Gladwell because I do not think he strives for anything more than this as a writer or intends anything else than being the social commentator and a bestseller along the way. He would also probably be the first to admit that his writing and books are simply a means of communication and are not developed or structured in such a way to have emotional powers or aesthetic qualities. For this reason, the medium for conveying his ideas is irrelevant (might as well be a YouTube lecture) but, that being said, there is a reason to contain it in book form: Gladwell's thinking is certainly tuned through his own reading and the way he gathers and solidifies his thoughts is in the process of writing (typing on a computer).

Gladwell is a man of the times. His writings and contemplations reflect how most Americans think. He fits perfectly into this Facebook Era where a lot of brain activity is spent on networking and connecting the dots. Conceptually and philosophically, society has moved beyond a system of categorizing everything under the sun; regimented associations have given way to relational "databases," which is why Gladwell's style works.

Personally, I cannot get excited about his writing because it is too formulated for me. His approach to unifying concepts is not by rethinking them but by overthinking them. Instead of deconstruction we get reverse engineering. The problem with this method is that it is gimmicky and superficial. What he is selling with his books is fruit with sterile seeds. But again...I understand why readers like him: he has his niche and he is certainly prolific.

If there is one thing that I should point out with a critical eye, it is Gladwell's slight of hand with some of his analogies.

An analogy is faulty to begin with; it is the communication equivalent of duct tape and it has too much influence to favor or mock the original idea. When an analogy is used to rescue a complex concept that is one thing but when the analogy is used as a distraction or when it hijacks the topic, then you do have to question the motives of the person who set it up. My own analogies (herein) comparing writers to runners and Gladwell's books to fruit with sterile sees are unfair as they suggest physical limitations and impotence. They certainly are not flattering.

Gladwell's article Creation Myth, published in the May 16, 2011 of the New Yorker, is about the development of the computer mouse, from its innovator, Douglas Englebart at Standford Research Institute, to Xerox to Apple. Respectively shown here is the first mouse from each entity. Unfortunately, Gladwell uses a very politically charged analogy to compare the companies with the institute, which makes one question his intentions.

Plumb Perfect

by Drew Martin

At the end of my previous post I touched on the contemporary arts organization SmartSpaces and Shannon Plumb: The Window Series in the storefront of 200 Lafayette Street.

SmartSpaces matches artists with transitional public venues. Their mission to make art more accessible.

I like this idea a lot. It makes sense for the artist, the property owner/manager and for the existing or future tenant. Most importantly these types of projects add a little something to the lives of the people who are fortunate enough to view/experience the artwork.

For the past six years, I've been using a formerly neglected window at a dry cleaner down the street from my house in Ridgewood, NJ with similar ambitions. Pictured below/right is the first piece I did for the space (click on the image to enlarge). It is a photograph I took of a well (studnia) in Poland and the text of a conversation I had with its owner (translated into English).

The dry cleaner is on a busy street two blocks from the center of the town so I wanted to do something that would catch someone's eye, which the well did because it is quite peculiar looking, and then to accompany it with a very short text, which had the potential to unfold into a longer story. The idea to use this space came from a much larger-scale project I was part of around 1990, and have thought about quite often since that time as a good model for public art.

I was in the art program at The University of California at Santa Barbara while the city of Santa Barbara was renovating multiple blocks of its downtown, which flanks the main drag, State Street. Santa Barbara has a great little art scene that is bolstered by a very supportive Santa Barbara Arts Commission. As their website says, and to which I agree, No city of its size has as vast array of arts programs as Santa Barbara.

So with dozens of stores made vacant during the construction process and not wanting to see its vibrant downtown scene wither, artists were called upon to bring life to the area. It was a great recipe for success. The artists got space and there was a reason for the residents of Santa Barbara to continue to visit this part of town.

I had a small window with some narrative relaying my experiences with and fears of dentists and orthodontists, which was supported by a display of extracted teeth I had gathered from local dentists. I also sat in another student's much larger window space as a live model for her piece.

When I read up on SmartSpaces and Plumb last Friday, I was eager to see her work when I returned to the city so I walked over to Lafayette Street on Monday at lunchtime. I spent all of my lunch breaks the past month in the West Village working on my UNDER THE HOOD: New York project so I immediately felt a bit of culture shock being back in trendy SoHo where there is much more of a scene of people wanting to be seen.

I probably would not have noticed Plumb's Windows walking by at that hour: even though the sidewalk is covered/shaded with scaffolding, the two screens were washed out by the daylight. Non-the-less, I stayed for about fifteen minutes and watched a few of the videos.

I really like what such a SmartSpaces/Plumb combination yields but I think it works better in more desperate areas. In New York City it is hard not to stumble upon an art museum, gallery, public art project or even a really well designed retail shop window. No one else stopped while I was there but when I walked away and rounded the corner, there was a fashion model being prepped and the curious pedestrians had formed a crowd around the shoot. This is what there is to contend with in New York. I should really go back at dusk or in the evening to see what kind of response there is by people who stop to consider her work when it is easier to view.

Fortunately, Plumb has some of the work she has done since 1999 posted on her website, including one of the six videos in Windows, which she has referred to as Woman with a Fan. In this short movie (the clips in this series are around 4-7 minutes long) Plumb dons a burka.

This character is sitting by a window, which is reflecting an American flag and a few windows from an apartment building across the street, which are propped open by air-conditioning units. The character, with all but her eyes covered, is relying on a fan to cool herself off and tries to position herself every-which-way to get the best effect. Finally, after checking to see if anyone is watching, she lifts up the hem of the burka and scoops in the blowing air. Plumb's delivery is pure slapstick but the billowing burka takes the skit into something more akin to classic Saturday morning cartoons.

I did not phone in to hear Plumb speak about the works, which is an audio service provided at the site, but I had previously listened to her online. Plumb is quick to explain that she is not criticizing the tradition of wearing the burka or the religious reasons behind it. The piece was purely an empathetic response to how hot she was once she put it on. While watching it, I considered how probably even the most ardent supporters of the burka would have to laugh at this...because Plumb is hitting on the core of humor here. It reminds me of an old Iranian film I saw where the reoccurring joke (which did not move me to laughter) was that a westernized woman returned to her home in Tehran and was driving a man around and he was embarrassed by this.

What I like about Plumb the most in her works is her energy. Technically "over the hill" (born a year after me, in 1970), she has the spunk of a hyper seven year old. Her lean body and youthful face with a dimpled chin make it easy for her to play some of her boyish characters as convincingly as her female roles. She is a pretty woman and a cute guy, especially with a mustache. Pictured right, is a still from Olympics (2005) of one of her male athletes.

Watching Plumb in action on screen seems less as a performance inspired by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (not to mention the antics of Lucille Ball) as it is a reincarnation of these greats.

Plumb is simply captivating to watch, whether she is in a solo skit, such as Woman and a Fan or layering herself in different characters in the same scene, as she does in one film where she plays a runway model, male photographer and several fashionistas at the pretentious event in one room. I think what works for me is that Plumb is so playful that she recalls a time when performers were still trying to figure out what to do with the new medium of movies. The absence of dialogue makes her work entirely about the physical comedy, which she is so good at.

The movie that I think shows off her facial expressions and quick mood transitions the best is Stewardess, which is just over two minutes long. Typically such a variety of expressions is handled by Plumb with different characters but in Stewardess she plays the flight attendant before a plane takes off, going through the safety instructions to a cabin of passengers. The only sound is smooth lounge music and all you see is Plumb from the waist up.

Plumb's props are economical but perfect. She shows a childish picture of a plane, a happy person and good weather and she flashes a brilliant smile. She flips the page and shows another childish drawing but this time it is of a plane plummeting and Plumb mouths a long Psycho scream. Instead of a seat belt, she uses a massive truck hauling hitch and tugs at it like a sideshow strongman. She pulls out a big paper grocery bag, winks at a nearby passenger and then heaves violently and repeatedly into the bag. She uses a dust mask instead of an oxygen mask and then for the flotation device, she places a wreath of balloons around her neck and acts like she is drowning but quickly takes it off and resumes her calm manner.

In Rattles and Cherries, Plumb explores the collision of her femininity and motherhood. She made it in 2004, a few months after the birth of her first son, Walker, whose needy squeaking contrasts the jazzy burlesque music. Plumb poses with various fruits, slithers up and down a cool lounge chair but is constantly distracted by her off-camera son so she can never get in the right sultry mood. Finally, she stops her act to nurse and rock him.

In her discussion posted on the SmartSpaces website, she speaks about her one-woman-show approach, partially influenced by the process of Cindy Sherman:

It's really important that I'm doing it because it's my only vehicle. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a poet. I wish I could have been a rock n' roll star and write my own songs but I have not talent in any of that. I only have this talent in my body. So my body is my paint and guitar strings. And the only way for me to get everything out is to use my body.

I also like what she says of the inspirations for her skits:

I watch people on the subway and I kind of take them home in my head as an idea.

A great introduction to Plumb is an hour-long video I watched/listened to on YouTube, Artist Talk: Shannon Plumb. Plumb speaks about her work, shows many of her movies and then is interviewed.

Additional work by Plumb and her bio/cv can be found on her website www.shannonplumb.com

UNDER THE HOOD: New York

by Drew Martin

Yesterday I hung the photo show I did for the New York Public Library, which is a continuation of my UNDER THE HOOD series I have done in Ridgewood, NJ, Los Angeles and Prague. The New York version is comprised of 270 black and white film photographs of people, pets and places in the West Village neighborhood of the Hudson Park Branch.

I was hoping nobody would be in the reference room gallery while I was hanging it so that I would not bother anyone and so I could have some privacy. My art has always been this kind of shy approach to socializing with people.

I walked over to the library on my lunch break with my clothesline, clothespins, photos with pre-attached handwritten captions, scissors, black and yellow handled phillips head screwdriver and a sandwich bag full of short drywall screws.

I was supposed to hang the show at the beginning of the week but the branch was undergoing renovations so the gallery space was being painted and carpeted. I wanted to get it in before the weekend so I was glad it was back open by Friday.

When I arrived at the reference room gallery, I got a bit nervous because there was a young lady sitting in the corner working on her Mac. I unpacked my things and screwed in one screw to a wall panel where I would start to hang my clothesline. The next screw I had to put directly behind her because she was in the corner so I mentioned that I was just going to be stepping behind her to do a little work.

"I am hanging a show" I said.

"A show?" she responded.

I did not explain anything further but just tried to be quiet and hurry because I had a lot of work to do. In total I screwed in about ten screws and hung about 150 feet of clothesline. I attached each photo with one black plastic IKEA clothespin. It took longer than I had expected but I liked the effect because this manner of hanging the show had an installation art feel to it; the clothesline helped redefine the space and it leads into corners and spaces which are typically untrodden.

The reason why I use clothesline is because the first show of this project was displayed in my backyard on my numerous clotheslines. They are actually forbidden in my town but there is nothing that will come between me and my laundry, especially freshly cleaned sheets that spend the day outside in the sun. In the Los Angeles version of this show Bill Wheelock, of The Thinkery, remarked how economical the clothesline system works for hanging art; quick to put up, quick to take down, with only a few contact points.

The process of this current show was very social in that I had to stop people I did not know, explain to them what I was doing and spend some time with them...often over half an hour just to get a couple casual pictures. But once the shooting was finished the process was singular and a bit lonely. While I was hanging it, I understood that I was going to walk away from it and not really be present when most people viewed the pictures. This did not feel right because the other three previous shows had a party feel to them. So I was happy there was someone present, perhaps interested in what I was doing at some level, although the way she said "A show?" I was not expecting any enthusiasm.

None-the-less, while I was going through the motions of hanging the show, I was also thinking about who this person might be. I thought perhaps she was unemployed, looking for job leads on her computer. I dared not look at her screen when I was behind her and I thought I should just carry on and then leave, with a simple thanks for her patience.

At one point she got up and asked me where the bathroom was so I explained to her how to get there. When she returned, she looked at a few of the pictures and then sat back down, saying something to me about her liking the show, especially that I had written personal captions for each picture. Eventually we spoke a little bit more about project and I showed her my write-up for it online (Won't Your Be My Neighbor?). Then to my surprise, she explained that she was part of an arts organization that was along the lines of what I was doing.

When I got back to my desk, I looked up the group SmartSpaces and was amazed by what I saw because it is an organization pursuing the kind of projects I have been interested in and doing since the late 1980s.

From their website:

SmartSpaces re-imagines vacant urban spaces as places to present contemporary art, with a mission to make art more accessible, while energizing local communities. Working with curators and arts organizations, SmartSpaces facilitates artistic interventions at the borders of public and private space, transforming empty properties into temporary public art venues, with information and tools that engage and inform the public.

It turns out this young lady is one of the SmartSpaces team members, Tristine Skyler, a New York based playwright, screenwriter, and producer.

SmartSpaces currently has a Window Series project by Shannon Plumb at 200 Lafayette Street until June 3. I listened to a clip of Shannon speaking about the project online so now I am excited to see her work for many reasons, which I can address it a post dedicated to it in the near future.

The Window Series (2010-2011) in the windows of 200 Lafayette Street. This series of six videos explores notions of voyeurism, intimacy, humor and silence in the context of a large city. Looking at a photograph of an apartment building in New York City, the artist began to imagine the different lives behind each of the individual windows, leading to an investigation of multiple imagined lives. click to listen

Select images of UNDER THE HOOD: New York can be viewed in an online book at blurb. click to preview

This show will be up until the end of June, 2011 at:
New York Public Library - Hudson Park Branch, 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY

Viewing hours:
Monday & Wednesday 10am - 6pm; Tuesday & Thursday 10am-8pm; Friday & Saturday 1pm-5pm

BOLI

by Drew Martin

One of the most serendipitous spaces in New York for art is 29 Downing Street. It's the residence and studio of husband and wife John Bennett and Karen Lee Grant. John is a sculptor and painter. Karen is a photographer. Downing Street has a number of interesting homes but John and Karen's place is the most accessible; the ground floor has been converted into studio and gallery space.

It is not uncommon to walk by and see John at work on his art or something on display, in fact, I expect it. I love how John and Karen so easily offer their talents and space to passersby. It is a reminder of why Greenwich Village has been such a magnet to artists for decades.

Even when no one is milling about and the house is closed up, it is still a place that is hard not to notice and feel engaged with. When renovating/reconstructing the space, John added a lot of personal elements, such as a lintel with triangle patterns and faces (pictured above) as well as other sculpted details.

Last night I went to their opening BOLI, which will be on display until the end of May.

A boli (pl. boliw), is a ritualistic object from Bamana, Mali (an original boli, pictured right). It is a power object whose function is to accumulate and control life force. The boliw are created from animal bones, plant fibers, honey, and metal, which are packed around an armature. They are covered with layers of mud, clay, dung, porridge and sacrificial blood.

John reinterprets the boli, using wire and concrete to define its form. The shaman's task is replaced with an artist's creativity, which at a certain level is one in the same.

Some of John's boliw look like the mortar part of a Mexican mortar and pestle. Karen has used these objects as the solid, grounded element in still life photography. She fills their cavities with various organic elements and photographs them.

The pictures are quite dark, but that gives them a certain softness and a mystery, like seeing wild animals just before sunrise, before they slip away from sight.

The contents of the boli really make each picture unique. There is one with tubers and avocados; the avocados are so ripe you can sense how soft they are and yet in the photographs, they can also be read as solid as the black-bronze surfaces of Rodin's sculptures.

In another boli Karen has placed tubers, pears and very old figs. They all lean to the right of the picture, which gives it a nice sense of movement, especially compared to the one with avocados, which stays put.

On the back of the boli, the movement of the objects creates a look of raised bristles on the back of a boar or some other alarmed animal. Karen's photographs do not simply treat the boliw as empty containers and they are not merely complementing her husband's art; they complete them.

The strongest part of the show is this combination because while the traditional boli is layered and contained, the boli here is revealing and offering.

We need to look at these as opened boliw, exposing their organs, their sustenance and perhaps their offspring. As with the process of how they are created, the power they hold as ritual or art shares something sacred.


BOLI
John Bennett, Sculpture Painting
Karen Lee Grant, Photography

May 5 to May 31
11am to 7pm Th Fr Sa Su
4pm to 7pm Mo Tu We

or by appointment: 212 242 1703

29 Downing Street 10014
at Bedford Street

http://www.29downingstreet.com/

To Sleep Perchance To Dream

by Drew Martin

I have been thinking a lot about sleep/rest recently, probably because I have defied it and have been denied it for so long. The analogy is that being awake is being alive while sleep is a form of death. But it doesn't work this way; there is a point when being awake and alert is counterproductive and the body cannot repair itself properly so the equation flips and you find yourself so tired that you feel like the living dead and sleep represents rejuvenation, because that's what it is.

How does sleep and media/art coexist? The references are abundant. Computers go into sleep mode when inactive. A sleeper film is a movie that takes everyone by surprise. The concept of sleep is played upon throughout history in mythology and stories such as Rip Van Winkle and although it is a tired theme, it takes on new meaning in science fiction whether it's in the long cosmic journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey (movie still pictured below, right) or in more recent films such as Inception.

Sleep and media are intertwined. Dreams are a form of media...they are internal movies presented to us with puzzling storylines. Dreams and sleep have been depicted throughout the history of art and contributed heavily to the surrealist movement.

Sleep is also often a transition from media or on the border of media. We stay up too late watching movies and reading books and at the same time a boring film or tome puts us to sleep.

The genius integrator of sleep and media was Andy Warhol with his 1963 film Sleep (pictured on top and below). It was his first film and was planned as an eight-hour-long movie of Brigitte Bardot sleeping but was made by filming his his friend/lover, the poet John Giorno, sleeping for six-and-a-half hours. A ninety minute section was duplicated and looped to stretch it out to eight hours to approximate a night of normal sleep.

"I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in... Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I'd better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping."

What I have been interested in most recently is less about the relationship of media and sleep so much as substituting media with sleep. This means in times when I would normally read, write or watch something, I simply rest and perhaps sleep, which happens now while I am commuting by train or during my lunch break.

When you are young, the idea of cramming one's mind with ideas and experiences seems urgent but as you get older and wade into midlife I think you start to realize that the younger, less experienced, less educated version of yourself was just as nice a person as you are now. In many cases that former self was even nicer so what was the lesson learned from all of those novels and movies? What did all of those informational articles about the world really prepare you for?

I am 41 now and although I still love to read and travel and explore life, I also know that these things will not really change me much as a person. Instead, I want to rediscover those moments when I was a better friend, less stressed and keeping closer to my convictions. So I use the rest time to reflect on past experiences and remember friends and family members. It's not simply recalling a memory so much as it is pulling it off the shelf, dusting it off and rereading it.

The New School

by Drew Martin

The other day I was walking around 14th Street and Fifth Avenue for the first time in quite awhile and noticed that my graduate school, The New School for Social Research, was gone; a hole in the sky and a crater in the ground. It was an odd feeling, not a tragic, sad loss like the Twin Towers but one of good riddance. What was there before was a cruddy building so I am glad the students and teachers/staff will get something decent, even though there has been a lot of criticism about the new design (pictured left).

Seeing the sun shining through the void, reminded me of how I once spoke of my Masters experience:

The facilities were horrible, the teachers OK, and the students fantastic.

I had classes in three different buildings but spent most of my time in the one that was demolished. The more inspiring original building, a few blocks away, by Joseph Urban is the school's landmark building, not to mention that is houses an Orozco mural (detail, pictured below, right). Perhaps it's no coincidence that one of my favorite professors, Richard Lorber, held classes there.

In the now-razed building, my teachers were not great. One instructor had not even finished her own Masters yet and should not have been teaching. The other adjunct, who I liked a lot, lost control of our thesis tutorial class and even asked me if I could return (after I handed in my thesis early) in order to bring peace to the sparring students. That the students were at each other's throats, was what I liked about the school. They were high-spirited, intelligent kids from an array of countries whose ideas often clashed for the good of the academic banter.

The construction site on this unloved corner of Manhattan also reminded me that one of my favorite classes had nothing to do with an edifice. I went to The New School because instead of getting an MFA elsewhere, I wanted to focus on theory and broaden my background of the arts to media studies. None-the-less, it was required to take a couple practical classes so for one of them I chose an audio course, which was conducted entirely online.

The teacher was invisibly up in Boston and the students were chiming in from all over the world. It was really great and oddly enough, it was my most intimate class. All of our projects were audio posts, including our introductions to one another. There was something about just hearing each other's voices and sound projects on our own terms that was much more intriguing and liberating than meeting at a set hour in windowless room, in a poorly built building.

Rely On Your Ears

by Drew Martin

Rely on your ears is RadioShack's slogan for its Talking Watch (pictured left) geared for the visually impaired. There is no light on it, but when you press a button, a lady's voice (who I have nicknamed Radia) announces the time and this is also true of the stopwatch function.

I recently bought this watch for twenty bucks because I needed a new way to record my mile track times. I did not want to hold a digital stopwatch and I also did not want to spend $100+ dollars for a Garmin. The Talking Watch sounded intriguing, especially because I typically run before sunrise and don't like to look down at a wristwatch. I recently tried to carry my BlackBerry for a trial mile because the app I downloaded showed the splits nicely but it was too awkward to use and it slowed me down.

The Talking Watch is geeky and clunky (it's quite thick), but I love it for timing the mile. When you start the stopwatch, Radia's voice counts off "One second, two seconds, three seconds..." she continues to ten and then counts off every ten seconds, "Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds..." when she gets to one minute, she continues to only call out the minutes, "Two minutes, three minutes, four minutes..." At four minutes it is all or nothing and I know I need to bring it in before she says "five minutes." It works for me because I don't have to bother to look down. I can even stop the stopwatch when I cross the finish line and then, when I am ready, press the talking function to hear her read off my final time.

When I went to RadioShack to get a stopwatch, the young sales guy gave me a nice, digital hand-held one but I did not like the split function. When I inquired about the Talking Watch, he shook his head and said "You don't want to buy that."

"Wow," I thought "it must be really bad if he is dissuading me." But I took it out and looked it over and liked it because it was so bizarre, so different than what other runners are using.

When I went to look for an image of it today, the salesman's comment hit home. I read the scathing reviews...people really hate this watch...they're furious about it and rightly so; most people bought it for an elderly, blind parent. Apparently there was an older version that everyone loved, which RadioShack discontinued. Here are just some of the comments:

Too many features. Not user friendly. Stopped working and not even a year old.

Please do not buy this watch for a blind person. It is very bad and unusable.

Have used older flat watch for over 10 years as alarm clock. Liked the rooster crowing. Do not like this version at all - tried to return but over 30 day return limit. Would buy older version if I could find it - ANYWHERE!!

Bought this for my blind 96 year old mother. She has been user the older version for several years and likes it very much. Too many buttons, and I don't think it was really designed for blind people, but lazy people who do not want to look at the watch. Would like to get the older version if available anywhere.

I bought this for my blind mother who had been happily using the previous RadioShack Talking Watch for years until the battery died. The new one has too many features, is very hard to hear...I'm not sure who this was designed for but it wasn't elderly blind people.

I have been buying the old style for my blind mother for years. She cannot handle the buttons on the new one and she cannot understand the voice. Also, the band is uncomfortable. The old watch had a band that could be replaced with an expansion one that is easy for older (mom is 100) people to use. I am returning the watch. You should do research on your products before presenting them to the public.

Old watch was very clear to hear. I bought two (new watches), one for my blind mom and aunt. Both started to get upset because the watches were not clear and not nearly as loud as the old watch. Very disappointing.

My 94 year old mother with low vision had used the former model with ease. This new watch has too many buttons and she keeps pressing the wrong ones. I am constantly having to re-set it as she has low vision and it is too complicated for her to do. She cannot hear the voice clearly unless she puts it quickly up to he ear and even then sometimes it is too late. We had previously taken the watchband off and relaced it with a Velcro band to make it an easy off-on for her but could not do this with this one. It is not user friendly.

Voice is totally inaudible...Please bring old model back.

Purchased this watch for my dad who cannot see nor hear very well. The older watch was perfect. This one does not speak loud enough. Please bring back the other one!!

I have been buying LCD Talking Watches for years from the Radio Shack for my blind mother-in-law. I replace the watch band with an expandable watch band. An elderly blind person has difficulty with the bands that come on the watch. Now this new design you cannot replace the band. Therefore I must take it back. Very poor design. Why the change from the 63-5042 model?

It hurt my finger to push the talking button. The button needs to be on the face and it needs to come with a flexible metal band.

Sounds like there should have been a recall/redesign...or at least, bring back the old model.

The wristband is nearly impossible to use and the sound is a bit muffled, but I mumble too, so I won't part with Radia because of her speech problem. I do like how you can set it up so she calls out the hour on the hour, which I find comforting.

While looking for the Talking Watch image, I also found some cool digital braille watches online (one of them pictured right) but if you misplace it, it would be much harder to find without Radia calling out to you.