Zebra Spider

Zebra Spider eating a fly of some kind on the front door window
click to enlarge

A Couple of Items

On Monday I expressed my dislike for the amateur fireworks that are so popular in my neighborhood. On Tuesday I got a chance to see the negative consequences firsthand. I left my house in the early afternoon and saw black smoke billowing into the sky three blocks away. I went to take a closer look and found a house completely engulfed in flames, the houses on either side (only about eight feet from the house on fire) were also burning. The whole neighborhood was gathered around watching. I found out later from the news that the fire was started by a 6 year old boy lighting firecrackers in his bedroom. The Police arrested a man who had been selling fireworks in the area from his car.

I got a Google Alert that my name was mentioned in an article about Shopping Carts in the Orlando Sentinel, apparently the Orlando City Council is going to consider requiring stores to implement "cart retention systems." Anyway, they tacked on some shopping cart trivia at the end which included my book and website:

Did you know . . . ?
*The shopping cart was invented in the 1930s by Sylvan Nathan Goldman, owner of the Humpty-Dumpty grocery chain.

*In 2007, Arkansas passed the Health-Conscious Shopper Act, which encourages businesses to provide sanitation wipes for shopping cart handles.

*Julian Montague, author of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, developed a classification system for stray carts. There are false strays and true strays and 33 subtypes, such as bus-stop discard and transient impostor. Check out strayshoppingcart.com.

Cleveland Carts in Canada / Group show

Site Visits
July 04 - August 16, 2008
Cambridge Galleries Queen's Square and Design at Riverside Cambridge, Ontario
Opening: Friday, July 4 at 7pm

Featured artists: Adrian Blackwell, Constantin Boym & Laurene Leon Boym, Electroland, Brad Golden & Lynne Eichenberg, In-Sun Kim, John Massey, Julian Montague, Paulette Phillips, Ana Rewakowicz, Frank Shebageget, Penelope Umbrico, Boja Vasic.

Site Visits is a survey exhibition investigating the often unexpected intersection between visual art and architecture. Comprised of work by more than a dozen artists and spanning two galleries, the exhibition features photographic and video documentation, installations, drawings, multiples, and mixed media constructions that alternately address housing and public space, social policy, icons of Modernism, sites of catastrophe and the links between urban development and shelter.

I am headed to Cambridge tomorrow to install a small installation of Stray Shopping Cart pieces. I will be showing work that I made while on a 6 week residency at Spaces Gallery in Cleveland in 2005. I was there for all of January and the first half of February, it was snowy and gray almost every minute of my time there, the resulting photographs are pretty grim. I am looking forward to seeing the show, it looks to be an interesting group.

Apocalypse Niagara Street / I Hate Amatuer Fireworks

The people in my neighborhood go nuts with the fireworks on and around the 4th of July (fireworks are illegal here). Last year we went around the corner to watch the amateur activities from the roof of our friend's three story building. We had a bird's eye view of what ended up being a three hour blitzkrieg of rockets, fire crackers and god knows what else. It was amazing how much money had been spent on fireworks by people who don't seem to have very much money. I was also surprised that people weren't at all bored with watching the exact same pyrotechnic event happen over and over again for hours. Random explosions continued until about 3 am, some of them were so deep and loud it was hard to believe they didn't leave craters in the ground. I absolutely hate being around these kinds of fireworks.

Mayflies at the sidedoor

I watched this one get caught in a spider web. I hope it had already mated.

This one got caught in a fragment of an old spider web.

Mayflies appeared today on the side of the house. Some years they show up in fairly large numbers, I only noticed a few today. Mayflies (by which I mean all species in Ephemeroptera) are known for only living a very short time, this is somewhat misleading as they live in an aquatic nymph stage for a year. Here is the Wikipedia breakdown:

Mayflies are insects which belong to the Order Ephemeroptera (from the Greek ephemerospteron = "wing", referring to the short life span of adults). They have been placed into an ancient group of insects termed the Paleoptera, which also contains the dragonflies and damselflies. They are aquatic insects whose immature stage (called naiad or, colloquially, nymph) usually lasts one year in fresh water. The adults are short-lived, from a few hours to a few days depending on the species. About 2,500 species are known worldwide, including about 630 species in North America. Common names for mayflies include "dayfly", "shadfly", "Green Bay Flies", "Canadian soldier", and "fishfly."

...The lifespan of an adult mayfly can vary from just 30 minutes to one day depending on the species. The primary function of the adult is reproduction; the mouthparts are vestigial, and the digestive system is filled with air..

The strangest thing about Mayflies is that they are the only order of insects that moult after they have developed functioning wings. The stage is called the subimago (the final moult is called the imago), and may last only a matter of hours. Cool, huh?

Wedding / Dia:Beacon / MassMoca

We went to a wedding downstate over the weekend and we took the opportunity to go to Dia:Beacon and (slightly out of our way, on the trip home) MassMoca. We had never been to either space before.

The scale of Dia:Beacon is pretty overwhelming, the building was built as the National Biscuit Carton Making and Printing Plant in 1927, I think it is something like 400,000 square feet. The spaces are enormous and they are all lit by skylights which makes for interesting shifts in color in the monochrome work as the clouds go overhead. The first thing you see when you walk in is Imi Knoebel's 24 Colors – for Blinky , 1977, an installation of large, brightly colored, unusually shaped monochromatic paintings. The installation takes up a significant chunk of space and as far as monochromatic paintings go, this is as good as it gets (I generally take a dim view of this kind of art). I liked the Richard Serras, the Robert Smithson mirror pieces, Sol Lewitt's wall drawings (I pity the people that actually had to do the drawing) and Louise Bourgeois' giant spider, which, by the way, does not have a face! They also have one of the best John Chamberlains I've seen, the colors make me think of the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee mashed up with Roscoe's police car, and the worst John Chamberlain, see below. The main space of the cavernous basement is currently hosting an installation of projections by Tacita Dean entitled: Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (six performances; six films, 2008. The installation consists of film loops of Merce Cunningham sitting in a chair doing nothing, the projections are very spaced out so that you have to walk through large areas of darkness to reach the light. I enjoyed the experience of being in the space.

NOTE: I got the following images from various places on the net, neither Dia:Beacon or Mass Moca allow photography. See more Beacon pix here.

Richard Serra

Best

Worst

Sol Lewitt drawings

MassMoca was a bit more conventional, with the way it stages shows I liked some of what I saw in Badlands:New Horizons in Landscape, particularly the work of Vaughn Bell. The other group show, Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China, purported to be "[Western] artists addressing the complex issues facing China in the wake of industrialization and globalization." There was some interesting work in the show but you get the impression that being on the outside of Chinese society, the Western artists really are basically limited to making art work about architecture and the Three Rivers Dam. There is no sense in any of the work of how a Chinese person, might feel about all of those "Complex Issues."

I really liked Jenny Holzer's work when I was in High School, (she had a big show at the Albright-Knox in 1989, when I was 16), but over the years I have come to think of her "truisms" as a collection of dull platitudes, and I find her newer political work particularly irritating. At MassMoca, Holzer currently has a fantastic installation and some abysmal political work. The installation is a projection piece that scrolls the poems of Stanislaw Barañczak from two different directions across the room. There are enormous bean bag chairs for viewers to sit in and watch it all go by. It is difficult to read, but who cares, the visual effect of the type stretching and breaking across the surfaces of the room is amazing. Her other body of work consists of huge silk screens (on canvas) of Defense Department graphics from the planning of the Iraq invasion, and redacted documents from the war. This, to me, seems like the lowest kind of preaching to the choir, op-ed art.

The Tiny Tims

A little while back I did a Google image search for "Tiny Tim." I was looking for the eccentric American singer, but of course his namesake, the Tiny Tim of Dicken's A Christmas Carol, dominated the results. I don't know why I find the compiled depictions of a lamed 5 year old boy so funny, but I do.

Watching "Control" (The Joy Division Biopic)

We just watched Control, the Anton Corbijn directed movie about Joy Division and more specifically, the story of lead singer Ian Curtis. The movie is shot in black and white and the cinematography is beautiful, just what you would expect from a photographer directing his first film. That being said, the movie is totally useless, in the way all biopics are. I would much rather have watched a well made documentary about Joy Division (there is one), where I could see original footage of their performances and interviews with the surviving band members etc. Instead in the biopic method you have to watch these performances recreated by actors, who may be very good at it, but who cares! I want to see the real thing. One of the all time worst biopics in this respect is Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey's portrayal of Andy Kaufman. What on earth is the point of watching somebody do a karaoke performance of a singularly bizarre comedian's routines? I like Joy Division, but I'm not a hardcore fan, I am however, a hardcore fan of The Smiths (also Mancs) and I can't imagine what a film treatment of their story could possibly do to expand my understanding of the band (who would play Morrissey?).

My two favorite music films, The Velvet Goldmine and 24 Hour Party People, both figure out ways to side step many of the problems and cliches of the biopic genre. The Velvet Goldmine creates fictional characters that closely resemble David Bowie and Iggy Pop, but by not pretending to be creating a factual depiction of what transpired the filmmakers are able to get to the essence of the story. They are also free to re-create the Glam scene as it might have existed in the imagination of a teenage fan. 24 Hour Party People also involves Joy Division in its telling of the story of Tony Wilson (Manchester television presenter, co-founder of Factory Records, Owner of La Hacienda night club, etc.). Steve Coogan, playing Wilson, talks directly to the audience and explains, at various points, what liberties the filmmakers have taken with leaving events, eye witness disagreements about how things happened and so on, it all works very well. See the movies.

Joy Division (the real band)

TKTS on Dailyserving.com

Check it.