The works of Rackstraw Downes

A recent weekend found my wife and I around Chelsea hopscotching the gallery offerings there. What was originally planned to be a short trip to the Brooklyn Museum turned into a Chelsea/Chinatown trek with the hope that we could score a double win: Enjoy the art picks at the galleries and drop in for some heavenly dumplings at Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown. A sudden change of plans also meant that we did not have a 'preferred gallery' visit-list to go by. We decided to rough it out and ‘randomly’ visit galleries (not a recommended option, but under the circumstances…) and see if we could be entertained. Heading south from 26th street, we stopped off at about 15 galleries and we did notice the usual Chelsea fare – brand name school MFAs with their ‘found’ artworks, artists working on their mid-life crisis', career retrospectives of established artists and the newly effulgent ones with their showy picks. Of course, the usual exhibit showing the next emerging hotshot Chinese artist also featured in one of the galleries that we passed by.

Figuring we would get more of the same, we dropped into yet another brand name gallery - the Betty Cunningham gallery – expecting to be greeted with the usual slickness and the somewhat forced fecundity of the contemporary art gallery scene. Boy!, We were surprised. The gallery was showing the works of Rackstraw Downes – a 70 year old American artist originally from England. My wife or I are not avid followers of ‘realist’ art, but the paintings of Mr. Rackstraw (that sure is a strange name) seem to border on the cusp between the abstract representation of a scene and a faithful rendering of the same on canvas. Not sure which side hangs more heavily. The paintings in this show are more of everyday scenes done plein air and feature scenes that one does not focus too much in the unhealthy speed of our busy city or country lives. The scenes happen to be there, right in front of us, invisible but imposing – the bridge, the skyway, the mesa or the rolling hills. In his hands, they seem to magically become a portal for additional scrutiny that seems to draw and tug a viewer strongly. I normally do not gush too much about art, but these paintings did it for us. He seems to have painted a good number of normal sized pieces and some really abnormal pieces – pieces that are about 15 inches high but stretch almost half the length of the gallery wall space (some were about 150 inches long). These are paintings of landscapes around Presidio, Texas and viewers could almost lose oneself in the panorama presented - a very novel device to present vistas – I must say.
This show is highly recommended and I would urge you to go and visit the gallery (if you are in town).

In his words:
A professional artist’s life is uncertain and miserable and everyday you feel obliged to do something extraordinary and unusual. It has its problems, it really does. The vagaries of fashion whisk you in and whisk you out again, and give you an income and take it away again. I will say this though, that all of us that are painters or poets or whatever spend quite a big chunk of time everyday doing exactly the thing we really want to do. And that can’t be said by lots of people.
- From the gallery catalogue whose price of $ 30 had us balking, but the gallery owner on seeing our excited expressions agreed to let us have it for free!
There is an interesting interview here.

A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue), 2007, oil on canvas, 11" X 18"

'Henry Hudson Bridge Substructure, A.M.', 2006, Oil on canvas, 39" X 32"

'Daphne Cummings' Brooklyn Studio', 2006, oil on canvas, 23" X 32" (my favorite)

'Atlantic Avenue at the entrance to the Van Wyck Expressway', 2007, Oil on canvas, 14" X 55"

'Presidio Horse Racing Association Track, Presidio, TX, 3. Looking South and West: the North Horse Shelter with the end of the track', 2006, Oil on canvas, 15" X 100"

'Presidio Horse Racing Association Track, Presidio, TX, 2. Looking West, North and Northeast: the South and North Horse Shelters' , 2006, Oil on canvas, 15" X 120"

Installation view

What afflicts us...

Normally, I do not pay too much attention to those annoying forwarded emails one gets in their inboxes. Most times, I delete them without much thought. This one I decided to read on... (especially in light of news like this).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Japanese company and an American company decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile.

The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, whi le the American team had 8 people steering and 1 person rowing.

Feeling a deeper study was in order, American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They advised, of course, that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.

Not sure of how to utilize that information, but wanting to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the one person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the 'Rowing Team Quality First Program,' with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and o ther equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses.

The next year the Japanese won by two miles.

Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the senior executives as bonuses and the next year's racing team was out-sourced to India.

Note: Ford has spent the last thirty years moving all its factories out of the US , claiming they can't make money paying American wages. Toyota has spent the last thirty years building more than a dozen plants inside the US. The last quarter's results: Toyota makes 4 billion in profits while Ford racked up 9 billion in losses.

A painting and a poem

Sunil, 'Tamping down the frustration of rising expectations regarding reincarnation', Oil on MDF, 20" X 48"

On reincarnation - A poem

You only live once,
contrary to the scriptures.
There is no reincarnation
no lifting up of souls,
no second comings
or the dead arising.
No paeans to souls.
All poppycock.

But,
It was not all drivel,
more, a clever way of getting people to listen,
to tune in,
to make better
from their humdrum existence. Any other way
would have risked misunderstanding
and unwanted interpretation.
Diluting the concept
and
muddying the big picture.

Instead of telling us
that piecemeal acts of selfishness
slowly accretes
to become a
cancer on the coming generation,
and the ill will generated
rebirths itself on the coming fold
like force fields that fashion our neurons
conditioning them for extended injustices
to silently transform and shortchange
our futures -

they gave us a simpler message,
more palatable.
They said something illogical,
hoping to pass it off for deeper truths.
It sometimes works.
It's what politicians do.
They said that the souls do not really expire
along with the body.

They told us that
It just passes on
from one mortal coil to other.
Supposedly satisfied and smug
with concepts like endless cycles.

When in actuality was something else
they had understood.
It was really an endless dance of the packets.
They were of two types:
Packets of deeds well done
instilling in the progeny
the need to carry forth in better ways,
rebirthing the essence of the original souls,
and multiplying the goodness all around.

And, packets of ill deeds,
also accumulating
this time rebirthing in the progeny
with effects more pronounced,
more deadly.
Multiplied through transmission.

Unless of course, one breaks out of the cycle
and achieves redemption.

In that sense,
there is reincarnation of the souls,
a banding together of the fields
good or bad
blotting the collective consciousness.
not literal,
not figurative
not in the real sense.

A litany of simpler explanations
devoured by the common lay
ensuring our continued survival.

Achieving a state of perfect bliss may be difficult,
the entropy only increases - they say,
but one makes best of what one has
and passes to the collective
an abstract body of
feelings,
deeds,
thoughts,
actions
to be
multipled forthwith.

Painting post: New work in progress

This is the first of four parts of an oil painting planned (not too sure if one can call it a quadtych - I have heard of triptych's though). This was done on gessoed canvas 36" X 48". The plan is to use a flat monochromatic hue of raw umber for all four parts.

Pictures

Life is beautiful - from erstwhile Russia...

Chinatown sights

On a trip to Bowery yesterday to see the works of the late Canadian artist David Askevold at the Canada gallery (will be posting soon), I happened to chance upon some very Chinatown moments. Some pictures below...

Tell me the last time you saw oranges so fresh that the leaves were attached on (unless of course, you are one of those compulsive 'farmers' market' shoppers). These looked super artificial. I had to touch them to make sure they were real. The vendor was not too happy that I did not translate my silly move to verify their authenticity into an actual sale.

Chinatown buildings present a curious array of little shack like holdups wedged between 1930’s art deco lots. The Empire State building is visible in the far end of the picture. The day was a mixture of clouds, humidity and effects spilling over from being the warmest February day ever in New York.

Yes, that is an actual cobbler working away. Think the last time I saw one of these vanishing species in today's instafix world was back when in we were in India. You can wait here until your footwear is repaired. I noticed that the line in front of this mobile shoe fix store numbered three ladies deep in various stages of footwear undress.

This tree looked like a stick figure singing a paean to the lords telling them to take it easy on mortals here on this year of the rat - which has not begun too well (atleast economy wise - which happens to be one of the mainstay's of Chinatown's anywhere)...

Leather chairs for sale: This one was reduced from 38 dollars to 8 dollars. Apparently all that talk about inflation after the record interest rate cuts over last week has not touched this corner of Chrystie and Canal streets.

This is part of an arch that marks the Manhattan bridge exit. Not too sure how many drivers actually notice these columns as they continue their mad rush over the East river from Breukelen to the island of Manahatta.

Yes, that is an actual storefront. Piet Mondrian would have been impressed.

Thoughts on yesterday’s election primary

Yesterday’s election primary results were interesting in the sense that the number of contenders for what is supposed to the most powerful political office in the world has narrowed down to three individuals. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. What was especially heartening to note was the fact that the candidacy of the shape shifting, forever morphing, chameleon like persona of Mitt Romney is effectively over. While a popular train of through informs that just about any monkey’s uncle would be better than the current incumbent of the White House, at this point, for me, the tension that accompanies the selection of candidature of the United States presidency is effectively over. I can live with any one of the three, Hillary, Barack or McCain… They are all fairly level headed and good for the country.

Related news from Bloomberg:
Last Saturday in Chelsea, New York magazine art writer Jerry Saltz compared Hillary Clinton to MoMA. How unkind. And possibly true. Both entities had ``lost touch'' and were ``a bit of a disappointment. The event, at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, was a rally to get out the vote for candidate Obama, also the presidential choice of New Yorker magazine art critic Peter Schjeldahl, artist Matthew Ritchie and New Museum curator Laura Hoptman. Obama was like the New Museum, Saltz riffed, ``impossible, audacious, awkward.'' ``Like a dream,'' he said, ``it changes everything overnight.''

Terpsichorean Ticker Tape

The Giants winning the Superbowl this weekend was sweet, but even better was to watch the ticker tape parade in downtown Manhattan as the fans celebrated the victory. The parade began right outside our office and it was hard to resist joining the fun. Though I did not manage to get any pictures of the stars themselves, I got some pictures of the ensuing action all round...

Camaraderie, Cameras and Constabulary
Canine Contributions

Ticker Tape Dances

Camera Interrupted

Raining Paperflakes

Unconventional sculptures

I noticed two unconventional sculptures in Chelsea last week.

Leonardo Drew is exhibiting at the Brenda Taylor gallery. The single piece exhibited is a monumental wall relief in wood, cotton, nails and rust, titled #23, evokes the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north beginning with the onset of the Jim Crow laws in the 1890’s. Using a loose grid reminiscent of a city street plan, Drew’s work seems like fitting commentary on injustices that must have accompanied the hordes during migration and after. The sculpture was visually strong and I felt a distinct sense of being overwhelmed by the spectacle. Of course, even if the gallery owner had not explained to me the circumstances surrounding the sculpture, I would still have found it extremely compelling – if only for the visual beauty. The picture below really does not do justice to the sculpture...

A fourteen foot sculpture titled 'Styrobot' dominates the exhibition space at Jeff Bailey Gallery at Chelsea. Constructed of Styrofoam packaging by the artist Michael Salter, the enormity of the piece invokes feelings of foreboding only to be supplanted by the knowledge that the whole thing is artfully constructed out of super light Styrofoam. No deep psychological insight here, but it seemed like a nice critique on consumer packaging goods. The exhibition also included examples of the artist’s kinetic sculptures and animated video’s, but all of them paled in comparison with the monster in the little room.

Two view's of Leonardo Drew's sculpture

Two view's of Michael Salter's Styrobot

Toot, toot!

The painting below completed last year is included in a group show, titled ‘¡Presente! Homenaje a la Mujer’ hosted jointly between Avenue 50 Studio, Los Angeles, California and Amnesty International USA. The theme of this show is to focus on Amnesty International USA’s ‘Stop Violence against Women’ campaign. The show begins February 2008 (end Feb). I am not too sure if we would be able to ship this painting over to LA (it is pretty heavy, Medium Density Fiberboard 3.5 feet by 4.5 feet tends to be about 80 pounds). I am negotiating to see if Giclee prints would suffice….

Sunil, 'Battery', Oil on MDF, 36" X 48"

Weekend paint spatter

Sunil. 'Untitled 020308', 36" X 48", Latex based house paint, acrylic and kumkum on canvas

Sunil. 'Untitled 020208', 36" X 48", Latex based house paint, acrylic and kumkum on canvas

Toot your horn department

My art/profile is featured today on the front page of a new art site called artlog. Started in NYC in January 08', it seems to have potential judging by the number of users and quality of art presented... I heard about the site via Point of View gallery...

Martin Schoeller at Hasted Hunt

I went to see Martin Schoeller's pictures at the Hasted Hunt today. Martin Schoeller is famous for his extreme close-ups of face shots done with his signature style that leaves a subject with little wiggle room to artificiality. Schoeller's images strike one for their remarkable intensity, frankness and truth. He was commissioned by The New Yorker magazine to visit the Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) along the banks of the Maici river in Brazil. I have just one thing to say: Their faces are beautifully pagan.

From the New Yorker (more here)

"There are about three hundred and fifty Pirahã spread out in small villages along the Maici and Marmelos Rivers. The village that I visited with Everett was typical: seven huts made by propping palm-frond roofs on top of four sticks. The huts had dirt floors and no walls or furniture, except for a raised platform of thin branches to sleep on. These fragile dwellings, in which a family of three or four might live, lined a path that wound through low brush and grass near the riverbank. The people keep few possessions in their huts—pots and pans, a machete, a knife—and make no tools other than scraping implements (used for making arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, and wood bows and arrows. Their only ornaments are simple necklaces made from seeds, teeth, feathers, beads, and soda-can pull-tabs, which they often get from traders who barter with the Pirahã for Brazil nuts, wood, and sorva (a rubbery sap used to make chewing gum), and which the tribe members wear to ward off evil spirits.
According to the best guess of archeologists, the Pirahã arrived in the Amazon between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago, after bands of Homo sapiens from Eurasia migrated to the Americas over the Bering Strait. The Pirahã were once part of a larger Indian group called the Mura, but had split from the main tribe by the time the Brazilians first encountered the Mura, in 1714. The Mura went on to learn Portuguese and to adopt Brazilian ways, and their language is believed to be extinct. The Pirahã, however, retreated deep into the jungle. "

The part I enjoyed most about these works was the fact Martin has shown the same level of attention and detail in photographing these tribes from the Amazon as his photographs of Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and George Clooney (some of whom are in the same show). When you have the Amazonian tribes, Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench in the same room, you slowly start to see the effects of mascara and eyeliner begin to wear away and you start to see all of them as naked human beings, plain and simple...

Up close and personal

I did recieve a couple of requests to post close-up pictures of my most recent painting - here goes. (sharpened a bit for clarity).

Middle Right

Middle Top Left

Lower Middle Right

Lower Middle Left

Middle Left

Altocumulus on the way home

Painting post

There is a certain cosmic element about large battles described in epics like the Iliad or the Mahabharata. Maybe the forces unleashed from the large seething masses of humanity numbering in the tens of thousands as they stand to square off in what could be the last day or night in their lives evokes out of control celestial bodies – or maybe it is the magnitude of destruction about to unfold while rational thought remains crucified at the battlefield entrance helplessly watching the bloodletting that ensues… I am not sure, but there is something other worldly about them that pricks our atavistic core. Childhood memories are fairly strong – or so neurologists say – it must be because our brain cells have not fully formed then and any available information sliver is indelibly singed on our neurons… For some reason, to this day, I remember vicariously participating in the imaginary battles while the warring clans clashed under the overcast demeanor of Kurukshetra through comic books such as the Amar Chitra Katha…

One such scene from this epic tale unfolds with two very large armies about to face off each other over a vast battleground. Moments before the time of reckoning draws near and that first arrow rends the sky, one of the commanders experiences a sudden burst of self-doubt and starts a dialogue with his charioteer on the nature of humanity, the soul, our existence and filial duty. A striking tableau develops when his charioteer drives the chariot out to the midlines of the battle field and starts to explain the answers to some of the questions posed. The interesting dialogue between the doubtful commander and his self assured charioteer is so powerful that it forms a separate section of the Mahabharata called the Gita. Though I would consider certain portions of the conversation between the two to be bit facile, a lot of the principles laid out in the exchange thousands of years back does resonate even today.

Even if the words did prod my conscience in many ways, the aspect of the epic that was most retained in my mind from all those surreptitious nights of comic book mythology was this scene from the battle. This painting is an attempt at trying to capture some those crucial moments before the impending battle. This scene is a familiar one and numerous Indian homes have a semblance of this tableau in some framed format. Owing to the scale and the gravity of the scene, I decided to try something large scale (though it was not really necessary) – I had not done anything so large before and the aspect of size in and of itself presented its own peculiar problems. Finished, the painting is about nine feet wide and six feet tall. I did make a mess of our basement completing the thing and am not sure how long that is going to take to clean the oil paint mish mash left on the floor. It took about two and a half months for me to go through the motions of the initial measurements, sketches, gesso ground and finally painting the canvas in three sections – the middle first, followed by the left and finally the right side.

This post also appears in Art and Perception here.

Sunil, ‘Everyman and Charioteer’, Oil on canvas, 101" X 73"

60 mph sunsets

Toddler Ab Ex

When I came home this evening, our son had this bit of water color based ab-ex art on the dining table...

A taste of the union

Warren E. Buffet tells us a story... Hopefully we do not end up with this as a state of the union...

Read the full article here. An educational excerpt below...

"Lets take a wildly fanciful trip with to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that's how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.

The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there's a quid pro quo -- but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).

Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off -- or simply service -- the debt they're piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat -- they have nothing left to trade -- but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest.

It can be argued, of course, that the present value of the future production that Squanderville must forever ship to Thriftville only equates to the production Thriftville initially gave up and that therefore both have received a fair deal. But since one generation of Squanders gets the free ride and future generations pay in perpetuity for it, there are -- in economist talk -- some pretty dramatic "intergenerational inequities."

Sooner or later the Squanderville government, facing ever greater payments to service debt, would decide to embrace highly inflationary policies -- that is, issue more Squanderbucks to dilute the value of each. After all, the government would reason, those irritating Squanderbonds are simply claims on specific numbers of Squanderbucks, not on bucks of specific value. In short, making Squanderbucks less valuable would ease the island's fiscal pain.

That prospect is why I, were I a resident of Thriftville, would opt for direct ownership of Squanderville land rather than bonds of the island's government. Most governments find it much harder morally to seize foreign-owned property than they do to dilute the purchasing power of claim checks foreigners hold. Theft by stealth is preferred to theft by force."

If the above story sounds like poppycock, then you definitely should look at this article over at the Washington Post that delves into just how much of us (or is that US) is being bought off by the Chinese...

Applications invited for more superpowers...

An epitaph for England appears in the conservative New Centurion after Gordon Brown joined twenty-six other European countries in signing the Lisbon Treaty last month. I must say it is beneficial… Having two or three superpowers around is not a bad thing – even if it is in the form of a loose coalescing of member states as they dream of in a nascent Europa or the blitzkrieg oligarchic formula currently practiced over at Putinstan… One will need to get more permissions before starting something as big as Iraq... The rumbles have been heard over in the distance with calls for an African Union...


After Dead Souls by Allen Ginsberg

Where O America are you
going in your glorious
automobile, careening
down the highway
toward what crash
in the deep canyon
of the Western Rockies,
or racing the sunset
of the Golden Gate
toward what wild city
jumping with jazz
on the Pacific Ocean!

----------- Spring 1952

An interesting story...

A story I read on the Antioch Review... (could not help but post here - a useful commentary on what sometimes gets lost in cultural translation)

My Wife, Their Sister by Robert A. Rosenstone

Only after the ceremony did I learn that when you marry a Muslim woman she remains related to her brothers as well – about half a billion of them. This bit of knowledge became evident on our travels to lands where Muslims and Jews live or once lived together in close proximity, but the first lesson came in London's Euston Station after we drag three large suitcases off a train and I go to search for a luggage cart while Aisha stands in the crowded concourse, guarding the bags. A middle aged Pakistani man in a uniform that seems to connect him to the station sidles up to her and asks: Can I help you, sister?

I return with a cart to see a dark man, bent painfully low beneath the weight of our suitcases, leading Aisha towards and then down a steep staircase to the lower level of the station, then out along a platform to distant taxi stands. I draw close, thinking perhaps I should help him with his burden, but Aisha looks over her shoulder and, her right hand palm towards me, waves me off. She repeats the gesture when I draw near and put my hand on my wallet just as he lifts the bags into the trunk. Aisha smiles at him, says shukran, and gets into the cab. I jump in next to her and say: You're not going to tip him?

Of course not. It would be an insult to tip your brother.

Photo of the eastern shore of Staten Island, January 25, 2008

Oil painting: Work in progress

I managed to finish up another third of the large scale oil painting originally talked about here. This is about six feet in both directions now. Have another third to go...

Notes on a Korean artist

I was over at Kim Foster gallery last week to see the featured exhibition when I happened to run into a very singular piece of artwork hung in an obscure corner of that gallery. Approaching it from afar, it looked like sculptural relief on canvas with a highly patterned black and white surface that exaggerated shadows and spaces. On closer examination, one realizes that it is a complex composition of thousands upon thousands of folded paper blocks arranged in a collage like pattern that produces an illusion of depth. What initially looked like a 'tunnel' morphed into plane surface modeled cunningly in three dimensions – yes, trompe l'oeil. I talked to the gallery assistant and got some more information.

Kwang-Young Chun’s compositions are constructed of hundreds of tiny triangles wrapped in century-old handmade mulberry paper. Using a range of gray to black tones, Chun creates what looks like deep depressions or craters. He fabricates small triangles out of Styrofoam and then wraps them with mulberry paper. He then fastens these objects with string to a canvas, creating make-believe surface relief by appropriately patterning the triangles. These deep depressions are not actual indentations but are a result of the triangles coalescing into an illusion of depth.

For those unfamiliar with Korean culture, the mulberry paper used in these compositions offers an additional layer of meaning. In pre-modern Korea, herb medicines were wrapped in white mulberry paper and were then hung along ceiling rafters of family run pharmacies to prevent dampness and to keep away insects. Like the Ayurvedic medicines of India that are falling into slow obscurity, the herbal medicines of pre-modern Korea are also falling into disrepair.
I found the following page on artnet that shows a little more of his works:

Two view of Aggregation by Kwang-Young Chun

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The original reason for going to this gallery was to see the audio/sculpture art of Scott Sherk. I was not that impressed, but if you want to read about it, please see here. I have a picture below.

Scott Sherk began with the idea that he could find a visual and aural way to document an interesting walk. Recording the walk with both a stereo recorder and a GPS tracking system led Sherk to the realization that the act of walking was itself a drawing in space. This drawing – his walking – could be represented three dimensionally in sculpture. Back in the studio he transformed GPS information that recorded his path and elevation into welded steel forms. He edited his field recordings from his stereo to accompany the sculptures. Together, these works become an installation of soundscape and landscape.

And now, the rest of the story

The current president of the United States is known to wax eloquent about his favorite painting in his official autobiography. A particular painting that he acquired after becoming a 'born again Christian'. The painting evokes the Wild West and depicts a bedraggled horseman charging his steed up a craggy slope followed by a couple of other men on foot. Titled 'A Charge to Keep' by Wilhelm Heinrich Dethlef Körner, the President says that this painting conveys the message that we serve the One greater than ourselves (the title also is the title of a Methodist hymn written in the eighteenth century). An additional reason this turned out to be his favorite painting seems to be the supposed allusions to circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. Given the resurgent religious revivalism engorging the States, the reading seems appropriate if hackneyed.

Of course, a little bit of enterprising research by political journalist Jacob Weisberg has turned up this story behind the painting: (quoted from the Harpers magazine). It turns out that the title, message or meaning of the painting were all different…

"The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

The parallels that may be drawn are entirely accidental.

Go figure.

W.H.D. Koerner, “A Charge to Keep”, 1916, Oil on canvas (Image ripped from Harpers magazine)

To revel in obscurity

A great review of Madelon Vriesendorp's works at artreview magazine, (an artist I really have not heard about, but her work captures you)...

How many others revel in obscurity? References to Duchamp hang heavy.

Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant Delit, 1975, Oil on canvas

From the review: "The painting shows the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in bed together, a wilted prophylactic with "Goodyear" on it discarded on the bed. The straight-laced RCA building has burst in the door, shining its spotlight on them. Through the window, all the buildings are faces glaring at the naughty couple. It's impossible to look at the Manhattan skyline in the same way after Flagrant Delit. Vriesendorp's ultra-sensitive antenna picked up the latent desire in the these preening skyscrapers, aching for each other and crying out to each other across 10 relatively stumpy and drab midtown blocks. Vriesendorp's imaginary intervention into the skyline is as psychologically significant and enduring as any new building there would be".

Ennui envy

Greek humoral medicine had endowed the spleen and the black bile produced as an antidote to cure melancholia or depression. Of course, in today’s world there are dozens of pharmaceutical devices to cure depression and in the odd case, an overdose (accidental or intentional) could also send one to states of happy ecstasy. In an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Wilson talks about the overemphasis of happiness in American life and the problems inherent from our constant struggle to create new and innovative ways of beating depression.

Come melancholy! silent Pow'r,
Companion of my lonely hour,
To sober thought confin'd;
Thous sweetly-sad ideal guest,
In all thy soothing charms confest,
Indulge my pensive mind.
…. ….
In Death's soft slumber lull'd to rest,
She sleeps, by sliming visions blest,
That gently whisper peace:
'Till the last morn's fair op'ning ray
Unfolds the bright eternal day
Of active life and bliss.

In 'An Ode to Melancholy' by Elizabeth Carter (full poem here) starts by actually courting the beneficial power in the extreme isolation offered by melancholy only to tell us in the end that the author was indeed blessed by the ‘sweet’ episode that taught her to further appreciate life in greater fullness than ever before. That applies to a lot of us - we go through periods of want where everything seems to be a struggle and the smallest tasks a big hurdle. All of these tasks and struggles suddenly seem simpler when the tides turn (and they do) and fortunes are reversed. In addition to the tasks seeming simpler and lighter, often we tend to appreciate the new found goodness in a deeper and thoughtful manner.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. There is nothing wrong with this, it is good to be happy, but Eric writes rather compellingly that the dearth of melancholia in society also means that the muse that powers the arts, poetry and music is slowly disappearing from our society. It is commonly believed that sadness lends to a deeper introspection of our condition in society – thus leading to a flowering of deep, introspective works in music and poetry. It can only be extrapolated that the slow banishment of the same (for the first time in recorded human history) might lead to structural re-adjustments whose effects are yet to be clearly understood. Moreover, he also asks the question: How can so many of us be so happy when globally the problems are ever more dire by the day? (yesterday I read a report that talked about killings in the Congo - 1500 people die each day from ethnic clashes, roughly 45000 a month). Not to mention of mutual aggression and hatred taking place in the Balkans, Chechnya, North West Pakistan and a host of other countries. Maybe the adage of the 'frog in the well' seems more adept here. ‘Everything looks good in my well and I can see no further, hence all is well’ syndrome that might be afflicting the American populace. Maybe it is a complex combination of positive psychology adherents, isolationist tendencies (if you tune into the news any evening and check the percentage of ‘global’ content, you will see what I mean), fear of seeking reality and pharmaceutical anti-depressant cocktails that seem to have led us down this path of being extra happy and bubbly.

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.
My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience.
Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.

Again, I must hasten to add that I am not endorsing a sad, melancholic outlook to life, but rather a tempering down of the extreme forces that assail us in achieving ultimate bliss, the American dream and super satisfaction might be actually good for the society in the longer run. A closer look at the problems around the world and a deeper appreciation for the issues might make us better global citizens.

In the end, I am really not sure. On the one hand, we as a family seek the dream – nurture our children - catering to their every need and making sure that hints of sadness in their eyes are wiped clean with that next candy or toy that we dutifully buy from the global marketplace. We also are privy witnesses to the paradox – the blank stares that greet you when you talk to teenagers about global issues and the fact that they are about to compete in a world gone flat, where geographical, linguistic and cultural barriers would not mean much and all of us would be expected to compete and cooperate in closer ways than ever before… Of course, it is not the children one should blame; it would be us - who foster them – foster them in ways that are bereft of the larger landscape…

Gaspard Gresly (French, 1712 - 1756), 'A candlelit interior with figures around a table', oil on canvas, 27" X 33", 1740

Meanwhile...

It is nice to see the mainstream media recognizing blogging - albeit grudgingly (The New York Times euphemistically calls it ‘citizen journalism’)...

Read Michal Yon's profile in the Times - a blogger who covers the quagmire in Iraq by actually staying with soldiers under fire...

His blog here...

On that note, a new database was launched by the Center for Public Integrity featuring about 1000 ‘statements’ that helped ‘sell’ the war (now in an easy-to-search format)...

Kerala Diary

During a visit to India last year my wife and I went to the temple where we were married eight years ago. We were struck by the beauty of the oil lamps that dot the outer walls of the five hundred year old temple structure. The scene gets especially compelling during nights of festivities when the entire village volunteers to light these lamps. The lamps themselves are made of beaten copper and brazed onto the weathered stone walls of the temple. The handmade wicks are made of rolled cotton and coconut oil is used to sustain the flame. Once lit, they last for hours into the festive night shimmering and dancing in the light breeze of Central Kerala.