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March 28, 2007
Catalog of the Mythical: Taylor Greenfield's "Legend"
The Calvin BFA show is up at Khora, Calvin's space at 106 S. Division. Pretty nice little show. My favorite piece is Taylor Greenfield's Legend.
Greenfield presents an antique card catalog, empty Bell jars, labels, pencils, and these instructions:
Dear Participant, This collection is incomplete. Please take a jar and fill it with something mythical, magical, iconic, or otherwise legendary. Label your contribution and place it in the drawer of your choosing and arrange the jars as you see fit.
When the show opened the drawers already contained many filled jars. The contents ranged from the mundane: wax, stones, to the fantastic: ground unicorn horn, gold, to the visceral: hair, urine.
My contributions include a jar labeled "WRATH," in which I put the smashed pieces of one of the other jars, "Ash that floated a mile to get here," which contains burnt pieces of foam that floated here from that huge fire a few weeks ago, and "ALL THE RULES NEEDED TO PLAY DUNGEONS & DRAGONS," where the jar contains a Sony memory stick with text files containing all the basic rules of D&D (which, incidentally, is about 15 megabytes of information).
I like this project because it combines the conceptual tendencies of things like The Art and Language Group and relational aesthetics with ideas of fantasy and myth.
Art and Language Group at Documenta 1972
After all, what's art if it's not a prescribed method by which the mythical meets the mundane?
Well done, Taylor.
ps- The show is only open until this Friday, so hurry down if you missed it. Gallery hours are:
Wednesday 1-9
Thursday and Friday 1-6
Posted by kevinb at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
Wikipedia, Friend of the Word Collagist
In addition to traditional collage and drawing, I've been interested lately in the way that words can be used as collage elements. I particularly like words from lists and catalogs. I'm sure this corresponds to my interest in wildlife guide books and encyclopedias in my pictorial collages.
On the one hand, a list lets an item stand on it's own, showing only its inherent meanings and associations (or what meanings we bring to the item), without influence of a surrounding "sentence", whether that be verbal or visual. But on the other hand, lists have this great flaw in that the items are not standing on their own, instead they are put next to other items. The reason is usually some form of empirical ordering, and is almost never aesthetically considered. This is where the "hands off" spirit of minimalism seems to pop up. I love the intersection of idiosyncratic associations of a list's items with its impersonal structure.
I stumbled upon a list on Wikipedia that I think embodies this pretty well. "List of animal names" shows the words for young, female, male, group, adjective, and meat for many animals. The names for groups are always fun, (a gaggle of geese, a mob of kangaroos...) but there were a few surprises. Who knew that a group of aardvarks were called an "aarmory"? Clever. I also liked: a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a business of ferrets, and a buffoonery of orangutans.
Even more than the group names I enjoyed the adjectives. These are words that usually mean "like or pertaining to" a certain type of animal. Some common ones are canine, avian, feline, bovine. But some the lesser known ones are really great. Some of my favorites: tolypeutine = armadillo-like, columbine = dove-like, vulpine = fox-like, and iki = sloth-like.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get the chance to use any of these words in conversational speech, but it's good to know that they're there if I need them. I could say, "This is a hystricine blog."
Posted by kevinb at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2007
Inside Austin (and Autism?)
SXSW... wow. What a crazy couple of days. Yesterday we saw a couple of movies, the first of which was Hannah Takes the Stairs. We ran from that one across town in order to catch the premiere of a documentary we were excited about called Billy the Kid. Maybe it had something to do with that film fest atmosphere that makes movies seem really exciting, but this movie blew me away. It's a documentary that follows a painfully socially awkward 15 year old through the whirlwind 3 day saga of his first love. Billy has Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. It was weird, because we interviewed the director, Jennifer Venditti, before the screening and she said how she didn't want it to be about a disorder, but about a person. And the film really did that, it never even mentioned the disorder until the final frame, an epilogue describing where Billy is now. But then, Venditti did a Q&A, and Billy was there, too. For some reason the whole "it's about a person not a disorder" thing vanished and it was several uncomfortable minutes of describing what's wrong with Billy, right in front of Billy! It left us with an uneasy feeling. But the film was amazing, simply amazing.
I've stitched together composite photos of some interesting Austin interiors. First, the historic Paramount Theater, where we saw Hannah Takes The Stairs and a really funny stoner movie from a woman's perspective (a first?) called Smiley Face.
Next, a shady (but authentic) Texas BBQ joint a cabbie took us to called Sam's. I tried not to let the giant roach I saw on the floor spoil my appetite. One of my favorite moments was when Sam grabbed a huge slab of slow-cooked beef, cut off the first slice and handed it to me for a taste test, similar to the smelling of the wine bottle cork ritual. It was good.
Posted by kevinb at 3:19 AM | Comments (1)
March 9, 2007
SXSW, not just music
I'm going to South by Southwest tomorrow!
In Austin!
Texas!
I'm excited, I've never been to Austin before, or Texas, for that matter. My wife (who is unable to join me) loves Austin and has given me a list of restaurants I must go to, but I'm having trouble remembering them all. I'll call her.
Anyway, I'm going with a team from Spout.com to do audio and video podcasts of the film and interactive portions of the festival. We'll be watching movies and interviewing the filmmakers like we did at the Denver Film Festival a few months ago. But this time we'll also be filming a series of roundtable discussions with filmmakers, bloggers, and other industry folk that will be available via Spout and Youtube. More on that later.
Spout has what they call a "sitelette" to keep track of all the SXSW happenings, complete with blog posts, podcasts, a Flickr photostream, and a Twitter stream. Check it out here.
If you're dying to know which amazing bands I'm going to see while I'm there, the answer is... none. While the film and music portions of the festival do overlap somewhat, I'll be leaving Tuesday, before the music gets under way. Oh well. There are more than enough amazing films to see.
I'll try to keep this blog updated with what's going down there, if I have time.
Posted by kevinb at 11:29 AM | Comments (1)