Facebook, blogs, mirrors, and art

there is a chapter in Invisible Cities about a city built on water. Everything that happens in the town is reflected in the alter image. The townspeople become so aware of how they look in the reflection, that they alter their actions so each may appear more effective, more enjoyable, more dramatic in the reflected image of themselves. Indeed their enjoyment is in imagining how their actions will appear, not in the actions themselves. This certainly relates to art work but perhaps even more to blogging and facebook.

Facebook seems to have largely taken over blogging. One can say in a readymade format, "Hobo is hungry....Hobo is voting for Obama, Hobo is gracefully sidestepping all responsibilities. " The effectiveness of facebook is that it allows one to achieve the feeling of being busy or looked at or paid attention to without much work. (the other side of it is that you get to be a voyeur into other people's lives which likewise seem very interesting because they're not yours) With blogging, the implication is that you have to write something worth reading. The thrill of both is that it feels spontaneous and of the moment. The downside is that no one wants to read something two days old.

But back to the reflection idea- one of the things that made the Blair Witch Project so interesting was that the female character used the video camera as a reflective device where she could project someone strong and confident. As long as she could hold on to the idea of the documentary and her role as narrator, the real life situation was less frightening. Was this because real life became a movie? Perhaps being the director or narrator brought a sense of confidence to her identity which she could bring back to everyday life. I often think of painting as a turning away from and a returning to the world. There is always a let down when the painting ends. I think it's some sort a ridiculous desire that when you turn back around from that world in the rectangle that the world behind you will be indistinguishable from it. There is a sense of failure that, although painful, is in many ways a healthy and humbling experience.



There is another chapter in Invisible Cities about a hotel room that a man visits every year. It has one window where he spends all his time peering through. The view is barren at first, but with successive years, the view becomes populated with characters....far off at first, and few. Each year the characters increase in quantity and proximity. After years of returning to look through the window, the characters are so plentiful that they begin to occupy the space of the room behind him and around him to where he can barely move. In many ways this seems a triumph, but the implication is otherwise. (think Dylan, Cobain, and Salinger)

American Destiny

Kevin Dann's book A SHORT STORY OF AMERICAN DESTINY 1909-2009 just came out. It has a painting of mine on the cover and title page.

society of the spectacle

Credo

As close as I get to a Credo. Many of the recent works have been circling these ideas.

Within one is an atlas containing maps of unpromised lands, visited in thought, but not yet discovered or founded. Perhaps those who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell toward which of these futures the winds drive us. For these ports one cannot draw a route on a map or set a date for landing. At times, all one needs is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd. Setting out from there, one puts together, piece by piece, his home, made of fragments, mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. Because the land toward which this journey tends is discontinuous in time and space, now scattered, now more condensed, does not mean the search for it will cease.

If the last landing place can only be the infernal city and it is here that, in ever narrowing circles, the current is drawing us, seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

(excerpt from Calvino's Invisible Cities-tweaked a bit)

Laughable

See if you can get through this without laughing. The very worst of country music. Teddy Bear by Red Sovine.

Republican American

Could there be a worse name for a newspaper? The local Waterbury paper has written a review of the CT Biennial and spotlighted Aqualung and given us a vocabulary lesson in the process.

Few images do that as well as Nathan Lewis' stirring and incriminating "Aqualung," an oleaginous image of people drowning in a corrosive blue oil slick. One man lunges for safety toward the latticework of the falling oil slick. Another screams as his body is sucked into the greasy bilge. All that is left of one woman is a polka dot clutch, held piteously aloft. This is perhaps the exhibit's most trenchant, prescient image and it is also its most searing indictment.