Is there a still-thriving tradition of gay (or at least homoerotic) collage, with the Bay Area as its potential capital? That question has lingered in my mind when I’ve glued images from After Dark to Maria Callas box sets (or placed old horror movie hand gestures in new contexts), and when I’ve met other local gay men devoted to simila... More

Originally from the musically rich Motor City, Detroit, Michigan, Oluyemi Thomas has been a San Francisco Bay Area resident since 1974. Thomas studied both music and mechanical engineering at Washtenaw College. He creates ordered compositional free music that he acknowledges as part of, but not limited to, what is called jazz. Over a career spannin... More

Originally from the musically rich Motor City, Detroit, Michigan, musician/composer/multi-instrumentalist Oluyemi Thomas has been a Bay Area resident since 1974. He studied both music and mechanical engineering at Washtenaw College. Thomas creates ordered compositional free music that he acknowledges as part of — but not limited to — what is cal... More

My interest in doing this interview with Oakland musician Oluyemi Thomas stems from a desire to get a wide range of answers to some questions that have held my interest for a number of years now. For example, how does the jazz aesthetic show up in the visual field? And, what are the visual markers indicating that we are “seeing” jazz? My goal is to explore the intersection between jazz music, spirituality, and ritual and to explain how these things are made present in the visual field. There are so many unexplored implications in the notion... More

In early 2011 Wide White Space: The Way Beyond Art was on view at the Wattis Gallery in San Francisco. Curated by local designer Jon Sueda, the exhibition investigated “graphic design’s evolving relationship with the practice of exhibition-making as it intersects with the visual arts and the work of both artists and curators.” ... More

Commodified Cinema: Art, Advertising, and Commodities in Film, plays at noon on December 6 as the free Tuesday program. Museum and program admission are free.

Some years ago, I tipsily cornered Peter Kubelka at a small gathering being held in his honor. Here was my opportunity to grill him regarding his stunning Schwechater, surely the greatest one... More

People always clap for the wrong things. — Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, in Chapter 12

Although I am living in New York I still follow the news on SFGate, KQED, KGO, and other news outlets. What has surprised me is how completely wrong Bay Area media has been about the Occupy Wall Street movement, its motivations, its strategy... More

After observing a rehearsal, I am writing to protest the “entertainment” about to be provided by Marina Abramović at the upcoming donor gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where a number of young people’s live heads will be rotating as decorative centerpieces at diners’ tables and others — all women — will be required to lie perfectly still in the nude for over three hours under fake skeletons, also as centerpieces surrounded by diners.

On the face of it the above description might strike one as reminiscent of Salo, Pasolini’s controversial film of 1975 that dealt with sadism and sexual abuse of a group of adolescents at the hands of a bunch of postwar fascists. Though it is hard to watch, Pasolini’s film has a socially credible justification tied to the cause of anti-fascism. Abramović and MoCA have no such credibility — and I am speaking of this event itself, not of Abramović’s work in general — only a questionable personal rationale about the beauty of e... More

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER FORECAST. STAY TUNED FOR RESCHEDULED TIME!

We are artists and art workers of the 99%. We are struggling to survive and sustain our creative practice in an economy that does not value us as workers, that privatizes cultural institutions and that continuously defunds art programs–from public education to government grants. We are putting our creative efforts towards this movement and considering our role in the fight for economic and social justice.

Join us for the Artists Bloc day at Occu... More

Did you hear about the Wall Street rioting over the weekend? If you are outside of New York, you probably didn’t. For some reason there was a media blackout. Early Sunday morning people reportedly heard gunshots and explosions. Then there was talk of guns and tear gas. Police clashed with masked men. Eye witnesses even reported seeing angry mobs of people trying to kidnap what looked like bankers and Wall Street executives. Hundreds of people dressed in black were seen fighting police in the street near the Stock Exchange.

Early reports said Occupy Wall Street protesters were to blame — their camp over at Zuccotti Park is just two blocks away — and so some were confused as to what exactly started the skirmish. But surveillance footage confirmed one thing: that it was not the angry mobs at Occupy Wall Street, but actually it was a number of scenes being shot for the new Christopher Nolan film, The Dark Knight Rises.

(more…)

On this past Wednesday, November 2nd, Oakland continued its historical legacy by organizing the first General Strike in the United States since 1946 — the last one was also in Oakland. Fifty thousand people (or more) took to the streets and participated in many of the workshops, break-out groups, and strike blocs as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in defense of a city under attack by its police force and mayor. Solidarity marches were held in cities throughout the country, banks were closed in Oakland, the port was shut down, chil... More

Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated for centuries in Great Britain, but it only became popular in the United States after the graphic novel V for Vendetta was made into a movie. In V for Vendetta (by Alan Moore), the main character is a masked anarchist who seeks to topple the fascist government ruling the Great Britain of the near future. The mask he wears is purported to be the face of Guy Fawkes. In the film, the masked avenger, named V, methodically assassinates and/or bombs his way through the key figures in the regime, hoping to inspire oth... More

The Art Workers’ Coalition was an organization of artists formed in 1969 to demand artists’ rights, museum reform, representation of women and artists of color in museums, and for museums to take a moral stance on the Vietnam War. As we consider artists’ stake in the current Occupy Wall Street movements, the Art Workers’ Coalition provides necessary historical context. Copied below is the Art Workers’ Coalition’s Statement of Demands made in November 1970 in New York City. How relevant are these demands toda... More

I’m sure some of you have noticed that a fair portion of my examples illustrating these “comedies” can best be described as harmless doodles — one-offs by bored adolescents, digital “folk” art by people otherwise preoccupied with their day jobs as graphic designers or computer engineers, or forays into digital text by artists whose main... More

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the founding of Canyon Cinema, and the recent release of Quick Billy on DVD, Bruce Baillie and Canyon Cinema present the restored version of QUICK BILLY in all its four-reel, 16mm glory at 7 p.m. this Thursday, Sept. 29, in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater, followed by a reception. For more information, incl... More

If big banks, credit card companies, and Wall Street firms can get hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and loan forgiveness, why can’t the students of America? Or more precisely, the art students of America? The way I see it is that the most creative people in the country are waiting tables, slaving away as secretaries, and doing menial jobs because their art degrees haven’t translated into earning potential. As a consequence, possibly tens of thousands — or maybe hundreds of thousands — of creative people around the country have given up their art and switched to non-art activities in order to pay the rent. So in 2009 (most recent year for census data), out of the 89,140 BFAs, 14,918 MFAs, and 1,569 PhDs granted in fine arts, just how many of those people are really making a living in the arts? My guess is: not many.

Does that seem fair? When the housing bubble popped and the economic crisis began, politicians never expected the bankers and Wall Street traders to give ... More

Accolades for smart, creative people are rarely as glamorous or lucrative as the MacArthurs. I always get a little thrill when the annual “genius awards” are announced, as the idea of an artist getting five hundred grand is a wonderful thing, something akin to winning Best Picture at the Oscars. There’s pleasure even in begrudging a ... More

David Clark’s major internet works — including “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played by left hand),” “Sign After the X,” and “A Is for Apple” — are dense, encyclopedic Flash pieces that are replete with imagery, sounds, graphics, voiceover narration. Clark’s visual sensibility is probably closest to that of a graphic... More

Encryption is the age-old practice of taking a message, commonly known as a “plaintext,” and enciphering it to make it illegible to the unpracticed eye — this new text is known as the “ciphertext.” Prior to the use of ciphers, messages could be conveyed secretly by simply hiding them — shaving a messenger’s head, for example, and letting the hair grow back before sending him on his way, only to have it be revealed after a drastic haircut on the other end. Invisible ink was another common practice. A very basic form of encryption i... More

The very prolific J. R. Carpenter seems, more than most writers of electronic literature, most keen on bridging the worlds between the digital and the social, creating a middle ground in her pieces where nature, community, geography, and politics can intermingle with the play of algorithm and the range of image-making abilities computers afford. Two major recent pieces, collected in the Electronic Literature Organization‘s second grouping of key works, aptly demonstrate her interests. “Entre Ville” is a project that investigat... More

The comedy of automation is present in all electronic literature works that dynamically generate “literary” content without the work of a writer; we can see it in any number of works in the previous posts, particularly in the comedies of dysfunction, recursion, exhaustion, and association. I decided to create this additional category specifical... More

Daniel C. Howe, like joerg piringer and Erik Loyer, can be described as both an artist and a researcher. His homepage lists a number of projects, many in progress, some merely sketches, but he doesn’t make any clear division between research and art, not surprising given his array of degrees and residencies. An early project involved developing a series of 3-D fonts, which puts him in a tradition of experimental font makers including the previously mentioned Paul Chan, who replaced individual letters with words, scribbles, or abstract sha... More

François Mori/AP

Libyans wave national flags in Tripoli’s Green Square, renamed Martyr’s Square, during morning prayers Wednesday on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Libyans are also celebrating the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi.

* * *

“The children are drawing pictures of the new Libyan flag, something that would have gotten them arrested only two weeks ago.” (National Public Radio, 31 August 2011)

* * *

The first time I ever heard of Tripoli was when, as a child, in a school classroom, our music teacher taug... More

This next comedy might be the one most associated with electronic literature, as it corrals work in both hypertext and computer-generated writing. I describe hypertext a bit in the first blog post in this series; it is basically the association of different text blocks, called “lexia,” through links embedded in the text itself, commonplace on the web but still exotic in the 1990s. Important early works in hypertext include Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” (1995), Stuart Moulthrop’s “Victory Garden” (199... More

Alan Bigelow has been one of the stalwarts of electronic literature for over a decade now, careful never to stray too far into what could be simply called “digital art” or even avant-garde poetry, building an impressive body of multimedia works that are both innovative and accessible. The artist statement on his website, “webyarns,”... More

My seventh comedy ties into many of the tropes common to new media discourse. Most prevalent among them might be the loss of the “aura” — that which obtains around an object of religious veneration, in Walter Benjamin’s original formulation, partly because only the elite were allowed to be in its presence — in the digital object, which ha... More

Alisson Clifford first came to my attention through her digital setting of a sequence of e. e. cummings’s poetry, a marvelous Flash piece called “The Sweet Old Et Cetera.” Especially impressive was how she managed to preserve the kinetic aspect that the poems themselves already had as still images; cummings’s poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,�... More

The internet has been characterized by acts of fakery since its inception; in fact, the general tenor of one’s attitude toward information on the web in the 1.0 era was that it was immediately of suspicious character simply by having been posted without the imprimatur of an editor or publisher. Certainly, times have changed: Wikipedia is considered a legitimate source for information of all natures — history, for example, which is the object of much contention when governments or even religions (when it comes to evolution) alter it to suppo... More

Rule number one for BART cops: DON’T SHOOT THE PASSENGERS. Hell, you have my permission to beat the BART riders with billy clubs, handcuff them, arrest them, tase them, pepper spray them, but for God’s sake, DON’T SHOOT THEM! Everyone knows that when cops shoot you they aim at your head or your chest. Cops don’t shoot to wound or disarm, they shoot to kill. If I am wrong please enlighten me. And whatever happened to rubber bullets? If BART cops have the green light to shoot at riders, can’t they at least use rubber... More

Erik Loyer combines the skills of a graphic designer, sound artist, and computer engineer in virtuoso, meditative works that negotiate fiction and science — the narrativized and the biological self — in eerie, seductive ways. “Chroma” initially impresses with its high production values, with its techno-rave aesthetic that harkens ba... More

Recursion is the phenomenon of an algorithmic function referring to itself within its execution. For example, if I were writing an algorithm that was to continue running until the value of x, which presently equals 10, attained the value of 0 and named this function subtract1UntilZero, I would call subtract1UntilZero — which subtracts one from x — from within the function itself until x equaled 0. Recursion can occur on linguistic levels (a common joke about recursion is the dictionary entry that says, “Recursion (n.), See, recursion“); it can also (and quite often does) occur in nature, such as in the shape of a sea shell, where the same pattern is repeated, though slightly mor... More

When I was living in San Francisco I didn’t realize just how many guys went to prostitutes — not once in a while, but all the time. It was like no big deal to them. One person I worked with told me he just wasn’t a relationship kind of guy and said that he couldn’t stand all the nagging, all the complaining, and all the BS girlfriends would give him. Hookers, he told me, knew what their job was, did it, then left. No endless talking about problems, no criticism, just simple.

Well one day he and I and my other coworke... More

The basic parameters of Jhave’s work are the use of video imagery that finds more of a basis in traditions of photography than cinema (the camera is often still, and he rarely uses montage), a clean but effective use of typography that harkens back to the “fixed” designs of print rather than the variable designs of HTML (Alan Liu writes about... More

When I teach or try to describe what “electronic literature” is, I often include works that are not produced by, or necessarily intended to be read on, computers. Artist/critic Stephanie Strickland, an accomplished poet and artist known for works such as “V: vniverse” and “slippingglimpse,” begins her short essay “Born Digital” with the statement, “E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it — reading... More

One of the most enjoyable aspects of curatorial practice is research, following thoughts to discover how random or apparently unrelated artworks that strike one’s interest can often have a literal or metaphorical connection. I am currently enjoying one such serendipitous occurrence which I thought I’d share.

I have followed San Francisco artist Sean McFarland’s art since he was in graduate school at CCA, where I teach. At that time he was engaged with the work of such artists as Thomas Demand and James Casebere, both noted for their phot... More

Unlike many of the artists who have so far been featured in this series, Christine Wilks can be understood as a writer of fictions and memoir rather than a poet, or at least an “experimental” poet engaging in the traditions of concrete and visual poetics so prevalent in electronic literature. Her works, while highly interactive, have the ambitions of short films — the sound, image, and text choreography is seamless and absorbing — and though one often reads quite a bit when engaged with them, recorded voices and illustration often predo... More

Poets have played with the idea of absolute compression since the start of the tradition — epigrams and haiku are two of the oldest forms of poetry — yet it’s not until the 20th century that one sees this trend extend to poems of under, say, five or ten words. Apollinaire included a one-sentence poem (called a monostich) in his first collection, Alcools, entitled “Chantre” (1913): “Et l’unique cordeau des trompettes marines.” Fans of Ezra Pound, author of the famously brief “In a Station of the Metro,” will be familiar with the even briefer poem “Papyrus” (1916), inspired by the Sapphic fragments, which runs: “Spring… / Too long… / Gongula.” The Italian poe... More

July 22 was the hottest day in New York City since 1977. It was still 100 degrees until 10:00 at night, and if you poked your head out the window nobody was outside. Earlier in the day, looking north, I shot this view from atop of the Empire State Building with the Hudson River to the left and the East River to the right.

Click on the picture for... More

Benjamin Moreno Ortiz is a Mexican writer and artist living in Querétaro, an industrial city with a rich historical center, about two hours north of Mexico City. His first novel, Signos de la Amnesia Voluntaria, was very well received. A little less than two years ago he became fascinated with digital poetry, and in a short amount of time built up a body of interactive and video works which he dubbed “concretoons,” which can generally be described as irreverent, conceptual satires on issues dealing with poetry and the literary figures in L... More

If the comedy of subjection asks “how fast?” the comedy of dysfunction asks “how broken?” and exploits the very slipperiness of web design and programming — the way the web browser and computer screen subvert the best intentions of digital creators to make their products look good and run well. In the early days of the web, graphic desig... More

I am standing on top of the Empire State Building in New York, where King Kong once stood, and it’s tempting to try and calculate how many tiny, insignificant San Franciscos would fit into Manhattan. It’s tempting because I had the idea to just levitate all my friends and the whole peninsula across the country and just sort of set it down somew... More

The Austrian artist joerg piringer is unique among electronic writers in that he not only has an impressive resume as a performer — he is a long-standing member of the Vegetable Orchestra, whose members play exclusively on fresh vegetables they purchased and carved into instruments that very day, and has developed several text/sound pieces for live-VJing in clubs — but he is also an accomplished programmer, having created his own programming languages for his increasingly complex work. piringer has also created several popular iPhone apps, i... More

In my last post, I described what I called a “simple” in electronic literature, which is basically a node of text/algorithm interaction — a point in time and space where the text and the code that is presenting it to you on the screen become apparent to the reader, and in fact cannot be ignored. Even when text is stable — not flying around, not changing shape or color, like when you are using a word processor — there is always code keeping it on the screen, and workers in electronic literature are almost always interested in exploitin... More

Jason Nelson’s huge body of electronic literature, most of it done in Flash, might at first seem the work of an obsessive outsider; the fact that he is an American living in Australia might only confirm this assumption. Each of his pieces is replete with text, images (and often video), strange sounds, and most importantly, unusual interfaces that... More

At this patriotic season, I have to admit, I’m more loyal to California than the U.S. of A. It is, after all, the blue state where I was born (the San Fernando Valley), and those sun-baked Fourth of July’s of my childhood — KFC and Shasta cola in Shoup Park for fireworks — are dry roasted into my memory bank. Barefoot, faded paisley bedspreads unfurled on brown crabgrass at a city-funded recreation area that right about now is probably facing serious service cuts, if not all-out closure. The memories aren’t erasable, but the sites the... More

I’ve been working for the past several years to find a way to discuss what has come to be known as “electronic literature” — it’s a creaky phrase that doesn’t survive parsing, hence the wavering between this term, “new media writing,” “digital literature,” etc. — in a way that is neither naively celebratory, presuming that computers will change writing the way DNA testing has changed crime television, nor overly technical, branching off into deep theoretical territory that seems, long before hindsight, to have nothing to do with literature or digital technology, not to mention graphic design, information architecture, film/photography, and video games, all of which at times seem to be relevant discourses.

The problem is that the artist/writers who can be said to be “electronic writers” are coming at it from different angles. Some have emerged from what is often called the “art world,” even though the most salient example of this, the artist group Young-Hae... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
See all Positive Signs.



In a previous post I blogged about being detained for jury duty for the first time and the peculiar sort of conceptual art that unfolds in the courtroom. At this point, my service is complete; a decision was made. I’m at liberty to discuss the details, which were, to my surprise, notable enough to be reported in a compact Yahoo News item that a f... More

Ai Weiwei was detained for 80 days before being released yesterday: April 3–June 21.

From a Facebook tip by Sarah Hutchinson of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum via the Hyperalerigic blog via the Chinese news service Xinhuanet.com:

Beijing government news outlet Xinhua has just announced that detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been released on bail, having confessed to his tax crimes and stated his willingness to pay the taxes he is said to have evaded. “A chronic disease” that the artist suffers from was also a factor in his releas... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Sign #33: An Assortment of Symbolic Knickknackery.
See all Positive Signs to date.



I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer … My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response, often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

I Choose for You

I met Bay Area artists Cheryl Meeker and Ishan Clemenco at Suppenküche in Hayes Valley for beer, grub, and a great chat. When our foxy German waiter came to take our order, I felt adventurous and asked for a random beer that sounded interesting ... More

The Chase plays tonight at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, as part of the retrospective  Arthur Penn, a Liberal Helping, showcasing 9 of the 10 major works by the great director. Click here for more information about this series.

In 1965, the United States was splitting apart at the seams. In February, Malcolm X was assassinated.... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism* and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #31 & 32 on symbolic ecology and domesticated objects.
See all Positive Signs to date.



I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer … My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response, often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

I Choose For You

I met Bay Area artists Cheryl Meeker and Ishan... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Sign #30 on the human body and embodied cognition.
See all Positive Signs to date.



“Palimpsest, i.e., a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” H. D.

“For every painter there was a poet.” Eric Brown

January in New York. Snow, cold. At Vince’s loft in Chelsea. Got there at little early. When Vince came in, his sons Oliver & Isaac were unfolding the papel picados I had brought for them from the Casa Bonampak, 1051 Valencia St., one for Dia de los Muertos, one tomato-red Amor for Valentine’s Day. They were happy, thought they could bring them to school for their Spanish cla... More

The perennial complaint that SF is a sleepy, culturally deprived town isn’t really holding up these days. Sure, there are deficiencies, but lack of culture is no longer one of them. In fact, I’ve been lamenting the steadily increasing frequency of Saturday gallery openings — as someone working in the arts, having weekends off has its appe... More

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”

William S. Burroughs

Last week Gil Scott-Heron’s death came and went, and then his name disappeared into the internet abyss. He seemed vaguely familiar to a lot of people, but aside from his song poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” his work was really known by few. As it turns out, the ones who knew the most about him were not the consumers of music so much as artists and performers and writers and people who make things. Gil Scott-Heron was what people call an “artists’ artist.” It is a designation given only to the rare few who make art with a high degree of integrity despite whatever difficulties might plague them — poverty & racism to name a few.

It is no exaggeration that his first album, A New Black Poet — Small Talk at 125th Street and Lenox, exploded onto the music and poetry scene of 1970, tapping directly into the collective... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #28 & 29 on space and place.
See all Positive Signs to date.



Last week I was called in for jury duty. Like most everyone who was instructed to report to the Civic Center courthouse that morning, I hoped to be ignored, or to find a way out of it with strong opinions. Alas, I was the second person to be called into the jury box for interrogation as potential juror. While I was screened by the defense attorney,... More

Bouvard and Pécuchet, characters in Gustave Flaubert‘s last (and unfinished) novel, are two copy-clerks, men of a certain age who meet by chance on the hot summer streets of 1840s Paris. As they walk, live, and explore the world together, they discover an infinity of shared habits and interests: writing their surnames in their hats in case of loss, inspecting public works, and an eternal quest for knowledge.
In dozens, even hundreds, of discussions and arguments characterized by thesis, antithesis, and on occasion, synthesis, B and P skim over a dynamic world of discoveries and information, dipping into book after book as if floating through an old-fashioned library. Converting a surprise legacy from an estranged uncle into a country homestead, they take up agriculture, scientific experimentation, and an autodidactic confusion of theory and practice, hoping to live in a state of eternal emergence. Many of us might want to do the same today.
Their crops fail to grow, or combine i... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #25, 26, & 27 on experiential perspectives.
See all Positive Signs to date.

I was chatting with friends near a makeshift bar at the opening night of the much-anticipated ArtMRKT fair, nibbling on a muffuletta finger sandwich, washing it down with complimentary tequila, when someone inadvertently knocked a fanciful floral welded metal sculpture from its pedestal. The surprisingly heavy artwork hit my lower leg before meetin... More

“Palimpsest, i.e., a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” H. D.

“It was a magic process.” Fran Herndon

Jack Spicer and Fran Herndon, poet and painter, were the best of friends. When they first met, Fran hadn’t started painting yet. As she got to know Jack, she turned that corner.

San Francisco, 1959 to ’60, it was a most exciting time for the pair. Spicer was working on “Homage to Creeley,” an amazing series of poems that became a sequence in Heads of the Town up to the Aether. Jack wou... More

The Cannes festival reported today that convicted Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof had been cleared by authorities to travel to France, but said it was awaiting confirmation. A court in December sentenced Rasoulof, along with fellow prominent director Jafar Panahi, to six years in jail and barred him from making films for 20 years. The two were released on bail pending an appeal but banned from travel abroad. “We are happy, if confirmed, that Rasoulof can come and then we will re-show his film, but we will only be really happy when his appeal and that of Jafar Panahi have been completed,” said Cannes Festival Director Thierry Fremaux. “When the love of art combines with the creator’s freedom, the festival is pleased to be able to contribute to this flowering,” said Festival President Gilles Jacob.

Cannes organizers have said Rasoulof’s film Good-bye, screened on May 14th, was made in “semi-clandestine conditions,” but his lawyer said Rasoulof had re... More

I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer … My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response, often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

I Choose For You

I met Bay Area artists Cheryl Meeker and Ishan... More

Positive Signs is a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June.

*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.

—
Next Wednesday: Positive Signs #23 & 24 on space and experience.
See all Positive Signs to date.

Last weekend, a friend offered me a ticket to see The Gurs Zyklus, a fully staged opera by Seattle-based, German-born, MacArthur-winning, musically inclined installation artist Trimpin. I accepted but had few expectations, though perhaps taste-based trepidations: I’d seen his sound-based installations in the past, just wasn’t sure it would be m... More

On the occasion of Open Engagement, a conference hosted by the Social Practice Department of Portland State University, Christian Nagler and I presented our research under the title “The Aging of Social Practice, or How to Get to Know Your Parents through Political Economy.” As the final gesture of the presentation, we offered a direct address to the subject of our research, the Baby Boom Generation, those born between 1946 and 1964. This address was an attempt to translate some of the basic tenets of socially engaged art practice by rewriting a text by Charles Baudelaire entitled “To the Bourgeois,” the preface to his text about the Salon of 1846. It was written two years before the French revolution, and was a respectful challenge to the bourgeois majority to consider the new prerevolutionary currents of Parisian art practice. Thanks to the wonderful Brandon Brown for pointing us to this text.

As 40% of the adult population, you are a majority — in number ... More