Recent Comments
Re: “Why did the Canes hear boos? It's the lockout, stupid”
It was a sellout because it was the home opener of a season delayed by four months. And also because writers and analysts, from the talking heads on the national networks to local writers like yours truly, have been talking up the Canes as a team to watch after Semin and Jordan Staal were brought in during the offseason.
The Canes don't suck. But they've sure opened the season with a familiar absence of intensity and urgency.
How many people will be in the stands Thursday night when the Sabres visit? It'll be closer to 13,000 than 18,000. Fans aren't happy.
Re: “The ArtsCenter lays off its longtime concerts director”
I thought that it was a director's role to fundraise to turn that red ink black. Tess is really talented at what she does. You figure out how to keep that talent. I hope that this layoff isn't indicative of a bottom-line, short-sighted new leadership. Bring on the microscope.
Re: “Six North Carolina artists combine text and image, but where are the women?”
Thanks, Lincoln, for your comment. I think we're occupying almost the exact same spot of rhetorical ground.
I don't think my review lobs any institutional accusation at all toward the NCMA. In fact I was trying to be very careful to not posit that argument. The NCMA's track record is great in this regard, in their collection of work, curation of exhibitions, and the makeup of their staff. That's what made the narrowness of Word Up so odd to my mind. So I pointed that out about this specific show.
Word Up presents NC artists using image and text in their work. We have six artists, all white men born within a four-year span in the mid-seventies. Isn't that bizarrely narrow? To me, that should have been presented transparently as a themed show, something like "Word Up: NC men using image and text." But it's not. Am I supposed to shrug that off as probably a coincidence? (Which I'd bet cash it is. But it's also 2012, not 1962.) I'd like to hear Jennifer Dasal, the show's talented curator, talk about this.
But consider this. If my admittedly awkward alternative title had been used, then I think the show presents a really interesting opportunity for deeper discussion, with that added facet. It's not just about how artists integrate image and text; Word Up becomes a platform for thinking about how gender -- maleness, specifically -- registers within that integration. That's much more in line with the NCMA's obvious emphasis on considerations of gender and race. And it sets up an exciting correspondence with the GirlTalk show upcoming at CAM. And it's done with a simple title change.
Gender differences in the handling of image and text would be a fascinating way to consider your painting "True/False," actually. There are so many art-historical references in it. I saw this male lineage stretching from the Chanel bag advertisement that images Mondrian, to the overall Rauschenberg combine composition, to the magazine announcement of a Brice Marden show. That line says something about maleness and expression, to me. Your title and the text "really upside down" conveys a fascinating ambivalence on your part, an awareness of the problematic male utterance and gesture.
Another curatorial alternative would have been to include women in Word Up. Here's a paragraph that didn't make it into even the extended online version of my review:
"Plenty of young North Carolina women artists incorporate text into their work. Stacy Lynn Waddell’s cursive branding (in the original sense of the word), for instance, would have brought a historical perspective to this show and lent an interesting edge of obsolescence to Richards’ contemporary graphics. Through her binary-code transcription of mp3 recordings of speeches, Heather Gordon would have provided a glimpse past text and image into the possibility of an exclusively multimedia future, while simultaneously reminding us that the onset of writing stirred fears similar to our hand-wringing about information overload’s threat to the intelligence and attention span of the masses."
I'm looking forward to the talk on Aug. 24. I've pretty much spent my whole life thinking about representation and language. Word Up is a great laboratory for that.
Re: “Carolina pays its Calder Kid”
The Federov incident seems from another era, doesn't it? Even the Dustin Penner RFA incident seems distant now. I think that, now that the salary cap has been in place for some years now, and now that the payroll-tied-to-profits evened playing field in the last CBA (read: mild sarcasm) has splayed back out with small-market teams now struggling to stay above the salary floor, the Flyers' flyer at Weber might be an indicator of a heightened predation of RFAs. Or, I could be full of it. We'll see.
And you make a great point about this last year's doings as evidence of the franchise's permanence here, I hadn't thought about that in so many words.
Skinner will shed the unproven label when he scores a point a game for a whole season. That might happen this year. The kid's just 20! People don't remember that. But Canes fans know. $6mil per might end up looking like a bargain within a couple of seasons.
Lot to look forward to this year! Now let's just hope they actually play the games...
Re: “Six North Carolina artists combine text and image, but where are the women?”
I appreciate your comments a lot, and encourage you to revisit my Word Up review -- about an hour after you commented, three or so more paragraphs were added to the end to mete out my "where's the women?" question (there wasn't enough room for these paras in the print version). Some of the points you make are dealt with in that additional portion of the review.
I'm seeing that my enjoyment of this show isn't coming through in my words, which is really too bad. Shaffer's three comics pieces brought me a lot of joy to look at, and I've been thinking about them and bending folks' ears about them too. I love the cryptic text he uses in the captions, it reminds me of a Duchamp piece in which he typed onto four cards, trying to use only non-representational language, and how difficult Duchamp found that. Shaffer is pushing words hard in these pieces, and extending that push with the social lines of power that come out of his images.
Richards' work also fascinated me. I didn't have the room to write about the yellow painting with the alphabet ghosted over the face of a young girl sitting at a dinner table. It's a complex piece and a perfect chance to talk about how Richards balances ambiguity and directness in his work. The XYZ on the girl's face reminded me of the poet Hannah Weiner.
Curran's three Life Magazine covers have also stayed with me. First, I liked how the NCMA hung them so that you could see Hancock's three equally dark fair pieces in the background -- nice visual parallelism there. Curran's pieces are, frankly, scary as hell to me, and I will mull them for a long time -- which is what I go to art shows for, above enjoyment. He's disfiguring women's faces, but they're icons instead of ordinary women, so in that way maybe they're not exactly women because we dehumanize our icons, but wait what kind of monster am I that I just kind of signed off on dehumanizing someone... you see the kind of dryer cycle I'm in the midst of, with the Curran work? I love work that sets me off on that.
So I feel that you're off-base on thinking I'm not interested in artists using text, but I'm thankful you accused me of that because I'm seeing how you could think that from the lack of joy expressed in my review. My background is poetry, so text and image are sort of where I'm coming from.
I hope the additional 3 paragraphs will give more detail to my questioning the NCMA on the male-only show. I think my question is quite legitimate. You point out the Mirror Image and 30 Americans shows (both of which I reviewed for the Indy, by the way) as gender- and race-specific shows. Yes, they were, and they were named thusly and presented as such. Word Up isn't. That's weird. And I think that should be pointed out.
Your last point, about enjoying art for art's sake... we might essentially differ here. I don't know that I do enjoy art for art's sake. I enjoy being provoked to think. I enjoy it when an artwork makes me realize that my thinking had been lazy to that point. I enjoy artworks and artists who make we walk out of the museum or gallery with many more questions than I had gone in with. Word Up absolutely does that and I'm looking forward to subsequent visits. I don't feel like I saw all the way into Lancaster's work, for example. And I started writing a poem in front of the Toomes pieces but ran out of time on my visit so I want to finish that.
Perhaps we'll run into each other on one of these subsequent visits. I would enjoy that.
Re: “Chicago brings the razzle-dazzle, but not the Brinkley”
Point taken, and thank you for that. I've not seen Brinkley perform Roxie, and was more using that as a foil to laud Marroquin, who was pretty terrific considering she almost literally dashed in at the last minute for the show. It's a real shame, and a missed chance for Durham audiences, that Brinkley won't be appearing in this week-long run of Chicago, as she received praise from critics (and obviously wowed you like Marroquin wowed me). Here's to her speedy recovery. Anyone who can survive a marriage to the piano man is a tougher person than me.
Re: “Eleven paintings and a giant vagina: Robin Walker at the Carrack”
Although Paperhand also works in Saxapahaw, there's no direct connection there. Walker moved to the area within the last six months or so, and was working in papier mache before that. Truthfully, almost all work in that medium presents a similarly crinkled surface.