Field Museum

At the Field Museum's [permanent] Africa Exhibit today, I noticed for the first time a plaque noting examples of African-American genius. Among the many worthy list items (medical discoveries, inventions of great worth, famous artists and actors) were listed "The High Five" and "Charismatic Preaching".

Really?

Aside from the obvious racial blunder, this is another of many examples of the Field Museum's lack of upkeep and updating. The anthropological/ethnographical sections are sadly ethnocentric and, while well-intended I'm sure, often culturally patronizing. In the 'Nature Walk' exhibit of taxidermy animals there are many removed display items, and many of the animals show wear. This is not to mention the telephones that connect you to imaginary computerized park rangers, mounted below signs that say 'listen to this cup'. The phones don't work anyway.

Update

Busy these days.

Have been staying up past bedtime, reacquainting myself with the darkroom. I'm not printing any serious work right now, just wanting to reinforce technical skills before getting involved in more meaningful projects. Nevertheless, I've been lucky enough to spend a few hours after work each day this week. Also making progress in the painting studio. One panel nearing completion, four in early stages, and one that's maybe halfway finished. After the holiday craziness is over, I need to devote a bit of energy into researching mediums and brushes, because I'm still unhappy with the surface of most of my paintings. Working on a panel base eliminates a lot of the texture, but I still find it distracting. It's not about the paint, after all. I've been wanting to work with spray paint for a long time, and maybe it's time to involve some high-quality acrylics. I'm not sure.

Somewhat Troubling

In Newcity Art's blog, I found an small article about a peculiar fund raising technique happening at the Art Institute of Chicago. Individual 'dots' in Seurat's La Grande Jatte are being 'adopted' for $10 each. I suppose this is something like having a star named after you; you retain some unseen tie to the star, but can't actually hold it or have it or really even be sure someone else hasn't also named it after themselves. I have to wonder, is there a time-limit on this adoption? If the museum ever decides to sell the painting (highly unlikely, but let's consider it), what happens to the dots? This brings to mind, albeit tenuously, Rindy Sam's kissing of a Cy Twombly painting, then attempting to claim it a collaboration. It's startling how little control over a work of art an artist retains once it's hung on someone else's wall.

Obviously, the Seurat example is one of creative fund raising and little to worry about. Perhaps I am so struck by it because I am in the middle of reading I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) and have a head full of talk of monetary and ownership considerations in the art world. This is not to say that I'm not a bit disgusted by the book; Richard Polsky's protestations that he's merely going with the flow- that the art world is leaving good dealers *cough*middlemen*cough* like him behind and what can he do but sell paintings like oil futures- are a bit too much. He expresses lament over the state of his beloved art world and it's pursuit of monetary over cultural gain, all the while a little too careful to compare his lowly hotel rooms with those of his clients. And as a side note, the digs at his gold-digging ex-wives are as unnecessary as they are ugly. Who cares, anyway? This book, ostensibly about the art world, is at it's core a book meant to alleviate Polsky's guilt over joining the race to break records at auction-houses.

California Dreaming

It's a rainy day outside, and I'm trying to keep myself lucid by listening to WNYC's Radiolab, drinking coffee, and using the internet for things other than Facebook.

I've just returned from a five-day stay in San Francisco, looking into grad programs and generally deciding if I want to live there. (I do.) Beautiful city, even more beautiful local environment, lively local culture, and an emphasis on 'green' lifestyles and local/organic food makes it pretty much heaven for a person like me. And the San Francisco Art Institute turned out to be very impressive, even more so than the California College of Art. It's a bit of a turnaround for me, as I expected the reverse to be true. This opinion came more from their websites, as it was the only real exposure I had to either of them from out here in Chicago. SFAI won me over with it's emphasis on theory and cross-disciplinary work, and it didn't hurt that every person I spoke to was eager to be helpful and informative. I was even able to meet Mark Van Proyen, one of the graduate painting professors, just by stumbling around with a confused look on my face.

That said, I look forward to spending the next several months in work mode. It helps me to have a goal, and this is certainly one. I'll be taking on more work at my job, which is a good thing both for experience and income, and I'll be working with a renewed focus and direction on both paintings and photography. I've got a few pieces now that are finished that I haven't been able to satisfactorily photograph, so hopefully I'll figure out my lighting situation before too long. SFAI wants a carousel of slides, and I'm looking forward to remembering how to accomplish that. I also hope to make a few proposal sketches for installations I've not been able to see through, and continue making drawings as well. I don't want to create an entire new body of work for my portfolio, but it may turn out that way. In a way, it's a good thing that I have three or so months of hiding indoors coming my way because I'll be a lot less distracted by petty things like fresh air and seeing friends who live more than two blocks away. Thanks, Chicago!

Around the Coyote Fall Festival 2009

A bit overdue, here are a few snapshots from my booth at the Around the Coyote Falls Arts Festival here in Chicago. I wasn't able to step back enough to get a shot of the whole booth, but here's the general idea:



With a close-up of one side:


And the other:


Here you can see that I was chosen one of the Curator's Choice's, the curator being Britton Bertran.

All in all the festival was a mixed bag. In general I felt let down by the venue. The poor (flickering) florescent lights combined with several empty booths and unpainted display walls left me with the feeling that those responsible for organizing the show didn't care as much about the presentation of the art as they ought to have. But I'm glad for the feather in my cap that is the Curator's Choice as well as the fact that I had the opportunity to sell a few pieces I've been carrying around for too long.

The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance

I have discovered the joy of painting on panel. I have discovered the joy of thickened linseed oil. Life in the studio is good, despite the plastic already covering the windows against Chicago's chilly onslaught.

I just finished reading The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance by Paul Robert Walker. This book tells the story of the artistic feud between Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence in the early 1400s. Using the competition to design the bronze doors of Florence's Baptistry (commonly regarded as the 'start' of the Renaissance) as a jumping-off point, Walker follows the creative development of these two artists through the completion of the dome of Florence's Duomo, in it's time the largest dome ever built (and still the largest masonry dome in existence.) The author ties in from time to time the lives of Donatello, Masaccio, Nanni di Banco, and other masters of the early Renaissance in Florence, but focuses his tale mainly on Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. He draws on Manetti and Vasari for anecdotes and general facts, but isn't afraid to refute their often glorifying relations of events.

The main flaw I found in this book was Walker's clear reverence of Brunelleschi. It's hard not to have affection and admiration for such a remarkable man; an inventor, sculptor, painter, architect when there were no architects, and a politician and adoptive father to boot. But Walker's narrative style loses steam when it gets bogged down too much in the feud between the two artists. In fact, it seems almost as though the feud was largely on Ghiberti's side, always trying to sneak his way in for a bigger slice of glory. The interaction between the artists is fascinating and relevant, but is given perhaps too much importance, when the personal drives of both men are so strong.

My only complaint behind me, this book was a great joy to read. I had a basic familiarity with this story from an early Renaissance art history class I was lucky enough to take during a semester in Rome, and I've had the good fortune of being able to take three trips to Florence to see a good portion of the architectural sites and art discussed in this book. This book has reminded me how much I love art history, and I've just purchased Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death by Millard Miess and Signs and Symbols in Christian Art by George Ferguson to read during these coming 'inside months'.

Yesterday there was a free concert given at the Chicago Cultural Center by Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg. This was part of the New Millenium, New Music series. Here is a clip I found on YouTube of a similar performance of theirs. Listen around 2:30 for some really interesting percussive bass clarinet work.



Inspired by this, I have picked up the clarinet again. This may not last.

ha-ha

Here are some really bad scans of some portraits I did for the My Face In Your Space show at Nexus in Philadelphia.


(An homage to Mollie's permanent hair-do.)


(this one suffers from lack of time spent. There were originally lots of teeth in the background and I had painted on the backside of Jenna's face, which was somewhat luminescent through the tracing paper. That version I destroyed, and was left with this lesser one.)


(Laura Lewis as a haniwa statue.)

Updating website; long overdue. Fatcow's new file-editing beta system is giving me no end of headaches. Argh.

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Going through the black and white negatives I shot with my Holga, it's frustrating how many of them are poorly printed. In a few weeks time I will have my darkroom set up and I will be able to (re)print them at a larger scale and with more attention paid than commercial developers can afford to pay. I expect to bungle the first few attempts, but I believe that familiar bicycle adage applies. It will be fulfilling to see the photographs that I intended to be more than snapshots exist as something more than snapshots.

The reason for postponing the set-up of the darkroom is that I want to wait until after my upcoming trip to upstate New York. Staying at a relative's beautiful farmhouse on 200 or so acres with nothing specific to do is going to be a wonderful opportunity to indulge in a bit of photography. I'm looking forward to doing some night work especially. Hopefully the weather will be clear enough to shoot star trails, but an eerie nighttime fog is welcome as well. I also intend to record a bit of family story-telling for vocolo.org practice, as well as record the shapes of objects on the solar-print paper I used to love as a child.



I didn't realize the solar print technique was used by the military to make quick copies of strategic maps drawn on tracing paper. This gives me a bit of an urge to use it in making drawings myself, or contact prints of photographs.

While coming out of a dream this morning, it occurred to me that these two objects might occupy the same space in their respective cultures.

Catch(up)all

Greetings, negligible amount of blog followers!

I have been incredibly lax in maintaining this blog, but I take solace in a statistic pulled from Harper's: “Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94%”.

I have been spending my time starting and soon after aborting several large-scale paintings and drawings. Something doesn't feel right about the size. I think I'm going to pack them away temporarily and for the time being focus on pieces of art that are small enough to be held in my hands while I work. I'm certainly out of practice at large-scale image-making but I don't believe that to be the real root of the problem. I'm feel myself at a transitional stage as far as imagery is concerned and it feels disingenuous to be making larger, more confident pieces.

I'm also at a point where I'm looking to be less of a painter. To put it perhaps more accurately, I'm NOT a painter. I'm an artist who paints (occasionally) and doesn't do much of anything else at all. I don't especially identify with the history of painting, though I find it fascinating, and refrain from making work in other media largely because of the difficulty of working in unfamiliar ways. Through the help of a friend I'll soon have my darkroom set up and hope to develop and improve my photography skills. If not an end in itself, I've always found photography a good way to improve my visual thought processes and a good way to test out ideas.

I'm also making small steps toward audio work, though I must emphasize the smallness of these steps. Vocolo.org is an offshoot of Chicago Public Radio (my local NPR station) which has an open format where listeners and producers of audio occupy the same space. I've been playing around a bit, trying to be a bit more literal in my storytelling as I try to be a little bit less narrative or explanatory in my visual work. As a side note, I've also been listening to old podcasts of Radiolab, which I highly recommend.

All in all, the summer has been extremely busy and only moderately productive. Part of this is my own willingness to socialize rather than work, part of it is the seasonal nature of making one's money doing wedding decor. I find myself looking forward to winter. After this comparatively chilly summer, it doesn't feel like it will be much of a transition (though, of course, it will). But I hope to make a trip to San Francisco to look at grad school options there and (though dreading the lack of income) look forward to working less and having more time to focus on creative endeavors.

Also, here's this:

My work is too literal, my practice too controlled. Perhaps part of this is the start-stop nature of my working time. Most likely, that's a justification. I am going to make a series of pieces for no reason other than their creation.

It has always been, and continues to be, the case that I am afraid of failure.


Cecily Brown, Lagoon 2004


I've let the image take over the canvas, when in fact the WHOLE POINT is that the image means nothing. But I've never been a 'painterly' or expressive painter.

Hello, wall, my old friend. Can I beat my head against you one last time?

My excitement was short lived today when the 24 by 36 silkscreen I found in the old 'dungeon' at work turned out to have tears in the screen.

Currently working on:

I've been lax in my blogging lately. In point of fact, I'm currently a schizophrenic mix of busy and productive but also descending to new levels of laziness. I've been mining a taxidermist's supply catalog for imagery, to add a bit to the museum pieces, but I fear that the work is becoming too image-based. There is something a bit dicey about painting all these animals, it's not imagery that's been taken seriously when I've shown it. Perhaps I am copying too directly from my source imagery.

To hopefully alleviate this effect, I've recently taken up etching, taking a class at Spudnik Press here in Chicago. I like the idea of working some of this imagery into a book with a bit of abstract text that might serve as context for the rest of the work. There must be a way to force people to focus less on the recognizable subject matter and more on why it's being presented. I should clarify that I see this not as a flaw in the viewer, but a flaw in what they are being shown. (Although my opportunities for productive critique are few these days.)

Also, I have begun to read Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. You can get an idea of the 'seriousness' in which Thornton presents her subject matter from this (and other) videos of the author I found on YouTube. I find her smiling and cutesy mannerisms annoying, and they are also somehow discernable in her writing. But it's a pleasant change to read about the art world in a way other than the hyper-verbose, dictionary-requiring style presented in ArtForum and many other magazines.



I should mention that I read this book in anticipation of AArt Chicago and the other, smaller fairs tied in with it which are set to descent on Chicago in about two weeks time.

Last Thursday I attended a lecture given by Phillippe de Montebello (en)titled Encyclopedic Museum: Enlightened or Entitled? De Montebello, in a voice akin to Patrick Stewart doing his best Patrick Stewart impression, preached largely to the choir on the subject of the ethical debate involved in 'discovering', purchasing and showcasing antiquities in modern encyclopedic museums.

De Montebello began his lecture with a brief history of museums in general and the development of the concept of the 'encyclopedic' museum- one intended to showcase and explain virtually all the cultures of the world and their artifacts. (One imagines this stems from the same impulse for amounts of information so large as to be unprocessable that brought us the internet.) Mr. De Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, cited shows that he presided over at his museum to illustrate the educational and cultural benefits of exposure to these antiquities, notably the Year One exhibit which took place in the year 2000 at the Museum and included a glimpse at what the craftsmen and artists of cultures worldwide were producing at or around the time of the year 0.

De Montebello approaches his topic with a love and nostalgia for the encyclopedic museum that can hardly be faulted in a man who has spent his life advancing its cause. The Metropolitan did nothing but flourish under his guardianship, and as one who spent formative years within visiting distance of the Museum, I must (and do) thank him, deeply. In point of fact, I have very few qualms with the concept of the encyclopedic museum, either on personal, ethical or cultural levels. I agree with Mr. de Montebello's assertion that national museums - or other museums devoted to one narrow place, artist, time or cultural movement - do not permit the comparison necessary to fully understand the place that an object holds in the entire span of human cultural history. Museums such as the Metropolitan (and the Art Institute here in Chicago, where I attended his lecture) provide a certain kind of context that facilitates a deeper understanding of the works they show. At least historically.

The problem that keeps coming up for museums such as these is the pedigree of the works they choose to display. De Montebello repeatedly referenced a carving of the Code of Hammurabi which was originally carved in a country we now know as Iraq, but wound up buried beneath a country we now know as Iran for 3,000 years before being unearthed by Western excavations. Sadaam Hussein's request for the return of the piece to modern day Iraq provoked questions of who can really claim to be the cultural heir to such a piece. Does it belong to whatever country is now on top of the nation in which it was produced? Does it belong to the place where it has spent the most time (in this case, Iran) or to the country that financed the excavations which led to its (re)discovery? Do we need genetic testing to see which country is the most genetically tied to the Babylonian empire?

De Montebello poses these questions with only slightly less exaggeration and disdain than I. He is a humanist at heart, one who solidly feels that the ends justify the means. And when the ends are the cultural enrichment of the people of the world over the national pride of the people of one country, I am inclined to agree with him. But he makes another point, subtly. In the history of museums that began his lecture, de Montebello refers to museums not as a part of our way of life, but as a part of our urban way of life. He also makes several allusions to the idea that "to the victor go the spoils." The interesting twist on this debate is who that victor is, exactly. We are no longer talking about the ancient Romans raiding their Barbarian neighbors, or the Muslim artifacts taken as trophies in the crusades. This is not even a matter of the booty brought back to France by Napoleon, or the looting and raiding of museums during the military maneuvers in Iraq. The real victory here is one of class over class and culture over culture. While I am generally inclined to agree with Mr. de Montebello in his stand (at least in part due to my own love of seeing beautiful pieces) I do find it hard to avoid the fact that collecting is a game for the rich, and exoticism a passion of the bored. The hordes of young white Americans who flock to Buddhism, Rastafarianism, or even something as simple as backpacking through Europe are all examples (and I include myself among them) of those who seek out new cultural validity when they feel their own cultures have failed them. The difference is that thoughts can be absorbed and left to remain in the place where they originated. Objects, naturally, must be brought back. To the enlightened (or entitled) go the spoils.

Consumed with domestic issues lately, a large part of which is an upcoming move. I move at least every 12 months. Since 2005, i have lived in six places. Before that it's just as bad, but I was in school so that doesn't count somehow. I hope to stay in this new place for a while. I think I'm getting frustrated with not having any roots. I wonder if it's natural to be afloat like I sometimes think I am. Although there is no doubt in my mind that soon I will be restless again, I'm looking forward to something tying me down a bit.

I will be setting up a darkroom in the bathroom attached to my room. There is some extra space at the top of a stairwell that I hope to use to visualize some installations. Assuming I get it together and register for the class, soon I will be learning etching.

Pull it together. Pull it together. Pull it together.

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I have just read (in five hours) Haruki Murakami's Dance, Dance, Dance. The man is amazing, although after reading a few of his books there is a tendency for too many plot points to be the same. Not enough to be formulaic, but enough to illicit a sort of, "Oh, that again" feeling every time a character walks into another world or there is a precocious and beautiful teenage girl. For that matter, every time a thirty-something man living alone eats well, appreciates jazz, elects not to sleep with a beautiful woman, drinks some whiskey and goes to bed only to have surreal dreams that he can't quite interpret and decides to go along for the ride.

Not that I could write any of this any better. And not that it stops me from devouring his books. But I wonder how many more I can read before, like Tom Robbins, they all get a little less revolutionary.

An afternoon at the Art Institute

The last trip I made to the Art Institute here in Chicago (who can resist when it's free all month) was a strange sort of de-contextualized one. Maybe I've been spending too much time thinking about context lately, but nothing seemed like what it was. Or what it was intended to seem like.

The European Decorative Arts section looks like this at the moment:



It's a strange sight made even stranger by the bizarre Yayoi Kusama-esque display of paperweights attached in a smaller room.





Maybe this is a consequence of contemporary people with contemporary thoughts designing displays. There was something funny about looking at such objects on display as purely decorative. It's almost as though, in truth just balls of glass, they masqueraded for a while as paperweights, somehow a different thing entirely, and have now been rendered (by their new found uselessness) balls of glass once more. Purely decorative at last, as perhaps they always have been.

Also fascinating was the Maya pottery from the Late Classic period decorated by Ah Maxam. At least, so says the sign. There is a strange kind of hubris is claiming that knowledge. Apparently the 'artist's ' name comes from a glyph on the side, although various groups have attributed it to the owner of the vessel or a professional title or perhaps the name of the artist. But doesn't it sound important if we know the artist's name? Doesn't it seem as if the museum is doing an especially good job?

The graphic qualities of this work are astonishingly striking and startlingly beautiful. It requires a much better look than I can offer you.

Consciousness (mostly) regained after a few days of sleeping off a cold of mysterious origin, I would like to edit this most recent post about the proposed blocking of funding for the arts included in the President's proposed stimulus package. It's deserving of a coherent thought or two.
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Art or Idiocy?, one of the blogs I follow, brought this to my attention. (I listen to NPR for at least a few hours a day, but I still seem to always be the last to know.) To quote from the Americans for the Arts website:

During their consideration of the Economic Recovery bill, the Senate approved an amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that prohibits funding for "...museums, theaters and arts centers..." This amendment, approved by a vote of 73-24, if included in the final version of this legislation would prevent the economic recovery funding from supporting these areas of the non-profit arts community.

On this website there is also a link to a form letter you can send to your senators. By entering your zipcode, your state's senators come up with a letter either thanking and encouraging them for voting against the amendment and for funding for the arts, or expressing disappointment at their decision that the arts are not worth funding.

I have to admit, I'm a skeptic about these mass e-mails of approval/disapproval, but if you click your heels three times and say, "Obama" maybe it will work. In any case, I'm sick of the arts being deemed excessive. We give money to schools, aren't museums and arts institutions an equal source of education? And continuing education for those no longer in the government mandated school system is just as important as teaching children. The Americans for the Arts website claims that without this funding 260,000 jobs will be lost; aren't those people as American as auto factory workers? It's a strange kind of reverse elitism to deny funding to those who aim to educate and advance cultural causes in favor of those who advance economic causes purely. A job is a job, and with an economic forecast as bleak as ours, is it really the time to bring up the old debate about government funding the arts?

Here's an excerpt from the 1992 ruling in the case of Karen Finley (performance artist) v. the National Endowment for the Arts:

The NEA was created by Congress in 1965 as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities (the "Foundation"). In establishing the Foundation, Congress found that "it is necessary and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of . . . creative talent." 20 U.S.C. 952(5) It was the intent of congress to encourage "free inquiry and expression," and to insure that "conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged" and that "no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression." 111 Cong. Rec. 13, 108 (1965).

a few shots from the Morpho Gallery show

"...a sedimentation of meaning."

I aim to steal more colors from Peter Doig.

I aim to steal more thoughts from Walter Benjamin.
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I have recently begun reading The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris. After a few attempts trying to jump into the deep end of critical philosophy, I have decided to start at a reasonably historic point of beginning. By this, I mean that I am not interested, or realistically able, to conduct an entire survey of Western thought by myself, so I am starting at a place that most other (failed) efforts have led me to see as something of a beginning.

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is a book I have read twice and understood fully neither of those times. Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View stumped me about half-way through. (Plus I had to return it to the library) Benjamin it is. And so far, reading this book is akin to someone is explaining to me the things that I already think, but in a much more coherent and comprehensive way. The introduction to the book is more or less a guide to Benjamin's approach to writing and how we as the reader must consider not only his intended meanings but the way in which his 'sober' method of writing not only adds to but is part of the meaning itself. There are plays on the words representing thought (the 'old' fashion of writing) and presenting thought (Benjamin's inteded goal). Writing is broken up into sentances, forcing the reader to pause and reflect, the same way pauses in spoken word can affect a listener.

A favorite quote from the introduction:

"Our knowledge of a subject is the means by which we relate to that which we do not possess."

Every now and then I think of this Edward Keating photograph of the dust settling on objects after the towers fell on September 11th. I remember seeing it in the New York Times on my parent's kitchen table, and thinking it was so much more striking than the photos of the crashes themselves or the people jumping (which, luckily, I have never seen).

I mean to say nothing more than that I think about it. It's a beautiful photo, I wish I could find a better image of it.

objects, objectified.

The first of a collection of found pieces representing nature, painted in grays and whites to isolate them from their intended decorative properties and reveal their actual essence (or lack thereof).

MACBA

One one of the last days of 2008, happily on vacation in Barcelona, I stopped in at the Museu D'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). In addition to the permanent collection there was an exhibit up entitled Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. Traveling with four others who all saw the exhibit at different times, we all felt at least one thing about it: it was in need of a good editor.

The first problem that presents itself is the layout of the show. The museum lacks a flow from room to room, which doesn't disrupt the diverse permanent collection but makes for an interrupted thought process when viewing one exhibit. The entrances to rooms were often blocked off with wall text, causing a distracting traffic jam at the start of each room. Funneling into one of the rooms, visitors are greeted by an astounding amount of photography. In the introductory essay in the companion book all visitors are given when entering, Jorge Ribalta writes that, "[t]he exhibition provides a historiographic prototype, not a visualization of a single linear account of the history of photography, but a constellation of accounts of the genealogy and trajectory of certain discourses. To this end, the different parts are articulated as specific, temporal, interconnected points of reference, making clear continuities as well as discontinuities."

This "constellation of accounts" is organized as divisively as possible; individual rooms are filled with "Politics of the Victim", "Public Photographic Spaces", "Comparative Photography", "Topographics", "The Photographic Construction of Barcelona in the 20th Century" and "2007 - Metropolitan Images of the New Barcelona". Indeed, the last two themes alone fill the second floor of the exhibit. The entire history of photography for the rest of the world has it's own (equally sized) floor, which visitors pass through first. The first few rooms are devoted to the "Politics of the Victim" and feature documentation of worker's struggles, child labor, Weimar-era Germany and America around the start of World War II. There is an interesting newsreel from America entitled, "The Plow that broke the Plains" which could just have easily been included in the propaganda section. The "Victim" rooms were my favorites, but I suspect this is at least in part because the sheer amount of energy required to sort through all the photographs in this show was a drain on my enthusiasm. By the time I reached the Barcelona floor, which is much less broad in scope, narrative in style, and (in a word) relavent, I was honestly worn out.

The problem that arises in Universal Archives is not the works themselves, but the "show" itself. The Propaganda section is an interesting exception, displaying fascist propaganda in the way it was shown in it's day, all black and red backdrops and powerful displays. There is also an interesting moving picture (forgive the pun) showing footage of Steichen's Family of Man exhibit at the time of it's world tour. Even the Barcelona section, startlingly narrow in it's worldview as compared to the first floor, has interesting pieces, although not as many. The problem is that there is just too much of everything. The "constellation" of photography starts to feel more like a galaxy as you walk past hundreds and hundreds of documents. And the organization of these photographs into specific places in both time and space (often interpreted as 'nation') does more to highlight the disconnections between cultures than the connections of photography. A bit of shaking up and a bit of paring down would have done Universal Archive a world of good.

Nothing needs to be said here about the architecture of the museum, of which much as already been written. The permanent collection is quite unique, casting an eye not only to Europe but other Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere. A few personal favorites include David Goldblatt's prints of South African Apartheid-era advertisements, (an example can be seen here), Öyvind Falhström's Second Feast on Edlund drawing, an strange composition in reds and blacks, and Vito Acconci's "Open Book" video, in which the artist reads from a text about openness without closing his mouth, which takes up most of the frame. Oddly enough, I found that video on YouTube:



Also an exciting (and long overdue) discovery on my part was the work of Marcel Broodthaers, whose thought process and meands and methods of expression could not be a more timely discovery for me.

Far too long a post, but too much to say.

I feel as though I should write about Barcelona a bit, though this really isn't meant to be a travel blog. I have put some photos up on my flickr site, but none of the Holga shots have been developed yet. These are just tourist photos.

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I'm not lucky enough to say, "generally, when I travel" with any meaning behind it, because most of the trips I've been on have been arranged or at least paid for by someone else, whether it's been studying/traveling abroad or accompanying generous friends in their travels. However, generally when I travel I like to know a bit about the country, know at least enough of the language to show some respect for it, and have a good idea of a few things that I don't want to miss. Arriving in a country which you are more or less arbitrarily visiting to tag along with a friend involves nearly none of those things. In truth (like hopefully most Americans) I know at least enough Spanish to order food or ask for directions. (Understanding those directions, however...) A language that I do not speak, and did not even know existed, is Catalan.

* I should backtrack. Being the sort of person I am, I tend to base the places I want to go on their arts and culture. I am not denying that Spain is rich in culture and history and centuries of fine art, and indeed found all the museums I visited fascinating, probably because of my lack of knowledge. But I've never 'liked' it as much as others, in that most simple gut-reaction-i-must-see-more-of-this kind of way. As a result, I delved more into Northern Europe and Italy, Egypt and a bit of Asia as far as my cultural investigations went. Back to Catalan.



Catalunya (Catalonia to us anglophones) is a semi-autonomous region in Spain. If you are anything like me, you didn't know Spain had semi-autonomous regions. This is a good general basis for understanding how completely unprepared I (and I think we all) were for the specifics of this trip. Yes, they speak Spanish, but as a sort of second language, with the result than in some museums the English text is limited to the entry wall. We saw lots of museums and historical sites, rode a cable car up a small mountain to a castle, ate a great deal of food, filled my socks with sand from the Mediterranean, and generally walked around and explored what I could. I went to a flea market, a food market or two, second-hand shops, grocery stores-- trying to get a taste of what it might be like to live here and not just look at it from your hotel window. El Raval is an interesting neighborhood, though I am sad to say I was too busy eating felafel to have a beloved döner kebab. The terrible events happening in Gaza began while we were abroad, and I have to be honest and say I nearly didn't know. I wasn't keeping up with the news in America and couldn't really understand the news I was hearing, when I came in contact with it. After a few days, though, even I figured it out when the students began protesting. They seemed to have taken over the student hall at a university, and a few days later I saw many young people chained to an Embassy, chanting and being dragged out by policemen, who seemed strangely uninterested in them. I came into contact with this protest on our last full day; a day I had planned to spend purchasing a few last trinkets for folks at home and generally walking about, drinking coffee and enjoying myself. I was immediately shamed and felt a typical shallow, consuming American. The "I'm on vacation" excuse seemed weak.

I found many of the museums to be interesting, both in their content and the way in which that content was presented. I am working on writing more about this and will spare you any additions to this already too lengthy post. One of my New Year's Resolutions, if you want to call them that, is to hone my critical thinking and writing skills which I have let grow a bit too dull. I will be writing about gallery shows and museum shows in Chicago, too. At least until (if) I leave it.