Scenes from a trip to the beach

Photo: Phoenix Mayet, 2009

Photo: Phoenix Mayet, 2009

Photo: Phoenix Mayet, 2009

Dragon Day Photos

Here are a couple of my favorite pix from the Dragon Day Races in Cambridge. I like the movement in the first - the ribbon, the dancer's crossed legs, and the body of the lion.

Photo: Phoenix Mayet, 2009

The second puzzles me a little. I'm not exactly sure what I like so much about it. I like the look on the girl's face, the fact that hers is the only face shown, and the hand leading her. I found it very difficult to take pictures of moving subjects and I struggle with issues of privacy and consent when it comes to snapping photos of people in crowds. I wonder whether other photographers have struggled with the same issue.

Photo: Phoenix Mayet, 2009

Fast Sky

Photo: Phoenix Mayet

Jen Davis, Photographer

Photo by Jen Davis

This photograph, 'Untitled No. 22' is from jendavisphoto.com. I understand she has a photograph included in the Photographic Figures show over at the MFA. I keep meaning see that show... now that I know Jen is included, I'll make the effort. I really admire her photos. She has a beautiful eye for light. Some of her nudes feel sculptural. Many of her shots are posed, but somehow manage to maintain a sense of intimacy and honesty.

NPR Article featuring James Balog

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 18, 2009 · Intent on documenting the effects of climate change, nature photographer James Balog ventured into ice-bound regions with 26 time-lapse cameras, which he programmed to shoot a frame every daylight hour for three years.

The resulting images — which make up Balog's "Extreme Ice Survey" project — show ice sheets and glaciers breaking apart and disappearing.

Balog calls the melting of glaciers "the most visible, tangible manifestations of climate change on the planet today."

A documentary film crew accompanied Balog, and their footage along with Balog's work will be featured in the Mar. 24 NOVA and National Geographic special Extreme Ice. Balog's photographs are also on display in his new book Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report.

Read more & see gorgeous photographs of ice: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102041024&sc=emaf

film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMdWMwOWnng

Drawing by Jenny Eggleston

Such a tiny world
This synconium
A place of speciation, phylogenies and mutualism

An inflorescence
(No, no light exists)
Of multiple Flowers and Seeds
Shine on In bliss
And grow together into a single mass
A fig.

Figuratively Speaking
April 3 - April 24, 2009

Featuring Artist Jenny Eggleston

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Raleigh, NC – M. Street Gallery will present its final exhibition of drawings by artist Jenny Eggleston from April 3 – April 24, 2009. There will be an exhibition reception on First Friday, April 3, from 6 – 9 p.m.

Jenny Eggleston is a Raleigh, NC – based artist, poet, and art teacher. Classically trained as a nature illustrator, she now uses images found in nature to create beautiful surrealistic figurative mindscapes that are emotive, sensual, and at times disturbing. Eggleston interweaves art with poetry, moving smoothly from one creative expression to another to help the viewer both see and feel her intent.

Surrealists such as Eggleston, tap into their subconscious minds, which they believe to be the source of all imagination and creativity. Concerned with the rapid recording of their unconscious and freely associated thoughts, the putting of pencil, pen, and crayon to paper is incredibly appealing and produces a prodigious output of drawings.

“I try not to plan a drawing, only to respond to a basic mood, to explore. I quiet my mind and let the pencil rest andwatch what starts to emerge” ~Jenny Eggleston

Jellies

Pinky-orangey flesh, illuminated, fluid.
Against the dark background, the jellies recall deep space galaxies.

The Sky

Photo: Phoenix Mayet

Lately, I find I am drawn to the sky... I follow the flight of birds, scan the tops of tall buildings, and watch jet trails bloom on the horizon. It occurs to me that the sky is both limitless and small. It wraps blue lips around our slice of the world, holding us in the dome of it's mouth. All things, volcanic ash, the smoke of burning buildings, the persistent wail of sirens are consumed by the sky, diluted in it's spaciousness. Yet, at the same time, the sky hovers over us, more like a cloaked villain than a busy parent. Sometimes, the sky is a pervert in a trench coat, revealing the absurdity of our lives.

Skeletons

Painting: Kathryn Boehm

This is a painting in progress, one I started this Summer. The orange is the ground stain, so most of it will be painted over, leaving just little hints here and there.

Photo: Kathryn Boehm

Here is a current snapshot of my bulletin board. National Geographic images of glacial fields, dried plant materials and orange twine.

Photo: Kathryn Boehm

The stems and leaf are skeletons of sorts, just a fragment of the whole. Grape stems cast such interesting shadows.

"Artists are basically problem solvers..."

Bruce Nauman - A Rose Has No Teeth

In this selection of the ARTnews article titled "A New Creativity" by Ann Landi (March 2009) the future of art-making during the economic downturn is discussed. I admit, I'm kind of a sucker for return-to-our-senses sentiments like the ones expressed here that suggest there is something new and powerful gathering force in the art world and now new voices and attitudes can finally step forward... and it is still possible to become a part of it. At the same time, I am also highly suspicious of that aspect of myself which desires to be a part of something.

"Irving Sandler, the scholar and critic who witnessed and chronicled the rise of American art in the ’50s and ’60s, believes that artists will “begin to create their own institutions, if you want to call them that. Artists will get together and think of fending for themselves, and this is happening right now. My sense is that they are considering the collective situation, just as we did in the ’50s with the Artists’ Club and the Cedar Street Tavern.”

We may see a change, too, in the way art is produced, which will of necessity be reflected in the character and materials of the art object. “You’ll probably see less video- and film-based work because of the kind of production standards that artists have demanded and the kind of financing they need,” predicts Eccles. Work that requires an atelier worthy of a Renaissance master could also fall by the wayside. “What we’ve seen in the last few years is a lot of art with high-production values, expensive and very sophisticated studio or out-of-studio production,” says Gary Garrels, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “There’s been a kind of celebration of lavishness and monumentality and very eye-catching work.” Harry Philbrick, director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, adds, “Artists who could count six months or a year ago on projects being subsidized by museums, dealers, or collectors are suddenly finding that they will have to trim that budget, and that may mean choosing less-costly materials or scaling back projects.” And artists themselves are foreseeing changes in the way they work. “I’m finally getting around to working my way through all the materials that I already have in my studio, which is a lot of fun,” says Ellen Harvey. “In general, I’m trying to think of projects that are less expensive to make, and that’s fine. Expensive is not necessarily better, anyway.”

“I’m seeing incredible, great work made out of nothing, nothing,” sculptor Petah Coyne says of a recent visit to a show of M.F.A. candidates at the School of Visual Arts in New York. That’s an esthetic that’s not particularly new and might be said to go all the way back to early Cubist collages and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz, finding its latest incarnation in the low-rent assemblages of last year’s “Unmonumental” show at the New Museum. Govan doesn’t believe that artists who want and need certain materials will cut corners. “There are so many stories of Picasso, when he had not a nickel, buying the most expensive cerulean blue, the most costly pigments for his paintings,” he notes.

As for decisive shifts in sensibility or esthetics, it seems far too soon to say what the art of the coming years will look like or to predict what thought processes may underlie its making. Garrels believes that the choice of Bruce Nauman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale this year is a portent, and some say Venice itself will offer a reflection of the times. “We’re going to see a shift toward work that’s more psychological and introspective and more out of an old-fashioned studio kind of work,” Garrels comments. “It will have to be a much more sober biennale this time around,” says Carlos Basualdo, curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and cocurator of the U.S. Pavilion. Garrels, too, sees “a return to work that is a little more personal and exploratory. A good example of an artist who really came to represent that shift in the moment, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, would be Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Again, you had thoughtful art with low production values. Felix was an artist who came to the fore right after the last collapse of the market, and I would not be surprised to see something parallel happen now.”

“People who travel light and do things that are contrary and ephemeral are going to have a good moment,” says Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art. Storr also notes that the last decade has seen surprisingly little political activity among artists, and virtually no politically inspired art, in spite of eight years of governance that has led to an unpopular war and a staggering deficit. “People talked revolution but didn’t do it,” he says. “If I could spot a change, it would be at the point where artists start to think outside the politics of the art world, or outside the academic discourses, and look around and ask, what’s going on here? This is an area where somebody with an idea and enough anger could have an effect.”

Like the rest of the economy, the cultural world has lived through cycles of boom and bust since the first serious museums and dealers opened their doors in the middle of the 19th century. It’s still too early to say what will happen in the coming year or two, but the one certainty is a curiously reassuring uncertainty. “Artists are basically problem solvers,” says Bonnie Clearwater, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. “They will respond to whatever the situation is in completely unpredictable ways.”"

For the full article: http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2641

Some Thoughts on the Aesthetics of Horror

"The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror" - by Mark Dery - from a lecture delivered at the School of Visual Arts, New York http://www.markdery.com/archives/news/#000087

"The eye is an erogenous zone; beauty and horror, aesthetic ecstasy and moral revulsion: philosophical binaries aren't always poles apart, in the aesthetic realm.

In the world after 9/11, the aesthetic eye is confronted---and the moral mind confounded---by images that are undeniably horrific yet in their own ineffable, ethically dissonant way, beautiful: blurry newswire images of jumpers leaping from the burning Trade Towers; the Towers themselves at the moment of impact, blossoming into terrible flowers of flame. The cognitive dissonance inspired by such images, and the outrage sparked by aesthetic responses to images so emblematic of horrific tragedy (Karlheinz Stockhausen, white courtesy phone...), opens the door to a contemplation of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called "the pathological sublime"---images or objects that confound the aesthetic gaze, flickering irresolvably between aesthetic seduction and moral revulsion.

That contemplation takes us far afield from 9/11, leading us to wonder about the awful, pitiable beauty of medical museum exhibits; the "installation art"-like crime scenes left behind by highly ritualistic killers such as the Black Dahlia murderer; the troubling persistence of Beautiful Dead Women---exquisite corpses?---in art and high fashion; and the Burkean sublimity of that 20th century icon, the nuclear mushroom cloud. And speaking of mushroom clouds, Walter Benjamin warned his readers, in 1936, that humanity's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic."

Do his words have special meaning for us, in the world after 9/11? Is the aestheticizing of the unspeakable the essence of the fascist imagination, which dreamed of a Nazi utopia consecrated to Aryan beauty and purified by "racial hygiene"? What are the limits of the aesthetic gaze?"

I think these are interesting questions that have certainly occurred to artists long before 9/11... many asked in the aftermath of the Holocaust whether art could continue to be made at all. I had a discussion about this lecture with a friend yesterday and she was pretty convinced that the idea of beauty made from horror is impossible and that finding any beauty in say, the images of those who jumped from the Twin Towers into the endless blue sky, is callous and wrong-headed. She went on to say that it is both insensitive and desensitizing to repeatedly view images of suffering, never mind to dissect them and potentially re purpose them for artistic use. I can understand her point, but I don't agree. There are an infinite number of ways in which an artist can be callous, but one way for sure is for the artist to plant her head in the sand and hide from the daily reality that so many others share. I am not insisting on political art, but I do insist that the artist be aware of her surroundings both locally and globally.

Refusing to find beauty in horror, or denying its existence undermines our ability to find humanity amidst the sea of suffering that surrounds us. What right do we have to tell the political prisoner that she cannot find beauty in the confines of the jail? How can we look into the eyes of a malnourished child living in the slums and tell him that he cannot marvel at the beauty of the world around him? Why must we focus so narrowly on the horrible, only to turn away in shame at any hint of beauty within it? Buddhism teaches us that all life is suffering, but also that there is an infinite amount of joy in the world. Perhaps, it is impossible to really know beauty without knowing horror... these two must exist together in order for us to be able to tell them apart. In a way, I think the artist has a responsibility to investigate the horrible and find some way to fashion beauty from it. Not as a means to deny or undermine the truth of brutality or to demean beauty, but as a way redeem humanity. Knowing that so many people suffer and die each day, how can we possibly refuse beauty?

Stirrings

I've been thinking about sculpture and poetry and this image speaks to something stirring in my subconsciousness. The hive hangs from the tree like an adornment. I love it's fluidity, it's texture, and color.

Photo by Chris Buckley
http://www.pbase.com/gandolf67/image/12856770

The hive image reminded me of a photo I recently took on a walk in Jamaica Plain...

Photo by Phoenix Mayet

I snapped this image outside of the Rochester Library and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. I like all the lines, the stubborn angularity chanted by every brick and mitered edge. But the white line bisecting the clear sky, the trail left by a passing jet, authoritatively asserts itself for only a moment before fading from memory like the signatures of the dead.

Photo by Phoenix Mayet

I also took a couple of photos of the pen I made for Joey's birthday...



Photos by Phoenix Mayet