Woodmere Catalog

A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron

I cannot say this was a page-turner. Many books were able to leapfrog over it when I would curl up for bedtime reading...why? Baron has chosen a fascinating subject - the transformations wrought by changing writing and reading technologies - but his book suffers from an unusual condition: too much reasonable thinking. When the conclusion of your book includes the sentence, "The effects of the technologies [forcing changes in how we write, read and circulate text] have typically been positive, with some negatives inevitably mixed in  - the plusses and minuses owing as much to the vagaries of human nature as to the advantages or disadvantages of the technology itself", you're being a little wishy-washy.

While the book includes flashes of imagination (a good section of Ted Kaczynski as author, an imaginative and inclusive overview of writing technologies form clay tablets to forgotten early word processing programs, a thoughtful meditation on global citizenship in the information age), Baron seems to have written a book that would be better discussed over dinner than actually published. His informal, conversational tone contribute to this impression.

All of this perhaps says more about my expectations than about Baron's book - an effort to consider the ways we are being manipulated by our own communication is a valuable opportunity for reflection. I wish I'd gotten a little more to reflect on here.

Another printmaking test

These are sort of amusing...

After Walter Benjamin, by way of Marjorie Perloff

Back up your Kindle...

I loved this project by Jesse England (described on Hyperallergic and tweeted by Kenneth Goldsmith) that involves copying an eBook and binding it. Those who remember the story about copies of Orwell's 1984 getting removed from readers' devices (can you make this shit up?) will take special pleasure in this work...

New print in progress...

I am very psyched to be going back to the Borowsky Center at the University of the Arts later this summer to make another offset litho with Amanda D'Amico. Last time, I felt like I was learning as we went...and I made a million mistakes. This time, I hope to be a little more organized. Here is the image I am working on for this year's print...

Last year, I was making layers on the fly. This year, I plan to have everything ready to roll as soon as I walk in. That means setting up the image...I realized how much I get out of having something lay around for a few days, so I got this done. Expect some changes (I can tell I am going to be adjusting contrast, for example...)

I'll post updates as the print unfolds...

Secrets revealed....

I'm especially interested in the segment of this where you see them setting up the shot - you can see they have projected the guides on the wall so they can place the post-its correctly...

Revised Dossier

Gerard Brown Dossier by Gerard Brown | Make Your Own Book

Tired of hearing talking about how guns make us a 'safer' nation...(UPDATED 6/18/15)

Also available..."Scene Painting and Bulletin Art" by Frank Atkinson

"A Show At Sho' Cards" by Frank Atkinson

Another scrapbook clipping

I've been keeping an article ("What's the most common mistake artists make?" by Corbett Barklie) open in the innumerable tabs of my browser for a few weeks...and before I lose it I want to pin it here.

Barklie suggests that the most common mistake artists make is that they, "frequently forget to acknowledge the people who help them"... and I have to agree. A bizarrely large number of my professional colleagues conduct themselves as if they expect the world to stop for them and their work. This attitude is one that students pick up on and adopt as part of their professional mannerisms...to horrible effect.

'Help' here needs to be broadly defined, too. It's not just the galleries that hang your work or the critics who notice it,; not just the community of friends that comes out to see it or the foundations that may support it. It's the people who make your life as an artist possible on a day-to-day basis.

For me, that's my family. Especially my wife, Carmina, who gives me wide latitude to follow my work in the studio as a writer and as a teacher. It's also my two sons, who endure openings and afternoons in the studio and patiently tote sketchbooks through the museum when they would rather be home watching TV or at the playground with a foursquare ball.

I'm also grateful for my job, where I am expected to do my work and from which I have been the fortunate recipient of a great deal of support and protected experimentation. I have the great privilege of sharing ideas with students, and of working with a number of talented and creative people whoa re generous enough to share their ideas with me.

The list goes on and there are too many people to name in this post, but I want share Barklie's article with other artists who see that they are part of overlapping worlds, not only citizens of some remote world world or (heaven forbid) 'creative community'...Artlandia or something. In fact, if you're reading this, I should be thanking you...

So, thank you.

Drawing...you gotta have it

While I'm putting up things I don't want to forget (and about which I would welcome conversation...) I wanted to post this piece by Anita Taylor from the Guardian online ('Why drawing needs to be a curriculum essential').

Taylor writes:

Drawing remains a central and pivotal activity to the work of many artists and designers – a touchstone and tool of creative exploration that informs visual discovery. It fundamentally enables the visualisation and development of perceptions and ideas. With a history as long and intensive as the history of our culture, the act of drawing remains a fundamental means to translate, document, record and analyse the worlds we inhabit. The role of drawing in education remains critical, and not just to the creative disciplines in art and design for which it is foundational.

...and she doesn't do such a great job of supporting that claim, falling into the common trap of being very specific about the art and design applications of drawing while being too general about the rest of the world's uses of it:

Alongside a need for drawing skills for those entering employment identified by a range of industries in the creative sectors – animation, architecture, design, fashion, film, theatre, performance and the communication industries – drawing is also widely used within a range of other professions as a means to develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan. This includes the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine and sport.

I am trying to get a conversation that I hope will lead to a major overhaul of the drawing courses in Tyler's Foundation program underway soon. How can we make classes that fulfill the needs to 'develop, document, explore, explain, interrogate and plan' and what - exactly -  are those out in the world these days?

To me, a conversation about drawing as visualization and invention is long-overdue. What do you think we need to talk about when we talk about drawing?

"Enoughness"

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open on my browser - lots of unread articles that I plan to finish, lots of ideas that catch my attention. Too often those get lost when the thing crashes, or maybe they get chucked in the Facebook stream and never thought of again. By keeping them open, I am trying to keep mulling them over. They belong here. I'll try to be better about posting.

Abigail Satinsky's April 3, 2014, essay on Art Practical (Appropriate Technologies) is one of those things...while I don't share Satinsky's enthusiasm for subscription-based marketing, I was taken by an idea she addresses early in the piece:

appropriate technologies [is] a term coined by the Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, first published in 1973. Schumacher calls for economic solutions to globalization that are founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. He advocates for decentralized working methods, or “smallness within bigness,” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal. Furthermore, he presents the philosophy of “enoughness,” a Buddhist approach to economics that advocates for self-sufficiency: producing from local resources for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life.

What attracts me to this is the notion of 'enoughness' - an idea almost completely foreign to contemporary American thought. Perhaps inspired by James Elkins' musings on the 'average, normal, mediocre artist', I've been reflecting on what a realistic life in the arts looks like and why it seems not to be enough for so many people who insist that the market is 'too small' or too 'artist-centered.'

In a funny way, it also reminded me of seeing Gerry Lenfest speak at Temple University a few weeks ago, and hearing him mention how the sale of his cable company gave him "enough" money to be philanthropic.