Ongoing

I haven’t posted in ages — it has been hectic (but more on that later). Here’s a quick look at my book backlog. If I had a beach and time to spend on it, I’d finally get these read:

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art — This is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery that the Telegraph described as “one of the year’s zaniest shows”. I have a low tolerance for zany, but I do like Martians.

Frances Stark: The Collected Work — This I really did read — in one sitting, at a coffee shop, out of order (I often start reading books from the back or the middle, then start over at the beginning once I’ve read a few chunks). I was ambivalent about Stark’s work until fairly recently, when I saw a show of her work at Mark Foxx in which she made collaged images of things from her house & life — front hall table, the door to her studio, neighborhood skunk — that were elegant and unassuming.

WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution — I didn’t get to see this exhibition, but read Richard Meyer’s essay on the cover controversy. I realize now that I read a lot about the exhibition, but don’t think I ever talked — or emailed — anyone about it. The reviews were good, but I wonder why it didn’t seem to generate much conversation?

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman — I did start reading this, and love the stories. Then Baby J. threw it in the toilet.

This does not photograph well, but may be more interesting in person.

With a grant deadline looming, I finished a bunch of new work and took some photographs. The studio space is full — to get anywhere or move anything, you have to move something else, but to put that thing somewhere you have to move something else, and so on. This is a new work — hopefully for the Franklin show — with a Dairy Queen on top, and a skate park/pool below the surface.

I got all these images ready for the grant application, uploaded everything, then clicked “complete” and everything was gone. It made me wonder what it would be like if everyone could view everyone else’s application — right now, I feel like I would appreciate that transparency. I’d be happy to be able to show people what I’ve been working on, and I’d love to see what other people’s applications look like — out of curiousity, out of wanting to know if I am horribly off-track, out of competitiveness.

This catalog accompanies Ingrid Calame’s exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery and at the Indianapolis Museum (for which she made tracings of the stains and scuffs on the track of the Indianpolis Speedway).

I read about Ingrid’s project at the Speedway about the same time I was getting interested in velodromes.

She made her signature tracings of the track - - sporting events (like racing) is so much about records and recording that Ingrid’s recording of the track seems perfectly appropriate.

And the book is beautiful. I was really most interested in seeing images of drawings, and they are beautifully reproduced here.

Holiday in Brazil has posted a gallery of images which includes this wonderful photograph of a model of the Santos Dumont Airport:

Meteorite and San Fernando Valley architecture

More SF Valley architecture in a sliding space (it sounds a bit much to call it architecture, these are buildings that don’t quite rise to the category of strip mall).

Here’s a new project:

This collage is composed from pieces cut from a photograph of the now long gone parking ramp that was just to the west of LACMA. It was a grim little structure that didn’t really look like it could ever withstand an earthquake, but there were Margaret Killgallen paintings on one of the levels (They were commissioned for the Made in California show, if I remember correctly.)

The shape comes from photographs of the Benego Meteorite, on the still-fuzzy theory that perhaps meteors, besides destroying the dinosaurs, also contained the seeds of everything that was to come later. Like the LACMA parking ramp.

In the spirit of accuracy and consistency, I thought I’d post some pages from this lovely book. I realize nearly everything I do is done in a spirit of quick and cheap, and spending time with this book is a good reminder to take care.

Two more photographs from the book about the Bendego meteorite. I like the meteorite because it is so thoroughly fallen — its fallen to the earth, and is so destined to remain fallen that it complicates all efforts to move it: it falls off carts, it breaks axles, it rolls downhill and gathers such speed that the cart carrying it catches on fire (not unlike its own fiery path to earth, I suppose).

I’m a bit behind on posting, and I have a backlog of books I’ve been meaning to get to, so I’m thinking the best solution is to write a post a day on a book a day. Two birds with one virtual stone. This book is an unexpected discovery from shelves at Gould Library:

The Bendego Meteorite and the Team of Workers and Engineers
One of the largest meteorites ever discovered, the Bendego Meteorite was moved from the jungles of Brazil to the National Museum. The transportation of the meteorite was slow and terribly difficult. Wooden carts were built, tracks were laid though the jungle, and the meteorite was hauled, slowly, up and down mountains by teams of oxen (and when it wasn’t possible to use oxen, by people). The account of the journey is illustrated with 16 photographs — they are beautiful images of this stubborn, difficult, and mysterious object. I’ll post more images from the book soon. To learn a tiny bit more about it, see this page from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collections online.

The Bendego Meteorite