greg.org

Reading this article (from Ftrain, like everything else today, I guess) is like watching Errol Morris’ First Person, wherein an interviewee is established as utterly normal/a genius in the first half of the show, and then is allowed to show how that utter normality is belied/that genius is applied in fantastic, frightening, or wildly misguided ways in the second half.

From Adrian Searle’s article on Documenta 11 in the Guardian:

Iranian photo-journalist and cameraman Seifollah Samadian pointed his video camera out of his Tehran window and filmed a woman in a black chador struggling with an umbrella in a vicious snowstorm while waiting for a bus. There is only the blizzard, and waiting, her silhouette and the cawing of crows, bare trees and a menacing, barbed-wire-topped wall beyond. Nothing happens, except more of the same, more waiting. It is one of the current Documenta’s unforgettable moments, of which there are many… [Not coincidentally, Samadian was the cinematographer on Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa.]
There are those who find the present Documenta patronising, or complain that it is like some horror National Geographic tour of a collapsing world. It is nothing of the sort. It is news from elsewhere, and news from home. We are all in it together, however impossible it is to deal with everything. Uneven, at times annoying, upsetting and even uplifting, Documenta 11 isn’t a perfect show. It isn’t a perfect world.

AIRPORT GIFT SHOP – MORNING
A CASHIER at the counter. She does not appear wildly over-qualified for her job. A YOUNG ITALIAN TOURIST COUPLE approach quietly with some postcards. The ITALIAN WOMAN wore her backpack on her stomach, as wary Italians are wont to do.
CASHIER (exclaiming loudly and with glee, but not to anyone in particular): That’s just like Mini-Me!! HAH!!
ITALIAN WOMAN (fright in her eyes, she looks at her husband): ……
CASHIER: You got Mini-Me in there?? HAH!!
The Italians drop the postcards on the counter and rush out of the store without saying a word.

No, it’s not just reciprocal link whoring, I swear: Just came back from the hotel pool, where I became transfixed by the beautiful patterns of reflections and whorls of light on the bottom of the pool, thinking to myself, “This is cool. Where are the artists examining this natural-yet-manmade phenomenon?” Well, they’re on Travelers Diagram for starters, and they’re named Kathleen Johnson, and they’re having their first solo shows this very minute (until Aug. 9, anyway) in New York. And she turns out to have shown last year at Marc Foxx in LA. Hey, Marc!

Mesa , AZ– Just when you think it’s too stupid to go back in the air, Delta.com offers the pleasant surprise of online check-in and home-printed boarding passes. A billboard on the way to the hotel says, “Sweating for free?! Get paid to test deodorants!” A photocopied sign at the check-in desk congratulates Gregory Allen for being selected guest of the day. And rather than redo my network settings in our upgraded room, I surf happily on a wide open wireless network that’ s bleeding in through the window. This is the way to start the week.

The route is so circuitous it bores even me, but I just came across The Essential Vermeer Lover, a scholarly yet very engaging site about, well, Vermeer.
While it’ll embarass him, I have to add a quick story from shooting in France about the cinematographer for Souvenir (November 2001), Jonah Freeman. Each night, we’d review the dailies on a giant monitor in the hotel lobby. On one such evening, a French woman (presumably another hotel guest) stood hovering behind us, watching quietly. When an extended shot of the Somme landscape (fields, with some trees at a distant ridge, with shadows of clouds racing across the fields and a really complicate sky) came on, she suddenly called out, “It’s just like Vermer [sic]!” She startled us, and then it took a while to figure who she was talking about. We figured the Vermer/Vermeer pronounciation thing was like Van Go/Van Gochh, something that, even if it was correct, Americans could never pull off. In any case, after that, any shots with sublime-looking light became known as Vermers. Here is Vermeer’s View of Delft, which then came to mind after the woman’s exclamation.
While Vermeer’s remaining work is known for subtlety and serenity, he painted during a prolonged war and religiously fueled conflict which devastated his home city of Delft. Early in his painting career, in 1654, a munitions depot in the town, which held 90,000 pounds of gunpowder, exploded to devastating effect. The Delft Thunderclap, as the accident came to be known, leveled buildings for hundreds of yards, damaged nearly every building in town, and killed and wounded unknown hundreds of people. [Read Anthony Bailey’s chapter about the Thunderclap, or buy his book, View of Delft.] One artist, Egbert van der Poel, painted over twenty versions of View of Delft After the Explosion in his career. Vermeer’s View of Delft, then, turns out to be a portrait of a partially/newly rebuilt city, one in the midst of and recovering from disaster.
(I’m working on an extended post about Jonah’s art, both his photography and installation work. Stay tuned.)

A nice passage from artist Anne Truitt’s journal. Easily find and replace “notebooks” and “weblog”:

I once watched a snake shed his skin. Discomfort apparently alternating with relief, he stretched and contracted, stretched and contracted, and slowly, slowly pushed himself out the front end of himself. His skin lay behind him, transparent. The writing of these notebooks has been like that for me.

An artist friend loaned me his copy of the 1968 underground classic film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. I’d seen clips of the film before, and it played at Sundance one year when I was partying there. But this William Greaves landmark is pretty amazing to watch. The film is a combination of “screen tests” or early scenes of a feature film and the “behind the camera” documentary of the making of the feature. As those familiar with Souvenir (November 2001) can appreciate, the contrast between scripted&unscripted, the use of documentary tools to tell a story, etc. are ideas the film explores. Well, in Symbio, Greaves doesn’t just explore these ideas, he riffs on them with amazing fluency (Miles Davis soundtrack >> obligatory jazz metaphor).
Earlier, Olafur (another artist friend) and I grabbed some milkshakes during his whirlwind US tour. He’s reaching an amazing level in his work, with a sustained fluency and engagement over a daunting number of complex projects, almost all at once. Even as I focus intently on Souvenir and almost everything about it (finetuning, critical reception, marketing and promotion, the potential impact on the WTC Memorial debate), he made a really good point that it’s the process, the continuous production that’s actually more important. A first project is a trial/test; the second is a reaction/correction; the third is the first real coherent/comprehensive attempt; it’s really the fourth project that has the greatest potential/expectation. A very useful perspective to be reminded of. And one that hits home these days when I’m regularly statuschecking myself and my longer term prospects/plans.