Bryan Ferry

[A few days late, distracted by the first of three scheduled U.S. Presidential Debates, below, in commemoration of the September 26, 1945 birthday of Roxy Music lead singer Bryan Ferry, a 1973 vintage performance of the 1935 pop standard "These Foolish Things," the title track for his first solo album.]

Meet the Fellows

This past week, the recipients learned in a single phone call from

the Foundation that they will each receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years.

List of the 2008 Fellows

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Alabama

On the occasion of the the birth of John Coltrane, a video of his legendary quartet performing his composition "Alabama".

According to the Socialist Review:: "In 1963 Martin Luther King decided to launch a non-violent assault on Birmingham, Alabama--the bastion of segregation. Within days 2,500 protesters swamped Birmingham jails. After ten days the authorities caved in. Birmingham was the civil rights movement's biggest victory. The protests had a massive impact--there were 758 demonstrations against racism and 14,753 arrests in 186 US cities in the ten weeks that followed Birmingham, culminating in the historic march on Washington.

Coltrane never described himself as a political activist--he was a musician first and foremost. He was also a deeply religious person. But it was his deep-seated humanity that drew him towards the civil rights movement. In 1964 Coltrane played eight benefit concerts in support of King. He also recorded a number of tracks inspired by the struggle--'Reverend King', 'Backs against the Wall' and his album Cosmic Music was dedicated to King. Events in Birmingham would also move him to write 'Alabama'.

On the Sunday morning of 15 September 1963 a dozen sticks of dynamite were planted by white racists in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. At 10.45am the bomb went off, killing four young black girls aged between 11 and 14.

Coltrane wrote the song 'Alabama' in response to the bombing. He patterned his saxophone playing on Martin Luther King's funeral speech. Midway through the song, mirroring the point where King transforms his mourning into a statement of renewed determination for the struggle against racism, Elvin Jones's drumming rises from a whisper to a pounding rage. He wanted this crescendo to signify the rising of the civil rights movement."

[YouTube video from interplanetarymusic. Information provided: "The John Coltrane Quartet (John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones) en 1963, el el programa de televisión Jazz Casual, interpretando Alabama."]

FYA: Some Cards

FYA: "when you care enough to hit send"

some cards

Barack Obama and the American Void

The New School
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City

Thursday, September 18 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Simon Critchley
Barack Obama and the American Void

Presented as part of the Vera List Center’s 2008-09 program cycle on “Branding Democracy,” in particular the exhibition “Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding,” presented at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, from October 16, 2008 through February 1, 2009.

* * *

Admission: $8, free for all students, as well as New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID
Ticket inquiries can be sent to boxoffice@newschool.edu or 212.229.5488.

[graphic from a google image search for 'Obama']

Prospect.1 New Orleans Update

[Reprinted in its entirety from Artdaily.org]

Prospect .1 New Orleans: A New International Contemporary Art Biennial

NEW ORLEANS.- Prospect.1 New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, will launch in New Orleans on November 1, 2008. Produced by U.S. Biennial, Inc., Prospect.1 is directed by international curator Dan Cameron, Director of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans. Conceived in the tradition of the great international biennials, such as the Venice Biennale and Sao Paolo Biennial, Prospect.1 will showcase new artistic practices, as well as an array of programs, which will benefit the local community. Over the course of its three-month run, the biennial will draw attention, creative energy, and economic activity to the City of New Orleans, a historic regional artistic center, and the struggling Gulf Region.

New Orleans was the first U.S city to host a recurring international art exhibition, beginning in 1887 with the Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans. In this tradition, Prospect.1 will feature art originating from New Orleans and Louisiana within an international context and will provide the Louisiana public with new art conceived and developed for the city. 81 local, national, and international artists, hailing from over thirty countries, have been selected to participate in the inaugural edition of the biennial. Their works will be shown in museums, art centers, warehouses, and public spaces throughout the city, for a combined total of more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space.

A number of biennial highlights respond to the destruction wrought on the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Region in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Mark Bradford will create a wooden Ark utilizing the shell of a destroyed house and other discarded scraps of wood in the Lower Ninth Ward. Paul Villinski, a New York-based artist known for creating work from debris who has said he found “new, urgent purpose in the disaster of Hurricane Katrina,” will create his Emergency Response Studio, a “green”-powered mobile artist’s studio, out of a discarded, now-iconic FEMA trailer. South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa, who first visited New Orleans in the more immediate wake of the hurricane, returned to the Lower Ninth Ward in late 2007 to create his first photographs outside of Africa, which will debut at Prospect.1.

Highlights of the biennial also include works by artists who have selected unique locations in which to install work. Adam Cvijanovic will paint one of his murals inside an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward, and Nari Ward will convert an
abandoned church in the Lower Ninth Ward into an installation.

Other artists creating new works specifically for Prospect.1 New Orleans are Jacqueline Humphries, who will create a new work using metallic autopaint; Julie Mehretu, who is creating a suite of large-scale paintings; Pierre & Gilles, who are creating a new series of enhanced photographic images; Kay Rosen, who will transform city billboards and benches into enigmatic word-puzzles; and Kaz Oshiro, who is working on a new series of his characteristic sculptural trompe l'oeil pieces.

A number of New Orleans-born and based artists have also been selected to participate in the biennial, among them Shawne Major, who is creating three large-scale wall hangings; Willie Birch, who will present a new series of drawings; and Croatian-born, New Orleans-based sculptor Srdjan Loncar, who will erect a sculptural pile of money in front of the Louisiana State Museum U.S. Mint and encourage the public to carry some of it away in briefcases provided at the site.

Recent and iconic works by other major artists will also be on view. Lee Bul will present delicate glass and aluminum works that were shown at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 2007-08; Fred Tomaselli will present two works that were painted in response to Hurricane Katrina along with a third, new piece; and Trenton Doyle Hancock will present elements including costumes, backdrops, and sculptures that he has created for Ballet Austin's new production Cult of Color.

The following artists will be exhibiting their work in Prospect.1 New Orleans: Allora & Calzadilla, Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Janine Antoni, Alexandre Arrechea, Luis Cruz Azaceta, John Barnes, Jr., Sanford Biggers, Willie Birch, Monica Bonvicini, Mark Bradford, Candice Breitz, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Francis Cape, Chen Chieh-Jen, Adam Cvijanovic, Jose Damasceno, Anne Deleporte, Leandro Erlich, Skylar Fein, Roy Ferdinand, Jr., Tony Fitzpatrick, Gajin Fujita, Rico Gatson, Katharina Grosse, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Victor Harris & Fi Yi Yi, Arturo Herrera, Takashi Horisaki, Jacqueline Humphries, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Lee Bul, Kalup Linzy, Srdjan Loncar, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Deborah Luster, Jorge Macchi/Edgardo Rudnitzky, Shawne Major, Nalini Malani, McCallum & Tarry, Dave McKenzie, Josephine Meckseper, Julie Mehretu, Aernout Mik, Beatriz Milhazes, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yasumasa Morimura, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Wangechi Mutu, Shirin Neshat, Marcel Odenbach, Kaz Oshiro, Miguel Palma, Perejaume, Pierre et Gilles, John Pilson, Sebastián Preece, Navin Rawanchaikul, Rosângela Rennó, Pedro Reyes, Robin Rhode, Stephen G. Rhodes, Nadine Robinson, Clare E. Rojas, Kay Rosen, Malick Sidibé, Amy Sillman, Nedko Solakov, Jackie Sumell with Herman Wallace, Superflex, Fiona Tan, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Fred Tomaselli, Jannis Varelas, Xavier Veilhan, Paul Villinski, Nari Ward, Xu Bing, and Haegue Yang.

Artists’ works will be installed in some 100,000 square feet of exhibition space throughout the city of New Orleans. They are Battle Ground Baptist Church, Charles J. Colton School, Common Ground Relief, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Edgar Degas Foundation, The George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, Harrah’s Casino/Plaza of Good Fortune, The Hefler, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Ideal Auto Repair, L9 Center for the Arts, Longue Vue House & Gardens, Louisiana ArtWorks, Louisiana State Museum U.S. Mint, Loyola University, New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts|Riverfront, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Center, New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, New Orleans Museum of Art, Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University, The Ninth Ward Village, Tekrema Center for Art and Culture, and Universal Furniture.

[Image from artdaily.org Web site. Caption: "Malick Sidibé, Les Apprentis Mccanitiens 1963, 2008, Gelatin silver print, 18 x 19 inches. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York."]

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

The article below is reprinted in its entirety from Newsweek online.]

David Foster Wallace
An author of infinite erudition who found artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread.

By David Gates

Updated: 12:56 PM ET Sep 14, 2008

When the news came that David Foster Wallace, only 46 years old, had hanged himself in his home in California, I opened his masterpiece, the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," at random and happened to land on a scene in which a recovering drug addict recalls a childhood moment of existential dread. "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted . . . I understood on an intuitive level why people kill themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling, I'd surely kill myself." We'll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work: some writers-Hemingway was one-seem to take years composing their suicide notes right under our very noses. In Wallace's last book, a story collection called "Oblivion"—oh, now we get it—the self-tormenting protagonist of "Good Old Neon," an ad man who has felt like a "fraud" his whole life (and who used to know one "David Wallace" when he was a kid) swallows antihistamines and drives his car into a bridge abutment. And in Wallace's commencement address to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, he dragged in—if not exactly out of left field, certainly out of left center—"the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

It will take a while for all these apparent "clues" in Wallace's work to stop pulsing like neon signs when we stumble on them. But that work will outlast the garish particulars of his death. In years to come, no one will be able to dismiss it as the symptomatic productions of a depressive head case: the dread to which he gave artistic shape is too real, too universal. True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we're all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and-that chillingly neutral word-information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant." The title of "Infinite Jest" calls to mind the image of Hamlet holding up a skull-that of the jester Yorick, "a fellow of infinite jest"-and Wallace's literary project was to get something of that infinity within us out where we could see and hear it. This explains his characteristic footnotes and endnotes, his digressions within digressions and his compulsive, exhausting (but never sufficiently exhaustive) piling on of detail. Like the narrator of "Good Old Neon," he found it "clumsy and laborious . . . to convey even the smallest thing," and his writing bulged and strained against practical limitations. A 2001 essay in Harper's (about Americans' abuse of English) ran to 17,000 words, and Rolling Stone cut half of his epic report from John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. (The entire piece appeared this year as a book called "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope."). And "Infinite Jest" is 1079 pages long-the last 96 of which contain his 388 notes. It was both a splendid, generous outpouring and a frantic attempt to bail out the waters as they rose.

Of course, Wallace was "showing off" in his nearly infinite erudition—what didn't this man know about, from tennis to terrorism?—but in the most humane sense: "I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose," he said in a 1993 interview, "is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves." Wallace's late work, notably the stories in "Oblivion," had darkened since "Infinite Jest," his second novel, and even that exhilarating book seems grounded in dread and panic. Its central premise is that a certain film (called, of course, "Infinite Jest") is so lethally entertaining that it renders viewers catatonic: they literally (to use Neil Postman's expression) amuse themselves to death. The novel's exhilaration shades into hysteria: it's a thousand-plus-page agon between the writer's shaping impulse and the "terrible master" of uncontrolled, unbounded, unsilenceable consciousness. But Wallace found both artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread: "Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside." He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein-one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived-was an artist because "he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."

I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius-Hemingway, for instance. You can't imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity" (2004), or winning an undergraduate prize at Amherst College for a thesis on "modal logic," whatever that may be, or going on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy after his well-reviewed first novel, "The Broom of the System" (1987) was published-this after getting an MFA in fiction at the University of Arizona. Like Wallace, Hemingway worked as a journalist (in his case, primarily as a war correspondent), but he was an observer while Wallace was an explorer. In his nonfiction pieces Wallace plunged himself into such microverses as a cruise ship, the Iowa State Fair, the porn industry, the U.S. open tennis tournament, and the Maine Lobster Festival. That piece, "Consider the Lobster," must have taken years off the life of Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl: Wallace devoted most of the piece to the discomfiting question of whether it was "all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure," since, as he argues, "lobsters can suffer and would rather not." Wallace later told the Boston Globe that his writing such a piece for an audience of foodies was—you saw this coming—"just an exercise in my weird self-destructiveness."

The writer who happens to be a genius—the archetype is Shakespeare—is in love with his words, his story and his people. Wallace-the reverse archetype-surely knew as much about words, stories and people as any writer would ever need to know, but he gave his deepest love to his ideas about them. If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that "speech of some twelve or fifteen lines" he composes to insert in "The Murder of Gonzago," the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"; it's a line that the author of "Infinite Jest" must have taken deeply to heart. Wallace's encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder of the literary world, and at its worst, nearly unreadable. In his recent study "How Fiction Works," the critic James Wood grants Wallace's seriousness of purpose: "His fiction prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposition of language in America, and he is not afraid to decompose—and discompose—his own style in making us live through this linguistic America with him." Yet, Wood argues, in channeling the "debased, vulgar, boring" argot of our times, Wallace's late prose sometimes becomes indistinguishable from what it parodies. And even the far more sympathetic critic Wyatt Mason, in reviewing "Oblivion" for the London Review of Books, concluded that while Wallace "has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him," but that "it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known."

We'll never get that third novel now—had he even started one?—so we'll have to take Wallace's achievement as it is, not as we might have wanted it to be. Is it enough? No. But would it ever have been enough? He sought to empty out the infinite within himself—a heroically hopeless enterprise. "What if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died," the narrator of "Good Old Neon" speculates in his last moments, "because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or passage of time in which to express it or convey it . . . ?" It's the writer's version of the Beatific Vision—and it sounds like a lot of work. "The rest is silence," says the dying Hamlet—these are his last words to us. But Wallace was no quietist: in his writing, at least, he never stopped wrestling with the "terrible master" in his own skull. Even beyond this life, he seems to have found silence unimaginable.

[photo by Steve Rhodes.]

New Media Art Criteria

[In recognition of the incontrovertible fact that it's WAY fun to make fun of oneself, with thanks to NM in Rijeka, Croatia for the tip: from Near Future Laboratory:]



Near Future Laboratory Top 15 Criteria That Define Interactive or New Media Art

"The Julianipedia entry for "New/Interactive Media Art" has been finalized by the guys and gals on the editorial floor here at the Near Future Laboratory officeplex. After several years of review, discussions with leading experts and practitioners we're finally ready to release our conclusions. And what better place to release them — here, in Linz Austria, and after a 3 year hiatus from Ars Electronica while I was teaching at an interactive media program where I would get in trouble for missing boring faculty meetings and a class or two because I thought it'd be useful to my pedagogy to go to the world's pre-eminent interactive media exhibition (but no one ever got the business for going to the Game Developers' Conference, so..there's that.)

Here at Ars Electronica is where we did an unscientific qualitative test of the criteria devised to define New/Interactive Media Art. Now we deliver to you the conclusive results, and do so in the spirit of the David Letterman Top-10 Countdown, only with a Top-15 rather than 10, cause we found 15 things.

Forget all the New Media "Theory"; we've got your empirically derived criteria right here.

The Near Future Laboratory Top-15 Criteria for New or Interactive Media Art are...

15. It doesn't work

14. It doesn't work because you couldn't get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/"dongle" of any sort..and the town you're in is simply not the kind of place that has/cares about such things

13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out "where the camera is"

12. Someone either on their blog or across the room is prattling on about the shifting relations between producers and consumers..and mentions your project

11. Your audience "interacts" by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

10. Your audience asks amongst themselves, "how does it work?"

9. The exhibition curators insist that you spend hours standing by your own wall text so that you can explain to attendees "how it works"

8. It's just like using your own normal, human, perfectly good eyeballs, only the resolution sucks and the colors are really lousy..plus the heat from the CPU fan is blowing on your forehead which makes you really uncomfortable and schvitz-y

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, "Yeah..yeah, I could've done that too..c'mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It's so easy..."

6. Someone in your audience, maybe the same guy with the Crumpler bag and digital SLR excitedly says, "Oh, dude. That should totally be a Facebook app!"

5. It's called a "project" and not a "piece of art"

4. You saw the "project" years ago...and here it is again...now with multi-touch interaction and other fancy digital bells and Web 2.0-y whistles

3. Your audience cups their hands over various proturbances/orifices at or nearby your project attempting to confuse/interact with the camera/sensor/laser beam, even if it uses no such technology

2. There's a noticeable preponderance of smoothly shifting red, green and blue lighting effects

1. People wonder if it wasn't all really done in Photoshop, anyway

3 Bonus Criteria!

0. There are instructions on how to experience the damn thing

-1. You can't "collect" or buy it. Heck, if you did, you'd need to get AppleCare or hire an IT guy in the bargain

-2. Crumpler guy says, "Oh, I thought of that already.."

There it is. The Near Future Laboratory Top-15+3 Criteria Defining New/Interactive Media Art!"

[graphic from The Near Future Laboratory Web site.]

ID-entity

Transformer
1404 P Street, NW Washington, DC 20005
202-483-1102

September 12 - October 18, 2008
ID-entity
Featuring work by ten emerging Mexico City based artists

Reception: September 12, 6-9 pm

"Seeking to further international contemporary art dialogue, build alliances for artists, and promote cultural exchange, Transformer is thrilled to be partnering with the Mexican Cultural Institute in presenting the comprehensive ID-entity exhibition.

Presenting work that reflects issues of living within a capital city, urban life, as well as larger issues of identity both national and personal - Domestic Fine Arts, Gilberto Esparza, Saúl Gómez, Ricardo Harispuru, Mauricio Limón, Edith Pons, Xavier Rodríguez, Marco Rountree Cruz, Amaranta Sánchez and Joaquín Segura
ID-entity is co-curated by Transformer’s Executive & Artistic Director Victoria Reis and Mexico City based independent curator Giovanna Esposito Yussif."

more

Way Down in New Orleans

Civilian Art Projects
406 7th STREET NW (at "D" Street)
Washington, DC 20004

Sept 5 - October 11, 2008:
WAY DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS

Showing just days after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, WAY DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS unites an array of New Orleans-based artists with other artists nationwide; both groups affected and shaped by the storm, and its aftermath. Each artist involved in this show was affected by this American tragedy viscerally. Their work was, in turn, affected and they each address the catastrophe and rebirth in very distinct ways. Curated by Aubrey Edwards and Jayme McLellan.

Artists & Vendors include:
Abby Gitlitz, Aubrey Edwards, Beth Dary, Beth Schindler, Brice Bishcoff, Brad Jenson, Courtney Egan , Daryn DeLuco, David Grant, David Wingo, Dread Scott, Elizabeth Underwood, Kid Camera Project, Kevin Golden, Kristin Littwin, Chin Music Press, Constance, Dirty Coast, New Orleans Craft Mafia, Jason Reeves, Jenny Hart, Jenny Leblanc, JR Portman, JT Yost, Lauren Castle, Leo McGovern, Marc Bianchi, Marlowe Parker, Matthew Rodriguez, Mike Combs, Miranda Lake, Neighborhood Story Project, Tabitha Soren, Skylar Fein.

more

[photograph from Civilian Art Project Web site.]