Daria for Plumtree, and Laura in Vegas!
Daria Tavoularis‘ album cover for Plumtree’s new Best-of CD looks like a sunrise with a black eye – which is pretty much how the band sounds. Wonderful. ALSO CHECK OUT: Laura Napier’s certainly awesome crowd intervention in Vegas: OFF THE STRIP 2010: NEW GENRES FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 14-16th, 2010 The Contemporary Arts Center presents “Off The Strip [... more ...]
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John Cage & The PedEgg
I heard something recently that I still can’t believe I heard. A lot of people are very upset about their feet, and I have proof. I was in Walgreens with my son, I think we were buying diapers. We were walking through the aisle that has all the AS SEEN ON TV stuff in it. [... more ...]
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I Like Tavi
I’ve been officially trying for years not to care about Fashion because it is expensive and involves starving girls. But Tavi Gevinson, Style Rookie has just ended all of my objections with her good writing and her hungry little eyes. I read The New Yorker profile and was then sort of horrified to find myself [... more ...]
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Blogging, Cronicas-style
Hi everybody. I have been reading Selected Cronicas by Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. These were Sunday columns that this super-genius Brazilian novelist produced for Rio de Janeiro’s major newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973. When you read these you will not believe they appeared in a regular newspaper. They could also [... more ...]
F****** Awesome Amish Quilts
What I must say first about the show “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco is GO TWICE. There are quilts from the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pa., and Holmes County, Ohio. Most were made before 1940. A couple pieces are completely insane. [... more ...]
Aurelia’s Oratorio: Light, Sad, Circus
Last night I saw Aurelia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theater. This is one of those rare things that is both light and heartbreaking. Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the creator of the show and the mother of its star, is Charlie Chaplin’s daughter. Uncle Dan actually hooted “Pure Chaplin!!” in the middle of one piece where two [... more ...]
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Robin Ekiss, Dollhouse Survivor
Last night I went to see Robin Ekiss read from her new book of poems The Mansion Of Happiness at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley. (“The Mansion of Happiness” turns out to be the Victorian precursor to the “The Game of Life.”) The poems mine her weird upbringing by miniaturists. She explained with a reasonably straight [... more ...]
Ebay Art Club
Has anyone found anything really worth looking at on Ebay lately? If so, please share. Here is a commemorative (not sure in what spirit, exactly) 9/11 disaster rug from Afghanistan. Bidding has ended for this one, sorry. I’m just keeping it in my “watching” pile. Today I found an interesting woodblock print of two dead [... more ...]
Ingo Giezendanner’s Diary for Nieves Makes You Want to Draw, or Leave.
Swiss artist Ingo Giezendanner’s beautiful new zine for Nieves Books is called Baku & Back. Ingo G. made the drawings on a cultural exchange trip he took from Switzerland to the Caucasus. The cultural exchange part didn’t work out but we get to keep the drawings. The amount of white paper left between the lines [... more ...]
Article Optimized for Fancy Phones
Now it’s easier to see/read Article on your “smart phone.” If you have one of those, the Forty-Two Suns Rise video series in particular looks especially nice on the small screen. For iPhone owners, you can even bookmark Article mobile so it looks like an app. Just go to articlejournal.net on your mobile browser to take [... more ...]
New Hoa Nguyen Poems at Glitter Pony!
Article contributor Hoa Nguyen’s poems are warm and wet and wriggly, like newborn puppies. “Rain Poem” begins “Stripes cover you in rain/We are grew and grey/A particular mood tooth / Kind of Day: Beans on Toast.” They often put together the most delicious sense impressions and then sort of drop back into diary entry mode [... more ...]
TRANS: form | color
TRANS: form / color is a sprawling nine-person show that came out of an Internet chat habit between artists Richard Schur (Munich) Mel Prest (San Francisco) and Brent Hallard (Tokyo). Each believes in the rewards of heavy viewer participation in abstract painting. Nancy White’s folded metal has sharp edges and a finish like lipstick put [... more ...]
Don Voisine at Gregory Lind Gallery
Sometimes you go to a show that makes you feel better because someone made some paintings that are not too proud of themselves but as respectful as possible of the complexity and difficulty of our little lives. Don Voisine’s paintings at Gregory Lind in San Francisco are at first glance pretty straight traditional abstract paintings. [... more ...]
A True Story: Interview with David True
When David True was a young New York artist in the 1970s working on industrially fabricated glass sculptures, his thoughts one evening settled on transparency, and then invisibility. He was alone, and sober (according to his account), when he decided to will himself invisible. He thought very, very hard, and then it happened. Or, at [... more ...]
Brodsky & Utkin: Etchings from the Projects Portfolio
BRODSKY & UTKIN: ETCHINGS from the PROJECTS PORTFOLIO (1981-90), Michael Rosenthal Contemporary Art, Redwood City, Calif. Last month I went to see the “Projects” etchings created between 1981 and 1990 by Russian artists Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. The pair trained as architects in the Soviet Union during the late 1970s. When they graduated, they [... more ...]
Imperfect Beauty: A Conversation with John Chiara
John Chiara is a 36-year-old artist from San Francisco who photographs with a camera the size of a speedboat that he built himself and hauls around town on a trailer to photograph the city’s hillsides and houses and underbrush. He never shoots the big, important view, and though his camera is big, it isn’t grand. [... more ...]
Posted in ISSUE #2 SPRING/SUMMER 2007 Tagged Crown Point Press, interviews, John Chiara, Kim Bennett 1 Comment
Article Interview: Leslie Snoke
1. How would you describe your work to someone who has never seen it before? Think of it as an interior designer’s nightmare. I am consumed with perception of good and bad taste. Take, for example, silk flowers “planted” outdoors in a garden. They bother me because I cannot decide to which season they belong. [... more ...]
Psychic Cherries: Into the Shadow World with Roz Leibowitz
Daria Tavoularis, my co-editor, met with serious resistance from her MFA program for focusing on the imagined and imaginative aspects of her work. One professor bragged to colleagues that if he had a pistol he would have used it at her thesis defense. I thought I was going to make my congenial reviewer at the [... more ...]
Posted in ISSUE #1 WINTER 2007 Tagged Daria Tavoularis, David Foster Wallace, David Lynch, Kim Bennett, Roz Leibowitz Leave a comment
Matthew Troy Mullins: Loving Archives, Loving Ourselves