This dam is at Elephant Butte Lake where among the things I am preparing for Monday, for post on adobeairstream.com, is a brief look back about Civilian Conservation Corps. At a time when the Albuquerque Journal is reporting that economic stimulus funds on paper went to 30-odd Congressional districts in New Mexico that don’t even exist, one can find evidence of the WPA in the material history of the state. A statue at the public park on the butte side of the lake reads in memory of boy scouts who died when adventure turned to tragedy. A very literary line for a monument. As to the CCC, they built bridges and dams like the one shown. The water level is at historic lows as most of the water rights belong to Texas, downstream. The road over this dam is now closed.
A trip to Truth or Consequences is for me always somewhere between the last words of Kurtz’s trip into darkness and the first words about emerging into light. It is a very light place, white in fact, with a desert clarity t
hat tends not to romance shabby edges. And the shabby edges exude a whiff of the American dream meeting the dangerous; viz the dark. Water rights cede to Texas; “meth watch” signs dot a road (“riverside drive”) begun with a park with swings, retirement trailer parks opposite the skinny Rio Grande. It’s a town of betweens where geography might still be destiny, one day.
Conrad and I first went there years ago over a Christmas holiday. I remember the seediness of a place with torn floors where a woman ran the bath water. Many of those places of course are now gone or fixed up, as the town bears such destinations as Sierra Vista and Blackstone, on the uphill side, and such camp and cult favorites as Firewater, La Paloma, Riverbend Hot Springs, The Charles, along with signs of past glories now being turned into vacation rentals.
Delmas Howe, the artist, in a famous event before Joe Waldrum died, showed his Stations of the Cross New York City pier paintings at Waldrum’s Rio Bravo Fine Art. Stephen Low, who was William Burroughs’s secretary back when in Lawrence (Kansas), hit TorC before decamping to Desert Hot Springs for his final stop this life. Burroughs, Low and Waldrum are sadly now gone. But a more recent attempt to up-market TorC found a guy from Mádrid (NM) who for a brief spell some four years ago founded and started a bunch of small art galleries along Main Street. From the looks of things today those aren’t operating anymore although while they did one had the opportunity to imagine all the storefronts repainted and a jam of traffic incoming and outgoing. Visitors would take baths, thriftshop, and recede back into the air conditioning for martinis and runways. Landscaping courtesy of the Exotic Cactus Ranch, perhaps the audacity of a century plant amid the statuary. Ah, Tor C. I will always love you. Call me a desert rat, the coalition of old aluminum Airstreams, Civilian Conservation Corps projects near the lake, and the springs that make water and property synonymous, are as close as we get to Lourdes around here. 95 years worth of Hot Water” Festival was celebrated with an aplomb play on words in mid-November.
I don’t know if you guys feel the same way but the reality of sometimes taking on more than you know at first is that you get tired. So the last six months have been about the pleasure of learning to re-feel six months old when you can play without much fear and the notion that curiosity gets you somewhere. We are in our sixth month of producing adobeairstreamdot com at that plain old web address. I may change the title of this blog but if so will make sure it links on through.
Late May this was written: It is with enormous pleasure that I announce the launch of our full magazine site at adobeairstream. This blog has been a terrific adventure and for all of you who are seeing this post consider this a simultaneous thanks and wave on to join us as we really step out now.
MIKE WHITING, represented by Denver’s Plus Gallery, installed “Kickflip” in Albuquerque last week. The sculptural triptych takes the lingo of skateboarding as it’s inspiration, combining it with Whiting’s trademark reference to pixelated forms from early video-game technology.
Trine Bumiller Interval 2009 oil on canvas
Trine Bumiller paints with a luminous and varied palette. Her subject forms found in nature such as shimmering river stones, a reflecting full moon and brilliant dogwood stems. Each work is composed of multiple and variously-sized canvases uniquely combined to further emphasize the artist’s ongoing visual themes addressing order and the organic; form and formlessness.
“The Blue Hour” refers to the cyclical transition times of each day that are neither total darkness nor full daylight. Bumiller’s explorations into this time of day reveals a monochromatic realm and offers a subtle shift in her work toward an increased depth of layering and sense of light in her canvases. Contrasting elements are unexpected yet contemplative. The work reveals a reinvigorated eye toward an increased depth of layering and sense of light in her canvases. read more…
Foundation to Support Indigenous Arts, Culture Opens Its Doors
A new foundation dedicated to supporting the work of Native American artists has been launched with a $10 million commitment from the Ford Foundation, the New York Times reports.
The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, the first permanently endowed national foundation dedicated to developing and revitalizing Native American artistic expression, will work to foster indigenous arts in American Indian, native Hawaiian, and Alaska native communities by awarding grants to artists and arts organizations, supporting native arts leadership, and partnering with other native-led efforts to increase financial support for indigenous arts and cultures. The Portland-based foundation, which also received a $1.5 million grant and additional $1.5 million commitment from the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians near Sacramento, will be led by president and CEO Tara Lulani Arquette, a native Hawaiian and longtime advocate for native communities who most recently was president and executive director of the Honolulu-based Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association. read more…
Not bad for the circumstances….
The question at the art auctions seems to be “when will the art market show its wounds in a collapsed economy?” So far, as a mangling of the old saying goes, the cup is still partly full.
Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Black and White, Sotheby’s top lot, brought $9,266,500.
Sotheby’s took in $61 million last week in its Impressionist and Modern Art evening sales, about 25 percent of what the auction house took in at a comparable sale 6 moths ago, which means the sale ran behind the stock market. Christies brought in $102 million. Not bad for the circumstances, the conventional wisdom went.
This week’s sales of contemporary art could be a better indicator, since the contemporary field seems to follow the fortunes of those who make (and lose) money quickly, and seems most linked to art fashion. A walk through the galleries at both major auction houses showed that consignors (sellers) are being cautious. The high-priced works are now perennials by Jeff Koons and Martin Kippenberger, yet prices are not as high as everyone assumed they would be.
In last week’s sales, some people had to sell, even in this market – cash-strapped Julian Schnabel, Madoff victims, and the heirs of the Frelinghuysen (Havemeyer) family — so works by Monet and Picasso ended up on the block, and they sold. You might still call this category “labels for less.” The great show of late Picassos, organized by John Richardson at Gagosian Gallery certainly helped build interest in late Picassos.
There’s Life After Spock ….
Now that you’ve seen J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek, the prequel to the show that launched a thousand sequels, you might be wanting to see two films that have just as much imagination and far lower advertising budgets (left, Rudo y Cursi).
Star Trek is clearly a product that can be expected to be one of America’s stronger exports this year – not that there’s much competition. This flagship franchise of the “knowledge economy” that now seems invested with as much hope as money didn’t bring surprises. Nor did it economizes on explosions. There are enough of them to destroy the World Trade Center or any other iconic location more times than you could count. And there are some glittery new faces playing earlier versions of the old faces that you know from the television show. Yes, Leonard Nimoy is back as an old sage. The script is about family and loyalty. And it’s making lots of money. Surprised? read more…
Dreaming the future can create the future. That is the premise behind Dreaming New Mexico (DNM), a Bioneers project with support from Google Earth’s Outreach Program. Dreaming New Mexico was selected runner up for the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.
Submitted by Kenny Ausubel (founder and CEO Bioneers) an award-winning social entrepreneur, writer and filmmaker and Peter Warshall, a polymath – biologist, anthropologist and former editor of Whole Earth Catalog, Dreaming New Mexico prompts citizens to ask: What is it we really desire? What would success look like? The act of envisioning is followed by a collaborative effort to discover what we know and do not know.
Their proposal reads:
The primary tool of Dreaming New Mexico is the innovative tool of “future maps.” read more…
Post by M. Nye. Photo by Lisa Law. Artist Ron Davis at left.
Dennis is offering a few introductory remarks re: his show, “Hopper at the Harwood,” to a crowd of art lovers who’ve shelled out $175 per for the pleasure, and dinner after. Dennis’s show (with catalogue and essay by the estimable Dave Hickey) is hot. And how could it be otherwise, featuring some of his own work (much better than you think) and that of five formidable artist friends who share his long-time LA-Taos connection — Ken Price, Larry Bell, Ron Davis, Ron Cooper and Dean Stockwell?
Dennis looks tiny and is charming, self-effacing and brief. He notes that he “ran into these bums in the early ‘60s when they were breaking all the rules,” and they’ve all been friends ever since. (Lucky, one reflects, in the perfectly installed exhibition. And what an odd place Taos is, or was.)
Dennis says he originally wanted to have a show with his favorite New Mexico artists —Andrew Dasburg, Georgia O’Keeffe, R.C. Gorman (!), these fellows, et al — but it came down to this and with the ostensible hook of the forty year anniversary of the release of the film “Easy Rider” (filmed partly, of course, in Taos, with hippies, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black and directed by Dennis), and the hopefully promoted and marketed “Summer of Love” in Taos with attendant exhibitions and events.
Dennis concludes that this show is not about him, and that if it has gotten some media sizzle — which it has and will — it’s only because he’s a movie star, etc. etc. Nice.
But the fact is Dennis was an active participant, documenter, supporter and creator of an art scene in LA from pre-Ferus Gallery, to this present incarnation as curator at the Harwood Museum. And the fact is he’s always had a keen, canny aesthetic eye and sensibility, and his stuff, and that of his friends here, is proof.
And it’s also true that when he brought his dystopian vision to Taos in 1969, right into the belly of the Anglo-artist beast, next to the Pueblo under the mountain, into the house that Mabel (and Tony) built, everyone from Bell and Price to Donald Rumsfeld and Julia Roberts came following.
Dennis’s show reminds us of the transcendent power of fine art and serious artists even as there is a trace of melancholia in the air. One reflects over dinner that the “Summer of Love” was actually 1967 — that 1968 was the “Summer of Hate,” and, if anything, 1969 the “Summer of Woodstock/ Nixon/ and The End.” One considers the “Devolution of Dennis” from “counter-culture” bad boy to neo-con, Bushie Republican front man for Cadillac, Ameritrade, and American Express; like a prodigal son returning to the faith and pieties of his fathers in the cattle town of Dodge City, Kansas, on the Great Plains, along the Santa Fe Trail. Western, ruggedly individual, conservative, contrarian. You couldn’t make it up.
And one considers the hippies, and their apolitical, narcotized hedonism, nihilism and narcissism, and how so many of them, over time, became real estate salesmen and developers.
And one recalls that Dennis and Peter’s “Easy Rider,” far from being any “celebration” of peace and love and the ‘60s, was actually the death notice for the era.
As Captain America says to Billy:
“We blew it, man. We blew it.”
Bummer. What a buzz-kill.
On the Santa Fe Plaza April 13 I suggested to Jeremy Deller that his trailering a bombed Iraqi car across America was a Ballardian act. “Ballard! he’s a genius, he’s crazy genius”, enthused Deller. We talked about the writer we both admired, neither Jeremy nor I imagining that prostate cancer would kill Ballard within the week. (Ballard died April 19, age 78.)
Reading Robert Smithson first turned me on to J. G. Ballard. From there I bought RE/SEARCH publication #8/9, Vale and Juno’s collection of Ballard writing, interview and commentary. Reading that led me quickly to Ballard novels Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, the early story collection Vermillion Sands and so on. Ballard’s motifs resonated: the marriage of flesh, machine, eroticism and death in Crash; the struggle between the organic and the crystalline and ultimate transcendent vision in The Crystal Land; media spectacle, war and politics in The Atrocity Exhibition. A story in Vermillion Sands captured my imagination. The Thousand Dreams of Stella Vista tells of a real estate tour of a house touted to adjust its shape to its owner’s dreams and desires. The house, built of flexible “plastex” is programmable by its owners – as if this were a smart house – to mirror their narcissism. Greg Lynn’s Embryo House? More like Vito Acconci’s Bad Dream House… In the course of the tour the house runs amok, deforming “like a tortured flower”, nearly crushing its visitors. The old owner’s subconscious, like psychological malware, has subverted the program to project torqued dreams into a residential carnivorous plant. House tour as torture. I imagine perversely animated Bruce Goffs.
Ballard’s characters live in worlds constructed of information, of facts and artifacts.
Pirate Radio. There were number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened:(1) Medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terrace faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo….
From The Atrocity Exhibition. Note the elisions of anatomy and geology, of psychiatry and celebrity.
I have just returned from the Marfa Film Festival. And on Cinco de Mayo, we are closing in on what has been a compressed trajectory between launching this blog and finalizing the launch components of our full online magazine site, coming next month. What a time. We are in a revolutionary phase that I know I have never experienced before. One’s skillset, to use a word keyed into American life, has to parlay itself into new definitions in a society that loves definitions. Just this morning, as I was interviewing Ivan Barnett of Patina Gallery for my Art and Antiques article (due next Monday, appearing in July issue), we talked words briefly. We touched on Ivan’s own work, a series of recent metal fabrications called “Homage to Sandro (Chia)” that opened last Friday at Patina.
The metal mobiles hang in the gallery like countervalances of light springy things with weightier questions about where art meets design meets craft. The word “craft,” Ivan reports, is back in. Does it need the adjective, “fine,” appended to the front of it, like before? “Interesting question,” he replied. Andrew Wagner, formerly of Dwell and recently the last former editor of American Craft, has gone on to edit Readymade, a magazine for young do-it-yourselfers chockfull of all sorts of craft (without adjective) projects. Janet Koplos replaces him at American Craft. Her article on studio jewelry appeared in the recent issue of Art in America. I digress, and yet not. Where Santa Fe plans its summer festival season, is where I have been–my usual interviewing journalist self, pen in hand, tape recorder at the ready. Yet how Santa Fe is seen from without, and the complexity with which we exist from within, have been the benchmarks of my creative efforts to launch the coming digital magazine. In the process I have (I hope) learned what feels like a doctorate’s worth about new media and immediacy, which can and do exist without sacrifice of integrity and critical discernment that make for strong content. Don’t let anybody tell you ever that content doesn’t matter. Our numbers on this blog spiked up last week to 200 a day. That’s a 100 percent increase. I don’t say this to brag as Internet audiences, as we know, can be fickle, and the question of judging who is seeing you, where they come from, what they think, do they like it? what do they want more of? Well, in this universe of the everyday, these questions are sort of like the kitchen sink, the dinner table, and the crystal palace all combined into one synergy of great service, excellent food, and the conversation that can only tick if all participate. So, consider this my hello for the week to our very valued set of early payer-attentions-to, of which, if you are reading, you are one. Thanks for your support so far. I’ll be back to say more about Marfa. 
read more…
Each year the National Trust for Historic Preservation selects what it considers important examples of the nation’s architectural, cultural and natural heritage that are at risk of being destroyed or irreparably damaged. On April 29, 2009 the list was published in the New York Times.
Below are images of the places at risk in the American West:
Mount Taylor in New Mexico, a sacred site for American Indian tribes whose cultural and archaeological resources are threatened by uranium mining.
The hangar for the Enola Gay at Wendover Airfield in Utah. The Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945.
Cast-iron architecture in Galveston, Tex.
The Human Services Center in Yankton, S.D. Founded in 1879 as the South Dakota Hospital for the Insane, the institution’s collection of neo-Classical, Art Deco and Italianate buildings have long stood vacant, and the state plans to tear down 11 of them.
The Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
Leanne and I have sort of decided Sundays are love your Airstream day. And that made me think: nobody knows what an adobeairstream really is. So, here you go:
Maybe all of the out of work performers in America could perform for those in unemployment lines, play music, make art. At least everyone would be happy for a moment! And who knows where that might lead….
oil on canvas, 63 x 82 ¾ inches (160 x 210,2 cm), Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
Reproduction, including downloading of Rothenberg work is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of the Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York.
On a recent trip to New York I hit the trifecta. The New Mexico trifecta of three artists who live and work either full or part time in New Mexico: Susan Rothenberg, Richard Tuttle and Bruce Nauman.
Rothenberg’s paintings at Sperone Westwater are marvels of color, texture and mark making. Her use of pictorial space and exploration of movement tend to haunt the viewer long after walking away from the images. The disembodied legs, arms and heads of marrionettes seem to swing across heavily textured putty backgrounds. Titles are all that hint at a narrative, and one of emotional and psychological tumult.
Tuttle’s fabric pieces at Pace Wildenstein are lofty and cloudlike and feature his signature use of line. Each of the twelve works on display are 1′ x 10′ made up of two parallel strips of dyed canvas secured to the wall via grommets and nails. Some include rope woven horizontally through the work. An amalgamation of abstract and real. For Tuttle, Walking on Air represents an “expression of elation for the potential for a new beginning, the possibility to rebuild and discover a harmony for existing in the world today.”
An iconic Tuttle paper octagon was also featured in the “The Third Mind” at the Guggenheim.
Speaking of iconic, Carlos Basualdo, curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and co-curator for the Pavilion of the United States at the 53rd La Biennale di Venezia seems to think Bruce Nauman is himself an icon. “Nauman is one of the most influential artists alive–American or non American.” Basualdo said during the Biennale press conference at the Italian Cultural Institute.
Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens is the official United States represenation at the Biennale and will offer a thematic view of the work that Nauman has produced over the past four decades, including video, installation, performance, sculpture and neon. The presentation will include seminal works by Nauman and will premiere a new sound installation by the artist. Nauman’s work will be spread across three locations: The US Pavilion at the Giardini dell Biennale, Universita luav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Universita Ca Foscari.
As a teaser, this Untitled work from 1965 and this sculpture from 1966 are currently on display at MOMA.
On May 2 Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences hosts the first annual New Mexico Education Launch. Students from New Mexico universities and high schools have contributed work on sensors to the rocket. Tune in at 7 a.m. mountain time this Saturday for a live feed of the launch preparations and launch.
Increasingly New Mexico and west Texas are the place for space. Among the developments: For three years in a row culminating last October the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge was held in Las Cruces, NM. Robots made ready to hover over the lunar surface hovered for prize purses over the New Mexico surface.In January Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s company, became the official first anchor tenant of the Spaceport (recent pictures at the end of this post) near TorC. The spaceport, soon to begin taking construction bids for its design by British architect Sir Norman Foster, offers to send the likes of you, me and Rose into preorbital disarray for several hundred large. And: with the constantly-permutating X Prize reflecting mindbending liaisons between industry and creative innovators, the future is cracking open to boisterous competition in service of humanity’s future. The X Prize’s latest contest announced last year (sponsored by Progressive Auto Insurance) has 111 registered teams working to design a production car that will perfect fuel efficiency at 100mpg. Why, when swine flu is grabbing all the news, and people’s mood of thumb generally dour, does nobody talk about the promise of technological development for our region? (Evidently the other byte stealing the rocket fire is that Lance Armstrong’s comeback after a broken collarbone finds him racing in the Gila with his team). 
Spaceport America designs, and a thumbnail of how earth looks seen from way high.
The best new gallery space in Denver is Plus Gallery at 2501 Larimer Street in the ballpark neighborhood. Owned by Ivar Zeile, the gallery has been operating since 2001, but moved into their new space (pictured below) in March.
On April 24, the gallery opened a solo exhibition of urban ambler Jean Arnold’s movement paintings.
“Onrush” is a series of oil paintings taken from Arnold’s sketchbook. When she travels, whether by bus or train, drawing allows her to gather visual information that is in a state of flux, contextualizing urban clutter. Arnold re-interprets her journeys on canvas, distilling specific portions of her sketchbooks into segments with cultural and compositional value. Her gestural techniques promote a broad, dynamic color range, converting her notes into forms that balance between the recognizable and the purely abstract. Several of the works on display were taken from sketches done during a previous visit to Denver. The work addresses issues of urban sprawl that are prevalent in cities like Denver and, as Arnold says, “essentially define our lives at this time.”
The geometric and colorful abstract paintings convey a dense layering of geography and complexity. Through her work Arnold breaks down barriers of time and space.
Arnold is currently in residence at RedLine an urban contemporary art laboratory in Denver. A talk with Jean in her studio at RedLine is tentaviely set for Thursday, May 7. She’ll present an artist talk in conjunction with her Residency at Redline next Friday, May 8th starting at 5:30pm, followed by a stroll over to Plus Gallery to hear her thoughts relating to the work on view here.
UPDATE: Jean Arnold will be in attendance Friday, May 1 at Plus Gallery. Plus Gallery will be open late till 8pm for First Friday.
Which do you prefer? This?
or This?
Yardbirds, Doors, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 1967, Bonnie MacLean.
Moby Grape, Chambers Brothers, Winterland/Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 1967, Wes Wilson.
Judith H. Dobrzynski takes the Denver Art Museum to task on her blog Real Clear Arts. She questions why the museum did not agree to host their former curator R. Craig Miller’s show “European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century.” An expansive exhibit she reviewed in the Wall Street Journal calling it “exactly the kind of show serious museums should be doing. It’s ambitious, it’s rooted in scholarship, it’s aesthetically interesting, and it’s displayed well.”
Read her full post by clicking on the hyperlink below:
http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/2009/04/denver-and-design.html
The exhibit is currently on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and will travel the High Museum in Atlanta and perhaps a venue in Europe. The Denver Art Museum claims to be a partner in presenting this show, but according to Miller: “The Denver museum did not view his show as a big draw.”
So what does the museum consider a big draw? Well, Instead of a 250 item design exhibit that looks forward to where design is going, Denver Art Museum’s new design curator Darrin Alfred has put together a show currently on display that looks backward:”The Psychedelic Experience, Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-71.”
Other temporary exhibits at DAM this year? Charles M. Russell through September 2009 and a show called “New and Noteworthy: The Hopkins Family Quilt in Context,” through December 31, 2009. Wow! How exciting! I’m sure both of those will be “a big draw!”
By David D’Arcy
Modernism’s deepest and broadest penetration in the United States was in southern California, from the 1930s to the 1960s. No one has recorded this architectural era as admirably and admiringly as the photographer Julius Shulman, who at an energetic 98 is the subject of a film about the relationship between photography and the built modernist environment around Los Angeles. Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman — a film by Eric Bricker — will screen Sunday at the Marfa Film Festival, which begins today.
Los Angeles and Palm Springs never looked so good.
If it weren’t for Shulman, the taste for modernism would not have encouraged so much of that architecture to have been commissioned. Now that the same work is threatened by the usual suspects – developers — Shulman as photographer and activist is also crucial to preserving many of those structures that are still standing.
Visual Acoustics has been playing at festivals for a year now. I saw it at the International Festival of Film on Art in Montreal (FIFA) , the most important event of its kind in the world, where you can see dozens of films on architecture and design that are unlikely to play at a theater near you.
Visual Acoustics was one of the few exceptions to that rule at FIFA. It has a commercial distributor. read more…
