My Father's Subway Stop

There was an amazing piece of art in the Greenpoint subway yesterday morning. My father's stop on the G line...


gothamist.com

I love this. I'm not quite convinced of the paper towel imagery -- but I really like the concept and the execution.

The thing about public conversation, though, is that... well... the public gets involved.

Here's a comment from AnnonEMouse

"Why are there such pointless idiots living in Brooklyn? Why? All that's gonna happen is those papertowels are gonna litter the entire platform --or worse be used to clean noses & butts-- and then disposed of on the tracks to create fires just in time for rush hour..."

Pointless idiots. One could say this of all artists, really -- couldn't one? Just littering the streets... filling the world with more pages and pages of waste.
Idiots.
The word idiot is a little contagious...

"What kind of idiot knowingly moves into an area on top of a oil spill?
This wasn't a big secret, tards. We've known about it for years. Thats what happens in a district that used to contain oil refineries." jaja007

I suppose I'm a little defensive. And a little annoyed. Defensive because not everyone chose to live there, of course. In this sentence seems such the clear disposal of the people who lived there before the gentrification -- and still live there. I was amazed at how much polish there was there still -- people still speaking it in the streets and in the stores -- young people, children. Furthermore, the only reason anyone cares at all now is because of the desirable land -- the view of Manhattan -- the proximity to the city.

I was at a poetry reading last night, and out to dinner after I was talking with my friend about one of the poems in the program -- wasn't it tongue in cheek, he said... the poem talked about the misfortunes of a family in poverty in Gloucester Massachusetts. The poem laughed at pregnancy and alcohol and drugs and poverty. I know, I sound like such a stick in the mud. "maybe he lived there," said my friend. Maybe -- but he didn't live there -- live there as in understand and reside.

The obvious exclusion in both of these conversations is the fact of lack of choice and alternative for so many people. And not just the lack of choice -- the way that the people without choice simply disappear in the sentence
as if they didn't exist.

Who moves there? Idiots. Who lives there...

This is what Nassau Avenue (or near) looked like when my father was little.


brooklynpix.com

Paint It Black

Last week, a famous British Columbian painter, Robert Bateman, posted a video on Youtube called "Not a Pretty Picture." Bateman has spent his life painting the landscape and wildlife of Northern Canada -- his paintings are in the Smithsonian, and without going too far into it I found one painting listed in an on-line auction for $90,000. They are lovely.



The purpose of the video is to try to prevent the passage of oil tankers through the region. In the video, the 78 year-old artists paints his own painting black.



According to an article in the Vancuver Sun last week,

"Fears over tanker traffic in B.C. waters have escalated since Enbridge Inc. last month rekindled plans for a $4-billion pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat.

If the pipeline is approved, the port would be expanded and crude oil shipped by tanker to overseas markets."

I'll look more into the exploration in BC another morning, but right now I am simply transfixed by this video in which the painter takes one of his own images of the magnificent water way -- filled with whales and birds -- and paints it black.

"We have to think about what can happen to thousands of organisms if there is an oil spill, and we know these can be treacherous waters, from what happened to the Queen of the North and the Exxon Valdez," Bateman said."

Okay -- it looses something -- well, a lot -- to find out the depicted "Orca Procession" a reproduction.

"The picture on the easel is a print, not the original, he admitted slightly reluctantly. It is, however, a digitally reproduced limited edition, probably worth a couple of thousand dollars."

But I love this.

For one thing, he paints beautifully, even as he tries to be ugly with it. His strokes are elegant and his work comes through even here. It's such a violent thing -- the covering over and the blanketing -- an allusion to the image of the landscape after the Valdez spill. Rocks coated, birds coated, a wildlife destroyed.

One of the comments on Youtube said, "oil is a natural substance. The Exxon Valdez disaster was one of the largest so called spills and as little of time as 19 years you have a full recovery. Why? because crude oil is a natural substance. If this substance bubbles up from the bottom of the ocean floor then what. I say lets burn and use as much as possible before it comes to the surface, including off the coast of BC."

But of course, this isn't true. The land and the lifestyle there was devastated and has never returned to what it was. I read somewhere the other day that Exxon is the single most profitable corporation in the history of the free market.

By the way, I looked into oil paint ingredients a few months ago -- vegetable oil; usually linseed, I believe.

Robert Bateman's site is at
http://www.robertbateman.ca/art/arttitlepage.html
The Youtube video is here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKVRuelvJ-s

Dots... Conecting The

From The Washington Post this morning:

"There is no single conspiracy theory about why the Bush administration allegedly waged this "war for oil." Here are two.

Version one: Bush, former Texas oilman, and Vice President Cheney, former chief executive of the contracting and oil-services firm Halliburton, wanted to help their friends in the oil world. They sought to install a pro-Western government that would invite the major oil companies back into Iraq. "Exxon was in the kitchen with Dick Cheney when the Iraq war was being cooked up," says the Web site of a group called Consumers for Peace.

Version two: As laid out in an April 2003 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, "The war against Saddam is about guaranteeing American hegemony rather than about increasing the profits of Exxon." Yahya Sadowski, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, argues that "the neo-conservative cabal" had a "grand plan" to ramp up Iraqi production, "flood the world market with Iraqi oil" and drive the price down to $15 a barrel. That would stimulate the U.S. economy, "finally destroy" OPEC, wreck the economies of "rogue states" such as Iran and Venezuela, and "create more opportunities for 'regime change.' ""

That article prints the following images from this website:





(in the interest of full disclosure, unrelated and unbeknown to me, one of the images from this site, "iRaq" not shown here, will appear in the next issue of Tuesday; An Art Project."

Another image on the site was this:



This Image from the NYTimes a few weeks ago, under the headline "Struggling but Grateful, Liberia Welcomes Bush."


photo by Lawrence Jackson, AP

“It’s easier to tear a country down than it is to rebuild a country,” Mr. Bush said in a speech at the Barclay Training Center, where the United States is helping to train soldiers so Liberia can replace United Nations peacekeepers with its own army. “And the people of this good country must understand the United States will stand with you as you rebuild your country.”

The last time I wrote about Africa Elisa, who works for Care, sent me to a website called "Pambazuka News, a weekly forum for social justice in Africa." I was writing about the praise for Bush in Africa, and how it concerned me. Them too.

"The Bush Administration's fixation on security and the "war on terror" is already escalating the militarization of U.S. policy in Africa in 2008. In his last year in office, President George W. Bush will no doubt duplicitously continue to promote economic policies that exacerbate inequalities while seeking to salvage his legacy as a compassionate conservative with rhetorical support for addressing human rights challenges including conflict in Sudan and continued promotion of his unilateral HIV/AIDS initiative. The third prong of U.S.-Africa policy in 2008 will be the contin- ued and relentless pursuit of African resources, especially oil, with clear implications for U.S. mili- tary and economic policy."

Just a connect the dots project today. What more is there to say...

Keep Your Mouth Shut

I started out today reading about -- trying to figure out how to write about -- a rather discouraging court case.

Appeals Court Overturns EPA on Mercury Emissions By Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer Feb. 8--A federal appeals court ruled today that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrongly exempted power plants from curtailing mercury emissions, which means the agency must now develop new rules to fight mercury pollution.

According to the article, the EPA was set to impose some regulations, the exemptions within the new law were too great to allow. It seems that energy producing plants were exempt from the legislation. For one thing, when coal is refined, mercury is released as a vapor.

Mercury becomes airborne when coal is burned. Once it falls into waterways, it becomes methylmercury, which is more toxic and works its way through the food chain into fish. It can cause nervous-system damage in a developing fetus and young children.

...

"Ironically, with their aggressive litigation posture, the environmental community and their state allies have again caused uncertainty and delay in regulating mercury," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. The EPA "essentially must return to the drawing board in developing a new mercury rule," he said.

In college I wrote about the propaganda art of the Soviet Union -- how it communicated strength and power. Dictatorships need to communicate this way to keep order among the masses.



Keep your mouth shut!
N. Vatolina, N. Denisov, 1941

Strength and power and fear.
A few months ago I was tired of listening to myself talk. I think today I'm tired of listening to everyone else talk. The language of propaganda seems to attempt to elicit emotion -- but seems today to me to be more an imposer of powerlessness...

This from George Bush Sr. -- on my birthday in 1988:

Vice President Bush, campaigning in the Northwest, has been urging greater domestic oil production and arguing that it can be achieved without endangering the environment.

For the end of this post I wanted to find a quote where George Bush Jr. said something nice about the environment, but I couldn't find one.

Mud, Salt Crystals, Rock, Water

It's always a relief when art comes to me in this project. It's only happened a few times, but always, it seems, serving the purpose art ought to -- giving room for breath and reflection on beauty and some piece of human condition...



Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water...

The Spiral Jetty was created by Robert Smithson the year before I was born. An article was written in the times in 2002, when the sculpture began to emerge from water --

The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson's ''Spiral Jetty'': 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rosé red from algae.

I studied the work in college.
I was surprised to see it in the Times yesterday.

It seems that oil drillers want to drill nearby. Art lovers are concerned that this will disrupt the 38 year old masterpiece.

Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, issued a statement calling the jetty “a significant cultural site” and saying that the trust was “deeply concerned about the potential harm that energy development could bring” to it.

Sometime we feel things completely out of kilter with what we think we are going to...
I'm annoyed. I wonder if there were 900 letters written in Brooklyn -- I wonder if there were 900 letters written in Alaska...

Traveling cross-country in 1992 - not long after studying the Spiral Jetty in Art History -- I went to Utah. I hadn't really planned to go to Utah -- actually it was a trip created to plan much of nothing; I was traveling alone with my dog, camping and doing whatever I felt like from one day to the next. I ate a lot of spicy cheddar cheese, I remember -- I took a lot of pictures. Anyway -- I'd spent about three weeks in the four corners, and I was overcome with land-lock. I figured any where named after a lake must be wetter than where I was. So I drove up to Utah. When I got there, all there was was a huge valley of salt. It might have been beautiful if I hadn't have been so disappointed.

When Smithson built the Spiral Jetty there were deserted oil rigs in his landscape. They have since disintegrated -- but they were there. Anywhere people gave up, they will go back to now. Now we go back in desperation...

The idea that people would make a choice against oil drilling for art -- well,
I'm not sure if I think they should --
but in the scope of the dangers we are ignoring -- I'm quite sure they won't.

Environmental art is supposed to interact with nature, with time, with people and what goes on around it. It is not supposed to be in a museum. Not that I'm for oil drilling at all -- but somehow this preservation movement seems contra-intent to me.

And in a way, disrespectful for all the real death and sickness we are causing. So typically human and narcissistic that we should be concerned with the preserving of what we have put atop the earth -- in this time when we are so damaging the earth itself... damaging the very course of nature...

I'm teaching Frankenstein right now -- butchering it, perhaps -- people keep telling me what a mediocre novel it is. I don't think so -- I think that Shelly is talking about creating and exploration and refusal of responsibility in a way that is entirely important.

That's Entertainment

Two days ago, after spending half the night up with a screaming, in-pain child, this household did something entirely decadent it almost never does -- we all sat around (for kind of a really long time) in our pjs watching Saturday Morning cartoons. If you haven't tried it lately, I highly recommend it...

The best cartoons are on Discovery Kids. In one of our favorites, "The Future is Wild," a group of kids flies through the future, searching through space for a sustainable energy source for earth. Last week they landed somewhere (I haven't quite got the show down yet...) where there were dinosaur-like beasts lumbering around. The kids honed-in on a tremendous energy source and followed their equipment (and a horrible smell) to a gigantic dinosaur graveyard...

This reminded me of a trend I've been noticing lately:
Oil is all over the arts.

Movies, TV, Theater... I think this may be as big a deal as Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize; I really do. It's easy to ignore the news and the world -- but once things move onto the stage and screen, awareness is infiltrated. Connection and communication are never stronger than in the entertainment industry, because nobody has to work at anything... When we are distracted by what we truly enjoy, our bodies take over and our minds open.

Furthermore, it's perfectly possible that no progress can be made without a little fun!

Happy New Year.

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published in The New York Times: December 26, 2007

“There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.

***

★ ‘PUMPGIRL’ This fiercely observed, unsentimental work by the Irish playwright Abbie Spallen alternates the monologues of three downtrodden figures: a female gas station attendant, her oafish lover and his neglected wife. The powerfully acted, bare-bones production emphasizes the staggering force of good storytelling (2:00). Manhattan Theater Club at City Center, Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212. (James)

***

‘TINGS DEY HAPPEN’ An engrossing one-man show about the Fulbright year its author and performer, Dan Hoyle, spent in Nigeria; in the spirit of theatrical journalism, it is at once a travelogue, a cultural survey and a good introductory course in oil politics. But it is the people the audience meets who raise the exercise above a guided tour (1:25). Culture Project, 55 Mercer Street, SoHo, (212) 352-3101. (Hampton)

***

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Published in The New York Times: December 19, 2007

The Hungarian cartoon feature “The District!” is a last-minute shoo-in for the title of 2007’s most original animated film, no small triumph in a year that also included the releases of “Persepolis,” “Ratatouille,” “Beowulf” and “Paprika.”

The movie is a sexually explicit, scabrously funny portrait of multiethnic European urban culture, similar to Ralph Bakshi’s early-1970s adults-only animated movies “Fritz the Cat” and “Heavy Traffic,” but richer and more coherent than either of those. It’s set in contemporary Budapest, where a group of streetwise Hungarian teenagers use a time machine (invented by their school’s resident nerd genius) to travel back to the prehistoric era and bury mammoths beneath what will eventually become their city’s streets.

Tapestries

I guess I'm looking for a little relief -- the stories are heavy, the narration is heavy, the idea that we are perpetually stuck in the past -- very un-new year-esque, if you ask me.

Today in the Real Estate section of the times is a story about a couple who turned their home into an artist in residence haven.

One of their artists in residence turns oil drums into lace!

In a series Cal Lane calls simply "oil drum tapestries" she makes what was heavy light -- communication created through space, through removal, negative space and the juxtaposition of what is heavy and light, laden and frivolous. What is beautiful. What is possible, even from debris.

She coats tires in powdered sugar, and makes intricate weaving out of dirt. Rust prints -- tomato paste paintings.

Nothing is permanent. Everything can be changed -- everything will change -- will change with the elements and time.

Take a look at her website!

http://www.callane.com/#