fyi for folks in Atlanta...or those few who still read this blog, anyway

Another year having gone by without a completely satisfactory solution to communicating art information to the various non-overlapping art audiences in metro Atlanta (despite the best efforts of the several online sources to remedy the situation), I am once again volunteering to put out the basic info re the first-weekend-in-December sale by the artists' studios in the Little Five Points Community Center. Perhaps someone will read it who shops at studio sales.

Tom Meyer's bio is deserving of quotation (as his photos are deserving of acquisition, but that accolade would go for any of the artists in the studio sales): "T.W. Meyer: 'I have been using a camera seriously since about 1976. I am a geezer. A geezer/hipster. Charming, capricious in word and harmless in deed, prone to solitary activity but witty and gregarious at a party (lala!). Boringly trusted by women young and old, a harmless flirt free of embarrassing ulterior motives (apparently).' www.twmeyerphoto.com, twmeyer.com and on Facebook (Tom Meyer)"

- - - - -

Four Euclid Arts Collective Studios, Ten Local Artists

Hold Holiday Open Studio Tour & Art Sale 1st Weekend in December

at Little 5 Points Community Center in Inman Park



Studio 102, Studio 204, Studio 207 & “Kitchen” Studio

Fri, Dec 4th, 7-9 pm; Sat, Dec 5th, 10 am – 4 pm; Sun, Dec 6th, 12 - 4pm



EAC artists Michelle Jordan of Studio 102, Chantal Gadd & Carla House of Studio 204, Henry Leonard of Studio 207 and TW Meyer of the ‘Kitchen” Studio will open their studio doors to the public and display their work along with several local guest artists, including Cathryn P. Cooper, Yvonne Dauria, Susan McCracken, Becky Sizemore and Christine Stanton.



Come tour four separate working art studios, meet local artists, and view a wide variety of artwork, including ceramic sculpture, watercolor and oil paintings, fiber & acrylic on canvas and other mixed media, photography, paper collage, gourd vessels, hand-made glass beads, ornaments, bookmarks, jewelry, stained glass and hand-woven wearables.



Free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Michelle Jordan at (404)759-0851 or michelle@jordanclaystudio.com

comments to come re Frank Hunter's photos

It seems appropriate on Friday the Thirteenth to reflect on the ill luck attending Frank Hunter's current show at Thomas Deans; a very distinguished guest (distinguished, so obviously it was not me) came by at the one moment when an emergency resulted in the gallery being closed for a brief period; the photos themselves, which take the platinum-palladium print medium firmly into the twenty-first century, lose their impact almost entirely when rendered in tiny low-res format online (but for those who know how to see, they can be viewed on the Thomas Deans and Company website).

Fortunately, the "Iowa Signs" series will be on the walls through Thanksgiving, but they need contextualization both in terms of art history (the compositions are more reminiscent of historic etchings than of contemporary photographs, in spite of being night shots of illuminated billboards) and in terms of scale: the image of a billboard silhouetted in its own lights with a bolt of lightning arcing horizontally across the dark sky above it requires a certain size to achieve its impact. Reproduced without the richness of the platinum-palladium print and in a tiny format, the "Iowa Signs" photographs feel like the Old Master paintings reproduced on Christmas stamps.

I hope to be able to write a sensible review helping readers to see what is in the miniature images available online, and I understand that Thomas Deans is writing a few paragraphs setting the work in historical context.

The contemporary context needs to be spelled out: there is a mini-history of photographs of billboards (including Gregor Turk's color images of desolate blank billboards), and Hunter's particular camera angles that situate his billboards in dramatically lightless settings is at once realistic and surrealistic—which itself is part of a contemporary tradition. If his photographs of forests and mountain glades hark back to a nineteenth century idiom, the "Iowa Signs" reach forward towards a twenty-first century one.

multitudes and common wealth or common weal

Jeremy Abernathy presents a mutual-aid challenge worthy of Pyotr Kropotkin at burnaway.org:
http://burnaway.org/2009/11/art-papersstephen-colbert-green-screen-challenge/#more-9368

Speaking of Kropotkin, Rebecca Solnit's new book A Paradise Built in Hell has been getting considerably thoughtful reviews, the one in the New York Review of Books November 5 issue. Sorry, Bill McKibbin's review is only available online to paying electronic subscribers, which even us print-subscriber-types are not:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=23321

how time flies regardless of the given amount of fun you are having at any moment

Sometime in the past couple of weeks I marked, or more accurately did not mark, the 25th anniversary of my first day of proofreading at Art Papers. Thank you, Xenia, though you should have been thanked back in the spring when the 25th anniversary came round for my first published piece of art criticism.

too late is not better than not at all

I have been meaning to write about the problem of exhibitions that cannot be adequately represented online by images. Holle Black's just-closed show at Sandler Hudson is a case in point: the image of Alice here looks insipid if you can't see the faint drawings in pencil and the very thin lines of paint that enliven the basic composition and make it into something quite other than what this photograph only appears to reveal.

If I had had more intelligible notes earlier I might have been able to do something to rescue the situation. As it is, it is a reminder that when it comes to 72 dpi images of paintings, what you see is what you get, but is decidedly not all there is.

Since galleries cannot afford the high-tech magnifications that museums can post that show more detail than the viewer in the museum itself can see, I am not sure what the solution to this except better online art criticism.

Chi Peng at Kiang

When I was an undergraduate back in the Early Pleistocene, the junior-year Asian Studies course everybody had to take included Arthur Waley's translation of Monkey, extracted from the monumental Chinese novel The Journey to the West. The novel is an episodic adventure based on the real-life journey of Hsuan Tsang (here known as Tripitaka) to India to acquire and translate the Buddhist scriptures that were lacking in China when the religion was first introduced.

This setup allowed for the invention of traveling companions and hazards that were the distant ancestors of the genres that evolved into today's Chinese action flicks.

I subsequently spent years wanting to know more about the real Hsuan Tsang (Arthur Waley's book on the topic was unavailable to me in those long-gone pre-internet days) and forgot about Monkey until my friend from college Larry Schulz translated the sequel novel The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, which had been written during the Ming Dynasty to explain how Tripitaka's ill-tempered companion the Monkey King could attain enlightenment while violating every credo of the Buddhist canon in his furious protection of the traveling monk.

This long digression explains why Larry and I are supposed to be among the discussants at 2 p.m. Saturday Oct 17 at Kiang Gallery, regarding Chi Peng's 21st-century photo update of The Journey to the West.

This much-discussed young Chinese artist has digitized satirical comments on today's journey to the West, with elaborate set-up scenarios in which Buddhist dialectics have been replaced by The Matrix (which of course is a Buddhist-inspired movie also dependent on the tropes and genre conventions of Chinese action flicks) and the internet has become the web of conditioned origination in which the commodity fetish...just as Marx said it would...no, actually, I'm writing nonsense just to be mischievous, which is much in the spirit of Chi Peng's brilliant digital and thematic manipulations.

If you've seen one, you haven't seen them all, because the visual sources that are transmuted vary from the conventions of scroll painting to the conventions of moviemaking to...well, go and see.

also not for my profit, except indirectly

Those within easy driving distance should contemplate patronizing Café Cliche, in the downtown Decatur building formerly also housing Little Azio. Not only is there considerable free parking (especially now that Café Cliche, which sells pastries and sandwiches, is the building's only tenant) but the ambiance is pleasant and I am often the only customer.

A reasonably priced wi-fi spot with available seating is a terrible thing to waste.