Today's final edition of Saturday Sharing for 2011 offers an animation of a John Siddique poem and a video feature on choreographer Bill T. Jones, plus links to Eric Fischer's beautiful maps of Twitter's language communities, Wave Book's Erasures poetry project, the Library of Congress's wonderful new ViewShare platform, and two sites where you can pin poems to Google maps.
✭ My friend the poet John Siddique has now completed his animated series "year of full moons" with the release of "Yew Moon - We Are Russian Dolls to Ourselves", from his collection Recital, which I reviewed here. Enjoy!
✭ Eric Fischer has posted on Flickr his beautiful mappings of the language communities of Twitter; the map colors correspond to languages typed on Twitter. The Big Think posted a feature about the maps and what they tell us.
✭ Introduce yourself to the erasure process at Wave Books, an independent poetry press in Seattle, Washington. As conceived, the online project allows you to select a source text and, through a process of "disappearing" words or punctuation marks, create a new "sculpted text" or poem. You may save the program to the project archive, or print or e-mail it. Currently, there are more than 3,000 erasure poems available to view.
✭ The Library of Congress has launched a wonderful new site: ViewShare: Interfaces to Our Heritage, described as "a free platform for generating and customizing views (interactive maps, timelines, facets like a search box, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections." The site's facilities work with spreadsheets and other record types, allow you to import and upload your own collections, and also copy-paste and embed interfaces in any Web page. For an introduction to how ViewShare works, view the Screencast.
✭ Don't let your poems go unmapped. With Google maps in place, you can now pin poems to place at Poetry Atlas or Poetry4U. The former site boasts "thousands" of poems about places (browse by poet name and poem title or first line, or search by location), while the latter allows you to post your own Twitter-length inspirations to a Google map. (My thanks to Harriet the Blog for the links.)
✭ I was privileged to see the premiere of choreographer Bill T. Jones's "Fondly Do We Hope. . . Fervently Do We Pray", which honors the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln. I found it an engrossing piece of dance-theatre. Last month, American Masters broadcast Bill T. Jones: A Good Man, a chronicle of Jones's creation of this and other work. In the following video interview, Jones talks briefly about his creative process and inspiration. For screening information, go here.
✦ For a "very personal" talk about Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993), a painter known for his "sensitivity to light and color of a particular place", take an hour off during the holidays and enjoy this excellent podcast by Diebenkorn's daughter, Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant.
While speaking about her father's drawings and other artworks, as well as gifts such as hand-made cards for family members, Diebenkorn Grant remarks on Diebenkorn's "fantastic" sense of humor, delight in useful objects, and comfort "going in and out of fantasy." She also addresses how he taught her to see, especially variation in color. Her comments on her father's "aggressive, active involvement" with a work, how "physically involved [Diekbenkorn was] with the paint and canvas", and how he "used the strength of his hands to express his ideas" are particularly interesting. Also noteworthy are three of 10 notes on beginning a painting: "Do search but in order to find other than what is searched for." "Mistakes can't be erased but they move you forward from your present position." "Tolerate chaos." A "very opinionated" man who "valued his own autonomy" and resisted all labels, Diebenkorn, says his daughter, "was interested in evidence of changes a work went through as it evolved". He basically worked 365 days a year, she notes. "He was always working because he was always looking and deeply noticing." His work, she adds, is "a series of intimate spaces the viewer is allowed to enter."
✦ In late October I featured in an All Art Friday post a video of Gerhard Richter that showed the artist using giant squeegees while painting. The Tate Modern posted on its blog this fascinating conversation with painting conservator Rachel Barker about how Richter makes his artwork. Images of a trio of marvelous work are shown. (My thanks to Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes for his link to the Tate blog.)
✦ Do take some time in the virtual Reading Room at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which offers a remarkable collection of art-related materials, such as exhibition catalogues, monographs, and other publications, on European art, German Expressionism, and, most recently, the wonderful Pacific Standard Time initiative.
Exhibitions Here and There
✭ The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting through January 22, 2012, "Glenn Ligon: America", a retrospective mid-career exhibition of approximately 100 paintings, prints, photography, drawings, and sculptural installations, including previously unknown early material and the reconstruction of such works as the "Door" paintings, the coal dust "Stranger" canvases, and the "Coloring" series. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which appeared earlier this year at the Whitney in New York City.
In conjunction with the show, Ligon (b. 1960) took time to talk about his work (see video) for which he draws on American history, literature, and society. I found particularly interesting his comments on Robert Mapplethorpe and about Ligon's own "Coloring" series, a reinterpretation of images of civil rights leaders in coloring books from the 1960s and 1970s.
✭ In New York City, take some time for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of Diego Rivera's "Murals for the Museum of Modern Art", on view through May 14, 2012. The last Rivera retrospective at the museum was 80 years ago; the current show brings together five "portable" murals Rivera created for the 1931 exhibition. Among the murals presented are The Uprising, Electric Power, Pneumatic Drill, Frozen Assets, and Indian Warrior. Here's a brief video introduction to the exhibition:
In addition to the murals, the exhibition includes full-scale drawings, working drawings, archival materials related to the commission and production of the murals, and Rivera's design for Rockefeller Center's mural, Man at the Crossroads(listen to the audio recordings here and here). The MoMA, the sole venue for the exhibition, has issued a catalogue, Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art by Leah Dickerman and Anna Indych-Lopez (2011) that includes 128 illustrations.
Diego Rivera, Agrarian Leader Zapata, 1931
Fresco, 7' 9-3/4" x 6' 2"
The Museum of Modern Art/Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
If you can't get to the Big Apple, don't miss the audio recordings available on the exhibition site. Go here and browse the playlist to the right.
✭ Artworks by poet Elizabeth Bishop have been much in the news this year, and those of you who might have missed the earlier exhibitions of her work in celebration of the centennial of her birth, take heart. New York City's Tibor de Nagy Gallery is running through January 21 a show of her watercolors and gouaches, in addition to several assemblages and constructions reminiscent of Joseph Cornell. Titled "Elizabeth Bishop: Objects & Apparitions", the show also features paintings by Gregorio Valdes and John Ferren, and an early Calder print. Two family portraits and an inherited landscape are included. A 48-page book with contributions from writers Dan Chiasson, Joelle Biele, editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, and Lloyd Schwartz accompanies the exhibition.
Also of interest: "From Pens to Brushes", Critical Analyical Essay by Davis Nguyen
✭ The Indianapolis Museum of Art has mounted "Universe Is Flux: The Art of Tawara Yusaku". On view through April 1, this is the first large-scale show of the contemporary Japanese painter's gorgeous and expressive work, which is primarily in ink on paper. This video is an introduction to the artist (1932-2004) and the exhibition, which features 77 works. A catalogue accompanies the show.
Go here to see a collection of Yasaku images dating from the early 1990s to 2002.
✭ The Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, is showing until January 15 "Dark Matters: Shadow_Technology_Art". The exhibition, which includes a commissioned installation, The Veil, by Korea's Ja-Young Ku and work by nine other artists, examines the effects of scientific, digital, and mechanical invention on visual culture.
✭ The first French retrospective for fascinating Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, comprising 150 works, including paintings and soft sculptures, from 1949 to 2011, continues at Centre Pompidou through January 9. This video from Vernissage TV is a walk-through of the show:
Since 1976 my work has used human perceptual processes
as subject, content, and the driving vehicle for [my] work. . .
All of the works [rely] on one premise: viewer participation. . .
As the work has matured, materials, context, and perceptual
sequencing have all developed into a more cohesive relationship. . .
The overarching interest throughout has been an underlying
fascination with the spiritual. . . The work continues to ask,
"What is this intangible reality?"
~ Roger Feldman
Take the time to view the many images of site-specific work on award-winning artist Roger Feldman's Website, and you begin to notice the provisions he makes for engaging his viewers: His constructions expose angled walls and curved planes, sloping platforms, tilted stairs, circular ramps, hanging apparatus, fields of different colors that assault the eye, sheathes of fabric, various heights of level or irregular but walkable surfaces, the inclusion of "intentional" components such as natural or constructed sound, video, or movement — all arguing for not only openness to the conceptual vision behind each piece, which may be room-size and made of wood, concrete, mortar, steel, sheetrock, paper, or mixed media, but also for visual, perceptual, and even spiritual connection, or what Feldman describes in his biographical notes as "kinesthetic experiences", tensions, and vulnerabilities. Also evident is the obvious care with which Feldman situates each artwork in its respective environment to promote and take full advantage of interactions with viewers. There are rewards to be had in just looking closely but greater rewards are to be experienced when you step into, onto, or around one of Feldman's sculptures.
Feldman's interesting charcoal-on-metal, pastel-on-metal, and pastel-on-wood-and-mortar drawings are full of movement and seem to experiment with illusion and scale. His digital work is wonderfully textured like collage, frequently arresting in color, and, perceptually, playful; you're impelled to look deeper, go under or through the surface.
Feldman, who makes his home in Seattle, Washington, currently is constructing an installation on the grounds of Freswick Castle in Scotland. The castle, built on the foundations of a 12th Century Viking settlement, an important archeological site, engages an international community of artists through conferences, exhibitions, retreats, and other creative initiatives sponsored or supported by The Wayfarer Trust. In the 13:48-minute documentary, EKKO, below, Feldman's seen discussing the site and what he wants the work to accomplish. He will complete his artwork, made entirely of stone, in 2012.
Feldman's installations can be found around the United States, including in Anchorage, Alaska; Claremont, Pasadena, and Santa Ana, California; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Rochester, New York; McMinnville, Oregon; and Dallas, Texas; and abroad, including in the United Kingdom and Austria.
My thanks to Transpositions, where I first learned about the documentary. That site's feature on Feldman addresses the issue of "philosophical and religious undercurrents" in the artist's work.
Your violin in its beat black case
takes your shape as I did dream
you, played into silence. I race
for time lost to words without grace,
and hollow. How worn you seem,
like your violin in its beat black case
lashed with leather belts. I could not face
your face tender in hers but did not scheme
against you, only played into silence. I race
the day into night now, try again to trace
to one place my fall from your esteem.
In its corner, your violin in its beat black case
absorbs your every note of my disgrace
you reduced to variations. This one theme
too well you played, and into silence I still race,
forever more that one, fingered and replaced.
What's composed you can't erase, and too extreme's
the screeching of your violin in its beat black case.
From you, even played into silence, I race.
No one is going to mistake this poem as embodying the "sounds of Christmas", unless she suffered a broken heart this season or was listening to Christmas carols played achingly on the violin. The poem is, however, a villanelle and I'm offering it up for TweetSpeakPoetry's call for Random Acts of Poetry, which earlier this month issued a call for work in the form.
Today is the deadline for poems (and for participants in the related PhotoPlay); so, if you've written a villanelle (the challenge is described here), drop a link to your poem on the T.S. Poetry PressFaceBook wall as soon as you can. Your poem, if selected, could end up featured at TweetSpeak or in Every Day Poems.
You'll find my villanelle "Few Precious Words" here.
This poem is my response to today's photo prompt at Magpie Tales. The image is titled "Diamonds" and is from Bert Stern's Marilyn Monroe Collection, "The Last Sitting", comprising more than 2,000 images shot over three days in 1962, six weeks before Monroe's death. The poem's last couplet borrows a bit from this quotation by Stern: "I was preparing for Marilyn's arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her in my arms, but to turn her into tones, and planes, and shapes, and ultimately an image for the printed page."
The photograph and others by Stern (b. 1929) can be seen here and at Magpie Tales, as well as at many other fine art photography sites displaying Stern's work. Stern published a selection of his photographs in 1992 in Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting. In 2008, Stern shot actress Lindsay Lohan as Monroe in "The Last Sitting". (See a New York magazine article about that here.)
Write your own poem or flash fiction response to the prompt, using the image provided, then go here to add your own link and to read the other participants' contributions.
Those who own an iPad or iPhone have a new way to experience the pleasures of reading: eBook Treasures. Created for the British Library by new media agency Armadillo Systems, eBook Treasures aims to bring readers facsimile editions of "the greatest books in the world" now in the collections of prestigious libraries. In using the interactive format, readers will be able to explore text and hear critical commentary about or interpretations of rare and wonderful texts.
All of the books are viewable in full-screen high-definition, and can be read offline after being downloaded. All are available via iTunes. They also may be purchased directly from the eBook Treasures site.
The Fine Books & Collections blog published earlier this month an interview with Michael Stocking of Armadillo Systems. Stocking talks about the creation of eBook Treasures, the process of selecting books to feature, upcoming launches, and plans to extend eBook Treasures to other devices.
Konstantin Bliokh set a number of poet Joseph Brodsky's "Nativity Poems"* to music. In this studio recording for soprano and two guitars, Songs on Nativity Poems by J. Brodsky, op. 27 (2009), you will hear the settings for "Imagine", "Lullaby", "Snow Is Falling", and "No Matter".
* Brodsky wrote a poem every Christmas. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux published in 2002 a bilingual collection of 18 of his Nativity Poems; the book is out of print and available only through resellers. A 2001 review of the collection is here; a 2003 review is here. An audio recording of his "A Season" (translation by Mark Strand) is here.
Today's just-before Christmas issue offers links to PennSounds' Threads Talk Series, the interactive online story Balloons of Bhutan, Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, the Smithsonian Institution Archives Education Page for teachers of K-12, and the new poetry journal Aesthetix. The video feature is the trailer for a documentary, Made in India, about the remarkable phenomenon known as "outsourced surrogacy".
May all my readers enjoy the beauty of this holiday season!
We Feel Fine (Website of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar)
✦ One of the highlights of Westminster Abbey is Poets' Corner in the South Transept. A stone commemorating the late Ted Hughes was placed there December 6, at the foot of the stone memorializing T.S. Eliot.
✦ Browsing online educational content for K-12 students can be time-consuming. If you're a teacher or a parent who enjoys exploring fascinating content with your children, begin with the Smithsonian Institution Archives Education Page. There you'll find online versions of primary sources, from diaries and letters to historic photographs, as well as lesson plans to make the most of the Smithsonian's resources.
✦ A new poetry journal has come online: Aesthetix, which publishes a single featured title in its quarterly issues. Themes to date have been "Red Car in the Future" and "Arrow". Submissions from new and established writers are welcome. Submission guidelines are here. (My thanks to Newpages for the link to the journal.)
✦ Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha have produced an award-winning documentary, Made in India, about the "outsourcing" of surrogacy. The film follows a working-class couple from San Antonio, Texas, in their quest to find a surrogate mother in Mumbai, India. The social, economic, and cultural implications and ramifications of this experience in reproductive surrogacy are profound. Here's the trailer for this extraordinary, thought-provoking film:
The film was screened in Washington, D.C., on December 4 and will premiere in Bangladesh in January. For information on educational or other copies for screening, go here. Interviews and other news features about the film and its topic can be found here.
✦ Devoted to promoting "awesomeness", the worldwide network known as The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences distributes monthly, no-strings-attached cash grants of $1,000 to projects and their creators. To date, projects in the arts, technology, social welfare, and other areas have received these "microgrants" from self-organized chapters formed around topics of interest of geographic areas. Check the FAQs to learn more about the organization and then submit your application.
The Awesome Foundation Blog (The blog includes a variety of posts on projects that have received grants.)
✦ Now a New York City resident, Swedish-born paper sculptor Ivar Theorin is one of a half-dozen artists privileged to participate in the Museum of Arts and Design's program Open Studios: Artists at Work Daily. Theorin takes his inspiration from history, current events, and observations of daily life, using animal forms — fashioned from brown paper, canvas, metal wire, wood, plastic, clay, concrete, and, more recently laptop, video projection, or other technology — to explore the paradoxes of human behavior. Take a few minutes to browse images of his thought-provoking work and if you're in New York City, stop by his studio at the museum.
✦ A book, Jim Denevan: Lake Baikal, and DVD, Art Hard, is now available about land artist Jim Denevan's journey to Lake Baikal, in southwestern Siberia, where Denevan aimed to create the world's largest work of art on a frozen surface (a spiral of circles, along a Fibonacci curve, that grow from 18 inches to several miles in diameter). Short videos of work-in-progress and still photos of the environmental art can be seen at the ANTHROPOLOGiST. Here is one video showing the work on its completion in 2010. It's stunning!
Take some time at Denevan's site to view his land art in sand and earth. I think it rivals Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty", which I love. Denevan also is the founder and organizer of a worldwide moveable feast, "Outstanding in the Field".
Exhibitions Here and There
✭ In Reno, the Nevada Museum of Art is showing through January 15 "The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment". Marking the museum's celebration of its 80th anniversary, the show draws from the museum's own The Altered Landscape Photography Collection, which was founded in the 1990s and numbers more than 900 images. Among the extraordinary photographers whose work is included are Robert Adams, Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, and Fandra Chang. A book of the same title, co-published with Rizzoli, accompanies the exhibition.
David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 13 (Ed. 4/5), 2003 (Printed 2007)
Dye Coupler Print, 48" x 48"
Collection Nevada Museum of Art
The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection
. . . we don't really love technology. . . but we use it
because we're interested in the way that it can help us
to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in
these creatures that we create. And once a creature pops
into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation
is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist
and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move.
~ Aparna Rao of Pors & Rao
Bangalore, India-based artist Aparna Rao (b. 1978), a 2011 TED Fellow, gave a talk in Edinburgh, Scotland, this past summer that will delight you. Rao, who collaborates with Danish artist Soren Pors (b. 1974), re-thinks and re-imagines the ordinary into something that is high-tech, playful, witty, and incredibly creative. Watch as she introduces a few of the duo's creations: the "Uncle Phone" (see image below) that is "so long that it requires two people to use it", an electronics-embedded typewriter that sends her uncle's commands as e-mails, a sound-sensitive installation titled "The Pygmies", and a video installation "The Missing Person" that is equipped with a camera that can follow you and also make you invisible.
Rao has worked since 2004 with Pors, whom she met while on a research scholarship at the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy. Known as Pors & Rao, the couple's multidisciplinary art practice draws on knowledge of mechanical and electronic engineering, programming, and manufacturing. Their work has been shown in Spain, India, Israel, Italy, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Their solo exhibition "Applied Fiction" was earlier this year at the Vadehra Art Gallery in India.
Open a quilt and you open the beginning of a story. The story may be a political statement, a rendering of a moment of personal or national significance, a commemoration of a loved one's birth or death, the marking of sheer delight in the look and feel of fabric. In the United States, where more than 21 million individuals are involved in the thriving $3.6 billion industry, quilts are more than big business; they hold a unique place in American arts and fine craft, history and politics, and education and culture.
A special and important documentary series Why Quilts Matter: History, Art, & Politics takes an in-depth look at the stories quilts tell, the quilters who tell the stories, the scholars who research quilts, the collectors and dealers who buy and sell quilts, and "quilt culture" in America.
Intended for a broad audience, the nine-part series, which is available on DVD and to PBS stations through 2013 (and Kentucky Educational Television through January 2012), was independently produced and funded by the nonprofit Kentucky Quilt Project. KQP, established in 1981 in Louisville, was the first state quilt documentation project (such projects are in nearly every state now), fostering research, exhibitions such as 1992's "Louisville Celebrates the American Quilt", and a range of quilt-related publications and other resources, including the extraordinary Quilt Index, an online resource comprising more than 50,000 records.
At the link for each episode you'll find a summary introduction to each episode and a selection of very brief video previews. Of particular note are the biographies for series participants and especially the Image Resource Guides. The IRGs are downloadable files (in pdf) that provide a complete catalogue of all the quilts and images featured in each episode. The information included with each image is as detailed as possible, with name, maker, date, material used, size, and owner or collection (individual, museum, etc.) noted if available. Funding is being sought to make the guides searchable via Google. The guides are indispensable to anyone viewing the series and anyone who makes quilts, teaches quilt-making, or is interested in the history of quilts.
Here's the trailer for the documentary series:
The series is available to libraries, universities, museums, guilds, craft shows, and educational institutions under public performance rights. See Screening Guidelines for more information.
I wrote this poem in response to a recent Lens blog post at The New York Times that featured the photography of Clara Vannucci, who for several years has been documenting women who are victims of domestic violence and imprisoned at New York City's Rikers Island on abuse charges. Vannucci, who is an assistant to Donna Ferrato, also a photographer and documentarian of domestic violence, has worked inside a European prison as part of a group that uses theatre and photography as tools for change; see some of her remarkable images here. Rikers, which conducts the program "Steps to End Family Violence", does not allow the women to have mirrors, which could be broken and the shards used as weapons, or photographs, which could be used to create fake identification.
The image above is from an exhibition earlier this year at the Montana Museum of Art, "War Torn: The Art of Ben Steele - Paintings and Drawings from the Bataan Death March", comprising 68 drawings and paintings by World War II veteran and Montana artist Ben Steele. Looking at the images and reading of Steele's experiences as a prisoner of Japan during World War II (Steele says art helped him survive the Death March), I was moved to try to write a poem. The italicized words are Steele's own.
This is my response to today's photo prompt at Magpie Tales, where you'll find the 1966 image by the influential photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) that was provided by Tess Kincaid. Join in by writing your own poem or flash fiction, using as inspiration the photo provided, then go here to add your link and to read the other participants' contributions.
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