Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’
Nitty Gritty: Cityscapes & Energy Viewpoints
Anne Marie Schultz: Cityscapes, opens at the Art Association’s Artspace Main & Loft galleries Friday, October 7, 2011. An opening reception begins at 5:30 pm that evening.
Schultz’s Cibachrome prints document the city of Chicago’s myriad venues as they are at the turn of this century. As the changes that inevitably affect cities took place, Chicago’s citizens experienced the city’s demolition of racially segregated public housing, structures built in the 1930′s. Now, Millenium Park is a major Chicago landmark and liberated, diverse celebrations such as the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade are the norm. Schultz utilizes double exposures, solarization of old film and a Holga camera to create a provocative collection of enigmatic, moody cityscapes. Urban life is represented as a slice of fleeting cosmic time and space.
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Two really good—and by “good” I mean expansive and, to my mind, balanced—articles on sustainable energy recently appeared in print. The first relates to global energy use; the second talks about the layers of possibilities and limitations surrounding Wyoming’s wind energy initiatives.
Article #1 is Fareed Zakaria’s review of Daniel Yergin’s new book, “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.” The review appeared in
the New York Times Sunday Book Review section. Zakaria opens with a mention of Bill Gates’ TED Conference remarks on energy. At that conference Gates stated that if he had one wish that would improve the world’s prospects in the next 50 years, he’d wish for an “ ‘energy miracle’”: a new technology that produced energy at half the price of coal with no carbon dioxide emissions.” Yergin’s book, 804 pages, covers the history of oil beginning at the Persian War, going forward to today. The review is fabulous.
Zakaria sums up the book’s purpose. “This book is really trying to answer a question: What will the future of energy look like over the next 50 years?” Zakaria says. “In addressing that issue, Yergin takes on a myriad of other topical questions: Are we running out of oil? Is natural gas the answer? What about shale gas? Is global warming a real danger? Is solar power the answer? He addresses each one of these in a chapter or series of chapters that mix recent history and fair-minded analysis.”
A core assertion is that the United States should spend much more money on energy research, and much less on existing technologies. Al Gore is politely admonished for advancing the view that current technologies are close to pulling us out of the hole.
They are not, Yergin says. Zakaria sums up: “The reason Bill Gates wishes for a technology that creates energy at half the price of coal with no carbon dioxide emissions is that he wants a technology so compelling that it is adopted by poor countries as well as rich ones. Coal is plentiful worldwide, and unless the new technology is much cheaper, China and India will never adopt it. And if these two countries — which together are building four coal-fired power plants a week — don’t get off coal, nothing that happens in the West matters, since the levels of carbon dioxide they will pump into the atmosphere will be well above the danger mark. Half the price of coal and no carbon: That’s a tall order, which is why Gates is looking for a miracle. But what he means is a technological miracle of the kind that happens from time to time. The steam engine, the automobile, the computer, the Internet are all miracles. We need something on that order in energy — and fast.”
A few days after reading this review I had a really nice dream about Bill Gates!
To read Zakaria’s full review, click here. I’ll tell you about article #2 in my next post.
Once in a while we post news about arts other than those that are spatial. This is one of those times. Local writer and activist Cate Cabot, sponsor to visiting filmmaker Malachi Rempen, wrote the following piece on Rempen’s work; he will make an appearance and present selected films at the Jackson Hole Community School on December 1. Rempen will speak at 11:30 am, and again at 5:30 pm.
“Malachi Rempen is a young up and coming talent in the film world. In 2009 he took 1st in the shorts film division at the Santa Fe Film Festival after racking up an impressive series of awards with his thesis film, “La Nina del Desierto” which claimed Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography at Chapman University’s 2009 awards ceremony for the Dodge College of Film. “La Nina del Desierto” went on to receive a Student Emmy in the spring of 2010 and in June of 2010 the film received 1st in the film shorts division at the Reno Film Festival.
Born in Switzerland, Malachi Rempen moved with his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico when he was a baby. There he started making movies at an early age. In high school he directed a film that claimed both 1st and 2nd place in a college festival. We are very lucky to have this talented young man visiting and teaching in our community at this early point in the arc of a most promising career. The Jackson Hole Community School will host a single showing of the award winning film, “La Nina del Desierto” on Wednesday evening, Dec. 1 at 5:30 P.M. The time will include a selection of other film shorts produced by this fine artist. Mr. Rempen will be present to discuss the inspiration of film in his life and the multi-disciplinary aspects of film production. This is free event with an open welcome to community members. Please join us for an evening that will stir the senses, engage the heart, stimulate the mind and inspire for months to come.”
Although the public is welcome to attend the 11:30 am session, Rempen will screen “La Nina del Desierto” only at 5:30 pm.
For information contact Sarah Walter at 307.733.5427, or email swalter@jhcommunityschool.org
Item #2:
On November 26, 2010 the New York Times carried a story on a small Colorado mining community’s division over a proposed Christo installation that, if allowed, would span 42 miles of the Arkansas River in that state. The region, located in south central Colorado, has an economy based primarily on mining–although artists and tourists are beginning to discover it.
Christo’s “Running Fence,” an installation of 25 miles of connected white nylon panels, ran across California’s Sonoma and Marin Counties, terminating on the sea coast. In 2005, Christo’s “The Gates” was mounted in New York’s Central Park. The New York Times called that project a joy and a “gift” to New York City. The installation was a huge success; Christo’s flowing, fluttering installations tend to hold specators spellbound. People experience profound change in the presense of Christo’s art. The Times wrote: “People preened under the unfurled gates, watching the fabric sway. Now one no longer ambles through the park, but rather saunters below the flapping nylon. Paths have become like processionals, boulevards decked out as if with flags for a holiday. Everyone is suddenly a dignitary on parade.”
The Colorado project, “Over the River,” is to be built in ecologically sensitive territory. The land is habitat for bighorn sheep, and the installation would span almost 6 miles along Colorado’s Arkansas River. Years in the making, “Over the River” would remain up only two weeks.
That’s a lot of territorial invasion to see what will no doubt be a visually spectacular but quite temporary public art installation. Any Christo project brings tourism, money to the community, and world-wide recognition. Right now, residents of Salida, Colorado enjoy a certain peace, low rents and an abundance of natural inspiration. If “Over the River” brings torrents of change, will that change be for the long term good?
It depends on what any of us consider “good,” and the fear that many residents have, as the Times reported, that nothing will be the same again.
Good, expertly envisioned and executed public art–on any scale, but particularly a grand scale— is huge for any urban entity. Well concieved projects draw tourism and become immediately identifiable. They are logos, of sorts. But this project as described should not go forward, no matter how visually spectacular. The ratio of excavation/installation time to time up-and-visible is not, in this case, acceptable.
Nicolai Ouroussoff’s March 31, 2010 article in the New York Times Arts Section brings to light a plan to reconstruct Haiti’s urban infrastructure by 
breaking up the population of over-crowded Port-au-Prince into smaller cities. These compact towns, if realized, are termed “smaller urban growth poles,” and could dramatically change Haiti’s economic, social and political future.
If you haven’t already, you can click on the above link and read the entire article. If you are short on time, here’s a bare-bones synopsis:
- The new urban distribution plan centers on the idea that many smaller cities would be established in areas of Haiti least likely to be struck by natural disaster. Port-au-Prince would no longer be the dominant city. Currently, Port-au-Prince has almost no sewage treatment and its building code is “barely two pages long.”
- Ouroussoff says these plans, still being developed, already best early rebuilding plans post-Katrina and post-Tsunami.
- Haiti’s woes go back a century, when America began concentrating trade ops in Port-au-Prince, shutting down other existing Haiti ports. By 1960, François Duvalier shut down any remaining ports in a bid for total political control via a single power base.
- Over 20 years, the city’s population almost doubled, to 3 million people. The “effect of the shift was an urban disaster – one that has put more and more pressure on the capital while draining the provinces of economic opportunity.”
- The quake has made redistribution away from Port-au-Prince’s major fault line and its exposure to landslides and floods a logical step. Thousands of the city’s buildings were destroyed, practically leveling it, as the world has seen. Refugees have fled, moving to other regions
of Haiti. - Planners hope relocation services like hospitals and schools will encourage re-establishment of new urban centers. They propose organizing new buildings around public parks and the like, which would provide sorely needed civic center points. Similar plans would be applied to rural areas, with farms surrounding central core services areas. Public structures would be paid for by the government.
- Light rail is proposed. Earthquake debris (millions of cubic tons) would serve as shoreline landfill, that could be turned into parks.
- One planner noted that “We should think in terms of the city’s urban evolution rather than large-scale development.”
- Haiti planners need access to money and ideas; the University of Miami’s “new urbanism” proponents can advise.
- Ouroussoff ends his article by observing that “….a connection between good urban planning ideas and political realities on the ground was never made (in New Orleans). The best plans went nowhere. Let’s pray that doesn’t happen in Haiti.”
Item #2:
University of Wyoming (UW) Adjunct Professor Nathan Abel’s print exhibition Origins, on display at Teton Art Lab May 7-31, also includes prints produced by members of the UW Print Exchange.
Besides being an accomplished artist, Abel is able to write with languid beauty about his work. Working to connect with a father he has no conscious memory of, Abel incubates his native landscapes, giving them new life that exists in binary-colored melancholy.
“In a time when oral history is diminishing I cling to the histories passed on to me by family members. My interpretation of those memories exist between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Through my work I explore the common ground that I feel I share with my father whom I never consciously knew. I utilize the rural landscape (where I grew up and still feel the most at home) in juxtaposition with integrated personal archetypes. The images exist as a dialogue between memories of the old family farm, photographs my father took, and my own personal narratives.”
Through his printing process, Abel is building what he calls a “dialog of history.”
“Wyoming” connotes thoughts of vast, wind blown space. Memories, in pictorial and written forms, sift their way through the ages. Abel is a highly conscious artist, taking history seriously. This is the true road.
A gloved hand grasping a warm gun. The gloved hand, avec pistol, pushes its way through the back of a steeple-shaped enclosure, and the gun is pointed at…..? The gun barrel is wrapped with what appears to be a barbershop pole spiral; all are framed inside a fire-engine red border.
Hold on, that tiny steeple is flanked by feral, sharp wing formations. Chubby jet propulsion feet set the base.
Hmm. Blows my theory about what this little sculpture may be about…..
It’s all subjective! And that’s the fun.
Found objects are the media of choice for artist John Thompson. His show, Accumulation, is on display in the Artspace Theater Gallery at the Center for the Arts through May 26.
Thompson says he sometimes conjures full works out of thin air. He wakes up and “there they are.” The Art Association describes Thompson’s work as experiments in color, pattern and finishes that come together in artistic statements—perhaps queries, perhaps pure observations–about universal themes: good and evil, positive and negative, decay and belief.
Also on display, in the Artspace Main Gallery through the end of April, is the Art Association’s 2010 Members Only Exhibition. The show is a grass roots, community inspired exhibition of artworks by all Art Association members. Hundreds of works are on display, representing all manner of medium. Come and see what Jackson’s creative community dishes out. It’s great dish!
If you have an idea for a show, submit your proposal to the Art Association by May 2010, to be considered for exhibition space in the Artspace Galleries in 2011. The Art Association’s policy and practice “….considers exhibition proposals on an ongoing basis as part of its mission to encourage a vital, creative community. The free contemporary art exhibition programs presented in the Artspace Main, Loft, Theatre and Lobby Galleries enhance the creative and educational environment of the organization and showcase a balance of local, regional and national artists. The Exhibition Committee of the Art Association considers complete exhibition proposals on a periodic basis.”
Not long ago, on New York’s Lower East Side, the world’s first Art Handlers Olympics took place. An article appeared in the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:
“The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics - a combination roast, “Jackass”-style stunt extravaganza and excuse to drink a lot – drew about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head-to-head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of Bubble Wrap.
“We kind of thought maybe this was the wrong time for this, because everyone who works in this field was worn out from working the Armory Show and everything that goes on around that, but it turned out it was the perfect time, because everybody needed to vent,” Ted Riederer, an artist, former art handler and one of the event’s organizers, said. For some of the events, Mr. Riederer took on the role of a cruel German curator, wearing a tight houndstooth suit and sunglasses, shouting abuse at the handlers like “Nein! Nein!” and “Hold it higher, higher, a little higher!” and “I pay you people to do this?”
dot, dot, dot……..
“Called “The Eliminator,” the final punishing round involved a kind of Nascar-pit-crew competition for the remaining two teams – one named the 
Kings of Cleats and one whose name was a slightly racy double-entendre. The teams had to take pieces of art out of a wooden crate and, with the clock ticking, assemble them into an installation with no instructions or curatorial guidance. (The “art installation” kit consisted of a blanket, a tambourine, streamers, two rattraps and other things that resembled street trash – in other words, the kinds of things many art handlers have actually had to try to assemble by themselves on the job.)
If the time constraints weren’t tough enough, the art handlers were often heckled during this round by onlookers; one shouted “Derivative!” as the artwork was thrown together. Asked if he and his friends had practiced for the event, Paul Outlaw, a member of the team that went home with the silver, said: “Other than doing this all day, anyway, and sometimes all night? No.”
At the end of the day the Kings of Cleats, in an upset, won the gold, a “lovely handcrafted medal,” as the organizers described it, embossed with an image of a hand holding up a majestic flaming tape dispenser. “Plus, of course, they win enduring fame,” said Shane Caffrey, an art handler for the Marianne Boesky Gallery (daughter of Ivan Boesky!) and the event’s lead organizer.
No money?
Mr. Caffrey laughed. “In this business?”
Here in rural Connecticut, I can’t find a ding dang movie theater inside of 12 miles. 
But the New York Times is sold in every nook and cranny; weekends, I get it delivered.
Sitting in bed with the Sunday Times at 7:30 am, watching yet another raging New England gale blast the landscape, is one of life’s great pleasures. Sorry, I’m still a hold-the-paper-in-your-hand kind of girl. When I can be. It’s civilized. And so much more interesting in a sensory way.
I do recycle. And my rabbits, Minnie & Pearl, make good use of old newspaper for certain projects of theirs. We’re efficient with our newspapers, o.k.?
Getting to the point, I want to make a point about the deep devotion the N.Y. Times has towards the arts. It’s HUGE. Of course, it is huge because New York is swimming in arts. You could spend a solid month viewing art in NYC and not come close to seeing everything. More arts there than there are grains of salt in the ocean.
The arts are struggling, but for those cities and towns committed to their arts, they are a giant economic engine. Stop and think. How interesting is any city or town without its arts? Without expression of environment and culture? What would Jackson Hole be without its galleries, without Dancers Workshop, Grand Teton Music Festival, NMWA, the Art Association, the Center? Without pARTNERS? Without Nicole Madison? Without Candra Day? Tina Close? 
Without Rocky Vertone? Without David Swift and Tom Mangelsen and Jon Stuart and the Riddells? Teton Art Lab? Off Square and Jackson Community Theatres? Without venues like the Brew Pub and Pearl St. Bagels and Koshu and Elevated Grounds? Charlie Craighead? Without Missy Falcey, our fabulous Library and its programs and exhibits? Without our movie and playhouses?
We’re already finding out what it’s like without McCandless; we’ve found out what it’s like without other galleries that didn’t make it, and we’ll find out what it is like without a few more.
Well?
I wouldn’t live here. Who’d want to? We’re not exactly ethnically diverse, so there’s no interest there. If town didn’t exist and we were a park only, that would be one thing. But we’re not. We’re an urban center, we’re Wyoming’s equivalent of Connecticut’s Fairfield County. (Hey, I’m a hugely boring WASP…self-deprication here! And actually, Fairfield Co. is now much more ethnically diverse than Jackson…) What can keep us from being just another snow village country club? Art, for one thing. All kinds of art.
This weekend, the New York Times has four sections devoted to the arts. A reflection of a reflection of commitment. Here are a few items from those pages–along with one item from the Travel Section, often packed with arts news from around the globe. (Because when people travel, they usually enjoy visiting regional art and architecture!):
The Whole Earth Catalog: The Prequel. The article reviews “Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe,” on view at the Rubin Museum of Art. Pull quote: “Western science and Eastern religion imagine the beyond.”
Time, the Infinite Storyteller. The article discusses the many ways that great institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes a visitor through time’s linked histories.
Growing Up Biracial Before Obama: Years of Pain and Eventual Progress. A theater review of a one-woman show at the Roy Arias Theater Center.
Nothing about “NINE.”
A 1965 film, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, is on view at MOMA.
George Orwell was born in…India? A small article about restoring the author’s birthplace.
A music review of the band Soulive, on the occasion of the band’s 10th anniversary.
Small Museum Captures a Rare Chagall. London’s Jewish Museum of Art has acquired a rare depiction of the Holocaust, by Chagall. The work is entitled “Apocalypse in Lilac: Capriccio.” The work is perhaps the most “brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions.”
A review of the show “Struttin’ With Some Barbeque,” featuring musicians Henry Butler and Donald Harrison.
36 Hours in Mountainous, Multicultural Tucson includes a mention of a great collection of American Photography, the Center for Creative Photography. You can also check out “Jet Age Graveyards” and the Titan Missile Museum—a largely underground nuclear silo not demolished, where you can get a quick view of a warhead “700 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.”
Degas Work Stolen from French Museum. Swiped while on loan from the 
Musee d’Orsay. (By the way, did Jackson’s police ever solve the mystery of the artworks stolen from galleries this past summer?)
Struggling Actor Tweaks Script, Buddy and Bodies. A review of the movie “Film With Me In It,” a “…slender, supple comedy graced with appealing performers and laced with agreeable poison.”
So, Jackson Holers–next time you bump into one of our town’s creative souls, give them an extra big “Thankyou.” And contribute what you can. Maybe we can expand our arts coverage, and I and my rabbits will like that.
