Former Organist @ San Francisco's Lost Weekend Cocktail Lounge Tickles the Calliope

You can take the boy out of the carnival but you can't take the carny out of the boy.

He Who Has Never Despaired Has Never Lived

This post's title paraphrases Goethe and responds to an oft heard shout-out (as in the shout-and-respond tradition of black churches and R&B lyric structure such as Sam & Dave's "Hold on I'm Coming") by the honorable Cornel West.

The He in the title refers to Chris Hedges . Hedges has been a major prophetic voice in America and the world. Hedges speaks (and despairs) regularly and fearlessly about matters that if discussed if at all are muttered sotto voce by mainstream media. I describe (again with a nod again to a Cornel West habit of usage ) Hedges role and his fearless public act of speaking truth-to-power as prophetic.....in the purest sense of that designation.

There is a wealth of Hedges material (written and video form) on the net. And it is well worth seeking out for its educational and galvanizing effect.

I recently ran into an April 2011 piece by Hedges on the apace corporatization of education in the US. The piece is well argued and speaks to my experience with counter-productive and demoralizing corporate-like changes in the tertiary education sector. Since NZ appears to track (with a short delay) social/political developments in the US....what Hedges is talking about is in the near future of Aotearoa. Charter schools are the thin end of the wedge.

Article begins:

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Posted on Apr 10, 2011
By Chris Hedges


A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both

see complete article HERE

WAYNE'S WORLD

WAYNE YOULE's I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

Nathan Pohio wing-shooting brief interviews ( for the CAG) at the opening festivities for Wayne Youle's big-ass Sydenham mural, titled -

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour

Beyond Tops & Bottoms; Asymmetrical Cinematic Dyads

“How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

-- Niels Bohr

Unlike my (piss-taking) academic-essay-type-title - followed by obligatory quote - human power relationships cannot be separated out with a simple (subordinating) semi-colon. That particular task takes an artist.

So, unless you relish the rictus-restricted prose of academics you’d best get reports, of power and control, from paintings, songs, novels, or (hell) even a bunch of leotard-clad ‘modern-dancers’….. than from some thin-aired theory-meister.

Good films (or good film-scenes in otherwise bad movies) are damn-close-to ectypal of the perpetually unfixed fact(s) of human nature. Films that toy mercilessly with conventional notions of power and its’ shifty asymmetry, are (at least to me) the most life-like. And,consequently, the most immersive.

Here’s a couple of favorite scenes, that more than fit the bill……………

True Romance, 1993

with Christopher Walken & Dennis Hopper

Written by Quentin Tarention

Directed by Tony Scott

Last Tango in Paris, 1972

Written and Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bad Moves - Career & Otherwise

Pyrotechnic clip from Elvis Presley's 1968 'comeback' special - featuring original band members Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana.


Presley's raw live performance anticipated MTVs patented unplugged format by more than 20 years. And gave evidence that Elvis and his mates (after some years out of the public eye) still had it...but reserved the best they had for after hour sessions... when tape machines had ceased rolling and the camera's red-eye was blind.


While on set (orchestrating a typically over-produced TV special)the producer/director of the comeback show, was perceptive enough (after catching the 'boys' musically unwinding) to realize just what he was seeing... and canny enough to want something like it, live and on-air.


Despite the show's critical and popular reception, Elvis - the ever compliant country boy - failed to parlay public triumph into any kind of lasting creative renewal. Instead, the freshly decanted Dionysian incarnation (as seen in the video) chose to put the cork back in the jug and resume taking 'The Colonel's' purblind advice - moving inexorably thereafter toward sclerotic packaging and creative death.


The corpulent, white-studded-jumpsuit-wearing, ersatz-stand-in-for-Elvis (the uninitiated think of when they recall Presley) finally suffocated the artist and buried the man.


When I was a kid, my family-of-origin's (equally) revered deities were the living, carnal Elvis & the imagined, discorporate Christ. It was a conceptual stretch for me to feel moved at all (or attracted by)the bloodless, text-based Jesus - but gathered around the family TV sets' warm nimbus - with a congregation of breathless Aunts and female Cousins - watching salubrious emanations of Elvis on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen and finally, Ed Sullivan Show, was as close to hip-shaking heaven as one could hope to get in those uptight materialist times.

INTELLIGENT CITICAL PRESS - WHAT ARE THESE ISLES COMING TO?

John Hurrell writes an economically intelligent (and ,as far as I'm concerned, accurate) bit of descriptive criticism re - "Aotearoa; A Pictorial Allegory".


Even going so far as to cite Craig Owen's seminal text "The Allegorical Impulse".

Huzzah.

"Ain't nobody can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"

"Ain't nobody can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"
- Dutch Schultz about Leg's Diamond



Embedding disabled on the immediately above video - of a young posse of light-on-their feet (in fact, by 40 seconds in, they are fairly bouncing) gang-bangers as they shoot up (2 fatalities) the Silver Nugget Casino in Las Vegas.



Compare the electric sang-froid of the dancing brothers compared to the flatfooted, middle-aged, workman-like ferocity of the Angels vs Mongols' dust-up (triple homicide) at Harrah's Laughlin Nevada casino.



Like the dumb-ass painter I am, and like the patent bore at every party I've ever been to - I tend to assume that what's interesting to me is interesting to you.....thus this post.



If not then - as the NYC Police are wont to put it - "Move along, nothin' to see here."

Antipodean Antennae - Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

Multi-hatted Tim Gregory and Oliver Watts shake the dust off the hoary Audio-guide form (sometimes clumsily called an acousti-guide) and skew it to their own entertaining purposes.


They democratically cover things cultural - from Entombed Terracotta Warriors to the Local (pub) and everything in-between.


Some of their guides can be downloaded to accompany physical walkabouts in the precincts they describe. Or may be enjoyed by armchair travelers who'll never make it to the places, events and exhibitions they bat about between them.

In either case they're worth an ear.


I'll let them do the talking

Gregory & Watts' Audio Guides

The Scenic Hotel

Home from Auckland, where Bridget McIntosh & Georgina Ralston of Bath Street hosted
Aotearoa; A Pictorial Allegory. Italian (or was it Croation-Indian?) dinner afterwards - with free ranging, vigorous conversation and debate (ranging from the academy, to the artworld, to metaphysics) between the two lovely art dealers + Denys ("-the last painter-") Watkins , his wife (and celebrated ceramist) Bronnynne Cornish and Mariko Susu....a Nipponese painter (also exhibiting) flown in that very day from Japan.

Overnighted at The Scenic Hotel - which is just across the road from Occupy Auckland's encampment. Visited the kids at OWS Auckland during the day and wandered down to the now empty RWC party-central piers - where organizers had left behind lounge-chairs - perfect for lying back beneath an overcast, but temperate, sky while gazing toward the horizon, at ferries, tugs and sailboats cutting through the grey-green waters of Auckland harbour.

Here now, as I type, at a preternaturally quiet Open Studio Day at Ilam..........ah, I must be back in Canterbury.

NOT AFRAID to TALK ABOUT IT

In preparation for the upcoming First Draft, Sydney exhibition "From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It" (featuring Christchurch based artists Marie-Claire Brehaut, Robert Hood, James Oram and myself) I spent most of the day talking first-person-shit with the uber-aesthetic lads Oliver Watts & Tim Gregory of Chalk Horse .

Chalk Horse being a sort of situated-in-Surrey-Hills polyglot dealer-gallery-cum-A.R.I, art-kid (everyone's a 'kid' at this late stage) warehouse/aesthetic-fort/collective-studio & critical/intellectual/curatorial node...with a drive-in auto-bay presided over by Sophia Hewson's de-consecrated, candy-covered, crucifixion and a monumentally scaled photo-realist painting of another female-of-the-species art-kid-as- virgin-mary with a very hairy mons..... or a hair-club-for-virgins-brand merkin.

In-between schlepping (Tim asks, with genuine curiosity...what is schlepping?) art-crates, trolling the web for a man-with-a-van, collectively cooking up an impromptu "short-run" catalog essay, taking a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride with an aging four-on-the floor truck with a faux P-Lab ( the Aussies would call it an 'Ice' Lab) in the cargo compartment, and drinking multiple cups of designer coffee, we talked. Oh yes, we talked.


And like some kind of high-country Basque shepherd, at the tail-end of a long companionless season in the thin-aired peaks ...with no one to talk to except the hoggets...I realized how starved I was/am for fearless and unselfconscious art-talk. The kind of talk made exclusively by fully-engaged, healthily-on-the-make, 'art-geeks' of a certain age. Rather than the usual run-of-the-mill (sure to be found-in-your-final-autopsy) faux-earnest approximation of art-talk. The kind that's really just promo couched in stilted artist's-statement-like theoretical rear-view-mirror-cant or gallery press-release-ese. I like to think of the better-angels of artspeak as engaging in purely speculative art-of the pleasant yakka variety.


Art talk. Inconsequential, by all outward signs, except for the very public and (of course) dire, personal consequences, arrived at by-creaking-increment, from its almost absolute lack. Of late.


Thanks Tim and Oliver - I can almost hear the rusty pistons of my critical/analytical brain beginning to commence sliding in the aspic-like congealed grease of their neural tubes. Grease and piston-rods almost vapor-locked by the enforced monasticism and despairing isolation of the creatively cratered, post-disaster, Garden City. I think I'll call it a day.


Tomorrow well do what the young-uns call 'install.'


If you were expecting something succinct or enlightening here...then why the fuck are/were you wasting time reading a goddamned art-blog anyway. Kwitcherbellyachin' and get back to work. There's plenty of time for talkin' when you've finished your chores.

Samuel Beckett writes - "nothing is funnier than unhappiness."

Artists and cartoon characters concur.

There's nothing much funnier than an artist's visually apparent unhappiness with whatever preceded his or her own production.

Art more often than not issues convulsively from its maker's unhappiness at having internalized and (of course) acted upon Marx's adversarial dictum "I am nothing and should be everything."

The entertainment (and the rub) lies in the historical reality that if an artist hopes to displace an existent 'everything' with his or her up-and-coming 'nothing' then there had better be at least a passing reference to whatever (of significance) came before.

Art about art is envy masquerading as influence and homage. Often taking the form of a sort of Oliver Hardy-esque dyspeptic-pot-shot at prominent (and putatively obstructionist) work that preceded (but won't make way for) puppyish, one-upping, commentators.

Have empathy for young artists who now must model and test their work against (and after) ready-to-hand targets - such as Dan Arps, Simon Denny, Dane Mitchell, Eve Armstrong, Robert Hood and Tahi Moore - artists who incarnate the very Destruktion the young wish to visit upon them.

Campbell Patterson’s sultana bran and spit works are emblematic (or symptomatic) of the aforementioned envy-crisis. And only (just manages to) be functionally funny by literally throwing in the towel.

Now, is there anything unhappier than that?

Saturday October 15 Occupy Wall Street International Comes to Christchurch

I suggest you might want to be there - so you'll be able to tell your children, grandchildren, et.al. , that you were there when............

CLICK HERE FOR A TOUCHING PHOTO-GAZETTE of EVERYDAY FOLKS WHO SUPPORT the O.W.S. INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT for SOCIAL JUSTICE.

From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It

Nature Morte - currently at Westspace, Melbourne - will be traveling to First Draft, Sydney

where it will open 2 November under the (Robert Hood penned) umbrella title "From a City Whose Gods Have Forsaken It." First Draft will be taken over by the Christchurch contingent of Robert Hood, James Oram and Boyce/Brehaut. The exhibition will be curated by the multi-hatted artist/curator/critic/gallerist/art-historian Oliver Watts who is a founder of Chalk Horse, Sydney . Watts is also producing a short-run catalog of the exhibition.

P-LAB opens in Melbourne - 29 September

NATURE MORTE opens 29 September at Westspace Melbourne.

The uglier superannuated 1/2 (me) of the Nature Morte team will be present for the opening.

Marie-Claire is in the middle of a rehabilitative trip to the UK & will be missing both the Melbourne and Sydney legs of the Nature Morte roadshow.

It's likely the work will be retired after Sydney ... so these two Australian venues will be the last two occasions to view the work.

Christchurch Art Gallery Acquires TIHoP

I'm happy to report that the Christchurch Art Gallery has acquired The Illustrated History of Painting. I thank the CAG for its support and valued imprimatur. I'm warmed by the notion that my young son Enzo will have the opportunity to see the work again when he's old enough to appreciate (or be horrified by) the set of paintings from an adult's perspective.

KINDNESS FIRST of ALL

Lucian Freud & Brendan Behan


"I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."

- Brendan Behan

"God bless you, may your sons all be bishops."

- Brendan Behan's last words to a brace of nuns attending his dying bed

PAINTER SPEAKS

It has been my lifelong habit to imaginatively reduce the creation to ur-categories - that which naturally occurs and that which is man-made.

Artworks are man-made objects that historically aspired to the look of naturally occurring things. And although mimesis (imitation of nature) is no longer the exclusive aim of artworks, objects continue to be forwarded by artists, and received by the public, as tangible incarnations of (intangible) natural forces. Forces majueure, such as introspection & speculation.

Man-made things are inherently ‘dumb’ and inanimate. Yet artists labor to make things that speak and, in so doing, move the viewer.

Great artworks that somehow manage to speak compellingly (to their time and beyond) are linguistically apotheosized as moving and ‘immortal’.

Painter Speaks, as a project, settles for a more modest and mortal (secular) level of ambition. These paintings’ potential for movement, if any, could be fairly characterized as suggesting a sort of painterly (hall of mirrors) infinite-regress.

The project relies (obviously) on a consciously redundant correlation of stylized landscape (painting as imitation of nature) and stylized portraiture (painting as imitation of life).

The portraits, in these cases, are painted transcription of a sculpturally simulated wooden ‘human-like’ ventriloquist’s-head. A head traditionally fashioned to slavishly entertain and articulate its author’s delegated voice.

PAINTER SPEAKS

Opens at Suite Gallery, Wellington on 22 September 2011.

Le GRAND MENAGE

AN OPEN LETTER

Good Day Dr. Carr, et al. -

I’ve taken the liberty of sending you this link http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html in the unlikely event that you haven’t yet read Richard Florida’s game changing books.


I once taught at Carnegie Mellon – a renowned research university in the city-of-comparison, employed by Mr. Florida (in the linked article) to illustrate his case about and for the ‘creative classes’. I can affirm, from experience, that Mr. Florida’s observations about Pittsburgh (and aspiring municipalities like, and unlike, it) are right ‘on the money’.

Well before Florida’s books were penned I had the historically serendipitous privilege of hanging out in Palo Alto with a number of the seminal figures who originated the knowledge and wealth creating digital revolution. A now-international phenomenon which had its beginnings on San Francisco Bay peninsula and later moved north to San Francisco and south to the Silicon Valley.

The scene I was privy to (and the intellectual ecosystem wherein these founding-father ‘digirati’ thrived) was richly populated with creative types - visual artists, writers, chorographers, dramaturges and musicians and, of course, the brilliantly science minded. In fact the science and art ‘types’ were, at the time, stylistically indistinguishable from one another. The (informal) interpersonal exchange I witnessed, between science-creators and fine art creators, was highly valued in both allied camps - and shaped thinking on both sides.

I’m of a mind that without this heady and creatively volatile social brew there would have been a much slower ‘arriving-at’ what is now (arguably) the largest international driver of knowledge and treasure.

If, as you claim, the university truly aspires to be “- a strong, comprehensive, research-intensive, - university in this city.” then the university, as a long-time incubator and attractor of the ‘creative classes’, should look – out of self-interest - to ways & means of retaining, attracting and supporting the fine arts (equally) alongside the institution’s demonstrated and growing support of the hard sciences. Art and science together are, and will be, the sparking catalyst of a renewed city and University.

Sincerely

Roger Boyce
Painter
School of Fine Arts

Rebirth of Wonder

Some songs displace familiarity with and prior knowledge of singing and songs. Enabling attentive listeners to slip blessedly free of supposition about what the act of singing is. Or isn’t.

Given the right vehicle great artists, such as Sinatra, can trip one’s reset button – dumping all dulling foreknowledge of a particular form and inducing (to paraphrase Beatnik forefather Lawrence Ferlinghetti) a ‘rebirth of wonder’.

As a kid I was vaguely aware of Sinatra the controversial celebrity, but was abjectly ignorant of what he'd done to and for male vocals - moving the form from standard-issue big band legato crooning to a heartbeat inflected and poetic conversational style.

It took the 1960's and the emergence of independent FM radio programming to hip me to what his voice could do - given the right material, arrangements and accompanists.

I first heard Sinatra - in a receptive frame of mind - one late evening while listening to Lights Out with Vacco. Vacco was a Hispanic sounding hipster who played an incredibly eclectic mix of sounds to a mostly stoned radio audience.

One night this particular music programmer prefaced something he was about to play with a cautionary warning about 'dismissal, prior to investigation'...and then proceeded to spin a smart selection of Frank Sinatra tunes from the singer's peerless Capitol years.

The few scattered groans in that night's room of long-haired listeners - when Sinatra's name was unexpectedly announced by the DJ - were soon silenced by a sound no one present had heretofore really heard.

I ran out the next day and bought the album Only the Lonely, for its title track. I've been listening ever since.

Only the Lonely

written by Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen

Frank Sinatra, Capital Records 1958

Change Partners (a gem written by Irving Berlin) performed with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Here Sinatra's voice has begun to thicken with age and lose some of its 'ping'. But he's so masterfully in command of his instrument as to make that fact irrelevant.

FESTIVAL FOOTPRINT - CARBON & OTHERWISE

In a recent letter to The Press, National MP Nicky Wagner crowed that Christchurch’s arts are alive and well. She cited two examples = The Arts & Industry SCAPE Biennial and The Christchurch Arts Festival … coming soon to a suburb near you.

If their history is anything to go by, the well-funded Biennial and the Festival will both be importing the great majority of art and artists featured in their (international, Lol) events. There will, no doubt, be an invited token-local or two but they’ll be veritable (and properly grateful) populist skunks at what are, for the most part, elitist garden parties.

Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of public and private cultural-dollars siphoned/diverted into Arts & Industry and The Arts Festival will go toward hotel rooms, restaurant meals, flights, freight forwarding and production costs – not to mention fully-salaried (non-artist) bureaucrats.

Consider the carbon footprint of these events and the heavy financial footprint left on the still-shaky back of a region-wide arts budget. A budget better dedicated to retaining the region's art practitioners – artists, some of whom are making a last-ditch attempts to stay in a town that apparently doesn’t care (except in lip-service) whether they do or not. As I’m wont to say, in a late capitalist society – if you really love me then write me a check.

Meanwhile, while festivals and biennials churn - scores of unsalaried local art practitioners will be studio-less or laboring in unheated and unventilated provisional spaces. Many, who’ve come to their senses, will be leaving town for good. Meanwhile, while festivals and biennials $burn$ – unfunded, scrappy and inventive provisional spaces (rooms for exhibition and performance) will continue to pop up around town. And, underwritten solely by sweat equity and the skinny bank balances of their originators they will attract and reward (real art audiences) on any given weekend.

How many worthy home-grown artists and artist-initiated spaces could be funded with the truly-large amounts lavished on so-called arts festivals and biennials? How many regional artists could be studio(ed), exhibited, their work temporarily underwritten by (say) just the printing/publicity budgets of the so-called arts festival and biennial?

With the Christchurch Art Gallery and most dealer galleries in the city shuttered for the foreseeable future it’s abominable to fund, support, import art and artists (from intact art communities elsewhere) plop them haplessly down in the middle of the city-and-arts-wreckage here, and pay them to do their thing in Christchurch while local practitioners struggle to survive and keep working…….on, CO2 producing, beans and lip-service.

The Illustrated History of Painting - The Book

The illustrated History of Painting - The Book launches at the Auckland Art Fair 4-7 August.

The hardcover edition Published by Suite Publishing - features essays by Justin Paton and Eleanor Heartney + 100 to-scale full color reproductions of the entire series.

Oh, the guy behind me at the CAG opening? My bodyguard.

But, but, who's carrying the Mcguffin?

The Genius of the Crowd

A wildly uneven talent whose gimlet eyed observations can raise goose-flesh.

Here's just such an instance.

Them That’s Got Shall Get

Live-music-legend and NZ-musical-treasure Rick Bryant used to be a busy muso. The formidably gifted blues/soul shouter ambitiously fronted Wellington’s Windy City Strugglers, led his Jive Bombers, performed with Bruno Lawrence’s Blerta and conducted the Jubilation Gospel Choir. Bryant currently languishes in an Aotearoan prison-cell for dealing cannabis – selling pot, no doubt, in lieu of a day job. Being an artist rarely covers one’s monthly ‘nut’.

Seized along with contraband in Bryant’s flat was $4,000 cash - an amount just shy of the gormless (and shameless) NZ-on-Air $5,000 grant to Sir Michael Fay’s pap-singing daughter, Annabel Fay. Sir Fay – said to be worth over 700 million – reportedly flew NZ-on-Air exec Brendan Smyth and a perk-licking posse of radio-biz players to his Great Mercury Island holiday ‘manse’ as a way (one would suppose) of extravagantly saying merci’ for their imprimatur of the musically impaired Annabel.

Simon Sweetman broke this story, some time ago, but no one (in or out of govt) seems much concerned with this brazen conflict of private/public interest. But then again it was only five grand’s worth of public money and the private elite, at least in this case, splashed out a lot more than 5K as payback for the public credibility afforded his undistinguished offspring.

Popular anecdotes about Merchant Banker Fay (and partner) pocketing wealth through fancy, under-regulated, public-asset swapping and stories about how he was thereafter accused, by the New Zealand Securities Commission, of insider trading are oft told tales in my adopted country. So, I’ll not bother repeating them.

I will submit the opinion that the Great Mercury Island music junket was a sort of asset swap - a trifling slice of Sir Fay’s fat assets, traded for a relatively substantial (1/10^th of a $50,000 public purse) suck-at-the-soul of New Zealand sonic culture.

The long run costs to a culture of supporting (with, what Dave Hickey refers to as, “stupid money”) the feeble ‘practice’ of an indistinguishably mediocre trustifarian like Ms. Fay, while spending public money to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate an artist of Mr. Bryant’s caliber is a case of chasing bad money with … uh, bad money.

No one’s saying that Bryant was ignorant of the risks (he’s a repeat offender) inherent in his side-job…and I doubt he’d complain over the inevitabilities he's currently suffering. And I’d guess he doesn’t know who Annabel Fay is, care what she sounds like, or is interested at all in my unauthorized use of his sad case to make my troublingly tenuous (and possibly specious) case about public and private patronage.

Folks in CCH who recently finagled CNZ administrative connivance in facilitating a kangaroo-style faux-art-community ‘election’ and who now, as a result, have their wagons neatly circled around a moldering heap of public funds – funds ostensibly earmarked for sustaining the post-quake arts (and artists) in Canterbury – operate from a similar position of entitlement….and thus inbred mediocrity. I’d hazard that such attitudes are born of the company one keeps - if one is a chronic courtier of the provincial elite then one might feel entitled by one's puppy-like proximity to private monetary power and its perks. I've never seen the AVC big dog (I make a ‘leetle’ joke here) hanging out at any of the art events I attend or sharing ideas (ideas, another micro-absurdity) with any artist I know. But I imagine that house-trained 'beast' can often be found regularly enjoying the Christchurch equivalent (another wee joke) of a junket to Great Mercury Island.

I know, I know that this post’s all over the map. It's the best I could do - given the circumstances. I’ll make the excuse that I’ve been painting hard over the past weeks and that I suffered the worst case of material (I’ll never-ever-ever purchase brand X oil-painting medium again, by g-d) failure in memory. Meaning two weeks worth of fairly accomplished paint passages ended up being scraped off (employing toxic solvents) onto the studio floor to salvage what was left of my undistinguished under-paintings.

I’ll conclude here by paraphrasing two salient quotes I can’t quite recall and am too weary to Google.

The artist is forced to sit on the doorstep of the rich. – Victor Hugo

And

Great poets die in steaming pots of shit. – Charles Bukowski

NOW is FOR EVER, AGAIN

Apologies to Franceso Bonami for today's post title.

If you are a fan of the ineffable David Hammons, want one of his works, but don't have the
.5 Million that L&M Arts in Manhattan gets for his larger new art-'units' then don't despair.

In the mid 80's Hammons made some unique (each one hand-made and thus different) frisket and chine colle multiples for an ill-fated artists' book. A handful were distributed and the rest given out to contributors (other atists) to the book. The rest of the books handmade pages were stored (unbound) in the basement of a Gold Street Brooklyn loft building which later flooded.

About 7 years ago I realized I had a Hammons (I was a contributor to the artists' book in question) in my possession and - given that his auction prices were reaching seven figures, and I was short of funds at the time - decided to sell.

I sold it - much to my surprise - to a prominent LA art dealer for high four figures.

I have a line on another - which I'm selling for the same reason - I need the money.

The provenance of the Hammons is unimpeachable - I met Hammons during this period and was involved with th publishing of the book. Documentation is available - as are images of the work. If you're seriously interested I can be easily reached - Google my name and you'll get my staff page at the Uni which links my email address.

The work is titled The Man Nobody Killed - and it's a work dealing with the death of Michael Stewart ...a graffiti tagger who died while in custody of the NYC Transit Police - the arresting officers were exonerated of Stewart's death. Thus the title and Hammons' decision to use the ubiquitous tagging method, of frisket and spray, to depict the taggers fatality. This is a representative Hammons - given its political/racial content and its deft use of socially conversant materials to depict.

Consider the uniformly robust-and-growing critical and market appreciation of Hammons - when considering acquisition of this rare example from the most sought after period of the artist's output.

I do realize that this text is a PITCH but its every claim is verifiable and accurate. Do your homework.

PS - That's an East Village street pebble embedded in the work...sort of like an 80's NYC reliquary.

Going, going, gone.