View current page
...more recent posts
More in a continuing series on artist websites. With these three, spatial relations are key:
Charles Goldman is a poet of unobserved and what might be called Zenovian space--as in Zeno's Paradox of the arrow that never reaches its target because it's always covering half the distance. Replicas of all the stairs leading to the artist's apartment, a raised platform recreating in miniature the meandering path of a walk through the city, a single line caroming around within a painting's borders like the traffic cloverleaf from hell are a few examples of his spatiotemporal investigations. In 1000 Feet of Tin Foil, 2000 (below), he hammered that many square feet of standard foil into a perfect sphere measuring ten inches in diameter. I also like the slightly larger pictures and text on this gallery-produced page, even though it's not as elegant as his personal site.
Elise Ferguson draws and paints symmetrical, tiled patterns recalling parquet floors or 50s-ish linoleum, which spill over into three dimensional space in eccentric, unpredictable ways. Sitting flat, like laminates, or cut jigsaw fashion, the patterns are one of many rogue elements in installations merging the Rosalind Kraussian "sculpture in the expanded field" discourse with the irrational or de Chiricoesque. Groupings of cylinders, boxes, pedestals, and cast (carved?) tree stumps, often incongruously including replicas of simulated fruit, mediate among the interior, the exterior, and the psychological, in work that is craftsy, private, smart, and funny in a very dry way. Below is Installation View, 2001:
Alan Wiener's boxy sculptures of Hydrocal (or aquaresin) are fringed with organic-looking tabs, the runoff of plaster oozing through molds. Instead of trimming the tabs, Wiener uses them proactively, as joints holding the pieces together. In the untitled piece from 2002 below, receding rows of toothlike tabs devour the viewer's gaze whole. Wiener's website is good--see also his matter-of-fact photos of cinderblocks from around the world--but I wish it wasn't in Flash so I could save an image or two without having to use a capture utility. [Update: his page is no longer in Flash--the cinderblock photos are gone, though.] His Feature gallery page fortunately allowed this.
This is from the White House press briefing transcript from yesterday. Check it out now before it gets revised. The subject is Bush buying UN votes with trade and immigration concessions, so he can have his war. On the CSPAN videotape, you can clearly see and hear the normally deferential press corps burst into spontaneous laughter at Ari Fleischer's BS: "Think about the implications of what you're saying," he smugly tells a reporter. "You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition." In the middle of the last sentence everyone in the room starts laughing. For a split second it looks like Fleischer thinks they're laughing with him; when he realizes they're not, he ends the briefing and marches out of the room with everyone still guffawing. This should happen more often.
(Thanks to cursor.org)Q Ari, just to follow up on Mexico. Is it true that the administration is willing to give Mexico some sort of immigration agreements like amnesty or guest worker program, to assure the Mexican vote, as the French press is pointing out today and is quoting, actually, two different diplomats from the State Department?
MR. FLEISCHER: No, it's exactly as I indicated, that we have, on this issue, a matter of diplomacy and a matter of the merits. We ask each nation on the Security Council to weigh the merits and make a decision about war and peace. And if anybody thinks that there are nations like Mexico, whose vote could be bought on the basis of a trade issue or something else like that, I think you're giving -- doing grave injustice to the independence and the judgment of the leaders of other nations.
Q -- the French press is quoting actually two different diplomats from the United States State Department that -- they're highlighting that the United States is giving some sort of agreements or benefits to Colombia -- and other non-members of the Security Council --
MR. FLEISCHER: I haven't seen the story. And you already have the answer, about what this will be decided on. But think about the implications of what you're saying. You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition. (Laughter.)
Thank you.