twain

Claude Cahun. Self-Portrait, c. 1927. Collection Soizic Audouard.

We in the (amazing) art collective that I am part of, The Art Foundation, are launching our second curated show at the end of the month, called twain. It's about the alter ego and its important role in laying new artistic ground in the face of societal and market norms. We've got a pack of amazing artists putting work in the show, but we're not telling who they are. (But I will tell you this.)

Read more about the show here, and follow our alter ego catch-all here.

our book (your book)

Just wanted to share some pages from the enormous collaborative book The Art Foundation commissioned for our first exhibition, Fountainhead. It's a beautifully made object, made by the hands of our man, Andrew Douglas Underwood (above, third from left). You can download the book for free here, as well as read about all the artists involved in bringing this harebrained scheme to life. Big news to follow about this project. Stay tuned.

 (all photos by Teresa Rafidi)

Fountainhead

For its inaugural curated exhibition, Fountainhead, The Art Foundation has solicited the alteration of various photographic iterations of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain, by a number of local and international artists. The altered images have been compiled in an outsized book that will be exhibited during the weekend of the Dallas Art Fair, April 14-15, alongside a small exhibition of art objects that explore themes of authorship, receptivity, deception and manipulation.

Referencing the prankster quality of Duchamp’s decimation of the existing art structures of his time, Fountainhead parrots the language of the traditional exhibition structure while reveling in the paradoxes and latitudes allowed in our current poly-post-ism of art. Flexing ideas of attribution, the works presented inFountainhead alternately specify and misconstrue authorship, as a means of bothering the leveled readings of the objects and actions presented in the exhibition.

It's been quiet around here, partly due to this little show I've helped put together with an art collective here in Dallas. Many thanks to my blogger friends that contributed work -- Stephanie Madewell (3rd image above) and Laetitia Benat.

Read about the show here and here.

Mia E. Göransson

Mia's ceramics are hot-baked kindred spirits to my own work, but frothier.

(found via Mike's ever-resourceful Contemporary Ceramics.)

(mine)

moledro
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.

definition via Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, image of Yves Klein fire painting via.

rahr

A gift, to keep thunder in my heart.

Thank you, Achlee.

chicken feed

Mel Bochner, Money

more on the subject, here

A Vision Of The Mermaids
Gerard Manley Hopkins

I had a dream just before I woke up this morning about the cover
of a book called Five Columns (or something?) by Gerard Manely Hopkins,
a poet I've never read. It was one of those dreams that feels like a clue,
or a hint, or a gentle provocation, and it's had me doing research all morning.
I can't find anything in his work about five columns, though I did
discover he was an artist as well as a poet, which is something.

domesticated nature

Thomas Demand's curated exhibition, La Carte D'Après Nature,
at Matthew Marks Gallery.

My latest rant, as inspired by the show, here.

two slighty related ideas, if you happen to be an artist and art critic, at the same time

via Ready for the House

and

How could I have been an art critic in New York for 23 years and never attended an auction before? Easy. I was used to loving things that didn't belong to me and talking about them to people they didn't belong to, either. That the things might get shuffled around for money, somewhere out there, was a given, but the fact of their existence was all that really mattered. Nobody said that art was the common intellectual and spiritual property of humanity, because nobody had to. To have a smart and deep take on art -- the drama of it and the fun -- was once to be somebody in the art world, whether or not you had a dime. When I came to art, I wanted to become that kind of person, rich in that way.

Peter Schjeldahl
An Auction at Christie's from The Seven Days Art Columns
4 January 1989

channeling Georgia

Feeling small. Aching to do big things.
Hankering to flee and make things simple.
Like she did.

(via I'm Revolting's style icon Pinterest board,
which is mine too, without the work of doing it.)

seven

Guido: I thought my ideas were so clear.
I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever.
I thought I had something so simple to say.
Something useful to everybody.
A film that could help bury forever
all those dead things we carry within ourselves.
Instead, I'm the one without the courage to
bury anything at all. When did I go wrong?
I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.

[Toasting myself and you, Counterpart]:

To 7 years of marriage, and all the hours we've spent,
and will spend, pronouncing Guido-isms in earnest.

sourceless

Thinking about:
primary sources, originals, prime causes,
firsts and foremosts, the beginnings of...

So all of this is just mine (ours).

expo 2011

mine. here this weekend