Wearing one's heart on one's slightly bloody sleeve
While the business papers blather on about their hopes of having taxpayers share their pain without ever sharing in the system's profits, my colleagues and I are bonding under workplace duress in new and novel ways. I may have reported that nearly half of the regulars physically operating from my company's HQ who were with our company at the beginning of the year are no longer with us. There have been dramatic leadership changes, dramatic strategic changes... Am I also describing your company right now? If I am, depending on the disposition of your colleagues, you may also find yourself experiencing some sort of survivor's bonding. You know what I mean: breathy, heartfelt conversations with people you didn't know so well before, telling you how they REALLY feel today about the company, or about their life choices relating to employment, or about any subject relating to the company. As if we've all been through something terrible, beyond the normal course of human experience. Worse than reality TV, even. [cough]I've been trying to explain this remarkably open, honest atmosphere of exchange to a few people who haven't noticed it. They weren't so sure what I meant. (I was afraid for a moment that they thought it was just a new openness among the women of the company, since some of these conversations do occur in the women's restroom, where the majority of the company's current leadership can not tread. [Ahem.])
And then, a colleague who is now one of my heroes sent out an announcement about a company event. In the background of his email was a half-tone image. (This means it was pale enough to easily read the text.) The image: the image right below the title on this web page (mboogiedown-japan.blogspot.com). The one with the little boy find a baby bear in a box, befriending it, raising it, having naked bubble baths with it (!?)... and ultimately being attacked by it.
This image starts out so innocently, and the message over it was so innocuous, that many readers never even got to the image at the bottom of the poster. For those who did and who also bothered to ask our posting hero about it, there was an outbreak of honesty: the bear was an allegory for corporate America. No matter how dedicated you may be to it, it can turn on you.
This explanation was made even better when another colleague, in interpreting the image, came to the conclusion that the bear represents our company and we are represented by the boy BEFORE the sending shared his view.
This exchange is an EXCELLENT example of the new openness that is spreading between colleagues.
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The creator of this mauling pink bear is Mori Chack, and his website, chax.net doesn't quite rely on the same idea. If you go to his about page, he has an urban, non-vegetarian's concept of the evils of human exploitation of animals, a concept that extends to depriving animals of their true wild natures in most forms of visual representation, which he perceives as a crime. His reaction is Gloomy Bear. (I believe I found this page at saltinthecode.wordpress.com naming Gloomy Bear with a Google search worded as 'pink bear mauls cute boy.')
The fact that my friendly colleagues are at a point where more than one of them can allegorically describe us as being mauled by a cute, clawed bear tells you about where we are in our strange, survivor's bonding period.
Added bonus: Mori's hair. Go look.
Labels: art, beyond the norm, employment
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:56 AM
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Brains? Braiiiiinnns? Brraaaaaaaains!!
I failed to post the link to Steven's photo/video montage of the zombie mob event. It is here: We Want Brains (YouTube.com).Labels: art, beyond the norm, event, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:09 PM
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The last night of this year's Zeitgeist International Film Festival is Monday, August 11th.
Zeitgeist International Film Festival 2008-MAIN (overcooked cinema.com) has the program details up. Yes, it's late on a 'school' night, but Frank's film, Since You've Been Ong (sinceyouvebeenong.com) is screening there, and I've never been able to watch it with a live audience before, I'm going. Assuming I can get in: I've heard it's a zoo.
Be a local: wear/bring LAYERS. (Gillian thinks I'm going to freeze. Gillian doesn't know how much synthetic fleece I own.)
posted by Arlene (Beth)4:07 PM
Monday, July 14, 2008
Things that turn up in the top of the international BBC News front page news items, which you do not expect to see.
The last time I was at Kinokuniya Books, I enjoyed a book about Banksy (banksy.co.uk), the international stencil-grafitti artist, whose installations around the world are 'stylin.' I knew the artist had 'arrived' when his book turned up in fashionable Kinokuniya, but hadn't realized that he is so well-known that he made it onto the BBC's splash page, along with major world news and, unfortunately, celebrity baby announcements. BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Paper 'reveals Banksy's identity' (news.bbc.co.uk, 7/13/08). My favorite quote:Asked by the paper whether Gunningham was Banksy, he replied: "Well, he wasn't then". Gunningham's father Peter said he did not recognise the person in the photograph, while his mother Pamela maintained she had never even had a son.You know your family is cool if your parents are willing to support your secret identity by denying your existence.Labels: art
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:00 PM
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Photography portfolio updates!
I've been a busy girl this evening... And for the past several months, actually.
New galleries up at aegraves.com include:
Extraordinary Light: Lake Merced (Infrared)
Palace of Fine Arts (Cyanotypes)
Pumpkins (Ambrotypes: Wet Collodion on Black Glass)
and
Tea Set (Ferrotypes: Wet Collodion on Trophy Aluminum).
I had promised a big April update, and I do have additional recent work to post, but these galleries provide enough updates for one evening.Labels: alternative process, art, photography, web stuff
posted by Arlene (Beth)11:28 PM
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
2008 U.S. Alternative Process Traveling Portfolio: Now... Traveling.
Yes, it is on the move. I am again participating in the Traveling Portfolio project, in which those of us who work in antiquarian, antique, or alternative photographic processes ship a small collection of our work to each other in one large box or book, so that we can see and touch actual prints that we might otherwise only see in low resolution, two dimensional reproduction.
So what am I sharing with you? Low resolution, two dimensional web reproductions. :-) Yes yes, I know. If you live near me and want to see the prints live (especially the shiny ones, so you can see them without the reflections of the studio where these samples were photographed), let me know, and I'll invite you over when the portfolio arrives. Otherwise, you're out of luck unless you join the exchange next year.Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:21 PM
UnScene San Francisco: first round of photos up!
Photos from the UnScene San Francisco show, taken by sponsor 944 Magazine (944.com), are up on their website here. It was quite an event!
I was so tired immediately after the show (and so busy trying not to worry about my mother's tumor news) that I didn't write much about it here at the time. Now that I have visual aids, I'll make a few comments.
The W Hotel was the venue sponsor, and they provided a lovely room with high ceilings, deep colors, and a view of Yerba Buena's buildings across the street. It was on the third floor, which was easily accessed from the main entrance atrium. There were two bars in the room: a no host bar for cocktails and a hosted bar for wine. Music drifted in from the DJ on the balcony below, and there was a view from the foyer of the lounge on the first floor, which was full of people posing, drinking, and watching other people posing.
Our presentation approach was very simple: we mounted our work to foam boards, and hung the prints without mats or frames on larger white boards with a single construction light shining down on the art. The boards looked dramatic in the relatively low ambient light. (This was great planning on the part of the UnScene Tour organizer, who know how to keep things simple and light for the best effect.)
It was glam. It was posh. It was much classier than my employer's holiday party!
The other artists had lovely prints up, all of which were mounted beautifully, giving me my first real case of 'mounting envy.' The work on display showed real variety between the artists. There were dreamy fogscapes, sharp-edged architectural abstracts, dusk photos of gritty urban scenes, serene night photos of neighborhoods, and my images of staid historic ships and the glowing foliage of the Japanese Tea Garden in infrared. It was fun to see such a range of work from a bunch of locals!
Pretty much anything I could say about winning the grand prize would sound like bragging, and I am a modest person when it comes to talking about my work, so I am struggling. But I can say that winning was completely and totally unexpected. There was a glossiness to the other pieces which was so seductive, and my work was exclusively matte-finish prints; there were deep, rich colors in the other work, while I was the only artist to only show monochrome prints exclusively... I had thought I was at a disadvantage. That made hearing my name called all the more surprising.
*
It was all the more special having 30 friends, relatives, and colleagues come out to the event to support me. I don't throw big fancy parties, and so being able to invite them to an event that I was sort of responsible for was a nice thing: it made me feel like I was giving back some of the social kindnesses that have been shown to me. And the enthusiastic support I received made me feel great.
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Looking at the photos of myself at the event is a bit awkward. As the photographer teased at the time, I am not comfortable on the lens side of the camera. (To think I ever modeled, ever so briefly, at a hair salon in my college days...)
I dislike the way flash photography makes me look: it washes out the contours of my face and neck in a way that I'll someday be grateful for (it will hide certain sorts of wrinkles!), but which I don't enjoy now: natural light seems kinder, and allows me to reflect more color. Flash photos of me don't match my conception of how I look.
I don't exhibit a high level of bilateral symmetry, and am accustomed only to seeing myself in a mirror (where I've grown accustomed to the imbalance): photos show me right-way round, and everything seems to slope off in the wrong direction... Also, the gradual changes in my face don't match photos of myself that I like and think of as "recent," but (as I am learning) are really 5 or more years old.
O, vanity.
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There will be more photos up on the UnScene Tour page in a week or so: I will post a link when the images are available.Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)9:57 PM
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Un-Scene San Francisco Photography Tour
That show that I mentioned that I will be in? Here are the details.(If you're e-mailing in an RSVP, please copy me. For those of you who don't want to give out your e-mail address to the hotel, let me know at my work address and I'll do one big group RSVP from the office.)WHAT: Join W San Francisco, the UnScene Tour and 944 Magazine and feast your lens on never before seen images of the City by the Bay, taken by local emerging artists at the UnScene San Francisco photography exhibit. Mix and Mingle with art lovers and take home a fav photo or two. One lucky photographer will also win the chance to be "seen" at the Jack Fischer Gallery in downtown SF. Zoom in on who will be the lucky winner!
WHEN: Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 7 - 9 PM
WHERE: W San Francisco - Great Room I, 3rd Floor
181 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
415 777 5300
RSVP: "RSVP WSF EVENTS AT WHOTELS DOT COM" (remove the spaces and quotation marks to decode)Labels: art, photography
posted by Arlene (Beth)5:57 PM
Monday, February 25, 2008
Power & Way
(Power & Way is the label on an odd railroad contraption that is often parked on the tracks near MacArthur BART. It would be a great name for a rock album, an engineering firm, a purse shop, and a variety of other enterprises and projects...)
Where does time go once it has used me up and spat me out?
*
Friday night was the SFMoMA opening party for the encyclopedic Friedlander photography exhibit. The opening parties involve no host bars on the ground floor of the museum, and you get the impression that many members never leave the immediate orbit of those bars... So I suppose it says something positive about my favorite cousin, plus Helen and Bryan, that I actually encountered them on the top floor of the museum, roving the galleries.
This was my first chance to see Olafur Eliasson's Take Your Time without having to stand in a line that wrapped itself down the central stairway several floors, so we started there (and encountered the most friends there). Eliasson's work is interesting, especially his sculpture, but the thing I liked best was the shelved room filled with his test models, three dimensional sketches made of ideas he had. He used copper wire and copper tape, what appeared to be Dutch cereal boxes, foam core with mirrored plastic on it... The room was filled with rough ideas explored in various levels of depth. It was great to see some of the process behind the ideas, rather than ONLY the finished products.
The Friedlander photography exhibit was a complete madhouse, and I was tempted to flee several times. The show was massive, and the large volume of work was interesting to see. I found it interesting from an American documentary perspective more than a fine art perspective. The items that most interested me were the samples of Friedlander's many books. Books are a fabulous way for people to experience your art in a thoughtful, long-term way: not everyone can get to a gallery, and as this party demonstrated, sometimes you can only catch a glimpse of an image before you are nearly shoved aside by the art loving wolverine behind you.
Samples of several books were on display, many of them gravure prints with an original gelatin silver print included inside for collectors. Some of the books were post bound, with the idea that the gravures inside were of such high quality that the books could be disassembled so the prints could be framed and hung for display. Now that I've tried a very modern photopolymer version of gravure printing (which still used a traditional etching press), I understand how labor intensive such work can be, and am all the more impressed with the quality of the images. I also got some ideas for editioning books and prints of my own.
The runner-up display at the museum was not in other galleries: it was the remarkable singles scene. You could immediately tell who was participating. Married & attached women were wearing pants, soft sweaters, and comfy shoes, and looked at the art. Heavily dolled up single women in a range of styles were displaying remarkable portions of their upper chests, looking only at the other attendees, and wearing shoes I have only seen in lingerie catalogs and drag shows.
I didn't have the heart to explain that all the men there were (a) married, (b) on a date with that woman who is firmly attached to him and ready to mace you if you get too close, (c) gay, or (d) with the band downstairs. Revealing that might spoil the fun.
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Saturday night was a pleasant dinner and coffee session at Japan Center with my core pal group to catch up with a peer visiting from abroad.
During the merriment, I noticed that my right eye was busy crying for much of the evening, though it didn't feel irritated in any way. My right eye cries quite a bit, especially when I've had a glass of wine, laugh heartily, or am sleepy. As a result, some of my acquaintances believe that I cry with zeal about our discussions, when really my right eye could care less what we are discussing.
If they think I'm more emotionally enthusiastic than I actually am... Well, I'm sure I can take advantage of that somehow.
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My only comment about Sunday is that the film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus has absolutely nothing to do with Diane Arbus, and I'm not sure why they even bothered to use her name (and the circumstances of a period of her life before she came to fame). It's a fairy tale, and a rather odd one. Beauty leaves her benign husband for a furry, eventually charming beast (rather than being given away as chattel by her father in the traditional story). I objected to the implication that it was only through fairy tale seduction that the implied Arbus may have liked marginalized people - even though it clearly drifted from the actual photographer, I can't see why her name had to come into this at all... It's an odd, odd film.Labels: art
posted by Arlene (Beth)8:21 PM
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Happy as a clam. If clams are, in fact, happy. Which I don't believe has been scientifically proven.
My employer does not believe in President's Day. It is not acknowledged. Most importantly, it is not a national holiday at my office. So I took the day off and went to SF Museum of Modern Art (sfmoma.org) for the afternoon, because it seemed like a terribly civilized thing to do, and I wanted to be visually stimulated by non-video art.
As an alt-process printer, I am always seeking out antiquarian process prints, but usually find only historical work. Which is okay, but since I know there are so many of us who work in these processes NOW, it seems... inadequate. Though some of the examples are relentlessly gorgeous, and it is interesting to note how different actual antique images are from modern ones (in those instances where there is a real difference).
There were three cyanotypes of bridge construction progress in Pennsylvania, which seemed like very modern images in composition. They were surely taken as practical, work-progress-report type images, but they were still... modern. Very direct. Bold. Printing out paper prints are abundant in the current selection, and carry an interesting range of tones. And that gorgeous Woodburytype by Nadar (Gaspar-Felix Tournachon) of George Sand was up, and it's just so... rich looking. Like the pigment has real depth. It is a remarkably lovely print.
The top floor was crowded with tourists seeing Take Your Time (which will close over the weekend), and so I perused the photography galleries and then went down to the gift shop. SFMoMA has a really fabulous gift shop which a gorgeous collection of art books. (It is also always fascinating to see how art is commodified in ways I would not have predicted.) This is where the revelation of the day occurred: Sophie Calle's book Prenez soin de vois ("Take Care of Yourself") is out in English!! I agonized over buying the book (at $95) for quite a while before purchasing it and retiring to Caffe Museo (caffemuseo.com) to sip a soy latte and wallow in Calle's brilliance.
I've written elsewhere about why I love her work so much. She is someone who stages a wedding to act out the ritual of it, who finds an address book and interviews everyone in it about its owner, who stalks people as documentary art projects... She turns little quirks into novel creative works. And so it is with this enormous new book. She was dumped by email, and made a collaborative artwork with over 100 female contributors of various professions and specialties who analyze, rewrite, dramatize, dance, talk, or otherwise perform the letter in a manner appropriate to their area of expertise. The book contains photos of the women performing their analyses, and their results - diagrams, scripts, DVDs of films and audio recordings, short stories... As soon as I opened the book and found the email translated into morse code and Braille, even before I spotted the miniature books bound within it, or the four DVDs, I knew this was the sort of conceptual work I would love. (There's a Guardian article about her book, and the associated show at the Venice Biennale here, and a great review of the show in the Washington Post here.)
And oh, how I do love it.
I actually thought while sipping my latte, 'I'm so happy I could pee myself. If that were the sort of thing I did when extremely happy. Which it is not. But it is still a compelling expression, despite its obvious inaccuracy.'Labels: art
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:00 PM
Monday, December 17, 2007
Small world. Today I found myself riding the train to my job at a company I will call "JCo" for no particular reason, reading issue 24 of McSweeney's (mcsweeneys.net). Which has a lovely cover. The lovely cover was designed by Rachell Sumpter. Who is the sister of Laura, who used to work with me at JCo.
The world is very, very tiny. Minute. Infinitesmal.Labels: art, literature
posted by Arlene (Beth)8:45 PM
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Steven's gallery of anthotypes is up at alternativephotography.com!Labels: alternative process, anthotype, art
posted by Arlene (Beth)7:52 PM
