I just use my muscles as a conversation piece, like someone walking a cheetah down 42nd Street.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
— Agatha Christie

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
— Plato

Let’s have a merry journey, and shout about how light is good and dark is not. What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves. “Now thyself” is more important than “know thyself.” Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be green pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.
— Mel Brooks


As the Baby Mama explained, it's a "human girl child..."

Alina Octavia Raczynska Redman
8/1/08, 11:10am, 7 lbs, 11 oz


No Time To Pontificate...More Next Week...but Mike Kelley at the Carnegie International? I Am Gobsmacked, Baby! First work we saw. Best work we saw. Yeah!!! And by that I mean....YEAH!!!




TONIGHT @ HW, 8pm
FERESHTEH TOOSI:
'78 Records: Erie Canal to Love Canal 1978—2008


This event has been organized by multimedia artist Fereshteh Toosi to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Love Canal environmental disaster and its relationship to contemporary environmental issues. Organized by Toosi, Spark Contemporary Art Space (Syracuse) and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo), the project seeks to connect Erie Canal history, the Salt City of Syracuse, and environmental projects in New York state including the planned Peace Bridge expansion in Buffalo as well as Onondaga Lake and Onondaga Creek in Syracuse. The live event will feature a performance that includes field recordings made during my journey along the Erie Canal, and interviews with Buffalo and Syracuse activists. The multi-media presentation will be followed by a screening featuring documentaries about Love Canal.
Hallwalls Media Arts

Buff News Preview


@ HW thru Aug 30
Karma Cab Boa
Hallwalls 2008 Members Exhibition
gallery hours: tues to Fri 11am to 6pm, Sat 1 to 4pm

with works by:
DAVID ANDREE • MOLLIE ATKINSON • RITA ARGEN AUERBACH • KATE BAE • DIANE BAKER • RACHAEL BALDANZA • MICHAEL BEAM • MARY BEGLEY • DENNIS BERTRAM •


AMANDA BESL (above)• ALAN BIGELOW • PRISCILLA BOWEN • NELSON BRADLEY • BRADLEY BUTLER • SCOTT BYE • ATTILIO CELOTTO • IAN CHRYSTAL • VIKTORIA CIOSTEK • OREEN COHEN • LUKIA COSTELLO • JAX DELUCA • MARIELY DOWNEY • LIZ DRUMM & CHRISTOPHER VEREL • VAL DUNNE • EDOLLIA • JACKIE FELIX • DOROTHY FITZGERALD • JOAN FITZGERALD • JENNIFER GOTTDIENER • ZEV GOTTDIENER • AMY GREENAN • JODY HANSON • PATTI HARRIS • PHIL HENDRICKSON •


ROBERT HOLLAND (above) • TOM HOLT • A.J. HUARANCA • BILLY HUGGINS • DALE INGLETT • ANITA L. JOHNSON • JOHN KENNEDY • LAWRENCE KINNEY • FELICE KOENIG • MATT KRUBACK • JAMIE KUBALA • MARK LAVATELLI • ZOE LAVATELLI • ELIZABETH LEADER • STACEY LECHEVET • GERALDINE LIQUIDANO • POLLY LITTLE & TED PELTON • SANDY LUDWIG • ROSEMARY K. LYONS • NAOMI MARINE • MAUREEN MATTHEWS • SCOTT McCARNEY • CHRIS McGEE • KURT McGHEE • MARK McLOUGHLIN •


GERALD MEAD (above) • R.J. MELNYK • DIANE MENCHETTI •


LILLIAN MÉNDEZ (above) • CONI MINNECI • ERIK MINTER • BERNARD P. MULLANE • KARA NEWBAUER • FRANK O'CONNOR • BOB OHRUM • MARY GRACE OHRUM • CATHY PARDIKE • NANCY J. PARISI • KATE S. PARZYCH • JAMES PAULSEN • ELENA RALSTON • JEAN-MICHEL REED • RENA REISMAN • THOMAS ROJEK • SALVATORE SCRIVO • GARY SCZERBANIEWICZ • KATIE SEHR • VICTOR SHANCHUK JR. • KATHLEEN SHERIN • JOANNE SLOAN • BENJAMIN SPENCER • CATHERINE LINDER SPENCER • NATHANIEL SPENCER • NORINE SPURLING • DEBRA STECKLER • KURT TREEBY • CHRIS VESPER • KURT VON VOETSCH • ALFONSO VOLO • GENEVIEVE WALLER • MARY WEIG • JACQUELINE WELCH • SUSAN WILKE • JANET WINKIE • GARY L. WOLFE • SUNG HE YOON • DIANE YUNQUE • and BRUCE ADAMS, listed last because in the world of Buffalo group shows, he always gets listed first.


Opening Elsewhere
• Carnegie Art Center Members Exhibition op Sat, Sept 13, 7-9pm (thru Oct 17)
• Marc Burgess at College Street Gallery op Fri, Aug 8, 7-9pm (thru Aug 30)
• Joe Whalen at Market Street Gallery (Lockport) op Fri, Aug 8, 2-4pm (thru
Sept 8)
• Aasta Deth at Three Rivers Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, op Fri, Aug 8, 5-9pm (thru Aug 28)
• Max Streicher: Metamorphosis at the Castellani op Fri, Oct 5


Alicia Ross @ Black & White

Alicia Ross Website


Continuing Elsewhere
• OP Art Revisited at the Albright thru Jan 25
• Comfort Burn at Artspace & Big Orbit thru Aug 10 Arvoice Gerald Mead
• Michael Veit at the Castellani thru Sept 14
• Robert Burley, Avalanche Collective, Ryan Boatright, Jim DeLucia, Bingyi Huang at the Rochester Contemporary thru Sept 21
• Brian Dickinson at Hardware thru Aug 28
• Buffalo Flickr Photographers at Betty's thru Sept 7
• Biff Henrich at the Buffalo Museum of Science thru Aug 31
• Kara Daving at the Niagara Aquarium thru Aug
• Dianne Baker at Kouros Gallery (NYC) thru Aug 29
• Rita Argen Auerbach at Chautauqua Institution thru Aug 23
• Molly jarboe at Studio Hart thru Aug 9
• Niagara Frontier at the Kenan Center thru Aug 24
• Members Show at Market Street Gallery, Lockport thru Aug 10
• Rick Steinberg at Quaker Bonnet thru Aug 29
• Ellis Ball, Jamie Hoggard, Robert Holland, Jeff McMullen, Sarah Baker MIchalak, Rosa Rojas at Olean Public Library thru Aug 15
• Tom Hughes @ 218 Grant St by appt. Tom@autocrat-art.org Buff News preview Eisenberg
• Buffalo Flickr Photographers at Betty's thru Sept 7
• Molly Jarboe at Studio Hart thru Aug 9
• Writing With Light at CEPA thru Aug 27
• Lukia Costello at The Rabbit Room thru Nov 1
• Julian Montague in Site Visits at Cambridge Galleries thru Aug 16
• Caitlin Krumm at WNED Horizons Gallery thru Aug 15
• Dianne Baker at Galleryh @ Artpark thru Aug 22
• Will West at El Museo thru August 31
• Diane Baker at The Mansion on Delaware (indefinitely)


Castellani Art Museum
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

TopSpin: Artists of Western New York and Beyond
The museum’s Tops Gallery—dedicated to the exhibition of work by local and regional artists— presents the TopSpin series. This juried series of solo exhibitions draws from the richly diverse work of Western New York artists, as well as that of artists beyond the region. TopSpin features a broad range of visual expressions, varied in media as well as message.

Please include artist statement, CV, 10-15 images (preferably on CD) and send to:
Michael Beam
Curator of Exhibitions and Collections
Castellani Art Museum
Niagara University, NY 14109
Please DO NOT email submissions.
All submissions will be reviewed this fall for 2009 exhibition opportunity.
www.niagara.edu/cam
716.286.8286


“I just decided to do paintings of friends’ skin colors, and I did a dozen or so of them. And that might have been it, except that a friend of mine who is a curator came to my studio . . . and saw these few skin paintings and said, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting over there and if you can make more of them, I know the perfect Kiki Smith sculpture I can pair it with.’ ”

Buff News Dabkowski


"Pictured in the painting enjoying a party at the painter’s Bryant Street home are Cuthbert and fellow artists Charles Burchfield, Seymour Drumlevitch, Harriet Greif, Virginia Tillou, and Martha Visser’t Hooft. Her husband, artist Philip Elliott, is holding the drink tray. Charmingly, their dog, Jongo, strikes a pose and their cat is peeking around the doorjamb."

Artvoice Brownrout


"By murdering Damien Hirst, I propose to create the most valuable artwork in the world, more valuable than the sharks, cows and golden calves Hirst himself sells for astronomical sums. That artwork will be the body of Damien Hirst, in all his glorious power, preserved in a vitrine. I think poison is probably the best way. . ."

artnet Finch


"China was Pop. It still is. It’s still a nation of uniforms, but of more and more kinds of uniforms. I saw outfits with matching corsages on department store salesgirls, the slate-gray shirts of guards stationed at luxury high-rises and the Chloë Sevigny T-shirts that teenagers wear on Beijing streets."

NY Times Cotter


"Mr. Ortiz never worked on the 1982 mural, although he had tagged the wall before Haring and Mr. Dubose made their mark. As a nod to his friend, Haring left Mr. Ortiz’s tag untouched, and this spring it was even replicated by the hired team of professional painters."

NY Times Koppel


"Sex, violence and pageantry; tragedy, comedy and cosmic vision: Dürer made all this and more visible with a grasp of pictorial space and composition that is as powerfully muscular as it is delicately intimate. And he did it all in a new, small-scale, mechanically reproducible medium."

NY Times Johnson


"His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks."

NY Times Cohen


Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1919—2008

NY Times obit


Lou Teicher 1929—2008

NY Times obit


Something I listened to this week...

Really, I did. I've actually owned this album since its release in 1979, a year which also say Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, The Clash's London Calling and the largely-forgotten but nonetheless superb Squeezing Out Sparks by Graham Parker and the Rumour. R&B being dominated by disco in the late Seventies, Summer's double album opus is a product of the alluring but eventually irritating syncopation of the times. Had it been recorded in another era—say with a live band in the studio and, in the name of All That Does Not Suck, a live drummer—it could have been a soul album for the ages. Too bad. The Giorgio Moroder production has worn a little thin over the years and listening to it again, the album that could have been is in perpetual evidence amid its otherwise dated aroma. Strong songs and an even stronger performance from a singer as capable of vocal gymnastics as recognizing the impact of a restrained delivery.


My friend Jeff is not going to like this because he's been swooning over this album for the past half year, and it's not like I didn't like it. It's everything you've heard—a superb concoction of two distinct voices and plenty o' lovely songs, but halfway thru I realized this was not what I wanted to be listening to. Without even thinking, I reverted to:


and when I heard Richard Thompson break into When I Get To The Border I thought, okay, that's more like it. Thompson and his wife LInda—those gorgeous Welsh voices, those awesome songs, that always compelling guitar work. Typically filed under "Folk," Richard and Linda were always somewhere outside of folk. If you discern some Celtic strains, you just as readily hear straight-up wicked guitar riffs. It almost never matters which of the two are singing, they're both so enjoyable as singers. Richard sang very much in the mid range, nothing spectacular vocally but he can really deliver a line, while LInda was in a higher register, making Richard's melancholic tone all the more sweet. One album was hardly enough so I moved to:



finished that (twice), and moved on to:



So, thanks to Robert Plant and Allison Krauss for the provocation.

But those are all albums I've heard before. I don't know where I've been that I had never heard this before:


What The Hell. I officially hand in my Music Geek badge in shame that I've never stumbled across this 1970 soul classic before. You can decide for yourself how great you think the album title and cover art are (uh, I suggest: fucking tremendous), but once the opening title track begins and Dogg begins to sing "Sittin on a cornflake / Ridin on a rollerskate / Too late to hesitate / Or even mediatate..." against a rising soul-funk crescendo, well Mabel, forget that dinner party, just crank it up while I grab us a couple of beers. Then, second song, bam! Synthetic World, with its slippery synthesizer groove and a smart, incisive critique of our increasinglly artifical environment. Then, third song, bam! Pure, undiluted, earnest soul slow jam to love and understanding. Dogg sings of rednecks, of getting drunk, and of a planet bombed to oblivion and it never sounds less than thrilling. It's worth noting that Dogg's funk-soul survey of the contemporary world around him preceded both Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On and Sly Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On. And unlike Bad Girls, this must have been recorded live in the studio, everyone sounds too tight and fresh and agile. Absolutely stupendous. I will listen to this for the rest of my life. Whew!





The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
— Albert Camus