Greetings, studiosavant regulars. Just the web guy poking my nose in for a moment. You may have noticed some recent changes to studiosavant, and its “parent” website for the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop. As a result of these changes, please clear your browser cache and update your bookmarks for the pages as well as for your RSS feeds.
If you run into any problems with the tweaked site, or just have feedback generally, please let me know!
Squires Pints, 2006
I could find all of three art blogs out there that currently list studiosavant among their recommended sites: Hans’ wild newimages from Tblisi, wcraghead’s drawer full of drawing, and JL’s Modern Kicks. Since we don’t have our own blogroll, it seems only fitting to send out thanks by way of a little Friday evening post that returns the favour. I’m lifting a pint to y’all, and hoping you guys aren’t our only three visitors.
Anyone else linking to us (artblog or otherwise) is welcome to share in the glory by leaving a comment with their http://.
[Edit] Three non-art-specific blogs that link here: Shruggle, felix hominim, and Pulse.
Leva Lunch, 2006
My argument is this: language is of no use at all, unless confusion is the purpose. Only art can relate human experience truly, and really good art does so by actually delivering the experience.
Take note of the neat new Recent Comments feature. It is the result of many hours I spent hacking html last night. I’m extremely proud of my ability to follow directions to cut and paste code – even if the simple installation directions for Ebenezer Orthodoxy’s hack were in clear English. Ignore the odd “Kristina or Pierre” hyperlinks that head the list just now; they are the result of the hack’s incompatibility with certain anonymous comments, I think. Or else I missed some crucial step. I can live with the anomaly for now if you all can.
The NESW crew can also, when there’s something good in the offing, follow the simple instructions of some hacker. In this photo a couple of unidentified sculptors labour to assemble Ryan McCourt’s own “monumentalist” sculpture, A Modern Outlook (follow the Sculpture link to images of the big blue thing in situ). The many wires seen here were not involved in the construction, except for that once.
UPDATE: If this was the welding studio I’d simply modify any element that wasn’t quite right – the Recent Comments feature was problematic, but my ability to manipulate javascript being underdeveloped I’ve removed it altogether. For now.
UPDATE #2: I’ve been persuaded that even with the glitch the feature should stay. I’ll have to get myself an assistant hacker to program my commands.
A nod of the head to the NESW’s webhelp at Black Riders Design. Winston is at least partially responsible for the creation and upkeep of the NESW website (which this blog may soon be folded into), and my own.
I am tempted to ask Winston about his choice of business name – invoking Tolkien’s undead harbingers of death as design shop mascots seems, well, incriminating at the least; but then, that’s just the association I make with Black Riders. He surely has his own reasons, just as he does for the logo.
Truth be told, I’ve at times been asked by folk to account for taking the penname ahab. Again, that I associate the name with Melville’s tenacious peg-legged whaling ship captain does not mean someone else might not be confused by incidental reference to the biblical king who unadvisedly made Jezebel his queen.
Occasional commentor w, an artist based out of Charlottesville VA, sardonically ranted on his art blog d r a w e r recently in reference to installations unworthy of the name art, “Apparently, if one mentions, scrawls or off-handedly depicts something, one has “referenced” it, and a whole world of wordy blather can issue forth.”
Any studiosavant word-associations y’all want to share with us? C’mon, I dares ya.
“I’m tired of critique and consumption everywhere.” So wrote TNFH blogger KH summing up her dissatisfaction with what she sees to be the inadequacies of weblogs as forums for exciting new ideas about art. This on the eve of a public artblogger panel discussion that was widely expected to provide an answer to the question smoldering at the back of every bloghost’s mind: “remind me why I’m doing this?”
Though I wasn’t in Miami for the panel event, the pre-game show and a blow-by-blow live-blogged account of it leave me unsure that the art weblog is at all useful as a public venue for art dialogues. Often it seems to be little more than an office newsletter.
Studiosavant, a “quality oriented art blog”, is of benefit to me, a quality oriented artist, in a couple of personally identifiable ways. For example it provides the opportunity to engage with art literarily when for one duty-calls reason or another I’m unable to deal with it corporeally in the studio. But whether time spent reading and writing art blogs does my studio art any good is not so certain; and why would I do anything that compromises my ability to make the best art I can make?
Two things motivate me to contribute here for a little while yet. One is consumption: like food, a daily necessity, I ingest the good things I see in order to taste them, and ultimately to digest them. The other is critique: careful, critical dialogue helps me make my art better to the taste.
Photo one credit: Rebecca Carter, greenermiami.com (presumably)
Photo two credit: Richard Siemens
This short image-free post is a postscript and bibliography to the last. Warm Albertan thanks to the Floridian patron of the NESW who, upon correctly reading my Artblog.net demeanour as downcast since I could not travel to see the Smith and Gonzalez shows proliferating on the East Coast USA this winter, sympathized and offered to salve my pain by sending a gift. It arrived this past Tuesday: a Spanish/English hard-cover catalogue for the Julio Gonzalez sculpture and drawing exhibition at the BASS – “Julio Gonzalez en la coleccion del IVAM“ (copyright Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia 2005). One of the two essays in the catalogue, Julio Gonzalez’s Sculpture by Angel Kalenberg, contained the David Smith quotes I lifted; and all three images come from the CATALOGO portion of the publication (photo credits Tom Haartsen, Ouderkerk a/d Amstel, Holanda).
Thank you, J.R.
Man, I’ve been on this typewriter-thing all day. I’m simultaneously working on my Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant application and feeding my new artblog addiction. I won’t share the grant application with you, but the artblogs, well…
I’ve been a regular reader/contributor on Artblog.net for some time, and really value the opinions and writing of Franklin Einspruch and his hordes. Right now its stuck in a current events political science thread that I don’t mind reading but cannot add anything intelligent to.
PaintersNYC is a Blogger-designed site (like this one) out of New York that posts jpegs of contemporary…well… paintings. It was pointed at on Artblog by George Rodart. It’s a site that I’m not afraid to bring down with my particular brand of intelligence. The breadth of painting styles on display is really interesting, everyone’s sure to find an image they’ll like somewhere in the archives; but don’t read the inane comments unless you’re feeling particularly suicidal and want to get yourself over the hump. Today’s posted painting might hurt your eyes, so viewer beware.
And my interest in JT Kirkland’s Thinking About Art weblog lies with his Artists Interview Artists project. Not really knowing why I would bother, I’ve nonetheless submitted five questions for an as yet unknown artist to type answers to, which JT will then publish at his discretion; and I now look forward, with some trepidation, to the task of answering a third undisclosed artist’s questions about my own art and studio practice.
So I didn’t get to the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop today, but tomorrow will be more artistically fruitful, I feel sure. Disclaimer: none of the hyperlinks are guaranteed to interest you; they don’t even all interest me but I had to try out the feature.
