Sunday, April 20, 2008

My Paper, My Land
A postcard show will be held to coincide with the IAPMA Congress in
Burnie, Tasmania. Works should reflect where you come from and contain
at least 80% paper. The size should be around 10 x 15 cm and works
should be sent through the mail, preferably with a postage stamp and
postmark to Gail Stiffe, 11 Keltie Street Glen Iris, Victoria 3146,
Australia.
The works will be exhibited in Creative Paper's Gallery for one month
including the congress time and will be for sale for $A20 each
unframed. The funds raised will be shared equally between Papermakers
of Victoria, Creative Paper, the IAPMA support fund and the Papermaking
Village in the Philippines and unsold works will remain the property of
Creative Paper Tasmania. All works will be documented on a website to
be announced. Works can be sent any time between now and 1 March 2009,
there is no limit to the number of entries anyone can send. Please
indicate on your card if you do NOT wish it to be displayed on the
website. Contact info@gailstiffe.info for more information.
www.papergail.blogspot.com
www.gailstiffe.info

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Writing Resource Center is beginning our yearly hiring process for new SWAs. Applications are available in the WRC and are due by 5 pm on Monday, April 28. I'm writing to ask that you inform your students of this opportunity. If there are any students you feel would be particularly good additions to the WRC staff, please personally encourage them to apply.

We have a unique challenge/opportunity in our hiring for next year, as five of our current SWAs are graduating in May and another will be leaving after next fall. That means that we need to hire at least five new SWAs. With so many openings, we want to do everything possible to have a high number of qualified applicants to choose from. This need also gives us a great opportunity to hire a group of SWAs with diverse backgrounds. With that in mind, we'd like to have quality applicants from each of the divisions. So, again, if you know anyone who seems like a particularly good candidate, please encourage them to apply. Thank you.

Happenings in the NYT

Art
Happenings Are Happening Again
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By JORI FINKEL
Published: April 13, 2008
LOS ANGELES

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Rob Hooks digs dirt in the vicinity of Watts Towers (background) in Los Angeles as part of a re-enactment of “Trading Dirt” by Allan Kaprow.

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Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute
Allan Kaprow in 1964.
IT’S hard to know what Allan Kaprow, the artist who gave us Happenings in the 1960s as a way to escape the confines of museums, would have thought of his current retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In some ways it’s even harder to imagine what he would have made of the re-creation of his historic work “Trading Dirt” at Watts Towers here, the first in an ambitious program of reinventions tied to the show.

Kaprow, who died in 2006, began “Trading Dirt” in 1983, long after he had largely abandoned his flashy Happenings in favor of more intimate pieces he called Activities. This one involved offering a bucket of dirt to someone in exchange for theirs. He traded soil from his garden for what he called “heavy-duty Buddhist dirt” from the Zen Center of San Diego, where he was studying.

Then he traded that for “dog dirt” from friends: soil that the artist Eleanor Antin and her husband, the poet David Antin, dug from a spot in front of their house, where they had buried Hayden, their beloved German shepherd.

Anecdotes accompanied the trades, which took place every now and then for nearly three years. And that was it, a rather uneventful series of events that Mr. Kaprow later served up in the form of a story captured on videotape. In much the way that John Cage’s music made space for noise and silence, Mr. Kaprow’s meandering narrative made room for dirt and gossip, and long interludes in between.

So when Rosie Lee Hooks, director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, decided to make a film version of “Trading Dirt,” she was deliberately adding another layer of meaning. Her idea was to trade buckets of dirt with a handful of artists who live in Watts and are linked to the center, filming the exchanges to make a 30-minute piece for the government-access Channel 35.

She plans to open her film with 1950s footage of Simon Rodia — the self-taught artist who in a herculean effort built Watts Towers out of scrap metal and found objects — carrying a pail toward his monument. The closing shot will show Ms. Hooks shoveling dirt from a bucket, post trade, into the ground beneath the soaring towers.

“This is a chance for us to give Watts a different image,” Ms. Hooks said on a late March morning at the site. “When you hear about Watts, you hear about riots and welfare. But this community also has loving families who want the best for their children, and an amazing artistic community.”

By 9 a.m. that day Ms. Hooks had dug up the first bucket of dirt from the grounds of Watts Towers. Her adult son Rob had helped. “We had no idea how hard the dirt was,” she said. Then, with the film cameras trained on her, she carried the bucket down the street toward some neighbors who knew Mr. Rodia to make her first trade.

But before she reached their house, the director called out. “Let’s take that again.” So Ms. Hooks, who has a theater background and some film acting credits, walked the block again, pail in hand. After three takes, they called it a wrap.

“This is very interesting,” said the artist Suzanne Lacy, a onetime student of Kaprow who watched the filming. “They’re doing two things at once, the piece and the documentation of the piece. We are witnessing the witnessing of an experience. This is very L.A.”

It was arguably not very Kaprow. Interested in the immediacy of experience (his retrospective is aptly titled “Art as Life”), he rarely made work for the sake of film or video. And although he liked to work from basic scenarios or “scores,” he welcomed spontaneity throughout. “There’s no doubt this film is more structured than Allan’s work,” Ms. Lacy said.

Which raises questions that Kaprow himself increasingly confronted as he aged. What does it mean to restage a Happening, revisiting an event that was meant to be very Zen and present tense? Does the artist’s original intention even matter? And, when it comes to exhibitions, what is the best way to sustain the legacy of an artist obsessed with the everyday and ephemeral, an artist who once compared putting “lifelike art” in a museum to “making love in a cemetery”?

For the Museum of Contemporary Art here, the only United States stop for a show that originated in Munich, one strategy for dealing with such issues has been to encourage visitor participation, both in the exhibition, running through June 30, and at the various off-site events. Its curator, Philipp Kaiser, has not only imported paintings, videos and more from the European show but has also invited a handful of Los Angeles artists to reinvent some of Kaprow’s early interactive installations, called Environments.

One of those artists, Barbara T. Smith, created a new version of Kaprow’s popular “Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann” from 1963 by setting up a living room’s worth of furniture, from chairs to tables to bookcases, all painted blue. Visitors can move the furniture, creating blue scuff marks on the floor.

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Julian Wasser
Kaprow’s 1967 “Fluids” is being restaged as part of the show.
At the center of the exhibition is another interactive piece, created by Ms. Lacy, the architect Michael Rotondi and the media producer Peter Kirby. Wooden chairs form a circle on a large pad of dirt, with a phone booth in one corner and the Kaprow video of “Trading Dirt” in another. Every Saturday Kaprow’s friends are scheduled to come, sit and record their experiences with his work for an audio archive.

At other times, anyone can enter the booth and dial (213) 455-2926 to record personal memories of Kaprow. (You can also call in from home.) Called “Trade Talk,” in a nod to “Trading Dirt,” this work is more tribute than re-creation. When the space is active, Mr. Kaiser describes it as “a living archive”; when it’s not, he regards it as a symbolic “void” at the center of the museum.

As Ms. Lacy sees it: “The conundrum of Allan’s work is how to move it into the museum, which was so fraught for him. I wanted to capture the part of Allan’s work that was the most significant to him and the most ephemeral. And that is the experience of his work as it becomes part of, and lives on in, someone else’s memory.”

The museum’s education department has organized a full program of Kaprow “reinventions” at sites ranging from local art schools to places overseen by community centers, like Watts Towers. With financing from the Getty Foundation, the museum has lined up 29 different institutions as partners in organizing 32 events (or nonevents) through June. Details are posted at moca.org/kaprow.

On Tuesday, for example, a group of University of Southern California students will reinvent “Drag” from 1984 by dragging concrete blocks around campus. Following Kaprow’s score, when you meet someone you know, you must switch to carrying the block. The next time you meet someone you know, you switch to pushing it. And then back to dragging, and so on.

On Wednesday the Hammer Museum will enact “Museum Portraits,” an unrealized activity that Kaprow developed for the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1977. He proposed that museum employees move their desk chairs to the street for an hour, exposing the “backstage” of the museum and perhaps revealing the way a chair can serve as a portrait of the sitter. “Van Gogh understood this very well,” he wrote, “when he painted ‘portraits’ of himself and Gauguin by depicting their respective chairs: one, crude, the other, elegant.”

Some of Kaprow’s most famous pieces will also be reconceived. Starting on April 22, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions will present his breakthrough 1959 “18 Happenings in 6 Parts.” And several institutions — including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center — will be recreating Kaprow’s 1967 work “Fluids,” starting on April 25. Each will build a large roomlike structure out of 50-pound bricks of ice and then let it melt.

“Kaprow had such a huge impact on Los Angeles, and ties to so many institutions here,” said Aandrea Stang, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s education program manager. “It was exciting to see how many groups wanted to be involved.”

Although he began his career and his Happenings in New York, Mr. Kaprow’s first retrospective was in 1967 at the Pasadena Art Museum, which helped organize a multisite production of “Fluids” across the greater Los Angeles area. Two years later he joined the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts before becoming a mainstay at the University of California, San Diego.

He taught at CalArts at the same time as the conceptual artist John Baldessari, which inspired the one-liner that while all of Mr. Baldessari’s students went on to become art stars, Kaprow’s went on to become social workers. “Or Zen Buddhists or chiropractors,” said Ms. Lacy, who shared a Zen teacher with Kaprow.

Kaprow was also close to the artist Paul McCarthy, who is doing his own, more private performances at unannounced times. The museum says he is planning a version of “Spit” from 1985, using a Q-tip and his own saliva to clean the car owned by Jeremy Strick, the museum’s director. (Saliva was a favorite medium of Kaprow, who had students lick their arms and watch the saliva dry and put ice to great use.)

For Ms. Lacy much of Kaprow’s work has social or political potential, even if he personally avoided that kind of content. Not only does his work bring people together, but it also uses the stuff of real life. There’s just one step, she said, from a Kaprow activity that involves brushing your teeth to a feminist performance that includes ironing clothes.

“That’s one reason the Watts film is so interesting,” Ms. Lacy said of Ms. Hooks’s project. “They seem to be using Allan’s work as a vehicle for political reasons.”

“You could look at their film and say it’s nothing Allan would have done himself, but I think he would have talked about it and thought about it. I don’t think he would have judged it.”

As for Ms. Hooks, she said she found some of her exchanges of dirt fascinating, even at the material level. The dirt offered by the sculptor Kenzi Shiokava was really rich, she said, complete with insects. “And we got some really wonderful conversation and stories, comedy and history.”

“This kind of work requires a lot of trust,” she said. “People could have been suspicious: What are you talking about, trading a bucket of dirt? But they were all so open.”

She plans to finish the film next month in the hopes that the museum will screen it before the end of its show. In the meantime she’s keeping the bucket of dirt.

“I’m going to ride the bucket around in my car until we finish shooting,” she said. “We still have to get some B-roll and wraparound stuff.”
Natasha Trethewey
will read and discuss her work April 17th 7:00 p.m. at Traditions
Hall on the University of South Florida Tampa campus. The 2007
Pulitzer Prize winner
accepted the award for her third poetry collection, Native Guard
published in 2006. It contains her poems about black Union soldiers
who guarded a fort off the coast of Mississippi during the U. S.
Civil War.


Her first work,
Domestic
Work, was selected by Rita Dove to receive
the inaugural 1999 Cave
Canem  poetry prize for the best first book by an African
American poet and also received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for
Poetry and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize.
Her second work, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) received the 2003
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize. She is the
recipient of the prestigious Bunting fellowship from the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.


Born in Gulfport,
Mississippi, Trethewey holds a B.A. in English from the University of
Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins
University, and an M.F. A. in poetry from the University of
Massachusetts. She is the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair, and
professor of poetry at Emory University


This event is
sponsored by the USF Humanities Institute, the departments of English
and Women’s Studies, and USF Women in Leadership and Philanthropy.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Poetic Meetup Featuring:
MARTHA MARINARA

Orlando Poetry Group presents:
Every Third Wednesday@ Austin’s
Martha Marinara is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida where she teaches rhetoric, First-year writing, and creative writing. She currently directs the Information Fluency Program, a university initiative. Marinara has written two textbooks—Writing Outside the Lines (2000) and Choices: A Handbook for Writers (2008), and published articles in College Composition and Communication and The Journal of Basic Writing. She writes and publishes poetry and fiction, and her work has appeared most recently in Massachusetts Review, Xavier Review, FEMSPEC, Estuary, Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, White Pelican Review, and Alembic. In 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for Poetry. Street Angel, her first published novel, was released in October 2006 and was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Best GLBT Novel Award for 2006.
Wednesday April 16, 8:30pm

Austin’s Coffee and Film
929 W Fairbanks Ave
Winter Park, Florida

The Wonderful Martha Marinara
Followed by an Open Mic
BE THERE!

Hosted by Chaz Yorick’s Open Words ,& Russ Golata
For directions or comments e-mail me at blacksox@att.net
Or phone me at 407-403-5814
Or AUSTIN’S at 407-975-3364

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Just a note that we will not be meeting during BACC days. For those of you who are not "BACCing," I hope you will consider:

-- reading some of the authors I have recommended to you throughout the term, hopefully in a pleasant place with a notebook handy
-- reviewing or otherwise creatively or critically responding to the BACC presentations

sharing the results here, on this blog, or elsewhere!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Introduction to Non-fiction Publishing featuring John Byram and Amy Gorelick of the University Press of Florida
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
2:00 pm
Cook Hall Conference Room

Amy Gorelick, Senior Acquisitions Editor, and John Byram, Editor-in-Chief, will discuss the basics of getting your work published; submitting a proposal, when to submit a full manuscript, the review process, the production process, marketing and selling works of non-fiction, and things to avoid when working with a publisher. A question and answer period will follow the brief presentation, with an opportunity to meet and discuss your own work in detail with Ms. Gorelick.

The University Press of Florida, established in 1945, is the largest publisher in Florida and the second largest university press in the Southeast.



UPF's mission is to serve all universities in the SUS system: to answer questions, offer advice, and possibly publish your work.
A mail art show at Urban Community School in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
Third and fourth level students are curating their own mail art show
and `artist's exchange'. Not only will the children learn about the
various ways that a theme can be artistically interpreted, they will
learn how to organize and hang an a show of their own, and will learn
about geography through the tracking of various entries. They will
send back their work in exchange for the work received.

The theme for all work should be centered on the theme of "habitat".
What is YOUR habitat like?

Entries can be in any media. Size should be kept at 8"X10" or
smaller. Remember to include your name and address.

No fees, no jury, no returns. All creative responses are welcome, but
please keep in mind that they must be school appropriate to be
exhibited.

In order to guarantee display entries must arrive no later than May
16th, 2008.

For more information please email: mgreen@leeca.org

Send entries to:
Mary Green, CAS
Art Department
Urban Community School
4909 Lorain Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44102

Wednesday, April 2, 2008