Intentionally left blank

It's Wednesday, it's true, but I'm so bogged down in details that I have nothing to give you today. Come back next week. I'll be posting images from the (e)merge Art Fair at the Capitol Skyline Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Love!

MIssed our date

Sorry I missed you on Wednesday. Things are getting tedious around here.

Things in the studio have slowed down as I pack the work up and prepare to send it off on a complicated choreography back and forth across the country. The boxes I ordered weeks ago are cheap and unworthy for the job. Not their fault, just a bad pick on my part. They'll make it to their first destinations but not the second. The flimsy cardboard will be destroyed by brutish handling, hand trucks and conveyer belts. The artwork will be fine because I insulate well with 1/2" foam cut to fit the boxes and everything is snug inside. And on the outside I've reinforced with edge protectors on all four vertical edges.  I wish I had done something about the boxes as soon as I had them, but my attitude was too casual. I had gotten the summer's work done and I was tired. I wanted to go to music lessons and swim meets with my kids. A good trade even in retrospect. Now, after a day of research I know all about edge crush and bursting tests that rate box strengths. I'll order new boxes in the morning, custom sizes to match the old ones, and they'll arrive in time at the artworks' destinations so that I can smoothly transfer, insulation and all, to new, tougher boxes for the second leg of their journeys.

You might be wondering why I don't just use crates. I gave up on them a while back because freight charges are expensive and freight is slow. Also, where do artists store their crates? The answer is in their studios and I've got other, better plans for that space.

Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark

Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica:
A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a Telematic Future
by Simone Osthoff

Translating Geometric Abstraction into a Language of the Body

Clark and Oiticica questioned representation in art by examining ideas inherited from modern avant-garde movements--Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Suprematism and Concrete Art--that broke with mimesis and assumptions of realism. In the late 1950s, they reframed modernist notions of universal aesthetics by translating them directly into life and the body. Weaving a web of relationships around the body's internal and external spaces, they relayed a Modern European geometric abstract tradition to Brazilian vernacular culture. This syncretic process fused two very different traditions--a Western aesthetic canon that privileges vision and metaphysical knowledge, and Afro-Indigenous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete. It must be noted that, in a true syncretic spirit, both traditions have always coexisted in Brazilian society at large, but it was not until Oiticica began working that this syncretism was methodically investigated in the visual arts. read more...