Wednesday, January 31, 2007
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Art Imitates Life (2007)
I made a new piece that graphs the searches for "Art" and "Life" against each other for the time period between 2004-2006. It is amazing how similar they are.
You can see it here.
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I made a new piece that graphs the searches for "Art" and "Life" against each other for the time period between 2004-2006. It is amazing how similar they are.
You can see it here.
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Monday, January 29, 2007
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Seattle, February 1, 2007
The Artists Reformation Project is pleased to present Caleb Larsen and Brett Walker's new collaborative installation, This is/not a Room Full of Peanuts. The two Seattle artists will be creating a work centered around the age-old question of "physical reality." Employing tongue-in-cheek metaphors, the artists will transform the gallery space into an active work of art, directly engaging the viewers both in terms of the function of art and of the metaphysical debate.
Labels: art, brett walker, exhibition, opening
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An Installation as a Passive Performance. Or, Something that doesn't make sense now will make sense later.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
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In considering an upcoming installation that Brett Walker and I are doing, I began thinking about "passive performative installations" (for lack of a better term). A work that is created and exhibited, but the viewers are not given the necessary information to completely understand the work. However, later in the documentation and supplementary text the visual and conceptual elements are completely explained and the viewer's response and confusion become part of the work. A tension is created with the initial viewer experience and it is resolved in the presentation of the documentation. I find the situation interesting where seeing the exhibition is not as important to experiencing the work as seeing the documentation.
This is a far from new idea. Many people use this strategy, Maurizio Cattelan comes to mind as does a recent installation at The Wrong Gallery by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset. These types of things can come off as one-liners, but a good one-liner is very hard to make.
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This is a far from new idea. Many people use this strategy, Maurizio Cattelan comes to mind as does a recent installation at The Wrong Gallery by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset. These types of things can come off as one-liners, but a good one-liner is very hard to make.
Labels: art, brett walker, ideas
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Sunday, January 21, 2007
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So I went to the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park (it was dark so most of my pictures are blurry). I have been anticipating this for months. I am a firm believer that Seattle needs more art spaces that look beyond the city's almost painful provincial artistic mentality and embrace national and international artists. Imay just be being snobbish or naive.
The opening was a complete success, if by success you mean a lot of people, I mean really a lot of people, wondering around. They had "live music and dancing" and "art projects for the kids". Two things that I generally don't like.
The "music tent" was set up right next too Richard Serra's Wake. So that the generators were almost touching the steel. It was a beyond tasteless placement of the tent. The music was of the typically safe and upbeat type. The singer was wearing one of those hats people make from balloons. And about hand draw "do not touch" signs were arranged throughout the piece. Couldn't they at least run up to Kinko's and printed something out?
I am terribly excited to go and see the park when i
t is not filled with buskers, strollers, sub-par family-friendly hip-hop bands, and strange fellows waving around Technicolor scarves.
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Today Marci and I will be going to the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. I first saw the project at the Landscape Architecture show at MoMA a couple of years ago. From what I have seen as they have been building it, it looks very neat. It is certainly beautiful and does a lot for the area that it is in (the lot used to be a couple of terrible parking/vacant lots). I am curious, however it will fall into more the "park" category than the "sculpture," i.e. acting primarily as a green space than an art venue.
I am a bit nervous of the opening days. From their website "Two full days of free festivities will kick off this historic occasion in grand style. Events and activities will include two stages of live music and dance, art making for kids and adults, artist demonstrations, self-guided park tours, and more! " Not really my cup of tea.
Pictures to come.
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Friday, January 19, 2007
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I went an opening at the Lawrimore Project in Seattle last night. I went for two reasons: 1) the Lawrimore Project is one of the few Seattle galleries that I have actually heard mentioned in the non-Seattle art press, 2) Josh Azzarella is Tiffany Calvert's significant other. I know Tiffany from a residency that we did at I-Park (which is a completely weird place, but extremely nice).
I think I like Josh's work. I had heard about it and seen bits online, but this was my first encounter with in person. It strikes me as Paul Pfeiffer meets Bill Viola meets USA Today. A bait and switch of mezmorizingly beautiful imagery and truly horrific content. I didn't like the projectors that Lawrimore used, I though the very visible light bleeds was distracting from the images, but I might just be nit-picking.
Labels: art, exhibition, opening, seattle
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I managed to fall out of Google. That is to say, my website this website used to be the #1 result for "Caleb Larsen" which makes sense to me. However, in fooling around with adding a sitemap and my robots.txt file I manage to tell Google not to index ANY of my pages. It was a simple clerical error, but it seems that GoogleBot crawled my site right after I did that, so now I no longer exist in Google. Very Odd. I am hoping to salvage my Page Ranking.
I am never happy with the way that I have my website set up. I want something that is simple, flexible, fast, easy to update and easy to modify that does not require me to muck around with HTML, CSS, or Javascript. Mind you, there is a time and a place to do all of that but I do not think that to add a project or post to my blog that I need to bust out a text editor or fire up Dreamweaver.
I recently started using RapidWeaver...which quite frankly kinda sucks. It aims to make building website quick and easy without having to deal with HTML. That is good. What is bad is that it is really really slow once you have put together a site that includes photos, video, blogs, and such. On a 2GHz MacBook with 2 Gig of ram it takes minutes to open, and minutes to save and minutes to publish changes. And, it does not give images useful names unless you explicitly name the images. Instead it calls them "image-01" or something like that. Which, one might think is not a big deal, but it is to Google Images and to people to like to have a neat meaningfully named site.
So I am now using a hybrid of RapidWeaver for maintaining projects, because it is quite simple to add projects despite the loading slowness, and Blogger. I essentially made a Blogger template that looks like my RapidWeaver site. Blogger is fast, easy, and good. While I think the RapidWeaver Blog feature is pretty much the opposite of that.
I also cleaned up the home directory of my site. Not that any of that matters to you, but I think of it as cleaning of my desk, or taking out the trash. Sort of therapeutic.
We will see how long this lasts.
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I am never happy with the way that I have my website set up. I want something that is simple, flexible, fast, easy to update and easy to modify that does not require me to muck around with HTML, CSS, or Javascript. Mind you, there is a time and a place to do all of that but I do not think that to add a project or post to my blog that I need to bust out a text editor or fire up Dreamweaver.
I recently started using RapidWeaver...which quite frankly kinda sucks. It aims to make building website quick and easy without having to deal with HTML. That is good. What is bad is that it is really really slow once you have put together a site that includes photos, video, blogs, and such. On a 2GHz MacBook with 2 Gig of ram it takes minutes to open, and minutes to save and minutes to publish changes. And, it does not give images useful names unless you explicitly name the images. Instead it calls them "image-01" or something like that. Which, one might think is not a big deal, but it is to Google Images and to people to like to have a neat meaningfully named site.
So I am now using a hybrid of RapidWeaver for maintaining projects, because it is quite simple to add projects despite the loading slowness, and Blogger. I essentially made a Blogger template that looks like my RapidWeaver site. Blogger is fast, easy, and good. While I think the RapidWeaver Blog feature is pretty much the opposite of that.
I also cleaned up the home directory of my site. Not that any of that matters to you, but I think of it as cleaning of my desk, or taking out the trash. Sort of therapeutic.
We will see how long this lasts.
Labels: updates
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