2007-07-17

the drug money didn't work out because i was stupid and drank too much before going in for my screening. had a wild bar-hopping time with my friend trevor.
and i won two games of pool which never happens. so i lost the 900$ that was supposed to be be payment for taking drugs and having my blood drawn. good thing is, now my weekends are just as open as the rest of the week. i think there's a mosquito in this office, biting me...

currently i am sculpting a clay head, a self-portrait, lifesize. it will be molded later into a reproducible porcelain one, if all goes well. after the firing, it will be 15% smaller than life-size.

oh, ! Europe was tantalizing and exhilerating. we took trains through germany. you know, they have really jumped ahead of us on the windmill energy thing. there are just hundreds and hundreds of them all over the countryside, clumped together on farmer's fields, i guess. here in Moorhead, MN, there are a few, and it's nice to see. But we could certainly build tons more. Also, lots of people have solar paneled their roofs. And in Hawaii it's the same way. Kelli says, that when they make solar paneling more attractive, and less discombobulating to look at, that it will take off.
We saw lots of art. of course, if i could post pictures on diaryland, i could show you some of the 1000 photos that i took. you'll just have to take my word for it... tons of art. it was fantastic.
my favorite may have been this sound piece in Muenster by Susan Phillipz, it was set up with speakers underneath the bridge, on both sides of a wide river. The artist recorded herself singing this song, almost a lullaby, parts of the song were played on one side of the water, parts on the other side. the architectural space allowed for the sound to travel between the water and the bridge across this long distance, and you just stood their on the bank kind of in awe. it would be silent then for a while, and you just heard the traffic above.
That was at Muenster Sculptur, where all of the works were in public spaces, and you rented bikes to go see them. the whole town was essentially a bike town.

Mike Kelley made this great petting zoo, with a salt lick for the animals modeled after Lot's Wife, the biblical character who disobeyed God's command and looked back at Gomorra as she fled. (in the story she was then turned into a pillar of salt). damn good

in Kassel, we saw Documenta. it was pretty awesome, heavily curated in a way that we are not used to seeing in the states. very political, text-driven work, with no bones about pushing an agenda. my favorite pieces were these video documentaries of Kurdish men getting together and singing stories to each other. i forget the artist's name right now... they would sort of improv and make up these songs, dirges.

in venice, was the international exposition (bienalle), its been going for over 100 years. each country picked to be in it has its own building. others were spread out all over the town. one or a few artists from each country were in each pavilion. it was full of great stuff, and wierd stuff too. like maybe its time to take away albania's permanent pavilion status. anyway, this chinese artist, Kan Xuan, had a video of a lady running through a busy subway tunnel, against the human traffic. the video is following her, frantic doc. style, and she is yelling for a missing child. except she keeps running and their is no child. it was good. David Altmejd's fantastic glass humanoid, sexualized, but overrun by nature in the way of squirrels and rodents kind of way sculptures in the canadian pavilion were wild.