Warm Hands Buttons

I recently made buttons for my friend Conrad's band Warm Hands. Get them from him in Portland, Oregon, and wear them and be warm. 

Other news:

* Steve Roggenbuck lectures at Duke University re: internet pums.

* Cassandra Troyan is driving traffic to my blog. 

Interview With Filmmaker Cassandra Troyan

          Coup de Foudre, Part I of The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy.

Cassandra Troyan, my erstwhile roommate, collaborator, and friend, is a filmmaker, performance artist, and poet who has just released a chapbook with her brother, Cody Troyan, called Big Bill and the Lonely Nation. At the Wexner Center earlier this year Ron Green, an Associate Professor of Film Studies at OSU, dedicated his lecture on the emergence of the film loop to Cassandra, as well as to other OSU alumni Stacie Sells, Randy Hunter, Karl Baumann, Matthew Swift, and Nicolette Swift for pursuing the realization of experimental film and video at a university that doesn't even bother to offer a program for film production. But don't fret, Cassie has since transcended such dire circumstances and now finds herself a MFA candidate at the University of Chicago.

I interviewed her almost a year ago about the three-part film she made with Stacie Sells entitled The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy. That interview, partially updated to reflect time + reality, is after "the jump."

Slugging Percentage Post-DIT Fest Press Conference

Slugging Percentage addresses the public following their triumphant win in Kent.

In another one for the victory column, their self-titled tape was favorably reviewed by Razorcake.

Conversation with Art Critic Lori Waxman

Read Waxman's reviews from the Columbus show at ROY here.

Art criticism is in a weird place. Lori Waxman's 60 WRD/MIN performance this past March at the ROY G BIV gallery made that clear by blurring the lines between art and criticism and mixing a bit of the past with the present.

Waxman is a professional critic and art historian who is an instructor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a freelance contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Bad At Sports and Artforum. With 60 WRD/MIN, a traveling performance underwritten by the Warhol Foundation, she visits isolated art locales like  Austin, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; and our own Columbus, Ohio to write short reviews on an appointment basis for that untouchable caste in the art world -provincial artists. 

So what's weird about that? Well, to start with, the reviews Waxman wrote in Columbus were published by a magazine that no longer has a dedicated art critic or arts editor on staff.* This is part of a nationwide trend among print publications to cut and/or water down arts coverage. Since art criticism has been amputated from our current media experience, part of the allure of being reviewed now lives in its near impossibility. Actually getting to have a serious review written about your work feels almost like a anachronistic novelty, like using a wind-up clock or going to a haberdashery to pick out a spic-and-span trilby. While 60 WRD/MIN clearly serves to invigorate local art scenes it also underscores that out-of-time je ne sais quoi of seeing actual art criticism in contemporary American media. The environment which makes 60 WRD/MIN necessary and intriguing also makes it a bit depressing, like "No, Lori, please don't leave - we need you here!" 

But it's also weird for the contradictory impulses that have always been constitutive of art criticism, as Waxman points out on the 60 WRD/MIN site:

"The short review is at once a challenge, an insult, a record, and a piece of advertising. Its purpose is debatable and arguably quite different for the various parties involved: the writer gets a tear sheet, a couple of bucks, and some editorial gratification; the reader, in the best case scenario, gets a succinct, opinionated description of a body of work they probably did not see in person; and the artist gets published recognition and an entry for their bibliography."

In our absolutely mammoth conversation after "The Jump" I ask Waxman about all of that and more - touching on long form versus short form writing, general readership versus professional readership, quality of artwork in regional areas versus metropolitan areas, her PhD dissertation for NYU on radical walking, the theatricality of 60 WRD/MIN, its critical reception and the particularly odd behavior exhibited by a few of our more uncouth Columbusites. 

*Arts Editor Melissa Starker left the Alive in December. Recent Artscape articles covering going-ons at the Wexner Center were written by freelancer Tracy Zollinger Turner, who is not listed as being a member of the Alive's staff on their site. And, perhaps tellingly, no one is listed as being the new Arts Editor.

Lori Waxman Reviews my Work as Part of 60 WRD/MIN

"Glitter and Xerox make an odd couple at first but not second glance. In James Payne’s Money Isn’t the Everything that Not Having It Is, 2009, conceptual and formal parallels abound between the two decidedly plebian mediums. Glitter, after all, is nothing if not cheap, accessible glamour. Xerox, after all, is nothing if not cheap, accessible printing. Money isn’t the anything of either of them, and in case the viewer doesn’t quite cotton to thinking about content through material, Payne provides the classic expression, “class war,” right smack in the middle of his print. Class party might have been a more apt turn of phrase, however, given the glitter and the Sex Pistols-esque aesthetic of collaged, black-and-white copied text. And what a party it is, down to the correspondence between rectangular pieces of silver glitter and the image fragmentation that results from blowing any image up over and over again on a photostat machine. It’s a getting at the heart of the matter old school style, not with digital pixilation but the flash of the copier. But why blow things up? To look closer at it, hoping that what gets lost in the expansion and repetition is replaced by revelation. If not, there’s always the pretty flash of glitter to make the emptiness of truisms ring anew."

                                                                                         —Lori Waxman

Full array of Waxman's Columbus reviews.

DIZZY HIPS

MP3 of my interview with Aaron Hibbs.

Pre-edit Lantern Story after "the jump."

And the Lantern version.