Visual Studies 280 Spring 2008 Flyer

VISUAL STUDIES 280 / Spring 2008
Graduate Seminar / Word and Image
Anthony Dubovsky
Monday Evenings 6:30-9:30 / 170 Wurster

This is a class about imagination and ideas. We begin each week with atheme—sometimes a single word--as point of departure. Everyone in the group does a project in response—a drawing, a painting, a collage—the medium is open. In the following class we look at the work, and a conversation ensues. And then, a new word.

The endeavor here involves a kind of opening—not just in terms of skill (although this can play a part), but more in finding the right (visual and verbal) language to give form to one’s understanding of the world. A challenge that carries over into any of the fields of art, design—and beyond…. The hand is important here--the autographic mark--both in terms of subject and source--and as a way of entering in. An exploration in which the goal becomes a part of the discovery...

Students from all departments welcome. Writers as well as visual artists. This is good place to explore your initial ideas about the master’s thesis. Also, for graduate students interested in teaching drawing (as GSIs in ED 11A) this course is strongly recommended..

If you are planning to enroll, please let me know by e-mail at my hotmail account. Include a paragraph about yourself, your interests--and a jpeg image of something you've made. (Please keep jpeg files small--500k or less. They're just to give me a sense of who you are.)

The Gaucho

This one is for Sabina--pretty much describes where I am these days, my dear, somewhere in the vicinity of Grauman's Chinese, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. on my left--in an Argentine Overture--with tickets for the orchestra, center row. We won't inquire as to the pagodas and lanterns. Just to make it absolutely clear that Bingo goes way, way back...

Mighty Sparrow

Somebody should check this out--maybe ME--my hunch is that it's really good! Early post-war Calypso from Trinidad...

SFW40534 Mighty Sparrow: First Flight: Early Calypsos from the Emory Cook Collection
(Smithsonian Folkways)

Experimental Urbanism: Braddock, Pennsylvania

Captain of Industry
One man's mission to save Braddock, Pennsylvania
by Joshua M. Bernstein
photo credit: Bryan Goulart
(ReadyMade, August/September 2007)

Fetterman, for all his efforts, knows he can’t spruce up every home on his own dime. In the long-term, his municipal uplift will require outside creative and economic capital. So, along with hands-on projects, the mayor’s days are spent as Braddock’s ambassador. “We need to get people excited about living in Braddock again,” he says. “For DIY-ers, this town is a dream.” On a typical day, he’ll meet clothing designers and museum honchos interested in what Braddock has to offer. The attention is mostly regional, spurred by articles in local newspapers, the town’s informative website, and Feldman’s outreach lectures.

article: Captain of Industry

"...we are ugly but we have the music."

A clip from Lian Lunson's documentary/concert film I'm Your Man (2006). The film contains interviews of Leonard Cohen interspersed with live performances (from a tribute concert in Australia) of his songs by other artists. I find these tribute performances of varying interest and quality, but the interviews of Cohen are, in my opinion, priceless.

Here Rufus Wainwright, one of my favorite contemporary singer-songwriters and performers (probably the best around), performs Cohen's elegy to Janis Joplin, "Chelsea Hotel #2" (1974).

I found interesting Cohen's remarks about New York versus Montreal and when, talking about the source of this song, he says:
"It's the only time I've been that indiscreet where I actually said to a journalist somewhere along the line that I had written it about Janis Joplin. You know the devil made me do it. I don't know why I was so ungallant. She wouldn't have minded, no, my mother would have minded."

Sit & Dig

Sit and Dig is an ongoing series of site oriented bench gardens from everyday abandoned objects. Wherever installed– whether the city center or the back forty, each Sit and Dig bench garden responds to the particulars of the given site and provides respite and nourishment to the curious passerby.

A small cooperative dedicated to availablism. (Nieto & Stone 07, "Grounded" SoEx, Dec 1st.)
The Grounded show continues.

Edwin Dickinson

Fairfield Porter on the painter Edwin Dickinson:

"Dickinson makes the most out of the least, especially in Winter Woods, Wellfleet, or View of Green Island. Least is, green, flat ground and blue-green sky; or an impression of trees that gives, with trained simplicity, a single essential for landscape, namely, the presence of nature. In these little paintings, or quick ones, he is in touch with an elusive, and fleeting, essentiality. In his large exhibition pieces, he is in touch with not entirely coordinated ideas of art. In the large paintings, he expresses, like an inadequate classicist, the limitations of a formality that originates outside himself; in the small paintings he has been able to surrender to his deepest self which has a profounder form than the form one can know and understand. It is a form that does not impose itself on his subjects, nor is it outside them. Chekhov said he wrote about the inkwell, and in the same way, in Dickinson’s small paintings, there is none of the manipulation of the artist who has lost contact with himself." (Art in Its Own Terms, p. 118-20.)

I posted this on our blog last year, but reading again, it seemed just as pertinent for this semester's class. Fairfield Porter is a painter you should know; he also wrote intelligently about the visual arts.