Hugh Graham Creative

I’m looking forward to tomorrow evening; Neo Rauch will be speaking at the Denver Art Museum. Some of the most engaging and provocative work of the last generation. More of his work at David Zwirner Gallery.

Artists on Art: Neo Rauch
Thursday, September 20, 6:30 pm

Artists on Art: From Any Angle Logan Lectures 2007 features lectures by ten contemporary artists. In September, we welcome artist Neo Rauch, who createa unsettling disjunctions of space and time in his work.

Lecture starts at 6:30 pm; doors open at 5:30 pm. For more information, visit damcontemporaries.denverartmuseum.org.

Bill Amundson is the funniest guy I know. And, man, can he draw. For the past two weeks he’s been drawing buildings on the walls of the Phillip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. The show opens on Friday, June 15th. It closes on Saturday June 16th. Site specific work intended for rapid destruction. I hope someone has a camera. I’m not quite sure what his left hand is doing in his pocket, but he seems happy enough.

Friday, June 15, 6-9pm
Saturday, June 16, 12-5pm
1600 Pierce Street,
Denver CO 80214
303-225-8575
rmcad.edu

Next up for the gallery at RMCAD (opening June 22nd) is an installation called “Chaussures” by Viviane Le Courtois. Viviane is one of the Denver area’s most compelling installation and performance artists; she had an installation at Ironton last year, and has shown at Pirate, Edge, and numerous other spots. She says this on her website:

Creating sculptures everywhere I go, as long as I live.
I walk, breath, eat, collect, transform and create,
commenting on behaviors and habits of the world around me.

In Viviane’s case, this is not hyperbole. I am particularly fond of her pickles and the work with kombucha. The shoes are pretty cool too.

Vivian has worn over 100 pair of shoes over the past 16 years in more than 30 countries. She makes them herself, and wears them until they fall apart.

Eric Shumake, the new curator at the Steele Galleries at RMCAD, is doing some interesting work; I don’t know how much was put in place before he got there, but I hope he keeps it up. It’s good to see an educational gallery support some of Denver’s most truly talented artists.

Summer is a time for casual enjoyment in a reflective but less serious manner. In Denver, the best of summer culture happens in Lakewood at the Lab. The Lab at Belmar is a somewhat eccentric art space in a new urbanist development; it’s run by Adam Lerner, who is committed to establishing a world-class arts venue in a Denver suburb. So far, he’s doing a pretty good job of it; in the first year he’s put on shows by Isaac Julien and Liam Gillick. But, it’s not all super serious; Adam and his team realize that you have to have some fun to get people out to the ‘burbs.

In the summer, Adam puts on a great series called “mixed taste”, which is a series of programs combining tag team lectures on unrelated topics. It goes on all summer - this Thursday, it’s Swiss Typography and TV Theme Songs. Next week, Kurt Cobain and Solar Eclipses. And it goes all the way to the end of August, with an estimable finale: Marxism and Kittens, Kittens, Kittens.

The lectures are short, to the point, and entertaining. If you don’t like it, there’s another one coming shortly. And, while you’re there, check out the exhibit of Fang Lijun’s Heads, including the main room showing over 15,000 individual heads. Impressive. Visit the lab site at belmarlab.org for more information.

This afternoon, I was down at PlatteForum – the current installation, by one of Denver’s most original creative thinkers, Michael Ensminger, is really great fun.

A city of buildings, some ten feet tall, built out of lincoln logs. A miniature trip through the Chicago loop, but with a global range of styles (as long as the styles are available as part of the miniature log home industry). No glue, just gravity.

While I was there a train passed by, and we all heard something fall off the installation. It turns out one of the asian influenced buildings lost an adornment off its roof.

Part of the installation’s charm, besides the obvious connection to the nostalgia and americana, is the temporality of the experience. The truth is, all our constructions are temporal.

Stewart Brand wrote a book published in 1994 called “How Buildings Learn”; according to Publisher’s Weekly:

All buildings are forced to adapt over time because of physical deterioration, changing surroundings and the life within–yet very few buildings adapt gracefully, according to Brand.

Some years ago, Brand started a group called The Long Now Foundation; the term was actually coined by the musician, artist, and longnow co-founder Brian Eno. The Long Now Foundation was created by some serious minds. I like this detail; The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years. Here is the basis of their argument.

I’m a gardener by avocation; I think in terms of seasons, and (when I’m paying attention) years. Some artists have a vision that takes them across decades. In a rare case an architect thinks of centuries. But the fact is that our viewpoints are based on far too short a timeline.

One of the initiatives of The Long Now Foundation (and they are numerous) is The Clock of the Long Now. According to the project initiator Daniel Hillis:

“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”

They are currently working on the second prototype. The first prototype was finished in 01999. I’ll be gone by the next time it ‘bongs’ in 02099.

When the last
living thing

has died on
account of us,

how poetical it
would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice
floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the
Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not
like it here.

–Kurt Vonnegut
(1922-2007)

So it goes…

Tonight JHH informed me that she wants a bunny. But not just any bunny. A french bunny. A bunny that can hear, smell, talk, read the news, wake you up in the morning, tell you to stop working, talk to other bunnies, move its ears, play the radio, read your email, send visual messages in a semaphore-ish sign language. A pretty extraordinary bunny, in other words.

She says there are two reasons why we need a bunny. First, it’s the first of the smart appliances of the future, and if we don’t accept them now we will be left behind in the future. Second, it’s cute.

In my opinion, it might be a bit too cute. I think I might want to dismember the little fellow after about a week. So, I’m not so sure I’m ready for this. But you can make up your own mind. His name is Nabaztag.

“My deal with illustrators was that I couldn’t pay them much, but I could give them freedom to function.”
–Patrick JB Flynn, art director, The Progressive, 1981-1999

For 18 years, Patrick JB Flynn was the art director at The Progressive, the Madison-based non-profit magazine edited (until 1994) by Erwin Knoll. And during those 18 years, Patrick provided editorial illustrators with an unparalleled opportunity to express themselves in whatever manner they desired. The result was a remarkable creative partnership between Patrick and many of the best illustrators of the last two decades of the 20th century.

The list of illustrators he worked with was astounding, and even more amazing given the tiny fees he could offer. Steve Brodner, Joe Ciardello, Sue Coe, Henrik Drescher, Brad Holland, Anita Kunz, Arnold Roth, Ralph Steadman, and many others. And not just the big guns (though plenty of those); he also allowed emerging illustrators (por ejemplo mi esposa, hadley) the opportunity to “produce art without editorial meddling.”

Now PJBF has curated an exhibit of some of the work created by illustrators during his tenure at The Progressive; called “Another Voice“, it is currently being presented at Northern Michigan University, and is also available through an online gallery that shows the remarkable level of quality he was able to bring together. In an article on the Another Voice website that offers a great introduction to Flynn’s approach and results, Steven Heller says the following:

Only time will tell whether The Progressive’s art can equal the staying power of the old masters’ most iconic works, but for now it is among the best indication that contemporary graphic commentary, which can be pondered and interpreted at will, has a place in the fast-moving electronic information age.

In the end, Patrick JB Flynn fell prey to the whims of editorial fashion — his unwillingness to compromise got him fired, and The Progressive is much the worse for it. The magazine no longer has the multidimensional edge that enlivened it during those best years, and the writing suffers as a result. No other magazine in our era has so consistently, and for so long a period of time, presented illustration as art. It’s a shame it is no longer around, but it’s great to be able to take another look at it.

Friend and former denverite John Cuneo has a book out called nEuROTIC; It’s published by Fantagraphics, and is comprised of a collection of sketches from his notebooks. Of course, John’s notebooks are legendary; the content is unabashadly filthy, but what makes them compelling is the insight into John’s psyche.

There is a ’short interview’ with John up on the comics reporter site; he throws out props to his illustrator friends, including Tim Bower, Joe Ciardiello, Mark Ulricksen, and Jill Hadley Hooper (of course).

Give it a read if you are interested in learning more about John’s (twisted?) creative process and how he acts as glue for the illustration community. We had the chance to go up to Woodstock for John’s surprise 50th birthday in January, and it was amazing. One well-placed neutron bomb and the New Yorker would now be using photography for cover art.

“Though silent, he speaks”

In cemeteries throughout the west, Dum Tacet Clamat is written on hand-carved gravestones paid for by an insurance company called the Woodmen of the World. In an era where people had no other form of insurance, they made sure that their ultimate resting place would have an appropriate marker.

Jill and I ran into Dennis Gallagher (Denver City Auditor, Historian, and Raconteur) last Saturday; it turns out that we share an interest in preserving one of the unique parts of Denver’s cultural history.

A hundred or so years ago in the western United States most people didn’t worry much about art; there were more pressing concerns. Looking back from a distance, the most significant works mostly went in two directions; either they were architectural, or they were in cemeteries.

Denver’s most significant (or at least compelling) collection of funerary art is in Riverside Cemetery, located north of downtown off Brighton Boulevard. Jill and Maddie and I go walking there a couple times a week; it’s by far the calmest, most private place in the city. (If you’re interested, I’ve posted a few photos of Riverside as a set on Flickr.

Unfortunately, Riverside is drying up and falling apart. This evocative collection of stories about the people who founded Denver, who lived and died in Denver, is barely hanging on. A few years ago they lost their water rights (even though the cemetery is right on the banks of the Platte River). So now the trees are dying, the grass is brown, the old roses aren’t making it through the hot summers anymore. It’s a shame.

The city of Denver should buy Riverside and turn it into a park; sure, it’s in the middle of an industrial area, but industrial areas close to downtowns are being renovated all around the country.

We’ll see what happens with this; hopefully Dennis and his buddy Tom Noel can raise some awareness about this little known jewel. Riverside has a lot to say. It’s just lacking the right voice to say it with.

The current show at Ironton is really cool. Chelsea Hunt has created ‘an installation of miniature proportions’; it’s intelligent, humorous, and disturbing at the same time. She created engaging scenes of tiny characters with frightening figures looming over them. The same sort of figures that used to loom over me when I was a little character. And now, as I look down at the little characters, I am one of the looming figures.

The artist reception for the show is this Friday, March 30th, from 6-9pm, and the show continues through April 21st. More information is available on the ironton website, irontonstudios.com.