Inside Art New Orleans: Rockmore Revisited: A Treasure Trove Revealed

Thornton Dial at the New Orleans Museum of Art

Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat. “If anybody else had created a major opus of this scope,” said Joanne Cubbs, an adjunct curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “he or she would be recognized as a major force in the art world. Instead Dial struggles at the margins.” More>>

Paul Chan: A Lawless Proposition

What happens when it is the making that instructs the maker? What happens when the art makes the artist? When I make a work, there is sometimes a turning point; a moment when the conceptual and sensuous materials bind in such a way that the composition begins to resist my attempts to shape it according to my original intentions, and develops, against my will, its own sense of what must be done in order to be itself. It doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does, I feel relieved, because it means the minutes, days, or years of working up to this point were worth the effort. But there is also a degree of despair, because the initial conception of how the work ought to be no longer holds sway in how it will continue to evolve. I am no longer the prime mover of the work. My directions are no longer followed. Beyond this certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached. More>>

Traviesa stars in Greber's A.r.t.i.s.t S.t.a.t.e.m.e.n.t.

New Orleans art experiences rapid change even as some things remain the same. Here Jonathan Traviesa -- a 20-something UNO student a mere decade or so ago, but now something of a gray eminence to a new generation of emerging artists -- stars as Dave Greber, an emerging 20-something video savant in this self-produced "publicity" piece on Vimeo. "Released specifically to combat growing rumors that Greber was losing a battle against pretension, this "artist statement" sets out to show that a typical day for the 'Grebster' is more playful than you'd think. Greber puts on an impromptu fashion show and sits in a comfortable-looking chair reflecting on life and art." More>>

A Tour of Banksy's New Orleans Landmarks

From Nola Vie

by Brianna Smyk

In 2007, Banksy focused his social commentary on New Orleans, when he painted a series of street art pieces around the city. These pieces marked the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and attempted to refocus national awareness on New Orleans. Now, four years later, some of the pieces have been painted over, while plexiglass coverings protect others. These plexiglass coverings broach a discussion about the ephemeral nature of street art. It originally is created to be temporary, but in the wake of its increasing popularity (due to its high selling prices in auction houses and galleries, as well as its inclusion in recent museum exhibitions), people are finding better ways to preserve street art. But that is a conversation for you to have during your own tour. More>>

Occupy Go Round: The Circularity of Influence

“Bloomberg Beware. Zuccotti Park is Everywhere.” —Nov. 17 #OWS chant

The influence of concentric circles in the contemporary world is subtle. Most of us don’t realize how affected we are by concentricity. Most people aren’t privy to the prevalent use of concentric circles for applications such as data mining, or protocols for tactical response by the police and military, or the design of our communities, both virtual and actual... We don’t realize that Microsoft researchers are mapping community dimensionally and using concentric circles to generate algorithms that enable programmers to create simulated environments to appeal to our basic human (circular) sensibilities. More>>

Mirror of the Buddha at the Rubin Museum

In early Tibetan painted portraits, founding masters of important Buddhist schools were often represented as holy personages. Using artistic conventions developed in India, Tibetan artists expressed the Buddhist ideals embodied in a particular person, exalting their human subjects to the level of buddhas. Mirror of the Buddha presents exquisite examples of these portraits, painted primarily in the eastern India-inspired Sharri style. Marking the third in a series of exhibitions that explores important Tibetan painting styles, Mirror of the Buddha will also analyze inscriptions and lineages, which are often overlooked yet of critical importance, as tools for dating these works of art. Mirror of the Buddha will be complemented by a full-color catalog rich with new scholarship, by curator David Jackson. More>>

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Rockmore Revisited: A Treasure Trove Revealed

The Tomb of Rockmore

by John Ed Bradley

“Noel Rockmore was a fascinating, oddball, homegrown American surrealist,” says Dan Cameron, a curator of contemporary art best known for his work as artistic director of U.S. Biennial, the organization that produces Prospect New Orleans. “In the last year or so I’ve participated in some interesting discussions with friends and colleagues in New Orleans whom I respect, and there’s no denying what they think about him. These are people who don’t use the word genius very often, but they all use it when discussing Rockmore.”
The artist, it turns out, had often called on Shirley Marvin when

he needed money over the course of their thirty-three-year friendship, and Rockmore, who died in 1995 at age sixty-six, seemed to always need money. The bulging contents in the storage unit were testament to his brilliance, but they also revealed Shirley’s devotion to an artist who produced some fifteen thousand works of art in his lifetime and who might have become America’s Picasso if not for crushing battles with alcoholism and bipolar disorder that, by the end of his days, had reduced him to a bona fide lunatic and a virtual pariah in the art world. More>> (From Garden & Gun)