I rather like to plan. I think a good plan for this year is to just get good and serious about my art work. Yeah, I’m not going to accept any more exhibition rejections. 17 December 2010, that’s the last rejection I’m accepting from an exhibition jury.

So how am I doing this? By deciding to. I’m only submitting to exhibits with substantial awards. Like an investment, my art business investment. And the other thing is to do more self promotion. Maybe display somewhere locally. You know rent a hall or something, throw a big ME event.

Been reading Seth Godin, “Small is the New Big”, very perceptive guy. Quite funny at times also. What I’m taking away from him is, one is the captain of ones own ship. Things aren’t going the way you want? Change course! Pretty simple.

As the year progresses I’ll keep you up to date. Of course I’ll have to be more consistent posting here, and I’ve got some good ideas along that line.

Stay tuned.

Financial Times in October 2010 did a piece about how the brilliant photographer Annie Leibovitz has no standing in the “art” photography market. Long short on it is because the gatekeepers don’t like the way she plays (who she is!).

As Jeffrey Boloten, a managing director of an art consultancy, puts it: “You do have to play by the art market rules.”  Apparently Leibovitz has failed this test, and therefore her credibility among the “movers, shakers and brokers” of the art world is low.

Well then isn’t it about time to dispense with the “movers and shakers”? I don’t suggest Annie follow the lead of Hazel Dooney an Australian artist of uncompromising personal integrity when it comes to her art and the relationship she has with the appreciators thereof. However, I would suggest a serious re-examination of how Annie wants to approach the marketing of her oeuvre.

I would consider the model of Jack Vettriano the painter/”postertier”. If only because Annie’s work falls into the multiply reproducable form and logically could (should) be marketed that way. To claim unexclusivity causes a lessening of the “art” of something as Mr. Boloten proposes “Rarity is essential and it is something that photography does not naturally have,” simply shows the gatekeepers don’t even know what art is. Vettriano’s work is not less impactful, or appealing, or interesting because you can get an example for $50, and more than a couple people have. Art is a communication from the artist to an audience.

And exclusivity, Ha! There are several hundreds of prints of various Ansel Adams photographs, and yet a single one, of over 1,000, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941” fetched $518,500 at auction.

Of course we’re not comparing apples to basketballs here as Adams is dead and the auction was secondary market, none the less 500k is not chump change.

The artist needs to be first true to their own vision, make their own statement, and bypass the gatekeepers. As the battle cry Ms. Dooney suggests “Art is war”.

From pre-history until the 18th century, practically, art was commissioned by a form of patron. This might be the church, a guild, or the portrait sitter, nobility or otherwise. Then in 1648 with Cardinal Richelieu’s founding of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Academie de peinture et de sculpture), in Paris, the taste of art started to shift and come under the influence of “official” critics. These at first were peers, working artists, but as their “responsibilities ” pulled them away from creation into teaching, administration, and production of art, ie. the studio factory, the Academy masters became gatekeepers holding up the status quo as the epitome of expression. Until by the latter 19th century appreciation is dictated by the “critic” who either has no particular experience in the medium, or is a failed practitioner. The critics lack of perception and support of the status quo thus dismisses and derides a new window of communication being opened by artists like Degas and Manet.

They missed the whole point; war is a crime.

Later I saw one of those ‘mechanical’ street artists doing his robot show. He wore military fatigues, but he was painted all gold.

The politics and the art leads to todays thesis; “Art is War”. It’s a war against the unaesthetic, the unimaginative, the unappreciative. A war of eye-opening, convention questioning, storming the status quo.

Art since before the Lascaux caves in the Paleolithic era has been a form of door for people to see beyond their daily existence.

As the cave painter invokes the magic of successful hunts; as the 15th century Van Eyck, in the Ghent alterpiece, tells the story of the Old Testament or Michaelangelo the story of creation. As Manet tells the aesthetic of “The Dead Toreador” or the “Execution of Maximilian”. As Picasso gives an anguished wail over Guernica and shows us a bull’s head in a bicycle seat Bull’s Head (Tete de Toro) so it mires in the frosting of Thiebaud’s cupcakes and so it loses touch with the people.

Why? What can be done about that?

Well one of my dance instructors, Nancy Lyons, was retiring at the end of the year and a retrospective concert was being performed. As I’m only 2 hours away now we went.

Not only has the campus sprouted buildings all over and the trees are many years taller, but the sleepy little town down the road is surrounded by apartments and housing developments. I spoke to 6 or 7 people I’d known, some I recognized, some I didn’t immediately.

Overall a delightful evening. The variety of dancers was more than the usually lithe, taut, muscle machines. The variety of dances was all Nancy. I particularly enjoyed the slightly formal ‘White Pause’ an early piece from 1984 the program says was converted from a solo to the group piece for these dancers. It converted well, with nice synchronicity and detailed floor pattern. The performance that impressed me most was Collette Van Gerwen in the solo ‘Lure’, look for that name cause this gal is good. The piece is from 1986, a few years after I’d been with Nancy, and I’d guess she is at her prime here. It has lyricism, humor, and strength.

When I danced in Nancy’s company we did some fun pieces, show for kids; some tongue in cheek; Procession; and the usual “dance” stuff. I was too serious a person then to see the purpose/value of humor/insouciance, but that changed one night on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Claire Porter showed me humorous dance can be ‘serious’ dance, but that idea then led to what is “serious” anything; and then ‘ding’ everything got less “serious”. I’ve built on this through experiment, experience, and much study in other areas and now view Life as the game it is; and if it ain’t fun you ain’t playing hard enough.

More soon.

A gaffer in the motion picture industry is the head of the electrical department. They are responsible for the execution of the lighting plan for a production.  An experienced gaffer can coordinate the entire job of lighting, including designing the lighting plan. The job is both technical and creative.

The name derives from the early days of film when they were shot mostly in natural light. Filming stages had canvas roofs and the natural light was controlled and directed by moving large tent cloths, to let in more or less light, using long poles called gaffs.  In 16th Century English, the term “gaffer” denoted a man who was the head of any organized group of labourers.  So the gaffer is the person in charge of men with long poles.  Not quite.

Given knowledge of the time of day and conditions to be portrayed the gaffer will manage all the resources needed, from electrical generators, lights, cable, and rigging to manpower. Gaffers are responsible for knowing how to gel the lights or windows (cover with coloured plastic sheeting) to achieve a variety of effects, such as bringing the dawn as night passes into day. They can re-create the flicker of light as a subway car goes through the station, or the motion of light inside an airplane banking across the sky.

Sometimes the gaffer is titled in the credits as Chief Lighting Technician.

The gaffer works with the director of photography (DP) or, in television, the Lighting Director (LD). The DP/LD is responsible for the overall lighting design, but they may give a little or a lot of latitude to the gaffer on these matters, depending on their working relationship. The gaffer also works closely with the key grip, who is in charge of some of the equipment related to the lighting.  And the gaffer will usually have an assistant called a best boy. Other members of the lighting crew are called ‘electricians’ though some may have no electrician knowledge or training and may do things like set up stands or move cables.

So I’m looking forward to getting back on schedule and having something to say.

Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.

How words get associated facsinates me. How does a piece of sheet metal equal generic text? I didn’t know.

So to find out we go to the late 1800s newspaper business and a company called Western Newspaper Union. Their idea was to make available national and international news that a small local paper would find hard, expensive, or impossible to gather. Thus the birth of syndicated news. Western would gather and typeset the national and international stories and distribute to their subscribers the plates to fit the local printing press. Then the local would print their papers with the syndicated news from these plates and the local news and advertising from their own plates. All the subscribers to Western got the same plates, therefore the papers printed the same text.

See where we’re going here?

A local paper set their copy into a soft alloy plate. Western plates had to be shipped all over so their plates were harder and heavier to withstand shipping. Ergo the slang ‘boilerplate’ came to mean the heavier Western plates and so by extension to mean the identical text printed from those plates

Though typesetting and printing is all computerized today the terminology remains.

In the future I’ll look at filmmaking terms and stagecraft terms.