Bob Dylan - Chronicles, volume one

I've just finished reading Chronicles, volume one, by Bob Dylan. It's a maze of a book - he skips around in his life - covers a period from about 1959 to 1989 (I think), but not in chronocological order, so I had to keep looking for dates to see what decade he was writing about.

In Chronicles, Dylan writes about the singers and writers and artists who inspired him. I'll leave it to you to read the book (check 'World Cat search' to the left to find it in a library near you) to find out who most of them were. Some of them were people who I listened to when I was young (Hank Williams), who I found out about later (Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie), and who I'd never heard of before (Red Grooms).

On Dylan's web page you can find lyrics to his songs - a good thing since my copy of Modern Times has no lyrics in the liner notes. Dylan's Wikipedia page is extensive - there are 234 endnotes.

Craft and the Creative Process

Craft and the Creative Process is an exhibit put online by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2001. If you 'view by artist' you can see sketches, craft works, writing, and other ephemera by various craftspeople. What intrigued me were the oral history interview excerpts - I listened to the one with Anni Albers. Now I'm going to read the transcript. Explore the site until you find something that interests you.

Since there weren't very many audio file links on the exhibit page, I went to the Archives home page to see what else was in their Oral History Interviews web page. Turns out that there is much more than I'll ever have time to look at and listen to. Many of the interviews have transcripts and some have audio excerpts. You can choose to look through all the records, those with transcripts, or those with audio (13 today).

The Archives has excellent and extensive resources: exploring the site is time consuming but very rewarding.

I originally found out about Craft and the Creative Process in the SuperNaturale Newsletter back in 2005.

Richard Serra at MoMA

Richard Serra at MoMA - Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence

This YouTube video [link included since embedding may not be working or the code changes - Dec. 21/07] shows one of the five "MoMAvideos" of works by Richard Serra currently showing on YouTube. There are thirty videos there altogether, as of today. If you want to see a better quality video, go to the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years site. MoMA has done an excellent online presentation for the exhibit. Since the actual show closed on September 10, this is the only way anyone is going to get to see it from now on.

The site has walkthroughs and dialogue between Serra and the interviewer, often providing a feel of what it would be like to be inside the sculpture. Many pictures of the works on the website, no matter the actual location, have an accompanying discussion by Serra, which provides context for the work, and his reasons for using the materials, how he found them and put them together.

The site has fairly good navigation, although I found that titles sometimes stayed on the screen and got in the way of the images. My quibble would be that not all of the images are in colour. I would have been happier to see the colours of the works, especially when Serra talks about texture and appearance.

Olia Lialina - My Boyfriend Came Back from the War

This web art has been around since 1996 and is surprisingly (or not) still relevant. The links within the work can lead on and on, or sometimes you end up with a black screen. It's better then, I found, to click back a few pages and start over again.

I like the added touch of the Google ads to the left of the first screen. They may, or may not, have to do with war. I reloaded a few times and got quite a variety of links.

I found the Olia Lialina web work through a list of "Classic Web Works" on Judy Malloy's web page. One of my current plans is to read her book Women, Art & Technology and explore the links on the web page devoted to the book. I've tried this before and didn't get too far. It's very easy to get distracted.

For instance, if you check the main link for the Lialina work, you end up on a page that leads to
many other web pages. Then I had to Google her to see if I could find more information about her works. Her Teleporticia cv page has quite a bit of info. The Wikipedia page is quite short but has some very good, and distracting, links - and great animated gifs.

The environment on the Digital Stage

Today, Blog Action Day, I'm going to use the Digital Stage as a bit of a soapbox.

I believe that when we think about 'the environment' and 'global warming' and 'climate change' or any of the phrases used to describe the changes that are happening, the concepts can seem distant and vague. But really, our environment is that which surrounds us. It can be as near as our living room and as distant as hurricanes or deforestation or droughts halfway around the world.

Except that, of course, where I live, in Nova Scotia, serious hurricanes happen; deforestation occurs through clear-cutting; and drought does happen in Nova Scotia now and then. With climate change happening (and the climate is changing, whether we want to admit that the change is caused by humans or not), we can't afford to ignore it. We can do little things, like opening our window coverings to let in sunlight, or close them to keep out the cold in the evenings. We can recycle, re-use, compost, follow the instructions of our local waste management program.

I moved back to Nova Scotia after Hurricane Juan hit, and it didn't severely affect the area I live in (Annapolis County). These photos show the devastation in other parts of the province.

As for clearcutting, there are patches everywhere. The photos here include pictures of the Ship Harbour Long Lake area near where I grew up.

As for waste management, Nova Scotia has been promoting environmental stewardship since the late 1980s. What this means in practical terms is that in Annapolis County we have to divide our disposable items into garbage, recyclables, and compostables. This can be really annoying, to be truthful, but it really isn't that hard. One of the most difficult tasks is dragging my compostable bin up a hill at 8:30 in the morning.

I'm including a few photos to show where I live. The barnacles are from the beach at the bottom of the hill below my home. The picture makes them look large but they are really tiny and, on the day I photographed them, covered many small and large rocks well below the high water line. Wikipedia's entry is quite good - I think my photo is of a common rock barnacle. In any event, they were a living organism on a beach which sometimes seems to contain only empty shells. On that day, when the tide was out very far, there were also clumps of periwinkles and mussels waiting for the tide to come back in.

In the photo taken from the beach, the water you see is the Annapolis Basin. If you click on the "Map" link one of the places you will see is Cornwallis, where I live. Across on the other side of the Basin is North Mountain (I live on the South Mountain). Neither of them are terribly high, except when you have to walk up part of one carrying grocery bags.

Over beyond the left of the photo is the town of Digby, and beyond that is Digby Neck, which is currently the site of a dispute about the building of a basalt quarry. As with most things, there are at least two sides to the story. Those opposed want the quarry stopped. The company that wants to build the quarry wants it started, of course. And this dispute is an example of the many sides of any consideration of environmental change.

New York TimesSelect available to all

On September 19, TimesSelect was ended and all content back to 1987 made available to the public. So this means that all the New York Times articles that I've noted as being restricted are now available to all. This is a 'very good thing', especially since some articles have slide shows of the art that is discussed.

I'm guessing that new users of the online version of the NY Times will still need an account (free) since, if you have an account, you can save articles, get customized emails about your favourite topics, etc.

My List on WorldCat

WorldCat has added a feature whereby a user can create lists of articles or books once they have been found in a WorldCat search.

So, I've created a list of items I've found having to with the topics I've used in this blog. For now, it's one big list, but I may change that if it gets too long. I've added notes about where to find the material if it's available online. As always, some is available only if you have a subscription. Or you can go to your local library and read the print copy, if they have it.

Day to Day in Iraq New York Times Blog

Access to this blog is available only to those people who have a subscription to TimesSelect at the New York Times. [Not any more - see post for September 22]

The Day to Day in Iraq blog ran for only four months in 2006. Some of the bloggers had their own blogs, all of which are still available. Two of the bloggers are publishing as of August 2007. The four are Iraqi Konfused Kid;   Zeyad (Healing Iraq);  Ayad Rahim (Live from Baghdad) who also has a radio show at WJCU in Cleveland;  and Hassan Kharrufa (An Average Iraqi)

Another blog which features video from Iraq is Alive in Baghdad. Their web page has an archive of the videos and you also subscribe through iTunes.

All of these blogs provide different points of view than are found in most news reports. Some of the material may be disturbing, but I think it is important to hear from the ordinary people of Iraq.

collective - the interactive culture magazine

Collective is an "interactive culture magazine" produced online by the BBC. It has sections on art, music, games, books, and "more culture". Articles appear in all of these sections and most have comments by members - indeed, the articles may be written by members. Members may also start and contribute to conversations, submit art for display, etc.

What I like about the site is that, in addition to the above added value, the section on art, for instance, has a long list of articles about artists, exhibits, reviews, and whatever. Some (most? all?) of the entries have links to even more websites about the artist.

One of the artists I saw listed was Banksy. I had heard of him, of course, but had never really seen much of his art. One of the links from the collective art review entry is to Banksy's own website, and his art is well-displayed there.

[Sadly, collective closed in the spring of 2008, although the content is still available as of May 30]

Zed - CBC Television

Evidently this television show was cancelled after the fourth season. The CBC, bless them, have left the website up. You can watch videos by clicking on a link and browsing through the selections. There is also music and still content. You can search for specific content or browse through episodes (the 'Real' and 'Candid' buttons).

[June 27/07 - The Zed site is supposed to be online. I received an email on June 25 that said it "will remain online for the foreseeable future", but the URL provided was incorrect and the link above isn't working. It may be just temporarily unavailable. In the meantime, CBC has a new program along similar lines, due to begin on July 29. There are already videos there to be seen and voted on. Check out Exposure until Zed reappears, which it seems to have done by July 4.]

What was great about the show is that most, if not all, of the content was viewer-created and submitted. I guess in a way Zed has been superceded by YouTube but this show, and the website, was an original CBC concept at the time.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

This site at the Brooklyn Museum is so rich in content that it would probably take days to explore the whole thing. As a resource for information about women's place in history, the search functions within the 'Place Settings' and 'Heritage Floor' sections are invaluable as is the Feminist Art Base, which is not part of this exhibit. The exhibit itself has images and information about most aspects of the artwork (and more). Some of the images within the 'Place Settings' section can be magnified, especially the table runners, making it easier to see the stitches and details. There are also audio files by the artist.

"The Dinner Party" was, and is, one of those works of art which become something more. I first saw the exhibit in Calgary, Alberta, around 1980. At the time I was with a group of women who had travelled by bus from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I remember walking into the room where the tables were set, but I wish now I had spent more time experiencing the work. This site, and the book that I have "Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party Needlework" by Judy Chicago enhances and extends that experience. The book, like the site, provides detailed information, and very good illustrations and photographs of the needlework and ceramics which make up the exhibit. Search the WorldCat link to the right for a library near you that has a copy to borrow.

"The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art [at the Brooklyn Museum] is an exhibition and education facility dedicated to feminist art—its past, present, and future." In this website, it has taken this dedication seriously and provided a resource which actually is useful and detailed. There is so much to see and experience that it is well worth the time it takes to fully explore it.

Bert Teunissen - Portraits at the kitchen table

All of the portraits on this photographer's personal page aren't of people sitting at their kitchen table, but many of them are. Under the "Domestic Landscapes' tab, there are pictures from nine countries. Since the setting is very similar in each photograph- people seated, facing the camera, in their homes - the emphasis, to me, is that people are the same the world over. There are many differences, of course, but each person looks directly at the camera, seeming to say "Here I am. This is my place'.

Under the 'Info/Links' tab, which should have headings rather than a run-on page, in my opinion, there are copies of reviews of the exhibit. Included is the review from the New York Times where I first found out about "Domestic Landscapes'. Unusual for the NYT reviews, there was a link to the artist's website, which is how I found the information for this blog post. The review is accompanied by a good slide show, so if you have access, have a look.

Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings

Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings, a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows drawings by Van Gogh. The website has 10 or 12 of the 113 works in the show. Viewing the images and a slide show provide a slightly different set of drawings and a few paintings. A neat extra touch is introduced through a reading by Kevin Bacon of letters from Vincent to his brother Theo - you can either download the file or listen to it on RealPlayer.

Although there is no text accompanying the art works shown, there is a good essay about Van Gogh and his drawings under the 'Learn More ...' link.

For more on Vincent Van Gogh, see the Van Gogh Museum. There's a dropdown menu near the top of the page. I found that the links under 'Vincent Van Gogh' and 'Permanent Collection' under 'The Museum' to be the most likely to lead to information about the artist and reproductions of his art works.

Newark Public Library Exhibits

The Newark Public Library Exhibits page (Past Exhibitions) doesn't always lead to pages filled with links and large images, but a few of them do. Even if there isn't substantial content, there are usually a few pictures which are interesting and enticing, leaving you wishing that they had been enlarged.

A Window to Your Government... has only a few enlarged images, but at least one, the Arctic bluebird, is worth clicking on. I'd guess that the images are scanned from the original since there are artifacts and graininess present but I still like the feel that I'm examining the page. The article in the New York Times mentioned a "patent application for a giant wooden elephant" which isn't shown on the website. Lucy the Elephant now has her own website and, if you click the 'history' button, you'll find some excerpts from James Lafferty's original application.

The current exhibition, as of today, is The Irish in Newark and New Jersey. For this exhibit, there is more extra material, including a podcast (my browser saw this as a video and temporarily froze) , and more exhibit photos. These are clickable, and lead to larger images, with that little magnifiying glass which means you can get an even larger picture. The quality of the scanned images seems better, so I hope that the Library will continue to use this enhanced quality in their future exhibits.

Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution

Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is an exhibit which concentrates on feminist art from 1965 to 1980. What the site seems to lack is an essay describing that art and the social history of that time period.

It does, however, have many images of the art and the artists. There are audio clips of three of the artists, Lynn Hershman, Judy Chicago,and Senga Nengudi, accompanying pictures of their art. Video files pop up all over the site as well as comments from online and in-person viewers.

I found that the site was a bit disorganized, so I would take this as encouraging roaming around, trying to find more interesting links. According to one of the comments I saw, the artists' lectures will be eventually recorded as podcasts although I wasn't able to find any as of today. Links to reviews of the show, including the one from the New York Times that led me to look for this site have been collected on one page.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The Hiroshi Sugimoto online exhibit at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian is a very good one. Unfortunately, there is no direct link to the exhibit web page, that I could find, so the best thing to do is to go to the Online Exhibitions page and scroll down to the Sugimoto link under Japanese Art. There are lots of distractions on the page and all of them are worth checking. I may come back to one or two of these exhibits later.
[August 4, 2009 - Actually here is the direct link to the Sugimoto exhibit but check out the Online Exhibitions anyway].

The Sugimoto site has text of 'words' by the artist - grey on black so it not easily readable. There is a very well-done interview with James Ulak, which is part of the Freer and Sackler Galleries podcast series. I'm listening to the podcast as I write this and it has a great deal of depth and breadth, touching on many subjects. You can either subscribe to the podcasts or choose one to listen to.

[July 3, 2008 - The webpage for a companion exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum has disappeared]
[August 4, 2009 - The Hirshhorn podcast episodes for the Sugimoto exhibit are still available. If not on this page, then on the very last page of the podcast listing.]

While looking at the Hirshhorn site, I was reminded that I had seen much better images somewhere else. So I Googled until I found the PBS Art:21 page for this artist. There you will find videos, and, under 'Artist Pages', the 'Artwork Survey' link which leads to slideshows with much larger reproductions of Sugimoto's art

Both the Freer/Sackler and the Hirshhorn shows were reviewed in the New York Times in September of 2005; you can read the review here.

Modernism at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Another museum with an impressive online presence is the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It also has a ‘Modernism’ site, separated by location and time period. Images, which can be nicely enlarged, are accompanied by text with links to further information.

There are extensive resources on the Institute’s site, so clicking around the home page is rewarding, once you discover where the art is located. Current exhibitions don’t always have accompanying online content, but some do. The real richness of resources is found under the ‘Explore the Collection’ section and in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program Wiki. The augmented exhibitions go back to 2000 as of this viewing, and it looks like content is meant to be added back to 1975.

Modernism: Designing a new world 1914-1939 - Victoria and Albert Museum

Although you may see "Exhibition Now Closed" stamped on the Victoria and Albert Museum's Modernism: Designing a new world 1914-1939 site, it is still open online in both html and Flash format. Watch for videos which accompany some images - how else would you get to see an alphabet dance?

In the Flash version, you can create your own Modernist poster, among other adventures, and have it displayed as part of the exhibit. Each version has its own good and bad points (mostly good as far as I’m concerned, although I prefer the html format for reading text) so it’s worthwhile to explore both.

The Victoria and Albert Museum is one of those museums that provide enriched content for the online viewer, especially under Collections. Today (or at least on the day that I saw it), in the ‘Textiles’ section, there is an exhibit by the Artist in Residence, Sue Lawty. In this section, as in others, there are also videos, booklists, and much more.

Aspen - "The multimedia magazine in a box" - Part one

Independent art magazines have been around for a long time. I’m sure that there were many published earlier than Aspen which began in 1965 as “a multimedia magazine, designed by artists”, published by Phyllis Johnson. The magazine’s unique feature for it’s 10-issue life was that it was published not in standard format, but in a box which contained other objects as well as the paper you would expect. For instance, issue “5+6 included a reel of motion picture film” reproduced here along with the referenced text for this paragraph (scroll up on the page). The web page includes instructions for co-ordinating the film clips with audio files copied from the original phonograph recordings. I played Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Lightplay’ along with Alexander Scriabin’s ‘Prelude D’ and they really do go well together.

The web version of the magazine has been digitized and presented on the UbuWeb site so that even if you can’t see the magazine in it’s original form (except for the paper if you were to print it) you can at least get an idea of how it looked when it first appeared.

[July 8/09 - Most links to artists added through the magic of Zemanta, although I had to find Claus Oldenburg myself. I wouldn't ordinarily link all personal names but if Zemanta is going to do it for me, fine.]

Issue 1, "The Black Box", is made up of 9 items, including a letter from Phyllis Johnson. To see the separate articles, click on the Issue 1 link, and explore. While I would like you to read the articles I mention, in the interest of promoting wandering as a method of discovery, I’m not providing direct links. There’s also an mp3 of the St. James Infirmary Blues, if you like jazz.

Issue 2, "The White Box", contains a variety of material, including excerpts from speeches by actresses Carroll Baker and Eva Saint Marie and movie director Jean Renoir, and one sentence from screen writer Abby Mann which could apply to artists in all mediums.

Issue 3, “the Pop Art issue”, includes an article by Lou Reed [check out the videos]; cards reproducing art, with commentary, by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, William deKooning, and others; and much, much more from a time we read about now but was happening as this issue was written.

Issue 4, “The McLuhan issue”, doesn’t necessarily contain much about the subject indicated.

Issue 5+6, “The Mimimalism issue”, on the other hand, provides an embarrassment of riches. There are poem excerpts spoken by William Burroughs; essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes; instructions and diagrams for a very simple, or very complicated, (read the artist’s description) Maze; readings from Merce Cummingham and Marcel Duchamp; four film excerpts, including one by Robert Rauschenberg with hens; and various other projects.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of videos, sound files, and texts. When I started the draft for this post in April of 2006, (procrastination is sometimes a fault, sometimes a virtue) the first video listed was of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte fish, a huge download (180 mb., MP4) just to watch an anti-war activist cooking fish. [Now, of course, UbuWeb has streaming video and audio.] But, hey, I did it and I think it is always good to see an iconic figure doing everyday tasks. It reminds us that ordinary people can do extra-ordinary things. For more info on Hoffman, see his Wikipedia entry or do a Google search.

One of UbuWeb's excellent resources is the material it has on Fluxus. 37 Short Fluxus Films shows those films in MPEG format. It may take a while to load, but all 37 files will show as black boxes on one page and each can be played from there. The resources listed at the bottom of the page link to other UbuWeb Fluxus material. The film and video section lists "over 300 avant-garde films and videos" (not all by Fluxus artists) and is well worth browsing. As for me, I'm looking at a "dada film by Marcel Duchamp" before I upload this blog entry. Incidently, Duchamp was born in 1887, not 1940.

Read their FAQ which is a good explanation of UbuWeb's reason for being.

Turning the Pages : the British Library's Online Gallery

I found this webpage through an article in the provincial newspaper, The ChronicleHerald, about the display of William Blake's notebook for his poem, The Tyger. The URL given there was a bit different so I've used the link recommended by the British Library's technical information page. That page explains why you should use this URL and which version (broadband or narrowband) you should try for. As far as I could see, I ended up in the same place no matter which URL I used. I also found that my computer is woefully unready for this type of display. Actually, when it worked, it worked very well.

The Turning the Pages Gallery includes fifteen online manuscripts as of today, as well as links to other Turning the Pages sites. Among the titles shown here are works by Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, and the Flemish Masters, as well as images from the Sforza Hours, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Diamond Sutra, a Hebrew Prayer Book, and the Qu'ran. There are many other things to explore on this website.

Leafing through the pages of the digitized books is likely easier if your computer is faster than mine. I was able to move through the books fairly well, and use at least one of the added features. There is a magnifying glass which works well (no in-depth zooming though), page-rotation when needed, a text explanation of the work, and audio files which follow the text. For the Qu'ran, there is also a reading of the text of the book.
I hope to do more exploring and reporting on those resources but I do tend to get distracted so be sure to explore on your own.

National Palace Museum, Taipei

I love the way that one thing leads to another on the Web. I find an article in the New York Times, or somewhere else, I do a Google search, and suddenly I'm looking at an exhibit from the other side of the world.
The exhibits page at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan has links to past exhibits back to 1999. The earliest one that I found was on The Art of Embroidery from early 1999. The presentation is much simpler than the latest one I saw which was Grand View:Ju Ware from the Northern Sung Dynasty. This is a beautifully set up site but can be memory eating and Flash-intensive. The 'Introduction' (Flash plugin needed) and 'Sections & Selections' tabs go in entirely different directions. On my laptop, I found that it was a good idea to have something to read while the pages were loading. The careful thought behind the site is evident, although I would have liked a pause button in some of the displays.

Discovered via an article in the New York Times Rare Glimpses of China’s Long-Hidden Treasures.