All Streets, Visual Data and a Narrative Atlas: Tracing my tracks on a short derive through the internet

I belong to an online cartography community where someone posted this compelling image of all streets in the lower 48 U.S.states. The topographical features of the landscape are created by the cross-contour effects of the roads alone. No geographical features were added to this map, and yet, look how clearly defined the Appalachian Mountains are due to the routing of roads that either avoid or hug the ridges. This map was created by Ben Fry, a programmer who transfers data into visual form.

Fry's work made me think of a link that an artist friend recently emailed me: the website of Nathalie Miebach, a sculptor / basket weaver who transforms data (in this case weather and environmental changes) into visual (more specifically aesthetic) form.

And a funny little map from an excellent cartography blog by John Krygier who collaborated with Denis Wood to write Making Maps. The Narrative Atlas from Denis Wood looks fascinating.

Fallow continued

110 pages posted with only 100 more to go in the thesis archive.


I used to think fallow spaces were fertile spaces
when I was angry as a girl
I would run away to the fields and pull up by the roots
whatever things were growing wild
I would bring them back to my room to sit in a bucket of water and rot

fresh flowers

archiving the thesis

I've gotten back to archiving my MFA thesis, Fallow, but have yet to finish. 71 posts down. 139 posts to go. This is a slow process indeed.

Bas Jan Ader, poetry, presence, the body and risk

This weekend Frank and I had one of our customary coffee-fueled conversations about art and literature. This conversation was specifically about poetry and poetic forms. I told Frank that I used to enjoy poetry (both the reading and the writing) more than I do now. Though I wasn't quite sure why, poetry no longer satisfied expectations I've grown to crave in an art experience. Anymore I tend to seek out metaphor in other forms, mostly visual...

And that prompted me to think about the work of Bas Jan Ader, whom I hadn't thought about in some time. And then I searched around and found these documentations of Bas Jan Ader's Falling performances on you tube.

To me, Ader's work is satisfying in the way Peter Callesen's Dying Swan is satisfying. Here are some of my thoughts on Callesen's work. The performances have a quiet intelligence, humor and an emotional punch without sappiness. He can laugh at himself and his frail but aspiring human efforts without being self-deprecating or narcissistically spiteful. And while the pieces are concise and clearly articulated, they are also open-ended.

The work has qualities similar to other conceptual / performance-based work that resonates with the sensibilities in some of my own modest performances (example 1, example 2). Other artists that came to mind during our conversation were Vik Muniz's Pictures of Clouds, Yoko Ono's Painting to See the Skies and her Smoke Painting and Ana Mendieta's Siluetas.

Because Frank teaches poetry and other literature and has a personal stake in poetry and in me being friendly toward the form, he wanted to find out what it was that I was or wasn't responding to in the written poetic forms.

So what I was able to tease out that I'm not responding to in poetry is the formalism. It's both the formal and expressionistic mark – the literal mark of language or the expressive line – that doesn't hold my attention as it used to. On the other hand, an imprint, a surface or even Pollock's drips are, to me, far more interesting as a trace of absence than the expressive line of other abstract expressionists.

As we talked more, Frank figured that it was the presence and the body that had such resonance with me. And I think he's right. What remains important to me is that there is something always at risk with the body, and any attempts to get around that risk, whether they be willful aspirations for artistic immortality or claims of some promise of spiritual immortality, feels horribly deluded and false to me. It's the impermanence and the flailings that are relevant... at least in my mind.

That being said, I still have a high regard for prose poetry and for fiction that reads like poetry and for work written in present tense (as Frank remarked I often write in present tense myself). My favorite novel is still Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. Curiously, even the title... It seems so obvious now.

The body is always at risk and carries with it the obvious social markers of race and sex... even class. Bodies with and bodies without medical or dental care carry very different evidence that becomes increasingly visible over time. Lack of education or proper nutrition leave their mark on the body as well.

All this is on my mind because today we had a meeting at the museum about an upcoming exhibit of Tim Davis' photographs of canonical paintings, Permanent Collection. I was struck looking at the catalog images of just how bodily and material Davis' photos of art historical "masterpieces" are. The history of each painting becomes embedded in Davis' photos – not just in the way the artist positions himself in a relationship between the museum lighting and the painting itself, but in the age and surface that is exposed with that relationship to the artist-as-viewer. Remarkable. I was really struck by these images and can hardly wait to see them in one of our galleries next week.

Quote On Photography

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been – what people need protection from. Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Remiss in Writing

I’m still here... though busy.

I found an old note that I wrote to myself on an discarded library card that read: Realism doesn't trust memory.

It prompted me to reread Susan Sontag's article, "On Photography," which then prompted me to go to the used book store to find a copy of her 2001 book of the same title. I didn't find On Photography, but did find (and purchase):

Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn

Cold War Pastoral, documenting the photographic work of John Kippin as he explores the Greenham Common transformation from military base to site of protest from the Womens' Peace Movement to common land

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

and some fiction: George Saunders' Pastoralia