Photos courtesy Aurora Picture Show, Melissa Hung, and Andrea Grover (me!)
During the ten years that I was with Aurora Picture Show, I hosted at least 300 visiting artists, and gave almost that many tours of Houston. Like an old cabbie, I have fine-tuned these trips into a scripted tour that features folk art environments, underground tunnels, celebrity grave sites, art cars, urban bayous, museums, mega churches, and art chapels. Imagine my gravelly voice coming through an old p.a. system as I humbly present to you, “Grover’s Guide to Houston, Part I.” Read this post on Glasstire.com
Thanks to my friend Bree Edwards for suggesting I write it all down!
I’m presently participating in Jeff Howe’s international Twitter book club, better known as #1B1T (One Book One Twitter). If you missed the 1B1T NPR broadcast produced by Laura Sydell (including my one minute of fame), it can be heard here.
The tweeters have spoken, and they want to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. At the moment, readers *should* all be on Chapters 4-6, marking our tweets #1b1t_4c (and so on for each chapter) to prevent spoilers, and wearing our official book club badge. I think membership is in the 6,000+ range now, so good governance is a must to maintain a cohesive conversation. I’m having a hard time keeping up, but like all online social groups, the best part is the offline outcomes, like the geek-out conversations I’m now having with Houston readers, Grant McManus, and Carlos Lama (a.k.a. father of my Lamas). American Gods was a good choice for comic book, fantasy or sci-fi enthusiasts, like us.
I adore projects that extend the social web beyond its known capacity, and often wonder what an artist like Andy Warhol would have done with his Twitter account? Would he have had one? Of course. Warhol tackled new technology–from the first consumer video camera to the first computer with a drawing application–the minute it was unveiled. Would he have tweeted live before an audience at Lincoln Center?
One of the 1B1T logistical problems thus far has been keeping pace with the volume of conversations on twitter. As I’ve been writing this entry, no fewer than 25 #1b1t tweets have been posted, and most are just observations or non-starters. The conversations online aren’t especially reciprocal or enduring as of now. Another issue is *some readers* clearly subscribe to the Evelyn Wood school of speed reading, and have completed the entire book. They’re already smoking a cigarette, and I’m still getting undressed.
According to R.A. Hill and R.I.M. Dunbar in the paper “Social Network Size in Humans,” the average person has capacity (in his/her neocortex) to remember 153.5 different individuals. What do I do with 6000+ instant new friends?
Even in contemporary western societies, where individuals are operating egocentric networks within a virtually infinite array of social possibilities, social network size and differentiation reflect the sociocentric networks observed in traditional societies, suggesting that the cognitive constraints on network size may apply universally to all modern humans.–R.A. Hill and R.I.M. Dunbar
Art & Boats is my ongoing series of interviews and stories about artists who build boats, sail, explore and challenge themselves on the water. For background on Art & Boats, read the first entry.
Tide and Current Taxi: The Hutchinson River with Mary Walling Blackburn, Marie Lorenz
It’s hard to believe that just 100 years ago there were still world maps with areas marked “unexplored.” I recently read that the only uncharted places left on earth were the ocean floors. With the exception of those places under water or ice, every corner of the planet can be observed via Global Positioning Systems. Sophisticated vehicles and satellite devices make adventures, like those of legendary Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett, a romantic notion of the past. Even Fawcett’s mythical lost city of “El Dorado” now shows up on Google Earth.
Artist Marie Lorenz is a modern day explorer, though the territories she traverses are not uncharted, just neglected. Lorenz accesses commercial or disused waterways around New York City in her own custom-made small wooden boats. She visits the canals, rivers and uninhabited islands that form the invisible, industrial and archeological backside of the city. Traveling with one other passenger, Lorenz encounters more freighters and barges than fellow leisure craft. Her journeys have taken her along the Harlem River, Bronx River, Gowanus Canal, Coney Island Creek, and to abandoned islands like North Brother, where the infamous Typhoid Mary was quarantined in the early 1900s. Read my interview with Marie on glasstire.com.
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, Well…How did I get here?– Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime (1984)
Presently, I am having the above awakening. It’s as though I aged from 14 to 40 in a flash, and all the memories in between were accidentally deleted from my hard drive. How did I get here? What am I expected to do? Whose house is this, and most importantly, who are these people in the house? They’re freaking me out.
It’s often assumed that artists are exempt from the social realities of adulthood, jobs, parenthood, finances, and civic duty. Not so. Increasingly, artists are grappling with the challenge of being creative persons with unavoidably uncreative roles within society. Few well-known Western artists have escaped dependence on civilization and the rules of participation. (Even Gauguin failed in his attempt to escape Europe for the perceived Utopia of Polynesia, where he ultimately found that societal laws applied there too– he died just prior to serving a three month prison sentence for breaking local ordinances.) Read my q and a with husband and wife artist collaborators, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy on glasstire.com.
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Courtesy Postmasters Gallery
Travis Whitfield (left) with "The Porch Crew," 1973
One of the potential hazards of moving to a small town is that you may end up the Mayor. Such is the case with Travis Whitfield, an artist who was so enamored with the rural town of Keachi, Louisiana (pronounced Kee-chi), that he settled there, and inadvertently became the town’s appointed archivist, preservationist, historian and finally, Mayor. In the late 1960s, Keachi caught Travis’s attention during his regular drives between Shreveport and Houston (where he was an art student at U of H). If you recall the episode of The Twilight Zone, “A Stop at Willoughby,” Travis was like the commuter on that train who longed to get off at Willoughby, “a peaceful, restful place, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure.” Fortunately for Travis, stopping at Keachi was just the beginning of his adventure, unlike the fate of the poor sap on The Twilight Zone. Read the rest of this post on We Have The Technology, Glasstire.com.
Among the many treasures for sale in my marketplace
I’ve opened a virtual storefront to sell my books. From here on out, it’s the public library loan system for me. No more trees will be slaughtered in the name of Andrea’s entertainment, education, or mild curiosity. Kindly shop till you drop.
Subjects include film art, experimental film and video, trash cinema, cult film, horror film, video art, art, art criticism, art history, world cinema, documentary, boating, sexuality, feminism, ornithology, design, future studies, and music, if I can get Carlos Lama in on this. New items added daily! Prices so low, it’s practically insane.
Unnamed Skiff Project, Zach Moser
I’ve got nautical kitsch and art all mixed up in my head. As the daughter of a boat builder and an artist, I have a Pavlovian response to anything that combines art and boats. I grew up in a house that would have suited Captain Ahab just fine– stuffed marlins, whale bones, ships’ wheels, rope art, portholes, buoys, crab pots, fish lures, oil paintings of ships in storms, all that. Enter the Grover family residence and immediately feel like an extra in Mutiny on the Bounty. This posting has been a long time coming, but boat artists, you’re about to get your due. Look for future posts on Bas Jan Ader, Marie Lorentz, Roy Fridge, Swoon, Open_Sailing, Waterpod, and others. Suggestions welcome, mateys.
Art & Boats, Part 1: An interview with Houston (boat) artist Zach Moser
Zach Moser is a co-founder of Workshop Houston, an innovative art/education/community center based in Houston’s Third Ward. Moser recently conducted a boatbuilding workshop inside the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston as part of the exhibition, No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston. The project (conceived with Benjy Mason) was titled “Yacht Shop,” and invited the public to collaboratively build a boat over six months. Yacht Shop concluded with the ceremonious hull turning and launching of the vessel (by spontaneous night parade) down Montrose Boulevard. This was all primed with sea shanties and home brewed braggot, a kind of malt and honey beer. (You can imagine what the drivers on Montrose thought of this land-locked endeavor.) Moser, a graduate of Oberlin, has a keen interest in collaboration via unlikely platforms – “civic events, low income neighborhoods, dying industries.” And this was not Moser’s first foray into maritime collectivity; his earlier nautical-theme works include “The Shrimp Boat Project” (with Eric Leshinsky), “Voyages to the Unknown,” and the “Untitled Skiff Project.” Read the interview with Zach Moser on Glasstire.com.
Jill Magid, Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, 2006-2007, Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York
The 60th anniversary of George Orwell’s science fiction opus 1984 came and went unnoticed last year. Why would such a prescient novel generate so little hubbub on its birthday? Perhaps the notion of a society numbed by perpetual war, newspeak (the reduction of language to suit ideological purposes), and constant government surveillance of the public is not that newsworthy. Do these ideas apply so aptly to the 21st century that 1984 seems redundant? Or is pointing out this trend toward total surveillance just harshing the mellow of the Net Generation who surrender their privacy with wild abandon? On my first day on Facebook, I jokingly posted my status as “Big Brother is watching you,” and was surprised by a slew of comments suggesting I was a buzzkill. Read the rest of my review on … might be good.
“Indirect Collaboration” is a blog that I and my indirect collaborators, i.e., SXSW co-panelists (Joe Alterio, Tim Lillis, Riley Crane & Josh Glenn), will be posting to in the lead up to SXSW Interactive. The theme of our panel is “The role of crowd-sourced input on the creative process.” I was invited to represent the art exhibition side of the equation, namely my involvement in organizing Phantom Captain: Art & Crowdsourcing at apexart, as well as a Never Been to Tehran, Never Been to Houston, and TxtMeL8r – all exhibits with works generated by the crowd. (Both of the Never Been exhibits were co-organized with artist Jon Rubin, my hero.)
I just got word from Javier Fadul of Culture Pilot that Houston is hosting a TEDx event on June 12, 2010. TEDx is the newly launched mini-me of the TED Conference (which started in 1984 to bring together the “greatest minds” in Technology, Entertainment and Design). The “TED Talks” videos are positively addictive (see “Confessions of a TED Addict,” Victoria Heffernan, NY Times), featuring eggheads who are at the forefront of everything from brain science to open-source architecture to spaghetti sauce (or rather the nature of happiness through spaghetti sauce as a metaphor, according to author Malcolm Gladwell). Drop tab, sit back, and watch the world unfold as a slightly better place. Read the rest of this post on my Glasstire blog, We Have The Technology.
