At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:
Nam June Paik, Video Flag, 1985-1996
Mindy Shapero, The Infinite Truths of Flatterland (inside the black thing there remains everything, perpetually without motion), 2006
Juan Munoz, Last Conversation Piece, 1994-1995
Dan Steinhilber, Untitled, 2002, (paper-clad wire hangers)
At the National Air and Space Museum:
At the National Museum of Natural History:
our travels visualized on TravellersPoint.com
In seven weeks, we'll be in Turku, Finland, working on our next video project. Five weeks from now, we'll be Kökar, on the Åland archipelago, filming. Four weeks from now, we'll be exploring Hamburg with Murray's sister. In three weeks, it'll be Berlin.
Two weeks from now, I'll be in New Orleans on the 4th day of a cross-country road trip with a good friend and her three-year-old, en route from Providence to deliver the dog to my generous parents, who offered to keep him for the summer while Murray and I are in Europe.
In the span of the next seven weeks, I'm going to spend time in Boston; Providence; Baltimore; DC; Fredericksburg, VA; Asheville, NC; New Orleans; Houston; Dallas; London; Berlin; Bremen; Hamburg; Helsinki; Kökar; and Turku, Finland.
Forgive us if blogging is light for the next week or so as we finish up all the coordination needed to accomplish this journey. Once we're on our way, though, you can expect regular, daily updates.
[source]
We've been snowed in! It's a forced break, which is nice to make sure we've crossed our t's.
Vik Muniz from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book [source]
If you're still wondering what to get your loved ones for the holidays, may I suggest consulting a tried and true Dallas institution, the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. For $110,000 you can buy a "His and Hers Double Portrait in Chocolate" by Vik Muniz. The perfect gift for the art lover in your life.
From the catalogue:
Maybe he sent bonbons after the first date. Certainly, untold chocolate has been exchanged over the years. To celebrate that entertaining, exasperating, enduring thing you call love, try our His & Hers portrait by Vik Muniz.
The brilliant Brazilian lives and works in New York, crafting internationally famous art out of literally anything: caviar, dirt, diamonds, toys even! Here, he will capture your likenesses in a double helping of Bosco® chocolate syrup. You come away with a framed 60" x 48" museum-quality photographic work of art, a limited edition of one, thank you.
To grow the good karma you've started, Vik is donating his proceeds to Centro Espacial Rio de Janeiro, the charity he created to bring social and art projects to life for underprivileged young people in Brazil.
More here: Neiman Marcus Christmas Book Fantasy Gifts and Brazilian Artist Vik Muniz has Some Sweet Paintings
As for us, earlier this week, we left the 14 inches of snow on the ground back in New England and flew down to Dallas to celebrate Christmas with family.
We started looking for a new studio when we moved to Providence in August. After a few months of cramped quarters at home and using our parking space to store art crates instead of a car, we finally found a studio and started moving in this past weekend. It's good timing for us: we've got a show back in Los Angeles this February and are getting to the point with the project where we need the space to build the set for the video that will be part of the installation for that show.
This past weekend was also our first trip down to NYC since we moved out east. We went with some of Murray's digital media students to PS1, MoMA, the Whitney, Cooper Hewitt and the Met. Murray and I have a lot to say this week about what we saw, in particular, the Kara Walker and Martin Puryear shows.
[source]
[source]
We're back from Greece and left Texas yesterday for a three-day drive to our new home in Providence, RI. First stop: Nashville, Tennessee. Where they have a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, including a reproduction of the missing 42-foot statue of Athena. The building is also, apparently, the city's art museum. We're shooting for making it to Harrisburg, PA today, but we're going to drive by the Parthenon and get some pictures. Since we just saw the one in Greece, see how America's Parthenon compares.
A while back my mother gave me her cast-off mobile phone because she found it too complicated to use. One of her complaints was that it was always taking random pictures. When I got the phone, I had to sort through a gallery of 187 inadvertent pictures. The majority were easy to delete, but a handful of the photos were cool.
Life has been at a standstill here in St Louis because of the massive winter storm that came through on Thursday and Friday. The Christiane Paul lecture we were looking forward to was cancelled. Power is out at some of the galleries around town. We've been too chicken to drive until today, so we've been taking long walks in the park with the dog. It's a nice change from the monotony of California's seasonal pleasantry.
My old iMac was prone to crashing. Sometimes it crashed 10 times a day. I've tried everything, short of putting in a new logic board. So when I finally decided to get a new logic board, and opened it up to get the board serial number, I found the problem. Caked dust and animal hair. After $10 worth of canned air, it's been three days and it hasn't crashed yet.
We love Macs. If America went to war against Macintosh, I would have a hard time choosing my allegiance. Do note: the most efficient Macs are the ones with slower processors.
Apple, like other computer makers, wants you to pay twice or three times as much for their higher end systems that only perform 10% better (under normal conditions). They tempt you to think that a 2GHz system is twice as fast as a 1 GHz system, which might be true in a special case but is not true under normal conditions.
I like the cheaper slow processors loaded with 768 ram (best bang for the buck) or perhaps 1.5Gb of ram if you want luxury. Any more ram than that seems a waste to me--even for video editing. If you work with video then get the biggest hard drive you can too. The plain truth is that an old G3 processor edits video fine. A G4 is luxury. With G5s we are at the point where processor speed is irrelevant.
If you're a video artist on a budget and you need a editing station, consider a used Mac G4 desktop for under $500. Don't shy away from iMacs, either--they handle Final Cut Pro just fine. Put the money you save into software, extra ram, a backup hard drive and a really good camera.
