New Online, and Physical, Location

Changes. That is what is up, and I'm not just referring to the seasons. This is my last post at artsravel.blogspot.com, as I move Art Ravels over to Wordpress. I'm trying to set up a redirect, but in case that fails please click here: www.linneawest.com/blog. I hope you'll follow me over! This will stay up as an archive as long as Blogger doesn't change, but I've migrated the old posts over.

I am writing this from Budapest, where I will be living for the upcoming year. I was awarded a grant to research contemporary Hungarian art. I am beyond excited and, as you can imagine, this means I'll be writing more about art in Hungary and Europe and less about New York City. I also have started a personal blog about the experience here: www.ayearinbudapest.wordpress.com.

I've lived in New York since 2006 (except for one long hiatus) and have blogged here since 2008, so these are big changes, but definitely ones I feel good about.

Thanks to all you who have read, commented, and followed me! It's been a pleasure reading your blogs and following your thoughts and life changes as well.

Color Redux

A run down of great links on color, what it is and how we see it as well as how other species perceive it, how our perception has changed historically, and what we could see in the future:

• Firstly, a fascinating Radiolab episode on color (that I have already begged the whole world to listen to): http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/

• Secondly, two articles that borrow heavily from the Radiolab episode but goes on to address how naming colors impacts our ability to see them in more detail: here and here.

• Thirdly, a TED Talk by an artist who has never seen color but, thanks to a device he has created, can now hear it: here.

And I'll throw in some of my own posts to round things off:

RGB Colorspace Atlas by Tara Auerbach and Mantis Shrimp
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2012/07/rgb-colorspace-atlas-and-mantis-shrimp.html
Making Color: about Victoria Finlay's history of color
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/color.html
Celadon Talking Jars
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/celadon-talking-jars.html
Black's historical uses
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/back-to-black.html
based on ARTNews's article
http://www.artnews.com/2011/11/24/the-color-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-a-color/
The making of red, orange, and yellow
http://artsravel.blogspot.com/2011/12/red-orange-yellow.html

In the Archives: Lowell Boyers

Red Boat, White Paint, Still Travelling, 2010

Going through my drafts archives, I found this unposted image of a Lowell Boyer's painting. More of the artist's mixed media works on paper and canvas can be found on his website, all a bit phantasmagorical, beautiful layered, even decorative like a China pattern gone wrong. I believe I saw this at the Von Lintel Gallery's booth at an art fair last year...but much like the figures in these works, the memory is unclear.

Maine Interlude

Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn't know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore

And build a little shanty on the sand

In such a way that the extremest band

Of brittle seaweed will escape my door

But by a yard or two, and nevermore

Shall I return to take you by the hand;

I shall be gone to what I understand

And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,

The words that lay a moment on your tongue,

Are one with all that in a moment dies,

A little under-said and over-sung;

But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies

Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it's quite glorious.

Christian Marclay's The Clock

I stood in line the next to last day that Christian Marclay's The Clock was screening at Lincoln Center, and I really lucked out. The line was only 2 and half hours. My friend from Georgia was suitably impressed by the lengths New Yorkers will go to for an experiential art film.

The film consists of thousands of spliced clips from cinema, put together so that each minute is filled with references to that minute, with clocks and watches, which is then played on that minute of the day, in a 24-hour cycle. The clips were largely English and French films, old black and white, last year's blockbusters, and some b-cinema with a few Asian or Swedish film clips thrown in.

Remarkably, what ought to have been a disjointed, jarring experience by the very nature of it proceeded with some degree of flow and linearity, largely owing to the great sounds transitions, which were carefully managed. This makes sense; the person ahead of me in line shared some of the artist's early sound work in the 80s. He spliced mechanically rather than digitally then.



I saw 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, always hyperaware of the time. The clips made me wonder "Is this what people do a 6:30? Miss trains? And do they eat soup at 8 o'clock? Is this life?" I enjoyed recognizing the clips. Immediately one knows so much even in never-before-seen clips--who the protagonist is, roughly when it was filmed, the mood of the piece. It's remarkable and would create a magnifiscent time capsule for someone to discover in 1,000 years, so much of our common consciousness is bound up in it.

I enjoyed, or rather disenjoyed, the continual interruption of the narrative, which would begin to drag you in only to end. It harasses the viewer with his status as a viewer, never letting him forget what and where he is. Or, of course, when it is.



And naturally everything you can think to say about the nature or passage of time is relevant to this piece which makes you hyperaware of the passage of time as you live it.

Also, see twitter for a variety of bad or better puns and jokes on the meta-ness of having to wait for hours to see this film.