Landscape Re-Mix at the Walker Art Center

Last weekend it was possible to drop off electronic waste at Indiana University to have it hauled away to be recycled. I read one comment about how someone dropped off an overhead projector: "I hadn't seen one of those in years."

Watching this very charming video, made by the landscape design studio ROLU, of a Designing Play! event at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, made me want to acquire an overhead projector of my own. In the hands of artists, the old technology tools can be remixed to very useful, beautiful, and contemporary effect. The tool is always only what we make of it.

The music is called "Coloring" by Lullatone. Lullatone "makes loopable lullabies for babies (and adults)" and has an album called Songs that Spin in Circles. If you click here to go to their Raindrop Melody Maker, you just might get lost in a splish splash of happiness and bliss.

This event look place last February, so there is snow outside those windows. Viewed through our windows today, the redbuds and apple trees are blooming. But who wants to be inside, looking out? Spring escapes into the landscape, the Earth having spun its birth circle again.

Many thanks to Nina Hale for tweeting this link.

Giving the gift of medical exam appointment scheduling

I missed the CBS Cares "Give Her the Gift of a Pap Smear" commercials last Christmas and Hanukkah, mentioned by Lyle in the comments yesterday as among the worst he'd ever seen. ("Give her the gift that even Santa can't deliver.")

They were all created on the same murky brown set, with minor prop enhancements (zebra pillow equals Jewish woman, whose gift is of a "schmear"). Here's the presumptuous-but-"caring" guy who delivers the bad advice to schedule the Christmas gift of a pap smear appointment.

Just to be sure there's no sex discrimination, here's a link to the CBS Cares "Gift of a Prostate Exam" PSA, too, in both Creepy Santa and Kosher Prostate versions, complete with female faces that light up with delight at the thought of "saving prostates."

These ads remind me of the talk given by artist Sarah Sudhoff, who documented her experience with medical treatment for cervical cancer. Maybe the ads look different to someone whose life has been saved due to catching cervical cancer in time for treatment? On second thought, I bet they still look ludicrous.

(By the way, isn't "pap smear" just the weirdest and most awkward-ugly name for such an intimate procedure?)

Sudhoff is someone who has treated the subject of women's reproductive cancer (cervical, vaginal, and ovarian cancers) in a sustained and serious way, proving that an artist might explore a topic in its complexity to unveil dimensions of medical practice (for example) that are typically obscured by routines and protocals.

She also wondered whether the importance of screening for reproductive cancer (and awareness of the many women it affects) might not be lost among the barrage of pink-themed breast cancer messages in the media. ("Nothing against breast cancer awareness, but...") Sudhoff underwent so many pap smears, and spent so much time alone waiting on medical tables, that one piece of her work includes video documentation of a "I think I can just do this myself by now" self-administered one.  

She said that the artwork on the wall was really there at the office where she had her exams and took this photo. It's a remarkable image to hover over someone interested in health procedures for women, and in what you might call the aesthetics of medical waste.

Prostate cancer is another story, complicated by the fact that there is more ambiguity about the value of treatment for this usually slow-growing cancer. There was a good update on this on NPR just the other day.

Okay, those are the medical PSAs of the day from elenabella!

'Cutesaces' from the 70s

There's a little shop on the corner near where I work called Material Plane, and it's one of my favorite places to poke around – very chaotic but filled with interesting ephemera. Last week I made a little score: these two small suitcases, bundled together, for only $10. They are from the 70s, and in remarkably good shape. I call them 'Cutesaces' because that's the word my daughter Savannah used when she was small (she liked cutesaces and 'mazagines')...

The large one is the perfect size to hold a few art supplies, including a favorite sketchbook. Felt craft materials go into the smaller one, all bundled and ready to go. What do you think? Pretty lucky? I find the fabric quite delightful. Interesting how this sort of bold patterning went away for so long...and now it's back, looking fresh and contemporary.

So much better than a Louis Vuitton case!

Art in a Changing Climate: Venus Watches the Ocean Rise

There is a special series over at Grist called "Art in a Changing Climate," with this image of Venus in standing water. It takes off from Bill McKibbon's call in 2005 for art about climate change, "What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art."

Four years ago, before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was released in book, audio, and video form, McKibbon asked about art and climate change: "Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Now comes the news that An Inconvenient Truth will be staged in an operatic rendition by composer Giorgio Battistelli at the Milan opera house La Scala, premiering in the 2011 season.

In a new essay, McKibbon acknowledges that there is now a flood of work on climate change: "the immune system of the planet is finally kicking in." The Grist series collects a lot of this good (and not-so-good) stuff, including a slideshow tour of green-leaning museums, and a song in which Miley Cyrus "talks about our troubled planet as if it were a needy adolescent." ("All she needs is a little attention/Can you give her just a little attention?")

The sinking Venus reminds me that while I once fervently loved the original painting (especially during a romantic phase in high school), it strikes me as incredibly kitschy today: the boy angels blowing those pink blowsy flowers, Venus' placid demeanor (with her head at that impossible angle), the faithful overdressed attendant...it's a strangely wonderful view of the beautiful. I bet there are many more altered versions out there. Send me one, if you run across Botticelli's Venus in another environment!

Okay, my own search resulted in this amusing cluster-collapse send-up of Rubens' Venus and Adonis, over at St. Kiki of Assisi. No erotic decluttering going on there.

Smart Design from French Paper

I got a sample book for the line of Smart Paper from a favorite paper mill, French Paper, in Michigan, and used it to make a visual journal.

Here are the pages: read the bottom line first, and then the top, ending with the image with the car. It was fun to work with the color palette given by the sample book.

The guy in the gas mask on the cover is from a line of cards created by French Paper, the Go French Card Game, used to promote their uncoated papers. I thought this was an ingeneous promotion, helping brand French Paper as quirky, humorous, and dedicated to innovative design.

Obama Posters: Power to move those undecideds?

Jess at How About Orange did the search for artists' posters of the candidates, and while she only found one for McCain, there's a website with a whole lot of wonderful ones for Obama. Click here, and be amazed!

Any undecideds out there: let art make the difference! (Click to David Sedaris's piece about that in a recent issue of The New Yorker). Wouldn't it be great to have a president who actually uses the word "art" now and then? And who has the ability to inspire this kind of creative outpouring?

You can also download printable art posters from AIGA here, urging everyone you know to vote.

Lotus in the Park

Yesterday I worked at the Bloomingfoods booth at Third Street Park, during the free-to-the-public Lotus in the Park portion of the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival.

It was a gorgeous day, and the park was filled with people waltzing, playing with their children, attending music workshops, making art, and greeting friends. Musicians from around the world took the stage and united us.

My job was to serve locally-made brats and beef burgers with grilled onions. We also had vegetarian chili, and a local mushroom burger (also known as the fungi - 'fun-guy' - burger) made with shiitakes, criminis, and portabello mushrooms. Lots of spritzers, Musgrave Orchard apple cider, Needmore Oatcakes, and other treats.

Our prices were amazing: $2 for burgers (or 3 for $5), $3 for brats (or 2 for $5). I ask you, has McDonalds ever done anything like that?! The food was affordable and delicious, and the customers very friendly and appreciative.

Who organizes all of this? Our renagade band of proud community organizers, including 'Rags' on the grill (from Nick's English Hut), and his wife Susan, manager of the original Bloomingfoods in the alley off Kirkwood. Here is a picture of the two of them from our Salsa Contest, where they give guacamole and salsa making demos.

Nick's was in the national news last spring when Barack Obama just happened to stop by. Rags was wearing his 'Vote Obama' button yesterday, as were lots of other folks in the park. We had wonderful volunteers at our booth, including a software designer from Washington DC who came to Lotus for the week-end, Earnie and Martha from the co-op, and a great guy named Mikeal, a new student at IU.

I saw scores of worthy community organizers: people who work on food security, housing issues, Habitat for Humanity, mental health and disability support, improving our schools (or starting new ones), and spreading the positive potential of the arts.

I am so fortunate to live in a place where these dedicated community organizers – some of the finest people you could ever know – enjoy the respect of our mayor! Together we seem to be achieving good things, not least of which was a very mellow, beautiful, calm, peaceful, contented day in the park.

"Deserted Landscape: The Bag Paintings" by Walter Lab

My cousin Walter Lab will have a series called "Deserted Landscapes: The Bag Paintings" at the Wayne and Miriam Prim Theater Gallery in the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from September 20, 2008 - December 07, 2008. (That's an oil painting, folks, not a photograph.)

Walter Lab often chooses to paint those objects that best suggest the environmental and social demise of our culture: improvised shelters of homeless people in LA, cargo ships filled with perhaps useless commodities (or imported food), beaches in Jamaica covered with trash.

He describes the bags in these paintings as "materialist sculpture in the public trust." Because he sees them as such, they become "claimed sculpture, site specific chance-made and chanced-upon installations" that arouse a contradictory response in the artist: both annoyance and longing.

Lab's own words say it best:

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Ernst Lorenz

In the California desert, winds lift the debris of physical culture, and relocates it in the landscape. The flying membrane and textual graphics of packaging is snagged on bushes, heaving where it is caught. Whipped and filled by desert bellows, shopping bags become ornaments, drapery, jewelry, signage, perversity, beauty.

Annoyance and longing are two strong human responses to the social phenomena of scattered packaging and ubiquitous plastics and to the physical anthropological presence of consumer debris in our surroundings.

Painting plastic bags on bushes, I am painting advertising set out like balloons into the wind, signage, romantic irony, diminished literacy, commerce and recall (human memory), the cheapest use of cheap oil and cheap gas, the demand for green technology. The uncertainty of humanity. I am also painting objects transformed into ornaments, into drapery and jewelry, weighted with opinion, objects believed to be perverse (annoying), or maybe elegant.

You could say that I am an optimist referencing the surety of change, the surety of survival. Yet I don’t offer a solution, I only describe the problem (longing).

You will appreciate these paintings if, like me, you get a queasy feeling in your stomach each time you use an extra plastic bag when you shop. Click on the image at the left to go to the Nevada Museum of Art and information about their upcoming Art and Environment Conference.

Welcome to Elenabella

I hope you will visit often, as this blog evolves.

But first I have to get this off my chest: I am not fond of that sludgy word "blog." Perhaps if I can think of this as a bio-log/dialogue I can overcome my aversion to this little word. I am very fond of some blogs, though, especially those that are fun, friendly, creative, quirky, networky, and filled with ideas. I am not a fan of snarky, aggressive, arrogant, ego-overdrive blogs. Click on!

This past Sunday New York Times had an article about the poet John Ashbery, who at age 81 has prepared his first exhibit of collages. I loved this article for many reasons, not least because Ashbery works with both words and images. And who knew! And 81 years old! And he looks like a sturdy bear in his photo.

I especially like the collage "Chutes and Ladders I (for Joe Brainard)" – here on this page.

One of my favorite poets has long been Robert Duncan, who lived with the collage artist Jess Collins. That is another, related, story – for another time.

Each Sunday the NYT arrives at my house in a blue plastic bag, sitting at the end of our driveway. I always look forward to it: for the words, pictures, the ads, the clash of sensibilities and opinion. It contains so many engaging surprises, including the weekly crossword puzzle. I never work the crossword, though – I'd rather spend some leisurely time reading the paper.

Today I cut out a number of crossword puzzles (including a round one, one with no numbers, and a few answer puzzles from previous weeks), to make a mod podge vase, inspired by one of my favorite blogs, How About Orange. It was a fun project, and I like the way the black and white squares form a design like weaving, blanks to fill with words. I guess the blog is like that too – an exciting idea, a diary to share with others, even strangers...

So here is a little tutorial (for a "How About Orange" one, click on the image of the vase on the left – and go to the link that inspired me to go all mod-podgy).

1. I started with a Burt's Bees glass bottle, once filled with a baby buttermilk bath. It's a nice bottle because of the flat square sides.

2. Cut out crossword puzzles or other images or words.

3. Glue them on with Mod Podge – I used matte.

4. Try to use a brush that will not shed bristles, or you'll need to go back with a pin and patience to pull off any stray strands of your brush.

5. Once your pieces are arranged and glued, apply a thin coat to the entire surface of the vase. I covered the bottom, too, so stood the whole thing upside down.

6. Let this dry, and do it again.

7. Now just place your vase somewhere to hold pens, brushes, or flowers. You can look at it and meditate about the weave of positive and negative spaces, the links between them, and the way we search for – or chance upon – the right words to fit into these gaps.