TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I have found - through the ease of this publishing platform - that I have some readership in Russia. This is nice for two reasons:

1) I like readers. Since I have not told a soul about this free-for-all-brain-upchuck of a weblog, I am surprised that people have found it, especially people abroad.

2) I am currently reading and writing about the Pussy Riot scandal in Russia. In my research I have developed an affinity for the Russian activists who, without much attention from the foreign press, have been vying for equality and individual freedoms. In one article I read Анна Зобнина (Anna Zobnina) talked about the surprise and elation she felt when she realized that Russia did indeed have a burgeoning feminist movement. I share this sentiment. Feminism is the first step toward a more pervasive equality because it begins conversations. Racism and homophobia are easily avoidable given that haters tend not to fraternize with people they don't like, for example, it is easy for the government of Iran to completely ignore the global push for gay-rights because they say that no homosexuals exist within the country. But Feminism (with a capital F) is different because everyone knows a woman and therefore it is more difficult for haters to avoid conversation. That is not to say that Feminism is the 'easiest mode' of structural change because it certainly is rout with ire and political tension. What I mean is that historically it has been Feminism that has ushered in other forms of political equality. It was women who got the vote first in the US, a right which was subsequently bestowed on Black Americans. It was women who won the right to serve in the US military, an honor which only this year has been available to gay soldiers. The action of Pussy Riot on February 21st in Christ the Savior Cathedral, was brazen Feminism, well orchestrated and thoroughly planned. This is the kind of event that changes the debate, charging it with religion and forcing it upon a public which may or may not want to broach the topic. Mr. Putin and his fearful government has so far locked up three activist of the group, leaving many more on the street to stoke support, further the conversation and continue to plan actions.

So, to Russia with love. Thank for reading. 

READING

For this week we have:
Post-Colonialism ~ sort of.

Peter Wollen, "Into the Future: Tourism, Language, and Art,: pg 1105-1110 in "Art in theory 1920-2000"

Frantz Fanon, "On National Culture," pg 710-715 in "Art in theory 1920-2000"

I read them both while I was roasting coffee. Wollen's work on tourist culture was a bit more my cuppa tea. I am intrigued to read more, specifically his Raiding the Icebox, which purports to be about the changes in fine art that occurred in response to a variety of different socio-political stimuli. Not that this is a new idea, but its one that I want to review.

The big elephant in the room with all of the reading I have been doing lately is French post-structuralism. I have to get through the 'continental philosophers' soon so that I can catch up with the people I have been reading. Now I just need months of available reading time to make that happen.

COFFEE

French Roast - 26lbs - Dark
Costa Rica - 13lbs - Medium
Malawi - 13lbs - Medium
Colombian - 20lbs - Medium
Ethiopian Yirgacheffe - 13lbs - Light

Espresso - Guatemala, Brazil, Malawi. (this will change tonight when I am with my Arduino and sampling)

COFFEE

Super Dark/Sumatra - 13lbs - Dark
French Roast - 20lbs - Dark
Sumatra - 11lbs - Medium Dark
Decaf. Colombia - 11lbs - Medium
Mexico HSA - 13lbs - Light Medium
Brazilian Deterra - 20lbs - Light

Espresso - Guatemala and Malawi - Nice body, consistent acid. Grainy, earthy. 

MOCK PhD

I keep going back to this idea of writing a mock-phd as a means of testing research skills and personal limitations. Basically I want to write a focused project, a book with a clear directive. It sounds like a lot of fun to me, but it also sounds like an incredible amount of work.

So what exactly is a mock-phd? Its a research project. A big fucking research project with lots of foot notes and lots of ideas and lists. Its a couple of notebooks.

Currently the ideas percolating to the surface are:

Figurative painting of late (contemporary formalism as essays)
Dana Schutz
Roger White
Richard Aldrich




Queer body images and political position (research project)
Gustave Caillebotte
Alexdre Jawlensky
Mardsen Hartely
Robert Morris

READING

This Sunday we are talking about appropriation with:

Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art, by Benjamin Buchloh

&

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE By Jonathan Lethem

ROASTING

Kenneth Davids's Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival has become a new touchstone for my coffee roasting development. I have a long way to go but so far things have been alright. I have forgone a lot of the note-taking as I saw it derivative, but that's starting too soon. Let's go back. 

Almost 18months ago I began roasting coffee for a shop in Portland Maine. From the outset I was given compliments for improving the roasting and maintaining a level of quality. I had no training to speak of save a tutorial on turning the machine on and getting the beans in and out of the hopper. I was told that once you get the thing going, you can do other things. He suggested exercising and I wish I remember what I said because it was so odd to me that someone would be given the opportunity to make something and squander it away to a modest fitness regimen. Fast forward 6 months and you would have found me doing things like exercising, rearranging the furniture, reading - lots of reading, and dancing - more dancing than reading. That said, I was always attentive to the stop-watch, meaning that I was always aware of the activity of the beans.  

Sorry, I jumped ahead there for a second. 

Here's how I roast coffee beans as of now:

1: Make sure your roaster in clean - a dirty one can lead to fires.

2: Turn on the roaster - I use a Diedrich. Its fucking huge and loud and I call it Died Rich for some reason. Its also black which makes for a highly reflective surface to watch oneself dance. 

3: Weigh out the beans. I usually do at least 3 batches and never more than 9,at 10-20lbs each. I think the roaster gets too hot after 6 so I try to cap it that. Any more means I have to be very thoughtful in my schedule so that the beans that can take the most consistent heat go in the oven at the right interval. Anyone whose planned a dinner with more than one dish understands this kind of planning. 

4: Once the Roaster hits 250F it will sound an alarm. This can be silenced easily. 

5: At 370F degrees put the first batch in - I'm not sure why I opt for this range other than that is what I was told. I have made adjustments to certain varietals so that they are subjected to a different measure of heat for a different length of time. 

6: Start the stop watch when the batch enters the hopper. 

7: The internal temperature - which is displayed on the side of my roaster - will drop to around 160F and then begin to rise.

8: After 4 minutes turn the flame on medium-high.

9: At first crack turn flame down to medium-low.

10: Depending on roast, you will cut the flame at a certain point. The beans internal temperature will continue to cook the beans, so the flame can be cut before you remove the beans.

11: Depending on roast, you will empty the beans from the hopper. This will be signaled by the proximity to the second crack. Dark roasts can stay in after this second crack, lighter roasts should not, being pulled just as the beans begin to make the popping sound. 

12: Cool beans by continually swirling them, dissipating the heat. 

There is a bunch of stuff that I left out because its based on personal nuance and I can't give everything like that away. I also don't want anybody to follow my lead because I made it up and its not perfect. I am trying to get better through reading up on it. Also I am going to begin cupping my coffees - something I keep saying and never do. Right now I taste test my stuff in the shop's Victoria Arduino three-grouphead lever espresso machine, the shop's BUNN double drip brew machine, my home FrenchPress, and my home stove-top espresso maker. 

The V&A:

This machine is a hulk but it can make a nice shot when its cleaned. The shots are usually of average size for a non-ristretto shots, 2oz for a double. The color is right, the crema is right. I try different blends weekly. The grinder's are burr (regular and decaf). The shots, maybe because the water - the filters are changed biannually - have a brackish quality to them. They do present the sweetness of the beans well and pull out nice earthy textures too. I like a rougher espresso and I am working with this machine to get a good, changing one. 

The BUNN:

With multiple setting for 'brew-type,' the machine is pretty nice for what it is. The filters are always pre-damped and the coffee is always freshly ground on BUNN burr grinders. The sweetness of the coffees come across with this machine. It sucks for body, but it's nice for flavor. 

The FrenchPress:

The water is boiled on the stove, the coffee is ground in a blade grinder (home burr grinders are so fucking pricey, but I shake the thing to eliminate any contact heat). It brews for 4 minutes. Good for body, nothing surprising for flavor. A nice cup.

The Stovetop:

Same grinder. Half the coffee as the FrenchPress with half the volume of water. Really grainy, some sweetness, nice body. 

At the end of it I think these devices give me a nice well rounded take on what my customers are tasting. This is how I have justified not cupping. But I was talking about note-taking so let's go back to that. Cupping comes with note-taking. 

When I was first told what to do, I was shown a graph; x-axis = time, y-axis = temperature. I was told to use this to chart the coffee, checking in at regular intervals. The sheet also asked me to log the date, green weight, roasted weight, type of coffee, and target temperature. When I began I did a fresh chart for each batch, meticulously monitoring the arc of the coffee. Then I ran out of sheets so I began to reuse the same graph multiple times which made enough sense since the same coffee should follow the same arc each time. Then I began to see this as a silly waste of energy and I began only noting the type of coffee and the green weight on a sheet of paper, in a list form, beginning each list with the date. I have become slightly ashamed of this dissolve of the written word, so I am trying to change things. I want to implement a better, more sustainable form of note-taking. 

The idea that I am developing a retail coffee program is the reality of my life right now. So much so that I am reading books.  

COFFEE 4.13.12

Guatemala - 13lbs - Medium
Decaffeinated Colombia - 11lbs - Medium Dark
French Roast - 20lbs - Dark

Espresso:
Tanzanian - Light
Malawi - Light Medium
Java Estate - Medium

Rationalized Regionalism

Terry Smith, 'The Provincialism Problem'
Done, and a good one. I chose to read this article because I have been trying to process a relocation out of the New York cultural network. I wanted to find something to give words and structure to what I was feeling, which was a weight of cultural condescension.

~I was growing tired of saying that my new place, Portland Maine, was vacuous culturally, because that just was not the truth. There was a vibrant culture of galleries, of cafes, of foodie restaurants and stuff. But its stuff  wasn't the stuff I wanted. It wasn't 24hours and it wasn't cosmopolitan. That said, it also was too urban. If it was country, rural or the like, it would have been easier to reconcile the differences, establish a binary opposition with New York on one side and Portland on the other. But with the galleries and the cafes and the foodies it was already assimilating to the cosmopolitan ideals of New York (most specifically it is the 'cultural imperialism' that is exported from New York via 'Sex in the City,' hip-hop, et al.). There are nightclubs and swank bars and as I have said, galleries, but they were different then I what I wanted.~

I decided that was a fucked up way of looking at this new place of mine. Sure it was a little too much of the PG13 version of my former life, what with bars closing at 1 and the city emptying out for Christian holidays and no others. But it was still where I was. So I decided to examine it more thoroughly.

First, I poured myself into landscape (see my Art Monk blog corpse), as Portland Maine's galleries often display some sort of landscape based art whether they be oil paintings in a plein aire style or photography of the urban life a la every fucking photographer ever. But soon I grew tired of staring at the landscape. I don't have the disposition for that brand of peace.

Smith makes a nice argument against the kind of stuff I was to ponder next. My ideas all circulated around the bringing of art from other areas to this place for the purposes of cultural conversations. To that point, Smith argues that 'there are no ideological neutral cultural acts,' and in so saying implies that any culture brought to this place will have to meet with the criticisms of this place.

~The art object, made in another place according to different cultural standards, announces itself within a language that is specific to these phenomenological points. Said differently, The New York art objects are rooted in their New York-ness and therefore talk in a New York language of art. This language is not only announced by the art object itself, rather it is born out of a discourse acknowledged by a collective of specialists. This collective of specialists and their language is validated by the success of some aspect of their work. In this case the New York art market is the tool used to underwrite the authority of the critical system (collective of specialists and their language) within the city. The audiences have learned this language and have assimilated to the authority of the collective of specialists. They 'get' it. Its because of their proximity to it and therefore their increased interaction with it, it being art. But nevertheless, they 'get' it. Therefore, when this art object goes to another venue it becomes the 'other' on display for a community that lacks the proper language to interact with it and therefore understand it.~

This community does not lack a language of cultural interpretation, nor does it lack a collective of specialists. The two substructures are different, although in the same shape. Each has an art market left to venerate certain attributes of the community. Each has a variety of different arts education programs available at multiple degree levels. And so, the need to bring in something to elicit a cultural exchange is in fact lopsided. New York is not a venue for Portland art, but the case is true in reverse.

Perhaps this is the caveat to explore.

(Influenced by Terry Smith's 'The Provincialism Problem' and Sarah Charlesworth's 'Declaration of Dependence.")

PHD 4.10.12

Stanford:

Bryan Wolf – the relationship of liberal belief and visual culture (Philip Guston as example)

Nancy Troy – the visual culture of Avant-Garde and Kitsch

UCBerkeley: teach and train new generations of art historians dedicated to close looking, theoretical sophistication, historical research, and politically informed analyses.

Whitney Davis – homosexual historiographies 

Julia Bryan-Wilson - performance art in the 20th century, gender and craft, methodology, historiography, authenticity and fraudulence in the digital era, public art since 1965, the history of video art, sexualities in art since Stonewall, and Latin American art since 1920. She is affiliated with the Arts Research Center, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality.

COFFEE 4.10.12

French Roast - 24lbs - Dark

Sumatra - 13lbs - Medium Dark

Colombia - 16lbs - Medium

Mexico - 13lbs - Light Medium

Jave Estate - 13lbs - Medium

Malawi - 13lbs - Light Medium

Tanzania - 13lbs - Light

Espresso Blend: Guatemala, Malawi, Tanzania

Grass, Honey, Mild Acidity

4.10.12

This week: I am finishing my reading of Terry Smith's The Provincialism Problem, and working through Craig Owens's The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, and a few things here and there for the Sunday reading group.

Last week it was two articles from Architecture Review's series The Big Rethink. The best of it was this one. Buchanan does a nice job of introducing a series of difficult discussions and ultimately moving through them to an alternative position. Of course he does, that's what writers do. They process and move on.

So, the first of the two articles I am reading is for pleasure, purely. Published in ARTFORUM in the Seventies, The Provincialism Problem dissects local trends in an effort to equalize. Oddly the latter article of previous mention, is involved with the discussion of creating a politics and society of 'others.' There is overlap in a very specific area of postmodernism there, the position of the other. Of course I am only halfway through each. So I am going to finish them both.

Art&Language

12.31.2010

12.30.2010

Art&Language

"The concept of making history requires purport and purpose. The required purpose is purpose indexed to a defensible projected view of historical reality."

Making greatness cannot be anticipated.

I've spent some time wondering how to make things that I wanted to make. Then I became preoccupied with making things that mattered and that I wanted to make. Then I lost sight of what I wanted and focused on making things that mattered. When I say that I mean things that matter to the broader history and culture. I wanted to make things that were 'meaningful' and 'thoughtful' but I did not think about actually making things. It was more about ideas that I felt would be regarded well.

My affair with this kind of historiography is dead now. Now that I'm not in the mouth of the beast, I feel I have the ability to stretch my agenda a bit more and enjoy the building up of things, over the building up of ideas.

Defending myself against history is no longer part of my agenda in this. I have to fully break down that impulse, but the initial fissure is there.

1.03.2011

A lot of what I do is compulsive and seemingly senseless, or rather nonsense. Above are a few handi-crafts made for makings sake and displayed to look like buildings.

Can't say much more about them.

Don't hate.

There will be a lot more

Z

Now that I've entered at least the visual constructs of being retired - the distant urban homestead, the hound, the pipe and reclusive informational overload - I feel like I can start to talk about what happened. Not like it was bad. It was mediocre. It was intoxicating and at times made me feel real shitty. Seldom was it satisfying. Whatever it was called, it had to do with art and the way people interacted with it. It was scholarly and gossipy and gross. Simply, it was a scene, and not much of one speak of.

But I'm gonna try. I'm gonna spend some time going through the last few years. Its the last of the unpacking we have to do up here. Go through the art-shit. This could be called artshitstory then.

Sprinkle in some contemporary ramblings and you've got yourself something to read sometimes.

3.02.2011