8.5x11 Fall/Winter 2013, Issuu#1

ISSUE 01 / fall/winter 2012/2013

INDEX[1] A LETTER TO 8 1/2 X 11 by Julia Cole

[2] FEMININITY, SEEN THROUGH CERAMICS, DARKLY by Rebecca Dubay

[3] INTERVIEW WITH GARRY NOLAND by Matt Jacobs

[4] HAUNTING/KNOWING/FEELING/LONGING by Nicole Mauser

[5] NEWTON’S BLACK BOX by Aaron Fine

[6] BRETT GINSBURG, A CONVERSATION by Chris Daharsh

[7] THE CONTEMPORARY IS STANDARDIZED, TYPED, AND PRINTED by Justin Beachler

[8] A WALK IN THE BOTTOMS by Amy Kligman

[8] .SUM by Theresa Bembnister

[9] DRAWING BURLESQUE by Karen Matheis

[9] RATIONAL AESTHETICS by Stephanie Bloss

[10] THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF NEGATIVE SPACE by Maria Vasquez Boyd

[11] HERE AND NOW by William Meier

[12] ATTENTION MUST BE PAID by David Wayne Reed


[1]ISSUE 01 / fall/winter 2012/2013

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Welcome to the world eight and a half by eleven! I wish you good looks, intelligence, wit, and a brilliant career! Among your many qualities, my own hope is that you will cultivate a kind of poetic usefulness; that you will be a word-tractor to till the cultural soil and a meme-laborer to sow and irri-gate new varieties of critical engagement. To begin the work I imagine, here is my own broadcast: I pro-pose to the community an open conversation about the nature of art criticism. How is it relevant in our time, and how does it contribute to the growth of individuals and communities?

These are some of the premises I assume: Criticism, in general, is a puzzle in the postmodern age. Up to and throughout Modernism, monolithic concepts such as “one almighty God,” “blind loyalty,” “noblesse oblige,” or the “weaker sex” reflected widespread and deeply embedded belief systems – which in turn made the molds for “normal” social structures. Values were much more certainly classified as “good” or “bad,” and you could pass judgments simply by referring to “the rules,” or to the past. Even personal taste reliably reflected the sector of society to which you belonged or aspired. Now, amidst a global awareness of an infinitely varying, subjective multitude, we struggle to define “universal standards”. Postmod-ern theoreticians have convincingly argued the relativity of meaning and the tyranny of absolute values, using semiotic analysis as a tool. If we were not branded by education, propaganda and advertising, we might expect there to be as many different “tastes” as there are people on the planet.

How can art criticism function in the flat light of relative value? If it can no longer be justified as the authoritative judgment of an expert, as in the days of Clement Greenberg, how then do we decide any more what is good art, or even what is art? Any given criterion, such as virtuosity in craft, for example, can be shown to be an equally powerful force whether present or absent, depending on the context of the work. And practices like those that blend high and low culture, or rely on appropriation, ready-mades or relational aesthetics, have fueled the troubling, expansive notion that art is art when an artist says so.

Happily, we are saved from the isolation of total subjectivity, by nature and by human will. Our com-mon humanity is a kind of absolute force field that surrounds us all. Basic needs and desires, both emotional and physical, drive or guide all bodies, and we intuit core human values that bind us, despite our multitude. Though vital and comforting, such ancient, innate commonality often fails to support the kind of reflection and exchange that fuel the growth of complex ideas. Strong, diverse, local communi-ties, however, - ones that are deliberately and creatively connected around common interests, and bound through time by reciprocal relationships of trust and goodwill - may present an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent ways to grow together. Such a fluid neo-tribe might ask many questions about the role that criticism plays in growth, and I propose the following for your consideration:

Is art indeed defined by its maker’s intention, and if so how can others best determine the work’s validity? Is criticism that fosters “improvement” often a thinly disguised attempt to remake the work in the critic’s own expression? What might a more useful, context-dependent measure of value be, and are interroga-tion, hypothesis and illumination juicier means to draw out self-expression than opinion? Might it be the critic’s role to better understand context via a research-based process in which s/he opens first, and then shares the peculiar flashes of insight or intuition that result? Importantly, might criticism be offered only and always as a gift –tenderly, with the awareness that an experimental life is often a vulnerable one, and that deep, shared curiosity tends to bind seekers in rigorous and authentic discovery?

This is a beginning. I listen for the sounds of tiny leaves.

A letter to 8 1/2 x 11,

from Julia Cole



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Susan Sontag was already on my mind when I first saw Updo Stump (2010), specifically her essay “A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” that ac-companies over one hundred photo-graphs of women by Annie Leibovitz. Both Sontag’s essay and Leibovitz’s photographs call into question conven-tional ideas and ideals about beauty and femininity, offering a meditation on and celebration of diversity and individuality.

Misty Gamble’s Updo Stump compli-cates and undermines stereotypes about beauty and femininity. The figure’s hair—a long-held signifier of beauty—is abundant and appears organic as it sweeps across the face, disabling sight and speech. Initially, this woman, blinded and muted, reminded me of the surreal-ist René Magritte’s infamous Le Viol (The Rape) of 1934. In his misogynist con-ception of a woman, Magritte replaces the female face with her torso (breasts for eyes, navel for nose, and genitals for mouth), reconstructing what it means to be a woman in terms of female sexual anatomy, while also rendering her face turned body as phallus. Magritte’s image is disturbingly sadistic. Perhaps knowing Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Boxing Hel-ena (1993), a horror film about a sur-geon so obsessed with a woman that he amputates her limbs and holds her captive, influenced the making of Updo Stump prompted me to think back to Magritte. Gamble’s work, however, is markedly different, neither as crude nor as cruel.

Nonetheless, Gamble’s title is brutally descriptive: Updo Stump (“stump” instead of “bust” or “torso”) depicts a woman without arms and legs. Sontag writes about how the “iden-tification of women with beauty was a way of immobilizing women,” and I am more interested in this figure’s inactiveness than her poten-tial attractiveness. In contrast to the woman’s writhing strands of hair, her body is a blue, immobile pillar. Updo Stump questions normalcy, challenges conventions, and begs for some reflection about disability.

The contemporary British artist Marc Quinn made a series of marble sculptures of people without limbs, people too often unrepresented. For example, his controversial statue Ali-son Lapper Pregnant that was tempo-rarily installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London from 2005 to 2007 shows Lapper, a friend of Quinn’s who was born with no arms and shortened legs, unclothed while eight months pregnant. Quinn puts forth, in his words, “a new model of female heroism;” Lapper describes her portrait as a “modern tribute to femininity, disability and mother-hood.” Quinn’s figurative sculptures are of real people; Gamble’s Updo Stump takes the form of caricature.

Updo Stump and John Currin’s Cripple (1997), a painting of a young woman, with blown-out hair and a

corseted body, who grins widely and whose left hand grips the curved handle of a white cane, would make a fine pair. Like many other portraits by Currin, the figure in Cripple is shown in a pos-ture one would find in the pages of any fashion magazine, though more exaggerated, contorted, and distorted. Currin’s Cripple is calculated, satirical, and darkly humorous. Gamble’s Updo Stump is all of those things, too. If Updo Stump addresses societal pressures on women to conform to expecta-tions of beauty and femininity, then I wonder just how crippled is that figure’s identity. How might she be psychologically or socially immo-bilized as well? And what is the degree of ridicule and interroga-tion by Gamble?

[Susan Sontag, “A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” in Women (New York: Random House, 1999), 30.

For a discussion on the politics of disability, mobility and gender normativity, see “Judith Butler with Sunaura Taylor : Interdependence,” in Examined Life: Excursions with Contem-porary Thinkers, ed. Astra Taylor (New York: The New Press, 2009), 185-213.

Quinn and Lapper quoted in “Quinn sculp-ture inaugurates plinth project,” BBC, 2005, revised 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2005/09/13/quinn_sculp-ture_feature.shtml, retrieved 7 October 2011. Although Quinn’s monumental sculpture was originally controversial, Alison Lapper Pregnant has become a celebrated icon; a replica was featured in the London 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony.]

Femininity, Seen through Ceramics, Darkly: MISTY GAMBLE’S UPDO STUMP

by Rebecca Dubay



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The following is an excerpt of a conversation which took place on August 21st, 2012, between Garry Noland and Matt Jacobs.

GN: {...} I get some criticism over using the tapes, but its so unimportant to me. I can’t emphasize how unimportant the use of these materials, or any other process I use is. In one sense, I’m my own patron in that respect. I’m working for the studio.

MJ: If its unimportant that they’re made of tape and reference the slew of things which that mate-rial does, how did you come to using it?

GN:Here’s the deal with the tape. I was doing paintings on National Geographic magazines and I would have stacks of magazines piled up - not unlike stone walls that I built as a kid - they were stacked up in the middle of the floor. I started to notice the gaps between the magazines and it made me think of Morse code. This was a lan-guage I knew from Boy Scouts. So I was trying to figure out ways to paint these magazines to make them black and white. It turned out to be much easier, and less toxic, to wrap them with tape.

MJ: That starts to explain how these sculptures came to be. Did the wall pieces then come out of the wrapped magazine sculptures? Was there an abandoning of the magazine as a base for the tape?

GN: I think that’s probably true. What the wall pieces have in common with the tape-wrapped sculpture and the Morse Code pieces is their modularity and repitition. Sort of like a punching-the-clock kind of art making. Just get in there and get it done. With these larger floor pieces, I would have scraps of tape all over. When I’d clean up I’d pull up strips of tape with the wood grain and debris on them and I’d throw them away, but I made a notation in a notebook, “inves-tigate this.”

Later I was talking with a friend of mine, Jessica Rogers, and while looking through the sketch-book I came across this entry and went, “Oh, I forgot I wrote this: deal with tape on the floor.” And she goes “Well let’s do it!”

So we put a giant swath of tape on the floor, andpulled it up and it looked fucking amazing! It was amazing to me to be able to plan something: the colors, what direction to put it in, but then not know exactly now its going to come out. It has my plan in it, but it has something that’s totally random on top of that.

I think that’s where a lot of the good things hap-pen in this most recent work; that overlay of different kinds of experience.

MJ: You’re also putting restrictions on a pro-cess, and limitations on creativity. That’s some-thing John Baldessari talks about: putting a cor-ral around an idea so that it can really flourish. You’re subjecting this material you know how to use to chance and seeing what comes of it. We’ve talked a bit about those as being more like printimaking.

GN: They are like monoprints and like colla-graphs too. I like the idea of subjecting to chance because if you conciously decide to subject something to chance its not really chance.

MJ: Exactly!

GN: There’s sort of an irony in that. But what I wanted to do was not be afraid of the things that look like fuck-ups. There’s a line in one of the Leonard Cohen songs where he’s talking about the crack in the Liberty Bell, and he says “that’s how the light gets in.” You see, if it weren’t for that flaw, not only would that not allow the light to get in, but we’d be robbed of that metaphor. I think of that line every once in awhile. Accept that crack, you know? Because that’s how we learn things.

MJ: I think that’s also a way to let the viewers into the work. You’re not making perfect things; you’re making things with flaws in them, just as we all have flaws in us.

GN: I think that has something to do with the tape, too. It’s a pretty common material, it’s not something you get in an art supply store that has it’s own intimidation factor. It’s a democratic thing. It’s a blue-collar way of working.

To read this conversation in its entirety, pleasevisit: www.temporaryartreview.com

www.garrynolandart.com www.thatmattjacobs.com



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Without work’s calving incrementsOr love’s coltish punchWhat would I be?An animaless isthmusBeyond the sea…That’s working to see it in allAnd this kidnaps me

-Bill Callahan, “Universal Applicant” from the album, Apocalypse, 2011.

On a Friday afternoon I left my studio for a second viewing of Plainsight, Plainspoken, the two-person show featuring recent works by Corey Antis and Anna Neighbor at Greenlease Gallery. I had been listening to Bill Callahan’s album Apocalypse that day in the studio prior to hitting the gallery. Callahan’s bare and crystallized lyrics reverberated in my head as I took in the show. I intend to encounter the works alone as opposed to the packed house on opening night in order to fully experience the thoughtful cura-tion by Antis and Neighbor, which gave viewer Melissa Lenos, “goosebumps.” The show emerged out of an on-going correspondence exchange comprised of letters and drawings between the artists. The artists described the nature of this exchange as featuring Antis’ rubbings culled from Kansas City gravestones and Neighbor’s young daughter’s scrawl on oversized drawing paper, which reads, “Your Death.” These omi-nous messages set the tone for the resulting exhibi-tion featuring paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations.

Upon entering the gallery one if first confronted by Neighbor’s piece, Mirror. Its placement opposite the gallery entrance reflects unsettling glimses of the viewer’s glance as it hovers over Antis’ installation of tabletop “natural” forms.

Neighbor operates across mediums to imply the body, subject, and viewer simultaneously. Yet at all times a carefully crafted and omnipresent void is front and center. Ideas of disembodied desire appear through residues of contact. A frozen encounter on freestanding glass locked into place by cinderblocks in Neighbor’s Build the Ruin (After Leah), acts as a ful-crum for the exhibition by bringing themes of tension and measured distance into focus.

Antis’ paintings achieve a mysterious and rich fac-ture where layers are laid bare for viewer’s percep-tion but their origins are not completely legible re-sulting in longer visual unpacking time. The painting surfaces themselves are at once rough and impossi-bly smooth. Paradoxically, the surface of the canvas matters not but the surface of the painting is para-mount. Formal operations seem to suck all of the color out of a room, distilling it and re-presenting it, condensed, polished and gem-like. The geometric forms and striations in Antis’ paintings have a kinship to his organic tabletop sculptures in Natural His-tory. Their handheld scale and visible brushstrokes wrap around forms without the pathos of the artist’s hand. Much like the elemenal forces in the slow formation of geologic compounds, this may reference the way knowledge is gleaned and slowly becomes wisdom or muscle memory. Can physi-cal sensations or tactile understanding be passed down through generations? Perhaps a devotional quality that is seeping into my take on this show is emitting from the VanAckeren Collection of Religious Art that flanks the contemporary Greenlease gallery on Rockhurst University’s campus. Perhaps it is the humidity that those ancient works and relics de-mand that are informing the quality I cannot shake or separate.

As writer Jon Raymond has aptly described Bill Cal-lahan’s music as “emotionally raw”; this parallels the quality of the work in the gallery that day. Rawness, whether emotional, material or conceptual, is a tall feat to achieve in today’s glossy and surface-driven landscape. Antis and Neighbor have tapped into a space that is particularly sharp, clear, and fully in the moment.

Achieving a tension of near-equilibrium through their considered curation requires practice, pa-tience, and play with meditation-like focus. The grouping as a whole delivers a one-two punch of desire and devotion, towards the viewer or perhaps to the artists subjects implied. Seeing the work alone evokes a striking and uncanny haunting/know-ing/feeling/longing.

haunting/knowing/feeling/longingA Response to Plainsight, Plainspoken, Works by Corey Antis and Anna NeighborRockhurst’s Greenlease GalleryMarch 30 - May 12, 2012



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People think I unlocked the prism, but the prism is a key, not a lock. Once I had it in my hands the secrets slipped out one after another like sheep from a pen. Even so, I stayed in that attic for weeks and months more while the plague ran loose in London. Shutting out the light, I came to know the swelter and stink of the world as a blind man knows it. I was Des-cartes in his bread oven; darkness the scourge that strengthened my mind against the deceiving demon.

“I am not speaking of a color of the eye or mind.” I spoke it to the darkness and to the colors that churned in it. I spoke it to the burning sparks when the probe touched the back of my eye’s socket. I spoke it to the sweet succubi who came with the opium.

I made the seven colors fly around my chamber – pulling them apart and putting them back together. The levers of the mechanism are bits of glass – prisms, mirrors, and lenses. The gears of the machin-ery lie beneath vision. Even these true colors are a mere slick of oil on top of the deep waters of reality. A plague of questions distracted me. They asked “Where is the organizing principal?” while vermin ate my bread. Time wound faster as they mocked “With what tongues can this machine be described?” and I forgot again to rest. At last the servants found me unconscious and carried me down into the blinding light. They say octave to mean eight. But sing “Do, re, mi…” and there are only seven notes. It is merely ‘Do’ at both ends and so the straight line becomes a circle. It woke me the night before the fever broke. Rising above the river, the wheel burned; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet… and red again. I did not invent the color wheel. It discovered me.

Newton’s Black Box by Aaron Fine



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Brett Ginsburg[a conversation with Chris Daharsh]

Brett Ginsburg is a young artist based in Kansas City. His latest body of work considers ideas of desire and satisfaction through consumerism and he uses this as a springboard for other discussions. He’s been featured on I Like This Art, TRAPPN online, and, in Blue Canvas Magazine. I had the pleasure of speaking to him about his work in his living room/gallery. CHRIS DAHARSH Your statement talks about commodities in a skeptical way, and elaborates on the fetishization of these objects in the market and in society as a whole. Is there a fetishistic quality in your work when viewed? Are your objects holding a mirror up to a problem, or are they taking a specific stance towards the issues they reside in?

BRETT GINSBURG I see my work as celebratory; if I was looking to be overtly critical I would probably lean towards activism rather than presenting ideas through visual art. I am looking to simply rearticulate the fetishistic qualities that initially draw me into consumer products. This allows me to discern what aspects of these objects I choose to appropri-ate when creating my own. Often artists like Ken Price come to mind with his participation in the Finish Fetish Move-ment.

CHRIS DAHARSH So when you speak about products or an image of a product, what do you receive from them? Is it the desire of ownership? What does it mean to own something or be an author of anything?

BRETT GINSBURG The feeling or entitlement that accompanies acquiring material possessions and the meaning one gets from owning something. I’m interested in the void people fill within themselves through these commodities.

DAHARSH So a good portion of your work is based in ceramics, and you use the properties of clay and its ability to create multiples in your work, but you deviate from the traditions when it comes to surface design, why is that? I’m think-ing especially about your series Market Idols.

GINSBURG My surfaces aren’t attempting to deceive the ceramic element; the ceramic element just isn’t presented in an overt way that we would normally associate with the medium. The designs and colors I employ reflect the industrial processes used in the making of products.

DAHARSH What do you think a viewer should get from your work?

GINSBURG There’s a lot of ideas I would like to translate physically that would most likely fall short. It’s like we always say, ‘all you can ever see in anything is yourself ’, not in a narcissistic way but because everyone’s trying to make an emo-tional connection to something to try and acquire comfort, we adhere meaning and our own experiences as a means to cope. So if you look at one of my objects and can discern elements that you know and elements that are foreign, that sort of clashing is a way to formally acquire interest. DAHARSH It seems like your work can go in a lot of ways from here, what’s next for you?

GINSBURG The work that I’m thinking about now is going to be less of a survey, not so much about a breadth or spec-trum. So I’m looking forward to working in a more intimate or singular way. I’ve always enjoyed working meticulously: when I was little making model cars or playing with LEGOS, you follow the instructions but are inventive along the way; that’s very much a part of my process now. It’s like Richter said, I’m just trying to have something to respond to.

So I’m working on using more industrial processes and design software to create my forms for the future. I acquired some new skills working with alternative surface methods at a workshop this last summer at Anderson Ranch and I’m excited to have new tools to continue to develop inventive ways of responding to things.



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The Contemporary is Standardized, Typed, and Printedby: Justin Beachler

To consider the museum as an interpretive buffer between the viewer and the art; the unfortunate result is this rambling about the museum label. In doing so, I am not solving theoretical mysteries, but hoping to provoke discourse about the curatorial explanations that we must coexist with when visiting our local museums.

Initially I wanted to say that the viewer is responsible for a self-educated awareness of the art world in order to comprehend contemporary art, thus stating that an involved background knowledge is necessary when decoding the work. I then realized the insensitivity of such a statement, understanding that this declaration be-comes problematic in reference to a mass – non art educated - audience. When considering this, I questioned the effectiveness of blatantly guiding the viewer in the right direction with a literal explanation of the work. While problematic in certain settings (most artist statements are a disaster, especially my own), I realized that this interpretive method both works and becomes necessary within the museum.

In order to tackle this, I feel the need to discuss museum labels, which attempt to explain the art. While we are all entitled to our own personal opinions when experiencing art, there exists an agreed upon visual rubric set in place for critical discussion. Conceptual work requires of us more than mere visual analysis as we must relate the art to previous movements and stylistic trends. We must consider it within the context of the times in which it was created. While the knowledge of past and present art trends tends to alienate some art view-ers, contemporary art’s conceptual/tactical provenance is a crucial tool when considering critical opinion of the work. Whether one personally enjoys this form of art deconstruction, or relies on a buffer such as the mu-seum for interpretation, there is a gained knowledge aiding our experience viewing art.

Within Kansas City, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art is arguably our largest local interpretive armature for creative works. Whether we enjoy the clinically planned layout of the work within the museum space, or the numerous standardized labels accompanying each and every artwork within the Nelson’s grid, these things ex-ist for positive art interpretive means.

At the Nelson, works are grouped according to period, and aesthetic concerns. We are given this informa-tion as we enter the abstract expressionist room, transition to the representational, traverse down to Pop Art, eventually to discover we are lost in the bowels of Conceptual Minimalism. This journey to the base of the mountain is surprisingly stable because of written and unwritten interpretive maps guiding our way. This floor plan alone stages the great battles and reactions between stylistic trends, as it places artistic movements against each other, allowing us to see how artists develop cohesive aesthetic relations by reacting against the concerns of their contemporaries/predecessors. If the macrocosm of the floor plan is not sufficient, each grouping of works has a label interpreting the stylistic movement as a whole, while each individual artwork has a label. So whether we enjoy using the provided knowledge and interpretive methods of the museum, the Nelson’s floor plans and work labels are there for our enhanced experience. I am guilty of cursing the paragraphs worth of eyesores when attempting to experience the art, but this provided art world knowledge is there so that we can effectively say, “I can appreciate what the artist is doing, but I still do not like it!”



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.sumat Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas

by Theresa Bembnister

Matthias Merkel Hess’ work in .SUM, a 3-person exhibi-tion at the Nerman Museum of Art, appears utilitar-ian in form. But it’s not. The artist uses hand-building methods to replicate everyday receptacles commonly manufactured from plastics. His glazing leaves no doubt these are ceramic objects arranged on the gallery floor. Merkel Hess flip-flops the evolution of production. These days machines use chemically derived substances to fabricate what used to be hand-fashioned from natu-ral materials. By sending viewers contradictory signals, the artist confounds expectations regarding utility and creation.

With its garish palette, clay globs and wrapped acrylic yarn, the first installation viewers encounter when walk-ing into the galleries looks like something you’d find drying on the shelves of a summer camp art cabin. But William J. O’Brien’s considered arrangement and sly art historical references reveal any perceived naïveté to be faux. Instead, his work comes across as the product of manic need to play. O’Brien’s gestural forms may mark him as heir to Abstract Expressionist ceramics, but rather than revealing the artist’s inner psyche, the work oozes with outside influences: African sculpture, classical busts, even Linda Benglis’ glitter knots. O’Brien’s work is pure visual excess, an exploration of materials and influences primarily useful to the artist himself.

Also on display are Arlene Shechet’s funny, lumpen clay sculptures. Her work demonstrates the material quali-ties of her medium in its different states—wet, bone-dry, leather-hard. Post-firing, her solid, but molten-lava-like shapes reveal gravity’s effects in earlier, wetter states. It’s as though Shechet reimagined Richard Serra’s Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself as specific to clay. Consider that along with her well thought-out pedestals, and Shechet seems more concerned with the history of modern sculpture than the history of ceramics..SUM may be a group ceramics exhibition, but ultimately, it feels like three stand-alone shows. Merkel Hess, O’Brien and Shechet use a common medium to create work with unconnected aesthetic and conceptual con-cerns.

Interfaces/Recursion. A Walk in the Bottoms

Dolphin: Andrzej ZielinskiBill Brady: John Houck

by Amy Kligman

It’s a room of color that is somehow both bright and heavy. Awkward trapezoids jut and glow, nestled in luminous halos, vibrating trails of pulled paint streaks chasing paths in the murky dark. These paintings loom, lord over the room with a certain ominous hulk. The surface is a hodgepodge of textures, but it’s the caulky, toothpaste-like pro-trusions I notice most.

Someone, somewhere told me these paintings are of printers, ATM machines, computer parts, etc. I suppose if I make the effort I could find those ma-chines buried in the purples and magentas…I could perhaps hear the manufactured whir of technol-ogy, identify the UFO-reminiscent green glow of an LED screen. But I wouldn’t have got there on my own, I’m pretty sure. Maybe I would have thought of the subject matter as robots, or cranky AI gone awry a la Terminator. Certainly these are ominous machines.

A brief walk in the late summer heat away, another room of even more technology-driven work awaits. Like the software written to create the the graphic digital prints, the pieces in the room are systematic and repetitive. Grid systems aggregate to produce images that feel like they could be the printed outputs of the ghost printers in the previous ex-hibition, a blur of cmyk and inkjet bits, into which one looks hypnotically, searching for some hidden message or revealed secret.

The secret in these works is actually the hand of the artist - a single, man-made crease, disguised amidst synthetic ones. The creases (both real and otherwise) crisscross each image, interrupting the background static and become the focus of the work. The exhibition becomes an exercise in seek-ing out the human interference in a mesh of digital noise. The one creased line in each photograph providing evidence of the man-made becoming so very important.



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Robert Howsare’s Rational Aesthetics exhibition currently residing in the UMKC Gallery of Art is comprised of a great number of mediums work-ing harmoniously to create a variety of visually complex imagery.

Using a combination of printmaking, drawing, and sculptural techniques, Construction III Drawing 1appears to have once been a single composi-tion before having been separated into its smaller square pieces. Each square has been mounted on a smaller bit of foam core and arranged upon the gallery wall, forming a new composi-tion unique unto itself, a site specific installation unique to each exhibition. The backing of each piece is a solid red hue, casting a pink glow upon the gallery wall, giving the arrangement a soft pulse in its cold surroundings.

Each piece contains fractions of simple grids, partially overlapping, creating unique complexi-ties within themselves, creating volume and depth where the lines weave under and over one another. As each grid comes to a close, some of the delicate lines trail off into negative space, almost like threads unraveling from the matrices that they create. The construction of these grids and the complexity in which they are arranged are the subject of the piece, the exploration of chaotic agents within complicated systems. The inner grids and line work to create an arrange-ment within the arrangement, a complex system within a system, disjointed while simultaneously connected. The automated, mechanical chill of Howsare’s shrugging off conventions of human emotion to explore the mathematical construct of the world in which his work exists.

rational aestheticsby Stephanie Bloss

Fatso’s is the place to draw burlesque models in Lawrence. Every first Monday of the month, artists gather to draw at the cozy bar on Mas-sachusetts Street. On a recent night, the theme was “space.” Miss Roach Vonhoebag, a member of the Lawrence Burlesque Troupe Foxy by Proxy, wore a silver 1950’s era space dress and held a plastic futuristic gun in a “ready for action” pose. Behind her was a backdrop of painted stars and a detailed hand drawn rocket.

The sessions, hosted by the Thieves Guild, are already gaining a following of regulars comprised of professional artists as well as those who have never drawn before. The laid back atmosphere allows artists to chat, drink a beer, and listen to music while drawing. There is a start time, but people meander in and out.

Choosing burlesque performers to model for life drawing is a trend that started with Dr. Sketchy in New York in 2005, and exploded into an interna-tional Dr. Sketchy franchise. Although the Guild’s event is not part of Dr. Sketchy, members of the Guild say they were inspired when they drew at Dr. Sketchy in Kansas City and wanted a similar life drawing experience available in Lawrence. The KC staff of Dr. Sketchy runs their event like a well-staged burlesque show; the wonderful MC, Sonny, wears costumes and make-up that can surpass those of the models. Sonny’s outfits include lederhosen with suspenders, a wig made of feathers, and Angela Davis.

The Guild’s productions are increasingly more elaborate each month. Lawrencians seem to like the scene. As one artist tells me “For $5.00, I can drop by and draw after work and have a drink… meet my friends.”

drawing burlesqueby Karen Matheis



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The Positive Aspects Of Negative Spaceby Maria Vasquez-Boyd



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Recently, while talking with Kansas City artist Paul Anthony Smith at his studio about some of his paintings, which were about to be sent off to a solo show in New York, I asked about his thoughts on the “post-blackness” dialogue surrounding his work. His response was that, while it would be an easily exploitable trait to adopt, he doesn’t want to be pooled into that critical classification. Or any other. He just wants to make his art. Recently, Smith was dubbed as a need-to-know black contemporary artist by the Huffington Post and granted a 2013 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award. In Non Tourist Location, a “picotage” composition (Smith’s sig-nature process in which the pigment of a print is meticulously picked off the paper), he leaves behind ski-masks of scarification that call to mind potent references ranging from blooming cotton to cer-emonial body paint. The pieces are political, but the degree is conditioned by the artist’s patient dedica-tion to an embodiment of his personal connection to the subject–a family photo–rather than his align-ment with a larger political narrative.

Theaster Gates’ recent Current Perspectives lec-ture at KCAI opened with an adamant and slightly unexpected proposition: “Don’t read Artforum,” he stated bluntly, as he advocated for Kansas City to continue to cultivate its own unique flavor of contemporary art.

Up until recently, Kansas City’s geographic disloca-tion from other urban arts ecologies seemed to be considered an impairment. We embraced our close-knit community, but our little cultural island was becoming bridged to the outside world by the internet. In certain ways this was, and still is, true.

HERE AND NOWby Will Meier

But it is far more a blessing than a curse that we are not so deeply entangled in the political/eco-nomic structures that seem typical of coastal art. Our isolation offers autonomy from the fashion-able trends of an art-world suffering from capitalist corruption and a fixation on artworks-as-word-searches. Our independence is possible because of the conditions present in the KC microcosm that allow people to worry more about making art than acting like artists.

In our situation, risk-taking is far easier than in other art-centric cities where the pressure to align with preexisting conversations is higher. Even more crucial, though, is the issue of economics. While nonprofit/benefactor patronage is present there is a less consumerist sense. Artists who are in the game for the large-scale glitz and glamour probably need to go somewhere else. Galleries that are pri-marily capital-exchange venues really exist for those on either end of the purchase. Galleries function-ing in service to a different audience are interested in the process instead of the profit.

All this is a roundabout way of getting to the com-monly emphasized point that there has never been a better time to be a working artist in Kansas City. Without a doubt there is a romantic allure to more art-historically significant locales, but in actuality, emerging artists who create quality work make the right decision between being part of the wave and moving to the beach.



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From the moment she sat in front of me at the theatre, I knew the shit wasn’t right. Maybe it was the ostentatious sequined beanie hat she wore; maybe it was her jumpy en-ergy. She spoke too loudly, Tourette-sian even, making other theatergoers stare and shift uncomfortably in their seats. She looks around scanning faces as patron’s dodged eye contact. She bellows “I’ve never been to this theatre but I’m sure that it will be just fine.” She continued to speak broadly as actors do from the stage, speaking to no one and everyone at once. She narrates the show as if she’d been given the job of usher. “This show is a HUGE CLASSIC. It’s about a man who works ALL OF HIS LIFE!” “All. Of. His. Life!” she repeats with upright and clenched fists. When her daughter asked what else is it’s about, she stammers and says that she can’t be expected to remember all of the gruesome details, darling.

The Woman then pops and springs around to sit up in her chair with her hands clutching the back facing the audience behind us. She beams as she scans the audience. “Let’s see who is here!” she announces. She’s staring at me so I close my eyes and rub them with my middle finger hop-ing that she won’t see me and if she does she’ll see my middle finger and move on. Eye contact begets con-versation, and I’m doing my part to indicate that I’m not interested.

Thankfully, the Artistic Director comes out to deliver the preshow speech. The woman claps maniacally for him. Fast, hard, staccato claps that sound painful, actually. It’s as if

she is participating in a clapping com-petition. Even the Artistic Director is taken aback by her startling applause.

“Get a hold of yourself, woman.” I think to myself. Furtive glances from other nearby patrons indicate the same sentiment. The show begins and Willy Loman barely enters the dim gloaming of the stage when the Woman collapses to her knees in audible, quaking sobs. She pulls it together quickly only to lapse into erratic snorts and chortles that indicate the rasp of a lifelong smoker. When Biff Loman stands up from his bed, exposing his barrel chest, she clutches her teenage daughter’s arm and catcalls the actor saying “nice, nice, nice, nice!” in escalating titilla-tion. And then she just rips off her sequined beanie and shakes her hair out.

“Jesus Christ” says the man I pre-sume to be her husband. The Woman quiets down for only a bit before reacting beat by beat to the actors onstage. It’s like watching a drama and a melodrama in split-screen; one family on stage narrating the demise of the American dream and another family watching it and living the madness that is surely undoing their own dreams. It is meta and then some. “Attention must be paid...” Indeed, Linda Loman.

Intermission. Again, the Woman out-ovates everyone around. She stands in a flourish and her dress has shim-mied up around her waist. She turns around to face me before pulling her dress back down.

Act 2. The Woman returns with her daughter. The Woman has a full cup of coffee that reeks of a fresh pour of some Bailey’s. She starts talking about “the killing, the killing, the kill-ing” and her daughter reaches over to massage her back The Woman says “oh, what I can’t have an opin-ion?” Her coffee bounces and splashes and her daughter reaches over to help grab the cup. The Woman denies her, splashing coffee everywhere and says “I’ve got it, I’ve GOT IT!”

In Act 2, the Woman continues as before in her showy petulance. Toward the end, Willy Loman leaves the stage. When the car crash sounds, the Woman jumps, convulses with loud gasps and sobs.

Then she immediately stops, sits up perfectly straight and reverently watches the epilogue. She jumps from emotion to emotion effortlessly. I wonder how one is so immediately serene in the aftermath of an erratic and dramatic seizure just moments before?

At the end, she stands first, clapping maniacally for the actors. This time she claps with her hands bawdily outstretched over her head. She whistles, she hoots, and she stamps her feet, too. She is a studio audi-ence of one. The lights rise and we stand to leave. She points at the stage and announces “THAT (!) That was pretty darn good.”

Attention Must Be Paidby David Wayne Reed


ISSUE 01 / fall/winter 2012/2013ISSUE 01 / fall/winter 2012/2013

In Plug Project’s first year, we held several meetings that we called “Art Writing = Critical”. They were open to the public, and initiated a conversation about art writing in Kansas City, and how we could support and encourage the growth of this practice in our community.

Some things we learned: there are questions about whether print is even relevant anymore, money is always a problem, its been done before and didn’t end well, and everyone has opinions about the kind of writing that’s missing. Some want KC’s own version of ArtForum. Some want Jerry Saltz. Some want to start a zine.

We say to this: yes. and yes. and yes. Also, that sounds like a mess, but we’re going to try it anyway...why? Because you have to start somewhere.

81/2 x11 came from a need to see voices on paper in a venue designed for conversations about art happening locally. Its meant to be a snapshot of the community at this point in time- to demonstrate the range of work, the types of voices, to mix the crowds that often stay separate. Its meant to change, to evolve, to grow from issue to issue, as the voices in the community change with it.

Chances are you have an opinion about what’s missing from this issue. Good!

You’ll have a chance to remedy this with the next issue, when we once again make our open call for contributions. Send us your thoughts, interviews, reviews, essays, studio visits, photos, artworks. We want to hear what you have to say about what you see at local exhibitions, what you think Kansas City’s doing right in its art scene (and not so right), we what to know what you talk about while you’re sitting around a table at YJ’s.

We define appropriate submissions as any writing responding to art being made or looked at in the Kansas City area, writ-ing related to local artists, venues, arts organizations: critiques, observations, artful interpretations, welcome all. Our submission policy is pretty damn simple. Email us. [email protected]. Put 8 1/2 x 11 in the subject line. Keep it simple- just a .doc or text file will do (no flattened jpegs, please!).

The deadline for our next issue will be June 1, 2013.

kansas city is waiting to hear what you have to say.

Love, Plug Projects

81/2 x 11...a publication for you, by you....

81/2 x 11 & PLUG PROJECTS MADE POSSIBLE WITH SUPPORT FROM:

and normal, everyday people who donate to Plug via Fractured Atlas.You too can pledge your tax-deductable support at:

http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=6638


Documents

8.5x11 Fall/Winter 2013, Issuu#1