what can't you glue a camera to?

I was charmed to discover a few months ago that hanging cameras from kites is a long established hobby that can have lovely results. This is an image pulled from the flickr group on Kite Aerial Photography (KAP).



You can also read more about it here

More recently a German man's cat became an unlikely star on the internet when his owner decided to attach a digital camera to his collar to discover where he went during the day.



To see the rest of Mr. Lee's (the cat's) travel pictures, go here.

And finally, a few months ago Hasted Hunt mounted an exhibit of what appeared to be aerial photographs by Andreas Gefeller. The pictures were mysteriously difficult to understand. When I asked how they had been taken, the gallery assistant told me that Gefeller attaches his camera to a long pole that he holds up. Then he walks around taking pictures and stitches them together afterwards in Photoshop.

the world is your wind machine

The art museum in Cincinnati is one cool place. I visited it a few years ago when I was in Ohio for a friend's wedding. My partner Jean and I were not otherwise having the best experience of the city (Do people eat there on Sundays? Apparently not.) But the weekend lives in my memory not as the time Jean's coworker got stoned and fell off the hotel roof only to land on another roof 5 feet below, but as the time we went to the children's section of the art museum and saw the magic tree.

The children's section of the CAC is on the top floor. When we got up there, we thought it wasn't open, because we were met with a big closed door. But then we noticed a doorbell. The doorbell was attached to a comically complicated metal creature, all over bells and springs and cogs, who was hanging over the door. The creature went wild, welcoming us.

Inside, the first thing we saw was a large metal tree growing in a shallow reflecting pool. It looked a little like a weeping willow out of an episode of Star Trek directed by Tim Burton. When we got nearer to it, it swayed a bit back and forth and then peevishly shot water out of the tips of its branches. I jumped. It moved its branches toward me searchingly. We realized that it was reacting to our presence, but we couldn't figure out exactly how. Pretty soon we were clapping, jumping up and down and moving closer and farther from the tree, trying to get its attention.

After exploring the room with the curved floor, playing the light-up orchestral piano and throwing ourselves into a room carpeted with pillows in the shapes of different trees' leaves, we were in an unprecedented frame of mind to take in the more serious parts of the museum.

When we encountered an Inigo Manglano-Ovalle thundercloud suspended in the stairwell, I stopped and stared at it as I would have stared into the sky. One floor below that, we went into a room that was simply a wind tunnel. I believe the wall text for this startling space had something (long-winded) to do with post-colonialism. Jean glanced briefly at the text and shrugged. "What's wrong with art being fun?" she asked, allowing the wind to sweep her hair wildly around her face. "What that wall should say is 'this is f**king awesome.'"

beating a dead art

When I was twenty-two I met a man who told me that art died in the 19th century. He spun out an elaborate argument about profit and loss, patronage and the church; he described the artist as a pioneer, scientist, engineer, builder, and single handed cottage industry who lost ground in every area until ending up starving in a garret in Paris in 1880. Everything that had happened since then, he said, was part of a sad mass delusion about the value of individual vision from which you inevitably wake up, blink your eyes in the harsh light of the modern world, and see that the only people with enough money to purchase art are Midwestern dentists. (He really had a thing about dentists buying art -- not sure what the story was there.) This uplifting person was the chair of my MFA program in photography. He left his audience that day and every day thinking that maybe they should all go home and just shoot themselves.

I am an artist. I hope that this does not make me ridiculous or pathetic or permanently in the thrall of rich philistines (and I don't mean dentists - I do like my teeth after all). My life, as I suppose everyone's is, is a sort of social experiment. Can she navigate the pitfalls of daily life while maintaining her identity as a ----- until her death? What will it mean if she does?

After I left school, I realized how annoying it is that there are no guides on to how to do this. No, Profitable Gallery Shows for Dummies, no 7 Habits of Highly Artistic People, no Not for Tourists Guide to Where All the Other Artists Went. I began to wonder if my permanently depressed department chair had been correct. Maybe I couldn't figure out how to do this because it isn't possible to do. Art is dead. I'm not interested in starving.

Fortunately, I woke up and realized that I was not currently sitting in a garret. I still make stuff. So do a lot of other people. On this blog, I'm going to take a look at how and where and why this happens.

Art is dead! Long live Art!