Architectural tile installation, Mother of All Herons, by Tammy Vitale of Tams Originals.

Flexibility – that’s the key to art and life. Mother of All Herons here was made to be the outside wall of this cottage, which has just been enclosed.  So it is now an indoor piece and will be soon joined by hand-made floor tile pieces (maybe, if I can get out of the yard here at my house).  I need about 3 of me to do everything I want to do right now:  install the floor tiles, play in the mud and see what happens in the studio, mix new raku glazes, find the ferric chloride to go along with the horsehair for new raku finish I just found, continue working in the yard – which looks fabulous (and should)….as you can see, even with 3 of me there would be multitasking.

Following up on yesterday’s raku post, Gary Ferguson puts out a sporadic but great raku ezine which you can subscribe to at:  http://www.justraku.com.  He also has a book of raku glazes for sale which I haven’t ordered – yet – but am sorely tempted.   The glaze names are enough to make you buy the book just to see how they’ll turn out (see above wishlist).

Have you caught the latest craziness about "art?"  Seems there’s this guy who has made 1,000 paintings:  the numbers 1 – 1000.  In blue.  Computer generated on canvas.  Stretched.  He started in February and sold a few but BoingBoing (apparently one of THE top blog sites – never been there) and Seth Godin (another top blogger – have been there just out of curiostiy – he didn’t make my blog subscription list) picked him up and all of a sudden sales went up to over 100 in a day.  Copyblogger asks:  is this art?  And gets a lot of replies that it is.  My own reply (to which Copyblogger did not respond, although he’s carrying on a conversation with several male respondees who have also bought numbers) was that it is high marketing, not art.  I was all set to make this a male thing and then noticed one of the respondents, the only other woman besides me that I can see currently in the comments section, also bought one.

Take a look: One Thousand Paintings.  Is it art?  Tell me what you think, while I sit here and stew over Jackson Pollack, DuChamp’s urinals, Jasper’s own numbers, 1000  Paintings and other (male) art that I simply do not get.  On the other hand, I do get Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.  So does this post connect to my previous post on Gender Wars?  And does the participation by at least one woman (I am sure that Copyblogger’s respondee is not alone, I simply have no other way to research the numbers….but hey, statistics are always about a smaller set to predict the whole, so let’s call is a statistical, though self-selecting, survey) prove the point that in order for men to be dominant, women must agree to be subbservient (whether they do it knowingly because they see it as a way to gain their own reflected power or through inherited and taught cultural assumptions)?

Ok, that is very convoluted sentence structure there and I hope you can follow it through to the end and make sense of it!

Sorry for the side track.

Here’s more on art, in this instance, Dance, from Johannesburg, South Africa:  www.joburg.org.za/2006/may/may30_danceceleb.stm, "Women’s dances move deep into the soul" by Thabang Mokoka, May 30, 2006, Joburg news.

I am publishing the actual url since I have no luck with newspaper url clickouts taking my reader where I want them to go.   

I seldom report on dance because it isn’t really my perview, but in light of recent gender discussions (so I guess it wasn’t realy a side-track), I found Magogo Gallser’s Blankets of Shame interesting as it is "inspired [by] philosopher Hillel the Elder’s questions: ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, then what am I?  If not now, when?’"  A second piece, Our Life Journey Begins, deals "with the stories people keep deep in their souls, the elements that makes them human. ‘Everyone has many stories about different things they have experienced and about things that they think and feel…’ "

Makes me want to pay more attention to what’s going on with dance here in the states.  Haven’t paid much attention beyond Daughter’s interest in tap (Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk) years back, along with several viewings of Stomp!.

Finally here’s an article  on the Minnesota’s women’s movement (who knew?) called WARM:  "A WARM Body of Work:  Rediscovering the history of Minnesota women’s art" by Amber Schadewald for  the Minnesota Women’s Press (if Minnesota has a Women’s Press, howcome Maryland doesn’t?!):  (www.womenspress.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=2379&TM=45833.79)    (you can see why these urls might not work – one typo and poof!).

Excerpt:          "According to Inglot, WARM’s transformation over the years reflects the changes in feminist art that have occurred across the nation. During the 20 years that the WARM gallery was open, feminist art cooperatives were springing up along the East and West Coasts and in larger cities everywhere. The galleries became places where women artists could discuss their feminist agendas and present them to the communities around them. During the 1990s, feminist art began to move out of the cooperatives and into a more personal space.

“’Feminist art is more of an individual expression today,’ Inglot said. ‘Those types of galleries are gone.’

"WARM didn’t escape this trend either. The collective was unable to overcome its financial burdens and was forced to close its gallery in 1991…"

Friend, Anne, has sent along her paper on "Gender, Patriarchy and Society" I mentioned in my previous blog titled  the Gender Knot after the name of the book she used as one of her main references for the paper.  I have ordered the book but it is taking its own sweet time getting here.

Thought for the day:  "Patriarchy’s defining elements are its male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered, and control-obsessed character, but this is just the beginning.  At its core, patriarchy is based in part on a set of symbols and ideas that make up a culture embodied by everything from the content of everyday conversation to literature and film [and art].  Patriarchal culture includes ideas about the nature of things, including women, men, and humanity, with manhood and masculinity most closely associated with being human, and womanhood and femininity relegated to the marginal position of ‘other.’  It’s about how social life is and how it’s supposed to be, about what’s expected of people and how they feel.  ..It’s about defining men and women as opposites, about the ‘naturalness’ of male aggression, competition and dominance and of female caring, cooperation and subordination.  It’s about the valuing of masculinity and maleness and the devaluing of femininity and femaleness…It’s about the social acceptability of anger, rage and toughness in men but not in women, and of caring, tenderness and vulnerability in women but not in men."  Anne Rutherford quoting Allan Johnson, The Gender Knot: unraveling our patriarchal legacy.