Fitzgerald’s book is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey McGuire in the new film), a Fitzgerald-surrogate observer on the sidelines who’s drawn into the boozy mix of new money, old money, and a love lost somewhere in between. Why not? Who wants to sell bonds when you can get dead drunk on bootleg alcohol.

The original book tends toward understatement, even as the bachannals run hot and long. This new screen version which just opened the Cannes Film Festival (in pouring rain) is a raucous melodrama, although Luhrmann leaves room for quiet moments of moral judgment.

Never underestimate the envy that Americans have for the rich, especially for rich people who look like movie stars – Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, for example, who play the doomed striver Gatsby and the heiress with the thug of a playboy husband (Joel Edgerton)who can’t decide to act on her love for Gatsby. Fitzgerald was trying to tell us, once again, that plutocrats can be dumb, cruel, and unhappy. Luhrmann is trying to tell us the same thing, but his $100 million production stresses that the rich are often miserable in elegant cars and sexy clothes that you can’t afford. Is the audience still jealous? Absolutely. You can just imagine them looking at the screen and insisting that they would have been able to make all the right choices.

The production designer, Catherine Martin was aiming at rock opera kitsch here – or if she wasn’t aiming for it, she certainly missed with great accuracy — with locations concocted by someone’s computer that looked like props in a McMansion video game, and interiors with wide spiral staircases that reminded me of the World Financial Center – a place where I imagine financiers are committing crimes far worse than anything Gatsby the swindler was guilty of.

That said, DiCaprio has the right look for his character – an appealing politician’s smile – and the blue-blood accent, that is shown to be confected out of nouveau-riche ambition, does sound fake. Should we fault him for being true to the character’s falseness?

Mulligan has the slinkiness of a spoiled flapper and the uncertainty of a girl who’s forced to choose between love and money. She will probably be nominated for the only award that this film deserves.

Back to the broader twilight-of-the-idols dimension to this moral tale. We watch it with Monday morning’s knowledge that the revelers – or most of them – will be brought down by the force majeure of a depression that hurt poor people a lot more than it ever hurt the rich.

The crimes that we see here aren’t committed in the board room. They’re personal, yet what we see doesn’t make you nostalgic for that time, as Gatsby and Daisie and Nick drive through smoking slag mountains in Queens, the filthy foundation of new wealth, on the way to New York, another playground. (Is this the Queens landfill that’s now called Fresh Meadows?)

This isn’t the last judgment – far from it. Yet Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby doesn’t bludgeon you with parallels to today. Gatsby’s estate looks enough like a Las Vegas reproduction to remind you that excess has been industrialized beyond the North Shore of Long Island. A critic in the otherwise-perceptive Guardian thought the story was set in the Hamptons. His mistake shows that the connection to today was made.

Other speakers in this third and final show on More Real include Minneapolis public artist and performance artist Janaki Ranpura; host of KFAI radio’s Fresh Fruit, Leigh Combs (the voice after the child, Andrew, who asks “is the other art in this museum real?”), former ad executive David Francis; a gallery guard named Tammy; a museum framer named Kurt Nordwahl; and a mother-and-daughter of Eileen Anderson and Rose; as well as several unnamed speakers. My gratitude to these participants and the ones in our second podcast is enormous.

We undertook this project of eliciting public comment on a contemporary art show as an innovative liaison between AdobeAirstream and MIA in order in part to demonstrate audience engagement through art media. Our wildest dreams, or at least my wildest dreams, really did come true in the form of so many people  having so many really thoughtful indeed fascinating responses to the works in the show. Even though contemporary art can often find itself culturally marginalized, what More Real and its respondents in these podcasts make clear is that culturally, everybody finds a way to plug into the concept of “truthiness,” because “truthiness” — our cultural preference for a little deceit — is a phenomenon of life in the public spaces we share. Please give a listen.

I extend special thanks here to contemporary art curator and director of the Center for Alternative Museum Practice (CAMP) at MIA, Liz Armstrong, and to Nicole Soukup. Jamie Ischer, CAMP intern, was instrumental during my residency at MIA in March. In Santa Fe, sound engineer Dennis Jasso offered fantastic production and editing skills without which these shows would not sound this way.  Claire Schoen of Claire Schoen Productions in Berkeley offered editing suggestions early on that helped enormously. Under creative commons licenses, music tracks from CC Mixter dot org demonstrate the insane creativity of sound artists and of remix as a genre today.

Artists whose works in More Real are discussed in this podcast include Joel Lederer (The Metaverse Is Beautiful), Vik Muniz (Verso), Eve Sussman (89 Seconds to Alcazar), John Gerrard (Live Fire Exercise), Thomas Demand (Oval Office), and Rembrandt van Rijn (Lucretia, in the permanent collection of MIA).

You can’t get much more real than these very real citizens speaking their own truth back to art.

Lucia Sanroman

This new exhibit platform replaces the biennial format that ran at SITE Santa Fe from 1995-1996 to 2010-2011 exhibit seasons. Co-curators of SITElines from SITE Santa Fe are: Irene Hofmann and Janet Dees of SITE, and independent curators Lucia Sanroman and Candice Hopkins. Sanroman, who currently lives in Mexico City and Boston, was formerly associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Hopkins commutes between Albuquerque and Ottawa where she is one of the co-curators of the exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, which opens on May 16th. Featuring 82 artists from 16 countries, Sakahàn is not only the largest exhibition of contemporary indigenous art, but the largest exhibition of contemporary art to ever take place at the  National Gallery of Canada.

Sanroman, in a brief conversation after the public event, hinted at works dealing in extraction issues including mining and land-use. Wherefore migrations and immigration? remains naturally a very big question regarding how the curators will shape the exhibit.

Hofmann disclosed that a trio of themes — “landscape, territory and trade” — have been identified for this first edition of the three-part show to take place also in 2016 and 2018 in Santa Fe.

Five additional “satellite” curatorial advisers, born in  Trinidad, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Canada, now reside in American locations including Trinidad; Costa Rica and Singapore; Mexico City; Buenos Aires and Toronto. An additional set of “SITElines advisers” puts the curatorial advisory cadre at 12, in addition to the four tasked with the actual curation of the first 2014 edition of this show.

Irene Hofmann said that Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map depicting the Americas as contiguous land masses set out an attitude to the fabric of the exhibition and  ”where our work will take us.”

“Linked through transit and metaphor” along the Pan-American highway, New Mexico is a “rich microcosm” of the Americas, in Hofmann’s words.

Candice Hopkins

“The term biennial will fade but innovation will not,” she said.

In addition, an interactive piece of the exhibit with an anticipated basis in community will be programmed. Called SITECenter, that aspect of SITElines.2014 will fall under the purview of SITE’s education director, Joanne Lefrak.

Biennials of the Americas in the recent past include a 2010 biennial held in Denver, which first tapped Toronto planner Bruce Mau as its curator and intended to feature art and culture as one of three components (the other two were an “innovation pavilion” and roundtable discussion), assigned seven themes: Education, habitat, economy, energy, health, environment and technology. As Leanne Goebel wrote in AdobeAirstream in 2010: “Consider this then a cross between a lecture series and a trade fair celebrating design and innovation.”

Curator Paola Santoscoy was tapped to curate “The Nature of Things,” the visual arts exhibit connected with that Denver biennial, after Mau was dropped as the Denver Americas’ biennial curator.

As Hofmann noted in her remarks Monday, biennial exhibitions, since SITE Santa Fe launched its international biennial in 1995 (and joined the Whitney and Carnegie as the only biennial or triennial format producers in the US, and the only US international biennial producer then), have proliferated exponentially. Arguably, a close analog to the new SITElines exhibition concept was the organizationally inclusive Los Angeles-wide exhibition, Pacific Standard Time, held in 2011 as an initiative of the Getty that coalesced some 60 presenting arts organizations to spotlight art created in southern California from 1945-1980. The Getty announced in late February that the 2017 sequel to PST, would be titled L.A./L.A. for Los Angeles/Latin America (read Jori Finkel’s LA Times post here), an announcement which effectively construes that SITE Santa Fe will scoop LA in its north-south axial emphasis.

In Santa Fe, Ryan Rice of the Museum of Contemporary Native Art is one of the SITElines advisers, indicating the import of contemporary Native American art to this panning view of the Americas spanning from Nunavut in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south, Hofmann said.

The additional curatorial advisers are Christopher Cozier; Inti Guerrero; Julieta Gonzalez, Eva Grinstein, Kitty Scott (“satellite” curatorial advisers), and SITEline advisers are Ana Paula Cohen, Luis Croquer, Douglas Fogle, Rosa Martinez, Gerald McMaster, Ryan Rice and Osvaldo Sanchez. Martinez was artistic director of the Istanbul biennial in 1997 and then continued to become guest curator of the SITE Santa Fe biennial in 1999, and director of the Venice biennale in 2005. Sanchez curated inSITE (the San Diego-Tijuana biennial) in 2005.

Kristin St. Clair

St. Clair explains that while no one knows precisely how and when female circumcision started, mention of the practice dates as far back as 143. B.C.E. in Greek writing and that  when Ethiopian women arrived in Egypt in 50 B.C.E., they were circumcised. St. Clair was working for the Clinton Foundation in Tanzania doing project development for rural African AIDS education when she grew the idea to found Humankind.

Song, St. Clair says, was her first evidence that an enduring change had been made.

“Because it’s a non written language, everything is translated through song and story.  Once they form choirs around the issue of not cutting and doing alternate rites of passage, they take that information by choir from village to village.

“That’s when you know you have made a long lasting sustainable result because it is incorporated in the mythology.”

Sunday’s concert takes place at 4 p.m. at the Lensic. (Ticket prices range from $25-$45 and a donor VIP reception occurs after the show at Casa Nova Gallery. For more information call 930-0993.)

Darius Brubeck is the son of jazz legend Dave Brubeck, who died in December 2012. Based in the UK, Darius performs internationally and played at the Kennedy Center 2009 awards ceremony at which his father was honored. In Santa Fe this Sunday, he will be joined by jazz rhythm section Straight Up. Opening the show will be jazz singer Maura Dhu Studi. Brubeck will perform jazz standards, South African jazz and Dave Brubeck hits.

Wilmot served with the Army from 1998-2006, and was deployed to Iraq, where she became part of “Team Lioness,” an experiment in pairing women service members with Marine infantry units in the explosive Anbar province. “Lioness,” a documentary about this program, makes it clear that women like Wilmot were “there for the action, but left out of the history.”

#4 Baraa’a (Iraq), by Michelle Wilmot

It’s only one of the injustices Wilmot has experienced, as ethnic, gender and anti-military jibes have been directed her way, but she’s managed to channel her uniqueness, and her story, into visual art. She also knows it was central to her healing. “After Iraq,” Wilmot says. “I felt tremendous pressure. Returning from a year of seeing deaths, injuries and some of the most glorious and hideous aspects of humankind in an uncensored montage before my eyes,” reintegration became a nightmare. “I felt dangerously close to the breaking point and art, undoubtedly, saved my life.”

Resource Wars – Oil Rebels in the Nigerian Delta

It’s an unkept promise – how’s that for a euphemism?

Filmmaker Rachel Boynton visits both countries in her film, which takes its title from the notion, advanced by one African observer, that enriching oneself is part of human nature. “We all want to be big men,” he tells Boynton. Everything’s relative, but both Africa and Wall Street are proving him right.

If Texas isn’t big, what is? Big Men (produced by Steven Shainberg, who is Boynton’s husband, and exec-produced by a very big Brad Pitt) follows a Texas firm’s gambit to make big men out of Wall Street investors, Texas oil explorers and Ghanaian businessmen. The payoff, we’re told, will be wealth for Ghana, as long as there’s a lot more wealth generated for the Americans who took the risk, and far more for their bankers on Wall Street.

Emoluments Are Welcome — Texas Oilman Jim Musselman Courts a Ghanaian Leader

Could Ghana become Nigeria, a place of vast human potential and vaster chaos where it takes hours to cross Lagos by car, where corruption rules, and where the 99% of the population has seen its future ruined by a petroleum klept-ocracy? Bear in mind that Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country. In cinematic terms, we see Nigeria as a place of urban squalor as far as the eye can see, and a river delta (reminiscent of the bayous of Louisiana, another oil-rich region famed for its corruption and environmental toxicity) where oil runs in the river and smoke from pipeline arson fills the air.  Guerilla groups rule sections of it. You won’t see women among them, a reflection of their Islamic fervor. When you have frightening pictures like those, the promise of being “run” by efficient American specialists working for oil companies seems attractive.

The company is Kosmos Ltd., oil drilling specialists from Texas, bankrolled by investors rounded up by Warburg Pincus. The deal with Ghana was that Kosmos would keep a vast percentage of the oil revenue, because the company and its investors had taken the risk.  What did the Ghanaians know? The pro-business Ghanaian president with whom Kosmos negotiated the deal ended up losing an election, and a more populist regime followed. The Ghanaian who ran the company locally came under investigation.

As efforts to reopen a contract that seemed overly favorable to the oil company continued, oil gushed out of the sea, and investors and the company they hired made money, lots of money.  Don’t forget that Wall Street is dictating the terms of African modernization.  If that sounds colonial, it is.

Boynton got enviable access to businessmen and bankers preparing to launch the project, and to rebels in the delta. These fighters are not the murderous child soldiers whom we saw ravage West Africa in earlier years, but Nigeria is a volatile enough place that things could risk getting even uglier. We get a sense of the hopelessness there, as pipelines burn and black entrepreneurs profit from spilloff while politicians enrich themselves. As bad as things seem, they are probably worse than what we see in the film —  and Nigeria is the fifth most important supplier of oil to the US.

Forget about the notion of a state being too big to fail. It’s a place that makes The Ambassador, the Danish mock-umentary by Mads Brugger, look encouraging. (Bear in mind that there are oil-rich disasters closer to home. With all the petroleum wealth in Mexico, millions of Mexicans risk their lives to leave that country, where corrupt officials can’t control a narco-state.)

OffshoreOil Flares in Ghana — Will Any Be Left for the Ghanaians?

Ghana (which we don’t see by way of the landscape, as we do Nigeria) presents a sad dilemma. It was one of the early African countries to try to make its way autonomously after independence, under Kwame Nkrumah, who was educated in the US. These days, Ghana’s most important export is still its own people. Go to Israel – not the obvious destination of choice for Africans seeking a better life – and you’ll find thousands of Ghanaians who speak perfect Hebrew.)

Now Ghanaians are watching as an American company gets rich on its resources. Will Ghana become a mini-Nigeria, or will it prosper as a result? There’s not much hope for any country that lacks the institutions to make prosperity possible.   We’ll have to wait for a sequel.

The show engages examples from three bodies of work which reveal the artist moving from open-ended inquiry to often-formalist solution.

He constructs diptychs of a digital archival photo print paired with a “painting,”  a circlet or square shape of accreted acrylic scraped from the palette. Studio practice, edged and organized. While it can be hard at first to reconcile the photo-image’s classical quality with the anime character of the acrylic, the juxtaposition suggests paradoxically both the formlessness and intentionality of making, the parts that derive deliberateness from habit or chance.

Now happens a slight projection, as I strive to remember what exactly were Jasper Johns’ words about wrangling the brute material to make art. I see a recognizable Joseph Beuys, then Andy. But in the more elusive Man Diptych and Woman Diptych, the bust heads of the eponymous man and the woman have their eyes covered by strips of paint-crusted studio apron. Are they hostage – or refusing the encounter?

Man diptych and Woman diptych

Cox took the Man and Woman liknesses from works by the Spanish artist Antonio Lopez-Garcia who in 2011 had a retrospective at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The figures’ hair looks almost marbled, and their aspect is new and old, effectively de-contextualized from representational realism and all the historical referents that art history layers on things. Which in a sense appears to make this newer work for Kris Cox transitional, compared to the paintings that make up Concentric Episode series and Post-Concentric Episode series. Scored and graphical surface treatments, reinforce the surface quality of painting. As I regard the images a second time, on the online catalog, I’m aware how my eye keeps wanting to form an impression of 3-D space out of the flat surface, but the map is leading into something more phenomenological in Bone Meta, where the radiating lines are irregular, and the axis point skewed. It’s the old language-image conundrum in which no sooner do you try to assert finitude to something, than it kind of jars your sense of where you are in physical space. See the online catalog here.

Installation shot includes a view of three sculptures that employ found objects including from the artist’s travels to Indonesia.

In aggregate, it’s as if Cox’s work is asking: For all our seeking after wisdom, aren’t we fundamentally sited in the material world?

During the planning process for the residency, curator Liz Armstrong spearheaded at her organization all kinds of meetings about the meaning of audience engagement in the museum context, which of course cheered my journalist and editor’s heart. It is frequently a conversation in my profession regarding trusting the audience; regarding concepts that are very new to these our times in which people “co-curate” their meaningful experiences online. But still, we were tossing things to the winds of chance and interview serendipity when we began a five-day long experience of investigating how an art show named for a concept, “truthiness” —  that means our collective preference for the little or big white (or black) lies, over verifiable facts — would hit the art-going public.

They were grand. Listen for yourself.

image: Phantom Truck by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Other works referenced include: Ellen’s Gift, by Iris Haussler; Lunchbreak Photos by Sharon Lockhart; Colored Vases, by Ai Weiwei.

Stone and WolfCHild worked with Parse Gallery to create an extension of a series of healing ritual performances, entitled White Snake, that they have performed throughout the country.  This is the first time the artists have brought the performance into a gallery space and incorporated an installation.  In the first incarnation of White Snake, Stone and WolfChild shared that they, “built a ritual performance by intentionally visiting specific outdated belief systems within ourselves through a trance state,” and through movement they presented these patterns of belief in an abandoned naval base in Richmond, Virginia.

In another manifestation, and in the fashion of Butoh, a series of organic movements closely affiliated with dance and first expressed in Japan after World War II, the artists, “painted their bodies white and used very intentional movements as they walked and danced,” through the city streets of New Orleans.  At the (e)merge Art Fair in D.C., the White Snake was performed through, “moving prayers of ecstatic gratitude and archetypal triumphant joy.  These movements reflected the expansive feeling of living in the energetic current of our highest good,” according to the two artists.  The artists noted that working with Parse Gallery in this latest exhibition was an “incredible experience culminating our ideas into a gallery show.” They credited Margot and Ricky, Parse directors, with support to see the show grow into “its most potent version of itself.”

The White Snake is inspired through myth-telling and ceremony traditions.  For the two artists their art form is, “living the practice of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s theory, that inventing and executing personal ceremonies gives one power over the creation of their reality.  By giving objects and actions symbolic power we are creating archetypes to interact with our purposes of our own transformation through ritual.”

The title, White Snake, refers to a Grimm’s fairy tale.  A king is brought a secret dish each night by a servant, one night the servant peers into the dish and notices a white snake. The servant takes a bite of the snake and instantly the servant is able to communicate with the animal realm and is further given protection and guidance by the animals.  To Stone and WolfCHild, “the white snake symbolizes the awakening consciousness, the thing that allows us to have a deeper understanding of our existence and of the emotional and spiritual hardships we face.”  For them the practice of healing ritual performance is their white snake.

During the opening of the exhibition the artists performed in a space packed with quiet viewers.  The artists were painted white, as in Butoh performances, and their movements were calculated, slow, and cathartic.  At times the artists movements were in sync,  and sometimes they emulated familiar yoga postures, but were performed in such a way that they seemed intuitive and created on the spot.  This was not a choreographed dance, but in application was evidence of the artists intimacy with one another, for with eyes closed and covered with cloth, the two were able to instinctively sense the other’s presence and actions.

The viewers entered the gallery through a yoni shaped hallway, being absorbed by the scaly body of a white snake.  Mostly constructed of wood, cardboard, and fabric, the installation is best experienced at night, when natural light is not coming through the gallery windows.  Illuminating lights shine through beams you cross, creating a theatrical space that is self-reflective.  The viewer is in a spotlight before entering a much darker clearing, which housed the opening nights performance.  Without the artists performing the dark space is reminiscent of the underbelly of a seaside boardwalk.  It seems you are underneath the falling support beams of a bridge.  The artists have also placed sand piles intermittingly throughout the room.  The constant sounds of animals such as wild grouse, badgers, and frogs, are flooding the gallery. The artist took further inspiration from these animals, “because of their innate transformation qualities and how they spoke to what guidance we needed in our lives at the time.”

Like the Rothko Chapel, the exhibition has been created for others to enter and utilize, Parse Gallery is located off the busy and often hectic thoroughfare, Canal Street.  A sense of calm blankets you as the exhibition slows the breath and invites a meditative state.  Stone and WolfChild hope, “to find here, and for others to find here, in our resurrected myth, the keys in our spirits that unlock the belief patterns that cause us pain.  Allowing blockages to break away, we wish to reveal the path to more joy and unleash a purer intent inherently living in our Selves.”

Image Credit: Keaton Andrew

The twelve communities on the list were chosen based upon per capita numbers of arts related non-profits, arts-oriented businesses and workers in creative occupations among small towns in the United States. The small towns were defined as being single-town zip codes in non-metropolitan areas with a population of 100,000 or less. The scores were normalized on a percentile scale (100 being the highest score and zero the lowest) and multiplied. The top twelve had the highest scores in the country. The data was analyzed for ArtPlace by Impresa, Inc., a Portland-based firm specializing in the study of regional economies.

ArtPlace is a collaboration of leading national and regional foundations including Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William Penn Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Rasmuson Foundation, The Surdna Foundation and two anonymous donors. ArtPlace is also supported by a $12 million loan fund capitalized by six major financial institutionsL Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Chase, MetLife and Morgan Stanley. They work with these federal agencies: the National Endowment for the Arts, the departments of Housing and urban Development, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Education and Transportation and the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Domestic Policy Council, to accelerating creative placemaking, which they define as putting the arts at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities.

The twelve in alphabetical order by state:

1. Eureka Springs, AR
2. Crested Butte, CO
3. Ketchum, ID
4. Vineyard Haven, MA
5. Boothbay Harbor, ME
6. Lanesboro, MN
7. Highlands, NC
8. Taos, NM
9. Marfa, TX
10. Stowe, VT
11. Eastsound, WA
12. Saratoga, WY

About the regional winners:

Crested Butte, CO

Crested Butte is a town of less than 1,500 people in mountainous Gunnison County, CO. A former coal-mining town and now primarily a ski destination, it is also home to a robust arts scene throughout the year. The annual Crested Butte Arts Festival, which includes visual, performing and culinary arts, is preparing for its 41^st iteration in August. The town also hosts an annual, month-long music festival, numerous theater and dance productions, and evening Artwalks.

Taos, NM

Adjacent to the Taos Pueblo, the millennium-old village and tribe from which the town takes its name, Taos is a well-liked destination for art-lovers.  With a population of 5,716, the town is home to 80 galleries and three art museums. The Taos Center for the Arts hosts exhibitions, performances, film series, and various special events. In 1915, the Taos Society of Artists was formed and the studios of some of the original artists are now attractions of their own.  Throughout the year, the town also has an active calendar of festivals, fiestas, ceremonies, art shows, tours, concerts, workshops, and demonstrations.

Marfa, TX

Marfa is situated in the high desert in western Texas, with a population of less than 2,000 permanent residents. Originally founded as a railroad water stop, it served as a military base, and is now the home of Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation. The Foundation began with a permanent collection of works by Judd, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin and expanded to include works by some of the most prominent artists of our time, special exhibitions, an artists’ residency program, internships, and public programs.  Other cultural activities include film screenings, readings, and gallery shows.

Saratoga, WY

Located in south-central Wyoming in the Platte River valley surrounded by mountains, Saratoga sits above an active mineral hot springs. Its 1,700 residents and many visitors who come for the rugged natural beauty enjoy a vibrant boutique shopping and dining district. The cultural anchor is the Platte Valley Community Center, providing visitors and residents with a roster of concerts, art shows, lectures, theatrical performances, and community events.