fall reading list

Books fall from trees and Warrior Ant Press rakes them up and bags them for your fall enjoyment.

Let the Great World Spin. Colum McCann.2009, Random House. A book that stretches a long thin wire between Philippe Petit's wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center and 9/11 and dares to take the reader along the route. With a cast of New Yorkers that makes you long for a big city escape. No doubt, the best book you'll likely read this year.


Bowl of Cherries. Millard Kauffman. 2007, McSweeney's Rectangulars. The Iraq conflict filtered through the eyes of the co-creator of Mr. Magoo and the screenwriter of Bad Day at Black Rock. One part comix, one part satire, one part Hollywood blockbuster. Settle down with a bowl of popcorn and enjoy the ride.

Lowboy. John Wray. 2009, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. A lowboy, as presented here, is someone who hangs out and lives in the subway tunnels. This lowboy, manic with the implications of global warming, is on the verge of a weirdly comic and inventive nervous breakdown. Jump the turnstile and join him.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Matthew B. Crawford. 2009, The Penguin Press. I found the first 100 pages of this book annoying as an admonishing parent. Work is useful for the soul. You knew that and if you didn't, well, you're lazy or ill. There's value in fixing things rather than outsourcing them. It wasn't until Crawford got over his embarrassment of having a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Univ. of Chicago that the book finally released itself from pedestrian interests and moved into something more substantive-like the quality of nuts and bolts.


The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers. Anthony Reynolds. 2009, Genuine Jawbone Books. So you want to be a rock 'n roll star? Borrow 10 grand from your father, move to England, and act like one...for a few months. Make a hit record then drink heavily for 40 years. Then sober up a little and try to convince the world that you were once bigger than the Beatles and the Stones. OK. So? Could be true? One of the funniest books I've read in some time. At some point I actually had to google the band to find out if they ever existed. They did.

The American Painter Emma Dial.Samantha Peale. 2009, W.W. Nortong. A perfect little book about big paintings dripping with sexy characters amidst the back-stabbing art world.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. David Grann. 2009, Doubleday. One of my colleagues has a collection of books about the world's most challenging adventures: sailing solo around the world, hiking in Anartica, getting lost. Most of these end in tragedy or dismal failure. The Lost City of Z is more than that, sorta of the equivalent of repeatably sending in someone to save a drowning man only to watch the rescuer drown. And then sending one person after another. Eventually someone makes it safely back and writes a story about it. This book will make you stop complaining about the occassional mosquito bite.

Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. Peter Orner (Ed.)2008, McSweeney's Books. Stop complaining about your job and reconnect with the American Dream. It's not all pudding and raisins.

Stiches: a memoir. David Small, 2009, W.W.Norton. Small pulls us through a childhood filled with mentally ill family members and into a life of redemption and art. Soft strokes and hard words rendered into reality.

Prayer Requested, Christian Northeast. 2009, Drawn and Quarterly. It's easy, upon first reading, to dismiss these prayers as the quirky, ramblings of desparate internet trolls. Give this book a second read and you'll discover these prayers aren't that much different from your own. Don't you want to be God's FB friend?

A Gate at the Stairs. Lorrie Moore. 2009, Alfred A. Knopf. This book got a lot of attention when it appeared the summer. Seemingly, Lorrie Moore was every where talking about the time and energy spent writing this book; the premise sounded intriguing. I really wanted to like this book. I really did.

cats in trees

m.o.i has always had a fondness for quirky folk who live at the edges of society. This may be due, in part, to fortunate circumstances that allow us to live somewhere in the middle realm, but one has to admit that often the self-trained artist is more interesting than the one more finely trained.

We say this in defense of Bob, whose performance piece Cats in Trees had a brief run as part of an ongoing street theatre project that Bob maintains. The premise of Cats in Trees is quite simple. First Bob, having created a Device for Placing Cats in Trees, must befriend feral cats that roam the neighborhood (no easy task in itself). Once Bob earns the trust of the cat to where he can pick them up and hold them without fear of cat-scratch fever or blindness, he gently places the cat in the Device for Placing Cats in Trees, lifts the device into the upper branches of a nearby tree, and gently shakes the basket until the cat removes itself from the basket and into the tree. Bob finds the phrase, "Ima a shaking it boss" if repeated long enough will usually drive the cat into the tree although I've also seen Bob resort to barking, growling, and reading the poems of Mary Oliver--all of which seemed to work.

Now, I'm certain that some of my animial rights loving friends might find this practice to verge on animal endangerment or even a violation of cat's rights, but hear this first about Bob before you render final judgement.

Bob's day job is to field test shopping carts by pushing them around on city streets until they surrender to the rigors of urban life. Poorly designed shopping carts can fail and endanger shoppers, their children, and are costly to replace. Bob suggests that one day on the street with him and the cart has undergone the equivalent of one year in a parking lot. As with Cats-in-Trees, the field testing of shopping carts is a public service the Bob provides with no expectation of financial reward.

Avian lovers might also object to Cats-in-Trees but to them Bob has a ready response.

"These aren't domestic cats I'm placing in trees. These are feral cats. A tree to a wild cat is a natural place. Now I can see that you might be opposed to cats eating birds but that's a natural thing for a cat. And besides, cats don't catch birds while in trees, it's too dangerous for the cat. Watch them hunt. They mostly catch birds on the ground or in low-lying shrubs. Only cats without claws are afraid of trees. My project just helps the cats realize the heights of their potential."

So there you have it. From Bob. Cats in Trees. Not the best art you've seen this week, not the worst. But maybe, just maybe, the most different. Purr on it.

warrior ant press: summer reading list

Warrior Ant Press casts a shade tree shadow on some summer books.

Gone Tomorrow: A Reacher Novel, Lee Child. Delacorte Press, 2009. Fiction noir at it's best. With a little Homeland Security profiling thrown in the mix to stir up the melting pot.

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, Marc Blatte. Schaffner Press, 2009. Suggested subtitle: The Effrontery of Street Cred. This book received more critical attention than it deserved; proof that connections in the Hamptons do matter and coy marketing slogans like hip-hop noir sell books. Don't kid yourself or let me dupe you into thinking it wasn't a decent read because it was; perhaps the sequel will lose some of the pretense.

Small Crimes, Dave Zeltserman. Serpent's Tail, 2009. Pushes fiction noir off a cliff. You'll find yourself jumping after the 1st paragraph.

God Says No, James Hannaham, McSweeneys Rectangulars, 2009. Despite, at times, reading like a book published through a politically correct lens you might want to say yes.






Bright Shining Morning, James Frey. Harper Perennial. 2009. Frey's editors appeared to have given him considerable leeway so as to put as much distance between his last book and Oprah. Frey's latest is interesting and funny. Weird thing though. This book, a work of fiction, has an ongoing relationship with factoids. Frey likes the joke, although three-fourth's of the way through the text I stopped caring so much about the laughs (the punchline is always LA) and wanting more character. Maybe for his next book Frey will let go of the facts entirely and stick with truth.

City of Refuge, Tom Piazza. Harper, 2008. Just because books are written to bring attention to Katrina and its aftermath has little bearing on their depth of meaning, the soul of the place, and whether or not you should read them. There's only so much room; leave this one behind when planning an evacuation.

Candide, Voltaire, translated by Theo Cuffe. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2005. Everyone is clamoring for Hope, but Optimism was a philosophy that came before. Steep yourself in its mirth.






Joe Turner's Come and Gone, August Wilson. Theatre Communications Group, 2008. Unlike Biggie O and Mother Michelle I wasn't able to make it to the Lincoln Center revival but the exerts I've seen have me pining for a stimulus check and a week along The Great White Way. August Wilson is destined to replace Tennessee Williams as America's greatest playwright. Get some today.

My Dinner with Andre: Screenplay for the Film by Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. Grove Press, 1981. You and a friend decide to have dinner at a local restaurant to catch up on each other's lives. In the past this was a regular occurrence but it's been awhile since you've talked over a slow meal. History would suggest that usually the food is decent, sometimes it is good, rarely it is wonderful. Although at times the conversation is irritating, it is always interesting, and sometimes the discussions are profound. You'll want to leave a 20 percent gratuity after this one.

prepare thyself: dylan mortimer @ leedy-voulkos gallery

Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl that you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? I have. That's an interesting moment.--John Patrick Shanley¹

Why doth the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?--Palsms 2:1²

I've always had an uneasy relationship to art. It's true. At a cocktail party in a gallery not long ago, Mary Anne, sexy New York-hardened Mary Anne, found herself trapped in the corner with me. It wasn't intentional. We found ourselves looking at one another hoping for something to say. She was dressed in black, I in fleece; we could have left it at that. But her friend/partner? had gone to fetch a refill and the mutual friend that introduced us had shuffled away to close a deal. Before we could part gracefully, a moment needed to pass. We looked at one another, took a pull at our drinks, just the situation that can lead to over-compensation. And then Mary Anne did something surprising. She reached out, grabbed my elbow, pulled me close enough so that I could smell her, looked into my eyes, and then with the measured cadence and practiced profundity of an analyst asked, "and what is your relationship to art?"

I almost dropped my drink on her shoe. Where to start? Should I tell her I'm a maker? A collector? A lover? All, any of these answers, would demand more explication. Did I have a worldly answer in me? How to respond appropriately? I sensed that Mary Anne had a more definitive view of this world-of-art than I did. She's a painter. I know that. I know her work. Her gallerists. Plural. And at least one of them on the coast. Me? She doesn't have a clue about me. We've met three or four times over the years and she's yet to remember my name, or even recognize that we've met before. I'm flumoxxed. She might as well have asked, "and what is your relationship to Jesus?" I don't know.

"I have a personal relationship with art."

"How nice. And how is that working out?"

A canape tray--poached salmon on toast points with habanero jelly--passes. The liquor and perfume are going to my head so I grab two from the tray. "Great. It's great. It's going great. Have you tried these? They're spicy and wonderful."

"Can you excuse me for just a moment?"

"Certainly."

I look around the room and realize my personal relationship with art is somewhat impersonal, if not downright quixotic. I will not be getting laid tonight. Soon I find myself standing before a row of abstract, black-and-white silk prints. Visually concise. Formally interesting. But Jesus!, weren't these same works shown last year, except in red? I look at the price. $2500 apiece and a red dot next to three of the four works. The artist is smiling, and I am slowly counting one...two...three...four...it is time to move on.

I walk outside. The night is clear, but bitter cold. I look up at the sky. In the country, this time of the year, before the moonrise, the sky would be lit up, as my grandfather used to say, "with half the answers to the universe. The rest you'll have to find on your own." But from the parking lot of an art gallery in the middle of the city everything is obscured. What's up there? What's inside? Anything worth a second look? Jesus. I haven't a clue.

...

Ask Dylan Mortimer a question and the answers come at you like quick jabs. His head bobs like a welterweight. Perhaps it's the personal juggle of faith, family, and art that makes him restless. Not many attempt that trilogy. He won't, can't, or will not stay still for a photograph. "It's not about me" he says of the work and maybe that's why all my images of him are blurred at the edges.

I have never heard, nor ever expect to hear, Dylan say, "I'm just a vessel. I just stand back and the ideas come into me." If anything, he's more likely to be found wrestling ideas to the ground in the sweat lodge of his mind, hoping to find a means and a way and to drag art, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the public temple. It's a crowded lot, this temple, some might even say cluttered. If the righteous were to bear witness some space might be cleared, lots of it in fact, but being neither righteous nor a Templar, that is not my call.

But there are those who are. Righteous.

And in a world where, in his words, contemporary art either treats religion as an abstraction or with complete cynicism, Dylan Mortimer's art seeks to balance his (and our) relationship to God on the scale of belief and doubt. Altogether, most of us would surely prefer not to be weighed on said scale of justice, lest we discover our rich diet to be gouty.

We want the belief...the certainty, even the humility, but the doubt, the toil and the trouble, are perplexing...and a bit of work. And we're busy. Lord knows that we are busy.

But if what lords us, if what anoints this day to be any different from(or even the same as) the day before, then for this day to hold any promise beyond the mediocre, then mustn't this day also hold the potential for failure? Surely it must. There are lessons aplenty in failure, but Big Fun? Hardly. Regardless of what the suburban, liberation theologist Rob Bell might lead you to believe, failure is not Big Fun³. Afterwards, you may find the humor and the pathos in your shortcomings but in the throes of your downfall, you cannot see them. And everything worth a second look (in the art world that usually amounts to any amount of viewing time beyond four seconds) has a struggle attached to it.

...

I ask a lot of questions. My daughter as well. Once, during a celebratory meal in a two-star restaurant we asked so many questions of the server, "why are the appetizers so small and the entrees so large?"; "what's with the English walnuts in that sauce, wouldn't Black ones make more sense?" that the chef de cuisine followed us to the car to ask if we were critics. "No. We're just chatty and enjoy fine food."

On the way home from the restaurant, we stopped to view William Pope L.'s exhibit, What Does your Democracy Look Like? Forty feet of our nation's flag slowly being obliterated by Hollywood special-effect fans in a public monument build on the back of the Great Depression. One could stand next to this flag, in the glare of airport landing lights, and hear our history being rent and bear witness to the destruction. What is the sound of art flapping in the wind?

Immediately, I withdrew my camera to document the experience. Within seconds, one of the two 24-hour security guards hired by the gallery demanded that I stop, demanded that I delete the images.

"This is a public space; that is my flag," I protested.

"Delete them, or I'll have to confiscate your camera," the beefy man threatened. And I, unsure of myself, and not wanting to end a birthday celebration in a brawl, or worse, in jail, relented.

"What does your democracy look like?" my daughter asked aloud.

"This. It looks like this," the guard replied emphatically.

...

There is no Gucci I can buy
There is no Louis Vuitton to put on
There is no YSL that they could sell
To get my heart out of this hell
And my mind out of this jail--Kanye West⁴

We find a way. Somehow. A way. A path opens up and we walk down it. Is it the right one? The one less traveled? Regrets, we've all had a few.

There's a path, a Via Doloros, through Ble$$ed, Dylan's show at Leedy-Voulkos Gallery. It's a red carpet walk that begins with Jesus, crying tears of diamonds rhinestones and ends at the foot of the cross. Along the way one can cruise past a blinking arcade of riches that includes saints on spinner wheels, panels of yeomen, bag-ladies, and hip-hoppers any of who might be saints. But they might just as well be crazy bitches with an attitude. We forget that before they became venerated, many saints were frequently the forgotten, marginalized, neglected members of society - the ones you might turn away from at the bus stop. The ones, if, and only if, you were having a blessed day, you might stop along the edge of the road and offer them help.

...

We do not know who anyone is. Not really. Mary Anne, the server, the chef, or the security guard. They do not see us; we do not see them. The connection, if there is one, between our disparate souls can be bridged. Art. God. Jesus. The Virgin Mary. Money. Fame. Fortune. We can put our marker down on any one of these and roll with it till the die is cast. Everyone has some skin in the game but who's got bank? Is your money on faith, doubt, or do you wish to cash your chips and wait to play another day?

It does not matter! I am happy about it--just so Christ is preached in every way possible, whether from wrong or right or motives. --Paul and Timothy, letter to the Phillipians.⁵

But how do you sell something that's already been sold? People do it all the time. Some argue, the more you see something, the easier it is to close the deal. Black and white abstract print, or a red and white one? Different, or the same thing?

Purity never goes out of style, but what is pure? Unless you are but a babe, it's unlikely to be your soul. Ideas? Intent? The Bible, that perennial bestseller, tops the lists every year. It's a wonder it doesn't have its own list on the New York Times: Best Selling Bibles. Number one, for the 750th week straight week, the Revised King James Edition.

But this year two new versions may be climbing the charts. One is a glossy work in magazine format with striking photo-illustrations including those of: His Holiness the Dali Lami, Princess Diana, John Lennon, Che Guevara, Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, swimming polar bears, and self-immolating anti-war protesters.⁵ It's a bible for the waiting room, the check-out stand, the multi-taskers yearning to be set free.

Another edition of note, one that, according to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, can't be found in the top 50 selling Bibles for October 2008, is the Green Bible ⁶. You've seen the embossed, red-letter editions, now try the green one. If God created the heavens and the earth, wouldn't that make Him an environmentalist? And why, after a couple thousand years of theology, has this idea suddenly taken root?



Perhaps, as Dylan likes to say, it's all in the translation. We see what we want to see, when we are ready to see it. First glance, it may be nothing. Second glance, who knows, you might fall in love--forever, or just a day. And here, in Ble$$ed, Dylan offers a new place in which to get lost. The map, if there is one to be found, will have to come from within.

-----------------------------------------------
¹Preface to Doubt, a parable, 2005, John Patrick Shanley, Theater Communications Group Inc., New York, NY.

²The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 1958, King James version, William Collins Sons and Company, London.

³Rob Bell, Nooma 001, Rain, [Accessed December 2008 at URL http://www.nooma.com/Shopping/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=270&PMID=25&mode=FLV]

⁴Kanye West, 2008, Pinocchio, Def Jam/Rockafella Records.

⁵Bible Illuminated, The Book, New Testament, 2008, Forlaget Illuminated Sweden AB, .

⁶The Green Bible, 2008, New Revised Standard Edition, Harper Collins Publishers.
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Ble$$ed, New work by Dylan Mortimer, Leedy Voulkos Gallery. 7 November 2008 through 20 December 2008.

elsewhere:
dylan mortimer art
dylan mortimer sermons
leedy-voulkos art gallery

other m.o.i. art reviews:
m.o.i.: marcie miller gross @ review studio
m.o.i.: art in the loop: laura deangelis' celestial flyways

marcie miller gross @ review studio

Imagine being tasked with pulling something, something common and everyday, pulling this thing completely apart until there was nothing left. Nothing left at all. Except art. How would you do this? If this sounds daunting, and I believe it to be, then this is largely the task that many of us face every day. We must pull apart our day to make something out it. We want to think that art is different, that it comes from some magical place, deep inside, but really it comes from the painstaking process of pulling things apart until there is nothing left. And then putting them back together. If there's any magic beyond the everyday, it's in the putting back.

Marcie Miller Gross's new work, a part, at Review Studios, offers a glimpse of the difficulty in putting things back together. Coherently. Miller, who has long worked to elevate the everyday object above the pedestrian object, this time takes on the second-hand store sweater. You know the ones. There are racks and racks of them at the your local thrift. Always a gem there if you can find it, the perfect wool sweater, gotten for few dollars when a new one would set you back near a hundred note these days. But how many do you have? Even if you mine the second-hand stores on a weekly basis, the gems are hard to find. Miller takes wool sweaters and then felts them. Not a few, but several hundred. As one who has combed the thrifts stores in search of the thrift store for wool sweaters to felt, I know finding a hundred or so of them isn't easy. Not when color and texture matter, and to Gross, color and texture always matter. Miller said the work evolved as a response to accumulating the materials. This is true of many works, and many art practices, but for her marks an attempt to be more fluid and abstract in her approach to making.

It shows in the work. The earliest piece, ginned from a show several years back, is a small cube of cut and stacked felted pieces. Several hundred small strips come together to make this small cube and it sits atop a stool, much like one might imagine the artist herself has done in the studio, sat on the stool and contemplated, "OK. Now what? Where do we go from here."

Moving forward is never easy for in repetition there is comfort, but repetition can bind us to point of injury if not careful. Gross's first step forward seems somewhat tenuous, a linear abstraction of the cube approximately 20 feet in length, that barring one slight cut, lines an entire wall of the gallery. Patience has always been a strong foundation of Gross's work, it's true in this show, and that structural underpinning continues to be a virtue in the work.

Space has also been one of the foundations of her work and here Miller takes ample exception to this one. The Review gallery space is best thought of as only half a space. The remainder seems unconnected. Gross makes a valiant effort to pull in the steel pillars and make them part of a more serene and contemplative space that Gross's work evokes.

One might best think of these colors, these thousand colors, as a mediation on the whole, rather than on a part of the whole. They attempt to establish a relationship between what they once were and what they are now. And in the process, they lose every part of what they once were, and define something new. This is were the subtly of art lies, in creating that new space, between those spaces that existed before, but which you never noticed. The post war movement mono-ha in Japan also worked on these edges and Miller Gross references them in her artist statement.

It is good that see that Gross didn't stop at the edges though, but ventured over them. And these forays carried her, and the viewer, first into a chasm of wool slashes pinned to the wall like insect specimens, then into the more elemental components of the wool itself. If a sweater carries forth a color field within its fibers, then what does the wearer carry forward? The memory of the fabric, the knowledge of the maker, the experiences of the owner? The intersection of them all? These are the questions her work evokes and to pass them by is to pass by a rack full of gems. Try one on for size. That's a fine color on you. And it fits you nicely in the shoulders. There now. Make a turn. Such a nice look for you.

art in the loop: laura deangelis' celestial flyways

Laura DeAngelis’ Celestial Flyways, an interactive sculpture produced as part of Kansas City's Art in the Loop project, was unveiled recently in downtown Kansas City. DeAngelis' work joins a growing list of art projects that have transformed downtown in ways that are arguably more far-reaching that the Power and Light District ever will be. One is about a vision of commerce - what drives it, underlies it, and makes it vital; while the other is simply commerce - the buying and selling of goods and services.

Artists were inhabiting, and in many cases, rehabilitating spaces to live in, to create studios in, places to show their work when city planners were giving your tax dollars to wealthy corporations and providing 25-years of property tax abatement so suburban folks who'd fled the city might consider moving downtown again. The practice of an urban revitalization driven by the arts eventually became institutionalized under the auspices of groups like the Urban Culture Project, and what followed was a revolution for Kansas City.

Today, art is frequently what is used to "sell" downtown as the place to be. Work, live, shop here. It's hip. Look! Art. How cool is that? Indeed. Suburbanites continue to flock into the new urban landscape, this canvas of people and energy that does not exist in cul-de-sacs; they come because art fills a void in their lives.

But artists do not make art for suburban visitors who find security in Ted's Montana Grill. They make it for themselves. Sometimes people see it. Sometimes they do not. To see it, one must take the time to engage oneself in another way of looking. Another way of longing. What is it that I seek? What is it that makes me alive and well in this world? Slow down. Take a moment. Here is a park. Let's sit for a minute.

“Celestial Flyways” can be seen at Oppenstein Brothers Memorial Park, 12th and Walnut streets and like many other large-scale public art projects currently in vogue, it hinges on a collaborative process, this one involving DeAngelis and Davison Architecture + Urban Design LLC. Collaboration can strengthen a work and add dimensions to it that otherwise wouldn't be possible, but sometimes it seems to lend itself to over thinking and a loss of spontaneity.

Given the arduous process to fund, site, and complete any major public works project, lest of all one involving art, that should come as no surprise. Like the vetting of politicians during the campaign season, this lengthy process makes producing any work of public art that throws lightening bolts at conventional wisdom a rarity - unless you happen to believe that art of any kind, is in itself, a practice that shocks the system. There's is some truth to that, but the vetting process typically leaves us with works that reference the controversial in very oblique ways, but frequently without a deep and jarring challenge to our psyche. The challenge for the artist then, in some ways, is how to circumvent the process that will meet the needs of the individual artist, how to find avenues to fund such large projects, and how to make engaging work that doesn't offend the patron. Or at least offend the patron and the public to the point where they stop giving.

The central component of “Celestial Flyways” is a large-scale interactive Star Disk at the center of the pocket park. The disk is purported to be the the largest-known modern recreation of an anaphoric clock, one of the first astronomical machines. [You known the machines; with microcomputers they've become so tiny that versions small enough to fit in a backpack are readily available.] Here DeAngelis has gone in the opposite direction, sizing the disk to the surrounding office buildings. Working with astronomy historian, James E. Morrison, who designed the computer program that maps the night sky specific to the park's location and through the magic of LED lights, presents the star pattern to the viewer. Etched on the disk are the constellations, or at least our vision of the constellations as perceived by Ptolemy.

Then throughout the park, as though small gems unearthed during a spring walk, are smaller references to nature. Metal etchings of migratory birds that utilize the Missouri and Mississippi River flyways are set into the concrete and fan out across the plaza. Crows, crested cormorants, scissor-tailed flycatchers. Don't walk past them. Stop. Take a long look. If you saw these birds in the wild, you'd stop for a minute to look. Do so here and you won't be disappointed.

In many ways, Celestial Flyways underscores larger problems in our society. As much as art can connect us, it can also remind us of what we've lost. Light pollution in the city obscures the sky to the point that sometimes even seeing the big dipper is a challenge. The city had a chance to install dark-sky approved lighting a few years back and refused to listen to concerned citizens. Naturalists were pitted against THE SOCIETY FOR ILLUMINATING ENGINEERS; the end game was less illustrious than your imagination, which the SOCIETY -for all the light - lacked in abundance. This left the city with an antiquated street light system that spews light in all direction, pollutes the sky, and is terribly inefficient. And one of the biggest proponents of this system was Mark Funkhouser, who then served as city auditor. Funkhouser's argument was that this was the only system that Kansas City could afford. That's clearly the auditor speaking but save a buck, lose the sky. How is that being smart with the money?

The flyways component of Celestial Flyways references the Missouri River, but the river can't be seen from this vantage point. So the idea of the river, as the idea of the migratory waterfowl, and the stars overhead become only a hint. Is this all we have left, hints of the natural landscape? Why can't we have both. With more careful planning we could. But for now we have art.

Spend some time in this park, down on your hands and knees if must, and examine the tile work. This level of detail, patience, and execution is rare in any work, even more so in a large public art installation. Where else can you find paddlefish cavorting between concrete steps and ladders to clouds? And if I can't see the river or the stars then give me a step ladder to the constellations so I can search my soul for a spoonbill of inspiration.
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The Art in the Loop Foundation is a partnership of the Kansas City Art Institute, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, the Municipal Art Commission and the Downtown Council of Kansas City. A 501c3 nonprofit organization, public art projects produced by the program have been supported by a five-year grant from the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, with matching funds from the City of Kansas City, Mo. for the past three years.

more at:
m.o.i.: art knocked for a loop
Elsewhere:
art in the loop
urban culture project