My mind has wondered often recently to the differences between black and white and color. I’ve been left with more questions than answers.

We all make certain choices as artists. Hopefully, those choices allow us to better communicate our ideas. However, certain aspects of our processes are “non-choices” for lack of a better word. To put it another way, at any given point in time, there are certain default settings associated with a given medium such as photography (I am happy to apply a digital analogy to the analog world here since it seems very often to work the other way around). Working within those default settings usually doesn’t require much explanation. However, any move away from them is seen as a conscious choice, and thus requires a conceptual explanation. Throughout modernism, these default settings involved black and white photography matted in a black metal frame hung against a white wall. Now they seem to be color photographs with no matte mounted to plexi or floated in a black wood frame. Have we come to the point where the choice to use color photography requires no explanation, but the choice to use black and white does??

Furthermore, all things seem to either march in a straight line (evolution) or go in cycles (fashion trends, seasons, the movement of the universe). Is the move to color evolution, or a trend?

It’s been nothing but sun here for three and a half weeks straight, and I haven’t taken a photograph in as much time. My printer is currently dead (a $5000 piece of scrap metal at the moment), and I haven’t had the time to figure out how to go about fixing it. I need a change in the weather. A good storm to come and wash away.

My second edition on 20×200 has just launched. I might be eating these words later, but my feeling is it will go fast, so stop reading and go pick one up (assuming, that is, you want one)!!

I have been fairly horrible at keeping up my blogroll. There are an overwhelming quantity of really good photo blogs out there. There are blogs I have read regularly for the past 6 months that I still haven’t added. I finally made some updates this morning. If I start keeping up with your blog on a regular basis tomorrow, I apologize in advance for how long it will take me to add you. Maybe I’ll get better at keeping up with it as I go. I’ll probably also think of a few more I forgot to add this morning.

I haven’t forgotten about my promise to write a report on my Review Santa Fe experience. I am working on it, and it will be up soon. In the mean time, have a look at the updated work on my site. Probably 20-30% of the work I brought to Santa Fe was new.

It’s been a busy week, and I’m disappointed to report that 3-4 of my prints are still too dark (one more day and I would have had it nailed), but I am now in Santa Fe on the eve of my first day of reviews. I have meetings with 7 of my top 8 choices for reviewers, which means either I requested different reviewers from everyone else or the match system that Review Santa Fe uses is really good (I strongly suspect the latter).

Here are the reviewers I’ll be meeting with over the next two days:

• Paul Amador, Cohen Amador Gallery
• Joan Louise Brookbank,  Merrell Publishers
• Terry Etherton, Etherton Gallery
• Karen Irvine, Museum of Contemporary Photography
• Robert Koch and Ada Takahashi, Koch Gallery
• Lesley A. Martin, Aperture Foundation
• Michael Mazzeo, Peer Gallery
• Melanie McWhorter, Photo-Eye
• Ann Pallesen, Photographic Center Northwest

I’ll will try  to report tomorrow after round one of the reviews. I will hopefully also get the work on my website updated by then.

20×200 is having a 20% off sale for any prints purchased between now and Monday night. If you do the math, that means $16 for a small print, $160 for a medium print, and $1600 for a large print. What’s even cooler, they’re still giving the artist the normal full price commission on any sales. Nice on the collector, nice on the artists.

Now’s the time to go back though past editions and see what you missed the first time around. There are still two large prints (30×40″) of my edition available, now at $1600 if anybody’s been thinking about it…

I spent last week in the great art mecca of New York. I’m fortunate enough to have a brother who lives there, so I try to get out at least once or twice a year to see what is going on. This trip was a different experience, as I had two of my colleagues with me, a drawing professor (who does lots of stuff besides drawing) and a graphic design professor (who does lots of stuff besides graphic design). This meant that rather than focusing all my time on photo galleries and exhibitions, I saw a much wider range of art than I normally do. A few highlights:

• Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim. I’ve been fascinated by his work for some time, but this exhibition just fell short for me. I found I was much more interested in the performative aspect of his work, which the exhibition of course at best can provide a record of. The documentary videos of him making the gun powder drawings were beautiful and mesmerizing, the drawing less so (with two or three exceptions). The exploding car didn’t have the effect I was hoping for either. This was maybe a case of letdown from having seen nothing but reproductions of his work for some time and imagining it a certain way.
• Whitney Biennial. Everyone loves to hate the biennial. I’m in the everyone camp on this one. The Polaroids by Mapplethorpe in that strangely out-of-the-way photo gallery upstairs were quite wonderful though.
• Chelsea. Same old same old. Not that there wasn’t some great work. There was, as there always is, but there were few surprises. The highlight was not a photo show (though I missed several I had intended to see), but the Warhol/Basquiat show at Van de Weghe Fine Art.
• New York Photo Festival. I’m embarrassed to say I spent very little time here- a quick run through of the exhibitions and the publisher’s displays. Most of my time there was spent at a bar down the street chatting with Amy Stein, who was wonderful to talk with. With her book award the following night and upcoming exhibition at Koch Gallery (a solo show at Kopeikin just wasn’t enough for you, huh?), I’m glad I got to talk with her before she’s too famous!
• Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Easily the highlight of the trip for me art-wise. This show was FANTASTIC! As opposed to the Guo-Qiang show, this was a case of the work meeting and/or exceeding my expectations in every way. While it got off to a slightly clumsy start with the installation of work in the front hall of the exhibit, it was nothing but flawless after that. I don’t know what I enjoyed more- seeing the pieces I was already familiar with, or the ones I wasn’t (the video work especially was a great surprise).

Seeing such a range of art on this trip, I’m again struck by how segregated all things photographic are in the art world. Despite photography’s “acceptance” as a fine art, it still seems that the concept of “separate but equal” rules the day.

I’m going to Review Santa Fe! In a two-fer of good fortune I was pulled in off the waiting list, and managed to get travel money from the university as well to offset the cost. I’m looking forward to the trip, and now have lots of work to do in the next three weeks.

My biggest fear about going is not a complete lack of interest in my work on the part of the reviewers (though this is always a possibility as well), but that being back in New Mexico will make me painfully aware of how much I miss it there. I haven’t been back since finishing grad school 7 years ago.

If anyone else out there is going to Review Santa Fe, let me know.

I’ve been loosing comments from my blog recently. They are retroactively being marked as spam even after I have approved them. Please bear with me, and know that I am seeing the comments when they first come in even if they disappear after a day or two. I am going to work on the problem this week and see if I can track it down. If I can figure out what’s going on, I will go into my mySQL tables and try to recover any comments that were lost (I’ve already successfully done this for a few). However, doing so will take several hours, so I want to make sure I won’t loose them again if I do it. Thanks to all who are submitting comments!

Someone help me out here.

I haven’t had a chance yet to look at work from all the artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial. It’s on my to-do list, but so are a lot of things right now. However, a post on Justin James Reed’s blog got me looking at Olaf Breuning’s work.

My first response was that it is the type of work I don’t usually give much notice to- all over the map, and an anti-aesthetic sensibility that seems to come more from technical incompetence than a conscious denial of the canonized art aesthetic.

Yet since my first visit to his web site a few days ago, I have returned multiple times, and watched probably 30-40 minutes of his video work (that’s saying something, as I usually have little patience for video pieces). I am completely captivated.

So my question is, am I interested in his work from a smart conceptual art type perspective, or from a “Jackass” “Viva la Bam” type perspective? In this day and age, does it even matter?