Blake Gopnik gives us a look at the Havana Bienal today in the Sunday Arts section of the Post.

By the way, I know it's pedantic, but if we call the Venice Biennial the Biennale then we should refer to the Havana Biennial as the Bienal, which is the Spanish word for Biennial, just as Biennale is the Italian word for it.

Although he mentioned it at the beginning, he skimmed lightly over the very important issue of censorship and this was very disappointing to me. More on this issue here and from the Prince Claus Fund, the main financial supporter of the past Bienal. They withdrew support from this Bienal because of Castro's recent human rights abuses and artist censorship.

More on the desperate situation of human rights in Cuba from Human Rights Watch and from Amnesty International.

Otherwise the article was very readable and somewhat predictable, as Blake does not mention a single painter and shows his colors by writing: "A visit to the main art school showed student work as good as you'd get anywhere, even in relatively newfangled fields such as performance and video art."

Newfangled? Hardly. As a child, I recall being dragged to "enjoy" performance art in the 60's in New York by various artsy members of my family, so that's been around for 40 years or more and video art came out as soon as the first video camera came out in the 70s and by the time I went to art school at the University of Washington (1977-1981) in Seattle, my then girlfriend Susie K. was boring us to sleep with her video art, which consisted of her recording the Seattle skyline from the Space Needle Restaurant as it slowly rotated around the Needle.

Same crap that Tacita Dean did decades later at the revolving restaurant atop the TV tower at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Susie K did it in 1979.

Also today, Paul Richards reviews Philip Guston's retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Guston is one of those artists that are very difficult to digest, but the more you talk to people, especially young artists, about him, the more influential he seems.

"If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting," Richards says Guston wrote in 1973, "that is exactly what I want."

The retrospective, curated by Michael Auping, was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, after closing in New York.

Terry Teachout, who BLOGs about the Arts for ArtsJournal.com has a very interesting posting about Jennifer Howard, a contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, and an article that she wrote, compalining about the direction that she feels the BLOGosphere is heading.

And further to my post below, what goes for shocking in New York or London is certainly different from what is still considered shocking around Washington, DC.

We're getting a lot of flak from our neighbors and some of the public in Bethesda about Scott Hutchison's large female nude paintings currently on exhibition. Especially this one which is five and half feet tall.

John Rockwell, writing in the New York Times, says that "for centuries new art has offended, challenging the purely pleasurable" and also that "in the end all art must seek to disturb and provoke" and ends with "great art is always shocking."

So because Seward Johnson takes Impressionist paintings and makes sculptures from them, his work is crap. But when the Chapman Brothers take Goya's war etchings and make sculptures out of them, their work may be great - because it's shocking.

I initially thought that they were both crap, but now I get it.

Opportunities for Visual Artists:

Deadline: January 15, 2004. Open Exhibition Competition for a show at the Target Gallery in the Torpedo Factory Art Center. Open to all individual artists and groups in all media in North America. Jurors: Annie Adjchavanich, Executive Director, Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran; B.J. Adams, noted fiber artist; James and Jenna Blalock, Washington area collectors of fine art and craft. Deadline for Porposals: January 15, 2004. Show dates: October 20-November 28, 2004. Fee: $35 for 20 images (slides or JPEG CD) and proposal. For appliocation, contact targetgallery@torpedofactory.org, 703/838-4565 x 4, or send SASE to Open 2004, Target Gallery
105 N. Union Street, Alexandria, VA 22314

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Deadline: December 15, 2003. The Humanities Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Minnesota Morris has a call for exhibition proposals for 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 academic years. Send 10 to 20 slides of recent work, artist's statement, resume, and SASE to be considered for solo or group show. No prospectus and better still: no entry fee. Deadline for Submissions is December 15th, 2003. Send proposal to:

Michael Eble
Division of the Humanities
University of Minnesota Morris
Morris MN 56367

Email questions to meble@mrs.umn.edu

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Deadline February 2, 2004. Ivyside International Juried Exhibition at Penn State Altoona. Open to all visual artists in all media. Entries must have been completed within the last two years. Artists will be selected from slides, CD Rom, or VHS/DVD by a faculty committee. Up to six artists will be awarded annually with a gallery exhibition in one of two gallery spaces (each approximately 13' x 25') at the Community Arts Center at Penn State Altoona. There is no entry fee.

Send:
1. CV - One copy, no more than 2 pages.

2. Artist statement - One copy, no more than 1 page.

3. Slides - A maximum of 12 (24 for three dimensional work) slides may be submitted for review. Clearly label slides with, name, title, date, medium, size (h x w x d) and an indication of top of image. Submit in a plastic slide sheet, in order, with a SASE. Artists are entitled to enter a maximum of 12 slides for review. Two-dimensional work one slide/work may be submitted for consideration. For three-dimensional work two slides per entry are allowed. Provide one copy of a slide list on 1 8 ½ x 11 sheet.

4. Or CD Rom: A maximum of 12 (24 for three dimensional work) jpeg or tiff images may be submitted for review. Submit on a CDR IBM compatible disc in order. Title each image on the disc. Provide one copy of an image list on one 8½ x 11 sheet. Submit with SASE.

5. Or DVD/VHS: A maximum of 10 minutes will be viewed by the gallery committee. Your tape or DVD may be a compilation tape, but one full length piece must be present. Submit with SASE.

Accepted artists will be notified May 1, 2004 and then artwork may be hand-delivered or shipped prepaid to Ivyside Juried Exhibition, Penn State Altoona. Within reason, Penn StateAltoona will return ship, via UPS ground. Each exhibition will have labels, a poster, postcard, gallery reception, and simple checklist.

Ivyside Juried Art Competition
Penn State Altoona, Community Arts Center
3000 Ivyside Park
Altoona, Pennsylvania 16601

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Deadline: December 12, 2003. District of Columbia Art Center 8th Annual Exhibition Raffle. An annual opportunity to win a six-week show in the DCAC gallery. Tickets are only $50 each for DCAC members and $100 for non-members. Note that a year's membership to DCAC costs as little as $30 making it possible to become a new member and enter the raffle for only $80. DCAC also encourages artists to join together with other artists and share the price of a ticket.

Tickets may be purchased at DCAC during gallery and theater hours of Wed-Thurs 2-7 PM; Fri- Sat 2-10 PM. Tickets will also be available at the December 7th's MUSE, hosted by Faith Flanagan.

For more information, please call (202)- 462-7833.

Lots of good stuff happening around the DMV's visual art scene:

Tonite is the Bethesda Art Walk from 6-10 PM.

The Art Museum of the Americas will be hosting “An Architect of Surrealism,” an exhibition of paintings by Roberto Matta, one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. The exhibition includes work ranging from a drawing from the late 1940’s to a pair of etchings from 1985, as well as four paintings and a dozen gouache, etching and lithograph works.

Ten of the pieces have been loaned by Walker Fine Art of San Diego, while the rest of the pieces are from the Art Museum of the Americas' permanent collection. This exhibit will open on Wednesday, November 19 at 6:00 PM with a reception at the Art Museum of the Americas (201 18th Street, NW), and will continue through March 7, 2004.

The third edition of the Guerrilla Film Fest (GFF3) will be held at the Carnegie Institution in DC on Saturday November 22, 2003. The program for GFF3 consists of 8 award-winning short films. You can get program details here or email John Hanshaw for info.

In conjunction with the ongoing citywide arts festival, "Blues and Dreams: Celebrating the African American Experience in Washington, DC," the The District of Columbia Arts Center gallery has an opening tonite from 7-9 PM. It's a four artist group show which includes work by painter Shinique Smith, performance videos by Jefferson Pinder, lightbox-mounted, quasi-documentary photographs by Djakarta Jacobs, and Nekisha Durrett's photographs - confrontational portraits of proud, young African American lesbians.

In reference to my frustration with the Post's galleries' coverage, photographer Jim Steele adds that he'd "hate to think [that] the lack of coverage by the Post implies a lack of respect for local artists, but I suspect this is a large part of the problem."

In the Post today, Style's Friday focus is movies, and appropriately enough, there are four movie reviews in the section. There is also one theater review and three different music reviews by three different writers. Nothing "extra" on the visual arts, of course.

Over in the Weekend section, Michael O'Sullivan reviews Jim Sanborn's great show at the Corcoran and at Numark Gallery. This show was earlier reviewed by Blake Gopnik on October 31.

As it happens almost every Friday, Weekend movie critics manage to review the same movies that the Style section critic reviews.

So three of the movies reviewed in Style are also reviewed, by different critics in Weekend. This is a great way to see how critics can differ - not just in movies but in any genre of the arts. So while Stephen Hunter says that Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World "suffers from what might be called colonitis," and generally dislikes the movie, his fellow critic Desson Howe offers that the movie is not only a "masterful performance" but also that "[the movie] isn't just a fabulous seagoing spectacle. It's one for the ages."

Guess which critic will end up quoted in those one line mini-quotes that movies use in their advertising?

As I've noted at least twice before, wouldn't it be great if once in a while the Post would send Blake Gopnik and Paul Richard to review the same gallery or museum show, and publish it the same day, to give us readers two different perspectives on one show?

This happens (not by planned assignment, but just because the Style section editor and the Weekend editor are different editors and do not "synchronize" who and what will be reviewed) very frequently with movies and theatre. It also happens on a rare ocassion (like today), when O'Sullivan reviews a show that either has already been reviewed, or is later reviewed by either Dawson (if it's a gallery show) or Gopnik (if it is a museum show).

But what this practice of multiple movie and theatre reviews does prove, is that the (sometimes offered) excuse that the reason that the Post does not review more galleries is due to lack of print space is an invalid reason not to expand galleries coverage to the same level as theater, music, and fashion.

Weekend also has an army of contract writers that provide mini reviews of dozens of music and theater events (and of course movies) throughout the area, but not a single contract writer to do mini gallery reviews.

Why not?

I don't know, but I would guess that the Weekend editor, Joyce Jones, does not think that offering the same level of coverage to art galleries and art museums as she gives to our wonderful theaters, night clubs, performance venues and cinemas is as important and that her readers are not interested in a gallery art show in Dupont Circle, Georgetown, downtown or Bethesda to the same level as in a play in Olney or a dinner theatre production in Woodbridge, etc.