Links I Like

So last weekend I wrote this post about Thierry Weyd's blogs, and it was cool because we emailed a little bit. It's someone I haven't seen in almost 20 years, so there is some magic with internet, I must say.
While I'm at it, I thought I should provide you with an irregular series where I would link to artist web pages, blog I read, etc. I think I'll do it maybe once a month? Which means you should feel free to email me your blog/website address at frenchybutchic@gmail.com, and if I find them in accordance with my taste, I'll be happy to link them in a post. I'd rather do a post than update my blogroll/links list, because it requires less organization for me, and I'm really behind my schedule now. A few things before you start emailing me:

- When you send me your links, please remember that it's possible your email has landed in my bulk folder. I try to check it from time to time, but if it's buried there I may not see your mail.
- Secondly, this is a personal blog and I have certain tastes, so if you don't make it on the post, it may mean I'm not into it (to give you an example, each time I see "art" featured on BoingBoing, what I'm looking at belongs to the category of illustration. I'm not against illustration, but it's not my primary interest).
- If you don't make it on FBC! please don't send me pleading or threatening or insulting emails. I'm sure there are many other avenues where your work can be featured, remember this is just a blog, not the Venice Biennial or MoMA.
- Also keep in mind I am very, very absent-minded. It happens that I want to present something, and I totally forget depending on how many migraines I've had that week or if I'm focused on looking for a job or whatever else. I'm only human, and I do my best, but it's only me. I'm still waiting for that hot stud of a non-paid male intern to materialize, but so far the Gods haven't been very generous.
- as far as links, I'm happy to get references to artists websites, food sites, literary sites, lefty political sites (as long as they are funny), curiosities sites, and musical sites. Blogs are fine, and flickr streams as well.
- FYI, I'm a bit of sissy, so, please, no gory, violent, racist or generally gross websites. And no porn either, thank you, I have a feeling my readers don't need me to know whatever happened to sex in Scandinavia. I know you care, but I don't.

***

Now that we are in agreement, I'm starting the list with Tosh Berman, who is the publisher of Tam Tam Books, a francophile and someone who happens to use the same Blogger template as I do. I don't know him personally, though I hope to meet him at some point in the future. He's very knowledgeable about French culture, and is the publisher of Boris Vian in America. Please visit his blog, and better yet! Buy his books!
The second person whose website I want to introduce you to is Calvin Phelps, who commented on FBC! mariachis post yesterday. I looked at his website, and thought, hey, I could link it to FBC! His website is very simple to use and navigate, and it will give you a clear idea of what he does.
I've already told you about Unframed, the LACMA blog, toward which I am biased since I've worked at the musuem a while ago. I really like this blog, I think it is very well made, with a clear balance between the visual arts and all other forms of expression featured at LACMA (movies, lectures, music, etc), and is written by both curatorial and communication staff. Please look at Allison Agsten's post about the decline in art coverage in Los Angeles. It's always been meager, and with the upcoming demise of the LAT (they sacked about 75 people on Monday) it's not going to improve.
You should also check Kehinde Wiley's website. I really like his work, which I find kitschy and and very fun to look at. It satisfies art historians like myself aplenty, with all his references to classical painting. Now, I think there's a slight, impossible-to-define-something that's missing, the little thing that would push his work from very good to awesomely great, but I don't know what it is, and I like it as is anyway. Enjoy!
To end this first edition of Links I Like, Ken Gonzalez-Day's website. I like Ken's work a lot, and I have had the pleasure to meet him a while back at an opening. In person he's adorable and very, very funny. In his art he makes pictures so gorgeous you want to lick them, but his work has a deep historical and political intent as well, without falling into propaganda. Have a look and you will understand!

Before you go look at all these sites, don't forget the Mariachis for Obama poll at the bottom of this page.

The photograph above was pinched from Ken's website, from the project Hang Trees.

Thierry Weyd's Blogs

Célestin Vs Thierry Weyd
Uploaded by yannick-lecoeur

When I was a kiddie back home in a boring, humid and gray bourgeois French town, the one thing that saved me from perpetual ennui was the local fine arts school where I took evening classes. Which explains everything, in case you wonder why I'm into that art thing so much.
It was a safe haven from a too eventful family life and an oppressive school atmosphere.
There was a great sense that the grown-ups there at the fine arts school were dealing with us kiddies at the exact right level, neither patronizing not burdening us with responsibilities far beyond our maturity. What else? Oh yes, there was that art thing. They got me hooked. I learn the word "conceptual" when I was 10, and saw my first monochrome around the same age. After this, I never looked back.

It was a degree-granting school (the fine arts schools in France train people at college level), but also a State-sponsored one, and as such received subsidies. Evening classes were inexpensive, and during the first few years they provided art supplies free of charge. If you know how expensive paper and paint are, you understand better why a community-oriented economy has its advantages .
Once a year they piled up on a bus to go see some art, either in Paris or, if budget permitted, some more exotic locale like the Netherlands, to see some great show. In any case it was dirt cheap, and I remember vividly my first trip to the Pompidou and the Louvre, for which our families had to pay the incredible amount of 10 francs, something like $2 now, or make that $5 with inflation.
On that bus were also gathered a few college-level students, with whom we usually never mingled for the good reason they were a) studying in a different building and b) older, duh.
I was something like 10 years-old, so conceptually speaking, hanging out with 18 years old seemed really remote. They were grown-ups!
But hang out we did, and I believe it was the first time I got to meet Thierry Weyd. I seem to remember now he was wearing a jacket the style I presently associate with early Talking Heads record covers, but at the time it was odd in a sea of denims. I don't have that many memories of Thierry on that trip, but I do recall the grown-up students "les grands" were rather nice to us little tykes, though I'm not sure their conversation made lots of sense to us.

After this trip I saw more of Thierry, he was a familiar figure on the streets of my hometown (the center of which being tiny, it's easy to meet and greet people there). I never really knew him well, but as I grew up I got to discover what he was doing, essentially running a small press called Cactus, where he was publishing exquisite and desultory artists books. I have a vague recollection of a series involving sugar cube wrappers, other than that Thierry introduced me to the technique of silkscreening. More accurately, I think he told me what it was and I subsequently took a class to learn the basics, an essential skill for my future training as an art historian. Any idiot I catch explaining how it is such an easy technique of reproduction and that Warhol was therefore just appropriating images will have to read the complete works of Jean Baudrillard, and eat the boiled books/pulp after*.

He was also a fan of the band The Residents, which I started to listen to thanks to his influence, and someone I must credit for my love for exquisitely crafted artists books. His were always fun to open, sometimes in boxes, sometimes things you had to unfold, books that came with surprises inside. I think the "domino" ones (the sugar cubes wrappers) came with real cubed sugars in it. I think I also knew him because we were also frequenting the same bookstore, which was divided in 2: the ground floor for literature, and the top floor for comics. I spent a fair amount of time there (I skipped school a lot, now you know) and I inevitably ran into him discussing with the clerk, Isabelle James (I credit her for my love of Literature in general and Virginia Woolf in particular).
I think he introduced me to lot of "arty" comics, showed me issues of Raw magazine, and I'm not certain but I think he's also the one who told me about classic comics, such as Milton Caniff, Windsor McCay and the Buck Rogers strips. Now that I look at this list, wow, I realize I can credit him with plenty of my visual education.

Which I never realized until now, and aside from that, I didn't really know him, because, you know, he was a grown-up, but I can assure you he was one of the few cool persons in my hometown. My hometown is a place I tend not to think about too much, except these days I receive rather bad news from my family there. I don't know how but somehow his name surfaced out of the corners of my memory tonight, I Googled him, and yeepee! He has a blog.
More than one actually, so you can navigate through them and practice your French. If you never learned French, don't panic! Because Thierry is an artist, his blog is heavily image-oriented. There are pictures about the graphic design of 1940s Penguin books, bridal shop storefronts, a post about Desiree Palmen, a children book that is a collaboration between his wife and his daughter (it's adorable), the history of recorded sounds, and his own work, which I understand is now performance/sound-oriented, etc.

There's plenty for you to discover on his main blog, and there's also a beautiful second blog about the house he and his family have had build.
I'm posting the link for that blog as well because I'm certain my architects friends are going to love looking at it, and also see how the building process and techniques differ in France. Note his house is made of wood, which is normal here in the United States, but very uncommon in France (new houses are commonly made of concrete and cinder blocks, old house of stone).

So I'm happy to introduce my readers to Thierry's blogs, and I'd like to encourage you as well to look at his list of links, there's plenty for you to discover. And for those of you who thinks, hey, he's an unsung hero of cultural education, please note he keeps on influencing younger minds as he now teaches at the very same fine art school through which I met him. He blogs about teaching as well, and if you look at his posts about teaching, you will also witness a French culinary phenomenon that I don't recommend you try at home: in France, you can buy baguette sandwiches stuffed with fries. Yes, it's gross. To recover from the shock, go to his Cactus Press website and buy yourself some nice present, or prepare the holiday season by ordering the whole back catalog for your family.
Merci qui? Merci Frenchy!




* dear erudite reader, who is the artist who ate Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture? The most accurate response will get the right to buy me a meal. I'm unemployed, after all.