In February 2012, IAM is holding a small, by-invitation-only gathering for catalysts in the “art/faith/humanity” spheres gathering throughout the world, and the Continuum has been invited to join this gathering. We have elected to send Kent Smith as our representative. For three (cold!) days, he and others will be gathering in IAM’s gallery in midtown Manhattan and meeting with the staff of International Arts Movement. This will be a vital time for us to build our relationships with one another in the movement, to learn more about the future of the movement, to contribute our input, ideas, experiences, and expertise to the shape of the movement, and to be more deeply equipped and resourced as we receive information on the programs and resources IAM produces.

IAM has raised funding for two nights of housing and three days of meals, but we have to cover Kent’s travel costs to NYC. I am writing to see if you would be willing to help underwrite the $500 in travel costs to attend this important gathering.

As IAM is a 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization, any donations made are tax-deductible. If you would like to support Kent & the Continuum’s participation, you may do it one of two ways:

1. Mail a check made payable to International Arts Movement, 38 W. 39th St, 3rd FL, New York, NY 10018. Include a note that your gift is to be applied toward the “2012 IAM Catalysts Summit” and include Kent’s name (Kent Smith).
2. Make an online donation. Click here and enter your donation amount under “General Donation.” Once you click “Add to Cart,” you will be able to leave a “note,” where you may designate “2012 IAM Catalysts Summit” and include Kent’s name.

IAM will reimburse Kent’s travel expenses based on donations received. (Any gifts beyond his travel costs will be used to support this regional gathering and the movement as a whole.)

This opportunity is something that will add tremendous value to our work on behalf of artists and the arts, and I am grateful the Continuum will be a part of it. Your donation will really help make that possible.

“This story bristles with ideas and intelligence, and the more you stick with it, the more complicated it gets.”

—Andrew O’ Hehir

“I can’t say that I understand everything Kiarostami has to tell me about life, art, romance, and tradition,…at least not consciously, but I know I feel haunted, elated, enriched by his wily and impassioned view of relationships as bodies in constant flux, of disagreement and individuality, and of the transformative power of a simple, sincerely felt timeout in a moment of bitter crisis…”

—Ed Gonzalez

We have set the next film night for Friday the 10th of February (7:00 PM). As always seating is limited so please do RSVP.

Certified Copy was directed by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and starring William Shimell and the ever enchanting Juliette Binoche, this film examines, indeed celebrates the ideas of originality in art and in life. It gleefully explores life and love and challenges our ideas of perception. It is a film that works on many levels: as an intellectual discussion about art, as an exuberant embrace of love past and present, and as a subtle mystery. Think of it as the contemplative cousin of the Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise / Before Sunset duology drenched in ennui and basking in the Tuscan countryside. I encourage any who are interested in joining us to avoid any and all articles or discussion regarding the subject matter. You will be best served to experience the film without any prior knowledge of its plot and machinations. We are very excited to hear what you all have to bring to the table as we discuss this gem of a film.

For more details or to RSVP contact: cinemaseries@continuumarts.com.

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

A powerful movie asking important questions about the digitization and democratization of art.

JUST AS, AFTER A POINT, JOB CRIED OUT a poem by K.A. Hays from Motionpoems on Vimeo.

You can read the poem and see other offerings on MotionPoem’s website: Just as, After a Point, Job Cried Out.

“The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.”

The painter Helen Frankenthaler died December 27, 2011, in Darien, Connecticut. Obituaries by The New York Times and The Washington Post construe Frankenthaler’s importance as the inventor of a “revolutionary” soak-stain technique in which poured paint unites with the canvas; a method which made possible the Color Field movement. That similar journalistic profiles would never focus the same attention on Rembrandt’s mystifying, heterogeneous technique, or da Vinci’s departure from buon fresco in The Last Supper, evinces the extent to which art in the 20th century has been defined in terms of ideas; even ideas fastened to events as miniature and ritual as the act of pouring paint from a coffee tin.

Helen Frankenthaler entered the art world at a tender age. In 1950, at 23, she was already going down on Friday nights to The Club on East Eighth Street, meeting with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and the other members of the New York School’s Abstract Expressionist movement, and falling almost immediately into a five-year relationship with the movement’s venerable philosopher-in-residence, Clement Greenberg. But more than simply clever and precocious, Frankenthaler was well-educated, well-financed, and serious. At 20, she toured Europe’s major cities, and at twenty-one, after receiving an inheritance from her late father, a Supreme Court judge, established her own painting studio in New York City while pursuing graduate-level courses in art history at Columbia University. In the coming years, Frankenthaler would see the treasures of Europe again, this time with Greenberg, examining masterpieces in Venice, Madrid, Rome, and London.

Frankenthaler’s love of art for its own sake, and Greenberg’s insistence that art appeal to the senses, doubtless helped inflate Frankenthaler’s lucid, self-contained, style. The paintings seem to be motivated by an interest in the beauty of paint itself—particularly the blooming effects associated with “staining” the canvas—and paint’s organization on the canvas. Small’s Paradise (1964), a bilaterally symmetrical puzzle of red and green, retains the inherent, visceral, qualities of paint—its sinuous, organic, contours, its pure color—but disciplines these elements in a classical design. Continents of green, red, pink and blue organize in a top-to-bottom asymmetrical figure in which massive, four-sided shapes in the upper half of the painting fragment into more delicate forms below; the two opposing sides sustaining equilibrium through contrast, and the entire, bouncing complementary field of red and green constrained by a dark band of blue at the appropriate spatial interval. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler’s interest in painting was pure, not sustained or clouded by political or existential ambitions, and without trailing polemics. “With any picture, on paper or on canvas,” the artist said in a 2003 interview with the New York Times, “the main idea is: does it work? Is it beautiful?”

By the close of 1951, Frankenthaler had already held a one-woman exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and participated in “Ninth Street: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture,” both in New York City. In 1959, Frankenthaler’s attention to pictorial organization began to gather its proper rewards. She received first prize in the Paris Premiere Biennale for Jacob’s Ladder, a painting, which, if lacking the chromatic interest of her later work, upheld Frankenthaler’s values of form. Just ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art would launch a retrospective of the 41 year-old artist. Subsequent retrospectives followed in 1986, at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1998, at the Guggenheim Museum.

Frankenthaler, however, had been fortunate enough to enter the scene at an era congenial to the brighter and less philosophical products of the New York School. Her entrance coincided with a postwar spirit of optimism, the artist’s career riding the same channels as rock and roll. The work of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, contemporaries of Frankenthaler and the first and most famous actors of Abstraction Expressionism, had been nourished differently. All three had survived the spiritual and social assaults of two world wars, and both Newman and Rothko had, with their art, attempted to build an insulating system against them. Rothko claimed his solemn, economical canvases conveyed “tragedy, ecstasy” and “doom,” and that “the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” But the painters’ existential defenses were not incorruptible. By the time Frankenthaler met Pollock in the early Fifties, his classic drip technique had already begun to subside, and he had resumed his alcoholism. In 1970 Rothko’s career would end with his death by suicide just as Frankenthaler’s work was ascending to maturity.

What impact Frankenthaler’s work has had on American painting is often summarized in a single anecdote. In the spring of 1953, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, two painters from Washington D.C., took the train into Manhattan to visit Clement Greenberg. Coincidentally, Frankenthaler’s studio held the recently completed Mountains and Sea; a stain-painted, nine-feet-wide canvas inspired by watercolors she had made on the Canadian coast.

Pollock’s drip technique had already attained philosophical importance for theorist-critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg—Rosenberg construing Pollock’s trope as giving rise to “not a picture but an event” (Greenberg disagreed)—and technique had been raised to the proportions of an idea; technique no longer the handmaid to works of art, but works of theory. In this highly oxygenated universe, little 24 year-old Frankenthaler’s idea, her concept of paint poured onto unprimed canvas, exploded like a match. Frankenthaler, Morris Louis declared, “became a bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

In one sense, the lavish attention paid to this event is unfortunate. It is true that Frankenthaler’s “invention” indirectly launched the careers of Louis and Noland who adopted it, and became the foundation of the Color Field movement; a movement comprising paintings, which, like Frankenthaler’s, were mostly luminous and stained. But to the extent that Frankenthaler’s soak-staining technique is praised for itself—as an idea—Frankenthaler’s true legacy is obscured. It is doubtful the artist would have regarded the technique as important—except in the classical sense of enabling a particular variety of beauty. Frankenthaler was always mainly interested in the formal relationships which Rothko dismissed as being not “the point.” Frankenthaler’s paintings, although perhaps lacking the imagination of Rothko’s misty, sublime work, is not constrained by allegiance to a particular mood or theory, and therefore free to radically change form with each instantiation. Frankenthaler never embraced the “moral and metaphysical” justifications of her circle because, of course, she simply refused them. The artist’s central dogma was beauty, and beauty is protean.

Amanda Johnson studies painting and philosophy and teaches a course on “the art of looking at Art” in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work can be found elsewhere including the online arts journal “The Curator”.

…The incarnation is the Father’s supreme rhetorical gesture, in which all he says in creation is given its perfect emphasis. This is particularly evident in the Gospel accounts of Christ’s miracles: the healing of infirmities, the raising of the dead, the feeding of the hungry, even the transformation of water into wine. These are not acts that manipulate or negate the order of creation in order to achieve an astounding effect; in them the goodness of creation is reaffirmed, its peace is restored: they repeat God’s gift of creation by imparting joy in the good things of the world—food and wine, fellowship and rejoicing, life and vision and health—to those in whom joy is lacking. Christ’s miracles—as do all the aspects of his life and ministry—constitute a semeiosis (John’s Gospel, in fact, calls them to semeia) that restores the original semeiosis of the world, the language of divine glory, and that reorients all the signs of creation toward the everlasting sign of God who walks among them. As Augustine remarks, Christ’s miracles are not intended merely to provoke amazement; to the person able to read them as signs they are simply true, a discourse of God’s truth, a text adorned by the particularly lovely illuminations of the writer, but a text nonetheless. Mere marvels—mere tricks—could never be woven into the greater narrative, either of Christ’s nature as God’s express likeness or of creation in Christ, because such marvels always constitute an interruption, inducing not only awe but confusion; the semeia of Christ, however, are transparently acts of lordship and love and testify to Christ’s nature as the creative Word who can command and restore all the words of Creation.

Which means, conversely, that all the signs of created being may, without contradiction, speak of him: there is a limitless array of ways in which creation’s words may be employed in service to the Word who has spoken them all eternally within the infinity of his “ever greater.” Every declaration of Christ (such as the church’s confession of faith in him), consequent upon the declaration of divine love that he is, an attempt to express the glory that is visible as the “other side” of his way of abasement, the Taboric splendor that breaks from his form in an endless series of signs. No claim regarding Christ can be excessive; everything that the Christian tradition says or attempts to say about him can be, at most, a joyous but inadequate attempt to span the infinity of the sign that he is: an epektasis of words, in and toward the Word…

In many ways, official or not, the Continuum has always drawn a lot of inspiration from IAM. For good reason, IAM is one of the vanguard organizations exploring the intersection of spirituality and the arts; it has been doing so for nearly 20 years. I have found the ideas, statements and vision of IAM’s leadership a fantastic resource for envisioning the Continuum and shaping its direction. IAM sees and understands the value of the arts to create “the world that ought to be” not as a tertiary, excercise but as a vital portion of what is intended. IAM hosts conferences, discussions & screenings, provides resources, and is intent on growing the impact of artists as they provide a means of interaction with the divine and the ability to give sight to a more perfect reality. We have followed their lead.

IAM has affiliates around the world: all across America but also in India, Thailand, Spain, UK, China, Japan and, now, Memphis. This February the leaders of these local movements will meet to discuss the future of IAM and the respective local movements. We are so excited to be a part of it and to contribute “to rehumanizing our world.”

The Pushcart Prize is the “best of the small presses” and includes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Each small press, which includes most literary journals, nominates up to 6 pieces to be considered for the Pushcart’s annual anthology. Nominations are submitted by December, and winners are announced in June of the following year.

The six nominations are generally considered by the editorial staff of each journal to represent the best of the journal’s published material over the past calendar year. The poetry editor at LAR, Tanya Chernov, had this to say about Jim’s work:

Though LAR does not often publish the more experimental forms of poetry, we were enchanted by James Allman’s “Corpus Delicti” and the notably sharp, tight-fitting corners of both the poems’ lines and the author’s wit. Form, thought and rhythm come together to make a strikingly vivid and at times even chaotic masterpiece. The combination of raw, visercal details and intellectual accuracy makes this poem fodder for much haunting thought long after the page has turned. Not for the lighthearted and not for the novice, “Corpus Delicti” embodies exactly what contemporary poetry should be: powerful, well-crafted, and smart.

The other LAR nominees are identified on their blog which can be seen here: LAR 2011 Pushcart Nominations. You can, also,  read the nominated work, “Corpus Delicti”, at Jim’s blog: DiatribalArts.