Dennis Hollingsworth

Summer, 2009.

Since arriving to Tossa a little over three weeks ago, my biggest question was how much of this experience is presentable in the blog. There are several problems involved in blogging, here is a quick list of a few from the top of my head:

-Dave Hickey had once stated that he had left literature for art criticism because he had felt that as a writer of fiction, he was cannibalizing life for art and with art criticism, he was performing something more like a public service and less like the ongoing sabotage of a life lived. (See Prior Convictions. For those not acquainted with Dave Hickey, this and this is a nice start.)

Something like that.

- Too Much Information that tends to destroy the Olympian effect, so necessary in the formation of the classical art career. Come on, don't you have the occasional fantasy of what and with whom Brice Marden is having for lunch, where ever he is having lunch... in the Hamptons maybe? What kind of music does Ed Rusche listen to... ...in the shower? And how does John Currin really feel about the sad and desultory passing of Michael Jackson and Farah Faucett? We want to know these things, and we don't know these things, and so we want ever so much more to know such things, the less we know of such things.

Therefore, they are famous.

Don't you remember the laws of dating in high school? Or Woody Allen's maxim about belonging to a club?

We don't know these things, and perhaps we shouldn't know these things, and yet modernity is heaving us to an immediate future where all of us can publish at a fingertip. And if there are those who decry this trend, let them defend their critique in the face of all the twittering that is justly demolishing the oppressive patriarchy in Iran in this moment, so acute.

TMI? Too much information in an information age? Perhaps even so, when the truism has yet to be overturned that "familiarity breeds contempt".

But then, even as our flood of information approaches totality, we might never reach it. There is always something omitted, the ellipsis always remains... (I remember something about Bertrand Russell wrestling with continuous numbers in a book that I'm reading about Paradox...) ...ah, elipsis!

- Time! I still can't justify Tweets and FaceBook yet, especially when I regard them as diminutives of classical blogging. I mean, do you really want to know just how delicious the pan Catalan was for me last night? I can barely manage this blog as it is!

When I started this blog back in 2003, my wife and I were about to begin our homesteading trip to Spain, to Tossa de Mar, and this blog was a perfect way to document the experience and keep in contact with friends and galleries. It was and still is, a virtual studio visit. But what was once remarkable is in danger of becoming mundane. Take Tocquen a Correr, for example. Next week, Tossa will host another annual Toquen a Correr. I've blogged about it in 2007 and when I blogged it again in 2008, I sequestered the point of view to a series of portraits of young Alberto as the Sardana music blared in the streets below my studio. And when the kids fill the streets of Tossa next week, ?Que?

?Que?

I guess that will always be the eternal mandate of art, of modernity (are they synonymous?): to make it anew. And thus, I guess I've answered the question posed at the beginning of this post: what do I blog? As much as I can make anew.

It's time to renew our dance together.

Here are a couple of videos that I've had time to splice together, one old:

Another beach video, I know.

It's so good, though. To be there, that is.

...and one a bit new:

This summer, Woodbury University visited Tossa de Mar for an quick assignment to study the town via photographs and photo constructions. Led by Gerard Smulevich and David Freeland, and assisted by young Alberto Barcia Fernandez (now working in Berlin), they were able to make contact with the local mayor (alcadessa) Imma Colom i Canal to present their work to her. This is a video compilation of the preparatory work prior to the ultimate presentation.