Visual art news, views & reviews in Dallas, Texas, USA

July 2004

This Ramble's Feedback   DARE   Allen Street Gallery   The End of God   #27   D-Magazine

It's been too long, and the delay is getting absurd and absurder. Besides, I need to do something about the future of this web site. It's been more than six months since the last time I did one of these fool rambles.

I am the fool that last sentence. It's my Tarot my signifier, the card I identify with. Who's stepping off a cliff with a bindlestiff over his shoulder, a dog at his side and the sun shining. I'd prefer a cat, but cats do not heel well.

The classic sensibility of a Fool is that he expects his next step to land on solid ground, even when evidence for that is not uh... evident. Or that the fall will be fun and the termination unpainful, though not uneventful.

We'll see about all that as the origami of this grandiose dream unfolds.

I'm not sure where DallasArtsRevue is headed. But I have some notions.

One of those is that within the next decade, I am going to give up doing it, or at least give up running it. Mostly because I'm almost sixty now, and even by my math, in a decade, I'll be almost 70 years old.

As much as I love doing this, some of the other things I want to do require money, which this provides precious little of. It almost pays its own way through my life, but it is not making me rich enough to get away from it sometimes.

So, gradually and finitely, DARts will become a nonprofit organization. It's already well along in that direction by generating zero profit. Might as well make it official.

I've avoided this path in the past, because I feared I would lose control, if I turn this over to a board of directors. If there is such a thing as a good board. I have my doubts.

 

I was a founding board member of DARE, which got sold out to the consortium that comprised a rich businessman, a fired former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and a big blue building on McKinney Avenue that now only sometimes exhibits Dallas artists, but rarely any that are not already famous or rich.

The DARE dream either sold out or got bought out, I was never sure which. The McKinney Avenue Contemporary is a shadow of what DARE was supposed to become, what DARE promised this art community it would become.

At least DARts doesn't make promises.

 

I was also a board member at Allen Street Gallery. Remember that nonprofit photographic gallery? It no longer exists, either. I was not a board member when either of these two groups went under and/or over to the dark side.

I quit DARE and I got fired from Allen Street — for warning of incipient nepotism. DARE has gone blithely along as the nonprofit entity behind The MAC ever since. Allen Street forgot that I ran their programming and did not find a replacement, so the their building's owner took their space back when they published an exhibitionless calendar.

Experience with both boards left a acrid aftertaste.

Two other nonprofits I was on the boards of were EGAD! (Electronic Graphic Artists of Dallas, a Mac users group), which still exists but I don't care anymore, and The Humanitarian Order of Kosmic Awareness, organized as a church, that published Hooka, an underground newspaper that defuncted in the mid-70s.

Other examples that caused me trepidation were Apple Computer and other corporations that grew from founders' dreams, then fired the founders. Apple later rehired its, and he saved their asses, but once I leave, I don't expect to come back. I used to be afraid any board I instituted would eventually give me the boot.

Now I think that's the best possible outcome.

The End of The Continuing Story of God

The last panels of what was to have been the last Continuing Story of God comic
by Jay Gaulding and Dennis Harper for Hooka. According to the story line, God
(a Black dude who lived in Pleasant Grove) had created a Creator Creator:
"See, if I just build up enough of a crowd... Nobody knows I've already split."

 

Letting go won't be easy. It will be slow and, sometimes, painful.

DARts has to go from total JR control to a bunch of people's collaboration, simply because nobody else should ever get stuck with doing all this by themselves. It's too important for this community, even if nobody with power — or money — ever realizes that.

Just as I was setting these words in pixels, word came down from D-Magazine that I and DallasArtsRevue.com were listed in their annual Best Of Dallas issue. Neato.

Hey, it's only been twenty-four and a half years. Meanwhile, It's not like anyone sane wants my job — the responsibility, the work, the pay scale.

Getting DallasArtsRevue to what it can become will require a major creative transition. I'm getting better at these changeovers as I inch into my 60s, but I don't ever expect to maintain constant change. DARts going nonprofit will have to bump along in fits and starts, like everything else worth doing.

More than seven months ago, I wouldn't have given any of my own major changes — thoroughly explicated in a series of 87 (!) essays in JR's Transition (where I've spent most of my Ramble energies lately) — were even possible. But now I are one.

 

The first steps, the tracks of which are slowly sinking into the mud of time, involved getting more people involved. I haven't been gung-ho about it, but I've been amazed at the positive responses to my short efforts.

It's a beginning. More people are writing for DARts now, and even more will be. More people are and feel like they are involved. Within the next decade, a lot more people will be.

That amazing sense of community is expanding.

I will carefully select whom I want on the initial board of directors. Whomever I choose, however, will likely do things with and to DARts that I would rather they didn't. That's of the very nature of turning it over to a lower power.
 

 

DARts will celebrate its 25th Anniversary this December. By its 35th anniversary, I expect to be free of it — mostly. Maybe they'll let me write something sometimes. Hell, maybe they'll even pay me to write something for it. Wouldn't that be a lovely turnaround.

My byline might say something like by DARts Founder Emeritus J R Compton, assuming they don't change the name. And in true Dallas Arts Community tradition, there'll probably be somebody else running around — with either too much money or power — claiming to be the founder.
...  

Site Navigation

Meanwhile, lots of other changes have to happen. Slowly, this site is reoganizing so even readers with the attention spans of fleas can find things. New pages automatically get breadcrumbs leading back to indexes and Home page, and all those subindexes are being updated.
 

DallasArtsRevue #27 ~ Summer 1988
With "What I learned in Art School"
cartoon by Tom Moody
 

The cover needs help.

All the wisdom of all of the people who write books about site navigation insist that the index page (what you get when you click on a link to www.DallasArtsRevue.com — I've always just called it "the cover") should load fast and link to everything significant on the site.

Odd that while I've eschewed most of the trappings of ink-on-paper publications, like deadlines, issues, themes and special editions — goofy things too many publications that go online try to hang onto — I do still call that page The Cover. Because it is.

I'm coming to understand that notion — like Artists' Statements — is a lot of hooey. I figure it's the first — and often only — opportunity for this site to make a good impression of what it is all about.

And that info can not be imparted with a bunch of links. The cover needs a recent, illustrated art review almost always.

I think.

Which is a lovely notion when I have such a story to run there. At the moment, I do not. So, when that happens, I stand back and punt, with images from DARts Supporting Member pages.

As I write this, I've just learned that D-Magazine has included us in their annual Best Of issue, and I'm expecting a little lift in site hits the next several weeks.

I wish I had a rip snortin' art review to put up there, but I'm very pleased to show off work by DARts Members that I especially like, as well as a photo of an artist's hands, because it's important to keep artists' hands in the big picture.

It also needs a big, oft-changing, hunk of high quality, local Dallas art. Right under the DARts logo. To start, I'm using images from members' pages. Between members' work, will be stuff I find.

As always, I am open to your ideas and feedback.
 

Just as I was setting these words in pixels, word came down from D-Magazine that I and DallasArtsRevue.com were listed in their annual Best Of Dallas issue. Neato.

um a little more than neato.
nice honor, congrats :)

Ellen Tuchman

 

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