Ling Zhang, ink, pencil, watercolor, handmade paper mounted on canvas. Photo courtesy Whitespace Gallery.

Over its long history, China has absorbed the influences of myriad cultures, from Central Asia, India and the Himalayas, Mongolia, and from the many nomadic races which have made periodic incursions. These influences have been incorporated into Chinese cultural quite fluidly, with later historians (seeking to preserve the idea of “The Middle Kingdom”) coming to refer to as “Chinese” the elements that sprang from what are in fact alien cultures. The Yuan and Qing dynasties, for instance, were founded by foreigners, while in the present century the Communist government looked to European philosophy for its definitions of culture.

Similarly, the objects of contemporary Chinese art that are flooding galleries worldwide exhibit little of authentic Chinese culture, but rather evidence a keen ability to make just what the market desires.

The explosive quality of art from China in the international art market, combined with old-fashioned Orientalism, explain the presentation of From Beijing to Atlanta, the exhibit currently on view at Whitespace Gallery. The attempt to place the works in this show in a Chinese context is largely marketing. As physical and cultural objects, they seem to have a far stronger relationship to the international art world than to Chinese culture.

The exhibition presents works on paper by three Chinese American sisters. While Hong Zhang and Bo Zhang are professional artists, Ling Zhang has chosen a non-art-world job and paints in her free time. The differing professions of the three sisters provide an approach to examining their work.

Hong Zhang, Three Graces, charcoal on paper on scroll. Photo courtesy Whitespace Gallery.

Since 2004, the paintings and drawings of Hong Zhang, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas, have utilized hair as a source and symbol. Three Graces, for example, comprises three charcoal drawings on long, narrow sheets that skillfully illustrate the Zhang sisters’ glossy, lengthy hair. These have a high sheen—charcoal on lush paper—and seem designed to emphasize the luster, flow, and silkiness of long, black Chinese hair.

The artist told me her reason for choosing hair as a theme relates to the special significance this physical attribute has for Chinese women: It is an object of power and an expression of personality. Some artists might consider the deleterious aspects of a cultural construction that encourages and values women who grow their hair to an extreme length (e.g., transforming women into objects/dolls, the impracticality of having hair that reaches the floor, etc.). Hong, however, pursues either very simple metaphors (e.g., hair drawn as a tornado) or purely sensual representation.

When an individual chooses to work in the same metaphor for a very long time, I wonder why. If the work is intended for the art world, I suspect the reason has less to do with the richness of the concept than with a sort of brand management.

Bo Zhang, Treasure 2-1, lithograph. Photo courtesy Whitespace Gallery.

Bo Zhang’s lithographic prints pair antique Chinese bowls (in color) with pieces of Western plumbing (in gray) on a white background. One is immediately reminded of Duchamp’s elevation of everyday objects to “art” status, a reference Bo acknowledges. The dichotomy between classic examples of Chinese porcelain with mundane bits of plastic is meant to convey cultural conflict: a beautifully hand-made bowl contrasts with repetitive, soulless PVC piping. The representation of these bowls in a litho print, however, seems to move them from the unique, antique pieces Bo intends to convey to the mass-produced, garishly-colored plastic ware that one finds in budget Chinese restaurants—a more likely association for most viewers in the West. That is, if she intended to present an object whose pleasure is its uniqueness, then why produce prints in frames behind glass? Intentionally or not, by virtue of operating in the art world the artist comes to occupy a place of similar tension between a unique cultural object and a thing repeated for the sake of commodification.

Ling Zhang, Culture and Nature, mixed media. Photo courtesy Whitespace Gallery.

Ling Zhang’s paintings on rice paper have the common title Dream of a Butterfly and share common elements: Buddhist monks, butterfly wings, and Chinese landscapes from traditional painting. The title alludes to the well-known Taoist anecdote from Zhuangzi, who lived in the 4th century CE, in which the philosopher dreams that he is a butterfly, then awakens wondering: Was I Zhuangzi dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I in fact a butterfly dreaming it is a Zhuangzi? Ling shows Tibetan Buddhist monks with butterfly wings rendered in a soft, somewhat child-like manner. Her works are the most narrative and illustrative of the three, and her intentions are more immediately clear, as well as more philosophical and introspective.

She described to me her experience some two decades ago of visiting the Tibetan region and feeling drawn to the life of the monks there. She recognized the sharp divide between life as a monk and a life more actively involved with the material world: Buddhist monks discern that love and beauty are qualities associated with human desire, something that the religious renunciant seeks to move past. For individuals still enmeshed in the world of desire, a conflict arises when encountering spirituality as one realizes the divide between the sacred and the profane. (We also discussed the conflict between being an artist and making a living. Ling prefers to maintain a regular Monday-Friday job and pursue her art part-time, since being a full-time artist can in fact a kind of bondage rather than the freedom that many working artists claim it to be.)

To any viewer familiar with the art world, which places materiality, conceptualization, and trendiness at the top of a list of desired attributes, it is obvious that Ling does not operate in this realm. In this sense, she strikes me as the most authentically linked to Chinese culture of the three sisters. Her works proceed from a distinct experience within both the presently physical and perennially philosophical boundaries of the country, rather than seeking motivation from the international art world.

Jonathan Ciliberto is the editor and cofounder of Buddhist Art News, an online journal dedicated to reporting on Buddhist art, architecture, archaeology, music, dance, and academia.

Jason "J-Trav" Travis is one of many local artists to take advantage of Dashboard Co-op's website. Above: Jason Travis, Jessica. Photo courtesy Dashboard Co-op.org

The last few years in Atlanta have seen an influx of the under-30 crowd starting galleries, organizations, collectives, and journals. It’s time to add another one to the bunch: Dashboard Co-op. Dashboard is a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to a list of jobs that includes virtual gallery, promotion site, and cheerleader for artists. So far, they have engaged a huge spectrum of talent ranging from sculptor Patrick Toups to illustrator Baxter Crane. Their website is preparing for its launch party this Saturday, March 20, from 8PM-midnight, at the Blue Tower Gallery, but in the midst of the chaos, founders Beth Malone and Courtney Hammond sat down with me to talk about their plans for the site’s future.

So, tell me about the site.

Patrick Troups, Untitled, sculptural installation. Photo courtesy DashboardCo-op.org.

Beth: Essentially it’s an online artist gallery, and we have been working on it for about a year now. It’s been trial and error. We started with a few web designers who were our friends, and then the project got put on the back burner because we had full-time jobs and didn’t have time. Then we tried to do it ourselves for a little while and realized we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. And then we just decided to pay somebody, and we found the greatest pair of dudes to design it.

Courtney: Together they are the monolith.

B: They are the monolith. They are amazing. We met with Chris and were like, “We want to do all this stuff and don’t know if its possible,” and within a week he whipped it into shape. We both kept saying, “It’s happening!”

We have 10 artists right now, all of whom are amazing and great. We show stills of their work and then do an interview with them to tell who they are; it’s cool. I think we try to keep our personalities in the interview because they are big and fat. And then we also include a lot of art happenings in the city, and then any kind of art news that we think is cool, like WonderRoot just put art all around the BeltLine.

C: Right, so I took a whole day with a couple of people and we all dispersed to go find the art. We took photographs and put them on Flickr and then wrote an article about what it was about. It’s all about awareness. Essentially, what I want is for people to be able to go to the website, and also to be able to do for art what Creative Loafing does for music. We would even like to host underground art parties and get to the point where people just send us their shows for us to post them. Just anything we can do in the art community.

B: I guess essentially we want to be an artist empowerment site, connecting folks that otherwise wouldn’t be.

C: I feel like there’s a huge disconnect between the titan galleries and the Beep Beeps of the world. The Beep Beeps of the world are great but the way you find out about them is through friends of friends of friends, so they have these great shows but only a handful of people know about them. Only 100 people will know about them, and those aren’t necessarily the people who will buy the work. I want to make information accessible for people who have the dough to buy the work, and who will go to these shows and create a network so it’s not this huge disconnect where these artists are making really great work but aren’t selling it.

B: I think people in Atlanta really are turning. People like us who are the Average Joe’s who really do want to support the artists are starting to do it.

Who are some artists that you’re really excited about?

C: Statisfaction, Sister Louisa

B: There’s a painter I really like, Fatimah Abdullah, and she’s really kind of undiscovered. She’s kind of meek about it. When I told her to send us stuff she was so giddy. One of my favorite artists Katherine Marbury, who is one of our friends and is actually the curator for art at the airport. Her artwork is phenomenal. I don’t know if she’s creating now, but I would eventually like to have her on Dash. Incidentally, she’s engaged to John Dirga. It’d be cool to have performance art, too. I know we were talking about covering fashion eventually.

Was there a catalyst that led to starting the site?

C: I graduated from art school and when I got out I was like, I have been working so hard and I am not in the scene. I don’t know how to get things and promote my work ever, or I don’t feel like I can. I felt really lost. I have a business mind and an art mind, too. You’d think I’d be able to build my portfolio and promote myself, and I started thinking about my friends who were just creativity. I wondered how these people that make such beautiful things were going to succeed. I really think it’s a loss for the city not to see these works that I was seeing. It was just never going to be shown anywhere. I didn’t see any way around it, and [Beth and I] started talking it out and this is what we came to.

Emily Norman, Bored Housewife. Photo courtesy DashboardCo-op.org.

B: We hope it spurs opportunity. Lucrative opportunity, and also creativity.

C: Right, and creativity to build collectives like ours. People up until now have been disenchanted with the Atlanta art scene and that’s why they go to Brooklyn. That’s why half of Brooklyn is the Atlanta art scene. Even we were like, we don’t feel like fixing it; we just want to go to where it already is.

B: But then, we were both like, we’ve already put in so much time here. But, now I feel like it is changing.

C: I think we both had a moment at the Axiom show.

B: I remember we both looked at each other and were like, “It’s happening.” We grabbed each other’s shoulders, and, I think, said exactly, “It’s happening.” People are really catching on.

So is Atlanta kind of a jumping off point for you, or do you want Dashboard to stay here?

B: When we first started we were like, “We’re going to travel the world!”

C: “I want to get grants that will pay us to travel the world and we’re going to travel around to find really cool art. And we’re going to get paid for it.” Very drunken.

B: And then we came back down to earth and decided to start in Atlanta. And we want to start here. We have a few artists from New York but they are Atlanta natives. I think we might venture out around the state and the Southeast. But right now there are so many great artists in Atlanta we want to expose. We have the excitement and deluded ideals.

C: I do want it to grow and just the thought of moving to New York and having a New York version of Dashboard and one in San Francisco so that we can all exchange artists is exciting.

B: And we can do that with just Dashboard.

The Dashboard Launch Party is Saturday, March 20, at the Blue Tower Gallery.

Joseph Paragine's new solo opens Friday at Solomon Projects. Joseph Paragine, Untitled (True Adventures), 2007 Watercolor, Conté crayon, ink and pencil on paper 30 x 22 inches. Photo courtesy SolomonProjects.com.

See below for visual arts events beginning Thursday, March 18.

THURSDAY, MARCH 18

Fundred Dollar Bill Pick-up Celebration
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center / 2-5:30

Avant Garden / DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip Hop Jam book launch
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center / 6-8PM

About Face / Group show
Spruill Gallery / 6-9PM

FRIDAY, MARCH 19

Joseph Paragine / Nature Porn, Etc.
Solomon Projects / 6-8PM

Dawn Black / Mad Semblance
Get This! Gallery / 6-9PM

The Future of Arts Criticism and the Role of the Academy
Emory University / 7PM

Spring Riot / Group show
Riot Atlanta / 7-10PM

A new solo opens at Twin Kittens this Saturday. Rusty Wallace, Revolution, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Twin Kittens Gallery.

Gather Atlanta helps celebrate the Westside Arts District's first birthday this Saturday at Emily Amy Gallery.

SATURDAY, MARCH 20

The Future of Arts Criticism and the Role of the Academy
Emory University / 9AM-2:30PM

One-year Anniversary 3rd Saturday Art Walk
Westside Arts District / various times and locations / 11-5PM

Rusty Wallace / Energy Plan for the Hopeful Man
Twin Kittens / open 11AM-5PM / artist reception 7-10PM

Gather Atlanta / Emerging Creatives Mixer
Emily Amy Gallery / 7-9PM

OBSCURA / Group show, curated by Joey Vicory and Lisa Thrower
Eyedrum Art an Music Gallery / 8-9PM

SUNDAY, MARCH 21

Rusty Wallace / Artist Q&A
Twin Kittens / 2PM

Image courtesy the Global Health Odyssey Museum.

In 1905, German scientists discovered the corkscrew-shaped bacteria Treponema pallidum, the spirochete that causes syphilis. The following year, August Wasserman developed a diagnostic test for syphilis (known as the Wasserman Test), and gonorrhea diagnostics were being developed contemporaneously. But the bright, enlightening light of science does not chase away the moral boogeyman from the site of sexualities in this narrative; 1905 is also the year Dr. Prince Morrow founded the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. He coined the phrase “social diseases,” securing the valence of moral value within the discourses surrounding VD. And so the story of venereal disease in the 20th century begins in the exhibit VD: Values, Rights, Public Health at the Centers for Disease Control’s Global Health Odyssey Museum. While the wall text describes the exhibit as a “social and cultural history of venereal diseases,” I think of the show as a visual culture essay with a human rights agenda.

Installation view. Photo courtesy the Global Health Odyssey Museum.

As an essay, the exhibition brings many kinds of evidence to bear on its serious goal of exposing the moral imperatives entangled in the discourses of public health. On the one hand, the exhibit presents information chronologically and has no shortage of fun scientific paraphernalia to mark major breakthroughs. These artifacts, however, are contextualized in a flood of visual propaganda and popular culture mementos that frustrate such a clean historical line while graphically illustrating the manner in which discourses about gender, sexualities, race, and class are recursive. This means not only will you find a 1980s public health poster among early- to mid-century posters, for example, but you will also recognize some contemporary rhetoric in the language of the early 20th century’s Progressive Movement with its vocabulary of morals and social diseases.

Some subjects of the Tuskegee study. Photo courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration, Southeast Region.

For me, one of the most shocking stories is the U.S. Health Service’s Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. In 1932, researchers observed the long-term effects of untreated syphilis on 399 African American men. Although penicillin was used to effectively treat syphilis by the early to mid 1940s, the study continued until 1972 when a whistle-blower brought it to the public’s attention. Poverty, lack of access to health care, and racism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, created a disproportionately higher percentage of sexually transmitted diseases within the African American population, and racist discourse has used these statistics to make unfounded claims about moral character. African Americans are not the only victims of this kind of rhetoric. Women are pictured as victims of immoral husbands, true, but flip that card over and you’ll find the diseased whore, a sinister Cruella de VD character phantasmagorically fleshed out, so to speak, in rich visual representation.

Image courtesy the Global Health Odyssey Museum.

Careful detail adds dimension to this exhibit. The wall text description of a late-1960s clinic poster, for instance, references not just its cultural moment, with its psychedelic sensibility, but also its formal debt to late-19th-century British artist Aubrey Beardsley. (Am I still at the CDC?) Also on display are the New York City Health Department’s NYC condoms. This year, the Department will initiate a design competition to establish a limited edition condom package … that’s right, public health paraphernalia as a signal of urban identity and a precious, collectible object. Curator Louise Shaw and exhibition designer Karen Tauches solidly bracket the politics of venereal disease within the far-reaching and critical domains of visual studies and interdisciplinary scholarship. The exhibit will also have an afterlife as an online exhibit, but it may take several months for this to surface. Did that sound like a diagnosis?

(Disclosure: Curator Louise Shaw is a member of BURNAWAY’s Board of Directors, and Karen Tauches is a regular contributor. BURNAWAY is committed to reviewing visual art exhibitions that we feel contribute to important discourse in Atlanta. In our commitment to transparency, our policy is to disclose instead of exclude.)

VD: Values, Rights, Public Health is on display at the Global Health Odyssey Museum at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention through Friday, May 28.

Joey Orr is a freelance writer, editor, curator, and former instructor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a doctoral student in Emory University’s Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and a member of the Atlanta-based art collective, John Q.

Michael Smith, From Sears Class Portrait #1 (1999-2007), Spring 2003. Pigment print, 16 x 13 inches. Courtesy the artist and Christine Burgin Gallery, NY.

As stand-ins for the real deal, substitute teachers often breed mischief: Kids can sleep through class, wear headphones, swear a little louder than usual, and, if reprimanded, give a false name. As an outdated video drones along in the background, students gladly ignore the intended lesson to begin their own study of authority and subversion.

The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s latest group exhibition, Substitute Teacher, focuses on such unexpected, yet highly educational, experiences. Run-of-the-mill life–what we do when the teacher’s not looking–often teaches us the most, and this fact alone challenges the primacy of traditional learning.

So how else do we come to know things? The show unfolds as a primer on the pedagogical, both out in the world and in contemporary art. To begin, Bulgarian conceptualist Daniel Bozhkov briefly tutors us in his creative process of perpetual exploration, or what he calls the “apprentice syndrome.” In the front gallery, Bozhkov’s video Flag finds the artist beneath a bed, his face partially obscured, answering the same questions posed to immigrants who seek naturalization to the United States. The rote trivia he rattles off (state capitals, the names of senators, etc.) on its own fails to encapsulate an experience so broad and personal as immigration, but Bozkhov’s sheepish delivery from his childlike shelter imparts an endearing fragility to the otherwise standardized test.

Mira Shor, Lack, 1997. Ink, oil, and gesso on linen, 12 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Borrowed texts like this one run throughout the exhibition: Glenn Ligon’s declaration in Untitled (I Am a Man) comes from a sign held during a sanitation workers’ strike in 1968–the many scrawled-on caveats, however, are Ligon’s own; Brian Dettmer cuts into a stack of dictionaries and encyclopedias to create a sculptural carousel of colorful images; and Luis Camnitzer’s Last Words reproduces death row inmates’ declarations of love and stoicism in monumental, textbook-like pages.

Though the realization of Camnitzer’s source is inevitably gut-wrenching, schoolyard tropes buoy the exhibition’s overall tone. Wall texts are scrawled out below eye level; a “cheat sheet” provides viewers with added context; and a bulletin board announces extra-credit events and artist talks, chief among which will be Paul Ramirez Jonas’ rock-scaling performance at Brasstown Bald Mountain in North Georgia on April 24.

Unlike the faltering control of conventional subs, guest curator Regine Basha manages to focus a disparate, unruly pack of heavy-hitting contemporaries around a single subject. Left open, as the exhibition brochure declares, to “any being, situation, or object that has the potential to impart knowledge,” Substitute Teacher satisfies the most with its sharper point: Teaching oneself is its own small rebellion, and there’s plenty to learn when the curriculum is just plain ignored.

Substitute Teacher continues through Sunday, May 16,  at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Joel Withrow is the former Art Editor for Flavorpill.com, based in New York City, and has contributed feature articles to BPM Magazine. He currently lives in his hometown, Atlanta, GA, where he throws pots and teaches kids at the Spruill Center for the Arts.

Ben Smith, Seated Figure with Masks, 1969, woodblock print. Photo courtesty BenSmithArt.com.

Mason Murer’s Mark Karelson and Twenty21 Collections’ Erin Wertenberger have, as Wertenberger reports, recently decided to begin hosting a series of exhibitions intended to create a history of living Atlanta artists, beginning with legendary veterans James Yarbrough and Benjamin Smith. Yarbrough’s wizardry with egg tempera and encaustic deserves its own review, but Smith is the priority here for several reasons, cited below.

Smith’s exhibition at Mason Murer, which closes on March 20, features a selective semi-retrospective of the woodcuts of the 68-year-old (69 on March 18) Atlanta artist who made some of the American art world’s larger examples of the genre (using sheets of plywood as the printing blocks). It also contains a sizable number of the newest of Smith’s exquisitely crafted drawings–drawings that, in the words of Wertenberger, betray “an extraordinarily wicked wit.”

His accomplishments in woodcuts can be viewed on his website. The recent drawings, some of which can be had unframed for as little as $95, can for the most part be viewed only in the gallery.

It’s remarkable that a significant part of Smith’s prodigious output should be available at prices closer to those found in emerging-artist galleries. It is even more remarkable that less than a week before the show’s closing, a major percentage of the unframed drawings were still available.

The failure of collectors to take full advantage of an unheard-of bargain may simply stem from a lack of publicity, or may have something to do with Smith’s combination of classical composition and perversely visionary humor. His figures typically seem to come from the Middle Ages by way of Mardi Gras, and the dramas they enact are sometimes obscure, often lovely, and almost always disturbing.

Ben Smith, Getting a Head at A.I.G., 2009, mixed media. Photo courtesy BenSmithArt.com.

Smith notes that the drawings are as darkly comic as the woodcuts are serious, and that their improbable titles come after the drawing itself is established as an integral work of art. The titles frequently undermine the dynamic established by the drawing itself, and are as topical as the visual themes are timeless: Getting a Head at A.I.G. is only one example, in which the appealing mix of technique and the visual romance of the historically costumed figures is negated by the fact that the details of the picture are comically horrific and the scene is further destabilized by the wry title.

A few drawings are straight moments of fantasy, such as one of Faustus conjuring, but most contain contemporary references (one is purportedly about sequencing the human genome) and all are vaguely unsettling. The late patron and collector Judith Alexander once told Smith, “The thing that’s disturbing about your humor is that your humor is absolutely serious.”

That puts Smith squarely in line with the ironic mindset of artists fifty years his junior.

A well-known critic, poet, and ART PAPERS staff member, Dr. Jerry Cullum has been a keen observer of the metro Atlanta scene for decades.

The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Lilburn, Georgia. Photo by Josh LeFrancois.

The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir ascends in Himalayan splendor and South-Asian finery 70 feet above the banality of a five-lane stretch of Lawrenceville Highway, claiming its place as Lilburn, Georgia’s newest, most sophisticated landmark. The Mandir, a traditional Hindu place of worship, is only the sixth of its kind constructed outside India to serve this particular sect of Hinduism. We took a suburban adventure earlier this month to experience the temple for ourselves to meditate on its relationship to the built environment.

Built like a jumbo 3D jigsaw puzzle almost exclusively by volunteers without nails or screws, the Mandir consists of more than 30,000 individual pieces of Italian marble, Turkish limestone, and Indian pink sandstone all hand-carved in India and shipped to Lilburn. Each one of the temple’s surfaces oozes a sort of legendary craftsmanship and skill that’s absent from 99% of Atlanta architecture; the story goes that this temple was built according to architectural guidelines from ancient Hindu scripts and is intended to last 1,000 years.

Epic historical scale aside, the place is a magnet for the soaring Indian population in Gwinnett County. It offers a mind-blowing venue to incubate the full spectrum of Hindu virtues and community ministries, such as family unity, cultural heritage, humanitarian services, and categorical harmony alongside peaceful coexistence.

In addition to serving the needs of its own supporters in the Hindu community, the Mandir willingly educates visitors of all ethnicities and faiths. On our recent Sunday morning visit, we were not the only ones unversed in the ways of Pramukh Swami Maharaj. As we delivered the recommended canned vegetable donation, we were received, de-shoed, ushered into a prayer service, and made to feel welcome, even after mistakenly sitting cross-legged with the wrong gender in the wrong part of the room.

The Mandir (center) and its environs. Photo by Josh LeFrancois; click to enlarge.

Once inside the Mandir for the prayer service, we couldn’t help feeling possessed by the karmic field emanating from statued deities, impassioned revelers, glassy stone surfaces, theatrical up-lighting, and soporific music. Standing outside after the ceremony, we couldn’t help but marvel at the building’s unlikely surroundings that render it incongruent and otherworldly. The banal, any-place landscape of Lawrenceville Highway enables the Mandir’s resplendent spires and domes to cascade into perception and declare its otherness among the expanse of parking spaces, the UPS Store, the Publix supermarket, Buck’s Pizza, and the other hackneyed storefronts that comprise the Lilburn Corners Shopping Center across the street.

Clearly, part of the Mandir’s weird factor comes from how prominently it represents something unfamiliar to most who encounter it. First of all, its architectural style starkly differs from the Lilburn norm. Further, it hosts a culture traditionally alien to most American suburbs. But perhaps on a deeper level it stands out because in this country, especially in the ‘burbs, religious buildings rarely overpower their built environs in terms of craft, luxury, and awe inspiration. They are just as architecturally mundane and materially ill-endowed as the strip mall across the street from them. Same box, different shape.

Nevertheless, our culture still tends to project a hint of stereotypical Christian conservatism across Southern America’s suburbs. After all, xenophobic white flight was a powerful motivation behind the initial growth of such peripheral settlement. (Of course there were other, non-racial reasons, too—and we don’t claim that any of the prejudices that were present then necessarily remain today.) While the shrinking majority cannot reverse the heterogeneous population influx, they might be inclined to to inhibit the diversification of the suburban architectural landscape.

For example, there is no shortage of opposition to an Islamic mosque that recently attempted to expand into adjacent parcels to accommodate its growing membership and afford the presence of a graveyard. Try a Google search for “Lilburn opposition” and see what comes up (don’t even include the words “mosque” or “Muslim”).

We also could consider the architectural cues that may allow the Mandir to dodge cultural bullets. Since it’s not even a building typology that we learn about in architecture school, it’s hard to believe that a run-of-the-mill resident possesses the vocabulary necessary to discuss (or fear) a Mandir in terms of Śikharas and Gopurams. Its particular non-Western architecture allows it to remain benignly exotic.

On the other hand, the minarets of Islamic mosques are well known, misunderstood, and stigmatized around the world. (See the widely publicized battle against minarets in Switzerland, and check out this popular Swiss online game. Pay attention to the audio!)

Thus, it would seem that an anomaly of such epic proportion as the BAPS Mandir would sound the alarms of right-wing watchdogs, but we were unable to uncover any history of concerted resistance against the edifice’s construction. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Shri Swaminarayans are all about peace and harmony. But of course it certainly doesn’t help that many people believe Muslims are all about repressing women and blowing up infidels.

This column is the second in a series of observations on the built environment by Jeff Sauser and Josh LeFrancois, a couple of 21st century architecture students looking for answers.

Photo by Mike Germon.

Another video interview produced by Kombo Ch.

The Plastic Aztecs present Grow at Beep Beep Gallery, opening this Saturday, March 13, from 8-11PM.

See also BURNAWAY’s Plastic Aztecs review from 2008 and these Grow preview photos on ThoughtMarker.

The Plastic Aztecs' latest exhibition opens Saturday at Beep Beep Gallery. Photo by Mike Germon.

See below for visual arts events beginning Thursday, March 11.

THURSDAY, MARCH 11

Abstracted Nature / Group show
Swan Coach Gallery / 6-8PM

David Johnson / Out of the Shadows
Opal Gallery / Noon-7PM regular hours / Artist reception is March 25

FRIDAY, MARCH 12

Art on the Beltline / Deadline for artist proposals
4PM

Castleberry Hill Art Stroll
Castleberry Hill Arts District / various locations / 7-10PM

Photographers Choice 2010 / Group show
Atlanta Photography Group / 7:30-10PM

Serenbe Photography Center's grand opening is Saturday. Above: Instructor image © Jeani Elbaum.

SATURDAY, MARCH 13

Krista Thompson / Toward a Post-Soul Art History / lecture
High Museum of Art, Hill Auditorium / 2PM

Photographers Print Studio / Grand Opening
Serenbe Photography Center / 5-8PM

Plastic Aztecs / Grow
Beep Beep Gallery / 8PM

Three Voices / Group Show
Snapdragon Photography / 7-10PM

MONDAY, MARCH 15

2010 Benefit Art Auction / Deadline for artist proposals
Hammonds House Museum

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17

Tenzin Norbu / Thangka Painting Demonstrations
Michael Carlos Museum, Emory University / 10AM-4PM

David Adamo, Untitled (Music for Strings), 2009 (Installation view, N.O. Gallery, Milan). Wooden stage, harp strings, nylon string, copper and brass fittings, wooden cane, wooden shavings, dimensions variable.

David Adamo’s whittled-down canes, which can be seen on the third floor of this year’s Whitney Biennial, could be taken as a kind of symbol for the exhibition in its entirety: a familiar object that attains a more poignant and poetic form through a process of reduction. With a greatly diminished roster (half as many artists as in 2008), a comparatively modest floor plan, and, most importantly, a greatly reduced sense of self-importance, this year’s Biennial demonstrates that common sense looks good, even on a top-tier New York exhibition.

The take-home message is that the art-world arms race is, for now, officially over. Bigger and faster is no longer better. The recession has finally settled in at the highest levels of the art establishment. If 2006 and 2008 were about the market crash and the anger, confusion, and fear that accompanied it, then 2010 is about what happens next. Curators are starting to note what was being made when the bubble burst, the market collapsed, and the sky came tumbling down. Who was still making art? The people who kept their cool. And that coolness comes through in the work, much of which is moderate in scale, self-reflective, and demonstrates a willingness to continue where the art-historical conversation left off.

I was surprised by how well the Biennial captured what I consider to be the feeling of our particular moment in time. Not quite optimism yet not exactly pessimism, it’s a certain kind (the best kind) of indifference—the spirit of artists and artworks that continue independent of their immediate political, social, or economic circumstances. Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari attribute this directly to the election of President Obama, claiming in the show’s catalog that his “reassuring and inspiring” presence has “allowed people to focus on their intimate concerns again,” and that “traditional forms of protest and resistance were no longer needed as in the years before….”

Alex Hubbard’s Annotated Plans for an Evacuation seems to speak on this level. Calling upon our collective memory of recent natural disasters and our fears of the vague doomsday scenarios climate change and terrorism seem to promise, this 7-1/2-minute video shows a man making a series of bizarre alterations to a Ford Tempo in preparation, we assume, for its use as an escape vehicle. Yet, in this narrative, Hubbard trades in calamity’s standard emotional/political baggage for a simple, even humorous, take on the private politics of survival. Betraying neither anger nor resentment, the protagonist displays only an unflappable willingness to move forward.

Ari Marcopoulos, Detroit (still), 2009. DVD, 7:32 min. loop. Courtesy Ratio 3, San Francisco.

Ari Marcopolous’ Detroit illustrates similar tenacity. In this video, two young men skillfully play noise rock for what the catalog calls “an audience of family and friends.” The show, which takes place in one of the performer’s bedrooms, is shot in a casual, home-movie style. Detroit portrays a kind of art that persists despite difficult conditions. It speaks, in Holland Cotter’s words, “of life beyond the art factory.”

Taking this ethic to heart, the Biennial presents works that could be made in modest studio apartments, filmed in garages or on street corners, or cobbled together from industrial surplus. There are a few spectacular exceptions: big, expensive-looking things that belie significant logistical and temporal means. But these works, despite their individual merits, seem incongruous with the exhibition as a whole, like the last of the dinosaurs hulking about among the emerging mammals. Piotor Uklanski’s Untitled (Monster), for example, is a work that, despite its tremendous material sophistication and appeal, seems overblown in this context and in danger of being overrun by smaller, more mobile, and more adaptable works.

Despite the Biennial’s success in describing the mood of our current historical moment, I would, as an honorary Southerner, be remiss were I not to mention that it comes painfully short of providing a census. The suspicions of regionalism with which many have viewed the art establishment are, in this exhibition, absolutely confirmed. Jerry Saltz’ claim that the show “isn’t New York-centric” is a little surprising since a full 60% of the artists exhibited (33 out of 55) live and work in New York, NY. Artists from Los Angeles and Chicago account for 17 of the remaining 22. In fact, only two of the artists in the exhibition live in the South: Vietnamese-American photographer Tam Tran (Memphis, TN) and Alabama-born painter Verne Dawson who splits his time between Saluda, NC, and … you guessed it, New York, NY.

Of course, criticizing an otherwise successful curatorial effort because it isn’t inclusive enough of a particular geographical zone smacks a little of its own kind of regionalism. I will then, in the spirit of the 2010 Biennial, set aside these kind of macro-political concerns for the time being and get back to enjoying the show.

The 2010 Whitney Biennial will be on view through Sunday, May 30.