WHY AM I GOING TO ART BASEL AGAIN, FOR THE THIRD TIME? I’m not showing anywhere, the rich don’t care about me, the art world outside my hometown barely knows I exist, and I refuse sponsorship for this annual trip (but thanks again mnartists.org for helping me almost break even). However, with my two shows up in Minneapolis garnering a few sales, and thanks to lodging, courtesy of my friend Cindy, how…

VANESSA VOSKUIL AND JOHN KOCH HAVE DONE A GREAT THING in starting the Minnesota Dance Film Festival. Dance film is a hot and growing genre, one that the Twin Cities, with its thinky dance and vibrant indie film scenes, seems naturally poised to excel at. The festival’s main event, the Dance Film Project, an unjuried screening of dance films made in the past year, draws enthusiastic responses from all…

ORNETTE COLEMAN CALLED WHAT HE PLAYED “FEELINGS MUSIC” — I think that is probably the best definition of music I have heard. And if music is about feelings, human emotion, then technique and knowledge should both be at the service of the most accurate expressions of emotions. This definition distills all great music down to a question of spiritual intent, from the intense mastery of Beethoven and…

THE MAN AND WOMAN LIE IN A HEAP of long black feathers, salt, dirt, and other organic detritus, naked, their bodies painted grey-white and daubed with dirt. The light — amber, pooling — fades and dawns as they gradually shift like sleepers, their hands reaching, opening, closing, rolling themselves slowly over so now her shallow side dimly glows under the light, now his curving rear. They’ve made themselves a…

A QUICK LOOK AT JUSTIN JONES’S LATEST WORK, JIG (+Band), showing this weekend at the Bryant-Lake Bowl: A trio of dancers (Sam Johnson, Justin Jones, Hannah Kramer), dressed in dirty union suits with fur dickies, pile up on each other in shaky assemblages, brief multi-limbed creatures that unravel one into the next. Their hands reach up, in search of, then claw; they sniff and shiver volubly, then strike noble…

THERE’S A NEW ART FORM ON THE HORIZON: POETRY-FILM. Approaches to the burgeoning genre are many, but the work is unified by intention: to shed light on and expand the boundaries of poetry in ways words alone can not. Poetry-film projects have been popping up all over in recent months: Todd Boss and Angella Kassube’s Motionpoems, ashort film re-visitation of The Waste Land by writer Jay Orff and…

THE STEPPES OF SOUTHERN RUSSIA ARE LOCATED on roughly the same latitude as our own country’s Great Plains, right around the 45 parallel, halfway between the equator and the North Pole. In Russia, this area consists, in part, of the land between the Black and Caspian Seas, and in the U.S., it spreads from the western part of Minnesota into the Dakotas. Besides being the breadbaskets for respective…

WHAT DO PIXILATED IMAGES OF BUILDINGS and photographic stagings of amateur pornography(whatever that is) have to do with one another? And where do phone booths and chalkboard-hovering sports analysts fit in? Why would you hang a low budget, street-style video of running children with large-scale wall reliefs referencing arctic glaciers?  Or, how are solitary, expressionist paintingsrelated to the cool…

LET’S START WITH THE DRESS worn by this year’s curator of Choreographers’ Evening, flamenco diva Susanna di Palma: a slinky one-shouldered column of viridian and silver sequins, it cast shimmering pools and dancing sparks at her feet and scattered disco stars all over the Walker’s McGuire Theater. For the dress, di Palma could not have chosen better. Its glitz exactly fits the mood of Choreographers…