Cabinet of Cabarets

Jennifer Starkweather: Spechome series

2010-06-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

I am interested in using the map metaphorically to create a personal history that, although rendered from an actual physical location, takes on a shape of its own. I am interested in crossing the tenuous boundaries between what is real and what is imagined, what is felt and what is known and where the unreliability of memory encourages a range of interpretations and manipulations. I am curious how mark-making while depicting something concrete, shifts to a more intuitive realm, where I am able to act out my own diversions, dreams and memories.

Drawings become maps that tug at my memories, flashing miniature life histories before my eyes.

My work has varied from documenting wind currents that occur in specific and cherished locations to mapping the floor plans of houses that I have lived in. Presently I am interested in the idea of a “spec home” as an intuited place or moment that I have just not yet occupied. Working from memory in these drawings allows me to create, deviate from and imagine surfaces, landscapes, trees, objects and connections that are perceived and familiar. With the physical act of drawing dots, scratching lines, making smudges, and poking holes, I am able to create an annotated catalogue of my daydreams, memories and ruminations.

On Humility: Or Small Work

2010-06-15T05:23:00.000-07:00

In Richmond, Virginia there once was a gallery named RAW for Richmond Artists Workshop that had an exhibition of many works entitled Small Art Goes directly to the Brain.

If one is lucky, Small Art goes directly to the heart. For this it must be humble and on a suitably modest scale - in this way some work can be crowned Great. (Golda Meir once said "don't be humble, you aren't that great.") To work with humility, one must acquire some of the practical virtues artist need: diligence, temperance, modesty, bravery, ardor, devotion and economy.

To work with humility it is better to strive for the communal if not the downright tribal; for wisdom in choices rather than cleverness; good humor in practice; and practice as daily habit. Phillip Guston famously said he went to work in his studio every single day because what if he did't and "that day the angel came"? Henry James once said, "We work in the dark, we give what we have, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task." Doubt is humility after a long long apprenticeship.

Small works dance a clumsy tango with one's shadow. Huge works can ice skate over one's nerves, file under fingernails on a chalkboard - I can just hear the screeching.

If our work is so small and reticent that one doesn't enter the space of the painting, no mind - we just might be making work that enters straight into the viewer's chest. I am weary of art that tickles my forehead for an instant and is gone - I am looking for the kind that thrums in my chest and lodges there, in memory, like those souvenir phials of the air of Paris Duchamp proposed.

Proportion based on the lyric, not the epic - that is where the juice lives. Stirred, not shaken. Duchamp once said that art is the electricity that goes between the metal pole of the work of art and the viewer, and I don't need shock treatment. Art that is the size and resonance of a haiku, quiet and solid as the ground beneath one's feet - not art that wears a monocle and boxing gloves in hopes of knocking other art out of the room.

A discrete art, valiantly purified of the whole hotchpotch of artist's tricks and tics.

The Importance of Being Louise Bourgeois

2010-06-07T05:25:00.001-07:00

For thousands of postwar American women, Scout is a touchstone of childhood authenticity . . . We were all Scout once: unfiltered, free-ranging, with a physical confidence rooted in a prepubescent androgyny -- qualities inevitably poisoned by the idiotic affectations of adolescence. (When she senses the feminizing agenda her stuffy aunt has in store for her, Scout feels "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in" on her.) Lee's magic . . . was in ventriloquizing the experiences of a 6-year-old in the voice of a grown woman, offering a bridge back to childhood. As a motherless child, Scout demonstrates how children treat life's curve balls as what happens, not what shouldn't happen, and adjust their expectations accordingly. She's unlike other girl characters, filmic or literary, of her age . . . What other girl character has Scout's open grace, her left hook, and the narrative to herself from beginning to end?

To be born female is indeed to feel "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary" closing in on one. That Louise
Bourgeios was an escape artist of the penitentiary of her childhood, with a father who humiliated her attractiveness and her failure to be a male like her brother, is one of the great Houdini acts of the century.

Her groupings of monads huddling together yet not touching reminds me of the parable of Schopenhauer's porcupines, who close in on each other for warmth only to be repelled by the exact distance of their spines. that this spininess is a human condition of wanting warmth and intimacy only to experience our own and other's spininess is accurately portrayed in these groupings or small tribal crowds.

Everybody Used to Be Womanfish in Womanhouse.

From the lyrics to Rebby sharp's song Womanfish, as performed by the Orthotonics:

I remember when I was two inches long
Looking back in my pool of red
I didn't have no nose
No no no no nose
I just had gills in my head - I remember drinkin' the mama juice
I remeber drinkin' the mama
Juice I remember
Drinkin' MAMA JUICE

Chorus: Because Everybody used to be Womanfish, everybody
Used to be Womanfish, everybody
Used to be WOMANFISH.

And I was thinkin' about my chemical makeup
I was so full of estrogen
I didn't know if I would be a
G-g-girl or a boy
But I was floating over and over,
Over and over, over
And over and I don't know what I saw through my lidless eyes
It may have been the moon and the skies.

(Chorus.)

It is a definite mystery to all but mature men what a woman's erotics comes from. I went to see a Louise Bourgeois exhibit in Philadelphia with two girlfriends and her marble carvings of grouped phalli made us all bubbly, (we almost giggled like schoolgirls) and when discussing what we liked about Louise Bourgeois in an art history class the male instructor Gerald Silk dismissed Bourgeois all but dismissed her achievement saying her work was too much like Gaston Lachaise and he brought up his sculpture titled Princess with its long neck turning into a phallus like creature, and I said it is not erotic like the rest of her work. There was a shared glance between Pat, Bernadette and myself trying to quell some rising laughter from the happiness we had experienced on seeing this show. It is true that Greeks and on up through the Renaissance marble is used to depict male nudes for its sensual surface - something about marble makes one want to run your hands over it.

The spiders have been much exhibited (exposed) and much ink spilled in their favor, and except for the cross cultural archetype of the spider woman goddess, they are for this writer the least interesting of her oeuvre in its entirety, so I would like to discuss her Red Rooms, as they fit into her theme of the womanhouse so well, as celebrated in the lyric above. I had seen the Red rooms at Peter Blum but it was not until the Guggenheim retrospective that I got them in a completely new way - I made the discovery that by peering through each of the slats between two doors serially around the installations, the reading is very different. It at once turns one into a voyeuristic child peering into the not quite closed door into a kind of keyhole vignette and the focus is as cinematic as one of Hitchcock's closeups. What was once as heimlich as looking into a jumble shop when one cranes one's neck into the wide space between the doors with the chain across the space becomes fraught and unheimlich like the child's phrase redrum in the Shining. Each space in the thin aperture as one moves around the outside circle becomes the zoetrope of a pixillated mystery like James' Turn of the Screw. One really does see with the kind of shiver of muted terror but happy awe of a small child. And that is a kind of achievement only available for those who have made this delightful discovery. there have been controversies over how much to read her childhood parables into her work, and possibly it gave Bourgeois too much license to have tantrums most of her adult life. But the dialectic of the heimlich?unheimlich is one familiar to any child who grew up with a haunted house.

Louise Bourgeois

2010-06-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

Daniel Johnston

2010-05-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

It's Raining Men, Hallelujah!

2010-05-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

David Salle in his Youth

2010-05-23T07:10:00.000-07:00

DAVID SALLE

On 8 May 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location Some Pictures
from the 80s, an exhibition of paintings from the 1980s by DAVID SALLE that have been
borrowed from museums and private collections. In an essay for the fully-illustrated
catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Klaus Kertess has written:

The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a growing reconciliation of the figure with the
planes of painting fostered by such artists as Jean Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente,
Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer (and several fellow German neo-Expressionists), Julian
Schnabel, and David Salle. With the exception of Basquiat and Salle, these artists
propelled their figures into unified grounds and space, ranging from the loosely mimetic
beaches, interiors, bullfighting rings et al that Fischl’s figures inhabit to the Surrealist-
inspired dream spaces Clemente’s figures waft through. Basquiat’s writerly figures and
words cling more precariously to modernist flatness looking back to late Picasso and
Twombly. His words are seen/read in the context of the figures and vice versa. Salle’s
figures, on the other hand, are seen in no context to the real world, only within the
context of the painted plane they inhabit.

Frank's Wild Years

2010-05-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Sticky Sublime

2010-05-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

Cary Smith's splats reminded me of the sublime moment when I found these in a Target Store.

Cary Smith

2010-05-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Carrie Moyer: Athena, Artemis and Baba Yaga

2010-05-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

Artemis: imagine for today the symbolic realm of the self contained, self reliant, full agency and power of the goddess who wants to think for herself, aim her bow, and whose arrows always hit their mark, and that she is the wild mirror of absolutely undomesticated intelligence to Zeus' other equally brilliant daughter, who would represent the father's other side, the symbolic of his law: Athena.

Baba Yaga: imagine for today the Slavic birth-death wild goddess riding in the sky in a mortar rowing with a pestle to grind nuts, grains and other spices for foods, and also pigments from minerals and shellfish and vegetation for dyes, paints and all the colors of the natural world. Her ways were fierce, and wild, and deep and penetrating and could also continuously grind a way what is extraneous, to lead one into the wildest cuisine or imagery, taste or vision.

John Morris

2010-05-12T15:18:00.001-07:00

Millennial Aphorisms

2010-05-11T12:24:00.001-07:00

Aphorisms written between 1998 and the present day.

We wear our halos like lifesavers to float in this ocean.

Celebrities only have to be herded together to feel celebrated.

When a man falls in love, he takes all women for one. When a woman breaks with a man, she takes that man as all men.

Solipsism rebounds, the more others seem unreal, the less Real the self begins to feel.

The nuclear family is easy to atomize.

In the suburbs no one can hear you scream.

If virtue is indeed its own reward, better keep that little treasure close to your chest as everything is forgiven except for self-righteousness.

We would all be so free if others didn't take such liberties.

The one who will love you the best may be the one who at the first has the hardest time meeting your eyes.

Why is is the least interesting people who remember the most gripping past lives?

Psychometrics are psychomeretricious.

If I contain multitudes, they are depressingly the same person.

A lot of word art since the seventies can be summed up as walls of non-sequitorial text bytes.

Psychologically most men have a blind spot the shape of one of those 18th C. silhouettes of their mothers.

When someone breaks up with you suddenly and painfully there is an initial reaction of wanting to have your cake and crush it too.

The most profound impressions are the voluptuous, the eery, and the spacious. The eery and spacious together inspire awe; the voluptuous and spacious intimates the sublime; and the voluptuous and the eery falls into convulsive beauty.

Spontaneity later in life is achieved when impulsive and compulsive drives are deprived of any of their previous power.

If I have a Jungian shadow it was stitched on to me the way Wendy sewed back on Peter Pan's.

Gossip is pseudo-intimacy that comes at others' expense.

Making art that is increasingly more complicated looking actually baffles rather than inspires meditations on complexity.

Have people attracted to the plastic arts become plastic people, to reuse the old sixties phrase?

Enlightenment is the utopia of the monad.

The emotional when pushed show signs of passion; the sentimental only the exact locations of their buttons.

Religious leaders would probably prefer potential followers to approach with the expectation of being shaken, not stirred.

Pleasure needs glamour, joy spreads harmony.

Pleasure is in moments that are taken; Joy in moments that are given.

Too varnished a style makes our eyes glaze over.

Sense and Sensibility - a portrait of a daughter of the Enlightenment and a daughter of the Romantics who happen to be sisters.

Republicans trying to stir up the spectre of a class war should realize that not since the equally ancient war between the sexes have so many been dying to sleep with the enemy.

To be ambivalent is human, to be sure supine.

Infatuation and Pity are two emotions that cannot share the same room with the other.

Analysts find sex and aggression the hidden motivation for everything save their own choice of profession.

Most critics write critiques ghostwritten by the artists they are writing about. That wouldn't be so bad if most artists weren't making works ghostmodelled by what the critics are writing about.

On Charm

2010-05-11T10:42:00.001-07:00

Charm is disarming, and if used conscientiously, can open the way to authentic moments for anyone, from the most elderly to the youngest and from any background and identity.

Flirtation once meant playing at being in love, in the anachronistic sense that making love meant a young man sitting beside a young lady as a suitor, and the rest was disarming ways of meeting and dancing with acquaintances whether of the evening or longstanding knowledge enough to evoke memories of grammar school.

In these disturbing times, it means coyly sexual under the guise of friendliness through subtle manipulations of length and meaningfulness of eye contact and a certain spin on how one touches the other at best, in order to better cement the camaraderie through a simultaneously gooey and arousing moment where both parties recognize they are mutually hot and can better focus on the possible benefits of networking (no one has time to spend with people too far afield from their field these days).

Seduction, once terribly strategic and as lengthy as Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, was a dangerous and risky tightrope between either successful intrigue or death by duels or fatal illnesses contracted by a body and soul laid to waste by permanent and catastrophic heartbreak, or the near death of banishment in humiliation and shame from courtly society dealt with by a secretive coach ride into the night towards a foreign country or immediate imprisonment in a nunnery for life for the now unmarriagable young woman. All under a mask of charm never allowed to drop for a second.

There is no seduction nowadays where all the men are cowards and the women are easy; only bars and pickup lines for the Fast Food Nation, and hookups by phone or via the internet that may possibly become "relationships" if women follow the Rules book - relationships that could last weeks or even months, be pushed towards and into cohabitation by the first person who needs it first, eventually followed by a costly wedding that will increase either the bride's parents' debt load or the couples' by an extravagant amount in most current demographics.

Marriage between those of privilege is two viable salaries wedded to two very firm value systems who find they have much in common, including producing and launching one or two extraordinarily viable children. Or the very newly minted monied who pick the beauty queens of the coyly sexual type to make them the newly motherly bling queens to produce heirs and accessories to their big hearts' warm consumer desires.

Which leaves charm for finding true friendship and true love (and in the platonic world, that is willing to go the distance, there is no difference) and letting chemistry alchemize into magic - which turns the charm into mutual enchantment. In other words, a way of gazing at each other in a conversation that lasts a lifetime, and protects the little ones born into the magic circle when they leave it armed with the old world charm needed to negotiate and enliven the networking and internet engaged American urbanites, and the better to observe the mores and customs of any sub, counter and foreign culture they may find themselves in, qnd politely and confidently and above all intelligently let them work their magic on you.

Alice Neel: Tough Love

2010-05-07T22:08:00.000-07:00

Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht,
Tief ist ihr Weh -,Lust - tiefer noch als
Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit -, - will tiefe, tiefe
Ewigkeit!"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900)

"Malraux, drunk with our age, can say about Cezanne: 'It is not the mountain he wants to realize but the picture.' All that Cezanne said and did was not enough to make Malraux understand what no earlier age could have failed to understand: that to Cezanne the realization of the picture necessarily involved the realization of the mountain. And whether we like it or not, notice it or not, notice it or not, the mountain is there to be realized. Man and the world are all that they ever were - their attractions are, in the end, irresistible; the painter will not hold against them long."

Randall Jarrell, from No Other Book: Selected Essays by Randall Jarrell

Robert Storr on Alice Neel: Neel "has often been compared to the collector of dead souls" in Gogol's short story.
I would argue that art today is made with much exercise and little vitality; Alice Neel is a collector of souls that are very much alive with their own, and Neel's vitality. No matter what kind of lumpen or just forming (children's) flesh the soul comes through with the accuracy of Nabokov's so beloved butterflies. Now we can say along with G. C. Lichtenberg that underneath each of these jokes there lies a problem. That Neel balances a vaudevillean humor with irony in its Greek and most tragic sense is indicative of the depth of Neel's absolute and impervious humanity. Calling down the sort of wrath of Mighty Aphrodite - that she was sexy, vital and erotic in life and in the touch of her paintbrush to canvas is never in question - this is the archaic way that she collected these souls as one man put it so assuredly in the documentary - tough love indeed for this mother of everyone. In the Greek Hera and Aphrodite blend she was doubtlessly born into by both Nature and Nurture. Following on the Aristotlean table of virtues and vices, she hit the golden mean in nearly all and was only a narcissist in the way that geniuses are narcissists.

Mira Schor on Alice Neel: "Alice Neel (1900-1984) began painting in the 1920s in a realist style influenced by expressionism and surrealism. In choosing to remain committed to figuration in the 1950s, Neel overtly disobeyed the dominant legislation of high modernism that, as Griselda Pollock states, "outlawed questions of the social, that is, all ideological baggage that presented art from saving itself from a capitalist system." Neel's artistic and personal trajectory was perhaps even more extralegal than that of her contemporaries Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler: she did not take the road of attaching herself to a famous abstract artist. Thus, though she lived a sexually adventurous life, she did so without the social benefits that such aan association would have offered. She had two children (two of them later in life and "out of wedlock"), maintained an activist in leftist politics, lived in Spanish Harlem rather than in the approved territory of the art world below Fourteenth Street, and committed herself to human subjects who often, especially early on, lived at the margins of established social
hierarchies - women, the poor, poets, artists, the elderly, people of color."

"Neel is as great a painter of abstract expressionist marks as de Kooning and Soutine, and I tend to look for those marks in her work, as much as I may read the expression or character of the subject." (From Mira Schor's essay Some Notes on women and Abstraction and a Curious Case History: Alice Neel as a Great Abstract Painter.)

This essay is dedicated to my mother and all my matrilineage; and Mira Schor, Rob Storr and Randall Jarrell.

The World is Deep and Deeper than Daylight May Reveal

My mother was a lot like Alice Neel in temperament, with her Serbian mother and Scotts-Irish father from Beech Fork, West Virginia, and she only encouraged me when I was bold, outspoken and talented in everything I endeavored. If I cried that meant I didn't get anything but humiliation - she studied Ancient History when she went to graduate school and her views like Alice Neel's, coming from a poor background, were archaic, exactly like Alice Neel's when she said humanity hasn't changed - "I read about the 15th century and it was exactly the same." Like Neel, she played tough times and hard knocks for entertainment and humor, something that is often misread here in Manhattan where people don't give you a New York second unless you talk bios and small talk, and she had a gift like Alice's for pushing buttons. And while she looked outwardly like a housewife she was quite belligerent just as Alex Katz said in the documentary [ ]/. So much so that I had a smile of recognition as he was saying it, remembering my mother and her encounters, and also the immediate impression in a show organized around the curatorial theme of the portrait, of Alice Neel's painting KOing Alex Katz's out of the room. (My problems with Alex Katz's work can be summed up as the same I had with Ellen Gilchrist's writing, which one critic summed up as "white people drinking white wine and whining."

The famous Cezanne painting shows me that early on Neel was what has now become known as a Cezannist, and that she successfully consumed and ate the father, in the sense that Randall Jarrell wrote of Picasso "- that if Picasso limited himself to one thing he would not be Picasso: he loves the world and wants to eat it."

"As I go about the world I see things (people; their looks and feelings and thoughts; the things their thoughts have made, and the things that neither they or their thoughts had anything to do with making: the whole range of the world)." Jarrell again. the documentary my husband and I watched the other night made by her son had her succinct and accurate summing up of the three things she looked for in her paintings; "I look for it first to be art you know, so actually dividing up the canvas is one of the most exciting things for me. Then I like it to not only look like the person, but to have their inner character as well. And then, I like it to express the zeitgeist." This reminds me of Linda Nochlin's writing on figurative painting and realism:

The art historian Linda Nochlin described modern art as splitting apart several elements that had been combined and integrated: the concerns with imagination, with natural reality, and with the material medium of the art work. In 1867, she says, Charles Blanc expressed the “traditional position in art” when he wrote: “Painting is the art of expressing all the conceptions of the soul by means of all the realities of nature, represented on a single surface in their forms and in their colors.” This integrated, premodernist mode could be compared to David Rapaport’s conception of the normal, adult Rorschach response process, in which perception of the stimulus characteristics of the blot (corresponding to the material medium), associations to memory images of real-world objects (corresponding to natural reality), and concept formation (corresponding to Blanc’s “conceptions of the soul”) work together to produce the normal perception of a recognizable three-dimensional object, without the subject’s ever being conscious of the integrated “cogwheeling” of these processes.

Once I got a fortune cookie at a place in Chinatown that read "a room full of pictures is a room full of thoughts." That it was the lunch after my speaking in front of my work in a show juried by Irving Sandler and Claudia Gould seemed like some kind of coincidence I couldn't overlook. I bought the book from Robert Miller accompanying an exhibition of Neel's art from the thirties and have just now read the essay by Wayne Kostenbaum from there, and looks like it gave us familiarly similar poetic take. In a sense, I have been writing this essay since making my first fresco at Skowhegan - a reinterpretation of her portrait of a doll that embodied a kind of melancholy in Cuba of that time. That so many people write so well, such moving and haunting and above all politically engaged essays about her work, is because she makes us want to eat the world again, and that is food for some of the best thoughts.

For the voice of Billie Holliday

2010-05-06T11:30:00.000-07:00

John Mendelsohn

2010-05-05T09:11:00.001-07:00

John Mendelsohn: Shimmer and Blur

When I went to John Mendelsohn's studio for the first time, I was immediately attuned to his paintings as coming from similar sources. He had enjoyed my relating Katia Santibanez's work and the grid to the Egyptian god of the Nile and abundance, and the first landscape architecture. Underlying all of his paintings is an interest in the very fount and source of things.

Tantra means "weave." The chakras, an ancient system of energy centers in and about our bodies, are as spools, providing yarn that forms the warp and woof of our consciousness, our "tapestry", so to speak. The chakras (belongingness, sensuality, empowerment, love, communication, clear thinking and seeing and spiritual connectivity) thread through our lives. Consciously woven into our existence, we weave a magic carpet with balance, integration, beauty, harmony and expansion for individuals, relationships and humanity.
The seven main body associations, the origin spools, for the chakras are: perineum, genital, solar plexis, heart, throat, brow and crown.

When I spoke with John on the phone, he said he didn't know that tantra means "weave" although he knows his history of textiles inside and out - we have corresponded about the origins of Op Art in the Optics of playing with the the weave, and Ikat has been another thorough investigation. He is also a contributor of articles to the Jung archives, so it would be appropriate here to quote Duchamp when asked if he was an alchemist - he replied "the only way to be an alchemist in these times is wIthout knowing it."

The only way to be a tantric artist in these days is without knowing it.

1) Fall, 6, 7, 8, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 51"x30", 2005

2) Shift 4, 5, 6, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 51"x33", 2004

3) Phase 4, 5, 6, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 49"x35", 2004

4) Fall 6, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 51 "x30", 2005

5) Frequency 2, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 49"x33 5/8 ", 2008

6) Frequency 4, acrylic and latex enamel on canvas, 49"x33 5/8 ", 2008

John's statement:

"These works have faith in art’s capacity
to embody a sense of our lives in material, abstract form."

In the Heart Thread

My younger brother's notebook

2010-05-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

From Petrification by Reggie David aka Frank Edmiston, Jr.

2010-05-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

From the notebook and manuscript of my peripatetic younger brother.

Lawrence Swan

2010-04-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Perambulations from a great long distance walker.

Lawrence Swan

2010-04-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

Ink and bush drawings

Anoka Faruqee at Hosfelt Gallery

2009-12-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

Anoka Faruqee had a phenomenal exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery from Feb 22- April 5, 2008 - there is not anyone working quite like her in the field of painting that so intersects with systems, process, the conceptual, and especially color mixing. I like using the word phenomenal as her work is based on these phenomena and others. In the color process, I was reminded of animation work where color mixing is a highly developed skill and how Anoka is certainly self taught in this respect as tube colors predominate nowadays for most painters and color mixing is hardly taught in art schools. The paintings reproduced from the gallery show are two of the most recent "Fade" Paintings. It is hard to reproduce the effect of them standing before them as they were large enough to sense oneself immersed in them with the field a shimmering distance. Coming for a closer look and seeing the pixels as Faruqee has dubbed them, with red underpainting aggressively poking through, mutating in freehand over the canvas in all kinds of directions, baffling grid or pattern on a very subtle basis. I am reminded that for Seurat and Monet science, optics and color were intricately linked and explored through the most current technology of the time - here is an artist whose paintings are a contemporary analogue to this kind of painstaking practice to a surprisingly organic effect. Textiles, the history of tiling, Op Art, and opulence itself come to mind.

Here is an excerpt from the press release:

In her “Fade” paintings, patterns of hand-made pixels appear to fade
away or disappear into the painting’s ground color. The effect is
like viewing a pattern through a spill of translucent color. Or
looking through a shifting, colored fog. Despite the immediate
gestalt, the impression is created one handmade “pixel” at a time --
Faruqee mixes more than a hundred subtly shifting colors to create
her illusions. Visually, the paintings refer to the modular
geometry of Islamic tile work, pixilation of digital information,
1960’s optical painting and the haze of Los Angeles. But the work is
firmly rooted in the systems of early conceptual art.

Precedents for Op Art

2009-12-07T14:18:00.000-08:00

From Susan Meller's and Joost Elffers encyclopedic book Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns Organized by Motif, Style, Color, Layout, and Period, pages 194 and 195:

"The distorted-looking images in these optical prints may seem to have been inspired by the paintings of twentieth century artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasereley, but all of the examples here, except for number 3, were produced decades before. Designs resembling modern Op Art actually predate the modern printing industry altogether, for they arise easily from the grid imposed by loom weaving.

Rochelle Feinstein and Guy Goodwin at David Reed's studio

2009-11-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

1) El Bronco by Rochelle Feinstein
2) photo of the reception for Rochelle Feinstein
3) Olive+Oil by Guy Goodwin

Following posting on Rochelle Feinstein at Momenta I wanted to post this recognition of two studio shows David Reed opened his working studio to host. The first was for Guy Goodwin in 2006, following on the High Times Hard Times exhibition with two older works of Guy's and then one from a series of his latest work, and the second in 2008 was for Rochelle Feinstein especially featuring a painting David had thought about for a long time - El Bronco.

Both receptions were remarkable for their warmth and the engagement of the onlookers with the art being shown, as would not be surprising given it was hosted through the hospitality of a fellow working painter rather than a commercial gallery. I should perhaps disclose that I was at Skowhegan in 1993 with Guy Goodwin and saw his slides there but not this older work in person until High Times Hard Times where his C-Swing was the first painting on the right as one came into the exhibition, at the National Academy of Art in the architecture of much earlier times. I had seen Guy's exhibition at Bill Maynes and was looking forward to this one - Guy was an important teacher for me at Skowhegan that summer.

Following are the interview with Rochelle and the invite for Guy's show, from Reedstudio - thank you for providing the images and attachments.
David Reed: I must have seen “El Bronco” in your studio fairly soon after it was painted in 1997. When during the Simpson saga did you start thinking about “El Bronco”?

Rochelle Feinstein: That’s easy. I thought of it during the slo-mo chase.
The freeways are so different from our roads – that aerial view on which there was only one car moving forward and across 4 lanes. It struck me that this was a grid: Simpson was moving along the grid. For me all the ripe areas were there as well: domestic violence, racial politics, civic policy, and celebrity. Then what it came down, ultimately, was how would I make this a painting? That’s my obsession: to maintain myself as a painter who’s observing and respecting the whole inheritance of painting, and at the same time experimenting and filtering added subject matters through that canonical language. That for me is the issue: to keep it a painting always and to keep the other things going. The paintings have a double read.

DR: The other things going… You make it sound easier than it is.

RF: I worked on “El Bronco” for about a year and a half. Picking it up, putting it down. I knew what the first part was, but it took a while, juggling, to figure out the second part. Each of the canvases is quite different in its material aspects. The first canvas, on the left, was painted using traditional mediums and various blacks: glazed and layered. The second canvas was made with synthetic materials: flash, tape, and acrylic. I made a stamp and used it repeatedly to make the tire treads; the language addition, in this canvas, was antithetical to Barnet Newman’s practice. I wanted the two canvases to have friction between them - materially, as well as the frictions represented in the event.

DR: Have you done other paintings referring to Simpson?

RF: One of my main preoccupations is also celebrity. The spectacle of celebrity has replaced so many other spectacles. I’m connected to TMZ.com four times a day, both fascinated and repelled. I love it. So Simpson led to Michael Jackson, led to Barry White, in more recent related projects.

Conversation May 9, 2008

Dear friends,
When Guy Goodwin re-stretched his painting C-Swing (1974) at my studio
earlier this year it looked so good, that we decided to have a little show of
his work. In the office, to keep his paintings company, Ulrike Müller has
installed my collection of question mark paintings, and Dean Daderko has
selected an illustrious group of lunch guests.
Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 16 2006, from
6–9pm.
We hope you can come, and please bring your friends!
David Reed
In the front studio:
Guy Goodwin: C-Swing (1974), Spine (1978), and Olive Oil (2006)

Rochelle Feinstein at Momenta 2008

2009-10-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

When I saw Rochelle Feinstein's show I was so excited to see her politics combined with the politics of disco, I emailed Jerry Saltz a telegram "Williamsburg not dead! Kim Jones at Peirogi and Rochelle Feinstein at Momenta - Rochelle Feinstein's show is the sleeper hit of the season."

Momenta, an institution of long standing in Williamsburg, and Rochelle Feinstein were an extremely good match. I was truly moved by but it would be hard to describe, the mysterious element, the magic, is elusive to put words to, but I know it tapped into many years of going dancing under mirrored balls which is not frivolous in my memory, many magic moments surrounded and merging with crowds of dancers and waiting to tap into the moment when the music is moving you rather than th effort laden making moves to the music. I will say also it held together remarkably with strong paintings, and installation with painted TVs, and Word Art that held more interest and invention than most. My favorite object entitled Ball and Chain reproduced first at left with a miniature mirrored ball revolving from the gizmo Rochelle created, reminded me of a turntable and black vinyl record. Their is always a piece in very strong shows that I award the purchase prize as the one I would most like to take home, this was the one in this exhibition.

From Momenta's statement:

"Rochelle Feinstein focuses on creating beautiful, uncanny paintings that employ light as a medium both literally and metaphorically, connecting subject matter from vastly different realms of experience. Her recent Hotspot paintings present images that reference both reflective mirror balls and globes, commemorating each year of U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether the "Hotspot" signifies a lens flare, WiFi access, a whiteout, a point of intense heat or radiation, or a site of political upheaval, its virtuality is offset by the visual slowness of dutifully hand-made, old-media halftone dots – effectively grounding the technological, social and political in the physicality of paint.

These Hotspot paintings connect to another series; this one painted or printed directly onto mirrored tiles. These works reference Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s "War is Over" anti-Vietnam War campaign, as well as the earlier WWII newspaper headline that Ono and Lennon appropriated. Feinstein adapts this highly politicized historical declaration by adding another subjective layer – turning the phrase into "Love is Over!" and referencing the languages of twelve ex-lovers. She then disempowers her own words’ negativity by physically turning the works on their sides."

Please note my Wilder Shores of Disco i Mix below has some of Yoko Ono's disco and dance music and that she was the original inspiration for the idea as the wildest longest shot in disco music ever. She has had a massive dance floor comeback in the past five years. So disco, a maligned and backlashed form by the later seventies and eighties. It went underground after having become too popular with middle America.

The Politics of Disco

"Disco is a genre of dance music that had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, psychedelic and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While disco was a form of black commercial pop music and a craze among black gay men especially, it did not catch mainstream attention until it was picked up by the predominantly white gay clubs of New York. Latinos and women embraced disco as well, and the music eventually expanded to several other popular groups of the time.

In what is considered a forerunner to disco style clubs, in February 1970, the New York City DJ David Mancuso opened The Loft, a members-only private dance club set in his own home. Most agree that the first disco songs were released in 1973, though some claim Manu Dibango's 1972 Soul Makossa to be the first disco record.[6] The first article about disco was written in September 1973 by Vince Aletti for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1974 New York City's WPIX-FM premiered the first disco radio show.

Musical influences include funk and soul music. The disco sound has soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or sixteenth note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line sometimes consisting of octaves. Strings, horns, electric pianos, and electric guitars create a lush background sound. Orchestral instruments such as the flute are often used for solo melodies, and unlike in rock, lead guitar is rarely used.

The disco phenomenon was the last mass popular music movement that was driven by the baby boom generation."

VInce Alletti has a new book out with charts month to month of the disco years of the 70s, (specifically 1973-1978) memoirs and photographs, that I have looked through several times at Spoonbill & Sugartown (they are having thier tenth anniversary November 10th, by the way, come celebrate.)

Here is an IMix I published on iTunes, with a title I had come up with for a cassette compilation years ago and was not able to track a great deal down, for the second time or even the first time until iTunes (and I also want to mention Frank Holliday, who I met at Joe Fyfe's dinner after one of his lectures at the Studio School, and we discovered we had both been a lot to Dadio's in Greensboro before leaving
North Carolina) :

Wilder Shores of Disco

Playlist Notes: First three, from Dadio's in Greensboro NC and the DJ who would play funk and the new disco coming out of Europe and NYC equally. The rest:

many DJs and dance floors since 1977 thanks to all the disc spinners and Vince Aletti's new book

Song Name Artist

Get the Funk out Ma Face The Brothers Johnson

Get Off Your A*s and Jam Funkadelic

Get Up Offa That Thing James Brown

Graveyard Groove Trouble Funk

Into the Groove(y) Ciccone Youth

Disco Mystic Lou Reed

Oscillations Silver Apples

The Act Became Real The Bollock Brothers

Why d'Ya Do It? Marianne Faithfull

Nightclubbing Grace Jones

My Jamaican Guy Grace Jones

Under the Boardwalk Tom Tom Club

Genius of Love Tom Tom Club

Hey, St. Peter Flash and the Pan

Slippery People (2005 Remastered) Talking Heads

Walking On Thin Ice Yoko Ono

You're the One Yoko Ono

Kiss Kiss Kiss Yoko Ono & Peaches

Know Your Chicken Cibo Matto

Lucretia My Reflection Sisters of Mercy

Confusion (Arthur Baker 12" Mix) [Edit] New Order

Megablast The Mysteriouz

Buffalo Stance Neneh Cherry

White Horse (Funkstar De Luxe vs. Laid Back) Funkstar De Luxe & Laid Back

Try Me, I Know We Can Make It (European Single Version) Donna Summer

You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) Sylvester

Disenchanted Communards, The

Riders In the Sky The Shadows

Sinnerman Felix da Housecat & Nina Simone

Ray of Light Madonna

Fare Mondi

2009-09-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

Bruce Nauman's 2009 American Pavilion at the Venice Biennalle

Pico della Mirandola had sought knowledge, and passed from system to system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made dim [...] and he has a true place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with their names, he is a true humanist (ital.). For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality - and no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time or zeal.

Walter Pater, 1871; from his essay on Pico della Mirandola, in the collection The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.

Marcia Vetroq begins her article in Art in America on the current Venice Biennale entitled Worlds Enough, and Time: Daniel Birnbaum's Biennale:
"When the second Triennale di Torino, organized by Daniel Birnbaum and called "Fifty Moons of Saturn." opened last November, it triggered intense speculation that the Stockholm-born, Frankfurt-based curator would be offering a sneak preview of his intentions for the 2009 Venice Biennale, then seven months away. [...]
"More intriguing is the volte-face in Birnbaum's construction of the nature of artistic practice. The Turin show centered on the melancholic humor historically associated with creative genius. Birnbaum's title for the 53rd Biennale, 'Fare Mondi' or 'Making Worlds,' likewise stays aloft in the metaphoric heavens, but this show abjures the temperamental determination of the dark side for an endorsement of art as an arena of free and enlightened invention."

I can't at the moment locate my copy of Margot and Rudolf Wittkower's Born Under Saturn, their study of the Renaissance's consideration of the planet Saturn as the celestial influence on artists. All I remember fundamentally from beginning (not finishing) the book matches up with what I found just recently here on the internet: in the founding of the Roman Empire and establishment of the meaning of Latin deities the god Mercury and his planet was not beloved by Romans in the same way that the winged messenger Hermes was to the Greeks; in the Wittkowers' book the turning point of the Renaissance conception Mercury was considered the god of artisans only. It was the influence of Saturn artists needed to become someone who had genius. (It should be noted here that before Kant genius was considered a gift one was given to differing degrees, not a complete embodiment as in the phrase one who "is a genius.")

This is my little internet trouvaille: " Mercury loves to race around and he invented the wheel. Mercury, and the element mercury named for him, is known as the quicksilver. The word mercurial is commonly used to refer to something or someone erratic, volatile or unstable, derived from Mercury's swift flights from place to place. The term comes from astrology and describes the expected behavior of someone under the influence of the planet Mercury."

I have a Turkish artist friend Sermin Kardestuncer who had two solo exhibitions at Pierogi. Befroe I met her there I saw a simple piece, a stitched wall with punctures in the wall sewn through with black thread, in Denyse Thomasos' group exhibit Crossing Lines at Art in General in 1999 - it was quite simple and remarkable. Often I find it amazing to see a piece that seems like it was waiting to be made like scientific discoveries are waiting to be uncovered, and think highly of the artists that make them.

Not long after her second show I walked into the gallery and Joe Amrhein referred me to a student who wanted to write about her work for an academic paper, and I said the first thing to think about was the idea of process art from the sixties and seventies. Sermin - and her work - have been seen as very serious by many but I enjoyed telling the story of the first time I went to her apartment and on taking me into the room that is her studio and on opening the door I saw was that she had stitched the cheap wooden hollow door on both sides to her studio with the same black thread I had seen on the wall at Art in General - I really burst out laughing at the sight of it and she was very pleased, saying most people don't see the humor in her work. (It could be a lot of our levity these days lacks gravity.) I was describing this to the student but said to her thinking of so much I had seen since moving to New York in 1996, "I think we have reached an age of bottomless ingenuity." I did not mean this in terms of Sermin's work but of younger artists and art students. She really liked that phrase but I am still trying to get over the dark side of that implication, even as I know I had a big grin when I said it. There is a real dark side to that moment of realization - this "bottomless ingenuity," and it seems to be more and more present.

Studies of the Renaissance in Pater's time following on Wincklemann in the eighteenth century were focussed on the reintroduction of Greek paganism into the Catholicism of the time as an end finally to the medieval Dark Ages. 20th century scholarship has increasingly laid emphasis on studying the Islamic world and its entry into Europe, especially in the inventiveness of the Renaissance scientifically and technologically. Islamic scholarhip is also where the Greek manuscripts that Pico della Mirandola and so many others were translating from had been kept for centuries following the burning of the Library of Alexandria. "Mirandola translated Plato's Timaeus from the original Greek into Latin and the Book of Genesis and Moses from Hebrew as an endeavor to reconcile the accounts of the origin of the world with the account given in both." - Pater again.

Just two Islamic philosophers are needed here, but there were many:

Ibn Sina (981-1037), known in the west by the Latin name, Avicenna, is often called by Westerners the "Arab Leonardo" for the amazing breadth of his knowledge in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. In addition to his Canon of Medicine, he is certainly one of the most remarkable thinkers of the Middle Ages and the most important and original of all Muslim philosophers. He held that religion was a kind of philosophy for the masses; the goal of all revealed truth (including his own Islam) was to lead us to our highest state—one of philosophic contemplation. He held the particularly original idea that intellectual discovery implies an intuitive act of knowledge. The idea of the intuitive intellect working outside of the methodical process of collecting facts and deduction has again become quite modern.

Ibn-Rushid (Averroës) 1128 -1198 is also of great interest to us. He wrote many commentaries on Aristotle and is known in Arab philosophy simply as "The Commentator." His works in religious philosophy were widely read in Europe, especially by Thomas Aquinas, the point, of course, being not that one was right and the other wrong, but that one of the greatest of European medieval philosophers honed his own sharp intellect by dealing with his Muslim predecessor. Averroës' work in law, medicine, and astronomy were also highly regarded.

This was an excellent opening for Plato and Aristotle and their interplay for the Renaissance thought still under the aegis of the Catholic Church - Aristotle having been "the Philosopher" for Catholic scholars especially Saint Augustine until the Italians started forming academies of Neoplatonic inquiry, based on writings of Plotinus and Neo-Pythagorians in Rome in the 3rd Century AD.

" The teaching of Plotinus, coinciding with a period of material decline and religious anxiety during the decline of the Roman Empire [...} had only one serious rival - Christianity."
- John Gregory, from the introduction to The Neoplatonists translated on introduced by John Gregory, 1991 Kyle Cathie paperbacks Great Britain

This could all prepare us quite well for the Bruce Nauman American Pavilion with its Roman Catholicized Aristotelian Virtues and Vices (1983-88) in alternating blue and red neon running along the top of the building. Apparently by following along the exterior reading the interplay of the Virtues and Vices one finally reaches finally Blue Fortitude alternating with Anger as entry way to the interior as a Nauman retrospective of sorts crowned with the much reproduced 1967 Neoplatonic spiral of neon words The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystic Truths.

A brief explanation of the Virtues and Vices from Aristotle to the conception of the Medieval Soul.

Aristotle had written a kind of middle path of a mean virtue between an excess and deficiency in character in his Nichomachean Ethics Table of Virtues and Vices, read carefully a means of reflecting on daily actions and developing maturity and character; these Virtues had been taken up by the Roman Empire as maiden figureheads carrying swords for the collective good of the Empire; who were in turn enlisted by Prudentius in the 5th Century to fight the Psychomachia for God and Jesus, quaintly translated in the Harvard Loeb series by H. J. Thomson as "The Fight for Mansoul."

In this epic poem the maiden Faith leads a battle by first taking on the frightful and beastly monster named The Worship-of-Old-Gods, with an entire war of Virtues countering both male and female vices in swordfight culminating in the She-monster Avarice accompanied by fiends Care, Hunger, Fear, Anguish, Perjuries, Pallor, Corruption, Treachery, Falsehood, Sleepnessness, Meanness and diverse others and flanked by her brood Crimes, the brood of her black milk, who "like ravening wolves go prowling and leaping over the field."

The maidens are baffled by Avarice, or Greed's changing double form, now like a Virtuous whiteclad mother to them and then terrifying glimpses of the awful hideous monster - until Good Works dashes into the fray to the aid of all the others. The epic battleground poem culminates in Faith and Concord bringing the Mansoul to Jesus and God in a lightfilled conclusion. To say that this was thematically repeated in Medieval literature and art is an understatement. In the Tenth Century Pope Gregory officially named the Seven Deadliest Sins found in Dante, Chaucer, Spenser and many other an allegory, and often a favorite subject for artists, including a series of frescos by Giotto. ( James Ensor also made a series of prints - unfortunately only two of the etchings were on display at the recent MoMA exhibition. At the Ensor exhibition in the Petit Palais in Paris in the Eighties all seven were mounted together.)

Also in this September's issue of Art in America Lynn Macritchie's writes in an accompanying article on the Biennale Pavilions, "grandiose gestures-the French Pavilion is an obvious example, as is the sanguinary Mexican presentation, trying desperately to shock-fall flat." Macritchie lauds Nauman's Pavilion - which recieved the Golden Lion award -as having the apparent message "that we humans are ugly, destructive, incoherent and unheeding."

Does this mean that the Vices have won, and that only artists are not born under Saturn these days, and are the only ones who can illuminate the darkness for us?

As we are all walking around in this new millennium at the center of our own ever complicating cosmologies that have increasing difficulty sorting out into something more akin to the profound and the complex, how do we intersect with others in these days ahead of us?

In short, is Mercury now the kaleidoscoping patron deity of the span of all of our attentions?

...and on the Seventh Day

2009-09-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7: The Biennale.

Sarah Thornton writes: "I left the British Pavilion with its giveaway goods - a tote bag, a catalogue, some temporary tattoos, and a white hat embroidered with pink with the words ALWAYS WANTING YOU...LOVE TRACE X - and headed over to the American Pavilion, which looks like a little state capitol building. Nancy Spector, the pavilion's curator, was standing in the lobby, basking in the warm glow of a luminous sculpture called "Untitled" (America) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Cuban-born Gonzalez-Torres died of complications due to AIDS in 1996. Some people were lamenting the fact that the pavilion show had taken so long to come; others complained that the pavilion should celebrate the work of a living artist. One irate curator even exclaimed, "maybe next time the U.S. will decide to show Whistler!" But the consensus seemed to be wrong; the pavilion was beautiful but funereal.
"Certainly the reception was not as overwhelmingly upbeat as that accorded to Ed ruscha's 2005 pavilion, in which five black and white paintings were hung with five new color canvases depicting the same Los Angeles locations. On show after the invasion of Iraq entitled "The Course of Empire," the exhibition had a freshness and a sense of history that satisfied many people's expectations."

Dave Hickey wrote a piece for a recent issue of Art in America about being asked to be the next American curator for the Venice Biennale, saying that the 2007 one was too sad and that his would be happy. thank you Dave, but my parents took me to the New York World's Fair in 1964 when I was all of six and I was whirled through the pre-Disney purchase debut "It's a Small World after All" there, but was more permanently impressed by Louise Nevelson's wall of black painted wood cabinetry. Picasso's Guernica and Rousseau's The Dream which I continued the dream it put me into by dreaming I was inside of his painting the very same night.

Seven Days in the Art World: The opposite approach to the Crit in last posting is Zen Master of CalArts Michael Asher's.

2009-09-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Canadian Sarah Thornton's BA in Art History and PhD in Cultural Sociology mesh quite well with her journalistic presence at the Art Newspaper and other publications for this book, with seven chapters as follows:

1) The Auction
2) The Crit
3) The Fair
4) The Prize
5) The Magazine
6) The Studio Visit
7) The Biennale

James Elkins' second point on Critiques at art schools (see prior posting) is Critiques Are Too Short.

Enter Michael Asher at precisely Ten AM in Sarah Thornton's observance of his "legendary" and "marathon" Critiques at CalArts, with graduate students who vied for place to get into the CalArts tradition of utmost discipline to see if they have what it takes to learn the Zen patience and humility needed to thrive in today's Art World as it has developed over the past decades. There is an entirely illuminating interview with the "Sasquatch Santa" John Baldessari describing his mission in founding Post- Studio crit class at CalArts in 1970, that he adheres to to this day.

Thornton sums up the MFA in one succinct paragraph of this chapter as "the first legitimator in an artist's career followed by awards and residencies, representation by a primary dealer, reviews and features in art magazines, inclusion in prestigious private collections, museum validation in terms of solo or group shows, international exposure at well-attended biennials, and the appreciation signaled by strong resale interest at auction. More specifically, MFA degrees from name art schools have become passports of sorts. Look over the resumes of the artists under fifty in any major international museum exhibition and you will find that most of them boast an MFA from one of a couple of dozen highly selective schools."

I must admit I had been very naive about any of this until going to Skowhegan in 1993, where Baldessari was greeted as the West Coast Guru on arrival and hung around with the already quite present San Francisco mystic David Ireland in a great cabal of minds - revered by most everyone there, even amongst the bell hooks enthusiasts - who were still decidedly more practically interested in the words of that year's designated Paul Mellon speaker.

bell hooks has been a practicing Buddhist and in one essay voiced trying to write academic works in plainspoken terms - and sometimes employing urban language otherwise known as "street smarts." She added that this was deliberate but not easy - that it was the Buddhist way to take a long and difficult path towards the simple. My teacher at Tyler Stan Whitney, after I said I had only read her film criticism in a textbook store for Virginia Commonwealth University I worked for prior to going to Skowhegan, recommended I read her book titled Yearning. If memory serves me (of course it doesn't consistently) in Yearning bell hooks writes about the white art teacher who reached out to her as a child in the Apartheid South at length, after having heard her speak briefly of this at Skowhegan as an opening to her first lecture.

Back to School Comix for Art Instructors and their Students

2009-09-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I had read James Elkins polemical book Why Art Can't Be Taught: the premise that it can't be taught because there isn't any way to measure achievement in art empirically seemed like it must be either his elaborate devil's advocate stance or just plain silly didn't mean that every page of the book wasn't worth reading: it is after all subtitled a Handbook for Art Students.

The absolute juiciest part was his longest chapter - a point by point dissection of critiques with actual dialogues presumably recorded at Chicago Art Institute where he is professor in Art History, Theory and Criticism to illustrate nearly every one of his points. the most memorable two being A Critique is Like A Seduction, Full of Emotional Outbursts and Critiques are either Judicative or Descriptive, with the courtroom trial aspect documented quite viscerally.

He develops beyond all this a very strong argument for the critique of The Critique, an ordeal both Instructors and students go through once hired by or entering into art school, and I would add parenthetically that it has been clear to me when in them that the instructors use techniques their most influential instructors did with them either with the conscientiousness that new parents bring to what they reflect of their parents for good and ill - or as unconsciously - and usually with the same kind of negative reactionary results. All of us are human and subject to both, but it must be under a certain amount of control and discretion to be of benefit to students at all. A minefield sometimes for everyone seriously engaged but especially the increasingly poor students that attend - I mean poor as in facing unbelievable debt loads and an increasingly shrinking means of earning a living above all in the marketplace of collectible unique objects.

So this is from Jeffrey Brown's latest book Funny Misshapen Boy I bought on recommendation for this series from Gabriel at Desert Island Books in Williamsburg - Gabriel also went to Chicago Art Institute, as did Jeffrey Brown. I had already tried in the mid nineties as someone in graduate school in my mid thirties to explain to some of my instructors how different it was from when I went to a state University Art Department for $12.00 to $17.00 an hour in the latter half of the seventies.

No one in this comic sequence at left culled to demonstrate exactly this dilemma, from the pages and pages of all too true words from the crushing critique style many instructors still practice without thinking from times when they could a) afford tuition, b) not work full time or often even part time due to low tuition, and c) leave home and be free enough in time and their own apartment or dorm room space to to work the hours and hours needed in their classroom or especially graduate school studio practice to even get anything at all from their instructors either during class or in critiques.

Hard times, and getting harder, for students - coasting on your own hard won but perhaps too hardhearted or lazy minded or both conditioned response pedagogical style is not what your salaries are coming in to your personal coffers for. It would be appreciated with the spectacular burden of debt for an undergraduate degree and then MFA from some prestigious school the BFA students are encouraged by their faculty to apply to consider their style of conversation, as art is meant to be an open dialogue not a public shaming device.

2009-08-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

Art World Comix for our Particular Situation in the Last Year

2009-08-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

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Introducing Lawrence Swan, creator of Art Bum comix, a really absolutely up to date satirical viewing of the New York art world from inside/outside the art world, and other life dilemmas of living in New York rather than somewhere else. If you are interested further please see the interview on Hrag Vartanian's blog with Swan. His comix completely took off on the internet via Facebook last spring within the art community, for its take on the current economy and aesthetics of art, and other dilemmas of being an "art bum" - "another dope who came to New York high on hope" as the animated version explains.
(See Newcleanwars on You Tube, an anagram of Lawrence Swan's name.)

As Facebook is the discussion of our time with everyone either joining in or not, this is of interest in terms of distribution and readership and the speed of gathering an audience with something that taps into a particular community's zeitgeist. You Tube has been a good medium for this artist also, who works with a group of musicians called Audio Artists and did some political videos with their music.

Bittersweet Art World Comix from Several Years Ago

2009-08-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

This is still at the MoMA Bookstore, a one time only collaboration between MoMA, PS1 and DC Comix made at the time MoMA was in Queens awaiting its controversial new space and architecture.

Three curators who worked so many years so astutely and intelligently to bring the public in its more expanded sense art important to the present moment, whether 20th century historical or absolutely new in the case of MoMa. I fear now all we have in their place are curators with their eye on the momentary present.

I am reminded somehow that the British word for curator was keeper, and that the current term curator has lost its custodial sense and long view somehow, that something might be for keeps, if one is modest enough somewhere to not want to be a curator as star in one own's right.

Saul Ostrow wrote an excellent article in the New Art Examiner titled Curator as artist in the mid nineties, and after he had done a presentation to the Tyler student body, I told him how much I liked the critical argument in the article (not mentioned in his talk) but asked him if auteur might be a better term. That was well past a decade ago; however Richard Sennett discusses this phenomenon in terms of politics in The Fall of Public Man, and all influence and power is more political now as imedia predominates and inherited and legislative power give way to charismatic in so many other arenas. (Max Weber's three forms of power, discussed in Sennett at length.) Charisma can be eloquent or it can be paranoid and find its target audience, in the art world it is unfortunately an academically competitive and increasingly globally capitalist admixture, without deep art history and a long view and large picture and understanding of a multiplicity of points of view, the eloquence of what is exhibited, written about the exhibits, and the public speaking and interviewing drops.

Glamour needs pleasure yet harmony spreads contentment. Perhaps the recession will bring a moral correction not just a market correction.

More Summer Vacation Art World Comic Relief - Jim Torok

2009-08-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

I loved Jim Torok's work from the first, both the intimate portraits with detail found in British miniatures of the 17th and 18th century, and the big nose comic character, the crudest portrayal in comics since Lynda Barry, whose first book Boys and Girls I bought at Printed Matter in the early eighties when it was on Lispenard Street. Only Jim was doing it on big paper and panels with a paintbrush.

Many of these would be about being an artist in New York, from a generalized standpoint, and quite good satire or wry humor. Wry humor would be how I owuld see this one I found on the internet posted by a young blogger, if I had not seen it shown at Bill Maynes Gallery when I saw it with its dark twin in black and white about how terrifying it can be to be an artist with everything in this panel its near opposite. Which is far closer to the truth for nearly every artist who came here if not actually than existentially - wish I could find that one and post it as well.

He nailed some of the worst experiences of art openings that I had experienced or witnessed without thinking quite consciously about it in one painting I have not been able to find in either his catalogue from Peirogi (worth seeking out) or online, but I only remember vividly the head swiveling motion lined head facing the Big Nose Every Artist, the effect of not focussing on the one who is talking to try and scan rapidly for people it is of utmost importance to talk to, and then the angling for where there might be an after party to go to.

See also his sendup of well known stunts to make one famous in the art world, or at least a news item for that year or so until the next stunt comes along. It was published in another form in Art in America under the Pen and Ink page before that delightful satire on the art world series came to an end just about a year ago.

More Summer Vacation Art School Comic Relief

2009-08-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

The only comic strip in the early eighties I ever did related to "art" is based on a painting student I knew in school - I wasn't in the painting department. Since the lettering breaks up, the text is panel by panel:

[I knew a boy in college named Raphael who was an art major, concentrating in painting. Good name for a painter, eh? A couple living in Georgia in the late fifties who named their son Raphael couldn't have been expecting him to grow up to be a truck driver - or an MBA either.

One day Raphael showed me his latest painting, rows of painted paper dolls alternating with cut out ones collaged right on to the canvas. Raphael explained why paper dolls - he said, if you draw a paper doll, its a drawing of a paper doll - if you cut out the drawing it IS a paper doll. A real actual live one there in your hands.
I liked his painting quite a bit, but I loved that idea. And the way he said it and everything else at that moment. I could have hugged him right there.

A few months later I came round to his apartment and the painting was leaned up against the wall, with great slashes running through it - shredded. I asked him when he had done THAT. He said about a month and a half ago. Now the emotion that initially made Raphael slash that painting may have been genuine, but when he didn't throw it away right afterwards, and left it there for all to see all those weeks, that was self-conscious. That was reading about angry young action painters who destroyed canvases they weren't pleased with. He wanted to buy into art history and I was sorry to be a witness to that. Poor Raphael, I wanted to hug him again, but for a completely different reason this time. It would take him years to get untangled from art history and back on his own again.]

This is interesting to reread now as I made this only a year out of college and therefore only a few years after the actual events: the kernel observation is based on a true experience; the name, impulse to hug and denouement an attempt at fictionalizing. No impulse to hug the first time, just a real nice fascination, and no affection there the second time when I saw what he had done to a painting and an idea contained in it I liked so much. I was a bit angry he had done that to a very promising Jasper Johns like path however when he ended up doing handsome paintings that were Diebenkorns with fluorescent paint it seemed clear to me there wasn't much point. I mean they were handsome but my mind stopped every time I looked over them with the thought, "but these are Diebenkorns with fluorescent paint."

This was not published in the Austin Chronicle along with the others as I had moved to France and dropped interest in sending them in by then. It wasn't a favorite with the editors or general public anyway - as I said the others weren't about art or art school. They were all stories told by younger and older men and women based on anecdotes from family, friends, or my own life, matched with photos I clipped from different sources to draw the faces and upper bodies from as the idea was someone across from the reader talking one to one. Any anecdote was good as long as a subtle humor was involved, which I suppose to have been initially mine. (After publication I was pleased that it was so generally shared.)

Artists I have met in the latter act of my life used to ask me what I did before I started painting at 27, and I could say the simple answer is, a lot of living, and a freer form life - and a lot of listening to others. Its all there in memory, and some of it recorded in the comic strips from that time. It is interesting being a world of remembered anecdotes, my own and other people's, in a city, period, and art world culture that doesn't have time for it. I continue to remember the ones I have been told up here by so many, and have long since stopped being surprised when it isn't in memory that I have ever been the one who listened, as many are surprised by what kinds of dialogue I can pull up from conversations years past verbatim.

Summer Vacation Art World Comic Relief part II - Alex Ross

2009-08-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Alex Ross, from Chemical Imbalance Magazine, Spring 1988

Alex is now a very well known painter. I had some of my comix in one issue of Chemical Imbalance in the late eighties also, with his psychedelic green man face on the cover. Chemical Imbalance was a mix of music reviews, the newest wave of grafix and comix following Raw, and literary book and fine art reviews added in, if in an art historical vein or tone of interest to the publisher Mike McGonigal.

Chemical Imbalance was published for something like four or five years I believe in the late eighties and early nineties. What was really remarkable was reading young artists writing about literature and fine art in a combination of New York art school library research and fanzine vernacular - like Bob Nickas' writing only very naive and outsider and mainly about surrealists or historical figures or Anna Mendieta. (I am enjoying reading Nickas' Theft is Vision and remembering the early issues of Index Magazine as I write this as he crather singularly combines inside the contemporary art world knowledge and fanzine fervor quite well - even if not all of his sensibility overlaps with mine in visual arts an amazing amount does in music and his enthusiasm and writing skills are quite a serious pleasure.)

Chemical Imbalance is the only fanzine I know of that took an interest in high and low and was equally enthused about both, and had such a successful run. I wasn't living in New York and was so pleased to have been published in there at all back in the day, even though I had long since started painting and the comic was from 1981 0r 1982 by then.

Summer Vacation Comic Relief

2009-08-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

From Aline Kominski-Crumb.

Long before Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential...

It gets more hilarious and lurid from here on out, but one would have to seek out her book Need More Love to see the next sequence of panels.

Peter Saul, H. C. Westermann, William T. Wiley, and Bruce Nauman - and San Francisco in the late Sixties

2009-07-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

List of Images, left:

1) Looking for Mushrooms book cover

2) William T. Wiley installation 1972

3) Bruce Nauman, Westermann's Ear 1967

4) H. C. Westermann, untitled 1968

5) Peter Saul, Bobby Seale 1968

The book Looking for Mushrooms: Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk and Minimal Art, San Francisco 1955-68 is a catalogue for an exhibition from November 2008 through December 2009 at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, that I picked up on one of my near daily stops into Spoonbill & Sugartown. I had named this forum Cabinet of Cabarets out of a special interest in how the visual arts can intersect with the poetry, writing, theater, dance and later film in a certain period - and respond to culture as counterculture in various forms - and the ways individual artists meet, collaborate, hang out with, and have something to learn from each other.

As I had been writing about Peter Saul the cover caught my eye, but I bought the book because San Francisco had been a counter culture focus in the US from the mid fifties on, and this exhibition had been organized by the three German curators to commemorate the 40th anniversary of 1968 and recognize the underknown San Francisco convergence of artists who were exhibited in Peter Seltz' 1967 exhibition titled Funk Art. In his introduction Selz makes it clear that he considers the "hot" Californian art to be the antipole to the "cool" New York art from Primary Structures, Minimal and Conceptual art.

Below the book cover is a work by William T. Wiley from the early seventies, who had an exhibition at the Corcoran in the early nineties of a much later body of work. Wiley was well enough known when I went to art school in the late seventies - an art school mainly influenced, in the rebellious painting department students but especially in the sculpture department (dropping down from the instructors themselves), by the antipoles of New York in Chicago and San Francisco.

Wiley was Bruce Nauman's teacher at UC Davis in the mid sixties, and together they wrote a letter to H. C. Westermann in 1966 they sent to him care of the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco where he was then showing, asking him if he knew anything about the discrepancy in titles between two books of a work of Man Ray's - whether it was titled The Riddle as in one book or The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse in another.

Wiley relates in the catalogue that they got a reply from Cliff (Westermann) on a valentine that he had drawn on, "I know you must think that I am some old mean thing - but that letter was almost an enigma itself...slow down - what's your hurry. Sincerely, H.C. Westermann." They were overjoyed to get a reply and later Wiley met Westermann at Peter Saul's place in Mill Valley and explained to him that it was he and Bruce who had written him a letter about Man Ray. Westermann said, "yeah, I thought you were puttin' me on." Wiley said, "no, not at all," and Westermann came to visit what he called Wiley's "shop."

Nauman becomes fascinated with knots around this time in homage to Westermann's 1963 sculpture The Big Change in photographs he sends to his collaborator in film William Allen, and in his sculpture Henry Moore Bound to Fail, culminating in the sculpture from 1967 entitled Westermann's Ear.

I have included Peter Saul's painting of Bobby Seale, as the catalogue for this exhibition has an entire section on the Black Panthers, and the Black Festival in 1968 in Marin County, and art by Emory Douglas, worth looking into.
It also has an interview with Anne Halprin by Yvonne Rainer for dance enthusists, and photographs of the collaboration between William T. Wiley and Steve Reich for set design costumes and music for Ron Davis' production of Ubu Roi.
Bruce Conner and Semina artists who were featured in a recent publication on Semina culture are also in this book, and enormous amount of archives of the intersection of general cultural and specifically cultural ground from the times as well; however I had especially wanted to post something about William T. Wiley. I have a drawing I have done versions of and painted once that is actually an homage to a recurrent motif in his work and no one seems to be the least bit familiar with his work at all in New York. There is a major retrospective coming up in Washington DC at the Smithsonian which I will be looking forward to, and I would love to meet other enthusiasts - and at least try to make a few converts along the way.

Peter Saul

2009-05-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

(Please scroll down and then up for the four images.)

The first image is of a Big Daddy Roth book, the second Basil Wolverton and the third a rather famous Miro painting titled Dutch Interior, leading up to two of Peter Saul's early paintings, which I believe I first saw in a catalogue titled Hand Painted Pop years ago. (I had been familiar with his later work since first going to art school.)

If Peter Saul showed his earlier paintings at a slide talk he gave in the mid eighties I attended while living in Austin I don't remember it - what I do remember clearly was his first two slides. One was ratfink in all his glory with his hands on the stick shift of one of his bronco like hot rods, and one of a comics style grotesque head. He cited Big Daddy Roth and Basil Wolverton as influences on his work which not only made a lot of immediate sense to me but tapped into my forgotten enthusiasms for both.

I spent so much time as a child at various magazine and comics stands marvelling in all kinds of stuff but especially remember CARtoons magazine and reprints of the older, really seditious re-editions of MAD with Basil Wolverton. (Basil Wolverton may still be at Barbara Gladstone as I am posting this.) I leave it to everyone to see and explore the connection at their own inclination or discretion - the Miro reference is more standardly art historical, and immediately familiar.

However, Peter Saul is not a pioneering pop artist for nothing, and I would say one who mined subcultures of popular taste from the beginning, along with the domestic interiors, and more and more as time went on. He has obviously thought about the way the fifties censored comic books in the same way that other artist thought about the way the Hays Code effected filmmaking. This is where artists like Peter Saul, Ray Johnson, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Andy Warhol intersect with the interesting ways one can love popular culture and respond to and create the new underground at the same time - and the British Pop movement had the same underpinnings as I wrote earlier in my essay on the interplay between Pop and hard edged painting. That Peter Saul's work is related to pre code comics rather than the kind of cool and ironic but also suspiciously sentimental nostalgic beginnings of Lichtenstein's presentational appropriations of comics has made Saul's work always more tapped in to the sheer joy of draftsmanship and paint and materials and much more amoral and engaged, in the political sense, and therefore engaging, for this viewer. ( I once overheard Peter Saul and Joe Zucker talking shop talk about what kind of paint they use at Zucker's opening, which was delightful.)

I went to the retrospective in Philadelphia to see the earlier paintings and really get a good look at them, although the late work is riveting in a certain fashion it certainly has been around a long time and it is a fact that early work can be shown for the first time to younger artists and have more to say as feeling to them fresh, and other qualities not easy for others to see. I could draw a comparison to some younger coworkers I had at Saint Mark's Bookstore discussing how good early Tom Waits records are - I had written a review of Swordfishtrombones when it first came out in the early eighties as an enormous breakthrough from a very good songwriter who had gotten to be someone one could buy every other album from, so it was difficult to hear this from my own standpoint - but I had an immediate kind of double vision right then about how good the early work could sound to these younger listeners so many junkyard/Beefheart/Kurt Weill influenced Waits albums later. He was always such a good songwriter, and it transcended his persona back then and stands now. So I want to say this as a fan of Saul's who has lost the thread with the signature work over time that I had gone down to see how good the early work really is. And how important it could be to younger artists - or anyone really - who has not discovered it or had the chance to experience it.

It is a testament to how really novel it was in his time to go to Paris and study painting of all kinds and come up with this unheralded subject matter of American iceboxes, stuffed chairs, stretched out superheroes and the like, and I would love to write more about this at some point - especially from the jumping off point of a phrase I heard living in Paris that translates as "homesickness (mal du pays) is missing the food one grew up with." (Peter Saul wqs born in 1932, the same year as my father, and grew up with what continued to be called iceboxes, not "refrigerators" - even when they had become newly run by electricity.) I am adding Miro's Dutch Interior because this is a reinterpretation of Miro's from dutch interiors, making a thread from the Dutch Interiors from the 17th Century to Miro's influence on Saul so that he could come up with the Pop surrealist domestic paintings he invented. By way of Big Daddy Roth and Basil Wolverton and a host of other comics artists.

This is to pay homage to three other inventive artists just underneath: Big Daddy Roth (not just a cartoonist but one of the icons of hot rod creation and the culture that went with it:, Basil Wolverton and the whole creation of Mad Magazine and the culture that went along with the comics and humor it pioneered and was never surpassed in; and also of course Miro whose recent show at Moma was a revelation for so many.

(Peter Saul is not the only one who was influenced by Miro by any means. Raphael Rubinstein's recent article in Art in America about what he terms the provisional has a meditation on what he saw in the most radical of the rooms in the exhibition, and it is worth reading - I also saw Robert Ryman, and something of Twombly, and so much of the future of painting in that room, in that direction. Gorky and Peter Saul just to name two took others.)

Before I get too far involved with Miro I would like to bring back the subject to Peter Saul, who has always been around and had cult figure status - much like the extra-fine art sources he loves to look at and derive from. The blog before this one - through a very lengthy path through a discussion of a social concern of everyone in the nation - has put him in the realm of the amoral, but in such an in one's face and satirical way that one feels he must be delighted with the love him or hate him divisiveness he sets up; nevertheless he is poised for a major reconsideration in the grander scheme of things. Certainly with an entire late nineties show entitled Pop Surrealism he should be talked about more by the painters and sculptors not to mention the writers and curators themselves. I am reminded of the difference sometimes between the art world and the music world, where Michael Hurley was interviewed recently on NPR about participating in all kinds of folk concerts and festivals with the burgeoning "Freak Folk" scene created by young people - he said "they need their grandfather."

Serial Killers and the Artists Who Paint Them

2009-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

This posting is dedicated to the Harvey Family, murdered in their home in Richmond, Virginia on New Year's Day 2006 and found by my drummer friend Johnny Hott later that day. The murderers were found later in Philadelphia, not serial killers but killers out on a "killing spree." Somehow this bothers me more than the term serial killers - which does at least recognize that this might be mechanical and under some kind of mechanism - its ryhme with shopping spree and "glee" is not something anyone who knows the Harveys finds easy to take.

I am preparing to write something about the Peter Saul retrospective I saw last fall in Philadelphia - I had been preparing to anyway but the linking of Oyvind Fahlstrom and Peter Saul's "refrigerator paintings" in the Hairy Who interviews, and a call to more politics in art, has brought me into something I would like to discuss at length - capital punishment, and two serial killer painters. I prefer Peter Saul because he is depicting capital punishment itself, to Joe Coleman, who I spent far too much time around when first moving here as my closest woman friend had published his Man of Sorrows book and was preparing a monograph with John Yau and Jim Jarmusch writing two of the three essays and some kind of documentary coming out. Coleman did and does have one of the world's most fascinating collections and interior design approach - although antithetical to what I had become interested in I probably would have enjoyed seeing it for the shock novelty value of the whole thing; however months of his monomaniacal approach to any social gathering was to focus on the serial killer stories and scenarios which were only a small portion of what he actually painted, simply because it was the surefire American popular fascination of choice and would draw a group audience around him every time. I knew that due to the burgeoning sales of the mass market paperback editions of serial killer true crime in bookstores I worked in when moving back from five years in France that this was a really amped and stepped up level of what had already been a US obsession; five years in another country makes one have a new set of lenses to view one's own culture with, and working in a general bookstore in a small city is the perfect way to get a handle on the zeitgeists in all the major areas of popular interest, and even current intellectual interpretation of same outside of the specialized academic world. True Crime, popular everywhere since Victorian England and the development of Scotland Yard, Poe's invention of the detective novel and other related genre fiction forms ongoing since the eighteenth century giving sweep, depth and color to the way journalists could "report" on news items in the same serial fashion Dickens and others were using in the serialized fiction in journals that fed into a more epic form of the novel. This in england and the US was eventually matched with what was happening in France, and Paris, and the unbelievable (to Anglophones) proliferation of journals, literary, specialized, academic, scientific, reviews, dailies (newspapers) and everything in between as free for all editorial combinations of possibilities in periodical print, with paying gigs for the well circulated for all writers engravers and illustrators - what a roadmap for all other Europeans to emulate coming from the French and English Empires who had evenly carved up the rest of the world as colonies. The French press was certainly not lacking in coverage of the most lurid and then inventive ways of reporting and describing it, and never even had the nascent goals of objective reporting that were counter to the days of yellow journalism and sensationalist New York newspapers. And conflicts of all kind of course were on the horizon, often the time that specifically lurid murders, crimes and such become obsessional to serve a well known psychological purpose to take the populace's minds off of impending breakouts of total warfare. (Alot of people forget that the World Wars were rooted in the nascent Prussian alliance with Austria and the idea that the 20th Century would be the "German Century" because Europe had been so focussed on itself for so long that it could not see the oncoming giants of the US and Russia as vast continents of unmined resources and populaces that the new idea of the nation state could harness in heretofore unknown things called "ideologies," making notions of inherited land, religion, and shared blood obsolete for that century, at least.)

It is interesting to differentiate, especially for furthering a discussion of the intersection of aesthetics and politics, between the notions of fairness, ethics, and justice, as the three ages of women and men. Especially as childhood is set primarily in the hands of women, as any boy chafing at female authority in the form of his mother reinforced by a phalanx of grandmothers, aunts, older sisters, nurses, nannies, babysitters and schoolteachers will tell you, for centuries,- and the increasing realization that the only fields still left of pure speculation on money that men seem to still have the compulsive obsessive lock on (we will leave out the porn industry as it is a discussion of children) and the other purely masculine domain of creative and scientific "genius" are passing away, - have passed away already for all but the delusional. Childhood itself is changing forever, but traditions of childhood also look like they will stay forever as well. So, childhood will always remain the realm of the notion of fairness, as we all want a beautiful world for our children and so try to instill it in their hearts. (That fathers want a secret rebellious streak and humor to work for a beautiful boy world under all the eagle eyed female supervision is fair, too - why I laughed when my single friend who works in animation told me he went to South Park and the whole theater was full of fathers who had clandestinely and deliciously taken their sons.)

School should then lay the map for the young adult's study of ethics, so that there can be a general understanding of underlying principles of commonly understood ethics and the legal ramifications - perhaps the reason for so many police, law and medical programs on popular television - the narratives of ethical dilemmas generate endlessly compelling underlying plot devices. Even the XFiles taking place in the FBI and has its allegories of trustworthiness and ethics - apparently all of this has an enormous pull on the American consciousness.

The nearly impossible part for a nation state such as ours is the notion of justice, as justice as opposed to ethics and fairness is meant to make absolute decisions of moral and immoral and mete out the absolutely stern and necessarily strict punishment, and this is nearly impossible anyway in a nation state founded on separation of church and state. A State that is based on elections and voting consensus cannot even pretend to have some higher order, and even if the truly secular moral thinkers do agree on an absolute wrong it is nearly impossible to apply the punishment as following somehow logically from the premise. If Americans starting at middle age could do the work of looking forward to their own absolute maturity and experience as elders instead of fearing the appearance of being "unhip" to children and youth and unattractive full stop, it would be easier to deal with the absolutely ad hoc in the most fearful sense nature of a world that actually gets tangled up permanently in ethics, - which is an endless argument between every single willful point of view in print or on television now collapsing from the notion that in the face of the international banking and financial class there was any difference between the Democratic and Republican parties - or European and American governments and their approach to any global problem at all. And I do mean global in both senses of the word.
The financial class had no notion of justice nor ethics because they had left behind the most basic of childhood precepts faced with children's decieving and cheating ways to get more than their share of absolutely everything - they hadn't even gotten some basic notions of fairness meant to be in the heart from childhood, in other words, so how could the young adult's serious and continuous study of ethics moving into the mature and elder adults' dawning wisdom about justice have a ground to take place? Hence the bubble bursting now is the biggest bubble of all, the beautiful world we had hoped for our children - but perhaps as it was culturally playing out it was not a beautiful world at all, and just a surface glamour with corruption underneath and the real beauty can start to come through, not based on enormous debt and consumer expectations.

So if Beauty is still the biggest debate in the Art World today, and I did read some of Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, I would remind everyone of the double meaning of the word fair, that in the archaic world of children, is still used as in a Fair maiden or fair of face. I find Joe Coleman's work repulsive aesthetically, but also plain tedious, in the category of:

You don't need to put your hand in a bucket of tar to know it is black.

This was my response to my sculptor loftmate's question whether I would see the Chapman Brothers show years ago, and I have used it ever sense, If educated culture in this country means endlessly being pulled into discussions where one is supposed to show what side of some massively discussed popular topic whatever the subcategory of American people you find yourself in, I have discovered a tactic called a conversation stopper. I had to use one several nights ago with a jazz musician who wanted to talk about OJ Simpson and Ishmael Reed coming down on his innocence and tell me he knew OJ did it, and I said the same thing I came up with to avoid my father's penchant for bringing up loaded topics everytime he wanted just one person in his life he could redline with political rage - which he has maintained no matter where he has been on the political continuum which has gone from socialism to ibertarianism, if only in his own mind - "I wasn't there." I would like to use the banality of evil with certain topics, but with Coleman's work use the conversation stopper. Certain topics and artists, discussing them at all is doing too much service.

That is Joe Coleman's work.

The Immoral, Amoral and Moral

This Peter Saul painting I find fair in both senses of the word, because of the palette, the absolute novelty of his paintings as inventing with paint from that period, and the amorality of it all. The child's world, as the reformers never seem to know, is largely an amoral one. I just watched the documentary on the history of comics picking up with the invention of the comic book and the chilling speech of the man who brought down EC comics and all of its imitators and slapped the morality code on the comics for children ever after. In the documentary the speech is used to historical effect the first time and then for comic effect to close it, in the Marxian parable of the second time something comes back it is as farce. Humor is terror management for children who know above all else that they are small and defenseless - Peter Saul's work is humorously and comically in the world of the amoral, and don't we love no matter how old we are being back in that version of a catalyzingly safe world no matter what age. Terror management will never lose its use value as no one here gets out alive.

However, I did go down to hear a lecture given on Peter Saul when I had gone to Philadelphia to see the retrospective - and the galleries and the Quilt's of Gee's Bend and James Castle at the Philadelphia Museum - and the lecture framing Peter Saul's work was so demoralizing to me in its method of framing Saul's work as "moral" including a quote from that great liberator the Marquis de Sade (whose girl and boy servants all fled his home in the age that aristocrats could do anything they wanted to peasants and servant class as their was no court system there, and literary figures like Voltaire or famous alchemists like Castiglioni were apt to spend time in gaols as a ticket to world wide celebrity, so he used his tedious mind to come up with pages and pages of torture plotted along a mathematical grid of orifices and applications of torture to them. Any page of the 120 Days of Sodom makes Abu Graib look like the fraternity party antics the Republicans tried to insist it was; but never mind, I have never met anyone that has read his purported novels yet, only the received ideas of Breton Bataille and cie stemming from the ongoing French obsession with its own history with the Catholic Church.) The lecturer went on to describe the highly comic painting of a serial killer as the cold State murdering the passionate killer.

Stop right there! I too have seen Kubrick's Clockwork Orange but found just amorality and entertainment there, and yes art, but no moral lesson society can use. A reified State is what paranoids come up with, and since as a general rule men are from paranoid and women are from depressive, I would like to have a novel approach in the Art World to approaching the moral, as someone who has no problems with paranoia but as an archaic throwback to the woman as designated mourner. (There are more of us depressives around than you would think, its just that paranoids really are sure they are the ones that know the "facts" and therefore crowd the airwaves op/ed pages lecture halls and just about every forum one can imagine - well the way I have found as a depressive is to use my massive reading and different very slow yet unrelenting way of sorting information to confront these purported facts with knowledge.) This lack of paranoia is actually quite novel in an art world that has fed on pure adrenaline of one kind of another since the eighties in a country that has fed itself on adrenaline since the underlying paranoia of the fifties, but passion in its most important interpretation is pure pain and suffering, and that is for everyone who loved the murdered one who is left behind. The state can only mediate between the passions of the families and loved ones and communities permanently injured by murder of any kind. The different ways of mediating through the legal system as it has become is very long indeed now that only a few pockets of vigilante justice actually do occur in our average communities. This is the most armed and violent country on the planet not actually undergoing revolution or civil war, and even the perpetual war for perpetual peace that Noam Chomsky wrote about can redirect that focus outward anymore, so it is strange in a way that the Death Penalty has stayed a kind of nontopic for so long, as progressives and liberals such as myself have known we have been against it since adolescence and never given it another thought. Obviously the death of this family I had know fairly well has changed that forever, and my trips to Richmond show that this is thought about more than ever since the killers were found and have been on trial.

So, with the recession making everyone get more panicky and weird, it may be a time to cut through ethics discussions that can be endlessly bracketed, and discuss capital punishment, something that I have to finally think about rather than comfortably bracket just as everyone else. I am a liberal, I have been solidly against capital punishment since fifteen - although in college I did have a mad dog metaphor for killing serial killers, they had a disease beyond their brain's control and should just be shot. My roommate was the daughter of a college professor and merely got out her arsenal of purported logic, however before I even wrote the phrase "excessive rationality always leads to rationalization" had enough intimation of our country's law schools and their debate to win training that I do what I always did when confronted with debate team types who just want to play verbal tennis and win at all costs rather than hearing a point of view and considering it for learning and experience, and walked away.

I would say that capital punishment is not fair in the ultimate two wrongs do not make a right simple addition / subtraction metaphor used for children. But to make the world fair and honor the passions of those in pain and suffering, we all need to change some our truly childish lurid focus and become collectively designated mourners for the victims and all those interdependently suffering for them. I learned on New Year's Day of 2006 through a phone call of the death of a couple I knew as well as everyone nearly in Richmond, a once famous (-for-Richmond) rock star Brian Harvey whose first band I had covered in 1980 and his wife who ran the toy store that is still the best toy store I have ever been in to date. I called my friend Ainslee de Wolf in Los Angeles who sat in on their recording sessions and worked from her film experience on their video, and also my friend Katharine Gates who now lives in Westchester who did the Joe Coleman books with her imprint Gates of Heck, immediately after the news, as I am sure they called or emailed everyone they knew. I went to a funeral just a year later and someone said it was the Richmond 9/11, but the worst and most painful irony was seeing the oscar winning Capote film of the period in his life where he conceived of In Cold Blood. I don't know when we may grow up as a country and realize the most profound meaning of the banality of evil and become the designated mourners of the victims of murders doubtlessly harder to write but infinitely richer lives. I do hope someone could write a book on the Harvey Family, the stories of the entire Richmond community could fill volumes. I don't want to know anything about the murderers, they are banal and evil as it gets in a society constructed such as ours, but just talked to my closest friend about the ongoing legal system and its way of dealing with it and the continued discussion in Richmond, and neither of us find it in our hearts to have capital punishment and know that they will die.

However Peter Saul's paintings like this, as one gets older, remind me that humor is also anger management and grief management too. Temperamentally I lean to satire and black humor having no terror problems compared to the anger and grief I have as someone approaching the elder status I am looking forward to. I think the idea of hip after forty is absurd and a good way to turn oneself into a cartoon, and immoral as a simple way of never having to think anything through for the rest of one's life. The United States loves cartoons and comics too much to become a self destructive until the end one for the rest of the world to only gape at and go tribal or go down with. Time to make some decisions, if the art world is going to have anything to say to anyone outside of it.

The Harvey Family

The Harvey family
In the early afternoon of January 1, 2006, Kathryn, Bryan, Stella, and Ruby Harvey, a family of four, were found beaten, slashed and bound with electrical cord and tape in the basement of their burning house in the Woodland Heights district of Richmond, Virginia.
Kathryn Harvey, 39, was the co-owner of a popular local toy shop called "World of Mirth" in the Carytown district of Richmond, and the half-sister of actor Steven Culp. Bryan Harvey, 49, was an indie musician of note, a former member of House of Freaks, a two-man band who had recorded, performed and had a following of note in Los Angeles and college radio stations until both members decided to move back to Richmond. Their daughters Stella and Ruby were 9 and 4, respectively. Bryan and Kathryn died of blunt-force trauma to the head, Stella of smoke inhalation and blunt-force trauma to the head, and Ruby of stab wounds to her back, one of which punctured her lung. [6]
The Drive-by Truckers recorded a song about the Harveys for their album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark. The song , titled "Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife," is sung from Bryan's point of view.

Oyvind Fahlstrom

2009-04-11T06:59:00.001-07:00

I don't ordinarily like the politics behind Jed Perl's writing but there was one observation of his that had some general application, "young artists don't have influences as much as sources." This doesn't meant that young artists aren't inventive, it is just that I have many friends who are teachers that have said that when their students reinvent the wheel andthey as teachers point them towards older artists there is a new phenomenon of being shrugged off. This is not terrible - Marinetti and others wanted to burn the ground behind them - it may be though that there is not as much fervor for making it up on one's own as much as a simultaneously busy kaleidoscopic imagery yet lazy mindedness for students to confront head on later in life - right after school perhaps.

This is by no means limited to the visual arts - writers I have known are bewildered to find students writing something like Wallace Stevens for example never having heard of him much less read him, and so many other examples, the refrain is how does this happen? The teaching and scholarship of previous epochs made one incapable of being unaware of the existence of predecessors much less absolutely required to go into them and through them. My roommate came back from Yaddo years ago with a wellknown writer giving his novel to an an agent who found a publisher - I was living with him through every step of this exciting process -and then finally an editor who said "this book has so much of two of my favorite novels, Mrs. Bridge and Geek Love." Wesley had never read either, but I read his novel and recognized the vignette style of moving through a chronological time in truly compact and well written prose paragraphs isolated from each other in the page space from both Mrs. Bridge and the follow up Mr. Bridge quite well; we had all been so enthusiastic about these two novels by Evan S. Connell (and all the handsome paperbacks from the belated North Point Press also). That is a mystery how these things are in the air.
One time in Bruce Pearson's studio I was showing him my drawings and he looked at one and said it looked like his work, and I said they were redrawings of Arp forms with the aboriginal radiating lines surrounding, and added, alot of times when we think we are pulling things from thin air we find the air is very thick.

It is an interesting time when the young no longer feel that they have to eat the father, as they are quite content absentmindedly snacking on him.

I had read somewhere that Robert Storr had said now would be a good time for students to reconsider working with politics. The main thing about refamiliarizing myself with Oyvind Fahlstrom on the website of his foundation (a trip to the Strand yesterday to buy the large monograph that I had been meaning to before starting the whole Cabinet of Cabarets endeavor was gone) is how much his early fifties working a codex book form is this very sweeping cinematic doodling and abstraction from page to page, so familiar to so much going on with younger artists now; and then his incredible range of activities, listed in the bio below. I didn't know he had written so much poetry and that he wrote an influential essay about concrete poetry - the article on his poetics on the website begins with a quote from Charles Bernstein (who is a compelling performer in the Futurist MoMA event from February 9th further down on this blog); I do intend to have a lot more on poetry eventually and have to study this aspect of Fahlstrom further. There is also the film work, the early days as a political commentator and journalist, and the plays...but the main thing is the political depth and breadth of research behind his work and how plain exciting, formalistically far ranging, pop and yet elegant his work always is - and there are many times he goes more in the direction of being more abstract and formally inventive as well.

For now I find some of his work so familiar to some of what younger artists are doing, but they are doing it without the political knowledge, or desire to weave it in as content. There could be no better artist to look into at the moment for lessons in form and content and attention to global events I can imagine. He certainly was an influence on a good friend of mine Lisa Austin who went to Yale to get her MFA in 1982, (she is still making work but never moved to New York as someone who got a job teaching art far from the center) and much under discussion at the time with so many of the sculpture students I knew in the late seventies and early eighties. It really is a loss that Oyvind Fahlstrom died so young - there was a roadmap for a continued life's work here in every direction while staying absolutely necessary to an understanding of US and European hegemony and its complicated interplay. In his maps, monopoly boards, and vast information filled puzzles, it would seem that many artists I do admire who work(ed) well with political events or economic diagrams or so on have only picked up on one or a few parts of the puzzle of his vast tracking and vision. Many of these artists are (were) late bloomers or had a long time underknown or underground and so are my age or older on top of that. When the backlash hit Identity Politics and other politics in the midnineties, it hit very hard right at a time where students couldn't really afford to think about their awful tuition and debt burdens not paying off with galleries and collectors or grants and commissions one day. We paid twelve to eighteen dollars a credit hour when we went to school in my day, only the unbelievably rich kids had credit cards and cars while we had bounced checks and bicycles - but we were free, in ways no student after the college loan and credit card epoch could possibly imagine. I never got a credit card and came back from France, which was a nation of national health care and savings accounts (met people with the new debit cards but never credit cards outside of a certain demographic. The Europeans had never believed the stock market anything for anyone outside of the casino class. It is too bad they didn't know what their banking and financial class had been up to. Paper money only is one thing in the end - it is promissory notes from banks backed up by a nation state's federal reserves and taxpayer monies. This is not socialism versus global capitalism, it is the difference between fictional money and something that could be proven to be a nonfiction!

We are now printing new money and bailing out trillions that should have been revealed as fiction in the first place on some impossibly brighter future, - this is the first generation actually to increasingly eat their young with each passing decade even while throwing way too much at them from the time they are born giving them no training in temperance or saving or tools for survival - in a complete reversal of Freud's little fable used for an art world parable above. I had seen the US as increasingly financially delusional with every passing year back from Europe, and that was not subject to left or right politics because absolutely no one was tracking deregulation or economics with any common sense whatsoever - there was always such a host of issues that could be endlessly discussed and argued about that seemed more important at the time.

Please look into Fahlstrom's monopoly game boards on his website - he would have certainly been of utmost help at this time and perhaps there is an artist out there who can pick up the baton. Mark Lombardi certainly was tracking money changing hands but not perhaps aware of this overall attempt at a New World Order that was no order at all, there is no pattern and order in a global capitalism become a giant casino that was not even entertaining but purely predatory and vicious. In an article on Gagosian Peter Scheljdahl describes this infamous dealer as both a genius and a shark. Really - the shark is the lowest form of prehistoric intelligence and so maladaptive that if it stops swimming forward it dies. So many American people, museums, universities, institutions think that if they stop expanding, making ever more money, getting ever more publicity, they will die. It is time to let them shrink back into something more rational, to the size they were before they had CEOS and presidents perched like ticks feeding off the entire enterpise, and before they were grown like the little sponge toys that start out tiny and become dinosaurs by being flooded with magic grow water in the form of fictional liquidity. And there have to be more real deaths allowed as a lesson - perhaps Parsons School of Art should just melt down altogether, for just one Art World metaphor.

If there often is one marker artist for a time we are in, Oyvind Fahlstrom is the one for the times we are in now. But then he always was in his own time.

1928
Öyvind Axel Christian Fahlström was born Brazilian on the 28th of December in Sáo Paulo, the only child of Frithjof Fahlström, born in Trondheim, Norway, in 1886, and Karin Fahlström, nèe Kronvall, born in Stockholm in 1900. He spends his childhood in Sáo Paulo, Niteroi and Rio de Janeiro and is educated in Portugese and English at Escola Britannica de Sáo Paulo.

1939
In July, at the age of ten-and-a-half, he is sent to Sweden to spend the summer with his maternal grandfather and aunt. A month after his arrival in Stockholm, Germany invaded Poland. Now stranded by the outbreak of World War II, he is enrolled mid-September in Whitlockska Samskolan, a private school for foreign students in Stockholm.

1948
His parents return to Stockholm, by which time he is an adult. After graduating at the top of his class in June, he is forced to choose between Brazilian and Swedish compulsory military service. He elects to become a Swedish citizen and relinquishes his Brazilian passport.

1949-52
Classical studies and art history at the University of Stockholm. Travels to Paris and Italy meeting other poets and painters.

1950-61
Theatre and poetry, journalism, criticism, translations. Contributes regularly to the Swedish press on cultural topics, both local and foreign, a role he will perform the rest of his life. Divides his time between Stockholm, Paris, and Rome.

1952
Produces Opera, a room-sized drawing using felt-pen.
Marries Birgitta Tamm.

1953
Solo exhibition at Galleria Numero, Florence (shows Opera). Writes Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben: manifest för konkret poesi (Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy: Manifesto for Concrete Poetry), which is published in 1954.

1955-57
Produces Ade-Ledic-Nander I and II, which are part of a planned series of "character-form" paintings. Writes twenty-seven page scenario for the second painting.
Separates from Birgitta Tamm.

1955
Joins the Phases movement. Opera shown at Galerie Creuze, Paris. Solo exhibition at Galerie Aesthetica, Stockholm.

1956
Every second Saturday hosts an open studio.

1958
Contract with Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris. Participates in the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute of Art. Scholarship for study in Italy.
Divorces Birgitta Tamm.

1959
Solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Cordier and at Galerie Blanche, Stockholm. Honorable mention for Ade-Ledic-Nander II at the 5th Bienal de Sáo Paulo.

1960
Scholarship for study in France.
Marries Barbro Östlihn.

1961
Grant from the Swedish-American Foundation to live in New York. Moves into the 128 Front Street studio formerly occupied by Robert Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns lives in the same building. Henceforth he lives and works in New York, spending summers in Sweden, France and Italy. Begins the Sitting… series.

1962
First variable painting, Sitting… Six months later. Solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Cordier. Participates in New Realists exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

1962-64
Happenings at Moderna Museet, Stockholm and on Swedish television. Publishes the word-game Minneslista för Dr. Schweitzer's sista uppdrag [Checklist for Dr. Schweitzer's Last Mission]. Fåglar i Sverige [Birds in Sweden], a "tape-event", is broadcast by Swedish radio.

1965
Writes the plays Hammarskjöld om Gud [Hammarskjold on God], which is staged at Pistolteatern, Stockholm in 1966, directed by Sören Brunes, and Bröderna Strindberg [The Strindberg Brothers]. Represented by Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

1966
Den helige Torsten Nilsson [Holy Torsten Nilsson], a five-hour audiphonic novel, is broadcast by Swedish radio. First variable multiples, Eddie (Sylvie's Brother) in the Desert and a banner, Send Me Back to Congo. Represents Sweden at the XXXIII Venice Biennale (the most important work is Dr. Schweitzer's Last Mission, 1964-1966). Performance of Kisses Sweeter Than Wine for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering organized by Experiments in Art and Technology at the 26th Street Armory, New York. Roulette, his first painting in oil on photo paper is shown in Erotic Art at Sidney Janis Gallery. Bord (poems 1952-55) published by Bonniers, Stockholm. The Strindberg Brothers is translated to French.
Mao-Bob Hope-March (black and white, 16 mm) using material from Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.

1967
Writes the play Oswald kommer tillbaka [Oswald Comes Back]. Solo exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Produces his first work in which the oil on photo paper on vinyl elements float on water (Parkland Memorial). Version of Kisses Sweeter Than Wine broadcast on Swedish radio. Monograph published by Bonniers, Stockholm. Participates in towards a cold poetic image, Galleria Schwarz, Milan; Pictures to be Read/Poetry to be Seen, the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

1968
Makes two documentaries in New York for Swedish television about the anti-war movement amongst other things (black and white, 16 mm).The Strindberg Brothers is staged in New York during the summer at the Gotham Art Theatre by Michael Abrams. Finishes the play Förlåt Hitler [Forgive Hitler]. Bonniers publishes Den helige Torsten Nilsson in book form. Eddie (Sylvie's Brother) in the Desert... Collage is donated to The Museum of Modern Art, New York in the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. Takes part in IV Documenta Kassel. Makes a thirty minute film, U-Barn (black and white and color, 35 mm). Retrospective exhibition in Pentacle, Musèe des Arts Dècoratifs, Paris, includes The Little General (Pinball Machine).

1969
Solo exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York and Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne. Travelling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Writes the screenplay for a feature film (old-age love story and revolt in a psychiatric hospital). Makes Meatball Curtain (for R. Crumb) for Art and Technology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Begins filming Du Gamla Du Fria (100 minutes, color, 35 mm).

1971
Solo exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

1972
Cellen [The Cell], a radio theatre collage for Swedish radio based on interviews with cancer patients. Du Gamla Du Fria [Provocation] is shown at the Venice Film Festival. Self-publishes Sketch for World Map Part I (Americas, Pacific) which is distributed in the May issue of the New Left journal, Liberated Guardian, in an edition of 7000 copies. World Bank is selected for the New York Collection for Stockholm, an American gift to Moderna Museet. $108 Bill is published by E.A.T. in two editions: as a silkscreen print and as a lithograph.
Writes the play Dromdjuret [The Dream Animal].

1973
Solo exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Writes the play The Black Room, based on the Watergate scandal. Retrospective at Moore College of Art Gallery, Philadelphia. Sketch for "World Map", is published as a silkscreen print by Avery, Kenner and Weiner, Inc. to benefit the Youth International Party.

1974
Retrospective at the University of Wisconsin, Foster Gallery, Eau Claire. Solo exhibitions at Galerie Buchholz, Munich, and Galleria Multhipla, Milan. Die Zeit publishes an article and a silkscreen print, Column No. 4 (IB Affair). Retrospective portfolio of ten silkscreen prints published by Edizioni Multhipla, Milan. Prize for the silkscreen print, Seven S.O.M.B.A. Elements, at The 9th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo.

1975
Solo exhibition at Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris. The exhibition Let's Mix All Feelings Together - Baruchello, Erró, Fahlström, Liebig is shown in museums in Munich, Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Paris, Rennes, Humlebaek, etc. A Proposito del Mulino Stucky for the Venice Biennale. Filming of documentary on Fahlström begins (Jan Sundström, director). Begins writing play interlocking events from the life of Wilhelm Reich with scenes from the television serial, Blondie.
Separates from Barbro Östlihn, to live with Sharon Avery.

1976
Prepares to live and work in Paris for a year. Participates in Drawing Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which travels internationally. Solo exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York and Galerie Ahlner, Stockholm. Catalogue raisonnè on his prints and multiples is completed by Sharon Avery. Éditions Maeght publishes Nights, Winters,Years (Words by Justin Hayward) in the series, Affiches (an artist-writer collaboration). Monograph published by Edizioni Multhipla, Milan (essays by Achille Bonito Oliva, Laszlo Glozer, Olle Granath, Öyvind Fahlström). Completes plans for Three Nightmares, a pool installation commissioned by Renault, Paris. Documentary on Fahlström aired on Swedish television. Elements from "Masses" and Sixteen Elements for "Chile I" prepared for publication by Gino Di Maggio and Sharon Avery. Reworks Night Music 4: Protein Race Scenario into eleven panels.
Divorces Barbro Östlihn.
An exploratory operation in mid-September reveals colon cancer metastacized to the liver which is untreatable.
Marries Sharon Avery.
Dies on the 9th of November in Stockholm.

Hairy Who, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Installation

2009-04-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

There is an essay to be written about installation I would like to do starting with the Salon des Incoherentes in 1870s Paris, but I am not inclined to do it now, just that here are two important installations by the Hairy Who from the late sixties and one by Oyvind Fahlstrom from 1964: certainly these two would be part of my timeline of installation ideas for exhibitions in an essay I do hope one day to tackle. (Different from installation art, which has become a genre). I am someone who loves to research things - the amount of reading I have done and things I have discovered for posting has been rewarding in ways I couldn't have imagined even as someone who has done this in a less focussed way all of my life.

I am going to use this opportunity to quote from Dan Nadel's interviews mentioned before in The Ganzfeld, where he asks certain members if they were influenced by H. C. Westermann, but more interestingly, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Peter Saul. The reflections on Saul I am going to record along with some postings on his work quite presently, having seen the small retrospective in Philadelphia (perhaps awaiting the big one) and his two shows in Chelsea at George Adams and Nolan last week - however, with Oyvind Fahlstrom it has been a shock continually to me how underknown he continues to be in the last few decades, even given his early death in 1975. I had too many artists I knew so thrilled with Inka Essenhigh's early work, and so unwilling to listen to my version of it - which I pointed out as bits of bodies and figuration straight out of early days of Metal Hurlant magazine (first imported to the US in the seventies under the name Heavy Metal). These are artists I could name if someone handed me the issues from my trace memories of looking at it myself. Her later work in fact has never gotten past this rendering style based on at most two maybe three of these French comics artists, and in fact only developed into some large scale tableaux images with all the implied motion frozen in the center, still sticking with the basic thematics of comic book genre, while her color sensibility is just monochrome grisaille composition with various colors replacing the grey. The first work of Essenhigh's had body parts and figurative elements strewn on a nearly John McCracken finished rectangle making me imagine them on a car hood. So I would try to tell everyone she should look at Oyvind Fahlstrom after this initial description and no one knew who he was.

Finally, working at Hacker Art Books about six years ago I was talking to my friend and coworker Hector Romero about what Inka Essenhigh's work could be like if she looked at Oyvind Fahlstrom and we pulled out a monograph and found we had both been fascinated with Fahlstrom's work from some complimentary directions, especially the political. Hector is the same age as the others I had been talking to, that is roughly ten years younger or a little more than me - I am fifty this year so this was when I was forty and they were thirty about ten years ago. Hector was different - working full time at Hacker's Art Books and now the Strand in the art department is a continuing education unlike any other - he helped me find the Assemblage book I needed for this forum when working on the Ad Hoc Shop. Hector Romero has a website and I recommend his drawings having seen them in his studio and now on this site, and any questions about Art Books he is a very good source in the Strand Art Department.

It is such a pleasure to segue in music fashion from the Hairy Who into Oyvind Fahlstrom as a next posting tomorrow through the graces of Dan Nadel's interview; here are their views on Fahlstrom and what he meant to them at the time:

Jim Nutt: "I don't know when I became aware of Fahlstrom, but it was from reproductions, since none of it showed up in Chicago until 1967 at the opening show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I remember liking what I saw right away. At some point he visited the Art Institute of Chicago and he asked to see the Hairy Who show up at the time (maybe the '68 show).
For the life of me, I can't remember why I didn't go hear his lecture (I was out of school at the time), unless I have misremembered and he came after we were on the west coast (...) In any case, Whitney [Halstead] reported that he looked very carefully at the show, liked what he saw but never cracked a smile. (Perhaps he was very polite and thought it bad form to say anything negative under the circumstances.) He was apparently a very serious person."

Gladys Nilsson: "I always liked the idea of the Fahlstrom magnetic stuff: game boards thst the viewer (owner) could fool around and play with. What fun, and fun is good. Comedy is good."

These are badly scanned images of several installations the Hairy Who did including a show at the Corcoran at top left of the second image, and a photograph of Karl Wirsum playing with Claude Nutt next to Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt.
The installation by Fahlstrom from 1964 is still so elegant and radical it floors me. I can't get over looking at these three images and apologies for the scanning quality. Absolutely anyone interested in the Hairy Who should buy this issue of the Ganzfeld right away. Gabriel, the owner of Desert Island Books (who pointed this issue out to me) and I were wondering why there has not been a book yet, perhaps Dan Nadel will do one.

Gladys Nilsson

2009-04-08T06:30:00.000-07:00

From one of Gladys Nilsson's latest press releases for an exhibition in Chicago just two years ago:

"Whimsical" is the term probably most often used to describe Nilsson's watercolor paintings and the artist enjoys a good pun, visual or verbal. Her figures have gangly, limp-noodle-like arms and legs. They are gawky yet graceful. And Nilsson's subjects are ordinary but at the same time serve to effectively represent basic human feelings and interactions. Her compositions always involve humor or irony, and the artist frequently makes fun of herself. As put by the Tory Folliard Gallery about Nilsson, "each work of art celebrates the artist's unending curiosity for human behavior: rituals of courtship, gastronomic delights, and narcissistic passions."

In the 1960s Nilsson was a founding member of the "Hairy Who," a group of artists who also came to be known as the Chicago Imagists and the Monster Roster. Although acknowledging the significance of being identified as a member of the Chicago Imagists, Nilsson has said that she prefers to think of herself as an individual, not as part of a group or movement. Since the '60s Nilsson has gone on to exhibit in over 200 solo exhibitions and 400 group shows, including at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), Los Angeles County Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), James Mayor Gallery (London, England), and San Francisco Museum of Art.

For younger audiences Nilsson might better be known as the artist who did the drawing found on the inside of the CD cover for Wilco's release "A Ghost Is Born" and for her interview which is included in The Wilco Book.

I have added a CD cover by my friend Michael Hurley, who had been drawing comics with his older sister who taught him to draw and then kept it up for life, and who is a cult figure amongst the current revival of "freak folk" musicians, because his drawings and paintings remind me in source and in spirit of one of the ways Gladys Nilsson has painted and rendered - she has several, and has kept them all going, since the beginning. An unrecognized prolific and reverie inducing, yet thoroughly idiosyncratic painter. I have had so many discussions lately about how little artists are really allowed to be idiosyncratic, in the deepest sense of the word, in the new pluralistic yet thoroughly taxonomic art world we are in. As if idiosyncratic making - and the being and existence it springs from - have nothing to do with originality. Which was the original Modernist project, after all.

Suellen Rocca

2009-04-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

The current issue of the Ganzfeld has a long reportage article mainly consisting of interviews with Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Art Green, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum, titled the Hairy Who's History of the Hairy Who, by Don Nadel. There are for the first time in print photographs of their famous installation in 1968 exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, where my friends and I had famously communicated by word of mouth things read about the kitschy wallpaper backdrop to the paintings, the comic books, the pricing, and all kinds of subversions to the art world exhibition and marketing and High and Fine art as usual. So amazing after all these years to see the actual photographs of something we were so much fans of in Richmond, Virginia in the late seventies and early eighties. We were enrolled in various art departments at Virginia Commonwealth University, and inspired by the Chicago artists' exhibitions in the late sixties that we tried so hard to envision.

The interviews clear up some disinformation that I remember hearing right at the time - especially the legend that they named themselves like a rock band. However, that was a legend we could use at the time; having thrown ourselves at some point in the late seventies into all things new wave and punk, and John Waters films and Bruce Conners' film for Devo's Satisfaction. In the graphic design courses I was taking we went from teachers imposing Helvetica and Swiss International Design as they had for several decades against all rock poster and pop influences from any direction whatsoever, to April Greiman, Wet Magazine (the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing) and all things in the New Wave design, in just one year - 1977 was the first and 1978 was the second. It blew both the faculty and students wide open forever, to all the neo-constructivism or historical influences from the past, and all innovative new trends for the future. This made it all exciting in a way that only precomputer design trained graphic designers could possibly understand; but it was something happening also in all the arts and in music and culturally all over - the opening back up of the past as an incredible stomping ground for re -envisioning and reinterpretation against an outmoded ever "progressive" future, simultaneous with a future made more exciting and freestyle by throwing off entrenched and petrified ideas of this progressive future dating to the forties, fifties and sixties by this time.

All of the East Village nascent scene, and its sources in the Secret History of Pop painters Peter Saul & Oyvind Fahlstrom, Bad Painting, what came to be called New Image Painting, Funk Art, Mail Art, and Chicago Imagism burst into the VCU Painting Department at this time which had been dominated by two more conceptually bent Photorealists and four Triumph of American Painting text and role model driven abstract painters. The students organized a show with the excellent title The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and in this well hung and packed (in all three senses of the word) exhibition, these rebellious undercurrents were in full force.

I had just joined the college newspaper and reviewed every band in Richmond I had seen and had enough musicians I had hung around with to know quite a lot about the talk style of bands. The story of how they ended up with the name of the exhibition in the interviews in the Ganzfeld does clear up how they named the exhibition itself and ended up sticking with the moniker and it was not like a rock band in conception, but the conversational style they described amongst each other and the "aha" moment with Karl Wirsum and the others is similar to how bands spend so much time hanging and talking and develop an enormous amount of inside humor, and even how they grope for a good name and have a narrative of how they finally found it. So our original inspiration of a group of artists that band together in a way musicians have for so very long had a kind of verity of its own, this still remains a singular instance of visual artists bonding and presumably with this issue of the Ganzfeld and their continued base in Chicago and contac with each other, for life.

As we were all listening to and dancing to and going to see local and touring versions of this new music we loved the idea of a group of artists hanging out together like a band and working with a shared sensibility but mastering their own instruments and voice, as a great metaphor for drawing and painting - and friendship. The art director of the college newspaper was a painter but two of us were from the CA & D department - Dale and Ronnie were actually roommates and we did all the grafix and comix mainly with just a few others let in. ronnie was black and this makes me laugh as a kind of grafix takeover of the newspaper version of the Mod Squad. Ronnie and I were in CA we had friends studying animation and the comic art fervor was actually in courses like a History of Animated film Shorts class I took, and Dale was doing paintings that were rather like Peter Saul's palette reinterpreting Picabia, but that was the core of the three of us as Hairy Who fan club central in Richmond, and for me the fact that Suellen Rocca and Gladys Nilsson were integral members from the start was the really amazing and inspiring thing.

Suellen Rocca is the only one to start off her interview saying the single most important influence on her was Ray Yoshida. (Please scroll down and see the postings on Ray Yoshida, Joseph Yoakum and Hawaii for an important footnote to this, in my life as an artist, but for anyone with in depth curiosity and interest about Chicago Art, starting with the Monster Roster and ongoing.) After telling Mr. Nadel that her parents were both jewellers, she said she was really interested in the catalogues and the illustrations and pictures of jewelry, and catalogues from Sears of bras and girdles, and then Kindergarten readers, so she would have all these sources of fascination with childhood looking and reverie on her studio walls.

The first two images are from her work that I remember, as are the reproductions in the Ganzfeld; the last one is her newest work which has something that reminds me of Rosenquist as in the first block of Art Green's below, but has still a lot of her image repertoire - it is hard with both Art Green and Suellen Rocca to see their work without removing the lens of attachment and nostalgia to the old work. This is always a process with nearly everyone as it is hard to be flooded with enthusiasm the way one was in youth, but as an artist there are imperatives involved when work changes this much and the time between has been so long.

By entering the actual paintings with longer looking and a willed opening up I do feel I can pay the respect due and understand them better from inside the work. Still, it is hard to listen to later music by bands one was once passionate about, see later films by filmmakers one once was breathless (reference intended) to see the next appearance of in a film series or cinematheque, and if one is a painter, well...I will say I am so pleased to post this painter as one of my first women role models in painting along with Gladys Nillson. They were the two, they as a dynamic duo gave me a way of entering the whole endeavor of painting with oil on support from having majored in the CA department. Nearly all my friends were in this department and we were intensely engaged in photography, design 2D and 3D, media, animation, film, illustration, comics and all kinds of other technically and conceptually difficult projects, sometimes all simultaneously and with insane deadlines all coming around every week we were there, with the free for all enrollment of those days, and the seventies major recession pressure to get out in four years and find a job immediately breathing down our necks - we all knew quite well that one floor above us - the legends in their own minds in the Painting Department - called us the "Sign Painters." Thank you Suellen and Gladys, for looking at primitive art, self taught art, comics art, but especially, especially all that illustration and design for popular, commercial art culture and for what almost all of us young women who entered the CA & D imagined trying to do for a living - illustrate and even write children's books, by way of illustrating children's schoolbooks for a living first.

Art Green at Cue

2009-04-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Art Green was the least known to me of the Hairy Who and all the Chicago Imagists. (A taxonomically imposed name like so many others writers come up with after the fact.) When first starting this blog I had read Ray Yoshida's obituary and posted at length on Yoshida, Joseph Yoakum and Hawaii.

My earliest attempt to paint to put together some of the comics I was doing with several friends from the painting department who were at my college newspaper, dancing couple panels, and some figurative mutations like the now underknown woman comic artist M. K. Brown from National Lampoon and Jim Nutt, with a palette completely swiped from one of his ultra violet black light suffused paintings I had been mesmerised by in a group exhibition at VCU's Anderson Gallery.

I had discovered a Comix and Grafix Bookstore in my neighborhood on Metropolitan in my neighborhood of Williamsburg not far from the famous Crest Hardware store called Desert Island. I can't recommend this store enough - I have Spoonbill & Sugartown on Bedford practically memorized and sift through the used books as they come in there, so I am happy to walk into a store as packed as this one with new things to discover. Two weeks ago I stopped in to inquire after comics having metacommentary on the art world and the owner Gabriel had recommended a book with an entire segment on a critique at Chicago Art Institute which I will spring on everyone in the Comic Relief section planned just after this group of postings - the intertwining of Chicago artists and pop culture and comics is a perfect segue into a respite filled with recession funnies.

It turns out Gabriel had also gone to the Chicago Art Institute and showed me a copy of the Ganzfeld with the installation shots from the original exhibitions and a series of interviews with several of the group of friends clearing up some of the usual disinformation. The next paragraphs are from Jim Nutt's writing as curator of Art Green at Cue, since I had posted Victor Kord at June Kelly and a meditation on Matisse (and much else) on either side of Marina Adam's show at Cue - an interesting twist on the alternative space.

Curator's Statement

by Jim Nutt

I was struggling in a first year painting class, desperate to do anything that looked better than half baked, when I became aware of some movement behind me at the back of the room. Though the interlopers were unknown to me, I slowly became fascinated with the distraction. They were silently removing a painting from the storage rack, giving it close scrutiny, and with the aid of animated gestures, argued in hushed tones the vices and virtues of every square inch of the painting at hand. And there was some giggling. I had never seen such a lengthy and animated examination of a painting. Needless to say I was impressed and hoped to make their acquaintance at some point. Fortunately I did, eventually discovering they were fellow first year students Cynthia Carlson and Art Green.

As I came to know Art, I realized how common this sort of behavior was for him. When he became interested in something, say an image or idea or their relationship, he would follow the interest wherever it went. Invariably, his progress would begin to double back on itself, and he would then find himself proceeding in the opposite direction. Then on to a variant, and then another and so on. It wasn’t exactly willy-nilly, though at times it appeared so. Open ended investigation of this sort quite often leads to a state of confusion in most of us, but for Art it leads to possibilities, often to multiple paintings, each nailing one or another destination. It is not surprising he would become fascinated with the potential of the oscillating illusion of necker cubes or find time to ponder if it is better or worse that a rolling stone gathers no moss.

Curiously his paintings are simultaneously both easy and difficult to look at. At first glance, there is a firmness of purpose and legibility of means that suggests casual grasp is possible. They seem to be and then are easy to read, encouraging a closer look. But this leads to my realization that something’s not quite right, but then it is. I have left easy-read and am now in the painting.

I experience this every morning when, half awake as I meander down the stairs, I find myself slipping into a new part of his painting which hangs on the wall at the foot of the stairs. I may experience the painting whole for a moment, but before I can help it, I‘m in, traveling yet another previously unnoticed path. What a treat!

Painters, Painting and the Idea of Home

2009-03-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

Matisse's studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse's work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, scaled away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem L'Invitation au Voyage:

"Furniture gleaming with the sheen of years would grace our bedroom; the rarest flowers, mingling their odours with vague whiffs of amber, the painted ceilings, the fathomless mirrors, the splendour of the East ... all of that would speak, in secret, to our souls, in its gentle language. There, everything is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure."

Within Modernism, there has been a counterstrain to avant-gardism; I used to sit in a course for graduate students titled "Tactics" where famous New York artists would come down and speak and so many graduate and undergraduate students would try to get something from them in the way of attention - and strategy, and connections - and when first hearing the name of this course I remembered Baudelaire said he was against the term avant-garde and any military terms for art.

The first image below is from the apartment my former husband and I found in Paris on rue de cherche-midi in the Sixth Arrondisement, not far from the Jardin de Luxembourg where I could go everyday and stroll, which is what the French do in their parks. The reproduction is not very clear but in this 17th or 18th C building we had a studio apartment with a small kitchen and bathroom attached to it, with plaster walls, thick wood beams, and this shelving niche in one corner, where I gave pride of place to Matisse's book Jazz that I bought in the first bookstore I worked for right after it came out in its early eighties new and technically state of the art reproduction.

That I had gotten reinterested in interiors through my husband from first meeting him as a boyfriend is absolutely true, as his mother had actually had her rented Edwardian house in Chillum, a medieval village in England, decorated so spectacularly in the traditional style that it was featured in the British House & Garden; and that his father (they had been divorced and started new families long ago) was a full steam ahead enthusiast for Memphis design and all Italian and other hip design of the time and put together a house that reflected that; this meant that wherever my husband and I lived it would be something we worked on together from alot of Mexican, some Japanese, some Indian , some modernism, and a considered bohemian thrift store mix. He was a painter with two parents practically obsessed with Interior Design, we were both painters that enjoyed this making and painting furniture and decorating our homes. There was a lot of DIY preparation even including scraping wallpaper and plastering and repainting and work house and sign painting that prepared me quite well for coming up here to the DIY loftspace I have been in now for over twelve years and its reconfigurations. painting projects, replastering and all manner of upkeep. (And a contract for housepainting I did by myself for Coco Fusco and some housepainting work with a loftmate who had her own business for awhile, in the early years.)

As a girl child it was suggested I study Interior Design, which was confused in some minds with Interior Decoration, but as a maker and builder of things including a girl's fort and puppet stages for puppets and furniture and props for backyard fairs I made from 3rd grade on I wasn't confused, just liked drawing and painting things so much more. However I was fascinated by my father's girlfriend's apartment in DC in 1968 or so with its Eero Saarinen tulip table and chairs on a black and white Op Art shag rug and the Op textiles on canvas stretchers around the place - I wanted my Dad to marry her so that we could have her cool stereo and record collection and furniture, and he did - it went well with, and enlivened all the Scan furniture and his minimalist acquisitions to fill the split level he acquired when getting custody of us.

The Baudelaire quote speaks to my earliest memories of a house and a home. When my parents remarried my mother had brought back Persian miniatures and Persian rugs and leather ottomans and all kinds of Middle Eastern things from having lived in Ankara in Turkey, and some Mediterranean objects from close to a year in Cannes in France, and they had gone all out to have a large house and prepare the way for my brother coming into the world. Then they divorced again and moved into a tiny apartment and a little townhouse - which in my mother's case had her garden statue of Aphrodite in all her over six feet of glory right in full view on first entering the little living room. My mother's house was always Baudelairean, and the kitchens Matissean, even in tiny apartment and townhouse complexes, and little rancher or bungalow suburban structures ever after.

The topic I wanted to discuss, with the image above. I was leafing through the January issue of Elle Decor at the newsstand when his painting popped out of the picture at me - right in the middle of a living room over the proverbial sofa.

A fellow graduate student at Tyler showed me a woman undergraduate's assemblage painting in the school catalogue, a monster of paint and tire halves and the largest artificial flowers saying admiringly "that could never go over anyone's sofa.' Given the above autobiography, it would be difficult to buy into this canard in the first place, but also I have a very real inability to hear received ideas as anything but such - any phrase I even hear twice may be suspect. As a dreamy but also very astute peruser of Mairie Claire Maison and World of Interiors and the much missed eighties and nineties House & Garden, I rolodexed up the feature on Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house and slotted that painting into an imitator's of that aesthetic's starter collection, right over the much less expensive version of the same couch. I was envisioning this just as Steve had instantly triggered this unconscious exercise by saying this, but said nothing. I don't like dampening other's enthusiasm with these thoughts, just store them away for the right moment to try and collect them into an essay on an idea, as in now.

The idea is painting's place in people's homes - as Matisse famously put it, he wanted to make paintings that would be like an armchair for a tired businessman. What a lovely way to think of someone who might potentially buy one of your paintings, might I add, the counterstrain in Modernism to wanting to shock the bourgeoisie. Matisse was stating his case fairly alone in these times of desired revolution and reform following in the spirit of the protoCommunist Saint Simon after the second half of the nineteenth century's incubation and infancy period of all these notions, introducing this essay above, when Saint Simon was already nearly ninety years ago at the cusp of High Modernism.

It actually is an imperative for discussion, at this time, and Dan Christensen the perfect symbol of this, as someone who was the earliest artist to suffer from something now called flipping in the auction houses and secondary markets but at the time it happened to Dan Christensen was an unconscious mechanism of the auction houses' very new rise in position in the contemporary markets forming in the sixties.

This is from page 18 of Anthony Haden-Guest's Book True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, in the first chapter describing the first auction devoted to a contemporary collection of Art, the 1973 selection from the collection of Robert C. Scull at the newly acquired Parke-Bernet by Sotheby's:

"Another painter whose work did well from the sale was Dan Christensen, a leader of a movement called Lyrical Abstraction. They were seen as a third wave - after Abstract Expressionism and Color Field - and doughty competitors to the dour Minimalists. Christensen described the effects on his sale as 'catastrophic.' Collectors who had bought his pieces for a few hundred dollars quickly popped them into salesrooms, creating a glut. "The prices started dropping. I suddenly started having a very bad time," he says.

The first time in history is serious and the second time is farce, according to Marx - the first time is serious and returns with redoubled force, according to Hegel. The economic crisis to Marxians (who many think rhymes with Martians by now) may seem a necessary farce. I suppose I am part Marxian or Martian myself, as I have been following the economic trajectory of this country quite closely since moving back in 1991, especially reading a book on executive pay packages and golden parachutes by Graef Crystal in 1992 or so titled In Search of Excess, and reading the Times business pages first even before this recession started.

I would say for all the mature painters I know the recession is very very hard at the moment - we should all be so lucky to not be part of some big warehousing for possible future flipping that has now ground to another art market halt (the third, fourth and fifth return were not something newly historical 19th C. followers of Hegel were able to foresee enough to have any commentary on - in Hegel's world there was supposed to be some kind of progress through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; in David Brooks frightening article in the Times Op Ed pages this country has been manic from near the beginnings and stay that way ad infinitum without worrying ever about temporary setbacks like recessions. He cites such a list of American entrepeneurs and Horatio Alger stories, and figures like Andrew Carnegie as fonts of wisdom supporting his thesis that everywhere the seeds of America's new enormous upswing are already sprouting, but as Crystal pointed out on the first pages of his book by way of introduction, Carnegie stated that the president of a company should never get more than 32 times the amount of the lowest paid employee. This was no legal idea for Carnegie, it was a solid fiscal ratio. (And he was called a Robber Baron?)

Some kind of collective national capitalist mania followed by financial recessions could synthesize into fiscal reflection, responsibility and maturity, if it were to take the steps towards recognizing this is not mental nor fiscal health with the diagnostic terms so clinical - for example, Mr. Brooks, if we put the capital and philanthropy back into capitalism? And most importantly disbelieve the notion that Wall Street wags this old dog of a US nation?

In the meantime, any of us who are in the homes of any solid, really hardworking, communally spirited, tired bourgeois types - the ones that are left - and in some pride of place on their walls, - and making them still believe in the world's strength, intelligence, and beauty, we should think of Matisse and his wise newly created adage at the absolute beginning days of High Modernism and consider ourselves lucky. No, let's change the terms completely - we all would be doing better if we considered ourselves fortunate rather than lucky.

Marina Adams, The Novel and The Erotic

2009-03-15T13:17:00.001-07:00

The basic five longings listed in my essay on Katia Santibanez include the Erotic and the Novel, which would be Matisse's absolute domain - it taking a great deal of intellect to innovate and introduce something truly novel into the world. It also takes alot of study of all the forms the French call La Luxe, La Luxure and La Luxurie to have made what Matisse has made. These words are not very translateable but in English the Voluptuous and the Sumptuous and the most Erotic in its more specific sense come somewhat close. All of this is certainly found in Marina Adam's work.

I had said that a certain Modernism privileges novelty and ideas of order - that is the eye on authority that Matisse was not so fixated on, as someone who was not particularly interested in either reform or rebellion: he shows something very early on which I would call a certain kind of sturdy, peaceful, confident maturity, which doesn't imagine changing the world; just being one of the best painters ever within it. Marina Adams has certainly been paying attention to Matisse, through her own eroticism and innovation, and this is why I wanted to pair her with Victor Kord.

This posting is based on her show at Cue in late 2008, and we may as well also bring up The Song of Solomon as it is one of her titles. The Song of Solomon and its lyric is the only extended erotic passage in the Old Testament and just as surely probably based on words, song and musical accompaniment composed and sung by a woman.

Marina Adams had an Alma Thomas quote for her exhibition - the small catalogue is still available at Cue and it is still also on the website. This is interesting to me as Alma Thomas has sorted out to be my most important experience of a painter in my life to date as that is what my body and my skin have told me. Thomas' show at Rosenfeld is the first time and may be the only time I ever got gooseflesh from an exhibition of paintings. I used to be a music critic and gospel and classical were the only ones to cause gooseflesh consistently as genres with other moments (usually live) also stepping in, and I had not really thought of visual arts as something that would ever give me this kind of prickled awe. So: Marina Adams working through the lost music and song of Hebrew still coming through the imagery and beauty of the Song of Solomon and Alma Thomas' musical abstract joy and some of her knowledge of a vital spring palette (with a great deal of her own color sensibility evident), and Matisse's lines, abstract forms and figuration is not so surprising as a thread runs through it all, Eros and Joy.

Victor Kord also talks about jazz, which is tied to Matisse through his book Jazz.

With Marina's painting, who happens to have been born in October of the same year I was born, I think of Al Green. I once made a riddle asking what Al Green and Tantra had in common that had a short but definitive answer rendered obsolete by Chris Quirk's wife Amy Madden's immediate and definite response - "alot."

I had also paired Marina Adams with Victor Kord because she is married to Stan Whitney, who turned out to be one of the great teachers at Tyler for me, and doubtless many others, before retiring just a few years ago. (He was a student of Al Held's and his old school Tough Love teaching was Al's famous toughness and his more abstract but nonverbally present benevolence were well combined). I was explaining to Stan at Mira Schor's opening the Al Green metaphor in Marina's work after the more obvious discussion of Matisse, and he started to walk away as I was saying "It's a woman thing!" - he laughed, it was always a pretty hearty laugh and good to hear as a student at Tyler.

"It's a woman thing." It certainly is, Thomas' work is womanly, and also mature as I had said earlier about Matisse and so is Marina Adam's, in direction. I have been thinking for years about maturity in modernism - and postmodernism (even rarer). Victor Kord's and Marina Adams' work enfolds both modern and postmodern notions into a work that might have been starting out from the beginning with a focus on maturity - it certainly looks and feels that way.

Victor Kord, Jazz and the Free Play of Forms

2009-03-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

These are paintings from Victor Kord's show at June Kelly. As the first and only painting class I had before going to graduate school was Victor's, at Virginia Commonwealth University, quite a few years ago, I had a special interest in seeing his exhibition there - because I had only seen a few reproductions of his work before ever. I had heard he had been teaching at Cornell before running into him about four or five years ago in Chelsea, and was curious as all get out to see what he was up to, after we had re-established our acquaintance.

Not only was Victor a really good teacher and introduction to painting and therefore fortunate for me as a complete novice, he had been reading my book review column that focussed on both fiction and poetry in the Richmond monthly a group of us from the Commonwealth Times college newspaper had begun to put out, and asked me to write for the New Art Examiner about some shows. So getting back to the art writing he invited me to do is entirely based on his early invitation (I was 21 or 22) to do it in the first place. I had been so swept up in the music scene after doing a roundup of all the local bands and record and concert reviews at the college newspaper that I had completely forgotten the two group exhibitions foisted on me there at that time until researching my other reviews of plays, films, music and books I did as the Folio Editor there, and researching and photocopying them about 9 years ago in the VCU Library.

This is from an email I sent Victor following asking for jPegs to post him paired with Marina Adams, as painters who obviously had thought about Matisse for years and arrived at work that is contemporarily thinking through Matisse, and then Victor talking about jazz music's importance to him:

My undergrad was in the Communication Arts & Design dept. where I didn't learn anything except for example in typography how to take one helvetica lower case letter (memorably my choice was h - for helvetica itself maybe, which Rob Carter made us use for two semesters (before he got punkified by April Graiman and the new wave design) - we had to take the letter and create 26 variations / mutations with a French curve and rapidograph and India Ink on the letter, completely out of our heads. Hey wait - if you linked those forms of all kinds of abstracted letters together colorfully - and I mean with a very subtle and personal color sensibility - and with jazz improv spirit you might get something like Victor Kord paintings one day...actually design itself is not a bad discipline for abstracting from, I just dropped that ball until seeing your work reminded me of the way of thinking that project engendered that would make me have the groundwork to appreciate the discipline and chops to make the free play of these forms.

Andrea Way, The Calendar, The Grid, and the Idea of Wonder

2009-03-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Greeks considered what we would call in English Wonder an important emotion, as leading to philosophy - wonderment leads to wondering which leads to seeking to know the world further. Pierogi itself has been a Cabinet of Wonders, quite well known for its extra high level of accomplishment in craft, artisanship, and the intensity of commitment to mining a particular path, amount of puzzle thinking and brainwork behind this commitment, and often the sheer amount of time devoted to making each piece. This sometimes leads to a certain kind of wonderment, quite sepecific, to such an extent that I have affectionately nicknamed it the Ripley's Believe it Or Not effect, when taken to the FX level of a Robert Lazzarini.

Andrea Way is more in the lineage of Karen Arm and Greg Stone - especially Greg Stone as they met long ago at an exhibition at the Clocktower devoted to labor intensive work. I do think about the difference between mystery thinking and puzzle thinking, as there is a difference in magic in its one sense and the cabaret magician sense. Tom Friedman for example is an excellent cabaret magician, probably the best. I had a studio visit with him and I impulsively said that his work reminded me of my father, who had a magic show for the children in his small town where he grew up and used to pull card out of the air and coins out of our ears. He looked at me in a very strange way and I didn't understand this look until I read an article later where he talked aobut the magic shows he used to do with his brother. I find this genre of work, where the mystery is how someone solved there own puzzles, entertaining but quite controlling - I like more room for my own reverie, rather than participating in the general audience's oohs and ahs.

Andrea Way's work in this show reminds me that the first life drawing I did was in fifth or sixth grade when we were asked to make drawings based on a microscope. That this was a source of wonder and intense and serious pleasure would be evident in the kind of drawings and paintings I do based on some of this source material abstracted, its just that Andrea Way's exhibition 365 Days took a more obvious engagement with nature viewed either this way or up close with real leaves, and other objects found so often on the same streets leaves fall on (a whole suite of pennies) and arranged the months either in calendars on vitrines, is a stunning accomplishmetn, and I wrote about Andrea's show and Katia's together because they fall so close to my own sensibility that my nascent collector that does what I call Theoretical Shopping (what I would purchase if I indeed had the money to purchase) gets baffled - instead of one drawing painting or object from an exhibition it was in both these shows, well about six or eight or in Andrea's 365 works on paper, it went into overdrive, and in the months I have chosen here, February (top) and March (bottom) it would be so nice to own the whole month.

The calendar is a grid we live by; it is fairly as ancient as a way of dividing the year as irrigation is as dividing the landscape, although the grid of our wall calendar is less ancient as children it is the way we learn to tell days as we look at clocks to learn time. It is quite possible that many artists swear to make a drawing a day. (I know I once did every evening after work but it was before I really knew what I wanted to draw and how to draw it, the archetypal two questions involved in the making of anything, and I only got a few weeks into it before I abandoned the project.

Andrea Way has met all the usual criteria for Pierogi's unusually high standards for inclusion in their now well known sensibility listed in the first paragraph, and added the wonder, which is the quotidian mystery - and magic - based on a close observation of nature, and the ordinary, and the close at hand.

Katia Santibanez, Landscape and the Grid, and the Idea of Paradise

2009-03-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

The first image to the left is Hapi, the god of the Nile; he inundates the Nile every year with his amphora of water and on his head he has a grid. the grid represents the irrigated fields that are fed by the waters of the Nile. This is the earliest representation of a grid imposed on the landscape I have found in my books and my research.

This leads into the entire history of garden design, which has often been based on an implicit or underlying grid; this is from an Iranian cultural website regarding some of the earliest and most well documented and now archaeologically studied garden design:

Since the first millenium B.C.E., the garden has been an integral part of Persian architecture, be it imperial or vernacular. In addition to written historical references, archaeological evidence of Achaemenid gardens exists at Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, and other sites.

The Achaemenids had a keen interest in horticulture and agriculture. Their administration greatly encouraged the efforts of the satrapies toward innovative practices in agronomy, arboriculture, and irrigation. Numerous varieties of plants were introduced throughout the empire .

Aside from the practical aspects of the garden and its sensual pleasures, royal gardens also incorporated political, philosophical, and religious symbolism. The idea of the king creating a fertile garden out of barren land, bringing symmetry and order out of chaos, and duplicating the divine paradise on earth, constituted a powerful statement symbolizing authority, fertility, and legitimacy.

What made gardens special during the Achaemenid reign was that for the first time the garden became not only an integral part of the architecture, but was also the focus of it. Henceforth gardens were an integral part of Persian culture. Successive generations of European and Asian monarchs and garden lovers copied the concept and design of Persian gardens

The earliest gardens on the Iranian plateau associated with the Achaemenids are located at Pasargadae, the royal park residence of Cyrus the Great (ca. 559-530 B.C.E.), the founder of the Persian empire. The royal palaces at Pasargadae were conceived and constructed as a series of palaces and pavilions placed among geometrically designed gardens, parterres, and meticulously hewn and dressed stone water-courses, set in a large formal park containing various flora and fauna.

From the time of the Achaemenid empire the idea of an earthly paradise spread to the literature and languages of other cultures. The Avestan word pairidaêza-, Old Persian *paridaida-, Median *paridaiza- (walled-around, i.e., a walled garden), was transliterated into Greek paradeisoi, then rendered into the Latin paradisus, and from there entered into European languages, i.e., French paradis, and English paradise.

The pleasures of Katia's work are very rooted in her observations of nature and conversations we have had about the European garden, prior to the English Romantics and their less classical way of ordering gardens and parks in a much more gridded and architectural way. Until researching the above I had not known of the connection to paradise, which has no doubt been influenced by the Romantic view of a wilder yet somehow completely benign nature and Edward Hicks style paintings, having removed both the ordering and architecture within and the wall without. I have written about the five main longings that are subjects for art, are for:

The Nostalgic,
The Exotic,
The Erotic,
The Novel,
and, The Idea of Order.

Paradise, as we could easily imagine envisioning it, would be 1) the right measure of nostalgia of the most pleasing kind, with all of our memories that are most beautiful to us intact and ready to revisit, 2) and 3) with the novel and the exotic around the corner of the most pleasantly strolling walk, and 4) the erotic in its expanded sense of pleasing voluptuousness on our skin through the perfect temperature, soft sunlight, and a light breeze. This is a small taste of paradise available for so many centuries to all who peacefully stroll through a park or a garden, all the senses alive and awakened. There are not a few aficionados of botanical gardens and the history of landscape architecture of other times, and Europeans have the good fortune to still have so many pre Romantic gardens and parks laid out in the most impeccable ideas of order designed since the migration of ideas of the garden from fifth century BC Persia above that one can experience and then reimagine what the believers may have imagined themselves: to inhabit a place much like this lovely experience, walled off from any harm or even irritation, forever.

I actually had a studio in the village of Versailles for nearly three years in the late eighties while living at Odeon on the Left Bank in Paris. It wasn't even five minutes from the gardens of Versailles which were permanently free and open to the public - breaks in painting on beautiful days were often spent there, a very large area of ground arranged for a long view vista from the balcony of the grand outdoor mezzanine in the back of the Palace. Katia and I had talked in passing about her relation to French landscape and especially the design and architecture prior to the 19th century, but not in any kind of didactic way.

This is what I will try to write about experiencing the back room of her show at Danese, that I went carefully through with Michelle Segre, an artist I also plan to write about, the night of the opening. The paintings have been focussed on elsewhere by good reviews in both the Brooklyn Rail and by Lilly Wei in Art in America, so I would like to try to describe what I felt then, in terms of the research I have done now.

That a very measured implication of grasses and botanical forms are so innovatively and delicately delineated in grids and designs in graphite - a medium that I had thought incapable by now of arousing much interest qua medium no matter what was rendered - now has been awakened from its small torpor by Katia's singular touch and skill in handling is certainly a testament to the wonderfully pleasurable novelty of someone actually balancing the five longings above, longings that are certainly are embedded in us by Nature herself, in such a measured, quiet. confident, persistent, and absolutely present way.

Katia Santibanez

2009-03-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

Katia Santibanez had a debut exhibition at Danese last fall after having shown with PPOW, Michael Steinberg and then in 2007 at Morgan Lehman. I had seen her work at Pierogi when first arriving in Williamsburg and of course New York and have followed her work with interest. The Morgan Lehman exhibit was my first opportunity to buy one of her works, albeit a very small print. Not only that but one of her recurring motifs in the more graphic and black and white work is very abstract but also very strongly abstracted from branching plant forms, so a train ride down to DC and then the change to a bus further to Richmond for a good friend's funeral service was this time of year in mid March with the nearly black tree silhouettes and still wintry grey that is almost white sky. I did have quite some time to have this rolling by bring me back to the palette and the rhyming motifs of the trees and Katia's branching works form a deepening memory of both her exhibition and this much needed time looking out the windows of the train and the bus. It was a form of contemplation, which is often discussed in abstraction, but beyond that, it felt a lot like something further and more absolutely necessary, in the sense of what one finds in a Wallace Stevens poem; it felt like consolation.

Ad Hoc Shop

2009-03-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Essays on Assemblage contains The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium

It is the transcript of the symposium held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, on October 19, 1961, in conjunction with the exhibition "The Art of Assemblage."

The Panel

Lawrence Alloway
Marcel Duchamp
Richard Huelsenbeck
Robert Rauschenberg
Roger Shattuck

William C. Seitz, moderator

From Roger Shattuck's essay How Collage Became Assemblage: "In the late 1950s, Happenings, Pop art, kinetic art and junk art found sponsorship and name. When Peter Selz arrived from the West Coast in 1958, he brought with him the idea of a show titled "Collage and the Object." Apparently Seitz had been thinking along similar lines and was assigned the project that opened in October 1961. After considerable in-house wrangling, Seitz had changed the title to "The Art of Assemblage" in order to avoid the primarily painterly term collage. Seitz believed that assemblage had been coined by Dubuffet in 1953, and provided that information in the catalogue. One wonders why no one connected with the show knew or discovered that Helen Comstock had used the word assemblage when discussing works by the American Arthur Dove in her review of Alfred Steiglitz's "Seven Americans" exhibition. Seitz included three Dove works in this show.

This book and this essay and the following transcript were enormously helpful to find only several months ago after forming the kernel of the show idea from a meditation on the difference between what I found in Lonnie Holley's work and do not in Richard Tuttle's, and then was reinspired to think about by my visit to Joe Overstreet's studio, and Frosty Meyers studio soon after, following the High Times Hard Times show and thinking about the late sixties and early seventies in New York in all the arts and in general - the last real intersection of all the arts in NewYork in both practice and audience before the rise of the MFA system and the arrival of so many so highly trained in their own medium armed with the new theory to prove it. Due to the increasing cost of living dovetailing with the incredible increase of higher education, it was also the last generation able to not arrive seeking immediate employment in an increasingly well trained and exponentially growing pool of competition within each chosen endeavor and medium, which leaves little time to explore let alone attend events purely for pleasure outside of one's field, the reason I am excited to work with a poet on this exhibition, and see what she brings to it, to revive some of that lost spirit in displaying collage and concrete poetry alongside the work and arrange for performance.

Since the running theme I had been investigating myself was how people look around and bring things into their studio in the city, or in a more urbane setting if not quite a grand cosmopolitan city such as ours, or bring things back from sojourns to more rural places or their own roots and backgrounds in the same, I was especially interested in Lawrence Alloway's statement introducing the importance of where something is found, rather than purchased as with Duchamp, and all of the prior discussion of the Assemblage show up until Alloway's late arrival with its relation to Duchamp and Dada. Alloway states quite clearly how what some hastily termed Neo-Dada might not share with these other sensibilities and politics vis a vis modernism's dialogue with itself and the culture surrounding it:

"Aside from the elegance of the show upstairs, I felt very close to it in a way I don't often feel to art exhibitions. I was very close to the "Art of Assemblage" show because the source material, or most of it, was a kind of source material I know, and it was just the same in the work of art as it was when I had seen it not in the work of art - in somebody's house, in a street, a city dump or something...[i]n a way, I think Mr. Seitz in the book for the exhibition established very convincingly the aesthetics of juxtaposition, there is one aspect that was not delved into: the urban street scene, waste lots, garages all that. These seem to me to be the environment we all share, and the articles of the living-space environment I recognize in the show.

The street, and the home, brought into the studio. And then brought into the marketplace, especially the marketplace of ideas and dialogue, that is Ad Hoc Shop.

The postings begin with a centennial nod to circa 1909 - 1910 when modernism and jazz exploded into the world and crisscrossed the Atlantic, and the Quilts of Gee's Bend and Robert Rauschenberg's Bed piece are discussed, through all the artists considered the core of the exhibition, back to Robert Rauschenberg and the Assemblage show of 1961. I am grateful to have discovered the importance of Lawrence Alloway's attention to the artists themselves and the clarity and literacy of his means of representing them. I had already discovered his importance circa 1960 in the beginning of the exhibition proposal under the title of Pop Aporia (see way way below) and then discovered this quotation right at the beginning of the Assemblage Exhibition (there were, as Roger Shattuck wrote in the introduction quoted above, "252 heterogeneous works in the show.")

Robert Rauschenberg

2009-03-12T15:10:00.001-07:00

The Cardboards

Rauschenberg used only found bits of cardboard in this series created between 1971 and 1972. His decision to restrict his materials to cardboard and cardboard boxes coincided with his move to Captiva Island in southern Florida: following a very successful period in New York, Rauschenberg was looking for new ways to concentrate; the move took place in 1970 and the artist was looking for a material that he could get anywhere in the world for his new series: "I still haven't been anyplace where there weren't cardboard boxes ... even up the Amazon." (Rauschenberg 1991)

Rauschenberg was the first artist to use only cardboard for large format assemblage paintings, sculptures and installations without treating it as painterly decor or subjugating it in any way. He discovered the expressive quality of packaging materials and united the language of formal abstraction with that of real life while completely preserving the material's character. It was precisely this material, which is usually discarded, on which he concentrated his attention: "... A desire built up in me to work in a material of waste and softness. Something yielding with its only message a collection of lines imprinted like a friendly joke. A silent discussion of their history exposed by their new shapes. Labored commonly with happiness. Boxes."

The Jammers

In 1975 Rauschenberg worked for a month in an ashram in Ahmedabad, India, a center of textile production. After returning home, he executed a series of works in 1975 and 1976 called the 'Jammers,' which were true bursts of colors. "I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realized they were not so artificial."

The fabrics used in these works are rectangular, square and triangular in shape and their colors are clear and intense. They are hung either loose on the walls or are attached to bamboo rods like veils in a state of ethereal equilibrium.

The series' name comes from the Windjammer, a sailing vessel, and the titles of the individual works, such as "Pilot" and "Sextant", emphasize the maritime reference. The 'Jammers' are reminiscent of sails on ships, of windbreaks on the beach, of laundry, drying on clotheslines in southern Europe and Asia, of medieval Italian banners or the flags of a Tibetan monastery. The exotic is connected to everything that is close and approachable, the holy with the worldly. As with the Venetian series, the 'Jammers' display the dual qualities of reference and abstraction.

Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman from the New York Times and their take on John Outterbridge, Sarah Braman and Richard Tuttle

2009-03-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

It was gratifying to pick up the Times this week and read Holland Cotter's report on this years big Art Fair in the city and find these two quotes including John Outterbridge and Sarah Braman just after putting this show together online at least (it is still pending in the proposal stage at the University Gallery Lee Ann Brown and I have contacted at his point). So I am happy to include his two choices out of the very few he did mention in his coverage of the vast and stupifying array these formerly proliferating art fairs have been laying out for their customers:

"There are exceptions. One is Mickalene Thomas’s “Something You Can Feel,” a kind of Byzantine mosaic of a painting at Rhona Hoffman that’s done in rhinestones and acrylic and generates all kinds of attitude. Another is a sardonic picture conflating military invasions and gym workouts by the Iranian artist Tala Madani at Lombard-Freid Projects. A meticulously knotted and twisted wall sculpture by the assemblagist John Outterbridge at Jack Tilton is a third."

Te first reproduction is a piece by John Outterbridge titled And In the Hay children Won't Play from 1991. Outterbridge was born in 1933.

and

"Sarah Braman’s sculptures at Museum 52 have a similar hapless but happening air. They look like a closetful of broken furniture that is slowly mending itself."
The second piece by SArah Braman I unfortunately don;t have a title and a date for is a piece I found on the blog Anaba that I have been dipping into for three years now, thank you Martin.
I don't know when Sarah was born, but there is enough of an age difference between herself and Outterbridge to tip off any curatorial participant or tracker of curatorial buzzwords to the idea that I am thinking in terms of The Intergenerational. Well, I have studied art history. There are lineages such as assemblage I am glad to find as far back as the 1870s where a shoe was stuck onto a painting, and food sculpture also displayed long before the Futurist Cookbook, both at the Salon des Incoherentes. The other art history I have been delighted to include is Melissa Meyers and MIriam Schapiro's essay on Femmage and Aime Cesaire's theories of Negritude discussed by David Hammons coming directly from practicing artists and the Essays on Assemblage publication published by MoMa which have influenced this particular choice of artists very much.

Which leads me to another underpinning of the show, something I have had to think about over the ears due to the amount of general attention given two artists in New York and its circles of influence: why I am indifferent to Richard Tuttle, and also the talented daughter of Judy Pfaff and Richard Tuttle, Jessica Stockholder.

My ideas for Ad Hoc Shop were already forming based on a memory of seeing Lonnie Holley's sculpture in the Visionary Art Museum and its spareness and inventiveness of what was casually yet magically composed about what was attached to the stretched wire and this sensation of seeing something so very very different from the usual in the always for me rich world of possible discovery in the self taught and outsider art worlds. I had noticed a long time ago that the statistics of what I would actually respond to in this category which seems fraught for some were not that different than what I responded to in the fine arts world, that is - very little.

Richard Tuttle has an enormous amount of enthusiasts who have tried to convert me over the years and it isn't that dissimilar to trying to convert me to any belief, I am very happy to listen to and hear the enthusiasm, especially when it is a friend, and see how the magic or influence works on them, but I don't feel the need to tell them that it does not do anything whatsoever for me. I don't want to dampen anyone's enthusiasm on anything but have my own, and some of them are not known at all or by very few so with Tuttle its like I am supposed to join the multitudes of some well established guru where I would rather witness a shaman practice somewhere in a tribe I can never be apart of but get so much of the feeling coming through me that I will be forever grateful to have witnessed it. If you think this metaphor is a little off base, I would point you to something I found in college in the VCU Rare Books collection - which as I just discussed with a member of the File Magazine group who now works at Printed Matter, is known to have started one of the best collections of artist's books in the country very early in the beginning days of the genre - the Holy Holy Art Cards where many revered artists were pasted on to Saint's heads and had quotes about what the artist had to say about spirituality in terms of their work. In Michael Kimmelman's At the Met with Richard Tuttle; Influence Cast in Stone Tuttle is described as a "shaman to many."

Then Kimmelman describes the work reproduced here in the article and Richard Tuttle's own associations.

"In 1983, Mr. Tuttle made ''Monkey's Recovery for a Darkened Room (Bluebird),'' a wall relief of branches, wire, cloth, string and wood scraps, which he says formally relates to the Met's diptych. ''The link is in terms of the organization of bottom, middle and top, the fact that the panels of the van Eyck are divided horizontally into three parts, and in a sense so is 'Monkey's Recovery' -- and maybe also in terms of having two vertical parts, the branches of 'Monkey's Recovery' being on one side and the wood on the other.''

Mr. Tuttle cites the German art historian Erwin Panofsky, who said that once you have van Eyck in your eye, Rubens is just another painter.

I am only interested in this piece of Richard Tuttle's because it nails for me why I have so much feeling for Lonnie Holley's work and why Tuttle has only tickled my forehead for a few seconds a few times and is gone. I am going to also quote Zora Neale Hurston here: "I pick up things according to my own juices and I sort through things using my own tools." So I don't owe anyone an explanation for this and quite enjoy employing a phrase that a Hungarian with a severely limited amount of english but an unmistakeably animated way of getting what he wanted to across, there is an enormous amount of work that reminds me of one of his favorite phrases, "don't care me." Having spent time in France and having grown familiar with the reflexive verb, I love this reflexive twist on "I don't care" - because their is a lot of work that causes me not to care. It is only the enthusiasts of any number of artists that are inclined to push me on a certain artist and I resort to this phrase relaying the tale of my Hungarian friend - oral to aural transmisson of it works great.

And just because van Eyck divided something in three parts and Tuttle wants to link his division of something into three parts directly to him doesn't mean that there haven't been The Ten Thousand Things made in three parts in between van Eyck and Tuttle, all over this globe, in all kinds of art making. (The Ten Thousand Things is a taoist term for an uncountably high number possibly standing in for the infinite by the way. Sol Lewitt made a piece with ten thousand lines for this reason and citation for example. Sol Lewitt makes me care very much for a counter example.) It just defies my belief that people still listen to this kind of thing!

Assembling Music

2009-03-07T04:23:00.001-08:00

These are contemporary artists who in the tradition of Harry Partch and many other sculptor-inventor-assemblage-musicians fashion and play their own instruments.

The first is by Brian Dewan, pulled from his Dewanatron website, and is in the series of Melody Gins; he has a show at Peirogi that ends this weekend. It is an elaborate installation including a filmstrip of a Utopian Indoor Community that is actually capable of making nearly everyone I have seen sit and watch it laugh out loud, including myself.

The second is one of Ken Butler's mighty large array of sculpted and assembled musical instruments; I was gallery sitting for Sideshow when his retrospective was in the two rooms there - his show along with TODT's were the only ones that got word of mouth with the children and teenagers in the mainly Puerto Rican and Dominican community south of Metropolitan in Williamsburg in the nearly five years I was there.

The third is from the website of the Audio Artists, a collective based both in New York City and upstate originally having formed alliances in Cleveland at the Art Institute. Their website is particularly well known for Alice Malloy's theremin bra and the psychedelic video of her playing it, however that is just one of the many things they have made, performed and recorded.

I have seen all of the above musicians perform numerous times and can vouch for the inventiveness and liveliness of their music to go along with the sensibility and idiosyncratic visual appeal of each that is only hinted at by their websites.

More Hobo Culture

2009-03-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

Harry Partch, in 1919, when he was mainly riding the rails.

Bozo Texino, famous boxcar graffiti figure.

Texino along with others is chronicled in a journal I bought entitled Mostly True by Bill Daniels. It is billed as The West's Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine. There is a revival of interest amongst young artists and graffiti followers spurred by the idea of these early taggers and the lengths the ywould go to to get both sides of a boxcar and the amount of boxcars due to amount of ground covered, and the many many years they kept it up. The chalk emblems aren't too much of interest in and of themselves, but the interviews with the legendary men who became such by stories circulated by hobos themselves are mighty entertaining. with some of the current fascination with the depression this may become more than just a revival amongst San Francisco based artists and reach a broader audience. Already there had been a revival of freight hopping itself to go along with the magazine and film's audience base.

Bill Daniel's amazing film Who Is Bozo Texino?, chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, "Bozo Texino"- a drawing seen on railcars for 80 years. The film was shot over a period of 20 years and features interviews with hobo graffiti legends Colossus of the Roads, The Rambler, Herby (RIP) and others.

Harry Partch: Hallelujah! He's a Bum
(excerpts from Irwin Chusid's essay on Partch)

At 29 Harry Partch took 14 years worth of quartets, piano concertos, and symphonic poems, crammed everything into a pot-bellied stove, and torched the lot. Then he started again from scratch.
Over the next forty years Partch would gain cult-level reknown as the 20th Century's most eloquent musical primitive, carrying a solitary niche in outsiderdom. The maverick philosopher-composer-carpenter devised his own 43-notes-to-the-octave scale. He sculpted percussion and string instruments out of artillery shells, Harvey's Bristol Cream Bottles, and driftwood. He camped in hobo jungles and abandoned shipyards, insulted well-heeled and well connected patrons who offered help, and did just aobut everything an artist could do to insure lack of widesread recognition.
As a teen, Partch payed piano in silent movie theaters in Albuquerque and composed ambitious works in conventional western modes. He resented the limits imposed by 12 tempered tones and grew obsessed with the notes between the tones (microtones).
Partch's instruments were fashioned out of airplane fuel tanks, Buick bumpers, eucalyptus branches, and junk scavenged from the California desert. These sonic devices - all objects of stunning beauty - received intriguing , such as Chrychord, Drone Devils. Zymo-Zyl, and Quadrangularis Reversum. The Mazda Marimba, named after the Persian God of Light, displays banks of tuned light bulbs and sounds like a percolating coffepot.

There are two documentaries on Partch I mentioned in the last posting, and both can be found on You Tube. The BBC documentary has composers and musicologists speaking aobut Partch including Phillip Glass.

Harry Partch and freighthopping

2009-03-03T00:39:00.000-08:00

In 1980 I took a course called Media Synthesis with Vibeke Sorensen at Virginai Commonwealth University and there were two memorable documentaries she showed us in class, one on Professor Longhair but especially one about Harry Partch, which I have just found on You Tube. It is the one made in San Diego in 1968. There is also one for the BBC on You Tube that I had not seen before. I was in the Communication Art & Design Department, emphasizing graphic design and illustration that also at the time included all film, photography and interestingly enough alot of the conceptually based Time Art. The then welding and woodworking oriented sculpture department didn't want these instructors nor much of their students who were doing this stuff nevertheless in the 1970s. I also took tickets to the Ann Arbor film festival every year I was there so that I could see the whole thing after the first half hour each night in its entirety, so was not lacking in some kind of introduction to the avant garde from a different direction to the painters and sculptors I knew in the other departments. The painters called our department the sign painters nevertheless, while reading Irving Sandler's Triumph of American Painting or rebelling by getting interested in "Bad Painting" or Chicago Imagism. (There was a great group show organized by the rebel students titled "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.") In the sculpture department the faculty was majorly interested and influenced by H. C. Westermann and Lucas Samaras and a lot of the young women excited by Ree Morton at the time, so it wasn't all formal welding and so on all the time. I tended to like it all - abstract and funky figurative - in the other departments, as an escape from the more heavy handed illustration and graphic design classes where we were supposed to imagine some purported audience from the point of view of an art director that would be engaging us, that I had to complete to get my degree and diploma and out of school.

It was also in 1981 that I talked a good friend from the CA & D department who was an R. Crumb fan and is now a comix artist and animator in New York into taking me on a freight hop, as someone who had grown up in what he nicknamed Dogtown in a part of Richmond near the train tracks where the kids in his neighborhood would go on hops up as far as DC and back starting at thirteen or fourteen. He said no women ("bad luck") but I wore him down ("Frank, this isn't a nineteenth century ship") and we went up to DC in an open boxcar to see The English Beat - a ska revival band from England. It was an all the way open boxcar with a vista as wide as the freight car itself. It would be hard to forget the fall foliage of Virginia and the dropoff view to the streams and small rivers along the way - nor the way I landed in the gravel when trying to disembark hitting the ground running as he showed me when we had to get off before getting caught in the trainyard if we had stayed on until it slowed down. I hit the ground running, but like a stick figure would - into the ground - impacting my knee and elbow and flipping over. I don't remember feeling much pain as we were immediately rushing to the concert, then in the concert and dancing. In those days I went to so many concerts involving stage diving and mosh pits in DC that I had just incurred the same kind of pain to ignore before, rather than during the concert, since it was not the Bad Brains or Black Flag or any number of other HarDCore bands in the 9:30 Club, but a group of mainly mod revivalists and mild yet vigorous ska dancing this time.

This is just to say I had not known until much later that Partch was our national dropout-of-the-music-conservatory hobo composer, who spent so many years riding the trains and collecting things he found to make instruments out of, in the documentary I din't remember the early conservatory years or trainhopping mentioned just the inventiveness of the instruments and the force of his personality and odd loveliness of the music. I am glad somewhere in the late eighties to have acquired this new information on Partch at the same time that my friend Frank continued to investigate his own freight hopping: as the only close friend I have who has been through all but three of the States on first a southern journey and then a northern journey and all his stories of riding the rails and even spending jail time once on the southern route, it is interesting to find my fascination with this culture I continued to hear and learn about through Frank and so much sculptural and musical invention in one legendary figure, Harry Partch.

Caryl Burtner: Toothbrushes and Lipstick Blots

2009-03-01T15:17:00.000-08:00

The first two are from Caryl's toothbrush collection - the notebooks are forms everyone fills out of the make of toothbrush, how long it was used, and other data including if it was used for anything other than brushing teeth. Within this sizeable and growing collection thereis a smaller one where artists such as Jim Nutt, Peter Saul and others sent her their used toothbrushes and filled out forms, that has been exhibited as a much smaller display.

The lipstick blots are noted with location, date, the name of the woman (it is usually a woman) , and the make and name of the color of the lipstick. I have myself had a napkin or something at hand taken and added to this ongoing collection, back in the days when I wore lipstick. The makes like Revlon etc. are well known but the names they come up with for the lipstick colors are everchanging and sometimes quite funny.

Caryl Burtner

2009-03-01T10:34:00.001-08:00

The first is an article I wrote for Throttle magazine in 1982 under my maiden name Lori Edmiston.

Under that is her collection of Carols - and one Caryl - from her yearbook. It was published in a different format in Harper's magazine.

The toilet paper cardboard rolls are notated from where they were found all over and including her own domicile, over the years.

"Roberts" is also a collection collated from her yearbook.

The notation on Roxy Music and times played was done on all of her records for a period of time and is just one example of her archiving projects that have been ongoing since the mid seventies. I will be posting more on Caryl Burtner as an archivist and an important part of Ad Hoc Shop.

Peter Soriano

2009-03-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

Full disclosure: working for Lennon Weinberg was my very first job arriving in New York in the summer of 1996. Robin Hill was subletting her Greenpoint studio (where I could go peer into and even nose around Kim Jones' room he was subletting from Robin, as he never locked it and the door was usually half open.) Robin suggested I go in and talk to Jill Weinberg and Tom Adams and I so enjoyed the two brief times that I worked at their old location in Soho I have not yet lost the habit of going in to see every show I can and talking to them twelve years later. Peter Soriano was doing sculpture in a vein that was a genre that Andrew Chesler had organized a successful exhibition of in the late Nineties titled "Almost Something.' It was a great title and an exciting Dr, Seussian World with an entire crayola box of possible colors sensibility, and Peter Soriano did it I thought better than just about anybody.

In 2007 I went into his show at Lennon Weinberg and the new wire and spray paint sculptures were in the gallery and I read he had just come back from the Calder Foundation in France and said look at how he is drawing Calder with the spray paint. (I had grown up going to the new I. M. Pei wing of the National Gallery in DC where it is impossible to ignore the massive mobile in the lobby, had seen one of the most amazing exhibitions in Paris entitled Calder Intime at le Musee de Les Arts Decoratifs in the eighties, the Circus on permanent exhibition there, and an exhibition of Calder in the summer of 1998 at the Corcoran in DC, in addition to books in every bookstore I had worked in since 1982, and never understood why he wasn't more talked about in New York.

When I went to his studio I was talking about taking ideas from the city and the streets into the studio as the major theme - along with ideas from rural areas and how they migrate to the city. and mentioned some of the ways that things are cordoned off and temporary signage with spray paint used by construction crews. in the course of our discussion. Today on Peter's website in a long, well written and considered essay written by Raphael Rubinstein for a major exhibition I found this paragraph:

"Indeed, when I first saw these works one of the associations that came
quickly to my mind was precisely those spray-painted arrows and words
one sees everywhere on the streets and sidewalks in New York,
especially these days when the city is in the midst of a building
boom. I’m not so sure about the “clarity” of Con Ed street markings
however; many of them have an almost hieroglyphic impenetrability, at
least to the casual passerby. By contrast, Soriano’s marks are easily
readable, though not without their own ambiguities. By my count, he
uses nine basic signs: arrows, dots, circles, Xs, zigzag cancellation
marks, squares or rectangles, brackets, horizontal lines closed off by
short verticals on either end (a kind of elongated uppercase H), and
the sideways Ts. These can be combined to create a larger graphic
lexicon. "

Chippies

2009-03-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

To the left are Bessie Smith in her most famous photograph and Victoria Spivey in a portrait shot, some city blues singers who in those early days were more likely to be photographed and become famous. There are unfortunately no photographs of Geeshie Wiley and only four recordings, however everyone who has ever heard "Last Kind Word Blues" can attest to how she has left her legacy over time.

“If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented: her scope and creativity dwarfs most blues artists. She seems to represent the moment when black secular music was coalescing into blues.”

From Don Kent's History of the Mississippi Blues.

Geeshie Wiley and Memphis Minnie were inventive guitar players as well as vocalists, and it is not too well known that an African American guitar player named Leslie Fiedler taught little Maybelle Carter, who was a prodigy of sorts, how to play the then rare Spanish guitar in the mountains where she grew up, adding to her mandolin experience and converting her forever to the guitar as her instrument of choice.

This is an IMix amongst the many I have on the ITunes store, to go into the Ad Hoc country and city theme from another direction. And a nice way to segue from Black History Month into Women's History Month, - - Happy First of March y'all.

Chippies

Playlist Notes: country and city blues gals

Song Name Artist

Pick Poor Robin Clean Geeshie Wiley

Last Kind Word Blues Geeshie Wiley

Skinny Leg Blues Geeshie Wiley

Eagles on a Half Geeshie Wiley

What It Takes to Bring You Back Butterbeans & Susie

Adam and Eve Butterbeans & Susie

Shreveport Blues Lillian Glinn

My Old Flame Mae West

Hoodoo Man Blues Victoria Spivey

Dope Head Blues Victoria Spivey

If You're a Viper Rosetta Howard

Men Are Like Street Cars Rosetta Howard

Trouble In Mind Bertha "Chippie" Hill

Conjur Man Memphis Minnie

Down In New Orleans Memphis Minnie

Hoodoo Lady Memphis Minnie

Me and My Chauffeur Memphis Minnie

Haïti Josephine Baker

J'ai deux amours Josephine Baker

L'accordéoniste Edith Piaf

Padam padam Edith Piaf

Hound Dog (Single) Big Mama Thornton

Yes, Baby (duet with Johnny Ace) Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Ace & Willie Mae Thorton

I Need a Man to Love Janis Joplin

Lonnie Holley

2009-02-28T11:04:00.001-08:00

I have a great deal to write about Lonnie Holley later as I have seen his work quite awhile and know him not to be a familiar name in New York. However at this time I will let the reproductions of works from the eighties on up delight those who may find them delightful, and in the heart of the spirit of Ad Hoc as I have been delineating it here starting with the Rauschenberg and the Quilts of Gee's Bend on up through the latest series of postings. It is actually seeing his work in 1991 I believe for the first time that originally started me on a certain train of thought that first laid the groundwork for this show.

This is the last paragraph from an article Raphael Rubinstein wrote on Lonnie Holley in Art in America, May 2004:

Holley's work is compelling not only for its inventiveness and social implications but also for the way it brings together various traditions and precedents. This gathering of sculptures summons up much 20th-century assemblage, from Picasso to Richard Stankiewicz to Jean Tinguely (in particular, the latter's Homage to New York, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960), and at the same time references the African-American tradition of the yard show. Holley's bent-wire heads recall Calder's early sculptures, while his bold informality has much to do with scatter art. Let's hope that in the wake of this exhibition and a survey show--recently at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and scheduled to come to Birmingham, Ala., this summer--his work, which is too often restricted to the ambience of vernacular or Outsider art, will become more widely seen

Joe Fyfe

2009-02-28T11:01:00.000-08:00

Joe Fyfe's exhibition at James Graham is coming down March 7th and so I would urge anyone who has not seen it to go.

From the last paragraph of the James Graham press release:

Traveling to other countries expands ones color repertoire, other countries have different 'palettes' and use color differently. I access that palette by shopping in a given country's fabric market and making my work with that colored material. Overall is the idea of the painting as a physical object that addresses the body as intently as it does the eye through an emphasis on its physicality, what better way than to utilize the material that covers the body?

Willie Bell

2009-02-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

James Hyde

2009-02-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

Sarah Braman

2009-02-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

Sarah Braman from Canada, a gallery that has built up quite a reputation in the new Lower East Side. They had a group of artists working with ideas that ended up in Unmonumental back when I was in graduate school with Phil Grauer in the mid nineties.

(this posting is currently under construction, as is Jim Clark's.)

James O. Clark

2009-02-27T06:54:00.001-08:00

Jim Clark's most recent exhibition was at Elizabeth Harris Gallery:

James O. Clark : There is nothing blue under the sun / Thornton Willis: Recent Paintings Nov 16 - Dec 22, 2006

(Thornton Willis has an exhibit opening at Elizabeth Harris soon.)

Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge

2009-02-27T06:06:00.001-08:00

I want to thank John Mendelsohn for sending me this press release and drawing my attention to the artists in Los Angeles I had not heard of mentioned in this press release to a show at Jack Tilton several years ago to follow. (I have seen a major retrospective of Betye Saar in Florida in the last year and had long been familiar with both her and Alison Saar's work). Ed Bereal is more of a painter, however I am delighted to post both of these artists, especially Noah Purifoy who was born in 1917 in Alabama. this is just the beginning of his bio, on his website he has entire folk environments and bodies of work;

Born August 17, 1917, Snow Hill, Alabama.

EDUCATION
B.S. Alabama State Teachers College. Montgomery, Alabama, 1943
Master of Social Service Administration. Atlanta University. Atlanta, Georgia, 1948
Bachelor of Fine Arts. Chouinard Art Institute. Los Angeles, California, 1956

John Outterbridge has a little of his bio in the image I captured from his website, and here is the press release from the 2006 exhibition at Jack Tilton in its entirety.

THE TILTON GALLERY PRESENTS
L.A. OBJECT AND
DAVID HAMMONS BODY PRINTS
October 17 - November 18, 2006

NEW YORK – L.A. Object and David Hammons Body Prints will be on view at the Tilton Gallery from October 17 - November 18. The exhibition features assemblages by Los Angeles artists of the 1960s and 70s, and early work of the American sculptor David Hammons. An opening reception will be held October 17, from 6 - 8 PM, at the Tilton Gallery located at Eight East 76 Street.

This exhibition will feature a broad overview of the L.A. assemblage movement of the 1960s and 70s, including the most important West Coast artists often seen as the core of this genre. In addition, L.A. Object will seek to re-examine works by artists often left out of mainstream gallery and museum historical exhibitions. In particular, it will explore the important role of African American artists within this period. We will present works by Noah Purifoy, Ed Bereal, Betty Saar and John Outterbridge, among others, alongside works by their better-known contemporaries such as Ed Keinholz, Wallace Berman and George Herms.

L.A. assemblage grew out of the historical context of Dada and Surrealism at a moment when the poetry and underground films of the Beat generation, of which Wallace Berman was a member, were an influential force in California. Walter Hopps had brought important exhibitions of Kurt Schwitters (1962), Marcel Duchamp (1963 – his first comprehensive show in the U.S.), and Joseph Cornell (1966) to the Pasadena Art Museum, where he was director. And MOMA’s Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage had traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968. However, the L.A. art scene of the 60s and 70s was far more removed from the New York art scene, and from
-more-
what was happening in the rest of the country, than it is now and than it has been since the 1980s when it began to play a more prominent national role. Within the scope of L.A. art of this period, those who were concerned with assemblage were a distinct group. Partially due to the dispersed nature of the city, culturally as well as geographically, there were separate networks of artists even among those making assemblages. African American, Asian and Chicano artists were often isolated from the gallery and institutional art scene and may be looked at both as part of distinct artistic communities, and in conjunction with the larger movement. This was also the era of civil rights, the 1965 Watts riots, and general social and cultural change. These events, along with the influential presence of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, built from 1921 to 1954 out of scrap metal and found objects, had an important impact on the work of African American artists.

In addition, Tilton Gallery will present for the first time in New York a selection of early body prints by David Hammons. Often considered a New York artist, Hammons created his first major body of work, including these unique body prints, from the late 60s to early 70s while living in Los Angeles. Although his work was often exhibited in Los Angeles, because of the separations among the various art communities, Hammons was seen mostly in the context of African American L.A. artists, and only after his move to New York did he become internationally known for his assembled sculptures and installations. In his body prints, Hammons, by applying oil and pigment to his body and ‘printing’ the forms on paper, created nuanced, ironic and humorous commentaries. As in his sculpture and installations, Hammons was always concerned with making work relevant to the African American experience. This mature body of work has rarely been presented within the art historical context from which it arose. We are pleased to exhibit these works alongside those of his contemporaries working within the assemblage movement in Los Angeles.
The Tilton Gallery is located at Eight East 76 Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 – 6 and Monday by appointment. For more information, please visit our web site at www.jacktiltongallery.com, or call 212-737-2221.
# # #

Julianne Swartz

2009-02-26T07:48:00.001-08:00

I do believe I have seen every show of Julianne Swartz's beginning with the earlier location of Josee Bienvenu's interesting gallery and following Bienvenu's various solo shows and curatorial projects (Bienvenu is a very good writer and has a degree in philosophy, and her press releases and essays in publications she has put out have always been worth reading). From the very beginning when Swartz combined lenses and optics to look through and see small ribbons and collections of objects moved slightly by fans, and her magic with hardware store items and magnets, and the sound pieces also, this is quite a body of work - I encourage a visit to her website, but most importantly both the Jewish Museum before March 15th and Josee Bienvenu at 529 West 20th Street before March 28.

Hannah Weiner

2009-02-25T07:28:00.001-08:00

Hannah Weiner is one of the guiding spirits of the Ad Hoc Shop as introduced to me by Lee Ann Brown. There is a video in three parts on You Tube posted by the tireless James Kalm, the photographs of Hannah with her cat were shown amongst others that evening by Carolee Schneeman. I have been searching the internet for photographs of her semaphore poems but will have to settle for excepting an article here.

poem as code

From the moment she took up writing, as Weiner related to Bernstein in a 1995 interview, it was never a matter of self-expression, but a means of displacing the self. She began to write poetry in 1963, and upon receiving a scholarship to the New School for Social Research, she took writing classes with Kenneth Koch and Bill Berkson, although, as Weiner notes, she "could not write New York School poetry" (LINEbreak). [8] Weiner recalls, in fact, that she felt compelled to work with found texts (a discovery she made through her association with "talk-poet" David Antin). [9] Weiner's Code Poems, a compilation of poems and performance pieces written in the mid-1960s, is one such result of having encountered a sufficiently alienated form of language with which to compose. The texts in Code Poems are based on a synthetic, nineteenth-century set of given messages comprising the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations, "a visual signal system for ships at sea" (3). Code Poems should be considered a landmark collection in the American avant-garde for a number of reasons. As Jackson Mac Low writes, "Weiner's Code Poems are notably original. Outside of a small group of aleatoric poems I made c. 1963 ... I know of no other code-book poems written in the 1960s. I also know that Weiner, when composing hers, knew nothing of mine: I have transcribed none of them from my notebooks" (97). [10] The significance of her poetic experiment lies not only in the novelty of employing this medium, but in the way she tests the limits of the material to comment on language. John Perreault observes that Weiner was "asking certain questions before it was fashionable to ask them. Is language a code? Is poetry a code? Can you use one code to describe another code? Can personal expression be avoided?" (8). Code Poems makes the compelling case that the official messages encrypted in the code harbor secrets hidden only from themselves as self-identical: within them lie communiques of an alternate totality, heterogeneous and cohere nt.

Forrest Meyers

2009-02-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

Most famously known for his bright blue wall on the border of Soho with aqua girders that has with much press coverage and fanfare been reconstructed and permanently installed back where it belongs, Forrest Meyers has been around and continued to make an ongoing series of bodies of work in all kinds of categories, the ad hoc spirit being the one I chose two pieces from in visiting his studio and apartment right in my neighborhood. I don't have images of the pieces yet to upload here. The cover of his catalogue to a show from Art et Industrie and some excepts from the review in Art in America following the exhibition in the mid nineties will have to suffice for now:

There is nothing new about the effort to meld art and function, In our century, it was an important mission of such modernist movements as De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. What Forrest Myers brings to the genre is a cheeky irreverence that places more emphasis on the furniture-ness of art than on the art-ness of furniture. Thus, while some of the art-furniture sculptures exhibited here remain marginally usable, for most the spirit of functionality seems introduced so as to disable the art-for-art's sake mentality of more serious modern and contemporary artists.

Picnic Table is an excellent illustration of this process. Installed so that the viewer entering the gallery gets a full frontal view of this work, it resembles at first glance a three-dimensional Sean Scully. Alternating upright planks of rusted and polished steel suggest a dialogue between light reflected and absorbed, between rough and smooth, between warm and cold. Only when one walks around the piece does it become clear that it is actually a full-sized, functional picnic table set on end, a realization which immediately deflates such high-flown formal responses.

Other works make sly reference to other modern and contemporary masters. Smokin' offers a red, buckled car hood (a la John Chamberlain) equipped with a flickering fake fireplace. Something Like a Good Armchair takes Matisse's chestnut and realizes it by shaping an overstuffed chair out of steel bedsprings. Mesa Double makes a nod to David Smith with a pair of polished steel plates affixed to an undulating black steel pipe in such a way that they could serve as seats. Such works tweak art history while hinting that the exalted status of high art is only a convention deriving from its apparent distance from function.

Other works relate to popular culture. Toon is a bright orange armchair fashioned out of a tangle of coated aluminum wire which indeed suggests a cartoon doodle brought to life. Ornette, a testament to the artist's lifelong interest in jazz, is a wire bed frame outfitted with pink plastic bottle caps and hung against the wall in such a way that its shadow suggests musical notation.

Myers has been interested in the intersection of art and technology since the 1960s, when he was a member of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). While many of his fellow artists went awry because they invested too heavily in a utopian vision of technology, Myers has continued to infuse his productions with a strong sense of whimsy. They refuse to allow us to take any polemic seriously.

David Hammons

2009-02-24T07:11:00.001-08:00

Here I would like to recognize Katharine Gates on my forum as the artist and Gallery Director of Key Gallery in Richmond Virginia in the early nineties, one of the first new people I met in Richmond after moving back there from Paris. She organized a show for Key with Hans Haacke's sculpture dealing with Phillip Morris, which he was quite happy to show just down from where the Tobacco Festival had its yearly celebration in Shockoe Slip, along with work by Paper Tiger, Dyke Action Force, and notably David Hammons' Whose Ice is Colder. There was a panel discussion with some local art historians and instructors notaly centering on the large mural David Hammons did of Jesse Jackson in pinkface, with blond hair that was quite memorable - especially for Richmond, former capitol of the confederacy.

Later when I was in graduate school at Tyler Stan Whitney arranged for the full graduate student class to come up to New York and get a walking tour of Harlem with David Hammons. In the Richmond Public Library back visiting from graduate school I found a book on David Hammons where he wrote about Aime Cesaire and the way things are made and constructed by the folks in Harlem, this is why I posted the Adhocism book, Aime Cesaire and David Hammons today as the one major lineage of the show Ad Hoc Shop.

The broken Piggy Bank with the cowrie shells is more timely than ever.

Aime Cesaire

2009-02-24T06:49:00.000-08:00

Martinican poet, playwright, and politician, one of the most influential authors from the French-speaking Caribbean. Aimé Césaire formulated with Léopold Senghor and Léon Gontian Damas the concept and movement of négritude, defined as "affirmation that one is black and proud of it". Césaire's thoughts about restoring the cultural identity of black Africans were first fully expressed in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), a mixture of poetry and poetic prose. The work celebrated the ancestral homelands of Africa and the Caribbean. It was completed in 1939 but not published in full form until 1947.
my negritude is not a stone
nor a deafness flung against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a white speck of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the blaxing flesh of the sky
my negritude riddles with holes
the dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, in the French Caribbean. His father, Fernand Elphège, was educated as teacher, but later worked as a manager of a sugar estate. Eléonore, Césaire's mother, was a seamstress. In Cahier Césaire described his childhood in a harsh light: "And the bed of planks from which my race has risen, all my race from this bed of planks on its feet of kerosene cases, as if the old bed had elephantiasis, covered with a goat skin, and its dried banana leaves and its rags, the ghost of a mattress that is my grandmother's bed (above the bed in a pot full of oil a candle-end whose flame looks like a fat turnip, and on the side of the pot, in letters of gold: MERCI)." Césaire's family was poor, but his parents invested in the education of their children. To faciliate the studies of their talented son, they moved Basse Pointe to Fort-de-France, the capital. Among Césaire's classmate at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France was Léon Damas, who later contributed to négritude.

During his years in Paris Césaire met other Caribbean, West African, and African American students, but the most important acquaintance was Léopold Senghor, a poet and later the first president of independent Senegal. Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948) became an important landmark of modern black writing in French.

The photograph is from the New York Times obituary honoring Cesaire when he died in April at 94 only last year.

Adhocism

2009-02-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

This is the book I found in the Richmond Virginia downtown Public Library in the room on all the Arts in the midseventies and would look through - although I didn't read anything that I remembered inside, it was a book I used a little as an image bank and was fascinated with as part of the tenor of the times, and the images were so compelling as drawn from so many periods and new ideas just currently developing, a well of past and possible future Ad Hoc accomplishment. I have refound it at the New York Public Library in downtown Manhattan. It certainly still speaks to the DIY spirit still pertinent to countercultures, subcultures and cultures still dealing with colonialization everywhere, however it does lack a certain recognition of what preceded it in the most latter category, dealing more with class origins rather than roots of DIY.

Luca Buvoli, Marisa Merz...and Futurism

2009-02-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

I had met Luca Buvoli in 2001 at the Greater New York show by standing in front of the monitor showing an animated work of his and trying to explain by describing in detail to my then poet boyfriend, who was new to the art world, Buvoli's show I had seen in the Drawing Center with its wires with wiry objects coming off of them encrusted with tin foil and cellophane, that when one got to the right angle spelled out "Not a Superhero." I was then telling my boyfriend how when I saw Marisa Merz's word piece at the Guggenheim of Italian art from the mid forties to mid seventies coming off the wall with wires spelling out B E A and wondering if he had seen her work before having the show when a tall young man stepped from behind the monitor and said in very Italian accented English, "I am Luca Buvoli." He said he had not seen her work before but when he did it made him very happy.

The reproduction is from the current issue of Modern Painters, just one page of a piece he did based on Marinetti's car using the painting ideas based on collating stop action photography into a depiction of movement on canvas, sculpturally achieved.

At the Futurist event he had an animation of profiles of people speaking very much slowly and more strangely the Manifesto that Marinetti would perform in theater halls; the speakers are aphasic - in his interview in Modern Painters there is a lot of discourse on why he used aphasic speakers, however experiencing the video makes these words haunting in the most moving way and was an excellent contrast to Charles Bernstein's magisterial re - interpretation right next to the monitor's ongoing loop of the animation.

After leaving MoMA around 2 pm for the Futurist Event I walked through Central Park and stopped at the Metropolitan and then the Guggenheim bookstore on the way to a panel discussion much later in the early evening at the National Academy (including David Diao, Mona Hatoum, and Amy Sillman as exhibits to be discussed) and found the catalogue to the Italian exhibition and looked at the three pages on Marisa Merz and especially at the B E A piece again. I had stopped in the Museum of Folk Art and found a book on another woman Italian artist there. Her name is Carol Rama and it was the catalogue for her retrospective which was in Trento and then in Gateshead in the UK - funny to purchase the book in that bookstore, I can assure you Carol Rama is no self taught or outsider artist.

Another Futurism: Mina Loy and Papini's Journal Lacerba

2009-02-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

Mina Loy drew a portrait of Papini while living in Florence - she was fascinated by the editor of the journal Lacerba, an Italian neologism for Acerba with the French article as it would be in French, L'acerbe.

This is the really brief Wickepedia entry for Papini which doesn't even mention Lacerba:

Papini was born in Florence as the son of a modest furniture retailer (and former member of Giuseppe Garibaldi's Redshirts) from Borgo degli Albizi, Papini was baptized secretly to avoid the aggressive atheism of his father, and he lived a rustic, lonesome, and precociously introspective childhood. From that time onwards he felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, as well as to any form of servitude (which he saw as connected to religion); he also became enchanted with the impossible idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized.

Trained as a schoolteacher, he taught for a few years after 1899, then became a librarian. The literary life attracted Papini, who founded the magazine Il Leonardo, together with Giuseppe Prezzolini, in 1903, then joined Enrico Corradini's group as co-editor of Il Regno. He started publishing short-stories and essays: in 1903, Il tragico quotidiano ("The Tragic Everyday"), in 1907 Il pilota cieco ("The Blind Pilot") and Il crepuscolo dei filosofi ("The Twilight of the Philosophers"). The latter constituted a polemic with established and diverse intellectual figures, such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche - Papini proclaimed the death of philosophers and the demolition of thinking itself. He briefly flirted with Futurism and other violent and liberating forms of Modernism (Papini is the character in several poems of the period written by Mina Loy).

So much for Wickepedia.

Apollinaire himself wrote one of the many Futurist manifestoes which appeared in Papini's Lacerba, then temporarily the official organ of Futurism. For graphic designers and historians of typography, Giovanni Papini's 'Lacerba' introduced free typography in Italy . Most interestingly is how Papini ends up in the discussion of philosophy via William James, excerpted here:

" A constant and colorful feature of William James's writing is his generous appraisal of those individuals who left their impression on his mind. James's pages abound with cameo portraits of philosophers and scientists both famous and obscure, religious mystics, Viennese peasant women and Brockton murderers; these are major actors and anonymous bit players in life's drama. One of most intriguing of these supporting figures is Giovanni Papini. Best known, perhaps, are the references in Pragmatism where he emerges as the originator of the famous "corridor" metaphor. This scant evidence gives little indication of just how controversial a figure Papini turns out to be in the history of pragmatism in Italy. While James praises Giovanni Papini in the most extravagant terms for his originality, rhetorical flair, and uncompromisingly militant pragmatic spirit, this enthusiasm is not shared by others who have subsequently written on Italian pragmatism. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic have questioned whether Papini truly deserves the lavish praise that James so readily bestows upon him. "

This is from an article by Paul Colella from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. I leave it to others to track down the Corridor metaphor to change the subject to the giant Mina Loy herself, the author of the only surrealist novel I was ever not only able to finish, but permanently impressed by titled Insel (Black Sparrow Press), who participated in New York Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism and for whom Duchamp wrote the catalogue essay for her exhibition in New York at Julien Levy gallery - they had maintained a friendship nearly their entire lives, when intersecting geographically. Her role in Futurism was at the center of a triangle of Marinetti and Papini's collaboration and rivalry in the earliest days of Futurism, but Papini was not to get alon with Marinetti much more on class differences as Marinetti was pampered son of a wealthy family in Milan and Papini had no such money or origins.

Specifically, Mina Loy had Marinetti as a frequent visitor when he was in Florence from Milan and he pursued her for quite awhile while she was more intrigued by, and felt Papini to be, her kindred spirit - Papini befriended her but withheld from anything further, so she did accompany Marinetti on a train trip and they were lovers for a time, but she thought his big theater entertaining but never took it terrifically seriously. Loy preferred Papini's knowledge of philosophy, and his poetry, and his acerbic rather than bombastic style. Papini and Loy were entirely kindred with her reading and English poetry and acerbic wit, and that other "Village Explainer" similar to Marinetti, Ezra Pound, proclaimed her one of the three poets worth reading in English very early on. (Gertrude Stein, who called Pound the Village Explainer, "fine if you are a village, if not, not" was a friend of Loy's in Florence where they were often found walking around together, and met Alice Toklas' approval as a close and enthusiastic reader of Stein's work.)

Futurism: February 20, 1909

2009-02-22T08:29:00.001-08:00

I am breaking into Ad Hoc shop for several postings on that great Cabaret and big theater spurred by Marinetti, Futurism. The current issue has a campy cover and interview with Maurizio Cattelan but more importantly Luca Buvoli, and other Futurism discussions are happening everywhere in this centenary year of the foundations of the movements, led or successfully interpreted and promoted for the first time by poets as was often the case in those days, but filled in visually and conceptually by exhibitions of painters. In Marinetti's case it was definitely a case of being led.

The day before yesterday I attended Poetry Magazine's Futurism Event at the Museum of Modern Art, where Charles Bernstein kicked it off with a powerful and forceful reading of the manifesto, with the delightful ironies of his reading "none of us is over 30" (Bernstein is a few years past thirty) and when he got to the lines on museums, in the Museum of Modern Art, the irony was quite enjoyable to the gathered audience, it was time to laugh out loud: - "Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?"

This performance was in the lobby on the steps in front of the sculpture garden with streams of visitors going by, not quite registering as they glanced over to get on to the second and further floors. When Bernstein got out a hammer at the part about blows he approached the Miro with a savage gesture bearing an ordinary hardware hammer, and then went over to the free issues of Poetry Magazine carefully stacked on a table and swept a large group of them violently across the floor, it was more of an attention getter for the passersby, some stopped to see what it was all about and some to pick up free copies as the floor seemed to make it more clear that one needn't pay for them.

I had especially gone to see Luca Buvoli's animation, to meet Lee Ann Brown there who is my cohort and founder of Ad Hoc Shop and see her colleague Charles Bernstein read, but had emailed her asking if someone would be reading Mina Loy's Aphorisms on Futurism, which are included in her collected work entitled The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Here is the posting from a little more than a year ago on James Geary's website. James Geary has written an excellent history of aphorisms entitled The World in a Phrase, and the most globally oriented compilation of aphorisms ever attempted in English, (and incidentally has published my aphorisms twice on his website). Here is his posting:

All Aphorisms, All The Time

A blog by James Geary about Aphorisms

Aphorisms by Mina Loy
Posted on January 31, 2008

Mina Loy always considered herself more of a visual rather than a verbal artist. She was born in London in 1882, and first established a reputation as a post-Impressionist painter. She lived in Paris during the early years of the 20th century and was involved in all of the artistic movements of the time: dadaism, futurism, surrealism. She moved to the U.S. in 1916, and in 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore, editor of Poetry magazine: “Is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?” One of Loy’s verses, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” is an aphorism sequence as much as it is a poem. My thanks Lori Ellison for alerting me to Mina Loy. Excerpted aphorisms:

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

LOVE the hideous to find the sublime core of it.

LOVE of others is an appreciation of one’s self.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.

THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.

Christopher Stackhouse

2009-02-21T07:22:00.001-08:00

I met Chris working at the animation studio the Ink Tank the summer of 1997, my second job in New York, and he told me about his interest in poetry (especially early interest in Hart Crane), his music and visual arts projects then - and we have kept in touch through running into each other and email since then: he has organized several ongoing poetry reading series through galleries and was included in a show that Rose Burlingham and Lindsey Brown did together several summers ago, with these clipped collections from things found walking around.

Tamara Zahaykevich

2009-02-21T04:49:00.001-08:00

The artist's statement from her website:

I create sculptures using foam core, paper and paint. I use the low-tech materials of model making for their association with the mundane and their lack of pretension. I also include studio detritus such as scraps of foam core and paint mixing palettes, which reflect my fondness for frugality and jerry rigged construction. My sculptures accrue meaning from this reuse and reassignment of materials. They are reformed and juxtaposed to be seen anew.

My late grandmother, Babcia, was an immigrant from Western Ukraine where my mother was born. She spent many years living in Poland with the family until coming to Newark, NJ in the 1960’s. My mother told me that when my grandmother was a young girl, her family owned a business, she rode horses, had a seamstress, and someone even braided her hair! During the war, her family lost everything and was very poor.

My Babcia had to become very resourceful to survive which is one of the qualities I most admire about her. She could take any old scraps in her refrigerator and cook up a delicious soup on request; clothes that didn’t fit came back to life with minor alterations; embroidered tablecloths and doilies spruced up the saddest furniture. Despite being frugal, she was also very generous. Everything she created made those around her feel special.

These admirable qualities are my artistic heritage from my Babcia. We both create beauty and nourish our bodies through our creative activities. I often think when I am in the studio that the scraps of foam core, with their random shapes and accidental drips of paint, that I use in my art, are as nourishing as the bits of carrots, beets, and onion skins used in making Babcia’s soups.

This is Tamara's statement from her website: it goes very importantly with the text of Femmage, by Melissa Meyer and Miriam Shapiro, with their emphasis on Waste Not, Want Not, and Rauschenberg's description of growing up on a farm, and David hammons' writing about the way things are made by Blacks in the city, in Harlem, and the Great Migration to the cities in the north - immigration from rural parts of Europe, or changing fortunes due to revolutions and similar upheavals. I had seen her work in a show in Feature titled Lost Sock Drawer.

Shinique Smith

2009-02-21T04:43:00.001-08:00

SHINIQUE SMITH Born 1971, Baltimore, MD. Lives and works in Brooklyn,
NY EDUCATION 2003 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture,
New York, NY 2000 Summer Studio Arts Program, Wackers Kunst Academie,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2000 Tufts University & The School of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Medford, MA 1998 MFA, Maryland Institute
College of Art, Baltimore, MD 1992 BFA, The Maryland Institute
College of Art, Baltimore, MD

Excerpts from an article in the Washington Post by Blake Gopnik on Shinique Smith:

Shinique Smith is as fine a mixture of street and salon as any artist could be.

For decades, her family lived in the genteel Baltimore neighborhood of Edmondson Village. Except that by the time Smith was growing up, she says, that gentility was lost and by now it's "totally the 'hood."

She was born to a teenage single mom who left Shinique (rhymes with "Clinique") behind to be brought up by her grandmother. This young mother, however, had "abandoned" her daughter to study fashion in New York and Paris, then came back to push culture and education on her kid.

Smith went to storied public schools in Baltimore: The Baltimore School of the Arts and later Frederick Douglass High. In between those two schools, she got arrested, for what she calls "ridiculous" graffiti crimes, and was bounced to Southwestern High, where metal detectors were de rigueur.

All along, this has been what Smith has had to reckon with: A complex negotiation between the "high" culture of the art world, for so long steeped in whiteness, and the black "street" culture of the city she grew up in.

Smith is proud of her brief flirtation with graffiti as a member of TWC, The Welfare Crew. "For a minute, I was the only girl writer in Baltimore," she says. But press her for details about her teenage arrest, and she just laughs it off as youthful foolishness, long since scrubbed from her record. That was more than 20 years ago, she points out. Her street-art past may be something "people like to glom onto," but she has spent decades moving on from it.

(In the show in DC covered in the Post, Smith included new verses from Nikki Giovanni, as part of the sound collage mix. Giovanni is in her sixties - there were students at the high school I went to in Columbia Maryland who wanted Nikki Giovanni at our 1976 commencement, but as the second only graduating class of Oakland Mills High School, we didn't have the budget. We were excited about reading her poetry then, the very young high school women.) Giovanni's verses include such phrases as "You are Just / If there is any / Justice / Trying to find a way of not / Just surviving but living" and "You are just / trying to say 'I'm Alive.' " They inspired Smith to include the following in her assemblage, which cascades from one corner of the room: A torn Tupac Shakur T-shirt, collaged photos of dead hip-hoppers such as Aaliyah, Jam Master Jay and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes (along with similar homages to dead fine artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Harding), images of roses torn from a movie poster for "Youth Without Youth," a cardboard-cutout butterfly, a plastic "Heavyweight Wrestling" trophy belt, gold plastic beading hanging from the ceiling, swirls of illegible writing done right on the wall (in that sumi ink), lengths of red ribbon, blue shoelace and yellow caution tape stretched across a window embrasure as well as a pair of high-heel pink mules that sit demurely in the middle of the mess.

Nancy Shaver

2009-02-20T05:45:00.000-08:00

Nancy Shaver is currently in a group show at Feature in its new location on the Bowery that opened February 19th. I had seen her work first in the back room at Hudson's Chelsea space, then more recently a large front room exhibit with her constructed, and painted work and found objects together, so much in the spirit of Ad Hoc Shop, which these postings are all delineating.

Chakaia Booker

2009-02-20T05:36:00.001-08:00

From Grace Glueck's review of her last show at Marlborough, which I had the pleasure to see, and then an acquaintance had her work in a well curated show at Henry Street Settlement a few months more than a year ago.

"Black rubber tires, cut up and recycled into sculptures, are Chakaia Booker's tough, aggressive signature medium, and in this show they are given even more expressive power. She uses patterned treads, thicknesses, textures, subtle differences in color (steel radials give the most chromatic effect) to different advantage in each object.

To Ms. Booker, black symbolizes the strength of African identity, suggests Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in a catalog preface to the show, but her stress on the color's nuances is meant to evoke the complexities of black's human application."

Joe Overstreet

2009-02-19T04:57:00.000-08:00

The paintings to the left are, from top to bottom,,

Origins, 2003

Chocktaw Fields, 2003

Morning Vines, 2003

Joe Overstreet is the impetus behind the Ad Hoc show idea - and certaInly someone knowledgeable enough for me to have learned from; he of course has lived the postings on Jazz cadence, Hilla Rebay and the Museum of Objective Art, and also Harry Smith with his "Injuneering" (early teenage recordings of Pacific Northwest potlatches) and rural roots recordings, and celestial and Pythagorean interrelationships. would be all very familiar to him from his own studies and experiences.
I had visited his studio just following the opening of High Times Hard Times hoping to put a show together of what some of the same artists were doing currently, a temporal bookend if you will, and include someartists who had not been in especially Gerald Jackson and Thornton Willis, and Ronnie Landfield who I met just a little later. The show fell through, but the first thing I told Joe and Corinne was that I was born in Montgomery Alabama, but that it was on an air force base, but looking at the screens built on to the stainless steel structures reminded me of going to family back in Crockett, Texas or Charlottesville, Virginia in the warm to hot months and looking through the screen door or porch at the birds or squirrels and trees and landscape outside. The idea of Ad Hoc, painting and assembling, and just plain assembling work, came out of my wanting to do a show with Joe Overstreet as one of the guiding spirits. This is from his website and says it all much better than I could. Also several summers ago there was an exemplary show at Zwirner titled "a point in space is a place for an argument." It was such a good show where all the work could have a dialogue in the tradition of the French verb "jaser" and Joe's piece was a nice extended solo interweaving with work by artists Lynda Benglis, Forrest Bess, Alfred Jensen, Lee Lozano, Niki de Saint Phalle, Katy Schimert, Al Taylor and others. Here is some of the accompanying text to Meridian Fields:

In the mid 1970s I understood my reality by looking into the deep. Where it was clear and not murky, from the surface 30 or 40 feet above, I could view the ocean floor.

In effect, this reminded me of looking out from the screened door of my grandparent's porch as a child, out at the fields near Meridian in 1940.

The screen paintings have a strong structural base, and incorporate geometric shapes such as whirling squares, logarithmic spirals, and patterns of organic growth, along with rhythmic waves found in music.

In the mid 1970s I made more than 100 screen paintings, but at the same time I was enjoying painting on canvas, and I continued to be occupied with that into the 1980s and 1990s.

At one point I realized that the canvases and structures I was working on were nothing more than surfaces. The way I work now the shadow is a part of the structure and as such, very much a part of the painting itself.

Open spaces, celestial observations, and the suggestion of the rhythms of nature reflect the rural, northeastern territory once ruled, and still inhabited by Mississippi Band of the Choctaws.

"Overstreet's oeuvre has remained dedicated not exactly to the idea of a black esthetic but to African-American art history, and at the same to the broader stream of Western modernism and post-modernism of which it is a part.

Overstreet is an artist in the American tradition. . . His work demonstrates a courageous determination to somehow be true to both."

Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music

2009-02-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

A monochord is an ancient musical and scientific laboratory instrument. The word "monochord" comes from the Greek and means literally "one string." In the monochord, a single string is stretched over a sound box. The string is fixed at both ends while a moveable bridge alters pitch.
(...) In 1618, Robert Fludd devised a mundane monochord (also celestial or divine monochord) that linked the Ptolemaic universe to musical intervals. An image of the celestial monochord was used on the 1952 cover of Anthology of American Folk Music by Harry Everett Smith and in the 1977 book The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (p. 133) by S.K. Heninger, Jr.

See both the original etching and the Harry Smith cover using it in the background, left.

The diddley bow is an American string instrument of African origin. It is typically homemade, consisting usually of a wooden board and a single wire string stretched between two screws, and played by plucking while varying the pitch with a metal or glass slide held in the other hand.
The diddley bow is significant to blues music in that many blues guitarists got their start playing it as children, as well as the fact that, like the slide guitar, it is played with a slide.
A notable performer of the instrument was the Mississippi blues musician Lonnie Pitchford, who used to demonstrate the instrument by stretching a wire between two nails hammered into the wood of a vertical beam making up part of the front porch of his home. Pitchford's headstone, placed on his grave in 2000 by the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, is actually designed with a playable diddley bow on the side as requested by Pitchford's family. Other performers who use the instrument extensively are New York City-based jazz pianist Cooper-Moore, and American bluesman Seasick Steve.

Sideshow, Mary Hambleton and Margrit Lewczuk

2009-02-17T06:12:00.000-08:00

This is first of all a reminder that next weekend is the last weekend to see It's A Wonderful Life at Sideshow. I no longer work there however it is around the corner from where I live, and Saturday when I went in there I saw Stephanie Frank, who showed me where her two paintings were in the 300 plus salon style two rooms, hers are on the wall facing one as you come in the door, near the bathroom door, looking up. Also on Saturday I encountered Jenny Landfield talking to Jeanne thomsen, who is currently in a group show at Nurture Art, a nonprofit space in Williamsburg open to curatorial projects of all kinds. I had wanted to revisit a certain familial notion at Rich's group show that expands on and goes beyond the community / communal feeling of the big group show, after writing about the daughters of American painters earlier in the blog, and Jenny was able to show me her mother Lenore Jaffe's collage work hung just to the left and above of Ronnie Landfield's painting and their son Noah Landfield's which I had seen as part of a series of wildly colorful volcano paintings, however the nicest surprise was Noah's wife Nagha Wada, a large rhythm of tiny petals coming down on a white field which was next to my small drawing and Gelah Penn's small framed sculpture in thin plastic filaments, we remarked on how well rich had hung the three together. (Gelah is one of the many couples included in the show; her husband Stephen Maine has a painting in the first room.) Rich has his daughter Cheyenne and son willy included in the show and is quite glad to point them out, and another important visitor to the gallery that day the filmmaker and chronicler of artists for PBS and other venues was showing rich on the PC his DVD of Nicholas Carone - who has a haunting as can be painting in the show and Claude Carone his son has a painting worth seeking out over the door to the hallway.

Sunday I was sitting chatting when my friend Leslie Roberts, who is a favorite fellow notebook artist of mine, came in to see work by friends and said how sad it was that Mary Hambleton had died, either two days or the day before the opening. I had not known this at all, having been in Los Angeles for another opening that night. So I am posting two artworks from the Mary Hambleton website which I hope everyone will visit. She had cancer for six years and yet never stopped working. This was a bit of a shock so I am afraid I may do Mary Hambleton more justice later. The two reproductions are from bottom Topsey Turvey 2006 and next upwards, Tall Dots with Orange Stripes 2006.

The next three reproductions are by Margrit Lewzcuk, who had a painting in an exhibition entitled The Color Imperative at N3 Space on North 3rd, that I thought for a second might have been by Chris Martin but more interesting in a certain way, before I read her name on the exhibition checklist. Then I saw her small exhibition at the Bowery Poetry Club while there for a reading, and the reproduction at left with the squares entitled Fire Fly was a large painting I was so happy to look at while gallery sitting for the Shapeshifters group exhibition at Sideshow. I am very excited by this work and in the stages where I haven't begun to form anything to write or frame it with - a very enthusiastic stage for me and one I am actually inclined to prolong at the moment.

The reproductions are Orange Cross from 2003, Fire Fly 2003 and Moondog also from 2003.

Hilla Rebay, "Paper Plastic," Dance, and Isadora Duncan

2009-02-15T08:31:00.001-08:00

Hilla Rebay was born in Strasbourg in 1890 into the von Rebay family. She went to Paris after one year in 1909 studying at the art school in Cologne, to go to the Academie Julian, still famous all over Europe as a place to draw and paint from live nude models rather than plaster reproductions of Greco-Roman sculptures. At the same time she attended the Academie de Grande Chaumiere which was more progressive in studying color in the new optical and scientific way pioneered by the Impressionists. After moving back to Germany and settling in Munich she met the painter Erler who was one of the founders and illustrators of the journal Die Jugend that was following up on the Munich Secession movement of the 1890s. But the turning point for Rebay as a hardworking artist wanting to find a solid way of working out of her studio was when she had moved back to Cologne in 1912 and saw the Futurist Exhibition that caused a sensation there just as it had already in Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels and elsewhere. It included works by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand leger and so many others.

By 1915 just before the breakout of World War II she was in Switzerland and was befriended by Hans Arp in Zurich, he encouraged her in linocuts and abstractions she was making based on visits to the Cirque Medrano and Ballets Russes. In these circus and dance scenes, which had occupied her since 1913, it was possible to trace her progres from greater and greater reduction and form and abstraction. She increasingly structured the lines until she wrote thatt she hoped "they would not be taken for a manufacturing blueprint."

It was Arp who gave Hilla the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (1912) and Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (1911). Through Arp, Rebay came to know the Zurich Dada circle, founded in February 1916 by Hugo Ball, but when Arp wanted to publish her new woodcuts and linocuts in the group's journal Cabaret Voltaire he was blocked from doing so.

Nevertheless she made her first paper plastic in 1916, the first reproduction at top left, as it was later to be listed in The Museum of Objective Art. please note in the overall composition the photograph of the little girl at top right whose forehead is peeking out at top right. Rebay herself founded and ran The Museum of Objective Art through Solomon Guggenheim's backing from the early twenties when it began until 1952. She resigned then three years later in the aftermath of Guggenheim's death and is described as "abandoning the batlefield" in the essay Art of Tomorrow by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, in the Guggenheim Catalogue with the same title, Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon Guggenheim, where I have gotten this information and the two reproductions from. It contains the correspondence she had with Kandinsky but I find it interesting beyond there theosophical ideas that she came to an interest in music through dance and the body, and her term for collage is based on the german distinction between drawing and painting and the plastic arts - as fabricated, hence the bizarre term for collage who have taken the French term into our art history. I find it interesting to note that New Yorkers were attending the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum of Non-Objective Art up until it was renamed the Guggenheim Museum in 1954, when the term abstract and non-objective were still interchangeable. Rebay, as a German with continual solo exhibitions at the Felix Feneon run gallery in Paris had considered Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius but decide on an American Architect, the then not so well known Wright, whose idealism however is in synch with her own, and asks for a "Temple" or a "Monument" to the spirit of art, which she emphasizes as ryhthmic, delineated in the essay by Karole Vail, "Rhythmic Delight: A Quest for Non-Objectivity."

I want to mention in passing, after having discussed the naissance of jazz, that the first big exhibition Guggenheim and Rebay brought to the US was not in New York but in Charleston where Guggenheim had a winter home and a great deal of city connections - since the twenties most enormous 20s dance craze that even little girls like me passed on tiny dance steps was called the Charleston - dwarfing the one my grandfather showed me once as having danced both called the Black Bottom - it is an interesting connection, but not one that Rebay ever let enter her temple - the music she wanted piped in to her absolutely modern in design and contemplative spirit of art space was not Stravinsky, Satie or Schoenberg but Chopin and Bach - although interestingly I suppose she does have an incredibly detailed study of dancers and then a couple at a table, all four African American at a Harlem Club in a style that presages later Berliner's New Realism work, but already resembles African American figuration that predates it, as expressionistic and recoding journalistically at the same time.

More to the point is the resemblance between another collage from the same period and Isadora Duncan, the founder of Modern Dance, the famous barefoot dancer from San Francisco who first toured Europe in 1905 and changed dance from the pixillated 18th century ballet form it had stayed stuck in most of the nineteenth century, forever.