Sunday, May 23, 2010

David Salle in his Youth



















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.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Frank's Wild Years

Sticky Sublime



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

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Carrie Moyer: Athena, Artemis and Baba Yaga



















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.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Millennial Aphorisms

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.