represent

Brooklyn Heights colorist

John Lloyd, Classic Brooklyn Townhouse, 2011

New York from Brooklyn to the High Line, Salon d’Art, until Oct. 2.

History’s over

From an essay in a forthcoming book of Martinez drawings:

Martinez isn’t afraid to make abstract expressionist paintings or cubist paintings or whatever. Movements and styles don’t have a sell by date. As long as artists can genuinely expand on a movement (I think groove is actually a better word) its completely valid. Dada and surrealism are as relevant today as ever, whatever they’re called. Eddie Martinez isn’t snowed by the notion of progress in art, as 99% of artists are. What makes his art really modern or contemporary is that it’s a powerful reflection of this moment, it vibrates with the rhythm of our microsecond saturated, overdubbed, post-logical era. This is an era that has outlasted art movements and hidden beauty away where the salesmen can’t readily find it. This is a moment where every artist is fighting a sketchbook war, informed and sustained by secret muses,against historians wired into suicide vests working for international banks. The artists might be making money, but they know it’s money with secret codes set to go off when least expected.

Glenn O’Brien

Best freelance contract in the history of the world

“Nobody cares about art”

David Cowan, beta version, with Matt Dorsey, Wolverine wannabe, far right

David Cowan paid a visit to Casa Dorsey a few days ago, since we missed him when we were doing our one annual vacation last month in Southern California where our son and daughter both work now. I’ve known David since he was about knee-high, one of my son’s lifelong friends who has moved to L.A. to seek his fortunes as a screenwriter. He was back in Rochester visiting family and friends and stopped in to catch up. He’s bearded now, wears cool shoes, and comes up with about 250 new ideas for movies in the course of a week. Talk to him for MORE

Anthem for artists

The progress of love

The Turning Season, handmade, clothbound chapbook at Viridian Artists

Over the past month I’ve become obsessed with creating a set of handmade books. I’ve never done this before. I essentially took lessons from the wealth of information available on the web, including many videos, so whatever craftsmanship I’ve achieved has been earned through many setbacks, mistake, do-overs, workarounds, and overall general trial-and-error. In the end, as of today, my efforts have resulted five sets of two-volume paperback chapbooks to show for my effort, and five clothbound, hardback single-signature chapbooks—a limited first edition. It’s been a long journey, but far more gratifying than I suspected it would be. In an age when the rate of e-book rentals at public library is skyrocketing, I like sinking into the long, slow, deliberate building of a physical book with an inkjet printer, printmaking paper, thread, binder’s board, bone folders, awls, glue and cloth, in a way that can’t possibly make me the kind of money that would justify the amount of time and, yes, cash, I’ve invested in the process. It’s been a labor of deep love, on a book that expresses some of my most fundamental values, and after working so many years on a story that has yet to find its conclusive form, it’s gratifying to see this small, elliptical child of that larger, difficult parent finally become something I can hold in my hands. When I see the final book, I feel: This is me. As much as anything I’ve created in my life, this is me. This is what I wanted these pictures and haiku poems to be when I first created them a number of years ago.

I backed into these weeks of consuming passion as a response to the theme of the next group show at Viridian Artists thanks to Vernita N’Cognita: Yin and Yang, a Fusion of Opposites. The show highlights the way member artists have drawn from Eastern traditions for inspiration or technique or a sense of purpose in their work. A few days after I heard about the theme of the show, it occurred to me to resurrect this series of drawings and poems I created as an appendix for a novel I wrote over the past decade but have never published, nor satisfactorily finished. Viking/Penguin published my first novel in the late 90s and since then I’ve either been working on this one—in between periods of writer’s block that many people call making a living. The novel is called The Turning Season. So is the book I’ve just designed, printed, and bound by hand. (I would have made the paper as well, if I’d had the time—and, well, if I’d ever actually made my own paper. Maybe that can wait for a second edition . . .)

The ten drawings I did for the novel were created as the work of two fictional characters in the novel: Rob Hapworth and Jill Pickett. They meet on vacation, they are attracted to one another, but they pull apart out of an obligation to people they already love, and yet they sublimate their affection for one another through a set of poems and drawings: Rob writes the poems and Jill does the drawings to match them. In the process, she delves deeply into a number of traditions and imaginative works, from the Buddhist Ox-Herding Songs to the central structure of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to The Wasteland as well as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. In other words she turns a set of simple haiku poems that chart the pull and push of her relationship with Rob into a reworking of an ancient mythic structure she detects at the heart of all these other sources: a universal spiritual journey toward fulfillment through loss. I spent more than a year writing the poems and taking the photographs to use as the basis for pastel drawings on watercolor paper, to accompany the poems. In other words, I did what Jill ostensibly does in the story. And then, when I put the novel aside, I hung the pictures on my wall and moved on to other things for the past few years. Until now.

Now I’m thinking I need to return to my manuscript and finally finish the novel.

Dante visits Cincinnati

Steam of Lethe, Sean Caulfield

Manifest is offering a fascinating exhibit right now: two artist’s books that use printmaking to merge images and poetry inspired by Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. The work draws on visions from the Italian poet’s trilogy and then reworks them as a way of meditating on what Sean Caulfield sees as the contemporary crisis of our relationship to the natural world, including the human body itself.  Caulfield, a Canadian artist, got the project rolling by devising images inspired by scenes in Dante’s great poem. Caulfield is a Centennial Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, and has exhibited his prints, drawings and artist’s books extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. He took his images first to Jonathan Hart who wrote poetry based on Caulfield’s work, at which point the collaborators called on Sue Colbert who helped create a unified, integrated book out of the work they’d produced. Caulfield was originally inspired by William Blake’s illustrations for Dante and Milton, as well as that brilliant, eccentric poet/printmaker’s ability to weave his world out of both text and visual imagery.

What inspired me to send questions to Caulfield about his work was his reverence for poetic and artistic tradition—his eagerness to see contemporary relevance in work done centuries ago. More

Asses of the world unite!

Kenny Schachter

Yesterday, an interesting and funny and startling conversation took place on Facebook between the informed and thoughtful curator Todd Levin and the self-described art hustler and polymath Kenny Schachter. It was a little like watching a car crash in real time, though no one really got hurt. More like a couple clown cars in a demolition derby. The conversation revolved around something Schachter wrote about Gallery Girls, a reality TV program built around the lives of young gallery workers. So this all started with a post from Schachter, who now does his thing in London. He’d gotten a scathing letter from the husband of a woman who had appeared in one episode of the show. His post:

Who is the poison pen in this instance, can someone please let me know, am i so terrible? Here is a scathing email I received, all because of this crap tv show I was asked to watch that was supposedly about the art market, not anyone’s academic achievements or accomplishments. Sorry.

Kenny,
I am a friend and subscriber of Marc Faber’s and so have read your art world More

Art I love

Karen Kilimnik, Me, Corner of Haight & Ashbury, 1966, 1998
Water soluble oil color on canvas

Should have started doing this from day one. A new, occasional department: Art I Love. Just great pictures, no words. (This was from a fascinating show Todd Levin curated.)

Oh, the ambition . . .

Lauren sent me an email a couple days ago: “Have you seen Hyperallergic today?” I knew what that meant. I don’t get many emails from her that don’t circle around to the subject of what she’s up to, so I figured somebody high on the 26th floor at Hyperallergic World Headquarters must have finally detected the sound of her painting boots stomping the floorboards at 3 a.m. all the way over on the other side of Brooklyn. Along with strains of Tom Waits from her Macbook. (That’s when she’s usually hard at work on her comics and paintings. I don’t think she actually sleeps.) So I clicked and found that one of my favorite art blogs had discovered her poster, which got tons of shares when she put it up on Facebook a while back. Right after she drew this, earlier this year, she showed it to me, while I was visiting Brooklyn, and pointed toward one of the panels and said, “That’s you.” At the time, I thought, “Oh, cool. I inspired one of these!” Upon further investigation (in other words, Lauren told me to get over myself, I wasn’t her inspiration) she merely meant that, as an artist, she was able to pigeonhole me into one of her well-observed categories. (This flattered me at first and then made me uncomfortable. Lauren’s too intelligent. She sees exactly where most things fall short of the ideal, and shortfall is my niche.) It’s unclear, at this point in time, which panel she meant when she was putting me in my place. I thought it was “Normal things need my help to be interesting.” However, she insists there’s a jar in here somewhere, and she knows I love to paint jars. Here’s the thing, though. Now I recognize myself in more than one of these drawings. At least three of them. Hm. No, five, actually. OK, this is as high as I’m going to go: eight. I’m definitely in eight of these. As Charlie Brown would have said if Lucy had drawn this: I am the inspiration for this comic, Linus! Then Lucy decks him with a roundhouse left.

One thing, though. Zero desire to get naked in public. Not that anyone was hoping.

Words to live by

Playtime, by Deborah Parkin

When I read this, I thought, yes! That’s exactly right! And then I reread it and realized that this would be something almost anyone who practices any kind of unrecognized art would think. Which doesn’t make it any less valuable, of course, but it was the way she worked in her children and possible grandchildren that somehow caught my eye. And also the quality of what she’s doing in the context of her struggle with obscurity. “I have also found the Internet . . .” Funny. Uh, yeah, Deborah. Ampersands and all.

From Lenscratch:

Robert Hughes

“Although art has always been a commodity, it loses its intrinsic value and its social use when it is treated only as a commodity. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of the contemplation of it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning, and visual experience generally, under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then hidden in storage, what would happen to one’s sense of literature—the tissue of its meanings that sustain a common discourse?”

Even better:

“The Cultural Cringe is the assumption that whatever you do in the field of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, dance, or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society. It is the reflex of the kid with low self-esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father, but secretly despairing that it can. The essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live. By the manipulation of such standards, almost anything can be seen to fail, no matter what sense of finesse, awareness, and delight it may produce in its own setting.”

–Robert Hughes

1938-2012

And now the vegetables . . .

Radicchio from Ithaca, oil on linen, 16″ x 36″

We bought these on a trip down to the public market on Cayuga Lake, in Ithaca, a few weeks ago and I was fascinated by the elongated shape and variegated color, as well as the twists and flares in the leaves. I wish I’d asked how the vendor grew them. I’d try some myself next summer. Our lettuce is just about done, but the cherry tomatoes are starting to get red.

Meet your meat

Poultry for Smithfields, Sarah F. Burns

When I saw this, it reminded me of two different paintings by Chardin (also involving game birds one step away from the oven), both in the choice of subject, the simplicity of the staging and in the handling of paint. Great work, part of an interesting and compelling series of vanitas paintings by Sarah F. Burns in Oregon. At one point, the project involved dragging a bloody bear carcass into her Ashland studio. This woman is serious about her meat. And her art. Her friend Jennifer Nitson interviewed Sarah and came away with a nice small profile of the artist containing a wonderful, illuminating quote: “I have been particularly interested in small-scale meat production and nose-to-tail eating because I grew up in that type of lifestyle. My father was a farm-kill butcher when I was born. That means he went from farm to farm killing livestock and brought them back to the butcher shop to cut up and wrap.”  The work was commissioned by a local restaurant in Ashland, named after a London market. As Sarah puts it on her blog: “Smithfields is . . . named after a London meat market with a very long history, going back to the middle ages where it was the place of public executions, becoming a livestock market, and is currently a wholesale meat market today.”

It’s sense of timelessness is what especially appeals to me about this work. It could have been painted two centuries ago and yet it looks totally contemporary as well. I guess that last sentence is just a long way home to the word classic.

Beasts of Revelation, Nixon Pilgrims and Rastafarian Israelis

Kehinde Wiley’s “Abed Al Ashe and Chaled El Awari (The World Stage: Israel)

My visit to Chelsea a couple of weeks ago turned up a surprising number of shows with religious content, presented in vastly different ways. I’ve already pointed out the quasi-Gnostic overtones of the Joseph Strau show at Green Naftali, which seemed to be a sincere attempt to produce art inspired by the German artist’s personal spiritual awakening, but at least three other exhibits approached religion in three distinctly different tones. At D.C. Moore, Beasts of Revelation offered a variety of interesting work, but the tone of the press release created a snarky lens through which it was nearly impossible to see any of the work as a genuine attempt to visualize religious faith in a non-judgmental way. Christopher Hitchens, if you’re watching, you should be grinning. The release was more than a bit pretentious, heralding that the show would break new ground into content heretofore taboo for contemporary art. Oh, that again. (Is that even remotely possible anymore?) The fact that, simultaneously, three other exhibits elsewhere in the city were infused with religious content offered a deflating reality check to this bit of bloviating on contemporary art’s ability to “pose uncomfortable questions and provoke disturbing answers.”

What the show appears to be is the gallery’s attempt to visualize what it calls . . . wait for it, wait for it . .  the “insidious aquifer of metaphorical power” exerted by “religion” but what’s clearly meant is right-wing Christianity. “Political issues that might have been considered personal during another era have become rallying cries for various religious groups.” It isn’t hard to translate what that means, and some of the idiocies of the Christian right-wing are easy targets for anyone who wants to pound the drum over their knuckle-headedness. Yet a show about “religion” that might have been far more interesting and resonant would have been one with images from Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist artists, as well as Jewish and Catholic, or maybe even a die-hard Taoist. Or a Rastafarian, anyone? A show that contained sincere images about personal faith: now there would be something that felt like a violation of a more genuine taboo, since we’re talking about More

What we talk about when we talk about Sol LeWitt

Very funny from Hyperallergic. A sample:

LeWitt’s paintings are clearly about making . . . anyone can make a Sol LeWitt painting. It might suck, mind you, but it’s still a LeWitt if it follows the instructions.

LeWitt’s conceptual approach is one of collaboration and is all about erasing, not only art as an object, but also the author himself. Because of this radical turn, one can say that he is seen as one of the most important artists in the conceptual art movement.

In fact, one should say that. You can usually get away with making a claim about who is “seen as” “one of” the most “important” anything — since these qualified phrases exempt you from having stated any facts. When a speaker says that X is seen as one of the most pivotal yadda, they actually mean to say something like, “Woohoo! I love this artist!”

However, in the case of Sol LeWitt, you can genuinely see that he paved the way for a whole new way of talking about art in terms of the concepts called up by viewing and or making it.

In fact, LeWitt’s new lexicon opened floodgates to a vast realm, a Pandora’s Box, one might say, of artworks that needn’t even be realized in order to be appreciated, and even bought and sold.

Intuition

Ok, from the beginning, again . . .

Joseph Strau, Exercises ab initio

“Josef Strau A former proprietor of well-regarded project spaces in Cologne and Berlin as well as an artist. Strau is known for combining aspects of automatic writing and automatic drawing into installations and sculptural ensembles that often include household furnishings—most notably lamps, which are something of a signature element for him.”

That’s the dictionary definition of Joseph Strau you can pick up at Greene Naftali, where you can inhabit his new conceptual installation until Aug. 10. That hand-out made me laugh when I got it home and read it, and laughter is so often my response to contemporary art, whether I’m laughing with the art or at it. Bottom line: I kind of liked the show, but I’m liking the guy who appears to be behind it even more than what he’s done here. If he’s real. Can you tell anymore? The ethereal quality of show makes you wonder if it’s all just a put-on, but I’m going to assume it’s sincere. It appears to be about recovered innocence, and it has a sense of rebellious spirituality you could trace back through the Hippies and Beats, on backward through Thoreau and Emerson and Rimbaud, all the way back to More

Thought for the day

Midsummer Night’s Dream

I want a painting to be as insignificant and perfect as a daydream. I want insignificant perfection.

Pink Slime, Zuccotti Park, and a little Led Zep

Fait II, Claudia Fainguersch

I spent most of Sunday helping to hang the new group show at Viridian Artists, on W. 28^th St., juried by Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was interesting to watch her silently visualize how each piece would look, deep in thought, while the rest of us moved pieces from one wall and to another and then often back onto the original wall, at her request. She required the center of each piece to be exactly 57” above the floor, so I helped Bob Mielenhausen, a fellow Viridian artist, in measuring each one, then bisecting it with a little plastic dot sticker. We then held up each painting to align the sticker with a levelled mark running along the wall at that height. It was something I’d never thought to do before: having the center of every work at exactly the same height in relationship to the floor and the viewer’s eye. No doubt it’s the most elementary rule in the curatorial book, but it was nice to finally learn it. It really made a difference in the look of the whole show when we were done.

As all of this went on, Chrissie was sensitive to distractions. “I don’t want to see those phones,” she said at one point, referring to a diptych involving a cell phone and a more traditional handset. So I would move them out of her sight. Same with a couple other paintings that seemed to keep getting shunted off to some place out of view. I was beginning to feel their pain. I’ve been ostracized; I know what it’s like. Finally, though, she would hit on the exact spot for a particular work and up it went, never to be reconsidered. Those seemingly neglected phones, in fact, were the first to find their home, long before everything else in the show. But for a long time, it was, “Just move that one somewhere else.”

She specializes in film, as well as film and video installation, and Minimalist and process-based art of the sixties and seventies. She is part of the curatorial team formulating the overall artistic policy of the Whitney Museum. For our day’s work, I joined our director, Vernita Nemec, her assistant director, Lauren Purje, and Bob. It took us six hours, from start to finish, with an hour break for brunch at the Half King a couple blocks away, where you get free Bloody Marys with your meal, their tomato juice loaded with bits of shrimp and hot sauce. When Chrissie came back from a long phone call from Europe, she started telling us about her close friend, the legendary international performance artist, Marina Abromovic.

Chrissie Iles

“I’m currently writing the text for a book on her performances. I did her first retrospective at Oxford,” she said, giving us a lot of background about how close the Abromovic family was with Tito in Yugoslavia, before it broke apart along ethnic lines. “The key to a lot of her work was her mother. Really rigid woman. Really awful.”

I wanted to hear a lot more, but our conversation was kept short by her long conference call with Europe and the need to finish hanging the show. Whan we got back to the gallery, the level of care she continued to put into every detail of our group effort impressed me enormously. The work was of varying quality, with many well-realized pieces More