ARTiculations

New Post, New Paintings

2011-07-13T11:50:00.000-04:00

It's been several months since my last blog - an interim in which these two paintings got done and delivered to their new home in New York State. You'll also notice that my website looks different, and soon the News Page will have frequent postings in a Wordpress format.

I'll be posting videos and a photo essay of the process of preparing paintings for transport - using the painting above right, Summer Grasses in Fog, as the example.

I'll post process shots for both of the paintings - showing the initial studies and the stages of the paintings from blank canvas through major intermediate stages to the finished work.

I was never much of a photographer, so I find the iPhone to be the perfect low-tech tool for documenting whatever I'm engaged with. So easy to record the day's progress at the end of each painting session! However - I have Jim Nickelson to thank for the studio shot above. Jim does a great job of capturing finished works for my archives.

Stay tuned for more of what's happening in the studio, and see Jim's work here. His images of the Maine landscape are gorgeous.

Red, White and Blue

2011-03-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

I like red and white - quilts, polka dots, seersucker sundresses, flags. You name it. I was excited about going to the Park Avenue Armory today to see the collection of 650 American quilts from the collection of Joanna S. Rose. And I was not disappointed, but I got something different than I expected. Being in the Armory, standing under these astonishing constellations of quilts, I felt like a small Alice through the keyhole and into Wonderland. Lovely!

But the nostalgia that I had expected was nowhere to be felt. Under the high vaulted ceiling of the Armory, the numbers of quilts and the numbers of people made for an experience that was distanced from the remembered coziness of one small me in the "pleasant land of counterpane." I realized that the most magic of quilts are those where the pattern elements and quilting stitches are very, very intimate and where the smell and feel of old cotton are tangible and near.

From Red and White to Blue and White: post-Armory, I wandered back out onto the street and came upon a Greek celebration and parade-in-the-making. Greek flags everywhere along Fifth Avenue. I love a parade!

And then, just because it's March Madness and this is a nostalgia post, I can't resist-

Bye Bye Kitty!!!

2011-03-25T17:33:00.000-04:00

Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, at the Japan Society, has received outstanding reviews already, so I won't recap them here. (Links are at the bottom of the blog and the catalog's essays are excellent.) This is an exhibition that puts paid to the easy simplifications of Japan's cult of cute (kawaii), of which the Hello Kitty phenomenon is the slickest and cutest. Bye Bye Kitty!!! recognizes Japanese artists born between the mid-1960's and the early 1980's, whose work looks deeply and thoughtfully at the imbalances in society and nature, and at our deepest fears, both real and imagined. The complex pen and ink drawings by Manabu Ikeda, PixCell Elk #2 by Kohei Nawa, and Makoto Aida's print, Harakiri Schoolgirls, have the strongest hold on me by far, but there is almost nothing in this show that I did not respond to positively. Though the catalog refers to previous earthquakes including Kobe in 1995, the terrible scenarios unleashed by the March earthquake, tsunami, and atomic disaster could not have been predicted to coincide with this exhibition. In fact they happened one week before the show's opening, and surely intensify its impact on viewers.

From the UN Plaza and the Japan Society, I headed west to Chelsea, where by contrast the vacuousness of certain Western artworks was more obvious this time than is usual. Robert Miller has a triple star show - drawings by Andy Warhol, postcard sculptures by Gilbert and George, and an installation by Yayoi Kusama. I generally like stopping in at Miller for looks back at recent art history, but this was a triple flop. Warhol's drawings could have been done by any talented highschooler, the G&G composites had all the appeal of video game screenshots, and - biggest disappointment - Kusama's installation (titled Heaven and Earth and priced at an astonishing $1,000,000) consisted of 40 fabric covered boxes from which protruded 285 fabric forms reminiscent of tentacles. As a single installation set in its own seagreen space, it was devoid of the disorientation that I look for and like so much in her work.

Hyperallergic's Review
Blake Gopnik's review in The Daily Beast
PixCell Elk #2 via The Daily Beast

The Black and the White

2011-03-06T12:35:00.000-05:00

My take-away from the fairs this week: Black and White. I got around to Pulse and Impulse, the Red Dot Fair and the Korean Art Fair (housed together on Mercer) and the Armory. Also managed to squeeze in Esteban Vicente's collages at NYU and Lynda Benglis at the New Museum, but for now I'll just comment on a few of my favorites at the fairs.

Mario M. Muller at Pulse: an elegant installation at Mary Ryan of Mario's quintessential silhouettes. I loved the finish and restraint of the landscape on the right.

Not sure if these arrows piercing the corner angle intentionally reference Saint Sebastian, but he was certainly part of the mix at the Armory, where (at a different booth) a stack of take-aways asked viewers to comment on 21st century martyrs.

People too come mostly in black.

One of my all-time favorites, Yayoi Kusama at the Armory. It's the disorientation of pattern dots that I love.

And girls love horses.

A beautiful installation. Sorry that I did not make a note of the booth or the artists.

Below: graphite and paper, if memory serves me correctly. This was a stunner.

And to round it out, Yoshitomo Nara. He takes the particularity of German medieval gothic and dissolves it in the contemporary.

All photos courtesy of my iPhone. Such a handy device. For a much more in-depth look at all the fairs where they were and who was there, see Hyperallergic's blogs for the week.

Economics and Art

2011-02-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

Ready to go - my Fundred Dollar Bill

Following up on my previous blog, I've mailed my contribution out to the Fundred Dollar Bill Project. Here's where to get your template and where to send it to convince Congress to clean up lead-contaminated soil in New Orleans. Why should you do this? Lead poisoning leads to health problems, impedes learning ability and contributes to violent behavior. Mel Chin's website says it best: This is an important local and national project of interest in the areas of art, science, health, education, environment and social activism. An armored truck, three million kids, Congressional leaders, need we say more?

And thinking about how imagination (art) works in the service of society, I'd like to mention the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. From time to time I serve as an Artist-Teacher working with their MFA students, and it was nice to meet Danielle Dahline, the MFA in Visual Art Director, and other members of the faculty, at the CAA reception last week. Vermont College's program promotes art that is collaborative and takes on its significance through a relationship with social, cultural, political and economic concerns. In their words, "All artists have an obligation to understand and struggle with these extra-artistic issues."

I just have to get my licks in - add them to the many voices speaking out against yet another round of cutting programs and funding for all the arts - and say that devaluing the creative process can only hinder intelligent thinking in all areas including science and economics. When will they ever learn?

More from CAA

2011-02-14T12:08:00.000-05:00

Last Friday's programs at the CAA Conference included a panel discussion of current practices in painting, a presentation of global opportunities for artists who want to work outside the US (and for artists from away looking to come here to work), and finally, an interview with Mel Chin.

There's a unresolved conflict between the modernist notion that paintings are objects, and post-modern practice which posits that paintings are events that take place over time, and that the resulting image is simply the residue of those events. When I'm working, I like knowing that the essence of change is always implicated in the painting, and that paintings come out of doubt rather than out of historical certainty. The unresolved conflict bit comes in when, in spite of the painter's doubts and uncertainties, the paintings themselves are inevitably resolved not only as objects, but often even as uncomplicated objects of beauty.

One of the presenters - my notes don't record which one - spoke of the computer as offering a new complexity for painters, a new way toward the sublime. I like that idea too - that the sublime as located by the Hudson River Painters for instance, and as run to ground by the Abstract Expressionists, will now have a 21st century residence.

And then, Mel Chin. Since the early 90's and Revival Field, I have been in awe of his decision to move away from making discrete objects and toward implicating all of us, whether we are aware of it or not, in taking responsibility for the things that are wrong with society. In awe too of his ability to put ideas into practice. Using imagination and humor rather than ham-fisted accusations achieves much. Have a look at his Fundred project for cleaning up the lead pollution in New Orleans. Make your own Fundred Dollar Bill and send it in. I have my template ready to color in.

Image: Geologics, oil on canvas, detail, has absolutely nothing to do with Mel Chin, but very much to do with paintings as objective accretions of process, and a whole lot more to do with Google limiting today's image choices to its surreptitious storage on Picasa of my own work.

Voy a viajar

2011-02-10T20:54:00.000-05:00

The subject of today's afternoon session at the College Art Association ARTspace conference was: Residencies. I've done residencies both locally, at Spalding University in Louisville and at the Art Center at Kingdom Falls in Maine, and also internationally at Pouch Cove in Newfoundland. This year, I'll be spending October at the Can Serrat Residency in Spain.

I have always loved to travel in search of the artistic grail, and I have always loved languages. Therefore, being awarded a stipend for a residency at Can Serrat is perfect. When I applied, I promised myself that if I got this, I would learn Spanish, and I'm well on the way to doing so now. I'm attracted to the geological splendor of the region (see above image), and the more I look into the region's history, the more I find connections to the medieval mysteries of Catholicism. All of this will feed my work in ways that I can only guess at now.

My thanks go out to ARTspace and the Services to Artists Committee of the CAA for excellent programming, and I'd also like to mention ResArtis and the Alliance of Artists Communities. If you are looking for residencies - and there are at rough estimate some 500 in the US and 600-700 world-wide - then these are your go-to resources.

Image credit: Can Serrat website

Soundscapes

2011-02-09T15:21:00.000-05:00

The College Art Association is in town this week, hosting its 99th Annual Conference. The ARTspace "conference within a conference" offers programs free to the public, as a service to artists. This morning's sessions were titled "The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces" - four talks on the nature of sound art, what it is, what the tools are, and how sound art intersects with environmental art. Like installation art and performance art, sound art had its genesis in the 60's and in situational esthetics. Two of today's questions were "who owns the air space in which sound occurs?" and "how do we make sound art that does not reference music?"

So the image I've chosen does not accurately represent what today's talks were about, but it does identify a seminal modern composer and sound architect whose drawings were the subject of an exhibition last year at the Drawing Center in Soho. I am sorry I missed that, but grateful for the opportunity today to be introduced to his work. I see it as a point of entry for my own installation work - not to jinx the subject, I'll save writing about that for later when I'm deeper into it.

Other take-aways from the talks today:

Jonny Farrow's Soundwalks along the Gowanus Canal and in Fort Greene. I'll walk more slowly and listen more intently next time I'm headed for the studio.

China Blue's Seventh Kingdom projects that invent new "bioforms" from the detritus of urban life. Her use of seismic recorders to catch vibrations in the structure of the Eiffel Tower - and then ratchet them up so as to be audible to humans - make me wonder what the inner shiftings of the earth sound like, to paraphrase Octavio Paz, sounds from the other side.

Image credit: Iannis Xenakis web archives

Erosions at Coleman Burke Gallery New York

2011-02-06T19:41:00.000-05:00

Some images from my exhibition Erosions at Coleman Burke Gallery New York

January 27 through March 10, 2011

Erosions, geologics & terrains, the exhibition catalog with an essay by Mark Wethli, is available at the gallery and from Blurb.com.

2011-01-19T17:13:00.000-05:00

So here I am in my apartment, having started the day by sketching the flowers on the windowsill. When you try to come up with marks that read as chrysanthemums, you do begin to understand Van Gogh and Japanese art. The trick is to avoid photographic representation and rather to provide a language, a transcription, a translation, a geomantic summons of the Family Asteraceae.

Driving down to New York this time, I stopped at a Barnes & Noble in Norwalk to pick up a map of New York State. Maps that you can lay out on the table are far superior to the disjointed bits of information dispensed by the smartphone or the 27" display where an involuntary flick of the wireless mouse can transport you instantly from the spaghetti junction at Worcester, MA to the twilight zone of Central OH. And then what? How to get back? Paper maps allow me to possess my territory, to locate myself in space, to see my path, to know - for future reference - what other paths I might have taken.

But maps, useful as they are, lack the smell, sound, movement and dimensionality of the "real" world. The perceived/received world is always changing itself and changing us, and so provides a richer source for visual language than any given by a printed or digital layout. This is why I am always so delighted to come into my light-filled Brooklyn apartment and find the vase of florist's brilliant yellow mums - and why I am equally pleased to be out among the profligate early yellow buttercups and late spikes of goldenrod in Lincolnville.

Christmas at Caldbeck

2010-11-30T20:08:00.001-05:00

Now that my blog's officially joined my website, it seems a good time to use the space for updates as well as for philosophical musings. I'm thrilled to be part of Caldbeck Gallery's Christmas festivities and their December-January Drawing Show.

They'll be showing a suite of very recent drawings done last month while I was in Austin, Texas. The medium is watercolor, ink and salt - and though process was important, I was exploring a range of images relating to imagined northeast landscapes. (Austin's another story. It has its own very specific hills that I hope to explore in more depth and height next time I'm there.)

Untitled Study #5

If it looks like meteors just landed in the ocean - well, it's possible. My latest reading has been on the subject of biocentrism, which begins an explanation of the universe at the point of probability, where quantum physics has reached an impasse.

In Unfamiliar Places

2010-11-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

I am such a big fan of Yoshitomo Nara (I even have the iPhone app) and glad to see his adolescent girls on Park Avenue as an lead-in to Nobody's Fool, the exhibition of his work on the second and third floors of the Asia Society. I've always loved Nara's drawing hand, and I remember the first time I saw some of the drawings a year or so ago - the sensitivity with which the eyes were rendered was completely unexpected. Clearly the time he spent in Germany influenced the way he uses graphite, and his early paintings too have a very Germanic way with narrative.

That narrative space has given way to simpler backgrounds for his dogs and children. In recent years, Nara has been working in collaboration with YNG to create shacks as sites for exhibitions of the figures he produces. Many of these "rooms" and spaces were built specifically for the Asia Society show. There's a distinct connection to medieval iconography in the isolation of the suffering or disaffected child, whether that figure is sited in a two-dimensional field of paint or in a room constructed of recycled materials.

Further wanderings yesterday took me down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass for First Thursday. I'd read two stories on Hyperallergic, one about underground art in Vegas, and the other in New York - art created by and about people who live below the streets. This is a subject of the moment - there is also an exhibition of photographs at 111 Front Street about street people. The new Kunsthalle Galapagos on Main Street in Dumbo has the feeling of being underground, in spite of the fact that it's on the top floor of Galapagos Art Space, a former horse stable. At the Dumbo Arts Center, you can enter a labyrinth of thousands of locally sourced cardboard boxes. I reflected on the fact that this might be housing for less fortunate members of society and though I never thought I would get lost in it, I did at least lose my sense of direction, wondered whether I could slip through some of the narrower passages, and in the end came out where I went in much sooner than expected. Pigeonhole is on exhibit through November 14th.

Haystack Mountain

2010-10-03T20:56:00.000-04:00

Last week at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine, the dripping trees, the fog, the moss on the rocks and even the architecture made me think about the timelessness of Japanese art, where nature is not so much looked at as it is lived in.

I was at Haystack for a gathering of Maine's arts leaders, and learned a lot that I did not know about the intersection of government, the arts, and the business sector. At the same time, I've been reading.

The Music Instinct by Philip Ball makes the case that music is something we cannot live without, that it is "a gymnasium for the mind" and that "no other activity seems to use so many parts of the brain at once." The same case could be made, I believe, for making and appreciating the visual arts. Art and music are more than candy for the eye and ear.

The other book I've been working through, a few pages at a time at odd moments, is Ludwig Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. Franz has been a student of Albrecht Durer, and is setting out for Italy to study with the masters there. When it comes to descriptions of the art world, this book could have been written yesterday, but the actual date of publication is 1798. In one respect however, the art world has changed radically. Artists no longer get to act like misunderstood children, but are expected to engage, if not with government, then at least with each other and with their communities.

Here's a loose translation from the book, in which the author speaks to Franz the childlike adult, the adult-like child. "How fine for you that you are still shielded from humanity's craziness and misery, that you can be wholly devoted to yourself and your first love [art]. For most people there comes a time when winter takes over their summer, when they forget themselves in order to appear right to other people, when they no longer make sacrifices on behalf of their soul, but place their own hearts as sacrifices on the altars of worldly pride."

So High Romanticism has passed into the annals of cultural history, and we are all most likely better for it, though wouldn't it be nice to have uninterrupted studio time, time for wandering, and for it to be always summer, at Haystack, in Maine.

Bern Porter Found

2010-07-03T19:45:00.000-04:00

A frog can support itself splayed out on the points of a group of rising rushes, just as if the rushes were a lily pad. There must be a metaphor here, or a haiku. Rushes are pointy but the frog does not seem to mind and even appears to be asleep.

About a month ago I began reading a book that's been on my shelves for years, James Schevill's where to go what to do when you are Bern Porter. Then I discovered that there is - right now -an exhibition of Bern Porter's work at MOMA.

Here's a Found Poem by Bern:

          ABRAHAM LINCOLN

FAILED IN BUSINESS AT AGE                           31
DEFEATED FOR LEGISLATURE AT AGE        32
FAILED BUSINESS AGAIN AT                            34
SWEETHEART DIED AT                                       35
HAD NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AT                     36
DEFEATED IN ELECTION AT                              38
DEFEATED FOR CONGRESS AT                         43
DEFEATED FOR CONGRESS AT                         46
DEFEATED FOR CONGRESS AT                         48
DEFEATED FOR SENATE AT                               55
DEFEATED FOR VICE-PRES. AT                         56
DEFEATED FOR SENATE AT                               58
ELECTED PRESIDENT AT                                     60

John Perreault's Artopia blog on the Porter exhibition is a good introduction with videos and images if you are not familiar with Bern's work - and even if you are, it's a pleasure to read.

Image credit

Chases Daily and Weasel Artblog Two

2010-06-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

I really mean to start work on the website updates today. However, down by the pond just now I got distracted by three dark shapes coming out of the rushes. At first I thought ducks, but these little shapes ran beside the pond edge, threading their way over and under each other, headed in my direction. After some discussion tschhk tschhk tschhk about my presence, they decided I was out of the ordinary for them and reversed direction. Back through the rushes, into and under and through the rocks, out on the other side of the pond. Now I thought I saw only two, but the third was there, swimming alongside his friends on the bank.

If weasels were charcoal and water and rushes were gesso, they would have been a drawing of line and erasures, describing the space of the pond and its surroundings. Some of my earliest drawings were done that way in description of bicycle wheels and frames. But if you want to see really impressive work in this mode, go straight to Chases Daily on Main Street in Belfast where Gideon Bok is making a drawing in charcoal, sumi ink and graphite. It both spans and describes Chase's interior, floor to ceiling. Gideon's blog has an image, and more information, but you really must see for yourself. There will be a closing reception on July 8, at which point Gideon will wash the drawing off the wall.

Pond rushes (Juncus effusus) image credit

Days of Decadence

2010-06-17T19:45:00.000-04:00

Tonight, the catbird's doing a great cover of the cardinal's song, the woods are alive with late evening light, and this morning, as I was coming back up the rise from the my pond, I met a bull moose on his way down the creekbank. He was gone through Beeler's Woods before I could get to my iPhone. The combination of experiences reminds me that I haven't yet written about absinthe.

My decadent day in Portland - now a few weeks ago - started at the Salt Exchange with frogs legs ravioli on a bed of arugula and quinoa with candied garlic and balsamic vinegar. As if that were not enough, this was accompanied by the sounds of Gene Austin's 1928 hit My Blue Heaven and a Satchmo version of Mack the Knife.

From there I went to an opening at The Bar of Chocolate Cafe where Holly Gooch has assembled an exhibition of absinthe spoons. It's an intimate grouping in a display case, of exquisite contemporary examples of the tool one uses to drizzle water over a sugar cube into the absinthe in the glass. "Absinthe has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of Absinthe is a poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of Absinthe and a sunset?" So said Oscar Wilde. The absinthe spoon made art history in a cubist sculpture by Picasso, made in Paris in the spring of 1914, in painted bronze with a perforated silver absinthe spoon. I have to add that the flower pots by William Merritt Chase in a painting now on exhibit at Colby College are so individually painted that they too are as poetical as a sunset and made me long for the good old days of painting as an art, not a conceptual exercise.

There's a good long run for the absinthe spoons at The Bar of Chocolate. They are up through New Year's Eve. My pond has lily pads. So does one of the spoons. Go see - and don't wait until December 31. Order an espresso martini? What?

More:
Holly Gooch and Absinthe Spoons
The Bar of Chocolate, Wharf Street
Absinthe
Image credit

The Armory Show, MECA, and the human condition

2010-05-16T16:11:00.000-04:00

My day began around 8 a.m. with a moose in the back field, and a little later on, a hawk soaring overhead. So I have a hard time understanding the current predilection among artists for making images that conjure up imaginatively mangled human forms that are intended to shock but generally don't. There were examples of this in gallery after gallery at the Armory Show in March, but a film there went even further - the artist nailing his own foot to the floor. Was there a point to this? Was this intended to call attention to the suffering of millions, or only to the artist's own aesthetic dilemma? Though each blow of the hammer driving the nail down further was difficult to witness, even at the remove of a filmed action, my personal discomfort then does not extend into the realm of memory today. That is, right now, I feel nothing more than I would if I were reading about Chris Burden's having been nailed to the back of a Volkswagen in 1974.

Given that art is always cutting its own new edge, I was surprised to find, at the BFA Thesis Exhibition at Maine College of Art, large-scale paintings of classically robed figures, wholly present, but with the action of the paint brushing out hands or feet or midsections. This kind of artistic obfuscation leaves more to the imagination than any careful illustration of macabre fictional details. A new web-based exhibition series permanently showcases the art and ideas of the senior class at MECA. Here I learned that Preservation, one of the contexts for their work, "reflects the joining of the artists [sic] relationship to the history of their medium while adding fresh, individualized aesthetics and viewpoints accrued from a contemporary context." In the case of the figure painter who, I think, is Gregory O'Neill, history directly references Greek and Roman art and might also include Neue Sachlichkeit and other classically inspired movements.

If the reason for depicting pain is to call attention to human suffering then the pain must be real, it must be timeless, and it must be shared. The statue of Laocoon and his sons, like the Crucifixion, puts us in the presence of all three. Contemporary art that seeks to contextualize pain will only achieve its objective if it can do the same.

Magic at MOMA

2010-04-30T09:26:00.008-04:00

The Artist Is Present. Marina Abramovic at MOMA. My first take? Not that interesting, a lot of people waiting for her to make a move, any move, false or otherwise. And by her refusal to do so, we were all forced to wait. Crowd-at-a-hanging mentality, sheep mentality, no one moves unless the leader moves. The artist as bellwether. Being an impatient Aries myself, I was anxious to look for greener pastures in the Kentridge show. You wait here. I'll be back.

William Kentridge! Magic drawing! Magic theater! Magic music and magic lantern shows! The power of imagination and inventiveness. The three parts of The Magic Flute were so entrancing that I watched each one all the way through. In an entirely different but equally affecting way, Ubu and the Procession is a parade of South African folk, torn black silhouettes moving herky-jerky across the screen from left to right, accompanied a loop of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," a ragged-edged version delivered by a woman's voice in more than a hum but without actual words, scat-style as ragged as the torn silhouettes themselves. Audio-visualize an allelujah chorus of the wounded on crutches, refugees carrying and carting their belongings, miners, prisoners, preachers and the lynched, ghosted and blackened. As I'm a Kentuckian getting ready for another round of nostalgia tomorrow afternoon (it's Derby Day in the Bluegrass), this tableau awakened in me that painful mix of wistfulness and sorrow that comes with the singing of "My Old Kentucky Home." But more to the point is Kentridge's power as a narrator and draftsman. I remembered too that magic moment at the University of Louisville when I was handed the keys to the kingdom of drawing and realized what worlds could come alive just by putting pencil to paper.

The Abramovic performance (I told you I'd be back) is in a way a political stance. By refusing to react, she dissuades us from reacting. Ostensibly, there is nothing to react to. Should we be horrified? mollified? lulled into non-action or provoked into retaliation? A sort of Schadenfreude ensues as one watches the person sitting across from the artist. What are that person's actions, thoughts and feelings? Around the perimeter, students are drawing the event, writing about it. I'm beginning to feel it's really quite extraordinary, the power of this performance. When one sitter rises to leave, Abramovic puts her fingertips to her eyes, adjusts her body, draws within, becomes human for a few seconds. As the next sitter takes her place, Abramovic visibly re-enters her body, the goddess inhabiting the oracle space, and engages this new supplicant through eye contact alone. Magic indeed.

For much more on Kentridge
and live video of Abramovic
MOMA's website is excellent.

Inside the Whitney

2010-04-12T14:44:00.004-04:00

My walk through the 2010 Whitney Biennial began on the fourth floor and went downhill from there, though not quite so negatively as that may sound. In a show devoted to ways of experiencing space, there are also connections with human presence. One of the fascinations of re-viewing these works on the internet is that many of the pieces are more effective on my display than in actual fact, and that the most striking piece of all comes across as barely credible on the museum's website.

First off the elevator was a large hemp and jute tapestry by Piotr Uklanski (no image available). There is a recent time and tradition in which tapestry was bold in its imagery and reflected its roots in primitive traditions. Untitled (The Year We Made Contact) is such a tapestry and it comes across now as dated, monotonous and far too big for its wall. By contrast, Still, Untitled, Pae White's tapestry one floor down is modern in its execution but looks back even further in history to the 16th and 17th century tapestries woven at the Gobelins workshops in Paris. The same size as the tapestry a floor above, White's images of curling smoke activate the space rather than kill it. The fact that it is machine woven is so little evident that I at first took it for a painting, which is to say that the technique did not call attention to itself.

Some rooms/spaces at the Whitney are devoted to a single artist. Charles Ray's big flower paintings make a nice grouping, though each one could certainly inhabit a space of its own. Ania Soliman's NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple, a frieze of collages and text that line the pink-painted walls of a small square room, describe the economic, politcal and ecological cost of the pineapple industry in Hawaii. The images were small enough to draw me in and spin me around the room. By the time I'd finished, I felt distinctly that I too had been sliced and canned, and was drawing personal parallels between the pineapple industry and the processing of viewers in blockbuster shows.

A site-specific installation by R.H. Quaytman that references an adjacent window by architect Marcel Breuer makes good sense visually, but on the whole this is a humdrum Biennial with much derivative work. Roland Flexner's 30 sumi ink drawings that have been mentioned by another writer as magical may have been so in the studio, but the presentation - overmatted, framed and gridded - snuffed the life right out of them.

Now almost a week later it is the breath in other pieces that stays with me: the heart-breaking photographs of Afghani women, by Stephanie Sinclair, Self Immolation in Afghanistan: A Cry for Help; the indifferent-to-human-pain smoke in White's tapestry; the hilarious video, Detroit, by Ari Marcopoulos of a couple of kids making noise rock in their bedroom. Standing in a small darkened room with this one is to know what it's like inside an adolescent boy's head: The Noise! The Color! The Lights! That's primitive, that's brash, and that for me made the show worthwhile.

Photo credit: No photos allowed of the Biennial art, but someone had left a closet door open, a stand-in for installations everywhere.

Some Answers, Some Questions

2010-04-05T15:14:00.006-04:00

In Maine, where I spend most of the year, painting is still the gold standard. In New York, the ARTSEEN editors at The Brooklyn Rail write that followers of post-modern theory have created "a ghetto into which painting, drawing and sculpture, along with certain kinds of film and photography have been driven, the door locked and the key thrown away." Personally, I like a balance between content and form, and in thinking about why both are important, have come up with some answers:

Art is an object. Art has no physical form.
Art is presented in special places. Art is everywhere we look.
Art is made by talented people. Art is made by everyone.
Art exists in a vacuum. Art exists in the interaction between the object and the viewer.
Art is the interaction between participants.
There is no message without a sender.
There is no message without a receiver.
Art is always static. Art is always moving.

And then some questions:

Where does art start and where does it stop? What is the vantage point from which art can be seen, practiced and acted on? When is an artist not an artist? Questions of permanence/ephemerality and of commercial value are secondary to the consideration that art is a noun for which there is no verb. The verb is "to make." If I jump on a pedestal and proclaim myself an artist - that's art. If I put a pile of sofas in the middle of Second Avenue and sit there - yes, I am an artist. What makes the sardine packer different from the canner of s***? The difference lies in the ability of the artist (in this case Manzoni) to take a concept, that of putting something edible into a can, and twist the concept for his own purposes, whatever those may be. The art lies in the transfiguration of action into idea into objectification, the creation of the moebius strip that unifies the three.

A Sense of Time

2010-03-28T08:57:00.017-04:00

This Monday, so many art writers writing about each other instead of about art. Noah Becker sums it up, and says it's maybe just too hard to write about the art itself. Yes it is, and I'm going to take a stab at some art that is hugely complex. Hard to put words to what I feel about it, but here goes.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite thing to do is to wander through to the medieval section. I love those polychrome statues of saints and important persons, love them because they reveal the essence of the real people they once were. I like to imagine what their lives must have been like, birth to death and and the discomforts in between.

At the Brooklyn Museum, I found correspondences between Kiki Smith's cast aluminum figures in the exhibition Sojourn, installed in a series of rooms on the fourth floor, and the Egyptian figures that are part of the exhibition To Live Forever. In both exhibitions, each figure imparts a sense of time transcended, of a permanent present that is rooted in the life of the person depicted. In an eerie way, the viewer senses a vision that emanates not from the artist's skill but from the statue itself. Each figure creates a tangible space around it. As I stood beside Smith's Annunciation (shown above), not knowing exactly what its blank eyes had seen or were seeing now, I knew that I too was experiencing the numinous. It came as no surprise to read that Smith has a deep knowledge of medieval art, or that her figures installed in the 18th century period rooms at the museum were right at home. I learned too that the ancient Egyptians believed that funerary statues contained the spirit of the deceased, and that a possible reason for the broken noses of so many of them was to prevent the spirit from coming back to life.

Sojourn is a new iteration of Smith's exhibition Her Home, installed in 2008 at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld and the Kunsthalle Nuernberg. In the accompanying catalog, Krefeld Director Martin Hentschel describes Her Home as "a scenario of life face to face with transience." Her work "links spirit, human and animal worlds," and in this way, I think, is very much like the art of ancient Egypt. Yet the title of the Egyptian exhibit, To Live Forever implies a different outcome to transience. At the Brooklyn Museum, transient time and eternity seem somehow the same.

Sojourn continues through September 12. To Live Forever is on view through May 2. The statuary at the Met is forever.

More on Kiki Smith
slide show
Brooklyn Museum
Flickr Source

A Kuniyoshi Tour-de-Force

2010-03-22T16:58:00.008-04:00

Toward the latter part of 2009, this blog kind of got away from me, or I from it, but I am back and planning to make it a weekly post again. Rainy Monday seems like a good time to begin. I'm in New York, focused on Japanese woodblock and my own beginning efforts in that direction, and I am looking, looking, looking. More than 100 of Utagawa Kuniyoshi's prints from the first half of the 19th century are on exhibit at the Japan Society. I spent several hours there yesterday, and then, it being a perfect Sunday afternoon for walking, continued on to the Asia Society where two exhibitions, Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art and The Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: from River Plain to Open Sea, are on view.

The title Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters barely begins to describe the richness of imagery in Kuniyoshi's prints. There are warlords, Kabuki actors, feuding clans, beautiful women, exemplary women, landscape elements derived from the Dutch, and indeed, monsters, demons and ghosts, along with oversized toads, cat spirits, and politicians rendered as turtles. Equally fascinating for me were the patterned depictions of nature: floating leaves on shimmering river water, pouring rain (described as a tour-de-force on the part of the block carver) and subtle color fades in skies and sunsets. For the aspiring student, most valuable of all, examples of Kuniyoshi's sketchbooks and a few of the key block drawings that provide the line elements for the prints. A related exhibition, The 36 Views of Fuji by Hiroshige is at Ronin Gallery through March 31. I will see that later this week.

Now that I've gotten started there is much I could say about what I notice as obvious contrasts between the exciting line and vigorous color of the Kuniyoshi images that have had such an influence on manga, and the quiet presence of Vietnamese objects and Chinese scroll painting. My work as viewer is different depending on what I'm seeing. Entering into the space of the scroll painting, or even standing quietly before the dun tones of a large ceremonial vessel, I am making a journey into myself. But Kuniyoshi takes me out into other worlds that mirror faces and forms of his own time and also reflect the issues and mores of the 21st century.

Image credit: Kuniyoshi Samurai Print
Japan Society
Asia Society

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2010-03-12T14:15:00.005-05:00

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Stuck in the middle

2009-12-29T19:46:00.004-05:00

Coming home from Austin TX I had a 3 1/2 hour layover in Atlanta. Post-Christmas Day 2009 that seems like not such a big deal. Restaurant opportunities in airports have improved greatly since 9/11, and we expect that in the future, as we arrive 4 hours in advance of flights, we’ll have time for 10 course French dining. But to return to my layover, as I finally settled down at the gate, the expanse of windows on the opposite wall gave onto the most spectacular sunset I have ever seen. The entire sky glowed red-orange, and silhouetted in the foreground, prehistoric shapes moved, the blackened tails of Delta’s jetliners.

On the Atlanta-Portland leg of my journey, travelers were reading books. Not Kindles, but bonafide tree-derived books. As a portable means of entertainment, books still have cachet. You can hold them, you can write in them, you can loan them to friends. They are so much more portable than the stone tablets that were once in vogue. As someone who has been plagued by eyestrain since college, I have avoided small electronic screens, and yet, the fun of Bakugan and manga lead me to believe that VOOKS may be the now big thing. If you’re not familiar with VOOKS you can learn more by clicking on VOOKS. Download them for your iPhone or the web, get fit in 90 seconds, cook Japanese and reinvent beauty, in multisensory experiences that work in the same way dreams do, leading you from one strange landscape to another.

Back to that strange landscape out the airport window – among all the waiting travellers, there was only one (besides me) who paid any attention to the sunset at all, and even the fact that he went to the window and photographed it was not enough to cause the people around him to look up.

To Plant a Tree

2009-12-07T12:35:00.002-05:00

To plant a tree in rocky soil, every day dig the hole a little wider, a little deeper. For a small person with just a spade and a limited amount of time to spend each day, there’s no way to do it all at once. What kind of tree should it be? A big branchy tree like an oak or an elm, a tree for the ages. The metaphors for art and life are obvious.

Come inside, look at the books and magazines on the table and floor, and write down the titles of those on the tops of the piles. The Wild Braid, The Lightning Field, L’Homme nu, The Language Instinct, Modern Painters, Bulgaria, Art on Paper, Manzoni (with an image of himself thumbing his nose at the world), The Immense Journey, The Doctrine of Recognition. Pretty representative: a naked human standing in a field of lightning rods trying to communicate with other humans, hopeful but with an attitude.

Now pull out one of these books, Stanley Kunitz’s The Wild Braid and open it to a random quote. “I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live – to grow, to bear fruit.”

Oak tree courtesy of the website it's nature.

View of Mount Katahdin

2009-09-14T07:50:00.005-04:00

I’ve been traveling around to the Bowery, Chelsea, Soho, Japan, China, Afghanistan, Brooklyn and Italy, the top of Mount Katahdin, and also Winnipeg. Not to mention a Grand Tour through Europe. As you can imagine this has meant a lot of walking. I’ve also vegged in my apartment for hours at a time, thinking only about sediments, the mechanics of plate tectonics, and wthether Neanderthals spoke as we do. It seems they did not, and that what defines us as human is the ability to express thought through complex language structures.

In the tradition of Shingon, or Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, the ineffable is beyond language and can only be expressed through mandalas, mantras, and mudras. We are brought to point of contact with other worlds through meditating on paintings and through phsyical position, and this is how I came to the foot of Mount Katahdin while standing on Manhattan ground. Sam Cady’s constructed paintings, on view at Mary Ryan, combine the precision of Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints with the spatial perspective of Chinese landscapes, while at the same time being firmly part of the Western landscape tradition. In the view of Mount Katahdin for instance, the shape of the canvas is an inverted trapezoid in which the rhythm of color runs from the slightly inflected dark blue of Chimney Pond at the painting’s base to the profusion of detail and light on the Knife Edge at the top. The perspective is precise, the observation of detail so uncanny that as viewer, I seemed to stand exactly at the bottom of the mountain. (You can see the painting if you follow the link below.) In another canvas that is a narrow horizontal strip of island and water, I was further down in the water, as if swimming or in a boat. A very small canvas captures the distance, the temperature and the great size of the iceberg that is its subject. To experience these landscapes as Cady has done and intends for us to do, we stand with him and with them, and the satisfaction of this communication is that as artist Cady allows us the opportunity to do equal work.

The show at Mary Ryan is up through October 17. Japanese mandalas are at the Met through November 29 in the Sackler Wing. Katahdin image courtesy of Wikepedia.

Art Tours

2009-09-10T11:35:00.003-04:00

If the Artist is Tour Guide where are we going? Into the past, into the future, into an altered present? Art is the craft of aesthetics, a Sunday kind of love, a discipline that requires total commitment. Last night I went down to the Lower East Side to an opening where the artist purported to give us a look into the past of Romantic landscape painting. He’d made an installation out of lots and lots of candy colored striping variously suspended from the ceiling and applied to the walls, and also fuzzy digitized images, and it was so fun to hear the popgun pops of taped down mounds of bubble wrap on the floor as we walked across them. The artist here was tour guide through the accumulations of his studio, advertising a look at Caspar David Friedrich-land, where once real hunters in Austrian get-ups might have been shooting boar. But the tour was a flop. The emperor’s new clothes had more going for them.

Thence to Soho to an exhibition that was nothing but paintings, and this one a lesson in why painting second-hand Romanticism is an irrelevant practice. Here the tour bus loaded with artisans never even left the station. It makes no sense to paint what’s already been painted, and it’s equally true that not every experiment with installations is of interest. What’s lacking in both cases is discipline and rigorous editing so that the end result has something to tell us. All dedicated artists seek an audience, all serious viewers want to come away with something more than entertainment. But it’s failure of imagination that allows us as viewers and artists to believe that either the viewer or the artist should do all the work. Just as a profusion of tweets is not a novel, neither does an unedited stream of video nor the detritus of the studio constitute art. Some sort of intelligent shape has to be imposed on it by the artist in order to convey a message to the viewer. Let us not venture further into whether the results are Vermeer or Shakespeare or not, but only remark that while everyone has a nugget of creative instinct, only some have what it takes to pan for gold.

As I finished this blog, into my inbox popped an invitation to what I guarantee will be a tour through some serious art and first-rate painting by Katherine Bradford,Meghan Brady, Cassie Jones, Don Voisine, Mark Wethli and others. Be sure to check out Chunky Monkey at Red Flagg in Chelsea next Thursday night, September 17, 6-8 P.M. and through October 17. Money will be refunded if you're not absolutely satisfied.

Ekphrasis at UMF

2009-08-31T10:51:00.002-04:00

“Reading drawings is like leafing through a book for answers, or turning a kaleidoscope until the bits fall into place.” So I wrote for my installation reading the landscape at the University of Maine/Farmington eleven years ago. I still believe that the landscape can be read, that it organizes itself in signs and equivalences, that every branch and every evening primrose is doing something that has meaning for each of us.

During a period of years from 2001 through 2005, I did some 250 gestural drawings of periwinkle shells and flowers. Those drawings have existed as discrete images until now, when in grouping them for the ekphrasis exhibition at Farmington I have been mindful of making connections between the purely visual and the literary. Sometimes the drawings tell their own stories. Other groupings are inspired by poems, as Buson’s haiku: “peony scattering/have piled up/two-three petals.” For the second time in my installation work, I have found inspiration in John Ashbery’s poetry. This time, I borrowed a title from “Some Trees” which begins “These are amazing: each/joining a neighbor, as though speech were a still performance.”

The methodology of each drawing was also simple performance. I laid down an ink or watercolor wash, dropped an ink line or periwinkle shells into it, and recorded the movement of its happening. The gestures are a calligraphy that has correspondences in Asian art, so the exhibition will include a Chinese scholar’s desk that the Curator, Sarah Maline, has very kindly offered include. I am also indebted to Sarah for the opportunity to bring a new dimension and new vocabulary to my work about the landscape.
And next week, possibly, I'll have images from the show.

Exhibition dates: September 3-24, with a reception on September 10.

Ekphrasis: Nature’s Spreadsheet

2009-08-17T19:23:00.004-04:00

Ekphrasis: a lucid self-contained explanation or description; the word made visible; words that describe something visual; by extension, visual art that is poetic or deals in words. . . . . The University of Maine at Farmington will explore the concept in a September show that includes my work along with that of five other artists and poets. In 1998, I mounted an installation at UMF entitled “Reading the Landscape.” My paper articulations were overwritten with text, which added content to the gestural imagery that in turn formed an intermediate layer on paper recycled from previous installations. This time I’m foregoing the text. Instead I am using gestural drawings to make storyboards whose narratives will depend on subtle variations – the bend of stems, the dispersion of periwinkle shells on ink wash.

I still believe that landscape is best understood as a written phenomenon, but I have become more attuned, to paraphrase something I read years ago, to the way nature reveals itself in multitudes and multiplicities. Repeats of a single gesture, rows of periwinkles and daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace, multiples of drawings in columns and grids, are another way to invent an installation.

The Holy Shoe

2009-08-03T20:22:00.004-04:00

Missed posting last Monday - it's too summer in Maine - but I did have a thought resulting from having heard an excellent "fireside chat" between the Farnsworth Art Museum's Roger Dell and Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a while the discussion centered around "the whole issue of curatorial independence" which can be something of a headache for directors. When the phrase was uttered, I must have been in some sort of synesthetic mode because what I heard was "the holy shoe of curatorial independence." Or was that "holey shoe?" I think of saints and beggars. Curators may be either or both. Can't go very far with that thought, but I can report on my ducks. Last week the mother ended up dead in the ditch, and of the eight now teenage offspring, only five remained. I suspect a run-in with a truck. And today it appears that one of the five lies flattened in the road. No one's going to make way for ducklings on Route One.

image courtesy of Flickr

Frog Pond

2009-07-20T20:16:00.003-04:00

Walking around the rim of the pond tonight I counted 9 frogs. Now and then I heard a vrump and a ribbit that gave away the presence of other frogs under the rocks.

Is there a Maine aesthetic that can be sussed out, even in the work of artists who live far away? Were they born here? Did they spend time at Skowhegan, or simply dip a toe in the waters of some summer camp at Pemadumcook Lake? I think the experience of place is indelibly imprinted in an artist’s work no matter how far she may roam. And I don’t believe you have to be born here to be inoculated with the germ.

The giveaway in an artist’s work could be the green-orange matrix operative in his paintings. It could be the love of water, because you’ll never die of thirst in Maine. It could be the certain light that inhabits Alex Katz’s paintings. It could be that it’s always landscape bound. We have more landscape here than anything else, and so even abstraction, for instance the complexity of line in Fred Lynch and Anna Hepler’s drawings, is derived from the confusion of natural phenomena that we see around us every day. If you’ve read this far, I’d really like to know your thoughts on the subject, and whether there are other operative motivations than landscape.

Landscape art is not a zzzzzzzzz

2009-07-13T20:40:00.004-04:00

Landscape remains one of the great subjects of art even though it’s no longer thought relevant to paint a scene of what’s seen. The artist for whom landscape is inspiration has to actively enter the dialogue with other forms of contemporary art than painting. Hamish Fulton takes long walks. Christo and Jeanne Claude stage installations in significant places like Central Park and Berlin. Environmental interventions (eco-ventions)are the preferred way of calling attention to the abuses contributing to global warming.

Yet it remains true that for us as visual artists, the only way to give lasting expression to our feelings about the landscape is through the visual formalities of drawing and painting. So now instead of painting scenes, we paint paintings based on what we’ve done. Process is product. Nancy Manter is a case in point. Her process is to make marks not on paper or on canvas but in the landscape itself, and then to photograph the marks. Andy Goldsworthy has done this for many years, but Manter does not stop at photo-documentation. She uses the photographs as a matrix for some very sophisticated imagery developed with distemper and collage on dibond aluminum panels. Ice, mud and water are the canvases in which she incises gestural abstractions; the collaged and painted extrapolations appear to be as un-programmed as the natural world itself, but the visual choices she has made are calculated to make us notice that world afresh.

Out on Moody Mountain this weekend I was momentarily mesmerized by the sough of the wind in the trees. It had some of the effect of looking at a Manter painting, with the difference that wind is up there in the air, whereas a Manter painting is like feeling the rush and slip of water over mud.

The exhibition remains on view at Waterfall Arts in Belfast through August 28.

Some Portland Elements

2009-07-06T20:06:00.003-04:00

A man calls to the sea and the sea answers. A man’s voice sends out messages and the sea responds. The sea responds with a force all out of proportion to the songs of the man. The sea is an uncontrollable force, with a song of its own that would drown any human voice, except that the man’s voice has doubled and tripled over on itself and can still be heard in the troughs of the waves. I thought of Shackleton and his men on the South Georgia Sea. I thought of the voice of God sounding over the darkness of the deep. I thought of the Hindu concept of vac, akin to the Greek concept of logos, and I thought, “in the beginning was the Word.” The next day I went to the Portland Observatory, heard the story of the great Portland conflagration of 1866 and looked out from the observatory deck toward the sea hidden by a fog that moved across the landscape as though it were smoke from a dying fire.

The man who daily calls forth the sea is Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. His video The Same Problem is currently on view at MECA. The Portland Observatory is located on Congress Street on Munjoy Hill and offers tours to the very top.

Photo from the observatory deck by Sean Flaim.

Geanticlines and Slumps

2009-06-29T20:28:00.005-04:00

Deduction from facebook posts: It’s hot in Texas and California. Not here though. We are getting ready to build an ark. It has surely rained for forty days now, and no signs of stopping. Was Noah’s flood a tsunami, or an expansion of the Black Sea? Geological evidence provides clues but no answers. Reading about geology, I’ve learned about regoliths, orogenies, geanticlines and slumps. I’m trying to work out a new group of installations based on sedimentary rock, and until I do it’s slow blogging. Thoughts like stones sliding along on a thin lubricant of salt, piling up at the base of the slope, in gravitational tectonics of the mind.

We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that their stories are one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.
-Hugh McDiarmid

Oh Ye of Little Faith

2009-06-22T10:17:00.001-04:00

The phoebes have three very hungry, very orange mouths to feed. The duck and her seven ducklings are taking the path up from the pond. And to think that I, for weeks now, have doubted even the existence of the mother duck, so well had she hidden herself, though her nest must be close by the creek.

In his book Earth: an Intimate History, Richard Fortey writes about tectonics and the fault line where Africa and Europe meet. All the alps of Europe were squeezed out of a seam in the earth no more the twenty kilometers wide, and extruded northward like pasta or spaetzle, in layers and layers of metamorphic rock. It’s a similar fascination to me that a sweater can be made from a long piece of string, or that babies arrive from tiny blobs of genetic material.

As I hope to breach the current impasse in my studio practice, perhaps it’s not too much to wish that something be building below the surface of my thinking to come forth in a rush of inspiration, or hatch like ducklings in seven permutations of a single mother concept. What power keeps the baby phoebe stock-still on the edge of the nest til it’s ready to fly?

On Route One-A

2009-06-15T20:14:00.005-04:00

I feel obligated by my own sense of duty not to skip another week of blogging, but it is after all, as of next week, summer, and instead of racking up shows that I’ve seen, I give you this: three moose, various ducks one of whom is utterly comfortable begging for a handout, tadpoles and frogs a go go, just tonight a deer in the driveway, and 4:30 A.M. wake-up calls by a very loud robin. Such is the life of the Maine artist on Route One. It’s a wonder I ever get to the studio.

But I do, and I also made it up Route One-A to Bangor today to the University of Maine Museum of Art to catch Vessels Absent, Aaron Stephan’s exhibit of humanoids cum packing crates, arranged like spectators at an art exhibit. Aaron’s work is born at the intersection of art criticism and craft. What is art, anyway? Is it the ability to make objects, or the gift of allowing those objects to comment on themselves and on art in general?

The packing crates reminded me of Mark Tansey’s “The Innocent Eye,” but I wondered too about the spillage of shredded paper at the base of each crate. Are one’s thoughts about art always so transparently “out there” for other spectators to see? As I pondered the question, I found myself standing contraposto just like one of the packing crates. And I can't leave without noting that the ink drawings in multiples of 64 comment not only on their old master sources and on Andy Warhol, but also on every artist's struggle to get it right.

Participatory Art

2009-06-01T19:17:00.003-04:00

According to Dave Hickey in The Invisible Dragon, a book of essays on beauty I’m currently reading, all art up until the seventeenth century was participatory. The people who looked at paintings back then believed in the sacredness of the subject depicted, or had a window into another world of which they felt a part. These days, we look on painting's subjects with dispassion. To follow Hickey’s thread, artists have come up with other ways to get us involved in their art, performance and installations being two such methods.

Aesthetics are inherent in work where the artist is not out to create beauty, but to demonstrate an abstract principle. Take for instance the principle of modulation. Installation artist Amy Stacey Curtis theorizes modulation by putting a rainbow-colored piece of paper inside a tin can, setting the can on the floor, and having her audience walk around it so that the color inside the can is seen to change from red to yellow to green to blue to red. But just as one human does not make a race, so one tin can cannot not give the full effect of color modulation, and the completed installation, exhibited in Brunswick, Maine in 2004, consisted of a circle of 2,304 cans, around which viewers were asked to walk slowly and meditatively. A later version was over 8,000 cans big.

The larger principle supporting Curtis’ work is that everything we humans do affects everything and everyone else. The installation pieces in Curtis’ solo biennials are participatory, as for instance a floor maze where persons entering and leaving in orderly progression emit random sounds, so that the result is something like a flattened tower of babble. In another, viewers walking a line next to a series of pendulums cause the pendulums to sway. No man is an island, but that he ripples the air where he goes. In yet another, photo overlays of many faces make one believable androgynous face.

Curtis examines chaos, not the blow-em-up variety, but a more subtle dis-order that is orderly in its affect. Think of chaos not as a cataclysmic disruption but as gentle revolution: order>chaos>order>chaos>order. As participants in her installations, we combine and uncombine elements, from pattern to random and back again. Installations are made and unmade, labor intensive, maximal in numbers of components, zen-minimal in concept, the actions deceptively simple to perform.

And where the biennials happen is also important. The unused mills Curtis chooses for her installations carry vestigial reminders of multiples of humans performing repetitive tasks. For a complete rundown on the biennials, visit her website and check out her youtube video.

The Responsibilities of Art

2009-05-25T17:37:00.004-04:00

"In the meantime, Neto's vast playpen is a good reminder that there are art worlds within art worlds and fields of 'otherness' not yet conquered because we stay too focused on what peaks and speaks (or used to peak) in auction houses."

"Many of our artists, suffering the repercussions of this desacralized mentality, have pretended for some time now that painting is merely a way of solving formal problems. The total opposition between art and life that formalism proposes exempts art from its moral tasks."

The first quote is from John Perreault's Artopia blog, and the second from Suzi Gablik's book, Has Modernism Failed?. Twenty-five years separate the two. Are the artists who play in the participatory fields of otherness the same ones who have re-sacralized art by restoring its moral tasks? In 1984, Gablik was complaining about the lack of moral and ethical positions taken by contemporary (Western) art, a lack which resulted from our producer/consumer society in which the individual's desires trumped the common good.

I'm also reading The Invisible Dragon by Dave Hickey. This book is a group of essays on beauty originally published in 1993, and occasioned by "the plague of intellectual dishonesty that infected every aspect of the controversy surrounding the public exhibition" of Robert Mapplethorpe's pornographic photographs. Again, a text about the function of images and the responsibilities of the artist. Would the great art of the Renaissance have remained so great to this day, had it not once addressed the moral issues of its time?

Is art that refuses to address life and the human condition ultimately destined for the trashcan? Does every artist have a moral responsibility to the rest of humanity? I'm not arguing for any particular brand of morality, just making a roundabout case against indifference, and looking for art that engages - intelligently and passionately - what it means to be human.

The Flaying of Dudley

2009-05-11T08:35:00.002-04:00

If you’re looking to incite discussion on facebook, you should become a fan of Julian Schnabel. In the melee I’ve forgotten now which of my fb friends had steered me in that direction, but I know for certain the friends who think I’m wrong-headed. What I said was that I’ve always liked hubris when it’s art-driven, and that I thought The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. I did not say I like Schnabel’s paintings. The plates on velvet never lived up to Schnabel’s ambition or to the hype he generated for them, but I do remember liking il cardinale if that’s indeed what he was, painted on the ceiling of a portico at PS 1, above a refectory table. There was an unintended existential vacuum that magnified the Renaissance antecedents of the space.

So what is hubris?? Marsyas had it. It’s presumption, originally toward the gods, that one is better than one’s betters. A long time ago, in the Art Starry Eighties, Schnabel set himself up as the peer of Duccio, Giotto and van Gogh. Things have calmed down some since. Schnabel is acknowledged to be a better film maker than painter or real estate mogul. Lesser lights like Damien Hirst have come and almost gone, John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage have had their moment, and Jeff Koons is making accessible balloon dogs instead of unfathomable basketballs in water tanks. Art is having an extended moment of anti-heroism, which is not to say that artists’ egos have ceased to exist, only that it’s become unfashionable to display them.

But I like poor flayed Marsyas for believing that he could, even when it turned out he couldn’t. Apollo’s such a buzzkill.

Run for the Roses

2009-05-04T11:48:00.003-04:00

So Susan has thrown down the gauntlet. Write about the Kentucky Derby and bring it around to art, she said. If you watched the Derby Saturday, you know that Calvin Borel’s victory on Mine That Bird was the second biggest upset in the Derby’s history. You should read the whole story here, but in a nutshell, what happened was that Borel and his horse, a gelding from nowheresville and a 50-1 long shot, stumbled out of the gate, came from way behind, squeaked through a narrow opening on the rail, and won the race by six and a quarter lengths. About that narrow opening - “I wasn’t worried,” Borel said. “He’s a small horse and I knew I could squeeze him through.”

As a kid growing up in Kentucky, I knew the names of Derby winners long before I ever heard of Pollock, Picasso or Van Gogh. Aristides, Gallant Fox, Whirlaway, Citation – all the romance of horse racing is tied up with the magic that happens when a horse and rider surge through the pack and across the finish line into history. In spite of the millions of dollars spent and earned in races these days, it’s still not about the money thing.

The wraparound is not some sentimental drivel about art being an equally wonderful and romantic pursuit to which money is only a corollary. Nope – it’s cut and dried a question of time. The fact of the matter is that a three-year-old gets a single less-than-two-minute crack at winning the Derby, and the win can neither be faked nor bought. By contrast, an artist can fake or buy his way right to the top of the heap, and only the passing of years can out the truth.

By Any Other Name

2009-04-27T20:57:00.004-04:00

Up until recently I only knew of James Lee Byars (1932-1997) as someone who had dated a friend of mine. One degree of separation was not enough to tell me anything about the man as an artist, but I met him – so to speak - in February in the company of Joseph Beuys, and now he pops up everywhere. He’s in the New York Cool show at Bowdoin College with a couple of works on paper that don’t really do much, out of context as they are, but there’s a stronger message in a video produced by the Kunstmuseum in Bern. The show there will travel to the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art this Fall. (I hope I’m right about that – the Internet is so often deceiving about dates.) Byars always had more cred in Europe than in this country, but his ball of roses is exquisite, his gold room is stunning, and, given the ephemeralness of his performances, the sight of 100 little children running around in gold capes (“little points of light” according to the curator, Susanne Friedli) has a certain poignancy. The gold room reminds me of another artist whose work deals with spirituality and ephemerality: Montien Boonma. Boonma (1953-2000) was a Thai artist whose “House of Hope,” made of beads, invokes the walking Buddha and freedom from fear. We're invited to step inside. And I wonder as I wander why beauty triggers thoughts of ephemerality and vice versa. Is beauty always fleeting?

Writing for the Telegraph, Richard Dorment has this to say about the ball of roses. “In Rose Table Perfect, first made in 1989, a ball made out of 3,333 red roses sits on the gallery floor. On the opening night when the flowers were fresh, the sight and the scent must have been overpowering. When I saw it last week, the roses had died and the dark orb was the colour of coagulated blood. Simple as it is, in this one piece Byars sums up in purest form his awareness that beauty is inseparable from death and decay.”

Way Cool Art

2009-04-20T20:37:00.002-04:00

Just as I’m reading Thomas Crow’s The Rise of the Sixties, I learned Saturday that there’s a great new show called New York Cool at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. As everyone knows by now, the Sixties actually began in the Fifties, and there’s a painting by Adolph Gottlieb, Circular, from 1960, that’s light years more alive than its catalog reproduction would have one believe. The same can be said for Helen Frankenthaler’s Seaside with Dunes, from 1962, and for Yayoi Kusama’s No. Red A, 1960. One of the hallmarks of Sixties art was that it was cooler and less personal than the Abstract Expressionism that preceded it, but these three paintings, while not announcing their makers’ egos, are anything but cool. Red’s a hot color. Oil’s a hot medium. And these three paintings have both.

New York Cool, the catalog, for the show which traveled from New York University, has reproductions of all the artworks plus a number of essays I’m looking forward to reading when I finish Crow’s book, which is an easy read and a good introduction to the period and its artists. Crow gives us a time line beginning in 1954, when Rauschenberg began his Combine series, also the year Matisse died. The next year, James Dean was fatally injured when he crashed his Porsche, and the year after that, Jackson Pollock ran his car into a tree and Johnny Cash recorded I Walk the Line. Hard to imagine now that these beginnings and endings happened within a mere 11 years of the end of World War II, an event that seems locked in another time and place. Strange too how art remains fresh and the rest of history gets all musty.

There is a theory that no space-time continuum exists, and that events are making themselves as they happen, only to disappear moments later. What this means for art, I have no idea.

Prickly Aesthetics

2009-04-13T14:24:00.003-04:00

Three pincushion cacti lived with me in New York, and in an effort to maintain the vibe, I’ve got a couple of new ones here. The cactus on the dining room table is sort of endearing, if that’s possible. However, I don’t want to test it by reaching out to touch it. The one on my work desk is different. It looks like a lot of tiny green fluted pincushions grafted together. This is a different aesthetic, which brings me to an online chat I’ve been having recently on whether aesthetics can fail. Is this cactus a failure? I don’t think so, because I maintain that aesthetics as a branch of philosophy or a set of principles, according to which a prickly artist or a pincushion cactus might operate, exists a priori and cannot be altered. Can an artist deliberately fail in his/her attempts at aesthetic renderings? Again, I don’t think so. The ontology behind the impulse to fail ensures that failing to succeed is to have succeeded.

There is a related issue, which is whether one can deliberately make something ugly. This requires a narrow definition of aesthetics as beautiful or pleasing, and in this case the answer is yes, one can make something that most people would agree is ugly (failed). Roses are thought to be more pleasing than cactus, a Vermeer painting more pleasing than a Manzoni can of crap. Personally, I like both roses and cactus, and expanded definitions.

Three Ways of Being Small

2009-04-06T18:45:00.004-04:00

I'm remembering three memorable productions I saw recently. One was Mabou Mines DollHouse, an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, at Saint Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo. The set was scaled down to the male actors, who were midgets. The women were tall, but spoke with tiny voices and Norwegian accents. On Mabou Mines web page, we read that Director Lee Breuer "turns Ibsen*s mythic feminist anthem on its head by physicalizing the equation of Power and Scale. Torvald, Rank and Krogstad, (the men), are all played by actors whose heights range from 40 to 53 inches. Nora and Kristine are tall and Helene, the maid, is a full 6 feet. Nothing dramatizes Ibsen's patriarchal point more clearly than the image of these little men dominating and commanding women one and a half times their size in a playhouse size doll house." The stuff of bad dreams that night for me and my friends, you betcha.

Second production: The Awaji Puppet Theater Company presented a group of traditional plays at the Japan Society. This was Bunraku, where all the puppets, which are 3 feet tall, are manipulated by three men dressed entirely in black, who somehow see through or in spite of the full hoods they wear. The men represent the shadow side of a world in which the puppets, who do not speak, through masks that do not move, are reality.

Third: Laurie Anderson is currently at Location One in Soho, through May 2. But Laurie is only a few inches high, seated in an armchair in a corner of a darkened room. Her dog is with her. They are 3-D projections of the real thing, and after you've been in the room for a while and your eyes have become accustomed to the dark and you hear Laurie tell her story, it dawns on you that you are a giant, looking down at her from your great height (in my case, 5'2"), and that you represent the terror that comes from the air, the vultures circling, the planes, as in "here come the planes, they're American planes, made in America." From the Air, as the installation is titled, is about disembodiment, hers and yours.

Hot Rocks

2009-03-30T12:05:00.005-04:00

A quick one this one - but a good one. Last week marked the 1 year anniversary of my consistent blogging. In the past year, I have written about the weather, the state of my piece of ground in Maine, and the art world in general. I plan to keep right on with that: it's cold and rainy, here in Maine there's still some snow on the ground, and the last show I saw before leaving Brooklyn was at the Japan Society.

KRAZY! is a really fun show that gives an overview of the serious pursuit of Manga. I now have a much better idea of the breadth of Manga and Anime subject matter and visual imagery. Not everything is shootem up blowem up sex and violence. The most unexpected part of this exhibition, though, is the house of comic books - bookshelves in the round, with a door to the inside, so that you and your small inner self can go inside, sit down, and read or be read to. I also see the thread that runs from ukiyo-e hanga to Manga, and this will be fun to explore now that I'm back in my studio. Get ready for rocks that rock and some hot color.

Oh, and one more thing. I love languages, and the book Japanese in Mangaland was too tempting to resist. From now on, I'll be playing with Japanese characters too, hehehe.

KRAZY! is up through June 14. Konnichiwa Friends and Family Tours on the second Saturday of every month.

Lots of Art

2009-03-23T09:42:00.003-04:00

Just give me art, lots of art, lots of starry nights and oh – Martin Kippenberger. He produced lots of art, and lots of it is now at MOMA through May 11 (The Problem Perspective). New York Magazine calls him “the artist who did everything.” When I was growing up in Lexington, KY, there were no museums to go to, no Kippenbergers to see, but I drew my own responses to the world around me: a smiley Jesus on the cross (religion), birds nesting (nature), a horse being sick at both ends (societal awareness). So I recognize a kindred spirit in Kippenberger, who came up with even better, more skewed responses: Fred the Frog crucified, a fake birch forest littered with uppers and downers, and Santa’s evil twin, Knecht Ruprecht.

Kippenberger worked fast and loose and prolifically, embracing most of the media and forms of visual art extant at the time. Too bad that digital art forms were then just in their infancy. Wall text at MOMA speaks of his “itinerant sensibility,” and the recent reviews of the show in Art in America, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and John Perreault’s Artopia blog, all place him in the context of post-war German art. He out-did Richter, faced down Beuys, and made fun of Picasso (I know, Picasso’s not German, but he was there to be called on the Teppich).

And yet, Kippenberger himself was German in his expression, and never more so than as an incredibly accomplished painter and draftsman. He refers to or anticipates most of contemporary painting, without losing himself in the process. In addition to stabs at Richter, Beuys and Polke, I found correspondances to Hockney and Wegman, and reminders of Francis Bacon. There is a beautiful series of watercolors featuring a magnifying glass, and a range of drawings on hotel stationery, done over the years, that make political and social points. In the end, at the end of his life, he did a group of drawings and paintings based on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. They are baroque in their intensity and outdo Gericault in their existential horror. Texts on two of the paintings announce “Je suis meduse” and “The End.” And so, in both cases, it was.

Cats

2009-03-16T10:01:00.003-04:00

If they weren’t so small they’d kill you. From my 3rd floor window in Carroll Gardens I’m watching a convention of twelve cats, loosely organizing themselves cat fashion in the neighbor’s back yard. Six seem to be related, because they’re all grey with ringed tails. Two others are Siamese. Two are black, one with boots. Three walk the top rail of a chain link fence. Now a decision has been made to change backyards. Some cats go over the fence, some through the hole below. They re-convene. Tails twitch. A victim has been chosen, or maybe that cat’s “IT” because all the others join in to chase it under the euonymus. Cat fight. Yowling. Everybody scatters. Reorganization in smaller breakout groups has occurred. Do cats think about art?

Most of the time, an art magazine arrives in my mailbox and I throw it into the mix of printed matter I will later slog through to feel better informed. This month’s Art in America International Review is an exception. I get at it right away, because It’s full of images that actually work. They have something to say. They bear extended looking. Kamrooz Aram’s paintings address the intersection of video games and Persian miniatures. Steve McQueen and Hannah Wilke are here. There’s a feature on Martin Kippenberger, whose show I plan to see at MOMA very soon. And a quote that really grabbed me, because it was both a YES! and a DUH – was this about Shepard Fairey’s designs. “Ironically, Fairey’s designs, which are often esthetic flirtations with the propaganda graphics and exhortations of communist Russia, China and Cuba, are much in demand in the corporate world.” Why is that? Not only is the message behind the images spelled out (“These sunsets are to die for,” “OBEY” and “HOPE”), but beyond that, the grim color and heavy-handed forms exactly mirror the mental images inhabiting the heads of corporate wonks.

Shepard Fairey’s work is on view in Boston through August 16, and in spite of his popularity with corporate types, Boston cops have not been so thrilled. You’d think that a city that started off by throwing tea into the harbor would have a soft spot for political messages, but apparently that’s not the case.

The Art Market – Not So Much

2009-03-09T12:54:00.002-04:00

The Armory Show was this weekend, and having walked my feet off getting there and back, plus having recently taken in the ADAA Art Fair, I had thought to rant about the commodification of art. You do get to see a great range of gallery offerings in both venues, and, dollar consideratiions aside, most of it’s quite good. There are booths devoted to single artists (Gerhard Richter and Donald Sultan at ADAA), and booths devoted to single subjects (Dieu Donne for handmade paper at the Armory). But try as I might, I cannot warm up to art as a commodity and I have nothing whatsoever to say about the current state of the art market. I like to be one on one with a work of art and think of it as connected to its maker rather than as something to which a price tag has been attached. It doesn’t matter to me that if I had enough money I could consider owning it. I’m happy to look. I got really happy looking at some elegantly painted portraits by Elizabeth Peyton (see my December 1 blog), and admired the skilled draftsmanship of Danica Phelps at the Lower East Side Printshop booth. Dubuffet always makes me want to go out and play in the mud – and that’s a good thing. Louise Bourgeois doesn’t necessarily make me happy, but she does make me want to challenge myself, a very good thing indeed. There’s a razor’s edge to her work that will never appear in mine, but I like knowing that she can slice up my emotions with it. Yayoi Kusama’s variations on disorientation bring me up short every time, no matter what the medium, and I love the way that happens. But with so much talent, why does Richter pull his punches in favor of showing off his squeegee techniques? I’m not so happy about that because his doing so is market-motivated, about which I said I had nothing to say, but maybe I was wrong. Hmmmmmmm.

Sapolio goes viral, Snow does the same

2009-03-02T11:13:00.003-05:00

"The snow the snow the beautiful snow it brightens the world like Sapolio." I learned this jingle/meme when I was a little kid, and it's right at the front of my brain every time I watch it snow, as it's doing - AGAIN - here in Maine. It even snowed in Alabama. Meetings have been canceled, driveway as yet unplowed. Wondering whether I had spelled Sapolio correctly, I came across this April 6, 1936 article in Time, which makes it clear that Sapolio was one of the pioneers of modern marketing, with branding in Europe as well as the US. Here's another jingle, a riff on Gilbert and Sullivan from the archives at Boise State:

When I was a lad, I served a term
As office boy to an attorney's firm;
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee,
But I couldn't have polished it bright I know
If I had not used SAPOLIO.

So these days, it's Google, Twitter and Facebook that get us around, and as soon as I'm back in New York, I'll check out the old Sapolio factory at West and Bank Streets. As I already know from Google street views, it's a handsome old building, on the west bank (where else) of Manhattan.

Chyrenheppa and Me

2009-02-23T11:08:00.004-05:00

Chyrenheppa Diefendorf, my alter ego and art interviewer, joined me recently for a trip to Chelsea to look at landscape art. “We’ve tramped all up and down from 19th Street to 26th,” she said. “Did you think anything was worth seeing?” And I replied that yes, I did, but it was not painting as I had hoped. It was photography.

CD: why had you hoped for painting?
DZ: because I’m always trying to define for myself the relevance of landscape painting. I’m not sure that a landscape painting is anything other than reportage, a look through the window at the scene beyond.
CD: What about those really big paintings we saw at Stellan Holm in Day-Glo colors that are “spanning the compositional formalism of the Hudson River School to a reverence for nature akin to Joseph Beuys’?” Surely the artist get some creds for linking to Beuys?
DZ: For starters, I get put off the art when the statement is poorly written. But there was a certain likeable-ness about the paintings, just nothing new to add to the dialogue.
CD: putting aside the question of why you want landscape painting to be something other than what it’s always been, did you feel the photography had anything more to offer?
DZ: Well, right off, photography is a look through a window, or lens, no matter how you manipulate it later on. So in his Dark Forest prints, Japanese artist Keita Sugiura starts by looking, but in the extrapolation of the camera’s information, goes far beyond that to create a world of richly dense darks and flickering lights that might have been painted but was not.
CD: scuse me?
DZ: Extrapolation - loosely put, extending the application of a method to an unknown conclusion based on trends in the known data. The going beyond was also there in the Kusho “writing in the sky” photographs at Bruce Silverstein. Watching the microlevel of India ink and water at the moment of their convergence is only possible thanks to technology that allows the photographic recording of phenomena within 7,500th of a second. But the result, again, almost fooled me into thinking it was a painting, just one that no human could have pulled off.
CD: sounds less like looking through a window and more like process.
DZ: You’re right, Chyrenheppa, and that’s what I want.

Brendan Cass at Stellan Holm through March 4
Keita Sugiura at Max Protetch closed February 21
Shinichi Maruyama at Bruce Silverstein through March 7

La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi

2009-02-16T13:56:00.002-05:00

This is the title of a full portrait phototype print of Joseph Beuys, and I remember the room where I first saw it years ago - on the end wall of a long and narrow gallery. I walked toward it, walked backward to the entrance, walked toward it again. And again. The feeling of my being approached by Beuys rather than vice versa has stayed with me. I saw it for the second time yesterday, in an ongoing exhibition of Beuys’ work at MOMA. It was not as beautifully sited, but the message is the same: We are the revolution. Beuys’ shamanistic stance and personal style bring meaning to what today, in most of his work, may seem obscure or even dated. Wall text refers to the “mythological, historical and personal relevance” of Beuys’ output, and sitting in front of five vitrines newly acquired by the museum, and surrounded by hordes of Sunday visitors, I was struck by the emptiness of those vitrines and their carefully chosen contents – the empty spaces surrounding the objects in the vitrines, and the psychological quiet that also seems to surround objects and vitrines. Nonetheless, Beuys is only as empty as your lack of imagination, and as rich and full as the symbolic and sacred worlds he refers to. Joseph Beuys: The Reader, published in 2007 by the MIT Press, was my first choice among the offerings of the Museum store on my way home.

So art is a catalyst for change, though art may be used to smother independence just as surely as it foments it. Also at MOMA, I came away from Arto Halonen’s documentary Shadow of the Holy Book, dismayed about big corporations’ complicity in the human rights violations in Turkmenistan, dismayed but not surprised at how revolutions can bring ill rather than good. Can artists be the revolution, or do the interests of global capitalism and big governments, using art for their own devious purposes, always have the upper hand? The Holy Book, by the way, is not the Bible, Koran or Torah, but the Ruhnama, a fabricated piece of propaganda supported by Daimler-Chrysler and John Deere, among other well-known corporate giants whose actions are in deliberate violation of their stated ethical standards.

And a final parting shot: judging by the checkout queue at the MOMA store, I would say that our own government missed a good bet when it deleted arts funding from the stimulus package.

some sites:
Joseph Beuys' La Rivoluzione siamo noi
The film
Update on the stimulus package

Reading The Road

2009-02-09T11:53:00.003-05:00

Just last night, I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and thought as I put it down, how often my work has been generated by walking, and by the impressions I’ve formed along the way. In Newfoundland, where I walked to learn the landscape, the scenery was so monotonous that I took to counting my steps just to stay motivated. Walking in Maine, where the bones of the earth are heaved up in most astonishing ways, I think about tectonics. Today I walked through the Brooklyn Museum, where a 4th Floor exhibit, Selections from American Art," reexamines landscape. There’s a hilarious quasi-sculptural painting, “Falling Bierstadt,” that answers my need as a painter to go up against the euphoria of 19th century landscape painting. And as always, I found Olafur Eliasson’s grid of photographs to be awfully two dimensional in more ways than one. I’m not a fan of his obvious iterations of what is all around us all the time. (Even in New York, all you have to do is look.) But the piece that grabbed me most and held me longest, and brings me back to The Road, was Terence Koh’s stack of large and small vitrines, some empty, some containing white objects recalling man’s inhumanity to man and its artifacts. McCarthy’s apocalyptic tale, in which few people and no other life forms remain, describes a world of “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.” Everything covered by blowing ash. Koh’s work, it would seem, has been to collect what remnants remain from that world, remnants finally washed clean by rain, and present them to us as reminders of what once was, or what may someday come to pass.

Painting in Winter

2009-01-12T20:14:00.004-05:00

As the days get perceptibly longer and the temperatures fall, I spend more time in the studio, and for the first time since I began writing here, am going address some of what happens while I'm there. After all, what I want to uncover is an evolved way of painting the subject matter that interests me, and that subject matter remains, as it has for a long time, rocks and water. But subject matter is only the starting point, or perhaps not even that. It becomes a distant reference the deeper I get into any given painting. Painting is a process, and the physical act of moving paint around on a support has to be joined with patience and the use of appropriate technical tools. It's not enough to mix, shove and scrape the paint until an abstraction is produced that can be interpreted as some sort of recognizable image. It is also not good enough, to my mind, to resort to obvious narrative. In other words, I have to work harder - thinking about what I know of Matisse, De Kooning, and their descendants, Diebenkorn and Brown. Their work with spatial relationships and chromatic harmonies are informative, but not imitable. In a confrontation with a canvas, it's what makes me uncomfortable that counts.

A Saving Grace

2009-01-05T19:54:00.002-05:00

Travel by air is a special kind of hell, but if I hadn’t flow through Philadelphia, and been stuck there overnight, I would have missed the three exhibitions in the F Terminal. Most airport art comes in two flavors: the oversize posters and scenic photographs that line the concourses and moving walkways, or the big public art projects, frequently mobiles, that are pleasant to look at but are not challenging art. Philadelphia does it differently.

My attention was caught first by the color and patterning in Andrea Packard’s fabric and paper collages of wooded landscapes. Somehow their complexities reminded me of David Driskell’s work, though the palette was entirely different. I was deep into these for a while before I realized that nearby, a group of paintings by Jackie Tileston created an equally magnetic space. Here, calligraphy and images borrowed from Chinese and Hindu sources combined with other elements to make dream-like spaces. The piece de resistance, one which tied Tileston’s work to Packard’s, was a lone three-dimensional tuft of fabric in an otherwise two-dimensional universe. In the third group of images, Florence Putterman’s black and white linocut narratives provided unintentional though perfectly possible story lines with which one might people the abstracted landscapes of the first two artists.

Each of these women has a substantial resume and a clear commitment to making art that matters. Andrea Packard teaches and is Director of the List Gallery at Swarthmore. Jackie Tileston has been awarded a Guggenheim and a Bellagio residency, and teaches at U Penn. Florence Putterman has received an NEA Grant, and has a long list of museum collections to her credit.

The Exhibitions Committee at the airport publishes a brochure detailing locations and projects throughout the airport’s terminals and I’m sorry I didn’t have the time and energy to get around to all of them. More airports around the country should think about offering stranded passengers the saving grace of serious art.

Drawing - on the Walls

2008-12-15T13:07:00.000-05:00

It’s Blogthirty. It’s cold, it’s warm, we’re having an ice storm, no wait, it’s 50 degrees outside. It’s been an unsettled week and as you can tell, I’m hard up for subject matter this morning. Trying to jump start my engine by reading other people’s opinions has so far been no help. The banality of Ikea furniture? Blah. Lily Tomlin’s brother’s go at creating a sectional by sawing his mother’s sofa in thirds? Nah. Remember drawing rooms? What sort of furniture does one put in a drawing room? How about no furniture at all and you just strip off the old wallpaper and draw on the walls?

Drawing is either a process or a goal-oriented activity. Someone with a narrative imagination is required to come up with formal inventions which allow the narrative to proceed and be manifested for the viewer. A manga artist could do wonders for the walls of that drawing room. If it were my room, I would start by letting the materials generate the result. A process drawing happens because of the artist’s curiosity about how things get made, and what materials will do; and the inspiration for this may lie - either or both - in the physical inclinations of the artist and in the processes of the natural world of which the artist, who is a life-form with just as much potential for art as Johnson grass, is a part. Things grow adapt change, get moved around come into being and disappear. The challenge for the artist is to be as inventive in making process work visually, as nature is in inventing form.

My hope is that whoever stripped off the wallpaper left the mess behind, along with some cans of paint, so I can get started.

I'll be busy drawing for the next two Mondays - and back here in the New Year. Have Happy Holidays!

If Not

2008-12-08T19:25:00.000-05:00

It's a cold, very cold, snowy day, though it's not snowing now. Last night the wind blew yesterday's snow all over the place, making surf-like patterns on the gravel, in and out of the weeds, across the snow walks and frozen pond. In the studio, I like to give myself over to what the landscape provides, and watch what happens when the wind blows my thoughts around until they pile up around one idea or another, and from that, art gets made.

Language has always fascinated me too, the old idea that the universe was created from sound, or language. Which is why I was so taken when I first found rocks that had what appeared to be inscribed x's and l's. Hah, I thought, here's evidence that the world is created out of language. I know now the inscriptions are actually quartz inclusions in what's called "graphic granite," but still, it's a minor thrill even now to see those bright lines in the granite matrix. I have another rock, a jasper stone, that I use as a meditation object. Jasper stones are so named because they turn up at Jasper Beach in Downeast Maine. This stone is a sort of mottled yellow-brown with no inclusions, but as I stared at it one afternoon, I realized that I was being texted. The darker grains of the stone's surface organized themselves to spell out, in an elegant cursive script, the words "if not." If not what, I asked. If this is not the perfect zen question, then what is? And so my rock continues to ask me, or I ask myself, in response to whatever expectations I may have and whatever ideas the wind blows up in my brain, what if not?

Portraits - A Snapshot

2008-12-01T11:27:00.002-05:00

“Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.” This from Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “Why Bother?”, reprinted in his book, How to Be Alone. What caught me here was not his lament for the novel, but the assumption that serious portraiture is dead. It’s true that the paintbrush as a tool for social reportage has mostly been displaced by cameras in the hands of everyone from your dad at Thanksgiving to Annie Leibovitz. But serious portrait painting has been and continues to be practiced by Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Elizabeth Peyton, in ways that comment on contemporary society and on the personality of the sitter. The fact that Elizabeth Peyton often works from photographs, not life, intensifies rather than diminishes her insights into the psychological makeup of her subjects. Instead, it’s reflective of the ways in which information is delivered these days – at several removes from reality. And the bright, harsh color juxtapositions mirror our secular world in the same way that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portraits mirrored the darks and lights of the Reformation in Saxony. That's his Martin Luther upper left.

Elizabeth Peyton’s exhibition Live Forever is on view at the New Museum through January 11. There’s an excellent slide show/interview online.

In another portrait story, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne believes it has identified a Dosso Dossi portrait of Lucrezia Borgia.

And to follow up on my November 17 blog about Relational Aesthetics, John Perreault’s Artopia blog has a great tour of the show at the Guggenheim, theanyspacewhatever, with commentary on the artists and the RA movement, or absence thereof.

Country Time and the Environment

2008-11-24T20:20:00.000-05:00

First it was the unnaturally bright green color, now that all the leaves are down, that pulled me over to the fence line. A pine sapling has started up under the birch, but as I crossed the ditch and looked closer, a glint of yellow metal caught my eye. Nope, I wasn't panning for gold. The yellow turned out to be a Country Time Lemonade can stuck up in the crotch of the birch. I wonder how that got there, and when, and who put it there and why. Did the drinker think to save it for later recycling, or just not want to pollute the ditch? Last summer I found a shattered Mason jar along the same fence line. No question about recycling there.

These items, so oddly out of context, take me back to a recent trip to Quoddy Head State Park, and the plateau of the Great Meadow with its open view to sea. The beauty of that spot has always been its uninterrupted quiet, but noise can be visual as well as auditory. I was dismayed to see one tacky cairn after another erected (and left behind) by visitors in some vain attempt to say "hey look I was here." Nothing wrong with the occasional cairn that marks the trail, but on the ledge, there's no trail to mark, and there were so many non-functioning cairns that they really ruined the sense of open space and untouched beauty. The motto "pack it in, pack it out" applies here too - in the sense that we should leave nothing behind to disturb the natural quiet that brings us to places like Quoddy Head in the first place.

Old Wine, New Bottles

2008-11-17T20:54:00.000-05:00

The field of “relational aesthetics” is fairly new to the art world, and one has to accept that art can be redefined in such a way that the object is no longer the art-maker’s goal. Artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller, and my personal favorite, Pierre Huyghe, traffic in events and installations which require viewers to be active participants. Wikipedia's page provides this: “Relational Art (or relationalism[1]) is defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, co-founder and former co-director of Paris art gallery Palais de Tokyo as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."[2] Artworks are judged based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.[3]” But even though the purpose of these relationships is to make art more democratic, relational artists mostly preach to the converted, while the public at large still prefers to define art as something one hangs on a wall.

This past weekend, the craft-faith-based initiative WOWHAUS, out of California, came to Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Maine, to present a Symposium on Deep Craft. WOWHAUS puts its faith in the involvement of community, and in teaching people to use what’s locally available, from food to building materials. They define deep craft as an “interstitial place” where skills, tradition, innovation and knowledge come together. But does this create a place that is deep, or only just spread thinly across the social landscape? Mainers are a pragmatic bunch for whom deep craft is digging out after a serious snowstorm, and I think too, it seemed to most of us that deep craft is something we’ve been doing every day partly just to get by, and partly because we came in on the seventies wave of environmental awareness.

So what’s new about ecodesign, permaculture, and the biodynamic movement? Just the buzzwords, really. WOWHAUS’s contribution to craft is in the field of possibilities, brewing the legacy of William Morris in the stewpot of sixties activism. Though they have realized some impressive designs, for Alice Waters among others, for WOWHAUS, building community relationships matters more than the actual making of things. Still, in a world where we can now order Domino’s pizza directly through TiVo, there’s something to be said for keeping the flame alive.

Crabgrass

2008-11-10T13:22:00.002-05:00

What to write about today?? What was I doing last week?? Trying to keep my head above water, get some work done in the studio, go to Portland – none of this is worth a blog. Of course it was election week and the results were beyond good. The sign on the side of the road said “Free at Last.” The Heartfield book lies waiting – are there parallels to the narrow escape we’ve just had? Why can I not be as disciplined as Obama in setting and sticking to a schedule? Shall I go read some more in hopes of finding a spark for what to write? Possibly yes, because I seem to be drowning in a sea of bad feng shui – books out of bookshelves, papers in piles on the floor, desktops and tabletops buried under sketchbooks and broken rocks.

So I pick up Post-Modern Theory, by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. I knew of a Kellner once and he was German. And I read this: “Privileging botanical metaphors, Deleuze and Guattari employ the term rhizome to designate the decentered lines that constitute multiplicities.“ What they’re saying is that we live in a world where all things are interconnected in “random, unregulated relationships,” and desires flourish like crabgrass. Crabgrass proliferates where it desires to multiply, in a positive way, taking advantage of newly mulched soil or improving poor soil by breaking it up. Crabgrass is useful that way, and so is art that is decentered, for instance the cartography of Julie Mehretu, and the worlds that Matthew Ritchie presents. Like crabgrass, I desire so much – electronic music, more and more books, life amid the Northeast coast’s botanical and geological feasts, and time spent in big cities. In practice, these are the concepts and things that fuel my studio work, in which, rhizome-like, an oil painting generates an acrylic on paper generates an installation generates a woodblock.

Some rhizomatic connections:
John Heartfield
Matthew Ritchie
My Installations
Roadside Geology
Free at Last

Past to Present

2008-11-03T09:41:00.001-05:00

Frost has knocked down the ferns and valerian, and for the first time since early spring, I got in close enough under the winterberry bushes to haul out lengths of wire fencing, its barbs long since blunted by rust. My project is to expose the rock walls along the property lines and get rid of old farm detritus. It’s at least as satisfying as making paintings, and quite possibly more enduring, since those rocks will be there long after we humans have departed. Later in the day. I heard a poet read this line: “walls made of rocks make a story from past to present.” That’s truly said.

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, which hosted the reading, currently houses three exhibitions dealing with the past and present of art. Downstairs, there is an exhibition of paintings by the mentally ill members of the LINC and Waterville Social Clubs. Some of the artists are also poets and it was they who were reading. The directness of their poetry and conversation is that of people who, in spite of what life has handed them, maintain a rare honesty about who they are and why they make art. In speaking of how art has affected his life, the poet who spoke about walls also said this: “When you’re sick, you sink into a puddle, and when you’re getting well, it’s like you’re picking yourself up and making a body.”

How many artists, in this time of mental gymnastics, appropriated ideas, and lax physical discipline, are able to say that with each new work of art, they are in the truest sense producing themselves? Look for clues upstairs in Dennis Pinette’s work. Pinette is a passionate advocate of the art of painting whose watercolors let us follow indirect paths, the images taken up or left behind, as he develops concepts into concrete objects. On the ground floor, “First Traces,” an exhibition of sketchbooks and preparatory materials, also examines artists’ progress from ideas to finished works of art.

The shows continue through December 20, and you can read more about them here.

The Big Three

2008-10-20T14:53:00.001-04:00

The enduring subjects of art are three: the figure, the landscape, and the still life. It may be possible to assign any given image to at least one of these categories. For instance, Jenny Holzer’s truism, “action causes more trouble than thought” refers to the human condition, and falls into the category of figurative art. Tomma Abt’s abstractions are landscape-based, as are Mondrian’s. Joseph Beuys’ great Lightning with Stag in Its Glare at MassMOCA, is a still life that incorporates by allegory both the landscape and the figure.

I’ve often wondered what makes these subjects so compelling, and as I continue to read Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place – see the Oct. 6 blog – I’ve come to realize where their appeal lies. Figurative art is always the mirror ourselves, our humanity, and our compassion or lack thereof. The visions of Goya and Banksy belong here, as do Monet’s odalisques and Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits. But those are easy ones. It’s harder to articulate why we find landscape painting so compelling. A scene is just a scene, but a really good landscape painting evokes longing for the unknown, a world we are ultimately unable to become part of even with the aid of one-point perspective. A Canaletto seems to invite us in, but into a landscape that moves away from us in time and in distance. Caspar David Friedrich’s horizons are always far off, his sea is boundless, our boats too small. Conversely, a still life is intimate. We get the point immediately, and how lovely to possess a rose that never fades, a table always set, an apple always ripe. How satisfying to contemplate a Hopper house, to have the tank filled at a Ruscha service station.

Confusion sets in when one considers that some landscapes offer a glimpse of the intimate and the familiar, and so have the same appeal as still lifes. Thomas Kinkade’s smarmy cottage scenes come to mind, as do generic lighthouse paintings. These set up longing of a different kind, longing for art that will fit nicely in the home, perhaps, and longing that can be indulged in without pain. Conversely, Dutch still lifes are reminders of life beyond the grave. To dwell on the insect-nibbled peach is to have a glimpse not only of sin, but also of the fact that the wages of sin are death.

Confusion is resolved, though, in a great artist like Van Gogh, in whose singular paintings we see all three subjects: our selves reflected back by a starry night, infinity in a vase of roses, and timeless familiarity in the postman’s face.

Follow This Blog

2008-10-13T11:24:00.000-04:00

Ways to follow blogs include RSS Feeds and "Following" which seems to me the less complicated of the two if you're a blogspot user, so I've added a following gadget. It immediately let me know I have one follower and that in addition to writing her own blog, white space imaginings, she follows some other truly interesting blogs including VoxPhotographs Weblog out of Portland, Maine, and black white and grey matters.

If you're not inclined to follow the blog publicly, with your picture on the sidebar, you can follow privately and and still get the updates. You'll be given the choice when you click on the "Following" link. So I encourage you all to follow - it's so much more fun than trying to remember to check in every Monday and it helps me grow my audience.

Welcome, Claire, and welcome future followers all!

N.B. "Follow This Blog" floats to the top left, RSS feeds are below my Profile.

Rocks, Water and an Island

2008-10-06T15:05:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I was out moving chunks of granite around, and this morning reading Space and Place, by Yi-Fu Tuan. To paraphrase, Tuan claims that breaking the bounds of gravity is the innate desire of man, and he was not referring to the difficulty of picking up large rocks, but rather to ice skating. I would add other activities in which there is total freedom of movement and an attempted or perceived escape from gravity – surfing, sailing, great sex, and colliding subatomic particles.

So what about man’s desire to go deep into the earth, and what are the physical attractions to the solidities of metamorphic and sedimentary rocks? This is the complementary desire for security. According to Tuan, a social geographer who taught at the University of Wisconsin, “human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom.” I hate more than anything to be tied down, but on the other hand, those rocks, which are the foundation of my art, provide a resting place. The ideal subject matter? Water moving over rocks.

I’ve used “man” in its now out-dated sense to include men and women, but something I read this morning made me realize how far we have not come. A story about the origin of the yoga pose “Matsyendrasana” (Lord of the Fishes) tells a fish and flood story about a man who rescued a fish, only to have it later save him and his ark in the great flood. Many eons later, Parvati begged her consort Shiva to give her the secrets of yoga, so that she might use them to help humankind which was once again in a fix. He took her to a remote island, imparted the secrets, and then realized that the neighboring island, looking so like a rock, was actually that very fish referred to above. So Shiva transformed the fish into the first great yogic teacher. And Parvati? The story I was reading forgot to say.

Cosmic Circus

2008-09-29T07:09:00.000-04:00

Over the years, I've been intrigued by the inventions Stew Henderson comes up with to express his view of the cosmos. To name a few, he’s used three dimensions, two dimensions, bird song, the covers of many New Yorker magazines, water from the Danube River and clock time to arrive at images which, though disparate, are always recognizably Hendersons. He describes his “Paper Circus” series, on view now at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, as a group of images which happened during a transition between two intentional bodies of work, but it seems to me that these images are more truly complete than the work which preceded and which follows them. Henderson has always been comfortable with a diamond format, which is very effective here, as is a larger vertical format. But what really makes these images successful is the combination of jewel-colored collaged “beads,” red Pollock-like skeins of paint, and black-and-white forms that seem derived from eyes and eyeglasses. While he has used these elements before, here, framed in black, they are overlaid in such a way that their activities reference an indefinable something that lies beyond themselves. I venture a guess that this might involve more abstract ideas such as vision and anti-matter and the cosmic dance. The strength of the message results from Henderson's accurate use of space, color. and line.

See more Stew Henderson here.

Deep Craft at Waterfall Arts

2008-09-22T18:37:00.000-04:00

I've been working with Waterfall Arts' founder Alan Crichton, to co-curate their upcoming show, titled Resonance and Response, which will showcase the work of two Maine artists - and am doubling up by writing and posting here the statement for the show, which is to be held concurrently with Waterfall's annual symposium on the connections between art and nature, this year titled "Conflux." I love blog sentences - they go on and on. Here's the statement.

Joe Ascrizzi and Diana Cherbuliez are artisans, sculptors, and story-tellers. In terms of what we ordinarily think of as “craftsmanship,” each is a master. But there is more to craft than careful making. To speak of “deep craft” is to acknowledge the art of slowing down, engaging more people, living through process and results. It implies knowing how to look, and how to think about what comes next. A carpenter at work with his tools always envisions the steps he will take before they happen. C follows B follows A. This kind of deep thinking and making means responding to the given, whether what is given is the mythology implicit in a found object, or the resonance given off by a block of wood.

Diana lives in a house of her own making, in an island world that provides her with a constant source of raw materials. In considering an apple wood limb, she will parse out the cultural and mythological implications of the apple tree, Eve and the snake aided by a rat. Or, a particularly disorienting wallpaper pattern will trigger associations with her childhood bedroom, and she will progress from that idea to create a mirrored box that invites us into the dreamtime, the in between time when we are just falling asleep. In Diana’s work mirrors are the tools through which we build the scaffolds of our personal histories, and by which, through the magic of infinite reflection, we come to understand universal human truths.

By contrast, Joe works intuitively, listening for the frequencies that emanate from his materials. As if tuning into a universal channel, he lets the materials tell him what tools to use and what images to bring forth. The resulting imagery may be a Renaissance-like allegory, or it may be constructed on a geometric abstraction, a five-pointed star or a Golden Section. Joe’s family is from the Italian region of Calabria, where he learned the medieval and Renaissance crafts he now practices. Something in the air, perhaps, has carried forward through history. In one of his mirrored pieces, the mirror appears to be on the surface with the frame, but is not – one reaches back, and back, to find an elusive reality.

In bringing these two artists together at Waterfall Arts, in confluence with CONFLUX, the Deep Craft Symposium, we acknowledge the connections between art and nature, that one informs the other, that although we no longer live solely in the natural world, art is the reflection of our surroundings, the reminder of who we are and have the potential to become, and how we may attend to the practice of living as individuals in community.

The More Things Change

2008-09-15T16:18:00.001-04:00

“We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures.

A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and the silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills.”

This quote, attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), is the starting point for today’s blog, that we might reflect on the pure and the impure aspects of the art world.

Would a return to the 18th century and the simple acts of drawing and deciphering visual information remove us from the evil influences of the 21st century’s ART MARKET and its UNEDUCATED COLLECTORS? In the Guardian, Robert Hughes has just written a scathing indictment of Damien Hirst’s auction, today and tomorrow, of his (Hirst’s) own work through Sotheby’s. You can read it here. And the French have their pantalons in a twist over the installation of Jeff Koons’ Bunnies and Lobsters at Versailles, the Sun King’s legendary palace with its Hall of Mirrors.

But was not Versailles a very grand Bunny of its day? The more things change, the more they stay the same. And when it comes to art as commodity, the 17th and 18th centuries have more in common with the 21st than we might imagine.

Viewers' Choice

2008-09-08T20:54:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I attended a panel discussion on the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s Biennial, where audience and panelists tossed around questions of what defines a Biennial. Is it a showcase for emerging talent? Should the selections reflect the post-modern scene and a variety of media? One panelist, whose career is well-established, felt that this Biennial, and the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, should reflect the career spectrum of Maine artists, and had entered because he felt a certain responsibility in that direction. The other two artists on the panel, though they work in traditional mediums, are new to the “fine art” scene. All around, the dialogue was refreshingly direct and free of art-speak.

CMCA Curator Britta Konau pointed out that Maine’s Biennials are unusually democratic, because they are juried rather than curated (and also carry no entrance fee), so that anyone with a Maine connection is eligible to enter. In addition to the recognition that inclusion provides, there is a Jurors’ Award which, since CMCA is not a collecting institution, takes the form of a small solo show the following year. And then the question was put, should there also be a “People’s Choice” awarded by popular vote of the viewers? A part of the mission of arts organizations these days involves engaging the public, and one imagines that the People’s Choice would be very different from the Jurors’ Award. Even so, viewers would likely make a more sophisticated choice than Komar and Melamid’s version of the most-wanted American painting: a dishwasher-size realist landscape with blue skies.

So, why not let the public have its say? Contemporary art derives part of its meaning from the viewer, and what better way to engage people in new forms of art and do a little consciousness-raising at the same time?

Batting Around Ideas

2008-09-01T12:07:00.000-04:00

What’s been going on around here this Labor Day Weekend? Nature. There was a bat in the bedroom the other night, and yesterday, I took some time out to prune foliage away from the boulders that line the creek beds along my property, because I would rather look at rocks and water than at weeds. Just now, an eagle/osprey/turkey vulture soared overhead – not close enough to identify positively. There is a dead fox up the road. Been there for four days now. But, so as to avoid the tedium of personal journaling, let me point you in the direction of the sidebar blogs, each of which I’ve chosen for a reason.

Lies Like Truth: Love the title, and the eclectic coverage of all the arts. Scroll down to read the recent post on Chartres Bleu – not a new varietal, but a video installation at the Di Rosa Preserve in Napa, California.

The Artful Manager: Reflections on the business of art. This is useful reading for me, and since (full disclosure) I’m on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, I like to stay in touch.

Life’s a Pitch: As the bat in the bedroom, art has become part of community. Check out "Auf Wiedersehen, New Media," the August 26 blog, and the August 28 blog on Comments. Apparently, some blogs get hundreds of comments from the on-line community.

Here’s a comment that came to me via email - “just enough familiar information injected with some reflection by you . . allows me to unearth information that I have taken in but didn’t realize was there.” Thank you, commentator: you nailed the reason why I blog.

Weasel Art

2008-08-25T13:34:00.001-04:00

The lead essay in Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk is titled “Living Like Weasels.”

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home.

Without continuing on into more gory passages, I think it's safe to say this can become a metaphor for artists.

Artists are a little scary – who knows what we’re really thinking? Or doing when we hole up in the studio? Maybe we’re just sleeping, or having too much fun. What about the visual information we drag home, which in my case once included a fox carcass? Certainly, many government officials and the public at large are uneasy with what we might be perpetrating, but I think it is essential that as a society, we allow artists to do and show us those things that we don’t fully understand. As soon as you’re in a place that’s unfamiliar, everything becomes more vibrant. You see with new eyes. Art can do this for us – show us the unfamiliar, make us understand and accept new ideas, bring order out of chaos.

And so as an artist I try to maintain a wildness of perspective and a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar. Specifically, when it comes to making art, my installations reflect my interest in space, and my paintings are all about the process of creating patterns. I like the kind of installation art that alters space and refers to our place in the landscape. In this day and age we do not experience nature without culture, and Richard Serra, one of the great transformers of indoor and outdoor space, operates in the intersection of industrial and landscape. I also like Yayoi Kusama, whose disorienting patterns cause one to lose all sense of one’s location in space, and all sense of personal physical boundaries. It’s telling that she lives by choice in a psychiatric hospital.

My own art is not intended to be disorienting, but rather to offer a place for quiet reflection. It's process art, and I spoke about it recently at Aarhus Gallery in Belfast.

Where Has All the Passion Gone?

2008-08-18T10:38:00.001-04:00

I’m remembering a Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode in which Detective Bobby Goren goads an extremely cool and affect-less perp to try and get some sort of reaction out of him. The perp finally breaks. “Now see, that,” says Goren, "is affect.”

The 2008 Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art is a curious mix of concepts that left me and my friend asking how one accounts for the cool temperature of recent art. There are plenty of obsessions with the vernacular, with alternative materials. and with greatly reduced palettes. Irony has given way to self-deprecation. The influence of post-modern theory is everywhere evident in the careful efforts of artists who have been schooled first in making straight A’s and then in crafting a product.

So where is all the passion? It’s at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland. Passion luxuriates in Nancy Wissemann-Widrig’s paintings of shallow water. It bounces off the stones in Alan Crichton’s pastel images of a waterfall. It’s there in the gestural abstractions of Anne Ayvaliotis. And most of all, passion, and life, radiate from Kathleen Florance’s large format charcoal drawings of bees and butterflies. These artists not only know their craft, they love their subjects and they love the difficult act of making art. And that, sez I, is passion.

Essumasay Community?

2008-08-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

In my list of blog ideas, there’s one called “excuses not to paint.” This morning I’d like to consider excuses not to blog. You have, for the week, a resident two-year old. You have a show to install. A dentist appointment. A sudoku lures. You know how it goes. The two-year old and I got into a private joke about coasters of the kind you set your drink on to keep from making a ring on great-grandmother’s cherry table.

My set of coasters features 50’s ski babes each saying something with double entendre. “I have to get down how?” “The word on the slopes was . . . she was fast!” “Did somebody say coke?” It was the two-year old’s job to hand me a coaster, and my job to read it aloud. Her favorite, “Did somebody say coke?” became “essumasay coke?” Language evolves, as has the meaning of coke.

The concept of community, both in general and as it applies to theater, has also evolved to mean different things to different groups of people. Community once meant a close-knit geographical entity, the village or town. Now we have communities of common interests, often widely separated by geographic location. Community theater in the UK engages local political and social issues. In the US, community theaters are formed by volunteers with a great love for the performing arts, who re-produce classics and Broadway hits. It’s a struggle to keep these US groups going in the face of changing demographics, the explosion in entertainment options, and a stumbling economy. But it’s not just a question of everybody wanting the same dollar. The true bottom line is that to remain viable, community theater groups must develop new programming that draws in new audiences, incorporates multiple types of performance, and engages contemporary issues, while at the same time remaining a source for the classics and being an attractive venue for up-and-coming actors. In a word, community theater must re-define itself in terms of changed communities.

Now I’m off to install that visual arts show. Back next week . . . .

Rules, Limitations, and Situations

2008-08-04T21:09:00.000-04:00

Rules: Stick to one thing, make one kind of art, find a signature style, make it easy to sell.

Limitations: Exploring a range of media or concepts is a bad thing. If you’re a painter, paint. If you’re a sculptor, carve. Don’t’ ask too much of the viewer, and don’t overtax your own imagination.

Situations: Avoid narrative. Narrative situates your art in a particular time and space. At best it marks your own output as storytelling and at worst it illustrates someone else’s story.

These have been the rules of contemporary art. Imagine these rules falling off of a turning world, and artists, Prometheans unbound from the marketplace, regaining a lost freedom. A little pop backstory: Prometheus as envisioned by the poet Percy Bysse Shelley uncompromisingly speaks truth (art) to power (marketplace), and herein lies the moral of the story. In art there are no rules, no limitations, no given situations. The best art comes by surprise, puts stones beneath wheels, and upsets apple carts.

Personally, I have found it difficult to keep my apple cart on a smooth path. I draw like a painter, paint like a sculptor, and make three-dimensional work that is effectively two-dimensional. Drawing the figure has trained my hand. Time given to walking the landscape informs the spatial narrations of my installations. Heidegger’s concept of physis provides a cogent explanation of my painting process and of the way I understand the natural world. It is greatly satisfying to me that artists are once again exploring multiple concepts in multiple media. It’s a leap of faith I know, but I hope this means that their work reflects a more engaged and rigorous intelligence than has lately been the case, and that they, unlike Prometheus, will not have their livers eaten out by the powers that be.

Color, Line and Texture

2008-07-21T11:11:00.000-04:00

Color, line and texture: this is the subtitle of Betwixt and Between, the current exhibition at Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth, Maine, curated by Bruce Brown. At a panel discussion this past Thursday with artists Robin Mandel, Lois Dodd, and me, Brown spoke about his wish to present work that was off the beaten path – the beaten path being a familiar one, strewn with images of the Maine landscape like boulders in a blueberry barren (my words, not his). And while there are plenty of landscapes in this show, from the abstract to the very representational, there are also Henry Wolyniec’s digital ink prints, Joe Kievitt’s accumulations of ink lines, and texture in three dimensions by ceramicist George Perlman. Brown, who is Curator Emeritus at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, has long been instrumental in bringing new forms of art to the fore in Maine.

Line, color and texture are qualities which exist in every work of visual art, so it was interesting to hear Robin Mandel speak about his avoidance of color in the service of identifying an ideal and impersonal form. His steel sculptures are the uninflected-black contours of ordinary objects, such as boxes and grocery bags, in which “absence” of color serves to locate each object in its own Platonic shadow. By contrast, Lois Dodd builds her paintings out of color shapes which reference very specific subjects, and because she generally paints from life, she maintains a balance between local color (what’s actually out there) and the color relationships that will make a strong painting. I was on the panel as the texture person, even though texture for me is not so much intentional as it is the random by-product of building up layered encrustations of paint. Hence I am indebted to Bruce for pointing out that perhaps this kind of texture has its correlation in what I too am looking at, the very real accumulations outside my studio. Granite, clay, gravel, and, right now, the endless weeds of summer inform the invented line, color and especially texture, of my abstract paintings.

The show – with a selection from each artist - can be seen online in the catalog. The exhibition is up through July 30.

The Artist and the Scientist

2008-07-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

I have a giraffe. His name is Roland. He’s almost as tall as I am, which either makes me a very tall person, or Roland a not-so-tall giraffe. In addition to size differences, giraffes also differ in their coat patterns. A friend recently dropped off a page from National Geographic illustrating six different genetically distinct giraffes, and we tried to match Roland's pattern to one of the real African kind, reticulated, or Rothschild’s. But it was not to be, and I suggested that Roland might represent the Platonic ideal of giraffeness. To which my friend countered, “Or a new species waiting to be discovered.” A giraffa melissaanddougii?

Which brings me to the current vogue for science-infused art, and the aesthetic of meaning (see last week’s post). It’s not easy to find pure painting anymore, or pure sculpture. Perhaps these traditional forms have beaten a retreat into the savannas of printmaking, where technology allows for all kinds of formal permutations. Drawing has become mapping, photography the documentation of time, painting is the handmaiden of computer generated imagery, and sculpture – well, Arthur Ganson's machines do all these things and more. Not that I think any of this is bad. To the contrary, it is in the light of the discoveries of new species of art that we become more rigorous in our evaluations of the patterns of form and meaning.

Arthur Danto Comes Out - for Beauty

2008-07-07T20:32:00.003-04:00

Thanks be to the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland for bringing Arthur Danto to the coast of Maine. Danto was required reading when I was a student back in the late 80's, and I always liked how his essays started off in one direction, then took a different tack, and finally got back on course to make his point. His lecture tonight was the inaugural presentation in the Farnsworth Forum series, and he was interviewed by the Farnsworth's Director of Education, the excellent Roger Dell.

By his own description, Danto's work as a critic has been to arrive at a philosophy of art as defined by the sort of Socratic questioning that is itself definitive of much of Western thought. He began his talk tonight by positing that when Andy Warhol presented the Brillo Box as art, he set in motion a sea change in what art can be. Of course, it was Marcel Duchamp, not Warhol, who questioned the boundaries of what we may consider to be art by giving us the urinal, and Danto did later make a correct philosophical distinction between the Duchampian and Warholian reasons for adopting the ready-made.

A new tack: what of the market, of government repression and the freedom that American artists generally enjoy, as long as one doesn't look too closely at Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Jesse Helms, or Rudy Guiliani? From here, Danto rumbled into considerations of aesthetics and the philosophy at which he has arrived: that art is no longer judged by an aesthetic of form, but by an aesthetic of meaning, of which beauty is not a necessary component. When pressed by an audience member for criteria by which we might judge meaning, he reasoned in circular fashion that meaning is to be found in meaning. What did the artist mean, and where has meaning resided throughout art history? Socrates would never have let him off the hook on that one.

But never mind. The interview ended with a return to the shock of the new in the form of Jeff Koons' exquisite balloon dogs. How is it we are allowed to think of these as art? They are a far reach from ready-mades, and they are gorgeous in their form. It's ok, Danto implies, to like them just because we can't help ourselves. But what do they mean, and are we to depend on the artist for the answer? I like to think we can trust our own critical judgment here.

A Welliver Sky

2008-06-30T11:15:00.000-04:00

Scrolling through my collection of notes for blogs-in-waiting, I’ve turned up this quote from Peter Schjeldahl in the June 9 New Yorker: “Painting is a medium of concerted imagination, symbolizing consciousness. It’s not a flat dump for miscellaneous ideas.” This is an accurate assessment, and it strikes a chord with everyone who loves painting. Independent Curator Suzette McAvoy incorporated it into her lecture last week at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She was talking about the simple act of seeing, as it relates to Lois Dodd’s paintings (whose exhibition remains on view through July 19).

Making a painting remains the solitary pursuit we've always thought it to be, and it is a complicated one, too. Cognitive theories are not much help to the painter confronted with a subject, a blank canvas, and a palette full of paint. If there is no subject, as is the case for pure abstraction, the complications multiply. So how is it that the viewing of a painting is a simple act, and one to which we must bring an open mind empty of theories?

Painting appeals to the senses. It’s visual, it evokes both sound and smell, it’s tactile (too bad that in galleries and museums we are not allowed to touch). I have a friend who once licked a Van Gogh – giving him perhaps an enhanced understanding of the painter’s struggle. Our sixth sense, intuition, or instinct, tells us whether we like the painting or don’t, but it also does much more. It brings up a host of visceral associations, and it is to this conciousness that we should listen first.

What a painting means in formal terms or in light of its subject matter and narrative, are layers to be discovered as one’s sophistication increases. But the simple act of seeing opens the door, makes the connection between the lived world and the depicted one, so that walking outdoors one fine day, with sudden insight we may see a Welliver sky or, driving through the city, come upon a Hopper row of buildings. It’s our imagination plus the artist’s skill that makes these moments happen.

If a Tree Falls, Is It Art?

2008-06-23T11:03:00.000-04:00

If a gallery exhibits art and nobody comes to see it, is it art? In this post-post-modern world where art requires a viewer, possibly not. The participation of the viewer is part and parcel of contemporary art in all of its incarnations. Education as it applies to contemporary art is no longer about teaching people how to paint. It is about bringing people into the gallery, setting up dialogues, facilitating the interactivites that make the art real. Education is also about outreach. People have to know the art is “there” before they can decide to be part of it.

In most parts of this country, the fear factor is still operative. Fear of walking into a white box and not knowing what what to do. Fear of having to meet an artist and not knowing what to say. Fear of seeing an installation/painting/video and having no idea what it is about. When I was four, my grandfather died, and was laid out at home. I really wanted to see him so I could know what a dead person looked like. My parents, trying to reassure me, urged me to go upstairs to his room, because they said, he was with Jesus. But this only made me afraid. I pictured Jesus sitting on the windowsill waiting for me to make conversation with him. What would I say? I was too scared to find out. Now I know it was just a misunderstanding of what was actually in that room. Education, experience, involvement and perspective have changed my thinking.

Contemporary art forms, like great musical symphonies, are not revealed all at once. Consider the richness that is yours when you broaden your perspective. Walk inside that Serra. Experience the double videos that are Shirin Neshat’s view of Muslim societies. Turn yourself upside down in a Kapoor. Unravel a Meheretu. Get down with Contemporary Art.

Two Painting Shows and the Old Guard

2008-06-16T07:09:00.001-04:00

Last week I wrote about the Olafur Eliasson show at MOMA, my disappointment in which set me up for the pleasure of the Merz installation one floor above. As I continued on into the Modernist collection, the vibrancy of the paintings and the engagement of the viewers were palpable. Even the old guys – Pollock, De Kooning, Warhol – flashed a freshness that I had become been inured to, what with all the hoo-hah about politically and environmentally correct work that holds sway these days.

Painting of course will never die, it just has to compete with a much expanded set of offerings. The knockout show of the season is at the New Museum, where on the top floor Tomma Abts exhibits a group of small acrylic and oil on canvas paintings, each eighteen and seven-eights by fifteen inches. She says this is for her an inherent size, and that she works on each one for a long time, making changes to color and spatial definition. As you read the paintings, you can almost follow her decision process, and though these the paintings have no direct subject, their purity most reminds me of Vermeer’s luminous renditions of perfect space and light. This show continues through June 29.

Here’s another show and I regret that it has just closed. Claire Seidl’s exhibition at the Painting Center in Soho is still on-line if you’re quick, and there’s more on her website. Seidl’s work is abstract but appears to me to be landscape-based. The overlays of semi-opaque paint remind me of the outer wall of forests where you literally can’t see the forest for the trees. But beyond the wall, and behind these overlays, lie worlds of colored secrets, slowly revealed by slowly looking. The more time you spend with them, the more you will discover

Arte Povera, Impoverished Art

2008-06-09T11:51:00.000-04:00

Take Your Time, the Olafur Eliasson show at MOMA, has me wondering what people have not been seeing in their daily lives that would have them excited about this exhibition. At the top of the escalator in the third floor corridor, yellow lighting has been installed. The effect of this is to leach color from all viewers and objects, so that everyone and everything appears in shades of grey. It’s a curious phenomenon, but even more curious is the fact that upon entering the normally lit spaces of subsequent installation rooms, though color is returned to their faces and clothing, visitors maintain a zombie-like grey affect, as if their minds have been leached of thought. And no wonder, for there is little in this group of installations to challenge the imagination. A wall of moss is a wall of moss is a look-alike for foam insulation. You can see droplets of fog in beams of light. A rotating prism casts color bands and shadows on the surrounding walls, but leaves the zombie-viewers reduced to striking odd “look-ma” poses, or casting rabbit head shadows with their hands. The brochure accompanying the exhibition announces that “by making bare the artifice of the illusion, Eliasson points to the elliptical relationship between reality, perception, and representation.” Huh? This is Artspeak for take your time reading the text because it won’t take long to figure out that where nature and culture are concerned, there’s just not that much for the viewer to do or see in these galleries.

By contrast, Mario Merz’s single installation on the next floor up, Luoghi senza strada (Places without streets), is a rich metaphorical space that combines an igloo-shaped structure set on a bed of twigs, run through with a neon-lit Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Merz was an artist associated with the arte povera movement of the sixties/seventies, and connections may be made to Eliasson’s use of simple makeshift technical devices. But Merz goes further. Through the juxtaposition of icons drawn from nature and culture simultaneously, he accesses an archetypal world independent of time, and both asks and gets more from the viewer.

Here’s another curious phenomenon: work that’s all about creating a space where the viewer is told to be active, can have the opposite effect of making that viewer passive.

A fetching farmland

2008-05-27T08:00:00.001-04:00

Many natural and man-made objects rise to the surface of a Maine field. Rocks are the obvious ones, and at the time that this part of the coast was farmland, rocks were piled in walls along the boundary lines. Even now, rocks continue to surface with every winter frost, and the litter of stones, boulders, and pea sized gravel across my piece of property is a reminder that once this area was a mile under a glacier’s ice. The Drinkwaters, who kept cattle here in the last century, added their used machinery to the rock wall, and in the past year, we have fetched up, for instance, inner tube tires preserving 1920’s air, a still shiny Sterling truck hubcap, a rusted out carjack, and yards of barbed wire. There’s more to come. My neighbor has a wheel and axle set which when turned on end is a dharma wheel waiting for prayer flags.

Each of these products of industry partakes of wabi sabi, that Zen concept of the singular and melancholic in art. The rust, the organic color, the minimal form, are all reminders of the passage of time and the transience of existence. One of my discoveries – and I have no idea what its original purpose was – is a bowl-shaped piece of metal that can be held in the hand. It has the simple elegance of raku pottery. As a form, it asks the viewer to collaborate with its original maker and the processes of the natural world, in re-creating it as a piece of art. Explanations of wabi sabi and postulations on the relocation of art from the viewed object to the collaboration between art and the observer require many words. More pleasure is to be had pondering the fundamentality of a well-worn rock or an all-day every-day hubcap.

Thanks to my html guru, the site feed to the left now does what it's supposed to and will let you know when I'm back online.

Wall Animation

2008-05-19T10:24:00.001-04:00

Muto - a wall painted animation by Blu - is graffiti gone nuts. Imagine a drawing that perpetuates itself along the gritty backways and brick walls of a nowhere city. Imagine this drawing executed in repeated washes of grunge white and black lines. The self-perpetuating characters recall high brow videos by William Kentridge along with the lowest brow South Park regurgitations. There were anime influences as well. If I tell you that my all-time favorite comic strip is Little Nemo in Slumberland, you'll understand my fascination for mediums that combine good drawing with few words. In fact this video has sound, but no words. See for yourself on vimeo.

Pigs, Squirrels and Street Art

2008-05-12T07:53:00.001-04:00

Long time ago when I lived in Louisville, I walked out to the back alley one morning to find “Die Pigs” and other unprintable slogans graffitied on the back of our garage. My reaction was the same as when, also in Louisville, I saw a squirrel strolling along our upstairs hall – Wow, I thought, that’s really cool. Not because I have it in for pigs, but because the visual impact of the graffiti had so much to offer the otherwise plain grey surface that was the garage wall. Graffiti, like squirrels in hallways, can re-locate our expectations either momentarily or permanently. My second thought was, Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here.

Squirrels really do have no business being in houses, but graffiti can be good or not so – bad graffiti being that which is visually unappealing, and good being humorous, well-designed, I saw a lot of really good graffiti in the 70’s while I was traveling by train in Europe, and the Tate Modern, described in the Guardian as “the world’s most popular modern art gallery,” is now hosting a street art exhibition that will use the building’s walls as canvas for spray-painters. Apparently, street art has become very big business in the UK. It’s hugely popular among the public, which nominated the street artist Banksy for the Turner Prize in 2005, but also now among collectors and museums.

If you are among the graffiti-challenged, and prefer to keep your thoughts and doings where they belong, I offer the ZOPP approach to project management, or Zielorientierte Projektplanung, which I discovered by accident while short-cutting the url address for this blog. It’s all yours – have at it, or go out and paint a building.

What We Know About Cows, or Sing One Song

2008-05-05T08:23:00.000-04:00

Me being a Kentuckian and all, I guess people might expect me to write about the Kentucky Derby which was Saturday, but I think I’ll write about cows instead. My grandfather was a cattle farmer in Mason County, Kentucky, and still stands proudly by his prize cows, preserved forever in an aged black photo album, the kind with black pages, where the black and white cows are fixed in with black photo corners,.

Right now at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, there is an extraordinary congregation of cows, painted by Lois Dodd. One of those cows will be looking straight at you, its face a plane of clear yellow, a simple plane of earth and endurance, the color of butter. It was Dodd’s painting that got me thinking about what it is about cows that entices artists to choose them as subjects. And that led me to the way cows epitomize unhurriedness. When rushed, they have the same awkwardness as swans forced to walk out of water. Cows have the solidity of boulders in a field – and like boulders, they’re thinking something, but you’re not quite sure what.

A quick Google search for artists and cows turns up a disappointing number of references to projects in which people decorate cows and put them on city streets, but also this directory of cow cartoons where you get a glimpse of what cows think, and this review of paintings by Sharon Yates, another artist who gets the essence of cows.

And then there are the references from The Rig Veda, in part a song praising cows, which makes them god-like. “To me the cows seem Bhaga, they seem Indra, they seem a portion of the first-poured Soma . . . . O cows, ye fatten e’en the worn and wasted, and make the unlovely beautiful to look on.”

Dancing Sardines

2008-04-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time time . . . Belfast, Maine was recognized as one of the One Hundred Culturally Cool Towns in the United States. It’s had its downs since then, but thanks to Waterfall Arts, Culturally Cool is back in Belfast. Waterfall’s mission is to make connections between art and nature, which it does with a mix of symposia, lectures, exhibitions and classes. Waterfall also has Dan Beckman, about whom I wrote here in Fluxus Redux on March 25. In his unassuming way, Dan had invited me to “a couple of events we’re putting on.” I didn’t make the first one (and boy, I am sorry now), because Friday night, the second event was excellent. Nature came right in the door in the person of Shana Hanson, a singer and storyteller whose a capella song about planting seeds (which is what she does for a living) was down to earth simple and beguiling. While singing, she kept time with her feet, as if putting the seeds into the earth right then and there.

The evening continued with Max Ascrizzi’s video projected onto a can of live sardines. Well, not really, but since Belfast’s sardine factory shut down only a few years ago, the mental connection is there. What did happen? A dark room, a black plastic backdrop, and six or seven people dressed all in white were the screen onto which Max projected a black and white video abstraction, and since those people in white were moving around in a very confined boxlike arrangement – voila, silvery sardines dancing in their container. Perhaps not what Max had intended, but a stunning visual nonetheless.

And wait, there’s more! Bill Daniel’s film , “a mostly-factual cinematic account of the epic search and unlikely discovery of hoboemia’s most legendary boxcar artist Who is Bozo Texino?” had its East Coast premier at Deitch Projects in New York, and is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Extended and detailed, in the way of Fred Wiseman documentaries. Grand, in the sense that the physical canvas of these United States is grand. The juxtapositions of scale, the close-ups of boxcars and couplings, tiny trains moving through a vast landscape, excellent music and dialogue, kept me riveted the whole time. Makes you wonder how Daniel got some of the footage without getting himself killed. If it comes your way, get on board, or best choice, buy a copy. There’s more here too – don’t miss it.

A note about feed for this blog: the site feed to the left is dysfunctional, and until I get it fixed, you can scroll down to the bottom of the blog for an atom feed.

Exploding Art

2008-04-21T07:56:00.001-04:00

In the April 17 Free Press, poet Don Tescher writes “this morning’s poem is yesterday’s prose . . . .” And so it is in blog world, as last week’s events become this week’s blog. On Saturday, I stopped by the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, where exhibition and education programming go hand in hand. Poets were engaged in writing poetry inspired by “An Other World,” an exhibition of visionary sculpture and paintings brought together by CMCA’s Curator, Britta Konau. In her talk earlier this month, Britta explained that the show’s title makes it clear that this art presents not just another world (as, say. a group of paintings about Italy would do), but very specific looks into worlds that might exist in some parallel universe. This multiple universe concept is directly tied to Education Director Cathy Melio’s invitation to poets to come to the gallery and present their other world visions.

Upstairs in the Loft Gallery, Jesse Gillespie was at work installing found industrial and utilitarian objects, some of them really big, others more modest but all equally quirky and appealing. On the end wall by the stairs, look for a spray can which apparently exploded in a garbage dump, because its head of foam insulation is embedded with gravel and a rusty nail. At the opposite end is a personable tribe of upright objects. But Jesse will provide no titles, and no labels – so you will be free to let your imagination run amok and possibly come up with poems of your own about artists and poets and bloggers whose heads periodically explode with the ordinariness of daily life.

Jesse’s show The Gleaners and Lois Dodd: Directly Considered downstairs open to the public Saturday, April 26, with a reception Friday, April 25, 5-7 p.m.

Bulldozers, toast and coffee

2008-04-14T08:40:00.001-04:00

This particular day is beginning with the squeaks and creaks of a bulldozer on its way up my drive to pull some dirt around. Eventually I will have a courtyard of rocks and gravel that will make being outdoors in mud season a lot more pleasant. But generally, my weekdays begin with Douglas McLennon’s artsJournal. This comes to me as an email menu of arts blogs and news articles, organized under the headings of “latest in aj blogs,” “today’s video,,” music, dance, issues, visual, and so on. It’s all there – and though I am a visual artist, I pick and choose from every submenu as the headlines catch my interest.

And as a visual artist, I find it’s no longer just about studio time and painting, though that takes precedence. It’s also about the larger picture (a Freudian slip?) where arts education and arts organizations are linked in community. How can the methods of Project Management be useful to arts organizations? “Is there a better case for the arts” is a particularly well-considered, in depth online discussion about expanding the role of the arts locally and nationally. Here the point is made that to act locally is to stimulate the arts on a larger scale.

In making a better case for the arts, McLennon initially asked “How do we get the public engaged in talking about art? We have to promote the conversations wherever we can.” And that’s why I’m blogging. I would rather begin and end the day with conversation about art in any of its forms and permutations than with another re-hash of the political scene as defined by the next election.

Goth Bling, Cityscapes and Meanders

2008-04-06T23:15:00.000-04:00

First Friday in Portland, April 4, found me entranced by a piece of Goth bling in the Maine College of Art BFA Senior Exhibitions. Holly L. Gooch’s “Necklace” most resembles a shed snakeskin, but is actually made of linked maggot casings, caught at each end in a clasp of green gold. The inclusion of green gold was a right choice which set off the ghostlike white of the casings. I imagined what it would be like to wear this necklace, though it must be incredibly fragile, and like Cinderella’s ball gown, crumble to dust at the stroke of midnight.

Across the hall at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Alison Hildreth’s “Forthrights and Meanders” have the visual impact of oriental scrolls. Each ink and wash drawing is a confluence of rusts, greys and ochers, archaeological tracings of architectural floor plans and roadways populated by scatterings of scorpions, wasps, bees, flies, and skeletal creatures of prehistoric age. The drawings on crumpled paper are pinned to the wall like specimens in a natural history museum. I had the feeling that Hildreth has excavated the thick surfaces of her early paintings to discover mementi of a distant past, in which the beginnings of civilization are waiting to be discovered.

A black and white photograph of Sixth Avenue, New York City, in the “Urban Seen” exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art rotates the vertical format of Hildreth’s drawings into a horizontal cityscape which references human scale and activity against manmade architecture and silent existential space. The relative absence of color in each of these forms – necklace, archeological excavations, urban scene – provides the key to the kingdom of what may have been and what is yet to come.

Bright Common Spikes

2008-04-02T13:11:00.000-04:00

Since seeing John Bisbee's show at the Portland Museum of Art last month, I’ve been pondering the nature of artists’ materials and whether they are barrier or boon in providing access to the spiritual. Bisbee works with oversize nails of different lengths, which he refers to as common spikes. It’s true that if you take a spike and scratch a contemporary artist, you’re likely to find traces of Duchamp or Warhol somewhere in there and that these were artists whose work ostensibly negated the spiritual.

But is it the spikes, or the way Bisbee uses them, that encourages the viewer to think spiritual thoughts? His sculptures are variously objective, provide food for the mind, and embody natural forces. Having seen his work before, I had come to the museum expecting to find something of the other-worldly, but it was not until I got back home that I was able to let go of my sense of awe at the extreme physicality of materials and technique, and revel in the multiplicity of patterns which is where, ultimately, the spirituality resides.

Fluxus Redux

2008-03-25T17:12:00.000-04:00

For some time now, I've been building momentum to re-enter blogspace, and last night’s happening at Waterfall Arts gave me the push. Though innocently billed as one in a series of monthly lectures that Waterfall, in Belfast, Maine, has offered for the past 4 years, this turned out to be a sixties-style happening, an event in which, to quote the tech man, “form and content merged." The audience was treated to a flow of old videos, readings, songs and magazine stills, backgrounded by an iPhoto slide show that repeated itself through various fades and washes and featured a trio of pink bunnies borrowed from North Carolina prison décor. All of this occurred in fits and starts amid a physical tangle of equipment, wires and stacks of magazines that was an installation in itself.

The presenter of this curiously charming event was Daniel Beckman, a peripatetic artist, musician and people magnet who has landed in Belfast as the Facilities Manager at Waterfall. He is also the Curator of the current show there, titled "Treading Lightly: One Foot at a Time." Two hundred ninety-six artists answered the call for this non-juried exhibition which specified that each work fit into one cubic foot of space. Beckman has ordered the work in a grid structure on the gallery walls, with overflow on cases and stands, a Wunderkammer in which no individual work is given priority. Meaning evolves through looking, and by looking, I came upon the one work that says it all. Wesley Reddick's "Footprint" is a wooden box inside which, by means of the viewer's turning a crank, a footprint appears and disappears in a bed of rice. Ephemeral, Hindi, and very clever. Like the footprint, the exhibition disappears on May 28, so you still have time to walk over and see it.

Beckett on the horizon . . . .

2006-08-08T16:19:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy, and at the same time, working on a new group of paintings about the horizon. Here's what Beckett has to say on the subject. "And of my two eyes only one functioning more or less correctly, I misjudged the distance separating me from the other world, and often I stretched out my hand for what was far beyond my reach, and often I knocked against obstacles scarcely visible on the horizon." A painting, being a two-dimensional object, offers the illusion of access to another world, and at the same time sets up an impenetrable barrier. It's the mind's eye that travels far into the distance of a painting about the horizon. The hand's eye, though, can actually touch that distance and read its physicality as if it were Braille.

CMCA's Upcoming Auction

2006-07-31T11:10:00.000-04:00

Art Makes a Difference - what could be truer? This is both title and raison d'etre of the Annual Benefit Auction at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, held on Sunday, August 6, at the Owl's Head Transportation Museum two miles south of Rockland. The venue has changed to accommodate the increasing crowds who gather for this most prestigious and exciting event. Last year it was standing room only.

Scroll to the bottom of the artists' list to see my painting, Yellow Green with Horizon, a landscape meditation in oil on birch panel.

Maine Art Openings

2006-07-23T15:32:00.000-04:00

It was well worth the drive from Belfast, through driving rain there and back, to see New York painter and photographer Claire Seidl's show at Icon Contemporary Art in Brunswick, Maine. But no matter, summer is Maine's high season for galleries and openings. If you find yourself here for the month or living here year-round, just follow the buzz. Other highlights are the August 4 Grand Opening of The Sink Room Gallery in Belfast (where yes, there is a sink in the room), and "The August Show" at Coppershed Gallery in Warren, Maine, just off Route 90. Reception for the Coppershed show is August 4. Upcoming and also not to be missed is Dennis Pinette's show at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, August 16.