Snapshots around the studio including/demonstrating:
I've finally come out on top in the struggle against whatever flu-from-the-bowels-of-hell has ravaged me with sweats and shiver-inducing fever and the debilitating filling of lungs. My voice has finally mostly returned to me, and hopefully a bit of mental energy as well. I suppose the flu isn't helped along by midnight painting frenzies and submerging headlong into oil paint fumes - an action sustained by febrile sudafed-induced spasms of energy and inspiration that strike at any hour of the day or night regardless of actual energy reserves. I've got four fairly large canvases going at once right now, so the air is ripe with poison, but I'm going to go on pretending that has nothing to do with the aforementioned irritation of lungs. I suppose I should be investing in some sort of air filtering system since it's not quite temperate enough weather for throwing windows open wide....
In unrelated news, a few weeks ago I finally got my mits on a bilingual copy of Die Nachtwachen (penned by the mysterious Bonaventura, who is supposed to be Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann) and found it fantastically entertaining; I can't think of anything except maybe Henri Barbusse's Hell that matches Die Nachtwachen for over-the-top grimness of sentiment (satirical or not). Beyond the splendid display of Romantic nihilism, there is also a wealth of puppets and masks and devils and alchemist-fathers and gypsy-mothers: surely something for everyone! A lovely, if randomly selected excerpt:
At first a few poetic broadsheets, which I let fly from my shoemaker's workshop, gave me a tolerable name; the first contained a funeral oration which I wrote down when a little boy was born to him, and I only still rememberd just the beginning, which approximately went thus:
'They are dressing him for his first coffin until the second has been made ready in which his deeds and follies are to be entombed; just as one is accustomed to lay princely corpses first in a provisional casket, until they then later carry the metal one down into the grotto, which is worthily ornamented with trophies and inscriptions, and encoffin the cadaver for a second time.--And do not trust, I pray you, the glow of life and the roses on the boy's cheeks; that is the art of nature, whereby she like a skilled doctor preserves the embalmed body a longer time in a pleasant deception; decay is already gnawing on his insides, and if you wanted to uncover the fact, you would actually see the little worms developing out of their embryos, the joy and pain which quickly gnaw their way through so that the corpse disintegrates into dust. Ah, only when he was not yet born, did he live, just as happiness consists in hope alone but, as soon as it is realized, destroys itself. He is now only just situated on the bed of state, and the flowers which you strew on him are autumnal flowers for his winding cloth. In the distance the pall bearers, who are going to carry away his joys and him himself, are already gathering in readiness, and the earth is already preparing his tomb for him in order to receive him. Everywhere mere death and decay greedily stretch out their arms after him, to consume him little by little, in order at last, when his pains, his ecstasy, his memory and his dust have wafted away, to rest on his empty tomb tired from killing. His ashes nature has by then already long since used up again for new death flowers for new mortals'....
The rest of the speech I've forgotten. They thought the whole effect was not bad and merely the title was a mistake, since obviously deathday should stand instead of birthday; it was even so used then in cases involving children's corpses....
If you're in Seattle there are still a few more days to catch The Cool School at the NWFF. It was much gushed about and highly recommended all of last week, so I bundled up to see it Friday night (presented with an intro by Regina Hackett, whom I'd never seen in person before and who has a surprisingly commanding, husky voice). The film is indeed great and quite funny at times. I admit that even though I'd seen the Ed Kienholz piece at the Portland Art Museum before, I didn't really know much about him prior to seeing the film, and I left the theater completely enchanted by the man and his work.
Funny blogosphere tidbit of the morning: Tyler Green points out, There should be about eight fewer sculptures in the garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center. One clever critic said to me, "It's beginning to look like a backyard." Since I recently visited the Nasher Sculpture Center for the first time to view the Gaston Lachaise bronzes, I found this a funny and agreeable observation. With as much wide open space as downtown Dallas has got (in comparison to, say, Seattle), you'd think editing the placement of sculpture around and about the arts district wouldn't be a challenging task. Alas. (I can't complain much about Dallas museums, however, when I arrive in my West Coast duds and am heartily pressed with student rate tickets, despite protestations; evidently my lack of bottle blonde blow-out, acrylic nails, and stilettos makes me look younger than my Dallasite twenty-something counterparts.)
Speaking of Nasher, while there I wandered across a stunning bronze by Polish sculptor Boleslaw Biegas called The Tragedy of Life (1910). I'd never heard of this artist before, even though I generally fancy Eastern European works of his period. Biegas'a style, it turns out, is a fascinating blend of fin-de-siecle symbolism and early 20th century modernist trends, and as would logically follow, some of his work is very similar in feel to that of Munch's (The Tragedy of Life being an obvious example), though his more heavily-stylized work reminds me of the later Polish artist Beksinski, who was undoubtedly very much influenced by Biegas.
I am horrified to learn that Dedalus Books, one of my favorite publishers, is loosing the government funding that has kept it afloat for years. If you've ever enjoyed one of their books, please take a moment to sign the petition and/or contact the Arts Council that controls this funding.
I finally arrived at the Grey Gallery and Lounge for the first time yesterday afternoon and I'm very much officially smitten. Not only is the show of art well-curated and presented (something I was sincerely doubting given that the space doubles as an eatery and bar), but the comestibles are mouth-watering and the liquor selection sophisticated and nicely varied. Laura C. Wright's whimsical (and touched with not a small dash the surreal) pieces, collectively titled "Going the Distance", were eye-catching and very amusing - particularly the boxing glove pieces.
I'm looking forward to another visit tonight - it's that good.
I've been trying to cram as much as possible into the few weeks I tentatively have here in Seattle. There's so much going on, and I'm not exactly sure when I'll be returning to Texas to continue caring for my mother, though I suspect it will be soon. Last night (tongue loosened by a bit of gin) I voiced the all-too-obvious truism of why, at least in part, I feel compelled to take care of my mother to the bitter end: I'm an artist. What more poignant material is there than this - this awful, scary unraveling of existence before my eyes, a sort of existential horror picture played out in slow motion, a slow motion that leaves perhaps too much time for consideration and meditation, etc. That's not to say I delight in this process one bit; her impending and untimely death has been one of the greatest tragedies of my life and has disfigured my life dramatically over the past years.
I think often these days of Sophie Calle's video "Pas pu saisir la mort" (here and here) which exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2007 and records the last 20 minutes of Calle's mother's life in an attempt to capture the elusive moment of death. I can't imagine a more poignant work of art on the subject than this. It's delicate, maddening, potent, perfect....
One of the upsides to being in Texas again so soon is that I'll be able to catch the Turner exhibit at the DMA, which I missed earlier this month as it opened the day I returned to Seattle. There's also some of Hirst's fleshy bits in formaldehyde on view at the Goss-Michael Foundation. Hopefully I can discover a few more gems worth driving into the bowels of the Metroplex to view.
I have to admit I've had a bit of a nerdy crush on Dawn Cerny ever since I learned of her work a few years ago. I mean, how can you not like someone whose website is crammed full of little one-liner essays such as:
"Worst way to die"
The worst way to die would have to be choking on your birthday cake.
She's funny and she's obsessed with history and addresses things of the outright morbid sort, which immediately makes her a bit of a hero in my book. However, it's the continual light-heartedness of her works that has kept me from being seriously wowed till now (though I'll be the first to admit the fault is probably mostly mine, given my predilection for relentlessly black humor). In an interview with Jen Graves, Cerny admitted to the jokiness of her works and addressed the intimidation of composing things on a grand scale. In the shows I've visited, she's worked mostly on paper: pen and ink and watercolors, often on small scraps, little bits of drawn ephemera. It's very curious and fun and invites close examination. But not terribly serious...until her recent show at the Henry, titled, "We're all going to die [except for you]." which strikes a brilliant tone of playfulness sans the jokiness. And this exhibit is all about mortality and how modern Western cultures have confronted, embraced, and decorated the uncomfortable inevitability of death.
One room of the exhibit is filled with glass cases displaying a smattering of funerary and mourning objects dating back to the mid-to-late 19th century (mourning jewelry, memorial photographs, etc.), a collection of beautiful stuffed owls, two Victorian mourning gowns dripping with jet, and hanging in the middle of it all, six ink/graphite/acrylic drawings by Cerny depicting heavy metal band t-shirts in such a way as to "recast [their] morbid caricatures as meaningful signs" - a contemporary memento mori. In a room across the hall, Cerny has created a battlefield diorama that sprawls across half the room, inscribing a cartoonishly bloody, panoramic crescent against the parquet floor, as a response to the proliferation of landscape paintings in the 19th century, which are, in a sense, pregnant with the terrible awesomeness of natural life and death cycles. She'll be working on-site during the weekends, playing with and rearranging the content of the paper diorama. The whole thing is conceptually brilliant and well-executed, and I can't wait to see what she'll do next.
I've finally returned from Texas and have been attempting to wrap my head around the composition of interesting tidbits and whatnots, but the cumulative intensity of nursing a dying parent has taken a bit of mental toll, and I find myself just trying to catch my breath at the moment, despite greater authorial aspirations. I did read Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge while there, and came across many a sweet passage, though overall the book seemed to reel me in and bore me equally at intervals. Of course, a "novel" composed of existential musings on death, mixed handily with a smattering of ghost stories can't be anything but good in the final analysis; as usual, Rilke shines when he writes about writing and waxes poetic about poetics:
I think I ought to begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and almost nothing has been done. To recapitulate: I have written a study on Carpaccio which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage", which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough),--they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they have come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
There's something interesting afoot in my hometown (thanks to Dangerous Chunky for the heads up): sculptor Sharon Arnold has started a project called Artomaton, which she describes as follows:
The underlying philosophy is simple: I dreamt of a community of artists collectively motivated and gaining force, working together through Artomaton so that eventually it becomes a vessel for arts' sake and to that end, Artomaton itself becomes the self generating machine of our collective desire to live a life full of art and generate art because of it.
I have for years daydreamed about the possibility (and feasibility) of recreating an art subscription system, in the same vein as that which was employed by groups like Die Brücke in the early part of last century, who issued periodical portfolios of prints to art patrons who would become "passive members" of the group for a fee. I've often wondered why this kind of thing isn't done these days. Printmakers do swaps - print exchanges - all the time, but that's a far cry from patrons or enthusiasts subscribing to an art collective in order to support the movement and buy artwork. I'd imagine that many art enthusiasts would be enabled to begin collecting or to enlarge their collections by means of a subscription system, which has the potential to be much more affordable than buying pieces from a gallery (not to mention the fact that more money from the sales of the works would go directly into the pockets of the artists, since this system largely eliminates the middle man). What Arnold proposes to do sounds exactly like a resurrection of this system:
Artomaton is considering a flat-file subscription project. Subscribers would pay for a boxed set of flat artwork available either as a one-time or annual subscription. The work would be delivered to subscribers by mail, and the project would act as a print exchange for participating artists. Artwork would be featured on Artomaton in a section dedicated to the project, including photos and a brief summary of the artists involved. Ideally, the subscription would revolve two or three times a year, and I am interested in launching this project by summer, 2008.
I really hope this gets off the ground, and I am very curious to see what kind of response this project receives by way of subscribers. As both an artist and a collector, I know that I personally would jump at the opportunity to subscribe to such a project, assuming the work offered was even marginally aligned with my tastes, but I wonder how many other people (particularly non-artists) would actually become involved?
The Carrington exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art was much tinier than I'd have liked, but it was nonetheless a treat to see her work up close, hung in a dazzlingly funky yellow room, surrounded by displays of dozens of photographs from her life. A few key works included Nunscape at Manzanillo (1956), Night Nursery Everything (1947), Bird Bathing (1963), The Fall of the House of Mink (1956), as well as a handful of etchings, drawings, a very fantastic love letter, and an early self-portrait. The quality of her paintings was so fine, the textured lines delicately cross-hatched and laid on so thinly that the surface of the masonite or canvas remained utterly smooth, as though polished. Thursdays must have been designated field trip days at the DMA because I've never seen a museum so packed with small bodies. Funny was overhearing docents and teachers try to hurriedly cram key artists' names into their young listeners' brains ("Van Gogh! Monet! Large brush strokes! Remember! Now let's off to see the mummies!") and randomly gush at works in passing (such as Dorothea Tanning's Pincushion to Serve as Fetish, which one docent repeatedly exclaimed with much passion was her favorite piece: "It's a pin cushion, but it symbolizes a woman's life!" to the dumbfounded glances of young children).
Now would be a good time to remind passing readers of Carrington's bizarre and wonderful book The Hearing Trumpet, which is one of the most whimsical and fun pieces of literature to issue from the loins of the once-Surrealist circle, in my opinion.
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