Thursday, July 16, 2009
Bruno blahs
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Notes from Iceland--1
Flying into Keflavik at 11:00 p.m.
Our cabin at the Motel Alex near the airport, around 1:00 a.m., with campers sleeping in tents all around. It's hard to remember to be quiet when it's so light out.Erica noted that everyone walks slowly to the point where, if we concentrated on it, the people on Reykjavik’s main shopping street appeared to be moving in slow motion. They are also quiet spoken, but at the same focused and deliberate. Is this because their sense of time is so unlike ours? In Iceland, rather than moving through time, you are suspended in it, and indeed we were told that the Vikings didn’t divide the year into months but gave each day its own name. I loved that it was light all the time, although the landscape seems less dramatic (if that’s possible) in summer because the light is more diffused. When I was in Iceland in the fall, the sun hovered just above the horizon, always in your eyes and casting long shadows from even the smallest rocks. Last week there was an hour or so of twilight around midnight and then, with a change that was more sensation than visually perceptible (something a photograph, for instance, could not capture), it would shift to dawn. In the space of a few minutes I’d go from anticipating more of the evening ahead to feeling as if I’d been up all night and wanting to go to sleep. There was also a different pattern of activity—more people out on Reykjavik’s streets at midnight on Saturday than at any time during the day.
Hotel Fron, Reykjavik, midnight
Random landscape shot
...with Terry and Erica shooting landscape for our video project, for scale.
Landscape at Þingvellir, with flowers for scale
Gullfoss: if you look carefully, you can see people standing on the top of the ridge
Monday, July 6, 2009
Catching up
Just back from Iceland, I segued into being so absorbed with painting that I don’t want to stop even to eat or go to the bathroom. But I know that soon enough I’ll be back to my normal self, wanting to share the images and thoughts from the trip that have been percolating in my head since returning. For an Icelandic art experience in New York, I recommend spending contemplative time with Finnbogi Petursson's beautiful installations involving sound, light and water at Sean Kelly. I became interested in Finnbogi's work on my first trip to Iceland in 2004, and was lucky enough to see the other half of the show last Saturday at i8 Gallery in Reykjavik.Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. There are now more than 100 biennales around the world (most of them put together by the same 25 celebrity curators, drawing from the same pool of 100 or so artists); Venice is often called "the most important" of them. The main show of the 53rd Venice Biennale, June 7-Nov. 22, 2009, is the work of Daniel Birnbaum, a well-respected 46-year-old Swedish critic and curator. His "Making Worlds," held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni delle Biennale and in the magnificent Arsenale, attains an enervating inertia of exhibitions and brings us to a terminal state of what we’ll call "the curator problem."
Birnbaum’s show, containing the work of 90-plus artists, doesn’t offend or go off the rails. Rather, it looks pretty much the way these sorts of big international group shows and cattle calls now look; it includes the artists that these sorts of shows now include. It’s full of the reflexive conceptualism that artists everywhere now produce because other artists everywhere produce it (and because curators curate it). Almost all of this art comments on art, institutions or modernism. Basically, curators seem to love video, text, explanations, things that are "about" something, art that references Warhol or Prince, or that makes sense; they seem to hate painting, things that don’t make sense or that involve overt materiality, physicality, color or strangeness.
Any critic who says this, of course, is accused of conservatism, of wishing for a return to painting. I’m not for or against video -- or any medium or style, for that matter. Nor am I wishing for a return to painting, which can never come back because it never went away. (That said, it’s hard to imagine anything more conservative today than an institutional critique. That sort of work is the establishment.) My beef is with the experience that "Making Worlds" produces. It’s just another esthetically familiar feedback cycle: impersonal, administratively adept, highly professionalized, formally generic, mildly gregarious, esthetically familiar, totally knowing, cookie-cutter. It is time we broke out of that enervated loop.
Monday, June 29, 2009
On my way...
To get in the mood for my trip, I watched the video Screaming Masterpiece, a survey of Icelandic music in which Barði Jóhannsson, of the band Bang Gang, answers the question: “Why is Icelandic music so special?” For a country whose largest city is about the size of Akron, OH, and where they speak a language shared by no other, it produces an amazing amount of great music. Barði says it’s because “all the bands that are any good know that their music won’t be played on the radio and that they won’t sell more than 200 albums in Iceland, so they make music just as they please.”
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
More Iceland
The Blue Lagoon, January 2004 Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday morning
Division Street, Great Barrington, MA Human beings are by nature spiritual beings, created by God to receive the Holy Spirit. The evidence of this receptivity is that we cannot be human unless we live ecstatically. In other words, each of us lives by participating in a larger reality than our particular location and perspective, than our particular consciousness, and, conversely, each of us, enriched by that larger world, adds his and her unique sensibility to it.....
Our spiritual potential is given a particular inflection in everyday life through music and literature. We all know what it is like to be moved by a poem or a novel, or any other work of art, for that matter. An aesthetic work enables its audience to enter and explore a different way of seeing something, a different way of feeling about the world, or, a way of feeling that is already ours, but which we may have repressed. To appreciate a literary work, for example, is not simply to be informed about the author’s point of view. It is to feel the sense of things expressed in the work.
You enter into the characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their clothing. Hence literature, music and art do not isolate us in egocentric desire or self-pity; rather, they invite us to actualize our capacity to love, that is, to abandon our self-preoccupation, to stand outside ourselves and within the world as experienced by others. This is what love does, and what art fosters. It enlarges the boundaries of the self.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Scott's house reprise
I love your place. Such artistic order. Carol's Blog reminded me of a story about my friend Peter in Stuttgart. I was staying with him about 4 years ago and was struck by how impeccably the place was organized. He doesn't have your artistic sense so it was just super neat and very clean. When we left in the morning, after the beds were made, the dishes cleaned and put away, the sink wiped down with a fresh, dry rag (who wants those unsightly stains on the stainless steel?), he stopped in the doorway and turned around one last time to make sure everything was in place. Sharing with me that he "doesn't like it when things are too perfect", he went back inside and took a coat off of one of the hooks by the door, walked over to the couch and tossed the coat on the armrest. Not happy with the way the coat had fallen, he picked it up again and threw it a second time. Ahhhh. Now, for him, the place was imbued with just an air of the casual.
Note to manically tidy self: go downstairs and throw some magazines around.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Scott's House
Scott Cole is often mentioned in my posts, sometimes as Scott Who Knows Everything, as he’s frustratingly multi-accomplished. Musician, painter, and chef (Scott owns Caffe Pomo d’Oro in West Stockbridge, MA) his home is an ever-changing work of art.
While the furnishings could not be more opulent, comfortable, and New England in orientation—as well as festive—Scott’s emphatic use of black adds a slightly sinister edge to his style, which I have dubbed “Goth Colonial.” Every room is permeated with a sense of mystery, the objects in whispered conversation with each other, telling cryptic stories, alluding to histories and secrets we’ll never know:

When I’m there I’m always taking pictures and the only challenge is editing—basically you can point the camera anywhere and get a beautiful vignette. For instance you can guess what vantage point I took this from. But really, isn’t this just the world’s sexiest toothbrush?
You get the feeling that it's all intentional, but not too intentional, and that there's a sense of humor behind everything:
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s Scott, preparing the dinner he made last night for a few friends, in his kitchen which, except for the black cat lurking nearby, is white and innocent:
As is the upstairs bathroom:


Because it fit him perfectly, I gave Scott this kimono, which was made for my uncle when he served in China during World War II. He wore it once for Halloween, then hung it on the wall:

And outside, the hand-carved pickets on the fence that came with the house. Even they tell a story:


Friday, June 5, 2009
Jaws
I was back in Pittsfield today, at the Berkshire Medical Center (for an MRI on my foot which, of course, was completely cured by the fact that I was going for an MRI—just the way a snuffly, crying baby turns into a smiling picture of health the minute you enter the pediatrician’s office) where this sculpture caught my attention. Although I’d go for something a little more comforting and calming for a medical center—incorporating a water feature perhaps, or vegetation (it would be a great place for some surprise topiary)—the sculpture itself is not so bad, and its sleek lines and mirrored surface contrast nicely with the traditional architecture of the building behind it. But what’s with the sign at the bottom? What’s the point of installing something if you’re going to overwhelm any redeeming qualities it might have with a tacky sign? Who’s thinking here?
So I’m driving home, ranting to myself about how I’ll gladly add public sculpture to the list of things (museum wall text, artists statements, children’s music) that I plan to outlaw when king, when I see this—unmarked, unattributed, and perfectly at home in its environment—and am reminded, as with the Kinderhook snow sculpture I came across last winter, that the human artistic impulse has a place outside after all, just best, perhaps, when it’s not institutionalized.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Photo by Erica Spizz
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Brushes goes legit
Lost! It was a crushing moment because then and only then did I realize that my true métier isn’t actual but virtual painting with the iPhone app called Brushes, and the masterpieces I’d made with it were gone forever. I love my Brushes “paintings”—really paintings over photos, just like Gerhard Richter—but have had to reluctantly acknowledge that yet again, the thing I do best has no material application. I thought they’d make great Iris prints, so emailed them off to a friend who has a gallery and does such things, but she was not impressed. That may change, however, and Brushes may yet become respectable, because it turns out that this week’s New Yorker cover by Jorge Columbo was done on an iPhone with Brushes. You can see it here, with a step-by-step video of how he drew it (makes it look easier, though, because it doesn’t include the “undos”)
Here are two of mine, which I was smart enough to save:

Monday, May 25, 2009
Younger than Jesus at the New Museum
With few exceptions (the one for me being Cyprien Gaillard’s 30-minute video Desniansky Raion—fueled by the electro-pop music of Koudlam, it’s a hypnotic ballet of images of social devastation wreaked by public housing) much of "Younger than Jesus" looks like an extreme version of Show and Tell (if anyone does actually make something, it's with tongue implanted in cheek) which might not be surprising for an age-group raised on praise. As one of my graduate students at SVA put it, “Everything we did was put up on the refrigerator.” MFA programs have continued the praise game—or at least the encouragement game—because to discourage a student would be to cut off a significant source of revenue.
Clip from Cyprien Gaillard's Desniansky Raion
Through its music we know that this generation has verve, energy, and innovation to burn, coming up in the world at a time when technology has not only extended music-making capability, but liberated music distribution from the corporate stranglehold—while visual art remains filtered and controlled by institutions driven by agendas that have little to do with quality. The lowered bar and limited lens has to be discouraging to those twenty-something visual artists who have something new and valid to contribute (some of whom—like Kehinde Wiley—may, gasp, still take painting seriously). Historically art has tended to thrive when real estate prices are low (New York’s Downtown scene in the eighties, the more recent migration of artists to low-rent Berlin), so if we’re lucky, the economic downturn will result in increased opportunities for artists to take things into their own hands.
I’m not sure what—other than a sensationalist marketing tool—the reference to Jesus is all about, but another comparison might be “older than Artemisia Gentileschi” –who made this painting at 16:
Susanna and Her Elders (1610) Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653)Wednesday, May 20, 2009
It reminded me of being a guest at a dinner following the opening of the 1984 “New Expressionists” show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, when Basquiat was refused entrance to the Russian Tea Room because of his paint-spattered clothing. He slipped away and returned a little while later wearing clean pants and the world’s most expensive Armani jacket, after which he was politely admitted. A class act.
Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio, 1985, photograph by Lizzie Himmel.Monday, May 18, 2009
Even more Olafur



Middle photo: Photo: Olafur Eliasson Studio
The latticework pattern mimics that of the ripples in the pond. Did he know it would do that?


The Eliasson installation is adjacent to the Frank Gehry designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a building I love for its quality of lightness and insubstantiality, heightened on this overcast day so that the roof of the building seemed to merge with the sky.


Sadly, this lyrical dance of wing-like curves and light ends abruptly with the rear of the building, which is as square and clunky as the back of any urban theater. Although I've been to the Fisher Center several times, I'm never prepared for the nasty slap of reality that awaits me as I walk around it to my parked car. I want to believe in the fairy tale.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Music Scrooge
I can also tell you that their father and I brought two sons into functioning adulthood without any of that crap—and it’s something they’ve continually thanked us for.
Although Matt's the music professional, my most vivid early memories of my children and music have to do with his younger brother, Adam, probably because of the dark winter when Adam was two and had pneumonia, which meant long weeks inside with just mom and the stereo. He spent hours dancing to the Beatles in front of the speakers, identifying which side of the album he wanted to hear by pointing to the cut or whole apple illustrated on the label. Among his other favorites were Bob Marley's “I shot the sheriff but I didn’t shoot the dead tree” and Paul McCartney’s “Man on the Rug." I remember trying to tear him away from Elton John’s "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" when we were late for a doctor appointment, by promising that we’d listen to the radio in the car. He was screaming “Yellow Brick Road! Yellow Brick Road!” as I carried him out and once in the car, insisted on hearing it there. I tried to explain that the radio played what it wanted, not what we wanted, but lost all credibility when I turned it on to find it playing—of course—“Yellow Brick Road.”
This all comes to mind as I’ve recently been spending much delightful time with various friends’ toddlers, loving the way 1-4 year olds are so trustingly imitative while remaining true to their emerging personalities—a combination that’s often hilarious. Then this morning Cary Smith sent me the link to this video of Thom Yorke singing the Radiohead classic “Weird Fishes” with orchestra (wait for the sound to start)…
…after which I found this, and it cracks me up:
Don't skip over the song links to the music videos above, each one better than the next, ending with Elton John accompanied by Muppets, the Sesame Street album being a big exception to my rule—because I enjoyed it. Happy parents, I always think, make for happy children. And why not give them something that enriches not only their present, but future life?
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Style
…style is optimism made visible. Style presumes you are a person of interest, that the world is a place of interest, that life is worth making the effort for….
As the speed of all our transactions increases, we need fast ways of transmitting information about ourselves without losing authenticity; we have less and less time to make our mark in other, more leisurely ways of knowing. Style, like a perfectly-fitting book jacket, evokes the substance within by way of the surface. It makes an authentic visual impression in a world that otherwise strips people of identity. There was a time when style was a luxury. Today it is a necessity.
Yes, because finally, in the 21st century, it appears that “style” is becoming the new “fashion.” And hooray for that! Starting with the vogue for unusual children’s names (which make it easier to be found on the Internet), individuality is key—when everyone used to think that in the “future” (which we happen to be living in) we’d all be running around like so many Spocks in identical silver tights.
Anyway, just thinking about style being “optimism made visible” cheers me up, as do the new, soft, white organic cotton pajamas (with wooden buttons!) I’m wearing while stuck at home with the nasty cold I’ve had since Chicago. The interesting thing is that while I know I have style (although am less concerned about making an impression than pleasing myself—no one can see me in my pajamas), I want a different style. I want to be funky, like my friend, Jude, but over the years have had to come to terms with the fact that I’m simply not funky. Just the way I want to be an expressionist painter and must reconcile myself to being…me. Oh well.
Friday, May 8, 2009
More Olafur

Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Report from Chicago
I thought Art Chicago was pretty boring—only a handful of really good galleries represented—but, to my surprise, loved the Antiques Fair a few floors below. Meanwhile the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the MCA (through September 13th) has caused a lot of excitement—as I mentioned, so much better than at MoMA and PS 1—and the the pairing with the Buckminster Fuller show (through August 9th) is genius, because you can see the lineage. As I’ve no doubt mentioned before, Einar Thorsteinn, who works with Olafur (“helps me with models and helps me to think,” as Olafur said in his artist’s talk), was a protégé of Fuller, and so here you can look at Fuller’s models and then go downstairs and see how Olafur and Einar have taken off on them in their own models, made them more fanciful, and then elaborated on them in large works. There are also interpretations of Fuller’s work by sculptor Kenneth Snelson, which are gorgeous. I wish I had images to illustrate all of this, but I was only able to photograph Eliasson’s exhibition while accompanied by a representative of the MCA, and had not made an appointment to shoot the Fuller show.
Let me go off a little bit on this policy of no photography, which is shared by the Whitney (but not by MoMA), and the reason I didn’t write about Jenny Holzer’s show here, which I loved. Yes, I could have gotten images from the museum, but if they didn’t reflect my vision, I’d just be doing P.R. I could understand it in the old days, the concern that a lousy shot taken on someone’s Brownie could end up in a magazine as representative of the artist’s work, or that people would produce coffee mugs and T-shirts with a pirated image. But today, when the influence of print is lessening and word-of-mouth rules, why would you want to insist on stopping someone from taking a picture with her iPhone and emailing her excitement to all of her friends? As for artists, photography is a way of recording what is important to them—not some commercial photographer—ideas that they may want to incorporate into their own work. As we all know, major museum exhibitions have an influence on the art that comes after, and to limit that in any way seems counter-productive.
Museums seem to be catering more and more to the casual visitor while distancing themselves from artists. First there’s the entrance fee, which limits when you can see the work (in crowds on free night). I tried to get a friend who’s a professor of art in Iowa into MoMA on my press card with me, and was told she could come in for free if she had a group of students with her. But even if she were teaching in New York, doesn’t she have to see the show first, to decide if it’s something she wants to bring her students to? I know so many artists who choose to pass on major exhibitions because of the fee, and often if you find a good show, you want to see it more than once. In Chicago, no doubt, many artists can afford to join both the MCA and the Art Institute (or “INSTITVTE” as it reads on their Web site—yikes!), but in New York, with a plethora of major museums, cost becomes prohibitive. I propose that the New York museums get together on an “artist’s card” that would allow entrance to all the museums for a yearly fee of $125 or so. Verifying that someone is an artist is easier now than it was back in the day when I had to prove my professional status to the city in order to live in SoHo—it can be anyone who has a Web site featuring their work, or is featured on a gallery Web site. Such a policy would increase not only traffic but word-of-mouth.That said, here are some random shots from the Eliasson exhibition:

Your eye activity field, 2009, oil on canvas (detail). Created for the MCA's lobby and atrium, this series of 300 canvases (approximately 6" x 14") represents the 300 nanometers of the color spectrum that can be seen by the human eye
Reimagine, 2002: spotlights cast shiftin, overlapping rectalinear patters across the gallery wall, creating an illusion of distance and depth.
Beauty, 1993: a spotlight shining obliquely through a curtain of fine mist.
From the model room
One-way colour tunnel (detail) with view of Inverted Berlin sphere, 2005
Colour sphere embracer, 2005, colored glass rings suspended from the ceiling nestle inside one another while a motor simultaneously rotates each in a different direction.Friday, May 1, 2009
Update
Wednesday evening I went to the opening of the newest version of Olafur Eliasson’s survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At one point a museum video crew, collecting short interviews to use in fund-raising, approached and asked me to talk about my connection to the museum. At first I didn’t think I had anything to say, but then realized that my intense interest in Eliasson’s work began with the MCA and the Robert Irwin exhibition in 1976 that changed forever how I think about art. Irwin was Eliasson’s biggest influence as well, although I think it’s unlikely that he ever saw an actual work until fairly recently. This version of the traveling Eliasson survey show (next stop: Dallas) is the best exhibition of the many I’ve seen (I didn’t see the survey in San Francisco, however, and the curator there, Madeleine Grynstein, is now the director at the MCA). At the MCA the work has room to breathe, and I think Eliasson is at his best in vast enclosed spaces—the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (below) being an example. I’m going back today to take pictures, which I’ll share.
Olafur Eliasson, weather project, Tate Modern, 2004.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The high cost of speeding
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Kurt's house
Even if you didn’t know Kurt was German, the siting of his cottage in the forest would make you think of Hansel and Gretel, but then you go inside and the fairy tale feeling is complete. Both rustic and elegant, it could be Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s house—provided Grandma had exquisite taste and a penchant for Biedermeier furniture.
But finding such a house in the middle of the Catskill woods isn’t the only incongruity. The other is that Kurt is an architect, a designer of chic store interiors (such as those for Diane von Furstenberg and my favorite department store, Bon Marche in Paris) and blindingly white loft-like spaces. Obviously he has range. How many modernist architects do you know who proudly display a cuckoo clock?

One of the many distinctive aspects of Kurt’s house is that there are no screens—“How European,” a friend said. Yeah, except northern Europe doesn’t have insects (a Swiss friend once told me it was because they wouldn’t allow them) and this is New York State, where mosquitoes rule. Kurt, however, is uniquely oblivious—or impervious—to mosquitoes, and one summer evening I ate in his dining room largely untouched—even though the room was buzzing with them—because his dog, sitting next to me on the bench, was incredibly efficient in snapping the insects out of the air with his mouth.
The massive, elaborate antique furniture is from his family, and when I asked Kurt how he got it into the house he said, “Oh, it was easy. It came from Europe in a container, which was left on the main road, and I rented a U-Haul…” Clearly what’s easy for Kurt would be challenging for a normal person—he's also moved hundreds of rocks from the woods to form patios and walkways around his house. I hope to do a summer update on the extensively gardened exterior which, when everything is in bloom, is as magical as the interior.
Living room:
Upstairs office:
A corner of the kitchen, set for Easter brunch:
A corner of the dining room:
And bunnies!
Kurt now splits his time between his architectural practice and a storefront in on Main Street in Catskill, where he makes indoor/outdoor furniture to be marketed under the name Somersaultwoods. Solidly handcrafted in rustic Bavarian style without glue or screws—all joints are made by hand—his focus is on green technology for the materials and finishes.Friday, April 17, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
You are what you think
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in ourwills.
(Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, Scene 3)
Mind is the wielder of muscles. The force of a hammer blow depends on the energy applied; the power expressed by a man’s bodily instrument depends on his aggressive will and courage. The body is literally manufactured and sustained by the mind. Through pressure of instincts from past lives, strengths or weaknesses percolate gradually into human consciousness. They express as habits, which in turn manifest as a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has a mental origin; in a vicious cycle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. If the master allows himself to be commanded by a servant, the latter becomes autocratic; the mind is similarly enslaved by submitting to bodily dictation.
Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946.
So reading about the brain and how thoughts and experience can change its physical configuration (neuroplasticity), I wonder why stop with the brain? If the brain can change, why not the rest of the body?
I have not forgotten a long article I read in The New York Times more than ten years ago (now finally available through the miracle of online archiving), which describes how a person diagnosed with multiple personality disorder may have actual physical characteristics that come and go, depending on which personality is dominant:
Excerpts:
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Reggie's house
A corner of the bathroom:
The upstairs studio:And outside, the Hudson, still bleak in early April:




