Overheard at the Vermont Studio Center

One poet to another: "It's as if Mary Oliver has an epiphany every time she walks out the door...."

475 Kent

The gestapo tactics that are being used against artists in New York are inexcusable (and, sadly, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened in Brooklyn) all while Mayor Bloomberg looks the other way. Complete coverage on Edward Winkleman's blog.

Bad technology day

How do I love my iPod? Let me count the ways. And I’m grateful for my GPS, too. Even though its performance is uneven, I cannot forget that it has extracted me more than once from driving hell (otherwise known as Boston). But yesterday they both let me down. At the same time. It was a long drive through the frozen tundra of upper Vermont to the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) in Johnson, which is even north of Burlington, if that’s possible, when my iPod began playing music from a band I swear I’ve never heard (lyrics: “Shut your mouth. Shut your mouth. Put your head back in the clouds and shut your mouth”—sound familiar to anyone?), while the readout said something else entirely. It was supposedly on shuffle and it would say it was playing, say, Air or Kasabian, when it was really just this one band, and not a great one at that. I might have written before about the time my iPod insisted on playing nothing but Oasis, the entire repertoire, until it got a grip on itself and went back to normal, but to think that a machine could share one of my obsessions only made me feel more affectionately toward it. This new quirk, however, just seemed perverse. Especially since, at the same time, my GPS, which had successfully gotten me through the twists and turns of Rutland, was now telling me in no uncertain terms to STAY RIGHT, TURN RIGHT!!! on Route 109 when I thought I should keep going on Route 100. Really, having a GPS is like being married (“I SAID TURN RIGHT, DAMMIT!”) except it doesn’t get upset if I stop at a red light I could have gotten through on the yellow, or choose a parking spot that’s not the absolute closest one to where we’re going. Anyway, I was 99% certain I was headed in the right direction—the analog technology I consulted (a map) confirmed it, plus my car has a built-in compass, plus I’d been there before—but nagging doubt stayed with me as I put fifty plus miles between me and Route 109, fifty plus miles of winding mountain roads, icy uninhabited flats and signs that said things like, “Moose crossing next 8 miles.” I went through the town of “Irasville” (surely I’d remember that name if I’d been there before, wouldn’t I?), and past The Church of the Crucified One (now there’s a place that could use a corporate sponsored name-change). Not to speak of a chocolate shop that turned out to be an outlet for “seconds” and “over-runs”—I’m addicted to chocolate, but not that addicted. It was only when I went through Stowe, and Route 100 met Route 15 at a restaurant called “Wok ‘n Roll,” (which I did remember), that I knew I was home free. Meanwhile my iPod…well, I haven’t turned it on yet this morning but I’m hoping it’s come to its senses.

Sculptor Judith Shea, who I know from when we were Senior Critics at Penn together, gave the lecture here at VSC last night and I give mine tonight. The temperature on this sunny morning is –5 degrees, and since the kitchen is out of herbal tea, I’m drinking simply hot water, the way the Chinese do, and it’s an extremely effective warmer-upper. Tomorrow I begin five days of studio visits, every half hour or so, from 8:30 to noon.




Judith Shea, Icon, 2003-4, wood and bronze, 62 x 16 x 13". Photo by ruy sanchez blanco.

Fame game

For a MySpace story with a happier ending, see son Matt's account in Black Book of one girl's whoosh from Savannah art student to the glam life with David LaChapelle.

Name game

I just read the piece in The New Yorker (January 21, 2008) about the 13-year-old who committed suicide after her neighbors made up a phony MySpace identity with which to harass her. It’s a truly horrifying story, and I hope I’m in no way belittling the tragedy when I confess that one of the things that sticks in my mind is the families lived on Waterford Crystal Drive. A residential street named after a product. Is this yet another trend that has completely passed me by? While I live in places with numbered streets or names such as Prospect, Grove, and Elm, are there people out there living the high life on Gucci Bag Place while their poorer neighbors stick it out in Ben-Gay Alley? Could be—after all, were we paying attention when our stadiums and arenas, which used to bear the names of notables and presidents, assumed corporate monikers? That was around the time the word “consumer” replaced “citizen” in the parlance and “patients” became “clients”—which should have told us something. (“Sleet” also became “ice pellets” in official weather jargon, and I’m not sure how this plays into the corporate scheme of things except that “ice pellets” sounds a lot scarier, and being frightened of the weather supposedly generates business for the news industry.) This street-naming trend, however, could have advantages for people who presently have less than attractive addresses, like my friend who lives on Cronk Road, a name that real estate brokers see as a deficit. There are a lot of dogs on Cronk Road, so maybe they could get it changed—with, no doubt, a subsidy for repaving—to, say, Purina Parkway. That has a certain ring, don’t you think?

The Bowery, in memoriam

The New Museum, 235 Bowery

When, in 1976, John Coplans, then the editor of Artforum, asked me to come to New York and be his assistant, my Chicago artist friends acted as if I’d been invited to Oz by the Wizard himself. It was completely inadvertent. I met John at the CAA convention in Chicago, where I was representing The New Art Examiner, and said, “If you ever hear of a job in New York, let me know.” I’d never thought of moving, and even at that moment it didn’t occur to me as a possibility; the words came out of my mouth, true, but probably because I wanted to see what it felt like to say it, and to give the impression of someone who might actually do such a thing, someone much older and more worldly than me. So two weeks later when John called and offered me the job I was completely unprepared, but with my friends egging me on, I called Angels Ribe, an artist from Barcelona who had lived for a time in Chicago, and asked if she knew of a place where I could live. When she said she was looking for a roommate, it seemed ordained. Except that Angels lived on the Bowery. I vaguely remembered the Bowery from one of my few previous trips to New York and asked Barry Holden, who had just come back from visiting Angels, “Aren’t there like bums and stuff there?” “Oh no,” Barry said, “the Bowery’s been gentrified. There are galleries and boutiques all up and down.”

Needless to say it was a bit of a shock when I got out of the taxi from the airport and there were no galleries and boutiques to be seen, and for several months after I assumed they were on a part of the Bowery I hadn’t been to yet. But I adjusted the way humans can--even girls from the suburbs--to armies of cockroaches and stepping over drunken bodies in the foyer. Do I miss it? What? Do I miss the stench, the filth, the crime, and the pathetic display of humanity I saw every day? No. Would I want my kids to live that way? Hardly. However there was something exhilarating about living on that gritty frontier of Manhattan: we felt courageous, like pioneers, we were in it together, and it was home. That last fact was cinched for me only a few days after I moved, when I was walking down Bowery carrying my portfolio and passed two bums, one of whom nudged the other and said, “She’s an artist.” Hardly anyone in Chicago, employed or otherwise, knew what that was.
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Photo is by Christopher Dawson, from the New Museum website

Evil

Topping my list of favorite end-of-the year lists is Henri Art Magazine’s compilation of the five biggest art world evils, which you can see by clicking here.

The transition year

Now that we’re into 2008, I’m thinking about how son Matt, a culture critic, has suggested that 2007 was really the first year of the 21st century—much in the way 1964, with the advent of the Beatles and protests against the Vietnam War, was the true start of the Sixties, as we know it.

2007 was the year when certain key issues that had previously been on the fringes entered mass consciousness: when it became generally agreed that Bush & Co. are whack and the war in Iraq is a disaster, that universal health care is a necessity rather than a subversive idea, that the pharmaceutical companies don’t have our best interests at heart, and finally, and maybe too late, that what’s happening in the environment is something to be taken seriously. Mass market phenoms such as The Secret and The Da Vinci Code indicate a new hunger for spiritual meaning and a general mistrust of the status quo. 2007 marked the year the Internet became embedded in every area of modern life: corporate publishing now has to compete with blogs, and Radiohead’s much promulgated decision to release their new album on the Internet was no small event. With the demise of the music industry, music is better than ever—because the Internet has taken information and art out of the gatekeeper’s hands and now the audience is calling the shots.

Except in the world of visual art, which seems to have gone backwards, and where everything looks like a retread. 2007 marked the complete takeover of the money people, the year that auctions and art fairs prevailed over gallery exhibitions, the year after which you really can’t get in the door without an MFA. The gatekeepers are everywhere and more powerful than ever. There has to be something new out there, roiling beneath the surface, but what is it? And would we recognize it if we saw it?

Many paths to art

Doing research for a catalog essay, I came across this interesting bit of art history from the days when you didn’t need thousands of dollars for an MFA to join the ranks of the art world:

Before he was a painter, Robert Ryman was a jazz musician who studied music in his native Nashville and played in an army reserve band during the Korean War. He moved to New York in 1952 to study with jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. To support himself, Ryman took odd jobs, one of them as a guard at MoMA, and in 1953, during his first year there, started painting. In 1955 Ryman made what he considers his earliest professional work, a largely monochromatic piece entitled Orange Painting, and his first exhibition was a staff show at MoMA. Other employees, with whom he became friends. were Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, and Dan Flavin.

I also learned that Flavin, who previously studied for the priesthood, began making sketches for sculptures incorporating lights during another stint as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History, and that Jackson Pollock once manned the turnstile at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which later became the Guggenheim.

Forget grad school, this guard thing sounds pretty hot--maybe all that's necessary to come up with ideas for great art is to be exposed to a bunch of it while having a lot of time on your hands.

Ice

The bad news is that I'm dealing with frozen pipes (note that's plural) in my newly renovated house, the good news is that I'm not flipped out--flipped out being, as Scott says, so 2007.

CAUTION: EXCESSIVE EXPOSURE TO CAUTION WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN

My hope for the New Year is that in 2008 people will give up saying “Take care” as a form of farewell. May it fall into permanent disuse. Really, even “Have a nice day,” which we used to hate for its insipidity, is beginning to look pretty good. And while we’re at it, let’s also get rid of the word “safe” in our goodbyes, as in “Have a safe trip.” Someone once said that to me as I prepared to drive from Great Barrington to Housatonic, a “trip” of six miles, which I think is more like a jaunt, but nobody says, “Have a safe jaunt.” At holiday time the food coop printed HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING on the bottom of each and every receipt. What’s unsafe about Thanksgiving? Are they afraid that we’re all going choke on turkey bones? Or that proximity to neurotic relatives will cause mental illness? “Drive carefully” bugs me too. I see myself gleefully making a U-turn at 80 across the median strip on the Mass Pike and then thinking, “Oh shit! I forgot to drive carefully. If only someone had reminded me...”

We’re the safest society that has ever lived, but the Culture of Fear invades even our homes, with reminders of impending doom everywhere—on each and every window screen in my house, is an unremovable (believe me, I’ve tried) label that says, in English and Spanish: WARNING: SCREEN WILL NOT KEEP CHILD FROM FALLING OUT WINDOW. Do I really want to think about the untimely demise of small beings every time I go to look outside? My hair dryer comes with a tag marked DO NOT REMOVE! that not only says WARN CHILDREN OF THE RISK OF DEATH BY ELECTRIC SHOCK! but adds that I must refrain—duh!—from using it while bathing.

Meanwhile, where are the warnings we really need, such as NOT HAVING HEALTH INSURANCE MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH or DANGER: EXCESSIVELY LONG POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS MAY CAUSE ENNUI or the one that should be posted above every voting booth: FAILURE TO THINK WHILE VOTING MAY RESULT IN ELECTION OF STUPID OFFICIALS.

I’d end this post by exhorting you to do something risky—RUN! Don’t walk!—but since I’d be courting lawsuits if I did, I’ll simply sign off with: peace, so long, take it easy, have fun, cheers, see you later, Godspeed, sayonara, toodle-loo…and wherever you’re going, I hope you have a rollicking trip and a totally awesome day.

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Image from http://www.pachd.com/free-images/

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

"Susana" AKA "The Devil and the Flesh"

On Christmas Day we watched a couple of old movies, one being “All Fall Down” a 1962 William Inge screenplay with a devastatingly attractive 25-year-old Warren Beatty (“man enough to attract a dozen women…not man enough to be faithful to one”), in which a desperate Eva Saint Marie drives off a cliff because he refuses to acknowledge her pregnancy. And "Susana," an early (1952) Bunuel, filmed in Mexico, where a “bad girl,” escapes from a reformatory (in high heels, which makes for some tough going in the mud), is taken in by a wealthy ranch family and wreaks havoc, seducing the son, father, and trusty foreman before being caught and again incarcerated—thereby ensuring that the ranch family lives happily ever after, the men totally exonerated because they’re men, of course, and could hardly be expected to restrain themselves in the face of blonde temptation.

It made me realize that the times we live in are not so bad after all, that we’ve made a lot progress, and have much to be grateful for. I think about how, when my ex-husband entered Evanston Township High School in suburban Chicago at the end of the fifties, there were separate swimming pools for black and white students. How, when I married at nineteen and moved to New Haven in the sixties, selling any form of birth control—condoms, prescription diaphragms and pills, whatever—was illegal in the state of Connecticut. How, in the seventies, a vice president of the company that published Art in America used to think it was fun to stop me at the elevators, feel my back to see if I was wearing a bra, and snap it if I was—and I had to be polite to him or risk losing my job.

I think about how the words “meditation,” “yoga,” “acupuncture,” and even “massage” (except in conjunction with “parlor”) were not part of the vernacular.

I think about how I spent Christmas, 2007, at the home of openly gay men, one of whom has health insurance as a result of his partner’s employee benefits. How thrilled my friend, Laurie, a single mom, is with her adopted Mexican son, and even if he’d come to her the Warren Beatty way, everyone would be happy for her because she's happy. How I can go to a club or restaurant now—even in France, as of today, January 1st—without being overcome by cigarette smoke. I can’t even remember life before the Internet, but I do remember what a drag it was to have to take film to be developed; what am I supposed to do with those boxes of old negatives, anyway? And slides…oh my god…as artists we have been relieved of a terrible burden.

Of course there’s more to do. But now we know it, whereas back in the fifties and early sixties, no one had a clue—and any discomfort, at least in my parents’ social set, could be drowned in WASP alcoholism, socially sanctioned as long as the highballs didn’t start before 5:00.

So in this worst and best of times, let’s make a list of our blessings, and welcome 2008 with optimism, an open heart, and a willingness to make life even better…

Happy New Year!

Meetings

In an unusually touching piece in this week’s New York magazine (Dec. 24-31), entitled “Love Underground,” four couples describe, in their own words, how they met in the subway—and it reminded me again (see below) of how agents and publishers may not be in touch with what the public wants to read and, of course, I AM. Many years ago I wrote a proposal for a book of interviews with couples entitled How They Met. I’d been collecting the stories for some time, my favorite being about how University of Iowa graduate student, Matt, got to spend time with Jude, the aloof and glamorous New York artist and professor, when he accidentally cut off the tip of this finger in the sculpture studio and she, who was supervising the studio, accompanied him to the hospital. He said "it was totally worth it to have this beautiful woman with me in the ambulance, rubbing my chest" (they’ve been together now for many years, and BTW his finger got sewed together and is fine).

Anyway, I wrote up the proposal, got on the subway, and dropped it off at 5:00 at the office of a legendary literary agent. She called at 9:00 the next morning (I was still asleep and, at first, thought it was my aunt calling) to say she was interested in representing the project on the condition that I’d be willing to change it to interviews with celebrities. I was not. That wasn’t my idea at all. Who cares how celebrities meet? My interest was in real people—I saw myself as a collector of oral histories, the Studs Terkel of modern romance, spreading hope among the lovelorn.

Less than two years later I was walking by a bookstore in the Village and there it was in the window, How They Met, interviews with celebrities such as Walter Matthau, Robertson Davies, Jay Leno, Daniel Dinkins, and Carly Simon, published just in time for Valentine’s Day. I just checked, and you can buy it on Abebooks.com for $1.00. Not exactly a bestseller. (However I remember once reading, perhaps in Rolling Stone, that when Carly Simon and James Taylor first met at a party they went immediately into the bathroom to fuck—if it’s in the book, that story alone might make it worthwhile. But do we really care how Mrs. Matthau met Mr. Matthau?)

I can’t do the book now because it’s such a good idea that, completely independently, the New York Times took it up and the “Vows” column on the wedding page, is one of their most popular. However if anyone wants to comment and tell me how they met, I’m all ears.

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The photo is from the NY Magazine article, of Mitchell Ratchick and Suzanna Ko.

Christmas is over

No, this isn't a Paul McCarthy, but the aftermath of our Christmas cake. After taking this photo, Roberto threw it away. He couldn't bear to eat the head.

Even though the heading was "I still want it all," when I sent this out as an ecard a few years ago, most of my friends thought it was an antique image I found somewhere and didn't get that it was me. But it is me, with my brother, John, probably at Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. My father took the photo and did the lettering. That's a terrifying grip Santa has on my arm.

More about seeing

In the latest issue of The New Yorker (December 24 & 31) there’s a cartoon by Michael Maslin of two toddlers in a playroom, and as their mothers approach, one says to the other, “Here they come—act infantile.” It reminded me of a conversation I had with Judy Fox, where we were talking about drawing being all about observation (but then, isn’t everything?), and I said I thought we underestimate children’s abilities, that if they were shown more sophisticated ways of seeing their world they’d be able to represent it. I was thinking about how my father, an engineer, taught me to draw in perspective when I was five. My early talents lay with music, and artistically speaking, I don’t think I was particularly precocious—yet as soon as my father pointed the concept out to me, I could draw it. Judy told me that when she was little, she drew stick figures because she thought that’s what she was supposed to do. Then one day in school when her friends were wondering what adults looked like naked, she volunteered that she’d seen a naked adult and proceeded to draw them a picture—with such graphically detailed breasts, nipples, belly button, and pubic hair that it was immediately confiscated by the teacher. Ultimately Judy grew up to be a sculptor of naked people, but at the time she took the wiser course and went back to stick figures.

Judy's sculptural installation, Snow White and the Seven Sins, was seen in New York this fall at P.P.O.W. and will be exhibited at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills in the upcoming months, dates to be determined.

Everything you always wanted to know about Art Basel/Miami but were afraid to ask

For all five of us who didn't go to Art Basel/Miami, Joanne Mattera has posted a complete review with pictures and comments on her blog joannemattera.blogspot.com/ that feels almost like being there--minus the sore feet and champagne.

More winter brights

While I'm on the subject, I could not resist posting this photo I took on my first trip to Reykjavik, where they have the most sophisticated sense of winter fashion:

Winter brights

Scott introduced me to The Sartorialist fashion blog, and now I’m an addict, because it doesn’t feature fashionistas but people the world over, young and old, who have created their own style of dressing. Therefore I was inspired to take this picture of the gentleman who sat down across from me in the Coop café the other day, who I’d noticed a number of times before because of his charmingly colorful garb. Neither hippie-ish nor gypsy-ish, his elaborate use of bright color only enhances his thoroughly distinguished look. It turns out he’s an Irishman named John ffrench (the correct Norman spelling), and a ceramicist who uses a lot of color in his work. It must run in the family. ffrench told me his wife buys his clothes, while his daughter, Crispina, is well-known in the Berkshires for her colorful fashions made of recycled fabric.

Sign of the times

Leaving the Whitney Museum the other day, we were in the mood for a quick cup of soup. The coffee shop that used to be in the same block was gone. Walking down Madison we passed a number of upscale restaurants, but no place where you could sit and simply get a bite--until 15 blocks later the Viand coffee shop appeared, looking like a complete anachronism amidst all the the steel and glass glitz. It reminded me of a piece the late Glen Seator did in 1999, where he inserted a full-scale replica of a check-cashing joint into the facade of Gagosian's Beverly Hills gallery. At the time Michael Duncan in Art in America saw it as "rather obvious social commentary" saying that "the contrast between the high-tone gallery and the low-rent check-cashing store seemed too much of an insider art world joke." Now the joke's on us when we can't get a cup of soup.

Kara's brother

How many people notice, upon leaving the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney, that there's another show equally rooted in racial stereotypes outside?

It's up to you

It was reported in the New York Times Sunday that with their pay-what-you-will system, Radiohead sold 1.2 million downloads of their new album, In Rainbows, grossing somewhere between one and five million dollars. The article suggests, with some skepticism, that this could be a new business model. I had a friend who, in the eighties, worked in a California restaurant where the diners were asked to leave whatever amount they thought the meal was worth. She said they consistently overpaid.

It's really all Chinese

The weird thing was that after seeing so much Chinese art at the beginning of my Chelsea tour (see "It's all Chinese" below), everything else began to look Chinese too. Ross Bleckner’s Chinese red flower swirls:

Cy Twombly’s splash blossoms, also Chinese red, were like blown-up brush paintings, and I'm amazed that I never before made the association between Pat Steir’s drip paintings and Oriental screens:

And Charles Ray’s farmer? Definitely Chinese:

It's all Chinese

Su Xinping (Stux)

This week, pounding the sidewalks of Chelsea, it became more and more evident that the Chinese takeover of the art world is complete. First stop was the group show at the vast Arario Gallery (521 West 21st with three other branches are in Korea and Beijing) followed by another across the street at Stux. While there’s no means of presentation here that’s particularly new—the Asians are riffing on Western contemporary art in a big way—it’s oddly refreshing. They bring, however, more than just exotica to the mix. While Westerners appreciate traditional Asian painting and sculpture for its beauty, at the same time it's opaque, a foreign language. By adopting Western tropes, these younger Asian artists are working with a visual code we understand, and one that allows their personal sensibilities to shine through. In writing classes I taught in the graduate program at SVA, where many of the students are Asian, I made a practice of encouraging foreign students to forget about using correct grammar and simply concentrate on expressing their thoughts and feelings. The results were charming and illuminating—and because of their heartfelt nature—surprisingly literary. The students told me they could express personal insights and observations in English that would be unimaginable within the confines and traditions of their native languages.

However the same Warholian and Duchampian ideas that the Asians find so liberating have been recycling in the West now for more than thirty years, to the point that they have become mechanical and rote. Pushed in art school to do work that looks “relevant,” students imitate what they see in galleries, which is work generated by artists who were imitating what they saw in galleries ten years before, which is work those artists saw in galleries ten years before that, so by now it’s all so denatured and watered down that it looks like the souvenir shop version of the original impulse.

Perhaps its time for us to take up brush painting.

Thorsteinn's Star

More from my friend, Einar (click label below for other posts), here with his newest configuration. He tells me a few (around 14) stars or stellated polyhedrons are known in geometry, the earliest being those of German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).




Einar first discovered Kepler's stars in the Kepler Museum in Weil der Stadt, Germany in 1973. That, along with meeting Buckminster Fuller in 1975, was the beginning of his involvement with geometry. When I asked how long this project took he said, "I've been working on geometry since 1973 and cannot figure out how much of this third of a century it took to finally define the Thorsteinn Star. Maybe it was the fine Brieselang air..." -- referring to the village outside Berlin where he and Manuela live.



I wanted to know more, and when I looked up Kepler I found this image, which I suggested to Einar looked a lot like him. True, Kepler's nose is much longer, as Einar immediately pointed out, and his eyes are brown, not blue. But what I see isn't a superficial commonality as much as a mischievous glint in the eye and look of deep inner satisfaction.



For more information on stellation and facetting, Einar suggests Guy Inchbald’s website: www.steelpillow.com/polyhedra/StelFacet/history.html.