More Politics

Well, Randy Kennedy (see post below) seems to be back on the Art Beat, but I'm having trouble going there. Besides the obvious personal life issues, there's the great national distraction that has grabbed my attention more completely than anything since McGovern '72. My buttons from those days, even if this dates me:

Edward Winkleman does an admirable job of balancing Art and Politics, and I may attempt to emulate him. I've been sending most of my art review posts over to BAArtQuake, which leaves other topics for this space. What topics, exactly? I haven't decided yet.

Art-wise I'm in abeyance right now, awaiting the appearance or determination of my true course. I have various half-finished and partially-formed projects sitting about, but the main hands-on project these days is building a flat file for my studio. I designed it to have a day bed on top and a couple of deeper, rolling storage drawers below. Actually, it's all built and I'm in the process of sand/painting (photos when I'm done.) A serious art retreat is in the planning stages and as soon as I nail down the dates and travel arrangements, I'll announce it (will probably be completely incommunicado for a little while.)

So now that we're caught up, let me leave you with the current magnet for my attention:

The Tide is Turning, from Bob Cesca's Blog:



Bill Richardson's March 21, 2008 endorsement speech in Portland:



Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on Race in America:



Link to text of Obama's New York speech on the economy given today, at Cooper Union.

Art, Politics, What's the Difference?

Has anyone else noticed that the New York Times has assigned one their arts writers to the campaign trail? Randy Kennedy has been covering Texas for the last two weeks:

"In my regularly scheduled life at The New York Times, I cover the art world, but I grew up in Texas, in a small cotton-farming town in the panhandle near Lubbock, so it’s been nice to come back here to watch the state in electoral thrall. By the time I became aware of politics here in the 1970s (I remember Gov. Dolph Briscoe coming through our town on a campaign swing with lots of bunting and a truckload of barbecued buffalo meat) my corner of the state had pretty much already made its transition from yellow-dog Democrat to Republican. So it’s been strange and fascinating for me - as it has for many of the people I’ve talked to around the state, even staunch Republicans - to see a Democratic race matter here so much."

His archived (art) stories at the NYT here.

His recent contributions to the NYT political blog here.

Art Conservation - A Growth Industry?

SFGate is running a story by Kenneth Baker about art conservation today. In particular, the materials of contemporary art, which could be anything. He quotes Michelle Barger, SFMOMA's conservator of objects:

"... what if you have a Sol LeWitt, and the work is not an object, but a certificate?" (For his numerous, often ephemeral wall drawings, LeWitt (1928-2007) issued precise instructions for their execution and a certificate of ownership that authorizes each owner to re-create the work as appropriate.) "Or you have a Dan Flavin, and the work is a fluorescent lightbulb - and the kind he used is going obsolete," Barger said. "Or a video by Gary Hill, "where you can't be all about preserving that material because it will die. You have to migrate what the heart of the piece is to a more stable medium. Or even a performance work by someone like Rirkrit Tiravanija" - who frequently works with food - "where you can't preserve the materials because it was an event. How do you conserve that?" (via)

And the next question is, should you conserve it? In many cases, the artist who created the work doesn't care if it disintegrates. Barger thinks it's society that cares:

"I think as a society we have a hard time with death, and art that has a steep degradation curve - way shorter than a human lifetime - that makes us very uncomfortable. Certainly, there have been replicas throughout history, but it feels like this scramble now is a symptom of not being able to let go." (via)

But I think it's the museum and the marketplace that worry about archival materials. For instance, I was at a gallery this weekend (a well-known gallery with spaces in NY, SF and LA) that shows mostly artists from the "Mission School" (their words, not mine.) The show in this gallery consists of two works of art - a sculpture and a painting. The sculpture was a modified box made from cardboard and scotch tape. The painting was made from cardboard, glue and acrylic paint. The sculpture was listed for $12,000 and the painting for $45,000. Let's set aside the issues of beauty, meaning, craft, and other "higher" concerns and just contemplate shelling out $12,000 for a cardboard box (unpainted) held together with scotch tape.

Maybe you love this thing so much that you don't care about the fact that it's going to fall apart in a few years, turn yellow, and then start flaking into a pile of dust. You can always donate it to a museum before that happens. Provided you guessed right on the artist's trajectory. But wouldn't it be nice to know, up front, that a piece of art was self-destructing?

Maybe not. If enough people cared, the issue would be resolved already. Meanwhile, there are only 25 graduates per year from the top art conservation programs - might be a good field to get into.

(image is from Joel Oppenheimer at the Natural History Art Gallery)

a poem about artists

from Michael Fallon at the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America:

For the Young Who Want To

by Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

(phlogiston, is an alchemical term referring to the hidden fire that lives in wood before it is actually burned.)

Image is "The Artist at Work," 18"x 23″Acrylic, Oil Pastel, and Watercolor, by Candace DiGiacomo at art by Candace.

Banksy's Ghetto

Someone named Charmarley Nightfire just opened a gallery/museum devoted to the work of Banksy. Called "Banksy's Ghetto", it's a big three-story building located in Second Life, surrounded by replicas of the Palestinian Wall, the Berlin Wall and a painted elephant on the front lawn. It's billed as the "world's first extensive gallery of street art by Bristol graffiti artist Banksy!"

Street art is ephemeral and much of Banksy's work has disappeared, so this sort of replay makes a certain kind of sense. You could see images of his older work in books, or on the artist's website, but this virtual museum helps provide a sense of scale, if not a proper sense of place.


Some of the work on the top floor of "Banksy's Ghetto" is for sale, but it's unclear if Banksy has anything to do it. Banksy's web site states:

"I don't agree with auction houses selling street art - its undemocratic, it glorifies greed and I never see any of the money. None of the print and painting exhibitions in proper art galleries are anything to do with me, it's all stuff they bought previously. I only ever mount shows in warehouses or war zones or places full of live animals (I'm aware the pictures don't stand up on their own)."

In his defense, Mr. Nightfire writes, "Like many I do believe the real home for Banksy's art is on walls of streets, but unfortunately much of his work has now been removed. Here I have created an opportunity to view it all (or nearly all) together. I think viewing his work in this way helps to reflect the creative journey Banksy has taken and shows how his ideas and techniques have progressed through time."

I've read the books, but I still enjoyed the visit to the museum. The only weird thing about it was a half dozen dancing women scattered about the grounds, in the middle of the day, and I was the only other person there . . .

More photos and info at Nick Burcher.

Eugene Carriere's last show

About a week ago, one of my friends gave me an old book that had been gathering dust for years on her shelves. She didn't know anything about it but thought it looked like something I might be interested in. Oh yes, I was interested - it was a copy of the show catalog for Eugene Carriere's postumous exhibit in 1906, held in his studio at the Hotel Drouot, Paris. Too bad the binding was trashed - if it had been in a little better condition the book would have been worth about $500. But it's still a pretty cool book - 14.5" x 10.25", 140 pages, softbound with 36 tissue-paper covered monochrome image plates.

Eugene Carriere is almost forgotten today, but he had a tremendous influence on more well-known painters in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. He was influenced by Rubens, was good friends with Gauguin and Rodin, was hated by Degas. He was called a symbolist, and mostly painted portraits of his family and friends. His work influenced Picasso (his blue period) as well as the photographer Edward Steichen.

Back to the book - I put a temporary protective cover over it, but first I scanned all the pages. The catalog lists 99 works for sale, including some offered in memory of Carriere by Carolus-Duran, Lhermitte, Lebourg & Renoir, among others. Also included are works belonging to Carriere by Delacroix, Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes and others. The reproductions of Carriere's paintings interested me the most. While the text pages are letterpress, the images looked to me like metal plate lithographs (offset printing) but I didn't think that process existed in 1906, so I started digging around . . . The first steam litho press (using stones) was invented in France in 1850 and the first offset press was developed in 1906! These could be some of the very earliest photo offset prints. I'd love to know more about how they were made, but for now, all I can say is that the catalogs were printed in 1906 at the Moderne Imprimerie at 37 rue Gandon, Paris. Jacques-Ernest Bulloz is listed as the image editor for the book. He was a local photographer who was friends with Rodin and Carriere, and managed the reproduction rights to their work.

Here are a few of the images:


95 - La Peinture, by Eugene Carriere


01 Lentente Cordiale, by Eugene Carriere


25 Jeune Fille au Ruban, by Eugene Carriere

Collecting Sunsets

A friend just gave me a stack of "Cabinet" magazines. It's a quarterly art & culture journal that focuses on a single theme each for each issue. The name refers to the old fashioned Wunderkammer and I was struck by the similarities between the current evolution of the web and a cabinet of curiosities.

Then I came across Albert Gilbert's essay In the Spring 2007 issue of Cabinet (#25):

Web 2.0 is a partial deathblow to conventional aesthetics. This isn't so terrible, and was inevitable anyway, since aesthetics is a historical construction - a rapidly aging one at that. Francesco Bonami writes in a recent issue of Artforum: "If going to a museum is seen as a kind of airport-lounge experience, you have to accept that art can easily turn into 'stuff: meaning that viewers will experience mostly accumulation rather than sublimation." This is happening on a much more pervasive and invasive scale outside of the museum space as Web 2.0 continuously and voraciously feeds on the compiling "stuff' of culture and information. In this sense, MySpace and YouTube are doing more to challenge traditional aesthetics than progressive artists, art institutions, and Hal Foster-edited anthologies on anti-aesthetics combined, just as gallery and museum-going paradigms for appreciating (and critiquing) art are being confronted by Web 2.0's culture-as-file-and-information-sharing model.

This rings true to me, but I've had some vociferous conversations with other artists who think that the ideas in the previous paragraph are complete and utter nonsense. Maybe I should get out more?

Maybe. But still, in spite of my infatuation with virtual, digital, and other alternate realities, I paint. Can't see that changing. I found my path, and I'm still walking it.

Welcome to 2008

Images: top - last sunset of 2007, bottom - first sunset of 2008