Wanted: Art Shrink

(Molly Stevens, Heads of State, 2010, oil stick on paper, 40" x 60")

When drawing, I’m constantly making decisions: to go in a certain direction, to change a color, to stop working on a piece. I call the shots, but I’ve always had someone who would say (who I've wanted so badly to say), “yes, that’s right, I’m behind you on this one.” This person changes. But she's always someone I’m trying to emulate or please; she's always someone who knows. More than I do.

At this point in time, there seems to be no one I can rely on or turn to but my own damn self. Sure, there’s the encouraging word from friends and loved ones, but there’s no mentor, and this has left me feeling both isolated and uncertain (to use the tamest of words).

And yet this is likely a prime opportunity for me to go my own way and make work that really looks like my own. It’s just that… what if I make a mistake.

The revenge of the unsung hero

(Christian Viveros-Fauné)

Christian Viveros-Fauné doesn’t mince words. Bless him.

In his latest rant in the Voice, he rips Jeff Koons a new one, and in doing so humiliates the world of art-money that bolsters him.

I especially like this description of his chat with a dealer who toured him through her Koons show:

Besides reconfirming art history's judgments and the weird sense that some rich people still think that price tags measure the cutting edge, the parley lent a particularly Koonsian brazenness to the day. The polished Dayan [the dealer] identified a picture of reverse-cowgirl anal penetration, Red Butt, as having been the favorite of Koons's octogenarian ex-dealer, Ileana Sonnabend: "She hung it in her office, right at the entrance." You don't say. A second image of cum on La Cicciolina's cheek Dayan compared to Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: "It's called Exaltation." Of course, what else? The exhibition's last hardcore picture waited: Titled Dirty Ejaculation, it bore a feces-flecked close-up of Koons's dick pulling out of Cicciolina's bunghole. "I think it's radical," Dayan purred. Uh, yeah!, I mouthed archly. And if this load were music, you would be the New York Philharmonic.

Passages like these are tremendously satisfying to read. It's the revenge of the unsung hero. You can't help but feel holier, purer, wonderfuller. But really, would that it were so clear-cut. If you're in it - in the art world and in fact in the world in general - you're part of it. That's just one of the many contradictions that we embody by just being here.

Remember when Mr. Virveros-Fauné lost his job as Village Voice critic because he was organizing an art fair? That was ridiculous. It's a messy world. Face it.

Pink

(Giotto, Joachim’s Dream, 1304ish)

It’s hard to use pink as a woman, because it’s considered girly. And it’s hard to use pink as a man, because it’s considered the opposite of masculine and straight. But what a fine color: strong, optimistic but serious. That’s because it has both red and blue in it.

Every Giotto could be an example. Skin glows pink, robes are pink, the simultaneous dawn and dusk light is pink (I think). Pink looks so good next his blues, his grays, his ruddy reds.

Pink.

And why can’t there be more flying angels emerging into visibility in contemporary art?

The Green Monkey

I’m just not into brainy art (broken record). Ideas tend to lack vitality and also visual appeal. I prefer to give precedence to the porous connections of the unconscious mind, which is at work doing its thing all the time anyway, whether we like it or not. I’m not in control. And neither are you.

Let me see if I can describe how I can trace the doings of the unconscious mind while I draw. In hindsight, of course. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

A few weeks back I took a picture of a wooden sculpture of a monkey at the Met. Yesterday, I set out to draw a human figure. It was a decision. But, at some point I thought I’d turn it into a monkey, then remembering the piece at the Met. That was semi conscious. Then I began daydreaming about a local (expensive) hangout, called Le Singe Vert (the green monkey), where I hoped to meet a friend. Did I make the monkey association? No.

Then I picked up my orange oil stick. I turned the page upside down, as I often do to continue drawing. Then I started on another piece, while listening to Democracy Now and considering the world’s mess. When I turned back to the monkey, I decided it needed to be green, making no connection to the restaurant. Then I wanted some red in there, and stripes gave the color some air. When I turned the image right side up, I realized, I had made a green monkey with shorts, the kind a street animal might wear as he sits next to an accordion player.

It’s not that I think the unconscious mind makes better art (this drawing, eh). It’s that I know it’s there. And if I give it some room, it makes the work less controlled, lending it a fresh quality that I like. Ideas are just not as interesting.

Wall Street

(Michael Douglas in front of a Condo-like painting in Wall Street)

One way to look at it is that art makes money look good. It brings “culture” to greed and the downright dirty. Oliver Stone portrays this so well in Wall Street (part I) that you’ve got to feel a bit like two-faced slime striving to join the market as an artist.

Major art fills the movie: in Gekko’s office we’ve got a large Miro-like piece (that he bought for 60k and is now worth more than 600k, he says); at his home in the Hamptons, there’s a Sultan-like lemon, a few Chamberlain-like smashed cars on the wall and some Leonardo-like huge drawings that act as a Greek chorus behind the drama. At one point Gekko buys a Stella-like painting for a couple of mil. This is definitely accurate décor – and it plays a supporting role; it goes so much further than just the classic portraits of foreboding head honchos – the fathers of wealth – that we expect to see on the walls of old-money firms (although there are these too in the movie).

In a telling scene, when Charlie Sheen asks Daryl Hannah’s character (her name is Darien – as in Connecticut?) what she wants in life, she answers a perfect canary diamond and a Turner (as in Joseph Mallord William Turner, I presume). I understood. Art is desired by power because art perfects power. Art makes power appear solid as a rock (a hard diamond). Art makes beauty belong to power.

Creativity in Hospitals

I spent the day yesterday in the hospital as the escort to my husband who had surgery. It was a surprisingly dull day, only enhanced by the occasional visit of worry. And then there were the posters on the wall, mostly picturesque landscapes.

There was one, a fall mountainside in pastel that included an unusual orange-yellow – something like this image above. It was in fact comforting to see. The color took me out of there. Art can really be a sweet friend.

Most of the other posters didn’t skirt tacky as well, especially when they had words on the bottom like “serenity,” or in one case, “creativity.”

Perhaps only more misguided than using the word “inspiration” to describe an artist’s process is the word “creativity,” as in “I’d like to express my creativity.” It implies a state where everything you do is beautiful, worthy, perhaps even touched by a greater force; in any case, it implies a person’s better side. That’s just not how a (good) drawing comes out of the pepper mill.

That artist didn’t choose that orange-yellow thinking, “let’s be creative.” That hue was something he saw or, in all likelihood, it resulted from the reproduction process.

Realistic fake

Talking about trees, check out this 1984 sculpture by Judy Pfaff up now at Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe. First, we’ve got those nice stylized trunks providing strength in multiple directions, like vectors; then we’ve got the suggestion of bark, not its faithful and laborious imitation. This keeps up the lightness. And then the sharp-edge chops clearly remind us that light and serious can coexist (and should, in my mind).

How do you get a realistic depiction of "nature." Unnaturally, I think.

That’s all for today, folks.

Does lyricism sell?

(Installation view of Edefalk's work at Gladstone)

On view now at Barbara Gladstone is an installation by Cecilia Edefalk of tree barks standing like figures on a table. I have a very soft spot for work with trees, even though most are a flop, succumbing to generic poetry. This one did in the end for me because of the exhibition title “Weeping Birch” and then because I heard an employee describing the piece (to a collector) as the result of a “profound” experience the artist had on an island during a storm. The combination of the words “Weeping” and “profound” was just altogether too self-important. The employee then pointed to a group of three or four barks on the table, and said they were $35k (or was it $40k?).

Personally, if I had the dough, I’d prefer to buy Kippenberger’s 1990 installation combining birch trees and pills titled “Now I’m going into the big birch wood, my pills will soon start doing me good.” I don’t need anyone to tell me it’s profound, it just is by virtue of what's there.

Krump drawing anyone? (moi, moi, moi)

I’m one of those people that must move physically. Sometimes it becomes restlessness, sometimes impatience and often anxiety, but it is, at core, an electricity that quickly stores up inside me.

This is not a concentration problem. When I was in high school, they put me on Ritalin, but lack of focus was a misdiagnosis. The classes were deadly dry. And they had me pegged as an unserious student. I think if they had let me pace around the room, I would have been able to focus on their boring lessons.

When I watch crumping or b-boying, I feel vicariously expressed (you’ve seen the movie Rize or Planet B-Boy?). I just love the spasms, the jutting, the angry thrusts and I admire the control. I’m too scared to try it for myself though. And also, I’m pretty heady, although I’m not a brain. Drawing is a good way to convert the surge, and so is writing, because I’m using my hands and mind at the same time. With drawing, I even get to walk around the table and back and forth to and from the wall.

So, if only I could make my drawings look like krumping.

Expressive sucks

Expressive sucks. The goal is not just to empty out, to show everything you feel. Who really cares how you feel. Maybe your mom, if you have that kind.

Spontaneity sucks. Especially when it’s related to Expressive. That candle burns fast and shallow. The goal is beyond loosening up.

Obsessive sucks. Get some Spontaneity, get Expressive.

Restraint sucks. Stop being so precious.

Thinking sucks. Don’t you hate smart art? The goal is not to make a point. Write a paper to make a point or do some public speaking.

Intention sucks. Art is aware of itself but not deliberate.

Art requires more and less than my current approach. Oh, were I only to have some Wild Style.

Shut up and draw

(Carroll Dunham, Another Island, 1989-1999)

What can I do? I set out to draw rocks, trees and mountains, which I fantasized would be great metaphors, and nothing but cartoony tribal figures are coming out. At best they’re Saul Steinberg, or maybe Carroll Dunham, but I fear they’re really more Bart Simpson.

I can’t say that I like them, but I’ll continue, because I have no choice. That’s what’s coming out.

To remove the discomfort of not knowing where this is going, my initial urge is to immediately try to explain the work, categorize it. If I could show off a range of knowledge about how contemporary artists depict figures, about why some chose realism, about how choice and historical awareness is important, then what I’m doing becomes valid. So I think. But what really happens is that the drawing blocks.

Shut up and draw.

We shall overcome

(The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. From the doc "Neshoba: The Price of Freedom")

Most artists with a political conscience have found themselves alone in their studio or room at some point and wondered, “What good is this doing? I’m here and the world is burning outside.”

Some artists try to kill two birds with one stone and correct the world’s horrors directly through their art. But paintings of Abu Ghraib prisoners are not effective against torture and they don’t stand on their own as art. I’ve come to the conclusion that the distinction between visual art and political activism simply is.

On Friday, I was listening to Democracy Now while drawing. I walked over to the computer screen to watch footage of a young African-American boy in the ‘60s, tears rolling down his face at his brother’s untimely funeral, singing with determination “We shall overcome.”

Today, reading Doris Lessing, I noted these words:

Now, when I start writing, the first thing I ask is, ‘Who is thinking the same thought? Where are the other people like me?’ I don’t believe any more that I have a thought. There is a thought around.

Both elbow me. The only thing artists can hope for with their art is that by making it, by showing it, it overcomes. The spirit of art goes against the downward spiral – or at least attempts to – and that is not insignificant, for the artist personally, for any interested viewer, and as a symbol. And it inevitably belongs to a thrust of our times, no matter how weak that force may now be.

Summer Reading sans Stieg Larsson

(Valentino Achak Deng)

Other than the usual daily and weekly New York press, here’s my summer reading list so far:

Jane Bowles, Everthing is Nice – Very oddball stories written in the most formal, proper language. Nothing is in fact nice, although it wants to appear so (and that’s an outlook I’m a sucker for). She was the wife of Paul Bowles, whom I’d also like to read.

Dave Eggers, What is the What – A painful page-turner about the trials of a Lost Boy who fled Southern Sudan on foot to various refugee camps and then to the U.S. Not hardened, but gentle does the soul become through suffering and loss (unless you’re a Republican, of course). If you don’t feel lucky to lead the life you do after reading this, there is something wrong with you.

Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews – Her rock-solid, heart-filled voice proves that it’s the person you develop away from the typewriter through your own life and the true acceptance of contradiction that are key to making you a good writer.

Marc enjoyed the Hunger Games series about a scary, sci-fi reality television show and this might in fact make for more typical late-summer beach reading.

What's happening

(Molly Stevens, Untitled (small drawing 3),2010, Oil Stick on Paper, 22" x 30")

It’s just that I don’t know where to take this blog. I’ve been writing twice a week for three years now as a way to organize my thoughts and also to activate my “web presence,” as they call it. I’m concerned if I stop now, I’ll become disorganized in my thinking and anonymous on the web. There’s white and there’s black. Always.

I could continue to write about shows. I could continue to complain about the art world and the inequities of becoming recognized. I could continue describing the processes of artmaking to myself and maybe to you. But I don’t really feel like it. No, I’m not depressed or discouraged, I just don’t feel like it. That said, if I feel like jumping off a bridge, should I? There’s what you feel, and then there’s what you do.

So, if I haven’t lost you all by now already, I hope you'll tune in next time.