What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Part 1

I went to Savannah, GA. I escaped this humid historic beach town on the marsh for another humid historic beach town on the marsh and I loved it! Actually I found Savannah surprisingly different from Charleston in that it felt more lived-in (less "preserved" than the Charleston Peninsula) and more socially liberal, probably because of all the SCAD kids.  God I was jealous of the SCAD kids. I'm not tossing that off lightly, I mean to say that jealousy of the SCAD kids almost ruined my vacation. There they were in a glorious beautiful town whereas I went to school in DC, an oppressive ball-sac of a city. They were kids in art school and I'm... well... an adult.

But I managed to have a great time with my lovely husband anyway. Savannah's got a great museum called the Telfair, which is actually three centers: the Jepson (contemporary art; folk art), the Telfair (historic Western art in a mansion, plus more folk art), and the Someone-or-Other House, a beautiful historic home from 1809 (I think) with slave quarters and service basement (the most interesting part of the tour). You buy a ticket that gets you into all three places once any time over the course of a week, a great system because there is so much to see.

[Image: the interior of the Jepson Center with white walls and sunlight streaming through the glass ceiling and creating a stripey effect on the walls that morpsa throughout the day depending on the light and weather.]

Jepson Center is an incredible building. I've seen a lot of big white minimalist museums in my time but this place was just big enough to be breathtaking but no bigger, white enough to be calming but not cold, and full of curves that created a soaring airy atmosphere without being hard to navigate. We unexpectedly spent the majority of our time messing around in the kid's educational section where my husband encountered an interactive music software table. Four measures of music bars are printed on the tabletop and you place wooden blocks where you want the beat to go. A thing above your head scans the bars repeatedly and plays the beats as you've arranged them in a loop in real time. You can scatter numerous beats across a measure and the tenor of the sound changes depending on where on the staff you place the block. It was addictive.

[Image: my husband hunched over a table playing with the music thing I described.]

There were plenty more well-designed absorbing stations in the kid's area that really got me thinking about how one should teach kids about art. When I was a kid a museum educational area always had some state-of-the-art interactive station involving computers which was always broken and roped off, leaving the museum with no other funds for further "exploration" except some dubious station involving filthy chip-board cut-out shapes with rounded child-safe edges that you arranged in order to "discover" some concept that no one really cared about. And a fiberglass mascot of the particular area of study that you could climb on. But not at the Jepson.

The staff also had an exhibit up outside the museum offices and I'm just going to say it: the staff show was better than the content of most galleries in Charleston. 

In one of the real galleries they were showing Betsy Cain: In Situ. She's a local artist who makes large abstract paintings by swirling acrylic paint over smooth surfaces with a squeegee. Oh man, they were gorgeous. Floor-to-ceiling huge, they were so big you really got a feeling for the way the painter's body moves as she applies the paint. Check out her work!

[Image: Betsy Cain, Indigofera #4. Vertical abstract composition with blackish indigo thick swirling marks smeared out or watered down to light indigo in some places on a white background. Lots of drips and visceral smearing.]

China, IL

I think I was alerted to Brad Neely's new show, China IL, on Adult Swim through some sort of newfangled subliminal advertising because one day Creased Comics popped into my head for no reason, then I remembered how awesome it was and felt compelled to tell other people, then the George Washington and Wizard People things came up in conversations, then when I was strolling along some street in Atlanta I saw an awesome mural painted on the side of a shop advertising the show. But that is OK because I am SO EXCITED. If you've been reading this blog for a long time-- and you probably haven't-- I've had a link to Creased Comics as one of my favorites for EVAH. My husband and I are always whining to each other, "don't be a shit in my cut!" Sometimes when I am experiencing social anxiety I sing to my self, "be... agressive! B-E-agressive!" Yes, I said it.

[Image: Cartoon drawn crudely but with smooth thin lines and colored with mostly pastel solids except bright red blood. An anchorman with puffy yellow hair and a serious, bland expression reports live in front of what could be a sidewalk full of dead or injured blood-spattered people with a giant baby and a plume of smoke rising in the background. Image is very ambiguous.]

The animation is a little smoother, and the pictures actually move. I miss the old animation, but that's probably really hard to do in large quantities so I forgive Neely. It's also not quite as strange, unfortunately, but it still has plenty of stream-of-consciousness near-logic and near-slang. Hulk Hogan plays the voice of the Dean. I don't have a TV, I don't have cable. But I saw a few clips of it on YouTube. I am cautiously hopeful that it will be the best thing ever.

To Catch a Sparrow or Net a Fox

I stopped by the opening of To Catch a Sparrow or Net a Fox, a show on view at Oak Barrel Tavern with the work of Lisa Shimko, Hirona Matsuda, Sara Boyts Yoder, and Lisa Abernathy. I'd already seen Lisa Shimko's work since we both rented studios at Tivoli, and I'd already seen Lisa Abernathy's stuff at another show at Oak Barrel Tavern a month or so ago.

Lisa Shimko does fantastic paintings that are sometimes a mix of abstract and figurative, with birds often, and sometimes purely abstract colors and shapes. The abstract stuff is my favorite because they are freely expressive and loose and her colors are phenomenal.  So I was surprised when she showed, instead, lots of index card-sized paintings of illustration-style animals on decorative backgrounds. She's very talented and they were priced very affordably, so... buy them now. While you can.


[Image: vertical rectangular layout on an index-card-sized burgundy paper with markings that has been painted over. Background is divided equally by horizon line, with sky a light dove grey with thick brushstrokes and ground a darker dove grey with little grey-green vertical marks creating a grass-like texture. In forground there's a yellow post silhouetted by the ground upon which a finch (??) is perched, silhouetted by the sky. It's a side view of a very realistically painted grey, black and white bird.]

I didn't get any photos of Lisa Abernathy's stuff because it was behind reflective glass, inside, at night, and I had a full beer in one hand. So, here's some photos from that older show that I'd intended to write about but never did.

[Image: greeting-card-sized collage behind glass with a thick black decorative frame. Background is covered with newspaper- or dictionary-like paper scattered and layered at odd angles. Foreground is a black paper cutout with a scalloped frame, as in a stage set, with a cartoonish or exaggerated female figure sitting at a crazy, unnatural angle, holding something-- a typerwriter?-- with a word bubble coming out of her mouth that I cannot read due to my own crap photography. Words are cut out of paper. Two more word bubbles float upward.]

[Image: collage behind glass, framed in thick wood frame. Background is vintage whitish-pastel print of a cottage, country land and flowers. Foreground is black paper cutout with scalloped frame. Puffy clouds "hang" down from the top like a stage set, three sparse trees with hanging-down leaves or Spanish moss and some flowers and grass grow from the bottom of the frame. A female figure in a dress "flies" across, also suspended by strings, blowing puffs of air that look like swirls.]

She had more paper cutouts but this time they were more stark black paper on white backgrounds. There was a tiger face baring its fangs and inside its mouth a small peaceful figure beckoning to the viewer. Others were classic storytelling devices with unexpected twists-- not overwrought irony, I mean *actually* unexpected twists-- and a jungle-like feeling. Once you get past the rich texture and the impressive technique of the work the content is dreamy and imaginative. She uses vintage textiles or papers and silhouettes to tell stories but somehow, somehow avoids preciousness. She also evoked a little of that Southern tradition of antebellum, often racist silhouette scenery in her last show-- again with unexpected twists-- but this work seemed more African- and Southeast Asian- influenced.

 I liked Sarah Boyts Yoder's paintings, so I'm glad she's got another show coming up that opens Oct. 8 on view right now at Flagship. She had big abstract blue, white and black paintings on canvas with some collage and sharpie involved. There's not much to write about, as this is the kind of art that it's best to just look at. The mark-making was fluid and confident, the colors were deep and bold, the compositions were dynamic and lively... good stuff. I didn't notice the nautical theme until I glanced at the titles, which were all about boats and the sea. But once I did the paintings could all be read loosely as illustrations of wave motion and the waterline that, like the other work at the show, told a story.

[Image: several of Yoder's paintings grouped on a wall, ranging from a 10 x 10 inch square canvas to a two-ish by three-ish foot canvas]

[Image: smaller square canvas with collage and abstract painting. Top is a large blue scallop shape, like clouds. Middle-top swath is thickly textured bright white "sky," and bottom half is a jumble of blue, black and white shapes on grey "waves." The literal reading as a seascape is very iffy.The waves are filled with patterned markmaking, collage-ed paper and two black upside-down "U" shapes.]

I was primed by the storytelling theme to see Hirona Matsuda's shallow, almost 2-D wall-hanging sculptures as narratives too, even though if I'd seen them isolated on some white wall somewhere I'd have immediately thought of Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Modernism, and Abstract Expressionism. When I see more of Hirona Matsuda's work around Charleston I'll probably write a post about it, b/c I need a little time to think it over.

[Image: several of Matsuda's sculptures hanging on a wall, one box long and vertical, about 1 x 3 feet, one smaller, maybe 8 x 10 inches, one maybe a foot square.]

[Image: shallow 12-inch-square sculpture, like a shadow-box or diorama in a black frame. Inside is grey concrete-like texture with two shelves on the upper right and two black wires run vertically in front of the shelves. Rusted found objects are placed on the shelves and there's a rusted porcelain doorknob standing at the left of the shelves with an old skeleton key dangling above it from the top of the piece.]

Go see the show, it's at Oak Barrel Tavern in Avondale, 825-B Savannah Highway, on view thru late October.

Crazy stupid love

So I saw Crazy Stupid Love the other night. Aaaannnnd... I sorta liked it? Romantic comedies usually suck because they're generally not funny and because they aren't romantic. Like, usually the woman girl is knocked off her high horse (which I'm supposed to savor because I'm supposed to hate and pity successful women?) and humiliated by one thing after another. The guy and girl hate each other. That's not very romantic. The guy is usually cocky enough for this scene to be included: [Her:]"Oh yeah? Well you don't know anything about me!," [Him:]"Ok, [describes details of her life and outlines her insecurities in the most insulting patronizing way possible]," [Her face becomes shocked, then she makes a pitiful attempt at covering it:] "You think you're pretty smart, huh? [humiliation followed immediately by sex]."

Helene Schjerfbeck

I'm linking to a great post about Finnish painter and avid self-portraitist Helene Schjerfbeck at Echidne's blog. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to link to the post and not the entire weekly archive of posts, as the blog format is weird to me, but scroll down till you see Mademoiselles Who Dabble With Paints: Helene Schjerfbeck. If you don't feel like reading words scroll further down to see a very cool progression of self portraits throughout this woman's life that also chronicles early 20th century artistic movements.



[Image: a photograph of the painter from the 1890's or so dressed very modestly, sitting tall and looking a little wary of the photographer.]

Walter Knestrick & Red Grooms

Portraits by lifelong friends Red Grooms and Walter Knestrick:




Walter Knestrick, self portrait
[Image: realistic, though slightly primitive watercolor of man with grey hair, glasses, friendly smile, blue and white checked shirt, swirly dark blue background. Looks like a painting of a snapshot.]





Walter Knestrick by Red Grooms
[Image: scratchy, cartoon-y watercolor and pencil sketch of exaggeratedly emaciated, tall thin man with glasses consisting of two white circles and crazy hair. He stands off-kilter and wears a dark blue shirt. Piece is about five times as tall as it is wide, figure has giraffe neck and the arms and torso are about four times as long as they should realistically be. Brushstrokes are messy and expressive.]

Self Portrait today, by me.

[Image description: self-portrait of slack slouching head and shoulders in marker and charcoal on white paper. Kind of cubist, kind of cartoony, a little grotesque. Contoured shapes of pure fauvist (exaggerated) colors along the face and body, some lines descriptive of shoulder muscles, with spine and skeletal teeth showing through. Slightly unfinished looking.]

I'll be back tomorrow

I got really burnt out this past week or two but I'll be back blogging (and in contact with the outside world) tomorrow. I've half-written about the rest of the artist lectures: Greg Hart, Nina Garner and DH Cooper, and maybe an overview kind of thing too, and I want to get those up.

wet sponges and the dark abysm of pish

I was looking up the origins of "butt-hurt" on Urban Dictionary to prove a point when I ran across this:

"H.L. Mencken said of U.S. President Warren G. Harding, 'He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.'"

I wish that the pressure visual artists experience to prove their dedication to craft through slavish repetition or to make the same point continuously for a lifetime did not cause us to toss succinctness out the window. Also, "flap and doodle" is now my go-to private assessment of most things.

Artist Lecture at the City Gallery: Alan W. Jackson!

[Images originally published in Charleston Magazine, republished here with permission from Jackson]

Clement Greenberg, the famous '50s - '60s Modernist art critic, used to say that art should be judged and experienced virtually free of context, that it should stand on its own. You don't need to know about the artist or the scene.

I took a look at Alan W. Jackson's pen drawings at the City Gallery's "Under the Radar" exhibit, without any context besides the gallery atmosphere and here's what I saw. Just under ten abstract black & white line drawings on white paper framed in white behind glass. They were all based on simple patterns, drawn in the same size pen using lines only. Though they appeared very precise the hand execution allowed for subtle texture and undulations to appear. The finished pieces looked very polished and the titles simply described the pattern or method.



I thought the pieces might be engaging modernity, somehow related to digital love/hate. They reminded me of Agnes Martin's grid pieces but didn't seem to reflect any ethereal or spiritual qualities that defined those Martin pieces. Instead they seemed more bold, the hand-made variations dealing with clarity rather than uncertainty. The meaning, intention and even effect of the work was ambiguous.

As it turns out meeting Alan W. Jackson and hearing him speak about his work is a fantastic argument against Clement Greenberg's theory* of viewing artwork independently of the artist or context. Jackson, an architect and draftsman, explained that before the industry switched to auto-CAD everything was drawn by hand. First it was pencil on velum, then he switched to pen on mylar. Remarkably Jackson and his partner have re-imagined hand-rendered architectural drawing and still produce it professionally. Jackson showed many slides of the architectural drawings illustrating the very subtle differences in techniques; he didn't merely reference the idea of drafting, he wanted us to really look at the subtle differences, a quality that is reflected in his work.

Jackson then began doodling and that grew into free-association abstract line compositions. He showed the work to a friend in the art world and was encouraged to show it, and over time he developed the drawings hanging in the City Gallery.

He cited Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt as inspiration. He appreciated Hesse's graphic abstractions more than any critical ideas associated with Hesse. LeWitt is famous for producing instructions to make a drawing then allowing others to create the works independently. Rather than capitalizing on the standard idea of LeWitt as a hands-off conceptual artist, however, Jackson connected with the idea of using simple instructions or a set of confines to complete a line drawing. One of Jackson's pieces, for example, is only broken vertical lines that cannot touch. Another is a series of sections of vertical lines each beginning with a wavy line and the rest reflecting that wave but gradually straightening out. Perhaps the ambiguity of his work has to do with similarities in appearance to such vastly different artists as Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin.

Having heard Jackson speak the drawings now resembled a detailed plan or blueprint for a hand-knitted organic scarf or handwoven basket. Moreover the work and Jackson himself reminded me of a very difficult-to-describe type of curiosity that I associate with artists such as M.C. Escher, N. C. and Andy Wyeth (and the whole Wyeth family), and James Gurney, who illustrated Dinotopia and writes a fun blog about illustration. It's a science-y, empirical, experimental and myopic sort of curiosity. I generally run across this attitude in biographies or films that really depict how an artist works or views life and it is usually reflected in the sketchbooks, planning stages and odd side projects of the artists, i.e. the offshoot of a "serious" ouvre which reflects the craftsmanship side or underside of art-making.



Indeed drawing has long been associated with planning, not only in architecture but in old Academic traditions for both painters and sculptors. While daVinci's sketches and mock-ups may be priceless today such drawings were generally not valued as pieces unto themselves until the twentieth century. While the French Academie of the 1800s considered drawing more philosophical and painting itself to be associated with lowly craft and thus encouraged emphasis on tone and value over painterly color in a finished painting (according to Waldemar Januszczak in Techniques of the Great Masters of Art) the actual preliminary drawings were not themselves valued.

But by producing finished, polished pieces that begin and end with what's on the page (i.e. no reams of preliminary sketches but beginning with the instructions and ending with the finished drawing) Jackson has conflated the ends with the means. Even more interesting, his background in literally making plans has positioned the plan as the finished product. In this way he is similar to Sol LeWitt but in Jackson's case the plan itself is also an art object.

After hearing Jackson speak his work also brings to mind Piet Mondrian in that he has broken down visual expression into its very simplest elements--black lines on white paper--and is pushing the limits of what is possible in order to get the maximum expression from the simplest possible means. Mondrian was very involved in spiritual movements and was interested not only in pushing the simplest of formal elements to the visual max, but pushing visual representation itself beyond the physical realm and into the metaphysical. Jackson mentioned no such thing in his lecture but the pieces certainly are calmly awe-inspiring in terms of what is possible with the simplest broken line and a human mind.



*How ironic is it that a professional art critic would come up with the theory that a piece of art should stand alone without accompaniment? Way to write yourself out of existence.

Traffic

I took a look at the traffic (if you can call it that) for this blog. To the two individuals who searched for "mila kunis nude art," and "fucking hipster copycat," I'm sorry to disappoint.

Carmelo Gannello, John Bramblitt, and Petros Roukoutakis

"What is art, anyway?" asks Elisabeth Axel in this video. "Is it the image in the artist's mind or the painting hanging on the museum wall?" Axel isn't talking about post-structuralism or Death of the Artist. She is instead introducing art education for blind people and how it works.

The late Carmelo Gannello was a severely visually impaired artist whose vision was obscured by flashing, intense or dark orbs in his eye. He incorporated the orbs into his work at the suggestion of his doctor. It was hard to find examples of his work but I really love his stark graphic abstractions. Creating an image of an eye that isn't grandiose or cliche is a tall order but here you go:

Carmelo Gannello, Running River. Woodblock print (9" x 11"), 1977.

[Image description: A bluish-black and white geometric abstract print with obvious carving marks. A cube, multiple circles and concentric circles intersect each other in front of a body of water with crude mountains and sky in the background. On the left a pair of scissors morphs into what could be an eye so that they both become the outline and the blades appear to be encircling the eye as if to cut it. The eye also functions as a sun whose beams enter the cube and shine on a fish. The style is similar to Paul Klee and Joan Miro.]

I found some more videos of artists who are working completely without vision, by feel only. John Bramblitt, who lost his vision later in life, does some absolutely amazing portraiture. I really wish I could find more video showing his and others' working process (most of these videos understandably focus on how inspirational the artists' efforts are). Intensely valuing color was another common theme, which surprised me considering some of the artists featured had never seen color before.

Petros Roukoutakis, a Greek sculptor who is blind. [Video shows Roukoutakis at a table sculpting a one foot tall clay female figure who looks like an early Picasso figure or a more representational Henry Moore figure. He uses his fingers only, no tools, creating a smooth rounded surface. The effed up music is not really descriptive of what's shown in the video.]

Another video of John Bramblitt, who does a great job at describing what he's doing (ahem, not all artists can do that well). [Video description: it shows him feeling a plaster mold of a face, then making some preliminary sketches using a paste or paint that he squeezes onto paper, creating a raised line. He then prepares a canvas, creates such a raised outline in white, then using a brush fills in colors which are very precise realistic colors for a very realistic looking face. He creates the portrait on the left side of the horizontal canvas, then fills the right side with fluid, loose, thick vertical dashes of bright blues, greens, and yellows that correspond to the music notes he describes. He then stretches the canvas.]

The first video I linked to, "What is Possible: Art Education for the Blind," depicts how a blind gallery goer can appreciate an art object by feel if such a tour program is available. It occurred to me that conceptual art and art that eschews the object-hood of artwork would be particularly accessible to not only blind people but people with other sensory disabilities or people who cannot leave their homes easily to see a piece of art in question.

I'm happy to say I think large portions of this blog are very appropriate for someone without sight, so I'm going to try to make this blog more accessible: image descriptions under the pictures I post, descriptions of how the work in question is situated within a gallery. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Special Announcement:

There will be no critical analysis of Harry Potter on this blog. Should this inconvenience you I refer you to the rest of the Internet.

Artist Lecture at the City Gallery: Conrad Guevara!

So yesterday I wrote about Melinda Mead, who spoke with Conrad Guevara at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. I'm quoting from memory, so hopefully it's accurate!

Yes I took these with my iPhone in a dimly lit gallery. Sorry. If you really want to see the work go to the show.

Like all great things Guevara's talk was in the form of a PowerPoint Presentation, in which he showed what inspired him: photos of the kids he teaches, the materials he uses, and a music video with a bunch of people rushing a basketball court, with pompoms, spotlights and dry ice. "I love this, it's so... everything is great. So I wanted to make the mylar like--" he pauses as we watch a man in a gorrilla suit making a slam dunk go sailing through a cloud of glitter and dry ice in slow motion--"a party."

Guevara had 3 things on display: a crocheted pipe sculpture, a cut-paper "painting," and an installation of 4 large sculptural panels covered with grids of fluttering cut silver mylar (assisted by a small oscillating fan) and painted hot pink at the back. I would classify them as "modernist toys." As in, toy versions of modernist painting and sculpture. I'm saying "modernist," and I mean the highbrow cult of Abstract Expressionism of the 50's and 60's and the criticism of it, plus to an extent some Minimalism which can be seen as an extension of formal abstract experiments and was admired by the same sort of crowd. Guevara used the word, "serious." "I want to communicate these serious ideas and have serious work, but disguised with this easy-to-digest fun style," he explains, referring to the sparkle-tastic mylar and candy-colored squishy yarn.

"Exploding Pipes at the Pompidou"

As a teacher, communicating "serious" ideas in a fun way is obviously important to Guevara. He said he wants kids to be able to relate to his work and was particularly happy that one of his mylar sculptures was hanging in the Children's Museum (the birthday party room!). This could be why I got the impression they were toys.

Guevara also talked about getting studio space in Redux and how that changed his process and really encouraged a flow of ideas and focus. He describes how he got materials-- paper, paint samples, a bag of free yarn-- and how relieved he was to have such cheap materials to use (omg, I can relate). He seems to have stuck with them, though, and they seem to be working really well for him. In this way he seemed to portray himself as a bit of an outsider to professional art-making, focusing on kids, free materials, and a "not serious" approach. I didn't get that from his work at all, though. In fact, of what I see of local artists, Guevara's work seems the most likely to be at home in a big city gallery and be really finely attuned to postmodern trends.

Yarn and fabric, for instance, have been popular choices since the '70s. When artists got frustrated with the limitations of the "cult of Modernism," I mentioned earlier, or Very Serious Abstract Expressionism, there was an outpouring of theretofore completely unacceptable artwork: art by women, crafters, illustrators, performers, people of color, openly gay people, and people with non-NY/LA backgrounds who had all been conspicuously excluded from the so-called 'universal' Modernist movement. Flaunting that which had been forbidden, many women utilized traditional women's crafts like sewing and crocheting as a means of sculpture (as opposed to steel, marble or bronze of the Modernist heyday) and later artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres used ordinary objects and large quantities of cheap, fun stuff associated with nightlife and ordinary life (as opposed to strictly oil paint on canvas).

"The Universe Pokes Holes In You." Guevara explained that the title referenced when things in your life seem to be on an upward trajectory and then your plans get sliced in half by The Universe.

Paper has also gained popularity as a postmodern material of choice. It brings so many things to mind: illustration, comic books, note-taking, education, office work, sketches, magazines, transitory throwaway stuff that had no place in Serious Modernism but is now the focus of inquiry. Mylar, similarly, is a material more visual artists are familiar with today as it is simply a newer product (developed in the mid-1950s and used by... wait for it... NASA) and as photography, printmaking, industrial design, old-fashioned hand-done graphic design and other technical fields are celebrated in visual arts curricula (a departure from the '60s) more visual artists are introduced to the material. Mylar has also been popular because it looks like commercial packaging and is *shiny* so has been a popular choice to access a modern commercial aesthetic.

But one interesting thing about the way Guevara used these materials is that, as he explained, they were cheap. But rather than use cheap materials to make a purposefully shoddy-looking product (as did many conceptual artists and Arte Povera artists who sought to criticize the "beautiful, original, expensive art object" values of Serious Art) or taking wildly expensive materials and making them look like shit (as does Jeff Koons or some of those Young British Artists) Guevara has taken cheap materials and made them look like either an expensive designer toy or famous high-priced paintings. Each object he displayed is highly finished and very covet-able. Moreover the cheap products he's using are only cheap in a modern industrialized country: only because of high capitalism, for instance, are reams of neon polyester yarn or millions of immaculately screen-printed paint samples a cheap byproduct.

Moreover the paper, as Guevara used it to mimic a Serious Painting, suggests the way the current generation of artists understands Modernism. We usually only see it on paper: in books, in abstracts of famous essays, photocopied and handed out. Postmodern artists usually reference Modernism in order to play around with the ideas or critique it or completely tear it down. But in order to reference it we collectively construct a quick intellectual mock-up of the movement in order to tear it down. Developing a visual short-hand for "the way things used to be" is essential, and I would argue that that short-hand consists partially of pedestals, canvases, drips, the Mona Lisa, images of 1950s housewives and the color white. The way Guevara used both yarn and paper, though obviously very time-consuming, suggests just such a quick mock-up. The yarn, too, suggests the playful malleability of Modernist ideas in the hands of the current generation.

Still his aim remains unclear to me. He said in the lecture that he wants to disguise Serious Stuff in a fun and kid-friendly way and not once did he mention satire. But his work isn't an all-out party. The pieces themselves are very careful and contained and this suggests a flip-side of doubt or unease. Before hearing him speak I interpreted an element of bitter sarcasm in the work, a sort of love-hate relationship with the work he was referencing (the Centre Pompidou, the minimalist work of Donald Judd, Barnett Newman and unnamed Abstract Expressionists). His fun packaging slices through the bullshit "untouchable genius" narrative built around the Modernists but also through the respectability of those artists. Of course it doesn't necessarily follow that in the wake of this respectability one would hate the Modernists; there is still room for appreciation, fondness, curiosity. Entire generations of Dadaists, Pop Artists and Surrealists came and went without ever dismantling the public awe of Modernism and Serious Art.

His work will be up at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park (i.e. Pineapple Fountain park) as part of the Under the Radar show till July 31, along with work by D.H. Cooper, Rebecca West Fraser, Nina Garner, Melinda Mead, Greg Hart, Alan W. Jackson and Lauren Frances Moore. So go see it! Plus hopefully I'll be writing about the next two artist lectures, which are this Saturday, July 16 and the next Saturday, July 23 at 5 pm.

Edit: Oh yeah, I almost forgot! I blogged about Guevara's work a few months ago, from the ReNude show.

Artist Lecture at the City Gallery: Melinda Mead!

Please pardon the shitty photography (my photos of the work, not Melinda Mead's)

"We all look for truth in photos, right?" explains Melinda Mead to a crowd of 50 or so people in City Gallery looking at a wall of her photos. There are around 6 on one wall, and 6 more around the corner. I'd guess they're between 11 x 14" and 14 x 17", matte digital prints mounted on some thick board with no frame or border, all in lush color and rich contrast. "As a record of who did what, how it was, who really has friends on Facebook, if Osama Bin Laden is really dead." [I am quoting the best I can from memory for this entire post] "So are they truthful? NO! These look like photos of people in their rooms having a solitary, somber moment. But I'm RIGHT THERE with my camera. We were making jokes and small talk. And I had to edit hundreds of images to get these."

I fell victim to editing before I even saw the show. I knew nothing about Mead or her work, only the snippet of one of her photos on display from City Gallery's advertisement: a young woman lit ethereally brushing her hair and looking in the mirror. "Oh great," I thought. "Another young, pretty woman artist who makes images of young pretty women doing pretty things." Sure there are artists who do this really well-- I've blogged about them before-- but it's usually a lazy trend that I'm just tired of. Fortunately when I got to the gallery I discovered I was flat wrong.

The photos are of Mead's friends, all in their 20's or 30's, some of them recognizable Charleston artists, alone in an interior space. The images are all crisp but it's obvious from the dim lighting that the exposures were up to several seconds long. That, combined with the thoughtful or mundane expressions and depictions of chores or processes being competed, imbues the images with a strong sense of elapsing time. The figures are small, framed by interiors that function as a formal extension of their thoughts while at the same time as a pedestal that objectifies them to the viewer. In one group of 6 the interiors are curved and organic, as in a van, or large and mostly empty. On the other wall the interiors are all mashups of rectangular door-frames, bookshelves, magazines and and furniture that Mead shot parallel or perpendicular to the edge of the photo so that they are flattened and collage-like with a person in the middle. I completely forgot I was looking literally through Mead's camera and that she was present in the shoot, just as I wasn't aware of myself, the viewer, looking at the scenes.




Mead explained that she got into photography like most people: to document friends and family so you can look back later and have a record of what things and people were like. But the reality, she said, of photography is that you want what's in the photo, what's already happened, but it isn't real. Taking photos and looking at them are inherently an exercise in nostalgia and loss. Mead says she didn't realize it while shooting this series but she now understands that she was reacting to her mother's recent death. Many of the images deal with grief in that they're solitary and solemn, dim with a figure turned away from the light source. But she also seems to have utilized the medium of photography perfectly in order to express elements of grief: that which a photographer falsely creates to prevent its passing and then grasps after it has passed.

I also thought it was interesting that, when presented with the challenge of working outside the conventional bounds of a medium that is normally trusted for truth, reality and accuracy, Mead chose to make images that were even more real. The dim lighting, composition and form all enhance the "solitary moments" subject-matter so that the viewer sees the content but also poetically and instinctively feels the mood. Although Mead posed some of the shots and issued instructions she ended up with overly accurate images. While many photographers when faced with the "photography = reality" problem would tweak subject-matter to depict a physically impossible situation or turn to some sort of surrealism, I think hyper-reality is a daring and rigorous solution.




The Q&A afterward was cool because the audience was engaged and thoughtful and Mead did a great job both communicating basic photography concepts and getting to the interesting stuff. Everyone wanted to know: what was it really like? How did you talk to the subjects? How did they feel? What are your own private moments like? Would it have been different if they weren't your friends? Which were most difficult? Why these people? Her description of what it was like to involve her friends in a formal project was especially interesting to me as a portrait artist who has a really hard time asking people to pose.

Her work will be up at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park (i.e. Pineapple Fountain park) as part of the Under the Radar show till July 31, along with work by D.H. Cooper, Rebecca West Fraser, Nina Garner, Conrad Guevara, Greg Hart, Alan W. Jackson and Lauren Frances Moore. So go see it! Plus hopefully I'll be writing about the next two artist lectures, which are this Saturday, July 16 and the next Saturday, July 23 at 5 pm. Next: Artist Lecture Part 2: Conrad Guevara!

A belly from a painting I'm working on right now.

Thar she blows.

Forever Cute

[Image: Zooey Deschanel dressed in pale pink in the sunshine holding up a heart necklace]

Sorry this is so long, but I have a lot to say:

I enjoyed this thoughtful post from What Tami Said: Who is the black Zooey Deschanel? No one really tries to identify a black Zooey, though, because what she is really asking is, can a black woman pull off a cutesy, innocent/sexy, intellectual yet vapid little-girl aesthetic? Does society give black women room to define themselves in this way? As Tami pointed out in another post, a white woman streaking her hair pink is seen as whimsical while a black woman doing that is seen as "ghetto." Both posts and comment threads I highly recommend reading.

[Image: Nicki Minaj, also in a pink dress, making cute face, and with pink hair, literally impersonating a child's toy.]

While there understandably wasn't much love given to this trendy eternal-little-girl persona on a post about how this mode of self-expression is unfairly racially exclusive, or examination of why white women might choose this on a blog that isn't about white people, I think digging deeper in this issue is actually very pertinent to Tami's question. I realize many women use cutesy-ness to be transgressive, that there is deeper meaning at work for many lesbians, sex workers, forty-year-old women who've defined themselves differently in the past, and many many more situations. But this is a mega-trend and since 80% of people don't seem to think deeply about anything at all, I'm going to assume 80% of the trend followers haven't thought deeply about this either. And to be as clear as possible, the "cutesy" I'm talking about is what I think of as Etsy, alternative precious weddings, Real Simple Magazine, cupcakes obsessives, DIY tissue paper pom-poms, and yes, Zooey Deschanel's persona. And no, I don't have a problem with people who are into this stuff (or Deschanel). It doesn't make you stupid or shallow. I myself enjoy a stiff drink even more if it's pink and coordinated with a pastel retro tablescape.

Let's say a white girl doesn't like being sexed up like a reality star. She doesn't enjoy the Barbie persona, doesn't enjoy the snap judgements or the way people treat sexed-up women, doesn't enjoy the harassment, doesn't enjoy the objectification. Let's say she doesn't want to focus her life on male attention, either. But she also wants to stay within the acceptable limits of what girls do. She's not about to grow out her pit-hair and spend tedious hours reading up on The Male Gaze. She doesn't want to be one of those Icky Girls. She wants to be a girly-girl, but on her own terms.

Louise Brooks, in a boyish bob, cupid's-bow lipstick and sailor costume. She was extremely young in these photos and a poster-girl for "boyish" figures, i.e. small-breasted and straight-hipped.

Probably the only time a woman in her 20s or 30s remembers feeling free of The Sexiness is early childhood. It's just about the only time in a woman's life where she is deemed "ok" by society. Hopefully it's pre-dieting, pre-making sure you keep your legs together when sitting in a skirt, pre-skeevy-uncles, pre-slut-shaming, pre-prude-shaming. This would not be the first time women rebelled by channeling childhood. Remember the flappers in the '20s who flaunted "boyish" (aka pre-pubescent) figures and loose clothing like a little girl might wear? Louise Brooks? Or the Sixties, when mod and Jackie-O prep styles both made women literally look like dolls (oversized hair, big eyes, clothes that were cut to make limbs look tiny and disjointed, that hide the waist and breasts)? It's a subtle way of saying, "I'm not a sex object. I'm a 'person,' not a 'woman.'"

Jackie O in doll-like dresses. Notice the proportions of head to body because of her bouffant, and the way the clothes slice her into movable parts. Compared with cinched-waisted, pointy bazooka dresses from the '50s these also downplay her breasts and waist.

And then there's the way the current trend (at least as opposed to other trends) centers itself around "female" experience, not performative femininity. For example, tweeting about adorable kittens, as Deschanel did, is basically for a female audience. Sharing childhood experiences is another big element ("Omg remember Thundercats/MyLittlePony/Full House???") and that is also about female community. People like Deschanel seem to be developing a sense of humor that is based around appealing to other women both on the cute level, the "our experiences are worth sharing," level and the girl-friendly gross-out level (I'm using "female" and "girl" as abstract ideas here). The guys in their universe can either get with the program or be relegated to the sidelines.

And it's not just "girly" ideas you can share, but intellectual stuff too. There's a strong current of liberal arts education, contemporary art/film/music awareness, and political awareness that comes rolled into this mega-trend, probably because of the affluence of the mainly white, slightly older participants.

And best of all you're still a good girl. You're still a desirable employee, a good daughter, a cute girlfriend, a good student, a good consumer.

So why is this a new (ish) trend? Why now? I know people in every decade believe women are being hyper-sexualized more than ever before but... I think women today are being hyper-sexualized more than ever before. Women in the workplace has been well-established since the '80s, and since the liberal '90s there has been a growing conservative backlash fetishizing domestic labor at the same time that working is just what women do. That requires delicate balance.

Also women--particularly middle-class women--are experiencing a decade-or-so-long no man's land between adolescence and doing traditional "grown woman" things: getting married, having kids, owning a house, having a Career-with-a-capital-C. Today there's often college, a few shit jobs you have to take where you're not treated like a real person followed by some fluff occupations while you're trying to figure stuff out, some hit-and-miss career moves, dating around and having a few long-term relationships, crazy room-mate situations, basically a time when you want to play around for a while and for the first time in history you can. Or for many, a time when you want to be treated like a grown effing adult but aren't. You graduated and haven't been able to get a job (any job!), or you have a humiliating job, or you have to move back in with your parents. Again, this requires a delicate balance and I think the eternal little-girl trend addresses this for lots of women.

Manet, "Bar at the Folies-Bergere." I think we all know how she feels.

But of course there are major, major problems with this, and I haven't even gotten to the issue Tami brought up yet. First, due to porn and legions of pervs, little-girl-hood isn't as desexualized as most would like it to be. In fact grown women infantilizing themselves is a huge turn-on to a lot of men. Because of the focus on female, not male appreciation I mentioned earlier I think many women can knowingly overlook this. Furthermore since there is a huge hipster-cute-little-schoolboy-aesthetic trend among guys, these women can often find plenty of men who share the childhood mentality instead of being pervy consumers of female sexualized infantalization. But I wouldn't put these guys in the majority. And while little girls may be mostly free of sexual stigma they aren't particularly powerful in society. Giggles and fantasy don't get you very far in a board meeting or an argument. The main problem with this persona: there is NO room for anger, power or raw sexual energy-- I'm talking about MAJOR HUMAN EMOTIONS here.

Deep breath. And here's my other point:

I think the media (mostly owned and/or run by white affluent men) uses black people and black stereotypes to be a fantasy outlet for white people who play by the rules. Black "bad-asses"--characters like Samuel L. Jackson's in Pulp Fiction and Shaft, and heavily produced personas like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent--function as fantasy outlets for white men and, somewhat, to white women, to the extent that many white men will, instead of expressing anger or misogyny in their own words, simply imitate black stereotypes. It's a way of saying the ugly shit you want to say but still having it be a joke (and a way to quickly earn my disgust).

Thus black women's stereotypes that get hyped in mainstream media are a directly related to white female fantasy (in addition to the old Women-of-Color-as-Exotic-Sexual-Deviants male fantasy). There's anger, power, raw sexual energy. I've seen many white women who, instead of simply standing up for themselves, imitate the neck-roll, finger-waving image as a way to say "Seriously, get out of my face" but in a cute, joking way. Even many positive-sounding phrases of empowerment used by white women are derived from black women because of the "power" fantasy: "You go, girl!" "Preach it sister!" "Right on!" "Tell it like it is!" etc. Plenty of white women directly imitate black women shown on MTV to express sexuality, too. I once saw an all-white, all-female Southern church group out at a bar being very prim and tittering until some music came on and a few of them ran to the dance floor and started booty-dancing and rolling their hips. They quit after a few minutes, all of them collapsing in laughter. They got to express their sexuality but not get in trouble for it because it's just a joke! A fantasy. Part of why reality shows seek out the same black female knock-down drag-out dramatic situations over and over is that there isn't any other viable female anger/power fantasy on TV. As the white girl cutesy trend has grown the angry black woman stereotype seems to get played in heavier rotation. White people can identify with certain black characters as fantasy, then imitate them to express emotions and attitudes that are forbidden.

I think Tami does a great job explaining why this is extraordinarily unfair to black women, both in this post and her entire blog, so I don't have much to add to that. But I'll point to the positive aspects of cutesy-ness I listed earlier that I didn't think were touched on in the post as a viable tool (however problematic) women use to circumvent societal pressure that is being denied Black women and other women of color. I also hope women who subscribe to the cutesy trend will give it some thought and perhaps develop some way to make it work for a full range of human emotion, including anger. Finally I hope that if any readers have ever thought of stereotypes assigned to Black women as Not Their Problem, that this post has illuminated just one way in which stereotyping Black women is gross and demeaning for all women, part of a system that sucks for everyone.

Noses

Opening credits on Ugly Betty.

In the past week, a woman between the ages of 40-ish and 60-ish whom I talked to while doing portraits, confided that she'd had a nose job when she was very young and that she didn't like the result. So I shouldn't draw her face. Then another woman between the ages of 40-ish and 60-ish told me, while I was doing portraits another day, that she'd had a nose job when she was very young and didn't like the results because she felt like the nose was someone else's, and was concerned about how some young women she knew felt about their own noses. Another woman asked me not to do her profile--she hated her nose. These were all within a week.

I can certainly identify to an extent: my nose is large, bent at the top, trapezoidal at the bottom, very shiny, and bumps up and down when I talk. I really, really wanted a different nose when I was younger because I thought it would make me prettier. I'm white, though, so I guess I got off easy with no pointed racial messages about my nose. People just said, "it gives you character," which doesn't mean much when you're a teenager and you're fed a bunch of hype about female beauty but none about female character. Strangers also frequently ask (!!) if I'm of Middle-Eastern/Greek descent. "No, why?" I ask. "Uhhh.... your eyelashes." Right.

Now I still think a straighter nose would make me prettier, but that would be a problem because my nose goes with my personality really well. Looking like a round-faced cute-nosed brown-haired girl would be misleading (see Sarah Vowell's story about wanting to appear more menacing and getting a goth makeover). All the same, I have no problem with cosmetic surgery in general. But it's such a shame people do it so young. I've heard lots of people in their forties say they're just starting to be comfortable with the way they look and are starting to understand the role (if any) that beauty plays in their lives. I guess it's not the nose you grow into, it's the idea that you're really, seriously not an object (and that can take a while).

So, since this week is apparently about nose-shame, instead of contributing something constructive about Patriarchy, I'll just post a "top ten" of my favorite noses, noses I simply appreciate. I have no idea if any of these people has had cosmetic surgery; either way, I like what they've got.

Comedian/actor Lily Tomlin

Actor Sandra Oh.

Snoop Dogg. And here's his nose in action:



Actor Sally Field, whose adorable looks never stopped her from throwing some of film's most memorable meltdowns.

Spanish actor Rossy de Palma.

Actor Julia Roberts, whose entire face fascinates me endlessly.

Actor/musician/comedian Jemaine Clement.


Actor/comedian Bill Murray.

Musician Nina Simone.


Actor Marc Indelicato, who played the adorable Justin on Ugly Betty. America Ferrera gets honorable mention with really expressive nostrils that she had the good sense to utilize throughout the series.

And an extra. Number 11, Actor, activist Audrey Hepburn.


Okay, just one more extra. Number 12, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Black Adder).

Sir Isaiah Berlin by Sir Lawrence Gowing at National Portrait Gallery, Britain

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller by Stephen Conroy at the National Portrait Gallery, Britain

Sir Michael Caine by James Hague at the National Portrait Gallery, UK

"Summer" at Rebekah Jacob Gallery

I stopped by Rebekah Jacob Gallery on my way home from some errand and unexpectedly viewed their new show pre-opening night. They've got the usuals: Tim Hussey, Timothy Pakron, Kevin Taylor. Their pieces are definitely worth another look as they're best viewed in person. Hussey's scraped and lightly sculpted surfaces, Taylor's smoothly glazed paintings and Pakron's large hand-processed photographs are more rewarding to see up close than photographed. There was also photography by Richard Sexton of the demolished crumbling building variety. I spent a long time looking at his photos, fantasizing about history in general, and feeling very Charlestonian.

My favorite, though --and SEE IT if you didn't see it at the Gibbes last year!!-- was Brian Rutenberg, who had two pieces up. I took myself out for my birthday to the Gibbes last year (or '09 maybe?) in time to see his show in that second-floor ballroom type gallery. The room has some sort of cupola-skylight thing, if I remember correctly, and a worn light wood floor, historical moulding, and double doors leading to a schmancy second gallery with ornate old globe chandeliers and large windows. The work itself was a series of medium-to-very-large canvases loosely--LOOSELY--depicting scenes from the woods in a very abstract, thickly painted, richly colored style. The sense of light filtering through branches and perspective was conveyed through saturated color and Diebenkorn/early Mondrian-style blocks of paint, with plenty of fractured, faceted shapes and a rich variety of brushstrokes and paint application. The paintings fit perfectly in the space: old/modern contrast, and both sharing a filtering of natural light in an almost sanctified space.

So, when I saw the to pieces at Rebekah Jacob Gallery I was disappointed at first, as that space is your typical white box, small and narrow with recessed lighting and a window at the front. But it turned out to be a more intimate place to view them. What was a medium size in the Gibbes seemed large in this gallery, and since there were only two I stopped for longer, looked closer, and appreciated the inner dynamics of the composition, which is rich, lively, and well-resolved. I could compare them to each other. Oddly, the space made them seem more "modern art"-y: paint for paint's sake, formal, angular and blunt,while at the Gibbes they seemed more narrative and lyrical. I have a serious art crush on this painter, so go see this stuff!!

Oorutaichi

The blog Contemporary Japanese Art has a post about Japanese musician & performer Oorutaichi that's worth a look. They describe him as performing, "his own progressive form of ‘drifting folklore music’ combining elements of dance, folk and pop. Singing with a palpable joy in his own invented language, while at the same time mashing and mixing driving base-lines with disco-kicks and synthesized freestyle beats." The second video is probably a good description of an annoying circular dream experience I have a lot, where you're trying to do something and all these obstacles come up that you have to deal with but you're never really done, just on a loop. Anyway, I think it's funny that "folk" can be this digitally sophisticated but I guess that's an honest description for someone that age in Japan in 2011, with "folk" being the flip-side of terms like, "crowd-sourcing," "networking," "DIY/guerrilla," etc.





Here's what this looks like live:

First painting I rememeber

This is definitely not the first painting I ever saw (my mom had actually made flashcards with famous paintings on them that she taught me along with the alphabet. She was very "classical music in the womb" at that point). But it is the first one I remember. I must have been 3 or 4 and was visiting my grandparents' Baptist church in rural Tennessee. We were walking down a basement corridor decked out in '60s office drab when I looked into a classroom decorated with smiling cartoon biblical men in beards, the "footprints in the sand" poster, and this poster in a frame:


I walked into the classroom, which wasn't lit and had some cloudy window light so I could see the poster. I sort of remember hearing the grown-ups exclaiming "damnit, where'd the kid go?" and just not caring. Someone eventually had to come find me. I told my mom I was looking at that painting and she said, "well, it's ok but not really my thing." It was SO my thing. She looked like a princess and I wanted to be a princess because, duh. But it was inexplicably so much cooler than "pretty." I thought it was cool how none of the whites were white and the composition (I didn't know that word) was weird. It seemed utterly mysterious.