Weeks five and six

So I guess I missed a week. This terrible betrayal on my part probably went largely unnoticed by most of you, but I did have several complaints. Several complaints, but only one complainer. So Dan, this Blog’s for you. Thanks for reading. And already I don’t know what move to make.

A large part of the reason for this blog’s lateness is due to the fact that last weekend I was anticipating results from my job interviews, and I wanted to fill everyone in on my good news simultaneously. Unfortunately, it seemed to be taking forever for them to get back to me, and so I kept delaying. Then, even more unfortunately, I got sick. And not just a few sniffles, but the whole delirious fever thing. So sick that I couldn’t even go to my own show opening on Thursday night. So I’m still pounding back the Neo-Citron even as I sit here trying to compose my thoughts amidst the swirl of psuedophedrines.

Ok, so lessee: On the job front: it looks like tomorrow I start my new job. I’m going to be a grantwriter for Momenta, an established not-for-profit gallery here in Williamsburg, though they’re contemplating a move to the city in the summer. You can check them out at

http://www.momentaart.org

They’re into mostly into politically active work, so it seems, and seem to be a fairly laid back organization. I think just got the job by the skin of my teeth, but hopefully I’ll be able to contribute as much as I learn.

I also managed to get a contract with a small dance company to do some grantwriting for them. My visit there on Saturday was fantastic, all these absolutely ADORABLE little black girls just barely able to contain their energy. Squirming around and bouncing – this is the future of the auto industry: not hydrogen, but little tiny dancer girls. So now I’m hooked and will totally do anything for those kids, which is probably why Kashani brought me there. I hope I do a good job for him.

So I’m now officially a grantwriter. The trouble is, even combined these jobs don’t give me a hell of a lot of hours. But I think they might cover rent, and give me some time to wander around aimlessly and plot my future. Which is very uncertain. Many of you have heard my ongoing art v politics debate, but that is a debate which is intensifying and decisions are going to have to be made pretty soon here. But now is neither the time nor the place for all that. Though that time and place are going to have to get here pretty soon.

So other than pacing around waiting for the phone to ring, I have become addicted to Strong Bad emails, and to the tv show Alias. Which I’m beginning to see is regrettable. I especially apologize to Holly, who I suspect is either the biggest Alias hater, or possibly a secret Alias lover. I was in need of vegetation, and my roommate own every season, every show. I’m on season three. My only excuse: temperature of 100.3.

What else have I been up to? Well, painting a fair bit last week, actually. I made three quite time-consuming studies of the CYMK process in various ways, none particularly successful, but they gave me the technology to compose the fourth, which is what went in the Square foot show. However, I had forgotten that the process I’m using requires at least six hours of drying between coats, and the final resin needs even more. So, professional that I am, three o clock on the day the thing is due finds me cranking up the oven, pulling out fans and hairdryers, and clamping light bulbs to furniture, all in an attempt to get the damn thing dry in time. Which it wasn’t. So I took it in and tried to hand it to the gallery owner and found the sides literally glued to my hands. She was impressed with my dedication, needless to say.

But alls well that ends well, and the work is on the wall and is, if I don’t say so myself, very shiny. As mentioned, I wasn’t even able to go to the opening, and today’s attempt to go to the “brunch reception” was a bit of a fiasco as the stupid L wasn’t running again and it all seemed to be over by the time I got there. The show looks really good though. A whole bunch of good work and a fair bunch of crummy work and one or two real gems. There is even one painting I think I must buy. Broke, starving artist that I am. But I think it is pretty hot. I think I should get it. And it isn’t that much money in the scheme of things.

This way madness lies. So, the report on the cliffhangers of last week: Got the jobs, got into the little art show thing. This week promises to be more exciting still, as I have the indomitable Christine Parsons in town for a visit. She has already taken me out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and introduced me to her high-flying NGO world-altering friends (one of whom is opening the new office of human rights watch in Beirut), and gone for a NYC marathon qualifying race in central park. It sucks to be sick when a friend is in town, especially as I haven’t had too many friends here, but at the same time it saves me the embarrassment of not being able to keep up! I’m going to try to get her to come to some of my more low-key activities (checking email, watching internet cartoons) like tomorrow night’s poker game. Most of you will be very pleased to hear that I have already, and seemingly without much effort, established a fairly happening game. Many of the players are suck – er, I mean new players, so I have fun giving them my advice, and that way don’t feel bad when I take their greenbacks. Ah, the sound of a freshly folded greenback patted onto the soft felt of a well-used table. Nothing like it.

Ok, wish me luck in my first day on the job tomorrow! And this one-way communication just isn’t working at all! This week public kudos go to Dan and Sarah for their near constant flood of emails (and devious opening chess maneuvers), but shame and retribution to all of you who are leaving me utterly in the dark concerning your joy-filled existences.

Week Four? Already a month?

It seems a month has gone by. Let me review: I have landed safely, acquired modest but comparatively inexpensive lodgings, survived numerous social encounters, maintained a stiff upper lip through some intense loneliness, endured the grueling rigors of the job hunt, witnessed a lifetimes supply of artwork, and, today, am experiencing New York in a snowstorm. Go to your mantelpiece, get the NYC snow globe that some acquaintance gave you long ago, give it a shake, and look inside: You should be able to see me buried in the drift on the left. So while you all bask in the warmth of the latest Chinook, you will pause to think of NYC shut down by a foot or two of real snow.

Based on the paucity of exciting events reported in my recent blogging, I made a concerted effort to get out and do a little more this week. Wednesday found me strolling pleasantly enough in Central Park, largely out of a sense of duty to do something “new yorky” as it was pretty cold that day. I also began work on a video project involving a small spitfire flying all over the city, with some success. By a great coincidence, that night I once again encountered Paul Auster reading a bit of poetry and talking with some New School muckity-muck. So that was pretty cool. It was a much smaller, more intimate and supposedly hush-hush event mostly for the benefit of New School grad students, but I found my way in, and then managed to videotape my spitfire flying around in New School with Mr. Auster in the background! So a bit of hijinx to start the week.

Then I went to the MET. Now this was an interesting day for me. Generally not a big fan of looking at a bunch of paintings of old dead white guys glowering down at me from their isolated lofts (which I believed was what a large part of the MET’s painting collection was all about), I was attracted by a big show of Rauschenberg’s combine works. For those of you who don’t know my artistic lineage it goes something like this: Basquiatà Warhol à Rauschenberg in order of introduction and importance to my early practice. Rauschenberg is huge! So it was quite surprising to me that I found the work fairly obvious and sorta “seen one seen ‘em all”. I guess his combines were never his most exciting pieces for me, but in still I found they looked just like what a lot of the better first year painting students get to by the end of their first year at ACAD. And this then led to other work of a similar era, all the modernist abstractions and minimalist oddities, and I was struck by one thing: All this work is only interesting in a historical context. The Rauschenberg combine was a crucial “invention”, an “important” extension of Duchamp and a pretty good gouge at the conventions of the time. I can appreciate them, as well as some damn neon tubes of some sort, as work interesting and important to the idea of the unfolding story of art, and that is no small thing. However, it is only one thing, one way to access this work, and ultimately I find it not enough. I understand what Malevich or whoever was up to with their clever white on white canvas, but I sure as hell don’t need to stand there looking at it. I understood it before I got there, and spending time with it gave me nothing extra. It is like an old bit of fossilized pottery, telling us that once upon a time a civilization made bowls (or art) that looked like this.

Compare with the paintings I was so dismissive of a paragraph ago, the big glowering white guys. Some of this work too can claim to be interesting from an art historical context, advancing the cause and so forth. We love to hear stories about how “radical” Gaugin or VVG was in their day, how they were ejected from the salon or whatever. So, like Rauschenberg, much of this work derives its value from its historical context. But unlike Rauschenberg, it also has this amazing legibility outside of any art context whatsoever. Much of the work is religious allegory, mythical illustration, memento-mori, aristocratic portraiture and the like, but here the context is not nearly so crucial. I am looking at a painting of a woman holding a sword in one hand and a man’s detached head in the other. What the hell is that all about? Hearing something about a Judith and Holfernes might change my ideas about the work, or give me a richer appreciation of some sort, but even without any EXTRA contextual work, I’m looking at a woman and a head! And she has this crazy expression on her face, a sort of smug smile, or almost a cheeky giggling smile, like she just pulled off a silly practical joke! What sort of joke is this? Ha Ha, Holofernes, got your head! Some sort of game of tag gone hopelessly wrong! The painting is marvelous, rich and fantastic even if (especially if) the IMAGE is divorced from its historical context.

Another example: a woman on her knees on a rock in the desert. In front of her is a prostrate child. The space around them is massive – tiny helpless creatures alone in a barren wilderness. In the sky some sort of angelic creature appears to be flying rapidly toward them. The painting is wonderful, crazy, melodramatic, totally over the top. But it is also rich, suggestive, and confusing in its arrangement of narrative elements. If one reads the text panel, one learns a little of the story of Hagar, the servant of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. The boy is Ishmael (am I getting this right?), and they’ve been kicked out into the desert to die when Sarah managed to give birth to Isaac. The totally un-ironic portrayal of an egregious injustice now appears mired in complication, the contemporary eye ill equipped to handle such straightforwardness, and thus suspects lurking ironies. Paintings of this sort abound: have a look at some the illustrations below.

Much contemporary painting, especially the kind I like right now, stuff like Neo Rausch (on left), gets us to look at similar paintings but without the text panels. So we look at a Rausch and see a fallen man in front of what might be a fire, while a generic laborer adds fuel. In the foreground a complicit woman ignores his plight. Or here we see a man with two buckets in an ambiguous space while others engage in what? Fish scaling? And so on. In the absence of an explanatory text panel which tells us simply that this is the story of so-and-so, we find this very strange image compelling and instinctively, intuitively develop narrative structures to accommodate what we see, like one does with images of the Tarot. This sort of interpretive work, the kind that contemporary viewers of some postmodern painting are used to, is then easily turned to work of the past. They seem every bit as strange, ridiculous, beguiling and clever as anything painted today.

The conclusions: 1) Carravagio is much more contemporary than Malevich. 2) I love looking at old paintings much more than I like looking at “modern” paintings. 3) The MET, far from being a monolithic yawn-factory, is a hell of a cool place to while away the day. 4) I must be getting older.

See What I mean? Pretty weird images, methinks.

Ok, so that’s pretty much the scoop on the Met. The next day I went to the MOMA, but it left me severely unsatisfied. Now that I have seen enough of this stuff it no longer has the same impact of “wow, I’m standing in front of a real Whoever!”. It doesn’t grab me in the same way, the magic of the aura. And given my recent feelings about the relatively meager value of modernist work I didn’t really get too taken with any of that. The “contemporary” stuff was weak, a showcase of the hip, but not very strong works. The only decent stuff I saw was an interesting drawing exhibition and a single huge Rausch painting which really blew me out. So mostly I nosed around in the bookstore trying in vain to persuade myself to spend money on an overpriced MOMA trinket.

The following day I went back to Chelsea (which was filled with photographs – Canadian photographers are very popular here) again, mostly to pick up a blank canvas for Art Gotham’s annual Square Foot Show. So I’m in my first New York Art Show after all. The show opens on February 23, so you can think of me being all famous on that day. Actually, the whole thing is pretty cheesy, but better than nothing. You can evaluate the cheese factor for yourself at http://www.artgotham.com/.

Ok, that’s pretty much enough out of me for the week. The only other things to report: Attendance at a Brooklyn amateur broomball league, last nights poker night (I lost), and, rather more excitingly, some job interviews. As I was writing this I just got an email asking about a telephone interview for this afternoon. So I guess I better have lunch and then have an interview! And I have another one at a cool W’burg art center, and these couple of nibbles are encouraging.

So life after one month ain’t feeling too bad. Please keep in touch with me too – I like to hear about what y’all are up to as well. More chat in a week.

Week Three

So another week has passed and already I’m behind on my Blogging. My excuse for not getting something done by yesterday’s deadline likely has something to do with Superbowl Sunday. So all you sitting by your computers checking to see what I have been up to – my deepest apologies.

My week began with some failure, which was nice for a change. I had decided to surprise you all with news of my first big art show in the city, but that news will have to wait. I had decided to participate in this silly gallery show that occurs at the same time as the armory. The deal is the gallery sells these little square canvases that artists paint on and then put in the show. So totally unjuried and silly, but I thought it might be a lark. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented my being at the gallery at 12 noon. Apparently they were sold out in the first fifteen minutes. I had suspected that it might be a popular event, that there might be a line up, and I intended to be there early. Unfortunately, I was prevented from doing so by love. My Hammock, it seems, has fallen in love with me, and insists on cradling me and wooing me into slumber WAY past whatever alarms I set. I’m endeavoring to sleep in increasingly complex positions to compensate for this design malfunction, but my Hammock seems to adapt to my every move, snuggling me and holding me tender and resisting every effort at consciousness. That, and the fact that the L was delayed by some sort of police investigation resulted in my arrival at the gallery closer to three, just the time for snooty owners to mock my laziness. I tried explaining about the whole hammock cuddling thing, but she seemed surprisingly unsympathetic.

Lessee, what else has been going on? I went to the gallery which is now responsible for the Henry Darger estate, hoping to see some of the mad genius’ original work. The very kind owner was very helpful and took me round back to see some of the work, though he didn’t have much on display. What he did have was pretty spectacular though. What an amazing mind that guy had. We got into a complicated conversation about contextualizing Darger in the high-art world, rather than just the folk art world where he is regularly celebrated. I’m always into all that context stuff, especially as it relates to thrift store paintings, of course. It also raised some questions about Dzama and other drawing based practices which seem to draw on or even appropriate Darger’s radical ontology. I think Darger is much richer. Dzama et al (myself included) develop these “private mythologies” in order to continue an art practice, or perhaps even to explore some sort of inner whatnot, but Darger did it out of necessity. In fact, I suppose one could argue – and this could be interesting – that Darger embodies Adorno’s vision of an artistic practice as a form of hibernation from the world grown cold. Surely that is not too melodramatic a way of describing the life of the lonely janitor? Ha ha. Adorno would roll over in his grave if he knew I was using Darger as his exemplar, rather than some avant-garde atonal musician.

So that was good. That same day I also managed to meet up with the dazzling Sisters of Mercedes. Many of you will remember Mercedes as the mad Argentinean who spent a summer or so painting at Untitled and then came back for a Banff center residency (and who is at this moment taking the Buenos Aires art world by storm). So apparently she has a sister (named, yes, Macarena), and a sister’s best friend named Sophia. They are both around 20 years old, absolutely full of energy, and seem to be in love with New York. So in spite of feeling very old, slow, and kind of fuddy-duddy we had a good time wandering the aisles of the Strand Bookstore before going to see MWard, an important musical prodigy, at a Polish community hall. This was my introduction to MWard, and through the whole show I kept thinking of Simon and Garfunkle, and the current ilk of chunky scruffy men with guitars all sensitive and poignant. So there was lots of sorrow, mellow strumming, and women all over the place falling madly in love with what they can never never possess. This held true for the “Argentinean princesses”, especially poor Sophia. Oh well, she’s young and will recover.

This week I also had my first guest at Chez Moi. Leah decided to come over and explore Williamsburg, and we managed to finally find a really good grocery store that sells the MOST ZESTY PICKLES I have ever had. ZESTY! I should keep them by my bed so in the morning I can smell them and spring from my Hammock full of perkiness. So anyhoo she came over for a meal and we watched a movie: The Five Obstructions. I tell you all this banal detail both because I have nothing else to report, but also because this is an interesting film, and has inspired the amateur filmmaker in me. The movie is about these two Danish filmmakers (very European, very Vidal Sassoon). One forces the other to remake the same movie under all sorts of difficult conditions, and I find it interesting to see the sort of proceduralist motivations underlying the film and Jorn’s responses to the challenge. So now I’m going to make all sorts of obstructed movies I think. One will be called “blogging boy” and be as interesting as it sounds.

I have been creative in other ways too – two painting experiments complete. See picture to consider results – TV painting with no dots. I’m really digging it, if only I can get a handle on the finishing process. More on that later.

So I’m sorry to disappoint you all with little excitement from the big city. I’m sure if you were here you’d be doing much more exciting stuff than me, but you’d be surprised at how much effort is required in just applying for jobs everyday and conquering computer solitaire. It is much harder than you think.

So before I go, I’ll do a short movie review. I was going to write an entire blog about Contemporary American Foreign Policy, at least as presented in some key recent documentaries, but in keeping with the stultifying level of political debate that exisits here I’ll keep my mouth shut. I will, however, recommend to all and sundry three movies: 1) Why we fight (in theatres now). 2) The Fog of War and 3) The Trials of Henry Kissinger. So why we (Americans) fight is not because of Satan. There is no evil demon possessing warmongering ne’er do wells. We fight largely because it is good business. A closed circuit is created between government contractors, think tanks, arms manufacturers, and the public. The movie, while a little less than pristinely objective, is nothing like a Michael Moore hate-fest. It explains the key players and the roles they have, showing that US Policy has always been, no matter what party is in charge, and will continue to be, one that goes to war all the damn time (especially with the likes of Kissinger behind the scenes!). The tricky think about this is that it offers no way out. Or rather, it offers the same message all such movies do: until we stand up and do something, this sort of thing is going to keep happening. The trouble is that standing up doesn’t seem to help much either. Sure getting rid of W might help some, but it doesn’t help much in the long term. If I’m a responsible daddy I want to make money to put my kid through college, then that means doing well at work and making shareholders happy. What is wrong with that? Nothing! No evil, right? But if Daddy works at a major American arms producer which is responsible for a good chunk of the economy and has a production plant in EVERY state in the country – hmmm. I’ll let the movie make the argument better than I will. Another movie is The Fog of War, which is mostly Mr. Macnamara talking though all the various conflicts and things he was involved with in his life. WHAT an amazing movie. What an interesting man. Imagine being the man who made the decision to firebomb Japan, killing a hundred thousand people in one night. What would he have to say for himself? He talks about that, about the 68 Vietnam peace talks, economic policy, JFK – Just this old very smart man reflecting on his life and trying to pass on some of the things he’s learned. These are both just amazing movies that anyone who cares about history and the future should have a look at. The trials of Kissenger is also pretty good, but not of the same mind-blowing status. I’m not old enough nor American enough to know of Kissinger the beloved statesman, so the movie doesn’t change my mind in any way. It just shows a good Machiavellian at work getting and keeping as much power as possible, which seems de rigueur. But you old fogies out there may have your opinions swayed.

But enough of that. I promise not to sit around playing solitaire and watching the first season of Alias on DVD this week. Rather I will go to PS1, the Met, the cloisters, Brooklyn bridge, maybe do some skydiving and bungie king-kong wrestling. Definitely going to get more exciting real soon. Ok, over and outtie.