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.