the
Ryder
the KatzTed Katz, February 26 2006
I am looking forward to my interview with Ted Katz tomorrow. I do not know him, which in this case is going to make it all the better.
He has a past. He can really draw and paint. He was fluid with the words, if only on the telephone with me. And most of all, he was interested. He had no notion of hiding his passion. Thank God!
He was able to spend time around some of the best paintings in America and I’m going to ask him all about it. It was the latest small offering at Butters which really convinced me: four small works, executed to perfection. One in particular was a salute to Ryder, whom I have written about before here.
the
Ryder
the Katz
I looked at Ryder for years while in New York. And when I briefly touched on the topic on the phone, Katz was all ready to plow in.
Here comes Success, February 23 2006
My art pal has a story which is sort of sad, funny and typical. She was an underdog for years. When she moved to a new town to start a new life, someone took a liking to her. She gave references and until recently, was in touch and supportive. She was a ‘friend’ as long as placement in social sphere was clear.
You can already tell where this story is headed.
The art pal gets some jobs here and there, and then, an exhibition. As all of this unfolds, the ‘friend’ (let’s just call her a colleague) is less available, less interested. One day they meet at some event and my pal has a gift for her: a framed piece like those to be in the upcoming exhibition. The colleague says to her: “Oh, I don’t have any room in my storage.”
At some point later on, this particular piece was out in the studio, in clear path of a visiting tomcat, who pissed on it. The colleague attended the reception, observing that indeed it was a shame that the piece was now enshrouded with cat piss.
When it looked like the show might be reviewed by a big gun, all her colleague could say was the dismissive ‘if only’ and ‘rather doubtful’ things. Before her eyes, the pal saw someone change from a go-for-it to an oh-let’s-not attitude. And when the show did get written about, no words of congratulations ever came her way.
It’s funny how much people hate success in their backyard. If it is far away, encircling a ‘celebrity,’ then it might be OK. But failure on the home turf can be so much more comforting. Before I ever had this diary, I was part of an online journal community from 1999 onward. It was there that I first claimed the name Lovelake. 1999 – 2002 were Dark Ages in some ways for me, and that diary community was there for me every step of the way. I spun my tales, told my woes and had a crew of visitors and notes.
Then one day I announced a game plan: a gallery, a radio show, an agenda of my party and nobody else’s. And I was frank in where the inspiration came from: my own past. You know the rest.
Some wrote you can never go back again (like that was my idea). What was most remarkable was how much the notes and visitors shifted out. And the more I detailed good times and some success (like my second show with Randy Moe and my third was Callahan), my visitors thinned out. They loved my failure much more than some success, even a hand-made-from-scratch one.
I always loved that song by Iggy Pop: Success. Here comes my Chinese rug. His exuberance was catching and I remember thinking: “Gee, what if Iggy Pop was a real success and sold a million…?” It didn’t occurred to me then that he would get creepy mail and lose friends over it.
Luscious gift of Romance and Delacroix, February 21 2006
For Christmas a friend gave me the journals of Eugene Delacroix. At the time I was not even sure that I would take a class on 19th c. art the following term, so it turned out to be a kind of prophetic gift.
Even so, I told my friend later: “I’ve got so much to read now - I sure hope I can get to it.” Then the Prof. (Charles Colbert – I’m in love) gave the class Delacroix as a term paper focus, telling us very specifically: “Now, I don’t want you to just read biographies of the artists. Find out what the artists themselves have to say.” He then slyly adds in an off-the-cuff matter: “….I understand he kept some diaries…”
So I read without guilt. I had no idea what pleasure was ahead of me! I figured the gift was a sort of recognition that Delacroix and I had two things in common - painting and diaries (- he was called one of the greatest, if not the greatest, diarist who was also an artist).
But then there is a third factor, equally important: they read like a romantic novel.
And so, like the diaries of my own for many years - a painting and a lover and a painting and a lover. Delacroix is girl crazy like I was boy crazy, a romantic in every sense of the word. And really, how else could it be? - For we paint ourselves into every painting. He was a Romantic on many levels (and from the images I’ve seen, like the self-portrait above, a hottie).
He might recount a trip to a gallery, but writes as many specifics over the curve of a woman’s back who crosses his way. This all may sound like a man distracted, but I am not so sure. The lust for life and beauty plays out in so many ways in our lives, and will be compounded and committed in order to create great work.
I understand that he said that he could turn the color of mud into the complexion of a beautiful girl. You bet. This was a man to spend time looking at beautiful girls – and often in purely observational ways. He might ask himself: is this beauty? Is she really beautiful? Why does her complexion have something I must know and comprehend? What is the real fascination here? His answers were larger and broader than what’s hot and what’s not.
I, too, went to museums, and described the works of art and how I felt about them - and then might add a thing or two about the men I saw there, or how I felt while traveling within their sphere. I recall strange details, like a trip to the gorgeous Palace of Legion of Honor in San Francisco (a very romantic art destination); I detailed the works I saw and then, the moment a handsome young man said: Oh Miss, you’ve dropped your gloves, while placing them in my hand and looking into my eyes.
Perhaps I would not recall any of it so well, save I wrote it out in enough detail it capture it forever – and in two modes, not dissimilar to Delacroix – the plight of the painter and the plight of the romantic, sensual, sexual being, working within that milieu. I use this instance as a true romance - for romance is idea and longing, not necessarily a reality and fulfillment. As I have written here before, some of the best of times were often the ones conjured solely in my head.
Mr. and Mrs. William Blake, February 18 2006
All over the internet, as in the NYTimes as well, I have read of the new Blake discovery. From what I understand, it came as a collection and now the owners wish to divvy the whole ensemble and sell separately - obviously for the much bigger bucks.
The class I am taking right now (19th c art history) has William Blake all over the place. The Prof says he’s more influential that ever, though a total outsider during his time. He was not of any academy, hated Joshua Reynolds and the establishment, knew few grey areas, a man after my heart. He saw little financial reward for what he did, and since he worked often in isolation, the entire oeuvre does have its uneven moments, with few mentors or input from the outside.
One thing Blake admired to the point of mimicry was the Illuminated manuscript. He looked to the old ways, the handmade object, the mixture of words and image, and found a way to express both his incredible way with the word and the image in the book. Those books, highly singular and hardly mass-made and not like anything else, spring from so many sources – have political and spiritual ramifications - and have influenced generations, right down especially to the 1960s. Blake had an aim as a book; to piece-meal it out is sad indeed.
One thing that has been on my mind as regards those books of Blake: I learned that his wife hand painted many of the covers and special details. No big thing, I suppose, though it is a detail that makes them the singular works they are. How might it all have been otherwise?
I wonder who was Mrs. William Blake? It’s just a side-note, maybe insignificant, but more than one young man has asked for my input, my help and whatever else I had to give to help him fulfill his dream (while casting mine aside). This was fine for Ms. Blake. And this was fine for Ms. Tauber-Arp. And this was fine for an endless list of females not significant in art history, but huddling on the outside.
- Even today I met a young woman who closed all her creative shit down when she met her mate and is now helping him with 'his' vision.
“If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud." Emile Zola
Look elsewhere for the Quiet Time, February 15 2006
In his interview at Artstar, David Inkpen spoke a bit about silence. He produced an entire show without the usual background music, and found that just the sound of his mind or his hands working was very different, refreshing - and in this case, it was sound enough.
During my final few years in New York, I yearned for (but was also reduced to) silence. I came home from work and shut the door on West 56th Street and all of that noise. I played no music, I watched no TV; I made some art or read, but what I did most of all was sit and think. Sit and think and write and smoke, in silence.
I’ll never be able to detail here what the illness of 1990 – 92 did to me, but part of it was intertwined with someone who wanted to downplay me at every turn (often in the form of a combined admiration and ‘advice’) and silence me. And he won for quite a long time afterwards. I was still licking my wounds when I arrived here in ’97 and by that time, found that PDX was hardly waiting with baited breath to hear my measured, quiet efforts, streaming from an unfashionable age.
Then thankfully I recalled that the silent bit was never my idea! - Never my style - and I’ve haven’t looked back since.
This all comes to mind as I get loads of emails from young men, full of suggestions about what I should do on Artstar (and my other ventures) and one of them, in response to what I wrote on the 8th of this month, suggests that I let it all be silent if indeed the artist is at a loss for words.
How interesting is this to me? - Ever look at my painting? What is silent about it? In fact I’ve gone to some lengths to express my own version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound via paint. Silence is the least of my aims and it is something I’ve had way too much of. I am here to make noise.
But it became apparent that this ‘suggestion’ wasn’t really about or for me, but about the writer. He did not have my personal interests at heart, not my professional ones either: the show is my responsibility; letting people hang out there to sweat doesn’t ever make them look bad, but me. It hardly helps my guest or audience. And being good is another issue: why would someone actually advise me to do that which seems like faltering? - I am sorry, but I can’t help but observe that this was, when all is said and done, another man telling a woman that it would be an interesting idea to be silent.
And yeah, of course they’re all hip and modern, laden with now-ness, but not dissimilar to the ones I encountered in the 70s, 80s, 90s and onward, which makes it all the more aggravating. I accepted it for years, as hormonally I needed them. But my radar is full-on now and maybe over-sensitive, but that’s OK. At least it’s there.
I can’t help but observe that the advising emails aren’t coming to me from young women - who, like me, were not trained to feel so entitled as to think I have time or interest in their ideas, when I’m really up to my ears fulfilling my own. And conversely, I have no inclination to email these young men and tell them what I think they should do. But I leave you with a few words from a young man I do admire very much:
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
roar roar roar roar roar roar roar
Cute drawing epidemic, February 12 2006
One thing Matthew Haggett and I shared in our interview was that while we both went into pattern and works not about a ‘picture,’ we did have specific drawing skills - and we were unwilling to let go of them completely. We exercised them in different ways, whether privately or not. There is a joy (and almost a strange feeling of responsibility) in being able to look and render.
In the past few years there has been a drawing show epidemic in the new Garde, and especially of a certain style. It’s often cute, sweet, pseudo-naive, and after a few examples, it can get really, really boring. You cease to differentiate. I have actually walked into a room, scanned and walked out and this is so not me.
Great: you can draw. I am glad you realize that it is an essential tool towards realizing a vision. But unless you can draw like Ingres (see above) (or Schiele, for Chrissake!), it is often not a vision in its own right. Get on with it. Cute animals and little girls in sweet outfits only go so far.
The 50s/ 80s woman, February 10 2006
Many young female artists are exploring and recontextualizing the arts and crafts women worked on years ago: baking, embroidery, sewing, etc. They elevate the everyday supposedly ‘creative’ chores that those women of the 50s endured. To a certain degree, I feel they glorify it and don’t really have much connection to what the woman of the 1950s was really up against.
These artists often use the words ‘feminine’ and ‘feminist’ in the same sentence, applying them to the same things and when they do, I backtrack. These words are not interchangeable. Being forced to take home economics in 7th grade – forced to sew a pair of culottes - there was nothing feminine or feminist about it and to this day, I will not sew one button.
The artists might say: “Oh, but you’ve got a choice!” - that’s the wonder of their feminine = feminist view. But when I asked an artist if indeed she spent her time, her regular time - not studio time - making clothes to wear and cakes to bake, of course she did not. Seems the choice is not as palatable as one would think.
I know the tales of Rosie the Riveter; I knew one: active as hell, smart as a whip in the later 1940s, beautiful, glorious, trained and ready. So proud to be a part of it all, to be essential, to have a life. All of that went away when the men came home. To placate these women and remind them of their place, they stuffed them into girdles and padded bras and killer heels and hey, your big effort today is the pie you make for your man.
She submitted, she had four children, and while smarter than her husband, the biggest gig she ever got was doing the windows for JC Penny when Lloyd Center first opened in the early 60s. Meanwhile, she’s smoking herself to death, pissed as hell, ready to scrap with anyone, has inexplicable health problems - so much promise stuffed away into a goddamn pie and a girdle. She died of Emphysema.
In a way, it reminds me a little bit of my career in the 80s as a makeup artist. To be one back then was so much more likeable, credible, believable, appropriate and encouraged than being the goddamn artist I truly and always was. They even told me that it was ‘creative’ – just like those women of the 50s really – when I knew it was not creative at all, but a job. It’s not like I got to cover women with IKB all day long and get paid, you know. It never was art, real art, but it’s amazing how many people wanted to tell me it was art enough for me.
Meanwhile, my real painting, my real art, was going nowhere, just where those boys of the 80s wanted it to be. But they sure did like my heels and makeup. However one thing I am sort of almost perversely proud of is that I never, ever, cooked a meal for a man in all my years of NY. There was no real love coming my way, no real respect and I intuitively knew it.
And just like that woman I told you about, smoking herself to death, I spent more and more time in my flat, not out in the art world (save places like the Met, a place of salvation), drinking and consuming cigarette after cigarette, just stewing (and writing up a storm) over the whole mess.
By the way, got no problem cooking for someone who loves and respects me. My husband gets great meals (even pies!) because he acknowledged the ID of artist in me as first and foremost and gave the help and support to carry it through, willingly.
Get the picture, February 8 2006
Considering that we work in what is known as ‘visual art,’ I find it odd that many artists, when I have them on the radio, don’t actually want to describe the art objects they make, and seem to downplay the fact that they even make them.
This is a rite of passage everyone must pass through on Artstar – I realized a long time ago that radio had its limitations and one of them was the lack of visual cues. I had to fill in some blanks. So right from the start, I ask the artist: “If someone walks in to one of your exhibitions, what will they actually see?”
Often I hear that the viewer will see irony or hubris or crisis or the balance between chaos and order and I could go on. You get the picture? - Well, no, how could you? The artist has not answered my question.
They will have plenty of time to get to all those compelling heavy, deep, conceptual thoughts. Perhaps they’re afraid they won’t, but we’ve got an hour. What I really want to hear, if only just to get it out on the table (or even just out of the way) is: “These are large scale paintings of naked women.” “These are plastic bottles, punctured to change their texture.” “These are photographs of dolls which look like familiar fascist leaders.”
See: that wasn’t so hard, was it? Most of us deal with physical objects to one degree or another, yet so many wish to deny or at least detail their blatant physical properties. It is as if to describe them or to even recognize them as objects will somehow turn them into simply that: an art object. Like that was some sort of kiss of death.
As to where they are placed in the art world, you wouldn’t believe how many artists claim to be clueless about it, even though they have obviously gone to some trouble to get a show and have their work seen and in the best venue possible (plus I see them at openings all over town). But now they claim to be, well, unaware of all that stuff. I do not buy it: I have the bio in front of me and somebody put that together. I see the images online, which someone took the trouble to photograph, scan and get to the webmaster. You would have to wonder who went through all of that trouble – since the artist is so unwilling to acknowledge its importance.
In the past, I have accepted a lot of limitations that artists put on me. You don’t want to talk about that? OK. As to personal things, I would never go there, but as to the actual objects they make and the structure they exist in, if they don’t want to talk about them, I will. I understand (more than they could ever know) their desire to be known as The Thinker. Previously I’ve written here about taking the history out of art history, and then the art object got tossed out too. I want no part of either.
eccentric
spin: fold 1 (red and yellow),
2004
Pattern passion, February 6 2006
Whoa, I had a fun interview with Matthew Haggett tonight . While our approaches to our patterns are very different, we share a few things in common. He told me straight out that his last show seemed to assault the viewer and maybe that was not what they always wanted. I understand. Neither of us was interested in creating works to walk by and ignore.
Check out these spheres he makes. I am now the proud owner of a few, thanks to him.
Give us a free night, February 4 2006
The Oregonian writes about the prospect of a free day at the museum and how people of all sorts lined up when one was offered. As I have written extensively on this subject here and elsewhere, I think I’ll do a bit of backtracking, as a way to drive home the point.
I don’t mean a day here and there: I mean a weekly free night, 2 damn hours. It will change the way that museum could function within a community and that community I speak of is the artists.
I’ve often recounted how the SF art museum (then housed in the War Memorial Building) had a free night while I lived there in the 80s. I often went alone, casually, with no plans, outside of nourishing an art fix. Since it was free and weekly, I could fixate on just the large rooms of Franz Kline if I wanted, or that room of Albers. I could visit that retrospective of Ed and Nancy Kienholz six times. One could develop intimate relationships with art. But not just with art, as it turned out...
- More importantly, while I entered alone, I rarely stayed that way or left that way. The free night was routinely filled with other artists and I ran into (or sometimes even met for the first time) and countless art VIPs. We’d leave together and continue our musing about art over drinks, most of this spontaneously.
(This is why it is important that it is a free night! Spontaneous carousing amongst artists and intellectuals just happens more easily in the PM.)
Perhaps my favorite character is the one I’ve written about before here (August 15 2005), John Gutmann. How often can you just run into, view art with and go party with an established genuine article of art history?
But you see the generosity of that museum then led to others being generous too. Funny how a thing like that can be catching. I often saw him at the museum (maybe he was visiting his own work?) and like I wrote here before, he was remarkably smart, candid and passionate about art, and happy to spend a bit of time with a youngster like me. But I might never have known any of that had it not been for the free nights at the San Francisco museum.
Overhung hangover, February 2 2006
Having just come off the tale of Arman, it would appear incongruous to state that more is rarely more. But it’s the truth, which may further demonstrate his powers. He was pretty clever to be able to get around that Modernist fact.
Wish more here could keep it in mind, especially in the holiday season, when we are subjected to an onslaught of shows with no purpose, it appears, save to squeeze in as much art as possible. After awhile, a very short while, you cease to really see singular imagery.
Somewhere in this diary, I recounted of when I first moved back here and went out to a First Thursday with an old friend. I hated everything. It all looked so small and dinky and cheap (especially after 11 years in NY). But looking back, maybe the real culprit was that there was just too much of it.
Just because it was made, does not mean it must be shown. When artists get fussy about it, I divulge a tough truth: I probably have more work that was never shown, ever, than work that has. A sobering thought: entire bodies of work in fact, paintings or collages that never saw the light of day in a gallery setting. It’s OK. I kept working.
Exhibitions, one after another throughout your career, are all the marks of your evolution (when it’s good) and your growing pains (when it’s bad). The quandary is the Here and Now and the fact that you can’t always clearly differentiate. So bring out your best, make a big cut and then you probably have the best show you could possibly have.
Even in my own exhibition, I looked around Augen and thought “Eight pieces.” Bob asked for twelve, I delivered eleven and ten showed. But if only eight had shown after all of that work, it would have been fine with me. Seeing less can force the viewer to really see, instead of scan and move on.
I learned this early on in my time at Lovelake via the request of Randy Moe. He wanted all of the 33 portraits of prisoners on one wall, unified in a grid and the rest of the gallery left bare. It was a powerful argument for putting all of your eggs in one basket for sure. That wall had all of those men staring back at you, yet you found relief in open space and blank walls.
Arman and accumulations, February 1 2006
Recently Arman died. At the time, I wanted to write something about him, but wasn’t sure where to start – for I have been familiar with his work a long time now.
What was increasingly odd to me was how others were not. Many artists were happy to cop his style: grouping things, all the same thing, and talking about them on the air with me; making many of the same thing or object, repeating it endlessly until it made a satisfying and meaningful image/ object of its own…
But when I spoke of Arman, they sort of said oh yeah. They were happy to claim Warhol, but were entering uncertain waters when I spoke of Arman.
I saw several exhibitions over the years, in different countries, for Arman was hotter in Europe than here. Example: rows and rows of red tubes of paint, with the paint all squeezed out – I still have the postcard for that one. He is known, almost to the point of kitsch, for his accumulations of piled-up violins. But he accumulated everything. Even in my last trip to Europe in 2004, I saw a big Arman show in Monaco at the Marlborough Gallery.
In the south of France, he was everywhere - almost to be taken for granted, as he was from Nice and was associated with my Art God, Yves Klein. I’ve traveled to that neck of the woods several times and each time, I would run into the work of Arman somehow.
The latest issue of Coagula (which is available and free at Chambers now) has the usual Baird Jones Review, a smorgasbord of sometimes useless information, but worth the read for the occasional gem: Mark Kostabi makes note of the passing of Arman, of the collaborations they did together, and how important this artist really was to the development of 20th century art. He may have overrated him a bit, I don’t know, but after all of the underrating I had witnessed, I was glad to read it.
More recent entries: January 2006
For a list of Diary Topics, read here
For information about the diary, read here
