may2004

Vacation, May 27 2004

Soon I am going out of the country. This diary will be at a standstill till the middle of June. Some say pretend you are a Canadian but I say no way! It is some sort of perverse social responsibility I wish to take: not all Americans fit the stereotype. My husband has had a peace sign button since the 1960s and has taken to wearing it this whole past year. Better bring it along as a vital piece of travel jewelry!

Like a Woman, May 25 2004

There is an oft-told story in Modern art of how Anita Pollitzer, good friend of Georgia O'Keeffe, brought some of O'Keeffe's drawings to Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia had no idea her friend was sharing her art with the most influential figure in American art at this time. Stieglitz took one look at the singular and simple line abstractions and said: "Finally, a woman on paper."

So in answer to a friends question --- can one tell the gender of the artist by the art? --- some would say yes.

Some would say that it is fine to create art that looks like a woman if you are one. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Most of my life I don't think I gave it much thought. If I wasn't taken seriously, I thought it was because I was a punk or young. And it really wouldn't matter at all if my art could be traced to my gender, if my damn gender wasn't underestimated.

When you see a painting you can't identify in art history, what are you going to guess? There is not a lot of opportunity to compare the genders and their accomplishments. Art History 205 will give you 3 female artists; it doesn’t get all that much better in 206. Often the inclusion feels gratuitous.

In contemporary art, perhaps you cannot tell. More than once someone has told me that my art didn't look "like it was made by a woman." I knew I was supposed to be thankful for that, but I wasn't sure how I felt. I am not happy being ashamed of my gender, or somehow having a lack of faith in it, though to be a Woman Artist has got to be a Kiss of Death.

Not long ago a male friend from Punk days told me of how the fellows were once discussing females of that time and referred to me as one with nice tits and ass. This was how I was remembered, after all that I had done (which was a heck of a lot more than he had done, BTW).

And how long do such things hold up, how long do we exist with our tits and ass in just the right place? When they are not, just where are we on the radar? This is why I don't like the gender association much. It would cut my life by half. And I think I'm going to be around a long time and maybe the best part is yet to come, if they can only see it.

Of course the argument can be made that as we become less about our tits and ass, we can then become about something else. I am counting on that.

Criminal, May 23 2004

Not long ago I was out to dinner with some friends and the conversation led to The Pianist. Someone said that ugh, they couldn't go see a Roman Polanski film because he had messed with a 13 year old girl.

This was the same woman who would not go to an imprisoned artists’ exhibition because of the crime he was in for. I've about lost my patience with much of this. History gets written and rewritten, depending on the times and what is considered good, or rather, correct.

One artist I had on the radio show told me that her Mom was really against "that" --- the crime of an artist ---- and that was why she did not attend the exhibition. As if I am "for" it by attending it myself…

In a New York Times Book Review, Michael Kimmelman reviewed a book about Beethoven. Beethoven was crazy, difficult, one of the first Moderns. He seemed to realize that while he had his limitations as a human being, art could provide a horizon without limits. His genius depended on being able to ditch those physical qualities and make them irrelevant.

I think that is what we are having trouble doing --- understanding that will, that situation, that compulsion, that fine line. In most cases I wonder if you can't have one without the other. What I am finding out by working with artists is that nearly all the really great ones are --- crazy! Sometimes criminal, full of inconsistencies, bad at life maybe --- but good at art.

I am not justifying or condoning anything here. It's just an observation about something which is essential to my life.

Kimmelman gave a great quote from another critic: "To study the lives of great artists is often a hindrance to the understanding of their works, for it is usually the study of what they have not mastered, and thus it undermines their authority in the things which they have mastered."

An artist’s life gets romanticized by what is left behind: the art of course. But the art can be the leftovers of a storm, the trace of a complex being, the one bit of peace or consolidation or reconciliation in an otherwise inexplicable existence.

I'm often surprised and frustrated at just what I should be in others eyes, and I think they actually have low expectations of me. I should make great art of course --- but then why aren't I a Mom and other indications of good citizenship and most of all, let’s do it all straight. And politely please. I understand that Beethoven was none of that.

These expectations come mostly from those who don't make art though. The biggest judgments always seem to come from the ones who hang out a lot and show up at all the parties but don't actually do anything. I wanted to ask this girl who doesn't see Roman Polanski (for moral reasons) just what the fuck she does.

What We Like, May 20 2004

Recently I was chatting with a big dealer in town about someone’s work and that I would like to show it to her. Her tenor changed a bit, in that wary and weary way an art dealer can act towards an artist. They are afraid you are going to ask something of them. And they could be right.

She then went on to dryly say that she liked all kinds of work, one never knew.

But does she indeed really show what she likes? It seems to me that when you show museum-level artists who have already had many galleries and reviews and degrees behind them, it is hardly a matter of just what she likes. It is by now a matter of what many other people have liked. What other people have approved of, what tests this artist has met.

Not saying it is a bad or good situation. Someone has to go out there and scoop up the good and give it a better home and promote it in the way it deserves.

But someone else was out there initially taking the risk to show what was not shown much before but was completely a matter of releasing onto the world what they liked --- long before she (and her sort of gallery) stepped in.

It just got me thinking about what people “like,” or say they do. What people like is what has had that stamp of approval and already been met with some kind of buzz. People look with their ears and generally buy with them too.

A Trip to Elsewhere, May 18 2004

Recently I read something about “proven UFO contact.” ...I had contact but I cannot prove it was real. Maybe it was just a dream. I was 11 or 12 years old.

But if it was a dream, it was one we all shared. One morning my mom and my dad and myself all had basically the same dream: that the spaceship, so to speak, had landed. It took us all aboard, though my parents were very concerned that I was a part of the journey. Me, I was most upset that my cat Charlie couldn't go. I think Mom and Dad had their own personal memories of the dream but it was basically the same.

I remember us all joining hands in a circular room in the ship and the room began to spin. This was how the ship generated power. Up we went into the sky. The people were the power.

Supposedly other groups/families have experienced a similar trip with the aliens. We did live out in the country … in Southern Oregon on Dark Hollow Road. They could have easily landed without fanfare.

I never saw any tracks though! - but I don't suppose I looked for them.

Pastels, May 16 2004

For about 5 years in New York I had no real place to paint. In my apartment I kept at the drawing though and did everything in pastel chalk. Unison is my favorite but I also use Sennelier. As a result I do pretty well with them and could make clean forms with the typically messy chalk. As I went more into the abstract and the geometric, pastels were not the ideal medium, but nothing beats their color, especially on black paper.

In 1999 I had a show of Chairs at the Alysia Duckler Gallery in Portland. The chair is my own salute to doing nothing. Nothing but thinking, meditating, sitting around, talking, bullshitting, you know---doing all the important stuff. I made over 40 and showed 8. Some were modern, some were old rickety chairs I have had for years.

What I originally wanted to do was to place about 25 or so on one big wall, all next to each other in a grid, no frames, no glass. The gallerist had other ideas so we had the 8 in frames on the wall in a more typical presentation. I still think the other way would have been much more interesting.

Fanzines, May 13 2004

The first magazine I made on my own (in 1978) was called Beyond the Black Thing. The title came from a book by Madeline L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time. I followed up that work for Charts for Autonomie in 1979.

I was not so much inspired by punk fanzines as I was just artists’ books in general and especially mail art. By this time I was receiving art from artists all over the world, most of whom I would never meet in person. The biggest givers were artists from Eastern Europe and behind the Iron Curtain. Many of these pieces were not just Xeroxes but real, 3D collages.

The Internet in some ways comes close to the kind of exchange you can have with absolute strangers, but nothing beats getting art in the mail. I know that today fanzines are big business and whole workshops and symposiums are based on them. I have some issues about all of that which I will leave for another entry.

Probably my biggest fanzine project --- and a true fanzine in my book, which means it was music-based --- came out in the early 80s in San Francisco. It was Bitchrock, which was what I was called by a group of Latino homeboys as they were throwing rocks at me one night in the Mission (my neighborhood too!).

I made several issues of Bitchrock and it eventually was distributed by Rockpool, a DJ group that distributed all kinds of goodies to music junkies and DJs all over the country. It wasn’t just about music either. I collaborated with a lot of various artists and writers and we covered politics and social issues, including Queer Vs Gay. I am so sorry to say that many of the people I worked with at this time are no longer with us, but taken by AIDS and the crisis connected to it.

Graphically, Bitchrock was obviously inspired by the Russian Revolution in art, plus the art and political climate of the Weimar republic. In fact in my fantasy Bitchrock was a product of Weimar, California. That seemed about right. The kind of lifestyle so rampant in SF at that time was fast and very short lived.

Art and Violence, May 11 2004

Recently Julie Bernard had Stuart Horodner on her KBOO show Art Focus, discussing a show he had curated at Savage Art Resources entitled State of Affairs. In the course of the radio show, they talked about what constitutes ‘appropriate’ and inappropriate materials or images for art. I wanted to call into the program and give my two cents…

What is appropriate for art changes all of the time. Right after 9/11, I was creating right away and almost felt guilty about it. I wondered if what I made was ‘appropriate.’ Of course it's possible to make things that are to be looked at later, in a different time. People tend to have boundaries on what is the correct subject matter for art. Some questioned my use of certain images which were in the newspapers --- crimes and tragedies ---- that perhaps these were not images to be used for art.

Funny, it's OK if they are documentary, it's OK if they are in the news and on TV or even in promotion for something and anyone, including children, can fill their heads with death and destruction. It's OK if it's "reality" but not if it's art. To use those same images in a different way, to examine them through a different lens, can seem wrong. But they are already a part of our aesthetics and language and we are accustomed to them on certain levels.

It’s also OK if it is clearly ‘entertainment’ --- as in films and Hollywood. Brutal, violent images are a dime a dozen and sell movies. So can’t art be entertainment too? I’m not answering that; I’m just asking. It does seem that art is supposed to take some high, moral ground. Or at least keep in with the zoned-out mode of waking sleep.

I believe it was photographs published after the death of George Harrison which can demonstrate this saga: in some the celebrity was smoking pot, in others he was dead or dying. People were all in an uproar about the photos of him doing drugs, not the shots of death. It's OK to see someone dead but not stoned?

Luckily we have many images of Harrison in his various royal Highness.

Escape, May 9 2004

I may seem far away from it now, but for years I dreamed of leaving the ghetto of the art life. I know it's surely not the only marginalized life out there but it was mine.

At the time I made these collages, I was making the transition to working all the time and not making a lot of art, and certainly not doing the hustle. But being able to see a doctor.

Over the years I had collected images of escape. The collages were all based on the vague idea of getting the Hell out. Many were also entitled The Lonely Metropolitans, which of course is derived from a very famous, great photomontage by Herbert Bayer.

If you live art history and the Bauhaus and all, Bayer will figure into it. I met him briefly at a reception for his work in San Francisco in the 80s. He was very cordial. Later on Miriam Rose, wise woman and art sage and also a student of his, told me he was of course quite cordial with all young hot art-babes.