Posted: 05/01/01
FIVE THINGS documents the ideas, experiences, events and objects that inform the artistic practices of members of the creative community in Washington, DC.
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| Carole Greenwood |
5 elements of work
work is love made visible
-khalil gibran |
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discipline-
making stuff requires tremendous strength of purpose. It seems to be the artists' way to develop a method of work in order to get it done. I have become so inspired by the artists around me - jason's enthusiasm for a new canvas or his magma paints, james' excitement in hitting the print button, colby's anticipation of seeing an image back from the printer - and it is observing the end result that wills us to create the means for these rewards. For these 3, it is the ritual of the studio (see photos of jason's and colby's from archives)... How is it that we create the sanctuary- physically and metaphorically, for our own work? For we all want to reap these pleasures... |
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gathering-
in anticipation of my new cookbook project I spend lots of time taking mental photographs and notes. this collecting process is central to the 'look' of the end result so I have become more and more deliberate in this foraging - with real tools - sketchbook, camera, computer, fork. Now that I know why I do this, I seem to save and savour more. |
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raising the bar-
james salter in 4.29.01 n.y.times Sunday magazine describes cooking for Craig Claiborne. Not only were there the dilemmas of food, wine and setting, but
"whom to invite? 2 at the table makes for the most intimate talk, 3 the most revelaing, 4 is congenial & 5 the most interesting with the slight imbalance and the opportunity to invite someone the others don't know. 6 is pleasant but tends toward the conventional if it's 3 couples. 7 is the absolute maximum. 8 or more & the meal becomes two parties..."
they had 7, and it was a tremendous success. Lots to think about for the upcoming outdoor entertaining season, as well as accepting dinner reservations for parties of 8 or more...
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criticism-
not only must one deal with professional criticism, but with friends, colleagues and seemingly passers - by who lend sometimes unwanted and unwarranted commentary on the work at hand. I have concluded that self-criticism is probably the most valuable, with collegial criticism running a close second. "professional" critics are the least important, particularly when the running commentary tends to focus on the personal tastes of the critic, rather than facts or observations. Some great critics - Stephen Hunter on film (W.Post), Richard Harrington on music (W.Post), William Grimes on food (n.y.times)... But... as difficult as the process of criticism in work might be - it is better to embrace its relationship objectively than to discredit it entirely... what is it they say about an unexamined life... or work? |
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pleasure-
play makes work possible - it is as children that play is our most important work. And, it is in childhood that we learn the most important lessons about our adult work -
to be giving, to care for others, to share ourselves and our things, to feel joy... |
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| Jason Gubbiotti |
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Last one in:
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"I remember every man who put me here."
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Artforum, April 2001, p. 137
Warren Isensee is a young painter living in NYC. His show this winter at Audiello was well received by artists, curators, collectors and critics. In this months artforum, (April), Meghan Daily discussed some interesting issues in Warren's work.
First, she talked directly about Warren's painting techniques. Ms. Daily realized that the hard edges in the paintings were not taped during their execution, making them very laborious to paint. Afterwards, she announces that "Isensee seems uninterested in mystical aspects of abstraction..." The process alone speaks of transcendence and the images presented are as hypnotic and cerebral as they come. The most interesting issue Daily offers is "Nostalgia is underestimated as a generator of meaning - critical, substantive meaning anyway - but here, carefully abstracted, it works just fine for Isensee's formal process." |
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Sticking to your story
For the first time, I am writing about an experience that I did not participate in. In comes to my attention that Robert Ryman is having a "retrospective" at Haus Der Kunst in Munich. From what I gather, the exhibition is not organized in chronological order, rather, the paintings are grouped by their "atmospheric relation" to one another. This means that a painting from 1965 can be set next to a piece from 1998.
This approach indicates that Ryman is an artist that constructed up a situation where the work is able to have an infinite amount of possibilities.
In this respect, Ryman is a category of artist like Tom Nozkowski, Agnes Martin, Philip Ackerman, Sean Scully, John McCracken and Wolfgang Laib. It is a mind set where the art sits on this plane of horizontal thought. It is a point where the artist thinks expansively and their project lasts longer than a season, actually, their project lasts a life time. The paintings become snowflakes. From a distance, they all look like the same piece, but when approached and examined, the pieces are all different. The idea of nuance and subtly become foregrounded in the work and demand a closer investigation. This procedure then actually demands more attention from the viewer and does not allow for passive participation. |
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365 days
Saturday night was the first anniversary for DC alternative space, Decatur Blue. Located on the edge of respectability, this space is run by artists is so vital for the arts community here. Even two years ago there were a good a handful of alternative spaces in the District. WPA/C and Arlington Arts Center were venues for young artists to exhibit their work. Today we have Decatur Blue and McLean Project for the Arts. Signal 66 is a club that has art on the walls, where you pay three bucks and get bombarded by some loud punk band. Decatur Blue on the other always keeps the focus on the art. Granted their openings are fun and that is good.... But they are not charging you to attend your buddies opening????
Anyhow, a big BRAVO!!! To Jose and the boys on Florida Ave. For keeping it real and doing it themselves .... On their own terms. |
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Fifteen feet of pure white snow
"where is my nurse
I need some healing
I've been paralyzed
By a lack of feeling
I can't even find
Anything worth stealing
Under fifteen feet of pure white snow"
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| James Huckenpahler |
| "… he was born a writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations,…" - Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin [applies equally to R. Rauchenberg.] |
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More Chat
Sarah Finlay gave me a copy of Illuminations, a collection of Walter Benjamin's essays, and this jumped out at me from the introduction:
"…Critique [he wrote] is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. … If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. …"
I'm not sure that it's that easy to separate the formal description of a work from the meaning contained within the object and of the object within a broader context [art history, current socio-cultural climate, the world.] A commentator can't help but write about the context a work was created in; likewise a critic must tie the concepts to specific, formal elements in the work.
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Lev Manovech in Artforum, April 2001, p43
On fashion:
"What might have happened if Darwinian evolution had taken a few different steps - or leaps - along the way? We don't have to wait until scientists start splicing our DNA to point us on the path not taken - season after season, fashion's there to reinvent us."
I'm not waiting. New skin for me in the studio this week.
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Benjamin Weil in the 010101, Art in Technological Times catalog, p61
"… As the use of the term interactive has become more prevalent in the spheres of art and other creative disciplines, so too has the use of ambient as a means to describe that which is not interactive. This raises the question of whether the notion of ambient can provide an intellectual framework for understanding work from previous eras or whether it relates only to work produced in the age of multimedia. Can one think of painting, or any analog or still art form, as ambient? …"
I suspect that Rothko's work has been discussed explicitly in terms of ambience - think of the Rothko room at the Phillips Collection. I'm sure interior decorators have also always considered the physical context of paintings and photographs and made choices according to the ambient effect they wished to create. Despite this bone to pick with Weil, I enjoyed his essay, as well as the rest of the catalog - the most accessable collection of texts and images of new media I've encountered.
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More Dragonball Z
From Ultimate Journey, by Richard Bernstein:
"… Another book, less widely read, but known to a few of us, was Monkey, or Journey to the West, a sixteenth-century novel by one Wu Cheng-en. It was the highly fanciful account of an expedition to India made by a Buddhist monk in the company of a five-hundred-year-old monkey of supernatural powers. And some of us knew of the historical monk, Hsuan Tsang himself, whose actual journey to what he called "the west" took place from 629 to 645. The monk's own account of his journey, whose full title is The Great Tang Chronicles of the Western World, translated into English in the nineteenth century by a British clergyman-scholar named Samuel Beal, is regarded as one of the great classics of Chinese literature. …"
What would Hsuan Tsang make of his story spinning off a lucrative cartoon/toy franchise that is featured prominently on MTV?
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Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt
A set of oracle cards; when you run into a creative block, shuffle the deck, choose one at random, and follow the instruction. Mine this morning:
"Disciplined self-indulgence"
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| Tom Mandel |
"Ich bin, auch hier, in Ihrer Gegenwart, diesen Weg gegangen. Es war ein Kreis."
– Paul Celan
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(Here too, in Your presence, I have traveled this path. It was a circle.) |
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Intense Calm of Alan Hovhaness.
The two young women wear "Panera" caps. They lean into each other and giggle behind the counter while a man walks past them in the direction of the door, his face at once blank and quizzical. He’s wearing denim shorts and carrying a to-go cup of coffee. It’s just before 9am, and I’m in Tysons. A meeting I was anticipating just got cancelled at the last minute. I’m trying to be inspired by this random event, by time opening up in a place I can’t leave (too much traffic to get anywhere), but it’s Alan Hovhaness that inspires me now, as I tune out the bouncy, customer-encouraging background music around me. Hovhaness lived his private set of ears. Whatever was most distant gave him of its mystery, and he gave back to it a music that is quiet, involving, and thoroughly personal. My mind, right now, is so unlike that music. In my restlessness and my anxiety I am trying to let that music in. I am trying to be inspired.
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Fernando Pessoa.
"I have always rejected the idea of being understood…. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I am not" wrote the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) or rather Bernardo Soares, one of his many ‘heteronyms’ – writers he invented, each distinct from all the others in point of view, style and personal history, and each with a substantial and characteristic body of work to his (but never her) name. Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and, writing under the borrowed name of his creator, Fernando Pessoa – these were the four great poets among them.
Autopsicografia
O poeta é um fingidor…
Autopsychography
The poet is a faker
Faking so completely
He even pretends the pain
Of pain he really feels.
Those who read his writing
Truly feel the pain they read
Not the twin pain he’s faking
But the single pain they lack.
So around its tiny track
It goes, to entertain our brain,
The little wind-up train
We call the human heart.
(my translation from the Portuguese)
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Evanston/family/Peets
I must be getting old, because I am beginning to like quiet university towns with wonderful bookstores and people in no seeming hurry – what’s the matter w/ them? Don’t they have anything to do? I was in Chicago (my home town) last week to give a talk and stayed with my daughter Jessica and her husband Tom at their recently-moved-into house in Evanston just north of the city. Flat landscape and lake as big as your average ocean. Spring there does feel like new birth, slow then juvenile -- unlike our lush and chubby instant-toddler season bursting whammo into then out of one after another colorful outfit. Trees were just budding in their yard. The light was thin and crystalline, then it poured down rain and wind followed, Chicago wind that growing up I used to hear people on the south side call ‘the hawk.’ We sat around their TV room and watched the playoffs and ate pizza, the weekend just draped all over us comfortably. Once a day we wandered out to Peets coffee, a venerable Berkeley institution that’s got a place there. There is no coffee like Peets coffee. When you watch your kids grow up, and mine are older than you dear reader, it’s like you take the complexity and hand it to them, to their lives, and then look down at your hands. You expect them to be empty.
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David Schubert
Some poets are famous, like John Ashbery. Others are pretty obscure, like his friend Jimmy Schuyler. But David Schubert died completely unknown. A book of his work appeared – finally – more than fifteen years after his death in 1946 at 33. Ashbery and Schuyler, both of whom influenced me, wrote about Schubert and I read him years ago. Recently I was reminded of him by Ashbery's Other Traditions and began to reread his work. Here's a David Schubert poem:
Kind Valentine
She hugs a white rose to her heart--
The petals flare-- in her breath blown;
She'll catch the fruit on her death day--
The flower rooted in the bone.
The face at evening comes for love;
Reeds in the river meet below.
She sleeps small child, her face a tear;
The dream comes in with stars to go
Into the window, feigning snow.
This is the book that no one knows.
The paper wall holds mythic oaks,
Behind the oaks a castle grows.
Over the door, and over her
(She dies! she wakes!) the steeds gallop.
The child stirs, hits the dumb air, weeps,
Afraid of night's long loving-cup.
Into yourself, live, Joanne!
And count the buttons--how they run
To doctor, red chief, lady's man!
Most softly pass, on the stairs down,
The stranger in your evening gown.
Hearing white, inside your grief,
An insane laughter up the roof.
O little wind, come in with dawn--
It is your shadow on the lawn.
Break the pot! and let carnations--
Smell them! they're the very first.
Break the sky and let come magic
Rain! Let earth come pseudo-tragic
Roses--blossom, unrehearsed.
Head, break! is broken. Dream, so small,
Come in to her. O little child,
Dance on squirts where the winds run wild.
The candles rise in the warm night
Back and forth, the tide is bright.
Slowly, slowly, the waves retreat
Under her wish and under feet.
And over tight breath, tighter eyes,
The mirror ebbs, it ebbs and flows.
And the intern, the driver, speed
To gangrene! But--who knows--suppose
He was beside her! Please, star-bright,
First I see, while in the night
A soft-voiced, like a tear, guitar--
It calls a palm coast from afar.
And oh, so far the stars were there
For him to hang upon her hair
Like the white rose he gave, white hot,
While the low sobbing bandit wept
Violets and forget-me-nots.
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Language is intentional sound not meaning. I better give you one of my own.
Skin
for James
Light, shadow, shit, a ladder
He purses lips wrong to sing
When I ran a blade along the earth
Where wall and molecule leap
I heard a tumult of heaven being flecked.
Light dives into its cup
Of cerulean worry. What is this image
But a memory deprived of its tasks?
Lifting shoulders she tore the sugar
Packet open and poured it in
He looked away then back to her
Slid her hand around the cup and
On a leaf in a corner of my garden
A snail sits in the sun
And waits all day for its shell to harden.
I see it & wonder if two are one?
His hand limp across the other hand
Small dictionary open to a word in his language
To match the newspaper article, chest dropped
In concentration. Right leg fallen, left
Lifted onto a chair angled before him
Eyes burn then glaze thinking then turn
And blink. He leans forward onto the open
Page but quickly arches back, lifts head and stares
Into the sweet eastern sapphire sky,
Where stars of another’s will conspire
To spin the absent words of his effort.
‘Frame’ he says, and means a rim of flame.
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| Annie Adjchavanich |
| Brief, to the point, and no questions asked... |
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Spend time with people you like.
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Tell people how significant they are to you.
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Write thank you notes.
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Take care of yourself.
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Know when to stop working.
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| Colby Caldwell |
| Against prevailing sentiments: |
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"Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the real one."
- Thomas Bernhard, from the novel, Extinction
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Lucian Freud never works from photographs,
"Useless as sources of information,"
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fugazi at 9:30 club
Seeing fugazi at dupont circle back in the summer of 1987 is one ofmy first memories of moving to DC. Not being a fan of that particular brand of music, I never was a feverent follower of the music, but I have always followed what the various band members have gotten into. They seemed an intelligent bunch, who had the right balance of career, and principals. And I have always felt that guy picotti was one of the most compelling performers I have witnessed. It has been 14 years since that summer show, and watching them at 9:30 club filled me with that same wonderment, and hope, that it did that first summer. I also had an interesting discussion with a student about the supposed, "tiredness" of fugazi. he argued that they were no longer relevant, and had become redundant. i took offense to this, and felt they had simply, and valiantly stuck to their ideals, which so happened to be the very ideals this young student had fashioned himself on. the fact they were no longer "new," seemed to make them "tired" according to my student. i used my dylan on the oscars experience as another example, but this drew even louder scoffs. i would write this off as mere youth, but it seemed to me to be a symptom of a larger problem, that being the marginalization of "old" for something else simply because it is "new".
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"I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed."
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"...we regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, the landscape, and so on) depicted there.
This need not have been so. We could easily imagine peoplewho did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman."
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| Peter Ferko |
| Pat Power Shows Me How to Add |
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Two Pseudo-Suffixes
words that end in "ocean"
motion
emotion
devotion
commotion
potion
words that end in "ants"
dance
prance
chance
romance
france
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Three Lips
tulips
two lips
"Smile Dammit;" a painting by Linda Lou Clements. 8' x 8' canvas. a 2' strip of meticulous squares punctuated by intense brush stabs, and Linda Lou's smile framed by two Baretta pistols. The bottom 6' of the painting is a bunch of pommegranates on a deep redish brown background, in a grid that refers to the top strip. Either about the service industry, or a love of red, or both. At Tom and Jerry's on Elizabeth at Houston in the East Village.
lyrics that spill through true lips:
So close to heaven
Girl of the summer sky
So close together
Close to my mouth
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