Nancy Spero

1926 – 2009

Gray Area
defines new age
of art + technology

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The Gray Area
Foundation for the Arts
officially opens today

55 Taylor Street, SF
(between Market & Turk)

Ribbon Cutting: 5:00-6:00 PM
Reception: 6:00-10:00 PM

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Arthur Okamura

1932 – 2009

David Ireland

1930 – 2009

Darragh Park

1939 – 2009

George Schneeman

1934 – 2009

There was nothing ironic in my choice of an image for Saturday’s notice of the passing of Andrew Wyeth. “Trodden Weed,” the 1951 painting I featured, is one of Wyeth’s few self-portraits. In the painting, Wyeth is wearing boots that once belonged to Howard Pyle, the founder of the Brandywine school of painting & teacher of N.C. Wyeth, Andrew’s father & a famous illustrator in his own right. It was N.C.’s illustrations for Treasure Island that enabled him to buy property in Chadds Ford, maybe 10 miles southwest of here. Technically, Chadds Ford is the western tip of Delaware County, but the tiny town where the Battle of the Brandywine – the worst defeat on home soil in the history of the American military – was fought on September 11, 1777 has much more in common with Chester County, which surrounds it on three sides.

Unquestionably, Andrew Wyeth was, is & will ever be the most famous visual artist to come from the western ‘burbs of Philadelphia.¹ That self-portrait shows him walking over Kuerner’s Hill in Chadds Ford, not far from the home where he died. Tempera on a panel, “Trodden Weed” – or “Night Sleeper” above – captures the very fine balancing act that Wyeth’s work always involved:  simply awesome technique, an uncritical sense of painting just ever so slightly on the impressionistic side of realism & an understanding that sentimentality would capsize this genuinely conservative aesthetic. The closest thing to Andrew Wyeth in the world of poetry is probably Wendell Berry, and I mean that as a compliment to both.

I never met Wyeth, never saw him at the Brandywine River Museum that is something of a Wyeth family headquarters for the general public, never ran into him at Hank’s, the diner he ate at once a week (but where I eat only once every couple of years), never saw him out in the yard at his place, tho it’s on one the main roads, one I’ve driven hundreds of times.

But you can’t live here and not feel his presence. He did more to give shape to this region’s sense of self-image than any other single individual, including I dare say George Washington.

 

¹ Tho she once owned the mansion that is now the Upper Mainline YMCA in Berwyn, Mary Cassatt never lived there.

 

Literally next door to the towering, majestic & world famous quilts from Gee’s Bend¹, the drawings of James Castle (1899 or 1900 – 1977) seem tiny & muted. Most of them are monochromatic on the simplest of canvases – the unfolded backs of commercial packaging, such as cigarette packs. His favored tools were sharpened sticks. His primary pigments were stove soot and saliva. Apparently deaf from birth and unable to read or even speak, James Castle turned out to be one of the great American artists of the 20^th century. His galleries and those of the Gee’s Bend quilt makers are what’s currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the same spaces that will be gorged with viewers of Cezanne come late February. Frankly, they should be there now.

Castle was not entirely an untrained artist, having spent five years in the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind, although his tenure there was not successful – he did not learn language and stories vary as to his recalcitrance & defiance. Many of his drawings depict the two-building school or focus on the various Idaho farms his family owned, most often in straightforward realist manner, with the notable exception of heads, which tends to be square or boxy or even objects, such as chairs. There is a quiet ease & precision, even in these simple, sometime minuscule landscapes, that is on a par with any of the 20^th century realists – he’d look just fine alongside any of the Wyeths, for example.

But there are works here that also absolutely foretell pop art, or that look like Ed Ruscha, or even Jasper Johns. And there’s no evidence that word of any of these art trends ever seeped through the TV or photo magazines into the Boise Valley farm where he lived the last 40 some years of his life. When we see him copying art, it’s the salt girl from Morton’s (with a boxy head) or images from the Sunday funnies or editorial cartoons. Indeed, nobody paid Castle much attention at all – there were enough kin to work the farms and let him just draw away all day, or to construct tiny sculptures out of cardboard & string – until a nephew, Bob Beach, first brought him to the attention of a Portland art professor. The rest, as they say, is history.

And although James Castle seems never to have acquired language², he certainly had ideas about language. And books. James Castle was one of the most prolific manufacturer of handmade books ever, constructed out of scraps of packaging or magazine ads, very competently sewn with whatever string he could scrounge up. There are books whose only content is the line, page after page of wavy lines clearly indicating his sense of how these go on. It is, in fact, a major treatise on the function of the line as a constituent of language itself, precisely because it is conducted by someone who can look at it from the outside. Castle often puts words or titles on these books’ covers, ranging from Taxes to Kotex. There are even collage displays of packaging, in which star formations themselves are transformed into kaleidoscopes of five identical images.  I think every visual poet in the world would want to consider the vision of this man for whom language seems to have been essentially visual, as distinct from semantic.

There is another James Castle who is likewise a sculptor, so use the links here not to be drawn astray. This show will be in Philadelphia through January 4, when it moves to the Art Institute of Chicago & finally to the Berkeley Museum of Art. When you go, be sure to see the video documentary that comes with the show, a combination of Castle’s work and interview snippets with his many nieces & nephews & various art critics (John Yau prominently among them) and historians.

 

 

¹ If you go jus to see the quilts – a day in itself – be sure to visit the Perelman annex kitty corner from the main museum where they have mounted a small show of recent acquisitions from museum’s permanent collection of quilts including thirteen pieces from the Ella King Torrey collection. Torrey, the first director of the Pew Arts program and later head of the San Francisco Art Institute, gathered a series of quilts from Gee’s  Bend while studying at the University of Mississippi. There are also some other recent acquisitions to the quilt collection that will cause your jaw to drop.

² Temple Grandin, a scholar of autism & herself autistic, and others have suggested that Castle may have been profoundly autistic rather than deaf, or at least in addition to being deaf.

Grace Hartigan

1922 – 2008


Hartigan with Frank O'Hara

I finally got around to viewing How to Draw a Bunny the other night, and both the documentary and its subject are quite a bit better than its rating on Netflix might make you suspect. Bunny is a portrait of the late Ray Johnson, the inventor of mail art & an active member of the New York arts scene in the 1950s & ‘60s, close to Fluxus, part of the Warhol scene, and a man who lived the most austere life imaginable, even by Thomas Merton standards. His final performance piece in 1995 found him jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor and swimming the backstroke generally out in the direction of Gardiner’s Bay & Long Island Sound. His body was later found in the water.

From the lengthy interview with the Sag Harbor chief of police – and extensive footage of Johnson’s home in Locust Valley taken either by the police or shortly after Johnson’s death – the conclusion of suicide was pretty much obvious, but even the police – usually not your best aesthetic critics – could see that everything had been set up as if it were a happening – a  genre at which Johnson excelled. All of his works (for the most part, thousands and thousands of collages) were either boxed up or turned facing the wall, with the sole exception, in the uppermost, furthest back room of the house, of a photo of Johnson himself, staring out (imagine an inverted tomb for an Egyptian pharaoh). Johnson’s earlier events included his participation in a poetry reading in which his work consisted of removing his belt and beating a cardboard box with it for twenty minutes, all the while hopping around on one foot, looking considerably “less hip” than anyone in the audience in a suit & tie, his hair cropped close (at other points he favored a shaved head). Johnson was also the person who brought Dorothy Podber to Andy Warhol’s factory where, anticipating Valerie Solanis by four years, she proceeded to shoot a stack of Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

Johnson himself dropped out of the New York scene with a vengeance the day Solanis shot Warhol himself. For one thing, Johnson had been mugged the same day. And two days later Robert Kennedy was assassinated. How Johnson survived, both in New York & later on Long Island, is not clear from the documentary. There is not much evidence that Johnson himself ever worked for a living, at least not after his parents died, and he actively made it all but impossible to purchase his art. Yet when he died without a will, there remained a massive estate of works and over $400,000 in cash.

What impressed the police most was that people from all over the world started calling, each with a story about Johnson that might shed some light on his behavior. Many of Johnson’s friends were famous – John Cage, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, Diane Di Prima, most of whom are either in the movie or in the extensive (and equally interesting) “out takes” included on the DVD. All of the stories were remarkable, the chief notes, but they were all very different and nobody it seemed knew Johnson well at all. Even his closest compadres like Christo, Chuck Close or his beleaguered art dealers Richard Feigen and Frances Beatty. For example, Beatty had been working for 14 years to get Johnson to hold still long enough for Feigen’s gallery to do a show. It was an impulse Johnson deliberately, repeatedly undercut. Much of the film, in fact, is a recitation of various would-be collectors negotiating with Johnson over the price of some collage. Morton Janklow, the corporate lawyer who became a literary agent, sat for a portrait that consisted of a silhouette, which Johnson then reproduced 26 times and used as the foundation for a series of intensely worked collages. Every time Janklow asked Johnson if he could buy the series, Johnson’s story changed. At one point, he added an image of Paloma Picasso, Pablo’s daughter & a famous designer for Tiffany in her own right. The image, a photo taken by Helmut Newton, is very 1970s. She stands wearing a dress that covers only one breast, the other half hidden behind a glass of what might be whiskey. Taken from wherever Johnson got it – Life magazine is a real possibility – Johnson declared that any portrait of Janklow – the silhouette is almost entirely unintelligible in at least half of them – that had been “Paloma-ized” was now worth double the previous price. Another time, Chuck Close talked Johnson down on price by 25 percent, only to receive the collage minus its lower right-hand quadrant. Close also tried mightily to get Johnson to sell something to the Met so that he could include Johnson's work in a show of portraits from the Met’s collection. Johnson was his typical impossible self, but he sent correspondence art – a photocopied bunny with a name attached – to the Met’s librarian, knowing the institution’s practice of saving all correspondence. It looked something like this:

And Close did include it in the show, tho to say that it was in the Met’s “collection” was stretching it more than a little.

I used to see Johnson’s work occasionally in various intermedia/Fluxus-oriented publications throughout the 1960s & ‘70s, less often thereafter. Unlike Basquiat, who was equally an outsider – more so socially than Johnson – but who transformed his role on the edges of the Warhol scene into a moment of brief fame & fortune before he died, Johnson is – like every member of Fluxus save for Yoko Ono – an artist who never got rich and certainly did not get his due during his own lifetime. Not that he made it easy for anyone who tried. Perhaps only Richard Lippold, the sculptor who was briefly Johnson’s instructor at Black Mountain – where else? – in the late 1940s, and who speaks as tho he had an affair with his student that lasted a quarter century, ever really got close. It was Lippold who brought the Detroit-raised Johnson to New York, and many of Johnson’s friends would have been Lippold’s also.

Much of the work around Fluxus, in particular, has always struck me as nostalgia for Dada, a kind of retro echo effect that suggests a derivative imagination, not for the most part first-rate work. Yet How to Draw a Bunny makes a superb case for Johnson as craftsman & visionary both. And as such, it’s an excellent example of how a film can really elevate the work of its subject (cf. Gustave Reninger’s Corso: The Last Beat, should it ever get distributed). Why is it that docs about these relatively obscure artists – or, in Corso’s case, famous but not taken seriously – so often provide much better treatment than do films about major artists like Kerouac or Bill Burroughs or Andy Warhol? Perhaps it’s because the film-maker understands his or her role not just in presenting the artist in question, but in making the case for a more serious, closer look than has previously been offered. With famous, successful writers and artists, it’s just presumed & accordingly the film never does the close reading, the serious work, it needs to accomplish. John Walter, director of How to Draw a Bunny, mostly has done anti-war films. But he’s almost made one of the best portraits of an artist I’ve ever seen. And he’s convinced me that Johnson is much more than a marginal fuck-up of the sort that make up the fringe of any large art scene. This film makes you realize that even when he was just emerging from the Black Mountain aesthetic, Johnson was already a powerful artist:

But as this film makes clear, that black square at the center of this work – the title is Calm Center – is, in fact, also a self portrait. Don’t take it from me. Ask Johnson:

Roger Rice, Katrina Sings the Blues

Quite some time ago – at least 14 years¹ – I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama to give a reading & my host, Hank Lazer, was rightfully escorting me to the wonders & surprises of a college town as deep in the Old South as one could get, such as a two-unit ice cream “chain” that had one shop in Tuscaloosa, but the other in Havana. At one point, on one of the town’s main commercial streets, we ducked into a store tucked among the shoe repair & hardware merchants & came upon the finest folk art gallery I had ever seen – or have ever seen since.

Robert Cargo had been a French professor at Alabama &, with his wife Helen, a lifelong collector of what we might now call outsider art. There were stacks of regional quilts not in the manner you might find in a midtown gallery on 57^th Street in New York, but almost as if you had wandered into a rug shop. There were the sequined hex flags and Santeria art from Haiti. I immediately recognized some paintings by Howard Finster, the backwoods minister who became one of the first true superstars of this genre, participating in the Venice Biennale in 1984 & designing the cover for the 1985 Talking Heads album Little Creatures. There were paintings by dozens of other artists as well, most of whom were new to me. Having retired from teaching, Cargo was now able to indulge this passion full time. He took Hank & I around & gave us the cook’s tour of his collection. I was flat out blown away.

When I returned home, I raved to Krishna about how much she would have loved to have seen this gallery. Her own mother was still quilting at the time, and, when I first met her, Krishna had been the director of the arts program at Central City Hospitality House, the closest thing San Francisco has to an active folk art center. But then life got busy, as it will with kids, we settled into our digs in Chester County, PA, and our folk art interests focused on the American Visionary Art Museum on the Baltimore harbor, which I’ve written about here on two previous occasions.

Then in November 2006, the folk artist Mose Tolliver died, an artist whose work I knew & I heard a lovely remembrance of him on All Things Considered. Later that day, or maybe later that week, I went online to see if there were any images of his work on the web. Indeed there were, and the first one I clicked on took me right back to Cargo Folk Art, the fabulous little gallery in Tuscaloosa .

Only it wasn’t in Tuscaloosa any more. It was now just one mile from my house.

There is, of course, a story to that, it being that as Helen’s health had failed, Robert Cargo had to turn more of his attention to care giving, so that his daughter Caroline Cargo took over the directorship of the gallery, moving it up to her home here in Paoli. An added irony, perhaps, might be that Caroline Cargo is that most rare of beings, a citizen of Paoli who once lived, as we did, in Berkeley . Go figure. We had never met in person until last week.

So this past Wednesday, I took the afternoon off work & Krishna & I finally got to visit the Cargo Folk Art gallery together. It’s open by appointment, which has the advantage that every visit is a guided tour of one of the great folk art collections in the United States. How great? Enough to make a donation of 156 African-American quilts, including some from Gee’s Bend, to the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska. The remainder of the Cargo collection consists of over 1,500 quilts and 400 quilt tops. We didn’t even get to see one percent of that, but it took all afternoon.

And while there was a while on Wednesday when Caroline & Krishna were unfolding quilt after quilt on the living room floor, most of what we saw that afternoon were paintings & sculpture. The first artist we focused on – my old prison movement background coming to the fore – were the paintings and drawings of Roger Rice, who did the watercolor at the top of this note. Rice is serving a life sentence in Mississippi and has, at best, sporadic access to art supplies. His work ranges between prison scenes & visionary portraits that reflect his background as an ordained fundamentalist preacher. One of the few artists in the collection with any sort of formal art training – some high school classes – Rice was already showing and selling his work when he was arrested.

Access to materials was not the issue with artists like Jimmy Lee Sudduth, a painter whose works were often done on boards, which might be gouged or burned for an effect, and who combined common house paints with mud (“earth pigments,” the gallery website calls this). Sudduth, like Tolliver and several of the other artists in the collection, has passed away now. One of those was Joseph Hardin, a man so crippled by arthritis that he was barely able to move – an artist Cargo knew was delivering food to Hardin in the Meals on Wheels program & recognized the quality of the work, putting Cargo in touch with artist.

I recommend exploring the gallery web site to get some sense of this great place. And, if you have any serious interest in folk art or in collecting, I really recommend calling and setting up an appointment to see it all firsthand. It’s one of the treasures not just of Chester County, but of the entire Philadelphia region.

My own interest in folk art is that the work of untrained artists often strike me as being much closer to what I’m doing in my poetry than the excessively processed works of the MFA mills. The perpetual construction that was Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, for example, is exactly what I think I’m doing with my own life poem that keeps on adding sections in all directions. The use of found materials, whether the bottle caps embedded in the Towers or the use of mud or the decision to work on board or, in one case, paper bags treated as canvases – not unlike the way the Gee’s Bend quilters recycle old blue jeans into their quilts – makes perfect intuitive sense to me. Of course one’s art should be continuous with life as we find it. And when it works, as with a painting done on an old tree truck, there’s a magic I can’t quite articulate. So I have to just sit down & look & be dazzled & amazed.

 

¹ My version of carbon dating: as we crossed the University of Alabama campus, we encountered George Starbuck, whom I’d met briefly at San Francisco State in the 1960s & for whose work I’ve always had a distinct fondness. Hank mentioned my reading, which I believe was the following night, and George apologized, saying that, at his age, he didn’t get out to readings much any more. My memory is that this occurred maybe two years before Starbuck passed away in 1996 at the age of 65, meaning that he would have been one year older than I am now.

Some thoughts looking back on a busy time –

I got to hear live music twice in one week, a rarity at this point in my life. And the two events really do represent the range of what I like: James Fei playing solo sax at the CUE Art Foundation last Friday, then Joe Ely & Joel Guzman at the World Café in Philly on Sunday. Fei I’ve written about here. His solo performance was every bit as magical as the work of his quartet at the Rotunda in Philly earlier in the month. Again his work was the closest thing I’d seen / heard to a cerebral minimalism applied to free jazz. The combination is exhilarating.

Ely, on the other hand, is the Lubbock-raised country / folk / rockabilly veteran who’s a key part of the legendary Flatlanders (alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock), a recurring member of Los Super Seven, & who’s played over the years with such folk as Bruce Springsteen & The Clash. He & accordion-wizard Guzman performed an hour & 45 minutes of mostly up-tempo pieces that included all of the above influences, a touch of mariachi, the requisite Townes Van Zandt song (“Tecumseh Valley”) & even Porter Wagoner’s “Satisfied Mind.”

I came away from New York with a sense that Cynthia Miller’s show at the CUE Art Foundation was the best show I saw in New York. Two other shows that were well worth viewing were Ian Baguskas’ photographs at Jen Bekman on Spring Street & Paul Chan’s exhibition “The 7 Lights” at the New Museum (that strikethrough is part of the title). I have to sit with my reaction to the New Museum itself – I immediately liked the light inside, and the galleries felt appropriately sized, but I’m not at all sure about the wildly fluctuating “maximum occupancy” limitations from floor to floor. Also the fact that an eight-story building only proves capable of having three active galleries suggests that the whizbang architecture will have a long-term impact compromising curatorial impulses.

One show that I found somewhat disappointing, mostly because it was so Spartan, was the exhibition of Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” works (mostly, I think, from the volume If) at Tibor de Nagy, which was crowded into the gallery’s smaller alcove in order to leave the larger one to Ben Aronson’s lumbering & unwatchable urban ‘scapes. This is one of those cases where the book, which the Nancy show is intended to celebrate, is unquestionably greater than the exhibition. Aronson made me want to go view some Diebenkorn, Thiebaud or David Park.

But the real train wreck was the Whitney & its lingering Biennale, even tho there were works there by people I like such as John Baldessari. Baldessari, who provided the cover for the first edition of my book Tjanting, has many virtues, but when he comes across looking like the master craftsperson in the building, something’s amiss. The theme appears to have been rubble (which would explain why the show includes Spike Lee’s magnificent HBO miniseries on New Orleans), but I felt for the most part like I had been sent to art school hell.

I missed the Poetry Society of America’s 98^th annual awards ceremony earlier last week, due almost entirely to my pneumonia (which hangs on as I write) and its impact on my day job, plus my desire to be at the CUE opening. In addition to Aram Saroyan winning the William Carlos Williams Award, with Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles a finalists, the other winners (and judges) include:

Michael S. Harper, The Frost Medal (presumably given by the PSA board of governors)

Ed Roberson, The Shelley Memorial Award (judged by Lyn Hejinian & C.D. Wright)

Joanie Mackowski, The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (judged by Donald Revell)

Brian Henry, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (judged by Norma Cole)

Wayne Miller, Lyric Poetry Award (judged by Elizabeth Macklin)

Christina Pugh, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (judged by Timothy Donnelly); finalist Sally Ball

Natasha Sajé, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (judged by Dean Young); finalists Kevin Prufer & James Richardson

Carey Powers, Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award (judged by David Roderick); finalists Willa Granger & Philip Sparks

Theresa Sotto, George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Prageeta Sharma)

Jocelyn Emerson, Robert Winner Memorial Award (judged by Annie Finch); finalists Rachel Conrad & Marsha Pomerantz

Catherine Imbriglio for Parts of the Mass, published by Burning Deck, Norma Farber First Book Award (judged by Thylias Moss); finalist Alena Hairston for The Logan Topographies, published by Persea.

What one notices first, or at least what I notice first, is the diversity. From Annie Finch & Dean Young to myself, C.D Wright, Norma Cole & Prageeta Sharma among the judges – that’s the broadest range I’ve seen for a set of awards. Last year’s judges (Thomas Sayers Ellis, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Srikanth Reddy, Eleni Sikelianos, Tracy K. Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Eleanor Wilner) weren’t bad either. Whatever one thinks about awards, or these award winners, the fact that the PSA is making a concerted effort to reach a broader range of what poetry actually is can only be commended.

Which is not to say that it’s perfect. I made a point of recommending a specific work for inclusion in the program for the evening:

What I actually find in the program, which just arrived in the mail, is the following:

a man stands
on his
head one
minute –

then he
sit
down all
different

My original suggestion stresses what is unique about Saroyan’s volume. The poem actually used stresses the ways in which his writing in the 1960s might be seen as continuous with the lyric tradition. Both aspects, as I noted here, are present in Saroyan’s writing. But, especially given the ongoing ghettoization of vispo, which do you think is the more important message?

One final note: readers of this blog clicked on over 5,000 links on Monday, a first.

When the CUE Art Foundation asked me last year if I would curate a show this spring for its Chelsea gallery, a number of possibilities immediately jumped to mind. The rule as I originally understood it was that it had to be an artist who either had not previously had a show in New York before, or at least not in ten years. When I checked further, I learned that it had to be an American artist and they needed to be living – there went, for example, Australian-born, Zurich-based media artist Jill Scott (an important figure in the San Francisco performance scene in the 1970s) as well as modernist wood worker Wharton Esherick (1887-1970), both of whom I would love to introduce to wider contemporary audiences. Even with the expansion of galleries that has accompanied the evolution of Chelsea as the post-downtown visual arts vortex, the number of superb artists who haven’t shown in New York remains overwhelming. Just to keep the process manageable, I restricted myself to those whose work has been important to me, generative in contributing to how I think about my own work as a poet. That list got a little shorter as I discovered that a couple of the people I’d been contemplating had recently had shows in NYC. And once I had finally gotten my list of possible choices down to two people, one of them, photographer Zoe Strauss, told me she had been offered a show in New York even earlier than would be possible with CUE and was going to go forward with that. Her decision had the advantage of keeping my selection from becoming a completely wrenching one.

Cynthia Miller has been a key figure in the Tucson art scene for quite some time. While many readers of this blog probably know her work already from its association with Chax Press and many of their book covers (including my own Demo to Ink), traveling to Tucson is what really gives you a sense of the scope and reach of her work. This show gives me the opportunity to do the next best thing to taking the New York visual arts world to the American southwest to get that context. I’m bringing Cynthia’s most recent work to the CUE Art Foundation, starting today and running through the end of May.

Here is a little statement I’ve contributed to the gallery’s catalog for the exhibition:

Blending so-called high and low genre, the Arts & Crafts Movement anticipated much that we now think of as postmodern. Many of the forms that concerned William Morris, for example, including wallpaper, carpets & floor runners, were not only designed for domestic use, but also engaged visual traditions that deployed imagery as pattern, muting or deflecting the narrative of a "scene." Many other "Other" traditions likewise share exactly these features, from the cubism of African sculpture to the pottery & tapestries of Central & South America, and of course the American Southwest. Tucson's Cynthia Miller, a painter whose work reproduced on book covers has been a visual signature of Chax Press for 20-plus years, pulls these different elements together with what I think she might call a Southwestern eye, and most definitely a Southwestern imagination.

The objects envisioned are simple – quail, a tea kettle, a flower pot – but seldom used simply. Rather, like the blue deer, the red pony or the red and yellow birds, each is cast so as to let in many possible connotations. Two crows represent two crows, yet they completely reframe the spatial relations of the two vases, one white, the other not (or the third vase, half hidden red against orange in the leftmost field). The result is a painting that conveys a sense of anxiety without ever telling why. Yet look at the lush leafwork about the crow on the right, or the transparent foliage about the darker vase.

The fields on which these translucent images sit are themselves visually rich, not unlike the flowers surrounding the road behind the blue antlers of Out West. The background tones often proceed from pink or red or red-orange to blue or blue green. At times I think this figures the seasons, at times the hours in a day, at times I think it is there precisely to resist figuration.

The opening reception is tonight from 6 until 8 PM at the gallery, 511 W. 25^th Street (between 10^th & 11^th avenues). Tomorrow, Charles Alexander & I will give readings at the gallery – this starts at 6:30 PM – followed by James Fei on saxophone. You need to RSVP for that event, as seating is limited. And you really need to bring your eyes, ears, mind and subconscious to both of these events.

Thursday, April 24^th & Friday, April 25^th

All at the CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25^th Street, Ground Floor
(between 10^th & 11^th avenues)
New York, New York
212.206.3538

 

ж ж ж

Cynthia Miller

Paintings

Curated by Ron Silliman

Opening reception:
Thursday, April 24, 6-8 PM

The show will be up through May 31
Gallery hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6
Closed Sunday & Monday

Catalog available

ж ж ж

Words + Music, 6:30 PM, Friday, April 25^th

Ron Silliman
Charles Alexander
James Fei

 

images © 2008 by Cynthia Miller

Blockbuster art exhibits are the most brutal way imaginable to view anything & the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is no exception. You need timed tickets to enter & even then you end up in a long single-file line that snakes through museum’s main lobby like the airport security line from hell – we were literally exchanging backrubs with strangers just to pass the time on Sunday. Once you are in the show, things don’t speed up all that much. If you want to look at the paintings – the show pretty much has all of the canonical ones – you basically need to wait to move to the front of the crowd around each picture as people move on. If the paintings weren’t so terrific, it just wouldn’t be worth all the standing on hard concrete.

Kahlo is that most unique of phenomena – the first-rate artist who became a “crossover” hit & an icon to the women’s movement right as second-wave feminism was rising to its heights. I can’t imagine, for example, anything like the same mob scene for a retrospective of Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s two-time (& two-timing) husband, tho the muralist was the most famous Mexican artist even when she first met him in art school & his Detroit Industry mural is easily the finest single painting in the United States by any artist ever. Thus, while the complementary audio program talks endlessly about Kahlo’s symbolism & some of her sources, the narrative actually discusses her actual craft as a painter exactly once, in the very last of its 24 little lectures, explaining why there are no paintings from the last three years of Kahlo’s life when her reliance on painkillers had finally become an addiction and “she lost control of her brushstroke.” This at the end of a program in which we’ve gotten to hear such fluff as Pattie Smith comparing Frida’s relation to Diego to her own relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In fact, Kahlo is a muscular painter whose fine strokes leave her canvases – and her masonite boards & her sheets of tin & aluminum – almost perfectly flat. Rather than a celebration of the hand that would emerge out of modernist abstraction, Kahlo translates this invariably to the image portrayed. Two of the very best paintings in the entire show are not her iconic self-portraits, but a painting of marigolds and a portrait, done on commission, of Doña Rosita Morillo, both executed in the mid-1940s, both freed largely from the angst that is so often portrayed elsewhere in her work. They are flat out great paintings and it’s worth the hassle of the museum’s presentation just to see them.

But, in fairness, Kahlo is also the most political of painters, more so than Rivera, more so than, say, Ben Shahn or Leon Golub. Her sense of capitalism is closer to Bosch & Brueghel than her contemporaries (this shows especially in one of her few European-influenced pieces, a collage she made while accompanying Rivera on his disastrous trip to New York to paint a mural for Mr. Rockefeller). Her feminism is serious & conscious & decades ahead of the women’s movement. Thus, in “A Few Small Nips,” the image at the top of this note, painted in 1935, Kahlo not only presents the stabbing death of a young woman, but her killer’s claim that it was only “a few small nips.” The spatters of blood extend beyond the metal on which the scene is painted to the work’s frame. Inside the frame, they are pictorial and representational – the walls are not covered – but outside it, they directly engage (challenge / accuse) the viewer.

Unsurprisingly, Kahlo has become the matron saint of chronic pain. As I told Krishna (who used to keep a poster of Kahlo’s Broken Column above her bed when we first met), I have a hard time reading a painting like Column, with its piercing nails spreading far beyond the shattered image of a spine, without thinking that Kahlo must have had reflex sympathetic dystrophy – chronic pain syndrome. Between her childhood polio, the horrific trolley & bus crash she was in at the age of 18 – Kahlo was impaled by a handrail & her pelvis was shattered – the lifelong surgeries that followed, her multiple miscarriages that resulted from a pelvis that was unable to support a pregnancy & her husband’s blatantly wayward ways – they married, divorced, remarried & came close to divorce again as Rivera tended to fuck anything in a skirt, including Frida’s sister – Kahlo has proven to be the perfect symbol for a particular feminist aesthetic. In this sense, she’s not unlike Sylvia Plath, tho their differences I think are more telling than the obvious parallels. Unlike Plath, who took her life right at the point where she was emerging as a mature poet, Kahlo persevered. If she thought about suicide – and it’s obvious that she did – she put it in a painting. If he slept around, she did too, famously, counting the likes of Trotsky among her conquests.

But a photograph of her in traction by Nick Murray – one of her lovers – is itself as painful in its own way as any of her hallucinated images. The photographs, from some family photo albums that have never been displayed before, are themselves a fascinating part of the exhibition (and notably less crowded around than the paintings). It’s worth noting, for example, that the exotic animals that give many of her self-portraits a surreal edge were in reality her pets. This is a woman who kept not just monkeys & parrots, but an eagle. Another photograph in which Kahlo is nude from the waist up has been torn in half, but carefully so as to render it a head shot – the text on the wall luridly (and without any supporting evidence given) suggests that Rivera must have been furious at this documentation of her affair with the photographer. But her gaze here, as in so many of the photos & in so many of her self-portraits as well, meets our eyes. Unlike Plath, this was someone absolutely determined to survive & prevail. It’s ultimately a very different message. In one of the last works, she portrays her self as a sitting Madonna, holding a naked infant that just happens to be the grown Rivera. One can certainly see the anger represented – to have married someone 21 years her senior only to have to treat him like a baby – but even more significant is the degree to which this work shows Kahlo in control, of her art, her images & her life.

Mike Goldberg

1924 – 2008

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

Frank O'Hara

 I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

For instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color; orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

R. B. Kitaj

1932 – 2007

Less than two centuries ago, my great-great grandfather, John Franklin, signed his wedding certificate with an X. Living in what was then – and still is today – one of the wealthiest nations on earth, this British fish monger had never learned to read. Today, I produce texts for a living. I thought of my ancestor, and of the meaning(s) of history & of context, often as I looked at the works of Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic installation artist who is the subject of a one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will run until February 24 of next year. Eliasson uses diverse techniques, ranging from photography to sculpture to light & mirrors to moss to, in one stunning instance a viewer might miss because it’s two floors from the main portion of the exhibition, a BMW racing car encased in two tons of ice, stored in a room kept at roughly 14° Fahrenheit (the day I was there it hovered between 12 & 13). What would an illiterate fishmonger make of that?

Or of the pieces employing light, such as Room for one colour, an eerie yellow that drains everything of color so that what you see, the instant you step out of the elevator, is a world in which there exists only shades of this yellow or its absence, the color black. This is created entirely through the use of monochromatic bulbs. It is simultaneously fascinating & nauseating, more or less literally. The sudden reduction of color makes you hyperconscious of just how much information is being redacted, just how much information you take in just through the presence of color alone in the simplest of scenes – people getting on or off an elevator in a museum. You are, you realize, fully literate in color. Or at least I am, not being color blind. I wonder what this same room would look like to one of my sons who often cannot discern orange from green, nor green from blue.

From my perspective, the most interesting of the 21 works was 360°room for all colours, a very nearly circular space – there is an entranceway that takes out perhaps 10 percent of the experience – that consists entirely of light being projected across this panorama. At times, the entire circle is one color – most often white, although at least once I noticed a cherry red. More often, swatches of the spectra occupy different portions of the circle, either moving gradually around the panorama or shifting very subtly into whatever will come next. While I was there, relatively few people were observing the entire panorama, say from its center or the door way. Most, myself included, positioned themselves maybe two inches from one spot, so that the light would entirely fill their field of vision. This is an intense experience, and may not be suited for everyone. What you notice, close up, are three things, only one of which is the light itself. You also notice physical items that are part of your own viewing apparatus, floaters in the middle of the eyeball. At 61, I have more than a few of these translucent strings, although in daily life I hardly ever notice them. Far less so these days than I did, say, 15 years ago when I had cataracts in both eyes that required surgery. Without the impinging shadows of the cataracts that were literally robbing me of my sight & thereby rendering me hyperaware of it, these floaters are no big deal & I never think about them, even though they’re there all the time, tiny deposits of hardened protein in the middle of my eyeballs.

The third element is something I take to be neurological more than physical, and even here at the edge of light I don’t notice it consistently, a series of what I can only characterize as webbing or a grid, so that a solid field of color is in fact richly organized & not a bare block. When I was much younger & given to playing with psychedelics, I would notice this as well – against a field of white it might tinge red or blue ever so slightly, pulsing or slowly spinning, lovely actually to look at – it was definitely part of the wow factor of acid hallucinations, but now I see it not at all as hallucinatory but rather as part of my omnipresent field of vision, normally just below the level of consciousness. Or of recognition. Stripped away of all else, it comes to the fore.

Other Eliasson effects often are based on similar instances of making us see that which is normally elusive, or maybe not even available. There are two pieces, one a black square cut out in a wall, the other an installation at window’s edge up a tiny flight of stairs, where people are allowed up two at a time, in which the presence of mirrored surfaces in all four directions lead you to be staring down at multiple instances the very top of your head or (on the little platform) at the bottom of your feet. Women who approach the window in skirts would be advised to wear panties.

Eliasson is at once beyond subtlety and a master practitioner thereof. Some of the photo series – every waterfall on a major glacier in Iceland, for example, is as droll as Ed Ruscha’s photos of buildings on the streets of LA – and the iced racing car, Your mobile expectations, is a case in point. The car has had to have its body re-engineered to take the weight & cold of the ice, but it is in some sense functional – the lights are on, tho how they manage this eluded me. The ice, tho, is not a block, but rather an egg-shaped web of ice, which is gradually softening, little spikes of ice gradually softening its surface. Viewers are given felt blankets to wrap around them and let into the sealed chamber in groups of about a dozen to twenty people. You can see everyone waiting, nobody wanting to be the first to flee but the instant the first person knocks to be let out the far door, roughly half the crowd rush through, then again in a couple of more groups. I circled the car three times or so, not really picking up details like the grillwork or tires until my last time around. I was surprised to discover that I was the last one out the door of my group.

Eliasson is quoted as saying that his work is about experience rather than objects, which walking through the museum bears out in spaces, save for the one room that consists of models built by Eliasson and his assistants that reveal them to be exploring the potential in geometric variations with considerable care & precision. This is not that far from, say, the poetics of Robert Grenier, particularly the more recent scrawl and drawn pieces where the whole trick of the work is simply to be able to decipher it, so that you feel the language going off in your head. Both Eliasson and Grenier also share the fact of being fun, which invariably must make some people suspicious. Can this be art? Eliasson, like Grenier, is an argument for the affirmative.