I'm an artist, designer, filmmaker and author of a few articles read by at least twelve people. I was born in Los Angeles, raised in the midwest, and now I divide my time between Seattle/Los Angeles/NYC.
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A Hand of Solo
Lips and tongue
wrestle the delicious
life out of you.A last drop.
Wonderful.
A moment's rest.In the firelight glow
the flickering
shadows softlycome and go up on the shelf:
red heart and black spade
hid in the kitchen dark.Woman throat song
help my head
back to you sweet.by Thomas Kinsella
read the rest HERE
I hadn't thought about the painter Fairfield Porter in years, and he would never have crossed my mind had Regina Hackett at the Seattle P-I not mentioned him in her fabulous blog recently. The story is complicated, and I hesitate to even bring it up, but...
This is how I remember it:
Florence, Italy. January 1, 1993. It is one of the coldest days on record in the city; snow is predicted for overnight, the first time that has happened in decades. A recently married young couple--artists from America--weave their way through the crowded, cobblestone streets. The artists are cold, tired, loaded down with bags seemingly filled with bricks, and disoriented from twenty-odd hours of travelling from their home in Seattle.
The two stop to ask directions to their pensione from a nice looking Italian couple chatting amicably in front of a coffee bar. The Italians react coyly, as if they don't understand the young couple's broken Italian. How fucking obnoxious! think the Americans, If you don't know where it is, just say so. Don't play this pathetic game! When they part, the coy Italian man says, "Je suis desolée , Monsieur. Vraiment," and does a classic, Parisian shrug. It turns out that the Italians were in fact French and really didn't understand a word the Americans had said.
Skip ahead three months. The young American couple (Julie and me if you haven't already guessed) have rented a flat and settled into a life of drawing, painting and visiting museums, art and architecture that we had until then only read about in art history books. We were lucky; I had recieved a small grant, and neither of us had been to Europe before, so we sold our car, closed our bank accounts and bought two one-way tickets to Italy. We would worry about careers later. We saw a chance; an entire year to study Art. The real deal. The Mecca of the figurative tradition--a version of which I was practicing on canvas at the time--and nothing but time to paint, study, eat, and drink...la bella vita!
Skip ahead another month to a bitterly cold Wednesday night, the night that I first met John T. Spike, art historian, critic and author of a forthcoming book on Fairfield Porter which would soon be hailed as the 'definitive text' on the subject. By this time Julie and I had become regulars at a student gathering held in the basement of Florence's St. James Episcopal Church; cheap pasta, free chianti, and usually a movie, slide show, or lecture. On the night we met, Mr. Spike had given a lecture at that gathering on the artist Fairfield Porter, and afterward he announced he would be curating an art exhibition in the basement of the church, The exhibition title; "Ars Gratia Artis: Art for Art's Sake". That was the beginning of the end.
Later that evening, after several glasses of free chianti, I gathered enough courage to walk over and introduce myself to the illustrious Mr. Spike. He asked me what kind of artist I was. I told him I was a painter. A figurative painter. Oil on canvas. Very interested in developing some ideas from the Bay Area school, and particularly in cannibalizing the work of Nathan Oliviera, Richard Diebenkorn, and David Park all of whom had monographs that I regularly referred to in my studio.
Mr. Spike laughed. He was no more drunk than I, no doubt, but nevertheless. A loud laugh. Beads of sweat formed on my brow. Mr. Spike; Harvard PhD., lecturer at Yale, Princeton, and god knows where else. Me; 24-year-old unknown artist. What did I know?
Mr. Spike said, "Does anybody paint anymore? You can't do that. Everyone is doing installations now. Or performance. Or video." He smiled at his giggling entourage. At this point I wasn't sure if he was mocking me--the quaint little painter--or trying to include me in a little ironic bravado--yes, of course you are a painter, why would you be making trendy, superficial installation art and living here in Florence?
I tried not to miss a beat, "Of course I, um, paint," I said, trying not to slur. "Painting is not dead, um, it's alive and, um, at least, um..." It was the best I could do.
But here is the irony of that encounter, and similar ones I had with Mr. Spike that year. Yes, it's true that I was exploring a kind of perversion of Bay Area figurative abstraction at the time, but I was also writing a thesis on the transformation of the socio-economic role of artists, from the beginning of the Renaissance to the end of it; from artisan/laborer to the epitome of the cult of personality. It is a transformation that still resonates today. And in truth, I was beginning to think that painting was out of touch, anachronistic, rife with nostalgia and burdened by the weight of history and NYC vitriolics, particularly in light of what was happening in film and the web at the time.
Mr. Spike--in fact a passionate defender of painting as it turned out, 20th Century American realism to be exact--only added to my suspicions about my painting practice. Like his subject Fairfield Porter, Mr. Spike seemed hopelessly lost to nostalgia, a romantic living in a dream of his own making; a dandy--irrelevant, spoiled and out of touch. Eventually, I found it difficult to separate Spike, Porter, and figurative painting. I began to view my practice--with no little help from Arnold Hauser's classic text "The Social History of Art" among others--as an extension of the Porter/Spike/Painting triumverate. In short, I thought my painting was...irrelevant.
I cut the stretcher bars from my works in progress, rolled up the six linen canvases--and never looked at them again (a la Baldessari, Park, and countless other artists given to fits of melodrama).
Jump ahead 14 years to today, February 16, 2007. It is a drizzly Friday afternoon here in Seattle. I should be in my studio working on my new series of pictures, a kind of collision of architectural paradigms; Koenig meets Mary Colter, as I joked to John Jahn over at PORT.
Will I work with paint today? Maybe.
Much has happened since those bucolic days in Florence. Painting has not died, obviously, nor has it faded in importance. It made it through it's 'crisis of legitimacy' and has, in fact, proven itself more relevant than ever as the world becomes more and more inundated with moving images; film, television, and most recently, broadband internet. Painting has survived Mike Kelly and Martin Kippenberger, Brice Marden and Stephen Prina, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Marcel Broodthaers, Ross Bleckner, Rudolph Stingel, Peyton, Owens, Freud, Hirst, Shaw, Currin, Murakami...
Painting today is crowded with vital, dedicated and serious exploration, so I will end this post with a few quotes I found written down in my notebooks. And then maybe I'll pick up a brush. Anything is possible...
"If some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will not come from where we expect them to." --Yve-Alain Bois in "Painting: The Task of Mourning"
"Today, there is an almost uncanny resemblance between the discourses around the status of contemporary painting and rock music. The techno-factions in both art and music have repeatedly buried the canvas and the guitar for good, and time and again both have risen from the grave, claiming that their time had not yet come, that there was still something substantial to say with and about them."--Jorg Heiser in “The Odd Couple”
"These paintings are reconceived in terms of the larger cultural spectacle without allegory, or any idea that looks backwards for its own relevance. I want them to be the symbolic language object come-to-life, the way it is impossible to ignore something that stirs in the ashes, not dead, but rising from the death of everything that has been poisoned and made extinct around it." --Daniel Mendel-Black in "The Paintings Are Alive Manifesto"
"Yes, I am the first to admit that my paintings are willful perversions of my training...Inversion and perversion only serve to reinscribe the law they seek to undermine...It is all shit. The law is there. And in my last breath, like all lapsed believers, I will whimper and ask for forgiveness. I will die groveling, begging to be reinstated into the ranks I never truly left: the ranks of the law-abiding. Stupid me.I was a beliver all along." --Mike Kelly in "Goin' Home, Goin' Home"
-Daniel
In response to Tyler Green's challenge to choose your five favorite American buildings (okay, structures)--which is itself a response to the AIA list--here are my five [a list that could, of course, change tomorrow], in no particular order. What are yours? No, really, I want to know...
The Watts Towers, a.k.a. Nuestro Pueblo [; Simon Rodia. The heart and soul of L.A. Part Antoni Gaudi, part Salvador Dali, part American rugged individualism. From Wikipedia: "The Watts Towers, consisting of seventeen major sculptures constructed of structural steel and covered with mortar, are the work of one man - Simon Rodia. Rodia, born Sabato Rodia in Ribottoli, Italy in 1879, was known by a variety of names including Don Simon, Simon Rodilla, Sam and Simon. Although his neighbors in Watts knew him as "Sam Rodilla", the official name of his work is "the Watts Towers of Simon Rodia".
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Stahl House, Case Study House No. 22; Pierre Koenig. This house is the most iconic modern building in the nation, and one of the best things about Los Angeles. Koenig's ideas around steel construction presage much of the prefab and/or green construction of today. From Norman Foster: ""I am thinking, of course, of the heroic night-time view of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #22 which seems so memorably to capture the whole spirit of late twentieth-century architecture. There, hovering almost weightlessly above the bright lights of Los Angeles, spread out like a carpet below, is an elegant, light, economical and transparent enclosure whose apparent simplicity belies the rigorous process of investigation that made it possible. If I had to choose one snapshot, one architectural moment, of which I would like to have been the author, this is surely it."
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Salvation Mountain (location ), Leonard Knight. While not technically a building, I had to include it in my top five buildings (structures?) in America. When we visited Leonard in 2001, he told me his only aim was to get people to stop hating each other and love one another. Not a bad idea. And he always needs more paint, so bring him a bucket. From Wikipedia: "Salvation Mountain is a colorful artificial mountain north of Calipatria, California, near Slab City. It is made from adobe, straw, and thousands of gallons of paint. It was created by Leonard Knight to convey the message that "God Loves Everyone". Mr. Knight claims to have refused substantial donations of money and labor from supporters who wished to modify his message of universal love to favor or disfavor particular groups.
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Experience Music Project, Seattle, WA. Frank Gehry. In another nod to regionalism, the EMP here in Seattle really does grow on you. Hopefully, the curation of the art exhibitions will become as exciting and innovative as the design of the structure. From Architecture Week: "In 1969 a screaming, reverberating rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by Jimi Hendrix seemed to herald an end to innocence. His resonant lyric "Are you experienced?" is now recalled in the name of software billionaire Paul G. Allen's Experience Music Project. Hendrix would have appreciated the design approach to Seattle's new museum of pop music.
"Architect Frank O. Gehry has made a career out of bending vertical and horizontal lines of building construction into something defiant and sometimes poetic. With Seattle's EMP, opened just over a week before the Fourth of July, he has met his perfect client in Allen and his metaphorical match in rock-'n'-roll.
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Old Faithful Inn (1903-1927) Yellowstone National Park, WY; Robert Reamer. The quintessential log lodge and one of my favorite places to stay [get a room in the original structure, not in one of the new wings, which have no more character than an average, mid-range motel room.] From AIA: "Old Faithful Inn is an exposed-log, wood-frame building of enormous proportions. The massive gable roof is the building’s central feature. The enormous, seven-story lobby of gnarled logs and rough-sawn wood is perhaps unique in American architecture. The inn is one of the few remaining log hotels in the country. It has influenced the rustic style of architecture seen throughout the nation’s parklands.
see Tyler's original challenge at Modern Art Notes
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Tonight I Can Write
Pablo Neruda (translated by W.S. Merwin)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through the nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
I have a piece in the "Bleeding Hearts" show at the Gallery OK. E-mail Greg so he can set-up a time to let you in gmc_tile@comcast.net ...
More about the show at (incli)NATION
[Picture is blurry, yes, I know, better pics to follow.]
title "Love Letters I Never Sent to My Sweetheart the Crack-whore; three translations of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII; binary, hexidecimal, base 64" (clear/ebony) 300` high-polymer archival ink on 80# pH neutral paper. Three prints numbering VII of X - XIX of X, 8.5 X 11 inches, 21.5 X 28 cm
On a bright, cold Sunday afternoon, the opening weekend of the Seattle Art Museum's new Olympic Sculpture Garden, my dog Parker took me for a walk among the grand, shiny and brand new additions to Seattle's waterfront. Parker is an eleven-week-old, yellow-labrador mix--a puppy really--still not fully in control of her bladder, but she is surprisingly conversant in the area of contemporary art. What follows are exerpts from my interview with her:
DANIEL Rumor has it that you actually liked the Olympic Sculpture Garden (OSG) contrary to some of the comments you've made recently.
PARKER What comments? Who's been talking? Was it the cat? You can't trust cats, you know.
DANIEL Did you not say that the OSG was a missed opportunity for Seattle, and that choosing second-rate work by internationally known artists was just a timid attempt by SAM and her patrons to get taken seriously in the international art community?
PARKER I didn't say any such thing. What I said was, choosing to include Richard Serra's "Wake" was about as daring as an outing to a Medina dog-park; it may have seemed like a nice idea at first, but when confronted with the reality, the well-behaved blandness of it all was a dissapointment.
DANIEL Can you explain?
PARKER Sure. And let me be clear, Serra's work is not the only culprit in this debacle, but he is arguably the most well known artist of the bunch and provides a convenient jumping-off point. For instance, let's do a run-down of the work in the garden; Kelly's "Curve XXIV" an immitation of his 1970s work: Caro's "Riviera" 1974; Pepper's "Perre's Ventaglio III", 1967; Nevelson's "Sky Landscape I" 1983; di Suvero's "Bunyon's Chess", 1965; Calder's "Eagle" 1971; Smith's "Stinger" 1968 ('99) and "Wandering Rocks" 1967. See the pattern?
DANIEL You've just listed an internationally known roster of talented, brilliant and influential artists.
PARKER Right. But it is also a list of artwork--8 out of the total of 16 sculptures on view at the OSG--that were made over 30 years ago. 30 years! It is also a list of sculpture that has been easily digested, is equivalent to decoration, and appears to have come out of storage [aren't they mostly Virginia Wright's? or are they the Shirley's?] only to be plopped down in the middle of a lawn.
DANIEL In all fairness, Nevelson's piece is just over 20 years old, and frankly, I find your lack of gratitude offensive...
PARKER You're missing the point. Here we have an opportunity to make a significant contribution to the history of art, or at the very least 'art in public places', or less heroically, to the unique character of the city of Seattle, and what have we done? We have simply imitated hundreds of other cities in this country, made a list of well-known artists and/or took any and all donations we were given by the old-guard, art patrons of Seattle, and plopped them down in the middle of some million-dollar real estate on the waterfront.
DANIEL But as you must know by now, the reaction to the Garden has been overwhelmingly positive. The paths are crowded even on weekdays, and the Garden is getting rave reviews from all across the nation.
PARKER And Mussolini was a hero to the majority of Italians in the 40s...
DANIEL That's not entirely true, nor is it a fair comparison. It is ridiculous.
PARKER I'm hungry.
DANIEL You're not tracking, Parker.
PARKER No, but consider for a moment even the most contemporary work on view here--aside from the Serra piece. Roy McMakin's "Love & Loss" 2005, appears to be an advertisement for his design firm, and Teresita Fernández "Cloud Cover" 2004-6, looks as though a group of b-tier, mall architects had a little money left over after construction and asked themselves, "Hmm. What would spice up an outdoor hallway in Seattle? I know! Colorful clouds!"
DANIEL Fernandez received a MacArthur "genius" award!
PARKER Did you bring any treats? I'm really starving.
DANIEL So then I take it my information was wrong. You do not like the OSG after all.
PARKER Actually, quite the contrary. I do like the garden. But just the garden, not the sculpture.
DANIEL What do you mean?
PARKER Just stop for a moment and look at the space! This is an urban dog's dream; grass--fresh cut grass--and wide open spaces. WEISS / MANFREDI Architecture did an outstanding job creating a park from this waterfront wasteland. The dreamy zig-zag path, the seamless bridge over Western, the integration with the beach and all those STICKS!--oh, and did I mention the views? Just fabulous. And now that they've seasoned this feast-for-the-eyes with a little art, I've mapped out my rest-stop routes to most of the smaller sculptures, and found the ideal corners on which to leave my mark.
DANIEL Very nice.
PARKER Actually, there is one sculpture I like. No, love!
DANIEL Let me guess; Roxy Paine's "Split".
PARKER What's not to love? A 50 foot stainless steel tree! This piece should have been placed on the crest of the hill where Calder's "Eagle" sits. It could have been iconic, emblematic, a picture-postcard installation symbolizing the bright, technological future of Seattle, not to mention art in the landscape. The piece is so simple even a dog could get it.
DANIEL So would you consider the Olympic Sculpture Garden a success or a failure?
PARKER I'm not able to make sweeping generalizations like that. I'm a dog. A hungry dog. What I can say is that regardless of what I think about the art, the politics, and the 'future of art in Seattle', I will still use the space on a regular basis. And like most of the dogs in this city, after the initial fracas is forgotten and all that is left is a park with some structures to climb, tag, or piddle on, I too will say to my best doggie pals, I kinda like this place after all, don't you?
Now please give me something to eat before I piddle...
Exit
Just when hope withers, the visa is granted.
The door opens to a street like in the movies,
clean of people, of cats; except it is your street
you are leaving. A visa has been granted,
"provisionally"-a fretful word.
The windows you have closed behind
you are turning pink, doing what they do
every dawn. Here it's gray. The door
to the taxicab waits. This suitcase,
the saddest object in the world.
Well, the world's open. And now through
the windshield the sky begins to blush
as you did when your mother told you
what it took to be a woman in this life.Copyright © 1995 Mississippi Review. Online Source
