Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Saturday, April 23, 2011

RE: series - Self-reflection/refraction/reflexion

RE: Fire?, 2010



The Obsure(d) Object of Desire, 2010



Narcissister, 2010



Self-Rejection, 2011




RE: Odalisque, 2010

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Diving out: Paul Thek

Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, 2010


Images of Thek’s work, and his name kept popping up, so intuitively I visited the exhibition at Whitney, knowing nothing about him beforehand. I actually assumed he was contemporary because his work looked so fresh in the images I had seen. Speaking of fresh…let’s start with the meat.


The exhibition begins with meat. A room of sculptures are rendered in highly skilled replication of juicy pieces of flesh, mostly encased in glass. Immediately David Cronenberg’s, Videodrome, screamed reference in my head. They are same in plastic, B-movie, sci-fi aesthetic with the outcome of gross, funny, cheesy and ridiculous. A great way to start off an exhibition, with a B-movie banger! So, let’s bang on.


The exhibition continued with a couple rooms of installation pieces. The gory, horror, flesh theme was surviving in various ad-hoc forms. The work was hokey, but unsettling. The arrangement of fake visceral compositions, piled in the exhibition setting was irreverent, either to the artwork or to the museum space I am not sure. Perhaps because the blood and gore was so obviously fake, it brought to mind mortality and the futility of perfection. The contrast of flesh and blood and decay in the pristine white wall space exposed this even more. Just as the installations dealt with the concept of decay, so they were decaying themselves, not meant to stand the test of time.


Following room after room of this maze presentation of a life felt uncomfortably intimate. The rooms of Thek’s paintings on newspaper and wood sculptures, where baby blue and pink reigned, were my favorites. They were smooth, graceful and genuine. These rooms made the work at the beginning look like it was trying too hard, the technical time and skill put into the work clunked like an old car. The blue and pink room purred. Simplicity in material and technique and color proved to elevate the same themes in his earlier work, except here he added a new element: beauty.


The exhibition carried on from here with ever more intimacy, with journals and pieces revealing doubts and questions of a spiritual and personal nature. The final room with paintings hung low to the ground made me cry, it makes me cry to think of it now, but in a fresh way, not a sad way. The way you cry when you say something true, something you didn’t know you knew. It sneaks up on you. (Of course, reliably, the wall text over-explained and over-sentimentalized the work.) An exhibition hung low is humbling to view. Meant for children, adults must bow or crouch down to look. This is modesty in visual eloquence. This humble, child-like work as Thek’s finale numbed the bravado of the exhibition’s beginning. The meat works are hearty showstoppers, but the true meat is found in the most simple, most humble, most honest heart openers.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Check My Swagga Out

Les Demoiselles du Miroir, 2011

feminineSWAG


The Pin-up Grrl paintings arose from my usual interest in the collaboration of a woman’s interior world and her exterior presentation, or simply: feminine identity. Usually fashion as costume is my focus, but in this series I used a woman’s unclothed body to display sexuality, a mix of power and vulnerability.


Women’s nude bodies are attributed with a powerful ability to visually express sexuality, but to be naked is also a physical form of vulnerability. It is exciting to see a woman combine a sensual, wild, untrained freedom with a confident self-mastery: or feminineSWAG. The struggle for balance in a push/pull of power and vulnerability creates an interesting tension.


Burlesque is performance which reconciles the exterior and the interior. No one can see the inner you because the inner you does not have a tangible form. This leaves one free to fantasize and create a physical form of “inner innerliness”. Not only do you not know who you are, but you don’t know how others view you, so this leaves complete freedom to find a form of self-expression that truly amuzes (amuses/amazes) you.


To master ones’ presentation takes confidence in wielding the tool of one’s own body. But feminineSWAG can’t just look authentic, it has to come from an inner authenticity. For success to be achieved for both viewed and viewer there needs to be a collaboration of interest between the internal and external. Between a woman’s invisible spirit and her visible form. Just as glamour and fashion provide power to its’ wearer so does a woman’s naked body. Without clothes a woman still performs, but she must always perform for herself.


The key to good Burlesque as well as good fashion sense is to be skilled in self-objectification. The trick is to be able to view oneself without subjective bias from the outside. But does this concept hinder natural free expression? Don’t people want to be loved for who they really are, not just how they appear to be? But as I stated before, who are we really? Does anyone truly know? What “inner innerliness” are we afraid to express or not express clearly enough? Learning to objectify oneself, to see oneself as a container, knowing that it is only the exterior and doesn’t automatically reflect what is on the inside is an important lesson. This lesson is critical as a woman ages. My mother recounted that she is shocked when she looks in the mirror because it does not reflect accurately what she feels herself to be on the inside, a fresh 24 year old.


Stepping away from that ideal of young beautiful perfection is a form of self-respect. But as French women know best the exterior needs cultivation. And in a way that is playful and arises from the interior direct, with flaws, fantasies and all. Beauty is found in imperfections, which create distinction and leaves the general for pursuit of the extraordinary. FeminineSWAG combines the inner subjective natural with the objective artifice. The deep with the shallow. The truth with the lie. All for the benefit of a woman who looks and is looked at.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Pin-Up Grrrls

Showgrrl #1, 2009

Pin-up Grrl #1, 2009

Pin-up grrl #2 (interior), 2009

over-exposed (black/white), 2009

double display, 2009

caught, 2009

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Fresh Inspiration, pay attention! Karen Kilimnik: currently exhibiting at 303 Gallery.



I walked into the single gallery room, a wide-open space and wished for a party. Definitely Champagne in fluted glasses. Besides the fact that it was an opening and many art world celebrities were there, there was a festive feel in the air. The celebration tittered from the work, which is light and playful, but glamorous all the while. Klimnik toys with the adult sophistication of fashion.


The room was cheap glamour, like glamour in quotes, but it was elegant and absolutely convincing. A poor-man’s Chanel fashion show. A few hints here and there to conclude style. Kitch paintings, awkward, gawky teenage drawings, a installation of photocopies, including a boot filled with crumpled plastic and fake pearls, with tinny music playing. Also some dark, amateur photographs and Ikea-esque chandaliers and music coming out of tinny speakers helped to reiterate this theme. This doesn’t sound like the scene of glamour. Isn’t glamour expensive and rich and decadent, not sparse and cheap? She achieved elegance with a surface touch. She achieved depth while entertaining (and being entertained by) the surface.


Kilimnik created a place that felt magical, even if the viewer only catches glimpses and hints, they added up to a world that one can enter into. Fantasy plays a large part in modern society though it isn’t often referred to as such. Dreaming is not something to brag about, results and progress and action are. It is now even the trend for artists, the professional dreamers, to be workaholics. But I cheer the dreamers. I understand Marlene Dumas and Agnes Martin who prefer doing nothing to always doing something. Imagination is fed by dreaming. Just the word, dreeaaming, slow and drawn out makes me think of lying in long grass, in shorts, staring at the sky while chewing a blade. Cramming for an exam does not whisper imagination, but rather screams ambitious goals of a mega-monster artist.


The reason I am drawn to Kilimnik is much for the same reason I am drawn to Ree Morton and Laura Owens. There is an element of space in the work. The work is simple but energized with something exciting, something beyond the material work. What is that? Is art adult-life dreaming? Jonathan Meese also considers art-making one big play-pen and I find this attitude freeing. It is modest and reduces art making to something a child does, rather than an ego enhancing career-choice. It may sound sentimental to wax on about innocence and purity and playing and dreaming, but the hard shells we grow into as adults could use some of this.


For the most part I tend to think of glamour as a constructed cold hard shell. One I love but have to consciously learn. It is something used regularly in urban society to protect that playful innocent and vulnerable child. So, I applaud Kilimnik for combining these two things, the cold with the warm, the adult with the child and the jaded with the innocent.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Thoughts after Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at MOMA




Warhol embraced the fallacy of a picture just as he embraced the fallacy of façade. He purposefully follows his obsession of surface appeal with the tool of video. Perhaps by investigating the exterior Warhol happened upon some interior?

Warhol’s exhibition at MOMA this spring (2011) is glamorous. Black and white large video screens confront the viewer, head on. Though the heads on the video screens are much larger than life, they transfix without overwhelming.

The sleeping video dominates the first room. It is the ultimate conceptual perfection of the limitation of what the exterior can reveal. The sleeper is lost in a rich world beyond the reach of visual documentation and we are left with a barely moving image of a head with closed eyes. There is no understanding of this person because there is no conscious communication.

In the second room each video screen shows a different approximate 4-minute filmed duration of each person. Watching these individuals you understand very quickly how they carry themselves in the world, how they consciously communicate without words. Some are tough, some are playful, seductive, artificial, calculated, serious, candid, but they all serve a purpose, to create a connection to the social world outside. Because who would we be without an identity?

Obviously we live in a visual-based culture. The exterior is valued and therefore manipulated with great care. The abundance of street-style and celebrity celebration is unignorable and imbued in self-awareness. An immaterial fantasy of oneself moves aside for a more material and true reality of oneself, based on photograph and video. Books are read less than movies and television. Celebrities are photographically sought after, face book pictures, paparazzi, everyone is looking at themselves.

A fantasy of oneself is necessary because we must learn to carry our intangible insides somehow. (Our soul?) We must learn how to operate in a society that unavoidably adheres to stereotypes and generalizations and categorizations. Are we truly ourselves only when we are alone? Where is the true self? Fantasy allows us to filter our true selves, to learn how to funnel something intangible and unverbalized into a form. We decide to lean left more or lean right based on how others react to us and our judgment of others. We become masters at playing ourselves.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Blahg Rules


These rules inspire this blog. As a painter in a solitary studio practice these rules help reassure me when doubts come to haunt. I appreciate their clarity and reason, just firm enough to be called “Rules”. While formulating a theme to help mold this misshapen mess of a blog with, I remembered these rules. Particularly Come or go to everything and Look at movies carefully and often because that is what I spend a lot of my non-studio time in New York doing. The beauty of living here are the cultural options, but I sometimes feel that my experiences come in and go out, leaving nourishment behind of course but also leaving a large portion to waste. This blog is my way of marinating my experiences…in the hope that I will extract from them even more flavor.

10 Rules for Students and Teachers from John Cage

Rule 1
Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
Rule 2
(General Duties as a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher.
Pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3
(General Duties as a Teacher)
Pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4
Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5
Be Self Disciplined.
This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them.
To be disciplined is to follow in a good way.
To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6
Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake.
There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7
The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It is the people who do all the work all the time
who eventually catch onto things.
You can fool the fans, but not the players.
Rule 8
Do not try to create and analyze at the same time.
They are different processes.
Rule 9
Be happy whenever you can manage it.
Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10
We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that?
By leaving plenty of room for “x” qualities.
Helpful Hints:
Always be around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
Save everything. It may come in handy later.