Arting in New York

Both times this year that I've been to New York there have been weather extremes. Last February Binnie and I trudged through 17 inches of snow to see El Anatsui and Leonardo Drew in Chelsea. This past weekend, we drove in through torrential rainstorms on Friday and trained in on Saturday in temps that were 90-plus degrees by nine in the morning in the Connecticut exurbs. But what's a little weather when there's so much to see!

So I went a little crazy with the photographs of course and now the thought of resizing and adjusting them is making me feel tired already. But I never expected to use them all.

Conveying the vast richness of what we saw seems daunting and better approached by dividing to conquer it all. I propose doing a series of posts with images and details of those I thought were outstanding. Some of them have already been covered extensively and unbeatably by Joanne Mattera, so I'm going to skip those but maybe mention some of my personal favorites in those shows.

An assemblage of NY memorabilia including a photo of Binnie and me waiting in line outside the Whitney on Friday evening, snapped by a Keds' promotion staffer.

So here is a list of prospective posts with an image from each of them to pique your interest. I'm not sure about the order in which they'll actually appear, but these are things I would like to cover.

Tutankhamun's Funeral at the Metropolitan Museum 

One of the necklaces/collars of beads and leaves found in Tutankhamun's funeral cache, ca. 1336-1327 BC

This was a fabulous show of objects that I have never seen the like of. I was especially bowled over by these collars and other fiber items that have survived more than 3,000 years.

Famous Paintings/Sculptures that are mind boggling in person (mostly at MoMA)

Detail from "Rebus" of 1955 by Robert Rauschenberg, 8'H x 10'11" W

Henri Matisse - we saw the 'Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917" show at MoMA but no photography was allowed. I'm going to use some images from the website (I hope) to discuss it. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite Matisse paintings that was not in the exhibition because it is was painted earlier.

"The Red Studio," 1911, about 6' H x 7' W

Charles Burchfield, Heat Waves in a Swamp, at the Whitney Museum

"An April Mood," 1948-1955, 40"x54", watercolor and charcoal on joined paper.

This is a fabulous show of huge, extremely dynamic watercolor paintings. The Whitney did an excellent job with this show and have it installed on the whole 3rd floor. Since they have an asinine policy of no photography anywhere in the museum, I couldn't photo it myself, but I bought the wonderful book and will take some pix from there to show you. 

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography

Annette Messager, "My Vows," 1988-1991. (Framed photos and hand-written vows hanging from strings push-pinned to the wall.)

I'm not a photography buff, but I was really impressed with this extensive, inclusive and very well organized show of photographs spanning the entire history of photography. Pretty stunning!

Big Bambu, Mike and Doug Starn, an installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum

The enormous and intricate bamboo structure alone is worth the trip, but when you view the New York skyline through it (and the back of Binnie's head), it is a totally unique experience.

Other Faves - mostly sculpture - from all the museums

Yayoi Kusama, Violet Obsession, 1994, rowbow and oars covered with "phallic forms" made of stuffed fabric.

My New York posts will begin later this week after the next installation of The Questionnaire - this week featuring Debra Claffey.

The Questionnaire: Milisa Galazzi

Misa, as she is called, leads off in the first post of a recurring feature of Art in the Studio. The Questionnaire is meant to be a lighter version of a bio, a little more revealing in some respects and personal without all the facts bogging it down. I supply the questions and the respondents supply the answers. Either one or both of us supply the images.



TheQuestionnaire: Milisa Galazzi

Misa in her favorite color in her alternative occupation

of Camp Director at Brewster Day Camp

What is your favorite color? 

PMS 266C

What is your favorite word? 

Stupendous!

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? 

Sleep.

What turns you off? 

Rude behavior

What profession other than artist would you most like to be? 

A Camp Director (and I am!) 

What is your favorite book or movie? 

Broadcast News – I guess that dates me…

Who is your favorite musician, musical group or style of music? 

Patsy Cline or anything classical.

What do you most value in your friends? 

Their love, support, and honest feedback.

Name three artists whose work has influenced your own or whose work you most relate to. 

Mary Cassatt, Kiki Smith, Antonia Contro

Mary Cassatt, "The Boating Party," 1893-94.

Kiki Smith, "Sojourn" at The Brooklyn Museum.
February 12 - September 12, 2010
Brooklyn Museumhttp://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibit...

Antonia Contro, Installation at Newberry Library, 2008.
Image courtesy of Carrie Secrist Gallery (see more of Antonia Contro's work here)

Name an artist whose work you admire but which may be unlike yours. 

Jim Dine or Chuck Close

Jim Dine: "Two Big Black Hearts", bronze, 1985, 12'x12'x33", installed in the sculpture park at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Mass. 

Self portrait by Chuck Close

What is your idea of earthly happiness? 

Swimming in Pleasant Bay on a hot Sunday afternoon on Cape Cod in mid July! 

Work by Misa Galazzi 
(from my post about her show at Springfield College)

Misa giving a gallery talk at Springfield College, work in foreground is "The Bitter End"

"Layers of Time", encaustic and dress patterns

"Hatching", encaustic and oilstick on panel

Check out Misa's website: www.milisagalazzi.com

Loose Ends and Questions

I Write Like
I'm sure everyone is totally bored and over it by now but here's the guy who wrote the code for the I Write Like site explaining how and why he did it. (link via Art Fag City) It seems that writing is like spam.

There were only three women authors in the 40 or so who who were included in the database, so no wonder. (list of authors from Tea Berry-Blue)

No one asked about or ventured a guess as to who the unidentified author was of the text snipped I included so that will remain my secret.



The Questionnaire
It's often called "The Proust Questionnaire" because Marcel Proust published his answers to two versions of it during his life. You may be familiar with it from Vanity Fair magazine, which questions celebrities on its final page every month, or from The Actor's Studio TV program, where James Lipton asked his guests a modified version of it at the end of their interviews. I've decided to try getting artists to answer it and post their responses here. In many ways it's more revealing than standard biographical questions. I'm going to do it first myself to see how hard it is.



What is your favorite color?
This week, blue or aqua.


Image right: Pongo, acrylic on ricepaper,
24" x 24"






What is your favorite word?
Suppose


What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Honesty and depth


What turns you off?
Hypocrisy, lies or shallowness


What profession other than artist would you most like to be?
Musician




What is your favorite book or movie?
Movie - For visuals - Raise the Red Lantern






Who is your favorite musician or musical group?
Can I substitute a style? - blues or r and b.


What do you most value in your friends?
Constancy and humor

Name three artists whose work has influenced your own or whose work you most relate to.

Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Louise Nevelson

Unidentified work by Robert Rauschenberg, 

Lee Bontecou, untitled 1961

Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral , 1958

Name an artist whose work you admire but which may be unlike yours.

Judy Pfaff and Leonardo Drew

Image left: Leonardo Drew

Judy Pfaff, “Drawings.” Wiliam Traver Gallery. ”From Surface to Form.” 2003




What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Early morning in the studio.

Never Mind

You remember Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live? She was the Gilda Radner character who always got it wrong and ended her spiel with "Never Mind" after being corrected to something like violence on TV when she thought it was violins on TV. Well, just call me Emily because, son of a gun, I got the date wrong for my New York trip. It's next weekend that we're going. Duh! I sure feel Emilyish.

So, still time to make suggestions for shows that we might see. We have MoMA and the Met on the schedule and possibly the Whitney, but we are looking for gallery recommendations.

The Writing Analyzer Tool
I wrote about my results in last night's post and had reports today on Facebook from Joanne Mattera and Pam Farrell of weird responses they also got when they put writing samples into the analyzing tool that tells you who you - supposedly - write like. Joanne called it the Magic Eight Ball of letters and said she got David Foster Wallace, Dan Brown and Arthur C. Clark for her samples. Pam's combo was a good one: Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King. Wendy Wolfe Rodrigue got Stephen King and Raymond Chandler for her matches.

In all the reports that I heard about, the tool came up only with male writers, so I resolved to get it to come up with a woman. I tried getting some writing samples from Amazon, but the copyright laws prohibit that, so unfortunately, I had to find a few books around home and type some samples in. (A good thing that those secretarial courses in high school made me a fast typist.)

The tool correctly identified Margaret Mitchell and Jane Austen, but all the others were misidentified. Most of the ones I put in were male but there was one female and one male writing in the voice of a female (Arthur Golden from Memoirs of a Geisha). Anita Shreve was misidentified as Stephen King and Marcel Proust as Charles Dickens. I didn't have any romance novels around (I'm so literary) so I couldn't test them for femaleness by putting in Barbara Cartland or her ilk.

A Little Analyzing Contest of My Own
The tool is not so great and Joanne was right about it being the Magic Eight Ball with Stephen King, Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace being the most popular answers, but how about we play the game ourselves with one sample and see if you can identify this pretty famous contemporary writer.

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was slaves and former slaves, men like Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass and women like Harriet Tubman, who recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half free. I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable – in other words, the absolutists – that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today – the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory – no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty – for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.
The tool thought it was Stephen King.


Finally: Some Images of Found Art (after all this blog is supposed to be about art)

Two shots above from the World Trade Center site where part of an 18th century ship was found during excavations. This area had not previously been excavated for the Twin Towers or other buildings. Archeologists think the ship was deliberately sunk into the Hudson River on purpose as part of a landfill operation. (See more images here.)

I Write Like Many Famous (Male) Authors

Every day I get an update from New York magazine's Daily Digest of the Devouring Culture Vulture. Well, I like to stay in touch with the latest gossip. So today they had a link that I found to be a lot of fun. You type a couple of paragraphs into the window of the statistical analysis tool, and your writing is analyzed for word choice and writing style and compared to those of "the famous writers." (This tool is not associated with the Famous Writers School, by the way.)

I took several examples from this blog and plugged them in and - whaddya know - my closest match is David Foster Wallace! - whose writing I find extremely hard to read because it rattles on forever and seems overly impressed with itself. Ooh, how embarrassing. I guess that's what I'm doing here. (blush)

David Foster Wallace, (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006).

But on the other hand, one of my paragraphs was picked as a match for James Joyce! Wow!

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Along with Marcel Proust,Virginia Woolf, and others, Joyce was a key figure in the development of the modernist novel. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922).

Of course I also got Chuck Palahniuk (who?), Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) and William Gibson (another who? for me). None of my matches were women. So this either means that I really do write like a man (or men) or else the statistical tool is biased against women. Maybe their female writer data base is limited to Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp, Elsa Beata Bunge and Maria Henrietta de la Cherois Crommelin (all real writers and famous in their day).

How I look when I write Art in the Studio

Oh, God. I just looked up Chuck Palahniuk and found out he was the author of The Fight Club and Choke & Rant. Yuck! And William Gibson is known in Wikipedia (my authority on all things authorial) as the "'noir prophet' of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction." I think I'm getting a message here.

A Week From Hell

It's been a long, hard week here between the extreme heat and humidity and exhausting computer problems. Ultimately the heat broke a little with a good soaking rain on Saturday morning and the computer(s) are fixed and improved beyond where they initially began after nearly 12 hours of work on them by a friend who is an IT wizard. I now have a brand-new operating system on my main computer and sparkling files that have been scrubbed of all the malicious viruses, worms, trojans, and evil-doers that were lurking in them. I won't detail what actually happened because I don't want to publicize the cretin who devised the knockout punch, but suffice it to say that it was a serious blow. Anyone who would inflict such a terrorist attack for no reason other than getting some kind of smug satisfaction at wreaking havoc on the world at large deserves to fry in computer hell.

Archangel. Michael slaying the devil. (Guido Reni's archangel Michael (in the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome, 1636) tramples Satan. A mosaic of the same painting decorates St. Michael's Altar within St. Peter's Basilica.)


No, I haven't gone and gotten religion over it all, but I am extremely grateful (in general) that there are kind and intelligent people around who understand the inscrutable world of computers and that one of these great souls came to our assistance. I'm sure that India is a wonderful country, but I would much rather have a knowledgeable guy from the next town be here in person. So I'm glad to put this bad experience behind me and focus on the improvements this has brought to my dear computer.

New York, New York
Looking ahead to this coming weekend, I am making the trek to Manhattan via dear friend Binnie's in Connecticut. The Binster and I hope to rendevous with other friends in NY and see some art in the flesh. One show I would really like to see is the new Matisse show at MoMA, “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917.”

Henri Matisse, Bathers By a River, 1909-1917

The Times today had an article about the research done on Bathers By a River, a painting which they say Matisse considered one of his five greatest works. The Times has an interactive feature about the painting showing the stages of its development over eight years. Here is the link to the slide/video/audio description of the process. On that site you will also find the link to MoMA's website which has a lot more about that painting and the show in general. Unfortunately, this show does not open until next Sunday, July 18th. Perhaps I'll get back to New York before it closes in October.

The Arting Trip List

Lee Bontecou, untitled sculpture, 1959.

1. Lee Bontecou
But in looking at the MoMA site, I see that they have now have a show on of work by Lee Bontecou, one of my very favorite artists. If my mind wasn't such a sieve, I might have remembered reading about it before, but I had completely forgotten it. This would be great to see because I only know her work from a couple of real pieces and mostly from reading about it. This is not a huge show, but I'm making it a must on the arting list.

2. The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times

From the MoMa website: This exhibition addresses the artistic traces of these motifs in modern art, as well as the practice of modern myth-making, through a nonlinear, thematic representation of works, following a rough chronology from 1797 to 2008. Among the artists represented are Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, Paul Cézanne, Enrique Chagoya, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Juan Downey, Max Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Wifredo Lam, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Jackson Pollock, Odilon Redon, Mark Rothko, Jim Shaw, and Andy Warhol. I'd say worth a look.

Mark Rothko, Archaic Idol. 1945. Ink and gouache on paper, 21 7/8 x 30"

3. Several other shows at MoMA
Such as Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, Contemporary Art from the Collection, and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

4. Chelsea Galleries

Including: Jack Shainman Gallery - Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" with Jonathan Seliger "Spoils", Cheim & Read, "Le Tableau," French abstraction, and many others that I will have to look up or we can just walk by and look in the window. 

Leslie Wayne "One Big Love"

Installation shot from "Le Tableau"

The last time that I visited Binnie for an arting trip, it was February and, wouldn't you know it, that Saturday was the day that there were 17" of snow in Central Park. I just hope that this time the temperature is not over 100 degrees as it was last week. I've been hot enough for a while.

P.S. Any recommendations? If you have any suggestions on shows to see this weekend, July 16 and 17, feel free to make your recommendations in comments.

Dimensional Extension

I couldn't quite call it a dimensional explosion (in honor of the 4th), but I have broken through into the third dimension with these little pieces. The "extensions" were made in Miles Conrad's 3D class at the encaustic conference and I worked the little paintings this weekend.

Two views of  No. 1 = Encaustic and collage with plastic, 8"x5"x1.75"

Two views of No. 2  =  Encaustic, collage, oilstick, pebbles with cardboard, 5"x8"x1.75"

Two views of No. 3 = Encaustic, fiber, paper, 5"x8"x1.75"

Of course I had to spend some time in the studio this weekend even though I was trying to take it easy because of the heat. With my two fans going, it wasn't too bad, but I had to leave by the afternoon when the sun came over the top of the building and moved toward my side.

I enjoyed sitting in my easy chair at the studio with my feet up early this morning as I sipped my coffee and read Daniella Woolf's Encaustic With a Textile Sensibility. What a wonderful collection of artists she has included in this book! I found it really inspiring.

Another Nest

Here's another whopper that Bonnie found in a birdbox. It's a house sparrow's nest that contained four eggs.

It filled absolutely every part of the box's interior. You can see how hard they must have worked to find all the great feathers, including a few cardinal feathers for color.

This shot is looking into the interior of the nest where the eggs were laid. It is lined with the kind of crinkly plastic that covers cigarette packs. Pretty clever and certainly three dimensional.