Matthew Troy Mullins, Traps, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 48 in. x 36 in., 2010.

I was attracted to the touch of Matthew Troy Mullins’ paintings when I saw them in the recent UC Berkeley MFA show at the Berkeley Art Museum but was about to be less interested in them because I was pretty sure artists have already had enough to say about archives and taxonomies. I was wrong! Matt Mullins has a unique way with this subject that comes from his fairly uncomplicated delight in the idea that people are able to make sense of their world by lining things up. He is a recent graduate of the Berkeley MFA program. His large scale watercolor and gouache paintings document cactus collections, bookbinding machines, fishing equipment, stacks of newspapers and other treasures from archives and museum collections in the Bay Area. I sat down to talk with him during his show at Martina }{ Johnston Gallery in Berkeley, Calif. I asked him a lot of questions about watercolor paintings and his feelings about people who build archives.

K: How did you start making watercolor paintings?

M: Whenever I see contemporary watercolor paintings, I feel like it’s used looser, not all the way built up. I went from oil to acrylic, and then to watercolor. I was starting to get this skin allergy on the hand that I was using the painting rag on, also at the same time I was starting to use straighter edges. At the time I was painting images of construction sites, and the plastic feeling of acrylic worked really well for the hard edges in the construction sites. The problem I was having was that I wanted to see the whole painting grow up together – with the masking I was using I couldn’t really see the whole painting all at once. I was like puzzle pieces. If I wanted to peek I could take the whole thing off at once but I never felt like there was any flow. It felt mechanical to make them, and they looked mechanical. With the watercolor each edge shows out from under, the process is visible in the end product.

K: How would you describe your relationship to your photographic reference?

M: I like a photorealism where you still see all the brushstrokes and you think it may fall apart – sort of teetering between a really slick, absolutely finished surface and being able to see all the ingredients. I don’t want it to be an attempt at perfection. I like how imperfection shows humanity. I like limitations. I do like to push the paintings to a point where it is impressive. I like challenging myself to do something that seems difficult at the beginning of the process.

K: Do you think technical feats in watercolor are more surprising to people than in oils?

M: Maybe to people who are familiar with watercolor painting, because they know that you have to leave the whites. Oil is just a whole different set of challenges. These paintings don’t make the normal associations you have with watercolor, you know paler and looser. I think that does come as a surprise.

K: When you switched over were you expecting to surprise people?

M: I had been doing studies in watercolor every few months, never for anybody to see – while I was working in the other materials. The studies I was doing were always monochromatic, so I didn’t know what was going to happen with the color. I didn’t really expect to surprise.

K: What artists were you interested in at that time? Was that guy [Tim Gardener] an influence?

M:I was looking at photographers, especially Andreas Gursky. The level of detail/ amount of information is powerful. I feel like his images in 100 years are really going to capture this moment. They are overwhelming.

K : That’s the point , right?

M: Yeah.

K: I feel like he has this worldview where the person is very small.

M: Almost a cog.

K: Is that how you feel in the world?

M: No, uh-uh, not at all! I feel like people may be treated that way but it’s not the way I feel personally. I think with Gursky’s images may depict people as cogs but in such a way that their humanity is not lost. Like individuals are part of a larger living thing.

K : That’s what my dad thinks, that the ant colony is the animal, not the ant. You don’t find that sad, do you?

M: I think it shows connections to people. That’s fine as long as we don’t lose sight of the work of an individual. But I think it can get in to a dangerous situation if we are only looking at things as a group.

K: Who is on your long list of influences?

M: Rothko, Reinhardt, Cezanne, Stephan Kurten, (at Hosfelt gallery right now) Julie Mehretu, Shahzia Sikander. I also really like Indian miniatures – I love the skewed perspectives & wonky patterns. Early northern renaiassance painters before perspective got really tight. Every little square inch of the painting is like worked over and loved but there’s still this off-ness about it. Before Van Eyck.
With Julie Mehretu – I am interested in her sense of the array – it’s too much to take in – in one look. They have a really long lifespan, where you can see lots of things. If you come back the next day there’s something new because looking at it all at once is just too overwhelming.

Chuck Close is my idol. There was a time when I was at Sonoma State when I felt like I was only emulating him. I wasn’t painting faces or anything but I was using grids. He gave me this idea that you put this system together, it makes something else. I also really appreciate how he elevates individuals by the act of making.

I have been painting portraits whenever I want to sidestep something else I am working on. I have a bunch of portraits at the shadow shop at SFMOMA. The gift shop is part of The More things Change exhibit there – the curator challenged artists to tweak their art to the context of a mom and pop gift shop. I thought it would be a good way of reaffirming the relationships with people. I just started drawing one drawing every week of one of my Facebook friends. Using their FB profile photos. I think I will keep them all b& W with one other color.

K: Facebook blue?

M: Maybe! Probably 6×9 or 8×10. The size of Egyptian funeral masks.

K: Oh! Are you a fan of Egyptian funeral masks?

M: Yeah, definitely. These people died so long ago but there is still that connection there. That’s what I want these portraits to do – if they are still around.

K: So they can’t be on paper?

M:Well I like them on paper so people have to take care of them if they are going to last.

K: what do you think about things lasting in digital archives?

M:I think its an important practice but I see it as really really fragile compared to an object. They need a lot of support, what if there is some disaster that wipes that out. I think it’s more fragile than how most people see it.

K: Basically if you want to work on paper, you want to work on paper, right?

M: For my next project I’m going to be using a lot of those online archives – caliphsphere.org — Land surveys. The Library of Congress and also the Smithsonian have really good photo archives. So I’m taking groups of two – three images – probably most are going to be three and putting them in Photoshop and dropping the opacity and overlaying all of them together. Ray Beldner is also doing something like that: 101 overlaid Andy Warhols.

Matthew Troy Mullins, Stacks, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, 48 in. x 36 in., 2010.

K: There’s a lot of archive based artwork. How did you get interested in it?

M: Well for this painting, the cactus collection – I had started out looking at architecture as a mirror of social priorities or goals – how what we make reflects who we are and what we want.

K: Or when we put collective resources in to something…

M: Exactly – I was really interested in this (cactus greenhouse) space as a compelling space to paint, it’s an interior place to house nature. Then I started thinking about collections as a place – how each specimen was a small representation of a big effort to go out and collect information about the world. That was the sort of Ah-ha moment – all these basements and archives represent these people’s efforts to understand things. Looking at the archive as a symbol – what does that say about people’s efforts?
Also, I took the Chemistry and other science courses in college, so there was that interest.

K: I don’t get a sense that you are critical of Linnaean taxonomy or anything – some people like Mark Dion seem to have more of a love/hate relationship with taxonomy, or they are trying to scramble rules of classification. You actually like that people organize things in drawers. Like – what would I like to see an entire room of? – Oh, bugs! I can go to the bug archive.

M: Right! I was carrying around a meteorite and then I found a meteorite collection, I was so happy. I think it’s comforting as way of being able to digest so much information.

K: I think it’s important that you are unambigiously pro- archive. I was just looking at the Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. Jasmine Moorhead(of Krowswork Gallery) was saying that it looks like he is playing around with grids of collected photographs more than he plays in paintings.

M: What interests me in the archives is the adventures they represent. I am attracted to adventures and stories of human endeavour and challenge, but I am sort of more of a homebody. I did spend the last week in the Mojave desert – but an archive is where you can see evidence of all that exploration. Feeling the places where it happens without going anywhere.
I’m interested in the early part of Arctic exploration. That was when they thought the Elysian Fields were up there, before the resource grab happened. It was more fun before they started worrying about how to get up there and kill a bunch of whales and get them back .

K: So you aren’t interested in infrastructure or trade– economic systems.

M: Not really. More the pure curiousity of the researchers. There is inherent damage in that curiousity – the bugs in the collection had to die to make the collection. There is this taking that’s happening.

K: As opposed to a painter’s kind of curiousity, which is totally harmless, right? The ultimate leave no trace investigation.

M: Yeah. These people really devoted their lives to doing this. I feel a relationship to them – I feel like it’s a really charming characteristic of people, that they are interested in things and they are willing to shape their lives to accommodate those interests. I am interested in how these collections or these scientists who assembled them wind up as storytellers. Also is my project there is a sense of archaeology – I want to take things that aren’t usually seen and bring them up to the surface. There is a responsibility to bring up those gems before they are hidden again.

K: You have to check out this poem by Jamie Robles, Under the Earth — written about photographs of the Stafforshire Horde. The Staffordshire Horde is recent find of very well preserved Dark Ages metalwork etc. An archaeologist already dug them physically out the ground but the poet felt a further responsibility to interpret what the find means to us.

K: Ok. Painting Materials. What do you use?

M: For brushes, mostly synthetic sable. I have a couple couple real sable brushes – just from Dick Blick. With the watercolor, I do use a little bit of gouache at the very end – like a cherry on the top. I use Old Holland paint.

K: What kind of paper do you use?

M: TH Saunders 300 lb. Cold press.

K: Okay, sorry. Back to this idea of archaeology.

M: More with the paintings I was doing before these, I was thinking of the paintings themselves as artifacts. I was trying to capture things that were right on the verge of being obsolete – like this book stitching machine. It’s for a certain kind of spine that almost nobody uses anymore. There’s this painting “2003- 2007 – Electron Teleportation Machine”. It’s a machine for coding and encrytption – and it works but it will be smaller/obsolete in the future. I want to preserve the moment where this thing exists. I feel like photo documentation would not be enough.

K: So what was your early art education like?

M: I started making art senior year in high school. I had a really awesome art teacher, Andrew Kjera. I made a painting of Mt. Diablo with a swirling vortex in the sky with a hole in the sky where you could see galaxies. So he was supportive but he was critical too, because I what I really wanted was for there to be a ladder up to the vortex and he was like – maybe the ladder is implied. Maybe the first ideas aren’t the best. But I really took to it. I spent lunchtimes in there. He really helped spark my early interest – kind of blew on that spark a little bit. I went to college to study kinesthesiology (to be a Chiropractor) and at that point I thought art was going to be a hobby for the rest of my life. Mark Perlemen (Sonoma state) Joy Broom (DBC) really encouraged me more. I feel like those early years are so fragile – people need the right blend of support and technique. Those people were formative. Of course there have been so many teachers after but those people were the ones who got me started.

The show’s bilingual title hints that pedagogy lies ahead. The French part of Williams’ title is freshly collaged from the eponymous 1963 essay collection by Raymond Aron (1905-1983). Aron’s book was Englished in 1967 as 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, and the New York Public Library’s Rose Room is a convenient locale for copying it with, for example, your phone’s built-in camera. I didn’t get too far into it, but look at what I found on page three:

In general [Aron writes], I think we can say that the idea of industrial society is likely to be prominent at times when economists and politicians are inclined to emphasise the forces of production, science and technology, and to play down the importance of the economic system, whether this is defined by the property system or by the method of economic regulation (by the market or by planning). On the other hand, in periods of prosperity capitalists and liberals are more likely to praise free enterprise and competition than technology.

Aron’s suggestion that, when a state’s economy is in the toilet, politicos and corporate elites make noise about technological innovations helped me filter President Obama’s January 21 speech to General Electric workers in  Schenectady, New York:

[M]illions of people are still out there looking for work.  And even here in Schenectady, as well as GE is doing, I know everybody here knows a neighbor or friend or relative who’s still out of work.

[O]ur job now, is putting our economy into overdrive….It means educating and training our people…..[U]ltimately winning this global competition comes down to living up to the promise of places like this.  Here in Schenectady, you’re heirs to a great tradition of innovation and enterprise:  the pioneering work of Edison that made the entire modern age possible — the tungsten filaments that still light our homes…

In these pioneering efforts, we see what America is all about.  We see what has in our past allowed us to not only weather rough storms but reach brighter days.

This is America.  We still have that spirit of invention, and that sense of optimism…The future belongs to us.  And you at this plant, you are showing us the way forward.  So thank you so much, everybody.  God bless you.  And God bless the United States of America.

Are education, innovation, and optimism what America needs now? Should we race, as Obama urges us in his most recent State of the Union Address, to “win the future?” Whatever the best approach to such questions, if they are indeed questions, Americans (and I must include myself here) could listen more carefully to, better respect, and more generously comprehend those with whom they disagree.

Stanley Hoffman, in an obituary for the French sociologist and political scientist, claims Aron’s “greatest legacy…was teaching [his students and readers] how to think if one refused all ‘secular religions,’ all philosophies of history that pretend to know the purpose and the march of mankind, that begin by rejecting the world as it is and aim at total revolution.”

Christopher Williams’s show at Zwirner features thirteen medium-sized color and black-and-white photographs. Twelve photographs hang, one to a wall, in the exhibition’s three main rooms. They are mounted in black frames behind highly reflective glazing; it’s difficult not to see yourself in them. Sorted by motif, these are photographs of women, photographic equipment, store windows, and agriculture. The thirteenth picture, placed in an adjacent gallery passage, shows a Kodak-yellow mop propped upside down in a service corridor at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Williams has been working on his For Example series since 2005, and some of the work in the current Zwirner show was conceived and executed during Williams’s residence in Baden-Baden last year, a time which Williams spoke of quizzically and fondly as a pastoral, perhaps sentimental journey. Baden-Baden was also hosted last major exhibition, another iteration of the “For Example” series: For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons… (Revision 11).

In most of Williams’s pictures, everything is in focus: the focus of infinity. Detail is full and rich to the degree you notice bruises and what may be a worm-nibble on a bunch of ripe red apples. These are photographs in which, if you take your time, you can get lost. You’ll find things: improbable narratives, echoes of Williams’s work, riffs from the history of photography, advertising, conceptual art, journalism, music, and that is just to begin.

Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz, Leichlingen. September 29th, 2009, 2010. All Christopher Williams images courtesy David Zwirner Gallery.

Silken hairs show up where a male hand-model’s wrist sticks out of a sharp white cuff. A camera flashes, but the female model is just a glowing globby outline turned around, upside-down. She is so down there, unmistakably, in an outfit the color of the crisp green apples best for making pie. Viewer, you are put in the position of some male person too obsessed with an obsolete pocket gadget effectively to attend to her, to the whirl, to the world.

Weimar Lux CDS, VEB Feingerätewerk. Weimar, Price 86,50 Mark GDR. Filmempfindlichkeitsbereich 9 bis 45 DIN und 6 bis 25000 ASA, Blendenskala 0,5 bis 45, Zeitskala 1/4000 Sekunde bis 8 Stunden, ca.1980 Modells: Ellena Borho and Cristoph Boland. November 12th, 2010, 2010.

On your wintry trek from subway to gallery, who knows, you might have caught a reflection of your busy self in the plate glass of the Apple Store. As I mentioned, these photographs are framed in such a way that you’ll see yourself reflected in their glazing. This gets more “fun-house” when you’re reflecting on a picture of a shop window containing two cutaways of layered window glass.

Another photograph, a real turn-on, perhaps best-known from its cameo on the cover of Frieze, shows off a woman’s lower leg as her hands put on, or perhaps take off, a bright red Falke sock. This photograph renders the foot fetish fresh. But is arching that way fun for her, as it seems to feel for me? Old questions about conceptual art’s seriousness and its general worth as a project are, of course, animated by Williams’s photographs. When I spoke with Williams about these illustrated leçons, it felt natural to ask about his own early experiences with school, with pedagogies.

Untitled (Study in Red). Dirk Schaper Studio, Berlin, April 30th, 2009, 2009.

We sat down at the Maritime Hotel with a tape recorder and coffee on January 10, 2011 and spoke for about an hour. Christopher Williams was born in 1956 in Los Angeles and grew up roaming around Hollywood, Playa del Ray, Studio City North Hollywood, Pasadena, and Valencia, a skater and a surfer.

“I was a surfer from the time I was twelve to the time I was seventeen,” he told me. “So I spent a lot of time in Malibu and in Southern California with the mountains and the ocean, and a lot of time in Big Sur. But basically I’m a city guy.”

As a teenager, Williams found surfing “incredibly intense and incredibly fun.” He developed sufficient skill that he attracted commercial sponsors. “I was lucky enough to get free equipment and everything. I was on a surf team, but I didn’t have to compete. I was an exhibition surfer. All I had to do was have their logo on my board and my T-shirt. And I was able to kind of get by, surfing.”

One of Williams’s earliest juried artworks tested the parameters of North Hollywood Junior High School. “We were asked in our art class to make proposals for an event on campus,” Williams says. “And I thought that a pornographic image would be the appropriate thing. So I made a pornographic image loosely based on John and Yoko and was kicked out of my art class for doing so.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, this first disobedience Williams’s early interest in art and oppositional artists took root. As a pre-teen, Williams visited a beloved grandmother in Philadelphia. She took him to the Philadelphia Museum, where they together they saw pieces by Rodin, Brancusi, and Duchamp. His grandmother gave Williams, as a gift, Claes Oldenburg’s Notes in Hand.

After the pornographic poster kerfuffle, Williams was tracked into in “a detention group for misdirected, intelligent kids.” Luckily, Williams found some traction there. The teacher took the class to free jazz concerts and shows at the Pasadena Museum. Williams first encountered work by Carl Andre, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Cornell, Duchamp, and Warhol.

“So I ended up in a great place, where I was exposed to a pretty wide range of contemporary art. And knowing those names led me to looking at the Sunday paper and looking at the list of exhibitions. I started riding buses to visit commercial galleries to see those same artists.”

“I realized that in high school there were two activities: there was pot and surfing. I had a very low grade point average, so I knew I wasn’t going to get into a good college without getting my grades into a good place and without putting a portfolio together. And I knew I wanted to go to art school. So I dropped out of high school, and I went to a community college.”

Williams lied about his age to enroll at L.A. City College. At first, Williams didn’t enjoy his art classes there. “They didn’t have anything to do with the kind of art that I was interested in,” he says.

A change came when Williams poked his head into an art class in which he wasn’t enrolled, a course taught by John White. “He had a slide of Guernica by Picasso projected very large on the wall,” Williams remembers. “And he was hitting golf balls into the slide and then discussing wherever the golf balls would hit. And this looked good to me.”

With support from White and early Artforum editor Fred Danieli, Williams gained entry to CalArts, where he earned both his BFA and MFA, studying under a star-studded cast of characters including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler.

Looking at Williams’ photographs, are a live conduit for puns, terms, cues, motifs, moods, historical anecdotes, threads, phrases, quips, shades, horrors, and tones. Myriad memes circulate via bioelectric synecdoche. Williams’s work activates the viewer as curious problem-solver, but without leashing your research-play-work to predictable conclusions or fabulist morals.

Bennett Simpson, in his 2006 Artforum review of Williams, has this to say about the aesthetic generosity for which Williams aims: “[T]he ceaseless rhythms of absence and plenitude that distinguish Williams’s practice belie a pleasure in contextualization that traditional accounts of Conceptual art rarely acknowledge. For all its displacements—indeed, because of its displacements—Williams’s work admits a level of affect that may not immediately be expected by viewers trying to ‘make sense’ of the many contingencies each photograph contains.” You won’t anywhere find the CliffsNotes or Sparknotes with which to hack Christopher Williams’s work. There is no one right answer, so you’ll have to come up with many of your own.

I hope I never forget Anne Collier’s major recent one-woman show. Real laughter was happening at Anton Kern gallery. People didn’t know what to do about it. What would you do faced with something like Collier’s My Goals for One Year (2007)?

Anne Collier, My Goals for One Year (2007). Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery.

Williams works pragmatically within existing structures–since 2008 he has been Chair of Photography at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Bernd Becher’s former post–for meaningful change. During the opening night Q&A, I asked Williams to compare Vogue magazine and the white cube art gallery as spaces for encountering photographs:

They both have really different functions. I think magazines are really interesting, so it’s not a hierarchical thing I’m going to say. But it’s a statement of difference. I think this [e.g., Zwirner’s gallery] is one of a handful of places in our culture where speculative thought is still part of it. It’s not pure entertainment in here. It’s related to the entertainment industry or to the culture industry, but there is the ability to slow down and ask questions here, if you like. And earlier, when I talked about the apples, I said a picture could be like a brake. It could slow you down. And when I’m making a picture, I tell everybody I’m working with, ‘Let’s try to make a picture where even if they are not interested in the subject, they want to look more.’ So, you’re not interested in photographic technologies at all, but maybe the complexity of the camera makes you want to linger over it longer. Whereas a magazine is really about speed, in a way. Certainly, you can slow down there, too. You can tear the pages out and rearrange them and re-photograph them, and do things like that. Which is one of the ways that I functioned as a younger artist; literally tearing things out of magazines and re-photographing them and thinking about how they functioned. I think it’s the idea that you can spend ten seconds with a picture in here, or you can spend ten minutes. You know? And I think that’s a huge difference. If there’s something political about my work; and certainly with my subject matter, I’m interested in artifacts from the cold war… But if I were to locate a real politic, it would be about insisting on trying to create the conditions for a different kind of looking: different from television. I get a lot of ideas from television.

The first picture you’re likely to notice in the first exhibition room is of a high-paid hand model pressing, with a manicured index finger, a glowing green key.

Bläsing G 2000, Bläsing GmbH, Essen. Modell: Christoph Boland. November 15th, 2010, 2010.

The show’s press release has fun quoting Canned Heat’s 1968 hippie anthem “Goin’ Up the Country”, a hit single which in a tone of woebegone idiocy attests to palpable desire for pastoral mischief. Yet not long after Woodstock, Canned Heat were making jokes at their own expense. Take a gander at the cover of their 1970 album, Future Blues:

I see a bright and shining Granny Smith green, the green The Beatles chose for their logo for Apple Records in 1968. Granny Smith glows in the BLITZ button. Her forces gather at the sharpest edges of leaves reflecting round Edenic apples. There she is again, flashing in the retro dress of the woman spinning out of the hand-model-man’s gravity-field.

Christopher Williams’s show is about learning processes that of course have no beginning, no end. The show is about better seeing where we are now, gathering and storing necessary supplies and techniques, sharing ideas and conversation using all means at our disposal, sharing ideas like these with each other. As the citizens of Egypt have shown us, it may sometimes be necessary to take lightning-swift, tactical, nonviolent action. Williams quietly provides us a useful place for refocusing plans for today—because the future will win itself.

Chris Hosea is an artist and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York. http://chrishosea.tumblr.com

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Laura Napier’s certainly awesome crowd intervention in Vegas:

OFF THE STRIP 2010: NEW GENRES FESTIVAL, OCTOBER 14-16th, 2010

The Contemporary Arts Center presents “Off The Strip 2010″, a three-day new genres festival featuring performance, video, sound and installation art at multiple off-site locations from October 14-16, 2010. Artists from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe will present challenging work addressing themes of consumption, visual spectacle, displays of sexuality, atomic testing, and Las Vegas as a global hub.

I was reading last week’s New Yorker. Alex Ross has a piece on the life of John Cage, apropos of a new biography coming out. Ross explains that the thing that finally got Cage out of “elegant” poverty in the late 50′s was not music but wild mushrooms. This was well after his reputation as an artist was established. He started making money hunting mushrooms for the Four Seasons and other restaurants, but he really hit the jackpot when he was was invited on an Italian game show and asked a lot of questions about mushrooms. He won eight thousand dollars.

I don’t know why, but this little culture story represents some kind of final straw for me. We hear a lot about the fairness or unfairness of “the market”. I’ve been staying up late discussing the “value” of an MFA with a friend who has just embarked on getting one. I even caught myself discussing with my husband the “value” of having a lot of facetime with our son, since I don’t have a full-time job. It makes us unhappy to put a sticker price on the things we think are really important, and it should – but sometimes we sort of have to do it anyway. However, I have a new idea. If the career of a major composer was supported by game show money and mushroom hunting, and also adult humans buy more PedEggs than any other single product when they visit a Walgreens store, the market might be reasonably viewed as absurd. I like this much better. Up is down, down is up. Of course what is important doesn’t sell! Who cares! Of course, I care a lot, since I have a kid to feed – but I am hoping that I can ride the cheery wave of “THE MARKET IS ABSURD” for a little bit longer. It helps.

Unwelcome voices have been singing in my head all week, sort of like this: “This kid is safe from consumerism within an insanely consumerist context.” Is that really possible? “Within a space of pure desire, the yuckiness of the marketplace falls away.” Wait a minute, that’s ridiculous! Am I really thinking this stuff? Yep.

I’m going to requote Tavi’s 100th blog post, as I read it in The New Yorker:

“In my opinion, the most interesting fashion is the Anti-Fashion. No rules, no restrictions, no normalcy, no pleasing anyone…I might be less attracted to the entire ‘chic’ deal because, as a younger person, I do gravitate more towards tackier clothes. That being said, I’m twelve! I have no one to impress and I’m not concerned about wearing something flattering to my body. I will dress as ugly and as crazy as I want as long as I’m still young enough to get away with it. Suckerssss.”

I know that it’s terrible what has happened to art in our culture, how despite best efforts of several generations of artists, everything an artist makes or does or thinks about is still for sale, so of course the gallery system is corrupt, MFAs are a racket, and every trustee of a supposedly cool museum is just there propping up the value of their art collection. But I don’t want to think about that stuff. I want to think about beautiful, insane paintings and dinosaur boots. I might be one more Style Rookie post away from draining the last drop of Quaker/Protestant aesthetic guilt out of my veins. Then I’m going to go make absolutely whatever kind of painting I want.

not the space
surrounding

nor the space
near but the space
inhabited by

that face:
space bent
by such matter
makes broad
of strait

1983

a sonnet for you
a sonnet from me
a sonnet from me
a sonnet for you

a sonnet for you from
me a sonnet for
you from me a sonnet
for you a sonnet from
me a sonnet for
you a sonnet

1978

Hi everybody. I have been reading Selected Cronicas by Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. These were Sunday columns that this super-genius Brazilian novelist produced for Rio de Janeiro’s major newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973. When you read these you will not believe they appeared in a regular newspaper.

They could also be really instructive for writers who are coming up and finding their voices as bloggers. The Cronicas have all the casual style of a blog but can then go ahead and get quite complicated and obscure. You can, as Lispector does, variously muse about the little girl from next door who comes over and murders her kids’ pet Easter chick in the kitchen or toss off a one liner like “A Challenge for Psychoanalysts — I dreamed that a fish was taking its clothes off and remained naked.”

In another column she basically asks “Hey guys, do you know what’s really interesting about Thoreau?” Where would you see that in today’s media landscape? (I never really liked Thoreau, and I found her angle persuasive.)

Bloggers, let’s use Clarice Lispector and her country’s weird newspaper genre as a call to arms. This is a short format, but it can hold anything we want. Narrow branding is so unappealing. We can be catty, familiar, obtuse, preachy, and write tiny little poems — and we can blame a magnificent woman who didn’t mind a little format surfing.

What I must say first about the show “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco is GO TWICE. There are quilts from the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pa., and Holmes County, Ohio. Most were made before 1940. A couple pieces are completely insane. Old Maid’s Puzzle (maker unknown) c.1930 from Holmes County, Ohio has a black circle in the center like a dilated pupil. The pattern uses small blocks bisected by curves to send a ripple out from that center point that looks like a diagram of radiation spreading out from a toxic event. Or, to read into the name of the pattern – a diagram of the fear of single girls. As with any established pattern, it’s the particular rotten sherbet palette of this piece that makes it scary. Also see a five-star version of Tumbling Blocks with a black and cornflower blue border, where the blocks are lit with lavender light coming from two directions at once. It makes you want a stabilizing drink, now. Clean living does weird things to people. Check it out.

Last night I saw Aurelia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theater. This is one of those rare things that is both light and heartbreaking. Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the creator of the show and the mother of its star, is Charlie Chaplin’s daughter. Uncle Dan actually hooted “Pure Chaplin!!” in the middle of one piece where two dancers + pair of pants = three dancers. It’s a dance vignette collection with puppets, spare props and some aerial gymnastics (drapes with hidden ladders, gymnastic rings hidden inside hanging silk shirts). There are low-key special effects, mostly having to do with black and white cloth knocking out or obscuring something tipped this way or that under the light. The all-vintage aesthetic is judiciously defanged by using a little electronic music here and there; in an old alarm clock bell chorus there is one pesty modern alarm clock. Victoria T. Chaplin and her husband started the cirque nouveau movement which people credit as the inspiration for Cirque du Soleil. This is not as fancy as Cirque de Soleil. It has a sneakier and more modest heart. Marcus just about spoiled it by asking in the parking garage, “How come every piece of French whimsy MUST include tango music? They can’t get enough of it.” Maybe somebody can explain that.