ART OR IDIOCY?

Doot Sphere

2018-12-14T18:17:00.000-06:00

In the erotic fourth dimension, spheres exist only as pseudospheres—the exact opposite of regular spheres.

This is a pseudosphere:

A child asks:

Why does a pseudosphere look like two trumpets placed honker to honker?
If a pseudosphere is the opposite surface curvature of a sphere, then isn’t the inside of a sphere a pseudosphere?

A wise adult responds:

So a sphere’s surface has no depth. Imagining the “inside” of a sphere is wrong. There’s no inside or outside because it isn’t like a shell or a ball or a barrier.

You’re actually just picturing a different perspective on a normal sphere when you say “inside.”

In terms of inside and outside of a sphere, you have to think of a pseudosphere as looking at the inside of a sphere from the outside of the sphere (not like see-through style, but the inside IS the outside).

Also, the technical term for a trumpet’s “honker” is “doot pit.”

The "doot pit" is also known as the "doot cup." Particularly in reference to trombones. When two trumpets are placed doot pit to doot pit or doot cup to doot cup, a pseudosphere is born. The doot sphere is the purest expression of an erotic four-dimensional union.

Trumpets and trombones cannot be place together, doot to doot. Rather, they can be placed together doot pit to doot cup and cetera. But what they form is neither a pseudosphere nor a doot sphere, but a "pseudodoot."

Interview - Baratta / Applin / Watt

2014-10-17T01:15:00.000-05:00

The following is an interview I conducted with Carl Baratta, Isak Applin and Oli Watt over email about their collaborative woodcut prints, which are featured in the exhibition They Pass Unseen In the World at SideCar.

Isak Applin, Carl Baratta & Oli Watt • What's Time to a Disappointed God II • 2012 •
woodcut on paper • 24 x 24 inches

ERIK WENZEL: Can you tell me a little about the process, how the collaboration came about and so on?
Were there any historic precedents you were looking at or specific artists/groups? I guess it tends to be a common read with wood blocks, but the images I saw made me think of German Expressionism. Particularly with the wild nature imagery.

CARL BARATTA: I'm waiting for some paint to dry (my dog licked some of a new painting off and now it's repair city USA/ bummer city, USSR). [Baratta paints with egg tempera—dogs can’t resist.]

Anyway, to answer your questions: I can speak for the process I have with those guys but Isak and Oli can explain their collaborations. Isak and I pass wood blocks back and forth. We both draw on them and talk about ideas for moods and composition. Sometimes we draw on un-carved areas and hand it to the other guy, as a guide to what we think should go next. But we don't always follow what the other person drew. Since we both draw and carve, Isak tries to draw like me and vice versa, same with the carved drawing marks. What ends up happening is we still kind of look like ourselves when carving/drawing but it creates intermediary marks that look like both of us, so the image is unified.

With Oli, we talk a lot about what should go in [to the print] while I draw with ink. I draw things from Oli's sketchbook and my own. Then he and I fart around with the composition and what it all means, or sometimes what it doesn't mean but how crazy it is. Maybe “crazy” isn't the right word; we try to go for “unique.” While drawing we leave large areas open so when Oli gets carving he can draw with the tools. I almost never carve when collaborating with Oli. The reasoning behind that is the large areas are left open so his drawing mingles with my ink drawing to make a unified image. Plus I kind of suck at carving. I don't know how Isak puts up with me sometimes.

Carl Baratta & Oli Watt • Shut Down / Shut It Down • 2012

Woodblock print • 24 inches square

When the three of us get cracking it's a combo of the above. I draw, Isak draws, Oli draws with the knife, Isak carves and we are all together making suggestions to work towards a unified image. Then we do rubbings to see how it will look like printed and adjust and tweak until we are ready to print the suckah.

As for influences, yeah, German Expressionism. The other guys can list more sources specifically, but for me I've been looking at a lot of etchings dealing with alchemy and mysticism and Munch and Kandinsky wood blocks.

Since working with these guys I've had a huge shift in my own paintings and drawings. Getting the opportunity to see how these guys solve pictorial and subject matter problems has been amazing. Now when I get stuck I can pull from my experiences working so closely with both Isak and Oli. Then after some paintings are made, I can bring what I've learned back into the printing project. It's a back and forth thing that I'm super happy about.

Isak Applin & Carl Baratta
But Can You Take Hold of the Moon's Light in Water
2012 • woodcut on Paper • 12 x 9 inches

ISAK APPLIN: Here are a few more historical influences: The woodcuts of Lucas Cranach, Aristide Maillol, Frans Masereel, Unichi Hiratsuka and H.C. Westermann. Other sources include old botanical prints, history engravings and a book on ancient Chinese paintings that Dahlia Tulett gave Carl.

Process: Carl's description is right on. I would add that Carl and I frequently never know what the other artist will do next. We often pass the block back and forth with little or no discussion of our intended next steps (this process feels exquisite corpse-like occasionally). At other times we'll work on every stage of the process (drawing, carving, proofing and re-carving) together.

The prints made with Oli are larger, so perhaps we are more prone to sketch and draw the entire image on the block before carving. As with the Carl/Oli combo, I often transfer the sketches to the block and Oli does much of the carving. (This description makes the process sound much more normal than it actually is, in reality we are often planning a woodcut in the middle of the night in a tired, feverish state!)

We've been working on this series since 2009. Carl and I had made a couple of collaborative drawings together in 07 and 08, and at some point woodcuts seemed like a more appropriate medium. Personally, I was attracted to the fact that the printing process smoothly combines the different artist's drawing and carving styles. I could be wrong, but I don't think these woodcuts have the disjointed quality that many other collaborative projects have.

Isak Applin & Oli Watt • What's Time to a Disappointed God I
2013 • woodcut on paper • 24 inches square

Oli and Carl started collaborating around this time as well.

I find that the collaborative woodcuts are a great place to explore over-the-top mythological and romantic themes that are not as present in my personal work. For some strange reason these woodcuts seem to thrive on ideas that we might dismiss from our usual bodies of work!

CARL: Yeah what Isak said except that Sarah Mallin gave me the Chinese boneless painting book (which is amazo).

OLI WATT: I'm not sure if I can add anything that will be more interesting or accurate than what Carl said.

As far as how the collaboration started, we've all known each other since about 2002 (is that right Carl and Isak?). I was trained primarily as a printmaker and doing a lot of woodcuts back then. I was really into Carl's paintings and ink drawings of monsters and ninjas and other mythical, mystical figures. He introduced me to Isak. We talked about collaborating for years, but never acted on it. Apparently those guys were two-timing me, and collaborating all along.

We lost contact for a few years, but when we found out we all lived close to each other, we started meeting in my basement and drawing on woodblocks.

Carl and I started on some small blocks and they weren't very good. We were pretty self-conscious. We decided to work bigger in order to make us make bolder marks. We made a bunch of prints, not all successful. Carl and Isak were also working on smaller landscapes together at the same time, and achieving good results. Then to mix it up, we decided all three of us should make a couple prints.

Frans Masereel • from The Passionate Journey - A Novel in Pictures • 1925

Carl and Isak's collaborations are pretty seamless. There's an overall harmony and believability of the spaces. The ones Carl and I work on can get pretty awkward. I don't draw or paint at the level of those two guys, so I really appreciate some of the awkwardness. I learn a lot from both of those fellows about mark-making to define forms, but I feel like I have a decent background for putting together an interesting composition with black and white. We spend a lot of time talking about all of those elements. We collect imagery from various books and magazines and cartoons and then put initial drawings on woodblocks. Then we adjust and move things around. The discussion is usually very formal—and narrative is secondary at this point.

When Isak and I work together, we tend to define imagery with line more than larger forms. Isak often carves into areas, but I generally don't do much of the drawing or sketching. As Carl said, I mostly draw with the carving gouges, but the composition has already been considered and put onto the woodblock.

We mostly use birch plywood and china plywood.

Other big influences: Fletcher Hanks, Looney Toons, definitely H.C. Westermann and Rube Goldberg's drawings.

CARL: Don't let Oli fool you though, he draws like a maniac but for collaboration he prefers cutting with tools. Also I'd just like to say that every single one of our woodblocks is a god damn masterpiece! Hahahaha... Ehem. OK. Back to being a slob.

Fletcher Hanks • panels from Stardust the Super Wizard

They Pass Unseen In the World - New work by Julia Klein and Collaborative Woodcut Prints by Isak Applin, Carl Baratta and Oli Watt is on view through October 18th, 2014 at SideCar.

Ger van Elk

2014-09-03T22:57:00.001-05:00

“What I want is a realistic depiction of unrealistic situations”
said Ger van Elk in a 1977 interview. (Via Artforum.com's obituary)

Van Elk's sensibility was characterized by simple, humorous and often touching gestures. The artist's direct approach is perfectly on display in the piece he contributed to Gery Schum's Fernsehgalerie. In the 1960s and 70s Gerry Schum ran a television gallery, an entity whose exhibitions existed only as broadcasts on German television. For the exhibition themed "Identifications" van Elk produced the work seen below.

Ger van Elk died on August 17th at the age of 73.

Ger van Elk • The Well-Shaven Cactus • 1970 • from Indentifications - Fernsehausstellung II, Fernsehgalerie Schum

For you videophiles out there, you can also find a high quality transfer on vimeo.

JULY 10, 2014

2014-07-10T17:09:00.002-05:00

On Kawara • I AM STILL ALIVE • telegram sent in 1979 • via Bukowski's

JAN. 2, 1933

JULY 10, 2014

Rene Ricard

2014-04-08T16:47:00.000-05:00

I met Rene Ricard in 2002 when he came to give a lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I was a student. Ambitious young artist and writer that I was, I set up an interview with him. Instead of a brief chat, I was pulled into his frenetic world. I only spent a short week with him, but it was a life changing experience, something I suspect happened with almost everyone whose life intersected with his. Rene (no accent mark!) passed away in early February.

Q & A SESSION

Rene in 2003 • Nancy Smith, artnet

“The clubs were just filled with all these... ‘Young geniuses.’ Of course that’s all gone now. The whole art world is dead. No one goes to the clubs anymore, there’s nothing interesting happening.”

“But maybe–not to be brash.”

“Oh, please, be brash.”

“Not to be brash.”

“Yes, yes, get on with it.”

“Maybe you just don’t know where any of the good clubs are.”

“Yes, yes, I’m old and boring and nobody loves me. I don’t get invited to any of the good parties. Is that what you mean, you little bitch?” Gasps, silence and then laughter. Rene Ricard takes a drag from his unfiltered Camel cigarette, one of many he’s been chain-smoking throughout his lecture. “…Or whatever you are?” Holds the fag daintily and gently taps the ash off. “Or did I hit the nail right on the head?”

THE REAL ANDY

In the early 1960s, when Rene was seventeen he saw one of the Warhol Flower paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He stared at it until the museum closed; he’d been sitting there for three hours. After that he immediately went to New York and joined the Factory. He had a Screen Test, he was in Chelsea Girls and he was one of Warhol’s Superstars.

Rene Ricard (left) with Andy Warhol (center) during the Factory days • photo via Hotel Chelsea Blog

“Can I ask you a gossipy question?”

“Oh No! Gossip. No, go ahead. But just one.”

“So can you talk about the fight you had with Andy?” I asked.

“We had so many! Ha!”

“I mean when he did those Shadow paintings.”

“Oh god, those were so horrible, I absolutely loathed them.”

“I know; you got in a big fight at a dinner. And Andy, in his diaries said how he was so embarrassed...”

“You know the funny thing about that is that it’s all true. He used to call up Pat Hackett every day and tell her everything.”

“He said his face was red. That he was so embarrassed because everyone saw ‘the real me.’ I was amazed. You brought out the real Andy, Rene.”

“You see, the important thing about those diaries is that Andy would call up Pat and tell her what happened and she would write it down, verbatim. It’s incredible. It’s the most accurate social document.”

At this point we were taking the sad walk from Rene’s suite in the Silversmith to the subway station, which would carry him to the airport and back to New York. When a friend and I were with him in his room he said that when he got on the plane Chicago would disappear.

“You see Andy and I had a VERY complicated relationship. I mean here I was, this 18-year-old boy. This 17-year-old boy. And, well. Andy had a crush on me. And I thought, well, you know I thought. I... I just couldn’t do it. Just because anyway…

And all that stuff about Andy being asexual just isn’t true, because I saw him having sex.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, I know. But he kept it well hidden. He was very clever in that way. You see, back then homosexuals posed an enormous threat to the male art world. If you were a homosexual, you would just plateau. And the critics would, well; it’s just much better to be a eunuch. There’s all that history.”

“And it’s much more romantic.”

“Yes, the wondrous god coming down from the sky with all the knowledge.”

Bartolomeo Manfredi • Cupid Chastised • 1613
oil on canvas 69 x 51 3/8 inches • The Art Institute of Chicago

The Visiting Artists Program was in a cramped little office above the cafeteria and just off a small, dark attic lounge where students had sex on filthy love seats. Rene and the Director, Romi Crawford, were looking at a website that someone made in his honor, collecting many of his poems and other writing, when I came in to meet him. There was a black and white picture of him. It was strange because you could tell it been taken in the past, but in it he looked much older than he did now, like it was him in the future. “I think that’s a good look for you,” she said turning from the picture to Rene. “Romi!” he said, “That was my crack cocaine phase!”

I accompanied him to the museum. He wanted to look at the Ingres drawings and an appointment had been made in the prints and drawings room. When we walked in he exclaimed, “It’s me!” I thought he was announcing his presence, but he was talking about an Alex Katz print that was his portrait. They had pulled it out just for him. He pointed out that, “Alex is the only person who paints eyelashes.” Then he went to les Ingres. He was most interested in the portraits with the Venetian landscapes in the background.

One of the prints and drawings people brought up David Hockney’s theory, “Did Ingres really use the camera lucida?”

“No, no way.” Rene instantly referred to the drawings themselves.

“Look at the erasures there. There’s too much erasures. Later in life Ingres did daguerreotypes, as a photographic reference. And he hid those like mad, but it still got out that he used them. So there’s just no way he would have been able to keep it a secret. Actually, It was the early photographers that were trying to copy Ingres, not the other way round. They were finding his pictures and trying to do it like he did.”

He noticed a bit of oil with a slight halo around it on one of the drawings. What was the restoration history, he wanted to know. The prints and drawings person didn’t know, she was an intern and had just started.

Rene knew who everyone was in the drawings. This was his friend a composer, this was so-and-so’s wife. He got a magnifying glass. “Look, look,” he said, “see how he gives us choices for the edge?” pointing out the several contours implying the edge of a face. “You don’t do that with a camera lucida. Look at that face, he really makes it full, it’s not a line, it’s the edge, that face is a head, it doesn’t just stop, it keeps going around the cheek.”

We looked at how Ingres merely uses a few bits of line and you get the whole brickwork of a bridge. There were full figure portraits, with tiny meticulous faces, amazingly rendered hair and delicate landscapes in the distance. “Look at all the problems with the feet, his ankle should line up with the indentation below the Adam’s apple, but it doesn’t. It makes it look like he’s pitching forward. But he sure could draw faces huh?” And there were slightly larger ones. A friend’s wife, done when Ingres was in his 80’s and a piano layer. “He must have done it while he was playing the piano, look, look! There’s a motion line, just like in the cartoons. You can see all the possibilities for hands. And look at this,” he said in a raunchy way, referring to the extremely loose bits around the body.

“How great it is.”

Then we left.

The first thing he said when we got outside was, “I can’t believe they stuck me with the fucking intern. I’m a celebrity.”

Peter Paul Rubens • The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis • 1636 • oil on panel • 10 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches • The Art Institute of Chicago

We went to look at the older paintings; that’s what he was really interested in. He wanted to see "the Chastisement of Cupid," he was calling it by the name of the guy who painted it, "the Bartolomeo Manfredi." We started in the room with the de Zurbarán. “He paints from black, all these artist do. It’s great, you can see it when the pigments on top crack,” he said pointing to the note tacked at the bottom of the cross. Nobody can do white like de Zubarán. Then there’s the Assumption of the Virgin (1577–79) by El Greco, which is horribly lit and you can never see it.

“It’s really a great thing that they got it here.”

Except it’s like that don’t have it, because you can’t see it,” I said.

“Churches aren’t like this, they were never meant to be seen in this light. And that gold leaf altar around it is just god-awful. Look at all that wasted gold leaf!”

Rene explained how the Met tried to get this El Greco, but somehow Chicago pulled through and they worked it out and that was quite an impressive thing. Rene was quite impressed with the Art Institute, how it holds such great works by such rare artists. Or a rare good painting by an otherwise bad painter. “This museum is really world class, it’s not provincial at all.”

As a kid Rene loved to go to the museum. When it was announced that the class wouldn’t be going to the baseball park, but the art museum for a fieldtrip, he would be the only happy kid. Even as a kid he knew exactly what he would buy with a million dollars, a Vermeer, even though they already cost two million dollars. He maintained that youthful exuberance for art all his life.

He spotted a Coreggio across the room and raced up to it. In one breath explaining the whole of it. As much as he could fill you up on 1980’s gossip, he could tell you about the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Rococo and so on.

Always look at paintings on copper, such as Virgin and Child Admired by St. Francis (1606/7) by Francesco Albani. Paintings on copper maintain the richness of pigment that canvas sucks up. You can always tell with green. Green is a fugitive and unstable pigment, if you have a good green, then you can rest assured that what you see is pretty close to what it looked like the day it was painted. The paint cracks and flakes off, and that’s what makes oil on copper so rare, so whenever you come across a painting on copper pay close attention.

Poussin “painted from orange”–meaning he used an orange ground–that’s why his blue skies are so amazing. He pointed out the French tendency to simplify nature. “Look at this painting, it’s all cones and cylinders. There’s even a sphere right in the center.”

“So it’s no surprise that Cezanné came up with what he did. I mean look at that Poussin, it looks like a View of Mt. St. Victoire!”

No one knows how Rubens made his paint; it’s a mystery. It just doesn’t behave like paint should. Look at Rubens’s student Jacob Jordaens’s Temptation of the Magdalene (c. 1616/17) as an example. Rubens’s St. Francis (c. 1615) on panel, “It’s a shame, it’s been cleaned to nothing.” Rene was adept at catching restoration and cleaning, from explaining the polishing of Roman marble, to how cleaned paintings get completely scraped to the underpainting, and how awful it is that they transfer paintings from a panel support to canvas.

There was a Rubens oil sketch, Wedding of Peleus and Thetis 1636), made with only red and brown. Rene pointed out how he’s made yellow with just a little sienna and white and how Rubens tricks us into seeing dark, dark blues.

Fragment of a Painted Wall • mid-1st century A.D. • Roman • plaster & pigment • 19 1/8 x 18 7/8 x 3 1/8 inches
Lent by the Field Museum of Natural History • The Art Institute of Chicago

POLISHING MARBLE

We were supposed to eat lunch in the nice restaurant upstairs, but there was a wait and Rene wanted to get back to the museum. So we went to the cafeteria in the basement. He was happy to have me along, but did not want to do a formal interview. “Rene Ricard doesn’t do interviews,” he’d stated flatly. It was at lunch that he said, “Here’s your quote: ‘Criticizing and making fun of art you hate is easy. Writing about good art is hard without sounding like a press agent.’”

In researching him for the interview, I read everything he’d written that I could get my hands on. He wrote a catalog essay on Phillip Taffe, which was really about Roman frescoes. He told he totally hated Phillip Taffe’s work, but they paid him an “ungodly sum” to write an essay, so he just wrote about what he felt like, which happened to be Roman frescoes.

They still don’t know how it was done to this day. The frescoes “glimmer and shine, which is something that frescoes just don’t do.” And that’s not a result of polishing or restoration. We were in the Roman and Greek antiquities section now. He pointed out the Pompeian red, which is so vibrant and deep, a complete mystery. There was one with a small still life; you could see the layers. There is an underpainting with lines on top. Again, you just can’t do this with fresco.

In front of the ancient Roman frescoes were three marble portrait heads, the center was Emperor Hadrian, to the left Antinous, his boy lover. When the boy died, Hadrian decreed that he was a god, and as a result there are more carved images of this boy in antiquity than any other god. It’s a shame though, on the face you could see the gouges from when statues were sacked at the fall of Rome are all smooth because they were polished down by restorers. There was a nude woman, which is rare, because the male nude was held as a higher example of beauty than the female. What’s best is she is untouched. She is covered in “sugar.” When marble is left untouched it flakes and turns to sugar. When they restore and polish it, they scrape all that off.

ALL ABOUT JULIAN SCHNABEL

“In your essay ‘Not About Julian Schnabel’ you said...”

“No I didn’t!”

I continued, “In the essay you write about how your responsibility isn’t to the painter, the dealer, or yourself, it’s to the pictures. Is it possible to still look at the pictures that way today, without all the politics and history of the 80’s interfering?”

“I’m just a poet, by the time I find out, the parade has passed me by. Painting is a way we experience history, in graphic. Real art has a historical prerogative. It’s always a comment on the art that proceeds it. Jean Michel’s Enola Gay (1981), what made me know it was real art was that it was drawn on a grid structure. It showed a participation in history. It had a touch. Does that answer your question?

When I look back at that time, I cry. I don’t think about politics, I think of all my dead friends.”

Rene has seen thirty thousand dollars in cash, because when he sold a Julian Schnabel painting for thirty thousand dollars, he got the money in cash. He put twenty thousand in a safe deposit box and took ten thousand and went to Italy for a while. I asked him how he survives, like pays for stuff. He said I wasn’t privy to ask questions and that I was much more attractive when I wasn’t asking questions.

“So how did you get into Art Forum?”

“By being Rene Ricard.”

“Julian’s problem is that he overproduced. There’s that famous Mary Boone waiting list. Julian was just cranking out these paintings to meet the demand. A couple of years ago about thirteen paintings came onto the market in one season, which can completely ruin your career. But Julian has protection,” Rene explained. The biggest diamond dealer in New York, which is the nicest guy—I don’t understand that part—Got some friends together, and they all bought up the paintings before they went on sale. Which is a good thing because that stopped Julian’s career from plummeting. “But then Julian made that When Darkness Falls movie and the whole series of giant girl faces with white splattered over the face, based on a thrift store painting he found a way back, that kind of did it in for him. But the important thing is that Julian has market protection.”

Julian Schnabel • Blue Nude with Sword • 1979/80 • broken ceramics, bondo, oil & wax on wood • 244 x 275 cm • Bruno Bischofberger
Cover of Artforum • Summer 1980

Julian’s career was kind of already made, but Rene was working on this great piece for Art Forum, everyone kept asking him what it was going to be about and he said it wasn’t going to be about Julian Schnabel, but then it was. So he called it “Not About Julian Schnabel.” It really has some great passages, like: “One doesn’t want to hurt an artist, but really, one has a bit of a duty to eradicate the mediocre. Children should never be encouraged to be creative.”

“You just had to love Julian. He would invite people up to his studio to see his work. He’d cover his giant paintings with tarp and unveil them to you. There’d be one on each wall.” Finally one day Rene went up to see him and on the stairs ran into some art world somebody going down, shocked and disgusted. He got up to the studio and there was just one painting, and the tarp was all lumpy and sticking out and odd shaped. And Julian yanked on it, and it snagged on the jagged edges. It was the first plate painting. Rene said, “You’ve done it Julian, now I can write about you, now I can make you a star.”

So Rene was working on this piece for Art Forum and one day leaving Julian’s studio, he happened to notice a coffee cup in the gutter, and it had a figure on it exactly like the one in Julian’s Blue Nude (1979-80). And Rene kept it around for a while and then gave it to the editor of Art Forum. There’s a picture of it in the “Not About Julian Schnabel” article. He doesn’t mention it, or say anything about its relation to Julian’s work, but it’s there.

Now they were waiting to get the advance copy of Art Forum, Julian and Rene. And it somehow was that they had to wait at a bus stop in the middle of the night and the driver would have the copy for them, and they could only get one. When they got it, it was horrible, because it had a tiled image of the coffee cup on the cover that Rene had given the editor, not one of Julian’s paintings. Julian was furious and it was hell for Rene, because he was staying at Julian’s house. And Rene was hurt because Julian’s career was already made, he didn’t need the cover of Art Forum, and he never once congratulated Rene for getting the cover, even though they were friends.

The last time Rene had dealings with Schnabel was when he got a two million dollar portrait commission for Julian and was supposed to get 10%. He only got five thousand dollars. And then Julian did the same thing to his daughter, Lola.

The movie Basquiat (1996) is all Julian getting back at Rene for getting the cover of Art Forum, and leaving him for Jean-Michel. The movie is almost entirely based on Rene’s landmark essay, The Radiant Child. He’s quoted in there ad infinitum, and a lot of significant vignettes are anecdotes and bits from the essay. Rene said he should sue for character assassination, except they paid him a ton of money for the rights to insult him.

Jean-Michel Basquiat • Gringo Pilot (Enola Gay) • 1981 • oil stick, marker, pencil & acrylic on paper • 81 x 103 inches at widest
via Basquiat Biography

THE RADIANT CHILD

Jean-Michel was the Radiant Child. “Julian was mad because he wanted to be the Radiant Child and he just wasn’t.” Rene first saw a Basquiat when he went home with a guy and the roommate had the piece on the mantle. He just stared at it and sat in front of it. He stayed there till the sun came up. It was Enola Gay (1981), it had a plane dropping a bomb. He called up Art Forum and said he had the next new artist to write about, they asked him who it was and he said he didn’t know, but he’d find out. And that was the genesis of “The Radiant Child” essay. Stephanie Seymor, The Victoria’s Secret model, owns it now, or she did in 2002 when Rene told me this anecdote: She told Rene she thought it was funny and he said, “My God Stephanie, that’s the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima!”

I cannot do justice to the way Rene talked. He was so passionate and lucid. The words just flowed out and you get all emotional hearing it. Rene spoke with such conviction, that you just knew in your heart that what he is saying must be true.

He gave me a book of poems as a gift. As a thank you I gave him a small artwork. At the time I was drawing and painting a cartoon orange every-dog on a blue ground. For me it was as rooted in On Kawara’s methodology as the whimsy of Yoshitomo Nara. I handed him the small piece in a little ornate frame and he was touched. “Do you know what color this is?” Rene asked, indicating the background.

“Ultramarine Blue Light!” I dutifully recited wanting to show off the attention to specificity I’d learned from walking through the museum with him.

“It’s periwinkle! This color is going to be very hot in the next year.”

I felt ahead of the curve.

“I’m going to put this on my bureau!” I can still hear his musical over pronunciation of the word “bureau.”

Years later, in the middle of the night, I got a phone call. When I asked who it was, the caller replied, “It’s Rene fucking Ricard.” He’d first called my mom and asked her for my number when it turned out I wasn’t there. I’m sure that was an amazing conversation.

As he launched into conversation I imagined him in his room in the Chelsea Hotel where he lived. I thought of that little dog I’d made for him in a place of honor amongst the clutter of various precious knickknacks and other treasures. I wonder what has become of it now that Chelsea Hotel is closed indefinitely for renovations and Rene is gone. Chicago didn’t disappear when he got on that plane, but the New York he helped make did when he died.

Rene Ricard • mixed media on paper • signed & dated: "March 2012 NYC"
via Morning Passages

The Production Line of Happiness

2014-01-27T10:55:00.000-06:00

Art or Idiocy congratulates Christopher Williams on his large scale museum exhibition, surveying his 35-year career, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 18th.

Christopher Williams
For Example: Chaton sjouant avec un appareil photo dans le style d'une photographie conceptuelle (Revision 13)
via Fotointeres

Family History / World History

2013-11-22T12:24:00.000-06:00

Guest contribution from Helen Wenzel Moss

It was sometime in the 1960's Mama told me the story of how our family knew the Oswald family. She said we knew the family through Christ Lutheran Church. The father was an insurance collector who came by our house on Independence Street in the late 1930's to collect payments on an insurance policy bi-weekly or monthly, as was the practice during those times. Mama said he was a very nice, pleasant man. Unfortunately he died very suddenly from a heart attack about two months before his second son was born. The Oswald mother, Marguerite, was in hardship from the loss of his income and with children to support. When the youngest son was a few years old, she put the children in the Bethlehem Children's home. Christ-Bethlehem Lutheran School was on the Bethlehem property. My sisters Faith and Judith, and brother Bruce attended school there at the time. Judith went to school with an older son of Marguerite Oswald.

Mama never thought of the Oswalds again until late in 1963. In 1963 Mama worked for the National Bank of Commerce at 210 Baronne Street (at the corner of Common Street) in New Orleans’ Central Business District. Uncle Fritz was manager of Jefferson Hardware Store at 4209 Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans. After work, Mama would walk the three blocks to the corner of Camp Street and Common Street. She would wait there in front of the old New Orleans International Trade Mart building. Uncle Fritz would drive downriver and pick her up to go home in Gentilly.

While Mama waited there, she noticed a young man handing out flyers. It was not unusual for people to hand out flyers in New Orleans at this time for all sorts of causes. She mostly studied him because there was something familiar about the way he looked. She felt like she knew him but couldn't quit place him. When the news came out that Lee Harvey Oswald had handed out pro-Castro flyers on the corner of Camp and Common Streets in summer of 1963, Mama realized why the young man had looked so familiar. He looked very much like his father did when he was her insurance man.

Is a Pound of Passivity Worth A Pinch of Pique?

2013-11-15T16:51:00.001-06:00

I do not want to document my starting points, turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, stopping points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns.

Robert Morris • Untitled (Scatter Piece) • 1968 - 9 • felt, steel, lead, plated zinc • plated copper • aluminum & brass
Installation view at the Art Institute of Chicago • photo: Art or Idiocy?

It will be interesting to see what Robert Morris has to say tonight at the University of Chicago when he delivers his public presentation entitled IS A POUND OF PASSIVITY WORTH A PINCH OF PIQUE?

The following is from "Robert Morris on Silence" posted on the Critical Inquiry blog in 2011. You may notice the curious detail that the CI website runs counter to The Chicago Manual of Style and puts the traditional double-space at the end of sentences. Thanks to Philip von Zweck for sharing.

One of the more inexcusable forms of talking comes in the form of those cultural events called art symposiums. Now that the role of curator in museums has metastasized to truly horrifying dimensions, it is necessary to keep these culture mavens busy by having them dream up completely irrelevant culture fests. As an aging artist I am still on occasion invited to these stupid shindigs. For years I made up excuses for not showing up. But now I have fashioned an all-purpose document of reply, which goes like this:

I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made half a century ago. Minimalism does not need to hear from me. I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made yesterday. Contemporary art is making enough noise without me. I do not want to be filmed in my studio pretending to be working. I do not want to participate in staged conversations about art—either mine or others past or present–which are labored and disguised performances. I do not want to be interviewed by curators, critics, art directors, theorists, aestheticians, aesthetes, professors, collectors, gallerists, culture mavens, journalists or art historians about my influences, favorite artists, despised artists, past artists, current artists, future artists. A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of speaking. It is possible that I was led into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. I do not want to be asked my reasons for not having worked in just one style, or reasons for any of the art that got made (the reason being that there are no reasons in art). I do not want to answer questions about why I used plywood, felt, steam, dirt, grease, lead, wax, money, trees, photographs, electroencephalograms, hot and cold, lawyers, explosions, nudity, sound, language, or drew with my eyes closed. I do not want to tell anecdotes about my past, or stories about the people I have been close to. The people to whom I owe so much either knew it or never will because it is too late now. I do not want to document my starting points, turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, stopping points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns. I do not want to talk about my methods, processes, near misses, flukes, mistakes, disappointments, setbacks, disasters, obsessions, lucky accidents, unlucky accidents, scars, insecurities, disabilities, phobias, fixations, or insomnias over posters I should never have made. I do not want my portrait taken. Everybody uses everybody else for their own purposes, and I am happy to be just material for somebody else so long as I can exercise my right to remain silent, immobile, possibly armed, and at a distance of several miles.

Read the full essay here.

Von Zweck explains that Morris sent this "all-purpose document of reply" to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in response to an invitation.

2013 Presidential Arts Fellow Robert Morris
IS A POUND OF PASSIVITY WORTH A PINCH OF PIQUE?
Friday, November 15, 2013 • 7:00pm
Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Hall
915 E 60TH ST Chicago, IL 60637
FREE

Amalia Pica / MCA Chicago

2013-10-11T17:29:00.000-05:00

Amalia Pica • Stabile (with confetti) • 2012 • paper & sellotape • dimensions variable
Installation view & detail at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland • via Herald St

I was recently looking at a website that specializes in selling art. Its fairly detailed cataloging system works well if you are selling Matisse etchings but not so much for today’s art. One of the categories to be filled out for each work is “style.” The style for recently made artworks is “contemporary” which sounds humorously inadequate. After all, doesn’t art today consist of so many different disciplines, genres, media and approaches that it is impossible to think of it as a single style? But if there’s one thing to be gleaned from the wealth of biennials, triennials and art fairs, it’s that contemporary art most definitely has a “look.” It’s a style composed of clever gestures and smart moves. Working across multiple disciplines and media is an aesthetic position.

In her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Amalia Pica has the look down, utilizing various materials, most of which are humble and everyday, to construct her slight gestures. The exhibition is remarkable because it so dutifully and flawlessly touches on all the right points necessary for a solid contemporary art practice: Performance and participation, personal biography connected to broader political history, obsolete technology deployed as signifier. It all works together too well, which is why it feels so flat and lifeless as a whole.

Amalia Pica • Moon Golem • 2009
Found photograph, etched glass, mirror, plinth & lamp
Installation view at Hayward Gallery Project Space, London
via The Project Space

Much of Pica’s work amounts to illustrations for stories she’s researched. (Research, another contemporary art attribute.) Often what is referenced is more powerful than the artwork that is referencing it. For instance in Moon Golem (2009) a small round mirror is placed on a plinth so that it bounces a spotlight onto the center of a photograph hanging on the wall before it. The image is of a tiny metal figure on the surface of the Moon. An accompanying wall text, which is also part of the piece, tells the story of how this statue was commissioned from the artist Paul van Hoeydonck by the astronaut David Scott to commemorate all the astronauts who died in mankind’s quest to reach the stars. In 1971 the statue, along with a plaque listing fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, was snuck aboard the Apollo 15 and brought to the Moon. The crew only revealed the project after returning to Earth.

The statue, Fallen Astronaut, and the effort to get it to the Moon is the art. Pica is just pointing to it. It’s much more interesting to think about how this is the least public monument ever created, not only is it miniscule, it’s not even on Earth. That this piece brings such a captivating story to our attention is of value, but why did it need to be an artwork? Or more accurately, why did it need to be told in this way?

Pica is at her strongest is when she confines herself to a simple gesture that packs a wallop. The standout work in the show and one of the most memorable pieces of late is Stabile (with confetti) #2 (2012). A mass of confetti has been scattered onto the floor of the gallery. Each little circle of colored paper has then been taped down. The initial chaotic act of tossing a handful of colored discs has been frozen. Viewers walk through the space and the air currents flow, but rather than being carried along by such forces, the confetti stays put. There is an interesting tension in the level of effort. I would describe the effort to individually secure hundreds of small pieces of paper to the floor with strips of transparent tape as “painstaking”. But it’s just tape and some cheap confetti you’d get from a party store. Still, the space is activated by the haphazard arrangement, disrupting all the other works of Pica’s, which no matter how casual they try to be, reek of being carefully placed “just so”.

What makes Stabile so good is that it's risky. It might be stupid. And it kind of is. And that’s invigorating. It’s not weighed down by references to history or literature, it hasn’t been overly conceived, it’s a simple gesture that gives us room as viewers to experience and contemplate what's in front of us.

How Much Can I Get For This Used Van Gogh?

2013-08-08T20:19:00.002-05:00

Marketplace, a program highly recommended in general for its thorough and intelligent reporting on economics for the common man, has a feature today on the ongoing situation in Detroit. Lizzie O'Leary interviews Detroit Institute of Arts Director Graham Beale. The DIA's collection has become the public face of the debt crisis with the City eying it like a drug addict desperately trying to get some fast cash. You can read the interview HERE or listen to the segment embedded below.

Karl Scmidt-Rottluff • Cactus in Bloom • 1919 • oil on canvas • 26.25 x 29.5 inches
City of Detroit Purchase • Detroit Institute of Arts

This painting by German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff purchased for the DIA by the City of Detroit is one of the contested works now being appraised by Christie's auction house. Even if the works, which are expected to be valued in the many millions, were all sold to the highest bidder the proceeds wouldn't put much of a dent in the City's debt, which is estimated to be 18 billion dollars.

Dust and Water

2013-07-30T17:56:00.000-05:00

The idea of a random space in Manhattan’s SOHO neighborhood, amidst all the other cramped spaces, filled with dirt is fascinating. What other strange things are hidden amongst the stacked shoeboxes that make up some of the world’s most pricey real estate?

The New York Earth Room (Walter De Maria, 1977) is located in an expansive gallery filled with waste-high dirt. You can’t photograph it, or walk on it. You just look at it, feel the moisture and smell the earth. It’s frozen in time. It consists of a vast main space once site to large-scale installations by the likes of Dan Flavin, and perhaps most intriguing, a smaller gallery, the project room, nestled in the back. You can catch a glimpse inside, see that the dirt continues, and spot a few light cans and then only imagine what is unseen. It’s a bit like imagining what is happening at the wreck of the Titanic at this moment. Or inside one of the pyramids. The experience most impressed upon me outside the odd smell of fresh earth, notable in a city often noted for its less than fresh odors, was the forced perspective. As a viewer, you are allowed a very narrow vantage and are left wondering what it would be like to stand at tantalizingly unreachable vantage points.

Entrance to The New York Earth Room • photo: Art or Idiocy?

The Earth Room is periodically tilled, watered, and weeded so that it is always fresh. By now most of the little plants and things that had been carried with the soil are gone. The New York Earth Room was the final exhibition at Heiner Friederich Gallery in 1977. It’s now maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, which Friedrich co-founded, and has been on continuous view for over 30 years. While the work itself is quite amazing, quite literally a gold standard of “Earth Art” what makes it stand out is the context in which it exists. The gallery has long since closed, but its final exhibition continues in perpetuity. It is kept lively and new like the day it was installed. The white cube, like an unchanging tomb, is also free of time.

To think of the Earth Room in terms of burial and, in its perpetual state of newness, a type of immortality is irresistible. After all, what is the work of art but a way for the artist to live forever? What is the desire to participate in history other than a way to carry on after you art gone? It’s like having children, but on a grander, less mundane scale. But then again, it is The New York Earth Room and other works fostered by the Dia that have attained a certain eternity more than their creators.

Boris Groys’ essay “On the New” seems incredibly relevant here:

It is a difference not in form, but in time—namely, it is a difference in the life expectancy of individual things, as well as in their historical assignment. Recall the ‘new difference’ as described by Kierkegaard: for him the difference between Christ and an ordinary human being of his time was not a difference in form which could be re-presented by art and law but a nonperceptible difference between the short time of ordinary human life and the eternity of divine existence. If I move a certain ordinary thing as a readymade from outside of the museum to its inner space, I don’t change the form of this thing but I do change its life expectancy and assign to it a certain historical date. [“The New York Earth Room, 1977” still on display in 2013] The artwork lives longer and keeps its original form longer in the museum than an ordinary object does in “reality.” That is why an ordinary thing looks more “alive” and more “real” in the museum than in reality itself. If I see a certain ordinary thing in reality I immediately anticipate its death—as when it is broken and thrown away. A finite life expectancy is, in fact, the definition of ordinary life. So if I change the life expectancy of an ordinary thing, I change everything without, in a way, changing anything.

This nonperceptible difference in the life expectancy of a museum item and that of a "real thing" turns our imagination from the external images of things to the mechanisms of maintenance, restoration, and, generally, material support—the inner core of museum items. This issue of relative life expectancy also draws our attention to the social and political conditions under which these items are collected into the museum and thereby guaranteed longevity. At the same time, however, the museum’s system of rules of conduct and taboos makes its support and protection of the object invisible and unexperienceable. [The Earth Room being closed to visitors during the summer months for maintenance] This invisibility is irreducible. As is well known, modern art tried in all possible ways to make the inner, material side of the work transparent. But it is still only the surface of the artwork that we can see as museum spectators: behind this surface something remains forever concealed under the conditions of a museum visit. [You cannot photograph it, you cannot walk on it, enter into it, only view it from without, from the entrance of the gallery that has a regular wood floor and from behind a glass enclosure.] As a spectator in the museum, one always has to submit to restrictions which function fundamentally to keep the material substance of the artworks inaccessible and intact so that they may be exhibited "forever."

Entrance to The New York Earth Room • photo: Art or Idiocy?

Indeed the idea of carrying on an exhibition indefinitely, one made up of such a simple gesture as fresh earth replacing the floor of an otherwise empty gallery, is the perfect example of Groys’ position. For it’s not only a single work being preserved, or even a final exhibition, but a moment in time made up of all these things.

Even if the material existence of an individual artwork is for a certain time guaranteed, the status of this artwork as artwork depends always on the context of its presentation in a museum collection. But it is extremely difficult—actually impossible—to stabilize this context over a long period of time. This is, perhaps, the true paradox of the museum: the museum collection serves the preservation of artifacts, but this collection itself is always extremely unstable, constantly changing and in ﬂux. Collecting is an event in time par excellence—even while it is an attempt to escape time.²

But for now we can revel in The New York Earth Room’s apparent timelessness, the thoroughly corporeal work’s simulated existence outside of corporeal reality— even as the gallery that hosted it, and now its maker—have succumbed to temporality.

Walter De Maria died at the age of 77 last week.

____________
1. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 36 - 37.
2. Ibid, 39.

Fear of A Black Planet

2013-07-14T19:13:00.001-05:00


*David Hammons • In the Hood* • 1993** • athletic sweatshirt & wire • via Peripheral Noise

Hood (e.g. Executioner, grim reaper, hoodie, hoodlum,
hostage, klansman, neighborhood, prisoner, S&M, serial killer)

I Like America and America Likes Me

2013-07-04T17:05:00.001-05:00


*Joseph Beuys • I like America and America likes Me* • 1974** Print on paper • 569 x 543 mm • via Tate

Happy Fourth of July. Joseph Beuys likes America.

In May 1974 the German artist, teacher, shaman and social sculptor Joseph Beuys arrived at JFK Airport in New York. He was rushed to an ambulance and wrapped in felt, the sickness in the air overcoming him. The ambulance, sirens blazing, took him to René Block gallery where a caged off area containing hay and a live coyote waited for him. Beuys spent the week communing with the spirit of America (embodied by the coyote), performing a healing and cleansing act. I like America and America likes Me, marked the artist's first visit to the US and further developed his ideas of the artist/shaman as healer.

This notion is at the core of Beuys' personal mythology, beginning with his origin story fit for a super hero. After crashing in Siberia as a Luftwaffe pilot during WWII, he was nursed back to life by wandering Tartars. They covered him in fat, and as in I like America and America likes Me, they wrapped him in felt. These materials became motifs in his work, addressing the question, "Why do you use ____ in your work?" artists regularly face in quite an inventive way.

It's interesting to look at the complex belief system Beuys authored in comparison to the myths surrounding successful artists today. Beuys' artist persona was based on spiritualism and faith in art, whereas today artists' backgrounds are often amount to unique selling points aimed at giving them an edge in grant applications, filling niches within collections, or simply standing out as a specialized commodity.

Celebrate the spirit of America and heal with Joseph Beuys by watching this video. It contains documentation of the performance and discusses the artist's work in general.

Coyote. Joseph Beuys in America from huubkoch on Vimeo

Lecture Notes: Thomas Baylre

2013-06-25T15:07:00.003-05:00

German artist Thomas Baylre is part of a lesser-known contingent of artists, including Peter Roehr, who came up in the 1960s alongside Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. If ever there was a “Capitalist Realist” it would be Bayrle. In the last few years his profile has risen meteorically. The graphic artist once rumored to have designed the logo for the RAF has been featured in a major installation at dOCUMENTA (13), exhibitions at Air de Paris and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and a career survey at WEILS Contemporary Art Centre, all within the last year.

Thomas Baylre delivered a lecture for the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2013. Here are the highlights from that talk:

Thomas Bayrle • billboard installed outside Gavin Brown's Enterprise • 2012 • photo: Art or Idiocy?

I will say 2 – 3 words about my so-called ‘career’.

I was not always aware if I’m a real artist or not.

Apprenticeship in weaving. Like Sculpture. The weaving of society. It is also like mapping.

I am not willing to do anything bigger than is absolutely necessary… Technically.

Chairman Mao brought the potato to China in 1957 because he didn’t want to be dependent on rice. I had a collection of magazines from China and was struck by ads that say, ‘Potatoes only grow if you read the Mao bible’ and other crazy fantasies. I saw stupidity in advertising in the West and in China. Stupidity here and stupidity there. Organizing masses in China for their purposes and in the West we must organize the masses through advertising to buy products.

Thomas Bayrle • Kartoffelzähler (Potato Counters) • 1968 • color screenprint on paper • photo: Art or Idiocy?

It was surrealism, they had to read the Mao bible to make potatoes grow. It is most crazy that it worked.

I tried to join the Leninists and Maoists, but they said, ‘You paint the figures with ties and we cannot have that.’ I learned they are impossible to work with. Stupid people. Any artists trying to work with them learned quickly, it’s not possible.

In World War II women cleaned as ideology, then after the war as products. Always cleaning.

Having US troops stationed in Frankfurt was very important. Since they were drafted, the intelligence of the United States was all there. Plus jazz.

A lot of my images were asked for by advertising agents: ‘Why not try our Glücksklee Milch?’ But they didn’t like it so much. So I kept it, I liked it.

Thomas Bayrle • installation view of "All-in-One" at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels • photo: Sven Laurent

Love and butter.

The figures make the image of what they dream.

Chickens are not happy, but they look happy.

When I did these things I did not think about ideology. I just thought, ‘Here is a terrible man, I will make him out of his mustache.’

Thomas Bayrle • Stalin • 1971 • color screenprint on gray wove paper • 836 x 609 mm
The Art Institute of Chicago

There was no criticizing. I was not criticizing technology. I just like the telephone in my mother. We didn’t even have a telephone at home.

Thomas Bayrle • Telefonbau-Normalzeit (Telephone AT&T) • 1970
Screenprint in colors on wove paper • 35 1/4 x 27 inches (89.5 x 68.6 cm) • edition of 25

Make an image out of images. Make a super image.

Why does Orson Welles have wheelbarrows? His lips looked like wheelbarrows.

My work is like Japanese pod hotels.

We should see the production of everything. This is why I take students on field trips—they should see what’s behind the curtain.

Everyone wants his Mercedes but also wants to get into heaven.

I think without humor nothing is possible.

It comes from the moment when you have to say, ‘I can’t do it any better. I can’t make it perfect.’

I’m not making an ideology out of it, but I do most of it myself. It is also meditation.

Thomas Bayrle • Kartoffelzähler • installation view (with R.B. Kitaj painting) in "Der Geteilte Himmel"
(The Divided Heaven) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin • 2011 • photo: Art or Idiocy?

Interview with Tania Bruguera

2013-05-30T14:52:00.000-05:00

I'm very excited to announce that my interview with Tania Bruguera has been published on ArtSlant. I’ve been working on it with her for a few months, and I am proud of what it achieves—we cover a number of issues that are pertinent to the current state of contemporary art. Bruguera’s stances on topics ranging from class, education, labor, and professionalism in the art world will hopefully spark much-needed debate.

"It is a process of excitement about the impossible made possible; which is also an aesthetic moment. Aesthetics have shifted from the craft that is in the transformation of objects (natural or manmade) into the meaning for a craft to transform our selves (as a single person or as a group). It is not a stone exquisitely becoming the face of a saint in ecstasy, but the mobilization of the realization of ourselves, which by the way was also in the face of that saint." – Tania Bruguera

Read the interview

Image: Tania Bruguera • Portraits • 2004-2005 • Medium: Sound installation, performance • Materials: Space painted white, historical speeches translated into applauses, recorded applause, white speakers, white text in the wall with the historical information on the speeches, security guards with dogs randomly walking into the space • Courtesy of the artist • Photo: Rüdiger Ettl for Kunsthalle Wien

Yes I Smoke Crack

2013-05-24T19:31:00.000-05:00

I'm not even sure where to start with "Witch House", a genre coined as a joke and then canonized by Pitchfork. It is the most interesting thing I've found of late. It combines gothy emo emotion, pretty high-pitched synth melodies from 90s rave music, slowed down vocals, the occult ...and rap. It should be the worst thing ever, and that's part of it's charm–it is horrible and brilliant at the same time, as all the best art is.

It also perfectly describes how I feel right now in the crudest hyperbolic way possible:

You ain't shit to me –nah
You ain't piss to me –uh uh
You ain't spit to me –nah
Ya bitch, you shit/you can suck a dick for me

Krawl by Salem on Grooveshark

Marumari

2013-05-22T23:43:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite song right now. I keep listening to it in my head. You know a song is good when you hear it in your background idle thoughts as clear as if it were coming through your headphones. I hear its rich textures, smooth synthesized bass and lush atmosphere. I smile at the end when I the campy tribal horn that comes right out an 80s song that I can't quite place. This song sounds like trying to remember.

Birch Beer Forest by Marumari on Grooveshark

The Twinkie Defense

2012-12-10T22:34:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: Twinkies returned. On my birthday no less.

Tomorrow morning the Hostess will deliver the last shipments of Twinkies and other beloved artificial treats to select grocery stores. Everyone knows these golden cakes that neither rot nor decay have a special place in the hearts of Americans. Few people realize, however, that the storied confections appear all throughout history. Such as in this painting by Paul Cézanne:

Paul Cézanne • French, 1839-1906 • The Basket of Apples with the Crazy Stack of Twinkies • c. 1893 • oil on canvas • 25 7/16 x 31 1/2 in. (65 x 80 cm) • The Art Institute of Chicago

Time Capsule

2012-11-16T22:43:00.000-06:00

Artist and Art Institute of Chicago preparator Robert Burnier shares this find. A crew tearing down an old wall in the museum came upon this newspaper clipping sealed inside over 20 years ago.

Tuesday, April 16, 1991

Obama

2012-11-06T22:21:00.002-06:00

Notes on Documenta

2012-08-27T11:43:00.002-05:00

Notes on dOCUMENTA (13)

Ai Weiwei Summons Ball of Energy & Attacks

2012-06-22T16:43:00.000-05:00

via: prosthetic knowledge source: "Zong Zong ball" on google+

The Underpass

2012-05-24T00:56:00.000-05:00

In the dank concrete pedestrian walkway that led under the highway to the lakefront, someone had written with a magenta paint marker, "YOUR VOCABULARY IS DEEP BUT YOUR HEART IS SHALLOW."

"Vocabulary" had been scratched out and someone else had written "VAGINA".

Bernese Nights

2011-09-12T08:30:00.006-05:00

I have been to Bern, Switzerland the past three summers for the Sommerakademie at the Zentrum Paul Klee, an intensive two-week residency for artists, curators, writers, academics and all of the above—“art people” as it were. First I attended as a Fellow in the Sommerakademie, returning as an Editor and Contributor to a book published by the Sommerakademie and as an Alumnus. The group of people affiliated with the Sommerakademie is kind of like a family that meets up in this Swiss city at the end of every summer for little bit of fun and formality. Each year it grows as new people become involved.

Bernese Nights. I have thought about that stupid title every year I’ve been in Bern. The idea being some sort of diaristic narrative, like George Orwell’s “Burmese Nights”. Maybe for no other reason than they sound similar. Every summer, late at night in Bern, what was originally a lame joke I made to annoy myself comes back to me and refuses to go away. What is a pretentious and clever title is also a device that suggests the content of the writing. Wandering around the empty stonemasonry that is Bern’s architecture I think, “I should totally write something called ‘Bernese Nights!’ That would be so stupid!” I’ve never read “Burmese Nights.” I did read, “Shooting an Elephant”, which is about being a policeman in Burma, though. And it is Burmese Days, not “nights.” I think I am thinking of Down and Out in Paris and London. Bern is neither Burma nor London or Paris. And rather than being down and out, which is pretty much how the other fifty weeks out of the year lived in Chicago have been, August in Bern is the only time I get to feel like my commitment to a life in the arts is amounting to much of anything. To be an international artist, how exciting! But also probably much less exciting than the life experiences of Eric Blair.

Bern is one endless picturesque vista, a quaint European city beautifully displaying its medieval origin. Paul Klee grew up here. Albert Einstein lived here. The Kunsthalle Bern was the site of Bernese native Harald Szeeman’s paradigm-shifting exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form.” The year prior he let Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap the kunsthalle, their first building.

I like to say that Bern is a city founded by bears. Bern’s coat of arms is a fierce bear sporting enormous sword-like red claws and an equally red engorged penis. Medieval settlers came upon an area suitable for starting a village except there was a community bears already installed there. The King waged war on the bears and once victorious imprisoned the Bear King in a pit on the edge of town known as the Bärengraben. Nobody really knows how the Bern got its name. A popular tale tells of the Duke vowing to name the city after the first animal he killed on hunt. And since the 1440s there really has been a bear pit at east end of the Nydegg Bridge. Only now it is an historic site and the bears live in a natural habitat on the riverbank called Bärenpark. It is kind of odd then that this small old-world city is the capital of the cantons that make up the “Confoederatio Helvetica”.

When I mentioned this to someone in conversation, he replied, “Yes, but the economic capital is Zurich. And Geneva. And the cultural capital is split between Zurich and Basel.” Subjective somewhat I’m sure, but the opinion of a Swiss citizen nonetheless.
“But the actual power is here, right? The Bundeshaus is here.”
“It’s the political capital. But that’s a different kind of power.” Said as if to remind me that it is common knowledge that goes without saying that government is a showy and relatively meaningless formalism. It made me think about how this goes without saying in America, not because everyone realizes it as an essential truth, but because it is unapparent to most people. Most Americans think that government is the cause of, and solution to, all the nation’s problems. It should be bigger or smaller, more or less involved, stricter or more lenient; but never does the commanding role business plays come into question. Business, the economy, the marketplace, they are always spoken of as some sort of helpless thing that the government must regulate or free. This conception implies the government for better or worse is in control and the private sector is more like a wildlife habitat or a colony of bacteria. In reality, it seems apparent to me that in America, as in all Western countries, it is the private sector that dictates the agenda—and in a quite sentient, organized and efficient way. Capitalism is a form of government; the question of democracy, communism or dictatorship is secondary.

Europeans seem much more pragmatic than Americans, who are so idealistic. I feel much more optimistic about the future around Europeans because they seem to be generally more realistic about things: economic, social, cultural, whatever. But this can also lead to a kind of defeatism. Idealism is a quality that makes us Americans special; it’s what gave us the drive to achieve all the crazy awesome shit we’ve done. But Americans are now so idealistic about so many stupid, unrealistic things. It is also no longer positivist idealism, but a negative, destructive clinging to increasingly dogmatic ideals. In fact, the last person who said, “Yes we can,” has been vehemently opposed, attacked and undermined every step of the way. That is what commitment to ideals has become in America–a tunnel vision that is becoming ever more rigid, stubborn, unwilling and bitter. Most Americans spend a great deal of emotion and energy on socially conservative issues that don’t affect them personally while overlooking issues that actually do.

Europe has it’s own problems with rabid conservatism, but it is focused almost entirely on immigration (Muslims and non-whites). In America there are so many topics to choose from one can hardly pick. In addition to immigration and Muslims, we’ve got gay marriage, unions, abortion, taxes, government, that black guy in the White House. Guns. The Constitution. Christianity.

A far-right party in Switzerland funded by wealthy individuals and corporate backers has plastered the country with posters depicting a red field with a white cross over which trample the black silhouettes of countless feet. I thought it was an uncouth ironic sampling of a Nazi aesthetics to promote a youth oriented product or music festival until I read the message commanding me to STOP MASS IMMIGRATION!

The SVP's most adorable ad yet. They also have one with crows.

The Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) is the strongest party in Switzerland, and like its Republican and Tea Party comrades fears a weakened nation state, opposes government spending on social wellbeing and education, and has signed a "contract with the people". Like its "Red State" counterparts in the U.S. the SVP also favors decreased government spending despite having a large constituency of farmers that count on generous subsidies. This wave of increasingly vitriolic conservatism flooding the Western world is troubling but at least Europe has multiple parties. Let’s face it, in America the land of plenty we have to choose between Coke and Pepsi. And don’t even mention the Tea Party because it’s just Coke when they still made it with cocaine.

While they were present on my journey, I didn’t see any of those posters in Bern, nor were there demonstrations the way there is always something going on Washington D.C., adding to the understated almost secretive nature of the Swiss federal government.

So anyway, what would a “Bernese night” look like in a place like this, where a gorgeous river valley that cuts through the center of city and a nearby square features a relatively unassuming parliamentary palace? A more classic outing might entail eating fondue in a big group at one of the oldest restaurants in town. Being careful not to scrape through the growing crust of cheese at the bottom of the bowl with your fork, you end up with a solid crispy wafer of cheese and wine. It is a test of skill, collaboration and manners to see if you can produce the toasted a religieuse at the bottom of your pot. Then maybe you walk across one of the many bridges and look out into the darkness, listening to the rushing waters of the Aare hundreds of feet below.

For me, in town because of the Sommerakademie residency, every night is a social function of some sort with artists, curators and academics from around the world. People like to say how awful such things are. And receptions are indeed socially awkward but I also think they are great fun. And honestly, as an eager young artist, it’s quite exciting. It’s always fun because what starts as passed champagne and a few speeches always leads to a dinner that ends up a low-key dance party. Maybe Pipilotti Rist is on the dance floor shaking her bottom like a feisty child. And then later maybe Jan Verwoert ends the night playing his Sponge Bob guitar and singing “There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out.” After the annual dinner that marks the finale of the Sommerakademie, evening becomes night and a group of people winding around the quiet downtown looking for a bar open past 1am.

This year we ended up at Cuba Bar, right near the giant Zytglogge, an enormous mechanized clock complete with an astrological dial and animated figurines that strike gongs and pop in and out of doors. Cuba Bar sells fine Cuban cigars and has an enclosed glass room for smoking on a landing off the stairway down to the toilets. Pretty low key compared to last summer when we piled into a silver Mercedes station wagon driven by an overly enthusiastic Middle Eastern entrepreneur we somehow befriended.

Bern’s old city downtown is very small, but he drove us around in circles for a half hour wanting to take us to a great bar. He finally stopped a few blocks from where we met him. We all got out of the car and left him when his brother called to talk about a time-sensitive scheme to import a shipment of rugs. It was clear he had no idea about anything but he was very nice. Actually, he was nice in a threatening way almost. You always have to suspect people that willing and excited to be your friend. We wound up on the edge of town where the highway meets the train depot at Dead End. Behind a heavy black metal door like the entrance to an underworld hideout or a gulag prison cell, a pair of eyes peered out through a slit. The man that answered was tall, hairless, pail and skinny, like a snake with spider legs for fingers. He was a total sweetheart and everyone there was friendly. It was decorated with fiberglass stalactites and stalagmites, like a Chuck E. Cheese vampire cave for heroin addicts. This is the “seedy underbelly of Bern” which is made more bizarre given the sunny face of Bern.

When we left it was just me and a girl. The sky was turning into different kinds of blues. And as the sun woke up this little city we kissed in morning light.

Electric blue lights in doorways and alcoves make it impossible for junkies to find a vein and shoot up.

The only time I ever felt a little unsafe is when a group of us wandered into a real drug addict dive my first year there. In the bathroom a drunk old fuck invaded my personal space either wanting to make out or sell me some drugs. Or get some drugs off me. These prostitutes who were playing Pac-Man tried to get our attention. It was International Blue Velvet. A burned out woman tried to steal the last cigarette off the table as she stumbled by. I snatched it back and scolded her. I pointed at her with my finger and repeated a couple of times, “Nein!” We played some foosball before calling it a night. Outside was a city that literally does not have a scrap of litter to be found.

Near the Dead End there is a massive graffiti-covered squat beneath an overpass. It used to be a huge stable with a giant hall in the center where you could ride horses and take riding lessons. The complex is now a co-op of various groups that stage film screenings, music events, parties and there is probably a communist lending library.

It was night in a world that had ended in a nuclear apocalypse and we’d made it across wastelands to one of the last outposts where all the rebels, nomads, pirates and smugglers stop on their way to parts unknown. Standing sentry was a giant horse made of wood. In a surprising show of civility, the Trojan tree house horse had made it the entire summer without being torn apart by any of the revelers. It had been damaged once, but they got together and fixed it. There were probably open fires in oil drums or at least some torches and over a hundred of people massed. It was incredibly laid-back though because the squat is also just a place where you can go for a drink and sit outside biergarten style. We purchased our drinks and sat at one of the long wooden tables around the side of the fortress, first walking through a cobblestone passageway once traversed by horses and stable hands. In the sleeping medieval village above, the giant cuckoo clock in the towne centre rang a few soft midnight gongs.

Milestone

2011-07-15T17:08:00.004-05:00

Friday, July 15th marks the 30th birthday of our Founding Director & Chief Executive Officer for Blogging Operations. What other notable cultural icons share their birthdates with Erik Wenzel? Here is just a selection:

Inigo Jones, the first British architect of the modern era.

Rembrandt, who is like one of the best artists ever.

Walter Benjamin, who famously proved that photographs have no soul.

Jacques Derrida, inventor of the ironic air quote.

Ian Curtis, who was depressed.

Jan-Michael Vincent, Air Wolf.

Jesse The Body Ventura, who got killed by a Predator.

Adam Savage, Mythbuster.

Forest Whitaker, who feels things deeply.