It is September. [Not really. It is October and I see I forgot to post this. Better late than never.]
Earlier in the month, Julian Schnabel received the 2007 Gucci Group Award for remarkable film achievement. The Gucci Group agrees with little ol' me: Schnabel takes the cake.
Upon receiving the award, Schnabel said, "Painting can be compared to life, but is about optimism and faith. Artistic expression is the embodiment of hope." hmmm, okay. Faith in the new and optimism that there are different—better even— ways of doing things; but hope..? "the embodiment of hope..." Hope is "expectation with confidence, trust." Schnabel says, "Artistic expression is the embodiment of hope."
Oh, I get it! Artistic expression, which relies on the creative act, is a demonstration of trust in the infinite possibilities of the universe, trust in the possible. Yes. Yes yes. Art Saves. Trust in Art.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
Cellophane Matters
Little art spread wide.
Artists in Cellophane is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Art*o*Mat next week with a swap-meet party - with bands! - in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tobacco country, where the good idea was conceived. Yessirreebob, art from a cigarette machine was a very good idea! spread now to some 90 locations nationwide, machines dropping art the size of a pack of smokes. Ten Years Kerplunking Culture is their anniversary slogan.
Kilgore Trout claims cellophane is the stuff of the universe.
Clark Whittington noticed that the happy sound of crinkling cellophane inspires consumption. He made art, wrapped it in cellophane, stacked it in a vending machine. The Art*o*Mat was born.
After the first one, Whittington filled the next and the next with work of artists of all kinds, from all over. I myself have a pinhole photograph by Emily Long of Chicago from an Art*o*Mat in Santa Monica. You could too. Visit Art*o*Mat for an Art*o*Mat near you.
Artists in Cellophane is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Art*o*Mat next week with a swap-meet party - with bands! - in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, tobacco country, where the good idea was conceived. Yessirreebob, art from a cigarette machine was a very good idea! spread now to some 90 locations nationwide, machines dropping art the size of a pack of smokes. Ten Years Kerplunking Culture is their anniversary slogan.
Kilgore Trout claims cellophane is the stuff of the universe.
Clark Whittington noticed that the happy sound of crinkling cellophane inspires consumption. He made art, wrapped it in cellophane, stacked it in a vending machine. The Art*o*Mat was born.
After the first one, Whittington filled the next and the next with work of artists of all kinds, from all over. I myself have a pinhole photograph by Emily Long of Chicago from an Art*o*Mat in Santa Monica. You could too. Visit Art*o*Mat for an Art*o*Mat near you.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Venetian Cake - Pompeii Pink
Let me get on the bandwagon.
Julian Schnabel has built a building in NYC and the neighbors don't like it. Big news.
Big building. Big color.
Schnabel is a big artist. He needs those 18ft ceilings!
Seriously, Schnabel is a great big artist, a great big filmmaker, a big man with vision and there is always complaint - frenzied even - about someone doing something that commands attention.
Well it seems in building construction the man is as attentive to aesthetic detail as in anything else. Give it time, and the neighbors will learn to love it too. Italian stylings, 18ft ceilings, 3ft walls, French windows, brass railings, and 17 storys red. Well, yessir it's a big building -and I like it.
360 W 11th St. NYC
*photo for The Villager by Lincoln Anderson
Friday, July 20, 2007
Good Gods
I stir up the gifts of the gods in me and around me, and I am blessed on every side with happiness, success, and true achievement.
Well, with that affirmation let me return to this blog. (No, I haven't been sleeping on the job, but out of town, down at the mouth, otherwise occupied.) Let me stir up some good news that the Olympian (read true) gods are yet alive and living in ...London.
My favorite bookseller, lent me an advance copy of a delightful read, Gods Behaving Badly, a new British novel by Marie Phillips. It seems Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, et al., have been living in London these 2000+ years after having been displaced in the people's affections by the messiah. They're having a hard time of it, being forgotten and all, cooped up in one ramshackle residence, getting on each other's nerves.
Of course they're in London. The ancients always have British accents in movies after all. It's an effortless book because it all makes perfectly good sense. Dionysus is a dj in an underground club. Demeter is plum worn out. Aphrodite is - well, Aphrodite must be played by Catherine Zeta Jones in the movie, because Aphrodite is gorgeous, but she has that nasty streak. Brad Pitt, oh god yes, would be Apollo. Sean Connery, Zeus. The big stars are gods, the gods are big stars - even as they age, they are gorgeous.
I'd vote for Maggie Gyllenhall to play the waif-like mortal heroine of the story. Who wouldn't go to the underworld for her? Even Marie Phillips likes her. You can read about that here: normblog When it comes out, in December in the US, read the book. Revive these gods. We'll all be better off for it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Champions Take the Cake
Is there a theme here? Well, lessee. This blog is about art, art that I like, art that I take pictures of (or find pictures of as the case may be), and especially big art - that follows because I like big art. The theme(s) so far.
And then there is Vonnegut. I have been re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Champions take the cake, of course, win the prize, are favorites primed to please.
Breakfast of Champions is a wry wacky work with drawings. It stars the great Kilgore Trout, consumate pessimist, but still the book gave me a certain hopeful perspective on the mess of things that is humanity. In this way:
Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were staying at the Inn, would come to the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
Poor Dwayne mishears the truth and ends badly... but still, Dwayne looked to art for truth and sanity. Me too.
My motto is: Art Saves.
So far, I am not insane, off my rocker, loony toons, nor vicious. Wacky wingnut...well, why yes, that I am.
To enourage you to ingest your Breakfast of Champions, I offer these bits, my favorites.
"Americans are always afraid of coming home," said Karabekian, "with good reason, I may say."
"They used to have good reason, " said Beatrice, "but not any more. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, 'Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It's just a motel.'"
***
The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it; in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the refrigerator. Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.
***
(ETC)-C-CH2-C-CH2-C-CH2-(ETC)
And when [the chemist] sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them - with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with "And," and "So" and end so many paragraphs with "... and so on."
And so on.
"It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.
Hail Kurt Vonnegut. May he enjoy cakes, ale, peace, etc. forever.
And then there is Vonnegut. I have been re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Champions take the cake, of course, win the prize, are favorites primed to please.
Breakfast of Champions is a wry wacky work with drawings. It stars the great Kilgore Trout, consumate pessimist, but still the book gave me a certain hopeful perspective on the mess of things that is humanity. In this way:
Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were staying at the Inn, would come to the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
Poor Dwayne mishears the truth and ends badly... but still, Dwayne looked to art for truth and sanity. Me too.
My motto is: Art Saves.
So far, I am not insane, off my rocker, loony toons, nor vicious. Wacky wingnut...well, why yes, that I am.
To enourage you to ingest your Breakfast of Champions, I offer these bits, my favorites.
"Americans are always afraid of coming home," said Karabekian, "with good reason, I may say."
"They used to have good reason, " said Beatrice, "but not any more. The past has been rendered harmless. I would tell any wandering American now, 'Of course you can go home again, and as often as you please. It's just a motel.'"
***
The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights above street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it; in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan his mistress kept in front of the refrigerator. Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time, just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.
***
(ETC)-C-CH2-C-CH2-C-CH2-(ETC)
And when [the chemist] sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them - with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with "And," and "So" and end so many paragraphs with "... and so on."
And so on.
"It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.
Hail Kurt Vonnegut. May he enjoy cakes, ale, peace, etc. forever.
Friday, June 22, 2007
di Suvero
In San Francisco there is also di Suvero.
This is not meant as a travel guide - I am just saying: In San Francisco there is also di Suvero. And like Richard Serra, his work is worth making pilgrimage to see. If not to big art, then to big trees. And mountains. For now I recommend making way to the waterfront and gazing upwards at the di Suvero planted there where he and his family first landed refugees from China. The wrapped ship shape wobbles slightly as if on unseen waves, and above a compass-like turns round the anchoring four legs extending down to the earth - or conversly lifting the rotating complex high.
Like Serra, di Suvero grew up around the shipyards and got the notion that men could make big things. Di Suvero's story is amazing. For though he made big things - out of huge planks of wood initially - he was crushed in an elevator accident and thereafter made huge things from a wheelchair, single-handedly, from a wheelchair. Leverage, he says, is what it takes. It is something else besides.
The piece on the Embarcadero is somewhat pressed by the stadium and street nearby. But in Venice (CA) the di Suvero on the beach has the air and space to breathe and soar. It is a delicious angular construction of enormous i-beams that lifts you up and out of the small human busyness of the boardwalk. I love it, pointedly above the small knolls of lawn, the palms, the sand and sea beyond. It is grand to stand in and under and near, and on this stretch of public space you can get space and get close.
This last, the just-so image for the Solstice. Amen.
This is not meant as a travel guide - I am just saying: In San Francisco there is also di Suvero. And like Richard Serra, his work is worth making pilgrimage to see. If not to big art, then to big trees. And mountains. For now I recommend making way to the waterfront and gazing upwards at the di Suvero planted there where he and his family first landed refugees from China. The wrapped ship shape wobbles slightly as if on unseen waves, and above a compass-like turns round the anchoring four legs extending down to the earth - or conversly lifting the rotating complex high.
Like Serra, di Suvero grew up around the shipyards and got the notion that men could make big things. Di Suvero's story is amazing. For though he made big things - out of huge planks of wood initially - he was crushed in an elevator accident and thereafter made huge things from a wheelchair, single-handedly, from a wheelchair. Leverage, he says, is what it takes. It is something else besides.
The piece on the Embarcadero is somewhat pressed by the stadium and street nearby. But in Venice (CA) the di Suvero on the beach has the air and space to breathe and soar. It is a delicious angular construction of enormous i-beams that lifts you up and out of the small human busyness of the boardwalk. I love it, pointedly above the small knolls of lawn, the palms, the sand and sea beyond. It is grand to stand in and under and near, and on this stretch of public space you can get space and get close.
This last, the just-so image for the Solstice. Amen.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Go See Serra Pt 2: Serratopia
The Richard Serra retrospective in NYC. John Perreault went to see it. The next best thing to being there.
Who is John Perreault? Art critic, curator, artist, poet, collector of books and ... dishware. On the scene since the mid-60s, writing erudite, clear-headed essays and reviews. He provides consistently intelligent insight into the various strands that make up the arts, exemplary of why arts critique is valuable, necessary. I am a fan. For freedom's sake he writes an art blog, Artopia, where he writes what he wants to write. This entry is about Richard Serra - the massive materiality of his works filling the new MoMA.Artopia
Who is John Perreault? Art critic, curator, artist, poet, collector of books and ... dishware. On the scene since the mid-60s, writing erudite, clear-headed essays and reviews. He provides consistently intelligent insight into the various strands that make up the arts, exemplary of why arts critique is valuable, necessary. I am a fan. For freedom's sake he writes an art blog, Artopia, where he writes what he wants to write. This entry is about Richard Serra - the massive materiality of his works filling the new MoMA.Artopia
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