Solo, So Very Fine

I ducked in out of the rain and into the Jonathan Solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery, SF.

Like walking into a white cloud, not exactly diversity-heaven, but diversity dream, an alternate dream world where anything is possible.



I say white cloud because these precious, precise, hand-drawn images are placed in vast vacant spaces of cream paper—a lot of light and space around these extraordinary drawings, even more so hanging in this white and bright gallery space. With the background context blanked out, there's nothing to do but contemplate the particulars carried on the face, on the body of the subject. A picture says a thousand words goes the adage. This is just how it feels when you are a man in a dress. "All anybody notices is my nails," says my tranny friend.



I say extraordinary drawings because Solo's subjects are more-than-ordinary, meaning not-commonplace as well as extra special. That they are sometimes (always?) composite portraits first composed of diverse elements on the computer before rendered in fine-line pencil is just part of the story. The other part is the singular, unconventional, gender-variant embodiment and presentation that certain individuals carry—sometimes secretly, sometimes out loud.

Solo's portraits point to the tension inherent in being out of the ordinary. This is What's Your Secret?, 2008, graphite & cut paper. Perhaps if you look closely you'll see the string which ties these genitals to the ring.



And then, like this, he points, reflexively, to the mixed reception cross or mixed gender presentation can get. This is stoggaF, 2008, graphite & cut paper.



Like the title of the boy-in-dress drawing above, I Keep Trying, Solo keeps trying to put the pieces together, like a puzzle, working out the equation to explain himself/herself/the self that is sometimes disjointed by one person's definition, but is always unique and deserving of a place in the universe.

In the alternate reality of his universe, there's a lot of mixing and matching, but unlike your usual cut and paste collage, in these drawings, it is hard to determine where one thing begins and another leaves off. The result, though, is quietly disarming. The subjects, composite or not, are exposed in an intimacy so rarely seen—and as you take in these signifiers of precarious difference, you notice, they stare, blankly, back at you. What are you going to make of it? Very powerful, very fine work.

Under the Milky Way

I've been thinking about this show I saw at Queen's Nails, every time I hear some song from the 80s... Thinking about what it means to feel sentimental about a song, about sentiment in music, about conditioning experience.

As part of the extended reach of the 2008 California Biennial, Queen's Nails Projects hosted D'nell Larson an LA based artist who works with video, performance, installation. There was a performance for this show, Under the Milky Way, which I did not see, but the video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me, I suspect represents the experience of being there.

Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty
Sound of their breath fades with the light
I think about the loveless fascination
Under the Milky Way tonight

In this show, Larson is concerned with differentiating her identity from the milieu of her upbringing—the parental and collective culture—specifically in regards to music and musical memories. She wonders "what is inherent in one's own emotional response separate from the rest of the world?" The rest of the world, in her case, includes parents who are wedding singers. Not everyone is rooted in such an atmosphere of popular romanticism. Wedding singers, like lounge acts, sing to set a sentimental mood, to elicit a certain saccharine response that befits an occasion of romance. Well-known, popular songs are stripped of their defining characteristics and synthesized into a cliché of the original. What is retained is the core melody and the lyrics. Ah, the lyrics. The lyrics which are often banal, usually maudlin, certainly evocative. Everyone can sing along, for the performance triggers the memory of the band, the era, the album, the track, and all the associated memories of time and place.

So what did Larson do? She filmed, simply and without embellishment, her parents, Dennis and Arlene Larson, singing a selection of personally meaningful songs, in their studio. They are dressed casually; the camera is set for a middle distance shot. They sing versions of songs by The Cure, Nirvana, Interpol, to drum machine, synthesizer & tambourine. The video lasts 17 minutes and then it loops again.

Love, love will tear us apart again...

When I was there, I watched the screen for a bit, then turned and watched the street through the window, cars and buses passing, people strolling by, with Joy Division the audio track for the scene. Will I associate that stretch of Mission Street with that plaintive harmony from now on? For sure it is now wedded to the memories of driving to the album in Southern California, memories embedded in the emotional-response-portion of my mind.

But even more interesting to me is the way that these songs can reach in and elicit such feelings of longing, tenderness, dismay. The heart seems particularly susceptible to this kind of sentiment, across these musical lines, despite how they are delivered. After I adjusted to what I was seeing and hearing, especially after I looked away from the screen, I was reconnected to the original songs and their emotive effect. Powerful stuff.



In a second untitled video, Larson created a a moving image from hundreds of still shots of birds flying over water. While mesmerized by the halting image which wavers and repeats, and somehow curiously replicates looking overboard at undulating water—meanwhile, through earphones came the sound of Larson singing The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Fate
Up against your will
Through the thick and thin
He will wait until
You give yourself to him

The film is a reconstructed memory, with feeling tone and meaning supplied, I suppose, by the song—which is sung à la familia. It is a beautiful piece in itself, but it also serves as a self-portrait. Here she works with the parental vocation, reconditioning songs, recreating associations, at the same time as reconstructing/constructing something of her own experience.

Wish I knew what you are looking for
Might have known what you would find
Under the Milky Way tonight

Larson, searching for her own singularity, found it interwoven, indistinguishably, with her world, culture, era, upbringing. Even memory of a particular moment carries all these associations. But the truth is, there is no I there in identity—or better said, I, as I experience I, is an amalgam of all that I am, I being a composite figure.

And all this because of a song.
What was it Walt Whitman said?

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
—Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself

Insects and Artists

Sometimes I wonder about the timing of things. Insects for instance. Butterflies here, crickets there. Not exactly the same, and to a different purpose. But still.

What I am on about is two very different shows that connected yet bounced off each other in a very... unsatisfying way.

The Haines Gallery, SF, is showing new work by Binh Danh including three of his signature leaf-portraits and a series of daguerreotypes. The series is called In the Eclipse of Angkor: Tuol Sleng, Choeung Ek, and Khmer Temples. There are photos of temple ruins, of young monks, of the museum displays in the killing grounds of the Khmer Rouge. These works reflect Danh's ongoing exploration into a period of time when a shadow passed over a culture. His work is an unearthing in a way, bringing to light a dark period, but in a delicate soft light as befits a memorial gesture.

In Cambodia, in the 70s, the Khmer Rouge regime killed some two million people in the span of a few years. Tuol Sleng prison and the area of mass graves in Choeung Ek are now memorial sites Danh visited and photographed. He makes a leap into the deep past by also photographing Angkor Wat, a huge, ancient temple site situated in the same region the Khmer Rouge originated. In Angkor, carvings depict Rahu, the dragon snake who periodically attempts to eat the sun and moon throwing the earth into a dangerous period of darkness.

Eclipse is just the right word for these works: in the daguerreotype the image is only seen when one passes before it. You see the ghost image in the shadow of your own reflection. These pics below do not do the objects justice, for until you stand in front of them, they appear as pearl-like, moon-like mirrors.


This is Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1, 2008.


This the Killing tree against which executioners beat children, 2008.

The daguerreotype itself, as a medium, serves perfectly—as vague as memories, unclear, wavering in the changing reflection of the viewer's breathing. I found the experience of standing in front of them profoundly moving—the image of the dead, or the torture site, clarifying only against my own living body.

And then I turned and caught sight of the butterflies. In three frames, each with a leaf-portrait—faces are brought forward out of the shadows of anonymous history and printed on fallen leaves—and a butterfly, a sacrifice to the dead.


Iridescence of life #6, 2008, chlorophyll print, butterfly specimen & resin.

Walking, reflecting on the weighty experience of Binh Danh's transformative work, I go a few doors down the street and check in at the Marx & Zavattero Gallery. Boy howdy, an insect of another color. Just goes to show you it takes all kinds.

Paul Paiement paints insect-gadget hybrids with scientific precision in watercolor and egg tempera. Paiement is a popular-with-the-press painter, but not one to get on the band wagon, I gotta say I found a serious lack of oxygen in the room like when you fly too high. Pop! oh shucks, the balloon burst and here I am on the ground again.
Paiement is interested in imaging life forms in context of the technological which is to say he is interested in cyborgs, the fusion of the organic and inorganic. The Marx & Zavattero press release says these paintings provide optical amusement as well. Hmm. About as much amusement as synthetic sugar. Far too laboratorial for me.


This is Hybrids H - Hyalophora Xboxcontrolerae watercolor on paper, with attached bits ( “Ben Day dot/half tone patterns”), approximately 20 inches all around.

More Than Just Coping

The sage returns to the original: a block of wood. A block of wood can be made into tools, but tools cannot be made into a block of wood.—Mencius

Before a block of wood is split, it can take any shape. Once it is split, it cannot be round if it is square. It cannot be straight if it is curved. Lao-Tzu tells us to avoid being split. Once we are split, we can never return to our original state.—Sung Ch'ang-Hsing

Of course, it is an artist's (read: human) natural inclination to make things—to split wood, nail it, build it.

It's a complicated business determining What's natural? When is it nature and when is it human? But certainly the split is felt and it is uncomfortable.

In Journey to the Lower World, Marcus Coates takes a shamanic journey on behalf of residents soon to be displaced from their high-rise apartment building. He doesn't find them a protector as hoped, but receives a healing image: a bird extends its wing to show its feathers are separate, not joined together. They are split, not whole. Coates suggests the residents need to band together. I'd suggest they return to their original state.

This unadorned video is part of the fantastic, complex group show at David Cunningham Projects, SF, Trying to Cope with Things that Aren't Human (Part One). Ian Brown out of England (and a member of the juxtapositioning Common Culture) guest curates the show and edits the accompanying book of (mostly) text-works. Journey is the lynchpin of the show and it's philosophical intent. Nothing better conveys the range of emotions caused by the split than the handful of residents trying to cope with the extraordinary manifestation of the non-human right there in in front of them in the innocuous person of Marcus Coates. (Albeit Marcus Coates dressed in full stag skin, complete with rack of horns.) The witnesses to the ritual are at turns nervous, giggling, astonished, serious, and seemingly embarrassed for the hooting and squawking man twirling in their living room.


British NeoHooDoo.

It seems to me we are in general confused by our relation to the "natural" world as much as we are embarrassed by our animality. And then there are those of us feeling alternately guilty or hostile for our collective creations, especially the technological kind. Thus the split and the effort to cope.

One response to guilt and uncomfortableness is to retreat to the meditation mat to redress our imbalance and return to our original nature (as prescribed by Lao Tzu and countless Zen teachers). On the other hand... Another option: get cynical, sarcastic—something smarty-pants humans do when confronted by the nervous-making. The international artists in this group show, happily—oh what a relief—grapple gently with the non-human and mostly make light—with a bit of irony and whimsy. Ian Brown's VW Golf, for instance, parked out front and labeled eventually I will rust and die/ before I go I will take some of you with me. Or is that not irony? Perhaps just too true.

Certainly the works in the show made me happy. The aged parents' deadpan response to living with a new technology in Annika Ström's video Min Mobil/My Mobile made me laugh. Disarming interviews uncovering cell-phone habits (under the pillow, in the closet) spliced with mobile-moments—daily disruptions to animal-like face-to-face, body-to-body contact—showed just how pressed we are, to the wall, by our own invention. Her text-painting Please remove me from your mailing list speaks to the same point.

And then there's Alex Pearl who creates his own cast of characters and plays (while holed up in a hotel room or gallery space). To play is not to complain; is in fact a psychologically healthy response to stress, or at least that's how Jung explained his periodic retreats to play with pebbles on the sea shore.




Pearl makes fuzzy little films of his curious robots: bowls of ping pong balls inching across the room on stilt-like legs, duct-taped square guy clamoring on a pillow, beetle-bug like things scuttling into each other and across the floor. These films are a glimpse into a surreal happenstance world and are completely engaging.



This is Study for Earthwalker (Caribou) one of three Lambda prints on display by Heather and Ivan Morison. They are part of a larger project that, as I understand it, looks at our study of natural history (these caribou are stuffed and on display at the American Natural History Museum) though the lens of a (fictional) alien culture. That's otherness twice removed.

And then, last week, the card, one of a thousand, arrived from England. The Morisons have been sending out bulk mailings of cards since 2001. They're always the same, plain white square cards, 135mm x 135mm, with text printed on one side, sent anonymously to a personal or gallery list. The card reads:

I used to love her, but look what she's done.
I hate her. I hate her.

[in fine print]
Tasmania

The cards used to relay something discovered in their garden project. Something like:

Today Ivan Morison planted six hundred and sixty four bulbs in his garden

And then as things evolved, the cards would report something altogether different:

Chinese citizen Zhou Peikun and his wife have been breeding pigs for many years. Tonight he will stab her twice, attend to the swine and then strangle himself with a silk thread. The couple had no other occupation.
Songinskhairkhan district, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia

I must say, even though that was a clearly distressing story, I felt just as jarred as I read the painful relational turn printed on the card I received. A couple of very effective lines.

In relation to the show, they make me think of two things. First, these lines remind me of Richard T Walker's incredible dialogues which run on just this kind of love/hate hinge. For this show he also produced a letter to be read accompanied by a soaring instrumental soundtrack. His locution is more long-winded than two lines, but I'll share this: The letter ends, "But I also feel that it is my duty to inform you of what could have been." What might have been is always such heady stuff.

The Book

The other thing the Morisons' text reminds me is to say something about the book produced in conjunction with the show. The artists I've mentioned ('cept Coates) each have texts in the publication, and these also happened to be the pieces that resonated with me the most.

Annika Ström's usual statement paintings are here extended entries in block print. They are personal poignant struggles in the busyness of the every-day.

In his introduction, (which is a surprisingly comprehensive inditement of the uncertain position we find ourselves, betwixt and between nature and the human-made), Ian Brown makes the point that "we often hear ourselves 'escaping to' or find ourselves in nature 'getting away from it all'." Get away or get it together. This is one of Stöm's texts:

A long walk. A long rapid
walk. A rapid walk
collecting my thoughts.
Get my thoughts together.
My head together. A long
rapid walk to clear my
head and get my thoughts
together. A long rapid
walk to get my head
together and get all in
place. A long fresh
uplifting walk to get my
thoughts together and get
me focused. A long walk
to get myself together
and get my thoughts
together. A long walk

A series of diary entries by Alex Pearl called Trains excerpts from Alex Pearl is not in Antarctic (which is funny in itself) concludes,

On my way home a woman sitting opposite me was trying to learn Hebrew and reading Psalms. One line read: 'My zeal wears me out.'

That just about sums up the dilemma of making an effort on behalf of art and relationship—or sex at any rate.

There are two first-person entries by the Morisons, one about a tree being felled, and the other about running away and the tension-filled encounters on the way away. Like Pearl, the writer is sensitive to the ugly little hotel, on edge with strangers, and then there's the anxiety of going home, or not. The piece ends with a disturbing near mishap on an escalator, the moving staircase that never stops. There's a sense of anxious fragility these pieces all share.

Richard T Walker is, on the other hand, standing still in his printed piece. Standing still, caught in the moment of holding on (and what that signifies about attachment and togetherness) at the same time as needing to let go. That this precarious moment, with all his signature multifarious particular dialog about it, concerns, in fact, the point in time when he is impelled to let go a leaf (as in the appendage of a plant) in order to scratch an itch is, well, just perfectly, neurotically, wonderful. His discrimination of the layers in the immediate present reveals relational communication between himself and his body, his skin and hands, his hands and the other, the other and the morning, the morning and curtains, etc., etc,. "Although talkative, the itch didn't have a lot to say." And yet, and yet...

I am not sure if an accidental scratch arrived before the itch, and the itch had then taken advantage of the situation, or whether the itch had instigated the whole event merely to distract you and I from whatever might have been.

Walker isn't going to let us get off thinking that there is a split between Things and Humans, let alone anything else. The world is alive and conspires to engage (or disengage) us at every turn. We just need to pay attention!

I loved this show (can you tell?)! There was so much interesting thoughtfulness packed into this—and I haven't even mentioned Mariele Neudecker's resin mountains in water tanks...



This is Heaven, the Sky (as installed in the Singapore Biennale). "Heaven; the sky" is a secondary definition of the noun cope. A perfect metaphor for the show, these humans contending with the issue. Just so, weightiness, under the surface, and the surfaces, water and glass, reflecting, refracting, setting up new images, and meanwhile the water changing, clouding—a whole new world. A really fine show: three cheers! Drinks all around!


Taoist commentary, trans. Red Pine (Bill Porter), 1996.
Coates pic courtesy Facebook.
Morison pic courtesy of Danielle Arnaud Gallery.
Neudecker pic from ArtNet.
The book (recommended) is available via the David Cunningham Projects gallery.

Year in Video

The sun is setting on the last day of this difficult calendar year. For days I have been trying to wrap my head around the year's art events, searching out some way of framing what I saw and what I liked. What I really feel is relief it is over.

But in sifting memories, notes, postcards and brochures, something emerged. This was a good year for video. (and film. Video and film. I lump it all together: art video, super-8, 16mm, the big screen, the tiny screen—moving picture art.)

In the Spring SFMOMA put on In Collaboration: Early Works from the Media Arts Collection. SFMOMA can pride itself as a leading institution in regards to video and its new curator of Media Arts, Rudolf Frieling, trotted out 30-year-old gems from the collection including my personal favorite, Transformer by Katharina Sieverding which is actually a multiple slide projection, but hey, the image appears to move. (I wrote about my love of her work here, so I won't go on about it but it was the highlight.) Also on view was a work by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, a walk in the park as it were, which I liked, and a Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, among other things. It was altogether a good show.

As part of the exhibition, Frieling did a screening of funny/not so funny 70s art films (read this), things rarely seen.



John Baldessari, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, 1972, 18 min (which can seem forever when teaching a plant).

Meanwhile, across the bay, a recent work by Joan Jonas was at the Berkeley Art Museum. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-05) is a multimedia installation which incorporates footage of a live performance which itself includes actors, objects, music, multiple video and audio layers. It is at once rough and clumsy, and poetic, lyrical, beautiful. This was by far one of the most resonant works—resonant in a dream-like way—that I saw all year.


Coyote watching the unfolding drama. Coyote "floating' through the landscape.

Also in the Spring there was California Video at the Getty. It was an overload—an incredible array of video art. From the early days: Bruce Nauman!—Target Video Punk Performances—Alan Ackroff, Cornceptual Art (Art all the time when you have a conceptual mind)—Paul McCarthy, Stomach of the Squirrel, to recent big complex works: Jim Campbell, Home Movies—Bill Viola—Lynn Marie Kirby—Diana Thater, to name a few—what I mean by overload.

The great Bill Viola who is clearly at the head of his class was represented by two older works in the show and another, Emergence, in another part of the museum. This stunning slow motion, undulating, unfolding, timeless scene plays out the rebirth of a man from a (watery) grave mid-wived by two women at first sorrowful, then astonished. Besides the christian-Renaissance inflected content, this piece demonstrates exactly how far video art has come.



Video art is a challenge to present especially when there is more than one piece. At the Getty it was dark rooms filled with buzzing screens. The first hall had station after station of monitors (or vintage TVs) with earphones and little benches. The second space held larger works in small rooms, or simultaneously projected upon adjacent walls. The best though, was in between: the video study room lined with benches and touch computer screens showing the entire assortment of works. 62 pieces were included in the show plus extras shown in screenings inside and out in the garden. All too good, but too far away to see it all.

The Puppet Show at the Santa Monica Museum (which I wrote about here) included some great video art in it's survey of art-puppets and puppet-art. The clever curators there built video booths out of plywood. This worked nicely, little video stations.

Later in the Spring, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts hosted the wonderful set-piece 8 by Ulla von Brandenberg as part of their series Passengers.



The eighth show of the series, 8 is 16-mm film, black and white, and silent, that runs for 9 minutes during which time the camera roves in a single tracking shot through rooms of a 17th century castle. Each room is a dreamlike tableaux of contemporary person(s), furniture, and objects, posed and static. Riveting and beautiful, the film, beginning where it ends, traverses the rooms and encounters a woman looking out a window, a sleeping man, a dead man and mourners, a cane leaning on a wall. Von Brandenberg is working here with theatrical tension, creating an emotional vocabulary which plays, scene by scene, over and over again.

[Reader, please note how often I've used the word Spring. This all happened in the Spring like someone said Video is the new Spring fashion.]

Altogether now, In the Spring...
In February, Pacific Film Archive screened James Bennings' silent 16 mm film casting a glance.



Over the course of 80 minutes and broken into 16 parts, like chapters, this landscape film, moving/barely moving, tracks Robert Smithson's earth work Spiral Jetty through seasons and years of change. It is not so much a glance as a visitation, certainly an homage, almost like being there.

Summer & Fall



A video of a different color (pink), Soft Sculpture Sunset, by Takehito Koganezawa both mesmerized and irritated me. It stands as a highlight of the year, seeing as how I can still bring it to mind, the two pair of hands, pink, yellow, white latex clad, squeezing and molding clay while a curtain waves and waggles in the breeze... well you gotta see it. Which you can here on the Christopher Grimes Gallery website. It is 5 minutes long and silent.

Astral Fields/Antepartum the video installation of face-to-face videos by mother and son Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie shown as part of the CA Biennial at Queen's Nails Projects is a project that bridges many things, early art film and digital video being the most mundane connection. I enthused about it here.

The video art that wins my 2008 cakewalk is (drum roll) the set of videos by Richard T. Walker shown this Fall at that consistently interesting gallery, David Cunningham Projects, SF. I've tried to come to terms with—find the right words for—these works which traverse a literary territory so out of the ordinary, certainly out of the American contemporary, that I'm not sure I can do it now, even after discussing the very thing with Walker himself. Perhaps I could just be plainspoken. Or perhaps I can let someone else speak.
Here. Read this by Tom Keogh:

He combines a Woody Allenesque obsession regarding the complex language of relational psychology with images of breathtakingly beautiful landscapes and buccolic scenes. Art, personal relations as we try to understand them, and complex (often kitsch) notions of beauty and the sublime merge seamlessly in his work to create thoughtful and affecting ruminations on the fickle nature of the human emotional and cognitive processes. The direct, seemingly naive, gaze and the presence of the artist himself in many of the pieces allows the viewer a direct connection with these concerns as we stare out into the void, not of sublime transcendence, but of the failed connections and broken promises of a world created to help us rediscover our happiness.

I couldn't have said it better myself.
Well, alright, I wouldn't have put in the last bit—I'm not sure if the world was created to help us rediscover our happiness, whatever that means, but for sure happiness and the longing for it through relationship is one of the matters on which Walker ruminates.


tamed through the sculpture of past experience: letters from a valley to a mountain and from a mountain to a valley. 2008, digital video, 9 min 26 sec.

Dialog, at turns witty, but always going a narrow path between ironic (which would be insincere) and sentimental (which would be something other than sincere as well), is the vehicle here that makes these works un-American, and I say this fondly. Walker's ear for inner dialog, for the twists and turns of relational exchange, for the subtleties of literary and social conventions is so sharp that it is natural. (But far too literate and philosophical to be American.) That the words are spoken, as it were, by a valley to mountain, or about the feelings a tree might have about, say, a taller tree, well, that takes us into other territory altogether. (Yes, a pun.) The territory of which I speak is the land, or rightly written the Land. Land and the relationship to Land (the concept) and land (the place) is a central theme. All these notions lie in the background, behind our eyes, as we gaze out on the view. Land, landscape, nature, the ground of being and the idea of Natural, Eden, Paradise Lost (perhaps that is the created world Keogh refers to, the created map of Paradise for which there is no ground.) There's such a complex web of associations and inferences, projection and anthropomorphizing, through which we hope to have an experience of—for lack of better word—nature. And with a song or simple gesture—a wave—Walker cuts right through to the heart of the matter.


A favorite moment: applauding the landscape in outside the democracy of circumstance, 2008, digital video, 6 min 44 sec.

There is much more to be said, much more to be learned from these slight yet penetrating works. Like slim volumes on a shelf, I want to go back, again and again, to dip into and delight in the words and the grand view.

So Richard T. Walker takes the cake.

It was after all a good year. I saw video (which I love) like I haven't seen video before (lots) but I have to confess my one miss was somehow entirely missing out on seeing the West Coast Premiere of The Rape of the Sabine Women, the video musical by Eve Sussman that I anticipated with, well, not bated breath perhaps, but interest and excitement. But it was here, in San Francisco, and I could have seen it, so I add it to round out the list.

Well. That's that.
Happy New Year. May it be bright.

Kline Pages

I can't tell you, I was so excited to read in the SF Bay Guardian that the Paul Thiebaud Gallery was showing a set of paint sketches by Franz Kline. Oh my.

By far my favorite painter of the American mid-century scene, I am always happy to see his work, but here an opportunity to see something personal as well. Sketches are like that, personal, because they are the precursor to finished work, done behind closed doors in the intimate incubation of maybe.

The story is that Kline was stuck, trying to find the way to produce what he had in mind, sketching about. De Kooning said, Try this: take your sketches, project them on a wall, blow them up, see what that looks like. What they looked like was big and powerful; the lines had depth and impact; the brush strokes stood on their own as entities in themselves.

Entities in themselves.




The other story is that Wayne Thiebaud was visiting Kline in his studio. The studio floor was littered with pages out of the telephone book. Each page had a painted sketch. Kline said each was a study in preparation for a painting. Every painting was worked out before hand on these throw-away pages. Thiebaud asked if he could take some to show his students. Even though Kline thought it was wrong to teach art, he said, sure, only don't sell them.




This was instantly my favorite.

I know the phone book paper was cheap and handy, but it has an archival quality and invokes the combine/collage of the era. Nonetheless, the images pop right out of the print, they're such strong statements. Entities.

Seeing his sketches adds a completely new dimension to his paintings which are revealed to be built upon these fleeting expressions of momentary awareness. The paintings are not so much in the moment as built upon—like painting after a snapshot. The remarkable thing is that the paintings retain the expressive energy of the initial gesture, if not more so. When enlarged, the expression is distilled, refined, more powerful even. Like a full sentence. Or an edifice constructed from a few brief lines.


Kline in his 14th Street studio, 1961, by Fred McDarrah.

Further elucidation.

When I look out the window—I've always lived in the city—I don't see trees in bloom or mountain laurel. What I do see—or rather, not what I see but the feelings aroused in me by that looking—is what I paint.

Using expressive gestures, he paints feelings experienced while looking—or remembering, like this one called, Chief, the name of a locomotive remembered from his youth, which doesn't so much look like the thing, but the way it feels. This is really a high level of discrimination—of experience and expression.

I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.

This seems very important to get. The white is as important as the black and is painted on too, not an absence of color.



And just because I can, let me add these two paintings. The first, Zinc Door, shows the beginnings of color. I like it, the force of the two squares and the blush of color above.



And this, a gouache and pastel sketch on paper, fantastic for it's messy urgency like writing something furiously in the night so as not to forget. These sketchy moments—capturing something elusive, a thought, a feeling—oh yes, don't forget—said in paint. Love it.




Photos courtesy of
City Review,
MOMA,
Stephen Foster Fine Arts,
Walker Art Center.
Thank you Johnny Ray Huston for the alert.

Time Based Homage

24 Hour Clock
Nam June Paik

120 seconds for 24 pictures. Playing with time, shuffling along.

—at the de Young Museum, SF.