Say Yes!

Oh I missed the show! I wish I could have been there—Susan O'Malley at Ping Pong Gallery, SF. But such is life. And, evidently, not being there was just where I needed to be.



Being here now, I can tell you it made me happy (Be Happy Now) to discover someone else out there thinks these pithy, optimistic statements are worthy of re-casting as Art On The Walls. I would have loved to have been there feeling the vibe, like euphoria, bouncing off the walls and across the room, but online is the Next Best Thing!



An artist out of San Jose, Susan O'Malley's work is whimsical and wry, a bit like Miranda July who she's worked with, so the connection is deeper than name-dropping. She likes these inspirational statements for the effectiveness of their direct command and how succinctly they boost the spirits. These slogans are the avant guard of a positivist, aggressively optimistic can-do attitude that is distinctly American. Have A Nice Day and that's an order.
Don't get me wrong, the work is completely sincere as is, most likely, the wish behind every off-hand, Take Care!



O'Malley's posters are a direct descendant of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's peace works. Social engagement through art. Lifting our sights to a higher order. Anything is possible with the right attitude. I believe it. I know it. Art Saves.



These affirmations recall Barbara Kruger's work, but they come with less bite. It may be a generational thing. This is the Obama era after all.



There's something absolutely reassuring to be held by the authority of conviction that stands behind these words. Don't worry. We're All In This Together.

Togetherness is a running theme in her work—literally, running around her neighborhood, and also engaging with her audience, or extending an art-hand to the community. O'Malley takes a gentle, fanciful approach to social engagement. In conjunction with these limited edition inspirational posters, she's got buttons for sale or barter. You can wear your art/slogan on your lapel—right next to your Imagine peace button.



Yes, yes we can.

Also on her website, I highly recommend seeing her interact with her neighborhood in this low-key video, A few yards in San Jose. With simple gestures she makes the mundane a lot more interesting. For further inspiration and instruction there's also her how-to video, Ways to be an artist in residence. Believe me—It Will Be More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine.

Kruger image courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery.

Sound and Furry

I was so looking forward to this show. Nick Cave' Sound Suits at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. When I saw press photos of his sparkling beaded costumes I thought, The Fishgod has returned!



This dancing man knows fabric, texture and design, costume and theatricality—and he has a penchant for amassing, archiving, and recreating the sequined detritus of last year's party and your great grandma's china closet.



The list of the materials used in his constructions speaks to the fantastic tactile details of his work: beads, buttons, baubles, sequins, bottle caps, yarn, wire, raffia, rusted iron, sticks, twigs, leaves and hair. Fake fur, crocheted doillies, knitted hats, bird figurines, plastic bags, tin tops. When worn, the suits go shhhhh, shhhhh, clatter clatter, swish, whusssh, crick crick crick, click, shhhhusssh. This is the ordinary stuff of life re-animated, brought mythically alive.



America needs this. Rio may not. Nor Chiapas or Sri Lanka. But America, corporatized, Ford-driving, Calvin Klien wearing, Calvinist America needs this. And that may be the reason YBCA had the largest crowd ever to welcome this infusion of color, movement and swishy sound. And I am fully aware of what that phrase implies: somnambulate white America does need injections of gay culture of color. It needs it, it craves it.

Our society is nearly devoid of this kind of masquerade, but the tradition Cave taps is ancient, deep and long. The show is called Meet Me in the Center of the Earth—that's where Enki, god of the deep dwells, Enki of the fish head attended by Sumerians in swishing layered reed gowns. Cave works out of the dream-realm, the deep undersea cavern of creative memory. He is shining shimmering Phanes at once lion, snake, and fish. Then he's in procession wearing a Yoruba beaded crown. Dagon was a Phoenician fish-god and the Dogon of Mali wear incredibly tall masks and fringy skirts. It all fits together. So too, his dreams turn to the attic where bird cages and nostalgia rest. It's all knitted together... somehow.



In his on-stage interview, Cave said he'd found his raison d'être. He was going to start bringing color and movement to the masses. He wants to be in residence in various cities. He has a mission. You know, sound-suit healing. Now that's American. Because, you know, America is always on about functionality, purposefulness, improvement. We've got to make a program out of everything. For the betterment of society. Building community. Gag. I know it is the easiest way to get funding, but oh, don't go that route. It waters down the mystical factor, that mysterious power inherent in art to effect without being didactic, programatic, or therapeutic. Art will cure your ills, but it isn't a medicine that you can bottle.

This is a white dream: to capitalize on the next new thing. Beware of One-Size-Fits-All. Art Saves, but it isn't an off-the-rack fashion statement.

These suits are wonderful as is. Extensions of Nick Cave's personal embodiment. They are wonder-full. Magical. Impressive and transporting. They need no other reason for being except that they are extraordinary. Other-worldly. They take you there. Nick Cave takes the cake.


Images courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.

The Lotus Series: The Final Series

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun. —Robert Rauschenberg

Less than two months before he died, Robert Rauschenberg's last series of prints were completed. They are the Lotus Series, a remembrance of and response to China, on view this summer at Greenfield Sacks Gallery, Santa Monica.

These very beautiful, light and bright prints are composed of photos Rauschenberg took on two extended stays in China in the 80s, first when he worked in the ancient Xuan Paper Mill, then later when he returned to Beijing to mount a ROCI exhibition.

ROCI is the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, a worldwide project Rauschenberg launched in 1984 in an effort to promote global peace and harmony. He believed that art can circumvent disparate political differences and function as a conduit of cultural understanding, nation to nation, artist to artist, person to person. Over the course of six years, ROCI mounted exhibitions of his and others' works, some of them collaborations, in eleven countries (many with political agendas at odds with those of the US) including Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Japan, Cuba, the former USSR, former East Germany, Malaysia. During these continuing evolving exhibitions, Rauschenberg would submerge himself in the host country's culture.



Twenty years later, ill and nearing the end of his life, Rauschenberg reworked his photos of China into 12 inkjet photogravure prints. They are spare, simple affairs, mostly just four images juxtaposed with a recurring imprinted lotus blossom. In his usual work, his combines and prints, there is lots of overlapping simultaneous imagery—here there is less and white space—also the floating lotus. Hovering over and under images of street life: doors, billboards, banners, and bicycles; and cultural artifacts of another time: sculptures, the zodiac, temple tops—hovering around the 10,000 things of ordinary and perpetual life, is the lotus, throne of the Buddha, pure mind, bodhi.



It seems significant to me that in his last days, taking stock of a host of images of a country he was getting to know, looking over sights and signifiers of culture, of life, he'd work up this conversation between teeming activity and philosophical contemplation. At last it comes down to this: there is life, and out of life grows understanding; without life, no enlightenment. These are sweet and wise works of an extraordinary and generous man who loved life and was friendly to all its forms. Om Mani Padme Hum, a prayer for Robert Rauschenberg, RIP.



***
In a related way, I was reading an interview with Ai WeiWei in this month's Art in America in which he describes the underground nature of contemporary art in China in the 80s and 90s. China was only then being introduced, in a controlled way, to Western ideas, philosophies, and artistic concepts. This was the time when Rauschenberg held the ROCI exhibition in Beijing, 1985. What was inspired and exchanged in 85 was swiftly suppressed in 1989—the year the exhibit, China/Avant-Garde, in the National Gallery was shut down and when students were crushed in Tiananmen Square. It is easy to forget, at a distance, just what conditions were (and are currently) like under Communist control. It is difficult to comprehend the deep societal and cultural attenuation that results after an sustained era of oppression. Change, WeiWei says, comes slowly.

It's a very complicated issue because China is a nation that needs change. The change is inevitable, given that the old part is really rotten and cannot meet contemporary standards of usage or practice. The question is how to change things and to what degree and, after the change, who reaps the benefits? What is going to be damaged in the process?

This from the artist who drops a Han Dynasty vase. He knows something about holding on and letting go relics.



Like Rauschenberg, WeiWei believes in first-hand contact and exchange. As his contribution to Documenta 2007, he brought 1,001 Chinese people to the exhibition in Kassel.

My intention was to use art to directly affect people and groups who are not generally associated with art. I'm fascinated with individual consciousness, awareness, a new sense among the participants that possibilities exist in the spaces between different cultures. We essentially created a big space of freedom there. The work itself had no other formal determinants or goals. The whole purpose was to encourage people to use their imagination to act on their own. The "visitors" ranged in age from 2 and a half to 70 years old. Many of these people would never ordinarily have a chance to go outside China or even leave their province. There were many farmers, people from almost every profession, and from 20 or more different provinces. Their experience of Kassel and of this contemporary art event affected their lives deeply. They often write to me saying it has marked their whole life. Now they will look at the world and understand the world very differently; the visit continues to shape them.

So there you have it: Overseas Cultural Interchange = Art Saves. It's true.

A nicely informative page about Ai WeiWei can be found at Artsy.

Pic of Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn courtesy of Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

I Heart Koons

I confess. I dismissed the whimsical work of Jeff Koons.
It was, in fact, only last year that I began to pay attention to what he has been doing all these years. Paying attention is getting to know is becoming familiar is one of the deepests acts of love.
I let Jeff Koons into my heart.
If I sound a bit evangelical it is to the point: Art Saves and Koons' art saved me—as was his intention all along.

I grew to appreciate him last year through a profile by Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker. Tompkins reports that Koons speaks ingenuously about the spiritual intentions of his work, which of course is suprising given he (re)creates playthings. Koons said to Tompkins, "I wanted the piece to deal with the human condition, and this condition in relation to God. I wanted it to be a contemporary Sacred Heart of Jesus."

He was talking about Puppy though of course his Hanging Heart could easily fit that bill.

Puppy is a 40 foot tall wire-frame terrier filled with soil and blooming plants. It is a form upon which life blossoms so of course it is a sacred heart, eternal spring.

Puppy renders all who see it equal. —Jerry Saltz

Puppy or Balloon Dog (Blue) or red for that matter—Koons' sculptures are accessible and that isn't a bad thing.
I'm just as elitist as the next art-snob, and take my art seriously, and this is probably just the thing that has kept me from enjoying Koons' work. The loss has been mine.

Tompkins explained that Koons early on "recognized and embraced his own ignorance of art history." "I realized you don't have to know anything, Koons said, and I think my work always lets the viewer know that. I just try to do good work that makes people feel good about themselves, their history, and their potential."

You don't have to know anything—or—you don't have to know everything. Something Marie Louise von Franz said comes to mind: "I hope that we may get to the point where consciousness can function without the pretension of knowing everything and of having said the last word." This idea that one can have awareness—consciousness—without having it all figured out, without having the last word as though in an argument with the world, this has been very important to me. Feeling that I have to know everything before I can respond to things is self-limiting, but is also encouraged by others. Certainly the art world has this tendency to elitism, making art appreciation the special domain of those in-the-know. Von Franz added, "Knowledge is one of the greatest means of asserting power."

Koons addresses this by making his work approachable—thus the subject matter, the familiar and friendly, serves as affable welcome. With the same democratic, sociable attitude one appraises a flower, a sunset, a small dog, one—anyone— can then take in the work in its particular display. Koons' work breaks down my assumptions of what is appropriate or weighty. This is the elitist stuff I bring to the work. When I let this down—or when a different viewer drops his feeling of being intimidated by art—the work at hand can speak.

What speaks then is not mere whimsy, nor merely ironic inflation of mass-produced artifacts of popular, mass culture (read low-brow). Not merely. It is all that and an affectionate embrace of all that we collectively are—and all our inflatables: balloons, boats, basketballs, et cetera. The man knows a lot, of course.



"I just try to do good work that makes people feel good about themselves, their history, and their potential," he said. Feel good about the pop star who is a pop star because the masses (and masses everywhere) felt so good about him. Set him on a pedestal and consider that, that he is on a pedestal, pet chimpanze and all. St John the Baptist an icon as well, with baby pig. Same same. This is our history, and our potential—both to be the pop star and to be aware of how that works, how that comes about—the collective makes the individual a collective idol, or commodity—that too.

Hanging Heart, at the top of the post, was purchased last year at the highest price paid for a work of art by a living artist: $23.6 million. There isn't anything more idealized and desired in our culture than romantic love. The longing for it drives so much commerce—and I don't mean just on Valentine's Day, but every day in all ways from selling toiletries to the commerce of therapy for the lovelorn. How appropriate then that this token, not the sacred heart, but the ornamental heart, reach the pinacle of price.



Louis XIV is one of my favorite of Koons' sculptures and I saw it in LA at BCAM which shows a really fine selection of his work, probably the highlights of the Broad inaugural exhibition. This bust of the Sun King is made of stainless steel. (The man knows a thing or two about manufacturing too.) The 17th century world revolved around the Sun King, hence his title; Louis' world was gold—our stainless steel world is likewise not truly tarnishless, but classist, racist, sexist, divisive. Zhan Wang coats scholar rocks—objects of aesthetic, ascetic contemplation and emblems of Chinese traditional spirituality—with stainless steel, China's major commodity. He's on the same track as Koons was in 1986. Just how self-reflective can we be about this material? It is pervasive, the metal of the people, born of the industrial age. The factory, a collective mass enterprise, rolls out the metal of perfection: non-corrosive, stainless, shiny and strong, to be used in countless applications. Symbol of an age and the conundrum of an age. When steel is king and everyone has a stainless pot to piss in, what is the spiritual goal? Where is the alchemical gold?



My Koonsian answer would be the gold, the ultimate prize, is found in self-reflection. Witness his picture-perfect paintings of his own shiny, polished, reflective works set against shiny, reflective, refractive background. Are his works, these sculptures made of "high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating" about "just the surface" of things, or is the virtue of a thing, anything, in its reflective surface? This is a self-reflecting universe after all. Here, on the transparent surface, we touch the depth and weight of his work. These painting are in a series called Celebration. Party hats, balloons, ribbons and bows, toys—celebration, yes that and a celebration of the world, an endlessly repeating, unfolding gift.



There's so much more to learn and love about this man's work. I haven't mentioned his mirrors, the collage-like paintings, Hulk Elvis and Monkey Train, or his embrace of sexuality, Made in Heaven. I'm so happy to have come out from under my rock and found him. I delight in his world. He's made it new, eternally new, like a new model vacuum cleaner, the New Deluxe Convertible perhaps! The piece pictured above is The New Hoover Celebrity III's, 2 vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas, flourescent lights from 1980. This from a series called The New, consumer items reborn each year encased in electrofied reliquaries. How we bow to the New—of course, it is in our very earthly nature (Spring), our emotional propensity (Hope), our religious heritage (Easter), our cultural tendency (Cutting Edge), why not in our consumption: Bigger! Better! Brand New!
Well, he's my New Favorite. Jeff Koons Takes the Cake!

Jeff Koons' website is the place to see more works online. In person, go to BCAM.

Double Take

After seeing the kaleidoscopic yet enigmatic works of Gilbert & George at the de Young Museum, SF, I read some texts about them online. Despite their stated desire to make accessible art, ("'We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood.") I needed some guidance to get into their personal language. So I looked 'em up on Wikipedia.

The work is stunning—light & bright—and huge (though somehow cramped in the de Young's halls), and amazing in both repetition and subject matter. Their slogan, Art for all, is sort of reversable: all is art, and this too holds true for them. Everything: themselves, their clothes, their neighbors, their shit and piss and plants and body parts—it's all worthy, all worthy subject matter. It's all up there framed within the stained-glass-window hallowed presentation which says, It's all good.

Of course, I can get behind this, for my slogan is Art Saves.

It does.

A cross of feces, a cross of wood. Same same.



I just wanted some more familiarity with them. Their lives laid bare, as it were, on the museum walls, wasn't enough. I wanted to know if "ginko" is British lingo like "pansy" is here. So I read around.

I learned that they are incredibly productive, have the most powerful graphics workstation computers in the UK; are very regular in their habits, eating in the same restaurants each day; are always seen together and always in form, in art. They are fixtures in their neighborhood, rarely travel, see movies or go to galleries. They tell the story how once on a visit to the coutryside, they came upon a young couple with a pram outside a lovely church. "Good morning!" they said to the couple. "Fuck off you weird looking prats!" came the reply.



They appear conservative, excentrically so, but are also always working that strange place in between irony and innocence, between what's genuine and contrived. Their personal and professional world turns things upside down and inside out. Obsessively so. That is their genius. They have entered the subjective universe that is of their own making and it is gloriously brilliant, self-reflecting, life affirming.

I never found out about the ginkos, but I did learn that their embrace of themselves, everyday, all the time, as living sculpture, was not inspired by Joseph Beuys, but by a visit to the Knock Shrine, County Mayo, Ireland where, in 1879 a number of people beheld an apparition of the Virgin Mary and Saints Joseph and John the Baptist. Jesus appeared to them as a little lamb standing on an altar. Gilbert & George have since been commissioned to produce a work of art for the site.



Shake your head and blink. What is and isn't real? What is and isn't art? What is and isn't worthy? A manifold mystery. Puts you on a wonder.

*pic of G&G strolling courtesy of Norf London Urbscape.

Art Insurance

Art is a Guaranty of Sanity, pencil inscription on pink paper by Louise Bourgeois. I received this in the form of a card for the holidays. Lifted my spirits, it did. Coming as it did at the dark time of the year, dark and cold. The sentiment an echo of my own year-end greeting years back when things felt particularily bleak. Two things you can count on: The Sun Rises. Art Saves.

In a few days, Grande Dame Louise Bourgeois, born December 25, 1911, will turn 96. Happy Birthday Madame, may you live long (you have) and prosper (yes, that too). I expect the reason she has fared so well is because of art. "Art is just one way of reaching an equilibrium—of becoming a sociable person," she said in explanation of this inscription. (ArtForum, Summer 1993)

"If the artist cannot deal with everyday reality, the artist will retreat into his or her unconscious and feel at ease there, limited as it is—and frightening sometimes. But since love excludes fear—suddenly if you are in love, you are not afraid anymore. This is amazing, but it is true."

So art is a refuge. She was speaking of a specific sculpture in this article, Precious Liquids. In this piece there is a coat (the unconscious she refers to above). Inside the coat there is a little dress embroidered with "mercy merci." Art arise out of this ground—this dress inside the coat—mercy, thank you, the saving grace of art. It's what makes it possible to go on, to reenter the fearful social context. And then there is love.

Just the balm needed at this time of year. Art ensures we make it through the dark and troubling times. Keeps us sane. And then there is love.

May we each live well and prosper in the New Solar Year.

Toasts n Trust

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.

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.