The Best Art I Saw This Week Was a GIF

It has been a hard week for my heart, not the medical one, the other one. I will leave it at that. A GIF is most effective when sent quickly as a reply, as if it were a card already in your hand, ready to throw down. I Googled “faceplant GIF” or “face-down GIF” on my phone, on my lunch break, to express to a friend in one little moving image how I was feeling, or more likely to avoid expressing seriously how I was feeling.

I found this stunning GIF of Superman. He is lying facedown by a pastoral wall, his body motionless, a detail emphasized by his cape blowing in the wind. I admit I was feeling raw anyway but when I saw it my heart (maybe the medical one) contracted. And it issued an electric impulse to my brain that became this thought: our love relationships serve the purpose of keeping our heart aware of itself.

Our other profound relationships, our friends, family, mentors, these relationships usually do not force us to feel the (not medical) heart in the same way our love relationships do, like a sickness even. In love, in the beginning or end or in times our love relationships struggle, the heart makes us aware of itself, a raw and frantic muscle. Falling in love, our heart feels lung-sized, swollen, electrified, pumped with endorphins and speed. In times of hurt, it feels like it took a major league pitch, stunning and bruising, concussing it. When it refuses to feel, it feels calcified, a small, cold stone. This GIF pressed on the bruised, fist-sized (not medical) muscle of my own heart saying “yes, it hurts right here.” I looked at the GIF all day.

The background in the GIF, which I assume was taken from an older–maybe water colored episode of Superman?–shows detail and distance. Beyond the dirt road, the wall, the row of trees, a ploughed field, there is a tree line. This is our world. I do not think of Superman cartoons as having particularly developed backgrounds, but the trees are so verdant and there is real air and atmosphere. I am drawn into that distance but here is Superman in his distinctive, primary colored costume, his muscles super-developed, and he has been knocked down. It could have been Kryptonite but it could have been something else, something more human. Anyway, he is hurt. Superman is hurt. 

If art is a designation, not market-made or requiring a special stamp, but determined by the way something lands in one's sensibility, this is the best art I have seen this week or month or maybe ever. I can’t stop looking at it even though it hurts.

About Whitespace

Sunday morning I had the feeling that everything was crushed up against something else. When I texted a friend asking if he had read some book, he replied that he was salivating at the idea of silence in the house where he could read for an hour not having had that in a “long long long time.” I responded that I was fantasizing about whitespace. I wanted to wrap myself in whitespace. I wanted to install whitespace around each thought, action, and obligation. The whitespace would be made of physical space, silence, and time. I drew a bullet point in the middle of a big, blank text message. He asked me to explain. 

Student Work

White space in art is also called "negative space." When I was teaching foundational drawing to first-year college students, I used chairs to demonstrate negative space. Students would draw, in charcoal pencil, the contour not of the chairs but the space surrounding the chairs. The students would then fill in the shapes made by outlining the background, in other words the negative space. The shape of chairs would emerge. 

These days, it’s as if nothing has negative space around it. One thing (one responsibility, email to answer, thing to order) overlaps another. Therefore, it is hard to see the shape of things.

I like reading books with lots of whitespace.

The White Cube is a term describing a certain art gallery aesthetic. The white cube is whitespace in cubic feet. I like the white cube. I like the controlled context, the minimizing of distractions, and the implied assertion that what you see in here attempts to address the notion that things have meaning.

I would like to put everything in my life in its own white cube, not only the painting I am working on, but the Entergy bill, my broken car window, my son’s socks on the floor. Then maybe I could see what they all mean.

And people, everyone to whom I owe a phone call or an hour, I’d like to put them in—or more politely, invite them to—a white cube gallery. I could go and see them in the near-void. Maybe it would be like Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present  without all of those museum-goers watching. (Meet me at the white cube at 4 o’clock. I will see you—like really see you—there.) 

All day Monday I thought about whitespace. 

I turned off NPR to try to hear the whitespace. 

I imagined my sons surrounded by it as they walked into school. 

I took a photo of my yard and whitewashed everything but the ladder to the shed roof (roofs are great for finding whitespace) and the palm trees. 

And last night I looked in my art books for whitespace (Toba Khedoori, Rachel Whiteread, Michael Landy...).

My Books

This morning, it occurred to me that whole breath thing with yoga might be about creating internal whitespace.

l(a by e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings knew a thing or two about whitespace.

I guess this is not new to me. As I was writing I remembered a painting I made in grad school that was about ten feet wide and four feet tall. It was all white except for on one side a silhouette of a man and on the other a silhouette of a dog. I found other images of old work that also prove this is not the first time I have thought about or engaged in whitewashing, if that is what it is.

Untitled, In-Progress Grad School Painting

Untitled, Grad School Painting (detail)

If I could have a superpower right now, this would be it: 

to make space where there isn’t enough space, 

quiet where there isn’t enough quiet, 

and time with nothing in it where there is no time with nothing in it.

I am more human than super. And like almost everyone I know, I am overwhelmed. 

But after thinking about whitespace I am committed to try to find more whitespace, 

to profit from nothingness, 

and maybe where I can't find space, time, or silence, try to create it.

Yard With Whitespace

Untitled (People on a Beach in California) Acetone Print With Graphite and Colored Pencil

Three Paintings by Patch Somerville at The Front

AROUND 100 WORDS

(Above, Below Left, Below Right) Patch Somerville at the Front

The two larger, more figurative, more advantageously placed paintings broke the spell of the three smaller, more interesting ones. Of the small paintings, one suggested landscape, one still life, one, portraiture. They formed a trio about genre, subverting genre expectations at the same time. Nothing novel, but the voice was distinct and believable. These paintings were also about paint and painting as most good paintings are, to the faithful, anyway. There was no list of works, and the gallery attendant could not tell me if the paintings were titled or not. Bummer.

 

Art Books

AROUND 100 WORDS

Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting

I stopped buying art books when I moved to New Orleans. Our apartment didn’t have central air. Mold and probably insects were consuming my collection. We, a family of three then four, didn’t have the resources to sustain this habit nor was I in the same mind-set. As a grad student or a young(ish) painter living in New York, I had been addicted to Phidon art book porn, the glossy, sexy, presentations that one could heavy-breathe over in some craigslist dump. They took these big messy things—paintings—and made them intimate, private, your connection to them felt real. You too would be a star.

Village Disco, Displacement, and David Bordett at the Front

David Bordett, The Patient Gothic Chisel, The Front

I was at Holly’s drinking an Aperol spritzer. Tom, who is a writer, was sitting across from me. I don’t know Tom well but I see him from time to time at the grocery store, at literary or art events and we have some friends in common including Holly. Tom asked me why I had stopped writing my blog, which I kept for two years and stopped writing in 2016. He turned to his wife and said, "She was writing a blog about displacement. It was called…” and he looked at me. "Village Disco,” I said.

That was more than a month ago and I am still thinking about what Tom said: A blog about displacement. I had believed I was writing a blog about art. 

“The election.” I said, answering Tom’s question about why I had stopped writing my blog in 2016. Everyone nodded slowly as if saying, well, of course. But it wasn’t quite true that I stopped writing about art because of the election; it definitely wasn’t the whole truth. The last post I wrote was a response to the election, and after the election I did feel a version of what the late night comedians would say in those days “…because nothing matters anymore.” In fact, it was not that art mattered less to me at that time, but that it mattered more. I wanted to be in the quiet of the studio painting more than I wanted to be looking at and writing about art exhibitions. At the time I was painting landscapes from photographs I had taken of the Luxembourg gardens and Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris. I was also painting a pine tree that had been in the yard of the house where I lived near Marseille in 2004.

Five out of six of us around the table at Holly’s had moved to New Orleans from New York about a decade ago and within months of each other. The conversation had moved to New York and what living back there, now, would be like: the cramped living spaces, the pleasure of reading on the subway, and that here we have our own yards for our children to play in. 

A blog about displacement.

Had this been a blog about displacement? I went back and had a look at my blog entries, keeping an eye out for clues. I found that I often asserted my expectations of a gallery, complaining when work was hung too high or too cramped, but couldn’t those expectations have formed anywhere including New Orleans? Maybe not. I wrote a whole piece about the weird habit many New Orleans galleries had of playing background music as if a gallery were a furniture store. In that post I do not reference other places but I think the way I refer to New Orleans is accented, obviously not native. A glaring “I’m not from here” post was my reaction to the Katrina reflection show titled Ten Years Gone at NOMA and my irritation at a reviewer who seemed miffed that not all of the work or artists screamed NOLA! at the viewer. I mention in various posts and in various ways that my expectations were formed elsewhere, my New York perspective transported in my carpetbag. Like this, in the second post on the blog I wrote:

The expectations I arrived with were formed in New York and New York is easy to feel homesick for even if it is not your place of birth, even if you (sometimes) remember well all its frustrations on many fronts including art. The thing about making and looking at art in New York is that is so, serious. Also, it feels part of something global. When I moved here I couldn't even get a handle on the local use of the vocabulary I thought was universal in contemporary art.

I end the post with a nostalgic Google Street View grab of West 19^th Street and wrote as if trying to convince myself, “I live here now, in New Orleans; David Zwirner does not. I’m okay with that. Mostly.”

Displacement. Displacement. I repeated the word until I almost lost its meaning. And what does this have to do with art?

I told Holly and Tom and the others that last summer I stayed alone in my brother’s Bronx apartment when he was out of town. One night I had the windows open. I stood by the open window and I thought, funny, it’s quieter here than in my house in New Orleans and the air smells better. I thought vaguely of the word, belonging. The next day I went to the Met and looked at French paintings of gardens and parks.

***

Lately, I have been considering writing about art again. Tom's comment about displacement kept mixing with that consideration and so I went to see what was on view at The Front.

In the second gallery there was a show of works by David Bordett titled The Patient Gothic Chisel. There were three sculptural works and one photograph on view.

The wall labels for sculptural works were detailed and abundant lists of materials. When an artist does this, the materials can take on a kind of poetic weight. Included in the list of media on the wall label next to Reliquary was “Christian Louboutin red flocking” and “stalactites recovered from the exterior of the cloisters.” I asked the artist (who was gallery-sitting that day) to clarify a couple things. “What is Christian Louboutin flocking?” I asked (outing myself as more of sneaker and boot type) and by “the cloisters” did he mean “The Cloisters?” as in the New York museum. Once I had that information (Louboutin, the fashion designer of the red-bottomed stilettos, and yes, The Cloisters) I went back and looked at the piece for a long time. It was hard not to enjoy the light-absorbent red fabric, the meticulous (Gothic?) details including the lancet window cubby that held the relic, the so-labeled stalactite from the outside of the cloisters.

I remembered the first time I visited The Cloisters on an afternoon many years ago. It was spring, and I had taken the subway north to Washington Heights, to a part of the city that was new to me. And I remember daffodils and the view of the Hudson River looking almost like a painting from another another era. The air was new and clean-smelling. I was with my sister and it is one of my fondest memories of being with her, though the memory is thin in story and detail. My memory merged with the “relic” in the gallery and I thought, memory itself is a relic that cannot be encased.

Next to Reliquary was a photograph. It pictured the base of a stone wall, part of a recessed column, and an outlet with an iPhone charger and phone plugged into it. Last summer when I was at the Met with a dying phone battery. I stopped near a little display of books and things to buy, not near any artworks, and I plugged in my phone. A minute or two later I was politely told by a passing guard that I could not plug in my phone there. Looking at the photograph I let out a little, spontaneous laugh. This photograph was one of those artworks that was completed not on the wall but in my mind as the viewer. The particular sum of my traveled path—the cloisters all those years ago, my attachment to old European stone, my experience last summer at the Met, and my vague and persistent longing that envelopes art, Europe, and New York—made this work speak to me. It was not a blockbuster work of art but it moved me.

The title of the photograph was The Patient Gothic Chisel. The photograph’s title made a funny little comparison between the sturdy tool that had presumably shaped the stones pictured and the fragile and antsy little iPhone sucking up electricity, loaded with concerns about being liked.

My experience of the remaining two pieces in the show paled in comparison, though, as I have admitted, this comparison is based largely on subjective and nostalgia-tinged experience. The two remaining works stirred no memory, and so for me operated as a bit of pleasing eye candy. The unicorn (titled Superleggera) was easy to like though I thought the painted unicorn and color on the base were redundant and unnecessarily distracting. The piece titled Many Paths seemed both democratic and slightly cynical, saying something between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and “Whatever.”

Before I left I talked for a while with the artist. He said he used to live in New Orleans, comes back frequently, but now lives in New York. I did not know the neighborhood he named when I asked where in the city he lives. This happens more and more. I asked about Greenpoint like it was an old friend. I have not been back to Greenpoint for a few years now, maybe avoiding it when I return to New York because everyone I knew there is gone, and on the streets one hears more English than Polish which makes me uncomfortably wistful. Two women visiting the gallery overheard us talking and said they were from New York, neighborhood: Williamsburg. We all talked for a while about neighborhoods here and there, rent prices here and there, and art here and there.

Before I left I told David Burdett that I have a friend, Holly, who used to work at the Cloisters. But she lives here now. I’d like for her to see your show.

David Bordett,  Reliquery, The Front

                 

David Bordett,  Superleggera, The Front

David Bordett, Many Paths, The Front

May I Recommend....Art

Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks From The Paul G. Allen Family Collection, NOMA

And the Collection at the New Orleans Museum of Art

Count me among the heartsick. On Tuesday, a week after election day, thinking it was Wednesday, which is to say the free day at NOMA, I went to see the exhibition Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks From The Paul G. Allen Family Collection. When I handed over my Louisiana ID, the admissions lady told me "That's tomorrow. but for what it's worth, tomorrow will be crowded; today you'll almost have the galleries to yourself." Sold. As it turned out the quiet of near-empty galleries alone was worth the price of admission. But there was something else–

I went directly to the landscape exhibit*. On my right was a large painting by April Gornik flanked by two Richters. Gornik's paintings have always annoyed me. While something about her work resonates, maybe subject or scale, I find her palette and surface lack insight. Her paintings often remind me of one of those school folders from the 1980s or a poster in a college dorm room. But seeing her painting in this show was like seeing a high school acquaintance in an unexpected place, grievances all but forgotten with the simple pleasure of familiarity. At NOMA, in the middle of a national/personal crisis, I found myself surrounded by old friends. 

I am a painter and these are my people. I have known all of these painters for much of my life. Some I loved in my youth. There was Maxfield Parish, painter of my preteen romantic self. David Hockney reminds me of the college days with the club kids and ravers; the acid palette in his painting of the Grand Canyon brought this back. I liked Hopper when I was young...Hopper the  draftsman, the poet, not really a painter's painter...still, it was still so good to see him there. Avery, Monet. It was like meeting old friends at a disaster relief shelter where philosophical or stylistic differences suddenly seem inconsequential. I am not a fan of the Surrealists but I was so happy to see Max Ernst, that weirdo. Gerhard Richter! Many years ago I had an impossible crush on Richter's work, big, handsome, a bit aloof, paintings I could never really get to know beyond formalities. Cezanne's Mont Sainte Victoire painting brought on a spell of homesickness –I once lived near Saint Victoire–the dual recognition of brushstroke and place.  And Klimt, whose landscapes feel like nostalgia for places never been but have always longed to see. And Caneletto. Caneletto, always so buttoned up and void of humidity. And Turner, Oh, Turner...where would I be without you? This show filled me with, oddly, affection and such gratitude as if they had all come here for me.

On a less personal note, the show is full of B sides of  A-listers, which was part of the value of the show. It felt both fresh and familiar.

I left the landscape show and went up to the third floor. There, in the quiet galleries full of old things, the faces of thousands of years looked back at me. We have been here a long, long time, they said. If walking among the paintings downstairs was like being among old friends, this was like standing among the Ancestors, the ghosts of civilization. 

Faces and also objects, the evidence that we have lived, that we were here. Objects I have seen dozens of times before on previous visits came into focus. And words: a Japanese poem about a plum. Maybe it was that all that silence that stood in contrast to the past week, but I felt like I could breathe again. The air in a museum is unique.

On the second floor--I was heading for the exit--I just sort of drifted through the European paintings: a garden in Paris, a woman with sad eyes, winter at Giverny, a small plate of peaches. 

I thought of a poem I have memorized in English and Polish. I may have mentioned it before because it enters my thoughts frequently. It is by Wisława Szymborska and is called, in English, Notes on a Himalayan Expedition Not Made.** In the poem the speaker is calling out to Yeti, listing the redeemable qualities of humanity: 

Yeti, we have Shakespeare.

Yeti, we play the violin.

Yeti, at dusk

we turn on the light.

All week I had consumed an excess of news, wine, and leftover Halloween candy, tonics and exacerbators to my nerves. Seven days after election day I still felt not only bruised, but doubled over and unable to catch my breath, each news cycle like more blows. I caught my breath at the museum. This visit to NOMA did not erase the reality beyond its cloister, but it did feel something like a disaster shelter of the spirit. We have Shakespeare. We play the violin. 

* Here is a link to many of the paintings in Seeing Nature. No photos allowed but I didn't have a camera anyway. 

**Translation by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Close Encounter

Local Honey, Still from I'll Be Your Mirror             

Local Honey
I'll Be Your Mirror

Good Children, New Orleans

After a two-month hiatus I was back out looking at art, the day after the Saint Claude openings. I would have liked if this outing were like a tall, cold drink of water after a long walk in the heat but it was more like the first morning run after two months of being a couch potato. I kept catching my face in a kind of pained and skeptical squint. I kept catching my thoughts drifting into the weeds: wait, what am I even doing here? In short, I was hardly an easy audience that day.

I hit the back room of Good Children, more inclined to ricochet back to the exit than stay to watch an almost eight minute video but I was drawn in by the only piece in the room, a dual-channel video screened modestly-sized and high on the wall. The left frame showed a bright window from a dark interior and the right a silo against a blue sky, the view angling up to match my own raised gaze. I am a sucker for an un-peopled view. The next minute both frames were peopled, a single figure in each frame. On the right a figure climbed into a rubber raft floating on a pond or lake, on the left a figure stood in front of a microphone inside the silo. Both figures were strange in appearance

These individuals (as well as the succession of solitary figures that in appeared throughout the duration of the video) seemed to be different versions of a single character. This was my impression in spite of dramatic costume, wig, and make-up changes. All incarnations of the character appeared to be a man in drag, making no effort to hide chest hair and other tells. The make-up was more Ziggy Stardust than Iggy Azalia, more alien-like than lady-like, though admittedly I know little of drag conventions. Actually, my own unfamiliarity with traditions of drag made me feel excluded at first, sort of targeted by this character whose gestures feel at times both taunting and solicitous. Is this exaggerated stripper dance sincere? funny? Who is the audience? I felt a little self-conscious about feeling self-conscious. I felt, in a word, alienated.

But the camera work, sound, editing, was so appealing I remained the captive audience. Gradually, partly through my familiarity with and appreciation of the natural settings, it seemed that the strange character was the ET here, not me. This person didn't seem to belong in these day-lit natural settings: by a river, lake, in a meadow or in the woods. This character seemed better suited to a dimly lit stage in a club or on an urban street. There were indoor scenes but they were constructed with props and acted almost more like metaphors than places. There was a sort of playpen made out of box fans over which a wig moved ghost-like. Throughout the video the natural world and the synthetic world come in contact but don't quite enmesh. The sound of birds chirping is replaced by an electrified voice, in a Radioheadesque not-quite singing. A disco ball reflects synthetic light in some shots and a magic-hour sunset in the most arresting sequence in the video. 

This sequence begins with the camera approaching a figure, twirling before a sunset (left channel) and (right channel) a single distant light, mirroring the placement of the sun. In a moment both channels show the twirling figure we now see is the same character, dressed this time in cowboy (or cowgirl) wear: a cow patterned cowboy hat, a sequined and fringed cape and matching skirt, a cowboy shirt with silver cuffs, and cowboy boots. The face is made up with silver or white black-framed lips and two braids frame the face. A disco ball lays nearby in one scene, in the other the figure holds it above. The body of water in the background, wide and slow, might be the Mississippi River. This is an American vision, it occurs to me. Cowboy, disco, the troubled river. Oh and this sequence began with a sound like Jimi Hendrix's electric guitar rendition of The National Anthem. Not that all this Americanness meant anything in particular but it hit a particular chord of restlessness, innovation, and done-up alienation. In the course of this sequence though the character becomes less solicitous, less concerned with the audience. The twirling becomes almost childlike in its lack of sexuality and precision.

Watching I’ll Be Your Mirror it suddenly occurred to me that my initial feeling of alienation was reflected on the character or vise versa. The character was alienated. The character was trying, setting after setting, costume after costume, to express something, to achieve something, to be a part of something, to connect with me, the viewer. While the character persisted in isolation, the video absolutely made contact.  

Local Honey                               Still from  I'll Be Your Mirror, Courtesy of the Artist                                     Good Children, New Orleans

Going Outside

Unfiltered Visions, 20th Century Self-Taught American Art
NOMA, New Orleans

Henry Darger       (detail) Hurry It'll Explode Any Minute Now

I have walked through many museum exhibitions of so-called outsider art without stopping. My resistance is usually visual: quilts, raw wood sculpture, and whirligigs, I just don't see much that draws me over. My response to art usually begins with physical attraction followed by a more intellectual engagement with a work's conceptual aspects. I rarely experience instant chemistry. in exhibitions of self-taught art. Without getting too far into into the problematic

Ike Morgan  Portrait of George Washington  (Sorry about the reflection!)

labels–outsider, self-taught, and folk art–the set up is that one is not expected to consider the work of self-taught artists within the canon of Western Art History or within the context of contemporary art.

Considering my tastes and habits, when I looked in on Unfiltered Visions I didn't expect I'd stay as long as I did. I hadn't known Henry Darger was there and his work is always worth seeing. Hurry It'll Explode Any Minute Now...is no exception and is the show's obvious superstar. But there was also this fantastic ink and pastel Portrait of George Washington by Ike Morgan. This drawing was a stunning mix of familiar and strange. The subject is of course irresistibly loaded. 

Holland Cotter once wrote, "...the question remains of where, in the concept of outsider art, the stress should fall: on outsider or on art?" Both artists have biographies that situate them outside of the art world and are stories worth looking into. But for me the work itself more than holds its own in any room. 

Face Values, Last Call!

Cristina Molina Ice of the World, The Front

Erica Lambertson Pancake Face, Good Children

Latoya M. Hobbs Angelica, Staple Goods

This is the last weekend to see the shows on and off Saint Claude. 

Christina Molina's Ice of the World, a roughly four minute video, is alone worth going out for. It is the heart of her show titled The Matriarchs at The Front and informs the portrait and still life photographs that make up the rest of the show. I went home and saw the video again on the artist's Vimeo page; I liked it that much.

If you go to The Front, you should cross the street and see Erica Lambertson's funny little little oil on panel painting titled Pancake Face in a fundraiser/group show at Good Children. 

I plan to stop into Staple Goods to see the work of Latoya M. Hobbs for the first time. I saw these prints on the Staple Goods website just now. This will be one of those I've-only-seen-you-online encounters and I am hoping the work and I hit it off in person.

These shows will close Sunday, June 5. 

Cristina Molina      Ice of the World, Installation View The Matriarchs      The Front

Erica Lambertson     Pancake Face       Good Children

LaToya M. Hobbs      Angelica       Staple Goods