POST #120: MAKING THE SCENE

"New York Rooftop Series" oil on canvas
48"x36"

A couple of Thursday nights ago, an artist friend and I decided to check out the Chelsea opening scene. Apparently Thursday night is a big draw and the streets were filled with packs (they travel in “packs”) of joyous thirty somethings, enticed no doubt by free wine and the opportunity to hone in on the latest wave in the art scene. Unfortunately, based on what we saw, there is no latest wave, only “same old – same old.” Of course, I hear that Chelsea is passe, as is the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, although no one seems to quite know where to find the latest “Happening” place. I hear Queens or the South Bronx, but by the time I find out, it will all be over.

"New York Rooftop Series" oil on canvas
72"x48"

Anyhow, I got talked into the trip because I was curious to see if my artwork had a place there. The gallery spaces are enormous and beautifully lit, but I cannot image my rag-tag “oeuvre” fitting in such a slick environment. What struck me most was that the artwork I saw all seemed to have been created for “the show.” There was no evidence of experimentation, growth; everything was tasteful, competent but without any challenges. Different color schemes perfect for the decorator to match with the drapes, but otherwise all the same sizes, same frames. I couldn’t imagine doing twenty or thirty versions of ANYTHING! I would go mad! It would feel like a JOB!

One of the problems I always have preparing for a one-person show is that my work evolves all the time, especially if I’m producing steadily, working every day. I have absolutely no capacity for repetition; in fact, if I even try to repeat myself because something works well, I find all the life is sucked out of it. Everything even looks like I was bored, like painting with numbers. I console myself that Picasso had the same problem. In fact, there are at least twenty different periods in Picasso’s artwork, ranging from Romantic Realism to Cubist experimentation to series of murderous –looking females with teeth bared (his version of vagina dentata), My late husband, noting my difficulty with repetition, used to mutter that he had no idea how he lasted so long with me. Of course, what he didn’t realize was that he too changed all the time, providing new “problems” for me to resolve.

"New York Rooftop Series" oil on canvas
72"x48" 

My companion informed me that a “gallerista” (those Size 4 clothes horses who sit at the desks in the galleries) told her that the gallery she worked for paid $30k a month for rent (not the highest amount by any means.) They are not in business to advance “art”; they need to make the monthly nut, and hopefully even, a profit. Unfortunately, I don’t see myself fitting in to their business model and I must say, given their lack of interest in my work, neither do they.

BTW, since it’s obvious that Chelsea is “dead,” does anyone know where to find the latest art scene?  It’s quite possible that art really is dead and this is not the time to be an artist anywhere. I just hope I live long enough for the next Renaissance to occur. Maybe if Donald Trump gets elected president (just kidding) although bad times often create the best art i.e. Weimar Germany.

POST #119: THE ART OF THE GIMMICK

Definition: gim-mick (noun).

A trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity,
or business.

Synonyms: contrivance, scheme, stratagem, ploy,
shtick (my favorite)

I’m on the e-mail list of a relatively new art center known as the Bronx Museum. It’s located on the Grand Concourse and 165^th St. and I have to confess, despite my interest in the borough, I’ve never been there. A press release arrived today announcing an upcoming “performance event” (their words, not mine) in which an artist (who shall remain nameless) will present an “interactive community based project” (again, their words, not mine) in which participants will share cups of brewed (donated) tea and make a room-sized quilt out of the tea stained paper filters. I let out a giant AAAARGH! when I saw this ….the triumph of the gimmick, I fired off an e-mail to the sender of the press release saying: “Re-purposed tea-stained paper filters woven into a quilt? Give me a break. This isn’t art, it’s a gimmick!” But why should I have been so surprised, most of today’s art is gimmickry masked as high-sounding “Conceptual Art.” I even believe that Gimmick I and Gimmick II are currently taught in all the major art schools in America. Everybody is searching for the cleverest gimmick, the one that will lift him or her above the rest. Tea-stained filter quilts? Not bad as gimmicks go, but not terribly original. A friend of mine did coffee-filter curtains a few years ago.

Anyhow, my e-mail to the Bronx Museum asked why contemporary art always needed a gimmick? Couldn’t it stand on its own? I’d be perfectly happy to see a lovely quilt made by an artist out of stained paper tea filters, but to make a media event out of it? To my surprise, a real person answered (chalk one up for the Bronx Museum), the Social Media Coordinator.) He actually wrote back asking what I meant, and, given an opening, I fired off a diatribe against this kind of busywork, a gimmick that to me was only one step away from a clever advertising campaign. Apparently, the Social Media Coordinator decided he had given me enough of his valuable time and did not respond. I’m sure he thought there was no point arguing with someone who didn’t understand “art.”

That leaves me with the point of my little tirade: so much fashionable art today isn’t art but an attempt to become successful through notoriety. Novelty sells, especially to art buyers that largely don’t know what they are buying. I appreciate and understand an artists desire to do something new and challenging, but that’s not as easy as it was a hundred years ago, in the days of the Dada  - true rebels and intellectuals who saw their unconventional art as a way of challenging a corrupt society. Today, it’s pretty hard to do something that hasn’t been done before - and who says novelty should be an artist’s goal?

But it’s an interesting issue and needs to be taken seriously. At what point does true creativity morph into gimmickry? I think the answer lies in the aesthetic value of what is being produced and the artist’s intention in producing the work. For example, Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade,” the urinal he entered into an art exhibit one hundred years ago, really is a work of art. Its harmonious curves make it a beautiful abstract sculpture in white porcelain. Plus, Duchamp was also saying that there could be aesthetic value in the mundane, the mass produced and the ordinary. But without beauty (debatable as it might be) as a goal, all you have left is a gimmick.

POST #118: THREE LOUISE’S: BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

This post is dedicated to the older woman artist, the one who keep plugging away without recognition, but with dedication and joy. It looks like we’re finally in fashion, although I had better work fast. Trends come and go with increasing rapidity in the art world. At one time, you could count on being hot for several years, now it seems like only months and you’re a ‘has-been.’ A few years ago, if you were Black (preferably with street creds) you had it made; next was transgender, (the more convoluted the better), and now it looks like older women are in…..finally! However, by the time fame and fortune gets to me, it will be too late. I’ll be doddering in a nursing home or dead.

What started me thinking about the subject was an article I read in the NYTimes a couple of months ago about the sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, She was one of the few role models I had in the art world: a woman who had a fairly conventional life style, like mine, with a house, a husband and children. Maybe it could be done. Most of the successful women artists I knew of only had non-traditional relationships with men (or women) who supported them financially or physically The article didn’t mention, however, that Bourgeois’ husband, was a prominent art historian and critic with a wide range of connections in the art world. In addition, she didn’t live in the suburbs (the kiss of death in the art world for a man or a woman) They owned a town house on West 20^th St. in NYC where they entertained frequently. After his death she acquired a huge loft space in a factory in Brooklyn along with an assistant! (what I would give for an assistant!), doing her best work and reaching her greatest prominence in later years when she was alone, - without having to make dinner for anyone. I “googled” a great quote from her: “I have been to hell and back and let me tell you, it was wonderful.” My kind of woman!

There’s another Louise whose work I admired: Louise Nevelson.  She died in 1988, almost 90 years old. She too didn’t become prominent until later in life, but led a completely different life than Bourgeois, much more bohemian, leaving behind any semblance of domesticity for an artist’s life. She notoriously left her husband and parked her child with her parents so as to be free to create. Like Bourgeois, she didn’t achieve her major success until later in life with her marvelous giant installations, assemblages of “found” wood painted black.

While I admired her work – and the way she put herself together with three pairs of false eyelashes and floor length sable coats – she wasn’t much of a role model. I never had the kind of ego – or self centeredness - that would permit me - no matter how much I wanted to have a career as an artist - to abandon my family.

And still another Louise showed up in today’s NYTimes, one I had never heard of before, an Abstract Expressionist painter, Louise Fishman. She’s having her first major museum show at age 77, a retrospective at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y. “I’m 77 and I’m at the height of my powers” Ms. Fishman was quoted as saying. “How did this happen? As my grandmother would say, “Who knew?” 

When my friend, the sculptor Reuben Nakian was asked how you become a famous artist, he replied, “You have to live long enough.” The question is “How long is long enough?”

POST #117: TAPPING THE INNER EYE

4'x3', charcoal on brown paper

In the 1920s, a new movement appeared on the art scene, Surrealism, literally, a form of Super Realism based on dreams and hallucinatory states. Unlike the cubists, the expressionists and the abstractionists of the previous decade, the Surrealists did not reorder reality, but created a world of their own. As is the case in all art movements, it coincided with what was going on in literature and science; psychoanalysis, with its examination of dreams, was particularly important. Manifestos, mostly unintelligible rants (at least in translation) came fast and furious as a bunch of ‘wildmen’ rallied to the surrealist banner. They wrote poetry, plays, fought with each other over philosophical fine points and were generally a disagreeable and unlikable lot. Too egocentric for politics, they reflected the cynicism of Post World War I Europe. With few exceptions, their paintings were technically adept, “hyper-realistic” images of a world that never existed except in their imagination. Dali, Magritte, Duchamp and de Chirico were among the more prominent names in the movement. I was brought up to dislike the Surrealists, considering them brilliant but morally empty. Who knew I would end up being one?

4'x3', charcoal on brown paper

If I had to pick one who influenced me most, I would have to say de Chirico, although I wasn’t aware of it when I started on my current series. The “rooftops” started as semi-realistic studies of city water towers and cornices. The more I worked on them, the more unreal they became. Pipes turned into menacing, robotic figures, arched window openings revealed nothing but sky and clouds behind them. Mysterious people stood alone on rooftops while menacing crows flew overhead. Blue skies appeared everywhere, even at street level or in reflecting puddles. Everything came from the subconscious; the creative FLOW process at work. Is it as easy as I make it sound? No; and there’s no way I could produce the work I am doing without decades of experience. My left hand is now so skillful it reads my mind. I feel blessed to have lived long enough to reach this level of accomplishment and when things are going well, I literally bounce around the room.

I know you are going to laugh at me, but I am convinced that one of the reasons artists don’t make any money is because they are having too much fun. No one wants to pay someone else to play.

P.S. I own a great book of surrealist games designed to be played at (preferably) drunken parties to unlock the imagination (the surrealists gave great parties, as you can imagine.) One of them is called The Exquisite Corpse; it has been around forever and most of you have played it without realizing its origin. You take a piece of paper, fold it horizontally into six parts and pass it around. The first person draws a head, the second a chest and so on. Since the paper is folded over, no one knows what the previous people have drawn. At the end, the paper is unfolded and a surrealist figure appears. Voila!

Happy dream states!

POST #116: KEEPING THE DOG ON THE PORCH or Sex in the Suburbs

There’s an old Southern expression that was used to describe Bill Clinton when he was Governor of Arkansas: “He’s a hard dog to keep on the porch” meaning of course his well-known tendency to philander. It’s a great way to describe a serial wanderer, but it doesn’t explain why the dog can’t stay “on the porch.” Is it constitutional, part of his genetic makeup? or is it that the porch is boring? Not enough going on to keep him there.

It got me thinking about all the couples I knew during my fifty years of marriage, some of whom wandered off the porch; most of who did not. The odd part was that it was usually the women who strayed. Most of my women friends were artists of one form or another, creative types, while their spouses were often engineers, accountants, doctors; steady and reliable, but boring as all hell. My sweet husband used to say (with a sad shake of his head), “No man is ever completely safe, but I’m about a close as they get.”  He was also quite large and unpredictable and no one ever dared come near me.  There was of course, one exception but I take no particular pride in that conquest because he tried to seduce all his wife’s friends. Since he was very attractive and macho, (a former Israeli commando), he had no difficulty enticing them until his wife (still my friend) decided she had enough and threw him out. The irony was, that since I never succumbed, he became a friend and treated me forever and ever with the utmost respect.

The women I knew, however, were an adventurous lot. Most were monogamous like their husbands, but there were several who loved to have scandalous affairs; in fact, the scandals were probably more interesting than the liasons themselves. Two close friends had well-publicized dalliances with prominent local officials. They made sure to tell everybody in town their “secret’; after all, what was the point of having an affair if the world didn’t know about it? (I’m surprised they didn’t take out ads in the Advocate). I never heard their husbands complain, so, for all I know, they were proud that their wives were so desirable - and that was what held their marriages together. It certainly gave all their friends lots to talk about. One of them had a lover who died (at home, with his wife, in his own bed) just hours after spending the afternoon with her. While she was wailing about her loss, I tried to explain how lucky she had been; if his heart had given out just a few hours earlier, we would have had our local version of the death of Nelson Rockefeller.

Although if took me years to catch on, my best friend, a glamorous European sculptress was always having love affairs. She never said a word about any of them and I only realized what was going on when I started to question all those phone calls she had to take “out of the room.” She was very wise about men, how to find them and keep them around. She gave me an insight I still find useful: “Women think men are after them for sex, but what they really want is a “warm bed.” She knew that what kept a man in your life was affection and caring: feeding (she was a great cook), loving and listening to him; what she wisely called ‘a ‘warm bed.’

…..And maybe that’s the way to keep the dog on the porch….although in Bill Clinton’s case, I don’t think anything would have worked.

POST #115: YALE & TOWNE REVISITED

Over a year ago, back in Post #31, I wrote about how I discovered the former Yale & Towne factory site in the South End of Stamford and how the loft colony there developed.  I recently “reconnected” with one of the artists, the photographer Bob Baldridge. He lived (illegally, of course) in a dream loft on the top floor of one of the buildings along Henry Street, next door to Jamie Burt, a potter/sculptor who occupied most of the 6^th floor. There were even more interesting, older structures along Pacific Street but they were uninhabitable and torn down in the 1980s soon after I arrived. The photos now being exhibited at Curley’s Diner on West Park Place date back to the late 1970s and show the way the site looked when the artists first moved in, before extensive demolition took place.

In those early days, only men lived in the complex; the neighborhood was just too dangerous for a woman and even the men kept their doors locked and rarely ventured out after dark. Drug dealing and robberies were not uncommon. The women who had studios there  were careful about coming and going, often keeping a dog for protection. I had an office for my preservation organization on the second floor, with huge, industrial-sized windows that looked out over a row of Victorian cottages on Henry Street. We even had room for a twelve-foot sideboard we had salvaged from a demolished house that once belonged to Lowell Weicker’s grandparents. One of the things I came up with while I was there was a yearly Open Studios weekend where literally thousands of people came to gape at SOHO in Stamford.

Between the ambiance, the light and the camaraderie, it was the closest thing to artist’s heaven I expect to achieve in my lifetime. It ended for me when the landlord, upon hearing that I wanted to have the complex listed on the National Register of Historic Places, refused to renew my lease. The irony was that the next owner was eager to have the complex listed so that he could use the Investment Tax Credits the government gave for rehabilitating historic buildings.

Baldridge and I were recently reminiscing about a party we gave at his loft. He had a girlfriend at the time who was considering becoming a chef and opening a restaurant. Bob offered her a chance to see what it was like to cook for a crowd and we arranged a spaghetti dinner to be held in his loft. He had a small, but functional kitchen and a couple of big pots. I drew up an invitation; we borrowed chairs and tables and Bob put out the word:  Loft Supper, $5.  - all the spaghetti you could eat and all the (cheap) wine you could drink. The party was a huge success; in fact, it was too huge a success. Close to seventy people showed up and we were overwhelmed. (We should have taken reservations!) They were lined up in the halls. The water for the spaghetti wouldn’t boil and dinner didn’t get served until well after midnight. However, with unlimited wine, everybody seemed happy to wait while Bob’s friend worked frantically in the kitchen. People still talk about it today, but it was not a success we wanted to repeat. 

POST #114: CONCRETISM AND OTHER BULL----

I was recently invited to an all-day seminar on Concretism (and Post Concretism) at the City University of New York. I confess the term escaped me and at first I thought it meant sculpture made out of concrete. Picasso did some great work with it and my friend Cici has filled her garden with little cement men attached to rocks. Of course, I googled it and it turns out Concretism (and Post Concretism) were popular movements in South America in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. No wonder I had never heard of it: I was busy changing diapers at the time with three children under the age of five. I was lucky I remembered my own name, let alone the avant-garde movements of the art world.

I Googled the topic (how did we live before Google?) and discovered it was a bona fide movement that had nothing to do with cement but was a form of non-objective art, contemporary with Minimalism, hard-edge, color field, etc;, all those movements which did away with anything figurative  in favor of complete abstraction. It was an art of shapes, lines and colors that grew out of earlier 20^th century experiments in “pure” painting by Kandinsky, the Russian Constructivists and Suprematists and the de Stijl movement in Holland, new art for a new world order. The abstraction that appeared in the ‘50s came from a totally different place, one of political avoidance and safety; no message was the right message in an era when McCarthy terrorized the country, what could be safer than a grid of lines? It’s Brazilian counterpart, Concrete Art (according to Google) was able to flourish “because it held no political messages or incendiary material” (as opposed to the “propaganda”  murals of Orozco or Diego Rivera.)

Meanwhile, in researching Concretism (and Post Concretism, an offshoot) I got the usual unintelligible artspeak. It has probably suffered in translation but what the hell does this statement outlining the difference between the two movements mean?

While Concretism built its art upon the basis of logic and objective knowledge with color, space, and form conveying universalism and objectivity, the Neo-Concrete artists saw colors, space and form as “not belonging to this or that artistic language, but to the living and indeterminate experience of man.” Monica Amor, 1959

It reminds me of an experience I had many years ago when the Whitney Museum had a branch in the Champion Paper building in Stamford. I went to hear a lecture by a prominent art historian. I forget what generally unintelligible topic it was, but one phrase stuck out as totally unfamiliar. He referred to something as  “anarchic formalism,” an oxymoron I had never heard before.  I waited until the clutch of sychophantic ladies finished telling him how wonderful he was (they hadn’t understood a word of his talk) and quietly went over and asked him what it meant. At least he had the decency to blush when he confessed that he had made it up because it “sounded good.” He figured no one in that audience of suburban boobs would know the difference.

And so Dear Reader, beware of art babble. If you don’t understand something, chances are the writer doesn’t understand it either. When I taught Art History, I used to begin my semester by asking the class to read a passage from their text. “What does it mean??” I would ask. No hands would go up. “Guess what?” I would say, “I don’t understand it either. The writer is just filling up the page.”