Clerihew for Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry
Makes buildings kind of scary.
He draws walls that curve;
That takes a lot of nerve.

Gruesome Crime Scene?

There might be a deep artistic meaning in this set-up, like an Ed and Nancy Keinholz-type of thing -- renewal! cycles! excrement! protection! cleansing! -- but it's more fun to imagine the awful toilet tragedy that could've led to this gruesome state of affairs.

Call the exhibit Home Repair: Destruction of the Past.

Warhol Tweets

Have you read The Andy Warhol Diaries?

I did. Andy called a friend of his named Pat Hackett every morning for eleven years (from 1976 to 1987) and told her what had happened the day before, including scintillating news like "took a cab 20 blocks, $10" or "ate at a diner, $4.20". She wrote everything down and transcribed it, and it was all eventually edited down and published in 1989.

He did it ostensibly as ammunition against his annual tax audits.

It's both mundane and hilarious because Warhol was a very intelligent person and didn't miss a trick.

In other words, like everything else concerning public personas and the need to self-validate via attention paid (and not acknowledgement of achievements), Andy predicted Twitter.

I just noticed that! I exist and I do things and I think thoughts! Acknowledge me!!

Why I Love Paul McCarthy

Paul McCarthy paints with his face. He once plastered his head inside a wall. He made a sculpture of a man with his pants down, humping a tree. He dipped his penis in a paint can and painted with it. He created a sculpture called "Santa Claus with Buttplug", which was displayed in a public park in Belgium.

What's not to love?

His work is corporeal and messy and comes from that impulse that makes you smash your fork into your mashed potatoes and fling it around the room. It's a reminder of the human animal and the fact that all this stuff we have built around us doesn't change our animal nature. While other artists are inside playing Boggle, he's going face-first down the Slip-n-Slide.

It's also fun. I saw his current installation at the Whitney Museum, which has an open staircase leading from one gallery level to the next. His gallery was full of stuff playing with rooms, so for example a life-sized video of the camera view spinning around a room. You stand still but your viewpoint spins.

There was also a small enclosed room with an open doorway and a rolling executive leather office chair bolted in the center. The room turned around like a carousel at various speeds, speeding up and slowing down, and the chair spun with it. The drawings of the project on the wall showed a person in the chair; I wonder if it was ever tried out that way. It was fun to picture that.

But this was the best part -- there was an installation called something like Bang Bang Room or Bang Door or something. A four-walled room, each wall with a door in it. The room starts closed up, closed doors. Then each wall swings out on right-mounted hinges. Then each door opens and closes with a bang. This keeps happening, at various speeds, until the room closes back up and the cycle resets.

Do you know how pleasant the sound of a four banging doors is? In an echoing gallery space, with an open stairwell at one end that carries the sound to the galleries above and below?

The poor museum guards. There's only one way to make that job worse than boring, and this was it.

But wait! There was an elderly white male guard at one end of the bang room. He stood looking at the room. There was another guard on the opposite end, a young black lady. When the door flung open, the old guard could see through to the young guard. Then they'd slam shut, and he couldn't see her.

Every time the doors flung open, he grinned widely, raised his arm, and waved at her. Slam. Fling, grin, wave, slam.

The young guard just looked at him bleakly.

That whole scene made my day. Thanks, Paul McCarthy!

I love that he forced this museum to install such an annoying piece, and that you were reminded of it even if you went upstairs to look at the amazing Buckminster Fuller exhibit because you could still hear it when you stood near the stair side of the room. McCarthy one up on Fuller in this one.

Paints with his face, people. Chew on that.

I am keeping street musicians poor

I used to live in Cambridge, MA. Cambridge, Harvard Square, the T stops -- these things are to buskers as honey is to flies with tip jars.

One day I took the escalator down to the Downtown Crossing platform. There was a busker sitting on the ground, singing and playing a battered old guitar held together with duct tape. He was probably in his late thirties, black hair spiced with gray held back in a long ponytail, bestickered black guitar case open for tips. I'd seen this guy all over town as I went on my way around Harvard Square, as I mingled with the tourists at Faneuil Hall, and as I ran the "No crazies, please!" prayer loop in my head while waiting at T-stops along the red line.

I recognized him, but there's no reason he would've recognized me. I rarely gave buskers money because I rarely had money, though there was that time I heard a country singer on the corner outside the Harvard Coop that turned me into such sentimental mush that I gave her whatever was in my pocket. It was the first and last time I ever saw her.

In contrast, I saw the regulars with a regularity. I saw Guster before they had a radio hit; in between songs they said they were going to NYC for a show, and they asked if anyone knew someone there with a spare floor they could crash on. After the next song they said, No, seriously, we need someplace free to stay there.

Aging Ponytail Duct-Taped Guitar Man rarely engaged with the audience. Sometimes I liked to stop and listen to him and other street musicians as a balm to the soul; plus I didn't have a choice. Move aside to a quiet spot and you've just moved into another busker's zone.

That day in Downtown Crossing the crowd placed me near Ponytail's guitar case. While waiting for the train, I watched him sing and play and smiled my encouragement.

He stopped playing abruptly and looked up at me and said bitterly, "Why don't I stare at you for a while?" He threw his guitar in his case and stood up and turned away.

What did I do?

There was a tall skinny guy with long hair who played guitar and sang rock songs in Harvard Square, mostly, and along the T. He had some measure of local fame, which I know because I saw him team up with other busking regulars sometimes, and because I saw him interviewed on the local cable access station once. He was practically famous!

One day in Harvard Square I was sitting on a wall outside the Discovery Store eating my lunch when Tall Skinny stopped playing and started lecturing the crowd. We were basically stealing entertainment, he told us. We were getting his work for free, and that's wrong. That's thievery. We owed it to him to drop a few bucks in his bucket.

Can I tell you what I wanted to drop in his bucket?

I get it. I understand the frustration of putting your talent out there and getting blank stares or simpering smiles (from me) in return. I understand the weight of failure that that puts on you. Believe me, I get it.

I understand the confusion you feel when you hear Courtney Love on the radio and here you'd gone and allegedly given Kurt Cobain, um, let's say "personal favors" on his tour bus and you've got all kinds of positive local press for your music and yet here you're the one out on the street in front of fucking smug-ass Harvard and there's Courtney being exactly the same except rich. ( I heard that story about a locally well-known Boston street musician from Courtney herself at a Hole concert at the Orpheum, and no, I didn't want to know, and yes, Ms. Love's a great musician but maybe not that reliable a storyteller.)

But standing in front of people and forcing them to listen to you is not the same as getting them to hear you, and no amount of whining about it is going to change that.

I wanted to tell this story to remind myself not to be Ponytail or Tall Skinny, no matter how frustrated I become, because DUDE, I DIDN'T FORCE YOU TO PERFORM AT ME WHILE I'M WAITING FOR THE T, AND NO, YOU CAN'T HAVE MY MONEY.

Take that, bloggers!

"My Kid Could Paint That" (2007, dir Amir Bar-Lev)

Buy what you love, because if you buy art as an investment, you're playing a loser's game. Not a losing game, necessarily, but a loser's game, a game played by people with too much money and too little interest in natural gas futures or real estate. Art is meant to be lived with, to instruct and enlighten and enrage and love, yet much of the best of Western art (at least; how the fuck would I know about any other kind?) is locked up in temp-controlled storage units owned by the wealthy. With the wine, maybe. (Ha! Of course not -- totally different temps required. Wow, that's a filthy rich person's sidesplitter right there!)

Imagine pouring your heart and soul and possibly risking your life or risking exile to produce a work of art, and now, however many years later, it's locked in a giant closet in Sylvester Stallone's house, or Lars Ullrich's. Want to see art used as an investment? Watch the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" and see Lars sell off his Basquiats and whatever. Let's hope there is no afterlife or there are bound to be some very disappointed paint-spattered souls up there.

But here's where I'll contradict myself -- art almost always has been defined by patronage, and I'm thinking that's the way it should be. Pieces produced for a specific purpose, often erotic (I think most major art museums should just be called what they are: "Museum of the Depiction of the Female Butt, Plus Some Saints and Jesus to Alleviate Resultant Guilt"). This whole bit of nonsense about one soul expressing himherself is kind of...well, the work's going to go on the auction block one way or another, isn't it? So it isn't so much expressing one's soul as it is guessing what other souls will want to see. Patronage. (Oh, and HINT: the other souls mostly want to see naked female butts, and/or war scenes and/or people being eaten by sharks.)

All I'm getting at is that I saw Amir Bar-Lev's doc, and although I was enraged for the first ten or fifteen minutes by the fact that I paid eleven dollars to sit in a theatre with six other people and some dopey woman STILL came right up to my seat in the back and asked to see my ticket because I had apparently sat in her ASSIGNED SEAT (Jesus, what is this, EUROPEAN SOCIALISM WITH THE ASSIGNED MOVIE SEATS?) -- I mean, for Christ's sake lady, there were only four other people there and you still walked down my row and said "Excuse me" to climb over my legs and you still bumped me out of my seat, I mean THIS IS AMERICA, LADY! -- so, fine, she picked the seat I should've picked, all's fair and I moved to another seat in only a 95% huff, and I was then further enraged by the fact that Amir didn't seem to have complete command of the focusing ring on his camera, so most of the interview sequences in the early part of the movie (with the journalist lady in overalls, and with Mark-the-dad) were fuzzy and, seriously, I paid 11 dollars to sit there watching a movie by a guy who couldn't manage to shine enough lights on his subjects and maybe needs new glasses.

But this movie was fantastic, really, and I think it comes down to Amir's niceness. He's so nice, it seems, that I feel I can call him by his first name. He's humble. He's not today's style of doc filmmaker, which is too often someone who wants to make narrative films with Angelina Jolie but needs to do something cheap and provocative first in order to get noticed. He's not a jerk with a camera looking for an expose or looking to make a point about society such that he'll edit his footage to fit it no matter how poorly his subject matches his theme --

(oh, I just watched "The Staircase" on DVD, CAN YOU TELL? Fascinating to watch and all, but damn there must be some kind of reverse libel statute that doesn't let you cover up so much of a real incident to fit your "American Southerners are homophobes and fools who consider justice a cotton-picking nuisance, and women are important only insofar as they are cute and doubtless golddigging and wear their hair in ways we find appealing", THAT MEANS YOU Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (writer/dir) and ESPECIALLY YOU Denis Poncet (producer), thanks for including the DVD extra of your own views on the case that explains your movie and it's creepy slant) --

...uh, where was I? Right, Amir. He's a nice guy who wanted to catch the painting prodigy in her ascendancy, and who's heart was, I think, genuinely a bit broken when he came to the inescapable conclusion that daddy was "helping" the prodigy to employ shape/form/repetition and theme in her paintings. You know, the things that a four year old couldn't employ or formulate. The things that make the paintings appealing and that make them sell.

Well, no. They sell because of the story behind them, and that's fine because lots of art is like that. "Guernica", or Motherwell without the Spanish war is...what? Mondrian without the move to New York and the influence of jazz is...not the same, I think. So the people who buy little Marla (+ big Mark's, I think) paintings are not being duped in any way that any art buyer isn't duped.

This is why people need to buy what they love. The price point is beside the point. I can give you a compare/contrast scenario to illustrate (no pun intended) what I mean: Norton Simon vs. Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Visit the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and you will see a wonderful, passionate, cohesive collection by a man who loved art, who especially loved Degas and his little cast horses. There's a viewpoint to this museum, and an expansive generosity. Now hop on a plane to Buffalo and visit the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This collection is shit, and I'm not just saying that because I stupidly made a special trip to the frozen center of hell (Buffalo in winter) just to see it. It's shit because it's clearly the work of a rich guy, and subsequent acquisitions directors, who decided to cherry-pick from the big names in modern art. This is a collection meant to impress with it's price tag, and the works are strung up in a stiff line like the Von Trapp children reporting to Captain Dad. Entering that gallery is like walking into a party where all the guests are big name but have no relationship with one another and simply stand around glumly with drinks in their hands. This gallery left me cold, while the Norton Simon makes my heart pound with the possibilities of humanity. I can't tell you how angry it makes me that some wonderful stuff -- a side of beef by Soutine, my beloved "Yellow Christ" by Gauguin -- is stranded in the art-prison of the Albright-Knox.

So the Marla controversy is really about money and art, about the acquisition position. It isn't about the dopey "controversy" over whether modern art is "real" art -- I mean, god, are we still worrying about that? We aren't, are we? I'm sure Morely Safer is, but the rest of us? (Go paint more hotel rooms and relax, Morely.)

(Oh, shit -- I just realized how poetically perfect the Marla/Morely naming alliteration is! I would totally do that if I were naming these characters in a novel! It's FATE!)

The movie works because it doesn't stoop to Safer-cynicism or Wallace-skepticism with the subjects. Amir lets them talk. He asks the needed questions and lets their faces tell the story. He, miraculously, gets the gallery owner who made his fortune (? Or some good amount) off of Marla to admit what we movie-goers suspected an hour earlier: that he, a frustrated photo-realist painter, was championing Marla in order to stick it the art community and their inexplicable love of the quick-'n-easy and the abstract. It's a story of revenge and ego and the desire to be special (Mark, this means you). It's MacBeth. So, of course, it's tragedy, but a small tragedy, after all. Amir sympathizes with the family, especially Mom Laura and Non-Prodigy Zane, and we sympathize with all of them, too. I'm sorry you guys got into this, that your weaknesses let it happen. Weaknesses like a need for expression, a need to be heard, love of your children, loyalty to your family, not wanting to hurt or doubt the ones you love, and money-is-good. Nice, meaty, human weaknesses.

But seriously, if you're buying Markla's paintings, you'd better do it because you love them, not because you're hoping to cash in. Don't be an ass about it. This isn't "F is for Fake" territory here, so don't pretend it is.

My mom had these little blue Chinese dragons, book ends, when I was growing up. I loved them. I saw some just like them years later in a (closed) store in Boston's Chinatown and took a photo of them. Lately, I saw them on sale at Plantation LA for $250. My mom says she bought them for something like $25. It's not that they've become valuable all of a sudden -- it's that the Plantation LA buyer went down to some Chinatown somewhere and you did not, so you pay a premium.

But no matter how much or little you pay, it doesn't matter, so long as you love your dragons.

Sally Mann, photographer

I recently saw a show of verite photographers (my term; I can't even remember what the museum called them, or how they justified grouping them together. Basically, the photographers all take photos of their friends and family, but not like you and I do; they keep the ugly shots). It included Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia. Also Tina Barney and Larry Sultan.

All had some interesting and arresting shots, but most of them became overwhelming in abundance, and they have an underlying bleakness with which I am all too familiar. I wasn't in the mood, I guess.

Then there's Sally. Sally's photos of her three kids and her rural Virginia surroundings have one thing the other photos don't: hope for the future. There's a tremendous determination in Mann's photos, an insistence on looking at the world around you, not as you want it to be, but as it is, and in admitting that it won't last. I get the feeling from her photos that life is brutal and gorgeous and worth fighting for, and that you'd better be ready to scrap. There's an unflinching tenderness in these photos that I've only seen so powerfully presented in Steinbeck novels, maybe, or in Emmylou Harris's voice.

It's like they're saying, "Keep trying. It's worth it."

Maurice Denis, "Easter Mystery", 1891

I don't know my Bible very well, it seems, since I leapt from Easter to Easter egg hunt, as if that's really what Easter is: an excuse to hide eggs from children.

So of course Maurice Denis painted a disembodied hand taunting white-robed egg seekers with the missing egg. Of course he did.

Except that apparently that's the hand of God, and he's presenting the Eucharist, and I don't think we're supposed to think he's taunting anyone with it.

This is what happens when dopey unbelievers interpret religious art. The mystery and wonder of the Resurrection morphs into a bitter suburban American nightmare of fed-up soccer parents dressing their children in robes, hiding in trees, and wagging eggs in the air. April is the cruelest month in middle class mainstream America, after all.

Of course, my picture cuts off the tomb and the women on their knees at its door; hey, I thought they were searching the grass for their eggs.

But the Easter/egg connection is quite old, it seems, old enough that Mary Magdalene is said to have presented the Emperor of Rome with a red egg to inform him of the Resurrection and the bloodshed of Christ, etc. So for real, Denis might've painted an egg here, and I might be more informed than I thought.

I quite love Denis and his gently gothic-mystery forest scenes, with their robed women fleeing or striding or moseying around. He is Emily Bronte crossed with M. Night Shyamalan.

But this truly is the Worst. Hand of God. Ever. Michaelangelo, he ain't.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of...holy crap, that's a lot of dots

I was in Chicago this past weekend, so I got took a good long gander at Georges Seurat's masterpiece. There sure are a lot of dots on that thing. It's so carefully built -- imagine if we really were characters in this painting, and we had to stand at right angles at all times. Unless we were a dog or a monkey.

I don't know about you, but I too like to take my monkey out for walks in the park, especially when I'm wearing my enormous bustle.

You never really know a painting until you see it in person (well, that's not true. For some, like Lichtensteins, I don't think it matters that much. But let's pretend this is true), and this one has a fabulous surprise in its painted purply border. The museum placard says Seurat added the border to help the eye make the transition to his custom-designed white frame, which they've replicated. (They being the Art Institute of Chicago.)

You almost never see that border in reproductions of the painting, which seems like a refutation of Seurat's intentions. I would imagine he'd like it there to lead the eye out to the white of the page of an art book, as well.

And so our eyes go unled, dazzled by orderly dots and skittering out to a chaotic 360 degree world.

I took a painting class once where we were forced to complete a pointillist painting, and boy did everyone hate doing it. It is profoundly unsatisfying. It feels like an obsessive compulsive exercise designed to force you to exert control over your own animal impulses and desires.

No wonder Seurat dropped dead at 31; he must've been exhausted.

Piero della Francesca's Hercules (ca. 1470)

This painting holds infinite appeal for me. Sometimes you come across a work that changes your worldview and makes you reconsider something you thought you knew. This painting is like the Madeline L'Engle book A Wrinkle In Time in that regard for me. You thought you knew what time was and what space was, but she made you think again. The work expands your concept of the possible.

Piero's Hercules is not the Hercules I thought I knew. He's less physically imposing and more vulnerable than I had ever imagines, and it makes me identify with the man in ways I never could before. He's less professional wrestler and more Olympic athlete. He's doing his best, but sometimes his best is exactly the wrong thing. Thus the insecure knock-knees, and the plaintive gaze. This Hercules makes sense to me; I can see the man in this painting beating his wife and children to death and coming out of his god-induced insanity with the determination to serve an impossible penance that turns his accursed physical prowes to his advantage. This Hercules is doomed to be more beast than man.

And I like how the lion's paws both modestly cover and immodestly imitate Hercules's genitals.

See the painting yourself high on the wall on the second floor of the excellent Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (the same room features a great Fra Angelico somewhat hidden on the far side of the fireplace, so look lively, folks).