SFMOMA

So, Tyler Green comes to my neck of the woods and shames me by noticing something that I missed: SFMOMA does not have one Thiebaud hanging on the Second Floor (Permanent Collection). What is particularly galling is that Thiebaud is one of my all time favorite painters, a native son of sorts of Sacramento (we used to frequent the same coffee house) and a huge painter-hero of mine. How did I not notice his absence?

Speaking of Minnesota

The other day I was looking at a painting by Elmer Bischoff, who, when he was at his best, was magnificent. One thing that always strikes me about his best work is how well he captures the atmosphere of the Bay Area (the way Diebenkorn's work from the 1950's captures the East Bay or the way Thiebaud captures a certain something about Sacramento in the summer).

That made me think of other artists who seem to distill the essence of their region in their work. Southern California, certainly. You have Hockney, for instance, not to mention scads of late 19th century painters who have captured the essence of the region that is reduced to small pockets (but when you encounter one of those pockets, you immediately recognize it).

There were artists who captured New York in various phases of history.

I got to thinking about Northern Minnesota (obviously I had been drinking chamomile tea to calm my sour stomach) and realized that I could not think of a single painting, let alone painter who captured the feeling of the area.

Then I realized that of all the great and beautiful parts of the United States, very few of them have been properly nailed by artists. Or have they? One of the problems with the New York dominance of the world of art is that we are far more inclined to know painted New York than the state next to ours. Nevada? Wait! Louis Siegriest's abstract work from the 1960's captures something of the Virginia City/Reno area, although only a particular aspect of it. But Oregon? Mark Tobey doesn't really say anything about the Northwest as a place. I know artists in Portland, yet none of them seem to grab the atmosphere of the area and paint it.

So, for the next few days I would love to hear from my readers in the various parts of the United States (well, why limit it... if you can think of a painter in, say, Hagen, Germany who captures the area, let's hear about it) about artists who "get" their area. As someone who is interested in the dance between abstract and representational art (think of the Diebenkorn Berkeley paintings from 1953 to 1955), those sorts of paintings are the ones I particularly want to hear about, but I also like a good realist (Sacramentans will certainly think of Gregory Kondos here). Also, while I am keen on current and modern painters, what about the 19th and prior centuries? Did the Hudson River School have an offshoot on the Red River of the North?

So let's hear from Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida, DC, Massachussetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, etc.

SFMOMA

Amalia and I went to SFMOMA today. It was my first visit in awhile, so it was the first time I saw the foyer stripped of all the ticket selling clutter, the first time I saw the Lichtenstein show, and the first time I saw the rehang of the permanent collection. As I have to finish a restaurant review for the newspaper, and I am suffering from some digestive malaise, undoubtedly caused by my own indiscretion with regards to acidic things (should have avoided the onion jam on my grilled ham and fontina panini at the Caffe Museo, at least so soon after the company holiday party and the amazing chorizo and bean soup we made last night), I will be brief.

Also, Amalia was in quick view mode when it came to the permanent collection (at least until we hit a Joan Brown painting with two dogs in it) and the Lichtenstein, I did not get the full absorbtion that I like to get before really evaluating an exhibit.

First, the foyer: it looks great. I love the SFMOMA building, and I particularly like the space that greets you when you walk through the doors. Now, I am a member, so I never have to wait outside for tickets (members still get theirs inside), so perhaps if I waited twenty minutes in the wind and rain sometime I would sing a different tune, but it is great to have this open space so, well, open.

Second, the fifth floor (contemporary art): mostly silly stuff, including an installation that I thought had been euthanized years ago. A whole room of Kara Walker, which is about as essential to an art museum as a diet of gravel and arsenic is to good digestion. One of my favorite Jay DeFeo paintings (Insision), which is baffling, seeing as how her contemporaries are hung downstairs (I think that, since SFMOMA holds one of her two important paintings, they are trying to boost her cache, which is a dumb idea. Those two paintings are great, but she is a minor painter. Let's appreciate the few good and the two great works she did and not try to boost her into something else). Now, I was being rushed through, so I did not read the criteria for inclusion, so maybe it made sense.

Third, the exhibit on design, architecture and fashion: a few good pieces but mostly fluff.

Four, the Lichtenstein: nothing here to change my evaluation of his most famous works: overrated. He finally started doing some interesting paintings in the 1980's, when he explored the ideas of surrealism, and was really on to something in his last years, but the cartoon frames wear thin. Really thin.

Five, the permanent collection: I always applaud good placement of Diebenkorns, and we get two outstanding paintings in this one. Why do we need even one Newman, though? And where are the Ryman's and Arneson's? Also, SFMOMA does not have a great Picasso, so why put the minor works they have right in the front? Matisse was a better painter anyway. There I said it. I love Picasso, but Matisse is ultimately the more important painter.

Six, do we really need all that photography? Why not just put it in a book and let people browse. I actually like photography, but have generally never gotten along with photographers, so this might just be a personal grudge. Still, way too much space devoted to photomechanical stuff.

MOMA

I was asked tonight what I thought of the MOMA renovation. I am witholding comment until I actually see the thing, which will probably not be for awhile, as I do not have any plans to go to New York soon, unfortunately. I am long overdue for a trip, but, you know how these things go...

Anyway, I am not as opposed to the $20 entrance fee as I thought that I was to begin with. First, crappy Hollywood movies cost over half of that, and you don't get to spend time with any Matisses (I won't even mention what folks pay per month for cable television). Second, for those who really are into art, you will get a membership anyway, which is good for a number of reasons: one, if you have the membership you will be more inclined towards casual visits, two, you get the newsletter so you can keep up on events, and three, you get invited to cool stuff that the nonmembers won't even hear about. Third, if you spend $20 to get in, you are going to be more inclined to make the most of your visit.

Museum memberships are about the best entertainment/educations value there is. Amalia and I go to museums all the time, and a membership makes an avec toddler trip much more enticing (if she only wants to search for horses and the color purple for an hour, so be it. We spend an hour. If she is in crazy art mood and wants to sit in front of a William Keith painting and talk about it for half and hour before returning to the California Impressionists and then another visit to the Hudson sculpture, followed by another half hour looking at the horse statue, that is fine, too).

For those of you in the Bay Area, be sure to take your toddler to the Oakland Museum of California. You may never get out of the Natural History section, but it is not every day that you get to see a wolverine fighting with a coyote over a dead marmot. The gardens are also great for running around (and you can climb a three ton piece of jade), and the art department is full of horses, particularly in the 19th century section. Just watch out for the museum gift shop, as it is full of cool toys for the toddler and cool books for the Babbo, all of which can lighten the wallet.

Speaking of local museums, I just realized that it has been way too long since we went to SFMOMA, which is a great space to look at art in. I have yet to see the rehang of the permanent collection, which is pathetic. Must be less Oaklandcentric.

Of course it is fun to be a little Oaklandcentric, since we have almost no tourists, and some cool stuff that is rarely crowded. There is a There there, but it is scattered around. You just have to know where to go and what to look for.

Stupid Distractions!

I have a project that I have been wanting to start, but I never seem to find it in me to actually start it. Other projects have been started, and finished, but this one just seems to pop into my mind and stay there. I have resisted using ideas from it in other projects, because I was "saving them" for this big, grand project.

Well, I was in my studio this evening, working on some caligraphy and listening to the rain and it dawned on me: this idea I have is a bad one. It is bloated, moves in too many directions, would be costly, time-consuming, and has little chance of actually working. So I cannibalized it and will see what can be used in other things.

It is a good feeling to reject an idea before investing too much in it.

However, I am wary of feeling too triumphant. Other bad ideas were put to rest only to pop up when, in a moment of weakness, I thought "Ah-hah! Before it was wrong, but here I have the solution. Now I will make this thing!"

The danger of these bad projects is that they are never done and they require so much work that I get really reluctant to scrap them once they are started, even after hours and hours and hours of reworking. I have this one canvas, for instance, that is probably beyond saving, but when I look at it I see a good idea here and a good idea there and think of the hours I have put into it, and I balk at doing the sensible thing of burning it and starting something new.

Part of what stops me is the memory of one really bad painting that finally got so wretched that I completely reworked it, so that only a couple of square inches of the original paint are visible. That painting ended up being one of my favorite ones. I finished the reworking about eight years ago, and I still like to look at the painting.

So, with these faulty projects I just plug away, secretly hoping that I will eventually wreck the thing and HAVE to radically rework it.

But it still feels good to nip a grandiose monstrocity in the bud!

It is Time for Fantasy Art Exhibit

You know about those fantasy league baseball games? Where nuts (and I say that with all kindness, as I have several cousins who are into this sort of thing), make up teams drawing from all of baseball and then compete based on the stats of the various players. At least, I think that is how they do it. Cousin Matthew explained it to me one night, but it was after cocktails and the details are all a bit fuzzy. I remember thinking that it all seemed rather odd.

Anyway, what about fantasy art exhibits?

Here is your chance: curate a show, or at least come up with a good theme and a few examples of paintings/sculptures/etc. to fill it.

You can be very broad:

Toros! Representations of the Bullfight in Painting, with works by Goya, Picasso, Diebenkorn, etc. (although it is more fun if you get really specific)

Or you can get minutely detailed:

Moo! A look at English oil paintings of Scottish Highland Cattle from the mid 17th century.

Anyway, enter your ideas in the comments box and I will pick a winner, who will receive absolutely nothing beyond bragging rights.

Try to put together shows that you would want to see.

Have fun!

The Arts

I try to keep a balance of topics on the blog, but balance is one of those difficult things to attain and to maintain. I have noticed that I have been rather lax about posting serious art entries. Mea culpa. Sometimes recipes get the short end of the stick, sometimes it is baseball, but this time I have noticed a lack of art talk.

Part of it stems from the fact that I have been looking at art that I already know quite well. Part of it stems from looking at said art with a toddler. On Thursday we went to the Oakland Museum of California and took an inventory of horse (and sometimes cow) images. Then we looked for uses of the color purple.

Oh well, you gotta start somewhere.

We had an interesting discussion over whether a mid-1950's (a Berkeley 1954 painting that is predominantly black, grey and brown) Diebenkorn indeed was a picture of a horse. Amalia decided that it was, in spite of my argument that it was a more generally landscape oriented abstract expressionist piece.

"It's a horse, Babbo! Here are the legs, here is the head, and it is jumping!"

So there you have it. Horse or no, it is really a fine painting. Go to the museum to see it.

More on New York as the Center of Arts

Terry Teachout has responded in a very reasoned and reasonable way to my shot accross the bow.

First, I find it interesting that he points out that he was not born in New York. The late Herb Caen (two guesses as to where he was from, and if Sacramento wasn't one of them, you lose) often referred to people as "true San Franciscans, which means that they weren't originally from here." The same goes for New York. To voluntarily choose life in a big city is a much bigger step towards citizenship in that Imperial City (hat tip to Gray Brechin) than being from there and staying put.

Second, he notes that New York is where folks came to be validated. In bullfighting it is similar. A novillero can take the alternativa anywhere, but it must be confirmed in Las Ventas in Madrid. In many ways New York functioned that way for the art world, but...

It wasn't nearly as all-powerful as it thought. My counter-examples run in two categories: first, the darlings of the New York art world who are running deeper and deeper into obscurity (and mark my words, Warhol will be less known as an artist than as the father of some daft ideas that the art world took years to recover from) and second, artists like Wayne Thiebaud or Richard Diebenkorn who never did a significant stint in New York (Diebenkorn's few months in an upstate artists' colony don't count).

Certainly it took longer for Diebenkorn to be recognized as THE major American painter of his era (and there is still some resistance from the New York establishment), but in the long run he will be seen as a much greater painter than de Kooning, Pollock, or even Rothko (all of whom I think are first rate painters).

It is good to remember that Cezanne remained in Provence, and that his art reflected a terroir, to borrow an oenology term, that went hand-in-hand with his greatness as a painter. Similarly with Diebenkorn, Thiebaud, Kondos, Staprans, Arneson, and Park.

The jazz world that Terry cites, well, New York was and is the place to make a living at it. I might note that the bass player of a band that he mentioned on his blog a while back was from San Francisco (and a classmate of mine at UC Santa Cruz), and is living and thriving in New York. I also would note the departure of Charlie Hunter, a great Berkeley guitar player, a few years back, one who only a year prior was saying that he would never go to New York.

This is more a matter of pure economics. New York has more opportunities for gigs. However, there are jazz musicians (like the extremely talented Sonny Simmons), who have found that even New York doesn't offer enough and have found Europe to be a better bet.

One thing to remember is the role that other cities used to have. Philadelphia, for instance, was the headquarters of many great jazzmen (still is. I think Kenny Barron still lives there). Then there was Boise (har har har. I never could figure out why Gene Harris lived there. Certainly he wasn't working every night at the pay that his talent deserved).

As Terry notes, it is all changing, partly due to the Internet, but I suspect also because cities like New York have the habit of getting smug and stale. It certainly happened to Paris, as well as Rome (although Rome has come back and fallen and come back and fallen more times than should be possible). On the West Coast, San Francisco certainly goes through this (although San Francisco has a whole other set of issues regarding its artistic identity).

The Decentralization of the Arts

Terry Teachout lives in New York, yet he understands (to some extent, as I don't believe a New Yorker ever really gets the extent of this phenomenon) that New York is no longer (if it ever really was) the center of the arts in America or the world. Certainly it was at one time the center of the hype of the arts in America, but in the long run, I really don't think that New York will be seen as all that significant.

People will realize that Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko really found their styles in San Francisco, that Warhol was useless, and so forth. As to music, it is a different story, but New York's role has been greatly inflated. While they had Corigliano, we had Lou Harrison. You can guess which one I think will be a footnote, only of interest to historical musicologists desperate for a new topic, once Amy Beach runs dry.

So, I have a lot to say about the decentralization of the arts. Lots.

However, I need to go to the Amtrak station to pick up some friends who are allegedly only an hour late.

You want liberal democracy? Fine, then you live with the late trains. They should be there in five minutes, but, oh no, you people need to vote on every friggin' measure and then you still whine about "they're takin' away our freedom!" So, the train is going to be an hour late. At least. I can't even trust the LiberalDemocracyTrak to report accurately on how late the train will be. Speaking of innacurate Liberal Democracies, why, oh why does the clock on my Ford gain something like 16 minutes every six months? Has relativism hit so hard that these 'tards can't even make an accurate clock? But I digress. I better bring a book. Probably a biography of the Duce. Bah!

Then, when I get a moment, between Lepanto League parties, I mean, serious and somber symposia, Italian Cultural Heritage Parades (black shirts optional), ushering at mass, going to a big barbecue, I might write a thing or two on decentralization in the arts, particularly in regards to the outstanding theater that is happening all over the country, but particularly in Sacramento (almost enough to make me miss the place), but, well, don't hold your breath. Instead, go read Teachout. Off to the station.

Cars With Character

I like cars that have character. Citroens and old SAABs and the Fiat Personale and the like make me very happy. My beloved (yet disabled) Krautrocket, a 1989 BMW 325, is of the last generation of BMWs to have character. Sometime in the 1990's the folks in Munich (like the folks at SAAB) got boring. Not horribly boring, and that wonderful Krautrocket hum was still in the engine, but they were not the same.

Hope is not gone, however, because I remember when the Jaguar went through an unfortunate period of having rectangular headlamps. They came to their senses. Likewise, recent Thunderbirds have had character, as do the Honda Element and the Scion. The Mini and the new Bug (although is a car without a rear-mounted air-cooled engine really a bug?) have character. Soon we will see the Smart Car, which impressed me greatly the first time I saw it in Italy. The PT Cruiser is a car that thinks it has character, but it doesn't. The Aztek has character, but it is on loan, and Waste Management might want it back soon.

Today I saw two cars that have more character than one can possibly know what to do with. The first was some old military ambulance thing that was absolutely stunning. It looked 4WD and quite ferocious. It also had a bit of that pushme-pullyou thing going for it, which is always a bonus in my book. I like a car that always looks like it just MIGHT be going in reverse.

The second was a very old Bronco. I think Bronco and I think of the boring ones from the 80's on, but this was a beaut. More like an old Jeep than a modern SUV.

Speaking of cars with character, the Oakland Museum of California has (or had, I am not sure if it is still up) a show of Kaiser automobiles. Wow! Each one was a beauty. If the show is still up and you are in the area check it out. For the price of admission, you can also check out the great art collection (not to mention the opportunity to talk to a stuffed deer, Amalia's favorite part of any museum visit).

On Painting and Writing

Last night I was having a discussion with a painter on getting out of the doldrums. Painters will know exactly what I am talking about: those days (weeks, months, etc.) where you know or think that you know that your present direction in art has run its course.

Let's say you made a painting of how late summer light hits a silo. It is a really good painting. In fact, after that painting is done, you realize that there is a lot more to explore in the light and shadows in the corn field against the silo. You paint a series. Your friends like them, you think they are good, you even sell a few.

Then you go into the studio and realize, "Wow! I can crank out another series, but it will really just be formula. I think I have observed all that I can right now on this, and cannot really dig deeper into it." So you decide to do something else, but nothing really strikes you as that interesting or worth painting about either.

So, I told this painter friend that the best way to get out of the doldrums is to work towards quantity rather than quality: just crank out some paintings. Set up a still life, even with the most hackneyed elements, and paint. Paint it with photorealist precision. Paint it in the style of Cezanne. Paint it in the style of Thiebaud. Adjust the subject if you have to (a sign that something is clicking), but just keep painting the things.

Alternately, pick a subject that you don't know a lot about, for instance, the different species of trees, and draw and paint them until you really know how to render a Modesto ash or an elm.

The idea is that we are surrounded by interesting visual things, but we start investing our symbolism with too many ideas and neglect to look. Or we fool ourselves into thinking that what we have been doing for the last few years is the only way we can do anything.

As of last night this painter friend decided that the best way to do something was to scrape down and brutalize paintings that never really worked. I think that is a good idea, too, as it allows us to kill sacred cows to make some good t-bones.

So, that brings us to writing.

Last night I promised an entry a day. I was about to flake on that promise and go to bed. Then I realized that even if I had nothing to say, I should at least come here to report that I have nothing to say. Of course I have plenty to say, but it is stuff that is too complicated for me to think about right now, so what I really lacked was a good amount of small things to say.

Then I realized that I needed to apply the same discipline I was advising my friend to do. And, voila! A topic for a blog entry that was better than "well, nothing much to say here, come back tomorrow!"

Quantity! Quantity! Quantity! Measure the paintings by the inch. Measure the verbiage by the characters!

Now, this of course makes me think of my own painting. I think I have to go set up a still life right now....

It's Just Art

Yes, Tyler, it really is just art, and it would be a tragedy for even the stoned mezzo-retard with the sideways baseball cap who blasts his friggin' [c]rap "music" in my neighborhood at three am to take a bullet, even for a Diebenkorn, even for the Last Supper of da Vinci.

Preserving art for future generations is a noble thing to do, but a sense of proportion is in order. Preserving human life, no matter how great the art, is more important. If you cannot agree to that, you have some serious contemplation to do.

Of course, Tyler did say, "short of taking a bullet", so I am not shaking my finger at him. I just have encountered too many people who have problems with getting these basic priorities straight.

More on the Collectors' Gallery Idea

First, go read this, which offers some interesting ideas on the topic I posted a week ago. Lenny makes a good point about the astronomical cost of such an endeavor, and the possibility of getting various embassies to pony up. Good idea.

What really intrigues me is his mentioning that Arbus, Judd and Hirst are old hat, which, of course, they are in the world of chasing avant-gardes. Thinking about the mercurial notion of contemporary art makes me want to start a betting pool on when the whole thing implodes. Who will be the first major museum to admit that the whole notion of an avant-garde is now essentially meaningless? Whose about-face will be the most amusing? Which museum will stubbornly cling to its manic search for the next new thing? Which critics will say that they predicted this years ago?

Then, of course we will get the folks who have been lurking on the sidelines, waiting to reintroduce the cause of their pet mediocrity, someone who was "neglected" for years.

The sad thing will be that a lot of great art will be neglected, as people crawl over each other to out-Beaux Arts their rivals. There will be some great abstract expressionism lost in a sea of big, brown eyes.

Another thing that will be interesting is watching the hedgers, like one Joseph Pearce (you know the fellow, who has turned his skilled and trained eye (giggle, titter) to the task of arts criticism: "cor blimey, some of this modern art ain't so bad! Cripes! Pour me another Watney's"), who have sort of cautiously endorsed very limited ideas of modern art (none of which they have even the foggiest notion of anyway). When the silliness of Mr. Hirst and Kara Walker and what have you has become the cause du jour, and a lot of folks start taking shots at a lot of modern masterpieces, I will be most interested to see who sticks by their guns and who joins the new bandwagon.

Obviously my view is that there is a lot of kee-rap passing as art these days. Always has been, but it has been particularly brutal in the last 20-30 years. There are also plenty of lesser paintings made by otherwise brilliant painters (although I cannot think of three Diebenkorn stinkers). However, for the most part, modernism has been a very good thing for art. What hurt art was the decision to move the teaching of art from a trade school/apprenticeship approach to an academic approach. When a young artist who lacks Picasso's formidable drawing skills tries to capture the dynamism of cubism, he is heading into troubled waters. When he goes into abstract expressionism without the discipline and eye of a Diebenkorn or Kline, he is doomed.

Hopefully the fallout of the collapse of avant-gardism will include a revival of proper training. Otherwise we will have nothing more than sentimental kitsch, rendered by people with as ferocious an axe to grind as the aforementioned Miss Walker. We are seeing a bit of this in music, as neo-tonalists, feeling emboldened, seem dead set on wrapping the world in mounds of dreary fake Romanticism.

Stolen Screams

I seem to remember Munch's Scream being stolen before, or am I confused?

Anyway, it is a fine statement of the sort of emotion that one should really grow out of, or maybe should become so accutely aware of that one finally does something about it, and not a bad painting, so it is sad that someone has taken this to who knows where.

I cannot really understand the point of stealing a painting like this. There can be no market for it. Even the shadiest dealer should have enough sense to realize that this one of those items where its value lies in its identity. It all brings to mind some underground complex, where the head of K.A.O.S. is sitting on some great stolen art collection.

"So, you see, Mr. Bond, with this painting I shall be able to complete my bid to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!"

Art theft seems like something that can only be done with the backing of an army and a sovereign state.

Art Meseum Thoughts

First, go read this entry from Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes, then come back for debate.

I will be brief out of necessity, since I have a heap of work threatening to engulf me at any moment (and since one of those crucial tasks is to get more diapers, I really don't want to be engulfed by any of that), but my basic point is that while the contemporary art world is global and completely interconnected, there is no reason to encourage that trend. I am more interested in what local collectors are looking at than what Saatchi finds compelling.

A show of what lives in local collections is a fascinating measure of the community (and note that I am not implying any sort of sophistication index, I am simply curious: we might find that Chicago collectors prefer secondary colors, we might find that Portlanders favor figurative drawings, who knows? I would like to, as it helps flesh out a portrait of the community). To give into the globalization of the contemporary art world is to do two things: first, it ratifies the McStarbuckization of even our higher culture. Second, it distracts artists from making art and looking at the real world around them.

If the Society of Six had been au courant they probably would have been far less interesting as artists. Instead they received a tiny exposure to fauvism and futurism and developed a home-grown way of painting that remains quite compelling today (yes, I was at the Oakland Museum again yesterday afternoon).

Now that we all know what is going on everywhere we tend to spend less time looking at the city, at nature, etc., and more time looking at reproductions of art on the computer, in magazines, and so on. That, combined with a completely archaic notion of an avant-garde, forces art to increasingly spend time peering up its own, well, you know what.

Let's call that an opening salvo and let the argument go from here!

The inevitable...

I have been finding myself more and more thinking about putting images on the blog. So far I have not done so, since I do not have a digital camera, I really have no idea how to post them, and I figure that images probably take a whole lot of space and bandwidth, and that Ann might get grumpy if I do that (seeing as how she hosts this blog for free, or the occasional paella). However, these are probably just excuses. The truth is, I should at least learn how to do it, so that I know if it is feasible.

What I have really been thinking about is that writing about art and the art's relationship with landscape is difficult without recourse to images.

The reaon I am posting this is not to ask how to post images. That will come later. First, I am going to have to bite the bullet and get a digital camera. If anyone has had any great experiences (or warnings about the other kind of experiences) with any particular one, please let me know. I do not want to spend a ton of money, but I want something that would take some decent pictures.

For real photography, I will stick with film, for now, although I am not really smitten with film and would shed no tears if it went away forever. It is just that we have a good film camera, so I see no need, as of yet, to go out and get some fancy digital camera. I just want a basic one.

Any recommendations?

Artists Top Ten List

Tyler Green has asked art bloggers to list their ten favorite artists as of the moment of typing them. His list amazed me for the simple reason that he includes four artists from my list along with an artist I completely loathe. I would like to see him talk more about this, but I find it amazing that someone who lists Diebenkorn and Matisse would like Newman.

Anyway, here it is:

1. Richard Diebenkorn
2. Henri Matisse
3. Paul Cezanne
4. Pierre Bonnard
5. Robert Ryman
6. Piero della Francesco
7. Giotto
8. Rembrandt
9. Wayne Thiebaud
10. Frank Lobdell

Ask me tomorrow and it might be different. Who knows? It might not be. I think that this is pretty much the usual list for the last couple of years. Perhaps Rembrandt is sometimes replaced with Van Gogh or Goya or Sargent or Winslow Homer, perhaps Lobdell sometimes loses out to August Gay or Louis Siegriest (later works) or Constable or Turner (watercolors in particular). If I am in one of those moods, Robert Arneson probably sneaks on there once in awhile. If I am in the throes of Kalifornia Uber Alles sentiment, then Gregory Kondos, Raymond Staprans, Thomas Hill, and William Keith might pop up there. I suppose that Pierre Puvis de Chavanne and di Chirico make the cut at times (not to mention Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkins). Sometimes Hockney or Miro might make the cut (although rarely).

My list also changes with frequency of museum visits. There are some artists who really get to me when I have been seeing their work a lot (Motherwell and a whole host of baroque painters come to mind). Others I tend to like more in theory and reproduction (hello Mr. De Kooning), but when I am seeing too much of their actual paintings, my enthusiasm wanes.

When it comes down to it, the only artist who is probably guaranteed a permanent spot on this list is Richard Diebenkorn. I have seen a lot of his work, most of the pieces multiple times. I have studied his work, including his drawings and the wonderful intaglio works he did for Crown Point Press. There is something about his command of line and space, not to mention color, that just grips me deep down and will not let go.

Probably a big part of my love of Diebenkorn is that he was not afraid to show his own influences. He rejected the Nietzchean balderdash put forth by Clyfford Still (an artist I run hot-cold on. When he was good, he was very good. When he was bad, he was as hysterical as a thirteen year old who has read too much Edgar Allen Poe). In my own painting I do not hide my influences. My art does not spring from my innermost being like Athena, fully grown in armor. Neither did Still's, although that was his story, and he stuck to it.

Diebenkorn never seemed to have been affected by that posturing. He was frank about his admiration for Matisse, for Bonnard, for Hopper, as well as for some of his gifted contemporaries in the artistic hot house that was the San Francisco Art Institute back in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

Two artists who are noteworthy in their exclusion from my list are, of course, David Park and Elmer Bischoff. Both artists I enjoy tremendously, but neither one of them grips me to the extent that the others on the list do. There are some Bischoff paintings that I can get lost in. There are some Park paintings that make me tremble in the face of their power, but as a whole, neither artist comes close to their good friend and colleague, Richard Diebenkorn.

Another artist who probably should be on my list is Nell Sinton. The only reason she is not on there is that I have just not seen enough of her work. What I have seen was powerful stuff, but I need to see more before I consider her for inclusion on my top 10.

The Sundial Bridge

Of course the first art-related question that a visitor to Redding must answer is, "what do you think of the Sundial Bridge?"

Since we are in Redding with some frequency we have been watching the bridge go up from the plans to the final product, which has been exciting. The finished bridge is stunning: elegant forms that provide multiple vantage points emphasizing different curves, different angles and different materials.

I will not go into too much detail on Calatrava's work, as I have not seen that much of it first hand, and the actual structures are always more interesting in real life than from even the best photographs (although this bridge is very photogenic - wish I had brought my camera). What really struck me was the tile work on the tower. I had read that he was influenced by Gaudi, but did not see it until I saw that tile work, which looked a bit like something that Gaudi and Robert Ryman could have collaborated on: monochromatic white, where the texture is composed solely by the variety of tile sizes.

When you approach the tower, it is nothing but a dazzling white form, elegantly sloping away from the Sacramento River. As you get closer, you see that the white surface is actually a mosaic.

My one criticism of the bridge is that dazzling white can be overwealming in Redding. This is a town where the summer temperature is regularly over 100 degrees. In Sacramento we used to always say, "well, it could be worse, you could be in Redding or Red Bluff." So, as you cross the bridge on a hot day, the brightness of it is almost blinding.

However, all of that bright hot light forces you to look at the river and the trees, so the bridge brilliantly throws the focus from itself to the lovely scenery not by understatement, but by outlandish overstatement. Then, once you reach the shade of the tower, you can focus on the structure itself, which rewards with some of the loveliest angles that were not painted by Richard Diebenkorn.

The Sundial Bridge is part of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, which is Redding's answer to the Oakland Museum of California, but with a local focus instead of a statewide focus. It combines the various civic museums of Redding: art, history and natural science under one roof.

For a veteran of history museums, I am used to the standard cant of the liberal academics who run these places. They show some artifact of human history, like logging, and basically say, "Ah, you thought that logging was good. Well, it isn't. It's BAAAAAAAAAAAAD."

It's usually a little more subtle than that, but not much:

"While popular publications glorified the settlers, we now appreciate the devastation that they brought upon the land, the indigenous people, and even their own women, as they established systems that forced ethnic minorities, women and animals into conditions that amounted to slavery. Two four six eight, Race! Class! Gender!"

The Turtle Bay Exploration Park, being in Redding, has to play it a little more cautious. As a result they actually achieve the detached, fairly objective view of things that the others pretend to by indulging in Commie Agitprop.

DIGRESSION:
Melanie: Amalia, here is a pretty, clean cup for you.
Erik: Actually it is a very clean cup that happens to be pretty.
Melanie: What did I say?
Erik: "Here is a pretty, clean cup for you." I just wasn't able to see the comma from where I am sitting.
Melanie: Amalia, he might be sick, but he is still a pain.
DIGRESSION OVER

For instance, the current exhibit about infrastructure shows the hidden water, energy, and landfill costs of building things (cities, subdivisions, etc.), but also amply shows the benefits to these things. The exhibit is also well designed, attractive, interesting, and full of great historical photos.

Bravo to Turtle Bay! If you are in Redding, definitely check them out (they also have a five foot long white sturgeon in their very cool Sacramento River tank).

Pablo Neruda

One hundred years ago today, Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto was born in Chile. Something happened to him fairly early on in life: in his own words, poetry arrived (read his poem about it below). He is better known by his pen name, which he later legally adopted, Pablo Neruda. He was a doctrinaire Communist, fought for the side of evil in the Spanish Civil War, received the Stalin Prize, and wrote some awful Commie doggerel here and there.

However, when he was good, he was very good. He could write poetry that sliced straight to the heart of the matter. His use of imagery can be startling, lyrical and chilling all at the same time. His poetry can be translated, although it does lose something when it is not in Spanish. Neruda is one of those artists, like Picasso, like David whose work and artistry transcends the artists’ reptilian philosophy. That is the crucial difference between Neruda and Paul Robeson: while Neruda still could tap into the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Robeson was nothing more than a bitter, nasty, ham actor and overblown minstrel singer. Even though both celebrated and loved Joseph Stalin, I can celebrate Neruda with a clear conscience.

Neruda also looked a lot like Philippe Noiret, one of my all time favorite actors, who played Neruda in Il Postino. Since Neruda was older, I suppose it is more correct to say that Noiret looks a lot like Neruda, but the resemblance is uncanny. The only closer resemblance I have seen in a biopic was Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock.

I found this translation of one of his poems on the Internet:

POETRY

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

SFMOMA

I just scanned Anna Conti's Site and was reminded that there is new stuff at SFMOMA. It looks like I need to make a trip. I missed the members' preview, because those things are not fun with a toddler. We need to go in the morning on a Tuesday or the paintings are lost in a sea of big people (imagine the view from a two-year old's perspective).

We did make a quick trip this afternoon to the Oakland Museum of California, where Amalia has a piece on display (a tile, to be precise. She was there with Melanie on a family craft day, and this was our first time to see it after firing. Lots of purple with some interesting sgraffito, all of which is symbolic in Amalia's highly personalized language: a squiggle for Mamma, a squiggle for Babbo, a squiggle for Nonna, a squiggle for Granddad, a squiggle that was created for Lorenzo (neighbor), but Amalia now denies. Mamma was there and heard it all, though. Let's not tell Lorenzo that Amalia changed her mind).

After viewing the tile, Amalia wanted to talk to the deer in the natural history section, so they went off there, and I went up to the art section. Got to spend some quality time in front of Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #107. I like just about all of the Ocean Park paintings, but this is one of my all time favorites, probably because I know it better than all the others, but also because it really is a superb painting.

I also spent some time looking at William Keith's middle period and the Society of Six. There was a contemporary art show and some of the pieces were moderately interesting, but only a few, and none were that interesting.

The Oakland Museum still has horrid lighting. If you have millions of dollars sitting around looking for a good home, they could use an updated lighting system (not to mention a whole bunch of other things - the history section could use a dusting off and updating, too).

The last big show I went to and did not blog about was the Art Deco show at the California Legion of Honor. It was good, although terrible crowded, and did not go into art deco architecture enough. It was a good reminder that the ideas of art deco were great in design but fairly lame in easel painting. If I felt more like writing about a design period that I am not too excited about, I would post a full review, but I don't, so I won't (I did mention being up until 3am, didn't I?).

So, if you are interested, go read Anna Conti's review of SFMOMA (she also links to the insipid Ken Baker, who I stopped reading years ago, but might be worth checking out for this one). I have read neither review so far, because I want to see it first, but I will read them and will review the thing myself after I see what they have done.

I have also resolved to make the rounds at the commercial galleries this summer. I have not done that for a long time, but it is worth doing. It at least gives me something to rant about.

Art pour l'art

Last night we dug into canti 10,11, and 12 of the Purgatorio. The topic of the artists and the arts came up, as it inevitably will when you encounter the Trajan's column of Humility. The notion of Art for the sake of Art (capital Art, to make is sound more Important) came up.

There was a day when I firmly upheld the notion of Art for the sake of Art, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am of even what it means. It sounds more and more like a slogan, and less and less like a tenable position.

Do we have cooking for the sake of cooking? Sorry, Cooking for the sake of Cooking? What would it be? We cook inedible food simply as homage to our techniques?

"Chef, this sauteed tire certainly shows off your skills on the line, and the knife work on the piece of oak is truly stunning, but what is for dinner?"

Art, if it is at all worth anything, must be towards some ends other than itself. Art for the purpose of resonating deep aesthetic realities is for the sake of that resonance within the human soul. It is not for the sake of the art itself.

Ulitmately I am more and more inclined to see visual arts as part of the realm of music than in the realm of rhetoric. One cannot persuade by art, and we should worry if one could.

At its most utilitarian political art is preaching to the choir or inflaming the enemy. It simply does not bring people around to the other side. I have never heard of someone seeing a painting, slapping his head and saying, "oh, I had it all wrong. David is right! Down with the King!"

At best, political art stands as art in spite of the political content. That way the Good, the True, and the Beautiful can be found in David or Mayakovski, in spite of their reprehensible positions on revolution.

It is perhaps the greatest slap in the face an artist has ever received from his own art that Bert Brecht's plays have become part of the canon of establishment theater, to be viewed by the wealthy without inciting them to revolution.

Art talk

I realized that I haven't done an art post for awhile, even though I have been more involved in making art in the last month than I have for quite some time. Then it dawned on me: when I am in furious art creation mode the arts thinking that I do is divided into craft issues and composition issues. The composition issues get thought about in the sketching and painting. By the time I am ready to discuss them, the art has to be dry and ready to leave the studio. Often I find that a theory does not work so well once it has hit the canvas, or at least needs adjustment. So rather than gush about some nifty way of dividing space or some interesting color management scheme, only to retract the whole thing later, I keep the talk about that sort of stuff to my studio and the one or two close artist friends who I force to listen.

As for the craft issues, I doubt that there is much of an audience for it. I might be wrong, but I really doubt that the average Rants and Recipes reader cares much about archival issues of multi-layered polychromed concrete sgraffito. Maybe you will want to see a picture when the piece is done, but I doubt that you really want to hear my worries over the technicalities here.

While I have been avoiding the First Thursdays like the plague, it is high time that I do a gallery circuit, and will have something to say about something out there (of course June and July are about the slowest for gallery activity, but there is less chance that I will run into one of the artworld creeps that I want to avoid). At the very least, I will be going to see the rehanging of SFMOMA's second floor, and have every reason to believe that I will be ranting about it for some time (I have a very set idea of how the permanent collection should be curated and hung, and I see some horrid trends in the administration there).

I was hoping to post something about a friend's open studio, but could not make it.

So, if you really need some art talk, why not debate amongst yourselves:

Is synthetic sizing as reliable as rabbit skin glue?
Are Isabey brushes worth it?
Should Iris Giclee prints be sold as bonafide fine art prints? Are they archival enough? Is the lack of control over the number of impressions troublesome?

Or pehaps tell a funny story about finding that your best painting has developed many cracks and the paint appears, after two years, to be seriously underbound. Har har har. Artist gallows humor for you.

Brief Update

I am just checking in to say "howdy." My to-do list is finally getting smaller, and I see the light at the end of the tunnel (until another blast of tasks comes my way). I am far too tired to write anything extensive for you, and I am sorry.

I will say this: for the last few months I have been very adrift in my painting. I start works only to lose interest in them. I have tried doing smaller works, but even there it has not been that fruitful. I have been spending most of my visual creative energy on art-related craft projects and have not really been able to focus on working canvases or panels to the extent that I have to in order to make a good painting.

Part of the problem has been that my own idea of what I want to get done in a painting has been shifting. This is a good thing, but it makes coherence rather difficult. One week I am thinking about Pierre Bonnard, the next about Giotto. The downside is that when one is in this mode, one tends to paint fairly insignificant works: when it comes down to it, no one really needs to see a Bonnard-inspired composition painted with Giotto's technique. Yawn. This is the stuff that art education is made of and has its place, but that place is not in a serious portfolio, much less a gallery wall.

The advantage to this mode of thinking is that it makes one think more generally about art theory. I have always held that good art theory explains why one finds pleasure in Lucien Freud as well as in a Diebenkorn Ocean Park. It should speak to Matisse AND Caravaggio.

When I see a landscape or a figure grouping and think about it in terms of various artists and styles, it forces me to take a more abstract view of art, particularly of composition. That makes me theorize, and theory is the scaffolding upon which good art is built (sorry to you Romantics out there who hold to blind, frenzied creation, but even the most ecstatic moments of Van Gogh were built on solid draughtsmanship and good principles of composition).

Hopefully something interesting will come of this, but I will definitely be focusing in on an exploration of composition in one particular direction. Maybe it will last for ten years, maybe ten weeks, but I am finally seeing some sense of direction to my painting, something that has been lacking for the past three years.

If I figure out how to do it, someday I will post some images on this site (or on another site). I have to admit that learning how to do all that computery stuff is pretty low on my priorities these days.

Painting in and out of a corner

I had a late night conversation with another artist friend the other night. We were discussing didacticism in painting. He had another artist critique his current work and she warned him of didacticism. It instantly made sense, as this friend's paintings are heavily loaded with narrative and images of his childhood and the like (as a Diebenkorn-influenced abstractionist, this is something I don't worry about too much in my own work), and it is easy to cross the line into trying to paint some sort of polemic when this is what one is doing.

I realized that we tend to think of didactic art as just so much agitprop, but I think that is the wrong way to identify the error of didacticism. So I came up with what I think is the simplest way to describe it: An attempt to use the pictorial medium of painting primarily to convey an argument (or subject) that is better made with words.

Didacticism is an error because it wastes time. Why risk the ambiguity when one could make a clear argument in writing or speech. I see Judy Chicago and giggle. A feminist with integrity sees Judy Chicago and rolls her eyes. A feminist who does not understand art or who lacks integrity says "right on!" An anti-feminist who does not understand art sees Judy Chicago and calls his favorite am radio talk show. Judy Chicago's work is the epitome of preaching to the choir (although I know of a church where the choir should be preached at - the danger of a professional choir).

Same with Thomas Hart Benton. Without the verbal arguments being made, all you have is incredibly poor illustration. However, with both Judy Chicago and Thomas Hart Benton we are still dealing with agitprop. Didacticism can be manifested even in the banal. Our dismay at how our siblings are living their lives, our likes and dislikes of avocado ice cream, all of this can cause the error of didacticism in painting.

Once we start trying to say something that can be better said in words, we are wasting energy trying to do with paint what words are better suited to do.

The second problem with this error is that didacticism begets didacticism. Once we are trying to make verbal arguments with paint, we end up wanting to reject our work if we change our minds. I might realize that I was wrong about avocado ice cream or wrong about Roosevelt, and if the painting is PRIMARILY about my argument against avocado ice cream or for FDR, then I am stuck with the temptation to change the painting or to destroy it.

Now, we can fight didacticism by attempting to reduce the argument to something that can be realized in paint, but then we either are back to preaching to the choir or we are in the dangerous territory of emotionalizing important issues without dealing with the rational basis of them. Purely emotional responses to anything, from politics and religion to how we FEEL about the way our parents' treated us tend towards a swamp of more emotions. I have yet to find that a purely emotive response ever solves any deep-seated issue.

So my advice to my friend was to pick subject matter that is completely without any sort of narrative loading. I told him to go buy $10 of fruit and a stack of cheap canvas boards and spend the next two months on quantity, to produce a lot of quickly-rendered paintings that have almost no deep emotional value. Basically, I think that any artist who risks getting bogged down in story-telling or political argument needs to forge for himself a retreat and get back to the basics of painting. Then, one may judiciously reintroduce the dangerous stuff. Otherwise the temptation to make poor arguments with paint always lurks.

A similar problem is found in conceptual art. When the concept is greater than the aesthetic experience of the remnants of the piece (here I allow my admiration to show for conceptual art that leaves behind beautiful photographs or other such relics), what we have tends to balance between bad art and bad literature. Heap political argument on top and all you do is plaster on a veneer of shoddy politics.

I realize that the standard retort to this is that apolitical art is inherently political, and I say AMEN. The only thing that art can successfully argue is the richness of the aesthetic experience itself. I have never had my mind changed by a work of art, and I find myself generally embarassed by didactic art that I agree with: "Gee, he's making a point, but by reducing the point to pictoral and emotive content, he is blowing any chance of generating a strong philosophical argument. I wish he had left this to writers."

Comment away!

Pipilotti Rist

One of the more interesting things at SFMOMA yesterday was a video installation by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. I want to see it again before writing a grown up review, but from a toddlers' perspective, the piece in which a figure in Hell is seen through a rough hole in the floor begging for help was a hit. The little screen was about two inches accross and was the only thing in the darkened room. It made me want to make a little "glimpse of Hell" display for each of the Canti in Inferno.

And, if you think Pop Art is bad...

On the fifth floor of SFMOMA was an exhibit of works from the 1990's from the Logan collection. Most of it was standard issue trendoid art junk: cow's head in fluid, kitschy paintings with "subversive" elements, etc.

They say that if you give a man enough rope... well, the arts establishment has a veritable Rube Goldberg contraption for its gallows. These works, from all over the world, show Western art in a terrible state of crisis, which brings to mind Bishop Wang's homily on the Easter Vigil.

His Excellency pointed out that the word for crisis in Chinese has the same root as the word for opportunity. I don't think that artists have ever had such an opportunity to rebuild art as in the last 30 years. There are a few brave souls making interesting paintings, but for the most part the mainstream art scene has put itself (not painted itself, because much of this crap is in assemblage and photography and whatnot) into a corner. There is no way out in the current direction. When these folks say that "painting is dead" what they mean is that painting as dictated by theoreticians for the past 40 years is dead. It was dead on arrival, actually, but the last gasps of the dinosaur prove how dead it is.

Pop Art is still silly.

In case anyone was wondering whether Pop Art looks any better after 30-40 years, let me answer: no. I went to the SFMOMA Pop Art retrospective today and found the usual suspects. There were some good paintings in the bunch, but one could easily argue that they are fundamentally different than the main body of Pop Art.

So, first the good:

Thiebaud. They were displaying about five Thiebauds, all of them excellent. I continue to find his paint handling, his composition, his use of color as exciting as ever. Two of the works were from the early 60's, and showed vestiges of his earlier abstract period (in terms of paint handling, not in terms of subject matter). I do prefer Thiebaud's more recent paintings (from the 1980's on), but these pastries and gumball machines are still fantastic.

Is Thiebaud a Pop Artist? Well, no. He paints landscapes, still lifes and portraits. The fact that his still life subjects are found in daily life is not a remarkable trait. All still life subjects (or at least most) tend to be of objects found in daily life. Why tag it as Pop Art simply because the daily life depicted is in the late 20th century?

Robert Arneson. Arneson, like Thiebaud, depicts daily objects, but with a humor that is not as apparent in Thiebaud's work. Calling him a Pop Artist almost works in terms of calling Oldenberg a Pop Artist, but there is something fundamentally different in how they approach the objects they are depicting. Oldenberg's use of monumental size might be seen as ironic (a term that is horridly overused), but Arneson is using the objects to provide form for his own peculiar visions of the world. So a closer comparison (not stylisticly however) would be to Picasso. Was Picasso a Pop Artist when he used his leftover sole bones in a ceramic work? Of course not, and neither is Arneson a Pop Artist because he made a ceramic sculptural fantasy on a typewriter.

Ed Kienholtz. I am bugged by this artist simply because his name is too close to mine. If you have an oddball last name, you should at least have the consolation of not having other folks in the field with a similar sounding name. OK, he was first, but so what? I do like his work a lot. Is it Pop? Maybe. But then again, what is Pop Art anyway?

If we have to peg it as a movement, then it must be scene through the eyes of Andy Worhol, and I hate seeing anything through his eyes. Yuck. But more on him later.

Mel Ramos. Another Sacramentan. Since he paints things like superheroes and supermodels, he might actually deserve the tag Pop Art, for what it is worth. His paint handling and compositional sense set him light years ahead of Warhol, though.

Now the Bad:

Warhol. Yawn. His work was never interesting. If we are to denigrate the genre of still life, then all of the criticisms of the genre belong in Warhol's lap (notice that the main purveyors of schlock art ALL have lots of Warhol prints, along with that Neiman or Neumann or whatever the horrid Sports Illustrated painter's name is). However, the less said about this most overrated artist the better. They had Brillo boxes and soup cans and Liz Taylor and all the other crap there.

Lichtenstein. More boring formula from a man with a mildly interesting idea carried way too far.

I will see the show for a second time (hopefully with Amalia asleep so that I can take a longer look) and will post a more thorough review then.

Dali

I have to admit that I have been fairly hard on the Catalans recently, mostly because of their preposterous recent positions on taurine culture. From listening to the ranting from Barcelona, you would think that they should establish Course Comarguese. However, what they are really doing is flashing a contemptable trans-Alpine (trans-Pyranee in this case) cosmopolitanism, a persistant curse and blessing of Barcelona.

Part of what makes Barcelona a vibrant city is this cosmopolitanism, but that vibrancy is won at the expense of armies of Commies and sexual degenerates that run rampant through the Western corner of the Occitan world. Barcelona was one of the last holdouts against El Caudillo, so I will always look at them with a dose of suspicion.

In my book, Catalonia partially redeems herself with the work of three artists: Gaudi, Miro and Dali. Each one is as close to a definition of Catalan as one can get.

So, partly because I admire the author of this article, partly because I have to give some credit to these folks (I ranted about their most recent disgraceful political performance this morning, so it is fair that I post something good about them).

The article is here and the link was brought to my attention by Fr. Tucker. Enjoy.

Minimalism at the Guggenheim

Modern Art Notes does it again with a great capsule of the minimalism show at the Guggenheim. While I tend to disagree with the common wisdom that places Robert Ryman in the camp of the minimalists, he is found in the show, and that is always a good thing. Personally I would not quibble with Ryman's inclusion in a show of Fra Angelico.

Anyway, Tyler Green offers some great insight into the Ryman Surface Veil pieces.

Ryman is a difficult artist. You simply cannot get what he is doing with a fast pass in front of the canvas. I have mentioned before in this space that when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened its new museum, they had a whole room dedicated solely to Ryman. I loved to walk in there and just move at my own pace, which in galleries tends to be slow; snails find me a bit too pokey.

After a few years, SFMOMA recycled the space and it is now full of po-mo garbage like Gerhardt Richter and little art school homages to grafitti and the like. I want my Ryman room back!

An interesting and sad thing about the room was the number of people who would walk in, take an incredibly superficial look and move on. These are the catalog and textbook people. They are ticking off from a mental checklist: oh, the Duchamp urinal, check. Matisse portrait with green stripe, check. An Albers square, check.

Since most textbooks have a terribly wrong view of modern art, these folks inevitably pay attention to the wrong things, which they barely see anyway. I would chalk it up to their own loss except that this mindset all too often governs the curatorial decisions. Certainly the blockbuster show is a symptom of this banal approach to art (although I will maintain to the bitter end that a banal approach to art is better than ignoring it altogether - I would rather have the Average Joe come to the museum to rush through a Chagall show than have him never come to a mueum at all).

Anyway, now that the buzz is gone from minimalism, it is a great time to take it in without the inflated hype. Some of the greats of minimalism continue to stand as strong artists, and they are worth a second (third, fourth, fifth...)long look.

Very Funny

I hate gallery openings with a passion. I also can't stand the First Thursday deals where you go from scene to scene, I mean, gallery to gallery and have to wade through tons of irritating hipsters. With the current state of contemporary art (I am talking mainstream here, I find plenty of good artists out there, but they aren't showing at the biggies for the most part) the art itself is depressing and made more so by the inane conversation that goes on, both in person and by a lot of art critics.

I talk about art a lot. I spend a lot of time with artists. I look at art. I make art. But I hate artspeak, because most of it is based on a completely useless notion of progress in art, the misunderstanding of how art is supposed to challenge the viewer, and the fact that artspeak cliches are nothing more than fashionable little phrases, designed as a sort of currency for other arts fashionistas.

So it was with particular joy that I encountered this little guide to art fairs on Modern Art Notes. Read it and weep (or giggle, either reaction is appropriate).

New Link

I have checked out Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes before, and have no idea why I did not add him to the links.

In reading his blog today I found this tidbit about Paul Wonner. I agree with him wholeheartedly that Wonner's early work was interesting, with broad, painterly strokes, the verve of which contrasted with the sort of unease of his subject matter. Later, he started painting these qaint little still lives in crisply rendered lines. They are formulaic, boring, and rarely worth the time spent taking a good look at them (I have spent a lot of time at it and have come away feeling like I should have been looking at Thiebaud instead).

Wonner will ultimately be remembered as a third-tier Bay Area Figurative painter, who, along with Joan Brown and Nathan Oliveira, showed extraordinary promise in the heady days of early Bay Area Figurative Painting, but never was able to really keep it up.

For me, the Joan Brown retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California was a real eye-opener in this way (as a recent Nathan Oliveira show was), in that it was clear that at some point she lost her artistic vision and substituted it for an insipid private language of domestic affairs. For Oliveira, he has shown sparks here and there, but Brown never did (and quite frankly her Bay Area Figurative stuff was always second rate to begin with - I suspect that a great deal of her reputation hinged on the fact that she was a women and was married (for all of a year or so) to Manuel Neri).

Anyway, this Green fellow hits the nail on the head, so I am linking to him. Go read some good arts writing!

Question Two

Question Number Two. What famous painting would you wish out of existence?

This is a really tough question. I am inclined to want to delete scads of crap: Warhol, Koons, Newman, Schnabel, Kinkade (although he is so much in the realm of product rather than art that I probably would have to let him be handled by another branch of the Keilholtz Police – sort of an additional insult to him that the Keilholtz Art Police would consider him outside of their jurisdiction). However there is always a temptation to “get at the root” and try to stamp out the error in the bud, hence the Pre-Raphaelites wanting to get back to where art was pure and build from there.

If there is one constant in the arts it is that an idea comes about, gets explored to the point where everyone is a little sick of it, it is pushed around and expanded in order to breathe new life into it, until a new generation comes around and rejects the whole thing.

When we look at the glory of the beaux arts style of architecture, it seems incomprehensible that Gropius et al would have rejected it, but to understand their rejection we need to look at how tired it had become. In just about any American city one can find at least one stunningly ugly example of beaux arts building. In Berkeley one need only walk onto the University of California campus to see a whole assortment of grotesque, gray buildings, buildings that scream empty pomp and bluster and are completely without charm or beauty. Now, when we want to look for tired ideas, we need look no farther than the contemporary modernists (and their pomo offspring), so young architects are looking to the pre-Bauhaus for the pure and noble.

Being human, we see these changes and get all caught up in the spirit of the times and dualist thinking and come to some pretty laughable conclusions: idea X [as observed and lived in its late, degenerate form] is inherently bad and to recover beauty we must go back to idea pre-X and start all over. Artists certainly do this, but they always do it within a tradition that was passed to them through the dreaded idea X, so their rhetoric is tempered by the realities of craftsmanship. Thus Picasso may have started a revolution of sorts, but there is always something of Puvis de Chavannes lurking beneath the surface.

Critics tend to really fall into this trap, because they tend to either have never had the experience of craft (and many of them really don’t know how to take a deep look at the painting, or a good listen to a piece of music anyway) or they have fallen away from it. So they are the ones that tend towards foolish statements, blaming so-and-so for the state of such and such a genre. Often artists fall into these traps because they listen too much to critics (note that I am not arguing against any reading of arts criticism, rather believing anything that is contradicted by and irreconcilable with direct experience). In certain cases the artists were simply nodding, because they did not think about it long enough, or they were sick of trying to correct misconception, or that they found that the critical rhetoric boosted sales.

When artists start to blame the degeneracy of an idea on the idea itself, they often retreat to some mythical ideal, when all was pure and wonderful. For the Florentine Camerata this was the ancient Greeks (although their citing of the Greeks was nothing more than a vague notion of singing dramas – they had no idea what the Greeks were actually doing in music). The happy result was opera.

The result rarely looks anything like the sources being emulated (except by hacks who slavishly imitate older forms to make their pastiches), so the Pre-Raphaelites do not look like Giotto, Monteverdi does not make musical archaeology, and so forth.

When I think of trying to banish one painting from the collective memory, my first tendency is to fall into this trap and try to find where “art went off the rails.” I could pick Warhol, or more logically, Duchamp, or even Toulouse Lautrec. However, I cannot really say that Duchamp caused Warhol, or that the inevitable end of German Expressionism is the silliness that is Schnabel.

Since it is foolish to wish simply one Warhol out of existence, and not all of them, I will have to abandon this route.

OGIC thinks that perhaps some overexposed painting like Munch’s Scream that has been reproduced and commercialized to death should vanish. I disagree. Make the coffee mugs and T-shirts and clever cartoons vanish, not the painting. Here we have an example of a painting continuing to resonate with viewers, and I have no impulse to try to stop that.

All of this leads us to content. I suppose that if I were to wish a painting out of existence, it would have to be because the painting is patently blasphemous, nothing more than immoralizing agitprop, completely lacks artistic merit and serves as a rallying point for the Enemy. The painting that springs immediately to mind is the elephant dung painting that was in the news awhile back. Or perhaps the posters of ACT-UP.

There is the personal vendetta school: any painting that gets the attention of the public before one of mine is going to be something that I would want gone, even if it were a great painting. If I were in a group show and someone else’s work were attracting the attention of buyers, you can bet that that other person’s work would come into the crosshairs of my Imaginary Vaporizer. It is not a pretty thing to admit about yourself, but when it comes down to it, the arts are pretty competitive, and artists struggle for crumbs. I might admire a painter at the same time that I am thinking, “ugh, now I have to contend with THAT!”

Mel Gibson

I have to say that I agree with Elinor on the strange glee that is pervading the Catholic world (cyber and otherwise) over Mel Gibson's The Passion. I will preface these remarks by saying that I have not seen the film and am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And certainly the historical facts of the Passion itself are not really contested by sedevacantists, so I am probably less skeptical than if Gibson had made a film that had more of a potential of error.

However, I will (if I decide to go see it, which is a matter of more factors than simply wanting to see it or not) be on guard for errors of interpretation. I am skeptical of the film, as I have yet to see a Gibson film that was really that great. Overblown productions just do not do it for me. I prefer Italian neo-realism to the sort of films Gibson normally is associated with.

What gets me, though, is the gush that is coming out about the film (another thing that tends to put me on guard, as gushed about films tend to fade in the memory mighty quickly - does anyone remember much about that awful Dances with Wolves?). Elinor is right. If some whack-job fringite who was not a handsome and famous Hollywood type made the film, would Catholics be as ecstatic over it? I doubt it.

Certainly Catholics are not immune to bad taste, nor to the charms of overblown productions. There are plenty of good Catholics who think that Spielbarf makes good films. As the visiting bishop told Don Quixote in Greene's Monsignor Quixote, "holiness is not a guarantee of good taste in literature." Or film, for that matter (The Lord of the Rings films come to mind, although I have yet to see the Return of the King - number two was dull enough, albeit visually stunning, as I am sure number three is).

I am not suggesting that one must be a good Catholic or even a good person to make good art. Mozart, David, Mahler, and countless others stand as evidence of that. But it seems that Catholics are gushing over the film because Gibson has Catholic sentiments, including Catholics who find my own Triumphalism to be hopelessly passe in this age of ecumenicism. Perhaps Gibson has created great art, in spite of himself (as it often is the case), but I am just as guarded about it as I would be if the film were made by a Protestant.

If we are going to exercise tribal loyalties, let us at least have the integrity to keep it actually within the tribe.