Stumbled Upon

On painting:

“think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.”

Gza Grants

MacArthur grants (a brief history here) are those kind of hazy, far-off dreams that not only cement one’s reputation, but one’s pocketbook as well. And it is always interesting to see who walks away with the prize(s).

This year’s recipients were:

Chimamanda Adichie 31, writer
Will Allen, 59, urban farmer
Regina Benjamin, 51, rural family physician
Kirsten Bomblies, 34, plant evolution geneticist
Tara Donovan, 38, sculptor (work pictured)
Wafaa El-Sadr, 58, infectious disease physician
Andrea Ghez, 43, astrophysicist
Stephen Houston, 49, anthropologist /epigrapher
Mary Jackson, 63, fiber artist (work pictured)
Leila Josefowicz, 30, violinist
Alexei Kitaev, 45, physicist /computer scientist
Walter Kitundu,35, instrument maker and composer
Susan Mango, 47, developmental biologist
Diane Meier, 56, geriatrician
David Montgomery, 46, geomorphologist
John Ochsendorf, 34, structural engineer/architectural preservationist
Peter Pronovost, 43, critical care physician
Adam Riess, 38, astronomer
Alex Ross, 40, music critic
Nancy Siraisi, 76, historian of medicine
Marin Soljacic, 34, optical physicist
Sally Temple, 49, neuroscientist
Jennifer Tipton, 71, stage lighting designer
Rachel Wilson, 34, experimental neurobiologist
Miguel Zenón, 31, saxophonist


I believe that a great part of the appeal for those of us who think about the MacArthur grant is its out-of-the-blueness. Because the process is a secret, reciepients typically aren’t aware that they are even up for selection, until they get the call.

I was particulary interested in the two artists who were selected. I am interested in them because of the materiality of their work.

Mary Jackson is a fiber artist from Charleston, South Carolina, and a decendant of the Gullah community there. She uses traditional sweetgrass weaving methods and materials to create vessels that are both functional, and forward-looking. The resources she uses are renewable, and the artist also leads efforts to protect the threatened wetland habitats of sweetgrass and ensure continued local access to these resources.

Tara Donovan’s work also uses the seemingly commonplace; using everyday, often disposable objects, the artist transforms spaces with geological and biological overtones.

I mention both of these artists because I see sympathy to their thought process and approach in the works of Billie McCray and Mark Creegan. Zeitgeist in the air?

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

The other day, the magazine Humanities (the published arm of the NEH) ran an article that took a look at the ideas of Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) and Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978). Dubbing them the Ali and Frazier of the Abstract Expressionist era, the article cursorily sums up each man’s view. Though their arguments now have the dated tone of ideas whose time has come and gone, it is nonetheless instructive as we today still wrestle with the ideological leavings of the 40s-70s.

In fact, the author writes, “...American modern art reached its apex in the 1950s through the flowering of Abstract Expressionism, art criticism achieved a glittering purity of its own—a beautiful high criticism perfectly matched to the period of high art.” This discussion is timely: the Jewish Museum has mounted a show (underwritten by the NEH), Action/Abstraction, which mounts works by “rival godheads,” Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and fine works by (notably) Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, and later painters like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and successors Jasper Johns, Frank Stella.

However, interspersed in the exhibit, writes Peter Schjeldahl, “abundant texts, photographs, and memorabilia. Film clips display the men’s differently impressive rhetorical panache: Greenberg is incisive and imperious, Rosenberg droll and oracular. (Parallel shots witness Pollock dripping and de Kooning stroking).”

In considering the show, one must cede the point that both Rosenberg and Greenberg were wonderfully logical writers, and highly influential thinkers. But now, we deal with their ideological detritus that asks writers to quantify, qualify and organize art...possibly/probably to our disadvantage.

As writers and essayists decry the obtuse and often seemingly nonsensical art writing of the present, we (as artists, writers, performers...) are left defending a position that though defensible, sometimes begs the question, why.

No, this is not a call for art and by extension art-writing to become incredibly accessible (art is elite, good art even more so), it is however, a call for truth in writing. Sometimes, a work is successful purely on its aesthetic merits...and that is enough. Placing artworks in a larger, social/political, cultural context is always instructive, but not always necessary.

That being said, it is worth noting that it took this writer 351 words to spit that idea out.

It is the ability to defend and explain that should be nurtured, not the need to endlessly do so. That way, when one is on a plane and forced into a conversation with a seatmate who argues the old trope "My kid could paint like Jackson Pollock," the line, "But little Sally didn't," can thrust home...leaving one in peace.



Pictured top: Greenberg, de Kooning, Rosenberg

Bottom: The Irascibles protest their exclusion from a New York exhibition in 1950. Back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne; middle row: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; front row: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko. —Photographed by Nina Leen, Getty Images

The Pen, The Sword, Lost and Found?

John Ruskin is widely acknowledged to be the father of art criticism. And though he wrote in a time, and of place in a manner that largely reflected a concern for the aesthetic nature of an item (be it building or painting) it was his writings that largely are said to have brought art appreciation (or theories of it anyway) to the masses.

Later in life, he suffered from mental disease that rendered his writings more and more incomprehensible, and was also in love with a girl (Rose LaTouche) many years his junior. Famously his first marriage (before he met Rose) was annulled because of his impotence. Ever since, the rumor has been that because his nude wife did not bear a hairless resemblance to the Greek and Roman nudes he’d studied, he could not perform.

However, his dictum, “that art was essentially concerned to communicate an understanding of nature, and that authentic artists should reject inherited conventions in order to appreciate and study effects of form and colour by direct observation,” is still felt today. He said, “go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing and selecting nothing.”

I mention him here and now because he was recently name-checked in an article that wittily decries the overburdensome texts accompanying this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Culling other writers' quotes, Eric Gibson waxes rather poetic about the mind-numbing, circular gibberish that accompanied this year’s show. Though I know that I've gone on about the dangers of artspeak before, Gibson does a really wonderful job of illustrating why it is so dully dangerous.

Perfect Coffee, Every Time

Coffeemakers are ugly. They sit on kitchen counters like cranky gargoyles that are good for only one thing: infusing the senses with a clanging energy--a bullet in the brain.

For most of the Western world, I’d hazard a guess that a morning cup of coffee looks less like watery, bitter mud, and more like salvation in a cup. However, as a confirmed non-drinker of the stuff, I see the coffeemaker perched on my counter less as harbinger of the day-as-yet-unfolded, and more like an assault on the already limited aesthetics of my kitchen (a former crackhouse we’re trying to restore to wholeness).

So when I wandered into Nestliving a few days ago, I was thrilled to discover that they carry the Chemex brand coffee maker. I’d been researching this product for awhile: in addition to the wonderfully simple lines of the mid-century-esque carafe, it supposedly makes the best cup of coffee in the world. And for those of us who like to support good design but have limited means, the 6-cup version (which is for sale at Nest) is a reasonable $33.00. The same price as the website, but sans shipping.

Since I was so pleased with my find, I got to chatting with the owner Shaan Batten. Though admittedly I was a little suspicious as well: the shop seemed to be very similar to Roost, which was in 5 Points a few years ago. I felt a little defensive for Roost, not least because I count its former proprietor, Tonya Lee, among my friends.

However, after Shaan let me wave my arms around and shout about ideas of authenticity and opportunism (okay, I just did that in my head, in reality I brought up the similarity to Roost in a very civilized manner), it turned out I was being ridiculous (a condition I'm pretty used to). Shaan said that he’d taken pains to not carry the same lines as Roost had, and, that his impression had been that the Roost space had been more experimental than what he was attempting to do. And I had to concede the point, in fact, Tonya herself once said, “The shop was never to generate revenue…it was an extension of my obsession with paintings; just more disposable decorative objects.”

Plus, it is really nice to have a shop selling modern-wares in the neighborhood again—it feels like a commitment not just to design that for purely aesthetic reasons feels contemporary, but to design that functions with people. That’s really the crux of good design whether contemporary or Modern: design that functions within the rubric of its time and place.

Sometimes, there is also hope that thoughtful, deliberate, design can begin to permeate other aspects of life…if we were to all become more present and aware, who knows what changes could be wrought? Maybe just golden tiger wallpaper in the dining room…maybe a whole new way of thinking.

So, does that coffeemaker make the best coffee I’ve ever tasted? I don’t know. But it does look wonderful with cut flowers in it.

Incidentally, there's a Grand Opening party at the shop on the 24th. Go out and show some love.

*click on the title to go to Nestliving's webpage.

To the Moon (or not)

image copyright Gary Larson

Over the past nine or ten months, I’ve had a few people ask me why I call this project Art Isn’t Rocket Science. And my answer is two-part-ish:

1. It is a Dave Hickey quote. Actually, it’s a quote he attributes to a friend of his that is like a hero of old. Briefly paraphrased it says: “Past his personal idiosyncrasy that delights in irony and absurdity, she believes in truth in all its ideological/mythological glory, and justice, both karmic and the kind that is meted out physically.” It’s a statement wherein I recognize my own penchant for windmill-tilting...and I do not think I am entirely alone.

2. It is a reminder--to myself--to resist the seduction of the dogmatic proselytizing of my own opinions. Sadly, I am not always successful.

So when I ran across the above cartoon, it reminded me not just of my own theory of art criticism…but of various pathetic projects I have mounted and seen mounted. The tender ministrations of artist attempts (on occasion) to craft a functioning object are sometimes enlightening, often humorous, and I think they only occasionally make it to the moon. Not nearly as often as NASA. Of course, that presupposes that one believes in the moon landing...

Anyway, no, art is not rocket science.

Quiet Resonance

When I first moved to Jacksonville, a million years ago, I was appalled at what I thought was worse than a dearth of art and culture, a void of art and culture. Those things weren't missed here because they never had been known here. Or so I arrogantly thought.

Then one of the first artists I became aware of was David Engdahl. An architect by trade, Engdahl builds sculptures with the most archaic of tools, resulting in works that are by turns sublime, straightforward, and somewhat redolent of the ’70s.

Engdahl’s work is the natural outcome of the ideology prevalent in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, that is sometimes hard to see built renditions of in an atmosphere that increasingly finds itself bound by code and regulation. Not to mention the arrival of the McMansion…

With his work, Engdahl is able to explore those forms that once seemed to herald the arrival of a new way of thinking about living…a thought process (I believe anyway) that is shared by architects Bob Broward, Bill Morgan, and Taylor Hardwick. Forms that mirror nature and are designed to work with the land, not to struggle against it.

In his studio, Engdahl’s tools, covered with a fine silt of sawdust sit as unprepossessing witnesses to his quiet process. A process that involves a monk’s portion of patience, and the willingness to distill forms to their most basic parts. In his most successful works, a simple form that references nature and logic in equal parts engages that part of the viewer’s mind that delights in the slope of a leaf, the sway of a boat’s hull, or the curled horns of a bighorn sheep.

So I was utterly delighted when an invitation to Engdahl’s April 11 show, “David Engdahl Sculpture,” arrived in today’s mail. The show, at the Ponte Vedra Cultural Center, opens on April 11, 6:30-8:00 p.m. I plan on going and taking in some tangible quiet.

Ponte Vedra Cultural Center, 50 Executive Way, Ponte Vedra, 280-0614.

All The Chandeliers Were Lit

Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were a bicoastal pair of wunderkinds whose work (collaborative and separate) was tapped first by the powers-that-be in the NYC artworld (they were both featured in the Whitney Biennale--in different years), and next by Hollywood.

However, as a couple they descended into paranoid delusions of persecution which ultimately claimed both of their lives last summer. So why talk about this couple now? Because Vanity Fair just did an in-depth story on Jeremy Blake, which only awakened question of Theresa Duncan in my mind. Probably because death, especially by one's own hand is the ultimate act of deliberation; it is wholly undo-able. Unlike other debacles where one can rise again, and wipe off a scandal-tainted smudge, there is no returning from a bottle of pills or the undertow off of Rockaway Beach.

The above video is from Blake's piece, Winchester 2000 (based on the house built by the heiress to the Winchester fortune, a house she never stopped building out of penance for all the lives Winchester rifles had take--this topic was also of huge interest to Duncan) while if you click on the title link, it will take you to an animated movie (40 mins), The History of Glamour, that Duncan made in 1999.

Though both pieces are video works, they are hugely disparate: Blake's is like a collage come to life that bleeds in and out of conciousness; while, Duncan's piece though visual, relies on a witty and insightful narrative that elegantly skewers fame and the idea of glamour itself...long before the Devil dreamed of wearing Prada.

Both pieces are elegant elegies, even if they were made at the hight of happiness. The pieces are suffused with undertones of sadness and dissonance that in light of their creators' choices seem fitting...if nothing else.

Cerca Trova: art history mystery

Listening to NPR today, they mentioned that a long lost mural of Leonardo da Vinci (500 years lost) The Battle of Anghiari has possibly been located. With clues that include a passage in a diary, and the phrase "cerca trova" the story unfolds like something out of a Dan Brown novel. "Cerca trova," which, translates roughly to "search and you will find," was painted on a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio by Giorgio Vasari. It is believed that Vasari painted over da Vinci's mural because after he completed it (at the suggestion of Niccolo Machiavelli...yes, that Machiavelli), that the ruling family was displeased with the image because it depicted the folly, not the glory of war.

But there's more to the story: originally, the mural was to be coupled with another scene of war by an artist half da Vinci's age, Michelangelo. But this artistic battle of an era was never to happen, Michelangelo was lured to Rome by the pope, and da Vinci left his mural unfinished to go work for the king of France.

There is certainly enough extant da Vinci information for study. However, the more interesting facet of this story is the idea that da Vinci was painting an anti-war message for one of the most powerful families in Italy. It might force a re-imagining/thinking of political art...or at least a little revision? 

*the pictured image is one of da Vinci's preparatory drawings for the mural.