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.