from the outside

[People Looking at Political Posters on Street, Paris]

Rudy Burckhardt  (American (born Switzerland), Basel 1914–1999 Searsmont, Maine)

Date: 1934

Medium: Gelatin silver print

Dimensions: Image: 16 x 23.7 cm (6 5/16 x 9 5/16 in.) 18.9 x 24.9 cm (7 7/16 x 9 13/16 in.) Classification: Photographs

Credit Line: Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2009

Accession Number: 2009.278 Rights and Reproduction:

© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

17 highly personal reasons that I’m conflicted about the teacher’s strike...

1. teachers must be highly compensated when they do good work
2. everyone who has a job must be evaluated at some point
3. individuals who cannot fulfill the requirements should be retrained or replaced
4. the battling egos of karen lewis and rahm emmanuel... rahm you’re short, karen you’re fat...get over it and think about the kids
5. there weren’t student teaching opportunities at my graduate school, because the school’s faculty union prohibited them (as we were told by our department chair)
6. teachers should not be considered daycare providers, social workers or medical practitioners
7. I have applied to more than 600 jobs in the past two years and have only recently become a part-time employee earning not quite twice minimum wage
8. if you exhibit at mccormick place you are not allowed to plug into an electrical socket or move a table even six inches, the union has to do it - and they’ll charge you for it
9. parents need to be responsible for what their children do - not teachers
10. 12.5 million people are unemployed in the united states
11. “absolute power corrupts absolutely”
12. in general, negotiation means compromise on both sides - this isn’t about “breaking” either side - i highly doubt that either the chicago school board or teacher’s union will be voting for the republican party - and if you’re voting for the green party - well i have no words
13. books absolutely need to be provided the first day of class - shame on the Board of Ed
14. the NATO summit - what a colossal cluster and waste of time and resources
15. if standardized tests don’t accurately assess current curriculum, either the test, or the curriculum need to change
16. there should be air conditioning in all public schools, but you’re going to have to reform the entire system of municipal building codes, permit acquisition and construction in the city to do this...good luck with that...(yes, talk to any architect who has worked on the city’s education facilities)
17. I had a plumber walk out of my apartment because we had installed our own dishwasher 15 years before...because it was not union installed. never mind that the job for which we needed him had nothing to do with said dishwasher

i will support the union because i am a liberal and unions are the only institution where many individuals can be treated and compensated fairly - i just wish we lived in a country where individuals were respected in such a way that unions were no longer necessary.

memorial

Today is Memorial Day. Originally conceived to honor fallen Union soldiers after the Civil War, the holiday now honors all members of the U.S. Armed Forces who paid the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.

In 2005 we went to France. Paris was the main goal as we had wanted to experience it together for a long time, but we decided to begin our trip in Normandy. I’m so glad we did.

Seeing the tiny ribbon that is Omaha Beach and the lovingly cared-for graves of 9,387 soldiers that are buried there was a deeply moving experience. We were both moved to tears, and talk about that trip every Memorial Day. I’ve experienced the same complex emotions while visiting our National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. There, almost all of the graves are identical. A military cook may be found buried next to a Colonel.

I am neither celebrating nor criticizing war. It is a terrible thing, I’m certain the 400,000 individuals buried at Arlington would attest to that. Every American should be required to visit Arlington. Perhaps it might give us some perspective when we plan the activities of our holiday celebrations, and what we might pause to consider during them.

And to those that have served, thank you.

the till is dry...

Last Fall I again experienced the semi-vagabond life, having been granted two significant artist residencies.  Thank you to both Oxbow and Ragdale for seven weeks and more fodder than I can possibly paint in the next several years. I am particularly focused on the work addressing truth and fiction in memory and nostalgia.

Because my mind is preoccupied with the visual work at hand, I am finding it hard to put pen to paper for blog content. (Yes, I often write long-hand.) Frankly, it's been a struggle to write since my return to Chicago in 2010. I don't want Art & Thinking to drift away, but have had to seriously consider its future. What to do, what to do....

Eureka! 

Among new and old friends, peers, and acquaintances there are some seriously talented writers. Thus, I am inviting submissions to Art & Thinking. I cannot pay you, but will fully credit you and provide a brief bio. The work can be fact or fiction, poetry, prose, criticism, and/or opinion. My only caveat being that it concern contemporary culture and the arts - preferably those visual.  Submissions should not exceed 1000 words. Please DO NOT submit writing that could substitute as a press release for your upcoming event  - we can include that information in you bio. 

In addition, I want to profile visual artists and their work. Here, I must admit, preference will be given to Chicago-area artists. But anyone may submit.  Artists should submit a link to their website, an artists statement and a CV.

Please submit materials, questions. and/or comments to artandthinking@gmail.com.  I will then contact you to discuss the post.

Hope to see you here!

rest ye merry gentlemen

Child with Christmas Card
Alden Finney Brooks ( 1840 - 1932)
Watecolor, graphite and gold paint on wove cardboard
Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1989 Accession Number: 1989.299, Metropolitan Museum of Art


Christmas did seem pretty swell when I was a kid. Sure there was Santa and the presents, but there were many other aspects of the season that made it different than the rest of the year.  Christmas served to soften the blow of the cold and bleak months that would follow. It was a sensory event filled with good cheer.

One day you would arrive home and Christmas cookies would be baking. Decorating them required concentration and teamwork. Another afternoon, you would find the stair's bannister transformed with swags of pine, fruit, silver beads and pale green satin ribbon. There was the advent calendar, the cut paper snowflakes, the ornament guessing game, the army of plastic carolers (my father piped music outside the house) and barrage christmas lights adorning our home. At school we would practice our carols for the pageant and each Sunday at Mass we would light the advent wreath. There was often snow on the ground and we would skate at the park after school. And the Christmas cards! It seemed as though my parents received hundreds. I would pour over them trying to order them best to worst. Every activity coerced that heightened sense of anticipation for the great day.

As time went on things fell off. Would my father get called in for a delivery? Would my mother drink too much? Would I get their tree be done by Christmas? Would I do my parent's Christmas shopping for them? Would I have to wrap my own Christmas present, which in the end would be two pairs of pants from Marshall's, four sizes too small and one of which was torn. (Yes, my father handed me the plastic Marshall's bag and told me to wrap it for myself.)

When I began my own adult life. I wanted to recapture all of the good things. After all, Christmas was the one time of year when everything looked special and everyone was kind to each other. You could still decorate the house, have a beautiful tree, make great food to enjoy with friends and family, and send out the type of card that you would surely have ranked in your own  top five. You could recapture, I thought, the good parts of your memories, perhaps even invent new ones. But nostalgia is a tricky thing and anticipation guarantees disappointment. The two married together are positively dangerous. You wish for something that never really was and hope for something that won't materialize and in the end, you have another day with a lot of stuff that just needs to be wrapped up and put away in just a couple of weeks.

Oh, I had that heightened sense of Christmas spirit for a day and a half this year and it was nice, but I just don't have the energy anymore. I guess, in the end, the satisfaction will come from just trying to live in the here and now and demonstrating kindness and compassion towards my fellow man, no matter their race, creed or means. You know, the Golden Rule. After all, wouldn't that be the best way to honor the individual Whose birthday started this whole spectacle?

lead pipe

postcard IV, 40 x 40, oil and graphite on polymered paper, © 2011 sioban lombardi

Yesterday I read an article that only reinforced my cultural and societal pessimism around contemporary culture. The article in the New York Times, A Career Provocateur described performance artist Marina Abramovic’s program for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) fundraising gala. Before I delve into my concerns regarding the event, I want to address some just plain stupid things stated in the article.

Obviously, the article's author is not well versed in the canon of contemporary art, hence the article’s placement in the style section, I suppose. Statements describing Abramovic as “a woman whose provocative works have made her, somewhat unexpectedly at 64, a darling of the increasingly incestuous worlds of fashion, society and art” articulate the author’s ignorance of Abramovic’s prominence in cultural circles. Unexpectedly at 64 - really? Flip back to 1974 and the artist’s work Rhythm 0. It changed the perceived boundary between artist and viewer, it changed feminist art and, if you really paid attention, it revealed the way people are willing to treat each other when given the opportunity.

The article also states that Ms. Abramovic is the first performance artist to wear couture. The author should check in with Yoko Ono. Yes, she’s a performance artist and yes, she’s worn couture. I’m certain that there are many more. Fashion and the arts have long had a relationship. Consider Coco Chanel and Jean Cocteau, Paul Poiret and the Ballet Russes, Andy Warhol and everyone, and Julian Schnabel and pajamas. It was sculptor Jana Sterbak that first created a meat dress more than 20 years ago, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. I so wish we were willing to extend our scope beyond the dubious talents of Lady Gaga and those parasitic Kardashian sisters. Conversations would be so much more interesting.

Finally, there is the shock expressed that Ms. Abramovic attended rehearsals carrying a $1500. Givenchy handbag.  What is she supposed to carry, a burlap sack? I love fashion, and were I as successful as Ms. Abramovic, I too would carry a beautiful handbag. I would prefer an Hermes Birkin or perhaps some bespoke Italian job. The myth of the starving artist is ridiculous and threadbare. As I’ve said before the cultural economy is one of the few remaining areas of independent production in the United States. Artists deserve to be paid for their work. Unfortunately, the so-called artists we reward have pink hair, lip sync and rely on Auto-Tune. Pity, when there is so much thoughtful work actually being made.

Well, that is enough ranting about clothes and ignorance. Let’s discuss Caligula.

If you recall, the article is staged around the fundraising Gala for MOCA. The entire evening appears to have been spectacle. Live performers whose heads protruded from holes in table tops, naked performers draped in fake skeletons as table centerpieces, cakes crafted in the shape of the artist’s naked body, a performance by Debra Harry. Ms. Abramovic is quoted stating. “But this evening is not about fancy dress and who [sic] have enough money.” Frankly, that is all it was about. The star-studded gala raised $2.5 million for the California museum.

Meanwhile, near that state’s capital (and across the country) the proles were coping with the abuse that peaceful students suffered at the hands of campus police.

I would like to pass this off as an LA thing, but it’s not. Frankly some of the best painting in the country is coming out of Los Angeles. But as a society, we are no longer capable of experiencing a work of art on its own merit. It has to be seen or heard with the assistance of an audio tour, television reality show, hired performers and a full day of scheduled programming. Just look at how many museum-goers choose to experience a work of art through the viewfinder of their smart phone. Museums have to keep up with this dumbing down and it’s expensive. Please don’t forget to stop in the gift shop.

Some theorize that the excess, failure and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire was due to pipes and cookware lined with lead. I doubt there is a lead problem in the Los Angeles drinking water. But I wonder when cultural institutions such as MOCA decided that their need for money, status and power was so great that the overindulgence displayed at this gala could fly in the face of attacks on personal liberty and the economic catastrophe playing out across the United States and abroad.

Shame on these institutions and shame on the artists involved. Sorry David.

Next post: the no complicit museum.

look homeward angel

I have a recurring dream in which I visit the house I grew up in. In my dream I am aware that the house has been abandoned. I am also aware of the weather. It is one of those bright, yet completely overcast days. There is no discernible temperature, neither hot nor cold. All of the doors and windows are wide open and the strong breeze causes the curtains to billow inside. Each time, I enter through the garage and progress through the laundry-room, kitchen and breakfast-room. In the den, my dog is sitting waiting for me. It is as though she has been waiting alone since I left this house, twenty-seven years ago. There the dream always ends.

In reality, I recently returned to my hometown for the first time in several years. I will be living here as an artist-in-residence for two weeks. The town is a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. My husband calls it Magic Town. The wealth has grown exponentially since I lived here. The town manages to be both manicured and wild. It smells good, the streets are lit with gas lamps, and the BP station still has full-service. This is the land of milk and honey, the land of the one percent.

I took advantage of a few free hours and drove down memory lane. Because I lived here from age twelve through twenty-two, I experienced many “firsts” here: my first boyfriend, my first cigarette, my first show and my first awareness that there was a big, nasty, gorgeous and painful world beyond these rarefied lanes.

I drove to my old college, whose demolition and residential re-development had been halted by the financial crisis. I didn’t realize that the old main building was still standing. At one time it appeared learned and grand. Now it’s a structural Miss Havisham, the haunted spinster waiting for the wedding that will never take place. This school is one of the lynchpins in my foundation as an artist. It broke my heart to see it sitting so forlorn, so I quickly moved on to the house my father built. While en route, I paused at the corner of Ridge and Old Mill, where I recalled barfing all over the dashboard only a few blocks from home (an ominous warning I failed to heed). But seeing the house lifted my spirits. It is obviously well cared for. I could not believe how giant the Maples had grown, showing off the season in full color.

 

It’s not strange that Thomas Wolfe named two of his most important works conversely: Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. I agree that you can’t go home again. If you think you can, you probably never left. But you can look homeward. Yes, I am an artist who has very different sensibilities today. But once-upon-a-time, before I knew any better, I was a debutante and a sorority girl who hung out at the country club and drank too much. All of that is as much a part of me today as critical theory and oil paint are. I’m proud that I know which fork to use and that I will never wear white shoes after Labor Day.

If I had the means to live here, it's unlikely that I would. Frankly, the locals would proably be relieved! It took me so long and was such hard work to get to where I am. Yes, the wealth, beauty and comfort would be lovely, but that kind of paper could certainly afford a pretty nifty little place in France. Besides, I’m still trying to embrace a future that is uncertain and waiting for me. Just like Cleo always is in my dream.

manifesto

I had a substantive conversation last night with a friend who is also an artist. Like myself, this artist had the advantage of being raised in comfortable circumstances in a family of successful professionals. Many of his friends, like mine, were reared and continue to live in those situations. I asked him if he ever felt that friends and family treated him like a “novelty” and was delighted by his laughing confirmation.

I paint the things I think because then I can make them real. There’s a lot of stuff going on in my noggin’ and my work allows me to sort that stuff out, and sometimes make sense of it. Occasionally, I’m asking the viewer to make sense of it for me. The ideas are rarely pretty, cute, or sweet. Look at the world we live in. On my good days I try create something visually compelling, and formally competent. It may even be beautiful. There is very little that is truly new in visual art, and that is not my goal. As I’ve stated before, as a painter, my work is bound to a long lineage of painters before me. It is also informed by my own experience and environment.

Talent or curse, painting came to be an avocation I could no longer ignore in pursuit of more common material benefits. Believe me, I like material benefits. Any romantic notion of an artist struggling in a garret is a load of crap. The creative process is hard. Artists practice the same base skills that are required in any successful venture; patience, ingenuity, decision-making, discernment, commitment and the ability to actually finish something that they commenced. My first inclination has never been the sale of my work; it’s been to get the ideas out there. But I am enough of a realist to know that sales provide more freedom, greater opportunity, and a roomier platform for an artist.

What I have a real problem with are those that don’t value the intellectual component of the work. There are those who try to helpful with “creative” ideas to “market” my work, but I have decided to pursue the difficult path of the painter that doesn’t paint what others want her to paint. Andre Malraux said, “The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.”[i] I have chosen to live with this path.

What is the point of all of this babbling? I take this very seriously. It’s not a hobby or a craft. I just want lay people to understand why my temperature goes up when they make certain suggestions, and why I probably won’t follow their suggestions. For this reason, there are things I will and will not do. Some of these things include:

·       I probably won’t paint what you tell me you think I should paint, and if I do I will charge you a lot more for it

·       I will not exhibit work at a venue that also sells earrings, Christmas ornaments (and I love Christmas ornaments), or decorative pottery. Sculptural ceramics yes, but not pottery. (this does not include museums and their attendant gift shops, but I don’t think I have to worry about that)

·       I will continue to make my Christmas cards only for the people I send them to

·       I will never call an inkjet print a Giclée

·       I will continue to believe that good art made today has to be about something - otherwise it is just decoration. And yes, I believe still-life, landscape, text and abstraction can all convey meaning. The about something has nothing to do with what or how something is represented. Goya and Rockwell shared the same sense of timing.

·       I won’t faux anything. Faux implies that the work is either very old or made under duress, neither of which is true

·       I will not buy any mass-produced wall decorations from a chain store unless they are plastic, illuminated and Santa

So, in a few years, I guess I’ll see you at the bonfire!

---

[i]  Malraux, Andre, Voices of Silence, Doubleday. 1953