proustian inclinations

For years I have been reading the simulated Proust questionnaire in Vanity Fair Magazine and thought - I would love to do this. Being a little slow on the uptake, I finally decided to answer the  original questions as posed to Proust. Proust completed the survey twice, and the questions differed slightly. This survey is a hybrid of the two versions. If you’re so inclined, complete your own interview in the comments section.

Your favorite virtue.	Love
Your favorite qualities in a man.	wisdom, passion, certainty, integrity
Your favorite qualities in a woman.	The same that I despise: her ability to do absolutely anything, to get what she wants
Your chief characteristic.	I’m a mixed bag, but I think resilience
What you appreciate the most in your friends?	their forgiveness
Your main fault.	there are many, but currently: vanity, avarice, sloth, judgment, arrogance, gluttony and envy
Your favorite occupation.	artist
Your idea of happiness.	living with Mat, in France: painting, cooking and gardening
Your idea of misery.	losing my sight - no potter’s wheel for me
If not yourself, who would you be?	me is fine
Where would you like to live?	France
Your favorite color and flower.	all colors and peonies
Your  favorite bird.	Sparrow
Your favorite prose authors.	right now? Gabriel García Márquez, C.S. Lewis, Joan Didion
Your favorite poets.	Wallace Stevens, T.S. Elliott, W.H. Auden
Your favorite heroes in fiction.	Atticus Finch
My favorite heroines in fiction.	Eloise
My favorite composers.	Bach, Lennon & McCartney, Mat Lombardi
My favorite painters.	too many to elaborate
Your heroes in real life.	St. Thomas More, Dr. Edward Mahama, Alexander Flemming, Robert Holbrook Smith
Your favorite heroines in real life.	The ones you never hear about
What characters in history do you most dislike?	of course - the usual suspects: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. Others that I think have done tremendous damage…Phyllis Schlafly, founders of the KKK, the previous Administration
Your heroines in World history	the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth I
Your favorite food and drink.	pastry and coffee
Your favorite names.	Phoebe and Algernon
What I hate the most.	Ignorance
The military event I admire the most.	The Battle of Agincourt
The reform I admire the most.	the one that hasn’t happened yet: when every single human is granted exactly the same rights, honor and dignity
The natural talent I'd like to be gifted with	coordination
How I wish to die.	intact
What is your present state of mind.	uncertain
Faults for which I have the most indulgence.	vanity
My motto.	“There is No New”

a little garden

I’ve finally returned to my marriage, my home and my life in Chicago. My studio is set and I look ahead to a productive fall. I have never perceived autumn as a harbinger of death, cold and decay. It is a new season of anticipation and hope, just as the start of every school year was.

Gardens and their many metaphors are a present topic on some of the blogs I follow. With all of the Midwest’s horticultural bounty so readily available, how could they not? I bought these zinnias at the farmer’s market yesterday and while walking home I reflected on my childhood garden.

Apparently I showed some interest in my mother’s roses, and when I was 10, she designated a small area that I could cultivate. The first year I planted rows of seed according to the flower's established height. (My varietal preference would develop in time.)  Entirely responsible for the care, watering and weeding, I was delighted in July and August when my labors yielded beautiful flowers. I had learned patience, responsibility and planning. Things I forgot for a long time.

One can draw analogies between the garden and so many areas of life: love, friendship, care and responsibility. Plants that are forced and controlled can become unnatural, dependant and stunted. They lack the characteristics that gave them their initial beauty and hardiness. Similarly, the garden left untended falls prey to recalcitrant weeds and invasive pests. It may wither or go to seed. As in life, the balance between neglect and cultivation is delicate.

Though an avowed Francophile, I am uncomfortable in their highly manicured gardens. I much prefer the English garden where plants are selected for their peculiar attributes and then tended so they grow according to their own design, not the gardener’s. But of course, these are lessons learned, forgotten and learned again.

dog dazed

Art & Thinking is on hiatus for a bit while it gets acclimated to the new/old digs.

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

Tonight is the BIG NIGHT when the previously discussed Work of Art premiers on television’s BRAVO network. If you are going to view the program, I highly recommend reading Art Fag City’s supplemental program guide and all show-related posts Jesse P. Martin has written at PURPLE LINKS. My own contribution is the proposed week-to-week episode breakdown as follows:

Establishing Myth: describe the narrative and metaphor of an ancient myth through installation. Only materials to be used are plastic Pokémon characters.

Identity Paintbrush Challenge: draw a paintbrush from the bucket, and make an artwork informed by or addressing the labeled constituency. Identities include: second wave hunter-gatherers, neoevangelists, the Tang party, puppies and bunnies, pantomime environmentalists, niche marketers, microglobalists, pipsters, proprietary vegetarians, and urban jamokes

It is What never Was: visually reconstruct the simulacra - cannot use self portraiture

Cut! #1: make a video

Cut! #2: remake the same video

Cut! #3: remake the remade same video

None for You: make a work of art so ephemeral, it cannot be sold

Name the Null Set: Minimalism with a capital M

The Object Found: Utilize a slaughtered chicken

Koonsian: have another contestant make your art for you

The Body as Medium: demonstrate Lars von Triers’ personification of women in a performance piece

THE FINAL CHALLENGE: written exam, closed notes.
Question: Compare and contrast in theoretical, historic and critical context, the notion of beauty in at least three periods of art prior to 1800 and after Modernism. Codify those notions as they apply to Clement Greenberg’s article Avant-Garde and Kitch, Juvenile and Preteen Beauty Pageants, Lady Gaga and your experience on this program. You have 45 minutes.

subversion

While I love all spring flowers, I think my favorite is the Peony. It used to be lilacs, but that was youthful romance, and they now elicit a tiny tinge of morbid nostalgia. But the peony - even when white, or the palest pastel pink, is a little bit naughty. Certainly flirtatious, peonies possess a joie de vivre that not even exquisitely controlled Chinese painting can keep in check. When you invite them into your home, like the Trojan horse, they release their hidden delegation of ants. Peonies are a bit subversive.

Some friends and I had dinner at a former professor’s home recently. The bucolic landscape, some wonderful food and her giant intellect generated great conversation. She has always stressed the importance of social action, participation and activism, but on a personal scale. The professor asked us if an artist had to make political art to be subversive. My answer was no. I believe that the choice to make art - if it even is a choice - goes against the grain of the general population. It’s a choice that often commits one to a life contrary to everything the rest of the world is seeking: wealth, security, comfort.

It’s a difficult choice, especially in a world where the individual is marketed to 24/7. The payoff is a stunning level of intellectual freedom. And, in the end, artists will not have dumped countless gallons of oil into the Gulf, created a subprime mortgage bubble, hedged on the bets of others’ failure, or created a worldwide financial collapse. And that’s fine.

draw winky

I remember this advertisement from magazines and matchbooks when I was a child. The idea intrigued me, although I never actually drew “Winky” or “the pirate”. Why? I didn’t think I could, that I was good enough. Next week, the equivalent of this contest will premiere on TV’s Bravo Network as Work of Art - The Next Great Artist. So continues the latest installment of the Top Chef cum Project Runway slash Real House Wives of American Idol culture to which we have been reduced.  Jumping on the bandwagon, every art blogger seems to have become an apologist and gone Gaga for it. I will not.

I read the bios of a number of the contestants and many of them have already achieved a meritorious level of accomplishment. However, I would rather see a portfolio than a carefully edited bio. One artist works in “carbon based media”, hmmnnn…. ground breaking… pencil? Charcoal?  Everyone should watch the hilarious clips on Bravo’s website. Trembling and tearful, an artist pleads that she wants her art to show in a Museum. Eureka! She's discovered fudge covered cookies! In fact, the winner of this glorified game show will receive a substantial cash award and a one-person show at a major Museum. I personally believe that that type of accolade comes from a lifetime of achievement or singular genius. Here that honor will be bestowed after 14 weeks of assessment by a group of merchants.

I wonder if there will be any discussions of art in critical, historical or theoretical context? I wonder if the program will show the time working alone in the studio, filled with indecision and doubt, dirty, messy, tired without sleep, fashion, jewelry and make-up. I wonder if they will capture the genetic predisposition that forces the artist to constantly doubt, question and navigate the world in visual terms. I wonder if there will be anything real here at all or just have a depiction of what people think the life of an artist is like. Will they really be giving these artists assignments every week? I can see it now, “Your assignment Scatological Assemblage!” After  all, isn’t this whole thing a scatological assemblage?

Call me an elitist; call me a snob, I’m happy to assume either of those mantles. But I would like to make a suggestion. Don't watch this crap. Learn about art through you own experience. Go to galleries and museums in your community, support local not-for-profit art venues, encourage arts programs in your school districts, go to the library and check out books and videos of artists and their work.  My father was a physician who always hated doctor dramas on television. I can understand why.

Me? I think I’ll watch Jeopardy instead. Maybe I’ll learn something.

warm swell

"We had intended if it were a pleasant day to go to the country it was a very beautiful day and we carried out our intention # 47”

Pencil, watercolor, gouache, cut-and-pasted paper on handmade paper


22" x 30"

© Cyrilla Mozenter

I have been trying to get current with art on exhibit in New York. Last Thursday I visited three very different venues. My first stop was at the Drawing Center to see Live & Die Like a Lion?, the late drawings of Leon Golub. I have always admired Golub’s work. As a political provocateur, Golub somehow managed to articulate the brutalities of war and power with masterful and luxurious paint. His paintings can lure you in and bludgeon you in one fell stroke. Seeing the politically charged artist so overtly concerned with his late-in-life virility left me bereft.

My next stop was the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Though I have ardently studied previous catalogues this was my first opportunity to see the Biennial live and in person. With the exception The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Charles Ray, Nina Berman, Theaster Gates, and Kate Gilmore, I was again disappointed. However, the show is dense and I am still processing it. I plan to return and reassess.

I had one final stop and that was at Adam Baumgold Gallery to see Warm Snow by artist Cyrilla Mozenter. It was unseasonably warm and humid that day and I felt tired, crabby and grimy. However, when I entered the diminutive yet elegant gallery, the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I know Mozenter personally. She was my MFA Thesis advisor. I admire both the artist and her work. Because I prefer to write about work that I like, I feel no loss of objectivity here. In fact, it’s harder to write about the work of someone you know.

Mozenter has been working for some time with industrial felt, hand-stitched and molded together to create two and three-dimensional works. The material recalls Joseph Beuys’ use of felt and his invoked mythology. Certainly mythology is present here. Yet there is a less Teutonic side to Mozenter’s mythology that I can only describe as enchantment. At the same time, a series of felt vessels suggest both the Holy Grail and a fancy ice cream dish. This show includes her recent series Polar Bear Pass VI. Throughout many cultures the bear inhabits a fabled station, particular and varied. Here there is the sense of great strength, warmth, and protection.

A number of works on paper are also included in Warm Snow. I have always been drawn to artists that appear to possess a secret language. Two works suggest that this might be the case with Mozenter.  We had Intended..., pictured above, is faintly inscribed with the words: bear, boat, mitten, cave, boot and castle. I don’t need to know why these words are here, but they are satisfying. Another work, Slow Wide Turn, suggests cautionary instructions that cross one’s mind when approaching a turn on either a snowy road, or indeed, in life.

Warm Snow will remain on view at Adam Baumgold, 40 E. 75^th Street, through June 26, 2010.