Pie in the Sky When You Die
Thomas Miccelli at Hyperallergic magazine

Thomas Miccelli's article (linked above) proposes that performance works are more highly valued than art objects, as the embodied encounter of a performer and audience member carries more psychic weight/exchange value than the art object's presence. This is one of many issues raised in the article, the result of a recent survey of artists and their earnings conducted by artist William Powhida.

It's no myth artists make art for the pure love of it; that's what keeps an artist working. Yet, there is a perception that support wouldn't, or perhaps shouldn't matter, as the artist would keep working. It's also no myth that without support it does become more difficult for an artist to continue. This is where the day job comes in, or whatever strategies the artist adopts to survive. The issue of sustenance, from Rubens' business acumen to Van Gogh's reliance on his brother, proposes an interesting discussion on the value of art and artists now.

A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's recent film on Freud and Jung, recaptures the modernist ideal of an individual practitioner (Freud) who passes the torch of tradition to his metaphoric son, Jung. Their analysands bore witness in a reciprocal, if uneven, relationship. Does the advent of technology--film, gaming, performance, collectives, with their democratic ability to engage large groups of people as participants, alter the value of privileged, one-on-one communication and art objects? 

Enjoy the read!

Walk With Me

Dorsch Gallery

iPhone image: acrylic on linen, 2012, 84 x 73 inches

Making paintings for Walk With Me, which opens May 11th, I ponder the fluctuating intake of an actual walk and what that's like, versus the speed of projected imagery. Painting is the way to slow images down. In the studio, a walk is reconstituted through the gesture, texture and color rhythms in painting. This may sound formal yet is anything but, as hours spent painting infuse the body with images and memories, like an extended stroll through time.  Reducing a construction shed to the barest notational markings, or flipping perspective into a topographical view reconstitutes the spatial logic of landscape as the unfolding of experience through memory.

From the great poet Wang Wei:

"Seated alone by shadowy bamboos,
I strum my lyre and laugh aloud;
None know that I am here, deep in the woods;
Only the bright moon comes to shine on me."

Nightclubs on the Brain?

Notes on a Landscape 33, 2012, 12 x 9 inches

The FUN Fellowship
The writer Joan Wickersham suggested I make a list of nightclubs I used to frequent in LA since I talked about them so much. It got me thinking about the club years (the first foray was 1974 to  Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco) and I am infusing this period of time into my work. Clearly, I am not alone--the link above, to the Museum of Art and Design, awards artists who enhance New York nightlife, a most worthy aim! and at Pulse Miami, 2011, Jane Hart had an exhibition of album cover collages from the 1960s and '70s at Available Space. Other artists are thinking about them too--who? And--does anyone have images from LA clubs between 1977 and 1981? Including pop-up clubs, like the Garage on Hope Street, before the museum was built?!

There is more, I know.

Jane Fine at Pierogi
Jackie Saccoccio at 11 Rivington
Pocket Utopia, Lower East Side
Julie Evans, others at Wave Hill
Nick Ghiz and group show curated by Teri Hackett and Michelle Weinberg at Lesley Heller

Zaijien, Beijing

Hurtling west toward the International Date Line, I marveled at how digital coordinates help ground a traveler. Their Platonic grids and three-tone layers summon Sh'i Tao's and Philip Guston's definition of painting as a construction of the mind by embodying the landscape at 37,000 feet.

Thinking about the studio visits we made in Beijing, it seems expressionist artists focuses on process to elicit meaning, while academically trained artists conversant in Soviet and Chinese painting and sculpting techniques work with more message-driven meanings. This relates to but is not western; expressionism would relate to mood and musical composition, which can be considered hallmarks of imperial literati tradition; while message might relate to social consciousness and performance, hallmarks of the People's Republic.

Check out the artists below:

Bingyi Huang
http://www.bingyi.info/

 Wang Qingsong
http://www.wangqingsong.com/

Yang Qian
http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2010/12/fair-enough-moola-riffic.html

Travelin'

New painting:18 x 24, acrylic on linen. Images and pours intersect as emblems of full and empty space. In this painting memories of places and their media images yield a mode of realization dictated through touch, whereas my physical presence in a particular place might inspire a more direct, even literal image. This re-enacts Chinese ideals that studio painting synthezes internal and external sensations, as a studio art. But whether in the landscape or observing it through projections and photographs, the idea is to move through painting, fusing image and gesture in the glances of passersby.

Conversations with I-Hsiung Ju

Professor Ju's website

"boneless" tree with outline flowers

plum blossom whiskers

plum tree practice, outline method

Double flower, outline method

Welcome to I-Hsiung Hu's instruction on the Four Gentlemen (bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum and plum blossom). These idioms introduce the texture strokes that define Chinese landscape, and in so doing, provide elements of calligraphy and stroke order. I'm using I-Hsiung Ju's quartet of instruction manuals, purchased in a 2007 visit to his studio. The Four Gentlemen are dorky, but they are also fun and I am glad to have the thorough, step by step instructions and cultural background for the idioms that I-Hsiung Hu's books provide.

To copy the idioms and memorize the stroke orders is to immerse into a silent conversation with Professor Ju. He issues admonishing "don'ts!"to accompany images that transgress proper application. He wants to redirect focus from crossed branches, awkward downward facing flowers or rigid vertical compositions to alteration of placement, tone and mark. This requires much pre-planning: leaving space on branches to allow one to cross in front, be sure that heavy elements rise to weightlessness with the size and emphasis of the brush, or balance the ink load between dark and light, dilute and dry. The principle of alternity expands within landscape composition, deploying open/closed or host/guest relationships within a balance of empty and full. Way more conservative than the free-wheeling literati whose paintings continue to amaze and delight, Professor Ju nonetheless bestows readers, at least this one, the ability to 'read' Chinese paintings with knowledge. Our conversation is studded with exclamations (I wiped out! Stop saying don't!) and dawning recognition of previously hidden points, such as the distinction between composing and performing, which become philosophically profound.

Luo Ping, whose work was exhibited in “Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733–1799)” at the Met in 2009, took plum to unprecedented levels of expression. Profusions of blossoms drip from flowing branches, rather than the minimal flower arrangements on jagged trunks Professor Ju instructs should be "ugly, pale and awkward." For Luo Ping's family, plum painting was their livelihood. Below, one observes an active shift from the performance role of execution to the composer role of innovator. Within the embodied process of painting, the two fuse together in seamless delight.

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2012/01/chinese-brushstrokes.html
 

Dana Schutz Interview

Keith Mayerson skillfully interviews the incomparable Dana Schutz for the exhibition, "8 Americans," which he organized for Maruani & Noirehomme Gallery, September 10 - October 29, 2011 in Brussels, Belgium. Click on the link above to access the interview as well as others with Schutz and Mayerson's fellow exhibitors Hilary Berseth, Joe Bradley, Ann Craven, Francesca DiMattio, Wade Guyton and Jacob Kassay.

Hawaii: Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City

Honolulu Academy of the Arts exhibition - welcome!

More from the exhibition--this looks like Wang Meng

The final exhibition photo before museum intervention--cannot identify the gorgeous bamboo, rock and calligraphic composition to left--Wu Zhen?--see another image on museum website, linked above. How beautiful the ornamental doorway!

View from Moana Surfrider - like Chinese landscape...

Westin's Moana Surfrider hotel, founded 1901

Hawaii Botanic Garden

Hawaii Botanic Garden shoreline

Looking up at million year old Mauna Kea (13, 796 ft.) from the Saddle Road at about 6000 ft.  in Hilo

Public park in Hilo, island of Hawaii (all photos courtesy PM)

Leaving LA I flew east instead of west, missing the easiest way to see the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Art on view through January 8, 2012. A friend who just returned alerted me to it and forwarded these photographs; she'd taken a few of the show before a guard intervened and included some breathtaking images from the rest of her trip that create a sensitive and immersive exchange between painted and actual worlds. How hopping on a plane to see it beckons, right now, right away:  this is a major exhibition of Chinese scrolls, including the Four Yuan Dynasty Greats: Huang Gongwang, Wang Meng, Ni Tsan and Wu Zhen. The Yuan Dynasty was the first in China ruled by foreigners--learned culturati and government officials had the choice of working for the Mongols or retreating to private life (most chose the latter, as hermits in the mountains). These painters, and others, developed the literati tradition of painting initiated in the art-friendly Song Dynasty, first ruled by Emperor Huizong, himself an artist ultimately overtaken by the Jin Dynasty of Manchuria as he was too focused on painting to develop the military. Working collaboratively with the Jin, one of Huizong's sons later founded the Southern Song Dynasty, but tended toward poetry, along with painting and calligraphy the three beauties of ancient Chinese culture.

Lunch

In this delicious lunch of cabbage, tofu, enoki mushrooms and pork, an armchair traveler might discern volanoes, trees, plateaus and mountains surrounded by a porcelain moat, preserving Shih-Tao's dictum that "Painting is guided by the mind."

Los Angeles

A gorgeous Caspar David Friedrich at the Getty, West Los Angeles

One of my favorites from the Getty villa in Malibu in years past: Winterhalter

Gerome!

Some sumptuous brushwork - lost by the iPhone - David

Jacques Louis David, The Bonaparte sisters 1821

Fleshy and brassy diagonals in David

Jacques Louis David, Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, oil on canvas, 34.5 x 40.5 inches

Sunset looking south toward Hollywood

Exene Cervenka and John Doe from X in the film at Geffen Contemporary

Los Angeles, in time to see Pacific Standard Time at the Getty (LA history, circa 1945-81) and Geffen Contemporary (1974-1980). At the Getty: gorgeous David Hockneys, Ronald Davis, Ed Ruschas, Helen Lundberg. Was not allowed to photograph them, but the permanent collection yielded world-class examples as above. The Geffen Contemporary (linked to header), showed work that constitutes my first artistic influences at UCSD and UCLA: William T. Wiley, Judy Baca's mural drawings, Linda Montano, Gronk, Paul McCarthy, and new artists such as Patrick Hogan and Theaster Gates. En route to the Geffen, reminisced about clubs past and present, including the Whiskey, Roxy, and remembering afresh the Cathay de Grand, Lhasa Club, Club Lingerie and Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco.

Transformation

"'Antiquity' is but a tool of knowledge; 'transformation' involves recognizing it as but a tool while refraining from using it in this way. For I have never seen anyone achieve transformation by using antiquity as a tool. Often I lament those who are mired in antiquity, unable to transform themselves because their knowledge has trapped them. It traps them in stylistic imitation so that their vision is narrowed. For this reason, the superior man just uses antiquities to expand the potentials of the present."

..."I am myself because 'I' naturally exists. The whiskers and eyebrows of the ancients cannot grow on my face, nor can my body contain their entrails. I express my own entrails and display my own whiskers and eyebrows. Even when there may be some point of contact with some msater, it is he who comes close to me, not I who am trying to become like him. Nature has endowed me thus. As for antiquity, how could I have learned from it without transforming it?"

Shih-T'ao, Enlightening Remarks on Painting, 1700. Translated by Richard E. Strassberg, Pacific Asia Museum Monographs, No. 1, 1989

Frank Bowling, Sarah Walker, Fabian Marccaccio and Rebecca Morales at Seven

Frank Bowling - a new discovery. Both paintings approx. 95 x 69 inches

Ah Susan Whoosh, 1981 @ Hales Gallery - http://www.halesgallery.com

Bowling - detail

Another beauty by Bowling

Sarah Walker at Pierogi at Seven Art Fair-http://www.pierogi2000.com/artists/sarah-walker/

Sarah Walker, Having Built Here BEfore, 2010, acrylic on panel, 20 x 22 inches
These paintings get weirder and weirder, in the best way--complex rhythms and structures but also look fun to make.

Fabian Marcaccio - http://www.bravinlee.com/

Marcaccio, Detail - he's baaaaack!

Rebecca Morales @BravinLee Programs - http://www.bravinlee.com/ - new discovery

Light and Space East Coast style at imPulse and ABMB

Brookhart Jonquil at Dorsch Gallery, ImPulse. For more on Jonquil, click link above.

Florescent orange paint at the end of each wood strip and metal attachments contributed a snowflake or jewel-like feeling.

I think by Aaron Curry at Michael Werner, but now cannot be sure. Loved these.

Aaron Curry again.

Robert Miller's booth, ABMB: Paul Jenkins
Phenomena high alter wall, 1977, Acrylic on canvas, 75 x 150 inches, 190.5 x 381 cm

© 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

An unusual monochrome by Jenkins.

Steven Parrino--at Skarsdedt?