61 degrees with Agnes of Dog

the studio visit

I had a studio visit over the weekend. There is a magic to the studio visit, partly because what is most centrally involved is bringing someone into a very intimate space and this person (or people) recognizing it as such. Beyond the idea of going backstage, a visit to the artist’s studio is about seeing the work come to life in a way that it rarely does on the walls of a gallery or museum. The work is there, surrounded by context and the tools of its creation. As artists, I think we get desensitized to this aspect.

I think too that when I have someone in the studio, I am able to see the work through their eyes for that moment. Thankfully, this is almost always a positive experience!

Most of my collectors are old friends, and perhaps that is the way it should be. That is what I hope to eventually find with a gallery, a relationship that extends beyond the business of selling paintings. For now, I'm always happy to at least sell a painting.

My visitor this past weekend is one of my oldest friends. He has work going back to 1997, when I was far more sculptural than I am presently. On the occasion that I visit him or his younger sister and her husband, it is like visiting a future retrospective of my work. They have pieces that I intended to exhibit together; they possess a collective timeline of process and approach.

The temperatures at night have dipped below the 30’s, so for now I’m shut out of working. The good news is that I have only 2 more weeks left at the day job for the year, so I’ll be able to get into the studio during the day when the temperature climb and the winter sun warms the spirit. The large wooden panel has yet to dry, and needs another coat of ground. It may not be ready to paint for another two weeks anyway.

Of crucifixes and WikiLeaks

Untitled (Christ), 1998
David Wojnarowicz
black and white photograph, 27.5" x 36"

I read Blake Gopnik's Washington Post article about the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery's removal of late artist David Wojnarowicz's video installation piece. The objection raised by the Catholic League and other conservative groups, centers around an 11-second segment in the video where ants crawl on a crucifix. The League stated this segment was, “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians.” The artist hoped the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead lover and to do so, in Gopnik’s words:

[In] the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

Again we hear the argument that taxpayer-funded museums should be held to some "standard of decency," ostensibly to be determined by a religious, conservative minority. It is little more than fear hiding behind self-righteous indignation, and bigotry supplanting love in the name of God. Not content with merely having the piece pulled from the NPG, the Catholic League has sent a letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committee, challenging them to "reconsider the proprietary funding of the Smithsonian institution." Effectively, thier prescriptive morality censors not only the artist and the NPG, but it censors the rest of us as well.

The recent WikiLeaks drama is a contentious issue in our post-9/11 culture, and one I see as important to any discussion of censorship. Some argue (with justification) that diplomacy will be compromised, and that lives will be endangered. But this is largely a distraction from the main issue, the content and implications of that information. Regardless of how one may feel about these leaks, the action of releasing the information into the public arena is accomplishing exactly what it was intended to do, to spark public debate; and that is a good thing. We are questioning our approaches, we are confronting and being confronted by our allies, and citizens –not just policymakers, are part of this discourse. The media is for the moment doing its job to inform and raise questions about our government’s actions and policies.

One of the fundamental tenets of democracy is that we are supposed to have divergence of opinion, but more importantly we are supposed to work through those disagreements in a public, civilized and transparent manner. In order to do this, there must be a certain degree of autonomy to ideas, or in this case, to art. Both of these incidents are about an attempt to centralize power and control information in the name of the public good. By this logic, the Inquisition and the Iconoclasms were equally justified. It is not up to the select few to determine what is "good" for the rest of us; not in politics, not in art, not in life or lifestyle.

It’s provincial to suggest that the National Portrait Gallery should not mount controversial exhibitions for fear of offending even the smallest segment of the public, -or worse, simply because it is publicly-funded. One must remember that art is provocative in its time, and what we consider commonplace today (like women artists) was at one point unimaginable and deeply offensive to society. Museums are indeed about education, and part of that education in this case is to expand what the public thinks of as a portrait. We should discuss what we see on the walls (this, I would argue is the point of going to a museum), and those discussions by all means should sometimes be heated and contentious if we ultimately embrace the right to a difference of informed opinion. Such discussions cannot exist however, if the opportunity -despite the risks, is never presented.

The extremes in our society don't want to allow for anyone else’s preferences. If groups like this have their way, what will we be allowed to see in our museums? Isn’t this is the same argument used against nudes in art throughout history?

My taxes also fund the NPG. I want to see this "vile" piece re-installed and I want to see some backbone from our public institutions and our elected representatives in the face of this cultural bullying. We falsely cast bullying as a problem with youth, but we deny the source from where they are learning it; adults. As Gopnik so succinctly states, if you don’t like an exhibit you can always vote with your feet. What you cannot do, is tell everyone that they don't get to see it simply because it offends you.

One important function of art is to hold things up to the light of day and to offer us an opportunity to think about those things differently. Art is a language through which we can express ideas that otherwise are too difficult, uncomfortable, personal, offensive, abstract, or even beautiful to otherwise address through our daily vernacular. The real issue with this piece is that it talks candidly and personally about AIDS, and some people don't want to have that discussion.

Do the Catholic League and other conservative groups ever go directly to the artist in these cases? One would think they might see it as an opportunity to educate that person, or less-aggressively see it as an opportunity for honest discourse through which both parties might learn about one another. I would hazard a guess that they don’t. They claim to be bold, but they are cowards who fear any dissent to their obviously fragile ideology. One can’t help to wonder if the prophet they claim to follow would have sat down with Wojnarowicz and discussed his work. I’m no theologian, but I like to think so.

Yes, when one deals with iconography and symbol –especially religious symbol, one must be both conscious and deliberate. Yet it is wrong to take any and all use, re-purposing or co-opting of symbol as a direct affront to one’s personal beliefs. Art challenges us to explore context, after all. One cannot do this by isolating that which they find objectionable and responding solely to that without acknowledging the entirety of the piece.

Taking offense is a personal choice. It essentially gives someone else power over you, and that is why I am very difficult to offend. We have become so careful in our society that we jerk any and all controversial art from a public venue the moment a few individuals or a loud group complain. What's worse, this is done in secrecy until after the fact. Let's have some public hearings before these institutions cave to these extremists.

To the NPG, shame on you. Your press release makes you appear weak and pathetic, and what hope do we have if our public art institutions will not stand up for themselves and defend their curatorial choices? Such should be their charge.

There will be blood

The cold has come at last, but those thermal Carhartts kick butt. I've managed to get into the studio semi-regularly and have been preparing a large wooden panel for painting. I laid down the second coat of ground over the weekend. It's been a while since I prepped my own surface; I've been buying pre-made canvases all summer and fall. There's nothing like building it up from scratch, despite the hit to time. At 4' x 7', it was a pricey piece of wood but already the surface is divine. In a week or two it will be ready to take the first paint, a bright, uniform stain which will eventually bounce the light from deep within.

I woke in the middle of the night last week and was thinking about blood. This, of course, got me thinking about Lorca again and about all the associations tied to blood: war, sex, birth, passion, life, violence and forgiveness. I don't know if I'll continue with wood panels or go to large canvas instead. The wood is a bear to manage alone in the studio.

I am returning to red, and incorporating everything from the past few months and combining it with the approaches I was using last summer with the F&S paintings. In cleaning up (a relative term in my case) I discovered a gallon of barn paint that is still good. Because I am fortunate enough to have access, I hope to get some microscopic photographs and play with the color and images in my sketchbooks. But blood is the thematic starting point for the forthcoming paintings.

It is interesting how ideas form. I watched Pasolini's "Oedipus Rex" a week or so ago, and was devastated. Sitting with my daughters the other night, we were looking through the production book for Julie Taymor's stage version of "The Lion King" and the color palettes really overtook me. Everything I see, or hear, or read, or watch gets thrown into a whirring soup of consciousness and then is brought into focus in the studio. It's one reason I am so deliberate in choosing what media I interface with.

So the next few weeks should see some new work.

Reflections on the Faculty Art Exhibition: 2010

The Faculty Art Exhibition this year is a respectable showcase of the institution’s artist-professors. The show includes the work of three adjunct as well as the two full-time faculty. The mix is, -as one would hope, eclectic and energetic and offers a wide array of ability, approach, medium and technique. That being said, the show is largely a three-person show; Ann Stoddard, Mark Anderson and Ralph Paquin. While the work of both Margie Howiler and Allen Stoddard demonstrate their professional ability, there is a clear delineation between the artists and fine artists.

The self-imposed assignment of the show was for each of its participants to continue to build the exhibition. In concept it was to be an evolving spectacle of sorts; where we, the audience got to see artistic ideas flushed out and the works made more fully realized as the semester went on.

In fairness this was a doomed proposition, both in general as well as specific terms. The reality of most college/university professors’ workload makes such an endeavor next to impossible, and this proved to be the case here as well. It was both an interesting idea and a noble concept, but an unlikely and somewhat empty promise from the outset.

The second issue is that no one artist has enough cohesiveness in the body of work they present here to warrant the rather emphatic curatorial choice of dividing them into separate, single-artist environments. Everyone has good work, but the work is often unrelated and lacks any dialogue with its siblings.

Ann Stoddard, various works in organza

Ann Stoddard shows us tremendous tenderness and sophistication with her works in organza. The single most cohesive environment of the show, the artist installed a rustic wooden table with an eclectic array of objects spread out on it, which seem like archeological specimens from childhood and dreams. This is set in front of a wall with the glass-encased organza works hung in groupings. “Here Now”, “Flight” and “An Extension of Light in Pink” push the anthropological references even further. We see delicate pieces of dressmaking fabric that exude history, sensuality, and worldliness. Daughterhood, motherhood and womanhood are all present without an ounce of sentimentality, and with a rare and refreshing vulnerability and conceptual vigor. It feels a bit like a traveling natural science museum, comfortably dodging sideshow references while embracing the artist's childlike fascination with oddity and wonder. These pieces are intimate, powerful, and delicate, like memory itself; songs of both innocence and experience. One feels they are seeing deeply personal bits of Ms. Stoddard’s family history while being fully aware of the work as art and thereby deliberate and directed.

Stoddard’s works on canvas, -while engaging and ephemeral, have absolutely no dialogue with the rest of the environment. These works are luscious in color and hue, and the absence of a stretcher frame makes them appear to be drifting away like clouds.

They are, in a word: lovely.

Yet there is little relevance to the works on organza. We are seeing the vitality and breadth of Stoddard’s ability, but we are not seeing focus. Had these works been broken up and interspersed in the show, they would be stronger for it.

Ralph Paquin, Kneeling Figure in Yellow, ink on paper

Ralph Paquin similarly has three distinct bodies of work from which he assembles this show. Would that he had spared us variety in favor of a depth of exploration. The virtuosic, large-scale drawings like “Reveal-ation” demonstrate the artist’s sure hand as well as his formidable technical abilities, but these seem utterly without context sandwiched between his mural “Gene Wall” and the dynamic triad of ink on paper paintings like “Kneeling Figure in Yellow,” and “Wonder-Figure in Pink and Yellow.” Though Paquin primarily embraces drawing and sculpture, these three works are clearly and definitively paintings, and rich ones at that. The colorfields against which his figures contort and pose are heraldic and flag-like; they raise questions of identity, self-adopted or externally imposed. The works reference medical illustration as well as erotic fetishism, though the latter is seemingly in spite of itself rather than obvious. Hopefully, Mr. Paquin will push farther and continue to build this body of work, as it appears to expose the artist in a way unique in his oeuvre.

The remaining wall of his gene-inspired work has strength, but in a very different manner. These works are humorous, bright, activated figure-forms against washes of flat color. They are irreverent, engaging and charged, but their power is diminished by their direct placement across from the figurative paintings.

When works are placed opposite one another in an exhibition, it implies a symbolic conversation between them. This environment simply does not work for Paquin, but he is not alone. The fault, in his case, does not lie in the work. There is a missed curatorial opportunity here, and that is our collective loss.

Mark Anderson is painter of tremendous musculature and vigor with terabytes of art history knowledge from which to draw source material. At his best, he plunges into deeply personal and often nightmarish visions of apocalyptic and emotional unraveling that careen towards surrealism but manage to side step it. Sadly, this show is not the artist at his best.

Anderson is the only artist who wrote an artist’s statement for his portion of the show, and posted it on the wall like a manifesto. Unlike a manifesto however, the writing is obtuse, meandering and seemingly evokes spontaneity and the claim of free association as justifications for lack of focus or a clearly flushed-out personal mythology. He presents them as explorations, but what we have instead are 5 large-scale, fully unrealized works-in-progress

Mark Raymond Anderson, Hope Rules Anyway, acrylic on paper

The standout piece is “Hope Rules Anyway,” a Jungian circus of sex, spirituality and symbolism. Though clearly unfinished, the work is farther along than the others. They are all good starts. One hopes we get to see the finished paintings at some point in the future.

This is a good show, yet somehow less than the sum of its parts. The curatorial choices do nothing to help it; the artists’ work should have been mingled together rather than isolated into environments. The show, like any faculty exhibition, is intended to showcase faculty work, not a career retrospective for each artist. It could (and arguably should) have been smaller, if in editing a more unifying narrative emerged.

I can think of no stronger recruiting tool for potential art students than a faculty exhibition. The unfortunate reality of these kinds of exhibitions is that professors often adopt the very same excuses their students use when submitting incomplete work or unrealized concepts. The artist-professor has a unique challenge in academia because that which they submit for public and peer review cannot be wholly experienced with intellect, or even marginally understood with a purely academic mindset. Spiritually and professionally, it is also their charge to rise to the occasion.