Saw the new Hiroshi Sugimoto work at the Fraenkel Gallery on Thursday night. He’s one of my favorite photographers. His earlier portraits don’t do much for me, but the architecture series, the theater series and most importantly the sea series have been some of my favorite works for the last few years. The exhibit is called Lightning Fields and the images online are striking, but you don’t get the full effect until you’re standing in front of them. From reading around the web his method was to apply electricity directly onto his film, and the results are pretty astounding. Online they look sort of flat, but in person there’s an unbelievable depth to the photos. The blooms are rounded and seem bulbous, and the fern-like light fields look almost like mountains rising out of a valley of deep black. I may try and go back before it closes on the 31st, just beautiful. I was really pleasantly suprised. I expected to like them but wasn’t expecting it to be quite as beautiful and deep an experience.
Wandered my way over to SFMOMA by way of an uncomfortable farmer’s market and then the Metreon. The Metreon is just so depressing. It’s huge and empty and anytime you even remotely looked towards a person working, there was a weird desperation. It’s an empty shell, bereft of stores and people. Empty, or almost empty malls, scratch that, dying malls, are very sad places.
The big exhibit at SFMOMA right now is Richard Avedon’s photography which I could probably care less about only if I didn’t know it existed. I was worried there might not be enough to keep me occupied but it turned out the Avedon wasn’t as large as I imagined. The old favorites were all there, the Still room, the large Rothko, the Cornell corner and Judd’s boxes. At the end of their selections from the permanent collection was a small exhibit called Not New Work curated by Vincent Fectreau. Nothing blew me away and in fact I disliked a few pieces, but the idea itself was wonderful and the selection overall left me smiling. Fectreau picked 20 rarely seen works from the permanent collection to show in two small rooms. There was a whimsy to the selection and to the two rooms generally, and a tendency towards concept over form. That said, some of the forms were stunning. Robert Overby’s “Hall Painting, first floor” was the standout for me; a false entrance to a non-existent hallway that was both beautiful and dirty, looking like rust and decay. Untitled (Torn Sky Painting) by Joe Goode deserves a mention in that I really expected as I rounded the corner to love this painting but it left me oddly cold. I have no idea why. Honestly though, the highlight was the exhibit “book”, a collection of postcards all depicting the weirdly imposing New by Christopher Wilmarth. New consists of two large rounds of wood connected by a thick plate of glass stood vertically. While the postcards are focused on New, because the main portion is glass you also end up seeing the majority of the exhibit. I have to believe that was the exact intent. I bought it and am trying to figure out the best way to show them on my walls.
I don’t have much to say about the second floor. There were some beautiful photographs, but I’m finding it harder and harder to talk about representative photography. I’ve decided to accept this as a fault of mine and revel in my enjoyment of abstract photography and confusion about representative photography. I noticed a couple Sugimoto’s from the theater series that I enjoyed but ended up walking through this floor quickly.
The highlight of this trip was an exhibit I didn’t know existed called “Focus on the Artists.” by Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still. The idea was simple, an exhibit consisting of a room devoted to a single artist. The theme might as well have been “Artists BW really loved a whole lot”. Diebenkorn was the only artist I didn’t know beforehand. The two later abstractions were frankly gorgeous. Simple blocks of mostly muted, pastel colors brought to mind Rothko and Mondrian but his paintings resembled neither. The Guston’s were fun, but the focus was early and late, none of the middle abstractions which are my favorite. There’s something about his representational stuff that just WORKS for me. Part of it is the context of them, and knowing that back then his friends and supporters treated him like a turncoat because he dared to use representational imagery. The Stella and Kelly rooms were overwhelming in a good way. Especially the Kelly pieces. There’s a purity of both content and concept in his work that I find so invigorating. I love Still, and predictably loved his room and the Marden selections were interesting; but the Ryman room was a masterpiece. A series of meditations on whiteness, blankness, space, border and painting itself. Each piece was attatched to the wall differently, some in frames, some with bolts in the middle, some with tape; and the attachment became part of the artwork. This blurring of work vs. hanging equipment vs. wall on which it’s hung was interesting and I spent a long time in this room even with the guard who kept staring at me. I saw a couple pieces by Serra both here and in the sculpture garden. My favorite of the bunch was Gutter Corner Splash. 7 decayed wedges of lead in a row leading back towards a splash of lead on the wall, in, yes, the corner. The play between hard and soft, solid and liquid were interesting, especially when you consider that Serra’s most famous works tend to be about making these very solid hunks of metal look airy, weightless and precarious. It was unlike any Serra I’d seen before.
I had wanted to go back and see my favorites from the collection. Another few minutes in front of that Rothko, the way it pulls the eye in. The bench is placed perfectly so the only way to perceive it in one look is to let your eyes go soft, a little out of focus, bringing foreground and peripheral vision into the same plane. There’s both a stillness and a subtle movement in this particular Rothko, and that blue on the bottom, almost an Yves Klein blue, is luxurious. And another few minutes in the Still room, staring at the largest piece in the room, the striped one, with Untitled from 1960 with huge swaths of the canvas left untreated and smears of white and black with browns and rusts in between. It’s one of the least imposing of his works I think, and is becoming a favorite because of the space on the canvas.
But alas, I was tired and decided to head home after a quick trip to the shop. The SFMOMA shop is really large, surprisingly large, and while there’s alot of crap, there’s also a whole lot of really interesting bits of design. Was tempted by the whiskey stones and the ceramic “I am not a paper cup” cup but decided to go only with the series of postcards mentioned earlier and the first Christmas gift for someone dear to me.
From this review of the new Built to Spill. I agree, and would include a hearty “So stop calling Sonic Youth necro-whatever, stupidheads.” But in my most mature, insightful critic voice.
Gravity’s Rainbow
http://www.nplusonemag.com/badiou-badass
I spent an hour trying to explain why I like something and realized I’d rather just listen to it. I think this means I’m doomed to never be a critic.
I don’t think of myself as particularly creative. I make things occasionally. I write, I paint, I draw etc. Sure. But I think of those activities less as creation than as meditation or reaction. I view them in some ways as work, not in any pejorative sense though. I think of them as part of the process of understanding the art I find interesting. When I’m drawing regularly or painting regularly I can start to understand a teensy bit better what the visual artists I like are doing. By repeating their actions, or a generalized form of their actions I feel, first and foremost, more connected to the act of painting.
When I first started painting I only painted abstractions. The first thing I learned? Well everything I’ve always said about how abstract expressionism isn’t just an anything goes, kids in the finger paint, affair, about how not every abstract painting is good, etc. is true. Firsthand I saw that when you’re doing the painting it’s pretty easy to tell when a painting is good or bad. And in my experience, it did have a lot to do with my intention and the level of attention I paid the painting, both while in the act and before, in the preparation. The best paintings were almost always the products of planning and some amount of thought. Not every painting I planned turned out well, but it was rare that unthinking painting would turn out well. It’s not that this was a revelation. I thought these things before I ever picked up a brush, but experiencing it first hand was a unique way of confirming things I’d been saying for years.
Meanwhile, I would try to occasionally paint recognizable objects but was never happy with the initial stabs and would end up scrapping each and every one. I’ve always looked forward to Brian Olewnick’s infrequent posts of his paintings and drawings. There’s something very simple and honest about his pieces. Last time I got my art stuff out I decided to use this set of pastels I found on the side of the road to imitate him. It’s the sincerest form of flattery, right? But it’s also that the very aspect of his paintings I love most, the simplicity of subject, means I had a chance of coming up with something I liked, regardless of whether it looked like Brian’s. I’d thought about still lifes, but for some reason it never occurred to me to just paint or draw a stone. There’s a rather confounding level of complexity possible when you really look at light and shadow and the texture of a stone, but as my drawings show it’s also possible to come up with something that is unequivocally a stone that is also simple, almost childlike. 
Unlike the abstractions I’m not sure I’m gaining new insight with this focus on stones, except perhaps to say that even if I don’t really view what I’m doing as “creative” work, it is important to me. The act of making something, even just a painting or drawing, is satisfying in a way not many other things are.
The two I’ve photographed are located here. More will be added as they’re made/photographed.
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In a similar vein, I’ve finally pulled out the only instrument I have in my apartment, an old, out-of-tune autoharp. I made a few recordings of the simpler graphical scores from the Book of Musical Patterns by Robert Kirkpatrick. They were a few of the casualties of a hard drive wipe a couple months ago unfortunately. I’m looking to get back to those. For a long time getting paint out or getting an instrument out created this weird burden. I felt the pressure of creativity on my back and it made me unable to make anything. For me, separating the two ideas has made me look forward to recording and painting and writing. I’m not trying to say or do new, innovate ideas or things as much as I’m trying to understand the process going into the art I love. If I happen to make something new, or something worth sharing that’s a bonus. But really for me the focus has become a better understanding. So when I, say, write about philosophy and music I may be treading ground others have tread, or not treading it very well, but if it helps ME make sense of these two things that have become linked then it’s worth it.
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Slightly related to the above. I realized in re-reading my last post I spent far less time talking about the actual music than I meant to. Dinner called and I answered. I’m going try again in the next few weeks.
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Completely unrelated, I’m going to Rhode Island soon, and will do my level best to take pictures of things. Perhaps they will appear here.
Every Sunday I wake up, have a leisurely morning at home and walk or drive to the Temescal Farmer’s Market to do my weekly produce shopping. I meet up with a friend there almost every week and we walk and talk about our weeks as we only ever see each other on Sundays. The farmer’s market itself is one of my favorite parts of my week. So here’s a picture of some vegetables and then the dinner I just made for myself with produce I bought this morning. No real purpose to this except I like food and thought my dinner looked delicious.
Vegetables!
And dinner!
Which consisted of these tofu sticks I make with nutritional yeast, bragg’s and various spices on a salad mix from Happy Boy Farms, with boiled fingerling potatoes, boiled green beans and a mustard vinaigrette I sort of made up.
Off to eat.
But perhaps the simplest way to summarize Harman’s position is to cite the informal addition he offers to Lee Braver’s notions of realism: “The human/world relation is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatsoever.” I’d clarify that “special” in this case just means a particular, not exceptional.
There is one lap I need to swim before drying us off from our refreshing dip in the pool of metaphysics, and it passes through Levi Bryant’s adaptation of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy into what the former calls flat ontology. This is a term that first occurs in the work of Manuel DeLanda, who uses it to refer to an ontology comprised entirely of individuals (rather than species and genera, for example). Bryant’s use of the phrase is somewhat different: a flat ontology allows all objects the same ontological status. And furthermore, as for Latour, “objects” can mean corporeal or incorporeal entities, including objects of intention: quarks, Harry Potter, keynote speeches, single-malt scotch, Land Rovers, lychee fruit, love affairs, dereferenced pointers, Slavoj Žižek, bozons, horticulturists, Mozambique, Super Mario Bros., all are fair game.
from Ian Bogost’s incredibly awesome talk, located http://www.bogost.com/writing/videogames_are_a_mess.shtml
SERIOUSLY. SERIOUSLY. How were they this good?
From Tool-Being by Graham Harman. Who I kind of love.
“What Deleuze and Guattari are ultimately developing is a politics of creativity, a theory of revolution that is based neither on beginnings (the conquest of the old system) nor on ends (the implementation of a new system) but on middles - interregnums, intermezzos, the space in between, the unpredictable interstices of process, movement and invention.”Deluze and Guattari by Ronald Bogue pg 105
Seriously just beautiful. And that, dear readers, is why I’m continuing to muddle through.
