PopWars

I thought “The Artist” was about an artist. And I thought it was going to be silent, like really silent, without any musical accompaniment. I imagined listening to people squirming in their seats but I was happily wrong on all accounts. I should accept the fact that actors are artists and I do but it’s not he first thing I think of when someone talks about art.

Maureen Outlaw took this photo last night and emailed it to me from class. I work on these charcoal drawings at arms length and hold them up to a mirror to get an overview while scrubbing away with my eraser. I’ve noticed that I spend more time drawing with the eraser than I do making marks with the charcoal stick. I stuck them up on the wall at class while I addressed Fred Lipp’s criticism and moved across the room to get another perspective. Some work better in your face. This camera phone photo is yet another vantage point and they are all informative. Fred told me they look “tough”, adding, “That’s a compliment.” They could be a lot tougher.

I loved “The Artist” and how it kept playing with the vantage points of filmmaking, the movie within the movie and the movie being projected in front of us which we were made more keenly aware of because of the absence of dialog. The theater was packed and I was aware of the oversized people crammed in the seats ahead of us. Skip Bataglia’s “Car Crash Opera”, a seven minute animated short which ran before the movie was sensational. In class a fellow student Craig said told my father, who is also in the class, that he looked like the librarian in “Hugo.” So that has been added to our queue.

First Friday’s art crawl is sometimes rewarding and sometimes not but it is always entertaining. When the art fails to engage the conversation always picks up the slack. We ducked in and out of art spaces on three floors of the Hungerford Building staying the longest in Brian Peterson’s studio looking at his assemblages the shortest at Heather Erwin’s space where some sort of reading was going on to a packed house. We heard she had been temporarily locked out of Facebook for some controversial posting about her show. Doesn’t fb know Heather is keeping them in business in this town? The RIT show at the R gallery on College Avenue was interesting in that the student work looked better than the faculty work in most cases. And over at RoCo it was nice to see that Robert Marx had sold approximately $20,000 worth of paintings. Rochester likes his work for reasons that I don’t quite understand.

Artists talks are not for the faint of heart. We bravely attended one at the new I-Square gallery last night where four artists talked about their work and so much more. It was exhilarating. Richard Harvey talked mostly of process but his is multifaceted and interesting. Wendy Menzie started making art after primal therapy in the 70′s. She quoted Philip Larken, “Your mom and dad fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do” and spoke of her journey back to the child inside. Ed Buscemi stressed the importance of improvisation and relayed a dream he had thirty years ago where people were moving by him on a conveyor belt and he jumped on and tried to shake the people but he couldn’t bring them out of their trance. It seems to be his modus operandi. He is fond of asking “Are you kidding me?” in an animated fashion and he admitted to being hooked on conspiracy therories. Todd Beers discussed his breakthrough painting which is on view until tomorrow and told a beautiful story of his encounter with a dove on the fire escape he was sleeping on. He dimmed the lights and wowed us with his poetry. Harvey, Menzie and Buscemi all studied with Robert Marx who has his own opening tonight at Rochester Contemporary. He is featured in their Makers Mentors show.

We scurried downtown for the Ossia show at Kilbourn Hall but missed the opening toy piano number. We caught “I Can’t Concentrate” by the Brooklyn band, Zs, a mathematically challenging, post jazz, brutal-chamber piece. And then were blown away (again) by Ossia’s performance of Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together.” From the liner notes – “The work consists of a bass line accompanied by a series of instructions which can be realized by any group of instruments. With each performer acting as composer, the work allows for a variety of performance outcomes and is essentially an experiment in compositional anarchy.” A vocalist read a letter from Sam Melville-in prison in 1970 for series of radical bombings in Manhattan where no one was hurt-to his brother on top of the music. The twenty minute piece was trance-like and hallucinatory like a deep dream.

Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself while walking by a building with reflective glass I’m always taken aback by how bent over I look. And we were really slumped over yesterday as we climbed the big hill up to the Cornell campus in Ithaca.

The guard at the Johnson Museum yesterday was downright chatty. We were admiring Giacometti’s “Walking Man II (L’Homme qui marche II)” when he offered that this piece was the most expensive one in the collection, worth over a hundred million in fact. I said, “You better make sure no one walks into it and he said “Someone already did.” “A women backed into it while she was taking a photo.” He showed us a slight crack in one of the legs setting the alarm off as he pointed to it. I had just seen a sign that said “No Photos” so I asked if it was ok to take photos and said it was ok to photograph the permanent collection but not the work on loan or the work that is usually in storage but temporarily on display. I really wanted a photo of the Otto Dix etching called “Self Portrait with Cigarette” (also in MoMA collection) but that was off limits so I took one of Walking Man and got the Otto Dix print in the background.

After painting class last night the talk centered around critical thinking and the lack of it. I was trying to imagine any other kind of thinking.

My drawing above was characterized as “academic” and I would agree with that. Adequate but not particularly expressive. I set out to do some rather quick sketches on craft paper and realized that quick or not the same criteria applies to any piece. The effort must work as a whole so the focus is the same.

Every mark matters. They must contribute value not deflate worth.
One must be committed and focused yet totally open to proceed.
People like interesting things not just well executed things.
The value, the commitment and the interest must all be on the page.

I remember seeing the Young Rascals at RIT’s downtown campus. It seemed like a pretty cool spot but then they moved the school out to windswept, god forsaken Henrietta. I really don’t like going out there but I make exceptions all the time like yesterday afternoon for the opening of Barbara Fox’s show of new paintings on paper. We had quite a time finding the Booth building. Didn’t see any signs labeling one as such and asked a student for help. She said she had no idea where it was but it turned out we were standing right in front of it.

Barbara told us her husband trimmed the wysteria in front of their home and she brought the clippings into her studio to draw them. Barbara starts these big paintings with a very loose, gestural application of gesso and then draws in charcoal or Conti crayon before working in oil. Some also included ink and they are all very beautiful. So dress warm and see if you can find the Booth building. This show is the perfect antidote for our wimpy winter.

Back just in time for winter and last night’s art opening at I-Square at the future four corners of Irondequoit. I have a few pieces in a show with Wendie Menzie, Ed Buscemi, Todd Beers and Richard Harvey. That’s Richard Harvey’s work shown to the left of mine in the photo above. It was a cool little gathering with coffee and homemade sweets. Peggi made ginger snaps with cayenne pepper following Shelley’s recipe.

We met I-Square developer, Mike Nolan, and our friend Charlie’s little sister. It gave me the opportunity to tell her the story Charlie told me of their other sister taking the ring off a famous dead man’s finger. I told the story to Chuck Cuminale and he wrote a song about it for Colorblind James. Charlie and Chuck are both dead now and Charlie’s sister had no idea there was song about all this.

Poet and artist, Todd Beers, said he gets all fired up at openings and can’t wait to get back and start work on something. I told him openings have exactly the opposite effect on me. Todd said he saw Peggi and me in my two portraits and he a sang a line from an old song of ours.

They make a big deal of Antoni Tápies in Barcelona. He is one of their own and his work is everywhere. We visited the Fundación Antoni Tápies, a building and foundation that he set up to not only showcase some of his work but to give back. The foundation supports artists of all stripes and shows their work as well.

Tápies’ work has to be seen in person. It is large, hands on, rough and tumble graphic work. He often uses concrete on his canvases. It encapsulates the look and feel of Barcelona, full of history and that rich Spanish palette and as lively as the graffiti on the grates they pull down over the shop windows at night. By the time you get down to the gift shop and start thumbing through hundreds of postcards you really miss the physical nature of his work.

Wandering for art is easier in some places. We do it wherever we go and it gets you into some of the nicest neighborhoods and then some of the most interesting ones. Often there’s an art district near a big gallery or museum. Many times they are in run down but up and coming parts of town. Usually though it is like following the money. There is a Marlborough Gallery Branch in Barcelona and galleries scattered about on Consell de Cente. I liked this beautifully painted portrait by the very un Spanish sounding artist by the name of Schmitz. It’s called “Sunomi Mori” and it’s selling for 2,000 Euros. At least that is what the tag said.