November 7, 2025
Out of the Woods
Heather Bause Rubenstein recently gave a talk at Ruttowski 68 Gallery in TriBeCa. Her interlocutor was her husband, critic Raphael Rubenstein.
I took notes:
October 28, 2025
trepidation and commitment
2024
PTG 654
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame
world shared with faith
world shared with faith
PTG 653
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame
the heart of the meaning
the heart of the meaning
2025
PTG 652
22-1/2" x 28-1/2" x 1-1/2"
Oil on canvas over Wood Panel and Frame
Doors of possibilities
Doors of possibilities
2024
PTG 651
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood
Abiding
Abiding
2024
PTG 650
Approximately 46" diameter, 9" depth
Oil on Canvas over Wire, Wood
Iliad
Iliad
2023
PTG 649
24 works on paper, 36 x 28.5 cm each
Oil on Paper
I'm assigning all 24 works on paper as one work as a whole.
See here and all 24 blogposts during October 25, 2023.
Fin de Año
Fin de Año
PTG 648
60" x 48"
Oil on Canvas over Wood Panel
envisioning what had come to pass
envisioning what had come to pass
2023
200 x 40 cm (variable)
Oil on cardboard, string
The Remove
The Remove
2024
PTG 646
28.5" x 30" x 8.25"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood
Bloom
Bloom
2024
PTG 645
28" diameter x 8-1/2" depth
flashes of an optic
flashes of an optic
2024
PTG 644
12" x 14" x 7.75"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood
October 27, 2025
as noumenal as
as noumenal as
2024
PTG 643
13" x 14" x 4"
Oil on Canvas over Wire and Wood
October 12, 2025
Bad criticism
I went to Triple Canopy's "Bad Criticism" symposium. Triple Canopy, an international online magazine that addresses a specific set of concerns in the contemporary dialog, I thought it would be interesting to to hear what the younger generation had to say about the state of criticism via their social justice perspective. It was interesting.
I took notes...
Downtown Dealers Association
I don't know what I was thinking...
Join us for Downtown Dealers, featuring Jane Lombard and Lisa Carlson, moderated by Matthew Higgs.
Independent is pleased to invite you to Downtown Dealers, a live conversation series uniting New York art dealers across generations to share their approaches and experiences. In celebration of Jane Lombard's 30-year career as a dealer, this panel will feature Jane Lombard and Senior Director Lisa Carlson, in dialogue with Matthew Higgs.
That's not true. I thought that this event might feature seasoned art dealers, talking about the current condition of the art market and of the various responses to go forward. Guess I should have read the event details.
In any event... it was interesting to learn more about Jane Lombard and her gallery history.
I took notes:
Shape of Painting
Back in NYC, my first stop was to see Saul Ostrow's curated group show at The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation located at 87 Eldridge Street in the LES (Lower East Side), NYC.
An incisive, extremely well thought out exhibition, The Shape of Painting offers an excellent survey of how painting has extended the realm of plasticity to the historically most overlooked aspect of the medium, the nature of the support. Saul Ostrow, a legendary curator / critic / nearly a philosopher, wrote an immensely thoughtful essay that accompanies a richly succinct overview of the subject, organizing an otherwise unwieldy topic. (The fact that I'm a friend presses no weight on this scale of his esteem. He's that good.) This essay is available in the exhibition catalog, which is now available from The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.
If you haven't already, please click on the Resnick/Passlof's Foundation exhibition web page to read the press release, an object example of how such a thing should be done... and if you're living in the Tri-State area, get down there and see the show.
A. Must. See.
October 1, 2025
Sovereignty
These three videos tell a story.
Best to be elliptical, for the moment at least.
September 26, 2025
WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY?
At the end of last July, shortly before I departed NYC for Spain, there was a book release event at Artists Space in TriBeCa. The publication, "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is a coda to a series of conversations dubbed "The Seaport Talks" hosted by the Perić Collection and edited by Dean Kissick. With the pre-departure preparation in full swing, I had just enough time to run down and pick up a copy of the book.
Dean Kissick stirred up a hornet's nest of a debate amongst at least one circle of my friends in NYC with the publication of his article in Harper's December 2024 issue, The Painted Protest. Best to read the whole thing if you haven't already but perhaps one snip might capture the gist: "...the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit." Actually, this sentence is followed by touching a third rail, fingering social justice discourses as one of the prime culprits. So, an uproar ensued as friends shared links to response articles some of which you can read here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
As the spring sprung in 2025, I sensed that my pals were weary of the topic, the chatter petered out. My perspective: this whole discussion was late in coming and it was a shame that it had arrived in the wake of the Trump election last November. Social Justice is uniquely armored against critique but it is a fact that art criticism had been dying for decades, long before Social Justice fully entered the stage. Critics are the honey bees of the art world and the collapse of the pollinating function that refines thought and defines breaking art history was a disaster that few could stomach to face. We all whistled past the graveyard of the current art cultural system.
People inexhaustibly nominate a multitude of art movements but in the big picture, there are only two: Modernism and Postmodernism. All too many think that the latter succeeded the other but I think differently. Both were born at the same moment like the particle / antiparticles we think of in physics. I am asserting here that the widespread assumption that art succeeds itself episodically has led us into a mental cul-de-sac, paralyzing our imagination. The inability to appreciate or simply understand that each implicates the other, the Modern and Postmodern, has led our art world of today into a strange and strongly insistent impotence. Similar to the material reality of painting where paint itself relies on both binder and solvent, Modernity can't be properly appreciated or understood until we appreciate how the binder of Modernism critically needs the solvent of Postmodernism and visa versa. We won't be mentally released from the 20th century in order to live into the 21st until we grasp this interrelationship. Until then, we will be mired in confusion and lassitude.
After the collapse of the Classical canon, the Modernists sought to redraft a canon appropriate to the new age that could be classified anew, whereas Postmodernists despised canon altogether. "We don't need your stinking badges." The seminal figure for the latter group was Marcel Duchamp (in my argument for twin birth, artists like Alfred Jarry had prefigured Duchamp) and his prime influence was the assertion that art is idea. As New York driven Abstract Expressionism started to wane in power and influence, what would become Postmodernism flowered, fueled by the anarchic vapors that inspired Duchamp, all too ready to kill what many considered the father. Here's my nut for encapsulating the bigger picture:
While Modernists wanted to touch God via material means, the Postmodernists instead wanted to point to (not touch) everyday life (not God) via conceptual (not material) means.
Art-as-idea was the core and Sol LeWitt was the fruit of the Postmodern tree. He concretized a most etherial assertion into art-as-a-set-of-instructions, anticipating the Information Age by ten or twenty years. After quintessence, nothing of similar consequence could be plucked, so anything else conceptual or vaguely so was food for the fodder. Hence, the widely shared sense -slowly at first, then all at once- of diminishing vitality in the art world since the end of the 70's.
Starting in cloud misted mountaintops as dew dripping from tree branches, splashing cold into creeks, joining together into a river soon mighty and then mightier. What was once clear, slowly becoming cloudy and then brown and then more brown, widening with gathering force. until the delta spread driving towards some supposed ocean over the horizon. Tributaries fan out and the water is now slow, fetid, steaming, stinking. (Don't get me wrong, the ecology of marshlands are a wonder all in themselves.) This is where we are, where we've been for quite some time, deep in a delta phase. What this all adds up to is that even though we are 25 years into a 21st century, we are still caught up in the brambles of the 20th. We have yet to fully evaporate into cloud formations that could define the epoch we have been living into all this time. The 20th century art world -episodic- model just doesn't work anymore for us nowadays. Reconciling ourselves to this reality is the struggle we are in today. It's a shame that the supposed successor to the modern is uniquely configured to resist reality.
After the impact of Kissick's article apparently had died out, sprung a multitude of other writers from a whole spectrum, excellent to mediocre, essentially complaining about the fact that what we are seeing in the galleries and in the institutions is weak cheese. I wish that I had the presence of mind to compile an inventory of them as they were published, but trust me, after Kissick's salvo faded away, similar assertions reverberated in the commentariat, outside of the perilous framing of a critique of Social Justice. Red lights blinked on dashboards everywhere.
I haven't read deeply into Kissick's oeuvre but my sense is that he isn't a good writer -- or perhaps more to the mark, he isn't a clear thinker. In his "Painted Protest", he starts off with "My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery." and takes five paragraphs until one could get an inkling of his thesis. (Guess I should have written that in first person, oh well.) Later on in the article, he establishes his experience glorying in the globe trotting art world as the standard to measure the current contemporary art by. This, is problematic. These two examples and more only clouded what I think is his central point, one made by subsequent writers struggling to memory hole "Painted Protest" by critiquing en passant: We're in trouble, folks. We're mired in mediocrity and can't get out.
To Kissick's credit, he sort of sticks his critique in the first sentence of his introduction to his slim Perić publication: "...many things [...] are wrong with art criticism today." Four paragraphs later, he returns to his point:
The reason we want to encourage criticism now is because we feel that contemporary art is ailing, and that it is very important to talk about this. Major exhibitions are generally met with total indifference, art seems as stuck as the other 20th century forms -- movies, pop music, television, contemporary art -- and trouble keeps coming.The problem with his title "WHAT IS CONTEMPORARY ART FOR TODAY? And what should it be for, if anything?" is that its' jalopy-like character enabled several of the contributing writers to avoid his central concern. Some dwelt on the nature of contemporary art, some on its' function, only a handful hit the bullseye. Maybe the book was assembled for enough time after the series of discussions to allow the meander, maybe the discussions themselves were hard to focus (most probably), maybe people didn't want to deal with what I'm asserting here as the central issue (no doubt).
Be this as it may, the roster of respondents -to what I figure was a request for contributions via email- is an interesting cross section into the thinking of as least one segment of the New York intellectual art world. I'm providing a short summary of each one, clearly my own assessment of what their essays are trying to say. Click on their name, and you'll find my annotations and commentary in each so you can verify if my summaries are correct or not.
What is this picture painting?
Splash Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction 1
Introduction 2
Introduction 3
Introduction 4
***
Domenick Ammirati: Today, art is just money. We are ending in a whimper.
Alvaro Barrington: Contemporary art is fast. Painting just has to catch up.
Gavin Brown: Contemporary art is a rat race in a dead end. His prescription is to return to comms of personal subjectivity and connections.
Caroline Busta: The future is networked nodes.
Joshua Citarella: We're fucked. Something something, poetry, something something. (In the key of trend analytics.)
Ben Davis: The conversation about art is better these days than probably the art itself.
Aria Dean: Contemporary art is an exhausted category. Art is radically free.
Travis Diehl: Art is all kinds of doing. Good art makes me feel ambivalent and uncertain.
Bridget Donahue: [Rambling, incoherent.]
Jason Farago: We have learned to live without great things.
Bettina Funcke: Art is something not to be consumed. Rather, it consumes you.
Nick Irvin: Contemporary art is bullshit. Get out while you can.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: Art is a stone to be chiseled, revealing truth. Technology has rendered us into lab rats. The lab rats must reveal the truth.
Matthew Linde: Art/Fashion changes not vertically but horizontally from some kind of "outside".
Patrick McGraw: The world that places a screaming Wojak and a Tintoretto at the same level, short circuits art. The problem many sense is in a crescendo and art will prevail. I don't know how, but it will.
Hiji Nam: Art is a joke. Art should emulate jokes more. Humor will survive, so will art.
Seth Price: The question of what contemporary art is, is irrelevant. The luxury of its' spread is important.
Walter Robinson: Art is the assertion of subjectivity in the face of oblivion, it also has five functions.
Jerry Saltz: No one knows the purpose of art and it doesn't matter. Art goes on.
Roberta Smith: Art is the efficient conveyor of subjectivity.
Tobias Spichtig: The contemporary doesn't exist, it has been disabled by the NOW. [?] Art is spiritual and supersedes mortal grasping.
Natasha Stagg: The lassitude of the moment is an illusion. Imagination is the cure.
Sean Tatol: Art sold itself out. The datum of imagination that art promises is all around us, if only we could attune to it.
Andrew Norman Wilson: There's a way out of this current lassitude. You just have to find it, others have in related mediums.
Lloyd Wise: Yes, the present times are scary, but find a way to be thrilled by it in order to reanimate art.
If you know, then you'll know.
It is not his property.
It is not your property.
It issues not from him. It isn't his.
The artist uses media and the artist is a medium.
This is why we use a medium.
This too, is refraction.
Inspiration is the breathing of spirit.
The displacement is the power.
The grasp of power destroys all.
August 10, 2025
Postscript and Prologue
***
Now that we've fully settled into our home for the summer in the Costa Brava, I'm becoming increasingly aware of my obligation to follow up and catch you all up on my last blog post, regarding the announcement about my recently urgent health situation, prostate cancer. Today, I'm clocking past three weeks after that period of my life. Pardon my urge to put some distance between that seemingly interminable period of radiation therapy.
What sticks in my mind was the quiet meditative quality of those days. You see, the actual therapeutic procedure was quick, somewhere around 15-20 minutes. The routine upon the start of sessions was to present myself to the staff at the head of their monitoring station, essentially a desk in a vestibule atop it a row of computer monitors. They would ask me my "last four" (SSN, a VA Hospital security question), the date of my birth, and for me to state my name in full. All this, a routine two make sure they don't apply the wrong procedure to the wrong patient. That done, I'm escorted to the room adjacent, where the external beam radiotherapy machine was sited. Despite my attempts to chat the staff up and pester them with questions about the machine, I was continually rebuffed, clearly evident it was that they were all about business and nothing else. So, I'm forced to describe the machine now and probably forever in prosaic terms.
The aesthetic was that of science fiction movies, think 2001, A Space Odyssey with a touch of Star Wars. White porcelain baked enamel, grey durable surfaces where patients are in contact. Wood grain walls. The ceiling, rimmed in an array of LED's along the perimeter for mood lighting to induce calm; a drop ceiling tiled with backlit photographs of trees and sky, POV: from below (I imagined the clouds to be moving, an illusion that was hard to break with a stare); A suspended monitor to the side displaying incomprehensible data (to me of course), cameras and lasers to verify the position of the patient within the machine. A sliding sled was my destination, it was prepped with an array of bedding material whose foundation was material very similar to diaper fabrication, the significance I was later to learn quite vividly.
Shoes off, I flip my shirt up and on I hopped onto the sled. The nurses draped a towel for modesty over my nethers and I then pull my pants down to my thighs. Down, I am instructed to lay still like a sack of potatoes while they positioned my body to align with the guiding laser beams, aided by tiny dot tattoos earlier administered in preparation which later on they would augment with black fat marker lines and crosshairs. The nurses then asked me to confirm that it was indeed my photograph displayed on the monitor, a final precaution. They then turned on music, an additional layer to induce calmness. Many times, I wished I could have hooked up my own music playlist, but the serious demeanor of the staff was granite. Then, the sled slid with me into the machine.
The machine. It is a projection of four or five devices that orbits the body, an accurate count evaded me because some of them folded away and there were other more pressing concerns that had preoccupied me, more on that later. One pair was probably a simple x-ray, no doubt to document my current condition, organ disposition and most certainly to align the machine's beam to the markers within my prostate, installed earlier as described perhaps too vividly in my previous announcement video.
The emission of probing x-rays have a characteristic sound, a rasping burst that you can probably recreate in your imagination. There's a whole other world of details I will withhold from this blog post, about the restrictive dietary requirements that help render the diagnostic scan effective. In short, no fresh vegetables and no diary. This is a whole other universe of consequential description. Then happens, nothing... a pause, where I can only imagine that the team is gearing up for the main event. The principal tool of the machine is something I'll nominate with little exaggeration, the Eye of Sauron. A fat disk endowed with a glass lens into which the darkness within I could make out a set of something I'll call grinding teeth, probably an x-ray absorbent material suitable to help via a variable orifice shape the beam upon emission. When Sauon orbits in action, he utters a sound which in my perhaps my too fertile mind resembled a predator devouring its' prey. A more sober mind could identify this sound as the set of servo mechanisms behind. But then again, I remember that such sounds weren't present when the eye was inactive and other rotations were in effect, supposedly also requiring servos. During operation, the eye would emit the sound that is easily identified as high energy x-ray beams, targeting first my surrounding abdominal lymph nodes to where the cancer cells had escaped the precinct of the prostate capsule and then finally to my prostate, proper.
But now I must here discuss the rub, the most difficult aspect that had turned what I had anticipated as a day at the beach into another meantime within the aforementioned meantime, which had become in turn an even meaner time. In the male anatomy, the bladder sits atop the prostate. When expended, the bladder deflates and its' form resembles a beret atop the head of the prostate gland. This is bad news for those tasked with wielding high energy particles into the gland in question. In order to mitigate this obstacle, nurses become highly concerned -almost fanatical- that the patient hydrates to the point where the kidneys are in high gear, filling up the bladder such that the beret becomes a soccer ball, distinguishing itself clearly and out of the way from the prostate. With all this in mind, I ask that you please indulge me with your imagination and put yourself prone onto the sled awaiting the Eye of Sauron.
The experience is like water boarding in reverse. (I was hoping to find a "How Stuff Works" website with illustrations, to no avail.) Instead of a wet towel over the head under a cascade of water, inducing stress... maintaining a distended bladder at the nurses' definition of peak performance involves a dry towel over your genitals and the withholding of a mercilessly engorged bladder impossibly tasked with restraining a huge reservoir of water... or urine, that is by then mostly water anyway. Instead of attempting to keep secret vital information, the mind is shouting all sorts of intel as Sauron sets to eat away so loudly with such bad table manners. I anticipate that this description so far is too abstract. Let's see if I can concretize the actual experience a little bit more.
We have all had the experience of needing to visit the bathroom while dining or drinking at a bar. As I'm sure you all can remember, the moment that available bathrooms are occupied. No problem, you wait patiently... and you wait... and you wait... but your bladder can't tolerate the loiterers occupying the bathroom in the way of blessed relief. A covert alley is nowhere nearby. There are no other alternative bars or restaurants of refuge nearby either. So, you pace and maybe you dance a little, or jump up and down if no one can see you. In real life, the bathroom door opens and perhaps a sheepish customer exits, thank god almighty. But in the case of the occupant of the sled, no such luck. It's only a few minutes, shouts the mind over and over, but the cascade is pounding savagely at the urethral sphincter's door. Resist the urge to reach down and manually pinch off, the invisible x-rays are working away and one can only imagine the damage that could do to your hand. You can do it, screams the mind but then now and again, and after all, only a few agains are too many, your urethra lets you down to your utter humiliation. Hence, the detail of the diaper-like material mentioned above. Remember, the material physics requires the bladder stay away from the orbiting stare of Sauron, so you try to pinch it off hands-free as the skin around your waist registers the reality of your 98°F / 36.5°C internal body temperature, so terribly badly the body wants to relieve itself of its' burden. Remember firmly, my prescribed protocol involved 45 sessions and the number of times that I had failed are too many to recount because even once evinces too much shame. Talking with other patients in the waiting room with me revealed I was not alone, and perhaps my failure rate was on the lower end of the scale. But this is my pride doing its own special pleading. None of my fellow comrades went full Open Kimono... as I perhaps am flirting with now. Only for you, my dear devoted reader. Only for you.
I'm tempted to append a diary of those 45 days... but that might be an open kimono too far. The diary is quite descriptive, of how I counted down the days, of how I tried to hack my body's internal hydration code, and of course the real ratio of success to failure within the parameter described above. I was only partially successful in how to calculate and limit the volume of water I had to manage throughout the day, especially the morning hours bracketing the actual radiation procedure.
THE EAR WORM.
These attempts at calculation formatted the whole experience and all what is written above is a prologue for the main message of this blog post, a postscript of what specifically I am driven to convey to you today, my audience.
A stick, a stone
It's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump
It's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass
It is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death
It's a trap, it's a gun
It takes an hour and fifteen minutes to commute to the hospital from my apartment in the Lower East Side, Manhattan. The hospital is located within Fort Hamilton, within sight of the Verrazzano Bridge and Gravesend Bay (ominously named, yes), sandwiched between Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, both iconic Brooklyn neighborhoods. Upon awakening each weekday, I had to hydrate my body in preparation for the procedure. Chugging water 45 minutes before hopping onto the sled is no good if your body is dehydrated. In order not to experience the bathroom scenario described above within the confines of the New York Metro subway system, I had to awaken at 3am. No problem, I love the wee hours anyway. The main parameter to bear in mind while hydrating is that the issue is not simply units in and units out. The body is a reservoir that once topped off, only then does it engage the renal function to fill up the bladder. This is a long way to say that a delay is involved in this affair, both before and after the procedure. My body's hydration needed time to equilibrate. So, the two and a half hours before I had to hop onto the D Train were minimum parameters, for my body, at least. Everyone in the city is asleep of course and again, I love the wee hours.
Enter, the ear worm. It's not unusual for me to awaken with a song playing in my head. I find it delightful and often I try to divine any subconscious signification that might be involved... to very little avail. This time, as the penultimate week approached and passed into the countdown to the final day, the lyrics of Tom Jobim's Waters of March floated into my consciousness and firmly stayed put.
This time, I had never felt relief that I thought a countdown would bring. In the days of my youth as a sailor in the US Navy, it was customary to count down with glee. When I first crossed the pier to the quarterdeck of my ship with a fresh seabag on my shoulder, fellow sailors would peg the ID clipped to my collar, identify my discharge date and tease me about how much time I had left in service, "OOOH SHIT! Rocks don't live that long!" As the final months towards discharge approached, three digits turned to two and I was then able to say with glee what I had heard from others during the years beforehand, "I'm a two digit midget!" Counting down the 45 days didn't register the same joy this time. For some reason in the grind of pre and post procedure, generally costing me seven hours before entering my studio shortly before lunch, this rigid routine never broke even a small crack to allow the joy of anticipation of that final day of radiation to shine through.
The oak when it blooms
A fox in the brush
A knot in the wood
The song of a thrush
The wood of the wind
A cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump
It is nothing at all
Jobim wrote his song in both English and Brazilian Portuguese, so I've heard. It was a message addressed to the world, no matter the hemisphere. It's a mediation on the seasonal end of a persistent rain, a prolonged annoying event requiring patience, understanding, and the wisdom to discover the little, small sparkling jewels hidden within its' difficulty. The first stanzas juxtapose the unity of opposites: "It is life, it's the sun / It is night, it is death / It's a trap, it's a gun", joyful and not forgetting for a second, the gravity of a hardship endured. As the song continues, the noticing continues, tiny things could be wonderful if you only gave them a chance to be so.
For me, it was the early quiet hours where I could scan the headlines, read the news my friends would share about the art world, the books my friends would enthusiastically urge me to read. I was the only one awake initially, but Manhattan was rousing. Lights in bathrooms would spark and people started on their street paths of their day. Traffic surged slowly at first, and then the flood. I'd notice the same folks in the subway train. The construction workers with worn boots and pants, wearing clean t-shirts that won't be so soon, hardhats suspended from battle-worn backpacks and hand carts when heavy gear was necessary. That one older lady with a penchant for colorful dresses and ankle bracelets adorning her sandals, punctually going to work, getting off at the middle of the connecting bus route. Older guys I assessed to be fellow vets at the terminal end of the line. I welcomed the ritual unwrapping of my breakfast scone once the train passed 36th Street, to be savored slowly bite after bite until the train passed 79th Street.
It's the wind blowing free
It's the end of the slope
It's a beam, it's a void
It's a hunch, it's a hope
And the river bank talks
Of the waters of March
It's the end of the strain
The joy in your heart
The guards at the hospital, nodding in recognition as I grabbed my bag from the security scanner. Old guys, who looked like they've been around the block or two. The same staff, day after day, doctors and nurses and support teams streaming in from the parking lot with lunches in tow since the food in the hospital cafeteria was so typically horrible. (Why is that?) My fellow compatriot patients, old veterans, mostly from the Vietnam era, some of them taciturn, some beaming and one guy in particular happy to lift his shirt to show me the scar that had once been opened from his navel to throat. Most are black men, a Brooklyn metric probably. All dignified, some is subtle ways and most in very clear ways. Some fancy, not a few with swagger. I learned of their lives after service, some in law enforcement, some entrepreneurs. Some guys, not all that often, were on the brink of devastation, either of old age or of their various diseases. One very old guy in a wheel chair, pale and clutching a blanket to keep warm, accompanied by his private nurse, a man of few words but his furtive eye upon greeting was friendly and respectful.
Like I said, a lot of these guys are Vietnam veterans, most of whom I met were marked deeply in the meat of the war period. Only marginally qualified to be ranked in the same cohort, the war ended in my first year in service and during my first WestPac deployment. My only contact with that experience was when my ship rescued refugees afloat in the South China Sea. Hospital staff continuously thanked me for my service, and I felt a bit shy about accepting such gratitude. However, note carefully the gratitude abounding there.
The bed of the well
The end of the line
The dismay in the face
It's a loss, it's a find
A spear, a spike
A point, a nail
A drip, a drop
The end of the tale
Then there was the Radiological Department itself. Think, layers of an onion. The public face was the constant genuinely kind smile of the lead receptionist, whose desk is festooned with small gifts given by years of former patients, a revelatory detail. She knew everyone's name.
One layer deeper, the two lead nurses who watched over my vitals weekly and were ready at hand if there was anything else I needed. Smocks and Crocs. Thank goodness my needs were few. There were other patients I've met who were not so fortunate. The nurses were there for them.
Another layer in the order of encounter are the doctors in residence, who helped me understand the nature and scope of my condition, what the various protocols indicated, along with the attendant up and downsides. I'm naturally inclined to be a bit impish when confronted with technical challenges and I'm reporting here that the doctors at this level were naturally generous with me. I've met others elsewhere where this was not so.
Down we go into the next layer, the doctors who are tasked with, let's say, is the more mechanical, quasi surgical work. These guys (all guys) are stone faced, all business, no fooling around. Let this passage be a testimony of my discretion since there is much here to describe but it borders on gore and nether parts... enough said. I was the first patient to arrive at the unit every morning, and so I would greet each of the team as they freshly arrived, smiles and hellos with hand waving. Not so with these quasi surgical guys. Eye recognition, yes, but no frosting on top. All business, no fooling around.
Now we peel to the team of the radiological technicians, proper. There are about ten or so of them, rotating into smaller teams to stay fresh on the job. Young an old, mostly female, a wide range of ethnicities, they are to me facets of a jewel who each glittered in their own way. A couple were super serious, but I was able to get them to crack a smile now and again. One guy, I almost got into trouble since he was disposed to entertain my persistent questions. This was frowned upon, his superiors told me to direct these questions to the head of the department. 45 sessions and 9 weeks allowed me to get to know them from a professional distance, witnessing the flashes of graceful patience and solicitude. They would trade off the task of coaching my hydration, and with this I was able to appreciate their different styles. Even when I touched initially and then occasionally upon my lowest point, they would let me know either explicitly or implicitly that they have seen worse. I've met some of the guys in the waiting room, they weren't kidding.
The core of the onion was the head of the department, whom I consulted with weekly. She too balanced generous solicitude and absolute no-nonsense. Leaders do color the character of their team, this is a law of the universe. In all of these passages describing the personnel, I've tightened up for the sake of discretion. They even frowned upon group photographs as I rang the bell on the last day. My lips are sealed.
A sliver of glass
A life, the sun
A knife, a death
The end of the run
And the riverbank talks
Of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain
It's the joy in your heart
Every day, after I pissed out the morning charge (a non-trivial process), cost me another hour to get to Sunset Park via the NYC MTA where I could have three to four hours in the studio until I had to get home to work out at the local gym. Any later than that and my energy would be completely spent. The parallel protocol of hormone blockers have a tendency to waste my muscles and deplete my bones of calcium, so weight training is a prescription. The silver lining after the initial grind, this has its' own payoff in terms of wellbeing. All the aforementioned is punctuated with mild bouts of exhaustion. Then comes dinner and a streamed series with my wife and to bed by 8pm. This was my weekday / day-to-day for a long time.
All these things and more -that now I am now beginning to forget- were the harmonics with which I resonated with in that Jobim song. Hard times have silver linings.
***
Complete lyrics to Waters of March, Antônio Carlos Jobim.
***
Postscript:
This will not be a cancer diary blog. Unless the situation turns worse -and there's no reason to anticipate this immediate eventuality- this kind of content, I will sunset immediately.
The central topic here is art: what I'm imagining / making, and the state of play of art history as we live it.
May 19, 2025
February 19, 2025
No Judgement, Annotated.
The follow are screen grabs from my Notes application of Gordon Hughes' review of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster's book, titled Exit Interview.
This is my favorite method of close-reading texts I like. Copy and paste it into
Notes, highlight, color fonts, underline, bold, italicize, change font size.
Really liked what Gordon Hughes had to say, extremely interesting. He touches on thoughts I've written about elsewhere in this blog. Intrinsic and extrinsic value, commodities and art objects, Modernity and the Industrial Revolution, the relation between the Modern and Postmodern, Duchamp (especially Thierry de Duve's writing), the inherent death wish within Western Civilization, deskilling, Ryman, the need to move past the End of History thesis...
Again, the images below are screen grabs. The links you see can't be clicked. Sorry about that. This is much easier than adding a hive of html's to the original text. Plus, I wanted to bust this out and get on with studio work.
These are raw notes, written on the fly paragraph to paragraph. More to come in terms of mapping out the facets of the diamond of Western Civilization and presenting it in a more succinct manner. A huge task, yes, but I feel compelled to do it before too much of my time on earth runs out.
February 7, 2025
January 28, 2025
Fresher Prey
Every so often, a group of artist and writer and artist/writer friends meet at Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. Over a group SMS, debates were raging over Dean Kissick's article in Harper's, The Painted Protest. Over the past couple of months in the chat, articles were dropping in, drip drip. By the time the meet happened at Dallas BBQ, everyone seemed exhausted with the topic. Hashing out the priority between art-for-art's-sake and art-for-politics had not only become tiresome but at least from my perspective, a dead end. Everyone else in the group seemed to share a variation of this sentiment.
Different people were working on drafts destined to be published soon in various publications. One was working on an article about the Guggenheim's Orphism show, questioning if it should be called a movement, whether it was initiated by the artists or assigned by others post facto. Another was writing a piece about how the Metropolitan Museum's recent installations seem over determined or over designed. Another was writing about a piece about how Kinetic Art never got its due.
All three seemed to me to share an over-arching concern about what has be recently called a vibe or vibe-shift. I thought that it was interesting, that this could be a way to move past the loggerhead problem of The Painted Protest debate, to talk about how the art world's conversation phases in and out periodically. I mentioned Becca Rothfeld's post in Substack: "what the heck is a vibeshift?", where she treats the idea of a vibe shift something like the phenomena of semantic satiation, where the constant repetition of a word often leads to an evaporation of meaning, in this case being a conceptual variety of it. Everyone was talking about vibes and vibe shifts and suddenly we find ourselves at a point where we don't know what exactly what we are talking about anymore.
I brought up a bon mot (at least I think so) that I had dropped in chat earlier: "The marquee always changes. This is its nature. The marquee must change." Identity Politics has had a long run now. What's next? Any ideas?
The cat had already had its' sport with the mouse and now it seemed to be dead and lifeless. It probably was. Uninteresting for felines. The group poked at the lifeless body and the conversation moved onwards to fresher prey.
Afterwards, returning home, I played with the carcass of the mouse a little more. My notes:
Some thoughts that might add up:The proliferating rapidity of art movement generation at different stages of art history is spun up by an enthusiasm, consumption and exhaustion, the rate of which seems the same no matter when they happen, not really affected by accelerating modernity (what happened in the 1910's seems similar to post WWII & Vietnam years*), possessing a constant seemingly imparted by basic human character. *Does war quicken art movement formation? 🤮
What qualifies the merit of an art movement, actually? Is it enough that a group of artists share inspired concerns and if so, how much deviation between their focus disqualifies the formation of a putative movement? Does such a concordance actually require a resonance echoed by critics and institutions? Is there a minimum degree of resonance? What's the smallest molecule of art history? In connecting a collection of shared concerns across similar chained episodes in art history, is there a point when the links between dots can become too attenuated? Does the existence of sleeper art movements (arguably Duchamp, for example) disquiet our ability to know anything really substantial or make substantive claims with an air of finality when there might be others sleeping now in plain sight? Can institutions spike the ball? Can they over manipulate the perception of an art movement? Distortion? When are thumbs on scales? Is there a dynamic, something like an emergence property going on here? While Rothfeld's piece was a toss off, her questioning "what is a vibe, actually" becomes something like semantic satiation where when we say a word over and over again, we lose its meaning. Could a similar thing be happening when we question what a vibe or vibe shift is, what an art movement is? A similar thing happens when we ask what art is, doesn't it? It seems that with some ideas or concepts, once you go too deep, it's (seemingly) impossible to surface again.
January 27, 2025
Messaging My Friend A
I had SMS messaged my friend A, these two TikTok links:
Aidan Walker (@aidanetcetera) intro to Historie d'Horreur and the phenomenon of Lakaka:@aidanetcetera The lore de @lakaka , a great innovation in online literary forms. #lakaka #lore #oupigoupi #france #meme ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker
(LINK)
(Sometimes the embeds don't work. Don't know why.)
Historie d'Horreur, @lakaka.land:@lakaka.land histoire d'horreur 😱 #dankmemes #catmemes #chat #brainrot #horreurtiktok #humour #offlain ♬ original sound - lakaka
(LINK)
***
"I don't have that app"
So I took the trouble to send the links to him again via email, taking not a little pleasure in knowing that I'm probably bugging him.
***
A's reply:
Unfortunately, considering how memes function is outside of my interest.
I've been rereading Deleuze's Bergsonism of late, a pleasurably confounding text.
These dorks are trying to wrap their heads around some of the concepts therein.
You will at least appreciate the room in which they sit.
***
My reply:
A,Beat for beat reactions:
First thought into the video: so, all is image. Nice summation: "..collapsing matter and memory..." referring I assume to the problem of bridging the perceiver and the noumena.
Genesis 26: Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..."
Wait a sec. Is this Platonism?
Memory as flow. Then, memory was then thought of as a playback, that memory is a neural pathway etched in our brains, . Today, the idea of memory as a reconstruction, that memory is not summoned but instead reconstructed, recreated (and importantly, error prone) in our brains, The flow concept is not displaced, but maybe modifiable?
There's another idea in physics about time cones or timescapes, rendering the past and future more or less fixed.
T=6:00 in
A reliance on calculus. Lines tangent to curves. Slicing derivatives.
There's also a scratching going on in science suggesting that the brain is a transducer of reality past, present and future... not a singular mainframe. A self distributed, not a materialist singularity.
"Science of the day." Keeping up with the evolving debate would a good Bergsonian make. String theory just got dethroned, for example. Dark Matter might be a dead end, for example.
T=11:00
The reduction of the image: that's what a transducer does, a device that converts energy from one form to another.
Maybe, in order to live and navigate in a material world, our access to the totality of which our imaging slices is too much for a mortal capacity. A limited capacity just might be the only way to exist in this world, to live on an earth for any given time. A totality is another word for G-d and isn't it a thing in the bible that direct contact with G-d would destroy mere mortals? Therefore, the need for a GUI avatar like Jesus or a Holy Ghost to sweep a pathway towards the godhead.
"Ego consciousness is hte least conscious facets of our perception."
Nice:
"the image for Bergson is our own body. That is what we experience and what we always there... and it is an interrelationship with the entire universe, this is where Delueze's Plane of Immanence comes in..."T=18:00
Man of action vs man of dreams.
My parents thought I was too day-dreamy and my dad used to say: "Son, you're like a chicken, born in a new world every day." Thanks, dad! 😂
Balance, a good thing.
Extracting advantage, good coinage.
T=23:00
Calculus reference. Shout out to Leibniz.
***The dome? Bucky Fuller was the apex dork. I prefer Gaudi. Good but way-too-thorough presentation by Mark Bury at the Architecture Association. You might have to press your finger on the screen for 2x speed to get to the good parts 3/4 of the way in. Good stuff to get the real nut of parametric design:
Why I thought of you with the Historie d'Horreur and Lakaka:The short bursts of storytelling adding up later in any order, the cats, the noir, the French attitude and his references to Godard...
...made me think of your oeuvre and how it operates in a similar way. Each thing you make could be likened to a TikTok video, viewing one after the other in any order of linkage could suggest a larger narrative with flexible interpretations, each of which are imbued with a certain attitude and character as your work is.
-D
Historie d'Horreur and Goddard:
@aidanetcetera Brainrot, Godard, and online cultural exchange. #lakaka #lore #godard #aboutdesouffle #brainrot #france ♬ original sound - Aidan Walker
Wish I could reveal who A is.
If I asked him, he'd probably say no.
January 25, 2025
Morandi Panel at Zwirner
Curated by Marilena Pasquali - founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center, Bologna - and Mattia De Luca, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 works from across Morandi's career on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the artist's death.
During the first two months of 2025, David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea opened Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. Similar to the Mattia de Luca show, the Zwirner presentation is closely coordinated with formidable institutions supporting Morandi's legacy across the Atlantic.
The Zwirner show seemed -to my eye- to feature off brand Morandi, what people usually identify as the typical Silence and Light Morandi (an intentional wink to Louis Kahn, same vibes). Anomalies such as (self) portraits, floral still lifestyles, atypical props, etchings, drawings, landscapes, and townscapes. It was effective if it was meant to be instrumental in destabilizing the usual image of the eternal, iconic Morandi scrubbed of detail in softened light, brush touched ever so softly and deftly. That Morandi.
There was a panel discussion. I took notes.
Some key take aways from the panel discussion:January 20, 2025
Responses to Dean Kissick
Let this post be an archive of all the responses to Dean Kissick's article in Harper's Magazine titled "The Painted Protest", subtitled "How politics destroyed contemporary art."
Kissick had kicked open quite a beehive, but I think that the beehive of Identity Politics in art was already in an overripe mature stage, with an ever thinning skin ready to burst. Conversations among my circle of friends have been pinging back and forth, mostly via text, with each new article crackling online and this blogpost has been in formation for at least a month now, swelling my Notes app.
It's fitting yet coincidental that today's date is the Inauguration Day for an extremely contentious presidential election in the USA. November 6, 2024 was a watershed moment and catastrophic for the institutional sphere who depended so dearly on a stable status quo to secure the power structures assembled to date. No doubt, Harper's Magazine intentionally published Kissick's a month after that fateful date but I estimate that not only had Kissick been formulating his thoughts about the topic years earlier, but Identity Politic's latest manifestation as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) within all facets of the superstructure corporate, governmental, educational and of course the arts had imparted... some would say an overconfidence and some would say a fatal level of hubris. This, a fulcrum in a topic full of fulcrums.
There's much to be said about the articles linked below. In my Notes app, each I read each closely, marking up passages, changing the type color red and bolding, italicizing and underlining, adding my own commentary interspersed between paragraphs in blue type. I'll content myself with holding this back not only for the shear tedium it would cost me but probably for you too.
This topic is aging fast not only because it is currently pivoting on what I consider to be an absurd binary of Art-for-Art's-Sake versus Art-for-Politics-Sake but also because a question is yawning about whether there is more to Art than it's current definition. Regarding the former: this is what happens when "live or let die" makes war on "live and let live". Regarding the latter: this is what happens when Fukuyama's "End of History" comes home to roost and the eschatological fever dream tries to force-foreclose on the horizon of utopia, a beat too soon.
I predict that in a year's time, we will all be off to new pastures because, as I like to say:
The marquee will change.
It must change.
That is its nature.
Kissick's subtitle: "How politics destroyed contemporary art." Art can never be destroyed, but it will go underground if it has to.
***
To the links:
PostScript: More articles coming in:
*
Tangential:***
My favorites were Saul Ostrow (He's chasing down the socio-economic aspect) and Ben Davis (encyclopedic, and yet a bit hedgy with too much passive voice but he saves the day in the final paragraphs by flagging Olufemi Taiwo's Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)).
***
TLDR?
Summary via Saul Ostrow's ChatGPT (January 7, '25):
1. Ajay Kurian criticized Kissick's assumptions about identity art and institutional exhibitions, arguing his views align with anti-woke culture wars and fail to address systemic issues in art discourse.
2. Patrick Nathan highlighted the discomfort of partially agreeing with Kissick while finding his critique reactionary and coded against diversity.
3. Saul Ostrow argued Kissick overlooks historical and economic factors shaping art, critiquing his call for a return to romantic ideals.
4 Jonathan T.D. Neil critiqued the article's length and editing, while acknowledging its articulation of a shared sentiment about the art world's political turn but questioning its nostalgic call for Romanticism.
5. Johanna Fateman published Ajay Kurian's detailed critique, which challenged Kissick's stance on identity art and institutional exhibitions, framing it as reactionary and aligned with anti-woke rhetoric.
6. Discussions on platforms like Threads expressed concerns about the article reflecting a broader cultural shift to the right.
7. Christian Viveros-Fauné published a response in The Village Voice to Dean Kissick's article, "The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art." Titled "The Culture of Complaint 2.0: White Guy Wants His Museum Back," Viveros-Fauné critiques Kissick's perspective, suggesting it reflects a nostalgic and dismissive view of contemporary art's political engagement
On Substack
1. Rob Fields critiqued Kissick's call for self-involved art, emphasizing the need for work that fosters empathy and understanding in a divisive era.
2. NewCrits labeled the piece a "clickbait manifesto," challenging its logic and framing Kissick's critique as resentment toward identity-focused art.
On Reddit, notable responses to Dean Kissick's "The Painted Protest" include:
1. LandscapeRocks2: Agreed with Kissick but emphasized the potential for dissent and experimentation in traditional gallery spaces .
2. NationalHunter5407: Critiqued identity-focused art, expressing hope for a new artistic direction beyond current trends .
3. SufficientPath666: Strongly disagreed, highlighting the necessity of addressing transphobia and personal struggles in art .
4. Glass_Purpose584: Praised Kissick for voicing a bold opinion but criticized his perceived dismissal of contributions from artists of color
January 17, 2025
Tell Them I said No
Little by little, then all at once, I've been allowing some lag in posting blog entries here. Circumstances both personal and professional have played a role and despite that this is a kind of public diary... discretion dictates discretion.
I've been maintaining this weblog for now more than twenty years and vast changes have occurred both in my career and in the character of the art world and being chatty about this is the wrong way to go. Thus the tight lips in these "pages".
Lest you read too much into the cryptology of this and the over-arc of my posts... no worries. Things are good.
What is success in art? Making art. A buoyant imagination. The urge to get into the studio, to make things. This and more is happening for me now and into the foreseeable future.
But the art world has become strange and estranging. Hebert documents well the now deep history of artists who by staking all on the heart of what art means, who have removed themselves from the charade that has crept into the various architectures of what has become our art world. The phrase "art for art's sake" has been abused up to this moment and the original meaning nearly lost. This condition has been discussed widely and variously by my circle of artist friends and when I insert the idea that "we are Ronin", they understand and when some might not necessarily agree at some fundamental level, they don't push back. In a world so besotted, some have to guard the flame and keep it safe from the rain for better weather ahead.
Art
The definition of art seems to confound many people, too many are in the art world itself.
Here's my definition in two aspects:
*The spanish expression is ¡Manda cojones!, which translates to "It's fucking awesome!" I've used it time and again both in Spain and in the States, usually resorting to what is probably my own peculiar transliteration, "huevos en mis manos." I've never thought I was misunderstood. When I've deployed the phrase, my meaning is a combination of trepidation and commitment, that I'm operating into unknown territory, that the stakes are high.
***
PostScript:
(I imagine this to be the sticky spot for a never ending list of related subject matter. A magpie's nest.)
- I've found Carter Ratcliff to be a delightful writer. His Substack emailer is welcome in my inbox. Here he is on the definition of art:We ask "What is art?" not to settle the question but to force ourselves up against the impossibility of settling it--an impossibility worth noting, as explicitly as we can, for it is what keeps art open and present and therefore alive.
- Thierry de Duve, THE INVENTION OF NON-ART: A HISTORY:
I DON'T KNOW WHO COINED THE EXPRESSION "NON-ART." But I remember that "non-art" and its supposed twin, "anti-art," were very much in fashion in the art criticism of the 1960s. The terms were used to refer to Dada and early Pop art, then seen as "Neo-Dada." However, by the mid-'70s, critics had realized that Pop art owed very little to the nihilistic thrust of the Dadaists. To imagine Robert Rauschenberg shouting with Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich had become counterintuitive; attention had shifted from Dada to the Neo in Neo-Dada, from the revolution to its recuperation. Consequently, "non-art" and "anti-art" fell out of fashion. It was clear to everyone in the art world that the aggressiveness of anti-art had been tamed, that the negativity of non-art had been in turn negated, sublated, or otherwise mutated into positivity.- The aesthetic judgment "This is art" in Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve by Pioter Shmugliakov & Alma Itzhaky:
Not everyone greeted the erasure of non-art's negativity with indifference or resignation.
Before the rise of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, the principal question vis-à-vis an artwork was the evaluative one: "Is it a good work of art?" or, in a manner in which it was most commonly posed, "Is this piece of art beautiful?" The fact that this is art that is being judged, on the other hand, was trivially given--neither argued for, nor disputed. The classification of certain objects as works of art, if it gave pause for philosophical queries at all, was considered an empirical question, preliminary to the aesthetic appreciation of such works. In the 20th century, however, the cultural situation in the arts became increasingly defined by the fact that the very belonging of certain objects to the category of art turned to be a matter of controversy. Confusion and dismay became the stereotypical responses of art spectators faced with certain objects that claimed to be art, and were treated as art by certain people and institutions, but which by the traditional standards shared by most of the population appeared as no more than a hoax or a provocation (viz. Malevich's Black Square [1915], Duchamp's Fountain [1917/1963], Manzoni's Artist's Shit [1961]). Since the 1960s, clarifying the status of these objects also became a central issue for philosophical aesthetics.
- X
December 25, 2024
November 11, 2024
November 7, 2024
September 20, 2024
June 3, 2024
June 2, 2024
Let's Call This a Bloom
An image appeared in my mind one day. A square, circled. A painting blooming from its support, a ring sprung a square, a frontal view displaced 90 degrees, the painterly seeped past the frontier of the canvas and into the wood and wire of the support. Petals spread wide, straining pistil and stamen forward, the gonads of painting glimmering for the horizon.
Later, associations. The first was a turbine. It was about the spin, it was about design, of blades about to spin but not yet so. Not yet. The piece was made, or well on its way. Wires implied motion strongly and yet they are fixed.
Spokes.
Bicycles.
Duchamp's Bicycle. He said that he made it just because he liked to see it spin. I'm in the middle of reading Thierry de Duve's "Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines". In it, a distinction is made, Greenberg's and I think de Duve's as well, between an art object appreciated aesthetically and one calculated in its' creation to impress. There must have been a moment preceding the manifestation of "Bicycle" when Duchamp found himself noticing how nice the spinning bicycle tires were, one moment here, one moment there. How better to hold that sensation aloft and away from the unpredictable circumstantial encounter than to fix it on a stool? Art material was all around him, freed from the specialty retail stores, ubiquitous. People said Duchamp was aloof, Duchamp had feelings, no matter how antiseptically there were categorized as aesthetic. Greenberg felt compelled to confine those feelings to the classical bins but I'm not yet entirely sure that de Duve does, even though he had charted very clearly the dangerous shoals of Art-In-General in "Between the Lines" and later more fully in "Duchamp's Telegram". All of this, I'm currently digesting.
About a week or two after I completed this piece, I sent an image of it to a friend, and his reply was a reference to the eclipse of 2024, the one everybody was abuzz about in the USA. Indeed, at the time of its making, the association didn't really occur to me. It seems a stretch, especially since I had made associations to celestial mechanics to art history in past blogposts. But yeah, the thought hadn't occurred to me probably because I didn't get swept up in the media hype at the time. And yes indeed, this is a great association. I love it, I've always had a fascination with astronomy since I bought an 8" Celestron in the 90's and learned that the sights we see of the universe in the media is quite different from what we can see with conventional optics here on earth. The eclipse, any eclipse is bound to be less than impressive unless one is directly within the path of totality, and that moment is all too fleeting as it is. But the association is wonderful, even if the reality of the universe is currently scrubbed of unimaginably vast distances between all celestial objects. Our abstractions of the world are quite vivid and spell binding.
May 20, 2024
May 14, 2024
Mighty Small
VERY happy to report my inclusion into this group show at Front, hosted by dear old friends, artists Sharon Englestein and Aaron Parazette.
FRONT 1412 Bonnie Brae St. Houston Texas, May 18 - June 15, 2024
From the website, a blurb:
Mighty Small brings together nine paintings by nine artists from around the United States. The aim of this exhibition is to demonstrate how much can be seen, conjured, and achieved within a modest frame. By contemporary painting standards the paintings in this show are small, but the effect of each one is expansive and reaching--even mighty. Encountering a small painting can be an intimate experience, as when you encounter it you are placed in the same proximity that the artist was in when they made it. Our constant processing of images on screens is too often seen as analogous to actually being with the thing the artist has made. To be with the actual painting is to encounter surface and depth, images and material, the ordinary and the mysterious, and potentially so much more. Each painting in the show provides this opportunity. Each is a record of idiosyncratic intentions and impulses, and each is a small but mighty moment.
May 7, 2024
Notes on Abstraction
In advance of a meeting next week with friends to talk about Abstraction, I created a note file* and dumped thoughts as they occurred to me during my day to day.
Then, I arranged them thematically.
A rough classification.
Here they are.
What is Abstraction?
"The idea of "removing" or "pulling away" connects abstract to extract, which stems from Latin through the combination of trahere with the prefix ex-, meaning "out of" or "away from." Extract forms a kind of mirror image of abstract: more common as a verb, but also used as a noun and adjective."
The Remove
Duality
"...the original human nature was not like the present, but different. ...the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast."
Mathematics
Mental Categories
Modernity
***
After listening to Lisa Blas give her talk about affinities and specifications in painting, she provides us with a rich vein to think about abstraction with. Adding another, probably more vital classification, using the framework presented by Blas:
***
Spiritual
*
*
*
*Another postscript: Thoughts on the fly. Usually, I flip out my phone while I'm commuting in the subway, the D train to Brooklyn, and catch the butterfly of a thought. This happens so often that it seems that if I want to brainstorm, I should just get to the subway station and let it rip.
