A Whole 'Nother Country

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1980s and 90s. I remember thinking of cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Dallas as distant metropolises full of glamour, neon lights, and general excitement. These were the places where my well heeled classmates would be taken by their mothers to shop for new school clothes or one-of-a-kind cotillion dresses, or would accompany their fathers to attend action-packed sporting events. Dallas had a special place in this starry constellation because a picture of it entered my family’s living room every Friday evening (in the form of J.R., Sue Ellen, and company on Dallas) and sometimes, with luck, on New Year’s Day (in the form of an Arkansas Razorbacks appearance at the Cotton Bowl). To my mind, Dallas, with its distinctive lit-up skyline and Neiman Marcus catalogs, was the epitome of a city; New York might as well have been on another planet.

Well, now I have the chance to learn about the real Dallas, to replace this childhood picture of it in my mind. For the next two months, I’ll be living and working at UT Dallas’ Central Trak artist residency, in the neighborhood of Deep Ellum. I’m looking forward to learning about a new art community and reconnecting with my Texas ties. I’ll be posting about my adventures here. Stay tuned!

Monique van Genderen at Happy Lion

I have been a couple of times now to see Monique van Genderen’s new paintings at Happy Lion Gallery in Chinatown, and I still don’t know what to think about them. I am seduced and repelled at the same time: the paintings’ slick, shiny surfaces and bright colors beckon but are ultimately inscrutable, like a tagged-up wall.

The 6’x4’ panels march around the gallery walls in lock-step, with flower forms, rainbow arches, and blocky areas of color flowing from one to the next. I kind of want to lick them (flavors like Tutti Fruitti and Daquiri Ice—Baskin Robbins circa 1985—come to mind), and I also want to wrap them around giant gift baskets for my girlfriends, like cellophane. The gallery space feels like a haute-couture fete. But in my jeans and t-shirt with fingers smelling like the egg roll I just ate, I am the frumpy girl at this party; I can’t untangle the refined language, perfect manners, and manicured surfaces of these abstractions.

After reading back over what I just wrote, I see that my interpretation of these paintings could be called feminine, as I have described them in the language of Vogue or the late Domino. I get the feeling from her artist statement that van Genderen would be okay with that. She describes her work thusly:

“Paint hangs on the surface, exposing the structure of the panel, not unlike the various states of dress a model for couture might display, showing contour and line through bone beneath the fabric.”

She goes on:

“Let’s say they have nothing to do with the figure at all, it is at least true that the works were made by a feminine hand, trying to carve out theoretical space in this world. For weaponry I resort to scale and boldness of color in order to cast about my subjectivity. Abstraction and materiality are the indicators and the language for what lies beneath.”

Subjective experience, beauty and meaning in pattern, idealization of feminine difference: aren’t these hallmarks of Feminist art? So maybe I was right after all to picture myself in a room full of beauty queens who are preening for my gaze yet are aloof from the need for my regard at the same time. I am still left not knowing what to think, but I really want to join the dance, all the same.

Van Genderen's work is on view through July 11. Image is an installation shot from the gallery's website.

Beyond Words (long ramble ahead...)

Last week I was catching up on some podcast listening while I worked on some fabric pieces in my living room (sewing is easier when you have a soft, well-lit place to park your backside). Episode 191 (4/26/09) of the Bad at Sports podcast featured an interview with art historian James Elkins about a growing international trend in art education: the PhD in Art.

During the discussion, Elkins pointed out many of the problems created by forging ahead with this new degree, such as lack of standard agreement on what should constitute the Art PhD or the regular old MFA; and the class-like split that might occur between MFAs (makers) and PhDs (thinkers). He also outlined the different approaches to this degree that he has encountered at various institutions. One sounds a lot like an MFA: intense studio time and critique that results in a body of work and a dissertation-length artist statement. The second approach is more philosophical or critical, asking degree candidates to focus their research in a discipline that may lie outside of art (anthropology, sociology, computer science, etc.), and to produce a dissertation in that field while also producing a body of studio work.

Elkins advocated for the second approach, at least in cases where an artist’s work necessitates expertise in an outside field (he mentioned Mary Kelly as an example). But the greater questions he seemed to be struggling with were these: what is the role of research in art? Can the production of visual art be considered research, that is, productive of new knowledge?

A lot of this questioning seemed to center around the key component of the PhD: the dissertation. And this got me to thinking about my own thesis (a mere 20 pages) and the role of language in the visual arts. I keep this blog because I want to exercise my writing skills and give the wordy part of my brain new thoughts to chew on, such as expressing connections like what I am doing now or trying to articulate my thoughts about an art show I have just seen.

However, when I am working in the studio I am not using that wordy part of my brain. Sometimes when I am working I realize later that I have been thinking with a different part of my brain, one that doesn’t put its thoughts into words in the same way that the part of my brain that worries about the laundry piling up or the unpaid bill on my desk does. This part of my brain thinks in pigments and marks, it tells me what to do next by showing me a picture of how things could be. These pictures are dark and fuzzy around the edges, so that I can only see a step or two ahead of myself at a time. I must rely on intuition to follow through on the ideas from this part of my brain, trusting myself to figure things out as I go along.

I have lately been thinking that we make art in order to express ideas that are outside language. We create sculptures or symphonies because we want to share thoughts that are hard to put into words, that come from this pigment/mark/intuition part of our brains. But does this count as research? Does relying on my intuition to put red next to gray create new knowledge? And how can a dissertation on DNA sequencing lead to a PhD in Art? Why not a PhD in Biology instead?

Art Notes from Culver City

When my landlords come over every so often to clean up the yard and look around the place, I make myself scarce and go see gallery shows if I’m not working at the museum (I guess I have a hard time getting studio work done when other folks are hanging around). Today was one of those days, so I lit out for Culver City.

I didn’t do my research very well ahead of time, as several galleries were closed for installation. But of the shows I did manage to see, it seemed like big, heavy-hitting dude art was an overarching theme—I’m especially thinking of Kehinde Wiley at Roberts & Tilton and Jedidiah Caesar at Susanne Vielmetter. I don’t mean this as a criticism. Sometimes hyper-real, towering paintings or hulking piles of trash and resin are just what you need to take you out of your own head and into another place, time, or existence. But a couple of group shows, that seemed to be involved with other concerns entirely, caught my attention more.

One was Keeper of Light at Sandroni Rey, an exhibition of smallish portraiture in diverse media. The one work in particular that I looked at for a long time I later learned is a daguerreotype made by Chuck Close; it is a small, mirrored surface imprinted with the image of a sunflower. A viewer can only clearly see the sunflower when she stands with her own reflection intersecting it. I felt myself to be part of this artwork in a very connected and intimate way, as I bobbed and weaved to see the whole image—maybe living with Dan Graham’s work for the past few months at MOCA has made me especially receptive to this line of thinking. (Keeper of Light up til May 23.)

I was also interested in the group photography show Mysterium at Kinkead Contemporary, around the corner on Washington Blvd. These were also small scale, and seemed to me when I was in front of them to be about the non-verbal, and unexplainable and ineffable beauty. Now that I am home and have read the online press release, I’m not sure I was in tune with the curatorial thread….however, still worth a look. (Mysterium up til June 13.)
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I chose Culver City for my outing today because I had heard about a show of unmade bed paintings at Walter Maciel Gallery. However, I had to wait a while to see this one, as the doors did not open at 11 as promised by the sign on the door. So, I circled back and saw this show last.

Frank Ryan’s 20-odd paintings (all sizes, all surfaces, all times of day and night) of an unmade bed (his perhaps?) seemed to me to be meditations on the beauty of the mundane and the every day. The paintings are all of the same bed, in the same room, with the same linens; however, the objects, pets, and points of view change or move from painting to paintng. Taken together, they look like a choreographed dance of light (duvet) and dark (sheets) forms rolling, folding, and bunching around each other. Individually and up close, they are both fast studies of subtle and specific lighting situations and built-up abstractions of brushstrokes on brushstrokes.

I loved this show very much, but I am biased towards all things bed related. You should go see it for yourself (up through June 3).

(image is an installation shot from Frank Ryan's show at Walter Maciel Gallery, from the gallery's website.)

Travels and Brief Mentions, Long Overdue

After a year-long exile, I went back home for my birthday at the beginning of this month. I’m a little ashamed to say that my memories had faded a bit. As soon as I woke up from the long, dark plane ride, I was gobsmacked by the green and the wet, like my eyeballs had been painted with chlorophyll. I marveled at the crazy, figure shaped oak leaves, the heavy, moist air, the big, muddy river. I missed out on barbecue, because I’d eaten too much Big Mista the week before (party leftovers!). Catfish, Franke’s, and red beans & rice were on the menu instead.

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I saw a couple of art shows over a month ago at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown that I kept meaning to blog about, but clearly I’ve had other things (food! party!) on the brain. So even though the shows are down, I still want to give a shout out to Jancar for some rockin’ feminist presentations: Ilene Segalove upstairs (hurray for old-skool, patriarchy-skewering photo appropriation!), with Alison Foshee & Katina Huston downstairs (three cheers for obsessive, super crafty, mixed media blitz!). This show made me smile bigger than any has in a long time.

I’m going to check out some more shows this week, so stay tuned…

(photos above are of the Arkansas River, taken by me; and of Alison Foshee's works Basketroid and Supernova, both mixed media and 2009, from the Jancar Gallery website.)

In Search of Q, Part 2

To any regular patrons of the Atwater Village Farmers’ Market on Sundays, this is old news. I, however, tend to be a weekend lay-a-bed, so it was not til a couple weeks ago when I had a craving for tamales that my nose led me to the source of my newest barbecue crush: Bigmista. That weekend I demurred, going instead with the old tamale standby for lunch (pork and sweet corn, obviously). M suggested that, even though my nose was swooning for the heady aroma of wood smoke and melting fat, I didn’t want to get my hopes up to have them dashed by subpar Q. So when we got home, I did some research and discovered other bloggers raving about Bigmista. I resolved to give him a try…

This past Sunday, we did just that. Two Mini Mistas (a sandwich, a side, a cold drink), both with pulled pork, one with beans, one with potato salad (cole slaw was gone by 12:30). I focused on the meat first, after pouring out my little plastic cuplet of sauce and dipping my finger in—sweet and smoky, black-peppery like what I encountered in Illinois. I sampled the meat with my fingers too, since it overflowed the bun. MMMM! Tender juiciness, just the right amount of slick greasiness, it rivaled Whole Hog, my personal back-home favorite, next to McClard’s (which, really, you go to for the atmosphere and maybe the tamales, which are wholely different from tamales as experienced out here, served with ketchup and Saltines).

I took home a catering menu, from which I can order meat and sides by the pound. I think Bigmista is going to be making an appearance at the upcoming Team M 30th Birthday Party. Be prepared with your wet naps.

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ps – oh! The potato salad! So good, made with mustard like it ought to be, like my Aunt Inez used to do. I think she would approve.

Day to Day Rememberance (or, nerding out on NPR)

It’s been two weeks now since one of my favorite radio programs, Day to Day, went off the air. Yet I still find myself feeling expectant around 9 AM, thinking, “oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be doing something right now….” That something always involved making sure I was tuned to Preset Station 2 (KPCC) instead of 3 (KCRW) and turning up the volume knob on my radio so I could hear Madeline, Alex, and Alex over my typing, or cereal crunching, or the traffic outside my car. Now I’ve got BBC News Hour or Morning Becomes Eclectic to toggle between….both good choices, but just not the same somehow.

I remember being excited when I moved to Los Angeles almost three years ago and realizing that I would again be living in a place where the public radio station aired Day to Day. I became enamored of this program when I was at home in Little Rock, where KUAR (89.1 FM!) aired it at noon. I think I liked this show because it listened the way a good website reads: a little hard news, a bit of obscure facts, a dollop of human interest, a pinch of snarky satire. I would hear about people, places, and events on this program that I probably never would have come across on my own. And I could hear about these things while being otherwise productive with my hands and eyes, unlike a book or newspaper. For someone who spends long, silent hours alone in the studio, this kind of aural stimulation is an important reminder of the outside world.

When I moved to Illinois, however, no dice on the D2D front, as neither WILL nor WBEZ aired it. However, during my second year, one of my fellow art grad students realized that we could pick up the AM station from Purdue U. (in West Lafayette, IN) in our studio building. One day I heard that familiar music from behind his closed studio door and immediately had him set me wise on how I, too, could tune in D2D once more. Of course, this station did not come in at my apartment or any other place in town—our studio was in a little radio sweet spot, and maybe that helped encourage me to get there a little earlier in the day than I would have otherwise.

I don’t have a good ending to this post, other than to say that I miss Day to Day very much. It has been a faithful and constant companion in my studio, in my car, and at my desk. So although I continue to be a loyal NPR listener (and member too! Support public radio and get a fabulous logo grocery tote like I did!), I now have one hour of listening to look forward to a little bit less.