Lecture Notes: Elizabeth Peyton @ SAAM

Last week I went to hear painter Elizabeth Peyton speak about her work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She used an unusual but lovely method of doing so. She made a short statement at the beginning of her presentation, then showed us over 100 images of her works in silence. They were projected large on a screen at the front of the auditorium; a few members of the audience seemed annoyed by the lack of narrative and departed. Most of us, however, sat in rapt attention watching the luminous images flash by.

After the slideshow, Peyton took many questions from the audience. Here are my notes on some of her answers.

-Painting is love & beauty & history captured two-dimensionally and telegraphed back to us over time.
-Literature (especially In Search of Lost Time & Balzac's writings) is very important to her, especially in understanding the life of the artist.
-She likes to work in a smaller scale and tries to make her paintings project into a room, to take up the maximum amount of space with a small amount of materials
-Printmaking generates a productive awkwardness. It is freeing because no one is expecting anything, and one can make a lot of work at once.
-She feels very connected to Romanticism, especially that Romantic sense of being totally alive.
-Painting communicated transcendence in human beings. It captures what is transcendent in an individual (beauty, vision, intelligence, etc.) and communicates that across time.
-The best things she got out of art school are good friends and learning to be self reliant.

(image: Elizabeth Peyton, Live to Ride (E.P.), 2003)

Lecture Notes: Ann Hamilton @ NGA

Last Friday I was one of Washington's lucky few who got to hear genius/visionary/artist Ann Hamilton speak at the National Gallery of Art. AMAZING. I think the whole audience would have sat there and listened to her til midnight if the museum had allowed her to go on that long (unfortunately for us, they cut her off at 5 because the building was closing. Lame!).

She had a beautiful way of using anecdotes about her life, work, and creation thereof to explain her underlying ideas and philosophies of art making. Here are my notes:

-A studio practice allows you to pay attention to what you pay attention to. A studio cultivates the situation for this to happen.
-Art is a process of finding what you need.
-Conditions for that finding are created and cultivated in the studio.
-A studio is therefore a metaphorical space, and can be wherever an artist deems fit.
-Things she pays attention to: forms of attention, felt qualities, processes of accumulation.
-An empty table is like a blank page.
-Art can satisfy the longing for a presence so acute that you lose self awareness.

I only wish I had written more down!

< complaint > National Gallery, do us artists here in Washington a solid and publicize this stuff more, will ya? Act like it's the big deal that it is? And maybe also invite these major, major figures like Ms. Hamilton to speak at a time when more of us can attend? Because lots of us have day jobs. Also, universities? Why weren't more students in attendance to hear this contemporary master? Because I think it would have been educational for them. < / complaint >

DC Women Artists Now Reception, 4/5

The reception for DC Women Artists Now at Gallaudet University was a lovely time of hot tea and good conversation.

Work by Gretchen Schermerhorn in the foreground, and Carolina Mayorga in the background

Work by Annie Albagli in the foreground, and me in the background

Work by Michelle McAuliffe in the foreground, with the conclusion of Kendall Nordin's drawing performance in the background

Carolina Mayorga with work by Kristina Bilonick

Kristina Bilonick & Kendall Nordin

Lecture Notes: Peter Doig

A few years ago (really? already?) when I worked in museum education, I spent several mornings a week for a few months plopping kids down in front of this painting. It's Peter Doig's 100 Years Ago, and it was great for getting students' powers of observation, imagination, storytelling, and interpretation going.

I was excited to learn that Peter Doig was giving this spring's Duncan Phillips Lecture at the Phillips Collection. So, last night I ponied up $20 to go to the talk. Throughout the evening, I was impressed with Doig's easy going manner and no-pretense way of talking about his works and studio practices. Here are some notes I jotted down when I got home.

-Work should surprise you, you should do something in your work to catch yourself off guard, do something that you wouldn't do.

-Think about what is outside the painting, not just the little self contained world inside the frame.

-You need time to come to terms with a work (example he gave of this is 100 Years Ago, which sat around in his studio for 6 months without being worked on much before he decided it was complete).

-Memories attach to paintings based on what else is going on in an artist's life.

-A subject worth painting once is usually worth revisiting several times, otherwise you cheat yourself. There aren't that many subjects worth painting.

-You make art about things that you can't explain or talk about (so he didn't really, except to tell us about the experience of making a work or the experiences that lead up to it, visual experiences mostly).

-You can't teach art making.

(image taken from blog Contemporary Art Seminar; painting is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, but they don't have an image available on their website.)

Lightness of Being

A few weeks ago, I went to (yet another) gallery talk by artist Andy Holtin, half of Causality Labs, about the duo's exhibition at American University's Katzen Art Center. (I guess I am making up for three years of almost never going to these things by now going to lots lots lots.)

I really enjoyed Holtin's talk; his presentation combined the best aspects of casual conversation with high academic discourse. However, what I've been turning over in my head ever since is one particular phrase he use at the beginning of his talk. He described himself as "trying to be an artist" rather than beginning with the assumption that he already was one. I am really enjoying thinking about the implications of this phrase: that this is an identity we can put on and take off; that identity as an artist is not fixed; that an artist is never fully developed, always growing more fully into his or her practice.

Dumbing down?

I have been to a couple of different artist talks over the past week, one by Mia Feuer at Transformer (this show closes Saturday) and one by a panel of Christian Benefiel, Michael Enn Sirvet, and Katherine Mann at Hamiltonian (show is up for another couple of weeks). All of these artists work in abstract forms that seem to directly reference natural or man-made objects, although they transform these forms via scale, placement, and strange juxtapositions into things almost unrecognizable.

Both Feuer and Mann talked about cultivating chaos in their practices, Mann by pouring random pools of ink, Feuer by trying to overextend her own physical capabilities with the scale and complexity of her work. They talked about their desire to create these chance-directed situations that they then have to clean up and respond to in order to create their work.

However, both artists shyed away from the word “intuition” when describing their processes, and neither seemed to want to give their subconscious underworkings much credit. Instead, they talked about their efforts to regain control over the chaos in very pedestrian, physically oriented, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other terms. I have caught myself in this same kind of downplaying of my mental processes when talking about my work. Now that I hear what it sounds like, I am kind of annoyed. Isn’t being an artist having this really refined visual sense that allows you to create meaning through inarticulatable (is that a word?) means? Isn’t that skill what sets artists apart from everyone else? So why do we have a hard time giving credence to that ability? Why do we do the “aw, shucks, I’m just an ole girl who works with her hands and nice things come out of it, somehow” song and dance? Why do we strive to un-intellectualize ourselves?

A Response

Last night I attended the WPA-sponsored panel/town hall/free-for-all “Running for Cover(age)” with Kriston Capps, Isabel Manalo, Jeffry Cudlin, and Danielle O’Steen. This discussion was held in response to recent articles (WaPo and AiA) and a Facebook exchange about collector Mera Rubell’s whirlwind studio visit tour of the DC area.

Well, what did I think? I am a newcomer to our nation’s capital city, so I am loathe to step on any tender toes lest I cross myself off the local art list before I even get onto it. That said, the audience was full of a bunch of whiny-assed arts professionals!

Why such a combative relationship with local media? True, arts coverage is given few column inches and tends to have a national/institutional focus , but it’s not as if this situation is much different from that found in any other city. Our newspapers are under the knife, and arts coverage is an easy pound of flesh to give up. (For instance, the Los Angeles Times no longer has stand-alone book review or arts sections {much less a daily local news section!} despite being in a center of art production and display….it’s now all lumped together into a general culture section once a week.) Art workers here need to accept the power of the Post to direct viewers and audiences, and at the same time look to themselves to solve their own problems. Someone in last night’s audience suggested an artist run publication. Makes sense to me based on what I've seen elsewhere. Texas has Glasstire, Chicago has Bad at Sports, LA has Artillery. DC needs its own smart, local outlet, too.

Notice I didn’t put New York in that list. That’s because every other complaint I heard last night was directed at the NYC-art-media-money complex. Old chestnuts such as: Why do our young artists leave for Brooklyn? Why doesn’t our art scene have a Chelsea equivalent? Why does New York media treat us as unimportant and second class? Why didn’t ArtForum review my show?

As if these complaints are original, unique, or limited to DC. New York media treat us as provincial because they themselves are provincial. ArtForum gives only the briefest of nods to the other major art centers in this country, and barely acknowledges the West Coast or the South, so of course it’s not going to cover DC in detail. Young artists leave for New York because 1) maybe it’s closer than LA or Chicago, and 2) it appears from afar that it will be much easier to make and show work there. In reality, it’s really freaking hard to make and show work anywhere, including a cold, crappy loft in Brooklyn. Every city has its own special challenges for artists, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding themselves. DC art workers, realize that you are not in New York. You have your own thing going here, that is unique to here, with many jurisdictions, out of the way art spots, make-shift studio space, and the long shadows of museums of international stature. Use your special challenges as strengths and uniting factors, not as reasons to bitch and moan.

Raise your own flag, as Bjork would say.

What I've Been Thinking About: Formalism vs. Conceptualism

I’ve been reading some discussions on the art blogs recently about formalism vs. conceptualism and the artist's intent, ginned up by Roberta Smith writing about Roni Horn at the Whitney Museum. (Scroll down to see Edward Winkleman's posts from November 10 & 11, and the review mentioned here.)

I used to want to draw a bright line between these two camps also. I believe my thinking was encouraged by grad school and the kind of art I saw in the Midwest and in the East. Those examples showed me that art was either beautiful, or heady, but hardly ever both at the same time.

My time in LA revealed that the distinction between the two kinds of art might be geographical, and is certainly a lot more blurry than I had once believed. I think schools in LA must convey the attitude that all art made now will be inherently conceptual, because it is made in a Post-Conceptualism world. We’ve all learned the lesson that art must mean something besides or beyond the way it looks, so we apply that lesson to all future creations and viewing experiences. Conceptualism can be fun, casual, and hell, even enjoyable to look at.

I was confronted head on by this problem when I was trying to wrap my head around MOCA’s Index show of California Conceptualism last fall. As a museum educator, I was grappling with how to introduce this work to elementary school students without having to give them a fat stack of books to read first. The problem as I saw it was: how are we going to deal with the art of ideas based just on what we see before us, since that is all we are gonna have time to go on in a one-hour tour? What I discovered was that kids approach Conceptualism the same way they approach any other kind of art. If they like to look at it, they’ll talk about why; if they think it’s boring, well, they like to talk about that too. For young viewers, form contains content.

Last night I went to an artist panel at Hamiltonian Gallery with Anne Chan and Michael Iacovone. They both seemed to be struggling with the Formalism vs. Conceptualism problem a bit too, though he more than she. Iacovone’s project was in part an effort to remove the artist’s hand, eye, and choice from image making via a series of arbitrary rules and random dice rolls. He seemed very concerned that the resulting photographs should not be aestheticized objects to be appreciated for their formal beauty (which they had in loads), but invitations for viewers to engage the city in a similar ruled based method (in order, with luck, to experience their everyday space in a new way).

I kind of wanted to shake him a little bit. Why are we still thinking that physical attractiveness is suspect, or that beauty and concept cannot work together to form a more perfect artwork? If Michael Asher can create a seductive pink plastic square and call it high minimalism, then dammit, I can enjoy looking at a well-made rule based photograph. In fact, that little bit of beauty is what gets me to look in the first place. So yeah, the artwork might be showing a little leg….but so what, as long as it follows through with complex ideas once it’s got my attention? Because as a viewer, what I see before me is all I really have to go on in the end.

(image is Michael Asher's no title, 1966, from MOCA.org)