PaintClot

Year's End

well the site has been languishing for quite a while
Agnes Martin, Anne Truitt, and Susan Sontag have passed on
motivating me to post again as well as a link from the MAN .
So. I better get posting, and more often,
a new year resolution perhaps.

Gloucester

Anne Truitt's words do her more justice then any i could summon.

"We dwell as strangers on the earth to become its wrack.
We invent it for ourselves. We name it land and sea and sky.
We divide its reaches arbitrarily into degrees of latitude and
longitude supplemented by a contrivance we call time. We keep
ourselves in orderly fashion by imposing on it grids entirely
our own. We forget, because we have to in order to endure our
plight, that these are rationales of our own logic. Colonists,
we attune ourseves to it as we may- but we remain strangers.
indifferent to us, the earth rolls under our feet among other
phenomena like itself.
I contemplate all this with curiosity and wonder, and then
return to my daughter and grandson"
from TURN, book 2 of Anne Truitt's diaries

Happy Bloomsday!

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the date that Ulysses is set, this lauded book will be presented here page by page starting with page one today and ending with the last page on June 14, 2006.

STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air.
He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

______________________________________

Tortures
Wislawa Szymborska
unknown translator

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered,
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

LEON GOLUB

Interrogation

RICHARD SERRA @ DIA Beacon

october 2004
autumn birthday roadtrip to beacon and stormking. three days
of rain, grey, breaks of blue and golden rays of autumn light. in this light "discovered" serra's Torqued Ellipses. and as the day hastened
to a close, i explored the canyons created by the rolled steel plates:
delicate and hulking, hollow innards of wrecked vessels, meditative
maze. all this but not quite right. a birthday surprise,challenge,
a present to return to, to move into.

AGNES MARTIN 1912-2004

The Sea

MAX GIMBLETT
Max Gimblett.s art is timeless. Born out of 20th century abstract expressionism and early modernist concerns to express the spiritual in art, it is also inflected by the artist.s interest in Asian art and religion. His paintings, which are at once seductive and austere, move from flat matte canvases to gilded and luminescent surfaces. They break out of the conventional rectangular frame with many employing circular, oval or the Gimblett trademark quatrefoil support. Shape, surface, gesture, light and a rich range of materials [from traditional oil and acrylic to gold leaf and gesso, pearlescent pigments, polyurethane, silver and silica] come together to create objects that do not so much "communicate as induce an attitude of communion and contemplation". (Donald Kuspit, in .Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art., 1986) Gimblett.s paintings embrace .gesture. which in addition to the mark of the brush, and Gimblett.s distinctive calligraphic stroke, can be interpreted to include other actions of the artist.s hand including the pouring, pooling and throwing of paint. Many of the paintings are also about layering . a layering that in some paintings reveals itself with levels of transparent planes and in some paintings is opaque and merely suggestive of hidden layers and under-painting. Drawing is also a very important part of the artist.s oeuvre and closely linked to the painting. Gimblett has said "the drawings let the paintings happen". (Interview with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2003.) Writer Wystan Curnow has described the drawings as slipping "between the figurative and the non-figurative, the calligraphic and the .automatic., dream and daylight reality". The drawings are often produced very quickly with the artist.s eye and arm interacting in a performative action.

check out

wood s lot my new favorite weblog.

dieter roth

WORKS WITH ORGANIC MATTER
"...While in Providence,Roth expanded on tentative experiments with organic edible materials-chocolate,fruit,cheese... He added chocolate and bananas to sheets of paper for prints before passing them through the press; he built thin glass vitrines into which he added a variety of materials that would decay and mold. Slices of sausage, sealed between sheets of plastic or glass, developed an aurora of mold transforming them into sunsetss of clouds..."

TOTH by Anne Truitt

An Excerpt from Anne Truitt's DAYBOOK:the journal of an artist (thanks due to MAN) "...This instantaneous recognition of quality has been very ,very rare in my experience with artists I am called upon to gauge, and in these modest circumstances I make it a habit to start by coming to respectful attention. It is such an act of courage to put pencil to paper that I begin by honoring the artist's intention. Usually the work falls into a range I have to examine with my mind, in the light of what I know about the history of art and about its techniques. If the work is the result of honest effort, I acknowledge its validity but I look for the skill and talent that set apart potentially significant art. I try to discern the range of the artist's gift. When this range coincides with contemporary artistic concerns, the work has cognecy in an historical context. This seems to me to be a matter of luck. A perfectly articulated range of sensibility may be just plain irrelevant to the problems confronting artists ambitious to make work of the highest quality in this historical sense. The degree to which an artist addresses these problems usually indicate the degree of his or her ambition. There is a sort of "feel" that marks relevant art. To some extent it can be learned, and here I find that young artists can badly deceive themselves: They can fall into using intelligence the wrong way; they can fail to realize that the purpose of scanning contemporary art is to use its articulations for the purer realization of their own work. As a carpenter might reach out for a new invented saw, the work of other artists may suggest techniquesor even solutions. But the essential struggle is private and bears no relation to anyone else's. It is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one's own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations. It is ultimately character that underwrites art. The quality of art can only reflect the quality and range of a person's sensitivity, intellect, perception, and experience. If I find an artist homing in on himselff or herself, i bring maximum warmth to bear, knowing full well that the process is painful,and, lonely as it is, susceptible to encouragement. Companionship helps. And the pleasure of being with younger or less experienced artists can be intense--the delight of watching people grow into themseleves, becoming more than they have known they are. Sometimes artist use their work for ends that have nothing to do ith art, placing it rather in the service of teir ambitions for themselves in the world. This forces their higher parts to serve their lower parts in a sad inversion of values. And is, in art perhaps more than in any other profession, self-defeating. Prity of aspiration seems virtually prereqiste to genuine inspiration."

WALLACE BERMAN 1926-1976

& JESS Collins 1924-2004

OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Robert Duncan

Wally Hedrick 1928-2003

"You've got to have a deep sense of the human, and you have to have a political stand. Painting is not above politics. Anything that has to do with the soul has to do with the stomach."
Wally Hedrick

Beside The Rose: selected works by Jay DeFeo

"Only by chancing the ridiculous, can I hope for the sublime. Only by discovering that which is true within myself, can I hope to be understood by others.
I regard myself as an expressionist as well as a symbolist. If expressionism implies emotional impact, I can realize it only by restraint and ultimate refinement." Jay DeFeo, catalogue statement;"Sixteen Americans," Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959.

CAVE CANEM

ANNE HAMILTON @ MASS MOCA

CORPUS is a new work commissioned from one the world's great installation artists for MASS MoCA's most dramatic space- the massive Building 5 gallery.

MADE IN MEXICO

Yasumasa Morimura, "An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo
(Hand Shaped Earring)", 2001. Colorphotograph, edition 3/3.
Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York.

happy new year

SeedVessel

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