paintings + drawings

The more the merrier.

Yesterday it was great to read Tyler Green's recent posts about Donald Fisher's super self-indulgent plans to build his own gargantuan art palace in the Presidio - what Green hilariously refers to as "FishMu."

I was also heartened by his mocking of the Chronicle's recent op-ed that ever so slightly questions Fisher's plan. Myself, I could not read past the first paragraph of that op-ed, since any sentence that refers to San Francisco as a "world-class city" causes me to instantly fall asleep. The same thing happens to me when anyone describes Sonic Youth as "indie stalwarts."

Revival.

Painter and musician Rebecca Schiffman announced today that she has flipped her zine, Upper East Side Journal, over to blogspot.

New project.

Five years ago I worked with Portland photographer George Korejko on a series of large-scale photos. He provided the images, snapped from found films. I cropped them and provided the titles. They were shown four years ago at Elizabeth Leach. That was my first collaboration with another artist. George and I were old friends, the process was easy.

Two years ago, I began another collaboration. Photographs again, this time with Atlanta painter Chris Herren. We didn't know each other that well, but the process was pretty seemless. The results were shown at Rebecca Ibel last year.

Two years ago, I also began a collaboration on drawings with Dan Golden. I started them, he has not finished them yet. Dan and I are old friends. I'm still waiting. I also began a collaboration on drawings with Josh Keyes. The project never really took off. He started one, I demolished it. I started a bunch more, he couldn't get anywhere with them. I met Josh Keyes twice. Oh well.

I've just embarked on a new collaboration. This time with Mike Monteiro and Dean Sabatino. I've known Mike for two decades. I knew Dean's sister in art school, but only recently was introduced to him - he's a great guy. The project will be mid-sized drawings that we will ship back and forth to each other. It should be fun. We are all ex-Philadelphians (Dean lives in Media PA, some might consider him still a Philadelphian) - you cannot ever really leave that experience behind, so the results should be cool.

I'll post visual progress reports here. But will keep any emotional neediness, complaints and whining to myself.

Model citizens.

Oakland gets few things right. Unless you work at the visitors center, I think you will agree with that. It shoots its journalists. It keeps killing its young. It allows developers to quash, with excessive condos, it's budding art district.

But Friday, the Oakland Museum announced one thing that has gone right -  OMCA is the proud recipient of Ted and Ruth Nash's decent sized art collection. The Nashes spent many years building a top notch selection of art from California artists: more than 275 pieces from 175 artists.

From the press release: “We are deeply grateful to Ruth and Ted Nash and their family for this extraordinary gift to the Oakland Museum of California collection. It deepens the museum’s already extraordinary holdings of California art, and particularly strengthens our representation of the preeminent artists of the latter half of the 20th century,” said Executive Director Lori Fogarty.

I'm gonna stop soon - but what a splendid and thoughtful gift from the Nashes. Their works will expand and engage with the Museum's already large holdings of California art, helping to build an even better experience at OMCA.

The museum will display a selection of 20 works from the bequest, August 25–December 30, 2007. Take that Donald Fisher.

Disclosure time: One of my paintings is a part of the Nash Collection.

Ash Tuesday.

According to ArtNet, Richard Prince's "Second House" -- a structure, containing several of his pieces, that he sold to the Guggenheim recently -- was struck by lightning last month. Using updates from the NY State Fire Wire, painter Martin Bromirksi tracked down the building in Upstate New York and drove out. An interesting report on the damage and some photos are up on his blog.

For the detail oriented, here is what the fire report said:

Working Fire: (ALBANY)
Firefighters responded for a lightning strike in Rensselaerville on Route 358. Command reported a house fully involved. (Updated June 27)

Ernest Briggs on the changes of the early 60s

AbEx painter Ernest Biggs spent a number of years in San Francisco (at the Art Institute) with Clyfford Still before moving East. Some of Biggs' recollections of the changes wrought by the emergence of pop art seem relevant to the present.

Here is a excerpt from an oral history interview conducted by Barbara Shikler for the Archives of American Art:

"That is, you could make reputations using typical strategies of investment capital. And that significantly changed the whole landscape of...and ways in which reputations were made, art was made, attitudes of the young people coming out of graduate schools and ultimately what the public, interested or not, gets. You can go across the country and from public collection to public collection and you see the same kit. An example of this one that one and the next one, all of it predetermined to a large extent right here in New York. That is, no regional selectivity. They are things that have to be in the collection whether it's this or that, individual artists. And, of course, the Modern Museum's been the primary engine for determining that taste, determining that historical profile to a public collection of contemporary American art. And that is a strange thing but it is part of the society in the way the society forms its patterns of consumption. And there is resistance to it, There are complaints about it but nothing seems to really change it. There are backwaters, of course. There are Chicago styles and San Francisco styles and Los Angeles styles of presenting and emphasis, but still there are certain necessary connections. Robert Irwin has to get to New York at some point in his career. He can't just stay in Southern California and become a nationally or internationally known artist. And he brings his laid-back Southern California vision to New York and then becomes a part of it--a part of the contemporary American culture. Really a very synthetic way in which society defines itself in terms of its art culture."

Bay Guardian weighs in on Donald Fisher, does not fall into the gap.

Some of the commenters on the feed at sfgate jumped on Donald Fisher's museum idea as if it was an extension of The Gap's labor policies. I woundered if the Bay Guardian would jump into the fray on this one. And they did. But instead of offering some Global Exchange kind of rant against Fisher, they presented a pretty well balanced op-ed mostly arguing against the presence of a museum in the Presidio.

Chronicle pops the big question to Fisher, finally.

Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle was all over Gap Founder Donald Fisher's decision to build a museum for his enormous art holdings, lavishing his collection with praise and describing the future digs in the Presidio (named Contemporary Art Museum of the Persidio or CAMP). Yet the article did not mention why Fisher wouldn't donate his collection to any of The City's numerous museums - especially SF MOMA, of which he once sat on the Board.

After all home builder Eli Broad, who has even more pieces than Fisher, is not building his own palace. He worked it out with LACMA and is paying for his own wing. His pieces will be able to  resonate with the rest of LACMA's collection, strengthening a local institution by creating new dialogues and experiences within the museum. In a video podcast made by Kenneth Baker of the Chronicle, Fisher acknowledges that he has a big collection and "for me to have any kind of control over it was not what they (SFMOMA) wanted."

Today, Julian Guthrie does the deed for the Chronicle. What was merely hinted at in Baker's video, a demand by Fisher for control of the collection is more thoroughly explored in the piece. It seems having a wing at SFMOMA, similar to the Broad project in LA was not enough for Fisher. "Museums are complicated organizations," MOMA director Neal Benezra said. "We have education. We have conservation. We do a lot of things besides hang pictures on the wall. Sometimes private collectors are interested in the most basic function - of hanging pictures on the wall." He goes on to note that the Museum has plenty of room to add on a wing for Fisher.

It really is too bad Fisher has demanded that his collection be housed in its own space in the middle of an obscure neighborhood in San Francisco. If Fisher's pieces were engulfed in an established museum (like MOMA), similar to Broad's holdings with LACMA, the works could engage in a larger conversation making the collection less about Fisher's ego and more about the art itself.

From Peter Saville's Manifesto #01.

"Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever."

That sounded unusually harsh to me, coming from, after all, someone who was big in the 80s.

The rest of Saville's blathering is here.

Teaching an old Dogg new tricks.

I’ve always been a fan of Richard Prince. Having grown up at the birth of hip-hop, I understood and appreciated his early comments on appropriation. Soon after art school, the art world began tackling issues of race and gender, and ideas about inclusion; it was easy to relate to his images of the dominant white male. Having grown up with a father who, at dinner most week nights, tell us the jokes he heard on the factory floor that day, Prince’s joke paintings made me look back at that childhood through a golden haze.

This was all before Michael Zahn bought a piece of mine last spring. I was posting a weekly online show of drawings and, after more than 9 months, the process was exhausting so I had taken to using guest curators each week. Paddy Johnson did the Valentine’s Day show, Zahn bought an ink drawing of the words “Too bad irony is dead” from it. We struck up a correspondence. I was fascinated by his work -- parts of it reminded me of Prince, other parts didn’t. The parts that didn’t forced me to confront some feeling I had been having about Prince’s work, namely that he had always felt to me like those cool kids in high school that went to vo-tech, smoked and wore denim jackets that as a second-grader I would wonder about as they hung out in parking lots. What I’m saying, in a roundabout way, is that he’s cool but from a different generation. He was old enough to be aware in the 60s and 70s. Hell, he probably saw Iggy Pop as a Stooge. I didn’t wake up from my childhood stupor until the late 70s (I was born in '66). So much of Prince’s work comes from a hip reference system - grubby bikers, female nurses, hair bands. Unfortunately the system he uses is date-stamped, many of its icons had waned by the time I was enveloped by the subculture.

That is where Zahn fits. Zahn and I are pretty close in age. By the time we came of age Iggy was looking like a freak (and not in a good way) and playing dance music, and no one really respected or feared him. Our generation was too busy figuring out how to use MacPaint and how to create art outside the gallery system. Our generation was blown away by Gang of Four's Entertainment, The Clash's Sandanista, X's Los Angeles and XTC's English Settlement. Zahn references stuff like this in his work, but he ties in to larger issues and more engulfing problems.

I still like Richard Prince from the 80s, but it sure is great to have someone around to talk to that’s my own age.