paintings + drawings

Enuff already.

yep, it is now a movie. And the Losers will be haunting an art house near you. Yeesh.

Three bits.

1.    James Day, KQED co-founder, dead at 89. Obit here.
2.    In the May issue of Interview Magazine Richard Prince’s fashion photos mirror his pirated photos. Also included is a boring conversation between Christopher Wool and Richard Hell (both of whom never seemed dull to me), and an equally boring piece on Tom Sachs by Ricky Jay (both of whom do seem really boring to me).
3.    Recommended SF openings and closings: Curated by Kearny Street’s Nancy Hom, Flo Oy Wong’s retrospective opens tomorrow, May 1 at SomArts. Jim Marshall at Gallery 291.  Gale Antokal at Sweetow. David Buckingham at MM Galleries.

photo: Johnny Cash 1969, Jim Marshall

Artists as shills (pt 2).

Not be outdone by Julian Schnabel's recent  hucksterism, Jeff Koons has teamed up with a crew of artists to offer "personal" themes for users of Google's homepage.

Glad I lived to see the day I would get to choose between Anne Geddes and Jeff Koons. Decisions. Decisions.

Process 1.08.

Part of process is the ability to imagine your piece in a different environment – outside the studio.

The piece on view in a gallery or at an art fair is a given. Galleries being a sort of halfway house, that transitioning place between the studio and the collector’s home or institution.

I like Martin Bromirksi’s paintings, but I like his idea for potential halfway houses even more. Well, actually I like the ideas and the paintings the same.

Anyway, here is Bromirksi on his choice of exhibition spaces:

Meatballs at Stuffy's is probably the first time I had what I'd consider a "real show" in a non-gallery space. I'd shown in other non-gallery spaces previous to that, the earliest I can remember was an artist clubhouse-type space in Philadelphia in 1991, but Stuffy's was the first time that I actually called it a show, had cards made, set dates, all that.

I was showing in a local gallery, but just wanted a place to see my stuff alone, and to have complete "creative control" of the installation and cards; hang them how I wanted. A big inspiration was seeing these weird seascape paintings installed at my local library... they just fit so bizarrely well there, and my own paintings were similar in scale with the same sense of "out there-ness".

When I started doing the paintings with circles it was while I was always eating at Stuffy’s. All winter long I had been going to Stuffy's, sometimes twice a day, eating their "Sub of the Season" - a hot meatball sub that was so delicious and cheap. I started to look at those meatballs every day and think about my little circle paintings, and started to think of the paintings as meatballs… not literally, not like pictures of meatballs... but the physicality, oddness, awkardwardness, sloppiness, etc… and to think about them in the Stuffy’s space. So I asked if I could make a show at Stuffy’s, and called it Meatballs at Stuffy’s.

I think my gallerist was a little pissed that I did the show at Stuffy's at the same time as my show at his gallery.. and was so into promoting Meatballs at Stuffy's, including making my own postcard announcements and distributing them all over. My cards were pretty funny; I got Stuffy's to agree to accept them as coupons good for 10% off your purchase at Stuffy's (stated on the card), and included the very deadpan "There will be no reception". (more backstory of Meatballs at Stuffy's is here.)

The Markel Building was the next awesome spot, the Guggenheim Richmond.

Perfect Murder.

There are few thing I hate to read more than written homages to the perfect song (although Robert Lange offers a pitch perfect rap on Neil Young in Dead Boys). But now its time for me to bask in my hypocrisy.

I was just listening to the new Portishead. Machine Gun to be exact, and I began to think of The Glove - you know the side project of Robert Smith and Steve Severin. Opening with the violin and sampled vocals, Perfect Glove really hits the sublime when Smith mumble/warbles the verse.

Hear for yourself:

Recent acquisitions.

Steve Keene.

Right on.

from SFMOMA's photostream.

Donati, dead at 99.

Excerpts from the NYT obit:

Enrico Donati, an Italian-born American painter and sculptor considered by many in the art world to be the last of the Surrealists, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

Mr. Donati survived Surrealism and moved through other art movements, including Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, and became a successful owner of a perfume company.

Mr. Donati attended the New School for Social Research and in 1942 had his first one-man show at the New School’s gallery. His work impressed the art historian Lionello Venturi, who introduced him to the writer André Breton, often considered the father of Surrealism. Breton brought him into the circle of prominent European artists, many of them Surrealists, who had gathered in New York at the outset of the war.

“You are one of us,” he recalled Breton saying to him. The group included Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and the American sculptor Alexander Calder.

“We met for lunch every day at Larré’s French restaurant on West 56th Street,” Mr. Donati later told an interviewer.

At his death, he was the only survivor of the group.

Duchamp became a particular friend. They collaborated on various projects, including the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1947. They devised the exposition’s program, decorating the cover of each copy with a foam rubber breast.

Rest is here.

photo: The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco exhibited Enrico Donati's work in 2007. Chronicle photo, 2007, by Brant Ward

NIAD: Call & Response.

My latest review for KQED goes up on Friday, May 2. Here's the tease:

You know what call and response is, right?

If you've ever been to church or attended a rally, you do. Or if you've listened to music -- like James Brown's "Soul Power" -- you know what I'm talking about.

Yep, its when one person poses a question or makes a statement and the like-minded group proffers a reply. In "Soul Power," when Brown sings "What we want?" the JB's ecstatically offer "SOUL POWER!" Got it now?

NIAD (National Institute of Art and Disabilities) Art Center, that local gem of an artist studio program, is currently offering Call & Response, their own take on this classic form of communication. But in their case the exchange is visual not verbal.

You know what NIAD is right? Alright sleepyhead, here goes: formed more than a quarter century ago in downtown Richmond by Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz, NIAD is a program that works with talented and developmentally and/or physically disabled adults. A couple of the artists in the program deserve a wider audience, but more on that later. On a good day, about 50 people can be found at work on painting, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture or exercising. At the beginning of 2008, NIAD sent a selection of their works (mostly drawings and paintings) a few blocks across town to Richmond High School.

The rest is over here.

Process 1.07.

More in the ongoing series on process.

Last year, a piece by Deborah Fisher really captured my imagination. “Solid State Change” was a large sculpture she made for Middlebury College.

I grew up around farms. During my childhood there existed, close by, a large field (really, just a few acres of land) that was filled to overflowing with broken down, rusting farm machinery - tractors, thrasher and other machines whose function was a mystery to me. After years on the sun the tires had warped and twisted into rubbery licorice.

“Solids State Change” took me back there.

Fisher was generous enough to let me crib the creation process for "Solid State Change" from her site.

Here is her statement, a good place to begin. Next is the proposal and sketches for the project. In her own words, here is the strategy:

1. Let the tires and whatnot accumulate and deform the expanded metal shape
2. See what shapes result and "lock in" those shapes with a bunch of armature steel.
3. Build a fake curved wall and figure out the best possible relationship between the sculpture and the wall
4. "Lock in" that relationship with more steel.
5. Add cement, cut and cover naked screwheads, and generally finesse it into something that someone would
    want to keep around for twenty years.

Below are photos of the piece in progress.