Bird of Paradise, front and rear view (unknown, German ~16th century)
Thursday, February 9
Sunday, January 22
All of us are collectors. We are not simply collectors of prints or drawings, we are collectors of interesting moments. If we are alive, we saturate ourselves within states of affairs that we can support. What I’ve been emphasizing is how sensitive we are, and how we sell ourselves the rightness of certain things. We like something, and we begin to think that this represents a state of finality. This finality is fiction. Shall I support what I find in life, or shall I take exception? Shall I say, “I only like this, I don’t like that?” We could go to the world’s greatest banquet, a feast for gourmets, and have a miserable night if were going to be specialists about liking this or not liking that. Each thing would interfere with the next thing. States of affairs are interrelationships.
Frederick Sommer, “A Talk Given at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1970”
Monday, October 24
My job is not to fuck up somebody’s day on their way to work. It’s to fuck up their whole life.
Lawrence Weiner at TYPO.
Tuesday, June 21
I admit I assumed that an animal rights activist and illustrator of slaughterhouse scenes would be, in person, tediously polemic and unreflective. Of course, I was completely wrong. Here is Sue Coe on her life and art:
I reject the concept of ‘career’ as it sounds contrived and planned and outside of oneself in a way. If you asked professional illustrators if I had a valid career, I doubt if they would say yes. Or art dealers if I have a valid gallery career, doubt if they would say yes. Have always had the idea, that life and work would merge into the same vision. Gandhi said to become the change you want to see, and I have tried to do that. I live in a solar-powered cabin in the woods, am vegan, but those things mean nothing if one feels one knows all the answers, and tries to control and manipulate others — and is not listening any more, so this is all fine tuning and balance, which is never actually achieved.
Life is being aware. Integrity is not something one has, and then can take it to the bank … it is a state that has to be worked at every day, in every decision, small and large. Art is that fleeting firefly in the sky, flitting in and out of sight, and one chases and pursues that light, but always keeping in mind that humility and losing are part of the game too.
If you’ve a chance ever to see her talk, take it.
Tuesday, January 5
Sol LeWitt
MassMoCA has a retrospective of his work up for the next 25 years. Click through for a super cool timelapse of this piece’s installation.
Sunday, November 8
One photograph stands out from [Dorothea Lange’s] travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange’s desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.
Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There’s an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California’s vast online archive of Lange’s work, in which he’s wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.
This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it’s so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man’s nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race. There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.
Here are, I believe, the two photos referred to:
Not hard to see why Lange cropped the latter; it is much more striking, and seems to “say” more — not necessarily about this particular man, but a culture. Is it a fabrication? Did the Hopi man intend for the latter photograph’s effect? I too would like to know what he thought.
