1/03/2007

Rebecca Morris

41 comments:

Painter said...

Rebecca Morris @
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Abstract
534 W 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Dumbpainter said...

is this naive, retro or hipsterism?

zipthwung said...

Memo. Please define your positioning statements. Alliteration is encouraged. Alliteration And ACRONYMS Are Awesome.
Headlines:

ART ABSTRACT MAKES ART A FACT

zipthwung said...

Postmodern camoflauge is cultural triage.

Michael Cross said...

I don't trust this painting.

zipthwung said...

Im down with less brown.
Im no clown.
But I need less frown.
Proust turned the world upside down?
I dont read but I like that sound.
Fecund gerunds germaine to the figure-ground.

Anonymous said...

The manifesto is silly - triangles are your friend - but hey.

I like this whole show. Love that Phillip Allen. Probably like RM least of all the participants. Perverse formalism, does that mean ugly?

Does this look like a Schwitters collage (but way clunkier)to anyone?

zipthwung said...

F to the G - effigy leads to idolatry
Idolatry can be a word
In the beginning was the word and the word was god
Logorhea is the meaning of the blog
Meaning is a message and a medium combined
Messages are ideas behind a duck blind
ideas are a dime a dozen but all you need is one
A dozen was thirteen if you like hot cross buns.

Anonymous said...

vanilla ice and kevin federline all rolled into one!

Anonymous said...

derricks

Anonymous said...

derricks
derricks
derricks
derricks
derricks
derricks
derricks

zipthwung said...

does this painting have asoundtrack?

zipthwung said...

Dore ashton was paid to hang out for a few minutes with the grad students. She came into my studio and said "youre the kurt schwitters of the program arent you".

I said, yeah.

Then she smoked a menthol or six and told me her daughter lived in a trailer.

I love Dore Ashton.

Anonymous said...

grad student

zipthwung said...

AUL SOLMAN: In the 1940's, Rothko took off in a new direction: a conscious, some would say self-conscious, embrace of ancient myth in an attempt, like the European surrealists before him, to create a global language. Ancient birds and ancient Greeks abound. Perhaps his most famous work of this period: "Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea," features symbols of music, the truly universal language. That's what Rothko said he was shooting for here.

DORE ASHTON: It's a tone of voice which is eternal, never changes, and that the, the whole issue of time is not linear. It's circular.

PAUL SOLMAN: So he's groping toward the eternal--some statement about the eternal.
Dore Ashton and Paul Solman

DORE ASHTON: Oh, I'm sure of that, yes. Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: Sure of it why?

DORE ASHTON: Well, because one feels it in the work. I feel it in the work.

PAUL SOLMAN: Did he tell you that as well, I mean when you talked?

DORE ASHTON: No, he would never, he would never say something so banal as I'm groping for the eternal.

Anonymous said...

grad student

zipthwung said...

That was over seven years ago or so.
Dont you know, oilman.

zipthwung said...

Indeed.

Anonymous said...

Dore Ashton

Anonymous said...

Dore Ashton with cigarette

Anonymous said...

mark rothko

zipthwung said...

ze ba zu ba za ba zo ba 2(za ba) zu!

zipthwung said...

Banalities translated from the Chinese

Flies have short lice.
To hurry is wit in a flurry.
Red raspberries are red.
The end is the beginning of every end.
The beginning is the end of every beginning.
Banality becomes all respectable citizens.
Bourgeoisie is the beginning of every bourgeois.
Spice makes short jokes nice.
All women hate mice.
Every beginning has an end.
The world is full of smart people.
Smart is dumb.
Not everything called expressionism is expressive art.
Dumb is smart.
Smart remains dumb.

Anonymous said...

another work by Rebecca Morris

zipthwung said...

Song

We contain all the passions
and all the vices
and all the suns and stars,
chasms and heights,
trees, animals, forests, streams.
This is what we are.
Our experience lies
in our veins,
in our nerves.
We stagger.
Burning
between grey blocks of houses.
On bridges of steel.
Light from a thousand tubes
flows around us,
and a thousand violet nights
etch sharp wrinkles
in our faces.

Anonymous said...

sing!

Anonymous said...

I don't know, what's the manifesto on brown and black, the one RM wrote, anyone!
I like black a lot. And brown is daring in a daring sort of way--I mean that!

Manifestos are good, bring em on!
You know you hate them but actually it opens things up and gives a chance to see how people are thinking, or telling us that they are. When it gets that two or more artists are working something that appears the same a manifesto can help draw you to the differences.

Rebecca Morris seems happy with bits of space all over the place: It appears to work!
I want to move bits.

And right, concerns are concerns. It's all open. But keep in mind, this stuff (the stuff people say nobody understands) is going to be everywhere by the 2008 season. It's always nothing or everything. I just don't get it even though you can see it coming a mile off. Go check the schools.

I wonder if the hedge fund guys and gals 'see', or do they just 'hear'?
Any hedge fund people out there? Any Bears?

Anyway, sorry, slow train--go Rebecca, go everyone.
It's 2007 and it's not over!

BITCJ
back in the concrete jungle.

zipthwung said...

see me....feeeeeel meeeee-eee

Existential pinball my man. Id like to read some hedge fund theory.

George said...

it's

cubism revisited

hlowe said...

Kandinsky crunched up and spray painted.

Not bad to look at,though.

Anonymous said...

kind of like stella's paintings when they got all sculptural, with all sorts of references, only back to the rectangle, and dirtier/browner.

Sven said...

this happened in my school:
place:elevator

dore ashton seen smoking in said elevator

dean to dore: "You know you're not supposed to do that in here."

Dore to dean: "I'm too famous for you to tell me that."

Dean:" ....([silence]).."

fuckin hardcore man

zipthwung said...

When I walk into a gallery now, I don't see anything. It's as if the artists spent all their time trying to find ways how not to do anything. Just because you don't do anything, doesn't mean you've said something. And, as Harold Rosenberg once pointed out, just because you don't say something doesn't mean it's true. (Dore Ashton)

I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect. (Ingmar Bergman)

Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working. (Jean Cocteau)

how do you braid your wavelengths? Thats some fucked up shit.

zipthwung said...

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say. (Andre Malraux)

Its funny because there was that article on how american culture is so degraded that it becomes bad branding abroad. As a child of the military industrial complex, Im pretty sure thats irrelevant; America is going to win and win big.

But we need to get rid of the Christian bioethicists who say stem cell research is wrong, and that tampering with DNA is like playig god - it is but that shouldnt concern us. Its evolution at its next logical step. Its manifest destiny.

We need to kick ass, because what we are saying is better than what they are saying, even if its in english.

In that sense - I mean, where I am coming from, this painting is helpfull to identify the intuitive humanity that we will enhance by our evolution.

Think four lobed brains. Think parallel processing. Think universal ESP. Its inevitable, and its RIGHT.

Have youtubed parents today?

Anonymous said...

Good argument Decay, really!
Though if there was a mission it is not the same remotely now.
Remember we live in the dominant world of knowing--of where we stand, and what we see. We live in the dominant world of things. Feelings are often attached to all sorts of things. You could even argue things give off feelings. For me though things just give me a headache! Historically Abstraction tended to preach 'behind the things'. Nowadays it more 'beside the things', or 'all things included'. It all depends on the focus. The word focus suggests that there is some kind of attention span going on, and that that span is trying to bring something together, though not necessarily a knife or a fork, or chopsticks even.
If you are lost without things, and as such everything... hang on
'every thing'... 'thing', appears arbitrary, then what the hell is the thing doing. It's still a thing--a thing in itself among other things somewhere between the knife the fork and the chopstick--of all things.

With this work It's between a conceptual rigor and the real thing--hard to tell which side it sings.

That's my view but nobody really agrees. That's what's good. It's like you need another language to communicate.

Anonymous said...

there is no commitment. it's all play with no shock. i'd rather find a vein of feeling, something, somewhere.

Anonymous said...

I saw a great lecture by James Sienna once in which he introduced his work with a lot of slides from nature walks he had taken. As I recall, he'd show a slide of a rock or an outcropping of shrubs of some sort without much commentary. (eg: he didn't say "nature had a huge influence on my work" so much as "i went for these walks"). Then he got to his paintings and described the rule for each. But the idea was that he was looking at things, lived in the world. It seemed like he was trying to express this tug in his practice between the rules he had devised for each piece, and a life outside the studio, mentioning at one point that his kid came up with a couple of titles. The gesture of going from a bunch of paintings titled Untitled to giving them names seems conciliatory, but to what--representation?

zipthwung said...

Jerry Saltz quoted one of his students blogs, where they complain that knowing about Walter Benjamin just reifies the power structure. THats pretty funny.

Farenheight 451 is pretty funny too, if you think about it.

Ive been noticing lots of people blathering about "non spaces" must be a book? A class? A curriculum?

Art is overdetermined rather than arbitrary these days. Ive stated in the past that history gets longer without any means of indexing it other than by genre. Genre makes it seem like theres nothing new to do, and yet every day is new.

Proliferation of information means information becomes noise. Noise is a tone. TOnes are a chorus. Redundant tones allow noise to become information again. Redundancy is built into the system.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of the disenchanted.
Arbitrariness is fine as a starting point but Im not convinced this tree is producing fruit so much as expressing on the way to arbitrariness. So much noise in the tree of information.

This work succeeds on being unresoved in an allover way - the ambition to lack ambition. The desire to keep unresolved. The appetite for destruction. The will to arbitrariness.

That means the politics are good, but the work itself is bad.

That means its conceptual.

As a concept its great.

Good concepts make good neighbors.
Like chaos theory, the transfer from macro to micro is a matter of turbulence. This work points towards a strange attractor.

The curriculum.

Anonymous said...

thousand points of light,

i've been aware of rm and her work since grad school '95/'96. when i say there is no commitment, i do not mean to imply that she is not committed to the act of painting, for i know she is. my problem lies with the lack of commitment intrinsic to the work, and from work to work -- a commitment of soul over hipsterism. the self-consciously awkward and ugly aspects of her painting reveal nothing of her but are a put-on, mere devices. i am aware of all this strategic positioning, but would hope that it would be subordinate to a true search for content.

p.s. i said nothing about the manifesto.

ad3pt said...

ADATROP : FU11CK YEAHHHHH!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Crapstract Expressionism?