this is the dude from captain beefheart i think, thus some may view this, and the michael werner show uptown, as a vanity show. I dont really think this is that bad, but unfortunately(or perhaps fortunately) it would seem his naivete is unfostered. Don Va Vliet is a nom de plume i believe. Why 2 shows at once?
JUst saying that cause they often have great shows, i like a lot of their artists, the staff are nice and intelligent, blah blah, but i guess its just a friend thing. I thought the Enrique Metinides show was great
Kern is taking over this artist, I believe it will be the last show with Werner? Thats why the double bill? I was in a show with this guy once, got me some serious cool points with the over 40 set... I think the work was used as a foil....
A foil because it all had musical influence or pedigree but was from different generations? Different styles? You ironic, Van Vliet not?
Was coincidentally listening to Zoot Alours last night. Hilarious and timeless. Frank quite the abstract musical genius. His social critique is surgical, too. What a bad attitude.
I haven't looked at this painting yet,.. I'm responding to the last one by Julian Pozzi...
Aron made the last couple comments and I have to agree with them in writing. i'm pretty sure I'm agreeing with old guy on it too.
If you were flipping through a magazine, lets say home and garden,.. and this pic was in it,out of art context perhaps, you'd blow right past it. I don't want to have to lie on top of something to see that its a good painting.
Johanna Newsome is overrated. I don't know if she paints though.
Joni Mitchell's self portraits are bad but in the context of an album cover, not so bad. Still, why not give someone with a real talent, desire and need a chance?
In the same way why give someone a show if they are not good?
But its not about cynicly, skepticly, faking "it" in a vanity show is it?
Some people say this stuff is slacker/stoner and that it's a declaration of sympathy for low brow working class politics.
Others might say its neither slacker nor stoner, but something heavier, like a german expressionist rip off.
I say if it walks like a turkey and talks like a turkey, then it is a turkey. In the same way that if you paint like a child then in a sense you are one, even though you could change, if you wanted to.
That goes for europeans too.
My advice is to change, because this kind of painting is not good in any context I know of currently, and does not make me happy, nor sad but a sort of saturday afternoon wasted watching Lassie and Hogans Heroes latchkey kid kind of raid the liquor cabinet dreariness that forsages a life half lived.
So, very existential, I suppose.
"Don's Art is spectacular. It reminds me of a drunk on a high wire who miraculously makes it to the other side each time, but not without the tension."
Don Van Vliet: sounds Dutch. Captain Beefheart: Sounds Funky and West Coast. I heard Don had some terrible disease and couldn’t play music anymore and so he took to painting (more). Is Don still alive? Even in the 60s he was renowned for his compulsive ‘doodling’. Some famous DJ collected them. In an interview Don said he could have been the greatest painter since De Kooning, if music hadn’t gotten in the way. Ah, sorry Don. From what I can see this looks like A. R Penck (alias Ralf Winkler, folkie) on a ‘heavy’ day. Or maybe the whole thing is an ironic tribute to Jorg (ohne umlaut) Immendorf bad-ass and old colleague of Ralfie. Don could be like that, musically. But Jeez 62 is not like… well… maybe it was a terrible disease…. But it still seems kind of…. GULP
... up the 87 to 91 are best, a return to earlier concerns, very beautiful, light, and an extraordinary sense of color, placement, and balance. The few earlier ones, including this, remind me of New Image Painting and some, remember, Susan Rothenburg painting around that time?
O.G., A. R. Penk come to mind straight off, but not, different space.
uhm, lets talk about the figures, since it is the subject matter right? they are super anorexic so already i feel for them,.. they are white as ghosts,.. seriously need to eat something or they will soon die. one guy had a head growing at the end of his penis. The throes of weird sexual desease.. and from what i can tell, they are still engaging in debauchery of some kind... this painting is pullin at my heartstrings...
oh and schjeldahl wrote up serra like he went back to Narnia or something. Whats up with that?
Ink mathematics grey mass ecstatics noggin elastics cerebral tatics cranium classics brainium domics denizen omics grey massmatics quantum pur9e it's plain to feel hard to see fission antics abombastics death antiques wrong deductions poor instructions mass destructions peace antiques singing ink mathematics hop along with me ink mathematics moon to a flea ink mathematics I breathe black and white day and night grey gymnastics ink math ah ratics mathfantastics ink mathematics moon to a flea ink mathematics hop along with me ink mathematics moon to a flea
I went to art school hoping Miranda July would be my studio mentor. Turned out she worked in the canteen. Just goes to show art can sneak up on you, when you get hungry.
Getting back to the studio got to be a problem.
As for the subject matter of Whalebone Farmhouse, (1986) 84 X 60” Oil/canvas – I don’t have a problem with their complexions or body shape – these guys are all about showing off their flexibility, their unlikely and absurd poses. They want to be out there, where they’ve never been. That yellow one diving over the top of the others - I’ve seen them in concert.
The scale comes as a surprise. From the jpeg, this looks like it could be worked out with a felt-tip and biro while on the phone. But at 7X5’ the brushwork’s got some serious coverage issues. From here, I buy it as drawing and not just coloring-in, and getting sick of it or messed-up about the color and just standing back from the overall design (Don is good at composition – can see why he goes abstract in later works) – even when you squint your eyes at the j-peg the white figures on black are dancing.
The penis with a head deal can be a little extreme. Is Don forging a metaphor or just a symbol for a famous NYT art crtic, or maybe just an obscure academic? Then again it could be a caustic caricature of someone like Eric Fischl, another misfit in the Neo-Ex circle.
But still most of us are born head first, before we know up from down, thick from thin – can look macho before we know it.
Painting can be a bit like that – stretch figures to fit brushstrokes, pick brushstrokes for the smoothest ride – space them, rotate them for the trip by line or color. If the people you meet or make there are the subject, then the space and facture, the energy – is that still subject to ‘subject’?
not over rated yet -she's getting better-vd parks arrangement are an improvement...
Last week our picture window produced a half-word Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake And pant and labour over every intake
I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"
Then in my hot hand She slumped her sick weight We tramped through the poison oak Heartbroke and inchoate
The dogs were snapping So you cuffed their collars While I climbed the tree-house Then how I hollered! Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Thurston Moore showed collages at KS last month. The ad in Art Forum was better. I suppose if you’re a star, people are just curious to see what else you do, like Anthony Quinn or Sly Stallone painting. Celebs form bands and ‘design’ accessories, just to project themselves. But when you go along with it and find they fall short you wonder if you just betrayed a brand or pledged allegiance to another.
I'm starting a t-shirt line with my hairdresser, for example, 'people are just curious' is good for a t-shirt, but for japan 'are' is very complicated, and 'just' is already branded, so it needs to be, 'people is curious'. 'us' snuggling close to the armpit. Then it's cool! People get it, without knowing what it means.
hey, why don't you paint that?, i'd buy it. people I wish were painters.. george W, painting his dog and family stuff. jewel, cause she's already a poet. smashing pumpkins..only goth stuff Mike Tyson,.. Oprah Winfrey ...(sp) they could be tag team, she'd do the delicate stuff and he'd rage on it. but they're probably both psycho so it might not work and they'd just fight alot. not sure who else right now.
Schnabel is good at recycling tropes, in the same way that tarantino is, but different genres.
When film was a new medium being exploited by artists, there were no tropes.
Ask yourself why the jump cut has seen no major advance in a hundred years?
In a way recycling tropes is all creative people do, with different levels of granularity (scale and complexity) - from wholesale rip off to micromanaged sand painting.
deliberate or emerging from the process like a reinvented wheel, each of which is remarkably simularly round from person to person.
For example, if you want to sound mournfull, then keep your voice low and slow with a little whine. Add a drawl and you have country.
You know Schnabel listened to Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Leo Kottke and everything else aldult and contemporary. can you discern the "tiki culture" flavor in one song?
What makes the CD so bad when you can tell the intention was so pure? (To make a hit alt-country album)
In the same way, doing an arial helicopter shot is a cliche - but where did schnabel steal that cliche from? How did he fly the helicopter so well?
Robert Longo tried to make a movie - it sucked. What are we to learn from that? That the hand of the artist is overrated? That a hands off policy is often the best policy?
Captain Beefheart is a self described only child. And yet this painting looks like it was made by multitudes. In that sense it is universal, and speaks to a more innocent time, before tropes.
watchin godfather2 last night. that scene where duvall and frankie p. are standing in the prison yard between 2 fences is awesome--technically how did he get that focus? and artistically? fuggedaboudit. thats what i call total resonance.
What I try to do in a painting is to get the reality of the object to argue with the fantasy of the image. Abstractly. thats what I do. It's fun.
'Immendorff was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1998. When he could not paint with his left hand anymore, he switched to the right. In 2004, he funded a stipend to research the disease. Immendorf has always skillfully used the media for self-promotion. In 2000, his wedding to a former student more than 30 years his junior became a public event. The two had a daughter in August 2001. In August 2003, Jörg Immendorff was caught in the luxury suite of a Düsseldorf hotel with seven prostitutes (and four more on their way) and some cocaine. More cocaine was found in his studio; all in all, the found substances contained 6.6 grams of pure cocaine, above the legal threshold for personal use. He admitted to having taken cocaine since the early 1990s and attempted to explain his actions by his "orientalism" and his terminal illness. He cooperated with the prosecution and supplied the name of his dealer. He was suspended from his position at the university. At the trial in July 2004, he admitted to having organized 27 similar orgies between February 2001 and August 2003. He was sentenced to 11 months on probation and was fined 150,000 Euros. The mild verdict was justified with Immendorff's illness and his extensive confession. In March 2004, a woman had attempted to blackmail Immendorff, threatening to divulge further details of the orgies. Immendorff notified police and she was arrested. Her trial started in September 2004.'
lenard cohen does art too, and I'd swear hes a schnabel influence.
Add to the list of musicians who have made painting:
Kurt Kobain Miles Davis Daniel Johnson
"And 70's music. I can hardly count the artists who are musicians or whose works are collaborations with musicians. Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, Daniel Johnston, T. Kelly Mason, Spencer Sweeney, Steven Parrino."
work looks goodall I know about abortions is that Ive had 3 and the overwhelming emotion associated with them was relief. think i'll go do a watercolor.
Some friends of mine got back from a vacation in Humboldt county and said it was awesome.
I slept on the beach in Big Sur once. People were watching the sun rise in the morning.
The Venice Bienial seems so far away and unimportant. I ran two miles and got meat on a stick at some street fair. Then I got a McDonalds shake. It was ok. Down my block they were playing Black Sabbath and hanging out.
But enough about me, wy is this painting so hermetic? Or is it?
Oh man I'm hungry. McDonald's chocolate Shake-down Street. That's what I'M talkin' 'bout Willis (Bruce.) How about a dance w/ Mr. D? Ronnie Wood's a phine artist as well... and a craftsman... of phine chops. Apparently he started the Rod Stewart/gallon-o-semen rumor (Willis.)
Spencer Sweeney's an artist?
Thought he was a Clubber (Lang.)
I pity the fool that disses my anti-formalist palette!
I saw this painting at Woodstock! Last september in a coffee shop.
the guardian has some Tracey emin stuff,also the "telegraph-I too have aborted,and fallen into several fires,etc.etc.-never wanted to artify it-i give Britain credit for puffing up this drunken narcissist,as character seems to have been eradicated from the art world here,tho,schnabel is her big pal-her work never interested me.Don't like "broidery-makes me nervous.
i was gonna mention Ronnie-my daughters friend married his guitar tech-johnny starbuck!She started to talk about Ronnies ..art-cut her off gently-I live in the b-side,cept for Bruce naumann
Ain't gonna work in the field no more. Gonna be Amway distributor. Ain't gonna work in the field no more, no, no. Gonna be Amway distributor. (Jah) Jah, jah, jah, Life is so very hard, I need a (jah) jah, jah, jah Jacuzzi in my backyard.
Gonna buy me a condo. Gonna buy me a Cuisinart. Get de wall-to-wall carpeting. Get de wallet full o' credit cards. I gonna buy me a condo. Never have to mow the lawn. Gonna get me the T-shirt With the alligator on.
I was reading an issue of Believer magazine and this musician dude Devendra Banhart gets a lot of press.
His drawings are trendily amateurish.
You get a lot of that beautiful loser stuff - its a cult, and some of it isn't half bad - better than Amy Cutler or Marcel Dzama, who come across as a tip-of -the-iceberg boring; Too precious and cute - which is why magazines and sweet young metrosexuals love the style (Cinders Gallery).
maybe it will mature or develop into something more substantial but I'm not holding my breath.
For example - Papperrad's comic book has a glimmer of life - you might see it if you read it, like a badly drawn jet boat in the slough of despond.
Or – joking aside – if the question is whether reverting to this ‘basic’ kind of painting is actually valuable or valid, or just provocation and contempt? I say not to both. 1) There is nothing savage here. Van Vliet is as savvy and sophisticated as Picasso or Klee, DeKooning or Penck. It’s no co-incidence this stuff was done in the mid-80s, in the wake of Neo-Ex and Van Vliet is anything but an outsider. 2) The myth of the noble savage projects some failed integrity to an exotic realm. But the projected savage is no more noble than the projecting noble is savage. We make of the savagery what we need, but it’s not necessarily noble. 3) What is expressed in the painting in facture and composition is a rough and ready élan, but I don’t see anything inchoate or stochastic about it – strikes me as very direct and articulate, and while I’m not that impressed with the sentiments or brushwork, still at times we all go crazy, or need to.
is it noble to spill the blood of your friends and foe for the fear of gods..or collect it in a container of some sort...what did the aztecs do? when war is a beautiful game you lose.. esp when the enemy arrive on floating mountains...
A traditionalist might buy these as a profoundly conservative reaction to the myriad threats to the Ancien Régime.
Or you might buy it as a gesture of solidarity with a tribal tradition. A bit of history and nostalgia for the trophy room.
I'd hate to think of the market as being akin to a pitty fuck for infantilized artists and halfwhits. A social safety net for the privileged.
No, its much better to be the scion of a noble tradition, upholder of noble truths and bearer of the eternal flame of human empathy and nobliesse oblige. Defender of degenerates and shirkers everywhere against the razored inexorable three flywheeled troika of social progress!
Let the broken cross till the bloody soil! Let the reptilian race emerge from earths fastness! Kobolds and all the lost races beneath the hills! Let the hedge funds burst like fat tumescent sacks of red shit!
Look, I'm not sure if anyone else notices, but the legs on those anemic looking dudes are getting longer, notice that? And also that Large long yellow arm, I think in the wee hours of the morning Currin has been coming in and touching up> And the pair of chromosomes, weren't they twisted the other way yesterday? And the poodle, Like sure it's always been a tad pink, but today it's totally shaved. At least the guy swinging his head down close there picked that up. It's amazing how paintings change with time, gravity, stuff like that. Anyway, no doubt it's time to roll on... BTW who is the greatest living painter today?
I wouldn’t go as far as to say Don is kitsch, but the problem is Neo-Ex was actually trashing just this kind of sensitivity/sensibility – if you compare his painting with the Mulheimer or Berlin Neo-Exs – A Fetting or Salome, a Bommels or Adamski, etc etc, you immediately see the difference. They are definitely about contempt or being the loudest bad-ass, and as they and everyone else quickly realises, you can’t sustain that. Mercifully they fade away real quick. But there’s no going back to Klee or Miro either – which I think is the problem with Don, and I think Quisquilloso nails the anachronistic tip. Trying to cover it up with broken plates or fists full of plants is no great advance either. I wouldn’t say we’re finished with the issue by any means, anymore than other abstraction, but I tend to think subject matter is probably a more fruitful place to start.
... a canvas is like pulling a pot, once you stretch it, coat it, you want to get all personal about it, and want that canvas not to look like any old stretched jon, you want that canvas to be a mirror of its times, and a window to you--and a story about you and the times the time you took the canvas for a gig--not woodstock but cool enough.
Generally there are two gigs:
There are observers. And they can kind of look at anything for a time, so they don't need any extra for it, neither uppers or mental embellishments, or downers or subjects at the circus on the merry-go-round. They run their clock to the digital, apparently assimilating the know-how of no moving parts. They move into the experience from the very quiet of the light point of observation, enter mildly disinterested, and end back there. Yep!
There are chasers. They are the second gig. There are usually more in this camp, and always they are looking for a new gig, so to speak. Their concentration is fine once they have the beats and bars all worked out> And they can let it go, to produce sound and wails with meaningful riffs. I think we have more of these at any given moment. I mean!
I mean the first campers, and their experience, what can you talk about, or say, "Wow!". This leads me to believe that subject matters if and when you want to talk about it.
I th0ught this was over too, but I agree with old guy about the subject matter stuff. this stuff isn't going away at all,... and good. But if we're going back, I hope chronology plays no role and all the baggage is brought to the dumps..
Greatest living painter...uhmm richard serra,.. cause he paints with steel...
as long as we are on topic everyone but closeup can skip this
just realize the party is over on your blog - whats up with that? - did you notice that M.M. has a podcast? i just did tonight - i just woke up my roomate to it - (the one who sited him from that gawker stalker) and he almost punched me in the face and stomped into his room... i just wanted to share that.
Ok, what about top ten, top five, ten worst to best, hang on that would mean there is a total of ten. How about the finest 22 over the seven, must be one of those? Or those born between October and January that have pet amebas, who paint left-handed, not the amebas, silly, that are kind of cute [we tolerate variation], who have some free time tomorrow round noon, who have a pocket full of the greatest, one of them everywhere?
I’ve only ever known Painter to make one comment, as a regular reader. Sometimes you can sort of trace a thread to the choices, like the text thing from Landers to Linquist to Wray, and issues of small scale and mixed media (Mineo, Linquist, Pezzimenti and Wray). The Bauer post was a bit left field (print related?) My feeling is she is as much prompted by issues raised in the commentary as prompts an implicit agenda. The next one on Burkhart obviously interested in an attitude thing, but there’s another thread to pursue this on.
Please explain to this uneducated lover of art why it is a musician is somehow less of an artist? Perhaps your expensive art schooling has formed your opinions for you. Nom de plume? Are you kidding? I am imagining a man in a very expensive but hip suit drinking from a thin glass of wine standing around in a large white room with paintings and others stiffly regarding work and comparing and then returning home and undressing and looking in the mirror and congratulating themselves on their subtle and succinct verbal performances. (In my mind i am drawing a beret and a goatee on the reflection with a sharpie).
103 comments:
Don Van Vliet @
Anton Kern
532 West 20th Street
New York, NY
10011
is this the musician? a very litle bit reminds me of the very interesting thornton dial, the twisting forms and palette of this image.
i prefer thornton dial.
Captain Beefheart.
Deal with it.
this is the dude from captain beefheart i think, thus some may view this, and the michael werner show uptown, as a vanity show. I dont really think this is that bad, but unfortunately(or perhaps fortunately) it would seem his naivete is unfostered. Don Va Vliet is a nom de plume i believe. Why 2 shows at once?
okay sorry to get snarky but is it just me or doesnt kern usually have a little more integrity than this?
JUst saying that cause they often have great shows, i like a lot of their artists, the staff are nice and intelligent, blah blah, but i guess its just a friend thing. I thought the Enrique Metinides show was great
Kern is taking over this artist, I believe it will be the last show with Werner? Thats why the double bill? I was in a show with this guy once, got me some serious cool points with the over 40 set... I think the work was used as a foil....
A foil because it all had musical influence or pedigree but was from different generations? Different styles? You ironic, Van Vliet not?
Was coincidentally listening to Zoot Alours last night. Hilarious and timeless. Frank quite the abstract musical genius. His social critique is surgical, too. What a bad attitude.
Van Vliet too lazy-trippy.
You know who's a great musician and also does really good art is Patti Smith.
was that last comment ironic? I thought the smith show was the epitome of cliched sentimental B&W hogwash but thats just me
I haven't looked at this painting yet,.. I'm responding to the last one by Julian Pozzi...
Aron made the last couple comments and I have to agree with them in writing. i'm pretty sure I'm agreeing with old guy on it too.
If you were flipping through a magazine, lets say home and garden,.. and this pic was in it,out of art context perhaps, you'd blow right past it. I don't want to have to lie on top of something to see that its a good painting.
I liked the moby dick comment..ha..
As a species is it our tendency to be come more obvious, or less obvious?
A trick question, he said, waving a stick of rhubarb.
Nope not ironic...i love that romantic shit. I think I would like it even if I didnt know who did it, but that's hard to tell.
80s era starn twins too? smith stuff just looks like stock photography to me
Johanna Newsome is overrated. I don't know if she paints though.
Joni Mitchell's self portraits are bad but in the context of an album cover, not so bad. Still, why not give someone with a real talent, desire and need a chance?
In the same way why give someone a show if they are not good?
But its not about cynicly, skepticly, faking "it" in a vanity show is it?
Some people say this stuff is slacker/stoner and that it's a declaration of sympathy for low brow working class politics.
Others might say its neither slacker nor stoner, but something heavier, like a german expressionist rip off.
I say if it walks like a turkey and talks like a turkey, then it is a turkey. In the same way that if you paint like a child then in a sense you are one, even though you could change, if you wanted to.
That goes for europeans too.
My advice is to change, because this kind of painting is not good in any context I know of currently, and does not make me happy, nor sad but a sort of saturday afternoon wasted watching Lassie and Hogans Heroes latchkey kid kind of raid the liquor cabinet dreariness that forsages a life half lived.
So, very existential, I suppose.
"Don's Art is spectacular. It reminds me of a drunk on a high wire who miraculously makes it to the other side each time, but not without the tension."
Robert Williams, former Magic Band drummer
One thing I did like was that the paintings look like they were painted on canvas tarps.
How about that Paul McCarteny coffee table book? OR John "Cougar" Melencamp?
I guess we all need to express ourselves. but I can see the Captain out in Humboldt county having a good time - I know I would.
Lets hope the Residents don't do painting.And how about some hatin for Becky Stark(and Miranda July)
relax.
Don Van Vliet: sounds Dutch.
Captain Beefheart: Sounds Funky and West Coast.
I heard Don had some terrible disease and couldn’t play music anymore and so he took to painting (more).
Is Don still alive?
Even in the 60s he was renowned for his compulsive ‘doodling’. Some famous DJ collected them.
In an interview Don said he could have been the greatest painter since De Kooning, if music hadn’t gotten in the way.
Ah, sorry Don.
From what I can see this looks like A. R Penck (alias Ralf Winkler, folkie) on a ‘heavy’ day. Or maybe the whole thing is an ironic tribute to Jorg (ohne umlaut) Immendorf bad-ass and old colleague of Ralfie.
Don could be like that, musically.
But Jeez 62 is not like… well… maybe it was a terrible disease…. But it still seems kind of….
GULP
... up the 87 to 91 are best, a return to earlier concerns, very beautiful, light, and an extraordinary sense of color, placement, and balance.
The few earlier ones, including this, remind me of New Image Painting and some, remember, Susan Rothenburg painting around that time?
O.G., A. R. Penk come to mind straight off, but not, different space.
東京にルバルブあるかな？しんじられないよ！
O' u sed on a heavy day, 'that's about right',
what do you say for sumemassen,
'oh, my bag'?
Cooky, sumemassen.
Penk, Rothenberg - yep.
I like the Kern vibe but sometimes you wonder if you went to art school to go somewhere else or to learn deep mystical truths from ascended masters.
miranda July has a cutesy piece in the new new yorker. Like fan fiction.
Probably got paid for it.
You and what army, is all I can say.
uhm, lets talk about the figures,
since it is the subject matter right?
they are super anorexic so already i feel for them,..
they are white as ghosts,.. seriously need to eat something or they will soon die.
one guy had a head growing at the end of his penis. The throes of weird sexual desease.. and from what i can tell, they are still engaging in debauchery of some kind... this painting is pullin at my heartstrings...
oh and schjeldahl wrote up serra like he went back to Narnia or something. Whats up with that?
Ink mathematics
grey mass ecstatics
noggin elastics
cerebral tatics
cranium classics
brainium domics
denizen omics
grey massmatics
quantum pur9e
it's plain to feel
hard to see
fission antics
abombastics
death antiques
wrong deductions
poor instructions
mass destructions
peace antiques
singing ink mathematics
hop along with me
ink mathematics
moon to a flea
ink mathematics
I breathe black and white
day and night
grey gymnastics
ink math ah ratics
mathfantastics
ink mathematics
moon to a flea
ink mathematics
hop along with me
ink mathematics
moon to a flea
I went to art school hoping Miranda July would be my studio mentor.
Turned out she worked in the canteen.
Just goes to show art can sneak up on you, when you get hungry.
Getting back to the studio got to be a problem.
As for the subject matter of Whalebone Farmhouse, (1986) 84 X 60” Oil/canvas –
I don’t have a problem with their complexions or body shape – these guys are all about showing off their flexibility, their unlikely and absurd poses. They want to be out there, where they’ve never been. That yellow one diving over the top of the others - I’ve seen them in concert.
The scale comes as a surprise. From the jpeg, this looks like it could be worked out with a felt-tip and biro while on the phone. But at 7X5’ the brushwork’s got some serious coverage issues. From here, I buy it as drawing and not just coloring-in, and getting sick of it or messed-up about the color and just standing back from the overall design (Don is good at composition – can see why he goes abstract in later works) – even when you squint your eyes at the j-peg the white figures on black are dancing.
The penis with a head deal can be a little extreme. Is Don forging a metaphor or just a symbol for a famous NYT art crtic, or maybe just an obscure academic? Then again it could be a caustic caricature of someone like Eric Fischl, another misfit in the Neo-Ex circle.
But still most of us are born head first, before we know up from down, thick from thin – can look macho before we know it.
Painting can be a bit like that – stretch figures to fit brushstrokes, pick brushstrokes for the smoothest ride – space them, rotate them for the trip by line or color. If the people you meet or make there are the subject, then the space and facture, the energy – is that still subject to ‘subject’?
That Paul McCartney show at Mathew Marks about 6 years ago was great in the coffe table pastiche art way. I know DVV has shown for awhile in NY.
It looks like he picked a painting style out of a book and started painting and said, "This is me."
Cutting edge music, retrograde painting?
i remember being checked for Multiple sclerosis in school. Its weird becasue they check you for something you don't have any clue as to what it is.
I'm all for gene therapy - maybe they can cure wrinkles.
Don Van Fliet:
Do you feel lucky?
"Johanna Newsome is overrated."
Them's fightin' words, mister.
i am a golden god and I do drugs
stuckist
thot we were supposed to stop being childish
but that's being dead, so no thanks.
van V seems to be going for inchoatness in the paintings. unformed alien thing. his music is richer.
Tool - sober...yeah!
stochastic inchoate anomie.
Those are some words all right.
String em together like cowrie shells. You'll take Manhattan.
not over rated yet -she's getting better-vd parks arrangement are an improvement...
Last week our picture window produced a half-word
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labour over every intake
I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"
Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate
The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the tree-house
Then how I hollered!
Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
from the mouths of babes
Thurston Moore showed collages at KS last month. The ad in Art Forum was better.
I suppose if you’re a star, people are just curious to see what else you do, like Anthony Quinn or Sly Stallone painting. Celebs form bands and ‘design’ accessories, just to project themselves.
But when you go along with it and find they fall short you wonder if you just betrayed a brand or pledged allegiance to another.
I'm starting a t-shirt line with my hairdresser,
for example, 'people are just curious' is good for a t-shirt, but for japan 'are' is very complicated, and 'just' is already branded, so it needs to be,
'people is curious'. 'us' snuggling close to the armpit. Then it's cool! People get it, without knowing what it means.
I'm afaraid I can't do that
hey, why don't you paint that?, i'd buy it.
people I wish were painters..
george W, painting his dog and family stuff.
jewel, cause she's already a poet.
smashing pumpkins..only goth stuff
Mike Tyson,..
Oprah Winfrey ...(sp)
they could be tag team, she'd do the delicate stuff and he'd rage on it. but they're probably both psycho so it might not work and they'd just fight alot.
not sure who else right now.
Q, that is a good question.
I hope its not rhetorical.
Schnabel is good at recycling tropes, in the same way that tarantino is, but different genres.
When film was a new medium being exploited by artists, there were no tropes.
Ask yourself why the jump cut has seen no major advance in a hundred years?
In a way recycling tropes is all creative people do, with different levels of granularity (scale and complexity) - from wholesale rip off to micromanaged sand painting.
deliberate or emerging from the process like a reinvented wheel, each of which is remarkably simularly round from person to person.
For example, if you want to sound mournfull, then keep your voice low and slow with a little whine. Add a drawl and you have country.
You know Schnabel listened to Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Leo Kottke and everything else aldult and contemporary. can you discern the "tiki culture" flavor in one song?
What makes the CD so bad when you can tell the intention was so pure?
(To make a hit alt-country album)
In the same way, doing an arial helicopter shot is a cliche - but where did schnabel steal that cliche from? How did he fly the helicopter so well?
Robert Longo tried to make a movie - it sucked. What are we to learn from that? That the hand of the artist is overrated? That a hands off policy is often the best policy?
Captain Beefheart is a self described only child. And yet this painting looks like it was made by multitudes. In that sense it is universal, and speaks to a more innocent time, before tropes.
i have the cd somewhere - lost the case. Maybe it could be a prize for a contest -
I also have the apple software bundle with claris works 5.0, Macromedia for Dummies 6.0, Philip Glass/Robert Wilson: Einstein on the Beach.
anybidy see the kippenberger show uptown @ 1018?
watchin godfather2 last night. that scene where duvall and frankie p. are standing in the prison yard between 2 fences is awesome--technically how did he get that focus? and artistically? fuggedaboudit. thats what i call total resonance.
What I try to do in a painting is to get the reality of the object to argue with the fantasy of the image. Abstractly. thats what I do. It's fun.
i live as if I have a gun to my head.
would hate to see your dry cleaning bill
Oh yeah, well Wavy Gravy's having a show at Gagosian in September. It's going to be far-out MAN.
http://www.wavygravy.net/art/art.html
Show him the ‘dry-cleaning bill’ Zip! Show him!
You know everyone else does.
'Immendorff was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1998. When he could not paint with his left hand anymore, he switched to the right. In 2004, he funded a stipend to research the disease.
Immendorf has always skillfully used the media for self-promotion. In 2000, his wedding to a former student more than 30 years his junior became a public event. The two had a daughter in August 2001.
In August 2003, Jörg Immendorff was caught in the luxury suite of a Düsseldorf hotel with seven prostitutes (and four more on their way) and some cocaine. More cocaine was found in his studio; all in all, the found substances contained 6.6 grams of pure cocaine, above the legal threshold for personal use. He admitted to having taken cocaine since the early 1990s and attempted to explain his actions by his "orientalism" and his terminal illness. He cooperated with the prosecution and supplied the name of his dealer. He was suspended from his position at the university. At the trial in July 2004, he admitted to having organized 27 similar orgies between February 2001 and August 2003. He was sentenced to 11 months on probation and was fined 150,000 Euros. The mild verdict was justified with Immendorff's illness and his extensive confession.
In March 2004, a woman had attempted to blackmail Immendorff, threatening to divulge further details of the orgies. Immendorff notified police and she was arrested. Her trial started in September 2004.'
http://www.arthistoryclub.com/art_history/J%F6rg_Immendorff
babooie!
Quality.
immendorf was a snitch
the paintings in the back room remind me of mark Tansey in a way - because of the technique and the thiness of the paint - like Joe Andoe For example.
Mark Tansey Reminds me that Neo Rauch lacks a punchline, which makes critics go crazy like cats for catnip.
how bout that tracey emin-wish I were there-maybs next time-before homelessness and all that
fanculo!!!!!
WHo's afraid of yellow brown red and black?
lenard cohen does art too, and I'd swear hes a schnabel influence.
Add to the list of musicians who have made painting:
Kurt Kobain
Miles Davis
Daniel Johnson
"And 70's music. I can hardly count the artists who are musicians or whose works are collaborations with musicians. Tony Conrad, Jim O'Rourke, Daniel Johnston, T. Kelly Mason, Spencer Sweeney, Steven Parrino."
here
what you liking with tracy emin in venice? got any good links?
give me a reason to love you
work looks goodall I know about abortions is that Ive had 3 and the overwhelming emotion associated with them was relief. think i'll go do a watercolor.
Some friends of mine got back from a vacation in Humboldt county and said it was awesome.
I slept on the beach in Big Sur once. People were watching the sun rise in the morning.
The Venice Bienial seems so far away and unimportant. I ran two miles and got meat on a stick at some street fair. Then I got a McDonalds shake. It was ok. Down my block they were playing Black Sabbath and hanging out.
But enough about me, wy is this painting so hermetic? Or is it?
Oh man I'm hungry. McDonald's chocolate Shake-down Street. That's what I'M talkin' 'bout Willis (Bruce.)
How about a dance w/ Mr. D?
Ronnie Wood's a phine artist as well... and a craftsman... of phine chops.
Apparently he started the Rod Stewart/gallon-o-semen rumor (Willis.)
Spencer Sweeney's an artist?
Thought he was a Clubber (Lang.)
I pity the fool that disses my anti-formalist palette!
I saw this painting at Woodstock!
Last september in a coffee shop.
Oh wow man! Old-man-Werner's gonna plotz!
the guardian has some Tracey emin stuff,also the "telegraph-I too have aborted,and fallen into several fires,etc.etc.-never wanted to artify it-i give Britain credit for puffing up this drunken narcissist,as character seems to have been eradicated from the art world here,tho,schnabel is her big pal-her work never interested me.Don't like "broidery-makes me nervous.
i was gonna mention Ronnie-my daughters friend married his guitar tech-johnny starbuck!She started to talk about Ronnies ..art-cut her off gently-I live in the b-side,cept for Bruce naumann
art brut nouveau.. seems to go hand in hand with a level of sensterizm and raw expressionism - don't player hate participate.
or a parasite on the britely trite
didn't say that quite right-don't BE..a p
Ain't gonna work in the field no more.
Gonna be Amway distributor.
Ain't gonna work in the field no more, no, no.
Gonna be Amway distributor.
(Jah) Jah, jah, jah,
Life is so very hard,
I need a (jah) jah, jah, jah
Jacuzzi in my backyard.
Gonna buy me a condo.
Gonna buy me a Cuisinart.
Get de wall-to-wall carpeting.
Get de wallet full o' credit cards.
I gonna buy me a condo.
Never have to mow the lawn.
Gonna get me the T-shirt
With the alligator on.
What you say?
I was reading an issue of Believer magazine and this musician dude Devendra Banhart gets a lot of press.
His drawings are trendily amateurish.
You get a lot of that beautiful loser stuff - its a cult, and some of it isn't half bad - better than Amy Cutler or Marcel Dzama, who come across as a tip-of -the-iceberg boring; Too precious and cute - which is why magazines and sweet young metrosexuals love the style (Cinders Gallery).
maybe it will mature or develop into something more substantial but I'm not holding my breath.
For example - Papperrad's comic book has a glimmer of life - you might see it if you read it, like a badly drawn jet boat in the slough of despond.
Barry Mcgee and Margaret Kilgallen -
what makes their work art and not the work of their influences? If context teaches us anything, it tells us that positioning is everything.
I love narcissists,...
kind of have to don't ya?>
I especially love the drunk ones,. it helps me love myself more
especially when I'm drunk...
Get me drunk enough and kitsch becomes art and visa versa. Vice first, then visas.
I bet Schnab collects Van Vliets.
While we’re on Vliet Street, anyone like Robert Zanvliet (Dutch guy) showed at um… Blum I think?
Were the noble savages really all that noble?
If you were a barbarian, would you "paint like a barbarian", or would you "paint the floor" with the blood of your enemies?
"As if" or "as is"?
dream on
Well you know, I say do the floor while it's dry but don't paint yourself into a corner.
The barbarians often think of catnip at the most inopportune of times.
Me? Ow!
Or – joking aside – if the question is whether reverting to this ‘basic’ kind of painting is actually valuable or valid, or just provocation and contempt? I say not to both.
1) There is nothing savage here. Van Vliet is as savvy and sophisticated as Picasso or Klee, DeKooning or Penck. It’s no co-incidence this stuff was done in the mid-80s, in the wake of Neo-Ex and Van Vliet is anything but an outsider.
2) The myth of the noble savage projects some failed integrity to an exotic realm. But the projected savage is no more noble than the projecting noble is savage. We make of the savagery what we need, but it’s not necessarily noble.
3) What is expressed in the painting in facture and composition is a rough and ready élan, but I don’t see anything inchoate or stochastic about it – strikes me as very direct and articulate, and while I’m not that impressed with the sentiments or brushwork, still at times we all go crazy, or need to.
But is it kitsch? Or is kitsch a bullshit distinction meant to exclude the Cimmerians from the Stygians?
is it noble to spill the blood of your friends and foe for the fear of gods..or collect it in a container of some sort...what did the aztecs do?
when war is a beautiful game you lose.. esp when the enemy arrive on floating mountains...
A traditionalist might buy these as a profoundly conservative reaction to the myriad threats to the Ancien Régime.
Or you might buy it as a gesture of solidarity with a tribal tradition. A bit of history and nostalgia for the trophy room.
I'd hate to think of the market as being akin to a pitty fuck for infantilized artists and halfwhits. A social safety net for the privileged.
No, its much better to be the scion of a noble tradition, upholder of noble truths and bearer of the eternal flame of human empathy and nobliesse oblige. Defender of degenerates and shirkers everywhere against the razored inexorable three flywheeled troika of social progress!
Let the broken cross till the bloody soil! Let the reptilian race emerge from earths fastness! Kobolds and all the lost races beneath the hills! Let the hedge funds burst like fat tumescent sacks of red shit!
But not yet, not yet.
yes, i'm for the superunknown trojan alien horse mobile too,.. please swing by my way and pick me up...
i think this party is profoundly over.
Look, I'm not sure if anyone else notices, but the legs on those anemic looking dudes are getting longer, notice that? And also that Large long yellow arm, I think in the wee hours of the morning Currin has been coming in and touching up> And the pair of chromosomes, weren't they twisted the other way yesterday? And the poodle, Like sure it's always been a tad pink, but today it's totally shaved. At least the guy swinging his head down close there picked that up.
It's amazing how paintings change with time, gravity, stuff like that.
Anyway, no doubt it's time to roll on...
BTW who is the greatest living painter today?
I wouldn’t go as far as to say Don is kitsch, but the problem is Neo-Ex was actually trashing just this kind of sensitivity/sensibility – if you compare his painting with the Mulheimer or Berlin Neo-Exs – A Fetting or Salome, a Bommels or Adamski, etc etc, you immediately see the difference.
They are definitely about contempt or being the loudest bad-ass, and as they and everyone else quickly realises, you can’t sustain that.
Mercifully they fade away real quick.
But there’s no going back to Klee or Miro either – which I think is the problem with Don, and I think Quisquilloso nails the anachronistic tip.
Trying to cover it up with broken plates or fists full of plants is no great advance either.
I wouldn’t say we’re finished with the issue by any means, anymore than other abstraction, but I tend to think subject matter is probably a more fruitful place to start.
... a canvas is like pulling a pot, once you stretch it, coat it, you want to get all personal about it, and want that canvas not to look like any old stretched jon, you want that canvas to be a mirror of its times, and a window to you--and a story about you and the times the time you took the canvas for a gig--not woodstock but cool enough.
Generally there are two gigs:
There are observers. And they can kind of look at anything for a time, so they don't need any extra for it, neither uppers or mental embellishments, or downers or subjects at the circus on the merry-go-round. They run their clock to the digital, apparently assimilating the know-how of no moving parts.
They move into the experience from the very quiet of the light point of observation, enter mildly disinterested, and end back there. Yep!
There are chasers. They are the second gig. There are usually more in this camp, and always they are looking for a new gig, so to speak. Their concentration is fine once they have the beats and bars all worked out> And they can let it go, to produce sound and wails with meaningful riffs. I think we have more of these at any given moment.
I mean!
I mean the first campers, and their experience, what can you talk about, or say, "Wow!".
This leads me to believe that subject matters if and when you want to talk about it.
I th0ught this was over too, but I agree with old guy about the subject matter stuff. this stuff isn't going away at all,... and good. But if we're going back, I hope chronology plays no role and all the baggage is brought to the dumps..
Greatest living painter...uhmm
richard serra,.. cause he paints with steel...
as long as we are on topic everyone but closeup can skip this
just realize the party is over on your blog - whats up with that? - did you notice that M.M. has a podcast? i just did tonight - i just woke up my roomate to it - (the one who sited him from that gawker stalker) and he almost punched me in the face and stomped into his room... i just wanted to share that.
I hate the whole idea of a greatest anything.
Art is not a race or a fight -
picking the winner isn't really the deal.
Unless you want it that way, punk!
Is it too late to jump on the German bandwagon in a non-camp way? Do you have to be German?
Also:
Dana Shutz, you are now influencing me via a saline drip directly to my neck. Soon I will own Frank.
There is nothing you can do.
I'm thinking of changing my tag to Colonel Klink
in the horse race of art I'm in the middle drinking mint juleps with the rabble. keep em coming and there wont be any trouble.
Ok, what about top ten, top five, ten worst to best, hang on that would mean there is a total of ten. How about the finest 22 over the seven, must be one of those? Or those born between October and January that have pet amebas, who paint left-handed, not the amebas, silly, that are kind of cute [we tolerate variation], who have some free time tomorrow round noon, who have a pocket full of the greatest, one of them
everywhere?
Guess we won't be asked to judge The Turner Prize anytime soon.
I’ve only ever known Painter to make one comment, as a regular reader.
Sometimes you can sort of trace a thread to the choices, like the text thing from Landers to Linquist to Wray, and issues of small scale and mixed media (Mineo, Linquist, Pezzimenti and Wray). The Bauer post was a bit left field (print related?)
My feeling is she is as much prompted by issues raised in the commentary as prompts an implicit agenda. The next one on Burkhart obviously interested in an attitude thing, but there’s another thread to pursue this on.
Please explain to this uneducated lover of art why it is a musician is somehow less of an artist? Perhaps your expensive art schooling has formed your opinions for you. Nom de plume? Are you kidding? I am imagining a man in a very expensive but hip suit drinking from a thin glass of wine standing around in a large white room with paintings and others stiffly regarding work and comparing and then returning home and undressing and looking in the mirror and congratulating themselves on their subtle and succinct verbal performances. (In my mind i am drawing a beret and a goatee on the reflection with a sharpie).
A very very interesting piece of work. I myself would consider the piece an actual piece of art, but then again i am not a professional art expert.
www.artesmagazine.com
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