Andy was suffering from depersonalization disorder, apparently.
Was/is (geometric) abstraction a retreat from overt content in the face of feelings of oppression? For some people no doubt.
Or is it the dominance of an outlet for people with no talent for representation?(My favorite line in the Warhol dealio - he had no talent for narrative - like Julian schnabel does. Ha! Like Robert Longo Does. Ha! Its not talent, you morons, its psychology=personality=TASTE)
You could write all kinds of narratives. Contexts are multiplying like tribbles. Its pandemonium out there. Remember HYPERLINKED NARRATIVE? Choose your own adventure!
this thing has shock value shocking classical references shocking ugly face shocking saggy tit shocking hairdo shocking red baby shocking grapes shocking highlights
Once someone attempted to insult me by calling me a Mannerist and I ate it up. That's what this is: eating up forbidden and forgotten artistic standards and doing it with skill. Good the way Leda and the swan and Laocoon are good. Fashionable the way Schiaparelli and early surrealism were fashionable. http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/classics/students/Ribeiro/Laocoon.jpg can't touch it for skill or stones
BTW why is anybody sending Warhol hate mail? Hating fairies and queens is like hating milk and cookies or puppies and kittens. Don't fuck beauty. The world isn't much without it.
is this pastel? this is so luxurious and rich and sensual.
the woman's hair looks like one of those hard plastic helmet wigs they are selling at the supermarkets now for halloween.. and that red baby... are they burn victims?
without the twisting burned baby, she is like some extremely awkward nerd in a 70's penthouse spread.
kalm james - i mentioned that von furstenburg was exec producer - so is Peter "Castelli taught me soo much" Brandt and Larry "I lunch with ladies" Gagosian.
kelli- i was going to say pontormo for sure. kj--this barnaby is much better than carlo mariani. mariani is more like the finetuch. dry. This Barnaby is seething.
comparing this to Pontormo is such a stretch...... This little pontormo sketch contains so much mastery and farsightedness.....
like how fresh was it that Jacopo was on that anime influenced shit like half a millenia before the fact?
one of my main problems with this whitfield images is he's having such a hard time getting the various visual references to mesh: collaging photos by way of pastel can get disconcerting to me, like the way the Yasumasa Morimura looking head sticks out in a way oblivious to the rest of the body, along with the ringling barnum and bailey lion coming outta leftfield,the grapes, etc.
I actually see this not so much in relation to past practices but correllating to a painter like Yi Chen (showing at Boesky)....but I think the technique is working better for Chen, though perhaps Barnaby is more honest in his attempts; Chen, in revealing his process so obviously may have an easier time with the task.
Kalm James I agree with you. Somehow the equation collectors= marketplace comes up. It's not true. I think art fairs are probably the main thing making everybody so money obsessed. Norman Dubrow donates most of what he buys to museums and is always promoting artists he likes, many who are underrepresented or women. For most artists money equals time to work not money. Even being able to have just a part time day job helps a lot of artists. And collectors are the least sexist least racist part of the food chain- some of them are good people who actually think about these issues. I really like this painting. There is something openly decadent about it.Hernan Bas in comparison seems sort of reticent and closeted ( pardon the pun).
Appropriation - you could say imitation(mimesis) through collage..becoming a critique. I think this is critical in a way Yi Chen is not.
This seems more influenced by amateur weirdness. I think this falls under thrift store kitch (velvet elvis) in a way.
I dont think being influenced by anime is much to crow about unless its the tentacle sex stuff. Anyone got a link to that? I'm not an expert. I think a lot of people drew off the TV - I know some of my friends did. Transformers and before. They werent crtitical neither.
Peeps it's less a question of taste and more a question of respect. You seem to feel comfortable personally insulting the intelligence of people who don't share your taste ( me ) by saying that I don't understand abstraction but you make no effort to treat work outside of your taste fairly. I had a graduate degree from Yale at 22. I understand a lot of things and can appreciate things like the really good Wendy White show that fall outside of my taste. We all need to show some respect for fellow artists and make an effort. Hey which major art dealer is openly racist and casually makes bigoted remarks in front of his staff? Answer: I can't say without getting his employee in trouble but this is the crap you should all be hating not art.
I think theres a problem with a system that requires the artist to humble themselves to gallerists, or people in general, so I'd like to use my cat as an intermediary. A familiar. How cool would a raven be? Two caws for new work. Five hundred for pay me you cocksucker. It could peck the eyes out of critics.
sometimes its hard to decode meaning without a lot of reading or writing.
I usually misread stuff, which is looked on as flippancy, apparently, but is really just me trying to make something interesting for myself. Isnt that what art is? a discursive process? A conversation between the subject and the object? Who else is there? I like artists who dont care about interpretation or even encourage that, like Rauschenberg. Critics call it ambiguity.
Joe Coleman lacks ambiguity and there are a lot of words so if you read them all you will get the painting like you get a comic book.
This painting has no words, but now I understand it might have some unambiguously coded homosexual stuff.
Is there something inherently, unambiguously gay in avant guard art?
WHere was I reading that the art world is conservatively (reactionary) liberal, having taken the streets and consolidating its power in institutional might.
I thought this was kind of hipocritical - art is supposed to be amoral, apolitical, and asexual, according to Gombrich's art through the ages. The good stuff rises to the top - like youth and gallery directors.
Thomas - If you actually want jpegs of my work leave your email on my raven.
Kalm James I like to throw queer theory into the mix because it breaks up the male female dichotomy and allows us to have a discussion with each other without breaking into opposing camps. Some of the ideas associated with the term ( art as counternarrative, irony and playfulness in art. rejection of normalcy) could easily apply to straight artists like Larry Rivers or Zak Smith. Read "the Queen's Throat" and "Opera or the Undoing of Women" back to back and tell me which critical vantage point is more friendly to art. Homoerotic content in art has been buried over time but really so has all erotic content. I'd like to see the the portraits of bathing women Hans Memling was commissioned for but can't because they have been lost. That being said orientation is used to marginalize some artists in the same way critics focusing on Pollock's alcoholism marginalizes him.
KJ you asked so: historically in the classical world male homosexuality was tolerated so long as one married eventually. In ancient India gay people were grouped with old people and kids ( non child bearing people). The Old Testament was neutral on female homosexuality but not male ( the term almah usually translated as virgin probably meant lesbian). However trans people have always been feared and denigrated. Read Lucian's "the Eunuch". The modern definition of gay as an identity not activity arose in the late 1800's and you have a point that it doesn't mean exactly the same thing over time.
KJ I guess there are always different ways ideas can be used. I think I find some of these concepts useful because they are disruptive and cut across gender traditions. I guess they could be used to create an alternate normalcy or oppositional heirarchy instead of challenging heirarchy. But that would be less fun. And Karl Rove uses identity politics.
Maybe we all know less than we think we do. Maybe the child is right - the emperor has no clothes. Maybe all the intelligentsia are too impressed with themselves. Beauty, after all is in the eye. God, the salon is so hot and stuffy. Someone please open a window. P.utto, in the words of the great Partridge Family, "I think I love you."
for anyone interested, Larry Rivers gave his friends blow jobs at parties and he fucked his couch in the living room as a young man, but who hasn't fucked furniture. I'm not really feeling the artist club/artist love thing. The intellectual game will keep us haters. Stay skeptical of eager beavers..
This was a sentiment i picked up on a while back in this post. something along the lines of not knocking art, then later - 'we are all in this together'. or something like it....
I think this painting is harboring nuclear weapons. Or, is it that they've already gone off and this is what it looks like sometime after fall-out? --kind of shocking, and makes one think, do we really want to do that again--have we not become more responsible human citizens who can live in peace and settle our differences through oil.
Whatever, the feline sucks! nwm i bought my young son a warhol jigsaw puzzle, because out of all the JSP's available at the time AW was the only one that had positive visual appeal.
Wade I was sort of lumping the classical world... Greece and Rome together to keep things brief. While generally more tolerant than ours it is hard to determine just how tolerent these cultures were particurally towards the receiving partners. Seneca has a character saying: " I simultaneously submit to both a man and a woman. Yet I also play the man's role to someone else's disgrace" Claudian in Eutropium says in reference to recieving partners "one whom the male sex has discarded and the female will not adopt" So while male homosexuality was accepted men viewed as feminine were on a somewhat lower footing than men perceived as masculine or dominant. I think it is interesting that some of the classical art historical imagery ( putti etc.)Whitfield uses has become kitsch and he is using the kitch references to allude to the earlier meanings.
poppy thx. i am amazed at how it angers people, he walked some form of tightrope line.
ttg, for some reason this quote came to mind:
"Art negates the conceptualization foisted on the real world...The truth of works of art hinges on whether or not they succeed, in accordance with their inner necessity, to absorb the non-conceptual and the contingent. For their purposefulness requires the purposelessness, which is illusion...Aesthetics cannot hope to grasp works of art if it treats them as hermeneutical objects. What at present needs to be grasped is their unintelligibility...By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it...The subject only becomes the essence of the artwork when it confronts it foreignly, externally, and compensates for the foreigness by substituting itself for the work...Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human...Actually, only what does not fit into this world is true."
Sex to the Greeks and Romans was about power. If you were a citizen of Athens you would be what we now call upper class. Only men of the upper classes could be citizens.
You could have sex with anyone below your stature, and they could not say no.
Having sex with young boys was common.
The term homsoexual came about around 1868 in context to the Prussian penal code on sodomy laws.
Karl-Maria Kertbeny seeked to have the law changed as he thought that private consensual sexual acts should not be subject of the criminal law.
Pdog you are right that power and class, slave and free as well as male and female were the pertinent categories governing sexual relations in the classical world. However pederasty in Athenian Greece was a mutually beneficial institution which was pretty consensual. It involved elaborate courtship rituals and forcing oneself on a boy (upper class) who was not interested was considered an act of hubris and punishable. However women and slaves were sort of fair game and men desiring a receptive role as adults or young men pursuing older men were at least frowned upon. I'm sorry if going off on this tangent was a distraction. I posted that link about Cupid and putti way up above because it directly relates to this painting.
Nowhere man, thanks for posting that quote, It sums up in a nice tidy way much of what i've been thinking about lately.. Since i am a few sheets to the wind - you get much love....:)*o*
Larry Is Also The Man no matter what he spent his days blowing or not blowing.. tip of the hat to that guy, the self proclaimed grand dad o pop.- or was it the re introduction of representational? whatever, read his book, very entertaining...
I had a summer job stacking boxes. Once you get the pattern down you can think about other things. But I found usually you would just think about one thing over and over.
Too bad andy didnt live to be able to do a portrait of paris. Though of couse we can all imagin it.
I always liked AW's portraits of the 80s. I felt they were quite critical, far from fawning. The critique was buried in the glamour and so he beat the swells at their own game. Not only that he took their money but he exposed them. It was part of the whole thing that they were too dumb to notice--or too cruel to care.
It is a very passive aggressive tactic--particular to strait women and gay men. No marginalization intended, just facts.
I have to say I hate men with an intense and bitter passion. And I find the fact that I desire them a nightmare but it defines my life. Now that's content!
The Symposium is basically just people lying around talking about who to have sex with. Closeup you just need a better toolbox http://www.medicaltoys.com/
just waiting for the day somebody makes something in stainless steel that fits in a harness. Ice water bath. Talking about the Greeks made me sad. I guess people just look for something positive and consensual in the past. And some of their love poetry was nice.
None of the stainless stuff has a wide enough base. Sounds like a trip to the emergency room. http://rainbowrope.com/all.html I swear by the 40$ probe. Notable for the slight curve. Affordable enough for Christmas presents. Beats the crap out of a scarf. About classical love poetry :Ovid is totally overrated and meanspirited. Talking about vain women dying their hair and it falling out. Just petty.
I find most peoples vision of ancient Greece or Rome is framed by film or tv.
Years ago when I was in school, I was working in a computer room and the discussion was on Rome, and this person made a comment about how in films on or about ancient Rome the actors seemed to all have english accents.
She was woundering why they did not speak Italian...
No-Where thanks for all the tips. Ovid can be summed up: rhyming couplets women like grapes they also like rape And all the stuff about sexual positions to make yourself look thinner leaves me to believe he was reincarnated in the Paris Hilton sex tape P dog you are too right Hey nobody answered my question. Can art use kitsch to reference the earlier meanings of kitsch images like Cupid??
its weird the text books skip this sort of stuff. I would have stayed awake during the survey courses. THe teacher was alseep at the wheel too I guess. Slide please.
Zip: The classical world had a love hate relationship with androgyny. Christianity had a hard time cleaning up self castration "eunuchs for heaven" and all that being so closely based on the cult of Cybele Attis Magna Mater. They turned gender bending into asceticism.
The springtime rites involving castration were turned into Easter and the stigmatic wounds. For the first time androgyny was available to women through the body modification and eating disorders of medieval saints. In the ancient world there was wide variation between castration practiced on captive people and sex workers ( Egypt was the worst) and the voluntary procedures lower middle class men underwent to obtain the diplomatic and governmental positions available to Eunuchs. Later the Castrati who were valued for their singing voices by the Church were made using gentler methods in a warm bath with opium. Drugs!
Poppy castration and eunuchs kind of go together. Little Boys: I got nothing. Anne Rice: Queen of the Damned with Stuart Townsend is a total piece of crap movie which does however work as porn.
Wade a lot of people point out his humor and self deprecation ( he's picking on himself as much as anybody ) but I still think there is a meanness there. It kind of spoils the buzz for me.
One more thing I've noticed is with all the focus on pederasty the accounts of Greek homosexuality leave out marriage between adult men ( which did exist ) and intercrural sex which was pretty common and might not have brought up the top/bottom issues within their society.
"Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce." When did Plato meet George Bush????
The ugly underside of that quote is that women were considered second class citizens and not suitable for friendship ( filia) or eros and disdain for people outside of the elite and outside of Greece. Everything has two sides. So when we resurrect ideas from the hstorical past we have to remember the other meanings and difference in context. The same with the art historical past. I kind of wish we had talked more about that ( art historical references) but oh well.
And why do I feel like grad students will be writing dissertations about Happy Valley in 500 years assuming identity politics have not made the planet a smoldering rock?
Mothra/A.C. I just figured out who you are (3 inches shorter, 7 year older classmate who shows at the same gallery with your husband). I hear wine and subordinate women age well though.
Not meant to be insulting, and yes! as a short person I am pro-short. I just wondered. You seem to know the artist, the artist used a model, it kind of looks like you, just a random thought. Kelli, you see insults everywhere. why so defensive & insecure?
Well perhaps you are used to being referred to as a chick. I tend to think of it as derisive. Calling a painting chafed and flayed and painful to look at was an insulting remark don't you think. I know several of the artists on this blog and when I really don't like or understand their work I am silent.
But it IS chafed and flayed looking. I am not imagining it. The baby's flesh looks raw.
Are you suggesting that I should be "silent" too? Sounds like censorship to me. I can't say "chick?" Are you policing my language now? I'd think you of all people would be more sensitive to that.
I'm not censoring you but I doubt you would have the balls in person to: A) call me a chick B) remark on my height ( I'd be looking down at the top of your head ) You have such good manners now that this isn't anonymous.
Uh huh. You forget I know you. And if you are referring to an incident of "policing" a mutual associate might want to keep quiet you might want to call them before talking about it.
Chick-Lit. A hyphenated word. If you say it as a spondee, accenting both syllables equally, it's a very hip term - confident and cool: this is "lit" by chicks. Read it.
If you say it as a trochee, accenting the first syllable, you get a term even more reductive than the slang term Chick that replaced Broad and Babe in the evolving spectrum of demeaning endearments. What you get is a baby chicken.
If you remove the hyphen and say it as one word real fast you get a more powerful meaning; this is especially true if you ignore the first three letters.
Finally, you might be thinking of those tiny brightly colored squares; if you put enough of them in your mouth, you'll get a wad of chewing gum.
The colon after Chick-Lit indicates a definition is about to be presented: Chick- Lit is Postfeminist Fiction. Whew. But then you wonder, what does that mean? "There is no hyphen: this fiction is not just feminist, it's postfeminist. Unfortunately (or not, as we may determine later), the prefix post has several meanings: after, subsequent, subsequent to, behind, posterior, posterior to, later than. Although the differences between some of these meanings are subtle, we wonder: is this book after feminism or behind it? Is it posterior to feminism, or is it subsequent to feminism, which implies more of a relationship? Or is post supposed to do what so much language does naturally: evoke all the meanings?"
The last post "quoted" [don't know how those things disolved], suggests there is no settling differences when 'difference' 'wants' the same--differnce as various positions within and wider than the frame. I took a long look through Barnaby's url and found it very interesting, though, the image up at painternyc, is, not so interesting, though, on B's blog, it becomes interesting again. That's how it goes--we become interested, then uninterested, then interested. There are various strategies to keep interest up, but they, as many here have mentioned, frame frames.
Thye say knowledge is wide enough, but never wide enough to be inclusive, and that's the problem!
Hey Brent I always find you interesting in a similar way that Zip is interesting. Postfeminism is problematic because it is so disparate the term is misleading. It has also aquired the popular meaning - something occuring after or in oppostion to feminism. It includes such disparate figures: queer theory, libertarian feminism, poststructuralism. nutcases like Camille Paglia in opposition to poststructuralism, the sex positive feminism which reacted against the unholy alliance between the Meese/Reagan reactionary camp and antipornography feminists and finally feminists who are basically just old-fashioned liberal feminists on some level operating out of an old tradition of liberal humanism ( I'm including Butler, Dorris Lessing (nonfiction), Jeannette Winterson). I belong to the last camp myself and frankly there isn't really anthing post about it. Mary Shelley didn't publish anything in 1995.
right kelli, know who you are, the rest you find out. I was kind of in the stream of Irigaray--early work and late. I had a sister as personal tutor, and then a friend of Itigaray in her Paris circle. I couldn't get it all, especially on coffee meets: you kind of have to let go of things and then pull it all together, very French way, poetic, structural, but organic. Anyway, I learnt human kindness at political work.
120 comments:
Barnaby Whitfield @
31GRAND
31 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
what is that?
Part 2 was much better than part 1. I stayed awake. But I think Ive seen enough pictures of andy for a lifetime.
This painting is great.
THe 31 Grand Esthetic is growing on me like a white powder mold. Juxtapoze.
Grapes again.
I like the "girls of gastric bypass."
It adresses the disgust I feel at the human condition.
But what does this painting mean? It looks classical.
Virgin, lion, grapes, suckle.
Back to planned obsolescence.
Ugly as sin.
Andy was suffering from depersonalization disorder, apparently.
Was/is (geometric) abstraction a retreat from overt content in the face of feelings of oppression?
For some people no doubt.
Or is it the dominance of an outlet for people with no talent for representation?(My favorite line in the Warhol dealio - he had no talent for narrative - like Julian schnabel does. Ha! Like Robert Longo Does. Ha! Its not talent, you morons, its psychology=personality=TASTE)
You could write all kinds of narratives. Contexts are multiplying like tribbles. Its pandemonium out there. Remember HYPERLINKED NARRATIVE? Choose your own adventure!
What is this painting about?
Its very ugly.
“I think it is dangerous to flatter the young. Only fascists flatter the young really.”
To quote the artist.
Many of the Nazis were artisticly inclined. This out Joe Coleman's Joe Coleman in a way.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
-Hunter S. Thompson
Im a hater, not a lover.
I like this artist. His level of talent is pretty rare in the contemporary art scene.
this thing has shock value
shocking classical references
shocking ugly face
shocking saggy tit
shocking hairdo
shocking red baby
shocking grapes
shocking highlights
Pretty in its pure form is like sugar. Try eating a lot of it.
Add noise.
Grunge fonts, for example. You know - labeling tape fonts, or ink spatter fonts, old fashioned typewriter, dot matrix degraded.
Raplph steadman is more interesting than hard edged corporate adobe illustrator defined block print style.
Pastels (Or the Corel Painter program)are used by some corporate illustrators - using rough pastel paper - the equivalent of scumbling...
I think I saw this image in a Chase Manhattan Stockholder annual report.
Is all.
Robert Feintuch was in an ad for Aetna Health Insurance.
Once someone attempted to insult me by calling me a Mannerist and I ate it up. That's what this is: eating up forbidden and forgotten artistic standards and doing it with skill. Good the way Leda and the swan and Laocoon are good. Fashionable the way Schiaparelli and early surrealism were fashionable.
http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/classics/students/Ribeiro/Laocoon.jpg
can't touch it for skill or stones
BTW why is anybody sending Warhol hate mail? Hating fairies and queens is like hating milk and cookies or puppies and kittens. Don't fuck beauty. The world isn't much without it.
In todays aol.headlines"baby dies after falling in mothers vomit-
bad link, this works
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/g/greek/laocoon.jpg
The last guy was a poet before becoming pope, this guy was a Christian.
here
as it seems to be abit on topic here would someone like to claim this?
From: "Marci" marci@rainbowcastle.com
To: johfrederson2000@yahoo.com
Subject: warhol and no where
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:56:29 -0400
knowing you believe warhol is the greatest,
you might always be no where man.
the baby in this painting makes me want to die.
is this pastel? this is so luxurious and rich and sensual.
the woman's hair looks like one of those hard plastic helmet wigs they are selling at the supermarkets now for halloween.. and that red baby... are they burn victims?
without the twisting burned baby, she is like some extremely awkward nerd in a 70's penthouse spread.
i like this very much.
kalm james - i mentioned that von furstenburg was exec producer - so is Peter "Castelli taught me soo much" Brandt and Larry "I lunch with ladies" Gagosian.
Just saying it takes money to make love.
And love is not art or artists would be loved.
kelli- i was going to say pontormo for sure. kj--this barnaby is much better than carlo mariani. mariani is more like the finetuch. dry. This Barnaby is seething.
Peg--check out Nylon--where the grunge fonts never die. Hey I still like them. Cant bring myself to throw away my old RayGuns
yes, seething.
This doesn't look like a painting, but something done in painter.
No Thomas, Im Sigmund Freud and Im nursing my jaw cancer.
Why?
comparing this to Pontormo is such a stretch......
This little pontormo sketch contains so much mastery and farsightedness.....
like how fresh was it that Jacopo was on that anime influenced shit like half a millenia before the fact?
one of my main problems with this whitfield images is he's having such a hard time getting the various visual references to mesh: collaging photos by way of pastel can get disconcerting to me, like the way the Yasumasa Morimura looking head sticks out in a way oblivious to the rest of the body, along with the ringling barnum and bailey lion coming outta leftfield,the grapes, etc.
I actually see this not so much in relation to past practices but correllating to a painter like Yi Chen (showing at Boesky)....but I think the technique is working better for Chen, though perhaps Barnaby is more honest in his attempts; Chen, in revealing his process so obviously may have an easier time with the task.
the color could have a lot more depth
Kalm James I agree with you. Somehow the equation collectors= marketplace comes up. It's not true. I think art fairs are probably the main thing making everybody so money obsessed. Norman Dubrow donates most of what he buys to museums and is always promoting artists he likes, many who are underrepresented or women. For most artists money equals time to work not money. Even being able to have just a part time day job helps a lot of artists. And collectors are the least sexist least racist part of the food chain- some of them are good people who actually think about these issues.
I really like this painting. There is something openly decadent about it.Hernan Bas in comparison seems sort of reticent and closeted ( pardon the pun).
Rococco is the most decadent of the 3. There is a really dirty Fragonard painting coming to mind.
Appropriation - you could say imitation(mimesis) through collage..becoming a critique. I think this is critical in a way Yi Chen is not.
This seems more influenced by amateur weirdness.
I think this falls under thrift store kitch (velvet elvis) in a way.
I dont think being influenced by anime is much to crow about unless its the tentacle sex stuff. Anyone got a link to that? I'm not an expert.
I think a lot of people drew off the TV - I know some of my friends did. Transformers and before.
They werent crtitical neither.
opulent kitchy good drawing ....... so what does he feel about women?
if anybody is interested in homoerotic subtext of Cupid and putti:
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/pastor05.htm
From Phonetics to Discourse: The Nondominant Hand and the Grammar of Sign Language
Kelli I was thinking mother/child thing.... but I'll contemplate androgenous!
KJ how would you change the background?
Peeps it's less a question of taste and more a question of respect. You seem to feel comfortable personally insulting the intelligence of people who don't share your taste ( me ) by saying that I don't understand abstraction but you make no effort to treat work outside of your taste fairly. I had a graduate degree from Yale at 22. I understand a lot of things and can appreciate things like the really good Wendy White show that fall outside of my taste.
We all need to show some respect for fellow artists and make an effort. Hey which major art dealer is openly racist and casually makes bigoted remarks in front of his staff? Answer: I can't say without getting his employee in trouble but this is the crap you should all be hating not art.
I think theres a problem with a system that requires the artist to humble themselves to gallerists, or people in general, so I'd like to use my cat as an intermediary. A familiar. How cool would a raven be? Two caws for new work. Five hundred for pay me you cocksucker. It could peck the eyes out of critics.
sometimes its hard to decode meaning without a lot of reading or writing.
I usually misread stuff, which is looked on as flippancy, apparently, but is really just me trying to make something interesting for myself. Isnt that what art is? a discursive process? A conversation between the subject and the object?
Who else is there? I like artists who dont care about interpretation or even encourage that, like Rauschenberg. Critics call it ambiguity.
Joe Coleman lacks ambiguity and there are a lot of words so if you read them all you will get the painting like you get a comic book.
This painting has no words, but now I understand it might have some unambiguously coded homosexual stuff.
Is there something inherently, unambiguously gay in avant guard art?
WHere was I reading that the art world is conservatively (reactionary) liberal, having taken the streets and consolidating its power in institutional might.
I thought this was kind of hipocritical - art is supposed to be amoral, apolitical, and asexual, according to Gombrich's art through the ages. The good stuff rises to the top - like youth and gallery directors.
Thomas - If you actually want jpegs of my work leave your email on my raven.
Kalm James I like to throw queer theory into the mix because it breaks up the male female dichotomy and allows us to have a discussion with each other without breaking into opposing camps. Some of the ideas associated with the term ( art as counternarrative, irony and playfulness in art. rejection of normalcy) could easily apply to straight artists like Larry Rivers or Zak Smith. Read "the Queen's Throat" and "Opera or the Undoing of Women" back to back and tell me which critical vantage point is more friendly to art. Homoerotic content in art has been buried over time but really so has all erotic content. I'd like to see the the portraits of bathing women Hans Memling was commissioned for but can't because they have been lost.
That being said orientation is used to marginalize some artists in the same way critics focusing on Pollock's alcoholism marginalizes him.
KJ you asked so: historically in the classical world male homosexuality was tolerated so long as one married eventually. In ancient India gay people were grouped with old people and kids ( non child bearing people). The Old Testament was neutral on female homosexuality but not male ( the term almah usually translated as virgin probably meant lesbian). However trans people have always been feared and denigrated. Read Lucian's "the Eunuch". The modern definition of gay as an identity not activity arose in the late 1800's and you have a point that it doesn't mean exactly the same thing over time.
I like the other. I also like the other's mother.
"BAD" like Thriller. needs more leather. not sure what is going on with is going down with that babys right hand leg.
KJ I guess there are always different ways ideas can be used. I think I find some of these concepts useful because they are disruptive and cut across gender traditions. I guess they could be used to create an alternate normalcy or oppositional heirarchy instead of challenging heirarchy.
But that would be less fun.
And Karl Rove uses identity politics.
Maybe we all know less than we think we do. Maybe the child is right - the emperor has no clothes. Maybe all the intelligentsia are too impressed with themselves. Beauty, after all is in the eye. God, the salon is so hot and stuffy. Someone please open a window. P.utto, in the words of the great Partridge Family, "I think I love you."
for anyone interested, Larry Rivers gave his friends blow jobs at parties and he fucked his couch in the living room as a young man, but who hasn't fucked furniture.
I'm not really feeling the artist club/artist love thing. The intellectual game will keep us haters. Stay skeptical of eager beavers..
ps
it looks like he spent alot of time rendering this tit..
nice to see where his priorities lie.
I guess he doesn't like hands or babies.
"the artist club/artist love thing"
what does this mean?
This was a sentiment i picked up on a while back in this post. something along the lines of not knocking art, then later - 'we are all in this together'.
or something like it....
PS nowhere,
love your love for the man..
I think this painting is harboring nuclear weapons.
Or, is it that they've already gone off and this is what it looks like sometime after fall-out?
--kind of shocking, and makes one think, do we really want to do that again--have we not become more responsible human citizens who can live in peace and settle our differences through oil.
Whatever, the feline sucks!
nwm i bought my young son a warhol jigsaw puzzle, because out of all the JSP's available at the time AW was the only one that had positive visual appeal.
Wade I was sort of lumping the classical world... Greece and Rome together to keep things brief. While generally more tolerant than ours it is hard to determine just how tolerent these cultures were particurally towards the receiving partners.
Seneca has a character saying:
" I simultaneously submit to both a man and a woman. Yet I also play the man's role to someone else's disgrace"
Claudian in Eutropium says in reference to recieving partners "one whom the male sex has discarded and the female will not adopt"
So while male homosexuality was accepted men viewed as feminine were on a somewhat lower footing than men perceived as masculine or dominant.
I think it is interesting that some of the classical art historical imagery ( putti etc.)Whitfield uses has become kitsch and he is using the kitch references to allude to the earlier meanings.
poppy thx. i am amazed at how it angers people, he walked some form of tightrope line.
ttg, for some reason this quote came to mind:
"Art negates the conceptualization foisted on the real world...The truth of works of art hinges on whether or not they succeed, in accordance with their inner necessity, to absorb the non-conceptual and the contingent. For their purposefulness requires the purposelessness, which is illusion...Aesthetics cannot hope to grasp works of art if it treats them as hermeneutical objects. What at present needs to be grasped is their unintelligibility...By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it...The subject only becomes the essence of the artwork when it confronts it foreignly, externally, and compensates for the foreigness by substituting itself for the work...Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human...Actually, only what does not fit into this world is true."
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,
hey, nowhereman...:)
Sex to the Greeks and Romans was about power. If you were a citizen of Athens you would be what we now call upper class. Only men of the upper classes could be citizens.
You could have sex with anyone below your stature, and they could not say no.
Having sex with young boys was common.
The term homsoexual came about around 1868 in context to the Prussian penal code on sodomy laws.
Karl-Maria Kertbeny seeked to have the law changed as he thought that private consensual sexual acts should not be subject of the criminal law.
Pdog you are right that power and class, slave and free as well as male and female were the pertinent categories governing sexual relations in the classical world. However pederasty in Athenian Greece was a mutually beneficial institution which was pretty consensual. It involved elaborate courtship rituals and forcing oneself on a boy (upper class) who was not interested was considered an act of hubris and punishable. However women and slaves were sort of fair game and men desiring a receptive role as adults or young men pursuing older men were at least frowned upon.
I'm sorry if going off on this tangent was a distraction.
I posted that link about Cupid and putti way up above because it directly relates to this painting.
Nowhere man,
thanks for posting that quote,
It sums up in a nice tidy way much of what i've been thinking about lately..
Since i am a few sheets to the wind - you get much love....:)*o*
Larry Is Also The Man no matter what he spent his days blowing or not blowing..
tip of the hat to that guy, the self proclaimed grand dad o pop.- or was it the re introduction of representational?
whatever, read his book, very entertaining...
a lot of this paiting has an icky painting on velvet feel.
To which I ad
BAjabajabajaba.
:)
thx for the book suggestion.
this
could be about a lot of things. But is it ironic? IS george washington a little too proud?
this
is weird. What is that thing in the lady's lap? It looks human.
so but compare- which of these do you find the most DOMESTIC looking?:
Cassat
Rivers
tentacles
and they always had a toothache-
You dont have to lounge around to think about who youre going to have sex with--you can do that while u work.
banksy
I had a summer job stacking boxes. Once you get the pattern down you can think about other things. But I found usually you would just think about one thing over and over.
Too bad andy didnt live to be able to do a portrait of paris. Though of couse we can all imagin it.
I always liked AW's portraits of the 80s. I felt they were quite critical, far from fawning. The critique was buried in the glamour and so he beat the swells at their own game. Not only that he took their money but he exposed them. It was part of the whole thing that they were too dumb to notice--or too cruel to care.
It is a very passive aggressive tactic--particular to strait women and gay men. No marginalization intended, just facts.
I have to say I hate men with an intense and bitter passion. And I find the fact that I desire them a nightmare but it defines my life. Now that's content!
ahh the good ol days...
from Rome to Warhol
if this is Rome it is 'Caligula' - u know the one with Courtney Love.
I was wrong the upcoming Warhol looks ver y good, will feature:
Mao, Ladies & Gentlemen, Hammer & Sickle, Skulls, Guns, Knives, Crosses, Reversals, Retrospectives, Shadows, Rorschach, Camouflage, Oxidation, The Last Supper, Self Portraits
The Symposium is basically just people lying around talking about who to have sex with.
Closeup you just need a better toolbox
http://www.medicaltoys.com/
alot of that breaks, well almost everything has a short shelf life - maybe more luck here
just waiting for the day somebody makes something in stainless steel that fits in a harness. Ice water bath.
Talking about the Greeks made me sad. I guess people just look for something positive and consensual in the past. And some of their love poetry was nice.
girlz--if that was only enough. but i need more!
this harness will fit whatever's in stainless.
they gave us the seeds for western civilization, which is no small contrabution.
Europe during the dark ages was no picnic.
On the throne of many hues, Immortal Aphrodite,
child of Zeus, weaving wiles--I beg you
not to subdue my spirit, Queen,
with pain or sorrow
but come--if ever before
having heard my voice from far away
you listened, and leaving your father's
golden home you came
in your chariot yoked with swift, lovely
sparrows bringing you over the dark earth
thick-feathered wings swirling down
from the sky through mid-air
arriving quickly--you, Blessed One,
with a smile on your unaging face
asking again what have I suffered
and why am I calling again
and in my wild heart what did I most wish
to happen to me: "Again whom must I persuade
back into the harness of your love?
Sappho, who wrongs you?
For if she flees, soon she'll pursue,
she doesn't accept gifts, but she'll give,
if not now loving, soon she'll love
even against her will."
Come to me now again, release me from
this pain, everything my spirit longs
to have fulfilled, fulfill, and you
be my ally
None of the stainless stuff has a wide enough base. Sounds like a trip to the emergency room.
http://rainbowrope.com/all.html
I swear by the 40$ probe. Notable for the slight curve. Affordable enough for Christmas presents. Beats the crap out of a scarf.
About classical love poetry :Ovid is totally overrated and meanspirited. Talking about vain women dying their hair and it falling out. Just petty.
Sappho was bi by the way and so was Wilde.
duh
Yes but people forget. Wade did bring up a good point that we tend to shape the past to fit newer versions of identity.
I find most peoples vision of ancient Greece or Rome is framed by film or tv.
Years ago when I was in school, I was working in a computer room and the discussion was on Rome, and this person made a comment about how in films on or about ancient Rome the actors seemed to all have english accents.
She was woundering why they did not speak Italian...
this cracks me up Study Guide for Ovid
how hard is it to extend the base just use fimo.
No-Where thanks for all the tips. Ovid can be summed up: rhyming couplets
women like grapes
they also like rape
And all the stuff about sexual positions to make yourself look thinner leaves me to believe he was reincarnated in the Paris Hilton sex tape
P dog you are too right
Hey nobody answered my question. Can art use kitsch to reference the earlier meanings of kitsch images like Cupid??
in gods army you can have a base.
Freud did a case study of Leonardo and mistranslated some sea bird as vulture. Kissed by a vulture.
I love that.
louche
its weird the text books skip this sort of stuff. I would have stayed awake during the survey courses.
THe teacher was alseep at the wheel too I guess.
Slide please.
I think its obvious these poets might be directing sex tapes,
they were of course just as vain if not more so then we are today
The comments read 101 so I walked into class.
'Closeuup' I love poetry and if it's good can't be mean spirited. Then it would not be poetry, it would be mean-spirited prose.
Zip: The classical world had a love hate relationship with androgyny. Christianity had a hard time cleaning up self castration "eunuchs for heaven" and all that being so closely based on the cult of Cybele Attis Magna Mater. They turned gender bending into asceticism.
get thee to vegas
The springtime rites involving castration were turned into Easter and the stigmatic wounds. For the first time androgyny was available to women through the body modification and eating disorders of medieval saints. In the ancient world there was wide variation between castration practiced on captive people and sex workers ( Egypt was the worst) and the voluntary procedures lower middle class men underwent to obtain the diplomatic and governmental positions available to Eunuchs. Later the Castrati who were valued for their singing voices by the Church were made using gentler methods in a warm bath with opium.
Drugs!
Huh. The chick in this painting kinda looks like Kelli, only taller.
Everything looks chafed and flayed and sore. It hurts to look at.
there is a great special on VH1 on drugs now. check it.
annndddd allll the jooyyyyyy with in youuuuuu dies.
don't dream it be it my friends sublimate with in the sparter.
oh 80's lyrics as contemporary poetry? oh well we know where that may lead. for a good laugh check talkback.
Nice read!!
I just googled Richard Merkin and goshdarnit if you didnt scare the bejeezus out of me KJ.
no idea y - re-reading and
this image
No-Where who made that?
otto dix. the first girl i feel for was so into him. i think he falls inline with your question of the non-kitsh but i am not sure. im not very smart.
Psshaw you are obviously smart. This was a fun thread. How many discussions include Larry Rivers, eunuchs and Adorno?
You forgot about little boys, castration and Anne Rice novels,..
Poppy castration and eunuchs kind of go together. Little Boys: I got nothing. Anne Rice: Queen of the Damned with Stuart Townsend is a total piece of crap movie which does however work as porn.
is that sad?
Wade a lot of people point out his humor and self deprecation ( he's picking on himself as much as anybody ) but I still think there is a meanness there. It kind of spoils the buzz for me.
One more thing I've noticed is with all the focus on pederasty the accounts of Greek homosexuality leave out marriage between adult men ( which did exist ) and intercrural sex which was pretty common and might not have brought up the top/bottom issues within their society.
"Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce."
When did Plato meet George Bush????
The ugly underside of that quote is that women were considered second class citizens and not suitable for friendship ( filia) or eros and disdain for people outside of the elite and outside of Greece. Everything has two sides. So when we resurrect ideas from the hstorical past we have to remember the other meanings and difference in context. The same with the art historical past. I kind of wish we had talked more about that ( art historical references) but oh well.
And why do I feel like grad students will be writing dissertations about Happy Valley in 500 years assuming identity politics have not made the planet a smoldering rock?
i must say... "Warm Wet Yellow Breeze"
is quite a picture.
Mothra/A.C. I just figured out who you are (3 inches shorter, 7 year older classmate who shows at the same gallery with your husband). I hear wine and subordinate women age well though.
Not meant to be insulting, and yes! as a short person I am pro-short. I just wondered. You seem to know the artist, the artist used a model, it kind of looks like you, just a random thought. Kelli, you see insults everywhere. why so defensive & insecure?
Well perhaps you are used to being referred to as a chick. I tend to think of it as derisive. Calling a painting chafed and flayed and painful to look at was an insulting remark don't you think. I know several of the artists on this blog and when I really don't like or understand their work I am silent.
But it IS chafed and flayed looking. I am not imagining it. The baby's flesh looks raw.
Are you suggesting that I should be "silent" too? Sounds like censorship to me. I can't say "chick?" Are you policing my language now? I'd think you of all people would be more sensitive to that.
I'm not censoring you but I doubt you would have the balls in person to:
A) call me a chick
B) remark on my height ( I'd be looking down at the top of your head )
You have such good manners now that this isn't anonymous.
What does "you of all people" refer to?
You've complained about others "policing" you in the past, on this very blog.
And I've never been anything BUT polite. Mom raised me up that way, yup.
Uh huh. You forget I know you. And if you are referring to an incident of "policing" a mutual associate might want to keep quiet you might want to call them before talking about it.
oy. enough with the baiting. I am referring to comments you made about "policing" on THIS VERY BLOG. Shall I go dig them up?
and p.s., quit doing it.
I would put you in your place but I think someone else has that covered. Come up to me in public and call me a chick to my face. Or my shoulders.
Chick-Lit. A hyphenated word. If you say it as a spondee, accenting both syllables equally, it's a very hip term - confident and cool: this is "lit" by chicks. Read it.
If you say it as a trochee, accenting the first syllable, you get a term even more reductive than the slang term Chick that replaced Broad and Babe in the evolving spectrum of demeaning endearments. What you get is a baby chicken.
If you remove the hyphen and say it as one word real fast you get a more powerful meaning; this is especially true if you ignore the first three letters.
Finally, you might be thinking of those tiny brightly colored squares; if you put enough of them in your mouth, you'll get a wad of chewing gum.
The colon after Chick-Lit indicates a definition is about to be presented: Chick- Lit is Postfeminist Fiction. Whew. But then you wonder, what does that mean? "There is no hyphen: this fiction is not just feminist, it's postfeminist. Unfortunately (or not, as we may determine later), the prefix post has several meanings: after, subsequent, subsequent to, behind, posterior, posterior to, later than. Although the differences between some of these meanings are subtle, we wonder: is this book after feminism or behind it? Is it posterior to feminism, or is it subsequent to feminism, which implies more of a relationship? Or is post supposed to do what so much language does naturally: evoke all the meanings?"
The last post "quoted" [don't know how those things disolved], suggests there is no settling differences when 'difference' 'wants' the same--differnce as various positions within and wider than the frame.
I took a long look through Barnaby's url and found it very interesting, though, the image up at painternyc, is, not so interesting, though, on B's blog, it becomes interesting again. That's how it goes--we become interested, then uninterested, then interested. There are various strategies to keep interest up, but they, as many here have mentioned, frame frames.
Thye say knowledge is wide enough, but never wide enough to be inclusive, and that's the problem!
Hey Brent I always find you interesting in a similar way that Zip is interesting. Postfeminism is problematic because it is so disparate the term is misleading. It has also aquired the popular meaning - something occuring after or in oppostion to feminism. It includes such disparate figures: queer theory, libertarian feminism, poststructuralism. nutcases like Camille Paglia in opposition to poststructuralism, the sex positive feminism which reacted against the unholy alliance between the Meese/Reagan reactionary camp and antipornography feminists and finally feminists who are basically just old-fashioned liberal feminists on some level operating out of an old tradition of liberal humanism ( I'm including Butler, Dorris Lessing (nonfiction), Jeannette Winterson). I belong to the last camp myself and frankly there isn't really anthing post about it. Mary Shelley didn't publish anything in 1995.
right kelli, know who you are, the rest you find out. I was kind of in the stream of Irigaray--early work and late. I had a sister as personal tutor, and then a friend of Itigaray in her Paris circle. I couldn't get it all, especially on coffee meets: you kind of have to let go of things and then pull it all together, very French way, poetic, structural, but organic. Anyway, I learnt human kindness at political work.
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