Archive | Art Matters

Venus as a Lone Wolf

I wake with longing. This is not new for me; this is not new for most people. Desire is the human condition. To be alive, to be embodied, is to need things in one form or another—food, water, shelter, sleep, air. Every minute of every day, our bodies drive us: They have to eat; they have to breathe; they have to shit and piss and cum; they are restless; they are tired; they are cold; they are hot. They crave contact.

I have been a lone wolf, an alley cat, for most of my life. I did not cathect to my tribe though I tried. I have never cathected to any tribe since. I was too psychic to bear dishonesty, too much of a Capricorn to bear laziness, too much of an aesthete to bear bad taste, too sensitive to bear spitefulness. I preferred people who tried their best, who prized truth and compassion over comfort and status.

Thus I have spent most of my life alone. I have learned to love in a vacuum.

When I was young I was guilty of the worst sort of manipulations. I saw people as stools and steps rather than stars unto themselves. I sang for my supper. I fucked for security. I preened for admiration. Continue Reading →

Desert Flowers: Object D’art O’Keeffe

Pictured here: three images from Living Modern, the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of work by and about Georgia O’Keeffe—the twentieth century’s most un-objectified object d’art. In gallery after gallery, this womon artist’s (quint)essence shines through others’ lens, myriad ages, and various iterations of her self-expression, including paintings, hand-made garments, and girlish fashion drawings. You can see how her physicality informed the shapes she created; in that stirring far left image (a 1918 photograph of her by husband Alfred Stieglitz), she’s austere, flat, concave; the only traditionally womanly mound is that seriously fulsome bush. In her fashion drawing at bottom right (check out those extraterrestrial fingers) and cityscape at top right you see echoes of those verysame shapes. This is womanbody as subject with a heathy slash of steel, a big blowsy flower, and the blood red and pale pale pink that Venus Retrograde in Aries and Pisces demands. Georgia is the eye of the beholder and, I’d argue, of twentysomething centuries, too. I expected a lot from this show but still am happily surprised. The clothes especially are something else: bleached-out and exquisitely detailed. I want them all.

Word to the wise: The Museum is charging major mandatory buckos for the exhibition. Though it’s a worthy institution, city museums are meant to be pay-what-you-wish, so on general principle I fished one of the O’Keeffe entrance bracelets from a trashcan and sailed right in.

Kerry James Marshall’s American Dream

Walking through the galleries of “Mastry,” the two-floor Kerry James Marshall retrospective at Met Breuer, the newest branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I flash on James Baldwin’s quote: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Certainly Marshall’s paintings, which I have visited three times in the last month, are profoundly American – proudly, gorgeously, defiantly. In a swoon of silver, brocade, and funeral banners, they embody the beautiful resistance that our country needs most right now – the revolution that has just recommenced. More than that, these paintings ask us to join the movement.

Born in Alabama in 1955, Marshall moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1963 – a classic midcentury migration of African American clans. He has said that his infatuation with Marvel comics began around the same time that he visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and certainly both influences are evident in his work. Also evident is the Civil Rights movement, which grew up right along with the artist, often in the same place. He was in Birmingham when four young girls were killed in a bombing of a Baptist church, and was living in L.A.’s Watts section during its 1965 riots. Remaining in that city during his early adulthood, he knew founding members of the Crips gang and studied at the Otis Art Institute, where he opted to become a representational painter querying beauty tropes as well as the eye of the beholder.

Marshall has so much to say about the gaze. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy