Cumulative power of tiny specks....

Landscape at Saint-Charles, near Gisors, Sunset  by Camille Pissarro

We always doubt the power of the small, the contained. We doubt our single, individual lives, wonder if we can matter at all.

The power of a bit of dust lies in juxtaposition with other unnoticed specks. It's in the whole where a speck has its best effect. One star in a sky of stars. One life in a history of lives.

  This is my favorite picture from the current Clark Art Institute exhibition. It's called Landscape at Saint-Charles, near Gisors, Sunset  by Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903. The application of color is in spots and specks. The effect is cumulative and it almost glows on the canvas.  

Specks, little dots or points of paint are featured in a technique called pointillism pioneered by Charles Seurat. In this picture the museum notes, Pissarro was experimenting with that technique.  We could experiment too, try to see ourselves in the context of our country, our continent, our planet, our solar system, universe, multiverse.  As we zoom out, our speck-ness seems more and more natural, comfortable. We are in places as it were. Right here. Right now.

Two from The Clark, Degas

The Clark had a free admission day on Easter. I took photos of my favorites. I'll start with two juxtaposed works, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, and Portrait of a Man both by Edgar Degas.

Dia Beacon then Hudson River gawking

This is a view of one of the giant sculptures on view at Dia in the lower level. A friend invted me on this excursion, and rather than wait around all day for primary results I thought, why not a day trip.  You can walk inside these metal pieces and if you sing a little the echo is stunning.  Later we stumbled into the parking lot of the Beacon train station which is right on the Hudson River. On this balmy Feb. day I needed no coat, hat or gloves - but ice was still in the river from last weeks -9 temps. Weird. We later had an early dinner at Max's on Main in Beacon. Great day.

Measure for Measure - better than getting a seat....

Last Sunday I went to a free concert at the Yale Museum for British Art in New Haven, called Measure for Measure - the Music of Shakespeare's Plays. The Ensemble Chaconne performed about 24 songs on period instruments: Peter Bloom on flute, Carol Lewis on viola da gamba, Olav Chris Hendriksen on lute, and finally a guest artist Pamela Dellal, a mezzo-soprano.

The room was "at capacity" as they say. We arrived before it began but still too late to get a seat, so we went up to the forth floor where there is a gallery or mezzanine-type opening in three of the walls. I peaked over a bit, but mostly I sat in a big comfy chair reading while the music spilled over into the gallery from below.

This was a very relaxing way to hear a very excellent concert. I could get up and stretch, look at paintings on the wall or check my email all  without disturbing anyone or enduring scathing looks from earnest concert-goers. I think in the future, I would prefer to be part of this spill-over crowd on the forth floor.

As a bonus, I found a wonderful painting I liked very much:A Grotto on the Gulf of Salerno, Sunset painted by Joseph Wright of Derby around 1781. It seemed so cool and relaxing to be out of the brightness of the sun and hidden away - almost like hearing a concert from the mezzanine!

Afterwards we visited a nearby Thai eatery where we had small bowls of miso soup $3.50 - a bargain! A friend also had fried green tea ice cream which arrived in flames. Couldn't resist taking a picture. Nice presentation with the drizzled chocolate.

De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way

Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at  MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am.  She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those  huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all.  Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy,  and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature -  powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and  her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor -  yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint.  The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt  shows Woman I at various stages  -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it.  Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight  - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards -  a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman)  was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.

-- Mar Walker

Dia: Beacon - thought-provoking exhibit...

Last Thursday, fellow Shijin Robin Sampson, White Plains Slammer Ann Marie Marra and I visted the DIA museum in Beacon New York (a snapshot of its website is to the left), which opened in 2003 in a 300,000 square foot printing factory.  We got separated in this large maze-like building and I didn't see them for two hours.

I was constantly surprised - each time I thought I had reached the end of the exhibits, there was a still a large part of the building I had not visited!   Better, each time I thought I had drawn a bead on the meaning of what was exhibited, another twist was revealed.

The first room featured an exhibit of  minimalist work "24 Colors for Blinky" by Imi Koebel - large odd shapes each painted in a single bright color.  They were not at all like the monochrome canvases of Modrian  which contain subtle, though barely discernible, complexities. Koebel's colors are utterly flat and uniform.  Just shapes varied wildly. Imi may well have been trying to "shape-up" Blinky Palermo whose small and uniformly square works were on display in another room.  Another room had works by Agnes Martin whose canvases were more in the actual lineage of Modrian, but with a much more personal touched-surface  feeling....

Then there was an entire warehouse-sized room of light work by Dan Flavin. I mean, a kind of minimalist work created entirely as arrangements or "monuments" of florescent light fixtures. I didn't really get off on these, though they were interesting.  On the lower floor were a several works that were a kind of minimalist drawing  and the medium was vivid  blinking neon lights .

And then there was a room entirely containing abstract expressionist sculptures by John Chamberlain that looked as if, and I think were actually made from junk cars and scrap metal. I liked several that were imposing crumpled metal cairns each cloistering a small brightly color nucleus.  But My favorite work of the day was The Privet - one of his metal  sculptures. (The photo simply does not do it justice...)  It is a bit of an abstract expressionist hedge - of metal strips painted capreciously with high gloss enamel. It's metal fronds twisted organically, and each with a unique color scheme. The form was so familiar, the material and colors, arresting. I was inspired to write a poem, though it has a miserable slant rhyme.

The privet's metal stalks aspire
To rustle 'neath the critc's pire
In colors crisp with high gloss shallac
The metal hedge row with varied palette 

Louise Bourgeois' mythic Spiders inspire primal fear, I think and awe.... One can walk right up to the monster which is sci-fi man-eating sized!

Another area I adore, was a set of architectural scale works by Michael Heizer - that involved enormous holes in the floor, I liked the effects, and as a bonus the polished concrete floors in that area were so beautifully and intricately marked, each of the huge sections could have been hung on the wall as art....

Another area I enjoyed very very much contained huge iron spirals "Torqued Elipses" by Richard Serra like the hulls of mysterious ships or giant vats in a factory, that were 15 feet tall with walls several inches. You could walk inside the huge spirals and sometimes, there were hidden inner chambers.  Their juxtaposition also made a very pleasing view of differing angles. There was an erie sonority to the pieces as well. I tried singing inside of one and the echos were amazing.

Interpretive verses generative art

One of the most fascinating aspects of the artists on display were the many who had not constructed the piece on view, but who had left a set of instructions as an architect leaves blueprints, or actually the very same way a composer writes a a score and then leaves it to the future - for others to bring to life!

There was one Lawrence Weiner who had left large sized instructions for the construction of arrangements of monolithic stones. One huge obelisk-like monolith was recessed into the wall. There was an exhibit of drawings by Sol LeWitt (who had recently died). The work required  a team of 20 artists to draw patterns of six different basic squares.  Each looked like a geeks creation on graph paper. The squares were drawn in combination, juxtaposition and super-imposition  in pencil right on the four walls of a museum room. It sounds so prosaic but the effect was sort of  contrary to that. Inside four twenty-foot walls all covered with this work, well the effect was strangely imposing and the repetition made it comforting and  tranquil. It had a great quiet dignity.

The presence of a whole room of Andy Warhol canvases gives real weight to the idea of art by collaboration rather than by one hand.  So much of the art in this exhibit was  what I would call Art Divisi - that is art divided into inceptor or "Idea-ator" and executor. Or more completely - as in music - the generative artist and the interpretive artist. As in theater or in the performance arts, this allows subsequent generations to add cultural nuance...

Could an artist devise a handmade drawing or painting of so many layers that generations of interpretors would be required to fulfill the design? One thinks of the great cathedrsls ( one was still unfinished when I was in college. Not sure now)

And on the topic of great catherdrals - the Photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher were of wonders of another sort - the great detailed twisting industrial cathedrals of European industry of an era past.

It's a great exhibit. They also have a fine coffee shop for lunch and a fabulous book store. Check the museum's website at http://www.diabeacon.org/exhibs/bindex.html

While we were in Beacon, we also visited the Muddy Cup for Lavendar Tea....

-- Mar Walker