More Forrest Bess - Roberta Smith wrote a more in-depth and touching article on him than the WSJ. His work is now on view at the Whitney thanks to Robert Gober (who also brought Charles Burchfield to the art masses), and at Christie’s.
Here’s one thing I would do with $100,000… I love the work of Forrest Bess, Texas Fisherman, “Outsider” Artist, and Jungian Mystic. His work is on exhibit and sale at Christie’s this month. Read about his life and quest for hermaphroditism in the Wall Street Journal.
Check out elementary school artist Camryn Manson’s portrait, “Oliver”. It’s on display in a coffeeshop near my parents’ house. It’s so sad! And such great use of negative space!
Read the interview and learn more about the process-based painting workshop I’ll be teaching in Italy!
This is so SAD!
Neil deGrasse Tyson: We Stopped Dreaming
This is an excellent valentine.
For Valentine’s Day, artist Eero Saarinen’s endearing 1954 list of his wife’s positive attributes
(via museumnerd)
Photos from the wonderful day of performances for John Cage’s Musicircus at the Blanton Museum. Michelle Schumann plays Suite for Toy Piano by cage, as Kirby Wallis, Ashley Gilfix, Oren Porterfield and Beth Terwilleger dance choreography by Michelle Thompson.
If you remember my post a few months ago, in which I gush over the outpouring of talent I witnessed at the Blanton Museum in a performance that happened only one afternoon, and if you felt pangs of regret at having missed it, then don’t miss:
The Blanton’s SoundSpace: MUSICIRCUS
Saturday, February 4, 2PM
In celebration of his 100th birthday, The Blanton presents John Cage’s MUSICIRCUS, bringing together musicians, dancers, and performance artists from Austin’s artistic community. First performed in 1967, MUSICIRCUS is a cacophony of simultaneous performances, determined by chance distribution. Embedded within this presentation will be the works of Cage, his contemporaries, and artists directly influenced by him.
Organized by Steven Parker, Blanton Museum Artist-in-Residence and graduate student in performance art in the UT Butler School of Music.
Here is a link to the event page on facebook.
And also: isn’t it great that John Cage is so happy all the time? He clearly knows the secret.
I am such a fan of Katharina Grosse.
Katharina Grosse
Cheese Gone Bad, 1999
Acrylic on wallInstallation for Chinati Foundation in Marfa
Another successful pencilstress, Robyn O’Neil, has done a short film. I’m excited.
While in San Francisco last week, I happened to catch the Francesca Woodman exhibit at SF MoMA. Reading the wall text before entering, I was dubious as to what I would find. It described the prolific photography of the daughter of artists, a girl in the blurry transition from adolescence to adulthood, who showed promise and then committed suicide before she reached twenty-three.
So, given, my expectations were low. But I was entranced, especially by the first two rooms of work she did at maybe eighteen or nineteen, sometimes using her assignments at RISD as a jumping off point. The work was curious, visually complex, and hardly the melodramatic egomania I expected from a teenager using herself as a subject.
My friend Will told me there’s actually a documentary about the Woodmans, that was so good, he was a little disappointed in the work itself. I guess it depends on your expectations. It’s a tough paradigm, dying young, untarnished, and yet never fully deserving of praise qualified by the unknowable potential of the artist.
It’s worth seeing if you’re in SF before February 20. There are also catalogues of her work.
“Feel the Moon” written by Katie Geha for Pastelegram on the work of Vija Celmins, is an aptly quiet and thoughtful reading of Celmins’ work, and her scientific/artistic quest to really comprehend the feel of something through its rendering.
“Celmins approaches [naturalism] as a kind of philosophical rendering of the world. For all of her specifics, the pinning of the picture to the page, imitating the spread of speckles on a stone just right, Celmins allows for the deeper meaning to remain wide open. Her work is the scanning of the photograph in a way not unlike the Surveyor’s scan of the moon; the arduous practice of deeply translating a thing made for concentrated looking.”
Many artists now make work based on pain-staking renderings in pencil. They aren’t necessarily photo-realistic, nor do they necessarily make you want to look longer or deeper or slow down to meet them. Maybe these artists are modeling themselves after Celmins, but either missing the focus or the tenderness. Celmins describes the world as I wish to describe it - thoughtfully, observantly, leaving the meaning wide open.
