Time has been running away again. No blog in so long! So let me begin again with my friend Joan Danziger’s show at Osuna Art in Bethesda. The very well attended opening was a few weeks ago on April 12 – Ramón Osuna’s gallery had outdone itself in the way the sculptures were lit – and Michael Sullivan has already reviewed the show in the Washington Post on Friday, May 2. Can I say more than he already did? Well, I have three advantages, not that they make me an expert, but still: I know Joan a bit, I own one of her sculptures and I got a copy of the catalogue that was published at the same time her show opened.

I met Joan in the street, in 2001, right after 9/11. I had just moved from South Africa to DC and was somewhat forlornly walking my dog when I caught sight of a house with near the front door a very large, colorful, weird sculpture with all manner of animals climbing up a pole . That house became a favorite stop on my daily dogspeditions. Then one day a smiling young man came out of the driveway. I asked him if he was the owner of the sculpture, but he shook his head, laughed heartily and said he was merely the studio assistant of the owner and the sculptor, Joan Danziger.

One of the mothers in my child’s new school said the next day: “Joan Danziger? Quite famous. Has works in museums and all that. Bit of a recluse, though, doesn’t talk to anyone, very grumpy type. Everybody in the neighborhood knows of her, but nobody knows her.”

The stuff of fairy tales! I could not be more enticed to wanting to know her. One of the next times I walked by, I again met the studio assistant, whose name was Alan, and this time he was followed by Joan Danziger herself. “Who is THAT?” she barked to Alan, over my head. “She’s your neighbor, sort of,” said the always smiling Alan, also over my head. “What’s your name!” she barked again, now to me. I was getting really nervous now; there is a difference between hearing about a Very Grumpy And Reclusive Famous Sculptor and actually meeting her at a moment of when she is being Very Grumpy and Reclusive. In a small voice I stated my name, and told her about our housewarming party, like it made total sense to do so, and she answered, “Fine, send me an invite,” also like that made any sense. Then, with an abrupt “Goodbye”, she was gone.

I did send her an invite and she did come and we had a lot of fun; she was neither grumpy nor reclusive which just goes to show how rumor gets into the world, right on the back of a horse named Nonsense, and she sold us a sculpture a while later and there where lots of parties over the years as well as tragedies she rarely talks about, and to say the least, I’ve never regretted the day I came to admire that sculpture in front of her house. I am sure that the tree in my latest painting “Paradise Lost” is channeling a Joan tree, although I didn’t do that on purpose, and if I did, well, imitation is the highest form of flattery, isn’t it? But maybe it is that she and I own the same tree book.

And now to her show at Osuna. Before it, Joan’s later work had already become considerably smaller in size and left behind its colors, the whimsical circus creatures, the musical animals, the human-animal hybrids. Her animals shrank and retreated into her forests, their colors fading into the grey of her increasingly ghostly trees. Of the human-animal hybrids only some remained, mostly the bird woman, but she, too, became small and even more mysterious.

This is even more so the case in Joan’s show at Osuna Art, but with a difference - read on. There are cats and birds, a griffin, a deer, and many, many, many charging horses, some with women riders. I am not sure if they hadn't been there before, these horses and their riders, but I certainly saw them appear after Joan’s accident (2003), about which a bit more later, when she couldn’t sculpt and took up painting instead, producing small, intense canvases, mostly in dark blues and reds, of mysterious horses and Amazon-like riders charging around and into dark trees.

There were two rhinoceroses, one a small mythical creature in one of the enchanted forests (Suspended Garden), the other, a lone stand-out in the collection, a huge creature all on its own (The Rhino Is A Tree ... The Tree Is A Rhino), straddled, no, infested, by a tree. She or he and the tree look ancient, they mirror each other, they feed on one another, they look like one single magnificent and strangely symmetrical creature that has lived since the beginning of times and will live on forever.

Apart from the rhino, though, the trees in Joan’s show reign supreme. Their roots have become more twisted and intricate, their branches thicker and more gnarled – at first sight they look older than they used to. The underlying metal armatures are often partly or completely exposed but rather than confirming that the trees would have aged and are falling apart, it makes them look younger, rejuvenated. They have cast off, literally, a cast of clay, or refused to receive one; there they stand now, shining and elegant, ephemeral (not a usual Joan epithet), mysterious in an entirely different way.

But that is only part of the developments in Joan’s fabled forests, because many of her trees now also are in bloom. Next to a number of Joan's familiar grey ghost trees, and next to the new and different skeletal metal ones, a second new generation of trees has grown, still covered in cellu-clay, but blooming in exuberant oranges, reds and yellows, while two have burst forth in showers of dazzling white petals. The casting off on the one hand and the blossoming on the other hand are much like the Joan that emerged from the 2003 car crash that wrecked her body as well that of others as well as life as she new it: here is the same Joan, but slightly different, alive once again, as strongly attached to life as the rhino is to the tree, with all her amazing imagination and sensitivity intact and brimming with new and different sculpted stories and enigmas.

Alan was in that car. Alan was at the opening of the show, in a wheelchair, still smiling.

Joan Danziger: Mythic Landscape - Recent Sculptures at Osuna Art, 7200 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, MD 20814 - 301-654-4500 - through June 21.

 

Spring has truly arrived here in Washington, DC, and so has Pope Benedict XVI, although he has now gone to New York. He celebrated a huge Mass at the Washington Nationals stadium here, and I am very proud of our friend Ronald Stolk whose stock went up overnight as he played the organ. Although for my sensibilities these occasions gather too many unmarried white male seniors, I do admit that I remain riveted by the pageantry and was much moved by Placido Domingo’s passionate rendition of Bach’s Panis Angelicus[*] and not less so when afterwards the Pope rose from his seat and Domingo rushed towards him, falling to his knees before him and kissing his ring. A truly operatic moment. And the commiseration with the abuse victims was a great step forward. As you can see from the photo, I was glad to be able to have my own little private moment with the Holy Father. Raising your eyebrows? That’s my Dutch irreverence for you (and when you grow up a Catholic, you can poke fun at it).

I am hopelessly behind with this blog, I’m very slow and do too many other things and not enough painting and blogging. I have a long list of subjects I want to cover: the two small exhibits I saw in Atlanta at the High Museum (I covered the folk art there in a previous blog); the stunning Louise Bourgeois (still active at 97) retrospective in Paris at the Centre Pompidou; the contents of the Musée Quai Branly (dedicated by Jacques Chirac to “the primary arts”), also in Paris; the beautiful small El Anatsui exhibit here in DC in the National Museum of African Art, as well as the truly, truly sumptuous exhibit at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery entitled “Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters From the Price Collection”. Wherever I go, I never change my mind that DC is a vast and mostly free treasure trove for the arts. Then New York: the magical Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, Courbet at the Met and the wildly annoying and truly crappy Whitney Biennal. Ron still mutters bitterly about the $15 tickets. Then there is my recent affiliation with CentroNía, a bilingual (Spanish/English) Community Development and Educational Center with a Charter School here in DC, where art is integrated in the children’s learning experience - and beats anything I saw at the Whitney. And there is my friend Joan Danziger's new show at Osuna Art in Bethesda. Also, there are two amazing books out that I’d like to describe soon, both edited by Umberto Eco: “The History of Ugly” and “The History of Beauty” (I bought the “ugly” book in Paris, in French, for almost 40 Euros (now $60) but I can reassure you that they exist in English and can be found at Amazon for less than $25 each). And finally, I am going next week to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition in Philadelphia.

Someone, a very dear cousin, asked me why I blog. I got the impression she saw it as something daring, like bungee jumping (and probably a bit crazy and exhibitionist, which it of course is). So here’s the answer: because I can. When I decided to create an artistic web-presence at www.zhibit.org, I saw their individual sites came with a blog opportunity included – I love to write, I had been thinking about blogging for a while because it’s helpful if there is an audience, even if it consists of one (you). I hope for reactions – I like reactions, I like to share things, discuss things. And I loved it when one of my neighbors popped out of his house recently when I walked the dog and waved at me, calling out, “Good morning! I loved your blog!”  It is the magic of the internet, which allows you to be an author without ever needing to be published. Most of all, though, especially when I describe an exhibition in the blog, I feel I need to know more than when I just randomly wander around a museum for my own pleasure, so I have taken to writing furiously in a notebook as well as to researching the subject a bit. I quickly found out, of course, that doing so enriches my own museum experience.

So now you know.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading in today's Washington Post's Health Section, the articles "What Crisis?" (pages F1 and F5) by Stefanie Weiss, as well as "Lulled into Numbness" by Douglas LaBier (page F5). They are about the midlife crisis, whether it exists, when it hits, if it hits at certain intervals, why it hits and what to do. There was a little box, too, which urged readers to share their own experiences, which I did, immediately proving I am squarely in midlife, because only people who are send letters to newspapers. At least this one was solicited. Sort of.

When I was 47, my hair started to get thinner and fall out. I lived in Africa at the time and suspected a weird exotic disease until my sweet hairdresser remarked, "Dahling, you're getting older, hadn’t you noticed? Your skin is getting thinner, alright, so why not your hair?"

Not every person senses, wants to sense, or wants to acknowledge physical or mental changes as keenly as the other, or at all. But they exist and I suspect that those who deny them are either dense or lie through their nose. Or maybe we pick and choose what we are going to be bugged about, like Nora Ephron had to write a book about her sagging neck. Well, nobody sympathized with my hair lamentations, some were even callous enough to call my frizz "stunning curls".

But then I met an old friend whom I had not seen in several years. Eight years older than me, she used to have lots of very thick straight hair – but when I saw her again it had dwindled to a stylish but wispy helm. I sighed with relief and, expecting her immediate empathy, launched into the long and sad story of my crowning glory's demise. "I can't see any difference", she established matter-of-factly (she is Dutch), “it  is still the same as always. Like mine." Then she entered into a sad discourse about her dental woes. I looked at her teeth – they were all still her own and all still as straight and white as ever.

Like all of us, I have personally experienced many external life changes that prompted anxieties and they probably masked the crises meant in the Health Section articles, of the kind brought on by birthdays or other milestones in time. There was leaving home, splitting up with boyfriends, graduating, finding a job, changing jobs, illnesses, injuries, falling in love, marriage, deaths, birth of child, moves to various countries, loss of career, watching loved ones go through difficult times, empty nest. There was only one period during which no one particular external change, but time changing something deep inside me, caused anxiety. That coincided indeed with a milestone, that of my 50th birthday, as it occurred in the period between roughly 48 and 54. I had ceased being a lawyer, and was slowly emerging as an artist. It was the most difficult time of my life, a protracted and deeply felt mid-life crisis, deeper than, but not unlike, the awful weirdness and senselessness of it all that one feels as an adolescent. I think it had much to do with cellular changes and dwindling hormones, but then to me the mind and the body are intricately connected. If the body goes through menopause, why not the mind?

We may not all experience crises every 9, 10 or 12 years as the articles in the WP's Health Section proposed, but life does have its phases. These phases are cyclical, not like stops along a subway line. There are the biblical meager and fat periods, alternating every 7 years or so. There is the cycle of our bodies renewing all its cells so that every 10 years there is not a single cell left that is the same - and that, of course and significantly, includes our brain cells. Seems to me that as a result we can expect to act and think somewhat differently every 10 years or so. And finally, a generation is about 20-25 years long and the distinct phases of our life – childhood and adolescence, childbearing years, mid-life and old age, are each roughly the length of a generation.

So, there are many natural indicators to prove the reality of our life crises. But these are less visible nowadays and the boundaries are becoming blurred as we live longer, can decide when and whether to have babies, and are much, much less ruled by nature. Some of us have no contact at all with nature. We have forgotten that, on the purely physical level, our function is a limited one: to go forth and multiply. The drive to fulfill that function is a very powerful one, which for a long time fuels us along, keeping us happy and ever forward-looking (like it or not, consciously or not, that would be looking forward to the next mate or the illusion of one) until the bottom (our hormones) falls out. But that drive is being sublimated by civilization into such acceptable urges as acquisitiveness and ambition which, unlike the bare urge to procreate, are not meant to have a natural end. Where the two kinds of urges collide, Viagra begins.

We also have forgotten that the linearity of time that rules man-made life is unnatural, and things are not getting any better. Even clocks no longer have hands that go round. Time has become linear, and is chopped up in equal parts. We don't need scientific proof that that is a big fat fallacy, because we all experience how some hours and days are much longer or shorter than others, or how time can race by, go around in circles, stop moving altogether, or do all of the above, all within one day. Africans have a totally different sense of time than do "Westerners" and they illustrate the difference rather neatly when they say that Westerners have watches and Africans have time.

Nevertheless, underneath all the linear veneer our lives remain essentially cyclical and we are like insects that must fly forward in a circular motion along the straight wall of our linear time. No wonder that along the way we periodically "hit the wall". Much of our life crises stem from our unnatural man-made environment. It makes us live by a ticking clock instead of like in olden times by the silence of the rising and setting sun, of the waxing and waning moon, the coming and going of seasons, and by our not so silent appetites and desires, and our pregnancies and those of our children and grandchildren. Back then, we slowly saw our functions change as we ourselves changed from child to adult, from adult to parent, from parent to grandparent, each time receiving distinct new tasks, until finally we found ourselves sitting at the edge of the village to watch others do the many busy things we had become to tired and weak to do ourselves. 

There is no such direct and immediate connect anymore between us and the passing of generations; often, when they are ready, our children go off to faraway schools, marry strangers and live in unknown cities, leaving us parents with the feeling, not of a new function in the same familiar life, but of an entirely new and unknown life.

Inasmuch as we have lost the understanding that time doesn't really exist, that only change exists, and that time is nothing but an imperfect, limited and limiting way to keep our activities coordinated with those of others, we have also lost touch with the natural changes that nevertheless occur in ourselves and with our innate knowledge about what those changes mean. Our fake world reinforces that disconnect – it holds up only one virtually immutable ideal human form which we ourselves can only attain or approach, if at all, during a very brief period in our life. As such we can easily be deluded, and basically are every day of our lives by those who sell the world's many kinds of snake oil, into hoping, desiring and believing that we can live forever, can remain young and beautiful forever, strong and vigorous forever, and consequently remain happy forever, as long as we drive certain cars, eat certain foods, run five miles, go to church, solve the crossword puzzle, make charitable donations, floss every night, mind our finances properly, file our tax forms, extend our cell phone plan, have sex on a regular basis, limit our alcohol intake and join the AARP. If we don't do that we will get old and sick and we will die, and it will be our own fault. Now, doesn't that make you depressed, especially if, like me, you have failed one or two of the above tests, and your hormones have moved to Florida?

At the same time it is wonderful that our unnatural environment allows us to find ways to seek fulfillment beyond physically contributing to the perpetuation of the human species. I much prefer living now than being an old woman sitting at the edge of a village, no matter how natural a state of being that might be. And while our bodies still become weaker with age, our mind can remain fresh and if the circumstances are right, and we are lucky, we can become President of the USA at an age when the man in LaBier's article sadly wonders: "How do you start over when you can't start over?" If the mind keeps functioning, we can do whatever we want at whatever age. Look at Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, my uncle Albert who still goes rowing at 90, my mother-in-law who wrote a novel at 80 and my old legal mentor Piet Sanders who still sits at his desk and gives lectures at 96. Or take Louise Bourgeois, who at 97 just finished a suite of gigantic drawings more or less all on how her bowels and other aging body parts still function. To my chagrin, my mother, who, of course always discreetly, raged, raged against the dying of the light, felt there were things she couldn't wear, say or do anymore after 50 and she warned me sternly that I, too, would “sing a different song” once I’d hit that age. Times have changed. We gained more power in and over our lives. I pretty much wear, say, think and do things in the same impetuous and unladylike way as when I was 25, and I intend to continue for a long time to come. But that is not given to everybody and I might still find out that it isn't given to me either – and then that would be so and it would be nobody's fault.

Actually, it's quite OK to be depressed at certain times, and to experience a "winter of the mind". It's quite alright to feel that way each time we are reminded that everything in life, including man-made things, has a finite season. And each time when we feel the existence of that internal, natural time-keeping mechanism that cannot be rewound even as life, in its seeming eternity, continues to speed by, and will ultimately do so without us. Go ahead, be depressed. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is only given to those who have had a lobotomy.

Did you know that there is such a thing as Prison Art? And that there is a Prison Art Gallery? It is located at 1600 K Street NW, Ste 501, in Washington, DC (phone 202 3931511), and it is open every day till 5pm. I picked up a little newspaper entitled Art for Justice the other day - published in conjunction with Street Sense, the homeless journal. The featured artists are all very skilled indeed. The art sells at very reasonable prices. It is very interesting to see how many of the artists choose animals as their subject - they represent freedom ...

John Alexander at the Smithsonian American Art Museum , Washington, DC

What makes a really great artist? Talent, skills, passion, prolific output as well as the proven ability to get oneself “out there”? Obviously, all that will get you quite far on the way, but something must be still missing – or Thomas Kinkade would hang in museums, too. Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not compare John Alexander with Thomas Kinkade. He is a processed square burger patty against Alexander's home-grilled, juicy red steak.

I had seen an article about the southern artist John Alexander in the January issue of Art in America and I received an invite to the simultaneous exhibition at Hemphill Gallery on 14th street but, reduced to small picture format, the work seemed like storybook illustrations. In conversations with friends I didn’t find any incentives to go see his show either. So I gave both shows a pass. But here I was in the museum anyway, for the “Recognize!” hip hop art exhibit (see the previous blog entry), and I figured I might as well walk through.

This retrospective was a strange, layered experience. The rooms where it can be found (until March 16, so better run) are lit sparingly, with floodlights on intense and often HUGE works punctuating the darkness. My first impression was: “Wow! Was I ever wrong not to go see this show!”

But then something happened. It began with the titles and the descriptions – and it ended there too. (I am determined to clean up my website after seeing the John Alexander exhibit in the American Art Museum. Bare bones! Intellectual rigor! Let the work speak, not the artist!) One could write a doctoral thesis, probably several, on the issue of artwork titles. Titles can be passion killers. In response to what I saw I am now feverishly in favor of “Untitled IV”. Alexander’s titles were so ... clear. They were telling you everything about the work, compounded by his descriptions, to the point of Too Much Information. They beat all mystique out of the artwork and made it into, well, just pictures. Gorgeous ones, beautiful ones, dazzling ones - but still, just pictures. 

So what is lacking that makes Alexander a good but not a great artist (who am I to say something like that)? Is it a certain brand of creativity? What kind of creativity makes art great? I could get in trouble on that one (but it would be an interesting subject for another blog entry), so for now I’ll settle on his WYSIWIG factor. He is so transparent. He seems to set out with a preconceived idea in his head and then he paints it. And then he explains the rest. And then you see it. And then you go home. Alexander may, at times in his life, have been a tortured person, but he is not a tortured artist.

What to think of two skeletons dancing in a brooding semi-abstract bayou landscape, brandishing scythes – I thought it was a terrific, haunting, mysterious painting until I read the title: “Dancing on the Water Lilies of Life”. The spell was gone, the dark spookiness evaporated and I felt like someone had just splashed water from the bayou in my face. The skeletons now looked hokey, a bit like a Halloween joke.

And so it went on. Alexander is a very skilled artist and draftsman, but maybe it is that his outsize personality competes with his work? Because these titles and descriptions are his and through them, something creeps into your experience that spoils it and makes you think: “Eh ... not quite.” Even when I did not read the titles and the descriptions I still heard Alexander yakking into my ear when I contemplated the initially very impressive “Glory Bound” (see picture): “Have you seen that LOCOMOTIVE! Awesome! How it comes out of that TUNNEL! And look how I PAINTED it. Isn’t it INTENSE? You can almost HEAR the whistle! WOW! Coolness!!!!”

Also, the exhibit feels like a group show, representing his entire range, and while that range is very impressive, the effect is also confusing. Here are portraits of clansmen (they’re terrific, no reservations), there are his crazy frenetic bayou voodoo African paintings, there is a superb alligator rendered life-size and life-like in watercolor, there are his birds (why does everybody seem to so like the lone cardinal? I really don’t get it. It’s like an Ann Craven bird and I don’t know what to think of her bird paintings either), there are his, again terrific, landscapes and nature-inspired paintings - I really liked “High Cotton” and “The Mighty Bog”. And then there are his enormous abstracts.

Alexander’s realistic work is great but not all the pieces are equally good, and while it is alright for any artist to produce lesser pieces it is not alright to hang those in a museum (but that is not the artist's, but the curator's fault). I could have done without one of the great white herons and also without the baboon picture “Mother and Child” – both were below par. There was a great drawing of a weird bird - Was it a marabou? A vulture on stilts? A spooky stork on speed? Regrettably, it was entitled “Aging Rock Star”.

There were also some what I would call, probably a bit arrogantly, “superficial” paintings, painted one-liners, like the cartoonesque Casa de los Locos, or the Venus and Adonis, KKK-birdmasked in their bed, about to make passionate love, so passionate that it their hair is on fire, which is of course a refreshing change from burning crosses. But I was wrong. The article in Art and America mentions that it references his marital problems - more TMI.

An impressive painting is “I’ve Been Living In A Hydrogen Bomb”, which is a phenomenally huge abstract on three panels, in total measuring at least 30 by 12 feet, or maybe it was 300 by 120 feet - I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even larger than that. It is good - its derivativeness (Pollock, Basquiat, who was then already very well known and dating Madonna) can be overlooked. One wonders indeed and in awe how it was executed, and why he made it – but wait! Alexander tells us conveniently that he painted it after he divorced (remember the marital problems?) and moved from Texas to New York City in 1979 (the painting is from 1982): “the trauma associated with all this upheaval took a tremendous toll ... I guess [this painting] was a form of exorcism that kept me from becoming an ax murderer.” Seems like a wise move.

And so it remains throughout the show. The viewer initially falls for the seduction and impact of many of the works, then is put off by the titles and the descriptions, looks again at the paintings but by then cracks have begun to form in the veneer. I felt a bit sad – I really wanted to appreciate the total but in the end I could not. I did leave with a few images firmly engraved in my mind – the frenetic voodoo Adrican bayou paintings (although also a bit Basquiatesque), the clansmen, the landscapes and the Hydrogen Bomb. But I didn’t buy the catalogue. I bought a book on the tortured artist Basquiat.

“RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture"

The above is a more than fascinating show at the National Portrait Gallery here in Washington, DC, and not at all what I expected. I went because I love graffiti art, the hip hop rhythm and, you got to hand it to them, many of these hip hop dudes are downright gorgeous. Admit it! My personal favorite is Snoop Dogg.

Oh! The main reason was, of course, the paintings of the amazing Kehinde Wiley. They were the center piece of the exhibition, really, even though they were a bit tucked away in two opposite rooms left and right of the corridor, both of them painted an intense Yves Klein blue. Together with that color, Wiley’s works seemed almost psychedelic. He paints hip hop artists and other great looking black guys against traditional decorative backgrounds and/or in the manner of the old British, Dutch and French masters, who, all of them, painted white, male and, indeed looooooong dead people. Hip hop is different, albeit not that much with regard to living females. Sorry.

Mostly, Wiley's portraits are large, very large or huge. He has a pristine hand of painting – from a distance the portraits look like giant photos. Wiley’s method of painting and of organizing his paintings is intended to confer a degree of royalty and gravitas to his subjects – he channels Ingres when he depicts KT as Napoleon on his throne, and John Singer Sargent when he paints LL Cool the way (more or less) Sargent painted John D. Rockefeller Sr in 1917. However, his subjects don’t really need it – they are SO present, so THERE, they virtually leap out of their ornate golden frames. The background of LL Cool’s portrait seems to pulsate, as the eye is forced to hip-hop (so to speak) madly between the red of its background and the green of the Rohrschach-like shapes he painted on it and thus are forced to concentrate on LL Cool – you just can’t avoid it.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five channel a 17^th century Dutch merchant guild painter and almost seem 3-D, with elbows protruding into one’s face and items the GFFF carry sticking underneath as well as above a painted border and even outside the painted area to the point that one tends to look for them again protruding outside the actual frame. My absolute favorite was the Triple Portrait of Charles I, which is copied above. The way Wiley plays with his colors – reflecting the aqua of the farthest away color he uses in the background onto the highlights in his faces – it makes for an unexpected and dizzying sensation of depth.

The show consists of four distinct elements in addition to the Kehinde Wiley paintings: colorful graffiti panels by Tim Conlon (aka CON) and Dave Hupp (aka AREK) of the national graffiti crews Burning America (BA) and Never Show Faces (NSF), photos of hip hop artists in action by David Scheinbaum, an installation entitled “No Thief to Blame” by Shinique Smith which is a creative response to a poem by Nikki Giovanni, and finally video art by Jefferson Pinder.

CON and AREK’s panels represented all the joy I used to feel when I used the New York City subway to go to work in the mid-1980s, which was the only joy on that otherwise miserable ride. I thoroughly regret the trains are clean these days. One of these panels actually, but almost invisibly, spells out: "Recognize!" So there, now you know.

I was somehow less passionate about David Steinbaum’s black and white photos which seemed incongruous in their colorlessness and subtlety, both with regard to their subjects and within the context of the exhibition. This is not to say that they are not good - they are soft, subtle and ephemeral – some of them are even gorgeous. They just seemed to be a whisper next to the exuberant beat of the other parts of the exhibition.

Shinique Smith’s installation beautifully complemented Giovanni’s poem “It’s not a just situation – Though we just can’t keep crying about it (For the hip hop nation that brings us such exciting art)” – it was written on the wall as well as read by a voice, presumably Giovanni’s, over a loudspeaker. Smith’s visually artistic response was creating a heap of disparate objects – shoes, a T-shirt with the face of a hip hop artist printed on it, bling objects, magazine photos, flowers, CD’s, lengths of caution tape - with symbols and tendrils extending from it that were painted directly onto the gallery wall, together forming a gloriously beautiful and strangely elegant “graffiti sculpture” hanging from one corner of the gallery, a hip, sexy daughter of Frank Stella, totally her own self.

I thought I did not much care for video art but sat mesmerized through all three sequences of Jefferson Pinder’s work. They are, for one, exquisitely beautiful and visually poetic. Also, they have an immediate effect of making you see something that is not really there – you see a one simple narrative but your brain registers something else, an entirely different and frenetic “meta video”, as it were. In “Car Wash Meditations”, a man in a car, depicted twice, mirror-wise as if driving in opposite directions, is followed by the camera while he waits for his car to go through a carwash. Somehow, the wall in the background, the spray of the water and the car shampoo, the appearance of huge brushes and later drying machines, everything in stark contrast and highly saturated primary color, suggest primal physical presences and brutal aggression. The man in the car continues undeterred, he has no choice, but his mirror image double makes that he comes across as torn into different directions. The effect is a “J’accuse” of the history of racial discrimination and violence against African-Americans in this country. A banal run through a carwash somehow in my mind became a horrifying act of violence and at the end I feared the driver, dark against the side window behind him, came to the end of his life spitting out white bodily fluid - in reality it was nothing else than light caught in the drips of sudsy water running off his car.

One question, only. Why, in the end, was my impression one of pristine cleanliness and clarity, as if hip hop had been censored by the Disney Company? After all, hip hop is not generally an art form appropriate for tea parties and ladies-who-lunch, judging by the words of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:

“Joy-riding with my Caddy,cold chillin', gettin' loose  -  When I saw this flygirl who needed a boost  -  So I dipped into her bumpers with skill and with class  -  She screamed."Harder,won't you give me just a little more gas"  -  Doin' my best so she wouldn't feel inferior  -  She said "I like your nice plush vinyl exterior"  -  She was holdin' on tighter than a figure-four leg lock  -  This is what she said the first time she saw the jock  -  (Who Johnny Carson, your Caddy's so large)  -  (But you can park your Cadillac in my greasy garage).”

Yo, baby.

I just spent a few days in Atlanta, Georgia, a city of moderate beauty, but it has a pleasant feel to it. And it has a very nice museum, the High Museum of Art, formerly the Woodruff Arts Center. It recently received two beautiful modern additions, the Stent Family Wing by architect Richard Meier and the Wieland Pavillion by Renzo Piano; both are luminous spaces. The resulting “arts village” encompasses the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta College of Art, the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Young Audiences of Atlanta and the 14th Street Playhouse.

My cab accidentally dropped me off at the Theatre entrance and so, though annoying because it was pouring, I first got to see the giant Tony Cragg sculpture “World Events”, which was commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Cultural Olympiad – a gigantic aluminum pile of hundreds of artist’s mannequins together forming the shape of a human being studying the globe. Little did the Committee know in what terrible way Atlanta was to become a world event itself ...

The lady who sold me my ticket asked where I was from, and when I said “Washington, DC”, she gave me the hairy eyeball and intoned darkly: “Ah, the city of the FREE MUSEUMS!”, then proceeded to charge me twenty  bucks. That’s a lot  of bucks. By the way, I just love it when people ask me where I’m from and I can answer “Washington, DC” - the question is of course prompted by my Dutch accent, not by any interest in my hometown, and my answer always causes a satisfying degree of bewilderment.

Outside on the balcony I first encountered a huge sculpture entitled “Balzac-Pétanque” by Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg – peaches and pears with a knife on a white and blue checkered napkin lying in the sand. Made in 2002, it is an example both of Van Bruggen and Oldenburg’s literary inspired work, in this case the French author Honoré de Balzac (who loved pears and peaches), and of their interest in ball and knife forms, while also honoring the various 18^th and 19^th century French painters of fruit still lives, notably of course Cézanne. Although amusing, I somehow didn't feel the wow-factor of the two artists’ other work (see http://www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com/), like their festive giant typewriter eraser with the fringe on top; the piece felt more like an exercise by the Disneyesque Impressionist-outdoor-diorama maker J. Seward Johnson (see http://www.groundsforsculpture.org/c_jjohn.htm - but the museum and the “real” sculpture are well worth a trip to Hamilton, NJ).

I callously bypassed the “Louvre, Atlanta” exhibit as I had seen most of it in the "Louvre, Paris", and followed the advice of the lady with the hairy eyeball to not miss the folk art exhibition, so I first headed first to the top floor.

I was rather confused by a really curious juxtaposition of many incongruous elements I found. There were a small (!) Kiefer sculpture, an Artschwager “Volcano”, a “New Figuration” discarded-plastic wall sculpture by that fantastic Brit (living in Germany) Tony Cragg, one of Californian sculptor Deborah Butterfield’s handsome metal horses, as well as two good pieces by the Swedish glass artist Bertil Vallien, a cut glass Janus head and a life size glass canoe, which must weigh a ton. Vallien, judging by his website, seems to lack an inner curator and his work thus spans the entire distance between the sublime and the ridiculous. Next to that was a small collection of bentwood furniture, and some older moderns, like two Otto Dix dry points. I later found out that the High has a good collection of modern art on another floor; I hope that one of these days someone will explain to me what these pieces were doing here, especially together with furniture and folk art.

And then there was a very curious little pavilion entitled “Improbable Objects” where the work of Eugene von Bruenchenhein stole the show. I doubt you have ever heard of Von Bruenchenhein (1910-1983) but he’s well worth knowing more about (http://www.ktfgallery.com/artists/eugene_von_bruenchenhein/). He was a “visionary artist” in Milwaukee who thought himself of German aristocratic extraction, worked at a bakery during the day and making his extraordinary art by night, completely privately – much like Henry Darger (see the previous blog entry, on Paula Rego), but less lonely, as he had friends and a juicy wife. The description of his life and work on the above website is definitely worth your time, like this small extract: “Von Bruenchenhein's prolific work crammed every corner, closet and cabinet of his house, where nearly everything was available to be exploited by his ambitious creative energies. He rendered paintings on cardboard and Masonite, in addition to furniture, ceilings, walls, doors and windows. He developed photographs in the sink. He erected sculptures from TV dinner chicken bones and model airplane glue. Ceramics were formed from hand-dug clay and fired in the parlor stove. Poems and philosophical writings littered the home, as though no thought would be lost for lack of a proper writing surface or instrument. Reel-to-reel tapes that recorded continuous conversations and background music serve to chronicle an everyman's everyday approach to art.” And he painted, too, with brushes made of his wife’s hair. His wife's hair! Chickenbones! I’m all for the weird and wonderful.

By the way, I'm also all for Google - Google is my very best friend (no, they don't (yet) pay me), I google constantly and everything, including for this blog and the images on which I base my own art. It’s an amazing, super fast way to learn things, the magic of knowledge at your fingertips and an ironclad excuse to sit at the computer for hours (“Will you $#%^&!! get off my case? I’m doing important research here!”).

But then I reached the folk art section and entered a magic and wonderful world of which I knew too little. There were Linda Anderson naives, carved creatures by Jimmy Lee Sudduth, brilliant all-kinds-of-everything work by Nellie May Rowe, who succinctly described her art as: “I see people crippled and I draw them to ask the Lord to help.”  Most “folk art” is by African Americans and quite frankly, some of it, no, much of it, is brilliant. See the photo accompanying this blog entry of  Ned Cartledge’s “The Flag Waver”, expressing all his anger at the southern racial strife. It’s hard to understand why many of these works are not considered “high” art, but then there are so many bizarre distinctions in the art world that I’m by now inclined to not pay too much attention anymore and to simply “follow my own nose” as we say in Dutch. It usually leads me to good things. Anyway, artists like Thornton Dial had what he called his “things” exhibited at the New Museum in New York and the Whitney Biennial, so the distinctions are blurred, to say the least. 

A non-African American folk artist whose work was on prominent display was Howard Finster, who died in 2001 and made “sacred art”, having been called to make art by a heavenly voice. Before that, he was a lawnmower and bicycle repair man for about nine-tenths of his life. He was apparently also a preacher. His offspring now runs what looks like a profitable business managing his “Paradise Garden” and selling things over the web at http://www.finster.com/ - but it is not the best place to learn about Finster, whose work is worth looking at and who was incredibly prolific, despite his late start in art; better look at sites like http://www.interestingideas.com/out/finster/index.htm.

But my absolute favorites were the spare but very expressive, and very “African” drawings of Bill Traylor, who became an artist at age 85, drawing with pencil and poster paints on cardboard, sitting on the sidewalk on Monroe Street in Montgomery, Alabama. Before that, he worked on the land, first as a slave (he was born in 1854) and then as a laborer. Now his work is in museums, including DC’s own American Art Museum. It makes you think: right, in that case, there must be a god.

That’s enough for now - next time more on the High Museum in Atlanta. There is still a lot to see!

You really make art primarily for yourself. I’d say, even when you are a very well-known artist with lots of shows and exposure in the media. That show only lasts a few weeks, maybe a few months. The opening of that show, when the artist really takes center stage and feels admired, maybe even adored, lasts just one evening. For that, the artist has slaved months, sometimes years. And you can’t have shows all the time.

It is the same in other branches. The chef in the top restaurant whose creations are served to people who, even after intensely savoring their first bites, are mostly interested in their conversation. The flower arranger whose amazing bouquets get at best a few seconds of admiration, but mostly just a passing glance. The band that plays at a party where people listen mostly to themselves. Maybe the high performing arts are different? There one is in the limelight every day and night. But that comes with other disadvantages. Like the same lines every evening, there we go again:  “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks ...” And so, after a few weeks of night after night even the most ephemerally beautiful becomes commonplace through its relentless repetition, MUST become commonplace in order for mortals to survive it. And there too, the same: the audience has only a fleeting moment of enjoyment, applauds, yawns, talks about the weather and goes home.

All the rest of the time, it’s just you and your art, and a whole lot of very hard work. So you’d better enjoy what you’re doing. As for moments of recognition, I've had a few, although they are of the social, spiritual kind, not the dollar kind. But it's good enough, although I hope it will get better, and I'm fortunate I don't have to live off my art. The best recognition I received: the picture here is one of my very first oil paintings and Caiti, my daughter, insisted on taking it to college ...

Well, here it is, my new website. I guess artists are, by definition, exhibitionists. I certainly seem to be a case in point. And this site comes with a blog, wow, now I can inundate all you sitting ducks out there with my wisdoms! I call it Rosie's Blarney because you have to know that I kissed the Blarney Stone, over there in Ireland, in 1977. Nothing changed. The stone's still there, and so am I.

As for today - today is February 15, 2008, for another 27 minutes, that is - the deep thought to convey is that life is short and must be enjoyed or otherwise be made useful in whatever minuscule or forgettable way, it doesn't matter as long as YOU remember its importance. Today I'm very sad that my neighbor Charles died, the last one in a spate of deaths that started with the emergence of 2008. I will remember him fondly and think of him every time I pass his garden, which is full of his elegant, colorful, abstract sculptures. Summer evenings used to be full of the sounds of his metal grinding, along with the hammering in Dorothy's silversmith's studio. Dorothy is my other neighbor, and she doesn't hammer silver anymore because of old age. This she decided last year, at 87. Luckily she could still make Ron a silver napkin ring, and luckily she's still around. But the neighborhood will be too silent this summer.

On Tuesday I voted for Obama and I'm proud of it. My Dutch grandfather was a socialist in his young years but lost his vim - saying if you were not a socialist in your youth, you had no heart, and if you were still a socialist in your dotage, you had no brain (along with some wisdom about only bald pates able to cover good brains, since everything else needs shit). But times have changed. Hillary is a great candidate but comes with too much baggage, like her husband. She seems to think she can vouch for him behaving as First Laddy, but I've seen him in action, when Ron and I, along with some 100 other good citizens standing in line for a Presidential Handshake (it was in the late 90s, when the Clintons visited South Africa), were passed over in favor of an amazingly beautiful woman in a sari who unintentially (we think) and unexpectedly appeared on the Presidential Retina. We're still waiting for that handshake.

In my almost-dotage this may be folly, but I like the leap of faith towards Obama. His name spelled backwards means "I will love" in Italian.

Maybe someone can tell me why I'm suddenly afraid to paint? That would be very helpful. Very helpful indeed.

Allright y'all. Good night and good luck.