Passed!

After Bruce Conner

In the spirit of the article on the famous San Francisco Funk artist, "Bruce Conner Makes a Sandwich" (Artforum, 1967) which was itself a parody of "Jackson Pollock Paints a Picture" (Artnews, 1951), I give you, "Annie Makes a Sandwich" (Orals Fixation, 2011).

*Conner made a sandwich of peanut butter, bacon, Swiss cheese, banana, lettuce, and Miracle Whip. Mine is peanut butter, bacon, and avocado. Issues of taste matter in appropriation, apparently.

Irene: orals lockdown enforcer

With Irene threatening to pummel NYC, the mayor has announced he will be suspending subway service from Saturday afternoon until sometime Monday. With the major brunt of the storm coming right in the middle of my one planned study break all week (softball playoffs on Sunday), it looks as if I will be in Queens studying ALL weekend. I will probably poke my head out sometime Sunday afternoon/evening for a beverage and (hopefully) contact with another human being, provided the winds and debris are no longer threatening to Final Destination me and I go as nuts as I think I will talking to myself as practice.

Need to stock up on supplies tomorrow. Any tips?

In other news, I helped out with student orientation today in my capacity with the Doctoral Students' Council. While my face was all smiles, small talk, and "welcome to grad school!" on the inside, my orals-stressed brain was screaming "TURN AROUND! IT'S NOT TOO LATE! GO MAKE MONEY!" This conflict between what I was saying and what I was hearing myself say reminds me of one of my favorite video projects:

Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, Boomerang, 1974.

Today's Previously Unknown (to me) Work of Art...

Richard Hamilton, Shock and Awe, 2007-8. Inkjet print on Hewlett-Packard canvas, 79"x39"

Not a ton of time to digest this piece, but really interesting contemporary tangent to find while brushing up on the Independent Group and early British Pop. I'll let Hal do the digesting for me.

Hal Foster: "...this wannabe cowboy appears here channeling Bush channeling Reagan channeling John Wayne. Why did he wannabe? That remains one question, and Hamilton captures precisely the lethal absurdity of his misidentification as Texas Ranger. Once again the pictorial pastiche performed by the artist rehearses and exposes the political pastiche performed by his subject." - in Richard Hamilton: October Files (2010), p. 156.

Earthquake!!

Hiccup in all day Bobst session. Earthquake tremors felt throughout library (my Coke Zero was shaking!).  They just had us evacuate... hoping I can go back in soon.  It was so quiet in there...

Eric Fischl's "Tumbling Woman" (2001-2002)

Not a lot of time to ruminate on this now, but an interesting figural response to the artist's friend who worked on the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It caused controversy when it was displayed at Rockefeller Center in 2002. Raises some interesting questions about figuration and terrorism memorials, and is mentioned in Erika Doss's excellent book Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.

Here's an interview with the artist and David Rakoff: http://www.newyorkartworld.com/interviews/fischl-rakoff.html

Harness good. Block bad.

After a strange hiccup last night in the storm, I not only didn't get as much work done as I thought, but missed Zimm's walkoff slam :-( The electrical storm knocked out the 7 and it took me over 2 hours to get back to Queens from Union Square (usually only takes about 30 mins).

I did, however, get to walk over a mile in the rain, eat a ham sandwich, drink Blue Moon, and practice gay speeddating with people in the neighborhood. [I told you it was strange]

Got a late start today, but going to head into the library anyhow. Kevin Nealon is giving me a pep talk...

Powerful book... [sniffles in library]

While I only got to read the intro and conclusion while skimming the middle, Patrick Hagopian's The Vietnam War in American Memory (2009) is a very provocative critique of the rhetoric of "healing" surrounding Vietnam memorials in light of Reagan-era politics and cover-ups of war crimes.

I highly recommend and the author is a great writer, however, vignettes from the My Lai massacre pop up often, so it is very upsetting at points. As is the author's mention of a law Bush passed in 2002 that authorizes military force to rescue US servicemen who may be held at the international court in The Hague.

I hope to have time to read the whole thing one day... but now need to stop reading things that depress me.

Today's previously unknown (to me) work of art...

VALIE EXPORT, "Touch Cinema," 1968, Vienna. [*updated 8/17 with better image]

This piece is an amazing precursor to Mulvey's polemic "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and a great example of the use of touch in feminist performance (as argued by Peggy Phelan in the WACK! catalogue).

This will definitely figure into my dissertation and upcoming class somehow.

More to come later (this was quick post from phone from inside the blissfully quiet stacks of Bobst)

Florine Stettheimer's Cathedrals of Art (1942)

Not entirely sure I buy Linda Nochlin's argument in "Rococo Subversive" (1980) that Stettheimer's work is legitimate social critique, but she does bring up some good points. I really like her use of Stettheimer's poetry, especially the piece she closes with:

Art is spelled with a capital A

And Capital also backs it

Ignorance also makes it sway

The chief thing is to make it pay

In a quite dizzy way

Hurrah-Hurrah-.

- from Crystal Flowers

Though I don't have a fully formed opinion on her yet... I do like the statement of having baby Art play hopscotch on a Mondrian in the upper left:

...for this is what I shall do if I make it past this test.

Rainouts=all day studying

Less than four weeks to go. I'm on lock-down.

Jacques Lipchitz, Pierrot Escapes, 1927. One of his "transparents" working through Cubism... in effect breaking out of the Cubist grid.

With softball rained out today and no Nationals game to distract me (also rained out), I have not left the apartment. Instead, today has been spent going through Suzaan Boettger's excellent book on Earthworks (which has a great summary of Minimalism and important exhibitions in NYC public parks of the 1960s in the beginning, so for me: two birds, one stone). And reviewing old notes from courses I've taken in the last four years.

Speaking of which, thank you, first-year-grad student-Annie for taking GREAT notes in your lecture courses... I wish you had told third-year-Annie to get her head out of her ass.

Softball and Orals Studying - together at last...

Heckscher Fields, Central Park

Granted my team hasn't played there in a full season or two, but I always loved playing at these fields on the southwest corner of Central Park. There are a ton of people milling around, so you feel like you have fans, though they overlap more than the fields in North Meadow (though not as bad as McCarren... yikes).

Never really knew who Heckscher was though...

Until now! August Heckscher II was Special Consultant on the Arts under President Kennedy (a new position JFK started following his administration's help in stopping a strike at the Metropolitan Opera). Heckscher wrote a very important opinion that expanded the definition of "the arts" and society's responsibility to support them that countered any previous 1950's concerns over government involvement in the arts as equating Soviet Socialist Realism. His opinions paved the way for the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in '65 under LBJ, and lead to a shift in attitudes that created even more public art agencies in the 1970s. Nice work! He was also Parks Commissioner in the late 1960's and early 70's (when a lot of awesome stuff went down in Central Park, if you know your NYC history...)

Next time I play here, I will be thinking about public art (though I usually use softball to stop thinking about school... doh!).

**Addition 8/14: Heckscher was also the brand new Parks Commissioner during the Sculpture in Environment show in 1967 where Claes Oldenburg famously dug and filled in a grave-sized ditch behind the Met around the same time as the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Placid Civic Monument or The Hole.

Did you know...

...That Michael Fried was only 28 when he published his polemic against Minimalism (or in his terms, "literalist art") "Art and Objecthood" in 1967?

Now that I'm newly 28, I need to find some major article I can publish and forever be known as an old fuddy-duddy out of touch with what's awesome...

Today's Previously Unknown (to me) Work of Art

Don McCullin's photograph of a painting by Peter Hobbs in a London bombsite, 1960.

I love this project by London painter Peter Hobbs in collaboration with the documentary photographer Don McCullin. Early 50s and late 60s artists around the Royal College found a profoundly unique way to use abstract painting in experiential and environmental ways with the Place exhibition and this project. The above photo not only calls attention to the marginal position of artists, but pre-figures site-specific art.

Thinking about it as "public art" (or at least art temporarily situated in a public space), I can't help but wonder how many regular passers-by would have just thought some rich dude chucked an old decoration following the ascendance of Pop. I wonder if anyone tried to take one of them home. I did this with one of the "Leviticus" objects that used to float around Williamsburg.

It's still in my apartment :-P

Sorry for the delay in posting. More blog updates to come.

Expressive and Unkosher

Chaim Soutine's The Beef (1925)

Jewish artist of Lithuanian decent, Chaim Soutine, made a splash in Paris with his unique brand of expressionism. Read an interesting book on him last week that discussed his varying receptions as outsider (Eastern European Jew living in Paris fascinated with Catholic ritual and marketplaces hanging raw, bloodied meat), as insider (a successful artist in his own right, though not without hard times), and as prophet of Abstract Expressionism (hence his popularity in the US in the 1940s and 50s).

Before I only knew him as buddy of Modigliani, now I will remember him as painter of gross meats. And other stuff...

More awesome Sonia Delaunay stuff...

She had this Matra car painted in her style for a retrospective in 1967!!


Last bit on her before I move on. A quote:
"I have had three lives: one for Robert, one for my son, and my grand-sons, a shorter one for myself. I have no regrets for not having been more concerned with myself. I really didn't have the time." (Sonia Delaunay, qtd in Baron and Damase, p. 201)

What I want for next trip to Rockaway Beach...

Wearable modernism from Sonia Terk Delaunay - a painter who got into textile designs and fashion after making a patchwork "Cubist" quilt for her newborn son, Charles, out of remnants (that's so sweet I almost threw up in my mouth). Her stuff is pretty amazing, though, and she took on applied arts full-time in order to pay the bills for herself and her painter husband Robert.

Seriously, though, I have new respect for Sonia Delaunay after reading some of Cottington's Cubism and Its Histories and flipping through a well-illustrated biography by Stanley Baron and Jacques Damase. Hope I have time to get my hands on the catalog to the show that recently ended at Cooper Hewitt.

But I must stick to my schedule...

Wild Beasts...

Read (skimmed) two books on the Fauves today - one a the formalist, straightforward chronology by John Elderfield and the other an interesting re-reading of the "Wild Beasts" as being more chez Donatello (and thus tradition) than traditionally believed (though the famous original naming of the fauves was indeed that they were chez rather than parmi or contre the more classicizing sculpture also on display at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. This book, Fauve Painting: the Making of Cultural Politics, was extremely insightful and provocative, looking to cultural notions of gendered possession, tourism, national identity in relation to the Latin past and the primitive "other," and the rise of Picasso. If I ever teach the Fauves at length, this will be on the bibliography for sure.

Basically, they weren't as wild and crazy as everyone mythologizes them to be (though they were still pretty cool... sorta), and were very much in dialogue with the past.

This is awesome, because normally my reaction to the Fauves was "yada yada, bright colors, Green Line..." then the gesture of the center-left figure below:




Andre Derain, The Dance, 1906

Today's Previously Unknown (to me) Work of Art

Umberto Boccioni's Beata solitudo (1908). Pen on paper, 64x33cm.

Detachment from desire in the top register with all order of human desire/lust/love in the lower (all of which inevitably end in DEATH). Yikes. And I thought The City Rises (1910-11) was creepy...

Guest Blogger...

I got to do a post for tonight's Nationals-Cubs game over at Sharkadina, [Nats centerfielder] Roger Bernadina's Unofficial Blog. Check it out!

More on orals coming soon...

Orals vs. Summer

So, apparently it's hard to force yourself to read art history books when the weather is gorgeous and you play loads of softball and go on awesome roadtrips to the Berkshires with your friends. Who knew?? None-the-less, I continue to press on!

Currently barreling through Cubism and Culture, which actually gives a lot of intellectual history behind such figures as Duchamp and Matisse, as well as more commonly known Cubist artists. I still need to learn how to pronounce Gleizes. Any ideas?? Maybe learning proper pronunciation would be too much at this point. Yes, I think it is. Scratch that.

I've also realized how helpful shelving in the library is for studying for orals. I find myself seeing a book on a movement or artist and instantly trying to call up canonical works of art and (most importantly) smartypants things to say about them. Today I also found a book on Neue Sachlichkeit and basically said "oh crap...nothing is coming up, I'd better check this one out." Though harrowing, this is also a useful part of seeing hundreds of art books as I work.

The Berkshires wasn't all fun and games, though. We made it up to Mass MoCA, where I gained a new respect for Sol LeWitt and experienced an actual Santiago Sierra performance. The latter piece, Veteran Standing in a Corner, really affected me. The museum recruited actual vets to stand, in uniform, so close to the corner that you could not see their face. While this work certainly draws attention to the treatment of war vets in this country and uses Sierra's signature antagonism to make the viewer think, my sense of unease went a bit deeper than I usually expect in a gallery-based performance. I kept wanting to go speak to the performer, or at least see his face. Not to mention how the connotations that come with "standing in a corner" certainly made this civilian watching feel unfairly placed into the role of judging schoolmaster/voter, forcing punishment for potential acts or decisions I will never be able to understand. This sense of unease and implication is no doubt intended, but I just wonder what (if any) benefit it could provide for the performer. I definitely want to do an interview with one of them.

Perhaps my recent research on Wodiczko's three recent pieces working with veterans makes me predisposed to a more therapeutic collaboration with veterans of war - while still maintaining a critical sense of confrontation with the viewer/spectator. Sierra's piece, along with Wodiczko's and the recent collaborative venture Combat Paper Project are rich investigations of how art can be part of a return from war or even a means to (hopefully) begin to heal its wounds.

OK, now it's Orals vs. Future Research Projects. Basically Orals vs. other stuff in general. Also the Nats got swept by the Angels, which was distracting.

And now before bed, it's back to the Cubists, who apparently were into far-out theories about perception and the fourth dimension. I'm seeing a Cubist-Psychedelic comparison in my mind now. It is optically giving me a headache.

More to come...

More meetings, bibliography construction

So... I still need to finish Doss's book tonight, but I think this is completely doable. Met with another professor on my committee today and crafted some more bibliography beyond the focus area in Art since 1900. While this is starting to feel pretty overwhelming, I was able to make up some salient discussion points for comparison on the spot today for a non-visual comparison between a generic Matisse 20s painting, a Sonia Delaunay design, and a Florine Stettheimer. Combining random things is something I like anyhow (put ALL the foods on the fork at once!), so this wild combo made it interesting. While obviously just a casual bit of conversation, it did make me feel a bit more confident (as I know it would have been a lot easier with actual visuals to talk about), but of course, the volume of material is starting to weigh on my head pretty hardcore.

Softball was canceled tonight (so lame!) so I was able to crank out and revise the bibliography more, which you can see at the tab above. I'm sure some will be skipped and likely more will be added, but it's a start :-)

New comparison for the evening:



and



Theme: male heroics, awesomeness, and artistic performance with sticks. GO!

(BTW, as I posted this, the Nats hit the .500 mark. Woohoo!)

Today's previously unknown (to me) work of art

Arthur Dove's "The Critic" 1925. Collage of anti-modern critic Royal Cortissoz.

Way better than those touchy-feely abstractions of nature. Love the rollerskates.

Here we go...

It is what it is...

I am about to embark on what will (hopefully) be the last art history exam I will ever take, the Second Qualifying Exam or (more commonly) "Orals." It is an intellectual rite of passage where you enter a room of three professors who proceed to grill you for up to two hours on an incredibly wide range of material (all of which, you need to have mastered). My exam will consist of a "focus area," Public Art in the U.S. since WW2, a "major field," Art Since 1900, and a "minor field," Film Studies. This test will take place in the first two weeks of September (date TBA) and will be followed (pass or fail) by sleep, beers, and my ecstatic attendance of at least two games of the Nationals trip to Citi Field. If all goes well, I will be a PhD "candidate" and can forever relinquish the title of "student" as I inch closer and closer to "doctor." This ultimate goal will, of course, guarantee me copious amounts of fame and notoriety, limitless fortune, and a lifetime of rewarding and stable employment.

And now for the studying: So it begins...

With less three months to go, today I'm starting to review some First Exam images and reading Erika Doss's Twentieth-Century American Art. I'm hoping to power through this book and refresh my major canonical images while also reviewing some European greatest hits on the old Powerpoints from two years ago. Met with focus-area professor last week, will be meeting with other major field professor tomorrow, so hopefully will be able to hammer down that bibliography by Thursday AM. Film studies I'll handle next week...