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.