Warm and Crusty

Justine Lai, Join or Die,* 2007

I cannot stop looking at these paintings. On the surface of it, the project sounds super-stupid: a 24-year-old recent college grad paints self-portraits of herself getting it on with each President of the United States in chronological order. Yup, that's right. But there's something about them that's kind of amazing. I'm going to try to describe it, but maybe it's just a gut feeling, so feel free to skip these next three parts.

I'm surprised, first of all, because I'm really not into art that's about artists' own sex lives.** Koons's brand of pop being the prime example of why: it feels exhibitionist, flashy, conversation-halting, kind of gross, and not really as interested in exploring meanings as using sex to get a rise. What's most annoying about this is that the rise is temporary. You either put it in the art category, or you don't. If not, you may just say it's pornography, which is fine. We've all got genitals, why not? But even if you do accept it into the hallowed halls of, say, the MCA, it's still, as Koons himself says, just a "ta-da" moment. (Not my thing, art- or porn-wise.)

Lai's works don't work this way. Certainly, her pop roots are strong. There's the initial shock of the subject-matter, the magpie treatment of cultural icons, the play with reality and fantasy. But there's also this other thing, what I think of as the sustainable side of pop. It's like this curious calling-attention-to that touches off more thoughts and resists that Koonsian hardening of the surface.***

For example, John Tyler's strange, blind fingering in her mouth and her fearful one-eyed gaze while grabbing his wrist. What's that about? Or Abe Lincoln's weary teat and wearier face. Of course! Of course, that's what that would look like! As Lai herself writes, it's about the vulnerability and the ambiguity. It becomes more than a game of three-card monte with "the artist," "the presidential likeness," and "the viewer" each cycling through their proper positions. They escape becoming fixed or known entities in the exchange, while the range of emotions on display ensures that the stakes remain fairly high, not jokey. I suspect this will become harder with the more recent presidents, since their roles in our collective sex fantasies are more clearly scripted. The first 18, though, are really impressive.

Justine Lai, Join or Die, 2008

To what else does this post's title refer? Why, homemade bread, of course. I've got a batch of this 20-hour creature rising and bubbling by the radiator right now. Should be ready to go by late-morning tomorrow. In this video, the baker from whom Bittman cribbed the recipe demonstrates how everything, even bread - especially bread! - has all this secret knowledge behind it involving squiggles and cracks, crumbs, crusts, and bubbles, proportions, substrates, and who knows what else? In other words, like snuggling up to a fat Martin Van Buren, delicious. Good night.

*No idea what the title means...
**Strange, I'm having trouble coming up with other examples not by Koons where the artist him/herself figures into the explicit image and not just images of partners, implied partners, or stand-ins. Comments?
***Like a printing error in a Warhol Car Crash.

ETA: The bread was a disaster. Better luck next time?

Looking as Memory

Just listened to a great Radiolab piece about memory. You know, this crazy research about selectively erasing memories? It's all over the internets. Well, what I found most interesting about it (other than the heartbreaking story about the man with the worst amnesia of all time and his love for his wife) is how they talk about memory as a constantly creative rather than a conservative or a retreiving process. The idea is that when you remember something, you are actually creating a new memory, while slightly distorting the old one. They even use the metaphor of painting or sculpture (as opposed to file cabinets or hard drives, as one might think).


Well, this reminded me of a pet theory I once had and never quite got rid of about looking at painting as a kind of performance.* I used to experience the act of looking at paintings as a very absorbing, active process (still do, but this was especially intense when I was younger and a bit newer to both museums and being by myself in public). I would stand there and trace all the lines of paint with my eyes, trying to discover all the hills and furrows in its texture. I'd get really close and try to figure out what was under the top layer, and then go back and see how the whole thing came together into a whole impression. Basically, I was that annoying person you would have to wait for to leave before you could have a look, and I didn't care one bit that you were waiting.

Anyway, this active memory thing made me think that looking at paintings is probably kind of like remembering. Think about it: you are looking at something that (in most cases) represents reality, an entity you're likely familiar with. So you are matching up the representation with your memory of the world. Also, at the level of the composition and the paint, you may be remembering other paintings and their solutions to the problem of representing the world (what kind of perspective did they use to show depth, how did they create light, how did they handle the paint to create an illusion of a world in the canvas). Even with abstraction this works, since the painter is solving some kind of problem (what to paint? how to paint?) that other painters have solved in other ways and that your subconscious mind is comparing in a way that is like remembering. But the thing that makes this idea even more compelling to me is this thing about memory as creation. If looking at a painting is kind of like remembering, and memory is itself creative, then looking becomes creative too. The brain is not just imprinting what's there in front of it, but actively generating a picture or an impression by interacting with the painting on both a conscious and subconscious level! How awesome is that? Go brain!

*Performance in the neutral, active as opposed to passive sense, not the Judith Butler sense.

What About Painting?

Sorry to the innocent bystanders, but this is another day where a comment I tried to make on a friend's blog became so long that it had to turn into a post on this one. My apologies.

My friend kg laid the gauntlet down in response to an article and a slideshow about the upcoming Mary Heilmann show at the New Museum in New York. kg writes:

We all know that painting is far from dead; it had the moment of strong return in the mid-80s and is now as equal a player as any in the sisterhood of media. And yet I find it so bizarre that people can still attach the same politics to it as they did in the first half of the XXth century.

And concludes:

But I honestly can't figure out anymore if earnest political claims can be made for painting anymore. Though more importantly, we first need to sort out whether any sort of earnest political claims need to be made for art at all...

Okay, I'll bite. (I'll post pictures, but check out the slideshow for any of this to make sense.)

1) It's really hard to tell what effect these will have on me without actually standing in front of them. If painting still has any meaning, I think it cannot be decoupled from the actual experience of the painting.

2) While I think some of these works are pretty derivative (and not in a good way) - Johns, Diebenkorn, Kelly...others I really do like: "Little Three for Two, Red, Yellow, Blue"...well, just that one, really.

3) The story in the Times is complete tripe. So, like, she wants to be famous, and her daddy died, and now she looks up at the sky and out at the sunset. And...? There is not one complete thought in that whole review that makes a case for this woman's art. Other than that we should give her due respect because she's a woman. Sorry, people, that's not good enough. Also, this is the kind of crap writing that makes people doubt painting. So, are these paintings about swimming pools and sunsets? Or one-upmanship with your idols/nemeses? Or what?

4) So what am I trying to say? Well, I think painting does and will continue to have an effect, but that effect is in the physical experience of viewing paintings, not in some essential quality of the medium itself. There is something about seeing the traces of human activity wrought on a large or small scale that is really hard to ignore. It's like looking at a baby and realizing that it's human. It's just really hard to deny the traces of human activity, period.

4b) That being said, there is a scale of painting, say, the size that fits right above your love seat or carries well to the market, the kind that was so easily mass produced in 17th c. Holland & Flanders that has nearly escaped the category of "trace" and become instead a commodity. This market scale is, I would suggest, what we have been conditioned through the centuries to recognize as "painting," been bombarded with, been desensitized to, and that has given painting - all painting - a bad name.

4c) My argument in 4 is different from the argument of early 20th c. expressionism or mid-century abstract expressionism or 1980s neo-expressionism that abstract painting is an index of genius, creativity, emotion, subjectivity, history, or any such thing. I am not saying that painting is compelling because behind the painterly mark lies the artist's hand and the artist's genius. What I am saying is that there are certain kinds of abstract paintings that still compel interest because they look unmistakably like human activity - we are drawn to traces of ourselves. Not all paintings. And not all scales. But some. If nothing else, some paintings are still utterly fascinating because they are like discovering someone has been somewhere you are now, and this is what they did, this thing is what they left. All additional content - historical, narrative, decorative, etc. etc. etc. is a bonus.

5a) Some paintings that have made me feel this way recently:

Anselm Kiefer, Andromeda, 2001

Julie Mehretu, Imperical Construction, Istanbul, 2003

These are really hard to convey without seeing them up close. They are huge in scale and minute in detail. They are crafted, and the overall image is just as striking as the little marks and crevasses.

Louise Bourgeois, Fugue, 2003

Even Louise Bourgeois's little old sketches. I mean, Fugue? Fugue?! But still, the lines are enchanting.

5b) The exception that proves the rule. Someone who has NOT made me feel this way recently:

Brice Marden, Attendant 5, 1996-99

Why? Because his paintings are repetitive to the point of feeling mass-produced, and because his colors are straight out of a Land's End catalog. So, the thesis holds.

6) As for politics, well, if you know anything about me, you'll know that I'm a strong believer in the "politics of appearance" - we appear before others and in this we gain agency. This is Hannah Arendt's argument, and I haven't found anything I like better.

7) And as for Mary Heilmann, I would have to see her in person, but I'm not sure I'm so into it. She's not appearing as much as performing, and it's kind of repellant. Also, I feel like this kind of "play with sources" is overdone and pointless at this point. I hate to do this, but...

Mary Heilmann, Little Three for Two: Red, Yellow, Blue, 1976

Ellsworth Kelly, Blue, Green, Red, 1962-63

Mary Heilmann, Go Ask Alice, 2006

Jasper Johns, Map, 1961

Mary Heilmann, Capistrano, 1994

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 125, 1980

Why?