Braggy-Braggy

This post is just to say that, while MasterGote may never experience the pains of childbirth, running a marathon, or occupying the highest tax bracket, riding an off-brand, $125, 17kg behemoth of a mountain bike with a loose saddle through snow, mud, sand, and occasional stretches of asphalt for 74km can now be checked off the list of the quite painful (but potentially awesome) things to do in life. Sore bottom, sunburn, and multiple bruises notwithstanding, it was one of the funnest things I've done so far in Russia. The people were absolutely lovely for letting a bum like me join in on their ride, considering I've never "ridden" longer than from Brooklyn to Queens and back and didn't even know the right way to change gears for going uphill (wha? there's a way to go up a hill without standing on the pedals???). Anyway, here are some pictures and here are some more braggy-braggy stats about the ride (in Russian). People back in the BK, start training...

The View from Here

Took the metro to the wrong stop yesterday and decided to walk the long way home. Turns out that this bridge eventually leads to the street where my pool is, which is also the southern border of the woods near my house and the one I used to always confuse with the street I actually live on. (One is bol'shaya, one is malaya.) We once tried to walk this way back in January or February, but it was too cold, and I chickened out. This time, the weather was more accommodating, and I watched some dogs frolicking on a patch of grass and listened to The Microphones as I walked.

The stop where I got off is a strange forest of unfinished high-rises on the edge of the river. It's built in a way that a pedestrian would have no idea which direction the river actually was, as the raised highways, overpasses, and tall glass steles tend to throw off one's sense of direction. All you get is a view of one's immediate block, no views through of any kind. A strange, urban claustrophobia.* I used one of the seven sisters poking out above the fray and the highway signs as orienters, but still ended up taking the wrong bridge across. Reminded me of the view from the Queensboro Bridge, though the apartments (would we call them projects?) seemed a lot cheerier. Also, to my great relief, despite all the urban/industrial impedimenta, there was always a sidewalk, an overpass, or a zebra crossing along the whole way home.

*This was before I finally found the bridge in the pictures.

Yoko Ono's Map Piece (1962)

Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map. If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside. When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet. The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped altogether. Ask your friends to write maps. Give your friends maps.

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?

If You Are In DC...

Go see TJ Clark give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. The first one was last weekend, but there are five more.

Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929

Here's something from an interview with Clark about the upcoming lectures (parts 1, 2):

If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.

You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.

One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world. But I think there's a pre-history to Guernica, and one of the things I'm going to try to argue about the previous 10-15 years before 1937 is that Picasso is trying to find a way of re-imagining space, and making a space which is kind of much more insecure and open and porous to the outside. At some kind of deep, intuitive level this is his response to the coming to an end of a bourgeois form of life.

It would probably be a cliche to wax on about his sensitive eye, but it should also be mentioned that Clark is one of the few art historians who cuts through the packaging and gets right to the meat. By which I mean the relationship between form and meaning - what can we say about pictures, or what is it that pictures tell us? His answers are daring and problematic, but also stated with conviction and very evocative. They really inspire (me) to go beyond schematic, empiricist thinking. To push the relationship and squeeze out meanings that matter, not just ones that could be said, but don't change anything by having been said. Whether or not you're convinced by his argument, I think the lectures will be well worth it, not least because of his sensitive eye.