Gobble
Posted: November 16, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Private Collections | Tags: art, art fix, Chicago Imagist art, contemporary art, holiday stress, Miyoko Ito, please tell me this all means something, Thanksgiving, women artists Leave a comment
Miyoko Ito
Where are you underneath
the holiday – yellow dogpile lines?
lemon lips. Green bean, durkee onion kiss.
I smell the turkey.
Is it done?
cavort you sweet potatoes
Stuff, Stuffed, Stuffing
and thanks for
10 am
Posted: November 11, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: 10 AM, art, art fix, contemporary art, hand paintings, hands, help, helpers, Louise Bourgeois, morning, sacred Leave a comment
Louise Borgeios, 10 am is when you come to me, 2006
(Series of hand paintings Louise did about the daily arrival of her long time assistant Jerry)
10 am is when you come to me.
when the clockbeast, its too slow
hands finally pass on
when my toes press to open sand
when this aged crust
strips away to white horizon
the air breathes my name
fingers unbind
your hands bring me yet
sacred red hours
Full installation
Personal Margins
Posted: November 6, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Museums, Private Collections | Tags: abstract expressionism, art, art fix, art quote, Barnett Newman, contemporary art, lithograph, margins, minimilism, post painterly abstraction Leave a comment
Barnett Newman, 18 Cantos, 1963-1964, a lithograph portfolio of 18 pages and one cover page
I should say that it was the margins made in printing a lithographic stone that magnetized the challenge for me from the very beginning. No matter what one does, no matter how completely one works the stone (and I have always worked the stone, as soon as it is printed) makes an imprint that is surrounded by inevitable white margins. I would create a totality only to find it change after it was printed-into another totality…There is always the intrusion of the paper frame. To crop the extruding paper or to cover it with a mat or to eliminate all of the margins by “bleeding” is an evasion of this fact. It is like cropping to make a painting. It is success by mutilation…The struggle to overcome this intrusion-to give the imprint its necessary scale so that it could have its fullest expression, so that it would not be crushed by the paper margin and still have a margin- that was the challenge for me. That is why each canto has its own personal margins…These eighteen cantos are then single, individual expressions, each with its unique difference.
-Barnett Newman, “Preface to 18 Cantos,” 1964
Canto XIV 1963-4 by Barnett Newman 1905-1970
Dish
Posted: November 3, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, MOMA, Private Collections | Tags: art, art fix, color, color theory, contemporary art, Josef Albers, quotes, square Leave a comment
“I’m not paying ‘homage to the square’. It’s only the dish I serve my craziness about color in.”
Josef Albers (1888-1976)
Closet
Posted: October 31, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Private Collections | Tags: art, art fix, Brazilian artists, contemporary art, family business, father, ghost stories, Halloween, oh God I am my father, prose, son, spooky, writing Leave a comment
Marc Wanicko, Icon nº1
(third in a series of ghost stories)
He always locks it when he leaves on business. I know it’s off limits. But I can’t help wondering what hides there. I searched the key many times, curious worm darkmawing my chest. But always empty handed.
I’m glad when he leaves town for business, a hurricane here, a revolt there. Massacres too. He assures me there’s always a demand for his skills and one day I’ll take over the family business.
When he comes home he’s so tired, his hands feel of stone. I glance up into his eyes, lost. Can’t seem to find him in shadows. His cheeks move higher on his face.
“This job is killing me,” he sighs. He brings home a dark air, some long wind foreboding and I shiver. He dusts my hair with a withered hand and I gasp. A sinking deep. A feeling to run. To scream, but my body too still. too still.
He opens a beer. Sits mute on the table. Unharmed. Tie flung aside and sunk into the recliner. His bones, a heap. Fingers dripping over arm rests. And I can’t see who I am looking at. I have forgotten.
I notice behind him the door to his room sliced open.
That dark wind swirls me. To the closet door standing – cracked. No heart in my chest. I see into space Dusk outlined souls and glint of sicklesteel and fire. Fear and trembling and teeth scattered round. My teeth falling. Then vast nothing
of no end
“I hoped you wouldn’t see this, yet”
I jump- skin out of pocket, arms tight held around me. The darkness horrible and bright. Faint smells of matches extinguished and scentless nothing.
“This is the family business?”
And his eyes stone sink back into a fleshless skull. my father, now the mask of Death.
“soon this will all be yours”
Ball
Posted: October 30, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Private Collections | Tags: art, art fix, Cinderella, contemporary art, Ghazal Bigdeloo, ghost stories, Halloween, prose, spooky, writing Leave a comment
Ghazal Bigdeloo, the woman
(Second in a series of ghost stories)
Her half-child back and half-full sack turns, (the sagging sun too tired of the day) and sees a gloaming shade at the field’s far edge. Trudges over to lay down under winded branches, a sleeping bed of white frogfruit. To forget she’s alone. To forget her fingers purple cracked.
An owl hoots at the secret mouse and she wakes in a pool of moon. Shivers. The field spreads a dark stain. A truck forgot, she and the half picked bag. Forgotten. Someone should come for her, of course they should. Of course they would.
Panic chews at her mouth. Closed night all around. Darkness in her eyes and shivers heat to scream.
Only blind woods hears. Hearing
a melodic strain, low and thin. Silver keys thread the dark. Is it a waltz? She turns shadow eyes to a glow. Follows the music through undergrowth. Scrape and claw. She stumbles and pitched to ground, looks up in the foil moon.
A coach.
Filigree door swinging open and seated on the velvet – a crystal slipper. Diamond bright. Leather tuft interior glows pearl. Melody grows with her breath
so close in.
Steps into the coach, how lovely the shoe.
Beauty. Ahhh.
Wedges foot in. Wrought toes pained. But, her hands soft, now French manicured. Her lips pout, red and full. Money rustle of silk and wrapped fur. The smell of rich and clapping for the belle of the ball.
Click door shut.
Glass shoe cold. And colder. Colding and happy and pain. Coursing up and down and into her blood, turns her breath hard. Crystal prisms. Symphonic volt and tympani drums.
Two mornings from now they find her body – chill. Toes broken back. Officer suspects foul play. An old glass slipper inside an overlarge pumpkin rolls away. A belly full of blood.
Caught in a trap
Posted: October 28, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: arachnid, art, art fix, Chick-fil-a, corporate spies, creepy, Halloween, Louise Bourgeois, spider, spider web, trap, web, weird, writing Leave a comment
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, Fabric Work
In the spirits of All Hallow’s eve, I’ll briefly chronicle some daily occurrences I find very “creepy.”
You pull into a fast food chain that hawks chicken sandwiches. Fresh face teenagers repeat “It’s my pleasure” over and over to you. Slaving away in entry level food service (aka chain) is a twilight zone of torture. And when they repeat again, “my pleasure,” they can’t be talking about the chicken. You start to imagine R to X-rated very pleasurable things. With a teenage automatron smiling into your face.
Creepy.
Freak moms spooked by kids climbing trees. Hell, breaking a bone is/was a celebrated kid-rite-of-passage. The cast – a trophy (and weapon). My best thinking, swinging between limbs. “Honey, now let’s not climb that tree, we could get hurt.” We?
Creepy.
Traffic cameras buzzing facial recognition software, recorded phone conversations with corporations, ubiquitous big brothering, internet spiders crawling though your email. Who’s watching? Stalker in your pocket, apple spy phone trick-tracking your every move.
Creepy.
Immortal FB pics/posts, indiscreet tweets frozen in forever cyber-life, little word vampires sucking your bloodygood reputation dry. Ad infinitum.
Creepy.
Go into a clothing store. Feel pretty good about buying those new BOGO jeans. Until you ask to use the restroom and look up to see a big red sign posted by the john, reminds the store’s employees to, “compliment her choices again and again” followed by, “celebrate our new friend with upraised voices.”
Creepy.
It’s a sticky flung corporate web and I’m a juicy morsel. My desire, consumer vibration so slight. Awakens worldwide-long legs. Hairy. Clustering eyes.
Sardines and Oranges
Posted: October 24, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: abstract expressionism, art, art fix, Frank O'Hara, kinda funny, Michael Goldberg, New York School, poetry 2 Comments
Michael Goldberg, Sardines, 1955, Smithsonian
Why I Am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
Frank O’Hara
(1926-1966)
Monday Monday
Posted: October 22, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: abstract expressionism, art, art fix, Franz Kline, list, Monday, painting, poetry, prose, staff meeting, writing 7 Comments
Franz Kline, Mycenae, 1958
Oh you Monday. With your redrush urgent,
your orange streak, next-in-line, get-it-done-before-lunch.
I’m yellow drifting in a little late, weekend hung over
deskchair heaped, haven’t checked emails yet.
your high hot list, citadel efficiency
Getting there,
Soon enough.
Staff mtg doesn’t start for another 5 min.
Richter’s Squeegee
Posted: October 19, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Museums, Private Collections | Tags: andthatsjustlife, art, art process, artfix, beauty, contemporary art, Gerhard Ricter, German artists, life, painting, process, redact, squeegee Leave a comment
I love this old German. The ballsy dedication of one’s life to the Great Squeegee. He creates world renown kick-ass art with it. And he’s 80. Currently he’s the top grossing artist in the world.
The dragging, adding, the taking away again. The adding, the taking away.
Smear on. Redact. Smear on. Redact.
And I find myself mesmerized. Its existential process draws me in. The way this paint pulls me apart and puts me back together. A surreal humptydumpty life.
what’s surface? what lies beneath? occupies the same plane.
What you are when your “title” is taken away. Who you are on your new business card. You, in juicy given youth, who you are as gainsaid, it peels away. (A forty-year-old anachronism) The email in your inbox – gives you hope, a slightsound of paper handed – takes it away.
Can the senselessness of the giving and taking away – can it be lovely? Can I, by some craft of hand or soul make it so?
Click above link to watch him in action.
igetitart 