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.
Ribbon
Posted: October 29, 2012 Filed under: Galleries | Tags: Barcelona artist, contemporary art, ghost stories, ghost story, Halloween, narrative, ooohaha, Pauli Josa, prose, ribbon, Spanish artists, spooky, writing Leave a comment
Pauli Josa
(First in a series of three ghost stories)
Ribbon
He married her in candlelight. A silver ribbon round her neck. Their love in flame. And the house and the cars and kids and the silver ribbon never left her neck. Silked velvet ribbon. Crushed in places, held high on her neck with a clasp of bone. He knew because he studied that ribbon, over coffee, over date night, over her making love. He could tell its everly crease and how the light softened over edge.
Him asking her, take it off.
“You’ll be sorry.” She says. Sometimes hazeleye laughing, sometimes eyes in storm.
Times he demanded, angry. Blood shot through eyes.
“You’ll be sorry,” clear grey tears. Fall like hourglass seconds.
PTA meetings go by, and the days. Going by. And cereal bowls rotate through the sink. He watches her ribbon to plot and scheme against it. This ribbon, a steel rebellion against him. He must have it.
Take it off – the years of denial crush in his throat.
“You’ll be sorry.” Her eyes pearl.
And the clouds hang dead, pale shroud the bulging moon. The branches scrape, scrape against night fall. Across the bed her breath rhythms the universe and he reaches. Reaches across to pull the clasp and her eyelash quivers,
The ribbon limp in his fingers.
A long sigh
as her head
moves
falls
rolls away
the night hush whisper y o u’ l l b e s o r r y
Her soft lips vanish into burgundy dark.
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.
Costco carries Matisse
Posted: October 17, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: art, art galleries, changing art world, costco, costco art, lithograph, Matisse, museums, social media 6 Comments
Henri Matisse, Femme au Chapeau, 1939
Yes, you read right. Costco now carries limited edition Matisse lithographs. Online for a fair price. (Warhol too) Whew, don’t have to don my Jimmy Choos to stroll out to Gagosian – style. Don’t have to blab up artsy chit-chat with a gallery owner to convince them I’m legit.
Aahhh, now I can slouch around in Old Navy velor sweatsuit and charge it ala Costco. With the 5% cashback. Priceless.
No uncomfortable negotiating over price. Click and ship. There are so many fantastic online orginal art sites now (artmuse.com, Saatchionline.com, 20×200.com). You can also buy direct from artist websites.
I’m happy about this. The same way I am happy Target carried Missoni. The same way I’ll be happy when one day I can walk into a museum and not be crushed by an art inferiority complex. Really – they do check for MFA’s at the door.
Because art needs the mainstream. Museums need social media. If museums continue to be white-walled Genius tombs, their shelf life is limited. It’s experience and interaction we want. Why do only curators talk about art? What if docents turned into gallery moderators and people could tweet back and forth about artwork on hashtags? (Imagine a world where people actually talk in mausoleums, ahem, museums) What if you went into a gallery and lounged around drinking?
It’s happening people.
They are sold out on the Costco website. Blarggh.
I’m waiting for the coupons. anyway.
Boxed and ready
Posted: October 14, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Private Collections | Tags: art, art fix, colored pencils, contemporary art, death of spouse, Folger's, garage, green, grief, hearing aid, Juliet, lonely, long read, neighbor, Patrick Wilson, writing 2 Comments
Patrick Wilson, Juliet, 2010
He posted calendars. In his office and garage and kitchen – spent several hours a week updating them to quarter hours, syncing old-school. With sharp colored pencils, he outlines boxes of time.
Fox news fills squared time between 6:30 and 8:30, formerly dinnertime. Lawn maintenance and church in green numbered boxes. She watches the blue bedtime box inch its way up from 9:30 to 9:00 to 8:30. His outworn hands gripping thin pencils like colorful pickup sticks. She noticed the broken pieces pierce heavy duty trash bags on Tues mornings, even though he double bagged.
“When do you go to the john?” She was there, borrowing his angle grinder. The grey clink of his fingers rummaged through a Folger’s coffee can, searching out an odd length screw. The color sharp schedule catches her eye. Rocking back and forth, heel to toe.
“huh?”
“The john!” she says louder and points. He needed a hearing aid. Of course wouldn’t admit it. Old men love their bowel movements. A daily badge, a gold star sir for gastrointestinal bravery.
“You didn’t schedule your bowel movements, isn’t that the highlight of your day?”
He scowls. A hoarse sound, possible guffaw. Remembers laughter like his last kidney stone.
She’s right, he didn’t schedule in his “constitution.” Takes good half hour or more. Enough to read the front page. Or study the obits for friends.
“guess I’ll have to update it. “
“And get a hearing aid.”
“what?” he deadpanned. Heel turn. “Not gettin’ a damn hearing aid. Juliet couldn’t make me. Neither can you.” Coughs. “So go on, here’s the grinder. Keep the box neat will ya?”
Shoes her out of this neat hen-house garage. He hunts and pecks for the one screw he found and lost several times. Entirely unnatural. A neat garage I mean. That schedule too.
Unfinished business
Posted: October 12, 2012 Filed under: Museums, Private Collections | Tags: art, artfix, beauty, contemporary art, dog, Lucian Freud, Modern, museum, portrait, prose, rat, truth, unfinished 5 Comments
Lucian Freud, 152 Portrait of the Hound, 2011
Ninety Freud paintings at the Modern FW devoured me. But I live to tell the tale.
And yes, I was very inappropriate at the museum.
“He’s such a virtuoso with the texture here,” I pointed out to a young man. It was kinda uncomfortable because we were discussing a penis juxtaposed with a rat’s tail. And I was using nice museumy language to soften the image of rat tail and penis laid together, side by side, central to the painting. The young man winced as a woman walked up to him. I laughed (inappropriate).
“You brought your mother to the Freud exhibit?” (Very inappropriate) They walked away.
I didn’t mind, we all skulked around, eviscerated, swallowed in a flesh sea. Stunned looks and furtive eye contact, what the hell is this? Too big heads, too little heads, too big hands, too big eyes. Contortions and legs, naked, bare. A flesh-eating exhibition pulling no punches. Clashing angles pushed hard against each other and bodies truncated, not fit in their painted rooms. As they did not fit into my head.
I approached the teenage docent, “So are you shell-shocked?”
“It was hard the first week,” he admitted. “They started to rotate us, so I’m ok now.”
My favorite – the last painting of the show. The unfinished one of Freud’s assistant David.
“Disturbing,” murmured a passing Dallasite.
Damn right and it should be. Why be subjected to these horrors of flesh? Because I extrovert beauty and introvert truth. It’s too bright, too hard, too loud, too flesh. I admire Freud for drawing me in with beautiful paint strokes, daring emotion and pushing me away with awful contortions and rooms that defy balance. It’s the pushpull between loveliness and grimy street truth. It’s unfinished business for me.
Seeing is believing
Posted: October 8, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Museums | Tags: blind spots, Dutch painters, Dutch still life, Edgar Fernhout, Experiment, life, perception, Richard Wiseman, see, still life Leave a comment
Edgar Fernhout (1912-1974), Stilleven
Move along people, nothin’ to see here. Another Dutch painting sans still life.
Wait, the Dutch and Flemish – weren’t they the painters that elevated still life to legendary status. Now MIA. Missing flowers, missing fruit, no pitcher, no half-eaten meat. All in absentia.
Which begs the question, why missing? What am I not seeing, my blind spots? In art, in life.
The answer – plenty.
Richard Wiseman at the University of Herfordshire shows us in his study of self-proclaimed “lucky” and “unlucky” people. He told them all to look through the newspaper (specially designed) and count the number of photos. The “lucky” people found the number almost immediately. The “unlucky” people took quite a long time and came up with wrong answers. Why? What did the self-proclaimed “unlucky” people not see? The answer – written bold, in two inches high letters, inside the front page.
Half-way through the special newspaper, the message “STOP COUNTING, TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU HAVE SEEN THIS AND WIN £250” also in two inch high letters. How many “unlucky” persons got the cash? Not one.
igetitart 