Saturday, August 27, 2005

I could not find a thing on Come paintings and Andy. Except this: How we work: Frank Auerbach, artist

Auerbach has a strict method: he paints and repaints his sitters, often scraping his paintings down to the canvas after each of the many sittings, and becomes agitated, weepy even if they're even a few minutes late for their weekly sessions. From such a destructive method come paintings which will always happen 'in one take' at a final sitting. (Where they haven't met his standards, he has been known to buy back and destroy an inferior painting, sometimes years after completion.)

Well, those are not "Come paintings" by Andy but paintings that are the result of a "destructive method." Is writing "from such a destructive method come paintings" grammatically correct? I mean do paintings "come?" or even "become" or are they "created" by somebody. Throw stones at me, once looking at the grammatical beauty throughout these diaries...

Here's where Andy comes to play within the same page quoted above: Has a 20-strong studio operation, Kostabi World, a logical progression from sometime stockbroker Jeff Koons's practice and Andy Warhol's The Factory which institutionalises creativity, and applies a big-M Methodology that McKinsey could be proud of. That sounds more like "Come" to me.

Keeping up with Art History, we find that Andy was actually in good company when it came to paintings and the word "come": Arts Briefing  Sep 30, 2003
WASHINGTON: AVANT-GARDE ART From the artists' early exhibitions come paintings by Salvador Dalí, Piet Mondrian, Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Arp, Max ... (New York Times) Well, they're not "Come" paintings either...

I'm surprised there's nothing outthere on Andy and Come, though there is plenty, as we know on his famous torsos...

Slaps in the artworld... Andy slaps Basquiat, then MoMA slaps MOCA: MoMA, anticipating the unveiling of its new Queens outpost, refused to lend the soup can series to the MOCA show, which the local press has considered a major slap in the face to the city. "The headline should read, MOMA to MOCA: Drop Dead!" wrote Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times.

Manzoni still slapping: Works which were a slap in the face when new are held at a comfortable distance from the present. Manzoni's Artist's Shit is still faintly disgusting even in a can, in a glass case, 24 years later.

Here's a polemic opinion, where supposedly it is Basquiat who is slapping the public's face... Basquiat's artistic skills could be said to rival those of a retarded fourth grader. The MOCA exhibit is a waste of space and time and an egregious slap in the face of anybody with artistic talent. It is a little disturbing that a human mind would conceive of such miscarriages and not have the good sense to relegate them to the slag heap; it is nauseating that other minds would pervert themselves to the extent that they provide these abortions with any more than a quiver of disgust.

Even Hemingway gets in the action: It was Ernest Hemingway who perfected the image of the creative personality as an emblem of the Man. This was a bitch-slap in the face of our traditional ideas about artists. Up until the postwar era, they were typically regarded as either effete aesthetes in rags or crypto-scientists in smocks. Hemingway took the stoical stance of cowboy heroes and merged it with the existential sense of man as Sisyphus rolling the stone of his vision up an impossibly steep hill. I

The public persona: A kid already rich and famous by the time he landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine at age 24, mocking his success by appearing barefoot in an Armani suit.

Why Basquiat may have suffered from depression: Jean-Michel Basquiat was born December 1960 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was Haitian, and his mother Puerto Rican. Often depressed, she was periodically institutionalized. The marriage ended in divorce. The drawing, says his father, Gerard Basquiat,started by age 4. By the age of 9, it was an obsession.

The interpretation of the Basquiat film; Andy looks good on this one: Eventually, Basquiat finds himself with no friends except for Andy Worhall (David Bowie), who is the only one who understands the beauty of his art. However as the movie progresses, Basquiat becomes more depressed and starts to experiment with drugs.

How the depressed genius was discovered: [...] in the economically booming '80s, commercial society's embrace of avant-garde culture seemed to occur simultaneously with developments in the latter. This trend reached an apex in the by-now-legendary Times Square Show in 1980, organized by the participating artists themselves. The initial motivation for the four-floor exhibition, held in an abandoned bus depot and massage parlor at 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, was wonderfully anarchic. None of the works had labels or names. Then someone sent out an engraved invitation to collectors and dealers. Artists—including Basquiat, then 19—rushed to put their names on their work. Basquiat was one of the show's few participants to keep holding the art-world's attention afterward. But in Basquiat's case, it wasn't just his art that commerce was taking into its arms. It was his race. His very success also made him increasingly angry, suspicious, and depressed.

Here's another possible element in Basquiat's depression: Jean Michel Basquiat, who was working on artistic collaborations with Warhol, moved into a two-story building on Great Jones owned by Warhol. The rent was $4,000 a month, which Basquiat often paid late "partly because he was extravagant with money and also because he had developed a $1,000 a week cocaine habit."

The Sandinistas: Members of a left-wing Nicaraguan political party, the Sandinist National Liberation Front (FSLN). The group, named for Augusto Cesar Sandino , a former insurgent leader, was formed in 1962 to oppose the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle . In 1979 the Sandinistas launched an offensive from Costa Rica and Honduras that toppled Somoza. They established a junta that nationalized such industries as banking and mining, postponed elections, and moved steadily to the left, eventually espousing Marxist-Leninist positions. The Sandinista-dominated government was opposed by U.S.-supported guerrillas known as contras.

It is odd to listen to a revolutionary talk about the role of art in a war with a group of artists who are not struggling with basic needs, but rather struggle with abstract notions of meaning in terms of purposiveness without a purpose for the sake of a commercial market. Andy did notice something to be at odds when the Sandinista Cultural Minister talked about art, and this may have to do with the fact that the kind of art that Andy became famous for can only have meaning in a state of excess, and that he somehow understood that such art is not compatible with the kind of struggle that the minister promoted, unless the artists were willing to create careful interventions in their works; something that Clemente clearly would not do because he did not want to lose his green card. Andy and Clemente functioned in a state where there is room for the consumption of reflection of meaning as a great commodity that is exchanged in the art market quite successfully. Andy understood this and knew that he was way too immersed in fashion: We've gotten so involved with fashion that we don't know about all these other things like wars and governments anymore. And Clemente was too much of an "artist" with that big "artist loft."

Today, this is the scoop on selling and buying Basquiat's work: Market Alert: Receive email updates when artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat are offered for sale in Galleries and Auction Houses worldwide.

Reading into (or theorizing would be a more respected term in this case) into Basquiat's desire to sell his work for so little, one could claim that it may really be about the fact that he had to struggle in the past to just get someone to look at his art, and how once he became part of the artworld he could do a stroke on anything and sell it for a lot of money if he wanted. Well, he really could not do this so easily, since the dealers controlled the market, but selling small works for so little may have given him some agency during that time. Wanting to sell drawings for so little may be a manifestation of him trying to claim a power position while he became submerged in an artworld that made him the exotic idiot savant artist. Or maybe it was just his ego, and he was trying to enjoy the power he apparently had attained when becoming a celebrated new artist. In this way he exercised a power he did not really have in the galleries or museums, but only on the streets when he sold the works for so little. I wonder if this would have been the case had the artworld accepted him for the actual person that he was, acknowledging his background and education.

The following account tackles such conundrum with some neutrality: Very little criticism has been done examining the work produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat. While his place in the history of American art is still under dispute, it cannot be denied that during the eight years that he painted, his much of his work examines the legacy of the colonial enterprise and his relationship to that legacy.  Whether recasting the work of European masters like Leonardo Davinci in his own terms or recounting events from Haitian, Puerto Rican, African and African American history, Basquiat presented a vision of a fragmented self in search of an organizing principle.

Stepping on dog shit. Word on terrorism: Afterall, what better way to terrorize people than to plant dog shit and make everyone scared of stepping on dog shit?

Stepping on it in the middle of the night is quite common: I see much dog shit and screaming in my future. Also, plenty of midnight stepping on dog shit screaming my head off while I run to the bathroom to wipe it off.

Even while working in someone's home: Van Dyke Parks refused to work at the piano because he kept stepping on dog shit left by Brian's beloved pooches.

something to [un]forget: oh yea.. stepping on dog shit in the house was the most memorable experience this time.

Superstition comes into play: A bad thing is not the exact opposite of a good thing. As a example, stepping on dog shit is usually considered a bad thing, but not stepping on dog shit isn't usually considered fortunate. In fact, when ten thousand happy people were interviewed in the 1976 Are U Happy Or Not Query, only 0.3% related their happiness to not stepping on dog shit.

But how different is such an experience when you call the shit something else... Juz when i was looking on the floor, my friend saw some brownish stuffs at the sides of my school shoe.....asked me...did i step on dung?... i was shocked....n i quickly ran off with my friend to the toilet to wash off the dung at the sole of my shoe....yucks...the quantity is not that much...i still remembered my friend laughing at me while i am washing spraying water from the water hose to wash off the dung...lol

Andy was upset because he was getting played while watching a play--Ha! How annoying it must be to know you are famous and have people act as though they don't know who you are... I mean he's da'man with the white wig; he's Andy. Cultural insiderism has never read better. The way he talks about gays and lesbians is something only he can get away with: "And these gays, you know, they refuse Interviews and always pretend they don't know who you are, and they they go home and dish you."