drawings 2010

Mean and Sneaking

This is a curatorial project I am working on for March 2010--Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn:

Mean and Sneaking

B Wurtz, Mai Braun, Michael DeLucia, Laura Braciale, Amy Yao, Drew Shifflett, Jeff Feld, Matthew Lusk, Matt Callinan, Elaine Angelopoulos, Jenny Bevill, Andy Coolquitt, Josh Faught

“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath….It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live…always on the limits …a very ancient slough….”

Henry David Thoreau: Where I have Lived and What I have Lived For, Economy

“People forget that I am trying to disappoint”

Gabriel Orozco; defending his Yogurt Caps.

"Mean and Sneaking" is taken from Thoreau about the state of living on the periphery; needing to make promises that can’t be kept, scrounging, borrowing, and removing oneself from the mores of the conventional social order. When Thoreau advocates for Economy, he does so with faith that people need not join the tide of material and commercial wealth seeking, but can follow a life aside and alone, where resourcefulness and self-sufficiency allow ample contentment with Nature as an alternative, substantive, and providing companion. But Thoreau presents an alternately peevish and gloomy attitude. Not everyone is so ready to head for the hills.

The artists in Mean and Sneaking borrow select pages from Thoreau…using what they can find at hand, at home and around to make a living and art. They are awake to the potential of found and conventionally wasted material presented by a society relatively unconcerned with its excess. To Thoreau they say “Thanks!” for validating and poeticizing life away from the rat race, the scrappy persistence and all, but “No thanks!” to the lonely and unsociable attitude. Their life on the outskirts is festive, filled with gift giving and celebration.

Like Gabriel Orozco, these artists stay connected and awake to the matter of daily life, but unlike Orozco, these artists aim to please, gratify and/or entertain. They are guided by a persistent homonym: Presence=Presents. Their use of cadged and modest material celebrates detritus, and shapes it into a generous gift.

OBSERVANT

OBSERVANT

by Vicki Sher

Artists: Cynthia Lin, Paolo Arao, Jenny Dubnau, Chris Doyle, Molly Springfield, Mike Bayne and others.

 

“The attempt to create beauty as perfectly as possible has led these artists to emphasize craft -- not at the expense of vision, but as its instrument.….superior craft intensifies sight so that it becomes insight,…”                       

                                                            Donald Kuspit,1999, describing the New Old Masterism

 

Donald Kuspit was referring to artists such as Odd Nerdrum, Julie Heffernan, and Eric Fischl, who aim for mastery in their paint and a forward path for representational work. The artists participating in OBSERVANT turn masterful technique toward a new source material: the digitalized image.  They all possess brilliant technical skills and a steadfast belief that reproducing the seen world faithfully will provide insights into that world. They also demonstrate that looking, when done with devotion, done methodically, or even with religious seriousness, approaches something the opposite of religion. Here, seeing is believing. The artists are "observant" and "extremist" in their painstaking depictions but, despite the religious fervor that those words bring to mind, they offer a decidedly undogmatic course: devotion to visual fact, specifically, digitalized visual fact.

 

These artists aim for exactitude, in a struggle to find a language with which to describe and explain, in all its complicated particularity, the world around them.  They take on their subjects with scientific eyes.  In all these cases, a technological support underlies the work but, paradoxically, the support is subverted in the end.  The computer, the scanner or digital camera speed our fluency with pictures, but these artists take opportunities to slow things down and re-assert the human pace and human comfort with slower absorption.  In doing so they posit that without full absorption, there is no meaning, or a diminished return from “just looking.” Translating a photo to drawing, Xerox to paint, etc., re-invigorates the image and at the same time demands of the viewer an act of concentration whose reward is a startling intimacy.

 

It is, moreover, a recurring act of faith for an artist to sit down and reproduce a photograph.  The power of an attentive hand is ages old, but has a peculiar contemporariness.  These images not only represent our world as it looks today, but also reflect our current technological tools for image-gathering and our specific ways of combining old and new.  How we see has changed as much as what we see, so even the basic art tools (pencil, oil paint) have new jobs to do to reestablish their validity.

February, 2009

Recital

"Lake Water Drawing"  by Vicki Sher, pencil on paper, 22" x 18", 2008.

I came across  the Poem "Lake Water" by David Ferry in the New Yorker last summer (2007).  I liked it, but filed it away in the back of my mind.  The longer the poem stayed with me, the more I realized its perfection.   I'm making drawings by copying the poem over and over.

Lake Water Drawing, 2008.

Lake Water Drawings, (installation view of progression of first 4).

LAKE WATER

by David Ferry

It is a summer afternoon in October.

I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out

At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens,

Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake,

Seeing the light shaking upon the water

As if it were a shimmering of heat.

Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same,

The same displaced out-of-season effect.

Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told.

Some of the trees I can see across the lake

Have begun to change, but it is as if the air

Had entirely given itself over to summer,

With the intention of denying its own proper nature.

 

There is a breeze perfectly steady and persistent

Blowing in toward shore from the other side

Or from the world beyond the other side.

The mild sound of the little tapping waves

The breeze has caused—there’s something infantile

About it, a baby at the breast. The light

Is moving and not moving upon the water.

 

The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily,

The increase in the breeze becomes the mild

Dominant event, compelling with sweet oblivious

Authority alterations in light and shadow,

Alterations in the light of the sun on the water,

Which becomes at once denser and more quietly

Excited, like a concentration of emotions

That had been dispersed and scattered and now were not.

Then there’s the mitigation of the shadow of a cloud,

And the light subsides a little, into itself.

 

Although this is a lake it is as if

A tide were running mildly into shore.

The sound of the water so softly battering

Against the shore is decidedly sexual,

In its liquidity, its regularity,

Its persistence, its infantile obliviousness.

It is as if it had come back to being

A beginning, an origination of life.

 

The plane of the water is like a page on which

Phrases and even sentences are written,

But because of the breeze, and the turning of the year,

And the sense that this lake water, as it is being

Experienced on a particular day, comes from

Some source somewhere, beneath, within, itself,

Or from somewhere else, nearby, a spring, a brook,

Its pure origination somewhere else,

It is like an idea for a poem not yet written

And maybe never to be completed, because

The surface of the page is like lake water,

That takes back what is written on its surface,

And all my language about the lake and its

Emotions or its sweet obliviousness,

Or even its being like an origination,

Is all erased with the changing of the breeze

Or because of the heedless passing of a cloud.

 

When, moments after she died, I looked into

Her face, it was as untelling as something natural,

A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,

Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.

Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;

 

But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.

You Don't Know Jack

 

“You Don’t Know Jack” is a group of drawings that incorporate bits of short accompanying narrative.  The title of the series challenges the viewer to a game of figuring out Jack’s identity.  But Jack’s story changes in the process of telling it.  The collage of words gives the sense that Jack is not only a man of many possible narratives, but he is an elusive and maddeningly unspecific subject.  The words have been changed, the face has been modified, we are presented with conflicting stories, so what can we know to be true?   In the end, we’re forced to admit that representation presents an interesting conundrum.  Pictures are static, but people are not; perceptions change, stories change, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.  And, this shifting landscape of knowing/not knowing is ultimately familiar, a better representation of human experience because it presents a territory of shaky and insufficient knowledge that we can recognize as our own.  So even though we know what we know, we still don’t know Jack. 

The text reads "Jack loves Women", but "Women"  has been collaged over, making it read "Jack loves - French Films"

Text Reads : "Jack smoked a little [Hash] in the Eighties".  "Hash" is collage.

The text reads: "Jack is a Total Heartthrob, Liar, Heartthrob, Liar".

Detail of above.

The text reads: "Jack thinks he looks pretty sexy holding this fish, but he doesn't realize not everyone goes for his particular brand of macho".