Saturday, August 25, 2007
PEACE OUT
I've grown a pair of handsom wings and it's time to jet on outta here. The truth is I'm having miserable separation anxiety about ending ABCN. It was fun gamboling about the ether to find Team Shredder and the Norf*ckneasters, and here's a final salute to Boadweeblog. It's been swell having a daily writing practice, lame though it may be. I'll try to keep that up through my free verse poetry, quatrains and of course poison ink letters to various evil concerns. Right now I am a broken crown of sorrow remembering happier times.
Check out the archives from 2005-2006, ABCN's golden years and here are two good sources of articles and essays to browse through, The Tate Papers and The Directory of Open access Journals.
Perhaps I'll post occasionally in the future (but dont bother checking back here regularly).
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Dame Laura Knight
I blame The Rhode Island School of Design for my deficient, male-centric, lame-ass art education and the fact I didn't know of this artist until now.
Two people called me today to read this essay in the London Review of Books by Terry Castle because it is funny as fuck but mostly because I get mentioned in it.
Terry and her 81 year old mother set out for Santa Fe on an "Artistic Pilgrimage".
The essay hinges on a visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
"My mother, 81 and widowed for 12 years, is lame, near-sighted, psoriatic and deaf, and apart from a residual compulsion to lament her elder daughter’s unfeminine appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity. (Little Lamb – you rackety old thing – who did make thee? I have some questions I’d like to ask Him.) True: ravages of macular degeneration notwithstanding, she still spends an hour every morning ‘putting her face on’, with predictably fantastical, Isak Dinesen-like results."
"The museum is a set of blocky adobe buildings just off the historic Santa Fe Plaza. Predictably it’s packed out, almost entirely with women. (The one or two men standing around in their Teva sandals look sheepish if not a bit anxious – like errant hunters in a Renaissance painting who’ve blundered into a sacred grove and see a troop of maenads coming to rip their guts out.) I get heavily cruised by the butch German number running the ticket counter"
Castle mentions Dame Laura Knight when her girlfriend challenges her to name ten female artists of the 20th century who are better than O’Keeffe.
"Agnes M. (natch), Popova, Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse, ummm . . . Living artists aren’t permitted, or photographers, so, gosh, Louise Bourgeois and Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott and Kiki Smith and Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog and scores of others get knocked out at a stroke .... If only Kandinsky or Andy Warhol had been a woman."But who is this dame painter lady anyways? In conclusion, what's up with the big saggy dirigible painting? Woah! And that rainbow landscape...
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Have pink pouty lips, and flotation devices, will travel!
My summer tan is prime and we're ready to head up to Maine for 2 weeks of RnR. This time we'll have our own house courtesy of Marion Boulton Stroud of the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. She runs a "camp" for peops in the arts community (except dealers) on Mount Desert Island which happens to be where Mrs. Cub's family is. Also joining us is a Brother of Cub
and his wife Julia Pistor and one of their awesome kids
[Here's Brother of Cub II with his awesome kid]
Enjoy the dog days my friends. 
