GORKY’S LIFE IN LETTERS & DOCUMENTS

The new book, Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents, gives new glimpses into the life of an influential artist. An immigrant who experienced death firsthand as a child, Arshile Gorky’s life was beset by loss but liberated by art, a devoted engagement in imagination. Considering the arc of Gorky’s life by way of the various accounts and musings here, art can be seen as the means for constant reinvention of an otherwise troubled life. For Gorky, it was was a the “poetic evaluation of the object,” as he wrote in 1936, that brought the possibility of renewal. …

CHARLES NORTH’S PROSE

Charles North’s book, States of the Art: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Other Prose 1975–2014, was recently published by the late Bill Corbett’s Pressed Wafer. The book is made up of his reviews, occasional pieces, lectures, statements, interviews, and a prose poem or two — written mostly in his home city of New York. One remarkable thing about States is its combination of clarity, philosophical rigor, and imagination. The fact that North also has a flare for the impressionistic makes his book hard to put down.

Like Edwin Denby, a poet who wrote about dance, North finds analogies between art forms, life and work, and his writing benefits from new understanding found by way of creative explorations of various states and affinities. Here, States of the Art change and are constantly examined, subject to inquiry, and North goes into the implications and particularities of each of these states. In his prose, North writes to reinspire a sense for where one’s tastes and attentions might lie and what they lead to, or else how they might get in the way of an otherwise enriching experience. …

NOTE ON MONA LISA SHAVED

Reading Harold Rosenberg’s essay on Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. Rasée (shaved), titled “The Mona Lisa Without a Mustache,” I’ve got some thoughts. The essay deals with Duchamp’s work wherein he graced Leonardo’s ubiquitous image with a fancy moustache and goatee (in 1919), and then (in 1965) mounted a reproduction of that original, “rasée,” onto a party invitation. The whole thing’s pretty funny, but it’s more than a gag.

How did Rosenberg forget to mention Duchamp’s sendup of gender roles; why did Rosenberg omit the “Shaved” part? To make this distinction in the essay, to call it, say, “Mona Lisa, Shaved” might have better indicated that the female figure once had a mustache, and now, doesn’t. To me, that makes a big difference. “The curious thing” Duchamp said, “about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a . . . real man.” …

APRIL 9, 2018 // Oregon ArtsWatch

Recently, I’ve had conversations with writers of other disciplines who’ve questioned the point of writing about art. As an activity in an atmosphere of limited nerves and resources and an overabundance of literature, images, noise, and every reason to seek what’s “fact-based,” it’s not that hard to imagine why some might look askance at this kind of thing. Why not write about ecological ills or politics, human/animal rights, or even celebs for a little entertainment? Otherwise, why not bake some bread (a writer friend of mine likes to suggest that) or whatever.

Why we do what we do is something that ought to be pondered often, or as often as is tolerable. I keep asking myself these questions and, to some relief, I come up with an answer every time I see a show like the group show on view at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Flower(s) in Concrete. The show features works by Léonie Guyer, Wayne Smith, and Lynne Woods Turner…

thought is inside the mouth. — Tristan Tzara

Facts beget further and more facts, necessitating more questions. Facts don’t end at the point of their discovery — they cause the seeker to ponder and hunt the unseen. Champions of freedom encourage curiosity, scrutiny, even adventure. It’s only the ideology of the fascist to make what’s hidden — and also far away — seem unsavory, evil. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his ideas about the universe that flew in the face of the state-enforced religious order. It’s like the modern ideology of the nativist, the bigot, evident in so many recent demands that indicate a fear-instilling, hegemonic plan. ‘Tighten U.S. borders’ is a most incessant platform, for fear of what’s outside, when facts reveal that dangers within U.S. borders are perhaps more insidious, unchecked. …

If I could make the world as pure
And strange as what I see
I’d put you in a mirror
I’d put in front of me

— “Pale Blue Eyes” by Lou Reed

In keeping with Warhol’s urge out of Modernism, it could be said that Lou Reed’s was an urge out of, away from, our own reflections. Simple, strange, and, like Cage and also Rauschenberg, these practices are less about singularity than about multiplicity, collaboration, and even, maybe, togetherness.

David Lynch’s politics makes an appearance in Twin Peaks Season II in absurd and surreal scenes, making a case for meaningful stripes of absurdism. And he doesn’t have to choose, or be dumb. One example is when Laura Palmer’s mother handles the Truck-You perv by taking her face off and de-necking the cur with her mind. …

John Yau is a poet as well as a supremely prolific art and literary critic. A new collection of his prose, The Wild Children of William Blake (from Autonomedia, 2017), centers on oft-forgotten artists and under read writers, with the occult as the leitmotif that threads many of his connections. Leave it to a poet to consider the unseen, the enigmatic — and even the mystical — in critical writing today. …

READ MORE @ artcritical.com

Lynne Tillman’s fictions read like essays, until they don’t — when they take inward facing, memoiristic turns. Although Lynne writes in third-person with a character called Madame Realism, her writing is at times so intimate, so seemingly “personal” that you forget there’s a fiction going. This kind of raw take is refreshing, characteristic of some art and poetry of our milieu. But still, with Madame Realism, it’s not all melodrama or the histrionics that you might get with your average confessional tome or memoir. …