Rothko is dead, we get to see Jeff Koons. Kerouac is dead, now we read books by JK Rowling. Alex Chilton is dead, now we listen to Lady Gaga.
We have lost.
I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of Alex’s – I‘ve met him about a dozen times – a drink, a smile, a “Hey, y’all ah right?” that was about it. It was more than I ever wanted and far more than I had a right to. Because while meeting him was great – it was always about the music for me. I still have that, and that’s fine. But like anyone, I would have liked to have heard one more song.
One more sloppy, barely held together, heartbreaking, amazing song. Warts and all. He did that better than anyone.
Sarah K. Rich made my day yesterday when I sat down to read a bit of the recent Artforum. Unfortunately it sometimes takes someone’s death to trigger a critical response about recent trends and ideas that seem to be on the way towards canonization. In her obituary for Kenneth Noland, Ms. Rich starts with an assumption that she finds (happily) to be false about the preciousness of an art object once Mr. Noland has finished, as well as the energetic physical engagement towards his finished art object.
Let me cut to the cash here; The part of this article that impresses me – and gives me hope for future critics and curators is this:
“Now that we are several decades down the hill of popular culture, and we’ve all gotten a better idea of how frenzied and mind-numbing kitsch can be, the formalist advocacy of work that might give the viewing subject a place for the exercise of sustained and quiet attention doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”
Nat Finkelstein was best known for his memorable chronicling of Andy Warhol’s Factory (primarily the first and Second factories).“I stayed at the Factory from 1964 till 1967,” Finkelstein told an interviewer in 2001. Then later, “I watched pop die and punk being born.”
His photographs of Warhol, the Velvet Underground and all of the superstars of the factory are primarily the visual record that we have of "The Warhol Sixties".
I came to know of Jim Carroll via the book The Basketball Diaries, not unlike everyone else I was going to school with at VCU in the very early eighties. Truth is, TBD is a fun read - not unlike Trainspotting is a fun movie. (irony intended)
It wasn't until I started reading his poetry that I really started to understand how interesting an artist he really was. I still read his work and will miss the fact that I wont be able to read what he might have produced in the future.
I guess no one else thinks today should be a holiday. Ballard was known for a few novels by the mainstream press, Empire of the Sun was probably the most famous.
For me, he changed the way I think and look at the everyday world around me. I read three novels of his back-to-back-to-back and radically changed what I made as art and how I thought about art, sex and our political system. Those books were; High-Rise, Crash, and Concrete Island.
It wasn't that these books were shocking in an accusatory way, it was that they were so matter of fact in a "this is how it's going to be sort of way" - problem was, they were mostly dead on accurate.
Martin Amis wrote: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." The trouble is, after reading and thinking about the work - those parts of the brain start to get used. To great effect, I have rarely met someone who has read Ballard and has not struck me as someone I should know better.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the first great novel of the universe of simulation. That praise alone should send you either running towards or running away from JG Ballards writing.
Willem de Looper was a fairly unique figure in his time in Washington. A painter and high level curator, de Looper was accessible, friendly and genuine. These traits alone make him rare - the fact that our arts community was blessed with someone like him is even rarer.
Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look. - John Cage, 1961
When the news came across the internet of RR's death on Monday, I felt like a someone hit me with one of those punches you read about in old timey boxing stories. Robert Rauschenberg is one of those artists that has always been in my personal "cannon" as it were, if not for the enormous body of impressive work, but for his bravery in the materials the he used to produce it.
I remember in my first year at VCU when Jim Baumgartner taught us the technique that RR used the make image transfers from newspapers and magazines. That same week, Richard Carlyne ran a movie for a class where we watch RR get shitfaced and show his latest work - the cardboard series, told the story about asking Willem deKooning to have a drawing that he could erase, and finally a Merce Cunningham ballet that he would design a set for. I guess you could say that unlike many other artists, I was aware of the value of his thinking about his work, no matter how impulsive it might have seemed. Recently most of the artworld traveled to the met to see his combines and literally saw how powerful and interestingly enough, how fresh they seemed when compared to what we see in galleries today. That surprised me. Because, truth be told, I had been taking him for granted for too long and had forgotten just how great that work is.
Robert Rauschenberg Pilgrim, 1950, mixed mediums with wooden chair, ca. 79 x 54 x 19 in.Hamburger Kunsthalle
I'll admit that there is a period of his work (late 80's and 90's) where I wasn't as interested in his approach, it seemed old and dated. Recently he had a bit of a comeback with his more photo-oriented collage work, and the cardboard work had been given new life with a traveling show.
There is a period in time, when New York was at the height of it's power as "the place where art was made" and RR was there. I'm referring to the Castelli gallery, along with Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Frank stella, et al. this group of artists, along with the major abstract expressionists defined American Art to the world for the late 20th century and many would say they still are. Rauschenberg was one of the truly original artists of his time.
I'm glad I can still see his work, but I miss him already.
Looking at my art you might be surprised to find that I have an above average interest in the game of chess (I joke, but I do...) Bobby Fischer was without a doubt the greatest - and saddest person to ever play the game at its highest level. I'm sure the newspapers have the full story, so I'm going to pass on re-telling the whole thing.
Overall the life story of Bobby Fischer is a sad story that curiously is being played out in a similar parallel in the life of Britney Spears. Before you snicker and think that BF was some kind of fool - he was just the opposite a superior complex thinker who literally was driven over the edge by his own mind.
When you look at Fischer, you see a man whose world outside of chess never became the extension of what he saw in a complex - but highly structured game. In the end, the messiness and randomness of the world will only remember him as someone who fell from the highest highs - to become a powerless eccentric.
Bobby Fischer, April 28, 1962. (John Lent, Associated Press / April 28, 1962)
CBGB founder Hilly Kristal has died from complications of lung cancer at the age of 75. HK was the owner of CBGB's - a club that helped launch the careers for the Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads and most of the New York Punk scene. Over the last few years, Kristal fought a long legal battle with the club's landlord to keep the club open, but lost, and the club closed down after 33 years in business. He was considering resurrecting the venue in Las Vegas.
On a related Note: It seems like the "baby boom" generation has really started to die over the summer, and as sad as it is to see some amazing people leave us, I don't want this blog to become the art obituaries. So if I miss some of these in the future, it's not that I didn't care, it's just that I need to focus on the living for the most part. Thanks for understanding.
Lee Hazelwood died at his home outside Las Vegas, after a three year struggle with cancer.
Lee Hazelwood proved himself to be one of the most ingenious, inspired and impressively stubborn people the music industry ever saw. Most famous for his work with Nancy Sinatra - he wrote and produced many of her biggest hits, including These Boots Were Made For Walking, Jackson (covered by Johnny Cash as well), and the unforgettable Some Velvet Morning.
I paused before I wrote anything about Sol Lewitt recently because to me he was truly an influential artist in helping develop my approach to image-making, in particular image-thinking.
My first intentional encounter with his work came when I was working for Nancy Drysdale in the early eighties. She was selling some of his wall drawings and asked Chris Bailey and myself (we both worked for Nancy at the time) to produce the work in accordance to the directions of the drawing. At first I thought it was quite a cop out - how could an artist not do his own drawings (I was young and more than a bit naive). The one thing it made me do, was to start thinking and looking at how these works could vary just by the installer. Later as the wall drawings became more colorful, I thought they were becoming more about the implementation of the work than the concept of the work.
What I came to realize was that the implementation is/was the concept. I still think that is pretty interesting.
His approach became infinitely scalable. Here is an example of the directions of a drawing. This one is from the NGA's Vogel collection:
Wall Drawing #65 / Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.
The interpretation is wide open, yet at the same time it is defined within structural limits. It is open and closed at the same time.
Every once in a while I'll talk to someone about my work and I will talk about how I'm interested in a "non-specific exactness", this approach comes directly from thinking about these early wall drawings.
Jean Baudrillard, R.I.P. I've just learned that Jean Baudrillard died earlier this month. I was/am a fan of his writing an although his approach seems to be falling out of critical favor at the moment, I do think he was probably the most accurate/interesting of the Semiotext(e) writers. His theories have seemingly held together longer and his insight seemed clearer than most.
His theories on Hyperreality and Simularca, are to me, the highlights of his thinking.
Stardust Hotel March 13th, 2007 both of the Stardust's (I'm taking about Las Vegas here) towers were imploded. In Vegas this kind of thing is happening all the time now, so I guess it's no big deal. However I do think of these as archetypes of the new American landmark. The Stardust was given a truly Vegas style send off with 10 minutes of fireworks before the building was imploded.
Isn't that perfect - we celebrate the fact that we are tearing it down.
Anyway, I was able to photograph the sign before it was taken down this fall. The Stardust sign will be moved to the Neon Museum on Fremont Street. It's going to cost $80,000 to move the it to the museum. I know that the Neon Museum is in fundraising mode right now for a number of things, and I'm sure they could use your help.
