Category: Art

Posted on

The Dating Game: Coco’s Opening, Meet Bachelor #10

The opening last night was fun. I ended up adding an extra work, a little quadrant of Dean Smith as a sort of flower/sphincter/target. It provided some balance and focus on the tiny wall as you exit, and a nice segue into Dean’s work. Thank you, everybody, for coming out! Tell your friends!

So five of the guys that I’ve seen lately showed up–numbers 1, 2, 4, and 8–and the latest dream date, Mr. 10. 4 and 10 had dinner with me, Philip, Dean, and his friend, Dean, afterwards, at Cafe Bastille. I’m at a strange point in this “game,” where I’ve met many interesting men, each of whom appeals to me in different ways. I see all these different paths available–do I hunker down with the Cowardly Lion and bad TV? Travel the world with the sexy newcomer? Be part of a boho artist couple? And then there’s #9, whom I hardly know but really like being around. This kind of dating is new to me–the calm and open kind. I don’t feel ready to commit yet to any one in particular, even for “serious” dating. I told Philip on the way home last night that I feel pulled by the growing attachments, afraid of hurting these very sweet men, but also afraid of jumping into something too quickly. Baby steps. (I immediately free-associated Baby Face, the pre-code classic with Barbara Stanwyck as the babe who sleeps her way to the top, stepping over and discarding the men she longer needs. Focus, Coco–baby steps, the basement…)

So keep your belt fastened, Coco, and remain seated for the duration of the flight.

By the way, there is a lot of whimsy in how I present this in my journal. I’ve chosen to number the guys only because I’d rather not mention names at this point, plus it lets me be more intimate and detailed, and I can indulge my fantasies without getting in too much trouble.

So Mr. 10 is like one of those guys that you see when you travel and think, “If only he lived in San Francisco and were gay…” Well, he IS gay, and he DOES live in San Francisco, and he’s as bright and charming as you thought–in a “rock flute” or “cool jazz” kind of way. His card says he’s a “guide.” I just think “tantric sex.”

Posted on

Opening Reception: Tonight!

Okay, so I’ve taken a deep breath, and feel better about the exhibition. Here’s a little statement I wrote about the show. Please come tonight…

Spring brings together three elements: 12 closeup photographs of plum blossoms; a 12-image grid made of closeups of testicles; and the sounds of 12 men breathing, gasping, and panting. You are a bee. Or a bird. A sub-title for the piece could have been Three Dozen Encounters for the Birds and Bees.

The visual and aural elements in the show are bound together by an anxiety of fecundity, the narrative of the show located in a world of heightened perception. It’s spring. The plum blossoms open, waiting to be pollinated. Symplegades, the testicle grid, is named after the clashing rocks that Jason and the Argonauts had to navigate in their quest for the Golden Fleece. The speakers, each playing the sound of a man breathing, resemble flowers sprouting from the gallery floor. One breath repeats endlessly, the exhalation of my lover Manny, who died in 1992.

Getting close is something I try to do. My nose is right there in the flowers. My buzzing around has produced these works. I hope you enjoy them.

……………………………………………………………………….
Chris Komater “Spring” + Dean Smith “thought forms”
Meridian Gallery
545 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Reception tonight 6-9 pm
Info: 415-398-7229

……………………………………………………………………….

Posted on

All Hung

I finished hanging my show today. I hate it. Really, could we put this off for another, like, YEAR for me to feel resolved? I read the show as being very much about a body of work in transition. There are three elements, three disparate elements, each engaging in its own way, and enigmatically connected by an intensity of focus and sensuality, by a wedding of fecundity and anxiety. But. I see the plum blossoms as part of an immersive environment, no longer tied to the male body, but to an abstract experience of color and form. Oh I don’t know, come see for yourself and tell me what you think. The show opens Thursday night. I’m never, ever working intuitively again. Men.

Posted on

The Dating Game: #4, #9, #10 Coming Soon!

I’m not sure yet if he’d be comfortable being considered Bachelor #9, but #9 came over for dinner and a movie Thursday night. We quickly ditched the movie idea and settled into a very comfy tête-à-tête and post-dinner mini snuggle-pet. #9 is a very fine fellow, with an easy likable manner, and warm. He has cute dimples and is going to change the world, an inch at a time. (He said it, not me.) I’m convinced, and eager to do my part.

But, Sunday I visited Emily’s studio, I’ll tell you that much. Emily’s the best. Her work is so strong and so real and so intoxicatingly good. It makes me so happy to see this stuff that tumbles so easily from her brain directly onto the canvas, or paper, or whatever she’s spilling herself onto. Anyway, we hopped over to Bachelor #4’s in Oakland, for brunch with 4 and his childhood friend, Lori, whom I actually knew but hadn’t seen in 10 or so years since I was a resident at the Villa Montalvo when she was the artist residency coordinator. She has a cute Moroccan hubbie, and is planning to set up a residency program in Morocco some day! Sign me up, and bring on the dancing boys! From there we attended the artist-led walk-through of the MFA show at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. Of course, 4 was the best, the most articulate, charming and intelligent.

Please stay tuned for the next installment of Chris Komater’s The Dating Game. What happens when Bachelor #8 returns to town. Does #9 get asked on a second date? We meet #10… And what wacky antics ensue when they ALL show up at Coco’s opening on Thursday???

Posted on

The Dating Game: Art School Confidential, #4 and #8 again

#4 and I went to see Art School Confidential tonight. We both wondered what people who hadn’t been to art school would think of it. We agreed that to us, all of the insightful and accurate observations about art school intrigued and delighted us more than the plot, but to others, the siting of the story in art school might be secondary to considerations of things like plot and narrative. People coming out seemed to dislike it pretty intensely. “I want my money back,” someone pleaded as The End came up on the screen, and three couples each chanted “Horrible” as they shuffled out. In San Francisco!

Well, I thought it was great, with that kind of purposely bad acting that Todd Solondz and his generation have woven into their bleak abstractions of reality. I love that kind of artificiality in film. It’s different from the John Waters School of bad acting–which seems an extension of camp–drawing our attention to the inherent fakeness of movies.

We had a fantabulous dinner at House of Nanking afterwards, as usual asking Mr. Pokerface to take care of us with three dazzling dishes of his choice, including a dish of calamari strips lightly fried and served in a coconut milk, vinegar and hot oil sauce. Omigod. We walked back to #4’s usual parking spot in the city, off of 6th Street near the Chronicle. There are always parking places there because of the broken bottles, needles, piss, and crack ho’s. I don’t think the Meter Maids even go there.

We seem to be getting along smashingly, #4 and I, although I’m still not feeling anything related to a spark, more like a warm fuzzy feeling that most likely is a friendly warm fuzzy feeling and not a lovey dovey warm fuzzy feeling.

#8 spent the night again last night, the hottest night of the year. I do not do well in heat. When I see sweaty couples making soupy love in movies set in Vietnam, I get a rash. When I have to actually be in that kind of heat, and have sex in it, I just want to get the whole uncomfortable thing over with and push him over to his side of the bed as fast as possible. Plus I had to watch Charmed. “Now, why are they hurling fireballs at each other again, honey?” I pleaded with him to give up Desperate Housewives so that we could watch The Sopranos, and chat about the warped duality at the core of the Cosa Nostra’s sense of morality. “But ‘leading a good life’ excludes on-the-clock murder and extortion, honey.”

Posted on

The Dating Game: Sunday Morning in Bed with Nuttin’ But My Chrissy

Did anyone else see The Giant Spider Invasion? Since the 4th grade, I’ve been haunted by a scene where the drunken wife, who gets blamed by her no-goodnick farmer husband for all the spiderwebs suddenly appearing around the house, makes a shake in a blender filled with spiders. My nightmare came true this morning. Sipping some OJ in bed, I glanced into my glass to see a GIANT SPIDER squirming in the bottom of the glass! AAAAAAhhhhh! When I poured it out, it seemed like half of its legs were missing. AAAAAAhhhhh! EEEEEEEwwwww! AAAAAAhhhhh! Will I be climbing walls tomorrow? Fighting crime?

Speaking of movies, Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton did Jerome’s paintings in Art School Confindential! Anyone who’s been to my house has seen her portrait of me “Kissin’ Bunny,” and in the old days might remember the portrait that she made of Bob in black and white makeup as my Genet-inspired Prisoner of Love. I haven’t seen the movie yet (going with #4 on Monday), but she says they really got the art school experience right on. Yay Caitlin!

Back to the spider experience. Why is it that these things–spider, snakes, mice–make grown men, well, this grown man, behave like someone about to be knifed 50 times in a horror film? I scream, really, like scream, an involuntary blood curdling hands thrown in the air 5-alarm scream. Spiders are all over my garden and house, but as soon as they get in my orange juice, they become something else, a threat so deeply frightening that some inner alarm goes off and my head pops off like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Did you see that Spongebob about “Wormy”? The one where Sandy goes on vacation and leaves Spongebob and Patrick to watch her little friend, a caterpillar that she calls “Wormy?” After a day of fun with their new friend, Patrick and Spongebob come back to find the glass bottle that Wormy was in broken, and they see a butterfly flit by. Suddenly cut to an extreme video closeup of the butterfly’s real face–“A monster!! It ate wormy!!!”–something so terrifying to them and the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom that the whole town ends up in flames as the citizens run in terror from the delicate little butterfly.

The sun is shining, the tea is steeping, and lover man, oh where can you be?

Posted on

The Dating Game: Another Sat’day Night

Today’s Dating Game Update is brought to you by the Number 4, and the Number 8.

#4 came over for dinner on Thursday, and Busby Berkeley Night. I played Ruby Keeler to his Dick Powell–that is, Ruby at the beginning of Footlight Parade, before she got the haircut and took off the goofy glasses and gave in to Dick Powell’s delicate woo-pitching. He gave me a sweet peck as he left, then pulled me in harder for another, which I deflected demurely, channeling Ruby’s you’re-going-to-have-to-work-a-little-harder-to-get-in-these-stockings attitude. I don’t want to lose sight of his brain this early on, which is the part that I’m lusting after most urgently.

Meanwhile, #8 had significantly less in between his pitching and my catching the following night. I picked him up at work, and after a swift, but elegant dinner, took the ferry to Larskpur and eventually to his bubbling cauldron of chlorine. He makes these wonderful sounds that drive me crazy. Wild. Instead of “uh-huh,” he says, “uh-yeah.” Not as two syllables, though, really fast, like a cough, only excited. “Uh-yeah.”

BC and I checked out the Calder show at SFMoMA this afternoon, and the surrealist photography show. One piece in particular of Calder’s stood out, called “Tightrope,” of a wire strung between two abstract conical forms, with little loops and squiggles of wire balancing delicately across the span. It was him at his best–spare, with just a suggestion of form. The wires on the span seemed like they’d blow right off if anyone walked by too quickly, and created a circus-like tension of imminent collapse. The photo show had many fabulous iconic Man Ray photos, but way too many of everybody else. Edit, girl. Please.

Philip and I joined up later for dinner at Dosa, and bumped into Philip Kaufman. The director. “Phil, this is Chris. Chris, Phil,” blah blah blah, “Enjoy your dinner.” “Wait… that was The Right Stuff Henry and June Unbearable Lightness of Being Kaufman Phil?!!” “Yes,” Philip said matter-of-factly. Philip hides his glamour well, but I’m happy to be around when it slips out. After dinner we watched the thoroughly enjoyable Match Point at the Coco Monoplex, interrupted briefly by the fireworks outside. Woody Allen makes me squirm these days. The critics all seem to want to examine his work independent of his personal life, but really, doesn’t it seem like his last few films have been so much about latent Soon Yi guilt?

I work and I play and think I’m enjoying being in the world by myself, engaging with people and ideas, but really, I just want a plump furry man in my bed. Who worships me. And moves. Without me having to flip him over all the time. And has a place in Rome. And reads. And cries. And sends me little notes. And…

Posted on

Preview

Panic attack panic attack… My show’s less than a month away. I approved the final C-print today, and will take the color work to the framer on Monday. I’ve whittled the plum blossom component of the show down to 12 images, but will probably hang only 4-8, and keep the rest in the back room. If the gallery had higher walls, I’d just make a big grid, but, actually, I like the idea of a linear progression with this imagery. I’m very nervous about showing these images, as I just shot them a few weeks ago, and haven’t figured out how they relate conceptually to the other components in the show. They’re pretty, though, or at least I think, and that seems to be enough for now, and they make sense in a fucked up way with the testicle grid. I just know I’ll look back on this installation years from now and roll my eyes and say, “Oh brother, what was I thinking??” I’m not used to being this close to a show opening and operating in such an intuitive way, but control is something that I want to learn to let go of, so here goes.

Here’s a sample of one of the pieces, 29″x29.” The image hasn’t been manipulated in any way, just how I see.

Posted on

Dean, Coco, and Now, Stan!

I met with Dean, also showing next month with me at Meridian, and Konrad, last night, to discuss Konrad’s programming an evening of film in conjunction with our show. The meeting lasted about 5 minutes. After Dean and I explained what we were doing, he offered to show some films from his collection by Stan Brakhage, from his Arabic Numerals series. These abstract films are really just about light interacting with film, light itself the subject. With both my and Dean’s work hovering between abstraction and representation, each of us focused on how light falls on our subjects and how we re-frame what we see, Brakhage’s films will be a perfect accompaniment. I’m super excited.

Posted on

Pipe-Smoking Hairy-Chested Coco

A bonus last night was bumping into Ed at Nayland’s talk. He recently completed a portrait of me, and took the opportunity of our bumping into each other to deliver the piece, collaborative in the sense that I provided an image for him to work from, an image of me in a pose that was originally taken from a painting by Giovanni Bellini and tweaked by Jack Radcliffe for a portait that I did of him. I suppose it would be called something like “Ed’s Portrait of Coco after Coco’s Radcliffe after Bellini.” Ed was kind enough to augment my chest with a denser pelt and perky red nipples. It looks fabulous on my mantle, the pink of my skin playing nicely against the fake pink carnation that Reeses puts in front of Mack’s portrait–also on the mantle–whenever he comes over, to cover Mack’s nudity. They make a very nice installation. Thanks, Ed!!