Nayland spoke tonight at the SF Art Institute about his work. I’m really sorry that more of you didn’t get to hear him, as it was a very inspiring and entertaining presentation, with Nayland challenging us to make and look at art by extending our experience beyond that of passive fixed voyeurs and gimmick-seeking provacateurs. Frustrated by the limitations of documentation, and the “tyranny of the image”–that is, the experience of art reduced to a documentary photo that denies the viewer of an experience of the art beyond one frontal perspective–Nayland recently placed an ad on CraigsList, offering to finish reading books that people haven’t been able to finish. His expression is an experience shared between him and the person who responds to the ad, documented through telling people about it. Isn’t that just great?!
The Dating Game: Bachelor #2 Cooks Up a Storm; #5 Goes Gallery Hopping
I’m not ready to jump into dating after all–the serious kind, with sex and everything, although I am continuing to meet and flirt with and even poke some very interesting men. It seems that I’m finally relaxed with being single, and am enjoying hunkering down with developing myself and my work. My last two lovers were so hurt by our breakups, that perhaps I’m a bit afraid of destroying any others while I’m so unsure about what I’m ready for. I suppose this can be seen as an exploratory phase–I have this whole life ahead of me all the sudden! What to do?? Where to go?? What do I wear?? The possibilities are overwhelming…
So Bachelor #2 had me over for “goulash” on Friday night. His idea of goulash was this elegant and tasty braised beef dish served in an intense red wine reduction. We also had yam soup, chicken liver pate, and a chocolate mousse, which he called pudding, for dessert, with mixed berries. He’s a wonderful cook, and a wonderful conversationalist. It was Good Friday, and we talked of his current crisis of faith, the Gospel of Judas, mink, and the Austro-Hungarian empire–the part of it that his family is named after, or that is named after his family. I can’t remember which–he was softly petting my hands during his explanation, which was a bit distracting, and really nice, but I had to switch gears and give him the “I’m not ready to let you pet more than my hands right now” shpiel. We met up again this afternoon for lunch at the de Young and to see the Art and Crafts show. The show’s pretty spectacular, covering the global scope of the movement. In James Turell’s occulus outside, he uttered the words that assured his erasure from my little black book–“I don’t get it.”
Bachelor #5 and I visited galleries on Saturday–the Misrach show at Fraenkel, the Muniz show at Bransten, Joel Sternfeld’s photos of alternative communities in the US and Nigel Poor’s stupid conceptual blots at Haines, what’s her name at Brian Gross, the before and after earthquake photos at Stephen Wirtz, and Michael Wolf’s fantastic and claustrophobic color fields of Hong Kong high rises. We came home and watched Layer Cake, but in scanning the possible titles to watch, he uttered the words that assured his erasure from my little black book–“I didn’t really like Election.”
Bachelor #7 will be coming over Tuesday night for dinner and a movie. I already felt him out at tea a while ago, while he felt me out literally, even squeezing my pecs to see what was behind my stylishly blousey blue top. He’s smart, is interested in art, really, and film, and seems to have a very active and fun life, engaged in all sorts of diverse interests. He has ads, though, on every gay site there is, with graphic pictures of all of his business. I’m playing the madonna to his whore, though, so stay tuned for fireworks or flying frying pans.
The Dating Game: Bachelors #3 and #4
I met up with Bachelor #3 yesterday afternoon for coffee. He’s a husky bear with a multi-hued beard similar to a lion’s, a big smile, and a bubbly personality. He has an assured masculinity that nicely balanced with a slight gay twang and an elegant stride. We had only an hour to chat, which went by swiftly with very pleasant and jolly bantering. Stay tuned for more of Bachelor #3.
Big Chrissy gave me a lift to Brett Reichman’s opening at Paule Anglim. Brett’s virtuoso crosshatched works on paper defy comprehension. I don’t know how a human was able to make those marks. The content is just as gripping–images of Brett in almost pornographic stances, clothed, but with rolled fabric standing in for gentle-talia, and huge colorful paintings of knotted fabric in colors of the gay flag. Many old buddies were there, as well as new. I bumped into Bachelor #4, with whom I had chatted the evening before, a grad student in the UC painting department. He’s very round and compact, with a black triangular soul patch and glasses, a very gentle man. He talked about his upcoming MFA show and his current work, and I noticed his eyes darting back up to my face as I looked away and back. There’s definitely some chemistry with this one. He’s articulate, talented (I’m assuming), and has a kind face and penetrating eyes.
Later I caught up with Davide for John Woo’s Hard-Boiled, which is still just as fun as when it came out. The violence is like a ballet, in fast and slow motion. In Hong Kong action films, people die by convulsing and flipping through the air and crashing into cannisters that explode. During the grand action sequences, hundreds of expendable cops and gangsters appear out of nowhere and leap in front of bullets and spray blood all over the screen. And there’s always paper flying up in the air. Guys on motorcycles jump over burning cars only so that we can see their bikes explode. Logic takes a back seat to spectacle, and it’s gorgeous.
Happiness
I’m so happy. There are birds singing outside my window. It’s like I’m in a Disney feature from 1939. “Hello little squirrel.” “Good morning, Coco!!” All the animals in the garden will follow me into the studio today and whistle while I work.
I’ve shot a brand new body of work that I’ll be printing this week and next. It feels so good to feel good about what I’m doing, and to be on a new aesthetic path. I’m into pretty these days, still with an eye on disturbing, maybe jarring, but pretty nonetheless. Beautiful and disturbing is what I long for, but today, just beauty.
I do hope you all can come to my show in late May–it’s my first solo show in San Francisco since 2000. It’ll run through Gay Day, so if you’re in the ‘hood, let me know and I’ll give you a guided tour. If you can’t come, send a friend. A friend with deep pockets. And hairy forearms.
Now I’m going to throw on my studio gown and waltz down to my studio in my glass slippers, golden cape, and velvet beret…
Shostakovich and Plum Blossoms
Saturday night I had a wonderful evening with D&D, first dinner at Caffe della Stella and then Shostakovich at the symphony. The performance began with a piece for jazz orchestra, written when Shostakovich was very young, a very lively piece of music that segued into a violin concerto and finally the dirge-like 13th Symphony. The piece ended with a cellphone accompaniment from an audience member, extending the music firmly into our post-Cage era.
I’ve been photographing up a storm. Forget all the bears for a sec, I’m druelling over plum blossoms! In between rain showers, I’ve been teetering on top of a rickety ladder and shooting some medium format color shots of my Italian prune plum in bloom. They’re almost abstact, with wild punchy color and tree-ness that’s like in cubist space or something. Unlike anything I’ve done before. They look photoshoped, but are completely unmanipulated, shot with a very slow film, aperature wide open (as always), and literally from a bird’s-eye-view. I’ve decided to scrap my previous plans for my show at Meridian next month and include a wall of these photos. They’ll mirror formally the sound piece on the opposite wall, and play nicely against the exploding testicles grid to the right. You all must come!
Single: Day 1
I’m on the plane back to San Francisco, contemplating the next stage of my life as a newly single homosexualist. But first, a bit about the last few days in New York:
Our last weekend in the Big Apple was shared with my old high school buddy Jason, now an environmental consultant working in Our Nation’s Capital. We spent the day visiting galleries and museums, and eating Cuban and New American cuisine.
Murray Guy on 17th Street had a show of photographs by Barbara Probst that we really liked. The subject of her photographs is the moment of exposure itself, and how our point of view affects our understanding of the image. She’ll photograph a scene with several cameras positioned at different angles, the shutters of the cameras released at the same moment. An array of five photographs, for instance, depicts the same girl, with hands up, but in one image it looks like she’s playing catch outside, in another it’s revealed that she’s standing in front of a backdrop and modeling for the camera, and in another it looks like she’s on the street and possibly in trouble. Any strict reading of the narrative is confounded by the different views.
We then hopped on the train for Long Island City and a visit to the Sculpture Center, where another old friend, Mary Cerutti is now the director. They have a fantastic group of works on display. A Scottish artist, Anya Gallaccio, cut down and reassembled a 30-foot tall weeping cherry tree in the central gallery space. The means of the tree’s support are all visible–large cables and big bolts used to piece the limbs back together. The piece elegantly represents our desire to tame nature, to create landscapes that mimic the natural, while drawing our attention to the extraordinary sculptural qualities of the tree itself. The smell is wonderful, too. There are also some fantastic installations downstairs: In one dark corridor of the industrial brick setting, Mary Temple has painted the brick and floor to make it seem that sunlight is streaming in through a nearby bricked-up arch, casting shadows of trees and shrubs on the walls and floor. The illusion is so realistic that you don’t notice it as anything extraordinary, even though it’s impossible. When it suddenly dawns on you that light can’t pass through brick, it’s quite magical. There were also wonderful tiny one-inch sculptures by Michael Ross, transforming found objects into wonders of form and color, and several other fabulous experiential installations that I’ll just have to tell you about later.
Here are some pictures of my new symbol, the weeping cherry tree that was cut to pieces and bolted back together, no longer blooming, but still solid and lovely:
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P.S.1 is not far from the Sculpture Center, so we strolled over to see Peter Hujar’s work, and the Wolfgang Tillmans show. The Hujar images–portraits, nudes, abandoned places–were printed all the same size, each image formally framed with subject in the center and beautifully balanced, very poignant. The Tillmans show is a big survery of this young photographer’s work, and is dynamite. His subject is photography itself–the way a photograph conveys information, the subject, color, and the paper as conveyor of information and object. He addresses the entire process, from taking the image to how it’s presented. There are large color-field abstractions made from blowing up images so large that just the grain is visible and a single color, or very subtle shifts in gradation. Some pieces are called “Impossible Color,” and are indeed of indescribable colors made possible only through photochemistry. In other images, he exposed the paper with no negative, just light, the resulting image a record of his interaction and intervention. Some images are folded and creased, the paper a sculpture that interacts with the ambient light to extend the experience of “painting with light” into another dimension. Very clever, inventive, and smart.
NOTE TO EXHIBITING ARTISTS: If you’ve shown your work in any exhibition during the past year, bring an invite to MoMA’s membership desk and get a $25 one-year membership!
Buttons
BC and I started today’s adventure at Tender Buttons, a tiny store on the upper east side that sells buttons. They have buttons that were made for George Washington’s inauguration, buttons of intricately carved vegetable (palm nut) ivory, buttons made of horn, miniature 18th century portrait buttons, flapper stocking buttons from the 20’s, deco buttons of silver and lucite–a museum of fabulous tiny functional artworks.
We walked down Park Avenue and paid homage to Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. The few elements–glass, bronze, tile, space, reflecting pools, columns–and complete lack of ornament create a harmonious and grand sculptural presence of form and meaning.
We visited a few more buildings, including the art deco General Electric building, with its zigzag motif evoking electricity, and crown of spires designed to complement nearby St. Bartholomew’s–the power of modern man firmly and phallicly towering over the power of the Almighty.
A bit further down the road, we made a brief stop to visit Nayland at ICP, and were briefly charmed by his graciousness and tour-de-force facial hair. Nayland, there should at least be a band named Nayland Blake’s Beard, or a wig and beard replica sold alongside Jeff Stryker’s penis! We checked out the contemporary African photography exhibit across the street, and then went DVD shopping near Bryant Park and scored several super cheap films, including a pirated version of the out-of-print Criterion Salo (which has sold for $1,000 on ebay). When I first saw it on the shelf, my heart stopped–Had I found the last cache of copies left in Region One? Should I buy them all and sell them on ebay and keep rent-bears into my old age? Well, it’s not even a copy of the Criterion release, filmed in a movie theater somewhere by someone sitting not quite in the center of the theater.
After a brief rest, it was back on the bus, for drinks with Donna and Bev at a lesbian taco bar in the West Village, and lots of laughs, drinks, dish about working for Louis Malle, and discussions of past life regressions.
Up-Chelsea and Down to Soho
The cool thing about a lot of the galleries here is that they are on such a grand scale–gorgeously designed art warehouses for big ideas. There are a lot of wonderful intimate spaces, sure, but the cavernous spaces of Mary Boone, Gagosian and Luhring Augustine are like art carnivals, just spectacular. Gagosian has a super show up of sculptures by David Smith from the 50’s and 60’s, really a mini-museum show of work based on the human form. Mary Boone has a few like super gigantic catoony paintings by Brian Alfred (pictured below left, a time-lapsed painting?), and Luhring Augustine has some sculptures by Rachel Whiteread. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if you’ve seen one Rachel Whiteread, you’ve seen ’em all, honey. Actually, I did find myself drawn to their nuance and delicacy. For this body of work she created casts of the insides of cardboard boxes in plaster, illustrating the aesthetic and conceptual complexities of the utilitarian cardboard box. One of the highlights of yesterday’s outing was a short film called Zoo by a Finnish artist, Salla Tykkä at Yvon Lambert. The camera follows a Hitchcock blonde type woman (below right) around a zoo as she observes and photographs, the point of view shifting back and forth from the animals’ to hers. The soundtrack is ominous and filled with menace. An underwater rugby game is intercut into her trip through the zoo. The film ends with her walking into the water of the bear pen, then cuts to her floating face down. Hey, this is my story! The film uses Hollywood narrative strategies to encourage us to watch ourselves watching, as gendered spectators and participants. We also saw Louise Fishman’s giant gestural abstractions at Cheim & Reid, Tony Oursler’s entertaining video sculptures at Metro Pictures, yet more silly Fischli+Weiss work at Matthew Marks’ up-Chelsea space, enough already, and an interesting show at Jack Shainman of work by Hank Willis Thomas. He’s taken out the text and logos of advertising imagery, revealing the visual strategies and cultural stereotypes used by the advertisers. Michael Raedecker has an interesting show at Andrea Rosen, of pretty and minimally embroidered paintings matted with clumps of hair.
Today we took a stroll through Soho. I haven’t been there since the late 80’s and early 90’s, before all the galleries moved to Chelsea, so it was a bit of a shocker to see how significantly the vibe there has shifted. It’s like an art ghost town, only the former galleries aren’t empty, they’re Prada stores.
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The Gallery That Never Died
Yesterday BC and I strolled through a few more Chelsea Galleries (more about them later). We were a bit surprised and unnerved to see the gallery where I was supposed to be showing, that was supposed to have closed, OPEN. I stopped in to get my two prints that they had and talked with the gallery assistant. He said that the gallery got an extension from the landlord, but that he hasn’t been paid in weeks, the director’s in the hospital but he’s not “allowed” to say what he’s being treated for, and the current show is coming down halfway into its run. I took my damaged prints, said goodbye and good luck, and split.
An Evening at Bill’s
Last night I had dinner at Bill Jacobson’s in Brooklyn. Bill’s this really interesting photographer who became quite well known for photographing blurry people. And things. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, his images were an especially poignant reminder of the people who were slipping away. Well, he’s now photographing things in focus, which is sending everyone into a tizzy. His recent work seems to convey the same sense of stillness and formal rigor, just lovely images. He looked at my slides and we ate takeout Thai in his studio. It turns out that he will be visiting with friends in San Francisco who live a block away from me, so it’ll be nice to hang with him back home, too. He’s a very sweet, intelligent, and talented man. I didn’t get to see much of Brooklyn on the way to his studio, but man, the area near where he lives is super hip. I was the oldest one in the subway, by about 20 years, and everybody had on fabulous outfits. This one guy had on a fake fur coat that looked just like a tailored gorilla suit. I have to have one.