Category: Art

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Fingers

The Wendy’s finger story would make such a great Coen Brothers movie. The woman accused of shaking down Wendy’s allegedly acquired the finger from her husband, who is in jail now for using his son’s social security number to avoid paying child support to his previous wife, and purchased the fingertip from his co-worker, whose finger was mangled in an accident at work, and who was desperate for cash because his disability checks were lost in the mail because he had to move out of his trailer when the guy he was living with was evicted after his dog mauled a neighbor’s poodle.

Speaking of body parts, I got nominated for this big photography award yesterday. As there are 49 other nominees, I’m not very hopeful of winning, but it is encouraging to at least be nominated. And I can add it to my resume. Woo hoo!

Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly wore Christ’s foreskin, which he had fashioned into a ring following his circumcision, after she was married and united with him. You can see her finger on display in her former home, and her head if you pop in a few euros to turn on the light, but I can’t remember if it was her marriage finger that’s on display. I bought rings from her house when I went there, and gave them to all of my friends so that we could be brides of Christ, too.

The body part thing is something that I love about Catholocism. The body that is off limits while it’s moving is suddenly worshipped when it’s all chopped up and put into little reliquaries. Is transubstantiation just suppressed sexual longing?

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YBCA with Philip

Last night was an aesthetic joyride with Philip. It all began at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with a show of photos and large projected videos by Oliver Boberg. Boberg seems to document banal and empty spaces, but rather than recording real life, he painstakingly crafts his scenes as scale models. There’s no visual cue. Not only are they absolutely convincing, they’re mesmerizing evocations of place and stillness. In the large gallery, there are four enormous screens, arranged in such a way that you only experience one projected film at a time. Each film is of a desolate space at night: one of snow falling on a bridge; another of a warehouse; a street scene in the rain; and a dreamy hazy forest. And isn’t he cute in that Euro-artist kind of way?

After the elegant installation by Robert Kusmirowski, The Museum of the Last Artwork, we made our way upstairs to David Cannon Dashiell’s epic mural, Queer Mysteries. Now you baby gays need to go see this show. I followed David’s work in the late 80’s, up to the first showing of the mural at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993, just a few weeks before he died. It’s a comic tour-de-force queer sci-fi rendering of the murals at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii.

This was a perfect segue to the films of George and Mike Cuchar. George was there and talked a bit before and after. He’s the most entertaining artist around, with a shrill Bronx accent, hunched shoulders, and the affect of a stand-up comic. And one of underground cinema’s masters. His films are homemade mini-melodramas, lurid and comic, and just short enough to keep your attention.

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Orange and Brown

Tonight the Super Bears and I had dinner at the Pacific Cafe, in the Richmond. I’ve been going there since 1985, the last time I think in ’88, and absolutely nothing has changed, from the predominance of the colors orange and brown to the two choices of starch. As usual, there was a line out front, and as usual we were each handed a glass of chablis as we waited for a table to open. It took two full glasses each for a table to be available, so dinner was a delightful blur of crustaceans and conversation and a pretty yummy cheesecake for dessert. We made our way back to BC’s and watched The Conversation, continuing my reacquaintance with the films of the 60’s and 70’s, which I’m convinced was truly the Golden Age of film. It’s all about Before and After the New Wave for me. It’s filmed on location in San Francisco and, narrative aside, you get to see the Embarcadero Center being built, the City of Paris building before it was demolished and replaced by Philip Johnson’s Neiman-Marcus, the harmonious Union Square before it too was destroyed to make way for the abomination that sits on the site today, and a really really young Harrison Ford, before all the muscle! And Cindy Williams doing serious acting!

Earlier I took in a few of the new Mission gallery spaces with Emily, including hot shows at Mission 17 and Queen’s Nails Annex. The neighborhood is finally buzzing with some exciting artist-run spaces. I’m not lucid enough to recount the shows that I saw, so check them out before the next dot com bubble forces everybody out of town again.

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Shows

I’m growing fond of Mr. Twentysomething Chelsea Dealer, and his fast New York pitch. It’s also encouraging to have someone so excited about what I’m doing. We’ve set a date for my New York show, March, 2006, and I’m going to show grids from the past few years, as well as some single image works and sound and video pieces that I’ve never exhibited before. The viewer is going to be showered gently in testosterone. The show is going to be called Spring.

Okay, time to put on my second hat, and invite you all to preview the next show at Marjorie Wood Gallery–a project by Nina Zurier, called Ham Balls. The essay about her piece isn’t ready yet, but here’s a little something in Nina’s words about her work:

When I take a photograph, I choose an object, usually for its color, point a digital camera at it, adjust the settings in a way that challenges the auto mode’s ability to take a “good” picture, and then click the shutter. I engage chance, to some extent, in the process; the purposeful part happens when I choose what to print.

By setting up a sort of mechanical system or routine, and taking advantage of the digital processors in the camera that have been programmed to adjust to a wide range of conditions in terms of light and focus, I’m experimenting with an old medium that has been given new technology. In choosing images I am considering the formal qualities of photography and abstraction, and in some instances I am also looking for social content.

I do my own printing. I don’t really do much image manipulation in Photoshop, just to get the color to print to what I remember shooting. I might crop a little, but usually not even that. The way it gets a little darker in the corners of the image is important, because that is how you can tell that the image was made through a lens.

Enjoy!

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All About Coco

Okay, so this dealer dude in New York sends me this note asking me to submit work for an art fair, to which I submit several ideas, and then today I get this…

Listen, I really think we have something hot here with your work and I think we can push you right into the limelight. Can I call you on the phone?

This has happened before. They get all excited, then Eve Harrington comes along. When I showed my San Francisco dealer my proposal for my first show with her, she said “You’re going to make me rich,” and instead, only a single lesbian heiress, who was obsessed with my sister, bought anything. She bought a lot, but still.

Limelight?

It’s hard not to get excited, to not think that maybe this time something might happen. Is this the way everybody thinks? Norma Shearer walks into the manager’s office and notices a picture of the manager’s daughter, thinks she’s pretty, and then makes Janet Leigh an MGM star? Janet couldn’t act, had no aspirations to be in films. That’s what I want!

I’ve been asked to come up with a proposal to represent his gallery at a second art fair and the deadline is Friday. Tomorrow. Better get to it…

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The Universe Within

So my sister Sue has been visiting. Sue is 50 and looks like she’s 29, with a matching disposition and complexion. Last week we went to see the exhibition, The Universe Within at the Masonic Hall. It consists of 100 or so actual bodies that have been preserved with a process called “plastination,” a kind of plastic petrification. The exhibit was a bit more visual than scientific, and offered several really stunning visuals, like a flayed man holding a hanger with his skin draped over it, an Asian-looking St. Bartholomew, and a guy sliced in half, the two halves turned to consider the other. There was also a cool exhibit of a person sliced horizontally into pieces about an inch thick, the slices spaced about an inch apart in a 15 foot case. Most of the guys were not terribly well endowed, but it was hard to tell since most of them had their entire skins pulled off. Only one particular specimen stood out, surrounded by giggling art students sketching his musculature. The bodies reminded me of the wax replicas of the various systems of the body made in the late 18th century in Tuscany, but lacking the scientific and even artistic qualities of those exquisite studies. The current models weren’t abstracted by the notion of an approximation, they were actual bodies, and maybe that’s what made it strange. All of those organs worked once. Instead of experiencing a sense of wonder at humankind’s scientific advancement, I felt like a steak by the end of the show.

Speaking of steak, Philip came over for dinner tonight. A salade niçoise, topped with a sliced rare tuna steak. I wanted to make him dinner so that he could relax, but instead he brought the dinner and cooked it, too. I look at all my friends now as if I can see their insides. I just can’t believe it all works. We’re all steaks.

I’m still in the midst of my continuing-mid-life crisis, although it looks like I’m going to be making a ton of art in the coming months, so thank you Cosmos, for the timing.

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Ida-bo-bida, fee-fi-fo-fida

Ida Lupino. I want a name like “Ida Lupino.” She’s my favorite hard-luck dame–powerful and sexy, and one of my favorites of her films is Road House. I made a photo a few years ago and called it Road House, not because it had anything to do with her, but because I liked thinking of her, Cornell Wilde, Celeste Holm, and Richard Widmark when I looked at it. She sings in the movie, a throaty, gravelly, been-around-the-block-and-back voice that sounds like it’s about to fall apart. “There’s only one kind of lovin’—MY kind of lovin’…”

I’ve been thinking about her because I’m going to show that photo next spring, as well as several other single-image color works that I’ve never shown before–romantic platinum blonde landscapes, peach blossoms, and Jack Radcliffe of course. Maybe. But that’s all I’m going to tell you for now.

It’s just a stunningly beautiful day in San Francisco today. With all the recent rains, everything’s in bloom and everybody’s sneezing and rubbing his eyes. Has it become accepted to use “their” as a single possessive pronoun? I grew up with “his” as the gender neutral choice, but then had “his/her” drummed into me in college to undo the gender bias of my forefathers, I mean foreparents. It still makes me cringe to hear “their” in the same sentence as a single ungendered subject, but even more so to hear “his/her” or “he/she.” What is one to do?

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Wake Up, Everybody!

I woke up sometime this weekend, actually a few minutes after BC called, and said to myself, well, actually repeating RRR’s thoughts that BC had just passed on to me, and said to myself, “Chris, what the BLEEP is wrong with you? You’re going to show in NEW YORK CITY! Who the BLEEP cares if the gallery is a little dinky place, just make a great show!” Whew, crisis diverted. I will be bringing my silly furry grids to… to–I can’t yet bring myself to actually tell you the name of the gallery so that you have all that time to find out the type of art that they show, and who knows, maybe by then they’ll be the hot place, but–to Chelsea in March, 2006, so if you know anyone there, more specifically if you know anyone with money, send them to my show and tell them that how cheap and easy I am…

Okay, so today I go into work, very excited after reading about the new book by Sean Wilsey, Dede’s stepson, because I know that my boss has read the same review and as the former “walker” to Madame S, has tons of dirt to share with me. Well, no sooner than I run up the stairs and blurt out “Did you read THE review this morning?” his cellphone rings and it’s his Most Recent Boy-Toy (MRB-T), whom he moved to Seattle a few months ago, calling from Seattle to say that he’d sero-converted and was going to sue the BLEEPITY BLEEPER who gave him HIV, The Virus That Causes AIDS™, and wanted his advice. Boss gave him the number of Previous Boy-Toy, whom the Boss moved to Pasadena last year after being milked to the tune of 20 grand and the promise of leaving the profession, after he too had sero-converted. It turns out that MRB-T was filming a scene in a porn film at the time of the alleged assault, and unable to appear as excited as he most assuredly was, was offered a fast-acting booster shot by his co-star. It was the needle that pierced his pubis, MRB-T claims, that passed the virus into his bloodstream, and this guy should be stopped before he infects any others this same way! Meanwhile Infector-Boy has started his own porn house, a bare-back porn production facility, and continues to not only shoot people with shared needles, is also bare-backing while not disclosing his HIV+ status. Well, it was all too much for this AIDS widow. I just said “Uh huh, tell me about Harry de Wildt” and mentally chiseled tombstones for them all. If only they were just killing each other…

And speaking of protecting each other, stay far away from the travesty that is Sin City. What a ridiculous piece of immaculately stylized trash. Although Mickey Rourke rocked. I’ve thought about it all weekend, since seeing it–why doesn’t this film work for me and I still ♥ Quentin Tarantino? Tarantino’s distillation and appropriation of film is accompanied by such a deep love and encyclopedic knowledge of the material.. Sin City is a graphic novel moved to the screen and nothing else. It’s like that big red strawberry that genetic engineers have spent generations making bigger and juicier looking, but it still tastes like cardboard. See it on a big screen. I also saw Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life tonight, in Cinemascope at the Castro. James Mason is a school teacher who is saved from near death by the then-new miracle drug Cortisone, but then abuses the drug and gets progressively more and more psychotic while his family refuses to call the doctor until he decides that his son should die because he’s slow at math and Walter Matthau walks in just as he’s about to cut up the whole family with a pair of scissors… It made me so anxious, like a nightmare where you’re trying to run from the guy with the ax and your legs are moving in slow motion. The wife ignores every meager suggestion or indication that something is wrong, and every single offer of help. I almost stood up and screamed “Call the Doctor!!!!”

BC is in arrivo. See ya’ll later!

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A Few Shows, No Drama, Carol Reed

Today Les and I took in a few gallery shows, the entire experience contained by different relations to space. The first show featured the photos of John O’Reilly, my favorite artist. John is in his mid 70’s, and his last 2 projects have focused much more acutely on the passage of time, meticulous little surreal paste-ups of black and white polaroid images of his crumbling world and studio, flecked here and there with allusions to youth and music, the visual space vibrating between personal and public past and present. He shared the gallery with an Australian artist, Timothy Horn, who created what seemed like baroque earrings and baubles, but enlarged to extreme proportions, vulgar and delicious. We then saw the photographs of Candida Höfer, large-scale photos of grand interior public spaces around the world, devoid of people but filled with amazing detail. The spaces were all quite gaudy and antique, but with slight references to the occupation of a contemporary presence and sensibility.

Happily or not, my love life seems on an even keel, and the absence of any heart-wrenching obsession or drama has me wondering about what to work on next. I’ve asked Dean to make himself busy on Friday so that I could have the day to myself to work in the studio on some ideas for my next project. I’ve never made art during such a lull in my soap opera–I’ll have to make something about that.

Philip came over last night for Chicken Coco-tore and then we zipped up the hill to join Redbackfur at BC’s for Carol Reed’s extraordinary Odd Man Out. James Mason plays an IRA leader who falls off the getaway car while speeding away from a robbery. Shot in the shoulder, and slowly dying, he wanders around town, looking for a place to hide and for someone to take him in, and thus wanders through every strata of republican or loyalist sentiment. At one point in Mason’s plight, a fey painter obsessed with capturing the darkness of the human soul takes him back to his flat to paint him. It’s a moving film, compassionate without being moralistic, with subtle performances and a brilliant script.

FLASH: Reese and I put up a new page on Fluffy and Ruffy last Friday…
Transform-a-Character!
(Reese did all the animation himself!)

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What to Do

I was approached by a dealer in New York, who is very enthusiastic about my work, and would like to show it in his gallery. He’s in a super location, right in the heart of Chelsea, in a building with many other galleries. He’s very young, though, and his space very new. He showed me the work of some of the other artists he’s interested in, and I felt no aesthetic or conceptual affinity, and sensed that a cohesive vision for the gallery hadn’t yet emerged.

I’ve been trying to show in New York half-heartedly for years, but lack the kind of personality or talent to work my way into the galleries that I’d like to be in, and don’t really make the kind of work that is part of the current zeitgeist. Several of my artist friends, well, ALL of them actually, say no, stay away, hold out for the right fit, but really, I’m almost 40, and maybe it’s time to settle for a mediocre dealer who’s at least behind what I’m doing?

The plusses are that I’d realize a full-scale project in New York that would potentially be seen by another dealer who’s a better fit; maybe my work would be seen by more than the same 50 people who usually just come to my openings; I’d maybe sell something; and the show wouldn’t be for a few more years anyway, so maybe by then a vision for the gallery would emerge that seems more appropriate a setting.

The minuses are related to context. The guy likes my art, but he also likes this work that I find difficult to consider seriously. Would I be associated with this other work? How important is context, really?

A few weeks ago, after meeting with him in New York, I decided to not commit to anything and see what happens with the gallery. Now he’s asking me for an idea, and he’s offering to let me do a large-scale installation and not to worry about saleability. This kind of opportunity in a commercial space has never been available to me before, certainly not in New York, and may never again.