Category: Art

Here I am in Beantown–don’t they call Boston that? I arrived yesterday afternoon, and spent the evening with my dealer, Bernie, and his lovely partner, Joe, who runs the local community-supported non-profit theater. I showed Bernie some of my new work over fabulous Greek food, including a truly stellar grilled octopus. We all ate too much, but drank just enough. He’s thinking of putting together a photo show later in the year with a few of his gallery artists, and would like to include a few images of Jack and Mack. We’re thinking of blowing them up even larger than the 28″ square that they are now. Bernie is one of those dealers that you dream of–accommodating, undemanding, gentle, gracious, smart… I have nothing but respect and admiration for him, and am excited to be part of the Boston art scene. I get the impression that they all think I’m this famous California artist out here. Somehow I project this illusion of fame. Remember that episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse where Miss Yvonne gives Reba the mail lady a makeover? When Reba complains that she’s not beautiful, Miss Yvonne gently scolds her with the words “If you feel beautiful, you are beautiful.” I really feel like a success out here.

So anyway, this morning I met with Les Wright, who couldn’t have been More Right as an art-viewing buddy. And he is as cute as a button–a shaved, squat, bearded one, with glasses and a big hoop earing. We ended up spending the whole day together, visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and the Gardner Museum, in between lots of coffee, coffee talk, theorist bashing, divulged secrets, art theory, bear theory (I have to giggle), boyfriend woes, girltalk, a bizarrely high number of common acquaintances, and just lots of fun. He’s just a swell fellow, and has written several books on the bear phenomenon, such as The Bear Book I and The Bear Book II. He’s working on a new tome about–you know, we talked for the longest time about it, and I can’t remember the way he put it, but it has something to do with long-term coping with trauma. Okay, so back to the Gardner museum… The Gardner contains the amazing private collection of Isabella Gardner. It includes a Masaccio (he died in his 20’s, produced very little, and was one of the most influential early Renaissance painters in northern Italy), a Giovanni Bellini (no identifying tag, but a gem of a painting of the Madonna and Child in a playful very tender display of affection), several Boticellis, a Rembrandt, she used to own a Vermeer, but it was stolen, a pretty fabulous portrait of herself by Sargent, a gorgeous Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach, and endless scraps of chapels, marble sculpture, monasteries, and venetian palazzi embedded in the walls and architecture of the museum, which used to be her home: home sweet classical medieval venetian renaissance baroque ashcan flemish fin de siecle home.

Here’s the latest. I should have a third piece finished by tomorrow…

Okay, Thundercrack! is now a series. The second piece will be a horizontal array of images arranged to look like a single arcing bolt of lightning. (I’m thinking of Andres Serano’s beautiful cumshot photos from the mid-80’s.)

I feel ecstatic about the possibilities of freeing myself from the tyranny of the 12-image rectangle.

……not while I’m alive, anyway. I finally got a hold of the curator of works on paper for the local big museum. They’re no longer collecting art of contemporary artists–their collection stops at the end of the 20th Century. Despite my assurance that I had plenty of work from before the turn of the century, a mid-20th century child myself, with roots firmly in modernist and postmodernist abstraction, I am considered an artist of the new millenium.

The senior photography curator at a local big museum sent me a note today that s/he wants to see my new grids IN PERSON!

Actually, this happens every year, so get used to the bitter pill that we’ll all have to swallow when s/he overlooks me to buy yet another of my younger contemporaries’ photos of blurry waiffish half-naked smoking trannies.

Here’s the response I sent to my disappointed supporter:

…thank you for your comments. Your opinions were not so much harsh as unhelpful. These images, I’m afraid to say, do indeed say a lot about me–perhaps a side that you haven’t seen yet, and a side that I am only beginning to explore. So it helps me more at this juncture to hear about what is being seen, and why the images don’t work. Pejorative terms like “derivative” and “sophomoric” are lost on me, because, first off, I’m not really interested in originality, but in being true to my experience–and “sophomoric” discards the conceptual basis of the project and the seriousness with which I’ve pursued its realization. Jack and Mack have always been photographed in poses that are very specific to and easily recognizable as pornography–it is within the context of pornographic photography that I wish to reposition them. But in doing so, I’m not asking the viewer to see them in a different way, I am merely presenting MY experience of them, which has been limited to porn videos and photos, in a new context–the context of nude male photography, which traditionally has been a way of presenting the naked male form in the guise of art. The poses are taken from paintings that have inspired and been copied by many artists over the centuries to tell different stories. I’ve isolated the form from the story to draw specific attention to the male body. I’ve kept the pose to imply that there is a narrative, one engaged with the history of the male body in art, but I leave it up to the viewer to create it. It’s the form that I’m after.

Lighten up a little.

Actually, I just wanted to be alone with Jack Radcliffe and Mack, naked–the rest is hooey. One of the things that interests me is that Jack and Mack are already in the public eye as objects of a kind of adoration. Catholic churches are filled with pieces of bodies and paintings of divine beings that are venerated in place of the live body. I have these pictures to gaze upon and project my desires onto.

A note from one of my collectors about my new Jack and Mack pictures:

I believe your piece on Mack is derivative and sophomoric. You have indeed captured the colors, light and poses of the classic painters and that may be what I find boring about them. They say nothing about you (other than of your ability to translate) and do not allow me to recognize something new about perception, emotion or beauty.

However, I was intrigued with the thumbnail images. I read across them and thought that the larger image would be of the piece I saw in the thumbnail: hands, bellies, neck uplifted, et al.

Alas, I was disappointed.