Category: Art

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Florida

Hot, sweaty, moving from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space… I am in Florida, enjoying a visit with my sisters, Carol and Sue, and their mates and daughters. Last night we all hung out in the driveway, in my niece Megan’s car, listening to the Dixie Chicks and No Doubt on her new CD player, and then spent the rest of the evening looking at Carol’s prints and ceramics. At 49 she decided to finish her art degree, having spent the last 28 years raising a family and designing dresses.

Today Carol and I went to the Dali museum. The Persistence of Memory was visiting from MoMA.

It was nice to see it again, one of Dali’s really satisfying works. The museum presented sanitized interpretations of these paintings that are so filled with sexual anxiety that even I get nervous around them. His later paintings, called Masterworks, are beautifully painted and visually thrilling, but are weighed down by grand themes that are less interesting to me than his sexual anxiety and Gala’s vulva.

Last night’s dinner:
– Salad of romaine lettuce and hearts of palm
– Zipper peas
– Fried okra
– Steamed squash with vidalia onions and butter
– Alabama white corn bread with local tangerine marmalade
– Sweet potato pie

Mmmmmm….

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Chemical Reactions

When the electro-magnetic of the he-male
Meets the electro-magnetic of the fe-male,
If right away she should say, ‘This is THE male,’
It’s a chemical reaction, that’s all.

Only chemicals perhaps, but that big hairy butt fills all of my thoughts and all of my art.

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Distractions

Last week Jane Delynn stayed over for a few days. She was in town reading from her new Semiotexte book, Leash, which promises to be a fun read. Degradation and submission, oh my! She has a motherly butch look, and the cutest little girly giggle. And then Robert Flynt flitted into town to speak at Camerawork and crash my guest pad. He’s in a show called “Everyman: A Search for the Male Form,” in which I am noticeably not. The same tired old hairless muscular young body is the subject of the mostly insipid and utterly drab work in the show. And then there’s the intelligent and beautiful work of master collagist John O’Reilly and Robert’s surreal and ethereal little gems to steal, if not save, the show. Robert and I traded two images each, and I am a happy little camper. Mysteriously, Camerawork called me today to ask for slides for consideration of including my work in an upcoming show on intimacy and erotics–right up my furry alley. Thank you Robert! Okay, so I get off the phone with Camerawork, and there’s a message on my voice mail from RJ, the curator of the AC at the PotLoH. Okay, so I call back and leave a nervous as all get out message–I think I forgot to say my name, but I’ll call back tomorrow and find out what the deal is. And yes, I would trade my soul to be in that collection.

I photographed the assmaster’s masterful ass a few days ago for my Thundercrack! grid, but need to arrange yet another photo session. It seems that I need to make a white “Y” out of his thighs and lower leg to get this thing to work. Hmmmmm…

Movies this week included Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Cockettes, both fab films. Y Tu.. was one of those movies that you wait years for. I’m not going to tell you anything about it, except drop what you’re doing and see it right now. The Cockettes, was equally enjoyable (plus my friend, David Weissman made it), and it left me yearning for fabulousness. After seeing it you’ll want to drop acid, put some glitter in your beard and spin like a dervish in your grandmother’s blue chiffon.

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New Grid

I’ve been frantically arranging images of BC’s Big Bottom, arranging them in an array that recalls bolts of lightning streaking across the night sky. Thundercrack!, after the Curt McDowell film, exclamation point after the title… Oooooo-Oak!klahoma!

Stay tuned…

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Thursday Night

Thursday night was Dean Smith (intooutof, 2001, pictured below) and Barry McGee’s opening at Paule Anglim. Their art created a fascinating dialogue–Dean’s hand almost invisible and so controlled, and Barry’s just as precise but gestural and expressive. One is drawn closer and closer into and beyond the surfaces of Dean’s universe, and Barry’s world seems to leap out and surround you. All of the people who make me incredibly uncomfortable were at the artist dinner afterwards–Renny Pritikin from Yerba Buena CFA, who visited my studio last week, the collector Robert Shimshack, and former Examiner/Chronicle art critic David Bonetti (who actually walked right up to me–I was in his way–after averting his eyes from mine all evening at the opening, and said “Oh HI, I’m SO sorry we weren’t able to talk at the opening–it was SO crowded!”). But Barry was there, and he is just an angel–someone who’s always present for you, even though he’d rather be tagging the building outside. And the lamb shanks were awesome.

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New Series: Jack & Mack

I’ve been photographing two bear pornstars, Jack Radcliffe and Mack–other-worldly beings residing amongst us–in poses taken from Renaissance paintings. Since the bodies of these guys are so familiar, through the many pornographic images and videos of them in circulation, I wanted to re-position their bodies as sources of aesthetic pleasure.

Jack (top photo) is photographed in a pose taken from a painting by Giovanni Bellini, and Mack (bottom) is in a pose taken from a painting by Caravaggio. Bellini’s bodies are of a different realm, heavenly, and Caravaggio’s are very much of this earth:

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Too Many Martini, Pancakes and my Fireman

So I drank too much last night. Again. You’d think that ONE martini wouldn’t be too much. Well, actually, it was served in a martini glass the size that is usually neon with a blinking olive. My cousin Vicki is visiting with her friend Barb, so we went to eat at Nirvana, on Castro. Nirvana is always filled with cute twenty-somethings of unnatural hair color and at least one visible piercing each. Vicki chatted engagingly about vivisection (Vicki is a lab technician working with rats and Alzheimer drugs) and her boyfriend. Vicki is dating this hunk of mid-western farm boy. He says he’ll never marry her, that he just wants a lifelong girlfriend. And he cooks, too. She wants a ring, so she’s signed up for a dating service that’s kind of like musical chairs, where 40 men and women gather in a room and conduct 3-minute interviews with each other. Potential lifemates are matched and e-mails exchanged. I say keep a side of farmboy and his homemade pancakes. They just left, Vicki and Barb, for a day at the Alemany flea market. The last time I was at the flea market, in 1997(?), I saw my fireman, sans shirt–a big balding hairy slice of chocolate cake. I had seen him around town for several years, and never had the guts to introduce myself, or at that time, the excuse of wanting to photograph him. Well, several weeks later, he showed up at the LAB auction, and was the winning bidder of MY photograph! I buzzed right over to my sweet fuzzy 220 pound flower and introduced myself as the creator of the image that he just bought, and, thinking fast, asked if he’d let me photograph him. He actually said yes, and I thought, “This is what I’m going to do for a living.” I came up with an idea about photographing every inch of his body, as a way of getting access to it without violating my marriage vows, and with no idea of what I was going to do with the images. Unfortunately, he bailed out after the first session, unfortunate also because we had started at the top and didn’t get down too far. I placed an ad on the internet and met Jacek, my next obsession, and created a whole installation about my obsession with him, The Night of the Hunter, and then made my first photographic construction, Every Inch of Jacek (above).

Who knows what Vick and Barb will find at the flea market.