Category: Art

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Are you two sexy nurses?

Two exhibits in town have momentarily drawn me away from pre-connubial ennui.  William Kentridge is showing at SFMoMA, a big show of his films, and environments constructed for them; and John Neff has a sassy little installation at the Right Window.  Both artists are within the parameters of Coco’s Type: physically slightly larger than life, a belly here, a bald head there… oh, and their art seduces me with wit, intelligence, and a kind of informal formal rigor.

Kentridge’s films are such complete experiences, containing so much narrative invention, such dazzlingly simple technique, his hand and likeness in everything… my only disappointment in the show is that the films are given these kind of meaningless environments with superfluous framed stills on the walls, etc…  One installation, though, was quite wonderful, a meditation on the artist in his studio.  For this installation, he summoned Meliese, who is always summoned indirectly anyway, but this time referring to specific films, utilizing simple techniques to create a magical tableau of the creative process and environment.

Neff’s installation utilizes early photographic techniques filtered through contemporary digital technology.  The results feel old and new at the same time, and the imagery pared down into lovely washes of form and texture and image.

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A Night With Dean A Night With Emily

Dean Smith’s opening was Thursday night. Bob and I went together and met up with Nick, whose opening Bob had been to earlier. They both were still glowing, Bob all pink and giggly. Dean’s work is really amazing. His hand is so present but in a way that’s about it seeming not present at all. The work itself contains forms and spaces that are rendered in a way to confound resolution. It’s frustrating and beautiful, harmonious and disjunct.

Emily and I went to see Godard’s Made in USA tonight at the Castro. The film was exhilarating. Exhilaratingly frustrating and beautiful, harmonious and disjunct. At times the narrative seemed almost within reach, but then we’d be assaulted by a blaring soundtrack or recorded message, or an absurd political digression, or an emphatic political digression, or Marianne Faithfull tenderly singing As Tears Go By, or a whimsical Hollywood pastiche. Godard reimagines cinema by utilizing its language, alternately seducing us and punching us in the face with his many manifestos and domination of the medium’s clichés and vocabulary. The truth must not be known. If you finish your novel, everyone will know it, for poetry is truth.

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Impressions

BC and I are back in San Francisco, where, really, I look 10 years younger than I did in New York.  I think it’s the predominance of grays and blues in New York, which are just not part of the flattering side of my color chart, a deficiency of green and beige, the near absence of pastels.  Upon getting home, I immediately threw on a pink shirt and pulled out my neti pot and washed that city right out of my nose.

Our last day in NYC was spent visiting the galleries in Chelsea, where we didn’t see much to blog about, except for Lisa Yuskavage’s fabulous show at David Zwirner, where green was dominant, her bosomy babes nestled in verdant landscapes, legs spread, a pie in the face…  Her mastery over paint and technique forces an engagement with such disturbing imagery, well, disturbing to this homosexualist, and an inquisitiveness into unraveling the almost cinematically spurting content.

Having never been to the United Nations, we walked over from Chelsea.  They wouldn’t let us see much, as it was a weekend, and what a dump.  The walls were seeping, the grand side entry was completely covered up with security tents, no curatorial will exerted over the awful member nation “gifts” stuffed into every nook and cranny… Isn’t there a feng shui person on staff?  This is not the qi of international progress.

We continued our walk back to Times Square and bought tickets for one more show, Impressionism starring Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen.  The play seeks to create a theatrical and romantic equivalent of the impressions that the painters of the late 19th century sought to capture on canvas.  Unfortunately, the only impressions left on us were closer to those of branding irons.  Message after message was seared into the flesh of the helpless audience.  We didn’t find out until after that people had been walking out during intermission while the show was still in previews, so the producers cut the play and eliminated intermission.  We were trapped!  But Barbara Walters was in the audience! When she walked in, just a few seconds before the curtain went up, all heads turned her way and you could hear whispered “Barbara” “Babawa” “Baabaa” like little sheep.

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Kippenberger, Cupcakes, Kings

BC and I checked out the Martin Kippenberger exhibition at MoMA today. It’s a really great show for people with limited attention spans, as he didn’t really stick to any one style or subject for too long, and the vastness of his output is quite entertaining, and he appeals to those who like to read wall labels and delve into the artist’s intent, as most of the work is saturated with meaning and references to art historical figures and movements. It seems very much like he was dealing with the last days of modernism as well as his own life. The last body of work on view at the museum is his reworking of the Raft of the Medusa, paintings and prints that convey a sense of an artist trying to come to terms with the past but unable to hang on, with little of the humor or irony of the earlier work—very powerful and moving.

Tonight we saw Eugene Ionesco’s fantastic Exit the King at the Barrymore Theatre, starring Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush, and Lauren Ambrose. Susan Sarandon tells her husband, the king, “You are going to die in an hour and a half. You are going to die at the end of this play.” The comic absurdity of the narrative somehow manages also to be emotionally wrenching, the story basically about a man, the king, learning to die.

New York to me is the smell of creosote and cigarette smoke. And Magnolia cupcakes.

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Brücke, Bonnard, Becco, and Broadway with Balding BC

BC and I started the day at the Neue Galerie, to see an exhibition of works by the Brücke, an early 20th Century group of artists who ushered in German Expressionism with their utopian scribbly primary-colored green-peopled bridge between past and future post-impressionism.  Downstairs I spent most of my time oogling the Josef Hoffmann objects from the Wiener Werkstätte, and the beautiful Klimt and eerily beautiful Schiele paintings.  Across the street at the Met, we viewed an exhibition of late interiors by Pierre Bonnard, made over a 20 year period in which neither his palette, subject matter, nor style changed in the slightest.  They are dazzling works of color and form, and the compositions made me more aware of framing than any art in recent memory.  For instance, lines of painted surfaces are almost always parallel to the lines of the picture frame.  He even alters rules of perspective to bend this table or that window into proper alignment.  The compositions are also crammed into the picture space, creating a claustrophobic visual and sensual experience of light, fruit and french charcuterie.

For dinner we went to Lidia Bastianich’s Becco on W. 46th.  We shared a perfect Caesar salad and mixed appetizers including a squid salad, poached swordfish, marinated beans and miscellaneous vegetables.  For our primi piatti, we each had the presso fisso meal, which included 3 pastas each: an asparagus risotto; rigatoni with tomato and basil; and fettuccine with a bolognese meat sauce.  Desert for two was like desert for 10 in San Francisco and consisted of a ricotta cheesecake, bread pudding, passionfruit sorbet, vanilla panna cotta… and I’m sure some other fabulously tasty thing that I’m forgetting about.  There is so much pleasure in her cooking and so much flavor.  You can’t go there and not overeat.

The women sitting next to us at Becco were straight out of The Sopranos.  One sounded exactly like Rosalie Aprile.  The waiter even called her “Ro!”  I couldn’t tell if her name was given by her parents or non-ironic viewers of the show.  The two from New Jersey loudly discussed how lucky they were to be surviving in this economy with only two houses each.  “We are so lucky, Ro.”

Continuing with the Sopranos theme, we then went to see James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage.  What a knockout play!  Two couples get together to discuss a fight that their kids had.  They try very sincerely to be nice to each other, but end up drunk, mercilessly tearing into each other, and nearly destroying the apartment.  And 50 tulips.

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Step into the “light!”

I’m starting this new photo project.  Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a project yet—let’s call it an investigation.  I’ve been photographing light reflecting off of water, focusing on the space between what’s being photographed and the camera, rather than on what is reflecting the light.  Inspired by the Stan Brakhage films that Konrad showed during my and Dean’s Smith’s exhibitions at Meridian, I feel that I want to explore the absence of subject matter, to distill the photographic process into an experience of light and film.  And me.

Although, really, I’m not very excited about these “light” pictures, not feeling very engaged yet.  Dean called a little while ago and urged me on, so I’ll continue my investigation, but I think it’s back to the body for me…  Maybe light and the body?  We’ll see, I think I have to play a bit and then a project will fall into place.  And maybe my Foreign Correspondent will get here soon and I’ll have some fresh furry inspiration.

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Wealth and fame / He’s ignored / Action is his reward…

I’ve completed the design and mockup for my next installation. It’s a project that brings to an end, methinks, a 10-or-so-year cycle of works based around the theme of the big hairy male form, and my intimate relation to it. I’m tentatively calling it Web, and it has three components: a wall of large colorful and blurry images of actual spider webs, just light passing through these delicate things; 12 images of a big hairy butt, photographed close up, the images arranged to evoke the form of a web, and less-directly a stained-glass window; and 2 groupings of light passing through forearm hair, arranged to allude to strands of webbing.

For the past decade, I’ve been constructing arrays out of close-up images of big beautiful furry bodies, creating documents of our intimate encounters—spinning a visual web of sorts, luring viewers into a sensual encounter with my subject. This project is about the possibilities of intimacy and the tenuousness of life and pleasure, about trying to make art out of what’s in front of you, about light and how we see what we want to see, about finding something magical and provocative in something as ordinary as the spider webs in my backyard, or Dean’s furry butt.

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Alcatraz Monathlon

Doug swam from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park this morning. Along with several hundred other clearly insane people, as part of the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon. Dean, BC and I dragged ourselves out of our respective beds and converged at the shore to cheer him on, or to bury him. Doug emerged from the water to experience the city’s enveloping fogginess as something actually warm. Hugging him, his body temperature seemed somewhere between a shaken martini and a stirred one. Dean brought along a thermos of warm water and dumped it on him, to help the warming process along. Or is this the kind of thing that induces heart attacks? Whatever, it worked, and Doug’s emersion from the frigid bay proved to us all that even Alcatraz couldn’t have contained Dean’s he-man husband. That is, if he had been a high-security prisoner and the year was 1936 and he figured out how to escape somehow and got down to the water and swam to the city.

Saturday, BC and I high-tailed it over to SFMoMA to see the Lee Miller retrospective.  I was very moved by her sensibility, and how her sexuality dovetailed so nicely into her imagery.  She captured her interests with a seemingly casual immediacy but framed with a rigorous formal elegance and precision.  This image could be her bending towards or away from the lens, fitting for one who moved so effortlessly between the front and back of the camera.

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Weekend Art Viewing

Emily and I went gallery-hopping this weekend. I hope Emily gets to be famous one day, she already looks so much like a rock star. She has one of those Julie Christie/Charlotte Rampling faces that is going to age so well, too. Deborah Oropallo was showing at Stephen Wirtz. Stephen engaged me in a conversation about her surfaces, which I think are redundant, but he thinks make sense. She covers her layered portrait-history-porno-photo/paintings with a thick sealer, but in an intentionally sloppy way to draw our attention to the surface that she’s already engaged us with pictorially. It confuses me. The surface just diverts my attention from the work, or confirms its relation to a certain type of mass-produced painting without letting me go anywhere else, but really, enough about her, Jess was showing at Anglim, along with images by his lover, the poet Robert Duncan. Made mostly during the 50’s, and with crayons and pencil, the work is a gentle immersion into their sensual and beautiful and literary world. John O’Reilly was showing at Hosfelt, with surfaces that really made sense, confounding an easy reading of his process, or of his complex imagery. Each image creates a fragmented but perfectly contained experience of longing and history and solitude and beauty, but held together with such a delicate tension that it seems poised to fall apart in front of you. Lee Friedlander’s photos at Fraenkel of his trips across the US were all taken from the inside of his car. He doesn’t ever get out, making overt the limit of his experience to the visual.

On Sunday BC and I had lunch with my sister DiDi at the deYoung and toured the Gilbert & George show. I just love them. So much of their work makes me laugh and gigggle and squirm and think. There are a few vitrines at the end of the show that display early work, when they thought of themselves and their actions as sculpture. They had this really brief moment of figuring out what they were going to do, and bam, they’ve been doing it ever since–for 40 years, and in the same outfits and in the same neighborhood and the same bodies. Their art is an art for the masses, that you can think about as much or as little as you want or need to, like stained glass windows made out of hand-painted photos. And gay! Not liking their work is like kicking a poodle.

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Love in the Time of Diarrhea

Last week BC and I watched Pascale Ferran’s brilliant Lady Chatterley, based on “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” D.H. Lawrence’s second version of his Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I am still moist. It’s a beautiful beautiful film. It doesn’t represent sexuality as something detached from the rest of human experience, but how we’re the same before, during and after love. The lovers separate at the end of the film, agreeing on an open future that may or may not include them being together in it, but they’ve evolved so fully because of their love, accessed such intimate truths, there’s no sadness or regret, just excitement about what’s ahead. Plus Parkin is hot as all get out.

The birds have converged on Casa Coco. There are so many robins in my backyard munching down on the cotoneaster berries and frolicking in the ashtrays-cum-birdbaths I feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Cinderella. Soon they’ll patch together a dress for me and take me away to the ball in an Italian Prune Plum carriage. They’ve eaten all the berries from the top of one tree over the past few months, and with plenty more, they’re going to be here for a while.

I woke up early Valentine’s Day morning to a slightly stronger version of a familiar scent that registered after a moment as not my own. Tossing back the sheets I was surprised to find a fairly large and colorful deposit from my bed-guest, which formed a trail from the bed down the hall to the bathroom, where an auditory experience competed with the olfactory and visual cacophony forming my morning greeting. Valentine’s Day morning was spent scrubbing my Tibetan hall runner and washing sheets. The SuperBears and I made crabcakes for dinner, then BC and I snuggled up to The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. My sparkling hall runner, Burt’s basket and Marvin Hamlisch’s cheesy score made the perfect Valentine.

I gave up the Gilbert & George opening last night to see my friend Kevin in a play about an imagined meeting between Hitler and Walt Disney. Kevin made a very commanding and hot little Hitler. The rest of the cast did a great job, too, and while BC, Reese and I thought that the writer could develop his ideas, dialogue and staging a bit, we thought that the ideas were intriguing. I would have loved to have seen Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl’s affair developed, only to be completely ignored by the other characters, for instance–their ignorance mirroring the German people’s turning away from what was happening in front of them. In other words, too much of the ideas were spelled out in the dialogue–explained really. Conveying the ideas within the action and interaction among the characters would have made for a more lyrical and thought-provoking play. The play ends with Valter and Adolf playing on the floor with models of their kingdoms, just two boys with big ideas.

I’m gallery hopping with Emily today. The bears are in town, so I’m seeking aesthetic-, instead of sensual-healing this lovely day.