K had a book of Philip Levine poems and gave it to me after she finished it. It’s really good. Stayed with me enough that I read one out loud into a microphone.
I spent a bunch of time thinking about Elaine May the past few weeks because of the bio by Carrie Courogen. I rewatched all her feature films, watched some Nichols & May clips, and wrote a thing about it.
A couple days before my birthday, K and I took in P.T. Anderson’s latest in 70mm at the Music Box. Everybody’s calling it the greatest film of the last thousand years but I was mostly bored by it. Except Sean Penn doing some kind of demented G.I. Joe Popeye thing. Sorry, but liking this toothless spectacle won’t end fascism in America.
I’m happy I live in a town where on a given night I can go with a friend to a place that looks like a converted Central-European social club to see a band like Brokeback.
I turned fifty-five yesterday. I’m writing this a week before so that’s not exactly true, but close enough. The newsletter comes out Monday mornings and I do my best to be done with the following week’s by Thursday at the latest. Otherwise it gets stressful and I’m not much interested in that.
Talking about my birthday isn’t ever much fun but I’ve been anticipating this one all year just because of the ring of saying the number. I bought the Minutemen’s double-album as a very early present to myself back in January. It’s been a favorite ever since I first heard it in the eighties.
On the night, I’ll be going to Gene & Georgetti with K. It’s where I’ve marked many of my birthdays. An old school Chicago restaurant with surly male waiters and giant pieces of meat. Other than that it will be a normal Sunday. Brunch at the Duck, then an afternoon at Tangible.
After a certain age, loved ones ask you what you want for a birthday rather than surprising you. I’ve never liked surprises and can’t think of any thing that I truly want or need. I want to keep going as long as I have momentum left. That’s nothing that anyone else can supply. I want what I do to be appreciated but don’t necessarily need to hear about that or see it myself. I want to be of use occasionally. I want to keep from being an asshole when possible (it’s often not possible).
I don’t have too many plans. Maybe an art show in November. More public domain books to illustrate.
I thank you for your attention and look forward to bending your ear some more.
Art isn’t like math. If you take a picture’s elements apart and put them back together, you may well get an entirely different image. Takakao Konishi—the co-curator of the exhibition this book documents—tells me he used to always start a new piece from a well-thought-out idea. Then, at a recent art residency, he challenged himself to fly blind, to just put things down on the page to see what happens. It changed his entire mindset and made him wonder how other artists do it. The question he asked in his call for entries was not about what a piece means but about the inciting point that pushed an artist to get started. The answers are as varied as the work collected herein.
A photographer recounts a childhood memory about his grandfather taking him fishing. Many decades later he has dedicated himself to documenting the lake in which they once fished. Looking at his pictures one would never guess they were triggered by a childhood memory. Does knowing this information change the way we look at these photographs? The thing with art is that it is often not the sum of its parts. There are ingredients that can’t be listed or even named in any image that works. I don’t know how many words a picture is worth but can guarantee you that no amount of them can ever truly explain one.
The impulse to turn to painting, photography, or any other form of image-making is beyond any verbal expression, yet we always want to ask about the intent or desire behind what we’re looking at. A painting of a chair turns out to come from a longstanding family joke. The artist doesn’t share the joke. That remains private, as well it should. Even if she had told it, I’d bet good money it wouldn’t land the way it does when an aunt or cousin repeats it. What we get from a painting often has nothing to do with what the painter intended.
That gap between intent and result is what makes it art rather than propaganda. The purpose of the latter is to use visual and verbal means to deliver a message, whereas the former is a blind dive into what may or may not even be water. This is why political art ages so badly. Take away its historical context and it loses its force. If you’re not part of whatever conflict it’s trying to influence, the power to persuade is disarmed. You can still appreciate it for its formal qualities but it’s kind of like admiring a car as a sculpture—that’s not what it was made for.
Objects that belonged to a loved one can inspire a whole body of work. Yet, because most viewers will never have met them, the way the resulting work lands can’t help but be different than it was to the artist as they made it. I don’t know that it’s ever possible or maybe even desirable to truly share the feelings and reasons for making something with a viewer. Art is always a means of communication. But it is not a series of sentences nor is it a mathematical proof. If doesn’t necessarily lead to then and 2+2 doesn’t always add up to 4 where paint and pixels are concerned.
It’s an interesting experiment to ask an artist about the jumping-off point that led to what we now see on a wall or in the pages of a book, but in the end, none of their explanations will form our own responses to what they’ve made. Not if they did it right.
Art is a conversation in a language of its own making. Words will only get you so far, then you’re on your own.
Drew the Q & A after Henry Fonda for President(which is great)—that’s researcher Regina Schlagnitweit and director Alexander Horwath talking to film professor Bruce Jenkins.
