Letter

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.

Wrote about a bad play and a good movie.

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.

I’m trying to figure out how to talk about the two books Arcade Publishing is putting out in October. I can’t in good conscience promote them whole-heartedly, as they will not be what I intended. Yet, I’m happy with the work I’ve done and would like if people had a chance to judge for themselves.

You can buy original art from one book or the other.

I’ve done one podcast where I tried to diplomatically address the issue. There will likely be more chances to talk about the problem and I have to be careful not to say what I really feel about it. It’s so tempting to go scorched earth but I know it’s not worth it. For one thing, Arcade still owes me the second half of my advance (payable upon publication) and they may be less inclined to pony up should I run my mouth too freely. It’s a conundrum.

For the most part, I’m over it. I took down my art show from the bar a few days ago, delivered all the sold pieces, and I’m trying to plot some new moves.

These clean slate times are always odd in that I feel like I don’t know what to do with myself after knowing exactly what to do for months and months but at the same time the open-ended state of possibilities is kind of refreshing. It won’t last long. I’ll be buried ass-deep in one thing or another soon enough. I know my patterns.

I watched a pretty remarkable new documentary about Leni Riefenstahl a few nights ago at the Siskel. It’s a good time to be a Nazi again these days and Leni lived a long happy life denying any complicity in genocide with plenty of people to defend her. I wonder which monsters from our present will be similarly beloved in the decades to come.

The director, Andres Veiel, did a Q&A after the screening and stressed his intent to show Riefenstahl as a person not a caricature monster. It’s all the more horrifying to watch a person dig their own grave rather than being thrown in one by others via righteous anger. This is the way in which art is a mirror. There’s dozens of Lenis running around pretending to be lillywhite pure every day now. Maybe it’s always been this way.

I wrote about perhaps the best bookstore book ever. Someone else wrote a nice rundown of Printers Row weekend: https://zonamotel.substack.com/p/dispatch-printers-row-offsite-the

I was commissioned to make five long and narrow paintings to replace crappy figure drawings done by a former hostess of a restaurant that has since gone out of business. The dimensions were determined by the gaudy frames the restaurateur refused to part with.

I wrote about this at the time but can’t find the newsletter and, thus, don’t even know what year it happened. This is a recurring thing that will only snowball, I know. The past is a looming, out-of-focus slurry. I reach in carefully and hope to pull out the thing I’m looking for, with mixed results more often than not.

The reason I’m recalling that project now is that the one painting that was paid for but never hung—for all I know, it’s gathering cobwebs in a basement to this day—is reproduced in a new print magazine called Tableware in their first issue.

The painting is based on a photo of the open secret door in Punch House, the bar in the basement of Thalia Hall in Pilsen. I think the bar is still going, though the restaurant upstairs, where my paintings hung, is now some seafood joint, I think.

The thing with art is you lose all control of what happens to it upon leaving the studio. It’s best that way so that you’re not married to it and there’s a chance it can lead its own life. But, sometimes, you wish for a better fate than what it winds up with.

In the case of the secret door painting, it was sort of doomed from the start. The guy who paid for it to be created is a really bad guy and his restaurant wasn’t any good. Still, his money was the color of everyone else’s, so I took it.

I’m happy this forgotten painting got remembered, albeit via reproduction. Now it has a chance to live again the way it didn’t the first time out.

Talked about my public domain project with Gil on his Virtual Memories show.

I wrote about Linn Ullmann’s Girl, 1983.