Author Archives: Mira

Day by Day in the Studio 3: July 15

A summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13.

There was a particular happiness, or at least so it seems only in retrospect, to the summer of 2008. It was my second summer after my mother died so my grief and loneliness were not quite as intense as the year before. I had spent almost all my summers since the age of twenty in Provincetown with my mother in the house she bought in late 1969, with my sister Naomi staying for shorter periods, writing upstairs at the table I am writing on now and also using the house to work when we weren’t here. My mother Resia worked at a little jeweler’s table downstairs, in the room with the boiler in it, I worked upstairs in a room partially under the eaves, with seashell wallpaper from the ’50s (installed by the previous owner–as modernist New Yorkers we wouldn’t have been caught dead putting up patterned wall paper but I’m crazy about this pattern and how it interacts with the paintings). We had lunch and dinner together, over the years the task of cooking passing from mother to daughter. A strange arrangement perhaps, by common standards of what a woman’s life is supposed to be–sometimes with some trepidation an image would pass through my mind, of the town librarian during my childhood who had a grown daughter who was always with her, who was not quite right–but the arrangement suited me because it suited my work and I always felt a strong sense of pride at this image of two generations of women engaged in creative work in one dear old house. An adjustment had to be made to the aloneness in that space and painting helped.

The summer of 2008 I continued work where the “object matter” was the empty thought balloon, sometimes a head, sometimes a cloud, but a particularly liberating space to just “paint paint.” This was my studio wall photographed the morning of July 15, 2008.

July 15, 2012

In keeping perhaps with the theme of mother and daughter, and what traditional female roles are as they affect the identity of an artist, this drawing from last summer was spurred by a funny thought that brought the image to my head, of the signifiers of female youth–perky breasts and bleeding cunt– as attachments that could be detached or aimed as weapons: it was part of some scenario I thought would be funny, but once I visualized it the thought vanished. However it is part of a fascination I’ve had since my early twenties with the notion of femininity, which I understood as a role or costume that a woman could put on or take off.

Mira Schor, Tit Doxa, July 15, 2012. Ink on tracing paper, c. 18 x 30 in.

Day by Day in the Studio 2: July 14

Continuing with Day by Day in the Studio, a project of posting works done on the same summer day different years:

July 14, 1976

My principal material in the mid-70s was handmade Japanese rice paper, much of it purchased from a special trove at an art supply store in the Village named for its irascible and eccentric owner David Davis, who, the first time I went into the store, when I was going to college at NYU a block or two up from the store, then on LaGuardia Place, threw me out because I was just looking at sketchbooks and not buying anything. The paper was often extremely delicate and also surprisingly strong, and for both characteristics at the time it seemed like a perfect metaphor for self. I rarely left the paper in its natural state, using medium, mostly Japan Gold Size, to make the paper translucent so that my handwriting could be seen through the back of the paper. It also gave much of the work a parchment-like, ochre tinge that people interpreted often critically as looking deliberately aged, which wasn’t my intention although I may have been partial to the color or, rather, the discoloration. But occasionally I left the paper alone, without using any medium or pigment as in this fan from July 14, 1976, seen from “front” and “back”

Mira Schor, Fan, July 14, 1976. Ink on rice paper, c. 10 3/4 x 7 in.

July 14, 1983

I continued to work with and on rice paper into the early 80s, looking to landscape for forms that were related to the way I had depicted or referred to the figure, and also related to the graphic elements of my handwriting as form. After first doing these nature-based figures freehand I turned to making stencils. This work was part of a series of vertically oriented works which represented the life under the surface of the sea, in a format similar to the kind of posters of the fish in the sea you’d see hung behind the counter in fish markets on Cape Cod. The overall title of the group of six works was Creatures of the Northern Ocean.

MIra-Schor-Creature-of-Northern-Ocean-I-1983-copy

Mira Schor, Creatures of the Northern Ocean I, July 14, 1983. Dry pigment, pastel, medium on rice paper, worked on back as well as front, 36 x 22 in.

July 14, 2012

I started using rolls of tinted tracing paper sometime in the late 90s. The many drawings I do on this very contingent material (much more perishable than rice paper though so far so good with careful handling) are also worked from back and front as I did in the earlier works on rice paper. The paper offers a useful space for thinking out loud for paintings, responding quickly to ideas from readings, and diagramming my emotional or polemic position at any given moment.

Mira Schor, Antithesis, July 14, 2012. Ink on tracing paper with gesso on reverse side, c. 18 x 30 in.

Day by day in the studio 1: July 13

I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers allow me a slight summer detour, as I trace my work from different years through specific days in July and August.

Learning how one works and how one works around work blocks is an essential skill for an artist. Every artist has her own habits and devises her own solutions.

Since I began to work as an artist, that is, thinking of it as my work in the most profound sense, as what made life bearable and meaningful, various patterns and approaches have asserted themselves, but their familiarity in no way makes them rote or comfortably reliable.

I understand more and more how incredibly privileged I’ve been to even be able to make art at all, as economic conditions make the kind of time and intellectual independence necessary to make art more and more difficult to come by. I’m doubly fortunate that, since the age of twenty, I’ve had the incredible luck of being able to spend two months a year in a beautiful place away from the city with relatively unobstructed time to confront my work and to work. A strangely agrarian rhythm established the summer as a particularly intense laboratory in studio struggle, beginning as if from zero.

So almost before I had made the “official” decision to be an artist by pursuing graduate studies in visual art, the beginning of the summer marked a moment of renewal and reassessment that has always been paired with a momentary but seemingly eternal sense of impasse. Even a short gap of time between studios and periods of concentrated work will have created enough of a critical break to put the whole enterprise in crisis. It is likely by now that this is a necessary element of my work process that I should recognize as such but it always feels awful. The road back to my work, that is to say to the part of myself I value most and need so that the rest of me won’t crack under the pressure of the daily, at first appears blocked. As my friends can attest through forty years of listening to me wail over the phone about how I’m not working, the work isn’t going well, that I know I always say that but this time it’s really bad, no amount of experience and of tricks I’ve successfully played on myself in the past mitigates the sense of despair that overwhelms me, even as, as it turns out a few weeks later, I was and am in fact “working.” I’m despondent until a moment when I feel a sense of access to the work, where I both feel that I am working and that I can see the work I am doing without its already being historicized within my own process.

Each calendar day carries enormous weight, has a specific identity. Studio set up by June 24, canvases stretched and rabbit skin glued by July 1 or earlier if possible, drawings begun end June, day and late night spent sketching anything that comes to my mind, summer readings begun with sketchbook at hand, sketches immediately scanned for use in developing paintings, first efforts to put paint to linen by July 4, assessment of drawings mid-July, July 11 often “the day” when the sense of working clicks in, slow down beginning August as social life interrupts pure isolation, return for another round of taking the summer’s visual metaphor as far as I can, before I am forced to stop so the paintings can dry to be taken back to New York and teaching and city life and winter rhythms.

Especially in my earliest years as an artist I felt the importance of leaving a daily trace of my existence, and I have dated many of my works over the years to the day. In recent years I document the studio every day to keep a record of the stages of paintings and, always driven by a diaristic narrative of the work itself, to keep track of the order of things as they develop in the studio, and sometime to realize that I painted over something I should have let be. This summer I’ve decided to begin to research what work I did on each particular and precious day of summer, over the years. I will post as I can through the summer, limited only (and it’s a big only) by the fact that I can only go by what I have on my hard drive, with most of the documentation of my work in New York, so this is a project I may return to. This particular way of presenting the work, focusing on the production from July and August, gives a very incomplete idea of the progression of the work, which is sketched out very schematically but with a more comprehensive and traditional chronology on my website. And, in general, I am aware of that my work appears to have undergone many changes in appearance over the years, but I see the work as an ongoing narrative where the apparent differences in what is represented and addressed and how this address is materialized visually are in conversation, with large periods of time where figure, language, and landscape may dominate, but, I hope to establish, a hand and a politics remains constant.

I begin with this day, July 13.

July 13, 1976

Mira Schor, Fan: Dreams (front and back), ink, dry pigment, metallic powder, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 8 1/2 x 11 in.

In the summer of 1976 I was working with a V shape which had emerged from a formal analysis of earlier work whose subject or, using Barnett Newman’s distinction, taken from Meyer Schapiro, between the object matter of the work–be it an apple or a figure–and the subject matter, the formal and material language of art itself, whose object matter was the female figure and then the figure of an empty dress. I also was beginning to use my handwriting as a visual element, used in order to represent the idea that women were filled with language and because my handwriting could “read” all too easily as abstract form. The writing was personal, often I recorded dreams and added commentary, or worked in a linguistic and diagrammatic manner, from an image I had read about that was resonant, as in this rice paper fan from July 13, 1976.

July 13, 1977

The summer of ’77 I made a series of masks, always two sided, using the same materials and visual elements as in ’76.

Here they are again, this time front and back in one image:

July 13, 2009

I had set aside the masks for many years, but began to look at them again as from 2007 onwards I began to work with the shape of an empty thought balloon that gradually turned into a head wearing glasses.

Mira Schor, Three States, July 13, 2009. Ink on paper, Muji Time notebook, c. 5 ¾ x8 ½ in. 2009

I began to think about doing this day by day in the studio exercise yesterday and went through the image archive I have with me to look for works that I had scanned or photographed and that were specifically dated. This morning I hesitated: the impulse to do this might be a concession to this year’s work block, but I decided to take it as a spur for today’s work.

July 13, 2013

It’s a bit of a crazy risk to post works that are not finished, but as part of this exploration of daily practice here are two of the work process images I take every day, here is what is on the floor and on the work table today, as I try to remind myself that what I’m trying to get to is what is true to the process of the work and where I am in my life and in the world, right this minute.

I was born: Past, Present, and

I was born. Here is the bill:

I was born, in the first hour after midnight on a first of June, a long awaited second child, much beloved.

A child is among many things a step into the future. So, surely, my parents did not consciously say, on this baby we will place the burden of our remembrance, our memories, the meaning of our lives and our work.

But so it is.

As I first became an artist, I began to consider some of this burden of memory.

Mira Schor, Tombs, 1972, gouache on paper, 22×30 in.

Now I am used to it, that burden is my destiny.

Mira Schor, sketchbook, 2009.

I should say that what I call “the burden” is filled with what I consider treasures.

I open a drawer. What will I find in it today?

These slightly gloomy/elegiac thoughts, on my birthday, come from working in recent days to pull together material for the catalogue for the show I have curated, Abstract Marriage: Sculpture by Ilya Schor and Resia Schor.

Just in the past few weeks I have come upon and scanned many things I had not seen before, including this grant application, apparently never sent, I’m not sure why each page is different, or who typed this, because I don’t believe we owned a typewriter in those days, in 1955.

“I am a Jewish artist from Poland. I lost all my creations and tools while escaping in 1941 from the Nazi occupied part of France to Marseille and later on from there to the USA. I was twice arrested by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp near Marseille. I was released when I received my American Visa.” (Ilya Schor, unsubmitted grant application to the Conference for Jewish Material Claims against Germany, 1955.) Note: My father was indeed picked up and interned during their wait for a Visa in Marseille, the whole thing shades of the movie Casablanca, down to a mother who looked a bit like Ingrid Bergman and the constant search for letters of transit, but he was to my knowledge picked up by Vichy forces, not by the Nazis directly. I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if he had.

Hanging, a manual drill that my father had brought from Europe.

Ilya Schor, Torah Crown, believed destroyed in a synagogue fire in the 1950s

and so on and so on, (today’s post contains only material related to my father, Ilya, but there is much work by my mother, Resia, for another day).

This archival and artistic material–paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, letters, and books, and the lines of thought they suggest–forms the seeds of the book I want to write, that I have been working on all my life. It is a cultural autobiography, and it begins with them and then–though a recently published “as told to” autobiography by one of my contemporaries reminds me that I also want to write about the art world since I entered it, to recuperate closer histories constantly being unwritten by patriarchy. But plunging into the Schor material I’ve shown you bits of here today is to plunge into the powerful emotion of memory. Even working on the Tworkov material I sometimes felt overcome by the weight and emotions of the past. That I can withstand, it is fascinating. Part girl reporter, part historian, part archivist, part Sherlock Holmes, I love archives, I love history. But at the moment I feel I have spent too much time in it and I am gladly about to go back to painting in the present.

Mira Schor, Spring Growth, 2012. Ink and oil on gesso on linen, 14 x 18 in.

So the mournful tone of this birthday blog post is not because of the emotional nature of the project, but because my ability to do it is so fraught, so endangered, because the austerity economy that has me and millions of other people in its stranglehold may not allow me to do the project as I want. I don’t want to do it from exile but from intimacy.

It was reported in the New York Times yesterday that the cost of restoring Donald Judd’s studio home in Soho cost $23 million. The result sounds fantastic, I can’t wait to see it. I admire Judd and I understand the fetishistic desire to put everything exactly in the place it had been placed by him. I admire and applaud his children for the monumental work they have done to make this happen. And I hope but wonder how I will find the considerably lesser amount necessary for me to do what I feel I need to do, fulfill the burden of memory that my parents did not know would rest on me when I was born. And although it may seem of interest only to me, I mean to make it useful to others.

Ilya and Resia Schor’s studio, New York City, 1976

This morning a friend asks me how I will spend the day, before we meet to see a movie (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann, the past). I don’t know. Sit under a tree, or perhaps sit at my parents’ work table and try to do even one small drawing.

Studio, June 1, 2013

Where the Fuck Was Edward Albee?

Where the fuck was Joan Didion? Where was Edward Albee?” That’s what I thought this afternoon, when after about an hour or so, I decided I could do at least one iota more for the cause that had brought me out of the house on a rainy day by writing something about the tiny demonstration I participated in at the New York Public Library, organized by SAVE THE 42ND STREET LIBRARY-The Committee to Save the New York Public Library to protest the planned destruction of the guts of the New York Public Library main branch at 42nd street, than by standing around with a motley crew of mostly more elderly than me ladies and gentlemen, a few of them using personal mobility vehicles, plus perhaps some 20 young people, holding hand-made signs up to for the most part uncaring passersby, with no media in attendance while I was there at least. People passed by the demonstrators, going in and out of the library, and probably some were annoyed that it was a bit harder to get their pictures taken with the lions because there were people hanging around with signs.

The occasion for the demonstration was a meeting of the Board though the few people holding up signs near a side entrance for vehicles saw few limousines pull in, if any.

For some of the details of the plan, here is some text and links from the Save the New York Public Library website:

The Central Library Plan (CLP), at enormous cost to New York City and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library – one of the world’s great reference libraries and a historic landmark. The CLP would demolish the library’s historic seven-story book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would replace the Mid-Manhattan Library (at 40th and 5th Avenue) and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library, at 34th and Madison), which would both be sold off.

• It will be hugely expensive, costing a minimum of $300 million (probably much more), of which $150 million will come from New York City taxpayers. There is great concern that the Library’s focus on a highly-complex construction project will absorb desperately-needed funds which might otherwise pay for renovations of branch libraries, and replenish slashed curatorial and acquisitions budgets.

• It will radically reduce the space available for the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL.

• It will threaten the 42nd Street Library’s status as one of the world’s great research libraries.

• It will threaten the architectural integrity of the landmarked 42nd Street building.

• It does not take into consideration more efficient and less destructive alternatives, such as combining SIBL and the Mid-Manhattan into a rehabilitated and expanded building on the Mid-Manhattan site.

Underlying the widespread concern is the closed process through which the Library administration has made its decisions. Despite the fact that the 42nd Street building is owned by the city and is one of our most iconic structures, the plan was formulated with minimal public notification and no public input. The $150 million that the city has earmarked for the project was awarded without oversight by the City Council and with no public hearings. If alternatives have been considered they have never been disclosed, and no cost-benefit analysis or detailed budget has ever been presented.

Famed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in the Wall Street Journal, attacked the Central Library Plan as “a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of or willful disregard for not only the library’s original concept and design, but also the folly of altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and architectural integrity. You don’t ‘update’ a masterpiece.”

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman derided the design for the new circulating library which would replace the book stacks in the 42nd Street building as having “all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall,” and called it an “awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.”

It seems a venture whose financial premise is patently suspect, and an outrage to civilization. Also this seems like a very poor idea in terms of a positivistic belief in technology, since by the time the plan to irretrievably remove the stacks of books from the core of the library to make way for internet facilities is realized, such technology may already be outdated, as everybody knows who struggles with constantly changing digital data storage formats and devices).

Other informative links include:

http://www.change.org/petitions/president-marx-reconsider-the-350-million-plan-to-remake-nyc-s-landmark-central-library

“Upheaval at the New York Public Library,” (The Nation, November 30, 2011)

“The Battle Over the New York Public Library, continued,” (The Nation, April 19, 2012)

“The Fight to Save the New York Public Library” (The Nation, June 18, 2012)

But today’s demonstration broke my heart. I applaud the futile efforts of the save the library petition organizers. But didn’t they know any writers? Wouldn’t this be the time to get Joan Didion or Edward Albee out of mothballs, get any living Pulitzer Prize winners in any field that requires looking at a book to get their asses out there to say a few words and get their face in the New York Times. I had imagined a gathering of some major authors, the few writers who qualify as marquee names in America and could get some press–Edward Albee, Joan Didion, Philip Roth–why am I thinking of so many writers in their 80s? Maybe because they are among the last hold-overs from when literary stars were bona fide celebrities. Norman Mailer couldn’t make it, he is dead. You know that if this were Paris anytime between the liberation of Paris and their deaths, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre would be at the front of a horde of French writers, journalists, and actors, if some assholes were trying to gut the Bibliotèque Nationale–well actually the French did something of a similar nature with the Bibliotèque National, leaving the original building intact but moving much of the collection to boondoggle high-rise buildings at the periphery of Paris, and at any rate de Beauvoir and Sartre were both dead by the time this took place.

OK, it did make the New York Times, a blog post this afternoon generously estimating the crowd of demonstrators at one hundred.

For that it’s worth, because all the famous writers in USA wouldn’t alter the plans of the worst folly since the destruction of Penn station and for what? and to serve who?

“They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.” Or a glorified Starbucks, in this case (the projected architectural renderings look better than that, but they don’t include the unnecessary and phenomenally expensive destruction that will take place, or what renovating the existing library branch across the street might look like for much less.)

This is a disaster in real time that is pointless and could be prevented, but no one who cares seems to have any power, and no one who has power cares.

I wrote a Facebook Note relating to the plans for the New York Public Library last June 12, 2012. In it I described a conversation I had with my friend Susanna Heller, who at the time was reading The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, about Lucretius’ book On the Nature of Things, which she was also reading. She read me the following passage from The Swerve and took the trouble to type it up and send it to me:

Hypatia was the daughter of a mathematician, one of the Museum’s famous scholars-in-residence. Legendarily beautiful as a young woman, she had become famous for her attainments in astronomy, music, mathematics, and philosophy. Students came from great distances to study the work of Plato and Aristotle under her tutelage. Such was her authority that other philosophers wrote to her and anxiously solicited her approval. “If you decree that I ought to publish my book,” wrote one such correspondent to Hypatia, “I will dedicate it to orators and philosophers together,” If, on the other hand, “it does not seem to you worthy”, the letter continues, “ a close and profound darkness will overshadow it , and mankind will never hear it mentioned.”

Wrapped in the traditional philosopher’s cloak, called a tribon and moving about the city in a chariot, Hypatia was one of Alexandria’s most visible public figures. Women in the ancient world often lived sequestered lives, but not she. “ Such was her self-possession and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her mind,” writes a contemporary, “ that she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates.” Her easy access to the ruling elite did not mean that she constantly meddled in politics. At the time of the earlier attacks on the cult images, she and her followers evidently held themselves aloof, telling themselves perhaps that the smashing of inanimate statues left intact what really mattered. But with the agitation against the Jews it must have become clear that the flames of fanaticism were not going to lie down.

Hypatia’s support for Orestes’ refusal to expel the city’s Jewish population may help to explain what happened next. Rumors began to circulate that her absorption in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy- so strange, after all, in a woman- was sinister: she must be a witch practicing black magic. In March 415 the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril’s henchmen, erupted. Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and taken to a church that was formerly a temple to the emperor. (The setting was no accident: it signified the transformation of paganism into the one true faith.) There, after she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.

The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person; it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later. The Museum, with its dreams of assembling all texts, all schools, all ideas, was no longer at the protected center of civil society. In the years that followed the library virtually ceased to be mentioned, as if its great collections, virtually the sum of classical culture, had vanished without a trace. They had almost certainly not disappeared all at once- such a momentous act of destruction would have been recorded. But if one asks, Where did all the books go? The answer lies not only in the quick work of soldiers’ flames and the long, slow secret labor of the bookworm. It lies, symbolically at least, in the fate of Hypatia.

The other libraries of the ancient world fared no better. A survey of Rome in the early fourth century listed twenty-eight public libraries, in addition to the unnumbered private collections in aristocratic mansions. Near the century’s end, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus complained that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading. Ammianus was not lamenting barbarians raids or Christian fanaticism. No doubt these were at work, somewhere in the background of the phenomena that struck him. But what he observed, as the empire slowly crumbled, was a loss of cultural moorings, a descent into febrile triviality. “In place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.” Moreover, he noted sourly, people were driving their chariots at lunatic speed through the crowded streets.