Category Archives: painting

Day to Day in the Studio 9: August 1

August 1, 1984

How much more Orwellian is 2013 than was the actual year 1984, or so it seemed when I did my calendar paintings in 1984.

Mira Schor, August 1984. Gouache, dry pigment, medium on rice paper, 72 x 36 in.

The degree to which science fiction visions of a far future and dystopians visions of a near future have turned out to be true is quite astounding although, perhaps too influenced by conditions in the Soviet and the dreariness of post-War Britain, George Orwell was wrong in thinking that political intimidation and mind control in the future would only be achieved through fear and brute force though these are still frequent methods in dictatorships worldwide. But now it is more often achieved through toys. We use our communicating devices in a pretty close manner to the way they appeared in various versions of Star Trek and we are as hypnotized by our devices as the crew in the STNG episode The Game from October, 1991, where, spoiler alert, the hypnotizing game, basically played in your visual cortex through something like Google glasses, is actually a tactic by aliens of distracting and brainwashing the crew to allow for a take over of the Starship Enterprise and the whole Federation–on STNG it’s a race called the Ktarians, before they fully understood the people from planet Jobs.  Plans are afoot to replicate meat, next thing you know, Soylent Green–there will be a fancy way of making it seem palatable as a reasonable solution to global warming or overpopulation, if you read the Wikipedia description of the plot of the movie Soylent Green, well, hello, today’s news. Today’s Times leads with an article on N.S.A. phone logs, as continued revelations of the degree to which all private communications are collected and monitored by governments and corporations challenge our illusions of privacy here in the US. I heard earlier this summer that cable boxes already have the capability of not just recording our choices of programming but they can see and hear us, they literally know when we get up and go to the bathroom.

When I think about the future, I think how the old and the new will continue to mix, but not necessarily in ways that will be easy to fathom. Already every new public bathroom is a challenge, as I try to figure out the mechanics of the particular faucet and the toilet–do you wave, do you get up, do you move the little lever up or down or sideways, and why is each different when for a century they were recognizably the same? I also think of the things that I have used in daily life for over 60 years which in the near future either will no longer exist or will have become luxury items: maybe in 2031 we will still have paper towels (invented in 1907), as an example of something I use everyday–in recent years struggling between awareness that they are part of a pattern of environmental havoc and the fact that they are just so damn useful, and hatred of the Koch Brothers notwithstanding–but they will be prohibitively expensive.

As an artist, as it is, many art supplies that form the core of my work are disappearing from the market–these include various inks, oil paint brushes, sizes of paper, types of sketchbooks, types of gesso, not to mention pure spirits of gum turpentine  in containers one can easily open, and even my favorite brand of Stand Oil. These disappearances are due to corporate restructuring, new technologies, the elimination of niche and craft manufacturing, and to marketing to the lowest common denominator of customer, in this case amateurs or beginners who don’t know the difference between a generic product and a high quality product: if you have never held a tube of high quality cadmium red light paint in one hand and of a student grade brand of the pigment of the same name in the other, you don’t understand how little pigment is in the student grade. If the color red is not as you had dreamed it because there is actually no pigment in the paint, you think there is something wrong with painting, not the paint brand you are using. (see discussion on Facebook about such matters, from June 30).

Reading predictions of the future can make you wonder about what you work so hard to accomplish in the present. For example I put a great deal of effort and resources into trying to preserve my parents’ work and histories, as well as my own artwork, but if New York is going to be largely underwater in fifty to a hundred years, as some studies predict, so will its museums and libraries, so maybe I shouldn’t bother.

I am not a huge reader of science fiction and I don’t have enough of an understanding of the present to be a futurologist: in fact I have a hard time understanding how we got to the point we are now, where almost all cultural developments I thought were achievements for the common good, from civil rights to women’s rights to environmental controls, are being dramatically reversed. I know that change for bad as well as for good can be abrupt, or it can be insidious, as were the changes in the economy and social philosophy taking place from the seventies onward, that have created our Nineteen Eighty-Four, our Brave New World.

August 1, 2013

To be honest and true to the letter of the law of these posts of works done on a particular calendar day over a period of about forty years, this sketch is from yesterday afternoon, July 31, 2013. Most of the text is appropriated from scam/spam emails and annoying emails from people I know. 1984 to 2013, other things on my mind for my work than the beauty of place.

Mira Schor, Chatter, sketchbook, July 31, 2013. Ink on paper, 14 x 22 in.

 

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Day by Day in the Studio 8: July 30

July 30, 1982

Mira Schor, The Bay at 7:30PM July 30, 1982. Dry pigment, pastel, medium on rice paper, 21 x 29 1/2 in.

The Bay at 7:30 PM was included in a small show I had of Provincetown drawings from 1982-83 at artSTRAND Gallery in Provincetown in 2007. I wrote some notes on each one when I saw them on the wall:

The Bay at 7:30 PM represents a moment of perfect pleasure and balance: the perfect swim, the swimmer caught in the tremulous moment of perfection — the water is smooth, clean, reflecting pink light from the sunset. It was inspired by the beauty of a particular minute of a particular day at the end of July 1982, looking at the bay, one of those days that are a gift.

Even in 1982 this would not have been the way I would have framed an artist’s statement on this work. At that time I was relieved to feel part of a tradition of American art, that of abstracted mystical landscape, and that would have been part of a statement. But in describing it when I saw it framed and on a gallery wall for the first time in many years, I focused on the sensual response to a moment of great beauty in nature and the joy of capturing such a moment of suspension of light in time.

July 30, 2012

Mira Schor, Who is Me?, July 30, 2012. Sketchbook drawing.

I return to the sketch from earlier in the summer which I discussed a few days ago, in terms of its temporal aspects.

Mira Schor, The Work Has to Be…, July 26, 2013. Ink, rabbit skin glue on gesso on linen,12 x 16 in.

To say that the work has to be an expression of who I am, at any minute, is to point to a very subjective criterion and would indicate a very subjective art practice. That was something that was frowned upon in certain influential circles in the art world from the 80s onward, in the years of the “death of the author,” although it could be argued that any work, even the most deliberately distanced and impersonal, in fact perhaps especially work for whom claims of rigorous objectivity are made, is still an expression of who the artist is at that minute. Subjectivity and objectivity are not really in the artist’s conscious control and, if I’m talking about “authenticity,” it may not even be something that one recognizes immediately so my directive to myself is another one of those vague tricks to get working or it is the direction someone gives saying “go there” while waving generally at the horizon.

The struggle implicit in the last paragraph is part of who I am right this minute. When I did The Bay at 7:30PM in 1982, I was just poised, though I did not yet know it, to begin an immersion in a specific type of critical discourse. In the next year I began to research my essay, “Appropriated Sexuality,” on the depiction of women in the work of David Salle, and in the process, of necessity, I began a process of reeducation in postmodern theory and aesthetics, and I found myself engaged in debates between the activist approach to feminism I had been engaged in during the 70s and the psychoanalytic, textual approach that marked the 80s. “Theory” proved to be a lifesaver, not just because it was necessary to have some fluency in it to survive in the artworld during that period and if you wanted to write about the art of the time, but a lifesaver because it took me out of “myself,” at a point in my life when that was needed, and forced me to struggle with concepts in a way that provided clarity and objectivity to the place I stood in the field of contemporary art practice.

In the late ’90s, the grip of theoretical discourse began to loosen, at least in terms of art practice, pushed by a move back to the, less theorized, body and a move forward to eye candy and spectacle. But, despite this slackening of a certain kind of critical rigor, “Theory” still holds pride of place in some parts of the art academy. And it remains as important to individual artists who still stand to gain much of value for their work and their breath as artists by gaining access to a larger discourse that takes them out of themselves, especially at a time when a lot of young artists have learned to commodify themselves by some kind of Homeric identifier: I do this work because…fill in the identity. But too much of a good thing becomes an orthodoxy that offers safe pathways to professional currency but may foreclose on so many of the possibilities offered by art history and contemporary visual culture.

Mira Schor, Who is Me? July 30, 2012. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 18 x 30 in.

The unreliability of the identity we decide to propose as our own was brought into sudden sharp focus for me many years ago. Not that I thought of it when I did this drawing, Who Is Me?, last year on July 30, (and not that I remember what exactly brought me to put those words into a drawing) but, when I was in my early 20s, I used to see a very old, very wise, half-paralyzed Russian/Viennese psychoanalyst. I said at one point something about being myself, hoping to really be myself. “Oh yes,” she said pleasantly, “who is that?” BOOM, explosions in the mind!!!

The conflict I have indicated between work that remains responsible to/restricted by critical/theoretical concerns and work that would be free to engage with visual pleasure in a less mediated way is itself an unreliable portrait of “myself.” I can’t possibly separate the intellectual from the visual. Even when I stick my nose in the earth, I’m doing it because I’m inspired by a text I’m reading (see my discussion of Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch in my previous post).

Mira Schor, Fallow Field Series: Deep Communication with the Earth, July 30, 2012. Ink and gouache on tracing paper
14 x 18 in.

July 30, 2013

Nevertheless, “during theory,”  I purposefully policed my use of painting “effects”–bits of virtuosity, swirls of paint, rich color just for the sake of it as opposed to being part of a conceptual program. Yet I was doing exactly what I thought was right for the work, and my stern editing of such effects was and I think it still is part of a search for formal clarity and at the same time I couldn’t help myself from putting paint on in ways that gave me visual and material pleasure.

Today was as perfect a day as July 30, 1982. But the visual particulars of the place itself, Provincetown, is not the object matter of the work today. The “place” in the painting is based on the real but it is transformed into a situation, a shallow proscenium in which to diagram thought and the impact of theoretical concerns on visual practice. This is a work in process in the studio:

Mira Schor, Visual Pleasure/Theory/Productive Anonymity, July 30, 2013. Ink, oil on gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in. Work in process

Reminder: I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers will allow me a slight summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13.

 

 

 

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Day by Day in the Studio, 7: July 25

Earlier this summer, I sketched this imperative for my work:

A page or two later, I did a bit of copy-editing:

For some reason there seemed to be an important difference between at this minute, and right this minute, with right this minute seeming more idiomatic and more like an order than a temporal indicator. But whether at or right, having written /sketched this out only makes it ever more apparent just how hard it is to do, how seldom work arrives in and of the moment, this minute and not the last or the next.

Every artist works within a number of contexts and territories, so that “this minute” is also the cultural moment, a network of discourses, histories, and ideologies that are always at stake, and even when an artist is not directly engaged in appropriation and sampling, much work done today has an appropriative dimension, even contemporary abstract expressionism comes out of an appropriative mindset and even historical abstract expressionism was always a negotiated ballet between the canvas as an arena for action and actions that were considered, deliberately explored.

Every work of mine is at the very least related to all the ones that came before, particularly within a time frame or series, and simple methods of mechanical reproduction such as stencils and tracing are part of the process. I scan quick notebook sketches like the one above and have printouts scattered around my studio as references, including the pages reproduced above, so “right this minute” is relative.

A case in point: today’s post is about work done on July 25, yesterday’s date. In all, a figure is off of the vertical, either asleep, floating, adrift, or forcibly expropriated from a space of relative safety.

July 25, 1979

Another in the series of Figures I did in 1979, in which abstracted figures, somewhat like buildings and sails, were often in a kind of classical stasis. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did these, though I think they were indirectly about my entry in to the New York art world as an adult.

July 25, 1984

Another in the series of large gouaches on rice paper done in 1984, this was a very meticulously detailed painting of seaweed attached to the basic figurative shape I was working with at the time, shifting gently in the bay at low tide.

Mira Schor, Drift, July 25, 1984. Gouache, dry pigment, medium on rice paper. 72 x 36 in.

July 25, 2012

Mira Schor, The Bland Face of Expropriation, July 25, 2012. Oil on linen, 18 x 30 in.

This painting, The Bland Face of Expropriation, done July 25, 2012, is based on this drawing done July 22, 2012:

Mira Schor, The Bland Face of Expropriation, July 22, 2012. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, c. 18 x 30 in.

Right this minute a year ago, I was furious about something. Fury can be energizing. The conduit between internalized corrosion by fury at injustice within to artwork that felt connected to much larger forces than the individual, was the book I was reading at the time, Silvia Federici‘s brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation:

The book evolved from studies of “the history of capitalism and class struggle from a feminist viewpoint,” begun by Federici and others in the early 1970s. Federici examines the transition from late feudalism to early capitalism and the regime of “primitive accumulation.” It’s hard to do justice to the book without quoting the whole thing, but it’s a gripping, vivid tale, about how the tradition of the commons and other folk experience-based crafts and practices that had developed in the medieval period were forcibly, often violently eliminated and suppressed as part of the development of early capitalism which necessitated the expropriation of peasants from commons lands, and the violent expropriation of women from any role of equal participation in production of their own culture, in order to make them available to the devalued task of reproductive labor of the proletariat. She introduces her premise for the book as follows:

I. The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the “New World,” were not the only means by which a world proletariat was formed and “accumulated.”

II. This process required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the “witches.”

III. Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.

Caliban and the Witch was one of a number of books I sought out last summer, to help me understand the socio-economic situation we’re in, of austerity, income inequality, and the death of the social contract that existed at least as an ideal up until the end of the 1970s. I also read Maria Mies’s Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, and Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity but Caliban was the most interesting and also the most current, because I read Federici’s examination of the systematic “war on women” over three centuries to control female power against the background of last summer’s vivid demonstrations of the current war on women–last summer, if you recall, being the summer of “legitimate rape” and other appalling instances of misogyny and magical thinking about female anatomy.

Federici’s description of some medieval agricultural practices first made me look at the grass upon which my little avatar of self figure lay as the borderline between life above ground and the earth below as a generative field, so I placed my figure in the earth below the grass as a line of demarcation. But reading about the horrific suppression of women particularly during the period of the Witch-hunts (not as long ago as you may think–not some dark long ago of the “Middle Ages,” but from the mid-15th century through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), my recent personal experience of expropriation clicked with a larger history and around the word expropriation, and I plunged my avatar into the earth, head first, not of her own volition, Expropriation surrounds us, whether it’s corporate downsizing, unemployment, climate-caused displacement, or expropriation of bodies of knowledge that are deemed obsolete but these days the methods of expropriation are usually as violent as burning at the stake, they come with a happy face.

July 25, 2013

This year the process of expropriation seems to be in a kind of stasis or impasse, of topsy-turvy which remains unresolved or, simply, dual. In the studio yesterday, the 25th, “this minute” as of yesterday, below or above, depending on how you hang the painting, an Arcadian mid-summer moment in which time and matter slow enough to be studied at leisure, and above or below depending how you hang the painting, another avatar of self, shrouded to near invisibility for self-protection, in a temporary and barren shelter, with only the guidance of a map, which offers no directional guidance, simply the idea of a map or of mapping, right this minute:

 

 

 

 

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Day by Day in the Studio 6: July 21

July 21 is mid-summer, already tumbling toward fall, winter, and another year. The goal of the day is immersion in the world of the work, to find the sharp edge between intentionality and experimentation, to know the premise then give the work the lead.

July 21, 1974

Mira Schor, Black Flower, July 21, 1974. Gouache on paper c. 8 x 6 in

July 21-24, 1979

Mira Schor, Figures (#33 front and back), July 21-24, 1979. Pastel, dry pigment, medium on paper bought in a stationery store in Chinatown, New York City, c. 10 x 22 in

July 21, 2003

Mira Schor, “Drawing” (front and back), July 21, 2003. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 18 x 24 in.

July 21, 2013

The goal is productive anonymity.

Mira Schor, Productive Anonymity, July 21, 2013. Ink, oil on gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in.

 

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail

Day by Day in the Studio 5: July 17

It is too hot to write much today, but day by day practice in the studio continued/continues.

July 17, 1976

Mira Schor, Fan, Dream (front), July 17, 1976. Ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 8 1/2 x 11 in.

Mira Schor, Fan, Dream (back), July 17, 1976. Fragments that are legible to me: “July 17, 1976. I feel better. A Dream: A man…..he felt it….the human race. Explosion of lightning–the only one–woke me up. A hard rain followed. It was terrifying and easily the most exciting event of the summer.”

One’s dreams are not that interesting but that single bolt of lightning out of nowhere which was experienced as explosive sound not light followed by intensely heavy straight down rain really happened early one morning, maybe that morning in 1976, striking the top peak of the roof of the building in Provincetown on the beach very nearby, of the restaurant then called Pucci’s. It remains a vivid memory.

Summer 2002

The summer of 2002 I painted language, words that represented what I did: painting, drawing, writing. I don’t know the exact day these works were done so I’m cheating, again, but let’s say it was sometime in July and I feel I need to include these today.

Mira Schor, Painting, 2002. Ink and Rabbit skin glued over gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in.

Mira Schor, Drawing, 2002. Ink, Rabbit skin glue on gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in.

Mira Schor, Writing, 2002. Oil on linen, 24 x 28 in.

July 17, 2009

Mira Schor, sketchbook, July 17, 2009.

July 17, 2013

Today I lie down to take a mid-afternoon nap in the downstairs bedroom that was my mother’s, where it is slightly cooler. Even here away from the city the heat is something that must be dealt with every minute and the past few days I’ve been getting up much earlier than usual to take advantage of the early cool and calm. This would be enough to make a nap a reasonable activity. But beneath seaside bliss is the stress of having to produce work not only because you want to and this is finally the longed for time to do it but for a show. It is a strange thing to work for a show. Many artists do it, in fact you can only hope that’s part of why you are doing it, but the result of that external pressure may also be part of why so many shows are filled with what my mother contemptuously referred to as “merchandise.” The more I have to simply turn out an adequate number of Mira Schors, whatever that means, the less I feel involved in the sense of an internal search that can sometimes be excruciating but has its own time and its own rewards.

The idea of just painting a “Mira Schor” is an inside joke for me. Each summer battling the sense that I am not working, that I can’t find my work, I try various tricks. I call them tricks, they could be described as mantras or passwords: this all started with a summer in my mid-20s, the decade when I was year by year setting in place elements of all the work I have done since—language as image, figuration and autobiography, narrative and narrativity, nature as an unlikely source for images of text and body, the critique of painting as a source for painting. That summer, after days of despair (that is, the period between June 20 and July 4), I said to myself, Oh just paint a Mira Schor. Now, understand, this was totally absurd, more so then when I was setting in place the elements of my work even than now when maybe I can claim that there is something called a Mira Schor. A Mira Schor, what the hell was that? But, amazingly, it worked, I started to work.

It was just an abstract permission, a release, it just meant, just do something, do something you did before, do anything. The distinction between two paintings may be negligible to anyone else, but I need to feel an engagement that refreshes the familiar. The room is the same, the door is the same, the lock is the same but a new key is required.

I lie down, I close my eyes, and my nap turns out to truly be a power nap because within a minute of lying down, perhaps from the implicit permission to self to not have to do anything for a minute, I suddenly have a vivid vision of something I might do in trying to situate a figure in relation to ground. I get up, grab a notebook and scribble a rough sketch.

After lying down again, the idea begins to seem more difficult to work out. I look at a work I did on July 10, 1983, hung on the robin’s egg blue wall. Something is there about how to depict ground with very little figure.

Mira Schor, First Swim (to the breakwater), July 10, 1983. Pastel, dry pigment, medium on rice paper, 24 x 25 in.

This work was included in a small show of Provincetown drawings from 1982-82 at artSTRAND Gallery in Provincetown in 2007. I wrote some notes on each one when I saw them on the wall.

First Swim (to the breakwater) gives me great pleasure to look at. There is a lightness to this piece that I am particularly struck by. In general, these drawings don’t seem dated to me although I did them 24 years ago, but the sheer frothy radiant joy of this work marks it as belonging to a different time in my life: I knew less and thought I was more depressed and uncertain, but I was young and engaged with nature and with my art in a particularly unguarded way that I am not sure I could replicate now. A spidery white figure reaches for the rock of the breakwater. The rock is the only heavily pigmented element in the work, a burnt sienna dry pigment monument in a shimmering field of reflections of light green, grey, white, sienna waves and lines that go in all directions. There is a grey patch on the horizon, it is the water but it looks like land because like all the horizon lines in these pieces, it is curved like a grey gentle mound. There is a little bit of blue in the sky. If you didn’t know this represented a swimmer in water, it might seem particularly mysterious: a figure reaches for a phallic stele, a rock, an obelisk in a field of unstable matter. Because some of the reflections are lines of algae, they are green so it could be a field of grass. A friend asked if this work had religious content: perhaps yes, swimming in the bay is one of my religions and the swim to the rock is a daily quest, but it is towards a goal that is, for once, attainable.

 

 

 

 

FacebooktwittermailFacebooktwittermail