Category Archives: painting

Thanks for the Memories: The Whitney and The Breuer Building Years

Today the Whitney Museum is ending its 48 years in its Marcel Breuer building on 75th and Madison with a 36 hours marathon. The building was open through the night last night and will close tonight October 19 at 11PM.

I had thought about going at midnight but decided that I had said my goodbyes earlier in the month when I was one of the last people in the New York art world to see the Jeff Koons show.

Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that every New York artist has a deep relationship of a kind of ownership of the Whitney in that building, which is the only place where most of us knew the Whitney Museum. Perhaps because it felt like family, we often have been angry at it, the Biennials rather like Thanksgiving dinners, something where you’re disappointed by some of the food, you have a lot of resentment about who was there, you feel it’s gone downhill but you’ve learned a lot from it, and you look forward to the next one. There have been so many exhibitions of note in this building and it has been such a quirky idiosyncratic but intimate place to experience art! I have not yet seen the new building, all the way on the west side, huge, filled, we are told, with the requisite large performance spaces for a more spectacular culture, and not near any public transportation, which marks it as another kind of place entirely than the cosmopolitan urban space and the kind of urban life that marked the New York of the modernist era.

On my last visit, ostensibly to see the Jeff Koons show, I also felt I was saying goodbye to the building, even though that is irrational since the building will remain as a space in which contemporary art will be exhibited. The Metropolitan Museum has deep pockets and takes good care of its properties, and also they have a limited multiyear lease only, until 2023, not ownership, but the Met, as much as I dearly love it, also has a tendency to tart things up with little extra luxuries that might be in the wrong taste in Breuer’s austere though warm building, so a lot depends on how much of the building’s interior is landmarked and how much the Met is interested in respecting the building’s interior as a modernist art work. The size and proportion of the rooms, the elegant brut nature of the stone floors and concrete ceilings, the inset lightbulb fixtures, and the relaxed configuration of the small lobby, the quiet of the stairwell, are as much part of the experience as the art seen, and confer dignity to the visitor to the museum. The art’s adaptation to that space, and the fact that the museum was just not that big also contributed to the possibility of an intimate experience, something that is now considered undesirable by most museums because it relies on art and the individual experience of the viewer with the artwork, rather than on a contemporary social network experience writ large and targeted for iPhone documentation rather than contemplation and private thought.

YESR-Whitney-Koons-IMG_9374 YEAR-Whitney-KOONS-Zwirner-IMG_9843

Even the Koons exhibition benefited from its interaction with this space. I had seen the blue balls works at Zwirner a couple of years ago and the chill of the white plaster in the large white space, clean bright white on clean bright white–which I somehow imagine will be the temperature of style of the new Whitney’s interior–was synergistically antipathetic to the human whereas at the Breuer Whitney, the concrete ceiling with its service ducts bare, created a useful counterpoint to the chill of these particular works by Koons, just as the sculptural ceiling of the 4th floor provided a counterpoint of some helpful gravitas to Koons’ Play-Doh sculpture.

YER-Whitney-Koons_c_IMG_9311

I started my last visit at the top on the 5th floor, where some of the museum’s permanent collection was on view arranged along the theme of gifts to the museum. I was particularly struck and moved by the fortuitous juxtaposition of two large square paintings, one by Helen Frankenthaler, the other by Grace Hartigan. Hartigan has never struck me as the strongest of the three major women artists of the Abstract Expressionist New York School era, the third being Joan Mitchell, and Frankenthaler’s mid-late career works could get very rote and boring, but this was a very strong Frankenthaler and a complex Hartigan which seemed to gain strength from its neighbor’s bold clarity.

Year-Whitney-Frankenthaler-Hartigan-IMG_9292

Like everyone else I took lots of pictures of Koons’ shiny objects. I happen to like some of Koons work very much, while despising other works and the show was equally distributed among the ghastly vulgar sexist, and the sublimely mirrored iconic. I particularly enjoyed taking a picture of myself in the purple balloon tondo that reflected the entire room it was exhibited in, including the great asymmetrical window.

Year-Whitney-Koons-IMG_9320

I also noted on a trip to the ladies’ room on the second floor that the Whitney was acting like anyone who is moving out of a place: there were empty shelves where exhibition displays normally would be, the utility closet was gaping open in the bathroom, and why repair loose fixtures, let the next tenant take care of it.

Year-Whitney-MG_9369

YEAR-Whitney-IMG_9367

YEAR-Whitney-IMG_9368

Finally I sat in the lobby. The museum bookstore, in recent days reduced to last bits and pieces, was once one of the really useful art bookstores of New York, it had no special room, just shelving in a smallish area near the coat check–hey guys I know many of your faces and you’ve been nice and I hope you all keep your jobs– and in addition to the requisite museum-branded chatchkes, there was a great selection of art books including art theory and criticism, selected by people who cared about books (I was honored to have my books there, or maybe just Wet, not sure now but anyway, honored because the selection was thoughtful and the space limited). In recent years there were fewer books and a less diverse and critical selection. The Met has a talent for proliferating gift shops, I don’t mind so long as they leave that open casual feeling that made the lobby of the building seem like a living room of a family you knew.

YEAR-Whitney-IMG_9380

I thought of all the exhibitions I had seen in this building through the years. I decided to look back through the Museum’s website of past exhibitions to recall some great shows but their current website only goes back to 2006. I won’t go hunting through my notes over the years, but will just select a few from over the years that have stayed in my memory.

Starting from the top of my head, some of the memories have not been substantiated by factual research: I distinctly remember a work by Richard Tuttle that was simply a white wall that one gradually realized had inset into its flat surface a rotating disk, white on white. The wall turned. I think I did see such a piece but I don’t think or haven’t been able to prove that it was a Tuttle, so I did see this but now I’m not sure whose work it was (this goes back to the 1970s I think). An early reader of this post tells me it was most likely Rotating Circle by Charles Ray from 1988, must be, and most likely then in a Biennial from that era, interesting how the memory shifts information from one place to another.

In a Biennial before 1974 or 75, or in a group show at any rate, I noticed little oval steelwool-like pads installed in spaces that normally would not contain art–above a red exit sign, outside the building–but that called attention to themselves with a strange intensity that marked them as art. Some time later later Richard Artschwager gave a lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and I discovered that these mysterious piece were his blps which also appeared in other media in other exhibition/non-exhibition spaces over the years.

In a Marsden Hartley retrospective at the Museum in 1980 curated by Barbara Haskell, an early Hartley painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, from the early 20th century, its forms abstracted and the surface painted in a late pointillist Signac-inspired manner, was hung at the beginning of the exhibition in a large room to the right side of the elevator, and as you stood in front of it, you could see from across the floor to the last room, to the left of the elevator, one of his last group of paintings of the same subject, from the early 1940s, the forms even more abstracted with a flatter surface, with bolder, less sugary colors, and a more extreme sense of emotional definition. Thus one could see embodied the meaning of a lifetime of work as an artist.

In a Biennial in the early 1980s, from across a very large space, I spot a very small painting, the first time I recall seeing a painting by Bill Jensen, when his surfaces were thick, scraped, much more intense and dense than his most recent work. In that period I was beginning to consider painting with oil and both Jensen’s scraped, palette knifed surfaces and the surfaces of Hartley’s late works, painterly and sculptural also, even when relatively thin, were both helpful mentors in my transition to this difficult rich medium.

An mid-career retrospective of Elizabeth Murray: at the opening I seem to remember that Elizabeth is carrying one of her young daughters in her arms, a powerful image for people to see. A painting I have never been able to see or find an image of since remains in my memory: a large work though made of relatively small shaped fragmented parts arranged in the shape like a giant abstracted question mark. Did I see this? Have I reshaped it in memory the way I did the Tuttle? Possibly.

More recently, at the 2013 exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, sitting alone in a room, trying to outwit the guards by just getting my iPhone enough out of my bag to surreptitiously snap a picture of works by DeFeo from the early eighties which I had never seen and whose greatness left me feeling crushed because I had never seen them before, because they needed to be in the history of American painting from their period, not an addition after the fact.

YEAR-Whitney-Jay-DefeoIMG_8447

Some more personal memories: of the night my mother dressed up to go to the opening public reception for the 1966 inauguration of the new Breuer building as the guest of a friend who taught architecture at Harvard and I think was friends with Breuer. She fussed over the right dress and to find the best dress she could afford, and then I remember hearing about the crush of people. The last art exhibition I took her to see was Picasso and American Art, in the fall of 2006, forty years later. The rooms were very crowded, she felt unwell and had to sit down while I looked at the second half of the show. In a further concession to the frailty of her great age, we took a cab home across the park instead of the bus as we once would have done. Nevertheless, sitting in the cab, she said firmly, “it’s the kind of exhibition that makes you want to go home and work.” I should add that my mother Resia Schor was an artist. She was 94 and died a few weeks later, just before her 95th birthday.

Another memory: someone gave me an invitation they couldn’t use, to the opening of Jasper Johns’ retrospective at the Whitney in October 1977. I floated around, young and solitary. At that point in my life, at 27, despite personal ambition, I could look at art world events and careers with a sense of impersonal distance, or rather, I had ambitions certainly but no expectations in that moment, I could watch the scene with interest but not personal jealousy. At one point I found myself in a small room off the main hall, from which I could see Jasper Johns, surrounded by admirers, magnetically elegant in an impeccable tuxedo. I happened to be alone in the room with Richard Serra, who, surly and probably sweltering in the heavy wool brown tweed jacket he was wearing, seemed like a working class character at an upper-class gathering in a 1920s British novel. I didn’t know him of course, but I did know it was him. I was struck by the discomfort of his jacket, and I sensed his fury at being at an event glorifying another artist–Why not him? When him?–and why was that artist such a James Bond like character, damn him, so handsome and so beautifully dressed!

The 2005 exhibition of Edward Ruscha’s series of paintings, Course of Empire, his contribution to the 51st Venice Bienale, was one of the most unusual exhibitions at the museum in recent years and the most strikingly effective uses of the space. This exhibition as I recall was an opportunistic event, arranged in a relatively short time frame, and taking advantage of all the walls from a recent Biennial (or perhaps some other major exhibition) having just been taken down to create an unusually broad open space for a very interesting installation of the paintings in a kind of foreshortened vista, an avenue bordered by paintings with a small room to the side a few versions or the complete cycle of The Course of Empire by the nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole. The contrast between Ruscha’s flat portrayals of American commercial architecture and Cole’s bizarre imaginings of the rise and fall of ancient Rome was very curious and thought provoking. When I saw this show I was practically alone with the work and the space, one of my favorite experiences.

YEAR-Whitney-IMG_9382

Many many more memories of so much art, thanks for the memories, and goodbye Whitney Museum of American Art at the Marcel Breuer Building, it’s been swell, and I hope the Whitney comes to regret its decision to leave it, and returns when the Met’s lease is up, to have a second, more intimate and experimental space for its collection and special exhibitions.

Interiority and reversibility

A few works on paper that I did in the 1970s are going to be shown for the first time in Four Figures, a group exhibition curated by artist Tom Knechtel at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills, California, opening Saturday July 12 through August 23.

These are part of a body of work from the mid-1970s in which the overall subject was interior language, or, coming from a more political, feminist approach, the idea that women are filled with language, rather than being empty vessels whose exterior nubile beauty as a commodity to be traded among men is the principal focus of their value in most societies.

I wanted to approach representation of women, and specifically self-representation as living inside a female body, with a mind, no longer from the point of view of figuration, whether realist or surrealist, which had been my first approach to representing myself as an agent in the world, much as a number of women artists associated with the Surrealist movement had done–I was already on that path even before I first saw works by Florine Stettheimer, Lenore Fini, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, having found cultural permission for narrative and representation in the works of male Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and René Magritte as well as from early Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, Rajput painting, and Japanese emaki–but, now, from the point of view of an interiority of thought, with the image of language as the sign for thought.

1a.-book-of-pages-editedIMG_9422SM

There were five groups of work done between 1976 and 1978: the first were a group of unfolded or folded fan shapes covered with handwriting, followed by a touchstone, foundational work for me, Book of Pages in 1976, followed by a group of masks many of which kept the idea of the book so that the mask has several layers, as did a series of Dress Book pieces, and finally the Dream series, in which the image was the text of a dream handwritten in black ink, with my interpretation and associations in sepia ink. While the shapes changed accordingly, the “image” on the surfaces was my handwriting recording dreams or diaristic personal writing and in some cases directly addressing a specific person, a much bemused male muse. Some works also incorporated diagrammatic drawings. All works were made from hand-made Japanese rice papers, some diaphanously delicate and made translucent with Japan Gold Size medium which also fixed the dry pigment I used for color used as matter rather than illusion, some other paper richly fibrous and sturdy.

All the works were two-sided: each component or piece of paper was worked from both sides so that the “front” was created by material applied to the “back” in order to create the effects that underlay the writing in the “front” but in the process the brute instrumentality of the work on the “back” often ended up trumping the more intentionally produced “front,” bolder and more abstract. Because the paper was often translucent, text could be doubly difficult to decipher: my handwriting was inherently difficult to read, and some of the text that was foregrounded was backwards, with the legible face permanently inaccessible to the viewer.

Since many of these works continued to work with the format of a book of pages that could be turned, these works were also layered dimensionally, you could turn the pages of the woman, her dress, or her face (where you might also try to lift a veil) and try to “read” the woman, but I came to writing as image at the moment when I saw that my handwriting had achieved an abstract beauty that was unrelated to easy legibility. Even the Dream pieces, one of which is in the Four Figures exhibition, though flat, were not only reversible, but sometimes contained a shape sandwiched within layers of paper so that what you thought might be revealed if you turned the piece over never actually surfaced.

Mask-book,-floor-plan-Sept-2,1977-front-SM

Mask-Book,-floor-plan,-Sept-2,1977-open-SM

These works were difficult to categorize: though I thought of myself as a painter, as I had earlier when working with gouache on paper, in defiance of the rules left over from Greenbergian formalism in the New York School that made oil or acrylic on canvas the probative medium, these were not paintings. But though they were objects they were neither conventional sculptures, nor could they be folded into any type of avant-garde sculpture focused on the readymade. The use of ink on paper made them drawings, but aside from the occasional diagrammatic sketch, writing escaped back into the category of actually being writing, not drawing. Because the writing was personal, the private made public yet retaining its illegibility, and because the image was my handwriting as opposed to printed text as many conceptual artists used at the time and rather than being writing that was meta-generic, in the manner of Hanne Darboven‘s (or Cy Twombly’s) scrawls, and because they did not turn their back on visual pleasure, they were not dematerializations according to the interpretation of that term as codified at the time. They were materializations of thought.

Mask-Book,-floor-plan-Sept-2,1977-back-SM

They were things, intensely personal things, that for the fullest understanding and apprehension, had to be experienced not just optically from a respectable spectatorial distance but viewed/experienced by an individual, pages turned, a veil lifted, a work turned over in your hand, with perhaps a grain of pigment or even a trace of the aroma of the medium remaining with you as material traces.

Thus, though they were things, and even quite precious ones, rare and fragile, they were the opposite of art commodities. They were and are still best experienced by hand but practically for their protection they require special handling and framing, thus are hard to exhibit to the fullest extent of their meaning (in Four Figures for clarity of presentation and their protection a number of works from this period are assembled together under Plexiglas and thus only one view of each work is available, other solutions include two-sided frames or the treatment accorded rare manuscripts, in a vitrine, open to a selected page, occasionally turned).

Because of their basis in feminist desire for alternate representations of the experience of being a woman, because of their focus on language as subject and image, because of their interest in scale through accretions of modules (in this case pages), because of their seriality (though this was narrative rather than in relation to mechanical reproduction), and because of their thingness yet impracticality, making them both experiential and notional, they have always seemed to me like archetypal 1970’s art, feminist and otherwise.

Mira-Schor-Dream-Feb-25-26-1978-backIMG_8328

*Works reproduced include a view of Book of Pages, 1976; and from the exhibition Four Figures, three views of Mask Book: Floor Plan, September 2, 1977, ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size medium on rice paper, front with page closed, page open, and a view of the back, which will not be visible in the exhibition; and Dreams, February 25-26, 1978, ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 18″x29,” image of the side that will not be visible in the installation in the exhibition.

Four Years of A Year of Positive Thinking: A Table of Contents

I began the blog project A Year of Positive Thinking with no end date in mind and it has proved to be an elastic and metaphoric time frame. It celebrates its fourth anniversary today. Today’s post is an updated table of contents featuring about seventy posts in an easy to search format that I hope will help give a sense of what I have done on this site in the past four years.

My first post on A Year of Positive Thinking was published April 28, 2010. In “Looking for art to love in all the right places” I teased out the different ways one can fall in love with an art work, as opposed to a person. My first project was to go out into the city I live in, New York, in search of art that I love, in keeping with the goal of the blog, which was to turn my attention to the art work that sustains and inspires me, in contrast to the works with which I have engaged in equally vital though perhaps more “negative” polemical battles in many of my other writings, including my 2009 book A Decade of Negative Thinking, whose title suggested this blog’s antonymically eponymous title.

As a friend said, well, that lasted about two weeks. Indeed, it has not always been easy to stick to the positive. Nevertheless in a world that rewards positivism, where things must be “amazing!,” a critical but passionately skeptical voice may have “positive” utility to cultural discourse. As I point out in the “About” page of this blog:

A Year of Positive Thinking may turn out to be a battleground between the two sides of my personality, something like Cassandra and Pollyanna! Cassandra tells truths no one wants to hear and Pollyanna actually does the same thing: she’s not the sweet cloying character we think of when we use the name in a disparaging way, she looks right at what she sees in the dysfunctional little town she has come to live in and her engagement with the people she meets sets in motion positive change.

I published fifty-one posts in the first two years and have published thirty-nine since. The slight decrease in the number of posts is relatively minor but to me it’s indicative of a number of factors which reflect different but familiar aspects of contemporary life. The writing I do here exists on the border between the aimless time of flânerie and the ticking clock of the 24/7 news cycle. I love to wander around, look at things, read things, trawl the web, an often solitary and anonymous paladin of the cultural field, and put things together that perhaps no one else would, without the concerns of daily journalistic deadlines or the schedules of the art market but I also want there to be a sense of necessity and I enjoy the moment when I realize that outside events provide an impetus and impose a schedule where “I have to” pull a text together in a very short time frame. Both these aspects of time require a certain independence of mind that benefits from a relative degree of financial independence or at least marginal security. I began the blog in 2010 with the help of a grant from a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation/Arts Writers Grant and in one of those moments of irrational but precious optimism that artists are able to pin onto the most minute signs of career movement. Over the past four years, for me as for millions of others, conditions have tightened while work loads have multiplied. So going to see exhibitions becomes like “playing hooky,” and writing for A Year of Positive Thinking seems like a guilty pleasure, time stolen away from other duties.

Another factor in my writing a bit less often on A Year of Positive Thinking in the past two years is that I have found it expedient to put onto Facebook content where I feel I can write a few words quickly around a link or image. There is something alarming or just plain stupid about entrusting cultural discourse to a site where there is always the possibility that it could all vanish just like that, by corporate fiat, and where, at best, material quickly becomes functionally unavailable as it drops down the page into social networking purgatory. Nevertheless, the extemporaneity and informality of such communication sometimes generates quite interesting comments threads where I may end up writing about as many words as I might have for a blog post, but with less pressure to build a coherent argument. I have never used this blog, as many other art bloggers do, as a regularly published site for the aggregation of art-related news stories by other people, I’ve used Facebook to perform that function and reserved A Year of Positive Thinking for long form, speculative non-commercial art writings. I have published a couple of the resulting Facebook discussions on A Year of Positive Thinking, with permission of the participants. Both the blog and my interventions on Facebook involve an approach to writing that is very different than the way I wrote long essays for M/E/A/N/I/N/G and for my books: I enjoy the challenge of capturing the speed and intensity of conversation in something like real time while trying to maintain some kind of standard of clarity for expository text. There is a high wire/seat of the pants aspect to the writing of a blog post: how will I pull together a constellation of thoughts, opinions, recollections, and references in a limited framework of time and length?

Publishing on a blog allows for instant communication and at the same time the blog posts remain available on the web as long as the yearly upkeep is paid. They can be accessed at any time via the tags and the timeline to the right of the page. Yet online publishing also fosters instant oblivion, in a way that a book does not. I hope this four-year table of contents featuring about seventy posts will help give a sense of what I have done on A Year of Positive Thinking these past four years, essentially writing another book, one which, despite the availability of the material on the blog’s archive as long as I maintain the site online, I would love to some day see this material published in hard copy book form, a form which I think still has a gravitas and a usefulness that online material does not.

Trying to find an order of subject matter for a Table of Contents is hard because the blog format, with its capacity for links and pictures and the web’s orientation towards a more diverse range of writing than the strictly or even partially academic has fostered my already marked penchant for associative thinking. Also, parenthetically, blog publishing allows for the immediate accessibility, through links, of material that in a book would be consigned to the endnotes and left to the reader’s enterprise to delve into further. In fact the writing style of the blog posts owe much of its tone and flavor to the kind of more personal and informal writing that I enjoyed salting away into the endnotes of my books. Whereas my two books, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997) and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009) each focus pretty evenly on feminism, painting, and teaching, the blog has given me the opportunity to comment on political events, write about film, and develop a photo essay format.

In keeping with this fluid, infinitely connected textual and visual frame, this table of contents will put specific posts into more than one section when it seems relevant, in order to be true to the content and to connect to the most readers, true to the web environment of samplers, and surfers, Google and Wikipedia addicted readers of this time. This four year table of contents builds on the one I published two years ago: I’ve kept the first selections intact, added one oddball post I had withheld last time around, and have reordered the categories slightly though it gets harder to contain the material into even the loosely defined categories I had selected two years ago–Art (painting and sculpture) [this specification is deceptive since I write about video, installation, and other forms of art, but just having a heading “art” would seem too general], Feminism, Women Artists, Politics, Teaching, Film, Conditions of Writing a Blog, Oddball, Studio Practice, and Family, or The Schor Project. Within each section, the posts, linked for instant accessibility of course, are listed in chronological order with a little summary of the subject and an occasional excerpt. This table of contents does not contain links to named people and events, these exist within the posts themselves.

I have bold faced some of the posts that I reference the most frequently when discussing the blog.

One technical point: some of the posts contain embedded film clips from YouTube but over the years some of the clips are no longer available due to copyright issues but I have left the embeds in place, as markers whose emptiness may perhaps serve as enticements to try to see the film in question by some other means.

Preface: “About”

Introduction: Looking for art to love in all the right places (April 28, 2010)

I’ve fallen in love with many more artworks than I have men and without giving anything away I’d have to say that I’ve had better luck with the artworks I’ve loved and even the ones I’ve hated. No painting I’ve ever seen was married or loved someone else, or got in the way of my need for independence or solitude, and if I’ve tired of a work, having taken from it all that I needed and then outgrown it, the parting has always been amicable with the possibility of hooking up again always open to me. Meanwhile, and you can fill in the personal analogy or not, I pay a lot of attention to works I really dislike and get a lot of energy for my own work as a result.

Art (painting and sculpture):

Reality Show: Otto Dix (June 28, 2010) I’ll let one of my readers sum this one up:

I’ll confess, when I saw the tweets start flying about Mira Schor’s essay on Otto Dix, Greater NY, and Bravo’s Work of Art, I was skeptical. How the hell was she gonna fit any of those, never mind all three–at once–onto a blog called A Year of Positive Thinking?

By gum, she pulled it off.

Otto Dix, a brief footnote: drawing and ideational aesthetics (July 5, 2010)

Under the circumstances, I was struck by the speaker’s use of the word “ideation” as a substitute for the word drawing. It stuck in my head partly because it is sort of a cool word, with its pseudo-scientific and vaguely military/corporate buzz. On the other hand it’s somewhere between annoying and sinister in its implications to art making.

Postcard post (August 8, 2010) In this set of virtual postcards to my readers, I write about some of my favorite works of art and works of popular culture, including Andrea Mantegna’s The Dead Christ, the sculptural program of the North Portal of Chartres Cathedral, Giotto’s frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel, Star Trek, and Buster Keaton.

Anselm Kiefer@Larry Gagosian: Last Century in Berlin (December 24, 2010) The forcible eviction of a few peaceable demonstrators by the NYPD from the Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in December 2010 was the spur to consider aspects of this body of Kiefer’s work with its inflated production values and questionable arrogation of Judaism.

Above the entrance of a vast space occupied by a German were letters written in black script. In transliterated Hebrew and English, they spelled out “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the concluding line of the Passover Haggadah. Next Year in Jerusalem? My hackles were officially raised even before I turned the corner and entered the occupied territory of Gagosian Gallery. I still don’t really want to write about Kiefer, so here is just a précis. The installation reminded me of nothing so much as Bloomingdales’s cosmetics floor if its Christmas decorations had a Holocaust theme.

The fault is not in our stars but in our brand: Abstract Expressionism at MoMA (October 3, 2010)

This led me to think about the work through the lens of the Brand. At first this seems to contradict approaches to art-making that are characteristic of the period, such as the picture plane as the arena of existential search. But of course most of the artists in the first two generations of Abstract Expressionism became known for a particular stylistic brand: drip (Pollock), zip (Newman), stroke (de Kooning), chroma (Rothko). Here then are some major case histories from the main exhibition.

Money can’t buy you love but art friendships can create joy (February 6, 2011) This post, about the exhibition “Poets and Painters” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, allowed me to consider the joyful and creative network of friendships among artists including Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Edwin Denby, Alex Katz, Mimi Gross, Red Grooms, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett, John Ashberry, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers, among others.

There is a particular kind of collaboration among artists who are friends that is special because it takes place outside of the frame of the art market, often before each individual’s path is fixed and their fate is determined, that is before some become rich and famous, while others struggle along, and still others die or vanish from the scene into another type of life than the one of the artist. Such moments are nearly impossible to sustain, but it can be pretty conclusively proven that these are often the happiest times in the lives of these artists and often too those artworks that later are seen to have the greatest market value emerge from just these moments of friendships and creative projects undertaken in relative conditions of anonymity, for the sheer joy of making and the pleasure in shared ideas.

Wonderment and Estrangement: Reflections on Three Caves, parts 1 and 2 of 3 (July 28, 2011) & part 3 (August 18, 2011) A consideration of three caves, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave featured in Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the cave inside a malachite mine deep in the Ural Mountains featured in a 1946 Russian children’s movie The Stone Flower, and the cave whose entrance lurks in the shadow of Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, which was on special display at the Frick Museum in New York in the spring of 2011.

You may once have had experiences of wonderment and delight, perhaps most uniquely in childhood, in your imagination, reading a book, hearing a story, or seeing something of incomparable beauty. You’d think being an artist would give you continued access to such experiences but for the most part life as a professional artist is at best a negotiation among the constantly changing realities of contemporary art, the limitations of one’s own abilities, and some internal core ability to still experience such wonderment when it presents itself, despite competitiveness, jealousy, and the infrequency of such experiences. Basically we once experienced wonderment and now we do the best we can. So when we do on rare occasions experience wonderment or delight, it is notable, and for a moment we may return to the prelapsarian intensity, awe, and joy first experienced in childhood and which is part of the secret fuel for a lifetime of art practice.

Art of the Occupy Wall Street Era (October 12, 2011) On Creative Time curator Nato Thompson’s exhibition, Living as Form

Youthfulness in Old Age (December 8, 2011) On expansive creativity in old age, exhibitions of later works by Joan Mitchell, Richard Artschwager, and Matta.

You put a spell on me (January 1, 2012) on two extraordinary exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini and Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures.

As a teacher, I’m interested in how one can use art or artifacts that may seem inaccessible or irrelevant because they were made in ancient or foreign cultures seemingly alien to our own and also because works like these African sculptures or Renaissance paintings seem to have already been digested, for once and for all by our own history, so that our ability to use them appears doubly blocked. How do you use old art? How do you use any great art while not sinking into preciousness?

A State of Intense Excitement and Apollonian Reserve (October 13, 2012), on an exhibition at the Morgan Library of color studies on paper by Josef Albers.

Three days more to see “Toxic Beauty” (December 5, 2012), on Frank Moore’s exhibition of paintings at the Grey Art Gallery and of sketches and videos at the Fales Collection, in relation to the endlessly recurring narrative of the death of painting.

That the narrative of the death of painting is still ongoing should be evidence at the very least of painting remaining a naggingly persistent ghost, or not even a ghost but a kind of zombie entity, not quite dead enough to go completely unmentioned. It continues to appear if only as a negative, as something that cannot be done…. At one point last spring it occurred to me to write a series of essays on the theme of When Exactly Did Painting Die? Not exactly a murder mystery, you see, not a Whodunit but rather a What Was the Time of Death mystery, or, maybe, When Was the Victim Last Seen Alive? mystery.[…] (In Moore’s 1994 painting Easter) Blood seeps out of two slices into a loaf of bread and into the middle of a puddle of spilled heavy cream which has oozed out from an overturned cartoon. The red paint has been dropped into the pool of white paint to create a very careful Jackson Pollock in the shape of a Crown of Thorns. The Christ reference and the art reference are at the center of a still-life painting with an almost folk art sensibility: the dusting of flour on the loaf of bread is created with a kind of spray effect which is completely different in technical feel than the loaf, or the cream and blood spill. It’s a folk Zurbaran of the AIDS era.

Catching up by playing hooky: Bernini, Shea, Cage, and Picasso (January 1, 2013), at Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim,

By the time I got to the middle of the ramp, before I even got to a painted sketch for Guernica of the screaming horse’s head, I wrote in my notes, “I would say, at this point, fuck it, this is a necessary show, don’t tell me you’re a painter or interested in painting and not see this show, forget what you know or think you’ve seen, or think you know about Picasso, and just look.” That I would be so emphatic seems silly given Picasso’s totally accepted status as a genius, but it reflects the fact that for many artists Picasso’s relation to subject, to medium, and to drawing, is as foreign as the back side of the moon.

Resisting Pier Pressure (March 10, 2013), this post epitomizes what I intended when I began A Year of Positive Thinking, the pleasure of discovering art works that I love, including a group of small clay reliefs by an artist I had never heard of before but whose works I have thought of often since I first saw them.

What does a man see when he looks at his own image? (April 12, 2013), on a very particular and powerful instance of the female gaze, in paintings by Susanna Heller.

The living and the dead: Wool, Motherwell, Kelley, and Kentridge (January 1, 2014), Abridged version: Christopher Wool? Not a fan. Longer recap: Motherwell? Not a fan either except when I occasionally am. Kelley? “…you can admire an artist tremendously, feel strongly that he is an important artist, and still not “love” his work. That is the case for me with Kelley. But love is probably the wrong word anyway to address work driven by a powerful undercurrent of abjection and self-loathing, from some of his earliest performances to the scenarios of the massive video installation work, Day is Done.” I manage to weave Star Trek, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tale “Quack! Quack! Stick to My Back!” into this post.

Intimacy and Spectacle 2: answering a questionnaire about contemporary art museums (January 19, 2014) News of MoMA’s destruction/expansion plans happened to coincide with a request from a graduate student in cultural management at the University of Madeira to answer some questions about the contemporary museum.

As a sub-theme to this section, one thread that runs through several posts is the importance of drawing as a way to apprehend the world. Several posts feature my love of drawing, including works by Philip Guston and Otto Dix, and the importance of drawing to my own art practice becomes a practical tool to circumvent institutional prohibitions of photography in special exhibitions, in posts such as Otto Dix, a brief footnote: drawing and ideational aesthetics, Looking for art to love in all the right places, You put a spell on me, and a post about The Mourners at the Metropolitan Museum, Looking for art to love, day two: uptown from May 1, 2010 as well as in Catching up by playing hooky: Bernini, Shea, Cage, and Picasso. More recent posts that feature drawing are Hurtling through life at a deliberate pace: an appreciation of Richard Artschwager (1923-February 9, 2013), A Drawing, inspired by the discovery of an ink on paper self-portrait drawing by my father Ilya Schor, Craft and Process: Jasper Johns/Regrets, and the series of posts on my own work from the summer of 2013 Day by Day in the Studio.

Feminism:

Two early posts were related to the Modern Women project at MoMA:

Stealth Feminism at MoMA (May 16, 2010)

On gradually realizing during a random visit to the museum that individual works by women artists and small shows of works by women artists were scattered throughout the museum, like treasures in a treasure hunt that has not been advertised as such.

MoMA Panel: Art “Institutions and Feminist Politics Now” (May 23, 2010)

A recap of a day of panel discussion held at MoMA, held May 21, 2010, as part of their Modern Women Project.

According to Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Photography, these curatorial discussions and initiatives emerged from a desire for greater transparency within the institution; she described the participants’ organization as non-hierarchical and cross-generational. The nature of this feminist work had forced departmental boundaries to be breached as researching work by women forced a greater transdisciplinarity. …

This question of permission is both the positive and negative side of the whole story: better to get the permission — which can only come from an activism brewing from below anyway — than not get the permission. But any freedom or rights based on patriarchal noblesse oblige or realpolitik can be withdrawn when it serves the institution, which is why continued vigilance and activism are always necessary. Some might take issue with the idea that it is better to get that permission and get some feminist action in a dominant institution such as MoMA but I think it all has to happen all over all the time and over and over again (over and over because feminism has tended not to have a good institutional memory, even if you take into account that we live in an ahistorical time).

A Great Artist (on Louise Bourgeois) (May 31, 2010), written the day Louise Bourgeois died.

Sometimes an artwork hedges its bets, or, by some minute concession to accessibility, in some tiny betrayal of form, apologizes for itself. I never detected that in Bourgeois’s work.

Stephan von Huene, Feminist Teacher (September 4, 2010) written about my mentor at CalArts, with whom I studied after I left the Feminist Art Program.

Biographies of Women Artists: Instinct and Intellect (July 10, 2011) Some thoughts about Lee Krasner, on the occasion of a New York Times book review of Gail Levin’s biography of the artist.

“I’m 27 and Unmarried…” 40 Years later (October 10, 2011) I use a piece written by my sister Naomi Schor for Glamour Magazine in 1971 to reflect on the early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement and how some of contradictions and societal imperatives of that time may still exist despite many advances for women in the United States.

A Feminist Correspondence (December 9, 2011) This post republishes my appreciation of British feminist art historian and psychotherapist Rozsika Parker from November 22, 2010, with a more recent quite extraordinary correspondence this post initiated, between me and Parker’s collaborator, the art historian Griselda Pollock.

In your blog you rightly captured what it was that Rosie gave us and me in terms of making me a feminist writer on art: that things mattered deeply and seriously and that art touches on things that matter to us as we live them. That was what saved me from a bloodless and remote art history which I still cannot inhabit. (G. Pollock)

A Discussion on Facebook About Feminism (May 21, 2012) This post picks up on the epistolary nature of “A Feminist Correspondence,” but transposes the format of emailed letters to a Facebook conversation, of the kind that occasionally make that off corporate space a platform for community and discussion among people who are not in the same room and who may or may not have ever actually met. I had posted on Facebook a link to a New York Times editorial, “The Campaign Against Women,” with the query “Is there still a need for “Woman”-focused feminism or would other theories and political positions be more useful?” The discussion that ensued is one that is all the more pressing for being so familiar, but expressed with informed passion by all the participants (who agreed to have the conversation republished on the blog). I have participated in many such conversations on Facebook as it seems that issues surrounding feminism remain perpetually pressing, perpetually unresolved particularly to the women artists who are my interlocutors as well as to men who take an interest in the subject and feel concern for their women students as they begin to grapple with these issues.

Women Artists:

Since there is much contestation over the designation feminist and in order to make access to posts about individual artists easier, I thought I’d create this separate category, of the notable posts on specific women artists.

Looking for Art to love–MoMA: A Tale of Two Egos (May 8, 2010)

“Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” is itself a tale of two egos: downstairs, that of the individual living woman whose body you can witness and potentially engage with at some level, and, upstairs, the projected ego of the woman who has hijacked curatorial common sense, whose many incarnations are screaming at you in an unpardonably cacophonous, unedited installation, who has created a kind of Disneyworld of the Spanish Inquisition through her use of re-enactors in stressful situations while rewriting the history of performance art so that she exists sui generis, without any historical context.

A Great Artist (on Louise Bourgeois) (May 31, 2010)

A Remembrance: Sarah Wells (June 6, 1950-June 6, 1998) (June 6, 2011) On the work of a wonderful artist and a wonderful person, a dear friend exactly my age, who died too young, on her birthday.

Biographies of Women Artists: Instinct and Intellect (July 10, 2011)

On Being a “Lady” (February 10, 2013) was my solution for how to review a show I was in, “since the show is divided into two parts, installed along two separate sections of the space, with one side featuring the works of women artists who are deceased, and the other side featuring those of us still among the living, I feel that I can safely recommend the dead without incurring controversy among the other living artists in the show or referring to my own work in it or the ramifications of the word “lady, ” which I know has stirred some controversy.” This is a brief review but provides the occasion to highlight some wonderful art works by artist such as Alice Neel, Alma Thomas, Irene Rice Pereira, Edith Schloss, Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa, and Janice Biala.

What does a man see when he looks at his own image? (April 12, 2013)

Politics:

My Whole Street is a Mosque (August 19, 2010) This piece was written when there was a media furor over the plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero and it occurred to me how absurd this was when the street that I lived on in Lower Manhattan, Lispenard Street, effectively was an outdoor mosque, when men pray on the sidewalk several times a day. This blog post ended up on The Huffington Post and was one of my few experiences with going viral, in a very modest way.

Confessions of a Yellow Dog Democrat (October 21, 2010) Attempting to reconcile my own profound disappointment at the timidity of Democratic party politicians with the reasons I could for many years call myself a “Yellow Dog Democrat,” I tried to cram as many references with as many links to as many great moments in American history, some which I witnessed, some which I already experienced as legendary, as I could, in order to give younger readers a sense of why anyone would still identify with a political party or regret no longer identifying with it.

This Past Week in Activism: Three Modest Gestures (December 12, 2010) How Manet’s The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1868, at the National Gallery in London, becomes a potent witness for a teach-in of students protesting the tripling of educational fees by the Cameron Government, and other valiant political gestures.

Should we trust anyone under 30? (with some excerpts from “Recipe Art” and other essays (June 20, 2011) Concerns about generational reversals, as observed before Occupy Wall Street.

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance (September 18, 2011) The relevance to our current political dilemmas of John Ford’s late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a starkly simple, cinematically almost archaic yet profound meditation on the role of violence in creating the American democracy and on the nature of history itself.

Art of the Occupy Wall Street Era (October 12, 2011)

A Discussion on Facebook About “Occupy Museums” (October 19, 2011) A topical example of the kind of Facebook discussion thread which at its best is a new form of group authorship. Bonus: photos of a 1984 demonstration outside the renovated MoMA to protest the lack of women in the inaugural exhibition.

“Books are like people” (November 15, 2011) The destruction of the People’s Library by the NYPD seen through the lens of art historian Leo Steinberg’s remembrances of the signal importance of books during his childhood as a young refugee in Berlin and London.

Where the Fuck Was Edward Albee? (May 8, 2013), I return to the politics of eradicating books, in this case the horrendous plan hatched during the regime of Mayor Bloomberg to gut the stacks and remove the books from the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street.

“amazing!” (October 13, 2012), on the jarring aspects and political implications of the style of presentation of talks at the 2012 Creative Time Summit in New York City in relation to the content of specific artworks and subjects. This was a post that seemed to touch a nerve and went semi-viral.

the Creative Time Summit’s first day was marked by a relentless positivism embodied in its chosen style of presentation, a style derived from the equally relentlessly positivistic and corporatized TED Talks. […] The word “amazing” was used liberally, notably by the organizers. Many of the speakers were indeed AMAZING but it is a crucial semiotic point that this style and format, enabled and dictated by the available technology, comes to the university and art world from the corporate world, in the Steve Jobs super salesmanship genre, thus they carry political DNA from these sources while other methods of presentation and thus of knowledge and political valence are suppressed.

Teaching:

All my writing is an extension of my deeply felt vocation for teaching but some texts specifically address conditions and specifics of teaching art.

Teaching Contradiction: Reality TV and Art School (August 27, 2010) On contradictions that exist within the expectations placed on artists studying in MFA programs around the country, as suggested by the end of the first season of the Bravo Network reality show “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

While working on a syllabus on a winter’s afternoon (January 17, 2011) Listening to “A Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” while planning a syllabus including works and writings by Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, John Cage, and Simone Weil (& see also Should we trust anyone under 30? to learn more about what happened in that class.)

Free Speech (October 2, 2012) noted a number of events in the fall of 2012 exploring alternatives to current educational institutions, including the Free University’s open air classes held in Madison Square Park September 21, 2012.

Film:

Magic Tricks in the Dark (May 14, 2010), on William Kentridge‘s installation of 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

In the Wave (May 20, 2010) a comparative appreciation of the films and the artistic friendship of Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, inspired by Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary Two in the Wave.

Money can’t buy you love but art friendships can create joy (February 6, 2011) This post includes an appreciation of Rudy Burckhardt’s films including Money, (1967), his first feature film of his 200 or so films, with script by Joe Brainard, about a money mad billionaire played by Edwin Denby, a film which combines a goofy, spontaneous home movie feeling (with actors including the artists Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Yvonne Jacquette, Neil Welliver, Rackstraw Downes, as well as these artists’ children, Jacob Burckhardt, Titus Welliver, and Tom Burckhardt–now all adult artists engaged in film, acting, and painting).

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance (September 18, 2011)

Wonderment and Estrangement: Reflections on Three Caves, parts 1 & 2 (July 28, 2011) a post inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams and my rediscovery of the 1946 Soviet era children’ film, The Stone Flower.

Craft and Process: “Mingei: Are You Here?” and other ghost stories (April 3, 2014), a show of contemporary art and traditional Japanese folk objects reviewed through the lens of an analysis of the allegory of creativity in Kenji Mizoguchi’s great 1953 film Ugetsu.

Conditions of Writing a Blog:

Three blog posts from the summer of 2011 examine the conditions of contemporary web publication and readership, centered around instant readership tracking mechanisms such as Google analytics, and their effect on what gets written about, and the increasingly compressed time available for elucidation of artworks and events, in relation to earlier forms of hard copy small journal publications, with a post devoted to two essays by John Berger, “The Moment of Cubism” and “The Hals Mystery.”

Invisibility and Criticality in the Imperium of Analytics (July 31, 2011)

The Imperium of Analytics (August 2, 2011)

The Berger Mystery (August 11, 2011)

Odd ball

“Miss Read” (April 14, 2012), an obituary in the Times reveals the identity of a writer whose book I read on a train during one of the strangest yet most memorable evenings of my life.

Studio Practice:

In the summer of 2013, I hijacked A Year of Positive Thinking for a slightly separate project, Day by Day in the Studio: I posted selected works I had done on specific calendar days from forty-three summers as an artist and discussed many of the topics relevant to this Table of Contents: family history, teaching, drawing, craft and process, feminism, and I reflected on a spectrum of influences and studio conditions, down to the very tables I work on. This was a personal project and provided the opportunity to situate statements about specific works within the complex forces that underlay any art work but I also tried to discuss themes that would have broader interest to readers who were artists themselves or interested in how artists work. This project was helpful in developing the work I was doing as I was writing about it, with the final post suggesting the title I used for an exhibition of paintings held in Los Angeles in October 2013, Chthonic Garden.

There were fourteen posts in all in this series: some contain mostly images of my work from the 1970s to the present with very little text, so the ones I have selected are among the more developed texts.

Day by day in the studio 1: July 13 (July 13, 2013) I introduce some of the rhythms of my studio practice, and some of the recurring anxieties about productivity.

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.

Day by Day in the Studio 2: July 14 (July 14, 2014) on my use of different kinds of translucent, delicate paper and my habit of working on both sides of the paper.

Day by Day in the Studio 4: July 16 (July 16, 2014) I have written about the phenomenon of “Trite Tropes” and “Recipe Art,” here I take note of my own early work with various trite tropes including tropes that weren’t quite so trite when I first came to them:

The dress is long since a trope of feminist-inspired art but at the time it was not that prevalent, and there was not so much of a leader/follower situation as that it was a moment when a range of subjects and materials from women’s daily lives and personal experience were newly available to women artists of a range of age and experience.

Day by Day in the Studio 5: July 17 (July 17, 2013), on the tricks one plays on oneself to get past work block.

Day by Day in the Studio 8: July 30 (July 30, 2013), about illusions of both subjectivity and objectivity on the part of the artist. I examine the arc of my relationship to critical theory since the mid-1980s:

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.

Day to Day in the Studio 9: August 1 (August 1, 2013) A work from 1984 invites a consideration of past and future, the sudden disappearance of essentials of studio practice including specific art supplies (an ongoing topic of discussion among artists “who use art supplies to make art” as a friend recently described it), and considerations of how the future may affect our present labor.

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.

Day by Day in the Studio 10: August 3 (August 3, 2013) on working equally on the front and the back of paintings, drawings, and even of frontally oriented bas-reliefs and sculptures, in my work and that of my parents Ilya Schor and Resia Schor, and on my reacquisition of a book on Rajput Painting that had been very influential in my formative years as an artist, before I went to graduate school. I had to order a new copy just so that I could check my memory of this line of 16th century Indian poetry:

This night of rain and rapture, all Vrindavana/ unmoored, adrift, lost in the solid dark of rain/ in torrents of sweet rain.

Day by Day in the Studio 12: August 11 (August 11, 2013), about the stability of work tables over decades.

Day by Day in the Studio 13: August 15 (August 15, 2013), I consider “how much, practically speaking, it takes to get anything, however modest, done as or for an artist, how much psychic energy it takes to believe in artworks and to make others believe in them, particularly the degree of intensity of belief that at least one person must feel for artwork in order for it to survive after an artist’s death.”

Day by Day in the Studio 14: August 24 (August 24, 2013), on a word to describe the content of recent paintings,

This week I have fallen in love with a word, the word Chthonic …. How do we fall in love with words these days? I clicked on the link in the Wikipedia entry for Persephone, and , at 2AM, having finally torn myself away from gazing at the definition on the screen, I jumped out of bed to go and gaze at the Wikipedia page some more…Chthonic, “it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land.”

In three recent blog posts I have continued to explore the importance of studio process and of craft, in response to situation where access to such aspects of art making is impeded by ideology and circumstance.

Craft and Process: Jasper Johns / Regrets (March 25, 2014),

I am interested in the capacity of material experimentation and serial practices to bring an artist to the expression of, the performance of, the actualization of content the artist had intended or desired but might not have arrived at if trust had not been put into process and materiality at some point or another.

Craft and Process: “Mingei: Are You Here?” and other ghost stories (April 3, 2014), continuing my interest in “an approach to art making that acknowledges the equal importance of making and thinking and I’m committed to the idea that there is a richness of intellectual content inherent in materiality and process,” I review a recent show of contemporary art and traditional Japanese folk objects through the lens of an analysis of the allegory of creativity in Kenji Mizoguchi’s great 1953 film Ugetsu.

Craft and Process: Tools and “wild ‘reserves’ for enlightened knowledge” (April 116, 2014) a beautiful old work chair in the studio of Chaim Gross opens up a consideration of tools and craft, the pleasure I take from watching things being made by hand, and my belief that there is “an intelligence in the craft, in the gesture.”

Family, or “The Schor Project:”

These texts form the nucleus of a project to which I am deeply committed, a cultural autobiography into which I would fold my parents’ lives and artworks and the influence of my sister’s work as a scholar and a feminist. This project would rely on archival images and on artworks, it might take the form of a book, but the blog posts have suggested the format of the photo essay, either still in book form or as photo- and text-based artworks. These posts may seem also like a hijacking into personal territory but if the goal of A Year of Positive Thinking was to turn my attention to the art work that sustains and inspires me, this goes to the core.

For Father’s Day: Ilya Schor (1904-1961) (June 18, 2010), a celebration of my father Ilya Schor’s work, featuring some small paintings made in Marseilles, France while my parents awaited a visa to America.

“I Love You with All My Hearth” (December 5, 2010) an appreciation of my mother Resia Schor’s work, published on what would have been her 100th birthday:

That my mother as a person had sought economic survival through her own aesthetic labor was already a lesson in feminism for me and my sister. And, as she developed her own style and techniques in her new medium, it became intriguingly clear that my parents’ work embodied a strangely crossed gender art message that in itself contributed to my sister Naomi and my involvement with feminism and perhaps too to the slightly unusual flavor of our feminist outlook. Inasmuch as art movements are gender coded, my father’s work — folkloric, figurative, narrative, Jewish, delicate, light in weight — carried a feminine code. My mother’s work, abstract, muscularly sculptural although still relatively small in scale but heavy in weight carried a code that would seem to be masculine, as those terms are used.

Orbis Mundi (April 24, 2011) An essay prompted by a major move and the resulting intimate contact with my family’s archival ephemera and their collection of art objects, including a mysterious ceramic ball with Christian liturgical associations, which lays the path for my future project of writing an artistic autobiography in a photo essay format.

So I have bucked an American axiom, that you can’t go home again. I have returned to the building I was born into, and to the beautiful apartment I moved into when I was five–the day I first saw the apartment with my parents, taking the elevator from our smaller apartment a few floors below, is the moment where my conscious memory truly begins. Thus infuriating circumstances have precipitated my taking on part of what I consider my destiny, that is to archive and to mark as best I can the memory of my family’s life, particularly my parents’ lives in Warsaw and Paris before the War, their escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, and their creative life in New York as the background for the path I have taken in my life as what I would call an inflected American.

“I’m Unmarried and Single…” 40 Years Later (October 10, 2011). On my sister Naomi Schor’s birthday, I begin a task I hope to continue, of writing about her via the magazines she collected over the years, to address her intellectual life through the popular culture she loved and the political events we lived through together, rather than through her notable work as a feminist theorist and scholar of French Literature and psychoanalytic theory, a body of work too daunting for me to address effectively.

A Drawing (March 26, 2013). Reaching into a closet in my family apartment has a cave of Ali Baba aspect: you reach in, grab at something that looks like scrap paper, and lo and behold there is something beautiful, here a self-portrait ink drawing by my father.

I was born: Past, Present, and (June 1, 2013) “As I first became an artist, I began to consider some of this burden of memory. Now I am used to it, that burden is my destiny.”

Naomi Schor at 70 (October 10, 2013), to celebrate my late sister’s birthday, “some of her many books and articles that are of continued interest, both for her original theoretical insights, her perceptive and nuanced writing style, and also, as traces of the theoretical and linguistics styles that mark developments not just in her work but in the fields within which she worked, from French Literature to Feminist Theory to Gender Politics to Aesthetics.”

Although it would seem that I should set aside A Year of Positive Thinking in order to more fully develop the project of writing such an artistic autobiography, I am reluctant to do so because it is hard to give up any space for public speech, even if, as a self-published blog with a modest readership, I am speaking while standing on a tiny slippery stone in the middle of a vast ocean of media and opinion. So, in the sporadic fashion of the past four years, I plan to continue for a while longer, because there are still some unfinished sketches for posts that I have carried around like my own personal “giant rats of Sumatra,” (“Watson…a story for which the world is not yet prepared”) and because even just the goal of looking for art I love, and the occasional discovery of such work, is a lifelong proposition and can only help expand my cultural life as an artist. The year of a positive thinking is a metaphorical time frame and if it is sometimes quite difficult to maintain a positive outlook in a precarious world, A Year of Positive Thinking retains its uses for me even if only as an aspirational mode of thinking.

Craft and Process: Tools and “wild ‘reserves’ for enlightened knowledge.”

I begin with a picture of me, but one where I am only an incidental subject.

I am sitting in the studio of Chaim Gross at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation in Greenwich Village during an event on Chaim’s birthday March 17 (b.1902-1991). Because of a lifelong friendship with the Gross family, I feel I am at home in a space where I will not be judged, so I am comfortable sitting alone without feeling any necessity to fill the social space with small talk with strangers. I can take a few minutes of contemplation in Chaim’s studio. This space, even cleaned up and staged for its function in a museum, is a different kind of studio than the ones I often visit in my professional capacity as a teacher, where such tools are not available to the artist, both for practical reasons and also, sometimes, for ideological ones. I am surrounded by Chaim’s artworks, some of his art collection, and by his wonderful tools. I am surrounded by color and materiality and the purpose of craft.This is officially a historical space, a museum; it is an encapsulation or a representation of a practice which is not only historic but historicized. Someone has caught me unawares, as I consider how I am being historicized through my own craft practice, as “someone who uses art supplies to make art,” as a friend has recently described my rare and dying breed, through my knowledge of these spaces and the practices that took place within them, through such associations that I cannot erase, that is, historicized through that inevitable but shocking process wherein the valuable knowledge one acquires over a life time is suddenly held by some as irrelevant to the problems of the present and the future.

A few moments after this picture was taken, I turned my head slightly and focused on a chair.

It is just a chair, an earlier era’s successful design for a work chair of adjustable height. It is also delicately ornate, with an art nouveau line. And it is old, so the wood and metal framework have a patina that maybe were not part of its original condition, but the curving lines, the darkened metal, and the worn and stained wood concentrate my attention: here is something that offers an alternative to the current design of chairs favored by institutions.

Theoretical discourse does not elect to keep practices at a distance, so that first it has to leave its own place to analyze them and then by simply inverting them may find itself at home. The partitioning (découpage) that it carries out, it also repeats. This partitioning is imposed on it by history. Procedures without discourse are collected and located in an area organized by the past and giving them the role, a determining one for theory, of being constituted as wild “reserves” for enlightened knowledge. (Michel de Certeau, p64 The Practice of Everyday Life)

Some of Chaim’s tools are on view,

The studio is in an order and a degree of cleanliness that is a function of its being a museum, not a place of current work. But Chaim was a professional man and a craftsman so I am sure that his tools were kept in good order in this system he worked out for himself.

Chaim was one of the three men in my childhood who I was able to observe at work or at least was able to observe the working studios of.

The painter Jack Tworkov was another. He too cared deeply about quality of craftsmanship, whether it was how to construct the surface of a painting or restore the surface of an old oak table or bone and stuff a leg of lamb, and his tools were remarkably well organized and maintained.

The first and most important artist I was able to observe at work was my father Ilya Schor. Today is his birthday: he was born in Zloczow, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, April 16, 1904.

As a teenager he was apprenticed to an engraver and goldsmith before he went to art school. This seems to have been the remainder of a European craft guild system and the tools were probably closer to those of the 15th century than to today’s. For example, soldering was done by propelling the flame through a tube using with one’s own breath. My father used to smoke 4 packs a day in those years, but, a young man, he could do that.

Ilya Schor c.1920 (at the left)

In 1937 he brought this drill from Poland to Paris, where he still used it, and from Paris to Marseilles, and from Marseilles to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to New York. This drill survived the Holocaust. Of course he did not use it anymore when I watched him work, he had an electric drill. But he showed me how the old one worked. It was clear that it was archaic, even for him, but it created a living bridge bringing me as close to when men made fire by striking two flints together as to the technologies of my own time.

Watching him engrave on hardwood was a great show: his movements were careful, accurate, but also swift and deft. I loved watching him roll out the thick black printer’s ink on a piece of glass, and I loved the rounded wood tool that rubbed the paper against the block to catch the ink smoothly, and finally I loved the revelation of the reverse image when the paper was pulled from the block.

To hold small silver objects secure while he engraved them, he embedded them into tar, which he softened with the flame of a Bunsen burner. The tar formed the top surface of a T-shaped block of wood which fit into the slot of a heavy base which he could swivel with his left hand while engraving with his right. The two part base is made of solid metal, the spherical section is like the turning orb of the earth, and with a similar density, I’m pretty sure it is made of lead.

This was all a long time ago. Around the world, artisans today may still use similar tools but technological transformations in the production of sculpture, images, and objects of all kinds are always privileged signs of contemporaneity. If they were starting out their art lives today, these three artists, born within four years of each other, all from the area of the pale of settlement, Chaim, Jack, and Ilya, would most likely be at the forefront of technological innovation, bringing as much ability and ingenuity to new methods of production as they exhibited with the tools they were given. People sometimes ask me if I am tempted to take up my father’s tools, the way my mother did after my father died, but the craft is in fact very hard, physically arduous, and without much beyond the most basic training even harder, and if I sometimes consider having some of my mother’s jewelry produced as multiples (another story for another day), I think more in terms of 3D printing in plastic! But if they would have opted for the new, if I too would opt for the new, nevertheless there was a tremendous satisfaction for them in their ability to manipulate materials, of a job well done in the working day, and there was tremendous pleasure for me in watching them work. I still love watching things being made. And most importantly, it was evident even to me as a child that there was an intelligence in the craft, in the gesture.

Returning to the chair in Chaim’s studio, it became a figure in a painting, in which furniture of the “hot desk” studio of the present/future and of the old painting studio of the past exist in a perpetually reversible relation of metaphoric temperature.

Craft and Process: “Mingei: Are You Here?” and other ghost stories

All I want to do in this post is recommend Mingei: Are You Here?, an exhibition at Pace Gallery in Chelsea which runs through this Saturday April 5. But detours of thought, details of multiple projects, and ulterior motives have complicated the matter: the following is whatever of these threads of thought could be ordered and researched sufficiently and fit into a relatively sensible text against a short deadline.

I’ve been thinking a lot about craft recently. Not from the point of view of a personal practice in crafts such as pottery, weaving, or more contemporary ventures into 3-D printing, not because I want to claim crafts associated with femininity for any kind of identity politics. I’m concerned more generally about an approach to art making that acknowledges the equal importance of making and thinking and I’m committed to the idea that there is a richness of intellectual content inherent in materiality and process.

I find that the direction of my thought is in sync with others in the art world, including the just released April 2014 issue of the Brooklyn Rail which contains a section on craft guest edited by Lowery Stokes Sims whose introductory essay “Beyond The Horizons of Craft: Diversity in the Global Art Market” notes some of the class and gender issues raised by the question of craft or handicraft, as well as the inclusion of ceramic and wood carved sculptures in the Whitney Biennial, as well as the success of recent exhibitions of works in clay and porcelain by artist such as Lynda Benglis and Kathy Butterly.

My train of thought has deep roots in the art works produced by my parents Ilya Schor and Resia Schor, who often worked in areas that had been delimited by high art as being part of the second class of “applied arts,” that is to say craft, such as jewelry and the creation of objects of Judaica. [My introduction to a recent exhibition I curated of some of their work is available on Academia.edu] Although I did not follow their path exactly in terms of the type of artwork I produce, I appreciated from my earliest moments of consciousness the pleasure of working ably with materials and the visual as well as conceptual intelligence of the marks and objects they made and those they collected. My current train of thought about the role of craft, process, and materiality is part of the ongoing negotiation I have engaged in since my earliest moments as an artist, between “wet” (embodiment, materiality, pigmentation, fakture, form) and “dry” (the precession of language, theory, and the concomitant privileging of photographic and digital media), where I have rejected the necessity imposed by the adherents of both sides to chose either one over the other, instead finding a way to step back and forth across the line, or, at best, work within the line of demarcation. My thoughts on craft and process is also the result of stress occasioned by the contrast between the richness of art that exists as living history and as presently available languages and the poverty of visual means and materials that I see some young artists disposing of when the emphasis of their environment is on theory preceding practice and on dematerialized practices rather than ones in any way connected to base materiality or the disciplines of painting and sculpture and their histories.

Here is some of what I’ve done in the past few weeks: I spent hours rubbing a decade of oxydation off of a group of twenty small silver and gold objects by my mother; I’ve compared the ornate form of an early twentieth century office chair in the studio of Chaim Gross with the modernist whiteness of office furnishings as represented in the New Museum’s recently announced plan for New Inc; I’ve worked on a series of reversible paintings where I seek to destabilize the hierarchy between the archaic, material, emotive, and the contemporary, digital, cool; I’ve tried to cram readings and rereadings of several books I have on the issue of craft in contemporary culture, including Glenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft, Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, and I’ve trawled Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life for instrumental quotes explaining the way that, at least since the Enlightenment, in Western culture, theory has absorbed the intelligence of crafted objects while arrogating superiority over these practices. I’ve even wasted some time trying to prove that the etymology of the French word métier is the primordial Greek mythological figure of the Titan generation, Metis: although metis means “wisdom,” “skill,” or “craft,” etymology could not take me where I wanted it to go. Instead Sennett posits Pandora as the provocative goddess for his investigation of craft and material culture. I always disliked the myth of Pandora, that a woman’s curiosity would be held accountable for human kind’s ingenuity in crafting destruction.

But for today, all I can do is recommend Mingei: Are You Here? which runs through this Saturday April 5, and view it principally through the lens of the beautiful and heart-wrenching movie it brought to mind, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 film masterpiece Ugetsu.

In Ugetsu, the main protagonist is Genjurō, a poor farmer and potter who lives in a humble hut at the outskirts of a small village where he works against time, dreaming of the money he can make by selling his wares at the market. He is not a bad person, but he is crass, materialistic, and selfish: he browbeats his devoted wife and risks their lives to tend to his kiln during the pillaging of their village during a civil war time raid, so that he can complete and take his wares to a larger market town, profiteering during a time of instability. Genjurō, his wife, their young son, and their neighbors attempt to evade bands of marauding soldiers by rowing across a lake to the town rather than walking over land. When, in an eerie foreboding fog, time slows and he and his other companions come upon floating ghostly omens of disaster, he insists on turning back to leave his wife and child alone on the shore, presumably to spare them the dangers that may lie ahead, but effectively abandoning them to cruel fate.

Each scene up to this point in the film is short, the action and the settings are rough. In general the film is very theatrical in its precise and economic use of each scene to advance the narrative as boldly and also as simply as possible, organized like a play where something happens and then the actor leaves the stage and the next diagetic moment can take place, as well as in the way sets, though representing the outdoors, often appear to be shot on an interior stage so that naturalism and artifice are in constant interplay. The efficiency and roughness of plot-furthering scenes only highlights the longer episodes when the film slows and the characters are plunged into beauty, mystery, and terror.

In the bustling market Genjurō is approached by a noblewoman and her elderly maid. These mysterious ladies buy many things and lead him to the noblewoman’s dwelling. There, through the most subtle process of transformation of mise en scene, filmed from above like the survey of a foreign planet, out of what at first seems like an inchoate weed-covered wilderness, an abode of the greatest refinement slowly emerges and he finds himself welcomed into a place of the most exquisite beauty.

His beautiful and aristocratic hostess, Lady Wakasa, dressed in sumptuous heavy brocades and ethereally diaphanous garments plies him with compliments for his craft such as he has never heard and seduces him into a marriage demanded by the spirit of her dead father, a Hamlet like ghost speaking from an empty warrior’s mask. The intense mixture of aesthetic refinement and boundless physical passion are like a dream. He has passed through a portal into a space so marvelous he cannot fully understand what is going on. Throwing himself on a perfectly groomed lawn by the now sparkling lake on a sunny day after a night of sexual passion, he exclaims ecstatically, “‘I’ve never dreamed such pleasure existed. This is exquisite! It’s paradise.”

Incredibly, and without the overt drama of the narrative of Ugetsu, that is somewhat the sensation I had when I walked from Kiki Smith’s exhibition at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, through a narrow passage way into a new smaller wing that Pace has built under the High Line and found myself, without preparation or expectation, in an exquisite, thrilling, soul-soothing, museum quality exhibition of craft objects and artworks, arranged in an inventive, harmonious, and instructive manner for contemplation. In a modest sized rectangular white walled exhibition space, objects of daily use, artifacts ancient and new, paintings and pots, quilts, and kimonos were arrayed on two tiers, hung from the ceiling, against works hung on wall that were subtly dematerialized by natural light coming from unseen skylights along the edges of the dropped ceiling. So-called high art, priceless antique jars, futon covers from the late nineteenth century made from distressed scraps of indigo colored material, all co-existing in an atmosphere of great calm, dignity, and beauty.

The sense of wonderment and confusion came first from the overall sensation of light and the unusual arrangement of objects, and from the immediate sense of displacement: in a gallery in Chelsea, an ancient Japanese garment and a teapot from the 1970s very much like one I own and use.

Filtered light, multiplicity of diverse objects, a kimono here, a teapot there, a painting there. Where was I?

I went back out to look at the wall text: the exhibition is Mingei Are You Here? an exhibition curated by Nick Tremley, originating at Pace London, focusing on works done in the spirit of Mingei, or “people’s art,” folk art, a Japanese philosophical and aesthetic movement conceptualized in the 1920s by Japanese theorist Sōetsu Yanagi. Mingei is a philosophy which “assigned value to and saw beauty in simple, anonymously produced utilitarian objects, signifying a revaluation of popular crafts in the midst of the industrial revolution.” (Nick Trembley, catalogue essay). Mingei was an influential part of an international Arts and Crafts movement that responded to the mechanization of industrial production with a complex respect for low culture, folk produced utilitarian objects of daily usage, and mass produced objects of simple and beautiful design. Yanagi and others rescued from obscurity and destruction humble folk ceramics from earlier centuries from Korea and Japan.

Excursus #1.

*It is of some significance that I had passed from Kiki Smith’s show to this exhibition. The narrow front desk area between the two gallery space had served as much as a portal between worlds as the foggy lake in Ugetsu. Before I happened upon the second, magical gallery space, Smith’s current exhibition had struck me as occupying a great deal of real estate with very little concept or substance, with no sense of a search or a theme, just various objects for purchase, some shiny wares for market, some beautiful (tapestries made from pleasing but not stylistically individuated images created or assembled by Smith), some just merchandise. As I passed through her show, a chronology of mental snapshots of Smith’s shows came to my mind, from the first work I saw of hers in the 1980s at the old Fawbush Gallery on Broadway, which included human figures made of rice paper hanging from hooks, utterly contingent shells of fragile skin that seemed to emerge from the AIDS crisis that Smith was deeply connected to, to a show in about 1993 at Fawbush in his next space in Soho that later became the smaller of Deitch Project’s spaces, the one on Grand Street, where a life-size wax figure of a woman on all fours trailing a chain of entrails seemed to herald a return to a type of essentialist representation of woman that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, to exhibitions a bit later at Pace Wildenstein in Soho where a kind of nineteenth century fairy tale illustration style of representation and narrative began to slowly erode the criticality and urgency of meaning which had been inherent in Smith’s use of materials and her approach to the human figure in the years she made her reputation, in favor of a more popularly accessible visual language and reference field.

This is only one of several instances of a contemporary artist with a large profile in the market whose early work’s vitality and criticality is long forgotten and often hard to find examples of online: when a young artist is faced with this vacuity within the work of a famous artist without the benefit of a deeper knowledge of the work that created the artist’s reputation in the first place, the disjuncture between name, brand, and artistic depth can only add one more bit of cynicism about the contemporary art market and world.

Excursus #2

*One work in Smith’s exhibition opens my excursus up to another extraordinary exhibition centered on explorations of materials associated with craft, Gauguin: Metamorphoses at MoMA. In this exhibition two three-dimensional figures of women are outstanding: Oviri (Savage) from 1894, a partly enameled stoneware figure of a young woman whose voluptuous earthy beauty is emphasized by the earthen burnt siena colored surface of her skin yet undermined by the resemblance of her pose to that of a deposition of Christ–Gauguin thought so highly of this work that he wanted it placed as his gravestone–and Tahiti Girl (c. 1896), a figurative sculpture that Gauguin crafted in wood, adorned with felt, silk, seashell and mother of pearl jewelry and amulets. Tahiti Girl‘s head is huge in relation to the rest of her body, nearly life size in relation to the half-sized body, with her legs tapering down like those of an elfin creature in a child’s fairy story. The work is exhibited three-dimensionally so that the process of crafting is made fully visible: what appears from the front view to be a continuous figure, with the head and body part of the same piece of wood, in the back is revealed to be a separate piece of wood, bolted to the body, a huge ghost-like bulbous shape left in an unfinished state, hewn with rough chisel marks, unlike the uncannily smooth burnished surface of the front. The necklace veils the juncture. She is as much as a spirit figure of exotic female beauty as the Lady Wakasa. And in Gauguin’s Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal, Gauguin writes of sensual intoxication similar to the rapture expressed by Genjurō: “Plein silence. Mais quelles harmonies violents dans les parfums naturels qui grisent l’artiste voyajeur? Que de beaux fruits dans l’eclat polychrome des feuilles, des fruits, des fleurs!” Total silence. But what violents harmonies in the natural perfumes which intoxicate the artist voyager? What beautiful fruits in the brilliant multicolored leaves, fruits, flowers!”

In sum, aesthetic responses are always set in a context: here the emptiness of much that appears as central in the art market is contrasted with the inspiration that can come from transformative works by an artist that you don’t even particularly love. The Smith show, empty of concept, composed of a few shiny wares for market, Gauguin’s transported responses to inchoate and incomprehensible beauty of another civilization both set the stage for my response to the calm beauty of the objects in Mingei are you here?

It is revealed to Genjurō that the Lady Wakasa is a ghost whose soul has wandered in search of the the full experience of a woman’s sexual life and true love, which her murder during the Civil War had preempted. Recalling his wife and child, he manages to flee her desperate embrace, waving her father’s sword at her, he throws himself into the dark night. When he awakens he finds that her exquisite home is a burned-out ruin, the impeccable lawn by the lake a tangled field of brambles and weeds.

I returned to see the exhibition Mingei Are You Here? two weeks later and had a more complex and nuanced experience. While I did not suffer so dramatic a transformation of my aesthetic experience as Genjurō, discovering that his beautiful love is a cursed phantom trying to take him to the spirit world forever, nevertheless I began to distinguish differences in what was arrayed so artfully that at first I had been so overwhelmed with wonderment, while my pleasure in the exhibition catalogue’s intriguingly Mingei-style design, with its modest brown paper cover and shoji-screen like fold out inserts, was slightly undermined by some of the historical complexities of the Mingei movement, including its uses to xenophobic assertions of Japanese nationalism in the pre-World War II period.

Unknown maker, Ainu Attush robe, late 19th c.

I realized that I experienced a hierarchy of fascination, with the most ancient artifacts and the most modest and simple of the contemporary mass produced objects at the top. Among my favorite works are a wooden kettle hook hanger from the Edo-Meiji period (nineteenth century) whose utility is not clear to a contemporary Western viewer, so that the experience is principally aesthetic or material: the dark reddish-brown patina of the wood and the curvature of the shape, a curved form that is also a box; a conical shaped object of bamboo and bronze that is a Falcon basket from the Edo period; a beech plywood and brass Butterfly stool manufactured by Tendo Mokko from 1954; and a brushed stainless steel kettle designed by Sori Yanagi in 1994 and still in current manufacture–I have one just like it. Of the modern art works, small granite sculptures by Isamu Noguchi seemed particularly powerful when placed next to these anonymous folk objects: in one work in particular, Untitled (Small Torso), the stone is allowed to be itself and the effort necessary to inscribe any mark into it, even one or two incisions, is a powerful trace within the work.

Each of these objects has an absolute tangibility as well as an ineffable quality that cannot be captured or fixed, although daily usage and absent-minded but constant concentration and contemplation can bring it close. Thus the beauty of the humble mass produced kettle from the 1970s:

On the wall, 2 oil paintings on canvas by Lee Ufan: Dialogue, 2007 and With Winds, 1989; Butterfly Stool by Sori Yanagi, 1954; Sgrafo Modern porcelain, designed by Peter Müller, c. 1960-80.

In the context of the old and often the anonymous, some contemporary works looked much better to me than they might have in other contexts: thus, a painting by Lee Ufan suddenly made a different kind of sense as the backdrop for a series of small curiously shaped white porcelain shapes of the Sgrafo Modern-Korallen Series (design by Peter Müller, c. 1960-1980) and for some ancient Japanese folk rain gear and a backpack made of indigo dyed cotton and layers of fiber than it does as just one more work in the current surfeit of contemporary “casualist” or “provisional” abstraction.

There were also a number of large contemporary hangings, sculpture, and paintings that I realized that I was simply blotting out: works such as Mai-Thu Perret’s enameled ceramic gold glazed slab, When I look I do not see, when I listen there is no sound (2011), Trisha Donnelly’s large Untitled slab of Stone Azul Macaubas, a mauve stone whose high polish reminded me all too much of what one might find in a deluxe bathroom of a new four-star hotel in Dubai, and even Steven Prina’s brightly painted Blinds. Their optic effect felt jarringly vulgar in the context of Mingei’s embrace of the modest, which parallels the aesthetic principles expressed by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki in his 1933 artistic and ethnological manifesto, In Praise of Shadows. They were gaudy ghosts of the market but, luckily, irrelevant to the impact of the exhibition as a whole.

At the end of Ugetsu, Genjaro is again working at his potter’s wheel. He has been transformed by everything that he has experienced, by the spectral encounter with aesthetic perfection in the person of the Lady Wakasa , and by the spectral reminder of the warm intimacy of family life which he had taken for granted when he had it, of which one precious reminder is given to him in a final ghostly encounter. In contrast to the rushed sloppy way he churned out as many pots as he could for the market when we first saw him, now he lovingly crafts a single pot, light catching the gleam of the wet clay as it turns and as the ghostly voice of his wife expresses her joy and admiration for his work, which at last fulfills her hopes for him. The film ends. We see him fire his kiln but we never see the completed work. Yet the intimation is that it will be beautiful, that all the suffering will be expressed in the beauty of a common object, crafted with love.

Strangely the texts I have read on Ugetsu don’t focus on the film as an allegory of art making. But I see it that way. I also can see that the moral of the story, that great art is not arrived at through crass commercialism and personal ambition for riches, but through the infusion of suffering and loss into a work done within a process of craft (and I use that term in the most expanded manner possible including so-called deskilled processes) is for some an outdated idea of who the artist is and what art is in contemporary culture. The quaint notions of objecthood, craft, sacrifice for art, aura–for what could be more auratic than a single pot which has been wrought–with humility and selflessness–over the souls of two dead women?–surely these are not characteristics directly applicable to contemporary practice.

Unknown maker, Sake Bottle, 17th century

So how does one get from the empty studio in which a young artist may be sitting on his tuffett like Little Miss Muffett, trying to bridge the gap between theory/ intentionality/ideation and artwork which may have some materiality or emotive weight? How does one get from the merely illustrative to the internally performative?

One answer is offered by one of the contemporary works in Mingei: Are You Here?, Simon Fujiwara’s Like Father, Like Son (2013): within glass vitrines there are two plates, one whole, one shattered, and four photos with typed text on cards such as one might find in a small local ethnographic museum of a slightly earlier era. The text relates what appears to be a personal narrative by the artist, about his absent Japanese father, pottery lessons, and the work of Bernard Leach, a British man who was a recognized master of Japanese traditional pottery in the early twentieth century. Yet, despite the first person voice, the stylistic signifiers and subtly shifting pronouns signal that this is an unreliable narrative even if some or even all of it is based on autobiography. In contrast to many of the other works of craft and art in the exhibition, this is clearly a contemporary conceptual artwork, with all the irony and distantiation than comes with that designation, rather than a straightforward work of craft. Nevertheless something about how one might proceed in this moment of imbedded disbelief in the kind of authenticity of the more historical works in the exhibition is implicit in the conclusion of the piece:

To make something you have to break something, to have something to break you have to make something–it does not have to be a plate, or a painting, but it has to be something you can see clearly enough to wield the hammer.

Further reading on Mingei: Are You Here?

“Mingei: Tradition and Craft; Simplicity and the Everyday” by Altoon Sultan

“‘Mokujiki Fever’ Endures” by Alice Rawsthorn

“Mingei: Are You Here?” by Michael Straus