Tag Archives: Mira Schor

The Osage Tree

A year ago today, out for an afternoon walk in Central Park, I came upon a few interestingly textured round hard green fruit along a path I often take. Someone explained to me that it was an Osage Orange from the Osage Tree. I immediately looked it up of course, and the next day I went back to pick up some more of the Osage Oranges (which of course are not oranges) because the wind was rising and soon they would fall, be eaten by squirrels, decompose, and also because someone had asked me where the tree was located in the Park and I wanted to locate it for them—in fact it is a small grove of Osage Trees right along the Western edge of the Park near 68th street and because the tree, its fruit, and its story intrigued me. I fell in love with it and what a gift to find something that gave that sense of discovery and yet had always been so close to home.

That second day, one year ago, a young woman noticed me gathering the green fruit and asked me about them just as I had asked passersby the day before. I could feel the tree and its fruit generate a chain of conversation as each person was drawn to the curiousness of these creature-like green balls lying on the ground. As I looked up and took some notes and pictures, she pointed to where there were still some on the branches. Then out of blue she asked me if I was an artist. I said yes in fact I am an artist but what made you ask that? She said that I had so much energy and seemed so purposeful that she wondered if I was an artist gathering the fruit for an art project. I thought, well I am gathering them for a project, Project Save My Life By Feeding My Spirit. I said that I found that being in the park with some (carefully landscaped) nature soothed my spirits. She mentioned that she was finding solace in the park since she had recently broken up with a guy who turned out to be a total liar (I thought, well as a nation we’re all trying to break up with a liar but he’s also a stalker and has crazy evil friends, but that is another story). Then she quoted something she had read by Alan Watts that had made an impression on her, “As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.'” The full quote as I found it online: “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

I thought about how the Osage tree at this point in the fall, in mid-November, has both green and yellow leaves, in fact still more green than yellow, and it still has some of its green fruit hanging on its branches. I’m at the beginning of the eighth decade of my life (I say that because it seems kind of incredible to me) but I am also as summer green as I am autumn yellow. I often despair but still have energy and spirit and hope to continue bearing fruit. The Osage tree is described (in the Wikipedia entry under its etymological name Maclura pomifera) as an “evolutionary anachronism” because of its roots in the Pleistocene era but it has many benefits: not only do squirrels and pigeons seem to love the fruit, but the trees’ deep roots and growth patterns make them ideal for hedges. Also the fruit are said to repel insects. The fruit at this point in the year have a slightly astringent and medicinal but not unpleasant smell which is perhaps what keeps insects away. As the ones I kept from last year attest, they shrivel and shrink with age.

Being an artist is difficult. Basically you are engaged in the making or writing or imagining something which in most cases no one else needs and few are interested in and, even if at some point you are in step with the Zeitgeist, the radical shifts in fashion and reversals of ideology that seem to occur pretty much every decade since the beginning of the modernist era make becoming an “evolutionary anachronism” nearly inescapable. An older artist has the task of remaining alive in their work—and also literally–in the face of an infatuation on the part of the art market with youth or, especially in the case of women, with such great old age that the women artists no longer pose a threat to the system and when they can no longer do more work with the belated support. In previous writings (see note below*) and artworks, I have noted the three ages of a woman artist’s life, “Young and Naked,” “Still Too Young,” and “Not Dead Enough.” I found support in the green leaves of the Osage Tree, in its unusual fruit, its evolutionary survival despite humans deeming it an evolutionary anachronism, and the fact that I can look for the tree again in the spring. Which I did.

And now I have come to another mid-November, the Osage Tree Grove still is more green than yellow, there seem to be fewer Osage Oranges on the ground, and yesterday the grove was fenced off except for a few people in some kind of Déjeuner sur l’herbe scene which I took as a living advertisement for an events business.

Now back to the studio and the prompts and permissions I’ve evolved over the years — “just paint a Mira Schor” I said to myself when I was in my twenties and that barely made sense because at that early stage, what, after all, was that? And then about twelve years ago I told myself, “just paint the worst or the stupidest painting (because you have already painted the stupidest painting).”

It gets harder to successfully play such tricks on yourself and the many shifts in art hierarchies, values, and fashion can begin to wear one down, particularly when they all too disconcertingly resemble something you have witnessed before. It is impressive and overwhelming to see so many young artists doing amazingly consistent, accomplished, impressive work in a style arrived at relatively early in their practice—and yet, for anyone who has been around for a while, in styles that seem unnervingly like older art styles including ones once successful, radical, or reviled. It is a weird thing–one wants modes of thinking in art to survive, one hopes valued traditions and forms continue to exist, but one hopes for acknowledgement and for a sense of interaction with the antecedents. Some of the past I experienced was pretty contingent so it is disconcerting when elements recur as efficient, consistent product. On the other hand, we see very successful older artists that are turning out work in their trademark style to satisfy their collectors long past the time when they were animated by search and discovery—in a way that makes me think of actresses who keep having cosmetic surgery to keep viable but thereby deprive us of what they might actually look like at 70 or 80 or 90. We know how interesting Henry Fonda’s face was in later life but we will never see that reality of Jane Fonda.

In a conversation about this, on the pattern of Artist X turning out Artist X works, I spontaneously said, “there is no Mira Schor,” echoing yet curiously altering my mantra from my 20s, “just paint a Mira Schor.” Yet, with my new spirit tree inspiring me and with my fresh Osage oranges scattered in the rooms I occupy, I’ll continue the project the young woman in the park apparently sensed, with all my mantras including a more recent one, “my work has to be a reflection of who I am, right this minute,” and the newest one–I return to my French education for this–“Il faut tenir le coup”–you have to take the blows, hang in there, hang tough–with this morning’s realization that whatever the market’s most recent stylistic infatuation is, it will shortly fade for whatever the next one will be, and that too will be as much a revenant or a replicant as it will be new. That doesn’t make me happy, the spinning bottle may not stop at a location near me, but it may help me adjust my perspective and hope the deep roots of the Osage Tree continue to yield bright green (though inedible) tough fruit.

“Miss Piggy and Madame de Beauvoir: A New Fable of La Fontaine: Cochon et Castor,” June 1, 2015 ; “Just a short message from Venus,” June 24, 2015; “Normalizing Inequity,” May 9, 2016

*Susan Bee and I invited a number of artists who had been working for at least twenty years (the amount of time we ourselves had been artists at that date) to answer a few questions about their practice “Over Time” for “Over Time: A Forum on Art Making,” published in our journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Issue #10, November 1991. Among the twenty-four artists who responded were Leon Golub, Nancy Grossman, Howardena Pindell, Carolee Schneemann, Lawrence Weiner, and Faith Wilding. A facsimile copy of this issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G can be found here.

Tipping Point–101 Days to November 3, 2020

It’s very hot and humid today in Provincetown, Massachusetts, yet this day I decided to finish cooking a soup that I typically only make during the winter, mushroom barley soup. I’m lacking some important ingredients, namely dried porcini mushrooms and short ribs–this is not a vegetarian recipe…and, also, this is not a blog post about recipes.

As I add the ingredients I ran out of time for yesterday (this soup is often a two-day project, refrigerating part 1 overnight so I can skim the fat off before part 2), I start thinking about The Marshall Plan (developed by Truman’s Secretary of State, retired General of the Army George Marshall to rebuilt the economies and governments of Europe, including Germany. Because that I feel that if trump wins in November the United States will fall into a prolonged period of possibly intense bloody discord and certainly with dramatic economic and intellectual decline. When the forces of fascism and science denial are conquered or spent, when they have looted and trashed every resource, we will need a Marshall Plan to rescue us, as the post-World War II plan developed and administered by General Marshall helped set Europe back on its feet and Germany on the path to a representative democracy. This is the great irony, as observed by Roger Cohen today on the editorial page of the New York Times, in his editorial, “American Catastrophe Through German Eyes,” that now we will be the country devastated, impoverished, and demoralized by fascism country, the country that must be rehabilitated and our best chance is our former enemy, Germany. The survivor of the Third Reich may be the only who cares enough about democracy to help the citizens of trump’s Fourth Reich.

But why would any of our former allies help? And our competitor, China, is unlikely to spend its resources to save a former world power or a democracy.

As I chop up the regular white mushrooms and the Shitake mushrooms that were pre-sliced and packaged, and saute them to add to the soup, it occurs to me (not for the first time) that trump has operated exactly as a wife abuser, having separated us from our allies exactly as brutally and efficiently as abusers separate women from friends and family.

The soup is good, even without the warmer more interesting flavor of the dried porcini. The day was nice. I made chocolate chip cookies too. Everything seems nice enough in the present moment but nothing is normal. I have no idea when I or any of us in America will have a normal day, when other human beings are not the source of infection. The exponential growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States went from 1 to 1 million cases in 99 days, 1 million to 2 million cases in 43 days, 2 million to 3 million cases in 28 days, to 3 million to 4 million in 15 days, and is anticipated to get to 5 million cases in 7 days. Death is a “lagging indicator” –one of my favorite terms of the time–it will come a bit later.There are federal troops most likely made up of private mercenaries occupying one American city and preparing to enter others run by Democratic mayors. November 3rd is 101 days from today.

We are at a tipping point.

Engraved memories

My father Ilya Schor died 59 years ago today, June 7, 1961, a week after my 11th birthday. Every year in the weeks preceding this anniversary, I experience a rise in anxiety, depression, paranoia even, always ascribing it to contemporary circumstances until the date is upon me. He was 57 years old, had been a heavy smoker from his teens until sometime before I was born, and basically died of cardiovascular failure of all sorts–though I always felt that in a time of better medical care he would not have died, but then my sister Naomi Schor died of vascular issues as well when she was 58, so who knows. His symptoms were misdiagnosed as anxiety but I also have written that because he had a succession of small heart attacks in the weeks after watching the daily broadcasts of the Eichmann trials, my sister and I had independently come to the same conclusion–he died of Eichmann).

This spring a few things happened in the weeks before this anniversary, related to my father’s life and work.

First, I was contacted by Shimon Briman, a journalist and historian from Israel, born in Ukraine, who has in recent years done a lot of work researching the Jewish community of the town of Zloczow, where my father was born and raised, a town which changed nationalities a few times, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Poland, to now the Ukraine, where it is referred to as Zolochiv (having spent my life remembering the Polish spelling with its characteristic surplus of consonants, I am not going to change how I spell it). He had many questions for me but also was able to answer questions I had about the nature of the town: I have always been confused by the semi-rural shtetl my father depicted and pictures of the town in the early twentieth century depicting a typical provincial Western city of that time period, with fine shops and hotels. In fact these two worlds were co-existent, as I have gotten fleeting intimations of before, but what I did not know was that it was a Jewish town, that is to say the bourgeoisie, the administration, all Jewish. He sent me pictures of the synagogue that my father often painted and of the rubble of the empty lot that exists now where it had once stood. I am glad my father did not ever see that empty lot. The Jews of Zloczow were murdered in the town in a succession of pogroms: there were no deportations to concentration camps, just slaughter in place.

Ilya Schor, Staircase to the Womens Balcony of the Synagogue, Zloczow, gouache on board, 1950s

Ilya Schor, Marriage Scene: Blessing of the Bride and Groom , 1958–59, gouache, cut paper, and gold leaf on board. The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of Mira Schor, 2004-63 (this illumination was made for my sister Naomi Schor, and donated in her honor to the Jewish Museum in NYC)

Empty dirt lot where the synagogue was, Zloczow, now Zolochiv, in the Ukraine.

Empty field, location of the old Jewish cemetery, Zloczow, now Zolochiv; possible resting place of my grandfather Naftali Schorr who died in 1930.

Briman sent me a picture of the grassy field which was the cemetery–the headstones all were destroyed during the Holocaust, but apparently the human remains are still there. So the dust of my grandfather’s bones may lie there still. He has posted a touching tribute to my father with lovely pictures from the collection of the son of one of my father’s friends from his childhood.

At around the same time I was contacted by a young woman art historian at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts who as part of an assignment to research women art students was interested in researching my mother Resia Schor’s career, having discovered her through some school documents in the Academy Archives. Through this connection I was able to obtain some of my father’s Academy documents. Here is one document from 1930 ((unfortunately I don’t read Polish so I don’t know what it says). In 1930, he was 26 years old. (He was renamed Ilya by a Russian friend in Paris in the late 1930s and that became his name when he arrived in the United States)

Next, I received an email asking me to comment on a work by my father. The query came in a neutral tone, without prejudicial wording, but I had a sense of what it was about and the minute I saw the pictures I understood what my task was. I spent the week before my birthday and the approaching anniversary of my father’s death meticulously trying to explain why I felt this work was a forgery–there are fake Ilya Schors (in the area of Judaica). My mother always said that my father always said if an artist is copied that is a real compliment, a testimonial to having a recognizable style! Some recent fake Ilya Schors I have seen are boldly improbable, bearing almost no resemblance and clearly, brazenly brand new, though with a faked signature. But a couple of objects that I’ve been asked to consider have been more disturbing., In these, someone with some skill has gone to quite a lot of trouble to produce a work that might pass–actually I literally mean one person seems to be responsible for some ambitious attempts, because I am now becoming an expert in this forger’s hand as well. I will post no pictures, obviously. In fact posting pictures of my father’s silver work is always a danger. But I have shared online (in a previous birthday post, from 2013) what I consider one of his masterpieces, in part because because I am fairly certain it was destroyed in a synagogue fire decades ago.

Ilya Schor, silver Torah Crown, 1950s, most likely destroyed in a synagogue fire was no longer in existence at time of retrospective of my fathers work at the Jewish Museum in NYC in 1965.

As I went over the pictures comparing them detail by detail to similar works I had complete verification of (and by the way I have learned that an artist’s estate cannot say that something is a fake because you could be sued, you can only say that you can’t verify), at times I wept because while, when I see one of the impostures, I experience a deep sense of injury to something at the core of my being, when I recognize the trace of my father’s hand in an engraved line into silver, I can feel him making it. As a child I watched him work. That was 60 or more years ago, so it amazes me to re-experience how much I learned at that time. It is a fully embodied memory of artistic gestures. When he was a teenager, before he went to art school in Warsaw, he had trained with a goldsmith and engraver, encouraged by his older brother Moses who thought the talented boy should learn a profession so that he could earn a living, a wise and as it turns out providential decision. He was extremely deft, swift, and certain in each mark. In engraving gold, silver, or hard wood, you cannot make a mistake. He also brought to each mark and flourish a particular joy coming from the culture of the pre-Holocaust Hadisim of Eastern Europe into which he was born. It is the character of this joy, suffused with humble piety and a kind of sadness, as expressed in silver and gold and in engravings and paintings, that makes his work unique and notable, and thus worthy of fakery.

That same week someone put up for sale, on eBay of all places, a truly exquisite Kiddush cup by my father, one that had been sold at a Judaica auction at Sotheby’s some time in the past thirty years. The price was ambitious, especially for eBay, so I am concerned about that, but I immediately saw/felt my father’s craft. But even though it has been on eBay so that some forger out there might be able to give it a go, I still am reluctant to share the screen shots I took of details. Still I will share just one, on the chance that my blog is obscure enough that no one with evil designs (literally) will see it.

screen shot of one detail of a silver Kiddush Cup by Ilya Schor, recently for sale on eBay (!!!)

As I have just celebrated my 70th birthday, I am concerned that once I am gone, there will be no one as qualified as I am to comment on the possible authenticity of an Ilya Schor work. I realized as I was comparing details between the real and the …what I think is not real work…that it is imperative that I leave a map of my reasoning, which may direct future art historians or art appraisers through my experience and visual line of thought. This is one more thing I feel that I must do as part of the cultural autobiography/biography of my parents’ life and work–“The Schor Project” as I call the work that I have not done except in small fragments such as this post as I struggle to achieve a place for my own work and to deal with the everyday. Each immersion in a detail of the past, each art work, letter, document, is an emotional journey that is difficult to recover from enough to meet the challenges of the present.

Mira and Ilya Schor, June 1950. A couple of months before I was born my parents moved into Apt.11B in the same building I currently live in; the images on the wall are my father’s design for the room I shared with my sister, I’m not sure if he block printed directly to the wall himself or made, or had made, wallpaper based from some kind of block or screen.

My father and me, at the Great Neck home of David and Norma Levitt, close friends and collectors, taken in 1960 or early 1961. I can tell you that it was hard to become a teenage girl with that “punim” but without that father (“punim” is the Yiddish word for face and expression)

It is part of the myth of American exceptionalism that there is, that there must be closure, that there is a schedule for grief, that things can be put into the past and left there. Our current political moment is stark evidence that there is no such thing as closure, historically, or personally.

The Lifetime Journey of an Artist

I’m honored to be a recipient of the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award for my work “a feminist painter, art historian and critic.” Previous recipients have included so many women artists, writers, and activists I admire, including Ida Applebroog, Judy Chicago, Nancy Grossman, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Martha Wilson, Adrian Piper, Whitney Chadwick, Lucy Lippard, and Faith Wilding –the more such names I type the more honored I feel by this Award! This year my fellow recipients included Olga de Amaral, Mary Beth Edelson, Gladys Barker Grauer, with this year’s annual President’s Award for Art & Activism going to Aruna D’Souza and L.J. Roberts.

Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awards February 16, 2019 from l to r: Ferris Olin, Ruth Weisberg, Mira Schor, Faith Wilding, Aruna D’Souza, L.J. Roberts, Amelia Jones, Kat Griefen, Janice Nesser-Chu (past and present awardees & committee and board members)

Here are my remarks at the lovely awards ceremony held in New York City on Saturday February 16, 2019.

For anyone impatient to get past the niceties of thank yous, the core of my remarks on the lifetime of an artist begins at about 3:58 min in.

I refer to and projected the following drawing that I did when I was about 9 or 10, one of many drawings I did at that time depicting girl and women heroines, often artists, writers, scholars, musicians, and queens of the realm, with all their books, artworks, and other treasures around them.

Mira Schor, Sea Voyages, c. 1960. Ink and crayon on paper, c.8 3/4″x 12.

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

I began the blog project A Year of Positive Thinking eight years ago with no end date in mind and it has proved to be an elastic and metaphoric time frame. It celebrated its eighth anniversary at the end of April. Today’s post is an updated table of contents featuring about ninety posts in an easy to search but thematically elastic format that I hope will help give a sense of what I have done on this site in the past eight 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. Since then the laws of entropy have been manifest. I write less often but when I do the sense of necessity is even greater because the reasons for the slowdown are 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. These penchants require a certain independence of mind that benefits from a relative degree of financial independence or at least one of 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 eight years, for me as for millions of others, conditions have tightened while work loads have multiplied.

Another factor in my writing less often on A Year of Positive Thinking in the past few 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 longer form, speculative non-commercial 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 eight-year table of contents will help give a sense of what I have done here, essentially writing another book–at least–one which, despite the availability of the material on the blog’s archive as long as I maintain the site, I would love to some day see published in hard copy book form, a form which I think still has a gravitas and a usefulness that online material does not.

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, making it harder to create an order of subject matter for a Table of Contents. The blog has given me the opportunity to pursue my longtime interest in feminism, painting, and teaching, but also 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 puts specific posts into more than one section, 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 table of contents builds on the one I published four and six years ago with the following loosely defined categories: 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.

The ways in which New York city museums have been moving, building, and shifting their emphasis in order to appeal to the “swipe” and selfie generation has been the subject of a couple of posts in recent years:

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.

Thanks for the Memories: The Whitney and The Breuer Building Years (October 191, 2014). I love the Breuer building, I love looking at art in the Breuer building. I like the scale, the possibility of monumentality within what for current museum fashion is an intimate space, I even love it most when it is fairly empty though at this point, when I experience exhibitions such as Leon Golub: Raw Nerve in the winter of 2018, I appreciate the space to see the works but shudder to think that current tenant, the Met, might decide to give up its lease on this treasure if the numbers don’t go up. During my last visit to the Whitney–I mean the Breuer building–“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.” In the new Whitney Museum building, I have sometimes had cause to reflect on the importance of rooms, actual rooms with proper proportions, to support artworks, particularly paintings–a great work can become a postage stamp when it is placed in a generic hall of shifting dimensions.

Recent developments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the past year, from turmoil over the directorship and finances, combined with the shorter time I have to write led to my getting to the point in a more direct fashion, “I love the Met, please don’t fuck it up,” (March 3, 2017) a sentiment widely shared by those artists I know, New Yorkers and others, for whom the Met is a sacred source of instruction and inspiration.

Being able to visit museums in Berlin for the first time in 2015 generated a post about the marvels I saw there and the extremely beautiful, humanely proportioned even when grand enough to enclose a city gate, spaces of the cities’ legendary collections of art and antiquities. In “Looking for Art to Love, in another city,” (April 29, 2015), I reprised the initial goal of this blog, focusing on “the piercing arrows […] cast by two paintings I either had never been aware of or had not fixed upon before: Lucas Cranach The Elder‘s The Fountain of Youth from 1546 and Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s Netherlandish Proverbs from 1559.”

In a number of recent writings about individual artists including Leon Golub, Elizabeth Murray, Benny Andrews, and Allan Kaprow, I mix current experience of the artists’ works in recent exhibitions, personal memories of the works and the artists themselves when I first encountered them, and references and quotations from their writings and my own. My approach in these texts reflects where I am now in terms of what and how I can write or teach, involving pointing to specific details of artworks and hoping that quotations from the books in my library that are the most important to me as well as passages I feel are significant from my own earlier writings will be sufficient to wet my current readers’ (or students’) interest in knowing more. These posts include:

A Necessary Man: Leon Golub / Riot @ Hauser & Wirth (May 21, 2015): The world goes and great people appear in every generation, but some people are more irreplaceable than others, Leon Golub is such a person for me, a necessary man. “The thrill of opening the door of a gallery and immediately seeing a masterpiece. Just hanging there. No fuss. The thrill begins at the threshold, you are not fully into the room but the painting already fills your field of vision and the disruption between the elegant quiet street you are stepping in from to the drama depicted in the painting, performed by the painting, happens in a flash.”

“Circle” by Benny Andrews (January 24, 2017): Andrews’ Circle is a remarkable artwork and yet one that I am not sure I interpreted correctly–an uncertainty of interpretation that’s incorporated into the text. My text is an effort to explain why I feel this is a masterpiece, a term I feel should be used sparingly to avoid degrading its meaning.

Painting in the 1980s: Elizabeth Murray (November 11, 2017):

I place Murray’s paintings/ paint things from the 1980s into the fraught feminist discourse of the time period, both theoretical and aesthetic, and in relation to current trends in painting, and discuss the painting by Murray that I had most wanted to see again to the point it had begun to seem imaginary, Cracked Question (1987): “it is dispositive, it feel instinctively that it solves a problem, a conflict, although its subject stays at the moment of the question. It is sculptural and would be seen as such under any circumstances, but the dark grey and metallic silver paint emphasizes the segmented painting’s relation to steel and stone. Each part is as powerful as the whole, yet the whole embodies its existence as language–speaking of Murray’s relation to “the language,” Cracked Question is language. It doesn’t represent a punctuation mark, it is a punctuation mark. It does not only pose but it is a philosophical question and a philosophical text.”

“I WILL ALWAYS BE A PAINTER. OF SORTS–” ALLAN KAPROW PAINTINGS NEW YORK @ HAUSER & WIRTH (March 21, 2018): “So one wonders, upon seeing this show, if, for Kaprow, painting embodied the egoism he so wanted to transcend.”

As a sub-theme to this section on art, 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 the 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.

As my involvement with feminism is nearing the end of its fifth decade, one theme of my writings has been the pattern of cyclical amnesia with regards to feminism and women artists. In recent years I have noted the constant loss of institutional memory of feminism. Another subject with increasingly personal meaning to me is the injustice of waiting to reward women artists until they are close enough to the grave to be unable to use the attention to further their work. In the past two years, the election of a pussygrabber and the #MeToo movement have occasioned new writings.

Often these writings happen when I read something online or in the Times in the morning at breakfast and something is so outrageous I am instantly propelled to my computer to write in response. Thus, Miss Piggy and Madame de Beauvoir–A New Fable of La Fontaine: Cochon et Castor (June 1, 2015) sprang from reading the “announcement that the Sackler Center will give its 2015 Sackler Center First Award to Miss Piggy. ” I imagined a new Fable by La Fontaine:

Cochon, Miss Piggy, having been a television and movie puppet character, whose main characteristic is that she is self-absorbed and boy crazy and is always trying to get Kermit (a male frog) to marry her, one day encountered Castor, the eager brilliant philosophical and feminist beaver Simone de Beauvoir (who, it must be said, was crazy about Jean Paul Sartre who looked a bit like a frog). “I’m getting the 2015 First Feminist Award from the Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum on June 3. Gloria Steinem is presenting it to Moi, Miss Piggy!” “Vous vous foutez de moi,” exclaimed Castor.

Or I write during an event, with the text incorporating my activities on Twitter. Such was the case with the The Feminist Wheel (September 20, 2014):

The task of the political activist is to keep saying the same thing over and over again, repeating the same history, over and over again for decades, and greeting new arrivals to the cause with enthusiasm rather than despair. I am not always so cheerful about it. Tweet around 9:05PM Thursday September 18 from the all too appropriately titled The Hole: @miraschor: Future feminism. Preview: is there something more basic than feminism 101? So naive & essentialist it’s all I can do not to walk out.

In recent years I have come to see the three stages of a woman artist’s life as “young and naked, still too young, and not dead enough.” The subject of women artists being “discovered” or “rediscovered” only when they have one foot in the grave is one that takes on more and pressing personal meaning as I move up in the “still too young” and approach the “not dead enough” category. I’ve begun keeping a mental file of pictures of great women artists in wheelchairs at the retrospective they finally get when they are securely in the “not dead enough”part of the narrative. This animates the post Normalizing Inequity (May 9, 2016).

The #MeToo movement and the gross revelations about various male luminaries of the media, film, and politics spurred #PERVSCHOOL #HASHTAGEFEMINISM #VALIANTWOMEN (October 29, 2017). Now we are learning more about the “incel” movement. The terror continues and grows.

This blog has been useful at times as an improvised publication site for other people’s writings. One morning, May 5, 2014, full court press on a Carl Andre exhibition at Dia was one of those bits of news that caused me to leap from my breakfast to write Still Naked by the Window. An email response from Ana Mendieta’s dealer Mary Sabbatino of Galerie Lelong led to my having the privilege of publishing two letters, one by Sabbatino and Mendieta’s London dealer Alison Jacques, the other by art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau, sent to the New Yorker to protest the publication of “The Materialist,” Calvin Tomkins’ December 5, 2011 New Yorker profile of Carl Andre, part of the campaign to restore Carl Andre’s personal reputation in advance of his retrospective at Dia. To add these letters to the feminist record in Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker, Unpublished (May 8, 2014) meant a great deal to me, having absorbed from my undergraduate education in art history, which included studying with H. W. Janson at NYU, the importance of archival records, and from my teachers in the Feminist Art Program at CalArts the vital importance of recuperating lost history relating to women artists.

My own ambivalence about my role in the writing of feminist art history is explored in Hey Jill Soloway who you going to get to play me on your Womanhouse series? (May 26, 2016)

November 10, 2016, the morning after the election, one of my students sent me a message: “I need help.” This was my response.

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) on some remarkable paintings by Susanna Heller.

I reviewed the Eva Hesse documentary (May 13, 2016).

I discuss Carmen Herrera and Hilma af Klint’s work in Tangible Visuality: Stuart Davis, Carmen Herrera, and Hilma af Klint (September 24, 2016)

Painting in the 1980s: Elizabeth Murray (November 11, 2017)

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. I think I enjoyed writing about this movie more than anything and think about it often as its resonance sadly continues.

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.

“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.

In Waiting for Gort (August 14, 2014), I wrote, “The news this summer has been bad, bad, bad. There is no direction you can turn to for relief or optimism.” Since I would write that to the nth degree now, at first I drew a blank as to what made that time so awful, since seen from now, it was a time when t was not the current resident of the White House. Looking back at what happened in 2014, I think that what was most motivating my political depression was the racial unrest, that is the racist events of the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. See more about this post below, under Film.

Saint Precaria (March 14, 2015) was written shortly after “National Adjunct Walkout Day,” February 25, 2015. I shared this post with my colleagues and students this spring, on the occasion of a strike of the New School by members of SENS-UAW, Student Employees of the New School, because the “plight” of part-time faculty at institutions of higher learning is a shame often kept under wraps to protect any frail illusions of power and to obscure the future of most students. This post also relates to the next category:

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.

Some thoughts on the meaning of success for an artist, Or, The art school and its former customers (August 1, 2014) looked at the development of the life of an artist from the point of a view of a teacher observing some predictable patterns of life after art school and I believe inspired renewed efforts at outreach to graduates on the part of the program where I teach.

“Certain Reflections about art making and learning about art making,” 1986 (April 21, 2017) reproduces a text I found in my files, evidently written for a class at SUNY Purchase in 1986 though I have no recollection of what circumstances led to writing it. I read it out loud at a lecture at Purchase last year.

Coda to Teaching:

A few years ago I scribbled on a sheet of paper all the essays I had written–and in the middle of the page, “+ my work, painting,” to say, painting, AND all this. A few more texts could be added to the list now including the more recent blog posts listed here. I don’t recall why I did this–I do sometimes wonder how it is that despite my having written these particular writings, the students I work with most closely are generally not aware of them. I know that in general we are all overwhelmed with information and also I feel that, even though my writing is so intimately connected to my teaching and, except for the personal contact, is perhaps more important in the long run, it would be inappropriate to insist that they read them. Doing so would reverse the focus of the relationship from the student to the teacher, and such insistence on a level of attention to the teacher would go against current notions of collaborative learning. Yet while writing cannot replace the importance of a student feeling personally recognized and supported as an individual, or the living model of the artist/teacher as a real person in the world, writing does allow for depth and, one hopes, clarity that may be less likely in the sometimes rather unscientific process of teaching visual art.

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). Orson, Edwin and other pleasures from August 1, 2015 looks at earlier collaborations involving Rudy Burckhardt, Edwin Denby and a young, pre-Citizen Kane, Orson Welles.

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance (September 18, 2011), this remains one of my favorite texts on A Year of Positive Thinking, as I often think of the continued relevance of John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to narratives of American identity and I deeply enjoyed breaking down important scenes and writing about such American icons as John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart with the character of then President Barack Obama in mind.

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.

Eva Hesse (May 13, 2016), examines how this film manages to get past some of the sometimes tedious tropes of the contemporary genre of cultural documentary.

In Waiting for Gort (August 14, 2014), I look back to two science fiction films whose theme is human beings’ propensity for violence, particularly at the level of war, global or interstellar, read through the scrim of a book I was reading the summer of 2014, on two mid-20th century readings of the Iliad, “War and The Iliad, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, two Jewish women living in France at the start of the Second World War who unbeknownst to each other each wrote an essay about the Iliad.” I discuss the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still and Day of the Dove, an episode from the original Star Trek series.

Fail-Safes (October 17, 2016) was written shortly after the first two Presidential Debates of the 2016 campaign. That fall my fascism alert meter was already on high. One of my students told me that he felt that the American system of government was sturdy enough to withstand the depredations of a Trump presidency. I thought about some of the times in recent history when in the face of attacks on some of the basic principles of our Constitution, the “system worked.” Thinking back on those historical instances, I wondered whether the same mechanisms would prevail now, and that led me to thinking about a few movies that are part of the filter through which I see our current political crisis. The movies I have chosen, including Fail Safe and Seven Days in May (both from 1964), All the President’s Men and Network (1976),were mostly made in the period between 1964 and 1976, and are historically bracketed by the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Watergate affair of 1972-1974. It wouldn’t be a Mira Schor text without a Star Trek reference, in this case to the highly relevant The Squire of Gothos from 1967.

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.”

I continued this exploration of major themes in my own work in Interiority and Reversibility (July 10, 2014), focusing on my habit, starting in the mid-1970s, of making works that through being worked from front and back, through layering and translucency are meant to be handled, opening, read, “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.”

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.

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.”

On occasion I celebrate my sister Naomi Schor’s birthday:

“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.

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.”

Letter from a Schoolgirl c.1960 (October 10, 2014) reflects on how my sister and I had interiorized a trauma we had not actually lived through ourselves, as evidenced by the draft of a letter she wrote when she was in high school to André Schwartz-Bart, the author of the 1959 novel Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just).

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. But at least on that stone, I can write on my own terms and schedule. So, in the sporadic fashion of the past eight years, I plan to continue. 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.