Tag Archives: Mira Schor

Day by day in the studio 1: July 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I begin with this day, July 13.

July 13, 1976

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

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

July 13, 1977

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

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

July 13, 2009

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

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

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

July 13, 2013

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

I was born: Past, Present, and

I was born. Here is the bill:

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

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

But so it is.

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

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

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

Mira Schor, sketchbook, 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Studio, June 1, 2013

Free Speech

Free speech seems to be the latest thing, but in a strangely nostalgic way. This coming Saturday alone in New York City there are at least two events which will feature readings out loud from historical and contemporary political texts. Unfortunately I can’t be in two places at the same time so I won’t be able to attend “‘A riot is the language of the unheard’: an exercise in unrestrained speech” at The Rose Auditorium of Cooper Union at 4PM but wish I could. The event announcement includes this description:

Taking its cue from a quote from a 1968 speech about injustice and freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King, this public event engages in the use of the voice in imagining collective and political speech through short readings by artists, scholars, writers, poets, musicians, and speakers.

The event features a variety of contemporary and historic material such as re-performed texts, poetry, experimental theater, pedagogic exercises, as well as everyday collections of testimonials, essays, and private ruminations.

Envisioned as a “rough cut” anthology of live subversive speech acts, “A riot is the language of the unheard” is an experimental tribute to parrhesia, or defiant and confrontational speech. As surveillance and force is becoming increasingly utilized to control and manage resistance, this program seeks to address how the right to speak is also a politics of listening.

Later that day, from 6 to 8 I will be among a few artists invited to read at the closing event for an exhibition organized by some of my MFA students at Parsons, “Question for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood” where performances have included other public readings of political texts with an emphasis on utopian possibilities, some from the past but all for the current era. Invited participants at the closing events will also include Maureen Connor, Andrea Geyer, Heather Love, John T. McGrath, and Alex Segade.

Last week saw an iteration of the Free University in New York City, first initiated last May 1, with seminars taking place in the open air at Madison Square Park over a four day period, an Occupy-related event for once unmolested by the NYPD. Discussion included topics such as “What is Money – What is Debt” led by Sue Waters, “The Sirens and Subjection: Homer, Kakfa, and Adorno” led by Julie Napolin, “Letters to a Young Artist: What should young artists know?” led by Caroline Woolard (which was planning to begin with a reading and discussion on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet), and “Discussion of The Alienated Librarian” led by Chris Alen Sula (a discussion inititated with students from Pratt Institute’s School of Information & Library Science of Marcia Nauratil’s 1989 book “The Alienated Librarian,” which examines the work of librarians from a labor perspective. (for the full schedule of events that took place September 18-22, click on the Five Day Schedule link on this Free University Page and for more photos from the event you can look at their Flickr page).

Inspired by the idea of the Free University, on Sunday October 14, I will lead a similar type of reading of Bill Readings’ predictive 1997 book The University in Ruins at Momenta Art as part of the current exhibition Occupy Your BFF, an exchange of ideas with Occupy Wall Street, with the involvement of Occupy related groups including the Arts&Labor group. Institutions including Parsons The New School of Design and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts are hosting some of the events listed on this schedule.

This ferment, in the case of these examples mentioned above, has centered around education within and beyond the confines of the university and in many instances focused on political texts from earlier moments of political fervor, conflict, and engagement is part of a world wide growing movement of radical critique of post-War neo-liberalism and the ravages of global, unregulated super capitalism. In the US the increase in such activity seems to be framed by the crash of the 2008 economy and the upcoming election, although some within the Occupy Movement are so convinced of the evil of the two lesser of two evils argument of our electoral choices that they are rejecting participation in the vote.

While many media voices declare that Occupy is dead or has failed, discussion about the political and economic situation and how to affect it positively, continues, large or small, public events such as the ones at educational institutions or on web-based projects such as Nicholas Mirzoeff’s year long daily blog Occupy 2012 or in small ongoing private discussion groups, the large meetings inspirational and occasionally dramatic (as people on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook share news pictures of huge mass demonstrations around the world, usually not discussed at any length if at all on American mainstream media, including such liberal sites as MSNBC, which focus on domestic events, with a tendency to get seduced by the horse-race aspect of electoral and party politics in the US). The smaller groups are interesting and moving in another more intimate way. I should note that including the Free University, I have attended only a couple of events in recent weeks, so my view is pretty limited but my sense is of a tender struggle, with a desire for positive social inclusion at the level of the everyday, for modest cumulative efforts to interject criticality but also small tangible moments of community and warmth into a media entertainment, corporatized, corrupted and alienated culture. Some of these efforts have a tentative aspect which may lead to media commentary of the death of Occupy, but these small meetings, as much as the larger public events such as the occupation of Zuccotti Park, at least reveal to each individual that they are not alone in their hopes and desires for a different and better world.

The turn to historical texts is significant in this regard. My totally unscientifc and personal view is that from the French Revolution, if you really want to go far back, through the Russian Revolution, to the crucible of the Great Depression with its powerful political battles between totalitarianism, fascism, communism and progressive liberalism, great union movements, and great battles for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, up to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the voices for political engagement were sharp, confident, fearless, funny, inspiring, historically rooted, with deep roots in the assertion of rebellion. The 1980s marked the beginning of the institutionalization of some of these voices into the university but underscored with a growing disappointment with the “failure” of the 60s and a creeping complicity with the corporatization of the world.

The turn to the historical texts and voices indicates a current thirst for the courage, eloquence, and, after thirty years of the triumph of irony, for the authenticity of such voices. At the same time it is quite interesting to note the trend towards re-performance, recently a hot subject of debate with regards to performance art. Events, political actions and interventions, and artworks whose contingent nature was completely a part of their meaning are now being not just celebrated but also re-performed under quite luxurious and heavily promoted circumstances–things artists and political thinkers did in conditions often of near anonymity, not that many such figures did not seek attention for their causes and themselves and document their practices as best they could, but I still would describe as near anonymity relative to current conditions of instant self-documentation, promotion, and commodification on pretty much everyone’s part. One problem is that questions of political belief and authenticity are still hard to bring up, in fact I type these words with censorious critical voices loudly whispering in my ear!

The interest in something like a Free University is also an indication, a recognition that things are not quite so rosy in institutions of higher education, just as they are not rosy in the public school system, in fact in every system. The moral economy of the 1% occurs in every part of culture: we see some of the public protests against the marketization of education, in faculty and student protests against closing of liberal arts departments, libraries, and archives and in the firing of even University Presidents, or, rather, some of these situations are so egregious that they actually get some coverage, but also we see the kinds of small repressions and erosions of knowledge bases that take place throughout the university system in favor of new global imperatives connected to the very same system critiqued by the Occupy movement. Some things will no longer be taught, and thus eventually some may then reappear in the small instances of extra-institutional education Free University proposes and is just one example of, or indicator of the need for–all the more significant as higher education becomes too expensive for even upper middle class people and begins to seem non-cost effective as jobs do not exist for the subjects being taught, particularly in the liberal arts and arts.

This is what has led me to be interested in extra-institutional teaching situations though perhaps it may be therefore inferred that even some such erosions and repressions take place right in the middle of the most progressive institutions in the name of the most advanced political positioning.

In this blog I have occasionally linked to some of the stirring political speeches and the closeness to historical turmoil that marked the generations before me. These framed my initiation into politics in my early teens: the admiration (the word is not sufficient) my parents’ generation had for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the policies of the New Deal–which current Right Wing politics in the US are intent on finally at long last repealing, after 80 years of concerted efforts to do so. My parents’ experiences with fascism and the Holocaust and the formative experiences of their American friends in the Great Depression and during the post-war McCarthy era were a strong influence on me as I grew up listening to their stories. In recent years as labor unions have come under attack, I have often thought about the general tendency towards progressive political thinking within immigrant groups in the US that had experienced political and religious repression in the lands of their birth and how these tendencies were part of what drove the labor union movement in the US in the early twentieth century. The political figures who I witnessed through the 60s and 70s had been formed in these crucibles and carried their traces still even as post-war economic conditions began to shift towards the situation we are currently struggling against. These are just some of the experiences that marked the atmosphere of the pre-1980s period as I experienced them, as were the examples of civil rights leaders and workers such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr.

My interest in the possibilities of the structure of Free University seminars is based on experiences I have related on this blog before, in a provocatively titled and, significantly, pre-Occupy post, including one comment that alas will ring in my mind for years, a student’s negative comment in a faculty evaluation of me to the effect that “she made us listen to a speech by Martin Luther King” in a seminar on contemporary art issues (King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered April 4, 1967, a year exactly before his assassination). Apparently the market based expectations of students (how will this help me be a viable contemporary artist and promote my work?) clashed with my feeling that certain kinds of speech are more important than the orthodoxies of critical theory or some art discourse as well as art market gossip that still hold sway even as such types of speech are now being celebrated in the events that I mentioned at the beginning of this post happening this week in educational and alternative art institutions this week in New York City.

Politics is not for the faint of heart and can be mind-spinningly complex and soul-breakingly frustrating, as are most human beings, and because of that an engagement with politics can end up making people flee back to the interests of their daily lives. As in the past it is the realization that the safety and comfort of those personal lives are contingent and subject to larger historical forces that turns our attention again to political speech from other times when such threats were also great and yet a political perspective was more part of common thought.

Despair and possibility for political activism through speech are also concerns of my current visual work:

Mira Schor, The Bland Face of An Untransparent Authority, ink and gesso on tracing paper, 2012 — a pessimistic realist view

Mira Schor, Voice and Speech, 2010. Ink and rabbit skin glue on gesso on linen, 2010. The optimistic activist view

Ongoing Upcoming

I really felt that my mother understood me when, at the beginning of one of our many summers together in Provincetown, as I was getting the house and garden ready, I overheard her telling a friend on the phone, “You know, Mira is very busy, she hasn’t started working yet.”

When I say “my work” I always mean painting, next is writing which is part of the constant process of thinking, and the rest is just work work, job work. I always say that I can paint and write at the same time, the two occupations are complementary and mutually generative. I can teach + try to do all the things one must try to do in order to maintain a professional life, that is, all the things that make all of us say and feel that we are so busy that we have no time to think expansively, spend time with our dearest friends, or do much of anything that might be restful, pleasurable, or generative of new ideas–with a modicum of clean clothes and cooked dinners now and then–and also write, maybe, or maybe also paint, maybe. I can’t do all three, my work, writing, and the big busy of work work job work: this winter writing for A Year of Positive Thinking has proved impossible as I have prepared for a show which just opened and a conference to be held this week while teaching intensely absorbing new courses and the rest of the daily stuff that must get done from the never finished “to do” list.

I really miss writing for the blog and hope to return to it very soon. Meanwhile here is what I’ve been working on and some of the ongoing and upcoming events I’m involved with.

Exhibition: Mira Schor Voice and Speech

I hope you can see my exhibition at Marvelli Gallery in New York City, which just opened and is up until April 28th.

See “The Thing Itself: Mira Schor + Bradley Rubenstein,” a recent interview about the work in the show.

I will do a reading at the gallery April 21 at 6PM to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of A Year of Positive Thinking and will send out more information about that closer to the date.

Conference: This week on Thursday, April 5th:

Art Practice, Activism, and Pedagogy: Some Feminist Views

The conference will consider feminist art as a zone of multi-disciplinary art production associated with a radical critique of gendered power relations in society. The women artists participating will speak about their current work, their history within feminism, and the relevance of feminist identification and communities to their creative endeavors. They will discuss what it means to be a feminist artist today within an extended range of diverse political engagement.

Speakers include Susan Bee, A. K. Burns, Audrey Chan, Maureen Connor, Andrea Geyer, Caitlin Rueter & Suzanne Stroebe, Ulrike Müller, and Mira Schor. The conference concludes the first MFA Advanced Practice course in Feminist Art taught by Mira Schor in the Parsons Fine Arts MFA Program.

This event is FREE: no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served

Parsons The New School for Design Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall

55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY

Schedule:

*9AM Brief introductory remarks

*Group 1 (9:15)

A.K. Burns, Andrea Geyer, Maureen Connor

*Group 2 (11am)

Susan Bee, Ulrike Müller, Mira Schor

*Lunch break

*Group 3 (1:45pm)

Caitlin Martin-Rueter & Suzanne Stroebe (collaborative+individual presentation), Audrey Chan

*General discussion

The conference concludes the first MFA Advanced Practice course in Feminist Art taught by Mira Schor and at 4PM there will be a screening of MFA student work from the class at the Fine Arts MFA Program studios at 25 East 13th Street, 5th floor.

Also Ongoing & Upcoming:

*I have an essay in Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment published by Paper Monument. The book has gotten rave reviews including one by Dwight Gardner on the New York Times artsbeat blog. Take a look, it’s a great resource, serious and entertaining at the same time.

*CB1 Gallery at the Dallas Art Fair–with Alexander Kroll, Chris Oatey & Mira Schor, April 12-April 15

*Take a look at Agape Enterprise‘s Kickstarter Project and support Momenta Art at their upcoming Spring Benefit 2012 on April 25th at 6PM-10PM

*And do take another look at M/E/A/N/I/N/G‘s 25th Anniversary Edition, published in late 2011. Susan Bee and I are immensely proud of it and hope that readers will continue to come to the important texts by the many artists and writers who contributed to this issue. It is also available on Amazon Kindle.