1998 WAS A GOOD YEAR

From the spoils of hate—
into hate’s barn
unshackle a mouse of shame
Salt is one
mean keen blade,
my vision dries up on me tenfold
hate builds a reef, lips gleam like fine ice
yech, not a rusty crust
for the tongue in its cage, the air
the water, my eyes paint with
all things crystallized, salt is one thorough bug
It’s not as though every day is ice:
both before and after seem splendid—wild ice—
at the moment I’m a frenetic xylophone of fire
but as to… Continue reading...

Edouard Manet
He drew Baudelaire’s shoes
I found them beautiful
I found them in Clingancourt
He drew a clochard’s shoes

Like the king’s slippers
in Rabat
He climbs into the pumpkin patch

You can see Mexico
You can hear Quetzalcoatl
Chewing bread in the Zocolo

And the good people laughed at him
In fact they spit on him
For painting a bum… Continue reading...

Roberta Smith in the NY Times from Feb. 10th:

“Museum curators need to think less about an artist’s career, its breakthroughs and its place in the big picture and more in terms of an artist’s life’s work pursued over time with increasing concentration and singularity.

They have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field. They owe it to the public to present a balanced menu that involves painting as well as video and photography and sculpture. They need to think outside the hive-mind, both distancing themselves from their personal feelings to consider what’s being wrongly omitted and tapping into their own subjectivity to show us what they really love.… Continue reading...

I just got back from visiting family and friends in Santiago, Chile. The neighborhood of Bellavista is a great place to hang out and one of my favorite neighborhoods to hang out in South America. Sure, Santiago has competition from more famous Street Art stomping grounds like Sao Paulo and Buenas Aires, but it still holds its own. Again I found the most interesting and relevant artwork on the streets, embedded and enmeshed in the architecture and the lives of the people who are blessed enough to live around this most refreshingly un-American of art-making modes. Yes, America has a huge tradition of Street Art, but I contend that it is not of the same scope as you can presently… Continue reading...

“I know you don’t like group shows, but if you did, what kind of group shows would you put together?”

“Come again?” I replied. It was like being asked what I would do in a restaurant that served only different kinds of yogurt, or sauerkraut.

The caller came again, explaining she was involved with a new organization devoted to displaying work by young, “emerging” artists. Questions like this make you wonder if haranguing for years on a given subject ever does much good.

Well, after a period of time, things that go without saying need to be said all over again.

It is hard to figure which kinds of group shows are most objectionable: patent space-fillers or shows that obviously consumed some time, effort and expense… Continue reading...

All the signs here say

Watch It for Flying Eggs!

and the tent string turnip pawns pocket of a Queens
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bound clown, eating noodles w/a fluke

in a toothpaste tube
bodysock                                    deep in the pocket of the D
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MZ

blowing tin cans… Continue reading...

In thinking about my last post—about putting into artists’ mouths a simple statement of what they do–I went back to my favorite art text of all time, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” a book by Lawrence Weschler about Robert Irwin. The following fragment (which is transcribed from a photocopy of two pages of the open book) outlines what seems to be Irwin’s breakthrough as an artist and—this is what makes it so amazing—a person. Here we can see how and where the artist, the individual human, and the human species merge.

“…purples. It’s a little more difficult to see the incidental transitions, the low-grade shadows caused by the varying textures, because of the starkness of the contrast between the white wall and… Continue reading...