Eavesdropping in the Modern Wing of The Art Institute of Chicago

A bit over a week ago, I found myself in the same weird room of contemporary art in The Modern Wing. In this little gallery room is this Lisa Yuskavage painting, Angel; Margharita Manzelli’s Dopo la Fine; Peter Doig’s Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre; and finally the Lucian Freud Sunny Morning–Eight Legs. And since it is such a weird and wonderful room, it is ideal for eavesdropping. I did not spend over an hour in this room to eavesdrop, but was in there reviewing the Manzelli painting. The eavesdropping realization was just icing.

I have always been very fond of eavesdropping in museums. I spent endless hours in many museums doing just this while I sucked in the art around me. But this day, with my intent being very great on my review for my class of the Manzelli painting, pondering reviewing the Yuskavage painting pictured above, it was a wondrous eavesdropping day.

Yuskavage’s painting I have pictured here is titled, Angel. This is very tame for Yuskavage whose use of porno pastels further creeps out her luscious canvases of nude female figures in various narratives of dire straits of physical deformities. Abnormally large breasts and bulbous bellies that seem inhuman, so this one … tame in comparison.

Picture this: In comes a couple in their 60s perhaps, they walk into this odd room where the eye first spies Manzelli and Yuskavage. They stand before Angel in complete silence for almost 5 straight, uninterrupted minutes and then she says: “That’s no angel!” She seemed angry, irritated, quickly leaving it for the Manzelli, while her male companion, maybe her husband, continued to stare at Angel as if she were the most gorgeous and real woman he had ever seen. He was very taken by this woman on the wall in porno pastels, and I am thinking perhaps this is what upset the woman, most likely his wife (they acted married, long married).

Later I caught them near  Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #88, and this same woman was empathizing with the visibly melancholic woman on the wall while this same man gazed into Mike Kelley’s wonderful downpour waterfall of stuffed animals, Eviscerated Corpse. It was a fascinating afternoon in the museum with a very fascinating couple.

Now, I am interning in the Art Institute with Express Talk tours and look forward to this journey with my museum guests … their words, their faces, so significant. If the Curators of museums don’t already do this, I think they should spend loads of time eavesdropping on their museum’s guests. I can’t wait to open my ears to any and all of the observations of everyone in that space there for a common reason — to see art, even if their agendas are different.

Eavesdropping in a museum … I recommend it highly.

rediscovering sHApE with Xiong Yu at the Chicago Cultural Center

One of the main (of many) things that draws me to certain works of art — Shape. As someone who often experiences tricks of the eye, seeing the world around me as a series of shapes rather than things, I deeply appreciate another’s take on the shape of the world. And to say today that I merely appreciate Xiong Yu’s take on shape is an understatement; I not only appreciate it, I feel it wholly, it is a gutshot.

Through the end of August, the Chicago Cultural Center (across from Millennium Park) hosts the profoundly important exhibition, The Big World: Recent Art from China. In this deep and moving and shapely exhibit, one artist in particular took my heart and eyes: Xiong Yu.

The above painting, Riders in the Forest and the work below, Falconer, still reside in me … the shapes of me day today, a day later …

In Riders, the amazing complacency of the eyes and necks of both the riders and the horses lends an odd variety of summoned imagery to me: Aeon Flux of MTV animation infamy, as well as the strangely “proper” and profound bone-structure moments in one a favorite Western painting of mine, Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage(1434).

The muted use of color that is a punch in the orbitals even while it is muted. This is an immediate recognition to me, van Eyck and Yu, hitting me in the vertebrae and shooting me with the odd feelings that maybe I am crazy to put these works side by side. But then maybe I’m not crazy. Shape … the texture of the human machine manifested by artists like Yu, is the driving force of love, hate, peace, and discontent.

The technique in Yu’s paintings show the truth of the great human truths as much as the narrative therein does. Everything will be fixed in moments of time if we’re patient enough, everything being a reason. A reason for something steadfast and absurd, slow and steady winning an impossible race.

And, dear readers, if you get to the Cultural Center by the 30th, do also see the sculptures from modern China in Millennium Park.

I know I  must go to China to study and to feel the fingers of humanity on my impatient Euro-American skin, see the beauty in the rebirth from decay like a falconer summoning a lover in a mad hunt for the ultimate happiness in the shapes of humanity.

Modern Art will always Have my heart, but Hans wants me to hear him …

Just yesterday I wrote here about a painting I came across very much at random, a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger titled Lady with a Squirrel. Then, today, again semmeingly at random, a Holbein painting was the artwork on my daily calendar I change religiously. So for today, Friday, June 26th … Holbein is on my art calendar. I cannot help but believe there is something in this beyond the haphazard coincidence. So now, I am going to begin my research of this man … get a book to add to my collection, this book having the added appeal of having this odd little message perhaps.

I think this message may have something to do with TRUTH.

Bizarre Visions of Squirrels in the Midnight : Father’s Day Reflections

Usually, I am attracted to Modern and contemporary art because it is a deep and wonderful anguishing to me and how I am feeling in my odd little modern world. But sometimes, very old art like this painting titled, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger (circa, 1526) and writings like Margarey Kempe’s Autobiography of the Madwoman of God will give me great meaning to my modern world. Since my dream last night, I am walking through a mundane Thursday afternoon  when suddenly so much again seems sad, heartbreaking even. Now is one of those days when the smallest thing can send me into tears, those large, gasping tears, tears  like toddlers have when their hearts break over something mundane, like an exploded balloon and a lost Barbie shoe.

Last night, I spoke to my parents on the phone, and my father told me he brought 2 dead squirrels from the road outside their house, buried them in the sideyard garden, made them headstones, naming one Step and the other Fetch, placing an American flag between them. To anyone who does not know my father, have a past with him, would find his behavior bizarre (and it does have its kooky quality for sure). But to me, I see the reasonable truth in this ritual, loving my father as much for his humor and sweetness as I do for his stupors of sadness.

He is the child of the sad Irish … photographs of he and his sisters from babies on up depict a sadness in their very rare, if ever, smiles. And they are not just bored, serious. They are sad knowing life is still waiting outside that camera shutter, Pennsylvania and Ohio starvation, darkness, furniture and carpeting covered in long draws of plastic always and forever. Their home constantly covered in plastic as if they had already left their living room, their living, but didn’t, just simply stuck in a room as complex as a turbine engine or Morning Glories.

And two squirrels dead in a street, still full of tap water and love from a yellow bowl. My father leaving water out for the squirrels in their yard, gallon by gallon, day by day. Patiently I have been waiting for a poem about my father to tap me in my dark and it did last night, tugging at me today. I know it is coming. It comes in small little nibbles. And I see and feel always a small house.

After the conversation with my father about the squirrels and about my mother’s anxiety about me moving to “the big city”, I shared some lovely hours with my love, Don and my great friend, Gina. And lying there last night with Don, medicine taking me gently away from the heat-steeped outside where sleep had been alluding, I slept in love another night in my life. And I was lying with a man who genuinely loved me back.

So why were there terrifying dreams when I wonder why I feel like a squirrel lying dead and decapitated in a street, driven around and laughed at by the engines of motorcycles? I was being drug into a house to help the faceless man (that usual man in my dreams I think — the bad man) embalm animals, me standing there vocalchordless, unable to help myself or anything or anyone else around me since I was being led around by the bad man’s thumb as if I were on a conceptual leash, a magnetic field of rebellion in the most intense manner possible in the modern world.

My modern world. And then today, this painting just comes to me in a book I arbitrarily open. She is scared, too. And just like me, I don’t know what really scares her.

So I start putting that black eyeliner around my eyes again looking for my inner Shirley. She has stopped talking to me. But I feel certain this painting is one that will get us talking again like two schoolgirls shoplifting in our little sockhops loving men who love us, arriving to save us.

the classy and somber side of IGGY POP …

Even as the over the top rocker of  The Stooges and the Bowie-collaborator Iggy break my heart with the raw power (pun intended) of his lyrics, Preliminairies shows yet another side of Iggy. A soft, somber, and wise Iggy, an inspired Iggy … as if this was all marinating in him for a long while only to emerge with a force like a Mac Truck at 200 mph. In an interview available for viewing on YouTube, Iggy talks about his need — a seemingly sudden need — to break away from the bozos of rock guitars.

Buy this record … see this absolutely necessary side of Iggy Pop …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8YqPehV–A

truly fearless … Lisa Yuskavages

Naturally, the first thought is Hans Bellmer … with the bulbous forms made up primarily of rotund shapes. The bellies of Yuskavages’ subjects look like they will explode or deflate, like something under great pressure, like blown up balloons. They are almost too round to be pregnant bellies … but they look to be holding something … and this idea just gives the viewer still more to consider and discuss about her paintings.

Women in the art world seem to be very much reacting and commenting on the ingrained sexuality of American culture right now. Look at Hilary Harkness for one … her works repossessing male narratives with Barbie-esque buxom blondes.

What bothers me as both a woman (a “buxom” one at that) and as a great and passionate appreciator of art is that the word “pornography” is being thrown around like a bouncy ball and therefore the works of Yuskavages and Harkness are often labeled thus. Wrongly labeled in my opinion. I think what makes this work the most shocking is that it is being created by women.

Just look at this video from James Kalm. Notice the reactions from the men. I feel they are not only utterly clueless about women, but absolutely clueless about women commenting on stark sexuality. Vaginas still scare and amaze men … my point proven by Kalm’s constant attention to it in the video.

What makes Yuskavages in particular so very fearless is her blurring of techniques and imagery.  I see nods to Hans Bellmer, Margaret Keene, even and most oddly, Precious Moments knick knacks. The bulbous forms and exceedingly exuberant innocence in the faces and settings of her subjects make me wonder how her mind kept it all together while guiding her very talented brush strokes.

The women in these paintings are human. This is what the men in the above video have forgotten. Their expressions and circumstances are human and in this these paintings excel. The nudity gives this humanity texture, shape, furthering the emotion very much present here.

This is an artist that must and will be followed by me for a long time.

secrets in drafty rooms: my reactions to the Edvard Munch Exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago

I went to the exhibit with my love, Don anxious to see Munch’s Madonna and then I fell in love also with this one, The Kiss (1892). The complete sense of devouring and secrets is not only sexy and subversive to me, but also anxious and sad. Such an amalgam of emotions from this work makes it great … like many of Munch’s work actually. A man near us said of The Kiss: “I bet they’re lovers, married to other people.” The reaction to this comment — and to the painting — by his female companion seemed to be one of mild disgust, shock. The engendered reaction to Munch in general intrigues me and I felt fortunate to be at this exhibit. This moment of eavesdropping (something I love to do in art museums in particular) was significant in even my reaction  to the piece. I think this woman saw more violence and the man saw more lust in this work. Of course, I will never know this, but there was an interesting reaction in their words and their look. It was an exceedingly intriguing moment.

And the work itself creates a nervous little room in this: Is the woman in a lovely lust pulling him closer to her in The Kiss? Is she trying to push him away? Looking at this work, I think one could go either way. But for me, especially looking at all of the versions of this work, it holds passion over violence; love over malice. And of course any reader of French philosopher, Georges Bataille will the direct connection between violence and sexuality.

I believe Munch’s intention in depicting women are often spawned from the femme fatale ideal … even The Kiss could be seen as a great moment of female power, the power of seduction that is primal and needful for their male counterparts. Look at Ashes, Sin, and The Vampire. These paintings are an expression of the depth and power of the female psyche over the male.

Munch’s 1894 painting (above), The Vampire has the fascinating dichotomy of coddling and devouring. The woman looks to both be comforting and destroying the man in the same moment. The result is a brooding work that, in its light (the woman’s skin), challenges the viewer to change perceptions.

Please check out this wonderful and important exhibit of the work of Edvard Munch at The Art Institute of Chicago. I welcome greatly comments here about your thoughts about the exhibit.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index

Ooh La La … Valentine’s Day with Edvard Munch

My sweet Don is taking me to Chicago on Saturday … for dinner at the Chicago Chop House, a lovely stay at the Allerton and of course a transformative blast at the opening of the Edvard Munch exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index

I am such a lucky girl.

Pictured above is Munch’s Madonna definitely one of my favorite paintings of all time …

This exhibit will also help me to get a handle of my current critical project on the work of Egon Schiele … the palpable eroticism in Munch and Schiele exist in the same little room of my heart, just beneath of the pillow of my breast and there it beats … and there it shall stay.

My reactions to the exhibit will be posted here … I know now I wouldn’t be able to resist.

Happy Love EVERYDAY!

National Poetry Month 2009 Poster Unveiled

… from the poem that gave me a moment with T.S. Eliot, a pre-Pound Eliot — when he was still an innocent, emotional man unafraid of expressing emotion. Ahh, Prufrock …

Great poster this year. The artist is the award-winning graphic designer and illustrator Paul Sahre.

Thigh Highs and the Music in the Work of Egon Schiele

I have begun to embark on another research project involving the artwork of Egon Schiele. This has been a project that has been with me for while, but I have never begun to execute it till now.

I wondered why I have had this sudden need to buy several pairs of thigh high nylons and socks, wearing them at least a few times a week … then I caught my subconscious seeing this painting,  Stehende Frau in Rot, from 1913. Art is a encompassing experience for me and in this, I guess I began to wear  nylons on my thighs. I guess I wanted to feel the cold air on my upper leg with the juxtaposition of my warm calf, swaddled in a nylon wonder.

After an afternoon at the Associated Writing Program Conference in Chicago, my dove and I are going to the Art Institute to see the Edvard Munch exhibit … opening, sweetly, enough, on Valentine’s Day. http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/munch

Egon Schiele, like Munch, was an Expressionist. Schiele’s work to me with his effortless use of gouache, is musical in its look. Sometimes the music is soft and sweet, sometimes sad, sometimes brimming with anxiety. Schiele is definitely, like Munch, a painter whose emotions went straight from his heart and through his fingers.

Dying at the age of 28, Schiele’s life was severed short with his influenza killing him three days after his wife died of the illness. I wonder what or who he is now, believing in reincarnation as the only form of afterlife. I think he would be a little black dog.

Today I wear red tights because of the Michigan cold … red as a kitchen in mourning. My kitchen was red … all red … in my dream last night. I was wearing red socks like Schiele’s subject and a man was cutting all of my hair off. I let him do it. Stood quiet. He was about 7 feet tall, staring into my scalp.

Today I wear an opal and think of Schiele. I sit here hoping he will be that French bulldog I am wanting to get someday. The one with the ears full of poetry and the expectant eyes loving walks in the city.