erasing.org: Tag: art

So today has been the day of the web’s big SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. I do not black out erasing.org. The extent of my participation is a lunch-break impulse to post the above picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s 2010 relief “Black Curve Diagonal” on erasing.tumblr.com. An egregious co-opting and misuse of art on my part, but to me somehow it looks correct for the occasion. And now I am cross-posting it here. Forgive me, Ellsworth Kelly, wherever you are.

Cross-posted from erasing.tumblr.com for Xmas Eve: Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday.

Above: A painting I hate in a photo I like. — Below: Mark Strand, “Paintings”, from Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More.

The paintings of A were of rock piles
The paintings of B were influenced by A
The paintings of C were of miracles flattened
The paintings of D were of cruise ships on fire
The paintings of E captured a lost transparence
The paintings of F contained a number of frozen animals
The paintings of G seemed always larger at night
The paintings of H announced the approach of the unreachable
The paintings of I completed themselves endlessly
The paintings of J stood in relation to nothing
The paintings of K were like parties under water
The paintings of L acknowledged the power of chance
The paintings of M offered readings of sunrise and smoke
The paintings of N left nothing to the imagination
The paintings of O contained elements of emptiness
The paintings of P were of babies swimming
The paintings of Q were of nudes having lunch
The paintings of R foretold the coming of midnight
The paintings of S seemed to shrink as they were looked at
The paintings of T were conceived in unison
The paintings of U referred to the Age of Vegetables
The paintings of V concealed their humble origins
The paintings of W hastened the end of self-portraiture
The paintings of X suggested a fury of something-or-other
The paintings of Y couldn’t be looked at without music
The paintings of Z died of neglect the minute they were shown

Above: Six beautiful and startling theater posters (well, five theater and one ballet) by Polish artist Tomasz Bogusławski that we recently purchase from PolishPoster.com. They are 27″ by 39″ and look ridiculously great in person. The plan is to get them canvas-mounted and then hang them together on a large wall, to help keep us in a more or less constant state of creeped-out disquiet. Clockwise from upper left:

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage:

Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist’s girlfriend, naked, on the walls … In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business. The artist’s studio, though, is still what it has always been: an erotic space. For the writer the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress.

Erased de Kooning Drawing and the White Paintings sort of make Rauschenberg the patron saint of my poor erasing.tumblr.com collection. Am up to 174 pieces since January. (Very unprolific for an art Tumblr, I know.) Wish I could buy all of them.

Lawrence Weschler’s “An Impromptu on the Theme of Erasure”, on Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser sculptures and Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing:

For here came an artist of the immediately subsequent generation (b. 1929), and surely part of what was going on was that in observing the de Kooning-Rauschenberg battle — the Old Man seized by the anguished Oedipal implications of the erasing gesture, and the Younger Man by the splendor of its look — he, in effect, the grandson, had taken to proclaiming: Forget the erasure, look at the Eraser! Look how beautiful it is!

Laura is in Italy. For work. She is in Rome. Her first time in Europe. I can only assume she is following Christian Bök’s advice: When in Rome, do as the Ramones do.

While she is away, earlier today I go to Toronto and conquer the Art Gallery of Ontario. I do the whole thing. I get there at 11am, break for lunch at I think 3pm, then go back around 4-ish and leave sometime in the 5pm hour, shortly before closing. Lunch is a large, cheap, excellent chicken-and-rice dish at a Vietnamese dive on Queen Street West. The weather is beautifully warm and summerish and sunny. I take no photos. I encounter no man eating catapilers. I hotfoot it back to the car just in time to avoid getting drenched and/or lightning-fried by the apocalyptic ass-kicker of a thunderstorm that cracks opens the heavens as I drive down Bay to Queen West to Spadina and to the Gardiner to split for home. Apparently I may have driven past Douglas Coupland, who around this time tweets about the storm from Queen West.

The thunderstorm follows me home to Hamilton and has been persisting with some stamina for a few hours now. My legs ache. They ache probably not so much from all that walking, but more from all those slow-motion art-museum steps one takes while creeping contemplatively from painting to painting. My eyes ache from beholding such volumes of art, so many stirring landscapes and bewigged portraits and sexy figuratives and sexier abstracts and staggering Henry Moore sculptures and various unwatchable video-art installations (I apologize to any video artists who may be reading, I can never get into anything done in this form, I am sure the fault is mine). Also a great number of old and immense and elaborately scary Jesus pictures, as all art museums must have. My throat is still parched from hours of breathing four vast floors’ worth of severely climate-controlled gallery oxygen. My tongue is still tingling from having surreptitiously licked so many delicious priceless contemporary canvases. (Don’t worry, just the corners. Tasty impasto!) The lightning flashes outside are getting more intense so I am just going to stop here before the power goes out.

Programming note: I’m on Tumblr, finding art; and on Twitter, in bad blank verse.

Postscript to yesterday’s entry: It is only just last evening, while browsing through online galleries of Rembrandts in search of AC/DC resemblances, that I happen across “The Rich Man from the Parable” and am surprised to recognize that a bad replica of this painting was the picture hanging above the mantel in the Pillar and Post’s Olde Library room where Laura and I had our wedding. In fact we conducted our ceremony while standing in front of it. (You can see it on the left side of the above photo, a wide-angle B&W film shot taken by my brother, who appreciates a good ceiling.)

All this time I’d thought that that library painting had just been a kind of amusingly quaint bit of grotesque old-timey portraiture. Some mystical/alchemical sorcererish weirdo, hamfistedly rendered by, say, a plague-ridden medieval monk armed with a hazy concept of perspective and paintbrushes made from rat bristles. It was ugly, but I liked it. Now that I find it’s an attempt at a Rembrandt copy, I’ve gone back and taken a new look at it — zooming in on where it shows up in the background of one of our color wedding pics — and I can now see just how hilariously awful it is.

Left: Detail from the Olde Library’s replica. Right: Detail from the Rembrandt piece.
Click for a closer comparison.

I guess this goes back to the old idea that you can more easily grasp the genius of the great painters if you compare their works with copies, where you can see what went wrong. Our replica-artist here is not really that terrible, but it’s just that they’ve taken Rembrandt’s evocative, moody, startlingly lifelike scene and transmogrified it into a flat, lifeless, misshapen tableau of what appears to be a softening wax dummy of a malnourished Richard Attenborough, posed in mid-parade-wave, with creepy post-lobotomy eyes bent on vacancy, seconds away from being buried beneath a clutch of enormous floating pastries from Cubist hell. (The fact that I’ve been reading a novel involving art forgeries is purely coincidental.) (Need I even add: I can’t paint.)

Robert Levine, profiling AC/DC for the New York Times last week, gets a compelling quote out of guitarist Angus Young:

The band makes no pretense to art, and its lyrics often contain what might be called single entendres … For this, and much else, Angus is unapologetic. “People say it’s juvenile music, but pardon me” — he speaks these last two words with exaggerated politeness — “I thought rock ’n’ roll was supposed to be juvenile. You sing what you know. What am I going to write about — Rembrandt?”

Below: A detail from Rembrandt’s 1627 “The Rich Man from the Parable”; and AC/DC singer Brian Johnson. I don’t know … maybe it’s just the hats.

OK, so we’ve been over what you get when you cross an ouroboros with a Möbius strip. But what about when you cross an almost-ouroboros with a sort of halved caduceus, then combine the result with a giant floating nut and bolt in homage to the cover of Rush’s Counterparts, then spiff the whole thing up with nonsensical stippled drop-shadows and a bad beveled frame? Answer: You get some cheesy pen-and-ink art that yours truly did at age nineteen for the cover of a 1996 Rush bootleg concert CD.

Travels

I’m not sure at what point during my reading of Memoirs of Hadrian it is that I finally notice that the bookmark I’ve been using, picked up from the bookmark pile more or less at random, bears a photo of a Roman aqueduct. It’s the Pont du Gard in France. Not a bad double synchronicity, for a novel of imperial Rome originally written in French, although the Pont du Gard was built before Hadrian’s time. (It’s estimated to’ve been begun in 19 BC, or as late as the mid-first-century AD. Hadrian lived from 76 to 138 AD.) Shown above is the photo, Dave McKean’s “Travels”; the bookmark it’s on is an old insert flier for his A Small Book of Black and White Lies.

Last Monday, doing laundry, watching Jeopardy on the ceiling-suspended laundromat TVs, we hear Alex recite the Final Jeopardy answer: For a short time, Diego Rivera was a suspect in the 1940 murder of this man. One of the contestants gets it right: Who is Trotsky. One of the other contestants, a Returning Champion who otherwise seems smart, gets it hilariously, howlingly wrong (or is perhaps just indulging in a bit of pointed art criticism): Who is Picasso. — Whoa! Ouch! The mind reels! Actually last Monday does happen to be one day short of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Picasso’s death, in 1973, at age ninety-one. By all accounts he was not whacked.

Related: Pablo recently reappears on his corner. Spring is early!