Our City Dreams

Another Movie of Interest

"Our City Dreams"

Filmmaker Chiara Clemente, daughter of renowned Italian painter Francesco Clemente, tracks the journeys of five female artists whose stories are tied to New York City in this biographic portrait shot over the course of two years. The documentary spotlights the work of Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, American artist Kiki Smith, Big Apple street artist Swoon, and American artist and activist Nancy Spero.

Who Does She Think She Is? THEATRICAL TRAILER

Marina Abramovic - nytimes.com/video

Thread Sketches

For more information take a look at Jaime Lyerly's blog:

http://www.jaimelyerly.blogspot.com/

Julie Mehretu tells the story of her art

After our discussion on presenting our work and telling our story, I thought this would be a good addition to the debate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k04kA7hJ8x8

Member at large Mary Conway

We had an invigorating discussion at our monthly seminar group of abstract painters. We discussed the artists and their work between World Wars I and II. One person, an art historian and artist, led the discussion with three others who did research on individual artists. It was great.

Who is Eva Hesse...?

How about redefining art history from a female perspective? VanGogh, Monet, Picasso, Polluck, Brancusi, Marks, etc. are great artists, but what about the gals? Here is an interesting woman artist who battled the demons of artistic worth and a hard life to create sublime pieces of art. The letter from Sol LeWitt (see next entry) is direct and little harsh and nasty but to the point. Quit wasting time and get to work!

Eve Hesse's art is often viewed in light of all the painful struggles of her life including escaping the Nazis, her parents' divorce, the suicide of her mother when she was ten, her failed marriage and the death of her father. Danto describes her as "cop[ing] with emotional chaos by reinventing sculpture through aesthetic insubordination, playing with worthless material amid the industrial ruins of a defeated nation that, only two decades earlier, would have murdered her without a second thought." She also always felt she was fighting for recognition in a male dominated art world.
Hesse is one of a few artists who led the move from Minimalism to Postminimalism. Danto distinguishes it from minimalism by its "mirth and jokiness" and "unmistakable whiff of eroticism", its "nonmechanical repetition". She was influenced by, and in turn influenced, many famous artists of the 1960s through today. Eva Hesse was for many artists and friends who knew her so charismatic that her memory remains simply unforgettable to this day.
Want more? Read this:
Eva Hesse. 1976 New York; New York University Press / 1992 Da Capo Press, Inc. Lucy R. Lippard. illus. Trade Paper. 251p.

Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

Dear Eva,
It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don’t! Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and you [sic] ability; the work you are doing sounds very good “Drawing-clean-clear but crazy like machines, larger and bolder… real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful – real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever – make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you – draw & paint your fear and anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO!
I have much confidence in you and even though you are tormenting yourself, the work you do is very good. Try to do some BAD work – the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell – you are not responsible for the world – you are only responsible for your work – so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be. But if life would be easier for you if you stopped working – then stop. Don’t punish yourself. However, I think that it is so deeply engrained in you that it would be easier to DO!
It seems I do understand your attitude somewhat, anyway, because I go through a similar process every so often. I have an “Agonizing Reappraisal” of my work and change everything as much as possible = and hate everything I’ve done, and try to do something entirely different and better. Maybe that kind of process is necessary to me, pushing me on and on. The feeling that I can do better than that shit I just did. Maybe you need your agony to accomplish what you do. And maybe it goads you on to do better. But it is very painful I know. It would be better if you had the confidence just to do the stuff and not even think about it. Can’t you leave the “world” and “ART” alone and also quit fondling your ego. I know that you (or anyone) can only work so much and the rest of the time you are left with your thoughts. But when you work or before your work you have to empty you [sic] mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done and that’s that. After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can see what direction you are going. I’m sure you know all that. You also must know that you don’t have to justify your work – not even to yourself. Well, you know I admire your work greatly and can’t understand why you are so bothered by it. But you can see the next ones and I can’t. You also must believe in your ability. I think you do. So try the most outrageous things you can – shock yourself. You have at your power the ability to do anything.
I would like to see your work and will have to be content to wait until Aug or Sept. I have seen photos of some of Tom’s new things at Lucy’s. They are impressive – especially the ones with the more rigorous form: the simpler ones. I guess he’ll send some more later on. Let me know how the shows are going and that kind of stuff.
My work had changed since you left and it is much better. I will be having a show May 4 -9 at the Daniels Gallery 17 E 64yh St (where Emmerich was), I wish you could be there. Much love to you both.
Sol

Start this week with this in mind...

What art offers is space,a certain breathing room for the spirit.~John Updike

Quote of the Day

“You already possess everything necessary to become great.” ~ Crow

The Great Paris Salon a History Lesson

Perhaps we have a Matisse or Fitzgerald among us, or better yet a Stein, Frankenthaler, Nevelson or Krasner!

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American writer, an eccentric whose Paris home was a SALON for the Cubist and experimental artist and writers, among them Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. Stein, a brilliant conversationalist, became a legend with her Roman senator haircut and verbal facility. Against all odds, she survived the persecution of sexual minorities and Jews during the German occupation of France in World War II.

"Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature - and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read." (Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle, 1931)

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, of educated German-Jewish immigrants. Her father, Daniel Stein, was a traction-company executive, who had become wealthy through his investments in street railroads and real estate. His business took the family for four years to Vienna and Paris, when Stein was a child. In 1879 the family returned to America. With her parents, she made subsequently several cultural trips to Europe. After the death of her mother and father, Stein and two of her siblings lived with her mother's family in Baltimore.

In 1893 Stein entered Harvard Annex (now Radcliffe College) in Cambridge. She studied psychology under William James (1842-1910) and experimented with automatic writing under his direction. James also visited Stein in Paris in 1908. After studies at Johns Hopkins medical school, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris without taking the M.D. degree. She lived there from 1903 with her brother Leo, and from 1914 with her life companion, Alice B. Toklas, an accomplished cook for the salon's guests at the 27 Rue de Fleurus flat, near Luxembourg Gardens. Her salon attracted intellectuals and artists to discuss new ideas in art and politics. In the atmosphere of creative energy, Stein wanted to produce modern literary version of the new art. In addition, she and her brother started to collect early works by such contemporary painters as Matisse and Picasso, who later described her as his only woman friend. Picasso met her first time at an informal art gallery established by Clovis Sagot, a former clown. He also painted a portrait of Stein in a brownish-gray monochrome. "Masculine, in her voice, in all her walk," described Picasso's lover Fernande Bellevallée her. "Fat, short, massive, beautiful head, strong, with noble features, accentuated regular, intelligent eyes."

Stein's first novel, Q.E.D. (1903), remained unpublished until after her death-perhaps because of its intimate, lesbian nature. As a writer Stein made her debut with THREE LIVES (1909), clearly influenced by the Jameses, novelist Henry and psychologist William. Stein's book was based on a reworking of a late Flaubert text called Trois Contes. Stein also tried to connect theories of Cubism to literature, as in the essay COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION (1926), which was based on her lectures at Cambridge and Oxford. After differences emerged between the Cubists and the post-Impressionists, Stein sided with the former while her brother Leo championed the latter. Leo, who was left on the shadow of his sister, once bursted: "She's basically stupid and I'm basically intelligent." In her book about Picasso (1938) Stein recalled that in 1909 the artist showed her some photographs of a Spanish village to demonstrate how Cubist in reality they appeared. According to Stein, Picasso's paintings, such as 'Horta de Ebro' and 'Maison sur la colline' were almost exactly like the photographs.

Her modernist literary style Stein lauched with THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, a family history and history of whole humanity. It was written between 1906 and 1908 but not published until 1925. Stein tried to translate in it Cubism's abstraction and disruption of perspective into a prose form and present an object or an experience from every angle simultaneously. The effect was reinforced by minimal use of punctuation-"... if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons to do with it, what had commas to do with it" (from 'Poetry and Grammar', in Lectures in America, 1935). As a result, her sentences grew longer and longer. Automatic writing, a technique favored by the Dadaists and Surrealists, also inspired her.

From the United States Stein's friend Mabel Dodge wrote in 1912 with enthusiasm about the Armory Show, calling it "the most important public event that has ever come off since the signing of the Declaration of Independence". The show opened in February 1913 and presented to the American public modern, revolutionary art from post-Impressionism to Cubism and Matisse. One of its most notorious exhibits was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Dodge's article, which compared Stein's writing to Picasso's Cubism, appeared in the magazine Art and Decoration. Although Stein met Dodge only a few times, their correspondence lasted over 20 years.

The poetry collection TENDER BUTTONS (1914) was a series of still live studies, such as 'A Chair', 'A Box', 'Roastbeef', 'End of Summer' and 'Apple'. Each of these is characterized by unexpected phrases. Her aim was to search ways to name things, "that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them." Thus 'Apple' reads "Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, coloured wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece please."

When England declared war on Germany, Stein was visiting the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in England, with her lover Toklas. After a brief trip to Majorca in 1915, they returned to Paris, joining the American Fund For French Wounded. She and Toklas received the French government's Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française in 1922. After the war Paris gained fame as a city of "the lost generation", and replaced Vienna as the cultural center of avant-garde art, music and literature.

'Miss Furr and Miss Skeene', originally published in GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS (1922), told of two women who live together. Within deliberately limited lexicon, Stein played with the meaning of the word "gay", but its underground meaning became more widely known when Vanity Fair reprinted the story in 1923.

In 1934 Stein travelled to New York. Her opera about Spanish saints, FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS, music composed by Virgil Thomson, had a huge success with an all-black cast on Broadway. The opera run for sixty performances. Originally Thomson did not conceive the score with black performers in mind, but after seeing Jimmy Daniels perform at a Harlem club, the matter was settled. The procection was co-ordinated by John Houseman, who later cooperated with Orson Welles. Thomson's second opera, THE MOTHER OF US ALL (1947), was also based on Stein's text. Stein toured America, taught for several weeks at the University of Chicago, became a lifelong friend of Thornton Wilder, returned to France next year. In 'Poetry and Grammar', originally one of the lectures she gave, Stein published her most famous statement: "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

A kind of right-wing anarchist, Stein hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. When many American writers and artists "went Left", Stein did not take a stand against the Nazi menace in her writings, but suggested to the Nobel committee that the Peace Prize should be given to Adolf Hitler. The proposal was rejected. In the thirties and forties she was a close friend of the collaborationist Bernard Faÿ, the director of the Bibliothèque national. Toklas and Stein were both Jews, but they remained in France during World War II, living under the protection of Pétain in various country houses. Mainly interested in the indivudual, Stein advocated in her war writings renewing American individuality. "America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be," Stein had once said. "After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clean and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything" (from 'An American and France,' 1936). In December 1944 she returned to Paris. Faÿ, who helped them to survive the occupation, was sentenced after the war to life imprisonment at hard labor. Stein and Toklas campaigned for his release.

We cannot retrace our steps, going forward may be the same as going backwards. We cannot retrace our steps, retrace our steps. All my long life, all my long life, we do not retrace our steps, all my long life, but. (A silence a long silence) (from The Mother of Us All, concluding aria)
Stein's best known work, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, is actually her own autobiography. Her later memoirs were EVERYBODY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1937) and WARS I HAVE SEEN (1945). The last years of her live Stein suffered from cancer. She died on 27 July 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Toklas lived on until 1967. Her memoirs, What is Remembered, appeared in 1963. Although Stein's works were highly modernistic and experimental, she also had a strong influence on such popular writer as Ernest Hemingway, who combined her use of repetitive patterns with vernacular speech.

For further reading: Gertrude Stein by E. Sprigge (1957); Charmed Circle by James R. Mellow (1974); Everybody Who Was Anobody by Janet Hobhouse (1975); Language and Time and Gertrude Stein by C.F. Copeland (1975); Lesbian Images by J. Rule (1975); Different Language by M.A. De-Kove (1983); The Structure of Obscurity by R.K. Dubnick (1984); The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World by J.M. Brinnin (1987); Gertrude Stein by B.L. Knapp (1990); Gertrude and Alice by Diane Souhami (1991); Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures, ed. by Renate Stendhal (1994); Gertrude Stein Remembered, ed. by Linda Simon (1994) - See also: Richard Wright - Note: Stein launched the phrase "There's no there, there," originally applied to suburbanised American cities, but now used to describe the de-centered Internet.

Salon Bibliography

Art and Fear: Observations on the perils and rewards of artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (a great read when you are questioning your creativity)

Artist's Way- A spiritual path to higher creativity by Julia Cameron (always helps!)

Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Maria Rilke (inspiration for anyone, anytime)

First Meeing Scheduled

Tuesday, January 26th, 6:00 pm
The Canoe Club at The Lakes
Whitefish, Montana

Meet the Salon

Nancy Teague--expressive writer
Jes Rosier--painter and found objects
Malinda Grommet--jewelery artist
Monica Pastor--art history, interior design, and galleriest
Leslie Blair--jewelery artist
Kristin Voisin--restraunteur and collage artist
Jessica Lowry--photograher
Pauline Graziano--etch-a-sketch artist
Jeanne Tallman--writer
Laura Munson--writer
Donna Gans--painter
Tashana Dilley--printmaker and painter
Kelly Marchetti--photographer
Madeline Shinn Boyle--painter and graphic design
Lindsey Gardner--photograher
Michelle Saurey--gallery owner and ceramic artist
Paula Greenstein--spiritually inspired artist
Kerry Nagel--sculptress
Jane Kleinschmidt--painter
Olivia Stark--painter and sculptress
Hunter Dominick--interior designer and glass artist
Barbara Lewis--watercolorist
Betsey Hurd--painter, sculptress, horsewoman
Mary Conway--painter
Erin Sabin--origami artist
Shawna Moore--encaustic painter

Wonder Salon at Linda Durham Contemporary Art

http://www.lindadurham.com/
A series of invitation-only conversational salons will be held periodically through January 4th, when the show will close. The Wonder Salon was conceived and facilitated by Linda Durham as a way to bring together serious artists in serious dialogue about the past, present and future of Art in these critical—yet highly creative—times. The artists, (“all daring, professional and evolved,” according to Durham) come from diverse backgrounds and aesthetic sensibilities. What they have in common is a deep understanding of the importance of Art and an equally deep commitment to their particular areas of interest and concern.

Significance of Salons for Women

At a time when society was defined and regulated by men, women could exert a powerful influence as salonnières. Women had a very important role in the salon and were the center of its life. They were responsible for selecting their guests and deciding whether the salon would be primarily social, literary, or political. They also assumed the role as mediator by directing the discussion. The salon was really an informal university for women in which women were able to exchange ideas, receive and give criticism, read their own works and hear the works and ideas of other intellectuals. Many ambitious women used the salon to pursue a form of higher education. (Wikipedia)

Salon History

A salon is a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation. These gatherings often consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate" ("aut delectare aut prodesse est"). The salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th century and 18th century, were carried on until quite recently in urban settings among like-minded people of a 'set': many 20th-century salons could be instanced.
(Wikipedia)