scattered thoughts on Georgia O'Keeffe

this is not in the format of my usual posts (highlighting an artist or show that I'm currently into), but this has been on my mind, and I haven't written about O'Keeffe (who I love) on here before, so I figured I might as well...


        We were discussing semiotics in my art history class, and (of course) Magritte's The Treachery of Images came up, which got me thinking about Georgia O'Keeffe. There is no denying that many of O'Keeffe's paintings (particularly the flowers) resemble female genitalia, something that she denied consistently throughout her lifetime. This always seemed silly to me, especially knowing what little I do about O'Keeffe and her interest in gender (for more on this read Susan Fillin-Yeh's Dandies, Marginality and Modernism: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and other Cross-dressers). The paintings are in my mind clearly genitalia and the idea of this being coincidence or a result of my own mind is just absurd. But in came Magritte, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". This is not a pipe.
        Magritte was perhaps playing with different questions (signified vs. signifier, what is "a pipe"), but his contrary statement is perhaps equivalent to O'Keeffe's in that the intent is to allow for thought. By invariably insisting that her paintings were flowers and that was all, or abstract and that was all, O'Keeffe was essentially saying "This is not a labia". If we are to take her for her word, we then must wonder why we are seeing it that way. Are we really so sexually minded that we cannot look at an innocent painting of nature without seeing genitals?
        Let's just say (for the sake of my theory) that O'Keeffe was painting vulvas. This is what most people see when they look at them. If O'Keeffe was to agree- that these are vulvas and that this is what she was painting, the conversation ends. 'O'Keeffe is a weird feminist painting weird, obviously vaginal flowers. We were right. Moving on'. But by denying this, the paintings become weirdly voyeuristic, we are forced to think about our own perception.
        I'm not sure people give her enough credit. She wasn't unaware what she was doing, either in painting or in the way that she approached or discussed her paintings publicly.




images: Magritte, O'Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz (photograph of O'Keeffe)

Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson 1969-

        Sorry for the few days absence, I needed to collect my mind as I gear up for the start of a new semester.
        I was on Marilyn Manson's website trying to find clips of his film project Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll (which to my utter sadness still has no official set release date, though imdb says this year), and stumbled upon his paintings, which I had probably not looked at since my freshman year of high school. While some of them are inarguably pretty vulgar (to be expected), his painting style is absolutely beautiful and strange.
       Manson's paintings are done with watercolor, and sometimes absinthe, which he discovered accidentally, "I was drinking as I was painting and put my brush in the wrong one. It makes a nice stain, so I figured I didn't want to waste it." It sounds sort of over the top, but it's very him, and the images are still really cool, regardless of whatever associations you may have with the man behind them.

-Manson's website (artwork section)
*note: There are some paintings on his website that feature nazi imagery. Though Manson is a known shock-artist and most of his work is a little controversial, usually in a way I can appreciate, I just feel the need to say that I am NOT in support of these specific pieces.
-Some of his work is also on MTV's website with comments by Manson




images: marilynmanson.com

Amy Cutler

        I was first attracted to Amy Cutler's illustrations because of the weird space they seem to occupy between nonsense and some sort of strange ritual. I wasn't quite sure what to make of them. I was interested.
        I stumbled across her when finding images for my post a little while back on Nikki S. Lee, whose work is carried by the Leslie Tonkonow gallery; which represents Amy Cutler. Her gouache illustrations are charming, but at the same time there is something unsettling about them. They are slightly off. Women performing mundane tasks (tasks that are particularly associated with females) are offset by slight peculiarities in the scene. (The perfect subtleness of the strangeness in her scenes can especially be seen in the first image, it took me a while to notice the women behind the trees.) The stark white absence of background leaves a large hole in the narrative which makes it clear the whole story is not being told. It makes them appear deceptively simple. They are nonetheless definitely narratives, however cryptic, or pieces of them at the very least.

Cutler at Tonkonow




images: various sources, c. Amy Cutler

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith 1954-

        I meant to write about Kiki Smith around the time of SMFA's InsideOut sale (as she had a piece in it; Born last image - one of her many depictions of the red riding hood tale) but somehow I managed not to do so.
        Kiki Smith is one of those artists where I've had an impossible time choosing images to put up here. This is not only because I love her work so much (definitely one of the artists I aspire to be like), but also because she works across so many mediums that it's absolutely impossible to give any kind of window into the breadth of her work. Nevertheless, I have chosen some of my favorites, and tried to give a small taste of what she's about.
        Smith has said that she strongly identifies with her gender, and it is definitely clear in her work, which re-contextualizes and reconstructs stories, myths, and histories; through her female eye. The two sites I've included here have way more information about her than I could possibly share or even summarize, so I suggest you take a look at one or both.

-awesome MoMA interactive site from their 2003 show Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things with lots of her work and lots of info.
-Art:21 on Kiki Smith (in the "Stories" episode)






images: pbs.org & moma.org

Fefe Talavera

Fefe Talavera 1979-

        Since I am home for the holidays I was going through a bunch of old Juxtapoz magazines to check if I could throw them out, and stumbled upon a few great artists I had overlooked the first time, including Brazilian street artist Fefe Talavera, whose work is both beautiful and badass.
        Her myspace explains that her monster paintings "are metaphors for strong and subconscious human emotions like anger, fear, dreams or desire", and that she connects them to the "dark side of her inner self". Her cultural roots also play a large part in her work, as she (who is half Mexican half Brazilian) was raised in São Paulo which is known for its graffiti scene, and has also affected some of the deeper meanings and intentions behind her work. Inspired by her heritage she also incorporates Aztec and Mayan mythologies into her work.
        I just thought her images were really strong and definitely worth putting up here, so take a look.

Talavera's blog ,
myspace ,
& flickr .




images: flickr.com/photos/fefe_talavera

2009 wrap-up

        In case you haven't been following my every move this year, here are my top ten favorite discoveries (all are artists that I had not known of before this year, since I sometimes write about long-time influences of mine):

April 18th : Bianca Casady (knew of her before 2009, but not her artwork)
April 29th : Jan Švankmajer
June 5th : Nadine Byrne
June 7th : Miwa Yanagi
July 24th : Compagnia della Fortezza
July 29th : Andrea Marshall
August 12th : Ali Scarpulla
September 23rd : Bert & Bertie
October 9th : Susanna Majuri
December 21st : Miru Kim




        I realize that the majority of this list is women, and while this did not surprise me (I tend to seek out female artists), I was slightly surprised after a bit of investigation, that the reasoning for this is also partially that the male artists that I've written about this past year are almost entirely artists I had prior knowledge of (and therefor did not include). This coming year I'll try to find some guys who are new to me.

images (top to bottom): Miwa Yanagi, Bert & Bertie, Andrea Marshall & Susanna Majuri

Walton Ford // info on NEW FORMAT

        This coming semester I am going to be very busy, so I will be changing the format of Brass Tea. What I imagine will happen is that I will be writing a combination of shorter posts (sips) and longer more analytical posts (cups) depending on what I have time for that day. This way I will still be able to get in five artists a week.
In the next few weeks I will be trying this out, so bear with me if things seem a little wonky or uneven at first. I'll have it hammered out by January.
        So without further ado...

Walton Ford 1960-

        First of all, if you are not familiar with the PBS series Art: 21 - Art in the 21st Century, I suggest you become acquainted. Art: 21, which was Emmy nominated, "documents artists in their own words". New seasons are every two years (starting in 2001), and each episode covers a theme (such as "loss and desire", "memory", "transformation") and includes 3-5 contemporary artists working with the theme. The series is really awesome, because you get to see the actual artist (often working) and speaking about their work and how it relates to the greater scheme of things.
        I have been sort of non-systematically working my way through the series (which you can watch on their website pbs.org/art21, or on Hulu or Netflix Instant View as well) and most recently watched the bit on Walton Ford (who is featured in the "humor" theme).

        A self described "maximalist", Ford's work is modeled after the work of Audubon, a name which is surely familiar to most. Ford however, has a focus on contextualization. He notes that Audubon probably killed more animals than he ever painted, and that this "hero/villain" aspect of early natural historians is a source of inspiration to him in his dark comedies.
        Ford injects current political and environmental tones into this vintage style, creating extremely strong paintings in which he confronts current culture and history (both shared and his own). The tension this meeting of times creates is mirrored in the "hero/villain" side of the work, as well as the "attraction-repulsion" that he says he tries to create. "The big, big thing I’m always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion thing, where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen or is in the middle of happening." This reaction to his work directly relates to the sensation of digging a little deeper into history and realizing what was really going on in some situations (Audubon being a perfect metaphor to speak through, as he is is all too frequently painted as some sort of valiant sportsman). I will also add that each of his paintings has a really interesting/strange narrative behind it, not all of which are immediately obvious unless you have an extensive knowledge of history, and he outlines some of these narratives in the episode of Art: 21. There are also explanations with the images in the slide shows on the Art: 21 site.

If you are interested in watching his bit on Art: 21, as I said you can watch it on Hulu or Netflix, but if you watch it on the PBS site you can also read a couple of really interesting interviews with Ford as well as see a couple slide shows of his work, and a brief bio. All that is here.


images: pbs.org/art21/artists/ford/index.html

Ahmed Abdalla

        This past Thursday I had the pleasure of attending Ahmed Abdalla's opening for his show Melody and Witness, which is currently up at GASP Arts in Brookline, MA. Abdalla's statement for the show reads as follows;

        In melody and witness, there is anxiety about what is happening and what might never happen. There is frustration, sometimes, with the impossibility of communication.
        Humility and arrogance, power and greed, guilt, redemption, forgiveness, ambiguity, paradox and contradiction are all present in this art event."

        This "art event" (described by Abdalla as something that lies between theater and fine art - his background is in both stage design and fine arts) incorporates elements of painting, drawing, sculpture, video projection, sound and light, culminating in a wildly powerful installation. He has effectively controlled every aspect of the experience within the space, and the effect is overwhelming.
        The viewer enters through the street entrance to the gallery, and is immediately confronted by a small space, a temporary wall covered in pencil marks, and a curtain to the left. Entering into the actual gallery, it is dark. The lights are set up to alternate between two overhead bulbs, darkness, and lighting underneath a table that is set up, with a large glass of oil and tar set next to a slab of special type of tar that has the appearance of both wax and charcoal. Small beads (I'm unclear on what they actually were) cover the ground, Abdalla explained that he hoped visitors would step on them and feel that they had done something wrong (something that I certainly felt before having the discussion with him about it). The second smaller room is pitch black, aside from a video projection into a pedestal sink, a man's hands scrubbing to get almost gold brown oil of his hands under running water.
        By nature of the piece, it really must be experienced (and I encourage anyone in the Boston area to do so) to understand the true power of it. Abdalla has extreme mastery over experiential language; his political and emotional message can almost be sensed without explanation or text.

Information on visiting the art event Melody and Witness:

GASP Arts
362-4 Boylston Street
Brookline, MA 02445
617.418.4308

The gallery is open Thursday - Saturday 11am-5pm and is less than two blocks from the Green D line Brookline Hills stop.




images: taken by me, c. Ahmed Abdalla Melody and Witness

Beverly Semmes

        Beverly Semmes (a graduate of SMFA) gave a lecture at the MFA yesterday. Her work is often described as, and certainly appears to be, very feminist, so I was surprised and interested to hear that this was not her foremost concern, or even something that she had originally considered. Semmes described how one of her earlier pieces had been written up as a "pool of menstrual blood", and how she had been surprised and embarrassed, thinking that she had simply been making landscapes.
        It is impossible in contextualizing Semmes' work to ignore the feminist connotations of what she has created, intended or not. She works in female garments, placed together with empty vessels (either clay or glass, both of which are made by coiling). In order to understand where Semmes is really coming from though, it is important to look back at where she is stemming from.
        Out of grad school Semmes and her boyfriend (now husband) moved to a psychiatric hospital - where he worked and they were offered free housing. There Semmes became consumed by the hospital's extremely well manicured garden. She began to making garments which reflected the space, and making super-8 films of friends wearing the garments and walking around the garden (second image). It is here that Semmes identity as an artist began to become more apparent. She described the way no one could quite do it the way she wanted. People moved too fast, looked back at the camera, overacted. It was obvious that even if she could not express it at the time, she had a clear intentionality for these pieces. She described it as something like the "marking" or "claiming" of space.
        This continued into her other pieces. By using scale, color, and once even smell, Semmes has a complete control over space. She chooses colors which she describes as both beautiful and nauseating, sometimes with a goal of "color contamination", where nothing is safe from the color, reflecting off of walls, clothes and skin of observers. She plays with this even further in pieces where the garment is the same color as the walls, making it not only difficult to locate but almost claiming the entire room as her art. She ups the scale in every one of her pieces, making dresses that are unwearably huge and with oddly pushed proportions.
        One of her more interesting pieces (in my opinion) was a small room, with orange curtains surrounding it, a couple of red pots, and a large circle of tan bandaids stuck to the floor in the middle of the room. Semmes states that although it cannot be taken too literally (which would leave no place for the pots) she thinks that the bandaids were in some ways standing in for skin, and the curtains one of her dresses. This places the viewer in an undefined space, between skin and fabric, something I thought was really cool, and goes along with her interest in marking or claiming space.
        She showed and discussed work than I can describe here (I unfortunately was unable to find pictures of most of this work, including much of what I was so interested in), but some other things she showed included giant fluorescent yellow "poops" with a guard dressed in the same yellow, a sea of pink fabric (the guard again dressed in the same color, and often chosen to be an older woman), video and images of Semmes watching her feet (an exploration, she says, of the self-absorption involved in being an artist), and a collaboration with a dance studio - something which she again like her early super-8 films, disliked her lack of control over, and ended up making new work in response to this.
        If you ever get an opportunity to see her work, I could not advise more that you do so. It is difficult to find too many images of her work on the web, and that aside her work is of an extremely experiential nature, and I have a feeling that photos only begin to scratch the surface.

Semmes' website
70min conversation lecture with Semmes and Glenn Adamson at the PA ICA




images: various sources including beverlysemmesstudio.com

Charles Goss

        I've mentioned my mentor a few times in previous posts, and I feel like following Ray Johnson is a perfect time to bring him to the focus of a post. Charles Goss has been teaching at the Museum School since 1979, and (with fellow Museum School teacher Robert Siegelman) started the artist in residence program Art In Amsterdam in 1996. I took his class "Art as Process" my first semester at the Museum School, in 2007, and immediately asked him to be my mentor. He is brutally honest, and forces me to expand my ways of thinking and push myself out of my comfort zones and open up in a way that I have infrequently been asked to in art school. Goss' teaching, as well as his artwork, inspires expansion of the way art is looked at. If I became frustrated with a piece, he would tell me to rip it in half, or turn it on its side. In class projects would be outlined in simple terms that begged for consideration of exactly what they could be warped to mean, such as "draw every person you know".
        The playfulness and ability for everything to have multiple layers and meanings that I described in Ray Johnson is present in every aspect of Goss, personality, work, and intent. His work ranges from collage and painting to large scale installations. His solo show, A Vertical Life at the Bromfield Gallery (where he is represented) in 2008 displayed all these talents; the show included 63 collages (shown together and deceptively titled 60) - some of which make references to Johnson, displaying instructions on how to draw a bunny- a bulletin board covered in what seemed to be thousands of notes (Charles is never without scraps of paper literally covered in names, times, etc), a ball of socks hovering over a photograph of the edge of Goss' face looking upward -the socks collected from family and friends, attached together so that the socks from the ones closest to him were closest to the inside of the ball- poles with tiny scraps of metal, found in Amsterdam and Boston, sticking off the edges, a ball of digital watches on a pole, all originally set to go off at the same time, slowly growing apart due to slight differences in their mechanics (I happened to be there at one of the times when the watches went off, it was amazingly cool) as well as a few other pieces, including a couple tongue in cheek references to work.
        Goss' work is not only visually intriguing, but all very meaningful and often humorous. He and Johnson would undoubtedly have gotten along. In addition to his artist's statement, Goss shares on his website an "artist's focus", which, in perfectly descriptive of Goss fashion reads (click to enlarge):

Goss' website
Bromfield Gallery
Art in Amsterdam program




images: charlesgoss.com

Ray Johnson

        I don't even know how to begin discussing the genius that was Ray Johnson, and this post would be much better left to someone who knows more about him (a couple people very close to me hold Johnson very close to them), so I'm going to focus on few specific aspects of Johnson and his work, because I do think that it is important that I address him as someone who has inspired me. For the greater picture, I can't express enough how much I believe everyone (artist or not) should watch the documentary How to Draw a Bunny, which focuses on Johnson's life, death, and work.
        *note: the links in the following paragraph are to excerpts from How to Draw a Bunny
        Johnson, who is most well known for his collage work, basically lived his life as performance (some speculate, including his mysterious suicide in 1995). He has been hailed the "most famous unknown artist", and not only made really awesome work, but was a really intriguing and genuinely quirky character. Though he is described as a relative unknown, it is more a reference to the way many people did not realize exactly how prolific he was until his death, at which point thousands of works were found, and also because of the way he has been somewhat of a cult gem in contemporary art history. His work is owned by various museums, including the MoMA and he was friendly with many pop figures at the time, including the much more widely recognized Andy Warhol.

“Mail Art has no history, only a present” - Ray Johnson

        I've been thinking about Johnson a lot lately, because I'm hoping to embark on some sort of mail art project, and Johnson has often be considered the father of mail art (which he began in the 1950s). The above quote greatly characterizes Johnson and his work; a playful pun (present meaning gift) but also a statement that can be taken more seriously and analyzed in the greater contexts of the evolving art world.
        I think what Johnson started with his mail art was so important, a sense of community and collaboration in art, wanting to give without some sort of expectation that something would be returned. It is this sense of community that art can bring about that is so important to me, and the reasons why I would like to start creating and exchanging mail art amongst my many creative friends. Ray Johnson, as much of an oddball as he may have been, totally knew what was up.

Again, cannot emphasize enough how I think everyone should see How to Draw a Bunny, but here are some other Johnson sources as well:
(also note that the work I posted only represents his mail art, definitely try to get a look at the rest of his body of work, even if you just google him)

cool short essay on Johnson and mail art
source for a good number of his mail art images (difficult website to navigate, but click basically any link and an image will come up)
official website of the estate of Ray Johnson (nice bio, images, general info)
Ray Johnson: Correspondences (if you have $70 floating around)




images: various sources, including artpool.hu

Toyen

        Czech painter/illustrator Toyen denounced her name and family (she was born Marie Cerminova and formed her own family of surrealist poets), referred to herself in the masculine, made explicit artwork, and earned herself a place in the infrequently infiltrated by women surrealist movement of the 1930's. She was by all standards, a badass.
        This is a large piece of why I love and admire her so much. Toyen was in command of herself, both as an artist and as a woman. She pushed the tight gender roles, refusing to be marginalized. This is reflected in her artwork, much of which is suggestive. It is important to note that female genitalia was no stranger to surrealism, and was in fact frequently represented on the male side of surrealism, but on completely different terms. Surrealism being very much about desires and fears, it from the male standpoint often presents the female form as either an object (desire) or as the archetypal castrated figure (fear). In Toyen's work the female form is much more commanding. They are still absolutely about sex, but she instead speaks from the female side of desire, creating a voice that was not typically seen in surrealist art (or most art in general). Toyen also frequently depicted the male genitalia (which was much less frequently represented), often making them proportionally larger than life to other figures in the drawings, a clear commentary.
        Toyen's body of work spans from paintings to drawn illustrations to photo collage. Her drawings are what first roped me in (the first image I posted being one that has been burned into my brain, something about it just resonates with me), but her entire range of work (which literally ranges from doodles of girls dreaming about penises to more typical surrealist paintings of barren landscapes littered with strange objects) is very strong. She frequently collaborated, both with painters and poets within the surrealist movement.

I was unable to find an online collection of her work that shows the true range of her work, but for now you canclick here, google image search her, or head to the library. (and if anyone knows of a larger online representation of her work please share!).




images: c. Toyen

St. Victor

        As I mentioned in my post on Tatt2 Tammy, I visited New Mexico two years ago. One night I was wandering around a mostly closed Santa Fe mall nearby where I was staying, searching for something or rather (I can not recall what) and stopped at the window of a gallery with giant canvases painted with strange, dark girls.
        I went in to find the artist, Lynden Saint Victor, working on a "mixed media original" (recreations of his original paintings; an alternative to the less personal prints and more expensive/one of a kind true originals) of his painting Lady Gaia (which I ended up purchasing a poster print of). He was extremely gracious and sweet, as well as eager to talk about his work, as well as art in general, and impart his wisdom on me.
        St. Victor's paintings are extremely narrative, and each painting has a story and deep meaning behind it. Visually they appear to be in alternate realities, everything slightly disproportionate or off, and are full of symbolism, both obvious and less-so. I just absolutely love his style and everything that he puts into each piece, and really believe he is worth checking out. And if you are ever in Santa Fe, you should stop by and have a chat.

St. Victor's website (online gallery with full descriptions)



images: stvictordiaries.com