'Giuliano de' Medici,' by Sandro Botticelli

'Giuliano de' Medici,' by Sandro Botticelli is kind of a dick

“He is dead. It’s a death portrait” I couldn’t get that out of my head, I read the wall text.

“I Didn’t Know! I Didn’t Know! I’m sorry.” Why was He yelling?

 The red was intense. Red covered his chest. Volume is what you could use to describe it. Washboard folds cover his red chest. The folds are strips, dark and chunky, sinking into the red.

“Is your head on backwards? That’s weird.” It really was, his head was seriously twisted all the way around but I guess it’s still in a way his belly. He has a bumpy nose, hook like, his hair curled and dark.

“Will you stop staring right at me please?” His eye rips over my right shoulder.

He is laid out on the wood panel thinly spreading out over the panel. He becomes very flat. “This guy is weird.” I answer to myself. He sits there proper with flawless posture; it feels dead.  If front of the backwards torso is a dove sitting on a branch. The bird is calm.

“Dove” I say, “what are you doing sitting on a branch in front of this still man?” The bird never responded he just sat with a piercing eye fixed outwards. This all feels very strange. I haven’t been able to figure out where the branch is coming from, where the bird is perched. I gave up on the smooth bird who never quite gave up on me. “Well since you don’t really talk to me I guess I’m going to go back inside to the painting. See You.” There was no response. Fuck that bird.

I came back into the space, the man was so still, and it took me a few more minutes to accept what he is. I wish I could have stopped staring at his extremely thin lips and bumpy nose. He looked pissed so I looked passed him. I wasn’t sure if this was his house or not. The walls were cold and grey I thought they were made of some type of heavy stone. I later learned the whole thing was just a façade, it was just paint, the type they used in kindergarten classes.

The architecture was cramped. It felt like a coffin. I had nowhere to go. I was starting to freak. It was heavy to take a breath, impossible. There was some light but it didn’t show any specifics. But it was very bright. I tried to walk towards it but He wouldn’t move.

“Get the fuck out of the way” He wouldn’t move! Or blink or piss or breathe. I was sick of this.

“Okay, man I guess you win. Thanks for letting me stare at you.” I thought about a pile of shit and how it would look on his shirt. I scuffed my shoe and exhaled.

No response. I guess it’s hard to breath for him, maybe it’s not an illusion and his torso really is backwards?

I left after this small elderly woman kept peeking over my shoulder at my green, 9 x 12 sketchbook I had owned for the past year and had yet to fill.

I didn’t wave goodbye.  

Fruit Snacks

“Murry has to tell a story,” She said

“I felt like eating Dark Chocolate Icing and some Milk, a spoon. The viscous dark creamy sweet material sits on the spoon. It fills the spoon, just to the top of the silver spoon. It enters my mouth with accomplishment. The tongue wraps around the spoon and starts evaluating. It feels safe and rests.

I poured milk earlier. I used a ceramic cup I made. The cup is wonky, not right; it shouldn’t be used for liquids, chunky with glazes that create a universe. The depth at the bottom of the cup is endless but not cold. I ingest the milk and close my mouth with swollen cheeks. I swish the mixture around through the cracks of my teeth. Ecstatic joy, orgasm, and addiction, it feels amazing, the milk compliments the sugary substance with an intellect that breaks down the dark substance to its raw form.

Again!

Again.

I push the limits three more times becoming more unnerved as I go.  There is a pain, Sickness.  I can’t stop. I ingest. Consume that’s all I do. Me oar, and me oar. Puke sits on a ledge in my mind, bile and saliva, acidic, green and black, the chocolate mix. It ends my erect pleasures with a spoon, a single explosive force of liquid into the lips of the mouth.”

Murry laughed alone. He finished his beer in a few minutes and left.

Murry waited at the heavy beige door. The hallway was lit but not bright, dingy. The hallway looked like a midrange hotel.  The hall was painted white and chalk yellow. He didn’t knock. She opened the door after a minute or two of him digesting the numb sterilizing uncertainty of the hallway. He was glad to see her; it’s been a few days since they were together.

“It’s okay I wasn’t out there long.”

He entered the apartment and into her room. It’s also mutely lit but warmer then the hallway.

“That hallway could use a few pieces of art and a nice purple carpet.” Murry exhaled. The carpet is grey, the type of grey that the lungs of a 50 year old smoker has.

“Uhhh okay, I guess I’ve never noticed it. It’s not like I spend anytime out there to care.”  

They came into her room, took off their shoes, some of their clothing, and lounged on the bed. They both nestled into a hearty prune colored blanket that had a similar texture.

"What’s up? How was your day?”

He knew the story would be mundane. It seemed to be the same most of the time.

“It was fine. I worked in the morning then wandered around for a half hour. I stopped to get some coffee around three. That’s been keeping me going ever since; I guess it was pretty strong. It was just so sunny today you know? I wanted to wear the new dress I bought because it’s just so perfect for this weather. Do you think it looks good on me?” She asked

“Yeah, it does look good” He wasn’t going to say anything but that. Her ass truly did look good in the floral patterned sundress.  

“Good I thought you’d like it, I thought you’d like the yellow. I also headed over to the grocery store and got some fruit snacks. You can have some.”

He did.

“Yeah sure, what kind are they?”

“Oh just like the target brand.”

Herald hopped off the bed onto the carpet, it was also the same dull droning grey that was housed in the hallway. The grey leached around the sides of his feet into the white of his socks. He bent down and grabbed a pouch. He displayed all the rubbery snacks out and sorted them in his hand by color. 2 peach, 3 red, 2 orange, 1 yellow, 3 grape. Murry traversed over the abyss of the carpet thankfully making it back safe to the bed. He began to eat the grape fruit snacks first waiting to eat the yellow ones last.

“I really fucking hate the color of the walls!” Herald felt lonely.

He began rubbing the thick royal blue towel hung on the door. It held him. We dangerously started talking. My throat was on fire from the pace and fever of the conversation. She was sitting Indian style in front of me. Her hair was blonde but not perfect, it was tarnished with brown and sat below her shoulders. The face I was severely focused on. My voice ran coarse. The conversation that was setting my mind and throat on fire started to shift its focus. The conversation was still occurring but my focus was shifting to my body.

The fire was ripping down my esophagus and hit my stomach with the force of a punch. It raged still farther picking up anger with each foot of intestine. It’s objective becoming clearer.

My sweat pants were quite comfortable. There light grey with elastic around the ankles; it keeps the warmth in. The sweat pants weren’t the type used for a work out. The grey fleece was used for lounging. Cozy. They were tight but in-between the elastic band the pants became baggy. The bagginess started to exist ominously in the front of my mind.

I nervously traveled my legs upwards feeling the looseness of the fabric. When I came to my buttocks it felt empty, there was a space, an empty cloth sack. A balloon blown up and deflated multiple times. Then I was struck with a firecracker. The first blow. The scuffle started. I hunkered down bit my lip and got ready for a long battle. The skirmish reached its pinnacle faster than anyone was prepared for. I clenched and held tight

Uncontrollable onslaught. Out of my clenched butthole came an unrelenting stream, a fresh Cheese Wiz nozzle recently bought from a second hand shop on sale. It filled the sack like an experienced softserve handler at a dairy queen with the finesse of a sculptor.

There I sat downgraded to an infant try to play with the colors. 

Mary Heilmann Neo Noir 1998. Oil on Canvas, 75-1/8 x 60-1/4 inches.

Sam Moyer: Slack Tide

Installation view from Rachel Uffner Gallery.

Sam Moyer: The Drink, 2012, ink and bleach on canvas mounted to wood panel, 82 by 120 inches.

Sam Moyer’s current show, Slack Tide, at Rachel Uffner Gallery consists of five paintings and one window sculpture. There are four paintings measuring about five by seven feet and one larger seven by ten foot painting.  According to the press release, Moyer makes the paintings using ink and bleach in a process where she gathers and folds the canvas and then applies ink to the surface.  When the canvas is unfolded the folds are highlighted white and the wrinkled surface is recorded on the flat surface of the canvas.  Moyer then applies bleach to the canvas, creating bands of light that resemble the stripes of a bad photocopy and harken back to the subtle, somber lines of an Agnes Martin painting.  The canvas is then ironed flat and mounted to wood panels. 

            The results of Moyer’s process are dramatic, melancholy, black and white compositions whose expansive space reads as bed sheets or the rippling surface of a body of water, and are also extremely topographical; they could be satellite images of the surface of the moon.  They are essentially trompe l’ioel paintings; an indexical record of the fabric that once occupied three dimensions and now occupies only two.  In that sense, her work is just as much in conversation with photography as it is with painting and much like Steven Parrino’s paintings, her process of recording the folds in the canvas is a record of the action and, once the canvas is flattened again, the action itself.

Steven Parrino: Untitled, 1997, enamel on canvas, 60 by 60  inches.

            It is an idea that can be traced back to Jackson Pollock.  Moyer’s action paintings at once call attention to the surface that is and once was, as well as the deep illusionistic space contained in the canvas.  She works under Jackson Pollock in a similar vein as Simon Hantai; using a kind of ready-made folded surface to create an expressive, expansive image that is extremely conscious of the flat surface it exists on.  

Simon Hantaï: Étude, 1969, oil on canvas, 103 1⁄8 by 89 3⁄4  inches.

         However, where Simon Hantai excluded the illusionistic space present in Pollock’s paintings in favor of a flat space recorded from disruptions on the surface of the canvas, Moyer mines Pollock deeper by pushing illusionistic space even further.  The sense of three-dimensional space present in Moyer’s paintings is augmented so much more than in say, Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm,” that they almost deny the imagistic in favor of the tangible.  

Jackson Pollock: Autumn Rhythm, 1950, oil on canvas, 105 by 207  inches.

Sam Moyer: Slack Liner I, 2012, ink and bleach on canvas mounted to wood panel, 82 by 64 inches.

         In a sense they are really conventional: they rely on the illusionistic properties of painting that have existed since the renaissance.  However at the same time, in the way they flirt with both the three-dimensional and two dimensional, with painting and sculpture, photography and drawing, and the way the paintings’ surfaces seem to penetrate out beyond the picture plane, they are really radical.  

Baselitz

Baselitz in his studio

            At the Gagsoian on 21^st it’s hard to enter a space that seems like I need to pay admission. The building is cold and empty. Its so large it makes the paintings inside look small. Yet, Gagsoian was full of Baselitz paintings, about 10 of them measuring at least 12 feet high, and a very large wooden sculpture but they appeared small. It blew me away how paintings that were bigger than my bed could ever seem small. Yet the paintings still grappled me into their gaze.

            The paintings finally consumed me when the blinders came on after the initial shock of how small such big paintings could look. Their figurative works, defiantly. Yet they lend so much of the mark making of gestural abstraction, specifically late Pollock. This relationship between the two (Pollock and Baselitz) kept me entertained for quite sometime. Baselitz’s use of the black drip interwoven with strong wide brush marks articulates different parts of the body. It vividly relates to the late Pollock’s where on one side there is a world of drips then countering that is a portrait carved out of drips and color.

Jackson Pollock. Portrait and a Dream.1952. 

            Baselitz then folds the painting in half or maybe he painted the first part while it was folded. Regardless there is a crease in the painting which, in some of the paintings, signals the entrance of a black ground while for others it’s empty with some brush marks occasionally entering the picture. It’s an exquisite corpse type process to build the figure. Which is similar to the separation of two distinct parts in Pollock’s late work. Some are hung upside-down which is a technique Baselitz likes to employ. It destabilizes the ground and therefore subverts where the normative gravity should exist.

            All of these extreme gestures are glamorous. In the first painting you encounter, to the left of the entrance, the top part has gold dust sprinkled in the paint. The brush marks must be six inches wide yet look like a small one-inch brush because of the enveloping size of the canvas. Everything screams for the heroic. By all means it does. The painting behind the sculpture contains a row of high-heeled shoes pointing up in the air, suggesting women on their backs. Submissive. Masculine to the core, disgusting at times, but they are still so alluring. I felt dirty.

            The color is perverse, borderline ugly. It’s not ugly like certain bodily fluids. But more like how colors would accumulate around a drain used by runway models after a fall fashion show. Makeup tans, pinks, oranges, and reds are harnessed to develop the figures. Baselitz controls these colors by using the drips as a grid that lay over the vain color to articulate the forms.

                  “I don't want to create a monster, I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, but is still new.

–Georg Baselitz”¹

            What happens when these paintings are now only tradition? They don’t seem new or exceptional. They show dominance over nature, women, and painting. Those ideas all are very dated. The handling of paint makes me feel embarrassed which was one of the most intimate experiences I achieved while looking at the work. I stepped closer to inspect the surface more vividly.

“Sir”

I saw the dust of gold clinging to the surface at the end of a brush mark.

“Sir!”

I looked over and was surprised by the guard gesturing at me wildly to step away from the painting. I was satisfied.

            I apologized and shuttered. The coldness was back, so I decided to leave. I took a right walking out the door and saw a man with a Spiderman cap on. He was filling a tiny gallery with artwork from the floor to ceiling, nothing for sale. I stopped by and he was happy to chat about it and how it was an open call to all his supporters: “The Internets”.  I took my sweater off.     

¹This quote came from the Gagsoinan website. It brings up an interesting question about perceptions and the timely vs. timeless. Baselitz vs. a contemporary viewer. http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/georg-baselitz--february-28-2012

A way to experience.

I like saw

I like fell over the

I like went to

I like did know

I like drove over to

I like couldn’t figure out

I like lost my

I drank more. The “lowlife”, a Miller Highlife and a shot of whiskey. I gave Dave my card.

“Get me two”

I already found out what 7 glasses of wine and a half hour of a cluster of dyeing old white people trying to look at art felt like.

Lowlife. That felt about right.

Fist shot burns, lowest quality whiskey. Chug the Highlife, must be living it now.

“Here, take this raffle ticket to the desk.” Dave talked close to my ear

“Why” It mumbled out

“To get your pizza”

I’m confused. I take a sip of beer and get up. Its dark, dingy, hard to see could’ve been the bar’s atmosphere. I know it was my drunkenness that made me fall off the stool. I got up dumbly laughed with the people laughing at me then trudged over to the hutch to get my pizza.  

It was in front of me at the booth, red and white nothing fancy. Oily, absorbent, recitative. I took the last shot.

It radiated through my spine. The fire revolted back up and bile hit my throat. I shuttered and swallowed. I kept it down with another beer.

It was backwards Dave flipped it around. We sat at the back of the bus but I only caught a glimpse till it was gone. Jacket bright orange, grey surrounds and seats, people were few and sat towards the front. It was dark out the windows were black and I was unable to think. It drudged and jerked. I hit the back of the seat and looked down. My hands melt into a blue glow and began to move slightly. I began to panic.

White, soft, and I may puke. Push back into the black hole. “Fuck” I got up and pissed. The sun was out.






Painting Glenn Goldberg

Yes we sing, we dance, we recite poetry with bongo drums. Adventure! Romance! Spectacular Sights! Wildly Witty! Trogg Blogg is not a destination it's a state of mind. Come for the posts stay for comments.

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